Lavelle mused on the irony of things.
The blacks whom he was supposed to save, as Cupid had so smartly reminded him, had saved his skin. While Easy Money had been struggling with Clinch – breaking the overseer’s neck – the girl quick-thinking, had grabbed the gun and chased after Lavelle and the Catahoula. But for her, Lavelle knew, he’d be long gone. She’d saved him for sure and she only a slip of a girl. Fleurs du Sud – Flowers of the South. Black flowers as well as white.
As they trekked on Lavelle wondered about it all. Not so much about the war itself and the men who fought it, but the women. It was the women, both North and South, whose lives would most be changed.
Back at the Labiche’s – the place seemed to tick over like clockwork, all overseen by the stately-named Lucretia. Previously, Lavelle had heard it said that the old planter stock liked to keep their Southern belles on the mantelpiece – so they could throw sugar at them! A Southern woman of a certain class could have neither her virtue sullied nor her hands soiled and slave society had helped perpetuate this high-mindedness. Now, the war had changed everything. Women had been catapulted into the public sphere – forced to manage the huge sugar and cotton enterprises, and work from first light to last. The mighty plantations could not be let slide under just because the Lord and Master was to war.
Lavelle wondered how it would be when these Lords and Masters returned from battlefront to home front? Would the women who had stepped into the breach to ‘run the South’ ever step back out again and into the long shadow of their former patriarchal protectors?
As always, every thought Lavelle had, returned at some stage to the woman he so enduringly loved. Ellen had long been a woman before her time – stepped over the threshold and out of the domestic circle. He had never sought to stop her. Maybe if he hadn’t countenanced her being so much in the public sphere, the boundaries of home life would have prevented her from stepping outside her marriage too. Not that all the evidence of such betrayal was present. And doubt – Lavelle wanted doubt. Would welcome doubt … was clutching at it but deep down he knew. Knew she had betrayed him.
She had betrayed him and Stephen Joyce had betrayed him. Then everything it seemed had come tumbling down. She had exiled herself because of the shame it would bring on them – on the girls. An adulteress for a mother would have been a fruitful cause for the expulsion of Louisa and Mary from the Magdalen Convent.
To some extent Lavelle could understand the demons that drove her: the suffering in her previous life; her will to make America work for them. That driving restlessness of spirit which she possessed. He knew too, that when the first fires of passion with Stephen had died in her, she would have become so utterly disillusioned with herself … go to any extreme to gain redemption.
He vowed that wherever she was he would find her. He had already forgiven her in his heart.
Stephen Joyce he could not forgive.