Low Country by Anne Rivers Siddons Read Free Book Online

was sitting on the dock
    at the end of the long, dilapidated wooden walkway
    that led from the marsh house to the tidal creek, where
    my grandfather kept his Boston Whaler and his canoe,
    trying to catch the spectral light. I was between my
    freshman and sophomore years at Converse, just tast-
    ing my gift. The dazzle to the west, where the sun hung
    red, preparing to flame and die behind the long sweep
    of emerald marsh, was overwhelming; I could not look
    into it without shading my eyes.
    I heard them before I saw them, heard the slow putt-
    putt of an outboard lost somewhere in the rose-gold
    dazzle, and turned to look toward it, squinting. The
    boat came out of the light, its engine silent, and loomed
    up almost at the dock where I sat. It bumped the rub-
    ber fender and wallowed to rest. Hayes got out first;
    I knew him slightly, from other visits he had made to
    my grandfather during my own summer stays, but I
    stared anyway. He was resplendent in a white linen
    suit, with the light gilding his red head, and looked far
    better in both than he usually did. Hayes is substantial
    and sometimes engaging, but he is not handsome.
    “Hi, Caro,” he said. “I’ve brought y’all a visitor.”
    “Hi, Hayes,” I said back. “That’s nice.”
    A tall young man got out behind him. He

    46 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    wore white linen also, but you noticed the man and
    not the suit, instead of just the opposite, as with Hayes;
    it might have been his everyday garb, it seemed so
    right and easy on his long body. A white linen suit in
    an Edwardian cut, and white buck shoes. He had a
    great, flowing blue satin tie. It should have looked
    foppish but did not. The light made an old-gold helmet
    of his hair and slanted into his eyes so that they flamed
    out of his narrow, tanned face, an impossible, firestruck
    blue. He smiled and the spindrift light glanced on white
    teeth. He had a flower in his buttonhole, a small, tight,
    old-fashioned pink sweetheart rose, and in his long,
    brown hands he held a bouquet of them.
    “This is Clay Venable,” Hayes said. “We roomed
    together a couple of years at Virginia. He’s been a fool
    over the Lowcountry since the first time I brought him
    home with me, and I’ve finally talked him into moving
    to Charleston. He wanted to see some real, unspoiled
    marshland and I thought of your granddaddy’s place
    right off the bat. I guess you can’t get much more un-
    spoiled than Peacock’s. This is Caroline Aubrey, Clay.
    Mr. Aubrey’s granddaughter. Did I tell you she was
    an artiste as well as a beauty?”
    “Miss Aubrey,” Clay Venable said, holding the bou-
    quet out to me. “I thought you might like these. We’ve
    been at a fancy garden party in Charleston and I stole
    them off a bush on the way

    Low Country / 47
    out. Better take them before my hostess comes after
    me in a motorboat.”
    “Her gardener, you mean,” Hayes said lazily. “In a
    cigarette boat. We’ve been at Marguerite MacMillan’s,
    Caro. I thought if Clay was going to be a Lowcountry
    boy he might as well start out in the virtual holy of
    holies. Little did I know he’d be filching roses out of
    her garden before the afternoon was over. Can’t take
    him anywhere.”
    I put out my hands and took the roses, but I did not
    speak. I could not seem to look away from this tall,
    radiant being clothed in white and molten rose-gold
    light. I remember thinking that his voice did not really
    sound Southern; it was deep and soft and slow, but
    somehow crisp. There was something else about him
    that did not seem native, either, though I could not
    have said what it was then, and still cannot. Clay was
    born on a farm in Indiana, but by that time he had so
    submerged himself into the fabric of the Lowcountry
    that there were few traces of the rural Indiana scholar-
    ship boy left, and of course by now there are none at
    all. Clay is more a denizen of this coast now than
    someone generations born to it.
    “You gon’ ask us