Authors: Lisa Howorth
“How am I going to get up there? I can’t be ready to go ’til Saturday, and the airport might close.”
“Hmm,” said Mann. “We’ve got a truck going up north on Saturday. Maybe that could work?” He laughed. “I’d love to see it!”
“Very funny.”
He cocked his head and said seriously, “Actually, why not? Foote Slay—you know him—we took some papers to his house that time. He’s our best driver.”
“Uh-huh. And what do you think Charles will say?”
“I’ll take care of Charles. Let me look into it.”
“You’re nuts. I can’t think any more about it right now.” She was so tired. “I’m sorry to drag you into all this, Mann. Thanks for coming over. I don’t know why you hang around with me—I’m depressed and depressing.”
“I know,” he said. “I guess I just always want to see what’s going to happen next.”
Mann left, walking the sitter out with him. Mary Byrd picked up the Spode plates, oily from the drippy peppers, and ate the rest of her egg with her fingers before putting the dish in the dishwasher. In went the silverware; she shouldn’t have used the sterling because the eggs and the stainless stuff would tarnish it, but she liked to use her nice things for Mann.
Charles should be home any minute, she thought. Where
was
he? Maybe he
was
up to no good, but she let the thought go. She was too exhausted and distracted. Besides, Charles was almost exclusively up to
good.
She just wanted him to get home and help her deal with Evagreen’s mess, and talk about going to Richmond, and she wanted to admit to her failure to secure what was needed from Wiggs and take her licks for that.
She wondered what Ernest had called for. Drunk again, she supposed. There was nothing to say. Still, it would be nice to hear him say nothing right now. Crazy thing.
Mary Byrd didn’t bother with the greasy pan and began making her nightly rounds turning off lights, locking up, making sure Mann had turned the stove off, situating Puppy Sal and the Pounder and making sure Iggy and Irene were inside for the night. She left the driveway floodlight on for Charles even though he deserved to come home to the reprimand of a dark house and fumble his way around the bikes and dog bowls and possible eviscerated voles and garden tools on the porch.
Passing though the hall on her way upstairs again, she paused, as she often did, at the engraved portrait of Charles’s ancestor and her crush, William Byrd, and the framed manuscript page from his amazing diary. Of all the lovely, heirloomy things Charles had, this was far and away her favorite. Using a seventeenth-century shorthand textbook called
La Plume Volante
, Byrd had written his entries in a cryptic scrawl that hadn’t been transcribed and published until 1941. But long before that, some manuscript pages with horny entries had gone missing from the original text in the Virginia Historical Society. How Charles’s family had come by the manuscript page was sketchy. Charles suspected either his very prudish Victorian great aunt or her infamously lecherous husband—an uncle only by marriage—of having pilfered the pages, or at least this particular page. They really ought to give the page back to the VHS. But then, why? It belonged to the family, didn’t it? She would hate to give it up. The translation of the entry was penciled on the back—the children hadn’t discovered this, or didn’t give a rat’s ass. Mary Byrd knew it by heart, anyway.
[September 26, 1711] I rose about 6 o’clock and read a chapter in Hebrew and some Greek in Lucian. I said my prayers and ate milk and rhubarb for breakfast. I danced my dance. I settled several accounts and wrote some of my journal. It was fine warm weather but there was great want of rain for the grass. I ate roast pork for dinner. In the afternoon I rogered my wife on the billiard table. Captain H-n-t came and told me he had but 70 hogshead on board and the reason was because people gave notes for tobacco which was not ready. About 4 o’clock I took a walk with him to Mrs. Harrison’s to inquire when she would send her tobacco. She gave us apples and wine and told me that Colonel Harrison was very much indisposed and drooped without being sick and believed that he should never see Williamsburg again. In the evening we returned home where my family and people were well, thank God. At night I had several people whipped for being lazy in the morning. I said my prayers and had good health, good thoughts, and good humor, thank God Almighty.
