Chesapeake by James A. Michener
Fitzhugh also took charge of the wine cellar, and saw to it that it contained bottles of Burgundy, a cask of port and a tun of Madeira, and when neighboring plantations ran short of either of the last two, he generously supplied them until the next ships arrived with replenishments. He supervised his slaves in the making of cider, which his family consumed in copious amounts, but he alone prepared the three drinks for which Devon became noted. Syllabub was served at most meals: “One part milk, one part cream, one part ale, flavored with lemon and lime, topped with cinnamon bark.” Possets were drunk before retiring, for they were conducive to sleep and good digestion, but persicot was reserved for festive occasions. Kept in cruets, a golden amber in color, it was served after the dessert to leave a pleasant tingling in the mouth. Of it Fitzhugh said, “For six weeks I warn the slaves to set aside every peach and apricot pit, and cherry, too, and when I have enough I cut each one in four parts, and steep them in French brandy with cloves and cinnamon. After three months I add some sugar water, and the longer this stands, the better it becomes.”
Rosalind tended the more mundane matters, particularly the medical care of all who pertained to the plantation; on some mornings the little house behind the mansion became an infirmary, with three Steeds, four other white planters and a dozen slaves in line for her ministrations. From long experience with plantation life, she had assembled those remedies best calculated to cure the ills that accompanied the cultivation of tobacco on remote fields: ipecac to induce vomiting, laxative salts for opposite effect, oil of juniper for the chest, spirits of saffron to control spasms, and glyster for burns.
Her sovereign specific was hot linseed oil, applied liberally and covered with cloths; this subdued congestions. She also used tartar emetic with great frequency to cure what she called distress, and in a small bottle which she alone controlled, she kept laudanum to use when amputations or tooth extractions were necessary.
For the Steed plantations, unlike some across the bay, were centers of work. Any of the Steed boys approaching manhood had learned how to tend fields, and make casks, and cure Oronoco, and figure profits. At some point or other, most had worked in the family warehouse at Patamoke, and many had sailed as ordinary seamen to Bristol. The scorn in which many English gentlemen held trade was no part of the Steed tradition; their family had prospered not primarily from tobacco but from the myriad activities associated with it, and in some years when Oronoco sold for little in either Bristol or London, the Steeds continued to make a satisfactory income from their barrels, their beaver pelts, their ships and, above all, their warehouse. It was difficult for anyone to live along the Choptank without paying tribute in some form or other to the Steeds.
It was a good life, but sometimes when Rosalind looked at her florid husband playing with the children, she could not escape thinking: If only he had the capacity to know that an ugly woman can also be a loving human being! At such times she would harbor deep resentment that God had not made her beautiful, but when her hurt was deepest she would swear grimly: I’ll not surrender. I’ll not sink to his level. Ugly or not, I’ll be the best person I can.
Among the visitors to the Patamoke warehouse was a petite, solemn Quaker girl of eighteen. Dressed in prim gray, with a bonnet whose strings fell untied about her shoulders, she had that clarity of skin which makes any woman beautiful; in her case her small features were so harmoniously balanced and pleasing that whenever she entered the store Mark Steed, if he happened to be there that day, would remark upon the difference between her and the rambunctious Turlock woman. He also compared her with his mother, and from something his mother had read him from Shakespeare, thought: Since she’s pretty, she’s probably stupid.
To test this he tried on several occasions to engage her in conversation, but failed. She had come to the store for specific items required by the shipbuilders and was not to be diverted. In the bright fabrics from Paris she could express no interest, and neither she nor any of the other Paxmores needed the lace of Bruges or the copper-ware of Ghent. She seemed almost retarded, a gray shadow appearing mysteriously at the town wharf in a shallop sailed by her brother, saying nothing, never smiling, never responding to gallantries.
Once at home he remarked upon her strange behavior, and Rosalind asked bluntly, “When are you getting married, Mark?” and he replied, “When I left London, I had a kind of arrangement with Louise Fithian.”
“London? I’d have thought you’d want a local wife.”
“Louise is a dear, really she is.” And he expounded on her qualities with an enthusiasm which pleased his mother.
“Have you a silhouette?”
He did. It had been cut by a Frenchman skilled in using small scissors, and showed a standard profile, a standard pouting beauty. “She seems quite attractive,” Rosalind said with no enthusiasm. Then, returning the silhouette, she mused, “I wonder if it’s a good idea to import a wife from London. I do wonder.”
“The sainted Edmund imported Martha by mail. Never saw her before she stepped on his wharf.”
“She was a fugitive. Driven from home. By her religion.”
“That’s another problem. There are no Catholic girls on the Choptank.”
“The Fithian girl can’t be Catholic.”
“No. But I know her.”
“You also know the Paxmore girl.”
“The little gray one?”
“Not so gray, Mark.”
And she insisted that he accompany her to Peace Cliff, and when he had tied their sloop at the Paxmore wharf and climbed the low hill to the telescope house, she led him not to young Amanda, who watched with keen interest, but to old Ruth Brinton, who was raging.
