The Devereaux Legacy Read online

  Leah drew back a little. “If you hadn’t seen my mother in so long, then why were we here?”

  “Because Mary Ellen loved her old fool of a mother.” Carrie sighed. “Mary Ellen was such a happy person, never sullen or quarrelsome. But she had a very strong will.” The old lady smiled a little grimly. “I daresay she came by it honestly enough. And she loved your father very much. She had written twice, asking to come. Finally, I wrote back and said she could visit—alone. She never answered that letter. You were only a baby then.”

  “Why didn’t you like my father?” Leah heard the stiffness in her voice.

  Carrie lifted her head and looked away, as if looking back through the years. “Tom Shaw was a fine young man, from all reports. Oh, it all goes back to pride, that terrible pride of the Devereaux. Both mine and Mary Ellen’s.” A faint spot of color touched her cheeks. “Yet I always wanted the best for her.” She looked beseechingly at Leah. “That was what I wanted. And she defied me.” Her voice rose. “You see, I had chosen the man I wanted her to marry. It was all arranged. The wedding was scheduled for the following September.”

  “What happened?”

  “She was on her way to college on the train, and she met Tom Shaw, who was going back for his second year in law school. She wrote me about him, how odd it was that they should meet on the train. His family had moved to Atlanta after the war, but she knew the name of course, because of our Marthe.” Carrie looked at her granddaughter quizzically. “Have you read about Marthe?”

  Leah nodded. Marthe’s story had been the heart of the magazine article she’d found in Louisa’s desk with the half-finished letter. Marthe Devereaux had fallen in love with Timothy Shaw in the summer of 1860, but West Pointer Timothy Shaw didn’t come home to South Carolina until late the following year, as a member of the invading Union forces. Then one spring night Timothy came by moonlight to Devereaux Plantation. The next morning his body and Marthe’s were found in the old tower, both dead by gunshot. No one ever knew what happened, but ever since, The Whispering Lady had been glimpsed in the Devereaux gardens when death was near. The ghost was seen when Albert Devereaux and his family went down on the Titanic and when The New Star sailed away.

  “Just a story, of course,” Carrie continued. “But Mary Ellen thought it was such a coincidence that she and Tom should meet and like each other so much, right from the start.”

  She was quiet for a long moment; then, in a weary voice, she told the rest of it. For the first time, Leah had a picture of what kind of person her mother had been. She’d been beautiful and happy, but determined. Then, shockingly, the day had come when her smiles hadn’t prevailed. Caught between the need to please her mother and her love for Tom Shaw, she had twisted and turned, not quite able at first to rebel openly, writing to Tom, the wedding date drawing nearer and nearer.

  She had run away a week before the wedding.

  “I never saw her again,” Carrie Devereaux said.

  Mary Ellen had tried twice that summer after her runaway marriage to Tom to see her mother. Each time she’d been turned away at the door. For many years now, Carrie had endured the hell she had fashioned.

  Dismayed and puzzled, Leah asked, “Why did they come on The New Star when they knew they weren’t welcome?”

  “Old Jason was our butler then. He helped me raise those children.” She paused, and her eyes saw scenes from long ago. “Oh, what happy times they had, the four of them! You see, my husband’s brother, Andrew, and his wife were killed in a car wreck when John Edward, Cissy and Merrick were small, so they came to live with us. Mary Ellen grew up with her cousins, and Jason treated them like his own, but in his heart he was always a little partial to Mary Ellen. He deferred to her, told me she was the smartest and the toughest. So when he was worried, I supposed it was natural for him to write to her rather than turn to the others. He wrote and told her she had to come, that The Whispering Lady’d been seen—and that I was in danger.”

  “The Whispering Lady,” Leah repeated.

  Carrie Devereaux’s mouth thinned. “All nonsense, of course. A story fit for guidebooks and newspapers. Nothing to it at all. But Jason worried Mary Ellen.”

  Leah frowned. “Why should he think you were in danger?”

  The old lady thumped her cane on the polished floor. “Anyone can have accidents.”

  “You had accidents that summer?”

