I’d met so many men in so many towns that I’d lost count. Some were better looking than Seth was, many were better dancers, but there was no one I’d ever met who was a better man. No one—except Phoebe’s God, perhaps—who knew me better or loved me more.
He lifted my hand to his lips.
One of my tears fell onto it.
He kissed my tear. Kissed my hand. Leaned forward to kiss my lips once more. And I knew then what I’d tell Phoebe later that night when she asked. I’d tell her that I’d finally found someone worthwhile to kiss. And the quality of the experience? My goodness! I’d have to say it was . . . Well, I wasn’t really saying anything at all at that moment. There’s just something about those West Point cadets. . . . They never do anything by halves.
A Note from the Author
A con woman and a good boy going bad? Really? This is who character casting central sends me? As a character-driven writer, I have to go with whoever shows up when I’m planning my stories, but frankly, I wasn’t sure how this one was going to turn out. I set a challenge for myself with each book I write, but I kept wondering if this challenge was just too big.
As I worked through the story, however, I realized that there’s a bit of the con man (or woman) in all of us. How else to explain the front we sell to others even knowing, full well, that inside we’re not as together as we appear to be? We too often convince ourselves that seeming is just as good as being, and we content ourselves with less when we could have much more.
This is the third time I’ve featured the military in my stories. The first two times were in contemporary settings. With this book, I was struck by just how little the life of a cadet has changed through the centuries.
A young version of the American Civil War’s General Robert E. Lee, who so quickly forgave the faults of many of his officers, can be found in this story’s longsuffering academy superintendent, Colonel Lee. In Stanley Horn’s The Robert E. Lee Reader, he is quoted during that time as saying, “I wish boys would do what is right; it would be so much easier for all of us.” He always hoped for the best from his cadets and gave them more chances at redemption than most superintendents. A West Point alumnus himself, he graduated second in his class in 1829, having never acquired a single demerit. He returned to the military academy as superintendent from 1852–1855.
Jefferson Davis, who would go on to serve as president of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, served as secretary of war during that same time period. He graduated twenty-third in a class of thirty-three, having accumulated an average of one hundred demerits a year.
Historically, class ranking has had little to do with success in battle. Some of the most famous soldiers in the Civil War, men like George Custer, George Pickett, James Longstreet, and Beauregard Ambrose Burnside, were Immortals during their time at the military academy. The writer Edgar Allan Poe and the artist James Whistler were also numbered among the Immortals before they were found deficient and dismissed.
Edgar Allan Poe came to the U.S. Military Academy in 1830 at the age of twenty-one after his foster mother had died. He’d previously served in the army as an enlisted soldier from 1827–1829. He may have been hoping for an eventual inheritance of some sort from his foster father, but after his foster mother’s death, the man remarried. At that point, Poe simply stopped caring. He stopped attending classes, stopped going to formations; in short, he forced the academy to dismiss him.
The hijinks my Immortals engaged in were inspired by some of theirs. Deacon had Whistler’s skills with a pencil. Otter had General (and later, president) Ulysses S. Grant’s facility with horses. Grant’s favorite mount was the famously bad-tempered York. To learn more about the Immortals, read Last in Their Class, by James S. Robbins.
As I was double-checking my facts on a final edit of this manuscript, I ran across the legend that West Point alumnus General J.E.B. Stuart, renowned cavalry commander of the Confederate States of America’s Army of Northern Virginia, was rumored to have moderated his academic performance so that, instead of being assigned to the Corps of Engineers, he’d be free to go into the cavalry. Assignments from the U.S. Military Academy are still awarded based on the order of merit, but now those with the highest standing in their class get to choose first from among the open assignments.
There has always been tension between the top of the class and the bottom of the class at the military academy. The top accuses the bottom of not caring. The bottom accuses the top of caring overly much. In my research I came to understand there are two types of failing cadets. Those who become overwhelmed by their studies, due to the subject matter or deficiencies in time management, and those who simply feel there’s more to life than studying. They would describe themselves as more well-balanced and more efficient at using their time. Why study harder than you have to?
Cadets at all the service academies are subject to regulations and restrictions that would send a civilian college student screaming in horror. The great care cadets take to interpret rules to the letter often leave them far from fulfilling their spirit. But when daily life is so restricted, when even the way you fold your underwear is inspected and regimented, the creative mind has to come up with some way to gain temporary freedom. Although these antics are never officially condoned, they are expected, and it’s widely assumed that a successful career in the military requires swift obedience as well as boundless creativity. Which leads to that fine balance between obeying the rules and rubbing others’ faces in them. We would all do well to remind ourselves what cadets, no matter the era, have always known: We’re all in this together, and no one likes a snitch.
