Wilderness Run (15 page)

“Yes,” said Addison, carefully stowing the accordion away.

“Then he won't die, for he has already passed through the valley,” predicted their captain. Burrs had knotted in his beard and he tugged at them, wincing. “Go on now, and let the others take him.”

“Sir,” said Addison. “You would put him in the hands of drunkards now?”

Spider giggled. Woodard gave a snort of protest, swaying unsteadily, knocking a laden apple bough so that its fruit hammered the ground. He and Spider had been given the office of stretcher-bearers because they were the worst shots in the regiment, but Woodard refused to admit it.

“I ain't got a choice,” said Davey. “We have to move.” One of the apples rolled toward Gilbert's head and Addison stopped it with his foot.

“Let Lindsey and me take him, at least to the field hospital,” he offered, toying with the apple. “We'll catch up.”

“I can't spare you. Which means you ain't got a choice, either,” Davey said quietly. “Move.”

“Captain,” Addison said. His hands balled into fists.

“We can't leave him—” Laurence began.

“Move,” Davey ordered again, interrupting Laurence, although he only looked at Addison. Time slowed, Addison's knuckles going white, Laurence holding his haversack, Woodard about to speak, his thin mouth opening, then clapping shut. Then Loomis broke the silence with a grunt.

“He'll be all right,” he muttered, and fell in behind the others, shouldering his musket.

Davey nodded and put his hand slowly down on the butt end of his pistol. “Lindsey, Addison, move.”

A fly descended to Gilbert's smashed ankle, filling its soft black bottle. Laurence stared at Addison, but he wouldn't return his gaze. His hair was full of sun, his eyes washed the color of old stone. Daylight drifted through the trees, bringing their brightness back to them. The fly careened off toward the brier patch, where the dead rabbit lay, already covered in ants. As the insect flew with slow, dizzy gluttony through the tufted thorns, something in Addison seemed to shrink. He lowered his head and spat on the grass. Another moment passed.

“Go,” whispered Gilbert, and he let slip away the stiff mask that he had been using for a face since he was shot. Laurence saw death lurking beneath the curling hairs of his eyebrows and beard, and he watched as Addison, seeing it, too, and repulsed by it, sprang toward the others and fell in behind them.

“Laurence.” Davey used the name of the boy who had led the runaway through the dark, feverish and impossibly cold, who in the act of trying to save the freedom of another had succeeded only in taking it away. A string of gunfire ratcheted beyond the orchard. Laurence's chin sank to his chest and he stepped carefully over the cannonball and into line, lifting the long weight of his musket. Ahead of him, Addison stood so still, he could not have been breathing.

Davey gestured to the stretcher-bearers to commence their work and ordered the rest of them forward. Gilbert cried out as Woodard hauled him onto the narrow board with clumsy arms. But if the others heard it, they did not turn, skirting the blond remains of the cornfield without speaking or looking back.

January–February 1863

Chapter Eighteen

Winter had bent the garden into valley and drift. Snow filled the bright air between branches until the whole understory of flower and bush became root, and Bel could see all the way to the farthest hedge of her father's acres. She named it Wilderness Plain in honor of her cousin Laurence, whom she imagined would see a vast untouched desert in the covered garden and would set off like an explorer to find whatever secrets were hidden in its soft dunes.

Bel often went out alone into the garden. It was the only place she was allowed to go unchaperoned, and she could hear the tramplings and winter-loud voices of Allenton beyond, a society that became at once closer and more isolated during the long cold months. It started with spontaneous skating and sleighing parties, and then came the official rigors of Christmas and New Year's calling. Painted sleighs coasted down Main Street and Pearl with the breakneck speed of young men and the dignified slide of the elders, all coming to a crunching halt outside the Pomeroys', or the Mays', or the Lindseys'. The morning after one of the great houses had a party, the drive in front would be flat and stained with the manure of the waiting horses. A lady always lost her hat or glove, and a drunk young man always misplaced a sunken pile of the contents of his stomach, and everywhere there fluttered the unidentifiable remains of a party—colored bits of paper, threads of an unraveling coat, even a page of Christmas hymns abandoned. It took a full day for the red-faced coachman to restore it to order.

