The Pledge, Value

by Jane Peart

  Always your loving mother,

  Johanna Shelby Davison

  JoBeth finished the letter with mixed emotions. She was not surprised either at her aunt and uncle’s reaction to her elopement or at Amelia Brooke’s dire predictions. Both were to be expected, considering the circumstances. Especially Aunt Josie and Uncle Madison’s response.

  The feelings of her relatives could have only been deepened and hardened by the news her mother sent in a later letter.

  It grieves me to have to add the news received here that Harvel was badly wounded in the terrible battle at Chickamauga in September. He is in a hospital in Chattanooga, and we hope for the best.

  This war was a scourge on the whole country, North and South. JoBeth had seen the trainloads of Union wounded, the lines of ambulances rumbling through the city on the way to the soldiers hospitals. Fatalities on both sides were heavy. Nobody escaped, no family was spared. She felt almost guilty that Wes was safe in his noncombatant duty. However, he had known the horror of the battlefield, although he refused to talk to her about it. When she allowed herself to dwell on it, JoBeth’s heart was wrung with pain. When would it be over?

  “Going out, dearie?” Mrs. Hobbs called to her from her parlor as JoBeth came down the stairway.

  “It looks like a lovely day, and I need some fresh air,” JoBeth replied, pausing at the door while she pulled on her gloves.

  “What a good idea,” Mrs. Hobbs nodded approvingly. “I’m a great believer in fresh air and exercise, even for females.”

  Her statement rather amused JoBeth, since the good lady rarely seemed to move farther than from her comfortable chair by her fire to the front gate for the evening paper.

  “I’ve been meaning to speak to you, my dear,” Mrs. Hobbs continued, setting aside her sewing, rising, and coming to the parlor door. “To see if you’d be interested in joining me for a project. I make quilts for the soldiers hospital. Of course, they’re not intricate designs or unique in any way. But they are warm and seem to comfort the dear boys. Reminds them of home, I believe, and their own mothers tucking them in at night.”

  “I suppose I could, Mrs. Hobbs. My mother makes beautiful quilts. In fact, she’s famous for hers. As are all my great-aunts. It’s a kind of family skill. However—” She hesitated. “I’ve only made one of my own. I’ve helped finish quilts—that is, stitch the tops to the under padding, but—”

  “Well, then, that’s good enough. These quilts for the soldiers don’t have to be works of art. I’m sure you’ll do just fine. I’ve made so many of these, I’ll be glad to show you. There’s nothing to finishing. Just a matter of diligence,” she chuckled. “And working with someone else makes it go fast. You know what they say, ‘Many hands make light work.’ We’ll make a fine team, you and I,” she said with a satisfied smile.

  They began working one or two afternoons a week on the quilts for the hospital. JoBeth discovered that in spite of the difference in their ages, spending time with Mrs. Hobbs was enjoyable, and they became good friends. On one of the long rainy afternoons they were together, JoBeth told Mrs. Hobbs about the pledge patches she’d made during her separation from Wes.

  “And did you complete the quilt then?” Mrs. Hobbs asked interestedly.

  “No. I mean, I kept making the patches I’d designed, collecting them. But I didn’t know when Wes would come home—to Hillsboro, I mean. I assumed it would be after the war. I’d made a kind of bargain with myself that I’d continue making them until the war was over and he was home safely.” She paused, took a few stitches before going on. “I guess none of us dreamed it would last so long—this long.”

  Mrs. Hobbs nodded her head in sympathetic agreement.

  “Anyway, then I went to Richmond, and then Wes came for me and—well, I just never have put it all together. I’m not sure I know how to do it myself.”

  “I’d be happy to help you, if you’d like?” Mrs. Hobbs offered.

  “Would you? That would be wonderful. Wes has never seen the patches. It would be fun to have it all put together and then show him.”

  “A lovely surprise—your work of faith and devotion!” Mrs. Hobbs’s bright eyes sparkled. “He’d be so pleased.”

  A few days later JoBeth got the patches out from the bottom of her trunk and laid them out over her bed to see if she had enough to make into a quilt.

