“He says . . . he says . . . he has gone home to Lenox.”
“As he should. The war has gone on too long.”
She said nothing more, and truly there was nothing more to say. I stood, John Paterson’s letter in my hand, and I thought for a moment that I would enjoy watching it burn. I held it over the candle, the page fluttering between my fingers.
I would not receive another.
Not from Elizabeth and not from her beloved John. He would have no reason to write.
I snatched it back, the corner singed, and turned to my little room.
“I’m tired,” I said, though it was not weariness coursing in my veins. “I’m going to bed.”
“Good night, dear,” Mrs. Thomas said softly.
“Good night,” I said, though it was only four o’clock. The day was dreary and dark, but bedtime was still a while off.
There is a clarity that comes when one surveys the years gone by from a perch of experience and age. Death, disappointment, and a wealth of desperation had backed me up to the cliff’s edge. I can see that now, even as I marvel that I jumped.
I pulled out the breeches and the shirt that one of the boys had discarded and none of the others had claimed. They weren’t the same pair that made me fleet of foot and free as the wind. They weren’t magic. I’d outgrown those. I loosened my dress and tugged it off, repeating the action with my underthings until I stood naked and shivering in the waning light peering through the tiny window.
I pulled the pins from my hair and ran my brush through it, watching myself in the small mirror that hung on my wall. My hair hung past my waist, and with it brushed to a sheen and streaming around me, I felt like a creature from the sea, not constrained by fashion or station. A siren or a Greek goddess. I thought I might be beautiful this way, though I was not soft or small.
And no one would ever know.
No one would ever see this version of Deborah. No one but my husband.
Milford Crewe wanted to be my husband. He seemed intent upon it, and I suspected the sale of the deacon’s land was contingent upon my agreement.
“No!” I spat, startling myself. My hairbrush clattered to the floor.
“No,” I said, but this time much more softly. “No. Not him. Not ever.”
My hair was my one vanity, yet my tresses made me angry too. What good was beauty to me? I was as tall as most of the men I knew—as tall as half of the Thomas boys I’d been raised among. My mouth was wide, my jaw square, and my cheekbones sharp. The bump on my nose and the thickness of my brows made me more handsome than fine, though I wasn’t certain I could claim any comeliness. Even my eyes with their many colors were more strange than lovely.
“I do not want to be a wife,” I whispered. “I do not want to be a woman.” Emotion rose and broke, and my reflection became a watery smear. “I want to be a soldier.”
Did I?
I swiped at my eyes, angered by my weakness, but my heart was pounding. I did.
“Why should I not play the part?” I said, louder now. “When it is within my power to make it happen?”
My hair shimmered around my body, beckoning me. I wouldn’t have to cut it all off. The men I knew wore their hair gathered at their napes in short tails. I’d trimmed the boys’ hair often enough. I’d shaved their stubbly cheeks too. Shaving was not something many men attempted without a good mirror, and often not even then. It was a skill better left to a barber—or a woman—and I’d shaved every one of the Thomas men, except Jeremiah, who had no more beard than I. The thought gave me courage. There were plenty of bare-faced boys in the army. But none of them had hair to their waists.
I took a hunk of my hair in my fist, and with the sharpened edge of the same blade I’d used on the boys, sheared it off at my shoulders, long enough to tame it into an oiled queue, but short enough to draw a sharp distinction between male and female. Section by section, I repeated the action until there was far more hair at my feet than on my head.
I turned my head to the right and then to the left, enjoying the new, weightless swish against my naked shoulders. My breasts seemed bigger without my long hair obscuring them. They jutted out, rosy-tipped and large enough to fill my palms, and for a moment doubt surged. I folded my arms across my chest, searching for a solution.
My corset lay discarded on my bed, and I studied it, an idea forming.
I slid out the boning, removed the ties, and cut the corset into horizontal halves. I didn’t need to be winnowed from my ribs to my hips; I needed to constrain my breasts.