Читать книгу Lydia Bailey - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 12

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Even in the very moment when I walked up the front steps of Harriet Faulkner’s house, I hadn’t made up my mind what I would do or what I should say. There was no question in my mind that Lydia Bailey was alive and in Haiti, and that Harriet was the only person who had wanted Thomas Bailey to think of Lydia as dead. Harriet was the only person with sufficient motive to do such a thing, and the only person in a position to keep Bailey from receiving letters from Lydia when she wrote him, as she must have.

All I knew was that from the first moment I saw Lydia’s picture I had been in love with her; that I had been attracted to Harriet because she vaguely looked like Lydia; and that Harriet must be stopped from appropriating whatever property was rightly Lydia’s.

I had long known that Harriet was firm and determined; but not until I’d learned that Lydia was alive had I realized that her firmness must be an adamantine hardness, conceivably impervious to assault unless that assault was made carefully.

I rang the bell, and it was Harriet herself who came to the door, as on that far-off day when I had reluctantly come to Boston to defend Thomas Bailey. At sight of me she screamed, threw up her hands in astonishment; then flattened herself against me and clung as if she intended never to let me go.

That settled the matter: I’d have to approach the subject of Lydia after Harriet’s own fashion.

It seemed to me that the time to mention Lydia would never come; for when Harriet had me sitting on that well-remembered couch on which we’d spent so many evenings before the Bailey trial, I couldn’t seem to struggle out from beneath her questions any more than I could escape her embraces. How had I happened to come back to Boston without giving her a warning? Why, only yesterday she’d had a letter from me, telling about the experiments in developing new strains of potatoes. When was I going back to Washington? What did Mr. Jefferson look like? Why hadn’t I seen Mr. Jefferson about the Kingfisher case? Had I any information as to when there might be a settlement of the Kingfisher claim? What were the women like in Washington? What were they wearing? She had heard they wore nothing beneath their evening gowns, which were often transparent; was that true? Why hadn’t I told her about the ladies I’d met in Washington? I talked about everything except other ladies—and my letters were cold.

“They weren’t meant to be cold—they were just letters,” I said; and then I tried to change over to my real interest. “I can never thank you enough for giving me the little picture. I used to look at it every night when I wrote you. Do you know where Lydia’s buried, Harriet?”

She didn’t move, but I sensed a sudden stillness in her as she lay against me—a stillness in which there was a barely perceptible withdrawal. “What a strange question!” she murmured. “No, I have no idea where she’s buried. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to keep my voice indifferent. “I was wondering the other day whether they buried yellow fever victims in lime pits, or how. The body wasn’t sent home, was it?”

“Certainly not,” she said. “What’s got into you, Albion?”

“Nothing’s got into me,” I said. “It’s only that you can’t help being curious about a person if you see her picture every day for a year or so. Probably she was buried on the plantation where she worked. Where was that, by the way, and what was the name of the planter?”

Harriet straightened up on the sofa and moved a little from me. “I don’t know. I have an extremely bad memory for foreign names, and she lived in a place that was deep in the country—not in a town at all.”

“But letters that were written to her had to be written to some town or other! They couldn’t just be directed to a piece of property somewhere in San Domingo or Haiti, whichever you want to call it.”

“I know that as well as you do,” Harriet said, “but it just happens that whenever I wrote her I gave my letter to Cousin Thomas, and he enclosed it in his.”

“I see.... Couldn’t you find some of the letters she wrote your cousin, they might mention the name of her employer and his address.”

“All such papers were destroyed as soon as Thomas died,” Harriet said. “As you know, she died a year ago last June, and even before then she never wrote Thomas.”

“Isn’t that a little peculiar?” I asked. “Your cousin told me that he got her the position in San Domingo, and even paid her passage. That’s why she insisted he take the portrait.”

“What’s strange about it?” Harriet asked. “She was just ungrateful, like almost everybody in this world.”

I thought of the sensitive lips, the shy smile of Lydia’s portrait. That was no picture of an ingrate; for if it had been, an artist of Gilbert Stuart’s ability couldn’t possibly have kept the truth from appearing.

Harriet seemed suddenly to melt once more. She flung herself against me and threw her arms around my neck. “Albion,” she cried, “you silly, silly boy! I do believe you’ve got some idea in that foolish head of yours that Lydia isn’t dead at all.”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s it. I think she isn’t dead. I think she’s alive this very minute—and that you’ve known it all the time.”

Harriet’s lips were against my cheek. “Silly, silly boy,” she whispered. “Why, we had proof that she was dead!”

“Do you still have that proof?”

“Of course!” She jumped to her feet, and ran from the room.

