Underground

by Gayle O'Brien

  “Don’t even think about it, Miss Sammy.” The slave strode into the room, grabbed Samantha’s arm and pulled her back in.

  “There ain’t no point tryin’ that again. Your daddy’s got Milo and Zeke down there and they got the same orders as we do.”

  Samantha looked out of the window and down to the ground. Milo and Zeke sat in the front garden, facing Samantha’s bedroom window.

  Oma left the room. Samantha slumped to the floor and put her face in her hands.

  Samantha stayed there all night, failing to figure out what to do. She had to convince her father that marrying Royal wasn’t what was best for Mont Verity. Or, for that matter, Samantha. Running away was not an option and her father knew it. She loved Mont Verity too much to ever leave it voluntarily. She briefly contemplated refusing to attend the cotillion unless her father changed his mind, then conceded that such a move would be disastrous. Whether she liked it or not, her mother was right: a debutante’s cotillion set the tone for how she would be perceived for the rest of her life. There had to be another way.

  Samantha heard a click at her window. She got up and peered out, just as a small pebble hit the glass. Outside the night sky was letting in the blue of dawn. Down below, Milo and Zeke were asleep in their chairs. In front of them was Eli.

  “Eli!” she exclaimed. He put his finger to his lips. He motioned for her to open her window. She did it slowly and quietly. Eli held up his slingshot. Samantha smiled. It was the one sport in which Eli was a good shot.

  She saw him pull something from his pocket. From where she stood, she couldn’t tell if it was a piece of paper or a scrap of cloth. She watched him wrap it around a small object, then shoot it towards her window. Samantha held out her hands to catch it, but misjudged its weight. It sailed between her open palms and hit her hard in the chest. Only the knowledge that Oma and Chimi were outside her door kept her from cursing.

  She lit the candle by her bedside table and saw what Eli had delivered – a note wrapped around a rock the size of an apple. She unwrinkled the damp paper, held it up to the dim light and squinted at the inky scrawl.

  I overheard it all – I know they want you to marry Royal. I want you to know that I WILL NOT LET THIS HAPPEN. I know how to change your father’s mind. But I need your help. Meet me tomorrow at midnight, by the stream. I’ll explain everything.

  Samantha ran back to the window. Eli was gone. The hand holding the note fell to her side. How could he ask her to meet him tomorrow night, of all nights? It was her cotillion, for goodness sake. How would she escape? She hadn’t been able to escape past four incompetent slaves this past night; how was she supposed to steal away when every person – guest and slave – would be watching her? And how on earth would she get to the stream in that blasted hoop skirt?

  “Men,” she sighed in frustration. “They never think of these things.”

  She read the note again.

  I know how to change your father’s mind.

  “I hope you do,” she whispered.

  She held the note over the candle, letting it burn in her hand.

  “I will meet you,” she said, forcing her resolve to harden. “I’ll figure out a way.”

  She threw what was left of the note into the fireplace and watched it wither into ash. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed six.

  Her mother then entered the room, fully dressed and painted. She danced across the room to close the window, her hoop skirt swaying.

  “Oh good,” she said, cheerfully. “You’re up. Oma will be here with your breakfast shortly, then we’ll put your hair into wraps. Then there’s the interview with the Beckwith Station Gazette, putting you into your corset, painting your face – oh, we’ve got so much to do.” She put her hands on Samantha’s shoulders and made Samantha meet her eyes.

  “Remember this day,” she said. “Because after today, your life will never be the same again.”

  Chapter 7

  Annie emptied the bag of clean laundry onto her bed and rifled through the pile. If she was really going to Theo’s house she wanted to make herself presentable. She threw off the two-day-old button-down shirt and picked up a long-sleeved V-neck. Once it was on, she checked herself in the mirror. It was tighter than she remembered, clinging to her waist and chest.

  Defying the cold draft coming in from the thin window, she took off all her clothes. Goosebumps rippled over her skin as she inspected her full shape. There was undeniably much less to her than there used to be, but somehow there still seemed to be too much.

