The Letter Writer Read online

  "Harriet?"

  He stood up and came forward. "Child? Is it you? The writer of all those letters? Why I came as fast as I could when you wrote, 'everyone here is dead.'" He held out his arms and I went to him.

  He enfolded me in those arms so tightly that the hug said things both of us hadn't even thought of yet. He patted the top of my head. "I've been here over an hour, child. Where have you been? All the servants were worried about you."

  I had a lie all ready. I was going to say I and Violet and Owen had been out searching for a lost colt, but something told me that lies had no legs around this man. Besides, it was good to have someone ask me where I'd been with such real concern.

  I drew back from him. I was still holding the map of Southampton County. "I went to find Nat Turner's cave," I said. "Did anyone here tell you the story about what happened?"

  "They didn't have to. It was in all our papers abroad. What a god-awful shame. And you knew this man? He worked here?"

  "Yessir."

  "And you went to get his map, you say?"

  "Yes, Uncle."

  He stepped back a bit, his hands on my shoulders. "So that's why you look as if the cat just dragged you in. You've been in his cave. Alone?"

  "No, sir, my girl, Violet, and our houseboy, Owen, came with me. I had to find the map, you see."

  "No, I confess, I don't." He had an English accent and I enjoyed hearing it. "Suppose you tell me."

  It came to me then that he was asking for an explanation. And that I must answer to him. That he was in charge now and a mite less than happy with my tardiness and my appearance.

  "It's a long story, sir, and they're waiting supper."

  "They've held it up for an hour, at least, they can wait ten minutes more."

  So I told him then how I'd drawn, or rather traced, the map for Nat Turner. How, out of pride, I'd initialed my name in the bottom corner. How he'd told me he was going plantation to plantation to preach, after the public whipping at the Gerard plantation. How he was known as a preacher and I'd never known him to be anything but gentle and kind. I was shamefaced when I was finished. There were tears in the tone of my voice.

  I showed him the map. He spread it out on the desk and examined it carefully, especially the notes Nat Turner had made. Then he looked at me.

  "The authorities are going to want this map," he said.

  "Please, Uncle," I begged. "That's why I went to get it. Please, I can't let them know I gave it to Nat Turner. Even though I didn't know what he was going to do. I can't let people, in years to come, see my initials on it. Please."

  He sat looking at me steadily. "I see you've thought this through."

  I nodded yes.

  "What were you going to do? Destroy it?"

  I said, yessir, I was.

  "We can't do that," he admonished. "We must give it over to the authorities."

  Tears welled in my eyes and started down my face.

  "I've always prided myself on being an honest man," he said quietly. "And now I'm home. And in charge. And head of the plantation. And I must decide what to do."

  I sniffed and nodded.

  He took out his handkerchief and wiped my face. "Tell you what, though, I haven't always been that honest. I couldn't, though I wanted to be. I've lied to you all these months and months, for one thing. Which was a bad thing to do. So, to make up for it, to you, what say I just erase these initials you put on the bottom corner here and then we turn the map over to the authorities? What do you say, hey, Harriet?"

  And all the time, there he was, carefully erasing my initials off the map. I just stared at him. My mind was unable to wrap around it all yet. What was it he had said? Why was he erasing my initials? Because he'd lied to me? When? About what?

  I asked him then. "What did you lie to me about all these months, sir?"

  He pushed the map aside. "Something very important, Harriet," he said. "You see, I'm not your uncle. I'm your father."

  Twenty-Five

  One would think that after what I'd seen of late, after what my eyes had been shown and what my ears had been forced to listen to and my tongue had had to say and been unable to say, that nothing would take me aback anymore.

  My father.

  I just stared at the man. The word found no familiar place to rest in my brain.

  "My father is dead, sir," I told him. "Been dead all these years. Are you an impostor then? Shall I call Owen and Ormond and have them put you off the place?"

