Swan's Way (15 page)

He leaned down and kissed her very softly.

“Don’t Ginna,” he whispered. “Don’t say another word right now. I was wrong to push you so hard last night. I caused your fainting spell. I don’t ever want to hurt you again. God, if anything happened to you, I don’t know what I’d do! So I want you to think about this some more. Think about last night and next week and next year. Think about what you
really
want to do with the rest of your life. See if I fit into the picture. I want you to be sure—as sure as I am.”

He kissed her again, before she could answer. It was a long, lazy kiss that made her dizzy and set her on fire. She wanted him—right here, right now. But he drew away, stood, and turned toward the door.

“Neal, don’t go,” she begged.

“Doctor’s orders. He said I could stay five minutes, no more.”

“Listen to me, Neal. I want you to meet me in the greenhouse at eleven forty-five.”

“Kirkwood said he wants you to stay in bed today.”

“Never mind what he says. This is important. I want to see Zee’s ghosts again. I have to find out about something—someone. And I need you with me. Will you come?”

Neal hesitated, then a slow smile lit his face. “It’ll be hell to pay, if the doc finds out.”

“He won’t find out. I’ll slip down the back way, the old servants’ stairs. You will meet me, won’t you?”

Neal nodded, still smiling. “And where do you intend to take me this time,
Miss Swan?
Back to New York or to some secret destination?”

“You know!”
she exclaimed.

“Bits and pieces. A lot of what happened in the greenhouse came back to me last night. I couldn’t sleep, I was so worried about you. Then I got to thinking what that old man told me about the fourth dimension. You know how it is, once you start thinking. Your mind wanders and things sort of start linking up and filling in the whole picture. I’m still missing some pieces, but I have an idea that you and I are sort of repeating history. Am I close?”

“I don’t know, Neal. I’m not sure what’s happening, either. But I do know we have to go back. I must find out what happened to Virginia Swan.”

He touched his lips and tossed the kiss her way. “The greenhouse, then, eleven forty-five.” He opened the door as if to leave, then turned back for a moment. “By the way, darlin’, I almost forgot. I
love you!”

After Neal left, Ginna hugged her pillow to her chest and rocked back and forth. For no reason she could fathom, she was crying suddenly, weeping rivers of melancholy, aching tears.

“Oh, Neal, my darling,” she whimpered, “what’s to become of us? What does all this mean?”

She couldn’t guess at the moment, but she vowed to do everything in her power to find out.

Neal was waiting when Ginna arrived at the greenhouse. She felt a little shaky, but the sight of him reassured her and gave her strength.

“I sent old Zee on an errand, so we’d have the place all to ourselves,” Neal said. Reaching out to take her hand, he drew her close and gave her a sound hug.

“Hm-m-m,” she sighed. “I needed you to hold me earlier. Why didn’t you?”

“Couldn’t trust myself with you in bed, looking so cool and tempting. You don’t know what you do to me. I wouldn’t have been able to stop with a hug, darlin’.”

“I wouldn’t have wanted you to stop, either,” she whispered, snuggling closer into his arms with a sigh.

“It’s almost time,” Neal said. “The ghosts should appear any minute now.”

“Neal, how much do you remember of what happened yesterday? Tell me quickly, before the sun touches the glass.”

“I guess I remember just about all of it I tried to deny it at first—tell myself it was some kind of hallucination or daydream. But the more I think about it, the more real it seems. You were Virginia Swan, weren’t you, Ginna? And I was Channing McNeal. But I still don’t understand. How did it happen? Why?”

“I’m not sure we’re meant to know the answers to those questions, Neal. But maybe we’ll understand, in time, if we explore further and learn more about Virginia and Channing and the world they lived in.”

Neal had set his watch alarm to go off at eleven minutes to noon. The small, repeating beeper sounded just then. They fell silent and turned toward the old glass plate negative of Virginia and Channing, waiting for the flash that would bring the pair of lovers back to life through them. The sun’s rays found their mark and, for an instant, the ghosts of that long-ago couple shimmered before Ginna and Neal, seeming almost alive.

Ginna squeezed Neal’s hand. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

“In the fourth dimension.”

Neal’s words were the last sound in the greenhouse, before time stopped at Swan’s Quarter.

Ginna soon found that she was mistaken about seeing Neal somewhere across time. When she found herself again in Virginia’s body, neither Neal nor Channing was anywhere to be seen. She was alone with another young woman in the rose garden at Swan’s Quarter. Both of them wore wide-brimmed straw bonnets that tied under their chins. They were dressed in pastel gingham gowns with yards-wide skirts. With gloved hands, they snipped colorful roses from the luxuriant bushes. A small black boy in knee pants and a ragged shirt followed along behind them, carrying a basket to hold their cut flowers.

