Chapter One
MAY 1837, WEST POINT, NEW YORK
Cecelia Stovall sighed. She was distracted and yet dazzling in a new shell pink gown trimmed with flounces, white silk roses, and ropes of pearls. The wide bell skirt, in the Southern style, with layers of petticoats beneath, rustled and swayed, making a grand impression as she strolled with her three brothers along the brick pathway from the West Point barracks toward the Commencement Ball. But her mind was elsewhere. The words that had been shouted so angrily at her brother Bolling back home in Augusta, only a few days before, still played across her mind. They were pressing her to acknowledge them and their meaning: “How could you do it to Anne, Father?” Bolling had asked. “Much less with a slave?” “Stay out of this!” their father’s voice had boomed. “You’re just a boy who hasn’t a clue what I have with yo’ stepmother, or what it is to have the needs and pressures of a man!”
Her mind and heart were made so unbearably heavy by those words, and by the questions the scene had aroused. So, too, her father’s response to her eavesdropping: “Very well, young lady! You want to involve yourself in my affairs as well, then so you shall! You’ll go to West Point along with them and be out of my sight until you learn to mind your place!”
Cecelia and her other two brothers had spoken little about it on the rough, noisy train as it clattered and clacked its way out of Atlanta or on the dusty, rattling carriage ride from Albany. Clearly it was something bad. But she feared knowing precisely what. Old Joe and his daughter Cretia had been a part of their lives for as long as she could remember. Though slaves, to Cecelia, they were a part of her family.
And now her family had a dark secret.
“What is there between Father and Cretia?” she had asked her younger brother, Bolling, as the train swayed along a length of track through a seemingly endless field spotted with cotton. Bolling was sixteen but very tall, serious, and, she thought, worldly for a boy his age. Of all Pleasant’s first family of children, it was he who most resembled their dead mother. His skin was smooth, his hair, ebony black and very straight. Like her own, his eyes were dark as coal and largely indecipherable.
“You know perfectly well she’s one of his slaves,” he had said, opening a book and refusing to say more. But there was something more. Of course there was. Her stomach had churned ever since as the unthinkable conclusion had settled heavily upon her.
Cretia was her dearest friend. They had grown through childhood and adolescence together. Shared their lives. All their secrets. Or so she had long believed until a few days ago. Certainly Cretia would have confided something so horrible. Then had come the trip to West Point, along with two of her brothers, and one long, hot train ride after another to spirit them away from the truth. All of that had brought them very far from the South. As it was a long and strenuous journey from Georgia, and plebes were required to remain over summer, her trip was meant to last at least a few weeks.
Now she was going to the Commencement Ball at the military academy where her brother had just completed his first year. And for the first few hours since her arrival, Cecelia had managed to feel a bit of joy at the unexpected adventure. Here, she would be with Marcellus, the eldest Stovall brother, and the one person in all the world who could make sense of things. She had longed to ask him about it from the first moment of their arrival this morning. Thus far, there had been no time. But he would tell her the truth.
Reunited, she was surrounded now by the three of them. Marcellus was tall and dashing in his cadet’s gray coat, gleaming brass buttons, and starched white trousers trimmed with black silk braid. Bolling and Thomas were dressed in dark coats and shiny gray-striped cravats. They all moved together into the crowded cadet’s Mess, a room already full of handsome, uniformed young men. For this evening, the Mess had been admirably transformed into a representation of a ballroom. Tall, ivory tapers flickered in wall sconces and on tabletops, bathing the open room in a soft, golden glow as the band played the popular tune, “There’s Nothing True But Heaven.” Already she could see that it was a world away from a Southern summer evening.
“It’s lovely.” She softly smiled, gazing around at the uniformed men and elegant women.
“Not so lovely as you, dear sister.” Marcellus squeezed her arm. “You’ve grown up while I’ve been away.”
“So it happens with us all.” She smiled up at him, her face shining in the profusion of candlelight.