  He laughed. He got funny lines on his face when he laughed. "You're a feisty little thing, Harriet," he said. "In truth, I'd be disappointed in you if you flung your arms around me and called me Papa." He reached down to the floor then, into a leather briefcase, and pulled out some important-looking papers.

  "You require proof," he said. "Very well. Here is proof. Here is my receipt of stewardship of the ship I came over on." He showed it to me. Sure enough, it said Richard Whitehead, and a lot of other fancy things in fancy writing. My father's ship. It was called the Crusader. And with that paper was a newspaper clipping from a London paper, telling of the sinking of the Thomas Paine, the ship my father was supposed to be lost at sea on.

  "We were picked up by a German ship," he explained, "those of us who could keep afloat in the waters."

  "They told us you were dead."

  "I preferred it that way."

  "Why?"

  "Mrs. Whitehead and I were estranged. She wanted a divorce but knew she would be ostracized in her world for it. It was my way of giving her her freedom to run things herself."

  "Richard ran them."

  "But as I understood it, she was boss."

  "Yes. How many years ago was that?" I asked.

  He knew he had to answer me. He was, in effect, "on trial" here.

  He said something that shocked me then. "How old is Violet?"

  I couldn't answer for a minute. My brain couldn't take it all in. He couldn't be about to say what I thought. It would be too much like a novel. Such things didn't happen in real life, did they?

  Margaret had once told me that truth was stranger than fiction.

  "Three years older than I am," I told him.

  "Then it was about fourteen years ago," he said. "Which brings us to the reason Mrs. Whitehead and I were estranged. Violet."

  He cleared his throat. "I fathered her, Harriet. Forgive me. I'm afraid I'm an awful reprobate. Violet's mother was a negro here on the plantation who has since died. Mrs. Whitehead ignored that, as all wives of plantation owners do. But it was always there, between us. I couldn't forgive myself, so I decided to go to England to give the both of us time away from each other. That was when you were born, three years after Violet. I really learned my lesson in England, didn't I?"

  I said nothing. Is that what I was? A lesson not learned?

  He went on. "I knew the plantation needed tending, so I came home. Richard was already at Hampden-Sydney, intent on being a minister. And something strange happened. They all took to you. You were a fine little thing, all smiles and bright eyes and friendliness. Mrs. Whitehead fell in love with you in spite of herself. She was a good woman. I left you here and went back on the Thomas Paine. It sank."

  "And you let us think you were dead," I said.

  "Yes."

  My head was spinning. I had to sit down. This family is going to kill me yet, I decided. I wish I could get on a ship and run away to England.

  My uncle, father, or whatever he was, was looking at me. "I'm sorry for what all this has done to you, Harriet, but let me say I've never been so pleased about anything as finding you and how you turned out. I've heard stories about what happened around here and what you've been through, child, and, truth to tell, I don't know if I could come through it as well as you did."

  "I love Violet," I said. "She's my best friend. And now I find out she's my half sister."

  "Well, then we must bring her in here and tell her," he said.

  I shook my head. "No. First you must tell me who my
mother was."

  He sighed. "Your mother disappeared on me two years after you were born. I tell you this carefully. Your mother was a beautiful and talented woman who belonged to a group of actresses and writers, men and women who were changing the face of literature and the role of women in England. Mary Lamb, and her brother, Charles Lamb, belonged to this group. They were a brother-sister writing team, part of a whole body of children's book writers in England. At that time, this group of writers was breaking new ground with children's books and were marked for their flamboyant ideas. Your mother was as liberal and flamboyant as the best of them. She put no restrictions on herself and everybody loved her. After you were born, I wanted to marry her, but she didn't want to marry. She wanted to be free. The group would have claimed you if I hadn't brought you here.

  "I didn't even want them to know where you were. I only know I wanted you to grow up to be American. Catharine accepted you. She wanted you to be an out and out American. And this is why Richard raised you as he did."

  "I hated Richard."

