Ciji Ware (70 page)

May 7, 1840

Daphne Whitaker Clayton—looking far older than her fifty-nine years—stood in her attic room at Devon Oaks, her moans echoing the cries of the wind and rain that violently lashed the windowpanes. Outside, a ghostly green light illuminated the glowering afternoon sky. In the distance, an ominous black funnel cloud moved slowly, inexorably toward the river’s edge.

Daphne hated the wind. It frightened her. And she hated the thunder and lightning even more.

An arc of electricity streaked across the sky and she screamed in terror. A clap of thunder immediately rent the air, and she shouted till her throat ached.

Tornado weather, she would have pronounced in her younger days, and then headed for cover. However, after nearly two decades confined to the top of the house, just as her mother had been, she seemed incapable of thinking logically. In some dark recess there was the thought that she had become a burden, an embarrassment to one and all.

It must be true, for no one came for her. No one climbed the stairs to comfort her or see that she was unharmed. And now, sobbing in terror, she stared through her garret window with wild, seeking eyes for a glimpse of Whitaker Creek. She hugged herself as she gazed across the flattened cotton fields and swayed from side to side in rhythm with the branches of a nearby pecan tree writhing and groaning in the mounting gale.

Another bolt of lightning illuminated the green sky. She wondered frantically where her eighteen-year-old son, Drake Clayton, had gone. Earlier, she’d seen him astride his horse, riding faster than the wind blowing outside her window, and began to call once again for the tall, handsome boy she hardly knew. Her brother, Keating, kept Drake away from her. The lad seemed to take after his uncle much more than his father, Aaron, and—

Aaron
…

Daphne pushed away thoughts of the massive, blustering man who used to terrify her so.

Now
why
did he frighten her? she wondered, confused as she always was when memories of her intimidating husband crossed her mind. She could no longer clearly recall what she had done to earn Aaron Clayton’s contempt those long years ago.

A third bolt of lightning, jagged as a scar and followed by a sharp crack of thunder, sheared off a branch of the pecan tree. Before Daphne knew what was happening, the enormous tree limb crashed through the roof not fifteen feet from where she stood, slicing through the shingles and joists. Now the winds were shrieking inside the attic walls and still no one came to find her. Chairs from the veranda, buckets, an old carriage wheel from behind the stable, flew across the storm-tossed landscape. Sheer instinct finally prompted Daphne to turn from the debris and destruction of her living quarters and race toward the door the wind had blown out. A loud roaring force at her back propelled her down the stairs. Down, down, she sped, past the bedroom floor. Down, down another flight, till she spied the portraits of long-dead Whitakers, Keatings, and Drakes hanging on the walls of the grand staircase that led to the entrance foyer. Down, down she raced, past frightened slaves and a butler whose name she didn’t even know, though the servant had lived in this house for half her life.

She paused for an instant and stared at her golden harp, her cries of terror drowned by the sounds of trees being yanked from the earth. No one wished her to play her harp or dance anymore. She was old. Useless. Sick. Despised by one and all, she supposed. Mammy had been in her grave a decade or more. Daughter Maddy had married and moved to New Orleans. Now, there was no one to care or remember what had transpired in this house. No one wanted to know about a lonely little girl who dreamed of being loved.

Daphne flung open the heavy front door and felt the wind catch her long skirts and whip her drab linen petticoats around her ankles as she ran toward Whitaker Creek. No one would remember that she had once worn a satin gown—its lime-green color as ugly as the glowering skies overhead—to the governor’s ball at Concord so many years ago. No one would remember those singular days when she’d played an etude or cantata flawlessly on her harp. No one would remember…

No one.

Daphne felt like a young girl again as she stumbled past the slave quarters and propelled herself into the woods. She was sure she would find her father if she went down to Whitaker Creek. She was certain that Charles and her sister, Maddy, and all the little children whose headstones had been moved to the new cemetery in Natchez were still down at the stream. She had sensed them when she went for walks, though no one else remembered them. Did the dead have picnics, splash their feet in the creek, and enjoy a summer’s breeze, she wondered.

Unmindful now of the roaring wind, Daphne lurched down the path strewn with broken tree limbs. The wind whipped her gray hair, its strands so matted a comb could not separate them. Twice she stumbled, but she kept on, determined to make her way toward the deep pool where she knew they waited for her. Their spirits were everywhere, guiding her steps. The many dead children and her father and the sister who’d hated her so… would all love her now. And Mammy, who had always loved her, and Willis, who had saved her from that brutal Frenchman… they all would be there to welcome her.

When she glimpsed the creek, she was startled to see how swiftly its rain-swollen waters rushed past the big rock where her family used to swim on hot summer days and where her father had set traps for the catfish near the deepest part of the pool.

Daphne’s dress was soaked through with rain, and she was gasping for breath. She looked up and down the banks of the stream and wondered where everyone was.

In
the
pool
…
in the pool
…

She could see them now. They were waiting for her down there, just below the rushing water. The winds of the most terrible storm she had ever seen howled across the landscape. Dwellings were swept like chaff from their foundations, the woods were uprooted, the crops beaten down and destroyed. But it would be lovely and quiet beneath the waters of Whitaker Creek, and Daphne was free to go now. All she must do was gather the stones that would surely take her to them.

And she would escape the tempest raining down on this land. For there was no one left to put a light on the veranda.

***

Keating Whitaker and his nephew, Drake Clayton, stood before Devon Oaks Plantation and surveyed the damage. The tremendous power of the wind had sheared off one section of the roof near the attic where Daphne had lived. The slave quarters were virtually blown away, but the plantation house still stood, and for that, the last remaining members of the Whitaker-Clayton clan sank down on their knees in gratitude.