“Glad as I am to see you, Father didn’t write to me that you’d be joinin’ the boys.”
She exchanged a glance with Bolling then, her dark ringlets bobbing, but he looked quickly away. “It seems he decided it at the last minute.”
“Well, however you got here, I’m thrilled. Now, do let’s enjoy ourselves! And judgin’ by the number of eyes upon you just now, the evenin’ is young!”
For the first time, Cecelia, too, saw the way the men regarded her. In this place far from home, she became aware of how the eyes of several cadets found her and then cut away amid soft, suggestive laughter. As children, her sisters had been cruel. Her glossy, raven-dark hair was too black to go with her dark eyes, they had said, especially against her white, white skin. She resembled a crow sitting in cream, they had taunted. Taunted, until she began to grow steadily and gracefully into features that became striking rather than hawkish as they once had been, bold rather than unremarkable, as both her sisters now were. In an oddly victorious moment she wished her two married, and heavily pregnant, sisters could see her now—a free spirit in a new party dress, unencumbered by their father’s rules, smiling—and admired.
As they moved more deeply into the already warm and crowded hall, with Marcellus holding tightly to her elbow, Cecelia was introduced to a blinding collection of her brother’s classmates. The motions and manners she found tedious, especially with things at home still tugging at the corners of her mind. But it was worth anything in the world to her to be back with the one person she loved best in the world, her Marcellus. The one who would always tell her the truth.
“Might I have the pleasure of this dance, Miss Stovall?” The voice was deep and unexpected—full of reassuringly familiar Southern charm. Still clutching her brother’s arm, Cecelia looked back before her. The cadet was older than Marcellus and admirably handsome in his uniform. He had thick, dark hair, heavy dark brows, and discerning, steely eyes. He extended his hand as if the request had been rhetorical.
“Thank you, suh, but I believe I shall wait until my brother is ready to dance.”
“Cecelia!” Marcellus’s startled tone stopped her. “Pardon her, suh. My sister has only just arrived after a long journey from Augusta. I’m certain that explains her rudeness. Cecelia, this is my friend, and senior classmate, Mr. Braxton Bragg. You may feel quite free to accept his invitation.”
Bragg smiled at her and bowed. The music was beginning again. “Shall we, then?”
Reluctantly, she took his arm as he led her toward the crowded dance floor.
Bragg danced smoothly. Too smoothly, she thought. And the smile that only briefly left his face was marked by a smug self-confidence. Her mind quickly wandered. Words, inferences—and Cretia’s last tormented expression as they left home played across what was already heavily on her mind. Anne, their stepmother, had been defensive over the way Bolling had pressed her before they had left. “I know,” Anne had told him. “I’ve always known … .”
Cecelia’s stomach turned sharply as the unthinkable conclusion settled yet again into the pit of her already nauseated stomach. But Father would never … something so unspeakably vulgar as … And with a slave! He had a wife, children … Of course she had misunderstood. She was too young, too spoiled, and, as he so often said, impossibly romantic about life. Her sister Marie was married and living in Rome, Georgia. Caroline, as well. The reason Cecelia had no suitors, Thomas always teased her, was because her head was filled with too much fantasy. And who the devil, he said, was man enough to unburden her of that?
She had never met a boy who she thought came close to understanding her. And if there ever were to be someone, he would not be like those perfectly proper, dull boys in Augusta. How in the world could she consider spending her life with a man like Caroline had married? Even Marie’s husband, handsome though he was, wore his dullness upon his gentility like a proud badge of honor.
When she married, it would be someone wildly industrious, brimming with confidence, and ambitious beyond measure. A self-made boy, not someone living off the family largesse and in their shadow like the man Marie had married. Men like that reminded her of warm milk-toast that Setty Mae, their cook, had given her as a child. It had been bland but predictable, sure to settle one’s stomach. Kind and gentle, Setty Mae...
