Rachel's Choice (28 page)

“It's late to give me that advice,” Rachel said. “I know you don't agree with what I've done—with what I'm doing right now in hiding Chance's friend. But I'm counting on you to keep my secrets.”

“I know half the secrets in this county,” Cora answered, “borned some, buried others. I suppose a few more won't bend my back into the ground.”

Chance flattened himself against the wall and waited until Coblentz blew out the lantern and crawled into his cot. Mosquitoes feasted on every inch of Chance's exposed skin, but still he steeled himself to wait motionless until the sergeant's drunken mumbling became a steady whistling snore.

Still Chance did not move. He'd known that coming back into the prison would be hard, but he'd not expected his bowels to cramp and his skin to feel too tight for his body.

Finding Travis had been easy; changing places with him had taken only a few moments in the hospital supply room. He'd never intended to attempt to rescue Travis with Rachel along. He hadn't wanted to endanger her life. But once he saw Travis's sunken eyes and heard his rattling cough, he'd realized that his buddy was close to death. Convincing Travis to switch was the hardest part,
but in the end Travis's yearning to see his wife and baby daughter before he died was enough to do the trick.

“I'll get out,” he'd promised Travis. “I've done it with my arm half shot off. I can do it again.”

Luckily no one had missed Travis at nightly roll call. Either someone had answered for him, or the corporal had been too lazy to take count at all. But in the morning, when breakfast rations were doled out, Travis would be found absent, and the camp would be up in arms.

All he had to do was murder Sergeant Daniel Coblentz and escape before sunrise.

Coblentz deserved death more than any man Chance had ever known. If truth be told, Coblentz wasn't a man; he was an animal who preyed on the defenseless. And if it cost him his own life in the attempt, Chance had to deliver justice.

For young Jeremy Stewart … for Jeremy and all the other men that Coblentz had ravaged on Pea Patch and maybe other places before.

Chance had never been one to judge a man's private life. So long as no one else was hurt, what was it to him if a man preferred his own kind to a woman? Or if he preferred a sheep for that matter, so long as the sheep didn't mind.

It was common knowledge that Sergeant Coblentz offered extra rations and favors to those prisoners that would go into his room and submit to his perversions. Not that anyone ever received the food or blankets the next morning, but that was the lie Coblentz told.

Other guards might enjoy seeing a prisoner whipped or thrown into the hole, a board-covered pit where the temperature was said to rise high enough in the noonday sun to fry bacon. And other Yankee soldiers stole and cheated
the prisoners out of their blankets and meat rations, and were quick to shoot a man if he wandered too close to the river's edge. But Coblentz had ordered Jeremy spread-eagled on the guardroom floor and had used him like a woman in front of a dozen witnesses.

And Jeremy, still more boy than man, had hanged himself, rather than live with the shame.

Chance had always believed in the law, and taking a man's life—even Coblentz's—was an act outside the law. Fort Delaware stripped the honor from many of the soldiers imprisoned there. Now it had taken his, but he'd hoped he wasn't acting out of blind revenge.

Jeremy's friends had summoned a makeshift judge and jury from the ranks of prisoners. Robert Aston, a Methodist deacon, had stood on one leg, holding himself upright with a bloodstained crutch, to plead Coblentz's case. The cleric had ignored his fever and the pain of his crudely amputated limb to argue for hours, begging the jury to spare the sergeant's life and leave his sentence to God. But the twelve men had found Coblentz guilty of unnatural crimes and demanded his death.

And when they'd drawn straws to see who would execute the sergeant, Chance had pulled the short one.

He'd thought long and hard about what means he should use to kill Coblentz. It would have been more fitting if Coblentz had been awake to know what was coming, but that meant taking a terrible risk. And if Chance wanted to kill the sergeant and still make his getaway without alarming the other guards, he couldn't put a bullet in his head. That left a knife or his bare hands. And Chance didn't want to dirty his hands by tightening them around Coblentz's filthy neck.

And so he waited, knife in hand, for the right moment to cut the sergeant's throat.

