Surrender at Orchard Rest (6 page)

“How is your grandmother?” asked Victoria.

“She has a weak heart. The doctors say she shouldn’t be alive, but the Faulks are all long-lived. She’s bed bound now.”

“I can sympathize,” winced Joseph.

“You poor thing! I felt relieved when I first saw you. The reports were so dreadful I didn’t know what I’d come home to, but you look like yourself, only with a cane. Do you hurt much?”

“I thought I’d tell you it doesn’t trouble me much at all, but now that you’re here, I have to say it hurts all the time. It hurts worse than any injury I had during the war.”

“You’re up. You’re walking. It’s more than I expected. When Somerset wrote that you were battling a terrible infection, I was sure you’d lose the leg. It took every drop of self-restraint I had not to jump on the train and come down here.”

“I won’t always have the cane,” Joseph assured her. “They tell me I’ll limp for the rest of my life. I can’t stand it, the idea of anyone looking at me with pity.”

“Better some stranger to look at you with pity than for your family to look at your headstone with regret,” said Fairlee. “Maybe you’ll reconsider law after all this?”

“I don’t believe so. The idea of sitting at a desk reading and writing all day seems remarkably unlike anything I want to do.”

Fairlee’s mouth tipped down in disappointment, but she was quick to smile again.

“I want to know every little old thing that happened while I was gone. I want to hear all about who married and had babies and who quarreled and broke up.”

“You may have been gone for two years,” said Victoria, “but I don’t think you missed anything.”

“Things don’t happen in Century Grove,” agreed Joseph.

“Nonsense,” scoffed Fairlee. “You were nearly killed. I doubt you were the only person something happened to while I was gone.”

“Helen had another baby last week,” supplied Somerset. “It was a little boy. They named him after George. He looks just like George, too, minus the mutton chop whiskers.”

“Which is to say, better looking than Helen,” whispered Joseph near Fairlee’s smooth neck.

She giggled and snorted.

Helen was a disappointment in a family full of attractive children. Thomas said she looked like a second edition of his mother, but that was not true, in that Mrs. Forrest had been pretty. Helen didn’t possess a single remarkable feature. Her hair was drab brown as were her eyes, and her mouth was small and pale set in a colorless face. Her figure was thick and graceless. Somerset agreed with Joseph’s assessment of “stodgy,” and sadly, her personality matched her appearance. Her looks came as a double blow to the family having been born after Theodore, who showcased every attractive feature the Marshalls were known for.

Victoria pretended not to hear and Somerset continued.

“Amelia and Mother are still fighting. This is the second summer Amelia hasn’t wanted to visit Orchard Rest. Mother frets that Theodore Junior and Elizabeth will love Amelia’s parents more than they love her and Papa. I can’t console her because they all live with Amelia’s parents and Charleston is a long way off. It isn’t as though she can force them to abandon life at the indigo foundry and come here.”

“Let’s see. Theodore inherited the foundry when Amelia’s father passed away. Is that right?” asked Fairlee.

“Yes, Mr. Winfree took ill not long after the war ended. Theodore arrived home less than a year before Mr. Winfree passed away,” remarked Joseph.

“Amelia and Blanche never got along,” remembered Fairlee. “Blanche was proud to have a son who took after her family and to name him after the brother she lost. She wasn’t going to like any woman Teddie brought home, but the deck was stacked against Amelia from the moment Teddie noticed her because Blanche Forrest wasn’t going to like some wealthy indigo baroness from Charleston taking her boy away. Certainly not a widow. Now those two are locked in an endless battle over who loves him more.”

“It’s a pointless, superficial battle that only women could engage in,” Somerset confessed. “I’m sick of it.”

Joseph stood and tried to stretch his wounded leg.

“You’ll never guess who the biggest profit turner at Stone Gardens has been for two years running,” he said, after settling back down beside Fairlee.

“Somerset?” asked Fairlee.

“Even less likely than Somerset,” scoffed Joseph. “Mother! Mother brings in most of the money.”

