Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (18 page)

Tomorrow? Jill thought. She was expected go to church with Brad and Louise tomorrow, then tour his apple orchards until time for the barbecue. Riding with Allison sounded better than any of that. "I'd love to, but I don't know when. Is there any way of squeezing it in before church?" Jill had a feeling this wasn't going to work. "How long does it take to get from here to Courthouse?"

Allison wrinkled her nose, now looking every bit like the ten-year-old that she was. "I don't really know. I should. We go up to Grandma's all the time. But it's not that long. I'm sure we'll have time. We can—"

The stable door opened and they heard footsteps coming down the short, narrow corridor formed by the tack room. Jill moved to the stall gate, assuming it would be some adult who knew the distance between Luray and Courthouse.

It was Doug. The bright light from the corridor outlined him, shining around the fringed epaulettes at the shoulders of his grey uniform.

Joy gushed through Jill, tingling up her arms, circling through her cheeks. It was like Phillip and Mary Deas embracing in the trampled garden, having found love amid their ruined world.

"How did you find me?" she breathed.

"Hi, Mr. Ringling," Allison chirped.

Allison's warble restored Jill to a measure of sanity. No, this wasn't like Phillip and Mary Deas embracing in a trampled garden. This was not an epic passion... at least it wasn't yet. She needed to keep reminding herself of that. She really did like Doug Ringling. Perhaps they would become friends. Perhaps fate would give them a magic, frictionless glide toward intimacy. But it hadn't happened yet... and it wouldn't, not if she kept expecting him to be Phillip.

She tried to speak normally. "How did you know to come here?"

"I have four sisters," he answered, as if that always explained everything about him. "In this situation they would all be at Kim's because she had the newest and biggest house to show off."

"I bet he knows," Allison put in, still wondering about the ride with Jill. "How long does it take to get from here to Courthouse?"

"Thirty minutes," he answered. "Twenty if your uncle Randy is driving."

Church was at ten. Brad had suggested she be ready by nine thirty. That would mean leaving the stable at... this wasn't going to work. Jill could do it Monday morning, but she supposed Allison would have to go to school.

"Oh, honey, I'm sorry."

And she was. There was so much she wanted to do in the two days she had left. She still hadn't seen Charles Ringling, she hadn't seen much of the Valley, and she did want to spend every possible instant with Doug. "Actually, Allison, I think I'm going to stay longer than I originally planned. What about Wednesday? Wednesday after school?"

"Wednesday? That would be
great."
Allison hugged Jill, her head almost reaching to her chin. "Wednesday's early release, so we'll have loads of time. Let me go fix it with Mom and Emily." She dashed off, stopping at the door to ask them to please turn off the lights when they left.

"Will do," Doug told her before turning to Jill. "This is good news, your staying. Is it just that you wanted to ride or does it have something to do with what you wanted to talk to me about?"

As they left the stable, Jill explained what she had inferred about the movie from Don Pleasant's birthday. "So, I'm not saying that this secret script was a masterpiece, but I am saying that it looks like there was one... although I still don't have a clue how they pulled it off."

Doug was shaking his head. "I'd be dangerous if I had a brain. That's so obvious. I can't believe I missed it. So is it safe to say that every scene with the baby in it was shot in April?"

"No." Jill was blunt. "It's safe to say that every
shot
with Don in it was done in April, and there won't be that many. If I remember right, most of the time you don't really see the baby. It would have been a doll wrapped in blankets. But I'd need to look at the movie again."

"I've got a copy. You want to come watch it tonight?" He glanced at his watch. "It's still early. But I should warn you, we live in a real dump."

"We?" This magic glide might have a bit more friction than Jill had anticipated.

"Randy and I bunk together, and we're not the most attentive housekeepers."

"That doesn't bother me. But I don't think we can leave right away. I don't want to offend anyone by leaving too soon."

"Leave it to me."

He had spoken airily. Jill was firm. "I really don't want to be rude."

"Don't worry," he assured her, his face glowing with a wicked little grin. "They have to let me leave first. I parked everyone in."

