Forever, For Love

by Becky Lee Weyrich

  A chill touched Pandora’s heart as she remembered those dreadful days after the storm. Burial was difficult. Six thousand dead lay tangled in the wreckage, and the weather was brutally hot. On Monday, the Central Relief Committee had decided that mass burials at sea were the only answer. Grimly, the men who had been pressed into service—some at bayonet point—loaded the three barges, their noses covered with camphor-soaked bandanas, a priest offering them slugs of whiskey to keep them going. The bodies were weighted and taken far out in the Gulf. It seemed the only solution even though families frantically dug through the piles of rubble trying to locate their missing loved ones before the funeral crews took the bodies away.

  The burials at sea proved a useless effort. On Wednesday, the first of the corpses floated back to the beach. Others followed. For days, Ward and Jacob worked on the cleanup crews, hoping to find Angelica so that she might have a proper burial.

  The two of them were working on the beach the Thursday after the storm, piling the decaying corpses into heaps to be burned. Had Ward not found her, Jacob would never have known his wife. Her head was gone from her naked body, sliced off by a flying piece of tin roof, but Ward noticed a gleam of silver still twisted about the neck. He recognized Pandora’s locket—Angelica had been wearing it that night.

  It was not until long after the storm’s horrible aftermath that Ward told Pandora where he had found the locket, but she knew. She’d guessed the very day it happened. Angelica had broken the chain and stolen the coveted locket as they embraced after her birthday luncheon. Inside was the lock of hair tied with a faded scarlet ribbon.

  Pandora did not wear the locket ever again. She gave it to Jacob, to place inside his wife’s coffin. The lock of hair, she returned to the antique box.

  Jacob Saenger, along with some two thousand other inhabitants of the island, left for good. He moved away to far off Boston in the late fall. Old Dr. Saenger was lost in the storm, washed away with his house to become part of the great windrow of wreckage that formed a barrier across the island, saving the houses on Broadway from total destruction.

  “You always were one for remembering, darling.” Ward’s soft, husky voice brought Pandora out of her reverie.

  She looked up at him, smiled, and closed the lid of her box. “Not so much anymore. But today, well, it just seems right to look back and give thanks.” She paused and shook her head. “So much destroyed! So many lost!”

  Ward reached out and took her hand, raising her gently from her chair. “I know what you’re thinking—what might have been. Darling, what is is infinitely more pleasant.”

  She smiled and let him lead her inside. The castle was quiet with the girls away in Europe. She missed the constant flurry of activity most of the time. The late afternoon sun painted the Galveston sky in flaming hues. Pandora was wonderfully happy to be enjoying it here alone with her husband—her one and only love.

  She looked up into Ward’s eyes—warm silvery-gray touched with mystery.

  “I wish we still had the beach cottage,” he whispered. “I’d take you there this minute, darling.”

  His lips came down to cover hers. Not a spark of excitement had faded from his kisses through the years. He could still set her whole body tingling with his slightest touch.

  When he drew away, Pandora took his hand and tugged him gently toward the stairs.

  “I know a place…” she whispered.

  The glowing sunset torched the scarlet damask walls and made the antique bed gleam with its patina of gold. The bedroom was warm and secret and locked away from the rest of the world. Only the scent of late-blooming oleander and the lazy hum of bees invaded their sanctuary.

  Ward loved his wife slowly, but ardently, and all else fled from her mind. There was no longer any room in the great, golden bed for a third party. No green-eyed lover intruded.

  Afterward, when Pandora lay in her husband’s arms—wonderfully warm, thoroughly loved, perfectly content—she knew, as she had always known, that they loved each other with a passion far beyond the here and now.

  Far beyond all their yesterdays… all their tomorrows.

  Author’s Note

  Galveston Island lay wrapped in thick, cottony fog the morning of February 13, 1987, when I saw it for the first time. I had been waiting for years to visit this place. As our car eased down Broadway, I strained to catch glimpses of stately palms and Victorian mansions through the enshrouding, gray mist. But the fog couldn’t obscure the island’s special aura—a certain haunted feeling, a sense of past and present coming together, a special mystery unique to this one spot on earth. I knew then that I would write this book.