“How terrible!” she stormed. “In the square facing the courthouse.”
“What happened?” Rosalind asked.
“To sell human beings under official sanction.”
“Mrs. Paxmore,” Rosalind interrupted. “It’s always been done and it’s done humanely. Now stop ranting.”
“But yesterday they sold a mother north, a father south, and a nine-year-old daughter upriver.”
“We do not do that on the island,” Rosalind said quietly.
“We all do it, my dear friend, if one does.”
“No!” Rosalind protested. “Each family lives by its own standards, and no Steed has ever abused a slave. We need them and we love them.”
“But if a human family can be dragged onto a dock at the very door of the house of justice ...” The old woman began to tremble, whereupon Amanda moved to quieten her. Speaking defensively she said, “On this point Grandmother is never satisfied.”
“Nor ever will be,” the old woman snapped.
“The meeting has rebuked her many times,” Amanda said. “But on she goes. A voice in the wilderness.” She said this with such simplicity that she resembled some Hebrew maiden in the Old Testament.
“I wanted you to meet my son Mark,” Rosalind said.
“I’ve heard he’s a fine lad,” Ruth Brinton said.
“Where would you have heard that?”
“Amanda told me. She sees him when she goes to fetch nails.”
Rosalind noticed that the little Quaker girl did not blush, she looked straight ahead without apologies; but Mark blushed profusely, and Rosalind thought: He should. It’s a very human reaction and it differentiates him from his father.
On the sail back to Devon, Rosalind said nothing, but once she had her son alone in the house she said firmly, “I wanted you to see a real woman,” and she told him briefly of Ruth Brinton’s travail in Massachusetts and of the exemplary life she had lived in Patamoke, serving as the conscience of both the Quaker and the general community.
“You don’t fool me, talking about old Mrs. Paxmore. You wanted me to see Amanda ... in her home.”
“I did indeed. I wanted you to see what a home of integrity could be.”
“I’d be afraid of touching a Quaker. That Amanda could be a fierce woman in a household. Did you see how she took c
“I wasn’t badgering her. It’s just that on slavery—”
“You were badgering her. And you’re doing the same to me.” He decided to have no more to do with the Paxmore girl, and now when she entered the warehouse he found excuses to avoid her. She was a prim, difficult and, in some undefinable way, repelling young woman, and he was afraid of her.
His problem of finding a wife was handled in an unusual way. On the October convoy Fithians sent Rosalind a disturbing letter:
This may be highly improper, for you are no longer involved in Virginia affairs, but we deem it prudent to warn you in severest confidence that the financial safety of the Janney plantation on the Rappahannock is in jeopardy. The yield of their fields has diminished and the quality of their sweet-scented has fallen. In each convoy they send us poorer tobacco and larger orders for more expensive goods. Stating it frankly, they are on the verge of bankruptcy, and no one in Virginia seems to be aware.
We have watched with admiration the manner in which you and Mark have cultivated your Maryland plantation, making it one of the best. Your diversification of interests has accounted for much of your success, and we notice that you rarely order anything which does not contribute to the further success of your operations. Could you and Mark not go down the bay and initiate the same program for your sisters and their husbands? Twice in the past we have had to repossess what is now the Janney plantation and we do not wish to do so again in the near future. Louise Fithian sends her regards to Mark and wishes him well in this venture.
So the slaves were ordered to ready the Fair Rosalind, and on it Rosalind and Mark made the long sail to the Rappahannock. The degree of business deterioration they found, and the inability of the Janney sons-in-law to rectify it, were not the memorable aspects of this trip; Rosalind’s remorseless disparagement of her younger sisters was.
Missy and Letty were now in their early thirties, each the mother of children and each as vacuous as a woman could be. They affected ignorance of all plantation matters, and when Rosalind spoke harshly of the looming catastrophe, the best they could do was whimper. They never appeared in their kitchens, leaving such matters to their slaves; knew nothing of family expenditures, and considered the Janney ships as mere conveyors of merchandise from London to their drawing rooms. What had to leave the plantation for London did not concern them.
The appalling part, to both Rosalind and Mark, was that they were rearing their attractive daughters for the same kind of life: rise at ten; eat heavily at noon; do a little sewing, but never on any garment of practical use; sleep through the afternoon; visit; chatter; change clothes; overeat at night; drink a little sherry while the men drank port; and never, never enter a shed in which tobacco was being cured.
It was Mark who detected the awful penalty exacted by this system. “The wastage of the wives can’t be prevented. It’s the destruction of the men that’s so painful. If your sisters tell me one more time, ‘Rosalind can manage such affairs, she was the clever one,’ I’m going to strike someone. Either one of them could have been as clever as you, Rosalind. They could have been, I know it, and they’ve wasted their lives, and their husbands’ lives and now the plantation.”
“You’re not entirely correct,” Rosalind said. “For a woman to become as fine ... No, I mean that for a woman to achieve her capabilities, she must have an example. She cannot discover truth by herself.”
“What example had you?”
