Gwyneth Atlee Page 6

  “Even in the blood of children,” Gabe said. “It’s a damned steep price for pride.”

  “There is no price too high for self-respect, sir, and I will thank you to watch your language in my presence.”

  He focused on her haughtiness, the contempt he imagined building in her. Only by doing so could he force himself to spill the entire story, especially the parts he’d been unable to tell Seth.

  “There is,” he told her, “or I should say there was for me. Before I became an infantry soldier, I spent several years designing and testing different cannon. I was so proud of those gleaming bronze Napoleons with my family name stamped on their barrels. Proud of their beauty and efficiency until I saw the mangled corpses on both sides.”

  He could still see them when he closed his eyes, bodies pulverized by grapeshot, pulped by exploding shells. So stubbornly, he kept both eyes open to try to keep the disquieting past at bay, at least for now. Later, when the only sounds around him were the snores of sleeping men and the splashing of the paddle wheels, he knew that he would see it all once more. Once more and forever, every time he tried to sleep.

  “The bodies looked the same. Didn’t matter if they hailed from Massachusetts or Kentucky, from Florida or Texas. Didn’t matter what color their skin or whether they ate Boston beans or black-eyed peas before the war. They all bled the same.”

  He could see the disdain fading in her eyes, followed quickly by the dawning of comprehension about what this war had really been. Not some grand adventure made more noble through its inconveniences and sacrifice, but all the carnage, all the waste.

  “Thank God I never had to fire any heavy weapons,” Gabe continued. “Pulling the trigger of my Henry rifle was more than enough. Sixteen shots, that Henry had. Sixteen chances to crack open another man’s chest or spew his brains all over his comrades or tear off one of his legs. But when I was called upon to fire, I still did it. To the very best of my ability. I killed my share of Rebels. Sometimes I wanted to just kill them all so I could hurry up and be quit of this place. That’s all most of us wanted, to get finished and go home.”

  Eve refused to meet his gaze now. Her mouth had flattened to a taut, grim line. But she did not get up and run shrieking from the room, as so many women would have. Even if she had, though, he might have gone on talking just to free the words that had lingered so long near the graveyard of his soul.

  “I might have finished up a hero, the way I shot those Rebs. Might have.” Gabe shook his head. “If we hadn’t gotten backed into a tight spot. We were close enough to bayonet each other instead of shooting. I was fighting hard, too, because I knew the minute that I stopped, some Johnny would run me through. I didn’t want to end up all in tatters like those corpses, didn’t want my family to have to bury its last son. I think I was wrong, though, not to realize there are worse things than dying. Maybe you were right about the price of self-respect.”

  The kitten hopped off her lap and trotted toward him, its neck craning with cautious curiosity. Keeping its back paws on the floor, it lifted the front ones to the bunk’s edge near his shoulder and stared at him, its green eyes blazing.

  Gabe barely saw the kitten but wouldn’t have touched it, anyway. Tiny and appealing as it might be, it remained a cat.

  “You said you didn’t want your family to bury its last son. Did your brother, or perhaps I should say brothers, die in the war?” Eve asked.

  Her voice surprised him, she’d been quiet for so long. He shook his head in answer.

  “Matthew drowned two years before the first shots. I was there. I saw him break through the river ice. I went in, too, thinking I could find him. But it was as if he’d fallen into a hole leading to the center of the earth. I never saw his face again, except . . .”

  “Except?”

  “Except after it became so pale and bloated I didn’t even know for sure it was my brother. And then again, that last time, my last battle.” He looked up at her, trying to mask his desperation for acceptance with a challenge. “I came eye to eye with a Rebel boy with Matthew’s face.”

  Tears welled in her eyes. Dared he hope they were born of understanding? Or did she still pity him, or worse yet, fear he was insane?

  He couldn’t care about that. He had to get this all out, for he sensed he’d never summon the courage to tell his tale again.

