Daughter of the Sword (55 page)

In August Lee defeated Pope at Second Bull Run and invaded Maryland in the hope of isolating Washington, but after Antietam in mid-September, Lee withdrew to Virginia. The battle had been a draw, but the French and British, who had seemed on the brink of recognizing the Confederacy and forcing mediation, now reconsidered. In November the British rejected the French proposal for intervention. This left the South without hope of foreign help.

It was also after Antietam that Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation which would, on January 1, 1863, free all slaves in states still in rebellion.

The Eleventh spent that winter and the spring of '63 marching, fighting, and countermarching through the muddy, when not freezing, rutted roads of northern Arkansas and southern Missouri. The women at the smithy shared letters from their men, and when they had a chance to send letters back by someone who was going through Lawrence, Ansjie, Judith, Sara, and Deborah all sat writing at the big table. Judith needed some help, but she'd learned to write in a large, clear hand and was tremendously proud of being able to “talk” to her husband.

Deborah wrote of every day life, filling up a few pages with talk of the twins, travelers, and the settlers at Friedental. She didn't mention her certainty that Rolf was back on the border and riding with Quantrill, but her heart stopped when Dane wrote that he'd heard from Sir Harry how Rolf had come back from the continent so restless that he'd almost immediately left for the United States. “He told Sir Harry he was going to Oregon,” Dane's letter ran. “I can only hope he does—and that I never see him again, for if I do, I'll have to kill him.”

Still praying that Dane could be spared that, Deborah never told even Sara and Judith that Charlie Slaughter, of rising infamy, was indeed Rolf.

Johnny and Doc came home in March on furlough, but Dane was near Fort Scott recovering from pneumonia. Johnny still limped from a thigh wound and needed to recuperate while he told the twins stories and marveled at how they'd grown.

Doc and Ansjie, though, insisted on driving Deborah down to Fort Scott and spent their time together while Deborah sat with Dane, reading to him and writing to Sir Harry. She was grateful to be with him but ached at his gauntness, skin stretched over bone. There was gray in his hair. She knew she had changed, too.

Her hands were calloused, her skin weathered. Her spirit felt hardened, too, tough and dry. It had been a long time since she felt like a woman. Yet she loved this man with a depth that made her earlier longing seem childish and shallow.

One day, when he seemed to be sleeping, tears slid from her eyes to the hand she was holding. He looked up at her, gently wiping away the tears with his long fingers. “Our time will come, love. As I've seen men die around me, things that were important aren't anymore. I'd hoped that on this furlough—” He gave a little shrug. “But I don't fancy being an invalid bridegroom!”

Neither of them mentioned Rolf. Also, it was firm in Deborah's mind that before she could marry Dane, if that time ever came, she must tell him she'd killed men. But not now. Not now. Let them have this little time together. They were gentle, grateful, after separation, just to be with each other, to touch hands and smile.

When Johnny rejoined the Eleventh, Laddie was with him. “Bound and determined,” Johnny explained, rubbing his stiff thigh. “Said if he couldn't come with me, he'd run off and enlist.” He blew out his cheeks. “Sara cried her eyes out, but
Cesli tatanka!
The boy's seventeen!”

“Be careful!” Deborah pleaded, kissing Laddie on his smooth brown cheek in spite of his squirming. He had become a very handsome young man.
Almost as old as Thos had been when he was killed.

“Careful!” Laddie scorned, thrusting back his dark hair. “I'm tired of bein' careful!” He grinned and was for a moment the boy she remembered. “Think I want my nephew askin' what I did in the war? Got to get some stories to tell him!” There was a swagger in his gait as he went off to mix with the veterans.

When the Eleventh left Fort Scott to join the First Division of the Army of the Frontier under the command of General Ewing, Dane kept his saddle more from willpower than strength. As he waved back at Deborah and the column faded toward the border, her tears seemed to fall inside her heart and freeze.

An echo of Conrad's voice and Boehme sounded in her.
“It can only be likened to the resurrection of the dead. There will the Love Fire rise up again in us and rekindle again our astringent, bitter and cold, dark and dead, powers and embrace us most courteously and friendly.…”

She was astringent and bitter, felt cold and dead. But she must endure. And in a tiny hidden part of her deepest self, she still believed in the Love Fire.

