Surrender at Orchard Rest (34 page)

“I was thinking that—”

“I’m old enough to know what that look means, Somerset,” he interrupted. His blue eyes looked self-assured and dangerous. “Shall I—”

“It’s a beautiful room,” she said as she stepped back out into the hallway.

“It has the makings of a beautiful room. I’m going to make it worthy of you. Don’t you want to see your dressing room? It’s nearly as big as the bedroom.”

“Thank you, no,” she said as she continued down the hall. “I’d like to see more of our house, and then we ought to find Joseph and Ivy. If they’ve finished eating, they’re probably eager to get back to the foundry. It isn’t the shortest drive.”

His warm breath skimmed along her ear as he stole up behind her and wrapped his arms around her middle, his hands coming to rest under her navel. Somerset felt all her nerves jump.

“You don’t have to be nervous around me,” he said into her neck. “That’s our room, and I’ve wasted hours thinking about us in it. I’m not going to do anything without your permission, Somerset.” He kissed the nape of her neck in the way he had that always made her want him as the smell of evergreens and cloves enveloped her. She twisted away, although she wanted to go back and bolt the door against the outside world for days.

“You’re not making me nervous. I’m making me nervous. Mother would be proud of my timidity. Now, what you do say to a cup of coffee with me on the piazza before we leave for the evening?”

***

“How is the newly wedded couple?” asked Phillip as a silver service for coffee was wheeled onto the piazza.

“We’re well-traveled but exhausted,” said Ivy as she accepted a cup.

“Any sage words for the uninitiated?”

“Don’t run away to be married,” chuckled Joseph. “People are more inclined to want to be a part of everything later. Suffer the agony of a big wedding and then depart on an extended honeymoon to sort out your new life.”

“Are you going anywhere after the wedding?” asked Ivy.

“Yes, are we?” seconded Somerset.

“We might go somewhere providing I actually work up until February. I skipped out on a month of work last month and now I find myself delightfully distracted once more. Speaking of February, I’ve forgotten to worry about my role in the ceremony. I haven’t chosen a best man. Joseph, do think you’d be up for the job?”

“I’ve never been a best man before, but I’d be honored to be it for my little sister’s wedding.”

“Good. I know it’s going to be a large ceremony, but I’d rather keep family in the party than friends and business associates. Perhaps if we do it this way, all of Charleston won’t read the details of the big day before it occurs.”

“At least the wedding dress is tucked away in Richmond,” said Somerset. “It’s funny how I used to be sour about the war cutting into the balls and parties that should have comprised my youth. I think this wedding is going to make up for it and then some.”

“I am going to spoil you until there is nothing left to spoil you with,” said Phillip and he kissed her on the forehead despite their company. “You all like parties so what do you say to joining me here tomorrow night for a large one? It was supposed to serve as a routine business party so that I could get to know some of my suppliers better, but we could invite some company for you girls and use the evening as an informal debut to the city. Would you like that, my love?”

“I can’t wait,” said Somerset.

***

“Here. Take this. Take it all, Joseph,” said Amelia. “I don’t need it in my house.”

She dumped a box on the library floor that sounded heavy and cluttered as it hit the hardwood. Somerset and Ivy sat down on the floor by it and peered in at the dank contents.

“What is it?” asked Joseph as he leaned over the box.

“Junk, souvenirs, mementos of a bygone day. Things that rightfully belong to you more than they do to me.”

“These are my Teddie’s things,” said Somerset with a scrunched-up nose as she pulled a soiled, tattered dime novel from the box.

“They’re my Teddie’s things, but I’m giving them to you as a peace offering,” corrected Amelia. She looked exhausted. Somerset didn’t know if it was from toting the box or the mental energy required to let some of his things go.

“Why?” asked Somerset.

“Why? Because these are his things from his time spent in the Brotherhood. I had nothing to do with those days, and to be frank, Joseph, I hated every fiber of your being for getting him to yourself those long, hollow years. What do I need with his westerns and his military decorations? You might as well all get some things of Teddie’s to keep. I know whatever Blanche has she’ll never turn loose.

“Besides, I have the things that matter. I have his wedding ring. I have his books, his diplomas, the scores of letters he wrote me from the battlefield. I have love and the evidence of a thinking mind. I may not love you, but you’re his family and deserve to be treated as such.”

Amelia pulled out her handkerchief and rubbed at her upturned, narrow eyes. Somerset wondered if she would ever see her when she wasn’t upset. The brutal force of Amelia’s emotions made her feel punched in the gut even when Amelia was trying to be neutral.

“It’s a copy of
Hamlet
complete with Theodore’s notes in the margin,” said Ivy as she held up a copy used to the point of the pages hanging to the spine and binding by threads.

“The cards we played poker with by firelight,” said Joseph as he shuffled the deck between his nimble, rough fingers. “Look how used they are. I don’t know how we ever shuffled them. Eric always won. I hated losing cards to him.”

