When the Splendor Falls (40 page)

“He must have been wounded, and is probably in a hospital. If only he hadn’t left Virginia. I could have gone to Richmond. He’d be where I could care for him,” she said, her eyes clouding as her thoughts ran on to an even less pleasant thought. “Or, God help us, Leigh,” she added shakily, “he is a prisoner. And he is in some Yankee prison up north.”

Leigh avoided meeting Althea’s tortured gaze. “Nathan would do just fine even in a federal prison. He’s probably handling the legal affairs for half the Yankee prison staff, or maybe Lincoln himself.”

“Yes,” Althea said, her worried expression lifting as she thought of that possibility, never realizing its improbability, but it gave her hope. “Possum?” she said, frowning slightly as she forced herself to eat, at first slowly, then with the appetite of a person determined to get well. “It’s quite good. Very good, in fact. I might even have a little piece of that corn bread. It smells delicious.”

“Good,” Leigh said, standing up, a satisfied smile on her face as she saw the contents of the plate disappearing.

“Where is Noelle?” Althea asked with motherly concern, and the first she had shown in several months.

“By the fireplace. She is embroidering a handkerchief for you,” Leigh told her, pleased to see her showing some interest in her children again. “She’s becoming as fine a needlewoman as Mama was. She asks about you constantly. She misses you,” Leigh said gently.

Althea nodded. “Would you have her come over here after she has eaten? It has been far too long since I’ve been with her. I’ve neglected her badly. I haven’t read to her in so long.”

“You’ve been ill.”

“No, even before that. I am surprised she does not resent Steward. I have spoiled him so. But I was so pleased to give Nathan a son.”

“She is very loving to him. I’ve heard her tell him that while you are ill she will be his mama and take care of him, and she does, Althea. She is very good with him. In fact, she reads to him from the same book of fairy tales that you read to her. You and Nathan can be very proud of her. She is a great help to me. I always know Steward and Lucinda are being watched when I’m not here.”

“Yes, I am proud of her, Leigh,” Althea told her. “Sometimes she reminds me so much of Nathan. She is such a serious little girl.” Glancing around the room, her gaze lingered on the rose damask chair near the fireplace. “Mama’s chair.”

“When the Yankees came, taking over the house for a field hospital, we moved what furniture we could in here. We thought it best to stay well out of their way. Fortunately, we’d already hidden all the silver and other valuables, and the family heirlooms,” she said, her gaze lingering on the empty spaces on the walls, where once family portraits had hung. “Our heritage is safe, thanks to Adam,” she added, a mischievous glint in her eye as she remembered Adam showing up at Travers Hill one afternoon and proudly displaying a ramshackle wagon pulled by a team of ancient mules—somehow overlooked by the troops requisitioning anything that wasn’t nailed to the ground. He had just emptied the wagon, and for the fourth time, of all of Royal Bay’s finest furnishings and objets d’art. They were safely hidden away from the Yankees, he’d claimed, and now he, rather than the bluebellies, would loot Travers Hill. Far easier, he’d laughed, to reclaim one’s possessions from him than a federal trooper who intended to become a rich man after the war on the booty he’d stolen. Adam, her father, and Sweet John had loaded up everything of value, even piling high with prized possessions the little cart hitched to Pumpkin, and delivered it safely to some secret hiding place only Adam had known about. Her father had been in a very boisterous mood when they’d returned home, and she suspected they’d been enjoying a jug of corn whiskey to ease their thirst, but her father had shaken his head, saying that he finally knew where the wild Braedon boys had hidden all those years ago, as if they’d dropped off the face of the earth.

“Actually, though, when the Yankees came, the officers were very civil to us, and the wounded soldiers, so many of them hardly more than boys, were very polite and grateful.”

“How do you know that?” Althea demanded, staring at Leigh in amazement.

“I helped the surgeons with them, Althea. I couldn’t just stand by and watch them die,” she admitted almost defensively, her eyes shadowed still by the memory of the amputations and the agonized screaming. “Some of them were from West Virginia and Maryland. They were almost like neighbors. They didn’t seem any different from Palmer William, Guy, or Stuart James. I kept thinking about their families, worrying about them the same way we were worrying. I only did what I could, which wasn’t very much,” Leigh said, wishing she could have done more for the young men who lay dying, knowing that they would never see home again. “Actually, we ought to be grateful to the Yankees.”

“Grateful? Now you go too far,” Althea said, shocked by such a treasonous thought. “I’ve heard horrifying tales about thievin’ Yankees. My dear friend, Mary Helen, down in Baton Rouge, has written to me about the Yankees breaking into her home, searching for silver, threatening her and her family with violence when they couldn’t find anything. When her servants tried to clean up the mess, the soldiers told them to leave, that they no longer had to serve her family, and if they didn’t leave, then they’d shoot them.”

