Surrender the Wind
Read Surrender the Wind Online
Authors: Elizabeth St. Michel
Tags: #Women of the Civil War, #Fiction, #Suspense, #War & Military, #female protagonist, #Thrillers, #Wartime Love Story, #America Civil War Battles, #Action and Adventure, #Action & Adventure, #mystery and suspense, #Historical, #Romance, #alpha male romance
Surrender the Wind
Elizabeth St. Michel
When Confederate General John Daniel Rourke is severely wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness, he’s captured and sent to a prison camp. On his way there, Union soldiers mistake him for dead and toss him from the train into the New York countryside, where he lands at the feet of Catherine Fitzgerald, a schoolmistress.
Rourke wakes to find the mysterious and strong-spirited beauty nursing him back to health. He’s intrigued but unaware of her true identity as the heiress to the Union’s ammunitions manufacturer, and their fiery battle of wits and wills commences.
Yet when outside forces begin to envelop them in a larger conspiracy, their own war begins. Torn between family loyalties and manipulated by a powerful leader from the Irish underworld, Catherine and Rourke will have to fight on both sides of the secession line to win the most significant battle of all: the fight for their love.
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Praise for:
The Winds of Fate
The Winds of Fate
“…captivating romance that takes us to the world of seventeenth-century London…Sexual tension and legal and familial intrigue ensue with the reader cheering on the lovely pair.”
–Publishers Weekly
The Winds of Fate
“has everything…full of passion, betrayal, mystery and all the good stuff readers love.”
–ABNA Reviewer
“Original…strong-willed heroine…I love all of it…the unlikely premise of a female member of the aristocracy visiting a man who is condemned to die and asking him to marry her.”
–ABNA Reviewer
The winds are ceaseless, eternal, roaming around the earth through cloud filled skies or starry nights—sometimes harsh, other times a tender caress. The winds rule us whether we obey them or not…
For my father,
Eugene Dollard
An ordinary man turned extraordinary…
and from whom the well-spring of my creativity has sprung.
Pleasant Valley, New York
May 1864
“This Reb’s dead.”
A Union soldier dragged a body to the dark mouth of a boxcar and lifted a lantern.
“Throw him out before he stinks anymore,” his sergeant ordered.
Catherine gasped and ducked farther into the shadow of the woods, her evening walk to the back part of her farm barred by a train, stopped for the switching yards farther down the track.
The sergeant jerked around. “Did you hear something?”
“No Sir, just these Rebs moaning with sickness. They reek worse than a bunch of polecats and I don’t desire to catch a contagion.”
“Rebs rot a lot quicker than regular folk.” The sergeant yanked his neckerchief over his nose and heaved himself up. With no regard, the Reb soldier’s body was swung from the train and rolled to the bottom of the railroad bed, stopping at Catherine Callahan Fitzgerald’s feet.
The lack of respect for the dead, Yank or Reb, shocked her. She waited in the gathering darkness until the train hissed and clumped into the night. Wind gusted and lifted her skirts. The air pitched with heavy vapors and piles of dark sullen clouds towered in the heavens. The storm that had dragged its ragged coattails from the south now boomed across the heavens. Rain pattered on her face.
To have escaped Francis Mallory, her hands shook with impotence. What a critical walk. One misstep…if Francis found her…no way would she marry the monster.
Six more months to hide…
Catherine shivered, tried not to look at the body in the ditch. To elude Mallory’s thugs, Jimmy O’Hara, an orphan boy, had helped her escape New York City. Her uncle, Father Callahan, a priest in Pleasant Valley, had stepped in and secured her a position as the schoolmarm far away from her home and had provided the small farm, two miles from town—away from prying eyes.
Her arrival was ahead of time and her uncle was out of town. She could not enlist his help and didn’t dare ask any of the townsfolk. No, she couldn’t afford any notice, not now. Asking someone to bury a dead Confederate soldier whose body was thrown off a train would put her, the new schoolmistress, under too much scrutiny.
At the very least, the poor soul deserved the dignity of a Christian burial. A blast of wind lifted the corpse’s hair…the same dark color as her brother’s. Her insides twisted with the thought of her dear brother. She glanced about, and once decided, she traversed a quarter mile to her barn, collected a shovel, returned, and then stabbed the blade into the silt, averting her eyes from the body with each shovelful. Not accustomed to manual labor, the task took a long time to dig some semblance of a grave. Her skirts were soaked and muddy, her hair plastered to her face as she attacked the earth. She couldn’t help but laugh. What madness was this? Two weeks ago she was dining at the fashionable Delmonico’s. Today she was a mud-splattered gravedigger.
How far had she fallen?
