He blinked, moving carefully, looking about himself.
There was a house in the distance.
It wasn’t Cameron Hall. It was a whitewashed farmhouse, and there were planters of summer flowers on the front porch. An old swing hung from a big oak.
The flowers had been mown down in a hail of bullets. The white paint was pockmarked with rifle fire.
Distantly now, he could still hear the cries of warfare, the crack of steel against steel.
His company had moved on. The battle had changed terrain. Dead men lay around him. Men in blue and men in gray.
He tried to raise himself and crawl toward the house.
The effort was too much for his remaining strength. The house began to fade. Blackness descended swiftly upon him once again. Let it come! he thought. Let it bring me back to the sweet grass by the river….
When he opened his eyes again he thought that he was dreaming. He thought he had died, and somehow made it to heaven, for the creature above him could not be any part of hell.
She was beautiful. As beautiful as his dreams of the river, as beautiful as a clear summer sky. Her eyes were a clear, level gray and her hair was a rich, dark, abundant auburn. It framed delicate, beautifully chiseled features, a face shaped like a heart, full, delineated, rose dark lips, a fine straight nose, and high, striking cheekbones. She was bending over him. He could almost reach out and touch her. He breathed in the sweet scent of her, as fragrant and soft as roses.
Just as he could feel and reach and touch the slope of grass back home, hear the river, be brushed by the breeze! he thought in dismay. He was seeing things again.
But no, she was real. Perhaps an angel, but real nonetheless, for she reached out and touched him. Her fingers gently moved over his face like the coolest, softest breeze of spring.
She lowered herself down beside him. He wanted to keep staring at her, but he couldn’t. He hadn’t the strength to keep his lashes raised.
He felt her fingers moving around his head. And still her touch was so gentle. She cradled his head in her lap.
“You are breathing!” she whispered. He tried to open his eyes. Tried to see the wide, compassionate, dove-gray beauty of her eyes.
He could see her! His lashes were raised just a slit, but he could see her against the gray powder that sat in the air like an acrid mist. Her voice was low and soft and like a melody when she spoke.
Perhaps he was dying. Even when his eyes closed again, he could see her face, that radiant sunset burst of her hair.
“Alive?” she demanded.
“Yes.” He tried to form the word. No sound came from his parched lips.
“Ma’am! Ma’am!” Someone was calling to hen “The shells are coming down again! This battle isn’t anywhere near over. Get inside!”
“But, sir! This man—”
“He’s a dead Reb, lady! A dead Reb officer, probably responsible for more’n half the dead Yanks lying around him. Why, he’s practically a murderer! Get inside!”
A Yank! He needed the Yank to believe he was dead. Maybe he was so close to death it didn’t matter. He couldn’t keep his eyes open.
He thought that he saw those dove-gray eyes once again. Exotic, really beautiful, slightly tilted at the corners. That face … ivory, with a delicate blush upon the cheeks. Those lips …
“Ma’am—why it’s you. Callie! Callie Michaelson! God in heaven, Callie, get yourself into the house.”
“Eric!” Callie gasped. “My Lord, I hadn’t expected to see a soldier I knew. This man—”
“This man is a dead Reb!”
The Yankee infantryman standing above him spit out of the side of his mouth, aiming for Daniel’s feet. He hit the ground instead.
Ass! So that’s why you fellows can’t win this war, you can’t even aim spittle! Daniel thought.
And you’d spit on a dead man, soldier! Pray God, sir, that I never rise to meet you in battle!
“Callie, my God, I’d never forgive myself if something happened to you. Gregory would be tossing in his grave. Now please, get in the house and quit wasting good time on a bad Reb! Jesu, Callie, I can’t believe that you’re even touching that man!”
But she was. He managed to raise his lashes. Her eyes met his. Those beautiful, entrancing gray eyes touched by silver, and those dark sunset lashes. Her hair was a halo of radiant dark fire….
She jumped up, and his head cracked back down on the ground. Hard. The world went very dark. He fought to remain conscious.
He reached out for her in desperation.
Her delicate, black-shoed foot struck his fingers as she left him.
His angel of mercy was gone.
She had remained until she’d been reminded he was a Reb! he thought bitterly.
Perhaps it was for the best. A Yankee company was moving over the lawn now, and he did not want it to be known that he lived. If there was one fate he wanted to avoid, it was that of prisoner of war.
Best to let the Yanks think he was dead.
She was gone, and then the Yanks moving across the lawn were gone. The light before him seemed to be fading for real. He was losing consciousness again.
Perhaps it was a great kindness, for the shells began to burst once again. Riders came. Horses’ hooves just missed him as they trod over the mud and the grass. There was no slackening in the fire. There were no moments of peace when each side came hastily for their wounded.
The dead could always wait.
He saw a flash in the sky, and then he saw nothing more. Not for a long, long time.
When he opened his eyes again, the world was nearly silent.
Incongruously, he heard the chirping of a bird.
He was alive. And he could move. He clenched and unclenched his fingers. He stretched out his legs. He closed his eyes and rested once again.
He was stronger than he had been before. He could swallow, he could open and move his eyes easily. His fingers followed every direction his mind gave them. His feet moved when he commanded them.
