CHAPTER SIX

April–July 1861

While Massachusetts and other Northern states promptly organized volunteer troops in response to the president’s call to arms, the governors of Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, and Virginia declared that they would furnish no regiments to make war upon their Southern brethren. Then, on April 17, the same day Henry took his sons to watch the Eighth and the Sixth Massachusetts Militia depart Boston for Washington City, delegates in Richmond voted in favor of secession. The loss of Virginia was a terrible blow to the Union, and the other rebellious states surely rejoiced, for it was only a matter of time before the new independent commonwealth of Virginia added its military and economic might to the Confederacy.

Charley avidly followed reports of the Sixth and the Eighth Massachusetts Militia as they traveled by rail to Washington, and he seemed to know their movements before anyone else in the household. From Boston they had gone south to New York, where they had spent the night, and where the next morning vast crowds of cheering citizens had lined Broadway waving flags, banners, and handkerchiefs to send the volunteers off with great fanfare as they marched to the Hudson Ferry. Later that evening they arrived in Philadelphia, where they were welcomed with the pealing of bells, a grand display of fireworks, bonfires, bands, artillery salutes, and the glad applause of thousands of loyal citizens.

By all accounts, the troops’ commanders did not expect such a warm reception in the next city on their route—Baltimore, about forty miles northeast of the capital. Although Maryland had remained in the Union, it was a slave state, and the city’s loyalties were sharply divided. Even before the attack on Fort Sumter, Henry had read stories in the Boston papers of boisterous demonstrations in the streets. One day Union men would march through the city singing “Hail Columbia” and waving the Stars and Stripes; the next, Southern sympathizers would parade, singing “Dixie” and waving home-sewn flags bearing the South Carolina palmetto or the three stripes and seven stars of the Confederacy.

“Why didn’t the militia travel by steamer?” Fanny asked when ominous rumors warned that thousands of Marylanders, clamoring for their state to follow Virginia out of the Union, were plotting to block the passage of Northern troops through Baltimore. The city had a history of mob violence, so the rumors could not be lightly dismissed; moreover, due to laws prohibiting the operation of steam engines within the city limits, upon arrival at the President Street Station, Washington-bound trains would be towed by teams of horses several blocks west through the city streets to Camden Station, where they would resume their journey by locomotive. The system, merely inconvenient in peacetime, was potentially disastrous in war.

“I suppose the generals decided that the railroad would be swifter,” Henry replied, “and time is of the essence while Washington City lies unprotected.”

“I trust that’s the right decision,” Fanny said pensively, and although she said no more of the matter that evening, Henry knew she was anxious and full of doubt.

All too soon, Fanny’s worries proved to be prescient.

“Father,” Charley shouted two days later as he burst into the house carrying the evening papers. “The Sixth Massachusetts was attacked in Baltimore!”

“No, no, no,” Henry murmured as he bolted from his chair and strode from his study to the foyer, where he met Charley, wide-eyed and quivering with excitement as he scanned the headlines.

“The soldiers that we saw off at the State House were attacked by a mob,” Charley exclaimed as Fanny, Ernest, and Alice rushed to join them. Henry took a paper from the pile in his eldest son’s arms, Fanny took another, and the children craned their necks, reading over their shoulders.

Ashen-faced, her gaze fixed on the page, Fanny pressed a hand to her throat. “Was anyone hurt?”

“They say two soldiers were killed, maybe more,” said Charley, “and a few civilians too.”

“What about the Eighth?” asked Ernest.

Charley shook his head. “The papers don’t say. I think they were still in Philadelphia.”

“Let’s pray they escaped the melee,” Henry said grimly. If there was any lingering doubt that their nation was at war, the deaths of the Massachusetts soldiers had abruptly dispelled it.

Over the next few days, as rumors spread and were quashed and fact could not always be distinguished from wild speculation, the truth of what had unfolded eventually came out. On the morning of April 19, the Sixth Massachusetts had left Philadelphia on a train bound for Washington by way of Baltimore. The commanders had been informed that their passage would be impeded, and they had warned their men that as they made their way through the city, they would almost certainly receive insults and abuse, and might even face assault—all of which they must ignore. Even if they were fired upon, they were not to fire back unless their officers gave the command.

