Wilderness Run (19 page)

“I was saying that you are too lovely to be made to frown over grammar,” Daniel told her in his awkward way.

Bel did frown then and they laughed, although Louis's eyes remained serious, even a little apologetic. “You're leaving us,” she said simply. How much more she wanted to say, but her parents hovered like giant marble statues, immobile but listening.

“Yes,” said Louis. “The train departs at two o'clock.”

“And you'll look for Laurence when you get there,” Bel said, her lips trembling.

“I have at least a month of training first. But when I get to Virginia, yes,” he added stiffly. “Or wherever they send us.”

“God forbid you end up in some malarial swamp in Mississippi.” Daniel shook his head. Bel's father had been engrossed in his drawings before the tutor's arrival, and his thin hair spoked out in all directions.

“Hush, Daniel,” Faustina said. “With luck, the war will be over before Mr. Pacquette even has to fight.”

A silence fell over them. Bel had the urge to laugh. The scene was so ridiculous: her parents chaperoning her good-bye to her tutor. All the code she and Louis had developed to communicate during their supervised lessons was lost and they stared at each other helplessly.

“Well, good-bye.” Bel extended her hand. He flashed her a single look of grave devotion as he bent over it, his lips lightly brushing her fingers. Bel's heart pounded.

“Yes, good-bye, Louis,” Faustina said, offering her own hand. “And by the time you return, no doubt our daughter will have forgotten everything you've taught her.”

“That would be a shame,” the tutor said as he bent again. Not to be outdone, Daniel Lindsey thrust out his right fist as soon as Louis straightened.

“I admire the men and women of your generation,” Daniel said, as if he had just made up his mind about some great, important thing. “You act, whereas mine waited. And you are stronger for that.” Bel watched her mother glance at him with surprise.

“Yes. But they suffer for it, too,” Faustina lectured, picking up on the usual tack of her husband. Suddenly, the two were reversing roles in an argument that had lasted for years. She pressed her hand over her collarbone and continued. “Our nephew will never be the same bright boy who left us, even if he comes back with all his limbs.”

Why are they telling him this? Bel wondered, and then realized her parents weren't speaking to Louis at all, but to each other. “Maybe Laurence didn't want to be the same bright boy who left you,” Bel commented, surprising herself. “Maybe he's a better man now.”

“Don't speak that way to your mother,” Daniel said, and Bel lowered her head, wishing the whole departure were over.

“I must take my leave,” Louis said, as if sensing her thought, then turned to look out the window at the February landscape. Icicles made a sharp, jagged line across the top of the pane, descending from Greenwood's peculiar ledges like the teeth of a dragon. “I shall miss the ice,” he said. “I fear there will be nothing so clear in all of Virginia.”

There was a pause, and then Faustina spoke up. “We mustn't keep you,” she said to Louis, but she was scrutinizing her daughter. Suddenly, all of Bel's practiced emotions fell away and she had to bite her lip hard to keep tears from flooding her eyes. Then her mother was thanking Louis for his courtesy, her voice polite but loud, as if she were ordering a roast from the butcher's. Daniel's left hand wagged in his pocket. Louis listened gravely, nodding already like a private receiving orders.

Finally, the taste of blood on her tongue woke Bel from her grief. She bid the tutor a calm good-bye and then watched him from the window, waiting for his figure to reach the lane.

Water dripped from the end of the icicles, framing the tutor's exit. After Louis turned the corner, a sleigh crossed his tracks, obliterating them. Bel's mother and father swiveled to look at her, and she gave them a fragile yet forbidding smile. “I suppose I'll forget everything,” she said lightly. “In six months, he'd despair over my accent.”

“It takes a long time to learn a language.” Faustina tipped her lovely face toward her husband. “Doesn't it, Daniel?”

His crooked left hand emerged and settled on Faustina's shoulder, steering her away. “And a short time to forget it,” he answered, sounding a little penitent. “Up in the study, I have a new draft for the reservoir,” he added. “May I show it to you? I need your advice.”

“Certainly.” Faustina curtsied. “Bel?”

