Wilderness Run

by Maria Hummel

  Louis accepted with a bow. “If it will please the king,” he murmured.

  The king looked as if he were trying to think of something both witty and merciless to say, all the while regarding Bel’s mother. Finally, he waved his hand. “The king decrees it,” he said. “Would you turn a reel with me, Bel?”

  Bel nodded, swallowing hard. She was still angry at him for upsetting her mother, and she didn’t want to spoil the pleasant memory of the dance with Louis. When her uncle placed his palm against her upper back, she couldn’t prevent an involuntary shudder. In the past year, she had often found his eyes resting on her, and something about his touch disturbed her now. She wanted to avoid it, the same way she had avoided Johnny Mulcane after she had tried to teach him to write.

  “That leaves us,” said Ernest, turning to Mary Ruth as Bel waltzed off in the king’s arms.

  “I suppose you’ve heard that Laurence is leaving Mt. Pleasant,” announced her uncle. They moved together toward the alcove, where the string players’ bows moved like small jags of lightning. “And he’s going to a place called Camp Convalescence, which your aunt says has a bad reputation with the Sanitary Commission.”

  “When will he get well, Uncle?” Bel’s voice trembled. She wanted to think of her cousin as a soldier, not a sick man.

  “When the winter is over, I suppose,” Uncle George said as he tightened his grip on her hand. Bel shrank back in her clothing so as to have as little contact as possible between them. “If I were really king, I would order him home.”

  “Even if he wanted to stay and fight?”

  “How can a man want to live in a dirty, vermin-infested tent when he could have one of our fine bedrooms?” the king said, trying to make it sound like he was joking. They swished passed her mother and Louis, who were talking and laughing like old confidants. Bel was momentarily distracted by them and didn’t answer her uncle right away.

  “How can he choose that life?” he added with a shrug.

  “Because conviction is the one thing you couldn’t buy for him, Uncle,” she moralized. “Laurence doesn’t want a fine bedroom, or even a rich house. He wants a world he can believe in.”

  Her uncle stopped waltzing but did not release her, his eyes flashing as they had in the old days when he and Faustina used to fight over Douglas and Lincoln at family dinners.

  “The world isn’t made of ideals, Isabel,” he said. “It’s made of men.”

  Unable to meet his gaze, she stared at his collar. The starched fabric pinched his neck and made the skin swell over it, but its stiff lines were beginning to strain, and by the end of the night, they would wear away, taking the same curve as his flesh.

  “Let me go,” Bel shouted, stepping back. She bumped into her father, who had come up behind her, obligingly dancing with the relentless Hannah Fithian. His damaged hand hooked around Hannah’s, the three misshapen fingers splayed above her own delicate palm as if she held a knot of branches. Bel stood for a minute, paralyzed between the two brothers, and then twisted away under her father’s raised arm to sprint up the spiral staircase to the second floor.

  “She doesn’t mean what she says these days,” she heard her father say, apologizing to the king. “She’s at that age where everything is difficult.”

  Faustina’s voice rose above the din. “Let’s have the cake, so Monsieur Pacquette can be fortified for his long journey south.”

  Bel looked back, to see Louis smiling at her mother, taking her in, as if he had forgotten there were any other women in the world.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Mary was trying to wrestle the kissing ball down with a long pole when Louis knocked on the door for Bel’s second French lesson. From her mother, who seemed to have become an expert on the tutor in one reel, Bel had learned that Louis would not be starting his training until the beginning of February, which left three more weeks in Allenton. Faustina insisted that the lessons to improve her daughter’s impoverished French continue in the meantime.

  The mistletoe splintered and fell in small sharp leaves as Mary jousted it with her pole, muttering in untranslatable Gaelic.

  “The door,” called Bel, sitting in precisely the same curve of the stairs where she had watched the Twelfth Night festivities the week before.

