When This Cruel War Is Over (19 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: When This Cruel War Is Over
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“WHERE'S MAJOR STAPLETON?” JANET TODD asked Joseph, Hopemont's butler, as she pulled off her sweaty riding coat in the front hall.
“Gone back to Keyport.”
Relief flooded her body. She had no desire to tell Paul about the federal raid on Rose Hill and Adam's hairbreadth escape. She was not at all sure she could describe it without revealing emotions better kept to herself.
“Where's Lucy?”
“Upstairs in your room, I 'spect,” Joseph said.
Janet's first reaction to Aunt Rachel's revelation echoed in her mind:
It can't be true
. She still half-believed those words. If there was one human being in the world she trusted absolutely, it was Lucy. Distrusting her was tantamount to distrusting herself.
She found Lucy in her room, ironing a dress, and told her to sit down in an armchair by the window. “Something terrible happened at Rose Hill just now, Lucy. Federal cavalry raided the house to capture Colonel Jameson. He got away by outwitting the Union general and forcing his troopers surrender. The uproar made Aunt Rachel, Pompey's mother, go crazy. She ran into Mrs. Jameson's bedroom and said it was all your fault. You had made her read my letter to Colonel Jameson and reported it to someone in Indiana. I didn't believe her. It couldn't be true. Why did she say such a thing?”
Lucy clutched at her hair, then pulled at her calico dress as if she wanted to rip it off. “Miz Janet, I didn't
mean no harm! I never meant harm should ever come to you in this business!”
“What in the world are you talkin' about?”
“The war you're fixin' to start with them federal niggers in Keyport. The one you want Colonel Jameson to come into no matter what! And Major Stapleton. You loves him but you got him in it too. I tole that much to Colonel Gentry but I never said a word about you goin' to the major's room at night or—or—”
Her voice dwindled to a mutter. “Or to the Happy Huntin' Ground.”
Janet's first impulse was more disbelief. “Lucy, have you gone crazy?”
“Maybe I have, Miz Janet. Maybe I been crazy ever since your daddy sold Maybelle to that whorehouse in New Orleans. I knew it was wrong to get Aunt Rachel to read your letters but Colonel Gentry told me he'd make sure nothin' happened to you.”
“My father would never sell Maybelle to—to someplace where she'd be unhappy. Who told you that?”
“Colonel Gentry. Mr. Jameson too. They both said it was as sure a thing as the grass bein' green. Colonel Gentry said he'd get her out of the place if I helped him stop this war of yours 'fore it started. That way you wouldn't get hurt and no one would ever know what I done.”
Tears streamed down Lucy's cheeks. She dropped to her knees and buried her face in Janet's skirt. “Oh Miz Janet forgive me please I won't do nothin' like it again ever. I'll be as good and true to you as I ever was in spita Maybelle. I'll jus' pray she don't kill herself in that place, that somehow she'll find a man to take her out of it—”
For a moment Janet saw the life into which she had been born as an unjust sentence handed down by some malevolent invisible persecutor. She had never asked for this black presence in her life. Any more than her
mother and her father had asked for this plantation on which a hundred black women and children were eating them into debt while their able-bodied kin worked at half-speed because they knew they could join the Union Army any time they chose and there was nothing Colonel Todd could do to retrieve them. The Todds, Kentucky, the whole South were sinking into ruin because no one knew what to do with these people. To free them risked anarchy, to keep them in bondage produced betrayals like this one—and worse.
“I have never been so disappointed with anyone in my entire life,” Janet said.
It was true. Lucy's betrayal resounded in Janet's mind as a kind of death knell to the whole southern system. She could no longer bear the thought of a lifetime with these people. But she also could not tolerate the thought of admitting it to obnoxious Yankees like Captain Simeon Otis.
“I couldn't help it, Miz Janet! I loved Maybelle so! She was so beautiful and sweet and kind to me. As kind as you!”
