by Lyn Cote
Beth yawned and Verity realized it was time to get her to bed. Then Verity would get to play Santa. Her own parents had shocked some of the other Friends by including Santa in their celebration of Christ’s birth. But her father had loved the story of the jolly old elf and had scoffed at the naysayers.
Her father would have heartily approved of the gift Samuel and Matthew had given these children this night. Who could disapprove of such innocent joy?
The house was silent as Verity crept down the creaky stairs to slip Beth’s Christmas presents into her stocking on the mantel. When she stepped into the moonlit parlor, with its Christmas tree, she was caught up short. Matthew was there also, putting something into Beth’s stocking.
He turned to her and whispered, “I got her some new red hair ribbons.”
The wonder that Matthew had thought to buy hair ribbons for her little girl caught Verity around the heart and made it impossible for her to speak. Tears came to her eyes and she turned away.
“What’s wrong?” he whispered as he came up behind her. “Shouldn’t I have bought ribbons?”
She pressed her hand to her mouth, trying to hide the fact that she was fighting tears. “She’ll love the ribbons,” Verity whispered.
“You’re crying.” Matthew laid his hands on her shoulders and turned her toward him. “Why?”
Verity shook her head, unable to put into words how his gift had touched her.
Matt tried to think why his putting ribbons in Beth’s stocking should make Verity cry, but came up blank. It was just one of those inexplicable things women did. Then he caught her lavender fragrance and his mind went back to the day they’d cut the two Christmas trees. The memory of her lips went through him like a warm west wind.
Then she did something unexpected. Her hand grazed his cheek and slid into the hair over his right ear. In that exquisite moment he thought he might die of the glory of it. It had been so long since any woman had touched him. He savored the sensation like a starving man letting sugar dissolve on his tongue.
In the moonlight she lifted her fair face to his. For the first time he saw the invitation he hadn’t known he was waiting for until this moment. Slowly, as if they were puppets on strings, their faces drew toward one another. Their lips met and it was a tender meeting. Matt closed his eyes and leaned into the kiss. Warmth flooded him. He had yearned for this moment—without even realizing it.
He let his lips roam over hers. They were sweeter and softer than he’d remembered. His thumbs made circles on the collar of her cotton flannel wrapper. Her underlying softness worked on him, melting his final resistance to this woman.
At last he drew back, his hand cupping the back of her head. He looked down into her caramel-brown eyes glistening in the low light. “We’re colleagues here and now. But we won’t be forever.”
She nodded.
Did that mean she agreed that they might be more than colleagues sometime in the future? He couldn’t go on without revealing more of his tangled, unexamined feelings than he was prepared for at this time. But this woman had brought healing to Fiddlers Grove—and at least some measure to him.
Because of her, he was speaking to his cousin and had even worked with him to deal with Orrin. He’d thought he’d come here because of his mother’s deathbed request. But he had come here to fill in the hole that being forced to leave his home in 1852 had left in his life. He’d come to find his family, his friend Samuel.
And did he indeed love this woman? Was she the right one? She must be. I’ve never felt this way about any woman before.
“Good night,” he whispered, making himself end their sweet interlude. Hesitating, hating to leave her, he traced her soft lips with his index finger once and then turned and left.
Verity stood still for a very long time after he’d closed the back door. Then she went and tucked into Beth’s stocking the new red mittens and scarf she’d secretly knitted, and a peppermint stick. Verity had already received her own Christmas gift—Matthew’s kiss and half-spoken promise.
They had come to an agreement tonight. Both of them were committed to their work here, and that took precedence over their personal feelings. If they went forward as a couple now, she would not be able to focus on her mission as teacher and peacemaker here in Fiddlers Grove. The Freedman’s Bureau did not employ married women as teachers.
But if she’d understood Matthew right, a time was coming when she could put widow’s black behind her. She leaned her head against the smooth wooden mantel and let lush wonder flow through her every nerve. Thank Thee, Father, for this very special Christmas gift.
