North and South: The North and South Trilogy (55 page)

The young people were bound for the beach. They went there almost every evening, with Charles the token chaperone. That amused Orry. Charles had reformed, but it was still a bit like hiring the devil to do missionary work.

George watched the young people stroll out of sight in the moonlight. Then he said to Orry, “I get the impression that your sister has set her cap for Billy.”

“George, not so fast,” Constance exclaimed, not entirely teasing. “Next summer Billy goes to the Academy. For four years.”

“Nevertheless,” Orry put in, “I think George is right.”

He didn’t bother to say that he doubted there would ever be a match. Ashton was too mercurial. Of course, like Charles, she could change. With that possibility in mind, he added, “You ought to bring Billy to South Carolina.”

“Yes, we’d love to have you—all of you,” Clarissa said. Seated apart from them at the end of the porch, Virgilia looked skeptical.

“I’d love to see Mont Royal,” Constance said.

Orry leaned forward. “Why not this fall? October’s one of our loveliest months. Cooper would be happy to show you Charleston, then you could come upriver for a long visit.”

“All right, we’ll do it,” George said after Constance squeezed his hand to encourage him.

A moment later he had second thoughts. Virgilia was watching and listening with great interest. If they took her along, the Mains would probably come to regret their offer of hospitality.

Charles leaned back against the damp rock, moonlight splashing his closed eyelids as he imagined naked thighs in various pleasing shades of pink and brown. One pair of thighs belonged to a plump and cooperative girl named Cynthia Lackey. Charles had met her during the first week of the summer, when he had gone to buy some hard candy in her father’s general store.

Away to his left he heard laughter. He opened his eyes and saw two figures emerging from the shadow of the bluff. Two figures that looked more like one. Arms around each other’s waist, they crossed the brilliantly lit sand.

“Watch out, there’s our chaperone,” Billy said. Ashton giggled. The single inky shape divided. Charles blinked away the last of his erotic visions. That didn’t relieve the tension in his groin. It was time to call on Cynthia again.

Ashton smoothed her hair. Billy tucked in the tail of his shirt. Charles felt sorry for his friend. He had no specific information about Ashton’s experience, but he had suspicions. At minimum, she would be an expert tease, goading a suitor until he acquired a glassy-eyed look of frustration. Billy looked that way right now, Charles noticed.

On the way home, Ashton discussed plans for the following evening. Some clam digging first. Then a driftwood fire on the beach, and—

“I’m afraid we can’t do that tomorrow night,” Charles broke in. “Billy and I have a long-standing engagement at the other end of the island.”

Dumbfounded, Billy said, “We do? I don’t remember—” Charles elbowed him to silence.

Ashton pouted, then grew almost nastily insistent. Charles smiled and held firm. After Billy had seen Ashton to the door of the house on Beach Road, he came charging around to the side porch, where Charles sat in the moonlight, one long leg resting on the porch rail.

“What the devil is this fictitious engagement at the other end of the island?”

“My boy, it isn’t the least bit fictitious. I’m going to introduce you to Miss Cynthia Lackey and her sister Sophie. I have it on good authority that Sophie’s just as eager as Cynthia to please the boys and be pleased in turn. Have you ever had a girl before?”

“Of course.”

“How many?”

Under Charles’s steady stare, Billy wilted. “All right. I haven’t.”

“That’s what I thought. We’ll make it a summer to remember.”

He clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Besides, I know cousin Ashton’s reputation for coquetry. I’ve left the two of you alone so much, I expect you need the relief of an evening with Miss Sophie.”

The following night they drove a pony cart to the Lackey place, a small farm in the open countryside. They drove back to Newport at two in the morning, with Billy thanking his friend and saying it was now a memorable summer indeed.

“But I want to see the South,” Virgilia said to George. “And they invited me.”

“They invited you because politeness required it, that’s all!” They had been back in Lehigh Station two days. This was their fourth argument about the trip. “They don’t want you down there insulting them and sneering at their way of life every waking moment,” George went on. “You’d probably parade this around Mont Royal.” He snatched up the broad satin ribbon she had brought into the study. She would be wearing the ribbon on Saturday when she marched in a Free Soil parade in Harrisburg. The ribbon bore the slogan of the party:
Free soil—free speech—free labor
—
and free men.
“Inviting you to come with us would be like carrying a torch into a dry forest, Virgilia. I’d be a fool to say yes.”