Rachel guided the
Windfeather
back to the clump of reeds where she'd bid Travis to wait for her. The sloop gently nosed against the muddy bank, and Rachel listened for a few moments to the night sounds of the marsh.

In the distance an owl hooted; closer, some small creature rustled through the grass. There were no stars visible, but Rachel didn't need light to show her the way. She'd sailed this creek since she was a small child, and she knew every crook and shallow.

Finally, when she was convinced that no other boats were near, she called out to him.

“I was beginning to wonder if I'd been permanently abandoned,” he replied. “I know I asked you to put me ashore, ma'am, but this mosquito sandbar wasn't quite what I had in mind.”

“Come aboard,” she said. “Damned if I know what I'm going to do with you, but I fancy that Chance would be mightily annoyed if I lost you before he got back.”

“Yes, ma'am, I believe he might be.”

She helped Travis to climb over the side and was shocked at how weak he was. “I'm hiding you,” she said reluctantly, “but if anyone finds you, you have to say you got to my farm on your own.”

When she reached Rachel's Choice, she made him wait on the sloop until she carried Davy and Chance's money up to the house and lit the lamps. Bear licked her hands, barked, and scampered around her like a pup.

“Good boy,” she said to him. “Good dog. Did you think I wasn't coming home?”

Later, when Davy was safely tucked into his cradle with the money bag under his mattress, she left the big black dog to guard him while she put Travis in the hired men's room in the barn. She brought him freshwater from the well and a medicated syrup to ease his hacking cough.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“No, ma'am, just tired.”

“In the morning I'll fix you a decent breakfast and see what I can find to help clear the congestion in your chest.”

As she left his room, she heaped hay in front of the door to keep out any curious visitors and went to her own bed. But even though she was weary unto death, sleep wouldn't come; she was too worried about Chance.

“In the morning I'll ride Blackie into town and pay off Isaac,” she whispered aloud, but she knew that she wouldn't. She would wait here until Chance came home.

Three days he had told Travis, maybe four. Not so long, not if she filled her days with farmwork. There was so much that needed doing. He'd be here before she knew it, she told herself.

“You will, won't you?” she whispered into the dark room. “You must come home … for Davy's sake and mine.”

The next four days were the longest Rachel had ever known. She cared for Davy, tended Travis, and hoed her garden. Solomon hadn't returned her cow yet, so there was no milking to do. But she did have beans and tomatoes to pick, fish to salt, and cucumbers to wash and put down in brine to pickle.

She worked from first light until she blew out her lamp long after sunset, but her mind was not on the chores her hands performed. She could think of nothing but Chance and the dangers that faced him between Fort Delaware and Rachel's Choice.

She could imagine him shot trying to escape, being devoured by sharks in the bay, or cramping up, slipping under the surface of the river, and drowning. If he died in the water, his body would wash up on some deserted beach, and she would never know what happened to him.

Once she woke screaming in the middle of the night after dreaming that she'd found Chance on a sandbar, his handsome face eaten away by crabs.

Not even Davy's morning smiles and joyful cooing could dispel Rachel's fears or her awful premonition that something dreadful had happened to Chance.

“Please, God,” she prayed. “I'm not askin' you to give him to me. Just let him live.”

On the evening of the fourth day, Rachel walked the creek bank with Davy in a sling on her back and Bear trailing after her. And when she found no trace of Chance, she pulled anchor on the sloop and sailed out to the river and down to the bay. She saw three deer grazing in the marsh, an osprey swooping over the river with a fish in his talons, and a huge snapping turtle, but no other human.

“Where are you, Chancellor?” she cried in despair. But the only answering call was the shrill hunting cry of a nighthawk.

The next morning, after she'd dried and dressed the baby, she put him in a safe spot and began to bake blueberry muffins, pumpkin cookies, and raisin scones. She used every dusting of sugar and white flour in her cupboard, and then she mixed corn bread, sweetening it with wild honey.

A few peaches were ripe on the tree near the barn. She picked those and packed them into a basket with hardboiled eggs and fresh-scrubbed carrots from her garden.

