Must the Maiden Die (39 page)

Bronwen looked toward the moon just rising
over the eastern farmland. "Chief, could I please borrow a horse?"
she asked. "I need one to get to a train station, because by
morning I
have
to be in Seneca Falls. My cousin's being
married there tomorrow...maybe." She looked down at her scratched
arms, imagining Emma's reaction.

Rhys nodded to her. "What about you, Sundown?"

"Heading back to Ohio."

Rhys smiled. "I distinctly heard you tell
McClellan— when he ordered you to stay in Cincinnati—that you are
not a Union soldier."

"Going back because I want to. There's a
difference."

"I really have to leave, now!" Bronwen said.
"But I don't want to abandon Professor Lowe. Chief, can some of the
men put the balloon on a wagon, and take it to the rail
station?"

When Rhys nodded again, Bronwen started for
the tethered horses. She stopped as two men approached, one of them
an agent, the other a man with bound hands and face rigid with
fury.

"And here we have our treasonous canary,"
Rhys said, gesturing toward the captured man. "You guessed the
identity of this angry gentleman, Agent Llyr."

"Yes, he lives east of Syracuse—which is
where the Oneida Community happens to be located," Bronwen
answered. "His name, I believe, is Derek Jager."

June 1, 1861

Men are April when they woo, December when they wed.
Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they
are wives.

—Shakespeare

Glynis stood with her brother Robin under a cherry
tree in full bloom. Every now and then a pink petal floated down
into her crystal punch glass. Vanessa Usher must have made
prodigious offerings to those spirits who command the weather, as
the morning had dawned just as she promised Emma: fair and warm, a
flawless June day.

The fragrance of mock orange blossoms and
opening roses drifted over a magical scene of women in pastel gowns
and men in courtly morning coats, while servants continued to bring
forth enough elegantly prepared food to feed half the Union army.
The virginal, white wedding cake stood nearly two feet high.
Violins, harp, and harpsichord sent music rippling from under the
flowered arch where Emma and Adam had just been wed. Adam still
looked somewhat dazed. Grooms usually did, Glynis had noticed.

Besides which, Adam had earlier managed to
work himself into a frenzy, because by eleven o'clock Bronwen had
not appeared.

"Marriages must, by law, take place before
noon!" He repeated this so many times the entire wedding party had
threatened to toss him into the canal. Even the ordinarily
unflappable Reverend Mr. Eames had shown a brief spurt of
annoyance, but then he joined Adam in worrying.

Emma, however, had stood firm. "Bronwen will
be here," she said with an unexpected faith in her cousin that
Glynis for once feared might be misguided.

All the while, Adam had paced back and forth
across the Usher grounds. When not intoning the legal statute of
doom, he muttered under his breath about what bodily harm he
planned to inflict on Bronwen if she failed to show up. Glynis
thought his plans displayed an imaginative streak she hadn't
previously seen in him. And Vanessa began to complain about her
grass wearing thin.

But then, at the drum of galloping hooves,
everyone turned toward Cayuga Street. Bronwen appeared, racing a
buggy at breakneck speed from the railroad station. Emma looked
rather pale when she saw her cousin's wildly tangled hair and arms
crisscrossed by scratches. But the hair had quickly been tamed with
brushes and combs and flowered wreath, the scratches mostly
concealed with face powder.

The wedding ceremony had taken place at a
quarter to twelve, only fifteen minutes late.

Afterwards Bronwen told her aunt what had
happened, at least those parts of it agent Llyr was at liberty to
tell. Glynis did not reciprocate with her deduction regarding the
mastermind behind the smuggling operation. She thought she knew who
it was, even if Treasury didn't. But the time for revealing it was
not now.

Her brother now asked her, "Can I get you
more punch, Glyn?"

"Please, yes, Robin."

As he went off to the punch bowls, she
glanced around, deciding that men never looked more handsome than
when, complaining every minute, they had been forced into formal
dress. Today they were decked out in shades of fawn and dove gray.
The portly Merrycoyf, Adam's best man, appeared to have stepped
directly from the pages of
Harper's,
or from a sketch of
Dickens's more well-to-do characters. Adam himself wore a velvet
coat the color of claret wine. It had undoubtedly been Emma's
choice.

