Secret Tides Page 9

  “Yes, they’ve been friends for a long time.”

  “He may have leanin’s toward her.”

  Josh glanced toward the kitchen, slowly shaking his head. When he spoke, he took care to make sure Camellia couldn’t hear. “Even if he does, it’s not likely they can end up husband and wife. You know how things work. A man of his station doesn’t marry down. It’s not proper.”

  “No law against it.”

  “Oh, there’s a law, all right. It’s just not on the books anywhere.”

  “No punishment if it happens.”

  “You’re wrong again. Plenty of punishment … for them and their kids. All the society people in Charleston, Beaufort—you know how they’d act. Oh, they’d speak nice to her face and all. The Tessiers hold too much money for them to do anything else. But behind her back they’d say awful things. No matter what she did, they’d look down at Camellia the rest of her life … and her children, too, when they come. They’d treat them like mongrel pups.”

  “If she and Trenton love each other, they can get past all that.”

  The conviction in his half brother’s voice, the tone that said this not only could happen but absolutely had to happen gave Josh pause. Although he didn’t want to think it, Josh suddenly realized that York wanted this marriage as much for his own purposes as for Camellia’s happiness. In fact, even if it might not end up best for Camellia, York wanted this anyway. A marriage between Camellia and Trenton guaranteed York’s position.

  A bitter taste rose in Josh’s mouth, reminding him again of the thing he disliked most about his half brother: the extra dose of ambition that lay in his gut, the selfishness that put a hard edge on him. Part of Josh wanted to say all this to York, to lay it out plain and hope that by speaking it he could give York a chance to see it, to fight it, and to destroy it forever. But how do you say that to somebody you love? How do you tell a person that he’s got a heart of stone when it comes to wanting something even if it hurts someone else? Especially when that person has cared for you when you figured nobody else would?

  “Maybe love can get past all that,” Josh finally said.

  “I’ll run this place for them after they marry,” said York. “Make it the finest plantation in the South.”

  Josh put a hand on York’s shoulder. “You shouldn’t get your heart set on this. What if it doesn’t come to pass?”

  York stared at Josh with a shimmery look in his eyes. “I got no doubt it will happen. But even if it don’t, I’ll come up with some other notions.”

  “What notions?”

  York shook his head. “I’ll keep those to myself for now. A man of the Lord like you might not think them too Jesus-like.”

  “We don’t keep much from each other,” said Josh.

  “That’s right, but maybe this time it’s for your own good.”

  Josh tried to read York’s mind but failed. Sometimes York thought in ways that he couldn’t match.

  “Let’s wash up,” said York. “After supper, we got a lot to do.”

  “It’ll be confused around here the next few days,” said Josh.

  “Yep. Got to get the old man buried.”

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “Don’t know yet. Just stay close.”

  “Anna’s not feeling well, but I’ll do all I can.”

  They walked toward the kitchen.

  “Headaches again?” asked York.

  Josh nodded. “Puts her in bed a lot of afternoons, with rags over her face to keep out the light.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “You talkin’ about Aunt Anna?” asked Camellia, reaching for a coffeepot as they entered the room.

  “Yes,” said Josh, taking the pot and setting it on the table. “Bad headaches.”

  “Tell her I’ll check on her,” said Camellia.

  “She’ll be glad to see you.”

  Josh washed his hands in the wash pot by the back door, then took a chair, his mind on Anna. She held his world together. When she hurt, he did too. He thought of Tessier’s sudden death, the way everything had changed all at once. A chill ran through him. What if something happened to Anna? How would he survive? He pushed out the notion, took the coffeepot, and poured a cup. Footsteps sounded in the front room.

  “Sounds like Chester and Johnny,” said Camellia, headed toward them. “I’ll tell them supper is on.”

  Josh faced York as she left. “You best not hitch your wagon to Camellia and Trenton marrying up,” he whispered. “Nor to any other notion either. Nobody knows what’ll happen next.”

  “I’m an optimistic man,” said York. “Nothin’ wrong with that.”

  Josh poured York a cup of coffee. “You haven’t told her yet, have you?”