  “The brakes in the car,” Carrie said vaguely. “And I took a tumble down the main stairway.” Her mouth twisted. “But death didn’t come for me. Not for me.”

  Jason hadn’t told Carrie what he’d done until the afternoon The New Star was expected.

  Angry, she’d packed a suitcase and left. When The New Star sailed up Mefford River to Devereaux Plantation, she’d been on the road to Charleston for two hours.

  “I always thought,” she said, each word came slowly, painfully, “that if I had stayed, if I had been here and welcomed them, The New Star would not have sailed on and been caught in the hurricane.” She picked up Louisa Shaw’s letter with a hand that trembled. “But you and Louisa survived the hurricane. What happened to my daughter and Tom? For God’s sake, Leah, what happened?”

  Leah stared into her grandmother’s eyes and saw fear and the beginnings of horror. She could only shake her head helplessly. Louisa had known what had taken place that stormy night, but now she, too, was dead.

  For the first time since she’d come to South Carolina, Leah wondered if she’d been unwise to make the trip. She had destroyed old certainties and substituted an agonizing puzzle in their place.

  “And here Louisa says that she was deceived that night—that if a ghost walks again, there is evil. Then the letter breaks off. Leah, whatever can she have meant?”

  Evil . . . growing, spreading, enveloping them all.

  Leah looked at Carrie, so old and frail, so tiny in the huge chair, and suddenly she was glad she’d come. “Grandmother,” she said quietly, “tell me more about The Whispering Lady.”

  Impatience flickered in Carrie’s black eyes. “It’s nonsense. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “Neither did Louisa,” Leah replied. “But when she read that The Whispering Lady had been seen again, she was afraid it meant danger for someone.”

  Carrie shook her head. “No, it’s just a sad story from long ago.” She pointed to a portrait above the mantel. “That’s your great-great-­grandfather, Julian Devereaux.”

  It wasn’t a fine portrait. Leah could sense the artist’s rush; the strokes were hurried, the colors uncertain, but the overall effect was of a greater pathos in the young face beneath the plumed officer’s hat and in the narrow shoulders in Confederate gray. She was beginning to recognize the features of her kin: huge dark eyes, high-bridged nose, narrow chin.

  “Julian was next in age to Marthe. They were both very much under the thumb of their oldest brother, Randolph. Everyone said later that she must have done it because of Randolph. He was so very bitter about any Southerner who fought for the Union.”

  “Must have done what?” Leah asked.

  Her grandmother looked at her in surprise. “I thought you’d read the magazine article.”

  “I did.”

  “Of course, it doesn’t come right out and say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “That Marthe shot and killed Timothy Shaw, then put the pistol to her heart and—”

  “Oh, no!” Leah cried. She hadn’t read the story that way. She had imagined a slender young girl, walking in the garden, dreaming and hoping and grieving, but she hadn’t imagined a twisted loyalty that put political allegiance ahead of love.

  “Not a happy story,” her grandmother said soberly. “It isn’t surprising that no one ever speaks of it. But when things aren’t mentioned, there are always whispers, and they breed imaginings. So when the moonlight touches a tree trunk or marsh gas flickers, someone sees Marthe. I’m sure that’s how the rumors began that the garden was haunted. In Mefford, they said that gene
ration of Devereaux was doomed. Marthe was a suicide by her own hand. Randolph was killed a few months later when his horse threw him. Even Julian didn’t survive the war for very long. He was weak and ill when he came home. His wife, Edith, tried hard to save him, but he died the next summer just before their son, James, was born.” The old lady looked up at the portrait. “As he was dying, he kept saying that it wasn’t right that Marthe was buried in unhallowed ground by the tower, and he begged Edith to see that her grave was moved to the family plot.”

  “Was she reburied? Put next to Julian?”

  Carrie shook her head. “No. Her grave’s just to the side of the tower. Maybe the rector refused. Or maybe there was simply a lack of money.”

