Wedded to War (11 page)

His face darkened. He leveled a stony gaze at her, and she returned it, unyielding. Clearly, this conversation was not going as he had planned. Charlotte sighed and looked down at her hands clasped tightly in her lap. “If marrying you means I must give up nursing, I’m afraid I must regretfully decline.”

He laughed then, but his eyes were cold and hard. “Afraid you ‘must regretfully decline’? My dear, you sound as though you are declining a dinner invitation, rather than ripping my heart out.”

But he didn’t look heartbroken. He looked like a volcano about to erupt, his eyes smoldering pieces of coal.

She shrank away from him and moved to the end of the seat.

He caught her wrist and gripped it as he would grip the reins of his horses if they were running out of control.

She could feel her pulse push against his hand. Her fingers began to tingle. She gasped.

At the rumble of an approaching carriage, Charlotte slid her gaze past Phineas. “You will remember yourself, Mr. Hastings,” she whispered, tilting her head toward the hoofbeats and voices of strangers growing louder. “Let go of me.”

He released her wrist then and rubbed his hand over his face. After a moment, she heard him mutter, “Uncalled for.” But it was impossible to tell if he was referring to himself or to her.

A
log snapped in the fire, sending a shower of sparks under a twilight sky brushed with strokes of pink and gold. Caleb Lansing tugged at the collar of his scratchy blue wool uniform and lowered himself down onto a wooden crate to watch the orange flames dance. He sure didn’t need the heat, but at least it kept the flies away as a pot of coffee boiled.

Wiping his glistening forehead with the back of his hand, he looked through the haze of smoke at the rest of the camp, most of them sitting on the ground or on overturned barrels, unwrapping small bundles of hardtack from their haversacks. He pulled out his own, placed it on a flat rock, and rammed a Sharp rifle butt onto it, breaking it into pieces.

“Well, Doc, is it a teeth duller or a worm castle tonight?” A baby-faced private named Hodges dropped down to the ground and reached into his own haversack.

Caleb groaned. “Worm castle.” Maggots and weevils writhed through the pieces of hardtack and onto the stone.

“Downright insulting, that’s what it is, Doc. A man marches all day under the sun and what do we get for it? All I got to say is, it’s a good thing we ain’t fightin’ yet, or we’d all drop over in a dead faint like a heap of womenfolk. Uncle Sam says ‘Fight a war!’ but he sure ain’t givin’ us any help, is he now?”

Caleb chuckled in agreement. “Too hard to chew, too small for shoeing mules, and too big to use as bullets. Utter waste of space, wouldn’t you say, Hodges?”

“Darn right, Doc.” Hodges scooped up the worm castles, trotted about twenty yards and threw them in the trench.

“Throw that hardtack out of the trenches, private! Haven’t you been told that often enough?” Caleb overheard the brigade officer of the day say sharply to the young man.

“I thrown it out two or three times, sir, but it keeps crawling back!”

Caleb didn’t advocate insubordination to officers, but he couldn’t help laughing at Hodge’s very reasonable response. It was a trial to not have decent food when the soldiers were constantly burning up their energy.

It had been another long day of marching and drilling for all but those who had come to see him with complaints of nausea, diarrhea, dizziness, or fever. If he had been in a hospital or at home at his own clinic, he could have offered them lumps of ice or oranges to suck on, but here in camp, that was out of the question. They hadn’t seen fresh fruit in at least two weeks. The fruit sent by post from well-meaning mothers and wives was putrid by the time it arrived. So far, he did not feel very effective as a regimental surgeon.

Dinner suddenly over, Caleb poured the coffee into his tin dipper and swirled it in the cup, hoping it would take the edge off his hunger. Hodges had gone off in search of a card game, so for the first time all day, Caleb was relatively alone.

His hand immediately went to pat the pocket of his uniform,
assuring himself that Charlotte’s letter was still there. He didn’t need to see it anymore; he had it memorized by now.

So she was going “out of formation,” she said. Caleb rolled the tip of his mustache between his thumb and finger, back and forth, as he mused. He was sure Charlotte’s mother would be appalled at any deviation from the norm, and he wondered how that stuffed shirt Phineas Hinges—Hobbs—Happysack—whatever his name was—was reacting to it. He had always known that Charlotte was meant to do more than just look pretty and be petted. But nursing? Why would she put herself in an army hospital, bound to be the bloodiest place on earth, aside from the battlefield itself? Had she somehow gotten past the haunting memories of her father’s drawn-out death, or was she punishing herself for being helpless to save his life?

He brought his cup to his parched lips and absentmindedly gulped, as if it was iced tea instead of scalding hot coffee, burning his tongue. Closing his eyes, he ignored the sting in his mouth and allowed his mind to travel back to a time when there was no war on the doorstep, a time when he and Charlotte had been together.

