by Lane, Cheryl
He closed his eyes briefly before answering, enjoying what my hands were doing. “Yes. She’s the one who lives in Bellwood, whom Mother was visiting when she found you. The little girl is her daughter, and her name is-”
“Virginia,” I finished for him.
“Yes, Virginia,” he smiled again and kissed my cheek. Another noise in a room close by interrupted us again. I figured it had to be Elizabeth, spying on us.
I took my hands out of Ethan’s hair, and he got off the piano bench, taking Lillie gently in his arms, and we walked arm in arm down the hall, through the dining room and up the staircase to my bedchamber door, where we kissed once more, carefully, while he still held Lillie.
“I’ll be upstairs on the third floor if you need me – in our bedchambers.”
“Oh,” I said quietly. So he had moved to the same rooms where we had consummated our love, after we were married. His eyes were burning with passion. I knew I had better get away while I could, or I might be tempted to let him into my room, even if he did have Lillie with him. Or better yet, I might follow him upstairs to those bedchambers. He kissed my hand and reluctantly said goodnight as I went inside his old room and slowly closed the door.
Chapter 11
Childhood Memories
I awoke early the next morning and couldn’t sleep, and since no one else was awake yet, including Ethan, I decided to take a ride up to my brother’s plantation. I wondered if seeing my childhood home might trigger more memories, and I also hoped to find my brother at home. I intended to be back before anyone missed me.
I made my way quietly through the silent house so as not to awaken anyone. I went downstairs to the study and found a quill and parchment paper and scribbled out a letter for Ethan, letting him where I was going, and put it on the piano by our wedding photo.
Outside, I could hear the hens cackling and the birds in the trees calling to each other. I headed out to the stables, saddled up Cinnabar, and took off side-saddle down to the main drive at a slow trot. Once I reached the main road, I headed up the road in the opposite direction from where we went to Williamsburg. Jack and Sally followed along behind me, running excitedly, barking occasionally at squirrels and chipmunks.
I thought about all the memories I had come to remember since being here. It really had helped, being close to the ones I loved, especially Ethan. I had new feelings for him, in addition to remembering the old ones that kept coming back. It was so wonderful. I had hope that soon I would remember everything.
Hopefully, visiting my brother would bring back even more memories, if he had returned from his trip yet. I still couldn’t believe Jefferson told me my brother was dead. If I ever saw him again, I’d wring his neck.
Not too far up the road, I looked to my left and saw a sign that read, “Magnolia Grove”, and so I guided Cinnabar there. On my right, I passed rows and rows of corn, blowing softly in the breeze, which reached from the main road to almost as far as my eyes could see, till it reached woods way in the distance. On the left were empty fields and scattered trees. After passing through a cool overhang of oaks, pines, and magnolias with big white blossoms, I could see the house that was my childhood home, standing tall and proud. Immediately, it was all familiar. The main house was a 3-story brick with once-white trim and a dark grey roof, with a big long porch across the front of the house and another one just above it, on the second floor. There were two chimneys rising up out of the roof, and a white pineapple in the middle, a sign of welcome, I remembered my mother saying.
There were a lot more dependencies here which had survived the war. They were arranged in a Queen Anne style with the dependencies sitting perpendicular to the manor. I first passed a dovecote, where we used to hang fowl before we ate them. I passed two dependencies, which I remembered to be the storage house on one side, and the ice house on the other. I passed through an open gate with brick columns, flanked by tall bushes and then two more dependencies as I got closer to the main house. These were the kitchen house to my right and the laundry house to my left. There was one more dependency on the left side of the manor. This was the bachelor’s quarters. I remembered that the dependency on the other side had caught fire after lightning struck it during a storm.
The manor looked huge yet forlorn and in need of repairs. The front porch was missing rocking chairs; I remembered that. I also remembered that mother used to call it the Great House. I dismounted Cinnabar and walked around. The house was much closer to the water than Wellington was. Looking across the corn field to my right, behind the kitchen house, I remembered that before the war, there were slave quarters way over on the other side of the corn field next to the woods. I also remembered the epidemic of cholera that wiped out a good bunch of them when I was a little girl. My mother cared for them and taught them how to read, which was illegal. She was kind to them and hated to see them kept as slaves. She died of pneumonia before she ever got to see them gain their freedom.
I walked up the steps to the big wide sun-drenched porch. Before I reached the carriage-front door, a blonde-haired young man came running out and threw his arms around me. His hair was parted on the side, covering half of his forehead, and he had a little bit of chin whiskers. His eyes were green like mine.
“Madeline! It’s so good to see you,” he said. He gave me a bear hug, lifting my feet off the ground. “Where on earth have you been?”
I was a bit surprised, but I actually recognized my brother. “Jonesy?” I remembered everything about him, more of our childhood than what I had dreamed about, such as playing with him on this porch as a kid, following him when he went hunting in the woods, and of course, following him down to Ethan’s and playing by the river. We used to have a bird call that we would use for each other when he would wait for me outside my window to go sneak out to the boat and head down the river to Ethan’s. Sometimes it was Ethan who did the bird call, as he had been the one to sneak out and come to see us. He’d always bring a slave boy with him so he wouldn’t be alone.
