Ruth’s Journey Read online

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  Three nights later high winds forced the British squadron into desperate tacks to hold their position. Although Captain Caldwell had assured Solange he’d notify her when he was ready to sail, Solange and her family boarded immediately. Solange feared one of those last-minute so regrettable mistakes. When Major Brissot and his improved reputation departed Saint-Domingue, the Forniers would depart too. A single portmanteau held their belongings, softer fabrics cushioning the blue and gold Sevres tea set. Jewelry, a few gold louis, and a charged four-barrel pepperbox pistol were stowed in Solange’s reticule. She had sewn her precious dower agreement and letter of credit into Ruth’s petticoat.

  By morning, the British blockaders were blown out to sea and the horizon was empty of their sails, but Major Brissot didn’t appear until ten o’clock. Soldiers carried the general’s precious trunks aboard and then had to be mustered and counted and two deserter-stowaways plucked from hidey-holes before they cast off. Captain Caldwell was anxious; though officially neutral, American ships carrying French booty were legitimate prizes.

  It was brisk and sunny, and the air was brilliantly clean. Beside Captain Caldwell, Major Brissot winced at two shots from the quay. “There but for the grace of God,” he murmured.

  The captain urged his quartermaster to crack on more sail before turning to his important passenger. “A fine day, monsieur. Excellent. If the winds hold, we’ll make swift passage.”

  Alexandre smiled sadly. “Good-bye, Saint-Domingue, accursed island. Your voudou men have cursed us. All of us.”

  The captain sniffed. “I am a Christian, sir.”

  “Yes. As are they.”

  As the island sank to the horizon, a thin column of smoke lingered above what might have been a plantation, or a town, or perhaps a crossroads where men were squabbling, fighting, and dying.

  Alexandre shuddered. “The Negroes . . . They love us, but they hate us too. I shall never understand . . .”

  “You are well out of it.”

  “I have left too much behind.”

  Captain Caldwell grinned. “You have left less than you think. Have you inspected your accommodations?”

  “Sir?”

  When Alexandre stepped into his cabin, he was startled to find a small girl serving breakfast to a fellow he may have met somewhere, sometime, and a woman he remembered too vividly. “Madame!”

  “Ah. Look, Augustin, it is my lover, Alexandre. Isn’t he handsome?”

  The husband so addressed set his fork down to examine his rival equably. “Good day, Major Brissot.”

  Solange said, “Alexandre, your uncle holds violent opinions about whom one may or may not love. My subterfuge spared you and restored your—and your family’s—reputation.”

  Alexandre stuttered his outrage. Why, why had Madame For­nier involved herself in his affairs?

  “Sir”—Solange smiled too triumphantly—“I have repaired your reputation at some cost to my own. Don’t I deserve your thanks?”

  Apparently not. Despite steady winds and exceptionally fine weather, their voyage was awkward and unpleasant. Alexandre sulked. Augustin was depressed. Solange, who had spent her childhood on small boats, was intensely seasick. Ruth was the sailors’ favorite. They spoiled her mercilessly with sweets and taught her “American” English. A burly seaman carried her to the tip-top of the mainmast.

  “I swayed out over the water,” she told Solange. “I could see all the world.”

  When they landed in Freeport, a fast schooner was waiting for Alexandre and his uncle’s booty. Alexandre made an effort. “Madame, you are a formidable woman.”

  “No, sir. I am ‘redoubtable.’ Your Joli is lost. Surely there are other Jolis?”

  Alexandre examined Solange until her gaze faltered. “Ignorance is always cruel.”

  * * *

  Although he was sailing for Boston, Captain Caldwell would call at Savannah, Georgia, a city he assured the Forniers was prosperous, cosmopolitan, and where (nodding at Ruth), unlike Boston, slavery was legal. Solange had made all the decisions she could bear to make and Augustin couldn’t help. Savannah would have to do.

  And, for just two louis, the Forniers could retain their cabin. A bargain, Caldwell assured them. The Irish immigrants he took aboard would have paid more.

  Solange and Ruth took the air on the quarterdeck, ignoring the stares and just audible remarks of less fortunate fellow passengers. Solange did wonder if Augustin had left something very important on the island, but she didn’t ask. Her husband rarely left the cabin.

