Just Imagine (35 page)

The miracle and the curse.

As Kit tied Temptation to the rail and walked toward the brick building, she thought how the gin that had saved the South had also destroyed it. Without the gin, slavery would have disappeared because it wouldn't have been economical, and there wouldn't have been a war. Would the spinning mill have the same disastrous effect?

Cain wasn't the only man who understood what it meant for the South to have its own mills instead of shipping the raw cotton to the Northeast or to England. And before long, there'd be more men. Then the South would control its cotton from beginning to end—grow it, gin it, spin it,, and eventually weave it. The mills could bring back the prosperity the war had stripped away. Bui like the gin, the mills would bring changes, too, especially to plantations like Risen Glory.

Jim Childs showed her through the mill, and if he was curious about why the wife of his employer should suddenly reappear after a two-month absence, he gave no sign. As far as Kit knew, Cain hadn't told anyone that she was the person who'd tried to burn it down. Only Magnus and Sophronia seemed to have guessed the truth. When Kit left, she realized one part of her was anxious to see the huge machines at work when the mill finally opened in October.

On her way homo, she caught sight of Cain standing beside a wagon filled with cotton. He was stripped to the waist, and his chest glistened with sweat. As she watched, he grabbed a full burlap sack from the shoulders of one of the workers and emptied it into the wagon. Then he took off his hat and ran his forearm over his brow.

The taut, sinewy tendons rippled across the sheath of his skin like wind over water. He'd always been lean and hard-muscled, but the backbreaking work of plantation and mall had defined every muscle and tendon. Kit felt a sudden, piercing weakening inside her as she had a vision of that naked strength pressed over her. She shook her head to clear away the image.

After she returned to Risen Glory, she indulged in a frenzy of cooking, despite the fact that the weather during these final days of August was oppressive and the kitchen heavy with heat. By the end of the day, she'd produced a terrapin stew, corn rolls, and a jelly cake, but she still hadn't managed to shake her restlessness.

She decided to ride to the pond for a swim before dinner. As she left the stable on Temptation, she remembered that Cain was working in a field she'd have to cross to get there. He'd know exactly where she was going. Instead of upsetting her, the thought excited her. She tapped her heels into Temptation's flanks and set off.

Cain saw her coming. He even lifted his hand in a small, mocking salute. But he didn't go near the pond. She swam in the cool waters, naked and alone.

She awakened the next morning to her monthly courses. By afternoon, her relief that she wasn't pregnant had been displaced by racking pain. She was seldom sick with her monthlies, and never this badly.

At first she tried to ease the pain by walking, but before long, she gave it up, stripped off her dress and petticoats, and went to bed. Sophronia dosed her with medicine, Miss Dolly read to her from
The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life
, but the pain didn't ease. She finally ordered them both out of the room so she could suffer in peace.

But she wasn't left alone for long. Near dinnertime, her door banged open and Cain strode in, still dressed from the fields.

"What's the matter with you? Miss Dolly told me you were sick, but when I asked her what was wrong, she began twitching like a rabbit and ran to her room."

Kit lay on her side, her knees clutched to her chest. "Go away."

"Not until you tell me what's wrong."

"It's nothing," she groaned. "I'll be all right tomorrow. Just go away."

"Like hell I will. The house is quiet as a funeral parlor, my wife is locked away in her bedroom, and nobody will tell me anything."

"It's my monthly time," Kit muttered, too sick to be embarrassed. "It's never this bad."

Cain turned and left the room.

Unsympathetic lout!

She clutched her stomach and moaned.

Less than half an hour later, she was surprised to feel the bed sag next to her. "Drink this. It'll make you feel better." Cain lifted her shoulders and held a cup to her lips.

She swallowed, then gasped for breath. "What is it?"

"Lukewarm tea with a heavy dose of rum. It'll take the edge off."

It tasted foul, but it was easier to drink it than to put up a fuss. As he gently laid her back on the bed, her head began to swim pleasantly. She was dimly aware of the smell of soap and realized he'd bathed before he'd come back to her. The gesture touched her.

He tugged at her sheet. Beneath it she wore only a plain schoolgirl's cotton chemise from her days at the Academy and a pair of expensive, delicately ruffled pantalets. Mismatched as usual.

"Close your eyes and let the rum do its work," he whispered.

