The Solitary Envoy (10 page)
The mantel clock ticked very loudly in the quiet. The street outside her window was strangely empty. Bells tolled, then stopped, then tolled again. Now there was silence, save for the dreaded count of time. The door opened behind her, but Erica could not manage to turn her head. She heard a heavier tread cross the carpeted floor. A voice spoke her name. Her brother.
Reggie pulled over a chair, seated himself beside her, and took her hand. “Look at me, Erica.”
He succeeded where her mother had not. She drew her brother and the world and the morning into focus.
“It’s almost time.”
She winced, not from the words, but from the fact that she now remembered. Today was the day. That was why the bells had been ringing throughout the city and why the streets were so still. Today the city mourned its loss.
“You must bathe and dress. Mother wants you to eat.”
“I can’t.”
“You ate nothing yesterday. You must.”
Each word held the leaden quality of an intolerable burden. “I can’t go.”
“You must,” he repeated. “For Father. And for me. How could I possibly do this without you? And we can’t force Mother to endure this alone.”
But he had not understood. How could he? Her sentence had not been complete. She forced herself to say what she felt in her bones. “I can’t go on.”
Again she had not managed to complete the thought. She filled her chest with air and ashes. “I can’t go on without Father.” Sorrow’s heat flamed in her heart, her throat, behind her eyes. She felt the tears come. She blinked them away, and others came. The hardest thing in her world was to halt the sobs before they rose.
“But you will, Erica. You will go on, and you will know exactly what needs to be done.”
The matter-of-fact way Reggie spoke acted like a great calming force, and her words came more easily now. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Don’t I just? Who’s been keeping all of us sane and focused through the worst week of our lives? Who told me how to pull up my own bootstraps? Who got me directing our workers to scrub down the coffeehouse and air out the furnishings? Who suggested we salvage the wood and timbers from what’s left of the warehouse and shore up the scorched rear walls?”
She shook her head. “I can’t recall a thing.”
“There, you see? Even when you’re addled, you’re working.”
Erica examined her brother’s face and saw his own pain. The center of his eyes looked hollow, as though his gaze had been bored through with a great merciless awl. But there he sat, giving her comfort, helping her rise out of her own dark place. “You’re the strong one.”
“Aye, I’ve got a good set of shoulders on me.” He stretched his face in a parody of his former smile. “Pity I don’t have your head to set there on top.”
The mantel clock struck the hour. Erica felt each musical chime like a fist beating her into a future she had no wish to enter. “If I had the strength, I would smash every clock in this city.”
Reggie did not understand—she saw that in his face. But he did not ask her meaning, which she found touching. He trusted her. She could see that in his weary wounded eyes, in the way he sat there waiting for her to rise up and move forward. “Thank you, brother.”
“Are we ready now?”
“No. But we don’t have any choice, do we?” She forced herself to her feet. “When does the service begin?”
“In three hours.”
“Is it safe?”
Reggie rose with her. “There’s been no sign of the British for three days.”
The redcoats had caught Washington totally by surprise, overwhelming the small local garrison and entering the city at a gallop. They fought a running battle to the city’s heart, where they burned the Capitol and the armory and a number of other structures. Then, just as troops from the Virginia and Maryland garrisons marched on Washington, the British vanished. They made no attempt to hold the city. Munitions in the armory were still exploding two days after they had departed.
Now there were rumors from every quarter. The redcoats had taken New York, Richmond, Charleston, Boston—the stories of dire deeds swirled like the ashes. In truth, no one knew where the British were or even how strong were their numbers. All that could be said for certain was that the nation had been caught unawares. It would not happen again.
So now the hour of mourning had arrived. Churches all over the city were holding services for those lost to the invasion force.
Erica permitted her brother to take her arm. “Do you know, I’m glad it won’t be just for Father. Does that sound selfish?”
“No, Erica. It sounds like you. Maximum efficiency, minimum of fuss and bother.”
She could not tell if he was jesting. “This way I think I shall be able to hold on to myself. If we were alone and all attention were upon us …”
He gripped her arm tighter as the shudder passed through her frame. “You would still hold on. I know you would.”
“I wish I shared your confidence.”
“You would do it because you have to.” He held open the door leading into their home. “How else are we to survive?”
Major Gareth Powers sat amidships, surrounded by a group of junior officers. The day smelled of fresh sea air. The steady following wind carried with it the prospect of a swift start to their voyage home. Gareth was not sorry to leave the Americas behind. In his opinion, his superiors were wrong to have ever let this conflict arise. Almost half of his men had relatives in the former colonies. He had been forced to constantly keep watch for deserters or, even worse, mutiny from men he cared for and trusted with his life. No, this entire war was wrong. America was a nation in and of itself. It may have begun as a group of British colonies, but they were independent now. One look was enough to make him certain there was no going back. What was more, these former colonials were kindred spirits. They should have been counted among the Crown’s staunchest allies. And the British had never needed friends as much as they did now, fighting for their very survival against a real foe—the upstart Frenchman, Napoleon.
