Gwyneth Atlee Page 20

  “You must be insane. How should I know where she is?” True enough, but Gabe decided to embellish, anyway. It went against his grain to appear cooperative in even the slightest degree. “The last I know of her, she was on the promenade with you. You didn’t see her after the explosion?”

  The captain stared at him as if trying to gauge the purpose of his question. Somehow or another, Russell had conjured up a fresh uniform. Despite all the hardships he surely must have suffered, he appeared as meticulously groomed as if no cataclysm had ever inconvenienced him. But that ought not to surprise him, Gabriel thought, for one who’d clearly sold his soul so long before.

  “Your loyalty is misplaced,” Russell said. “I’ve told you, she’s a criminal. A murderess, in fact. There’s even talk she might have been part of a conspiracy that caused the explosion. Whatever the outcome of that investigation, she will hang. And if I don’t catch her, you will in her stead.”

  “You know damned well she had nothing to do with what happened on the Sultana. You know where we all were, and you know what happened when the boat blew up. What makes you think she’s even alive?”

  A slow smirk curled the left side of the captain’s mouth. “I have intelligence to that effect.”

  Despite the leap of hope his heart gave at the news Yvette might have survived, Gabriel forced himself to match the man’s disdainful expression. “Your pardon . . . sir, but I sincerely doubt that. That you have intelligence, that is.”

  “You tread the thinnest of thin lines, boy.”

  “Yvette won’t come back here. I’m nobody to her, just some soldier who helped her out a time or two for lack of anything better to do aboard the boat. Right now she’s probably already sitting in some general’s office, convincing him that you’re a lying murderer. She sure as hell convinced me quick enough, and I don’t normally cotton much to Southerners, not even pretty ones.”

  Standing near Gabe’s feet, Darien Russell flinched visibly at those words. His gold-brown gaze flicked toward nearby cots, as if to check for any reaction from the men sleeping nearby. His clear discomfort felt as soothing as a balm to Gabe.

  “I’ve known Yvette far longer than you have. She’ll come back for you,” Russell insisted. “And when she does, I’ll be waiting.”

  Gabe prayed that he’d been right before, that the conversation he’d shared with Yvette had been mainly wishful thinking on his part. That Yvette had merely acquiesced out of fear and loneliness and desperation. That after having escaped the explosion and the Mississippi, she had fled for the safety of her uncle just as quickly as she could.

  His hopes were swallowed by an almost overwhelming wave of bleakness, a cold black swell of utter desolation. For if Yvette were to escape with her life, it would mean that everything they’d told each other had meant nothing.

  It would mean that the love that burned inside him had been based upon a lie.

  Fourteen

  When Johnny comes marching home again,

  Hurrah! Hurrah!

  We’ll give him a hearty welcome then,

  Hurrah! Hurrah!

  The men will cheer, the boys will shout,

  The ladies, they will all turn out,

  And we’ll all feel gay

  When Johnny comes marching home.

  —Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore,

  “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”

  “I expect to hear of it immediately if he attempts to leave or any visitors ask for him,” Darien told the ward master, a man with the unsettling name of Mr. Butcher. “I’ll be at Colonel Patterson’s headquarters for a few hours. Here is the address.”

  Darien handed him a slip of paper, and the man snatched it away. His bald pate reddening, Butcher glowered at him, apparently

  offended for some reason. Like most of the hospital employees and volunteers Russell had spoken to, the man had eyes underscored by the bruised smudges of fatigue.

  That must be it. Exhaustion made men as snappish as a mare in season, and there was no doubt the steamboat explosion had overtaxed the hospitals of Memphis.

  “We’re doing our damnedest to comfort and feed these men,” the ward master responded. “I have neither the time nor a spare man to stand guard over your prisoner while you’re away, and as I told you before, I will not tolerate you ordering about my staff.”

  “As I told you, Colonel Patterson is sending over a pair of guards almost immediately. However, your assistance would be most—”

  “Unlikely,” Butcher told him, “if not impossible.”

