“None other.” He called for Hosea to bring a light and the missing decanter. His manservant, never far, soon appeared with both.
Juliet settled into the nearest chair. “Given I no longer have to roll tobacco into cigars for you like Mama did, I suppose I should thank him.”
“I hope you do.” Father sat with a wince, favoring his left leg. “The head of the firm, Leith Buchanan, will soon land in Virginia, or has promised to.”
Leith.She swallowed, throat parched, lemonade now the farthest thing from her mind. “So this Buchanan would hazard a journey rife with risk to come here?” Her impression of a doddering old man as gouty as Father began to crumble.
“These Scottish merchants are all about risk, understand.”
Tobacco smoke purled from the cigar’s burnt end, its leathery, woodsy scent heightened in the heated room. Though Juliet preferred Father smoke a pipe, she favored cigars to snuff with its inelegant sneezing, spitting, and coughing. And at the moment she felt like spitting herself, trying to come to terms with this unwelcome news.
“Surely Mr. Buchanan shan’t stay here,” she said.
“Nay, Nathaniel Ravenal laid first claim to him. Buchanan’s been invited to Forrest Bend.”
“But Mr. Ravenal no longer deals in tobacco.” Juliet felt slightly betrayed. Why would a man who shunned slave labor and its products entertain a man who dealt in both?
“Ravenal has a long-standing correspondence with the Buchanans, dating to the late father and founder of their firm. And you well know his reputation for being hospitable reaches far beyond Virginia.”
This she couldn’t deny. “Frances, Lucy, and Judith can keep him company, then,” Juliet said of Ravenal’s sociable daughters, excusing herself from any responsibility.
Father’s smile was thin. “You’ll be in charge of planning a ball in his honor, of course, here at Royal Vale.”
“A ball?”For the man who has us so wed to debt we are near collapse?“You know there’s no funds for it, Father.”And no heart for it either.
“Tobacco credit should do.”
She nearly ground her teeth at his quiet insistence. Did he not know the humiliation of going from store to store on credit? Of clerks and factors looking askance at them because they were so in arrears? She’d gladly eat hoecake and greens the rest of her life if it would help alleviate their humbling difficulty.
“Perhaps this would be a good time to tell Mr. Buchanan we’re considering abandoning tobacco in favor of wheat and investing in indentures,” she said firmly. “He needs to hear that we intend to begin repaying our debts once the indigo is shipped and settled.”
“Oh? We’re no longer in the position to tell Buchanan what we’re going to do, Daughter.” He leaned back in his chair till it groaned, cigar poised between thumb and forefinger. “He tells us.”
6
Life often seems like a long shipwreck, of which the debris are friendship, glory, and love; the shores of existence are strewn with them.
Madame de Staël
GLASGOW
Leaving Glasgow on theThistlein September, Leith took a last, hard look at the city of his birth. Sharp as pointed fingers, the spires and towers of the tolbooth, the university and hospital, and the Tron Church vied for attention against the sullen sky. Today the Merchants Hall failed to boast its gilded weathervane of a ship in full sail, for haar crept in like a ghostly invader, hiding it and mirroring Leith’s mood.
He lingered longest on Glasgow Bridge, branded into memory ever since that racking November night Havilah fled their Virginia Street mansion. By then she’d moved far beyond his reach in her rapid descent from reality. It wasn’t long after the twins’ birth. She wasn’t well, her pallor stark white against the blackness all around them, the streetlampsilluminating her misery. He’d gone after her at a full run, but she’d been faster. Clad only in nightclothes, her feet bare, she’d fled their cocooned, coal-warmed home in an attempt to return to her Romany roots and the lass she’d once been.
If he’d hoped to set the clock forward as his ship left the Firth of Clyde and pulled away to the northwest, clear of the sea-lanes of French privateers, he’d been mistaken. Time seemed to tick backward, miring on that fatal moment. Havilah hovered like a specter on the windswept deck, her demise unrelenting. Haunting.
“Mr. Buchanan, sir.”
Leith looked up to find a cabin boy on the quarterdeck.
“The captain has invited you to dine in his cabin, sir.”
Glad for the distraction, Leith went below. Beef, pork, fowl, citrus, fruits, preserves, olives, capers, wines, and beer crowded the long table. Since it was his ship and the ill-named Captain Coffin and crew were first-rate, Leith was unstinting with provisions. He weathered an hour of conversation, a far cry from his last West Indies sailing when he’d kept mostly to his cabin, Caribbean rum his company.
“My swiftest cruise is five and twenty days,” Captain Coffin said, forking a bite of beef. “Glasgow to the Virginia Capes.”
Leith hoped this voyage bested that. He had no love for the sea and had never conquered seasickness. This journey was simply a miserable means to an end, revealing how desperate he was, a fact he hated. That he owned an entire fleet of ships hardly assuaged him, though it did earn him the respect of the crew instead of the ill-scrappit gossip of Glasgow. These sailors within their wooden world cared little about what happened on land.
