“How was your day in Boston?” she murmured, spearing a tender bit of asparagus with her fork and lifting it to her mouth.
“A few difficulties with the investment I want to make. I’ll have to go back tomorrow.”
“Of course,” she said, tight-lipped as one suspicious thought after another went through her mind. Did he make all those trips into the city for business reasons, or was he visiting some woman?
Heath’s blue gaze sharpened on her. “What about you? A profitable meeting with the good ladies of Concord? What exactly were you discussing tonight—orphans or veterans, the art students’ fund or—”
“We were discussing plans for a benefit,” Lucy said with dignity, stung by his sarcasm. He had made it clear many times before that he didn’t hold a high opinion of the women she had chosen to associate with lately. “A benefit for the musical society.”
“Ah. I had no idea you were such a patron of the arts.”
“I am!” she snapped, slamming down her knife and fork. Her anger gave her temporary bravery. “Why are you always ridiculing my clubs and meetings and my friends? You told me I could do whatever I wanted to do—you have no right to criticize me. You don’t really care about any of it, you just want to irritate me!”
“I am interested. I’m fascinated, in fact, that given complete freedom you’ve made such uninspired choices. I should have expected that it would be that particular crowd to draw you in, but I had hoped that by now your taste would have been developed enough to avoid them.”
“They’re my friends.”
“Are they? What about your old friends . . . the respectable elements in town, the ones whose invitations and notes you refuse to answer? What about that little blond one you knew—”
“Her name is Sally. And you know the reason I don’t accept invitations from her or the others I used to know. I told you about the week when—that week before we were married. They were all horrid to me. I’m not ever going to forget or forgive them for deserting me so quickly. I don’t care how sorry they are—”
“Careful, honey. As the saying goes, if you live in a glass house . . .”
“Why are you taking up for them?” she demanded, trying desperately to ignore an odd, almost painful thump of her heart. Casual and careless though his endearment had been, it had been so long since he had called her that. Oh, what she wouldn’t give to know if he felt anything for her still! He sat there in such a self-possessed manner, unruffled by her temper or her useless attempts to get the better of him in an argument.
“I’m not taking up for anyone,” he said smoothly. “But only a coward turns his back on someone who’s trying to apologize to him. It’ll take some spunk to forgive them, but that’s one thing you’re not short on.”
“I don’t give a fig about their friendship or their apologies. Betta Hampton says it’s better just to forget all about them and go on to—”
“Betta Hampton? That aging . . .” Heath started to say, then stopped abruptly. Lucy was startled to see a hot glow in his turquoise eyes and the sudden hardness of his jaw. She felt chills of uneasiness and anticipation race down her back. For weeks he had been so cool, collected, and taunting. Now, for once, she had managed to drag a noticeable reaction from him. “What else does Betta tell you?” he asked, standing up and bracing his hands on the table, leaning over her. “How to lead me a merry dance just like she does with her husband? That woman is known as the most unfaithful wife in town—yes, I’ve seen her prancing down Main Street with her false curls tucked under the brim of her hat and her two paid studs in tow—”
“Those are her footmen,” Lucy said defensively. “Her husband is a very important banker and she needs those men to accompany and protect her in case someone tries to—”
“Explain, then, why she can’t stop making eyes at those fine, strapping footmen when she’s out in public. She’s trouble, Lucy. Her kind feeds off of people like you—she won’t rest until she’s managed to drag you through the mud she wallows in.”
Lucy shot up from her chair. “You don’t even have any friends,” she said vehemently. “Except for whoever it is you visit in Boston, whoever it is that fascinates you so much—”
“What are you talking about?”
“And you don’t want me to have any friends either. Well, I will! Nothing you do will stop me from seeing Betta and the rest of them!”
“So be it,” he said, the softness of his voice making her shiver. He turned and strode out of the room while she called after him in impotent rage.
“And you can’t ever make me leave here! You’d have to drag me away kicking and screaming, and then I’ll leave you and come back!”
She heard his heavy footsteps as he went up to his bedroom. A few seconds later she was weak and tired, staring at the dirty dishes on the table, pondering the question of how her life, which had once been so good, had been ruined so completely. Was it her fault—had she done something so terribly wrong that she had deserved to have Daniel taken away from her and a hateful stranger put in his place?
Maybe Heath will leave me, she thought dully. Neither of them could last much longer like this. Maybe he would decide that he’d had enough and that he wanted to go back South where he belonged. It was ironic that that thought brought a terrible emptiness inside instead of comfort.
Why didn’t she understand anything anymore?
The Country and the Collapse. She had bought a copy of the book that Heath had written, and she had sneaked it home as guiltily as if she had been doing something forbidden. Thick and well-bound, the book made barely a crackle as she opened it. Alone in the parlor, Lucy turned each page as if seeking some elusive clue to the man she had married. The book outlined the story of a regiment from Virginia during the war, written in a clean, stripped style. Sometimes the writing was as casual as that of an unedited journal, while at other points it took the form of clear and precise prose.
Slowly the book caught her interest as she recognized bits and pieces of her husband winding through the pages with increasing frequency. There were odd notes of humor and descriptions that were sometimes moving, sometimes grotesque. There were stories set off by themselves without preface or conclusion, so cryptic and personal that she was embarrassed and startled by their frankness. The more she read of his book, the more hopeless a task it seemed to come to an understanding of him. The men she had known—Daniel and David Fraser, the boys she had gone to school with, the shy and polite men she had met at dances—had all seemed like such uncomplicated creatures. They liked to flirt with pretty women. They liked to talk among themselves about war and strike manly postures. They were so easy to flatter and cajole. Most of them couldn’t stand a woman’s tears, and none of them could bear a woman’s frosty silence when they had displeased her.
But Heath was different from all of them. He only laughed when she was mad at him, or did his best to provoke her even more. Her silences didn’t bother him a bit. And even when he looked relaxed and lazy, underneath the surface lurked the most biting sarcasm that she had ever been exposed to. Surely there was some key to him, something that would give her the ability to know what to say to him. She would dearly love to know how to make him wince uncomfortably as he could make her wince. She would give her left arm to know how to win an argument over him. But trying to see into his heart was like trying to see through a stone wall.
Something in this book, perhaps—there must be something here that would help her find the answers. Staring at the pages intently, Lucy found that she didn’t have the objectivity necessary to see things clearly. All she understood was that as chapter followed chapter, his scruples seemed fewer and farther between, and his feelings more shadowy. He wrote about the heroic deeds of his comrades in a way that made them seem like vainglorious fools. Somewhere in the middle of the book a chapter ended in the middle of the description of a battle. The next chapter was headed with the words Written at Governor’s Island . . .
“Prison camp,” she wh
ispered, feeling a chill of shock at the revelation. Heath had never mentioned anything about having been kept in such a place. On both sides, North and South, the prison camps had been known as the most disgusting, unsanitary, and dangerous places on earth. Hundreds of men had been crushed together without adequate shelter, forced to survive on tiny quantities of unfit food. Disease had swept through the camps unmercifully, unrelieved by medicine. A few words jumped out of the next few pages: . . . captured in summer clothes . . . so cold here . . . men dying of typhoid . . . new outbreak of measles . . . exchange, exchange—the rumors lead to the highest hopes and the worst depressions . . . no water fit to drink . . .
Lucy closed the book with fumbling hands, curiously upset. She didn’t want to know what Heath had gone through during the war, how long he had been in prison camp or how he had gotten released.
You’d be surprised about the amount of things you don’t know about men and their integrity . . .
Did he ever think about the prison camp or had he buried it deeply in his mind? What had he done to survive? Why hadn’t he ever told her about it?
She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to feel sympathy for him. She didn’t want to know this insistent urge to take him in her arms and offer comfort for things that had happened so long ago. It was all in the past, she reminded herself. He didn’t need comfort or sympathy now, and he certainly didn’t need any silly attempts of her to approach him.
As night approached and Mrs. Flannery arrived to prepare dinner, Lucy wandered into the parlor where Heath was settled on the sofa in a long-legged sprawl. Several newspapers were piled around him in neat, crackling stacks. Heath lowered the paper he was reading and watched her walk across the room, his eyes bright blue and unrevealing as they followed her every move intently.
“What are you reading?” she asked idly, glancing at one of the piles and bending to pick up the top sheets. A paper from Vicksburg, the Citizen. “Oh, these old things . . . oh, how strange—this one isn’t the usual sort of paper, it’s . . .”
“Printed on the back side of wallpaper,” Heath said, one side of his mouth lifting in a half-smile.
“Why?”
“Supplies ran low near the end of the war, and the paper mills were burned. Some newspapers printed on wrapping paper, wallpaper, anything they could stick in the presses. And when they ran out of ink, they started using shoe-blacking.”
Lucy smiled, admiring the persistence and determination of the Southern publishers. “I guess we Northerners don’t have the market cornered on stubbornness, do we?” She shuffled through a few more sheets. “The Charleston Mercury. Why did you save this one?”
“Read the headline.”
“The Union is dissolved . . . oh, the announcement of South Carolina’s secession—”
“That’s right. At fifteen minutes past one, December 20. The moment everyone knew that there would be war.”
“And this other newspaper—why did you keep this?”
“That . . . ah, that one . . .” Heath reached out a hand
for it and settled back down on the sofa, his expression softening with distant memories. Lucy tilted her head as she looked at him, mesmerized by the bittersweet smile that played gently on his mouth. “This is what my father died for.”
“What do you mean?” Lucy asked, stricken by his words.
“ ‘This paper,’ ” he read aloud, “ ‘which has heretofore strayed from its former Unionist loyalties, is under new management which will seek to uphold the principles of the United States of America . . .’ ”
“I don’t understand.”
“It was a Richmond paper, run by one of my father’s closest friends. My father was a loyal man as well as a firm believer in the Confederate press—he had a great respect for the printed word and swore that as long as the Southern press was alive, the South would never fall. He rushed over to the newspaper office where the editorial staff had started a battle to keep the paper from falling into the hands of the Union troops and becoming a Yankee mouthpiece. My father was killed in the fight and the paper was taken over. This Union edition came out the next day—the struggle to keep it from the Northerners had been useless. My father’s fight had been in vain.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Don’t be. There were worse ways to die. Slower ways. It was good that he never found out how the war ended.”
They looked at each other for a long moment. A soft and unexpected feeling of warmth swept through Lucy’s chest as she found what she had been seeking all afternoon. Why, of course, she did understand much more about him now. It all made perfect sense. “Your father’s feelings about writing . . . was that why you became a correspondent?” she asked hesitantly. “Is that why you wrote that book, and why . . . why you’re so interested in newspapers and publishing and things like that?”
Heath’s gaze pulled away from hers. He shrugged slightly. “I would have been interested in it anyway.”
“Did you find out about his death before or after . . .”
“Before or after what?”
“Governor’s Island,” Lucy said, suddenly pinned by his narrow-eyed stare.
“So you got your hands on a copy of the book,” he mused, raking a hand through his tawny hair. “What did you think about it?”
“I thought . . . ,” she faltered, uncertain of exactly what she had thought about it. “Well, I was a little . . . revolted . . .”
“Yes?” he prompted, seemingly fascinated by the shifting emotions on her face. What was he looking for? Why did he appear to be so absorbed by her expression?
“I was . . . sorry that you had been in prison camp . . .”
“A reassuring sentiment, coming from my wife. Anything else?”
“I . . . didn’t really like it. I didn’t expect it to be so . . . dark. There was no . . . kindness, no hope.”
