Adelsverein

by Celia Hayes

  Adelsverein

  Book 3 – The Harvesting

  by

  Celia Hayes

  Copyright Celia Hayes, 2008

  Published at Smashwords, 2012

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  A Note of Thanks, Appreciation and Dedication

  This volume of the Adelsverein Trilogy – which concludes the story begun in The Gathering, and continued in The Sowing – are not a project created solely by me. I owe a debt, as well as thanks and acknowledgements to a great number of people who contributed advice, feedback, editing, and all sorts of support to the original individual editions of the Adelsverein Trilogy, beginning with members of the Independent Authors Guild; Diane Salerni, Michael Katz and Al Past for the use of his gorgeous color photos for the individual covers of the three original volumes.

  Extravagant thanks are due to Barbara Skolaut and J.H. Heinrichs –generous patrons of the arts, literature and most importantly, genre fiction – and to Mary Young, for help in time of need. Thanks are also due to Friedrichsburg historian Kenn Knopp who kindly reviewed all three manuscripts in search of historical errors. Any which remain in are purely my fault. Thanks to Jim Berne, of San Antonio for a quick lesson in maintenance and handling of a 1836 Colt Paterson and to Jo Rudolf who read the early drafts and made many useful suggestions. Thanks also to my late good friend and computer genius, David Walsh. Gratitude is also due to the the staff of the San Antonio Public Library, Semmes Branch. They managed to find many of those books on various matters to do with historical events in Texas which I needed to research this historical novel.

  Finally, this volume is dedicated as always; with love for my infatigable daughter Jeanne, to my Mom and to Dad, AKA Vati – the best dad ever. Dad was – as was only to be expected – a dedicated fan, in spite of not being much into historical fiction. But he loved what I wrote, and read and critiqued – and we miss him.

  Book Three – The Harvesting

  They shall beat their swords into plowshares

  And their spears into pruning hooks;

  Nation shall not lift up sword against nation

  Neither shall they learn war any more -

  Micah 4:3

  Prelude: A Time of Portents and Wonders

  The rain continued all of that afternoon and into the evening, falling from dreary and sunless skies. It wrapped the world in a shroud of grey, flattening piles of fallen leaves into sodden masses and pattering on the roof of the mansion on Turner Street—sometimes lightly and sometimes in a full-throated roar—as the gutter downspouts spurted like fountains. The world outside was in shadow, in more ways than one, as was the downstairs parlor where Magda Vogel Becker dozed in the largest armchair as she waited for her youngest daughter to return home. The mantel clock chimed a musical half past, and Magda’s eyes opened. Mouse, the fat little Peke, was sleeping on the footstool by her feet with his blunt muzzle dropped across her ankle. He started awake.

  “Half-past eleven, Mauschen,” the old woman remarked, disapprovingly. “She’s very late tonight.” The little dog merely yawned, stretching luxuriously, before regarding her with bulging eyes liquid with adoration, then laying his head across her ankle again. “It’s just as well I sent the cook home. It’s not as if we are helpless without servants! She will want something to eat, even if she will not admit it at first. Health, Mauschen, it’s a precious thing ….”

  Magda sighed; here she was, ninety-five years of age and waiting up, hovering like a mother hen over Lottie, the youngest and last of her chicks; and that chick being a woman in her fifties and a grandmother to boot! Ruthlessly she evicted Mouse from his position on the footstool. Setting her feet to the floor, she rose and moved to the largest window, drawing the heavy curtains aside.

  Outside the rain poured down with increasing vigor, casting a halo of silver around the street lamp opposite. The wind tossed the dark branches of the oak trees in the garden across the way. Along Turner Street there were a few lights burning in upstairs windows— doubtless those households in which someone lay ill of the influenza. This was a dreadful epidemic, coming as a bolt of thunder out of nowhere.