  In shallow waters off Florida, the weather deteriorated, and the leadsman chanted night and day. Driving rain flogged the deck and the huddled Irish passengers. Two unfortunate infants died and were consigned to the deep.

  As they pelted northeast, the rain relented but the wind was biting.

  The captain reduced sail as they approached the delta where the Savannah River emptied into the Atlantic. “Mistress, mistress, come look!” Ruth pulled Solange to the rail and clambered up to see better.

  “The New World.” A burly Irishman betrayed no enthusiasm.

  Solange, fresh from quarreling with Augustin, did not need a new friend. “Oui!”

  The man’s thick dirty hair was brushed back, and he smelled powerfully of the bay rum he’d applied in lieu of soap and water. “You’d be one of them Frenchies the niggers chased off?”

  “My husband was a planter.”

  “Terrible hard work, all that stoopin’ and hoein’.”

  “Captain Fornier was a planter. Not a field hand.”

  “Betimes rebellions overturns masters and betimes they overturns field hands. Turnabout bein’ fair play and all.”

  “You, monsieur; are you too the debris of rebellion?”

  “We are. Me brother and me, the both of us.” He smiled. Some of his teeth had been broken, all were stained. “Do you reckon it matters if the hand that fastens your noose is white or black?”

  “Sir, don’t distress the child,” Solange said. “She knows nothing about such matters.”

  The Irishman studied Ruth. “Nay, ma’am, I reckon this child knows a muchness.”

  A pilot boat battered over the bar; a seaman in oilskins climbed the rope ladder and had a word with Captain Caldwell before taking his place beside the helmsman, hands clasped behind his back.

  The ship eased up a channel through an estuary pocked with brushy islands and pale sandbars. It looked nothing like Saint-Malo. Ruth took Solange’s cold hand in her warmer one.

  Reluctantly the tide loosed them to slip inland between a wall of gray-green trees dripping with ghostly moss and a vivid yellow-green salt marsh. Directly, this wilderness gave way to a port where big and little ships docked and anchored, beneath an ­American city on the bluff above their mastheads.

  Augustin came on deck blinking in the sunlight.

  Savannah’s bluff was faced with five-story warehouses, and staircases wriggled back and forth as if embarrassed by what space they required. The docks were frantic with carts and wagons while spindly cranes delivered cargo from ship to shore and reverse.

  The pilot eased them alongside this confusion and scurried down his rope ladder indifferent to the shouted promises of New World hucksters: “I want your silks and by Jehoshaphat I’ll pay for them!” “British and French banknotes discounted! I have U.S. and Georgia banknotes in hand.”

  After the gangplank was lowered, their meager possessions clasped fast, the immigrants hurried into their future. A small man in a white waistcoat and top hat confronted Solange’s Irishman. “Work for the willing. Stevedores, draymen, drovers, wherrymen, laborers. Irish and free coloreds treated same as white.”

  As Solange came up the burly Irishman set his bundle down and inclined his ear. He shook his head no, but the small man clutched
his sleeve, whereupon, pursued by his top hat, he was flung into the river. “And a Killarney greeting to you, my man. Selling work is a shabby business.”

  “Silks, jewelry, gold or silver, gewgaws? Madame? You won’t find fairer prices in all Georgia.”

  Solange brushed by with “Invariably, sir, those most eager to help strangers offer the least.”

  The little family humped their portmanteau up three landings to Bay Street, a broad boulevard where coloreds unloaded cotton bales and rough-cut lumber into warehouses.

  Solange rested on a wooden bench wiping her brow. Among the mercantile bustle, gentlefolk exchanged gay greetings, promenading through Negroes and Irish as if they didn’t exist. Solange felt poor.

  Some shops facing the boulevard were busy, others silent as rejection. A six-horse lumber wagon rumbled by, off wheel squealing. Some coloreds were respectably dressed, others wore rags that scarcely observed the conventions of decency. River breezes refreshed the promenade. Solange dabbed perspiration from her brow. Augustin was pale, silent, and diminished. Augustin could not be sick. That would be too much! Solange elbowed her husband and was relieved by his querulous protest.

