Time After Time

by Elizabeth Boyce

  She heard the door open followed by muffled whispering in the entry. A male voice, probably Josiah, who came to supper several times a week, along with the more recognizable timbres of Sarah and Mrs. Ruskin.

  Margaret packed her sewing in her workbasket and went to see what precisely was causing the commotion. Perhaps there were new letters.

  She rounded the corner smiling but felt her expression harden into a mask. Sarah was ashen and frozen, looking ten years older than she had at tea. Mrs. Ruskin was looking at the floor, shaking her head. Josiah was unmoving and silent. Margaret found she could not process the changes in them. Her mind simply would not ask why.

  “Whatever is the matter, Sarah?” she found herself saying, amazed her tongue could form words.

  Josiah, who clasped one of Sarah’s elbows, spoke at last. “There was a great battle in northern Virginia two days ago. East of Fredericksburg.”

  “That’s near where we think Theo is, is it not?”

  At this, Mrs. Ruskin sobbed. Margaret felt her chest tighten.

  Josiah continued. “Yes. In today’s Constitution … ” He extended the paper to her, but Margaret didn’t take it. Her eyes suddenly wouldn’t focus.

  “Tell me. Quickly.”

  He swallowed and nodded. “Missing. Feared captured.”

  Her eyes flicked to a rose on the carpet at her feet. It was dark maroon, the color of day-old blood. The mossy foliage was shadowed, fading into nothingness.

  Theo was not coming home, might not ever be coming home. He was dead, or dying. Alone.

  She blinked. The petals at her feet were half open. The rose hadn’t reached the fullness of its beauty and potential before it had been caught here, forever, in cloth. The flower seemed to grow larger, threatening to consume her as she swooned.

  • • •

  With a start, Margaret jerked to a sitting position. Someone had carried her to the settee in the parlor. Mrs. Ruskin crossed the room and handed her a cloth soaked in eau-de-cologne.

  “Thank you,” she murmured, unused to kindness from that corner. Whatever disorientation lingered in her head melted away like a late winter thaw when she turned to Sarah and Josiah sitting across from her. “We have no news, then?” she asked.

  “Nothing beyond what’s in the paper. We’ve started letters to everyone we know at the front, but Samuel Dix … ” Josiah trailed off.

  “Fallen?” Margaret half whispered.

  Josiah nodded.

  She turned to Sarah, unsure of what to say. In the long years of fighting, she had often visited the mothers, sisters, and wives of the dead. So many faces, stained with tears, exhausted with the work of mourning. In her mother-in-law, she saw the familiar, stony rejection of the news. The confusion, the inability to give in to grief that terrified and thrilled her.

  “Sarah, I — ”

  “No!” the older woman snapped. “Don’t say it. Don’t say anything! We know nothing. I will not hear it, Margaret Ward.” She swept up from her chair and began stalking up and down the length of the room like a tigress.

  For a time, they watched her, heads nodding back and forth, lulled by the movement, ignoring their emotions.

  Sarah finally began speaking again. “I will not grieve. Not until we know more. The Greenes, they held a funeral. They buried an empty box! And the next spring, who should come home but George? Until I have the body of my dear boy, until we have a report from someone who saw him, I won’t do it. And neither will any of you.”

  Each word was crisp, as if it had been cut from paper, and sharp as if it posed a risk to the listener. None of them would dare cross her in this mood.

  Margaret cleared her throat. “Sarah, I — ”

  “And you!” Sarah whirled around now, her skirts darting around her body. “Of all the people in this room, you have the least standing. I hold you responsible. Theodore never would have gone if it hadn’t been for you. You badgered him into it. He was happy. Here. With me. You made him dissatisfied with his life. You drove him to it.”

  Josiah shuffled and adjusted in his seat, suddenly uncomfortable. “Sarah, you’re upset, there’s no need.”

  Sarah balled her fists in her skirt, and her eyes flashed. “No need? There’s every need. She needs to know what she’s done.”

