Cadmus made the tiniest of nods.
You maybe right, by the way, Cesaria said. I don’t have any better idea of what waits for you than you do. Maybe your soul’s free after this. Maybe it’s the ones you leave behind who’ll pay the real price. She took another step toward him. Your children. Your grandchildren. Your wife. She was so close to him now she could have touched him. But she didn’t need to make physical contact; she had a profound hold on him: that of her will and her words.
His eyes were filled with tears. His mouth opened a little way, and he started to speak. It was the ghost of a whisper.
“Can’t we . . . make peace?” he murmured.
Peace?
“Your family . . . and mine.”
It’s too late for that.
“No . . .
You had your own flesh and blood murdered by my son, Cesaria said. You drove Atva to madness for your ambition. You sowed terrible seeds when you did that. Terrible, terrible seeds.
The tears were pouring down Cadmus’s face now. The perverse smile had gone; he looked like a mask of tragedy: his mouth turned down, his cheeks gouged, his brow furrowed.
“Don’t punish them for what I did,” he sobbed. “You can stop this . . . war . . . if you want to.”
I’m too tired, Cesaria said, and too old. And my children are as willful as yours are. There’s nothing I can do. If you’d come to me fifty years ago, and repented maybe I could have done something. But now it’s too late, for all of us.
She drew a little breath, and it seemed that as she did so the last of Cadmus’s life went from him. His body ceased to shake, his face, that tragic mask, was abruptly wiped clean. There was a long moment of absolute stillness. Then Cesaria turned to Loretta and said: He’s all yours, and turned her back on wife and corpse. The moment she withdrew her patronage, Cadmus slid back down the wall like a sack of bones. Loretta let out a tiny cry and went down on her knees beside him.
Cesaria wasn’t interested in the drama, now that Cadmus had left the stage. She didn’t turn to look back at Loretta keening over the body; she simply strode to the door and out onto the landing. Rachel went after her.
“Wait!” she called.
She could feel the air in Cesaria’s wake becoming agitated. An aura rose off her, like heat off a stove. The air shook and melted. But Rachel wasn’t about to let the woman go without at least attempting to question her. Too much had been said that needed explanation.
“Help me understand,” she said.
There’s nothing you need concern yourself with. It’s over now.
“No, it’s not! I need to know what happened to Galilee.”
Why? Cesaria said, still descending. The emanations were beginning to cause some major disturbances now. The ceiling was making a peculiar grinding sound, as though the beams were shaking behind the plaster; the banister was rocking, as if buffeted by gusts of wind.
“I love him,” Rachel said.
Of course you do, Cesaria replied. I’d expect nothing less.
“So I want to help him,” Rachel said. She’d hesitated at the top of the stairs, but now—realizing that nothing she could say was going to halt Cesaria—she went down after her. A wave of sickly air struck her, smelling of camphor and dirt. She plunged through it, though it stung her eyes until they watered.
Do you know how many men and women have wanted to heal my Atva over the years? Cesaria said. None of them succeeded. None of them could.
She was at the bottom of the stairs now, and there hesitated for a moment, as if making up her mind where she would start her blitzkrieg. If Rachel had entertained any doubt that Cesaria intended to take up the offer made in Cadmus’s room, and wreck the mansion, she had it silenced now, as the great Venetian mirror hanging in the hallway shook itself loose and came crashing down, followed in quick succession by every item on the walls, even to the smallest picture.
Rachel halted, shaken by the sudden violence. Cesaria, meanwhile, moved off down the passageway toward Cadmus’s sitting room. “You should go,” said a voice above.
Rachel looked up. Loretta had come out onto the landing, and was now standing at the top of the stairs.
“She won’t hurt us,” Rachel said; brave talk, though she wasn’t entirely certain it was true. The noise of vandalism had erupted again; clearly Cesaria was demolishing the sitting room.
The woman might not intend to do any harm, but when such chaotic forces as these were loosed, was anybody safe?
