Veiled in Smoke Page 2

  Mr. Pierce looked at Meg. “How do you do?”

  Meg sent him a smile while appraising him from an artist’s perspective, noting the exact shade of blue in his eyes, the proportions of his lean frame, the sun’s glints in his hair, and his tapered fingers, one stained with ink. “My sister can help you find whatever you want. Or whomever, as the case may be. David Copperfield, perhaps? Or the elusive Moby Dick?”

  A corner of his mouth turned up. He smoothed a hand over the two cowlicks at the back of his head. “Stephen Townsend, if you please. If Miss Sylvie didn’t mention it, I’m doing an article on Chicago’s war heroes, and I’d love to record your father’s experiences.”

  “An article.” Swallowing the surprise edging her tone, Meg set down her brush. Her apple-green muslin skirt whispered as she stepped closer. “Now? Six years after the war’s end?”

  “Ten years after the war’s beginning. A fine time for reflection, don’t you think?”

  What a luxury that some people might wait that long to consider the war’s toll, when she and Sylvie could not get away from it. “It was ten years in April. You’re a bit late, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I’ve been featuring our veterans on a regular basis since then.” Mr. Pierce gave her a look as if to say she would know this if she read the newspaper. “I’m merely continuing the series.”

  Hiram joined them, wiry eyebrows drawn together. “Doing a story on the war, young man? Why, if I can be of service, I’d be most willing. I served as a prison guard at Camp Douglas in the south part of town. I remember it well.”

  That much was true. It was anything after the war that seemed to slip Hiram’s recollection more and more of late.

  While the two men chatted, Meg pulled Sylvie toward the counter. On it sat their mother’s copy of Little Women, which Sylvie must have been reading. Not only did it contain their mother’s notes in the margins, but it also held the photograph of their father when he enlisted. The precious image showed Stephen as he had been before the war had altered him. He didn’t want to see it, but Meg and Sylvie wouldn’t part with it for anything.

  Meg glanced at the reporter before refocusing on her sister. “Exactly what have you arranged?”

  “I see no harm in it. Mr. Pierce was gathering stories at the Soldiers’ Home last week when I was there dropping off some books. When he learned about Father, he asked to interview him, and I agreed.”

  “For a newspaper article,” Meg said. “He barely talks to us about the war. You suppose he’ll talk to a stranger?”

  “He might.” Sylvie straightened the cameo at her collar. “I want Chicago to know of Father’s sacrifices on their behalf. On the country’s behalf. Look out there.” She gestured to the window. “All those people going about their business like nothing ever happened. This city got rich off the war—filthy rich—while soldiers gave life or limb, or came home broken beyond repair.”

  Meg’s throat cinched tight. “Father can heal. He just needs time and patience and love.” This was her mother’s conviction, bequeathed to Meg before she died. She only hoped her voice sounded as confident as her words.

  Sylvie looked away. “He’s had time and love and patience. But perhaps he could do with a bit more respect as well. And it could help the store. We need the business. We may draw new customers from other parts of the city who wish to patronize a veteran-owned shop. A newspaper article is our best chance to reach them.”

  “You want to exploit our father for gain?”

  “Pardon me.” Mr. Pierce inserted himself into their argument, Hiram still at his side. “I do not exploit.”

  “Our father—” Meg stopped before she could say that he was different from the average veteran. That he was easy to exploit, that children already taunted him. They threw bread crusts and apple cores over the Townsends’ backyard fence just to laugh as Stephen scrambled to gather them up. Lifting her chin, she tried again. “Our father survived Andersonville.”

  “Exactly why his story should be shared.”

  Hiram pounded his walking stick on the floor. “Quite right! My dear girls, your father is a grown man. Let us leave the question to him, eh? Allow him the dignity of making his own decision.”

  The ridge between Sylvie’s eyes smoothed away. “I’ll mind the store.”

  Conceding, Meg turned her back on the unfinished painting and led the men to the work in progress she could not seem to improve.

