The Foxes of Harrow Read online

  FRANK

  YERBY

  The

  Foxes of

  Harrow

  THE FOXES OF HARROW

  Frank Yerby

  This magnificent historical novel, though a first book, remained near the top of the American best-seller lists for no fewer than ten months—a true test of popularity.

  Set in New Orleans and Louisiana State in the troubled days between 1825 and the Civil War, The Foxes of Harrow has a broad sweep and is charged with colour and action, with white-hot animosities, with strife and warfare and the clash of races. Dominating this fast-moving story is the figure of Stephen Fox, who is loved by three women, who has the face of an angel and the mind which can conjure visions of both beauty and evil.

  Frank Yerby was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1916. He studied at Fisk University in Tennessee and at the University of Chicago where he gained his M.A. degree. During the war he wrote his first novel and has since had twenty-three others published. He now lives in Spain.

  NOVELS BY

  FRANK YERBY

  The Foxes of Harrow

  The Vixens

  The Golden Hawk

  Pride’s Castle

  Floodtide

  A Woman Called Fancy

  The Saracen Blade

  The Devil’s Laughter

  Bride of Liberty

  Benton’s Row

  The Treasure of Pleasant Valley

  Captain Rebel

  Fairoaks

  The Serpent and the Staff

  Jarrett’s Jade

  Gillian

  The Garfield Honour

  Griffin’s Way

  The Old Gods Laugh

  An Odour of Sanctity

  Judas, My Brother

  Goat Song

  Speak Now

  The Man from Dahomey

  The Girl from Storyville

  The Voyage Unplanned

  William Heinemann Ltd

  15 Queen Street, Mayfair, London W1X 8BE

  LONDON MELBOURNE TORONTO

  JOHANNESBURG AUCKLAND

  First published 1947

  Reprinted 1948, 1949, 1952,

  1961, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1972

  434 89016 2

  Printed Offset Litho and bound in Great Britain

  by Cox & Wyman Ltd,

  London, Fakenham and Reading

  To Muriel Fuller who made this book possible

  Foreword

  The Foxes of Harrow

  ABOUT fifteen miles above New Orleans the river goes very slowly. It has broadened out there until it is almost a sea and the water is yellow with the mud of half a continent. Where the sun strikes it, it is golden.

  At night the water talks with dark voices. It goes whispering down past the Natchez Trace, past Ormand until it reaches the old D’Estrehan place, and flows by that singing. But when it passes Harrow, it is silent. Men say that it is because the river is so broad here that you cannot hear the sound of the waters. Scientists say it is the shape of the channel. But it is as broad by Ormand and D’Estrehan. Yet before Harrow in the night it is silent.

  It is better to see Harrow at night. The moonlight is kinder. The North Wing has no roof and through the eyeless sockets of the windows the stars shine. Yet at night when the moon is at the full, Harrow is still magnificent. By day you can see that the white paint has peeled off and that all the doors are gone, and through them and the windows you can see the mud and the dust over everything. But at night the moon brings back the white again and the shadows hide the weeds between the flagstones. The Corinthian columns stand up slim and silver and the great veranda sweeps on endlessly across the front, and the red flagstone swings in perfect curves through the weed-choked garden where once the cape jasmine grew, past the mud-filled birdbath and the broken crystal ball on the column to the smokehouse and the kitchen house and the sugar mill and the slave quarters.

  You walk very fast over the flagstones and resist the impulse to whirl suddenly in your tracks and look back at Harrow. The lights are not on. The crystal chandeliers are not ablaze. There are no dancers in the great hall. And in the garden the smell of the pinks and the lavenders and the white crepe myrtle and red oleanders and the mimosas and the feathery green and gold acacia and the magnolia fuscatas and the cape jasmines and the roses and lilies and the honeysuckle are ghosts too and figments of the imagination, but so real that at last you turn and scratch the flesh of your palms and your fingers with the harsh and rank reality of the weeds.

