The road leading away
from Hickory Heights
Jamie’s bitterness and his base condemnation of her haunted Annie and everyone else at Hickory Heights. It was a meager, quiet dinner that she and Thomas shared with Laurence and her cousins. At dawn, she’d have to pack what belongings she could carry on horseback to begin the long journey to her new home. Most of her clothes she was giving to Rachel, with the exception of her emerald green princess gown and the elegant dinner gown her mother had made of the midnight blue velvet Thomas’ mother had sent. Annie slept little. She and Thomas were in Miriam’s room, and Annie kept waking to look about, remembering. Finally, she arose and tiptoed downstairs. She was going to leave all the books for Laurence. She knew Thomas had plenty. She just wanted to sit in the parlor and people it with all she loved, before war had broken them apart.
She paused at Miriam’s desk, remembering the arc of her mother’s slender neck, the crispness of her lace collar as she bent over her letters or accounting. She heard the sound of her own laughter, when as a child Annie snuck up behind Miriam and threw her hands in front of her eyes, and Miriam’s fond chuckle as she laid down her papers and reached behind to catch Annie up in her arms. A tiny patch of silver gleamed in the moonlight drifting through the windows. Annie reached for it and found one of Miriam’s thimbles. She slipped it onto her thumb, thinking of all the gorgeous needlework Miriam had made, and kissed it. That she would take with her for luck.
Annie eased herself into the window seat, imagining Laurence reading a book aloud to them, so vital, so handsome; Miriam by the fire, sewing, looking up occasionally to smile at Laurence; Jamie, youthful, impish, darting to the piano to bang out marches and camp songs.
It had been a loving, pretty place.
“Annie?”
Annie startled, thinking sure a ghost was speaking to her. But it was Will.
She held her arms open for him and he cuddled against her. “I’m going to miss you,” she whispered. “Will you be all right here, with Laurence? He’ll take good care of you. Or maybe I should ask you to take care of him, the same way you helped me, especially when the soldiers came.”
He nodded solemnly. Then he handed her tightly folded papers—Stuart’s poems.
Annie gasped. “Where did you have them?”
“In my shoe,” he answered quietly.
“That was very brave of you, Will. Promise me that you’ll always be brave enough to be kind, just as you are now,” said Annie.
He nodded again.
Annie weighed the cherished poems. They would only endanger the family now. She went to the fireplace, threw them in, and struck a flint to set them on fire. Forget not him you met by chance. She’d remember.
The next morning, early, as dawn seeped crimson along the sky, Annie waded through heavy dew to the family cemetery. She didn’t know what to say to her father and brothers buried there, but Miriam she told about prison, about Thomas, about Laurence, and finally about Jamie. “I’m so sorry, Mother. I can’t keep my promise about Jamie. He’s disowned me. He called me a coward and a traitor. He thinks I sold myself in marriage to Thomas for my freedom. It wasn’t like that.” She ached to hear an answer, some reassurance, but there was none save the wind and a whirling cascade of falling leaves. Annie picked up some of the tiny, wild purple asters dappling Miriam’s grave.
Anne turned back slowly. When she reached the house, she put her hand on its wall, dragging her fingertips along the fieldstone as she walked around to the front door. She memorized the stubbly feeling, the smell of the morning-damp stone, the occasional prickle of the horsehair mixed in the mortar, the touch of cool ivy that grew up it here and there. Her hand dislodged a tiny sliver of the stone. She bent and picked it up, lovingly stuffing it into her pocket along with the thimble and the asters. Silly, little bits of her childhood home, but she needed them for strength. She knew that most likely she’d never see Hickory Heights again. She closed her eyes and etched its picture in her mind. Then, each footstep feeling so final, she made her way to the front gate, where the people she’d loved all her life waited to send her away.
Everything was packed; the horses were saddled and ready. She said her good-byes to everyone but Laurence. That was the hardest.
As much as she was suffering to leave her home, she knew she would be all right with Thomas. They had a promising life, their own frontier, ahead of them, away from the ashes of the war. Jamie was lost. The war had ruined him, perhaps forever. Annie would mourn him as surely as if he had died. But Laurence, dear Laurence, he had the chance to begin again. As he’d said himself, he’d fought a good fight. He could honor a truce, knowing he had fought his battles with bravery and honesty and respect for his enemy. His body was sound now. He seemed committed to living, breathing in, breathing out. But Laurence wasn’t yet healed enough to be capable of looking for happiness; she could sense it. He was simply strong enough to be stoic.
