Charleston Read online

  DEDICATION

  To John and our children,

  John Randolph, Alexandra, Elliott, and Elisha

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Bradham Thornton

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank:

  Dan Halpern and his remarkable team at Ecco for being further proof of Paul Bowles’s view, “Things don’t happen, it depends on who comes along.”

  Ann Patty, the editor every writer hopes to find.

  William and Susan Kinsolving, Bettina von Hase, early readers.

  John Eastman, who has always given me brilliant advice.

  My parents, for passing on their love of the Lowcountry.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A SIMPLE GESTURE, A MAN’S HAND ON A WOMAN’S SHOULDER. It could as easily not have happened. Eliza often thought about how a series of unconnected events strung out over a number of years had brought about this chance encounter between Henry and herself. Had she not applied to the Courtauld for the fellowship, had she not fallen for Jamie when he described himself as “a man abandoned by space” at a London gallery, had they not gone to the wedding of his classmate from Eton—a wedding they almost missed because of a stupid argument—she might never have seen Henry again. A similar set of attractions and invitations had brought Henry to the same country house an hour west of London. Everything that had come before—so exact and perfectly timed—had forever changed the direction she was heading. Eliza used to think that Fate had abandoned her, but now she wondered if it had its arms wrapped so tightly around her that it would never let her go.

  THE SPRING OF 1990 PROMISED TO BE A SEASON OF WEDDINGS. May was not half over, and Eliza and Jamie were already attending their third. After the ceremony, a flat gray sky threatened rain as they walked to the tent set up on the lawn for the wedding lunch. Jamie ducked inside to get two glasses of champagne while Eliza paused to examine the seating chart. She ran her finger down the list and found her table—number seven. She began to scan the list of names to see if she knew anyone. Then came the tap on her shoulder.

  “Eliza.”

  She turned. Something galloped hard across her heart. The man standing in front of her seemed more real than anything around her.

  “My God, Henry.”

  “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He reached out and touched her arm.

  “God. Henry. You know, I thought I heard you. Your laugh. In the church. And then I thought I must be crazy.” Henry looked the same—thin and angular with cheekbones that pushed beyond the rectangular frame of his face. She could tell by his tanned face and hands that he still spent a lot of time outdoors.

  “I saw you come into the church.” Henry leaned down and whispered, “Seriously late.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I came over for the wedding.”

  “This wedding?”

  “Mmmm.”

  “Why?”

  “Caroline.”

  “How do you know Caroline?”

  “My mother and her mother were distant cousins. She lived with us for one summer. About . . .” Henry put his hands in his pockets and looked down at the ground before looking back up. “Six or seven years ago.”

  “That’s wild. It’s even wilder seeing you here.”

  “How are you? You look great.” Henry squeezed her elbow. “I heard you were about to marry a lord and take up residence in some stately home outside of London.”

  “Charleston.” Eliza shook her head. “The farther away you go, the more social standing and money they award you.”

  Henry stepped back to make room for an elderly couple who held on to each other as if they were lost. He folded his arms across his chest and looked at Eliza. “So you aren’t married?” He spoke in a low voice.

  “No.”

  “Engaged?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “So no lord?”

  “No lord.”

  “No stately home?”

  “Small flat in South Kensington.”

  Henry turned his head and looked at her obliquely. He was amused by something. “God, it’s great to see you. What are you doing here?”

  “Simon is a friend of my boyfriend’s. They were at Eton together,” she said.

  “Boyfriend?” Henry tilted his head and raised his eyebrows.

  “Boyfriend.” Eliza nodded. “Jamie.”

  “Sounds serious.”

  Eliza smiled.

  “Jamie,” Henry repeated. “English?”

  “Very.” Eliza looked over her shoulder to see if she could spot Jamie. He was zigzagging through the sea of colorful hats and dark jackets, holding two flutes of champagne at shoulder height. “He’s just coming, I’ll introduce you.” Jamie passed through an involved conversation between two matrons and appeared before them.

  “Sorry, darling.” He handed Eliza a glass. “I ran into Lady Caledon and couldn’t get away.”

  “Jamie, I want to introduce you to an old friend from Charleston, Henry Heyward.”

  Jamie held out his hand. “Jamie Barings, very nice to meet you.” He took a long sip of his champagne. “You’ve come all the way from Charleston? How do you know Simon and Caroline?”

  “Caroline’s mother was a distant cousin of my mother’s,” Henry said.

  “Caroline lived with Henry’s family in Charleston for a summer,” Eliza added.

  “Oh, I see. Caroline’s such a lovely girl. I just met her a few months ago. Simon is absolutely besotted with her,” Jamie said. “Charleston, well, you have such lovely weather in the Carolinas, not this filthy rain we’ve had all week. I keep trying to coax Eliza to take me down there, but she always finds some reason not to.”

  Eliza watched Henry to see what he thought of Jamie. She knew she shouldn’t care, but she did. And she knew what he was thinking—that Jamie was too English and too mannered for her.

