Or Give Me Death Read online

  There was a letter from Pa.

  I took the mail, newspapers, and letters and walked the long central hall, out the back door. Here I sat on a bench in my newly planted herb garden.

  I ripped open the letter.

  Good Morrow, Sarah, Daughter, Son,

  and little ones:

  I write to tell you that I'll arrive home late

  tonight. Don't wait up. Keep a candle in the

  window of the traveler's room, and some cold

  meat on the hunter's sideboard. I miss you all

  I folded the letter.

  Pa coming home tonight! What would I do? I put the letter down and filled my eyes with familiar things that settled me.

  There. Some bridal wreath already blooming at the end of the gardens.

  There. Daffodils nodding their yellow heads along the lane that led through the dependencies, the warehouse, washhouse, ash house, kitchen, and blacksmith shop.

  There, too. Blue field pansies, so pleasing to the eye.

  And there! MyJohn coming home from the fields. I watched him dismount his horse, Peaches, and hand the reins to Barley, the stableboy. My eyes feasted on the tall figure he cut, his graceful, sure movements, his elegant stature as he walked into the detached kitchen to wash.

  My favorite fancy was that MyJohn and I were already wed, and this was our house.

  He came out of the kitchen, holding his planter's hat, his dusty boots making long strides on the lane.

  "You look spent. And you're early," I said.

  He kissed me. Greedily. I didn't want it to stop, but I pulled away. Servants were always watching, and decorum must be kept.

  "You sound like a wife already. I couldn't wait to see you."

  "Then I'm glad you came early. Have you seen the children?"

  He laughed. "They're running wild with the dogs over Chiswell's grave."

  "Did you scold them?" Sometimes MyJohn was too lenient. It was why they liked him so.

  "I told them to come home."

  "Pegg tells them stories about Chiswell's ghost," I said. Chiswell was buried on the grounds. After bail and before his trial, he'd killed himself. But at the burial, a crowd of men demanded that the casket be opened to make sure Chiswell was really in it.

  "Wait until I get my hands on Anne," I said.

  "Don't be harsh with her. She's still just a child," MyJohn said. We went to the dining room, where Silvy was just setting down the silver chocolate pot and china cups.

  "Anne said that your mother near drowned Edward this morning."

  "I knew she'd mouth it all over the place!"

  He leaned forward, toward me. "Patsy, your mother is in a perilous way. You can't keep it quiet anymore."

  Tears came to my eyes. "You would have me tell Pa?"

  "It's his concern, Patsy, not yours."

  "It's my job to protect her. I'm the oldest."

  He took my hand. "It's your job, dearest, to protect your little brother Edward. And maybe the others. As a gentleman, a man of prominence and honor, your father would take great exception to your not telling him. Did you not think of that?"

  I gulped back my tears. "Pegg locked Mama in the dry well. And she turns Anne against me."

  "Dearest, that's part of the problem. Pegg senses the mistress of the house is in a weak position, and she's taking over. I can help you with that. I'll speak to her."

  "No. I must speak with her. If I don't, she'll never respect me."

  He squeezed my hand. "All right. But we must do what's best for Aunt Sarah."

  We were cousins. He loved Mama, too. "MyJohn, I'm thinking I should ask Pa if we could wed sooner than next year. Then you can live here and run the place for him."

  "David is doing a fine job. I wouldn't usurp his place."

  "Are you saying you don't want to wed me sooner?"

  A new place was cut into my heart every time he smiled. He smiled now. "You know I'd marry you tomorrow if your father said yes. And I'd continue to work with David. With six hundred acres now cleared, he needs help managing."

  He was so dear. "It's the children. We should be here to care for them. Anne runs wild. So does Will. And little Betsy looks to me," I said.

  "Ask him, then. I'd gladly help you manage the house and children as well. You know they love me. John asks my advice all the time about his horses. He needs a man to talk to on occasion."

  "Pa's coming home late tonight."

  "Good."

  From the back entrance came the shrieking of children. I stood up. "I must go."

  "And I must see to the books before supper." He held on to my hand as we walked to the back entrance, where the children were wiping their muddy feet with pieces of burlap. Pegg and her Nancy were with them. Anne was forever bringing Nancy into the house. She'd take her to her room, if I'd let her.