  She shivered and pulled the V-neck back on. It was too revealing on its own. She didn’t want Theo to think she was the kind of girl who flaunted herself. She pulled on a clean button-down shirt, a bulky blue sweater and her jeans, now satisfied she was well hidden underneath the layers.

  She tried to remember the last time she’d dressed up to meet a boy. The answer, she realized, was never. Girls dress to impress other girls, she thought. In Virginia, Annie dressed in what she knew would meet with Jenna’s approval. It had never occurred to her to change or challenge it. She realized for the first time that she was now free from those restrictions, at least until this nightmare was over.

  Her stomach roared. It was nearly three in the afternoon, the time she usually allowed herself one meal. But she needed to get to Theo’s house. She would just have to eat later.

  Annie went to get her mittens off the radiator in the kitchen. From the living room came the low rumble of the television she’d found in a closet and reluctantly set up, knowing it would never be turned off and give her mother even less of a reason to get off the couch. She wondered if her mother remembered not allowing that in their old home, how if Annie had the television on for too long her mother would come in and turn it off, telling her to go rot her brain somewhere else. It was typical of grown-ups. The rules they threw around like boomerangs never came back on them.

  She poked her head into the living room. To her surprise, her mother was sitting up, her legs crossed and the blanket on her lap.

  “Mom?”

  She looked over at Annie and smiled faintly. “Oh, hi sweetie.”

  “You okay?”

  Her mother looked confused. “I think I’m hungry.”

  “Really? That’s great! Do you want something?”

  “I don’t know. Anything. Please.”

  Annie went into the kitchen, turned on the oven and took her last burrito out of the freezer. Great, she thought, now I’ll have to buy more food when I’m at Theo’s store. She had been hoping to use it as an excuse to go back there tomorrow. Why did it suddenly feel like she was back in Virginia and her mother was getting in the way of what Annie wanted to do?

  She went back into the living room. “There’s a burrito on the counter. The oven should be warmed up in about ten minutes.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just to the store. We’re almost out of food.” She gritted her teeth. “Is there anything you want me to get?”

  “How much money is there?”

  “A thousand, at least.”

  “It’s going to run out soon,” she said.

  Annie crossed her arms. “What do you want from the store?”

  Her mother looked out of the window. “Where are we again?”

  “Vermont. Battenkill, Vermont.”

  “How much longer?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think we’re safe here?”

  “As safe as we can be. No one knows we’re here. Our names aren’t on anything. If he finds us, it’ll be pure luck.”

  “Good.” She pulled the blanket up to her shoulders.

  For a brief moment Annie considered telling her mother where she was going and why. She and her mother had never had much in common, but she thought Samantha Weston and the room under the stairs might be something that would spark her mother’s interest. After a few brief seconds of contemplation, she decided against it. The less her mother knew about what Annie did, the better
.

  “So, you’re okay waiting until the oven warms up?”

  “What? Oh, yeah. Then what do I do?”

  Annie felt a familiar rage seep into her bones. “The burrito needs twenty-five minutes. The timer’s broken, so you just need to keep an eye on it.”

  “I think I’ll wait until you’re back,” she said sleepily.

  You can’t bring yourself to put a burrito in the oven? Annie thought. “I might be a while. It’s a long walk,” she lied.

  “No rush. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Annie stomped into the kitchen and turned the oven off. She didn’t want to rush her time with Theo because her mother refused to make her own food. Even here, even now, somehow her mother managed to ruin everything.

  “I’m glad I didn’t tell her what I was doing,” she muttered to herself as she opened the front door. “I’m taking as much time at Theo’s as I need to. She can wait for me for a change.”

  Annie entered the Store at Five Corners and saw Theo behind the glass deli case, absorbed in the process of making a sandwich. She suddenly felt giddy and nervous, like every move she made or word she spoke could make him change his mind about wanting her there.