  She smiled at Leah’s look of surprise. “There wasn’t any money. Everything was ruined and gone, the land parceled out to freed slaves, the ships seized by the Yankee blockade. Nothing was left but the house, and it had gone to ruin. The windows were broken, the books in the library had been stolen, and most of the rooms were closed off because there was no one to clean them. A little vegetable garden remained. Somehow Edith managed to feed James and pay the taxes. But she lived long enough to see Devereaux Plantation restored. James left South Carolina as a young man to prospect for silver in Colorado. He didn’t find any silver, but he did find a wife, Abigail Morris, whose father owned a good deal of the Western American Railroad.” Carrie Devereaux smiled dryly. “They do say she was a bit long in the tooth, but James was a good husband.”

  “And the Devereaux prospered?”

  “Oh, yes. James bought back all the land that had been lost, but so many of the levees had been destroyed that he switched from rice to short-staple cotton.”

  “And no one saw Marthe again until—”

  “It isn’t Marthe,” her grandmother retorted sharply. “It’s just a story. The tale went around after Albert and his family went down on the Titanic, but that was just silly babbling by an old maid who wanted attention.”

  “And the summer my mother died?” Leah asked determinedly.

  “Marsh gas.”

  “Tell me, Grandmother.”

  The appellation came so naturally. Carrie Devereaux felt that, and it pleased her. “Lilac’s my maid, a superstitious old fool. Not that she’ll admit it. But I see her turn the other way when she comes upon John Edward’s black cat.”

  “What did Lilac see?”

  The old lady shrugged. “Who knows? Something white in the garden. Could have been anything—one of the younger maids slipping out to see a boy-friend. But she told me, and when I just laughed, she told Jason.”

  Three days after Lilac had seen something, the brakes had failed in Carrie’s car. A fast driver, she’d topped a hill and was starting down when a wagon pulled onto the road. She braked—and there were no brakes. A rickety truck loaded with farm workers blocked one lane; the cart, the other. At the last instant, she swerved to her right, toward the reed-thick marshy water, swollen at high tide. The car, a huge Chrysler sedan, hung for an instant in space, then plummeted into the channel, throwing Carrie out into the water. A teenager had jumped from the back of the truck and dived into the channel, staying there until he had found her and brought her up.

  It had been, Leah realized, very nearly a deadly accident. No wonder Jason had been worried.

  “What happened the second time the ghost was seen?” she asked.

  A month later, Jason himself had seen something luminous in the depths of the garden and told Carrie. Later that very night, a faint cry had roused her. She’d thrown on her robe and hurried down the hall. The cry came again, and she’d started down the stairs. That was all she remembered. They found her, hours later, unconscious at the foot of the stairs.

  “I fell,” she insisted. Then she said wryly, “But even if there is a ghost, it isn’t coming for me.” She looked triumphant. “The ghost’s been seen twice this summer—and not a single thing has happened to me.”

  “Is this summer the first time the ghost’s appeared since The New Star sailed?”

  The old lady shrugged. “I think so. But you’ll have to ask John Edward or Cissy to be sure. I didn’t come back until this spring.”

  “Come back?”

  Carrie Devereaux shook her head. “I keep forgetting you don’t know anything about us. Yes, Leah. After all hope was given up for The New Star, I left Devereaux Plantation and went to Nice. I lived there until this spring.”

  “You just came home this spring?”

  Carrie nodded.

  “Why?”

  Her grandmother’s black eyes looked at Leah steadily. “I’m a very old woman. I want to die where I belong.” She smiled, a mirthless, twisted smile. “Perhaps there is a Whispering Lady who appears when death is near. Perhaps . . .”

  “No, Grandmother. Stop that. I haven’t found you to lose you.”

  But Leah wondered. Not about ghosts, but about an evil that could spread and engulf and destroy.

  Chapter Four

  “Henry, show Miss Leah to Miss Mary Ellen’s room.” The old lady looked up at her with such love and happiness that Leah impulsively bent down and kissed a wrinkled cheek.

  “Grandmother, I’m so happy we’ve found each other. I don’t know why we had to be apart all these years, but we will make up for lost time. We will.”

