When the Splendor Falls (70 page)

“She hasn’t lied, Guy. I know Neil wasn’t happy with his first wife, and it’s only natural he would have turned to another woman, and one as beautiful as Diosa. I cannot blame him for that.”

“Well, then make certain he is happy with you, if that is what you want, so he won’t have the need to turn to another woman again.”

“Oh, Guy, it isn’t that simple. You and I both know why Neil married me. He would have married Diosa, except that she was recently widowed and still in mourning when he left to fight in the war. If he hadn’t had to marry me in order to save his men and help Adam, then, when he returned to Royal Rivers, he would have married Diosa. She expects Neil to come back to her, not to me.”

“I wouldn’t make any judgments about what Neil wants or doesn’t want until he returns and makes that decision for himself,” Guy warned her, thinking Leigh didn’t know Neil Braedon as well as she thought she did if she truly believed he would ever do anything he didn’t want to do. And even Adam, with his dying wish, hadn’t forced him into marrying Leigh unless he had intended that all along. That much Guy knew about the man he’d once hated—and had because of that very trait of ruthless determination.

“Maybe it won’t matter,” Leigh said, turning away from the window.

“What do you mean?”

“Neil may never return.”

“If he survived till now, he will, and probably soon. The South surrendered,” Guy reminded her, still unable to believe the war between the states was over—or the chain of events that led up to General Lee’s surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant, General in Chief of the Armies of the United States, three months ago at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. The date—and he would never forget it—April 9, 1865. A week earlier, the once proud Confederate capital had fallen to the Union, and once again the Stars and Stripes had been seen flying atop the domed Capitol building. But there had been no glory for the federal troops who’d laid siege to the city for so long, for the city they marched victorious into had been gutted by fire. Few of the residents, and most of those were freed slaves, remained to welcome the victors into the charred and smoking ruins of Richmond.

Unwilling to leave the factories and arsenals to the federal troops, the retreating Confederate soldiers had burned sections of the city, with blocks of warehouses going up in flames, the inferno spreading out of control through the city as Jefferson Davis and his cabinet escaped by train, leaving mobs of drunken looters and deserters running wild through the abandoned streets as panicked citizens fled to the south bank of the James River, until the main bridge was burned, cutting off their escape, then they streamed along the north bank, flooding onto the roads crowded with troops moving westward to regroup into an army and fight again.

And the fighting had continued sporadically, with many Southerners refusing to surrender and continuing to offer resistance, but it was a lost cause, and only the most fanatical Secessionists continued to fight a guerrilla war against their conquerors. Even John Mosby, the famed guerrilla fighter known as the
Gray Ghost
, had disbanded his men, refusing to fight any longer, and successfully avoiding ever having to surrender to the enemy. Quantrill, however, had been killed while looting somewhere in Kentucky, his bushwhacking days of terrorizing the countryside over.

Jefferson Davis and his fellow fugitives, having fled from Virginia into the Carolinas, were finally caught by federal troops in Georgia. Their desperate flight to Texas was over. Seeking protection in the Confederate lands west of the Mississippi, which had still been officially at war, they had never reached the Confederate stronghold they sought, and from where they would have continued the fight with partisan warfare. Or that having failed, they would have fled farther south into Mexico, as other bands of rebels were reported doing. They were hopeful of aid from Emperor Maximilian, the Austrian archduke who was trying to bring French rule to Mexico by overthrowing Benito Juarez, president of Mexico, and at a time when the United States, because of its Civil War, would be unable to send troops to defend its doctrine forbidding European intervention in the Americas. But Jefferson Davis, under armed guard, was sent instead to Nashville, then returned to Richmond, where federal troops had restored order. The onetime president of the Confederacy reentered his capital in chains, bound for a prison cell for his crimes against the sovereignty of the Union.

