Merline Lovelace (15 page)

“I don’t know how.”

The ragged whisper tore at his heart. With a visible effort, Julia raised her head. The hollows around her eyes made his chest ache.

“Do you know Private Rafferty died?”

“Yes.”

“And little William McKinney?”

“Yes.”

“Mary Donovan’s son, Patrick, is gone.” Grief darkened her eyes. “The sergeant major’s down, too.”

“I know.”

To lose any of his troops was a blow. To lose a man with Sean Donovan’s experience and calm head in a crisis would leave a gaping hole in the regiment.

“Henry Schnell said Colonel Cavanaugh has recovered enough to return to his quarters,” Andrew told her, his voice gruff. “I have to give him my report and get him moved to Old Bedlam. I’ll come back soon as he’s taken care of.”

With a tortured effort, she shrugged off her fatigue. “No, I’m not thinking. You shouldn’t have come at all. It’s too dangerous.”

He didn’t bother to respond.

“You could take the sickness,” Julia cried, waking belatedly to the danger he’d exposed himself to.

Pain lanced into her, as sharp as a sword. She couldn’t lose Suzanne and him, too. Dear God, not both of them!

A gloved thumb feathered across her lips, stilling her incipient panic.

“You’re about to drop where you stand. You need sleep. I’ll come back and watch Suzanne while you get some rest.”

“I can’t leave her.”

“What use will you be to your daughter if you keel over in exhaustion?”

Or if she started cramping, or hearing the noises in her head that signaled the onset of cholera? The possibility that the disease might yet strike Julia had Andrew sweating under his uniform jacket.

“I’ll be back,” he promised grimly.

S
he couldn’t leave.

Despite Andrew’s stern orders when he returned, Julia refused to go back to her quarters to rest for fear Suzanne might slip away while she was gone. The most she would agree to was to curl up for a few hours on the cot emptied by the young private’s death.

True to his word, Andrew took over Julia’s nursing duties while she rested. The trooper detailed to help in the tent seemed somewhat awed by the sight of his major with sleeves rolled up, lifting patients to help them use the buckets and wrapping scraps of blanket around heated bricks to tuck at their feet. The barriers of rank between major and trooper soon fell away, however, just as the social barriers between the women had. Julia sank into an exhausted slumber to the murmur of Andrew’s questions and the experienced nurse’s firm responses.

She had no idea how long she’d slept when she woke, groggy and disoriented. A flicker of lamplight
against the canvas tent wall sent fear bolting through her. Terrified that Suzanne might have lost her fragile hold on life, she rolled over.

The sight of Andrew seated on an upturned bucket beside her daughter’s cot, murmuring to the girl while he bathed her face with a damp rag, left Julia limp with relief.

He’d taken off his uniform jacket in concession to the heat but still wore his riding boots and dark-blue pants with their yellow cavalry stripe. Suspenders stretched over his white linen undershirt that was already soiled. Whiskers shadowed his cheeks and chin, and his short, rumpled hair stood in spikes, as if he’d thrust a hand through it.

Seeing this tall, lean man bent over Suzanne closed Julia’s throat. For all his joy in his daughter, Philip Bonneaux had considered it a mother’s responsibility to change nappies and tend to childish complaints.

Shoving aside all thoughts of how different things might have been if Andrew, and not Philip, had fathered her child, Julia pushed off the borrowed cot and made her way down the center aisle. Two heads turned at her approach, one so slowly and painfully Julia’s heart squeezed.

“Mama?”

The hoarse whisper wrung her soul. “I’m here,
ma petite.
”

As if that reassurance was all she needed, Suzanne’s lids drifted down over sunken eyes.

“She drank a little boiled rice water a few hours
ago,” Andrew said quietly, relinquishing his seat on the bucket. “So far, it’s stayed down.”

“Thank God!” Dragging a hand through her hair, Julia tried to shake the last vestiges of sleep from her mind. “What time is it?”

“A little after midnight.”

“Where’s Private Connors?”

“The patients had quieted down, so I sent him to get a good meal and some rest. I don’t suppose I can convince you to go down to the mess tent for a decent meal, too.”

“No, I won’t leave Suzanne.”

“I figured as much.” Retrieving a cloth-covered plate from a makeshift table in the corner of the tent, he pushed it into her hands. “I asked Private Connors to bring you something before he headed back to his barracks. It’s only cold beans and pork, with a little buttered bread,” he warned.

Julia hadn’t eaten in so long even cold beans and pork made her mouth water. Murmuring fervent thanks, she sank down onto the bucket.

Andrew disappeared and returned just as she was sopping up the last of the bean juice. Steam curled from the two tin mugs he carried. The wondrous aroma of hot, black coffee acted like a cattle prod on her numbed senses.