Oh yes, Francis Mallory was charming and witty, charismatic and clever. He was also a madman and killer. Her sides trickled with perspiration as her mind reeled with the hushed whispers and guarded warnings of Mallory’s unspeakable crimes to support his lust for power and wealth. Growing up among the roughest gangs in New York, he’d robbed, cheated and murdered, eliminating everyone in his path and emerging as the top Irish Mob Kingpin, ruling the Five Points district and maintaining his power through an alliance with the Tammany Hall political machine.
She threw down the shovel upon finishing the soldier’s grave. In heavy sheets, the rain came slanting down, whipsawing against her. Steeling herself, she crooked her arms beneath the man’s dead weight and dragged him. Good lord, he was heavy. She stumbled, tripped on her skirts and dropped the Reb’s head on the ground.
“I hope you appreciate what I’m doing for you.” She rested a moment, hands on her hips. “But you can’t appreciate it, can you. You’re dead.” And she was talking to a dead man. She shook her head, then laid his feet in first then lowered the upper part of his body, wiped her muddy hands on her skirts and spoke a few relevant words, something appropriate for the occasion. The eulogy was not as good as her uncle, Father Callahan, would have offered, but she remained satisfied with a pretty good imitation. The soldier’s family would appreciate it if they knew.
She picked up the shovel again, ready to spoon in the rain-soaked earth, then stopped. Of course, she must get his personal effects to notify his family of his passing. Her gaze went to the dark, wet hole in the ground. No. She was not going into the grave with the corpse. The storm raged, tearing and screaming its wrath upon the earth. She shuddered, more from her grisly decision than from the icy rain. Wasn’t it the decent thing to do? A family deserved to know.
She swallowed the sour taste in her mouth and scrambled into the shallow grave straddling his body to search his pockets. Lightning flashes ripped through the skies again and again. He was a poor common soldier, with no ornamentation to depict a rank. Her hands trembled as she searched his pants pockets.
Nothing.
The grave, filled up fast with water. Drat. No documents in his outer coat pockets. Bending further to explore his inner pockets, she heard the wind moan.
It was the wind, wasn’t it?
Hurrying, she touched the man’s breast pocket and felt…heat. Oh, God. She snatched her hand back. The corpse’s body was still warm.
A hand shot out, grabbing her by the neck. She tore at iron-tight fingers circling her throat, her air passage cut off. Dizzy. In the ooze, she tore at his hands, her fingers slipping from his knuckles. Sheer black fright swept through her and she brought both fists down hard on his chest. Her heart thumping madly, she kicked and flailed, her life flashing before her eyes. His hand dropped.
Sweet oxygen poured down her throat, filling her lungs. Catherine pushed to her feet and dragged herself from the grave. Rising, her legs wobbled, the mud shifted under her feet. She teetered, lost her balance and toppled back onto the corpse. Images of the Reb cadaver pulling her to the fiery gates of hell flashed through her head. Hampered by the weight of her soaked skirts, she hitched them up over her knees then kicked, clawed, and once again pushed from the ditch.
She ran as if the devil incarnate charged after her. Reaching her home, she dashed inside, slammed and bolted the door, behind her. Her back against the rough wood, she sucked in long gulps of air. She had read that a corpse could have a final reflex, but to what degree? For a dead man, the Reb exhibited unbelievable strength.
Hands shaking, she placed her mud-spattered spectacles on a shelf. With certainty, the Reb was alive. Had he reached to her for help? She squeezed her eyes shut, remembered his harsh grip on her neck. No, not help.
But what if he was drowning in the flooded grave? She would be responsible for his death. She would be a murderer. Surely God would never forgive her. She touched her throat, felt the raw skin where she’d scratched to get him to release her while her mind warred with moral reason. What if it had been her brother, Shawn, missing for eight months after a skirmish with the Rebels, injured and suffering the elements? Wouldn’t she want someone to help him?
Sighing, she unlocked the door and stepped out into the darkness. Light spilled onto her porch from her lantern. The wind gusted in violent blasts and the thunder rolled and attacked as the storm vibrated the heavens with its superior force. Nature had declared war. No doubt she was mad.
She ducked her head and stepped from the roof’s protection, staggering as her long skirts plastered against her legs, the hems flapping violently behind her. Reaching the ditch, she peered over the edge. Empty! She gasped. She swung around, her lantern creating fearsome shadows.
A chill black unease raced up her spine. What was she thinking? She yanked a strand of wet hair from her eyes and slogged her way across the mud-slicked path back, struggling to keep her balance, watching her footing lest she slip and fall. Good. He wasn’t her problem anymore. She couldn’t wait to strip off her wet clothes and submerge in a hot bath.
