Wild Midnight Read online

  “D’Arcy always complains about her social life,” Sissy said, coming in with a silver tray with cut-glass pitcher of lemonade and Waterford goblets, “but she’s been president of everything. She’s run every charity and club in Charleston at least once. She’s so smart, I guess that’s why she’s still not married.”

  “Oh hush up, Sissy.” But the quip had struck a nerve: D’Arcy looked away with a strange expression. “All the good men are taken, you know that. Charleston’s about the only place,” she told Rachel, “where a handful of people marry each other so they can keep their land and their money in one place. Isn’t that positively feudal? Middletons still marry Izards and Manigaults and Rutledges and Beaumonts and Draytons the way they did back before the War. Sissy’s going to do the same thing—she’s going to Ashley Hall, just like Mama and Grandmama did, so she can catch some Pinckney or Manigault boy from the Citadel.”

  “At least I won’t fall in love with somebody I can’t marry,” the teenager responded sulkily. “And still be hanging around when I’m thirty.”

  There was an awkward silence. Then D’Arcy said calmly, “I just fell in love with the wrong man, brat. And I can’t help being thirty and practically half dead. I’m a well-known Charleston misfire, that’s all.”

  “Oh, D’Arcy,” Rachel murmured sympathetically. The same brooding expression had come back to the blond woman’s lovely features that she had seen when they’d visited Belle Haven.

  D’Arcy turned to help herself to more lemonade. “Me’n poor old Beau down in Draytonville,” she said with a mock sigh, “we’re the marital fiascos of the family. Beau’s no chicken, either, and Lord knows when he’ll get married! Clarissa’d turnover in her grave if she thought there wasn’t anybody coming along to keep the Beaumont name alive.”

  “If he can even find anybody who’ll have him,” Sissy observed.

  “There are just zillions of women who would! What are you saying? Any red-blooded woman would take cousin Beau on looks alone, you know that. Good Lord, Sissy—he’s the sexiest man alive, it’s getting along with him that’s pure hell! But then what can you expect—the way Clarissa and Lee Tillson brought him up was enough to make a basket case out of any young’un.

  “Beau’s a real nut,” Sissy confirmed, helping herself to a sugar cookie from the silver tray.

  “And will you stop saying that? You don’t know anything about it. There was nothing anybody could do with Clarissa, she was obsessed with that damned house, and Beau always looking like some sharecropper’s child without any decent clothes half the time, and with only the cook, Eulie, and the yard boy to pay him any mind. Besides,” D’Arcy said indignantly, “the whole town knew Clarissa and Lee were too busy fighting like wildcats to look after anybody but themselves. Mama used to have a fit the way they let that boy run all over the marshes in a leaky little bateau and associate with shrimpers and crabbers and do just what he wanted to. He was neglected as hell. Why, when Beau was little he got scarlet fever and Eulie had to take him to the doctor herself—she was more a mother to him than his own mother! Beau damned near died too. Then Clarissa had hysterics about it and took to her bed, and God Almighty, she got more attention than poor old Beau did!”

  “Old?” Rachel said, confused. They had moved back into the spacious bedroom, and she sank down wearily on the antique organdy bedspread of the canopied bed. “When did this happen?”

  Both sisters laughed. “Old, sugar—not old, just ‘poor old Beau,’“ D’Arcy said, sitting down beside her. “Or poor old anybody. Beau’s thirty-five or thirty-six. He was barely nineteen, you know, when he went off to Vietnam.”

  “Aunt Clarissa died while he was over there,” Sissy put in, “and the army let Beau come back for the funeral. It took a long time to find him, and the undertaker had to keep Aunt Clarissa refrigerated for weeks. D’Arcy and I went to the funeral, we were the only ones there except Great Uncle John from Fripp Island. It was the pits,” she said in a sepulchral tone. “Beau stayed drunk for just days and days. I thought he was going to fall in the grave at the cemetery, he kept swaying back and forth right at the edge.”