  He withdrew another piece of paper from his portfolio. "I'm going to read this to you," he said. "It's a letter to me from Richard, after he was appointed pastor here and more or less took over the family. Sit quietly now and listen."

  I sat quietly and he read.

  Dear Father: Still being in a state of grace inside my heart from receiving the pastorship of Saint John's, I approach your request with the highest degree of open-mindedness. First, I wish to thank you for the trust you have invested in me and promise you that I will always honor Mother's wishes, and, in the case of disciplining a slave, which is definitely a man's work, I will work around her as delicately as I can without seeming to go in the face of those wishes.

  Second, as to the girls. Margaret is a treasure and I can handle her with no problems at all. Violet has her place in the household and she knows what it is. It is never discussed that she is part of the family, but she is treated with decorum and a certain amount of respect. As for Harriet, I understand what you require in her upbringing and why. Her mother's flamboyant background needs reining in, and since this is in keeping with my beliefs as a minister, I shall see that she is trained this way. My God is a stern God, a punishing God, and will stand for no willy-nilly excuses, nor will I. She will have her chores, her schedule, her prayer times as well as study time. When I am finished, she will be as true an American woman as the Puritans at Plymouth. All vestiges of English nonsense will be gone from her.

  I do think, however, that once she reaches a certain age, she should start to correspond with you, to soften some of the sharp edges. What I lack in the liberal arts of her education, she will receive from the tutor I hire, who will likely be my wife, Pleasant, and in later life from you. God bless you.

  Your son, Richard

  He smiled. "I hope, in time, you will be able to forgive Richard," he said quietly. "If you hate him for the way he raised you, you might as well hate me. It was by my orders."

  I lowered my head. "He was good at what you wanted him to do," I said. "And at the end there, in the cotton field, I saw the real Richard, right before he died. He set the cotton afire to save my life."

  He smiled. "As he should have."

  There was silence for a while. It was getting on to dark. Somewhere in the house a clock chimed.

  "Did my mother ever try to get me back?" I asked.

  "Yes. But I was always able to prove her an unfit mother. After you were born, she left me. I never knew where she was. Or with whom."

  Somebody knocked on the door of the office and he said, "Come in." It was Connie, who announced that she'd put supper on the table in the dining room.

  He said thank you, and I simply did not know what to do.

  "Shall we fetch Violet?" I asked.

  "No," he said. "We'll have one meal alone, and then I'll talk to Violet. Alone, if it's all right with you."

  "Yessir," I said.

  We started in to the dining room and he asked me if I went to school and I told him about Pleasant and he said he'd see about a school for me. And he pulled out my chair when we sat down and I looked at him and said, "I don't know what I'm supposed to call you."

  He smiled. "Many people along the way have puzzled over that. You can call me Father, or Papa, or Pa. I kind of like Papa. In England that's what the girls call their fathers. But take your time and get comfortable with it."

  The soup came first, and it was good. And by the time it was finished, I had the courage to ask him a favor.

  "So what are we going to do with the map, then?"

  "Well, I think the proper thing is for me to bring it to the authorities. I'll tell them you found it. That you and the others were playing about as children do and found Nat Turner's cave."

  I hesitated, then spoke. "Can I go with you?"

  He looked at me. "In heaven's name, why would you want to do such a thing?"

  "I want to see Nat Turner," I said.

  His very expressive eyebrows raised up and he looked startled, but just for a second, then he had himself composed. And I thought, I must learn how to do that. And then I said, solemnly, "The only person Nat Turner killed, himself, was Margaret. I want to ask him why. Please. I have to know why."

  Connie came in then and served the meat and potatoes and vegetables. I waited until she left.

  Then I spoke again. "I know that he liked Margaret. I want to be sure he didn't let her suffer."

  He was cutting his meat. "You can't let it be?"

  "No, sir."

  He buttered a roll. He said nothing for a moment.

  I said, "Please, Papa?"