  She sent Ruth to inquire for a moneylender. The coloreds would know who offered fair value. She told Augustin to remove his outer coat. Did he wish to poach like an egg?

  Her husband’s smile begged for tenderness, an emotion Solange had less of. In this hard, uncouth new country, tenderness would impede her progress.

  A dray braked as its driver berated another. They concluded their loud confrontation by leaning from their perches for vigorous, mutual backslapping.

  Solange was so very alone. “Augustin?”

  “Yes, my dear.” His too familiar, too flat voice. His damnable despair!

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  Augustin did try. “Dear Solange. Thanks to your cleverness, we have escaped Hell!” His pale lips and jacked-up eyebrows seemed to believe it too. “Le Bon Dieu . . . ah, He has been so merciful.”

  Was this the man she’d married? What had the island done to him?

  Ruth returned with an elderly Negro in tow. “Mister Minnis, he fine honest Jewish gentleman, ma’am,” the Negro informed her. “He bein’ glad buy or loan ’gainst your jewels and gold.”

  “Jewels and gold?”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am. You pickaninny, she say how much you bringin’. King’s ransom. My, my.”

  Before Solange could correct his misapprehension, Ruth dragged Augustin to his feet. “Come along, Master Augustin,” she cried. “Soon you be joyful again.”

  At Mister Solomon Minnis’s residence on Reynolds Square, the servant left them on the piazza, assuring them that “Mr. Minnis be seein’ you straightaway, yes, sir: straightaway.”

  At ten o’clock on a winter morning, Mr. Minnis was unshaven in nightshirt, slippers, and robe, but he bought their silks—including Solange’s green voile ball dress—and loaned against her jewelry and cobalt blue tea set. She could have payment in coin or scrip.

  “At what discount?”

  “Ah, no, no. No discount, madame. The notes are redeemable today, in this city in silver. A branch of the Bank of the United States is established in Savannah, and there’s to be a substantial bank building erected come spring. The cotton trade requires such.”

  Each of Solange’s notes assured that the “President and Directors of the Bank of the United States promise to pay twenty dollars at their offices of Discount and Deposit at Savannah to F. A. Pickens, the President thereof, or to BEARER.”

  “Satisfactory,” the bearer said, stowing her notes with the three silver Spanish reals that completed Mr. Minnis’s purchase and pawn.

  As his Negro servant discreetly removed Solange’s valuables, Mr. Minnis asked about Saint-Domingue: Were the Negro rebels as brutal as reported? Were white women subjected to . . .

  Solange said rebel atrocities were too harsh and too numerous to relate, but that was then and this was now and her family required accommodations during their stay in Savannah.

  Although refugees and immigrants had strained Savannah’s modest housing stock and not a few families camped in the squares, Mr. Minnis knew a widow who might rent the coachman’s apartment over her carriage house.

  They moved into two bare rooms that afternoon and Solange engaged a cook.

  Impoverished immigrants competed for laboring jobs with colored servants, like Solange’s cook, who’d been rented out “on the town” by her master.

  Since Augustin Fornier couldn’t “do” anything, he must “be” someone. Solange told her husband he was “a prominent colonial planter: one of Napoleon’s bravest field officers.”

  After lifting her husband’s spirits, Solange made love to him. In the afterglow, Augustin fell into deep, satisfied slumber while the sweaty, discontented Solange lay stiffly at his side. Although Ruth’s regular breathing rose from the straw pallet at the foot of their bed, Solange didn’t think the child was asleep.

  If necessary, a pretty maidservant would fetch a good price. Yes, Ruth adored her, and, yes, she was fond of the child, but one does what one must. What had Alexandre meant when he called her “ignorant”? Of what was Solange Escarlette Fornier ignorant?

  Augustin snored his unimaginative drone and wasn’t up the next morning when Solange dispatched Ruth and Cook to the market and sat down to write Dear Papa! So Far Away! So Desperately Missed!

  How Papa’s favorite daughter had suffered. Sucarie du Jardin had been a Fornier fraud! Her husband was useless. Had it not been for Escarlette wit, they’d be trapped on Saint-Domingue at the mercy of rebellious savages! Thanks to Le Bon Dieu they were safe in Savannah. If Papa’s favorite daughter had known then what she now knew, she would never have left Saint-Malo!