  D’Arcy glared at her sister. “My God,” she said under her breath. “I guess you could say Beau was a little stinking,” she admitted to Rachel, “but then he could just as well have stayed out in the jungle for all the good it did coming home. Clarissa was out of her mind that last year, and Lee Tillson had gone back up to Clemson to buy a whole slew of banks and get even richer. They made a pair, those two. Lee Tillson was just a redneck from up-country who wanted to get into low-country society. He even bought a couple of hunters and learned to ride, the fool—all done up in a pink jacket and English boots, like he was master of the Middleton Hunt or something! You’d fall down dying laughing to see him.”

  “Didn’t they love each other?” Rachel said. She was so weary, she was tempted to lie down against the heirloom bedspread they were sitting on and close her eyes. Propped on one elbow, a glass of lemonade held in listless fingers, she felt the events of the last twenty-four hours dragging at her like a powerful force. “There must have been some attraction,” she said with an effort. “Other than just money. At least in the beginning.”

  “She was beautiful,” Sissy said. “Aunt Clarissa. Even when she got old.”

  “Oh, yes,” D’Arcy said and sighed, “tall and lovely with all that white skin and those perfect porcelain features. But Lord, she was mean as hell. I don’t think Lee Tillson got any sex after Beau was born, at least that was what my daddy always said. And she probably wouldn’t even have had Beau, only Belle Haven needed an heir. Then Lee Tillson got his revenge by sleeping all over DeRenne County, and that only made her worse. Clarissa had an awful temper. You know,” D’Arcy confided, “his daddy didn’t set a very good example for that boy when he was growing up.”

  “Beau’s had a lot of women,” Sissy put in. “Lots and lots.”

  “No, he hasn’t,” D’Arcy screeched. “Will you quit it, Sissy? She just says things like that to get my goat,” she muttered to Rachel. “You just wait—next year, when she comes out, Sissy will have lots and lots of boyfriends and act like a decent human being, it always happens. Anyway, Clarissa spent Lee Tillson’s money like water, going to New York and Paris for antique furniture. And Lee was just as bad with his hunter horses and big Cadillac cars, trying to get his name in the Charleston News and Courier and be a part of Southern aristocracy. But people never liked them. Crazy as bats, both of them.”

  “Aunt Clarissa tried to burn the house down,” Sissy put in sotto voce. “When she was crazy. That’s what happened to that wing you saw.

  Rachel was wondering if it would be too rude to ask to be allowed to take a nap before dinner. Her eyes were drooping in spite of her best efforts to keep them open, and the flower-scented breeze that flowed into the beautiful room from the garden was almost narcotic. She had a feeling that the sisters, especially D’Arcy, could go on about family history for hours. She choked back a yawn.

  “Oh, Sissy, somebody’s always trying to burn down that place down there,” D’Arcy told her. “Good night, don’t you remember Daddy’s story about how they set fire to it when Uncle Estill put in gas heat just after World War Two? And when they had that accident in the dining room one Christmas when the tree caught fire—that was Uncle Estill’s mama and daddy, Rose and Garvey Beaumont. They were drunk as snakes with all that Christmas partying, and the fools threw champagne and bourbon on the tree, and of course that only made the fire worse. It was the servants who ran out the back and got water from the river, but of course they were all sober.”

  “Aunt Clarissa took a can of gasoline out of the garage when she was so crazy,” Sissy said, staring at Rachel with her usual sangfroid, “and set fire to her bedroom. The whole place went up, that wing anyway. When they pulled her out she just fell apart. The undertaker told me. They took her out in a rubber bag.”

  D’Arcy gave a small scream of outrage. “You’re going to make
us all sick to our stomachs, you nasty brat. Besides,” she said scathingly, “Belle Haven’s not supposed to burn down, it’s supposed to fall down. Lord knows when Beau will get enough money to build that wing up again, if he even cares.”

  Rachel had sunk on the bed, propped on one elbow. The sisters’ voices seemed faraway. It was strange, their obsession with the past. They were so young—it was something she’d always associated with old people, living with memories, chronicling what family members had done for generations.

  The voices dwindled to a murmur and the light had become dim. She hardly noticed the sound of a door closing.