It seemed like a lifetime ago that Charles Waverly had died. Caleb was twenty, Charlotte sixteen. She had looked so lost, so abandoned, and she had asked him for help. Death had bonded them together in a way that little else in life can. He longed to shield her from as much pain as he could, the way a father would protect his child, and called often to check in on her throughout the first year of intense mourning. She grew to rely on him, on his strength, his words of comfort, and he relished it.

What would I do without you?
she had often said, and his chest swelled.

When the grey veil of grief began to lift off her face, she looked at him differently with those caramel-colored eyes, the flecks of gold brilliant with happiness. If he could make her eyes shine, it made his day.

Not long after her mourning clothes changed from black to grey and deep purple, he realized his affection for her was not as a surrogate
father figure toward a pitiable child, but as a man toward a woman who warmed under his gaze.

The more time they spent together, the more he felt for her. He hoped it was mutual. But when she said,
I need you
, he began to fear that he had simply stepped into the void in her heart left by her father. That she needed him because he was a safe place, he was reliable, as her father had been.

The thought needled him until he could no longer sleep at night. He cared for her for who she was, but he had a nagging suspicion that she cared for him just because he was there. He wanted the woman he loved to love him not because she needed him, but because she wanted him, whether he was right there in front of her or miles apart. Would she have loved any man just as much who had happened to be by her side during her darkest days and nights? If Charles could see them from heaven, would he accuse Caleb of putting Charlotte’s grief to his advantage by preying on her wide-open heart?

She seemed blind to the spell she cast on him. He had made up his mind not to steal a kiss from her willing lips—she was still so young, by then still only seventeen—but the temptation was driving him mad. Once he kissed her, he’d never be able to think with his head and not with his heart again. He would have done everything he could to convince her to be his, while she was still in a state of grieving for her father.

It wouldn’t have been right.

So he chose a path that took him away from her—medical school at Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut—not because he didn’t love her, but because he loved her too much to let their relationship simply happen by default. It would have been cheating.

When he wrote to her several months later, just to wish her a happy birthday, she replied that she was glad he had “abandoned” her, that her feelings for him had turned cold. He tried to forget her, to replace her with other women, but none of them captured his heart as she had.

So he studied more than anyone else at Yale, graduated at the top of his class, and worked harder than any other doctor in town. Some
had suggested he was burying himself in it, but they didn’t understand. With Charlotte out of the picture, it was the only thing that made him feel alive.

Caleb trusted that God had a perfect plan for his life, and assumed years ago that Charlotte Waverly was simply not part of it. Now, he wasn’t so sure.

Logs crumbled and hissed in front of him now, and Caleb snapped out of his reverie. On the other side of camp, he could hear strains of men singing “Victory’s Band” to the tune of the Southern anthem, “Dixie’s Land.”

Caleb sighed. He loved the Union, but singing about treading upon the enemy like they were pebbles smacked of a false confidence the size of New England. These soldiers were as of yet untested, unproven in battle. As a regimental surgeon, so was he, and he knew it.

“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,” he muttered into his tin cup, and swallowed the last of his now lukewarm coffee.

M
y husband is Matthew O’Flannery. He left with New York’s Sixty-Ninth Regiment five weeks ago, and I haven’t heard from him since,” Ruby told the officer behind the desk at the recruiting office on Broadway that had enlisted him.

He looked her up and down. “You’re sure he enlisted? Could it be that he just—found an opportunity to strike out on his own?”

“Aye, I’m telling you, he is fighting for your country.”

“Not yours, though, eh?” He leaned back and put his hands behind his head, smirking.

“’Tis more your country than it is mine, sir, as I assume you have been here longer and have an easier time of living here.”

“And yet, this is still better than what you left behind in Ireland, isn’t it?”

Her face burned, but she bit her tongue. She expected there could
be an argument this morning, but this was not the fight she wanted. She hated confrontation as a general rule, but she was so hungry, so desperate for money, she knew she had to stand her ground.

“Look it up, you’ll see his name in black and white. Matthew O’Flannery. The Sixty-Ninth. I need to know what happened to his paycheck.”

“I don’t need to look it up,
lassie.
” He leaned forward. “Even if he’s with them, I wouldn’t expect any money any time soon. The army is regrettably behind in paying its soldiers, but will pay arrears in full as soon as it can.”

Ruby didn’t know what arrears meant, but she did know about being behind in payments.

“As for why you haven’t heard from him about it personally, I could only make a guess.” He sneered as he looked over her faded, threadbare dress again. She knew exactly how he saw her, for it was how she saw herself: poor, uneducated, dirty. Unworthy. Well, if she looked the part of a beggar, then beg she would.

“Saints alive, can’t your office spare a few dollars? We’ll pay it back as soon as the government pays its soldiers.”

“Have you considered working yourself, or do you insist upon waiting for money to just magically appear for you?”