He passed her one of the cups, brought another bucket over, and squatted down beside her. They sat side by side, shoulders brushing as they downed the bitter brew, ears tuned to the mutters and occasional
groans of their patients. Twice, Julia leaned forward to check her daughter’s shallow breathing and sponge her face. Once, Andrew got up to help a whiskered infantryman roll over and piss into the bucket beside his bed. The veteran dropped back on his cot, exhausted by effort, and drifted into restless sleep.

“You’re so good with them,” Julia murmured when he reclaimed his seat.

Fort Laramie’s other officers had dutifully come to check on their men, but had left the menial tasks of caring for them to the troopers on hospital detail. Andrew shrugged aside her surprise that he didn’t do the same.

“We learned to take care of each other in Andersonville.”

In the quiet of the night, with everything stripped from Julia’s soul but prayers for her daughter and the others in the tent, she could finally ask Andrew about his past without stirring old hurts.

“How did you end up in prison? No—start earlier, before that. What happened that night in New Orleans? I heard the shot, and watched you fall. I saw the blood,” she added hoarsely. “There was so much of it. My uncle swore you’d died of your wound.”

“I almost did.”

Leaning back against a tent support, he stretched out his legs. The tin mug nested loosely in his hands.

“I bled like a stuck pig,” he admitted with a wry grimace. “The ball shattered my thighbone and knocked me out. Luckily, Justin didn’t think it nec
essary to waste another shot. He had two servants drag me into the back of a wagon with instructions to cart my carcass off to the swamp. My guess is they were supposed to feed me to the alligators and spare a military tribunal the trouble of hanging me as a spy.”

Spare Justin the shame of having his name associated with that of a Union spy, Julia corrected silently. Her uncle had made it clear when he shipped her off to Natchez the next day that she’d better keep her mouth shut. With luck, his scheme to annul her marriage to Andrew would quash any rumors before they began to circulate.

That, and the fact that he’d disposed of Andrew’s body.

“How did you get away?”

“I managed to throw myself out of the wagon as it drove along a levee. I landed in the Ponchetrain.”

His careless shrug made light of the agony he must endured in that fall.

“The damned river carried me almost to the Gulf. I hid out in the swamps for a few weeks, then eventually made it back to Union lines. My spying days were over, so I returned to my company. Two years later, what was left of my regiment marched into Andersonville. Eleven months after that, less than twenty of us crawled out.”

The sparse tale omitted so many details. The weeks of crawling through a swamp with a shattered thigh
bone. The battles he’d fought. The horror of the prison camps.

“I didn’t know any of this,” she whispered. “Justin bundled me onto a paddle wheeler and shipped me off to stay with friends in Natchez the very day after I—After you—”

“The day after I came back for you,” he finished quietly. “It’s all right, Julia. I don’t blame you for showing your uncle the note I sent you. Nor do I blame him for shooting me down in the street.”

Not any more, perhaps. He’d blamed her once, though, and hated her. Just as she’d hated him.

“I was a fool to entangle you in my dangerous games,” he said. “An even greater fool to think I could protect you when I couldn’t even tell you the truth about why I was in New Orleans in the first place.”

“You weren’t any more to blame for what happened than I was. I wouldn’t listen when you warned me there were things about you I didn’t know.”

The ghosts of old passions, old hurts drifted through the tent. They left no bitterness in their wake, only a fleeting sadness for all the wasted years.

Downing the rest of his coffee, Andrew set the tin mug aside. Metal chinked against wood, rifling through the quiet.

“How long did you stay in Natchez?”

“For the rest of the war. I never went back to New Orleans. I couldn’t live with my uncle any longer.”

Or with the way Justin Robichaud’s avid gaze had
followed her every move. Even after all these years, she couldn’t put into words what she’d been too naïve—or too ashamed—to recognize at the time. Incest left as foul a taste in her mouth now as it did then.

Locking away the memories of her uncle in the darkest corner of her mind, she stared down at the coarse-ground coffee beans at the bottom of her mug.

“Is that where you met Bonneaux?”

She nodded, remembering the first time she’d bumped into Philip. She’d been staying with her cousin Dorothy and was on her way back from a ladies’ auxiliary meeting at Monmounth Plantation, set high above the river. Fingers aching from hours of rolling bandages, she hadn’t even noticed the dashing young officer making his way up Silver Street until an uneven paving stone tripped her and she pitched forward, right into his arms.

“He’d just assumed command of an ironclad.”

The knowledge Philip gleaned from his gambling days aboard a succession of Mississippi riverboats had stood him in good stead during the war. Familiar with the river’s twists and turns, its shifting sandbars and treacherous currents, he’d sallied out in his flat-topped, iron-plated gunship to stalk and sink enemy supply barges.

