Infidelity: Manor (Kindle Worlds Novella) Page 3

  “Do you know…”

  “Please don’t ask me if I know anything. I would never tell you. Telling you puts your life and the lives of everybody in this house in grave danger.”

  “But I thought…”

  “Don’t, honey…your heart is so good that you just can’t see how dangerous this is. Don’t mention it. Ever. You never heard anything from me, okay?”

  I nodded.

  A few months later, on a cold, rainy fall day, I received a letter from the Colonel. It was addressed from South Carolina. He was close. I blanched as I read the letter.

  November 11, 1861

  Summerville, SC

  Dear Sarah,

  As I battle the invasive Union forces to the north, my already-troubled mind and heart received this morning disturbing word from Savannah in the form of a letter from Beauregard Fitzgerald. It appears you’ve fired my overseer, a man who has worked for me for almost twenty years. It also seems you are holding cookouts for the field slaves. Worst, I’m told that slaves now live openly in our home. How on earth have you allowed this to happen? Are you consorting with the lower orders? I’m fighting this war to preserve our pure white heritage, and you’re betraying that at home in front of our community?

  I cannot begin to express my disappointment with you. You were charged with maintaining my home while I am away. I cannot imagine what has gotten into you, but I promise you I will reestablish order upon my return. Our campaign for a free and prosperous Confederacy is succeeding better than we had hoped, and I expect to be home within a few months.

  Until then.

  EC Montague

  Colonel, Confederate army

  I tore the letter into shreds and threw it in the fireplace.

  Despite the fear, these were also good years, and the longer the war went on, the more I enjoyed the life on the farm. My cookouts went from monthly to weekly. I became close to the families. I heard their stories. I played with their children. I taught reading and writing in a small schoolhouse we built on the property. I couldn’t help but enjoy this life, but of course I wasn’t a slave toiling in the hot sun all day. Instead, I was a wealthy white woman sipping cool drinks in the shade. But our farm flourished. The wealth of the family grew exponentially.

  The stain in my heart, though, knew this couldn’t go on. There was a pall over everything we did. I couldn’t accept the idea that every penny made came from slave labor. I knew it had to end. It must end. I wanted that more than I wanted anything else in the world. I knew that I had to find a way to give freedom to the people on this plantation. I didn’t know how, but I knew there would come a time.

  1864 – The Man of the House

  At dinner, General Bradley seemed surprised that Sallie joined us and sat next to me. He didn’t say a word, at first, but gave enough curious looks so that I knew his thoughts. He was much less weary now, and his blue eyes sparkled in the candlelight. He sat at the head of the table, where my husband would sit dourly, slurping soup. Instead, the general was engaging. He wore a crooked smile at all times. His broad shoulders pressed against the back of the high seat.

  As we finished our meal, he took a drink of wine and asked in his deep baritone, “So where is Colonel Montague?”

  I paused for a minute. I guessed that he was asking for intelligence on the Confederate army. I looked at Sallie, and she had a soft smile on her lips. “Honestly, General, I have no idea.” And that was the truth, unfortunately.

  “He hasn’t written?” He took another drink of wine. Azure eyes looked deeply into mine.

  “Sir, please understand…”

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t asking for the position of the army.” He smiled and leaned back. He exuded confidence and charm. He looked out the window, eyes in the distance. “I just know that if I had a beautiful home and a beautiful wife, I would be doing everything possible to get home and protect both.”

  I felt my blood rise. It was very unseemly to show annoyance, but I couldn’t help it. “How do you know he’s not?” After all, how dare he assume that my husband wasn’t racing home to defend me? And perhaps he was, though I hadn’t heard anything from him in months.

  He turned back to me. “No offense intended, ma’am.” He smiled as he looked into his wine glass. “But the Confederate army is far from here. Grant has them occupied up north. We thought burning Atlanta would bring them home, but it hasn’t.”

