An Acquaintance with Darkness - Ann Rinaldi [46]
I picked up Puss-in-Boots, who slept with me now, and went with Addie. I was annoyed that she'd interrupted my dream. Daddy's presence had been very strong in it.
"There," she said, pointing out a window that overlooked the garden.
I looked. It was a moon-flooded night and I could see that Marietta's flowers were all in bloom. I also saw two lanterns, a horse drawing a carriage, and three figures inside the carriage.
Uncle Valentine, Robert, and Marietta.
The neigh I'd heard in my dream was from the horse pulling the carriage into the yard. It came to a halt in front of Uncle Valentine's stone shed.
"There," Addie was saying, "I tol' you."
"Told me what? What are they doing?"
She snorted. "Tha's for me to know," she said. "An'for you to find out."
"How am I supposed to find out?"
"You go inna that shed and look. That's how! They never home inna afternoon. Always out on biz-ness. If'n I could do it, me a half-drunk, no-'count slave woman, so could you."
"You've been in the shed?"
"Why you thinks he locks me up days? 'Cause I went outside coupla times. Wanted one o' them flowers that girl grows. All day long they hang down like bells at rest. At dusk they turn right up to the sky."
"The yucca flower," I said.
She nodded. "Sail I wanted. It wuz near the shed. I looked inna window. An' saw."
"Saw what?"
"You make it your biz-ness to find out, girl. And when you do, you let old Addie go. Like you promised."
I peered out the window. Uncle Valentine and Robert were unloading the wagon, taking some barrels out, lifting them down from the wagon, then rolling them into the shed. Marietta held the lantern. "Barrels," I whispered. I felt relieved. Not coffins. Barrels. "He does experiments."
"If'n that's what you wanna call it."
We watched in silence for a few more moments. Then I turned around, but Addie was gone. I picked up Puss-in-Boots and went back to bed, wondering if this was part of my dream. And wondering at the same time how I could make it my biz-ness to find out what was in the shed.
The next day was the nineteenth. The day of Washington's own funeral services for President Lincoln before his body started on that fourteen-day and sixteen-hundred-mile trip so they could finally lay him to rest in Springfield, Illinois.
A day of marking the ends of things. And the beginnings of others. I decided to ask Uncle Valentine about the paper.
At breakfast when I told him Mrs. McQuade was taking her girls to see the funeral, he nodded. "Stay with your teacher. It's going to be a circus out there today. I worry about you, you know that, Emily."
I saw my opening. "Can I ask you something, Uncle Valentine?"
"Of course."
"You had that paper of yours saying you were responsible for me when you invited me to lunch with you here on Good Friday, didn't you?"
"Yes," he said.
"Then why didn't you tell me about it? Why did you let me go home from here thinking I was moving in with the Surratts? And come and get me only after Lincoln was shot?"
He folded his paper and put it aside. He looked shame-faced. "Vanity," he said.
"Vanity?"
"I was trying to prove something to myself. That even after all your mother said against me, you would come to me of your own choice. And not because I had a legal paper in hand. I was wrong, child. I'm sorry."
I nodded, humbled by this admission from him. I could see how difficult it was for him to make it.
"But there is something else you should know."
"What?"
"I wasn't doing anything your father didn't want. He asked my help to get you into Miss Martin's. He wrote to me when he was away at war. He sent me the money for your education and asked that if anything happened to him I'd bring you to Washington and put you in that school."
"Mama said she put me there. That all he did was leave the money for my education."
"Your father wanted it, Emily. And if you and your mother hadn't moved here after he was killed, I would have brought you here anyway. Your mother couldn't have done a thing about it. It was his wish, stated in his letter."
My daddy. I