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply.
He was desperately thirsty. He opened his eyes again. His head still pounded, but the pounding was lessening. He tried to rise, and did so. He rubbed his neck, and moved slowly and carefully.
Sitting up, he looked around. The ground was littered with men. Men in blue and men in gray.
He looked toward the house. He had to reach it.
The battle was over, and he did not know who had won. Maybe neither side had seen a clear victory. But his men were gone. They would have returned for him, or for his body, if they could have done so.
That meant only one thing. They had to be retreating. He would have to get through Yankee lines to return to them.
He pressed his temples together hard for one long moment then managed to make it to his feet.
As he staggered, it seemed that he was alone in the world.
Alone in the world of the dead, he thought wearily.
He looked to the house, then remembered the woman. The one with the amazing gray and silver eyes and the flow of hair like a deep rich sunset.
He wasn’t alone.
His Yankee angel was in there somewhere, very near. The sweet little beauty who had cradled him so tenderly until she had been reminded that he was the enemy.
Pretty soon, Yankee patrols would be around to search for their wounded and to gather their dead.
And capture any stray Rebs for their notorious prison camps.
His fingers clenched into fists. He wasn’t going to any Yankee prison camp.
He looked back to the house, and his lips slowly curved into a smile, wistful, bitter—determined.
“Well, angel,” he whispered softly, “it seems that we are about to meet!”
Slowly, silently—very carefully—he made his way toward the battered and bullet-riddled farmhouse. He kept low as he approached the porch. She might well have a loaded shotgun in there, and from the snatches of conversation he had heard, she was defin
itely on the side of the blue.
He’d best go in by the back. He’d need to take her by surprise, and to have her understand that he very much intended to stay alive.
He touched his head and winced. Had it hurt this badly before she cracked it down on the ground? And then kicked him?
She’d looked like such an angel. He’d been sure that he’d died and gone on to the hereafter.
He smiled wryly. His angel was going to keep him from the certain promise of hell!
———— Two ————
The last drumbeat had sounded. The shrill call of the bugle had ceased to blare. The battle was over.
It was over, all but for the acrid smell of powder and smoke in the air, all but for the wages of war left strewn across the once green and fertile and peaceful farmland.
For two days Callie Michaelson had sat down in her basement and listened to the horrible sounds of war. Once before she had heard the curious sound of silence, and she had ventured out, but there had only been a lull in the fighting, a shifting of the troops, and as she had been ordered, she had hurried back inside.
How strange it had been to discover that the officer concerned for her was Eric Dabney! He came from a small town about twenty miles northeast of her. He had stood up for Gregory at their wedding, and the two of them had always been close friends. She had lost track of him since the war. He’d gone to military school as a very young man, and with Lincoln’s call to arms, he’d won himself a commission in the cavalry.
Union cavalry had died here, she thought pityingly. Just as Confederate cavalry had died. And the only thing she had been able to do was to wait down in the basement.
There had been nothing she could do for the men beyond her door. The men in blue, or the men in gray.
Not once had it come again. That sound that was even more horrible, the sound of silence.
But now, the battle was over. The ravages of war would be all that were left behind.
When she emerged from her basement at last, she was first aware that the black powder from the guns and cannons still hung upon the air, thick and heavy.
When she walked through her parlor and out on the porch, an anguish like nothing she had ever felt before came rushing around her heart. There were so, so many dead.
The powder stung her eyes as she looked around her yard. Standing there, she felt a chill sweep her, for she seemed such a strange being in the midst of the carnage. She was dressed in a soft blue day gown with a fine lace bodice and high neckline. Her petticoats, a snowy white that showed when she walked, seemed incongruous against the blood and mud in the yard. Even her hair, so fiery with its auburn highlights, seemed too bright for this late afternoon.
There, before her, hanging from the old oak, the big whitewashed swing miraculously remained. As if some spirit touched it, it drifted back and forth in the gray mist.
The oak itself, to which the swing was tied, was riddled with bullets.
Callie stepped from the porch. Her gray eyes were almost silver with the glistening of tears that covered them as she looked at the lawn, heavily laden with soldiers. She was horrified. She lifted her skirts and then swung around. It seemed that something had grabbed her hem.
And so it had. There lay a hand, upturned. And the hand was that of a very young Confederate soldier. His eyes remained open.
Atop him, as if caught in a last embrace, lay another soldier.
This one in blue.
Both so very, very young. Perhaps at peace, at last, entwined in blood and death.
Where was the soldier she had held so briefly before? she wondered, gazing around the yard. She knew that she had touched life, something warm and vibrant in this field of cold damnation. And it had seemed so important that something, someone, survive the carnage. Trembling suddenly, she remembered his face. It had been a striking one despite the smudges of mud and black powder on it. Ebony dark, thick, arched brows, and lines clean and stubbornly strong. In death, his very strength and masculinity had held a haunting and gallant beauty.
Perhaps the handsome cavalry officer lay beneath his fallen enemy, just like the two young soldiers near her feet.
