The Other Side of the Sun Page 8

  Here it was again: Illyria belonging to Honoria. In the midst of my curiosity I was overwhelmed by a wave of sleep. This kind of sudden sleep has always been one of my body’s safeguards—sleep and laughter. When I have had more than I can manage, my body simply goes to sleep and there is nothing I can do about it. It has happened in far more inconvenient places than in a room in which I am already in bed. I blew out the lamp and fell into sleep.

  But after the first drench of sleep I slept lightly, as though listening for something; I would wake up, then drift back into sleep as into shallow water. When the waves of the night-breathing ocean began to make a different sound, I woke up completely, pushed aside the mosquito netting, and went to my balcony.

  But it was not the ocean which was making the pounding sound; it was a group of horses galloping along the ocean’s edge. They were ridden by hooded figures like something out of All Hallow’s Eve. They galloped up the beach, growing smaller in the distance, as small as sandpipers strutting along the sand. Finally they disappeared from sight, a vanishing cloud of dust. They were like something strange and sinister out of the Middle Ages; they did not belong in the twentieth century. They were an Illyrian nightmare. I was not entirely sure they were real. If I had been given to fancies I would have thought—

  A large insect flew by, its wings brushing my cheek and frightening me. I left the balcony and went back to bed; the kitten was gone. I tucked the netting in carefully. In its filmy protection I felt comforted, as though I were a small child. I tumbled back into sleep.

  I woke up when the storm broke. Now that it was here there was no need to count between thunder and lightning; crash followed immediately upon flash. The storm was directly over Illyria. Around the house the palm fronds rattled in the wind; the great fans, shaken and brushed against each other, sounded like driving sheets of rain, so that the rain when it came was simply an added hissing across and against the roofs and turrets of Illyria.

  At first, so noisy was the storm, I did not hear the gentle scratching at my door. The scratching turned to a soft, insistent knocking. I pushed at the soft cloud of mosquito netting, found the opening, reached for matches. The room was lit by a brilliant green flash of lightning, so that I was blinded in the following dark and fumbled with my fingers over my bed table: where were the matches? Where was my candle?

  The knocking became louder, almost frantic. I heard a muffled, urgent bark. Lightning exacerbated rather than relieved the dark. I found the matches. As I struck one the door burst open and the old Irish wolfhound slid, cowering, belly dragging, across the floor and under the bed.

  “Oh, Stella!” came Great-aunt Olivia’s voice. “Oh, Stella, I’m so frightened!”

  “Aunt Olivia!” I managed to light another match, and then the candle.

  Flash.

  “Come in!”

  Crash.

  Aunt Olivia was in my arms. I held the old woman as though she were a baby: what an extraordinary resemblance there is between the very old and the very young. To Aunt Olivia’s faded hair, to the folds of the long-sleeved, high-necked nightgown, clung a soft odor of milk, of powder, of lavender. The old woman’s breath was sweet and smelled faintly of pomander. On her cheeks there were tears. I brushed them away in a wave of tenderness, a kind of gentleness which was wholly new to me. I murmured endearments, marveling at the softness of the wrinkled skin.

  “Cucumber.” Aunt Olivia answered my unspoken thought. “It does marvels for the skin. And I rest my elbows each in half a lemon every night when I say my prayers. Do you think God minds? I think he wants us to be our best for him. And that includes not having leathery elbows.” Flash. “Irene’s elbows are like horn.” Crash. The dog under the bed yelped. Aunt Olivia clutched me more tightly. “For all she’s half my age. Her skin’s like a turtle’s who’s left its neck out too long, and sometimes I think—oh, Stella, hold me tight, I’m so glad you’ve come!”

  I held the old great-aunt close until there was a lull in the storm. “But we can breathe quietly for a few minutes. And I’m not afraid while I’m here with you. Is there anything you want to know, lovey? Is there anything I can tell you while we’re waiting for the storm to pass?”

  “Yes. Please, Aunt Olivia. I don’t understand about Illyria belonging to Honoria.”

  “Terry didn’t tell you?”

  “There was so little time—we’d expected at least six months together.”

