by Tara Cowan
Shannon nodded, rising. “I shall, then. Goodnight to all of you.”
Shannon walked to the stairs, her bones aching, and was surprised to find herself dizzy at the top of the stairs. By the time she was changed into her gown, she was exhausted, and, curled on her side, fell asleep.
Mrs. Haley, awakening in the night with a pressing foreboding, sat up in bed and, slipping on her dressing gown, thought suddenly of Shannon. She could not have said why, but her steps quickened as she approached John Thomas’s door, and she opened back the door.
She sucked in her breath and crossed the room to the bed, where Shannon was thrashing, though unconscious. The room was lit by the dying embers of the coal, and she could see that she was wet with sweat. She lifted a hand and found her forehead singeing to the touch.
Wasting no time, she crossed quickly to the bell and pulled it, and was soon joined by Phoebe, her own maid, and Lizzie.
“Martha, have them send for Dr. Perkins immediately,” she said, throwing back the covers and taking the wet cloth Phoebe was rushing to her mistress. “Elizabeth! What is wrong with Amelia Lamb?”
Lizzie standing at the door with her hand clutching the top of her nightgown, said, “I did not like to say so to Shannon, but it is the influenza.” Her mother met her eyes.
“Miss Shannon,” Phoebe was saying, trying to revive her.
Breaking out of her stupor, Mrs. Haley joined her, saying, “Shannon!”
She could not be recalled, even when the doctor arrived, but continued her fevered thrashing.
“Influenza,” he said almost immediately upon seeing her. “The fourth case I’ve seen today, though only children and an old man—not one in her prime. But she’d be more susceptible to our strains. Her fever must come down, or she’ll start seizing,” he said, ordering the bath to be brought up.
“Mrs. Haley,” the doctor said sharply, trying to recall her once she was again in bed.
“Call her Miss Ravenel or Shannon—she’ll not recognize herself by his name,” her mother-in-law said, standing nearby.
The doctor looked startled but after a moment said, “Miss Ravenel!”
Finally, her eyes began to flicker, and she looked around the room, her eyes coming to rest, heavily lidded, on the doctor before drifting shut again.
Throughout the night, her fever spiked several times, the doctor staying and assisting. By the first light of dawn, the doctor, noting that Miss Haley and the two maids had drifted to sleep, said to his stalwart helper, “You must send for her husband, Mrs. Haley.”
The color drained from her face as she stared at him. “Merely as a precaution,” he said, not quite meeting her eyes. When she still seemed stunned, he added, “Can he be reached?”
“No, not by telegram, if that’s what you mean,” she said. “They are in the middle of a farm in Connecticut, and they have a full day’s start on any messenger. And—oh, good heavens, they will be leaving tomorrow morning for Washington.”
“Then I would send the messenger, and also send a telegram to his hotel in Washington,” he said firmly.
She held his eyes another moment before looking away, quite pale. Lizzie, who had been listening, said softly from the other side of the bed, her eyes filled, “Ought we to write to her parents?”
“I… I think it would do more harm than good to send it until we know,” Mrs. Haley said, rising and going to Shannon’s bedside once more. “Though what I shall say to them, I cannot think.”
Shannon’s maid, her slave, really, sat by her side, her expression arrested, tears flowing freely down her face. Then she looked back down, Shannon’s hand in hers, and stroked her forehead with a cloth. Mrs. Haley watched them for a long time.
Shannon’s eyelids flickered open painfully, weakly. The sun seemed overly bright, but she knew instantly she was at Harmony Grove from the utter peace and stillness which reigned. Outside, a bird tweeted, and she could faintly hear the wind rustle through the small spring leaves.
Lizzie sat in the window sewing, her pale head bent over the loom, her movements intentional and quiet. She must have felt Shannon’s study, for she looked up, breathing, “Oh!” and got up, coming to her. She took her hand. “Your fever broke last night,” she whispered. “The doctor said you would awake when you could, but we were so worried.”