“How could you be so stupid! Colonel Gentry lied to you. So did Mr. Jameson. My father never sold Maybelle to a—a—whorehouse.”
The idea was so loathsome, she could barely pronounce the word. “I know, as surely as I know this house is standin', that Maybelle is living in Mississippi or Alabama or Louisiana in the house of some respectable family, working as a cook or a nurse to their children.”
Lucy rubbed her streaming eyes. “What you gonna do to me, Miz Janet?”
“I don't know. I'm going to talk to my father about this. You'll be punished, I can promise you that.”
Lucy flung herself on the floor at Janet's feet, in a pathetic imitation of Aunt Rachel. “Oh, please don't, Miz Janet. I'll kill myself first. Don't tell your daddy.”
Janet left Lucy sobbing on the floor and rushed downstairs,
ignoring her mother's call from her bedroom for an explanation of the racket Lucy was making. In the gazebo she found her father well into his daily quart of bourbon. She seized the bottle and poured the last third onto the grass.
“It's time for clear heads,” she said. “Clear heads and hard hearts.”
She told him what Lucy had done. With a roar Gabriel Todd struggled to his feet. “I'll whip her personally. I'll whip her till she dies.”
“That won't accomplish anything,” Janet said. “The damage is done. It's more important to find out what she's told your dear old cousin Colonel Gentry.”
“I'm going to whip him too. I'll whip that one-armed bastard till he begs for mercy.”
“You're sounding like Rogers Jameson. The Todds are thinkers, Father. Didn't you tell me that a long time ago?”
He sank back into his chair, struggling to clear the bourbon haze from his head. “You're right,” he said thickly. “But what can we do?”
“Did you sell Maybelle to—to—one of those houses?”
“I sold her to a trader in Lexington for a thousand dollars. He was sure he could get fifteen hundred for her in New Orleans. I didn't ask him who'd pay it and he didn't tell me.”
So it's true
. The words were like a knife thrust or a bullet in Janet's body. Not a fatal wound but a painful one. What was this crime compared to the monstrous things Lincoln and his crew were doing? An act of weakness, at worst.
“First we have to find out as much as possible about what Lucy's told Gentry. Then see if we can befuddle him some way.”
“First we'll whip her. Then we'll ask questions.”
“No, Father. I don't think I could stand that. I still love her in a strange irreversible way.”
He gave her a consoling hug. “Where is the black traitoress? We'll both question her.”
They strode back to the house. “Lucy!” Janet called up the stairs. “Come down here.”
No answer. Janet mounted the stairs, thinking she might whip her personally, after all. In the bedroom she found Lucy unconscious on the floor, fluid drooling from her mouth. Beside her right arm spread a pool of blood from a slashed wrist.
“Janet?” her mother called. “Janet!”
Janet rushed to her mother's room. Letitia Todd was frantic. “Lucy came in her and snatched my medicine off the bureau. My laudanum. She took a scissors too—”
Janet raced back to her bedroom and tied a tourniquet around Lucy's arm. “Father!” she called. “Father! Come quickly.”
In sixty seconds a winded Gabriel Todd was in the doorway. Together he and Janet hauled Lucy over to the commode. Janet thrust a finger down her throat and she vomited up a half-pint of green laudanum. Janet slapped her hard in the face and she came half-awake. When she saw Colonel Todd she struggled to free herself from their grasp.
“Lemmy die!” she wailed. “Why didn' you lemmy die?”
“You're not going to die until you tell us every single thing you told Colonel Gentry,” Janet said.
They propped Lucy against the wall and demanded answers. What they heard appalled them. Lucy had opened every letter Janet and Gabriel Todd had sent for the past year and with the help of Aunt Rachel had recited their contents to Henry Todd Gentry. That meant Gentry knew the plan for the creation of the western confederacy and the southern confederacy's role in it.
“They could arrest us anytime,” a staggered Gabriel Todd said.