“I want to go outside,” Bel said stubbornly. How excited she had once felt to be shown her father's plans, inked in his tiny, exact handwriting over sheaves of curling paper. He had even let her choose the metal spires for the new railroad station down in the lumberyards. But now his notes and sketches were like bird tracks to her, just another ordinary passage spelled across the yard.

“Don't go far,” her mother warned.

“I won't.” Bel allowed a note of bitterness to creep into her promise. The red mark on her arm had remained, a thin crescent the size of a fingernail, but the soft kiss Louis had given her fingers left no impression, as if it had not happened at all.

Her parents exchanged looks, then drifted off together, arm in arm. After they were gone, Bel went out into the garden alone. She broke off the largest icicle she could find and held it, burning her hands with the cold, until it melted.

January–December 1863

Chapter Twenty-four

When dark fell, Laurence found himself trying to sleep in a cramped, unstable tent with three other men. They were all drenched and hungry, but food and dry ground already seemed impossible to come by at Camp Convalescence. He and Woodard had arrived there that afternoon and then had had to stand in several long lines in the rain before they were allowed to enter the miserable campground, which was situated on an old plantation. All the majestic trees had been chopped down for firewood long ago, and the giant stumps glowed between tents as Laurence and Woodard sloshed down the muddy rows, searching for a place to sleep.

By dusk, they managed to team up with two New Hampshire men, who had commandeered a cast-off tent from a guard. After a grim hour of erecting the faulty apparatus in a downpour, there had been nothing to do but lie down in it. Laurence had drawn the shortest match and was stuck with the drafty position by the entrance. He heard his ribs creak as he huddled against the chilly earth, trying to remember the kind faces of the nurses at Mt. Pleasant and the rich soups he had tasted every day when he was there. The tent snapped and he burrowed deeper beneath his blanket, expecting a cold gust to follow.

Instead, he heard a small voice begging, “Make room, please.” Laurence sat up and opened the flap. Outside it stood a young man, shivering. He had the rickety, unraveling build of a wicker chair, one shoulder jutting higher than the other, and his face was charcoaled by the shadows of hunger. Laurence pushed back to make some room for him, jostling his neighbors, who were still faking sleep.

“Hold on, now. 'M afraid we're full up,” said the burlier of the New Hampshire men in a voice that indicated he was fully awake. His knuckles pressed into Laurence's spine.

“Keep on trying down the line. Sommun'll let you in,” his partner added.

“I been trying,” the young man insisted. The words ghosted from his mouth in delicate clouds. “You're the last tent.”

“We could make room,” Laurence said hopefully, although the hard-earned stability of their cast-off tent might truly be destroyed by another body.

“We ain't got any room to make. Sorry,” said the first New Hampshire man.

“Sorry, son,” the other one echoed, contrite. Laurence glanced to Woodard for help, but his friend feigned sleep, his face damp and serene.

“But I'm a Vermonter. Please, in the name of being a Vermonter.” The boy would not give up. He crossed his arms over his chest and bent down to look inside the dim cavern. “There's room,” he said eagerly. “I don't take up much.”

“Let's make room for him.” Laurence kicked Lyman Woodard, who shifted slightly but did not come to his defense. “He said he won't take up much,” he added, as if the men could not hear the boy.

“In this democrissy, you air outvoted, sir, three to one.” The burly New Hampshire man sat up. “Either give up your own spot or shut that flap. We ain't got room.”

Laurence met the boy's eyes for the first time. His pupils were so large, the irises so thin, the center of his gaze was like the darkness just before dawn, when the faint sliver of light at the rim of the hills looks too weak to prevail. Laurence recoiled when the boy tried to smile.

“Naw, that ain't right,” the boy said softly. “You keep your place,” he added, as if Laurence had already offered to rise and trade with him.

“You said you walked the whole line,” protested Laurence. Very slowly, his arm was letting the flap fall shut.

“I'll walk it again.” The boy straightened and faced back up the row of tents. “There's someone'll let me in.”