In writing this book, I appreciated more fully the tragedy of the American Civil War. Five short years after graduation, cadets like Seth, Deacon, Dandy, and Otter would face each other across battle lines. It’s a testament to their military training that they were able to prosecute war against each other at all. But it’s a testament to the close ties of friendships they formed as cadets that whenever they saw each other during those terrible years, in victory or defeat, they reached out to each other with kindness. And after the war, when the nation had such difficulty with reconciliation, they still viewed each other as friends.
It’s quite difficult to erase a first impression, be it good or bad. Often, if you try hard and make an effort early at your job or in your course work, people are willing to give you the benefit of doubt as time wears on. Any soldier (or airman or seaman) knows that the needs of the army (or air force, or navy, or marines, or coast guard) trump the needs of the individual. No officer who recognized a talent such as Seth Westcott’s would have thrown away that talent by assigning him to the lesser ranks of the infantry or cavalry during that period.
There really was a Benny Havens. He and his wife originally kept a tavern near the academy grounds, but they eventually earned the superintendent’s disfavor when they were caught selling liquor to academy cadets as well as to the general public. Forbidden from setting foot on the military reservation, they relocated to the village of Buttermilk Falls. By all accounts Benny and his wife offered much more to cadets than liquor. They offered a warm room, hot meals, and unconditional love. Benny was also reported to be quite adept at mathematics. To be found at Benny Havens, however, meant automatic dismissal from the academy for having been guilty of consuming liquor. Jefferson Davis (future president of the Confederate States of America) was sentenced to be dismissed for being caught at Benny Havens but was saved by his prior record of good conduct. His runs to the tavern, however, almost got him killed when he fell over a sixty-foot cliff on his way back to the Point one night. The song “Benny Havens, Oh!” commemorates the old tavern and is still a part of the military academy tradition.
Being married to a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and knowing several graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, I have tried my best to capture the unique atmosphere and humor that flourishes at service academies. The joke goes that one can be an officer
or a gentleman, but not both at the same time. Perhaps they’d like to think that’s true, but I suspect that you, like me, know better. Most graduates I know, be they men or women, manage to be both. That’s probably due, in part, to the Cadet Honor Code, which influences every part of a cadet’s life: A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal or tolerate those who do. Although its current wording dates to 1970, those principles have governed the conduct of cadets since the founding of the military academy.
In the prewar era, the purpose of West Point was to graduate engineers and gentlemen. Both were a particular fixation from the very founding of the academy. West Point developed as an engineering school modeled on France’s legendary École Polytechnique. Many of its professors and department heads were acknowledged worldwide experts in their fields.
The most prestigious assignment coming out of the academy was to the Corps of Engineers. Americans like to say that the West was won by cowboys and pioneers, but in actuality, it was won by the army’s engineers and topographers. They surveyed the land, they built dams and levees, they constructed forts and harbors, and they charted the railways.
America was also built by con men. They plied the rivers and byways of the developing West as they sought to take for themselves a part of others’ American dreams. Land swindles abounded. Colonel Lee’s father was impoverished by one. The sons of William Penn enacted another. Patrick Henry became ensnared in and lost his fortune through land speculation. George Washington, James Monroe, and James Madison all acquired land in what would become Ohio for the purposes of investment. I imagine Mr. Pennyworth’s land swindle to have been in the vicinity of the Farson-Eden Valley of Wyoming. The Oregon Trail forded Big Sandy River in that location, but a town was never built until irrigation came to the valley in 1907. The current census lists the population of Farson-Eden as 660.
Lucinda’s father would have been labeled “morally insane” in the 1850s. Today he might be diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Those with NPD exhibit a lack of empathy, an inflated ego, and are willing to go to incredible lengths for self-promotion. Some of the symptoms he manifested were pathological lying, blaming, selective memory, denial, lack of conscience, entitlement, intimidation, neglect, and normalizing.
The village of Buttermilk Falls, located about a mile south of the West Point military reservation, was incorporated in 1906 under the name of the Village of Highland Falls. It is part of the Town of Highlands. In 1860, it had a population of 307. In the years after the Civil War, as New York City titans such as John Pierpont Morgan built summer homes there, its population boomed. Billy Joel’s Turnstiles album song, “Summer, Highland Falls” was inspired by the town.
