Wellington Cross (Wellington Cross Series)

by Lane, Cheryl

  I shook my head. “I only remember Ethan as a child.”

  “That’s a good start. Perhaps we can help you remember more. I know it’s a lot to take in,” she said, as we reached the second floor.

  The upstairs hall was a duplicate of the one downstairs, except the top of the staircase was directly across the hall from a door. There was no door where the staircase met the upper hallway; it was open. Clarissa explained that the stairs on this floor came directly to the hallway instead of a bedroom because it really didn’t matter if this floor was symmetrical since only family came up here. We crossed the hall and went into that room, which overlooked the carriage drive. Clarissa told me this would be my room for now. “This was Ethan’s old room when he was a child before he turned 15 and moved over to the bachelor’s quarters next door. Perhaps you’ll have more childhood memories. You played in here from time to time.” I looked around, trying to remember.

  “Ethan and Elizabeth currently share bedchambers down and across the hall. Like I said before, yours and Ethan’s bedchambers after you were married are up on the third floor. It is actually the attic, which was used by our house slaves, including one named Fanny, but since we don’t have slaves anymore and Fanny was the only female house servant left, Ethan talked her into moving above the kitchen house where Cora and the girls will be living now. He wanted to convert all the rooms on that floor into private living areas for the two of you after you were married. That way, he wouldn’t have to build a new house, which of course he couldn’t afford to do anyway. He worked on those rooms as soon as he got back from the war. You know, he’s not gone up there since you left. He moved down to the second floor when he came back from looking for you. He said it was just too painful to be up there without you. Those rooms have sat empty for a year.” That must have been the reason for their shared look earlier.

  “Tell me about Elizabeth,” I said, looking out one of the two windows overlooking the carriage drive and tall oak trees.

  Clarissa hesitated before she began, and turned around to close the door. “Well, she showed up here one day, looking for work. It was not long after you and Fanny disappeared. She said she came from City Point, and that her parents, Joseph and Anne Tyler, had been killed in the war, and she was left alone. She claimed the Yankees did awful things to her. I don’t know; I guess they did. Anyway, she ran away from her home when the Yankees came in, and claims she hid in the well of an abandoned farmhouse here in Charles City County. Now, tell me how you can live in a well?” she asked dramatically.

  “Anyway, after the war, she wandered here looking for work as a house servant. Since Fanny was gone and I had no house servant, I invited her to stay and work for us. Elizabeth moved into the room up above the kitchen house, since Ethan didn’t want anyone to live up on the third floor rooms, and that way he wouldn’t have to move into the bachelor’s quarters. She wasn’t the best housekeeper or cook, but she tried hard. Well, she took one look at Ethan and how handsome he is, and she was smitten. He was distracted at first, of course, out looking for you, gone for a week at a time, and when he was here, he was busy in that study, like I said before. Once he gave up the search, he went into a deep melancholy. Elizabeth saw that as an excuse to be around him, bringing him food and water, and doing all sorts of things to get his attention.

  “One day she slipped and fell, broke her ankle. Ethan found her lying on the ground crying because of the pain and because she was worried about ruining dinner, which had spilled when she fell. After that, he slowly started coming out of his melancholy and started talking and paying more attention to her. He waited on her with that broken ankle, helped her walk again, and went for rides with her on horseback. Next thing you know, Ethan says they are getting married. He tried to convince us it didn’t matter that she was poor, that she had lost everything, and he felt pity on her. He also wanted a woman – other than me, you know, someone younger – as a companion to help take care of Lillie, thinking it might be good for her. They’ve only been married a month.”

  She paused for a moment to let it all sink in; then she continued. “Elizabeth is a sweet girl, but Ethan doesn’t love her the way he did you – still does. He told me so before the wedding. He wondered where you were, if you were watching him from heaven if you were deceased, and if you would hate him for marrying this new girl. He told me he wanted so much to have you back, that he would never love Elizabeth as much as he loved you, that he still wasn’t happy per se, but he felt he was doing the right thing by marrying her. He said that since she helped him out of his melancholy, he wanted to take care of her in return, protect her since she’d been through a lot, and to give Lillie a surrogate mother.”

