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Part VII: 1846- On Whose Bones We Built Our Glory
"There's no marriage at all, in fact!" Beth protested.
"In the cart with ye, now, Caiomhe!" O'Halloran barked, "Salesmanship's no position for a liddie!"
Beth was going to say something to that, but she was derailed by the fact that this man had named his daughter after the sound of vaginal flatulence, "I'm sorry. Did you say her name was Queefa?"
"Just so, missie, and my apologies for the interruption."
"Oh, no, that's fine. I think we need more liddies in business, in fact. Gaslight, gatekeep, liddyboss, that's what I say," she turned to Everett, "This is cute, right? They're selling male aphrodiasic out the back of their car...riage. Whatever happened to this country...?"
"Cillian!" O'Halloran called, "Come collect your sister!"
A teenage boy, a few years older than Queefa (?), poked his head out of the cart, "Sorry, Da!" he leaned his arm out with a rakish smile, "Hello, sir and miss! Got a care for our wares, or were you drawn by the sight of a pretty face?"
-Beth, O'Halloran, and Cillian
"Well not yet I suppose, but you keep making my mother squirm and I might propose sooner than later." He jested as he turned back to the irishman.
"Now don't be going and trying to sell your snake oils to this impressionable young lady you hear?"
"Oh, please, Papa!" Caoimhe whined in her Irish brogue. "All I did was say what you usually say! Just cause I'm a lady doesn't make it any less true!" She stormed off before Cillian could return her to the cart. "I'll be goin' on my own, thank you very much! But good luck askin' me to do the demonstration for these customers, or ever again, mind you!" With that, Caoimhe slammed the cart door behind her.
Beth did a double-take, "Did you...did you just hit on me?"
This would've been a fine time to spontaneously become a lesbian, though her generally sexual position usually rested somewhere in the broad category of 'amorous ambivalence'.
Thankfully, there was an unfolding rustic domestic squabble occurring. People had a lot of those around here, she supposed.
"Ah, kids," O'Halloran sighed, turning back to them, "Never have 'em, 'less you want to be ruled by 'em."
"Kinky," Beth noted, turning to Everett, "We should buy something. It's only good manners, but something tells me your mother has more Bibles than she knows what to do with."
-Beth and O'Halloran
"Maybe i did." Everett responded.
"Listen, you got any hair tonic, my father could really use it."
"Well, as to that," the window opened again, and Cillian descended lightly to the ground, slamming it shut behind him, presumably so his sister couldn't escape, "The Hoppin' Syrup will fix up the barest scalp right as rain! Just ask me Da."
"No kiddin', pal?" Beth asked, unable to suppress a smirk.
"He speaks rightly, Miss. The tonic's an ointment as well. It also has powerful application in the removal of hemorrhoids and other festers."
"Oh, we've got to get this to your people," Beth told Everett.
-Cillian, Everett, and Beth
"So it works for pains in the ass as well you say? Well I might need a couple dozen then. at least, four."
Everett joked, giving the man a grateful handshake.
"And you know what, as a thanks for all your help, let me buy your gal a dress, while i buy one for the Miss here. You're in America now, she ought look like the proper lady she is." It might have been pity, or the fact she reminded him of his annoying little sister.
Caoimhe popped her head out the window. "Order five if your ailment's your father!" She turned to the fellow who called out to her. "And who are you to say what makes a proper lady, good sir? I'm feeling plenty feminine, if I do say so myself!" There was a glint in her eyes, though, that was perhaps open to the young Maddox's offer. Above all, Caoimhe appreciated being talked to all nice and polite, a rarity with their less gentlemanly customers.
"Say no more, sir!" O'Halloran declared brightly, fetching a small handful of bottles, "Small dosages, now, mind. But a teaspoon will be potent enough."
"Oh, I bet," Beth muttered, smiling askance as Everett mentioning buying both Miss Queefa and herself a dress, "Wait, what is this about dressing me up?"
"Oh, yer too kind by half, sir," O'Halloran inclined his head, "But yer business is reward enough."
"Seriously," Beth muttered, "Let's not be too ingratiating. You're like one of those people who buy the homeless sandwiches instead of giving them a buck."
But it was very cute that she'd run into the 19th century equivalent of a well-intentioned New England liberal. She supposed living in a house run on the backs of chattel slaves gave one a complex.
"We're making our own way, sir," O'Halloran said easily, collecting Everett's pale paper currency (Beth briefly considered getting her hands on some of that so she could make a killing at an appraiser's back in the New 10s), "But your generosity is appreciated."
