She sighed. “Sissy has worked with my husband, Corporal. I met her through him. She became my servant because of her work with my husband. She was born a free woman, but Corporal, at one point she was seized as property and richly abused by her master.” She stared at Randall. “It is possible, Corporal, to be a loyal Rebel, and deplore what monsters do to other human beings!”
Randall looked ahead again, a small smile playing on his features. “Miss Sydney, you don’t need to go getting your dander up around me! I never did cotton to the idea of one man owning another. But then again, I never did cotton to the idea of the Federal government telling a Virginian what to do and what not to do. Still, I think we’d best get these mules moving, since folks are mighty touchy these days about all aspects of the war!”
Close to the enemy lines, Randall climbed down from the wagon and looked up at her. He shook his head with a sigh.
“I don’t much like leaving you.”
“I’m almost within Yankee lines.”
“Well, that’s just fine. As long as you meet up with Yankee troops. There’s too many misfits in this war now, and you may meet up with men who have no loyalty in any direction.”
“Deserters?”
“Deserters, drifters ... trash. White and black. You take care now, you hear? Move fast. And get within those Yankee lines.”
“Thank you, Corporal Randall. I promise you, I’ll move with all speed.”
“You do that for me,” Randall said, untying his horse’s lead from the rear of the wagon. He mounted his mare and came back around by the wagon, where Sydney had now taken up the reins. “God guard you,” he said, saluting Sydney.
“And you.” She smiled, saluting him in return. “Stay well!”
“I will! Wish you would have stayed with us, Miss Sydney!”
Maybe I should have done exactly that! she thought. She should have just stayed with Brent, assisting him in his surgery.
What had brought her back? The husband who’d had no desire to see her since the machinations of their marriage?
Christmas. It was nearly Christmas. She needed to be there, in case he came back. Only because he had done what seemed to be the honorable thing in marrying her, she felt she owed him at least the appearance of a home and a wife loyal to him, if not to his country.
Corporal Randall saluted again, called out to the mules, and when they had started up their journey again, he turned his mare, and left. When Sydney was certain they had ridden far apart down the long path, she turned around and called out sharply to Sissy where she sat in the rear of the wagon. “Come up here!”
Sissy, she had come to realize, could play any role. She had seemed as meek and mild as the most timid servant girl when they had met—but then, she’d been following Sydney around and spying on her spying activities! This small, beautiful, remarkable young black woman had a tempest and passion in her soul too often hidden by the thick, dark lashes that could conveniently sweep over her eyes when she didn’t want her thoughts known. Now, she came forward as Sydney bid—carefully, lest the jerking gait of the mules send her crashing over the side of the wagon.
Taking a seat next to Sydney, Sissy informed her, “You might have said ‘please,’” and her tone was no less imperious than any Sydney had ever used herself.
“I might have, but I’m hardly in the mood!” Indeed, she cracked the whip over the backs of the poor mules with such a sharpness that the sound sent them bolting down the path. The wagon creaked and jolted; in the rear, the thin woman moaned, and Sydney gritted her teeth, irritated that Sissy could make her so foolishly angry.
“You’ve told me often enough that you know masters who are not only kind, but polite to their slaves.”
“You’re not my slave, you never have been, and you know darned well I never owned any slaves whatsoever. So don’t play word games with me right now, Sissy, not when you might have risked my life back there.”
“Your life was never in any danger,” Sissy said.
“Oh yes, it was! Unless this really is your long lost brother—which I do not believe! So let’s be honest and open here—are these escaped slaves? Have you forced me into a position of betraying my own country?”
Sissy turned on her. “Have you betrayed your own conscience?”
“My conscience, ethics, morals, heart, et cetera, are none of your business. You’ve used me, and we remain in danger.”
“I didn’t use you—you came forward to help me of your own free will.”
“Yes! But I didn’t know that you were trying to smuggle slaves out of the South! It’s illegal.”
