Candle in the Darkness (44 page)

Mr. St. John bristled at my sharp tongue and I immediately regretted my outspokenness. He raised his finger and shook it at me. “I’d be careful how I spoke if I were you, Caroline. You are in a very dangerous position right now.”

“I’m sorry. Look, they searched my house thoroughly and didn’t find any trace of Robert. Don’t you think I’ve been harassed enough? If Charles knew how I was being treated, he would—”

“You wouldn’t be a suspect if you had heeded my warnings and stayed away from the prison.”

“I’m starting to think you believe Major Turner. You have your doubts about me and my loyalties, don’t you? Would you like to search my house, too?”

“Charles has a right to know if you were involved. As his father, so do I. If you loved him and respected his family’s name, you would have stayed well away from Libby.”

“My love for Charles has nothing to do with this. I would be happy to let you read the letter he wrote me. He said he admired me for doing what I felt was right and visiting the prison. I mean no disrespect, Mr. St. John, but it’s up to Charles, not you, to decide if I’ve acted appropriately. It’s his place to question me and to decide my guilt or innocence when he gets home. Now, I’ve answered your questions, and you obviously don’t believe me. I don’t know what more I can do.”

He studied me for a long moment, and I feared that I had made him angry again. But the expression on his face was one of confusion and bewilderment, not anger. I saw Mr. St. John for what he was—an aging, unwell man, not my enemy. He was as sick of this war and the hard choices it forced him to make as I was.

“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” he said. He turned and walked out the door, limping down the path to his carriage.

Robert may have been freed from Libby Prison but he was still a virtual prisoner in my house. With an intense search for the escapees going on in Richmond and the surrounding countryside, it was much too dangerous for him to risk leaving. Fearing another surprise search by Major Turner, Tessie and I decided to sleep in Mother’s room for the next few days so we could continue to hide Robert in my bedroom.

After Mr. St. John left that morning, we hauled buckets of hot water upstairs, filling the copper bathtub so Robert could bathe. Luella doused his shaggy hair with turpentine and wrapped it in rags to kill the lice, then Gilbert trimmed it short after it had been scrubbed clean. Robert’s long beard and mustache also had to go because of the vermin. Gilbert, who had barbered Daddy countless times, was given the job of shaving him, too.

Meanwhile, Tessie and Ruby worked to let out all the seams and hems in one of Daddy’s old suits and altered one of his shirts so they would fit Robert. I burned his Federal uniform in the library’s fireplace. The only things we couldn’t replace were Robert’s shoes—the worn-out pair the Confederate soldier had left behind when he’d stolen Robert’s army boots. Daddy’s shoes were too small, Eli’s too large. Gilbert’s shoes fit him the best, but then Gilbert would need a new pair, and shoes in Richmond cost a small fortune these days. Robert would have to go without shoes until his leg healed.

When the transformation was complete, I hardly recognized Robert. He was much thinner and lankier than he’d ever been when we lived up north, and he was very pale from the lack of sunlight for the past year and a half. But his bearing and demeanor were what had changed the most since our days in Philadelphia.

There was an austere strength in his face from all that he’d endured, a rugged tilt to his jaw that made him look fierce for the first time in his life. The sadness in his gray poet’s eyes was gone, replaced by a hard glint like bayonet steel. Clean-shaven and dressed in Daddy’s clothes, Robert looked surprisingly handsome.

Within two weeks his leg was healing nicely—and forty-eight of the escaped prisoners had been recaptured. Two had drowned in the canal, but fifty-nine, including Robert, remained at large. “It’s time for me to go,” he repeated as he paced my bedroom floor to exercise his leg. I sat in a chair beside the fireplace, watching him.

“You can’t just walk out the door,” I told him. “For one thing, I think my house is still being watched. For another, every healthy young man your age is in the army. You’d stick out like a sore thumb. Besides, as soon as you open your mouth they’ll be able to tell you’re a Yankee. You need a plan.”