“If you say so,” Laurence said doubtfully, but the arm had finished its work; the flap was almost closed, except for a thin crack through which he watched the boy drift out of sight. And although Laurence listened to the sloshing of his boots all the way up the lane, he never heard the boy's voice again.

Chapter Twenty-five

His small load of branches was hardly enough to last their miserable second night at Camp Convalescence, but they were all Laurence could find after three hours of gathering wood. The forests around the camp had been picked down to the bare earth, and many soldiers had taken to stripping the lowest green branches as well, making the trees look like they stood on stilts. Laurence hadn't walked so long in months, and the effort had exhausted his weakened body, his legs trembling as they climbed the last short slope.

He wondered if Woodard had fared any better with his chore, which was to find a tent for the two of them. Their domicile from the night before had leaked so badly, they parted ways with the New Hampshire men at dawn, eager to make a fresh start on their own. Laurence was glad to take firewood duty. He didn't like the look of the longtime residents of Camp Convalescence, a surly, obdurate bunch who crowded around their morning fires as if to hoard for themselves the very sight of the warmth and light. The wholesome air of Mt. Pleasant was entirely absent here, and he wondered at the effectiveness of a recovery camp that made its soldiers sicker.

Skirting past the garden wall of the old plantation, he saw a man limping ahead of him with a similarly small armload of sticks under one arm, a crutch under the other. If it had taken Laurence all afternoon to find his own stash, it must have occupied his neighbor's entire day. His bandaged right leg wagged out to the side, while the left hopped along with grudging speed. Laurence was about to offer to help, when a handsome blond guard accosted the soldier.

“Well, Davis,” said the guard with a toss of his head.

“Well, Captain,” Davis grunted, maintaining his slow pace forward.

“It's a small price to pay, but it will do,” said the guard. “Give it here now.”

Davis halted but kept his eyes aimed at the ground.

“Give it here now and I'll get you that little something you need to help you sleep at night,” said the guard. Davis still did not move, but he allowed the guard to ease the load from under his arm. “Give it here,” he said soothingly.

“When, sir?” said Davis in a low voice.

“Soon.” The guard was already striding away, carrying his prize. Laurence waited until he had turned down another row, and then he caught up with Davis.

“Here,” he said. “Take a couple of mine. You can have a small fire.”

Davis looked at him. He had a dull, indifferent gaze and the flabby mouth of a drinker.

“Please,” said Laurence, handing him a few branches.

“You must be new here,” said Davis.

Laurence nodded and introduced himself. “Who was that?”

“Captain Ellroy. Captain of the guards,” said Davis, limping forward again. “Don't cross him. He'll eat you alive.”

He turned abruptly and hopped off in the opposite direction, the branches clutched tightly beneath his arm.

*   *   *

Woodard had already set up the tent by the time Laurence arrived, and he sat in front of it now, grinning. His hands were looped over his knees and shins, both so bony from loss of weight that they gave him a childlike air.

“I'm going to be part of an opera,” he burst out, his usually eager expression honed to one of fervent joy.

Laurence shifted his pile of wood to one arm and pointed to the tent. “Where did you get it?”

“Captain Ellroy,” said Woodard. “I went around asking this morning, and nobody would even look me in the eye until I met him. But he said he knew when he saw me that I might have acting talent, and he promised to help me out.”

“A good-looking blond fellow?” Laurence crouched down and began to dig a pit for the fire.

“That's him,” said Woodard. “He's organizing an opera.”

“I wouldn't trust him too much if I were you,” said Laurence. “I saw him take firewood from a cripple.”

“You're just jealous,” Woodard said. “You spent all day gathering firewood and that's all you found?”

“Firewood's impossible to come by,” Laurence retorted. “That's probably why some people steal it.”

“Some people also told me a bit of information you might like to know.” Woodard folded his arms. Overshadowed by his giant nose, his chin looked like it was in desperate retreat from the upper half of his face.

“What's that?” Laurence began to arrange the sticks. “Did you get anything to eat?”

Woodard pulled out a small sack of hardtack and salt pork. “I got coffee, too,” he said. “And a pot.”