When the Splendor Falls

by Laurie McBain

  “You’ve been talking to Jolie,” Leigh said, but her expression was solemn as she thought about what Guy had said. She’d never realized how perceptive he was. She’d misjudged him, even during the long, lazy days of summer at Travers Hill, when she’d thought he never noticed anything other than his own pleasures.

  “Jolie’s been talking, I’ve been listening. Which I happen to do very well nowadays.”

  Leigh smiled, but her lips were stiff. “Sometimes, I used to feel like the mares in the pasture. Fenced in, grazing on sweet grass while I waited for my time to foal. I had no choice, and I would have done what was expected of me. But I was tempted one morning to set those fat, lazy mares free. That wouldn’t have been fair, though, because that was the only life they knew, and it wasn’t a bad one. They were well fed and treated kindly, and beloved by Papa. The only thing they didn’t have was their freedom. That’s the way I felt sometimes. It wasn’t that I didn’t like my life, it was wonderful. And I would have married Matthew, and I would have been happy with him. And I promised myself that I’d make life for my family at Wycliffe Hall as happy as mine had been at Travers Hill. Those were wonderful days. And I vowed I would never become a society matron, forgetful of everything but what was considered proper. When I was little, I can remember climbing the tallest tree in the apple orchard and looking toward the Shenandoah. The mountains were so blue in the distance, shrouded in that veil of mist that drifted down into the valleys early in the mornings, and I used to wonder what lay beyond. Was that wrong of me, Guy?”

  “No,” he said, his words hardly more than a whisper, for he now knew the frustration she must have felt.

  “I don’t know how many times I’ve stood here at Royal Rivers, just watching the thunderclouds building over the highest peaks. And I can ride across the lower slopes, into the forests where the pines tower above the spruce and mountain mahogany. The air is so fresh and pure, especially after an afternoon shower, when everything has been washed clean. And I can ride for miles, Guy, without ever meeting another soul, without being questioned about my activities. In Virginia, I’d always meet someone, or be seen riding across a pasture by a nosy neighbor, and I’d know that before I reached home, they would already have visited and told Mama that one of her daughters had been seen riding bareback or wading barefoot along the riverbank. I can do what I want to here, Guy. You may not be able to understand, because you’ve always done as you pleased because you’re a man. Things are different for a woman. Propriety says I must ride sidesaddle, even though I ride astride far easier, and far more safely, especially in this rough terrain. So astride is the way I have chosen to ride. I value my neck more than I do adhering to outmoded customs that might get me killed. Survival dictates in this land, not fashion. And after their initial shock at my appearance, even the Misses Simone and Clarice have come to accept that life is different out here—even for women. There is a freedom here I’ve never known. And yet, I’ve never done anything I cannot be proud of. I’ve not tarnished the Travers name, nor the name of Braedon. And just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I don’t have any pride or common sense.”

  “I’m not certain I would have understood once, but now—now that I can’t do as I would like—I think I can understand how you might have felt,” Guy said, remembering the many times he’d ridden across the fields, forgetful of everything but his hunter clearing the hedge, and never giving a thought to Leigh, who would have been sitting back at the house, occupied in womanly pursuits. “And what happens when Neil returns?” he asked again. “He is used to doing things his way too. And he is a hard man. He’s different from Matthew, or some of your other beaus, whom you could have wrapped around your little finger. You are Mrs. Neil Braedon. He may wish, and I truly cannot blame him, for a real marriage. Don’t forget that. He has his pride too, my dear, and he may not be as indulgent of your newfound freedom.”

  “I haven’t forgotten that we are man and wife, but maybe someone else has. And maybe Neil will also wish to forget,” Leigh murmured, forgetting how sharp Guy’s hearing had become.

  “Diosa?”

  “She may have more of a claim to Neil than I do, Guy.”

  “There is one advantage to being blind, and that is that you have to listen very carefully to what people are saying. You cannot know by their expressions if they are smiling, frowning, teasing, or lying. I sit and I listen, and I hear nuances in people’s voices that they are completely unaware of. And I have heard a note of fear in Diosa’s. She isn’t as sure of herself where Neil is concerned as she would have you believe, Leigh. I believe your marriage came as a very unpleasant shock to her. And since I know how beautiful a woman my sister is, and Diosa is not blind, she too must suspect that as the reason why Neil married you. Don’t let her jealous lies, or her own wistful memories, ruin the chance you and Neil may have to make this marriage of yours work.”

  “She hasn’t lied, Guy. I know Neil wasn’t happy with his first wife, and it’s only natural he would have turned to another woman, and one as beautiful as Diosa. I cannot blame him for that.”

  “Well, then make certain he is happy with you, if that is what you want, so he won’t have the need to turn to another woman again.”

  “Oh, Guy, it isn’t that simple. You and I both know why Neil married me. He would have married Diosa, except that she was recently widowed and still in mourning when he left to fight in the war. If he hadn’t had to marry me in order to save his men and help Adam, then, when he returned to Royal Rivers, he would have married Diosa. She expects Neil to come back to her, not to me.”