The train carrying the Sixth Massachusetts had arrived in Baltimore unannounced, and several train cars carrying a few companies had made their way through the city without incident. But word of the soldiers’ presence had spread quickly, and soon a hostile crowd had converged upon them, shouting insults and threats as their horse-drawn cars had pressed onward. Then the mob had torn up the train tracks, forcing the last four companies of the Sixth to abandon their railcars and attempt the crossing on foot. Immediately, several thousand enraged men and boys had swarmed them, hurling bricks and paving stones; from upstairs windows, other angry citizens flung dishes and bottles down upon them as they passed. The soldiers had marched onward at quick time, but when the furious mob had blocked their path and one rioter had shot a pistol into their ranks, they had opened fire upon their assailants. As the frenzy escalated, a man waving the flag of the Confederacy had become a rallying point for the mob, more shots had been fired, and the wounded had fallen bleeding to the ground amid screams and chaos. Eventually the soldiers had fought their way to the Camden Street Station, and after other sabotaged railway lines had been repaired, the train and its battered and bloodied passengers had sped off to Washington.

At least three soldiers and nine civilians had been killed and scores more injured on the streets of Baltimore. After the federal troops had escaped, the frenzied mob had turned its rage upon government property, destroying railroad tracks leading to the North, burning bridges, and severing telegraph lines. When the Sixth Massachusetts had finally reached Washington City, they had discovered that they were the only troops to have arrived, and that the destruction in Baltimore had completely isolated the nation’s capital from the rest of the Union.

For six days Washington City stood alone, stranded, imperiled, and surrounded by enemies, with the Sixth Massachusetts its sole defenders against an attack by Confederate forces. But the attack, feared imminent, inexplicably did not come, and on April 25, the Sixth Massachusetts was joined by the New York Seventh Regiment, the First Rhode Island, and at last, the Massachusetts Eighth.

Washington City was safe, for the moment, and no longer cut off from the North, but concerns about its vulnerabilities shocked the people of the North into more urgent action. While young men rushed to join regiments and engineers raced to repair the damaged bridges and railroad tracks, governors ordered their newly mustered regiments to the capital and military officers contrived other ways to transport them there, since Baltimore remained impassable.

In Boston, Henry observed a new, energetic, and unified spirit among the populace. News that sons of Massachusetts had been killed and wounded in an unprovoked attack by hostile rebel sympathizers—and on the eighty-sixth anniversary of the revolutionary battles of Lexington and Concord—compelled them to abandon old political distinctions and animosities and to proclaim their allegiance to Governor Andrew, President Lincoln, and the Union. It seemed to Henry that the people’s pride had soared to unprecedented heights, for the Commonwealth had endured a harrowing test and had kept faith with their country.

And yet Henry found the talk of war and the martial display woeful and wearying. Faces in the streets were stern and serious. The drums pounded an ominous rhythm. Even the coming of May with its sunshine and flowers and birdsong seemed to him bleak and cheerless. May had always seemed a perfumed word, breathing life, youth, love, song, but in such troubled times, the air had a bitter gunpowder taste and he could take no pleasure in it. Once, while strolling past the State House, his heart sank when he observed two youths of no more than twenty standing sentry at the gateway. Charley envied young men like them, but he envied even more their counterparts bivouacked in Washington or at Fortress Monroe. He understood nothing of the sadder aspects of war and saw only the glory and adventure.

As May unfurled her beauties day by day, buttercups burst from the grass, the purple buds of lilacs tipped the hedges, and birdsong mingled discordantly with martial drums. Near the end of the month, Henry received a note from a friend, the writer and orator George W. Curtis, urging him to write a national song or hymn to rally the people of the Union behind their great cause.

“Will you attempt it?” inquired Fanny, smiling up at him as they walked along Brattle Street. They had set out hoping that the fine weather and perfumed air of spring would distract them from the war and from concerns over her father’s declining health, but after they had chatted of the children and the garden and of their plans to move to their summer home at Nahant on Massachusetts Bay later that summer, the conversation turned back to work and to war.

“I think I’ll decline,” said Henry reluctantly.

“But why?” she asked. “It seems to me these dark times call for another great work like ‘The Building of the Ship.’”

Henry patted her arm and smiled his thanks for the implicit praise. He had written the poem in 1849 in response to the growing animosity between slave states and free, when secession was still only a distant threat, a shoal few truly believed the nation would break upon. Its heartfelt call for the Union to endure—“sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O UNION, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate!”—was said to have moved Mr. Lincoln to tears when he had first heard it recited.

