Chapter Eight

Beatrice did not return to Savannah. She dare not do so, even after Meshach and Cricket returned from Atlanta with a new family of sharecroppers; fear for Ella kept her there. Ella was not demented, as first Beatrice had feared the day of her arrival at Greenpoole, but she was indeed possessed. So calculating in her bitterness and so scheming in her dreams of revenges and so full of hatred for the architect of her misery that Beatrice regularly cringed at the sounds of her dry-eyed ravings. Not since the loss of precious little Seth, had Beatrice seen this tearless combination of grief and bitterness. Only now, her hatred was for Gentry Garland, not Victor Faircloth. She rarely spoke of anything other than her plan to regain her son, and always with choking anger in her voice.

"When the next crops are in," she said. "I will hire the Pinkerton Agency to find Adam and bring him home to me.

"The Pinkertons?" Beatrice cried. "Why, they spied on the Confederacy during the war!"

"I don't care if they spied on Jesus Christ! I'd enlist Sherman himself, if I could!" She then stared accusingly at Beatrice and added, "With Honor gone off to Europe, we could manage much easier, Grandmother, if you would sell your house in town. You don't need it, and I want you here at Greenpoole where you belong ... here with Adam and me when I get him back. I could get him back a lot sooner if you'd sell. We need the money. If you love Adam and me, you will do it."

"We shall see," was Beatrice's only reply, forgiving, for the moment, her granddaughter's uncommon rudeness.

Beatrice could only watch and worry, as Ella, ignoring warnings to slow down, worked tirelessly around the house and grounds, in the stable, and in the gardens and orchards in which Meshach also worked tirelessly to restore. In all Beatrice's years, she had never seen anyone in such a state of mental and physical undoing, scrubbing the floors, the walls, the windows—daily pulling weeds from the graves in the rose garden, digging for their roots even before they broke surface. Meshach digging nearby, his wide troubled eyes clearly fearful for her. It was as if she knew if she stopped, she would fall apart—just as everything around her had fallen apart. She scarcely ate and was so thin that Beatrice worried she would collapse from malnourishment. But all the begging and pleading, and lastly, the hard slap across the face, did not jar Ella from her smoldering state of mind. Beatrice could not bear to look into Ella's eyes, her anguish evident in them, and her tormented thoughts constantly flickering in their depths. Something had to be done, and quickly!

Unable to stop Ella from her obsession, Beatrice pondered a solution while wandering thorough the big old mansion, something she had not done in years. Greenpoole Manor, once exquisitely furnished with the collected treasures of five proud generations, was now simply a collection of cavernous, mostly empty, rooms, its dying breath echoed with every hollow footstep across its bare floors. Like the whole of Greenpoole plantation, the house was beyond the frantic efforts of one thin, angry young woman bent on restoration.

* * *

Beatrice, agitated more than usual today, snorted loudly then wagged her finger at Cricket on the stairs, as he toted firewood up to her room. "Why, it would take the entire inventory of my attic just to furnish half the downstairs rooms of this monstrous old mausoleum!"

"Huh?"

"Don't "huh" me, young man. Put that wood where it belongs and find Meshach—we're going to town."

Gentry had mercifully left his fine horse behind and taken old Blackie, and Beatrice sat on the seat of the enormous cotton wagon while Meshach and Cricket hitched the horse and Beatrice's mule to the cumbersome vehicle. I am crazy as a loon for bringing my treasures out here, she thought, as the three of them headed for town, but perhaps Ella will calm down if surrounded by a few comforts. Besides, if she decided to sell the house in town, she most certainly wasn't selling her treasures along with it!

*. *. *

With most of the downstairs cozily furnished and Beatrice's promise to sell, Ella seemed better—until a cold day in January when she stumbled, sobbing, into the house. She had been down by Corrigans' pool for hours, and her face stood out like a pale, ornamental mask as she stumbled toward Beatrice, her eyes swollen nearly shut from crying, her nose red and dripping.

"Grandmother!" she screamed, hoarse, and choking on her words. "I am with child! I'm pregnant! Pregnant!" She dropped to her knees beside Beatrice's chair, her eyes filled with disbelief of her own words. Then, wretched with convulsive sobs, she buried her head in her arms across Beatrice's lap.

Beatrice could only pat her shoulders and stroke her hair. The thought of Ella giving birth at this time, when food was so scarce and Ella's health was not at its peak, worried her as much as it horrified Ella. But perhaps this unwanted baby, still safe in it mother's womb, was the miracle that would jolt Ella back t her senses, and she would go to her husband and son—without I having to conscript the final drastic measure, Beatrice thought. That night, after readying for bed, Beatrice got down on her knees and thanked God for His drastic measure ... surely His latest miracle in disguise.

* * *

Whether consciously, because she must think of the health of her baby, or simply because nature induces a woman to eat when her body hosts another life, Ella regained her appetite. By the end of June, her cheekbones no longer stood out sharply beneath the covering of her alabaster skin. Beatrice was relieved that Ella appeared fit, even with keeping pace alongside her new batch of sharecroppers, a family of Victor's ex slaves from his dreaded Moss Oak plantation. Beatrice did not have to wonder about their devotion to her granddaughter; the fact that Ella, as well as they, had suffered Victor's cruel existence at Moss Oak was enough to bind them. But Ella continued to agonize over her child's safety 'in that God-forbidden place Gentry had taken him to.' She seldom altered her expression with a smile, although Beatrice laughed aloud with her once when Judith Ashville rode out to Greenpoole especially to gift Ella with the same large, blue shawl the woman had worn to conceal her twelve pregnancies that had occurred in rapid succession, one after the other ... until her tyrant of a husband was sent off to Castle Williams Prison on Governors Island in New York right after the war and had not returned—another of God's miracles in disguise, Beatrice quipped.

Ella laughed dryly again when, sitting on the veranda with Beatrice, she added more folded paper to the insides of her shoes.

"Remember before the war, Grandmother, when we sat on this very same spot and you chastised me because I was too sure of myself ... too smug in the luxury of our life? You said it could all evaporate like morning fog on the river. How right you were!"

Beatrice smiled, and shifted the mending basket in her lap. "Yes, and we bantered back and forth over your reluctance to chose a husband, I believe."

"Well, I'll bet even that old fortune teller of yours, Bootsie, never guessed that I'd marry twice, and finally end up deserted, pregnant, and...," she violently stuffed the other shoe with paper, "and barefooted!"

Beatrice did not look up from her sewing. Not that her mind was idle, but the moment was not yet right in which she should put her long thought-out plan into play. She glanced at Ella swollen stomach outlined beneath the blue shawl. Time was not her ally. Her plan must be executed soon; Ella's future depended on it.