Beauty From Ashes (24 page)

I should be only excited, Anne told herself, tucking a bed blanket around her legs and feet as she sat down at a small hotel desk

to make a diary entry, her first since 313 she’d said good-bye to the Mackays at the railroad depot in Savannah day before yesterday. Anne had forgotten how many years ago she’d obeyed her mother, Rebecca Couper, and began trying to remember to keep her diary current. Mama had been dead for nearly six years, but even at age fifty-four Anne still felt clear in her conscience when obeying her. Wherever she happened to be staying since forced to leave her own beloved cottage at Lawrence on St. Simons Island, she had packed her diary as regularly as she’d packed nightclothes.

She smiled. Only those times when circumstances made it impossible for Eve to go with her had Anne packed anything. Eve. How had Eve reacted to her letter written from Savannah back in January? In it she tried to explain to Eve why she had gone directly from her visit to Frances Anne at the Wylly home on St. Simons to Savannah without a return trip to Hopeton, where Eve fidgeted through her days, unhappy, Anne was sure, because she didn’t know exactly where her mistress was or with whom or

why.

The blanket felt good, helping to hold some body warmth around her against the chill of the up-country, early March day just beginning to break. It was still dark enough to need the leaping flame of a brass two-candle stand on the tiny desk. She dipped a quill and began to write.

Wednesday, 12 March 1851

In a peculiar state of goose bumps from the dry, cold, up-country spring weather and almost total uncertainty in my own life, I am trying to make some sense here about what might be about to happen to me. The room I occupy at the Howard House on Marietta’s city Square is comfortable, except that there seems to be no servant in sight to build up the fire, and I would give more money than I have for a cup of hot coffee. One thing is certain: If, by the wildest chance I should decide to try to make a new life for my children and me here in the up-country, I will not—I could not—face any of it without Eve beside me.

In the letter written to Eve in January, I mentioned that she could come with John Couper,

Selina, and Fanny if I decide 315 to settle in Marietta. Knowing Eve, I think she has clamped on to that mere suggestion. Even I do not know what I will decide to do, and yet I sit waiting for the lifting of my spirits all the way up here, so far from all I ever held dear, simply because I know that the sun will rise in Marietta, too. I will know it is rising only because its light will push around the winter curtains covering this one window to the outside. I’m away from the sunrise because the Howard House is on the northwest side of the Square. What nonsense I write! Thank God, Pete will be in that other bed, empty beside mine in this strange room, tomorrow when I awake. With Pete will come activity, at least. My tall, determined, red-haired daughter will generate activity. It is her nature. Like her blessed father, she will charm strangers for me, will lay out a thousand plans for my approval, will laugh if I need laughter, will press me steadily but seldom too much. Pete will help. Oh, yes, Pete will help me find out why I’m really here. But as with her sweet father, I will stay alert, because she is as persuasive as John ever thought of being. One thing

I know: Pete and the landlady here at the Howard House, Mrs. Dix Fletcher—Louisa, I believe she said her name is—will certainly take to each other. Both know what they think and neither is afraid to express it, with no mincing of words. Did I really like Louisa Fletcher when I spoke briefly with her as she greeted me and showed me to this room yesterday? Yes. I did like her. As tired as I was from all those hours trying to rest on hard, unrelenting train seats, I remember that I did not want her to leave me in this room alone. Only courtesy and good manners made it possible for me to remember how busy she must be in her efforts to run a bustling hotel. I vowed then, and I repeat now, that I will not resemble those cantankerous guests who keep her longing for the day of their departure. Louisa Fletcher reminds me of someone, and I recall that I did not find it at all difficult to put myself in her place, to imagine the hectic pace of her life, and to wonder if she truly enjoys being a landlady in such a popular place. Or does she love her husband, Mr. Dix Fletcher, enough to endure for his sake? At any rate, she vows she will have Pete and me as her guests for dinner tomorrow here in the

hotel dining room and will find time to show us 317 around what appeared last evening to be a prosperous and rather charming little village. I believe she said she and Mr. Fletcher came south from Massachusetts and that when his business burned in Savannah, they started a journey to St. Louis but got no farther than Marietta. Both, as she put it, were captivated by the village and had no trouble agreeing that her husband would accept the position as manager of the Howard House. I must say I rather enjoy her vitality, her Northern way of speaking in clipped accents, and find her altogether pleasing. She is, to say the least, stimulating, and in my fearfully numb, uncertain state of mind, I need stimulation.

