***
We celebrated the fourth in our own rite. Rising late, Warren and I walked in the gardens surrounding the house, and we massaged the strain from one another’s backs and shoulders. When we held hands, Warren had a habit of holding up my fingers and kissing them one by one. At the back of the house we found a patch of ripened berry bushes and I insisted that we make a pie. The servants allowed us to take over the house kitchen, and with the flour flying, two pies were produced from the berries we’d picked. Two pies sweetened with honey and served with the fresh ice cream made by the house servants in quiet honor of the day.
One pie with all its trimmings became our dinner. While the sun dropped down in the sky, I rested and then fell asleep on Warren’s lap while he rocked the porch swing forth and back. The only artifacts left from our meal were two forks and an empty pie plate resting on a table nearby. Surely, he too must have drifted off to dreams that I’m certain, had nothing to do with war.
In that weekend I became convinced of Warren’s sincerity. It came like an internal nod between us, a rich chord. Warren’s love was a deep current that rushed with gusto and fervor like a river, bringing the shallows at each side into movement.
Perhaps I should have felt guilty about loving him, but oddly, I did not.
Everything I’d learned to that point would have told me, surely, that I was an adulterer, a meddler, fixed on loving a man whom I shouldn’t love at all. A man of rank for the wrong army. But those voices didn’t speak in me. It wasn’t a matter of my not hearing them; they simply weren’t there. What I had with Warren was right, and at some core level, it was beyond all politics and personality. It was pure. Just as an artesian well fed by clear spring water is pure, down deep, past where the brackish surface waters lay, I too felt clarified with him.
“I wouldn’t ever want to return to the life I had,” Warren told me around the fire on the last night of my visit. “I’m married to Lydia by law, but not by heart, and as soon as I can, I intend to change that. I need you Annie. It’s that simple. I need not only your comforts, your warmth, and to touch your soft skin, but selfishly I also need you to help me feel whole within myself. And now, I need Us as a reminder that All is not a farce in this grim, ungodly war. Sometimes this war feels like an arm, poised and ready to tighten around my neck and bring me to my knees, until my light goes out. I struggle to find peace… and despite all of this, I’ve finally found it with you.”
I had to trust him when he said this. I had to trust myself as well. The best that Warren and I could do was to live fully every day and peel off the layers of fear that would creep up around us, winding their way in like summer vines. We needed to remind each other to be strong. Still, I had to keep my secrets from him. I had to lie about who I was and what I was doing.
On the last day of our rendezvous, Warren surprised me with a horseback ride far into the fields. First he led me by the hand to the front door where, when I opened it, the same strong, lean chestnut I had ridden out and beyond the pond, stood before me, tied securely to the hitching post, an iron ring sunk into a post of limestone. After checking the bridle and hitching the saddle one more notch, Warren mounted the horse and gave me his arm to pull me up. With me seated behind him, he gently gave a heel tap to her side and off we went across the fields and through the woods.
The morning was brilliant since the heavy heat and humidity had lifted. We crossed a creek and rode up the far embankment into a quiet glade. I remember the way his breath felt through his back as we rode; how the sun penetrated my spine, recharging my spirit. Patches of sun and shade dotted thick moss and grasses with alternating shades of green and yellow. Ferns splashed against low rock walls where farmers had cleared the land decades before. The blues, lavenders, and yellows of field flowers woke up the greens and browns of trees and shrubs punctuating the land as if pieces of a crystal sky had fallen in prism dots to the ground.
At the creek, Warren stopped to walk the horse, my cheek resting against his back, my fingers still laced around his waist.
“Annie,” he said over his shoulder, “Thank you for coming down here to meet me. You know, you’ve helped me a great deal. I feel like an enormous creature that had been sleeping on my chest forever, just got up and walked away. I can breathe deeply again.” He paused, “We’ll get through this. We’ll help one another to get through this. And the time is coming to write Lydia. I will write her and end it with her. I want to have a future with you. We just have to get there.”