Bluff House, in Natchez proper, had come through the terrible storm remarkably unscathed except for a few broken windows. Keating and Drake had hitched a wagon and ordered their surviving slaves to haul the finest pieces of furniture from the plantation—including Daphne’s harp—to their town residence until repairs to Devon Oaks could be completed.

Keating had never forgiven himself for not assigning one of his servants to sit with Daphne when the storm first blew up. He and Drake had run frantically out of the house to help the slaves drive the workhorses and other animals to safe shelter. It had been two days before they found Drake’s mother beneath the waters of the creek—a discovery that had only prompted more talk among the servants about the “Whitaker Curse.”

They had buried the poor, benighted woman in the city cemetery along with all the other family members who had died before her. Amidst the horror and carnage of the killer storm, the death of an unbalanced old woman was just one more tragedy for the town to absorb.

Long lines of mourners had joined in their sorrow, for the Tornado of 1840, as it would forever be known, had taken three hundred and seventeen lives. Among them were Rachel Gibbs Hopkins and all her children, save the eldest. Trey Hopkins had been down at the barn with his father, securing the animals as best they could, when the funnel cloud cut its lethal swath across their land and sliced through Hopkins House itself, leveling it to its foundation.

The sound of horse hooves caused Keating and Drake to turn as two mounted riders appeared in the drive.

“We came to say farewell,” young Simon Hopkins III announced. He gazed sorrowfully at the men of Devon Oaks as he and his father, mounted on their two surviving horses, approached the wide steps leading to the broad veranda. “We’ve taken what we could find ’bout the place and now, we’re heading west.”

Their horses were laden with bedrolls, saddlebags, and the provisions they would need for the treacherous journey along the trail that Lewis and Clark had forged some thirty-five years earlier.

Young Simon’s father had aged almost beyond recognition. Overnight, his hair had turned completely white. Today, he sat slumped in his saddle, mute with grief for the wife and children he had loved and lost. He had bequeathed his plantation lands to Daphne’s son, Drake, in hopes that the young man would eschew the law firm of his father and remain on the land. Aaron Clayton had never returned from Europe, and Gibbs, Senior had engaged the husband of his eldest daughter to join the legal partnership in the scoundrel’s stead.

“Will you write us, Simon, when you decide where you’ll be settling?” Keating asked of the older Hopkins.

“If I live to see where that is… yes, I will.”

Keating was proud of his nephew when Drake spoke up, saying “I hold the Hopkins lands in trust only, should either of you decide to return.”

Hopkins’s hands on the reins were trembling, and Keating wondered how long this lover of armchair botany and Sunday painting would survive the journey toward the towering redwood trees and mountains said to be so tall, their summits touched the heavens.

“No… no,” Simon murmured, glancing at Trey. “We’re both certain we must leave this place. There is too much sorrow… too much loss to be borne…”

“We’ll miss you mightily,” Keating said, his throat tightening at the thought that he was unlikely ever to see his oldest friend again. “Won’t we, Drake?”

“Yes sir… that… we will,” Drake replied, his voice cracking.

Trey reached into one of his saddlebags and withdrew a piece of canvas rolled tightly and tied with string. “Here,” he offered, “Father and I both want you to have this.”

Drake reached up and retrieved the proffered gift. “What is it?” Keating asked, touched by this gesture.

“Father found it in… in the only part of Hopkins House left standing,” Trey said slowly, each word painful to utter. “In the… study. It’s a sketch of a great-footed hawk. Its Latin name is
Falco
peregrinus
or peregrine falcon. Mr. Audubon did it when he ventured far along the Trace. He made a present of it to Mother when he visited our plantation… when was that, Father?”

“Eighteen twenty-two,” Simon murmured. “He did a much bigger version of the hawk for his folio, but he wanted Rachel to have this as a memento of his stay at Hopkins House.”

Keating shook his head. “We can’t accept this, Simon,” he said regretfully. “
You
keep it. ’Twill remind you of this land and the birds you loved here.”

“Just to look at it cuts at my heart like a knife,” Simon cried, his anguish suddenly raw and displayed for all to see. Then he gathered himself and his voice softened. “And besides, Keating… you are a man of science, as was Audubon. Hang it on a wall at Bluff House, for all to see that we welcomed a genius in our midst who chronicled a world both beautiful and terrible to behold.”

“I will cherish it,” Keating replied humbly.

“And, one thing more, if you’d be so kind.”

“Anything, Simon.”

“Will you be so good as to tend the Hopkins graves at Natchez Cemetery?”

“Of course we will,” Keating assured him. “And Drake will see to it after I’m gone, won’t you, nephew?”

“Yes sir,” Drake said, nodding furiously as if relieved there was something useful he could do amidst the devastation.

“And remember,” Simon asked, his voice choked, “to put a magnolia and a pale pink rose on Rachel’s grave on her birthday every year, will you? Those were the flowers she painted most often,” he added wistfully.

“May twenty-eighth?” Keating asked.

“Yes,” Simon murmured. “Five days from today.”

And with that, the two men turned their horses and urged them down the graceful, curving drive, setting off bravely for territory unknown.

Chapter 31

Daphne? Daphne?”

Daphne Duvallon could hear Sim calling her from far off as the image of two men on horseback faded slowly and disappeared. She sat bolt upright in her chair at the foot of the hospital bed in the Natchez emergency room and attempted to regain her bearings.

“Sweetheart,” Sim asked, kneeling at eye level, his hands grasping both arms of her chair. “Are you all right?” he demanded, his voice filled with concern. “I practically had to shake you to get you to come around.”

Daphne nodded, blinked, and stared in confusion at her surroundings. The hospital bed was empty and Jack’s cousin, Libby Girard, was nowhere to be seen.

“Jack!” she cried, twisting in her chair. “Is he—”