“Well, if the Yankees hadn’t been here, then Travers Hill might have been shelled worse than it was, like Royal Bay, Althea, and then we wouldn’t have even a leaking roof over our heads.”

“Poor Euphemia,” Althea murmured. “If only she had come over to Travers Hill. She’d be here with us today.”

“We asked her to, begged her even, but she said she wasn’t leaving her home. She was there by herself, except for a couple of house servants. She’d even sent old Bella to Richmond with Julia. She was so proud and stubborn,” Leigh said, the scene of Royal Bay in flames still vivid in her mind, as if it had happened yesterday instead of a year ago. “Why would anyone want to destroy such a lovely place?”

“Plain meanness,” Althea said.

“At least with the Yankees camped around the house, we were safe for a while from the deserters, especially the ones deserting from our own army. They’re the vilest ones, preying on their own people,” Leigh said quietly, unable to forget the afternoon when five deserters, dressed in ragged, dusty gray uniforms, had come to Travers Hill to loot; four were now buried in the manure field back of the stables.

“There was little we could do to refuse the Yankees’ request, out of fear of being shot because we didn’t open our homes and hearts to the Yankee invaders. A General Pope decreed that any Virginian caught aiding the enemy would be executed. His troops would live off the land, meaning they could steal whatever they wanted from us, leaving us to starve, and if there was any guerrilla activity nearby, we would be held responsible and dealt with accordingly. We could, however, to save ourselves, sign an oath of allegiance to the Union.”

“Yes, I heard about that madman in Richmond. It caused quite an outrage.” Althea sighed, thinking not for the first time that they found themselves in a never-ending nightmare. It was madness. Nothing made sense any longer. And what used to seem important, no longer did.

She smiled sadly. “I wonder what Mama would say to see us eating in here. She was always so very proper. Even now, I fear she’d have us sitting down to dine in our Sunday best, and ever cordial and the perfect hostess, she would’ve invited those Yankees to dine. I can just hear her asking Stephen to bring in the tea service. No one, not even a Yankee, would ever accuse her of being inhospitable, she was always declaring. And somehow, she’d have had a clean, pressed damask tablecloth spread beneath our finest china, even with cannon fire in the distance, and she’d sit there serving chicken curry and rice. Remember how we used to have it every Sunday? Odd, isn’t it, the little things like that you remember, and you miss.”

Leigh glanced down at her work-roughened hands for a moment, realizing that their mother had never been able to accept the war that had taken her loved ones from her one by one, destroying the genteel way of life at Travers Hill. She’d tried to carry on as if nothing had happened, as if nothing had changed. And, eventually, she had begun to believe that nothing had, that it was the summer of ’60 again, not 1863, and Travers Hill was filled with family and friends. There were so many things for her to do, she would say, looking dazed as she hurried from one empty room to another, dragging Jolie after her, never seeing the change, always calling out for a member of the family who’d never appear before her again. There would be a fish fry beneath the willows on the riverbank, and the barbecue on Sunday, then the routs and races, and she had to see to the preparations for Blythe’s sixteenth birthday party. Her daughters would do her proud, she had said with the old gleam in her dark blue eyes.

That had been in summer, when she could walk in her garden, the fragrance of her beloved roses surrounding her, and lose herself in long-forgotten dreams of days that were no more. But winter had come all too soon. And one cold morning, the frozen ground covered with the first snowfall of the season, they had found Beatrice Amelia in her garden. Barefoot, the cashmere of her dusky rose dressing gown no protection against the cold, she had wandered out in the night to prune her roses. A week later, she had died. Leigh’s only consolation had been that her mother had, in death, finally found the peace she had been searching for.

Leigh looked around the room, and saw only too clearly the changes that’d had to be made if they were to survive. “It’s the warmest room in the house,” she told Althea. “We keep most of the other rooms closed, and we don’t have a fire in here until evening. We light one in your room, and in the kitchen before dawn, bank it so it burns low and lasts, then light it after dusk again. It’s better not to draw too much attention to Travers Hill,” she added, thinking again of the gangs of deserters that drifted around the countryside looting abandoned homes, or those protected only by women. “And at night, we use only a couple of the bedchambers. I don’t like to waste our wood. I’m not very good at chopping it up into kindling. I’m afraid Stephen is even worse. He never had to chop wood before,” she explained, remembering his look of offended dignity when she’d suggested they needed wood and would have to chop it themselves. “We try to use what is close at hand, I don’t like anyone to go far from the house. There are so many strangers around, and you don’t know your enemy. You can’t trust the color of a uniform any longer.”

