The Railroad War (17 page)

“Well, that puts an interpretation on it now, doesn’t it? It’s strange, my sweet maiden, but all the time I had the distinct
impression that all of those beautiful preparations were leading up to a seduction.”

“I don’t know where you got
that
idea,” she huffed.

Laughing, he scratched his head with theatrical ostentation. “Oh,” he sighed stagily. “Then I must have been totally mistaken
about you. I had begun to suspect that you were leading me—delightfully—to your bed. But I couldn’t have been right about
that, my maiden, now could I. Good people would have us believe that no woman seduces a man—at least not since Eve. I was
beginning to believe otherwise, but I must have been wrong.” With that, he flourished an imaginary hat at her and bowed deeply.
“At least about you, my dear maiden,” he added at the perigee of his bow.

“Don’t torment me, Sam,” she said. Tears were flowing copiously by now.

“But you deserve it. You deserve worse.”

“I…I…” she stammered.

“Shall I go now?” he said.

“No!” She didn’t want him to leave; she needed him now more than ever.

He smiled. “Then I’ll stay awhile longer,” he said.

“Why do you need to hurt me?”

“I don’t need to hurt you, Jane Featherstone. I need not to be played with and used. I told you that. I won’t have you gaming
with me the way you play with the men you seduce information from.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. It didn’t take me long to realize what made you such a formidable spy.”

“That’s a lie,” she whispered, turning away from him. “And it’s cruel to suggest it.”

He took her face in his hands and forced her to look at him. “Then shall I leave?” he asked.

“No,” she admitted. She wanted him to stay, now more than ever. God, how she wanted him to stay!

“All right, then,” he said, releasing her.

He turned to the threadbare love seat, and she approached him there, her face soft, her eyes wet and glistening.

“Now will you come into my bed?” she asked him, extending her hand.

“You still want that?” he asked.

“I want that very much,” she said.

“I see it! I see it now! There! There it is!” Miranda Kemble called out with a voice full of joy and anticipation. “Ariel!
There! Lam, do you see?”

“Yes, yes, dear, I see it, too,” Miranda’s sister Ariel Edge said. As befitted her position as a wife and mother, Ariel was
more sober voiced than her sister. But she was nonetheless every bit as excited as Miranda.

The two sisters were standing at the prow of a small sloop. Standing with them were their brother, Lam, and Ariel’s five-year-old
son, Robbie. The sloop had just rounded a bend of the Kemble River, which was a small estuarial offshoot of the Altamaha.
Beyond the bend lay the reason why the younger Kembles were standing at the sloop’s prow: Kemble Island.

The two young women were wearing light summer dresses. Miranda’s was peach, while Ariel’s was the palest green. Ariel had
covered her head with a wide hat to protect her face from the sun, but Miranda was hatless, wearing instead a band of sherry-colored
ribbon to keep her long bangs out of her eyes. In honor of the occasion, Robbie was dressed in a new white sailor suit made
especially for him by his grandmother Edge.

Miranda, Ariel, and Lam’s father, Pierce Kemble, sat on the deck a few feet behind this group. As had become his custom, he
was by himself, sitting with his back propped against the mast. For most of the journey, he had kept his own company, and
his dark expression made clear that he would not welcome an invitation to abandon his solitude and join the others even though
they were at this moment so very near celebrating the much longed for goal of their little voyage.

Farther to the stern was Uncle Ashbel, who, contrary to his usual practice, had stationed himself near the stern, apart from
the rest of the family. He lounged against the rail near the tiller, chatting with the pilot.

Aside from their mother, who was spending the war in London, and Ariel’s husband, Ben, the entire family was on the sloop.
For the first time since the start of the war, they were all together, and for the first time during the war they were all
visiting the family plantation on Kemble Island.

And, oh, what a ravishing day for the journey! The sun was high and bright and not too hot. The air was clear and shimmering
and smelled of the sea. The low, flat tidal islands they glided by were a green and golden paradise that war had seemingly
left unstained.

