by Alyssa Cole
Miss Marlie,
I thank you once again for your kindness. I have a question that is most unbecoming, but the result of not asking even more so: Is there some manner in which I might make use of the necessary?
Your most humble and obedient servant,
Socrates
Marlie stood and looked about: In the mad rush to secrete him into the house, she hadn’t left him a chamber pot, and she knew why. She’d meant to bring him one after fetching remnants of the previous night’s dinner for him, but when she’d walked into the room with his plate he’d been stripped to the waist, balancing on one leg as he washed off the grime of the prison camp. He’d been a reeking mess when he entered—she’d never seen him within a stone’s throw of clean—but there he’d been, beardless and shirtless, the ropy muscles of his arms and chest illuminated by candlelight.
Marlie had placed the plate down on a bundle of rosemary and left him to the rest of his ablutions without another thought of his other bodily needs. She’d been too distracted by her own.
She moved to search about for a pot and then realized that his request was likely urgent if he’d been moved to write that note. Could he wait while she searched closets and cabinets? The house was silent as she considered her options; everyone was out, and if anyone returned suddenly, they couldn’t gain entry to her rooms.
She hesitated; this was courting trouble. However, Marlie and trouble were already on a first-name basis, it seemed.
She quietly pulled the desk away from the wall, not too far since Ewan was all lean muscle, as she’d seen for herself. She slid her hand over the wall until she felt the ridge where the door had been cut into the wall, and then she pushed. It swung inward, and his face appeared in the opening, the slightest frown pulling at his lips.
“I’m sorry to be more of a bother than I already am, but . . .” His whisper trailed off.
She shook her head to show he was no bother to her, and then motioned for him to squeeze out of the opening. She had looked down at him as he crouched in the doorway, but now he was standing at his full height and she had to look up into those eyes that always made her feel as if he were peering right into her.
Her face warmed.
“There’s a privy in my bedchamber,” she whispered. “There’s a plumbing system, so . . .” Finishing that sentence would rend the already frayed propriety of their situation, so she turned and began walking to her room. He was a smart man; he could figure out the mechanics of a rooftop water receptacle and gravity.
There was no noise behind her, but when she looked back he was tight on her heels, and she startled. He’d said he was quiet, and apparently it hadn’t just been an appeasement.
How can a big man like him move so silently, even while injured?
“Is the painkiller I gave you working?” she asked quietly. “I have laudanum, though I’ve been saving it for dire circumstances.”
“I’ve seen too many men fall into laudanum’s embrace to ask for it,” he said, his voice low but clear. “And I assume that you have given me the treatment you think best, which is fine with me.”
Marlie didn’t know if all those words meant he wasn’t in pain; he’d talked cheerfully with an ankle so swollen and ugly he should have been in tears.
She stopped at the door of her chamber and pointed out the privy, then returned to her workspace.
She stood beside her desk, fiddling with the decoding square.
He is just another passenger on his way to freedom.
He was at her mercy, and even the thought of anything further was inappropriate. More importantly, she reminded herself of the obvious: He was white. She’d been immersed in white society for the past ten years, had white blood in her veins, but she was a Negro woman in a country that was fighting a war to keep people like her enslaved. It didn’t matter that Socrates was for the Union. She wasn’t a fan of his devotion to logic, but it didn’t require much to see that her fascination was an unwise one.
“They take what they want because nothing is denied to them, Marlie. But taking is different from loving. Problem is, it feels a lot like loving ’til you find out otherwise.”
Her mother’s words surged up from the recesses of her mind. What had they been discussing—perhaps the white boy at the general store who always paid her too much attention when they went into town? She didn’t remember, but at the time she’d thought her mother overly careful; now she understood she’d been giving her a warning.
“‘O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies, in herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities.’”
The low voice startled her, and she turned to find Ewan looking over her equipment with those keen eyes of his. He seemed to be entranced by the vapor gathering in the coils and the low hiss of steam releasing as the medicine distilled. Ewan looked over her distillation system how most men looked at a shapely ankle. Maybe that was what drew her to him; that he was a curious man in a world full of incurious ones.
He reached out a hand to touch, and then seemed to think better of it, as if sensing that she wouldn’t like that. He was correct. She’d worked hard to assemble and calibrate her apparatus, and he could keep his hands to himself—even if they were very nice hands.
“The Apothecary put us all in a bad light with that irresponsible plan of his. I would have told Juliet to go home and perhaps drink some calming tea,” she said, moving to stand beside him. She should have ushered him back into the drying room. She didn’t. “I admit I’m surprised that someone so committed to the Stoics would be a fan of Shakespeare.”
Something resembling a smile, but not quite, pushed up at the corners of his mouth.
“I was a child with a limited library who spent all my time reading and rereading what was available,” he said, then gingerly lowered himself to a kneeling position to look up at the still from below. “My father was rather fond of the tragedies.”
The words were delivered without inflection, but there was something in his grip on the edge of the table that belied his measured delivery.
“You didn’t find it romantic, then? Star-crossed lovers and such?” she asked.
She felt foolish as soon as the words were out of her mouth, could taste the residue of an implication she hadn’t intended. She squeezed her eyes shut and when she opened them he sat with his head tilted, as if actually giving the question thought.