Shannon attempted to moisten her lips. She tried to speak, could not, and then tried again. “How long have I been unconscious?” she whispered.
“Three days,” Lizzie said, eyes downcast, and then lifted water to her lips. Shannon studied her after she had sipped the cool water, a balm to her parched throat. After a long silence, Lizzie looked up, her eyes moist. “I won’t conceal from you that we feared for your life, Shannon.” She swallowed, still gripping her hand. “And I couldn’t help but think,” she said in a voice of forced merriment, “that there was so much we never talked about.”
Shannon’s eyes flickered over her face. She was unexpectedly moved. “Now we shall talk about things, Lizzie,” she managed to say softly.
Lizzie looked up, smiling a bit. “John Thomas is very lucky, I think.”
Shannon’s smile slipped, and she held Lizzie’s eyes. Lizzie opened her lips to speak, hesitated, and then said, “We sent word to him, Shannon, but we are unsure whether it has reached him. I know you must feel his absence keenly. And if word has reached him, that he must be in the utmost misery.”
Shannon moistened her lips, the enormity of her ordeal still not fully comprehended. “He…He will come if he can, I imagine,” she said. She pictured again his anger and wondered if the words John Thomas, I am ill would’ve stopped him in his tracks. Reason told her it was so, but reason seemed very far from her as she lay feeling so very poorly, so many miles from him.
Massachusetts, May 1860
Chapter Twenty-Six
Shannon slowly drifted awake, and she realized it was night, although her chamber was lit by the golden light of a fireplace recently stoked. That was unusual, for Mrs. Haley was not one to waste coal. Her eyes drifted across the room to her mother-in-law’s accustomed chair, and she was surprised to find it empty. She had religiously kept the night vigil, while Miriam and Lizzie sat with her during the day.
She turned her head the other way toward the two Shaker chairs where the girls usually sat and encountered instead John Thomas. Her heart jumped, but she was still too weak to move. He leapt to his feet, his face pale and haggard.
“John Thomas,” she whispered.
He bent over her, smoothing back her hair with a hand that was not quite steady as he drank in her features. He was not speaking, only crying, hot tears that occasionally fell onto her. He touched his forehead to hers and kissed her cheek, lingering there. She smoothed a hand down his arm and felt her eyes burning.
They stayed as they were a long time until finally he lifted his head and swept his eyes over her face. She was fully aware of how she must appear: gaunt and pale, her hair slipping out of its once-neat braids. But he drank her in. “How are you feeling?” he whispered.
“Weak,” she croaked.
He hesitated, still surveying her deeply, with raw love. “Do you need anything?” he rasped.
“Water,” she said, and when she was too weak to hold the glass, he held it to her lips. When she finished, he brushed salve onto her cracked lips. The fireplace cast flickering shadows over the room, but it illuminated his face well enough that she could see his handsome features, his eyes steadily regarding her. She did not know if he was still angry. It was her last thought before drifting to sleep.
Shannon awoke the next morning to find her room full—her mother-in-law, and two sisters-in-law sat sewing quietly. John Thomas was nowhere to be seen—had she only dreamed him? Lizzie, seeing that she was awake, said with a smile, “He has gone to send a telegram to your mother that you are recovering. He believed your last letter had her in C
harleston, and your father still on the island?”
Shannon nodded. “Yes. Yes, that is correct.”
Mrs. Haley stood and helped her drink, and then insisted that she eat a little from the tray Phoebe had brought up. She felt much stronger than the day before, well enough for Phoebe to change her nightgown and Miriam to brush out her hair and braid it neatly. Mrs. Haley was gently washing her face when it struck her that it was Sunday, and they were all staying home for her, and John Thomas was travelling to Weymouth and back.
She felt a surge of affection and was perhaps more loving with them than she had ever been. They were talking in female fashion about Frederick’s baby and the nursery at Ravenel House when there was a light knock at the door and Mrs. Haley called, “Come in.”