Janet paced the room, groping for self-control. “Maybe not, Father. They don't have the letters. Just the contents—and Lucy's testimony would never be admitted in any court. Slaves have no legal standing. They don't know the date of the uprising because we haven't decided it. They don't know the names of most of our leaders. We've been chary with names because the letters had to travel through so many hands.”
“All true,” Gabriel Todd said. “But with habeas corpus suspended, they could still throw us in jail for a long time. They wouldn't hesitate to arrest you. That swine Burbridge is no respecter of women.”
“But they haven't done it,” Janet replied. “Their hesitation makes me think we've got them in a kind of checkmate.”
They locked a weeping Lucy in Janet's bedroom and went downstairs to confer on the veranda, where no house servant could eavesdrop. Gabriel Todd remained unconvinced that they were at least temporarily safe. He wondered if other Hopemont slaves were working for Gentry and feared there might be a conspiracy to kill him and his wife and daughter with poison or a midnight uprising—the unmentionable nightmare that haunted every slave owner.
Janet discounted this possibility. Lucy's pleas that she never meant to harm her were convincing. She doubted if anyone else on the plantation was involved in the betrayal. Compared to nearby plantations, few of their blacks had run away since the war started. They were fundamentally loyal.
“I think the letters have revealed to Gentry just how volatile the situation is, how strong we are,” Janet said. “He's afraid if they began arresting people on the say-so of an illiterate slave it would only drive more Democrats into the Sons of Liberty's ranks. We could and would deny the existence of the letters and attribute the whole
thing to Lucy's lurid imagination and the money Gentry was paying her. We might even suggest that he was carrying on a liaison with her.”
“I like this, I begin to like it very much,” Gabriel Todd said, stalking up and down the veranda in the ferocious heat.
“As long as they don't know the exact date of our insurrection, we have the upper hand. I suspect boldness is our best defense. I'm inclined to leave for Richmond as soon as possible with Major Stapleton to set a date and get the money to buy the rifles. I suggest you send Lucy to Colonel Gentry with orders to deny everything, to say she made it all up. You could even give her a sarcastic note urging him to stop spying on his near relations.”
“By God, they need you in Richmond to run this war!” Gabriel Todd said.
A rush of pleasure coursed through Janet's body—not dissimilar to the one she had felt as she witnessed Adam Jameson's triumphant escape and savored the part she had played in it. What was she discovering about herself? Did making history mean more to her than anything else? Was Paul right, she was an adventuress at heart? Was that kind of woman capable of loving anyone?
“I better start packing,” Janet said. “I'd like to catch a steamboat that will get me to Cincinnati before dark tomorrow.”
Upstairs, Gabriel Todd removed a still-tearful Lucy from Janet's bedroom. “Come along, you lyin' little piece of dirt,” he said, twisting her arm behind her.
Lucy gasped with pain. “Miz Janet, tell me you forgive me, please!” she wailed.
“I don't forgive you,” Janet said. “I'll never forgive you.”
“Nor will I,” Gabriel Todd added. “Tomorrow I'll show you just what unforgiveness means to your damned black skin.”
For a moment Janet was about to remind her father
that she did not want Lucy whipped. But the thought of her spying at the Happy Hunting Ground froze the words in her throat.
You wanted him,
whispered the reproachful voice in Janet's head. Was that the deepest reason for her anger at Lucy—knowing she had seen and understood that? When Lucy claimed she had not told Gentry about it, wasn't she implying that she believed Janet had disgraced herself? Even if Janet resisted feeling any shame for it, Lucy felt it.
So what if I did want him? I'm not an ordinary woman. The rules don't apply to me. Especially when I'm fighting a war.
Spoken like an adventuress. But that undeniable fragment of Lucy's loyalty suddenly made Janet unable to bear the thought of her being whipped. She ran to the head of the stairs and called, “Father—don't whip her! Just send her off—”

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