In spite of his colonial cruelties, somehow Mary Byrd had long adored William Byrd—had known him longer than she’d known Charles, since her William and Mary days. In fact, she knew that some part of her initial attraction to Charles had to do with his being descended from Byrd, and that he and his ancestor, who had been born more than three hundred years earlier, seemed so much alike. Not the cruelty, but his stoic swashbucklingness, or something.
She knew Byrd intimately. At William and Mary she’d pored over Byrd’s insanely extensive and anal-retentive diaries—volumes and volumes he’d written detailing life on his James River plantation, participation in the House of Burgesses, laying out the cities of Richmond and Petersburg, acting as colonial agent and diplomat in London, commanding the militia for two counties, and surveying the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina. He wrote in it
every fucking day
about
every fucking thing
that was going on, from his bowels and his wife’s periods to the state of his tobacco crops. It was irresistible to Mary Byrd that she could get such an intimate glimpse into early eighteenth-century life; the diaries were practically a time machine and fed the voyeur in her. She’d read other early American diarists in American lit class, but the bloodless, spiritual ruminations of the chilly Yankee, Cotton Mather, couldn’t touch the earthy, sticky, and stinking humanity of Byrd’s diary.
In the day, they’d called him the Black Swan because of his dark and dashing good looks—his portrait, an etching after a Kneller painting, was framed side-by-side with the yellowed hieroglyphic page—and Byrd looked charmingly swarthy; a little like Stanley Tucci in a wig. Byrd himself had used the pen name Steddy in his prime. His family crest was crowned by a swallow, a bird that she discovered symbolized perpetual movement and safe return: he’d crossed the Atlantic a few times.
Ten
times! A trip that sometimes took more than two months! Mary Byrd loved him so much—she could remember when she was a little girl feeling the same way about Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier—that she’d chosen to write about Byrd for her senior thesis: “Ague, Flux, Blue Wing, and Sallet: Healing and Foodways on an Early Eighteenth Century Virginia Plantation.” If he wasn’t walking about Westover checking on his mill or his orchards or unloading hogsheads full of tobacco or bossing his people around, Byrd was worrying about bad New England rum, sloops and tides, making business deals, arguing politics, writing letters back to England, raising the militia for a smack-down on the Tuscaroras, or complaining about his wife, who was a poor household manager or just lazy, and was frequently “
out of order
.” Ha! They argued a lot: once, because he wouldn’t let her pluck her eyebrows. This didn’t stop him from
rogering
her vigorously
or
giving her a
flourish
, sometimes on the library sofa or wherever. Other times he
committed uncleanness
, or kissed or felt up someone else’s wife or a maid, and when he went up to sessions of the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, he and the other burgesses were
merry
on
canary
,
syllabub
,
mead
,
sack
, or
persico
and
played the fool
or
made good sport
with girls, or just
spoke
lewdly
. Talked trash! He was a control freak and super-industrious, like someone else she knew, and read the classics in five or six languages every day, but also found time for gambling at
piquet,
hazard, basset, cudgels, whisk,
and horse races, seeming often to lose some shillings, but never more than fifty, which was his limit. He dealt with characters who had crazily Dickensian names, like Billy Brayne, his dumb nephew; his friend Dick Cocke; and a French pirate named Crapeau! Believing that one should only dine on one dish at a meal, he was always having milk (he said he
ate
it),
caudle
,
sallet
,
chine
, s
heldrake
,
neat’s tongue
,
pease porridge
,
water gruel
, and calf’s head. Everyone, black or white, rich or poor, was always indisposed with
quartan fever
,
distemper
,
bloody fluxes
,
gripes
,
gout
,
dropsy
,
and
impostumes
,
vapors
, and worms, and they came to Byrd for purges of
scurvy grass
or
laxative salts
,
tincture of
snake root
,
jesuit’s bark
,
beaver mineral
,
spirits of juniper
,
red lead plasters
,
burnt hartshorn
,
Venice treacle
,
stupe
, or laudanum. Often, he’d
salivate
them for rheumatism, or
let blood
—whole pints of it—for whatever, or have them take a
physic
or a
glyster
. He gave his slaves and servants no choice—Mengele had nothing on him—but his wife often sensibly resisted his quacky, experimental cures. For his own terrible piles, he had his wife
anoint his fundament
with tobacco or linseed oil and balsam or saltpeter. What a guy. No wonder he had ’rhoids: he was always doing stuff like slogging across the Great Dismal Swamp because he wanted to buy it and drain it and grow hemp!
