Silk and Stone

  Sarah yelped. “No, Alexandra, wait—” But she had already pivoted on her high heels and hurried out. Clara stood in furious silence. Rachel wrung her hands together. “Judge, you fool. You blind fool.”

  “I’m doing what I think is best,” he said, a muscle popping in his jaw. “Sarah, you have to believe that.”

  Sarah sank back on the pillows, gaping at him. “That’s what you said when you gave our family’s heirloom to her.”

  “There. Look at what these two characters are up to.” His wife appeared in the doorway again with a starched nurse glowering beside her. The nurse said swiftly, “Mrs. Vanderveer, I swear I didn’t know what they were doing.” The nurse barged in, grabbed a cup of water from the bedside stand, and dumped it in Clara’s bowl.

  Rachel Raincrow gasped. “Clara, fix it.”

  “It’s too late,” Clara announced in Cherokee. She stared in horror at her bowl. “The spirits have been insulted.”

  “No, oh, no—”

  Sarah pounded her fists on the bed. “Get your meddling tramp out of my room.”

  Her brother turned anxiously, his hands out. “Don’t talk that way. Please—” His jaw worked spasmodically. “Alexandra, apologize.”

  His wife raised her chin and looked at him. “I’m sorry for trying to take care of your sister and her children.”

  “Dear, I didn’t mean anything like that. I meant—”

  “Enough,” Clara said. She knew this was a lost cause. She emptied her bowl in a sink in one corner, then packed her things in her bag. Rachel Raincrow huddled over the babies as if she had the power to undo the harm. Sarah Raincrow said other things to her brother and his wife, bad things, not what family should talk of.

  Clara shivered. Still speaking Cherokee, she said, “Rachel Raincrow, we must go. I’m getting dirty. Come on, please. We need to discuss this alone.”

  “Rachel, I’m sorry,” Sarah cried. “Tell Mrs. Big Stick I want her to come back later. Or she can come to the Cove next week—”

  “No.” Clara faced the poor girl and shook her head sadly. “This is not like giving a shot of penicillin. There is a time for it, and when that time is past, well—you’ll have to do the best you can. I’ll pray for you and your children.”

  Clara hoisted her bag and marched out of the room. She waited in the lobby, grim-faced, until Rachel Raincrow joined her. Rachel’s hooded eyes were terrified. “Tell me the truth,” Rachel said.

  Clara stared at the floor. Giving bad news to people was the only unpleasant part of her work. She stalled. Maybe Rachel wouldn’t pressure her. “Tell me,” Rachel repeated, grasping her arm. “I have to know.”

  Clara lifted her head. Her eyes met Rachel’s. “I’ll try to help you with the children. I don’t know how much good it will do. For now, I need to know all you can tell me about that woman.”

  “Oh, Clara, why? I’m already worried about her being a witch.”

  “It’s worse than that.” She could barely say the word, it was such a horrible threat. She whispered it furtively. “Ravenmocker.”

  Rachel Raincrow moaned. Bowing her head, she shielded it with both arms.

  Ginger Monroe Flemming had done even better in marriage than Alexandra, a fact Alexandra secretly loathed. Her old schoolmate had married into the South Carolina Flemmings of Flemmings Pharmaceuticals. Very old money, very big money, very much the epitomy of Charleston society. It galled Alexandra when Ginger arrived for a weekend visit driving a Rolls Royce sedan and accompanied by her own maid.

  William and she had only a grumbling housekeeper who served double-duty as a cook. William was devoted to the furtive black creature and her equally recalcitrant husband, who kept the gardens up as well as caring for the two Arabian mares Alexandra had brought to Highview after their marriage.

  Alexandra couldn’t convince him to fire them and let her staff the house with people of her own choosing. Since the birth of his sister’s children, and that bizarre incident at the hospital, William had been moody with her. She was treading lightly, coddling him these days, as she waited out the last two months of her pregnancy.

  Ginger’s visit only made the frustration worse.

  “It’s absolutely lovely here,” Ginger said, leaning back in a white wooden chair on the lake dock to catch the spring sunshine. Behind them, crickets droned sleepily in the grass of the back lawn; before them a secluded inlet of Pandora Lake stretched to steep hills covered in giant firs and rhododendron.

