Candle in the Darkness (11 page)

“Fine,” he said offhandedly.

I threw one of the bed pillows at him in frustration. “You’re not telling me the truth. I want to know the truth.”

“You shouldn’t get so involved, Carrie,” he said, tossing back the pillow. “They’re only slaves. You wouldn’t be sick yourself right now if you hadn’t meddled where you had no business meddling.”

I felt pulled in two directions at once. I liked Jonathan and I wanted him to like me, but I hated the way he talked about the Negroes, the way he treated them. I knew it bothered him that I cared so much, but I couldn’t help myself. I’d held and soothed and rocked those little babies. I’d fallen in love with Nellie and little Caleb. I needed to know how they were faring. I flung back the covers and lowered my feet to the floor.

“If you won’t tell me the truth, then I’ll just have to go down there and see for myself.”

“Over my dead body!” He came out of his chair in a flash, scooped me up as if I weighed nothing at all, and dropped me back into bed. “Now listen,” he said when we were both calmer, “the truth is, I don’t know how any of them are. We’ve all been too worried about you to bother with them. But if you promise to stay put, I’ll send for one of the Negro girls who lives down there. She can tell you what you want to know.”

That afternoon one of the scrub maids came, a tall, dazedlooking girl about my own age. She showed no emotion at all as she stood in my bedroom doorway and told me the awful truth. “Nellie on the mend now, Miss Caroline. But Caleb and little Kate gone to be with Jesus. All four of them babies gone, too. No help for them, I guess.”

All the grief that I’d felt over losing Grady returned, magnified tenfold. I wept and wept. I couldn’t stop crying. Even when I was no longer sobbing out loud, the tears silently fell, all that day and into the night. It scared me that I couldn’t seem to stop. It scared Aunt Anne, too. She sent for the doctor.

“Caroline has recovered from the measles,” he told her. “But I think you’d better take her home.”

I wept as I watched the servants pack my clothes, along with the bird’s nest and the butterfly’s wings and all the other treasures I’d collected with Jonathan. Uncle William would accompany me to Richmond tomorrow. I was sorry to go, yet I knew I couldn’t bear to stay. Slave Row wasn’t visible from the big house, but that didn’t stop me from thinking about it.

Later that night, I awoke to the sound of voices in the next room. My aunt and uncle had left their bedroom door ajar, and I could hear them talking as they prepared for bed.

“Do you suppose her hysteria could have been caused by her fever?” Aunt Anne asked. “She seemed fine the first few weeks she spent with us. A little skittish, perhaps, but she didn’t cry like this.”

My uncle’s boots dropped to the floor, one after the other. “Her mother’s the same way, Anne. Goes from one extreme to the other. She has terrible crying spells. It’s a real shame, but it looks like the daughter is turning out to be the same way.”

The thought of being just like my mother started my tears falling all over again.

“Poor George must certainly have his hands full with two of them like this,” my aunt said. “I had only one of them and I was at my wits’ end. Has he considered an asylum?”

“Heavens, no! George nearly took my head off when I suggested it.” The bed creaked as one of them climbed into it. “No, my foolish brother wanted to marry that woman—the belle of all Richmond. I tried to warn him that she was high-strung, but he just had to have her. Now he’s living with that mistake.”

“Jonathan asked me if he could go to Richmond with you tomorrow,” my aunt said after a moment.

“No. I already told him that he couldn’t.” The shaft of light from their doorway vanished as one of them snuffed out the light. “Caroline is a beautiful girl, Anne, in spite of her moodiness. She has a hypnotic quality about her—a vulnerability—that attracts foolish young boys like Jonathan. From now on, I don’t want him anywhere near her.”

I heard the haunting song of the slaves the next morning for the last time. As we drove past them laboring in the fields, I looked away.

Chapter Six

Richmond, October 1856

Back in Richmond, my life quickly returned to its old routine. I couldn’t forget everything I’d experienced, but I managed to push most of it from my mind, packing away my disquieting thoughts and my grief like the dolls and other toys I’d outgrown. For the next two years, my mother’s condition seemed to slowly improve. She spent more and more time downstairs in the drawing room instead of in her bedroom, and she even entertained guests for dinner once in a while. One afternoon when I came home from school, Ruby called me to my mother’s sitting room.

Mother was smiling, and her curtains and shutters were open, but she couldn’t seem to be still. She flitted restlessly around the small room, her hoop skirts swirling, her nervous hands picking up first one object, then another, quickly discarding them again.

“I have some wonderful news I want to discuss with you, Caroline. In private.” Her voice had that frenzied breathlessness I’d grown to dread. “Ladies don’t talk about such things in polite company, you know.”

“What things?”

“You must tell no one, Caroline, but I’m finally expecting another child. I waited to tell you until the doctor was certain I was past the danger point. He says the baby is strong and healthy, and I’m not likely to lose it. But just to be sure, I must stay in confinement for the remainder of my time. I’m not even allowed to go to church.”

I tried to act pleased, but the news terrified me. I recalled the terrible grief I’d felt after the babies died at Hilltop, and I worried about what would happen to my mother if her baby died. I tried to pray, putting all my worry into Jesus’ hands, as Eli had taught me, but the worry and fear grew and swelled inside me even as the baby grew inside my mother.