“Of course it’s me, silly. Have you lost your head?” He pulled me out at arm’s length and just looked at me.
“As a matter of fact, I did lose my memory.”
“You did? But you remembered my nickname. You haven’t called me that in years. Come inside and tell me all about it. I see the “wolfies” followed you,” he said, looking at the two dogs, which jumped excitedly onto the porch to greet Jonas. I had forgotten that we used to call them “wolfies”, short for Irish wolfhounds.
All of a sudden I remembered where the dogs came from. Ethan had brought them home with him from the war. They’d belonged to his captain, who’d died in one of the last battles in Petersburg. He’d asked Ethan to take care of them if anything happened to him. And then I remembered what Ethan looked like when he’d come home from the war. I stood there on the porch of my childhood and turned around looking down the long drive, and I could see him, what he looked like then. His hair and beard had been long, his skin was tan, his uniform tattered and dirty, and I remember running down the drive to greet him as he came walking through the trees. Once I reached him, I threw my arms around his neck, and he picked me up in the air and twirled me around and around. We both laughed and cried and kissed. I was so happy to remember that. It’d happened right here in this very spot.
“Are you all right?” Jonas asked me, distracting me from my new memory.
“Yes,” I said, smiling. I turned around and followed Jonas, the dogs tagging along behind us into the house, just as they had tagged along with Ethan that day two years earlier, and we walked into the house.
Inside was a great hall with a big winding staircase to the right, and a fireplace to warm visitors, across from the staircase. We went straight down a narrow hall towards the river-front door and into a big parlor on the left. He got the dogs a bowl of water to drink by using a faucet near the fireplace, where he said water came into the room from the pump house, so that dishes could be washed when mother had big parties. I looked arou
nd the room. The walls were painted light green, and sofa and settee were deep red. I remember that there used to be a big carpet stretching across the room that had shades of red, green and brown. When I asked Jonas, he said he rolled that up and stored it for the summer. I remembered doing needlepoint in this room with my mother. We’d sit by the fireplace on cold winter days, and she would darn socks. She also taught me to read and write in this room, and all about hospitality and decorum. Father would come in holding a big rabbit by the ears or a duck by its webbed feet, showing off his catch of the day. I was happy that I could remember my mother and father.
I relayed the whole story to Jonas as to where I’d been for the past year. “Everything comes back in spurts,” I told him. “I’d been having dreams of you, Ethan, and me when we were children. I didn’t remember your nickname until Ethan called me Maddie, the day I first came back here. And while on the porch out there, I remembered the day Ethan came home from the war.”
“I’m so glad you’ve been found, Madeline. I just got back late last night from Orange and found this letter from Clarissa. So you were in Chester all this time?”
“Yes.”
“Of course I helped Ethan look for you when you disappeared. We were all devastated that we couldn’t find you. Do you remember what caused your memory loss?”
“No, I don’t. I vaguely remember being hit in the head with something and falling out of a carriage, but that’s it. Ethan said I had gone to sell cotton blankets with Fanny in City Point, but I don’t know how I got so far off course over in Chester. It was like I had taken the wrong road or something. Or maybe I couldn’t take the bridge across the James and had to take the long way around. I’ve thought about this a lot.”
“That is strange. So, you must know about Ethan getting married again…” he trailed off.
“Yes, he told me all about it.”
“That must be hard to take.”
“Yes, but he says he…” I felt a little embarrassed talking about Ethan this way with my brother. “Well, he says he still loves me, and he’s been helping me get my memory back.”
“I’m sure he does still love you, Maddie. The two of you were inseparable from the time we were children. I’ve never seen two people more in love than the two of you. He was truly distraught over losing you. I didn’t think he’d ever turn himself around again.”
“Yes, well, it didn’t take long after he met Elizabeth, did it? I’m still a little worried about that. How do I know he really still loves me? I mean, he told me he did, and he’s been really wonderful, but he did marry her.”
“Well, I can understand how you may have doubts since you’ve lost your memory, but I’m pretty sure he still loves you. You just don’t know how lost he was without you. He was not himself. He was very depressed. I do know his father was the one who convinced him that you had to be deceased so that he would stop torturing himself and get on with living again. Honestly, Madeline. I really think you can safely believe him if he tells you he loves you. I never heard him say that to or about Elizabeth.”
“Really and truly? Oh, thank you, Jonas. That helps me a lot. I want in my heart to believe him. I’m starting to remember more about us when our friendship changed as we grew up. I feel like I’m a young woman again, courting him.”
“I hope you get all those memories back again real soon,” he said, patting me on the shoulder. “You know, you’re welcome to come back here and live, if you want.”
“Thank you, I’ll keep that in mind. I’m sorry about Lucy,” I said then, changing the subject. I searched my memory but realized I had not met her, had only seen a photograph of her, which I saw sitting on the parlor table. I picked it up and looked at it. She’d had blonde hair and brown eyes and had lived up near Fredericksburg.
“Thanks,” he said quietly. “Do you remember me telling you about her?”
“Vaguely,” I said. “Refresh my memory. You met her during a battle?”
