What Lies Buried: A Novel of Old Cape Fear Read online

  They might be welcome in the homes of the gentry once more, but she was still doomed to make do. Things were better than they had been, yet there was still a long way to go to recapture those first few heady years after arriving at this small village perched on the edge of a great wilderness, when their dreams for a prosperous future were unbroken. Or of the days she now could only wistfully recall back in bustling Philadelphia, as a doted-upon child of middling fortune with so little demanded of her!

  Eggs done and turned into a warming pan, Bess poked at her cathead biscuits, then swung the copper kettle nearer the tall flames to hasten the tea water’s boiling. She sat on a stool by the hearth for a welcome moment of ease. She turned her head to look at Samuel, who was standing four-square by the front window, munching on his strip of bacon, hands in the small of his back, and contemplating the weather.

  She knew it was termagant of her to take things out on him, but God in Heaven, he was a slender reed! He did toil hard, when put to it, but merely followed, never seemed to lead, and the idea of Samuel taking charge of the struggling businesses, even decades later, gave Bess a chill which the hearth fire could not ease. He had no head for Commerce, and when it came time for Father …

  She put that thought firmly out of her mind. Father was not yet elderly, far from it, with many productive years left him! Lamed as he was, he let nothing stop him! Just to walk again took more determination than a dozen gentlemen could boast! Failure, the dire shame of poverty—the shame of being needful of charity!—rolled off their father’s stout shoulders like water off a duck’s back. Even the cruel and heartless japes from children in the streets, idlers and ne’er-do-wells, the taunts of “Hoy, Board-Foot!” and “Hallo, Mr Hop-kins!” could not faze him. He merely laughed and shook his fist or his stick at them, joshing them back in like manner, then dismissing it as merely a thoughtless, minor burden to be borne, and had never uttered a single word of frustration. Bess wished she had her father’s forbearance and ability to cope, or his strong faith to bear such insults in a truly Christian manner.

  More admire than jeer, she assured herself, was forced to smile a wee trifle, considering the glances her father had been getting lately, those he drew from the widows and elder spinster ladies at church.

  The war and his disability had thinned him painfully, and going about in his everyday exertions, as regular as a full man should, had made him strong and fit. Liveseys, so he’d confessed to her when she had asked about her grandparents, had always run a tad stocky, appeared solidly square-built, and her father had been weathered down to a fine figure of a man for his age.

  One who deserved better, she gloomed, poking at their breakfast fire to speed the boiling. A dutiful son who’d shoulder the burdens a business demanded. A daughter more supportive and cheerful, she chided herself, too. But it was so hard not to yearn for those better times, so hard not to want … ! A real house servant, ’stead of the old free-Negro woman who came once a week for a day. Daily garden help, ‘stead of the old woman’s husband and his white-whiskered mule, who came even less often to plow or weed, do chores, nail things back together …

  Hands other than hers to do the tatting and repairing, so their clothing was presentable. Hands other than hers to do the washing and ironing of their threadbare garments and bed linens: altering and letting out to fit her sprouting brother until they’d saved up enough for one precious bolt of cloth, from which she so dearly wished hands other than hers—just the once!—could run up new!

  If Samuel feels like kicking over the traces, he hasn’t a patch on the way I feel, Bess sighed, squirming and blushing at her selfish, ungrateful, rebellious and un-dutiful, un-Christian feelings of wants. Surely it was Woman’s Lot to do for her loved ones. Yet Bess ached for just a few luxuries, for just a few more idle hours in her days, for a tiny jot or tittle of wealth. Other Wilmington girls, in or above her own station, seemed so much better off to her. There were only six hundred or so white settlers in the borough, and only about a third of them could be considered well-to-do. Thankfully, the Livesey’s earlier prosperity, and the warm sponsorship of the Tresmaynes—“Uncle” Harry and “Aunt” Georgina—had eased their entry into that elevated third of the colony and its social doings. Even their bankruptcy hadn’t ended that, for “There But For The Grace of God Go I” could so easily strike any or all, seemingly at whim in a single hard season.

  Other girls her age could seem so idle, could tat lace or entertain, gossip and titter over such inconsequential things, their hands unsullied or roughened by actual labor. Goose-silly some of them were, at times, yet Bess burned to be that idle, to have time to read a whole book without interruptions …tobe able to afford a new one!

