One Wore Blue (29 page)

She didn’t love Anthony, but he loved her enough for both of them he had told her once.

Marry him, marry him, marry him, she told herself. Erase forever the hope that Jesse will come back.

“Anthony,” her father answered for her, “this has been a cavalier and highly romantic deed on your part, but perhaps it might be best to wait until—”

“Yes!” Kiernan exclaimed.

“What?” Anthony and her father voiced the word simultaneously.

Anthony, she realized, had not really dared to hope. Her father, she thought, knew her too well.

“I said yes!” Kiernan exclaimed.

“Kiernan,” John said, frowning, “this is so fast.”

“Nonsense, Papa, we’ve known each other for years. Anthony has been asking me for years! And he’s about to ride away into battle—” She broke off, for his troops were shouting and whooping, cheering her on.

“It seems that I’m outvoted here,” John murmured. He stared at Anthony. “Young man, give me a moment alone with my daughter.”

He drew her into the house, closing the door so they could have privacy in the hallway. He set his hands upon her shoulders.

“Daughter, do you know what you’re doing?”

“Yes, Papa, I do.”

“You were in love with Jesse Cameron.”

She didn’t blink. She stared steadily into his eyes. “I hate Jesse Cameron,” she said flatly.

“That’s what scares me,” John told her. “There’s a very thin line between love and hate. All these years, young lady, I never forced your hand, never arranged a marriage, so that you could fall in love and marry the man of your choice.”

“But if you had arranged a marriage for me, you would have arranged it with Anthony,” she reminded him.

He sighed softly. “Kiernan, don’t do this.”

“Papa, I must!”

“You’re always too passionate, Kiernan, too reckless.”

“Papa, don’t stop me, please. He’s riding into battle. He came miles and miles out of his way.”

“And he’s riding out again as soon as you say the word. I
won’t stop you, Kiernan, but listen to me first. If you marry him tonight, he will ride back into your life. You will be his wife, and when he returns for you, you will go to his home. You will share his bed at night, and you will take care of his family. Do you understand that?”

She shivered deep inside. Images of Cameron Hall flashed through her mind. She had always dreamed that she would be the lady of the hall.

“Yes,” she told her father.

“You really want to do this?”

“Yes, with all my heart.”

John sighed softly again, then opened the door. Anthony was waiting on the porch, handsome and dignified in his new uniform, straight and tall. Only his eyes betrayed his anxiety.

“Seems my daughter is now all-fired determined, Anthony. All these years, and we have to have a wedding here tonight with the supper dishes barely off the table. Well, then, it’s what you both want. Come in, men, come in.”

A cry went up like nothing Kiernan had ever heard before. Anthony let out a whoop and threw off his hat and plucked her up high into his arms. She stared down into his eyes, and she was glad.

It was just that she felt cold and numb.

“Lieutenant Miller, let’s get to it!” one of his men advised. Suddenly the gray-clad soldiers were filing into her house, and her feet were back on the ground.

Anthony’s adoring eyes were still staring into her own. “Thank you!” he told her.

She tried to smile, but her lips would not move. She stared at him gravely until her father caught her arm, pulling her back into the house. “Anthony, come on.”

She remembered very little of the ceremony. Her father stood by her side and slipped her hand into Anthony’s. Captain Dowling—Father Dowling of Charles Town—said all the proper words while Anthony’s men stood witness behind them.

Her father had pulled a handful of daffodils from a vase, and she curled her fingers around them as she listened to the
words. Anthony had to nudge her to repeat her vows, but she did so. She repeated them firmly, even if she was so cold that she didn’t know what she said.

Then the same cries went up in the air, and Jubilee, her father’s housekeeper, who had been very much a mother to Kiernan, started to cry. Father Dowling said that the groom could kiss his bride, and she was in Anthony’s arms.

He kissed her.

And then she knew that she had made a big mistake. His kiss was filled with love and warmth. It was tender and restrained.

And it was little else. It wasn’t demanding, passionate, or filled with fever. It wasn’t a kiss to cause the world to cease spinning, a caress to warm her inside and out. It did not touch her blood or reach into her limbs, or into the very center of her being. It wasn’t hot and wet and reckless and …

It wasn’t Jesse’s kiss.

