Gwyneth Atlee Page 3

  He recalled the sisters’ differences too well. Most importantly, Marie revered him. She never would have considered making him an object of ridicule. They also differed physically. Whereas Marie had been refined and elegant, her youngest sibling had the fiery eyes of a tigress set in an angel’s face. Smaller and infinitely more vocal, Yvette resembled the graceful Marie only in coloring and in the long, thick lashes that provoked so many admiring glances.

  That resemblance was enough, however, for the third man he asked recalled a pretty, black-haired young woman boarding the steamboat minutes before. If he’d had any doubts at all as to the passenger’s identity, the man dispelled them when he laughed about the way she had dressed down the sergeant trying to keep order among the men crowding on board.

  The little hellcat already had men laughing at another Union soldier whose only crime was helping to keep order. The sergeant should be grateful she hadn’t brought with her a piano, her weapon of choice.

  Yvette had never known the meaning of the word comportment. Darien well remembered how Marie had fretted over the girl’s future in society. Their father’s family background and his standing as a wellto-do coffee broker assured all of the Augerons invitations wherever better families gathered in the Crescent City. But it would take more than money to blunt the cutting edges of Yvette’s razor wit. Marie had been tight-lipped about the cause of the girl’s disgrace, but Darien had finally coaxed from her some nonsense about a stingingly acerbic little ditty she’d sung at a society soiree.

  “Surely, such youthful mischief is not sufficient cause for social death,” he’d told Marie. He’d been foolish enough at that time to imagine the girl harmless.

  “Oh, I’m certain that the song might have been eventually forgiven if not for the unfortunate verse concerning Madame LaFarge’s predilection for the services of handsome young gardeners.” Marie’s dark gaze flicked away, as if she found the subject too distasteful for discussion.

  She continued, anger coloring her words. “It’s bad enough Yvette is so extreme in her opinions, but Papa wouldn’t force her to apologize. He’s always spoiled her no matter how Maman feared for her character. Papa may have smoothed things over this time, but she’s learned so little from it. If she does not begin conducting herself as a lady, no one in polite society will have a thing to do with her.”

  Darien wondered how they’d react if they learned that the proper Marie was keeping company with him, a Union officer— worse yet, an aide to both General Banks and, before him, the hated Butler, who had made such bitter enemies when he occupied New Orleans. At Marie’s insistence, they’d been extremely careful. She’d been fond of saying that Lucifer might have regained heaven if he’d been more discreet.

  Apparently, despite the fact that her meddling had cost Marie her life, Yvette hadn’t yet learned the lesson of discretion. No matter. Darien meant to bridle the girl’s tongue once and for all. Even if he had to steal aboard this crowded steamer, the vicious little hellion was going to share her sister’s fate.

  * * *

  “I think you’re gaining back some weight,” Gabriel lied. If anything, Zeke felt even lighter. Or perhaps, with his returning strength, the younger Fuller brother was less a burden to Gabe’s arms.

  “In two months’ time, I aim to get so fat I’ll bust my buttons.” Zeke tried to grin, but pain contorted his expression. His cut and swollen ankle, when they’d checked this morning, had darkened ominously. But Zeke refused to let either his brother or his friends call for a doctor out of fear he’d be left behind in the hated South. Like the rest of them, he told himself that time spent home would erase all traces of their incarceration.

  Sadness washed over Gabe on a dark tide of misgivings. Zeke’s bones felt so close to the surface that his shoulder blades ground into Gabe’s supporting arm.

  Gabe forced himself to agree with his friend’s boast and tried to make himself believe in the future Zeke imagined. Zeke grown fat and healthy, married to some apple-cheeked farm girl. Zeke, in later years, father to a slew of children with the same green eyes, the same mop of unruly, straight brown hair. Maybe he’d be a prosperous businessman, organizing horse races at some Indiana fairgrounds with the same good humor with which he’d set up louse races for the entertainment of his fellow prisoners. It could be . . . because it must. Surely, a just God would see that Zeke deserved that much. Surely he’d fought hard and suffered plenty for one life. All of them had except, perhaps, for him, Gabe thought.

