Flirtation Walk

by Siri Mitchell

  “Not everyone’s like him.”

  “No.” My contradiction didn’t seem to bother him much. “There’s people like you too. There’s cadets who could have a lot more fun if they cared a little less about academics. The way I see it, it’s not that I don’t study enough, it’s that cadets like you study too much. If you look at me and you look at you, you’ll realize that I get lots more done than you.”

  “You hardly do anything at all.”

  He pointed his pencil in my direction. “You, sir, are mistaken. Here you are, getting everything in order, reporting where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be, and I’ve already been down to the hotel—”

  “You’re not supposed to—”

  “Down to the wharf—”

  “When!”

  “And over to the riding hall and done everything else I’m supposed to do. If you’re talking about efficiency, I’ve got you beat.”

  “And you’ve probably got your uniform spread around your tent and your books in disarray.”

  He shrugged the criticism away as he pulled his flask from his pocket.

  “Any demerits this week?”

  “Two. I ran into Campbell Conklin. But we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you. Can you really say you’ve had any fun since you got here?” He took a drink from his flask.

  “That’s not the reason I came.”

  “Doesn’t mean there’s no fun to be had as you go along. With that chiseled jaw of yours, that fair hair, and those blue eyes, you too could start wooing the belles of the Hudson Valley.” He sat up and leaned forward as if to scrutinize my looks. “Why, bless my heart, Mr. Westcott! As our legendary drawing teacher would say, ‘You’re a regular Adonis.’ Shame is, no one will ever know it if you keep your nose to the grindstone.”

  I turned round, took up the stiff-brimmed forage cap he’d dumped on the mattress and threw it at him.

  He dodged, laughing.

  It was always about girls with him. Thing was, all we had to look forward to after graduation was life as a lowly lieutenant. And the path to promotion was both long and treacherous. I couldn’t help but agree with the privates who swore that if the army wanted you to have a wife, they’d issue you one.

  Deke was peering at me through narrowed eyes. “Speaking of fun, usually you’d have chased me out of here by now. What’s wrong?” Deacon was as gossipy as an old woman, and I knew he wouldn’t leave me alone until I gave him something to jaw about.

  “It’s the news I got from my sister in that letter.”

  He screwed the top back on his flask and sat up. “What about?”

  I shrugged, hoping he’d let me leave it at that.

  “You might as well just tell me and get it over with.”

  “You ever hear of anybody selling deeds to property that doesn’t exist?”

  “My pa usually drums those folks right of town. They come around now and then. But most of the time they’re selling liniments or snake oil.”

  “My sister met one selling the rights to property in a town out west of Laramie. I told you she was headed to Kentucky?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, she bought some hotel from him instead . . . only there wasn’t one. Wasn’t even any town.”

  “That’s tough.”

  “Tougher that I’m here and she’s stuck at Laramie doing laundry all winter.”

  “Wouldn’t want any sister of mine out there. All those privates . . .”

  “Exactly.”

  He cocked his head as he sat there watching me. “You going to do something about it?”

  “I already wrote and told her to stay right where she was, that I’d come get her once I graduate. What else can I do? They wouldn’t even give me leave to go home and see my mother buried and the farm sold! I’ve some money in my account with the treasurer. I’d send it to her and tell her to come here, but you know they won’t let me have any of it until after graduation.”

  “Well . . . there’s things you should do, but there’s a whole lot of other things you can do. You want to leave right now to go get her, why don’t you get yourself dismissed? I’ll lend you my flask, and you could let old Campbell Conklin see you take a drink from it. Or you could take a deck of cards down to supper tonight and deal yourself a hand. Hate to see you go, but if that’s what you want to do, I’ll help you any way I can.”

  I’d already thought of that, but it would be pointless. “What’s being dismissed going to do for me? Or Elizabeth? I’m all she has now. At least if I graduate, I’ll have lieutenant’s pay. . . . That would be something.”

  “Guess you can hope she survives the winter without getting talked into marrying one of those privates.”

  That’s exactly what I feared would happen.

  “And then you can use your furlough to go get her. Take her with you to your new assignment.”

  “I might not get a furlough. Professor Hammond’s talking like I’m going to be sent straight to Europe.”

  “No furlough! Furlough’s the only reason I’m still here.”

  “Even if I don’t get the chance to see her, I could still send her some money. Trust that she’ll get herself to Kentucky. . . .”

  Deke didn’t look as if he thought any better of that idea than I did. “But what about that fellow?”

  “What fellow?”

  “The swindler.”

  That was the other part of the problem. Elizabeth’s rightful inheritance, as well as my own, would still be gone. Stolen. “I was thinking I could hire one of those detectives to track him down. Elizabeth said they’ve heard of him out there at Laramie.”

  “They’ve probably heard of him at more forts than just Laramie. There’s really only those two trails heading west. I know settlers are scattered every which way across the frontier, but with the cavalry, it’s different. All those trips for resupplying and with reassignments . . . soldiers see each other so often it’s like they’re neighbors. Too bad they won’t give you furlough. If you could have the summer out west, put the word out that you were looking for him, you could probably run him to ground.”

