Picture the Dead

by Adele Griffin

  My hand roves among his few shabby items his identification papers and long underwear and folded neckerchiefs, a print of himself in his uniform, all brash and swagger, and a penknife that I’m quite sure belonged to Uncle Henry, before it was acquired by one of his sons. I slip both the photograph and knife into my cloak pocket with a twinge of guilt, for poor Nate has so few worldly treasures. My fingers spider around in the dark drawer for any other missed particulars, and I pull out an onionskin envelope, marked only with the letter J.

  It is as if Will couldn’t quite commit to addressing it. Seeing it, however, I know what it means to feel one’s blood freeze.

  With everything tucked safely in my possession, I turn. “Thank you for this.”

  Nate looks uneasy. “You won’t tell Sue? Or ole Wigs for he’d chuck me out of his pub in a heartbeat and leave me for wolves if he learnt it.”

  “I won’t tell…” Though I don’t understand what I am promising.

  “’Twas a different world, Sumter was. You’d have to live through it.”

  My fingers rub the crinkled paper. “What where is Sumter?”

  “Camp Sumter; it’s in Georgia. It’s where we got sent after they took us,” Nate explains, impatient when I still don’t understand. “The Succesh prison, of course. You must have known that much.”

  “Oh…yes.” My hand crushes the envelope tighter. Will’s last letter has confused me. He was killed in battle, not captured.

  “They’ve been good to me here, Sue and her ole Wigs. And I’m not here for long. For it’s crawling up on me, see ” Nate swipes back the blankets and begins undoing the binding around what’s left of one of his legs.

  “Please, don’t ”

  But he won’t stop, and what he reveals to me is the stuff of nightmares, far worse than Quinn’s bludgeoned eye.

  The flesh of Nate’s legs is rotten. Even by flickering candlelight I see that his skin, mottled and sticky with pus, is also rancid with infection.

  It is revolting, and horrifying, and almost too sad to bear. I cup a hand to my nose and mouth to stop myself from gagging. “Where is the doctor to tend to this? No matter, I will send ours.”

  “They brought one, Norris. He’s a dentist, so he should know when parts are rotted. He said it’s rotted too deep, but that weren’t news to me.” And yet the sight of his own leg seems to have panicked Nate. He hides his knees with the blanket, his fingers spreading and smoothing the fabric as if to erase the vision. “Stay a spell, Fran. Tell me about the good days. How it used to be between us. Please, dear? I want a pretty memory in my head.”

  Shaking my head, I back away from him, toward the door. “I’ll come and visit again, just as soon as I can, with our own doctor. And I’ll bring you some books, too. They’d be good company for you.”

  “Don’t want ’em. Can’t read ’em. Fran, stay awhile. Smoke a pipe with me. I’ve got a whole raft of Durham tobacco under my mattress. Please, Fran?”

  No, no, no. I shake my head, I can’t bear to hear anymore. Tomorrow I’ll send someone with a crock of soup and blankets, and a note for Doctor Perkins. But I can’t stay here a moment longer.

  Nate continues to entreat me. “Please, Frances, darling? Won’t you please?”

  “I’m so sorry… so sorry.” Head tucked, I hurry from the room and close the door. Nate’s voice follows me down the stairs and echoes in my ears, even after I’ve escaped the tavern, and Wigs’s gimlet stare, and have headed back out into the night.

  14.

  Coming home I’m nearly found out. Luckily the noise is thunderous, and I scamper behind a tree as the carriage clatters past and turns up into our drive.

  Uncle Henry, who had been away on business in Scarsdale, must have decided not to stay the night. Now everyone will be waked, and my absence surely will be discovered.

  As I approach the house, I see the hired man in his work clothes. I know he’d returned from the tavern only moments before I’d heard his whistle up ahead of me on the road, and I’d walked well behind him, out of sight. I creep up along the edge of the lawn, darting from tree to tree. One of the boys is unstrapping Uncle Henry’s valise from the back, and Mrs. Sullivan is stationed at the door, quiet as a post. Her folded hands waiting to see if Uncle wants her to cook him a late supper before he goes to bed.

  Such unrelenting drudgery, the lives of the servants.

