“Sew it—just like that?”
“Yep.”
“Don’t you need something for the pain?”
“It’s just two stitches, and I’ll take another shot of whiskey. It wouldn’t be a good idea for me to go too far under the influence of liquor in this house, do you think?”
Jacob flushed. He had the needle in his hand. His eyes sought Jesse’s once again.
“I’ve had stitches before. Go on, sew.”
Jacob was in far more pain than he was, Jesse decided as the needle touched his flesh. He locked his teeth and braced himself hard against the pain. The needle went through his flesh and back out again, then quickly, very quickly, it went in and out again. What Jacob’s touch lacked in experience, it made up for with speed.
A cold sweat had broken out on Jacob’s brow. Jesse told him where to hold the suture, and he tied it off. He swallowed down another shot of whiskey and poured a little portion over the wound, wincing at the sting. “Don’t know why, but it’s good for it,” he told Jacob, who was staring at him once again.
Jacob remained silent—and obviously scared. Jesse leaned back against the desk and watched him. “Let’s get one thing straight here and now. You’re on one side of this war, and I’m on the other. I don’t expect you to change sides—I’ve been given the best arguments in the world, and I’m not changing sides. It’s a war. That’s what happens in war. But I want you to understand one thing. I didn’t want your brother’s death, not in any way. I admired him, and in better times, I considered him a friend.”
Jacob looked down at his feet, then looked up at Jesse and shrugged. “Yeah, well, I—I guess I know that.”
“You do?”
Jacob shrugged, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Anthony told me he challenged you to a duel. He wouldn’t tell me what it was about—only that his temper had kind of gone and that it had been real stupid on his part. He said that you wouldn’t kill him. He said you were a right good man, that there was only one thing wrong with you.”
“What was that?”
“That you were a Yank, of course.”
“Oh,” Jesse said softly.
“I—I didn’t really mean to kill you,” Jacob told him.
“I didn’t think you did. I never met a Miller who couldn’t handle a firearm. If you’d wanted me dead now, I’d be dead,” Jesse said.
“Yeah, maybe,” Jacob said with a flush.
“I came here because I owe your brother,” Jesse said. “We may not be on the same side, Jacob, but I came here fighting for you.”
Jacob nodded.
“I’m not asking for surrender. I just want to call a truce in this house,” Jesse told him. He offered Jacob his hand.
Jacob stared from his hand to his eyes. “That’s it? I shot you, and that’s it?”
“Yep. I’d like your word that you won’t try to shoot me again.”
Jacob shook his hand, still looking into his eyes. “You’ve got my word. That’s enough for you?”
“Yep. I never had reason to doubt a Miller before.”
A small smile touched Jacob’s face. He nodded. “No, we don’t lie. We never lie,” he said proudly. He swallowed hard and studied Jesse’s face again. “Thank you,” he said.
Those two words must have cost him a great deal, Jesse decided. “There’s nothing to thank me for. Now, we probably should go up to bed.”
“Yes, sir,” Jacob said to him. He started for the door, then turned back. “You came here because you felt you owed something to Anthony?”
“Yes,” Jesse said.
Jacob gazed at him innocently. “That’s funny. I could have sworn that you came here for Kiernan.”
His eyes were steady on Jesse’s. Jesse kept his eyes steady too.
“Yes, that too,” he admitted.
Jacob grinned again, lowered his head, and said good night. He opened the door, and Kiernan nearly came tumbling into the room.
She had given up her pounding sometime before, and she was tired out. But her gaze raced quickly over her young charge, her fear and concern evident. “Jacob, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I learned how to do sutures, Kiernan.” He held her shoulders and kissed her cheek, then walked past her up the stairs.
Kiernan, exhausted, leaned against the wall, her eyes closed.
Then those emerald orbs shot open and gazed upon him with glittering fury and reproach. “You left me out there thinking—you left me terrified and worried sick!”
“You shouldn’t have been terrified or worried sick,” Jesse said dryly. “You’ve known me all your life, and you know damned well that I’d never do injury to a child.”
