North and South: The North and South Trilogy (92 page)

“All right, Pa. “ He lowered the gun. The butt thumped the platform softly.

Orry glared at the bearded man. “Are you in charge of these ruffians?’ ‘

With exaggerated politeness, the man said, “Be careful with your language, sir. You are addressing the commander in chief of the Provisional Government of the United States. Captain Smith.”

Not Smith. John Brown of Osawatomie. Orry recognized the face from engravings in illustrated weeklies, even though the beard had been much longer. Had he cropped it, hoping that would make identification more difficult?

Brown’s blue eyes resembled bits of pond ice. “My son meant no harm to the young woman. He was merely protecting himself. Tempers run high in an enterprise of this importance.”

“Enterprise?” Orry snorted. “Damn fancy term for train robbery.”

“You insult me, sir. We are not thieves. I have come from Kansas to free all the Negroes in this state.”

Despite Brown’s calm tone, Orry sensed madness in the fierce glint in the man’s eyes. He thought of Virgilia then. Was this her revolutionary messiah?

“You mean to lead a revolt?” he asked Brown.

“I do. I already have possession of the United States Armory. No more trains will be permitted through this station. You will go inside and keep silent until I decide on the disposition of this one. If I’m interfered with, I’ll burn the town and have blood. Do I make myself clear?”

Grim-faced, Orry nodded. Then, supporting Brett with his arm under hers, he led her into the small lobby and to a horsehair settee.

A small boy began to cry; his mother drew him onto her lap. A husband chafed the hands of his sniffling wife. Orry counted eighteen passengers sitting or standing around the lobby.

Opposite the door they had entered was a second one, this leading to the street. Half open, it permitted a view of another of Brown’s men, a Negro who paced slowly back and forth with a Navy Colt in his hand. Orry saw farmer’s shoes and ragged pants several inches too short.

He sat down next to Brett, rubbed his palm back and forth over his knee. Obviously John Brown had recruited slaves or former slaves. Deep in Orry’s gut old childhood fears were stirring.

At the station doorway, Phelps put his head in and said, “I am attempting to negotiate with Captain Smith for release of the train and its mail. Please be patient and remain calm.” Then he was gone.

A clock with a brass pendulum tick-tocked behind the lobby counter. The boy’s crying continued. Orry yawned. He thought of John Brown’s eyes, and for the first time he believed in Senator Seward’s irrepressible conflict.

He was jolted by Brett’s whisper. “Orry, that man’s been watching us.”

“What man?”

“The guard outside.”

“The captain’s boy?”

“No, the other one. The nigra. There he is again.”

Orry looked up and as if one nightmare were not enough, confronted another.

Just outside the door hovered a dark face, its good looks scoured away by care and hunger. Orry had seen that face at neighborhood gatherings along the Ashley, and would have recognized it anywhere.

“Grady,”
he whispered, and walked swiftly to the door.

Grady stepped back as Orry came outside and shut the door. A few misty lights glowed in homes on the mountainsides, but little could be seen of the town itself.

“Grady, don’t you remember me?”

“’Course I do, Mr. Main.” He cocked the Colt. “Better stand right there. Captain Smith says to shoot if anybody causes trouble.” He sounded as if he hoped someone might.

“How many are you?” Orry’s breath plumed in the night air as he spoke.

“Eighteen,” Grady replied quickly. “Thirteen white men, the rest nigra.”

“How on earth did you concoct a scheme like this?”

“Captain Smith, he’s been planning it a long time. We been living across the river at a rented farmhouse quite a while now. We get supplies and guns shipped down from Chambersburg.”

One more shock on top of the others; Virgilia had said she was bound for Chambersburg.

“Is your—” He couldn’t bring himself to say
wife.
“Is George Hazard’s sister with you?”

“Yes, she’s at the farm with the other women.”

“God,” Orry whispered.

“Go back inside, Mr. Main. Sit quiet an’ don’t provoke us an’ maybe the captain will let the train go on. With the guns and ammunition that’s in the Armory, we’re going to bring the jubilee. If anybody stands against us, blood will run.”

“You can’t win, Grady. The blood will be yours.”