  Aunt Clara is nowhere in sight. For this, I breathe a calming sigh as I slip around the side of the house in order to enter through the back. If Aunt were awake she’d expect everyone to rouse and tend to her. Which would have made it quite impossible for me to sneak into the house and then pretend I’d been here all night.

  Through the pantry, silent at the boot jack, I steal in stockinged feet up the back stairs, where I overhear Uncle Henry in the foyer requesting a sausage pie and brandy in the library. But I am battened down safe in my attic room before he has taken the second flight of stairs.

  At last. My heart is knocking in my chest. I build up the fire from its embers and unfold Will’s letter, which I read on my hands and knees by the scant heat.

  Even before I begin, I can see that it’s been written under hardship and duress. Will’s letters tremble and slant backward confusedly. What’s more, the paper is water damaged, the last passages a wash of ink.

  When I am finished, I close my eyes, which burn with the effort of reading this final, agonized missive from the grave. Wherever Will’s body is buried, too much of my heart is there, too.

  “It doesn’t matter, William,” I whisper. “None of it matters anymore. For I will always love you, no matter what this war forced you to become. Always and ever, dear heart.”

  For what else could I say? What else could I ever possibly say about a senseless death and a war that I do not understand?

  15.

  My dreams are bursts and jolts. I see the bloody steel blade of a bayonet. I hear the drum beat to the sound of soldier’s boots and feel cold earth, cold hands, a chain, choking me.

  I awake into a glare of morning and the sound of a voice.

  “Saints above, Miss, what’s done you in drink a bottle of your uncle’s spirits last night?”

  I sit up, wheezing for breath, my fingers stroking my neck, reassuring myself that it’s not broken as my bleary eyes find Mavis staring down on me.

  “You think I’m drunk?” I ask faintly, as the horrible dream ebbs away.

  Her grin is teasing. “How else could you sleep through breakfast and all this arguing?”

  Sunshine streams through my window. It’s rare for me to oversleep, particularly now, on this lumpy horsehair mattress. “Arguing about what?” But I hear it. My bedroom door is ajar, and the voices below are angry. Quinn and Aunt Clara. When I stand, my sore muscles resist. “What about?” I repeat.

  “Everything!” Mavis enthuses. “It’s been more delicious than toffee cake. Oh, has Mister Quinn been giving her an earful. It started as something to do with the dressmaker’s bill. Old Mister Pritchett will never raise his voice about Missus Pritchett’s wastefulness, but it seems Mister Quinn’s taken her to task.”

  I can’t resist. I clamber to the banister, the better to hear the voices pitching back and forth below. Quinn’s tenor is clear and flat, barely raised at all. “…drowning in costs…well over our annual… damn fripperies… and pay for the household expenditures!”

  And while Aunt squeaks like a mouse defending her cheese, her words are mysterious. “If you would only assert yourself…you are paralyzed…to make a decision one way or another…”

  A decision about what? But next comes the slamming of doors, another of Aunt’s childish gestures, and now their conversation is muted.

  Mavis clears her throat. “Speaking of household particulars and it’s awkward to ask of you, Miss Jennie but Missus Sullivan sent me up to see if you’ll lend an extra pair of hands. It’s brass and silver day. She says t’would only be ’bout an hour or two.”

  “Of course.” Closer to
four or five hours, but I don’t mention this.

  “It’s another reason Mister Quinn’s upset.” Mavis’s eyes glint with gossip. “There isn’t enough in the ledger to hire more than one day girl. Missus Sullivan spoke with your uncle last night. He said hired girls had been pre-considered in the annual household budget and what a donkey laugh that was. There isn’t been a household budget in months, anyway. Missus Pritchett spent the whole lot on clothes and gimcracks like fancy sun parasols and watering cans from London, England.”

  Mavis can’t disguise her annoyance. I sense that Uncle Henry’s fumbling inattention has been a topic of servants’ talk before. “Quinn mentioned you, too, Miss. He says you’re in need of new boots.”

  I color, surprised that Quinn would have noticed. It lifts my heart that he did.

  “And he said you’ve got no position here,” Mavis adds, more quietly. “He didn’t say it unkind, Jennie. But he said it.”

  My heart skips a beat. “He means well by me. He’ll set things right,” I say, though new doubts shake awake in my head. Does Quinn want me gone? With a new pair of boots for the journey out?

