by Karen White
Quietly, he said, “If I did not think I would win, I never would have agreed to our little wager.” He leaned forward, as if to make sure nobody else heard him. “But if you continue with your distractions, you might still win this match.”
I saw his gaze directed at the low neckline of my dinner dress, one of two from Julia’s wardrobe that had been modified to fit me. I quickly yanked my elbows off the table and sat back as far as my hoop skirt would allow, which was approximately two inches. I felt myself blushing as I hastened to roll the dice. Snake eyes. “Whoop-de-do,” I said unenthusiastically.
“Never say you do not roll doubles,” Stuart said, and he rolled again and completed moving his counters off the board. His blue eyes gazed steadily at me, making the blood run thick and heavy through my veins. “One more game, and the winner takes all.”
I chewed on my inner cheek, wondering how I would answer the question he was bound to ask me. I looked down at the board and began setting up my pieces one last time.
The wind outside picked up, alerting us to the signs of an early autumn storm. Dried leaves and other debris were tossed carelessly at the window, mixed with the louder pat-pat of water droplets against the glass. The crackling of the fire in the fireplace joined the chorus, and I breathed in deeply the homey smell of the pine logs. I absently fingered the smooth polished wood of a counter in my hand, remembering games I had played with my father and with Michael.
“Your move,” Stuart said, his voice low.
I jumped, startled into the present, and gave him a weak smile. “Sorry, I was just daydreaming. Calling up ghosts, actually.”
We began to play in earnest, the dice rolling quickly, and the click of the pieces on the board drawing us further into the game. We were neck and neck as we pulled our remaining counters into the home stretch. He had three on the first space, and I had four on the fourth space. All I needed was at least a double four and I would win. I picked up the dice and brought them slowly to my lips. I blew softly on them, Stuart’s eyes never leaving mine, then let them drop. They rolled as if in slow motion before coming to rest. Double fives.
I stared at them in shock. “I won,” I whispered.
Stuart sat back in his chair, a bemused expression on his face. “This time. But do not think I am through trying.” He rolled a counter between long fingers. “Name your prize.”
The tempting thought of claiming another kiss crossed my mind, but it was all whimsy. “I want my freedom to come and go as I please.”
He nodded slightly. “So be it. Unless you do something to jeopardize our trust.”
Julia spoke up. “What a wicked night. I was just sitting here calling to mind a night just like this. The night Willie was born.” A dreamy smile touched her lips as she paused. “The wind was blowing something fierce, just like it is now, but we thought it might be a hurricane coming in from the coast. All the shutters had been nailed shut over the windows, and the house was very dark.” Her soft hazel eyes grew still and dark, looking at me but past me, seeing another autumn night.
She put her hand lightly on her abdomen, smoothing the fabric of her dress. Her voice sounded as if it were coming from a far-off place, barely audible against the violence of the wind outside. “I felt the baby stretching, pulling my skin so tight that I thought it might burst, and I knew that my time had come. But I had no fear. Zeke had told me that everything would be all right.” The firelight flickered over her face, casting a portion of it in shadow but illuminating the other half in a soft, radiant light. The undulations of light and darkness mimicked the surges of an unborn child in the womb, making me grieve afresh for the emptiness of my own.
Julia blinked, as if seeing me for the first time, and smiled. “And he was right. Willie was born in the early-morning hours, chubby, pink, and bawling.”
The mood broke as Julia laughed softly, and the click of her knitting needles began anew.
“You’re very blessed, Julia. All three of your children are so beautifully healthy.” The words tasted sour on my tongue, and I hoped that no one had detected the bitterness. “So, now I know the story of Willie’s birth, and I was there for Robbie’s. Tell me about Sarah’s.”
Dr. Watkins stood and moved to the window. He crossed his arms on his chest and leaned back. “That was frightening—remember, Julia? It was summer, June if I remember correctly, and she was a good two months early. So small. We did not think she would make it.”
Julia kept her head down, the needles clicking vigorously. An earsplitting scream broke the silence of the house. Stuart stood immediately but was held in place by a gesture from Julia.
“Let us see if she quiets down by herself.”
I looked around me for some sort of explanation, but all faces were turned to Julia in mute awareness. A minute passed in silence, my heart beginning to beat at a normal rate again, when the same horrifying scream began again.
Julia stood abruptly and her knitting needles, still attached to the stockings she had been working on, slid from her lap. “I will go,” she said, and left the room. Suddenly realizing that it was Sarah who had screamed, I followed Julia upstairs.
Muffled sobs reached me as I crossed the landing and entered Sarah’s room. She shared a room with Willie, whose curved form I could make out in the dim light on the opposite twin bed. In true male form, he had not been awakened by the shrieks.
Julia sat on the edge of the bed, her arms around her daughter, murmuring unintelligible words of comfort. I heard her hand thudding gently on the back of Sarah’s nightgown.
Sarah brought her head back abruptly and pointed toward the window. “Mama, make it go away!” she screamed, and then pushed her face onto her mother’s shoulder.