  Zeke was already the thinnest and weakest among their group the day they had departed Andersonville. Even so, he’d been in high spirits when they’d left the Georgia prison camp. They all had, certain that the worst was now behind them. None had been prepared for the harrowing journey from Georgia to the Mississippi River. The tracks, torn up during the fighting, had been in such poor repair that the train derailed three times along one short stretch in Alabama. On the last occasion, their crowded railcar had overturned. Several men broke limbs made fragile by starvation, but at first it seemed that none of their group had been hurt. Only later, when he could not walk the final stretch to Union-held Vicksburg, would Zeke at last admit his injury.

  Gabe didn’t blame him. After all they’d been through together, he’d rather haul Zeke’s half-starved body clear to Indiana than leave him behind to recover in Alabama or Mississippi. The war might be over, but Seth was right. Confederate resentment hadn’t died. No telling what sort of “tender care” an injured Yankee might receive.

  “Let’s grab a spot right here before the best ones are all taken,” Seth suggested, raising his voice to carry over the sounds of clanging metal.

  Gabriel guessed that he was thinking of the difficulty of getting Zeke up the main stairs, where many of the other Indiana cavalrymen were heading. Also, this central section near the boilers would be warm at night, something that would especially benefit the injured man.

  But Zeke shook his head.

  “That banging might sound like a symphony to a farrier,” he began, referring to Jacob’s career shoeing horses, “but that racket will drive the rest of us insane.”

  Jacob rounded a corner and shouted a question Gabe couldn’t hear. In a few moments, he returned.

  “They’re working on a boiler,” he told the others. “Might be pounding on it a couple hours more. I say we should go up with the others.”

  Zeke nodded. “Let’s go on up, Jake. If we have to be stuck in one spot for three or four days, I want to sit where I can watch the South get farther distant and God’s country come into view.”

  When he put it that way, all of them agreed. Jacob moved to his brother’s left and helped Gabe carry him upstairs. Halfway there, they had to rest.

  Gabe noticed the strained expression on Jacob’s face. “What’s wrong?”

  “Must have been those extra rations I swiped when you boys weren’t lookin’. I’m getting too brawny for my big brother to carry anymore,” Zeke joked, making a bare swell of a muscle with his thin right arm.

  Jacob shook his head and grinned. “Hell, Zeke, I’ve been carryin’ you your whole sorry life. I’m not about to start complaining now. It’s only that—”

  “What?” Gabe urged. Despite his jest, Jacob’s face looked grim. “Come have a look yourself.”

  “What’s the trouble?” Seth asked.

  Jacob shook his head. “I’m not sure I like the looks of this. Probably nothing, though. How about if Gabe and I go check? Zeke needs to get off his feet, though.”

  “All right,” Captain Seth said, but he didn’t look too happy. Knowing Seth, he probably wasn’t certain they’d stay out of trouble without his preaching good sense in their ears. “But come and get me if you need me. Zeke and I will find a spot for us up top.”

  Seth took over the task of supporting Zeke, and Gabe followed Jacob. As they passed several soldiers wearing the insignia of an Ohio infantry unit, Gabe scanned the area, hoping to God he wouldn’t be spotted by anyone who knew him. The Ohio co
ntingent of prisoners must be settling on this deck. Whatever Jacob wanted, Gabe prayed it would be quick.

  The pair returned to where two men were hammering a patch onto a boiler. One man paused in his pounding to look up at Jacob.

  “Something troubling you, soldier?”

  “Just interested,” Jacob told him, but Gabriel read concern in his friend’s expression.

  Gabriel glanced at the boiler, then looked back over his shoulder.

  “Don’t worry,” the mechanic told Jacob. “We’ll have this patched and get you home in good time. Didn’t you see the elk’s antlers on the staging? The Sultana broke the record last year—New Orleans to Cairo in four days and seven hours. She’s a fast one, and no mistake.”

  The boiler mechanic returned to his banging.