I missed John so desperately through last night! I do long to find an end to the pain of grieving, the lostness, the odd, continuing fear of it. I so want to be a new person for the children. Could new surroundings accomplish that? Could they— possibly? Frances Anne vows that someday I will be able to enjoy my memories of John. I have at times. At rare times I have truly enjoyed remembering, but more often the enjoyment dissolves into tears. Somehow, by some means, that must stop.

Mrs. Fletcher does remind me of—someone. I wonder who?

A polite knock at her hotel room door about 8 a.m. so startled Anne that when she rushed to answer, a blob of ink waited to be wiped from the surface of the cluttered desk. Streaks of clear, bright sunlight had just begun to lie in yellow shafts across the wide board floor of the room—a sunrise she’d scarcely noticed, so lost in thought had she been since writing the last line in her diary.

The Wilders, John Couper’s friends with whom Pete had been staying in Marietta, lived on the outskirts of the village, so the early-morning knock could not have been Pete’s. Anyway, she thought as she hurried across the room, Pete would never knock so quietly. But when Anne opened the door, there stood both Pete and the Howard House landlady, Louisa Fletcher.

“Surprise, Mama!” Pete said, beaming, rushing to hug her. “This nice lady likes you so much, she insisted on bringing me up to our room personally. I might have known you’d already begun to make friends in Marietta.”

“Good morning, Mrs. Fraser,” 319 Louisa Fletcher said brightly in her Northern way. “I find not only you likable, but your daughter Rebecca as well. You didn’t give me any warning about her charm. Or her glorious red hair! May we come in? I do apologize that no one has been here yet to bring coffee or to tidy your room.” She swept her wide forehead with the back of one hand in a rather dramatic gesture. “No one—no one can imagine what a burden it is trying to keep these servants in line and serving our guests in a manner they deserve.” Mrs. Fletcher’s laugh was contagious. “At least some guests deserve superior service and surely you’re one of them. And now, you’re two. I promise to see that neither of you wants for anything while you’re in town gracing the Howard House with your presence.”

“Forgive my lack of manners, Mrs. Fletcher, and do follow my somewhat willful daughter right on in.”

Pete, as though she’d already been living there, offered their landlady one of the two small armchairs in the boxlike room, her mother the other, then took the straight desk chair where Anne had been

sitting. “Are you sure you were all right making the long train trip from Savannah alone, Mama?”

“Don’t I look all right, Pete?”

“Don’t be shocked, Mrs. Fletcher,” Pete laughed. “Everyone who knows me well calls me Pete. I loved my grandmama, but I don’t like her name, Rebecca, so I’m glad for Pete. It still surprises me though, Mama, that my gallant brother allowed you to come by yourself on the train. I’d better get a letter off to him right away before he has a case of apoplexy from worry.”

As though Pete had said nothing, Anne turned to Louisa Fletcher. “Too many apologies can be tiresome, I know, Mrs. Fletcher, but I am sorry you’ve caught me in my oldest but warmest robe. I—I had some writing to do and haven’t bathed or dressed yet.”

“Forget it, Mrs. Fraser,” she said, getting quickly to her feet. “I’m leaving at once so you and”—she gave Pete a glowing smile—“Pete can chatter to your heart’s content while I see to the very best the Howard House has to offer in breakfast for you both.”

“I’ve eaten at the Wilders’,” 321 Pete said, “but, of course, I’ll sit with my mother while she has breakfast. I take it you were all right making that long train ride by yourself, Mama,” she added pointedly, perched ramrod straight on the small wooden chair.

“Your mother didn’t arrive alone,” Louisa Fletcher offered. “She came with one of Marietta’s most prominent and richest gentlemen, Mr. Edward Denmead. It seems he’d been in Savannah purchasing materials for the splendid new mansion he’s building at the edge of town. The Denmeads are at least indirectly responsible for our living in Marietta, as I’m sure you know, Mrs. Fraser.”

“Mr. Denmead did tell me at length of the visit he and his wife made to Savannah the time they first heard your golden singing voice, Mrs. Fletcher. I believe he said he’d invited you to sing at your convenience to the Episcopal congregation here. I’m eager to hear you myself. So you see, Miss Pete, your brother put me on the train with a most distinguished gentleman as my escort.” Turning again to their unusual landlady, Anne

added, “I must say, Mrs. Fletcher, your village of Marietta has no more convincing booster than Mr. Denmead!”