  How much did Great-aunt Olivia tell me that night during the violence of the storm, and how much did I learn later? I remember Honoria’s story all of a piece, but surely she can only have hinted at it in the breathless intervals between lightnings. It was an ugly story, though she took pains to assure me that it wasn’t unique: there had been old man Kingsley at Fort George Island, off Jacksonville, and other men, too, who like Claudius Broadley had been successful slave traders. ‘He was successful,’ Aunt Olivia had said, ‘because the Africans were nothing but animals to him, or less than animals, really. Half of them died on the ships coming over to America. He’d have treated animals better.’ Honoria had not come over in the hold with the slaves because she came as Claudius Broadley’s wife. In Africa she had been a princess, and exotically beautiful. No one knew precisely why the slave trader had bothered to marry her, but her power must have been as magnetic then as when I first met her. Perhaps he knew that here was one human being he could never beat down. In his own way he must have loved her.

  ‘So,’ Aunt Olivia said, ‘she was never a slave. And the chief captain answered, “With a great sum obtained I this freedom.” And Paul said, “But I was born free.”’ She looked at me expectantly. Candlelight flickered over her face, blurring the lines of age; she looked young and eager. But her words made no sense to me and for a moment I thought that Aunt Irene was right about the great-aunts; then I realized that she was playing her game. “I suppose it’s from the Bible. Sorry, Aunt Olivia. My father considered the Bible great literature, but I know Plato lots better.’

  ‘Acts.’ Aunt Olivia cringed against a flash of lightning, waited for thunder. ‘Acts, 22. Honoria, like St. Paul, was born free.’

  Born free, and never a slave, but ostracized, scorned, sometimes abused. Broadley was often away from home on his hideous business, and the young black princess almost died of homesickness.

  ‘When was all this?’ I had asked.

  ‘A long time ago. A lifetime ago. Fifty, sixty years. It was before the war.’

  My candle was burning low, so I lit the lamp and blew the candle out.

  Not long after Claudius Broadley brought his African princess to Jefferson, Theron—Dr. Theron, Mado’s husband—was asked to come to Jefferson to start a hospital. It was assumed by the family that they’d be in Jefferson only a year or so, just long enough to get the hospital on its feet, and then they’d go home to Charleston. But the war changed everything. And by then Mado and Honoria were fast friends.

  When Mado and Theron came to Jefferson they heard—of course they heard, it was a scandal and a source of gossip—about Claudius Broadley and his bride; and Mado, breaking all precedent, went to call on Honoria. They were both young brides far from home, come to live in a strange land; from the beginning they were drawn to each other. And Aunt Olivia made it clear to me, that night during the storm and later, that Mado knew the difference between compassion and pity. ‘When you pity someone,’ she once said, ‘you are concerned with their problem, but you don’t share it. Mado somehow shared. And that’s compassion.’

  About once a week Mado had herself rowed down the river to the Broadley plantation. It must have been quite a sight, the young Frenchwoman in her best Paris clothes, holding an elegant silk parasol, sitting in a little tub of a rowboat. As I came to know more about Mado, I learned that she had the kind of arrogance that comes with the absolute assurance of knowing who you are, the assurance of true aristocracy. She couldn’t have cared less what Jefferson society thought. When people criticized her, she simply laughed her beautiful,
joyous laugh. But Claudius Broadley and Honoria didn’t get off so easily. He was cut dead whenever he appeared on the street in Jefferson, and people threw stones through their windows.

  ‘Why?’ I had asked.

  ‘Because Honoria was black. And free. And a princess. And Broadley was crude and filthy rich. But when money was being raised for the hospital in Jefferson he was one of the biggest benefactors. Did it even ever bother him that if Honoria were ill she wouldn’t have been allowed in Mercy Hospital? Merciless Hospital, Mado sometimes called it. She saw that things were impossible for Honoria in Jefferson, so she talked Claudius Broadley into building Illyria for his wife.’ All she had in mind was a cottage, but Broadley insisted on building the great Gothic folly which was to become so dear to me. In those dim days before the war it was the only house on the beach, and could be reached only on horseback and by boat. San Feliz was entirely postwar, and the little railroad and the yacht basin didn’t come till after the turn of the century. Illyria was a safe place for Honoria, and Mado used to visit her there, and who knows which one taught the other more?