“His composition book that he wrote letters in,” crooned Somerset. She picked it out of the box, mindful of spiders. “He started a letter to Victoria on this page.”

Dear Sissy,

In answer to your question, no, I am not so hungry as I was over the winter. We have had hardtack, chicory coffee, and some side meat this week. Sawyer was able to buy grits off a widow on the southern edge of the mountains so my belly is full.

The letter went no further. Evidently the writer found his meals less than worthy to mail or he started a new letter on a later ripped-out page.

Joseph’s face contorted as he fished out a warped fiddle bow and he positioned his hands as if playing an imaginary instrument.

“He’d play the fiddle most nights when we weren’t fighting or tracking. You’ve never heard ‘Amazing Grace’ until you hear it played on a cigar box fiddle on a moonless night while you rest on the ground three hundred miles from home.”

“Oh, Joseph,” said Somerset.

Ivy crawled from the box to his feet and wrapped her arms around his knees and put her chin on his lap.

“I don’t have my own memorabilia from those days,” said Joseph. “I threw my uniform on the fire with my Whitfield. His uniform—it smells like him.”

“I go and stand in his dressing room with my eyes closed for hours at a time,” said Amelia. “It smells like him yet. Sometimes I’ll find a golden hair of his on a jacket or a shirt collar. It makes it easier to remember his voice. Voices are the characteristic of people that I have the most trouble hanging onto. I always forget the pitch, the intonations, but if I can smell his smell, I remember the way he used to sound when he told me he loved me or begged me for a pecan pie.”

Amelia’s heavy jaw convulsed, and Somerset realized she’d had enough of discussing her precious memories with the likes of them. Amelia had meant to make a simple gesture and leave it at that. She hadn’t meant to share her life.

“He’s been gone a year but it’s as though he never existed,” said Joseph.

“No, it’s like he just left the house this morning,” said Amelia. “Somerset, I was already attending the soiree tonight and now I have to dress for it. It’s my first function now that I’m out of deep mourning.”

She left the room with unhappiness etched in her high, white forehead.

“I can’t believe she gave these to us,” said Joseph as he withdrew a series of maps from the box. “I don’t have one thing that belonged to him. I can’t remember his face unless I’m looking at a portrait and those are all pre-war. Yet when I touch these things, I can almost remember his face as he made notes over a campfire on a winter’s night.”

“The glimpse she gave us must be the woman Theodore married,” said Somerset.

“For your mother’s sake, you probably ought to keep quiet about this gift,” said Ivy. “She’s vulnerable enough as it is after the Marsh.”

“We probably should gloss over that we stayed here. Let her think we stayed at a hotel.”

“What is this?”

Ivy pulled a photograph, bent and creased, from inside a dime western.

Theodore and Amelia—he in a chair and she at his side with her hand on his shoulder—looked to the camera and their future on their wedding day. Amelia’s mouth was set in a grim line for the cameraman but there was a light in her smoky eyes and the hand that touched Theodore’s shoulder clinched it in bridal possessiveness. She looked a new bride and not a wealthy, experienced widow. Teddie’s eyebrows arched high above his Marshall eyes and his chin just dimpled, too overcome with excitement to bother looking stern. His right hand rested on his knee on top of a law book stacked atop the Bible. A peeling crease cut across the image horizontally as though carried in a billfold for a long, long way.

“She doesn’t know she gave this away,” said Ivy.

“She has photographs and paintings all over the house,” said Somerset. “I don’t have a picture of him. I want to keep it.”

She stuffed it in her basque. It was the most dishonest act she ever committed. She smiled at the floor as though she had done something much worse.

***

Somerset met Phillip in the parlor before the first guests arrived. He poured her a glass of claret and set it on the sideboard so that he could encircle her in his arms.

“Do I look the way you imagined your lady of the house would look?” she asked.

“I think you look like Bathsheba before David took her,” he breathed into her hair.

His fingertips glided in taut circles on her spine, making her inexplicably wish he would start undoing the Satsuma buttons that gilded the back of her green silk gown.

“I’m never going back to Orchard Rest if you keep saying things like that.”

“Having you at Turning Tide is such fulfillment that maybe I won’t send you back.”

“I thought you said that you waited so long for this occasion that nothing would do but a sophisticated wedding,” Somerset said under his ear.

“Watching you in this house and feeling that you belong here makes me want to bite my tongue off for insisting on a luxury ceremony. I need to be less of a perfectionist and more of a strategist.”

He took her face between his marred palms and interlocked his fingers through her fussy updo.

“The dress is in Richmond, but it isn’t important. I’ll marry you anytime you say the word. The greatest loves I know were spur-of-the-moment unions.”