  “Really?” I tried to add a knowing response to my voice, but it wasn’t there.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s too bad. The way your foragers are consuming the resources of Savannah while your navy blockades the port, the city will be ashes before you even set it ablaze.”

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “We’re not burning Savannah. It’s too pretty.” And now his eyes were like cold fire. “It’s so nice I wish we could stay.”

  “I see.”

  “Oh, and I wanted to promise you that, in return for your kind housing, I’ve ordered my men to not forage from your farm, nor to disturb your home in any way. I will also pay you for the kindness you’re showing me.”

  I kept my aloofness and was not going to appear gracious for small favors. “Pardon my directness, General, but telling your men not to steal from me seems like something an officer should say without being housed in my home.”

  He again looked away, eyes far. “These are strange days, Mrs. Montague. The world has gone mad.”

  After dinner, he asked for a bottle of brandy, which we provided from our depleted stores. He poured himself a drink and sat by the fireplace. I busied myself in the kitchen. When I peeked into the living room to check on him, I saw his hands on his face. He was sobbing, though he never made a sound. His chest wracked, and his hands were wet. His neck muscles were pronounced.

  I pulled away and crept silently back to the kitchen.

  1859 – The Colonel

  Those dresses turned out to be a curse. I never imagined what desire would do to my life. I foolishly thought I had some measure of control of my little existence. Little did I know. I had never understood a man’s lust. I didn’t know what a man thought when he saw a young girl in a pretty dress.

  I remember the day it all changed. It is as clear to me now as it was when it happened. My mother and I were in the general store. She had just that morning finished a canary-yellow dress, and she was proud of the bustle I could now wear. She had said, “This dress makes you look like a full-grown woman, Sarah.” That compliment didn’t alert me to the danger, though I wish it would have. I wish I’d have doffed that dress and swam in the river that day instead of joining my mother.

  As we stood at the counter ordering cornmeal, I heard the bell over the door jingle and looked to see Colonel Elijah Montague enter the store. Colonel Montague was well-known to us all, of course. He was the wealthiest man in Savannah and owned the largest plantation outside Atlanta, adjacent to Forsyth Park. Anybody who had ever strolled through that park couldn’t help but see his large, stately mansion at the end of a long avenue of oaks. Nor could they miss the hundreds of shacks and outbuildings, or the many slaves toiling in his fields. The Colonel produced half the cotton in Savannah and owned the ships that took the city’s cotton across the Atlantic to markets in Europe and elsewhere. His tobacco filled the pipes and homerolls of nearly every home in the county. The Colonel was Savannah.

  “Missus Bertsching, Miss Bertsching…” he said, tipping his tall white hat to us. Mother and I curtsied with polite smiles. He strode past us, but as he did I saw his look linger on me. With my peripheral vision, I saw his eyes take me in, from my toes to my bustle to my petite hat. I turned away, cheeks burning. It was the same look the boys at school had given me, and I didn’t like it. Not from him. I’d seen the sweat on his mottled cheeks. I’d seen his thin white hair dripping beads. I could smell his age on him as he went by; it nauseated me.

  And I knew. I knew right at that moment that he would have intentions. My intuition told me this was the moment my life
would change, and my intuition was right. That night I prayed that it was just the humidity playing tricks on me. I prayed to God on my knees and squeezed my hands tightly. I prayed that the Colonel had no desires. That he would continue on with his life and ignore mine. That his great presence in this community would be enough comfort for him in his advanced years. I prayed that God would, instead, send me a man that I could love. A handsome, slender young reed of a man. A man who would work hard with me to build a life that we would both share. God chose not to answer my prayers. I wonder now if he didn’t have a larger purpose for me.

