North and South: The North and South Trilogy (3 page)

He smiled, thinking of Smollet. What a rogue. He had asked only a couple of perfunctory questions about Joseph’s background. Fearing the offer of indenture might be withdrawn, Joseph had rashly shown the document Giles had provided. Smollet had scanned it and chuckled as he handed it back.

“A family errand. Taking you all the way to the colonies. Fancy that.”

Their eyes met. Smollet knew the boy was on the run and didn’t care. Joseph admired the captain’s ruthless enterprise. He liked him more than ever.

Seven years wasn’t so long. Not so long at all.

That thought in mind, he paused at a stair leading down to the water. He descended half way, clung to the slimy wood with one hand, and dipped his other in the salty water once, twice, three times. He did the same with his other hand. If there was any symbolic blood on him, it was gone now. He was making a new beginning.

He examined his dripping fingers by the light of the nearby ship’s lanterns. He laughed aloud. Earlier there had been some charcoal dust still embedded beneath his nails. It too was gone.

He whistled as he stepped on to the gangplank. He went aboard Smollet’s vessel with rising spirits. About to put himself in bondage for seven years, he faced the prospect with a sharp new sense of personal freedom.

In the New World things were going to be different for Joseph Mof—no, Joseph Hazard. God would make it happen. His God, growing more familiar and companionable by the hour, was a Deity who favored the brave man who didn’t shrink from the hard action.

Joseph and his God had become well acquainted during the past few days. They were close now; friends.

In the late spring of the following year, across the ocean in the royal colony of Carolina, someone else dreamed of making a fortune.

For him the ambition amounted to a lust. He had known what it was like to be rich, powerful, secure. But the security had proved an illusion, and the wealth and power had been swept away like the shining beach sand down by Charles Town when a storm tide attacked it.

Charles de Main was thirty. He and his beautiful wife, Jeanne, had been in the colony two years. Carolina itself had been settled by Europeans for only seventeen years; all of its two or three thousand white citizens were, relatively speaking, newcomers.

Among the colonists was a group of adventurers originally from Barbados. These men had settled in the village of Charles Town and had quickly assumed power under the Lords Proprietors, the English nobles who had started the colony as a financial venture. These same Barbadians had already mantled themselves in superiority.

Charles considered the Barbadians impractical fools. They dreamed of an agricultural paradise where they could grow rich raising silk, sugar, tobacco, cotton. Charles was more realistic. Carolina’s coastal lowlands were too wet for conventional farming. Its summers were pestilential; only the very hardy survived in them. Currently the colony’s prosperity—such as it was—had three sources: Pelts like those that passed through Charles’s trading station. Grazing cattle. And the kind of wealth he was just now engaged in bringing down from the back country at the point of a gun.

Indians destined for slavery.

It could not be said that Charles de Main had come to this land of coastal swamps and back country sand hills because of its physical or commercial attractions. He and Jeanne had fled here from the valley of the Loire, where Charles had been born the fourteenth duke of his line.

In his twentieth year he had married and begun to assume the management of his family’s vineyards. For a few years the life of the young couple had been idyllic, except perhaps for the troubling fact that Jeanne produced no children. But then the religious faith traditional in their families for several generations had brought their ruin.

When Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the uneasy truce between French Catholics and Protestants ended. Like all the other fiercely proud Huguenots—for
proud,
some Frenchmen substituted the word
treasonous
—Charles de Main and his wife were threatened by the purges that soon ravaged their homeland. Once the terror began, it became a serious offense to attempt to leave the country. Just like hundreds of other Huguenots, however, the de Mains made plans to do exactly that.

In the village near the great round-towered Château de Main there was a certain lawyer named Emilion who practiced bigotry and thievery behind a pious expression. He knew the profits to be made in England from the sale of the château’s rich reds and tart whites. He coveted the de Main vineyards, and to get them he paid a groom to inform upon his master and mistress.

