as wafers, everything breathing but me.
Sarah walked with me to the basement. She said, “Would you like some warmed tea? I can put a little brandy in it.”
I shook my head. She wanted to draw me to her for solace, I could tell, but she held back. Instead, she laid her hand gentle on my arm and said, “She’ll come back.”
I said those words all night long.
I didn’t know how to be in the world without her.
Sarah
Charlotte’s disappearance brought a severe and terrible mercy, for not once throughout the harrowing weeks that followed Burke’s betrayal was I uncertain which event was tragic and which was merely unfortunate.
Someone—Mother, Father, perhaps Thomas—placed an ad in the Charleston Mercury.
Disappeared, Female Slave
Mulatto. Wide space between upper front teeth. Occasional limp. Answers to the name of Charlotte. Wearing red scarf and dark blue dress. A seamstress of skill and value. Belongs to Judge John Grimké. Large reward for her return.
The appeal brought no response.
Each day I watched from the back window in my room as Handful walked a repetitive circuit in the work yard. Sometimes she walked the entirety of the morning. Never varying her path, she started at the back of the house, moved toward the kitchen house, past the laundry, cut over to the oak tree, where she touched the trunk as she passed, then back to the house by way of the stable and carriage house. Upon reaching the porch steps, she would simply begin again. It was a circumambulation of such precise, ritualistic grief no one interfered. Even Mother left her to walk a rut of anguish into the yard.
I didn’t much mourn the loss of Burke or the demise of our wedding. I felt little heartbreak. Was that not strange? I did cry buckets, but mostly from the shame of it all.
I didn’t break my seclusion again. Instead, I took refuge in it.
Almost daily I received notes of concern in flowery scripts. I was being prayed for by everyone imaginable. It was hoped my reputation wouldn’t suffer too much. Did I know that Burke had vacated the city and was staying indefinitely with his uncle in Columbia? Wasn’t it a shame that his mother had taken ill with apoplexy? How was my own mother bearing up? I was missed at tea, but my absence was commended. I shouldn’t despair, for surely a young man would come forth who wouldn’t be put off by my disgrace.
I wrote rants and rebukes in my diary, then tore them out and burned them along with all the supercilious notes. Gradually, the lava in me subsided and there remained only a young woman whose life course had been demolished. Unlike Handful, I had no notion what path to walk.
One month after Charlotte’s disappearance, a frigid wind brought down most of the leaves on the oak. Handful still walked obsessively each morning, but only a quick loop or so now. The week before, Mother had put a stop to her unremitting march and sent her back to her duties. The high social season with its quota of gowns awaited—all the sewing now fell to Handful. Charlotte was gone. No one believed she was coming back.
I’d managed to stretch my three weeks of seclusion into four, but on this day, my reprieve ended. Mother had ordered me back to my duties, as well: procuring a husband. She’d informed me that a rowboat traversing the Atlantic might eventually be rescued by a passing ship, but only if the rowboat bravely set out upon the water—this, her hapless metaphor of my marital prospects. My sister Mary arrived with similar encouragement. “Lift your chin, Sarah. Behave as if nothing has happened. Be gay and act assured. You’ll find a husband, God willing.”
God willing. How strangely that strikes me now.
On the evening my solitude ended, I shoved myself out into the public domain by attending a lecture at the Second Presbyterian Church delivered by the Reverend Henry Kollack, a famed preacher. Those were not the waters Mother had in mind. The Episcopal Church might pass for society, but certainly not the Presbyterians with their revivalism and shouts for repentance—but she didn’t object. I was at least rowing, wasn’t I?
Sitting in a pew beside the devout friend who’d invited me, I scarcely listened at first. Words—sin, moral degradation, retribution—flitted in and out of my awareness, but at some point during that hour, I became morbidly engrossed.
The reverend’s eyes found me—I can’t explain it. Nor did he look away as he spoke.