“What if I promise that I’ll be on my very best behavior? I feel it’s important for me to see the South firsthand. If you’ll take me, I’ll be good as gold. Not a word about free soil or anything else the Mains might find offensive.”

He peered at her through smoke curling from his cigar. “You mean that? You’d be polite the entire time?”

“Yes. I promise. I’ll swear it on a Bible, if you want.”

He managed to smile. “That won’t be necessary.” He shaped his mouth into an O and blew out a thin rod of smoke while weighing the risks. Then:

“All right. But at the first slip, I’ll send you home.”

She flung her arms around him and squealed her thanks. It had been a long time since she’d behaved in such a girlish way. For a moment he felt he had a sister again.

When Virgilia went to bed that night, she was too excited to go to sleep. But at last she did. She dreamed of black men’s bodies.

T
HE HAZARD PARTY CONSISTED
of eight: Maude, George and Constance, the children, their nurse, and Billy and Virgilia. All but Billy were seasick on the stormy trip to Charleston. They rested a few days at Cooper’s house and improved rapidly.

After supper the second evening, Judith entertained them by playing the piano. Then she gathered the guests around her and they had a grand time for almost an hour, singing hymns and popular songs in a rousing way. Everyone took part except Virgilia, who excused herself and went to her room.

Mont Royal
happened to be in port, loading cotton for New York. Cooper took them through the vessel, pointing out every detail from the sleek clipper bow to the advanced-design propeller. The visitors didn’t understand the engineering innovations as well as their host did, hence couldn’t be quite as enthusiastic, but all of them could appreciate the vessel’s exterior design. She was lean, graceful—unmistakably modern.

Next Cooper took them over to James Island, to the acreage he had bought earlier. “What I’m proposing to put here, using my profits from C.S.C. to do it, is a shipyard. A yard to build commercial vessels. A yard that will be the best on the East Coast.”

“You’re starting to sound like a Yankee,” said George. They both laughed.

Cooper and Judith showed them the sights of Charleston, including the marble marker at Calhoun’s grave in St. Philip’s churchyard. Then Cooper proposed to take any interested adults to a rally being sponsored by an organization calling itself the Charleston Southern Rights Coalition.

“Is that a political party?” George asked.

“Nobody’s sure,” Cooper answered. “Not yet, anyway. The traditional parties are disappearing faster than I can keep track of. ‘Whig’ and ‘Democrat’ have become virtually meaningless labels down here.”

“What has replaced the regular parties?” Virgilia wanted to know.

“Groups that fall into two camps. In one camp you have the Unionists, men such as Bob Toombs of Georgia who love the South but can’t quite swallow the secession pill. In the other camp are the Southern rights crowd: Yancey, Rhett, Ashton’s friend Huntoon—he’s one of the speakers at the rally, incidentally. You probably won’t like anything you hear”—the gently pointed statement brought a prim and humorless smile to Virgilia’s mouth—“but it will give you a flavor of current thought in Charleston.”

Only George and his sister accepted the invitation. George feared Virgilia might make a scene despite her promises—perhaps even disrupt one of the speeches by shouting insults from the box in which they were seated. But she seemed uninterested in the oratory, preoccupied. While Huntoon was at the rostrum, proclaiming the need for “a great slaveholding republic from the Potomac to the tropic latitudes,” she whispered that she needed fresh air and left.

She rushed down the dim staircase to the foyer. Sure enough, he was there, loitering with the other coachmen outside the main doors. He was a strikingly handsome black man wearing heavy velvet livery. She had noticed him earlier, as he was opening a carriage door for his master—Huntoon, she realized suddenly.

Virgilia’s breasts felt tight and heavy as she walked to and fro, waving her lace handkerchief in front of her face to indicate why she had left the hall. Sweat glistened in the down on her upper lip. She could hardly keep her eyes off the Negro.