The house Doug shared with Randy, Jill discovered an hour later, was not a dump. It was a white frame farmhouse which had clearly been decorated by an old lady. Several crocheted afghans were draped across the back of the sofa. White lace antimacassars protected the arms and back of the soil-resistant easy chair. Braided rugs dotted the floors;
Reader's Digest
Condensed Books and
Ideals
magazines spilled from the bookshelves. The lamps had hand-painted glass globes. Only the VCR, the superb stereo system, and perhaps the two fat collies sleeping on the sofa testified to the current occupants.

"Whose house is this?"

"It's Brad's now." Doug shoved the two dogs off the sofa and pushed them outside. "Randy's great aunt used to live here. She's dead."

Jill drew a finger through the dust on one of the glass globes. "I gathered that."

Doug dropped to the floor in front of the TV and started to flip through the video tapes. Jill moved to the sofa.

"No, stop," he called out. "Don't sit there. Not unless you want a terminal case of dog hair. Let me pull the chair over for you."

Jill didn't need a chair pulled over for her. The floor was fine. She sat down in front of the sofa, and figuring that between her white shirt and her own golden hair she was a good match for the collies, she leaned back against the sofa.

Doug slipped the tape in and punched the play button, then came over to her, switching off the lamps. "Are you sure you're okay?"

"I was in the Peace Corps. I don't mind anything this side of raw sewage."

"You were in what?"

"The Peace Corps." The music was starting. "Will you sit down?"

The credits had begun....
presents a Miles Smithson Production...

"The Peace Corps? You aren't serious, are you?"...
Weary Hearts...

"Yes, and I am also serious about watching this movie."

"The Peace Corps?"

... Bix Ringling... Charles Ringling... Alicia Ringling...

"I hate people who can't shut up during movies."

"Where? What country? Why?"

"Phillip Wayland would have shut up during movies."

Doug groaned... and shut up.

CHAPTER 8

It was a solid, well-built house, brick and square with twin chimneys and cool, high-ceiling rooms, spacious halls, and polished floors. It sat at the center of Briar Ridge, a horse farm that produced the finest horses outside of Kentucky. Other farms along the curving silver river grew oats, wheat, corn, peaches, and Queen Victoria's favorite apples, but Briar Ridge's rolling hillsides were blue-grass pastures, kept close-cropped by the horses.

Two brothers raised these horses. Booth, the older, was fair-haired and intense, expecting a lot from himself and others. He was a quiet man, a large man, as strongly built as his house, as sturdy as its grove of oaks.

His younger brother, Phillip, was arranged on different lines. Slender and quick, he was a glorious young man, his hair a wild black spill, his eyes full of spirit and reckless laughter. The family intensity, the one trait he shared with his brother, manifested itself physically in him. He was fearless, and his sinewy strength was inexhaustible. He was a born cavalry man, and Virginia had great need for such men.

Mr. Lincoln had already refused to exempt Virginia from the conscription laws and the state had reversed her decision and joined the secession. Booth and Phillip were going to join Turner Ashby and his Black Horse Cavalry Troop, taking a string of horses with them. They were waiting only for the spring foals to mature a little more.

Their mother had been a Morrison, and one of her cousins had married an angular, gaunt-eyed mathematics professor, the now-Colonel Thomas J. Jackson. On his way to Harpers Ferry, he stopped at Briar Ridge. He wasn't known as "Stonewall" yet or thought to be great, but his deep, gentle voice had weight. Booth's young bride served him dinner and afterward let the brothers show him through the well-tended paddocks.

"This is a fine crop of yearlings," Colonel Jackson said. "Who's to train them while you all are gone?"

"Old Pompey here," Phillip answered airily, waving his hand at the grizzled-haired Negro following them. "He's been doing this since before we were born. And we'll not be gone that long. This thing's going to be over in ten weeks' time."

"It may, son. It may."

"But it may not?" the steadier Booth asked.

"It may not. And if you care to serve your country best, perhaps one of you should stay behind."

Even Phillip could see the wisdom of that. The Valley's Germans weren't going to war; they could stay home and farm, raising the corn and the oats that the army might need if there was still fighting by harvest time. But the Germans weren't horsemen. Training a spindly legged foal to pull artillery or lead a cavalry charge was perhaps not work to be left to old Pompey.