Somerset arched into him, raising up her face like a bird seeking rain, but all she found was sun. His importunate mouth came down on hers with vigor, and Somerset felt agreeably scorched, the sensation of incalescent heat spreading outward from her as she kissed him back with greed. His hands meandered along her form, and she thought as she teetered on incoherence that he couldn’t hold her any tighter, that he would pull her inside of him if he tried. She twined her hands through the impenetrable ebony moor of his hair and pulled him down against her on the brown paisley divan. He was telling her in his voice that was too loud, even though he whispered, that he loved her, and she unbuttoned his waistcoat with shaking, blind fingers as his hands found the curve of her ankle under her mint green underskirt and snaked up her bare calf as it curved up and around his hip.

The library door slid open and Louis walked in. His smooth countenance never changed, although Somerset shrieked and managed to sit upright under Phillip’s large body.

“Mr. Russell, Mrs. Forrest has arrived and is waiting in the ballroom to be received.”

“Thank you. We will join her soon, Louis.”

Louis left the room without making any expression and drew the door closed again.

Somerset disentangled her hands from Phillip’s hair and watched as he straightened his cravat and began buttoning the brass buttons on his waistcoat. He was as unhurried as a morning fog retreating from the banks of a river.

Somerset got up and smoothed her skirts.

“Better that Louis catch us than Joseph or Amelia,” she babbled. “I don’t know why she insisted on taking a separate carriage from us when we all live in the same house. I’m sorry. Every servant in the house will be whispering about us by nightfall. It’s an odious way to begin in this house, I’m afraid.”

Phillip took her hand.

“Somerset, you seem to be under the impression that you’ve hurt your esteem in my eyes, and that’s not the case. I was going to wait until later to give this you, but I think you need reassurance.”

Phillip slipped a ring over her fourth finger, and when Somerset held it up, she admired an emerald-cut diamond flanked by a collar of small pave diamonds. The chandelier light reflected off the large diamond’s face as if giving her a wink.

“I love the life we have planned,” Phillip assured her. “I can’t wait to get started on this philanthropic, busy life of privilege with you, and I mean that whether we don’t see each other again until February at the ceremony or whether you demand we elope tomorrow so that we can finish that bold prologue on the divan that we started. Do you understand? I love you, and it doesn’t embarrass me that you return that love. Two people who are getting married should be passionate about each other.”

Somerset’s discomfort wore off as she looked into the intense, bold face above hers. She found the glass of sherry at her elbow and drank it dry. She planted a kiss on his chin with confidence.

“I forgot myself,” she said with a guilty smile. “I’m afraid it isn’t the first or the last time I’ll do it around you. Now, what do you say about receiving our guests?”

***

Louis opened the entire downstairs floor of the house to the guests. The onslaught was rapid. One minute Somerset stood on Phillip’s arm chatting in irregular spurts with Amelia, and the next the house roared with the mixture of excited, unfamiliar voices as the frantic caterers dodged about stocking the rooms with the increased last-minute food orders.

Somerset found the people charming, courteous, and bolder than their Richmond counterparts. They were frank in both their compliments and their questions as she and Phillip received them at the ballroom door. Somerset found them refreshing, like a puff from Joseph’s cigar during a brief absence from a Marshall dinner, and it only illuminated her original thought that she would feel as stifled and unholy in Richmond as Blanche did.

“My most sincere condolences on the loss of your brother,” said Ophelia Baldwin when Phillip introduced them. He explained to Somerset that Ophelia’s husband manufactured most of the implements used in his mines.

“You are uncanny to look at because I thought I’d never see his eyes again, but there they are in your face. I don’t recall meeting you at the funeral service. Pardon me, I should be offering up hearty congratulations, but Mr. Forrest was beloved to this fair city and I know more so by you.”

Somerset gazed into Ophelia’s light brown eyes set in her round, attractive olive face and felt instant kinship.

“Thank you for that,” she said. “No, we’ve never met. My mother was too distraught to attend the service and I stayed with her.”

“And this must be Amelia’s first public appearance since he passed. You can tell she’s been mourning him. She’s five years younger than me but looks ten years older.

“Will I get to meet your mother at the wedding, dear? I’ve longed to for most of my life. I remember when I was a young woman my family went on holiday to New Orleans. I bought a postcard of Somerset Manor in one of those quaint general stores they treasure down there. There was a blond girl in a sky blue hoopskirt painted in that everyone said was Blanche Marshall.”

Somerset was mystified at the idea of any such thing existing and couldn’t wait to ask Blanche if she had one tucked away in an old hat box in the attic.

Phillip reached down and squeezed Somerset’s shoulders.

“If we can last to the winter ceremony, Ophelia. I didn’t expect to see Somerset until next month and she showed up on my doorstep during our charity meal as a gift to me. I’ve been prodding her for an earlier wedding. It’s such a shame to send her home when she fits so well here.”

Ophelia’s round peachy mouth stretched into a grin.