Angel of the Battlefield

by Ann Hood

  “I thought . . . ,” Felix began.

  “You tried to get back, didn’t you?” Maisie said. “Without even discussing it with me?”

  Clara looked bewildered. “But how could you go home from here?” she asked. “Did you intend on stealing one of our horses?”

  As if he understood, the black horse lifted his head and neighed. “No, no,” Felix said. “Nothing like that, Clara.”

  He took his sister’s arm and pulled her away from Clara to talk in private.

  “You said we would stay one night and then go back home.”

  “You tried to trick me,” Maisie said.

  “Because I knew you were going to keep stalling and stalling, and we’d never leave here,” Felix said.

  “I think somehow we came here to meet her,” Maisie said thoughtfully. “I don’t know why yet, but I don’t want to leave before we figure it out.”

  “See?” Felix said. “You’re stalling already.”

  “I’m not, really. Think about it. Why did we land here of all places? Why did Clara Barton find us in that barn? There must be a reason, Felix.”

  “Mom has probably called the police by now,” he said. “She’s probably worried sick.”

  “I’ll make a deal with you—” Maisie began.

  “No!” Felix said, louder than he intended.

  From across the meadow, Clara looked over at them.

  Lowering his voice, he said, “No more deals.” He realized that Maisie had let go of her corner of the paper. He pulled it close to his chest.

  “You go then,” Maisie said. “Leave me here, and you go back.”

  “Without you?” Felix said.

  “Please, Felix,” she said, “just one more day. We’ll figure out why we came here, and then we’ll go back. I promise.”

  Despite his better judgment, Felix nodded.

  “Thank you,” Maisie said and gave him a big hug.

  What Maisie didn’t tell her brother was that she had thought the same thing he had: If they both held on to the paper at the same time, they would go back home. That was how they got here in the first place. Surely the same thing worked in reverse? But she and Felix had both grasped the paper and nothing had happened. They were still here on Clara Barton’s farm in 1836. So how exactly were they going to get home?

  “I will bring back our dinner,” Clara said, getting them settled in the same place where they’d eaten the day before.

  In 1836, dinner meant lunch. In the evening, you ate supper. Felix had figured that out yesterday, but it still sounded odd to him.

  “Thanks, Clara,” he said.

  As soon as she left, Felix looked at Maisie and said firmly, “We need a plan.”

  Maisie surprised him by agreeing. “Let’s look at the paper,” she said. “I bet that’s the key.”

  Maisie sat cross-legged on the grass, the paper open on her lap. “Dorence Atwater,” she said finally, looking up at Felix. “Does that name ring a bell?

  He shook his head.

  “Do you know where Andersonville is?”

  “Near here?” he guessed.

  Maisie chewed her bottom lip and kept reading.

  Impatient, Felix asked her, “Who is this Dorence Atwater? What does he have to do with Clara Barton? Or us for that matter?”

  She didn’t answer him.

  “Maisie! Give me the letter and let me figure it out.”

  Slowly, Maisie lifted her head again and looked right into Felix’s eyes. “It’s just terrible,” she managed to say.

  “What? What is it?”

  His sister handed the letter to Felix. “See for yourself,” she said.

  Felix read. The letter, written by Dorence Atwater, was addressed directly to Clara Barton!

  Back in The Treasure Chest, they didn’t have the time to make out the fancy writing.

  “Maisie,” Felix said, “I think this letter is for Clara. It says he copied this list of the dead Civil War soldiers in Andersonville, Georgia. And that he managed to get it out without being discovered by the Andersonville officials.”

  He continued to read some more, then told Maisie, “He took it with him through the enemy lines when he was released from there as a prisoner of war. Having been afraid that the names of the dead would never get to their families, it was his intention to publish it.”

  Now it was Felix’s turn to look up from the letter.

  “Maisie, this says that there are thirteen thousand names on this list,” he said quietly.

  Maisie gasped.

  “And it’s dated 1864,” Felix said.

  “That’s thirty years from now,” Maisie said.

  “Andersonville was a prisoner of war camp during the Civil War,” Felix said, pointing to the letter. He read from it, “‘People are dying all around me. I can do nothing to save them, but I can let their families know exactly where they are buried—where to put flowers and pray.’”

  “So this Atwater guy went to Clara Barton with this list he snuck out of the camp and asked her to help him notify their families?”

  “I think so,” Felix said.

  “That’s an awful lot of people,” Maisie added.

  The enormity of this settled around them as thick and heavy as the August humidity.

  Clara came skipping toward them with the basket of food and the quilt. Watching her, a strange feeling came over both Maisie and Felix. Here was a young girl, young like they were. Yet in their hands they held a letter that told them that somehow she would be brought into the horrors of the Civil War. To what extent, they couldn’t even guess. But the idea was overwhelming. Why did Dorence Atwater approach Clara Barton for help? Had she done something else during the war that made him believe she was the person to assist him? They couldn’t help but think of their own futures. What paths would they travel in the next three decades? What mark would they make?

  “Why do you two look so solemn?” Clara asked.