Flirtation Walk is just as popular now as it was in the nineteenth century. It’s strictly off limits to visitors, however. In order to walk that lovely path, you have to be escorted by a cadet. Kissing Rock still juts out over the trail, and I’m sure every year at least one guest is convinced to come to the rescue of a hopeful cadet.
During the 1800s, most instructors at the military academy lived on the military reservation. I’ve been around enough military bases to know that the housing areas always seem to be in need of repair. It should not have been surprising then to read that several instructors at West Point had to leave their military housing during the 1850s and take lodging in the surrounding areas so that their quarters could undergo renovation.
In a world where streakers routinely show up at sports events, it can be difficult to understand just how shocking it would have been in the nineteenth century for a cadet to report for parade in his underwear. In the mid-Victorian period, however, modesty was most definitely a virtue, and at an academy that was meant to produce gentlemen, this would have been close to an unforgiveable sin.
I’ve toyed with the idea of turning this book into a series, intending Phoebe and Dandy to pair up after graduation and Deacon and Seth’s sister, Elizabeth, to do the same a bit later on, out West on the frontier. Otter, God bless him, just seemed so close to his mother that I couldn’t ever quite figure out what to do but let him go on home. As I worked through successive drafts, however, it became quite clear that Dandy and Deacon weren’t the only characters with secrets. Otter had a secret too. Though I don’t currently have any plans to develop the stories of Phoebe or Elizabeth, I did turn Otter’s secret into a short story. If you visit my website and sign up for my newsletter, I’d be happy to send it to you. Beware: Once you read it, you’ll probably find yourself flipping back through the pages of this book to see how you could possibly have missed it. Intrigued? Visit www.sirimitchell.com to find out!
Acknowledgments
My agent, Natasha Kern, kept believing I could get through this one. Turned out, she was right! My editors, Dave Long and Karen Schurrer, did a terrific job, once more, of shepherding this book through the development and editing process. Mark Waclawski (USMA Class of 1979) graciously agreed to lend me his firsthand knowledge of the U.S. Military Academy and its traditions. Any errors regarding the USMA are mine, not his.
Once again, my street team—Jamie Lapeyrolerie, Denise Harmer, Jaquelyn Scroggie, Kathleen E. Belongia, Amy Putney, Brenda Veinotte, Kelsey Shade, Debora Wilder, Beth Bulow, Lindsey Zimpel, Melissa Tharp, Julianna Rowe, Lorraine Hauger, Martha Artyomenko, Nancy McLeroy, and Pattie Reitz—cheered me on enthusiastically from start to finish. Thank you, ladies! And through it all my husband, Tony, kept a smile on his face even as I spent the better portion of many days this past year communing with my imaginary friends.
Questions for Readers
What’s the worst piece of advice you’ve been given? The best?
Lucinda’s father gave her many pieces of advice. Were any of them valid?
How do you know what advice to listen to?
Why was Seth attracted to Lucinda? Why was Lucinda attracted to Seth?
Campbell always played by the rules, and Lucinda’s father never played by the rules, but in many ways they were similar. Why?
Campbell and Phoebe were both moral characters, but one was winsome and one was not. What accounts for the difference in the way you reacted to both of them?
In Chapter 13, Phoebe is talking to Lucinda of her accident. She says, “But how would you have wanted it to end? For me to wander home with no one the wiser? If nothing at all had happened, if there hadn’t been any consequence for my disobedience, would that not have been unfair as well?” How does your perspective influence your concept of what’s fair and what’s not?
Seth, Deacon, Dandy, and Otter came from different parts of the country and had very different personalities. Why were they friends?
Seth and Campbell were both at the top of their class, both served as captain to their cadet company, yet one was loved and the other feared. Why? Which was a better captain?
If you’re like me, you enjoyed Deacon, the consummate rule breaker, much more than Campbell, the consummate rule keeper. Why? Did it make you feel guilty?
What benefits and drawbacks do you find in obeying a law to the letter? In obeying it in spirit?
What happens when a person of faith requires obedience to its laws? What happens when they hope for obedience? How do you reconcile the two?
Siri Mitchell is the author of over a dozen novels, three of which were named Christy Award finalists. A graduate of the University of Washington with a degree in business, she has worked in many different levels of government and lived on three continents. She and her family currently reside in the D.C. metro area. Visit her at www.sirimitchell.com.
Books by Siri Mitchell
The Messenger
A Heart Most Worthy
She Walks in Beauty
Love’s Pursuit
A Constant Heart
Unrivaled
Love Comes Calling
Like a Flower in Bloom
Flirtation Walk
Resources: bethanyhouse.com/AnOpenBook
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