“Oh, God!” Callie whispered. Shaking, aware that more than the powder was bringing tears to her eyes, she sank low upon the balls of her feet and tenderly closed the eyes of both soldiers. She fought for some words, to mouth a prayer. She felt numb.
She straightened and tried to look out across the mist of powder and the coming dusk.
Where once the fields had been covered with near sky-high stalks of corn, they now were cleared, the corn literally mown down by bullets and cannonballs and canisters.
Everywhere she looked, all over the beautiful, rolling countryside, there lay the lost. The strength and beauty of two nations—their youth. Their fine young men, their dreamers, their builders. All lost …
The sound of hoofbeats brought her swirling around again, her heart seeming to leap to her throat. Out of the mist emerged a horseman. Who had taken the battle? Who was coming now?
The horseman wore blue. Behind him rode others.
The man saluted her. “Captain Trent Johnston, Army of the Potomac, miss. Are you all right?”
She nodded. Was she all right? Could anyone stand in the midst of all this carnage and be all right? “I’m—I’m all right, Captain.”
“Is there anyone else in the house?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “I live alone. Well, I’ve three brothers. They’re all in the West.”
“Union army?” Johnston asked her sharply.
Callie felt a wry curl come to her lip. Maybe it was natural. A lot of soldiers had little faith in the loyalty of Marylanders. There was tremendous southern sympathy here. There had been riots in Baltimore when Lincoln had come through on the way to his inauguration. But she resented her loyalty being questioned when she had just spent two days hiding in her basement, and when both her father and her husband lay in the family plot down by the creek.
“Yes, Captain. My brothers are with the Union. They asked to join up with companies fighting out West. They didn’t want to fight our immediate neighbors to the south here.”
The captain’s eyes narrowed. He rose slightly on his horse, his heels low in his stirrups, and called out a command. “Jenkins, Seward, take a look at the men on the ground here. See if we’ve any Billy Blue survivors.”
Two men dismounted and quickly looked to the fallen men.
Callie stared at Trent Johnston. He wasn’t an old man. But time—or the war—had etched deep lines of bitterness into his face. His eyes were a faded color. Maybe they had been blue once. Now they were the weary shade of the powdery mist.
“Did the Union take the battle?” she asked.
Johnston looked down at her. “Yes, miss. From what I hear, both sides have been trying to claim the victory. But General Robert E. Lee has taken his men and pulled back, so I daresay the Union has taken the battle. Though what we’ve taken, I’m not so sure myself,” he said softly. “Jesu, I have never seen so many dead.”
He looked over to the two privates he had ordered down. They were still stepping around the men strewn across her yard, studying them carefully. Callie felt her nails curl into her palms.
Good Lord, she could not look at them so closely. She didn’t want to see the saber wounds and the great holes caused by the minnie balls and the destruction wrought by the cannons and canisters.
There were no living men in her yard. Not one of them had moved. Flies created a constant hum beneath the warm September sky, and that was the only evidence of life.
“See if those Yank boys are breathing, men,” Captain Johnston said.
Callie looked at the captain and then gazed upon the devastation on her lawn. “What if there had been a survivor in gray?” she asked softly.
One of the men on the lawn, either Jenkins or Seward, answered her gravely. “Why miss, we’d take care of him, too, right as rain, don’t you fret none about that.” His vo
ice lowered, and she was certain he didn’t want his hard-nosed captain hearing him. “I got kinfolk myself on the other side,” he told her. He looked to the captain. “We would take care of a Reb, right, Captain?”
“Oh, indeed, we would,” the captain said. He gazed hard at Callie once again. “Are you sure your loyalties are with the North, miss?”
“Yes. My loyalty is to the North,” Callie said flatly, her teeth grating. But no one could stand here and see these men, these young men, enemies in life, so pathetically entwined in death, and not feel a certain pity for the other side.
“Sir!” Callie said, remembering Eric. “An officer I know went through here in the midst of the battle. Captain Eric Dabney. Have you seen him? Has he—survived?”
Johnston shook his head. “Not as yet, I haven’t, ma’am. But I’m sure that I will by nightfall. I’ll be glad to express your concern.”
“Thank you.”
The captain tipped his hat. “We’ll be back with a burial detail shortly, miss. Seward, Jenkins, mount up.”
With another nod to her, the captain turned his mount. Dirt churned as his company did an about-face, and he rode into the gray mist of the now quiet battlefield.
Callie closed her eyes. She suddenly felt very alone, standing on her lawn surrounded by the dead. Her fingers wound tightly into her skirts, and she fought the overwhelming feeling of horror and devastation sweeping through her. They would come for these poor fellows. They would be buried somewhere near by, she was certain, and probably en masse.
And somewhere, far, far away, a sweetheart, a mother, a lover, a friend, someone would weep for their fallen soldier. And say a prayer, and erect a stone in memory, and bring flowers to that stone.
Just as she brought flowers to the stone that had been erected out back next to her mother’s grave. Gregory’s body had been returned to her in a coffin. She had awaited it at the railway station, cold, numb, and clad in black. But her father had fallen at Shiloh, far, far away, and all that she had received had been the letter from his captain. “Dear Mrs. Michaelson. It is my great misfortune to have to inform you …”