When she came back, she handed me a letter. It seemed a little the worse for wear, as though it had been purposely crumpled, folded, and refolded. The wax seal was gone; only a faint pink mark showed where it had been. However, it was addressed clearly enough to Thomas Bailey, Esquire, Boston, Mass. I opened it and found it dated simply “At sea, June 20th, 1800.”

Dear Sir [the letter read]: I write this at the request of the employer of Lydia Bailey, spinster, teacher of English to her employer’s two children. By the greatest misfortune, an epidemic of yellow fever has swept San Domingo during the weeks just past, and it was the unhappy fate of Miss Bailey to contract this disease. She was stricken while attending to her duties as teacher, and after she had suffered for three days the black vomit appeared and she died almost immediately. Owing to the infectious nature of the disease, she was buried at once and all her personal belongings were buried with her. The wages due Miss Bailey at the time of her death, plus the money found in her belongings, came to one hundred and twenty gourdes, or twenty-four dollars. On my advice her employer is sending you, by me, the equivalent of this sum, one half in coffee and one half in rum, inasmuch as these commodities will have a far higher value in America.

Regretting the need of conveying these dismal tidings to you, I remain, sir,

Your obedient and humble servant,

Alexander Bean

I studied the letter, front and back. “Who’s Alexander Bean?”

“Dear me,” she said lightly, “I don’t know who he was. I know he was all right, though, and telling the truth, because we got the coffee and the rum, just as he said in his letter. I think you’ll admit nobody’s going to send three hundred dollars’ worth of coffee and rum to somebody he doesn’t know, just for fun. That’s how much it was worth here: three hundred dollars; and that proves the letter was no joke!”

“I don’t for a moment think it was a joke,” I said. “There are some odd things about it, though. For example, Mr. Bean doesn’t mention the name of Lydia’s employer, the town in which her employer lived, or his plantation. He was as forgetful as you are.”

She shrugged. “What’s so strange about that?”

“If you don’t see what’s strange about it, no words of mine could make you understand.”

“I don’t like your tone,” Harriet said. “You’re implying that I somehow had a hand in deceiving my cousin. I haven’t the slightest idea what you’ve heard, but I won’t be talked to in any such way—not even by a person I regarded as more than a friend. I’ve had enough, Albion, and I’ll ask you to leave this house.”

“I can’t do that,” I said; “not until I take the steps I consider necessary. I am not—as you said—‘implying’ that you somehow had a hand in deceiving your cousin: I’m stating it as a fact.”

“That’s an absolute lie,” Harriet said.

“I’m saying,” I went on, “that this letter from Alexander Bean is a forgery, probably written by yourself.”

“How dare you!”

“I’m saying that when you tell me your Cousin Thomas never heard from Lydia, you’re telling a deliberate falsehood to account for the destruction of the letters he certainly received regularly from her.”

“You must be crazy!”

“I’ll go further: the proof that Bailey got letters from Lydia must have been in the diary I saw him keeping while I lived here. I know I’ll never see that diary. You’ve destroyed it to protect yourself.”

“Everything you say is a wicked lie!” Harriet cried. “You’re accusing an innocent woman of an atrocious wrong, without a scrap of proof.”

“Oh, no, I’m not. There’s all the proof in the world, though it’s mostly negative. Do you think any jury on earth would believe that though you lived in the same house with your cousin you can’t remember where his much-loved niece went to live, can’t remember whom she worked for, can’t produce even one letter or diary of Bailey’s that might reveal her whereabouts, can’t account for the letters she wrote him during all the time he was led to believe her dead?”

“She was dead!” Harriet insisted hysterically. “She was dead!”

“Listen,” I said. “She’s alive! An American sea captain saw her with two children in Cap François less than three weeks ago.”

“He was lying!”

“No, he wasn’t! He was telling the cold truth, and you’re caught—because when I see her, as I shall, I’ll learn that she has written regularly to her uncle in spite of not hearing from him. Then I’ll have proof that you’ve been destroying all her letters, since nobody but you had either the opportunity or the motive.”

“You haven’t a shred of proof of anything you say!” Harriet protested. “My cousin made a will leaving all his property to me. That property is mine, and it’ll stay so in spite of your lying accusations!”

I stared at her, marveling at the horrible things women will do for money and security—shuddering, too, at my narrow escape.

“Harriet,” I said, “you don’t realize that every word you say confirms my charges. If I go before the Judge of Probate in this city, with Lydia Bailey as my client, and state the facts in your case, he’ll have that will declared null and void. What’s more, if we want to press the matter, you’d probably spend the next few years in jail, convicted on the charge of obtaining money under false pretenses.”

She said nothing—just sat silent and sullen.