  Grateful to still be included, yet awkward and secretly sullen, envious, imagining that her invitations to join her sisters was more of the same shameful charity… ! Could a body really crave the ability to glide through Life dumb, giddy and carefree, she asked herself ruefully? Then here, Lord, is one … God help me, she thought.

  The tea water began to bubble in the copper pot and she darted a hand out to swing the rod away from the flames with her usual quickness, then scowled in wry amusement at herself.

  Long before, she’d been told by her mother and grandmothers that a young lady of her station (back in Philadelphia when she’d had one) must always comport herself gracefully. One glided, not tromped; one’s hands and gestures must always be languid and flowing. Breeding was expressed by one’s elegance in all things, every waking moment, if one expected to be a credit to one’s family … and catch the eye of a suitable young man.

  Bess, though, seemed doomed to wave expressively when she spoke, to be chirpy and a bit too vivacious when engaged in an exciting conversation, to dart …to even sometimes point!

  “I’m a trull,” she whispered over her failings. “A common drab.”

  “I agree, wholeheartedly,” Samuel piped up from the window.

  Perhaps it was the frontier that debased all her mother’s hopes; Bess stuck her tongue out at her brother. “Bless me, Sam’l, but I had no idea you knew words that big. Break teeth, did it?” she cooed.

  “Termagant trull’s more like it,” her brother grinned back, sure that her nagging was at an end. “Poor Bess. No hope a’tall of weddin’ you off, long as you spit fire and nettles. I s’pose we’re stuck with you. At least you know how t’cook.”

  “More talk like that, dear brother, and it’ll be the last meal you’ll eat,” Bess snickered. “’Less you learn to fix for yourself.”

  “Good thing I love game-meat, then,” Samuel responded quickly, coming back to the table.

  “Charred on a stick, with the hide and hair still on …” Bess suggested.

  “Nothing better!” Samuel declared. Their bickerings were over; this was their normal repartee, ’twixt elder brother and bright sister.

  Bess sifted the tea leaves with the mote-spoon for twigs, dust and such, then poured the boiling water over them into a large “company-come” china pot, using a larger, stronger measure of leaves than usual economy might dictate. Father would be in need of bracing, if he had stayed as late at the taverns as she suspected.

  As she hung the copper kettle back on the fire-rod, she heard his door open, heard the careful thump of his footsteps in the narrow hallway from the rear of the house. Bess took a moment to swipe at her forehead with a dishclout and tuck her raven-black hair into tidier order ’neath her mob-cap. She put a proper daughter’s smile upon her face, even a welcoming twinkle in her blue eyes, and presented herself absent of any judgment or amusement over her father’s night of Falling From Grace. She willed herself, a long day’s chores notwithstanding, to be the cheerful, helpful and dutiful daughter that he had a right to expect.

  Not without at least a wee bit of teasing, though.

  Chapter 3

  AT LEAST they’ve gotten over whatever plagued them, Matthew . Livesey was happy to note when he took his place at the head of the table, after dutiful
hugs and a peck on the cheek from Bess. In a wood house as small as theirs, one could not help hearing voices raised in pique.

  “Tea, Father?” Bess offered.

  “Bless me, yes!” He enthused, as much as his head would tolerate, at least. “We were hard at it last night at the Widow Yadkin’s. Moores, Ramseurs, all the barons and their lot. Harry and his crowd, all the young sparks, going at it hammer and tongs. Deuced polite, they were … consid’rin’. Politics, Lord save us!”

  “And did the wine flow?” Bess inquired with a grin.

  “I expect it did,” Livesey allowed, shrugging innocently as he spooned sugar into his tea and added a dollop of cream.

  He looked up at his daughter as she took her seat at the end of the table, marveling again at how much like her mother she had become. The same clear skin, the same pert and tapering face, the same shining hair and eyes. Taller by an inch or two than Charlotte; he imagined that was Livesey blood, but the Fairclough side showed through. It was only lately, though, as she had matured, that Bess had developed her mother’s unconscious gestures, her wry wit and her side-long, quirky smile that lifted one corner of her mouth, along with the raised eyebrow that had been Charlotte’s “dubious” expression. The one Bess wore now.