  “I wouldn’t make any judgments about what Neil wants or doesn’t want until he returns and makes that decision for himself,” Guy warned her, thinking Leigh didn’t know Neil Braedon as well as she thought she did if she truly believed he would ever do anything he didn’t want to do. And even Adam, with his dying wish, hadn’t forced him into marrying Leigh unless he had intended that all along. That much Guy knew about the man he’d once hated—and had because of that very trait of ruthless determination.

  “Maybe it won’t matter,” Leigh said, turning away from the window.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Neil may never return.”

  “If he survived till now, he will, and probably soon. The South surrendered,” Guy reminded her, still unable to believe the war between the states was over—or the chain of events that led up to General Lee’s surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant, General in Chief of the Armies of the United States, three months ago at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. The date—and he would never forget it—April 9, 1865. A week earlier, the once proud Confederate capital had fallen to the Union, and once again the Stars and Stripes had been seen flying atop the domed Capitol building. But there had been no glory for the federal troops who’d laid siege to the city for so long, for the city they marched victorious into had been gutted by fire. Few of the residents, and most of those were freed slaves, remained to welcome the victors into the charred and smoking ruins of Richmond.

  Unwilling to leave the factories and arsenals to the federal troops, the retreating Confederate soldiers had burned sections of the city, with blocks of warehouses going up in flames, the inferno spreading out of control through the city as Jefferson Davis and his cabinet escaped by train, leaving mobs of drunken looters and deserters running wild through the abandoned streets as panicked citizens fled to the south bank of the James River, until the main bridge was burned, cutting off their escape, then they streamed along the north bank, flooding onto the roads crowded with troops moving westward to regroup into an army and fight again.

  And the fighting had continued sporadically, with many Southerners refusing to surrender and continuing to offer resistance, but it was a lost cause, and only the most fanatical Secessionists continued to fight a guerrilla war against their conquerors. Even John Mosby, the famed guerrilla fighter known as the Gray Ghost, had disbanded his men, refusing to
fight any longer, and successfully avoiding ever having to surrender to the enemy. Quantrill, however, had been killed while looting somewhere in Kentucky, his bushwhacking days of terrorizing the countryside over.

  Jefferson Davis and his fellow fugitives, having fled from Virginia into the Carolinas, were finally caught by federal troops in Georgia. Their desperate flight to Texas was over. Seeking protection in the Confederate lands west of the Mississippi, which had still been officially at war, they had never reached the Confederate stronghold they sought, and from where they would have continued the fight with partisan warfare. Or that having failed, they would have fled farther south into Mexico, as other bands of rebels were reported doing. They were hopeful of aid from Emperor Maximilian, the Austrian archduke who was trying to bring French rule to Mexico by overthrowing Benito Juarez, president of Mexico, and at a time when the United States, because of its Civil War, would be unable to send troops to defend its doctrine forbidding European intervention in the Americas. But Jefferson Davis, under armed guard, was sent instead to Nashville, then returned to Richmond, where federal troops had restored order. The onetime president of the Confederacy reentered his capital in chains, bound for a prison cell for his crimes against the sovereignty of the Union.

  It was over. The fighting at least. Now, the talk was of reconstruction. Guy sighed, wondering if there was anything left of the South to reconstruct. Certainly life would be different for many, since slavery had been abolished, and a thirteenth amendment had even been added to the Constitution assuring the freedoms first granted with the Emancipation Proclamation. The war had truly become more than a battle to save the disbanding of the Union by a Southern rebellion against Northern interference; the whole social and economic structure of the South had been changed. Guy allowed his thoughts to move deeper into his soul, and he knew that no man, whether of a black-skinned race or a white-skinned, should be the slave of another. If only enough others had felt that way, and if they’d had the time, they might have abolished slavery without the shedding of blood, without the dividing of their nation.

  Guy smiled bitterly, for, oddly enough, President Lincoln had been criticized for being too lenient on the South by those who would have sought a harsher punishment for traitorous followers of the rebellion against the Union. But the man’s sincerity, and true wish for a healing between the two divided peoples, had been proved to Guy when Grant, on Lincoln’s authority, had offered Lee generous terms of surrender. Robert E. Lee had not been put in chains. The defeated general had been allowed to return proudly to his troops and send them home, with the promise that those who threw down their arms and fought no longer, who asked for pardon and from that day forward obeyed the laws of the Union, would suffer no retribution for the stand they had taken.

  Guy shook his head in disbelief, still shocked by the singular act of violence that repelled him more than any of the other tragedies that had befallen so many during the war. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln. During the first years of the fighting, he’d hated the man who’d come to symbolize the differences between the Union and the Confederacy as much as any Southerner, but no man deserved to be shot down by an assassin’s bullet. Strange to think that the assassin, that madman Booth, may have caused more harm and grief to befall the defeated South by his actions than if Lincoln had lived to see his policies carried out. Guy suspected that those who would now dictate Lincoln’s plans for reconstruction, and seeking either vengeance or profit, might not be as sympathetic to the South and its people, forgetting the words spoken by Lincoln in his second inaugural address. The text had been read to him from an Illinois newspaper Althea had found spread across a seat of the train during their journey across the North. But Guy remembered as if the words had been burned into his mind. “…With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne their battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

  “Guy?”