  Magda regarded the lights, knowing very well what was going on in those rooms. Behind every window was a sickroom, sickrooms where someone labored to breathe and someone else watched tirelessly, while the wings of the angel of death whispered in the darkest corners. Magda knew this very well for she had often tended the sick and dying herself, during her own life. There had been such ravages of sickness when she was a girl and a young woman. It had been confidently assumed such things had been banished, defeated, driven back into the shadows by such great advances in medicine. Her own younger brother, Johann, was a doctor and had talked proudly of such miraculous advances. No more did thousands die ugly deaths from cholera, from the yellow fever, from agues and diphtheria, since science and medicine had entered the fray. And yet now they seemed as powerless as they had ever been before—so many stricken so suddenly that the hospitals overflowed. Her daughter had volunteered to nurse at the Army camp, for there were many young soldiers fallen—not by bullet or shell, but to something which had seemed at first to be nothing more than the grippe.

  Magda would have volunteered herself. “I have often tended the sick,” she had insisted to her daughter and son-in-law, “and I have already had the grippe this year. I am not made of spun glass.” But Lottie instantly forbade her to even contemplate such a thing. And perhaps she was right to do so, for Magda walked with a cane most days and could not lift and carry anything heavier than Mouse’s food dish.

  There were lights at the end of the street, a pair of lights that flickered as they moved, accompanied by the roar of an engine; one of those new-fangled motor cars. Magda watched with interest as it came down Turner Street, slowing to a stop before the window where she waited for Lottie to return. “A noisy thing, “she remarked to Mouse, “noisier than horses, but not quite so prone to run away … and certainly not as much of a mess.”

  Lottie’s husband was thinking of buying one. Magda’s younger son, Samuel, had bought a Hudson Touring car eight or nine years before, a marvelous thing with padded seats as comfortable as a leather sofa in a gentleman’s study. Once, Samuel had taken her, Lottie, Lottie’s children and his own—all crammed in together—to an exhibition of a flying machine. It was a gossamer thing of wires and delicate wings of canvas stretched over an intricate framework of wood; a tiny, fragile machine, lifting off the ground, soaring like a bird and circling the oval parade ground at Fort Sam Houston, to the wonder of the crowds watching underneath. “Fancy that, Mama!” Samuel had cried. “Heavier than air, and powered by an engine—what will they think of next!” Such marvels and wonders as this new century had brought—and such horrors, also!

  Magda could hardly bear to read the news in the papers. It seemed that even those tiny, fragile airplanes had become instruments of war. She found it disheartening to see the evidence that her new country and her old one were deadly enemies in a battle to the death. Her grandsons and great-grandsons went eagerly to the war, little recalling that those enemies they were so eager to slaughter were their cousins, their second cousins, those grandsons and great-grandsons of the friends and kin that her family had left behind when first they departed their ancestral village of Albeck on a bright autumn day over seventy years before. All that time, Germany had still been home in their min
ds, “the old country.” Truly they had come a long, long way from Albeck, farther than Magda had even comprehended when she and Hansi and her sister Liesel had arrived. And her new country had been torn by a dreadful war, one part pitted against the other. War was nothing new to Magda Vogel Becker, who had lived for most of a century.

  A woman emerged from the back of the automobile, a woman in a long pale coat, holding an umbrella over her head. Her face could not be seen for the darkness, the rain, and the distance from the window where Magda watched, but there was no need for that; a woman knew her own child. The automobile rolled away, setting a tidal wave of muddy water splashing over the sidewalk. The woman hurried up the sidewalk towards the porte-cochere and around the side of the mansion. A moment or two later, the sound of a door opening and shutting echoed in the hall outside the parlor.

  “Lottchen … don’t forget to bar the door,” Magda called from the parlor. There was the sound of a heavy latch falling into place, and a few seconds later, Magda’s daughter Lottie appeared in the doorway.

