Glory (3 page)

He stepped away from her, his eyes pinned upon hers. He smiled slowly, reached for the Colt, tossed it down. His stare didn’t alter or flinch as he heard the men rushing into the room to take him. Yet, as they reached him, they didn’t touch him, they hovered awkwardly around him.

At last he drew his gaze from her green eyes. “Good evening, gentlemen. No, I’m afraid it’s morning. Where does the time go? It seems to fly when so many are about to die, doesn’t it?”

One of the men cleared his throat and started toward him. Julian shook his head, smiling. “There’s no need for force or manhandling, my good fellow. Point me where I am to go, and I shall proceed.”

“Just come along, Julian,” General Magee said. His still striking, if aging, face, lined with pride and character, seemed to sag that night. He stood just in the entry of the small church.

“Aye, sir, as you wish,” Julian said politely. “Tell me, since we have this happenstance to meet, sir, do you know if my brother is well?”

“Yes, Julian. Ian is well. But he isn’t a part of this; he knows nothing about it—”

“No, sir. My brother wouldn’t be a part of such naked treachery.”

Magee stiffened. “Mrs. Tremaine?” he said softly, ready to defend and protect Rhiannon.

Julian had reached the general at the door, but he knew she walked behind him. He stepped out to the clearing. Yankee horsemen were aligned thirty feet from him. He turned back. Magee had exited the church, Rhiannon at his side.

He smiled, addressing them both. “By the way, your pardon, General Magee, but she is Mrs. McKenzie now. I’m afraid you and your men were a little late,” he said, his tone apologetic.

Magee stared at Rhiannon. “My dear girl, is it true?”

“No!” she said, her whispered word alarmed.

“General, I swear to you that it is. Father Vickery will tell you so, before God. The lady is over twenty-one. So am I. The marriage is legal and binding. With witnesses. Ah! And in private, sir!” he said, lowering his voice so that only the general and Rhiannon could hear his words. “As I did the right, proper, and most gentlemanly thing, coming here at the lady’s summons—and since I have become your prisoner—I ask you to do me a service. As an officer, and a gentleman. Rhiannon is in your medical service,” he said softly, “be kind enough to keep an eye on her. She has a tendency to believe herself dreaming of her dear departed Richard—then turning to the nearest living, breathing body—”

She stepped forward and slapped him. It was a hard, stinging strike. Hard enough to make him feel the blow straight to his jaw.

He lifted his hand to his face, then bowed deeply to her. He turned around and started for the horse that the Yankees held for his use. He swung atop the animal. It was sleek. In excellent condition. He saw the opportunity he’d been waiting for. A gap in the Yankee line. Lying against the horse’s neck, he moved his heels against its flanks. It leapt to life, bolting straight for the gap.

“Stop him!” Magee commanded. “What, will we be the laughingstock of the battle, losing a lone surgeon?”

“Men—” Magee began.

Two cavalrymen managed to fill the gap. It didn’t matter, Julian needed only spin his mount and ride hard straight back and to the left. But when he swung his mount around and started pell-mell back,
she
was there, in his path, eyes on his. Tall, straight, as still as a statue, challenging him.

Not much of a challenge. She knew he would stop.

He reined in his mount. Instantly, the soldiers were on him, dragging him from the horse. One of the men swung at him with the butt of his rifle. A good, solid blow. Julian’s head rang. The whack had been strong enough to cause a fracture, pray God, no.

He started to fall, the world going black. But he saw her. Saw her beautiful green eyes upon his. He reached out. She screamed, but he had caught her hand. And with what strength he had left, he pulled her to him.

And she came down with him. The world continued to fade. No matter. He smiled at her. Tried to mouth words. “I swear, dear
wife,
you will be sorry.”

Indeed. Brave, bold words, especially when the world was fading to a total black. ...

“He’s unconscious, ma’am, if you’ll take my hand. ...” one of the young horsemen offered.

Rhiannon looked up. Nodded. She looked down at Julian again. His eyes were closed, a long lock of dark hair had fallen over his forehead. “You’ll just never know, never believe, that I did this ... because I love you,” she whispered, knowing that neither he, nor anyone else, could hear her.