  Rachel had fallen asleep with all her clothes on in the great bed under the ruffled canopy. Sleep had claimed her, and with it a dark void. The next thing she knew, she was lying on the all-too-familiar boards of the flatbed wagon as the tractor pulled it over rows of tomato plants. This was strangely real: she remembered thinking that she was much too tired to begin work again after the sleepless hours of the night she dreaded to remember, and the long trip to Charleston. Why was she back in Draytonville again? she wondered fretfully.

  As she leaned over to stick the green slips into the dark, brown earth, water flowed into the furrows from some unknown source. She’d never seen so much water—more than a leak from the water drums, she was sure. As she watched, the furrows filled with lead-colored liquid, and still it came; she seemed to be rolling on the flatbed wagon over a rising lake. Then the wagon under her floated free. She couldn’t move. There was water all around, and it was rising toward her face and she couldn’t move.

  With a start of terror Rachel woke up. It was late. The frilly lamp by the side of the bed had been turned on, and she blinked against the light. The long curtains at the windows and at the open door to the veranda billowed in the evening breeze. The room was fragrant with the scent of flowers. And D’Arcy Butler, in a long white evening gown that glittered, was bending over her.

  This was Charleston, she remembered groggily.

  A cool, soft hand was against her forehead. “D’Arcy?” Rachel murmured. For a moment the beautiful blond woman was like a glittering ghost.

  “Honey, I think you’re a little feverish.” D’Arcy frowned. “I’m going to go out. I’ve got a date, but Sissy and the cook are here if you want anything.” Rachel felt hands pulling the light spread over her. “Just go on and sleep, darlin’. I’m so glad we brought you back to Charleston with us. I don’t know what you’ve been doing lately, but you’re plumb worn out.”

  Rachel sank back into the bed. Charleston, she reminded herself with a sigh. It was so puzzling to fall into such a heavy, exhausted sleep when it usually took her several days to accustom herself to a strange bed, a strange place. Tiredness was a dark mist enveloping her. The last thing she remembered was that she didn’t want to dream anymore.

  But she did. It unfolded slowly with an odd, conscious knowledge that she was asleep, that it was a dream, and that she was one of its players. She was dancing in a candle-filled ballroom in this house—was it really the Butlers’ house in Charleston? she wondered as she entered a large elegant room in the upper story. The windows overlooked the darkened streets of the city and the faintly reflecting lights on Charleston Bay. The room was crowded with couples waltzing to the music of an orchestra playing somewhere, men in black old-fashioned evening dress and women in glittering silk gowns somewhat like the one D’Arcy had worn, but with full bell skirts and bodices cut low to reveal naked arms and shoulders. It was even stranger that Rachel was there among them; she had a sense that it might be: sometime in the past. Then the crowd parted and an incomparably beautiful tall man in somewhat antique black formal clothes, with sun-gilded hair and strange eyes, bowed slightly and enveloped her in his arms to whirl her away in a slow-beating waltz.

  It was too real, Rachel thought, struggling in the coiling mists that enveloped her. How could one be having a dream and know it was only that? Yet Beau Tillson’s body was warm and hard against hers, so real her nostrils were filled with the scent of the black broadcloth that covered his chest and shoulders, even his skin and his thick, springy hair with a faint fragrance of cologne. He held her lightly in his arms as they danced, and smiled down at her, a poignant smile that made her heart beat faster. They whirled and circled among the dancers, Rachel’s silk sparkling gown belling out around her as Beau Tillson swung her to the music’s three-quarter tempo.

  And all the time they waltzed a storm beat in fierce, slanting bursts against the ballroom windows and over the sound of the music. The torrent began to break into the room, gushing down the walls, staining the satin draperies, collecting in puddles on the polished floor under their feet where the dancers twirled on like automatons, splashing through the growing flood that even rose in the alcove where, behind a sheltering screen of palms, the musicians played on obliviously. Rachel was trying to pull back from Beau Tillson’s arms. The water kept rising in the ballroom until it was around their knees. Rachel’s heavy silk ballgown dragged around her legs suddenly, and she gasped with the effort to keep on dancing. But his hard, glittering face bent to her, and his warm lips touched her own.