Tears stung her eyes, but she swore that she would not shed them. She forced herself to curl her arms around Anthony’s neck, to return his kiss, to try to give him a hint of the love that he was so determined to give to her.

The war whoops and hollering continued. The men stamped the floor. She heard the pop of a champagne cork.

She allowed herself to break away from the kiss, and she forced herself to keep her eyes upon Anthony’s. She hadn’t really thought this out at all. She didn’t love him.

But she would be a good wife to him, she swore. She’d be a wonderful mother to his little brother and sister, she’d keep the house while he went to war, and she’d learn what she could about his business. She’d be good for him, she really would. She’d make up for the fact that she’d love another man until the day that she died.

But Anthony would never know that, she vowed.

“Kiernan, I love you. If I died tonight, I’d die happy, knowing that you love me.”

She forced a smile to her lips. Her father brought them both champagne and shook Anthony’s hand, and he welcomed him as his son-in-law.

It felt as if her cheek were kissed a hundred times as each of Anthony’s men filed by her. Her father’s supply of champagne, cool from the wine cellar, was drunk, and Jubilee managed to get out enough pies and cakes and breads and smoked meat to create something of a wedding feast.

It all went by so fast. Then a nervous private urged the company on. The troops filed out until only Anthony was left, holding her hands in the hallway.

“You’ve made me the happiest man on earth,” he told her. He pulled her against him again and kissed her. She tried very hard to return his emotion, to fight the tears that stung her eyes.

“Take the greatest care, Anthony.”

“I will. I’ll come for you as soon as I can. Oh, Kiernan, thank you! I love you so very much.”

He kissed her one last time, then released her, looking over her head to her father and thanking him.

“Care for her for me, sir.”

She sensed her father’s smile. “I’ve been doing so all these years, young man. I reckon I can manage awhile longer.”

Anthony grinned, and he was gone.

Her father came up behind her, setting his arm upon her shoulder as they watched Anthony and his company ride away. They were beautiful—all of them, Kiernan thought, all young, and elegant in their new plumage, excellent horsemen.

God protect them all, she thought.

“Well, Mrs. Miller?” her father said. He spun her around to face him. She lifted her chin. She was close to tears, but she knew she had to smile.

“I’m happy, Papa. Honest to God, I’m happy. I’ll be good to him, honest I will.”

He lifted a brow. “Most men don’t want a wife to be good to them, Kiernan. They want a wife to love them.”

She lowered her head quickly. “Papa, I care very much for him.” She raised her eyes to his. “He was so handsome tonight, wasn’t he? Handsome and gallant and wonderful!”

“Handsome and gallant and wonderful.”

And that, John Mackay agreed, young Anthony Miller
had been. Everything was right about the boy. He liked his new son-in-law just fine.

But handsome and gallant and wonderful didn’t mean everything. The real measure of a man was inside him. While one man might not be any worse or any better than another, it was largely the qualities inside of him that made him what he was.

She was still in love with Jesse Cameron. John Mackay understood that better than she did herself at that moment. He still liked Jesse himself. There was something special about Jesse Cameron, and something special about the way he and Kiernan connected.

But Jesse was gone with an enemy army, and it was best that Kiernan learn to forget him.

She was on the right track, John determined wryly. She was married now, legally wed, forever bound.

He hoped she understood that.

“I’m tired, Papa. I’m going up to bed,” she told him.

He studied her eyes, nodded, and kissed her cheek. She smiled brilliantly and hurried away.

But later, he passed by her room and heard her sobbing softly.

Not a good sign for a bride of less than four hours, he thought. He sighed. Anthony Miller was a good man. And he’d be good to Kiernan. They’d get on well enough, which was what most people did anyway.

But his heart went out to her as he stood outside her bedroom door. She was his only child, and he loved her with all his heart. He prayed for her happiness. When Anthony came for her, when they lived together, when there were little children at her feet, perhaps then she would find the happiness that seemed determined to elude her now.

But Kiernan never had to lie in the bed she had made for herself. Manassas saw to that.

In his hospital tent at Bull Run, Jesse was up to his elbows in blood.