  Sipping iced tea, Alexandra lay on a cushioned lounge beside her, feeling bloated and encumbered by a belly that was growing more enormous every day. “You live in paradise,” Ginger continued heedlessly, stroking wavy brunette hair back from her forehead with one hand and rubbing suntan lotion on her face with the other. “No humidity, no gnats. I can work on my tan without sweating and swatting at things. The air is so clean. My sinuses haven’t bothered me since I got here. And the scenery—oh, Alex, I can’t believe the views you’ve shown me outside town. And town is the cutest place, right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. I envy you.”

  Alexandra scowled behind black sunglasses. “We have five churches and no movie theater. The owner of our only restaurant thinks yeast rolls and overdone sirloin are haute cuisine, and the best clothing shop we have stocks dungarees next to the dress rack. Once you drive off the main roads, nothing is paved, and the electricity went out for an entire week last winter. Deer eat the shrubbery, and last month the postman totaled his new pickup truck when he ran into a bear. It made the headlines for two weeks in our newspaper.”

  Ginger laughed. “Don’t you see? That’s why this place is so fascinating to lowlanders. It’s quiet and unspoiled, tucked up here in the top of the mountains.”

  “It’s lonely. William’s relatives are gentrified hicks. They look down on anyone who can’t trace the family tree to some grubby mountaineer settler.” She paused. “Or to some shabby Indian.”

  Ginger looked intrigued. “How funny. Are there many Indians around here?”

  “A lot. But most are so shy and backward, they keep to themselves. There’s a nothing little community across the mountains called Cawatie Township. About five miles from here. William dragged me over there once to some sort of cermonial dance. Indians stomping and chanting. Half of them either can’t or won’t speak English. William thinks they’re wonderful. His sister even married one.”

  “My God, you’re kidding.”

  Alexandra smiled wearily. “Of course, my sister ran off in the middle of the night with an army sergeant.”

  “Where’s Frannie now?”

  “On an army base in Germany, with her dearly beloved. My parents won’t even write to her. I sent her some money and told her to get a divorce and come home. I’m sure she married the man just to spite us all. It won’t last. I told her she could live with William and me. I even had William write to her—invite her to come here.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She sent the money back and told me she was happy.”

  “Maybe she is.”

  “My sister,” Alexandra said grimly, “thinks I’m the unhappy one.”

  Ginger laughed. “You’ve got everything a girl could want. Including a baby on the way.”

  Alexandra was silent. William was thrilled with her pregnancy; he doted on the idea of having a child. That was the main reason she wanted to give him one. Extra insurance. “I’m so bored I could scream,” she said suddenly. “I wish I had a job. I wish I could do something, anything to put this godforsaken place on the map.”

  Ginger sat forward eagerly. “Alex. Help me find a piece of property to buy. Something irresistible. John would love it up here. We have a summer cottage in Maine, but it’s so far away. We should build one here. I know he’d go crazy for the place.”

  Alexandra pushed herself upright. A thready coil of excitement erased her lethargy. “Really? And you’d bring friends to visit?”

  “Dozens of them. Think about it—a whole crew of peop
le with money to burn, drooling over the fresh air and the mountains, buying land, building homes, tennis courts—God, a country club even. A golf course. Something private, of course. But everything would hinge on finding the perfect setting.”

  “I’ve already got it. William owns a thousand acres of the most gorgeous property you’ve ever seen. Only a few miles from here.”

  Ginger yelped with glee. “Empty land? What does he do with it?”

  Alexandra waved a hand in disgust. “It’s as good as empty. He rents it to a handful of tenant farmers.”

  “Would he tell them to move?”

  “Not even if his life depended on it. They can barely scratch together rent payments, and half the time they show up on our doorstep with truckloads of vegetables instead of money. But he lets them get away with it because they treat him like some kind of adored land baron. I’ve pointed out that they’re cheating him blind, but he just mutters about traditions and loyalty, as if they’re his personal responsibility.”

