When Charles suddenly began to laugh, I felt insulted. Jonathan and Sally gaped at him, mystified.
“Tell us the joke, Charles,” Sally said.
I made the mistake of looking into his eyes and my heart turned traitor on me, galloping as foolishly as a spring colt in a wide meadow. It was the first time I’d seen laughter in his eyes, and it made them startlingly bright, like the blue in a rainbow.
“You have to admit this is quite ironic,” he said when his laughter died away. “I had no idea you would be the mysterious cousin, and I can see by your reaction that you had no idea I was Sally’s brother.” His smile was so radiant, his face so transformed when he wasn’t scornful or angry, that I smiled weakly in return.
“Do you know each other?” Sally asked.
“Miss Fletcher and I have never been formally introduced until today. But we have bumped into each other before.”
“I remember now,” Jonathan said. “Weren’t you having some sort of disagreement at Sally’s party?”
“Oh, Charles, you’re not going to spoil this nice afternoon for me, are you?” Sally said, pouting.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said smoothly. “Truce, Miss Fletcher?”
“Of course.”
He offered his hand, and I shook it. His grip was warm and firm. A tight little knot in the pit of my stomach seemed to come unraveled at his touch, and I hated myself for reacting to him.
“I’m not hungry yet,” Sally decided. “Let’s stroll around the fairgrounds for a while before we eat.” Jonathan picked up the picnic basket that the St. Johns had brought, and Sally took his other arm. They started down the path ahead of us, Jonathan’s head bent lovingly toward her as they talked.
Thankfully, Charles didn’t offer me his arm. As we walked down the path behind them, I decided to take Cousin Rosalie’s advice and ask him about himself. I learned that he was five years older than me, that he’d graduated from Virginia University in Charlottesville, and that he would probably manage his father’s flour mills one day. But he also loved politics, and he was currently working as an aide to one of Virginia’s senators, traveling with him to Washington whenever Congress was in session.
I told Charles about my father’s business, about my cousin’s plantation, and how I’d attended school in Philadelphia for the past two years.
“Ah! So, that explains it,” he mumbled.
“Explains what?” But I knew exactly what he was going to say.
“How you became brainwashed with all that anti-slavery propaganda.”
“Nobody brainwashed me. I’m perfectly capable of thinking for myself.”
“Let me guess, they had you read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and—”
“For your information, I have never read it. I didn’t need to. My experiences with slavery right here in Virginia were enough to—”
“Your experiences should have told you that Miss Stowe’s book is filled with melodramatic exaggerations.”
“Have you read it, Mr. St. John?”
“I wouldn’t be caught dead—”
He stopped short when Sally suddenly pushed between us. “Charles, stop this!” Her voice was hushed with embarrassment.
I had forgotten myself in the heat of the argument, but as I looked around I was shocked to discover that Charles and I had been standing in the middle of the path, shouting at each other. People were staring at us. I felt mortified. Charles looked shaken.
“If you two can’t be civil, then please have the decency to be quiet,” Sally said.
“Fine,” I replied.
“Of course,” Charles agreed.
Sally took Jonathan’s arm again, but they walked behind us this time, ready to douse the flames if the sparks began to fly. Charles shoved his hands into his pockets. “It has turned out to be a beautiful day, hasn’t it, Miss Fletcher?” I was surprised that the spring flowers didn’t wither at the ice in his voice. But I could be coldly polite, too.
“Yes, it’s a lovely day, Mr. St. John.”
We continued in that vein until Jonathan found a peaceful spot on the grass for us to spread our blanket. As we ate lunch, Charles gradually revealed a very charming side of himself, a side I’d certainly never seen before. “I’d like to hear more about your work in Washington,” Jonathan said.
“Tell them about the time you met President Buchanan,” Sally coaxed.