  “Honestly, Mama, you were sitting up waiting for me, with the door unbarred?” Lottie had shed her coat and umbrella in the hallway, and now began unpinning her hat and motoring veil. She was a tall and fair woman, whose pale-blond hair was fading imperceptibly from the color of ripe wheat into white.

  “I had Mauschen and … other means to defend myself,” Magda answered. “You look tired, my dear little duckling. How bad was it today?”

  Magda’s daughter let her hat and veils fall onto a chair by the parlor door, and dropped into the chair nearest the fire, pressing her hands to her face.

  “Dreadful, Mama,” she answered at last. “They are so ill. Our best, and strongest and bravest young men, and yet . . .they die, and nothing can be done for them! They suffer so, Mama. One of Onkel Johann’s old friends is the senior surgeon. He tells me that they drown, from this dreadful plague. They drown on dry land, as their lungs fill up with fluids, in a matter of hours. None of his colleagues can find a reason why. All we can offer to them is to tend and comfort them in their last hours.”

  “And hold their hands,” Magda nodded, acknowledging in sad resignation. “At the end, perhaps that is all we can offer. To know there is someone near, who cares for them . . .”

  “And to write a letter to their mothers,” Lottie added. “That is why I am so late, Mama, I was writing letters. It would mean something, I think, that their mothers hear something of their last moments, and be reassured that they were tended as lovingly as they would have been in the bosom of their own families.”

  “One does what one can,” Magda offered dryly. “And I assume that, such have been the miracles of this age, even in an emergency as this, I presume the hospital is tidy and adequate to the needs of the sick?”

  “It is, Mama.” Lottie smiled sadly. “It offers every suitable convenience but that of a sure and certain cure. Every other comfort than that!”

  “That is good.” Magda nodded. “At least, you have something! For your cousin told me once or twice of his experiences in hospital. They had no drugs at all, when they cut off his arm. And nothing could be done at all for him, but that—”

  “Oh, Mama,” Lottie gasped, “Cousin Peter—but that was so long ago!”

  “No, “Magda shook her head, “it was not that long ago at all. A mere blink of time, to me!”

  Chapter One: Homecoming

  In the late summer of 1865, Peter Vining came home from the War. Hatless and thin to the point of emaciation, he was a tall and fair-haired young man with a drooping mustache of which he was still rather vain. He had a pleasant and open face marred by a thin straight scar that slashed down across his forehead and cheek, courtesy of a Union officer’s saber. When he thought about it at all, he was only grateful that it hadn’t cost him the sight in that eye. Still, the scar pulled his left eyebrow up in a permanently skeptical expression. Like many another, he was clad in the ragged remnants of Confederate motley. The newest thing anywhere about his person was his shoes, which had been the gift of a kindly surgeon in a Union hospital that had been set up outside of Richmond to care for the human wreckage left in the wake of the fighting.

  “Take them,” Major McNelley, the Union surgeon, had urged Peter as he looked down over his spectacles. “After all, you cannot walk all the way home to Texas barefoot. The sutler will not miss them, after all. Take them. I would hate to see my good work wasted.”

  “I expect not,” Peter had replied, accepting the brogans with mixed feelings. He had lain raving with wound-fever in a rough Confederate hospital, a hospital that seemed to be short of everything except the sick and dying, and had woken in a Union one, on clean sheets. There had been plenty of medicines, and a surgeon who probed the bandages crusted on what remained of his left arm had informed him that he would most likely live. And that the war was over. So far, he hadn’t been able to feel much beyond numbness about either of those pieces of information.

  Still, he had needed shoes, and Major McNelley was right. He couldn’t walk barefoot from Virginia to Texas, and his old boots were more hole than leather. He came as far as Galveston with a straggle of Texan survivors, men of Hood’s Brigade and Terry’s cavalry. Most of them had been in hospitals or Yankee prisoner compounds when the fighting ended, too sick to travel with the ragged remnants of their units when the Armistice was signed. Peter, bone-thin and pale from the hospital stay and months of semi-starvation, had gotten as far as Houston, where he fell sick again, fevered and shivering with the ague. The family of one of his friends had looked after him for a few weeks. When he had recovered somewhat, he wrote to tell his mother that he was on his way home, but had never gotten an answer. Not that he expected one, the way that things had fallen apart during the death throes of the Confederacy.