  “What?” he said automatically, still lost in his thoughts.

  “I was saying that I have to go.”

  “What are you doing up so early?” he demanded, wondering for the first time what she’d been doing outside his door.

  “Actually, I’m late. I was supposed to meet Gil ten minutes ago. We’re riding up into the high country. We’re taking supplies to one of the shepherds. Guy, are you going to be all right? I really think I should tell someone about your sight beginning to come back,” Leigh said, pressing a kiss to his pale, perspiration-beaded forehead.

  “It’s not back yet, and until then, Leigh…” he warned.

  “All right, my lips are sealed.”

  “Be careful,” he called to her as he heard her walk toward the door.

  “I will, oh, and I’ll send one of the maids to clean this up.”

  “A good idea; Stephen would be outraged to find my room in such a mess, and I don’t think I can stand having him mother-henning me any more than he already does,” Guy said with a grin of amused disgust. “He’s been grumbling more than ever of late, and especially about Jolie and her voodoo scaring him out of a good night’s sleep, and every night.”

  “Don’t forget to tell him about your hand so he can tend to it,” Leigh called back to him as she left the room, closing the door behind her, then turning quickly, and that was when she nearly stepped on the glove that someone had dropped in the corridor.

  At first she’d thought it was her own, but when she picked it up, feeling the fine grains of dirt clinging to the slightly dirtied cotton of the fingertips she knew whose glove it was. Lys Helene had been standing in the corridor, and the door to Guy’s room had been ajar, just enough for her to have overheard the conversation within, and now Leigh knew what, or rather whom, Guy had heard in the corridor.

  Leigh frowned slightly, wondering if Lys Helene had overheard Guy’s churlish remarks concerning her hanging around him after he regained his sight. She hoped not, because Leigh did not believe Guy had meant that harsh denunciation of Lys Helene. He might have been serious about never marrying, but then that was pride speaking; the other had been fear. He might never admit it to himself, but Leigh knew he was frightened that if he did regain his sight, he might lose Lys Helene. What would he discover when he searched her face, a face Leigh knew he would find lovely, but would Guy see love in her eyes, or pity?

  Leigh glanced out into the shadowy coolness of the gardens, searching again for the slight figure, but the garden still seemed empty, and she didn’t have time now to find Lys Helene. “Well…they will just have to work this out for themselves when Guy can see the truth for himself,” Leigh said to herself, dropping the glove on the windowsill, then walking toward the door at the end of the corridor, intending to let herself out into the courtyard, then through the kitchens at the far end.

  “Oops!” a startled voice said apologetically as a door suddenly swung open and nearly caught Leigh on the shoulder as she passed by. “I’m sorry, Leigh. Did I hit you?” Althea asked, softly closing the door behind her with her shoulder, her arms full of bundled up papers and books. “I don’t want to wake the children,” she said. “It’s still early.”

  Leigh stared at her in surprise. “Yes, it is early,” she agreed, eyeing her sister questioningly.

  “I know!” Althea laughed, her brown eyes glowing with mischievous excitement as she started down the corridor, Leigh having to hurry to catch up to her.

  “Where are you going?” she asked carefully, thinking Althea must be delirious, perhaps suffering a relapse of her fever.

  “To teach school,” Althea replied matter-of-factly, her lips twitching as she watched the incredulous expression crossing her sister’s face.

  “School?” Leigh repeated.

  “Yes. I can read and write, my dear, in fact I’m often comp
limented on my lovely penmanship, and I’ve some knowledge of geography, arithmetic, and history. And since I still know some of my schoolgirl’s French I do not think I’ll have too much difficulty with Spanish, since Lupe and the maids have been tutoring me. My qualifications seem quite acceptable to the patrón.”

  “Qualifications for what?” Leigh demanded, wondering how Nathaniel would allow such a thing.

  “For teaching the children here on the rancho,” Althea told her, squaring her shoulders as if prepared to do battle.

  “But you can’t—”

  “Why not? Solange has been doing that for the past two years.”

  “But Solange is dif—”

  “Different?” Althea supplied helpfully. “If being different is doing something useful, then I intend to be. And do not say I am not well,” she told her when Leigh opened her mouth to object, “I have seldom felt better. I may not have proven another Florence Nightingale with my nursing skills when in Richmond, but I think I can survive teaching children their letters. Solange wanted to paint today, especially this morning when the light bathed the mountains in a certain golden hue she said, but the children have school at that hour. I offered to teach the children for her, and if she will agree, and if I think I can do an admirable job, then I will offer to do so again.”