Wild Midnight (13 page)

“When the Beaumont men worked late on the rice crops they could sleep downstairs in here and not bother anybody,” D’Arcy said. “Beau doesn’t use it, he’s too damned big for that little sleigh bed. Clarissa didn’t like that little Maria Theresa commode either. I think that’s why she put it in the hideaway—that’s what they call this. But she didn’t make too many mistakes, honey, when she was buying things. She got rid of all that beat-up antebellum stuff most people hang on to. You know, they imported it from up North to begin with, and it was factory made even back in those days.
 

They had come back out into the downstairs hall. Rachel passed a brass stand and quickly slipped the envelope with the money into it.
 

“Hello, D’Arcy,” a woman’s husky voice said.
 

Under the curving staircase there was a small door that apparently led to the back of the house. A woman was standing there as though she had just come out to see who it was. There was an impression of a bush of dark hair, sharp chin, white skin, and dark eyes that were not at all welcoming. The rest of the woman was sharp angles, elbows, legs, and seductive curves in tailored slacks and a green-knitted tank top that revealed her large breasts. The dim light caught the glitter of gold hoop earrings and an armful of clanking bracelets.
 

“Hello, Darla Jean.” D’Arcy’s voice was cool. “Is my cousin Beau anywhere around?”
 

The woman moved toward them, full of curiosity. “He’s gone to town to buy a pump. Who’s that with you?”
 

“Rachel, this is Darla Jean.” D’Arcy’s soft voice held a distinct disapproving chill. “I guess you could say she just hangs around here, isn’t that what you do, Darla Jean? I declare, everytime I come here Darla Jean is just hanging around.” She took Rachel’s arm. “The dining room is a showplace, let’s go look at it. You know, Clarissa was dead set to put the house back the way it was in General Renee Beaumont’s time. General Renee fought with Francis Marion—you’ve heard of Marion the Swamp Fox during the Revolutionary War, haven’t you?” D’Arcy pointedly excluded the other woman as she moved away.
 

Rachel glanced over her shoulder. She was painfully aware not only of Darla Jean’s avid stare, but the fact that at any moment Beau Tillson might return. “Isn’t it ... shouldn’t we be getting started?”
 

But Darla Jean had followed them. “You run that farmers’ cooperative, don’t you? Ain’t you Miz Brinton?”
 

At that moment Sissy appeared at the door under the stairs, carrying a plate with a plastic cover. “D’Arcy,” she announced, “look, Eulie’s given us some pecan pie! She just made
pecan pie,
D’Arcy!”
 

“You can’t eat pecan pie,” D’Arcy shrieked, whirling on her. “Sissy, you know it’ll just raise hell with your spots!” She took advantage of the interruption to mutter in Rachel’s ear, “Dear Lord, let’s get out of here. I can’t stand it when Darla Jean’s around.”
 

Outside, D’Arcy made a grimace of distaste. “She would have to be here this morning. He said he was going to get rid of her, but you can’t depend on a damned thing Beau says—he’s been saying that for months. Oh, where’s that girl?” D’Arcy went around the driver’s side of the big gleaming car and honked the horn several times. “You can’t get that brat sister of mine away from a place where there’s any food!”
 

Rachel stood helplessly, aware only of noise and confusion and her aching head.
 

“At least Darla Jean doesn’t have those two no-good brothers of hers hanging around,” D’Arcy went on, pressing down on the horn again. “I mean, they’re
dirt.
They say they’re stock-car racers up at Darlington, but they’re plain old moonshiners, honey. Murrells are trash, the whole tribe of them. And that means Darla Jean too. I bet Beau bought her those tacky clothes.”
 

Rachel opened the door and slid into the backseat of the Lincoln, sinking against velvety soft gray cushions with a feeling that she could not stand any more of this terrible day.
 

D’Arcy gave the horn a final earsplitting blast, then got into the driver’s seat. “Did you drop off your money all right? I don’t know why he keeps her around,” she grumbled. “I swear I don’t—slinking around like an old bitch dog warning everybody off her territory. But I tell you, she’s way out of Beau’s league, even if she does think she’s got squatter’s rights.”
 