  I felt a little resentment that Ethan tried to replace me. Would he have married just anyone, to get rid of his loneliness and provide Lillie with a new mother? Was that the right thing to do? Perhaps he was simply having a hard time getting over losing me, so soon after the war, and needed companionship. He was still probably haunted by the war. Still, I couldn’t and didn’t want to imagine him being…intimate with another woman. I felt jealous, even that my childhood friend had been with another woman. And that longing that I’d felt for him made my stomach turn with thoughts of him perhaps longing for this other woman in the same way.

  Clarissa turned to go out the door. I stopped her. “I’m sorry I lost Fanny, your house servant. I have no idea what happened to her.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. The good Lord will take care of her or else she may be up there with him now. And besides, you have more than made up for it by bringing me three servants to replace her with,” she said, laughing.

  “Thank you for saying that.”

  “Don’t you worry about a thing, now. Just work on getting your memory back.” She patted me on the arm. “My husband, Mr. Wellington, and I are right down the hall on this side, if you need anything.” She looked down at a trunk on the floor. “Here’s the trunk Jake brought down here with your clothes. There are only a few items since clothing was scarce after the war, but at least you’ll have something else to wear besides what you have on. I suppose you lost everything in the fire, didn’t you?” I nodded. Even the blue dress Jefferson bought me, I realized. I wouldn’t miss that, since he’d bought it for me. “Later on when you’re feeling up to it, we can go over to see your brother, if he’s back from traveling. He’ll be just thrilled to see you again.” She left me in the room alone with my thoughts.

  Chapter 7

  Settling In

  I looked through the small amount of clothing Jake had brought up, including a couple of dresses, a skirt, a blouse, a dressing gown, a riding habit, a winter cape, as well as a box of worn hats and bonnets. No stockings; I’d have to keep washing what I had. No drawers. Jake came back in the room with Zeke, bringing a galvanized hip bath. A few minutes later, they came back with buckets of water.

  “Miss Clarissa thought you might like to clean up, ma’am,” Zeke explained.

  “Oh, how nice,” I said. “But you don’t have to work so hard on my account.”

  “It’s nothing, ma’am.”

  I looked around Ethan’s old room. It was decorated in dark tones of burgundy and brown. There was a high 4-poster bed of dark cherry wood situated on the long wall with a small window above it. A high boy chest of drawers in the same dark wood sat in between the other two windows. There was a fireplace on the wall directly across from that, and a brown-covered armchair sat in the corner near the fireplace. An oval hand-made rug was spread at the foot of the bed, which was where the men were setting up my hip bath. There were tiny metal soldiers lined up on top of the high boy, remnants of Ethan’s childhood. I walked over and picked up one of them, trying to remember playing with them. I did get a spark of a memory, of us playing with them on the floor, with my brother, as well, reenacting the Revolutionary War. I always got angry when my soldiers were “shot”.

  I placed the soldier back on the chest and glanced around the room. Out the sma
ll side window I could see the bachelor’s quarters, and to the right, the river in the distance. I leaned over the bed and opened up the window and heard a bell clang from a distant boat. I wondered about what Ethan and Elizabeth were saying to each other. I couldn’t help but wonder how much Elizabeth really loved Ethan. I hated to hurt that poor girl; she’d apparently been through a lot.

  I wondered about my own little girl…Lillie Rose. I had a little girl; I still couldn’t believe it. There was so much that I could not remember, so much I had missed, and so much that I would have to re-learn.

  A few minutes later, the hip bath was filled halfway, and Cora came in and poured some steaming water from a copper kettle into the hip bath.

  “Oh, hello, Cora. Are you getting settled in?” I asked.

  “Yes, we are. It’s a beautiful place here. Beautiful family, too. Real nice folks. They’ve been nothing but kind to us. What about you, missus Madeline? Are you happy to be here?”