  Anne was not a pretty child. Too thin of face, yet her hair, which was strawberry colored and thick and always flying loose, gave her the appearance of a fairy child. Her eyes were as blue as the field pansies. She gave you a turn, all right. She had more intelligence than any girl had a right to have. It would bring her to trouble if she didn't keep it in tow.

  "Anne, where have you been?" I demanded. "Look at you. You look like a wanton."

  "What's a wanton?"

  "Never mind. Go upstairs and change. No, wait."

  She turned. "MyJohn says you were running over Chiswell's grave with the dogs."

  Pegg took Nancy and the dirty burlap and went outside.

  "We don't run over people's graves, Anne. We respect the dead."

  "He's not in the grave."

  "What? Who told you such nonsense? Pegg?"

  "Pegg says he's not in the coffin. He wanted to be buried here, but he isn't. And so his ghost haunts the place."

  "That's folderol. There's no such thing as ghosts."

  "There are. Pegg says he comes whenever there's a full moon. And next full moon, I'm going out to see him."

  "Did Pegg also tell you not to come to lessons or your household learning?"

  She made a face. "Household learning grinds at my innards." Then her face brightened. "I saw a white pigeon on one of the chimneys. That means calamity is near." Anne was taken with calamity. It presented her with opportunities.

  MyJohn went to her, knelt down close, and whispered something in her ear. She smiled. Then he stood. "Now go upstairs and get clean, as your sister says. You, too, Will."

  They went. Will adored MyJohn. Times they acted like he was around for their benefit, not mine.

  They ran. Then halfway up, Anne stopped. "Is Mama all right?"

  "She's doing well," I lied.

  She made a face. "Calamity's coming. I knew it when I saw the white pigeon."

  "Anne." MyJohn's voice was gentle.

  I leaned on MyJohn's shoulder. "Pa says I'm the glue that holds this family together. What holds the glue together?"

  He kissed me again. "Love."

  Oh, what would I do without him?

  ***

  I SET WILL to reading and Anne to working on her sampler before supper. Betsy, I put down for a nap. Mama woke long enough to nurse Edward, then both went back to sleep again. The house settled under the waning sun.

  Then I walked outside to the kitchen to speak to Pegg.

  Once Pegg had held me on her lap when I was a child, rocked me, soothed me, told me stories, bathed and dressed me. Her strong arms had been my refuge.

  When I'd been invited to other plantations for balls or routs or barbecues, it was Pegg who'd accompanied me. But it is a sign of growing up to distance yourself from the Negroes.

  There comes a time in every white child's life when you must let them know you are in charge. It is, for some of us, the most difficult thing to do.

  "Mama will be at the board for supper," I told Pegg.

  She was basting the ham. "Good."

  "I want no mention of this morning. She's forgotten it."

  She made a sound in her throat. I saw Silvy and Alice exchange glances, which meant she'd told them all about it.

  I took a step forward from the doorway. "Pegg, you locked Mama in the dry well again. I won't have it."

  She was putting butter in the peas. "It makes her come round, doan it?"

  "That is not for you to decide! And if you do it again, I'll tell Pa."

  "Seems to me you oughta tell him anyways."

  "Don't sass me, Pegg. I won't have it!" My voice cut the air like a knife slicing butter.

  Her eyes flicked down. "Yes, Miss," she said.

  I looked at Alice and Silvy. They, too, dropped their gaze to the floor.

  I turned to go. "And please stop telling Anne ghost stories and encouraging her to disobey me."

  "Uh-huh," she agreed.

  Leaving, I was stopped by her voice. "You oughta get a wet nurse for Edward."

  "What?"

  "Seems to me, if'n your mama got her mind set to drown him, you oughta let somebody else nurse him."

  God's shoe buckles, as MyJohn would say. Why hadn't I thought of that? "Who?" I asked.

  "Delia gonna give birth any hour now. Seems to me you oughta think on it."

  "Of course. I was giving the matter thought," I said. And I walked out the door.

