The brigantine Hopewell came up the Charleston roads in the late morning of Thursday the eleventh of February 1714, half-rigged at the foremast from the storm of the third of January, with a south-southeast wind on her starboard quarter and Mr. Eldridge himself at the wheel, and made her landing at the Cooper Street pier at twenty minutes past nine.
Barbara Tempest Needham, twenty-eight years and four months old, stood at the rail in her wool cloak with the hood down and watched the colony come up at her.
It came up slowly. Sullivan’s Island first, low and green at the south end of the harbor channel; then the curve of the inner roads; then the line of warehouses and the cluster of masts of the small Carolina coasting fleet and, behind it, the wooden curtain wall along Meeting Street and the spire of the half-built Cooper Street church and the brown roofs of the merchants’ houses, and over all of it a thin coal-smoke and a thin February sun that did not, even at midday, give the impression of giving heat.
She did not look for him at first. She knew he would be there. He had been on a bench at the landward end of the Cooper Street pier every morning since the eighth of January, Mr. Eldridge had told her — the harbor master, who had come aboard the night before at the outer roads with the pilot, had volunteered it without being asked — and so when she came down to the deck in the morning and put her hood down and stood at the rail she did not, in the first minute, look for him. She watched the colony come up. She gave it a minute on its own.
Then she looked.
He was on a bench by the harbor master’s shed, in a brown coat, with a hat in his hand. He had stood up when the Hopewell came past the south end of Sullivan’s Island. He was, at this distance — a quarter-mile, perhaps a little less — a small upright figure with a hand raised above his head, palm forward, the way a child raises his hand in a schoolroom to say here, here, I am here.
She raised her own hand to her shoulder, palm forward, and held it there.
He saw it.
He did not lower his hand for some seconds after that. When he did, he sat down again on the bench, because his knees, she suspected from the way he sat down, were not at that moment entirely reliable.
The Hopewell came up to the pier. The longshoremen took the lines. The gangway went down. Mr. Eldridge nodded to her without saying anything, because Mr. Eldridge had decided some days earlier that this particular passenger should be allowed to walk down his gangway and into her new life without further interruption from the man who had brought her across, and Barbara, who had spent fourteen weeks learning to read Mr. Eldridge’s silences, nodded back.
She walked down the gangway.
She did not hurry. She had been at sea for one hundred and six days. Her legs, at the foot of the gangway, would have to learn the pier. She let them learn it.
Christopher had got up off the bench again by the time she came down. He stood at the landward end of the pier, by the harbor master’s shed, with the hat still in his hand. He did not, for a moment, say anything.
Then he said: Barbara.
She said: Christopher.
He said: You came.
She said: I told you I would.
He said — and his voice was not quite steady, which was the first time she had heard his voice not be quite steady, and which she filed away with the other things she had begun to file away on his account since the seventeenth of October 1710 — I have been waiting for you on this bench for thirty-five days.
She said: I have been at sea for one hundred and six days.
He said: I know.
She said: I do not think you do, quite, yet. But you will.
He said: Yes.
He did not, in the moment, embrace her. They were on a public pier at a colonial harbor in the morning, surrounded by longshoremen and harbor officials and the other passengers coming down behind her, and Christopher was a man of careful Reformed-Protestant Swiss-Bernese formality and Barbara was an English gentlewoman of Hertfordshire upbringing, and the embrace would wait for the carriage Mrs. Brewton had sent down and the drive to the lodgings on Tradd Street and the moment of being alone together for the first time in three years and nine months.
He took her bag from her hand. She let him take it. He offered her his arm. She took it.
They walked up the Cooper Street pier together, with Hans behind them carrying the trunk that had come down first from the Hopewell’s hold. At the landward end of the pier Christopher stopped and turned to her.
He said: The Reverend Johnston has been waiting. He is at the Cooper Street church. Whenever you are ready.
She said: Eleven days. I should like eleven days. I would like to rest, and to write to my mother, and to see Susannah settled with Mrs. Bellinger. Then we should be married.
He said: Eleven days. The twenty-second of February.
She said: Yes.
