Beverly Jenkins (28 page)

I
n the days and weeks following Chase’s departure, Cara’s sadness turned into a kind of acceptance. She kept herself busy during the day by helping Asa repair the floor in the biggest bedroom, and at night by writing long letters to her husband in care of Fort Davis.

One afternoon in late February, Cara responded to the chime on the door pull to find Virginia Sutton standing on the porch. Cara toyed seriously with the idea of slamming the door right in the Black Widow’s face.

Virginia seemed to read Cara’s mind. “If you don’t want to invite me in, I’ll understand.”

Again, Cara’s instincts were to send her packing, but the reason for the unprecedented visit made her curious. Since no one, not even furdraped, mean-spirited Virginia Sutton, deserved to be left standing in the February snow, Cara stepped back to let her enter.

“Nice place,” Virginia remarked, taking off her expensive gloves and looking around.

Cara closed the door.

“Your husband provided well for you,” she added, tossing her big fur over the settee. “Paid me the asking price in gold. He tell you that?”

“Mrs. Sutton, I’m sure you didn’t come all this
way to talk about my husband’s method of payment, so get to the point.”

Virginia smiled. “No, I didn’t. I’m here to offer you your job back, and I hope you will accept.”

Cara was stunned, but eyed the woman suspiciously. “Why?”

“Why am I offering or why should you accept?”

“Both.”

“Well, I’m offering because I’ll need people like you if this town’s to have any chance at a solid future. And you should accept because I’m willing to pay you sixty dollars a month.”

Sixty dollars a month! Only men received salaries in that range. “Four months ago, I wasn’t decent enough to teach anyone. Why the sudden reversal? And if it’s because of your son, keep your pity. I don’t need it.”

“Only Miles can apologize for Miles. When he turned seven years of age, his father took over his raising. I’ve had no influence since.” With a compelling look Virginia continued, “Do you know how much I envy your college education, your intelligence, your independence? I disliked you from the moment we were introduced because you’re all the things I’ll never be.”

A dumbstruck Cara wondered if the woman before her could be an impostor. The Virginia Sutton she knew, or thought she knew, would never have said anything like this. In the past, the woman scarcely ever parted her lips, other than to make Cara’s life miserable.

“Surprised?” Virginia asked.

“Frankly, yes. How in the world can you envy me? You have everything: money, prestige, power. You own half the town, for heaven’s sake.”

“I can’t read.”

Cara’s shocked gasp sounded too loud in the silence of the room.

“Not a letter.”

Due to the restrictions of the prewar South, there were thousands of the race who by law were not allowed access to the printed word. Cara had never imagined Virginia was one of them. “How do you run your businesses?”

“All my businesses revolve around counting and sums. I have a gift for that. Mae handled all my correspondence until she went off to school this past summer. Miles helps out a bit also. When I first started out here, banking consisted of making loans and handling deposits. Now times are changing. Those fools in Washington City are issuing conflicting edicts every time I turn around, and if I can’t keep pace, I’ll be plowed under. Jim Crow may take everything I have in the end anyway, but I’ll be damned if I let them have it just because I can’t read. I want you to teach me.”

Cara stared. Virginia had never been anything but unpleasant in their dealings. She’d been uncooperative and opposed to every idea Cara had ever had, but Cara knew it must have taken a lot of courage for Virginia to come here today and confess what she had just now. “Why me? Why not the teacher over in Nicodemus, or the reverend?”

“Because even I know you’re the best the area has to offer. I’ll pay you, of course.”

Of course, Cara thought to herself.

“So? Will you accept?”

“On one condition.”

“Which is?”

“Build a new school. Do that and I’ll tutor you for free.”

Virginia looked mildly surprised. “Most people would want the money.”

“I’m not most people.”

Silence settled as the two women assessed each other.

“You have a deal,” Virginia conceded, “but I’ll only provide the building.”

“That’s fair.”

“Well, then, have Sophie’s man draw up some plans. We’ll start the construction in the spring, agreed?”

“Agreed.”

Virginia doned her coat, then pulled on her gloves. “Oh, and I would prefer to keep this arrangement about my lessons just between us. If my competitors find out, I won’t last a week.”