“It isn’t that I wouldn’t like to honor Curtis’s request, but the command, ‘Go to, let us make a national song,’ doesn’t inspire me. In fact, it has quite the opposite effect.” Henry shook his head, wishing it were otherwise. “A national song will likely arise in some other way, if not from my pen, then from some other poet’s.”

“Oh, I hope it shall be from yours. Who else can move the people’s hearts as you do?” She smiled up at him. “The children would be so proud.”

“Ernest and Alice, perhaps,” he replied. “Edith and Annie are too young to understand what their papa does.”

“Charley is not too young. Why do you not mention him? Wouldn’t he be as proud of you as Ernest and Alice?”

“Ah, Charley.” Henry sighed, wistful. “You and I both know that our eldest boy is not overfond of literature. He’s impressed by men of deeds, not men of letters.”

“Charley admires you as much as the other children do,” Fanny protested. “Perhaps more.”

“He loves and respects me, but he does not admire me.” Henry felt a pang of loss as he spoke the words, for giving voice to his great regret somehow anchored it in truth. “He admires men who fight, who risk their lives for noble purposes, who embody manly courage and daring. And I—” He shrugged and tried to smile, though he knew himself incapable of disguising his true feelings from his wife. “What do I risk in defense of my country? Ink-stained fingers? Injured pride from a scathing review?”

“Courage takes many forms,” Fanny replied, squeezing his arm for emphasis, “and there are many honorable ways to contribute to the Union cause other than fighting on the battlefield. Charley knows this.”

Henry raised her hand to his lips to thank her for her loving reassurances. He wished he could believe her.

•   •   •

Spring blossomed into summer, and the arduous work to build armies and navies continued apace, even as dismaying accounts of skirmishes in Virginia and Missouri, and the inevitable loss of life, appeared more frequently in the papers.

On the night of July 3, Henry invited Fanny outside to the garden to observe the night sky, where a splendid comet blazed in the north, near the constellation of the Great Bear. “If we were less scientific and more superstitious than we are,” he remarked, his arm around her shoulders, “we might believe this to be an omen of a great Union victory yet to come.”

She shuddered. “Or a terrible defeat. Weren’t strange, celestial phenomena also considered portents of doom?”

“Oh, surely this one cannot presage anything so dire,” he assured her with mock solemnity, kissing her forehead. “It shines in the northern sky, upon the North. It can mean only great things for the Union.”

“I hope you’re right.” She gave a small, shaky laugh. “Of course, if I am to be brutally honest, I confess I believe this comet portends nothing, but serves only as a reminder of the endless wonder of God’s creation.”

“It’s good for us to pause and remember that.”

“Henry,” she said with sudden urgency, “I don’t want our sons to go to war.”

“Neither do I, darling.”

“I have missed our precious Frances every day for almost thirteen years. I cannot lose another child. I couldn’t bear it.”

Henry’s throat constricted. They almost never spoke of their precious, lost daughter, who had succumbed to illness at only seventeen months of age. “You needn’t fear,” he said. “Charley and Ernest are too young to enlist, and the war cannot last long.”

“Charley is seventeen, and what war ever ended sooner than expected?”

“If the worst happens, and the rebellion is not put down for months, or even years, we will forbid Charley to enlist.” Henry could not believe the conflict would last long enough for Ernest to be eligible to serve.

“Do you promise me?”

He took her hands. “I’ll do everything in my power to prevent it.”

“Thank you.” She took a deep, tremulous breath and squeezed his hands, eyes downcast. “I’m ashamed of myself for demanding this of you, when other mothers’ sons are risking their lives for the Union even as we speak. It seems almost treasonous—and yet I cannot take the words back.”

“I’d be more astonished if you didn’t want to keep our boys out of the fight,” Henry told her soothingly. “Darling, I truly believe, and I fervently pray, that they’ll never have the opportunity.”

He put his arm around her shoulders again and drew her close, and she sighed as she rested her head upon his shoulder. For a while longer they watched the comet in silence, but gradually, and without changing a single spark of its appearance, to Henry the celestial marvel had assumed a sinister aspect.