  As they left, Jacob said, “I’m more worried about getting home in one piece than making any records. They’re slapping a patch over a bulge in one of the boilers. If I didn’t know they were civilians, I’d think it was a typical shoddy army job. I don’t like it at all. Makes a weak spot in the metal.”

  Gabriel nodded. He’d worked around metal enough to see the sense of what Jacob was saying, but every moment they spent on this deck begged a confrontation. Though he’d enjoy a chance to explain his reasons for running six months earlier, he knew his former comrades would no more listen now than they had the day he’d been drummed out. Only this time, instead of sending him into an enemy ambush, they’d likely beat him senseless, maybe even cut his throat.

  And maybe they’d be right. After all, he hadn’t learned his lesson in spite of nearly paying with his life. If he faced that boy again today, he’d do exactly what he’d done before. He knew it to his bones.

  “Come on, Jake,” Gabe urged, unwilling to tell his friend the real reason for his hurry. “These fellas work on boilers all the time. Surely they have inspectors lined up to check the work before we go.”

  Jacob hesitated, running a hand through his newly cropped brown curls. His natural impatience won out, and he nodded. Then the two worked their way upstairs, to the hurricane deck.

  Gabriel could have sworn he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a hand lifted in his direction.

  “Hey, Davis!” The words were faint but unmistakable.

  Gabe quickened his steps and hoped that Jacob hadn’t heard. They bypassed the cabin level and hurried up top, to the hurricane deck.

  “It’s getting mighty thick,” Jacob said, gesturing to the soldiers who were crowding into every available spot. “Looks like they mean to pack us in like hogs.”

  It was a wonder Gabe could hear the way his heart was hammering. He hoped his voice would not betray his nervousness. “You’d think they’d split us up and put some on that other steamboat.”

  He nodded toward the Pauline Carroll, which was tied nearby. The big steamer appeared nearly empty.

  “You aren’t still trying to figure out the way the army big bugs think? There’s only two reasons they do anything: bribery or lunacy. Tryin’ to figure out which one’ll only give you headaches,” Jacob told him. “Look, there’s Seth and Zeke, back toward the stern. Let’s see if we can get to ’em without stepping on too many of these fellows.”

  But Gabriel already felt as if someone had trodden on his thumping heart. He’d been noticed, recognized. He scanned the crowd on the hurricane deck, hoping like hell that there was no one else.

  When he saw someone he knew, nausea rushed at him until he realized it was only Mac Mahoney, from Andersonville. Shame heated Gabe’s face. Had his guilt made him so jumpy that he flinched upon hearing another former inmate’s voice two decks below?

  At last they reached their two friends, who’d staked out a narrow stretch of deck in front of a wheel housing.

  “So, brother, did you make ’em quit their banging, or did you just show ’em how it’s done?” Zeke asked Jacob.

  Jacob grinned. “I thought I might fix those boilers myself, but the fools suggested I stick to pounding little brothers.”

  Gabe couldn’t help but smile at their banter, but he felt a measure of pain, too. He’d been with Zeke and Jacob for months, but in the past few days, seeing the two brothers together resurrected Matthew’s ghost. Why now and not before? Was it prompted by his fear of being caught by members of his old unit? Or maybe with their journey home, Ohio was once more growing real inside his mind instead of a vague, unattainable idea, like freedom.

  Well, he was free now, thank God, and soon he would be home. He’d have to face the fact that a grave was all that he would see of his younger brother, that the only Davis male to greet him would be Father.

  His father. A memory rushed up at him, like a hungry fish rising to the bait. His mother weeping as his father jabbed the air with his pipe to emphasize his words.

  “No son of mine is going to shirk his duty.”

  “But you said I’m more useful working on artillery design,” Gabe argued. A part of him did want to go with his friends, to join in the grand adventure of the war. But Mama’s tears, her whispered pleas, had stayed him. That and the satisfaction of working in his father’s factory to build the weapons that would help the Union win the day.

  Flint Maxwell Davis made a ring of his pipe smoke and sent it floating toward the ceiling. In a moment it dissolved into a sweet, ashen fragrance, like the ones that came before it.