I listened to Warren’s heart beating as if inside a barrel. The pump I heard was more than an organ, keeping his body alive. It was the place where we connected. The horse’s steps slowed and when I lifted my head, I saw a clearing surrounded by tall trees, a few fallen logs and moss-covered rocks with another arm of the creek flowing through it. The horse stopped as Warren pulled back on its reins.
“I was listening to your heartbeat. You have a strong heart, strong and steady, my dear,” I said to Warren.
“It’s a good thing, so if you break it, I may just survive,” he responded looking over his shoulder at me with a grin.
I eased myself off the horse, and then he dismounted as well.
“I have no intentions of ever breaking your heart.” I paused. “Just your nose,” I said miming a boxer and raising my fists to his face.
Grabbing his hand, I pulled him towards the lush mossy carpet just yards from the creek.
“Sit here with me for a bit. Let’s enjoy this beautiful place.”
“I’ll do that, Miss Annie,” he responded.
Settling into our waning time together, we leaned against a log, listening to the creek. The scents of summer were everywhere. Clover in the fields with spots of daisies and Queen Anne’s Lace attracted a few bees.
“Ah…no guns, no cannon,” Warren said. “For now, right at this moment, we could forget the whole thing, this awful war. God, how did we get in to this?” he asked me. “How, Annie?”
“I don’t know, Warren, “It seems that whether they realize it or not, everyone is playing a role in this war. It hardly seems real, but it is and here we are in the middle of it.” I couldn’t go on and say what I truly wanted to tell him.
I looked into his face, his eyes. I wanted to tell him about myself, my convictions. About Sarah and life in Massachusetts. Someday, I would be able to do that but first I had to know everything that I could about him. So much of him was still a mystery to me, but he seemed ready to tell me about who he was and where he had come from. I turned to him and made a request that I’d been thinking about all morning.
“Warren, please tell me about your family, tell me all about you. I want to know more about you, and this may be my only chance for a while.”
Warren responded. “All right, I’ll tell you. How far back do you want me to start? Birth?”
“Oh, you, tell me whatever it is you want me to know. And then, tell me everything else,” I said.
“All right then, m’lady. Here goes,” he said finding a comfortable niche in the log with his outstretched legs crossed at the ankle. “Let’s see, I was raised in Baltimore. My father was a merchant and I was the youngest of two boys. When my maternal grandfather died, he left us his big house, a house I’ve loved since I can remember, and we moved there when I was ten, or maybe it was eleven. Yeah, that’s right. I had my eleventh birthday shortly after Mother and Father moved us in.
My brother, Thomas, was three years older than me. We fought and wrestled all the time. I looked up to him, followed him around even without his knowing, just to observe him and everything he did, taking in his actions, his movements, the way he spoke. I loved to go to his athletic competitions and cheer him on, secretly taking notes on what I could do with my life and who I could become…someone like Thomas. In fact it was Thom whom Lydia was attracted to first, though she was much younger than he was. She was always around him at holiday parties and I think they discreetly met for private get-togethers.
Then, one day
when I was fifteen, my world collapsed. A man came to the door with Thomas’ body covered up in the back of a wagon. You see, he had been felling trees with a family friend, and was standing beside the wagon when the horse team was startled and the load of logs was thrown over the side. Unfortunately, Thom was standing on the wrong side of the wagon and was buried, probably killed in an instant, by the enormous load of full sized logs.
Nothing seemed the same after Thomas died and I alone could not take his place. My father was often away with his business after that, and my mother grew quite depressed. I tried to get her together with friends but she seemed to have given up. She died two years after Thom did. It was a gray winter day and she had had a fever. She had been ill for nearly six months and the doctors offered little help. At her death, I personally dismissed her nurse, made many of the arrangements for her internment, and tried to find my father. He arrived eight days later, having come from Louisiana at his ‘earliest convenience.’
After that there was nothing left for me in Baltimore so I went off to find work and a few months later, with my father’s help, got in at West Point. I must say those were some of my best years. When we weren’t busy with drills and books, my buddies and I would sail up and down the Hudson River from point to point and peak to peak, once sailing clear down to New York Harbor, then back again when the winds changed and we had had our fill of beer and stew. That’s where I met some of the men with whom I work now and have worked with in the past, like JEB Stuart.