It was over. The fighting at least. Now, the talk was of reconstruction. Guy sighed, wondering if there was anything left of the South to reconstruct. Certainly life would be different for many, since slavery had been abolished, and a thirteenth amendment had even been added to the Constitution assuring the freedoms first granted with the Emancipation Proclamation. The war had truly become more than a battle to save the disbanding of the Union by a Southern rebellion against Northern interference; the whole social and economic structure of the South had been changed. Guy allowed his thoughts to move deeper into his soul, and he knew that no man, whether of a black-skinned race or a white-skinned, should be the slave of another. If only enough others had felt that way, and if they’d had the time, they might have abolished slavery without the shedding of blood, without the dividing of their nation.

Guy smiled bitterly, for, oddly enough, President Lincoln had been criticized for being too lenient on the South by those who would have sought a harsher punishment for traitorous followers of the rebellion against the Union. But the man’s sincerity, and true wish for a healing between the two divided peoples, had been proved to Guy when Grant, on Lincoln’s authority, had offered Lee generous terms of surrender. Robert E. Lee had not been put in chains. The defeated general had been allowed to return proudly to his troops and send them home, with the promise that those who threw down their arms and fought no longer, who asked for pardon and from that day forward obeyed the laws of the Union, would suffer no retribution for the stand they had taken.

Guy shook his head in disbelief, still shocked by the singular act of violence that repelled him more than any of the other tragedies that had befallen so many during the war. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln. During the first years of the fighting, he’d hated the man who’d come to symbolize the differences between the Union and the Confederacy as much as any Southerner, but no man deserved to be shot down by an assassin’s bullet. Strange to think that the assassin, that madman Booth, may have caused more harm and grief to befall the defeated South by his actions than if Lincoln had lived to see his policies carried out. Guy suspected that those who would now dictate Lincoln’s plans for reconstruction, and seeking either vengeance or profit, might not be as sympathetic to the South and its people, forgetting the words spoken by Lincoln in his second inaugural address. The text had been read to him from an Illinois newspaper Althea had found spread across a seat of the train during their journey across the North. But Guy remembered as if the words had been burned into his mind.
“…With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne their battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

“Guy?”

“What?” he said automatically, still lost in his thoughts.

“I was saying that I have to go.”

“What are you doing up so early?” he demanded, wondering for the first time what she’d been doing outside his door.

“Actually, I’m late. I was supposed to meet Gil ten minutes ago. We’re riding up into the high country. We’re taking supplies to one of the shepherds. Guy, are you going to be all right? I really think I should tell someone about your sight beginning to come back,” Leigh said, pressing a kiss to his pale, perspiration-beaded forehead.

“It’s not back yet, and until then, Leigh…” he warned.

“All right, my lips are sealed.”

“Be careful,” he called to her as he heard her walk toward the door.

“I will, oh, and I’ll send one of the maids to clean this up.”

“A good idea; Stephen would be outraged to find my room in such a mess, and I don’t think I can stand having him mother-henning me any more than he already does,” Guy said with a grin of amused disgust. “He’s been grumbling more than ever of late, and especially about Jolie and her voodoo scaring him out of a good night’s sleep, and every night.”

“Don’t forget to tell him about your hand so he can tend to it,” Leigh called back to him as she left the room, closing the door behind her, then turning quickly, and that was when she nearly stepped on the glove that someone had dropped in the corridor.

At first she’d thought it was her own, but when she picked it up, feeling the fine grains of dirt clinging to the slightly dirtied cotton of the fingertips she knew whose glove it was. Lys Helene had been standing in the corridor, and the door to Guy’s room had been ajar, just enough for her to have overheard the conversation within, and now Leigh knew what, or rather whom, Guy had heard in the corridor.

Leigh frowned slightly, wondering if Lys Helene had overheard Guy’s churlish remarks concerning her hanging around him after he regained his sight. She hoped not, because Leigh did not believe Guy had meant that harsh denunciation of Lys Helene. He might have been serious about never marrying, but then that was pride speaking; the other had been fear. He might never admit it to himself, but Leigh knew he was frightened that
if
he did regain his sight, he might lose Lys Helene. What would he discover when he searched her face, a face Leigh knew he would find lovely, but would Guy see love in her eyes, or pity?

