The Lost Quilter (29 page)

The wagon had brought cotton from Oak Grove, some in bales in hopes that Colonel Harper might be able to arrange for a blockade runner to speed them past the Union ships and earn Marse Chester some sorely needed cash. A smaller portion had been woven into coarse homespun, which Miss Evangeline presented to Joanna with a warning not to waste it. “Use the scraps for your patchwork,” she suggested. “I’m sure our other servants would be pleased if you furnished each bed with one of your creations, and the colonel would certainly approve of such frugality. Perhaps something like that other quilt you made, the one with the triangles and the intriguing stitches. It’s very quaint, quite lovely in its way.”

Joanna was so terrified that the mistress might ask for a closer look that she almost forgot to thank her for the homespun. From a distance the quilted images blended in perfectly with the coarse muslin, but a careful inspection would reveal each unexpected irregularity, and Miss Evangeline had too sharp a mind to dismiss them as mistakes. But the mistress promptly forgot the Birds in the Air quilt, out of sight in the slaves’ dormitory above the kitchen, and Joanna soberly beckoned Ruthie to come closer so Joanna could measure her with a long strand of yarn. She blinked away tears as she cut out the pieces for the girl’s new dress, heart heavy with grief, imagining Titus tossing and turning in his hayloft bed, sweating and groaning with pain and fever. Or perhaps he was in Tavia’s cabin, tended by his niece. Pearl would care for him. Though she was young, she was strong; she had learned
to be strong in the cotton rows, and now she would care for her brother and sister as her mother had done—

It was too much to bear. Sewing allowed Joanna too much time alone with her thoughts. She welcomed errands that sent her from the busy house with its constant coming and going of soldiers and into the streets of Charleston, where she could forget her heavy heart in the challenge of finding the scarce goods Miss Evangeline craved.

Midmorning one day in mid-July found Joanna running to the fish market to procure something for the colonel’s supper. “For once we won’t have guests, so get the best of whatever they have,” Miss Evangeline instructed Joanna and Sally, counting out coins into Joanna’s palm. “There must be nothing unsavory to distract my husband from the pleasure of my company.”

“Should’ve sent you first thing this morning,” Sally grumbled after the mistress left the kitchen. “Everyone know best fish all gone by now.”

“Just pour a lot of sauce over it and they won’t know no better.” Joanna adjusted her headscarf and snatched up her basket. The mistress was becoming increasingly capricious as her frustration with her confinement—and her husband’s inattention—grew, and the slaves bore the brunt of her bad temper. As Joanna hurried down the street, rain-soaked and muddy from a recent downpour, a painful flash of memory struck: Titus fishing in the river just beyond the quarter, Titus bringing home a string of trout for Tavia to fry up, Titus watching Pearl and the younger children licking juices from their fingers and beaming at their uncle as they filled their bellies. Not a word had come to her about how her beloved fared, and in her desperation for news, she had begun sneaking into the colonel’s study whenever it was unoccupied and searching desk drawers and pigeonholes for let
ters from Oak Grove. She read about thriving crops, destructive storms, admonishments for Miss Evangeline to exercise moderately for her health, and countless other minutiae, but nothing about her own dearest ones. She tried to convince herself that the absence of her husband’s name from the letters was a good sign. Marse Chester so prized Titus that if he had been obliged to purchase a new driver, he surely would have mentioned it.

Joanna reached the fish market and inspected the nearly empty stalls with a sigh, resigned to failure. She ought to just drop a line in the harbor herself for all the good this would do her. She made her way down the block, looking for something decent enough to please the mistress, when she spotted a small, handwritten sign tacked to a barrel of redfish: “All redfish and speckled trout half-price after noon.”

Joanna glanced at the sky; noon could be no more than thirty minutes away. Sally was right that all the best fish were sold by morning, but if she waited and the fishmonger didn’t sell out, she could keep the difference for herself. The mistress would never know how much she had paid, and the blockade had sent prices soaring so high that she would not expect Joanna to return with change. The pass in her pocket did not say what time she was expected home, and given the scarcity of goods in the city, Miss Evangeline would never think to wonder why Joanna had taken so long to find what she needed. Joanna could conceal the unspent coins under her bed with her wages from her day at the soldiers’ laundry, her tin cornboiler, and her few other treasures. She would need money when she ran.