“Are you leaving?” Rachel said to Loretta.
“No.”
“Then neither am I.”
“Don’t go near her, Rachel. What’s going on here is beyond you. It’s beyond us both. We’re just little people.”
“So what? We just give up?”
“We never had a prayer,” Loretta said, the expression on her face bereft. “I see that now. We never had a prayer.”
Rachel had watched events transform a lot of people of late: Mitchell, Cadmus, Galilee. But none of those changes distressed her quite as much as the one before her now. She’d looked to Loretta as a place of solidity in a shifting terrain. She’d seemed so certain of her path, and what measures she had to take to clear the way ahead. Now, suddenly, all that certainty had drained out of her. Though she’d known Cadmus was not long for this world, and though she’d certainly known the Barbarossas were something other than human stock, the proof of those facts had undone her.
I’m more alone than ever, Rachel thought. I don’t even have Loretta now.
The din from the sitting room had died away during this exchange, and had now ceased entirely. What now? Had Cesaria tired of her furies already, and decided to leave? Or was she just catching her breath between assaults?
“Don’t worry about me,” Rachel said to Loretta. “I know what I’m doing.”
And with that hopeful boast she headed on down the stairs and into the passage that led to the sitting room.
IX
i
A bizarre sight awaited her. The room which Cadmus Geary had used as his sanctum had been as comprehensively trashed as the sickroom and the lobby, but two items had been left untouched by the assault: the landscape painting on the wall and a large leather armchair. Cesaria sat in the latter looking at the former, surrounded by a brittle sea of shards and splinters. Bierstadt’s masterpiece seemed to have her entranced. But she was not so focused upon the canvas that she missed the fact of Rachel’s presence. Without turning to look at her visitor, she started to speak.
I went out west . . . she said . . . many, many years ago.
“Oh?”
I wanted to find somewhere to settle. Somewhere to build my house.
“And did you?”
No. Most of it was too barren.
“How far west did you go?”
All the way to California, Cesaria replied. I liked California. But I couldn’t persuade Jefferson to join me.
“Who was Jefferson?”
My architect. A better architect than he was a president, I may say. Or indeed a lover.
The conversation was rapidly straying into the surreal, but Rachel did her best to keep her amazement to herself. “Thomas Jefferson was your lover?”
For a short while.
“Is he Galilee’s father?”
No, I never had a child by him. But I got my house.
“Where did you end up building it?”
Cesaria didn’t reply. Instead she got up from the armchair and wandered over to the painting, apparently indifferent to the shards of ceramic and glass beneath her bare feet.
Do you like this picture? she asked Rachel.
“Not particularly.”
What’s wrong with it?
“I just don’t like it.”
Cesaria glanced back over her shoulder. You can do better than that, she said.
“It tries too hard,” Rachel said. “It wants to be really impressive and it ends up just . . . being . . . big.”
You’re right, Ces
aria said, looking back at the Bierstadt. It does try too hard. But I like that about it. It moves me.It’s very male.
“Too male,” Rachel said.
There’s no such thing, Cesaria replied. A man can’t be too much a man. And a woman can’t be too much a woman.
“You don’t seem to try very hard,” Rachel replied.
Cesaria turned to face Rachel again, a look of almost comical surprise on her exquisite features. Are you doubting my femininity? she said.
Challenged, Rachel lost a little of her confidence. She faltered before beginning to say: “Upstairs—”
You think womanhood should be all sighs and compassion? The expression on Cesaria’s face had lost its comic excess; her eyes were heavy and hooded. You think I should have sat by that bastard’s bed and comforted him? That’s not womanhood. It’s trained servitude. If you wanted to be a bedtender you should have stayed with the Gearys. There’s going to be plenty of deathbeds to tend there.
“Does it have to end this way?”
