by Dara Horn
The air in the little shed was still. Jacob shook out the match and waited, his gentleman’s reflex strangely intact, as Jeannie sat down on the cotton bale, her wedding gown spread across it as though she were seated on a cloud. He settled down beside her, startled when the cotton didn’t give beneath him but instead remained as firm as a wooden bench, as if there were some sort of support inside it. Of course there was. She was examining him now in the candlelight, wincing as her eyes scanned and then avoided his disfigured face. She looked away from him, and he saw the slight revulsion in her expression. He was hideous, and he always would be. He looked at the dripping candle, watching each teardrop of wax harden as it slid away from the little flame. At last he found the strength to speak.
“I didn’t turn you in, Jeannie. I turned in your sister, because I was afraid, but I never turned you in. I—I’m so sorry.”
She was silent. He looked back up at her and saw that she was stealing glances at his scars, blinking her eyes. At close range in the candlelight, it was clear how much she had aged in these few long years—how her eyes had grown tired, her forehead and cheeks creased by worry and fear. But her sadness only made her more beautiful, making her face more mysterious, more captivating. The curve of her body in her wedding gown still enchanted him. Everything about her enchanted him. He could hardly bear sitting beside her; it took all of his strength not to take her in his arms. But he could not tell whether she wanted to be taken. He held back, afraid, as she remained silent.
He rubbed at his remaining eye, blinded. A moment passed in darkness before his vision adjusted again, as he waited for her to speak. But she said nothing. “I waited for you that night,” he said, when he could wait no longer. “I would have waited for days, if I could have.”
Still she was silent. Her silence horrified him. He made one more attempt to speak, no longer able to keep the pleading out of his voice. “When I reached Washington, I tried to convince them to release you,” he said. It was weak, feeble, but it was all that he had. She hadn’t even needed him; she had released herself. “I asked them to exchange you for your father,” he added. “I—” But he didn’t know what else to say.
She was silent for another long moment, a small eternity. Finally she spoke. “Lottie said she saw our father at the border when she—when they—” She stopped, holding her breath, and at last looked back at him. “You arranged that?”
Jacob’s head was throbbing. He tried to ignore it. He was half-seeing and half-imagining the woman in front of him; the gleam of the light on her lips was so glorious that it could not possibly belong to the same world as this dirty tool shed full of broken chains. He pictured her standing with her sisters in the front room of Philip Levy’s house, the mirror behind her reflecting her ribbon in his hair. He still could not believe that it was really she. “I meant for them to release you, not your sister,” he said softly, too terrified to lie. “And I didn’t intend it to take two years.”
“You don’t know what a gift you gave us, just to know that he was freed,” she said. “No one told us that it was because of you.” The shed was cold, but the air between them was warm with her breath. “Have you seen him?” she asked.
Her father was the one who mattered to her, he understood. “A few months ago, in Philadelphia,” he answered. “He was living with his brother.”
Jeannie leaned toward him. He could smell her now, an unexpected smell that he had long forgotten—a sweet scent of ripe longing in the hollow of her neck, like fresh fruit. “Really?” she gasped. “Oh God, how—was he well?”
Jacob thought of everything he hadn’t told her and her sisters while Philip was in jail, the familiar lies welling up in his mind. He pushed them away. “He’s aged twenty years,” he said. “He had heard that you were dead. He asked me to come here, to try to find you and your sisters. It was all that mattered to him.”
Now she was watching him, her face skeptical. “You came here for him?”
Jacob perceived the doubt in her eyes, and started thinking quickly—the liar’s reflex, planning the best approach. But then he stopped planning, and told the truth. “No,” he said. “I came here for you.”