Joanna made a show of considering the redfish before shaking her head and moving off through the crowd. Other colored folk milled about, some with badges pinned to their clothes showing they had been hired out, others with the same sober, wary look of
slaves she was sure they saw in her own eyes. Free people of color worked their shops, their smiths, their fruiteries—and how Joanna envied them. It appalled her that some of those free colored folk owned slaves of their own, something she had never seen before coming to South Carolina. Colored folk should lift up other colored folk, not spend their hard-earned freedom working other slaves. To Joanna, that made them worse than the cruelest of the buckra.

Joanna finished her other errands, and as soon as a bell in a distant church tower struck noon, she returned to the fishmonger and purchased a string of fine redfish. She wrapped the unspent coins in a bit of cloth so they would make no sound as she went about her work back at Harper Hall. She probably wouldn’t be able to sneak them from the big house to the slaves’ dormitory above the kitchen until much later, and until then, she had to be careful.

“You there, wench.”

A hand on Joanna’s shoulder spun her around, and she faced the man in the long brown coat. There was a glint of intelligence in his green eyes, but she quickly remembered to drop her gaze to his boots. Buckra hated being looked in the eye; they thought it impudent. “Yes, suh?”

“Come with me,” he said, his voice low, his grip on her shoulder firm. “Don’t make me drag you.”

Heart pounding, she allowed him to steer her away from the busy market, away from the confusion and down a secluded alley. Her hands clenched around the basket, but she forced herself to remain calm, clear-headed. As soon as he released her to unfasten his trousers, she would strike him with the basket and run.

But he did not let go. He guided her into a doorway, glanced
over his shoulder, and regarded her appraisingly. “You read that sign.”

Her heart was in her throat. “No, suh, Marse. I can’t read.”

“Don’t lie to me. I’ve been watching you. You read that sign, then you bided your time and came back when the fish were half-price.”

“His fish always half-price after midday. Everybody know that.”

“You’re quick-witted but wrong. That lie could be easily disproved.” He released her and took a step back, searching her with his eyes. She held the basket in front of her as if it would keep him at bay, but she no longer feared he meant to molest her. But if he reported that she could read, it would be far worse for her. She could be beaten or killed, separated from Ruthie and Hannah and Titus forever. No matter what this strange man said, she would not admit she could read.

“I’d like to hire you.”

Hire her? “My marse don’t hire me out, suh.”

He shook his head, impatient. “This has nothing to do with your master, do you understand? You help us, and we’ll help you. If we succeed, we may help all of your kind.”

Joanna risked a quick look at his face and saw only clear determination there, no malice, no deceit. Still…“Don’t know what you mean, suh,” she mumbled, looking to his muddy boots again.

“You’re sensible, you’re well placed, and you can read,” the man said as if she had not spoken. “You could be our eyes and ears within the headquarters of the military defense of Charleston. You can intercept letters, overhear conversations, gather information, and I’ll pass it along to those in a position to use it. You can help end this siege, Joanna, and bring a swift conclusion to the
war. Wouldn’t you like to see the Confederacy fall? Wouldn’t you like to see an end to slavery?”

How did he know her name? “You could be anybody,” she said, meeting his gaze boldly. “Maybe you think to trap me, get me to defy my marse, and get me killed.”

“Why would I bother? You’re just one housemaid. What would I possibly have to gain?”

“What
I
got to gain?”

He smiled grimly. “Aside from freedom for your people if we succeed? I can pay you a little. The rest of your reward will have to wait until after the war is won.”

She had not given any thought to a reward. “That ain’t what I want. I got two children here with me, two girls. I get you your secrets, but you got to help me when I need you. I get caught in the marse colonel’s study and he kill me for it, you buy my girls and get them north to freedom. My marse try to sell them, you buy them and set them free. He try to sell me, same thing. My family never get split up, never get sold away down south. That’s it. That’s my price.”

He needed little time to mull it over. “Agreed.”