Lee was one of the Point’s best supervisors. While at West Point, my grandfather died and left his home to me. He must never have trusted my father, but that’s another story. Then, I had my accident. It was a stupid mistake I made trying to show off with fireworks. Instead I blew off parts of my fingers. It took a while to recover. The pain was the worst part and I knew that I’d never be a line officer. My military service would best be served in communications or supplies. I played all the games the army threw at me and eventually won the favor of JEB and the others. So, I ended up working in Virginia getting appointed to their post. He paused as if coming up for air after a long dive.
Warren turned to look directly at me and cradled my face in his hands. He held me there looking into my eyes for a minute as if examining a delicate porcelain tea cup.
“Whew. I’ve got to be with you, Annie. I can’t help myself, and I swear to you I’ll find a way to be with you, right there,” he said touching my sternum. “And there,” touching my forehead. “I can’t explain it but it’s as if we’ve already started a life together. Are you sure you’ll be okay on the way back to Marsh Station? I have to leave so early, even before you do. I’m sorry. Perhaps you should have gone back today.”
“And miss this time with you, Warren? No, I want to spend as much time as we can together, especially now. Lee’s heading north and I get the feeling that in the upcoming weeks, there will be little rest for either of us. If I could be very honest and very selfish, I’d have to say I don’t want to return to that hospital. But I’ve got to and I know I will.” I said. “I have seen so many shattered men in the hospital…and I even saw a woman. I haven’t told you this but Warren, we discovered a woman among the wounded last week. She had kept her gender a secret for six months, but after the wounds she had, I have to wonder if she is still alive.”
“A woman fighting in uniform,” he said listening. Well, that must have been quite a surprise for you all.”
Facing each other on our knees in the moss, I held Warren’s wrists in my hands. In the distance I heard the sounds of the birds back in the woods that surrounded us. First, kissing his fingertips, I moved his hands to my waist and reached up around his neck.
“Someday I’ll tell you about myself, but it’s nearly time to go back now, so we’ll wait,” I said quietly.
He kissed me and as he did, every fiber was alive in me. Like two logs glowing as orange embers, our kisses melded our spirits, our minds, even our egos. Our love had awakened every dormant cell within us and sent their essences skyward like sparks from a campfire against a cool, dark sky. Leaning back, the moss beneath me created a quilt of velvet cushioning upon which only the sounds of the creek echoed our secrets and carried them on the wind into a summer meadow in the Virginia countryside. Our horse, drinking at the creek, looked up at us and seeing us deeply engaged with one another, sought out the shade of an old ash tree bordering the creek and meadow.
By mid afternoon, we realized that we’d have to hurry back to the house and gather our things. Warren would have to be back to his camp by dawn and I would leave with the first coach in the morning. Warren had requested that one of the house servants take me into town by carriage, so all we had left was each other. Our love glowed into the night as our bodies found one another. Sleep overtook us in turns. I listened to Warren’s restful breathing and held his hand as he slept until my eyes, too, became heavy and my limbs seemed leaden. Then, we slept deeply, contentedly. Resting so deeply side by side had to be the human equivalent of geologic time, sharing layer upon layer of connected landscape, replenishing our bodies and our spirits.
By morning, I couldn’t watch him leave. I could only make it as far as the front hallway.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Warren told me. “But it might be weeks, even a month. I just don’t know. But I do know that I love you more than I can say, Annie,” he added. Then he kissed me and he left.
Afterwards, I walked upstairs in the early dawn, the sun teasing the horizon, and sat in one of the chairs that he had moved to the window in his room. I stared at the four-poster bed that we had shared for three nights and mornings and remembered how he had woken me up in the middle of the night by stroking my side in the curve of the hip, then pulled me to him. Then I backed up the images to the afternoon of our arrival and the ring buried as an artifact in the lush carpet.
‘Perhaps I should have rejected him then. Perhaps I should have turned around and packed up,’ I thought. But, I couldn’t. And I hadn’t. Listening to my own thoughts, I didn’t feel like a mistress of his at all, but like a friend, a lover, and oddly, like a wife.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN