Wilderness Run (29 page)

“You're right,” Laurence said, peering behind them as if he suspected they were being followed. “I've met the best and the worst in men since I enlisted.”

The horse plodded steadily up the steep hill. Past the crest, farms stretched along the Winooski Valley, barns and rail fences stranded in snow-covered pastures. The city would be behind them in another mile, and the sharp air of the country would make their voices loud and consonant. Bel had not thought Laurence would take her in this direction, because the other young people always gathered at Battery Park in the winter. A track had been worn hard and slick there, and the men raced one another until their female companions lost their hats and emitted laughing shrieks of protest.

“Do you want to go back to Virginia?” Bel asked, hesitant.

“I have to go back,” Laurence replied quickly. “I reenlisted.”

“That's not what I asked.”

“But I would give you the same answer, no matter how many times or ways you asked me,” he promised with weighty dolor. “Duty leaves little room for personal opinion.”

This statement seemed to close the argument. Bel knotted her hands beneath the buffalo robe and sighed. How could she bring up Louis Pacquette when Laurence was behaving like this? And yet she yearned to invoke the tutor's name, to see him again in her mind's eye, bending over a book, or standing on the ladder to the hayloft, holding a candle.

“Don't worry,” Laurence said softly, almost as if he expected her not to listen. “I'll never leave you.”

As they mounted the crest, the horse's head sagged, making her mane spill forward. At the top, Laurence halted the sleigh. “Look back,” he commanded, pointing to the jagged rows of lumber buildings and houses winding up the flank of the hill. The few evergreens in Allenton shone like green banners in the colorless ruins of winter. Smoke bulged from a hundred chimneys, stalled by the cold. Bel glimpsed the other sleighs circling in the park.

“What do you see?” Laurence asked, his arm tightening around her. She squirmed a little.

“I think Mary Ruth's brother is winning,” she said. “They're the ones with the big blue sleigh. What do you see?”

A cloud of breath masked his mouth as he answered. “I see you as a young girl, standing on the rim of that very lake, and me watching another man catch you from falling.”

Bel stared at her lap. “I guess I didn't understand what you were asking.”

“You used to understand me.”

“I used to worship you,” Bel said, her cheeks hot. “I'm not sure that's the same thing.”

Suddenly, Laurence's arm flexed again and his face was close to hers, faintly stubbled and rimmed by the omnipresent Union cap. She felt the cold pressure of his lips, the warm air that seeped through and touched her tongue, before she realized he was kissing her.

“Bel,” he whispered. His mouth tasted like lemon peel. “I know it's wrong to fall in love with you, but—”

“Don't!” she cried and fisted her hands against his neck, pushing him away. Laurence slid back, his eyebrows knitting together. He brushed his chest and sleeves as if dust had fallen on him.

“I'm sorry,” Bel said miserably, staring at the horse's immobile tail. It seemed as if they had crested the hill hours, even years, before, and she couldn't remember a word they had said on their way to the windy summit above Allenton. “I don't feel that way about you. I couldn't.”

“Is it because of him?” Laurence demanded. “That ugly tutor of yours?”

“No.” Suddenly, she saw Louis more clearly than she had for months, his brown eyes raised toward the winter light streaming through the library window.

“Because we're cousins?” He turned to her. “Of course, I've thought about that, too, but I'm not asking—”

“Laurence,” said Bel, interrupting him. “It's because of you.”

They sat there for another long moment—Bel facing forward into the rolling valley, the chalked blue rim of peaks beyond, Laurence's spine twisted to allow him to look down over the city. She could feel the heat of his body beneath the buffalo robe, but he did not try to touch her again.

“I'm sorry,” she offered again.

“For what?” he asked in a low voice, his face in profile. The dark circles beneath his eyes made him look much older than twenty-one. He directed the horse in a full circle so that they aimed toward the lake. “Shall we go to the races?”

Before Bel had time to answer, he slapped the reins again, making the horse trot and then canter down the white lane. The sleigh began to gain momentum, barreling past the snow-drowned trees, the few houses like outposts on the hill, past rail fences leaning, heaved up by frost, past buried gardens and the rickety sprays that in spring would fill out to yellow forsythia.

“Stop,” she called out when she could find her voice. The sleigh was dangerously close on the heels of the running horse. Laurence's expression did not change, although she saw him try to pull back on the reins. This had little effect. The mare had no desire to be run over by her passengers, and she careened sharply to the left, kicking into the hard snow that clung to the street's edge. The sleigh wobbled and spun and Bel fell against her cousin. His bony elbow bruised her ribs.

As the horse continued her mad sprint, Laurence let the reins go with a little toss. Beyond the city, the lake shone a tawny gold, like the back of a deer, and Bel had the feeling she was riding straight into the center of its spine. There was a crunching sound as one of the sled's runners swerved up the bank, tilting their conveyance to the opposite side. This time, Bel's cousin fell on top of her and she punched wildly, not caring if she hurt him. Her knuckles skidded against the wool of his coat.

With a last lunge, the horse's maneuvering wrenched the sleigh at a right angle to the street, where it stopped and began to tip, spilling its passengers with comedic slowness. Skidding to a halt, the horse turned her head to watch the damage she had caused. Laurence's shoulder ground against Bel's scalp as they crashed into the shadow cast by the sleigh and scrambled apart. She shoved a small pile of snow from her lap while Laurence cursed and thrashed around for his lost cap. He did not ask her if she was all right.

As she gripped the sleigh's edge and stood slowly, Bel had the feeling they had lapsed into strangers again, like two people thrown together on a railroad car, partners of circumstance, not of blood. She saw the cap half-buried beside Laurence but did not point it out, watching him with pity as he groped in the snow. She could not imagine being him—always searching for something he could not find—and she wondered with sorrow how he had come to be that way, and what woman would love him truly if she didn't.

A few spectators emerged from nearby houses, holding their heads low against the wind.

“Took a spill, did you?” a black-haired matron said with some satisfaction as Laurence restored his cap to its usual jaunty angle. “I sar it coming.” She nodded to another approaching onlooker, a man Bel recognized as the one who delivered their eggs every Wednesday. His appearance was highly suited to his profession, for he had a bald and oblong pate that shone in the summer as if it were glazed.

“Need some help, Mr. Lindsey?” the man said to Laurence. “Any bones broke?”

“We're all right, sir,” Laurence said stiffly. “We just took a turn too fast.”

“I'll say you did.” The black-haired matron, first to the scene, spoke with some authority to the other arrivals. She was standing in a pool of slush, but it did not seem to bother her.

“Let's get this tipped back again,” the deliveryman advised. “Let's get you back in the lane.”

Bel edged away as Laurence, the egg man, and a towheaded young boy gripped the sides of the sleigh and dragged it, creaking, from the snowbank, setting it back to its rightful position. The boy watched Laurence with undisguised awe.

“Faster than the railcar,” he said appreciatively, slapping the flank of the sleigh.

“Don't you even think of trying that again, young man,” the matron cautioned, looking to the clouds for reassurance. She had fleshy, immobile lips that moved out of time with her words.

“We won't,” Bel assured her, irritated by the warning. More people were coming now, stamping down the lane to gawk at them. “It was an accident. He let go by accident.”

“Soldiers,” the egg man grunted in a friendly way. “You only got three weeks to impress the ladies and you try to squeeze it all in at once. Ain't no use a'tall to try and stop him, Martha.” He nodded to the matron. “He's going back to war soon.”

“I'm going to war, too,” said the boy, thrusting out his small chest. “As soon as I'm able.”

Laurence, who had been staring at the ground, now wheeled on the boy. “I hope to God it's over before you're able,” he said fervently. His feet squeaked as they spun in the snow. “I hope to God the war won't wait for you.”

The boy's mouth opened and shut, but he did not speak again. Laurence checked the traces on the horse and took the reins in his fist before climbing back in the sleigh. He offered his free hand to Bel. “Thank you,” she said to the onlookers, taking in their squinting, well-meaning faces and understanding for a moment Laurence's dislike of other people's kindness, for it came so close to pity. “We're fine now.”

The sleigh lurched forward and a cold wind rose up, separating them from the others. As the distance grew, the onlookers' faces went blank and featureless as a far-off hill. Only the young boy, smaller than the rest, was easy to pick out. His body was so still, he could have been a stone. Loneliness flooded her. The buffalo robe, stiff and snow-filled, lay across her ribs like something that had never been alive. They coursed down the street without speaking, and the sounds of the city overcame them: the ringing of the blacksmith's hammer, a man skidding down icy steps, the thump of a maid beating dust from a rug with a paddle.

“I'd rather not go to the park anymore,” Bel said finally to the bitter air. She fixed her eyes on the approaching walls of the brick church, as if reading something there.

“No?” said Laurence. “Can you imagine what my father will say when he finds out?” he asked in the old conspiratorial tone.

“You might be gone by then.” Bel shrank to a tiny ball beneath the buffalo robe, suddenly cold. “I won't tell.”

Without answering, Laurence steered them toward Greenwood, letting the sleigh skim across the lost red scarf, snowy and crushed. Bel turned around to watch it after they passed. At first, she thought the sleigh's blade had severed the wool, because a snowy gap bloomed where they had run over it. Only later did she tell herself that the weight of their passing had merely shoved the scarf's center deep beneath the snow, that it was still one piece, and its owner would come back for it and take it home.

Chapter Thirty-seven

“My dear, your Miss Bottum just raves about you, your mother thinks you need some experience in the world, and all we have to do now is convince your father,” concluded Aunt Pattie, who had spirited Bel away to the drawing room to talk her niece into accompanying her on the Sanitary Commission's spring tour of the hospitals in Washington. The idea thrilled Bel, and she was already drafting plans for her boastful call at Mary Ruth Cross's house when her aunt continued. “I need a quiet, useful girl like you. My own daughters would be far too busy making beaus of the soldiers to do me any good.”

While Bel didn't appreciate such immediate dismissal of her own beau-making prowess, she nodded obediently and tore out the five or six stitches she had just made in a new white shirt for Louis, who continued to write polite letters to the whole family. Bel's sketching was far more advanced than her stitching, as Miss Bottum, the drawing tutor, had attested, and Aunt Pattie had convinced herself that the only way she could outdo Mrs. M. J.'s hundred-page report from the year before was to hand in an
illustrated
version of the medical care the brave boys received.

“Of course,” continued Aunt Pattie, who needed very little reciprocal conversation to keep her going, “it will be a hard thing for a girl like you to see men suffer like this. Mrs. M. J. and her daughter were absolutely scandalized by some of the places.”

“I don't mind,” Bel said in a small voice. “I could stand it for Laurence's sake.” Her cousin had left just days after their sleigh ride, their old camaraderie replaced by a stiff formality. After three weeks with no word from the soldier, she blamed herself for the deadness in his eyes as he said good-bye. He was so sensitive, she scolded herself. She could have pretended to love him.

“My dear son, I hope he learns to be among us again once this war is over,” Aunt Pattie was saying. “He was so happy to be here, especially to see you. And he ate well,” she affirmed. “But he wasn't the same.”

“No,” Bel said, thinking of the upset sleigh and Laurence thrashing in the snow for his lost cap when it was right beside him. “He wasn't the same.”

“Mrs. Van Sicklin said that someone in Laurence's regiment was shot for desertion right before they came home on furlough. Laurence never spoke of it, did he?”

Interested as she was in the gossip, Bel resented this prying, for she realized Aunt Pattie had not garnered any real news from her son and was hoping Bel had succeeded where she had failed. Why couldn't they leave him alone? “No,” she said shortly. “We didn't talk about the war. You know he didn't want to talk about it.”

“I see.” Aunt Pattie reared back with a creak of whalebone. “Well, I'm sorry I asked.”

“He was so tired,” Bel added softly. “He wanted home to be home.”

They sat in silence for a moment, watching the fire.

“I hope you can bear seeing what war does to all those brave young men,” Aunt Pattie said.