The curtains had been pulled back, revealing nothing but pitch-black darkness. The wind still whipped against the house, but the rain had stopped. I approached the window cautiously and peered out. Nothing could be seen in the yard below, but a small brightening of the night ceiling brought my gaze upward. Thin strips of cloud slid quickly across the sky, alternately exposing a round, full moon and casting it in shadow. As the bright moonlight flooded the room momentarily, Sarah screamed again.
“Close the curtains.” It was Julia’s voice, soft as usual but commanding nevertheless. I quickly grabbed the two panels and brought them together.
Julia began to sing quietly, and Sarah’s sobs lessened. I felt like an intruder in this maternal scene and softly crept out of the room. As I started to walk down the stairs, Julia left the room, closing the door behind us.
I turned to Julia. “What was she afraid of? Was it the storm?”
Her face was in shadow, dark and unreadable. “No. She is afraid of the full moon.” She stepped past me and walked down the stairs, her dress rustling as it brushed the steps. A chill covered me in goose bumps, and I shivered.
I didn’t follow her. Instead I went to the library and to the shelf where the family Bible was kept and pulled it from its place before opening the front cover. There, the next-to-last entry under a long list of births and deaths: Sarah Margaret Elliott, born June 16, 1856. Quietly, I closed the book and pushed it back on the shelf.
Feeling restless, I crept quietly past the parlor to the front door and stepped out onto the porch. The storm was passing but leaving trailing shifts of wind in its wake. My skirts billowed out around me and I slapped my hands down at my sides to try to keep them from making me airborne. The sound of buggy wheels and the brisk trotting of horse’s hooves came from the front drive, and I assumed the good doctor had taken his leave. The cloud cover had thinned and the bright moonlight streamed down on the front yard, reflecting itself in the sporadic puddles and illuminating the scattered debris of twigs and leaves.
I walked slowly toward the edge of the porch and leaned on a column, its hard surface a comforting support. The smell of wet clay and damp animals assailed my nose and I breathed it
in deeply, as if to convince myself of the new reality of my life.
A different scent caught my attention, and I turned slowly around to see Stuart at the other end of the porch, drawing on a cigar. He walked toward me, his face hidden in shadow but briefly illuminated by the end of the cigar as he inhaled.
I remained where I was. “I’ll leave if you want to be alone.”
He stopped and stood several paces away from me and blew the smoke to the side. “I find your company refreshing.”
I laughed. “That’s mighty big of you to say, since I pummeled you at backgammon.”
He smiled down at me, but his eyes were serious. “Are you sure you will not change your mind about your prize? Is there anything else you might like?”
My gaze traveled down his face and settled on his lips before quickly glancing away. “No. I like the idea of being a free woman again.”
He tipped ashes over the railing, his eyes never leaving my face, and I watched them scatter in the night air. “You won the match, which is why I will allow you a bit of freedom. But do not think it is because I trust you.”
I bit back my anger, suddenly realizing how much I wanted to gain his trust. I grabbed the railing with both hands, my back to Stuart. “If you’re standing on a river’s edge, just looking at the water, not touching it, do you have to wade in to find out that it’s wet?”
He didn’t say anything, so I turned to face him. “These people—Julia and the children—do you really think I would do anything to harm them? And this house—it’s more of a home to me than you would ever realize.”
My voice quivered as I remembered standing in front of the house for the very first time with Michael and feeling the powerful force of being home. I shivered as a gust of cool wind worked itself down the front of my dress.
Stuart took a step toward me, still unspeaking, his face unreadable. Smoke from the cigar danced up between us like little ghosts, vanishing with the wind’s whim. “These are dangerous times, Laura. Things are not always as they appear to be. People, too. I have met men and women since this conflict began who will risk anything to promote their cause. I have learned to withhold my trust until my boots are completely submerged in the river. Then I will believe it is wet.”
I threw my hands up. “Fine. Just allow me to write the inscription on your headstone. ‘Killed by a bullet he did not believe would hurt him.’”
He leaned close enough that I could smell the soap on his skin. I pressed my back against the rail, unsure of the light in his eyes. “The only thing that sustains me when I am in the heat of battle is the picture in my mind of this house and my family—and knowing they are safe. But now you are here, living with us. I do not know who you are, where you are from, or what you want. You have secrets. You have never denied it. And I have a strange way of not trusting people who are not completely truthful with me.”
I straightened, my anger brimming like static electricity. “What if . . . What if the truth was so insane—so unspeakable—that you wouldn’t even recognize it as the truth?” I slammed my fist on the railing. “I don’t even know what the truth is anymore—and I really don’t care. I just want to find Annie and go home. I just want to go home with my daughter.”
“Where is home? And what is there that is so important to you—more important than staying here, where so many people have grown to care for you?”
I didn’t realize I was crying until he reached up and brushed a tear from my cheek. Pushing his hand aside, I used my sleeve to wipe my cheeks. “My memories—of my husband and our lives. Of our perfect little life with our daughter.”
Stuart’s voice was low and measured. “I have watched my boyhood friends die for this cause. I held the head of my best friend while his brains drained into my haversack, and all I could think of was my rations being spoiled.”
