Dan looked at the locket. It was open to the photograph of Amelia, cut from a carte de visite and fitted into the oval space.
The ambulance drivers pushed Dan aside and glanced at Douglass; then one knelt beside Lieutenant Pratt and examined the wound in his leg.
“I’m all right,” said Pratt. “Take Douglass first.”
“We’ll take Captain Holmes first,” said the other driver.
“Take Lieutenant Warren here,” said Dan. “Captain Holmes can’t live. He’s shot through the neck.”
“But Captain Holmes is alive . . . for now. Lieutenant Warren is dead . . . forever.”
vi
The Twentieth was mustered out in July of 1864, their three years served, their blood spilled, and their hearts, as Holmes would write, “touched with fire.”
Of the twenty Harvard officers who had trained at Camp Meigs, five remained. To preserve the Union, the Twentieth had taken more casualties than any other Massachusetts regiment, and when it was finally over, of the two thousand regiments in the Union Army, the Twentieth would have taken more casualties than all but four.
Sergeant Dan Callahan was a hero in the Irish districts of Boston. Friends and strangers stood him to pints. His mother cooked him lamb stew on his first day home and invited the cousins. On his second day home, Alice O’Hara invited him to the kitchen of the Fay House in Cambridge, cooked him chicken pot pie, and agreed to marry him.
On his way home that night, he went through Harvard Yard. It was a place he had thought about many times during the war, but not even in his dreams had it seemed so serene, so peaceful, so unreal, as it did on that embracing summer night.
He thought to linger, but for Dan and men like him, there was no longer serenity in silence. It was in the deepest silence that they would hear most loudly the roar of muskets, the thunder of cannon, and the cries of men left dying on the field. And Dan had to hurry away from his own sense of guilt, because so many were gone while he was still breathing, with a belly full of chicken and a life full of promise.
He got himself out of the Yard as quickly as he could, out to the Square, out to where there were people and sounds and the distractions of life. He jumped onto the Boston horsecar and sat down next to a well-dressed young man who carried a cane and wore a wooden leg beneath his trousers.
“Good evening, Sergeant,” said the young man.
For a moment, Dan did not recognize the man, who now sported side whiskers in addition to his mustache. “Why, Lieutenant Heywood Wedge. How are you, sir?”
“Glad to be done at the college, and”—Heywood hefted a pile of books on his lap—“preparing now for the law school. And how are you?”
“Happier than I’ve been in some time, sir. You know Alice O’Hara, maid to the Fay family? We’re to be married, sir.”
“Congratulations.” Heywood offered his hand. There had been a time that he would not have touched an Irishman, but the war had changed all that. “I’m to be married, too. To Miss Amelia Fleming, of Beacon Hill.”
And Dan, an honest and reliable man but a simple one in many ways, said, “You know, sir, that’s a fine bit of a coincidence, for I’ve somethin’ I promised to give her. ’Twas a promise I made on the field at Antietam.”
Heywood’s smile faded. “Promise?”
“To give her a locket, sir, give to me by your cousin. A message goes with it.”
“What message?”
“Well, sir . . . considerin’ the circumstances”—Dan looked out at the horses—“’tisn’t one you’d want to hear. A message of undyin’ love, you might say.”
Heywood’s face lost all its false friendliness. “Dan, it will do no good. For her . . . or for me . . . or for Douglass.”
“But, sir, ’twas a battlefield promise, and the locket’s engraved, D. to A., Douglass to Amelia.”
“Miss Fleming has only recently emerged from grief,” said Heywood. “To remind her of Douglass now . . . well, take it from one soldier to another. Leave it to the Lord.”
“One soldier to another,” repeated Dan. To men who had fought and survived together, it was a term that mattered.
Heywood leaned close. “Leave it, and I’ll be even more beholden to you, Dan. I’ll see to it that there’s always work for a loyal member of the Twentieth. No heavy liftin’ and a warm place to shit, eh?”