“Only when you’re in the South.”
“We’re still in the South!”
“Barely,” Sissy assured her. Then she added quietly and desperately, “And I would have used you, yes! I am ready to use anyone, do anything, to help free people who are kept in bondage.”
“Oh, my God.”
“You’ve seen my back!” Sissy told her heatedly.
“Not every slave is viciously beaten.”
“Look at those two!” Sissy implored her. “Do they look as if they’ve been cherished and tenderly cared for?”
Sydney had to turn around—and admit that Sissy was right. The pair with her, overworked into an early old age, were stick-thin, sadly emaciated.
“You could see some real scars on his back!” Sissy said.
“Maybe he deserved them. Maybe he lied or cheated or—”
“Or tried to escape,” Sissy said flatly.
“You’re missing the point here. You have no right to make me a part of this!” Sydney insisted. “I am a Southerner—”
“You’re Jesse’s wife now.”
“It doesn’t change the fact that I think the North should let the South go!”
“Well, the North isn’t going to let the South go.”
Sydney shook her head. She was angry, unnerved, uncertain, and angrier still because she didn’t want to be at all uncertain. Yes, good God, these poor people most obviously and desperately need their freedom. But she had gone to a Rebel camp, she’d been born a Floridian, and she had gone with her state, and there she was—helping escaped slaves! She shouldn’t be doing it, it went against the laws of her country, the Confederate States of America, and yet ...
She didn’t believe in slavery, she had never believed in slavers, and she knew that her grandmother’s people had often helped escaped slaves. There had even been large communities of escaped slaves who had taken on the Indian ways and become known as the Black Seminoles. The Indians, so constantly persecuted, had stubbornly resisted white efforts to find escaped slaves, often at the peril of their own lives.
And yet ...
The persecution by the army had also been so rigorous that most Seminoles had readily embraced the Confederacy—the Union uniform was so very much hated by those who had managed to flee the mass migrations to the West.
It hadn’t seemed to matter that many of the vicious men who had hounded the Indians had simply changed uniforms. To most Seminoles and other Indians in Florida, the Union uniform was a hated symbol, and so it would remain. Her father, her brothers were all Rebels. The irony of the contrasts in what they believed in and what they were fighting for suddenly seemed incredibly great.
“What you have done to me is a presumption on our friendship,” Sydney began again angrily.
“Friendship? Was I your friend—or your servant?” Sissy demanded.
“Oh, my God! Here I am, risking my life, getting you through the Rebel lines, and you have the nerve to goad me. Let’s see—were you my friend? Lord, no! You had me arrested!”
“I didn’t have you arrested. I merely knew you were out to do some harm to Union troops, and I followed you, and listened—”
“And spied on me, and had me arrested.”
“Jesse arrested you.”
“Thanks to you.”
“Well, then, he married you—and got you out of prison, right? So it all ended well for you,
didn’t it?”
“Oh, wonderfully! It was a forced marriage, and we hate one another—”
“He never hated you,” Sissy interrupted. She looked at Sydney, her dark eyes serious and questing. “You hated him—because you thought he was betraying you by forcing you to remain here. Well, you were a fool. He let your brother go when it was against everything he believed. By forcing you to stay behind, he gave Jerome a better chance to escape. He kept you from danger. He arrested you because he had to. And I don’t think you hate him at all. I think you’re fighting a stupid war that you don’t believe in yourself.”
“And I don’t care what you think!” Sydney flared.
“Sydney!” Sissy said suddenly, her face gray. “There’s someone ...”
Sydney fell silent, listening. There was a commotion in the brush ahead. She felt the color drain from her own cheeks. She’d been arguing with Sissy out of anger—she hadn’t thought that they might really be caught by Rebel troops.
Who was ahead?
A voice suddenly seemed to crack out of the air, as if God were speaking.
“Halt! In the name of God and the Union, halt!”
