“Can you transfer? Become an orderly and work in the medical tents?”
He shook his head. “I’m too valuable where I am. I have no medical training, but I’ve got plenty of combat experience.” His expression turned bitter. “I don’t want to cut off limbs, anyway. I want to find out how disease works.” He leaned closer. His face, only inches from hers, lit up from within. “It’s in the chemistry, Emily. It has to be. In the tiny particles we can’t see. We don’t understand it yet, but we’ll learn. I’ll learn.”
She remembered his passion for science, his interest in using it to better mankind. Unfortunately, it had taken a war to give his dream a focus. She smiled warmly. “I have no doubt you will.”
***
Jovie insisted on paying for a hotel room, but Emily never slept in it that night. She took Jack’s care on herself, cleansing his wound, changing his bandage, emptying his bedpan, sponging his fever. Grateful for one less patient to mind, no one in the hospital asked her to leave. So she stayed, dozing on the wooden floorboards beside Jack’s bed.
In the wee hours of the night, Emily felt his hand on her hair. Raising to her knees, she found him calm and lucid. “Are you all right?” she asked in a low voice, so as not to awaken the other patients. “Do you need medication?”
“The pain is bearable. I’d rather have a clear head.”
Emily laid a hand on her brother’s overheated face. “Jack, I feel terrible for thinking so poorly of you all these years.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“You were far ahead of me. I’ve only recently come to see what our family, what our lifestyle, has caused.” She found it remarkable that she and Jack had both been born to privilege and had both rejected it—Uncle Timothy’s legacy, passed down through Uncle Isaac and cultivated by Zeke.
“The important thing is that you see it.”
The day’s heat had subsided. The flies had gone off to their rest. It was almost pleasant in the church sanctuary. She studied her brother in the faint, wavering light of the room’s single kerosene lamp. “Why’d you join the army, Jack? All that Secessionist talk, your bring-on-the-war-and-whip-the-Yankees routine, it had me completely fooled. But if you are so hell-bent against slavery, why on earth are you fighting for it?”
His brow lowered. “I’m not. And that was no act. The North has no business here.”
“But the North agrees with you.”
Jack sighed. “Before the 30s, most planters would at least admit slavery was undesirable. But since the North started condemning slave owners and applying political pressure to force us to change, Southerners have dug in their feet. Now you won’t find one who’s unwilling to defend the system to his last breath. They should have left us to sort it out ourselves.”
“Would we have?”
He shrugged sadly. “We couldn’t have done any worse.”
“I don’t know why the North made such a clamor in the first place. I’ve been there. I’ve seen their mills. Their industry depends on our cotton.”
“Hypocrisy is easy,” Jack said and paused to catch his breath. “Even Jefferson and Washington wrote eloquently about the evils of slavery, but they didn’t free their own people. And they didn’t forbid it in the Constitution. A failure we are now paying for.”
She regarded him keenly. “Jack, would you have freed Ella Wood’s slaves?”
“I’ve been planning out the details for years. But you’ll be the one who has to implement them.”
The implication of his words slowly worked its way into her brain. When Jack died, she would be their father’s sole heir. She stood in line to inherit Ella Wood. Her shoulders bowed under a tremendous weight of responsibility.
“It could be years from now,” he said. “But you must. Uncle Isaac will help you. Promise me you will.”
Her fist clenched around his blanket. He covered it with a trembling hand. “Promise me.”
“I promise,” she whispered.
He relaxed. “The blockade has brought our efforts nearly to an end. The only way runaways can escape now is by land, and we’re so far South, their chance is nearly zero. But I overheard the doctors discussing a proclamation Lincoln made several days ago. He declared that on the first day of the new year, all slaves in all rebel territories will be free.”
“It will never be enforced.”
“Of course not. It’s meaningless. Lincoln’s just trying to put a noble face on a horrible war. He wants to justify the bloodshed. But it will be enforced in areas that are controlled by the North,” he added significantly.
“What does that have to do with Ella Wood?”
“You’ve forgotten about Port Royal and the Sea Islands.”
Emily studied him keenly. Freedom would soon be only twenty miles from Charleston.
“For all the evil this war has caused, it might soon provide you and Zeke with an unprecedented opportunity.”
She shook her head. “Impossible. The rivers are barricaded and torpedoed. There’s no way we could get the schooner through.”
“By land, then.”
“Past thousands of Confederate soldiers? Jack, I’m not you. I don’t run an illicit smuggling operation.”
“You did once.”
She shifted off her knees, crossed her legs beneath her skirt, and changed the subject. “Jack, before you fell asleep this afternoon, you tried to tell me something about Jeremiah.”
“Has he been here?”
“He came when you were sleeping. The nurses wouldn’t let him stay.”
“He’s our brother, Emily. Our father’s son.”
Emily drew back as if she’d been slapped. During the past year, her father had displayed an amazing capacity for stubbornness and irrational behavior, but it had been directed toward her, and not entirely without provocation. She knew she had crossed him with an equally stubborn will on subjects he considered very serious. But if what Jack said was true—and Jeremiah’s coloring had always been far lighter than the other slaves—this was an offense against someone who had never done him wrong. Someone who had devoted her life to pleasing him.
