Surrender at Orchard Rest (12 page)

She stood back up. Her whole face smarted and her chest burned. Laughter floated across the lawn to her as Sawyer’s sisters kept dropping ribbon that they were trying to spool through the bannister beside the back steps.

“I have to go home now. You shouldn’t have told me. You should have just disappeared and left us wondering what happened.”

“I’ll go and soon. I’ll have a train ticket by the end of the week. The way I see it is that there won’t be too many more opportunities for us to see each other. The birthday party is easily managed. It will be a Grove-wide event so it will be easy to stay away from each other. I won’t keep exposing you to the hurt of being around me.”

He stood up and he put his arms around her. She did not return the embrace. She stood as he kissed the top of her head and watched the girls on the patio tying bows. They looked like hard candies in their bright print dresses. The longer she stayed, the more distracted and removed she felt from everything that had ever happened.

“I would give my life if it would bring him back. I am devastated that I ruined the life of the person I love most in the world. I wasn’t worthy of you in the end, but thank you for choosing me, for making me see how good and selfless love is.”

“You showed me how very selfish love is,” she heard herself say. “If you really loved me, you wouldn’t have told me. You would have locked it away inside of yourself and never let it surface. A real man would have dealt with it and not left it on the shoulders of the woman he claims to love. You are pathetic and unworthy.”

She wobbled to the wagon and left Sawyer under the weeping willows.

***

Somerset dreamed that she sat on wooden crates with Sawyer in the Unnamed House in a pool of mellow light caused by the snowfall of a winter afternoon. Their breaths made a maze of lacy frost on the air as they huddled together under the lap robe Somerset brought from the carriage house.

“A braver man would light a fire in the fireplace.”

“And give away our meeting place? Never. I can handle the cold. I don’t feel it unless you bring it up. Did you buy a horse at auction today?”

“No, there were other things that caught my eye. How was your day, sweetheart?”

“Long. I sat at Warren’s bedside all day to let Victoria sleep. His fever finally broke, but he’s spots all over. Mother’s so afraid of illness that she can’t sit with him. She’s ashamed of my nursing skill until someone falls sick, and then I stumble into esteem for a week.”

“Do you still want to nurse for a profession?”

“I do. Finding a training program or hospital that accepts me won’t be easy. There’s a formal program starting up in England so maybe the States aren’t far behind.”

“Your future is decided.”

“No, my future is indistinct, a blurred shadow. Even if find a course that will take me, I don’t have enough money to get started on. It isn’t as though my family is going to condone me working.”

“They won’t, but they haven’t seen your work beyond a trifling illness or ailing child. They can’t imagine your sagacity or levelheadedness in a crisis. When I think of those anarchic days in Atlanta, the way you reassured the poor cadet when the doctor hacked at his leg with a bone saw or the way you stanched the blood flow from the chest wound of that infantryman who decided he wasn’t going back to fight, I—Somerset, those examples are only a handful of what you did, but it cowed men stronger than me. I had to look away but you didn’t.”

“I’d like to believe that someone out there was compassionate with Eric, that he met his end in a humane way or someone ameliorated his pain at the last. There’s a hole in my heart, Sawyer, and this work fills it.”

Sawyer’s eyes channeled empathy. He chafed her chilled hands in his brawny, rough ones.

“Are you hungry? I packed a basket for us.”

“I’m not hungry. I don’t want to waste time eating when we could be talking. These visits take too long to come, and when they arrive, they’re over too soon. I wish we could suspend these moments in time.”

“Let’s try.”

Sawyer combed through his basket with dexterous fingers and withdrew his hand with seven golden crocuses on his broad palm, their petals lifting up as if to glorify the cloud-shrouded sun.

“Crocuses.” Somerset swept them into her hand.

“Can you believe that I found them out there?”

“I can’t recall the last time I saw anything this perfect.”

“Seven of them. One for every year I have loved you.”

“Since I was fifteen,” she meditated. “Seven years is a long time, but seven is said to be a lucky number. Zeus loved Hera so much that the land bloomed thick with crocuses. Perhaps this will be a banner year for us.”

“You’re the only woman I’ve ever loved. This time with you has been sacrosanct for me. You’re better than I am, and I know I’m not him. Except in that I love you more than anyone in the world. I hope you’ll forgive me for daring to ask, but—”

He cast off the lap robe and rose up on one knee.