He said: That is a Monday.
She said: That is a Monday.
· · ·
She slept that first night at Mrs. Brewton’s on Tradd Street, in a bed that did not move under her, and woke in the dark before dawn because the absence of motion was a thing she had to learn before she could sleep through it.
The room held a four-poster with a faded blue counterpane, a chair by the window, a chest at the foot of the bed, a small table with a basin and a pewter ewer, a candle in a brass stick on the table, a mirror over the basin, and a print of the new King George above the mantel. The fire was low. The diamond panes of the window faced east toward the harbor and were beginning, in the next quarter hour, to take a paler shade of gray than the room around them.
She put her hand flat on the counterpane.
The counterpane did not move.
She lay still for a long time and listened to the silence under her — not silence, exactly: a creaking of timbers somewhere lower in the house, a watchman’s bell two streets over, the wind off the harbor under the eaves — but silence of the kind that has a floor in it, a floor that does not lift and fall, a floor that holds.
The floor held.
She got up. She dressed in the half-light without ringing for the maid, because she had not, in fourteen weeks, had a maid to ring for, and the habit of dressing herself was still the habit she trusted. She went to the window and put her hand on the sill and looked east through the panes toward the harbor.
The Hopewell was at the pier. She could see the half-rig of the foremast in the gray light. Beyond the harbor the sky was beginning to come up a thin lemon at the horizon line.
She did not, in that first quarter hour, think anything in particular. The morning was a thing to be inside of. She watched the lemon at the horizon line widen.
Then she went down to the parlor.
Mrs. Brewton was at the parlor already — Mrs. Brewton, the Tradd Street widow at whose house the Charleston factor had engaged a set of rooms for Christopher in early December and at whose house Barbara would now keep the eleven days. She was a woman of perhaps fifty, in a gray gown and a white cap, sitting by the fire with a piece of needlework on her knee, and she stood up when Barbara came in and curtsied with the careful courtesy a Charleston lodging-house keeper extended to the bride of a foreign-born gentleman who had paid in advance for the rooms.
She said: Good morning, ma’am. I had not expected you down before seven.
Barbara said: I have not had a floor under me in fourteen weeks. I find I do not, this morning, want to be in a bed.
Mrs. Brewton said: I will have coffee in the dining-room in five minutes.
She had coffee in the dining-room in five minutes. The coffee was strong and hot and tasted of the bean itself rather than the ship’s stores Barbara had been drinking out of a tin cup since November. She drank two cups of it and ate a piece of cornbread that Mrs. Brewton put in front of her without asking, and at seven o’clock the London case-clock in the parlor struck the hour — Mrs. Brewton’s late husband had brought the clock out from London in 1685, she said quietly as she poured the second cup — and a quarter of an hour after that, while Barbara was still at the table, Christopher came in from the street.
He had been at the Cooper Street pier already that morning to see Susannah Fenwick down to Mrs. Bellinger’s carriage. He had a folded sheet in his hand — Susannah’s note of thanks, written on board the Hopewell the previous afternoon — and a careful look about the eyes that said he had not, last night, slept either.
He sat down across from her at the table. He set the note between them.
He said: Susannah is at Mrs. Bellinger’s. Mrs. Bellinger came for her at six.
She said: Good.
He said: I have not slept.
She said: Nor I.
He said: I did not know what to do with the night.
She said: Sit down, Christopher. Have coffee. We have eleven days. We will use them.
He sat. He had coffee. They used the morning.
· · ·
The eleven days went the way they went.
Susannah Fenwick was at Mrs. Bellinger’s in St. Michael’s parish, recovering, the cough easing in the dry Carolina air the way it had not eased in the damp of the ship; Barbara went to see her on the third day and on the seventh and on the tenth, and on the tenth Susannah was dressed and downstairs and had begun to be useful to Mrs. Bellinger in the household ledger, which was the task Mrs. Bellinger had set for her in the contract, and Mrs. Bellinger had pronounced herself, in three meetings, more impressed with the young woman than she had expected to be on the basis of the brother’s letter from Bristol.