She felt ill. “He was unfaithful to Mother?”
“In his eyes, no.”
She dropped her voice to a fierce whisper. “Who is Jeremiah’s mother?”
“A house slave by the name of Hannah. I barely remember her.”
“Did Father love her?”
“Not as he loves Mother. She died years ago, when you were very young.”
“Why did he do it?”
“I’ve never asked him, but Jeremiah was born three years before me—and only one year after cholera ripped through Ella Wood.”
Emily remembered the four tiny graves within the iron bars of the family graveyard. Four siblings she had never known. Eleven slaves, she’d been told, had also died that summer, and the disease had nearly killed her mother.
“Father never talks about it, but Deena told me he was a different person then. Brokenhearted. Guilty for not being at home when it happened. And lonely. Mother, even after she recovered, hardly left her room for a year. So he found comfort in the arms of another woman.”
Emily straightened, her jaw set. “It still doesn’t excuse his behavior.”
“It’s in the past. And it’s not Jeremiah’s fault. You must do right by him, Emily.”
She found her affections toward their former slave had cooled considerably. “Are there other siblings?”
“No. When Mother found out, she put Hannah from the house.”
Emily reflected on her brother’s words, and the corner of her mouth curled down in disgust. Her own father—a lecher.
Jack touched her hand. “Emily, there is something else.”
She looked up in amazement. How many surprises could her brother be hiding?
“Perhaps the most important of all. It’s about Thad.”
“What about Thad?” she demanded, suddenly defensive. Then she held up a hand. “Wait. I don’t want to hear this. N
ot now. It’s all been too much.” She stood up and snugged the blanket more closely over his chest. “You need your rest, and I need time to mull over the things you’ve already told me.” She kissed his cheek. “Get some sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
Jack nodded and closed his eyes, unconscious before Emily lay down on the floor in the space between the beds. Blessing the flexible petticoats of her riding habit, she curled her hands beneath her cheek.
Anger surged through her. How could her father have betrayed her mother like that? She knew the transgression was so commonplace that it had become acceptable. White men often took mistresses from among their slave women, and everyone looked the other way. Everyone but their wives. And unwilling slaves like Lizzie. And the children they begat who filled the ranks in the master’s fields. When Emily considered what her father had done, a new hatred for him burned within her.
Her thoughts shifted to Jeremiah, but now she could only view him through the lens of her father’s disloyalty. Deep resentment filled her. She would see him safely into Northern territory, assuming he chose to come. After that, he was on his own.
It was nearly morning before Emily dozed off.
When she awoke, Jack was dead.
18
Emily spent the next day in a surreal haze. Her body, still not fully healed, finally rebelled against the demands she’d made on it. Jovie ordered her to the hotel room, where she slept until afternoon, but even when she awoke her thoughts remained insubstantial, swirling through a mist of loss, regret, and emptiness. Sorrow bound her in place. She lay until dusk, unable to muster the willpower to attend to details that could not be postponed.
“May I come in?”
Emily turned her face to the darkening window. If she ignored him, perhaps Jovie would leave her alone.
“I know you’re in there. If you don’t open the door, I’ll get a key.”
With heartache weighting every movement, Emily drew a blanket over her undergarments and reluctantly unfastened the lock.
He carried a tray with two cups of coffee, a bowl of soup, and blueberry pie.
“I don’t want any.”
“I don’t care.” He set the tray on the bedside table and forced a cup into her hand. “I won’t lose you next.”
She took a sip. The hot liquid was as bitter as she remembered, but it poured strength into her muscles. She drank from it again.
Jovie handed her the soup and sat in the room’s only chair, crossing an ankle over one knee. “Your father arrived today.”
Jack’s monumental revelations had driven away all thought of her parents. Of course they would have received a telegraph after the battle. “I don’t want to see him.”
“I didn’t tell him you’re here.” He sipped his own coffee. “We made arrangements to send Jack home.”
The words came like a blow. Neither had she thought through the logistics of Jack’s funeral. It would take place at Ella Wood. And she would miss it. She wouldn’t be able to tell her brother goodbye. Fresh tears seeped down her cheeks. “Is my mother here?”
He shook his head.
“Has my father seen Jeremiah?”
Jovie raised his eyebrows. “No.”
How much did he know? How much could she tell him? “I’m going to take him with me to Baltimore.”
“I think he might agree to that. Jeremiah hasn’t left the chair outside your door all day.” His eyes pierced hers, searching out the hollows of her soul. She shifted uncomfortably as the silence stretched to an awkward length.
Jovie sighed and set his cup on the tray. “Emily, I already know he is your half-brother. Jack made me vow to tell you if he could not. I was hoping you’d trust me, too.”
“He’s not my brother,” she said sharply. Then her eyes narrowed. “Jack told you everything?”
“The way he freed Jeremiah and slipped him past your father? Yes, he told me.”
But was Jovie aware of the rest of Jack’s activities? “My father didn’t agree to the manumission, so however Jack did it—forgery, bribery—it can’t be legal. Helping me could make you an accessory. You’re okay with that?”