Yes. I’m afraid it does. I meant what I said to the old man: I’m too old and I’m too weary to stop war breaking out. She returned her gaze to the canvas, and studied it for a little time. We finally built the house in North Carolina, she went on. Thomas would go back and forth to Monticello, which he was building for himself Forty years that house of his took to build, and I don’t think he was ever satisfied. But he liked L’Enfant because he knew how much pleasure it gave me. I wanted to make it a glorious place. I wanted to fill it with fine things, fine dreams . . . Hearing this, Rachel couldn’t help but wonder if Cadmus and Kitty, and later Loretta, hadn’t felt something of the same ambition for this house, which Cesaria had just waged her own war against. Now of course the Gearys are going to come, and walk into that house of mine and see some of those dreams for themselves. And it’s going to be very interesting to see which of them is the stronger.
“You seem quite fatalistic about it.”
That’s because I’ve known it was coming for a very long time. Ever since Galilee left, I suppose, somewhere in my heart I’ve known there’d come a time when the human world would come looking for us.
“Do you know where Galilee is?”
Where he always is: out at sea. She looked back at Rachel. Is he all you care about? Answer me honestly.
“Yes. He’s all I care about.”
You know that he can’t protect you? He’s never been good at that.
“I don’t need protecting.”
We all need protecting sometimes, Cesaria said, with a hint of wistfulness.
“Then let me help him,” Rachel said. Cesaria looked at her with a strange gentility. “Let me be with him,” Rachel went on, “And take care of him. Let me love him.”
The way I should have done, you mean, Cesaria said. Rachel had no opportunity to deny the accusation. Cesaria was up and out of the chair, coming at her. There aren’t many people I’ve met who’d talk to me the way you talk. Not after having seen all that’s gone on here tonight.
“I’m not afraid of you,” Rachel said.
I see that. But don’t imagine being a woman’s any protection. If I wanted to harm you—“But you don’t. If you hurt me then you hurt Galilee, and that’s the last thing you want.”
You don’t know what that child did to me, Cesaria said. You don’t know the hurt he caused. I’d still have a husband if he’d not gone off into the world . . . She trailed off, despairing.
“I’m sorry he gave you so much pain,” Rachel said. “But I know he’s never forgiven himself.”
Cesaria’s stare was like light in ice. He told you that? she said.
“Yes he did.”
Then why didn’t he come back home and tell me? Cesaria said. Why didn’t he just come home and say he was sorry?
“Because he was certain you wouldn’t forgive him.”
I’d have forgiven him. All he had to do was ask and I’d have forgiven him. The light and ice were melting, and running down her cheeks. Damn you woman, she said. Making me weep after all these years. She sniffed hard. So what is it you’re asking me to do? she said.
“Find him for me,” Rachel replied. “I’ll do the rest. I’ll bring him home to you. I swear I will, if I have to drag him myself, I’ll bring him home to you.”
Cesaria’s tears kept coming, but she didn’t bother to wipe them away. She just stood there, while they fell, her face as naked as Galilee’s had been that first night on the island; all capacity for deception scoured from it. Her unhappiness was there, plain to see; and the rage she’d nurtured against him all these years. But so too was her love for him; her tender love, planted among these griefs.
You should go back to the Garden Island, she said. And wait for him.
Rachel scarcely dared believe what she was hearing. “You’ll find him for me?” she said.
If he’ll let me, Cesaria said. But you make sure he comes home to me, woman, you understand? That’s our bargain.
“I understand.”
Bring him back to L’Enfant, where he belongs. Somebody’s going to have to bury me, when all this is over. And I want it to be him.
ii
“Are we at war then?”
That was the question Luman had asked me, the day I went down to the Smoke House to make my peace with him. I didn’t have an answer for him at the time. Now I do. Yes, we’re at war with the Gearys, though I would still be hard-pressed to tell him when that war actually began.