  Mavis still looks shy. “Missus Sullivan’s holding your breakfast. You better claim it before she gives it to Lotty.”

  I nod. My mind is a whirl. It will be impossible to get to Geist today. It had been all I wanted to do after last night’s revelations the arrow marked in a wreath of irises that had led me to Will’s scrap of letter.

  Before I dash to rescue my meal, I open my scrapbook again and rub my fingers against the stained paper. The ink is blotted, the handwriting looks weak. I can almost feel the ache and fatigue in his words, so different from the determined cheerfulness of his other letters.

  In bold daylight I am better able to register that Will’s last letter is in fact a confession. He had killed. He had stolen. He wrote of suffering and injuries. His last days were not as I’d imagined, cut down in the heat of battle. He died a prisoner. His story is a cry of shame.

  Nate carries part of this secret. And so, I am sure, does Quinn.

  Something is not right here. I must make sense of the confusion. What sort of raging monster had Will become in the end? What does Quinn intend to protect in his silences and lies? I yank so hard at my bootlaces that my feet feel the pinch as I hasten down the back stairs to the kitchen.

  For of course Quinn is protecting his brother. Will’s end must have been so wretched that Quinn had to pretend he fell in battle. Quinn didn’t see his brother die otherwise Will surely would’ve given him my locket. I’m speculating, but I’m on the trail of the truth. And I want all of it.

  Yet today I’m tasked with servant’s chores. There’s nothing I can do until they’re done. Under Mrs. Sullivan’s regime, the polishing of the brass and silver is a tedious matter, set in motion when every item is carried into the dining room and placed on the table. Each object is checked against her ledger before bowl, candlestick, or piece of tea service is transported down to the kitchen, where the day girl, Lotty, is given the lowest job of all: tarnish scrubber.

  The scrubbed silver is then rinsed and re-rinsed, polished and buffed, carried upstairs, and set back upon the table for Mrs. Sullivan to inspect before it’s all replaced, safe and sparkling, in its designated position on whatever dreary sideboard, table, or corner cupboard. No amount of sparkle could lighten the gloom that lies over Pritchett House.

  We work steady as carpenter ants, the mood of the morning’s fight lingering like an acrid burning after the fire’s stamped out. Aunt Clara has slunk off to her rooms, and Quinn has locked himself in his. I catch nobody’s eye for fear I might blurt out the whole incredible business of the last twelve hours.

  Later in the afternoon, as I am replacing the bone-handled carving knives in their chest and Mrs. Sullivan has moved on to dinner preparations, I hear her call for the hired man to kill a chicken for supper.

  “He’s up on the roof. I’ll do it.” Quinn’s voice. He has left his room, likely creeping down for a cup of bouillon that Mrs. Sullivan, a great believer in the healing powers of bouillon, keeps in a spare kettle on the hearth.

  I hear the clatter of cups. “No, no, Mister Quinn, let me pour ”

  “It’s no trouble. I did quite a bit of hostess duty for the corps.” I recognize the old coaxing charm in Quinn’s voice that these days he reserves for the servants. It always works. Sure enough, Mrs. Sullivan giggles.

  I hear Quinn pass through the kitchen door. I pull on my cloak and hide my tarnished palms in a pair of mittens before I join him in step as he heads out to the yard.

  “The almanac promises an early spring,” I begin amiably, but Quinn’s in no temper to chat.

  “Jennie, you should leave here,” he says. “Put us out of your life, one and all.”

  “Where would I go?” I feel a sting my eyes. I think of Nate, trapped at his window.

  “There are opportunities.” Gracefully, Quinn swoops underhand to catch a speckled guinea, thrusting it into my arms in a single motion. A lock of his hair falls forward, and I resist the impulse to smooth it back into place. We head for the tree stump. La guillotine, Toby had called it. “You’re very clever.”

  I can’t remember if Quinn has ever outright complimented me before. In light of that kiss, and Nate Dearborn’s words he’s sweet on you,

  too I wonder if he continues to harbor feelings, or if he ever truly did.

  “Clever at what?”

  His expression is neutral. “You’ve got a calming way. You could be a nurse, or a governess, even.”