He shrugged. “In this case, yes. The circumstances are unusual. I saw how important it was to Jack.”
No, Jack definitely hadn’t told him everything.
Emily finished her meal, conscious of the way Jovie considered her over the top of his coffee cup. She tucked a wayward strand of hair back into place and wished she’d dressed before admitting him. She had grown quite warm beneath the blanket, but there was no way she was going to remove it.
“Emily, maybe you should return with your father.”
She set down the empty pie plate and warily returned his gaze.
“I know you don’t want to,” he continued. “But you’re ill—”
“I’m as well as you,” she snapped.
He paused, watching the grounds swirl in the bottom of his cup. “Exactly. Go home, bury your brother, and regain your strength. You can attend school next term.”
“Jeremiah can’t go back to Ella Wood.” Despite her ill feelings toward him, she’d never return him to slavery.
“Jeremiah is a full-grown man who can take care of himself.”
“I won’t kowtow to my father.”
“He may see you differently now that you’re his only heir.”
But she shook her head, her jaw thrust forward. Aunt Margaret’s earrings hadn’t fetched nearly what she’d hoped, and this trip had already cut deeply into her emergency fund. Now she’d have mourning garments to purchase, as well. “If I leave, I’ll lose all the money I earned for my tuition. Money my father will never replace.”
Jovie dug in the pocket of his uniform, drew out a handful of trinkets, and closed her fingers around them.
“What’s this?”
“The items Jack won in poker. They were among his personal effects. I removed them before giving the rest of his things to your father. I figured William owed you this much.”
Emily opened her hand. An abalone stick pin, an intricately wrought silver flask, and a fine gold pocket watch rested on her palm. They would sell for enough to cover her tuition and lodging for the rest of the year. Tears brimmed in her eyes. “Thank you.”
“You’re sure you won’t join your father?”
“Jovie, you know I won’t go.”
He sighed. “I’ve got to get back to camp. You’ll be all right?”
“I’ll be fine.”
He opened his arms. Still clutching the blanket, she walked into his embrace. Shared grief flowed between them as strong as the current of the Ashley, leaching away a tiny fragment of her burden. When they had said their goodbyes last spring, Emily thought she had left him behind. She realized now she never truly could. Too much still tied them together.
It was Jovie who pulled away. He caught her chin, his eyes lingering on hers, then he strode from the room.
***
Traveling home the next morning, the full weight of Jack’s passing descended over Emily, along with the heavy mantle he had asked her to take up. Feelings of inadequacy pressed her into the saddle. She had secretly helped four slaves to freedom. But manumitting two hundred was a monumental undertaking. One that could not be hidden. Such an act would stand out like the Morris Island lighthouse—which the military had blown up to hamper Union efforts against Charleston harbor. Sometimes folks just didn’t appreciate illumination. And her neighbors were notorious for clinging stubbornly to their own blind beliefs. She wasn’t sure she had the courage to follow through on her promise.
But that was years in the future. Jack had also left her a more immediate problem. She frowned at the man riding beside her, and her anger welled up again. Jeremiah had become a symbol of her father’s failures. She knew firsthand the pain of William’s betrayal. How much greater must her mother’s suffering have been?
She had hoped Jeremiah would simply disappear in the middle of the night. Yesterday, after Jovie departed, she ha
d entered the hallway and found him dozing in a hard-backed chair that he’d propped against the wall. He snapped awake at her words.
“Jovie said you’ve been here all day. Why?” she asked in clipped tones.
He stood. “Mister Jack’s wishes, Miss Emily. He told me to look after you the best I could.”
Her lip curled. “That’s curious. He told me to look after you, as well. Did he also ask you to follow me to Baltimore?”
“Yes, he did.”
“And you said you would?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I cared something fierce for your brother.”
If she’d had any lingering doubts about Jack’s character or his claims, that single statement of devotion from a former slave dissolved them all. Not that it helped her situation any.
“You sound different.”
“Yes, miss. Jack told me I should learn to talk like a free man. He’s been instructing me.”
She regarded him coolly before relaying her intentions. “My father is here in Winchester,” she began.
“Mister Jovie told me.”
“He doesn’t know that either of us are here, and I intend to keep it that way. Tomorrow I’m going to slip out of town. If you’d like, you may come with me. I’ll see you as far as Baltimore.” Her tone was businesslike and, she hoped, uninviting. Reckless or not, she’d rather risk the return trip alone than spend four days face-to-face with the reminder of her father’s faithlessness.
Now she watched Jeremiah riding beside her from the corner of her eye. “What do you intend to do when we reach the city?” she asked.
“I reckon I’ll look for a job, miss.”
“You’re free to move on. I don’t need a governess.”
His glance skimmed over her. “No, I reckon you don’t.”
The short exchange typified their conversations over the next several days. Jeremiah exercised infinite patience, refusing to argue or take offense at her rudeness. It removed some of the venom from her sting. Even so, she felt no compunction to make herself more agreeable. Her father’s latest offense still tasted too bitter.
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