Perhaps, in reflection, that’s true of all wars. The war between the states for instance, from the furnace of which the Gearys rose to such wealth and power—when did that begin? Was it the moment that the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter? That’s certainly a convenient choice for historians: they can pinpoint the day, the date and even the man—a trigger-happy civilian called Edmund Ruffin—who did the firing. But of course by the time this even takes place the grinding work of war had been under way for many years. The enmities which fueled that work in fact go back generations, nurtured and mythologized in the hearts of the people who will bankrupt their economies and sacrifice their sons for that enmity.
So it is with the war between the Gearys and the Barbarossas: though its first casualty, Margie, may only just be in the ground and the knives have only lately been sharpened, the plots and counter-plots that have brought us to this moment go back along, long way. Back to Charleston, in the early spring of 1865: Charles Holt and Nub Nickelberry stepping into Galilee’s strange boudoir in the ruins of the East Battery, and giving themselves over to pleasure. Had they known what they were initiating would they have done otherwise? I suspect not. They were living in the moment of their hunger and their despair; if they’d been told, as they consoled themselves with cake and meat and the comfort of kisses, that the consequences of their sensuality would be very terrible, a hundred and some years hence, they would have said: so what? And who would have blamed them? I would have done the same, in their boots. You can’t go through life worrying about what the echoes of the echoes of the echoes of your deeds will be; you have to do what you can with the moment, and let others take care of their moment when it comes.
So I lay no blame with Charles and Nub. They lived their lives, and moved on into the hereafter. Now we have our lives to live, and they will be marked by a period of war that may undo us all. It will be, I suspect, a subtle war, at least at the beginning, its significance calculated not in the number of coffins it fills, but in the scale of the structures it finally brings to ruin. I don’t simply speak of physical structures (though those too will inevitably come down); I speak of the elaborate edifices of influence and power and ambition that both our families have constructed over the years. When this war is over, I doubt any of them will still be standing. There will be no victor: that’s my prediction. The two clans will simply cancel one another out.
No great loss, you may say, knowing what you now know about us. There’s a certain pettiness in the best of us, and such malice in the worst tha
t their passing will probably be something to be celebrated.
My only hope as we move into these darker times is that the war will uncover some quality in one or other of us (I dare not hope all) that will disprove my pessimism. I don’t wish to say that war is ennobling, you understand; I don’t believe that for a moment. But I do believe it may strip us of some of the pretensions that are the dubious profits of peace—the airs and graces that we’ve all put on—and return us to our truer selves. To our humanity or our divinity; or both.
So, I’m ready. The pistol lies on one side of my desk, and my pen lies beside it. I intend to sit here and go on writing until the very last, but I can no longer promise you that I’ll finish this story before I have to put my pen aside and arm myself. That only everything of mine now seems like the remotest of dreams: one of those pretensions of peace that I was talking about a few paragraphs back.
I will promise you this: that in the chapters to come I won’t toy with your affections, as though we had a lifetime together. I’ll be as plain as I know how, doing what I can to furnish you with the means to finish this history in your own head should I be stopped by a bullet.
And—while I’m thinking of that—maybe this isn’t an inappropriate place to beg mercy from those I’ve neglected or misrepresented here. You’ve been reading the work of a man learning his craft word by word, sentence by sentence; I’ve often stumbled, I’ve often failed.
Forgive me my frailties. And if I am deserving of that forgiveness, let it be because I am not my father’s son, but only human. And let the future be such a time as this is reason enough to be loved.
PART EIGHT
A House of
Women
I
I was in a fine, maudlin mood when I wrote the last portion of the preceding chapter; with hindsight it seems somewhat premature. The barbarians aren’t here yet, after all. Not even a whiff of their cologne. Perhaps I’ll never need the gun Luman gave me. Wouldn’t that be a fine old ending to my epic? After hundreds of pages of expectation, nothing. The Gearys decide they’ve had enough; Galilee stays out at sea; Rachel waits on the beach but never sees him again. The din of war drums dwindles, and they finally fall silent.