“I’ll leave at night.”

I shook my head. “That’s when they recaptured forty-eight of your fellow escapees. Listen, we still have Jonathan’s army jacket from when he was wounded. Esther has been using it for a rag and it’s in terrible shape, but we could try to patch it—”

“A Confederate uniform? I wouldn’t be caught dead in one, even to escape.”

I thought of how proud Charles was to wear his Confederate uniform and I lost my temper. “Don’t be an idiot, Robert. You might be both—caught
and
dead.”

He lifted his chin stubbornly. “Think of something else.”

I drummed my fingers on the table. “They’ll have all the roads blocked. And the last time I traveled outside of Richmond I needed a permit. I don’t know if that’s still true or not. I’d draw too much attention to myself if I started inquiring about it. Jonathan kept the permit from when we went to his brother’s funeral. But I think I still have the travel permit Aunt Anne and I used when we went out to Hilltop. Maybe we could alter it or forge a new one.”

“Let me see it.”

I kept it in a hatbox in the bottom of my wardrobe with all of Charles’ letters. Robert crossed the room to stand behind me, peering over my shoulder as I searched among the envelopes.

“Are all those letters from him?” he asked.

“He has a name,” I said quietly. “It’s Charles. And yes, these letters are from Charles.”

“Did you save all of my letters, too?”

I hated to hurt Robert, but he needed to face the truth. I shook my head. “I’m engaged to Charles. It didn’t seem right to keep letters from another man. . . . Here, I found the travel permit.”

Robert took it from me and paced across the room, studying it. “This would be much too hard to forge—unless you have talents I don’t know about. If we altered it, we would have to change the date and erase all the names . . . it’s made out for three people.”

“Three of us could use it.”

“Out of the question. I won’t involve you.”

“You keep saying that, Robert . . . and then you keep involving me. You asked me to help you deliver the Bible, to help you escape, to try to gather information from people in my social circles. You hid in my stable and in my bed. I’m already involved.” I yanked the travel permit away from him.

“I’m sorry—”

“Listen, I think I know a way we can use this with less risk. It’s written for two women and their slave. If you dressed as a woman, the only thing we’d have to change is the date.” I saw Robert recoil at the idea, and I lost my patience. “I suppose playing a woman is worse than wearing Rebel gray? You’re running out of options, Robert. If you go waltzing out of Richmond in civilian clothes they’ll assume you’re a Yankee or a deserter. Either way, they’ll shoot you dead. Make up your mind.”

I stalked out of the room, giving him time to consider his narrowing options. In the meantime, Tessie, Ruby and I hunted down every piece of black material we could find in the house and started sewing a mourning dress big enough to fit Robert. Ruby sewed a black veil to one of Mother’s old hats so his face and hair would be covered. I gave Gilbert the travel permit and he carefully sanded off the date without ripping the paper so I could write in a new one. The hardest part would be borrowing another horse to help the mare pull all three of us in the carriage. “You leave that to me,” Eli said. By the time we finished, Robert had little choice but to submit to our plan.

Winter had lasted a long time that year, leaving many of the roads muddy and impassable. “All we need now is for the roads to finish drying,” I told Robert on a sunny morning midway through March. “Everything else is in place.”

“A diversion would help, too,” Robert said. “Something to distract the Home Guards’ attention for a couple of days.”

A very unfortunate distraction was provided for us a day later. Robert and I were reading the morning newspaper in my room when a low, rumbling sound like a powerful explosion shook the house. It came from the direction of the river.

“What was that?” he asked, looking up in alarm. “Gun ships?”

“I don’t know . . . it didn’t sound like cannon. But it was very close. Too close.” I ran down the hallway to Daddy’s room and went out onto his balcony, which overlooked the river. A column of thick, dark smoke plumed into the sky to the west, near Shockoe Slip.