“A fine prospect, sir, but . . . what about Douglass’s mother? Should I give the locket to her?”
“She remains insensate with grief. Never leaves the house. That locket would only remind her of her loss, and my future wife would wonder why Douglass hadn’t thought of her. Then she would think ill of Douglass. We wouldn’t want that, either.”
“But the locket—”
“Keep it. Let it remind you of Douglass. Or better yet, melt it down and make a ring of it. Then give it to your future wife. I know Douglass would be pleased with that.”
And the horsecar clip-clopped across the West Boston Bridge.
Dan considered his mother a philosophical woman, one who had learned how to make her way through a hard world with few skills but a strong back. So he told her the story of the locket, showed it to her, and asked her what he should do.
She took the locket, opened it, turned it over. “If I was a grievin’ mother, I’m thinkin’ I’d want to hear the story of my son’s last minutes.”
“So . . .”
“But I’m your mother, and I’m thinkin’ that what Mr. Heywood is sayin’ may be right. Life is for the livin’. And the Wedges are folks who can help you on life’s ladder.”
“So . . .”
“So, do as Mr. Heywood says. ’Twill be the better way. Better for the livin’. And better for the Callahans.”
And that was how a certain locket came into the possession of the Callahan family.
Chapter Twenty
“A LITTLE breaking and entering,” said Orson Lunt. “This should be fun.”
“If Evangeline is with us, it isn’t breaking and entering,” said Peter.
She was waiting in front of her apartment on Memorial Drive. It was the end of March, cold and windy, sunny and bright.
“This better be good,” she said.
Peter pointed to a book on the seat of the car. “Take a look at that.”
She read the title. “Twentieth Massachusetts Regimental History, 1861-1865 . . .”
“Go to the page I bookmarked.” Fallon swung the car around and headed east on Memorial Drive, so that the river sparkled on their right. “Read the list of officers.”
“Oliver Wendell Holmes . . . Heywood Wedge . . . Douglass Wedge Warren . . . Artemus and Francis Pratt, my own collateral ancestors.”
“I was looking up Douglass,” said Peter, “and I remembered the first time I went to your grandmother’s attic to go through the Pratt papers, all those years ago.”
“The day we met,” she said. “How could I ever forget?”
“There were Civil War artifacts in that attic . . . Civil War papers.”
“So?”
“So, maybe Ridley wanted to see you because he wanted to get at them.”
“Peter,” said Orson, “Ridley’s research hadn’t gone beyond seventeenth-century commonplace books. He never saw the restored Copley portrait or had his curiosity piqued by a locket. He was acting on hunches.”
“Ridley wanted to see me because of my ancestry,” said Evangeline.
“Before you gang up on me, remember that there were Pratts in the Twentieth Massachusetts with the Wedges. So . . . let’s see if they had anything to say to one another.”
“Just remember,” she said, “I’m not on a treasure hunt. I’m writing a book.”
“But of course you are.” Orson Lunt laughed.
Searidge: home to generations of Pratts and Carringtons. The big white house always reminded Peter Fallon of a clipper ship cresting a wave. But this ship had never sailed, and the wave was the granite coast of Marblehead.
“Pity your grandmother’s in
Florida,” said Orson. “I always enjoy her stories.”
“Come back in June.” Evangeline took out the key, opened the door, and punched in the alarm code on the little keypad in the foyer.
“At least she decided to join the twentieth century,” said Peter.
“Alarm system, CD player, too . . . one of those little chairlifts to get her upstairs,” said Orson.
“But the good stuff is still the old stuff.” Evangeline led them up to the first landing, where they looked into the face of Horace Taylor Pratt, another Copley portrait. Once, the original had hung there. Now it was a large Polaroid reproduction. The original was on loan to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Peter hadn’t been in that attic in over twenty years, but attics don’t change much. There was a new spiral staircase rising to the trapdoor and the widow’s walk on the roof. The rest was a jumble, just as it had been twenty years earlier—clothes, furniture, piles of books, steamer trunks, metal boxes and filing cabinets filled with family papers, an old sword hanging from a rafter.