Her eyes returned to his scars, and she cringed, a visceral disgust. He turned away from her to spare her his ugliness. But as he turned away, he felt her hand curl around his, her fingers warm and alive against his cold hard palm. He held his breath. In two and a half years of dreams, he had forgotten the specific beauty of her hands, the firm enveloping power of her magician’s fingers around his mortal palm. He saw her looking down at his hand in hers, and he knew she was imagining how he used to be. The pity in her expression was unbearable. But he couldn’t release her hand.
“When I heard you were captured, I—I—” he stammered after a moment, when at last he was sure she wouldn’t let go. I was devastated, he would have said, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. He was still too ashamed to ask her about anything that had happened since—too ashamed, even, to ask about the child. “I wanted to go to see you in the prison, but no one would allow it.”
Her hair had fallen loose from where she had tied it behind her head, a dark curl hanging over her eye. It reminded him of her cousin Abigail. He flinched, oppressed by every mistake he had ever made, every unforgiven sin. She brushed the loose curl behind her ear. To his surprise, she smiled. Her smile unnerved him, as though he were once again sitting beside her in the front room of the house after her sisters had gone upstairs, alone with her for the first time. “You wouldn’t have found me there in any case,” she said. “I was sent to the hospital within hours, and then I was gone.”
“I guessed as much, when I saw your show this evening,” he said, watching her as she enjoyed his bewilderment. Her hand was still wrapped around his. “But I don’t understand how you were able to convince the doctors in the hospital that you were dead.”
Now her smile was even wider, as though she were trying not to laugh. It was the way she had looked at him the first time they met, when she had helped herself to his wallet, before he understood who she was. He still wasn’t sure whether she was laughing at him. “The ward of the hospital in Washington didn’t have any other lady patients, so the nurses put up a curtain around my bed when I was carried in,” she began. He listened, mesmerized. “After my supposed collapse, I borrowed a pistol from the guard, which I kept under my dress. When the doctor came behind the curtain to examine me, he put his ear against my chest to listen to my heart. I pressed the pistol against his head and whispered to him, ‘Pardon me, Doctor, but I must inform you that a guerrilla force of Rebels has infiltrated this hospital. Four of your fellow doctors are our agents, as are twelve of the nurses and twenty-seven of the patients. All of us are armed. The only way you can survive this situation is if you succeed in releasing me alive. If you sign my death certificate, declare me dead, and send my body promptly to the morgue, you will spare yourself and your true patients from further retribution. If you fail to do this, or if you tell anyone about this exchange, I will kill you immediately, and the shot will signal the others to begin the revolt. Doctor, am I being perfectly clear?’” She added with a grin, “The next thing I saw was a sheet being drawn over my face, and I heard the doctor telling the guards from the prison that the Lord would surely have mercy upon my sinful soul.”
Jacob laughed out loud, and Jeannie laughed with him. For a moment it was as if nothing had been lost, as if they were laughing together in the front room of her father’s house, as if she had forgotten how he had disfigured himself in every possible way. But he remembered.
“How did you get out of Washington?” he asked.
Her smile faded. She shook her head, drawing her feet up onto the cotton bale and pulling her knees against her chest, huddled in her wedding dress against the wall of the shed like a child. Her hand slipped from his. “I won’t tell you,” she said. “What I did was unforgivable. Even you wouldn’t have done anything like it.”
He considered her,
diminished in the shadows against the wall of the shed, and remembered his own smallness, how he was nothing more than dust and ashes. “I’m quite certain that I would have,” he said, and at last decided to confess. “Before I met you, I murdered my own uncle.”
She stared at him, incredulous, then suddenly smiled. “Jacob, you’re an awful liar,” she said.
He forced himself to look at her. “No, Jeannie, it’s true. That was my first mission. My uncle was plotting to kill Lincoln, so I was assigned to kill my uncle first.” He thought of adding the gruesome details—how it had happened at the Passover seder, how Harry Hyams had poured out his wrath onto the table before him, how Elizabeth had doubled over screaming, how easily he had become the angel of death. But he was not that brave. Instead he added, “He really would have killed Lincoln, Jeannie. I heard him planning it. It was beyond doubt. I saved Lincoln’s life.” As he said it, he could hear how false it sounded, how little he believed it even now, how certain he still was that Harry Hyams would never have gone through with it.