“Stay here,” I told Robert. “I’ll try to find out what’s going on.” I put on my coat and hat and headed out to the carriage house to find Eli. Gilbert stopped me along the way.

“Eli ain’t home, Missy. The fish is running in the James River and he go on down to catch us some perch for dinner.”

“Did you hear that explosion, Gilbert?”

“Sure did, Missy. Don’t know what it’s all about, though.”

“Get the buggy ready, please. I think we’d better find out what’s happening.”

But before Gilbert had time to get the mare harnessed and ready to go, Eli came running up the hill from the river, out of breath. “Don’t go down there, Missy Caroline. It’s a terrible, terrible sight. That factory on Brown’s Island where they make all them ammunitions just blowed up. I saw it from where I sitting along the river. The roof went straight up in the air with a
boom,
then all the walls fell in . . . smoke and flames . . . Oh, Lord, have mercy!”

Esther, who had hurried outside when she spotted her husband, wrapped her arms around his waist to console him as he struggled with his emotions. “They mostly all poor women and little girls who work in there,” he said. “I seen them crawling out, trying to jump in the river cause they all on fire. Children . . . they just little children . . . I tried to go help but everybody in the city down there helping. They sent me home.”

Later, the newspapers would give the details of the disaster at the Confederate States Laboratory on Brown’s Island. Nearly half of the forty-five people who died were younger than sixteen years of age, the youngest little girl only nine. But for now, if what Eli said was true and everyone in Richmond had gone down to help, this could be Robert’s chance to escape from the city.

“Go borrow that horse, Eli, and get the carriage ready. It’s time for Robert to leave.”

Gilbert bent down and removed his shoes and socks, presenting them to me like a gift. “He gonna be doing a lot of walking, he gonna need these,” Gilbert said. I had tears in my eyes as he padded off to the carriage house, barefoot, to help Eli.

Ruby and Tessie dressed Robert in his disguise. We’d made the gown large enough so he could wear his shirt and trousers beneath it. With the hat and mourning veil covering his face, he looked like so many other women on the streets of Richmond, swathed in black from head to toe.

“For goodness’ sake, keep your feet tucked under your skirts,” Tessie warned. “Ain’t no lady in the world has feet that big or shoes that ugly.”

Esther packed Robert’s suit coat and some food in a small satchel. We were ready to leave less than an hour later.

“I don’t know how to thank all of you,” Robert said as the servants came out to the carriage house to see him off.

“Go win this war,” Tessie said. “That’s how you can thank us. Then maybe I get my boy back.”

No one said much as Eli drove the three of us north to the Mechanicsville Turnpike, each of us lost in his own private thoughts. We were stopped only once at the picket lines near the perimeter of the city, but the soldiers seemed more interested in hearing the news of the munitions explosion than in us. They never asked for our travel permit. We skirted around Hilltop, then stopped in a wooded place near a creek about a half-hour’s drive beyond the plantation. It was as far as we dared travel if we hoped to make it home before dark.

Robert quickly took off the hat and skirt, and I helped him out of the bodice before we climbed down from the carriage. “Guess you on your own from here,” Eli said as Robert shook hands with him. “God bless you.”

“Thank you, Eli.” It was all Robert could say as his voice choked with emotion.

Eli led the horses down to the creek, leaving Robert and me alone beside the road. As we studied each other, I felt my own emotions welling inside me. “I’m going to miss you,” I told him. The discovery stunned me. He had been part of my life for the last ten months.

“I’ll miss you, too.” His eyes turned soft, the steel in them gone as the poet’s sadness returned.

“Do you know which way to go from here? I never asked you about your plans.”

“I’ll just keep heading north, cross a couple of rivers. Once I get across the Potomac I’ll be in Federal territory.” He finally looked away. “Someone will contact you, Caroline. We have agents in Richmond. Any information you can give us will help— what the Rebels are thinking, what they’re planning, how many troops they have, artillery, gun emplacements, troop movements. Even if it doesn’t seem like much, it will help.”