Cannon fire suddenly exploded far too close to them. “Get the prisoner up and to the field hospital!” Magee commanded. “The day’s work has commenced, and gentlemen, may I remind you, the fate of a nation may rest here today!”

The fate of a nation. What of the fate of
people
? Did she have the power to change fate? She’d been willing to risk anything to change her dream. She’d tricked him, betrayed him.

He’d tricked her. And now, if he’d told the truth, they were evermore entangled in a hopeless web. ...

Fate. Had it all been destined, from that first night when he had ridden through the foliage to the isolation of her house, and into her life?

P
ADDY MACDOUGALL WAS DYING.

Julian McKenzie carried his stalwart old friend before him on the scrawny gray nag with a show of courage and a sinking heart. If he didn’t get the sergeant to some decent shelter soon, get the bullet out of his leg, and stanch the flow of blood, the man would almost certainly perish. Their ragtag troop of skirmishers, eleven in all including him, a surgeon, ostensibly a noncombatant, had ridden hard, zigzagging a good distance from their camp to avoid discovery by the Yanks in pursuit, and now, though it seemed they had eluded the enemy, they were far from home.

“There, sir, up there!” Private Jim Jones called out, pointing through the trees. “A house!”

The sun had begun to set several minutes ago and that, combined with a light billowing of summer’s fog, gave a surreal appearance to the pine forest surrounding them—and the pathway to the plantation house ahead. In classical Greek style, the house boasted a large porch with six massive white columns. Its last coat of paint had most probably been white, but time and the elements had faded its pristine color to a dull gray that all but matched the dusk and fog. The forests and foliage surrounding the house had grown wild, and the place appeared to be abandoned.

“Thank God!” Julian breathed, blue eyes sharp on the facade before him. “Let’s get Paddy to shelter, men. The place looks empty, but hopefully we’ll find a place where I can make Paddy comfortable and get to work.”

“Wait, sir! Colonel, sir!”

Julian paused, looking back. Liam Murphy, just eighteen—if he was telling the truth at that, and the newest recruit among their troops—was anxiously calling to him. Julian realized unhappily that all the men were looking at him as if he were a military man, trained for strategy. His older brother—the Yankee, he thought with dry amusement—was the one who’d gone to West Point. He’d gone to medical school.

Steady nerves under fire and an ability to assume command when field officers had lain dead around him had recently brought him a battlefield promotion to colonel of their small militia unit, which frequently made him the officer in command. Due to the strange conditions under which they fought—too few fighting men in a state that had been stripped of the majority of her troops—he found himself in combat situations despite his oath to save lives.

Guilt often plagued him by night; survival instincts kept him returning fire by day.

“I don’t think we should go there, sir,” Liam told him. He was a skinny youth with earnest eyes as green as the fields of County Cork, from where his family hailed. His father had died at the second Manassas, his mother of fever or a broken heart, and his three young sisters were now scattered to relatives about the South. He wasn’t bitter, and he wasn’t determined to fight for revenge, but justice. For a youth he had a good head on his shoulders, and Julian arched a brow, ready to hear what he had to say.

“Private Murphy, I have a dying man here,” Julian said.

“I don’t think that the place is empty, sir.”

“You know this house?” Julian asked.

Liam nudged his mount, an old gelding that looked as if it would fall over in a heavy breeze, urging it closer to Julian.

“I’ve heard tell of the place, sir. It’s said the folks there were Unionists—we might be riding into danger.”

Julian stared at the house. It didn’t much matter who had owned the place if it was deserted. And if it wasn’t, well, at worst, someone’s old mother and maybe a mammy were left behind. As small as their band of soldiers was, they could surely hold their own against a few women.

“Private Murphy, I acknowledge your concern. But I’ve got to find shelter where I can work.”

“Colonel, we’ve got to have a few minutes rest as well,” Corporal Henry Lyle told him, nudging his own mount forward. “Liam, boy, we’ll take care, but we were on the road two days solid searching out that Yankee depot, and now we’ve been running night and day.” Lyle, a grizzled old codger of indeterminate age, solid and steady as rock, looked at Julian over Liam’s head. They were exhausted and beaten, and shelter lay ahead.

“There’s more,” Liam said stubbornly.

“Oh?” Julian queried.

“A witch lives there. Or she did.”