He entered, looking immediately at Shannon. She was propped against the pillows, emaciated and weak. How could a person look so different in so little time? Then he looked around, apprehensive about the circling of wolves around her, metaphorically speaking, of course.
But he perceived almost immediately that there had been a shift. Shannon had just been smiling, and his mother had a look of peace on her face. There was no discomfort in Lizzie, and Miriam’s eyes were shining. He smiled cautiously, handing his mother the medicine for Shannon which he had retrieved at the apothecary’s in Weymouth. He treaded hesitantly toward Shannon, so very much at a loss as to what to say.
It hadn’t taken her illness to awaken him. He had not been gone two hours when suddenly the look on her face had collapsed on him. She had been trying to tell him something, something about the night before, but he couldn’t quite think. They had gone another hour before it struck him that she was trying to say that she had been hurt the night before, and that her letter was the result.
By the time they had made it to the hunting lodge, he gathered he was not very good company, from Charles, who had said those exact words. He put on a good face for their hosts, and tamped down his guilt with a reminder of her words about his family, which showed general ill-will and no desire to forge any bonds, even contempt. It had seemed so unlike her that he had been thrown into confusion, and yet just enough like her that he had felt crushed. But her temper—he ought to have known it, had known it, really. It seemed unthinkable that he had acted in such a manner toward his Shannon, whose soul he knew to be sweet and gentle.
Just now, he wasn’t thinking of his sisters and mother sitting about. They seemed to recede. Shannon was past the crisis, and now usual emotions returned. She would remember. Could she forgive him for that night and the next morning? He looked at her, hesitating, trying to judge what she wanted. The last thing he desired was to upset her. If she had preferred him to leave, he would.
She gave the him the slightest, weakest smile, and he looked at her in a way that he hoped conveyed his bitter regret, and apology, and love. A sheen came to her eyes, and, encouraged, he walked forward, bending to kiss the top of her head gently. “You look better,” he said softly, surveying her. Her blue eyes looked up at him, so delicate. Was it all he could think to say?
“Is that your way of saying that I looked haggish last night?” she asked softly, her tone light. He was glad someone had remembered there were others in the room: he had not.
The ladies laughed, and he managed a flicker of a smile. He stroked his thumb over one of the twin spots of color on her cheeks, glancing at his mother. She smiled gently. “Her color became heightened while we ministered to her, but there is no fever.”
He continued studying her, flushing for reasons he did not know when she met his eyes.
“Are all Southern girls so headstrong, John Thomas?” Miriam asked merrily as they continued to look at one another. “Shannon has been the worst invalid imaginable.”
He glanced over at his sister, the tension easing from his shoulders. “Yes, they are, while seemingly so meek.”
Shannon smiled at him docilely, and his mother said, “There is nothing wrong with being decided in one’s mind. I am myself.”
John Thomas smiled at her. “I know you are, ma’am.”
She seemed surprised at his cheekiness, but his smile had won him many battles with her. “Very well, sir: you believe you may say what you choose because your wife is ill, and we will take pity.”
“But she will not be ill very much longer,” Lizzie said, rising. “I think you are tiring, Shannon. We’ll leave John Thomas to sit with you.”
They filed out quietly, and the door clicked shut. He waited just a moment, hesitant as to what to say. She looked up at him. The silence, the aloneness of the room, seemed to grow larger. His lips parted. “Something is different,” he said gently.
“Yes. But it isn’t any business of a man’s, what happens between women,” she said, looking very wise.
“Very well,” he agreed. He sat gently beside her, content just to survey her features, to soak her in. “You ought to go to sleep,” he said, removing her pillows until she was lying down again.
She looked up at him, and, slowly, her eyes welled up even as exhaustion threatened to claim her. She held his eyes, and he shook his head, his throat tightening. “No,” he whispered. “No, please. The fault was my own. Entirely. The thought of leaving you in such a way, and you ill, and alone, Shannon, I…” He stopped, unable to go on, his eyes moist.
She shook her head, covering his hand, her thumb stroking lightly over his hand.
He held her eyes. He could think of nothing to say when she looked at him like that. His mind failed him completely.
