Southern Ghost by Carolyn G. Hart Read Free Book Online

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.
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•

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    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