  I nodded. “It will be nice to get my memory back, and hopefully being here will help me do that.”

  “And that’s a fine little baby girl. Missus Clarissa said it was yours and Ethan’s. You must be so proud.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It was quite a shock.”

  She patted my arm. “You’ll be fine. Thank you for bringing us here,” she said, and then she headed back downstairs.

  I turned the key to lock the door, peeled off my clothes, and soaked in the tepid bath, feeling all the tension being released into the water. I tried to remember all that I was told happened in this house in the past, during the war, and in my marriage to Ethan, yet nothing new came to mind. My thoughts drifted to Ethan again. He said he wanted to help me remember my old life. Would he really choose me over Elizabeth? How would Elizabeth take it? What would happen to her? She had no other family, according to Clarissa. Ethan was married to Elizabeth, but now that I was back, would his marriage to me take precedence over hers? Would that make their marriage null and void? Who was he legally married to? He couldn’t be married to both of us at the same time. It seemed to me that the first marriage would supersede the second one. But then again, how did he marry her while he was still married to me?

  I thought about Ethan and how we first came to meet in the garden, and how I felt about him. I was happy to find out he was my cherished Wellsy, but I wasn’t sure how to feel about being married to him. Not only that, but we’d had a child together. A child that was part of him…and part of me. I had to admit I was attracted to him. He was so kind and generous, so loving and attentive, and so handsome. I wished I could remember him after he’d grown up. I did have moments of longing for him, because of the memory I had gotten when I first looked at my wedding ring. My ring! How did Jefferson get that? It was obviously not his mother’s ring. Ethan had given that to me. Ethan had been so sweet about dismissing the ring, just being thankful that I was alive.

  So what should I do? Break up his marriage to Elizabeth so I could take my rightful place next to my husband and be a mother to my child? Was it selfish of me to stay here and want my husband back? To want my old life back? Or should I quietly move to my brother’s until I could remember who I was? I felt guilty at the thought of breaking up a marriage that had just begun, for my own selfish reasons, until I could remember – no matter how tempting it might be. And yet, that’s exactly what I found myself wanting to do.

  After my bath, I put on one of my old dresses from upstairs. I longed to take a look up there and see if I could remember anything but didn’t think it proper to go snooping around by myself. I draped the other clothes over the pulled-out drawers of the high boy chest. There had been nothing inside the drawers. Before trying on the dress, I pulled on a corset over my chemise – it was so uncomfortable, and I had difficulty tying it myself. I had not worn one while working out in the fields at Oakworth – it just wasn’t practical while working in the heat – but I wanted to be properly dressed for my first evening meal at the plantation. I didn’t know how formal they dressed for supper. On top of the corset, I pulled on my battered crinoline, and finally a burgundy short-sleeved dress with a low neckline, trimmed in white ribbons. I redid my long brown hair by parting it in the middle, braiding the sides, and pinning them in a bun at my neck. I covered the bun up with a dark hairnet and tied it under the bun with a burgundy ribbon.

  I looked at my dress and tried to remember the last time I wore it. Nothing. I felt somewhat uncomfortable about wearing a dress that I didn’t remember, but it made me feel better somehow, knowing it was a part of my past. I pinched my cheeks for color and headed downstairs.

  Upon reaching the bottom of the staircase, a young blonde-haired woman that I had never seen before walked towards me from the dining room. She wore a soft blue dress with a plunging neckline and had neat tight curls hanging down against the back of her neck. One eyebrow arched higher than the other as she looked me over.

  “You must be Madeline. So glad to meet you,” she said in a slow Southern drawl. She looked anything but glad to meet me. She held out her hand to shake mine weakly. “I’m Elizabeth, Ethan’s wife,” she said firmly. Those words stung me. She was apparently trying to show me that her place was with Ethan.

  Jealousy overtook me. I took her hand in a solid shake. “Hello,” I said, smiling, trying to keep the awkward moment light. “I’m Ethan’s first wife, Lillie’s mother,” I said, smiling. Her face paled, but she forced out a smile, letting go of my hand abruptly. I probably shouldn’t have said that, but I couldn’t help it. She seemed too smug.