  The broken leaves dusted across Mary’s white cap and stuck in her hair. She let the pole fall with an aggrieved clatter and went to answer the door. Bel watched as the servant yanked the knob back, revealing Louis, silhouetted against the high banks of snow outside. He nodded to Mary, who gave a low, smitten curtsy and followed him inside. The servant’s response made Bel study her tutor curiously as she descended the stairs. She hadn’t thought of Louis as especially handsome, just pleasing to look at. Maybe he was more dashing than she thought.

  “Monsieur,” she said in the best accent she could muster. With her father away and her mother retired for an afternoon nap, Bel had safely put on her second-best dress and pinched her lips and cheeks to rosiness. The swan necklace made a small lump beneath her dress, but she did not dare wear it in the open with Mary around.

  “Miss Lindsey,” Louis said, setting down his strap of books to pull off his gloves. Bel blushed, remembering her irrational plea for formality.

  “Shall we go to the library?” She turned to lead the way up the stairs. Mary began to follow, ignoring the mess of mistletoe. “I hear you are leaving us at the end of the month, Mr. Pacquette,” Bel said, trying to assume her mother’s gracious, teasing air on Twelfth Night. “Mary, would you please continue working on that mistletoe? I think we can find the library ourselves.”

  Mary glowered at Bel’s sudden superiority, but she stomped obediently back down the stairs.

  “Perhaps sooner,” reflected Louis. “I must return to Canada to take leave of my mother.”

  They reached the top of the stairs and walked in silence down the portrait hall to the library. Henry and Isabel Gale regarded them with their usual cool distaste as Bel and Louis brushed against each other crossing the threshold. Bel had asked Mary to light a fire in the grate an hour before, and now it burned a lustrous orange.

  “You mustn’t mind Mary,” Bel advised. “She gets so taken with young men, you know.”

  “I don’t mind Mary.” Sitting down at the table by the fireplace, Louis unhooked the leather strap and began flipping through his books. Bel hovered uncertainly between the chair right next to him and the one opposite. Finally, in a fit of shyness, she chose the one opposite. She watched Louis’s dark bent head for a moment, expectant. He did not look up for some time, and when he did, he shoved a book across the table at her.

  “I think this will be easy enough for you,” he said. “Please read it aloud and we will work on that terrible Yankee pronunciation of yours.”

  Smarting from the insult, Bel took the book and began to read, her voice wooden and echoing against the walls of shelves. Every few seconds, Louis would stop her and have her repeat a word, his eyes boring into her. When they completed the passage, nothing of which Bel had the time or ability to comprehend, he had her read it aloud again, without interruption.

  After she finished, Bel glared dully at the table, refusing to raise her head.

  “Do you know what you just read?” His tone was gentle now. Against the polished oak, his hands looked like boats on a distant pond.

  “No.”

  “You just read the first page of the ‘Lay of Milun,’ about the messenger swan,” Louis said triumphantly.

  “Oh.” Bel touched the place where the bird locket lay against her skin. She met his eyes and a flash of heat washed over her. The walls of the room moved closer, the fire crackling loudly in the grate.

  “I thought you would like it.” He sounded disappointed by her reaction.

  “Oh, Monsieur Pacquette, I’m flattered that you would remember our conversation,” Bel answered, trying once again to adopt her mother’s wiles.

  “I wish you wouldn’t speak to me that way. It’s not becoming,”
he said quietly, and then resumed his teacherly manner. “Today, I think we should work on verbs.”

  “Why? I mean, why can’t I speak the way I want?” Bel demanded.

  “That’s it precisely. Speak the way you want, not the way you think you should,” Louis said, leaning forward on his elbows. “Now, most French verbs follow the same pattern, but some are irregular—for example, the infinitive to be.”

  “I thought men liked that sort of thing,” Bel muttered. “My mother is rather successful at it.”

  “Because she believes she has to be,” said Louis. “I have noticed that it doesn’t come easily to her, either. She wasn’t raised to be a hostess. I’m certain she was a lot like you.”

  This comparison both pleased and irritated Bel. “She used to live in the country,” Bel admitted. “On a big sheep farm. I remember her telling me stories about going out at night to roll down the highest hill they could find.”

  “They?”