  When Mrs. Hobbs saw the squares with their unusual original design, she exclaimed, “Why, you’re quite an artist, my dear. I’m sure your mother was happy to see you follow in her footsteps, wasn’t she?”

  JoBeth looked sad. “Well, not exactly—she never saw it. I had to keep it a secret, even from her. You see, ever since my father died when I was a little girl and we went to live in Hillsboro, it’s been difficult. At least, since the war. All my relatives supported secession. Almost everyone I know is for the Confederacy.” She paused. “So when Wes made his decision, everyone there turned against him, and I just didn’t want to make it any harder for Mama, since she had to continue to live there.”

  “I think I understand, dear,” Mrs. Hobbs nodded, then said briskly, “Well, I see we have work to do, but in no time you should have a beautiful quilt—one that you and the lieutenant will always cherish for its meaning.”

  Mrs. Hobbs was patient as she showed JoBeth how to complete her quilt. She was generous in her praise of JoBeth’s design, her tiny stitches. Mrs. Hobbs’s romantic soul relished that the theme had stemmed from their secretly exchanged pledge rings.

  After that their friendship seemed to blossom. “Do call me Caroline,” Mrs. Hobbs urged JoBeth. Together they pieced the pledge quilt together and attached it to a cotton under-pad filled with fluffy cotton batting. The finished quilt was indeed “a thing of beauty whose joy would last forever,” as Mrs. Hobbs quoted admiringly.

  As fall moved into a stormy early winter, there were many afternoons working on the soldiers’ quilts together before a cheerful fire in Mrs. Hobbs’s sewing room. Although Mrs. Hobbs dismissed these quilts as “necessity quilts,” their joint endeavor brought back some of JoBeth’s happiest childhood memories. As a little girl, JoBeth had loved sitting on a low stool by her mother’s chair and going through the over-flowing scrap bag, finding colorful material from which her mother would select appropriate pieces for the squares that would be put together for the top of a quilt. Next there would be the length of flannel for the lining, to be stretched onto the frame and held by small nails all along each side. Usually Johanna whipstitched the lining onto the frame, because these quilts were done quickly so that she could get on with the quilts for which she had orders and that people were waiting to have delivered.

  The quilts that JoBeth made now with Mrs. Hobbs were like the ones her mother had made for their own personal use when they still lived in the mountains, before JoBeth’s father died. Those were most often made from clothes that no longer could be mended, pieced, or turned or the many tidbits and pieces left over from the designs of patterns for the ones she made for sale.

  JoBeth could shut her eyes and nostalgically feel the warmth of those quilts, remember their smell, recall the feeling of being caressed with love, security, warmth. No wonder Mrs. Hobbs’s quilts were so welcomed at the hospitals by wounded soldiers sick of heart and body, a long way from the comfort of their own home and mother.

  Caroline Hobbs had fulfilled Wes’s early prediction that JoBeth would find her delightful company. Their friendship provided JoBeth with the feminine companionship she had known at home and missed. Mrs. Hobbs kept JoBeth entertained with her recital of the daily events of Washington society. She was an avid reader of the society pages of the daily newspaper, and she recounted the social doings of the capital city as though she had attended every fete and levee.

  She was a great expert on the president’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, a controversial figure, the subject of much gossip ever since she arrived from Springfield, Illinois. “She is a woman of unpredictable temper, apt to explode at the tiniest thing
.” Mrs. Hobbs made a clucking sound with her tongue at this deplorable trait. “An implied snub or a gesture is enough to send her into a fury. Those who have been witness to such tirades say they are frightening to behold. It’s said she is insanely jealous of her husband and has caused terrible scenes as a result.”

  Mrs. Hobbs’s favorite personality on the social scene was Miss Kate Chase, a popular belle who was the daughter of the secretary of the treasury, and she read every scrap written about her. She served as her widowed father’s official hostess and did a great deal of entertaining, as was required of a member of the president’s cabinet, reaping inches of complimentary newsprint.

  “She is a stunning creature,” Mrs. Hobbs assured JoBeth. “Holds herself like a queen, has skin like snow, marvelous hazel eyes, and glorious bronze hair.”