“Does she take in sewing or bake?” faltered Fairlee.

Somerset laughed.

“Neither. Think poultry. She has an uncanny knack with birds. The McKennasaws’ chickens wandered out to Orchard Rest when they evacuated to Tuscaloosa, and she fed them and tended them. There were only three birds. Now we have over three hundred. She knows everything there is to know about chickens now. She sells birds, breeds birds, and sells eggs.”

“It does sound unlikely,” said Victoria, “but she can diagnose all their ailments. She’s very particular about their feed and she culls like any other farmer. We probably would have starved to death if she hadn’t taken up with those runaway chickens. It gave us plenty to do while waiting for the boys to come home.”

“Proverbially speaking, you can’t put all of your eggs in one basket at Orchard Rest,” continued Joseph. “It does irk me that a little society woman makes more money than I’m bringing in by the sweat of my brow, but food on the table is food in my stomach.”

“And you said there was nothing going on,” winked Fairlee. “I’m certain there’s more still.”

“You and I have so much to talk about that I don’t know where to begin,” Joseph said. “I’ve missed you so.”

“I’m here now. Let’s just enjoy each other’s company before I have to go away again.”

“I want you here with me. If we were married I could go with you, and you could nurse me and your grandmother at the same time.”

“I’d rather wait until Rowena comes home,” said Fairlee. “I don’t want to have my attention divided between a sick old woman and you. Marriages should be happy at the start.”

Somerset cast a worried eye at the grandfather clock in the corner.

“Would you like to come home with us, Fairlee? I promised to bring everyone back in time for supper. Mother would be glad to see you, of course. Papa should be home from Tuscaloosa tonight, too. We’ll have a party.”

“I’m afraid Daddy and Evelyn wouldn’t be very forgiving if I went away on my first evening home,” professed Fairlee. “I’ve already visited more than I meant to.”

“I’ll come see you tomorrow,” said Joseph. “Somerset will bring me every day this week.”

“She will not. I’ll come to you tomorrow.”

Somerset and Victoria rose from their seats and began to make their way back to the foyer, giving the pair some scant privacy before their departure.

“I’ve only just laid eyes on you,” Joseph could be heard murmuring through the doorway.

“You’ll have a whole lifetime to lay eyes on me,” retorted Fairlee. “Come, are you really going to play the lovesick schoolboy, Joseph?”

“I hear the sarcasm in your voice, but it isn’t in your face. I can sneak out later and have Tuck bring me.”

“I can see the strain this visit has brought on you. You’ll go to bed tonight and get a sound sleep in before I arrive tomorrow so that I don’t feel guilty visiting.”

“Fairlee, I don’t want to leave.”

A heavy pause sat on the air that could have only been a kiss. Then:

“We have two weeks of paradise ahead of us, Joseph. We have two whole weeks of eating on the porch together and arguing agriculture on the lake. The horseback rides and dances seem to be on hold, but I can sacrifice anything and see our time together as perfect. I missed you.”

The ride home was a contemplative one. Somerset discarded the memory of visiting with Fairlee in order to relive the happiness she felt upon seeing Sawyer in the road. He said he would come for her. In her mind all romances were inferior to her own. She witnessed the shades of tenderness and love between Fairlee and Joseph and still managed to feel pity for them because they couldn’t love as she loved.

***

Blanche threw them a smile of approval when they arrived early for the evening meal. Somerset noticed the empty glass of wine at her mother’s elbow but saw her narrow shoulders relax when they walked into the dining room. Joseph excused himself for not feeling well, and Franklin helped him up to his room to lie down. Victoria wanted to freshen up before eating.

“Was it a pleasant outing?” she asked as Warren brandished a peacock feather with a mighty yell.

“It was,” said Somerset, pulling out a chair. “Sometimes I forget that there are women other than in our family and Ivy in the world.”

“I suppose Evelyn was furious at us?”

“She will have told everyone in the county by sundown,” admitted Somerset. “It felt satisfying to make her angry somehow. I must have inherited the family contrariness, Mother.”