  In the brick kitchen house it is dark. The great open fireplace, fourteen feet across, is silent and dust-covered and cold. But the small pots still stand on the trivets after eighty years and the pot-hooks and the game spits are rust-covered but otherwise unchanged. And the ovens with the hollowed-out tops where the live coals were put still stand on the hearth waiting for old Caleen to push them into the fire to bake her master’s bread and hum softly under her breath.

  It is no good to stay. So you come out of the brick kitchen house and walk very fast down the old wagon trail from the sugar mill where the machinery for crushing the cane rusts away in the swampdamp; stumbling in the eighty-year-old stone hard ruts made by the wagons that hauled the bagasse away to be dumped into the river, until you come to the landing and untie the boat and yank the cord that starts the outboard to coughing and barking and roar away downstream in the still water that is silent before Harrow. And you don’t look back.

  I

  THE Prairie Belle came nuzzling up to the bar. The big side wheels slowed and the white boiling of the water stopped. Still the boat slipped rapidly toward the bar so that at the last moment the captain ordered the wheels reversed and the water boiled briefly in the opposite direction. The port wheel turned forward again and the Belle came to a stop alongside the bar.

  The captain took the cigar out of his mouth and spat into the yellow water.

  “Run out the plank,” he said quietly.

  The two gigantic Negroes bent down and the black coils of muscle glistened. They came up with short, deepthroated grunts and the oaken plank wavered and came to rest on the bar. This was not the canopied, ropestrung plank they laid down for passengers to leave the vessel, but a single plank down which the Negroes used to roll the hogsheads of sorghum and molasses ashore and walk with marvelous surefootedness, bending under the weight of the cotton bales.

  “All right,” the captain said shortly. “You may go ashore, Mr. Fox.”

  Stephen Fox fingered the single rich ruffle that stood out from his shirt front. Then his fingers caressed the pearl that gleamed like a bird’s egg against the dark silk stock wound about his throat. He put his hand into his pocket and came out with the golden snuff box. Then he put it back again. To take snuff then, and under those circumstances, would have been a gesture and Stephen despised gestures. For the same reason he kept his tall gray hat firmly on his head, although convention demanded that he at least salute the ladies.

  “All right, Mr. Fox,” the captain said. “Up with ye.”

  Stephen stepped up on the plank. His weight was insufficient to make it springy. He strode along it very solidly, like a man treading firm ground, taking care to keep every trace of jauntiness out of his step. That would have shown something—defiance, perhaps; some indication that this that they were doing mattered. What he wanted was to give evidence of exactly nothing. It wasn’t easy, but he did it. Going down the plank to a muddy bar one hundred yards from the left bank of the Mississippi, there was not the slightest indication in his bearing that the Prairie Belle existed or that the men and women lining her decks were alive. His disregard was Olympian.

  A little murmur started among the passengers and grew and ran from man to man until all the people were muttering. Then some
one said it aloud and another and another until they were all saying it, shouting it at the tall, slim man with the burnished copper hair who was standing on the muddy finger that lay in the water pointing downstream toward New Orleans:

  “Cheat!”

  “Sharper!”

  “Card shark!”

  The captain sighed a little and nodded to the second officer.

  “All right, Mr. Anthony,” he said.

  The second officer pulled twice on the bell cord. The bells jangled. Two great white clouds billowed up from the high twin stacks and the great side wheels turned over once, twice, then took up their steady beat, the water boiling white beneath them. The plank was lifted from the bar and slid inward to the lower deck of the Belle. She stood out for midchannel, heading southward toward the river’s mouth.

  The captain took the cigar out of his mouth again and spat into the yellow water.

  “A scoundrel, Mr. Anthony,” he said. “A black-hearted scoundrel—but still . . .”

  The second officer nodded.

  “But still a man,” he said, “very much a man—eh, captain?”