“So I have only this to say,” I went on. “If from this moment you sell, use, or destroy anything that came to you through the last will and testament of Thomas Bailey, I’ll make it my business to see that you are put in jail, because when I come back from San Domingo, either I’ll bring Lydia with me, or I’ll bring incontrovertible proof that the ‘Alexander Bean’ letter was a forgery that enabled you to steal a fortune from a young and defenseless girl.”

I picked up my hat and met Harriet Faulkner’s hard, defiant stare for what I hoped was the last time—and if looks could have killed, I would never have lived to reach the street, let alone Haiti.

I went to Portland to spend two days with my uncle, Aunt Emmy, and Madam Ross. When I’d shown them Lydia’s picture and told them about Harriet Faulkner, they made me feel sorry for those benighted souls who talk about New Englanders’ frosty lack of feeling.

My uncle licked his lips over my documents on Spoliation Claims; and Aunt Emmy and Madam Ross summoned three needlewomen to stitch new shirts for me. Even Eddie and Owen, who had reluctantly done my bidding when I was directing the farm, proudly bragged of doing the very things that once they’d been so averse to doing. The hay, they boasted, would run two tons to the acre, first crop, and one ton the second crop—though, when I’d made them use a ton of lime to the acre for that very purpose two years before, they’d told all the other farmers in town that I was crazy.

When my uncle, Madam Ross, and Aunt Emmy drove me to the wharves, they overwhelmed me with advice. “I’ve put a flannel belly-band in your bag,” Aunt Emmy said. “I found it,” my uncle added, “and wrapped it around those pistols I put in. You bring her back here for Christmas, Albion, and bring some of that old San Domingo rum with you. We’ll mix it with brandy and just a little peach cordial, and make her sorry for all the time she wasted in San Domingo!”

We were two weeks making that voyage between two worlds—that almost unbelievable miracle which changed the ice, cold, and bleakness of New England to the searing sunlight, the deep blue water, the drifting golden gulfweed, the skittering flying-fish, the billowing clouds, and the palm-fringed islands of the Caribbean.

Captain Lee called off the names of the islands we passed as readily as I’d have called the names of Portland streets—Ethera, Abaco, Hole-in-the-Rock, Berry Islands, Little Isaac, Great Isaac....

These must have been the very islands that Columbus saw, according to that ancient French book that I had first read to my aunt and uncle on those far-off winter nights in New Brunswick. I had found a copy of it in Moreau de St. Méry’s bookstore in Philadelphia, and now, as I re-read its pages, I reflected that Columbus must have seen those islands through emerald-tinted spectacles; for to me the islands looked like hot and dusty pancakes on the ocean’s rim, their colors sadly faded, their greens all gray, their blues smudged.

Yet my excitement grew as we rounded the blunt nose of Cuba and turned southward in the path Columbus followed, and although I still thought he’d misrepresented those Sugar Islands in his account to his credulous countrymen, I found something thrilling about the things he said he saw. I read aloud to Captain Lee the account of Columbus’s first glimpse of San Domingo—or Hispaniola, as he called it.

“It was lofty and mountainous,” said Columbus, “with green savannahs and spacious plains, grown thickly to trees of enormous size, all of which bore fruit so sweet and so beautiful as to be the product of a true rather than a terrestrial paradise.”

Captain Lee nodded. “Wait till you see the women,” he said. “Creamy, like thick cream, but flexible as snakes—unless you prefer ’em black. Some do. They’re solider.”

He stretched out his arm. “There it is,” he said, “high up, high up.”

Hung high in the hot, transparent, pure air, was a blue, blue blade, a vast point unreal in its sharpness, unreal in that it was bluer than a sky already so deeply blue as to seem bluer than anything on heaven or earth. It was a mountain-peak: one lone blue peak, I thought at first; and then I saw others and others and still others, towering pointed things, cocked at incredible and impossible angles, just as Columbus had said.

That night we saw lights gleaming at the foot of the mountains, and at dawn the scent of the island came out to us—a poignant perfume, soft and languorous, all-enveloping and heart-stirring.

When morning came I saw exactly what Columbus had seen and faithfully described: tumbled purple mountains; misty blue peaks stabbing up out of rich forests; velvety plantations draped opulently over green savannahs; lush valleys slashed as if by giant axes through cliffs carved by Cyclopean chisels into battlements and castles.

San Domingo—Hispaniola—Haiti! Columbus had been no liar; and I wondered whether the rest of it was true, too: whether there was something accursed about this fantastic, unreal island: something that would cast a spell around me, just as it had cast one around Columbus, involving him in countless perplexities for the remainder of his life, dooming him to an infinity of woes and disappointments, and darkening all his days with undeserved humiliations.