Carolina Gold (14 page)

“Most of what I know about art I learned outside the hallowed halls of Madame Giraud’s.” She paused, remembering. “One day in a fit of pique I left school against all the rules and wound up at the door of an old Italian gentleman who lived just off Tradd Street. He was a painter—not a very successful one, as he was the first to admit. He made his living restoring paintings belonging to the wealthiest families in Charleston.

“That first afternoon he gave me tea and cake and showed me the painting he was working on—a scene of the holy family on their flight to Egypt. He told me the entire story of the painting, and when I showed an interest he allowed me to borrow his art books. I smuggled them into my room at Madame Giraud’s and read them by candlelight when I should have been learning the many forms of French verbs.”

Mr. Betancourt smiled. “I’m fascinated. Please go on.”

“There isn’t much more to tell. After that first day, I slipped away from school as often as I could to watch him work. It was a painstaking affair—stripping away two hundred years’ worth of soot and grime an inch at a time. But the result was beautiful. He died only a year after my mother did.”

His eyes held hers. “Too much loss for one so young.” He dropped his gaze. “So much sadness for us all.”

“Papa?” Anne-Louise trotted over and deposited a handful of smooth river pebbles into his hand. “Aren’t these pretty? I want to take them home and put them in a jar.”

Mr. Betancourt nodded and consulted his pocket watch. “Speaking of home, I suppose we ought to go.”

“Can’t we stay longer? I want to look for more pebbles.”

“Afraid not, my sweet. Miss Fraser has an appointment in a little while, and I must attend to some correspondence for tomorrow’s mail. Go get your sister, please.”

Anne-Louise hurried down the narrow beach, calling for Marie-Claire. Mr. Betancourt helped Charlotte to her feet, and together they packed up the remnants of their picnic. He gave the horse a leftover piece of carrot and stowed the basket and his violin case in the rig. “I’m glad you came with us today. I quite enjoyed myself.”

“I did too. It was a welcome diversion from worrying about my business with Mr. Finch. I hope this afternoon’s meeting doesn’t turn unpleasant.”

“He’s a strange one. The day he came to Willowood, he spent half an hour talking politics. Despite his crude manners, he seems to be better educated than I expected.”

“He reads poetry too—when he isn’t busy berating his workers. I do understand the need to maintain discipline, but I wish he would be kinder about it.”

The girls ambled toward them, their shoes tied together by the laces and tossed over their shoulders, their arms full of blooming vines. Mud clung to the hems of their dresses and to their tangled hair. They looked so innocent and carefree that Charlotte laughed.

He joined in. “You see the challenge I have before me in turning them into proper ladies—and why I am ever in your debt for your efforts.”

“Marie-Claire reminds me very much of myself at that age. Independent, always testing the rules. She told me the other day that she wants to be a rice planter like you.”

His eyes darkened. “It seems all our fortunes on that score are in jeopardy.”

She studied his face. What was the nature of his problem with his plantation? She didn’t know him well enough to question any of the mysteries—his departed wife, his abandoned profession—surrounding him. “Your difficulties regarding Willowood are not resolved, then?”

“Not yet. I’m going to Washington tomorrow.”

She brushed away a cloud of gnats that had swarmed in from the river. “I can imagine how eager you are to get your fields into cultivation.”

“I’ve nearly given up for this year. But if things work out quickly enough, I might yet be able to plant a small crop. If Mr. Finch can keep his crew together.”

She released a gusty sigh. His concern was well founded. But for better or worse, Jeremiah Finch and his crew were their only option.

“Tamar has promised to stay with the children while I’m away,” Mr. Betancourt went on. “They will appear for their lessons as usual, and I’ll be back on Friday. Late.”

The girls reached the rig and piled inside, elbowing each other and giggling. Charlotte squeezed in beside Mr. Betancourt.

When they reached her yard, he helped her down, then placed one hand on her arm. “I have a favor to ask.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know about you, but I feel as if we are old friends. I wonder if we might call each other by our Christian names.”