"Oh, well," Beth shrugged, "He can afford it."
She thought she could glimpse Cillian watching from the cart, a catlike expression in his eyes at the expression. Beth decided not to think too much on that.
-Beth, O'Halloran, and Cillian
"Well whatever you decide, we'll be right inside the shop."
Everett made it clear they needed to go ahead and pick her out some proper garments. Ones that weren't handed down to her.
* * *
The Maddox house was quiet and still in the evening. Everett had proven a gallant escort as far as the entrance, though Beth had decided it was best for her to enter through the back like a good little domestic, lest Delilah Maddox look up from whatever deep therapy her areolas required every night to see her firstborn and heir wandering home in the company of a scullion of low birth.
Beth personally didn't give a shit. She'd come to the conclusion she'd been brought to this time period to troll the cast of Gone with the Wind, and until Dr. Galdamez showed up with a neatly bulleted list of directives, that's just what she was going to do.
"The night they drove old Dixie down," she sang softly as she mounted the narrow back stairs, "And all the bells were ringing/The night they drove old Dixie down/And all the people were singing/They sang 'La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la...'"
There was somebody sitting at the foot of her bed. Beth stopped in the doorway, the song curdling on her lips. She felt her blood go cold.
"By all means, my child," the figure spoke in a heavy accent Beth tentatively pegged as Cajun, "Don't let this old woman stop you."
A hand reached out to light the taper on the nightstand. In the warm orange glow of the lamp, Beth could see the intruder as a Black woman in her 40s or so. Hardly "old", at least by the standards Beth was used to, but something told her people in this time, in this woman's position, didn't live much longer than that.
"You're one of the slaves," she said at last.
"Clelia is my name, and I am not your slave."
"Right," she collected herself, "Sorry. That, uh...that was rude," she paused, "...what are you doing here?"
"I have come here to ask the same question of you," with one calloused hand, she reached beneath the bad to produce Beth's black wool coat, which she pulled up to the coverlet. Beth winced at once, took a step forward...
"I am up at the house most days," Clelia continued conversationally as she rummaged through Beth's pockets, "And it is expected of me to, sight unseen, move from room to room to see that all is in order and neat."
"And so you came up here to look at my stuff?"
"Your 'stuff'," Clelia smiled thinly, holding up a silver star on a chain, "The pentacle. Do they give these to all the girls at that fancy New Orleans finishing school?"
"You, um...you know what a pentagram is."
"I know a fair few more things than that," Clelia held up a few more items, "A sachet of sage, to cleanse ill humors. The singulum, for protection. The smudger, for the burning of sacred herbs..."
"Oh, that's just my Nicorette gum," Beth paused, "No, uh...magical implications."
"You have come a long way, little governess," Clelia said at last, looking at her knowingly, "Farther, I think, than New Orleans. But closer in some ways."
Had she figured her out? Just from looking through her pockets. And the way she'd recognized Beth's things...
"Are you a witch?" she asked breathlessly, "Like...a real witch?"
Clelia laughed, a rich and hearty sound, "I am as much a witch, little child, as you are a governess."
"No, but...you know what all this is. I've never met anyone who even knows what a singulum is for..."
"I know a few things more," she said sternly, "I know that some powers are not for foolish children to meddle with," she got to her feet, "You keep those things well hid. And if I were you, Miss Beth, I would make sure I am the last to have found your little stash," she paused, "And I would leave this place while the getting was good."
She snuffed out the lamp and left the room so quickly she may as well have poofed into thin air.
Beth lowered herself to the bed and took the pentagram in her hand, pressing it slowly to her lips. She realized she was shaking.
-Beth and Clelia
Beth reported to the "morning room" at 8:00, which was about as 'morning' as she was willing to manage. Breakfast had been a distasteful porridge of barely sweetened grits, which seemed to further Mrs. Maddox's almost fetishistic dictate that the sugar farmers have the blandest diet in the state. There was no coffee, only very weak tea. Beth was, accordingly, beginning to wonder whether or not her fingernails could be suitable instruments for suicide.
But no time for that now. She had an impressionable child to educate.
"Good morning, Ellie May," she greeted her young charge as she set the previous governess's (she of the notorious Unsuitability) texts down on the desk, "Fully weaned or hardly weaning?"
-Beth
Ellis paid the witch no mind, as he was deeply invested in his game of ball-in-a-cup.
"Hey," Beth attempted to snag the little fuck's attention, "Hey. Ellis. Kid. Sport. Fuck's sake, it's just a ball on some string; you saw more interesting shit in the womb. Come on, we have to do your, um..." she picked up one of the books, "...catechism."