  The captain’s bushy black brows came together over his nose. “We’re behind schedule,” be growled. “Up steam, man. Let us be on our way.”

  The sun came down very low over the Mississippi and the muddy water gleamed golden. The Prairie Belle ploughed into the suntrack and blazed white there, then dropped downstream, growing smaller and smaller until she burned black in the sun-washed water, like a water beetle, and was gone at last, leaving only the white trails of wood smoke hanging over the river.

  Stephen Fox turned his back toward the Belle and gazed upstream. He had only two choices and one of them he rejected at once. That was to swim ashore and make his way southward through the bayou country afoot. The second was more reasonable: He could stay where he was and take the chance of hailing some passing river craft and making his way to New Orleans in comparative comfort. So he remained standing, from time to time taking off the tall gray hat and wiping the sweat from his face with a silken handkerchief. His brows gathered into a frown as he gazed over the surface of the water.

  In that year, 1825, there were still only a few steamboats plying the Mississippi, but there were hundreds of ungainly flat-boats drifting south, and even a lonely keelboat or two, stealing silently downstream with its sixteen poles shipped. Stephen shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He was going to have a long wait. There was no chance of sitting down; the bar was muddy, and Stephen had no desire to ruin the loose fawn-colored trousers he wore or his rich green cutaway coat. Besides, his tall figure could be seen more easily if he were standing.

  He took out the golden snuff box and poured out a pinch on the back of his hand. The brown dust caught in the bright hairs that gleamed like foxfire. He sniffed briefly up each nostril and straightened. The blue eyes, pale almost to colorlessness, burned in the freckled face.

  He bent forward. Yes, there was a black dot moving on the waters to the north. Stephen stared at it without moving for almost ten minutes. There was no change in its size and shape. He looked away, counted one hundred, and looked again. This time the dot was definitely larger. Stephen kept up the little game, looking away and counting, then looking back again. Each time it was larger. But when he looked at it he couldn’t see it move.

  Then at last it was taking size and shape. It was a steamboat and now it was coming on fast. Stephen’s heart sank. It was in midchannel and making all steam, the white smoke standing straight up in stiff, hard pants, the water breaking white around the prow. As it came abreast of the bar the whistle cried out twice, in long, belly deep tones, then she was boiling past, the paddle wheels cascading the yellowish white water down in a torrent, and the v-shaped waves moving out, out, and out until at last they broke over the bar and wet Stephen’s feet.

  “Damn!” he said without heat and turned his back on her, staring upstream. But nothing more came. The haze came down over the river and the warmth went out of the air. The sun went down quite suddenly behind the pines on the western side of the river and a star began to glimmer palely. Stephen put up the handkerchief and fixed the tall gray hat firmly on his head. The sky purpled, blackened. The stars strung a necklace over the river. There was no hope for it, he would have to wait until morning.

  He started walking back and forth from one point of the bar to another, rubbing his long-fingered hands to keep the blood circulating. The water talked darkly in the night, but Stephen didn’t listen. He walked along thinking—remembering London, Paris, Vienna, New York.

  “A long trail,” he thought. “A long trail to end thus.” He stretched out the long, nimble fingers and stared at them in the darkness.

  “Aye, ye’ve carried me far—and will again, no doubt; but it is a sorry thing—no certainty in it. A flip of the pasteboards and it comes and it goes. No more of that. This time the trail ends—for good. No more the river. It’s the broad lands for me.” He threw back his head and laughed aloud, the clear baritone carrying out over the water. “Fine chance of that. A Dublin guttersnipe don’t become one of the landed gentry—not even in this mad, new land . . .” He stiffened suddenly, listening. The sound came again, far off and faint, floating over the river.

  “Hullo! Hullo, therrre!”

  Stephen lifted up his head and cupped his hand.

  “Hulloo!” he called, “Hullo!”

  “Where are ye?”

  “Here to your right—on the bar! For God’s sake, man, make baste.”