One cold February day when Eli brought me home from school, the doctor’s carriage stood parked by our front gate. Fear gripped my stomach in its fist and wouldn’t let go. “Is Mother sick again?” I asked Eli.

“Better ask Tessie. She know.”

“Is it time for Mother’s baby?”

“Shush! Ain’t fitting to talk of such things.”

As soon as I came through the door, Tessie was waiting for me. “Where’s Mother? Can I see her?”

“Now, you best stay down here, child, ’til the baby come.”

I thought I could hear my mother moaning now and then as I waited nervously in the parlor. Tessie finally took me outside to the kitchen to distract me. Esther had all sorts of pots and kettles going in the fire, as usual, and the fragrant room quickly swallowed some of my fear in its steamy warmth. I sat down at the table across from Eli and watched the cold sleet wash down the windowpane outside.

“What’s it like to have a baby?” I asked.

Esther rolled her eyes. “Ain’t no picnic, I tell you that.”

“What makes Mother cry out so?”

Eli leaped up from his chair and fled the kitchen.

“Hush, now,” Tessie warned.

“Why won’t anyone tell me?” I asked.

“Because it ain’t fitting to talk about such things,” Tessie scolded. “You find out when the time come. And I ain’t gonna say no more about it, so quit asking.”

When I heard Daddy’s carriage arrive, I ran back through the cold sleet to the house. He immediately went upstairs to talk to the doctor, then came down again and asked Gilbert to pour him a drink. I went into the library to see him, but Daddy never did sit down in his chair. He paced nervously across the room to the window, looked out at the doctor’s carriage, covered with slush, then paced back to his desk, over and over again. I grew tired just watching him.

“Is Mother all right?” I finally asked.

“The doctor says so.”

I was afraid to ask about the baby.

Neither of us ate much of the supper Esther had made, but I saw Ruby carry up a huge tray of food for the doctor. The baby still hadn’t come when it was time for me to go to bed. I slept poorly, listening to Mother’s moans in the night.

The next morning, Tessie came to sit beside me on the bed, gently stroking my hair. “You mama had a little boy baby last night,” she said softly. “But he all blue, just like the others. He in heaven now, with the angels.”

“What about Mother?”

“She okay.”

“Is she . . . is she going to die?”

“No, the doctor say she ain’t gonna die. But I think she want to.”

The doctor was wrong. Before nightfall, my mother was dead.

Mother’s older sister, Martha, came down from Philadelphia by train for the funeral. Aunt Anne and Uncle William drove into town from Hilltop. Jonathan, who now attended the College of William and Mary, arrived by paddle steamer from Williamsburg. He wrapped his arm around my waist to hold me up as I stood beside Mother’s open grave in Hollywood Cemetery. The gaping hole in the ground, the bare tree branches, the black mourners’ clothes all looked stark against the frozen white ground. I had just turned sixteen, and my first grown-up dress, with long sleeves and proper hoops, was a black mourning gown.

That night after everyone else had gone to sleep, I slipped from my bed and went down the hall to my mother’s room. Ruby sat all alone on the edge of Mother’s neatly made bed, a single candle on the dressing table casting an eerie light. Ruby looked up as I entered, and I saw that she’d been crying.

“Ruby . . .” My voice sounded loud in the quiet night. “Ruby, there’s something I need to know.”

“You as pretty as she always was,” Ruby murmured as I stepped closer. I cleared the knot of fear from my throat.

“The doctor said my mother was fine after the baby was born . . . but Mother died.”

Ruby said nothing. I didn’t want to ask the question out loud, but she wasn’t going to make this easy for me.

“How . . . how did my mother die?”

Ruby shook her head as if she wanted both me and my question to go away. I knelt on the floor in front of her, face to face, taking her hands in mine.

“I came here to see Mother the day the baby was born. She didn’t have a fever. She wasn’t sick. . . .” I waited. “Please tell me, Ruby.”

“Seem like . . . seem like maybe your mama make a mistake,” she said in a tiny voice. “She not sleeping much, you know . . . and maybe she want to sleep. Laudanum pill always help her sleep, but maybe . . . maybe she take too many this time . . . by accident.”

“Is that what you think, Ruby? That it was an accident?”

She closed her eyes. By the light of the single candle, I watched the tears roll down her cheeks. When she opened her eyes again, she smiled. “I glad they bury her little baby with her. Now he won’t be all alone in that cold ground. Your mama so worried about that. Said a child need its mama.” She squeezed my hands tightly, her eyes pleading, begging me to understand. “Your mama didn’t want to leave her child all alone, Missy Caroline.”

I wanted to understand, but I couldn’t. I was her child, too. I needed my mother. And she had left me all alone.

My father seemed to age twenty years overnight. He wouldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, and spent most of the time in his library, where Gilbert endlessly refilled his glass. Daddy and Uncle William had shouted at each other in loud voices the night before my uncle returned to Hilltop, but I didn’t hear what they’d said. When it was time for Aunt Martha to return to Philadelphia, she and Daddy called me into the library one night. The sight of his griefravaged face brought tears to my eyes.