“Tell me again why your grandmother never let us go through this attic and conserve these things,” said Orson.
“She’s old,” said Evangeline.
“So are all these things.” Orson examined the sword.
“I’m just thankful we could persuade her to send the Copley to the museum. As for the rest of this stuff, she says it’s like having family members in the house. If she wants to visit them, she can just come right up.”
“She doesn’t strike me as the eccentric sort,” said Orson.
“She also says the longer it sits here, the more valuable it gets, like real estate.”
Peter went picking through the junk.
Orson flipped open a steamer trunk and looked in.
Evangeline said, “Those are old family Bibles.”
Orson lifted out the Bible on top.
“That’s the one from the twentieth century. It was begun by my grandmother’s father, George. He was the son of Artemus II, the one at Antietam. He died on the Titanic. There are three more Bibles there, from the 1600s on,” said Evangeline. “Grandmother always said they were too big to keep downstairs. One Bible was enough.”
“Worry about Bibles later,” said Peter. “Here’s what we came for.” He pointed to a metal box. There was a label on it: ARTEMUS PRATT II. Peter pulled out a folder of correspondence, all yellowed pages crumbling around the edges.
Soon he and Evangeline were sitting in the dormer at the front of the attic, with several piles of ancient papers spread out around them.
“Here we go,” said Peter. “Dated August twenty-first, 1861. ‘Dear Father, I am proud to say the regiment is well trained, and the family is invited to see the effects of six weeks’ drilling Sunday next at one o’clock. Bring everyone to see how brave we look under our banners. The Rebels will surely run at the first sight of us.’”
“Young men are so full of confidence when they go off to war,” said Orson.
Then something dropped out of the packet. It was a sepia-tinted image of a young woman seated against a curtained background in some ancient photographic studio.
“A c.d.v.,” said Orson.
“A what?” asked Evangeline.
“Carte de visite. A nice collectible.” Peter turned over the cardboard-backed image. “To brave Lieutenant Artemus, God Bless You and Keep You, Amelia Fleming.”
“That’s the girl who married Heywood Wedge.” Evangeline slipped the carte from Peter’s hands and looked at it more closely.
“I guess she liked young Pratt, too,” said Orson.
Peter read on through the letters, written once a week from Artemus Pratt to his father. They described the trip south, tenting on the Potomac, “the strange southern world of pic-a-ninny Washington,” and the bloody horror of Ball’s Bluff.
Then Orson said, “With a little editing, we have a publishable manuscript here.”
“I might do it myself,” said Evangeline.
“Well, you’ll need your strength,” said Orson. “And I know of a marvelous little Marblehead boîte where they make the most divine fried clams. Strictly take-out. While you two read on, I’ll go get three orders for lunch.”
“Make mine fried scallops,” said Evangeline.
“Get some onion rings, too.” Peter threw him the keys.
“What’s the alarm code?” asked Orson.
“I left it off,” said Evangeline.
“Fine. I won’t be long.”
By the time Orson drove off, they were back to reading Pratt’s letters, all through the horrors of the Peninsula Campaign in the spring of 1862, all of it fascinating, but few mentions of Lieutenants Warren and Wedge, or the girl in the carte de visite.
Then Evangeline found it: “‘September eighteenth, 1862. I write from a farmhouse in Keedysville, Maryland, now a field hospital for officers of the Twentieth. I have survived a bloody day with a wound in the calf. Holmes is here, miraculously alive despite being shot through the neck. Neddy Hallowell lies incoherent from fever and infection. Heywood Wedge had his leg amputated below the knee and bears it bravely. The maggots have not yet found his stump. But poor Douglass Wedge Warren has—’”
“Did you hear that?”
Evangeline looked up from the reading. “What?”
“Someone’s in the house.”
“Orson?”
