by Maria Hummel
After another moment, Faustina burst out from behind the screen and marched quickly toward the kitchen. Her eyes looked swollen. Cramped and dusty, Bel saw her uncle emerge and stride into the ballroom, smoothing his waistcoat with his right hand. He threw his head back before he entered the light, and Bel hated him in that instant for upsetting her mother, whatever he had said. She pushed out the other side of the hole behind the piano, only to find her exit blocked by a pair of legs.
“Move,” she hissed, and batted one of the calves, suspecting Ernest Pomeroy, a tubby thirty-year-old bachelor who often hid in the dining room at parties to consume whole plates of sweets.
“Excuse me?” came the polite voice of the tutor. His dark hair caught the candlelight as he bent down to investigate.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded, brushing dust from her dress.
“I could ask the same of you,” Louis retorted. He offered her his hand and she took it, straightening up to stand beside him.
“Did you hear any of that?”
“Any of what?”
“What they were saying.”
“I don’t know whom you’re talking about,” he said honestly. “I just came in. I was trying get away from all those girls.” He gave a tragic shrug.
Bel laughed in spite of herself. “I know a good place to hide,” she said, suddenly daring. The blue silk and all the starched petticoats beneath felt like a cloud around her legs.
“You are not waiting to be queen?” Louis picked at invisible lint on his coat. It was too short in the sleeves and the bones of his wrists protruded from the cuffs.
“I never put my name in. My mother says I have to wait until I’m sixteen.” Bel felt stupid for admitting it.
“And when is that?” Louis said without looking at her.
“In a few months.” She shrugged to show him she didn’t care. Mary bustled past with a tray of oysters, managing to simper in Louis’s direction.
“Anyway, meet me outside the front door in five minutes,” Bel commanded suddenly, irritated by the maid. “I’ll go around another way.”
“Outside? Can’t we hide in a warm place?” He regarded the dim dining room.
“It’s the only place that’s safe from dancing girls.” Bel nodded to Mary Ruth Cross, who was fast approaching, her yellow hair yanked up in a tight crown.
“Five minutes, then.” Louis grimaced and stalked deliberately past Mary Ruth on his way to the cloakroom. The girl paused after he passed and addressed Bel. Her white-blond eyebrows arched to a new zenith.
“If I get to be queen, I’m going to make him waltz with me the rest of the night. He’s a divine dancer,” she oozed.
Nodding, Bel watched as her mother returned to the ballroom. Not a hair was out of place and her green eyes were large and serene. Bel turned back to the screen. She saw feathers sometimes on the dark, inky body of the dragon, and sometimes fur. It had no wings, but still she believed it must be able to fly, for how could a creature have the power to destroy if it could not save itself, too? After his wide nostrils breathed fire down on the village, she imagined that the dragon would just rise up and fly over the mountain range, to live on the untouched other side.
Chapter Twenty
Bel’s candle threw a yellow glare on the dusty glass of the coaches, making her reflection flare across the panes, Louis a tall gray shadow behind her. The interior of the barn was bitter cold, the air so still, they instinctively blinked and rustled their feet to imbue it with movement.
“We hid a runaway slave up there,” Bel said, pointing to the ladder that led to the hayloft. Her breath clouded around her finger.
“Are you the friend of a friend?” Louis looked at her with surprise.
“No. It was an accident.” She shook her head, feeling the old shame return. “Everything was an accident.”
Louis’s only response was to stare at the coaches, carriages, and the white surrey Lucia had insisted she would be married in, before Morey Aldridge was killed at Lee’s Mills.
“How did you know that, by the way?” Bel asked. She inhaled the dull leathery smell of the vehicles.
“What?”
“Friend of a friend.”
“My mother assists the slaves across the border,” Louis answered, still riveted by the coaches. He spoke with the overly correct English of one who has learned his vocabulary from books. “We have had so many inhabit our house over the years, I can’t recall their names. They all look the same, though, so dirty and hungry and fearful; they cannot believe they’re free.”