  “Nope,” York answered. “Never saw reason.”

  “She’s old enough to know.”

  “That’s the truth,” York replied. “But it just don’t seem right, least not now.”

  “You’re afraid of telling her, that’s the thing.”

  York nodded. “I know what you’re figurin’. You think I’m holdin’ back because I’m hopin’ for her to marry Master Trenton. That I’m just watchin’ out for myself.”

  Josh wiped his hands on his pants. He knew his agreement with York was written plainly on his face.

  York spoke again. “You’re some right, but I ain’t afraid just for me. I’m fearful for her too—what she’ll feel when she finds out that her mama bore her out of wedlock. That she …”

  As York’s words trailed off, Josh saw the hurt in his eyes. Josh knew that despite his faults, York truly loved Camellia and her brothers.

  “Camellia’s not your real daughter,” said Josh. “No matter how much it hurts her, she needs to know that someday. She needs to know you stepped in and married her mama, even though she already had Camellia and came up expecting a second baby by another man after you married her. You took care of Camellia and Chester like you had sired them, even when her mama didn’t stay true to you.”

  “I don’t know how that will do any good for anybody. You’re not plannin’ on tellin’ her, are you?”

  “It’s not my place,” said Josh.

  “I reckon it’s not.”

  Camellia came back, her brothers stomping in behind her. They were tall boys, like York, with dark features, loud voices, and ready tempers. Also like York, they worked hard and didn’t like anybody who didn’t. Josh wondered how Camellia’s softer temperament managed to mix with such a rowdy group. Somehow she managed it.

  York drank his coffee. Josh hung his head, his emotions torn over York’s dilemma. Although he’d not been with York when it all happened, York had told him the secret story. Camellia’s mama had not lived a virtuous life. A finely featured young woman, she’d grown up an orphan and had taken to living with a man after she got out at the age of sixteen. Camellia had come out of the union with that man before marriage, Chester after her. Sadly for her mama, though, that man hadn’t done well making a living for them. So when she met York, she left Camellia and Chester’s father and took up with York. He loved her, he said, when he got on his knees to ask for her hand in matrimony. It didn’t matter to him that she’d fallen short in the realm of chastity. So long as she stayed true to him after the marriage, he wouldn’t hold her past against her.

  The marriage lasted almost two years, just long enough for them to have York’s boy, Johnny, but not much more. Camellia’s mama had run off in April that year, 1844, without warning or explanation. Nobody ever knew where. York tried to find her for a while, but she never showed up. Most figured she’d run off somewhere out of state, a long way from The Oak. Just over two years later, after Josh’s arrival at the Oak, York heard from her one final time when a box reached him in the mail. The box contained her last belongings: a pair of earrings, a Bible, the red dress she wore the day they wed, and a navy blue cape. A short letter, written in a scraggly hand, came with the other things.

  Hampton, I am sick with the typhu
s. Will not make it, I expect. Sorry I was not a good woman for you, not a good mother to my children. I am a sinner. May the Lord forgive me. If you see fit, give Camellia my things and tell her and the boys I have sought to mend my ways. Asking mercy …

  Then she had signed her name.

  After showing Josh the letter, York had torn it up and burned it in the fireplace. As for the rest of the things, Josh didn’t know what had become of them. Knowing York, they were probably destroyed long ago.

  “We will not speak of her ever again,” York had told Josh a couple of days after burning the letter. “She is gone forever.”

  They had pretty much kept true to that decision. Only when Camellia or one of the boys asked did York ever say anything about her. Even then, his words were sparse. “Your mama died of typhus,” he said simply. “She was a beautiful woman. Camellia looks like her.”

  All that was true. Why York left out the fact of her unfaithfulness, Josh didn’t quite know. Was it to spare the children the hurt of knowing their mama was a tart … or to protect York’s own pride? With York, a body could never really know.

  Josh wiped his face. Was York right? Was it best to keep from Camellia the secret that she’d come from a mating between a pa and a mama with no virtue? Or should York tell her the truth?

  Josh shook his head. Too many secrets, he thought. Too many unsaid truths. Somehow, he figured, the secrets would get out. And when they did, who knew what unexpected things they might shake loose?

