Sarah's Ground (9781439115855)

by Rinaldi, Ann

  And in the chilled autumn, regiments were still encamped in tents on the hills. The smell of things burned lingered in the air. There were broken bales of hay in the streets. And I saw three or four dead horses.

  I went straight to the Riggs bank and tied my horse in front. I brought my basket of eggs with me. Mr. Riggs was waiting.

  He came over to me and took my hand, and showed me where to set the basket down. He picked up an egg, held it to the light, sniffed it, and exclaimed how fresh it seemed. Then he took the basket into the back room and I waited.

  A clerk smiled at me. “Isn’t it a shame about the fire,” he said.

  He told me then what had happened and why the city smelled. Near the observatory, in the corrals, thousands of horses were stabled for the army. One evening the stables caught fire, and it began to spread. Hundreds of soldiers and citizens alike volunteered to cut loose the horses. Once loosed, the poor animals ran through the dark, to the common along Rock Creek, and into Washington’s streets. Wild and frightened, they galloped down Massachusetts Avenue. Some ran over the canal bridges into the Seventh Ward. Some ended up in gullies. Two hundred died in the stables.

  “War,” I said. “It kills not only those on the battlefield.” And I felt sad for the horses and angry for the stupidity of those who were supposed to care for them.

  “Is that why everyone seems so cast down in the city?” I asked the clerk.

  “No,” he said. “They are cast down because of recent battle losses. Because there are no orders to go into winter quarters.”

  We talked awhile longer. I wanted to appear like an ordinary citizen just waiting for her payment for the eggs.

  Then Mr. Riggs came back, handed me my basket and my money for the eggs, and walked me outside. There he gave me the key to the safety-deposit box to give to Mr. Burke.

  “You have done a wonderful thing,” he said. “You have saved the money and bonds for John Augustine’s children. Between what you are doing to save Mount Vernon and what you did with this money, Miss Tracy, the Washington family owes you much.”

  “They owe me nothing,” I told him. But there was a warm feeling of peace inside me, a feeling of lightness, finally, about what I was doing.

  I decided, on the ride home, that even if Upton Herbert knew what my family had done, arranging for me to come to Mount Vernon because of him, I would not leave. Mayhap this has been all their idea, but it has become my life. I have made a promise to people, indeed to the Washingtons, coming here.

  My parents could not begin to know the wherefores and whys of it. They are mine alone, to keep and nurture. I’ll be here in the spring to plant the gardens, to sweep the winter out of the corners of the grand old house.

  I’ll be here as long as Miss Cunningham needs me.

  Now all I need to do is make things right with Upton.

  Twenty

  I must write the rest of it before I go to bed this night, though the hour is late. I cannot sleep, for I must capture my feelings before the morning light seeks them out and renders them weak and without meaning.

  I did not intend to confront Upton immediately. I intended to go about my business quietly and efficiently. I delivered the key back to Mr. and Mrs. Burke, and by the time I returned home it was near eight at night.

  It was dark when I drove the buggy into the west gate. In back of the house Upton was waiting for me. Once again he was angry.

  First he asked if I was all right. When I said I was, he inquired about the nature of my day. And when I told him, he exploded.

  “Money and bonds into Washington?” he repeated. “Are you daft, Sarah?”

  “I suppose so. In many ways.”

  Dandridge came to take the horse and buggy. And while he was with us, Upton said nothing. But he paced in the dark. Priscilla was waiting in the shadows of the doorway. “They’ve kept supper for you,” Upton said finally when Dandridge had left.

  “Good.” I started to make for the back door, but he stayed me with a hand on my arm.

  “You can’t do these things, Sarah. I worry. I feel as if I am responsible for you.”

  I looked at him and he at me. And I knew then that he knew of the arrangement, that he’d known all along. And more than that I saw something in his eyes that I’d seen before but never recognized.

  I saw that he wished to speak of it.

  The knowing sat heavy on him. And he wanted to share it with me. But he didn’t know how.

  I told him he was not responsible for me. I told him I was my own person.

  “I worry about you, chasing all about as you do. How do you think I feel? I can’t even go into Alexandria anymore. And it was once my hometown.”

  I told him I was sorry. He nodded solemnly, wanting to say more. I waited.

  “I am troubled by things I cannot speak of, Sarah,” he said then. “I have come to hold you in great esteem, and I would speak to you of them.”

