"Certainly." This time there was no fumbling as she slipped her arm around his. She felt at ease, womanly. No one paid them any heed as they strolled up Church in the mellow spring light.
"I'd love for you to meet my family," Theo said.
"I'd like that, too."
"I have eleven brothers and sisters."
"Good heavens," she cried.
He grinned. "I love them, but it did make for a crowded household, and skimpy portions at the table. Father's wage wasn't big enough to handle so many mouths. He's a Lutheran minister."
"Oh, dear. Not an abolitionist, too?"
"Yes, he was."
"And a Republican?"
"I'm afraid so. I'm the second youngest child, so I always had to sleep on the floor. We didn't have enough beds. It's the reason I joined the Army. To have a bed of my own and regular meals. Soldiers grouse about the poor food and bad mattresses. For me, it's the life of a prince."
Seeing the Tradd Street intersection but one square away, she said, "Like you, I'm very glad the Army brought you here, Theo." She was shocked by her own boldness.
As they walked on, she told him about the loss of her brother off the North Carolina coast, and the harrowing moments in the sea when she feared they'd all drown. "Papa was much less severe before Judah died. It did something to him, and he's never recovered."
"That's tragic. It does explain the way he reacted to me. I hope it isn't an impossible obstacle." In the shadow of a high brick wall, he faced her and clasped her hand. "I want to pay court to you in the proper way — You're frowning."
"Well, it would be much easier if you were — not what you are."
"As in Mr. Shakespeare's play?"
"What?"
"Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? In other words, why am I Romeo, a Montague? An enemy? Will it truly make a difference?"
Marie-Louise went swirling down into the blue whirlpools of his eyes, abandoning herself to emotions so fierce, she wondered if she could endure them. "No," she declared, all at once very certain of what she wanted. "No, it shall not."
"Your father —"
"No," she repeated confidently.
He left her at the gate of the Tradd Street house, promising to call formally the next afternoon. With a parting clasp of her hand, he was gone, leaving her floating there, several feet above the mundane earth.
"No!" Cooper clattered his spoon against the bowl of lamb stew. "I won't have some Yankee freebooter calling on my daughter."
Marie-Louise started to cry.
Judith reached out to squeeze her daughter's hand. To her husband she said, "It's a perfectly reasonable request."
"If he were a Southerner. One of us."
"Aunt Brett married a Yankee officer —" Marie-Louise began.
"Without causing the collapse of civilization as we know it," Judith remarked.
The irony was lost. "I refuse to have some yellow dog from Canby's staff sniffing around my family."
"You make it sound so crude and nasty," Marie-Louise cried. "It isn't like that."
"Please reconsider, Cooper," Judith began. He shot his chair back and rose. "Allow my daughter to be courted by a shoulder-straps whose father is a Bible-thumping Republican? I'd sooner have that fellow LaMotte in my house.
The decision is made. I am going to the garden to work while the light lasts."
With quick strides that rapped hard on the polished floor, he left the room. Judith braced for a new flood of tears. Instead, she was surprised by what she saw in her daughter's eyes. A silent rage not at all typical of a girl so young.
Marie-Louise wiped her cheeks. She kept staring at the doorway through which her father had disappeared.
Later, when it was dark, Judith went quickly to the piazza overlooking the garden. Insects circled the oil lamp burning on a wicker table. In a chair beside the table, Cooper had fallen asleep, his waistcoat open, his cravat undone.
Stepping over papers covered with columns of figures, she leaned over to wake him by kissing his forehead. Cooper jerked erect, momentarily unsure of his whereabouts.
"It's almost ten o'clock, Cooper. Marie-Louise ran up to her room right after we ate, and I've scarcely heard a sound since. I think you should go make peace, if that's possible."
"I did nothing wrong. Why must I —?" Judith's look silenced him. Rubbing his eyes, he stood. "All right."
She listened to his slow step ascending the stairs. Heard a faint knock. "Marie-Louise?" She was gazing into the dark garden when he came bolting down again, shouting. "She's gone."
"What are you saying?"
"She must have used the side stairway. Her room's empty, half her clothes are missing. She's gone!"
The specklike insects circled the flickering lamp. Judith allowed herself anger for the first time. "This is your doing. You've driven her out."
"That's impossible. She's a mere girl."
"Of marriageable age, I remind you. Many South Carolina girls are mothers at fourteen. You misjudged her attachment to that young man. Because of him — and you — she's run away."
A muffled pounding broke through the mists of sleep. Trying to interpret the sound, Madeline slowly raised her head. She heard Prudence Chaffee stirring in the other bedroom. The pounding grew louder. "Please — someone —" A woman's voice. Madeline thought she should recognize it, but she didn't. She was still too sleepy. Was it one of the freedmen's wives?
Prudence lighted her lamp and brought it to the door of Madeline's room. Her plain, stout face was alert, her eyes anxious. "Do you think it's trouble with the school?"
"I don't know." Barefoot, Madeline went to the front door. "It's the middle of the night."
It was actually morning, she discovered as soon as she opened the door. Between the great trees she saw jigsaw pieces of orange-tinted sky. The light silhouetted a disheveled figure on the stoop.
"Aunt Madeline —"
She couldn't have been more stunned if Andrew Johnson had come calling. "Marie-Louise! What are you doing here?"
"Please let me come in, and I'll explain. I walked all night."
"You walked all the way from Charleston?" Prudence exclaimed. ''Twenty miles, by yourself, on a dark road, and you didn't think twice about it?"
In the space of a heartbeat Madeline knew something dire had happened. A death? Some act of violence? Then she saw the bulging valise. People didn't pack a valise in order to report a tragedy.
"There's this boy. Papa refuses to let him court me. I love him, Aunt Madeline. I love him and Papa hates him."
So that was it. A young girl in love would do many a dangerous or thoughtless deed when her mind was fixed on her own problems. She remembered how it was with Orry; how romantic emotions had swept away many a practicality, and all fear of danger.
"Will you let me stay, Aunt Madeline? I won't go back to Tradd Street."
Then there would surely be trouble with Cooper. But Madeline couldn't turn her away. "Come in," she said, stepping back to welcome the breathless fugitive.
WHITE MEN — TO ARMS!
Today the mongrel "Legislature" convenes in Columbia. The maddest, most unscrupulous and infamous revolution in our history has snatched the power from the hands of the race which settled the country, and transferred it to its former slaves, an ignorant and corrupt race.
This unlawful and misbegotten assembly will trample the fairest and noblest states of our great sisterhood beneath the unholy hoofs of African savages and shoulder-strapped brigands. The millions of freeborn, high-souled countrymen and countrywomen are surrendered to the rule of gibbering, louse-eaten, devil-worshiping barbarians from the jungles of Dahomey, and peripatetic buccaneers from Cape Cod, Boston, and Hell.
The hour is late; the cause is life itself; our sole recourse is force of arms.