  He gave me an appraising glance. “Why don’t you get assigned to the cavalry and do that detecting yourself? Could be it will take longer than a summer, but you’d find him eventually.”

  “That’s an idea. . . .” I hadn’t thought about the cavalry before.

  His lips twisted in a sardonic smile. “Not all of us are bound for the engineers.”

  “It’s not like I could just tell Colonel Lee I want to be assigned to the cavalry . . . do you think?”

  He lifted a brow, though he seemed to be more interested in assessing his handiwork than in continuing the conversation. “You mean old Robert E. I don’t know. You could ask him.”

  7

  Lucinda

  I was staring wide eyed at my aunt, I knew that I was, but I couldn’t help myself. “My father was a cadet?”

  “He was.”

  “At the military academy? This military academy?” Wouldn’t he have told me about something like that?

  “At West Point.”

  “But . . . are you sure?”

  “Quite.”

  “I just . . . he never told me.”

  “And why would he have? He left before he graduated. That doesn’t make him look very good.”

  “He . . . he really was a cadet?”

  She took up my hand and squeezed it. “He truly was a cadet. And a good one. A very clever one. He might have been at the top of his class if he’d applied himself.”

  “What happened?”

  She shrugged, a delicate lift of a shoulder. Then she sat down on the bed by Phoebe, who must have entered the room in my moments of shock. “He had a way about him. He was quite charming. Very handsome. He drew people like a flower draws bees. But after a while, I came to realize that he wasn’t laughing with us; he was always laughing at us. As if he considered himself smarter than everyone else.”

&nb
sp; “He did.” He had. And generally speaking, he was.

  “I always imagined that it must have been difficult for him at the academy, obeying everyone else’s orders when he felt as if he should be the one giving them.”

  “I can’t picture him as a cadet. I thought . . . I mean . . .” He’d always avoided soldiers. Had he been afraid of them? I discarded the thought almost as soon as it had formed. He hadn’t been afraid of them. He must have been afraid of being recognized by them. That explained quite a bit, although it didn’t resolve the contrast between his way of life and his time at the academy. “I just can’t . . . I can’t imagine it. My father, here. One of them.”

  She looked to Phoebe and then back to me. “You can only be as good as you are. They come here as boys and they leave as men. But at what other place in the world are men issued their undergarments and taught to march as if they’d never learned how to walk? So they learn how to comply with the letter of the law rather than its spirit. Sometimes a person has to in order to survive.”

  “And I suppose some don’t comply at all.”

  “The military academy is not for everyone.” The way in which she said it left little doubt that she had identified my father as everyone. “But there’s no point in dwelling on his record at West Point.”

  “He had a record?” I suppose that shouldn’t have surprised me. He had a record out west too.

  “He has . . . had the distinction of amassing the most demerits in the least amount of time.”

  I almost smiled, knowing how proud he would have been of that. “Does it still hold?”

  “It does.” Something flashed in her eyes.

  “So you met him? You knew him?”

  “Oh yes. And so did your uncle. They were barracks mates.”

  I felt my mouth drop open once again.

  “Your father pulled him into several of his schemes. It was only thanks to the superintendent’s mercy that your uncle was saved from dismissal. You can see, then, why the subject of John Barns is so distasteful to him.”

  “John Barns?” Who was John Barns? And how did he figure into any of this?

  Her brow puckered. “John Barns. Your father.”

  John Barns was a name I’d never heard. It sounded like one of those men my father always made fun of. One of those stolid, serious men of good character and very little imagination. Ezra Pennyworth—or Pennwith or Penfield or Pennman, depending upon the situation—couldn’t be a John Barns, could he?

  “I’m sorry, my dear. It must pain you to hear me speak of such things. He was your father after all. I’ll try to remember that. Only please don’t think the worst of us if it seems as if we cannot speak of him charitably.”

  It didn’t pain me to hear her words, it just . . . it . . . unnerved me. Unanchored me. Set me drifting. To think that the man I had spent my life looking up to was just a . . . a . . . a John Barns! If I didn’t know these basic facts about him, if I’d never known his real name, then what else didn’t I know? What else hadn’t he told me?

  Down the hall, Ella began to protest something quite vigorously. Milly’s reply was rather testy, and soon the little girl began to wail. My aunt left us to see to them.

  Was this what it felt like to fall prey to one of my father’s schemes? To place all of one’s hope and one’s trust in his words and then to find out that they meant nothing? That he was nothing?

  “Lucinda?” Phoebe’s voice was gentle and kind, but I wanted to bark at her. Punish her for being so noble, so good.

  My father had told me so many things through the years, given me countless pieces of advice. I’d secreted them away in my soul, every one of them, as if they were treasures. I’d been hoarding them as one would jewels, but . . . “I’ve so been wrong.” It was as if I’d been living my life inside a kaleidoscope not realizing that what was real was on the outside, not the inside, of the tube. Rotating did nothing to rearrange what was true and real. It only jumbled up the images and distorted the truth. “I didn’t know . . .”