In the thin wintry sunlight of early January, Verity walked up and down the rows of desks, her skirts swishing over the wooden floor. Friendly voices hummed in the room. Children were quizzing each other, preparing for a spelling test that would start in just a few moments. Then the school door opened and Annie’s grandmother burst inside, ushering cold wind into the warm schoolroom.
Matt stared out the kitchen window toward the school through the windbreak of leafless poplars. He wondered how the latest news from Washington would affect their work here. The Richmond newspaper lay on the table. He’d read the headline countless times in the past few minutes. Every newspaper had brought troubling news from Washington, D.C., but this was the worst. It couldn’t bode well for them.
President Johnson had been fighting the Radical Republicans in Congress over the South’s refusal to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which would make former male slaves voting citizens. When Matt thought how the latest development in this conflict might affect the tenuous peace here, his stomach churned. He knew Verity, who’d always had higher hopes than he had, would be devastated.
Matt saw Dace galloping up to the back door. He knocked and entered without invitation. Then Dace pulled the same Richmond paper from inside his coat and shook it at Matt. “Have you seen this?”
Startled, Verity looked up at the woman. “What is it? What’s happened?”
“We’ve found Jesse!”
For a moment Verity could not figure out who Jesse was. And then it came back to her. The day she’d visited the Daughters of the Confederacy meeting, Jesse had been the first lost soldier she’d revealed to the ladies. “Thee did!” Verity shouted in joy.
“Yes.” Annie’s grandmother swept up the center aisle. She held out a letter in both gloved hands. “I just received a letter from his wife, Louisa. We had contacted the South Carolina militia adjutant and he fowarded our request to the family of the man he believed to be our Jesse. She begs us to send his effects to her.”
Thinking of Louisa and the comfort that word of her late husband would give her, Verity could not stop her tears. “Oh, I am so happy, and my sisters will be, too. Oh, praise God.” Verity opened her arms and the two women embraced.
Dace halted in front of Matt and looked at the paper on the table. Dace threw his copy on top of Matt’s. “You’ve read it, then?”
“Yes.” Matt glanced down again at the headline: Congress Divides South into Five Military Districts.
“It’s monstrous,” Dace exclaimed. “According to this, Virginia isn’t even a sovereign commonwealth anymore. The Union military will rule us. Are you Yankees trying to get us to secede again?”
You Yankees. He and Dace were enemies again. The past few weeks had just been a lull in the long war. Matt rubbed his taut forehead, his gut tightening.
“When my slaves were freed, I lost most of my wealth. Then after the surrender, the Union government confiscated my harvested tobacco and cotton. I’d stored four years of harvests on my land that I hadn’t been able to sell due to the Union blockade. Then they stole everything but the house, leaving me nearly penniless.
“Now, because before the war I owned too much land to suit the abolitionists in Congress, I was barred from taking the oath of loyalty to the U.S. or holding office. Virginia was in the process of writing a new state constitution. I had hopes of at least regaining the vote. Now this.” Dace
looked at the paper with loathing.
Dace felt that his right to vote was more important than Samuel’s? Matt’s ire fired up. “What did you think was going to happen, Dace? The war supposedly settled once and for all the issue of slavery—”
“I can accept the end of slavery,” Dace cut in. “I must.”
“But you don’t accept that Samuel is free now and will vote just like any other man,” Matt said. “And people like Orrin Dyke are still actively fighting the changes that freeing the slaves must bring. In other Southern states there have been race riots and lynchings. The slaves can be free as long as they don’t act free. Isn’t that what you mean, Dace?”
With his clenched fist, Dace hit the table, turned and stalked out.
Annie’s grandmother had left to spread the good news. Now Verity stood in front of the row of first-graders and began dictating their spelling words. The children had their chalks poised over their slates and were listening so hard that it made her smile. “Spell rob.” Squeaky chalk scribbled on the slates.