“I’m not very well-versed in the topic, but I’d have to argue against two dead adolescents being romantic,” he said. “I did find many of the passages to be quite moving, though, before the poison and suicide and such. ‘Did my heart love till now?’”
The question hung in the air between them, resonating between the motes of dust caught in the late afternoon sun that streamed through the window. He looked up at her, his eyes wide and searching, and for a moment Marlie could scarcely breathe. There was warmth in the depths of those eyes, she could see now. Warmth in the flush that spread over his broad cheekbones.
He turned back to the still, all of his focus on the apparatus before him. “Your alembic is quite . . . smooth. And sturdy.”
Marlie cleared her throat and focused on the still, too. She hadn’t wanted him to read anything into her words, and she wouldn’t search for any meaning in his. She’d rather discuss science than sonnets anyway; there was less room for misinterpretation there.
“I’m not surprised you found the most ancient piece of equipment here,” she replied, brushing a finger over the blown-glass ball. A candle below it heated the liquid inside, pushing the vapor down a long glass tube that ended in a small opening, where it dripped into a waiting vial. “It serves its purpose, but great advances have been made since the days of your Greek alchemists.” Her hand drifted over to the more modern metal still, glistening bronze with multiple condensers projecting from its sides like unwieldy appendages.
“An acolyte of modern science, I see. So you don’t believe in the balance of the humors?” he asked, one auburn eyebrow raised. “I’d
say the country is suffering from an excess of phlegm right now. Maybe you could whip something up to take care of that?”
He grinned at her then, and Marlie felt a sharp pinch in her chest at the beauty in the creases around his mouth and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes.
“I’ll set to it immediately,” she said, fixing her gaze on the still, which was a more proper resting place than the face of a man she was giving shelter to. She moved one bottle from below the dripping end of the coiled tube, replacing it with another without wasting a drop in a practiced move. “Lynch’s Mint Tisane will break that right up.”
He was quiet for a moment and when she glanced at him again, he was watching her hands.
“I didn’t realize you did this all on your own. All of the salves and tonics you brought to Randolph—” he said, and then nodded to himself once as if it met his approval. Marlie didn’t know why that one nod made all the hours of work seem more worthwhile.
“You seemed to keep quite busy there,” she teased. “I’m sure you would have had your own distillery in the works, eventually. McCall’s Moonshine.”
“I don’t drink,” he said, and she noticed the tightness in his body again, one that was instinctual, how a child shies away from a hot stove after having been burned once. He caught himself, and turned to her with some approximation of a pleasant expression. “How did you come to this line of work?”
It pleased her that he called it work. Most people treated it as a hobby despite her hours of reading, study, and testing new formulas.
“Plants and their healing properties have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Some of the first memories I have are of going out and collecting leaves and roots and making them into things that helped people. It was when I moved here, with my . . . with the Lynches, that I began to study more modern techniques of distillation and processing.” She pulled a battered and dog-eared book down from the bookshelf and handed it to him. “This was gifted to me soon after I arrived. I was having a hard time acclimating and Sarah thought it might distract me. She was right.”
She could see the curiosity on his face as he took the tome on medical botany from her and began flipping through its pages. “You didn’t always live here?”
A diplomatic question.
“No,” she said. “I came here when I was thirteen. Before that I lived with my mother, in the east of the state. She wanted me to have more opportunity than she’d been given, and when the opportunity arose she sent me here.”
“Are you still close with her?” he asked. He flipped a page and his eyes scanned back and forth slowly as he read. He dropped a fingertip to the page, just beneath something she’d written in the margin. She hoped it wasn’t from that brief, embarrassing period when she’d been smitten with Tobias and taken to scrawling his name surrounded by hearts in all her books.
“I was. I visited with her a couple of times a year, but she’s passed on now.” She waited for the awkward expression of sympathy, the withdrawal, the polite way of saying “let’s not linger on such unpleasantness.” Even Sarah, who’d lost her own mother a year before Vivienne, didn’t indulge Marlie. It simply wasn’t done. She’d read Ewan’s Stoics, and knew what they’d say about the grief that was lodged like a splinter between her shoulder blades.
He looked up from the book, and she knew it had to be a draft from the faulty window jamb, but his gaze felt like a caress. “That must have been quite upsetting for you, to lose her by degrees.”
It was a tactless observation, and not exactly sympathetic, but Marlie still swallowed against a sudden roughness in her throat, as if a handful of bristly bark had cropped up there. No one had ever understood that—that she hadn’t lost her mother once, but every time she’d gone to her mother’s with a trunk full of fancy dresses and heavy books, and then left Vivienne behind for Lynchwood. Each time she’d gone home, the distance between her and Vivienne had been more apparent, even if their love had remained the same.
“She never got to see all of this,” Marlie said, gesturing toward the still and the books. “She refused to come here. Understandably so. And when I offered to buy her things to make her life easier, she said the old ways had worked just fine for our ancestors, and they’d work for her. I wish I had been able to share what I’ve learned with her.”