  “Well, then, why do you think he’d change his mind?”

  Alexandra lay back happily. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll think of something.”

  Not much work was getting done around the Cove these days because Sarah and Rachel couldn’t keep from playing with the babies. At four months, the two put on an endless show of smiles and gurgles and wide-eyed charisma. Every wave of a tiny arm, every kick of a fat leg, was cause for admiration. And Hugh wasn’t much better, rushing home in the evenings to spend every spare moment with them in his arms.

  Deep in the narrow secluded valley below Pandora, with the Saukee River whispering just out of sight beyond a grove of poplars and the steep granite face of Razorback Bald rising in the background like a protective wall, Sarah was never lonely. She had the big two-story log house to manage, chickens to feed, a cow to milk, a garden and fruit orchard to tend. She had three frisky mutt dogs and five fat cats to keep out of trouble. She had her paintings—bright, gentle watercolors of landscapes and flowers, with an occasional portrait of any willing souls who would sit long enough to be copied. She had her children, Rachel’s friendship, and Hugh’s love.

  Most days, it was almost enough to keep her from brooding about her ruby and her brother, and his wife.

  She and Rachel were picking tomatoes in the garden beyond the log barn, with little Jake and Eleanore asleep on a blanket in the shade of a yarrow hedge, when Rachel raised her head toward the road. “Somebody’s coming,” she said, and frowned.

  Rachel’s hearing was an extraordinary thing, like her talent for finding gemstones. The dirt road that ran through the Cove intersected a turn in the Saukee so far in the distance that the drive to the house took a full five minutes. To get into the valley a person had to drive through the river at a shallow ford, then traverse the road down the mountainside in steep and winding curves. Hugh’s father had built a wooden bridge off a narrow side road to cross the river when the water ran high, but even when visitors rumbled across the bridge, their approach couldn’t be heard at the house.

  Even the dogs hadn’t barked yet. But Rachel was rarely mistaken about these things. “A big truck,” she added, pushing herself up from the herb bed and brushing dirt off her faded work skirt. Her long braid of brindled hair swung along her back as she nodded to Sarah. “You’ll see.”

  Sarah got up, tucking thick garden gloves into a back pocket of her overalls, then trying in vain to puff up her damp helmet of teased hair. Mountain hospitality called for the lady of the house to be presentable—and in warm weather armed with iced tea. She thought quickly. She had a fresh gallon in the refrigerator.

  A few minutes later, the dogs began barking. Sarah walked into the front yard between towering clumps of nandinas and the wide shade of huge oaks, peering through dogwoods that lined the narrow dirt driveway off the road. A lurching, ancient flatbed truck with tall, slatted-wood side panels pulled into the driveway. A half-grown boy drove the old truck, and the cab was crowded with small children, all standing up. She immediately recognized the dozen women who stood in the bed of the truck, clinging to the side panels. Weathered, tough, young, old, two of them black women. She knew their shy faces and simple Sunday-go-to-church dresses as if they were family.

  The wives of William’s tenant farmers.

  “Well, hello,” she said when the truck came to a stop and the growling engine went silent. “What are y’all doing out and about in the middle of a workday?”

  They climbed out silently, their faces grim. She was startled to see evidence of tears. Rachel came up beside her, a baby cuddled in each brown arm, and whispered, “Look at ’em. There’s bad trouble.”

  Sarah waited politely. One of the older ones edged forward, her knotty hands wound together in front of her. “We come to you for help, ma’am. You bein’ the judge’s sister. We don’t know what else to do.”

  “Help for what, Lucy? What’s wrong?”

  “Revenuers. Government men. The law carried our husbands off. Busted up their stills and caught ’em.”

  Sarah gaped at them. Making liquor was a revered hobby in the mountains, not a booming industry anymore. Swapped and sold by people who were proud of their homemade brands, it amounted to a local craft, not a crime. Government agents hadn’t seriously hunted for moonshiners since Sarah was a child.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “We don’t know exactly. But they’re sayin’ our men’s going to jail for six months.”

  “Yes, we do know what happened.” A crying young woman, hardly more than Sarah’s age, came forward. “We ain’t never spoke ill of the judge before, ma’am. He’s been so good to us. But now he’s turned on us.”

