“For the cause,” Julian murmured, lifting his brandy glass to Rogers.
“For the cause!” Rogers repeated passionately.
“Tell me, sir, how did you draw this assignment, finding me here in this Godforsaken little hammock?”
“Why, I’m in the process of being reassigned as well, sir. And I’m from Georgia, familiar with north Florida here.”
“Why are you being reassigned?”
Rogers rimmed his brandy glass with a finger and then smiled ruefully at Julian. “Well, the boys and I are all that’s left. We started out with a company near fifty men back at the beginning of the war. My company. I financed them, you see, and I was elected captain—we were militia to begin with as well, you see. We fought at Chancellorsville. By then, we were already down to about twenty-five men. And after Chancellorsville ... well, we’re all that’s left. So we’ll be seeing you outside of Jacksonville as well, sir.”
Julian nodded slowly. “I’m very sorry, sir.”
“So am I, Doctor. So am I.”
“It seems to me you’ve fought a hard war. Perhaps you should be seeing out the rest of it back home in Georgia.”
“That sounds like a right fine proposition. But it’s strange, Colonel. Once you’re in this thing, seems like you’re in it to the end.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Julian agreed.
“You keep your head down, working out on the battlefields, Doctor.”
“I will. And you, Captain, you take care of yourself, too.”
“I’ll drink to that, sir! That is, if you can spare me a touch more of that brandy.
Julian poured them both another drink.
It was late the following afternoon when Rhiannon ventured out to the brook. She was feeling hot, sticky, and restless. Corporal Lyle stood guard at the passage to the water and assured her that he was on duty for several hours to come and would let no one disturb her. Of course, she had heard that story before, but she was beginning to feel a strange sense of fatality, and of recklessness, and she realized that she missed sparring with Julian, and that he had carefully kept his distance from her since his cousin’s surgery.
At the brook she hesitated, then stripped her shoes, stockings, petticoat, pantalettes and mourning gown. In her thin linen shift she stepped into the water, delighted by its cool caress. She moved into the deep area, floating on her back, looking at the canopy of trees above. The cool water trickled through her hair, seemed to massage her scalp, to wash away the heat of the daytime sun and all the dust of the earth and air that had surrounded her during the day. The water was lulling, cleansing, crisp, and sweet. She delighted in it.
She didn’t know when he came; she just knew suddenly that he was there, by the brook, leaning against an old oak, watching her. She straightened, treading the water to keep her toes from touching the muddy bottom. “Were you waiting for me?” he inquired.
“Certainly not. Corporal Lyle swore to me that he’d guard the pathway.”
“Oh, I see. And it never occurred to you that for those of us who know these woods so well, there might not be another path?”
“I was told there was but one.”
He pushed away from the tree and came toward her. On the shore line, he hunkered down, trailing his fingers on the surface of the water. “As far as Corporal Lyle knows, there is but one way here.” His touch remained on the water. “So cool ...” he murmured. “Touched by the sun, and still so pleasantly cool. In summer, of course, when the water level lowers ... it’s like bath water. But not today.”
His eyes met hers. He straightened. She realized that he was already barefoot; he stripped off his cotton shirt and stepped into the water in his trousers. “You don’t mind if I join you, do you?”
“Well, yes, actually—” she began, but he had walked straight to the deeper section, very near her, and plowed in. She continued to tread water nervously, looking around. He didn’t surface. He remained below far too long.
Then his head shot smoothly from the water. He was some distance away from her, in the deepest section of the brook leading toward the river.
“I do mind, but, please! Hop right in,” she called to him dryly.
He started swimming toward her. Strong, sure strokes. She started to back away, but it was too late. He was suddenly before her, capturing her hands.
“You don’t mind. If you did, you wouldn’t be here.”
“Don’t be absurd. I was assured that—”
“That what? I came here and found you before.”
“I came to swim, McKenzie. The coolness, the cleanness—”
“Wash away the feel of all those Rebels you’ve been touching, eh?” he queried.