“No. I didn’t have much hope then. Or kindness.” As he saw that Lucy’s forehead had become furrowed, he smothered a grin. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t develop a little of each in the last few years. Don’t look so anxious. Is Mrs. Flannery almost ready with dinner? I’ve been hungry for hours.”
Instead of the regular Thursday Circle meeting this week, the club was sponsoring a special musical evening. A huge crowd of men and women filled the impressive drawing room of the Hamptons’ home, while several young musicians played selected works by German composers. Betta, Alice, Olinda, and the rest of the Thursday Circle were well-known for their quick, sharp tongues and the short work they could make of anyone who was targeted by their gossip. During the musical evening Lucy sat close to Betta and Olinda, whose presence would ward off the approaches that her old friends might have made to her.
Sally Hudson, usually so bubbly and friendly, dared not come near the acid-tongued matrons for fear of being ridiculed by them. Lucy glanced at Sally across the room occasionally, trying to ignore the guilt that the pretty blonde’s uncertain smile caused. They had once been such dear friends. They had once told each other everything, laughed about boys and parents, talked about dress patterns and candy recipes, cried for each other’s heartaches. Now Lucy felt that they didn’t know each other at all. I’ve changed too much for us to be friends ever again, she thought sadly, knowing that even if she and Sally made peace with each other, they would have nothing to talk about. Lucy had too much pride to confess to anyone that her relationship with Heath was practically nonexistent and that her marriage was a sham. Neither did she want to hear about Sally’s problems, which were so little and insignificant that they made her own look that much more appalling.
Fidgeting absentmindedly, Lucy traced the black jet beads that glittered along the box-plaited ruffle of her rich blue evening dress. It was one of the most daring dresses she had ever worn, cut so deeply at the neck that her breasts appeared to be spilling out of the basque. She had worn it with the intention of attracting as much attention as possible, and she was aware of many men’s eyes on her. Only one man in t
he room was not staring at her. He was looking at Sally, whose golden prettiness was accentuated by demure pink and white ruffles. Daniel, who looked much younger than she had remembered him, handsome, proper, starched and combed, and sitting up straight in his seat, staring at Sally as if . . . as if . . .
He had once looked at Lucy that way.
Noticing Lucy’s sudden intake of breath, Betta Hampton leaned closer and followed the direction of her eyes. “Why do you keep looking back and forth between that puppy-eyed Daniel Collier and that blond twit?” she whispered.
“I think there’s something between them,” Lucy said stiffly, fixing her eyes on the musicians at the front of the room.
“Oh.” Shrugging disinterestedly, Betta leaned the other way and began to talk to her husband.
Lucy, who had no husband there to talk to, heard not one note of music all through the rest of the evening as she sat and wondered. As the performance concluded and all agreed with pleasure that it had been a resounding success, wine was served and several toasts were made to the Thursday Circle. Lucy nodded and smiled with the others as the club was thanked repeatedly for sponsoring such a delightful evening. Before the crowd began to disperse, Mr. Hudson, Sally’s father, stood in front of them all with a glass of wine and a red, beaming face. Somehow knowing what would come next, Lucy stared disbelievingly at Sally, who had blushed and modestly turned her face downward.
“My friends,” Mr. Hudson said, gesturing expansively with his free hand, “I am certain that a more appropriate occasion could have been found for this announcement to be made . . . among a quieter and more private gathering, perhaps, as is the Concord way. After all, we know how to do things just as well as those cold-roast Bostonians.” The crowd chuckled as a whole, while a few Concordians laughed outright. Mr. Hudson set his glass down and held out a hand to Sally, who went up to the front of the room to join him. “However, the joy of my family, and most especially my Sally, is something we feel should be shared with everyone here tonight. I wish to announce the engagement of my daughter to a fine young man from one of the most respected families in Concord—a young man whose intelligence and responsibility have impressed me many times over—Daniel Collier. To Daniel and Sally.”