She reined in quickly, realizing that Corporal Randall had risked his own well-being, taking her as close to Yankee lines as he had. A soldier stepped onto the trail, rifle in his hand.
“Who are you and where are you going?”
“I have my papers right here, sir,” Sydney said.
He came to the wagon, glanced over her travel pass, her and her company, and told her to move. “Farther up, you’ll be asked out of the carriage, ma’am.”
She thanked him and started down the road again.
Ahead was another stop. The road here was filled with soldiers. Tents and cooking fires were to one side of the road; a number of soldiers stood against trees nearby, drinking coffee, cleaning weapons, taking their leisure. Sydney crawled down from the wagon with her papers, nodding in return to the soldiers who acknowledged her presence. She felt their eyes watching her every step. She was unaccountably nervous leaving Sissy and her friends in the wagon. She’d left the South with these people. That should have been the hard part. She was tired now, with a blazing headache.
She handed the Union sergeant her papers. He stared at the papers, then he stared at her. He stared at her papers again, then peered into her face for the third time. She shifted from foot to foot and sighed with deep and obvious aggravation. “My papers, sir, are in perfect order.”
“There’s a McKenzie here in your name,” the sergeant pointed out. “You kin to Colonel McKenzie?”
This was Union territory.
Which Colonel McKenzie? she was tempted to ask.
She knew that he was referring to her cousin, Ian, the Union colonel. She was tempted to tell him that she was also related to Julian, her cousin and Ian’s brother, but a Confederate colonel, and then there was another Colonel McKenzie, Colonel Brent McKenzie—her brother, the surgeon she had just gone to see. Then, of course, there was her other brother, naval Captain Jerome McKenzie, the one she had used when trying to leave the South—but mentioning his name to Federal forces often caused a severe reaction since he continued to run circles around the Union blockade.
Was she trying to make good use of renowned names here?
If so, naturally, there was still that other colonel she could mention ... Colonel Jesse Halston, United States Cavalry, just like the one McKenzie relative she was ready to claim at the moment.
“I am a first cousin to Colonel Ian McKenzie, United States Cavalry,” she said, but she knew by the man’s sudden, snickering smile that he knew exactly who that made her. The McKenzie who had been instrumental in more than one prison escape from Old Capitol, the McKenzie who had helped break out her brother and a number of her countrymen dressed as a ladies singing group. She’d also helped her cousin escape by suggesting he slip into a coffin.
Yes, she was one of the McKenzies who had actually resided at Old Capitol for a while. Perhaps she could get into a friendly conversation here with this man and explain it all. Tell him how she had tended Jesse first in Virginia when he had been a wounded prisoner in the Confederate States of America. How much she had started to like him there, and how liking him had made her see more than ever that the war was a tragedy in which friends and brothers, fathers and sons, could walk out on a field any day, be ordered to fire—and shoot one another down.
But then Jesse had betrayed her, threatening to call out the guard should she attempt to leave the city with her brother Jerome.
Then came the part the guard would really like—there she was, a good Rebel stuck in the heart of Washington. Before she knew it, she was passing information, and before she knew it, she was a Rebel spy. She hadn’t come here with designs on espionage—she had really, truly just fallen right into it. Then, in a nutshell, Jesse—assisted by Sissy, who had ostensibly been living with her as a servant!—had learned what information she was to deliver, disguised himself to receive the information and prove her a spy, had her arrested, and seen her sent to Old Capitol. The man who had then been her downfall and total nemesis had come around at the urging of her cousin-in-law, Rhiannon McKenzie, Julian’s wife. Because she’d asked Rhiannon for help—afraid that all her male kin would feel honor-bound to storm the Yankee citadel for her release. Rhiannon had gone to see Jesse. And Jesse had come to the prison—where she was incarcerated because he had tricked and betrayed her. There was only one way to get her out, and that was because of his own reputation as a heroic cavalry commander. He could marry her, and take responsibility for her future actions.
Would telling the man any of this help? No.
