Beauty From Ashes

BEAUTY FROM ASHES

by Eugenia Price

Copyright 1995 by

Eugenia Price

All Rights Reserved.

Hope … Heartbreak … the Civil War … the Final Volume of the Georgia Trilogy

For three decades, Eugenia Price has entranced millions of readers with her sweeping, romantic chronicles of life in the American South. In all its beauty, glory, infamy, and tragedy, Ms. Price’s South is at once mysterious and heartbreakingly familiar.

Beauty from Ashes is the long-awaited concluding volume in Ms. Price’s Georgia Trilogy, preceded by the New York Times bestseller Bright Captivity and Where Shadows G. Again she leads us through her South —by now an aching South that will soon be torn by pain and pride, riven by fierce principles and divided loyalties, but always guided by men and women of uncommon passion.

The sweeping saga of two families of St. Simons Island—the Coupers and the Frasers—

resumes in 1852, as Anne Couper Fraser grieves the deaths of her husband and her parents.

But fate is as cruel to Anne as history itself would prove to be to the nation: Anne’s family, fallen on hard times, has lost its home. Anne has no choice but to seek refuge, and reluctantly resettles in Marietta, three hundred miles north of her beloved St. Simons Island.

As she begins to piece together her broken life, all around her the society she knows so well is falling apart. The roots of the Civil War are already evident. Anne’s family, like the South itself, seethes with internal conflict. Her son and grandson, who find it impossible to spurn their Southern heritage, enlist in the Confederate Army. Anne, in strong sympathy with the Unionists, finds her life disintegrating once again, and the family, the region, and the nation begin an agonizing collapse.

But Anne, like the Union, endures. She learns that even in life’s cruelest circumstances, there is always a place for the unquenchable human spirit to find a refuge, and to blossom anew.

Filled with characters drawn from history and from Eugenia Price’s rich imagination, Beauty from Ashes is a memorable finale to her admired Georgia Trilogy. An inspirational story of courage, love, and friendship, it will delight longtime Price fans and introduce the Georgia author to a new generation of readers.

Eugenia Price is known around the world as a master storyteller. The author of thirty-eight books of both fiction and nonfiction, she makes her home on St. Simons Island, Georgia.

NOVELS BY EUGENIA PRICE

STILL. SIMONS TRILOGY

Lighthouse

New Moon Rising

The Beloved Invader

FLORIDA TRILOGY

Don Juan McQueen

Maria

Margaret’s Story

SAVANNAH QUARTET

Savannah

To See Your Face Again

Before the Darkness Falls

Stranger in Savannah

GEORGIA TRILOGY

Bright Captivity

Where Shadows Go

Beauty from Ashes

This novel is a work of historical fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents relating to nonhistorical figures are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance of such nonhistorical incidents, places, or figures to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

For

Frances Stubinger Daugherty

… to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, …

ISAIAH 61.3

BEAUTY FROM ASHES 1

July 19, 1845

Jerked from a sound sleep, Anne Fraser sat bolt upright in bed and listened. The darkness outside her thick-walled tabby cottage at Lawrence Plantation on the north end of St. Simons Island was silent as a tomb. Still, something—was it a wild animal’s scream?—had roused her, and the old, sickening fear of being alone made her shudder. As she had done for the past six years, she stretched her arm all the way to the far side of the empty bed searching in half sleep for her dead husband, John.

“Eve?”

No answer. Eve had not come yet. Night after night for the six long years since John left her, Anne’s bright-skinned, insistently faithful servant, Eve, had spent a part of each night in Anne’s room, curled on a straw mattress on the floor beside the bed where her mistress slept alone. “Ain’t nobody can help you through the first hours when you hab to climb

into that empty bed without Mausa John,” Eve said again and again, “but Eve be here eber time the pain hit you when you wakes up.” Anne had tried to convince Eve to spend the nights beside her own husband, June, so they would not miss waking up together when dawn came. “June, he know zactly how to cook his own breakfus,” Eve would remind her, as usual leaving no room for argument.