Quantrill was back on the border, disappointed that he'd wangled only a colonel's commission during his trip to Richmond to visit President Jefferson Davis. His chief lieutenants, Bloody Bill Anderson, George Todd, and William Gregg, had managed without him during several pitched battles at Prairie Grove, Cane Hill, and Springfield, and according to rumor, they weren't particularly pleased to see him.

As battles raged that July of '63 at Gettysburg and Vicksburg and the whole length of the Mississippi fell to the Federals, Confederates in the southwest were cut off from Richmond, left to survive as best they could. Cherokees, mostly full-bloods, and Negroes fought Stand Watie's Confederate, mostly mixed-blood Cherokee, and Jo Shelby's “Iron Brigade” was serenaded to the tune of “Maryland, My Maryland”:

“Jo Shelby's at your stable door;

Where's your mule,

Oh, where's your mule?”

Guerrilla ravages surged to a peak as the war shifted inexorably against the South.

Lawrence, hated as the old Free-State citadel and refuge for blacks, as well as for being the home of Jim Lane and other jayhawkers, had for months been swept with rumors that guerrillas planned to attack. General George Collamore had been elected mayor that spring and he was very anxious for his town.

He organized military companies and wangled from the military discarded Springfield muskets which were kept locked in a vacant storeroom on Massachusetts Street. For part of the summer, a squad of Federals was sent to guard Lawrence, but in August it was ordered to reinforce the border. Most Lawrence people believed that if the commanders in Kansas City felt the border in that region was sufficiently protected, then it must be.

Deborah knew from Dane's letters that Ewing was doing his best to protect the north-central border below Kansas City with troops, stationed at intervals, that patrolled back and forth. Dane had also added details about the collapse of a makeshift, a prison run by Federals in that city.

Late in June a number of women had been arrested as spies, among them three sisters of Bloody Bill Anderson and a cousin of Cole Younger's. To be separated from male prisoners, the women were housed in an old brick building and treated with all possible consideration.

“But whether a tunnel was being dug to free the prisoners or whether hogs rooting about had weakened the foundation, the walls fell in and four women were killed. Naturally, southern sympathizers are blaming the Federals, some even accusing Union soldiers of undermining the building. However that is, Bill Anderson and other guerrillas will take vengeance for their women. Be very careful, love, on your journeys near the border.”

A wagonload of food was ready for distribution, and Deborah meant to take it to a refugee farm community ten miles southeast of Lawrence, where she hadn't been since getting the people settled. She decided to stop at Lawrence for news and to buy the twins' first book as a present for their fourth birthdays next month, so she didn't wear her boy's clothes, though she tucked them under the seat along with her loaded Spencer and Bowie.

Would the war ever end? Would there ever be a time when everyone had food and shelter, their own place in which to work and live? When one could travel unarmed and not take fright when more than two or three horsemen came into view?

Sighing, Deborah got into the wagon and started the team. She was going alone. Judith was heavy with a child conceived during one of Maccabee's leaves. Sara was in her fifth month. Johnny's March furlough was going to give the twins a brother or sister. Sara had offered to come, but Deborah hadn't wanted her to risk miscarriage from jolting. Ansjie was terrified of what dangers might be on the roads, so Deborah had refused her brave, if faltering, offer.

Much of the wheat in the fields she passed as she neared Lawrence had been harvested that year by the Kirby Patent Harvester that one enterprising farmer had bought. By starting before the grain was quite ripe, he'd been able to cut most of the community's supply.

The driver sat over the bull wheel while a man with a rake pulled the grain off the platform, where it'd been dumped by the reel, and tossed it to the ground in bunches to be bound up by five to eight men scattered across the field. At day's end, the cutting stopped and the whole crew piled the wheat into shocks.

It made possible much larger crops and was certainly faster. Probably a binder would be invented next, even a shocking machine. But Deborah was glad she'd bound after a reaping man, much as harvesters had done since biblical times. Changes seemed to be coming with dizzying rapidity. She wondered if it was good for human beings to be so pressured by the speed of their inventions.

