And One Wore Gray (6 page)

“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 voice 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 …”

She had been lucky, she understood now. Officers no
longer had the time to write to loved ones of their fallen men. Widows now discovered their status by reading their husband’s names aloud from the lists posted in the nearest town, or reprinted in the newspapers.

It was no good to stand on the lawn. No good to feel the air on her cheeks, to feel the coming of the darkness, the whisper of the night. For these fallen men around her would never again feel the soft caress of a breeze, or the endlessly sweet nectar of the first soft kiss of the night.

She turned, anxious not to see the faces of the men as she hurried past them.

The house, she realized, was riddled with bullets. Her front windowpanes were shattered. There was even a small cannonball lodged in the stone base of the left corner of the porch.

This was one battle Callie would never be able to forget.

She stepped back into the parlor. Her feet crunched over broken glass.

It was beginning to grow very dark and shadowy within the house, and she was anxious to light the gas lamps.

She started to move, but then her hand flew to her mouth and she tried desperately to swallow down a gasp. Fear, vivid and wild, came sweeping through her. She fought a growing sense of panic, biting down hard upon her knuckles.

She wasn’t alone.

There was someone in her house. Someone who had come through the rear door, and into the kitchen.

From the parlor through the hallway, and to the door frame that led into the kitchen she could see him standing there. He was very tall, and his height was emphasized by the plumed hat he wore at a rakish angle
over his brow. She could see little of his features, for the shadows of dusk hid them.

But she could see his uniform, and it was gray. Gray trousers, rimmed in gold. Knee-high black boots. A gray frock coat, also trimmed in the same gold. He was southern cavalry, she thought quickly.

The southerners had pulled out. That’s what Captain Trent Johnston had said.

So what did this southerner want with her? She’d heard tales of what happened to lone women when men of an invading army came their way.

Don’t panic, she warned herself.

But his mind was moving in the same direction, and his warning came down upon her like a hammer.

“Don’t!” he rasped out sharply, before she had found the breath to scream.

She had to scream, she had to move. Quickly. Captain Johnston still had to be close by.

Callie spun around, ready to exit her house as swiftly as the wind. But even as her hand fell upon the doorknob the southern cavalryman fell upon her.

Her scream escaped her then, as his hand touched her arm, ripping her away from the door. “Stop it, damn you, ma’am, I am not spending the rest of the war in a prison camp!”

The voice was deep, rich, almost musical in its drawl. But it was also touched with an arrogant authority, a harshness, even a ruthlessness.

And his face …

He was the soldier she had touched! The one she could have sworn had lived.

He stared at her with eyes as sharp as steel blades beneath those imperious, high-arched, and deadly dark brows.

“No!” Callie screamed, finding breath at last. Her fingers clawed at the fingers that held her arm. She touched something warm and sticky. Blood.

She looked up into his eyes.

They were deep blue, nearly cobalt. They stared at her evenly and with a dangerous and determined warning.

“Let me go!” she demanded. Oh, Lord. She was a competent woman, she assured herself. She was not easily intimidated. She had lived here all alone since the war had begun.

She had never been so frightened before in all her life. This soldier looked at her as if he had some personal vengeance in mind.

“Let me go!” Her voice was starting to rise again. He was very tall, even allowing for the heels of his boots. He towered over her, and his frock coat emphasized the breadth of his shoulders. His jet dark brows framed his eyes, and hiked up high as he watched her. His mouth was set in a firm line within his square and unyielding chin.

“Miss, don’t—”

“No!”

She wrenched free and made for the door again. “Captain Johnston!”

The cry rose high on her lips.

“Don’t! Dammit, I do not want to hurt you!” He swung her around and planted his hands firmly on either side of her head against the door as his arms formed steel bands around her. She opened her mouth. One of his hands moved to clamp down hard over it.

She was forced to stare into those endlessly blue eyes. His face, she realized, was a strikingly handsome one. His features were cleanly sculpted, very well defined.

“Listen to me, ma’am. I do not want to …”

He broke off. He took a deep breath. Callie realized that he was struggling to remain standing.

“I do not want to …”

He blinked, ink black lashes falling over his cheeks.
A wild bravado filled Callie along with her realization that he was barely standing. She thrust away his hand and pushed against his chest with all of her might. “Let go of me, Reb!” she demanded.