Today, Greenwood was all preparation for the first social event in Allenton after the exhausting New Year's calls, which sent the men all over town partaking from the wine and sweet-laden tables of waiting lairs of women. Twelfth Night was Faustina's yearly tradition, complete with an enormous fruitcake made from Martha Washington's recipe for “Great Cake,” and a king and queen who would order the evening. Despite the disapproval of Allenton's most puritan residents, who would rather Christmas revelry be abolished altogether in favor of a simple church service, the event's popularity grew each year, and each year Bel was allowed to stay up a little later.

Sprigs of evergreen hung from the windows of Greenwood, affixed with scarlet bows that sagged under the previous night's snow. Bel spotted her father circling the house now, knocking the powder free with the pole he used to hang their flag in summer. He could have asked a servant to do it for him, but Bel suspected he was also escaping the indignant tirades of her mother as she prepared for the evening.

For all her gaiety once her Twelfth Night was in motion, Faustina hated throwing parties. Days of baking, cleaning, and decorating generated in her a unique form of rage. She would mutter to herself as she arranged towering piles of pears and apples, as she tied up the mistletoe into a kissing ball (which, of course, no one else could tie properly), as she shook the curtains Mary had already washed, hunting for spots or tears. Faustina's voice would tighten and thin like pulled taffy and she moved with the jerky, overdetermined steps of a marionette. She alternately chastised her family and servants for being in the way and for not helping enough, so Bel and her father often left the house together on guilty errands, seeking the peace of the frozen country, the raw, uncomplicated wind that in winter had no smell but its own clarity.

Bel was just about to investigate a new set of bird tracks when she heard her father calling her. “Isabel.” His tone of reprimand summoned her back to the brick walls of Greenwood. Daniel Lindsey was facing one of his windows, the wooden pole thumped in the ground like the staff of a shepherd. As she approached the glass, Bel saw her reflection spring up across it—a tall blue-eyed girl with an abundance of honey brown hair sticking from beneath her winter bonnet. Bel was already more buxom than her mother, her arms stronger and the bones of her face heavy and wide as the tiger skull her father kept in the library. She often heard the adults murmur that she was “handsome,” a description that seemed to contain within it a note of disappointment.

On the other side of the glass, her mother hovered, a shadow behind Bel's apparition. Even in anger, Faustina looked fragile, like the German porcelain figures on the mantel, treasures she insisted on dusting herself so she would be the only one to blame if they broke. Her mother's mouth was shaping words Bel could not make out.

“Your new French tutor is here,” Daniel translated for his daughter before crunching off to the next dispirited bow.

Bel nodded and made her way around the tramped path of fallen icicles to the kitchen entrance to the house. A wave of air stung her cheeks as she entered the warm, busy cove where Grete was basting the roast goose. The bird's body lay like a hill in the deep pan, sown with a bright field of potatoes and carrots. Bel paused by the stove, thawing her face and hands while she watched the whirlwind of the German cook.

“Excuse me,” Grete said in an accusing voice as she bustled past Bel with a tray of gingerbread cookies. Their raisin eyes stared up unblinking as they were thrust into the fire of the oven.

“I'm sorry,” Bel said, and moved toward the other side of the kitchen. Her boots felt damp and clammy, and the snow dragged in gritty pools behind her.

Faustina waited in the threshold of the dining room, arms folded across a green woolen bodice. On her face, an aggrieved and angry look that appeared only at holiday time had worn grooves below her eyes.

“Late,” she said. The day of the party, Faustina's sentences were clipped to the bare essentials, as if only the slightest amount of her energy could be spent communicating with her unhelpful family.

“I'm sorry,” Bel repeated, this time allowing mutiny to creep into her apology. She couldn't help wanting to avoid the new French tutor. The former one had been an aging widow who smelled of sardines and always forgot what she had taught Bel the week before. Consequently, Bel had a precise knowledge of colors, numbers, and fruits, but the rest of the French language loomed like an impenetrable forest she had no desire to explore.