  Supper was a quiet affair, with the children on their best behavior. Even little Betsy sat at table with us. I read a piece from the Bible before we ate, as Pa would want me to do.

  I hadn't told Mama that Pa was coming home yet, and cautioned the children not to, either. But now it was time to tell her. I did it gently.

  "Pa's coming home tonight." I put my hand over hers. "He sent word."

  "Your pa? Why, darling, Pa died. Don't you remember? He took sick at the Charlotte County Courthouse. A blockage of the bowel
s. Dr. Cabell gave him a vial of liquid mercury as a last resort. And it killed him."

  "Mama!" I gasped. The children started to whimper. "Hush," I told them. "Pa's not dead. Mama just had a bad dream. Silvy, take them to the front parlor, and we'll read before bedtime."

  She did so.

  "Mama," I turned to her again. "We live in Hanover County. What would Pa be doing in the Charlotte County Courthouse?"

  "Why, darling, we lived there when he took sick. And when he offered himself as a candidate for a seat in the House of Delegates."

  "You mean the House of Burgesses, Mama."

  "No, dear, the House of Delegates." She smiled. "This is after he was elected governor for the sixth time."

  She was predicting things now. Was that all part of it? I took her hand. "Mama, Pa can never be governor. He's a colonial. And accused of treason, remember?"

  She patted my hand. "He was governor six times. Now I'm tired. I think I'll retire. Will you see to the children?"

  I did not look at MyJohn. But I knew the pain that would be written on his face. I said yes, I would see to the children.

  Chapter Three

  "YOUR MA HAS the sight," Pegg told me that night. "The Lord is restorin' to her for what the locust hath eaten."

  How like Pegg to say something like that. The Negroes believed in things like second sight and uncommon powers. We paid no mind to their nonsense.

  We were in the little clapboard house next to the mansion house, where Pa did his law work when he was home. Where MyJohn went to keep the books. Upstairs there were two bedrooms for any law clerks Pa might bring with him. I had Pegg put fresh sheets on the beds and I swept the place out. I neatened Pa's desk and put fresh ink in the botde. I sharpened his quill pens.

  "She sees nothing," I shot back. "She's just raving."

  "Mark her words," Pegg pushed. "The addled have the sight sometimes. Who are we to say who is sane and who isn't?"

  I locked up Pa's office.

  "You want I should get the cold meat and leftover biscuits an' fix things in the traveler's room?" she asked.

  I said no. I wanted to do that for Pa myself. I sent her to the quarters for the night, then fetched the food and brought it inside where I set it on the hunter's sideboard and covered it with napkins. Then I lighted a fire.

  Everything would be perfect for Pa. The traveler's room had a brick floor and its own entrance. Pa used it for travelers who came to see him. The brick floor wouldn't be ruined by their muddy boots. I got fruit and Madeira wine ready, too. Pa's tastes were simple.

  I lighted candles and set them in the windows. The nights were still chilled. Here in Hanover County many was the time we'd had hailstorms in May, ruining the orchards and crops.

  Ma was asleep. Edward was in his cradle in my room. When the fire had warmed the traveler's room, I brought his cradle in, so Pa could see him. Thank heaven he'd started sleeping through the night of late.

  I wrapped myself in an old quilt and put a branch candlestick on the table beside me. It was pewter, not silver. Pa's fondness for plainness spilled over to the household furnishings. We still had animal skins on the floors, not Persian carpets, even though ours was one of the biggest houses in the county.

  Pa seemed fearful of ostentation. It harkened back to his youth.

  When he was a boy, he spent a lot of time with his uncle Langloo Winston, his mother's brother, who'd lived half the time in far-flung wilderness cabins, traded with Indians, and was said to have Indian wives. Great Uncle Langloo never came near polite society in the Tidewater.

  Pa's people are all Winstons and Dabneys, educators, writers, military officers. Pa was born knowing he came from eminence, but if he wanted to rise in the world, he had to do it on his own because everything his mother had went to his older half brother, John Syme, Jr., from his mother's first marriage. And his own pa gambles and is a poor manager.

  Pa and his brother William had kept a poor-man store and gone bankrupt. Then he married Mama, with me already on the way, and worked in her father's tavern and worked his own fields with the Negroes.

