Gwyneth Atlee Page 25
“I’m not going to ask you again, Private Davis. You will remain silent until such time as I ask you a question or give you leave to speak. Is that understood? Answer me.” A flash of lightning lit his stern face, and the rain came faster, harder.
Reluctantly, Gabe nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“I did not receive this telegram until after Captain Russell left the premises. I sent soldiers to arrest him, but by that time, he’d disappeared. Private Davis, I am given to understand that you’ve become involved with this young woman. Is that true?”
“Yes, sir,” Gabe admitted. He had no intention of denying it, even if he would be punished for consorting with an enemy.
“You’re in love with her?”
Gabe nodded, wondering how far Patterson’s line of questioning would go. He refused to reveal private details. Because, colonel or not, Gabe knew he’d pound the man who made lewd comments about the sacred act he and Yvette had shared.
Surprisingly, Patterson’s expression softened. “I’ve seen a lot of ugliness during this war, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. So much that I thought I’d grown immune to horror. But when I saw the bruises on that poor girl’s neck . . . What Russell did deserves—”
He shook his head, and anger flicked across his features—real anger, not the annoyance he had shown at Gabe’s outburst. “I’m only glad it was you that caught the bastard and not me. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have lived long enough to stand trial. And long enough to experience the legal hanging he deserves.”
“You think he will hang?”
“Without a question.”
The colonel stood and offered Gabriel a crisp salute. “You’re a brave man, Private, to steal a horse and face an armed enemy to try to prevent the murder of a Southern woman. A very brave man, and I’ll see personally that you don’t suffer for it.”
Gabe rose and returned the salute. “Thank you, sir, but what about Miss Augeron . . . Yvette?”
“We’ll need to take her statement and get this sorted out, but if what you’ve told me can be corroborated, she has no more to fear.”
Something distracted Patterson, and he peered beneath his desk. Raising his voice, he shouted, “Lieutenant Thompson, come and get these kittens out of here!”
The gray-and-white fugitive made a dash for freedom, but Gabriel scooped it up before it could escape.
“If you’d like,” he offered, scarcely believing what it was that he was saying, “I’d be happy to take this little rascal off your hands.”
Seventeen
April 29,1865 Memphis, Tennessee
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night
incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world.
—Walt Whitman,
from “Reconciliation”
Yvette sat on the bed, staring numbly through the window. Mrs. Beacon had it scrubbed so clean that only the slight distortion caused by its thickness indicated she was looking through clear glass instead of air. Subtle as the glass was, she felt cut off behind it, separated from the world she had reentered.
As she glanced down at the telegram, the same sense of unreality persisted, for the words confirmed a fact she’d known already. Her brother, François, had been killed by Union soldiers in one of the final battles of the war.
The fingers of her left hand touched the line of tenderness at her neck, and her skin rippled with a chill. A Yank had done that, too, but against the odds, her Yankee had saved her. Her mind could reconcile what had happened, but how could she be sure of her heart?
The telegram that Mrs. Beacon had delivered swam into focus, its message somehow magnified by welling tears.
Will arrive soon to escort you New Orleans. François dead of wounds rec’d. Tenn. raid in February. Body to be returned home for interment.
André Augeron
Her brother had died in Tennessee. How far from here? she wondered. Uncle André’s message indicated he felt she must return to the Quarter, just as François would be coming home this one, last time.
Yvette had thought that with Uncle André there would be some choice, that he would ask her what she wanted instead of just assuming. She’d thought he would be different, since he’d broken away from the claustrophobic expectations of New Orleans in general and of Grandmère Augeron in particular.
Will arrive soon to escort you New Orleans. Those words suggested that to his way of thinking, she was nothing but a young, unmarried woman, someone whose decisions must be made by wiser heads. He would try to do well for her. Just as they all would, but they would never think of asking her her mind. After all, her last attempts at independent thought had resulted in such tragedy, such scandal, that it was a wonder they would take her back at all. She knew beyond doubt that no one in the family would ever admit that her father’s judgment of Darien Russell had been flawed. Just as no one would ever believe that Yvette, who had stepped beyond the limits of her convent schooling and her strict upbringing, had not been somehow guilty of causing this whole disgraceful episode.
And if she tried to tell them that she wished to marry Gabriel, a common Yankee soldier, they’d lock her away, convinced the strain of these past weeks had driven her out of her mind. They’d never allow her to speak to him, much less see him, again.
And yet the thought of deliberately turning her back on all of them—especially poor François— broke her heart. He’d been the brother closest to her own age, and Yvette remembered the hours they all had passed together in the nursery, under the watchful eyes of Mama Séverine, a slave whose embraces had been far warmer than their distant mother’s. François had been less inclined to rowdiness than either of his brothers. His tastes ran more to reading and to music, and both his sisters loved him for it. In fact, given his gentler nature, Yvette had been surprised when he had volunteered. Even now, she wondered if he’d done it to make up for Jules’s weak heart and somehow ease their brother’s guilt.