  “Rachel,” he was saying in his warm, husky voice. A world of melancholy revolved around them in the ballroom, people long dead there in the echoing house. “Rachel, I can never love you.”

  She woke with a start.

  She brought herself to a sitting position in the bed, straining with unseeing eyes into the darkness. For a long second she didn’t know where she was, her consciousness saturated with the feel of her dream. Then she remembered this was Charleston. The sound of a television somewhere downstairs in the Butlers’ vast house came to her. Sissy was there. The peaceful drift of the white curtains against the darkness and a mockingbird’s nocturnal song from somewhere outside in the garden was reality.

  But reality, too, Rachel knew, shuddering, was the taste of Beau Tillson’s soft, sorrowful kiss still wet on her mouth.

  Dim-panelled in the painted scene of Sleep

  Thou giant Harlequin of Dreams dost leap

  The Harlequin of Dreams

  Chapter Eight

  For the third or fourth time Rachel tugged at the bodice of one of D’Arcy’s evening gowns, wondering how to approach her on the subject of blind dates. Looking over the top of D’Arcy’s blond head to the pier-glass mirror, the off-shoulder taffeta formal gown Rachel saw plunged much too low in front. There was a world of embarrassing difference between her bust measurements and those of the nearly six feet tall, elegantly slender D’Arcy, who was kneeling before her, taking up the hem.

  D’Arcy was going to an immense amount of trouble to show her the best of all possible good times in Charleston, and Rachel was impressed and grateful. But a date for Saturday evening with a young Air Force major and the major’s friend—hastily recruited as Rachel’s escort for dinner, the opera, then dancing—would in all probability turn out as badly as the doubles tennis match Rachel had stumbled through that morning with two young naval officers. D’Arcy had forgotten to ask her if she played tennis; at the last moment the doubles team on the clay courts at the Charleston country club had found out that their fourth member had made the second-string swimming team at Swarthmore, but was something of a dud on dry land. Rachel’s partner, one of the Charleston Navy Base’s top seeded players, had lost, thanks to her help.

  She wasn’t ready for dating, she, thought, watching D’Arcy make her way around the hemline of the ballgown on her knees, her mouth full of pins, and she had only herself to blame for not having made it clear. It was just so hard to protest anything kindhearted D’Arcy was doing for her. The fact that it had only been a year since Dan’s death wasn’t the only reason. There was another problem, one much more difficult to explain, especially with D’Arcy’s Charleston background.

  As the daughter of an admiral and a peripatetic, “Navy brat,” popular D’Arcy was perfectly comfortable with a circle of handsome young Navy and Air Force officers. But for
Rachel with her pacifist Quaker convictions, this was an entirely new experience.

  Rachel again pulled self-consciously at the top of the taffeta evening gown as it crept downward over her breasts. She had nothing on underneath the obviously very expensive creation—it was a Halston, she’d noticed, seeing the label as it was slipped over her head—because D’Arcy had told her firmly that the evening gown had a built-in bra. But if so, Rachel could hardly feel it. She couldn’t believe anyone would be allowed to wear the thing in public.

  The gown wasn’t the only thing that made her uneasy. As she’d found out at brunch on the country club terrace after the disastrous doubles match, conversation with young military officers went smoothly enough only as long as one stayed away from the subject of defense budgets, the late Vietnam war, the situations in the Middle East, and other current events. Those were, unfortunately, the topics young officers seemed to want to talk about. Rachel had sat dumbly through most of the lively meal, too aware of her own convictions and not able to respond to the stories they told, obviously to entertain her. What was so funny, she wondered, when both young Navy fighter pilots joked about the “kills” they had missed on the computerized carrier tracking screens? She was aware that downing enemy planes in simulated combat didn’t mean an actual loss of life, but she was horrified. She’d sat silent for most of the brunch, miserable over the way she’d made her good-looking young partner lose the match, and even more miserable because she’d felt so out of place. The final blow had come when they were on their way out to their cars. She couldn’t help overhearing her tennis date say to his fellow officer that she was attractive but “terribly shy.” The words were mild, but his tone conveyed that she’d been a washout.