Barbara wrote to her mother at Lockleys on the second day, a long letter, addressed to a house that had taken her in and was not hers; to her cousin’s wife in Hertfordshire on the third; to the Reverend Mr. Pelham at Wymondley on the fourth, briefly, to thank him for the silver groat. The letters went into a packet that the Charleston factor undertook to put on the next eastbound packet for Bristol, which Mr. Eldridge believed would sail in the middle of March. She did not, in any of the letters, say more than the documented facts required: the Hopewell had landed; she was well; she was at Charleston; she would be married on the twenty-second of February; Christopher was as he had been. The letters would arrive in England in June. By June whatever she said in February would have been said already, and so she said the documented things and let the rest stand.
Christopher came to the lodging-house at seven each morning and went back to the harbor master’s shed at ten, because the shed had become his daytime office in the five weeks of the bench and he had business there with the Charleston factor and with the Reverend Johnston and with the merchant Allston who would stand as his witness at the wedding. He came back at four in the afternoon and sat with her in the parlor, the two of them in the chairs by the fire, with the door open onto the hall so that Mrs. Brewton or the maid could pass back and forth and the propriety could be observed; and they talked, in the afternoons, of the things that two people who have crossed a long absence and who are about to be married in eleven days find themselves talking of.
They talked of New Bern.
They talked of the half-built house there and of the cleared field and of the cat and of Hans and of the runner Wilkes and of the four letters that had arrived together on the seventeenth of November. They talked of the Yamasee unrest at the south end of the colony and of the Tuscarora settlement at the north end and of the Carolina Land Office obligation that Christopher had been holding through the autumn. They talked of Williamsburg — Christopher had business there in the spring; he had taken a lot already, Lot 47, the Pitt-Dixon corner; he meant for them to be at Williamsburg by the autumn — and of the brick house he meant to build on the lot and of the rooms he meant for her and of the books from his father’s library he meant to send for.
She listened, mostly. He had been alone on a half-built farm in a half-emptied colony for three years and four months and he had a great deal to say. She let him say it. She had crossed an ocean for him and there was a great deal she had to say too, but she had decided, by the second afternoon, that she would say it slowly, over years, and not in eleven days.
She did say one thing on the fourth afternoon.
She said: Christopher. I have learned to be useful at sea. I do not know yet how to be useful on land, and I do not know what will be asked of me at New Bern or at Williamsburg. But I will not be ornamental. I would like you to know that.
He looked at her over the rim of the coffee cup.
He said: Barbara. I have never thought you ornamental. I would not have written to your father in 1710 if I had thought you ornamental.
She said: Good. Then we understand each other.
He said: I think we have understood each other since the chapel garden at Wymondley.
She said: Yes. I think we have.
· · ·
The wedding morning was the morning of Monday the twenty-second of February 1714, and it began for Barbara at five o’clock in the bed at Mrs. Brewton’s, in the dark, with the floor still holding under her and the case-clock striking five somewhere in the parlor below.
She did not get up at once. She lay in the bed and counted the days backward — twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve — and arrived at the morning of the twelfth of February, which was the morning she had stood at this window and watched the lemon at the horizon line widen, and she thought: I have been here eleven days. I have been on land eleven days. In four hours I will not be Barbara Tempest Needham any longer.
She got up.
She dressed in the gown the Charleston seamstress had altered in the second week — a dark wool, with the waist taken in two inches against the slack the ship’s stores had put there. She did her hair herself, because the maid at Mrs. Brewton’s had a Carolina hand and Barbara had a Hertfordshire one and the two hands did not entirely agree on the question of pins. She put on the small pearl earrings her cousin’s wife had given her in the priory yard the morning before she left.
She went down to the parlor at half-past eight.
Mrs. Brewton was at the parlor in her best gray gown and her best white cap. The fire was high. The London case-clock had been wound. The widow Mrs. Houghton was there from her own lodgings on Church Street, and Mr. Pelletier in his Bristol broadcloth, the two of them having come early to walk with Barbara to the church. They had been her shipmates and they would be her witnesses, and they were both, in the parlor at half-past eight, in the careful courteous mode of people who have come through a fourteen-week crossing with a young woman they have grown fond of and are now about to give her away.
