osprey_archer | Sleeping Soldier Saturday

The Sleeping Soldier’s release looms ever closer! So I thought I would post the first few chapters here, as I am wont to do.

I posted a version of this chapter a couple years ago, and it hasn't changed too much, though the rest of the book has morphed enormously in that time.

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Chapter 1

Mr. Krause did not believe in fairies. In fact, although he liked to pretend he was a pious man, he believed in nothing but himself. He had come from nothing, a German immigrant who fled the draft in his own wretched principality and landed on the shores of America with no money and no English in the year of 1820.

He went west, and made his fortune cutting virgin timber in the wilds of Ohio. After twenty years he had enough money to build himself a beautiful house, a mansion in the style of the schlosses owned by the German landowners he had hated in his youth.

Once the house was built, he decided that he must find a wife who would be a jewel in this crown. Soon enough he wed a Welsh beauty with black hair and blue eyes and an adamantine heart to match his own; and she was the only thing he ever loved.

Neither of the Krauses cared for children, but of course there was need of an heir. So in the course of time Mrs. Krause had a baby boy, and they invited all the best society around to a great party after the christening.

The fairy arrived uninvited. She stood and watched a while, and smiled, because fairies like pretty things; and it was a time of elaborate ball gowns, wide skirts and low shoulders, the plainly-dressed men mere stalks for the shimmering flowers that were their partners.

Then the fairy lifted her hands, and the candles flickered and died. The orchestra stopped, and the dancers stopped, and there was no light in the ballroom except the silver glow of the fairy herself.

The guests parted like the Red Sea as the fairy walked the length of the ballroom, toward the baby in its bassinet. As she approached, the prim little Irish nurse of fourteen leaped to her feet to block the fairy’s path; and the fairy smiled again, and paused.

Mr. and Mrs. Krause drifted through the crowd, and stepped ten feet short of the bassinet. Mrs. Krause asked, “May I help you?”

The fairy turned to face the room. Only then did the guests see her face, with her lavender eyes—no, blue; no, silver, like her gown. No, it was her hair that was silver—or gold—or white—elegantly coiffed, or hanging wild down the back of her silver gown…

The silver gown, in the end, was the only thing that everyone agreed on. And even on its details, there was sharp disagreement. Some people swore it was a sack-back gown, such as great ladies wore in the days of the Revolution; and the box pleats at the back looked like folded wings.

“Why did I not receive an invitation?” the fairy asked.

“I’m sure we sent an invitation,” lied Mrs. Krause, who certainly would have if she had known that this evidently rich and imperious person lived in the area. “The post office… the state of the roads…”

The fairy sniffed. She brushed effortlessly past the little Irish nurse, and peered into the bassinet. The baby still wore its long white christening gown, and could not get its feet free no matter how it kicked its little legs. But for all that it was a happy baby, smiling, gazing up at the fairy with wide interested blue eyes.

“A pretty thing,” the fairy said. “What’s its name?”

“Russell,” said Mrs. Krause, over and above the gasp of the little Irish nurse.

“The traditional thing is a spindle,” the fairy said, with a sigh, “but that won’t do for a boy. Well, it would hardly do for a girl these days: who spins in modern times?” She laid her long white hand on the baby, and the baby waved its little hands, and gazed up at her with its sapphire eyes wide. “When a bayonet pricks you,” the fairy intoned, “you will sleep for a hundred years.”

“Please!” cried the little Irish nurse.

The fairy turned to her and laughed. “Come now!” she said. “It’s a better gift than a silver teething ring. When a bayonet pricks you, the usual thing is to die.”

“But can’t anything wake him?”

“Oh, you know the stories,” the fairy said, with a yawn. “True love, or something like that.”

She swept out of the hall. The candles had not gone out after all, it seemed, for their flames rose up again, and the chatter came back with the light. The guests talked and talked, and left still talking, with the candles only half burned down and the punch bowl still almost full of syllabub.

Strange to say in these rationalist times, but everyone who had been at the ball believed that the Krause baby had been cursed by a fairy. Even the action of time and sunlight could not sway them; and, as these erstwhile guests were all the best society in town, the Krauses soon found it expedient to move further west. They settled in Indiana, in the town of Aurora, where Mr. Krause built another brooding Schloss high on the hill above the Wabash River.