She began to unbutton her lamb's wool coat and unlace the wet boots, still safely on the stone floor of the kitchen, where it was permissible to be wet and dirty. Her stockings sticky with snowmelt, she stepped onto the wooden slats of the dining room floor and took the slippers her mother held out.

“Where is she?” Bel asked.

“
He
is in the library,” Faustina informed her. “His name is Louis Pacquette and he comes highly recommended from Mrs. M. J. Pomeroy. For the son of a St. Albans hill farmer, he has done quite well educating himself, and his French is impeccable.” St. Albans was a northerly settlement, where Allentonians rarely traveled.

“He's not Canadian?”

“His mother is. She moved her family back there after his father was killed in a haying accident.”

“Oh,” Bel said. She had never had a male tutor, and the very fact that one existed threw her whole expectation of the coming hour into confusion.

“I suppose I have to go make sure Mary has indeed ironed Daniel's suit for this evening.” Faustina once again assumed her mantle of martyrdom as she climbed the spiral stairs behind her daughter. Their right hands skimmed up the banister, one after another. The elegant white spread of Faustina's fingers contrasted sharply with her daughter's sturdy, nail-bitten digits.

“I suppose so,” Bel echoed wearily.

“And if you have any time in your busy day, I'd like some help arranging the fruit.”

“Of course, Mother.” Bel took her hand from the railing and continued the rest of the way up the steps without touching it.

When Laurence was younger, he had bet her he could slide all the way down the very same railing—and he did, although he bumped his head at the end and a tender egg swelled up. Bel wished he was coming to the party, for then they could plot ways to make the adults meet under the kissing ball and crow with delight as their matchmaking succeeded.

It amazed Bel that she would not think about her cousin for days, and then miss him with sudden intensity. Three years had passed since they found the runaway together and almost two since she had seen Laurence for the last time, climbing into the train with the rest of his regiment. Since October, he and his comrade Lyman Woodard had been so sick with dysentery that they had to leave their regiment and were recovering in a Virginia hospital called Mt. Pleasant. In his last letter, he had written that they were being moved to another camp, and that he'd miss the daily soup and fresh bread, but beds at Mt. Pleasant were dear, and his condition was improved enough to give his up to another fellow. “Not dear enough for my son,” Aunt Pattie had muttered when she read this missive aloud to them.

“Let me introduce you to Monsieur Pacquette,” her mother said as she and Bel walked down the hall together, their shadows lengthened by the window behind them. Faustina's dark silhouette flickered over Bel's when she pushed past Henry Gale's portrait to beat her to the library. The patriarch's disapproving gaze did not alter.

“I can introduce myself, Mother,” said Bel.

Faustina looked shocked. “Of course you can't,” she said simply, and entered the vaulty room. Now that Bel was almost sixteen, a hundred inexplicable rules of etiquette had settled around her like the bars of a cage. Corsets made their way into her daily dressing; constant bonnets and stiff, starched petticoats promised to hinder her for the rest of her life.

“Monsieur Pacquette, this is my daughter, Isabel.”

The tutor rose to greet them. Lanky and tall, he had the narrow, intent face of a horse leaning through the paddock rails to reach a better crop of clover.

“Bel,” Bel said stubbornly, for the nickname Laurence had given her was the only shred of childhood she could still claim.

“Mademoiselle,” Louis said tactfully, and bowed toward her offered hand. The fingers that held hers were cool and dry.

“Well,” Faustina said. “I have much more pressing things to do than to stand around listening to the lovely language of your people.” She dipped her own head gracefully in an echo of Louis's bow, then turned and rustled out of the room.

“A beautiful woman, your mother,” Louis said, striding back toward the table. His accent was present but faint, like the start of a sunset on the winter sky. Bel followed without comment and sprawled into a chair with an unladylike sigh.

“You prefer Bel to Isabel?” he asked, taking a seat opposite Bel and pulling out his books. He looked at least twenty-five by the calloused wear of his hands, but his cheeks were lightly freckled and smooth as a boy's.

“I hate Isabel. It sounds like something itchy,” Bel said.