Bel nodded, about to speak, but Louis continued, strolling between the carriages, touching their wheels.
“Last summer, one woman would not take off the chain on her ankle. My mother made her file it off one link a day, until finally she believed it was true.” He paused. “Did he reach the border?”
“Who?”
“Your runaway.”
“I think he did,” Bel replied hastily. “Here.” She handed him the candle and started climbing the ladder. The cold rungs made her fingers ache even through her gloves, and she could feel the heavy drag of her skirt. Suddenly aware that Louis would have a clear view up her petticoats, she stared down accusingly, only to find him gazing again, enamored, at the coaches.
“Are you coming?” she said. She entered the black cave of the hayloft. Loose straw whispered along the boards as she set her palms down to pull herself up.
“Why are we going to climb there?” Louis asked, still at the bottom of the ladder. He had the low, reedy voice of a bassoon.
“Do you want to go back to dancing with Mary Ruth?” Bel threatened, half-hoping he would say yes. The January chill began to seep through her cloak and needle her skin with goose bumps. Winter always made her feel thin and alone.
“No,” he said.
The scant starlight revealed the shaggy heaps of the extra bales they had stored in the hayloft. “Then you better bring the candle up, so I’m not sitting here in the dark.” Bel scrambled backward, trying to find a comfortable position. Down below, the light wavered as Louis began to climb.
Bel wondered for a second what she was doing in the dark with a man she had met only that afternoon, then banished her shock to the corner of her mind. As she inched back to make room for Louis, her thumb touched something thin and metal lying in the straw. She pulled it into the small glow cast by the candle.
“I liked it better down there,” he announced, his feet still on the lower rungs. His elbows leaned on either side of the hole. The yellow light softened his sharp features into handsomeness.
“Shh,” Bel said, as if the sound of his voice could somehow block her view of the silver chain in her hands. A bird-shaped locket hung on the end of it, the kind of keepsake a boy would give his first girl, the kind that would gleam in the jeweler’s window—just cheap enough that she could allow herself to covet it, just expensive enough for him to feel he had made a sacrifice worth making. Bel let it swing back and forth like a pendulum.
“Did you lose it?” Louis asked.
“It’s not mine,” Bel said, unsnapping the locket with trembling fingers. A wisp of paper drifted up, then fell past the tutor’s shoulder, through the hole to the floor below. Bel lurched after it, knocking Louis off balance. The tutor swayed from the ladder, the candle wagging in his hand and lighting Bel’s long hair. He thumped her shoulder enthusiastically. The singed ends curled like wire. Bel cried out and clutched him by the neck, caught in the acrid scent of her burned hair, his lemon cologne, and the damp spice of her own skin meeting his. It was a long moment before they were able to disentangle themselves safely, arm by arm. When she was free, Bel withdrew to the farthest rim of the light, feeling strange and warm.
“So this is your substitute for dancing,” Louis said with an indignant air, and attempted to smooth his ruffled person. This succeeded in making his black curls more comical than ever, and Bel began to giggle, forgetting about the locket until she felt the chain tighten acr
oss her fist.
“Whose is it?” asked Louis as she once again brought it into the light.
“I don’t know. Maybe Mary’s,” said Bel. “Laurence said she used to come up here with the blacksmith. But he wouldn’t marry her.” She blushed immediately after this confession, realizing her own situation was not so different from the servant’s.
Louis finally hoisted himself into the hayloft and sat beside her as they examined the necklace. “It’s too fine for Mary,” he said. “It looks like it would belong to a girl like you.”
With a dark indent for an eye, and a downcast beak, the bird looked sleepy, its wings tucked neatly back, as if flight were only their secondary purpose, after beauty. The locket’s clasp lay where the tail ended in a tip of metal, the loose hinge opposite, at the outer perimeter of the breast.
“In the old French fairy tales, the swan is a messenger bird for lovers who are married to others,” Louis added after a moment.