  It was a lie, Meg had realized years ago, that the end of the war meant the end of suffering. At the age of seventeen, she’d linked arms with Sylvie and their mother on the train platform, waiting for her father’s return. Steam engines hissed, whistles blasted, crowds tramped across the soot-filmed floor. Nearly dizzy with anticipation, she had craned her neck, searching form and face. But the stranger who finally shuffled toward them had borne no resemblance to Stephen Townsend. Emaciated, covered with scabs, breath that reeked of illness. Even his voice was thin. Only the eyes belonged to the man they remembered, but those looked both haunted and hunted.

  That night at home, rather than resuming his chair at the head of the table, he had left it empty, choosing to sit elsewhere. Pointing to the vacant spot Meg had waited four years for him to fill, he’d said, “The man who left is not the one who came home. I’m sorry. I am a shock to you. I’m a shock to myself.”

  Meg wondered if Stephen was a shock to Nathaniel Pierce as well. Though no longer stamped and scored by starvation, her father remained thin, his beard uncut, his eyes possessed of a fierce alertness. He squatted on the far side of the yard, the knees of his trousers threadbare to a shine though other pairs filled his closet. A canteen hung at his hip. He held up a hand to halt their approach, then pointed to the reason.

  Beneath a naked linden tree, a stray dog devoured the blackberry pie Meg had brought home from the bakery last night. Scattered in a drift of dead leaves were the crumbs of what she could only guess had been a loaf of bread.

  Meg watched helplessly, Hiram and Mr. Pierce flanking her. At last the floppy-eared stray finished his feast and scampered through the gap in the wooden fence. The air was warm as summer and dry as dust, for they’d had less than an inch of rain since July.

  “Father.” She made her way to him, carefully stepping over and around the marks he’d made on the ground, while Hiram stood back with Mr. Pierce. “The pie and bread were for us,” she whispered.

  “He was hungry. No man or beast should know hunger. If a creature comes asking for a bite to eat and it’s in my power to give it, I’ll do it. Every time.”

  She nodded, choosing to see the compassion and kindness in the act, though she wondered if the reporter would interpret it that way.

  Stephen ran a hand down his brown beard, grizzled with coarse grey strands though he was only forty-five. “Who does Hiram have with him?”

  “His name is Mr. Nathaniel Pierce, and he’s with the Tribune. Sylvie met him at the Soldiers’ Home. He’d like to hear about your experiences during the war for a series of articles he’s writing on Chicago’s veterans. I’ll introduce you, if you’d like.” Her voice tilted up in question at the end.

  “He wants information?” Stephen squinted across the grassless yard. At length, he said, “Let’s see what he’s about.” With strides ungainly from perpetual ache in his joints, he led the way to the waiting men.

  “Stephen!” Hiram shook her father’s hand. “This young fellow wants to hear what you have to say about Andersonville. Whatever you want the city to know, he says he’ll print it in that newspaper of his.”

  “It would be a privilege, sir.” Mr. Pierce extended his hand.

  Stephen turned away from it, pulling Hiram aside.

  Mr. Pierce stepped back to allow them more privacy. Meg offered him an apologetic half smile. On the third floor, a window slid open, and she imagined the Spencers were watching and listening to everything.

  “Who is this man, really?” Stephen whispered to Hiram. “What do we know about him?”

>   Hiram clasped Stephen’s arm and held firm. “He’s a reporter, friend. He merely wants to listen to you.”

  God bless Hiram Sloane. He could talk Stephen down from his suspicions in ways she couldn’t, for her father considered her naïve. Perhaps if Meg had been born a son rather than a daughter, he would heed her insights. If she’d been a son, she would have gone to war herself and fought alongside him. Instead, she was the daughter who needed extra time and attention during her childhood, and he still deemed her delicate. If what he meant by that was fragile, he was wrong.

  “It is up to you, of course,” Hiram added. “But I trust him. He’d like to hear whatever you want to tell him. Some might consider that a gift indeed.” Hiram didn’t know that he was that gift to Stephen every time he came to visit, listening to the same stories over and over again with the same rapt attention, as though it were his first time hearing them. In Hiram’s mind, it was.