“Sergeant, you have no right to detain me in this manner,” she told him firmly. “My papers are in perfect order.”
“You went back behind Rebel lines, Miss McKenzie.”
“Mrs. Halston,” she hissed impatiently. It seemed ridiculous that he was giving her trouble—for once in her life, her motives had been strictly within the law. “And my husband has been out of the city—fighting. He was wounded, imprisoned, and wounded again—fighting for the Union, sir. But without him being here, I took the time I was left alone and went to see my brother. He is not a spy, nor engaged in any manner of undercover activity whatsoever—he is a surgeon. I hadn’t seen him in a very, very long time. I left the city with permission from General McGee. But now I am back, because my husband is a Union soldier. This is his home, and this is where I will wait for him. Now I am weary, and I want to go home. Please let me pass!”
To her surprise, the man seemed to take a slight step back. “Mrs. Halston, you’ve got to realize that Washington, D.C., is a hotbed of snakes and spies. And with your known Rebel activities, I’m not sure it’s such a good thing for you to be coming and going. Whether you are or aren’t guilty of carrying information—”
“I am not carrying information!”
“Who are these people with you?” he demanded suddenly.
“What?”
“The Negroes?”
She straightened to her full height. Although the man naturally remained taller, she was aggravated enough to feel as tough as a little terrier. “This is a free woman who resides in Washington, and for your information, soldier, she has done the Union great favors upon many an occasion!”
He looked over at Sissy. “The Union—or other darkees?”
She stared at him, horrified and infuriated. “President Lincoln has taught us that the major issue we’re fighting over is slavery! I can imagine being challenged in the South, but how dare you detain me here any longer regarding the Negroes in my company!”
“Look, Mrs. Halston, the city is teeming with refugees and darkees with no jobs and no place to go.”
“This is Mr. Lincoln’s city, and they will reside here. Let me pass now with these people, or so help me, sir, I will somehow see to it that you are very, very sorry for the difficulties you have caused me!”
The soldier suddenly looked as
irritated and angry as she herself felt. “You should have never been let out of prison, Miz McKenzie, and that’s a sad fact.”
“But I have been let out!” she replied with soft vehemence, but as she turned away from him, he had a rejoinder for her.
“Leave it to a half-breed!”
She didn’t know if he had meant for her to hear him or not. But it was the wrong night for him to come out with such fighting words.
She swung back around on him, catching his jaw with a sturdy slap that must have stung like the venom of a hundred bees.
“Quarter-breed soldier, and you can count on it. We just keep fighting and fighting, one way or the other. We are survivors!”
“Why ...” the soldier began, incensed, his cheek reddening, his hand rising reflexively to touch the spot where she had struck him. “Why you—”
“Breed? Rebel? Just what would you like to call me?” she inquired. “Take care, sir, with what you do, since you must recall, you are dealing with someone carrying the blood of pure savages in her veins!”
She was startled by a sudden sound of applause. Swinging around, she saw that the group of Yankee soldiers standing by the trees had been watching her. They had kept their eyes on the entire altercation.
“Teach him his manners, ma’am!” a young soldier called out.
“And if he takes another step toward you, don’t you worry none, we’ll do some of the teaching for you!” another man said. He wore a sergeant’s stripes on his arms as well, an older man, with rich gray whiskers, heavy jowls, and a round, muscled body. “Are you forgetting you’re speaking to a lady, Sergeant?” he demanded sharply.
“The lady has been a Confederate spy!” the checkpoint sergeant argued.
“If we had to hang every lady in Washington who had lent a sympathetic ear to the South, we might be plumb out of ladies in the capital. As to Mrs. Halston, well, doesn’t seem to me she’s doing anything much against the Union now. Looks to me like she might be doing something for those poor people there in that wagon. There’s been refugees by the hundreds piling into the city—I can’t see what harm Mrs. Halston’s bringing in two more can do to anyone.”