20

LILLY

Friday, June 15, 1838

Early morning

Lilly’s lifeboat, six by eighteen feet, lurched and spun with the power of the sea. The group of twelve huddled together. They learned each other’s names. Lilly already knew Mr. Couper and his companions Nelle March and her ten-year-old son, Theodore. The others included Barney, a seaman with white hair and burned hands, his uniform tattered and torn; Solomon, a Negro waiter who wore only pantaloons, his chest bare; Mr. Pooler and his teenage son, Francis, both dressed in dark pants and white shirts; Mr. Harris from New Bedford with a balding pate and a low voice that seemed to demand calm; and Mrs. Bird, who had become so still and quiet, Lilly was half-afraid she had expired and was being held up by the people on either side of her. The night passed, stars bright and moving across the sky as the only indication that time marched on as the men rowed toward the west, grunting with the effort. The waves churning in from north, south, east and west, quilted and stitched with white foam.

The misery of the burned firemen in the second quarterboat became excruciatingly evident as they groaned from their injuries, their cries carrying across the water and night as clear as if they’d been sitting in the same boat. As the morning sky began to glow, the skeletal faces of the two men, their burns radiant in the growing heat of the sun, revealed what night had hidden from them all: the continued horror of the explosion. Lilly turned away. Would it have been better to have saved another?

“Oh, Priscilla,” Lilly whispered near to her ear. “Those men won’t last a day once the sun rises higher.”

Priscilla nodded and she, too, turned her gaze from the sight.

Then Lilly repented for the horrible thought. All human life was worth saving. A stab of guilt for Adam’s drowning pierced her. All the hours and days she’d wanted him to suffer, and now she prayed for mercy, that his drowning had been quick, that he was at peace.

Madeline began to fuss, squirming in her wrapping, and Lilly untied the cloth and lifted her baby to her face. She kissed her from cheek to belly button and then handed her to Priscilla. “She’s hungry.”

Priscilla slipped the strap of her nightdress from her shoulder and her left breast hung pendulous, swollen with milk, her nipple the size of a dessert plate. Madeline latched on immediately and Priscilla used the wrap to cover Madeline’s face from the rising sun.

Grief clogged Lilly’s throat. She should be nursing her own child, with her own milk. She swallowed her tears and placed her hand on Priscilla’s arm. “I am sorry.”

“Mistress?”

“Your daughter . . .”

Priscilla looked away, her gaze cast farther to the horizon than Lilly could see herself, to the place where Priscilla’s own child, lost at childbirth, must live and move in her mind as a great grief. If Lilly lost Madeline . . . she could not, and would not think of it.

Lilly felt the gazes of everyone in the boat as she leaned close and touched her nursemaid. What would have seemed inappropriate only hours before now seemed as normal as the new day. There could be no pretense now, no vanity or prejudice. In this boat they were not mistress and slave but two women intent on survival. Lilly had never let herself wonder before—was Priscilla’s child Adam’s?—and she now let herself sink into the question that had always been before her. What could not be considered in her home came to her now with clarity. Hate surged, a heat that began in her breast and spread like fire: hate for Adam, for cruelty, for helplessness.

“Was . . .” Lilly wound her fingers around the small foot of her child, Madeline’s toes pearls in her hand. “Was your child . . . ?”

Priscilla looked up, her eyes glazed with fatigue and the fear she kept tamped down so often, a way of being that she had become proficient at maintaining near Lilly. But now, her lips quivered, and she ran her hands along Madeline’s covered body. “No, mistress. My little girl, my Anika, she belonged to me, and to a man who loves me, a man I love.” She lifted her chin and closed her eyes, a pride and a pain Lilly would not and could not understand yet speared her chest with sorrow.

“I am so very sorry you lost her,” Lilly said as the boat swayed and the stars blinked and the rows dipped into the water in a rhythmic dance that hopefully brought them closer to shore. The horizon soon turned orange and the sun climbed the sky like a ball of fire as they considered the appearance of each other on the boat, nearly laughing in comical horror at the sight they made. They would never, at any other time, have seen each other in this condition, wet to the bone and nearly naked. Without the pretense of linen and silk, without the finery of three-piece suits and elaborate bonnets, without the rings and necklaces that told of wealth, they were all equal.

It was easier for the men when they had to urinate, but the women were ashamed, needing to be held over the side of the lifeboat to do what should have been done in private. Everyone helped shield and offer isolation behind capes and shirts and turned faces. Not one of them could get by without exposing their pure humanity, humanity usually hidden behind closed doors and perfumed water.

No one spoke of their servant or their slave. No one talked of their money or their property. They talked of their families; they prayed for safety for those who might be floating on other scraps of wreckage. They sang hymns—“Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus”; “Awake My Soul; Arise to God”—and uttered the names of their loved ones. Lilly did not once let Adam’s name pass from her lips even as the memory of his last plea for help haunted her.

When the boat became quiet his memory was thrust into her mind the same way he had once thrust his way into the bedroom.

When she’d first met him, she’d been enchanted. Had he changed or had she not seen the truth of him? She’d been blinded by the sheer immensity of his personality, his ebullient family and yes, his wealth—four hundred acres along the river planted with cotton and indigo. The big rambling home in Savannah with porches that faced the river’s breeze and gardens lush with roses, jasmine and gardenia. The security and ease of life he offered.

Soon after their wedding day, she would have easily given them all up in exchange for simple kindness.

Adam’s cruelty toward his slaves, his choice of an overseer so wicked that she had begged him more than once to please find another. Both of these should have alerted her to the violence he harbored deep in his soul. Her desires were as nothing to him. A mere woman, she existed equal in his mind to the hunting dogs that he by turns indulged and mistreated.

Their lovemaking became nothing more than him pressing himself into her as he held her to the bed. It didn’t matter to him if she was clothed or naked as long as he could pin her arms over her head and enter her hard and fast while telling her how she would never be enough for him. Cruelty aroused him. Hatred became his fuel. At first, she’d begged him to let her participate—but that was when she thought their intimacy was about love. Now she knew better—it was about control. Over her. The household. The servants and slaves. Over all their lives.

After she gave birth to Madeline, she enjoyed a reprieve: a few months of peace and calm when he kept far from her. Lilly knew he turned to the slaves for his hateful pleasure, but she could do nothing to prevent it.

One night she heard whimpers coming from a closet in the spare bedroom and found Priscilla, her arms swollen in the same places Lilly’s had been many times. She fell into a despair so enveloping that nothing, not even Madeline’s cries, could rouse her from bed. Until Adam told her about this trip, until she realized that there might be a way out. If they traveled up north to Saratoga Springs, and she wasn’t surrounded by so many watchful eyes, she might have a chance for escape—maybe far into the northern lands. Or possibly even push a little west. She had planned on figuring it all out once she arrived in New York.

With a lurch of the boat, Lilly returned to her present watery hell. She imagined the other passengers on the Pulaski. Were they dead? Were they still fighting for their lives? Where was Augusta? The relief at knowing Adam was gone started to mix with the shame of having listened to his dying pleas and done nothing. Yet she refused to believe she would pay for that decision with her immortal soul.

In that bobbing boat, nausea rising along with thirst, the grunts of the exhausted rowers the only sound louder than the slap of waves, Lilly held her child to her chest and dreamed of a land where crystalline water fell over boulders, grass grew as thick as a blanket and wildflowers danced in the breeze.