  “Hi,” she said, approaching the counter. Theo looked up.

  “Hey! I was just thinking about you.”

  “You were?”

  “I was trying to figure out what a girl like you would want for a snack.” He motioned to the contents behind the deli counter. “You can have anything you want. We’ve got ham, turkey, roast beef, hummus, tuna, cheddar, American, provolone, Monterey Jack, lettuce, tomatoes, sprouts and onions. And for bread we’ve got white, wheat, multigrain, oatmeal, rye or pumpernickel.”

  Annie’s mouth watered. It all looked too good to be true, all that food. But accepting it felt wrong, even though she knew the freezer at home was bare. The food regime she’d established a year ago was so ingrained she almost feared veering from it. It was better to stay in control.

  “I just ate. What are you making?”

  “Theo’s Triple,” he grinned. “Three of everything: ham, turkey and roast beef in between one slice of rye, one slice of pumpernickel, one slice of oatmeal, and all the trimmings.”

  He put the sandwich on a paper plate and arranged the other sandwiches in the deli case.

  “You do that like you’ve had practice,” she said.

  “Yeah, I guess you could say my brothers and I learned to crawl back here.”

  “How many brothers do you have?”

  “Two. They’re both older. One is a junior at Wesleyan and the other is in law school at Northeastern. What about you? Any brothers or sisters lurking in the bowels of higher education?”

  “No,” she said.

  He motioned with his head for her to follow. “This way.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “The computer is in my bedroom.”

  Annie gulped. His bedroom?

  Annie followed Theo through the back of the store and up two sets of wooden stairs. His bedroom was the attic room on the third floor of the house, its walls sloping with the roof line. A bed without a frame sat in the middle of the floor, covered in a blue and green flannel quilt and various wool blankets. His desk was a thick piece of oak clamped to two weathered trestles. A poster of Ziggy Stardust hung over his bed, the edges weathered and worn.

  She went to the dormer window and looked out. Theo’s top-floor vantage point provided a long view of the property behind the store. There were at least two acres of lawn. In the middle was a tired red barn. Its loft hatch lay open and Annie could see small hay bales through the gap.

  “What’s that over there?” said Annie, pointing to bumps in the landscape.

  Theo looked over her shoulder. “That’s the old town cemetery. Some of the graves go back to the 1700s. The more recent ones are from the 1940s. After that they opened the new cemetery in the middle of town. But most of my family are in there.”

  “Which Theodore Mason are you again?”

  “I’m the fifth. Or the sixth.” He laughed. “I can’t remember.”

  “Guess you’ll just have to count the graves.”

  “I suppose. Although lately I don’t like looking at them.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s kind of weird to see so many gravestones that have my name on them.”

  As she turned something caught her eye. On his chest of drawers was a small black and white photo in a silver frame. A woman smiled through the shades of gray, clearly Theo’s mother. The eyes, the high cheekbones and the perfectly round dimples – all of this he inherited from her. She was young in the picture – mid-twenties, perhaps. Her smile stretched from one thick curtain of hair to the other.

  Annie felt the heat of Theo’s body behind her and wished he wouldn’t stand so close.

  “My mother,” he said, reaching around her to pick up the photograph.

  “She’s beautiful.”

  “Thanks.”

  There was a sadness in his voice that rang familiar, but she struggled to place it. Then she saw his notes from the Town Hall on his bed and remembered: she’d heard it when Shirley mentioned his family. She wanted to know more, but didn’t dare ask. It might make him think he could ask questions of his own.

  Theo put the picture down and went to his computer. His computer, Annie thought. She felt in her pocket for the memory stick; it was there, like always. Maybe she’d be here long enough that he’d go to the bathroom or something. She only needed a five-minute window to do what she had to do.

  She thought about the different ways she could trick him into leaving, then stopped. Theo was her only friend. Friends didn’t do such things. No matter how badly she needed his computer, she didn’t want to take advantage of him. I’ll just have to come up with something else, she thought as she sat on his bed.

