Author’s note: This story is for Labyrinthia Mythweaver’s prompt: This week’s image is an overgrown tea table in the woods. The chairs remain. The table is set. Time has not been kind. What happened here?
She went as she always had, skirting the mill pond away from the belching smokestacks of her father’s factory. The evening breeze played upon her fine hair as she read, by the fading light, his latest letter from the front. Richmond was near collapse and Grant would soon bag that old fox Lee. He vowed he would see her soon, once more free to sit “under his vine and fig tree” in the company of his beloved.
She smiled, as the bucolic silence on the wooded side of the pond enveloped her, shielding her from the industrial din. She had first set eyes on him a few years before Sumter, when he rode in from his small law office in the village to call on her father. He had the marks of a young man of ambition, yet also the sensitive air and searching eye of a poet.
The latter was confirmed when she stumbled upon him one afternoon, as she made her customary circuit around the pond. On the far side a park had been made for the workers, part of her father’s vision to marry the pastoral beauty of New England with manufacturing efficiency. He sat at a table beside a brick wall, covered in ivy, with a tea set before him and a book in one hand. When she heard him, perfectly oblivious to her presence as he elegantly recited Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven”, a veritable magnetism worked upon her. Before she knew it she was seated with him, sipping tea and singing verses with equal liberality.
The enchantment only grew, and without fail she met him as often as possible “under their vine”, both weather and his business on the circuit permitting. He coaxed and encouraged her own artistry, reading with relish the verses she had penned but kept secret from her father, who in stolid Yankee fashion frowned upon such frivolity. But she was too much in love to give heed to such pretentious practicality. Emboldened by her paramour, she submitted several of her poems - including a celebration of Lincoln’s election -for publication in the Providence Evening Journal.
The Rebellion commenced shortly after.
Her beau dutifully answered the President’s call for 75,000 volunteers, being named a captain in the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry. At their last meeting underneath the vine, before his departure for Washington, he proclaimed their love deathless, bound by chains that not even Omnipotence could break.
As the early predictions of a swift end to the conflict were dashed by the disaster at Bull Run (where he served with distinction), her days grew decidedly darker. Her father’s operations also saw a marked downturn, as the largely Irish immigrant workforce either enlisted or left for greater economic opportunities in Providence, Boston, and New York. The mill village became a shell of its former self, with the park grounds growing practically feral with neglect. Yet she kept her daily round, taking her familiar seat at the table underneath the vine to read his letters, imagining with all her might that he was across from her…
The familiar sight of the weathered table, with the now wild vines reaching out over it from the wall, broke her reverie.
The figure seated there nearly made her swoon.
There he was, as resplendent in his Union blue uniform as the day he left.
She ran to him, clutching the letter.
“My God, William!” she cried, the old magnetism having revived on the instant. “How so soon?”
“You have waited long enough my dear,” he said, taking her hand with his signature tenderness. “I have fought the good fight. But now, ‘they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid.’”
He escorted to her seat, where the tea set waited.
“Elizabeth!” “Elizabeth!”
Her father scrambled down the path, coming to a sudden halt before the table. There sat a teapot and two saucers, but no other sign of human life met his gaze.
He clutched a telegram in his trembling hand which bore the news.
Brevet Colonel William Steere, 2nd RI Infantry, was killed while gallantly leading his men in action against the Rebels at Sailor’s Creek, Virginia, April 6, 1865.
© Conor MacCormack, 2026. All rights reserved.
Oh, this was too perfect. Superb!
I loved the story! It’s tragic, but makes the reader to fill their love. Very well written, especially the historical details. I wonder what happened to Elisabeth, but I can assume that she followed her beloved.