•   •   •

In Cambridge and Boston, Independence Day was celebrated with impressive patriotic fervor even for cities renowned for patriotism. Parades wound through the streets led by brass bands playing rousing martial tunes, and orators and politicians declaimed from many a park and street corner. Red, white, and blue bunting graced nearly every window and storefront, and the sidewalks were filled with citizens, young and old, waving flags and chanting patriotic slogans. Churches invited passersby to join them in solemn worship, prayer services to appeal to the Almighty for the restoration of the Union, while at the State House thousands gathered to hear the governor’s annual address. Beneath a high banner declaring, “Massachusetts for the Union Forever,” Governor Andrew proclaimed the importance of preserving the Union, and of heeding the call to arms to fight for liberty and freedom, and of the noble courage of the Commonwealth’s brave youth, who would gladly offer up their lives for their country. It was a stirring speech, but Henry and Fanny exchanged wary, knowing glances every time Charley and Ernest nudged each other, whispered together, and nodded eagerly.

After calling on Fanny’s parents, Henry and Fanny took the children to the Music Hall for a special concert of patriotic music, with a program designed to appeal to the young. Afterward they enjoyed popped corn and ice cream sold by street vendors, and then went to the Common to view a hippopotamus, a magnificent creature that had come to America directly from touring the Continent and meeting the crowned heads of Europe. Henry and the children agreed that it was surely one of the most astonishing curiosities ever seen in Boston.

The weather on Independence Day was hot but tolerably so thanks to freshening winds that swept in from the sea, but soon thereafter the weather took a turn for the unbearable. Temperatures soared, the humidity steadily rose, until Henry could not wear a shirt for five minutes before it was soaked through with perspiration, and Fanny fanned herself and complained that she felt as if she were trying to breathe underwater.

“Perhaps we should retreat to Nahant sooner rather than later,” Henry suggested wearily to Fanny less than a week after Independence Day. They were sitting listlessly in his study where the open windows gave them something of a cross-breeze, Henry in his favorite armchair by the fireplace, dark and swept clean, Fanny on the sofa between seven-year-old Edith and Annie, all of five years. They had intended to retire to their summer home in early August so that Henry could devote July to his work, but the sultry air so enervated him that he could hardly focus his thoughts enough to compose the salutation of a letter, much less a few lines of poetry.

“I’d like that very much,” said Fanny, stroking Edith’s limp curls. The back of the poor child’s neck was damp with perspiration. “I daresay the children would too. But would that not interrupt your writing?”

“There’s nothing to interrupt,” he complained mildly. It was too hot to complain more vigorously. “If Nahant can afford us some relief, I may be able to tap into a wellspring of poetical inspiration.”

“Say the word and I’ll begin packing.”

“We’ll go as soon as I can make arrangements.” Henry folded his hands across his waist and sank deeper into his chair. “I feel cooler already.”

“I wish I could say the same.” With a sigh, Fanny rose and reached for Edith’s hand. “In the meantime, I can give this little one some relief. Come, darling. Let’s go trim those overgrown curls.”

Edith nodded obediently and slid down from the sofa. Little Annie promptly did too, taking Fanny’s other hand.

“Save a lock or two, won’t you, dear?” Henry called after them as Fanny led the girls from his study.

“I’ll seal a curl in paper, just for you.”

“For us,” he mumbled drowsily. “For all posterity.”

He smiled at the trill of her laugh, fading as she moved off down the hall.

Alone, he dozed in the quiet of his darkened office, his thoughts drifting from Nahant to his unfinished poem to a few letters he ought to answer before the week was out. His friend George Curtis had written to lament that the Committee on the National Hymn had received more than twelve hundred manuscripts, yet not one was considered suitable. Henry suspected that he would be obliged either to submit a piece or contrive a better excuse for not doing so. Either way, he did not relish the effort—

“Henry!”

The anguished cry jolted him from his doze. Horrorstruck, he beheld in the hallway his beloved wife, her light muslin dress engulfed in flame.

“Fanny!” He bolted to his feet, snatched up the hearth rug, and threw it around her in an attempt to smother the flames. The rug was too small; he could cover only a part of her.

“Henry,” she gasped, her eyes rolling back into her head. Her skirt was but ash and charred steel hoops; the bodice burning yet as the flames crept upward to her face, her beloved face. The rug was too small. He flung his arms around her, crushing the flames with his chest, his arms.

“Papa!” Annie shrieked.

He glanced up to discover his daughter unharmed but watching in terror from the library doorway. “Get help,” he shouted.

She darted off. As he fought to extinguish the flames, Fanny struggled in his embrace, pulling him with her as she staggered down the vestibule and into the front hall. At the foot of the stairs, she fainted; he eased her to the floor, flung the rug over her, ran to the dining room, snatched up a pitcher of water, and raced back to poured it over her. The smell of burning flesh stung his eyes and seared his nostrils.

