V laughed at Florida, and Jeff looked at V, uncomfortable and embarrassed and a little angry.
He recovered and said, Miss Howell, by now you’ve probably learned that anything Cousin Florida says is suspect.
And then to Florida he said, Where is Old Joe? I have a business matter.
—Of course you do. He’s in the office, but you know that. He lives there. Why don’t you show V our steam-powered cotton gin. She’s only been shown it twice since she got here.
Jeff shook his head and kept walking. After he passed through the front door, Florida turned to look at V.
All it took was a lift of eyebrow on V’s part and Florida started spilling a story.
She told how Jeff’s first little wife, Knoxie, remained close in his heart long after her death, her loss haunting him to the extent that he had lived in almost hermitic seclusion for nearly a decade. How in the early days of mourning—after Jeff and Pemberton went to Havana to sketch and read and recover from her loss and Jeff got arrested as a spy by the Cubans because he sketched too many fortifications—he and Pemberton had lived like savages out on Brierfield, going a month at a time without sticking their heads out of their hole—living in nearly identical log cabins they built themselves. It was just Jeff and Pemberton and a few slaves. Jeff would turn up his sleeves and clear land all day like he didn’t care if he worked himself to death or anybody else either. Florida said that Jeff and Pemberton had been together since before West Point, and after graduation—because Jeff’s grades were poor and a few of the faculty wrote scathing letters of evaluation—they found themselves stationed way up in the northwest wilderness. Nothing but dark fir forests and cold rivers, and frontier forts. Stockades of palings with the bark left on, the top ends sharpened to points with axes, like rows of upright primitive pencils. Otherwise just bears and wolves and Indians and British and French moving south out of Canada. Then before long Knoxie and Jeff fell in love. Her daddy, Zachary Taylor, was the officer in charge of the fort and didn’t want his daughter to marry a soldier, or at least didn’t want her to marry Cousin Jeff. So Jeff quit the army. They ran off and got married with none of her people there, and headed down the river on their honeymoon. Before they made it to New Orleans, they both got sick, and she died but he did not. That song “The Fairy Bells”—she was singing it when she died in his arms. At least that was the story. And he’d been wearing some degree of mourning ever since—seven years—until today.
A FEW DAYS LATER, Jeff invited V to ride with him and have a look at Brierfield. The Hurricane’s horse barn was two dozen stalls at least, filled with beautiful Kentucky thoroughbreds. V walked to the barn in what she had always worn riding since she started at five or six, a split skirt for sitting astride. She rode well due to lessons and lots of lonely hours along the bluffs of the Mississippi, jumping gullies and fallen trees.
Jeff looked at her with some concern. He said, We’ll need to retack. I’ve had a sidesaddle ready for you on a reliable gelding, very calm.
V walked down the barn aisle and saw a bay mare looking white-eyed out of the stall. V held out the back of her hand and the horse leaned her velvet nose and took a deep breath and relaxed her ears, though she kept tossing her head and then made one quick spin in the stall and came back to breathe V’s hand.
V said, Her, please.
THEY RODE OUT to Brierfield side by side, sometimes at a walk and sometimes racing along past stretches of woods and big empty fields and pastures and smaller fields of cool weather crops—greens and root vegetables mostly. During the walking, they talked about the personalities of horses and about his house. The nearer they came to Brierfield the more Jeff apologized for his miscalculations in the design. He aspired to equal his namesake in every regard, and this was only his first attempt as architect.
When they arrived, V saw that he was right to apologize. The house was no Monticello. Just a plastered cat-and-clay construction without even a real chimney of stone or brick, just more cat-and-clay. The house lacked a gallery and made do with an awkwardly proportioned stoop sheltering the front door. The windows sat high on the walls and very small.
A black man, middle-aged, met them in the yard and held V’s mare as she dismounted. He stood a couple of inches taller than Jeff, nearly as slim, and he wore about the same clothes Jeff did, except a little more worn. And a fine Panama hat frazzled at the front edge of the brim. Long fingers with big joints. Unless he was being addressed, his eyes looked into the middle distance like a hunter with a gun in his hands waiting.
Jeff said, Thank you, Pemberton. I’m going to show Miss Howell around and then we’ll go back to The Hurricane shortly, so no need to untack. Just water and a little hay to keep them busy. Then come find us. If Miss Howell has questions about what we’ve done here and what we plan to do, I might need your help explaining.
As Pemberton led the horses away, V couldn’t stop looking at him. She had expected him to be some deep friend from West Point, a fellow newly minted lieutenant up on the northern frontier—half of a special pairing that human males make in late adolescence and sometimes have a hard time giving up.
Instead, Jeff owned Pemberton, held title to him. Legal papers.
V said, So, how long . . . ?
Jeff said, Since I was fourteen.
WALKING INSIDE THE HOUSE jolted the
