June 17, 1863
Hickory Heights
“It was terrible, Annie,” Laurence said quietly, describing a surprise attack by the Union cavalry four days after Stuart’s grand review. “They came from all directions. They caught us completely unawares. We were exhausted from the pomp and fuss of Stuart’s review and that fool saber charge he had ordered. Plus we had to repeat the review for Lee when the general was finally able to come. That one, at least, we held at a walk. But we were tuckered out, so we’d stretched out across four miles of hills to let our horses graze and recuperate. My men were snoring like bullfrogs, when around three A.M. a picket cries out: ‘Yankees! Great God! Millions of them!’
“Ten thousand of their riders were on top of us before we could collect ourselves or protect our guns. The fighting went on till nightfall.”
Annie was listening only so well. She was circling Angel, running her hand along her flanks, fighting off tears from the sight of the gashes across her beautiful coat, from the way the horse flinched when Annie’s light touch neared one of the cuts. Angel would carry those scars forever.
“She’s all right, honey,” Laurence reassured her.
He sat atop Angel, at the gate of Hickory Heights’ lane. His division was moving east along the turnpike from Upperville toward Aldie, to hide the infantry’s march up the Shenandoah Valley on the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Once again, Lee was crossing into Maryland to find food for the hungry horses and men and to pull the Union armies away from Richmond. At all costs, Stuart was to keep the Federals from getting to the mountain passes at Ashby’s or Snicker’s gaps and seeing the Confederate army on the move. Stuart had ordered pickets to be established up and down Loudoun and Fauquier counties to watch for and fight any Union cavalry trying to find Lee.
“Angel saved my life, Annie,” Laurence continued. “You saved my life by giving her to me. There was one charge from the bluecoats that cut down every rider within twenty feet of me. Six men, Annie, blasted from their saddles within a few seconds of one another. I was the only one to survive. Angel moved so fast, they just couldn’t fix their sights on her.”
For a moment he was silent, watching the Virginia cavalry pass by. “I have to rejoin them, Annie. But I’ll try to come back to visit Mother once we’ve camped for the night.” He shifted in his saddle uncomfortably. “Annie, I need to tell you something.” He paused and cleared his throat. “William Farley was killed.”
Annie looked up at him in surprise. Her stomach lurched. She’d seen death in Manassas and in the Middleburg hospitals, but miraculously no one she’d known well before had died. Farley’s gentle, aristocratic face came back to her. She shook her head. How could it be? He’d been so alive, so promising, the last time she’d seen him, just two weeks before.
“A shell exploded right beside him, Annie. There was nothing anyone could do.” Laurence reached out and took her hand. “He was his gracious self even at the end. As we tried to get him to an ambulance, he said, ‘Good-bye, gentlemen, and forever. I know my condition, and we will not meet again. I thank you for your kindness.’”
Angrily, Laurence pulled his hand away and straightened up. “There was no need for it,” he said huskily. “Vanity brought that battle on. The bluecoats were alerted to our whereabouts by all the noise we’d made—guns booming, our shouting—during that review.”
Annie felt numb. She’d read the scathing condemnation of Stuart in the Richmond papers. They’d called him negligent, self-aggrandizing, more interested in ladies (rollicking, frolicking, and running after girls, said his critics) than in protecting the country or knowing the whereabouts of the enemy. She’d not known what to think. And now this? A man of poetry and grace, cut down. She thought of William Farley trying to give her his dress coat. It was as if he had had a premonition.
“I’m sorry, Annie. You should know that William was very taken with you.”
Suddenly, Annie was furious. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” she shot back. “That this dead man might have come to love me? I think I could have loved him, Laurence; you were right about that. The fact that there was a wondrous possibility there only makes the loss sting harder. It is no comfort.”
“I only thought you’d like to know.” Laurence sighed. “But I understand what you say.”
“This war costs too much.” Annie choked out the words. For the first time, the tragic waste of it all revolted her.
Laurence nodded, pulled his dusty slouch hat back on, and tried to cluck Angel into a walk. The mare nuzzled Annie and refused to move. Laurence let the reins fall. “I haven’t the heart to pull her away from you. I know she’s been looking for you.”
Tears fell down Annie’s face unchecked. For a moment, she put her cheek against Angel’s forehead. Then she took her by the reins, led her into the lane, and pushed her on. Swishing her tail and looking back over her shoulder, Angel complied unhappily. Laurence slouched in the saddle.
Annie watched them go until they disappeared into the crowd of slowly moving horses and riders. It was hard to recognize them as the swashbucklers who’d charged up and down the hills of Brandy Station and made ladies swoon.
That afternoon some of Stuart’s riders clashed with Union cavalry just outside Aldie. These Yankees were new regiments, from New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Maine. They were fresh, emboldened by what had happened at Brandy Station, and they fought hard, finally struggling hand to hand in a hay-field. The Confederates lost a hundred men.
