CHAPTER SEVEN
“W e’re all down there . Dig,” Victor ordered and handed Leona a spade.
The surrounding soldiers were digging. With growing dread, she set the sharp edge of the tool down into the soil and shoved the blade in.
The soft ground yielded. It wasn’t long before the shovel bit into bloody arms, legs, and torsos to reveal glistening muscle.
White bone glimmered in the twilight and shadow of the dream wood.
She cried out in horror and stopped digging.
“We’re down there, Leona,” Victor insisted. “You’ve got to get us out.”
Whimpering, she applied the spade again, pushing deeper, but with no result. She dropped the shovel. On her knees she cleared away the broken limbs and decapitated heads with their staring eyes. A moan started up, surrounding her.
Panic rose. They were waiting for her to dig them out, Jack, Ada, and Mary, and the soldiers of her regiment.
Who else lay suffocating beneath this mass of decaying flesh and bone?
Her parents? Daphne? A nearby shade watched her, swaying with grief, singing too low for her to hear in the rising wind.
Another lost but familiar voice, and she sobbed with relief.
“Grandmother! Help me! They’re down here, and I can’t—oh, God, help me!” The shade disappeared and with a renewed shock of grief, she knew no help was coming.
She dug on, frantic, sending bones and gobs of flesh and clots of blood flying. Cannons blasted away nearby. She’d run out of time, and the horses were screaming, screaming—
“Leona!” Gil shouted in her ear. He shook her hard and slapped her cheek lightly.
As she came more fully awake, she fended off a second slap, crying out, “Don’t!”
He sat beside her on the bed, fully dressed, his face filled with impatience.
“You were screaming again,” he accused her. “I called out to you, and shook you, and you wouldn’t awaken.”
“I frightened you, I’m sorry,” she said.
“Shrieking like a banshee.” He got off the bed and stood in front of the looking glass, adjusting cuffs and creases. “And you were calling out for Mary, the child you lost.”
Leona met the hazel eyes of his reflection. The child you lost....
“Yes.” Weariness turned her voice into a rough whisper. “It was terrible, Gil. They—” She stopped, unable to tell him, to give voice to the terror and sorrow echoing through her bones.
“Are you sure you’re strong enough for another child, Leona? Are you over her death?”
“What kind of question is that?” she cried. Her empty womb clenched like a fist. “I am a mother with no children!” A soldier without a war, a child with no parents.
He sat beside her again before and took her hands in his. He kissed the fingers of both hands. “I’m sorry. I know a baby will make you happy.”
“Please don’t go.”
She put his hand on her breast beneath the covers. A smile trembled on her lips. Please, make me forget. Desire in his eyes, he moved closer, loosening his collar and sliding under the quilt.
***
H ER HUSBAND LEFT SOON after their marital interlude.
Sleep hovered almost within reach, the quilts a soft cocoon.
The dream, however, lay too near at hand.
Before she let sleep drag her back to the evil wood, she shoved off the covers.
The cold air prickled her skin. She washed with rose-scented soap, thinking hard.
She feared every day she spent not pursuing Audrey or someone from that abandoned household that the gossip crept closer to Cranberry Street.
Leona pulled on fresh drawers and stockings and yesterday’s chemise.
She loosened the ties of her corset in anticipation of a day of walking.
She dressed in her comfortable traveling dress cut from dark green wool.
Trimmed in black piping, shining black buttons marched down the front.
Sometimes she missed the simplicity of men’s clothing.
Today she wanted armor—layers of cotton and wool to protect her.
She reached for the comb in the vanity. Peeking out from under a black-edged card lay a limp yellow rose.
Francine Creighton. Mrs. Creighton had pinned the bloom to her blouse against the whispers during Daphne’s wake.
Her friends had spoken to Leona as they always had.
What might Francine Creighton know? Surely, she had her own thoughts on Benedict, Daphne’s decline, and what had happened to the jewelry. Leona could use her advice.
Mrs. McCarthy arrived with a tray of coffee and toast since Leona had slept so late. She stayed to brush down the matching overcoat while Leona laced on low-heeled black boots, alternating sips of coffee with bites of toast, then took the tray away.