“Yes, she was a nurse. I was shot in the Battle of the Wilderness where Ethan also was, and I got hit with a bullet to my leg.” He rolled up his trousers to show me the scar. “I was taken to an old house near the Orange Court House where other wounded were being taken care of, and had to stay there for a whole month before I was able to walk on it again. During that time, she took real good care of me, read to me, sang to me, and we fell in love. By the time I was able to walk again, I found out my troop had moved to Cold Harbor, so I had to hitch a ride down there to join them. I vowed to come back for Lucy after the war, but when it was all over and I came looking for her, I was told she was killed by a Yankee.” He stopped to rub his face. “I just came back from visiting Lucy’s family over in Orange. She has a mother, father, and two younger sisters. I haven’t seen them since after the war when I went looking for Lucy. Her mother is the one who told me about her being killed. I promised them I would keep in touch. They’re a real nice family. I took them some strawberries. Do you remember the war?” he asked me.
“No, I don’t. Like I said, I only remember bits and pieces. The war is still a blank to me.”
“That’s probably your mind protecting you. You and mother went through a lot here. Come on, I’ll show you more of the house. Maybe things will come back to you.”
“All right.” As he started walking me through the house, I asked him about his leg. “You seem to be walking fine from your gunshot wound. Is it all healed now?”
“Yes, it was not a crippling wound; I just had to wait till it healed before I could walk on it again. It healed fairly quickly with rest and Lucy’s good care. It aches sometimes when rain is coming, however. Obviously, I now think of Lucy every time it rains.”
We walked through the dining room, back into the great hall, and into his master study, which had a big dark wood desk and a sitting area on one side of the room, with two leather chairs and a table between. This was where he and Ethan smoked pipes from time to time, he said.
I could remember a lot more as we walked through the rooms that used to be my home and up the free-standing staircase to the second floor. I looked at photographs of our parents, of me and Jonas, and a painting of my grandparents. Jonas explained that when the war started, and the Yankees began to take over the plantation homes, I had taken as many photographs and paintings as I could up to the attic to keep away from them. He said I got them back out when the war was over.
I went into the bedchamber I used to stay in, the door to the balcony where I used to sit and sometimes sleep on hot summer nights. There were double porches on the river side identical to the ones on the carriage side of the manor. I used to look over the big old willow oak tree that sat between the house and the river. Jonas, Ethan and I used to climb that tree as kids. I was happy that I could remember more adventures of us as children.
“What have you done since you came back? How much do you remember?” he asked me. I told him about riding with Ethan, going to Williamsburg, and getting shot at.
“Getting shot at?” he asked me, worriedly.
“Yes. Apparently it was an old friend of Ethan’s that he met in the war. They had been friends.” I told him about Jefferson and how Ethan’s father turned him in as a spy. Jonas did remember meeting him after the war. I told him my story, which was getting tedious, but I wanted to come clean with everyone close to me about me seeing Jefferson while I was staying in Chester, that not only did he deceive the South, but he deceived me, as well. He was apparently a thief who’d stolen my ring, Fanny, our horse and carriage, and even tried to steal me away from the ones I’d loved.
Up on the third floor, or attic, Jonas told me this was where the house slaves stayed before the war, and that our mother used to teach some of the women how to sew and knit in the evenings. It was practically empty now, except for a few trunks and odds and ends.
I spent the whole morning talking with Jonas, longer than I had anticipated. We ate some strawberries on the river-side porch, looking out over the river and talking about more childh
ood stories.
When I started to head back to Wellington Cross, Jonas said, “I’m coming with you. You shouldn’t have come out here by yourself this morning, especially after telling me that you were shot at yesterday. Even if the wolfies did follow you.”
“You’re right, I shouldn’t have. Ethan is probably worried about me.”
On the way back to the house, I had the feeling someone was following us. I looked around but didn’t see anyone. I told Jonas quietly, and we slowed the horses down while Jonas pulled a gun out of his boot, just to be on the safe side. Then we picked up the pace. I looked all around but saw no one among the thick pine trees. The dogs growled, sensing danger, or at least our anxiety.
When we reached Wellington Cross, we rode over to the stables, and Jonas went on inside the house to greet the family. I told him I’d be right there after putting Cinnabar in the stables.
After I put Cinnabar into her new stall, I closed her gate and heard a noise outside the stable. I looked around to see if it was Ethan, but to my surprise, I saw Jefferson, looking through the windows of the stables! I ducked down quickly and peeped out a window nearby, writhing my hands nervously, wondering what to do. I couldn’t face him, not here, not now. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted. I wondered where Ethan was and how I could tell him that Jefferson was here. I feared for my safety since he’d apparently shot at me in Williamsburg. I looked around for a weapon I could use in case he tried to hurt me, maybe a pitchfork. I moved quickly down to the end of the stables where the tools were, and then I heard a stable door swing open and then close. My heart leapt inside me.
I didn’t have time to grab a pitchfork, so instead I crouched down in the corner. I heard footsteps coming close, my heart pounding, and I held my breath.
“Madeline? Maddie, are you out here?” It was Ethan.
I breathed a sigh of relief and stood up. “I’m over here.”