  The lingering touch of Southern accent, the way he stood there in the dark, which was relieved only by the burning torches he’d set in their holders this side of the bowling green, the thrust of his strong chin, the way he held his head, all made me say what I never meant to say.

  “Tell me of them.”

  “It’s late,” he said. “You are tired.”

  But I persisted. “Is it about what was in the letter I received from Mary the other day?” I asked him.

  He said he did not know the contents of the letter. But I suspect he did, for I think mayhap Mary had told him of the arrangement.

  “I think you do,” I said. “Leastways, I think you know what Mary was keeping from me until that letter.”

  He nodded yes. That is all. He just nodded yes. Slowly.

  My heart leaped and expanded in my chest. Oh, Upton, I thought. And I said aloud, “So, all this time you knew.”

  He said yes. All this time he knew.

  I apologized for my family. “They treat me as a horse,” I said. “A prize horse they are auctioning off. They send me around as if to auctions, to the highest bidder.”

  “You are a prize,” he said. “But don’t think of yourself as a horse, or someone to be auctioned. All families do this with young women. In the South, too.”

  “I’m sorry they involved you,” I told him. “I am embarrassed about it. I hope you don’t feel …” I paused, seeking the right word. “Obligated in any way.”

  He told me not to be sorry. Or embarrassed. He said he was obligated. And then he paused. “I’m honored to be considered,” he said.

  “Well, I suppose a Southern gentleman would say such a thing,” I told him with a little laugh. “It’s too bad you are spoken for, Upton.” I felt safe saying it. I felt sophisticated. After all, he was spoken for, wasn’t he?

  “I’m not spoken for,” he said.

  I felt hit in the face with cold water. My embarrassment went from my head to my toes. “But you said there was someone you cared for.”

  “There is,” he told me.

  “Oh.” I said I supposed she was the younger sister of the people caring for his house. Or someone like that.

  “She is someone like that,” he said. “She is caring for a house. The trouble is, she is blind.”

  I wished there were a fence post to hold on to. I wished I were a fence post. Was he saying what I thought he was saying?

  He was. And he did. It was the next thing he said, as a matter of fact. And no, I shan’t write it here. Mayhap this is a journal, but who knows, my daughter might read it someday. Upton’s and my daughter.

  I will say, for my children’s sake, that he did take me in his arms then. And that the darkness became light.

  Then he said that we must be careful. And we must talk about what we would do next. And I agreed. Oh yes, I agreed.

  We decided we will go along as we have been. I will not leave. I cannot leave, even though it might be the proper thing to do, given the circumstances between us.

  We decided not to tell anyone. We decided t
o act, every moment we are together, as proper as we can, so as not to bring down any shame on what we are doing here. Or on the Association.

  Oh, we might have touched hands when no one was looking. Or stolen a kiss in a dark corner. But no more. Ever. Not until all this is over. The war, everything.

  After all, the first thing we must do is honor our responsibilities. People are depending on us.

  As I know Upton, he cannot act with anything less than honor. It is part of why I love him, I think.

  It will be difficult for us. We both agreed on that. But look at the sacrifices and the difficulties others are experiencing because of this dreadful war.

  I think, after all, that I have finally found my part in it.

  A ll through the long and dismal war Sarah and Upton continued to do their jobs, retained their dignity and honor, and never brought a word of criticism to the Association by their actions. And they were closely watched by those who would disrupt their goals.

  They scrambled for food, welcomed soldiers, acted as host and hostess, received visitors, and made and sold coffee bean bracelets, bricks, and flowers to keep the place going. Sarah wrote to Miss Cunningham that the visiting soldiers were “crazy for flowers.”

  The Mount Vernon boat ran again in spring of 1862. General McClellan was relieved of his command and replaced by General Ambrose Burnside, who moved his troops south through the Mount Vernon area in December of 1862 to attack General Lee. But the South won this battle, and the Union army retreated north, and Sarah and Upton and others at Mount Vernon could hear their sad passage as they returned with wounded in the wagons and defeat on their faces.

  General Burnside was replaced by General Joseph Hooker, and in the spring of 1863 the Union army suffered a severe defeat at Chancellorsville, forty miles from Mount Vernon. General Hooker was replaced by General George Meade. Southern general Stonewall Jackson was killed. And the carnage went on.

