And one by one, Union soldiers had lit the great houses of the plantations ablaze, with their own kerosene-laden bed sheets and curtains. One by one, Genevieve watched the homes of her neighbors, of her friends and family, surrender to the flames. And in the worst of circumstances, many of those friends and relatives surrendered as well, eaten alive by the flames in the very homes where they were born.
That’s why she was running, into the smoke, toward the fire—right into the mouth of the beast. She had to get to Greenbrier before the soldiers. And she didn’t have much time. The soldiers were methodical, working their way down the Santee burning the houses one by one. They had already burned Blackwell; Dove’s Crossing would be next, then Greenbrier and Ravenwood. General Sherman and his army had started the burning campaign hundreds of miles before they reached Gatlin. They had burned Columbia to the ground, and continued marching east, burning everything in their path. When they reached the outskirts of Gatlin the Confederate flag was still waving, the second wind they needed.
It was the smell that told her she was too late. Lemons. The tart smell of lemons mixed with ash. They were burning the lemon trees.
Genevieve’s mother loved lemons. So when her father had visited a plantation in Georgia when she was a girl, he had brought her mother two lemon trees. Everyone said they wouldn’t grow, that the cold South Carolina winter nights would kill them. But Genevieve’s mother didn’t listen. She planted those trees right in front of the cotton field, tending them herself. On those cold winter nights, she had covered the trees with wool blankets and piled dirt along the edges to keep the moisture out. And those trees grew. They grew so well that over the years, Genevieve’s father had bought her twenty-eight more trees. Some of the other ladies in town asked their husbands for lemon trees, and a few of them even got a tree or two. But none of them could figure out how to keep their trees alive. The trees only seemed to flourish at Greenbrier, at her mother’s hand.
Nothing had ever been able to kill those trees. Until today.
“What just happened?” I felt Lena pull her hand away from mine, and opened my eyes. She was shaking. I looked down and opened my hand to reveal the object I had inadvertently grabbed from under the stone.
“I think it had something to do with this.” My hand had been curled around a battered old cameo, black and oval, with a woman’s face etched in ivory and mother of pearl. The work on the face of it was intricate with detail. On the side, I noticed a small bump. “Look. I think it’s a locket.”
I pushed on the spring, and the cameo front opened to reveal a tiny inscription. “It just says greenbrier.
And a date.”
She sat up. “What’s Greenbrier?”
“This must be it. This isn’t Ravenwood. It’s Greenbrier. The next plantation over.”
“And that vision, the fires, did you see it, too?”
I nodded. It was almost too horrible to talk about. “This has to be Greenbrier, what’s left of it, anyway.”
“Let me see the locket.” I handed it to her carefully. It looked like something that had survived a lot— maybe even the fire from the vision. She turned it over in her hands. “february 11th, 1865.” She dropped the locket, turning pale.
“What’s wrong?”
She stared down at it in the grass. “February eleventh is my birthday.”
“So it’s a coincidence. An early birthday present.”
“Nothing in my life is a coincidence.”
I picked up the locket and flipped it over. On the back were two sets of engraved initials. “ECW & GKD.
This locket must have belonged to one of them.” I paused. “That’s weird. My initials are ELW.”
“My birthday, your initials. Don’t you think that’s a little more than weird?” Maybe she was right. Still — “We should try it again, so we can find out.” It was like an itch that had to be scratched.
“I don’t know. It could be dangerous. It really felt like we were there. My eyes are still burning from the smoke.” She was right. We hadn’t left the garden, but it had felt like we had been right there in the middle of the fires. I could feel the smoke in my lungs, but it didn’t matter. I had to know.
I held out the locket, and my hand. “Come on, aren’t you braver than that?” It was a dare. She rolled her eyes, but reached toward it all the same. Her fingers brushed against mine, and I felt the warmth of her hand spreading into mine. Electric goosebumps. I don’t know any other way to describe it.
I closed my eyes and waited—nothing. I opened my eyes. “Maybe we just imagined it. Maybe it’s just out of batteries.”
Lena looked at me like I was Earl Petty in Algebra, the second time around. “Maybe you can’t tell something like that what to do, or when to do it.” She got up and brushed herself off. “I’ve gotta go.”
She paused, looking down at me. “You know, you’re not what I expected.” She turned her back on me and began to weave her way through the lemon trees, to the outer edge of the garden.
“Wait!” I called after her, but she kept going. I tried to catch up with her, stumbling back over the roots.
When she reached the last lemon tree, she stopped. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”