  “Do you spell Butcher with a ‘t,’ sir?” Darien asked coolly. “I’ll need to know for my report in case there are . . . complications.”

  “It’s A-D-R-I-A-N space T period space B-U-T-C-H-E-R, Captain Russell,” Butcher told him, the crimson of his scalp deepening with each letter. “And there’s blood enough around here to write it in red on your report. Enjoy your visit to Memphis, sir. If you’ll excuse me, I have patients to attend.”

  * * * “Insufferable bastard,” a gravelly voice grumbled.

  Gabriel opened his eyes, confused. What could he have possibly done while sleeping to bother anyone? As his vision cleared, a potbellied, grizzled man came into focus. With his brawny arms, he looked as if he may have begun his working life as a blacksmith or a riverman. He still had a cigar clamped in his rear teeth—perhaps the same one that Gabe had noticed earlier, since it remained unlit.

  The man was staring back at him.

  “You a criminal?” the man asked bluntly.

  “What?” Gabe asked, more confused than ever. “A criminal? No,

  I’m not. I’m a Union soldier, that’s all.”

  The fellow grinned, but only on that side of the mouth not busy keeping the cigar in place. “Well, then, that’s good enough for me. Why don’t you skedaddle before that bastard captain gets a chance to send them guards he was jawin’ about?”

  Guards? Darien Russell’s threat rushed back into Gabe’s mind, eliminating any doubts as to the true identify of the “insufferable bastard” the man had been grumbling over.

  Now that the effects of his last dose of morphine were wearing off, the pain of his hands began to reassert itself. Soon, he knew, the wound would throb in earnest, taxing his exhausted body. But that discomfort faded to insignificance against another threat: that Yvette would, as Russell had predicted, come to find him and be captured on the spot.

  If he simply lay here, waiting for the guards and for Yvette, he could do little more than watch as she was clapped in irons. Nausea swirled inside him as he imagined her imprisoned, degraded by some of the same indignities that he had suffered so very recently. Before she died. Somehow Gabe had no doubt that Russell would find a way to guarantee she would be hanged.

  Such a shameful death, and so undeserved. No, he could not allow it no matter how badly his body screamed for rest or his scalded flesh cried out for relief.

  The man before him hitched his pants and adjusted the unlit cigar to the left side of his mouth. “Here.” He offered a strong hand to Gabe. “I’ll even help you up. Whole reason I left the army and come here is so I don’t have to listen to sons a bitches like that cap’n. There’s a handy window you can get outta over here.”

  Gabe swung his leg over the cot’s side and reached out with a bandaged hand, grateful that his palms had not been scalded.

  “Thanks, mister,” he told the older man. “I don’t know you from Adam, but you’re one of the best judges of character I’ve met in a long time. If I get back this way, I aim to bring you a new cigar. One that you can smoke.”

  The man scratched his belly and grinned lopsidedly. “Butcher’s scared to death I’ll catch the place afire. So just don’t let the ward master catch you with a lit one in the building. Otherwise, we’ll both need them two guards—for protection.”

  * * *

  As Yvette approached the river, for the first time she saw it for what it truly was, a wide brown ribbon that bound her homeland to the north, forg
ed of sterner steel than the shackles that had once bound slave to slave.

  Strange that the Mississippi, impartial as it seemed to human rivalries, would exact upon the Yankees such a costly toll. A toll that yet lined the cobblestone walkway along the riverfront, as if Mr. Lincoln’s murder had not been calamity enough.

  And though she’d loved it all her life, she cursed the river now for its insatiable hunger and its utter indifference to human pain. She thought back to the moment she had awakened to find that Gabriel was gone, to her certain knowledge that he would not have willingly abandoned her. The Mississippi had robbed her of even the delusion that he might have survived.

  Two days later, the dead had mustered here in silent order, their number growing steadily as, by twos and tens, they were recovered from the Mississippi. These men who’d wanted only to go home. She thought about the soldier she’d seen sleeping, his emaciated body curved around the food basket she’d given him, and fresh tears filled her eyes.