“No!” she protested, her eyes still flashing their emerald fire. “I don’t know you at all. Because the man I thought I knew would never have walked away from the graveyard at Cameron Hall that day.”
Pain was mingled with the anger of her voice. He wanted to touch her. He took a step toward her. “Kiernan—”
She straightened, pushing away from the wall. She smiled at him, a regal, elegant, very superior smile.
“It’s Mrs. Miller to you, Captain Cameron. Mrs. Miller.”
She swung around and left the room, her head high, her hair flowing, the angel-white fabric of her gown floating behind her.
He followed her out to the stairway and watched her run up the steps.
He smiled suddenly, then wondered how he could be smiling while everything inside of him ached at the same time.
Sadly, the same conclusive and useless thought that had plagued him since he had come plagued him again.
Damn her.
Damn her sweet, beautiful, elegant, little hide.
Seventeen
During the following week, Jesse had Jacob for a dinner companion.
By the end of the week, Jacob’s sister, Patricia, had joined them.
Kiernan kept her distance.
For a woman who so detested Yankees, Kiernan was spending a fair amount of time with them. She no longer waited until the wee hours of the night to move among them. Afternoons, when he looked in on the wards, he usually found her there.
In the midst of the pain and injury and the growing cold of the coming winter, she was the sweetest breath of spring. She smelled delicious. She was dressed elegantly. She moved with a rustle of silk, with that sweet fragrance, with her beauty, her hair always smoothed beneath a net, her fingers thin and delicate upon a pen as she wrote a letter, or upon a cloth as she soothed a man’s brow.
They were all in love with her.
“Ain’t she just the most glorious thing that ever lived and breathed, Doc?” an old soldier asked him one day as Jesse looked carefully over his chart.
Jesse cocked a brow and grunted. Yes, she was glorious, he thought dryly. But the old coot had never seen her angry.
Of course, the injured men never did see her angry. They saw her in full skirts, with her demure smile, and they heard her laughter and her teasing tones.
One afternoon, it was almost as if she were holding court. She was seated on a chair in the middle of the beds in the large ward. She wore a beautiful yellow day dress with a lace overlay that covered the bodice to the collar and the sleeves to mid-elbow. A beautiful brooch highlighted her throat at her collar. Her skirt flowed around her. Her eyes were alive and dancing, and her accent was thicker and richer than he’d ever heard flow from her ruby lips before.
The men were enthralled.
“It’s not that I don’t think highly of you gents,” she drawled softly. “It’s just that I most earnestly do believe that two of our boys have the speed and the fighting ability of about ten of ya’ll.”
“Why, that ain’t true at all, Miz Miller,” a young soldier protested. “We just ain’t had all the right opportunities.”
“And we haven’t got generals like Stonewall or Lee,” the grizzled fellow said sagely.
“Men fight very hard to protect their own land.”
“We can stil
l outfight the Rebs,” another lad offered.
Watching silently from the doorway, Jesse realized that the soldier speaking had just come into Montemarte the day before yesterday with his arm all torn up by shrapnel. Jesse had been sent the soldier to see if he couldn’t save the arm. He’d spent hours in the surgery, removing bits of metal and ball.
“You just wait and see, Miz Miller,” he was saying now. “When our boys are the ones with the element of surprise, they’ll take the Rebs. Why, we’ve got some boys going down into the valley in just a few days’ time. They’ll whomp the few troops old Stonewall has sitting there.”
“Whomp ’em?” Kiernan asked, laughing sweetly.
“Why, sure. We’ll have surprise on our side—and better numbers, too, probably.”
“Well, we’ll just see then, won’t we?” she asked. She stood, and moved among them. “Why, Billy Joe Raily, I declare, your skin looks nice and white and so healthy today. That bit of yellow tinge is all gone.” She stroked the man’s cheek with the back of her hand.
Billy Joe looked as if he were just about to burst. Kiernan had her bedside manner down pat. A touch, and poor Billy Joe was probably trying hard not to climax.
