Gwyneth Atlee Page 17

  * * *

  Gabe didn’t know how long he had dozed, only that his fingers ached where they’d been cramped so long in one position, knotted in the dead mule’s mane. His legs felt numb and his brain logy with . . . what? Exhaustion? Cold? He could barely think.

  He peered around a world of velvet darkness, cold darkness, without the flickering Sultana to add light. Had the steamboat burned completely, or had he drifted far downstream?

  He lifted his head from the mule’s cool belly and noticed for the first time the way the backs of his hands and forearms stung. Maybe he’d been burned in the explosion, or maybe it was only the night’s breeze blowing across exposed, damp flesh.

  Even more disturbing than the darkness and the pain was the eerie quiet that had descended upon the river. He wondered if it might be possible that he alone survived, that no one else was clinging to flotsam. A more frightening idea brought him fully awake. Had he dozed through a rescue? Had the others all been picked up by passing steamboats while he’d drifted past?

  The idea so unnerved him that he was glad to hear the splashing of another swimmer’s approach. He felt a body thud against the mule’s back, opposite him.

  Recovering his senses, Gabe hoped that it would be just one. The mule could certainly float two of them to safety. How many more than that, he couldn’t guess, and he lacked both the strength and will to fight off others.

  The other person bumped his arm while seeking a handhold. “Are you alive over there?” a hoarse voice asked.

  Despite the hoarseness, he recognized the Southern accent. His

  heart gave a leap, and he instantly awakened fully.

  “Yvette?” he asked.

  A pause stretched on and on, so long that he was certain he’d

  imagined it was she.

  Across the mule’s ribs, a hand gripped his arm. He bit back a yelp as flesh pressed his burned flesh, but in a moment he forgot his pain completely.

  “Gabriel!” she cried. “Je ne comprends pas! How can this be, of all these people? My float was sinking, and this was the only thing to grab, and—”

  He released the mule’s mane with one hand to stroke her cold fingers. “Maybe we were meant to find each other. Oh, Yvette, I thought I’d seen two men drowning you, but at that moment I was pulled under as well.”

  “Those ill-bred ruffians didn’t drown me, but it was not from lack of effort on their part.”

  “After I broke the surface, I couldn’t find you anywhere. I— Please, marry me, Yvette. You didn’t answer me before, but do it now. Promise that you’ll marry me when this is over. Promise me.”

  When she didn’t answer, he continued, his words suddenly in flood. “I’m sorry. I know I made a mess of that, but—”

  “Let me guess. You neglected to read Miss Willington’s chapter on the etiquette of proposals over a dead horse floating on the Mississippi River.”

  Her absurd comment, in the face of all that had happened, took Gabriel aback. But the moment passed, and he found himself laughing, more from relief that they had found each other than at her statement.

  “I—well, I did read that one,” he said after he recovered, “but this is different. It’s a dead mule, actually.”

  “In that case, I shall forgive your ignorance,” she told him, her voice now so hoarse that he could barely understand her.

  “So will you? If we can get out of this?”

  Another pause. As the water lapped at them, he tried to read her face by starlight, but the moonless night had shrouded her expression.

  Finally, she answered. “Yes, I will, Gabriel Davis. I will marry you.”

  “I love you more than I ever believed it was possible to love anyone, Yvette.” He squeezed her arm. “You’re so cold. Give me your other hand. I don’t want you to slip off.”

  “I can’t lift my left arm. I think it’s broken. Something must have struck me when I fell from the boat.”

  “You should have told me you were hurt! Are you injured anywhere else?”

  “I don’t think so . . . hard to tell with this chill. What about you?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure, either. Maybe a few burns.”

  He released her fingers to unwind a length of rope he’d wrapped around his upper arm. “I’m passing you the mule’s lead rope. Let’s wrap this around your good arm in case you fall asleep. Don’t try to tie it, though. If this animal goes under, you’ll want to be able to break loose.”

  She murmured her thanks and accepted his help.

  “Will someone come for us?” she asked.