After each hazardous mission, he’d return to port in Natchez to woo the woman Julia had become. She’d married him within the year.

From the perfect perspective of hindsight, she could see now the real reason she’d accepted Philip
Bonneaux’s persistent suit. He was everything Andrew Garrett wasn’t.

Southern born and river-bred, Philip wore his gold and butternut gray with a jaunty pride. He kept no secrets from Julia, freely admitting to his past career as a gambler with fervent promises of reform. And his kisses roused only a gentle hunger instead of hot, mindless greed.

“After the war, we returned to his home in Mobile,” she told Andrew. “That’s where Suzanne was born.”

He sifted the details through his mind, mulling them over in the quiet. So many happenings, Julia thought. So many roads traveled to get them to this isolated outpost on the plains. She wouldn’t have believed it all those years ago, when a laughing, careless sixteen-year-old had caught a stranger’s glance across a whirl of dancers and felt her breath quicken.

“I searched for you after the war.”

Startled, she lifted her gaze to find his shadowed blue eyes on her, unreadable in the flickering light of the oil lamp.

“You did?”

“I went back to New Orleans. Justin was dead, and no one knew what had become of you.”

The knowledge that he’d returned for her a second time started a little ache just under Julia’s ribs.

“I finally ran down one of your old house servants. Tante Bettina, I think her name was.”

“Our cook,” she murmured. How long ago those days of servants and gracious living now seemed.

“She said she’d heard you’d taken up with a riverboat gambler.”

“Is that the tale that got back to New Orleans? I’m not surprised. Philip used to ride the paddle wheelers before the war. He—he had a fondness for the river.”

His fondness was for the deep games of chance played aboard those paddle wheelers, but even now Julia couldn’t bring herself to reveal her husband’s weaknesses to anyone. Not to Suzanne. Certainly not to Andrew.

Not that it needed revealing. Andrew had guessed her straightened circumstances within hours of her arrival at Fort Laramie.

God, was that a mere—what? Two months ago? Three? When had she left Mobile? In late May. It was now August. August what?

Lifting a tired hand to rub her neck, Julia tried to pinpoint the exact date she’d clutched Suzanne’s hand in hers and boarded the train that took them both away from all that was familiar. It seemed so important to keep the weeks from blurring together, although she couldn’t think why until she remembered that Suzanne’s birthday came in early September.

A moan clawed at her throat. The fear she’d fought to hold at bay these endless days and night swam to the surface.

Please, Dear Lord! Please! Let her see another
birthday! I’ll pay whatever you ask for my sins when it’s my time to die. Just let her live.

Her nails dug into the back of her neck. Tears stung her eyes. She squeezed them tight, refusing to give in to the anguish that tore at her insides, unable to bear the sight of her daughter’s emaciated form.

“Here, let me.”

Andrew shifted on his bucket. A strong hand peeled away her fingers. Slowly, surely, he began to knead her shoulders, her neck, the base of her skull.

Julia’s knotted tendons screamed in protest, but she welcomed the pain. Desperately, she fastened on the fire in her aching muscles, on the strength in Andrew’s hands, on anything but the terrifying possibility that her daughter might not live to celebrate her sixth birthday.

Gradually, the knots loosened. Slowly, the fear receded. For long moments, there was only the steady rhythm of Andrew’s breathing behind her. Almost boneless now with a week’s worth of accumulated fatigue, Julia slumped on her bucket.

“Lean back. Rest against me.”

The invitation rumbled low and seductive in her ear. She had no shame left, no defenses. She needed to draw on his strength. Wanted to ease into his arms and let him shelter her. For a moment. For…

For forever.

The truth seeped slowly into her consciousness. Wary as a kitten, it crept soft-footed into her mind. She’d loved the handsome rogue she’d known in New
Orleans with all the passion of her youthful heart. Now she craved this man’s strength and solid support with every particle of her woman’s soul.

She didn’t love him. She no longer believed in that ephemeral, illusive emotion. But this…this was as close to love as Julia ever expected to feel again.

“Andrew.”

It was a whisper, a plea. Her head tipped back on his shoulder, his angled down to meet her gaze. She could see every bristle in his cheek. See, too, the question in his gray-blue eyes.

Like one in a dream, she lifted her lips to his. His mouth fit over hers, so right, so sure.

“Mama?”

The hoarse whisper wrenched Julia’s head around. She jerked forward on her bucket, her heart pounding. Brown eyes too dry and sunken for tears stared up at her in distress.

“Darling! Are you in pain?”

“Were you…kissing him?”

The raspy query cut straight to Julia’s heart.

“No, sweetheart, we were only—”

Suzanne’s small face scrunched in dismay. “You
were
kissing him.”