  Josiah looked at Margaret and shook his head. She raised a hand to stop him and spoke. “No, she’s right. This … this is entirely my fault. But Sarah, don’t make the mistake of thinking he was happy. Content is not happy. Inert is not happy.”

  Sarah gasped. “Why, you … ”

  “Yes, me.” Margaret choked back a sob and forced her face into an expression of composure. She would not give in to anger or tears. Not yet. “If Theo is dead” — Sarah gasped again — “I will never forgive myself. I … I love your son. More than you or he will ever know. But for whatever I have undertaken in search of my happiness, or whatever I did to encourage Theo to pursue his, for that I will never be sorry.”

  She struggled to her feet, surprised when she managed to support herself. “If you will excuse me, I am going to retire.”

  Her fingers bit into the railing as she stumbled up the stairs and along the hall to her room. To the room she had shared with Theo. Precious few nights had she spent here in the arms of her husband and now, perhaps, she would never again. The rest of her life stretched before her, a series of cold nights in narrow, empty beds. That had been her fate, once, but then Theo had filled her future with fire and heat. Now, knowing his love, she wasn’t sure she could go back. But perhaps she had to.

  Margaret lowered herself deliberately, each movement slowed by her heavy limbs. She did not fling herself down, just as she did not abandon herself to grief. In at least one thing, Sarah was correct: they did not know.

  Theo could be alive. It could all be a mistake. Even now, he could be returning to them. Or … he could be injured. He could need her, out of his mind with pain and illness in a field hospital. He could be even now in a prison — Libbey or Belle Isle, stories of which she had read in the papers. A captive of a cruel and unjust government. She might never see him again.

  She was aware she was shaking, but could not move to get into the bedclothes. She watched her fingers jerk on the counterpane. She could see the bones under the skin and her pulse in her wrist. Was she really so fragile? Each lurch of her hands corresponded to one in her stomach. Theo had engendered so much quivering in her soul and body. She would know, wouldn’t she, if he were gone? She would feel the change if he weren’t under the sky anymore?

  During their years apart, she had felt him a few miles away, across town. He had been maddeningly out of reach in a place she thought she would never return to, but he had been there still. So she would know if he were no longer on the earth, wouldn’t she?

  Margaret stared at the wall, aware she was curling into herself little by little, leaving a smear of tears across the bed as she turned into a shell. Thus she did not respond to the knock on the door, but Mrs. Ruskin entered anyway, a cup of tea in her hand, which she set on the dressing table.

  “Don’t mind Mrs. Ward,” she said after a pause. “She’s mad with grief and uncertainty. You are no more responsible for Mr. Ward’s situation, whatever it is, than she is.”

  Margaret struggled to sit up. “That’s kind of you to say,” she said. Her mouth tasted strange, all stale and brackish. She swallowed and said, “If … ” The word pained them both into shuddering. She repeated it nonetheless, “If … she’ll never forgive me. I won’t be able to forgive myself.”

  Mrs. Ruskin said, “I have known Theo Ward for more than thirty years, long before you met him. He was never happier than he was after he enlisted and married you. Whatever’s happened, he finally became the man he wanted to be.”

  Margaret had never seen the housekeeper so thoughtful. She said, “I
never told him to go. But I made him feel he was too deferential to … well, to others. He set out to prove he was not.”

  “Mr. Ward wanted to go from the moment South Carolina left the Union,” she said with a snort. “If you think he went because of you, that’s hubris, that is.”

  Margaret shrugged, but her chin had started its shaking again. She sobbed, “Mrs. Ruskin, I love him so.”

  Mrs. Ruskin crossed to the bed and ran her hand over Margaret’s hair. “And he loves you. It’s as plain as his love for this country. But he wouldn’t give up one for the other, not if he could help it. We have to wait. Mrs. Ward … she’ll come around. She’s lashing out at you for something to do in the meantime. Not a patient woman, Mrs. Ward. What’s needed now is for you to be as brave in your heart as that boy’s being in his. Now, do you need some toast with your tea?”