Blanche refilled her glass.

“How did Joseph and Fairlee do?”

“I don’t know. It was clear that they missed each other deeply. Either they are learning wisdom or they won’t make it.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Blanche.

“They didn’t argue once.”

***

The next week immersed everyone in ease. Every afternoon Fairlee arrived at Orchard Rest and stayed until sundown. She picnicked with Joseph on the deserted front lawn of Orchard Rest, took him for rows on the lake, and wheeled him down to the blackberry thicket where they engaged in lengthy recollections about days past as they filled their pails. She invited Somerset and Victoria along for parts of the day and tolerated Jim’s presence as chaperon on all their excursions. They drove the wagon to Tuscaloosa to catch a play, peeked in on Helen to see the new baby, and waltzed through the day without a solitary care, leaving everyone with the impression that the days were better than before the war.

The only person who didn’t partake in the magic was Ivy Garrett. Somerset knew she should go see her, but imagining the small, forlorn figure ensconced in her own loneliness at Maple Pool, she decided against it. There was nothing she could say to comfort Ivy. Fairlee and Joseph were discussing wedding dates in a cheerful, aimless manner, contemplating the fun of a summer honeymoon one moment only to backtrack and revel in the idea of a January wedding the next. Fairlee, Somerset, and Victoria even went through the fashion plates every evening, complimenting the splendor of wedding fashions they would never be able to afford.

“I’ll tell you who I haven’t laid eyes on,” said Fairlee as she leafed through a Peterson’s and ate a peach. “I haven’t seen Ivy Garrett at all. Shall we run up and say hello tomorrow?”

“Let’s,” agreed Victoria, who was growing accustomed to getting off the plantation and spending time with Somerset’s and Joseph’s friends. She was lazing on the davenport with her bare heels on the arm.

“No, she isn’t home,” lied Somerset.

“That’s unfortunate. I wanted to see about borrowing her dressmaker’s die. She always had the best one. I wanted to start trying patterns for a wedding dress.” Fairlee licked the peach juice from her fingers. “Mrs. Garrett brought it home from New York.”

“None of them are home. The house is closed.”

“Oh well,” said Fairlee. “I never could think of anything to say to her. She’s sweet as can be, but somehow I’m always uncomfortable around her.”

Blanche relaxed when she found Joseph dressed for Sunday morning services with Fairlee. As far as she knew, he hadn’t set foot in a church since the war. The cardinal sign that Blanche softened was she stopped referring to Fairlee as “that minx” or “that yellow-headed strumpet” to Somerset and Thomas, and soon after, she allowed Fairlee to stay for supper and sent her home with small gifts.

Joseph entered the room without his cane. He looked more helpless without the cane than with it despite his belief otherwise, but he was full of determination to regain his independence with Fairlee present. She cast aside her magazine and stood by the piano while Somerset brokenly picked out a waltz. Somerset was a pathetic musician, and Joseph said she played as though her hands were broken.

“I’d give anything to have a dance like in the old days,” he said.

“Remember how tight you held me and how mad you used to make your mother? She’d pull you behind the potted palms and lecture you about propriety.”

“What’s propriety?” grinned Joseph.

“Is that what you told her?”

“No, I told her I feared for my virtue when you held me close.”

Fairlee’s slow laughter filled the room.

Joseph extended a square brown hand.

“You can’t dance on that leg,” protested Fairlee.

“Somerset’s taking so long to find that next note that it doesn’t matter,” countered Joseph. “You can lead. I’ll look demure and sway in time to the music.”

***

Somerset’s week ended with the event she had looked forward to since Blanche’s dinner party. She and Sawyer trysted every two weeks when he was home, in addition to the calls he paid her at Orchard Rest. They began this in the early months of a tremulous courtship when she questioned whether she could be with Eric’s friend, much less a family member. Then as she saw young women marrying best friends and siblings of the deceased, their relationship matured and he began taking her to dinners and dances. While it was true that they had been courting for years, most people viewed the relationship as casual. Others wondered when Somerset was going to throw him over and marry a distant relation in her mother’s or father’s family. No one gave their partnership a serious thought and most declared Somerset “just killing time” while others said Sawyer “was moving too slowly to be serious.” The bored citizens of Century Grove would have been sick with regret to know that Somerset and Sawyer were conducting a romance under their noses.