  “Of course, it couldn’t have been Matthew. He’d been dead for years. But at that moment, I-I saw my brother. It was an awful shock.” He paused and asked himself again whether his mind manufactured that vision later to excuse what happened next. No, it could not be. He remembered it too clearly. Matthew’s pale blond hair, his eyes flashing with what looked for all the world like recognition.

  He shuddered with the memory of it, still absolutely vivid despite the months that had passed since then. A perfectly clear moment that would last him all his life.

  “I almost shot him, anyway. Just a reflex to keep myself alive, like vomiting a bellyful of poison. But my finger froze on that trigger, and then my mind— I’m not sure what went through it. I’ve tried to remember, but—” He shook his head, despairing of the task. “All I know is what the others told me. I threw down my rifle, and I ran like hell.

  “By the time I realized what I’d done, I was wandering among a lot of pine trees. I could hear the echoes of a few last shots far in the distance. But by the time I found my unit, the Rebels had retreated. When I reported to camp, my mates had all heard how I’d run. They turned their backs to me.”

  He remembered the stark desolation of that moment, the realization that he’d betrayed his fellow soldiers and not just himself. “I went to the captain and reported in for discipline.”

  “No coward would have done that,” Eve told him. Her voice was adamant, leaving no room for polite half-truths. Though he’d thought her strident earlier, he found he liked the fact that she said what she felt.

  As if it agreed with its mistress, the kitten hopped onto the berth beside him. Gabe summoned the strength to sit and scooped the ball of fluff into his hands.

  “This coward did,” Gabe said as he set the kitten on the floor. “That was the problem. I expected to be drummed out, sent home in disgrace. It was a fitting punishment. My father . . .”

  Shaking his head, he closed his mouth against what his father would have done, would do, when he returned to Ohio.

  “No one wanted to hear why I left the battle. Every friend I had turned on me. Enough to listen when Silas Deming came up with an idea. Instead of waiting for the captain to properly disgrace me, the men could drum me out themselves, run me through the Southern line. The Rebels would take care of me, he reckoned.”

  “Is that how you were captured?”

  He nodded. “I tried my best to make them kill me, but it didn’t happen that way. Without a weapon, I wasn’t even threat enough to shoot.”

  “Did you . . . did you ever see the boy again? The one who so reminded you of your brother?”

  Slowly, he shook his head. “I didn’t, but I swear he was real. I know it. I can still see every feature, every freckle on that young man’s face. And I still . . . I still wonder if somehow it could be . . .”

  She leaned forward just an inch more, and the room seemed to close in around him. He’d only have to shift a bit and his knee would graze hers. He looked into her face as if to memorize it. She’d saved his life today—perhaps in more respects than one. Already he felt the pain bleeding out from the empty socket the truth had left. But the pain and blood felt cleansing somehow, as if they were preparing him for the chance to heal.

  He might never repay her for what she’d done today, but he would carry her beautiful face with him, cast it into crystal as he had his brother’s. As his mind took in Eve’s delicate features, he grew increasingly conscious of the astonishing fact that he was alone inside this room with a very desirable woman. Awareness stole over him, and he felt his heartbeat race.

  His gaze lingered for a long moment on her hazel eyes
. Long enough to see them darken, just as summer clouds will to presage a violent storm.

  * * *

  As Gabriel sat across from her in the cramped stateroom, Yvette reminded herself he was just another Yankee. Even so, she dug her nails into her palms to divert her rising tide of sympathy.

  Sympathy for what? For a young man who’d admitted killing Rebel boys? She thought of the day she and Marie had been enjoying coffee in Madame Bouchard’s parlor. How proudly Honorée had shown them the photograph of her husband, Emile, who had gone to war before the cursed Union took New Orleans. Then, as if her pride had drawn disaster, Yvette remembered the solemn knock at the front door, the shriek of Simone, the Bouchards’ mulatto maid. Honorée’s insistence, “C’est de la foutaise! This is nonsense—just a disgraceful Yankee trick!”

