Chapter 14
When Victoria arrived at the train station in Richmond, a chauffeur and two liveried footmen were waiting for her.
They took charge of her bags and escorted her to the car.
Vergil Jackson had sent a Rolls for her, and the drive to his plantation took a little over an hour.
It was a beautiful warm day, and it didn’t strike her that all three servants who had picked her up were Black.
The countryside was beautiful, and when they finally reached the plantation, she noticed an enormous horse farm across the road.
The chauffeur said Mr. Jackson kept his racehorses there, and she could take a tour of the barn later if she wished.
She was far more interested in his mills than his stables.
The house was a magnificent Southern Colonial mansion that seemed to stretch for miles.
Vergil was waiting for her on the terrace, and a butler was serving champagne on a silver tray.
Some of the other guests had arrived before she did, and everyone was in good spirits.
A waiter in a starched white jacket was also serving mint juleps.
Their host made a great fuss about Victoria’s arrival, singing her praises to the other guests as the biggest and most important mill owner in England.
Her bags had disappeared to the guesthouse where she was staying, and Vergil escorted her to the table where lunch was served, in his beautiful formal dining room that looked out on his splendid gardens.
There was a fleet of gardeners tending to them.
She was seated to his right as the guest of honor, and he charmed her all through lunch with stories of his racehorses and travels in Europe on his yacht.
The meal was delicious, and he served the finest French wines.
There was some talk at the table about when Prohibition would take effect.
Congress had already passed it, but it wasn’t fully in force yet.
“I guess we’ll have to start hiding our liquor in the basement next year,” Vergil said, laughing.
A fleet of waiters served the elaborate lunch, and Victoria noticed a crowd of maids and a chef in the kitchen whenever the kitchen door opened.
Vergil seemed to have an enormous number of employees, and Victoria was startled to realize that all of them were Black.
Vergil saw her looking, and explained that their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had been enslaved on the plantation, and that most of them had stayed when Lincoln freed them.
He said they were paid now, of course, but they had stayed and continued to work for him.
Victoria wondered why, if they were free now, one almost had the feeling of a time warp, as though nothing had moved forward in the last fifty years or longer.
Vergil said that the South really hadn’t changed much, which he thought was a good thing, and it made her uncomfortable as she listened to him.
He leaned very close every time he spoke to her, and she had the distinct impression that he was hoping to seduce her sometime during the weekend.
He was a very handsome man, the same age as Bert, who would be sixty-nine by now.
But Vergil Jackson seemed older, and Delphine was right.
He gave off the aura of a womanizer. He had children who were older than Victoria, and he dropped the names of all the raciest aristocrats and biggest snobs in Europe, most of whom she knew and couldn’t stand, and who no longer spoke to her anyway, because she was engaged in commerce.
She wondered how a woman in her position would be viewed in the United States, if she would be respected for her successes or treated like a pariah, as she was in England.
America seemed much more modern to her from all she’d read, but Delphine led the same restrictive life as the women Victoria knew in England.
Upper-class women were ruled by their men.
She was taken to the guesthouse after lunch, where her bags had been perfectly unpacked, her dresses ironed and hung in the closet, and there were two maids assigned to her.
Later that afternoon the guests were given a tour of the plantation, and Victoria shuddered when she saw the slave quarters, which looked like shacks and prison cells, and she could too easily envision the human misery that had existed there, even in Vergil’s lifetime.
He had grown up with slaves on the plantation, which was unimaginable to Victoria.
The other guests were impressed by the tour, but Victoria wasn’t.
It made her feel sad and breathless to realize how many slaves there must have been, easily hundreds, brought from Africa, beaten and mistreated, which seemed quite natural to Vergil.
She was disappointed when they didn’t get to the mills that day, and visited the horse barns instead, which were impressive but of no interest to her. The men loved it.
Dinner was white tie, and she had brought two evening gowns to wear.
There were a dozen guests staying at the plantation, and only two others were mill owners, but no one seemed interested in talking about cotton or their mills.
The “conference” she had come for never materialized.
It was a strictly social occasion. And halfway through dinner she realized why she was there.
He was curious about her, and had wanted to meet the pretty young widow of his old friend, who was now a famous mill owner herself.
He had a ballroom and a band that came in and the guests danced after dinner.
Vergil danced a little too close and a little too tightly with Victoria.
But he had had so much to drink that he was easily discouraged, and at the first opportunity, she slipped away and went back to her guesthouse.
One of the footmen showed her the way, escorted her to her door, and saw her safely inside.
It was a relief to take off her dress and lie down.
She was exhausted from the day and evening, which had served no purpose whatsoever.
She had come all the way from England to learn something, and so far it had been a total waste of time.
It was just a group of upper-class rich snobs who drank too much and name-dropped all night.
She had traveled all the way from England for nothing.
The next day was no better. They finally got to the mills briefly after lunch, and they were no more modern than her own.
Vergil’s cotton fields were vast, and there again, the ghosts of past slaves hung heavy in the air, all of his employees were the descendants of slaves, and Victoria found the whole thing oppressive.
There was no band that night and she retired after dinner.
The man sitting next to her was a socialite from New York and told Victoria that Vergil was obsessed with her and talked about her all the time, which was why he had invited her and invented the “mill owners’ conference,” which didn’t exist. He was just showing off to her, and wanted to get to know her.
She was up early the next morning, packed and ready to leave.
She said she had a meeting in New York that afternoon, and she was sailing the next day back to England.
At breakfast before she left, the wife of the socialite whispered the secret that Vergil had a Black mistress on the plantation, the granddaughter of one of the slaves.
She was said to be a beautiful girl, and he had a baby with her.
“Nothing here has changed in two hundred years,” the woman from New York said, but she had still spent the weekend there, knowingly.
“The South is still living in another century,” she added, and Victoria could see that that was true.
She had no idea why Bert had liked him, except that Vergil was immensely rich and successful, and maybe less offensive to a man than he was to her.
And it occurred to her that Bert had come to see Vergil days after the Titanic had sunk, and had never actually talked about him after that.
She wondered now if Bert had disliked him as much as she did.
Victoria had felt like a piece of meat all weekend that Vergil was about to pounce on and devour.
She couldn’t wait to leave, and changed her ticket at the station for an earlier train.
The trip had been a disappointment and Vergil Jackson the embodiment of everything she abhorred.
She couldn’t imagine Bert liking him any better.
It was a relief to get back to the normalcy of the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York. She called Delphine and told her how awful it had been, and she wasn’t surprised.
“The South gives me the creeps. Frederick loves going, and I let him go without me now and I stay in Newport.” Delphine knew all the people Victoria had met and didn’t like them either.
They promised to write to each other soon.
Victoria was happy she had seen her friend, which was the best part of her trip, but she couldn’t wait to get back on the boat the next day.
The weather had gotten warmer and she lay on a deck chair in the sun for most of the crossing back to Europe, and sent Thor a telegram: “Can’t wait to come home.
Virginia was a total flop. See you soon. V.”
He was waiting at the dock in Liverpool when she arrived, and rode the train to Manchester with her, while she told him how awful Vergil Jackson and his friends had been, and he was immensely relieved to hear it.
He had been worried that she would fall madly in love with Vergil Jackson or one of his friends and he was delighted that she hadn’t.
“Why are you smiling?” she asked him, after she told him how awful it had been. It was the first time she’d been to America when she hadn’t liked it.
“Sorry, I was thinking of something else. That I’m happy you’re home.”