  “So, have you found anything on Samantha Weston?”

  Theo jiggled his mouse and brought the computer to life. The excitement in his voice was palpable.

  “Okay, so I started by looking for Beckwith Station, Virginia.” He motioned for Annie to look at the screen. It was a modern day map of Virginia. Her eyes zeroed in on Clinton, sitting just below the Beltway.

  “That’s my home!” she wanted to scream. “That’s where I want to be, not here in the Ice Age. I want my friends, I want my house. I want everything back the way it was.”

  “The thing is,” said Theo, “Beckwith Station doesn’t exist.”

  “What? How is that possible?”

  “Well, here’s the thing I found out about the South. In the old days, before the Civil War, they didn’t really have towns. They had cities, like Charleston and Atlanta, but outside of cities they really only had plantations and farms. It’s only after the war ended that a lot of the plantation land started to be built up as towns. But before that, addresses were linked to railroad stations, which is why Samantha’s mailing address said ‘near Beckwith Station’.”

  Annie felt stupid for not knowing this. She’d lived in Virginia – how could she not know all this? “So Beckwith Station is not a town?”

  “No.”

  “What is it now?”

  He looked at the computer screen. “It was in an area that’s now known as Clinton County.”

  The room swayed.

  “You okay?” said Theo.

  “Sure.”

  “Now, Beckwith Station – the actual train station – was destroyed in a slave rebellion right around the start of the Civil War. The area around Beckwith Station was renamed during Reconstruction.”

  Annie tried to figure out why she felt she was in a bad dream.

  “What about Mont Verity? Did you find anything on that?”

  Theo grinned and picked up a notebook covered in blue-inked handwriting. “Mont Verity was built by an Abraham Weston, and when he died it went to his son, Sanford. He married Madeline Jacobs in 1829 and they had two daughters. The eldest, Georgia, died in 1856, but the youngest was a
lovely little girl called …”

  “Samantha!”

  “Yes.”

  Annie couldn’t stop herself. “Is the house still there? Did you find out why she left? How did she end up here? Where did she go after? When did she die?”

  Theo laughed. “Easy there, cowgirl. I’ve only been at this for an hour. There’s still a lot more I can do though. But in the meantime, I think you should see this.”

  He opened a document and hit print.

  “Right before you got here I found this website. It’s all about old Southern society, so it has minutes of Plantation Owners’ Society meetings and reports from slave auctions. But then there’s this one section that is old who’s-who announcements about cotillions and weddings.”

  He took the paper off the printer and held it up proudly. “On March 6, 1861, Samantha Weston had a debutante ball.”

  Chapter 8

  Beckwith Station Gazette

  Society News and Views

  March 7, 1861

  Cotillion season had its grandest coming out so far this year when, yesterday, Samantha Ashton Weston, only daughter of Sanford and Madeline (née Jacobs) Weston, was introduced to society.

  The young debutante wore a Charles Worth original gown of champagne silk and tulle, embellished with embroidered pink rosettes. Hot-house roses and baby’s breath were woven into her coiffure, which this society reporter deemed a magnificent defiance of gravity.

  The first guests to arrive were Major Louis Fabre of Dominion Royale, his wife Narcissus (née Main) and their eldest son, Royal. Other guests and eligible bachelors travelled from near and far, with Colonel Jeremiah Stanton making the furthest journey from the Carolinas.

  Miss Weston graciously met and greeted every single guest, engaging each of them with a few minutes’ pleasantries. She remained at the door for over two hours without ever breaking her stance or smile.

  Dinner was served promptly at 8 o’clock. Master and Missus Weston put on a sumptuous feast of roast pig, honeyed swede, collard greens, tomatoes and beans, and baked rhubarb and cream. Every one of Sanford Weston’s slaves rushed to ensure the comfort of each guest. Never has this society reporter been offered so many mint juleps!