“Mr. Longfellow!”

The servants were running down the stairs toward him; he was on his knees beside Fanny, dousing the last of the flames with the pitcher and the rug. “Fetch the doctor,” he ordered hoarsely. She was unconscious—oh, merciful God, Fanny, his beloved—and he bent over her to kiss her smooth, untouched face. “Fanny, darling, stay with me, it will be all right.” To the servants, he added, “Help me get her upstairs and into bed. Carefully, for the love of God, carefully!”

As his servants lifted her, he tried to stand, but his legs collapsed beneath him. Suddenly he felt someone seize him from behind and help him to his feet—it was Miss Davies, the governess. “Thank you,” he murmured automatically, then hurried up the stairs after Fanny as quickly as he could. By the time he entered the room they had her lying atop their coverlet. The sight of her pale face and charred legs and torso nearly made his heart stop. “The doctor. Where is the doctor?”

“He’s been sent for, sir,” said the butler, his voice breaking.

With a sob, Henry knelt beside the bed and stroked Fanny’s brow, desperately listening for the sound of her soft breaths, to be sure she yet lived. It seemed an eternity until the doctor hurried in, his face a careful, impassive mask, his dismay betrayed only by the grim set of his mouth. Obediently Henry moved aside when asked to make way, but he paced at the foot of the bed, tormented, clenching his jaw so he did not scream.

“Mr. Longfellow—”

“Miss Davies.” Distraught, he turned about and seized her by the shoulders. “The girls. Are they all right? Were they also burned?”

“The girls are safe, Mr. Longfellow. All the children are safe.”

“You must take them away. They mustn’t see their mother like this.” His thoughts darted wildly. “Take them at once to the Dana home on Berkeley Street. Do you know it?”

“Certainly, but Mr. Longfellow—”

“What is it?” he barked.

“You must let the doctor tend to you as well.”

Henry stared at her, bewildered, and then glanced down at his hands. They were red and charred, as were his arms, as was his chest. Suddenly searing pain crashed down upon him, an agony of fire from his neck to his waist. He felt himself growing faint, but strong hands seized him and kept him on his feet. Distantly he was aware of stumbling along between two servants down the hallway to the guest bedroom, where he was eased onto the bed, and the blackened tatters of his shirt and waistcoat were peeled away. He cried out in pain, in misery, and then the doctor was at his bedside and he breathed in sickly sweet ether and darkness engulfed him.

•   •   •

When he emerged from the stupor of ether and laudanum several days later, he wished the silent blackness would engulf him again.

His beloved wife was dead, taken cruelly from him after suffering beyond human endurance.

She had been buried, he learned, at Mount Auburn cemetery on July 13, their eighteenth wedding anniversary. The funeral had been held at noon in the library of Craigie House, the scene of so much domestic happiness, and of one horrific tragedy. Her coffin, covered in a fragrant blanket of flowers, had rested on a table in the center of the room; white roses had adorned her bosom and she had worn a wreath of orange blossoms upon her head.

As he grappled to comprehend the unimaginable, Henry learned that the family had suffered a second loss. After Fanny’s funeral, Nathan Appleton, of fragile constitution at eighty years of age, had sat for the rest of the day clutching a lily saved for him from her coffin. “She has gone but a little while before me,” he murmured whenever anyone offered him condolences. He died the next day, and soon thereafter he was buried beside his daughter.

As for Henry, when the doctor informed him that he was severely burned, but that he would live, and that his physical wounds would heal in time, he felt both relieved and utterly devastated.

At first, he was dosed too heavily with laudanum to see anyone, but when he overheard that Fanny’s brother Tom was in the library, he asked for his brother-in-law to be shown to his sickroom.

Tom looked pale and haggard as he sat down at Henry’s bedside, and his voice broke as he struggled to express his sorrow.

Henry could not bear it. He raised a hand to silence him. “How?” he croaked.

It was a single, despondent word, but Tom understood. It was a candle, he replied haltingly. Fanny had trimmed Edith’s curls and had saved a pretty lock for Henry. As was the custom, she had placed it within a piece of folded paper, intending to seal it with a stick of wax, melted over a candle. Somehow she had brushed the sleeve of her light muslin dress against the candle, or a sudden breeze from the open window had spread the candle’s flame, or the candle had fallen over—no one knew precisely—and her dress had caught fire.

Henry nodded and thanked Tom for the story, knowing that it pained his brother-in-law to tell it almost as much as it grieved him to hear it.