She jerked her hands free, and turned, ready to swim toward the shore. She got nowhere. His hands settled on her hips as she tried to flee, and he turned her back to face him. The material of her shift had never felt so thin. His hands all but burned against the coolness of the water and that of her flesh. His eyes were steadily on hers. She set her hands on his, trying to free herself. “Mrs. Tremaine, you are the most atrocious liar I have ever met.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” she snapped, working at his fingers where they lay against her waist. “Let me go—”
“You came here to wait for me. You knew that I would come.”
“Now there is the lie, Colonel—”
“Have you been drinking, Mrs. Tremaine?”
“Drinking? While working with your injured soldiers?”
“Have you?”
“Of course not!”
“Any laudanum in your system?”
“No!”
“You’re sure, absolutely sure?”
“Yes, of course, I’m sure—”
“Good!”
He drew her hard against him, caught her chin between his fingers and thumb, and kissed her. Very hard, open-mouthed, with a startling, searing passion. Instinctively she struggled. Set her hands against him. His chest. Bare. Sleek. Furred with dark hair, tautly muscled, alive with a searing heat that seemed to explode from the water. She couldn’t breathe ... that was it, of course. The lack of air. She couldn’t breathe, she was losing consciousness, sanity, reason, her touch with reality. She felt the wet heat of his tongue and lips, so seductive, ravaging her mouth. Felt his hands, as if they touched her bare flesh, moving over her body creating an erotic friction through the sheer linen that only seemed to enhance his slightest touch ...
She made a sound in her throat ... pressed against him again, pushing him, trying to free herself, and yet ... her strength was fading, along with her desire to be free. She’d never felt anything so evocative, the liquid heat of his touch, the fire of his body. The coolness of the water causing her to burn and shiver in one. Her fingertips remained against his naked chest. Her lips parted freely to the sweet, raw, raking of his tongue, the touch of searing wet fire that seemed to sluice all around her. He tilted her head, tasted her more fully. His fingers moved over her breast, the tips brushing her nipple beneath the linen, hot and cold, sluicing seductive fire everywhere ...
Then his head lifted. His lips hovered just above her.
“Not drunk, eh?”
“What? No ...”
“And no drugs?”
“No.”
“Good. Then you’ll remember me this time.”
He released her, inclining his head politely.
She stared at him blankly for a moment, still feeling the pressure of his lips, but now the coolness of the water around her felt like a cold wake-up slap.
“Why, you Rebel bastard.”
Naturally, she tried to strike him. But naturally, he was prepared, capturing her wrist and then drawing her against him one more time. “If you ever want the truth, Mrs. Tremaine, look me up. This time, at the very least, you’ll remember my name. And my face. Call on me, if you ever decide that you need me.”
“Need you!” she gasped furiously.
“You never know, do you, Mrs. Tremaine?”
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“I will never need you—”
“You may.”
His eyes were deep blue and steady on hers, intense, and yet touched with just the slightest amusement. Maybe more. Maybe something deeper. She was held so closely against him that she felt the muscle and sinew of his body again, felt the strength. She couldn’t see Richard’s face anymore, just his. His face. He had wanted her to know it, to remember it.
She railed inwardly against her own weaknesses, the darkness in her heart that allowed desire when love was dead, slain on the battlefield.
“Do you know what I need, Colonel?”
“What?”
“Trust me, I know your face and I need just one chance to lay a right jab against your smug cheek!”
He released her, stood back. Smiled, eyes alive and dancing. “One chance. Go for it,” he said.
She swung. Hard, with all her strength. She thought that her blow would land. He spun like an acrobat at the last second, and she careened into his arms, pinned hard against him once again. “As I said—”
“You’re a rude oaf!”
“But an honest one.”
“Honesty and honor are slain on the field like all else, Colonel.”
“Life itself has a way of going on, madam, in defiance of all else. Life will always find a way.”