  “Thomas Lakey was there, too,” Mr Livesey told her, intent on teasing her in turn. “And his nephew Andrew Hewlett. Young Hewlett expressed the wish that I convey his respects to you, Bess.”

  “Did he indeed,” she replied, composing her face to “placid.”

  “A well-set-up young fellow. Nice enough, I suppose. Should we be setting out the good china for him anytime soon, hey?” Livesey inquired with a bland innocence of his own.

  Bess snorted in amusement. Whether that meant she thought Andrew Hewlett a fine catch someday, or an abysmal lout, he could not discover. But her eyes sparkled with merriment as she quickly deflected his query with her own. “And did WidowYadkin give you her best respects, too, Father?”

  “God rot th …” Livesey began to say, blushing as he caught himself. “God forbid, I meant to say. Poor, pop-eyed mort.”

  “Pop-eyes for you, Father, haw haw!” Samuel said with a snigger of delight. It was no secret that Barbara Yadkin needed a new husband to help her keep and run her inherited ordinary. She was an acceptable enough woman of middling height, years and features; but for the unfortunate way she blared her eyes in any state but sleep, or could be found staring—unblinking for so long it made peoples’ eyes water in sympathy—as fixedly as an alligator. And had declared to anyone unlucky enough to have to listen to her rather ewe-like, bleating voice that she thought Matthew Livesey a likely prospect, now his year of mourning was done.

  “Not being able to decipher your words through that considerable cud in your mouth, Sam’l, I shall pretend you made no comment.” Livesey pretended to huff up, leaning away from his son in mock disgust, and wishing (not for the first time) that Samuel had merely a moiety of Bess’s cleverer humor. “We taught you better, surely. And before I say grace? Is it this clime, bad influences in town? We never heard the like of old, I’m bound. Poor manners, a father mocked by his own children! What is the world coming to, I ask you?”

  He ended with a laugh, his first of the day, and was amazed it didn’t pain his throbbing skull as much as it might have. He took a long sip of hot and refreshing tea. Half the maze-y cobwebs seemed to clear of an instant, restoring his humors. Then, he opened the Book of Common Prayer which was always by his plate, and found a suitable Collect to read before he asked for a blessing on their breakfast. As he did so, the low-mounted bell at St James’s around the corner on Market Street began to toll the hour, as did the smaller bell in front of the courthouse, chiming both the hour and the end of the night curfew for freedmen blacks.

  As they ate, he laid down his instructions, as a father must. Samuel to get the barges ready on Chandler’s Wharf, instead of going to the sawmills,

  for they had a ship to load out for the West Indies this morning; for Bess he offered a free day, once the breakfast items were done. He left off further admonitions for Samuel to keep at it. He’d be under his eye today, and Bess had (he had overheard) put the word on him already, so he would not have to hector him like a puppy who’d soiled their one and only decent carpet.

  Matthew Livesey garbed himself carefully in sober brown tailcoat and buff colored waistcoat, black tricorne and his long walking stick. He stepped out onto his front stoop and looked about with a pleased grin. The sun was barely up over the eastern rise ofFifth Street and the trackless pine barrens that led to the ocean across the cape, but the sky was clear and blue already. It would be a fine day. A deuced fine day! The street was dry, making for good footing in the light, sandy roadway. A few pushcarts were already at their labors as tinkers, flower vendors, ragmen, milk sellers and vegetable mongers cried their wares. Drays were out as well, heavy wagons drawn by ox teams, or rare and solid draft horses. Mules were in abundance. So too, unfortunately, were pigs and chickens, running free and only partly claimed; and dogs and cats and geese were two-a-penny.

  He levered himself down off his high stoop to the road with a wince and a puff, and made his way down the slope of Dock Street, for the waterfront, crossing the roadway which ended above the actual dock which gouged into the foot of the bluff’s hill like a rectangular indentation, in which one of the coastal trading schooners from farther up north was being cleaned of barnacles and weed. Being re-stocked, too, with naval stores, with hemp and manila rigging purchased from his stocks, her sails patched with canvas from his own bolts of cloth.

  He stopped to savor the sight, as if seeing it all for the first time all over again, as he did almost every morning of his existence.