“I’d like that.”

He smiled and touched one finger to the brim of his hat. “Good-bye then, Charlotte.”

“Good-bye, Nicholas. I hope your trip proves fruitful.”

Ten

C
harlotte tossed another armload of ruined papers into the trash barrel she had wrestled into her father’s study. Though the sight of his plantation ledgers and stacks of torn correspondence rendered in his neat hand filled her with sadness and longing, holding on to a mountain of trash would not bring him back. And truth to tell, every small step toward restoring the house brought her a growing sense of peace, despite her ever-present concerns.

She pressed her fingers to her temples and briefly closed her eyes. Mr. Finch would expect a payment soon, and the
New York Enterprise
had not yet paid her for her last two articles. Yesterday she’d hitched Cinnamon to the wagon and made the trip to Georgetown to pick up supplies and check for mail. Nothing from New York. But a letter from Alexander in Atlanta had lifted her spirits.

In between teaching the Betancourt girls and keeping an eye on Mr. Finch, she had scrubbed, polished, and waxed the remaining woodwork until it gleamed. After a good airing, the summer
linens and quilts her cousin had brought now graced her bed, adding a welcome spot of color in the whitewashed room. Her mother’s china cups and teapots lined the shelves in the kitchen, and the front parlor, though devoid of its intricate mahogany woodwork, looked better now that her mother’s blue and gold rug covered the cypress floor.

She had decided to convert the library into a classroom. With its generous proportions and tall windows facing the golden marshlands, it was a lovely place for her and her charges to pass the Lowcountry spring. Perhaps by the time she returned to Fairhaven for the winter, she could hire a chimney sweep to clean the fireplace. A crackling fire on a cool winter’s evening would be just the thing.

She dusted the books that had survived the Yankees and stacked a few of them with the ones she had ordered on a plain pine table Lettice had provided. The girls could sit there to attend to their lessons while she sat at her mother’s walnut desk.

She moved to dump more papers into the barrel, and her foot hit something that skittered across the wood floor. The key to her father’s strongbox. She bent to pick it up.

For as long as she could remember, Papa had kept that key in the bottom drawer of his desk. But the desk was long gone. Perhaps it now graced some Yankee officer’s home along with her stolen piano. Perhaps it had been used for kindling or for the making of a Yankee coffin. In any case she would never see the desk or the strongbox again.

She tucked the key into her pocket and finished sweeping the floor. Then she pumped clean water into her bucket and tackled the dirt-streaked windows, her mind filling with plans for the girls’ next lessons. They needed more books already. Anne-Louise had finished the Peter Parley book. Marie-Claire had shown an aptitude for English composition and a talent for drawing. Soon Charlotte’s small cache of reading material would no longer suffice.

She finished one window and moved to the next. Too bad she hadn’t kept her copy of Ollendorff’s grammar with her notes about French verbs scribbled in the margins. She wished she were more proficient in the language. Thinking of the times she had tried to bluff her way through Madame Giraud’s lessons by randomly adding
vous
onto English words filled her with regret. Madame had not been fooled. She’d muttered and rolled her eyes and tapped her pointer on the chalkboard, her disapproving frown magnifying all of her pupil’s shortcomings.

But perhaps now Charlotte’s lack of proficiency with French wouldn’t matter. Her arrangement with Mr. Betancourt—Nicholas—was only temporary, and he was well able to correct the girls’ French himself.

Charlotte wrung out her rag and tackled another dirty window, still thinking of that long-ago classroom. Perhaps her dogged determination to prove everyone wrong and make Fairhaven profitable again was the result of feeling like such a failure at school.

With the windows finished, Charlotte emptied her bucket, spread her cleaning rags out to dry, and hurried upstairs to change her dress. The girls were due at ten.