  Jamie nodded hello to two bridesmaids and moved closer to Eliza to allow them to pass. Eliza sensed they were disappointed Jamie had not introduced them to Henry.

  “So when was the last time you saw each other?” Jamie lifted his champagne flute first toward Henry and then toward Eliza before taking a last sip.

  Henry tilted his head sideways, but he didn’t take his eyes off of Eliza. “About ten years.” He looked at Eliza for her acknowledgment.

  “How long are you here?” The rain was coming down hard now, and Jamie raised his voice.

  “I’m going back tonight. Catching the last flight. I asked Caroline to seat me somewhere close to the exit in case I have to leave early.”

  Jamie looked beyond Eliza at the guests taking their seats. “I think we should probably find our table. I’m just going to put this down,
” Jamie said, referring to his empty glass. “Can I take yours?” Eliza handed him her untouched glass. “I’ll be right back.”

  Henry watched Jamie disappear. “He’s crazy about you.”

  “Perhaps,” Eliza said.

  Henry waited, but Eliza offered nothing more. “So, do you ever come to Charleston? I used to see your mother some, but now I never do.”

  “I haven’t been back in a while. You knew my mother remarried?”

  “I did,” he said. “Ben Hastings. They don’t spend much time in Charleston now, do they?”

  “Not really. They spend most of their time in Middleburg, but they come down some. Sara, Ben’s daughter, goes to the College of Charleston.”

  “What about Christmas? Do you come back for Christmas?”

  “To Middleburg. My mother has everyone there. Actually I’m coming to Charleston in a few weeks for Sara’s coming-out party.”

  “Is Jamie coming?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Eliza.” He took her wrist. “Promise you’ll call when you get to town.”

  Eliza looked at Henry to see if he understood what he was asking her to do.

  “Promise.”

  A footman’s voice asked everyone to please take their seats.

  “Yes, okay.”

  Jamie returned. Henry let go of her wrist.

  “Darling, we had better find our table.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  ELIZA WASN’T CERTAIN SHE HAD MADE THE RIGHT DECISION. Several times she had decided it wouldn’t be wise for her to return to Charleston, but when she called to tell her mother she had too much work and too many deadlines, her mother insisted how much her coming meant to Sara. In truth, work and deadlines were not the reason Eliza was reluctant to return home. She didn’t know what spending time with Henry would do to her—and she wasn’t certain she wanted to take the risk to find out—and yet there had always been something about Henry she had never been able to resist.

  She was flying in on the afternoon of her stepsister’s debutante party, cutting the edge as finely as she dared. Eliza looked out the airplane window, down at the landscape she knew so well. She liked seeing it from such a distance. So much of her time was spent looking at images on vertical surfaces at close range—paintings hung on walls or projected onto screens. She had been thinking about distance and location in painting for some time. She had gone to an exhibit at the Marlborough Gallery of a Spanish hyperrealist who had painted with such minute precision that she had overheard someone mistake one of his compositions for a photograph. He signed all of his work with a self-portrait, no larger than a dime, painted as if it were reflected on the convex head of a silver tack. And then there was the Englishman who had covered the floor of the ground gallery of the Tate Modern with a spiral, twenty meters in diameter, made of dried wooden sticks and pocket compasses of varying sizes and shapes. The title of the installation was What Interests Me Is the Thing That Cannot Be Located. The work of the Spaniard and the Englishman demanded vastly different distances to be understood.

  When and where she might run into Henry was something Eliza had thought about from time to time for years. She imagined running into him at the National Gallery or on the Eurostar to Paris or at the British Airways check-in at JFK. It made no sense, but Eliza sometimes caught herself looking in the mirror and smoothing out her ponytail before she left for a journey. She even half expected that in the conversations with the collectors she had traveled to meet and whose paintings she had been hired to document, Henry’s name might come up with the revelation of her Charleston background, but it never did.

  She reached in the seat pocket in front of her for her folder on Bonnard. She opened it and looked at the image of Bonnard’s Déjeuner one more time. A man and a woman sat at a table bearing a feast of fruit. Eliza still wasn’t convinced, as Jamie had been, that this couple was not waiting for someone. Bonnard had, after all, painted an empty chair between them. Across the top of her draft essay on Bonnard she wrote, “What does it mean—the thing that cannot be located?” She would have two weeks in Charleston to figure this out.

  Eliza returned her gaze to the window. Thousands of feet below, roads that curved and faded without apparent reason snaked through large green untouched forest. Unlike the ordered rectangles and quadrilaterals and polygons of the English countryside that fit together like irregular pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, everything here was sinuous, unordered, untamed. The only straight line she could see was the Southern Seaboard Railroad and the power lines that cut sharp tracks through large expanses of timber. Toward the coast, the solid forests gave way to winding rivers and irregular patches of marsh. Eliza guessed that the dark river that curled in lazy loops was the Ashley River—it reminded her of the white sugar icing her grandmother used to let her serpentine across the top of her lemon cakes. Eliza watched the plane’s shadow flee in front of them across land that disappeared into marshes. She enjoyed the weightless feeling of the shadow’s swift escape precisely because running away from something or someone had never felt so easy.