Cara concurred. “When would you like to begin?”

“As soon as possible.”

After they agreed on times and days, Virginia started toward the door. “You’re a decent woman, Cara Jefferson. Thank you for hearing me out. And although I can’t speak on my son’s behalf, please know how sorry I was to learn about the babe. Miles is still recovering from the beating your husband gave him, which Miles deserved. Your husband loves you very much. I envy you that also.”

On a blast of February wind, she departed.

Cara came to learn a lot about Virginia during the mornings they spent together. Although Virginia had been born free, she’d been sold by her mother, Simone, a blue-eyed octoroon seamstress, to a man named Ezra Sutton, a former slave on a nearby Virginia plantation.

“Ezra was in love with my mother,” Virginia
told Cara one March morning over coffee at the kitchen table. “Because of his status he could only see her once or twice a month, so he didn’t know he was just one of many men, black and white, who paid for Simone’s company. The Union Army was close, and the planters were deserting the plantations in droves. Ezra, being a head houseman and carriage driver, helped his master bury all the valuables to keep them from the Yankees.”

“Did many of the planters do that?”

“Quite a few,” Virginia replied. “They couldn’t carry gold plate or all their jewelry on the trains North, which is where most headed, for fear of being robbed or stopped at the rail stations patrolled by Union forces.”

“The planters expected these things to be there after the war?”

“Yes. They planned on coming back, digging up their plate and gold coins, and going on with their lives.”

Cara simply shook her head.

“Well, after Ezra helped bury the gold, he took the master and his family to the train station to go to relatives in New York. When he returned, he waited until dark, went out, and dug up the valuables. He brought the hoard to my mother and asked her to marry him.”

“What did she say?”

“She laughed in his face. Told him she didn’t care if he had rediscovered King Solomon’s mines. He was a dark-skinned slave and she would have nothing to do with him. She, too, was headed North, but with one of her gentlemen friends. He was also a blue-eyed octoroon, and they were going North to live out their lives as white.”

It was a common story. No one knew how many fair-skinned members of their race had “passed”
before and after the war. It was a phenomenon very much prevalent even these days.

“My mother hated the restrictions that forced her to live in the small free-Black section outside Richmond, and she hated even more the drops of African blood in her veins that made the restrictions enforceable by law. However, there was one thing standing in her way—me, her fourteen-year-old daughter. Her lover didn’t consider me, with my brownish eyes, ‘bright’ enough to make the passing ruse a success. He gave my mother an ultimatum. Either get rid of me in some way or stay in Richmond.”

Virginia’s voice lowered. “So she gave me to Ezra in her stead. I’ll never forget the humiliation of standing naked in her front parlor while she and Ezra haggled over the price. He bought me for four gold candlesticks, a diamond necklace with matching earbobs, and a brooch. My mother put on her finery, told me I belonged to Ezra, and showed us both the door.”

To punish Simone for her treachery, Ezra raped Virginia as soon as he got her back to the deserted plantation, Cara learned when Virginia picked up the narrative later that week. The abuse became a horror he repeated over and over again in the years that followed. Young and uneducated, Virginia stayed with him out of sheer fear at first, but eventually grew into a thick-skinned woman who took his nightly visitations and backhanded cuffs without a word. After Miles’s birth, she was determined to survive. And she had survived, long enough to see him into his grave.

“How did he die?” Cara asked.

Virginia chuckled for the first time. “Funniest thing. He’d been around animals all his life and got kicked in the head by a mule named Opal. Only creature on this earth meaner than he was. I didn’t mourn at all.”

Cara awakened and smiled. Virginia’s lessons had been rescheduled because she’d left town on business. So today, Cara’s time was her own.

Shivering from the early morning chill in the room, she pulled on a heavy robe over her nightgown and was thankful for the warmth of the red flannel ankle-length drawers beneath the gown. Donning a pair of woolen socks, she left her bedroom.

She was halfway down the hall when she stopped. She smelled coffee. Hoping she wasn’t being paid a visit by some drifter, she tiptoed back into the bedroom for the rifle.

