Beauty From Ashes (10 page)

“No. I just had to know if you feel any older today. I don’t.”

What the child asked struck his funny bone. He bent to give her a big hug. “Not a minute older! Are you sure you don’t want to come in? At least I’m not too old to remember my manners.”

“Thank you, Grandpapa, but Mama told me not to disturb you, so I’d better go back downstairs. I—I don’t want you to be old enough to die. I see you’re not, so I’ll go now.”

After another hug and a kiss on her forehead, Couper climbed back into his rumpled bed to wait for Johnson, who would surely josh him for oversleeping but would just as surely be there any minute, armed with a sharpened razor, soap, and hot water. He stretched his old body under the light bedcover, still smiling over his early-morning visitor. He fully intended to smile as long as possible, because today he would be forced to tell his adored Anne that even he had not been able to think of a way to keep her very life from being torn apart

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“I’m a blessed old goat,” he told Johnson as the well-mannered, faithful servant dried and rubbed Couper’s back after a good, soapy bath and then began to shave him. “I occupy the best room in my son’s house and his kindness to me in my infirmity is almost as tender as that of his beautiful wife, Caroline, and every one of his children. Am I not blessed, Johnny?”

“Yes, sir. An’ now that my wife, she lef’ me for heaven, too, I be blessed right along wif you, Mausa Couper. What I do effen you didn’t need me here to Hopeton to look after you?”

“What would I do if you didn’t look after me? You must be getting on too, Johnson. Do you know how old you are?”

Chuckling, Johnson answered, “I be older than dat riber out there, sir, but not quite as old as you. Scuse me, Mausa, but I couldn’ help oberhearin’ what your lil granddaughter ax you awhile ago. She jus’ had to know was you feelin’ any older today?”

“Aren’t you about through shaving me? I need to talk,” Couper said, his long face abruptly

serious.

“Jus’ let me get dis one place under yo’ chin, sir. Dere.” Johnson rinsed off the last of the lather, then dried his master’s cheeks and forehead. “Now, what you got to talk ‘bout, sir?”

“Before my breakfast tray arrives, I need to ask you to pray for me, Johnny, and I want you to put your knees to the floor if they aren’t too stiff and pray as hard as you can. In my own strength, I know I can’t do what I have to do an hour or so from now.”

“Miss Anne? You gonna tell her after dey finish breakfus downstairs?”

“That’s right. My son James offered to give her the bad news, but James Hamilton has never been known to deliver any kind of news gently—with feeling. And that’s the way Anne must learn this. Oh, Johnson, it’s going to be a dreadful blow to her. James is doing all the caring, considerate things for her and her family, but I—I feel I’ll—was

“You’ll let it come down on her easy.”

“I’ll try. Oh, I’ll try.”

When Johnson left Jock’s 123 room, bearing the heavy porcelain washbowl, wet cloths, and used towels, he went straight to the kitchen, where he hoped to find Miss Anne’s woman, Eve. No one had given him permission to tell Eve what lay ahead for her mistress, but Johnson had long known how close the two were, and if Mausa Couper had thought about it, he’d agree for sure that once Anne heard what she had to face, no one could comfort her as Eve could.

He’d failed to ask Mausa Couper exactly when he expected Miss Anne to come to his room, so to make certain that Eve knew well ahead of time, he quickly left the bathing paraphernalia on a shelf in the roofed walkway outside the main house and headed for the kitchen, hoping to find her.

“Where you think I be?” Eve asked in her pert way when Johnson motioned for her to join him in the yard just outside the kitchen door. “You think I be takin’ my ease on the veranda wif de white folks? Ain’t you looked around at the crowd of guests in dis house, Johnny? Poor ole Lydia ‘bout cooked herself to death

tryin’ to keep up. I jus’ got to lend her a han’. What you want wif me? Ain’t nothin’ wrong wif Mausa Couper today, is they?”

“He be good as ‘spected wif what he got to do next.”

“What he got to do nex’?”

“Sit down here on the steps, Eve,” Johnson instructed her as though she were a small girl.

“I ain’t tired. Why I have to sit down?”

“Because I aim to, an’ it gonna take me a while to git it all tol’.was

As though noticing for the first time, Eve said, “You —you mus’ be most as ole as Mausa Couper, I guess.”

