Picture the Dead

“But that necklace has worth to me.”

“I apologize. Guess I’ve never been much of a gentleman when I needed to be.”

“You knew how I treasured it, you knew ” In a quick, choppy motion, Quinn’s hand cups my chin as his kiss lands hard upon my mouth.

“Oh.” My heart thumps with unladylike vigor. My desire if that’s what it is frightens me. I pull away.

“Wear the damn necklace if you like,” he says, his voice just above a whisper. “I didn’t mean to kiss you. But it was the only thing I could think to do, to make you be quiet.” He turns to go.

How can I think nothing of it when I am all afire? “Wait, Quinn. Wait.”

He doesn’t. I join him, my boots crunching along behind his as he forges the way. He hurries, but at one point he drags back the branch of an overhanging red maple so that I can duck beneath.

“You once spoke of defending the dead!” I call out. “What you couldn’t have known is that Will comes to me in his own defense. He craves my forgiveness. And I would forgive him, Quinn. We all need our peace in order to move on.”

Quinn glances over his shoulder, his eyes gleaming like a wolf’s. “Is this more bunk from your communing with that fraud, Geist? I’m all for forgiveness, if that’s where you’re coming out. But the less said of Camp Sumter, the better. The truth would destroy my parents.”

“You can’t shrug off everything that you don’t want to face.” Though I’m unsure if I am referring to Camp Sumter or our kiss of a moment ago.

He stops walking, his posture losing some of its starch as his fingers press the temple of his bad eye. I can almost feel it throb myself.

“We did fight at the Wilderness, back in May,” he supplies. “All of us Dearborn, too. Dearborn was brazen but not a bad sort. But we lost more than half our company in Virginia, and it changed us. We were in a strange country, with death and horror all around. Soldiers stole food and bullets, fought with their fists, with knives it wasn’t long that some men of the company began to make alliances. It’s one way to protect yourself. Watching one man’s back and hoping he’ll have yours. Will and Dearborn were thick. What happened after the two of them were captured I can’t say firsthand. We got separated and I continued on to Savannah.”

“Where you were wounded.”

“Yes.” He touches his eye reflexively. “Through runners, I learned Will and Dearborn had fallen in with another fellow, Charles Curtis.”

“That name is familiar. It was in the letter.”

“Curtis made the newspapers, too, though it wasn’t much reported it didn’t put us Yanks in so pretty a light. I have an article I can show you. Curtis spearheaded a gang of prisoners that called themselves Curtis’s Raiders. A brutal bunch with murder in their hearts. I heard of one Raider who killed his own brother for a few dollars. Hid the corpse in a ditch and slept on top to hide the bones. Honest prisoners fought Raiders every day a war inside a war till orders came in from a Confederate general to get it stopped.”

“You are telling me that…?”

“Yes, Jennie. Will was a Raider.”

“‘One broken neck, an example to others,’” I repeat the words of Will’s letter.

“Six broken necks,” Quinn corrects. “There was a trial in July. Where six men were hanged, including Curtis and Will. Somehow Dearborn paid off a jailer and escaped. Well, except they got him in the end.”

In my mind’s eye I see Will, steadfast in his military brass and buttons. The clean scent of Pears soap on his skin as he held me close and whispered his love, promising his heart and his safe return. My image is awash in light and hope and resists the shadow that is falling over it; that of a confused young man, ill prepared for the trials and darkness of war. Disenchanted, exhausted, witness to slaughter, and then a murderer himself. Did I ever know this Will? Do I sense him in the worried tug and rattle of my disturbed senses, as I try to press on without him?

Our conversation has drained us both. I sense that Quinn has retreated from me.

We walk until the roof of Pritchett House is visible beyond the trees. I hate the house on sight. Hate its monolithic walls and windows. If only I could have predicted what sorrows awaited me, I’d have fought like a dog before I passed through its doors.

“You were right, I should leave,” I tell him. “There’s nothing for me here.”

I can’t continue. Not one more step. But Quinn has stayed on my elbow.

“That’s not true,” he says, and the catch in his voice makes me look up. “I didn’t kiss you back there to hush you, Jennie. I kissed you to be heard. I’ve wanted you to leave here for selfish reasons. My brother didn’t deserve his death, but he didn’t deserve you either.”

Quinn’s hand catches my fingers, which are so cold that it is only a pressure. I pause a moment, but when I step forward he pulls me in so tight his arms near wrap double around the small of my back. He falls against my body, and my hands slip around his neck as his head sinks to find purchase on my shoulder. The weight of his unburdening nearly crushes me. “I’ll look after you now, Fleur,” he whispers. “I promise. I will. If you think you can look after me?”

His flinted face is a map I’ve known since childhood. And yet my eyes have never traveled it so intently. Toby and I always thought that it was Quinn who was the cold one, holding himself apart from us. We judged him swiftly, as children do, without wisdom or compassion. Now I stare at this young man who has endured so much and has asked so little. Quinn’s eyes are incandescent, guarded but hopeful.

“Of course I will, Quinn,” I tell him. “You’re all I have.”

23.

We’d each left the house that morning alone, weighted by our private afflictions. Fingers laced and feet in step, we return to Pritchett House together. We have made a promise to each other, and our bond needs to be as strong as the stone and mortar that holds us here.

In a first act of faith, Quinn begins to collapse his smokescreens for me. He is relieved to show me the few articles on the Raiders that he has folded into brittle squares and slipped into the pages of his books. I secret one away for my scrapbook before advising him what to do with the rest.

“Dispose of these,” I advise, and though I sense he cannot, I do have his ear on many other aspects of the household.

“You should take Mrs. Sullivan’s key ring” is my first practical suggestion. “As long as she guards our cellar and larder, it is difficult to take inventory.”

“That seems wise.” And not a day later he presents me with the keys like a waggling retriever who has fetched a stick. It is not his only gift to me. One day I find a box of chocolate-covered almonds in my knitting basket. The next day it’s a silky hair ribbon on my dresser. On my pillow that night is a poem clipped from the Atlantic Monthly, with a nosegay. Such devoted attentions and such a wealth of consideration after so little are an unbridled pleasure.

Still, the moments I wait for are not made of flowers and chocolates but our stolen, heated moments in the hall and at the banister, behind the library door, and once in the scullery, when Quinn sweeps me up so that only the tips of my toes touch the ground. His mouth hungry on mine as if seeking something extra, hidden, and secret, past my lips, my name whispered like some kind of elixir. What I had thought was arrogance I now know to be nothing but reserve, and not even much of that anymore.

“You won’t leave me, will you, Fleur?” He often speaks this refrain into my ear as he presses against me.

“Never,” I whisper back, so sure in my answer that I don’t know why he continues to doubt and to ask.

I am no longer a spy. Toby’s ghostly instructions were nothing but my own childish whims. I don’t even care when Mavis shyly reports that she saw us kissing in the corridor.

“See? You’ll be the Missus of the house yet, just as I always said,” she declares. “Though I’m sorry to lose