Angel of the Battlefield

by Ann Hood

  “All of this land belongs to Captain Stephen Barton,” the girl said with the slightest hint of a lisp. “My father.”

  The name meant absolutely nothing to Maisie. When she met Felix’s eyes, he shrugged.

  Maisie swallowed hard. “I’m Maisie Robbins,” she said. “And this is my brother, Felix.”

  The girl studied them carefully. Then she held out her hand.

  “Clara Barton,” she said. “Pleased to meet you. Now can you tell me what you’re doing in my barn?”

  Clara Barton

  Maisie watched the girl intently. She had dark hair topped with a bonnet of some kind, and she wore a long, loose dress and black granny boots that laced up the front. As Maisie looked around the barn, a slow realization came to her. She knew exactly where they had landed. Filled with disappointment, she kneeled beside Felix, who lay sprawled and dazed on the ground.

  “Come on,” she said. “Get up. Mom is going to kill us for sure.”

  If their mother hadn’t been so adamant about them not having cell phones, Maisie would have called her right there and then. She almost laughed, imagining her mother’s surprise when she heard where they were.

  Clara kneeled, too. She gently prodded Felix’s arm. Clara shook her head. “I do not think it’s broken,” she said.

  Maisie looked at her, surprised. “Well, I think we need an X-ray to be sure. If we can use your phone and call our mother—” Maisie stopped.

  The girl was staring at her in complete confusion.

  “Oh. Right. You’re not allowed to have telephones,” Maisie said.

  Clara continued to stare at Maisie.

  “Haven’t you ever seen anyone in her pajamas before?” Maisie said.

  Clara didn’t answer. She just kept staring. Finally, she pointed to the logo on Maisie’s fleece jacket. “Are you in a society of some kind?” she asked.

  “What? This?” Maisie said, fingering the blue-and-orange stitching that said NY METS. She laughed. “Well, sure. Of course you don’t know about baseball. You don’t have TV or even a radio, right?”

  Felix looked even more puzzled than the girl. His face was pale, and his arm hurt. Badly. He didn’t care what this kid thought. Felix was certain his arm was broken. Below the short, yellow sleeve of his T-shirt, he saw a red mark right where it hurt most.

  “Can we please use your phone?” he asked Clara. He didn’t care how mad their mother got, either. If she could come and get them, he would be happy. Why had he ever let Maisie talk him into this?

  “Didn’t you hear me? She doesn’t have a phone,” Maisie said with great authority. “Can’t you guess where we are?”

  “I don’t feel like guessing,” Felix muttered.

  “No phone. No TV. No radio. No Mets,” Maisie said, counting off on her fingers. She leaned close to Felix and whispered, “She’s wearing a bonnet.”

  “I can see that!” he snapped.

  “Where are you from?” Clara asked, chewing her bottom lip. “You speak so differently.”

  “Rhode Island,” Felix said.

  “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” Clara said, nodding knowingly.

  Maisie and Felix exchanged a glance.

  “Is that what you call it?” Maisie said.

  Clara blushed. “Isn’t that what you call it?”

  “I think I read that somewhere,” Felix said. “Maybe in one of those brochures.”

  “I love to read!” Clara said. “Dolly taught me. My sister,” she added.

  “Homeschooling?” Felix groaned.

  In their apartment building in New York there was a family who homeschooled their two kids. Every morning, when he and Maisie headed out the door to school, those kids were still in pajamas. They used to rub it in, too. We spent the day at the American Museum of Natural History, they’d say as Maisie and Felix lugged their heavy backpacks down the hall. We studied the flora and fauna of Central Park.

  Clara was nodding thoughtfully. “Why, yes. I did learn at home. Stephen taught me arithmetic, and Sally taught me geography. But I love to read more than almost anything.”

  For the first time since they’d landed in the barn, Felix smiled. “So do I,” he said.