“You guess right,” Johnson said with a weary smile. “But my bein’ so old ain’t why it take me some time to tell you what I got to tell you. It be the badness of what I got to say. Knowin’ how you takes to Miss Anne, an’ how she takes to you, I’se got to tell you ahead of her findin’ out from Mausa Couper that she got to break up her lil family an’ stop livin’ at Lawrence.”

Eve jumped as though he’d struck her, but she

said not one word and made it no easier 125 by sitting there on the kitchen step wiping tears from her eyes as Johnson talked. Finally Johnson put a question to her: “Ain’t you eben gonna ax why Miz Anne got to break up her family an’ leave her home she loves so much?”

Johnson, knowing Eve, wasn’t surprised that she began to fuss and fume at him in her effort to get hold of herself, plainly torn by what he had said. “Why I ax what I already knows? You think June an’ me’s so dumb we don’t know Miss Anne’s Lawrence house is fallin’ down ‘roun’ her ears? It be a wonder to me dat her an’ Fanny an’ Pete an’ Selina ain’t sick from sleepin’ under dat leaky ole roof. An’ come summer when the hard rains start, they be so much dampness on the walls de mildew turn the whole house green!” She gave both eyes a good hard rub with her apron and turned to look straight at Johnson. “What I don’ know is why, the way she cling to dat lil house since Mausa John be gone, de mens don’ fix it up for her. Why her papa an’ her almighty brother Mausa James Hamilton

let it fall down on her? Why dey let it git so bad? You kin tell me that much, Johnny.”

Johnson tried to straighten his stooped shoulders. “No, Eve, I can’t tell you. I knows, but a person’s got loyalty in his heart for mens like Mausa Couper an’ Mausa James. Leastways, dis man’s got loyalty in he heart.”

“What do you owe to Mausa James Hamilton? You more’n pays fo’ yo’ keep lookin’ after he papa like you does.”

“He the son ob the gent’man I respect more’n any other gent’man on the whole, wide earth, that why. Eve, I tol’ you ‘bout the talk Miss Anne’s got to hab wif her papa ‘cause I knows you got the same kind ob loyalty to her. She gonna need you when she walk outa the old gent’man’s room afterwhile. She gonna need a friend.”

On her feet, Eve almost glared down at him. “Leavin’ Lawrence gonna break her heart near like losin’ Mausa John an’ Annie,” she snapped. “But where you think I gonna be? You think I fixin’ to take a trip across the

ocean? It be bad enough that she got to tell 127 young John Couper good-bye down at the dock when they finish eatin’ breakfus. Hearin’ bad news from her own papa gonna grind her heart. But one thing be sure. When de time come fo’ me to help Miss Anne, Eve be right there!”

Throughout breakfast with Caroline and James Hamilton, William Audley and his likable wife, Hannah—daily growing more like her mother, Anna Matilda—Anne sat memorizing the incredibly handsome features of John Couper, who would be leaving her in minutes. She had forced herself to laugh during their meal, determined to send her son back to his fine new work in Savannah in a happy mood, not dragged down by the memory of a struggling, lonely mother left behind. Laughing had not been too difficult, despite the lingering dread she’d been conscious of since Papa’s birthday celebration yesterday. She had lain awake last night trying vainly to understand why she felt dread. Papa had seemed to enjoy himself, to feel fairly well. The reunion of their family had been as pleasant for Anne as she supposed anything would —could—ever be pleasant again without John, without

Annie. Tomorrow or at least the next day, she and her girls would be able to go back to the warm, cozy, familiarity of Lawrence, bedraggled as the sweet little house was these days. John Couper was obviously doing extremely well in his new position as clerk in the Savannah firm of McCleskey and Norton. She could feel only proud that at sixteen her boy had already carved such a promising niche for himself in a successful mercantile house. Oh, he’d tried to make funny stories of the “dumb things” he’d done with bills of lading and shipment files during his first weeks as clerk. The boy, while a bit quieter and less talkative than his father had been, without doubt had inherited John’s gift of gab, his penchant for making a good story of almost any incident. Unlike Anne’s brother William Audley at this age, John Couper was already a man—strong, decisive, energetic, responsible. Of course, William Audley had finally grown up, although he still took evident pleasure in poking fun at his staid, brilliant brother, James Hamilton, for whom he had worked as manager of Hamilton Plantation since John went away. Even with the