Indeed, her eyelids were suddenly too heavy for her to hold open. As they fluttered shut, he touched the small of her back and began to massage her. His hands climbed gently along her spine, then down again. She was barely aware when he pushed the camisole out of his way and touched her skin directly. While she drifted off to sleep, she knew only that his touch seemed to have dulled the knife edge of pain.

The next morning, she found a great bunch of field daisies thrust into a drinking glass at her bedside.

  17

Summer glided into fall and an air of tense expectancy hung over the house and its inhabitants. The harvest was in, and soon the mill would spring alive.

Sophronia moved belligerently through the days, increasingly snappish and difficult to please. Only the fact that Kit wasn't sharing Cain's bed brought her any comfort. It wasn't that she wanted Cain for herself—she'd gratefully relinquished her hold on that idea. Instead, it was a feeling that as long as Kit stayed away from Cain, Sophronia wouldn't have to face the awful possibility that a decent woman like Kit, a decent woman like
herself
, could find pleasure lying with a man. Because if that were possible, all her carefully arranged ideas about what was important and what wasn't would become meaningless.

Sophronia knew she was running out of time. James Spence was pressing her to make up her mind whether or not she'd be his mistress, safe and well protected in the small doll's house he'd found in Charleston, away from Rutherford's gossiping tongues. Never one to be idle, Sophronia now found herself staring out the window for long stretches of time, looking in the direction of the overseer's house.

Magnus waited, too. He sensed that Sophronia was coming to some sort of crisis, and he steeled himself to face it. How much longer, he wondered, could he be patient? And how was he going to live with himself if she left him for James Spence with his fancy red buggy, his phosphate mine, and his skin as white as the underbelly of a fish?

Cain's problems were different, and yet the same. With the harvest in and the machinery installed in the mil!, there was no longer any reason for him to work so hard. But he'd needed the numbing exhaustion of those long workdays to keep his body from realizing the great joke he was playing on it Not since he was a kid had he been so long without a woman.

Most nights he was back at the house in time for dinner, and he couldn't decide whether she was deliberately driving him mad or it if was unintentional. Each night she appeared at the table smelling of jasmine, with her hair styled so that it reflected her mood. Sometimes she wore it impishly high on her head with wisps of curl framing her face like soft, inky feathers. Other times she'd arrange it in the severe Spanish style so few women could wear successfully, parted in the center and pulled into a heavy knot at the nape of her neck that just begged for his fingers to undo it. Either way, he had to struggle to take his eyes off her. It was ironic. He who'd never been faithful to a woman was now being faithful to a woman he couldn't make love with, not until he could put her in the proper place in his life.

Kit was as unhappy as Cain. Her body, once awakened, didn't want to go back to sleep. Strange, erotic fantasies plagued her. She found the book Cain had give her so long ago, Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass
. At the time, the poems had confused her. Now they stripped her bare. Never had she read poetry like this, sprawling verse stuffed with images that left her body burning:

Love-thoughts, love-juice, love-odor, love-yielding,

love climbers, and the climbing sap,

Arms and hands of love, lips of love, phallic thumb of

love, bellies press'd and glued together with love…

She ached for his touch. She found herself rushing back to her bedroom in the afternoons for long, soaking baths and then dressing for dinner in her most attractive gowns. Before long, her clothes grew too tame. She cut off a dozen tiny silver buttons from the bodice of her cinnamon silk gown so that the neckline fell open to the middle of her breasts. Then she filled in the space with a string of glass beads the color of juniper berries. She replaced the belt on a pale yellow morning dress with a long swath of vermilion-and-indigo-striped taffeta. She wore bright pink slippers with a tangerine gown, then was unable to resist threading lime-colored ribbons through the sleeves. She was outrageous, enchanted. Sophronia said she was behaving like a peacock spreading its tail to attract a mate.

But Cain didn't seem to notice.

Veronica Gamble came to call on a rainy Monday afternoon nearly three months after Kit's wedding. Kit had volunteered to sift through the dusty clutter in the attic for a set of china no one could find, and once again she looked less than her best.

Other than exchanging a few courteous words when they saw each other at church or in town, Kit hadn't visited with Veronica since the disastrous dinner party. She'd sent her a polite thank-you note for the handsome, calf-bound copy of
Madame Bovary
that had been Veronica's wedding present—a most inappropriate gift, Kit had discovered as she was devouring every word. Veronica fascinated her, but she was also threatened by the older woman's self-assurance and cool beauty.