Jesse imagined that he was saving his men from their battle wounds—so they could die of heart attacks from the excitement Kiernan caused them.
She stooped to place a wet cloth on another brow, then turned and saw him. And stopped dead still.
For a moment, the demure mask of the very sweet belle slipped. She was every bit as beautiful, but her face suddenly appeared sharp and weary, and her eyes bore a trace of wariness. She straightened, still staring at him, and set the cloth upon the table. Then she turned around to sweep the room with her gaze. “Good afternoon, boys,” she wished them, serene and innocent. The mask was back in place.
She swept by Jesse.
He breathed in the sweet scent of the woman and her perfume, and he listened to the rustle of silk.
Later that afternoon, near twilight, he looked out of his bedroom window and saw her in front of the house. She had changed into a dark velvet riding habit that had been fashioned more for utility than for elegance. As he watched, she hurried toward the stables.
He dropped the letter he had just received from Washington, grabbed his wool, shoulder-skirted frock coat, and hurried downstairs. By the time he reached the porch, she was just riding out, careful to skirt around the tents of his men and the bivouac on the front lawn.
Jesse hurried toward the stables himself. Old Jeremiah was seated on a chair by the door, leaning back and dozing. But when Jesse strode by him, he opened his eyes wide, then hurried after Jesse.
“Where you goin’ there, Master Jess?”
“Riding.”
“Don’t seem to me like no good time to go ridin’. It’s gonna be dark soon enough.”
Right before Pegasus’s stall, Jesse paused. “Oh, really? You should have thought to stop your mistress then.”
“What?”
“Kiernan just left. Mrs. Miller just rode away from here,” Jesse said impatiently.
“Did she now?”
“Jeremiah, you’re trying to tell me that you didn’t see Mrs. Miller riding out, when you were sitting right here?”
“Come to think of it—”
“Right, come to think of it,” Jesse muttered. He drew Pegasus’s bridle from its hook and moved around to the horse’s head.
“Want me to saddle him up for you, Master Jess?”
“No, thanks,” Jesse said. “If I let you do it, I have a feeling I’d be sitting here all night waiting for you to finish.”
“Why, Master Jess—”
“Step aside, Jeremiah,” Jesse said. He pushed on Pegasus’s neck, backing him out of the stall. He quickly threw a blanket and his saddle over the horse’s back and cinched and tightened the girth. Then leaped upon the horse and looked down at Jeremiah.
“Don’t fret too much, Jeremiah. She’s way ahead of me.”
Jeremiah stepped back; he had no choice. Jesse set his heels to Pegasus, and they started off.
He didn’t skirt around his own encampment and made up some time by riding through it. Still, when he reached the place where Kiernan had disappeared into the trees, he reined in. He studied the ground, but it was bone dry, and there were few prints. One trail seemed to have more broken foliage along it, so he urged Pegasus in that direction.
Mentally, he drew a picture of the area. Harpers Ferry was far below, with Maryland Heights, the mounts and hills and crests and valleys, all around. He thought of the manors and the plantations in the region, places where he had attended balls and fêtes and where he had hunted with friends.
He remembered that the trail before him led to the ruins of the Chagall estate.
“All right, Pegasus, let’s see what she’s up to,” Jesse murmured. He tightened his thighs, urging the horse forward.
* * *
Some mornings when Kiernan awoke, she still prayed that she would discover that it had all been a horrible nightmare.
Jesse had never come to the house. None of the Yanks had ever come. The war had yet to touch them, and a dozen injured men were not living in her house.
At first, nothing could conceivably have been worse than having Jesse in the next room. Surely not even the fires of hell could bring so much torment as having him so near. She had not slept, just knowing that he was there. Hearing his footsteps across the wooden floor, imagining the movements that he made—she could picture his face because she knew him so well. He would be weary coming in from surgery. He would cast off his coat or his jacket, sit back in the chair at the desk, and prop his booted heels up upon it. He would sink down, close his eyes, and press his temple between his thumb and his forefinger. Then, slowly, his hand would fall, his eyes would open, and he would rise.