  The fact that Mrs. Hobbs had never seen the lady in person did not diminish her knowledge of the details of the beautiful socialite’s life. “She’s being courted by the young senator from Rhode Island, William Sprague.”

  Eventually her wedding was the social highlight of the winter and became the topic of Mrs. Hobbs’s monologues to JoBeth for several days. Having avidly read the accounts, she could give JoBeth a full report, as though she had attended the wedding along with the president (but not Mrs. Lincoln: “It’s said she’s extremely jealous of Kate and wouldn’t want to be where she ain’t the center herself—which of course she wouldn’t be, with its being, after all, the bride’s day”).

  Mrs. Hobbs relayed almost word for word the newspaper-article description of the elaborate reception following the ceremony, telling JoBeth that “the beautiful bride was a vision in white velvet, lace veil, and the matched set of diamond-and-pearl jewelry that was the gift of the bridegroom.”

  Listening, JoBeth could not help but compare this glittering affair with her own wedding—which no one attended or wrote about or deemed in any way special. A wedding far from girlish imagination. But JoBeth was sure the bride of Mrs. Hobbs’s extravagant description could be no happier than she.

  Sometimes JoBeth had to pinch herself to believe her own happiness. It seemed strange that she could be so happy, having been cut off so completely from family and friends. But then, she had felt even more isolated and lonely in Hillsboro without Wes. Any doubts that she might have had that she had been foolish to follow her heart vanished entirely. Wes lived up to her idealized image of him: his brilliant mind, his absolute integrity, the sweetness of their intimate relationship. All they had been through to be together had been worth it.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  At long last, JoBeth’s large trunk, battered, badly handled on its circuitous journey, finally arrived from Hillsboro. That it had come at all Caroline Hobbs declared a minor miracle, considering the “fortunes of war.” It was scuffed, scratched, its leather straps worn, the brass locks rusted. Luckily, it had been well-made, and the contents were all safely intact.

  JoBeth spent the day unpacking and putting away the embroidered petticoats, dainty camisoles, handkerchiefs, the peach dressing gown with its lace ruffles. She took a long time going over each dress before hanging it up in the armoire, contemplating where and on what occasion she might wear it. She lingered especially over the hyacinth blue velvet ballgown, fingering the folds. As she held it up to herself in front of the mirror, she remembered the last time she had worn it. It had been last Christmas, and she had danced with Curtis Channing.

  Where would she ever wear it again? Perhaps a military ball here in Washington. For sure, if she ever did wear this gown again, she would most certainly dance with a soldier in a uniform of another color.

  That possibility seemed dim. Wes worked long hours, came home weary. He often came home dejected from all the gloomy news he heard during the day, and it took all JoBeth’s efforts to cheer him. The idea of any kind of social life for them seemed out of the question. Besides, just now a period of pessimism hung over the capital city. Things looked dark. The war was not going well. The North had lost its easy optimism about winning. Rumors were rife, morale was low. The draft for men was digging deep, dragging the bottom of the barrel for soldiers, taking all comers, including Irish and German immigrants straight off the boat who couldn’t even speak English. The president was criticized at every turn, the generals were fighting among themselves, the Congress was in disarray.

  The chance for any social occasion that would call for such a dress seemed remote. JoBeth sighed, putting the gown carefully away.

  However, sooner than she could have imagined, an unexpected social opportunity came. To her complete surprise, Wes announced that they had been included in an invitation with Major Meredith’s staff to attend one of Mrs. Lincoln’s receptions. They were also invited to dinner at the Merediths’ home before going to the White House.

  JoBeth was beside herself with excitement. To think she would actually meet the president! Until she came to Washington, he had only been a shadowy figure to her, someone whose name she had heard denounced and vilified almost daily. Since then she had seen his name, headlines and articles about him, caricatures or cartoons of him, with regularity in the city’s newspapers.

  Mrs. Hobbs revered him greatly. When JoBeth told her of their invitation, she was as excited as JoBeth had ever seen the lady. Hearing his praises sung by Mrs. Hobbs when they worked together on the quilts had given JoBeth a different view of the president. She was curious to see him firsthand and form her own opinion.