The wounded, the already dead, and the dying were arriving with frightening speed. He was probing a ball from an artillery man’s shoulder when suddenly a cry went out that they should evacuate quickly.

The ball wasn’t quite out. Jesse gritted his teeth and stood his ground, even as shells exploded nearly overhead.

“Captain Cameron! Did you hear me?” a young sergeant demanded.

“I heard you! And I promise you, son, if there’s ever a ball in your shoulder, I’ll see that it’s out before I hightail it and run, all right?” He looked up, motioning to his orderlies. “Get the rest of these men out of here, and onto the wagons—fast!”

He paused, then set back to his task. Another shell exploded, ripping along his nerves, but he held steady. He could hear the troops racing by him.

They had taken the offensive here at Bull Run. Military leaders had advised Lincoln to use patience, but the northern populace had been clamoring for action. The attack had been sound enough. Under the command of Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, Lincoln had ordered that the troops advance.

But the strategy had not gone smoothly from the start.

Jesse’s corps had started out with the campaign on the sixteenth of July. McDowell’s army had been thirty-five thousand strong, marching out of Washington with colorful Zouaves in the front.

But two days of confusion and straggling and an incredibly slow pace had followed. They had entered Centreville, Virginia, a town directly east and north of Bull Run, which was a lazy, sluggish stream.

But behind that stream was Confederate General Beauregard and his army, with twenty-two thousand Confederates waiting to defend the vital railroad position at Manassas Junction.

On the day of their arrival, McDowell ordered a reconnaissance probe. That resulted in a skirmish with two Confederate brigades at Blackburn’s Ford.

The skirmish resulted in two more days of confusion, days
in which McDowell resupplied his poorly disciplined troops and created his battle plan. Finally, at about 2:00
A.M
. on the twenty-first, McDowell had his twelve-thousand-man flanking column marching down the Warrenton Pike from Centreville.

McDowell’s plan had been sound enough, Jesse thought. But his troops were still not an army—they were an untrained, inexperienced mob. It seemed painfully clear now that Confederates had been warned of the plan. Beauregard had been reinforced by troops from the west under Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston.

The battle had grown heated by midmorning, when a Confederate colonel led his troops against the Union attack force. Jesse heard from the wounded coming in that reinforcements for the Rebs as well as the Union forces had come piecemeal, as the Confederate and Union generals alike sent men scrambling from the Confederate right to bolster the sagging left flank.

One of Jesse’s orderlies, a longtime army man and Virginian from Powhatan County by the name of Gordon Gray, told him dolefully that it had been their own statesmen who bolstered up the day for the Rebs. “Colonel Bartow and General Lee were up there, heading things up. But the Rebs are just as raw and green and scattered as most of these new recruits we got here ourselves. Then that eccentric college professor from the Virginia Military Institute stood up there with his troops—Jackson. Thomas Jackson, Brigadier General Jackson. And he held still up there on the hill. General Lee tried to rally his troops, and his cry went up—‘Look! There’s Jackson standing like a stone wall. Rally around the Virginians!’” Gordon shook his head sadly. “And by God, they did. Jackson’s men on the hill started our troops running, and they’ve been running every since.”

The Federals had regrouped, and savage fighting had continued. Men had streamed into the field hospital. But now, it seemed, they were being beaten back at last.

Shells were exploding one right after another.

Jesse pulled the ball cleanly from the soldier’s shoulder
and quickly set to bandaging the wound. The soldier opened pained and opiate-glazed eyes to Jesse. “Am I going to live?” he asked.

“Maybe to the ripe old age of a hundred,” Jesse told him.

The soldier grinned. Corporal Gordon Gray appeared to help him scramble over to the wagon where a score of wounded waited. The wagon started off. A shell that exploded overhead missed the wagon by inches.

Gordon forgot his military etiquette. “Jesse, come on!”

Jesse quickly and efficiently closed up his bag and gave orders to save what they could of the field hospital. His cots and bandages and surgical equipment were quickly packed and loaded unto another waiting wagon. Pegasus was tethered to the rear of it. A veteran of many confrontations in the West, the seasoned war horse awaited Jesse’s command.