The Bookman's Promise (19 page)

Charleston now seemed close at hand. But we had to endure another night, and a wretched one it was, on the road. It was too much to expect another grand inn in backwoods country, and we stayed in the worst place ever imagined by the angels of hell. The road from Florence to Charleston was a hundred miles of near-total wilderness. I had never seen its like; the choking thickness of it was unbroken except for an occasional settlement with a few scruffy citizens and the equally unkempt shanties they lived in. There were moss-draped trees, swamps, and all around them that brooding black pine forest: vast, unrelenting, increasingly intimidating. I have forgotten the name of the place where we put up that last night before Charleston. Burton seemed satisfied with it, and I had to be, for darkness was falling rapidly and even he did not wish to be caught on the road in such a night as these trees would bring down on us.

The inn was run by an old woman and two hulking simpletons who were apparently her sons. She had a hag’s face, gaunt and full of gaps where presumably teeth had once been; the men conversed in grunts and were well on the way to losing their teeth as well. The only name I heard for any of them was that one of the boys was called Cloyd. The woman tried to appear friendly but this had an effect that I found chilling. We were given a very poor stew, made of some mysterious stringy meat that I could barely manage to taste and Burton ate not at all. He had his suspicions even then, and we retired soon after our arrival.

“I don’t trust these people,” Richard said. “I think we should bunk together tonight and one of us stay awake at all times.”

This was alarming and what he said next was even more so. “I’ll bet there’s more than one sinkhole, each about the size of a man, out in that swamp.”

“What are you saying?” I asked stupidly. “That they would murder us?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time an innkeeper has done away with a guest to steal his purse.”

He volunteered to take either watch. It didn’t matter: I was tired from my restless nights but unlikely to sleep after that. I took the first six hours, abandoning my own room to sit on a chair in Richard’s. “If you get tired, wake me,” he said. “Don’t worry about the time. Six hours from now or six minutes, I don’t care.” By the light of a coal-oil lamp, he produced a gun from one of his bags. He slapped it into my hand and went to bed while I sat at the door and blew out the lamp. This was going to be a long, long night and I took my responsibility seriously. I must not, must
not
, fall asleep!

Richard was asleep at once. I sat in the most incredible black void listening to him breathe. He snored briefly and the minutes dragged by. I had no idea what time it was, and after a while time stood still.

At some point much later I heard the noise in the hall: a single footstep and the slight creaking of the floor. I stood with the gun in my hand. There was a bump outside the door and I turned the knob and opened it so slightly—just enough for a look into the hallway. I could see nothing at first, then the two hulks and the smaller one nearby. I heard them whisper, though what they said was much too faint to make sense. I pulled the door wider and cocked the gun. Its sound was loud and unmistakable in that quietude, and suddenly everything froze, all of us where we stood, except Richard, who was just as suddenly out of the bed and at my side. We waited but nothing happened: they had faded away and disappeared.

Inside again with the door closed, Richard lit the lamp. “Well, that settles that. We’ll have to stay alert.” I asked if he had slept, and he said, “Like a baby.” I felt a great sense of camaraderie and pride in his trust. I asked if he had any idea what time it was—my watch had stopped at half past eight. “My sense of things tells me it’s near midnight,” he said. “Your turn to rest.” I protested—I was not at all tired—but fair was fair and he insisted that I take the bed. So I lay down in the recess, still warm from his body, closed my eyes, and did sleep, soundly, for several hours. When the dawn broke I still felt that sense of kinship in what I foolishly imagined lingered from Richard’s body heat.

The proprietress and her sons were nowhere to be seen as we left. “They have no real courage,” Richard said. “They know we’ve figured them out and they will only return like vermin of the night, after we’ve gone. They remind me of Burke and Hare, the infamous Scottish murderers. One held while the other smothered, but I suspect these three had far quicker and more violent deaths in store for us.”