“I read that story,” Bel said, not remembering where or when.
“The swan comes to the woman with a letter folded beneath his neck. She starves him for a week while she writes a letter to send to her love, then sends him home. And so they go, back and forth.” Louis touched the bird as he said this, his finger brushing across Bel’s knuckles.
“The swan must always be hungry,” said Bel.
“The swan is the sacrifice for them,” Louis said solemnly, withdrawing his hand. “In the story, they don’t get punished for their adultery, but the swan starves all those years.”
“That’s not fair.” Bel kicked a piece of straw over the edge.
“No,” Louis said simply.
The hay bales that surrounded them smelled of a long-lost summer, faintly green and sweet.
“Why did you come to the party if you didn’t want to dance?” she asked.
“I came…” He paused, and stared down into the hole as if he were waiting to greet someone climbing up. “I came because I was interested.”
“Interested?”
“Interested in what would make a girl like you tell me she would die for love. I thought there might be a man here who could make you say that, and if so, I wanted to meet him.” He uttered his speech to the darkness below them. Bel stared down at the film of dust on her dress and shivered.
“I’m cold,” she said, unwilling to acknowledge the seriousness of his statement. “And I don’t love any man, except for my father, and my cousin Laurence.”
“I’ll give you my coat,” he said automatically, and pressed his thumbs against the silver buttons, undoing them one by one.
“You don’t want to go back inside?” Bel watched his shoulders flex back as he shrugged off the coat. He’s a man, she thought, without knowing why. Behind his dress shirt, his collarbones jutted like branches.
“Will you marry your cousin?” Louis asked, instead of answering her. He spread the warm shell of wool over her shoulders and whisked his palms together to bring the heat back into them.
“Oh no,” Bel said. Her love for her cousin had nothing to do with the romantic scenes she pored over in books, trying to dislodge her heart from its firm mooring in her chest. “He’s like a brother to me. I know him too well.”
Louis gave a satisfied nod. He seemed fascinated by the still room below them and would not look at her. Bel huddled deep in his coat and waited for another question. She liked the way the wide wool shoulders made her feel small and protected.
“Sometimes the slaves were too sick to live, even if they reached freedom,” he said after a minute. “We have ten graves in the woods behind our house. Mostly babies. If they were about to die, the priest would come late at night and baptize them. My mother had me dig the holes for the small ones,” he said, then paused. Bel was about to interrupt, when he cleared his throat. “Today when you asked me if I would fight to end slavery, just then I saw myself at fifteen years old, digging a grave at midnight in half-frozen ground. I always thought that was enough, that I was Canadian and it wasn’t an issue for my country.”
He tossed a gold length of straw into the void below them and continued. “I went and enlisted today after I met you. I came tonight to tell you that.”
Chapter Twenty-one
The party had settled into its middle age by the time Bel and Louis returned to the house. All the guests had arrived, the less temperate men had tarnished their chins with the nutmeg of their fourth eggnogs, and the eldest elders were beginning to succumb to the long, slow blinks of approaching sleep. Uncle George was chosen king, and Mary Ruth Cross his lady queen. Together, they made a gangly monarchy of commands and giggles in the center of the room.
The cold air had colored Bel’s cheeks, and she longed to creep to her former position at the top of the stair, where she could observe the party unnoticed. She and the tutor came in through separate entrances, the weight of their conversation having made them both awkward and eager to leave the silent confines of the coach barn. Bel hadn’t known what to say about his decision to fight with the Army of the Potomac on her account, but she admired his sense of purpose anyway. Louis was just entering the other door, his hair still upended from their collision in the hayloft, when Bel heard her uncle, the king.
“Why, there is a girl who hasn’t waltzed all night. Isabel Lindsey, I order you to dance with the last man who walked through the door.”
“That would be me. I was the last arrival.” Ernest Pomeroy stepped forward. The balding eldest son of her parents’ friends had tried to kiss Bel in the dining room the year before, but she had run away from him, wiping her sleeve across her lips.