  As she followed the butler from the library, Leah glanced up and down the central hallway, but it lay empty, the late-afternoon sun shining on the heart-of-pine floor. She fought away a sharp sweep of disappointment, then wondered at herself. Why was she looking for Merrick? Her cousin Merrick. He hadn’t been overjoyed at her coming. Why now, as she walked through this strange house and up the central stairway, should her every thought be attuned to him and what he thought of her?

  He was her cousin, after all, so of course she didn’t really care. There was no reason to. But where was he?

  In her room—her mother’s room—she stood for a long moment after the door had closed behind Henry. It was a spacious, airy corner room with windows on two sides and a screened door that opened onto the veranda. The pale gray wallpaper held a muted rose pattern. Fresh-cut roses filled a cut-glass vase on the mantel over the fireplace. But the marble-top table by the canopied bed and the marble-top dresser lay bare. Had cosmetics and powder and lipsticks been scattered across them when her mother had lived here? Leah reached out and touched a solid cherry wood bedpost. She had no real sense of Mary Ellen, of her life or her death.

  Leah shivered. Would she ever feel at home in this house?

  To drive away the dark thoughts that hung over her like the miasma above a swamp, she unpacked, then sat down at the upright desk in the corner and wrote down the bewildering occurrences of this very special day. When she’d finished, she added these questions: What happened to my mother and father? Why did Louisa lie to me? Did a ghost walk at Devereaux Plantation? Why were John Edward and Merrick upset when they saw me?

  Leah put down the pen and walked over to the window. The sun was beginning to set, and the Mefford River lay below, a shining stream of silver.

  Merrick Devereaux.

  Why did her heart have this sudden, different feeling when she thought of him? He was, after all, just a man. No, he wasn’t just a man, an inner voice said quickly. He was different from any man she’d ever known—and she wanted desperately to know him better. When would she see him again?

  As the red glow from the setting sun crimsoned the windowpanes, she began to dress for dinner. She would never have admitted to anyone that she chose her dress very carefully, a shantung silk of blue shot through with a dark green thread. She hesitated for a moment before the dressing-table mirror, then fastened a choker of pearls around her neck. Her mother’s pearls, Louisa had said when giving them to her on her sixteenth birthday.

  Leah brushed her hair until it glistened like polished ebony. Carefully, she applied a faint pink blush to her cheeks and a touch of coral to her lips. Then, unsmilingly, she studied her reflection: a ra
ther thin face with high cheekbones and dark, dark eyes; a slender white throat. Would Merrick notice her tonight? Would he be there?

  Henry knocked on her door shortly before seven. “Miss, if you will come down to the library now. The family is gathering there.”

  Slowly, a little reluctantly, she descended the central staircase. The family. That would be her grandmother, of course. And perhaps John Edward and Merrick. Were there others she had yet to meet? How would they greet her?

  She felt a moment of panic when she stood in the open doorway to the library. Too many faces turned toward her, but her grandmother, in the wing chair near the fireplace, held up a welcoming hand, and Merrick came over to escort her inside.

  “That’s a very lovely dress,” he said, smiling. “It reminds me of Venice in the moonlight.”

  “Thank you, Merrick.” A surge of happiness moved within her; then she tried to suppress it. He was her cousin. She walked on toward her grandmother.

  “Leah, Leah,” the old woman said softly. “You know, it was nineteen years ago that Mary Ellen left us. I had been feeling so unhappy, and then you came. Now I am happier than I have been in years.” She looked around the room, and her voice carried to every corner. “Leah has been restored to us. We will celebrate tonight.”

  Leah glanced up and saw everyone still staring at her. With a start, she recognized the red-haired woman who had looked so shocked when Leah had bought the pamphlet at the Mefford Historical Society. The woman’s face held no expression now. It was as smooth as a pond on a windless day.

  A long silent moment passed after Carrie Devereaux’s proclamation. No one in the room, other than Carrie, looked happy or festive. Instead, Leah felt a tension that stretched as tight as a drawn bow. Even Merrick, despite the warmth of his greeting, seemed disturbed.