  Aunt Olivia spoke through a rumbling-off of thunder: “The beach is becoming fashionable now, alas. A Negro wouldn’t be allowed to have a house here today, even if he could afford it.”

  “What happened after the war? How did you come to Illyria?”

  With a seeming non sequitur she replied, “Claudius Broadley was a beast. We all loathed him. Though why people who bought and kept slaves thought they were morally superior to a slave trader I’m no longer quite sure. Was he any more of a beast than William Hutlidge?”

  “Who?”

  “Oh, someone you needn’t fret about, lovey. He’s dead, thank God. James’s brother-in-law. His plantation bordered on Nyssa. Let’s forget him. Even if Broadley was a beast, he was a shrewd one. And no one is wholly bad. Not quite. Broadley’s gains may have been ill-gotten, but he did provide for Honoria. Maybe he wouldn’t have if Mado hadn’t pushed him, but no matter why, he did. He built Illyria, and he made investments, and after the war Honoria had what—for us here in the South—was a good bit of money. And then there was Honoria’s treasure.”

  “Treasure?”

  “Her dot—her dowry. The precious stones and jewels she brought with her from Africa. Your wedding ring. Oh, and I don’t know how much else. No one knows. Some people think she still has a fortune in precious stones hidden somewhere. Remember, she was a princess.”

  I didn’t know much either about treasure or about African princesses. I looked at the ring again; in the lamplight it shone quietly.

  “After the war, Honoria managed to get a message to Mado and James that she was in trouble. She made it look as though we were doing her a favor, all of us, by coming to Illyria to live with her. And in a way she did need James and his legal protection. And Clive. If Claudius Broadley made marriage a farce and a tragedy, Honoria and Clive made it what it ought to be and seldom is. People in the South right after the war weren’t—still aren’t—apt to be generous or even honest with a black person who has money when whites are starving. So Honoria did need James. Claudius Broadley died of apoplexy in a fit of rage during the war, and Honoria’d have been wiped out, ruined, perhaps worse, if James hadn’t managed everything for her. And she made the rest of us feel that she needed us, too. So, because of Honoria’s friendship with Mado, we fared a lot better than most people. And we were a family. We all shared, the good things and the bad. The only reason Des and I still have a bit of jewelry left now is that everybody had jewels, and we couldn’t always find a market for them. Diamonds, yes: all the diamonds went to get the Charleston portraits back.” She yawned.

  “Don’t you want me to help you back to bed, Aunt Olivia?”

  But even as I spoke, the room was lit again by lightning; and the thunder, following immediately, made the old dog under the bed yelp anxiously. Great-aunt Olivia clutched to me. “Not till the storm’s—and there’s something I want to say. It must seem odd to you, the way we live, as though Honoria were the servant, and we the—it all happened slowly, inevitably, the world being the way it is. Mado understood it better than the rest of us. I tried to quarrel with Honoria about not eating at table with us, but Mado said that we had to let Honoria do as she saw fit. And she reminded us that there are—that there are precedents. For whether is greater, he that sitteth at meat, or he that serveth? is not he that sitteth at meat? but I am among you as he that serveth.” She paused.

  “Sorry, Aunt Olivia. I suppose it’s the Bible again.”

  “St. Luke. It bears thinking about. And so does the verse that precedes it: He that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve.” She looked at me with the sudden sharpness that could come to her gentle blue eyes. “I suppose all this must seem very confusing to you? Oxford’s not a jungle, is it? Was life reasonably tidy and ordered for you there?”

  “Reasonably, I suppose.”

  “It used to be for me, too, when I was nineteen. I didn’t understand about the jungle, then—not the jungle around Illyria, but the one in our hearts and lives. The pattern is all overgrown now, for all of us. The past ought to be past, so that we can get everything all tidied up and start again. Maybe that’s what we’re all hoping you’ll do for us. Push us into a present that leads to a future. But the past doesn’t ever seem to be past. It moves up and intrudes into the present. And it threatens the future.”