  He continued buttering the roll. I saw him bite his lower lip. That roll sure got a lot of butter on it. Finally he put it down on the plate and looked at me. "All right, daughter," he said.

  Twenty-Six

  "It's like something from a fairy tale," I told Violet, "us finding we're sisters."

  I'd read her enough books in the past for her to know about fairy tales. We were in my room, where I was helping her into one of Margaret's dresses. Mine were too small for her, and she didn't seem to mind wearing Margaret's.

  "I want you to dress according to your station in life," Papa had told her when they'd had their private talk in his office. "And no more servant's work. I'm going to get a tutor for both you and Harriet. I don't think she's ready to go to school yet and expose herself on a daily basis to the stares and questions and, yes, even the giggles of classmates. So we'll keep on with tutoring for a while."

  "It'll remind me of Pleasant," I told him.

  "Everything will remind you of everyone for a long while," he explained quietly. "And if you can't climb up and out of those memories, we'll move. Get another plantation. There are plenty of them in Virginia, Harriet."

  Violet looked scared. "I don't know how to do this," she said, adjusting the flower print dress. "All I've ever been is a slave."

  "You haven't been that," I told her. "You've been my companion, practically my sister, anyway."

  "But they gave me to you when I was just five."

  "Yes. As a playmate."

  "As someone to fetch for you. And carry. But I never ate with the family. And all Richard ever did was threaten and scold."

  "That's all he ever did to me, too, Violet."

  She looked beautiful in the pale green and yellow dress. I almost wished I had skin like hers. She stopped talking now to gaze into some middle distance while I was buttoning up the back of the dress. "What do you suppose Richard would do if he were alive today? And knew the truth about me?"

  I stopped buttoning and thought a moment. "Richard did know. He knew all the terrible secrets about this family."

  "You mean, when he started you writing to 'Uncle Andrew' he knew he was your father? And mine?"

  "Yes. I believe he started the whole thing rolling. And watched it," I said, "waiting to see what would happen. Richard apparently did have a rich sense of humor. And if he hadn't been killed, you
and I never would have met Papa."

  "So," she said almost reverently. "It's a good thing, then, that he's been killed?"

  "No," I said quickly. And for a moment both of us were wrapped in a terrible silence. And I knew it would take years, not minutes, for us to figure it all out.

  For one thing, I knew I was going to have to start forgiving. Or at least understanding. First Richard, and then Nat Turner, and then my own mother and father, and then God.

  Can one forgive God? Does He ever get the blame for anything? Richard would make me kneel an hour on the stones in the drive in back for even thinking such a thing.

  "Forgive yourself," he would say. "You are to blame."

  Was I? I know that some people went through all their life never forgiving themselves, but I did not want to do that.

  "Can I go with you to visit Nat?" Violet was asking as we went downstairs.

  "No," I said. "Oh, don't look so put out. I'm not being mean. I just think Nat won't talk if I'm not alone. Papa wanted to go in with me, too, but even he promised to stay outside the cell and give me my privacy. Isn't that decent of him, Violet?"

  She agreed that it was. "I think he's going to spoil you," she said.

  "I don't know what that would mean. People used to say Margaret was spoiled."

  "Well, she was."

  "Are you going to have a difficult time now? I mean, with all the servants?"

  "They'll tease me, I suspect. Especially Owen. I'll have to get used to it."

  "Did Papa tell you who your mama was?"

  "No. He said someday. Someday when things are settled and the mood is right, he would tell me. He said she isn't living anymore."

  More secrets, I thought, but I said nothing. Perhaps Papa was right. Enough had been said for now.

  Owen brought the gilt and cherrywood brougham, pulled by two thoroughbred horses, up in front of the house and we got in.

  Violet was coming along for the ride, for her own protection. The other servants hadn't been told about her new station in life yet. Papa would tell them when we got home. He didn't want any ruckus or teasing of her when they saw her in those clothes.