“I will never need you!” she whispered again.
“Regardless of that, my dear, I would move heaven and earth to come to your assistance if ever you should beckon. The name is McKenzie. Julian. Remember that.”
“Let me go this instant, Julian McKenzie—”
“There you go, you’ve got it!”
“Julian—”
“Remember me.”
He still held her so tightly. His lips touched hers once again. Now the touch was light and swift, like the whisper of a flame against her soul.
When he released her, she was scarcely aware. She lowered her head, suddenly bereft of strength.
And when she lifted her eyes again ...
He was gone.
She wasn’t to see him again until he touched her in her dreams.
Chapter 12
“WHY, MISS SYDNEY, WELCOME, how are you this evening?”
“Fine, Sergeant Granger, just fine, thank you, sir,” Sydney McKenzie replied to the man on duty at Capitol Prison, Washington, D.C. She offered him a pleasant smile. She smoothed back a straying lock of rich dark hair that glittered with a touch of auburn in the lamplight. “Come to see my boys, of course.”
“Yes, Miss Sydney, don’t worry none. We might sit here and wish you were coming to pay a visit to us Yank fellows, but we sure do know better.” Sergeant Granger was an old enlisted man. A bit grizzled, a bit worn, but a pleasant family man; the kind who made her realize at times that the war was all about fighting their own ex-fellow countrymen. But though she’d acquired a fondness for him along with some of the other Yanks she encountered in the Federal capital, her fondness didn’t go so far as to cause her to feel any guilt for what she was doing: anything she could to get the Southern boys out and back home.
Or anything she could to carry important messages where and when they needed to go.
She’d first come north to help free her brother Jerome when he’d been a prisoner here. He was to have been exchanged for Captain Jesse Halston, a dashing young cavalryman wounded and imprisoned in the South. But the exchange had been halted, mainly because of Jerome’s father-in-law. Union General Magee had thought that his son-in-law would better survive the war in prison. He hadn’t known Jerome well enough; Jerome had been determined to leave one way or the other.
Sydney had been Jesse Halston’s nurse at Chimbarizo Hospital in Richmond. He’d been an important prisoner, one for whom the South had known they could exchange an officer dear to their own cause. He’d been a model patient, and he was a handsome, reckless, daring young man. They’d formed a friendship.
Destroyed completely, of course, once he’d stopped her from leaving with Jerome. Oh, he’d done it well. Though the North had refused to exchange Jerome, Jesse had been exchanged for a Confederate general. Jerome had been determined to leave, and one of the other prisoners’ old Irish grandmother had brought some friends—Southern sympathizers—and so a number of the men had escaped dressed as part of the Irish ladies’ singing group. Jesse, however, had caught on to their plan, and in the middle of the Confederate flight he’d caught up with her—threatening to alert the authorities about the prison break if she attempted to leave the city with her brother. He’d been adamant, and she’d had to put on one of the performances of her life to convince Jerome she had meant all along to stay in Washington. Of course, Jerome had been very aware of the danger she would have been in traveling with him, and since she had been the one to introduce Jerome to Jesse back in Richmond, her brother had trusted her. He had even been relieved that she would be out of danger.
Jesse had forced her to stay behind, detained in the parlor of the handsome town house he had inherited from his father. For hours she eyed him with barely controllable rage. “I’m making you stay for your own good,” he had told her, “so you can’t go chasing after your brother and wind up with a bullet in your head.”
She’d finally fallen asleep on his sofa, and she’d slept there ten hours after all that. When she’d awakened, however, he was watching her. She’d told him, “You can deliver me to President Lincoln, for all I care. Jerome is gone. And now I’m going. You can arrest me, or shoot me—I’m not staying in this parlor any longer.” He had turned his back on her and told her to leave.
At Old Capitol, the Irish ladies were no longer admitted, but Sydney, who hadn’t been blamed for the escape, was allowed to come to see the prisoners, to bring them food and clothing and other donations. Her brothers were Rebels, but her cousin Ian was a Northern cavalry hero—very much like Jesse Halston himself—and so she was often granted special privileges. People seemed to trust her.