“Now, don’t you dawdle, Teebo,” Virginia’s companion scolded gently when she turned to see the little servant chasing a butterfly, instead of tending to his duties.

Virginia laughed—a happy, carefree sound. “Let him play, Agnes. Goodness sakes, it won’t be long before he’s in the fields stripping tobacco.”

“He should learn to mind his business now, if he’s to make a good field hand.”

Agnes was a petite young woman with ebony hair and sleepy gray-green eyes. She had a creamy complexion that had never felt the kiss of the sun. Rodney’s fiancée had never climbed a tree, never ridden a horse, never done anything in her seventeen years that was less than perfectly ladylike. Often in the past, when Melora Swan had scolded her daughter for her tomboy ways, Agnes Willingham was the example Virginia’s mother held up to her to be emulated. Even so, the two girls had always been close friends, and soon they would share their wedding day. Soon they would become sisters.

Nearly a month had passed since the Swans’ return from New York. The days were rushing by, now. As Virginia and Agnes and their mothers prepared trousseaus and made wedding plans, each day seemed more exciting than the one before. To both girls, this time seemed the happiest of their lives, spinning away in a whirl of springtime parties and sunny, dream-filled days. The two young women ignored the men of the family, as they gathered in plantation libraries or in the meeting house in Winchester to talk heatedly of secession, or when they rode off to the fairgrounds to drill their companies, preparing them for war. War talk and wedding preparations didn’t mix. Besides, who would want to spoil such a lovely spring with thoughts of the coming conflict?

“What do you hear from Channing?’ Agnes asked, as she snipped a particularly beautiful blood-red rose.

“I received a letter only yesterday. Mr. Tiffany has sent my ring to Channing. He says it’s quite lovely, and he can hardly wait to see it on my finger.”

“Only
quite
lovely?” Agnes slipped off her gardening glove and held up her own engagement ring to catch the light The diamond flashed a rainbow of brilliance. Rodney had given it to her on Christmas Day.

“Channing wanted me to have a diamond, like yours. He was not entirely pleased that I chose an opal instead. For him to say it is ‘quite lovely’ must mean that it is indeed magnificent.”

“When will he be sending it to you?”

Virginia smiled. Agnes was at her most competitive this morning. She knew the answer to that question well enough, but Virginia replied just the same. “He won’t be sending it. He plans to give it to me when we go up to West Point for the commencement ceremonies next month.”

“La, dear, how can you abide the wait?”

“The wait will make the moment all the sweeter when it comes.”

“You mean if it comes.”

Virginia whipped around to stare at Agnes. “Whatever do you mean?”

A small smile of triumph curved Agnes’s thin lips. She always took pride in her ability to ruffle Virginia’s feathers. “My daddy says we’ll be at war before my Rodney and your Channing finish at the Academy. He says word could come any day—any
minute—that
the first shots have been fired. He is certain that’s all Governor Letcher is waiting for, before he insists that Virginia secede from the Union. When that happens, our men will ride home to marry us quickly, before they go into battle. Rodney said as much in the letter I received from him this very morning.”

Virginia kept cutting roses, her lips pursed tightly in annoyed silence. She refused to respond to Agnes’s needling. And she refused to allow herself to think about war. Surely the cooler heads in Washington would prevail and figure out a way to bring the states back together peacefully. Thinking of the alternative turned her heart to ice. She knew all too well Channing’s feelings on the subject and where his loyalties lay.

Both women were distracted from their roses and their thoughts, when a rider came charging up the lane past the swan pond at such a furious pace that the old cob and his mate flapped their wings in distress. The man was a total stranger-dirty, disheveled, and wild-eyed. His horse was lathered and muddy, stumbling with exhaustion.

“Who on earth could that be?” Agnes wondered, aloud.

“I have no idea.”

“Just look at the beggar, Virginia. Why, he’s riding right up to the front veranda! I’m surprised your mother would allow his sort at the company entrance. Surely, Miz Melora will have one of the servants tell him to go around to the back door.”

However, as the two young women watched, Colonel Swan himself burst out of the front door to greet the man, then ushered his filthy visitor right into the house.

“Well, my stars!” Agnes exclaimed. “Will you look at that?”

A dark cloud drifted over the bright sun just then, draining the riot of color from the rose garden and threatening a violent springtime storm.

“We had better go in, now,” Virginia said. The calm quiet of her voice betrayed none of the cold fear raging through her. Fear for the man she loved was uppermost in her mind. Agnes’s statement earlier about Governor John Letcher and his determination to join the Confederacy focused her thoughts on facts she had been trying desperately to ignore. She had an awful feeling that her whole world was about to come crashing down around her.