Grady’s pride exploded in anger. He extended his right arm to full length. His hand trembled, but whether from excitement or uncertainty it was impossible to say.

The muzzle of the Navy Colt quivered, an inch from Orry’s nose. Orry stood motionless, rigid in fear. Five seconds passed.

Five more—

Suddenly the hotel door opened. “Orry?”

Grady jerked the Colt down, self-disgust evident on his face. “Get in there!” He pushed Orry toward his sister. Orry followed her inside. With his heavy plowman’s shoe, Grady kicked the door shut behind them.

The lobby was still. The passengers dozed or simply stared at nothing. Hours had passed. All emotion had been spent. It had been a long time since anyone had cried or even spoken.

Brett slept with her head on her brother’s shoulder. Orry watched the clock’s brass pendulum sweep back and forth. Soon the pendulum slowed and seemed to float from side to side. Orry knuckled his eyes, tiredness and strain beginning to affect him.

Conductor Phelps entered, looking haggard. “Everyone please get aboard. They’re going to let us go.” He whispered that news, as if fearful that saying it any louder might cause Smith to change his mind.

Men and women gasped and rushed toward the door. Orry roused Brett, led her outside and down the platform past the guns of four guards. They climbed the steps to the darkened coach, and within minutes the train was chugging slowly through the covered bridge over the Potomac River.

Phelps walked ahead of the cowcatcher, searching for any signs that the structure had been deliberately weakened. One by one, the coaches rolled out from the shadows of the bridge. Dawn had reached the Blue Ridge. Orry sat with his forehead against the sunlit window, thinking that he should tell Brett who Captain Smith really was. The car passed Phelps, who jumped onto the rear steps.

In the aisle, a man waltzed his weeping wife around and around. Phelps came into the car. Another woman rushed to him, clutching a scrap of paper. “I’m going to throw this off. We must warn everyone of what’s happened.”

“But we’ll be in Baltimore in just—”

The woman paid no attention. As she hurried away, Phelps took off his cap and scratched his head.

Orry felt drained—and convinced for the first time that only armed force could meet the threat of Yankees such as John Brown. Suppose you granted that slavery ought to be ended—and in his most private thoughts he sometimes granted exactly that—even so, violent revolution wasn’t the way. Revolution had to be resisted.

That was his conviction as he watched scraps of paper blow past the window. Messages thrown from the cars by the passengers who had survived the night. Messages carrying the news of Harpers Ferry to the world.

Three evenings later, Orry bought a paper at their Baltimore hotel. In the lobby, in restaurants, and in the streets, people were talking of nothing but the raid, which had ended with only two of the insurrectionists left uninjured. Brown’s men had killed four townsfolk. One was the Negro baggage handler Orry had seen lying on the platform. For a time a great-grandnephew of President Washington had been held hostage.

The insurrectionists had finally been overcome by a detachment of Marines rushed from Washington. The commander of the detachment was Lee, and he had been accompanied by Charles’s old friend Stuart. Brown himself had been wounded defending an engine house in which he had taken refuge. He was now in jail at Charles Town, Virginia.

Orry took the paper up to the suite. “They list Brown’s men who were killed,” he said when Brett entered the sitting room. “One is a Grady Garrison, Negro.”

“Garrison?” she repeated.

Orry shrugged. “He must have adopted the last name of that Boston rabble rouser.”

Brett’s face was nearly as melancholy as his. “Is there a mention of Virgilia?”

“No, not a word. It’s presumed that any of the conspirators who didn’t take part in the raid fled after the shooting started. The farm isn’t so far from Harpers Ferry that they couldn’t hear the gunfire.”

“Well, much as I dislike Virgilia, I hope she got away.”

“I do too. For George’s sake.”

Frightening as it had seemed when Orry was in the middle of it, the raid, it was now clear, had been a pathetic doomed affair. A conspiracy organized by madmen, executed by misfits. Even so, it was sending shock waves through the country and around the world. If the North and the South had not been irreparably split by the events of the last few years, they would be split now, he thought.

So it proved in the days that followed. Not even bleeding Kansas had divided the nation quite so completely. Late in October, Brown went on trial for conspiracy to incite a slave revolt and treason against the state of Virginia.

