by Murray Pura
“Thank you.” She smiled. “I wish you would.”
“I never could get you out of my mind, whether I was Kyle Forrester or Liberty or a seminary student or a conductor on the Underground Railroad. And I can’t get you out of my mind as a Mississippi boy or an Irish American. If I could put you on the train to Washington and get permission to have you share my saddle and ride with me into combat on Plum Run, I’d be the happiest man alive.”
“That sounds like a grand adventure.”
“But I’d never want to expose you to musket fire or cannonades or some Reb cavalryman’s slashing saber.”
“I’ve braved the risks on the Underground Railroad, my dear Iain. War is ugly, but I would never be afraid to face it with my beautiful, brave, and heroic man at my side.”
“Thank you, but unless Bobby Lee comes knocking at your door, you’ll just have to wait upon my return. Which, with the way this war is dragging on, is likely to take years. In lieu of me, I offer up this ring, something you can wear and gaze at and hopefully remember me as you admire its sparkle. You’re the most amazing woman in the world, Clarissa Avery Ross. I love you, I want you to be my bride, I’d fight through a thicket of bayonets just to be at your side, and I’m not going to let this war get between you and me and keep us apart. God willing, I’ll be back to sweep you off your feet and see you all decked out in white with a bouquet of summer roses in your hands. But will you say yes? Will you wait for me? Will you take this ring? Will you be my bride in 1864 or 1865 or 1866?”
He dropped to both knees in the dirt, holding up the slim band of gold that glittered with its diamond.
“Are you serious, sir?” Storms of emotion gusted through Clarissa, and she wanted to cry and sing and scream at the same time. “Wait until 1865 or 1866? I can’t do that.”
“But I …”
“I love you far too much to wait that long.”
“Avery …”
“Hush. You’ve had your say. A lot of say. Now, hear me out, my lovely man. I adore you. It took some time getting used to all your personalities, but I’m fairly well settled in, and you’re the man I want to live and die with. Oh sweetheart—” She went to her knees in front of him and curled her arms around his neck. “Yes, I’ll be your bride. Yes, I’ll accept your wonderful ring. Yes, I’ll wait for you … but not until 1866!”
She began to kiss him, placing her lips rapidly all over his face.
“How long will you wait?” he gasped out between the kisses she rained on him.
“Not long, my love. You know how impulsive and impatient I am.”
“How long?”
“I’m not going to haul you to the altar at Christ’s Church before you and Plum Run board the train for Washington, my handsome Irishman. But if they ever give you any leave …”
“They won’t give me leave, Avery.”
“Or you come limping back here to convalesce from a bullet wound, or Plum Run bucks you off, and you wind up on crutches with a busted leg, and they send you home to get it all better under my tender ministrations …”
“You’re dreaming, my redheaded beauty …”
“I don’t care what happens or how it happens, so long as it’s not a pine box—the next time you set foot in Gettysburg, you have to marry me. Right there and then. And God help you if it takes longer than a year, because if it does, I will fetch North Star here and ride to the battlefield where you’re waging your war to set the captives free, find your regiment and find you, gallop around by your side, dodging minié balls and repeating your commands at the top of my lungs so troops a mile away will know what to do. And as soon as there’s a lull in the fighting, I’ll get a chaplain to marry us as we sit in our saddles—you think I’m joking, but I assure you, the redhead is not joking, sir—and I don’t care which shows up first, a Union chaplain or a Rebel one. Heavens, if neither shows up, I’ll call for a flag of truce and demand Stonewall Jackson marry us—I understand he’s a devout Presbyterian, which ties in well with my Scots heritage—but marry you I shall, though the artillery of both armies should be booming overhead. Are you taking me seriously?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“You don’t. So better you snap a bone and come home to me to recuperate if you don’t want a wild Gaelic woman, with crimson hair blowing about her face as if her head’s on fire, racing down upon you on her horse and waving a sword and singing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’”
She suddenly felt so happy, so free, so strong, so full of thanks to God, so in love, she burst out with a couple verses of the song.
“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible, swift sword.
His truth is marching on.
“Glory! glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! glory! Hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.
“In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free,
While God is marching on.
“Glory! glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! glory! Hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.”
Clarissa laughed, unpinning her hair and tossing it back in a wave of scarlet. “I’m not much of a singer, but I hope you get the idea. I love being in love with you, I love the fact you’re going to set men and women free, I love being hidden away in the woods with you, and I love the ring—when on earth were you planning to put it on my finger?”
He laughed too. “I didn’t want to interrupt your kisses. I like them.”
“Oh, I’m glad you do. We’d be in a bit of a ditch if you didn’t. Well, I’ll be sure to give you a bushel more, kind sir, and one day there will be a kiss on the lips, but first I truly want to wear my ring.”
They were both kneeling in the dirt, facing one another, she in her riding outfit, he in his shirt and pants, and he slipped the ring on her finger just as several robins alighted on a nearby branch. “Red heart, red hair, red robins,” she said, turning her hand back and forth in the mixture of sunlight and shadows that covered her fingers and her ring. Then she embraced him, even more ardently than before, and did not let up, she was certain, for a good half hour. Then she patted her fiancé on the cheek. “Let’s ride along the ridgeline, my love.”
