But it’s the only place left for me.
I urge my mare down the street. I’ll use what little money I have to spend the night at an inn, and come the morning I’ll head toward Sharpsburg — and my uncle. I’ll tell him about the Red Raven and the role my grandmother has played in this war. Whether he sends her to prison or not, that shall be his concern and not mine any longer.
I don’t know what lies in front of me. I have little to offer Uncle Ambrose aside from a half-finished education and a soon-to-be sullied surname. Yet I know one thing: whatever path I choose, I shall make my mother proud. I hold tight to this thought.
I pin a brave smile to my lips and bring my mare to a canter. The pounding of her hooves matches the thud of my heart, and I breathe in the crisp air that carries the scent of a new day ahead. A new start.
“Head north, girl,” I whisper into the wind. “We’re going home.”
I’m a native of the Washington, D.C., area, and as a kid I was fascinated by the rich history of my little corner of the world. I was especially intrigued by the Civil War and how D.C. played a big part in it, and how the city was mere miles from the South. It seemed as if the Confederates could’ve swum across the Potomac at any moment and claimed the city for themselves. So when Jessica Spotswood kindly invited me to contribute a short story to this anthology, I knew that I wanted to set my story during the Civil War and use Washington, D.C., as a backdrop. That’s how the idea of “The Red Raven Ball” was born.
As I started my research, I became fascinated by the lives of Civil War spies, specifically the hundreds who were female. These women came from all variety of backgrounds, from freed slaves to poor actresses to Washington socialites. One of these socialites, a widowed secessionist named Rose O’Neal Greenhow, used her connections to gather information on the Union military for the Confederates. Mrs. Greenhow was the inspiration for the character of Grandmama.
Although most of the characters in this story are fictional, the atheist Robert Ingersoll was real (and an ancestor of my husband’s). Ingersoll was a famed orator and politician — the Washington Post once dubbed him “the most famous American you never heard of”— but he was best known for his disdain of organized religion, which was a shocking proposition to nineteenth-century Americans and earned him the nickname “the Great Agnostic.”
I HAD DONE EVERYTHING RIGHT. IT brought me no comfort to know that now, but I had done everything right. It helped, of course, that I’d been born into the right family. My papa had invested heavily in the rail system before the trains connected east and west, and before that, his papa had invested in the War, and before that, his papa had invested in ships crossing the Atlantic. But it was more than just being born into the right family. I had cultivated the right friends, gone to the right parties, flirted with the right men.
Well, I thought I’d flirted with the right men.
And when one of the so-called right men had proven to be anything but right, well. Everything changed.
At breakfast the morning after, my father had been waiting for me. All I had wanted to do was pretend that nothing had happened, nothing at all, but Papa had stood in front of the door, not even allowing me into the dining room and the comfort of a warm breakfast made by our cook, Maggie.
“You were seen,” he had hissed at me.
I hadn’t even had the courage to speak. Again.
“You were seen with that man. Everyone knows you let him have you.”
Let.
“You could have done better, Helen. You could have married a Rockefeller, or a Vanderbilt at least. This one’ll do. But you could have done better.”
And then he had left, yelling for Maggie to bring coffee to his office. That had been my one chance to talk to my father about that night, but it wouldn’t have mattered even if I had found the courage to speak. He’d already decided what he would believe, and nothing anyone could say or do would have changed his mind.
Just like nothing I could ever say or do would change that night.
Richard said I hadn’t been pure to start with. He said I had led him on.
He said I had wanted it.
That morning, Maggie had made soft-boiled eggs and toast with fresh cream butter. She had presented the eggs to me in the little porcelain cups Mama had had imported from Japan when she married Papa, the ones with wispy blue lines along the rims. I’d cracked the top of the egg with that ridiculously tiny silver spoon in that ridiculously pretty little cup, peeling off the top of the shell and exposing the gooey insides. And there was something about it all — the broken egg exposed and the bleeding yolk inside its shell in the perfect little cup — it was in that moment that I realized just how much of my life I’d lost.
I haven’t had eggs since that day.