“I think you are being very wise,” Althea said nervously, noticing for the first time the rifle next to the door, and hanging just out of reach of small hands. “Where do Noelle and Steward, and the baby, sleep?”

“They’ve been sleeping in the trundle bed in my room. Jolie has been staying with you at night in case you needed anything.”

“Now that I’m feeling better, I’ll move them in with me. You need your rest, my dear, and it will be comforting for me to have my children with me again. I’d be happy to have Lucinda too,” she offered, worrying about the dark circles beneath her sister’s eyes that bore proof of the long hours she worked and the restless nights, her sleep disturbed as she tended to the children.

“No!” Leigh answered abruptly. Then she said more quietly as she glanced over at the sleeping child in the cradle, “I’ll keep Lucinda with me. Noelle and Steward can start sleeping with you, but you mustn’t let them tire you. You are still very weak, Althea, and it will take you a while to recover your strength,” Leigh reminded her, taking the empty dish. “Would you like a little more?”

Althea nodded. “Yes, I would. I’m being a pig. But I’ve discovered I have a ravenous appetite for possum all of a sudden.”

“Possum,” Stephen muttered, watching unhappily as Leigh dished up another plate for Althea. “Not fit food even for peckerwoods. An’ last night you served this family peanut soup.”

“An’ we’re goin’ to have it tomorrow night too, with mashed yams fried into cakes from what’s left over tonight,” Jolie told him, the look in her eye brooking no opposition.

“I don’t know what the colonel would say if he could see us, woman,” Stephen fretted, eyeing the steaming contents of the tureen with a despairing shake of his head, amazed at how fast it was disappearing right before his eyes.

“An’ day after, if I can get my hands on that sneaky hen’s eggs, she’s been hidin’ them from me, then we’re goin’ to have squirrel pie, ’cause I’ve been watchin’ him like a fox.”

“If little Mister Steward’s Gran’papa Noble knew his only gran’son was eatin’ possum an’ hog fodder, well, I couldn’t look him straight in the eye. It’s just not right.”

“Now you listen to me, ol’ man,” Jolie said, a glint in her yellowish eyes as she glared at him. “The colonel might jus’ be turnin’ in his grave to know we’ve been servin’ his kin what poor white trash wouldn’t even throw to their hogs, but he’d be spinnin’ if we let his grandchildren, an’ one named in honor of him, an’ his great-grandchildren, starve to death. Same with Mister Noble. You jus’ think about that, you fussbudget. An’ I’ll tell you this, I’d serve this to the colonel himself, an’ he’d eat it too, it’s that good. Went out an’ got myself all the herbs I needed an’ been storin’ them away since fall like that fat-cheeked squirrel. I know those woods good as my papa would have. Creepin’ Fox didn’t sire no fools. There’s nothin’ Jolie can’t find if she wants to. Simmered this possum in thyme, laurel, cloves, parsley, an’ celery, dash of red pepper an’ a bud of garlic, then found some yams growing wild, baked them nice an’ tender an’ plumb full of nutmeg, an’ made up a pan of corn bread, crisp an’ hot. We’ve got ourselves a mighty fine supper here. So you quit’cher complainin’. I’ve got enough to do. Still can’t believe that Rosamundi and those fool maids runnin’ off with those Yankees. Goin’ to cook and wash for them, she tells me. Thinks they’ll be safer with them. Hmmmph!”

“Well, I’m not complainin’ any,” the gray-uniformed man in the chair said, the aroma having drifted to him. “And you really can’t blame the Yankees, after all, you taught Rosamundi how to cook. They’d have been fools not to have wanted her fixing them up some good Southern cooking. You’re truly a jewel, Jolie. I don’t know what the Travers family would do without you and Stephen. Thanks to Stephen, I’d wager Travers Hill still has the best corn whiskey in all of the Old Dominion. Don’t know where he hid that still when the Yanks came callin’. Glad I had some with me to pour on my wound until I could get here, probably kept me alive, or at least pickled nicely, and combined with that horrible smelling salve you keep putting on me, Jolie, I’m surprised you don’t have me bunking out in the stables. I have detected a hint of garlic in it,” he said. “I’m glad you stayed,” he added softly, feeling that same sense of gratitude he had when arriving at Travers Hill to find Jolie and Stephen still running the house and what was left of the Travers family, despite Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and, before that, the Confederacy’s order demanding half of all the able-bodied male slaves on every farm or plantation to report to work camps.