Stuart himself rode into Middleburg. As always, the town’s ladies surrounded him with joy and flowers. But the celebration lasted only a few moments, until Rhode Island Federals rushed in, firing their guns. As darkness fell, blue and gray cavalrymen dashed up and down the village streets, shooting at one another, jumping barricades each side put up to trip the other.
That’s when the call came to Jamie. Mosby wanted to join Stuart’s forces for this scrap, which was turning uglier by the moment. Annie followed Jamie, carrying a candle to light his way in the stable as he tacked up his horse. She didn’t want anyone else at Hickory Heights to see him get ready. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust them. She just didn’t want them to have knowledge that could endanger the household if the Yankees came asking questions.
It was a damp, misty night. “Jamie, be careful. Promise me,” she said. “This is a real battle, not just a surprise raid on a sleeping camp.”
Jamie whirled around to face her. “I know that!” He grinned. “Isn’t it grand?”
He cantered away down the road, the ground barely visible through the fog, the moonlight only so much of a guide. For the first time in a long time, Annie knelt and prayed.
At dawn on the nineteenth, as light filtered through her bedroom windows, Annie stretched and listened for the usual sound of morning singing. The birds were silent. She sat up quickly. There was a distant rumbling. She looked at the soft beam of light creeping across the floor. It was a bright day coming. That wasn’t thunder. It was artillery, sure.
“Annie?” Through her bedroom wall Annie heard her mother’s call.
“Coming,” she answered. When she opened the door, she found Miriam leaning against the wall, holding back the curtains, looking out.
Annie joined her. There on the hills were two small armies—bluecoats to the east, gray to the west. Tiny puffs of smoke dappled the hills as carbines and rifles shot at one another. Punctuating it all were rumbling booms and large bursts of red and smoke—cannons. First there was a swell of blue riders moving forward, a crescent moon shape that surged, then wavered, then broke into bits as gray swarmed to meet it. Then the gray line wavered, broke, and fell back.
One by one, Will, Colleen, and Sally tiptoed in and knelt by the other window, peering out at the fighting, their noses on the sill. Even Aunt Molly braved Aunt May to join them. “Just like Manassas,” she muttered. “They’ll run over us again, Miriam. What are we to do?”
Miriam ignored her sister. “Where’s Jamie?” she asked Annie.
Annie caught her breath. Somehow they had managed to avoid telling Miriam that Jamie had joined Mosby. She started to lie, to tell her mother he was probably up a tree watching himself. But Miriam’s light green eyes were fixed on Annie’s. Annie hesitated.
Miriam reached out and patted Annie’s face. “He’s out there, isn’t he? My baby?”
Biting her lip, Annie nodded her head.
“Both my boys.” Miriam pulled in a long, shuddering breath, and then looked back out the window to the tiny waves of cavalrymen, careening back and forth across the distant hills. “It’s like a fever, Annie darling. There’s nothing to be done but to wait it out.”
The cannons thundered off and on. Not until midnight could Annie and Aunt May convince Miriam to get into bed.
“Wait until I see that rapscallion and give him a piece of my mind, plaguing Missus Miriam all day long, charging up and down hills playing soldier,” Aunt May muttered as she covered Miriam.
Miriam smiled. “May,” she said, as she closed her eyes, “you’d be the same if Jacob were fighting.”
It was the first time anyone had brought up Jacob since he and Gabriel had run off. Annie froze. But the conversation remained one of mother to mother.
Aunt May straightened up and sighed. “I wonder where that boy be.”
“I’m sure he is fine, May. I feel it here that he is.” Miriam touched her heart.
Before Aunt May could answer, there was a loud rapping on the front door.
Trembling, Annie ran down to open it.
The first of the wounded had arrived.
“Saints preserve us,” Aunt Molly whined as she poured water for a young man who was stretched out on the settee.
This time, though, they had only a handful of wounded men, not badly hurt, whom the Confederate cavalry left as they withdrew a few miles down the road. They needed water, minor bandaging, and a few hours’ peace to recoup.
Next day there was more hard fighting, this time south and west of them. Stuart was definitely falling back. The wounded at Hickory Heights recovered enough to get up on their horses and make their way to the front line to rejoin their companies. Stragglers kept trotting down the road. There was the occasional pop-pop-pop of a pistol and then nothing.
Miriam stayed by the window, although now there was nothing to be seen on the back fields or the hills behind them. They waited, waited for the armies of horsemen to disappear, leaving Fauquier, or to suddenly ride through their fields again.
When news finally came, it careened up the front lane. A wagon rattled up the lane, mules braying at being pushed to work so hard and so fast. Horsemen cantered up behind it, filling the air with gravel dust. Among them was Laurence.
