Hesitantly, I followed Edward into Lydia Dodd’s sickroom. I knew that if I stepped quietly and left quickly enough, I could have run back down the broad staircase and out the front door before Edward even noticed I was gone. But, had I done that I would always wonder why Lydia has called me there at all. So instead, I lingered at the threshold of her room, smelling the pungent bite of camphor, and then I entered. Lydia must have been ill for several weeks, or longer. An array of tinctures and ointments met my eye. Bottles of various elixirs and tonics lined her bureau and each of two bedside tables.
In contrast, a fresh bouquet of flowers sat at the window, brightening the gloom somewhat. Yet, the still, sharp air hung with melancholy and an acceptance that a life would be ending, perhaps that very day. I was ushered to a chair in front of the bed where the dying woman lay.
“Mrs. Dodd? Miss Cunningham is here to see you,” said Edward in a hushed voice. Then he turned and promptly left. It was just Lydia and me on a quiet spring morning sitting there together in her sickroom.
Quite frail, Lydia turned her head on its thin neck to face me and opened her eyes. She looked much older than her years. Her skin, thin like fine parchment, was draped on her bones and her eyes registered a flash of confusion for a moment as she looked at me. Then, after several attempts, she managed to speak.
“Well, we finally meet after all these years, Miss Cunningham.” Her voice was withered and hoarse, yet she continued slowly. “Undoubtedly, you know exactly who I am by now so I don’t have to introduce myself,” Lydia said wryly. “You may wonder how I found you.”
“I must say I was quite surprised to receive your messenger, and I didn’t know that you were looking for me, Lydia.”
“It was your picture in the newspaper, the one with your daughter along with an article about your work. When it mentioned your names and the reference to the war, it was all I needed to know just who and where you were,” she explained.
I could see the perseverance that it took for Lydia Dodd to speak at all, much less to speak the words that she had struggled to formulate through the fog of drugs and dying. And I admired her for it.
She continued, “For many years, I was a bitter woman. Bitter towards you, a woman whom I had never met or known at any time, bitter for the loss of my husband, and bitter for the loss of our future and the hope that we would raise a family together.” She paused for a while, looking around, catching her breath, for she had started to wheeze slightly. “I never intended to call you here. But, you see, I have something of yours. At least something that rightly belongs to you. And now that this is all falling behind me, all the bitterness and emotions I held onto for so long, I feel that I must return to you that which is solely yours.”
As she said this, Lydia pointed a long finger towards the window. Her thin pointer finger appeared so frail, that had it been a twig it would have snapped with the weight of even a hummingbird. My eyes followed Lydia’s direction and there, off to the side and beneath the window sill was something that I hadn’t noticed when I first entered the room: my old yellow trunk. Indeed, it was the very same trunk that I had been forced to leave behind years ago in Virginia. Like seeing an old worn friend, it appeared to be nearly as I had left it, the paint more faded but it had survived the years intact, an artifact from my life long ago. For a moment it seemed that the past and the present were without distinction as two sides of a single vessel, interior and exterior, part of a whole.
“They brought it to me along with a flag after Warren died,” Lydia continued. “Said it was found in his horse’s stall and should be returned home.” Her frail voice flattened and she added, “Along with the flag, they gave me these.”
Reaching for a packet from the bedside table, she pushed a small bundle of letters towards me. They were stained with brown marks and a large splotch that looked like dried blood. Staring at the “W” on the top envelope, I recognized the unsigned letters I’d left behind in the basement of the cottage so long ago. He’d found them and read them. After so many years, I knew then that he’d died knowing how I’d wished for a future together with him after the war, a future, a home, and children.
“They were found on his person after he was shot,” Lydia explained. “They were delivered here. Misdelivered with your trunk.”
Poor Lydia. It couldn’t have been easy receiving those things. Her kindness was clear and her bitterness was clearly gone.
I could see that she was drifting off. Her eyelids were closing and her voice had slowed, grown very quiet, until she was silently mouthing a few lost syllables, then she fell back to sleep. Gratefully, I sat for a moment in the quiet with my thoughts and memories as Lydia slept. Occasionally, sounds from the servants downstairs drifted upwards and I imagined for a moment that this was my home and that I had lived here with Warren and our children, but I meant no irreverence by it. A clock ticked somewhere and reminded me that my time was limited so I rose from my chair, crossed the room and approached the trunk. I knelt down, paused and with a tug, I lifted the heavy latch and then the lid.
An ageless scent of cedar juxtaposed the must of peeling stamps from destinations all over the world. Indeed, I was back in Virginia with Warren. I imagined his hands first around my shoulders, where he’d gather my hair into a tail with one hand and lift my chin to his with the other. My auburn hair was long then, and wavy; my eyes a lighter blue. My small, slim figure seemed a perfect fit for his large, angular frame, two pieces of a puzzle. As if in Warren’s presence again, I breathed deeply trying to find his scent in the ether of memory, but I could not.
With a tight gasp, I lifted my old flowered dress from its resting place and found, tucked just inside the bodice, a yellowed envelope. Gently pulling it from the fabric as though it might dissolve and vanish back into the past, I spotted an “A” on the front of the envelope that caught my eye.
Warren had penned me a letter, one that I’d never seen. I sat back on the floor and smoothed the paper with my hands as if feeling his skin once again. I couldn’t resist putting the sheath to my face, closing my eyes, imagining his scent. Strands of sunlight poured through the window as my eyes blurred and filled with tears. Opening that letter in Lydia’s room may have been damnable, but as I listened to the quiet breathing of the woman behind me, I knew that I had a few moments to ingest its words, and after nearly three decades, I was entitled to them. I had waited long enough.