  Beyond the bodies, a pair of steamboats glided along, followed by faint trails of scalding steam. She shuddered at the thought of boarding any one of them again.

  Yvette turned her head to gaze out over the shrouded rows. Their lines soon softened, then shimmered with the tears that filmed her eyes. She thought about the men these lifeless corpses had once been, men who had already suffered the worst that war could muster. Men not so very different from her brothers, who fought out of devotion to their homeland and would now want nothing quite so fiercely as to go back to the places and the people they had loved. Images of the starving men dawned in her memory, only to be eclipsed by Gabriel’s handsome face. The longing in his blue eyes so pained her that her tears at last spilled over.

  “You deserved to live,” she whispered. Just as he’d deserved to love. Her mind flashed back with painful clarity to that moment she had reached across the floating mule to find him gone.

  How in God’s name was she going to search among these dead to find him? How could she bear to see his face set with the hideous rictus of a river death?

  She began to tremble, and grief loosened both her knees. But as a pair of soldiers rushed toward her, mouthing words that went unheard beneath the roar of her own blood in her ears, Yvette shook her head in an attempt to banish the effects of shock and sorrow.

  If she could not do this, Gabriel Davis’s body would never be identified. Gabriel would never be sent home. No longer could she marry him, but this was something she could and must do. To let him know she truly loved him, for their time together had been so cruelly short.

  “You’d better come away, miss,” a thick and nasal voice insisted.

  Yvette turned to face a military guard, a bearded man who squinted through watery brown eyes. His red-tinged nostrils made her want to step back before he sneezed.

  “This is no place for a lady.”

  “But I must. I have to find him, for his family,” she explained. The second soldier grimaced. A solid-looking, pox-scarred veteran,

  he looked as if he’d prefer battles or even latrine duty to a woman’s tears. “Hate to put you through all this. The last lady who come by here had some sort of hysterical fit and had to be carted off to the hospital herself. You checked the Argus yet for the list of the survivors?”

  “There’s a list in the newspaper?” Yvette asked, hope bubbling past her ability to tamp it down with caution. “If there’s any chance, I want to know. Do you have a copy?”

  “I’ve got one right here,” someone said behind her.

  Yvette spun on her heel, her eyes widening with recognition at the familiar voice. A voice she had believed that she would never hear again.

  Her legs failed her utterly, but it did not matter, for Gabriel was there to catch her with hands swathed in white linen but strong and steady all the same. Gabriel—Dieu merci! C’est fantastique! But though her mind gushed grateful torrents, the words were dammed inside her head with the shock, the wonderful, joyous surprise of his appearance.

  Gabriel appeared no less moved by her presence. Sweeping her into his embrace, he kissed her deeply, apparently oblivious to the first guard, laughing through his sneezes, and the second, who tossed his forage cap into the air.

  “I’ll take more of this and less of the weeping,” the pox-scarred soldier commented with a grin.

  Yvette heard them, but she cared nothing for what the two men must be thinking or how any other witnesses might judge her. She cared about nothing except for the flame that roared through her where their lips met and where their bodies pressed together.

  Her own yelp startled her as he pressed against the sling that held her wrapped arm.

  “I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?” Gabe asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she whispered in reply, leaning back into his arms. “Nothing matters except that you’re alive. I thought—”

  “I know. I was just as worried. We’ll talk about what happened later. But first, we have to get away from here,” he said quietly into her ear. “It isn’t safe for us at all.”

  She nodded, fear opening a chasm at the feet of newfound joy. She mustn’t forget Russell, and their reunion had already attracted more attention than was wise.

  Only now did she notice how Gabriel, like herself, wore cast-off clothing and, worse yet, the way his shoulders slumped with exhaustion, perhaps pain. His gaze had strayed from her to the shrouded rows of corpses, and she wondered if his friends’ bodies were among them.