It was late in the afternoon, but the day was still warm and the humidity had not relented, so it was a bit of a shock to emerge from the trees and the shade and feel the force of the summer heat. Crossing from the Round Tops, the two of them made their way along Cemetery Ridge. The sun was on their left shoulders as they walked their horses north toward town, looking below at the sparse number of wagons and riders on Emmitsburg Road, Taneytown Road, and, just past Taneytown and to the east, the Baltimore Pike. The orchard of peach trees and the field of wheat they’d ridden past earlier in the afternoon were green and lush on the valley floor.
“I was last up here during the winter,” Clarissa said, smiling down at both the valley and the glitter of the ring on her finger. “You were still laid up with your wounds. I’m glad we could picnic on the big Round Top while you were in Gettysburg. Heaven knows if we’ll get another opportunity. I’m sure time will fly by faster than a diving hawk.”
“You told me you were up here frequently when you were a girl.”
“Oh yes, Mother and I were up on this ridge every week once spring arrived.”
“I should have hiked over from the seminary more often. It’s a pleasant setting.”
“This is the stone wall I’d pretend I was a mountain goat on. I did climb some of those oaks too.”
“Ha. I never climbed them. I’d bring my Greek New Testament here with the best of intentions, but I’d always wi
nd up dozing in their shade.”
“And no one disturbed you? There are always people at the cemetery in the nicer weather, and families like to walk along the wall like my mother and I did.”
“People are afraid of Lutheran ministers.”
“Even sleeping ones?”
“Especially if the sleeping ones snore.”
“Let’s linger, Iain.” Clarissa slipped out of her saddle and stood holding North Star’s reins. “There’s no one about, so you can hold me here among the oaks if you’d like.”
“That, Miss Ross, is a capital idea.”
“I’m grateful you think so, Mr. Kilgarlin.” She gave him her widest and most dazzling smile as he climbed down from Plum Run, a man-slaying smile that, she reflected, she’d begun to practice in front of the mirror once she’d turned sixteen, but a smile that she had hardly ever used. “You’ve made me the happiest woman in Gettysburg today, oh, probably in all of Pennsylvania and the Union, and the Confederate states as well. There’s not much to be happy about, North or South, but I’m happy that you love me and are coming back to marry me.”
“I’m happy when I make you happy.”
“Well, then, how happy we are.” She stepped into the trees, leading her mare, and looked back over her shoulder, still smiling her long-practiced but rarely used larger-than-life smile. “Let’s take each other in our arms, Iain Kilgarlin. Let’s hold on tight and see if we can’t make an improvement on the lack of happiness in our divided nation.”
“I’m sure President Lincoln would thank us.”
“I’d like to think everybody would thank us, Iain.”
August
Christ’s Church
Gettysburg
A sharp thunderclap resounded just as Clarissa reached the steps leading into Christ’s Church, so she ran all the way up, just as she had done countless times as a child despite reprimands from her mother and father. The clouds burst and showered her the moment she opened the door and ducked inside. She shook her parasol and placed it on the floor in the entryway, leaving it open to dry. Then she readjusted her white bonnet and brushed the sleeves of her white dress with her fingers to get rid of the raindrops. And faced the wide central aisle of the small but beautiful sanctuary, the stained glass windows on either side now running with water from the summer storm.
Fifteen rows of pews. Two pews on each side of the main aisle. Two smaller aisles along the walls and windows. The pews where the gates opened to the main aisle cost more to rent. Her parents paid three dollars and fifty cents every six months. The family beside them, whose gate opened to the smaller aisle along the wall, paid perhaps half of that, she wasn’t sure. Kyle Forrester had been expected to pay fifty cents per school term for a pew next to the west aisle, pews set aside especially for students. But he had often joined her family in their pew close to the front. She walked up the aisle to it, opened the small gate, and smiled. As a girl, she had often swung on the gate, which also got her into trouble, just like running up the church steps did. But nothing got her in so much trouble as the balcony or gallery.
She turned and looked back at it. “Resolved, that the short pews on the left side of the gallery be assigned to people of color”—a decision apparently set in stone in 1835 six years before she was born. How many times had she twisted about in the family pew and asked out loud why the “people of color” couldn’t sit with everyone else and be close to the beautiful windows and the beautiful altar? Her mother hushed her. Adults seated in pews nearby hushed her.
But that was nothing compared to how she felt as a sixteen-year-old when she realized William could not sit with them at the front of the church but had to go to the balcony. “This is an outrage,” she once said out loud, in a particularly fine redheaded mood. “His blood is no different than ours, I’ve seen it. No different than yours, Mr. Miller. Don’t shush me, sir. It’s a free country. Or perhaps it is not a free country. Are the people on the left side of the gallery free? I thought we were Christians, and that there was no slave or free once we were Christians, but all were one in Christ Jesus.”
