A Lasting Impression

hers.
    And the following afternoon, when she stepped onto the station platform in Nashville, she wanted to believe it more than anything else in the world.

3

    C laire followed the flow of passengers outside onto the train platform, pausing only after she’d picked her way through the crowded station. A late-day September sun hung hazy in the west, and a breeze wonderfully absent of smoke and soot brushed warm against her neck. Without a doubt, every speck of sand and dirt between Louisiana and Tennessee was now embedded into the pores of her skin. Either that, or layering her bedraggled curls.
    Every inch of her itched, and ached, and felt utterly and completely spent. She was relieved to have finally arrived, and yet—staring out across the city of Nashville—she wasn’t.
    Surely this must have been a beautiful city, even charming, before the war. Yet she couldn’t escape the sense of loss and defeat. Rows of buildings, constructed mostly of brick but with a few clapboard thrown in, huddled the narrow streets. The majority of structures were vacant, windows boarded up. Those not were cracked and broken, long since abandoned, by the looks of them. Some blocks away, a church steeple, barren of decorative touch and lonely on the horizon, rose like a bewildered beacon.
    Street signs, what few there were, leaned to one side, bent and stooped beneath an invisible weight. And where trees had once flourished—she could imagine stately poplar and sycamore dotting the nondescript streets even now—the dirt sprouted burned-out stumps and piles of rubble and debris. And the people . . .
    Their expressions mirrored their surroundings.
    Soldiers still clad in the uniform of a once-proud army stood in clusters of two or three, the gray woolen fabric now tattered and threadbare, coats hanging limp on their too-thin shoulders. Negroes populated the streets—far more than in New Orleans—yet not one of them wore the exuberant smiles of recently freed men and women. On the contrary, their countenances mirrored the same despondency as those of the broken men who had fought—at least in part—to keep them enslaved.
    Only a month ago, she’d read in the New Orleans Picayune that the state of Tennessee had finally been readmitted into the Union, over a year after the war had ended. But looking out over the city, seeing the lingering aftermath of war, Claire couldn’t escape the feeling that the battle was still being waged.
    And this was where Papa and Uncle Antoine had chosen to come?
    She reached into her reticule for her mother’s locket watch to check the time, and her fingers brushed against a piece of paper. She pulled it out. The address Uncle Antoine had written down on a torn piece of stationery. From one of his many trips, she knew. This one to New York, to the Perrault Gallery. New York was a place she never wished to visit again either. However, in comparison to Nashville . . .
    Uncle Antoine had instructed her to report to the residence as soon as she arrived, and assured that she would be well taken care of until they joined her. Papa had said the same just before she’d boarded the carriage. But with nearly five hundred miles separating her from them now, she didn’t feel the same pressure to comply as she had the night she’d left.
    And yet . . .
    She had no arrangements other than the ones already made, whatever those were. And no money left either, having spent the few coins she’d had on meager rations of food along the way. Standing there, satchel in hand, her brief dream of independence and adventure puddled pathetically at her feet, and her choices narrowed to one.
    “Sir?” She flagged down a porter. “Would you be so kind as to give me directions to this address?”
    “Surely, ma’am.” He glanced at the paper. A brow rose. “That’s a ways from here, but not a bad walk on such a pretty afternoon. And a nice part of the city too. Lots of shops and galleries.”
    Encouraged by his comments, Claire focused as he told her the way, drawing a map with her mind’s eye. She thanked him and set out but had barely reached the end of the station platform when an oversized wooden crate being unloaded from one of the freight cars drew her attention.
    As did one of the men beside it.
    The man definitely wasn’t an employee of the railroad, Claire surmised—not with the expensive cut of suit he wore. And not with the way the other men looked to him for instruction.
    “Careful, gentlemen.