“Right. My shining moment in the presence of greatness,” he replied. I heard gentle laughter in his voice and saw that conceit and self-importance were not part of his nature. Instead, Charles possessed the rare quality of being able to laugh at himself. “I was attending a reception at a Washington hotel,” he began, “and the president mistook me for the British ambassador’s attaché. I didn’t know what to do. It was a huge gathering, and president Buchanan took me aside to ramble on and on about some trade agreement he was negotiating. I couldn’t be rude and interrupt him, so I just kept nodding my head. But then he asked me what I thought. I didn’t know whether I should embarrass the president of the United States by pointing out that I wasn’t the attaché, or simply mimic a British accent and say, ‘I think it’s a jolly good treaty, old boy!’ ”
Charles’ imitation of an Englishman was so amusing that I couldn’t help laughing. “So what did you do?” I asked.
“Luckily, I spotted the real British ambassador just then, so I said, ‘There’s the ambassador, Mr. President. He’s much more qualified to speak to this issue than I am.’ ” Charles used his phony British accent again, and we all roared with laughter.
“Is that the tightest spot you’ve ever been in, in Washington?” Jonathan asked.
“Politically, perhaps. But my most dangerous experience occurred the time my landlady lost her cat.”
“Tell us, Charles,” Sally begged. Charles had such an amusing manner of storytelling, mimicking all the voices and gesturing dramatically, that he might have been a stage actor. I found myself leaning toward him, listening attentively.
“Well, I had just returned to my boardinghouse one afternoon, when my landlady came running out to the front hallway, wringing her hands and begging for my help. Mrs. Peckham is such a sweet little white-haired lady, so small and frail—and at least a hundred years old—so of course I offered to help her any way that I could.
“ ‘My poor little kitty cat has been missing for three days,’ she said, ‘but I heard her crying this morning. I think she’s trapped up in a tree.’
“Now, I’m no cat-lover,” Charles said, “but I do take pride in being chivalrous. Her cat was, indeed, about halfway up the oak tree in front of the boardinghouse. So, like a good Southern gentleman, I removed my hat and coat, fetched Mrs. Peckham’s ladder from the tool shed, and began to climb. Wouldn’t you know, the blasted cat saw me coming and climbed higher and higher to get away from me? By the time she ran out of branches to climb, the ladder was far below me, and we were both teetering at the very top of the tree. The limbs were a bit thin to bear my weight, so I swayed in the breeze like wheat in the wind.
“Well, I finally succeeded in catching the animal, but she fought like a wildcat, scratching and hissing at me. I was already hanging on to the tree for dear life, and I knew I couldn’t hold her and climb down at the same time, so I did the only thing that came to mind: I unbuttoned my shirt, stuffed the cat inside, and buttoned it up again.
“Dreadful mistake. She had claws like razor blades, and she wanted her freedom, so she proceeded to slice my chest into ribbons. Of course, Mrs. Peckham was watching all this from below and singing my praises as a hero. So I had no choice but to grit my teeth, ignore the pain, and start climbing down.
“By the time I reached the ladder, the cat had worked her deadly way around my body and was now shredding my back. I was in such a hurry to end my torment that I accidentally kicked the ladder over in my haste to get down. Tiny, frail Mrs. Peckham couldn’t right it again, so she tottered off, in her doddering way, for help.
“I couldn’t
wait. The lowest branch was about fifteen feet above the ground, but I figured if I broke my neck in the fall, at least it would end the misery the cat was inflicting on me. And with any luck, the cursed cat would die, too. I swung from the branch with both hands and dropped to the ground—spraining my ankle in the process. I didn’t care. That pain was nothing compared to those needle-like claws. I quickly unbuttoned my shirt, wrenched the blasted cat off my back, and bundled her up inside the shirt like a sack of potatoes.
“By the time Mrs. Peckham returned with her handyman— who probably should have been sent to retrieve the stupid cat in the first place—I must have looked a sight: sitting on the ground, shirtless, my body bleeding and cut to ribbons.
“ ‘Look like the overseer done whipped you good, Mr. St. John,’ the handyman said. He took the bundle away from me and carefully opened it to present the cat to Mrs. Peckham. That’s when I got the biggest surprise of all.