The freshening wind sent a dark squall line scuttling toward their ship, and Gareth raised the collar of his greatcoat against the pelting rain. But not even the cold wash of rain could erase the odor he had carried for almost a month now. Woodsmoke mingled with burning roof tar and billowing plumes of fine tobacco. Overlaid upon this was the more acrid flavor of gunpowder. Though the real fighting had not started until much later that day, in his memories Gareth could not separate the burning private warehouse from the subsequent battle for Washington.
Nor could he erase a certain lovely face from his mind, one streaked in tears as the young woman cradled her father in her arms and watched her family business go up in flames. Officers were trained never to allow such moments of war to bother them. But try as he might, Gareth could not protect himself from this memory. He even found himself repeating the young lady’s name in his sleep. The lovely Miss Langston.
He turned to the burly sergeant leaning against the nearby gunwale. “I was thinking of Washington.”
“A miserable affair, if you don’t mind my saying so, sir.” Daniel was a veteran of countless skirmishes, a hard-edged giant with eyes constantly on the alert for danger. “March in, fight a scuffle we had no business starting, fire the town, march away.”
“We didn’t have sufficient strength to hold their capital.”
“Never should have gone there in the first place if you ask me, which you didn’t, so excuse me for speaking as I shouldn’t.”
Gareth would not have accepted such an attitude from any other noncommissioned officer. But Daniel was his most trusted ally and friend. “There was some trouble early in the day.”
“Trouble from start to finish,” Daniel grumbled softly. His voice was now pitched low enough for Gareth to pretend the words were meant for no one but Daniel himself if he chose. “Nine deserters that morning. Nine from three hundred. Just slipped away into the night, men refusing to fire upon them what might be kin.”
“I remember.”
“Set me in a terrible state,” Daniel continued softly. “First desertions in my whole time with the brigade. Had to post sentries facing inward like we were guarding prisoners. This with the enemy all around us. Or them we called enemy. Only they weren’t. Leastwise, they never should—”
But Gareth was too much the king’s officer to allow him to continue. “The scuffle that morning as we entered Georgetown.”
“Sir?”
“A warehouse was fired.”
“I remember. Terrible, it was.”
“Who struck the old man?”
“Nary an idea, sir. I suppose I could ask about.”
“See what you can learn.” It was a fruitless gesture, Gareth knew. Nothing he did could restore the young lady’s loss. Or grant him what he truly wanted, which was to behold those lovely eyes once more.
He turned his face upward, hoping the rain would wash away the tumult in his mind and heart. But the wet and cold only beat down harder, as though seeking to cry tears for him and for the stranger he would never glimpse again.
Erica opened the drapes in what had once been her father’s office. It was a very different room now, and she was a very different woman. In the two years since the British invasion, her entire world had canted sharply upon its axis, not once, but numerous times.
The chamber was now her bedroom. She had fitted it as best she could, for in truth it was more like a bed-sitting-room, her own living chamber. At twenty-one years of age, she was now referred to as a spinster. The unmarried and increasingly unweddable Erica Langston. Her suitors were older men, widowers seeking a mother for children from previous marriages. Her own mother had ceased referring to them as unsuitable. In fact, she scarcely seemed to notice them at all, which was fine as far as Erica was concerned. One positive outcome of these two long and dreadful years was that those families with whom her mother had aspired a connection now avoided them. Erica was no longer being pressured to form a proper match. She was glad for this small taste of good fortune.
The issue of social standing did not occupy Mildred Langston these days. She now lived for the church. The family no longer attended the huge stone edifice in central Washington, but rather gave its Sundays over to the simple Georgetown chapel where her mother also spent many evenings. At first, Erica had assumed all these changes were merely her mother’s way of coping, but increasingly she had come to accept this as a genuine fundamental change. How Erica felt about this, she honestly could not say.
She heard her mother stirring in the next room, previously Carter’s office. Carter’s will to live had vanished with the man he had served for almost half a century, and he had passed on the summer after her father had. By rights Erica’s mother should have taken her husband’s former office as her own chamber, for it was by far the nicest of the upstairs rooms where they now lived. But Mildred still disliked entering this room, although now for very different reasons.
Reggie occupied what had formerly been the clerks’ quarters. The moneys were simply not there to rebuild the warehouse after the fire. Instead, they had used the salvaged wood to repair their home and erect a much smaller structure. The coffeehouse still occupied much of the downstairs, along with the tobacconist, where Fran
ois still rolled his miniature cigars and served patrons from as far away as Boston. The extended downstairs housed a tobacco storage room and a space for roasting and grinding coffee. There was also a cramped storeroom for articles coming up for auction.
A narrow hallway ran the length of the upstairs against the wall opposite the windows, so that the family could move about without entering one another’s private space. The upstairs parlor was now their sitting room. What had once been the formal upstairs vestibule was now walled off and sectioned into three chambers—a kitchen, a dining room that scarcely seated three, and a bath. Their former home was rented out to a senator from New York.
Washington had changed much in the past two years. Leading up to the British invasion, rumors had swirled that the capital was to be moved yet again. Richmond and Philadelphia had been the two most likely choices. But by burning the city’s major structures, the British had not wounded the American spirit as they had intended. Instead, they had unified public sentiment. The next congress had convened in a midtown church and unanimously voted that all the structures be rebuilt. The capital remained exactly where it had been. Washington’s future had been solidified by the war.
