Wild Midnight (39 page)

Some part of her, Rachel knew as her eyes filled with unshed tears, would always be herewith them, in this dreaming dark countryside with its shining rivers, its melancholy forests and thick, velvety black nights. And her heart would be here always, with the man who had shut himself away at Belle Haven. That she could never forget.
 

“And now,” the mayor was saying, “we are going to be privileged to have a few words from the little lady responsible for this fine organization—Miz Rachel Goodbody Brinton of Philadelphia.”
 

I can’t
, Rachel thought in sudden terror as hands boosted her up to stand beside the mayor and the members of the board of the co-op. She stared out over the seemingly unending sea of faces and bit her lips, her gaze meeting that of Til Coffee. Til’s look said that Rachel had better get on with it.
 

Suddenly, in spite of the tears trickling down her cheeks, she felt strangely lighthearted. “Friends,” she began in a surprisingly clear voice. She stopped and looked around her. “We—all of us—have made this possible.”
 

She still carried the little conjure doll with the bulging belly Uncle Wesley Faligant had given her; it was clutched in her hand.
 

When Rachel pulled her car out of the parking lot behind the co-op’s office clouds had already obscured the sun in a typical turnabout of low-country weather, and a cool wind from the sea was bringing the first sprinkles of rain.
 

A few cars followed Rachel’s station wagon as she made a last tour of the town, Til and Loretha in one, and Billy Yonge with his father J. T. in another, and Uncle Wesley’s almost new pickup with one of his grandsons driving. She turned her Toyota into Main Street and drove past the modern glass facade of the Draytonville Bank, then past Pembroke Screven’s elegant offices in the restored eighteenth century courthouse, then down to the river, where at last she made a U-turn.
 

“Come back soon, honey,” Loretha cried, leaning out the window on the passenger’s side of Til’s car. She was crying openly, holding a Kleenex tissue to her nose.
 

Rachel hadn’t expected Beau Tillson to make an appearance; she hadn’t really expected to lift her eyes during her speech and find him standing on the edge of the crowd, watching her with his tawny jaguar eyes. But somehow she had carried the hope in her heart until the very last minutes. Now she was leaving Draytonville, and that was the end of it, she told herself.
 

She touched the gold locket around her neck. The irony of it—a
heart,
she couldn’t help thinking. At its center was a very small diamond. On the back, neatly engraved, was the message: remember your friends. the ashepoo river farmers cooperative, draytonville, south carolina. And the date.
 

At the end of Main Street she entered the highway and the intersection with the familiar peeling paint of the Polar Bear Drive-In and the clutter of cars in the service station.
 

Good-bye
, Rachel said to everything. As the cars behind her stopped—Loretha hanging out of the window of Til’s bright red Mustang, and Billy Yonge and one of the Faligants leaning on the horns of their pickups for a final farewell—she put the image of the man she loved out of her mind. She turned right and headed the station wagon piled high with her belongings toward Route 17 and Charleston.
 

Chapter Twenty-Two

If rain on the wedding day meant a happy marriage, as the old saying went, then D’Arcy Butler and Jim Claxton were headed for a lifetime of sheer bliss. Their wedding guests came wrapped in plastic raincoats and galoshes and rain boots, carrying umbrellas against the ferocious downpour and the running rivers in Charleston’s streets. Assembled in historic old St. Philip’s Church, the cream of Old Charleston society gave out a close-packed steamy wetness that competed with the fragrant massed banks of yellow tea roses, waxy
magnolia grandiflora
leaves, and exotic green and brown orchids Admiral Butler had flown in from Hawaii.
 

The beautiful bride, in a wedding dress of yards of silk organza embroidered with white-on-white daisies studded with seed pearls, and wearing an immense floating cloud of tulle and an antique lace veil, had to be escorted from her limousine by her father, who carried a large red golfing umbrella hastily pressed into service as the only thing big enough to protect her. Even then irrepressible D’Arcy, almost delirious with happiness on her wedding day, splashed to the church door holding her billowing skirts up to her hips with both hands so high that edges of her “something blue” satin-and-lace teddy showed plainly.
 