  Chapter XIX

  Somehow, Margaret survived the first night after the news, and then the next after that. Soon a week had passed without consulting her. During that time, Sarah had made no reference to her outburst, and Margaret hadn’t wanted to revisit those horrible moments. No one was speaking of anything at all. Instead, the household existed in a dreary stupor of delayed grief. It seemed like everyone in Middletown visited, aghast that the mirrors were uncovered, that the clocks were not stopped, and that the ladies of the household continued to wear colors.

  “We know nothing,” Sarah insisted. “And I detest crepe.”

  This was untrue. Her mother-in-law had scarcely left half-mourning since the death of Theo’s father, but no one felt in a position to contradict her. So they worked. They ate. They drank tea. They stared out the window. They prayed.

  Most of all, they wrote letters. They wrote to everyone they knew who might have been at the battle or might have known anyone who was. For a week, the missives went unanswered. For almost the first time since his deployment, no letters arrived from Theo. The sad shake from the postmaster grew more forlorn each time Margaret saw it.

  She wanted to give in to her despair. Whenever she thought of the silence, a panicky tension filled her chest. She could not catch breath. She would feel her knees giving way beneath her and the air in the room closing in. Each time, she jerked herself out of the spiral, afraid that if she surrendered, she might never return. Sarah was correct: there was no news. It was an act of unfaithfulness to proceed as if it there were. Wherever Theo was, whatever he was battling, he deserved better from her.

  On the eighth day, two letters arrived. One was from Henry O’Brien, the second lieutenant to Theo’s regiment, the other from Thomas Gaunt, a private in the same. O’Brien repeated what he had been told by others: that Theo had led his troops onto the field of battle and there he may have fallen but no body was recovered. No one had seen him die. No one seemed to have seen anything at all.

  “How is that possible?” Sarah cried.

  Josiah, who had very nearly taken up residence with them, patted her hand. “The battlefield is all heat and haze, confusion and noise. This uncertainty is not unusual.”

  Thomas Gaunt supplied that Theo had been wounded early in the fighting, but he had not been seen in the Union hospital. Some men in that part of the field had been taken prisoner. Some had been returned in an exchange shortly after the battle. Others may have been taken to Richmond. He did not know where Theo was.

  “Doesn’t he supply names of those men who were exchanged so we might query them?” Margaret asked.

  “He does not,” Mrs. Ruskin said. She had become the official secretary of their efforts, being in best command of herself at present.

  For a long time after this statement, there was silence in the parlor. In the nearly two years she had resided in the Ward home, Margaret had never heard as much quiet here as she had in the past eight days. There was no movement. No activity. No motion. No music. No debate.

  For the long months during Theo’s deployment, they had existed in a bee-like state, trying to put off their fears with business. Now they were down only to pretense, but these letters made that impossible.

  “What now?” Margaret finally whispered.

  “New letters,” Josiah said at last. “To the prisons in Richmond. To this Mr. Gaunt, I think.”

  “I’ll get my writing box!” Mrs. Ruskin said.

  “I must return to the office, but I’ll check at the post office and the telegraph office and stop by this evening with the news,” Josiah said. They exited the room, leaving Sarah and Margaret alone.

  “Tea?” Margaret asked.

  “No … thank you,” Sarah said.

  A silence settled between them. During the course of Margaret’s marriage, they had often shared companionable silences, silences during which they had worked and reflected. This was not one of those. Sarah still resented her. Her grief was a terrible animal, all the more destructive because she still disallowed its existence. Margaret felt deferential. She accepted, wholly and without question, Sarah’s charges but could not regret whatever had brought her and Theo together. It was a quandary, her guilt and her joy and her grief and her love springing from the same circumstances.

  “Do you wish to pray?” Margaret asked. “I could ask Reverend Patterson to call again.”