By the time Virginia and Agnes entered the front hallway, Jedediah Swan and his mysterious visitor were closeted together in the library, but the sounds of their excited voices boomed through the door.

“The Palmetto troops have fired on Fort Sumter, sir. A thirty-three hour seige. Three thousand shells fired from thirty guns and eighteen mortars. The officer in charge of the fort, Major Anderson, surrendered at two-thirty last Saturday afternoon. This is the start of it, sir. Governor Letcher is calling an emergency meeting in Richmond.”

“God’s teeth and eyeballs, I knew it would come!” the girls heard Colonel Swan shout, his voice quaking with excitement. “Our state won’t be long in joining the fray. I’ll leave for Richmond this minute. And, if I know my son Rodney, he’ll be on his way home from West Point, the minute he hears the news. My cavalry will be ready to ride when the first call comes.”

Virginia felt tears sting her eyes. The worst had come to pass. Now what? Would Channing come home with Rodney to join her father’s cavalry unit? Or was this the end—the end of
everything?

Neal panicked.

He had been holding Ginna’s hand when the flash filled the greenhouse. He had expected to be with her when the light faded. But once the dust settled, he found himself all alone. For a few confused moments, he thought he was still at Swan’s Quarter, still in the twentieth century. A quick check of himself, however, told him he was once more Channing McNeal, dressed in his trim cadet uniform, alone in his spartan room in the barracks at West Point. He was writing a letter to Virginia Swan.

For a time he sat very still, trying to get his bearings, trying to think where Ginna might be. He glanced down at the unfinished letter on his desk, at the pressed forsythia blossoms Channing had meant to send to his love.

Neal took up Channing’s pen to finish his letter to Virginia, but there was so much shouting and cheering from the quadrangle that he couldn’t hear himself think. Before he could dip the nib into the inkwell, Rodney Swan burst into the room, without so much as a knock.

“Channing, old man, how goes it?” The big, blond, burly Virginian was bursting with excitement, bristling with a hawklike verve.

“It goes less than well,” Channing answered, grimly.

“Haven’t you heard? The Virginia legislature has finally recognized the Confederacy. They’re sitting in Richmond right now, drawing up a proclamation of secession. Since the surrender of Fort Sumter, all hell’s broken loose. Superintendent Bowman has announced that any cadet who wants to can leave immediately for home. That’s us, old buddy!”

“You mean classes have been suspended?” Channing was not pleased with Rodney’s news. He had worked too long and hard for his degree and his commission in the United States Army to have it all snatched away at the eleventh hour by the rash act of a group of militiamen nearly a thousand miles to the south.

“There’ll still be classes, commencement, too, if there’s anyone left here to graduate. But, hell, who can study at a time like this? As for our commissions, the rank we get will be determined by the Confederacy now, not the U.S. Army. Rumor has it that officers are resigning right and left to answer the call of the South. Even Lieutenant Colonel Lee.”

“Robert E. Lee?” Channing was sure Rodney must be making this up. Everyone knew President Lincoln had offered Lee command of the Federal forces.

“That’s right. He turned old Lincoln down flat and resigned from the Army. There’s a copy of the letter Lee wrote to Winfield Scott posted in the chapel. I don’t remember all of it, but one line made his intentions quite clear.” Rodney paused, frowning, trying to recall Lee’s exact words. “He wrote, ‘Save in defense of my native state, I never desire again to draw my sword.’ So, he’s with us, for sure.”

“Colonel Lee?” Channing muttered, shaking his head, still trying to grasp this disturbing reality. He couldn’t believe it. The man was his idol, a former superintendent of the Military Academy, a hero of the Mexican War.

“And Lee’s not the only one joining up to fight for our Cause. Jubal Early, John Bell Hood, Joseph Wheeler, Benjamin Helm, Theophilus Holmes, John Magruder, Joseph E. Johnston—the list goes on and on. Even Samuel Jones, one of the instructors right here at the Point—but he’s a loyal Virginian from Powhatan County, so that’s no surprise. Of course, the West Pointers will get the choicest commands in the Confederate Army. Why, I’ll bet Pa will jump us both to majors right at the get-go, since we’re riding with him. Come on, McNeal! Quit mooning over that letter. You’ll be bedding Virginia before the mail can reach her. I’m packing now and heading home on the first stage out of here. Get your gear together. We’re going to war!”

Channing’s heart went cold and colder, as his listened to his boyhood friend talk excitedly of the coming conflict. The moment of decision had arrived, the moment he had dreaded for months.
Virginia!
Both the woman and the state were uppermost in his mind and his heart. He loved them both, which made this all the harder.