“William Shakespeare.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I was an ugly child—had no young men pursuing me—and in God’s grimness I could do nothing but read. I read all of that heavy book you see on the table near the window, and I warrant it hasn’t been opened since I left.”
“I couldn’t understand Shakespeare,” Mark said honestly.
“Nor could I ... the first two times. Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.”
“I want to get out of here, Rosalind. There’s nothing we can do for these doomed people.”
“Now we face the third and fourth try,” his mother said, and they spent two agonizing months trying to reorient the Janney plantation. Mark worked with the sons-in-law, both older than himself, showing them how they must supervise their distant fields and balance their funds: “Order from Fithians only those things that will enable you to create new wealth on the land you already have. Either you produce more wealth here or you perish.”
Rosalind was much harsher. Without betraying Fithians’ confidences, she forced her sisters and their husbands to construct a four-year accounting and showed them the awful downward drift of their fortunes: “No more clothes from Europe, only the raw cloth. You can learn to sew. No more expensive trips. Your children can learn in Virginia what they require. Three slaves in the house. All the others at productive work.”
“What work?” Letty simpered.
“Damn it! God damn this foolishness! You ask what work? And your accounts show that you buy shoes, you buy barrels, you buy jackets, you buy furniture that Fithians import from Flanders. Stop it! Stop all this idiotic buying and make the things yourselves.”
“I can’t make furniture,” Letty said.
“Then teach your slaves to do it.”
“How?”
“There are books. If you’d been importing books ...”
“That’s for you to say. You were always the clever one.”
In disgust Rosalind turned her back on her lovely sisters; they were beyond salvation. But their husbands still had a chance—“If you work diligently for five years, you may salvage this place. If you don’t, it will go bankrupt, and on one of the convoys Fithians will send you not great packages of lace and silk but a manager to supervise the sale to someone better qualified.”
Tears filled her eyes as she left her childhood home, that lovely, quiet place where the lawns stretched forever, but this sentimental farewell did not dampen her fury, and when the Steed sloop was well down the Rappahannock she sat with Mark and talked boldly. “When this boat reaches Devon, I shall get off at the headland and walk the rest of the way.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s going to carry you to Peace Cliff. And it’s there you will disembark. And you will walk up that hill and ask Richard Paxmore for the hand of his daughter Amanda.”
“But ...”
“Mark, you’ve seen the alternative. If strong men like you don’t marry the finest women available, what will happen to humanity?”
“She’s not Catholic.”
“I have no comment. I simply have no comment because that’s not a relevant statement.”
“But Quakers ...” He paused. “Look at the old woman. She’s all fire.”
“I’m all fire. When I’m seventy the people of the Choptank will hate me. Because I will never stop being as strong as I can. I will not tolerate surrender, and I will not stand by and watch the best of the Steeds, their one great hope, make foolish errors. Louise Fithian just died. Now get yourself a real wife.”
Amanda was not surprised when Mark Steed came to her door proposing marriage, and later when Rosalind arrived to arrange details, the prim little girl confided, “I realized these things take time.” In her strong-willed way she announced one decision which took her family by surprise: “Mark’s Catholic, so we’ll be married by a priest.” And it was the Paxmores’ sloop, not the Steeds’, which sailed to Annapolis to fetch Father Darnley.
In these momentous affairs Fitzhugh Steed took no part. Regarding the troubles at the Janney plantation he said, “They’re your family, Roz. Straighten ’em out.” And when his son announced that he was marrying the Paxmore girl, he said, “One woman’s about as good as another. I never suffered from marryin’ a Protestant.”
He had grown careless in speech, affecting the dialect used by local watermen. Days would pass without his being seen at Devon, and Rosalind became accustomed to watching him climb int
It was a strange world she occupied: wife to a man she scarcely knew and whose bed she no longer shared, organizer of a vast plantation belonging to others. Now, with her stepchildren launched into lives of their own, her entire emotional life concentrated on her three children. Samuel, aged eight, showed signs of becoming another Mark; he was intelligent, quick to respond and lively, but he already had his father’s inclination toward irresponsible gallantry, so that Rosalind often wondered if he would ever establish a solid base to his life.
Pierre, almost two years younger, named for a friend her husband had relied upon while at St. Omer’s, was quieter, a stalwart little fellow with reddish hair. He seemed to love animals and the quiet places in the wooded garden his mother had created, and he had a passion for speaking French with his father. Rosalind never felt that she knew Pierre, for he had a stubborn character and withheld confidences, but what she saw of him she liked. “He’d make a good Quaker,” she said of him once when he had obstinately refused to obey.
Rachel was fun, a laughing little girl of five who gave every indication of becoming a giddy woman, like her aunts at the Janney plantation. She flirted with her father, on the rare occasions she saw him, and was fiendishly skilled in manipulating her older brothers. She seemed much above average in intelligence and delighted in using words more complicated than she could understand. “Pierre is apprehensive,” she once said, intending to say that he was being difficult. Whenever Rosalind caught the child playacting or abusing her privileges, she thought: When she grows up she’ll acquire common sense. Rosalind put great store in common sense and prayed that all her children would achieve it.