So we were on the road again. I had already studied my maps: I knew that Charleston was located at the end of a long, crooked peninsula, with wide rivers on both sides emptying into a spectacular harbor. It was easy for a mapmaker to visualize it as an eagle might see it, like a long buzzard’s neck. I was not surprised to learn that the upper peninsula was in fact called the Neck. We came down east of the river, on a road that would take us through the village of Mount Pleasant and within a few miles of Fort Moultrie. The road was alternately hard earth and planked, and I suppose we made good time by the standard of the travel Richard had chosen for us. The train would have avoided all this and got us there a day earlier, but this was so obvious I kept it to myself. When you traveled with Burton, this was what you did.

The skies threatened rain, which would have added greatly to our misery, for the road was rough and sloppy in places from another rain two days earlier. Charleston was on the horizon: Richard said that more than once, but in fact we now headed into the deepest forest on the trip and I saw nothing on the horizon but more of the same. There was a river crossing before we came out into land that telegraphed an approach to the sea. Richard spent the time talking earnestly to the ferryboat owner, about what I could only guess. “That was the east branch of the Cooper River,” he said when our coach was under way again. “We are almost there.”

I was ready to believe this, so delighted was I to be out of the dark and dreary forest. “Our luck is changing,” I said: “It didn’t rain after all.” Richard smiled, noncommittally, as if it didn’t matter to him either way. We had to cross again at the Wando River, with its broad expanses of marshlands, and now I saw the unmistakable signs of the sea: sloughs and creeks thick with sea oats, and there was a salty tang in the air. But night was coming and I feared we would still not arrive until tomorrow, an awful prospect. The sunset was spectacular, lighting up the cloud-streaked horizon as we put in at Mount Pleasant.

We managed to catch the ferry to the city. I stood out on the deck and watched the lights draw closer, but Burton seemed restless, circling, looking out to sea, making his notes in light almost too dim to see. He spent his time on the port deck, watching the dark, empty hulk of Fort Sumter, and aft, where he could see Fort Moultrie and the lights of the lonely federal garrison stationed there.

We got in at eight o’clock. “No more backwoods inns for us, Charlie,” Richard said merrily. “Now we go first-cabin.”

He instructed our driver to take us to the best hotel and soon we were on Meeting Street in front of an elegant blockwide, four-story building, gas-lit, with a marvelous facade. I had studied Greek architecture briefly in college, and immediately I loved that hotel and its magnificent colonnade: fourteen great white Corinthian pillars that reached from the second-floor balcony to the roof. The Charleston Hotel. That night I slept the sleep of the dead.

All the next day we were like tourists, walking the streets, talking to people we met, probing the babble of the marketplace not far from our door, strolling along the Battery. The Battery is a walled promenade around the tip of the city with a green behind it and some of the town’s finest old houses in the background. The view of the harbor is spectacular. One elderly gentleman offered the pompous opinion that this was where the Cooper and Ashley rivers met to form the Atlantic Ocean. We should all have shared a hearty laugh except that the old bird seemed absolutely serious and might have been offended. Richard listened politely but I knew he was far more interested in the geography than in any local silliness advancing this city, as lovely as it was, as the center of the Western world. From any point on the Battery we could see Fort Sumter, that brick fortress sitting on its man-made shoal in the mouth of the harbor. On both sides the land curved in tight, with Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island to our left and Fort Johnson on James Island to the right, giving Sumter the appearance of a cork in a bottle. “Exactly right,” Burton said when I put it that way. “It’s a cork in a bottle.”

“When it’s finished it will make the city pretty much impregnable,” I said.

“
If
they finish it. And
if
they get the guns mounted, and
if
all three forts are controlled by the same side.”

“A lot of ifs.”

“Indeed. And if the wrong side had it, speaking from their viewpoint, its guns could easily be turned on the city it was built to protect.”

The fort was just a speck from there and I doubted that even the most powerful guns could reach that far. But Richard looked askance and said, “You don’t know much about modern warfare, my friend,” and I had to admit the truth of that.