  For there was the river, the Cape Fear, flowing brown as tobacco juice from the Piedmont, stained brown by the pine forest saps, leaf-moldy and rich. Sweet water was the Cape Fear, this high up above the tides, death on the teredo worms and ship-borers which ruined vessels. That made Wilmington a much more desirable port than poor, dying Brunswick, sixteen miles down-river near its mouth. Especially after that hurricane of last September of’61 which had aimed direct for Brunswick, and had ripped the New Inlet open, making a channel a quarter-mile wide and eighteen feet deep at the low tide.

  He increased his pace as he neared Water Street which ran along the life-giving river’s banks. Eagle’s Island on the opposite shore, before the wavering salt-marsh lowlands, smoked with the fumes of the distilleries and rendering try-pots set among the few surviving trees and the wire-grasses which bowed in marshy surrender to the insistent currents and tides, the new sluices and dikes which fed fresh river water to burgeoning rice fields behind them.

  And, the Thoroughfare! Not as grand or as broad an anchorage as old Philadelphia, but filled with coastal schooners or corn crackers from up-river settlements, with brigs and even small three-masted ships. Ships from New York, Philadelphia, Boston and New England ports, from Charleston, Georgetown and Savannah, from Port Royal and Beaufort and little Plymouth on the Outer Banks, from New Bern and Edenton along the Albemarle or Pamlico Sounds. Ships from Bermuda, up from the Bahamas, the Salt Isles of the Turks, even from Jamaica and rich Sugar Isles of the Caribbean—timber-hungry, pitch- and tar-needy vessels from the Danish Virgins, the Dutch Antilles, the West Indies and England, too, come for salt-beef, salt-pork or salt-fish, cloth, barrel staves, cut lumber, naval stores and tobacco.

  And the in-bound cargoes, now free of the Pratique Grounds by Brunswick, down-river, certified sickness-free, at last! Ships laden gunwale-deep with sugar, rum or molasses, with bolts of cloth, lace, iron, nails or glassware, coffee or tea, with whole carriages, books and newspapers, or fine china and strong brandies, with wines so fine they went down the maw like smoke, Italian marble and New England oak, Hamburg knives, anvils and clocks, English thread or ribbon, shoes or boots … Trade! The sinews of Commerce from the whole civilized world were gathered in this struggling but boundless little seaport!

&nb
sp; Matthew Livesey had always stood in awe of ships and their goods, from his earliest days toddling ‘twixt his father and grandfather along the immense spread of bustling wharves of Philadelphia, with the ships’ beakheads spearing to heaven over his head, and every unloading he had witnessed then had felt like the Magi come bearing their gifts for the Baby Jesus. Early on, he’d fallen in thrall at the sight of spars and masts and rigging laced against the clouds, of sailors’ cries in dozens of languages and the esoteric foreign tongue of the sailor’s trade itself, of the chanty songs of men set to pulley hauley, the jaunty lilts of fiddlers’ and fifers’ tunes at fore bitters or idle hornpipes, the husky voices of black dock workers in call and response choruses when lading a vessel bound out for somewhere distant.

  He stood in awe of such things, still. There had even been a time when he’d thought to flee a fretful teen’s drudgery of chandlery work for the life of a jolly sea rover, himself! Like a well-set fore tops’l, Matthew Livesey had felt the press of wide open ocean breezes that led to exotic horizons, and had signed aboard a stout merchantman out of Liverpool… for a day. One thrilling day, he had had, before his father had come for him, nigh dragged him down the gangplank by his ear to set him back on his Proper Course before the lines could be cast off, returned him to the role expected of him … with a shameful bout of lecturing on Familial Duty and Responsibility delivered just before a painful caning! “When I was a Child, I spake as a Child … when I became a Man I put away all childish …!”

  This morning, the Thoroughfare, that safe haven under his adopted town’s low bluffs, was aflutter with new-day life, with swooping, keening seagulls and terns. Shoals of mewing herring gulls, so pristine white and gray, or spottybrown piebald pariahs. Here and there his favorites, scoffing likejesters, the black-headed laughing gulls perched on bollards and spars. Snowy egrets across the river, fluffed up and flying like a passing blizzard, and blue herons stalking the marshes. Cormorants on their long, narrow wings, gyring about the swirls and eddies cross-set by current and tide. And the comical spotted brown pelicans which wafted crank-necked round the sterns of ships, looking for a morsel of edible jetsam. He felt like shouting glad greetings to them all.