“I'm going back to the fort,” she told Travis when she brought him his evening meal of eggs, crab soup, corn bread, and honey. “Something's happened to him. I know it has.”

The lieutenant lay propped up against the wall on Chance's narrow bed, the bed where Davy had been born. Travis's face was ashen, his features drawn. She didn't believe that he was much older than Chance, but it was hard to tell because illness had drained him of youth and vitality.

“If he dies, it will be my fault,” Travis answered in his
cultured Virginia drawl. “I was wrong to let him trade places with me.” He swallowed, and his Adam's apple bulged out on his thin neck. “You see, ma'am, I have a little girl I've never seen. I knew my wife, my Mary, was with child, but I didn't know if …” He inhaled a shallow breath, and Rachel heard the ominous rattle in his chest. “Another prisoner, a man named Mitt Welsh, told me that he'd seen Mary in church when he was home on leave. He said that Mary had a baby girl in her arms. He didn't know the baby's name.” Travis swallowed again, and his brown eyes clouded. “I just wanted to hold her once … my baby daughter. I just wanted to see her and my Mary before—” A spasm of coughing took away his breath.

“If Chance is dead, it's his own doing, not yours,” Rachel said. “I've seen Pea Patch.” She smoothed the folds of her apron. “No man deserves to be penned up in there. I wouldn't treat my hogs so—if the army had left me any hogs.”

“You shouldn't go,” he replied weakly. “That's no place for a woman.”

“No, it isn't,” she agreed, “but I'll not rest until I know what's happened to him. There's eggs in the henhouse, beans and tomatoes in the garden, and bacon and ham in the smokehouse. You'll have to manage for yourself while I'm gone. Be careful and try to stay out of sight. If you hear my dog bark, that will mean someone's coming.”

“I'm sorry to put you at risk, ma'am. I should have stayed where I was, but I wanted so badly to see that baby girl of mine.”

“You will,” Rachel replied, but she didn't believe it. In all likelihood she'd have a grave to dig for Travis Bowman on Rachel's Choice. “I mean to dress as a Quaker
again,” she explained. “If it got me inside once, it should work this time.”

She knew she'd have to ask Cora to watch Davy again, but she was dreading explaining where she was going. Cora might refuse to help.

Pharaoh was home again. Rachel had seen him crossing her meadow on horseback with a pack of hunting dogs. If Cora confided in her son, Pharaoh would try to stop her from going. He might even come to the farm and murder Travis.

She should be putting Davy first, but she couldn't. So long as there was the slightest hope that she could get Chance out of Fort Delaware, she had to try. “I should think of my child, but I love Chance.”

Travis smiled, and for an instant she saw the ghost of a dashing cavalry officer. “I know,” he replied. “He's a hard man not to love.” And then he touched her hand. “There's a decent Yankee guard in there. His name is Cochran, a lieutenant. If you get into trouble, ask for him. He won't help you free Chance. Cochran's too honorable for that, but he will protect you if he can.”

“Then he couldn't be bribed?”

Travis ran his fingers through his light brown hair. “Not Cochran.” His lips tightened into a thin line. “There's a Dutchman, Sergeant Coblentz, who could. Daniel Coblentz would sell his own mother for two bits, but he won't be of much use to you.”

“Why not?”

Travis shrugged. “Because he's the man Chance stayed inside the prison to kill.”

“You're sure you know what you're doing?” Cora Wright asked Rachel at the door of her cabin. She held
Rachel's baby in her arms. “You think this Richmond lawyer is worth risking losing your babe and your land for?”

“I'm in love with him, Cora.”

Cora frowned and tried to find the words to convince her that what she was doing would only bring her grief. “He won't marry you, child. No matter what he promises you, he'll go back to his own life and his own kind.”

Rachel shook her head. “That doesn't matter. What matters is that I've got to save him, if I can.”

“And if you can't? What happens to your Davy?”

A single tear trickled down the white girl's face. “There's money, Cora, lots of money for Davy's keep. I've written a will leaving the farm to him if I don't come back. I hope you'll look after him for me.”

Cora sighed. “Love. What has it ever caused a woman but trouble? You're mad as a hatter, girl.”