Leona pulled the comb through her hair in a hurry and plaited it.
Had to start over when her thoughts tangled her fingers.
Mrs. Creighton knew something. Leona didn’t want to lose a minute of the day and get her errands done before Gil’s return.
Another storm was coming. It’s outline lurked on the horizon.
She needed to keep Gil and their financial woes far away from it.
She couldn’t think of anything more important to add to her to-do list. A little black top hat dressed in green velvet ribbons went on her head.
A small notebook, pencil, a book of poems, and her change purse she dispersed into the pockets of her overcoat.
The unloaded derringer, another secret she kept from Gil, she slipped from its hiding place in her stocking drawer into the beaded reticule.
Early morning sun filled the day with light as she walked. Pulling on her gloves, she kept an eye out for a hackney. Her breath smoked in the cold air. Her body hummed with energy and anxiety. The cold, brisk air almost worked to lift her spirits from the twisting morass of her mind.
Trouble had not only knocked on their door but kicked it down and moved in.
The thought of turning their home into a boarding house sickened her.
With strangers in the house, there went her precious solitude.
Not to mention all the extra clean-up for Mrs. McCarthy and herself—why, they’d have to hire more staff or pay higher wages, so where was the financial sense in that?
Perhaps if there were a baby, Grandfather would help Gil out of their financial trouble.
She could almost imagine walking down this same road with a child on either side of her.
Perhaps taking them to school or to the penny candy store.
To the river to watch the boats. Her heart twisted.
Mary would have been almost three years old.
The memory of bitter laudanum clung to the back of her throat, and she forced her thoughts away.
She lifted her gaze to the pure blue of the sky hanging over Brooklyn.
With Gil, she’d almost found the love she thought she’d never find again.
A strong-minded, well-read man, handsome, popular, and intelligent.
He’d studied law and chemistry. Though the passion she and Jack once shared was sadly missing, Gil had appeared to be the antidote to her loneliness, to her lost purpose.
She’d needed something to build on but had hesitated to make any worthwhile decisions.
She’d hoarded paper, pens, and ink but her journals were blank until desperate need opened the floodgates of recollection.
But she hid all this from her gentle husband.
Was this not the problem between them? A good wife has not killed enemy soldiers.
Did not have the memory of bloodied, broken horses, their bellies ripped open by cannon balls.
Was he truly staying away for business, as he said, or away from her and her nightmares?
She tried to imagine the children for them to nurture through the dangers of childhood, the rigors of learning and schooling.
Children for her grandfather to delight in, to teach literature, agriculture, and transcendentalism, as he had with all of them.
Or did she only want a child to keep her husband near, to staunch the wounds of the past? Perhaps all these things were true.
To give her a reason to go on, she acknowledged, looking the devil in the face.
How many of them had not come back from the battlefield, had not survived, and yet lived on?
The walking wounded haunted the roads of cities and towns.
Scores of soldiers returned to their homes to take up their lives again and kept the horrors to themselves.
Leona slid on a slick patch of snow, and the derringer bumped her hip.
Her mind had wandered too far off course.
Before anything else, at least she had a clear purpose today.
To seek the truth behind the theft of Daphne’s jewels and the two missing women.
They’d left Leona standing alone in the footlights, center stage.
***
“G O AWAY.”
Johann, Mrs. Creighton’s butler, slammed the door in her face.
“For Heaven’s sake.” Leona stared at the closed door with hands on her hips. “What is this about?” She knocked again.
The door opened a crack. The butler thrust a folded piece of paper at her.
She took it, and he vanished behind the polished wood.
Leona read the page, her heart sickening.
Mrs. Creighton wouldn’t see her. Had turned her back on Leona.
Mrs. Creighton wrote that Johann had instructions to summon the police if she did not absent herself at once.
Leona hurried off the stoop and down the steps to the street, walking quickly away from the house.
Yesterday she’d snuck into Daphne’s house like a thief.
That damn Benedict Van Wyn must have told Mrs. Creighton about her visit.
Would all of Daphne’s friends slam their doors in her face now?
And how would their rejection affect Gil?
He worked night and day for a future of financial comfort for the family to come.
Their reputation in Brooklyn was everything—and the thief had stolen this, too.