  “I read so much that my parents even sent me off to school,” Clara told him. “But I hated being away from home so much, they let me come back,” she added softly.

  Her shyness touched Felix. Sometimes he felt like that, afraid what he thought or did might seem ridiculous.

  “You don’t have to go to school?” he asked.

  “They’re all homeschooled,” Maisie said. “I can’t believe her parents even let her go away.”

  “They who?” Felix said.

  “The Amish!” Maisie said. “All that trouble and we’ve landed in Amish country. Just our boring luck.”

  Three years ago, their parents had rented a car and taken them on a family road trip to Philadelphia and Amish country in Pennsylvania. Maisie had sulked the whole way there because Marina Martin’s family had also gone to Pennsylvania, but her parents had taken her to Hershey where the street lamps were shaped like Kisses, the Hershey factory tour gave out free chocolate, and the amusement park had something like five different roller coasters. Maisie and Felix were stuck staring at the Liberty Bell and watching people in old-fashioned clothes drive by in horse-drawn buggies. This is the worst vacation ever, she’d said over and over. Her mother kept reading from a guidebook and making them do everything it said, like eating something disgusting called shoofly pie and looking at hand-sewn quilts.

  “Of course,” Felix said, his eyes brightening. How awesome was this? They had gone into The Treasure Chest and landed in Pennsylvania! “It all adds up. The bonnet. The dress. Even this barn.”

  He’d hated that trip, too, though not quite as much as Maisie. The cheesesteaks in Philly were good, he’d thought. What he’d hated was how much their parents had bickered, how their mother rolled her eyes at almost everything their father did, and the way their father said, Fine, Jenny, like absolutely nothing at all was fine.

  “We’re in Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania. Again,” Maisie said.

  “You are not in Pennsylvania!” Clara said. She turned to Felix. “You’re in Massachusetts, and you must know that. You must.”

  Felix glanced over at Maisie.

  “There are Amish everywhere,” Maisie said, but she didn’t sound completely certain. “Not just in Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania.”

  “How would you even get to Pennsylvania?” Clara said, more to herself than to them.

  “The point is, we need to get out of Amish country and to the nearest town so we can call Mom,” Maisie said.

  A new wave of disappointment came over her. Massachusetts? How lame was that? All that planning, all that excitement, and they were only an hour from home.

  “At least it’s easier to get home from Massachusetts,” Felix said.

  He stretched his arm and yelped. As if being the new kid wasn’t bad enough, he was going to have to start school with his arm in a cast.

  “You need to lie down and be still,” Clara said. “When my brother David fell, he was fine, too, at first. Three days later the fever came, and he wasn’t himself for three more years.”

  “Three years?” Felix said. He rubbed the spot on his arm that hurt so much.

  Clara shook her head. “It was terrible. I was only eleven that summer. He went to a barn raising, and he was assigned to affix the rafters to the ridge pole—”

  “Now who’s speaking differently?” Maisie grumbled.

  Clara ignored her and kept telling her story. “The timber on which he was standing suddenly collapsed, and he fell to the floor.” She shuddered remembering. “But he leaped up immediately. Everyone who saw David get to his feet so quickly was amaze
d. Mister Goddard called it a ‘wondrous escape.’ And David claimed he was completely unhurt, except for a headache that plagued him all of that day.”

  Felix put his hand to his head and pressed. No headache. Just the throbbing in his arm right above the elbow.

  “Then the fever came,” Clara said softly. “When it continued after seven days, when fevers usually stop—”

  Maisie, clearly bored, had started to pace.

  “Do you know what Doctor Finigan has our mother do when we get fevers?” Felix asked Clara. “Doctor Finigan has her alternate Tylenol and Motrin. The kid stuff, you know? It almost always works.”

  Clara patted her apron pockets. “I wish I had something to write with so I could make a note of that.” She blushed. “I very much want to become a nurse. To help others who need it.”

  “A nurse?” Maisie laughed. “And change bedpans all day? If you’re so smart, you should go to med school and be a doctor.”