Emilion felt the de Mains might try to flee, and before long the groom saw signs of preparations. One word from him to the proper official was all it took. The night the de Mains left, their coach was no more than half a kilometer from the château when the authorities came galloping up behind it.

Charles put his arm around his frightened wife and whispered words of affection to distract her from thinking of what they would face following their arrest—the inquisition by means of which heretical Protestants were forced to recant. Another Huguenot in the neighborhood, caught while dashing to the coast, had died when the inquisitor’s blade slipped and cut off his testicles.

The young nobleman and his wife were kept in prison seventeen days. They were questioned with the aid of knives and hot irons. Neither broke; not outwardly, at least, although toward the end Jeanne alternately screamed and wept without stopping.

They would have died in the dungeon at Chalonnes had it not been for Charles’s uncle in Paris. He was a clever politician who could change his style of worship as effortlessly as he changed satin robes. He knew a few important men whose Catholic principles did not extend to their purses. Bribes were paid; a certain postern was left unlocked. Charles and Jeanne de Main escaped from Nantes in the bilge of a rickety fishing boat that almost capsized in the furious waters of the Channel.

In London other Huguenot refugees pointed them toward Carolina. The colony’s professed religious tolerance made it a likely haven for those of their faith. Months later, depressed by the heat and the arrogance he found after he crossed the ocean, the young nobleman wondered whether the journey—or life itself—was worth the effort. Charles Town was not necessarily lucky for those named Charles. Or so he thought then.

He had simplified his last name to Main to demonstrate that he was making a new start in a new land. Soon his pessimism vanished. In Carolina he was free of many of the rules that had constrained him when he bore a title. He took advantage of that.

He had survived torture—his scarred legs and chest testified to it—and he would survive poverty, too. The greedy little lawyer had stolen his lands and his château, but he would own other land and build another great house. Or his descendants would. Provided Jeanne’s body ever yielded him an heir.

Poor Jeanne. Today her gray eyes were as clear and lovely as ever. But a narrow white streak running all the way through her yellow hair betrayed her suffering in prison. So did her sweet-little-girl’s smile, and the way she hummed and laughed in response to any serious question. She recognized her husband sometimes, but she thought they were still living in France. Her mind hadn’t survived as successfully as her body.

The ruin of Jeanne’s mind hadn’t dampened her passion. But their couplings produced no children. That and his own advancing age, kept Charles sleepless many a night. At thirty a man was growing old; at forty he could say he had lived a long life.

The effort of establishing his little trading station at a ford on the Cooper River above Charles Town had changed him physically, too. He no longer resembled an aristocrat. He was still tall, and slightly stooped because of his height. But poverty, work, and strain had blurred his good looks.

His smile, once quick and gay, looked false, even cruel, when it appeared, which was seldom. Gone was any trace of a prideful bearing. He slouched on the back of the little marsh pony that labored under his weight. He had become almost a brutish parody of his former self.

Today, in fact, he hardly resembled a white man. His hair, brown as his eyes, hung to the middle of his back, tied with a scrap of red rag. His skin was as brown as that of any of the eight shackled and half-clothed human beings staggering along in a file behind him. Although the spring morning was intensely hot, Charles wore full-length trousers of deerskin and a jerkin of old, cracked leather. In his beaded belt were two loaded pistols and two knives. A musket rested across his knees. A slaver learned to be cautious and a good shot.

This was the fourth expedition Charles had made to the Cherokee towns in the foothills of the mountains. Without the occasional sale of some Indians he would have failed as a trader. The little post by the river simply didn’t bring in enough income, even though the Charles Town factors took all the furs he could collect from members of the very same tribes he raided on other occasions.

The seven men and one woman trudging in chains were all in their twenties. Handsome, brown people with wiry limbs and the most beautiful black hair he had ever seen. The girl was especially attractive, he thought. She had a fine bosom. He had earlier noticed that she stared at him frequently. No doubt her large, placid eyes concealed a desire to cut his throat.