Their first meeting was an accident, when Sawyer found Somerset weeping over Eric’s picture on the back porch as he traveled past to Margaret’s Glade. It took only one chance encounter to decide they wanted friendship. They always met at the Unnamed House that Eric had been building for Somerset when he died on the Chickamauga. What began as awkward false starts to conversation and silent blushing evolved into conversations that took multiple meetings to finish, catching up on each other’s lives from week to week, and ultimately a kiss that was completely unlike the impetuous one at the Atlanta hospital.

Somerset visited the Unnamed House from the time Eric presented it to her as a Christmas gift. It was her future, a castle in her imagination materializing before her eyes. After Eric’s death, she returned to it to remember him and daydream about what might have happened. She loved the house, and she wished someone inhabited it so that they could love it and care for it. It was a small thorn of contention between her and the Rutherfords although she didn’t say so, for she loved them much more than her blood family.

Eric built the house for her, but he left no will. It was sitting on the Rutherfords’ property because they hadn’t deeded it yet to Eric when he died. They owned the house in every sense of the word. Yet everyone felt that the house was really Somerset’s. Eric’s parents hadn’t set foot in the unfinished building since the day he perished in the hills. People on the road saw her sitting on the front porch, chin clasped in her hands, all by herself. People whispered that Paul and Margaret really had enough in assets and that if their daughter Caroline didn’t want it, it would really be best to let Somerset take it and maybe bring her sister and the boy for company.

Somerset sat in the Unnamed House for hours waiting on Sawyer to arrive. She wasn’t bothered when she was still by herself after an hour. Sawyer sometimes ran late due to unfinished business on the farm. For the next hour she walked through the house, running her hands over the bare but dusty walls and bannisters with the same reverence she would apply to a cathedral. She wandered through the entryway and meandered through the double parlors and loitered in the library, cognizant of but not quite believing that the beautiful house had been intended for her. She walked upstairs and peered out of the beautiful picture window through the thin clumps of oaks and birches surrounding the place. There was nothing and no one ascending the gravel path to the house and the sky took on the masculine green shade that foretold dusk and warned her she would have to return home soon or Blanche wouldn’t believe she helped Ivy put up okra through the afternoon. She dashed away a single tear as she turned from the window and clattered down the steps and out the door. Sawyer was not coming for her.

“I should have known he wasn’t coming. Why doesn’t he want to be with me anymore?” she asked herself as she hurried back to Orchard Rest as the sun sank into the turbulent hills behind her. “All he ever wanted out of life was me.”

The sad fluid notes of nesting birds met her ears in reply.

Cleo shot her a look brimming with suspicion and alarm when she opened the door for Somerset.

Victoria even cried out “Are you ill?” as Somerset pulled off her hat and gloves and stashed them in the little chest where all the girls stored their things.

“I think I’m catching a cold,” said Somerset and rubbed her reddened eyes.

Victoria sent Cleo for tea and Blanche demanded Somerset take a warm bath and go to bed with a warm compress. Somerset obeyed with such compliance Blanche feared Dr. Harlow should be summoned. When Somerset tucked herself into bed with a flatiron and a dose of Blanche’s cherry cough syrup, she let the tears flow in rivulets out the corners of both eyes, run down the curvature of her neck and soak the pillow behind her. It was a gift to allow her feelings to surface, to let the weight of the sadness out.

She was no one, nobody wanted her, and she was about to be packed up and given to the richest man in Richmond with interest in her because she was almost an old maid and her own fiancé wouldn’t speak up and claim her. She fell asleep just as the moon cast its calming beams across the window pane.