When he heard his niece’s cry of delight and saw her raise her arm to point, Ash Kemble jumped to his feet and let out a shout:
“Hey-Ho!” And then he bounded quickly forward, pausing momentarily beside his brother in order to urge him to join the others
at the prow. Pierce, however, was not to be moved from his private thoughts. He declined with a smile that might, in a pinch,
have been called polite. And so Ash went on ahead, laughing and puffing away at the long black Cuban cigar that was clamped
in his teeth and which jutted out of his face like a cannon. Cocked back on his head was a creamy, wide-brimmed Panama hat.
His white linen shirt was loose, with the neck open wide and the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His trousers were white,
too, and baggy. He was the resplendent image of a man at his ease.

“Well, well, well,” he said when he had joined the others at the prow. “So there it is after all these long years. And every
bit as heavenly as when I last saw it.”

As he spoke, Miranda was pointing ecstatically at the main boat landing of the island. Above it and beyond the dike, she could
also make out the plantation mansion, Kemble House. Standing at the landing, waiting patiently, were a half-dozen slaves who
had been warned of their coming. When they saw the sloop, the slaves started to wave and cheer.

Lam looked pleased to see that. “Ah,” said Lam, “it’s so nice to see them again. And it’s nice to see that they’re glad we’re
visiting.” The cheer in Lam’s voice, at least to Miranda’s ears, seemed a bit forced; it was more like relief than joy.

But the relief was for a good reason. This part of the coast had been under Federal control since close to the beginning of
the war. A powerful force of the Union South Atlantic Squadron was based not five miles away on Saint Simon’s Island. And
a settlement of over five hundred freed Negroes, a consequence of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation earlier that year, had
been set up on the same island. The dwellers in the settlement sold labor and produce to the base.

Like the Kemble plantation, most of the sea-island plantations had been abandoned by their white owners when the navy arrived.
So Lam was understandably apprehensive about the loyalty of the servants.

“Of course they’re glad to see us,” Ariel said. “Why shouldn’t they be?”

“Oh, look!” Miranda cried. “There’s Luna and Dorcas. Wave, Robbie. We’ve told you all about Luna and Dorcas. You must know
them by now almost as though you’d actually met them.” Luna and Dorcas were both revered and intractable slave women well
into their seventies or eighties.

Obediently, Robbie waved.

“He’s too small. He can’t see,” Ariel said, looking down at her small son with concern. “Show Robbie, please, will you, Lam?
Will you be a darling and lift him up?”

“I’d like nothing better,” Lam said. “Up you go, my brave young man,” he said, and swung the boy up over his head and set
him down on his shoulders, straddling his neck. “There!” he said to Robbie. “There it is. Kemble Island, the finest and loveliest
place in all the wide world!”

With a sharp crack, swiftly followed by rumbles and slaps of canvas against canvas, the mainsail was lowered. And soon after
that, the sloop warped into the landing.

The inspiration for the voyage to Kemble Island had sprung from Miranda. It had been brewing in her imagination for many months,
and that’s where it would have doubtless remained were it not for the miraculous mixture of luck, persistence, and design
that allowed her to pull it off. Somehow she convinced Ariel, Pierce, and Lam to come together even though their lives had
been so profoundly separated by geography and circumstance.

After she sold her father, her brother, and her sister on the possibility of the reunion, she then had to sell them on its
locale. When the subject was first broached, everyone but Miranda herself imagined the gathering would take place in Savannah,
or maybe Charleston. No one save Miranda had dreamed they could go to the island, even though it was the one place in all
the world they all wanted to visit. Since the area was occupied by the Yankees and by renegade Negroes, a visit to the island
had seemed out of the question. Miranda, however, would have none of their fears. If they were all going to come together,
then they would do so on Kemble Island. And though she was only twenty-two, she was strong-willed enough to wrestle her dreams
into reality.

And yet, though she was courageous and determined enough to get her way about the visit to Kemble Island, Miranda knew in
her heart that the trip was as risky and mad as it was dazzlingly wonderful. But she did not confess any of her private apprehensions
to her father or her sister, who would have been frightened by them. Lam was no less aware of the dangers than Miranda, but
he, too, kept silent.