At the moment, her three nieces were seated
under a white dogwood, undergoing a photographer's endurance test
,which made them pose in the same position for minutes at a time.
It was no wonder that even Emma's smile was wavering.

How different they were from one another,
Glynis thought, as she had thought many times before. Any
similarity was to be found only in their size, which was almost the
same, with Bronwen a shade taller than her sister and cousin. Emma,
her dark hair partly concealed by veiling, her gray eyes
glistening like stones under sunlit water, radiated the glow which
a wedding was believed to bestow upon a young woman. And if this
was too rosy a picture of some brides, today it appeared to portray
Emma perfectly.

Kathryn, of honeyed hair and dark blue eyes,
had arrived the previous afternoon, having just completed a nurses'
training period in New York City. Last evening it had been Kathryn,
alone of the family, who had tried to deflect the irritation
directed at her younger sister's conspicuous absence. Glynis,
chafing under sworn secrecy, had been grateful when Kathryn said in
her gentle voice, "I think Bronwen must be involved in something
for the Treasury. She would never deliberately slight us—it's not
in her nature."

Coming from someone else, this might have
sounded persuasive. But everyone there knew that Kathryn would
try, if at all possible, to find reason to excuse Caligula. It was
her nature.

"Aunt Glyn!" Bronwen's voice now called.
"Aunt Glyn, would you come over here?"

Having escaped the photographer, Bronwen was
standing at the edge of the Ushers' bordering pine trees. Glynis
went toward her, threading through groups of family and friends,
wondering what intrigue Bronwen might be hatching now, for her
voice had held an unmistakable note of urgency.

"What is it?" Glynis asked when she reached
her niece.

Bronwen took her arm and all but dragged her
in among the pine trees. "Sundown's here! You know he won't come
over here with this crowd," she said over her shoulder with, Glynis
thought, remarkable tact.

She walked through the remaining trees to
Harriet's back yard, where the black-and-white paint stood
patiently, its rider astride.

"Wanted to see you before I left," he
said.

"Are you going to Ohio?"

"For a while. Gave McClellan my word I'd be
back."

And that would be enough, Glynis thought, if
McClellan knew this man at all. He seldom gave his word. When he
did, it was uncompromising.

He reached inside his buckskin jacket and
withdrew a small wooden box on which had been carved an intricate
design of dogwood blossoms. "To keep you out of trouble. When I
can't be here," he said, handing the box down to her.

Glynis brushed at her eyes with her gloved
hand.

"Got to go," he said. His warmed gold eyes
looked down at her for a long moment, then he wheeled the paint
around.

"Please stay safe, Jacques," she said. "Let
me know where you are, how you are."

"You know I will."

When he rode off, Glynis stood there until
he was out of sight. She took the lid off the box—the carving must
have taken him days—and took out a thin silver chain from which
hung the small silver figure of a running wolf.

She put it around her neck, slipping it
under the bodice of her gown, and tried to compose herself enough
to return to the wedding party. It took some time. As she walked
back through the pine trees and stepped onto the grass beside a
flower bed, she felt something snag her satin sleeve. She looked
down to see a rose bush, its full, scarlet buds just opening; her
sleeve had been snared by one of its thorny stems. As she carefully
unhooked herself, something skimmed across her mind. She frowned,
trying to recover it, but she was halfway across the grass before
it came to her. She stopped and turned to stare at the rose
bush.

Even at the far edge of the grounds, and
dwarfed by the pink and white trees and shrubs, the red blooms drew
the eye like a magnet. And Glynis realized she had very nearly made
a serious mistake.

She believed that she knew who murdered
Roland Brant. Because there seemed little in the way of proof, she
hadn't as yet spoken to Cullen. She had also waited to speak in
deference to those who were not guilty, as Brant hadn't been buried
until dusk the previous evening. But earlier this morning she had
given Liam a letter to deliver to the Brant house.