At nine o’clock Christopher came for her. He was in a dark coat she had not seen before — Allston had had it made for him in the second week — and he had Hans behind him in his good livery, and the carriage Mrs. Brewton had engaged was at the door.
He said: Barbara.
She said: Christopher.
He said: Are you ready?
She said: Yes.
· · ·
They were married at the Cooper Street church in Charleston on Monday the twenty-second of February 1714, the Reverend Gideon Johnston officiating, with the widow Mrs. Houghton and Mr. Pelletier from the Hopewell standing as witnesses for the bride and Hans the Swiss manservant and a Charleston merchant named Allston standing as witnesses for the groom and Mr. Eldridge himself in the second pew in his good coat.
Susannah Fenwick attended, in a borrowed dress, on the arm of her new employer Mrs. Bellinger, who had collected her from the ship eleven days earlier and who had pronounced herself, in those eleven days, more impressed with the young woman than she had expected to be on the basis of the brother’s letter from Bristol.
The Reverend Johnston was a slight man of thirty-eight, English-trained, six years and ten months at Charleston as commissary for the Bishop of London, in poor health that winter but holding. He read the office in the careful Anglican English Barbara had heard at Wymondley every Sunday of her childhood, and Christopher answered in the careful Anglican English he had learned at the Reformed academy in Switzerland and at Yverdon and at the Inns of Court, and Barbara answered in the careful Anglican English of a Hertfordshire gentlewoman, and the office took half an hour.
The marriage was entered in the church register on the same day.
When they came out of the church into the Cooper Street it was raining a thin cold rain that had begun while they were inside. Mr. Eldridge had a great-coat for Barbara that he had brought down himself from the Hopewell. He put it over her shoulders without saying anything. She nodded to him.
They went back to Mrs. Brewton’s in the carriage. The wedding-supper was at three o’clock, in Mrs. Brewton’s dining-room — Mrs. Brewton and Mrs. Bellinger had arranged it together — and Mrs. Houghton and Mr. Pelletier and Allston and Mr. Eldridge and Hans and Susannah and the Reverend Johnston sat down at table with the bride and groom; and Mrs. Brewton’s cook had made a Carolina ham and a dish of rice with the new orange spice the Charleston factors had begun to bring up from the Spanish Main, and a custard, and there was Madeira from Allston’s cellar, and the company stayed three hours and went home in a hard rain at six.
By seven Mrs. Brewton had cleared the dining-room. By eight the house was quiet. By half-past eight Barbara was in the chair by the window of the upper room with her shoes off and her feet on the fender, watching the harbor through the diamond panes a quarter-mile to the east, where the Hopewell lay at her mooring with one lantern at her stern and a second at her mainmast head and the half-rig of the foremast a darker thing against the dark sky.
She was asleep in the chair by nine.
· · ·
Christopher de Graffenried sat at the writing-desk under the east window with the candle in front of him and the small leather-bound family Bible his father had given him before he sailed in 1710 open at the fly-leaf.
The Bible was eight inches by five, bound in dark calf, the binding rubbed at the corners from four years on the road — Worb to Bern, Bern to London, London to Charleston in 1710, Charleston to New Bern in 1711, New Bern to Williamsburg in 1712, Williamsburg to New Bern in 1712, New Bern to Charleston in December 1713. The fly-leaf was the front fly-leaf, the recto, the page the Baron had left clean for him when he gave him the Bible at Worb on the seventeenth of August 1710. The Baron had said, when he gave it to him: You will marry in the new country. You will write the entry on that page. I will not be there to write it for you. Write it in French. Write it in your own hand.
Christopher had carried the Bible at the bottom of his sea-chest from August 1710 to February 1714. The fly-leaf had stayed clean.