Influential Northerners praised him and spoke out in his defense. Emerson called him a new saint. In the South, Huntoon’s reaction was typical. He denounced Brown as a homicidal maniac and his scheme as “our homeland’s deepest fears made manifest.” With that Orry sadly agreed. Although Brown’s raid didn’t propel Orry into the camp of the fire eaters, he found himself a good deal closer to it.

Fear of further uprisings spread like a plague. Along the Ashley, planters and their wives spoke of little else. The LaMotte brothers formed a militia-style marching organization of like-minded men, the Ashley Guards. Huntoon was named an honorary captain.

George wrote Orry to apologize for his behavior at Lehigh Station. He made no reference to Virgilia or to her presence at the Maryland farm. George found it deplorable that some Southerners were blaming Brown’s raid on the so-called Black Republicans. He said Brown was clearly in the wrong, except perhaps in the matter of his original motivation. The desire to see all slaves freed was, in George’s opinion, laudable.

“Laudable!” Orry crushed the note and flung it into a corner.

On the night of December 1, church bells pealed across the North from Maine to Wisconsin. It was a night of mourning for John Brown. Next day he ascended a scaffold in Charles Town and gazed peacefully at the bleak and wintry sky as the hangman settled the noose around his neck.

That evening Cooper dined at Mont Royal. He expressed regret over the day’s events. “They shouldn’t have hung him. While he lived he was just a poor lunatic. Now they’ve turned him into a holy martyr.”

A few days before Christmas, Orry had confirmation of that in another letter from George. The letter concluded:

People still speak passionately about the raid. Do you know Grady took part in it and died at Harpers Ferry? I have been told that Virgilia also spent some time at the farm, but this I cannot confirm. She has disappeared; I have neither seen nor heard from her since the night of our quarrel—for which I once more tender profound apologies. Will you not break your silence, old friend, and write and tell me that you accept them?

Orry did so—grudgingly. An hour later, he tore up the letter.

The events at Harpers Ferry stayed with him in an obsessive way. They were responsible for the decision he reached about Brett in late December.

C
LARISSA HAD EARLIER INDICATED
her delight with the candle-bedecked Christmas tree, so Orry had moved her drawing board downstairs to a corner close to it. She sat at the board now, alternately gazing at the flame of a candle for five or ten minutes at a time and cheerily nattering as she worked on the latest version of the family tree.

Clarissa’s hair was pure white and her smile as ingenuous as a baby’s. Orry sometimes envied his mother’s separation from reality. He seldom liked anything in the world these days. He especially disliked the responsibility he was about to discharge.

Brett entered, sliding the doors shut behind her.

“One of the girls said you wanted to see me.”

He nodded, standing wide-legged before the bright hearth. Brett frowned; she sensed tension. She tried to relieve it with banter.

“Your beard is showing some very becoming touches of white. In another year or so you’ll be able to play Saint Nicholas.”

He didn’t smile. “At the moment I have another role, that of your guardian. I thought we should discuss the matter of you and Billy.”

“His letter was the grandest present I could have hoped for!” Billy had written to say there was an excellent chance he’d be assigned to a group of engineers who were soon to start repairs on Fort Moultrie, located on Sullivan’s Island near the entrance to Charleston harbor.

She studied her brother. “I hope you can make Christmas perfect and give me the other gift I want.”

“I can’t give you permission to marry him. Not now, anyway.”

He said it so bluntly she wanted to cry. But she considered that kind of behavior unworthy of a lady and quickly got herself under control. In the corner, Clarissa hummed “Silent Night.”

“Pray be kind enough to state your reasons.”

Brett’s arch tone antagonized him, “They are the same as before. We are on a collision course with the Yankees. Reasonable men discuss the need for compromise, but nothing is done. And if anyone has been responsible for pushing the South toward an independent government—”

“Are you saying you want that?”

“No. I am saying it’s coming. Please let me finish. If anyone helped to promote secession, it was John Brown. Men on the other side share the feeling. In the
Mercury
last Saturday, Professor Longfellow was quoted on the subject of the hanging—which he of course opposed. Do you know what he said, this great poet, this humanitarian? “This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon.’” Orry shook his finger like an evangelist. “Soon. That was his word.”