A sorrowing family.
Annie riffled through several more stories and found nothing that changed the import of the initial report.
She returned the photographs and clippings to the file and picked up The Tarrant Family History and Guide to the Tarrant Museum, both cream-colored pamphlets with crimson printing. A yellow tab on the outside of the history carried an inscription in Max's handwriting: Received from Courtney Kimball.
Annie looked through the Guide to the Tarrant Museum. She was startled when she realized the museum was housed in former slave quarters toward the back of the Tarrant grounds. Wow, this was Family and History in capital letters, although it was clear, despite the obviously biased introduction by Mrs. Whitney Tarrant, its founder, that the museum housed some interesting and valuable collections, including playbills from early traveling shows. The Orphan or the Unhappy Marriage was presented in 1735, shortly after its initial production in Charleston. In 1754, a traveling troupe put on A Bold Stroke for a Wife, The Mock Doctor, and Cato. The museum housed the personal letters of Hope Tarrant, who spent her life opposing slavery and was one of the earliest to speak out in South Carolina, along with Angelina and Sarah Grimke. Copies of many of the various Chastain newspapers from 1761 to 1815 were featured. (Three had belonged to Tarrants, of course.)
Annie put down the guide reluctantly. A hodgepodge, yes, but such an interesting mйlange from the past.
The Tarrant Family History was also written by Mrs. Whitney Tarrant. Was she perhaps a trifle obsessive? Annie skimmed the introduction: . . . distinguished family from the outset of Mortimer Tarrant's arrival . . . the author's aim is to provide ensuing generations with a record of bravery, devotion to duty, and honor . . . gallantry both in war and peace . . . exemplary conduct which can ever serve as a shield in good times and bad. . . .
The introduction was signed by Mrs. Whitney Tarrant and dated September 14, 1987. In parentheses following the date,
it read: Marking the two hundred and fifty-second year of the Tarrant Family in Chastain, South Carolina.
Annie raised a blond brow. My, aren't we proud of ourselves! But she turned to the first page and dutifully began to read.
"Chief's not in." Sergeant Matthews's pale eyes returned to the papers on his desk.
Max leaned on the doorjamb and drawled, "No doubt he is leading a posse in search of wrongdoers even as we speak."
The sergeant looked up, blinked once, then ostentatiously began to straighten the papers before him.
"Any trace of Courtney?" The drawl was gone.
Matthews ignored him.
Max crossed the brief space to the desk in two strides, leaned over, and knocked sharply. The papers quivered.
Sergeant Matthews's head jerked up, and his pink cheeks deepened to tomato. "You want to go back to jail?"
"Jail?" Max exclaimed. "Jail? In law school, I must have missed the section where it's against the law to undertake polite intercourse with the properly constituted authorities of a municipality."
As always, the magic reference worked. Max almost felt a moment of shame and wondered anew at the undeserved deference paid—even if grudgingly—to anyone possessing a law degree.
"The chief'll be in around ten."
"That's all right. You can help me." Max's tone was brisk. "What progress has been made in the search for Courtney Kimball?" At Matthews's look of dogged resistance, Max continued crisply. "I want everything that's part of the public record."
He knew damned well the sergeant wasn't certain what constituted a public record.
Max didn't enlighten him.When Annie closed the cream-colored pamphlet, she knew with certainty that Mrs. Whitney Tarrant was not going to be a bosom chum. Annie was willing to bet that Charlotte Tarrant was extremely serious, extremely humorless, and quite boring. The Tarrant Family History resounded with grandiloquence: the Tarrants were not only a leading Family, but they always "enjoyed prominence in Society even among their own kind." Of course, in Texas, Annie's place of origin, it mattered most how a man conducted himself today, not where he came from or who his family was. In fact, it was still not considered mannerly to ask where people came from, a harkening back to the days of the Old West when a man might not be exactly eager to reveal his past. Now, as then, it was the present that counted.
However, there were glimpses of the past that not even Charlotte's labored prose could trivialize.
The heartbreak when five daughters—Anna, Abigail, Ruth, Margaret, and Victoria—were lost to yellow fever in 1747.
The loss of a younger son, Edward, his wife, Emily, and their three children in a storm at sea when he was taking them to safety in Philadelphia as the Revolution began.
With her husband, Miles, gone from Chastain to serve in Sumter's army, his wife, Mary, sallied forth to oversee the outlying plantations. Mary managed a bit of work for the Revolution as well, smuggling papers or food, information or boots, whatever the moment required. Her devotion to her infant nation was repaid with grief: Miles perished in a British prison camp just two weeks before the end of the war.
But happier days were to come. The land overflowed with plenty when Tarrant rice was sold in every market at home and abroad and wealth poured in. Oh, the dances and the convivial dinners when nothing was too grand for guests. These survivors of war and deprivation embodied in their lives the ideals for which they had fought. Of first importance was a man's honor.
The code of chivalry was understood:
A man's word was his bond.
A woman's name was never uttered except with respect. A promise, whether wise or foolish, must be kept.
A man must always be prepared to fight for his name, his
state, or his love.
Tarrant men died in duels in 1812, 1835, and 1852. Michael Evan Tarrant was seventeen years, three months, and two days of age when he bled to death "near the great oak on the bluff above the harbour after meeting in combat in an open field." Another, Roderick Henry, shot his own gun into the air, refusing, he said as he lay dying, to permit another man to make him into a murderer.
Tarrants had survived or been felled by warfare and pestilence. Then came fire. Tarrant House, the first structure on the present grounds, burned to the ground in 1832. All were rescued from the inferno except Catherine, the mistress of the house, a victim of paralysis. Catherine was tragically trapped in her bedroom on the second floor.
A daughter, Elizabeth, defied her family and eloped with a young man from Beaufort. Her father wanted her to marry an older widowed planter. The breach between Elizabeth and her family was never healed.
South Carolina on December 20, 1860, was the first of eleven states to secede from the Union.
Four Tarrant sons perished in The War Between the States: Philip, twenty-five, at Fort Beauregard in one of the earliest engagements; Samuel, twenty-two, who drowned trying to run the blockade; and William, nineteen, of yellow fever at Manassas. The second son, Robert, twenty-four, was a graduate of West Point, who served in the Union Army. During the third year of the War, he made his way through the lines to come home as he'd heard his sister Grace was ill with typhoid. His father, Henry, home with a wound suffered at Chancellorsville, met him at the door and refused him entrance. They struggled. Robert was stronger and he pushed his way past to go upstairs to his sister's sickroom. There was a gunshot. Robert fell on the stairway landing, mortally wounded. A dark stain marks the top step, and no manner of scrubbing has ever been able to remove it. During the long war years, the womenof Tarrant House cut up curtains to make clothes, tore down the copper gutters, which were melted and used for torpedoes, took in sick and injured soldiers and nursed them back to health or buried them. But one by one came the news of the deaths of the sons of the house. Henry Tarrant did not recover from his wound, though some believed he died of a broken heart. His widow, Emma, and their remaining son, Thomas, by guile and wile, despite the loss of all the outlying plantations, somehow managed each year to pay the taxes and so were able to hold onto Tarrant House.