  Chapter Seven

  When the parson showed up from Beaufort two days after Tessier’s death, everybody gathered in a high spot among some thick trees a long way behind the manse to pay their respects to the dead man. The parson, a bald cleric as round as a barrel in a long black coat that didn’t meet in the front, quietly called everybody to order. The day turned out breezy and cool, with the first true feel of fall in it. Thick white clouds built up overhead. The parson wiped his brow in spite of the chill and started in on what a good life Marshall Tessier had lived, how he’d generously given most of the money to pay for a new section of the Episcopal church in town.

  “Although he never had much time for churchgoing, given his steady work here at The Oak,” said the parson, “Mr. Tessier helped make it so everybody else had a fine house of worship where they could meet. The Lord’s now made a place for him, a place better even than the beautiful manse of The Oak.”

  Sitting by his mother in a wood chair near the head of the casket that Obadiah had built, Trenton Tessier found his thoughts drifting from the parson’s words. He wondered what would happen to The Oak; whether he should go back to school or not; how his mother would cope with all this. Trenton shrugged. His mother and father weren’t exactly a well-matched set. Truth was, he suspected if his mother could find a man to run the plantation and keep the money coming in, she might not even miss her deceased husband. Trenton considered the notion of her taking another husband. She was young enough. Why not? But how would that affect him?

  Trenton glanced over the crowd, over seven hundred people he guessed, counting the Negroes. The burial of a man as wealthy as Marshall Tessier brought folks from all over. He eyed his mother. A black lace veil covered her face. The veil matched her dress and gloves. Although he couldn’t see her eyes, he knew they were clear today, off the laudanum for this occasion. That surprised him a little, but then again, maybe this would shake her up some, cause her to shoulder some of the load for a change.

  Calvin sat by her, his hands busy going in and out of his coat pockets. Trenton reached for his mother’s hand and hoped the parson would speed things up. His father had never claimed anything more than a facade of religion, and everybody in the crowd knew it. No reason to pile the hypocrisy on too heavy. The parson read the Twenty-third Psalm.

  “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He …”

  Trenton’s eyes moved to the edge of the crowd. It took him a couple of seconds before he found her, standing near the back, her brown hair shimmering as it fell beyond her bonnet and then onto and past her shoulders. She wore a simple blue dress, clean and obviously pressed for the occasion with hot bricks. He tried to catch her glance, but she kept her head down. The house woman Stella stood by her, one arm around her waist.

  Trenton wiped his brow with a starched white handkerchief and focused on the parson again. Hickman—that was his name, Reverend Donald Hickman, parson at Saint Michael’s. The parson moved to a new passage of Scripture.

  “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.”

  Trenton stared at his father’s casket, realizing that life could change in a hurry. One day he was off at boarding school with not a care in the world; the next day his father was dead, and he now carried the responsibility of caring for a family and one of the largest plantations in the South. Trenton scrutinized his sisters, Martha and Miranda, both of them dressed like his mother. Their husbands, Gerald and Luther, stood behind them—their tall black hats perched carefully in their hands and their faces blank. Although he didn’t particularly like either of the men, he did appreciate the fact that they took care of his sisters.

  The preacher continued to read from the Scripture. “Behold I shew you a mystery …”

  A dog barked. Trenton considered the parson’s words. Will we all be changed? he wondered. Will a man of faith in the Lord receive a new body, an incorruptible one made for the heavens? But what about a man with no faith in the Lord? A man like his father, a man who put his faith in the product of his own hands, in the fierce effort of sweat and heart? What happened to a man like him when they laid him out horizontal in the ground? Not given to thinking too often or too long about such matters, Trenton had to admit he didn’t know.

