The Bride of Texas (23 page)

So he got into the gig with her and drove her back to the Carson plantation. He couldn’t catch a word of the rapid exchange
between Rosemary and her mother — Mr. Carson was out in the fields — but Cyril could guess what they were talking about
.

He waited in the vestibule of the white house. It was big, but not as extravagant as Mr. de Ribordeaux’s mansion with the white pillars along its façade, on the road to Fayette. Still, it was a spacious home, fragrant with the smell of the smokehouse. On the vestibule wall hung paintings of men in red coats and white trousers, riding through unfamiliar scenery with packs of dogs. Mrs. Carson poured him a glass of something that tasted like apple cider and left the room. Rosemary smiled at him. He said, “I must go work. In field.”

The girl kept on smiling. Her teeth were small and white. “Just wait a minute,” she said. “Wait, please!” Her mother came back with something large wrapped in a piece of linen
.

“No, no!” he protested
.

“Yes, yes,” said Rosemary, mimicking him, and then, noticing that he was blushing, she added, “You must take this. You — saved — my — life!”

As he hurried home towards the distant field with the big bundle under his arm, he realized how exaggerated Rosemary’s words had been. After all, she had merely scraped her palms. But he didn’t mind, and could even forgive her mild mockery of his accent
.

The bundle contained a whole smoked ham. For the first time in a long time, they had a proper dinner. Back home, they wouldn’t have had a meal like that even on a feast day
.

“She’s fallen in love with you,” said Lida, when he recounted the story over supper, and told her how Rosemary had enticed him into the gig to drive her home. As charmed as he was — less by the girl than by the adventure that had briefly brightened the monotonous slavery of his days — he was still worried about what Lida would say when she discovered what he had used to bandage Rosemary’s hands. But Lida didn’t discover her loss until three days later, and by that time the adventure had produced a healthy return
.

“You don’t say,” replied Lida, licking her fingers, when he protested. “You think she gave you a present like that for no reason?”

“I saved her” — he almost repeated her exaggeration, but caught himself in time — “her team. The horses bolted and pretty near got away.”

“You don’t say! And bolting horses run for ever, do they?”

The next evening, as they were having supper, they heard a horse whinny outside the cottage. A knock came at the door. Cyril’s father opened it and a man in a cowboy hat stood silhouetted against the Texas sky. “My name is John Carson,” he said in English
.

“Toupelik,” said Cyril’s father, and then, in Czech, welcomed him with a country saying: “Come on in so you don’t steal our sleep.”

“May I come in?” asked Carson. By now Cyril was beside his father
.

“Yes, please come in.”

He had come to offer Cyril a job. Carson’s overseer had fallen ill and wanted to return to New Orleans, where his sister, widow of a rich tobacco merchant, lived. Carson needed a replacement. Later, Cyril discovered that Carson’s blacks didn’t need much overseeing
.

Even though his farm-hands were his property, Carson wasn’t much of a slave-driver. He was a gentleman plantation-owner; originally a farmer in England, neither rich nor poor, he had inherited a huge Louisiana plantation from his childless brother. He didn’t like Louisiana. When Texas opened up to slave-owners, he sold the plantation, bought one in Fayette County, and brought his slaves with him
.

“They didn’t like Louisiana either,” he grinned, and by this time conversation came more easily to Cyril, because he’d picked up English quickly, the way small children pick up a new language. Rosemary teased him for talking like the Negroes (there were too
many of them on the plantation and they talked a lot), though her own King’s English, acquired back in Miss Meacham’s boarding school in Devonshire, was coloured with a Texas twang and Negro syntax, especially when she tried to get a word in edgewise with her father’s garrulous slaves
.

“Not many Negroes like Louisiana, and they have good cause not to,” said Mr. Carson. Cyril still didn’t understand why. After all, Carson’s Louisiana Negroes seemed to like it in Texas, at least in that tiny piece of Texas owned by Mr. Carson. The reasons gradually became clear as the Toupeliks became acquainted with the politics of the South, and as Cyril came to understand that Mr. Carson was not a slave-driver
.

Carson put two young Negroes at the elder Toupelik’s disposal to replace Cyril’s labour, and in exchange for half of Cyril’s new wages. They didn’t seem like slaves, either, and they had nice names: Washington White and Jefferson Black. They were so talkative that even the elder Toupelik picked up some English from them — their English, of course. They had clever hands and they helped him fix his cotton gin, a rickety old machine that had already had five owners and was a cotton gin in name only. They laughingly encouraged Mrs. Toupelik to teach them Czech, and they picked it up as quickly as Cyril had picked up English, which seemed to confirm the theory that Mr. Carson put forward with true British irony — that if they were children, as most Southerners claimed, they were the wiliest of children
.

There was one way in which Mr. Carson was a typical slave-owner: he thought more about politics than about his plantation. The plantation ran as well as it did mainly because he was the kind of slave-owner he was, and the slaves were the kind of slaves they were. Behind their cabins — not the standard, cramped, dirt-floor cabins, but spacious wooden structures — were verdant vegetable plots and clucking chickens
.

Cyril was fascinated by how a large plantation worked, even
though it wasn’t his own. He was always poking around and asking questions
.

Under a shelter in the corner of the Carson farmyard stood a cotton gin. Beside it was a deep pit filled with layer upon layer of cotton seeds, the remains of several bountiful harvests
.