“Here,” Sissy said through the backseat window to Rachel as she thrust the plastic-covered plate at her. “Can you hold the pie, please? Eulie made sandwiches for us to eat going back. Watch your clothes, the plate’s sticky.”
 

Rachel took the plate from the younger girl’s hands. Nothing made sense, as far as she was concerned, except that it was clear who Darla Jean was in Beau Tillson’s household. She was feeling sick. She turned her head away from the sudden warm, sugary smell of the pie she held.
 

“It does look good, doesn’t it?” she murmured with an effort.
 

Going to Charleston was not as mad as it seemed. Trying to persuade herself that she should ever come back to Draytonville was going to be much, much more difficult.
 

Chapter Seven

The Butler town house sat on Charleston’s curved esplanade known as the Battery—or as Rachel’s northern ears heard the drawling low-country speech, “the Bottry”—named for the pre-Civil War gun emplacements that had guarded the seaport city in the last century.
 

From the widow’s walk on top of the Butlers’ wedding-cake style three-story house, excited members of the Butler and Drayton families had gathered on a warm spring day over a century ago to watch the bombardment of Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor and the beginning of the great conflict which was to tear the union of states apart. The stair to the walk was no longer open, D’Arcy told Rachel regretfully, but every April twelfth it had been the custom for her father and some of his Charleston friends to commemorate the occasion with cocktails and war maps up there, an event that had only been suspended sometime in the mid 1970’s, when Rear Admiral Butler had assumed command of his Hawaii-based fleet.
 

As children of the military, the Butler sisters had lived in many places around the world while their father pursued his distinguished career, but they were at home in Charleston now so that teenaged Sissy could attend the traditional Ashley Hall School for Girls. In fact the Butlers’ social life was, as D’Arcy pointed out, defined by not only tradition; but the city’s geography: their house stood in the select historic area of the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper rivers on the north and south, and by Prioleau and Calhoun Street on the east and west in the heart of Old Charleston. The famous Dock Street and Garden theaters were almost within walking distance, as well as several fine restaurants. A rather frenetic social schedule took the Butlers to the Charleston Yacht Club just south of Calhoun, the prestigious officers club at the nearby Charleston Navy Base, the St. Cecilia Society: Balls—where Sissy would make her debut in the coming year—volunteer fund-raising events for the Charleston Symphony Orchestra, the Opera Society, and Gian Carlo Menotti’s Festival of Two Worlds, which alternated between Spoleto, Italy, and the port city. For Sissy’s subdebutante agenda there were dances at the Citadel, the South Carolina military college.
 

“It’s a rat race, honey,” D’Arcy confided to Rachel as they put Rachel’s things away in an antebellum walnut wardrobe in a guest bedroom on the second floor of the vast house. “If you’re going to keep up with Charleston society, you find your whole damned life is sacrificed to it. In the old days the only way you could drop out was if you were pregnant. But lordy, that was because you couldn’t even go out of the house and let yourself be seen in that ‘disgusting’ condition.”
 

Rachel’s spacious bedroom, filled with graceful antebellum furnishings of the last century, opened out onto a large connecting veranda overlooking the Butlers’ back property, including old slave quarters that had been turned into a garage. The two women went outside to enjoy the beautiful spring day and the view of Charleston’s famous walled gardens.
 

“I just love it here,” D’Arcy declared, resting her elbows on the veranda railing and looking down at the tops of lush bougainvillea vines and sago palms protected by the high walls. “Of course, Charleston is my home place. I’m a dyed in the wool rice eater, but even I have to admit it’s not the easiest place to know. It
is
the world’s most reclusive society, honey—nothing but old money here, and the cardinal sin is to show off too much of it and get your name in the papers. Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive are dirty words around here—Old Charlestonians wouldn’t be caught dead in such tacky places!”
 

Rachel had to smile. “Neither would Old Philadelphians.”
 

“Oh, sugar, I forgot, but then you know what I mean. Old money is awfully quiet. I think Charleston invented genteel snobbery. Some people spend all their lives trying to get on the St. Cecilia list, and even
they
have to come from places like Columbia or Richmond or something really Confederate. But you can be poor as a church mouse and still get into the St. Cecilia Ball if you’re a Drayton or a Pinckney or a Rhett. There’s always somebody in the old families who will put up the money for a poverty-stricken little cousin to make her debut.”
 