And Ash was—well, Ash. No one had expected him to arrive in Georgia when he did, but somehow he had sensed he was needed at
home.

Though Miranda hadn’t seen him in years, he remained as infuriatingly savvy about her tricks and stratagems as ever. It wasn’t
long after their first embrace of greeting when he took her aside and told her that only madmen would sail into those islands.
Every one of them, he told her sternly, was a nest of wild and raging free men—or else ferocious Union naval personnel. Then
he laughed and kissed her and encouraged her not to lose heart. They would sail to Kemble Island, by God, and he would let
no one and nothing stand in their way.

Miranda welcomed Ash’s encouragement. His words and his warmth
did
strengthen her resolve. But still, there was never any danger of her losing heart, for the engine of her will was fueled
out of sources that were deeper and more central than even her attachment to the island, or her love for her family. What
most deeply burned in her and moved her to undertake the journey was her anxiety about her father.

Unlike the other Kembles, Miranda had not welcomed secession and war. As far as she was concerned, the continuation of slavery
and all the other myths of the Great Cause were so much silliness.

And yet, when the war did come, she turned down a chance to leave Georgia and travel with her mother to London. Before she
sailed for Europe, Fanny used all her considerable powers of persuasion to encourage Miranda to sail with her. But Miranda
refused her—not because she
wanted
to stay, but because someone had to take care of her father.

That argument, understandably, carried little weight with Fanny Shaw. Fanny leaned on Miranda harder than she’d ever leaned
on her daughter before, but Miranda, in spite of her youth, was every bit as forceful as her mother. She wouldn’t budge. Pierce
needed her.

Pierce himself was a man with little talent for enduring hard times. He was thus not equipped for dealing with all the crises
the war brought down on him. His chief talent, in fact, was the pursuit and capture of beautiful women. His greatest skill
was for extravagance and the squandering of wealth. His profession was speculation.

Knowing this, Miranda understood that he couldn’t be left to his own devices.

At the beginning of the war, Miranda lured Pierce to Kemble Island, where she hoped to keep him peacefully out of trouble.
But as soon as their position there became untenable, he lured her to Charleston, where he managed to lose $50,000 on failed
blockade runners—very nearly all that he had left from the proceeds of his great slave sale in 1856. He then speculated in
land in Georgia just as land values began to plummet, and factories in Tennessee just before the Yankees overran them. He
traveled to New York after that in order to arrange for the smuggling of weapons to the South. He was arrested there and placed
in confinement for a year at Fort Lafayette. He was released when he gave his parole not to work again for the South.

Miranda, meanwhile, had settled near Atlanta on one of the Kemble properties, Raven’s Wing, a cotton plantation. The property,
happily, had been willed to her and not to her father. As a result of her grandfather’s foresight, the skill of his lawyers,
and the resolve of the trustees of the estate, Pierce was unable to obtain title to it.

After his release from prison, Pierce made his way south. After a struggle, Miranda persuaded him to join her at Raven’s Wing.
“I can’t live like a child or a refugee on the property of my own daughter, Miranda,” he wrote her. “If I am to live with
you, it must be as your
father
,” by which she knew he meant “master.” She refused his demands, and he refused to live with her until it became clear that
he had nowhere else to go. By the time he arrived at her home, he managed to forget—or else ignore—the galling fact that he
had to live on property that was his daughter’s and not his own.

Running a cotton operation the size of Raven’s Wing was no easy task for a woman, especially a woman as young as Miranda,
but she handled it and was even able to make the property turn a small profit.

Pierce was harder to handle. The limits placed on his life by the war and his personal failures left him angry and frustrated.
Since he was powerless to maintain his customary extravagance, he could not busy himself with his usual speculations. To make
things worse, few of the women he customarily pursued were available to his charms. His speculations were limited to wagers
upon the fall of playing cards, and his conquests of women came only with those whom he could purchase for a night.