  Lightning and thunder shook the house again, and again the old woman clutched at me like a child. “Did you see—did you see the journals?” she gasped. “I had Ron put them on your bed table. Mado’s journals. I thought they might help and comfort you. You’ll find more about Honoria in the—”

  “Miss Olivia. You here?” Honoria herself stood in the doorway, revealed in a brilliant flash of lightning, wrapped in an old blue and white seersucker robe. Below it hung her white cotton nightgown, and below that were her dark ankles and large feet in men’s felt slippers. The amber-striped kitten followed her. “How you get up those steep stairs?”

  The thunder almost obliterated the question. “I came up on my bottom,” Aunt Olivia said. “I butted my way up. Is Illyria going to be struck?”

  Honoria’s voice was scolding. “You want to fall and break your hip?”

  “I was scared. This isn’t just a regular little old thunderstorm. This is a—a cosmic thunderstorm. I called you, Honoria, I called, and you didn’t come.”

  “I is here.” Honoria pushed the netting farther side, reached in and disentangled Aunt Olivia’s arms from their hold on me. She picked the old woman up as though she were a small child and stood by the bed, holding her. “You all right, Miss Stella?”

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  “Miss Olivia didn’t frighten you?”

  “Of course not.” Lightning lashed across us. The house trembled.

  “Why would I frighten Stella?” Aunt Olivia asked indignantly. “I thought she might need me.” Then she giggled. “That’s one of my poorer lies, isn’t it?” Thunder roared, and in the following silence Aunt Olivia said, “That’s immediate retribution for you.”

  Honoria started toward the door, but Aunt Olivia cried, “No! Not yet! I want to stay here in Mado’s room.”

  “Hush,” Honoria said, but did not argue. She sat in the rocker near the windows. The next flash of lightning seemed to lick around the chair.

  Creak, went the rocker. Creak. Creak.

  Thunder overrode it. It seemed as though the storm would never leave us. But there had been a slow count of three between flash and crash, so it was, in fact, beginning to move over. I could feel a relaxing of the tension in the air, in Aunt Olivia, in and around Illyria.

  “Why is it a cosmic storm?” Aunt Olivia asked sleepily. “It’s almost as though the elements are angry because of Stella’s arrival.”

  “Could be,” Honoria said. “Darkness don’t like the light.”

  “Did Minou come tell you I needed you
?”

  “Could be,” Honoria said again.

  “Minou’s a Guardian, like Finbarr, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Speak English, Miss Olivia.”

  Aunt Olivia shifted position in Honoria’s arms and looked at me. I sat up in bed, my arms about my knees, and looked back at the extraordinary picture of the gaunt black woman in the rocking chair, cradling the old great-aunt. “Oh, Stella,” Aunt Olivia said, “we’re all terribly curious about you. You are aware of that, aren’t you?”

  “I’m curious about all of you. Aunt Olivia.”

  “Irene’s going to go on asking you all kinds of semi-polite questions as though her only reason were—oh, solicitude and hospitality. Though of course you had impeccable references, you might say, from Lord and Lady Dowler.”

  “They wrote you?”

  “Of course. You don’t think we’d let Terry marry someone we didn’t know about, do you?”

  No, I supposed not. I had been aware only of my father’s establishing the fact that Theron Renier was a suitable person for me to marry.

  “I’m not going to be like Irene,” Aunt Olivia said, “skirting around questions. I’m too old for that. There isn’t time for games. Except Shakespeare. Terry’s working for the government, and we’re all proud of that, though when he was at Chapel Hill classics was his field, and he always put puns in Latin and Greek in his letters. Des and I called him our Lancelot Andrewes. It’s odd to think of him involved in some kind of hanky-panky.”

  I smiled. “It isn’t hanky-panky, really. Just—special and confidential.”

  In the next flash of lightning—but gentler, now, not the searing, tearing brilliance of the storm when it was directly over Illyria—I saw Aunt Olivia’s smile of satisfaction. “So what he’s doing now is a deep, dark secret?”