“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.