  “They probably heard that blast all the way to Memphis. Don’t worry. They’ll come for us. . . . I swear it.” He spoke with more certainty than he felt, but the words helped reassure him, too.

  “But what if they can’t find us? It’s so dark.”

  “Look that way, where the sky is getting a bit grayer. That must be the east, then. Once the sun’s up, they’ll find us for certain.”

  “It’s a big, big river, Gabriel.”

  “You found me, didn’t you?”

  “I did. And I promise, mon cher, that I won’t let you go again.”

  * * *

  “. . . he’s destined for great things.”

  Grandfather’s voice kept Darien company, but it could not keep him warm. By this time, he was shivering so violently that he could barely keep hold of the two planks that he had killed to get.

  His mind was playing tricks, too, pushing him again and again into the past, forcing him to watch more of the things that he’d been forced to do. Telling the old Creole he knew a way to make profitable investments in Union industries secretly so that his neighbors wouldn’t guess. Dropping poison into Lieutenant Simonton’s drink. Choking the life out of Marie, the only woman who had ever really loved him.

  “This boy’s going to be the finest Russell ever.”

  He had to hold on to those words, had to use the power of Grandfather’s voice to float him like a raft.

  Out in the darkness, Darien heard a new sound, a deep, repeated splashing, a pulling of oars through water, a distant voice shouting, “Hallo! Call out if you can hear me!”

  He felt such shock at it that he could not respond. Or perhaps the cold and the long swim had numbed his mind.

  The sounds drew steadily nearer. Darien was content to simply listen, without doing anything at all.

  But he finally came to himself long enough to shout out, to wave until they found him and hauled him from the water. He had to, for it could only have been his destiny that provided this escape.

  It must have been, or all his actions had a darker meaning than he could bear to face.

  * * *

  Cold. So very, very cold. If she could only get dry, she might feel better. Must get out of these rain-soaked petticoats. Must get out of this rain.

  Yvette woke with a start, wondering where on earth she was and how she’d come to be there. One thing had certainly been right about the dream. She was soaked through, but, she realized with a jolt of horror, her condition had nothing whatsoever to do with any rainstorm.

  She was floating in a broad, cold river. Her arms both ached ferociously. The right, where it was wound up tightly in some sort of rope. When she tried to move the left, pain shooting through her elbow made her cry out sharply.

  Fresh agony exploded upon her senses, and she remembered that greater blast aboard the steamboat, the struggle to survive, the clumsy swim with one arm injured. Finding Gabriel out here floating, holding on to this dead beast. Promising she would become his wife.

  “Gabriel,” she called softly.

  When he didn’t answer, fear coiled in her belly. She spoke his name once more, her voice tight and anxious.

  The sky had lightened somewhat, enough to turn the drowned mule an indistinct dark gray, the color of a particularly wet fog.

  She used her good arm to pull herself up slightly so she could see over the hummock of the bloated equine corpse. She prayed that she wou
ld be able to reach over the beast’s ribs to shake Gabriel awake.

  But there was nothing save the water, which must have taken Gabriel.

  Yvette screamed, a long, painful shriek that fractured into sobs. Gabriel was missing. Gabriel was gone!

  Though her throat felt as if her grief were tearing it to pieces, she sobbed with loneliness and loss. And all her losses crowded in upon that drifting island in the Mississippi, an island made of misery and death. The loss of her possessions, from all her clothing to poor Lafitte, who surely must have died.

  So many, many losses, but none worse than Gabriel. Yvette screwed shut her eyes, now blinded by a haze of tears. Blinded to anything except her horror. But closing them did nothing except isolate her with her grief and make her wonder why on earth she still held on.

  “Hello out there! You fellas holler out if you can hear me!”

  Yvette looked up, wondering if in her exhaustion she might have imagined the man’s voice.

  “Hello!”

  The second shout convinced her, but the voice seemed to float above the water, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once. She turned her head to try to see a boat or perhaps a nearby shore. She had grown so stiff, the action caused her upper body to slide off the mule’s back with a splash.