Oh, how Annie wished Miriam could tell her what to say to Laurence at this parting. Instinctively she knew Laurence would read but ultimately dismiss any worry or advice she expressed in a letter. The time to help him was now, before she left.
Annie braced herself. “Laurence, what happened with Charlotte?”
“We needn’t discuss it,” Laurence growled.
Annie ignored the warning in his tone. “Yes, brother, we do need to. I have to leave in a moment, and it is important to me to know.” She tugged on his sleeve. “Please, Laurence.” She smiled up at him.
“Well,” Laurence began grudgingly, “she came back here after seeing you, to tell me about those…” He looked over at Thomas, who was talking to the children, and lowered his voice. “About those fool poems General Stuart wrote you.”
“It wouldn’t matter now to Thomas,” Annie reassured him. “He’s remarkable that way. Go on about Charlotte. It was incredibly courageous and loyal of her to come to the prison, you know.”
Laurence’s face clouded and his hand balled into a fist. “I know that! That’s why I couldn’t…I can’t shackle her with someone like me.”
“And what did she say about it, Laurence?”
He shuffled his feet and didn’t answer.
“What did she say?” Annie prodded.
“She said she didn’t care and that she loved me all the same, perhaps more,” he mumbled.
“Why aren’t you married then?”
“I’m missing my arm, Annie! Can’t you see? I don’t want to be married for pity. I can’t even dance with the girl anymore.” His voice caught and he turned his head, ashamed.
“Laurence.” Annie shook her head. She thought of the radiant couple he and Charlotte had been that night of the Culpeper ball—the gallant officer and the breathtaking girl circling the dance floor. It was tragic that that picture could be no more. But there could be bits of it for them.
Annie had an idea. Gently, she took her brother’s left hand in her right and held them up at shoulder’s height. Then she put her left hand on his right shoulder, steadily, not flinching from the lump of scar tissue she could feel underneath the fabric of his coat.
She began singing an old Stephen Foster tune they’d sung together in those earlier, easy times: “Open thy lattice, love, listen to me! / While the moon’s in the sky and the breeze on the sea!”
It was a perfect slow waltz melody. Up on her toes, slowly she turned, pulling Laurence with her. At first he scowled and tried to pull away, but she refused to let go of his hand. “Sing with me, Laurence. Remember what music sounds like?”
He shook his head. His hazel eyes grew foggy with unshed tears and a storm of conflicted, raging thoughts.
“Yes, you can, Laurence. You can remember. You see, you can still lead Charlotte in a dance. You can still look in her eyes and sweep her across the floor. The only thing she might need to do is hold you tight with her arm. She can do that, Laurence. Give her that credit. Give her that chance.”
Annie continued singing and turning. “The moon like a queen, roams her realms of blue, / And the stars keep their vigils in heaven for you….”
All the while Laurence struggled with his pride, his embarrassment, his anger at Annie’s insistence. Annie could see it. But she refused to stop. It was like riding Angel to jump a stone wall. If she faltered, they’d turn away, never to try the fence again. She sang on, pulling his rigid body along in the dance: “Or skim like a bird o’er the waters away…”
Finally, finally, Laurence’s body began to relax. He started to follow her. Then—miraculously, like the Laurence of old—he burst out laughing, flashing that amused, dimpled, disarming grin of his. “I never have been able to say no to you, little sister. God help your husband. Does he know what he’s in for?”
“Let us hope not,” Annie teased back. “Or he might abandon me.”
“Oh, I think not, Annie. I think not. Lord, I’m going to miss you, honey.”
Laurence picked up the waltz lead himself, turning her round and round, her skirts flying, and brought her back to her husband and the crowd of Hickory Heights, waiting at the front steps.
“Is this a Virginian custom I need learn? Dancing a good-bye?” Thomas asked in his good-natured way.
“Perhaps so,” Annie said. But before she let go of Laurence’s hand, she looked at him with great earnestness. “You’ll write her, today?”
Laurence nodded, but his grin broke as he looked down at his left hand, and he hesitated. He’d always been right-handed.
“I’ll scribe his words for him, Miss Annie,” Sam said quietly. Rachel nodded.