  Mr. Pierce shifted his weight, placed his hat over his heart. “I sincerely would be honored to hear and explain to our readers your sacrifices. We are all of us in your debt.”

  Stephen appraised him. “You served? Or were you not old enough to enlist?”

  A bit of color rode the reporter’s cheekbones. “I was twenty at the start of the war. Old enough to stay here and raise my three young stepsiblings.”

  Meg stifled her surprise. If he wasn’t a veteran himself, how could he possibly understand and represent a man like her father? “Maybe this isn’t a good idea after all. Thank you for your time.” She touched Mr. Pierce’s elbow, signaling that he should leave.

  Stephen reached out to stay them, dirt beneath his fingernails. “Your parents?”

  “Cholera, ’fifty-nine. Took my mother, stepfather, and many neighbors.”

  Hiram clucked his tongue. “And you were left to tend the children.”

  “The least I can do now,” Mr. Pierce forged ahead, “is to record stories like yours. As you are a bookstore owner, surely we can agree on the importance of not letting history disappear. We have much to learn from you, sir.”

  Stephen hooked a thumb behind the strap of his canteen and angled toward the back of the house as though considering. “Far be it from me to fault a man for caring for his own.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll talk.”

  “Good. I’m grateful.” A subdued smile warmed Mr. Pierce’s face. Reseating his hat, he asked if there was some other place Stephen wanted to go to conduct the interview.

  “Here’s fine,” Stephen replied. “Here’s fitting.”

  He spread his arms and spun in a slow circle, dust clouding the tops of his boots. Meg followed Mr. Pierce’s gaze and saw with his eyes what she had grown accustomed to during the last six years.

  All the grass had been pulled up. In a large rectangle that encompassed nearly the entire yard, sticks whittled to pointed ends were driven into the ground. Inside that barrier was another perimeter made up of the same. Small pebbles spelled the words Dead Line inside the second rectangle. Three straight lines cut through the dirt, marked Market Street, Water Street, and South Street. Cutting across the width of the southern half of the rectangle was a deep groove Stephen had carved out with his knife. Seeing that it was dry, he crouched and poured water from his canteen into the cavity. Stockade Creek read the pebbles alongside its bank. Inside the Dead Line, uncounted scraps of fabric were nailed into the hard-packed ground to represent makeshift tents.

  Rising again, Stephen took a drink from his canteen. “Welcome to Andersonville.”

  Sorrow clamped Meg’s chest, screwing tighter with each breath. This model he’d made and faithfully maintained had been part of her landscape for so long that she had learned to bury its significance. After all these years, and in a city that had grown fat with profit from the war, her father still wasn’t free of the prison that had shattered him.

  Chapter Two

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1871

  Sylvie rarely won an argument with Meg. She didn’t even like to disagree with her, preferring all the conflict in her life to be contained within the pages of books, where it was resolved by the last chapter, or in neat columns of numbers, which could be reconciled with a little careful figuring. So the fact that Meg had conceded to Mr. Pierce featuring Stephen in the newspaper was made sweeter still by the article in the Sunday morning issue of the Tribune. It was just as respectful as she’d prayed it would be.

  If she was honest, however, the triumph she felt was tempered by the surprises the article contained. Sylvie knew Andersonville had held as many as twelve thousand prisoners in an open stockade. But she’d had no idea that to stave away mental decline, her father had organized an oratorical society among several inmates, wherein they debated all manner of lofty topics, starving though they were.

  She’d had no idea that “one man would kill another over a wash pail or a scrap of canvas for shade,” as her father was quoted in the article. “I reached out to stop such a rogue from taking a tin cup from a fevered man, and he broke my arm with his club. It was easy enough to do. We were all brittle. Bones like spun sugar.”

  Sylvie was only thirteen when her father had been captured. The two times he’d written home after that, he had said he was being treated well.

  Lies.

  She’d known so little about his experience. She knew so little about him now. When she’d asked him this morning before church if he wanted to read the article, he’d said he had no need to, since he had lived it once and then again in his dreams for good measure.