  “I can do without you, Gabe.”

  That was God’s truth if he’d ever heard it. It always had been, ever since his father realized that Matthew shared so many of his interests, which Gabe found somewhat alarming. But Father had gleefully taught his younger son the workings of a dozen games of chance and encouraged him to breed bloodthirsty roosters for illegal cockfights. More and more, Flint Davis ignored his eldest, whose interest in sketching trees and animals he proclaimed unmanly. When Matthew drowned, Gabe could all but hear resentment buzzing in his father’s skull.

  Even so, hearing him admit what Gabe had long sensed stunned him. He remembered a wave of nausea rising, like one of Father’s damned smoke rings.

  “This draft notice cannot, will not, be ignored,” Father insisted.

  “Don’t ignore it, then. Pay a substitute,” Mama told his father. Though she didn’t give it voice, her terror hung in the air, fear that she would outlive yet another son. “It isn’t as if we can’t spare three hundred dollars. You’ve said yourself how well the business is doing.”

  “Like hell I’ll pay a substitute!” his father roared. “And have everyone saying that Flint Davis, the man who built a fortune in artillery, was too cowardly to send his own son off to war? Or thought his money made him too grand? I’ve told you before, I’m not one of those damned blue bloods who thinks that a few dollars set me above the rest!”

  “Plenty of families we know have kept their boys at home! There are men who need that money just as much as we need Gabe,” she pleaded.

  “No. We don’t need him; you do. You need Gabe tucked under your wing so he won’t die like him.”

  The tears filling Mama’s eyes spilled over. In the three years since his brother’s death, as if by consensus, his parents never spoke his name. When forced to refer to Matthew, they said only him. As if by pretending Matthew had never existed they could assuage the pain of losing Father’s favorite.

  His mother straightened her spine and glared into his father’s eyes. “Mr. Davis, you know very well you’re only using this draft notice as an excuse! You mean to punish Gabriel!”

  She didn’t have to say for what. Though no one asked the questions, they hung heavily among the surviving family members. His sisters stared them at him. His mother wept them into lacy handkerchiefs. And his father, especially, hinted at them in dozens of furtive looks and conversations that danced around the point. Why couldn’t you save Matthew? How could you have let him drown?

  That Gabe had nearly died, too, jumping in after his younger brother, was not an answer. Flint Davis was consumed by the mystery of why one son climbed out o
f the icy river while the other hadn’t.

  God knew Gabe had tried to make it up to his father. He’d turned his talent from sketching landscapes and horses to drawing precise artillery designs. He’d followed the old man into the factory out of a sense of duty and the hope that he could prove useful enough to earn his father’s forgiveness, if not his love. Flint Davis never thawed, but after a time, the work became its own reward. Gabe had discovered art in three dimensions among the gleaming rows of cannon with his family name stamped on the barrels.

  Until his father made him join the army and Gabriel saw with his own eyes the carnage he’d unthinkingly unleashed upon the world.

  * * *

  Capt. J. Cass Mason thought longingly of the well-stocked bar in the main cabin. After everything he’d done to secure this load of released prisoners, he felt uncommonly tense. But the bar would have to wait, for Capt. Frederic Speed had just asked for a private word with him inside the Sultana’s office.

  He waved the assistant adjutant general into the small room and invited him to sit. Captain Speed, a trim, dark-haired man perhaps ten years younger than Mason’s thirty-four years, glanced at the chair he’d indicated. Apparently changing his mind, he remained standing, looking ill at ease.

  He’ll want something for his trouble, Mason decided. Too many of these young officers thought the steamboat lines had bottomless pockets. Never mind that the U.S. government routinely commandeered the boats and played havoc with the schedules. Never mind the fact that they’d seized the Rowena from Mason, all for the crime of carrying some medicine and trousers to the South. Now, two years later, every hope—and every dime—he had were riding on the success of the Sultana. And still, every mother’s son of them came calling with his hand out.

  “I’m very much concerned about the crowding,” Captain Speed began. “I was just informed there are very nearly two thousand prisoners aboard.”