  Unable to speak, Felix shrugged and carefully rolled up the letter. He wondered what would happen if he threw the thing away. Maybe that would save Clara from whatever horrors of war she might encounter. He wanted her to always be a shy and generous tomboy, pitching a ball on a late summer afternoon.

  Maisie looked at Clara now as if she were seeing her for the first time.

  “Clara,” Maisie said, “I believe you are the type of person who would help anyone who came to your door for a favor, no matter how daunting or enormous that favor was.”

  “I think so,” Clara said, after considering the question.

  “Do you think that’s your fate? To help others?” Maisie asked.

  Felix looked at his sister in admiration. She was trying to piece together both the young Clara and the woman she would become.

  “I do believe I would like to do that, yes. Nursing my brother these past few years brought me great satisfaction. My parents worry, though, that my shyness will prevent me from doing anything of much importance.”

  Impulsively, Maisie reached out to Clara, grabbing her hand. “Oh no, Clara!” she said emphatically. “I don’t know exactly how or why, but I believe you will do something important. Maybe even many important things that will help thousands of people.”

  Clara squeezed Maisie’s hand. “You are so peculiar that I almost believe you,” she said, studying Maisie’s face carefully.

  “Yesterday you told us that you wanted to be a nurse,” Felix said. “Like your aunt.”

  “My great-aunt, actually,” Clara said. She began to unpack the basket, placing plates with slices of cold ham and thick-cut bread and cheese on the quilt. “She’s a midwife in Maine, but it’s so rural there that she does all kinds of medical work. She delivers babies and heals wounds and saves lives every day.”

&nbs
p; As Felix took this information in, he tried to imagine the connection between Clara’s passion for healing and tending the sick and what lay ahead for her.

  “Your great-aunt inspires you,” Maisie surprised him by saying.

  “She’s a gift, I think. She’s accomplished so many things, impacted so many lives, and is still alive to share those stories with me.” Clara cut a piece of ham and took a bite. “Do you have someone like that in your life?”

  Maisie thought of Great-Aunt Maisie, sitting in the nursing home. Every time they had visited, she’d tried to hug Maisie, but Maisie shrugged out of it. Her cloudy-blue eyes had struggled to make contact with Maisie’s, and Maisie always looked away. When they’d visited just the other day, Great-Aunt Maisie had even tried to talk to Maisie about Elm Medona, and Maisie had dismissed her like she always did. But thinking back on it now, it seemed that Great-Aunt Maisie had actually been trying to tell Maisie and Felix something.

  “We have a great-aunt, too,” Felix was saying. “She’s old and sick, but when she was younger, she led a very interesting life, I think.”

  “Does she prefer not to talk about it?”

  “No,” Maisie said, “we prefer not to listen.”

  Clara’s face changed. “Not listen?”

  “Sitting here,” Maisie said, “I’m thinking about her in her wheelchair, trying to talk to us, and I feel just awful.”

  “Well,” Clara said, “it isn’t too late, is it? When you get home you shall go directly to Great-Aunt—”

  “Maisie,” Maisie said. “I’m named for her.”

  “Great-Aunt Maisie,” Clara said softly, clearly touched by this. “You will go to her and hear all the wonderful things she has to tell you.”

  “The last time we saw her,” Felix said, “I had the strangest feeling that she wanted to tell us something important about Elm Medona.”

  “You didn’t tell me that,” Maisie said.

  “What is Elm Medona?” asked Clara.

  “Elm Medona,” Felix said, “is the name of the house we live in. It’s actually Great-Aunt Maisie’s house.”

  “Oh! She lives with you!”

  “No,” Maisie said, “she lives in a hospital that takes care of her.”

  “Do you know that kind of tree, Clara?” Felix asked. “Elm Medona?”

  Clara shook her head. “They don’t grow here in Oxford.”

  Maisie slathered a piece of bread with butter and began to eat it. Felix could tell that her mind was working, trying to figure out all of these mysteries. Elm Medona and Dorence Atwater and, most of all, Clara Barton.

  “Clara,” Felix said.

  She looked up and smiled her shy smile at him.

  “We have something that we think belongs to you.”

  His eyes met Maisie’s, and she nodded.

  “Remember that paper we lost?”

  “The one you found in the field?” Clara said. “I remember.”

  “Well . . .” He hesitated. How much should he say? What did he know, really? The letter would speak for itself. But what would Clara make of it when the Civil War was still years and years away? What would she make of the date almost three decades from now?

  “What about the letter?” Clara said. “Is it a letter for me?”

  “Yes,” Maisie said firmly. “It is.”

  She reached over and took it from the place where Felix had laid it down, holding it out for Clara.

  With a small but quizzical smile, Clara took it.

  “How peculiar,” she said.

  That was the last thing Maisie and Felix heard Clara Barton say.

  As soon as she said it, the air changed. A warm wind whipped around them. It smelled of everything good: cinnamon and Christmas trees and salty ocean air; fresh lemons and hot chocolate and a flower garden. It smelled like home.

  Maisie gripped Felix’s hand and held on tightly as they lifted and rolled.

  “Clara!” Felix called. “Thank you!” But he wasn’t at all certain that she heard him.