“D’Arcy always complains about her social life,” Sissy said, coming in with a silver tray with cut-glass pitcher of lemonade and Waterford goblets, “but she’s been president of everything. She’s run every charity and club in Charleston at least once. She’s so smart, I guess that’s why she’s still not married.”
 

“Oh hush up, Sissy.” But the quip had struck a nerve: D’Arcy looked away with a strange expression. “All the good men are taken, you know that. Charleston’s about the only place,” she told Rachel, “where a handful of people marry each other so they can keep their land and their money in one place. Isn’t that positively feudal? Middletons still marry Izards and Manigaults and Rutledges and Beaumonts and Draytons the way they did back before the War. Sissy’s going to do the same thing—she’s going to Ashley Hall, just like Mama and Grandmama did, so she can catch some Pinckney or Manigault boy from the Citadel.”
 

“At least I won’t fall in love with somebody I can’t marry,” the teenager responded sulkily. “And still be hanging around when I’m thirty.”
 

There was an awkward silence. Then D’Arcy said calmly, “I just fell in love with the wrong man, brat. And I can’t help being thirty and practically half dead. I’m a well-known Charleston misfire, that’s all.”
 

“Oh, D’Arcy,” Rachel murmured sympathetically. The same brooding expression had come back to the blond woman’s lovely features that she had seen when they’d visited Belle Haven.
 

D’Arcy turned to help herself to more lemonade. “Me’n poor old Beau down in Draytonville,” she said with a mock sigh, “we’re the marital fiascos of the family. Beau’s no chicken, either, and Lord knows when
he’ll
get married! Clarissa’d turnover in her grave if she thought there wasn’t anybody coming along to keep the Beaumont name alive.”
 

“If he can even find anybody who’ll have him,” Sissy observed.
 

“There are just zillions of women who
would
! What are you saying? Any red-blooded woman would take cousin Beau on looks alone, you know that. Good Lord, Sissy—he’s the sexiest man alive, it’s getting along with him that’s pure hell! But then what can you expect—the way Clarissa and Lee Tillson brought him up was enough to make a basket case out of any young’un.
 

“Beau’s a real nut,” Sissy confirmed, helping herself to a sugar cookie from the silver tray.
 

“And will you stop saying that? You don’t know anything about it. There was nothing anybody could do with Clarissa, she was obsessed with that damned house, and Beau always looking like some sharecropper’s child without any decent clothes half the time, and with only the cook, Eulie, and the yard boy to pay him any mind. Besides,” D’Arcy said indignantly, “the whole town knew Clarissa and Lee were too busy fighting like wildcats to look after anybody but themselves. Mama used to have a fit the way they let that boy run all over the marshes in a leaky little bateau and associate with shrimpers and crabbers and do just what he wanted to. He was neglected as hell. Why, when Beau was little he got scarlet fever and Eulie had to take him to the doctor herself—she was more a mother to him than his own mother! Beau damned near died too. Then Clarissa had hysterics about it and took to her bed, and God Almighty, she got more attention than poor old Beau did!”
 

“Old?” Rachel said, confused. They had moved back into the spacious bedroom, and she sank down wearily on the antique organdy bedspread of the canopied bed. “When did this happen?”
 

Both sisters laughed. “Old, sugar—not
old,
just ‘poor old Beau,’“ D’Arcy said, sitting down beside her. “Or poor old anybody. Beau’s thirty-five or thirty-six. He was barely nineteen, you know, when he went off to Vietnam.”
 

“Aunt Clarissa died while he was over there,” Sissy put in, “and the army let Beau come back for the funeral. It took a long time to find him, and the undertaker had to keep Aunt Clarissa refrigerated for weeks. D’Arcy and I went to the funeral, we were the only ones there except Great Uncle John from Fripp Island. It was the pits,” she said in a sepulchral tone. “Beau stayed drunk for just days and days. I thought he was going to fall in the grave at the cemetery, he kept swaying back and forth right at the edge.”