“You aren’t here, are you, Eve?” So that she would not wake the children, Anne was whispering into the shadowy room. Her daughter Pete, who would be twenty in November, had probably heard the same wild sound that woke her mother. But Fanny, thirteen, John Couper, twelve, and Selina, eight, were surely asleep. Still clutching a light blanket around her shoulders even though the July night was warm and airless, she tried to help herself by giving thanks that Pete and Fanny and John Couper were old enough for adult conversation. Selina had been too young, only two, when her father died and couldn’t “figure for sure” that she really remembered much about John. There was an odd solace in that the child seemed not to miss him as sharply as did everyone else.

“Eve! Eve, where are you?” Anne’s voice

sounded like a croak. If only Mama’s 3 big clock downstairs would strike, she would at least have an idea when Eve might get here to help her. What could Eve do anyway? What could anyone do now that John was gone? Now that her blessed firstborn, Annie, had died on a cool September morning some two years later trying to give Paul Demere a child. Not only Annie but Anne’s only sister, Belle, had also died in childbirth, just eight months before Annie.

Unshed tears seemed about to choke her and she cried out, “No! No, Mama, I don’t want you to be dead, too. You can’t be dead, too!” The dam of pent-up tears broke, and unmindful of her sleeping children, Anne began to cry aloud—wrenching, hard, loud sobs torn from somewhere deeper than her very heart. The heart that had been so smashed, so broken, so torn that restraint of any kind was beyond her. …

Pete had half heard the wild coon’s scream, but sleep overcame her so that when the unmistakable sound of her mother’s helpless, almost primitive weeping roused her again, she ran halfway down the narrow upstairs hall before she

came fully awake.

When the girl burst into her mother’s room, loosed red hair tousled because her nightcap had, as usual, fallen off, she made herself stop running, tried to catch her breath in the hope of offering some comfort. But all she could do was throw herself on the bed beside her parent and grab her in her arms. Holding Mama seemed not to help at all. The harsh, racking sobs only grew louder, and for once, Pete felt no response. She had come often through the years since Papa died, sometimes right, sometimes wrong in thinking she’d heard her mother crying. There was no mistaking what she’d heard tonight. The still-slender, still-pretty aging woman in her arms was a total stranger in her heavy grief—grief that revealed itself in almost as wild a cry as the coon’s.

“Mama,” she gasped. “Mama, did the coon wake you? I heard it, too, but I’m afraid I—I went back to sleep. Oh, Mama, how do you keep walking around all day doing things that have to be done? So many in our family have—died. So much grief! Too much. I don’t like God at all anymore. I not only don’t like Him, I don’t trust Him either!”

Still feeling like a stranger in Pete’s 5 arms, her mother seemed to make no effort to stem the weeping. “Mama, can’t you stop? Can’t you even slow down?”

A voice Pete had never heard before groaned, “No! And don’t you try to stop me. Get out of my way, Rebecca, so I can get out of this house!”

“Mama, what? You haven’t called me Rebecca in—in years. Only when you’re out of sorts with me. What did I do? Did I make you mad because I said I didn’t trust God? Well, I don’t. How could I trust a God who could send all this sorrow and heartbreak down on you? One person dying right after another!”

Her mother was pushing her away, pushing her roughly to one side so that she could crawl out of bed. Without even grabbing her voile summer robe, the bent woman, who by now didn’t look like Mama, stumbled across the bedroom floor, out the door, and down the cottage steps. The front door banged and just as young John Couper appeared, eyes wide, young face distorted with fear, Pete heard the hard, helpless weeping all the way from the

front yard. Mama was running out there in the dark toward their landing—toward Lawrence Creek!

“Pete, where’s Mama going?” John Couper whispered.