Fuck.
-Beth
The stone wheel flung sparks to the ground as Mosiah ran the machete across it, stopping every other stroke to dunk in it water.
A razor's edge was needed, to cut through the thick cane stalks.
After the final dunk, he inspected the edge, and tested it by gently running it against the hair on his left arm. Shaving sharp.
"No!" Ellis whined, denying the witch the right to his eye contact. "The catechism is boring! It can wait. I'm not to be confirmed for some years!"
"Confirmed for what, kid? Skim or 2%? Now sit your ass still. We've got a metric ton of books to go through, and the other chick didn't leave a lesson plan before you terrorized her out of the house."
-Beth
"I didn't terrorize her," Ellis said snobbish-like. "Daddy did. He chased her around the house with his trousers down!" He paled like a ghost. "Don't tell him I told you that! Please!"
Beth didn't stop to mask an expression of naked (in a manner of speaking) disgust, "Of course he did."
She'd make a note to barricade her door, but this was probably one of those houses that had secret doors under all the beds. The old bastard could be watching them right now, working his sugarcane.
""Right, yeah, of course I won't tell him, Ellis. Why would I want to be the person to bring that up? What kind of depraved person do you think I am? Christ. Now sit the fuck down and read about..." she indicated the marked page, "...the transubstantiation. What, is that alchemy or something?"
-Beth
Like a good catholic boy, Ellis recited, with his hands folded before him, "The transformation of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ! Oh, please! A challenge!" He returned to his ball-in-a-cup.
"Lesson One, kid: nobody likes a smartass. And put that stupid thing away!" Beth swatted the functionally useless toy away.
-Beth
With that motion, the ball exited the cup and grazed Ellis's eye!
He began to cry!!!
"Aw shit," Beth breathed, "Oh fuck. Dammit."
Okay, so she didn't appear to have bruised him or anything, but what the hell difference did that make? It wasn't like governesses were a protected class in this wretched society.
Beth thought rapidly for quick and dirty solutions to this problem. She couldn't very well run away. The kid would rat her out in a second.
"Oh Jesus..." Beth cracked her knuckles and made to grab Ellis by the neck and end the little shit's misery before he could prolong hers...
"What is the meaning of this, by heaven?" Delilah had appeared in the doorway.
Beth immediately got very busy with her hands, "Shadow puppets!" she paused, "By heaven."
-Beth and Delilah
Ellis's crying came to an abrupt end when his mother stood in the doorway. "Mother!" He ran to her loins. "I'm scared! She won't let me play with my ball in a cup!"
Beth was fully anticipating having to jump through the window and make a break for freedom, but Delilah surprised her.
"And well she should have!" Delilah cuffed Timothy about the ears, "This is a time for studying, if you know what's good for you. Idle hands make devilish deeds. Now, back to your schoolbooks."
-Beth and Delilah
Ellis gasped, scandalized.
His face wrinkling up like a prune, he turned to Miss Beth, crying hysterically. "YOU TURNED HER AGAINST ME!!!" He ran to his bed and buried his face in his pillow, wailing.
"And I'll do it again!" declared Beth impulsively, "Now sit the hell down and do your fucking multiplication tables," clearing her throat, she turned back to Delilah, "Hi."
"You are strict in the schoolroom," the older woman observed.
"Prepares them for the streets."
"Good," she nodded, "He needs good discipline," she cocked an eyebrow, "Perhaps I was right not to turn you away outright."
"Oh, thanks, ma'am. Really sweet of you."
"See that my mind is not changed."
With that ominous comment, Delilah left as swiftly as she'd appeared. Beth sighed, returning to the books, "Okay, you little degenerate. What's two times two? Double time if you want to eat tonight."
-Beth and Delilah
Ellis whimpered incessantly, "B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b there's no arithmetic in the catechism!"
"There is if you want to eat!" Beth declared in triumphant vindication, "Now get to it."
***
"I saw you last night," Marianne leaned over the back of the sofa in the south lounge to leer at her elder brother, "Stealing on up to the house on our Miss Beth's arm," she giggled, "You made a handsome couple, to be sure, but I'm sure mother wouldn't like to hear me tell it."
-Beth and Marianne
"Marianne didn't I ever tell you about our other sister? She was quite the little sneak too. Go ash I miss her, tragic accident."
He said, never looking up from the book in his lap as he made busy packing his pipe extra firmly as he said the word accident.