“ ‘Why, Mr. St. John!’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s not my kitty!’ ” By the time Charles finished his story, I was laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes. I couldn’t believe he was the same obnoxious man I’d argued with earlier. And I couldn’t believe that I was having such a good time with him. But when Sally and Jonathan left the two of us alone on the blanket and went to feed the leftover cake to the ducks, the fireworks soon started again.
“Have you picnicked here at the fairgrounds before?” Charles asked me casually.
“No, I never have.”
“Isn’t it nice to see so many people enjoying the fine spring weather?”
“Yes, it is.” But I’d noticed that all of the couples strolling the paths that afternoon were white. It angered me that educated people like Charles couldn’t see how wrong that was. I simply had to speak my mind. “It’s too bad, Mr. St. John, that in this beautiful land of freedom, the Negro population of Richmond is not allowed a day of rest or the pleasure of a stroll.”
His eyes narrowed. “Listen now. Don’t start . . .”
“The truth leaves you without defense, doesn’t it?”
“I have a perfectly good defense, but why waste my breath?”
“Ha!” I said. “I’d like to hear you try to defend the fact that slavery deprives people of their basic rights and freedoms.”
“Why bother? You people don’t listen anyway. All I ever do in Washington is argue with Northern abolitionists, and it doesn’t do a bit of good.”
“That’s because they’re right and you’re wrong.”
“No, it’s because you’ve all been brainwashed with a bunch of overblown rhetoric—”
“Stop it this instant!” We looked up to see Sally standing over us, hands on hips. “Honestly! If you two won’t stop bickering, then we’d better go home.”
Charles held his hands up in surrender. “Sorry. Don’t let me spoil your day. I promise I won’t say another word.”
“Me either!” I folded my arms across my chest.
“Well, that will make for a cheerful afternoon,” Sally said. “Pack everything up, Jonathan. Charles, fetch the carriage. I want to go home.”
“No, Sally, wait!” Jonathan pleaded. “Let’s give them one more chance.”
But Sally refused. Long before the afternoon should have ended, she and Charles were gone. Jonathan was so upset with me he didn’t say a word on the ride home, and he refused my invitation to come into the house. When he drove off without saying good-bye, I comforted myself with the thought that he wasn’t likely to beg me for any more favors.
The worst part of that whole disastrous day was the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about Charles. Half of the time I would argue with him in my head, and the other half of the time I would be remembering his smile or the sound of his laughter—and then that breathless, dizzy sensation would come over me again, the way it had when he shook my hand. I hated myself for being attracted to such a horrible man—for laughing at his stories and for enjoying myself at least some of the time that I’d spent with him.
As I lay tossing in bed that night, I could still hear the sound of his drowsy voice and the habit he had of saying, “Listen now. . .” I groaned aloud.
Tessie got up and came over to sit on my bed. “May as well tell me what’s bothering you, or neither one of us gonna get any sleep tonight.”
I sat up to face her, sitting cross-legged. “He is the most infuriating man I’ve ever met!”
“Jonathan?”
“No. Charles St. John. I hate him! I never want to see him again! I’ve been arguing with him in my head, thinking of all the things I should have said, and now I know exactly what I intend to say to him the next time I see him.”
“I’m just an old mammy, but . . . why you gonna talk to him again if he annoy you so?”
“Because I want to forget him, but I can’t get him out of my mind. I hope I never see him again, but I’m so afraid that I won’t see him. He has me so confused, Tessie! I wish he would go back to Washington and . . . and drown in the Potomac River!”
“Guess this here James River ain’t good enough to drown him.”
“No! I mean, yes! Tessie, I’m not even making sense, am I? What’s wrong with me? I shake all over when I’m with him, even before he makes me angry. My heart starts going crazy, and I can’t catch my breath, and he makes me laugh—yet I can’t help arguing with him.”
