Candle in the Darkness - Lynn N. Austin [160]
“Let me see it.” As she pulled the dress out of her wardrobe and spread it across the bed, I remembered how beautiful she had looked in it the night of her Christmas party, five years ago. She had stood in her soaring entrance hall, greeting her guests, the stairway behind her decked in candles and greenery. I had been awed by the St. Johns’ wealth, their magnificent home, their countless servants. We had no way of knowing on that joyful night what the future held for all of us, that war would ravage that prosperity, that Sally would have to remake a five-year-old dress into her wedding gown. And we couldn’t know what next Christmas would bring, either.
For the second time that afternoon, I recalled Charles’ terrible words: “Listen now. I’ve had to prepare myself . . . and you must, too.”
Quietly, tenderly, I felt the Lord’s presence surrounding me, drawing me to Him, coming to dwell among us as He had that first Christmas. As the angels had sung their song of joy, no one in Bethlehem had known about the coming tragedy of the cross— or the triumph of the empty tomb. I couldn’t know my future either, but I could trust the One who held it in His hand. I opened my heart and my hands to God, offering Him my dreams, trusting in His resurrection power. Thy will be done.
“I want you to wear my wedding dress,” I told Sally.
She stared at me, openmouthed.
“I really mean it. The dress and everything else I made for my trousseau are just going to waste, moldering in a trunk at the foot of my bed. It would make me so happy to let you use my things.”
“But . . . what about your own wedding?”
“Charles wants to wait until the war ends. By then we’ll have boatloads of new dresses to choose from. Please, Sally, let me give it to you for a wedding present—all of it—the dress, the chemise, the petticoats and crinolines. They’ll look so beautiful on you.”
“I . . . I don’t know what to say.”
“Say yes. Then we can plan your reception, too. Do you suppose they have ‘starvation club’ receptions during wartime?”
Sally laughed and cried at the same time. “You are so dear to me, Caroline. I’ll never be able to thank you. And to think I hated you the first time we met. I was so jealous of you and Jonathan.”
“That was his plan that night,” I said, smiling. “To storm the castle and win your heart. See how well it worked?”
In the new year, 1864, Sally and I poured our energy into planning her wedding. “You’ll have the best reception ‘no money’ can buy,” I joked. All we needed was the groom, and Jonathan wrote to say that he’d threatened to desert if his commanding officer didn’t grant him a furlough soon.
While we waited, I continued to host evening get-togethers at my house and afternoon gatherings of our ladies’ sewing circle. Our latest project was to stitch a new Confederate uniform jacket for Jonathan, cut from an old blanket and dyed “butternut gray” with homemade dyes. But before we had time to finish it, Sally drove up Church Hill to my house one afternoon with bad news.
“I came to tell you that there won’t be any more meetings or parties,” she said. “It happened again. Mrs. Fremont came home yesterday to find two of her maidservants missing. So was the emerald necklace that has been in her husband’s family for eighty years.”
“Oh no.” I groaned as I sank into Daddy’s chair. This wasn’t the first time one of my guests had returned home to find that her servants had run away, taking some of the family valuables with them. “Two of them ran away?” I asked. “And it happened during sewing circle?”
Sally nodded. “That makes four times that somebody’s slaves have run off while we were at your house. I’m sorry, but the ladies don’t want to come to the meetings anymore. They think . . .”
“What? What do they think? That I’m involved?”
Sally shrugged. “It is an awfully big coincidence.”
The thought had occurred to me that my servants might be involved in helping all these slaves run away, that they were using the map I had drawn for Eli. I would have