Jesse had been sent back to war.
Since then, she’d twice been able to relay information from prisoners. She knew it was a dangerous game—other family members had played it. But she was careful, and she was charming and good at her game, and she never trusted anything to paper. The messages she carried were by voice alone, her own or that of Marla Kelly, a young Irish girl she’d met during her brother’s escape. Marla’s brother, with whom she’d come to America, had been killed at Sharpsburg. The young husband she’d married just before the war had perished protecting Richmond during McClellan’s Peninsula campaign. Left so alone and bereft and far from home, Marla wanted revenge. She was acquainted with Rose Greenhow, the bewitching Washington widow who had charmed the capital society while informing Southern generals of Federal military movements. Rose had been caught, sent to Old Capitol herself, and finally brought South—where she still worked for the Confederacy. Many women were managing to help the Confederacy. Her cousin-in-law Alaina—wed to Ian, that most ardent of Yanks!—had become a Confederate spy, working with Rose. In the end she had been caught, but by Ian, and so, on her honor, she was done with spying. Sydney’s older half-sister, Jennifer, had also turned to espionage after her husband’s death—the pain and bitterness had made her reckless as well. Jennifer had actually been hanged, but Ian had found her before the rope had strangled her, and she had ceased her far too dangerous activities.
Sydney never felt that she was in danger. Nothing could be proven against her. She was different from Jennifer—she wasn’t in pain and she wasn’t bitter—she was just angry. Therefore, she wasn’t reckless. And she knew so much. About both sides. She had lived in both Richmond and Washington, D.C., and knew the hearts of both countries. She was loyal to her cause, knowing the terrible weakness of the South—and the strengths. The South, despite her fabulous generals, excellent cavalry, and the fact that her young men were defending their homeland and their way of life, couldn’t win a war waged on manpower and technology alone. The North did have the factories, and the capabilities
of drawing from far greater resources of manpower. Dead Northern soldiers could be replaced. Some died without ever speaking the English language.
The South, however, could win on morale. The Northern people had to tire and sicken of the war. They had to want to let their Southern sister go, say good riddance to the bloodshed. The South could win if politics swung to the Southern favor, and every time the South won a battle, every time lists of the Union dead were read, the people came a little bit closer to wanting it all to be over.
She knew how that felt herself. She wanted it over. She was sick to death of worrying about her brothers, her cousins, her friends. She wanted to be able to go home, and find her family there, and she wanted to see her mother and her new baby sister. She had been with her brother Brent in Richmond for a long time, and now she missed him as well. She was living among the enemy. She needed to go home, except that she was useful here. Please, God, she’d heard it here, among the whispering Yank soldiers and from the prisoners of the South—Lee wanted to take the war to the North. If he could only win his great battle on Northern soil, strip the North as the North had stripped the South. Lay so much waste ... like so much of her homeland. Not the far south of the state, where she had been born. But the more northern cities. Jacksonville. The Yanks had been in and out, burning, looting, destroying. St. Augustine, taken over. And so many of the people so fickle! The city just couldn’t make it, it seemed, without her Yankee tourist dollars! Inlets and coves, shelled and lambasted. Salt and cattle scavenged, when every little bit of supplies was so desperately needed by an army growing evermore ragged and malnourished, day by day.
It was high time for the South to scavenge cattle from the Northern states, trample the crops, steal the corn.
“You’re a bit late tonight, aren’t you?” Granger asked.
“I guess I am. May I still come in?”
“The boys are in the public room having just finished their suppers, so I suppose I can let you in. But I’m going to have to see your basket, Miss Sydney, you know,” Granger told her.
“Why, of course.”
She handed him the basket she had brought. There was no danger in it. She carried nothing but food—meat pies, sweetments, fresh breads, apples, and cherry marmalade.