“Somerset Blanche Forrest, will you be my wife?”

The vapor from his proposal drifted warm in her face and smelled of apple tobacco and tea. The robe slid down the bold curve of her skirts as she pushed herself off the crates.

“Just try to love me,” he said.

“I do love you and for much longer than I knew.”

“I know how you loved him. I can’t replace him, but I can take care of you. I can love you enough to make up for who I’m not. I promise it to you.”

“I’ll marry you,” she said.

He slipped a ring on her finger, but she didn’t look because her lips were on his.

The scene dissolved.

A single gunshot dissolved the peace of a winter front moving into the foothills. Somerset opened her eyes to find herself prostrate on the hard, frozen ground. The moisture in her eyes frosted over as a crow fought to stay aloft in the gusts of wind.

***

Somerset woke with a gasp and heaved aside the blankets wadded up around her face. The covers lay in knotted piles around her, and the muddled light of a humid afternoon leeched through her window. She sat up and vomited into the chamber pot underneath her bedframe and sank to the floor beside the bed.

I should have known from the beginning that it was ominous my proposal centered around Eric, she thought as she held her throbbing head. He told me I would be grateful for how things worked out if we didn’t announce our engagement.

She wretched again into the chamber pot and drew her knees up to her chin. Tears ran down her face and splattered the floor.

Sawyer’s proposal had been the second sweetest moment of her life, and it amounted to nothing.

It’s too cruel. It’s too cruel, she thought. How could I love the man who killed Eric? How can it be that pensive, thoughtful Sawyer ruined the futures of three families with one errant bullet?

She knew he told the truth. Sawyer was analytical. He was honorable. His story filled in the gaps of Joseph’s rough outline. Her head shook no even as her mind acknowledged that Sawyer was a lousy shot. Deep down she knew he had no business in a tree with a Whitfield.

“He didn’t do it on purpose,” she whispered to the floor.

He killed a family member and your husband, her conscience said in rebuttal.

The door opened. Somerset startled and hit her head on the bedframe. Victoria rushed into the room.

“Oh my stars!” she cried and got down on her knees beside Somerset.

“I’m fine,” said Somerset. “I must have eaten something that disagreed with me.”

“Dr. Harlow is coming after the evening meal. You haven’t come downstairs in nearly two days. Bess brought back all your trays untouched.”

“I’m better now. I’m out of bed.”

Somerset sat up on the floor and watched the wreaths of roses on the wallpaper do minuets.

“Is that the dress you went out in days ago?”

Somerset looked down and saw she was wearing the black organza she visited Sawyer in. It was crumpled like wadded stationery from collarbone to hem.

“I need to take a bath, and then I’ll eat as much food as Cleo puts in front of me. Don’t call for the doctor early. That will only upset Mother and make her think the worst when I can’t handle her today.”

“I’ll have Bess bring up some hot water for the tub and then we’ll work on getting you fed. I hope you don’t think I’m overstepping my bounds, but if you don’t want me to call Dr. Harlow, then maybe you’ll tell me what’s wrong with you.”

“You know I’ve had a bad cold.”

Victoria’s eyes were topaz stones in her sweet face. Blanche Marshall showed herself in her features and disappeared.

“I know that’s what you’ve told me. I think the truth is in order.”

“Maybe it is,” said Somerset.

***

An hour later Somerset sat in a tub of heated water up to her neck while Victoria sat on a stool at the foot of it with a piece of mending. Victoria asked Cleo to fix a tray of biscuits, grits, and sausage while she bathed and have it waiting for her in the bedroom by the time she came out. Somerset submitted to being taken care of and couldn’t imagine the life of ease everyone knew before the war, how anyone could be worn out or ill in those days.

“I’ve lived through tragedy, too,” said Victoria as she threaded her needle. “You know my story. You walked in on it. You’ve been as loyal to me as anyone in the family could ever be. I can be trusted with your story if you tell it to me.”

“It’s awful enough that I can’t tell anyone.” Somerset rested her head on the curving lip of the tub. “Of course I’ve been loyal to you, Victoria. I’m the cause of all your problems.”

“I don’t have problems. I have a son.”

“You have him because I sent you to the barn.”

“I have him because I crossed paths with some Yankee devils. You didn’t do what they did to me. You saved me.”

Somerset’s quick, bitter laugh cut the air, a disappearing scythe.