Joanna nodded and let out a deep breath she had not realized she had been holding. “What I got to do?”

Quickly the man explained that she should gather information about troop movements, supplies, and defenses, and report to him once a week, every Friday in that same alley. If she could not get away from Harper Hall at the appointed time, she should set her basket on the kitchen windowsill as a signal. If she discovered news so important that it could not wait, she should go to the market and drop her basket in front of the stall where she had purchased the redfish. “I’ll be watching you,” he said. “I’ll know.”

He tugged on the brim of his hat and turned away.

“Wait,” she said. “Who you be? What your name?”

He smiled. “I’m with Mr. Lincoln’s army, and you may call me Mr. Lewis.”

With that, he strolled from the alley as if utterly unconcerned and melted into the busy throng of craftsmen, slaves, gentlemen, and passersby. By the time Joanna reached the street, he was gone.

Joanna’s theft of Marse Chester’s letters to Miss Evangeline had trained her well for Mr. Lewis’s assignment. She had learned when Colonel Harper was most likely to be away from the study; she had trained herself to wake in the middle of the night, leave the dormitory without waking anyone, and creep silently across the cobblestones and through the darkened house. She had learned how to open the second desk drawer, the one that stuck and opened with a loud squeak, without making a sound by lifting the handle just so, and she had discovered a nook between the bookcases where she could quickly and invisibly read the news from Oak Grove, unseen by anyone who might cross the hallway or pass outside the windows. In the day, she worked upon her sewing and mending on the front porch instead of the back piazza so she could monitor the comings and goings of messengers and eavesdrop through the open window on discussions in the colonel’s study. She silently repeated unfamiliar names of people and places until she knew them by heart, for she dared not steal paper and ink and write down the secrets she discovered. If even a single sentence on a scrap of paper were found on her, it would mean her death.

Friday came. She concealed her impatience as she waited for
the mistress to send her on an errand, and when no errand appeared, Joanna hid the last spool of black thread and said that she had used it up mending the colonel’s trousers and needed more to finish the job. A few minutes later, pass in hand, coins jingling in her apron pocket, she ran off to meet Mr. Lewis in the alley off Market Street.

At first she thought she was alone, but a movement in the shadows suddenly revealed him. “Good girl,” he greeted her in a murmur, then took her elbow and steered her deeper into the alley.

He listened intently as she told him everything she had learned since their first meeting—new fortifications being built around the city, the appointment of a Cuban soldier of fortune as General Beauregard’s chief of artillery, the names of Charleston’s most successful blockade runners and their ships. Mr. Lewis kept his face impassive, so she could not discern whether he considered her news good or bad, helpful or worthless. For all she could tell, he already knew everything she told him.

“Have you seen any maps?” he asked when she had finished. “Anything to indicate troop movements, future offensives, plans of attack?”

“Only what I already told you, suh,” Joanna said, wishing she had more to offer.

She feared for a moment that she had displeased Mr. Lewis so much that he would cancel their agreement, but just then he dropped a few coins in her palm and told her he would see her the following week, if not sooner. Without waiting for a reply, he strode away and melted into the crowd, his brown coat blending into the mud of the streets, the storefronts, the passing wagons and horses.

The weeks passed. Joanna grew bolder, venturing into the
colonel’s study in daylight while he was away, glancing at the papers scattered across his desk while dusting or sweeping. Once she smuggled a map to Mr. Lewis, pressing herself into the darkened doorway and willing herself invisible while he copied it into a sketchbook. Her heart did not stop pounding until hours later when she returned it to its pigeonhole in the colonel’s desk, rolled and tied with brown string as if it had never been disturbed.

Ruthie was walking confidently now, chattering and laughing as she toddled around the workyard, faithful Hannah chasing after. Joanna saw her beloved Titus in the curve of her smile and the shape of her head, and though she tried to find comfort in these signs of his earthly presence, sometimes they pained her so much that she had to look away. Sometimes it seemed as if her brief moments of happiness in Titus’s arms had never happened, that it had all been a dream, that he himself had been a creation of her own longing and loneliness. Ruthie was the only sign that he had ever been, that he had ever loved her.