“Your father? Does he live here, too?”
She laughs. “Oh, no, ma’am. My daddy’s passed on, a few years back. And he never did live with us. I was born on what we call the wrong side of the blanket, you know. My daddy’s a white man, a businessman who used to come out here from time to time. He was friends with old Mr. Fitzwilliam, though Mr. Fitzwilliam visited the place but once or twice. But my daddy met my mama here, one of those times, and they fell in love, and—well, here I am. Not of one world nor the other. Betwixt and between.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. You can’t change folks, and you make yourself unhappy trying. Why, I was lucky, by any measure. I had everything I needed. My daddy did love my mama, loved her dearly, even if he had a wife elsewhere. A family elsewhere. He was one of those fellows who possessed what you might call an excess of love for the female sex. And he did want the best for me. He surely did. Paid for me to go up north and study at the finest college money could buy. But we didn’t suit, Radcliffe and me.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Now, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, don’t you go giving me that look.”
“What look?”
“That pity look. Poor little Negro, she woulda had such a bad time among all the white folks. It wasn’t like that. No, ma’am. I was their pet darkie. You just about had to invite me to lunch or to teatime, if you wanted to pass muster your first semester. All those clever, rich Brahmin girls, they simply couldn’t wait to be my bosom friend.” She plucks at the cookie, examining each piece against the light before popping it into her mouth, so that I can’t help wondering what she’s looking for.
“So what happened?”
“I got homesick. Who wouldn’t?” She makes a long gesture of her arm, toward the tall French windows. “For one thing, Florida’s got all these characters. It’s like the Wild West sometimes. Billy the Kid got nothing on some of these moonshiners and gladesmen.”
“I wish I could meet one of them.”
Miss Bertram snorts. “No, you don’t, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. Not especially in the state you’re in.”
“Why, what state am I in?”
She sets down the remains of the shortbread, dusts the crumbs from her fingers, and strokes my hand. “I’m going to tell you a little story, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. I think it’s about time you had to know it.”
“Know what?”
“It’s about Mr. Fitzwilliam. It was just after Christmas, you see. He’d had a big old dustup with his brother, over there in Cocoa. Had to do with all those ships and what they were carrying.”
“Moonshine.”
“Oh, so you figured that out, did you?”
“It wasn’t hard.”
“Well, but you’re just a New Yorker, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. You don’t know from moonshine. Anyway, it wasn’t just what was going out, you see. It was what was coming in. Rum, mostly. Rum from Cuba, rum from the Bahamas. A nice little business. Anyway, you know how it is with business. Once you start to make a little money, other folks want a piece of your action. And the folks who wanted a piece of Mr. Fitzwilliam’s action, well, they weren’t nice folks. So Mr. Fitzwilliam, like a good gambler, he decided he was going to quit while he was ahead. He was going to use that profit to pay off the outlaws once and for all and go back to the ways things were. Honest cargo.”
Her voice, low and sort of rhythmic, affects me like a lullaby. I have to fasten on each word, to concentrate, to part the veils of fog in my head. To remind myself that this is important, Virginia, important. Pay attention. Simon and Samuel, they had a fight.
I say, “And I suppose Samuel didn’t agree. He liked the dishonest cargo just fine.”
“That he did. You see, Master Samuel, he still wanted to make some money. I guess he didn’t feel the orchards and the ships were making enough. And he and Mr. Fitzwilliam, they had a big old fight, and Mr. Fitzwilliam came home and told me about it. He said Mr. Samuel had offered to buy out the shipping business from him, and he said no. And he told me he thought Mr. Samuel was in deeper than he was letting on. And he said he was going to do something about it.”
“Like what?”
“That, I don’t know. He wouldn’t say. But he did tell me this, Mrs. Fitzwilliam.” She squeezes my hand and leans closer, almost over my face itself, so I can smell the sweet shortbread on her breath. The tang of lemonade. “He said I was to watch out for you. If you was to come down here to Florida, looking for him, I was to keep you safe. He said to me, Portia, if anything happens to my wife, why, I’d never forgive myself. She is the most important thing in the world to me. Everything I do, I do for her sake.”
“Is that true? Did he really say that?”
She leans back in her chair. “He did.”
My head is beginning to ache. My stomach is sick. Across the room the curtains are drawn over the windows, because my eyes are so sensitive to the light, but I think the sun must be setting. The glow that surges past the edges of all that white fabric is thick and molten, like you could hold it in your hand. You could hold it in your hand, but if only you could get out of your bed to try. If only you could lift your arm and stretch out your fingers toward the sun.
You might think, at this point, that all sorts of questions should be rattling around inside my skull, and they are. Rattling and screaming and carrying on. But I can’t quite seem to grasp them. I can’t quite seem to make them hold still and talk sense. As if I’m staring at a jigsaw puzzle, not a terribly complicated one, not all that many pieces, and I can’t remember what I’m supposed to do. What to do with those pieces, lying there on the table before me.
I just lie there, gazing at the thick yellow line between the two nearest curtains, and I think, She knows so much. How does she know so much?
And: She wants me to stay here. Safe and sound.
Which sounds lovely—staying here at Maitland, in this tranquil room, in this tranquil state of being—but it’s not. There exists something deep inside my tranquil, tranquilized brain that doesn’t want to stay here. A small worry, a particle of fear. An atom of anxiety. I am not where I am supposed to be. I am not doing what I am supposed to do.
I want an aspirin. How long until I can take another aspirin?
My lips move. I hear myself asking Miss Bertram if I can see my daughter.
Evelyn cheers me up. Evelyn always makes me feel better.