  As they approached Charleston, the waterways grew wider and the creeks and tributaries so numerous that it looked as if one big rainstorm would submerge the city. A local poet, long deceased, had referred to Charleston as a “sea-drinking city.” As they descended, Eliza could see all the houses lined up along the marshes with long thin docks running to the deep water. She watched a motorboat making a tight circle to pick up a waterskier.

  Eliza wondered where Jamie was now. Jamie had gotten angry with her for her ambivalence about his coming to Charleston. When the National Trust commission had come, he hastily arranged the trip without consulting her. He had always been so wonderful to her, and she hated that she made him unhappy. Was she looking for something that didn’t exist? Did she even know what love was? Did she know the answer to the question she had asked herself before she left—could she live without Jamie? But was that even the right question to ask? She had lived without Henry. Maybe it was all as simple as she did not love Jamie enough.

  The afternoon heat had not yet left the day when Eliza’s flight arrived in Charleston. Eliza remained seated and reorganized her satchel while she waited for the other passengers to push past. She had told her mother not to send anyone, she would take a taxi. At the baggage claim, she looked at the people gathered around her, and she realized she could be in any city. There was not one familiar face—only the same redcap who had been there whenever she had flown home from college.

  Eliza wrestled her bag off the luggage carousel and headed for the taxi rank. She paused for a moment to look at the palmetto trees outlined against the sky. Almost another three hours of daylight left, but the descending sun had already begun to pull the color out of the sky. The air was soft and heavy. It was as if someone had put an arm around her. A battered yellow station wagon appeared and a small black man hopped out. “Where are you going, young lady?”

  “Downtown. Church Street.”

  “Alrighty, hop aboard.”

  He held the door for Eliza. They proceeded down the wide parklike retreat from the airport and then onto Interstate 26. The driver drummed his fingers on his steering wheel to the rhythm of Jr. Walker & the All Stars’ “Road Runner.” Eliza was relieved that Jamie had not come with her. She was tired, and she wanted to feel what it was like to come back to the place without having to translate or explain. Had Jamie come, he would not have been able to resist telling her that the roadway into Charleston was “oversigned” with billboards tempting tourists with promises of perfect beaches, comfortable hotel rooms, endless meals; that Charlestonians’ reference to a colonnaded porch as a piazza was the equivalent of calling it an Italian square; and that Charlestonians’ pronunciation of the French street names was not only incorrect but also incomprehensible. He would, in his mock serious tone, begin discussing, as he did on every trip they had taken, the addition of a new chapter to his imaginary work A Guide for the Perplexed.

  On the
way into town, Eliza sat back and let herself be soothed by the clunk-clunking of the tires over the sections of concrete, past the acres of factories and worn-out land, until the tip of the Cooper River Bridge appeared above the railing. When the signs pointing to the turnoffs for King and Meeting streets loomed overhead, Eliza asked the driver to follow the sign to Mount Pleasant and then get off at the East Bay exit. “Whatever be your pleasure,” he said as they dipped under the overpass and headed up the ramp toward the Cooper River Bridge, then down the East Bay exit and stopped at the light.

  Nothing had changed. The massive three-storied Faber-Ward house, built in the 1830s and converted into a hotel for freed slaves during the Civil War, still stood haunted and empty—facing land that, for as long as Eliza could remember, was used by the Port Authority for stacking the containers of cargo ships. They continued on down East Bay Street past the Slave Market, which catered to the tourist trade, and crossed Broad Street. Soon the buildings on the east side gave way to a seawall and promenade, and the name changed from East Bay to East Battery. There was something soothing about coming back to a place where there was nothing new to see, where everything was known, where there were only confirmations and never any questions.

  Eliza asked the driver to go all the way down East Battery past the towering antebellum houses and then loop back around White Point Gardens to Church Street. She wanted to take the long way home. She knew that once she left the taxi her journey would no longer feel free and effortless like the shadow of the plane she had been watching. As they turned onto Church Street and bumped slowly over the uneven brick paving of the streets, Eliza said, “It’s the pale stone-colored house on the left.”

  THE PAST WAS A KIND OF WEATHER THAT PUSHED IN FROM the harbor and lingered long. Eliza stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the tall three-story stucco house that had been in her father’s family for six generations. The Richardson-Poinsett house was a typical Charleston single house—two major rooms on each floor, the narrow side of the house facing the street and the length stretching back into a deep plot of land. As an only child, Eliza had had the entire third floor to herself. The Poinsett house, as it was now called, was distinguished with a double lot and a manicured lawn. In Charleston, houses were heritage and were sold only if they had to be. When Eliza’s mother, widowed for nearly a decade, remarried eight years ago, she had moved with her husband to his farm in Middleburg, but the house and garden were maintained as if the family were still living there.