  “No.”

  “Do you wish to read? I could fetch your Bible.”

  “No.”

  “Do you wish to talk?”

  At this, Sarah changed. She turned to Margaret and smiled sadly. “We have much to say to one another, do we not? But I cannot apologize, cannot respond to you, until we know. I’m not certain, after all, what I am apologizing for. It could be that I have accused you of killing my son when he lives. It could be that my son is dead, but not at your hands and instead through his own willfulness. I wouldn’t want to apologize for the wrong thing.”

  Margaret found a laugh building in her. The first laugh she had felt in more than a week. She released it and found it inadequate but still comforting. “Very well, then, I’ll wait.”

  “Won’t we all?”

  And so they did. New letters were dispatched. Responses were not forthcoming. They waited and prayed and cried, hiding all these activities from one another.

  “We’re the most confirmed group of liars I have ever met,” Margaret confided to Josiah while they sat in the garden one afternoon. “If we knew, we could mourn together rather than hiding our solitary grief. But we cannot admit we are mourning because that is to admit that we have given up hope.”

  “Have you?” Josiah asked, his face drawn and serious.

  Margaret thought a while and then shook her head. “No. I have not and I do not and I cannot. Just before you told me the news, I had the strongest sense Theo would return home. I have not, since the first day of this war, felt as certain as I did then that I would have a long and happy life with him. Whenever I feel my confidence leaching from me and my despair taking over, I return to that moment.”

  He nodded as if this explanation had convinced him too.

  “He promised me he would return. I tried to stop him from doing so, but he insisted. Even now I expect him to open the gate” — she gestured at it — “and to ask what the fuss is about with a boyish grin.”

  “If ever a man would change his fate, it would be Theo to return to you,” Josiah said. “Whatever Sarah may say about it, you realized his life by marrying him. Don’t forget it.”

  “No, he realized mine.”

  They returned to the house and spent another evening in one another’s company, exchanging only the barest of pleasantries and hurrying off to bed to be alone with their honest, isolated lamentations.

  • • •

  So this was Richmond.

  Theo wished he could rise and strain onto his toes in order to look out the squat window. His fellow prisoners told him that through the bars one could see over the river
, to the factories, steeples, and hills of the Confederate capitol. Hear, even, the bells from the churches. It would be fitting to enjoy a view of the city he had thought about, cursed, and spoken of more than any other in the past two years. But at present, it was nothing more than the place where he might very well die.

  In his experience, it was less a city than a cold, stinking, gray stone room. His Richmond housed, at present, several dozen Union officers in various states of injury and infirmity. Several piles of filthy straw stood in for beds. Chairs and tables also. Prisoners were ingenious.

  Theo had the exclusive use of the largest, an honor in accordance with the perceived severity of his hurt. Maybe that was why the French word for wound was blesser. Il a été blessé à la jambe. He had been wounded in the leg. He muttered the words over to himself several times as a talisman. Old Professor Bright would be pleased to know that, fever or no, he could still conjugate the pluperfect. If he ever got out of here, he’d write the man a letter and tell him so.

  He ran a hand down his thigh, skimming over the matted hair, thick with dried blood and dirt, toward the wound itself. Where his fingers paused he felt heat. He was hot — much too hot, he knew. He could feel weeping too, a thick sludge of mucous and discharge. He lacked the fortitude to check the color of it. He’d rather not know.

  So far, he’d kept the leg. Not out of any sort of choice, mind, but because he hadn’t seen a doctor. Or at least he didn’t remember having seen one. He’d been told there was a shortage of them at present in the city. There seemed to be a shortage of everything, really.

  They should have left him there on the damned field of battle. Eventually the Union Army would have picked him up. What precisely would these bastards trade him for? Why had he been bumped over every hole and lump the bad roads possessed sixty miles south into the heart of Virginia? To where there was no food, no doctors, and no medicine. Even clean water was at a premium and appeared only twice a day.