  “You should know Mr. Pierce did right by you,” she told him. “Even I learned some things. Things you might have told us yourself.”

  He’d dipped his chin, and that was that. A line from Little Women scrolled through Sylvie’s mind. “We haven’t got Father, and shall not have him for a long time.”

  Now Sylvie sat beside Meg in the landau carriage Hiram had sent to fetch the Townsends for dinner at his house, regarding the complicated man across from her.

  Stephen’s long fingers knotted together on his lap, then gripped the edge of the leather seat, knuckles brightening as he craned his neck to take in all he could as they trundled south on Clark Street, the river to the west and Lake Michigan to the east, yet neither close enough to glimpse. Always, always, he was watching.

  Ironically, he didn’t see Sylvie.

  She shouldn’t mind. He wasn’t well. But even when he had been, he’d devoted far more time to Meg than he ever had to Sylvie.

  Something like resentment had burrowed deep inside her, though it shamed her to admit that even to herself, especially after reading the Tribune article. But these days, Stephen might spend all day repairing the little fence he’d built around his replica of Andersonville, Meg might spend hours with her paints, and Sylvie spent herself studying ledgers and receipts and ways to stay afloat, though she was the youngest in the family.

  An irrelevant point, and selfish. At twenty-one, she was old enough to manage a household and business. By this time, she had just hoped it would be her own.

  She shook her head to loose the thought. Meg didn’t complain about encroaching spinsterhood, so neither would she. There was more—far more—to life than courting and proposals. Which was well indeed, since no man had yet proven brave enough to seek Stephen’s approval.

  Sylvie had filled her head with too much Jane Austen, that was all. What she needed was more of the Brontë sisters, or nearly anything by Charles Dickens.

  A sigh escaped her, and Meg sent her a smile. “You seem overtired lately.”

  Sylvie couldn’t deny it. “I hope there’s coffee at Hiram’s table.”

  “That and more.” Meg brightened. “Did he tell you his nephew has come to stay with him? A fine young man, if even half of what Hiram says is true. He’ll be dining with us today. He’s in Chicago studying law.”

  “Then perhaps the conversation will be as stimulating as the coffee.” At the very least, Sylvie hoped their topics of conversation would vary from the usual. A
nything different would be welcome.

  His toe tapping the carriage floor, Stephen snapped his pocket watch open and shut, barely looking at its face. He didn’t handle new people well, but for a relative of Hiram’s, surely he’d make an effort.

  The wheels beneath her seat rumbled over the tarred seams between the pine blocks paving the street. Lampposts and public drinking fountains passed by at intervals, until Eli Washington steered the horses onto Prairie Avenue. From both sides, limbs arched to meet each other over the middle of the street. In early summer, it formed a ruffling green canopy of shade. Now, the bare branches fractured the sky.

  Wrought-iron fences enclosed boxwood hedges and parched gardens where hydrangeas nodded their dried, bronze-colored blooms. Front porch steps were wide and tall, flanked by sculpted lions or topiary evergreens in stone pots. The stately houses in this neighborhood fairly bristled with chimneys, turrets, and cupolas.

  The carriage slowed to a stop in a horseshoe drive. Hiram’s limestone residence boasted a tower to the left of a white-columned porch, ornamented hoods over the windows, double front doors, and a mansard roof as a dignified crown and functional third story over it all. Hiram had done well in the lumber trade before selling his half of the business to his partner upon retiring.

  “Watch your step, Miss Margaret.” With a large-knuckled hand, Eli helped Meg and then Sylvie from the carriage, while Stephen climbed out after them.

  “Eli,” Sylvie said, “do you suppose Hiram is . . . expecting us?”

  It was a standing tradition to share the noon meal with Hiram on the first Sunday of the month, but he was losing his ability to keep track of the days. And last month they’d had to skip it, due to his having the grippe.

  Eli smiled, pushing creases deep into his ebony face. “We all—Mr. Sloane’s staff and I—been doing our best to see that he knows you’re coming. Honest to goodness truth? We look forward to having you folks over as much as he does. It gives Cook and Miss Dressler all manner of purpose as they plan for it.”