The joy of locating the first family of a lost soldier still bubbled inside her. Verity couldn’t wait to write her sisters this evening. This was cause for celebration. Wait until Matthew hears. Maybe now he will believe in the power of love to reach hearts and change minds. Then she made herself concentrate on the spelling test. “Spell mob,” she said.
After school on that happy day, Verity strolled home, lighthearted, through the early twilight. She’d stayed late, tidying up the schoolroom and correcting papers written by the older students. As she approached her home, she noted that there was a strange carriage parked in front of her house. Who could be visiting? Verity hurried up her back steps and into the warm kitchen, where Hannah was standing at the stove. Verity bent to pat Barney as he greeted her. The room was fragrant with the scent of ham roasting. Beth was at the table, doing her homework.
Hannah swung around to face Verity. “I’m glad you come home, Miss Verity,” Hannah whispered. “Joseph and Matthew are in the parlor, entertaining two gentlemen. I didn’t like the look of them.”
Verity took off her gloves, cape and bonnet and hung them on a peg by the door, smoothing back her hair. “Who are they?”
“I don’t remember their names, but one is black and one’s skinny and white. Looks like he never had a square meal.”
Verity grinned. “Do we have enough to invite them to eat supper with us?” Hannah nodded. “Then I’d best go in.” Patting Beth on the back, Verity headed to the parlor. She paused at the entrance to the room, a smile of welcome on her face.
Joseph jumped up from his chair, but Matthew made the introductions. “Verity, these two gentlemen, Mr. Alfred Wolford and Mr. Jeremiah Cates, are from the Freedman’s Bureau. Gentlemen, this is Mrs. Verity Hardy.”
She walked forward, holding out her hand.
The two men who’d stood up were staring at her in a funny way. It turned out that Mr. Wolford was the tall, thin white man and Jeremiah Cates was the large, robust-looking black man. After they had shaken hands, she said, “Please be seated again, Friends. I’m so happy to entertain thee in my home.”
“Don’t you mean the Freedman’s Bureau’s home, young woman?” Mr. Wolford glowered at her.
This caught Verity just as she was about to lower herself into one of the chairs. “I beg thy pardon?”
“This home, in fact, belongs to the Freedman’s Bureau, doesn’t it?” Mr. Wolford insisted in a scratchy voice that was higher than expected. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his scrawny throat.
“Thee knows that is true.” Verity sat down. “But why does thee bring it up?”
“We bring it up,” Mr. Cates said in his full deep voice, “because rumor has it that you have overstepped your bounds, ma’am.” He sat down again, while Mr. Wolford remained standing.
“Indeed?” She widened her eyes in surprise. “And thee listens to rumors? I never do.” Of course she shouldn’t have included those final three words. But it’s the truth.
She glanced at Matthew to see if he could offer her any enlightenment as to what was going on here. He merely stared at her in stony silence. Smothering fear pressed on her lungs. What do these men want?
From his stance at the fireplace, Mr. Wolford glared at her. “Young woman, we’ve heard rumors that the Freedman’s school here has openly included white children. And your father-in-law has admitted that this is true.” Mr. Wolford sounded as disgruntled as if he were at table and someone had pulled away his plate of food.
“So, ma’am, you see it’s good we listen to rumors,” Mr. Cates said with a sly, smooth smile.
Her gaze on Matthew, Verity replied, “That is true. We have four white students attending here.” As she thought of this triumph, sparkling happiness filled her as usual. “Why shouldn’t white children attend public school? They would in the North.” Matthew’s face was clenched and rigid.
“Now, ma’am, is it fair for children whose parents owned slaves and fought against the Union to receive a free education at the government’s expense?” Mr. Cates asked in his rolling baritone. “You are forgetting who the enemy is.”
Verity tried to stifle her increasing apprehension, a stiffening at the back of her neck. “Do we still have enemies a year after the war ended? The war is over, Friends. I didn’t come here to prolong it. I came to do what President Lincoln wanted us to do. I wanted to bind up the nation’s wounds, to bring help and healing here. White children should not be punished for the actions of their parents. And I would think that having white children and black children attending the local school together would advance this—”
“Young woman, this isn’t a Christian mission,” Mr. Wolford snapped. “The Freedman’s Bureau is a government body with very specific purposes paid for by taxes.”