  She nodded toward the folded newspaper he had just dropped to embrace her. “Did you find your friends’ names in there?”

  He shook his head, still staring at the grim lines on the waterfront.

  “I haven’t found them yet, but I will. Every one,” he swore.

  He stooped to retrieve the paper. When he stood, his face had grown so pallid that she feared he might collapse. Certainly, if Russell found them here, he would not be strong enough to flee. And Yvette knew she could never bear to leave him behind to be punished as an accomplice in her crimes.

  She must get him out of sight. And the only place where she might do that was her room in the boardinghouse.

  Yvette thanked the two soldiers and began leading Gabriel in the direction of Gayoso Hospital and the somewhat shabby two-story town house where she had a room. As they walked, their backs toward the waterfront, she told him about the nurses’ collection and the room they had arranged for her.

  “We’ll go there,” she said. Into a little bedroom, alone and together. She shivered as her mind filled with razor-edged memories of his hands on her flesh.

  He hesitated. “Could Russell find us there? He’s alive, and he’s convinced that you are, too. He came by the Soldiers’ Home, thinking you would look for me.”

  “As I would have as soon as I assured myself you were not here. I swear it.”

  They stopped walking for a moment, and he looked into her eyes, his gaze so intense it warmed her like the Louisiana sun in late July.

  She felt certain that despite his weakness, he was thinking of that bedroom, too, that he had read her mind and judged her brazen. The memory of forbidden touches aboard the Sultana made her body tingle with anticipation and her mind whisper warnings of what had happened to Marie.

  “I know,” he finally answered. “That’s why I had to leave the ward, so he wouldn’t catch you when you found me. Do they know you at the boardinghouse, in case anyone comes looking?”

  Yvette arched an eyebrow. “I told them my name was Caroline Edwards and I was traveling with my husband, who was lost in the river after the explosion. I thought that might buy me a bit of time.”

  He smiled. “I should have known you’d keep your head about you . . . Mrs. Edwards, but I’m going to have to get a notebook to write down all these names of yours.”

  Yvette’s heart thudded at the thought of what she meant to say, but the words slipped out before she had the chance to fully consider what they might signify. “Since we have the same name now, you’d best c
ommit it to memory . . . Mr. Edwards.”

  Thankfully, no expression of shock or disapproval swept across his features. Perhaps after all that they had been through, strict notions of propriety meant nothing to him now. Just as they were fading in her mind.

  He hooked his arm through her uninjured one, and they resumed walking. “Do I have a first name, too?”

  She could barely think, yet somehow she managed to babble on as always.

  “Hmmm,” she told him. “Something biblical, I think. You Yankees prefer that, do you not? How about Lazarus, then, since you have come back to me from the dead?”

  “Lazarus?” His smile was wan. “That might be biblical, but it doesn’t sound American at all.”

  “Then it must be Sam, after your uncle.”

  “Uncle Sam?” A short burst of laughter punctuated his words. Then he shook his head and shrugged. “Sam it is, then.”

  His gaze once more settled on hers, so unflinching that she felt the skin prickling at her nape.

  “As long as I can share a name with you, Yvette, I’m not much concerned about the details.”

  * * *

  As Gabe walked along the avenue beside Yvette, he could not help fingering the sleeve of her gray bodice or laying his hand upon the back of her slender waist. For if he kept in contact, the spell could not be shattered, could it? She could not fade away.

  Had he hungered for her so desperately that he cast her from thin air, he wondered, the way his imagination had once manufactured meals from wishes? But those foods had had no substance, and Yvette felt warm and solid beneath his touch. So real, as if his mind had slipped the bonds of sanity.

  Yet how could she be here? How could he have found her so very quickly simply by wandering the streets of a large city?

  It’s not so hard at all when a ghost gives one directions.

  Lord. The memory of it oozed like frigid sweat along his spine. The Rebel soldier he’d seen earlier, lifting up a finger to point him toward the waterfront. The boy dressed in a uniform of butternut.