Candle in the Darkness - Lynn N. Austin [64]
The worst part of that whole disastrous day was the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about Charles. Half of the time I would argue with him in my head, and the other half of the time I would be remembering his smile or the sound of his laughter—and then that breathless, dizzy sensation would come over me again, the way it had when he shook my hand. I hated myself for being attracted to such a horrible man—for laughing at his stories and for enjoying myself at least some of the time that I’d spent with him.
As I lay tossing in bed that night, I could still hear the sound of his drowsy voice and the habit he had of saying, “Listen now. . .” I groaned aloud.
Tessie got up and came over to sit on my bed. “May as well tell me what’s bothering you, or neither one of us gonna get any sleep tonight.”
I sat up to face her, sitting cross-legged. “He is the most infuriating man I’ve ever met!”
“Jonathan?”
“No. Charles St. John. I hate him! I never want to see him again! I’ve been arguing with him in my head, thinking of all the things I should have said, and now I know exactly what I intend to say to him the next time I see him.”
“I’m just an old mammy, but . . . why you gonna talk to him again if he annoy you so?”
“Because I want to forget him, but I can’t get him out of my mind. I hope I never see him again, but I’m so afraid that I won’t see him. He has me so confused, Tessie! I wish he would go back to Washington and . . . and drown in the Potomac River!”
“Guess this here James River ain’t good enough to drown him.”
“No! I mean, yes! Tessie, I’m not even making sense, am I? What’s wrong with me? I shake all over when I’m with him, even before he makes me angry. My heart starts going crazy, and I can’t catch my breath, and he makes me laugh—yet I can’t help arguing with him.”
“Let me ask you, honey. That young man who keep sending you letters from West Point?”
“You mean Robert?”
“Uh huh . . . does he do all this ‘heart messing’ and ‘body shaking’ with you?”
Not once. Nor had any other man I’d ever met. I shook my head.
“How you feel about that Yankee man?” she asked.
“I feel . . . I feel sorry for Robert. And I feel safe with him.”
“You want to wake up beside him every morning?”
I remembered my cousin Julia asking me the same thing. The thought horrified me. “No,” I told Tessie.
“Well, then. That’s your answer.”
“What? What’s my answer?”
“You not in love with this Robert.”
“Well, I’m certainly not in love with Mr. St. John, I can tell you that! He’s insulting . . . and . . . and obnoxious and . . .”
“What he look like? He as ugly as he is mean?”
“No, he’s not ugly at all.” My voice suddenly quivered with emotion, and I didn’t know why. “He’s . . . he’s . . .” I saw his face in my mind, the way he looked when he laughed and told stories, not when he was angry.
“He’s what, honey?”
“Well . . . he would be a handsome man if he weren’t so obstinate!” I covered my face and cried. I didn’t even know why.
“Mm, mm, mm,” Tessie soothed as she gathered me in her arms. “Sure do make it hard to hate a man when he’s handsome.”
She let me cry for a while, but as my tears began to fade, she asked, “What you and this man arguing about all the time?”
“Slavery. He defends it! Can you imagine? He thinks it’s perfectly acceptable!”
A smile tugged at the corners of Tessie’s mouth. “Seem to me Cousin Jonathan, your daddy, and just about every white man in Virginia think the same thing. You arguing with all of them, too?”
“No,” I answered meekly.
“Honey, if you looking to find a Virginia man who think like a Yankee, you gonna die an old maid. Guess you better marry that Robert fellow while you still got the chance.”
I recalled what she’d said about Robert. I wasn’t in love with him. But how had she known? “What’s it like to fall in love, Tessie?” I asked.
She gazed into the darkness for a long moment, then her smile widened. “Well, when you