Candle in the Darkness - Lynn N. Austin [35]
“Seem like . . . seem like maybe your mama make a mistake,” she said in a tiny voice. “She not sleeping much, you know . . . and maybe she want to sleep. Laudanum pill always help her sleep, but maybe . . . maybe she take too many this time . . . by accident.”
“Is that what you think, Ruby? That it was an accident?”
She closed her eyes. By the light of the single candle, I watched the tears roll down her cheeks. When she opened her eyes again, she smiled. “I glad they bury her little baby with her. Now he won’t be all alone in that cold ground. Your mama so worried about that. Said a child need its mama.” She squeezed my hands tightly, her eyes pleading, begging me to understand. “Your mama didn’t want to leave her child all alone, Missy Caroline.”
I wanted to understand, but I couldn’t. I was her child, too. I needed my mother. And she had left me all alone.
My father seemed to age twenty years overnight. He wouldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, and spent most of the time in his library, where Gilbert endlessly refilled his glass. Daddy and Uncle William had shouted at each other in loud voices the night before my uncle returned to Hilltop, but I didn’t hear what they’d said. When it was time for Aunt Martha to return to Philadelphia, she and Daddy called me into the library one night. The sight of his griefravaged face brought tears to my eyes.
“I have business overseas, Caroline,” Daddy said without preamble. “I’m sailing at the end of this week. Aunt Martha has offered to take you to Philadelphia to live with her for a while.”
I couldn’t find the words to tell him that I didn’t want anything to change, that too many things had changed already. I felt this new loss as if it had already taken place. “I want to stay here, Daddy,” I said desperately. “With you.”
“I can’t stay, Caroline.” He glanced up at me, then quickly looked away. I knew I reminded him of Mother. I saw the resemblance myself in the mirror every morning. “I’ll be gone for several months,” he continued. “Your Aunt Martha doesn’t think you should stay here alone.”
“I won’t be alone. I have Tessie and Eli and Esther. . . .”
“That’s not an option,” Daddy said harshly. “If you stay in Richmond you will have to board at school.”
His words filled me with dread. I’d lost my mother, and now I was losing my daddy and my home, too. Aunt Martha came to me, slipping her arm around my shoulders, taking my hand in hers.
“Boarding schools are terribly lonely places, Caroline. After all you’ve been through, don’t you think it might be better if you lived in a home for a while, with your family? I have two girls of my own who are about your age. They’ll be company for you.”
“The only other choice,” Daddy said, “is to stay with my brother at Hilltop.”
I didn’t care for any of those choices. I knew I would hate boarding school—the cold gray hallways and barren rooms, standing in line for everything. I had no friends there—the other girls weren’t like me at all. Nor could I go back to Hilltop with an aunt and uncle who thought I belonged in an asylum. My cousin Jonathan was away at college, and I didn’t think I could stand being at Hilltop without him, living in the plantation house with papered walls and rich food on the table while the slaves lived in drafty cabins with dirt floors and cornshuck beds. I would never get used to seeing beautiful children like Caleb and Nellie hungry and sick, knowing their mothers were praying that they would die. That left Philadelphia as my only option—and I had no idea what to expect if I went there. Aunt Martha was as plump and plain as one of Esther’s biscuits. She had none of my mother’s beauty nor her shifting moods. She seemed kind.
She gently squeezed my hand. “Come to Philadelphia with me, Caroline.”
“How long would I have to stay?”
“As long as you’d like. You can enroll in school with my girls.”
“Could I come home again if I didn’t like it there?”
“You’d have to agree to give it a reasonable amount of time,” my father said. “It