Leigh glanced out into the shadowy coolness of the gardens, searching again for the slight figure, but the garden still seemed empty, and she didn’t have time now to find Lys Helene. “Well…they will just have to work this out for themselves when Guy can see the truth for himself,” Leigh said to herself, dropping the glove on the windowsill, then walking toward the door at the end of the corridor, intending to let herself out into the courtyard, then through the kitchens at the far end.

“Oops!” a startled voice said apologetically as a door suddenly swung open and nearly caught Leigh on the shoulder as she passed by. “I’m sorry, Leigh. Did I hit you?” Althea asked, softly closing the door behind her with her shoulder, her arms full of bundled up papers and books. “I don’t want to wake the children,” she said. “It’s still early.”

Leigh stared at her in surprise. “Yes, it
is
early,” she agreed, eyeing her sister questioningly.

“I know!” Althea laughed, her brown eyes glowing with mischievous excitement as she started down the corridor, Leigh having to hurry to catch up to her.

“Where are you going?” she asked carefully, thinking Althea must be delirious, perhaps suffering a relapse of her fever.

“To teach school,” Althea replied matter-of-factly, her lips twitching as she watched the incredulous expression crossing her sister’s face.

“School?” Leigh repeated.

“Yes. I can read and write, my dear, in fact I’m often complimented on my lovely penmanship, and I’ve some knowledge of geography, arithmetic, and history. And since I still know some of my schoolgirl’s French I do not think I’ll have too much difficulty with Spanish, since Lupe and the maids have been tutoring me. My qualifications seem quite acceptable to the
patrón
.”

“Qualifications for what?” Leigh demanded, wondering how Nathaniel would allow such a thing.

“For teaching the children here on the
rancho
,” Althea told her, squaring her shoulders as if prepared to do battle.

“But you can’t—”

“Why not? Solange has been doing that for the past two years.”

“But Solange is dif—”

“Different?” Althea supplied helpfully. “If being different is doing something useful, then I intend to be. And do not say I am not well,” she told her when Leigh opened her mouth to object, “I have seldom felt better. I may not have proven another Florence Nightingale with my nursing skills when in Richmond, but I think I can survive teaching children their letters. Solange wanted to paint today, especially this morning when the light bathed the mountains in a certain golden hue she said, but the children have school at that hour. I offered to teach the children for her, and if she will agree, and if I think I can do an admirable job, then I will offer to do so again.”

“Well, I—”

“You what?” Althea inquired patiently, a twinkle in her eye as she saw Leigh’s hesitancy.

“Nothing,” Leigh said, for there was nothing improper about Althea. Dressed in a plain gown of gray silk with a lacy-edged collar, her blond hair pulled back in its usual neat chignon, she looked most respectable, even down to her sensible gaiter boots and the bonnet of gray velvet trimmed with white silk roses slung over her arm, and to be worn to protect her delicate complexion when crossing the sunny grounds of the
rancho
.

“You are worried about the propriety of it? It may not be Madame Talvande’s, or our finishing school with Madame St. Juste’s proper deportment classes, but it is learning, Leigh, and I want to do something for a change rather than just sit around doing needlepoint. To see those children lettering their names across a page would give me a sense of accomplishment. I’ve been teaching Noelle and Steward each day, so I see no difference in this. I want to repay the hospitality and kindness my family and I have been shown while we’ve been guests here at Royal Rivers.”

“No one expects you to do that,” Leigh said quickly, beginning to frown slightly as she thought about what Althea had just said.

“I know it is not expected, and that is why I wish to,” Althea said with such a note of finality in her voice that Leigh was reminded of their mother when she wished to end further discussion. “Thank you, dear,” Althea added as Leigh held the door for her to pass through, her steps determined as she crossed the courtyard.