  Clarissa walked towards us from the dining room with Lillie Rose in her arms. Once again I was struck by Lillie’s beautiful amber eyes and curly brown hair. She reached for me, making my eyes water with joy. Such an adorable little creature wanted to be with me, wanted to be held by me. Elizabeth tried to take her, but she protested by smacking Elizabeth’s hands with her own, and reached around towards me again. I took her in my arms and followed Clarissa into the dining room.

  “Come along, ladies. We’re having dinner a little late today. Shall we?” She graciously led the way around the corner to the dining table. As the table came into view, Ethan and an older gentleman stood up to greet us. The older gentleman had been seated at the head of the table and had difficulty standing up with his partial wooden leg, which he held onto with a handle. He looked directly at me, seemingly startled and ended up tipping his chair backwards onto the floor with a loud bang.

  “Please forgive me,” he said, righting the chair again. Clarissa introduced him to me as her husband Edward, Ethan’s father. He was a graying older gentleman with a beard and mustache, also graying. As he took my hand and kissed it, he looked at me strangely. “Madeline,” he said. “Forgive me; we had all thought you were deceased. It’s good to see you are well. Welcome back.”

  I looked over and saw Ethan, who locked eyes with mine. He looked devastatingly handsome, having cleaned up, his hair slicked back, and wearing a black frock coat over a clean white shirt. He walked towards us, briefly acknowledging his mother and Elizabeth, and kissed Lillie on the head before taking my hand and gently bringing it to his lips. He bent over and said in a low voice, “You look wonderful. Please…sit here by me.” He pulled out a chair to the left of where he had been sitting at the other end of the table, while taking Lillie out of my arms. He walked around the table to place her in the high chair next to Elizabeth, but Lillie began to cry, reaching across the table towards me again. It warmed my heart.

  “Why don’t I switch places with her? Ethan, would you help me?” his mother asked. She had been next to me, and Ethan helped move the high chair beside me and the other chair on the other side of the table between Elizabeth and Edward. Lillie Rose was delighted.

  Elizabeth was on the other side of Ethan, which was right across from me. She glared at me with contempt through a forced smile. I couldn’t help but smile. I felt like I was in school again, competing with another girl for a boy’s attention. It made me feel a little
uneasy, and yet at the same time excited. It was wickedly delightful to be competing for a handsome man’s attention. Elizabeth shot daggers my way all throughout the evening. I tried not to look at her any more than necessary.

  We were seated at a table dressed with a beige crocheted overlay surrounded by 5 unmatched chairs and the high chair. A brick fireplace was on one wall of the room, behind me. There were three windows in the room, two facing the trees, gazebo, and river beyond, and another facing the kitchen house. They were dressed with long drapes of pale blue and were pulled back dramatically on each side. A warm breeze drifted through the open windows, outside of which were big oak trees providing a shady respite from the heat. The wallpaper in the room was creamy yellow with a swirly blue pattern. In the center of the dining table was a glass Mason jar full of some fresh red roses and yellow lilies, making me think of my little girl’s name and how fitting it was that they grew the same flowers here.

  “Didn’t this table used to be bigger?” I asked, remembering that it was very long and had more chairs, enough to hold almost a dozen chairs.

  “Why, you’re absolutely right, Madeline. It did used to be bigger. The Yankees that came here during the war used part of the table and a lot of the chairs for firewood during the winter. I’m surprised you remember that.”

  I looked at Ethan, and we smiled at each other because I had remembered something.

  Cora and the girls brought in the meal through another door near the study. I smiled at Cora, who winked at me. She was enjoying her new home and responsibilities. Day turned into evening as we enjoyed cucumber soup, Virginia ham, peas, green beans, as well as some flounder and fresh cornbread. The sun outside dipped behind the trees and river, and Cora came back in to light the eight candles of a simple but tasteful black chandelier that hung over the table, adding a nice glow to the room.