And now he’d died because Jules had not been strong enough to go to war. Thinking of her brothers brought grief crashing over her like a fresh wave. Grief for Pierre’s lost arm, for François’s death, and for the guilt that would likely fester in Jules’s soul. Could she truly abandon all of them to run off with Gabriel?
A tap at the door interrupted her thoughts and startled the grayand-white kitten that Gabriel had brought to try to cheer her. Chanson, as she’d been christened, puffed out her fur and hid behind Yvette’s skirt.
Yvette’s heart beat faster. For a moment, she’d forgotten that Darien Russell was in Officers’ Hospital, under guard. She no longer had to fear that he would find her.
Nor was she certain she wished for Uncle André to come and solve her problems. Praying it would not be him, she scooped up the kitten, then cracked open the door.
“Oh, Gabriel, come in, please,” she told him, feeling a bit guilty they hadn’t disabused Mrs. Beacon of the fiction that they were man and wife.
Without a word of greeting or even a touch, he walked past her, his eyes so filled with pain that it could only mean one thing.
“You have found them?” Yvette asked, speaking of the friends he’d gone in search of, whose disappearance clearly haunted him.
She set Chanson down on a chair. She wanted badly to drape her uninjured arm around Gabriel, to pull him close to her. But something warned her that her touch might be unwelcome, so she hesitated, fingers trembling like marsh grasses touched by wind.
“I went from hospital to hospital to see if their names might have been left off the lists. Then I looked at body after body, and . . .”
He looked at her, and it was as if he saw her for the first time. But instead of turning away, he stepped nearer and pulled her gently against him.
She said nothing, trusting him to tell her when he could, knowing that the contact of their bodies relayed the contents of their hearts far more perfectly than the vagaries
of language.
“Colonel Patterson says they all must be presumed dead,” Gabriel continued. “He says that many of the victims will never be recovered. But I can’t—I won’t— give up on them. They wouldn’t give up on me. Those men kept me alive!”
Yvette nodded against him. “It is the waiting that’s the hardest. Those days after Marie disappeared . . . and then my brother François. One would think that all the torment of not knowing would somehow soften the blow of finding out.”
Her voice broke, and Gabriel pulled her even closer, then began to stroke her hair.
“Tell me,” he whispered, and she felt the warm moisture of his breath against her crown.
The words lodged in her throat, so she pulled away to retrieve the telegram. Handing it to him, she waited solemnly while he read.
“I’m sorry,” Gabriel told her. Then he hesitated, as if he feared the words he would next say. “What will you do now?”
He had asked her. Unlike Uncle André and her family, he had asked her what she would do. And that one question made up her mind completely.
“I will tell my uncle to go on without me. I want to stay with you while you keep looking,” Yvette answered. “Everything else can wait.”
And she knew she meant it. She would wait. Uncle André, her parents, and her grandmère wouldn’t, couldn’t, understand. But Marie would . . . just as would François. They would both want her to be happy with the man she loved.
“No,” he whispered, turning her face toward his. And this time, when he spoke to her, she breathed in every level of his meaning. “Everything cannot. That’s one thing that I’ve learned. Nothing, nothing lasts forever, so putting off happiness is inexcusable.”
With that, he closed the gap between them and took her into his arms. They kissed, neither in control, neither dominated by the other, but only by the power of a passion based on love. When finally he pulled his mouth away, it was to tell her. “Marry me, Yvette. Please . . . marry me this minute.”
She took his hand and kissed it, then gently nipped the fingertips, just as he had hers before. Smiling at his gasp of pleasure, she helped him undo the top buttons of her bodice. “I will marry you today, but first . . . there is one pleasure that we need not postpone.”
Author’s Note
I hope you have enjoyed Against the Odds. To read Jacob Fuller’s story, look for Trust to Chance in January of 2001. An excerpt is available online at www. gynethathlee.com.
More than 1,700 people lost their lives as a result of the destruction of the Sultana, making it the deadliest maritime disaster in the history of the United States. But the yearly death tolls of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s assassination a few weeks earlier had numbed the public, so news about the steamboat accident faded, leaving few traces in most history books.
This novel is a work of fiction. However, many of the events are real, as are several minor characters, including Capt. J. Cass Mason, Capt. Frederick Speed, R. G. Taylor, Nathan Wintringer, and Major William Fidler. These characters’ actions and conversations were derived from historical accounts of the final days of the Sultana. Their thoughts and motivations, however, are of my own construction.
To learn more about the Sultana, visit www.sultana. org on the web or explore the books mentioned in the acknowledgments of this novel.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Prologue 1
Chapter One 3
Chapter Two 18
Chapter Three 28
Chapter Four 38
Chapter Five 55
Chapter Six 78
Chapter Seven 90
Chapter Eight 108
Chapter Nine 119
Chapter Ten 130
Chapter Eleven 143
Chapter Twelve 151
Chapter Thirteen 160
Chapter Fourteen 175
Chapter Fifteen 195
Chapter Sixteen 212
Chapter Seventeen 219 Author’s Note 225