Yet it was inconceivable to Phillip that he would be the one to stay. Booth could manage the farm better than he. It was he, not his muscular brother, who had the build of a cavalry man. To stay home when there was a war going on, to miss the glory, the honor, the
fun
of it all... it was unimaginable.

But as darkness blanketed the green fields and shadowed the pink dogwood blossoms, as the two brothers stood on the white-columned veranda, leaning back against the red brick still warm from the spring sun, Booth said, "I suppose we'll be needing to flip a coin."

Phillip straightened. "What about Mary Deas?"

Through the open window of the parlor, past the gently stirring white undercurtains, a girl's silhouette moved, slender and quiet in the lamp-lit room, her rich skirts brushing against the mahogany chairs. She was Booth's bride.

"If men used that for an excuse," Booth answered, "there'd be no army."

He pulled a coin from his pocket, a coin minted by a nation they no longer considered themselves a part of. He flipped it in the air. Phillip called heads, his voice confident, knowing that this was an exercise, that Providence could not deny him what was his by right—a place in the Black Horse Troop.

But Providence did. Booth caught the coin on the back of his left hand, trapping it with his right. He moved toward the lamplight and uncovered the coin. Mary Deas's shadow moved across the window, blocking the light for an instant. But the shadow passed, the light glinted against the coin. It was tails. Phillip was to stay home.

Although Mary Deas's soft, dark eyes had been looking at the world for only seventeen years, they saw it clearly. An hour later the light wind that stirred through the upper story windows caught at her white nightdress, teasing it into the billowing netting of the canopied bed. The gentle folds of her lace-trimmed gown, the cream of her magnolia skin shone against her dark eyes and the intricate walnut posters of the bed.

"Phillip wants to go," she said to Booth.

"I can't send him off to die."

"But Booth..." She couldn't say it: He might die too.

"I have a chance. He doesn't."

And as little as she knew of war, Mary Deas knew that to be true. Phillip would surely die. Gallant, brave, and foolhardy, he would die in the first battle of the war, long before he would have been of much use to anyone. Booth had a chance, and if he did die, it would be after a long, hard road.

So, three days later, it was Booth who swung himself into the saddle, accompanied only by Pompey and a string of Briar Ridge's magnificent horses.

Phillip would have loved the hot-breathing excitement of a
cavalry
charge; to Booth, it was mind-numbing duty. Turner Ashby was an inspiring leader, a magnetic white-plumed figure, the first into a battle, the last one out. But he was no manager; his troops had splendid horses and superb skills, but they were disorganized and undisciplined. Booth hated the
chaos.

When he got his own command, he forced on it the order and control the rest of the troop so desperately needed. Rain dripping off of his
forage
cap, he would rub his hands over a whisper of a campfire, always watching out for his men, worrying about the horses, making sure that they didn't outstrip the supply trains. While none of his men wanted to be like him, while there was nothing magnetic about him, they respected him, they cared what he thought of them, and they trusted him.

Phillip's life back at Briar Ridge was no easier. His was Aeneas's part, commanded by the gods to stay alive so that he could found a city. After Manassas in late July, "old Jack" started to seem like a god, and
Phillip
accepted the covenant. Hold on to that stallion, keep those mares, and stay alive so they can keep breeding.

He knew of a narrow path into the dark bulk of Massanutten. When the Yankees came, he led the horses up there. When they had gone, and Jubal Early, now generalling the Army of the Valley, came back through, Phillip turned over the two-year-olds. But once again he traced that narrow path, leading the stallions and the mares; the now-desperate Confederates would have taken them all. Although every fiber of his soul hungered for a blaze of glory, one chance risking it all, he knew that that was not the part assigned him. As the Valley changed hands time and again, he lay in the swamp, hiding himself like a coward.

He faltered once, saddling up his mare to ride with John Mosby's Rangers. It was a glorious raid, a late-night swoop on a Federal supply depot, which the Irregulars looted and burned. The spring night was crisp, the line of fleet-footed horses followed a flaming torch, When the dark mass of the depot loomed ahead, the riders spurred their horses and let out the high-pitched Rebel Yell, charging toward the Federal supplies. The stores were profligate—the tinned lobster, the cheeses, the cases of champagne, their corks popping. The light from the burning buildings glistened off the flanks of the sweating horses.