cotton market so bad, William 129 Audley had managed somehow to break even at Hamilton. James seemed pleased with him if only because William had harvested crops profitable enough to feed his own family and his Hamilton people. At least he’d run up no debt, and that could be said for few planters in the financially depressed year 1849. Even James Hamilton had no cash. No means of expanding his own huge operations. And poor, humorless James, as brilliant as he surely was, never seemed to catch on when William was unable to suppress teasing him. Anne longed for Papa to be having breakfast with them today because William Audley was in fine form. Anne laughed at every opportunity, wanting each last golden moment with her son to be just that—golden, despite her heavy heart at losing him again so soon. Still, finding a means to do the impossible was becoming almost a way of life for her. Perhaps Papa’s little talk last evening about his own conviction that John and Annie and Isabella and Mama were really still there with them, in spirit, had helped more than she thought at the time. Somehow this very morning, when she first opened her eyes, John had

seemed closer than he had in years.

“This is all a part of the maturing process,” Mama would say, were she still there to say it.

“How I wish I could smooth your path, dear Anne. Make all things easy for you,” Papa would say, and he was still there.

As soon as she’d given John Couper one final hug at the Hopeton dock, she would head straight for her father’s room as he’d asked at the end of the dinner party last night. Papa was too frail to join the family at breakfast these days, but he was still here and he’d never failed to find a way to help.

Unashamed of the tears still wet on her cheeks from her last sight of John Couper at the Hopeton dock, Anne hurried to her father’s room. She found him alone, waiting—bathed, dressed, shaved—in his favorite old Cannon’s Point rocker by the high front window from which he’d obviously been watching the family tell John Couper good-bye.

His arms were out. She rushed into them.

“Papa, oh Papa, what would I do 131 without you? How do I manage to live for such long periods at my beloved Lawrence with you all the way over here on the mainland? I miss you! I miss John Couper. I—I even miss his father more when the boy’s at work in Savannah.”

“I know, Daughter. I know.”

“You do, don’t you? You always know everything. Papa, it’s so good to be with you again. Even my blessed Lawrence cottage seems lonely sometimes now that the Cannon’s Point house is empty.” She freed herself from his arms enough to look straight at his face. “Do you ever think how dear and generous you were to give Lawrence to John and me? Do you have any idea how—how rescued I feel living there even now?”

He grabbed her again, his frail arms trembling. “Oh, Anne, don’t say that!”

She tried a little laugh. “And why not, sir? If you only knew how much more Lawrence means to me than Hamilton ever did, you’d never doubt how completely at home I am there. Even with the whole end of the roof over the porch rattling every time we get a good blow off the water.” She smoothed his red hair, marveling at how little gray there was

for a man who had just turned ninety. “Do you ever get one of our old urges to march around James Hamilton’s veranda when it’s storming? The way you and I always marched the Cannon’a Point porches?” She laughed again. “I should probably ask if my pompous brother allows you even the urge to march!”

His arms tightened around her and Papa buried his face in her breast as she leaned above his chair. “Anne,” he said in a voice so thin and cracked, he sounded like a stranger. “Anne darling, this old goat can’t even respond to your— joke about James Hamilton this time.”

“Papa! Papa, is something wrong?”

“Have you ever known me not to be ready for a good joke? A playful poke at your fine, stiff brother James? Can you ever forgive me for being such a—dud? Tr-ruly, I’m sor-ry, Annie.”

He was weeping. Papa weeping! And she couldn’t think of one thing to say. Not one single word of comfort. She was too puzzled, too confused, so ended up with only a helpless plea. “Papa, try to—try to explain to me! What did I say to make you cry?”

Wiping hard at his eyes, he 133 struggled with even a crooked half smile. “It’s not what you said, lass. It’s—it’s what I find I don’t have cour-rather-age enough to say to you. I tell you, Daughter, your papa’s a a useless old mon. A very useless, very old mon. Sometimes I can almost hear my bones rattle, but until now I took what cour-rage I own for granted. I—I’ve lost my cour-rather-age, Annie!”

He was clutching the sleeves of her morning dress, peering up into her eyes, pleading for her to help him. All she could think to say was feeble at best. Something that undoubtedly would make him feel even worse. “Don’t, Papa! Don’t —be old. Be—you. Be the same as you’ve always been! I know there’s God to trust, but I can’t see Him. I couldn’t have gone on breathing with John gone, if I hadn’t had you. I refuse to let you get any older. I couldn’t—I couldn’t—was She cut off her own words.

I am making everything worse for him, she thought, so ashamed of herself, she too battled tears. And then she did what they’d always done in any tight place. She smiled, lifted his wattled old