“That’s not true!” exclaimed Mary Ruth Cross, placing her hands on her small and perfect hips, her paper crown slipping down over her forehead. “It was Monsieur Pacquette who just came back in.”
As string players in the alcove by the staircase struck up a lively, light-footed waltz, Bel met Louis in the center of the room. He looked annoyed by the king’s decision and placed his hand on her shoulder with a distracted air. Bel turned her cheek toward the cool fabric of his shirtfront. A clumsy, timid dancer, she generally avoided it at all costs and longed to escape now.
Louis, strong and assured, steered them in tight circles. Bel, seeing her mother watching from her seat beside Mary Ruth’s parents, tried to appear happy.
“Relax,” the tutor ordered after a few other couples began to pivot around the room. “Your body is too stiff for me to lead.”
“Oh, so it’s my fault,” Bel retorted, defensive.
“Think of yourself as water pouring down a hill,” he advised. “Let the hill take you where it wants to go.”
“And I suppose you’re the hill that gets to make all the decisions.”
“The hill is the music, Isabel.” He clicked his teeth in reprimand.
“Bel,” she reminded him, although in her mind she was already trying to let the music decide her movements.
“I prefer Isabel,” he said.
“Well, then I prefer Miss Lindsey, if you wish to be formal.” Bel trampled the toe of his right foot.
Instead of answering, Louis suddenly picked up his pace, so that she was spinning, the whole room spinning, and the focal point his face, dark, intent, his mouth pursed into a line that balanced somewhere between concentration and disapproval. Bel surrendered to the steps, her feet flying up and down, back and forth as they never had before, her heels always in the air. Couples parted for them—blurred to a spectrum of muted winter colors, their figures fixed in their own small circles. And then the music loomed where the rest of the world had vanished, a high sawing that reached all the way to the creamy candles of the chandelier. When it stopped, Louis slowed his steps and released her with a contained bow.
“Mademoiselle, it was a pleasure.”
Bel sank into a breathless curtsy. Her uncle approached them.
“Well, Monsieur Pacquette, I have heard from my queen that you are such a splendid dancer, I wondered if you would take a turn with the
lady of the house.”
Behind her uncle’s shoulder, Bel saw Mary Ruth bite her lip in disappointment, evidently expecting that she would be the one appointed to the role.
“Monsieur,” replied Louis, “I can’t refuse to dance with the lady of the house, but after that, I must take my leave. I have had a very long day at the recruiting office.”
“Are you trying to find a particular soldier?” Uncle George asked. “My son—”
“No, I’m a soldier myself. I enlisted today.” This was said with forthright certainty, as if the young man had known of his decision for a long time.
Mary Ruth clapped her hands over her face with a small cry. Still dizzy from the dance, Bel stared at him, unable to believe he was really going.
“Well, because of your imminent departure into the company of men, perhaps you would like to dance again with a young woman,” mused the king, straightening his lopsided crown.
Mary Ruth nodded with ill-concealed eagerness, but Louis shook his head and gestured to the approaching Faustina. “The young woman she was must have broken many hearts,” he said.
The king flushed and tugged vigorously at his beard. Bel watched them with hard, dry eyes, irritated with her mother for stealing all the attention. The emotion surprised her, for she was accustomed to her mother’s superiority when it came to men.
“Well, monsieur, you are just a sensation among the ladies,” Faustina said, although she glanced at Bel when she spoke. “They haven’t danced with anyone so skilled since Thomas Van Sicklin left with the Third Vermont regiment.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Ernest Pomeroy, crowding into the small circle. He was the kind of fellow who would make any comment just to insert himself and his round stomach into a conversation. Having conquered his position, he would stand there for as long as the talk lasted, just breathing. “I’m still here,” he added.
“Yes, you are, Ernest. But I simply will not allow you to take up any more of Monsieur Pacquette’s valuable time by trying to waltz with him,” Faustina interjected. “I hear you have only one dance left.” She held out her hand.