She again looked to Matthew, appealing for his backing. He said nothing, but looked back at her with a pained expression. She tried reason again, saying, “I don’t understand why four white children in school is objectionable. I assure thee that the black children don’t complain. Perhaps thee doesn’t understand the situation Mr. Ritter and I faced when we arrived here.”
“Mr. Ritter gave us some indication of this, ma’am. But we would be glad to hear what you have to say.” Mr. Cates motioned to her to speak.
Some indication? An odd sensation came over her, like ants crawling up her spine. What had Matthew told these men about her? “When we came to Fiddlers Grove, the white people here were set against having a Freedman’s school in their town,” Verity began.
“And they didn’t hesitate to make this known.” Joseph spoke for the first time. “They attacked Matt, attacked my daughter-in-law, burned our barn and tried to burn our house down. Or should I say the Freedman’s Bureau’s house down?” Joseph looked flushed and angry. “Why wasn’t the Bureau here then to try to protect its house and my daughter-in-law?”
Seeing the men’s expressions hardening into anger, Verity spoke up, her words stumbling over each other in her haste. “I think that my father-in-law is trying to tell thee that we had a very difficult time at first. But with God’s favor, I won some of the people over by appealing to their better selves.”
“Young woman, where in your instructions did it say anything about including white children in a Freedman’s school?” Mr. Wolford demanded, ignoring what she’d said. “A Freedman’s school is to educate black children and adult Negroes—freed slaves—who must learn how to read and write in order to become informed voting citizens.”
“Aren’t white children supposed to become informed voting citizens, too?” Verity asked in what she hoped was a reasonable tone, fire beginning to burn in her stomach.
“That is not the point in question,” Mr. Cates replied, rising to stare down at her. “Are you aware that the former Southern states have been dissolved and the South is now under military jurisdiction? The South is unregenerate. They will not ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, giving former slaves citizenship.”
; Each word hit her like a well-aimed missile.
“The Freedman’s Bureau is a bureau in the War Department,” Mr. Wolford added. “You and Mr. Ritter were given very generous funds in order to carry out a specific program to benefit black children and freed slaves, just as Mr. Cates has said. Not to open a school for all the children of Fiddlers Grove, Virginia.”
Mr. Cates nodded his agreement.
Verity stared at them in dawning disbelief. No, no, please, no. Were they listening to themselves? “White children sitting in the same building as black children costs the U.S. nothing.”
Frowning, Mr. Cates said, “I don’t like repeating myself, but you have overstepped your bounds, ma’am. No doubt from the best of motives. But as usual, a woman doesn’t easily grasp legal distinctions.”
The man’s casual insult of her intelligence just because she was female left Verity openmouthed, gasping, speechless. When someone deems thee inferior because of thy dark skin, does thee like it? She bit her lower lip to stop herself from tossing this question into his condescending face.
Mr. Wolford moved toward the parlor door. “Mr. Cates and I will be staying in the area. We expect that you will dismiss the white children from the school. Otherwise we will have to inform the Bureau that you should be dismissed.”
One last time, Verity tried to catch Matthew’s eye, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze. Her face burned from their scorn.
“Mr. Ritter, we’d like to meet the men you mentioned earlier, the ones you think will carry on the Union League after you leave Fiddlers Grove.” Mr. Cates’s rich voice boomed in the strained silence in the room.
Matthew was leaving Fiddlers Grove? Verity felt as if she’d been hit with a second hammer.
“Good evening, ma’am.” Mr. Cates gave a perfunctory bow and left, followed by Mr. Wolford who gave her only a parting glare. Matthew departed without even a backward glance.
When Joseph returned from seeing the men to the door, he and Verity just looked at one another.
“Does that mean they are going to put Alec and Annie and the other white students out of our school?” Beth stood in the doorway into the parlor, Barney whining at her feet.