  “She and my father. And my uncle, I suppose. They all grew up together.” Bel bit her lip and stared hard at one of the books. “You said we were going to study verbs? I hate verbs.”

  “How can your sentence go anywhere without a verb? Verbs are like the horse pulling the wagon, or the coal in the train engine,” Louis said, following the new direction of the conversation.

  “Oh, please don’t talk about trains. That’s all my father and uncle go on about. The best new engine and the latest type of rail and who has a line going where. It’s frightfully dull,” she added, regurgitating an opinion that had originated with her cousin Laurence.

  “Very well, then. Since trains are forbidden by the lady, we shall go back to verbs.” Louis rapped the book with a pair of spectacles he had just pulled from his pocket.

  “Before we do, may I ask you one more thing?” Bel pleaded, wanting to postpone the lesson.

  “I am your servant, mademoiselle.” Louis inclined his head. In the hallway outside the library, Mary drifted by with the deliberately absent expression of someone pretending not to listen. She was carrying a tall pile of white linen.

  “Do you regret your choice to enlist?” Bel asked.

  Louis sighed and put on his spectacles before answering. “I regret I must leave so soon.” His eyes were the color of caramels.

  Just then, Mary marched in with a feather duster. “Mrs. Lindsey, she wanted me to give the library a good going-over,” she said in a loud voice. “But don’t you mind me one bit. I like Franch, and one of my great-aunts in Ireland went to Paris and married a visscount there.”

  “So, let’s start with the infinitive to name,” said Louis, smiling at Bel across the table. Bel nodded, watching Mary’s freckled arms stretch for the highest books, the dust raining down over her determined pear-shaped face. “Comment vous appelez-vous?”

  “Je m’appelle Isabel,” she answered.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  In the blue light of her bedroom, Bel pressed her lips against her arm to feel what it was like to be kissed by her mouth. Unmoved, and a little spit-speckled from the process, the arm fell to her lap. She kissed again, with greater fury this time, sucking at the skin below the elbow. The arm grew hot with her breath. Only when a stray hair tangled in her teeth did she halt her passionate advance and draw back to examine the arched red mark on her skin.

  Today, Louis would leave for Virginia. Bel had been practicing for his departure for a long time, examining an array of her own reactions in mirrors and windowpanes: the soft pout, the trembling “I’m trying to be brave” look, the hard and studied carelessness of someone pretending her heart isn’t broken. Her suppressed romance with Louis had made Bel’s life seem much larger than before, made her remember with scorn the girl who hated dancing and giggled nervously when characters claimed their undying love in books.

  Her mother called her name. It was time. Bel gave one more practiced smile at the silver mirror and stuffed the swan locket beneath her dress. She wanted Louis to see it, but she was afraid Mary’s sharp eyes would notice the swan and claim it. She rose unsteadily, laden with voluminous petticoats, pinched her cheeks, and made her way to the stairs.

  “Isabel,” her mother called again. “Your tutor has come to bid us farewell.”

  “I’m coming,” Bel said, wondering if she should sound surprised. For weeks, she had dreaded the day Louis would board the train for Brattleboro, where his training would commence. Their last two French lessons had passed under the supervision of Bel’s mother, who must have surmised the budding romance between the tutor and his charge. Bel resented this intrusion fiercely and had treated her mother with more than the usual adolescent belligerence. Imperturbable, Faustina had attended the sessions, knitting quietly in the corner while a flushed Louis had pressed her daughter on proper grammar and punctuation.

  She reached the stairs and looked down on her parents and tutor standing by the door. Louis had already donned his blue wool uniform, which, in contrast to his former clothes, fit him perfectly. In the gray February light, his face looked remote and thoughtful, as if he were considering a matter of politics or religion. There was the slight air of a clergyman about Louis, Bel realized, someone whom people would trust enough to tell their secrets but who would never relay his own in return. Her father and mother were clustered beside him, watching as she descended the steps. Daniel said something low, which made Louis give his pained smile and bow slightly. Bel blushed.

  “I was saying that you are too lovely to be made to frown over grammar,” Daniel told her in his awkward way.