Henry Lyle broke into laughter, along with the rest of the men, Kyle Waverly from Palatka, Keith and Daniel Anderson out of Jacksonville, River Montdale from Tampa, and the Henly cousins, Thad and Benjamin, out of Tallahassee.

“Liam, if there’s a witch in there, we’ll burn her,” Thad said, riding by Liam to ruffle the boy’s hair. “God a’mighty! If there’s a witch anywhere near, I’m praying she can conjure up a chicken or a hog. I’m hungrier than a bear.”

“Don’t count on any hogs,” his cousin Ben said, riding on by him to reach Julian. “Maybe we can scavenge up some roots or old canned food. Doc—Colonel, sir—what do you say?”

Julian looked at the house, then at Liam, who was as red as a beet but who was still looking at him steadily. He shook his head at Liam. “Boy, I haven’t got any choice. If there are any witches up there, we’re just going to have to deal with them. Paddy’s dying. I can feel his blood seeping through my fingers.”

“And hell, if there are Yank sympathizers in there, it won’t matter much, anyway. We don’t have any real uniforms,” Kyle Waverly, a young schoolteacher before the war, a graying philosopher now after two years of constant skirmishing, reminded them. He hiked a brow at Julian, scratching his bearded chin. “If there are any Yanks, we can just say we’re heading on in to join up with the Unionists at St. Augustine. Who would ever know the difference?”

He was right. As one of the few militia units left to attempt guarding the state, they had started off in Florida colors of their own making. Time had worn away any attempt at uniforms. Mostly in the heat of summer, they wore cotton shirts and breeches, threadbare at that, and whatever footwear they could get their hands on.

“We’ll move in. I’ll talk when necessary,” Julian told them. He nudged his horse forward.

They rode down the overgrown trail to the house. There, Julian dismounted, pulling the Colt he carried before hefting Paddy’s unconscious body from the haunches of his horse to his shoulder. He motioned for Jim, the Henlys, and the Andersons to circle around the back of the house and for the other men to follow him. Carefully, he walked up the steps to the broad porch. A swing sat upon it, caught by the breeze, and it was easy to imagine better times, when moonlight had played down upon the nearby magnolias, casting a glow upon the dripping moss while soft breezes whispered by. The swing still moved gently in the breeze, but the foliage was overgrown and the columns were linked by spiderwebs.

He strode across the porch to the door, anxious to work on Paddy’s injured thigh. To his surprise, the double mahogany doors at the entrance were locked. He backed away, then threw his shoulder against the left door. The wood shuddered. He kicked the door, and the wood splintered at the lock. A second kick opened the door, and he stepped into the entry.

To his astonishment, candles gleamed from polished tables in an elegant breezeway.

Like many an old plantation home, the house was symmetrical, with wings expanding off a large central main hall. As Julian stepped in, his Colt at the ready, Paddy over his shoulder, he came to a dead halt, surveying the place warily. The hardwood floor gleamed. Richly upholstered chairs were angled against the wall, along with a hall tree and occasional tables and two tall cherrywood hutches, all polished to a fine gleam. An Oriental runner lay in the center of the breezeway flooring, the midnight blue within the design matched by the carpeting up the staircase that led to the second floor.

A woman stood upon the stairway.

She was dressed in black—mourning black. She stood so still, unruffled and elegant, that she might have been a witch, a very striking witch. She was tall, very straight, dignified—hauntingly beautiful. Despite the somber apparel her lithe—yet richly curved figure—seemed all the more enhanced. Her hair, wrapped in a chignon at her nape, was an even deeper shade than the ebony of her gown, shining almost blue-black in the glow of candlelight and kerosene lamps. Her complexion was pure ivory; her features were classic. She stared down at him with bright vivid green eyes.

How long they stared he did not know. He forgot time and place, and even the two-hundred pound man he carried over his shoulder. When he spoke at last, he managed only an acknowledgment that she was there.

“Madam.”

“Sir,” she said, and her lip curled with cool contempt as she evenly suggested, “you might have knocked.”

He had been raised in polite Southern society, and though he had spent several years under terrible circumstances, he felt his cheeks redden beneath her disdainful scrutiny.

“Sir?”

He heard Liam behind him, and he gave himself a mental shake, breaking the strange spell she had cast upon him. No spell, he told himself. He had simply been taken by surprise.