Byrd was crazy busy managing his practically medieval, gigantic estate; he owned something like two hundred thousand acres. If he’d been born twenty-five or one hundred and twenty-five years later he would have been a revolutionary or a confederate. He didn’t like being fucked with and even in 1709 he was already pissed off at the governor and the king for all the cash they were squeezing out of Virginia.
Nulla pallescere culpa
, he had adopted as his motto. “Pale at no crime.” It was a good thing Byrd hadn’t been around to see his beloved Westover first ravaged by Benedict Arnold and Cornwallis, and then used as headquarters for Union troops in the War of Northern Aggression, as he surely would have called it.
Imagining herself as Lucy Parke, Byrd’s put-upon wife, she saw herself in her
undress
, meaning a sort of housedress; she’d rather have been in the fancy
mantua
that Byrd had brought to her from England, thickly embroidered and beautifully
scroddled
in swallows and flowers, with its lovely
scroop
, the train tucked up in back, but he wouldn’t have stood for all that froufrou on a workday. She did have on a lovely new lace cap.
“Could you please get off your ass and do something around here?” he’d say.
“And what is it that my lord and master would have me do?” Mary Byrd would reply, lounging on some fabulous piece of furniture, picking sadly at a sweetmeat.
“I’ll have you unloading some hogsheads, if you can’t find anything else to do. God in heaven, woman,” he’d say.
“I’m indisposed at the moment,” she’d say. “I’m overwhelmed and despondent, having just lost my only son.”
“
Work
is the best cure for that,” he’d say. They’d fight a little more. Then, he’d say, “I know what you need, my good wife,” and he’d yank her up, toss up her skirts, and bend her over the billiards table.
In William Byrd’s mind, she’d enjoy it, and he’d believe that they were reconciled, but Lucy Parke probably faked it. Mary Byrd would’ve straightened her cap and gown, smiled weakly, and gone upstairs to lament her lost baby, do up some laudanum, and nap.
“Fuck this guy,” she’d think, hoping he wouldn’t follow her and have her anoint his fundament.
Byrd was a hard-ass. He had to be! When their baby son had died he barely mentioned it in the diaries, which had led some famous, dumb-ass feminist historian to offer this as further proof of his misogyny, or some silly crap. Mary Byrd knew Byrd better than that: it didn’t mean that his heart wasn’t broken. A teeny coffin was made from one of his walnut trees, and his baby boy was buried in a hard summer rain. William Byrd couldn’t afford the twentieth century luxury of grieving. Hundreds of people depended on him. He just sucked up his gripey, colicky, hemorrhoidy guts, swallowed his tears, and attended to what needed attending to. Got back to work.
Mary Byrd’s very favorite thing about him was the daily notation:
I danced my dance.
He mentioned it nearly every single day. No matter what wildness was going on around him—Indian uprisings, incompetent overseers and public officials, unpaid bills, shipwrecks, crop-ruining or sloop-stalling weather, people sick and dying—he got up at the crack, read his books, ate some milk, and danced his dance. Of all the Merchant Ivory vignettes of Byrd she carried in her mind, it was this one that fascinated her most. She pictured him shedding a Chinese silk wrapper, and then his billowing white shift—rough flax to mortify himself—and in front of a blazing fire, he’d do a sort of combination minuet, tai chi, and yoga, his longish colonial balls and mauve, sheathed cock bobbling and slapping against his strong, capable, and no doubt hairy thighs. Maybe there was a merkin, too. She couldn’t remember if he ever mentioned lice. How did they stick merkins on, anyway? Call it exercise or exorcism, his dance got him prepared for, or through, his days and years. It seemed to give him what he needed to
go on
.