  With a soft thud he landed facedown on the Oriental carpet in The Treasure Chest.

  “We’re back,” Maisie said.

  But Felix couldn’t tell if she was glad or disappointed or simply as surprised as he was. He got to his feet and looked around the cluttered room. Everything seemed exactly as it had been when they entered.

  “How did that happen?” Maisie asked.

  “Beats me.”

  “We weren’t holding the letter,” Maisie said, thinking out loud. “Clara was.”

  “Do you think that’s what sent us back? Giving it to Clara?”

  “Maybe,” Maisie said.

  “I’m sorry,” Felix said. “I know you weren’t ready to leave.”

  “After we read the letter,” she said, “I didn’t really want to stick around. All those dead soldiers. The war coming. At least here I don’t know what to expect, and that feels a whole lot better.”

  “Poor Clara,” Felix said.

  “No,” Maisie said. “She’s going to help all of those families. She’s going to make a difference.”

  Felix thought about that. “I guess you’re right,” he said thoughtfully.

  Early morning light was just beginning to illuminate the ornate stained-glass window, casting beautiful rays of color into The Treasure Chest. Felix walked slowly to the window, his hand gently brushing items as he passed the desk and then a table, both of them covered with strange and commonplace items. Could each of these things take us into the past and reveal their secrets to us? Felix wondered. As his fingertips grazed tiny silken shoes, a test tube, a quill pen, and a geode, his body tingled with curiosity.

  At the window, he gazed down at the sight of his mother’s Mustang parked in the driveway.

  “Well,” he said, “Mom’s home.”

  “Mom,” Maisie said as if the impact of their absence had just hit her. “Uh-oh.”

  Felix grimaced. “I guess we’d better go upstairs and take our punishment.”

  Reluctantly, Maisie agreed.

  They left The Treasure Chest, both of them glancing over their shoulders at it as they walked away, until even those backward glances no longer offered a glimpse of it. Down the stairs, they touched the wall, slowly rotating it back in place and hiding the secret entrance to The Treasure Chest again.

  On their way down the Grand Staircase, Maisie paused at the photograph of Great-Aunt Maisie as a young girl.

  “What are you up to?” Maisie whispered to her.

  Then she continued down the staircase, across the Grand Ballroom, and into the Dining Room. She turned the knob on the door that led to the servants’ stairway, but it didn’t budge.

  “Locked!” she cried.

  Felix looked under the rug for the key, but it was gone.

  “Now what?” asked Maisie.

  “The dumbwaiter?” Maisie offered.

  “We can’t just pop out of the dumbwaiter after having been missing all this time. Mom will have a heart attack.”

  “And who knows who’s up there with her, probably making those flyers like they hang up for missing kids,” Maisie agreed.

  For a moment, Felix actually felt excited. “Do you think Dad flew here from Qatar? He must have come to help Mom find us.”

  Despite her own excitement at the idea, Maisie said, “But you’re right. We still can’t pop out of the dumbwaiter like that. How will we explain why we were in here in the first place?”

  “There must be another way in,” Felix said, thinking hard.

  Maisie groaned. “If we get caught in here, we are going to get into the worst trouble of our lives.”

  “There’s that,” Felix said.

  Then he remembered something the Woman in Pink had t
old them. There was an entrance to the Kitchen that was hidden from view so that guests would not see delivery vehicles or servants enter the house. She’d said it was still used for deliveries today. That might be just the right way to exit.

  “Come on,” Felix said, tugging his sister’s Mets fleece. “We’ve got to get to the cottage’s Kitchen.”

  He led her down the steps in the Dining Room to the Kitchen. Then they took the short flight of stairs down to the subbasement where the little train brought the coal in from the hidden tunnel. They navigated through the winding tunnel, passing wine cellars and storage spaces until they saw a glimmer of light from a high, small window.

  “Remember the entrance hidden by . . . how did the docent describe it? A portico and foliage?” Felix said, pleased he’d remembered the new word.

  “Uh . . . no,” Maisie admitted.

  “Well, good thing one of us listened to the tour,” Felix grinned. “There’s a door over here that people on the inside can open, but people on the outside can’t.”

  Sure enough, a very ordinary-looking door painted a dull red stood right under the small window. Felix turned the knob, and it opened as easily as that. A blast of hot air hit him in the face.

  They stepped outside onto the circular drive under an arbor of purple wisteria so heavy it obscured where they stood. By the time they walked around the house to the side entrance that led to their apartment, they were drenched in sweat.

  “Sitting with Clara at lunch,” Maisie said, “I promised myself not to complain so much at home, but I’m already breaking that promise. It’s still hot and miserable here.”

  Felix stopped at the door and looked at Maisie, puzzled.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “You’re right. We were at lunch with Clara, but here we are now, and it’s morning.”

  “Do you think we traveled a whole day and night to get back?” she asked.

  Felix shrugged. “Maybe.”

  Maisie took a deep breath and opened the door. “Here we go,” she said.

  Slowly, they climbed the stairs to the apartment, afraid of what would happen when they opened the door.