  At Mount Vernon, Sarah Tracy and Upton Herbert continued to keep the place safe, but every time a Northern commander was replaced with a new one, Sarah had to appeal to the new commander for a promise that Mount Vernon would remain a sacred and neutral ground, the only neutral ground in the country during the sad and destructive war.

  All around the Mount Vernon area, property, fences, and crops were destroyed by the war. Horses were stolen in the night, and the Quakers especially suffered from such depredations.

  In a letter to Miss Cunningham, Sarah wrote: “You have had no army twice and thrice through your place, every stalk of grain and hay, and every barn burned. Every hog, sheep and cow killed. Every pound of wheat and corn taken away and every horse. Every carriage carried off, and when they could not be, the wheels taken off and burned. I have heard nothing else for three years. But all we see who have lost everything and have to begin life anew, are cheerful and go to work like men and women. They have tried, and do try, to put aside the past and look only to the future. Alas, it is very hard for some.”

  She was speaking of her neighbors. Mount Vernon remained intact.

  In 1865 the war ended, with the North victorious. Then came the long walk home for many soldiers, and those who could stopped at Mount Vernon to visit, to see General Washington’s home and reaffirm their faith in their country and themselves.

  Sarah continued to write to Miss Cunningham, making her daily reports. She made more than eight hundred bouquets of flowers to sell to soldiers to raise money, enough to put a new zinc roof on the tomb. She wrote, “The plants and flower seeds I bought with my own money.”

  Sarah Tracy left Mount Vernon in 1867. Her work was over there.

  Upton Herbert continued as superintendent for one more year.

  In 1872 Upton Herbert and Sarah Tracy were married in Philadelphia. No one knows why they waited so long after the war. There is much about this story that is not known, as with all stories. They made their home, for fourteen years, at Mr. Herbert’s Bleak House, which was five miles from the Fairfax courthouse.

  In 1886 the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association acquired a real appreciation of what had happened at Mount Vernon during the war years and how Sarah Tracy and Upton Herbert had played out a real life story there. They wrote to Sarah Herbert and asked if she would send to them any written account she had of those years. Sarah wrote back that their house had burned the Friday before Christmas in 1885, and they were living with Colonel Arthur Herbert, Upton’s brother, near Alexandria.

  She wrote that although silver, some private papers, clothing, and furniture were saved, the trunk on the second floor, in which were her papers from her years at Mount Vernon, had burned. How strange to think that throughout all those years she spent at Mount Vernon, in the middle of a terrible war, it remained safe, yet in peacetime it was lost when their own house burned!

  All that remained were the letters she had written to Miss Cunningham.

  Sarah Tracy and Upton Herbert are buried in Ivy Cemetery, in Fairfax County, Virginia. They had no children.

  The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association still exists and runs General Washington s home today.

  T his novel is based on the story of Sarah Tracy at Mount Vernon. For the sake of story I have moved some characters around, changed the chronology of some of the events that happened to them, and given them motivations, thoughts, and emotions that research does not provide.

  But all the major happenings in the book really occurred. I made up none of them, except for the fight between Sarah and Mary. This was for the sake of story.

  Sarah Tracy did write daily to Miss Cunningham. Her letters are preserved in the book Mount Vernon: The Civil War Years by Dorothy Troth Muir. This is one of the many books I used for research.

  All the others I used as an updraft and flew with them on my own.

  I am grateful to the writers of all the books I mention in my bibliography for providing the research I needed. But as a writer of fiction, I gave Sarah and Upton and the others a life they did not have in research. This is the job of a fiction writer, to create a satisfying story. And this story—of Sarah Tracy at a falling-down Mount Vernon, working with Upton Herbert not only to repair it, but to keep it from ruin and make it the only neutral ground in America during the Civil War—haunted me until I actually wrote it.

  Bibliography

  Blair, William. Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

  Boyce, Burke. Man from Mount Vernon. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1991.

  Dalzell, Robert F, Jr. , and Lee Baldwin Dalzell. George Washington’s Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

  Greene, Constance McLaughlin. Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800-1950. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962.

  Johnson, Gerald W. Mount Vernon: The Story of a Shrine. New York: Random House, 1953.

  Leech, Margaret. Reveille in Washinton, 1860-1865. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1941.

  Muir, Dorothy Troth. Mount Vernon: The Civil War Years. Mount Vernon, Virginia: The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, 1993.