  The preacher asked everyone to pray. Trenton bowed his head. While the parson prayed, Trenton pondered his future. What should he do now? What did he want to do? Did he want to come home and run The Oak, or did he want to talk his mother into selling the place? Camellia’s face rose in his head. Since childhood, they’d talked about marrying someday. Should he do that now that he’d become the man responsible for his father’s businesses? Oh, he knew what his mother would say. “She’s beneath you,” she’d point out. “Not quality.” He knew that of course. As he’d gotten older he’d learned what he never knew as a boy. Men of his status married within their class; anything less than that caused scandal of major proportion. But no girl matched Camellia’s beauty—not any he’d seen in Charleston or anywhere else. Besides, what right did his mother have to tell him what he should or shouldn’t do? If he wanted to marry Camellia, he’d do it—no matter what she said.

  When the parson finally said “Amen,” Hampton York and Josh Cain nodded. Four of the darkies stepped forward and lowered the casket into the hole already dug. The parson took Trenton’s mother by the elbow and helped her from her seat as she walked to the casket. The parson gave her a handful of dirt, which she dropped on the casket. Trenton, Calvin, and his sisters then joined their mother. The parson handed a shovel to Trenton, and he lifted a shovel full of dirt and dropped it into the grave. Calvin did the same, then his sisters.

  With his mother on his arm, Trenton left the grave and headed back to the manse. Before long the rest of the crowd followed and started in on the food that the servants had laid out in the yard on wood tables. Trenton led his mother to her bedroom and helped her lie down under the canopy of the bed. A couple of minutes after he got her situated, someone knocked on the door.

  Trenton opened it, and Stella stepped in, Ruby beside her. “We come to aid Mrs. Tessier,” said Stella.

  Trenton nodded and Stella pulled off his mother’s veil and gloves. He turned his back while his mother slipped out of her dress and petticoats and lay back on the bed. When he faced her again, Stella stood over her on one side, Ruby on the other. Stella wiped her face with a damp cloth while Ruby fanned her with a large fan.

  “It be a hard day on you,” said Stella. “Wonder you don’t just pas
s right out. Thank the Lord the heat broke some, that’s all I got to say.”

  Mrs. Tessier glanced at Trenton and patted the bed. Trenton moved to her, and Stella and Ruby stepped away. Trenton took his mother’s hands. He noticed her eyes, dry as dust and far clearer than he expected. He wondered why she hadn’t already called for a dose of the laudanum, then hoped she wouldn’t. Sometimes a thing like this shook people up so much they changed some habits—for better or for worse.

  “I’m glad that’s over,” Mrs. Tessier said.

  Trenton nodded. “Lots of people came—from Charleston, Beaufort, even Columbia.”

  “Your father had business in a lot of places.”

  Trenton considered Stella and Ruby as they waited in the corner. Their eyes seemed a long way off, seeing something he couldn’t. He considered the strange world between whites and blacks. Although the house servants saw, heard, and knew everything that happened with their masters, they knew to keep it quiet if they wanted to keep their place in the house. They acted like deaf and mute beasts in a way, unable to speak what they experienced.

  He faced his mother again, wanting to speak truthfully of some things he’d long wanted to express. Although fearing he should wait, he didn’t really like that notion. As the elder son, he carried the authority to speak what he really wanted to say.

  “I know you and Father kept separate rooms the last few years,” he said, deciding on the straight talk. “I know he traipsed around with other women.”

  “We understood each other,” she said, expressing no surprise at her son’s bluntness. “He provided things I needed; I provided things he needed. Not exactly happily ever after, but we stayed together.”

  “Did you ever love him?” he asked wistfully, hoping for a positive answer.

  “I married him at twenty. He was forty, a widower. You know that.”

  “Yes, his first wife died of fever, without giving him children.”

  “I needed to marry for my family’s sake,” she said. “No reason to lie about it. We were an old Charleston shipping family, but down on our luck. Had lost a couple of ships to storms; another to piracy. Your father came along, and I knew him from other times, parties and socials. He courted me for a while. He was a handsome man, well-dressed, even if a bit forward at times, rough with speech and liquor. After four months or so, he approached my father. They made a deal. I’m not the prettiest of women, and I’m not afraid to say it. I didn’t have that many suitors at the time. So I agreed to the arrangement, liked the life your father promised, the fact he could provide for me better than anyone I knew. We married. I’m not sure love had a lot to do with it. But a lot of marriages happen that way, not just mine and your father’s.”