Standing waiting for his bride at the altar, Jim Claxton’s broad shoulders in his gray formal morning coat were sprinkled with raindrops from his run to the church porch from his pickup truck with his best man. Only Sissy had managed mysteriously to stay dry. In her wide-skirted “southern belle” silk organdy dress and matching jonquil yellow nylon hat with velvet streamers, D’Arcy’s younger sister was suddenly a dreamy-eyed vision of the brunette beauty she would be in a few years.
 

Old St. Philip’s, with its eighteenth century pews marked by the brass plaques of planter families that had owned them, and the gallery at the back of the church for their house slaves, had the pungent, austere fragrance of old plaster and wood. The light that fell from stained-glass windows illuminated fragile, beautiful D’Arcy in a halo of rich reds and blues as she came down the aisle on the arm of her father. For once D’Arcy was calm, incomparably regal under the little seed pearl coronet that crowned her magnificent veil, her eyes shining like mist-covered stars. Following behind her, holding the blue velvet ring cushion in his hands, was Jim Claxton’s little boy, his four-year-old face concentrating powerfully on what he had been told at the rehearsal—to keep his eye on the ring cushion and not drop it.
 

Rachel, in the front pew with Mrs. Butler, held Jim’s squirming baby daughter, who from time to time let out a loud “Dada” at the sight of her father standing stiffly in his formal attire, his blond hair still damp and his blue eyes somewhat dazed.
 

On the bridegroom’s side of the church a smaller group of plainly dressed guests—Claxton relatives with the spare, taut faces of country people—watched with cautious reserve. Their expressions said that this was a mighty fancy wedding, even for Charleston, even though they’d been told in advance it was going to be a small one. But it was to be hoped that Jim would have better luck this time than he had with his flighty first wife.
 

“Dearly beloved,” the rector of St. Philip’s began in a rich, full Episcopal voice that filled the crowded church. The rain beat so loudly on St. Philip’s roof that Rachel could hardly hear D’Arcy’s soft responses. But as she watched her friend turn to Jim Claxton with her heart in her eyes, Rachel felt an unexpected lurch inside her breast. D’Arcy deserved her happiness, she tried to tell herself; it was wrong to envy anyone, especially her good friends. And she had to reconcile herself to the fact that soon this chapter of her life would be closed.
 

“Mama,” the little girl in Rachel’s arms suddenly said. A ripple of muffled laughter swept the church. Rachel buried her face in the baby’s fat, warm neck to keep from laughing out loud. D’Arcy had spent a lot of time in Jim’s house in the past weeks, and the baby was becoming accustomed to calling D’Arcy by the only name she knew. It was the eighth wonder of the world that D’Arcy couldn’t seem to get enough of homemaking; she-had thrown herself into the care of Jim’s household with a stack of cookbooks and quicksilver energy, and was now a nonstop authority on the best laundry detergents and the best recipes for bread.
 

Dear Jim, Rachel thought, looking at him with a rush of affection. He was beaming at his lovely bride as though he would explode. The baby laid her head against Rachel’s neck and yawned sleepily. The downpour and wind battered the sides of the old church so that Rachel could hardly hear, but this being Charleston, no one seemed to be particularly alarmed. Rachel discovered an ominous wetness had begun to seep through the front of the jade-colored silk dress D’Arcy had picked for her to wear to the wedding.
 

Holding the baby was so satisfying, she thought with a sigh. In not too long a time, Rachel knew, she would be holding her own baby in her arms, and the thought sustained her as nothing else could.
 

She had planned to spend the night in Charleston and then, with the small Toyota station wagon packed with all the possessions she’d somehow managed to accumulate during her stay in Draytonville, she wanted to make a slow journey up the southern coast, stopping in North Carolina to visit some of the old Moravian churches whose communities had been established two centuries ago, and then on to Norfolk, where her mother had many friends. She didn’t know how long she would stay, perhaps a week, but she intended to take the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to the Delmarva peninsula, then proceed at a leisurely pace toward Philadelphia. She had to take time to prepare herself for this, the first large gap in her life since the one following Dan’s death.
 