Two years ago the first daily overland coach had gone from Sacramento to St. Joseph, Missouri, in seventeen days. The transcontinental telegraph had been completed that same year, and the year before that the first oil well west of the Mississippi had been dug at Paola, in eastern Kansas, only a year after the first American well was drilled at Titusville, Pennsylvania.

Railroad building in Kansas had been stopped by the war, but it would be only a matter of time before trains thundered to all parts of the nation. The Homestead Act had gone into effect that January, giving title to settlers who stayed on their one hundred sixty acres for five years. Again, once the war ended, a flood of homeseekers was bound to cover the prairies.

She wondered how many would be Negroes, and she wondered when they'd be given the vote. January 1, the same day that the Homestead Act became law, so had the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves in rebelling states “forever free.”

Slavery wasn't yet abolished, but that was bound to come. It just took so long—and so much blood, so much grief. Her whole family was dead, and every man she felt close to, from Dane to Laddie, might not come back from the army.

Usually she had no time for introspection, but the slow pace of the team going this way she'd first traveled eight years ago brought memories crowding. How much had happened since that twelve-year-old had come to the Territory! It seemed a hundred years ago; in fact, it seemed a century since she and Thos and Sara had enjoyed Rolf's Fourth of July celebration, or that last Christmas with her parents.…

Most of the time, as Conrad, himself now one of her gentle shades, had predicted, she was aware of her twin and parents as comforting, loving presences deep within her. She often thought of them without having to confront the horror of their deaths. But sometimes, with a stabbing wrench left throbbing with exposed pain, it all flooded back. Blinking at tears, she led her thoughts, as she had trained herself to do, from the occasion of grief to something she could do now.

On their last Christmas, her family had read
A Christmas Carol.
Would the twins be old enough for it this year? Probably, if Marley's chains were rattled with sufficient drama. If Wilmarth's had a copy, she'd ask them to save her one, but for their birthdays she'd buy them something else.

Mount Oread loomed ahead. The legislature had that year voted to locate the state university there if Lawrence would give forty acres and fifteen thousand dollars to the state. Amos Lawrence of Boston, for whom the town was named, had in 1856 donated ten thousand dollars in notes and stocks for a university, and this, with accrued interest, had secured the school, though the war was sure to delay its building. Governor Robinson's house and stone barn presently dominated the hill.

Though there hadn't been much new building, Lawrence had done better during these war years than the few preceding drought-stricken ones. Deborah drove past spacious, rubble-laid limestone, frame-and-brick dwellings between Indiana and Tennessee streets. New houses were under construction all over town, and churches were starting new buildings or improving old ones.

As she hitched the team off Massachusetts Street, she again admired Colonel Eldridge's brick mansion on Rhode Island.

He'd built the Eldridge House on the ruins of the Free-State Hotel, destroyed by Sheriff Jones in the days when Border Ruffians ran the legislature and wreaked their will on the Territory. The Eldridge House was more than a fine hotel; it was the informal capital of the state, even if Topeka was the legal one, and the whole town was full of bustle.

It had a Chamber of Commerce, a Scientific and Historical Society, and, more practically, a foundry and machine works, a saddle and harness emporium, a carriage and wagon maker, and a plant nursery. Massachusetts Street was lined with impressive two- and three-story buildings, and she couldn't resist a peek at Dalton's latest shipment of ladies' clothes before turning into the City Drug, in Babcock and Lykins' brown brick bank building.

She looked wistfully at the array of magazines, especially
Harper's
and
Knickerbocker,
but she stuck to buying a few pencils, some gargling medicine for Tiberius, who had a persistent sore throat, and some gumdrops.

At the grocer's, she bought salt and matches and remarked to Mr. Ridenour that the bridge replacing the ferry at the end of the street seemed to be nearing completion.

“Won't be long,” he agreed. “If you're in town overnight, Miss Whitlaw, you ought to come to the concert. The band's going to perform with their new silver instruments on a platform down by the bridge.”