  “A doctor?” Clara said, and she laughed, too. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a girl.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know that the Amish had rules about girls going to college and stuff,” Felix said.

  “A doctor,” Clara said, shaking her head. “Imagine that. A woman doctor.”

  “Doctor Finigan is a woman!” Maisie said, still more irritated.

  Clara considered that. “Well,” she said slowly, “my Great-Aunt Martha served the town of Hallowell, Maine, as a midwife for over thirty years—”

  “Mom used a midwife,” Felix said, eager to show the girl that he wasn’t as mean as his sister. Something about Clara interested him.

  “Except she couldn’t use her because twins are high risk,” Maisie corrected.

  Clara’s eyes widened. “Twins? I’ve never seen twins before! Aunt Martha has told me about such a thing, two babies born at the same time—”

  “Uh, yeah,” Maisie said. “I guess all great-aunts are rocket scientists.” She turned her back on Felix and Clara and went to peer out the open barn door.

  “Rock what?” Clara said.

  “Oh, don’t pay attention to her. She’s just crabby because we landed so close to home,” Felix said. “See, we went to the other Amish country, the one in Pennsylvania, a few years ago, and we were hoping for something a little more exciting.” He grinned at her. “You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  Clara blushed again. “I’m afraid not,” she said. “Your language is so similar to mine, yet so different.” She frowned, concentrating, then broke into a smile. “Of course!” she said. “You must be from England, and you speak the King’s English. There are still people around here who speak it.”

  “King’s English,” Felix repeated. He called to his sister. “Maisie?”

  “The thing is,” Maisie answered, without moving, “I don’t see any telephone wires at all. And wouldn’t you think that even off in the distance there would be a tower or electric poles or something?”

  Forgetting his arm for a moment, Felix propped himself up to get a better look out the door. Immediately, pain shot through him, and he let out another yelp, falling back onto the ground.

  “There, there,” Clara soothed. “I warned you to be still.”

  All Felix could do was hold his breath and wait for the pain to subside.

  “I have three years’ experience with caring for someone sick,” Clara said softly. “I did everything the doctors told me to do for David. Everything. I hardly left his side. Oh, his case grew desperate.” She shook her head. “Why, I even administered those loathsome crawling leeches.”

  “Leeches!” Felix gasped.

  Clara nodded. “Of course. His fever came from too much blood. But even the bloodletting didn’t work.”

  Maisie was starting to feel like they were in a horror movie instead of Amish country. “If you could just point us in the direction of the first town that isn’t Amish?” she said.

  “There,” Clara said. “You’ve just said one of those odd words again.” She studied Felix with great curiosity. “If you’ve come from Rhode Island, where’s your horse then?”

  “Yeah, Maisie,” Felix said. “Where’s our horse?”

  Maisie ignored him. Instead, she took a few steps outside of the open barn door. Felix watched her as she stood, hands on her hips, and took stock of whatever was out there. He tried to stay calm. After all, they were only in Massachusetts, the state immediately north of Rhode Island. They could be back home at Elm Medona before their mother even realized they’d left.

  “If my mother wasn’t feeling poorly, I’d bring you inside the house,” Clara was telling him. “But if you stay right here, I can go inside and make you a poultice. That will help your arm feel better.”

  Felix had read the word poultice in books, but he was fairly certain he had never actually heard anyone say it. He was completely certain he’d never had anyone offer to make him one.

  “You mean like with water and cloth and mustard or something?” he said, just to be sure he’d understood her right. Even though she was speaking English, she had a funny accent, like someone in a play.

  “Onions,” Clara said matter-of-factly as she got up. “Now don’t move,” she said, pointing at him. “After all that time taking care of David, I think I know what’s best.”

  With that, she strode off, right across the barn and out the door where Maisie had been standing just a minute ago. Felix blinked hard.

  “Maisie?” he called.