All I really carry away from here,
she told herself,
is my baby. And my memories.
 

The toddler had gone to sleep in her arms. D’Arcy, glowing with happiness, was putting her wedding band on Jim’s finger. They were approaching the end of the ceremony. Rachel had an uncomfortable feeling someone was watching her from the back of the church. It was an odd sensation; the back of her head was tingling. And the front of her dress, she realized wryly as she craned to see the exchange of wedding rings, was soaked by the sleeping baby she held.
 

Rachel.
 

She felt her nerves vibrate suddenly in strange excitement. She had heard that husky, unspoken whisper once before, in her dreams, here in Charleston.
 

The minister was saying the final words, pronouncing D’Arcy and Jim husband and wife.
 

Rachel.
 

It wasn’t real, all her senses told her that, but someone was watching her, silently calling her there in the church. Rachel scanned the church carefully. In the same pew with her were Admiral Butler—taking his place beside Deenie Butler, D’Arcy’s mother—and a distinguished looking gentleman who had been introduced as D’Arcy’s Uncle John from Fripp Island. In the several rows behind her these were the Butler relations, cousins and uncles and aunts, and then nearly all the important members of Old Charleston society, as well as international guests who had flown in from London and Paris and Rome. Behind them in imposing array were the military from the naval and air bases, and members of the St. Cecilia Society, the extensive Charleston music world, the Confederate Home, and museum people. D’Arcy’s “small” wedding had grown and grown until St. Philip’s could hardly contain it.
 

Slowly, with an odd kind of dread, Rachel turned to the very back of the church and what one could take for a late-arriving guest—a tall man with sun-gilded hair and a face so glitteringly handsome it would stand out in any crowd.
 

He leaned with one elbow propped against the marble baptismal font, wearing a black T-shirt, muddy jeans and boots. His gold-flecked eyes sent a bolt of lightning through the air, and it bored into Rachel’s skull with its intensity. It was Beau.
 

But it wasn’t
, Rachel knew, trembling. This had happened once before, in the Butler house on the Battery when she dreamed of dancing in his arms in some place and time that had never existed. And he’d told her in the dream that he couldn’t love her. She saw him now as in the same dream, and knew he wasn’t real: her eyes told her that even Beau Tillson wouldn’t come to D’Arcy’s wedding looking as though he’d just stepped out of a muddy field. Was he going to haunt her forever? she thought with a sob.
 

His narrowed eyes seemed to watch her as she touched her cheek to the soft curls of the baby she held sleeping in her arms. There was no mistaking that look; it burned her like gold flames enveloping her hand, her face, her whole body. He still wanted her, called to her in his loneliness; the same powerful yearning was there in that incredible face. But he didn’t love her. That much of the dream was true.
 

Rachel tore her gaze away from the phantom. Jim Claxton was lifting the white floating clouds of veil from his bride’s face and bending his head to kiss her. Heedlessly, D’Arcy threw her arms around his neck and kissed him so passionately that the congregation gasped, then tittered. When she let him go, Jim looked staggered, overwhelmed by love.
 

As the organ pealed the first loud notes of the recessional, the little girl on Rachel’s shoulder stirred and gave a fretful wail. Rachel shifted her, taking a last furtive look at the back of the church. The ghost of Beau Tillson was gone.
 

The guests who lived in Charleston left the elaborate wedding reception in the Butler house early, anxious to get safely home in the storm. Some few had made their flights to San Francisco and Atlanta and New Orleans on time, but those who remained, the friends and relatives who lived on Isle of Palms, Hunting, and Fripp islands, and even Hilton Head, gathered around the Butlers’ television sets in the den and the library, listening to the weather advisories that told them not to make the trip to low-lying coast areas. By late afternoon the bridges to the coastal islands were closed, settling the matter.