Marlie experienced the sudden sensation of nudity that came with unexpectedly revealing one’s feelings to a stranger and crossed her arms over her chest. She didn’t know why she was telling him these things, just as she didn’t know why she’d picked up the pencil and written to him that first time. It was as if some unknown force squeezed at her until she gave up a private part of herself to him.
The sounds of hooves clapping in the drive drew both of their eyes to the window, though she was the only one who moved toward it. He stepped farther into the shadows of the room.
Marlie watched as Stephen’s carriage and horses rolled up to the house, and she felt the familiar sense of dread that enveloped her every time Melody was near. She moved back to the side of the desk. “You should go back inside now.”
Despite having work to do, despite the danger, she wished he could stay a little longer.
Utterly ridiculous.
“Yes. Right. Thank you, again.” He snapped the book shut and brushed past her to slide behind the desk. She pushed the desk back against the wall firmly once he was through, as if she could seal the feelings Ewan stirred up in the drying room with him. She leaned her head against the top of the desk and exhaled shakily.
Ancestors, help me.
She drew a deep breath and then sat down, only to jump again when a knock sounded at the door. She imagined she would be jumping at every sound until Ewan was on his way. She tucked the letter on her desk into a botany book and pulled a pile of blackberry bark over the decoder.
“Yes?”
“It’s Sarah.” The response was terse—Marlie knew that tone. Sarah was furious. Had Tobias told her?
Marlie opened the door and Sarah stormed in. She pulled off her gloves in a fit of pique and then threw them down on the ground and kicked at one of them.
“The nerve,” she spat, glaring at Marlie. “As if this isn’t my home and my life being turned upside down for the sake of some godforsaken man!”
Marlie’s lungs contracted and her skin went cold. She’d known Sarah would be angry, but not this angry. Sarah was her closest friend, which superseded the tangled web of family secrets between them, and Marlie hated when she was upset, especially if she was the cause of it.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She reached a hand out and Sarah grabbed it, held it fast, but gently. Marlie didn’t understand the disconnect between word and deed.
“No, I’m the one who’s sorry, Marl,” Sarah said. She squeezed her eyes shut in a face that was flushed pink from anger. “While visiting those horrid people today, we heard that there had been another skirmish between the Heroes of America and Vance’s militia. Some of the resisters’ wives were captured and are being imprisoned as incentive for them to come forward and join the army. In retribution, Cahill’s lodgings were burned down in the early hours of the morning.”
Marlie’s skin pricked as the feeling came back into it. Sarah wasn’t angry with her. She didn’t know about Ewan at all. That still left Marlie with the job of telling her, but she would attend to that soon enough.
She took a deep breath.
“Was he hurt?” Marlie asked. “I’d hate to waste the burn salve on such a repulsive man, but if you need my help—”
“Marlie, she’s awful.” It was then that Marlie realized Sarah’s hands were shaking. “Don’t you see? As soon as Melody heard, she rushed us over to the garrison where Cahill had gone and invited him here. Into our home.”
Marlie dropped her hand and stepped back, the room spinning around her. Hosting Ewan was dangerous enough, even without Melody’s noxious presence, but Cahill was the accelerant that could send her life up in flames. Beyond that, the
man had flatly stated he considered her good for nothing more than being a white man’s plaything. How could she be expected to live with him?
“No. Surely Stephen won’t allow this.”
Marlie struggled against the panic that was building like steam in a glass coil. Ewan’s presence. Her Loyal League ties. Her safety and that of everyone at Lynchwood. They were already in danger, but Cahill’s arrival would multiply that a thousandfold.
“Stephen lets Melody do as she pleases,” Sarah said in a shaking voice. “She said it’s our duty to provide assistance to such an upright Southern man, and that not offering would convince people of my Unionism. He’ll get here later tonight and we’re to treat him as an honored guest.” She swiped angrily at her eyes. “I thought having that adder here was a violation, but this?”
Marlie’s mouth worked, but no words came out. She had to tell Sarah about Ewan, but the shock of the situation was too much.
“Well,” Marlie finally managed. “This is inopportune.”
Sarah gave a harsh laugh. “Perhaps there’s one way in which this isn’t so bad. It will certainly throw suspicion off of us once people learn that he’s lodging with us.”
Marlie startled, tried to hold herself steady against the dizzying realization that hit her. Surely no one will suspect Ewan’s presence with Cahill here, because only a fool would attempt such a thing.
“Sarah, you must know—”
“Sarah! Where are you, sister dear?” Melody’s voice echoed up the stairwell and into the room. She had steered clear since Marlie had implied that some ill might befall her if she entered. “Lace is being stubborn, but I know we must have finer linens for Captain Cahill’s bed.”
“We’ll just have to be careful, is all,” Sarah whispered, giving Marlie a fortifying hug. “No more passengers, no more Unionist work, until we figure this out. We’ll get through this.”
Marlie nodded numbly, and then slumped into her high-backed wooden chair as the door shut. Her head swam like she’d imbibed a dose of laudanum. If she didn’t know better she might think some higher power was punishing her for her deception. She pulled open the drawers on her desk and began rifling through the sundry items that had collected there over the years. When her fingers grazed the square of soft red flannel, she tugged it free and stared at it.