One
The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
—William Shakespeare,
The Tempest, III, ii
One
Mockjack Bay, Virginia
April 1854
Hunter Calhoun started drinking early that day. Yet the sweet fire of the clear, sharp whiskey failed to bring on the oblivion he thirsted for. Lord above, he needed that blurred, blissful state. Needed to feel nothing for a while. Because what he felt was a lot worse than nothing.
Gazing out a window at the sluggish, glass-still waters of the bay, he noticed that the buoy was sinking and a few more planks had rotted off the dock. The plantation had no proper harbor but a decent anchorage—not that it mattered now.
“That poor Hunter Calhoun,” folks called him when they thought he was too drunk to notice. They always spoke of him with a mixture of pity and relief—pity, that the misfortune had happened to him, and relief, that it had not happened to them. In general, women thought it romantic and tragic that he’d lost his wife in such a spectacular fashion; the men were slightly disdainful and superior—they’d never let that sort of disaster befall their womenfolk.
Calhoun glared down into his whiskey glass, willing the amber liquid to numb him before he talked himself out of what he knew he must do. He experienced a strange, whimsical fantasy: the whiskey was a pool he could dive into, headfirst. If the ocean was whiskey and I was a duck, I’d swim to the bottom and never come up.
A sound of disgust from the adjoining room alerted him that he’d sung the lines of the old ditty aloud.
“Don’t go clucking your tongue at me, Miz Nancy,” he called out. “I can sing. A man has every right to sing in his own house.”
“Humph. You call that singing? I thought the neighbors’ hounds just treed a coon.” The gentle clack of her knitting needles punctuated the statement.
He finished his drink with a long swig, and oh-so-silently set his glass on the age-scarred sideboard.
“Don’t matter how quiet you try to be,” Nancy called. “I know you been at the spirits.” A moment later she stepped through the open pocket doors and came into the shabby parlor, her cane tapping along the floor until it encountered the threadbare carpet. Her African face, wizened by years she had never learned to count, held equal measures of patience and exasperation. Her eyes, clouded with blindness, seemed to peer into a deeper part of him even he didn’t see. Nancy had the uncanny ability to track his progress through a room, or worse, to track his very thoughts sometimes.
“Humph,” she said again, this time with a self-righteous snort. “How you going to shoot a gun if you all full up with Jim Hooker’s whiskey?”
Hunter gave a humorless laugh, poured another drink and gulped it down. She was the only person he knew who could actually hear a man drinking. “Drunk or sober, Nancy, have you ever known me to miss a target?”
Setting his empty glass on the smoke-stained mantel, he said, “Excuse me. I’ve got something I have to do.” He paused to fill his silver hip flask with more whiskey. Nancy waited in silence, but he felt the cold bluster of her temper as if she’d scolded him aloud.
It was too much to hope she wouldn’t follow him. He could hear the busy tap-tap of her cane as she shuffled along behind him, down the central hall toward the back of the big house. In his parents’ day, the gun room had been a hive of activity on hunt mornings, when neighbors from all over Northampton County came to call. Now the room contained only the most necessary of firearms—a Le Mats revolver, a percussion shotgun and a Winchester repeating rifle. He went to the gun cabinet and took down the Winchester, cocking open the side loading gate to make sure it was well oiled.
It was. He had known this moment was coming. In preparation, he had lit himself with whiskey, but suddenly strong drink wasn’t enough.
He looped a deerskin sack of .44-40 cartridges to his belt, then stood for a moment at the window, staring out the wavy glass at the broad gardens of Albion. Dogwood and rhododendron grew profusely at the verges, though the flower beds had a weedy, untended look.
“You best get a move on,” said Nancy. “Miz Beaumont took the children off to lessons at Bonterre for the day, and you want this dirty business done ‘fore they get back.”
“I reckon I do.” He flinched, picturing his son Blue’s silent censure when the boy learned what had happened in his absence. Blue had suffered so much loss already, and here his own father was about to take something else from him.
A wave of self-loathing washed over Hunter. Earlier that morning, he had sat down to breakfast with the children, putting jam on Belinda’s biscuit and pouring the cream for Blue, pretending—God, always pretending—that things were right between them.
With her strange, unerring sense of direction, Nancy joined him at the window and caught hold of his arm. “I’m real sorry, son. I’m just as sorry as I can be,” she said, gently fingering a rip in the sleeve of his shirt.
“I know you are, honey.” He stared down at the dark, papery-dry hand, the knuckles gnarled and shiny with rheumatism. That hand had soothed his feverish brow when he was a baby and dried his little-boy tears. It had mended his breeches with a lightning flash of the needle, and, when the occasion warranted it, delivered a smack to his backside a time or two, though never without drawing him into a hug afterward.
And when he had signed the manumission papers to set her free, that trembling hand had cupped his cheek, her touch more eloquent than the words she could not summon.
Nancy’s mothering hand couldn’t soothe him now. His nervous fingers strayed to the slim hip flask in his pocket, but he didn’t take it out. Nothing could soothe him this morning.
“I’ll be back by and by, honey,” he said to Nancy, then stepped out on the veranda.
Setting his jaw, he jerked open the gate of the rifle and loaded the cartridges. Then he hitched back his shoulders and strode down the steps to the walkway. The brilliant Virginia morning mocked him with its bright promise. Thready high clouds veined the April sky, and sunlight flooded extravagantly down through the twisted live oaks of Albion. The long misty acres rose up into the sloping green hills.
At one time the tidewater plantation had been as busy as a small village. Tobacco fields had covered hundreds of acres; the cultivation and curing of the leaves had occupied hundreds of hands. Now everything had changed. All that remained were Hunter and his children, a small staff of misfits and a dream that was about to be shattered.
Not for the first time, he contemplated giving up, selling out. Would a prospective buyer notice the chipping paint on the soaring columns that flanked the entranceway? Would he see the brambles and creeper that encroached on the once-pristine lawn?
Would a buyer see the work and sweat that had gone into the riding hall, the round pen and lunging ring, the barns and paddocks and the only mile oval racing track in the county? Would the mares and foals in the hills show themselves? Would a stranger be dazzled by Albion’s wild promise, or disappointed by its failed glory?
He simply didn’t know. These days, he had no answers.
