O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [41]
Amanda chose her next words cautiously. “I could get Beth onto the household staff at Inverness,” and added quickly, “It would be better than the job she has now.”
Damn! His silence said everything.
“Zach, I’m sorry.”
“Varnik and I are equals, buddies for life. Lord, my da was a sergeant major when he and my mother married. She did the Irish washerwoman’s chores and carried out the chamber pots in someone’s fine mansion.”
“And it angered your father, badly.”
“No, they knew the drill when they married. What riled him was the everlasting low station of all the Irish. Varnik serves at the pleasure of his country. They love each other and can maybe make a go, but it’s a hard life to be the wife of an enlisted man.”
“I am sorry,” she repeated, then shivered, although it was warm. “It’s been such a beautiful day, I want to hang on to it a little longer.”
“Did your parents really know you were going to Chesapeake Park?”
“There is that possibility.”
“You told me you had their approval.”
“I did, in a manner of speaking.”
“But you didn’t, specifically.”
“It falls under the terms of a treaty with Father.” Amanda could feel Zach smiling through the darkness. She sighed. “You aren’t the only one who has to live up to regulations. Before I was sixteen I always had a couple of Father’s Pinkertons with me or following me everywhere. I’ve made a lot of different kinds of different friends, some who made my father’s hair bristle. It was difficult to keep them, so I decided to take a stand.”
“How’d you do that?”
“In my parents’ world, daughters are presented to society when they’re sixteen. Well, the Baltimore Cotillion was coming up and I told them I would not attend unless he gave me some freedom. A year of Mother’s noble scheming would go down the drain. Father and I did not exchange a word for over a month. Then he yielded. Father agreed that in the future I could leave Inverness without his Pinkertons and I could keep my friends on the condition that I was properly escorted and home before midnight.”
“But it was still difficult for you to keep Willow?”
“It may be hard for you to understand. There are no black people in the Marine Corps,” she said.
“I tried to sort some of that out going into all those contrary villages in New York. Once the suspicion of difference is overcome—it has to come about or otherwise we’re just replanting warring countries in America.”
“Then you can understand that we are like sisters, and I love her.”
“And there were times today, you wished she was with us.”
“I am very happy about who I was with today.” She pulled back from him, now only touching by voice. “I want to be able to take Willow to Chesapeake Park, just once before we’re very old.”
“Tell me about it, Amanda.”
She felt for his hand again, and it felt so good to be touched by him and to say words to him that she had always kept secret.
• 14 •
THE HALLS OF INVERNESS
1858—Inverness
War drums along the Potomac became yet louder. The industrial establishment knew that war was going to happen and set forth to feather their nests.
Horace Kerr had already relieved his father and older brothers, Malcolm and Donald, of the ranking positions in the family shipyard. They were too rooted in the past. Their shares of stock would see them and their heirs through life with great wealth, and the family members magnanimously continued to speak to one another, realizing Horace held the keys to the vault.
Horace had grandiose plans to expand the facility at Dutchman’s Hook fivefold and placed his bet on the Union in the event of war.
Baltimore’s first banking family, the Blantons, fit the bill. In the beginning, the Blantons’ hearts leaned toward the Confederacy, but never their money. The Blanton bank also sought investments that would reap a golden harvest from a war. Horace Kerr filled that order.
Daisy Blanton’s marriage to Horace Kerr sealed the loan. Inverness was still in a building stage when Daisy moved in, bringing her personal slave, Laveda Fancy. Laveda’s husband, Matthew,