She dreamed she was with Eric in the olden days.

***

They rode Juno through the woods together. The ground was slick with melting frost and her breath froze in delicate crystals on the back of his neck and in his coarse black hair. She locked her arms around his waist as the horse bore them up the path.

“I can’t believe they gave you furlough so close to Christmas,” she sighed. She snuggled closer to him through the thick, coarse fabric of their homespun coats.

“Sometimes things in this world go right.”

“Franklin killed our last turkey for your dinner tonight,” she boasted. “I’m a disaster in the kitchen, but I’m trying to learn to cook just for you. I have endless plans for our time together. At the end of it all, why, I think you’ll desert and stay here with me forever. I’ve waited for you so long that I can’t believe you’re finally here. What excitement this is!”

“Your ability to obtain joy from the simplest of situations makes me the luckiest man alive. Most men are miserable trying to placate a woman, but you—you make a grand occasion out of every day. I’ve never seen anyone with the ability to be happy like you.”

“No, no,” she disagreed. “Happiness is something you feel, not something you learn how to do. It wouldn’t be fun at all if I worked at it. Besides, I belong with you and your family. It’s an example of some things in the world going right.”

She squeezed his middle and rested her cheek on his back.

“Now tell me, where are we going? We’re going to see your family, aren’t we? It looks like you’re taking me to Margaret’s Glade. This is the way we always go.”

“I’m not taking you to them today. We have more important things to do. Try to hold onto this moment, this day.”

Somerset tried to be silent for a few minutes. She always found herself chattering to Eric. She spoke freely in the moment to him, never running out of things to say. She knew that it was because she felt that he and his family accepted her for who she was as opposed to who she might become. They weren’t concerned with her potential; they were delighted with her just as she was. Eric would protect her from Blanche’s pretentious expectations and Thomas’s complete lack of interest. He would be a wall that they could never breach. He said so.

Juno plodded on as frosted limbs combed their backs, and limbs snapped as crisply under his hooves as the air felt. Somerset took in the distant side of Margaret’s Glade, Eric’s home. The concave glade that served as a front yard to the mansion was dull, brown, and shaggy. By spring it would burst into a lush growth of tiger lilies and irises. By summer it would die and spend the rest of the year growing more unkempt, but Mrs. Rutherford said it was all worth it for three months of complete beauty and that someday Somerset would be old enough to understand. The house beyond the glade was sprawling, whimsical, and somehow tidy looking. Somerset thought how she would love to be in the drawing room before a fire with a cup of coffee, gossiping with Mrs. Rutherford until Eric had to take her home again. The Glade tantalized her, just out of reach, and she knew what it was to be homesick for a place in which she never lived.

Juno turned onto Rutherford land and began navigating a wood without a trail. Pine trees flicked water droplets over them as they squeezed past packed trees, and the sawing of swaying trees met her curious ears as they wandered in dim light. She resisted the urge to ask what they were doing, and she nervously interlocked her fingers together where they met at Eric’s breastbone as the horse began to make finicky whinnies as it navigated the forest.

Then light filtered through as they broke into a less dense area. Felled pines and cedars lined the ground, silent dead giants in a quiet landscape. A compact clearing lay beyond all this, stacks of timber arranged to be hauled away, and a house.

“What place is this?” she asked. “It’s so pretty, such a secret. Why did I not know about it? Who lives here?”

“We live here.”

She slid off Juno’s back and ran at the building, half-skipping like a child with her wavy hair flying behind her.

“We live here!”

Eric built on her love of visiting Baton Rouge with her family, and he built her a house in the Italianate style that was the hallmark of Blanche’s home there. It was not so large as Somerset Manor or even Margaret’s Glade, but everywhere Somerset looked was a point of interest. She could not see it all. She ran a few steps forward and then a few steps back, pointing at the windows with pediments and the ornately crafted balcony. Cornices, quoins, and corbels graced every square inch that could be accommodated, and a compact tower rose from the right side of the house topped with a cupola. She knew it was their room.