“Is that what you think? That I saved you? I didn’t have a weapon on me. That’s a poor excuse for a savior. You should be angry with me.”

“You set the fire that freed me. I wouldn’t have thought to set fire to the hay bales under us. No one would have but you.”

Somerset raised her head from the tub.

“How do you stand it?” she asked, biting back tears.

“I was fourteen. I didn’t know anything.” Victoria’s eyes filled. “I know what happened to me, of course, but while it was happening—I don’t know. After they pulled my skirts over my face, I didn’t know anything. I smelled the barn dirt and could see the light coming through the loft window through my skirt. I heard the animals nickering and the buzzing of flies in the manure. I even heard the slosh of water when one of them knocked over a bucket, and to this day I can’t stand to hear something spill. The act itself though, well—I went somewhere else in my head, and I didn’t come back until I felt the flames on my shoulder. You can’t tell me anything worse than that.”

Somerset forced herself to look at Victoria. Habit made her think she was a child, but at eighteen, she could be married and have a household spilling with children if circumstances were different. She wasn’t a child and hadn’t been for years.

Her coping skills are exemplary, thought Somerset. She gets up and does a full day’s work while caring for her child and everyone else on the plantation, when most women would have gone crazy, killed themselves, or been packed off to an asylum by eager family members.

“There’s nothing left under the sun that can shock me,” said Victoria as she bit off her thread.

“As terrible as your story is, mine would startle you.”

“I doubt it.”

“Can you keep a secret?”

“You know I can.”

“I was supposed to get married.”

Saying the words made Somerset feel better.

“You were? To whom?”

“I can’t tell you that, and I’ll get to why. We kept the engagement a secret because I was worried about what people would say. I didn’t want to seem disloyal to Eric, and I couldn’t face his parents and flaunt my happiness when they’re suffering for their son. I loved the man I was engaged to, but I felt guilty about moving on with my life.”

“I see. What happened?”

“Joseph had his accident. It made me realize how cautious I’ve been, how I’ve lived the life expected of me without ever examining what I want. I went to him and told him I wanted to announce our engagement but he changed his mind.”

Tears blinded her and her back bucked as her story came out.

“He jilted you!”

“Not without reason, Victoria. His conscience told him that he needed to come clean about something he did during the war. He did something that he’ll never forgive himself for, and I don’t think I’ll forgive him, either. He destroyed people’s lives. He didn’t mean to. He’d give anything to take it back, but he caused pain, loss, and unhappiness to everyone we know.”

Even though she felt as if she might be sick again, Somerset’s stomach relaxed like bread dough after a rise just to get the words out of her.

Victoria’s thin black eyebrows were half-moon crescents on her high forehead as she bent over her mending.

“It sounds simple to me.”

“It does?”

“He didn’t mean to do whatever he did. If he’s hurting so badly that he can’t forgive himself, it sounds as if he’s worthy of your forgiveness. I’m going to assume this wicked, abominable act he committed was during the war. Lots of people did awful things during the war that they wish they could take back. He’s paid enough.”

Somerset dropped her bar of soap in the steamy water and stared.

“What? But you don’t know what he did, and I can’t tell you.”

“I don’t need to know what he did. Oh, I believe you that it’s bad. You wouldn’t have been sick in your room for two days if it wasn’t. If it hurts you that much, I can imagine the effect it would have on me. You said he didn’t mean to do it. That’s all I need to know. Forgive him.”

“I don’t want to forgive him, and I don’t care if he forgives himself. My vote is for vengeance, retribution. I should let Joseph or Papa deal with this problem so it doesn’t come up again.”

“Does this man still love you?”

“I don’t want to believe it but yes.”

“Do you still love him?”

“No. It hurts me to think of him but not because I love him. I’m ashamed I loved him. It shows I’m more gullible, flawed, and naïve than I thought possible. I’m supposed to be made of finer mettle. I’m not supposed to be this fallible.”

Victoria’s laughter echoed in the steamy room to hear Somerset’s personal assessment.

“I would like to have your confidence,” she said. “Don’t choose vengeance to rectify an accident, Somerset. It won’t fix the past. If you choose vengeance, you become like those stragglers in the barn, and more innocent people suffer than the one you seek to punish. Don’t repeat his mistakes. Don’t hurt people. Appeal to the goodness in you, to the war nurse. I’ve always wanted to be you.”