His words drew me toward him and I faced him again. He threw down his cigar and ground it out with the heel of his boot.
“Why are you telling me this?”
His eyes were dark pools of still water. “Life goes on, Laura. Memories will not keep you warm on a winter’s night.” He inhaled deeply. “And I also want you to understand what is at stake. We have sacrificed so much, and I do not want to give away what is left so easily.”
“I won’t take anything from you. I just need shelter until I can go home.”
“It is too late for that.”
My hand clutched his sleeve. “Too late to go home?”
“No. Too late to leave without taking anything with you. You have already captured hearts, Laura. You could not leave without taking at least one casualty.”
I knew he wasn’t talking about Julia or the children. The moonlight lent his face an eerie blue cast, giving him the appearance of a ghost. I felt the goose bumps on my arms when I realized that, to me, he was a ghost—at least somebody who had lived in my own distant past. He saw my shiver and slipped off his coat, placing it gently on my shoulders.
His eyes were clouded in shadow as he looked down at me. “I might as well tell you this now. Charles has told me that I will not be fit for combat duty for a few months yet, but I have some business to attend to and will be making several short trips before I return to my regiment.”
I opened my mouth to mention the conversation I had overheard between him and Pamela, but stopped. He would never let me go into town if he realized I knew Matt Kimball wanted to speak with me.
“Will you miss me?” he asked suddenly.
I was glad of the darkness. “Yes, I will. A lot,” I answered, without hesitation. With a trembling voice, I added, “There’s nobody else here who can play backgammon.”
He chuckled lightly as he placed his hands behind my neck and tilted my face toward his. He leaned down and kissed me softly. His lips lingered over mine, and a faint sigh escaped me as I tasted cigar smoke and whiskey.
“This might be considered by my superiors as consorting with the enemy, you know.”
I kept my head back in the hopes he’d kiss me again. “I’m not your enemy, Stuart.”
“This coming from the woman who said she wanted a cannonball to land on my head.”
His lips were so close, I shut my eyes. My voice sounded languid in the night air. “I didn’t really mean that, you know. I might even be upset.”
His kiss this time was anything but gentle, his lips bruising mine. His mouth traveled to my ear and he whispered, “Memories cannot compete with flesh and blood, can they?”
The front door opened and we stepped apart. Julia looked at us knowingly, a tight smile on her face, and I was glad again for the darkness to hide the stain of red creeping up my face.
“I was wondering where you two had gone off to. Laura, we were hoping you might play something for us on the piano.”
We followed her inside, but she stopped me before I entered the parlor so she could adjust my hair. With a raised eyebrow at Stuart, she swept past us and settled herself onto the sofa, waiting demurely as I sat at the piano and began to play.
Much later, as I lay in my lonely bed, I tossed and turned, unable to sleep. The full moon turned the blackness in my room to gray, reminding me of how my life was no longer black-and-white but instead had fallen between the colored cracks of reality. Finally, in the last stages of wakefulness when the world tends to blur its edges, I imagined I heard the tap-tapping of a black crow’s beak against a windowpane, and my blood chilled with dread.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The past is only the present become invisible and mute;
and because it is invisible and mute, its memoried
glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious.
We are tomorrow’s past.
—MARY WEBB
I walked in the henhouse with authority. I had found that this worked with even the most stubborn chicken. Let them know you were afraid of their pesky li
ttle beaks, and the result would be something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Not that I was in a mood to care about being pecked—I was going into town alone. Stuart had left on his trip to deliver whatever information Pamela had given him, and Julia needed me to go into town to fetch cloth at the company store for new pants for Willie. They no longer accepted Confederate money, and we had to rely on what we could trade.
I thrust my hand under chicken number one, whom I had dubbed Cher, and snatched away a lone egg, placing it in the folded-up skirt of my dress. Number two just as easily acquiesced, until I got greedy and reached for the second egg. She responded with a resonant squawk and a well-aimed peck of her beak on my forearm.
Despite her protests, I unceremoniously removed her from her perch and found yet another egg. I left the henhouse ignoring the squawks of disapproval and feeling a bit smug.
Hastily depositing the eggs in a basket, I changed clothes and headed for the buggy. I had received informal training on how to maneuver the thing, and I was fine just as long as I didn’t have to get too close to the horse. I’d been assured it was an old and docile horse—too old and docile to have been confiscated—but I still planned to keep my distance.
Julia ran out of the house and handed me an empty basket and a list. She shielded her eyes with her hand as she looked up at me. “Goodbye, Laura. And thank you.”
She looked so forlorn, I felt the need to reassure her. “Don’t worry, Julia. I’m not running off. I’ll be back shortly.”
She waved a hand at me and stepped back from the buggy. “I know that, Laura. It is just that . . . Oh, never mind.”
I slapped the horse’s rump with a whip, and we trotted off in the cool afternoon air. I recognized the brick facade of the company store, remembering how I had eaten several times at the restaurant that would eventually be housed in the building.
The door was propped open, allowing the fresh, crisp air inside and lighting the dim interior. Waiting a moment for my eyes to adjust, I soon made out a counter at the end of the room with a man standing behind it.