“What do you do with them?” Cyril asked the Negro operating the machine one day
.

“Nuthin’,” replied the man, whose name was Franklin Adams. “They ain’t no use at all.”

Cyril picked up a handful of seeds from the top layer and rubbed them between his palms. “No use at all?”

Franklin shook his head, “We tried usin’ them for fertilizer, but cotton plants come in too tall and the bolls don’t make much cotton. No need to fertilize here anyways. It’s fresh soil. Massa told us to feed them to the stock, but they won’t eat them much, and the milk tasted bad. Too much fat,” said Franklin. “So here they sets.”

In the old country, nothing went to waste. He mulled it over. He started playing with a corn crusher. In the old country he had learned how to fix anything, so now, by tightening some screws and readjusting the plates, he got the crusher to remove the shells from the cotton seed. He roasted the kernels in something he rigged up from an old metal stovepipe, then pressed them by hand
.

A few days later, he turned up in the Carson kitchen, where Hester the cook was preparing dinner under Rosemary Carson’s scrutiny. Chicken was frying on the stove
.

“Try this,” he said, handing them a small bottle
.

“What is it?”

He explained that it was oil from the cotton seeds. Rosemary wrinkled her nose and pretended to gag
.

“Just try it,” he said. “No one will know.”

He was sure of that. He had tried the new oil out on Washington and Jefferson the day before
.

Rosemary stopped making faces and began to wonder when Cyril would approach her father
.

Franklin stood by the corn crusher and watched in amazement as the cow gobbled up the cottonseed mash
.

“Look at that, Massa Cyril,” he said. “Look how she love it!”

And so they started making cottonseed oil on the Carson plantation. It turned out to be the first production site of its kind in the South. Soon Cyril had improved the cleaning process and found a way to eliminate the mild but unpleasant taste. He and Mr. Carson formed a partnership. His reputation reached the ears of Monsieur de Ribordeaux, at whose house Cyril first set eyes on all the beauties of the white world and the black. That was when everything else faded in importance
.

He put the question delicately to Washington, because he knew he could hardly ask the Carsons
.

“Dinah?” Washington winked at Jefferson and they both laughed. “She was a birthday present,” said Jefferson, “for young Massa Dribordo.”

Cyril didn’t think their laughter sounded very genuine. And he didn’t like what he’d found out
.

Sergeant Kapsa couldn’t bring himself to ask the question. Was it for fear of opening the old wound? Time and this huge land had healed it for him long ago; all that remained was the scar. He could feel it but it no longer hurt. It was merely a memento of the paradise in the mysterious little house on the hill at Gottestischlein, not a reminder of the hardship of his escape, Hanzlitschek’s clothes flapping loosely about him, with none of the officer’s documents, no official papers to provide him with security. That had been a land where sundry uniforms
with eyes and ears — or so Kapsa saw it, evading the authorities on alpine footpaths and forest trails and later, in Germany, fleeing in coaches and even leaping from moving trains — existed only to annoy travellers who were doing nothing suspicious (which in itself aroused suspicion) by demanding stamped papers of the sort the fugitive did not have. All he had was money, the hundred and eighty gulden in gold and silver coins that Ursula had taken from the Hauptmann’s cash-box. But the money could only help him on his way, not protect him from uniformed spies. He managed to cross two borders and reach Holland — by then he was wearing new clothes he’d bought for three of Hanzlitschek’s gulden from a discreet Jew in a small town in southern Germany, where he’d finally mustered the courage to emerge from the woods. He spent several anxious hours at a tiny railway station, realizing that the eyes beneath the derbies could be more dangerous than eyes in uniform. In a dubious effort to disguise himself, he returned to the merchant and bought himself a derby like the ones the police agents wore. But now, in Amsterdam, his anxiety almost completely vanished.

He still had well over half the gulden, and under his shirt, against his bare skin, was the velvet pouch she had pressed into his hand during their last kiss, their final farewell: “
Jetzt lauf!
Run now! And don’t forget me,
mein liebster Mann!”

He hadn’t looked inside the pouch until he was well into the woods. Under the alpine moon, the diamond necklace had glittered like a nest of crystal eggs.

He heard the distant report of a Parrot gun and braced himself to ask the question. He didn’t want to hear of death from the Polish woman’s lips. In the nightmares that had haunted him all the way from the haystacks and stables he’d hidden in, on the Atlantic crossing and even in the garrisons of the Thirteenth Regiment, he had hellish visions of Ursula facing the
gallows. What if the maid had talked? What if there had been gossip? What if the colonel investigating the tragic accident in the forest had failed to believe the evidence of the bloody rock and the bootmarks in the moss? Kapsa had sweated in mortal terror as he tried to sleep in the garrisons of the United States Army. In a hot summer, he imagined Ursula standing in prison garb under the malevolent imperial eagle, before an awful judge. His own safety only made his fear worse. Once, in a fit of madness, he decided to desert the army once again, cross the ocean and two borders to Helldorf, and then, like some Robin Hood or Janosik, carry Ursula off through her prison window, down a rope, and back across two frontiers and the Atlantic. But it had been no more than a momentary fantasy.

That had been long ago. Now, here in the burning city of Columbia, his fears were revived.

They had almost reached the white building when a terrified young woman in a blue-grey dress came running out of the door, screaming, “Mama, Mama! Something terrible has happened!”