Wilderness Run

by Maria Hummel

  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.

  “Isabel is a woman’s name,” reflected Louis. “Bel is like the name of a pretty little girl.”

  Bel frowned and picked up the white sleeve she had left in the chair earlier that day. Every morning, she made progress on a shirt cut from a pattern her aunt Pattie had commandeered from the Sanitary Commission. Bel was in competition with her friend Mary Ruth Cross to see who could finish one first. Mary Ruth had a brother in the war, about whom she talked constantly, her almost-white eyebrows arching up as she listed his many accomplishments. Laurence had yet to win any commendations for bravery, and Bel rather hoped he would hurry up and get some, just so Mary Ruth wouldn’t shake her blond head in sympathy at the lesser courage of others.

 
; “I’m making a shirt for my cousin Laurence. He’s in the Army of the Potomac,” Bel announced.

  “Il est dans la guerre?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oui.”

  “Oh, sorry. Oui.” Bel did not look up from her stitching. The needle was cool and slippery against her thumb, and suddenly the row of thread seemed to be straightening. The tutor waited in silence.

  “Mademoiselle.” Louis finally thrust his face into her peripheral vision. He smelled like tobacco and lemons. “I will answer any question you ask as long as you ask me in French.”

  The temptation was too great, and Bel laid down her stitching to meet his brown eyes. “Est-ce que—” she began, and then faltered. “I don’t know how to say it.”

  “What do you want to ask?”

  “Why aren’t you fighting, too?” She was thinking of Laurence’s twin sisters; Lucia and Anne were both marrying men who had decided to profit from the rebellion rather than enlist. She couldn’t stand either of the copperhead fiancés, because she had heard them poking fun at the stiff, patriotic letters Laurence sent to his mother and father. She knew that beneath his brave lines her cousin must be burying a separate, more painful truth about the war.

  “Fighting for what?” Louis opened one of his books.

  “Fighting to end slavery,” Bel said, her cheeks hot.

  “My country does not have slavery,” he answered, scanning a page. “I don’t need to fight.”

  “You don’t live in Canada. You live here.”

  “For a time.” He shrugged.

  “I would if I could. I would die for it.”

  “That’s because you have never been close to death, I think,” he said to the text in front of him.

  “I’ve never been in love, either, and I would die for that, too,” she said, half-frightened by her own words.

  Louis raised his head from his book. This time, Bel stared back, defiant, clutching the white sleeve in her lap. The light in the library faded as a cloud crossed the sun. Nodding and biting his lip, her tutor closed the book with a soft thump, and in that moment Bel felt something inexplicable pass between them, like an unseen wind parting the summer leaves.

  Just then, Faustina rustled past the threshold with an armload of hemlock. “How is the lesson going?” she asked. A few needles fell soundlessly to the floor.

  “Très bien, Mama,” Bel said, avoiding the tutor’s eyes.

  “Louis, you know as one of the few single young men left in Allenton, you are a necessity to the festivities this evening. The girls will mob you the minute you walk in.” In the company of strangers, Faustina was all graciousness, reserving her ire for her household.

  “I am honored, madame,” Louis bowed his head. Bel looked out the window, to see the sun reappear above the maple branches.

  “Wonderful. We’ll see you at eight o’clock, then,” Faustina said. Her armload began to slide and she scurried off, clutching it to her chest. “Mary!” she called, her tone of indignation returning.

  Louis resumed flipping through one of his books and opened to a page, smoothing it with his palm before sending it across the table to Bel. “Please read,” he commanded.

  “You never really answered my question,” she said, taking the book.

  “You never asked me in French,” he countered. “Lisez ce passage, s’il vous plaît.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Oh no, every year I refuse to put my name in,” said Faustina, declining her sister-in-law’s offer with a wave of her hand. “Daniel and I are our guest’s servants and we couldn’t possibly claim the throne.”

  Daniel compressed his lips in agreement as Pattie Lindsey moved on, shaking the hat of names. Although his black suit and trimmed silver beard easily made him the most elegant man in the room, Daniel didn’t like parties and wore the air of a man burdened by his own success.

  “Let it be known that I gave you a chance,” Aunt Pattie said over her shoulder, already smiling at the next victim with practiced cheer.

  Faustina was wisely making use of her sister-in-law’s managerial enthusiasm by putting her in charge of the name-drawing for king and queen of the evening. After her only son had enlisted in the Second Vermont, Aunt Pattie had finally found her calling as an organizer in the women-run Sanitary Commission. If Mrs. M. J. Pomeroy, the matron leading the Allenton chapter, was the general, Aunt Pattie was her faithful colonel, carrying out all commands with an alacrity for which others could not help commending her, although their praise often sounded like complaint.