  He stared out at the wide open space beyond the door. But all he saw was bright-blue sky, green pastures, and Clara walking away.

  “Maisie?” he called again, even though he knew that his sister was gone.

  September 5

  The air smelled different. That was the first thing Maisie thought as she walked across the pasture. She could actually smell grass and dirt and horse poop and smoke, each scent sharper and . . . she inhaled deeply, trying to find the word to describe what she meant. Cleaner, she decided. The air smelled cleaner. In New York, the air always had a hint of car fumes in it. On their block, the smell from the Laundromat hung in the air and food smells from nearby restaurants mixed with it. Since they moved to Newport, her mother had made a big show of taking exaggerated deep breaths and saying “Ah! The salty sea air.” But Maisie never really got a whiff of it. Sure, everything stayed kind of damp from being so close to the ocean, and once in a while a strong odor of seaweed infiltrated the air.

  But here it was as if every scent was making itself known. Maisie paused. Like right now she could smell something strong and floral. Sure enough, a cluster of flowers appeared around a bend. Maisie kept walking and breathing in all the smells, keeping her eyes peeled for some sign of civilization.

  A new smell. Maisie inhaled. Berries, just like the Union Square farmers’ market on a hot summer day. Sure enough, she saw a tangle of blackberry bushes. The berries were bigger than any she’d seen before, even bigger than the ones her mother liked to buy at her favorite supermarket, Fairway, where the produce and meat and just about everything was superbig and shiny. Her stomach grumbled at the sight of so many berries, and Maisie realized she hadn’t eaten anything since that mac and cheese.

  She plucked a blackberry from its branch and popped it in her mouth. The flavor—intense and sweet and more blackberryish than any blackberry she’d ever tasted—exploded on her tongue. And the bushes were crowded with blackberries. Maisie decided to help herself. She chose the fullest bush, placed herself in front of it, and began to eat. Each berry tasted better than the one just before it, all of them plump, juicy, and slightly warm. What kind of chemicals do these Bartons use that make the blackberries so delicious? she wondered.

  As soon as she wondered that, Maisie said, “Uh-oh.”

  She stepped away from the bush and turned slowly in e
very direction. Everything smelled clean, she realized, because it was clean. There was absolutely no pollution here. And she couldn’t see any power lines anywhere because there weren’t any power lines. And these blackberries were so good because they were, well, real blackberries, without Miracle-Gro or anything at all.

  Maisie had figured out where they had landed. But when was it?

  For the first time in her life, Maisie wished she’d paid a little more attention to her social studies teacher, Mrs. Johnson. All last year, Mrs. Johnson had taught them about American history—pilgrims and pioneers and settlers. Which group did Clara Barton fit into?

  Pilgrims. She was fairly sure they wore shoes with big buckles. And they lived in Massachusetts. But didn’t they live by the sea? No, Clara was not a pilgrim, Maisie decided with a certain measure of doubt.

  All those Laura Ingalls Wilder books her mother had loved as a girl and tried to get Maisie to love took place somewhere out west, not here in New England. So they hadn’t landed back when pioneers settled, whenever that was. Maisie rubbed her temples as if that would help her figure this out.

  Wait a minute, Maisie thought. Who cares what year it is? She’d find that out eventually. What really mattered was that somehow she and Felix had gone back in time. They were not in the twenty-first century. They were not in Newport, Rhode Island. A shiver of excitement spread through her. Just yesterday, her life had seemed dull and claustrophobic. She’d been stuck in a hot apartment with no friends and her father halfway around the world. And today? Well, today everything was different.

  Maisie stretched out on her back in the sweet-smelling grass and stared up happily at the bluest, clearest sky she’d ever seen. The taste of blackberries lingered on her lips, and from somewhere nearby, she could smell the musky scent of horses mingling with the rich earth and grass smells. Maybe they hadn’t traveled somewhere superexciting, but lying there, Maisie felt happy to be out of Newport.