When she could only stand there like a pine stump, her brother repeated, “Where’s Mama going? She could—Pete, she could drown out there if she took a wrong step off the dock. It’s pitch dark on that dock at this hour.” The words were no sooner out of his mouth than the big clock downstairs struck five times. “Where’s Eve, Pete? Isn’t it about time for Eve to be here?”

Without giving her a chance to answer, John Couper turned and ran down the stairs. Even before he slammed the front door, she heard their mother’s frantic voice almost screaming Eve’s name—screaming from far off. It was plain that Mama was all the way across the big front yard, past the giant oaks, and down to the water’s edge.

In seconds, finally able to make her legs move again, Pete was also racing across the yard. In the black, starless, moonless night, she hurried to where they both stood, John Couper clutching Mama’s shoulders as though holding her back.

Suddenly Pete realized that Mama was no

longer sobbing, no longer letting out that 7 terrible wail. The woman who had come to be the one solid part of all their lives—the one person they had left to them on St. Simons—was just standing there, facing them in stark silence. Silence that was almost worse than the sound of her helpless sobs.

John Couper said nothing but continued to grip Mama’s shoulders. Pete could think of nothing to say either, so the three simply stood there wordless in the velvet night.

Finally, Pete, never comfortable with silence, said, “Mama? Mama, I’m so glad you could stop crying.”

“I’m sure you are, dear,” her mother said, her voice still thick. And then, in the now barely perceptible first light, they saw their mother turn away from them. For what seemed another eternity, she just stood there, forced back her shoulders, lifted her chin, and fluffed at the stringy curls on her neck as though mindful for the first time of how she must look to her children.

After a long, long time, holding her rigid posture, still facing the water and the marshes, Mama whispered hoarsely, “Will one of you run for Eve? Then both of you go back to bed. I need Eve.

I’ll be too glad to have her with me to give her a piece of my mind for being so late getting here, but I do need to talk with her. I think suddenly I feel different. It just could be that I’ve made a big leap ahead in the past few minutes.”

“What kind of leap, Mama?” Pete asked, her own voice timid, especially for her. “I have to know. John Couper, you run for Eve. I have to stay here with Mama as long as—as long as she’ll let me. Did you hear me, John Couper? Scat.”

When her brother had hurried up the lane toward the cabin Eve shared with June, Pete wondered helplessly if she dared ask Mama if she knew the date today. It was July 19, and the day had come and gone last year without a mention that on July 19, 1839, they’d buried Papa in the churchyard. Last July 19 had, for Pete, been a ghastly day, not only because of her own distressing memories but because, more than anyone else, Pete did suffer from silence around her. She’d far rather be fussed at or scolded or allowed to weep than to endure everyone she loved, including Mama, moving through any day as though made of wood. For the first four anniversary

years, they had all gone in the carriage 9 to Christ Church with flowers and they had all cried until their eyes ached and to Pete, that had been far, far better than ignoring the date. Surely Mama remembered what day it was. But in all the six years Papa had been gone, Pete had never known her mother to act the way she was acting now. What on earth did Mama mean when, out of the blue, she mentioned a leap ahead? What could Eve do to help her that Pete couldn’t do?

For as long as she could bear it, Pete waited, then said, “I know you wish I were Annie, Mama. She would think of some way to help you. I want to. I really want so much to help you.”

“Don’t do that, Pete!”

“Don’t do—what, Mama? I am just standing here like a lump and I do want to do something for you.”

Still staring out over the marshes as Lawrence Creek reflected a hint of the clear, pink dawn now beginning to light the sky, her mother said, “You don’t know, do you, dear Pete? As grown-up and wise as you’re getting to be, you still don’t know.”

“Don’t talk in riddles, Mama! Please don’t. I know perfectly well that you do need

to be with Eve now and I also know you and Annie were always so close that you wouldn’t have called out for Eve if Annie had been here. I’ve always known I’m a tomboy and not as good as Annie was.”