“Annie!” he bellowed at the house. “Annie! Come here at once!”
Annie burst through the front door. “Oh, Laurence, is it Jamie?” she gasped.
“Jamie!” Laurence exploded. “Why would it be Jamie?”
Annie couldn’t speak.
He jumped off Angel and grabbed Annie’s arm. “Why might it be Jamie? What has that fool boy done?”
“He…he…he is with Mosby.”
“What? I told you, Annie, not to let—”
“Captain, we’ve got to hurry.” The driver interrupted Laurence. “They’re right behind us.”
Laurence rubbed his forehead to control himself. “I’ve got to leave Major Heros von Borcke with you. He’s one of General Stuart’s closest aides and friends. He was shot through the throat yesterday. No one expected him to live through the night, but he has. General Stuart wants all attention paid to him. We’re regrouping a mile west. Hickory Heights is the closest house. We’ll carry him up to the attic. If bluebirds search the house, you’ll have to try to trick them into not going there, somehow. Can you manage that, Annie?”
Stung by the implication that she hadn’t kept Jamie safe, she shot back, “I’ve done it before, brother. It hasn’t exactly been a tea party here at home.”
For a moment, she thought about suggesting they put him in Jamie’s cellar hideaway, but seeing the size and condition of the man, she knew that wouldn’t work. It took all four men to haul von Borcke up the stairs. He was a huge man, a Prussian, one of the Europeans who had attached themselves to the Confederate army. At the landing, Aunt May met them.
“Where you going with that man?”
Laurence told her.
“You think them Yankees ain’t going to see that pull-down door in the ceiling?”
Laurence hesitated.
Aunt May turned to Annie. The two of them thought hard, looking at each other for some guidance.
“We could push the wardrobe up under it,” Annie finally suggested.
“They’ll see them marks on the floor,” Aunt May countered, sticking out her lower lip.
“Not if I sit there knitting, they won’t.”
Aunt May snorted. “P’shaw, Miss Annie. Since when you knit?”
“Since now,” laughed Annie.
Laurence gaped at them. “You sound as if you’ve done this before.”
Annie humpf-laughed, a most unladylike sound. “Move along, brother Laurence. The Yankees are behind you, aren’t they?”
Von Borcke was laid carefully on a blanket in the attic, with a pistol and his saber across his chest. The Prussian was wheezing horribly. Annie couldn’t believe he’d live. And after all this trouble, she thought, as she watched the cavalrymen push the attic ladder up and close the door.
They shoved the wide, heavy wardrobe into place. Its crown molding reached within a hair’s breadth of the ceiling door. Annie quickly moved a chair across the floor to the telltale outline left from the heavy wooden cabinet that had been sitting on the same spot for years. Her skirts would hide it.
She hugged Laurence. “Go on now. We’ll be all right.”
Laurence shook his head. “Lady Liberty.” He bowed. There was respect in his teasing. He took several quick steps toward the door and then turned. “You tell James that he and I are due a talk.”
Then he was gone.
Within twenty minutes, Yankees arrived. As soon as they rode up the lane, Annie slipped upstairs and took her position in the chair. She’d given up on the idea of knitting. Aunt May was right; she didn’t know how to, and it’d be obvious. She grabbed a book instead. She’d use her new defense of arrogance. She would remain reading in her chair. The Yankees simply didn’t warrant her interrupting herself. She sat, straightened her spine, and tipped up her nose, making herself the picture of feminine disdain.
This group of Union cavalry at least was polite. They were from Massachusetts. They went about their business quickly and quietly—no stabbing the walls, no running helter-skelter, no prying into drawers. Annie heard the front door open and several more step inside. Someone thumped across the hallway to them. She could imagine a salute from the junior officer. She was beginning to know the drill well.
She heard: “We’ve searched every house in Upperville. There’s some big Rebel officer wounded. We saw him fall from his horse. He wore a plumed hat and fancy uniform. We think it might be Stuart.”
“Keep looking” was the reply.
Annie heard footsteps on the stairs.
She perfected her aura of haughty disinterest and waited. She forced herself to look down at the text on the page before her, although she read no words.
A Union officer walked into the room.
Annie didn’t look up. She turned a page and pretended to keep reading.
“Well, I’ll be. Is that Lord Byron?”
Annie hadn’t even noticed what book she held. What is it with these Yankees and Byron? she wondered. She didn’t answer.
The officer stepped closer. “I believe it is.”
Annie slowly turned another page. She held herself even more upright. She sniffed slightly and made a face as if something near her smelled horrid. Still, she did not take her eyes off the pages.
Softly, the officer recited: “She walks in beauty, like the night…”
She couldn’t help it. Annie looked up with surprise.
Before her stood Thomas Walker.