  She was always bustling somewhere with her fist in a ball of lint for bandages or whisking through a mess of lists she had made with Mrs. M. J. of all the things that needed to be manufactured, counted, and shipped to keep her brave boys safe and well fed. Since the war began, Aunt Pattie had gained an enormous amount of weight, as if her own necessity to “our boys” had swelled her past her previous shape and into one of greater consequence. Tonight, she coursed through the waltzing couples like the ironsides the Union had built to destroy the Merrimack, thick and unstoppable, her gray-blond hair shining.

  From Bel’s vantage point at the top of the staircase, Allenton offered an even sadder showing at the party than it had the year before. The lack of young men gave the dance floor a spiritless air, although many young girls obligingly waltzed with each other to fill out the numbers. Bel had already refused to dance with Mary Ruth Cross and Hannah Fithian, both of whom were fascinated with boys and hoping to practice their skills in preparation for the war’s end. The partnerless young wives and fiancées faked a desperate sort of merriment, while their elders sat around the rim with fans raised, nodding as if they expected the world to fall apart just this way and there was nothing to do but to enjoy complaining about it.

  Bel’s bird’s-eye view allowed her to see the real circulation of the party: Lucia and Anne with their copperhead beaus, Aunt Pattie raising the hat of names that would determine who would be king and queen of the evening, her mother leaving Daniel’s side to check on the kitchen. Soon after, Uncle George extracted himself from a conversation with the minister to follow Faustina, and Louis Pacquette arrived, his eyes blinking rapidly, as if he had just walked into the sunlight. Momentarily distracted by the tutor’s entrance, Bel forgot to monitor her mother and uncle. She suspected them of sneaking off to talk about Laurence. Everyone was worried about him being moved from the hospital.

  Just as Faustina had predicted, Louis’s name was entered into the hat and he was signed up for several reels before the butler even took his coat. Dragged onto the dance floor by Mary Ruth in the next instant, Louis looked both pleased and terrified. Bel thumped down the stairs and drifted to the kitchen, ignoring the gaze of the tutor, who followed her with his eyes as soon as he spotted her. Still, she straightened her spine and was inwardly glad for the first time that her mother had insisted she wear a blue silk that matched her complexion perfectly.

  As Bel entered the dining room, she saw two figures silhouetted behind the Oriental screen, her father’s Christmas gift to her mother. She ducked into another of her favored hiding places, a nook in back of the piano. The space was almost too small for her now and her spine scraped the wall. Although she knew her elders would be scandalized if they caught her eavesdropping, to watch the private conversation play across the exotic screen was far more interesting than waltzing with Hannah Fithian.

  In the past year, Faustina had acquired an obsession with the Orient: She devoured books about Arab empires and Chinese dynasties, and lectured Bel one day on silk making, telling her daughter about the rooms of tiny caterpillars that would spin a thread so fine, it felt like water in your hands. The screen had come from a Chinese junk docked in New York, where Daniel had bargained for it, from sunup to sundown, he said. He’d brought it home on Christmas Eve and triumphantly unfolded it for his wife. While Faustina gave a sharp cry of delight and exchanged modest kisses with her husband, Bel studied the gift. It was decorated with sprays of pink flowers
, a village of small thatched huts, and a distant, fantastic mountain range that curled up in green spirals, as if it were made of taffy instead of earth. A dragon lounged in one panel, breathing fire. Bel longed for it. She had never seen anything so beautiful and strange, and she sulked a little over her own gift, an ornate jade teapot with a frog for a handle. She didn’t even drink tea.

  Mary, on the other hand, viewed the screen with utter and unfounded superstition, calling it “a pagan abomination.” She had howled with dismay when Faustina insisted on placing the canvas in the evergreen-bedecked dining room for Twelfth Night. But there it stayed on its bamboo legs, smelling faintly of ginger. The two people on the other side of it now seemed unaware that their shadows drew over the curling mountain range an exaggerated dance of their low conversation. Bel recognized her uncle from his jutting stomach and the way his hands jabbed the air when he talked. The woman was her mother.

  Although she was unable to hear a word they were saying, Bel watched, transfixed by the sword of his raised arm, her mother’s arched neck. They were fighting about something, and then her uncle reached for her mother’s elbow, cradling it briefly in his palm. Her mother backed away and a stretch of white canvas made a channel between their shadows. He was pleading now, both arms out in a peacemaking gesture, and she was refusing, her head flicking back and forth.