  On my wedding day, my sweet Georgia breeze betrayed me, and the air was as still as a funeral…and that’s what it felt like. I would have welcomed a black casket instead of the sexagenarian man in black who awaited me in this oppressive heat. Waited to make me his wife. Waited to take away my childhood. Sweat dampened my clothes and burned my eyes. In the distance, I could see the long, oak-lined path that led to the front of Montague Manor. Great stone steps led up to its stately, pillared façade. Its long kitchen house and smaller outbuildings rolled out to the fields. The grand white manor stood proudly elevated, looking down in judgment on the clapboard shacks and rows of cotton and tobacco plants that seemed to go on forever behind it. I could just hear the hum of the slaves singing in their toil in this oppressive heat. I could see them hoisting large burlap sacks stuffed with white puffy cotton. I could see the women working the cotton gins and other men loading the massive sacks into bailing machines. I could see the shine of their sweat, even from the distance.

  And I remembered. I remembered that when Colonel Montague called on my mother, it was another sweltering day in late July. He had come dressed like he was running for office, wearing a black suit and white shirt. He reeked of sweat and ointments. His smile shone with gold teeth and gaps. As was proper, he was shown into our humble home, and I curtsied low as my mother had directed. I dared not look him in the eyes, even as I shook his cold, clammy, smooth hand. Instead, I was proper and stared at his shoes before being directed to fetch drinks. As I obeyed, I could hear him talking with my mother. It was business. No laughing, no stories, no humor. Just business. My bride price was determined before I could return with the sweet tea.

  He was a widower, you see. Edith Montague had been his wife for over thirty years when she contracted cancer. The city knew her as they knew the Colonel. She had been a pillar of the community. She was in the Lutheran Church every Sunday, always in the front row right next to her husband. As a pillar in the church, she directed and rode at the front of the annual Lighted Christmas Parade, even riding just months before she passed. She knew everybody and watched and sat in judgment of the affairs of others. She demanded clean streets and polite slaves. Anybody who crossed her soon learned how fearsome she could be. Though the new world was envisioned as a classless society, everybody also knew that the Montagues were our betters.

  She had died slowly and painfully. The city had remarked often that the Colonel had demonstrated his breeding by never showing his suffering as his wife of nearly a third of a century slipped away from him. He had stoically stood by her bedside as she passed and like a statue at her funeral. He performed his duty like the soldier he had been. Since she had passed on, now nearly a decade ago, he had lived alone, cared for by only his slaves. Yet he never showed his age, always walking the streets with his back as straight as an arrow. He was polite and cordial, reserved and strong—all the features of a Southern gentleman plantation owner. He was Savannah. He was Georgia. A rich white landowner making wealth on the labor of others. His presence in our chalet by the river was an oddity by itself, and our neighbors had watched him enter, then stood on their porches waiting for his departure so they could ascertain the reason for his presence.

  As we sat in our humble home, the silence was weighted. Eyes searched out other eyes, but few words were spoken. After he had taken a long drink, the Colonel smiled at me, again showing the wealth of gold. “Miss Sarah,” he began in his long, slow, properly Georgian drawl, “your great-great-granddaddy helped build mah home. Montague Manor. Did you know that?”

  Being now a conventional young lady of the South, having been coached by my needful mother, I demurely looked down to the poor worn rug in our home. “No, sir,” I replied. “I didn’t know that.” I focused on keeping my back straight and my feet politely under my chair.

  “I shall have to show you the work he did. First rate. First rate, indeed.”

  My mother smiled brightly and then smiled to me. Her eyes spoke loudly to me. A desperate song from an impoverished family to its lone hope for better. Her eyes had the fear of a hunted deer. And here among us was a lion. An aging lion, but with tooth and claw all the same. Flashing through her eyes was all the desperation and pain and loss and hopeful gain of a woman who saw her daughter a month away from financial security, gained at a price that would grant her much of the same. A maelstrom of desperation and despair and hope competed in her gray eyes.

  I understood her position. My drunkard of a father couldn’t even be there to meet the man who would marry his daughter. He was probably out hunting or drunk or both. My mother had raised two boys and a girl almost by herself. The bride price the Colonel could offer would ensure she could survive the rest of her days and not worry about eating, so long as she could keep my father from it. Perhaps she could even buy a few things for the home. I understood that look in her eyes. She’d been cheated by life, and here was a chance to get a few chips back, while securing the future of a daughter who would have no dowry. It was a logical exchange.