  She tried to flail her legs, but her clumsy efforts had little effect. Had it not been for the lead rope wound around her forearm, she would have gone down like a stone. But even with it, she could barely manage to push her face above the water’s surface. Once, then twice, she fought her way to air, then coughed and sputtered with the effort to breathe. She couldn’t think of shouting out; the struggle to keep from sinking again consumed every ounce of energy. She could hold nothing back.

  But it wouldn’t be enough. The cold hours in the water had weakened her too much to pull her head and shoulders up on the dead mule’s back. Fight though she would, eventually the river must win out, and someone far downstream, perhaps as far as New Orleans, would find her, dangling from the lead rope of a drowned army mule. Once more, she submerged.

  Something snagged her hair, then pulled it sharply, yanking her head free of the river’s grip. She could see a dark shape just above her—a little boat, a man leaning far over the side. The man still clutched her hair near the scalp.

  It hurt badly, and she wanted to shout at him to stop it, to cease tormenting her while she was dying. Instead, she felt him shift his grip to her midsection. With one huge hand, the black man drew her from the water and into the bow of a small sounding yawl.

  “God’s sake, it’s a woman. And look at this. She’s got up like a soldier. What do you suppose . . . ?” A bristle-bearded white man wrapped her in a blanket as he spoke to his two mates.

  Other drenched survivors were lying in the bottom of the yawl, each one wrapped in a wool blanket. Some were moaning, maybe crying. She raised herself up on her good elbow and tried to see their faces.

  “Gabriel?” she called out. Then more loudly, “Gabriel?”

  No one answered.

  Curling her body tightly within the blanket, Yvette wept until exhaustion overtook her. Her last conscious thought was a fleeting image of Gabriel, his hair waving in the murky waters of the Mississippi, like Marie’s.

  Twelve

  “There in the bosom of the Mississippi they found their last resting place. . . . [F]lowers are strewn over the graves in the cemeteries of our dead, but there are no flowers for the dead of the [people], who went down on the Sultana. But let us remember them.”

  —Maj. Will A. McTeer,

  adjutant of the Third Tennessee

  Cavalry, which lost at least

  220 men aboard the Sultana

  God forgive him, he had lost Yvette. Even now, Gabriel wasn’t quite certain how it happened. Only that at some point cold and pain and shock had conspired once more to lull him to sleep. His grip on the mule’s mane must have eventually relaxed, and he’d slipped easily beyond the safety of the float made by the creature’s air-filled lungs.

  He awoke as water closed over his head and struggled to the surface. But not before he’d taken in a lungful of the river, which caused him to choke and cough so badly that several minutes passed before he could call out.

  He doubted that Yvette had heard him, that she had awakened. By this time, the mule’s body had caught an eddy that spun it away from the main current, which had swept Gabriel downstream.

  He tried to fight the river to reach Yvette, but his limbs felt as if they’d been cast in iron. Within moments, he realized that his mad attempt to swim upstream would mean certain death. Shouting once more to Yvette, he gave up and turned his gaze downstream to find something—anything—he might hold on to.

  A keg drifted not ten yards away. Even that felt like a mile as he floundered toward it. When finally he reached it, he found it difficult to hold. No matter how he tried to grasp its rounded sides, the blasted thing rolled and spun and bobbed out of his grip.

  “Over here!” a man’s voice shouted. “Get over here and hold on!” Gabriel turned his head to see a trio of soldiers around a floating bale of hay. They weren’t much farther than the keg had been, but to Gabe the distance looked impossible.

  “Come on, soldier! Swim for it!” another man shouted. “You’ll drown for sure on that thing.”

  He was right, Gabe knew. He had no choice but to try. Summoning the last of his reserves of strength, he clumsily paddled toward the raft.

  He’d nearly made it when his legs cramped. He fought the pain and with a flurry of his arms kept his head above the water’s surface. But he could no more reach the hay bale than he could sprout wings to fly.