He fell to his knees.

And then he keeled over.

He lay flat on her floor by the door. For several seconds, she stared down at him. She prodded him with her toe to see if he would move. He did not.

Was he dead?

She wanted to swing open the door and shout for Captain Johnston, but she was certain that the horseman was long gone by now. And this Reb was no longer any danger to her.

Gingerly she bent down, trying to decide if he was dead or alive.

His hat had fallen aside, and she saw that he had a full head of near ebony hair, rich and waving just below his nape. He was handsome, and more, she thought, a sudden wave of pity sweeping over her. He had gained something more than beauty in his years. There was character to his face, something in the set of his jaw, in the fine lines etched about his eyes and his mouth.

He is the enemy, she told herself.

She saw a lock of damp, matted hair at his temple. She smoothed it back and saw that he had been grazed there by a bullet.

He was also bleeding from his side. There was no rip or tear in his uniform, but a crimson stain was appearing over the gray wool of his frock coat. She rose and hurried into the kitchen, soaked a towel with cool water from the pump, and hurried back out to the parlor. She bathed his forehead and determined that the wound was not bad. He might live.

She lay her hand upon his chest and waited, and then nearly jumped when she felt the beating of his heart.
The blood staining his frock coat and shirt at his side disturbed her. She moved his coat back and then pulled away his shirt, gingerly pulling the tail from his breeches. A small pang struck her, and for the first time she didn’t think of him as being the enemy. His belly was taut, his chest was tightly muscled, his flesh was handsomely bronzed. His skin was very hot to her touch. Yank or Reb, this was what war brought, the loss of such men, so handsome, so gallant, so beautiful, and in their prime.

Not so gallant! she thought with a sniff.

She brought her towel up to bathe away the blood at his side.

It was an old wound, she discovered. A slash above the hip, probably from a saber or a bayonet. It had reopened, and he lay bleeding from it.

She pressed against the towel. The flow of blood seemed to stop.

“You’re going to live, Reb,” she said aloud. “Maybe,” she murmured. She wasn’t convinced that Captain Johnston wanted any Rebs to live.

And both sets of soldiers, from the North and from the South, dreaded the horror of the prison camps.

Well, it wasn’t her problem. Her house was decimated. Not far from where the soldier lay were the shattered panes of her windows. This soldier had invaded her very home. She couldn’t care what happened to him after Captain Johnston took him away.

She bit her lip, curious. He wore the insignia of a Confederate colonel of the cavalry. Southern uniforms were often very haphazard—she’d heard that many of the great southern generals still wore their old U.S. Army breeches with jackets and shirts of their own design. But this cavalryman was well dressed in gray with yellow cavalry trim. He came from money, she thought.

There was a small leather wallet attached to the
band of his scabbard. Certain that his eyes were still closed and that he remained unconscious, Callie delved into it. Hurriedly, she looked through the packet of papers she discovered within. There were a number of letters and an old pass. She glanced over the pass quickly. It had been issued to a Colonel Daniel Cameron, Army of Northern Virginia, by General J.E.B. Stuart.

Cameron. Daniel Cameron. So that was his name. She shivered, suddenly wishing that she did not know it.

The enemy should remain nameless, she thought. It made it easier to hate. But the enemy should have remained faceless too.

She had seen all those faces out on her lawn. Young faces, looking to heaven.

Stop, she commanded herself. This was war.

She thought she heard horses coming once again and relief filled her. She stuffed the papers quickly back into the wallet. All that she had to do was call Captain Johnston, and this enemy could be off her hands. She started to move, and discovered that she could not.

She looked down. Blood-stained fingers curled around the hem of her skirts. And sky-blue eyes, very much alive with a startling threat, were upon her.

He was very much alive.

She forgot that she had been feeling magnanimous toward her enemy as a swift new fear filled her. “Let go of me!” she commanded sharply.

Those blue eyes seared right through
her.
A lopsided grin touched his lips.

“Not on your life, angel. Not on your life,” he promised her.

The riders weren’t coming to the house, she realized. Already, the sounds of their hoofbeats were fading.

To reach the Yankee horsemen, Callie would have to move quickly. She had to escape the Reb who had so menacingly come back to consciousness at exactly the wrong time.