9
Next day, in Pennsylvania, Billy's wife, Brett, left Belvedere to do an errand. A servant could have gone down to Lehigh Station instead, but she wanted to escape the mansion's overheated sewing room and the volunteer work being done there by the ladies of the house. The work for the Union boys bothered her conscience.
Belvedere, an L-shaped stone mansion of Italianate design, stood beside a second residence on the terraced summit of a hill overlooking the river, the town, and the Hazard ironworks. The other residence was twice as large — forty rooms. It belonged to Stanley Hazard and his dreadful wife, who had left a caretaker behind when they went to Washington.
Brett waited on Belvedere's shady veranda until a groom brought the buggy around. Her thank you was perfunctory, and she practically snatched the whip from his hand. She pushed the whip into the dash socket, then off she went in a cloud of dust, mad at herself for her unwarranted surliness.
Brett was twenty-three, an inheritor of the dark hair and eyes common in the Main family. She was attractive but in a fresher, plainer way than her older sister, Ashton, whom everyone, including Ashton, considered a beauty. Ashton's loveliness was suited to evening, to sweet scent and bare shoulders under candlelight. Brett was a child of daylight and the out of doors, most at home in homely surroundings. People introduced to her for the first time quickly sensed that from her manner and especially from her smile. There was nothing of coquetry in it. Instead, it conveyed a kindness, an openness, often lacking in young women her age.
But that seemed to be changing here in her husband's hometown. People knew she came from South Carolina and sometimes treated her with the care given some wilting exotic flower. Not a few, she supposed, considered her a traitor at heart. That annoyed her, and so did the infernal heat of the afternoon. Her sticky white muslin dress clung to her, and the humidity seemed even worse than that of her native low country.
The longer Billy stayed away — the longer the dread uncertainties of this war continued — the more isolated and unhappy she became. She tried not to show those feelings to George and his wife, Constance, with whom she'd been living since Billy returned to duty. But she was far from perfect, and she knew it. So the groom had taken the brunt, just as one of the servant girls had yesterday.
Perspiration quickly soaked through the palms of her net mittens. Why had she worn them? The buggy horse required sharp tugs of the reins to keep him in the center of the high-crowned, bumpy road that wound down the hillside past the factory. The huge Hazard works generated smoke and noise twenty-four hours a day, rolling out rails and plate for the Union war effort. Lately the company had acquired a contract to cast cannon as well.
Above her, the factory's three stone furnaces dominated the laurel-covered mountain nearest the mansions. Below spread the three levels of the expanding town — solid brick or frame homes the highest, then commercial buildings, and finally shanties on the flats near the railroad line and the bed of the abandoned canal next to the river.
Everywhere, she saw evidence of the war. She passed some boys drilling in a vacant lot to the beat of spoons on a pail; not one of the strutting little soldiers was over ten. The front of the Station House, the good hotel, displayed a great amount of red, white, and blue bunting; George was speaking at a patriotic rally inside the hotel this afternoon. And at the intersection where Valley Street met Canal to form a T, hammers and shouts accompanied construction of a plank platform for the coming celebration on Independence Day.
She drove up to Herbert's General Merchandise and tied the horse to one of the six iron posts in front. As she crossed the walk, she noticed two men watching her from a shaded bench outside the lager-beer saloon two doors down. Their muscular arms and drab clothes told her they probably worked at Hazard's.
Watching her, one man said something to the other, who laughed so hard he nearly spilled his tin growler. Despite the heat, Brett shivered.
The General Merchandise smelled of licorice and rye flour and other items sold by Mr. Pinckney Herbert. The proprietor was a small-boned, bright-eyed man who reminded Brett of a rabbi she'd met once in Charleston. Herbert had been raised in Virginia, where his family had lived since before the Revolution. His conscience had driven him to Pennsylvania when he was twenty; all that he'd brought from the South were his loathing for slavery and the name Pinckney, which he admired and adopted in preference to his real name, Pincus.
'Afternoon, Mrs. Hazard. How may I serve you today?'
'With some heavy white thread, Pinckney. White. Constance and Patricia and I have been sewing havelocks.'
'Havelocks. Well, well.' He avoided her eyes, which was a second comment on the novelty of a Southern girl fashioning protective flaps for the hats of Union soldiers. When George's wife and daughter began — Constance said most of the women in town were doing similar work — Brett joined in because it didn't seem a partisan act to help another human being protect his neck from rain or sunburn. Why, then, did a subterranean sense of disloyalty persist while she sewed?
She paid for the half-dozen spools and left the store. At the sound of a plank creaking, she turned sharply to her left and wished she hadn't. There stood the two idlers, sloshing beer round and round in their tin cans.
'What d'ya hear from Jeff Davis, lady?'
She wanted to call him an idiot but decided it was safer to ignore the remark. She headed for the buggy, alarmed to notice only one other person in sight: a bonneted matron who vanished around a corner. From the Station House came faint cheering; the rally and the afternoon heat had emptied the streets.
She hurried past her horse, heartbeat quickening. She heard sounds behind her — harsh breathing, boots on the hard-packed dirt — and felt the man near a moment before he grabbed her shoulder and yanked her around.
It was the one who'd taunted her. His beard, bushy red with white mingled in, held flecks of beer foam. She smelted the dirt on his clothes and the fumes from his drinking.
'Bet you pray Old Abe will get a seizure some night and fall down dead, huh?' The bearded man's companion found that so funny, he brayed. It caught the attention of two men walking on the other side of the street. When they saw who was being bothered, they went right on.
Slurry of speech, the first man said, 'Still own some niggers back home in Carolina?'
'You drunken jackass,' Brett said. 'Take your hands off me.'
The second man giggled. 'That's the ole reb spirit, ain't it, Lute?'
The first man dug his fingers into Brett's sleeve. Her face contorted. 'Somethin's wrong with your eyesight, woman. I'm a white man. You cain't talk to me like I was one of your damn slaves. Get that in your bonnet, an' this, too. We don't want any secesh traitors paradin' around this town.' He shook her. 'Hear me?'
'Fessenden, let her go, and right now.'
Pinckney Herbert had emerged from his store. The second man ran at him. 'Get back inside, you old Jew.' One hard punch doubled up the merchant and knocked him back through the door. He tried to rise, while Fessenden dropped his growler and grasped Brett's shoulders, shaking and twisting them so as to hurt her and, perhaps, touch her breasts with his forearms, too.
Herbert grasped the door frame and struggled to pull himself up. The second man hit him under the chin. Herbert crashed down on his back with an involuntary yell. Brett knew she could scream for help, but it ran against the grain. Abruptly, fright seemed to defeat her. She sagged in Fessenden's grip, her eyes half shut.
'Please, please let me go!' Were any tears coming? 'Oh, please — I'm just a poor female. Not strong like you —'
'Now that's what I 'spect a little Southern girl ought to sound like.' Laughing, Fessenden slipped an arm around her waist, pushed her against the buggy wheel, bent near, his beard scraping her cheek. 'Say pretty please an' see what happens.'
Apparently she didn't understand. 'I'm not — big and burly like you — You must be kind — polite — Won't you do that? Won't you?' Small, desperate sighs and gulps fell between the quivering words of the plea.
'I'll think on it, missy,' Fessenden promised. His other hand took hold of her skirt and the petticoats beneath and the leg beneath those. That left her hands free.
'You Yankee scum.' She raised the leg he wasn't holding and drove it into his privates. While he screamed
