Picture the Dead

Lemon-oil polish holds a strong scent of expectation. Everything has been aired out, sudsed over, or plumped up for the party, even rooms where no guest will tip a toe inside. I pause on the landing to stare out the window, where Madame’s trap waits. Soon this view will be filled with carriages. A rare spectacle. Toby loved dinner parties, though he could be mischievous. So many voices to eavesdrop in on. So many secrets to absorb.

A spy must never let down his guard.

Pritchett House is a theater before the curtain rises, with the principal actors offstage. Aunt and Uncle are in their respective rooms, dressing and presumably bickering, while Quinn has rushed off in the carriage to the newspaper offices to personally submit the announcement of our engagement.

“The most precious errand of my day,” he’d spoken in my ear, sending sparks up my spine.

Servants pass me with quick deferential bows. Some unfamiliar faces have been hired on for just this evening.

As I try my heels on the next flight of stairs, I run into Mavis. Her arms are weighted with the tea tray. “Why, you’re a picture, Miss,” she breathes. She herself looks exhausted and can hardly perk up a smile or wait for my response before she disappears into Aunt’s lair.

At the end of the hall I pause at the entrance to Uncle Henry’s study. Though this is his private sanctuary, I dare myself to enter. After all, no room should feel off-limits to me. Not as the future Mrs. Pritchett.

Defiant, I brace myself. I open the door and loop the room, one pinched step at a time. The room carries a whiff of authority, of old scotch and pipe tobacco and leather-bound books, and of Uncle’s own pine-scented cologne. I am drawn to the clutter on Uncle’s desk. Perhaps there is an opened ledger where I can see for myself what sort of expenses have been incurred this month.

The morning newspaper partially obscures the letter. But I recognize the handwriting. I pick it up.

It’s a formal request for a meeting at the bank and for an explanation of the details of his trust. Quinn had told me he’d be composing just such a note to Uncle Henry. The contents aren’t what I see. There are no magic words here.

My chemise has gone damp with sweat. Phrases stab my eyes; I snatch the paper, balling it so tight that my fingernails bite my palm. I am stuck and bleeding with the knowledge. It can’t be undone. I back out of the study and run, my heels catching and digging into the carpet. On the landing I nearly sprain my ankle as I rush into my room, locking the door behind me.

“Please, dear Lord. It’s not true. Don’t let it be true.”

Will’s last letter from Camp Sumter is kept with his others safe inside the pages of my scrapbook. So many times I’d knelt before the hearth or grate, intending to destroy it. To torch its physical reminder. Turn it to ash. At the last minute, I never could. It was Will’s final clutch of contact with me before I’d lost him altogether. Or so I’d thought.

Steeling myself, I unfold it. Then I smooth out Quinn’s note to Uncle Henry and place it next to Will’s prison confession.

The blocks of paragraph, the cutting strokes of his uppercase letters, the back slant of his lower loops. My finger traces these same words as my lips repeat them, hearing their fierce braggadocio. I’d never found Will’s identity in that final letter. His words had never imprinted as the young man I could claim as my own. So I clung to the assertion that he’d changed from the war. How could he not have been changed?

I’d read that letter with my own pain surging through me. I’d read that confession with hardly a thought to the writer. For it hadn’t struck me, not once, that it wasn’t the same man at all.

Right-handed, Quinn’s letters had been elegant as a woman’s. In readapting to his left hand, his style has taken on some of his brother’s traits. The narrow loops, that blown-back slant. Some of Will, but much of Quinn remains on the page.

With shaking hands, I tuck both letters into my skirt pocket and hurry from my bedroom. Wheeling around the staircase and gripping the banister for balance, I see Madame in her cloak at the mirror, making fastidious adjustments to her hat as she prepares to leave.

“Madame,” I whisper. But new doubts strangle my breath.

Here it is, laid out in front of me. The sense of what I ought to have seen all along. And yet, staring into the horror of the moment, I’m numb. I need to force myself to action, but I am paralyzed by what that means for me.

A monster. He is a monster.

A cry escapes my lips. Startled, Madame looks up and catches my eye in the mirror’s reflection. “Why, Mademoiselle Jennie, what is it? What has happened?”

I want to hide, but instead I run, hurtling down the stairs to grasp hold of the dressmaker’s wrists, my eyes beseeching her. “Take me away from here, Madame. Please, I must go at once!”

27.

In the mirror, the right hand becomes the left. In everything I saw, I now find its reflection. A young man looks into the mirror and another looks through. In replacing one brother with the other, the lock of the mystery comes unclasped. Now I smooth out the chain of the narrative, link by link.

A spy is foremost a code breaker.

Two brothers went to war. The older was a natural soldier, an optimist, and an athlete. Adored by everyone, invincible in his confidence. The younger brother was reserved, an acid wit with a taste for gambling and fine clothes. He stood in disdain of the elder’s good and trusting nature while secretly craving all that his big brother had. Sometimes to the point where he pretended he had those things, too.

Away from home the younger brother befriended a soldier, another rogue like himself, who became a happy substitute when his blood brother loomed too disapproving or expected too much. Together, Quinn Pritchett and Nate Dearborn played cards, rolled dice, drank whiskey, and invented stories of their sweethearts back home Franny Paddle and Jennie Lovell. The fact that Franny didn’t exist, or that I was engaged to Will, didn’t matter to these brothers-in-arms. The battlefield was not reality.

The friends honed their talent for gambling and then, inured by the monstrous horrors of the Wilderness, for grave robbing what use has a dead man for a watch or a ring or a pair of thick boots… Thieving from corpses of fallen soldiers meant a wealth of treasures to barter, and others must have known of their cache. Rounded up with their company and forced into Camp Sumter, they would be naturally attracted to a gang of thieves, and the thieves to them. Charles Curtis, the leader of such a gang, knew how to put these young men’s talents to good use for a time. We picked the adventure knowing there’d be no end but a bloody one…This was my true self.