“Let me ask you, honey. That young man who keep sending you letters from West Point?”
“You mean Robert?”
“Uh huh . . . does he do all this ‘heart messing’ and ‘body shaking’ with you?”
Not once. Nor had any other man I’d ever met. I shook my head.
“How you feel about that Yankee man?” she asked.
“I feel . . . I feel sorry for Robert. And I feel safe with him.”
“You want to wake up beside him every morning?”
I remembered my cousin Julia asking me the same thing. The thought horrified me. “No,” I told Tessie.
“Well, then. That’s your answer.”
“What? What’s my answer?”
“You not in love with this Robert.”
“Well, I’m certainly not in love with Mr. St. John, I can tell you that! He’s insulting . . . and . . . and obnoxious and . . .”
“What he look like? He as ugly as he is mean?”
“No, he’s not ugly at all.” My voice suddenly quivered with emotion, and I didn’t know why. “He’s . . . he’s . . .” I saw his face in my mind, the way he looked when he laughed and told stories, not when he was angry.
“He’s what, honey?”
“Well . . . he would be a handsome man if he weren’t so obstinate!” I covered my face and cried. I didn’t even know why.
“Mm, mm, mm,” Tessie soothed as she gathered me in her arms. “Sure do make it hard to hate a man when he’s handsome.”
She let me cry for a while, but as my tears began to fade, she asked, “What you and this man arguing about all the time?”
“Slavery. He defends it! Can you imagine? He thinks it’s perfectly acceptable!”
A smile tugged at the corners of Tessie’s mouth. “Seem to me Cousin Jonathan, your daddy, and just about every white man in Virginia think the same thing. You arguing with all of them, too?”
“No,” I answered meekly.
“Honey, if you looking to find a Virginia man who think like a Yankee, you gonna die an old maid. Guess you better marry that Robert fellow while you still got the chance.”
I recalled what she’d said about Robert. I wasn’t in love with him. But how had she known? “What’s it like to fall in love, Tessie?” I asked.
She gazed into the darkness for a long moment, then her smile widened. “Well, when you see that certain man you heart flies like paper on the wind—don’t matter if you just see him one minute ago or one year ago. When you with him, ain’t nothing or nobody else in the whole world but him. You might be walking down the same old street you walk on every day, but if you with him, y
our feet don’t hardly touch the ground anymore, like you just floating on a little cloud. And, honey, you want his arms to be around you more than you want air to breathe.”
“Is that how you feel about Josiah?” I asked. She nodded silently. “But you hardly ever see Josiah. Have you ever thought about finding another man?”
“Most people very lucky if love come around once,” she said quietly. “Better not be letting go of it, thinking there be another chance.”
I knew that my father’s grief had healed when he decided to take an active part in Richmond society again. As more and more invitations arrived at our house, he sometimes asked me to accompany him in my mother’s place.
“It’s hard for me to believe, Caroline, but you are old enough to be married already,” he told me one day. “I think it’s time I introduced you to some suitable families.”
Half of the time I worried that I’d run into Charles St. John at one of these functions, the other half of the time I was disappointed when I didn’t. Then one night, nearly a month after the picnic, I accompanied my father to a political fund-raising ball at the governor’s mansion. I was standing near the punch table when Charles appeared out of nowhere and stood in front of me.
“Dance with me.”
There was nothing gentlemanly about it. But it was a command. I wanted to refuse, but I couldn’t stop myself from moving into his arms. It was the first time Charles and I had ever held each other, and my knees trembled so badly I could scarcely move.
“Listen now,” he said after a moment. “If I believed in witches I’d swear you were one.” There wasn’t a trace of humor in his voice. He stopped moving and drew back to look at my face. I’d never seen a bluer pair of eyes before. They smoldered like blue flames.
“Come on, Miss Fletcher, fight with me. Make me angry.”
“Why?” I asked in a tiny voice. I was afraid I was going to cry.
He looked away and started dancing again. “Because maybe then I can stop thinking about you day and night.”