  My husband and I had flown from Georgia to Houston the day before, renting a car to take this side trip. We spent the day coming to know the island. I had no story as yet, only a setting. I needed to find my characters before I left the island.

  Around noon, my heroine presented herself. As we toured Ashton Villa, the former home of the Brown family, the spirit of Bettie Brown seemed to hover about, begging me to take notes faster.

  What a fascinating woman she was! Artist, world traveller, collector, fashion plate, the belle of Galveston in her day. Bettie never married, although she was beseiged by suitors, even in her later years when any other lady of the Victorian Age would have been considered an old maid.

  Bettie Brown inspired the creation of Pandora Sherwood.

  While browsing through the gift shop after our tour, I came across a brief history of the family, “The Browns of Ashton Villa,” written by Suzanne Morris, author of the intriguing novel, Galveston. In this booklet, Ms. Morris told not only of the family, but of the mansion’s miraculous rescue from the wreckers’ ball in 1971. At the last instant before its demolition, the Galveston Historical Foundation and several other local sources came up with $125,000 to purchase Ashton Villa from the Shriners, who had used it as their temple since they bought the mansion from the Brown family back in 1927. Galveston was denied a new filling station on the site, but retained a valuable piece of its history.

  Although Pandora’s box exists only in my imagination, it, too, was inspired by a story from Ms. Morris’s booklet. In 1984, Bettie Brown’s great niece, Mrs. Francoise Jumonville Vosbein of Louisiana, found a hidden drawer in a writing desk handed down to her from the Browns of Ashton Villa. Inside the secret compartment, she discovered over fifty mementos—letters, clippings, travel souvenirs—dating back to the golden years of Galveston.

  My story was taking shape. We wandered on, visiting the Bishop’s Palace, the Strand, the beach, the west end where Laffite’s Grove still stands. At that point, I remembered that I’d come across an intriguing Galveston story about Jean Laffite while doing research for Tainted Lilies, an earlier novel about the gentleman smuggler’s New Orleans years. His wife had been killed in Galveston, the only casualty of the forced evacuation of the island in 1821. Had her death been an accident or murder? No one ever found out. She died in Laffite’s arms and was buried on the island.

  I thought there must be some way to combine Laffite’s story with that of the Oleander City in its golden years. By nightfall, I had my solution, and soon Forever, for Love began weaving its own tapestry in my mind.

  The tragic hurricane that struck Galveston on Saturday, September 8, 1900, still stands on the record as the worst natural disaster ever to strike the United States. That anyone on the low-lying island survived seems miraculous.

  The death toll is listed at six thousand, but we will never know the true figure. During the fifteen-hour seige, 3,600 houses were destroyed. After it was over, there was talk of abandoning the island altogether, and moving Galveston to the mainland. But some two thousand of the staunch survivors refused to leave. The funeral pyres on the island burned into mid-November, wrapping all of Galveston in a pall of black, evil-smelling smoke. The last body—the skeleton of a fourteen-year-old girl—was recovered on February 10, 1901. Many of the missing remain unaccounted
for to this day.

  For further reading on this great disaster, I recommend A Weekend In September by John Edward Weems, Galveston, A History by David G. McComb, and Galveston by Ray Miller.

  Becky Lee Weyrich

  Unicorn Dune

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to several friends who helped at various stages with this novel—Nancy Knight for suggesting my trip to Galveston, Sandra Chastain for sending me Patricia Rae’s Storm Tide, Eugenia Riley for acting as my Texas connection and putting me in touch with Mr. Bob Nesbitt of Galveston, who sent me a copy of his intriguing book, Bob’s Galveston Reader.

  And, as always, many thanks to my husband, Hank—my research assistant, driver, and patient companion in this life and perhaps…

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