She attended to hygiene, brushed and pinned her hair, and changed into a navy dress. It was too heavy by half for the warmth of this morning, but her budget didn’t yet allow for new frocks—not when there still was so much to do to restore Fairhaven. Home was her first priority.

She heard a shout at the gate. The girls turned up the avenue, swinging their lunch buckets and laughing with a boy who walked between them. Thin as a rake, he moved with a loose-limbed gait, his eyes cast downward. Bony wrists protruded from the sleeves of a worn homespun shirt. His bare feet were brown and as hard-looking as tanned leather. Charlotte hurried outside just as the trio reached the veranda.

“Miss Fraser,” Marie-Claire said. “This is Daniel Graves. He lives upriver from us—nearly all the way to Richmond Hill.”

“Daniel.” Charlotte offered a polite smile and inclined her head in greeting. She was uncomfortable with the notion of a strange boy accompanying two young girls and annoyed that he had interrupted her plans for the morning, which included a walk to the beach to sketch the wildlife along the river. But behaving rudely toward this waif would set a bad example for her charges.

“Ma’am.” The boy stood straight and spoke respectfully. That was something.

“I’m glad to have made your acquaintance, Daniel, but now I must ask you to excuse us. The girls have much to learn today.”

“Yes’m. That’s why I come with ’em. Marie-Claire said you’re the best teacher in the whole Lowcountry. And I am a boy in dire need of an education.”

She couldn’t help smiling at his forthright manner. “I see. What about the school near Sandy Creek?”

“Teacher quit back in January ’cause they’s no money to pay ’im, and Pa can’t afford to send me away to school. B’sides, the Yankees busted up the schoolhouse and took everything that wasn’t nailed down.”

“Perhaps a new teacher—”

“No, ma’am. I don’t reckon no other teacher for fifty miles wants to take us on. And anyway, there ain’t hardly any of us left since the blacks moved in and the rich folks left these parts. But me and Pa, we’re stayin’ put. We ain’t rich, but we’ve got big plans. Soon as I get some schoolin’.”

Marie-Claire plopped her lunch bucket onto the bottom step. “At least let him stay for today, Ma’m’selle. He walked an awful long way to get here. Think how you’d feel to come so far for something you wanted real bad, only to be disappointed.”

“I won’t be any trouble,” Daniel said. “I don’t expect to have
books of my own or nothin’. And you don’t have to pay me no mind. I just want to listen. No harm in that, is there?”

The earnest, hopeful look on the boy’s face, his absolute faith that an education would bring an end to all his troubles, overcame her objections. “Very well. You may stay for today. But I’m afraid that’s all I can promise.”

He looked away and scrubbed at the ground with his bare toe.

“Come inside.”

Abandoning her plan of taking them down to the river, she settled the girls at the pine table in the library and sent Daniel to the kitchen for another chair. As was her custom, she read from the book of Psalms to begin the day, then set the girls to their various assignments—an arithmetic exercise for Anne-Louise and an essay for Marie-Claire. As the younger girl recited the multiplication tables aloud, Charlotte noticed Daniel mouthing the answers along with her. Never had she seen a boy so obsessed with learning. She gave Anne-Louise a handwriting lesson and set her to copying a verse from Proverbs, then she turned her attention to the boy. Was there any book on her father’s shelf that might occupy him for the next four hours?

“Tell me, Daniel. What are your interests? What do you hope to accomplish with your schooling?”

“Me and Pa aim to buy us a riverboat and start a passenger service. Pa says now that the war is over, people will start travelin’ again, and they will pay for a nice accommodation. But boats cost money, so that’s why I got to learn and get a job soon as I can. I reckon it’ll take a good long while to save up enough to get us a boat.”

“An admirable plan. But jobs are scarce in these parts nowadays.”

“I know that. Me and Pa aim to head north soon as I’m ready.”

She pulled a tattered copy of
Two Years Before the Mast
from the shelf. “Perhaps you would enjoy this.”

“Yes’m. I enjoy just about any book you can name.”