He watched as her smile disappeared, her mouth slowly falling open. “Jacob,” she breathed. “How could you have agreed to do that?”
“How could I have said no?”
Her beautiful face was pale. “He was your uncle,” she said, her voice still. “You could have said no.”
He tried to think of a reply, but there was none. Suddenly he understood that she was right. He could have said no. And he hung his head in shame.
She shifted in her place, lowering her legs back to the floor as a loose chain clanked somewhere against a wall. The coffin cast a flickering shadow over her face. Jacob looked at the seam sewn across the lap of her wedding gown, wishing there were some way he could atone. He thought of what Benjamin had warned: that the person he was that night was the person he would always be. But didn’t that make repentance impossible?
“After I escaped from the hospital, there was a Federal army captain whom I—whom I—befriended,” Jeannie finally said.
He was grateful to hear her voice, until he realized what she meant. Now he looked up at her, but she was looking away, her fingers tracing patterns on the patched skirt of her dress. “And he helped you to come home?” he asked, with forced innocence.
“He did,” she said, then stopped, still looking at the seam on her skirt. “I was frightened, and desperate, and already expecting.” He watched her, refusing to understand, until he did. She brushed a curl behind her reddened ear, and added, “I could have said no.”
He looked at the candle, afraid that she would think he was judging her. He was, of course, just as she was judging him. She lowered her head, blinking her eyes in the dim room. He waited a long time, sitting beside her, until he sensed the shame slowly dissipating, the residue of all their deeds staining the ground beneath their feet.
“Jeannie, what is our daughter like?” he asked.
She looked up at him, and he saw how her face illuminated, suddenly brightened by something close to happiness. “Her name is Deborah, and she is always smiling,” she answered. “Most children her age are afraid of strangers, but she runs up to people in the streets to say hello. She smiles at everyone, even the crippled beggars and the slaves. We joke that she could be a society hostess, except that her tastes are a bit too democratic.” It was impossible to imagine this, though he struggled mightily to try. “I named her after my mother,” Jeannie said, “but she looks exactly like you. It’s almost frightening. Every time I look at her, I think of you, whether I want to or not,” She looked down at her knees. “For most of the past two years I haven’t particularly wanted to think of you,” she said. “To say that I hated you would be too generous. I wanted you to suffer.”
He imagined her prayers for retribution mingling with her father’s, rising up from their mouths to God’s ears. In the dim light, she examined his eye patch and his cane. He saw that her disgust had faded somewhat; she was becoming accustomed to his ugliness, able to look at him without complete revulsion. She didn’t ask him how it had happened. In her own way, she knew.
“But everything changed when Lottie came back,” she continued. “Because then I remembered all the things she had done to me.”
He wasn’t expecting this. “What—what do you mean?”
“When the cavalry captured me and Lottie, they gagged us and locked us into the back of a wagon together,” she said. “At one point Lottie’s gag fell off and she started shouting at me, unforgivable insults.” Her cheeks were flushed as she spoke. “She screamed that I had sold her off like a slave, and then that I was a whore, that I had sold myself to you, that I—that I—” She bit her lip, looking at the candle. “At the time I was shocked to hear her say those things. But later I understood that it was no different from everything she had done before I met you. She was the one who convinced me to go back to William, so that he could become our contact.”
“What do you mean, to go back to William?”
She bit her lip again in the dim light, her face darkening. “William had proposed to me the previous year, and I had refused him,” she said. Jacob hadn’t known this, though he could hardly be surprised that she had never told him. “It was beyond humiliating for me to crawl back to him like that. But Lottie told me that it ought to mean nothing to me, that I was being selfish, that I was betraying our mother—and I believed it all. I didn’t know at the time that I could have said no.” Jeannie was watching him now, taking in his whole mangled form before her. “Later I understood that you had been my escape.”