Annie knew it would be done.
It was time to leave. As she and Thomas rode down the lane, Annie refused to turn back. She couldn’t have borne doing so. Instead, she thought of the foals Angel would have someday. She tried to imagine what they’d look like. Ebony like their mother, she hoped, with lightning blazes of white down their legs and faces. They’d be beauties, for sure.
“Thomas.” She turned to her husband. “Do you think we could manage to have one of Angel’s foals brought to us, way up north?” Her voice shook a bit as she asked.
Thomas blessed her with one of those calming, self-assured smiles of his. “Of course,” he promised.
Of course, Annie thought. Of course. If they could manage to fall in love, to still care about poetry, to respect and admire each other across enemy lines amid all this bloodshed, they could manage to bring a little bit of Angel into their lives.
Annie rode on. As they slipped onto the turnpike, completely out of sight of Hickory Heights now, Annie tried to save herself from a searing sadness. Leaving her home, her family, was an amputation of sorts. Like Laurence, she’d have to learn to do without, and, like Laurence, she could be happy as long as she made herself look for joy.
Annie knew that Jamie’s bitterness foretold how many of her fellow Southerners would be—they wouldn’t give up the fight. Or if they survived the war, they’d never give up their grief and disappointment, their anger and hatred, inflamed by the outrages the Union had inflicted on civilians—their wives, children, and aging parents. While men like Laurence would work to restitch the country, men like Jamie would try to unravel it.
She glanced at Thomas again. He was humming to himself the Stephen Foster melody, giving her time to sort out her feelings.
How would she fit in with Northerners in a Northern land? Annie worried. Would they ridicule the way she talked or her Irish looks? Would they ostracize Thomas for marrying her, and would he come to hate her for it? Would they demean the Virginian people she so loved, the terrible fight they had fought, their sacrifices? Undoubtedly, as Thomas initially had, they would probably assume that her family had been advocates for slavery. They might even believe that she had been cruel to Rachel, Aunt May, and Isaac. How could she bear it? How could she hold her tongue if they did so?
Annie’s head swam.
Then her mother’s voice came to her again, a final good-bye from Hickory Heights. “Remember that it doesn’t matter where someone comes from, but where that person is going.”
Miriam had done it—she had stepped into a social world that disapproved of her and made it on her own. She had even managed to disprove a few prejudices about her countrymen and to carry a bit of her past into her new life. If Mother could do it, so can I, Annie reassured herself. Thomas would help her. Perhaps their union promised what America itself could become after the war, for the nation, too, North and South, would have to redefine itself.
Annie took a deep breath. Massachusetts. What would it be like? Cold, for sure. In heart as well as weather? The only thing she knew about it was the novel The Scarlet Letter—hardly reassuring. She thought of the character Hester Prynne, stepping out of a Puritan prison with the letter A embroidered so brazenly, so beautifully, on her dress. In Hawthorne’s novel, the Massachusetts court had ordered Hester wear it to identify her crime of adultery to anyone she met. And yet, through her elaborate needlework, Hester had turned the letter into a statement of her own—part shame, part pride. Shame for her mistakes, pride in her courage in admitting them and in her devotion to making a new, better life for her baby.
Annie felt a sudden kinship with the book’s heroine. Like Hester, she would be justly branded—not for adultery, but for the institution of slavery—because she was a Southerner. At least she could now speak for change, for abolishing the practice. And like Hester, she could still have pride in other aspects of her life—the bravery and compassion of men like Lawrence and Sam, her own dedication to Virginia and her Hickory Heights family.
Annie squared her shoulders. Besides, she thought with a spark of mischief, if I have a foal of Angel’s, I can show those Yankees a thing or two about riding—the Virginia way.
Resolved, Annie started singing with her husband’s humming: “Open thy lattice, love, listen to me! / In the voyage of life, love our pilot will be!/ He will sit at the helm wherever we rove….”
Thomas joined in the words, nodding at their meaning for the two of them, his voice straining to keep the melody.
Annie smiled. Thomas sang quite off-key. Oh well, she thought. Far better to sing with the man she loved, even if he was not a very good singer. There was no way that their marriage would be completely harmonious or trouble free. But it would, she knew, be a remarkable journey, because they took it together, traveling a course of their own choice, their own voice.