From the top of the steps, Cara had a clear view to the floor below. A man dressed all in black sat at her kitchen table, drinking coffee. He had his back to her. Cara set the rifle against the wall.

“Chase!” she screamed with joy, running down the steps. She flew into his waiting arms, and he caught her up and swung her around to his kiss. They passionately greeted each other as if the months had been years. When they finally parted, he held her tight.

“Oh, it’s so good to hold you,” he whispered.

Cara was hanging on to him fiercely. All the worries she’d harbored over his safety melted away, along with her loneliness. “I’m glad you’re home.”

And that’s exactly how Chase felt, as if he’d really come home for the first time in his life. He hugged her with every fiber of his being and never wanted to leave her again. Ever.

Cara looked up into his face and smiled, so glad
that he was really home. “I see you made coffee. What do you want for breakfast?”

“You.” As he placed soft hot kisses over her jaw, his firm hands slowly rubbed her nightgown up and down her hips. He purred like a cat and captured her parted lips. “I dreamed about doing this . . .”

Cara backed up against the wooden table and used her arms to brace herself as he covered her throat with his kisses. He opened her robe, then the gown underneath, and slid his hands into the opening, grazing her tightened nipples, rolling them slowly between his fingers. “Oh, Chase . . .”

“Yes, darlin’. I’m home now.”

His mouth replaced his fingers and she bloomed with the sweet ripples flowing from his ardent appreciation. He raised her gown and slipped his hand inside her long drawers to caress the enticing flesh of her hips. Cara nipped his ear with love-gentled teeth while he circled his hand lower to tease the warmth already flowing between her thighs. He backed up a moment and undid his belt before shucking his pants. His dark eyes alone were enough to send Cara to completion as she stared up at him. And he was ready for her she saw, glancing down. The mahogany glory of him drew her hands to stroke the velvet-covered iron. She leaned forward and kissed the brown tip, lovingly using her tongue to pleasure him as he had done to her in the past.

He drew her head up after a few torrid moments, growling as he placed her atop the kitchen table. He drew her forward to his kiss, then coaxed her to lie prone, sending the sugar bowl crashing to the floor along with his coffee cup. Neither of them cared.

Just when Cara felt on the verge of pleading, he
stripped the red flannels down and off her legs and took her right there on the tabletop. She rose to kiss his mouth, his jaw, his eyes, as he filled her. He felt wonderful, powerful, male. And when he began to move, he felt like bliss to her. He worshipped her with his hands, teasing her lips, stroking himself in and out, showing her in all his many talented ways why she would never love any man but him. He increased the tempo and her hips rose in response. The sensations exploded in her body like a flare, making her gasp his name as the passion grew sharper. She stiffened as release claimed her, the shudders bringing forth her surrendering cries.

For Chase, the sight of her riding her completion, so uninhibited and responsive, broke the tenuous hold he had on his own passion and moments later he, too, surrendered with cries of his own.

When they came back to themselves, Chase kissed her lips in parting and gently withdrew from her warmth. Cara just lay there spread out on her kitchen table like an offered dessert, wondering if she would ever move again. “I will never be able to look at this table the same way again,” she confessed wearily.

He chuckled and leaned down over her prone figure, “Neither will I. So you’d better get up before I order another helping of breakfast. . .”

Cara smiled and rose. “What is it with you and furniture? You know I can’t write at my desk anymore? Every time I sit there, all I can think about is me, you, and the runner sliding back and forth. We ruined that runner, by the way.”

“You complaining?” he asked, drawn to taste her lips once more.

“No,” she whispered, kissing him back in long,
humid snatches. “I just never considered furniture to be a place to make love.”

“Wait, I can show you uses for furniture you never thought possible.”

“I can’t wait,” she purred as he swung her up into his arms and set her on her feet.

“How about some real breakfast?” she asked. “Won’t take long.”

“If you could somehow work a bath into the offer, you got a deal.”

They had a deal.

While the water heated on the stove, Cara whipped up eggs, fried potatoes, and bacon. She’d made bread yesterday, so she added a fresh-cut hunk of that to his plate and served it to him with a smile.