A candle. All his happiness lost forever because of a candle.

A week after Fanny’s death, Cornelius Felton, professor of Greek literature and president of Harvard University, called at Craigie House. Since the accident, Henry almost never consented to see anyone other than family, but as Felton was one of Henry’s oldest and closest friends, he asked him to be shown upstairs.

Felton expressed his condolences as gracefully as any man could, but each word was a stab in the heart. When Felton asked about his health, Henry gestured absently to his bandages. “I am still suffering from the burns, especially to my hands, but the doctor says I will recover.”

“I’m very relieved to hear it.” Felton scrutinized him, his worry unmistakable. “Does the pain disturb your rest?”

“On the contrary, I sleep best when the pain is greatest.” Just then Henry glimpsed Annie lingering in the hallway just beyond the doorway, her face contorted in misery, and he decided to say no more of his suffering. “I’m sorry I haven’t responded to your letter, but I have not felt up to it.”

Felton hastened to assure him that no reply was necessary, that he had written in hopes of providing some small measure of comfort and would never dream of adding to Henry’s burdens. Henry thanked him, and they chatted for a while longer, but then Felton, ever a kind friend, rose and bade him farewell rather than tire him.

Soon after Felton departed, Henry was sinking into a doze when he realized that Annie had reappeared in the doorway. Her face was streaked with tears.

“Dear little one,” he said, holding out his bandaged arms to her. “Come. Come to Papa.” Obediently she entered the room. He patted the bed, and she drew closer, but would not sit. “I’m getting better day by day. Does my appearance distress you?”

She nodded, and then she looked at the floor and shook her head.

“What is it, then, my dear little chick?”

“I killed Mama.”

Henry felt as if he had been struck a blow to the heart with a blacksmith’s hammer. “Oh, my precious girl, you did no such thing.”

“I did,” she sobbed. “I did.”

“Annie, darling, it was an accident. A terrible accident. The candle—”

“It wasn’t the candle. It was me.”

He stared at her, wanting to draw her to him but powerless to move. “What do you mean?”

“Mama was cutting Edie’s hair.” Annie gulped air, trembling. “She folded the paper and put the curl inside. She got out the candle. I was playing with the box of parlor matches—opening the box, closing it. One fell out onto the floor. I went to pick it up, but it rolled under Mama’s skirts and I don’t know if she stepped on it or if I struck it on the floor but it lit, and then Mama’s dress caught fire and she burned up and she’s dead and I killed her.”

Unable to speak, Henry held out his arms to his weeping child. She came to him, and he ignored the sharp, stabbing pains to his chest and arms as he enfolded her in his embrace. “It was an accident,” he said in a voice that would allow no argument. “You are not responsible. You did not kill your mother. It was an accident.”

Annie flung her arms around him and sobbed as if her heart had shattered from grief and guilt and would never be restored.

Later that day, he woke up from a fitful sleep just as Miss Davies passed quietly by his door, which had been left ajar. He called to her, and when she entered, he asked, “Is it true that a candle ignited my wife’s dress?”

“Why, yes, Mr. Longfellow,” she replied, puzzled, clasping her hands together at her waist.

“You’re certain?”

“I myself heard the police captain tell Mr. Appleton so.”

Henry inhaled deeply and sank back against his pillow. “Thank you, Miss Davies.”

She nodded and departed, leaving the door ajar exactly as it had been before.

A few days after Annie’s strange, disordered confession, Henry was able to rise from bed and take a few hesitant steps around his bedchamber. Soon thereafter, he attempted the stairs, and was able to sit up in the parlor. It was decided that he and the children would go to Nahant as soon as he was able, to convalesce and to find, if they could, some comfort for their broken hearts.

The day before they were to depart, Henry went to his library to search for a particular volume of Italian poetry he wanted to take on the journey. Suddenly, a few scattered objects on a table caught his eye—a candle, a slender bar of wax, a box of parlor matches, a piece of paper folded upon a golden curl.

Henry froze in place, scarcely able to breathe. Then he forced himself to cross the room, to examine the artifacts of his beloved wife’s last day.

The folded paper had not been sealed. The slender bar of wax was whole, untouched. The candle had never been lit, its wick pure white without the slightest char.

Clenching his jaw to hold back a howl of anguish, Henry struck a match, lit the candle, melted the wax, and sealed his daughter’s golden curl within the paper Fanny’s gentle hands had folded.