  A hand extended outward from the hay bale. He focused his gaze— and his efforts—on those fingers.

  “God damn you, grab on!” the soldier screamed at him.

  He did, and the soldier dragged him closer, so close that he could grasp the twine that held the bale together. Two men, the soldier who had offered him his hand and a man with a gash extending from the corner of his mouth to his cheekbone, hauled Gabe up onto the bale.

  “Rest up here a spell,” the third man told him. “We been takin’ turns.”

  “Damn awful cold up there,” the man with the cut said. “Breeze cuts right through them wet clothes.”

  He was right, Gabe realized. Though his exertions had sent warmth flooding through him, it took only moments for him to begin shivering. His forearms and hands, exposed to air once more, began to burn intensely. He ought to crawl back in the water and just hold on to the side. But he could neither move nor speak now, so within moments he succumbed to his body’s desperate need for sleep.

  * * *

  Yvette was barely conscious of the strong hands that passed her from the yawl to something larger. It might have been another steamboat, or it may have been a military cutter. She knew little more than the shivering that had overtaken her body, not a delicate shudder, as if she had been chilled, but a powerful, palsied quake that threatened to shake her all to pieces.

  As more survivors were brought aboard the vessel, she began to take some notice of the swirl of activity around her. Her thoughts coalesced into concern, not for herself but for the one she’d lost.

  She wanted to ask one of the men about Gabriel, whether they had seen him, whether they would look. But no matter how she tried, her jaws worked only at their chattering, and her voice failed her completely.

  By the pearl-gray light of early morning, she saw a man kneeling beside her, his hair pale silver, his expression grim. She noticed he wore a Union uniform. “We’ll have you feeling better in a trice, miss.”

  But his words barely registered, for her gaze fell upon the wickedlooking knife in his right hand. Though her limbs lacked coordination, she struggled as he moved the blade in her direction.

  “Sorry, but it’s needful,” he told her. “I’m a surgeon, and I’m obliged to get you out of these wet things to warm you.”

  Somehow she clutched the blank
et wrapped around her in the hopes he wouldn’t take it off. No one—not even a medical officer— was going to strip her of her clothes! Sodden or not, Union blue or not, they now composed the sum total of her possessions.

  He pulled harder, so hard that the blanket drew tight around her injured elbow. She gave a hoarse cry and let go, then wept silent tears as he carefully cut away the jacket.

  “Smart of you to put on a boy’s clothes before you went overboard,” he commented. “Something would have likely caught your skirts and drowned you if you’d kept to female dress. You’re the first live woman we’ve pulled out of the river.”

  Clumsily, she tried to cover her exposed breasts with her left arm.

  “Here. Allow me, miss,” the surgeon told her as he wrapped her in another, drier blanket. It effectively shielded her from view as he pulled something from the remnants of her jacket. “What’s this?”

  Yvette stared at the sodden black mass in surprise. Her reticule, which she’d swung behind her back beneath the jacket, remained with her. Incredibly, her reticule, with its precious secret in the lining, had survived. She loosened her grip on the blanket to clutch the ruin of her bag.

  Fresh tears blurred her vision, for what good would the pulpy mass of Russell’s letter do her? After hours in the water, every damning ink stroke would be river-washed, destroyed. She choked out a sob of frustration as the surgeon removed her trousers. Even the possibility of revenge had been lost now.

  The silver-haired man tried to console her. “I’ve a daughter your own age back home in Michigan, and I promise, I’ll watch after you just as I would her. My name is Henry Millard. When we get back to Memphis, I’ll take you to the hospital and see to any wounds. In the meantime, you’ll need to drink from this. It will warm you from the inside out.”

  He pressed a flask to her mouth and tipped it. Yvette swallowed reflexively and felt the whiskey burn a path from throat to stomach. She coughed and spat, trying to clear the awful taste of both the whiskey and humiliation from her mouth.

  “Now, you just rest here real quiet,” he admonished, and she realized that this Yankee, like her Gabe, was a kind man. “I have to see to others now.”