She could hear him moving about the room, stripping down. His boots falling to the floor, his shirt over a chair, his breeches, his belt. Then she would hear his weight as he fell upon his bed, and she would picture him again, fingers laced behind his head, his eyes upon the darkened shadows on the ceiling.
In the silence that followed she could imagine no greater anguish than lying awake and seeing him in her mind’s eyes, just feet apart from her. He was her enemy now. They had no future together. Jesse had donned blue and gone his own way, and she could never change him. She had sworn to hate him.
And she had sworn to herself that she hated him.
And she did, completely. But love died hard, she realized, no matter what color cloth covered a man.
And now she was Anthony’s widow. She had married Anthony, and Anthony was dead, and it had not been that long ago, and she should have been in deepest mourning.
But none of that mattered when Jesse was in a room. No matter how deep her fury, no matter how desperate her situation, when he came near, smoldering sparks came alive, furnaces blazed. Her hatred was intense—and so, too, was her longing.
It was not simply Jesse’s arrival that tormented her. It was the men who camped out on the lawn. It was the men who lay in Anthony’s room across the hall. Yankees. Sick Yankees, hurt Yankees.
When she had first heard a man screaming in the surgery, she had simply stayed in her bedroom, her hands clamped over her ears. She could have sworn that the victim had died. But there he was that night, alive and well, and with a gentle smile when he saw her looking in on him. He, too, was the enemy.
But how could she wish him dead?
Then the others came. They were men with lean faces and blue eyes and brown eyes, and men with weary and worn faces. Some wore whiskers, and some did not. They, too, were the enemy. They were the same as any man, and as often as not in this region, they had kinfolk on the other side, and they prayed not so much to live as to not encounter their own loved ones at the other end of their rifles. She wanted to ignore their suffering; but she discovered that she could not bear it.
She also discovered that Jesse’s patients were a fin
e way to learn the movements of the Union troops. They had all come in from skirmishes in the countryside nearby, and the information they had was invaluable.
She had already left a message at the oak for foraging Confederates to vacate a place before Yankees with superior numbers could surprise them. Now she had a second opportunity to do so. It pleased her greatly. It seemed, at the very least, some recompense for the anguish of having Jesse in the house and the agony of hearing the screams that came from the surgery.
Night was coming quickly this evening, she realized, riding harder as she neared the Chagall estate. She reined in, seeing the pillars of the burned-out place, white and black and ghostly in the pale moonlight that had replaced the rays of the day’s dying sun.
The wind rustled through the trees, and haunting shadows fell over the terrain. Movements seemed to flutter all about her, and for a moment she held still, as a shiver of fear danced up and down the length of her spine.
She had been a fool to come so late at night, she thought. But there was little to fear, she told herself. The Rebs would not hurt her, and the Yanks were already living in her house.
And still …
The breeze was very cool, and the night seemed to have eyes.
She leaped off her horse and raced to the old oak. Just as she neared the tree, a shadow stepped out from behind it.
The shadow of a man, and not of a man …
Tall, dark, pitch-black, and menacing, the moonlight caught him in a strange silhouette, throwing his shadow far and wide across the tree and all the overgrown lawn before the house.
Kiernan screamed, reeling back, her hand flying to her mouth. Instinctively, she turned to run. She heard a shout, but in her panic, it meant nothing. She tore across the weeds and grass and fallen branches, desperate to reach her horse. The wind rose again, rustling through the trees with sudden vengeance.
She could feel him, the shadow on her back, hounding her. She ran faster, gasping, screaming desperately for every breath, running so hard that her lungs ached and threatened to burst, her legs cramped and burned, and her heart hammered.
Just feet away from her horse, the shadow devoured her. She was swept off her feet, and she screamed again in a wild panic. She felt herself falling and hitting the hard earth, the shadow on top of her.