Peter went to the dormer and looked down. No car. Not Orson.
Evangeline went to speak but fell silent when Peter pointed to the staircase. Footfalls. Two sets, climbing the stairs. It sounded as if they stopped a moment in front of the portrait of Horace Pratt. Maybe they were trying to decide if they should steal it. Then they continued up.
“They’re going through the house,” said Evangeline.
“Room by room.”
Evangeline’s eyes widened at the sound of drawers being pulled and contents dumped in the room right below her.
“Make that dresser by dresser,” he said.
She gestured to the staircase that led to the widow’s walk. “We could hide on the roof.”
“Been there. Done that,” said Peter, recalling his last visit to this attic. “What happens when Orson comes back?”
“But what if these guys are armed?”
He pulled out his cell phone and handed it to her. “Call nine-one-one. But whisper.” Then he tiptoed to the top of the stairs.
Before she could dial, the door from the second floor to the attic stairs opened.
“Do you think there’s anything up there?” whispered one guy.
“Could be shit up there. Could be what we’re lookin’ for, too.”
Peter looked at Evangeline and mouthed the words “lookin’ for?”
Then the two young men started up the narrow staircase.
Peter put a finger to his lips, then he turned to the rafter behind him and carefully lifted the sword, scabbard and all, from the peg on which it hung.
Evangeline shook her head. What if they had a gun? But the top of one of the heads was appearing now, wearing a Boston Bruins cap.
Peter yanked at the hilt, expecting the sword to swing out of the scabbard with a resounding thwang. But it wouldn’t budge.
And now, the guy in the Bruins cap was looking right at them.
“Oh, God,” said Evangline.
“What the fuck?” The guy in the Bruins cap: Jackie Pucks.
“People!” cried the other one, a little guy with a ring in his eyebrow. “You said the people left.”
“They did,” cried Jackie. “Or at least their car left.”
Peter knew these guys were more surprised than he was. So he pulled back the sword, scabbard and all, and held it ready to strike. “Stop right there.”
“Yeah,” said Evangeline, pressing the buttons on the phone. “The police are on the way.” Except that she dropped the phone.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here.” The little guy turned and went stumbling down the stairs.
Jackie Pucks would have been right behind him, except that Evangeline bent down to grab the phone, and Jackie grabbed for it first. So Peter smashed the sword down on Jackie’s wrist and sent him tumbling back.
Peter went after him.
And Evangeline called the police.
But as Peter burst out the door to the attic stairway, he was met by a fist in the belly, then another off the side of the head.
He stumbled back into the stairwell, the door was slammed shut, and a deadbolt was thrown from the other side, locking them into the attic.
By the time the police got them out, Orson had returned and Peter and Evangeline had their stories straight: They had come to the house to do some cataloging work for Evangeline’s grandmother. They left the alarm off, and someone sneaked in, thinking that the house was empty. Peter persuaded Evangeline that they should not mention that he recognized one of them.
She demanded a reason, of course.
“Because somebody put those guys on our tail. And somebody tried to run me down in the river. It’s all connected to Love’s Labours. I need to find out how. When it’s time for police, I’ll know who to turn to.”
“I could stop this right now,” she said. “Just blow the whistle.”
He slipped his arm around her. She was still shaking from the fight. He held her tight and whispered, “Do you really want to do that?”
“Remember, Peter, I’m writing a book . . . about the Radcliffe Eight.”
“So let’s get back to reading about Dorothy’s son. Maybe he was an inspiration.”
While the local police dusted for fingerprints (though both intruders had been wearing gloves), Peter, Evangeline, and Orson ate their fried seafood feast, and Evangeline finished the letter from Artemus Pratt.
“‘Douglass Wedge Warren died the day of the battle. I saw him put a locket into the hands of Sergeant Callahan and whisper several words to him before expiring. Whether he intended to return the locket to his mother, send it to someone else, or give it to Callahan for his brave services during the battle, I do not know.’”
Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon) Page 39