  I felt Phoebe’s hand patting tentatively up my arm, then increasing in firmness as she grabbed hold of my shoulders and pulled me to her breast.

  “I don’t know anything anymore. I just don’t—” I choked on my own sobs, on the tears streaming down my cheeks.

  “Hush. You’ll be fine. I’ll help you.”

  I couldn’t keep myself from smiling. And then I was laughing through my tears. “You’ll help me?”

  “I’ll help you. I will.” She was quite serious.

  A blind girl would help me? Lucinda Pennyworth . . . rather Lucinda Barns? My soul wavered between hysteria and despair. But I knew, as surely as I’d ever known anything, that Phoebe would. She would help me. And that was worst of all. I was so unfit for normal life that the only person I could count on was a girl even more unsuited to it than I. She would help me not because I deserved it—heaven knew I didn’t—but because she was a kind and decent soul.

  Which only served to underscore that I was not.

  I never had been, even at my best.

  Would I ever be?

  8

  Seth

  I could have asked the superintendent, Colonel Lee, about an assignment to the cavalry, but upon reflection I decided I didn’t want to. For wouldn’t he want to know why his top cadet wanted to go for the cavalry? And who could think honorably of a man whose family had been taken in by a swindler? Whose sister was, at this moment, taking in laundry for her room and board? This might be a military academy, but it was still a school for gentlemen, and Colonel Lee was the most distinguished gentleman of us all.

  I decided to speak to Professor Hammond instead. In spite of my concern about the way he had treated his niece, he still had great influence over assignments, so I went over to the academy during recreation to find him. He looked up from his desk at my knock with what I took to be a smile. His lips hadn’t moved, but there was an easing of the lines above his brow.

  “Mr. Westcott. How may I help you?”

  “I uh . . . well . . . I was thinking about Dirichlet’s unit theorem, and I just wanted to make certain I understood the principles.”

  “I wish more cadets would take the time to make sure they understood mathematical principles. Why don’t you try a problem and we’ll see how far you get.” Professor Hammond gestured toward the board. I took up a piece of chalk and sponge and then went to the board and stood at attention.

  After he gave me the problem, I wheeled around, wrote it on the board, and went to work on it. It wasn’t so difficult that I didn’t understand it, although I took my time in solving it. In truth, I was hesitating for I hadn’t yet decided what I should say to him. By the time I had finished, spun around, and recited the answer, I still didn’t know.

  “Well done.”

  I turned around once more and sponged the chalk off the board.

  “You didn’t have any trouble with that your yearling year. At least not that I noted.”

  I hadn’t.

  “What was it you thought to be confusing?”

  That was the question, wasn’t it? “I guess . . . I should say . . . I figured it out, sir.”

  “I shouldn’t worry, Mr. Westcott. With the talent you’ve shown, and your grasp of theories, I should imagine you’ll stay at the top of your class this year. It’s men like you, men with your grasp of mathematics and engineering, who are needed abroad. Men of understanding who can study at foreign academies, make true friends of our allies, and then bring all that knowledge and those experiences back home.”

  “I hope so. That is, I know our assignments after graduation depend upon our performance as cadets.”

  “You’ve scarcely stumbled since you’ve been here.”

  “But . . . what if I do?”

  “For a cadet of your obvious talents, at this late date, a few missteps could be forgiven. Although you should keep in mind that an assignment to the Corps of Engineers is never guaranteed.”

  “Yes, sir. But I’ve he
ard some of the fellows, some of those who might go as ordnance or artillerymen, say they’d give it all up to go cavalry.”

  He frowned as he leaned forward, hands clasped in front of him. “I understand what it is to hear the call of the untamed wilderness, and I’d like to see a bison for myself one day, but what would happen to the army if soldiers were allowed to decide their own assignments? There are no options for a soldier, Mr. Westcott. You must know that by now. There are only orders. The best and brightest must go where we’ve the most need for them—to the engineers. If they’re not acceptable to the engineers, they must go to ordnance. If ordinance won’t take them, the artillery will.”

  “But not the cavalry?”

  He gave me a stern look. “The cavalry, sir, must make do with what’s left.”

  There was no need to inquire as to what he thought of those cadets like Deacon and Dandy who had settled, quite comfortably, to the bottom of the class.

  “The road to success is found through hard work and study, Mr. Westcott. Keep on the straight path, and your future will be secured.” Incredibly, then he winked. “You can trust me on that.”

  Which is exactly what I’d been afraid of.

  Deacon caught me as I came out of the academy.

  He was strolling up the tree-lined road, looking for all the world as if he were free to do whatever he wished. And it looked as if . . . Was he wearing my officer’s sash? He hailed me as I jogged down the steps, throwing a salute in deference to the chevrons on my coat.

  I returned it.

  “What were you doing in there?” He lifted his chin toward the building. “Are you that anxious for classes to start?”