  JoBeth would have liked writing to her mother about all she was seeing, observing, doing. But since delivery of letters to the South was uncertain at best, she decided to start keeping a journal again. That way after the war, she would have a record of the places she went, the people she met, the things she could not tactfully or safely put in her letters. Certainly, going to the White House would be one such event she would have liked to share with her mother. JoBeth knew that Aunt Josie would faint if she knew to what “special occasion” her niece would wear one of the lovely outfits her own seamstress had made for her.

  “Be careful not to outshine Madame President!” Mrs. Hobbs warned JoBeth when told of the invitation. “She don’t like to be outdone in fashion—or anything else, for that matter. Especially by a pretty young woman like yourself.”

  Privately JoBeth doubted that the First Lady would give her a second look or a second thought. However, she did choose her dress carefully. A simple dusty rose silk, over which she wore a deeper-rose velvet jacket with a fan-shaped collar.

  When Wes and JoBeth stepped into the entry hall at the Merediths’ townhouse that evening, their wraps were taken by a rosy-cheeked Irish maid in a ruffled cap and apron over a black dress, just as Major and Mrs. Meredith came to greet them warmly. The major’s wife, Frances, was equally as gracious as he. Taking JoBeth by the arm, she led her into the drawing room, where several well-coifed, elegantly dressed ladies and an impressive group of officers in dress uniforms shining with medals were already assembled.

  She introduced her to a lady in purple taffeta lavishly trimmed with Belgian lace, who was seated on a satin-upholstered sofa. Then the major’s wife called to welcome another group of arriving guests and left JoBeth there.

  “What a lovely home,” JoBeth remarked—a safe opening line she had been taught to use when starting a conversation with a fellow guest who was a total stranger.

  The woman turned ice blue eyes upon her. “Do I detect a slight Southern accent?”

  A little taken aback, JoBeth answered, “Yes, I am from North Carolina.”

  The woman moved her skirt an imperceptible inch. “How unfortunate! I’ve heard the city is filled with ‘secesshes.'” With that the woman unfurled her fan and turned away, picking up the thread of the conversation she had been conducting with the woman on the other side of her.

  JoBeth did not know whether to be insulted, amused, or grateful. Had the comment meant she was unfortunate to be from the South and far from home? Or unfortunate to be from the South when her h
usband was a Union officer? Or simply unfortunate on general terms? She certainly had not expected such blatant rudeness in such elegant company. She did not have a chance to either think of an appropriate retort or get up and move, because just then a splendid-looking officer bowed before her, saying, “I must be addressing Lieutenant Rutherford’s charming bride?”

  His flattering manner and the frank admiration in his eyes as he bent over her extended hand made JoBeth forget the enigmatic remark of the lady beside her. “May I introduce myself?” the officer said. “I’m one of your husband’s fellow officers, Lieutenant Marsden Carlyle. May I have the honor of escorting you in to dinner?” He added with a smile, “I have your husband’s permission.”

  At the table, JoBeth was seated between Lieutenant Carlyle and another officer. Wes was seated across from her, far down the other side of the table. Every so often he glanced approvingly over at her. It had been such a long time since she had been out socially, but JoBeth soon got the knack of it again. She recalled the advice Aunt Josie had given her before her very first dancing party: “If you can’t think of anything to say, just tilt your head to one side, gaze intently at whomever happens to be speaking, look interested. It never fails. It is flattering to people to think you actually care about their opinions. Whatever they are.”

  As it turned out, JoBeth needn’t have worried. Both men proved to be amusing conversationalists and flatteringly attentive.

  After dinner, carriages rolled up to the front of the house, and the party divided into groups of four and left for the White House. Wes’s approving look and smile as they left their hosts assured JoBeth that she had “passed muster” at her first Washington dinner party.

  JoBeth felt as if she had swallowed a bunch of butterflies when they drove up to the imposing white mansion. Alighting from the carriage in front of the porticoed entrance, Wes held out his arm, and together they went up the steps, into the foyer, then on into the grand drawing room.