  But that exchange cost me my life. My freedom. I would be the traded asset for her fortune. Sold off for gain. I burned inside…yearning to throw off my dress and race to freedom. I wanted to be me. Myself. Yet here I was, dressed in layers of cheap silk and cotton, trying not to sweat in front of the man I was being sold to.

  I was dutiful, smiled, and agreed to the date of the exchange, a few weeks hence in August. I put on a brave face and shook his icy hand as he left. Shook the hand of the man who now owned me. Shook the hand that would ravage my young, inexperienced body. I shiver now to even think about it.

  As the carriage rolled up to the stone steps at the front of Montague Manor, I felt the impending doom rush to and over me. On the far side of the home, I could just see the flowers and the white chairs strewn about the lawn. They set up on the opposite side of the toiling slaves. I guess they weren’t to stop working even for the master’s wedding. Though I was a child, the opposing sides of white flowers and people dressed in their Sunday best on one side, and toiling slaves dressed raggedly and laboring in the sweltering heat on the other side of the same mansion weren’t lost on me.

  There’s an old saying in the South: when you marry for money, you earn every cent. I had never wanted to marry for money, instead being sold into this bondage. But I would learn how true these words are. The big home, the wealth, the standing in the community…these were the chains of my bondage.

  A woman met the carriage. She was a slave dressed in house clothing, her hair tied up. She was neatly pressed and looked the part of a woman used to receiving guests.

  “Morning, missus,” she said. I noticed just a touch of silver filigree in her hair. She gave a wan smile—a forced smile. I hadn’t realized until that very moment that, no matter how difficult my life was, I would have a life immensely better than this woman had, not to mention the men and women who toiled in the fields. We had all been sold, but my life would be that of a wealthy white woman all the same. These men, women, and even children would never escape their life of bondage. I hadn’t grown up with slaves and hadn’t even met one before this moment, despite their presence by the thousands in Savannah.

  “I’m Sallie. I’m here to escort you to the changing room. I’ll help you get ready for the ceremony today.” I knew instantly that I would love Sallie. She gave off a warmth that I didn’t have elsewhere in my life, even though she was forced into the graci
ousness she showed me this day.

  At least she wouldn’t sell me as my own mother had.

  I took her offered hand, and she helped me down from the carriage. The carriage pulled away behind me. She led me up the massive stone steps that rolled up to the front of the home. I heard the activity all around this massive manor and the preparations going on in the back.

  This was only the second time I had been to this mansion, my new home. Montague Manor. My first visit was with my mother and father in a final meeting to make the wedding arrangements. I remember my pappy whistled when he saw the grand sweeping staircase leading up from the foyer to the bedrooms above. From below, I could see the white doors and glass doorknobs of many rooms extending away from the top of the railing. I remember feeling that the bedrooms above held terror and sadness for me. My father’s joy showed me that we viewed the world differently.

  I wonder if Wilhelm Bertsching could have ever imagined the irony of this scenario. Decades ago, he had carved the handrails for the twisting stairway in this grand foyer. He had used all his skills to carve, polish, and stain the beautiful oak railing. His initials could still be seen, discreetly placed at the top of the railing near its termination. Could he have imagined that his great-great-granddaughter would be brought to this very home, sold for a bride price? That her hands would slide along these rails? That her tears would stain them? That she would hold them and shriek her rage and fear? I imagine not. He seemed not to have cared for wealth, so he probably never thought that his progeny would be sold for it.

  But I was ever the dutiful daughter. As we had taken dinner with Colonel Montague, I smiled and made polite conversation. I tried to maintain that smile as he spoke at length about the cotton business and how his finances were impeccably maintained. About his ships and their trade routes to Europe and South America. I guess he was trying to reassure a young girl that she would be well-cared for. For that I probably should have been grateful. Yet I honestly only wished I had the strength to run from the home. But to where?