  Solange didn’t promise Dear Papa a new grandchild, not in so many words. She only suggested that Dear Papa might soon have a happy surprise! She grieved over her pawned jewelry and cobalt blue teacups but scratched that sentence out. Dear Papa would have starved before he pawned one Escarlette treasure!

  There was nothing for civilized French people in this hemisphere. Might she come home?

  She wiped her pen and capped the inkwell. Morning sun poured through her window. Savannah birds haggled, and camellias flaunted fat, bawdy flowers. As she sanded and folded her letter, Solange felt a little less certain of what she had written. Perhaps . . .

  Troubles had come so fast and in such bewildering profusion!

  A not unpleasant lassitude crept into her bones; she was safe this morning, and American songbirds were auditioning for her approval.

  Solange crushed coffee beans into a muslin bag and poured boiling water through it into her cup. The rich aroma tickled her nostrils.

  She reappraised matters. They were in America; she, her husband, and the child who was almost more than a servant. If they returned to France, what were their realistic prospects? Poor Augustin would always be a second son, but in Saint-Malo he’d be the second son complicit in the loss of the Sucarie du Jardin, which Solange understood would grow more valuable in everyone’s mind the longer it was lost.

  Negroes lived in Africa. What would happen to Ruth in Saint-Malo? When Solange’s ebony companion grew into womanhood (Solange shuddered to think), what would Solange do? In France, she couldn’t sell her.

  Solange’s eldest sister had married a legislator and produced a healthy Escarlette grandson. Her second sister was affianced to a cavalryman and would, in due course, produce satisfactory offspring.

  While Solange Fornier was the failed second son’s childless wife with an unusual very dark-skinned handmaiden.

  She drank her coffee, waked Augustin, fed him a roll and an orange, and brushed flecks from his coat. She inflated his pride, insisting her hero was her Hero. “Brave men do what must be done.” She kissed him on th
e cheek and sent him forth into the world.

  When Ruth and Cook returned, they were chattering in some heathen tongue, but when Solange evinced displeasure, Ruth begged pardon very prettily.

  That afternoon, Solange walked to Mr. Haversham’s home, whose drawing room served (until the permanent structure could be built) as the Savannah branch of the Bank of the United States. The cherry wainscoting, florid wallpaper, and elegant ceiling medallion contrasted with the great iron safe crammed into the narrow doorway of what had been Haversham’s butler’s pantry.

  Mr. Haversham studied Solange’s impressively sealed and notarized letter of credit. “Very good, madame. Please ask your husband to come by to open an account.”

  Whereupon Solange laid her dower agreement beside the letter of credit.

  Mr. Haversham ignored it while he explained, as if to a child, that, under Georgia law, Solange was a Fem Covert, and as a married woman could hold no property in her own name. He smiled agreeably. “Some liberal husbands accommodate their wives. Why, my own dear wife has full authority over our household accounts . . .”

  Impatiently Solange unfolded and tapped the agreement. “You do read French?”

  “Madame . . .”

  “This attests to my right to hold property under my own name under the régime de In fiparatum de bient. Since this agreement preceded my marriage and was freely entered into by my husband, I am, under French law or the laws of any civilized country, a Fem Sole—exactly as if I were an unmarried female heir or widow. Should you require a translation, I can arrange one.”

  The banker raised a mildly surprised but not disapproving eyebrow. “Madame, not every American is a provincial. I am conversant with French legal instruments.” He pushed his glasses back on his nose, and under a very large magnifying glass he scrutinized the document, its seals, signatures, and notarization. His chair squeaked when he leaned back. “Your documents are in order. Naturally I must have verification of your French balance before I advance your funds.” He plucked a Georgia Gazette from a wicker basket at his feet and opened to the shipping register. “L’Herminie sails this afternoon for Amsterdam, and she’s a fast sailor. We might have verification in . . . say . . . nine weeks?” He rose and bowed. “Your obedient servant, ma’am. Welcome to Savannah. I trust you will prosper here.”