Allison shuddered. “I should say they are not. Some of the details of this case… we shall have to clear the court of all female spectators-though why they would wish to attend in the first place, I cannot imagine.”
Well, I could. But I let that pass. “Now what exactly do you mean by woman troubles?”
Captain Allison leaned forward, hand cupped above his lips, and hissed at me, “He has the pox, sir!”
I have the honor to be married to a preacher’s daughter, who was raised in the genteel society of the Morganton planter class, so perhaps he thought I would be as easily shocked as my Harriette by such news, but I grew up in the rough-and-tumble world of the Carolina backcountry, and, after my father died, my family ran a way station for the cattle drovers who passed through Madison County. Between my association with these colorful specimens of humanity, my early career as a country lawyer, and my later years in Congress, I was quite inured to the specter of human iniquity in all its many forms.
I cannot say that I understood the impulse, though.
You might think otherwise, for, as I said, I grew up in the mountains that form Carolina’s border with Tennessee, and many of the frontier folk up there had little use for the social conventions, and I do confess that for a year or two I enjoyed the drinking and the dancing of rough-and-ready Asheville, and I’ll even admit to brawling a time or two, before I came down with the fever of ambition and went to bettering myself through education and mingling in polite society. In those days I lived up to the light I had, but it wouldn’t have been bright enough to read by.
Despite my youthful escapades, the one snare that I never got caught in was a dalliance with unsuitable women. I never let my youth and high spirits blind me to that extent to the road that lay ahead. I was intent on bettering myself, and the road to privilege is best traveled alone until you are almost there.
As pretty and winsome as a frontier girl might be at seventeen, she would have proven a millstone around my neck if I had tried to marry her and drag her, unlettered and unrefined, up to the seats of the mighty, where I was bound and determined to go. I knew better than to risk my future for the momentary pleasure of a youthful romance. I waited until I was accepted to read law with the Woodfin brothers, two prominent attorneys in Asheville, and then I began in earnest the hunt for a suitable bride.
Do not misunderstand me. I was no fortune hunter in search of an heiress, nor did I marry one. Birth and breeding were what mattered to me. My Harriette was the orphaned daughter of a Presbyterian preacher-but she was raised by a gilt-edged family of the plantation aristocracy in Morganton. It was not money that I was after. I needed a well-born young woman, cultured and socially acceptable to the frontier Brahmin. She would see my potential to make something of myself, and I would honor her for her gentility, and aspire to live up to her standards. She would be my guide and my mentor among those “quality folks,” whose ranks I had been determined to join since my days as a clerk at the resort hotel in Warm Springs.
I came from a good family myself-it was only the poverty caused by father’s early death that put me at a disadvantage. But my mother meant for her seven children to succeed in life, and so when I was nearly twenty, she sold our drovers’ inn in Lapland, and moved us to a modest frame house in Asheville. The town of Asheville had been built upon land purchased from Mother’s family, the Bairds, and from my paternal grandfather David Vance, who had fought in the Revolution. In Asheville, if nowhere else on earth, I could count myself a prince.
I think John Woodfin took me on as a pupil to read law on account of that pedigree. I do not know what else he could have seen in a raw-boned youth from the hills. In addition to the Bairds and Grandfather Vance, the war hero, I was kin to the Erwins of Morganton through my mother’s mother Hannah Erwin. Woodfin set a store by that, because he and his brother Nicholas had married two McDowell sisters from Morganton, and kinship with the Erwins and the McDowells connected you to everybody who was anybody west of Raleigh. I knew that my association with the Woodfin family would give me an entrée into that frontier aristocracy, and it was there that I proposed to seek a wife. Morganton is forty miles east of Asheville and outside the mountains. Like water, money and power seem to flow downhill, so the closer one gets to the flatlands, the more of it there is.
Presentable young men with prospects are at a premium in the Carolina backcountry, and so a few months after I began my association with the Woodfins, I was invited to a formal party at Quaker Meadows, the McDowells’ elegant home in Morganton. It was there that my fellow law student Augustus Merrimon introduced me to the McDowells’ ward, Miss Harriette Espy, orphaned in infancy, and raised by the McDowells, so that, while she was not an heiress, her social connections were like threads of spun gold. The tiny young lady standing by the punch bowl, silver ladle in hand, was auburn-haired with earnest gray eyes and a kind face.
“You are reading the law?” she said, after the introductions had been effected. “Oh, what a noble calling!”
“Well, that doesn’t relieve the tedium too awful much,” I said, trying to balance a plate in one hand and a cup of punch in the other. I felt like a mule in a choir loft.
She ignored the jest. “I do so admire a learned man, sir. My own dear, departed father studied at the Princeton Theological Seminary. I shall pray for your success, Mr. Vance.”
I had recently decided to leave the Woodfins’ tutelage and attend the University of North Carolina, and so I played on the heartstrings of this pious young lady, telling her that I should soon be far from home and friendless, and assuring her that entering into a correspondence with my unworthy self would be an act of Christian charity.
The courtship wasn’t all smooth sailing, for Miss Espy ran a tight ship when it came to piety, decorum, and, most especially, absolute fidelity. Why, before we had exchanged no more than a handshake and a sheaf of letters, I nearly lost her, when that infernal stick-insect Merrimon told her that I had been paying addresses to another young lady-an incident that occurred months before I even met Miss Espy, mind you, but she wrote me a letter that would have frozen a bonfire, telling me that our association was at an end, but that she would pray for me. Well, I deserved a law degree just for being able to talk my way out of that one, for it was the hardest case for the defense I ever had. (At least until the matter of Thomas Dula.) But in the end I carried the day with Miss Harriette, and on August 2, 1853, in the Presbyterian Church in Morganton, Miss Espy became Mrs. Zebulon Baird Vance, before God and a host of frontier gentry, whose approval at last I had won.
Forever after, folks said that Harriette was the apple of my eye, and so she was, for like that apple in the Garden of Eden that imparted wisdom to our first parents, so my Harriette bestowed the wisdom of civilization upon me-the gift of powerful friends and the wit to use our connections to advance my career. Indeed I treasured her-but to return to the metaphor of Eden, I am mindful that any apple from that fabled tree would have conferred those self-same gifts.
So I sat there on a porch in Wilkesboro, peeling an unmetaphorical apple, and listening to Captain Allison stammer through an explanation of the behavior of our client. I was not shocked, though I would have never repeated a word of our conversation to my sainted wife. She would have been horrified beyond the power of speech. She’d have expected me to give up the case on the spot, I suppose, and since I was not being paid a red cent to conduct the defense, it would be hard to argue to the contrary. But, after all, somebody had to defend the poor boy.
I put down the apple. “So you are telling me that this Dula fellow had seduced the victim, Laura Foster, and promised to marry her, but that he was also in an adulterous relationship with his codefendant, Mrs. Ann Melton? And the state’s witness, the servant girl, Pauline Foster… she also claims that the accused has had-”