She had been asked to leave. Her parents were horrified, but she marched down the main aisle and out, quite happily, and attended the German-speaking Lutheran church on York that morning, St. James. She had enough of the heavenly tongue in her head to sing the hymns and follow the sermon. And when the decision was made to ban her from Christ’s Church for a month, she took herself to the Catholic church as well, St. Francis Xavier, and three or four times to the German Reformed Church on High Street, where she often sat with Ginnie Wade and Ginnie’s mother and younger brothers. She had made up her mind to return to Christ’s Church if and when she was ready, not when the church leaders said she had their almighty permission. Thinking about the incident still made her simmer as she gazed up at the balcony. She had only rejoined her mother and father, in their seven-dollar-a-year pew, when the minister, whom she liked, had personally asked her to come back and when William had said he missed worshipping with her.
“You are not worshipping with me, William,” she had retorted. “I might as well be a mile away.”
“I am high and lifted up, Miss Ross,” he had replied, smiling. “And though you may dwell far beneath my lofty status, I can see you very well indeed, and I pray when you pray, sing when you sing, bow my head when you bow yours, and listen to God’s Word when you listen.”
He had made her laugh. And she was back in the Ross pew that Sunday morning.
And working with the Underground Railroad before she was seventeen.
“We shall simply have to pray for you more than we ever have,” her mother said in response to her hotheaded daughter’s demand.
“Then that is a good thing for you both,” Clarissa had replied, tossing her hair. “I have offered the two of you an opportunity to enjoy a closer walk with God.”
She removed her sunbonnet, smoothed back her crimson hair she’d pinned up in a bun, and looked around her at the colorful windows—now radiating light with the sun’s reappearance—as well as the baptismal font, the pulpit, and the pipe organ. And the altar. What would it be like to stand there with Iain and exchange vows? The church where, with all its flaws along with all its goodness, she had grown up? Where Iain, masquerading as Kyle Forrester, had preached his first sermon? And what a sermon it had been.
“What’s going on in that pretty little head of yours?”
She smiled as Iain entered the church and came up the aisle. “More than your pretty little head could ever handle, sir.”
“Do you hold that as a proven fact?”
“I do, sir.” She held out her arms. “But who wants to quarrel with that pretty little man of mine? Especially when he’s dressed up so fine.”
“Your father and William helped me get into all this to begin with. Then your mother appeared to fuss over the details.”
“As shall I. My chevalier.”
They hugged, he gave her a kiss on the cheek, and then she stepped back to survey him.
“Kyle Forrester in a suit and tie. Liberty in a black hood. Iain Kilgarlin in a homespun cotton shirt and pants. And now this. Your latest incarnation—Captain Kilgarlin in the uniform of an officer in the United States Army. Where will it end?”
“In certain moods, Avery, you wouldn’t have it end until I was commanding general of the Army of the Potomac.”
She brushed lint off the epaulet on his left shoulder. “I may have to lower my aim. Once you join your regiment and square off against Thomas Jackson, the conflict may not extend far into ’63.”
“Wishful thinking.”
“Very wishful.”
She continued to scrutinize him. He wore a dark blue frock coat with a single row of nine brass buttons and two gold shoulder straps, pants that were lighter blue, a red sash with a large tassel tied under a wide black belt that held a gold buckle engraved with an eagle, a saber in a scabbard that hung off his left hip, a holster with a revolver on his right hip, a slouch hat with
a gold band and a gold bugle—which she knew meant infantry—and the black boots her father had made for him. The boots were polished so brightly they looked like mirrors, which she had intended, since she was the one who had polished them the night before. She reached over and took his hat off his head. “You’re in the house of God, sir.”
“Thank you for reminding me. The stained glass windows ought to have been my first clue.”
“Hmm. Of course, no kepi for you. You needed something jaunty.”
“You don’t like the slouch hat?”
“Actually, I do. I just don’t want you to stand out, that’s all.”
“Plenty of officers wear slouch hats.”
“So it might take awhile for the sharpshooters to get to you.” She took another step back. “Turn around for me, please, Captain Kilgarlin.”
“Your parents are waiting in the carriage outside.”
“I expect they are.”
“They reminded me we have just thirty minutes.”
“And I want twenty-five of those. Did you already load Plum Run?”
“Yes.”
“How was that?” Clarissa asked him.
“Capital.” Iain grinned. “He took right to his stall and hay.”
“Capital.” She grinned back, mimicking his voice. “Now turn around, please, sir.”
He did as she wished.
“I thought so.” She gave the tails of his frock coat a yank at the back. “I suspected they’d be bunched up.”
“From the carriage, I’m sure.”
“I’m sure. Remind me to straighten them out again at the depot. Where’s your cloak? Your gloves? Your waistcoat?”
“With my luggage.”
“Your gold epaulets? The round fancy ones?”
“Luggage.”
She placed his hat on the floor and took his hands in hers. “I love thee.”
“And I love thee.”
“Are you bound to me?”
“For eternity,” Iain responded.
“Do you take me to be your lawfully wedded wife?” she asked.