  As far as Yvette knew, her friend had not yet admitted that her husband was truly dead. She could well imagine Honorée turning away all visitors who might insist she face the truth and not run to the window to peek out through the curtains every time a rider or carriage approached. She was too young to be a widow, she’d told Yvette and Marie. As if that fact could undo his death. As if the typhoid that killed him could be cured by the empty arms of his desperate twenty-year-old bride.

  If that memory wasn’t enough, Yvette could call forth so many others. The day their flag had been torn down, her city captured. Pierre’s shame at returning home minus his right arm. Sweet François, the youngest of her three brothers, who’d been fighting in Tennessee when she’d last heard from him, about five months before. And Jules’s bitterness at being the brother left behind, his heart too weakened by rheumatic fever to survive the hardships of campaigning.

  Juste ciel, but she could cry a bucket for each of them, her city and her brothers and her friends. And a river for Marie, perfect, prim Marie, who’d been misled by a Northerner with manners of silk and morals of coarse ash.

  “What’s wrong?” the Yankee asked her, concern furrowing his forehead.

  She must think of him as a Yankee, she admonished herself. Not as Gabriel Davis or as another young man wounded by this war. As damaged and as haunted as the men who’d fought on the right side.

  “I am counting up the thousand reasons I should hate you,” Yvette admitted.

  “It must be working. You look mad as h— You look very angry.”

  She suppressed a smile at the way he’d corrected his language to appease her. Then she shrugged. “Mostly, I am angry with myself. A thousand reasons should be enough for anyone. I could recite them endlessly, but still I listen to your words and wonder. Could it be the Yankees suffered, too?”

  “War causes pain enough to go around, Miss Alexander.”

  “This I will concede. Now tell me how it is that you are feeling? I have washed away the blood, but you have quite a bump there. Shall I try to find a doctor?”

  “No doctors, please. I’m feeling better now.” Something in his tone suggested he was lying. He didn’t want to draw any more attention to himself. This she understood, and it brought her to the last, best reason she must steel herself against his story. She could not afford the chance he might grow too curious about her.

  Still, she hesitated, though she knew she ought to hurry him away. The hour had grown late, and propriety bespoke one danger if he lingered, her situation quite another.

  She was a fool, she thought, even as she clutched at this opportunity to talk with someone. She’d been on the run for days, lonely among strangers, she who had never spent so much as one day totally on her own. How she missed her family, her friends! Lafitte was some comfort, for he reminded her of home, but Lafitte could never answer, and she was deathly tired of their one-sided conversations.

  That was why she put aside the thousand reasons she should hate the Yankee long enough to say to him, “Tell me, Mr. Davis, what happened next to you. I’ve seen stories in the newspapers about Andersonville. Tell me about that place.”

  His polite expression melted into something darker, graver, until he looked far older than she’d guessed he could be. “I can’t tell you what that place was. Not without saying things about your fellow Rebels and using language that you would certainly object to. But you don’t need the words to understand. You looked around as you boarded today, didn’t you, Miss Alexander? You must have seen the men with open sores, the ones without enough meat on them to make a decent soup bone. Some of them don’t even speak. They gape and drool, and they make noises, but hunger and sickness have broken their minds.”

  “I understand there are places just as evil in the North, but I must say I don’t condone it,” she told him honestly. When she’d first read about the prison, she’d supposed the reports mere Yankee propagandizing, gross exaggeration. But even the tamest version was a shame unto the South. And Gabriel was right. The withered bodies of so many men could not be faked.

  “But you aren’t like those poor men,” she told him, her gaze sweeping over him. He was quite thin, yes, but not emaciated.

  “I wasn’t there as long as most,” he told her, “and then there were my friends.”

  Something changed in his expression at the mention of his friends. A warmth stole over the cool blue of his eyes, which reminded her all the more painfully of those she had been forced to leave behind. So much so that she was grateful when he continued.

  “They kept me alive in every sense of the word. I remember the day I first came into camp. The smells, the sights—” He shook his head as if to dispel the images. “But I’ve told you, I won’t describe it. At least the other captives were too miserable on their own accounts to care about the circumstances of my capture.”