He bit his lip and let several moments pass. “You’re tired,” he forced out.
“Am I?”
A smile flickered as he covered her. She met his eyes, her own growing heavy, still fragile enough to seek comfort. “I’m not going anywhere, Shannon,” he whispered. “Ever.”
Two nights later, all of the family had returned, fearing the worst and delighted to find themselves wrong. Charles had brought Shannon a flower, which he said grew in a pretty little park just across from her home in Washington. Shannon, touched, had looked up at her husband and saw such love for his brother in his expression, that she tightened her hand on Charles’s. “Is it very beautiful?” she asked, blinking rapidly.
“The city? Yes. You’ll take it by storm. John Thomas and I have already decided.”
“It is entirely unaware of its fate,” John Thomas confirmed. “It will be a surprise attack, which brings them to their knees overnight.” Shannon laughed, enjoying the wild flirtation, reminded of her days in Charleston, surrounded by hopeful suitors, who by now wished ill upon John Thomas.
As for Adams, he quietly brought her a stack of books precisely to her taste, asked vaguely if she were feeling better, and departed. John Thomas, a scholar himself, distractedly handed her Othello, which, she, picking up, dropped with a scream. That brought him out of his reverie and to his feet. “It is the Adams copy!”
“What?” he asked faintly, picking up his discarded Greek tome.
“Look at the inscription!”
He bent over her, opening the cover. To my darling Abigail.
He looked down at the stack and saw Adams’s own copy of Othello. “He would’ve meant to show it to you, I daresay, and forgot. It belongs to him: our grandfather willed it to him.”He handed her the more modern book.
Shannon’s fingers glanced over the cover of the old one. “Oh,” she breathed reverently. “How kind to share it with me.”
“He is very kind,” John Thomas said.
Shannon looked up at him. “All of them are, John Thomas,” she said, eyes cutting away. She swallowed. “So truly kind and generous.”
She felt him watching her. “Shannon…” She looked back at him, and he seemed unable to speak, unsure of what to say. She could not read his expression. She swallowed, blinking rapidly, and attempted a laugh. “And here is your father, insisting to your mother t
hat I must have lamb, to build my blood, and the idea makes me very nearly ill.”
He laughed softly, covering her hand. “I’ll speak with my mother.”
Shannon smiled briefly before looking away. After a moment, she turned her head back toward him. “John Thomas,” she said, delicate brows drawing together, “why doesn’t Lizzie have a beau? She is pretty, and there is Mr. Richardson, who comes calling on every pretense imaginable.”
His eyes roved her face, and he hesitated a moment. A long pause drew out. “She was engaged before,” he said finally. “To an Albert Weatherford. She met him while they were in Boston, and I believe… From everything I am told, there was true affection between them. He travelled to Philadelphia for something concerning his business—shipbuilding—and was struck with cholera and died there.”
Shannon moistened her lips, her hand tightening on his. He met her eyes. “Frederick and I had just made it to London when I received word. I began a correspondence with her in hopes of alleviating her spirits. She said it helped,” he said, lifting a shoulder.
“Oh, John Thomas,” she said. “I had no idea.”
He hesitated, seeming almost as though he would say more. But he didn’t.
John Thomas would not leave her while the rest of the family dined downstairs, and Shannon was coming to enjoy their quiet evenings in candlelit darkness, talking or sleeping, with John Thomas reading by the fireplace, sometimes aloud, sometimes to himself.
She watched him in the golden glow, in the rocking chair with the Bible in his hands as he leaned over, reading. His sandy hair was longer than it generally was, a testament to his worry for her. The curve of his jawline, the line of his neck, were so masculine yet elegant, the length of his nose, the curve of his upper lip so appealing. She had for many months thought the most beautiful part of him were the subtle changes of his eyes, the shifts from stubbornness to kindness, from distant reserve to warmth. But there was no need to forget the rest of the visual exhibition. And heavens, it didn’t end with his face, as she knew perfectly well.