Jacob’s eye began to water, his vision blurring. Suddenly, with painful, unforgiving clarity, he understood that he would never be worthy of her.
“How did you manage to come to Richmond?” she asked, with strained cheer, after he had been silent for too long. “I hope you weren’t smuggled down in a coffin.”
She meant to lighten the air between them, he knew. But he shook his head. “I can’t tell you,” he said.
A shadow crossed her face. “Oh no. No. Don’t say that.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“Jacob, it isn’t like it was before. They hang everyone now. You can’t continue.”
He remembered what he needed to tell her. The space behind his missing eye throbbed as he understood what it meant: that this was not only his first time seeing her again, but likely his last. “No one is continuing, Jeannie.”
“What do you mean?”
“The government is preparing to evacuate. They’re abandoning the city.”
She leaned back, alarmed. Then she laughed, as though she had just understood a clever joke. “That’s an old rumor, Jacob,” she said. “People were talking about that months ago, but it’s not true. Everyone is still laughing at the rich people who left.”
“No, Jeannie, it’s true. I work in the State Department. The government has already distributed the evacuation plans. Even Judah Benjamin is going to escape to England somehow. He told me that himself.” She leaned back against the wall, bewildered. “Jeannie, you have to leave. As soon as possible. Go with your whole family. Tomorrow morning, if you can. Is there somewhere you can go?”
Her eyebrows pulled together, a knot of worry lodging itself at the base of her forehead. He recognized her expression, from Philip’s face. “My uncle once had a cousin in Lynchburg,” she said. “But we haven’t heard from him in years. I’m not even certain that he—”
“Good. Go to him. Get on the first train you can find. All of you. Leave tomorrow morning. Bring everything with you.”
She was still shocked. “What about you?”
“I have to meet a courier at the old cemetery on Sunday evening, at midnight,” he said. “I’m meant to bring him a message, but I plan to ask him to take me back to Washington with him.”
Jeannie’s eyes narrowed. “Why don’t you just wait for the Yankees to come and save you?” she asked, and he heard in her voice the slightest edge of a sneer. “Someone always saves you. You never save your
self.”
Was that what she thought of him? Surely it was, and rightly so. But it no longer mattered. “It’s more difficult than that, Jeannie. I’ve seen the instructions for the militia when the government evacuates. They’re going to burn down the city. I doubt I’d survive it.”
“Burn down the city?” Her voice was strange, childlike, stricken with wonder. But she quickly recovered. “Jacob, that’s absurd. Why on earth—”
“Oh, they only intend to destroy a few resources, of course, so the enemy won’t be able to use them. They merely want to burn all the tobacco warehouses, and burn all the food, and scuttle all the ships, and blow up all the ordnance, and…well, if their only intention was to destroy the supplies, then why didn’t anyone suggest simply dumping the supplies in the river?”
“Surely there must be some reason behind it,” Jeannie said.
“The reason is irrelevant. Almost every building in this city is made of wood.”
He saw her glancing around the tool shed, at the coffin and the barrel and the chains. He couldn’t begin to imagine what she was thinking. But he had seen how impossible everything had become, and how impossible it would remain. Whatever was left of her love for him was poisoned by pity, and his for her was poisoned by regret. “Promise me you’ll leave,” he said.
She sat motionless, still astonished, as he struggled to form the words for what he now knew he had to tell her.
“Jeannie, I don’t know when I will see you again, but it may be a very long time, or never,” he said. Because I have become too ugly, he meant, and you have become too beautiful, and mercy and longing are only corrupt cousins of love, and neither of us can ever return to the people we once were. But he did not need to say it. She knew. “Please don’t wait for me,” he finally told her. “I—I release you, Jeannie. If people ask, tell them I’ve died. Find another father for Deborah.”