  He could hear the splash of the great sweep now, and a lantern glowed faintly from the river. Then the black bulk of the flat-boat was looming up through the darkness and the smell came rolling in over the water and struck him in the face.

  “A pig boat! By Our Lady!” Still he couldn’t afford to be choosey.

  A man was standing in the great curving bow holding the lantern at arm’s length. By the Saints, Stephen thought, a face like that would chase all the devils out of hell.

  The flatboat touched the bar now and hung there, grinding. “Well, I’ll be a pizen wolf from Bitter Creek,” the lantern-bearer said, “if this don’t beat all. A gentleman, no less—all got up in tophat and fancy waistcoat and cutaway standing up on a bar in the middle of the Mississippi and laughin fit to kill his-self! Who mought yez be, me foine lad?”

  “I’m Stephen Fox and I’m plagued cold and hungrier than a grizzly. May I come aboard?”

  “Now that depends. Furst I think yez had better explain what yez be a doin’ thar in the middle of the river.”

  “Well,” Stephen said, “as one Irishman to another, I am a gambler. But aboard the Prairie Belle there were tinhorn sports who bore their losses badly. They complained to the captain and here I am. Now may I come aboard?”

  “Here’s me hand. Up with yez, me lad!”

  Stephen scrambled aboard. The smell from the hogs was formidable, but no worse than that from the various members of the crew, who came crowding around to examine Stephen.

  Seeing them, Stephen frowned. He turned to the one-eyed giant who wore the red turkey feather in his hat which indicated that he had knocked down, gouged, bitten, and spiked into unconsciousness half a hundred fierce flatboatmen. It was to this one he had been talking.

  “A word with ye, Captain?”

  “Yes, me lad?”

  “Might we not walk aft?”

  The captain grunted, then nodded his massive head. He was a huge man, Irish and all muscle. The two of them walked back toward the stern of the craft, past the big pen where the hogs were, past the great oaken keg of Monongahela rye whiskey with the tin cup chained to it, back for nearly a hundred feet until they came to the place where the huge broadhorn sweeps were.

  Stephen hesitated. His hand swept up to his throat with a lightning like movement. When it came away, the golden setting at the top of the stickpin gleamed empty; the big pearl was gone.

  “Now, captain,” he said, “when they put me off the Belle,
they forced me to disgorge. In my money belt there are only thirty gold dollars—a twenty-dollar goldpiece and a ten. They are yours.” He unbuttoned the wine-colored waistcoat and undid his white ruffled shirt. He unbuckled the money belt and handed it unopened to the captain.

  The captain only grunted.

  “Beside that, I have only this golden snuff box. I will count it a favor if ye will accept it.”

  Again the captain grunted.

  “And now,” Stephen said evenly, “ye have all my worldly goods beside my clothes. I hope ye will not take it ill, but this crew of yours . . .”

  The big mouth split into a grin.

  “Right yez are, my lad. There’s no one of them as wouldn’t murder his own mither for a copper.”

  “I thought as much. Deliver me safely in New Orleans and ye get my coat and waistcoat and this hat. My trousers would not fit ye, I’m afraid. Is it a deal?”

  The captain threw back his great head and laughed. “Keep your duds,” he said. “The box I will take, but I offer yez this pewter one of mine in its stead. A man should not be without his snuff, specially so foine a lad as yez.”

  Stephen put out his hand. The captain took it, and for a moment Stephen thought that the bones were crushed.

  “Now if ye have something that a man might eat . . .”

  “Right yez are. Louie!”

  There was a shuffling of feet in the darkness and a hulk of a man whose spine curved over into a bow came into the glow of the lantern.

  “Fetch some grub for Mister Fox, Louie,” the captain said. Louie said nothing. He shuffled off into the darkness and came back after a moment or two with a moldy cheese, a jug of whiskey, and a loaf of stonelike hardness.

  “Here,” he grunted, and moved forward again.