"Don't wait for a reply," she'd told him. "I
doubt there will be one."

She now saw that she had been misled.
Deliberately misled by the ancient trick of dragging a herring
across a trail to cover a scent and thus divert the hunter. The red
herring here had taken the form of a rose.

***

Somewhat later, after Emma and Adam had left for
their wedding trip, the Usher grounds remained crowded, as if all
were reluctant to leave this ephemeral Garden of Eden to rejoin
the real world. Glynis, walking back from the road where the
couple's carriage had just rumbled off, looked over the beautiful
grounds and experienced a profound sadness. Some of those here
today, she thought, may never be again.

The war could claim them. Her nephews, the
brothers of Bronwen and Kathryn and Emma. Bronwen's rugged young
Marsh, who had arrived this morning from the small Pennsylvania
town of Gettysburg. Jonathan Quant, Liam Cleary, Danny Ross, and
even Adam. And if Negroes were allowed to fight to free their
brothers, she knew Isaiah Smith and Zeph would go.

It was said by many that the conflict could
not last long. That the South would soon drop to its knees in
surrender. But what if it did not? And then if the younger men were
not enough to feed the war, would the call come for older men? Her
brother Robin. Brother-in-law Owen Llyr. Abraham Levy. Cullen and
Jacques....

How many would not come back? How many
women, both North and South, would be left impoverished, widowed,
unable to fend for themselves and their children? How many would
need to care for men so badly wounded they had little life
remaining?

Glynis shook her head. This was not the time
to think of the uncertain future.
Carpe diem.
Seize the day,
this warm, loving day, and face tomorrow only when it came.

She gathered up the skirt of her gown, and
went across the grass.

While the nation's life hung in the balance,
and the dread artillery of war drowned alike the voices of
commerce, politics, religion and reform, all hearts were filled
with anxious forebodings, all hands were busy in solemn
preparations for the awful tragedies to come.

—Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
History of Woman
Suffrage

Church bells were tolling to gather the
faithful. Glynis winced, recalling the frowns of disapproval when
it became apparent that neither she nor Bronwen would be joining
the family for services. The two of them had left the breakfast
table in the Carr's Hotel dining room, ostensibly to powder their
noses; the euphemism employed even though everyone knew it meant
use of the water closet. Their plan called for them to maneuver
with some degree of finesse. Alas, at the hotel door they had been
intercepted. It then became all too transparent that they were not
sneaking out to attend church. Fortunately no one had seemed to
notice the ungainly bulge in Glynis's large book bag caused by the
short-handled crowbar ordinarily used to open crates of library
books.

"We are in utter disgrace," she said to
Bronwen as they hurried across the Seneca River bridge.

"When you've been in disgrace as often as I
have," Bronwen replied, "you get used to it. You even begin to
expect it. Besides, by now everybody's in church—supposedly
learning forgiveness!"

"I fear your mother is right, Bronwen—I'm a
bad influence. If I weren't so worried that evidence might be
removed, I would have waited to do this until you'd all left town.
As I had planned to do, before your account of the Oswego River
raid. Now I'm worried that it might be too late. You, though,
should have stayed there with the others."

"Do you think I'd miss
this?
Don't
look so upset, Aunt Glyn. If you're right, Rhys Bevan might raise
my salary. And you and I will be heroes."

"People are seldom considered heroes by
their own families. Having usually, in the process of becoming
heroic, offended almost everyone. And I may not even be right
about this."

"Even if you're not, it's better than
sitting through church. Reverend Eames is a nice man, but we heard
him say it all yesterday. I thought that wedding ceremony would
never end."

"Now there is a real hero," Glynis said. "Do
you know how much Reverend Eames has risked, working with the
Underground Railroad? People like him can receive long jail
sentences, when they help escaped slaves."

"I know," Bronwen said. "But even more
people will die in this war over slavery. What we're doing right
now could mean a few less will die, so I don't think Reverend Eames
would object."