A light rain rattled on the fall leaves. Cig, reading, put aside the Deyhle chronicles to get out of bed and open the window.
She stuck her head out and a fine mist covered her face. The night, so inky she couldn’t really see clouds, closed around her. She shut the window, thinking that three hundred summers, three hundred winters, lay buried in that night.
Peachpaws snoozed on the end of the bed. Woodrow lifted his head from his paws as he snuggled in the comforter.
Sliding back into the clean cotton sheets, Cig quickly found the warm spot where she’d been before.
“Woodrow, read with me.”
He trilled, rolled over and showed lots of striped tummy.
She returned to the part where the family was divided on whether or not to stay loyal to the Crown. This decision, once made, committed the fortunes of the Deyhles to that of the rebels. Had the colonies lost the war, the men might have been hung as traitors. As it was, even though she hadn’t gotten that far, she knew some of the men were killed at the Battle of Saratoga.
She recalled Margaret’s face when she first told her America was an independent nation. Now she was reading about Margaret’s grandsons fighting for that independence.
She wondered, for an instant, if Lionel had sent some of his Indians to kill Fitz, and they’d made a mistake. But he couldn’t have known about the fog. She dismissed the idea.
She wondered, too, why he had been shot in front of the House of Burgesses. As no details were forthcoming in the family Bible or letters of the next generation she figured one deep winter day she’d drive down to William and Mary, invade the stacks of the library’s history section and see if she could find out.
Did he fool around with another man’s wife?
Did he cross someone in a business deal?
Was he late on a debt?
As there were few random acts of violence in those days, she knew there had to be a reason, however flimsy.
Her attention drifted back to the present. Laura’s pain hurt her because she felt helpless. Nothing she could do would restore her daughter’s innocence, faith and love for her deceased father and her beloved aunt.
Perhaps it was just as well that a mother couldn’t totally protect her children from the ways of the world. They had to learn to survive and be self-sufficient emotionally as well as physically.
She dropped back on her pillow. She didn’t remember life being this hard when she was their age. It certainly got harder later. Her father, not a cold man but a removed one, once said when she was red-eyed from crying over another of Blackie’s infidelities, “You made your bed, now you must lie in it.”
And so she did. The only life Cig could change was her own. If she had learned one thing from Margaret, Tom and Fitz, it was to celebrate life; the details of one’s inconveniences and miseries were irrelevant.
She could see Margaret sliding the long peel under the bread, the bricks warm to the touch, the smell of the sweet burning hardwood mingled with the scent of fresh dough. She imagined the light in Tom’s dark brown eyes, his broad shoulders and his bull-headedness sometimes, but most of all she remembered Fitz, the taste of his kiss. If she closed her eyes she could smell him. He was as close as a heartbeat. And he died trying to save her.
Cig buried her head in her pillow to muffle the sobs. There’d been enough emotion today. Laura and Hunter didn’t need to hear her.
Woodrow, upset because Cig was upset, got up and licked her face. He reached out, patting her hair, purring loudly, offering his services. She wiped her eyes and rubbed his head. Gravely, he crawled up on her chest and rested his furry head under her chin, which only made her cry more. Love comes on four feet.
She felt the rumble of his purr throughout her body and then like a stiff wind clearing away a low-pressure system, she felt suddenly clear, crystal clear.
“My fears are petty,” she whispered to Woodrow. “I’m afraid that our memories, our lives, our emotions, will be forgotten like Tom, Margaret, Fitz—even Lionel.” She kissed his head as he crawled closer to her face. “Time erases nothing. Only the names change. We’re all riding shotgun on history.”