  “No,” Sarah said quickly. “My brother wouldn’t do that. He’d never—”

  “It was his wife,” another woman added.

  Sarah felt the blood draining out of her face. “What did she do?”

  “She come to visit, like she just wanted to be polite. Bringing little gifts—cakes and things. Everybody got together at Lucy’s house to see her. Everybody brought her presents—just like we do when the judge comes to say hello. We give her a basket of liquor, ’cause we always give a basket to the judge. She asked all about it, real sweet, about how it was made, and where the stills is at. We figured—ain’t nothing to worry about, people around here know what’s right, and how to behave.”

  Lucy said slowly, “But that was a week ago, and last night the gov’ment men come. Ma’am, we hate to think your sister-in-law put the revenuers on us, but we don’t know what else to say.”

  Sarah dimly heard Rachel’s hiss of anger. Shame and fury strangled her. “Y’all go on back to your homes,” Sarah said evenly. “I’ll take care of this. I promise.”

  She left the babies in Rachel’s care and drove to the next town—the county seat—as fast as she could push her old Jeep. She remembered her brother’s court schedule—it was Wednesday afternoon, and everything in the county shut down after twelve on Wednesdays. William would be finishing up paperwork in his office.

  Sarah barged into the big, paneled room lined with bookcases. William sat at his desk with his head in his hands. “You know,” Sarah said, horrified. “You know Alexandra called the law on your tenants.”

  He jerked his head up. His expression was anguished. “I don’t know anything of the kind.”

  “Who else would?”

  “There’s no reason on God’s green earth for her to do something like that. I asked her. She swore to me it wasn’t her. You forget how it used to be. People make enemies. They get some little feud going and turn each other in out of spite. It could have been anyone in the county.”

  “You don’t believe that. I can tell by the look on your face. She hurt those people. What are you going to do about it?”

  “Sarah, I love her. I love her, and she’s not cruel at heart. She’s got this … this need to be important, and it’s because she’s defensive about her family’s reputation. People still gossip about the
way they treated their workers at the mills.” He thumped the desk. “It was thirty years ago, by God.”

  “The Dukes haven’t changed that much. Life isn’t that much better for their employees, even now. Besides, Alexandra’s creating her own reputation, and it’s damned bad, and she’s dragging you down with her.”

  He slammed his fist on the desk. “She’s my wife, and we have a child on the way. My first duty is to stand up for her and that child.”

  “What about honor? What about self-respect? And loyalty to the other people who’ve come to depend on you? All right, putting Alexandra aside, what are you going to do to help your tenants? Those families can’t keep their farms going with the husbands locked up for six months.”

  “I’ll take care of them.”

  “They’re proud. They want fair treatment, not charity.” She paused, her jaw working. “That’s all I want too. Fair treatment.”

  “Sarah, I’d cut off my right arm if it would take away your disappointment.”

  “You know what you owe me. It’s not an arm. Don’t you understand? You’re my brother, and I love you. I don’t want to be at odds with you.”

  “Then try to forgive and forget. I’m being torn apart here, sister.”

  “Judge? Excuse me for interrupting, but it’s an emergency.” His secretary stood in the doorway, wringing her hands. “They called from the hospital. Mrs. Vanderveer has gone into labor.”

  William leapt up and grabbed his hat from an ivory peg on the wall. He shook his head at Sarah. “I’ve got to get over there. Trust me, sister. I’ll make things right.” He rushed out past her, running.

  Alexandra knew the moment William took his newborn son into his arms that her power and influence were forever secure. Tears in his eyes, William cooed to the red, wrinkled baby, then kissed the top of his head. “He has my red hair,” William said in a husky, reverent voice. “He’s the most perfect … thank you, darling, thank you.”

  “It was my pleasure.” She relaxed on the hospital pillows with peaceful exhaustion. Once was enough. William wanted more children, but she would simply find a doctor out of town who’d prescribe birth control pills for her—thank God for that new resource—and she’d take them without telling William. “Would you mind if I hire a nanny for him?”