  “I’m sorely uneducated.” I stroke the guinea beneath its gullet to subdue it. Other chickens, sensing danger, are clucking and scuttling around us, clawing up the cold earth. “You know I quit Putterham when Papa died. Besides, I never took to it, not really. I could tell you everything about Prometheus and Epimetheus, thanks to Papa. But I can’t multiply higher than ten times ten.” I feel the bird go heavy in my arms.

  Quinn shrugs. “A pity. I wish I’d got to know your father. History will remember him with respect, as one of the first men to enlist in this war.”

  “And to get killed in it.” Four years ago. It seems another lifetime since the beginning of the fighting. “Toby always said it was suicide. That Papa was never right in his head after our mother passed.”

  “He wouldn’t be the first to go mad with grief. Some days I think I am mad, with what I’ve seen.” Quinn shakes his head as if to displace his thoughts. “The new reports say that the South is bankrupt, and I know firsthand that most of it’s destroyed, with a Union victory all but guaranteed. However it ends, I fear it’ll be many years we’ll be wiping up the blood of our memories.”

  “Your experiences have left you bitter, Quinn. I’m sure we’ll be happy again. That’s what Will and Toby would have wanted.”

  But Quinn doesn’t answer. He disappears into the henhouse, and when he returns he has knotted on the blood-rusted butcher’s apron and is carrying the axe. He pulls the limp bird from my arms, positions it on the stump, and then with one sure hand and a single stroke he severs its neck.

  There’s a chorus of squawking as the headless chicken begins a jerking death-dance around the yard. Other livestock scatter.

  “You used your left hand,” I note.

  “I favored it as a child,” he says, opening his fingers, then closing them into a fist. “Then I was retrained properly at school. Wasn’t until I needed to shoot a gun that I went cack-handed again. Now I use my left for everything. It seems to have retained an intuitive skill.” He wipes the blood of the blade on his apron before wedging it into the stump. “S’pose I needed any natural advantage for survival.”

  Doubtless there will never be an easy time to confront Quinn, but the question has been so long on the tip of my tongue, it almost has a taste. I plunge ahead. “Will you tell me what Will met up against before he was killed? I want to know it. He was in trouble, wasn’t he?”

  “Trouble? He was a hero.” Quinn raise
s his eye patch for a moment and wipes his forehead with the sleeve of his coat. The eye, though less raw, is thickly ridged with scar tissue. Queasy, I look away. “Don’t we have a telegram from Captain Fleming? Don’t we have a respectable service planned for Will come spring?”

  “I deserve better from you, Quinn,” I say. “The truth, for example. I know there’s more to this story.” I don’t dare risk telling him about Nate and the letter. Not now.

  A spy’s sixth sense is timing.

  In the barbed silence, we stare at each other, faced with the unassailable wall built of what Quinn refuses to confess.

  “And after that service,” he says, his voice level, “it might be best for you to leave this house. As I mentioned, there is nothing for you here.”

  “Except you,” I murmur, glancing down at my blood-spattered boots.

  “Don’t say that, Jennie,” His voice breaks. “Not when you don’t mean it.”

  “I’m sorry.” Didn’t I mean it? I’m confused myself and unable to tear my gaze from his.

  By now Mrs. Sullivan has come lumbering across the yard. She scoops the lifeless bird to bleed and pluck, oblivious to what, if anything, has just passed between Quinn and me. “Thank you, Mister Quinn,” she says, but he has already turned away.

  “Wait! Quinn! I’ll walk with you!” I call after him.

  His strides are too long for me to keep up. I stop following. Still in his bloodied apron, Quinn crosses under the trellis that leads from the kitchen garden down to the crab apple orchard.

  Dismal by winter afternoon, it appears as a trek of starved gray trees and hard-packed soil. Along its path, Quinn moves steady, casting a long shadow that is wafer-thin and lonely as a reaper against the gray sky.

  16.

  Although Quinn doesn’t bring up my leaving Pritchett House, he has injected the fear into me. Where would I go? What would I do? Over the next few days, I am a mouse in search of a new flowerpot under which to hide.

  Homing in on what she (rightly) perceives as my insecurity, Mrs. Sullivan starts to give me lists, misspelled commands on scraps of brown butcher paper, and though she hasn’t assigned me the charwoman’s work yet my hours are spent sweeping, mending, and so much dusting that my lungs ache from sneezes. But I do everything she asks, afraid to raise a fuss.