We walked around the point and back again. The sun was warm and bright, a blessed relief from the miseries of the road, and again I was so delighted I had come. I was in the company of an extraordinary man and he liked me: what else mattered? But then as I stood watching the waterbound fortress, Richard moved away, and when I looked around for him he was standing off at a distance, scribbling in that damned notebook. All my suspicion came back in a gush. What was he doing? If he wanted to spy, why bring me along? That part made no sense. But my doubt magnified and doubled again, and abruptly I walked up to him, quickly enough that I could see he was not making notes but a sketch of some kind.

“What are you doing there?” I asked, making the question sound as much as possible like idle curiosity.

“Just drawing a picture.” He snapped his book shut. “To remember the day.”

Again this was so plausible that it had to be real. Unless it wasn’t.

We walked up East Bay, turned in to Chalmers Street, and saw a slave auction. The building had a platform on its second story where the Negroes were paraded and sold. Richard, who must have seen other such events in his travels around the world, still stood mesmerized for an hour as a family of blacks was broken apart and sent off with their separate masters. The pain in the mother’s face was heartbreaking and I was angry and indignant on her behalf. “You must write about this,” I said, but Richard only watched and kept his thoughts to himself. “These men are beasts,” I said, none too quietly, and Richard gave me a withering look and said, “Try to remember, Charlie, you are in their country now.”

We moved on. On East Bay near Queen Street we saw a photographer’s studio—barney stuyvessant, the sign said—and I asked if we might get a real picture made. “Something that will capture this day.”

Burton’s inclination was to dismiss this as silly, but before he could seriously object I went inside and made the arrangements. I didn’t want a trumped-up studio shot; something on the street would be much better, a picture that captured some semblance of the city and her architecture. Burton did protest then—he wanted no part of it—but the photographer was so young and eager for the business that his equipment was already out on the sidewalk, and I so clearly wanted it done that he stood still for it at last. The photographer fussed over the light: it was high noon and the sun was harsh, and Burton was such a reluctant subject that the young man knew he couldn’t keep us waiting long. He tried to chase away two little colored boys but Burton insisted they be left alone, and he gave each of them a penny. At last the photographer stood us on the walk near a palmetto tree, with the old Exchange Building rising dramatically behind us: Richard smiled and draped his arm over my shoulder, and there we were. The picture we took that day long ago was perfect, and remains one of my dearest possessions.

We lunched at the hotel, and I finally broached the dreaded subject. “You must know Lord Palmerston well.” I said this innocently, I thought, but Richard looked hard in my eyes: there was no fooling him, and his answer was vague. “We’ve met a few times in social gatherings.”

I pushed the point. “What do you think of him?”

“A colorful man. Not one you’d want to trifle with or have as an enemy. Rather like Calhoun was, I would imagine, like some of your fire-eating Southerners of today when he’s opposed.” A long moment passed while he leveled me with those eyes. “Why do you ask?”

Another long moment, and I saw that there could be no lying or evasion. “Richard,” I said, looking straight at him.

He waited.

“I’ve become uneasy about a few things.”

“I could sense as much.”

I felt my insides trembling: my God, I did not want to lose him! In those few seconds a dozen thoughts flooded through my mind. I imagined him taking dire offense, wounded in the heart. I saw him getting up from the table, walking away without a word, checking out of the hotel and disappearing into the bright sunlight. I saw myself rushing along beside him, pleading,
I didn’t mean it, you’ve taken me wrong
! But in fact if I offended him, he would be taking me exactly right.

I mustered myself and as calmly as I could said, “I would rather cut out my tongue than say this.”

Then to my amazement, he said it for me. “You are worried that I am spying against your country.”

“No,” I lied quickly. “No, no, nothing like that.”

“Please…Charlie.”

“All right, yes. I can’t help it, the thought crossed my mind and it won’t go away. I just wouldn’t have put it so bluntly.”

“Sometimes bluntness is the best way. The only way.”

“The thought never once occurred to me until we were in the backwoods, and you seemed so preoccupied with everything and everybody.”

“I told you, I do that everywhere. It’s my way.”

“Of course it is and I know that. I know as well as anyone how your books were compiled and written. I know these things and yet…”