Charles rode with his back to the captives because he had an assistant, as heavily armed as he, at the rear of the file. His helper was a hulking half-breed apparently sired by some Spaniard who had wandered up from the Floridas. He was a Yamasee Indian from the northern camps of that tribe. He had come to the trading station a year ago, already knowing a bit of French. He claimed to have no ambition other than to make war on the tribes that were his enemies.

He seemed to like working for Charles. Perhaps that was because there were about thirty different tribes scattered through Carolina, and most of them preyed on all the others; hence for the half-breed, who called himself King Sebastian, vocation and avocation became one.

King Sebastian had a villainous face, and like many other Indians, he enjoyed going about in white men’s finery. Today he wore filthy breeches that had once been pink silk, a brocaded bottle-green coat that hung open to show his huge chest running with sweat, and a great frowsy turban ornamented with paste jewels.

King Sebastian relished the work he was doing. Every so often he would jog his pony up beside the captives and jab one or more in the buttocks with his musket. Usually this produced hateful glares, at which times the half-breed liked to chuckle and utter a warning, as he did now: “Careful, little brother, or I will use this fire stick to make you less than a man.”

“And you be careful,” Charles said in French, having halted his pony to let the column straggle by. The scowls and glares of the captives were unusually ferocious, he noticed. “I’d like to deliver this lot to the vendue table intact, thank you very much.”

King Sebastian resented criticism. He took out his anger on the captives, lashing a laggard with a quirt he kept at his belt. Charles reluctantly let it pass.

The vendue table was the local name for the auction block. In this case it was a secret auction block, out in the country above Charles Town. The Indian slave trade had been illegal in the colony for several years, but it was a profitable business and still common.

What made it attractive was the relatively low risk. Charles’s prisoners, for example, had been snatched at gunpoint from a melon patch at twilight. The Cherokees were both warriors and farmers. When surprised in their fields in the foothills, they could be captured with relative ease. Of course danger was never completely absent.

Few Indians died on the trek to the coast, whereas large numbers of blacks imported from Africa via Bridgetown died on the long sea passage. Further, one couldn’t get into the African trade without owning ships, or at least some capital. All Charles owned was his little outpost, his pony, and his guns.

The heat increased. Clouds of tiny insects bedeviled the procession as it wound through the sand hills. The temperature and the dark smudge of woods on the distant horizon told Charles they were approaching the low-lying coastal plain. Another night plus half a day and they should reach the station, where he reluctantly left Jeanne alone each time he went on an expedition.

He was always on edge during these trips. Today, however, he was more than alert; he was nervous. He noticed the girl watching him again. Was she awaiting an opportune moment when she could signal the men to break away? He dropped back and rode beside King Sebastian the rest of the afternoon.

That night they built a campfire, not for warmth but to keep the insects away. King Sebastian took the first turn on watch.

Charles stretched out with his weapons arranged on his chest and closed his eyes. He began to speculate drowsily about rebuilding his fortune. Somehow he must change direction. He wasn’t making any money, only keeping even. Besides, the isolation of the trading station was no good for Jeanne, even in her sorry mental state. She deserved better, and he wanted to give it to her. He loved her deeply.

However, one couldn’t avoid practical considerations. If he did manage to rebuild his estate, who would inherit it? His poor wife, to whom he had remained faithful—it was the only point of decency left in his life—was not only mad, she was barren.

He was nearly asleep when a clink of chain roused him. His eyes came open at the moment King Sebastian uttered his shout of warning.

The half-breed had fallen asleep too; that much was evident from his seated position and the frenzied way he struggled to aim his musket. The eight Indians, their ankle and wrist chains stretched to full length between them, were rushing toward their captors in a line. The girl, third from the right, was dragged along. She was the one forced to leap directly over the fire.

Terrified, Charles grabbed one of the pistols off his belly.
Christ Jesus, don’t let the powder be damp from the night air.
The pistol didn’t fire. He snatched up the other one.