  I think, even though he's a famous lawyer now, he's no more than two whoops and a holler from being a backwoodsman himself.

  When he first started lawyering, he used to hunt deer, pheasant, and partridge along the way to Louisa Courthouse. He'd be wearing his leather breeches. His coat would be stained with blood from the hunt. He'd go into the courthouse to take up a case with a brace of ducks in his hands and his saddlebags on his arms.

  I think that's why Anne is the little savage she is, that she takes after Uncle Langloo.

  Well, I was doing my best with Anne. I settled in the chair, thinking it was time I started her on the loom. For three years now we've been planting flaxseed, and Pa got us a loom and flax sickle, and we wear homespun.

  I miss my silk, but I still have six yards of crimson laid by. I wondered if Pa would mind if I sewed up a gown of it. As Patrick Henry's daughter, would that be unpatriotic? MyJohn so likes me in silk. I wondered if I should bother telling Pa? I could wear it after we were wed, when we had parries. A girl had a right to silk in her dowry chest, didn't she? Still, I mustn't let Anne see me working on it. She'd tell.

  I picked up the tea towels from my dowry chest that I'd brought to work on. Outside there was a near-full moon. When it came on to being full, Anne would be outside at Chiswell's grave, waiting to see his ghost. She was good for her promises.

  An owl somewhere in a tree was asking who. At my feet was Pa's best hunting dog, Charger, who was getting long in the tooth and spent nights near the fire.

  What would it be like, I wondered, to be married? To nevermore have to say good-bye to MyJohn? To have him with me always?

  Why did Pa, who was so ahead of everybody else in his thinking, have such set ideas about a wife's place in the scheme of things? Maybe that's why Mama was going mad. He believed a woman should never try to control her husband by opposition, displeasure, or anger.

  Mama hadn't. I never recollect her trying to oppose him. When they wed in the front parlor of her father's house at Rural Plains, she'd promised to obey him "even as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord."

  I could not be that kind of wife. Nor would MyJohn want me to be.

  If Pa had only made more allowances for her. If only he'd shown the same compassion as he had for criminals in the Court of Oyer and Terminer in Williamsburg. And what about the time he rode fifty miles to defend a Baptist minister imprisoned in Spotsylvania County jail? He'd charged into the courtroom. "Great God!" he'd yelled. "Did I hear what those men are charged with? What? Preaching the gospel of the Son of God? Did I hear that?"

  The case was dropped.

  Would he yell "Great God!" when he heard about Mama?

  Pa was not mean to her. He never struck her, never even raised his voice. I know he loves her. But he's become so much of a personage now. Arguing all those cases, presenting all those resolutions.

  "Your passions are no longer your own when he addresses them," George Mason, a friend of George Washington, had said of Pa after hearing him speechify.

  Nor is your reason, I thought.

  I worked on my tea towels until Charger thumped his tail, got up, and went, whining, to the door. Pa was home.

  ***

  HE CAME IN quietly. His blue eyes took in the room, the cradle, me. I knew he was looking for Mama.

  "Patsy," he said. And in one fluid movement he patted Charger's head, dropped his saddlebags, set his cloak aside, and reached out to me.

  "Pa, I'm glad you're home." I tried not to let my voice break. I needed to be strong. He disliked weakness.

  He hugged me fiercely, and I felt as if I'd come home, not him.

  His face was rough with a day's growth of beard. He smelled of tobacco and horse.

  "Sit, Pa, I've got food. Sit by the fire. Is the wind picking up?"

  He sat, but not before leaning down to touch little Edward's face. The baby stirred and in his sleep made a suckling motion with his mouth. "He's grown," Pa said.

  "Yes. He's thriving." I fixed a plate of meat and biscuits, butter, cheese, and pickled preserves. I served a glass of Madeira.

  "Ah, Patsy, you spoil me." He sat, setting his tricorn hat down. Again the piercing blue eyes under his bushy brows took in the room. "Where's your mother?"

  "In bed."

  He ate. But he was interested in food only for the nourishment it gave his body. He'd as soon eat coon as ham or turkey.