Huntoon’s voice rolled through the open doors behind her. “Our institution must follow the American flag, wheresoever it goes. For our system to contract, or even fail to expand at a steady pace, would be tantamount to defeat. We shall not permit it to happen.”

Wild applause and cheering interrupted him at that point. Boots stomped and shook the floor. The sound poured out of the hall and engulfed her, somehow heightening her feelings of desire. Over the shoulder of another coachman she tried to catch the tall Negro’s eye.

He noticed her but didn’t dare show cordiality toward a white woman, lest he be punished for his boldness. She understood. With one long glance she tried to convey that understanding, and something else. His eyes flickered with surprise. Then, looking past the other coachman’s shoulder, he smiled. She caught her breath. Four of his front teeth were missing. He was one of those poor wretches whose owners identified them in that inhuman way.

His dark, shiny eyes dropped to her breasts for a second. She thought she might faint. He understood! Another coachman took note of his stare and turned to see its object. At the sight of Virgilia’s white skin, the coachman looked at his tall companion with shock and disbelief.

“Here you are.” George came hurrying out to her. “You left so quickly I was worried. Are you ill?”

“No, it was just too hot in there. I feel better now.” She slipped her arm through his and led him inside.

She couldn’t get the tall Negro out of her mind. On the way back to Tradd Street she asked whether there was any special significance if a slave had several teeth missing. “I saw a man like that outside the hall.”

George tensed while Cooper explained the probable reason for extraction of the teeth. Virgilia reacted as if it were new information, but no outburst followed. Then Cooper said, “The chap you saw must be Huntoon’s man, Grady. Tall fellow? Handsome?”

“I honestly didn’t notice,” Virgilia lied, pressing her legs together beneath her skirts. She had the information she wanted.

Grady.
She savored the name as she drifted to sleep that night. A sultry breeze blew from the fragrant garden. The sweet odors and the dampness of the night heightened her hunger until she ached.

“Grady,” she whispered in the dark. She knew she would never see him again, but she wished there were some way it could be otherwise.

Cooler weather arrived at Mont Royal just when the Hazards did. October’s sharp, slanting light lent a melancholy beauty to the days, but it was beauty of which Billy was unaware. He hardly saw anything, or anyone, except Ashton.

He spent every free hour with her. On horseback she took him around the plantation, though he suspected she was improvising much of what she said about it. He sensed that she had little understanding of, or interest in, the way rice was planted or harvested.

The slave community fascinated Billy in a grim, almost morbid fashion. The Negroes returned his stare with sad, hopeless eyes. He heard laughter, but not much. For the first time he had some understanding of why Virgilia, Constance, and the rest of the family opposed the peculiar institution.

In the past his attitude had been largely a reflection of theirs: correct, but lacking any passion. The ride down the dirt street between the rows of mean cottages changed that. If slaves were carefree and happy, as Southerners claimed, he saw damned little evidence. He grew angry. Here was an obvious wrong. The conviction was like a splinter in his foot, not really severe enough to interfere with anything, yet a constant source of discomfort.

There was a similar splinter produced by his relationship with Ashton. At first he couldn’t identify the reason he felt uneasy in her presence. She still excited him. This was true even though some of the mystery of sex was gone, thanks to tumbling with that Newport girl in her father’s hayloft; after the initial embarrassment of removing his pants, Billy had enjoyed his hour with Sophie.

Physically, Ashton remained one of the most perfect creatures he had ever seen. And if not exactly intelligent, she was gifted with an innate cleverness and a glib tongue. What troubled him, he concluded toward the end of his first week at Mont Royal, was a certain quality in the way she kissed, or touched his face, or looked at him. It was
adult;
there was no other word. Yet she had only turned fifteen this year.

Orry arranged a Saturday-night picnic in honor of the visitors. As the breezy twilight was deepening, cousins and neighbors began to arrive. One guest was a handsome woman named Mrs. LaMotte, whom Orry seemed to treat with great politeness. She spent almost no time with her husband; he was off with some of the men and, to judge from their muted voices and raucous laughter, telling dirty stories.

When darkness fell, torches planted in holders in the ground lit the side lawn and kept the insects away. Billy and Ashton left the picnic site and slipped down to the river, hand in hand.