  His gaze, which had drifted off as he spoke, rose to meet hers, then he glanced down in wonder at her hand, which she had placed atop his.

  “I’ve known cowards, Mr. Davis,” she said softly. “And I’d never number you among them.”

  She leaned forward, only half-realizing what she offered, only half-guessing that this blond Northerner would lean forward as well. Would raise his hands to grasp her arms gently. Would touch his lips so warmly against hers.

  She felt as if a candle flame had kissed her. Its heat seared her without burning, singed her without pain. Instead, the warmth of it coursed through her, pooling in her breasts, her belly, that tiny, secret place that melted like wax heated by fire.

  She moaned with the intensity of it. Never had she imagined that any kiss could feel like this.

  His hand rose to stroke her hair, to cup her cheek as though she were something precious, and all the while, their kiss went on and on, opening an aching need inside her, an unguessed, ancient want. She felt the tip of his tongue taste her lips, felt them part, felt her whole mouth opening to him. Felt how easily, how eagerly, the rest of her would follow. And for the first time she understood how it was so many women allowed men to compromise them, how even her proper sister had opened herself up to this exquisite ruin.

  She wondered, in her saner moments, how she would feel about it. Surely there would be shame then, even if she felt nothing but bliss now. Shame she had allowed this near-stranger, this ragged-looking Yankee to—

  He moved to pull her closer, and she regained her sanity. The passion she had felt iced over, and her body splintered just a moment later, jerking her back, away from him.

  “Thank you.” He stood, and a wistful smile warmed the cool blue of his eyes.

  She jumped to her feet and felt a fierce blush rise to heat her cheeks. Thank you? Was that how he saw her kiss—the first real kiss she’d ever given—as no more than a favor?

  “You’re very kind . . . and very lovely,” Gabriel said, his gaze so intense she had to drop her own. “I’m much obliged to you for helping me tonight. Too obliged to try to take advantage, tempting as you are.”

  Her efforts at thought felt like wading upstream against floodwaters. Impossible as it seemed, she felt flattered and insulted all at once. She needed time to sort out exactly how it was she felt abou
t their kiss, how she felt about this man, this enemy.

  “I-I think you should leave now,” she stammered. “I will remember you in my prayers. I-I’m not sorry that I helped you with those men.”

  Before she could react, he leaned to kiss her. But, to her relief, it was a chaste kiss on the top of her head, more like one of those her brothers might bestow than the cataclysm that passed before. “I don’t want you to be sorry later, either; I want you to be safe. Please, stay away from them the rest of the trip. How far are you going?”

  The words “St. Louis” stuck in her throat. She couldn’t tell him, couldn’t tell anyone, just in case someone followed her. “I’ll be on board another day or two,” she said instead.

  His index finger brushed her cheek. Though the gesture seemed innocent enough, the pleasure that rippled through her body felt white hot. For a moment, she feared he saw the blaze the touch engendered, that he would insist on staying here to ruin her for any decent man.

  The idea that he might be a decent man skimmed across her surface, as graceful as an egret. But what sort of decent man told his secrets to a stranger, an enemy, no less? Still, the impression stayed with her, a ghostly image of a stark white bird in flight.

  He reached for her but at the last moment stayed his hand. The longing in his eyes made her heart race with a mixture of apprehension and desire.

  A smile faltered, and he dropped his hand to the doorknob. “Good-bye, Miss Alexander, and once again I thank you.”

  He stepped out into the darkened main cabin. She stared at the door as it clicked softly shut. She really should have felt immense relief. Yankees were so often vilified for their lewdness that no true lady of New Orleans would willingly spend time alone with one.

  So why had she? And worse yet, why did she feel so disappointed that he’d been such a gentleman and left?

  Her mind turned back to the letter she had written to Marie, the question she had asked her: How could you allow romantic sentiment to blind you to the fact that this man was an enemy? How ever did you come to love a cursed Yankee?