Today's Reading
"I do not want to marry Elijah Shepherd," I said, trying to appeal to his compassion, though I'd not witnessed it often. "I do not love him."
"Love." He said the word with such disdain it made me wonder if he'd ever been in love. He'd never spoken of my grandmother and rarely spoke of my mother, unless he was comparing my inadequacies to hers. The only things I knew were the rumors I'd overheard the servants whispering.
Witchcraft. Adultery. Abandonment. Betrayal.
"If I can secure a marriage between you and Elijah," he said, "and we can join our plantations, we will be the richest planters in South Carolina. I will not have you thwart my plans." He opened the back door. "Come. Nanny will help you dress for supper."
I had no choice but to slip up the back stairs to my room. The house was long and narrow, with three rooms on the main floor and three above.
Grandfather slept in one room on the far end of the upstairs, and I had the middle room. The room on the opposite end had belonged to my mother but had been locked my whole life. I walked by the closed door now, a reminder of all the secrets kept from me. Twice, I'd tried to break into that room to see what Grandfather was hiding, but both times I had been discovered and thoroughly disciplined with the rod.
Nanny was waiting for me when I entered my room, my best muslin gown in her arthritic hands. She had been with me my whole life, coming to Middleburg when my mother was an infant. She'd been old when I was young and was almost too old to be of service now. But I would not hear of her being displaced. She was one of the only connections I had to my mother, though she told me little more than Grandfather.
"Off gadding about again?" she asked, tsking me with a smile in her voice. "Your grandfather is in a state. We must hurry." She began to untie the lacings at my back.
"I was not gadding about," I told her as I slipped out of my gown. "Did you know the purpose for Governor Shepherd's visit today?"
"Aye—and I suspect you did, too."
"Grandfather has told me nothing before now."
"Are you that naïve, Caroline?" she asked. "Surely, you knew that he would marry you to his advantage." She turned me to look at my image in the mirror as she helped me into my muslin gown.
"Look at how pretty you are. 'Tis a wonder someone didn't scoop you up before now."
My brown eyes stared back at me from a face that some called beautiful, though I saw all the flaws. A square jaw, thick eyebrows, a petulant mouth, and a rebellious gaze—one I tried to quell.
I shared some similarities with my parents in 1927, but neither of them had brown eyes. Did Anne, my mother in 1727, have brown eyes? Or were they the eyes of her sea merchant husband? The man with a name I'd never been told.
Nanny helped me restyle my hair as I used a wet cloth to wipe the sweat and dust from my face. When I was young, I tried telling her about my other life, but she had shushed me, threatening to whip me for speaking such blasphemy and lies. She had put her trembling hand against my lips and said, "Speak not such things. You're already marked by your ancestors." She had moved her hand to my chest where I bore a sunburst birthmark, the same one she said my mother had possessed, and perhaps my grandmother before her. "Do not give them a reason to destroy you as they did them."
Her words had further terrified a frightened child. For years, I had lived in fear and uncertainty, wondering if I was insane. Perhaps my two lives were a work of my imagination. But, if so, which one was real, and which was made up?
I wanted to ask Nanny who had destroyed my ancestors, but my questions would go unanswered, so I heeded her words and spoke no more about the second life I lived as the fortress of secrets grew around me, holding me captive. Over the years, I had come to accept that somehow both of my lives were real, and there had to be an explanation—one that was being kept from me.
One that perhaps my mother could answer.
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