There Mr. Krause forgot the fairy, more or less. So, almost, did his wife. Only the baby’s little Irish nurse Katie, who had smelled the fairy’s scent like lavender and hellfire, remembered that night clearly. Katie was the one who told the story to little Russell, and told him all about the Good Folk besides, and indeed everything he knew about goodness for a good many years of his life.

The Krauses never had another christening. But although they were not much interested in children, they felt their princeling was a credit to them. He grew up a sturdy little boy, a high-spirited child with a mop of black curls and bright blue eyes, running across the wide lawn in his fashionable sailor suit, dressed “just like Prince Albert Edward,” his mother liked to tell her guests.

They did not send him to the rough local schools, but hired a tutor from Hawkins College, which was just at the bottom of the hill below the Schloss. But they did not send him to Hawkins, for the college was coeducational, and his father did not approve. So when the boy was old enough, they shipped him off to the preparatory school at Wabash College.

The beginning of the Civil War worried Mr. Krause not a jot. War is always a business opportunity, and of course, the bloodshed would not touch his family. His boy would finish his college course and get a jump on those fools who joined up. And if he got drafted, well, it was only $300 to hire a substitute.

But then Russell decided to enlist. To Katie perhaps (who had married, and gone with her man to California) he wrote lofty musings on freedom, equality, and the sacred principle of union; but to his parents such words had no meaning, and so he wrote to them in their own language. “No man will amount to anything after this war if he does not do his part and fight.”

Mr. Krause crumpled the letter in his fist. “What,” Mrs. Krause cried, “will the neighbors say, if he comes back in an enchanted sleep? Who ever heard of such a thing?”

The Krauses stood steadfastly against it, till the day the boy came to his father to say that he was engaged to Julia Gage, penniless daughter of a Wabash College professor. It was a match that could bring the family neither money nor connections, and Mr. Krause tried to forbid it. But the boy refused to yield, until at last Mr. Krause threw him out of the house; and with nothing to stop him and no prospects elsewhere, Russell joined the 14th Indiana Cavalry.

During the war, no bayonet touched him. After the war, the 14th Indiana Cavalry stayed in Georgia as part of the army of the occupation, and no bayonet touched him there either. The regiment mustered out in mid-December of 1865, and Russell started for Indiana, where he was to spend Christmas with the Gages, though Julia had died the year before.

But on the way home, he intervened in a brawl at a railway station in Tennessee. A bayonet raked his left arm, and he fell to the ground as if dead.

A telegram brought his parents to the hospital, where the surgeon shook his head. “It’s only a little scratch. But it won’t heal, and he won’t wake.”

And the Krauses knew that the fairy’s curse had come true. They both kissed the boy. It was the only time his father ever kissed him.

The boy did not wake.

They carried him home to Aurora, and laid him to rest in his childhood bedroom, and put it out that he was dead. Then they went west, moving so precipitously that perhaps Katie’s letters never reached them, although strangely enough none of their business correspondence went astray. It was not to be considered that the nurse might succeed where the parents had failed.

Time stopped in the Schloss. There was a trust of some sort, no one seemed to know the details, a caretaker who came once a month to ensure the house did not fall utterly into ruin. It decayed gradually, genteelly, the climbing roses softening the blunt assertion of its tower and its aggressive crenelations.

Mrs. Krause—Mrs. Lentz by then, for she had remarried after her husband’s death—returned just once, in 1924. She did not die in the house, but afterward the children said her ghost haunted the place, and dared each other to peer through the iron fence in the moonlight, when you could see, they said, the ghost watering the roses with her tears.

The stock market soared; the stock market crashed. The roses climbed the brick walls even to the roof. War came again, and in the college at the bottom of the hill troops bivouacked on the green as they waited to ship out.

Then the war passed, and students poured in, more than Hawkins College had ever known before. Untouched but for the monthly visit from the caretaker, the Schloss continued to decay until it seemed that the climbing roses might be the only thing holding the old building up.