He had the pen ready. He had cut it himself an hour earlier from a quill Mrs. Brewton had brought up, in the careful way his father had taught him to cut a pen when he was nine years old. He had the ink — Mrs. Brewton’s ink, a Carolina ink, a slightly browner ink than the Bernese inks of his childhood, but a good ink, a steady ink, an ink that would hold on the page for two hundred years if the page was kept out of the damp. He had the blotting-paper. He had the small ruler he used when he wanted a line to be straight.
He did not use the ruler. He had decided, in the half hour he had been sitting at the desk, that the entry should be in his own hand without the ruler, in the careful French he reserved for the most important entries, the way his father had written the death entry for his mother on the fly-leaf of the Bernberg Bible at Worb in 1697 when Christopher was seven years old and had stood beside him at the writing-desk and had watched the pen go down on the page in the candlelight and had understood, in the way a child of seven could understand it, that the entry on the fly-leaf was the entry the family came back to.
He dipped the pen.
He wrote, in his own hand, in the careful French he reserved for the most important entries:
> Christophe de Graffenried, fils du Baron Christophe V de Bernberg, époux. Barbara Tempest née Needham, de Wymondley en Hertfordshire, épouse. Mariés en l’église du commissaire à Charleston, en Caroline du Sud, le vingt-deuxième jour de février, 1714.
He set the pen down. He blotted the entry. He looked at it.
The entry was in his hand. The French was correct. The date was correct. The names were correct. The church was correct. The father, the bride, the place, the day. The entry was the entry the Baron had told him to make. The entry was what the family would come back to.
He sat for a long time at the desk with the candle in front of him and the Bible open and the entry on the page and his bride in the chair by the window with her feet on the fender and her breathing the steady breathing of a woman who had walked into a colony on land that did not move under her and had taken a man’s name at eleven o’clock in the morning of a Monday in February and had eaten Carolina ham at three and had sat down in a chair at half-past eight and had fallen asleep before nine.
He looked at her once. He looked back at the page.
He had not, in twenty-four years of his life, written anything in English that mattered to him.
He had been writing letters in French to his father since he was nine. He had been writing entries in the household ledger at Worb in French and German since he was eleven. He had written in English at the Reformed academy when he had to and at Yverdon when he had to and at the Inns of Court when he had to and in Carolina when he had to, but the writing in English had been business writing, factor’s writing, surveyor’s writing, the writing of a man transacting business in a language not his own. He had never, in twenty-four years, written anything in English that he meant.
The formal entry was sealed. The page was the family’s. The Bible was the keeping-Bible. The French on the page was what the Baron had told him to write and what the family would come back to.
But there was room on the page. There was room beneath the formal entry. There was, on the fly-leaf, a clean half-inch of paper between the bottom of the careful French and the top of the lower margin where the Baron had said nothing about what could or could not go.
He dipped the pen again. He held it above the page. He thought, very precisely, of the morning of the seventeenth of November 1713 — the runner Wilkes coming up the river path in the late afternoon at New Bern, the leather pouch, the four letters and the canvas-wrapped packet from the Baron, and the thin folded sheet at the bottom of the pouch with no salutation and no date and no signature and three words in a hand he had known since the chapel garden at Wymondley in October 1710 — I am coming. He thought of the bench at the harbor master’s shed and of the thirty-five mornings he had sat on it. He thought of the south end of Sullivan’s Island and of the half-rig of the foremast coming up at twenty minutes past nine of a Thursday morning. He thought of a quarter-mile and of a hand raised palm forward above a head at the rail of a brigantine and of his own hand going up before he had told it to go up.
He thought of two words.
He wrote them, in a hand smaller than the hand he had used for the formal entry, in English, in a hand that was not quite his usual hand because it was a hand being written by a man whose throat had been swollen with feeling for thirty-five days and who had finally, this Monday evening, in the upper room at Mrs. Brewton’s on Tradd Street in Charleston, with his wife asleep in the chair by the window and the candle burning down and the Charleston harbor visible through the diamond panes a quarter-mile to the east — finally been able to write what he had wanted to write since the seventeenth of November 1713 at New Bern, when a thin folded sheet with no salutation and no date and no signature had arrived in his hand and had changed his life. He wrote, in small clear letters:
She came.
· · ·
End of Bridge.