“If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never forget the first tour of the town given my husband and me by the Denmeads when first we stopped as guests here at the Howard House, met at their insistence by both Mr. and Mrs. Denmead.” She moved toward the door. “But for now, I am leaving the two of you alone and I promise you a superior breakfast. Then, I intend to declare two free hours to show the two of you around Marietta myself.”

With Pete’s energetic assistance and four pitchers of both cold and scalding water Louisa Fletcher sent up, Anne bathed and dressed to the compliments of her seemingly lighthearted daughter.

“Why wouldn’t I be lighthearted?” Pete wanted to know. “Who else is as sure of as many things as I am and who else has such a talented little sister as Fanny, your seamstress? Mama, you look utterly charming in that black walking dress! How did Fanny know that the very latest

style is no collar at all?” 323

“We do see New York and Washington papers down on the coast, you know,” Anne snapped. “I’m absolutely starving for breakfast, but before we go down to the dining room, you have to tell me what it is you’re so sure of. You’re being oddly mysterious. Have you already made up your mind about something you haven’t even told me?”

“Maybe I have and maybe I haven’t. Stand over closer to the door so I can get a good look at you. What you need with that nice black woolen dress is a shoulder cape—black velvet. It’ll be good, won’t it, when you can stop wearing mourning clothes? Grandpapa’s been gone a whole year. Fanny could start on a few more cheerful dresses for you now, couldn’t she? Grandpapa Couper will never be gone from our hearts, but we’re beginning a whole new life, Mama, and in some pretty colors there won’t be a more attractive woman in Marietta than you can still be.”

Anne stood shaking her head, unable not to smile at her talkative, impetuous daughter, even though she hated being pushed almost more

than anything. “Fanny already has paper patterns ordered from New York for the time when I can wear colors again, and it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that she and the Mackay sisters have already decided exactly which colors I should try to find. That is, if I think my old dresses aren’t good enough for visiting awhile in Marietta.”

Pete lifted an eyebrow. “Visiting? I know right now we’re only visiting, but as good and helpful as Fanny is, we owe it to her to live here where everything from the air to the drinking water is so healthy. I haven’t found a house yet, but we will and you’re going to feel like a new woman, too. I guarantee it!”

“You guarantee it? And just how do you do that, Rebecca?”

Pete grinned her most impish John-grin. “Oops. I went a little too far, didn’t I? But the word guarantee does have a good ring to it.”

“What has a better ring to me is— breakfast. Then, as you heard, my new friend, our landlady, Mrs. Fletcher, has offered to show us as much of Marietta as she has time for today. If you’ll look through the few things hanging on that wall hook over there, you’ll find a splendid new

short cape Fanny just finished before I 325 left Savannah. And if you’ll notice, it is black velvet. Will you slip it around my shoulders, please?”

Pete’s happy eagerness when something pleased her was as unmistakable as her somewhat firm lectures. Anne gave her a big smile and a hug and thanked her warmly before they left the hotel room to head arm in arm downstairs for breakfast.

After a delicious meal of coffee, biscuits, eggs, and ham, its serving supervised by Louisa Fletcher herself, Pete followed her mother and Mrs. Fletcher out the front door of the Howard House into the bright spring sunshine flooding the Square, already bustling with people. There were well-dressed ladies inspecting shop displays, servants leading children, horse-drawn carts and buggies, and storekeepers tidying up the board sidewalk for the day’s business. Pete had ridden more than once around the Square with John Couper’s friend Mrs. Wilder, so observed even more than Louisa Fletcher pointed out as she led them along the south side of the Square. Pete

even read aloud some of the grocery store signs— C. C. Bostwick, Stephen M. Satterfield, and up ahead on the southwest corner of the Square, Edge and Wright, selling both dry goods and groceries. One large sign caught her eye and brought a smile: General E. R. Mill’s Store, which boasted not only a varied assortment of foods but “Cherry Bounce, Champagne, best London Porter, Claret, Port, Cognac 1834, old Bourbon XXX, Whiskey SUITABLE FOR TABLE USE AND NOT BAD TO TAKE BETWEEN MEALS.” Mama and Louisa Fletcher were talking, so Pete, a step or two behind them, said nothing but hoped Mama had seen the sign too. Every smile on her mother’s face these days was somehow a small triumph for Pete.