  Bel did frown then and they laughed, although Louis’s eyes remained serious, even a little apologetic. “You’re leaving us,” she said simply. How much more she wanted to say, but her parents hovered like giant marble statues, immobile but listening.

  “Yes,” said Louis. “The train departs at two o’clock.”

  “And you’ll look for Laurence when you get there,” Bel said, her lips trembling.

  “I have at least a month of training first. But when I get to Virginia, yes,” he added stiffly. “Or wherever they send us.”

  “God forbid you end up in some malarial swamp in Mississippi.” Daniel shook his head. Bel’s father had been engrossed in his drawings before the tutor’s arrival, and his thin hair spoked out in all directions.

  “Hush, Daniel,” Faustina said. “With luck, the war will be over before Mr. Pacquette even has to fight.”

  A silence fell over them. Bel had the urge to laugh. The scene was so ridiculous: her parents chaperoning her good-bye to her tutor. All the code she and Louis had developed to communicate during their supervised lessons was lost and they stared at each other helplessly.

  “Well, good-bye.” Bel extended her hand. He flashed her a single look of grave devotion as he bent over it, his lips lightly brushing her fingers. Bel’s heart pounded.

  “Yes, good-bye, Louis,” Faustina said, offering her own hand. “And by the time you return, no doubt our daughter will have forgotten everything you’ve taught her.”

  “That would be a shame,” the tutor said as he bent again. Not to be outdone, Daniel Lindsey thrust out his right fist as soon as Louis straightened.

  “I admire the men and women of your generation,” Daniel said, as if he had just made up his mind about some great, important thing. “You act, whereas mine waited. And you are stronger for that.” Bel watched her mother glance at him with surprise.

  “Yes. But they suffer for it, too,” Faustina lectured, picking up on the usual tack of her husband. Suddenly, the two were reversing roles in an argument that had lasted for years. She pressed her hand over her collarbone and continued. “Our nephew will never be the same bright boy who left us, even if he comes back with all his limbs.”

  Why are they telling him this? Bel wondered, and then realized her parents weren’t speaking to Louis at all, but to each other. “Maybe Laurence didn’t want to be the same bright boy who left you,” Bel commented, surprising herself. “Maybe he’s a bett
er man now.”

  “Don’t speak that way to your mother,” Daniel said, and Bel lowered her head, wishing the whole departure were over.

  “I must take my leave,” Louis said, as if sensing her thought, then turned to look out the window at the February landscape. Icicles made a sharp, jagged line across the top of the pane, descending from Greenwood’s peculiar ledges like the teeth of a dragon. “I shall miss the ice,” he said. “I fear there will be nothing so clear in all of Virginia.”

  There was a pause, and then Faustina spoke up. “We mustn’t keep you,” she said to Louis, but she was scrutinizing her daughter. Suddenly, all of Bel’s practiced emotions fell away and she had to bite her lip hard to keep tears from flooding her eyes. Then her mother was thanking Louis for his courtesy, her voice polite but loud, as if she were ordering a roast from the butcher’s. Daniel’s left hand wagged in his pocket. Louis listened gravely, nodding already like a private receiving orders.

  Finally, the taste of blood on her tongue woke Bel from her grief. She bid the tutor a calm good-bye and then watched him from the window, waiting for his figure to reach the lane.

  Water dripped from the end of the icicles, framing the tutor’s exit. After Louis turned the corner, a sleigh crossed his tracks, obliterating them. Bel’s mother and father swiveled to look at her, and she gave them a fragile yet forbidding smile. “I suppose I’ll forget everything,” she said lightly. “In six months, he’d despair over my accent.”

  “It takes a long time to learn a language.” Faustina tipped her lovely face toward her husband. “Doesn’t it, Daniel?”

  His crooked left hand emerged and settled on Faustina’s shoulder, steering her away. “And a short time to forget it,” he answered, sounding a little penitent. “Up in the study, I have a new draft for the reservoir,” he added. “May I show it to you? I need your advice.”