  When he was able, he had bidden his friend’s family goodbye and taken to the road like all the other grey-clad stragglers returning home in ones and twos, halt and lame and heartsick. It had taken him some days, but folk were kindly inclined towards returning soldiers, and he had not had to walk very much of the way.

  The last few miles to town he had gotten a ride in a half-empty dray. The teamster who had given him the ride was a dark-haired and bullet-headed Dutch lad, a little younger than Peter, who understood just enough English to tell Peter that he was from the Hills and had driven wagons for the army in Texas for the past two years.

  “Nicht soldaten,” he had offered, shrugging ruefully. Peter let it go without comment, being only too glad for the ride.

  When they reached town, Peter jumped down from the back of the wagon, waved casually by way of thanks to the driver, and hitched up his bedroll, haversack and canteen for one last march.

  He trudged wearily along the road from town. His eyes were fixed on a line of low hills above Austin. A rambling white house ringed by apple trees, like a castle in its moat, sat on the nearest of the hills, that grove of trees his grandfather had planted years before. And now he took those last few steps slowly, along the graveled drive beside the row of apple trees, their boughs heavy-hung with hard green fruit. He was so very glad to be home at last. It had been a long way, to get to the roof that his grandfather built and his mother had extended every which way ever since.

  Old Alois Becker came to Texas with his wife Maria, his two sons, and a daughter, following the promises of Baron de Bastrop who was looking for settlers, back when all of Texas belonged to Mexico and the wild Indians. Alois built his home place on a tract of land near a settlement called Waterloo, on the upper Colorado River. When Texas won independence and President Lamar insisted on building a new capitol there, Alois and his neighbors had willingly sold their holdings. Well, actually, the neighbors sold up willingly; Alois Becker didn’t give a damn one way or the other. His wife and one of his sons were dead, the other son gone, and his son-in-law lay dying of consumption by then. He sold all the property but for a few acres around the home place and the apple trees, and spent the last few years of his l
ife sitting by the kitchen hearth, a lost and broken man, venting spitefulness on anyone who came within reach.

  His daughter Margaret ignored it pretty much, letting it roll off her like water from a duck’s back. She was a capable and busy woman, Margaret Becker Vining, running a boarding house to support her boys, her bedridden husband, and the father who sat by the fire and stared gloomily into it.

  “You mustn’t mind your Grandfather,” she said once to Peter, when he was about four years old. “He always thought he was the monarch of his world, that everyone obeyed his slightest wish and that he could order everything to his liking. It broke his heart to find out he wasn’t, and turned him sour and bitter. Everyone that he really loved either died or went away . . . your grandmother, your uncles. And he can’t bear thinking on that and it makes him angry.”

  “You’re here, Mama,” Peter had answered, much baffled. “Doesn’t he love you? And Horace and Jamie and Johnny?” He was afraid of his grandfather, who scowled at him from under great, hairy frowning eyebrows and barked abrupt commands at him in the old language. His older brothers took every opportunity to escape the old man’s baleful eye. His mother had sighed and flashed a wry little smile as she hugged him to her in a rustle of lavender-smelling fabric, the black widow’s weeds that she wore for the burying of her husband the year before.

  “Oh, I think he loves us when he thinks about it; he just doesn’t think about us much, Peter-my-chick. It’s the grief that makes him sad and distracted. Pay no mind to it.” Then she had tousled his hair and added, “We’re stuck in the world that we are given, Peter. No use breaking your heart over what we wish we had. We’re happiest in the long run if we adapt to what we are given, rather than yearning after what has been taken away from us. I was grateful to have your dear Papa for the time I did.”