Kary, Elizabeth (56 page)

He
could feel the response his words engendered, the tremors of emotion that moved
beneath her skin. She did not resist as he drew her back against his body and
crossed his arms around her chest to hold her close.

"Leigh,"
he whispered against her ear, "I don't want for us to part like
this."

With
slow, deliberate movements she turned in his embrace, fitting her body to the
shape of his, sliding her hands along his arms and across his shoulders,
kneading his woolly lapels between her fingers.

"Nor
do I," she whispered. "Nor do I."

Then,
as if drawn by the warmth of his skin, her fingers traced the column of his
throat and tangled in the thick brown hair at his nape.

"I
do love you, Hayes," she murmured gently. "I love you with all my
heart."

He
felt her arch into the curve of his body and saw that the lips she raised to
his were parted with anticipation. There was a roaring in his ears as he folded
her closer and lowered his mouth to accept her invitation, as long denial
intensified the wonder of the kiss. Tentatively each opened their mouths to the
other, languishing with the sudden sweep of deep emotion. Their tongues
touched, a caress as gentle as the morning mist, a caress filled with the wild,
sweet poignancy of longing.

Together
they sank to the bed to lie pillowed on the downy counterpane. As their hands
sought the other, clothes became an impediment to the growing passion of each
touch. Never breaking the tender contact, they shed their coats and shirtwaists,
their pants and petticoats. Only flesh against flesh, skin against skin, would
serve the intimacy that each demanded, and at last they lay bared and
defenseless, unencumbered and strong. They came together in a chorus of
sensation, joyous and triumphant, vital and proud. They knew now how precious
each moment in life could be, how fleeting and fragile the scope of existence.
And as each sought to please the other, they were filled
with wondrous
exultation that echoed in their veins long after the crest of loving was gone.

Footsteps
on the stairs roused Hayes at last, and he rolled off the edge of the mattress
to nudge the door to the bedroom closed.

As
he returned, Leigh smiled at him across the rumpled sheets. "It's probably
only Susan come to light the lamps," she said.

As
they had lain together, the sky had grown dark, and the rain that had been
threatening since early afternoon pattered through the trees outside the open
window. For a long time they lay listening to the storm, the sound of the carriages
and wagons moving through the wet streets, the rustle of the early summer
breeze, the thud of distant thunder.

Hayes
turned to kiss his wife and pull her close against his chest. "I love you,
Leigh," he murmured gently. "I don't want you to go away
tomorrow."

The
breath of her sigh moved across his skin. "I must go. You know that as
well as I do."

"But,
Leigh, it's dangerous at Vicksburg. The papers say some of those hospitals are
under fire all the time. Besides, you've surely had your fill of nursing with
your mother, and me, and all the time you've spent working here in St.
Louis."

"It's
something I must do, Hayes." There was both a hint of steel and a murmur
of reproach in her tone. "I always thought you knew that."

A
gentle stroke moved along her arm. "I do. I just don't want to be away
from you, not now, not yet. We need more time."

Leigh
looked up at her husband, reading all he had left unsaid in the depths of his
shadowed eyes. "I told you I understood about what happened at
Vicksburg," she reassured him softly. "I understand, and I've
forgiven you."

At
her words, Hayes sucked in a long breath, and the quiet in the room became
suddenly brittle and destructive.

"Forgiven
me?" Hayes echoed at last, edging up on one elbow. "Forgiven me for
what?"

Leigh
seemed not to understand his reaction. "For—for going into the city to
rescue your mistress and her child."

A
swift spear of anger pierced Hayes as he sat staring, seeing with frightening
clarity that she didn't understand at all.

"Damn
it, Leigh! Perhaps I wouldn't have gone into the city if I had known Charles
was another man's son, but I won't spend the rest of my life apologizing for
something I'm not even sorry I did. I don't want your forgiveness. What I want
is your understanding."

He
was furious at her well-meaning condescension, at the lifelong reserve that
made her able to understand with her head but not her heart.

"But
I do understand—" she began.

"No
you don't! You sit there with that sanctimonious expression on your face,
considering yourself good and noble for granting me your forgiveness. You can't
comprehend anything I felt when I thought my son, my flesh and blood, was in
mortal danger."

"Hayes—"

"You
don't understand anything: not loving, not caring. You don't know why I went to
Vicksburg, and even if I spent a hundred years explaining, you could never
grasp the simple truth of real emotion. God damn it, Leigh! I want a world of
things from you, but forgiveness isn't one of them."

His
hand tightened on her arm, and he pulled her against him, his mouth covering
hers before she could respond. The kiss he pressed upon her was as rough and
demanding as the first ones had been tender and gentle, but she went still
beneath his attack, afraid that if she struggled, she might do him some unintentional
hurt. Then there were tears on her face, despairing, helpless tears, wetting
his cheeks as well as hers.

"Oh,
Hayes, please, not like this," she whispered when he freed her mouth at
last. "I don't want to spend the night like this. I want things settled,
mended, made right between us. Please, Hayes, please! I go away tomorrow!"

He
rose above her with wild, blue anger still burning in his eyes. She wanted
things settled but made no effort to understand; she wanted things mended but
had never learned to compromise.

And
now there were other secrets he was aching to tell her, things he could not
hold back. He had not meant to shout his news in anger or use it to gain the
advantage in a battle he did not want to fight. Yet the words burst from him,
cutting and venomous, breathless and proud.

"And
I'm leaving, too," he told her. "I'm to report on the first of July.
A letter came yesterday from the Corps of Engineers in Washington. I have a
commission waiting for me, and I'm anxious to go."

Her
concern for him overcame her resistance and confusion. "But Hayes,"
Leigh protested. "You're not strong enough yet. You need more time—"

Hayes
brushed her concern aside. "It's done, Leigh. I wrote to them months ago
when things began to slow down at the shipyard. And Dr. Phillips says I'll be
fully recovered by the beginning of next month."

"But
where will you be posted? Do you think it might be at Vicksburg?"

He
could hear an eagerness in her voice that touched his heart. He was no longer
angry, just sad and incredibly weary.

"No,
Leigh," he said softly, pulling her close, "my assignment will
probably be in the East, or perhaps with the Army of the Cumberland."

"Then
that means we have only tonight—"

"Yes,
only tonight," Hayes acknowledged in a whisper. He silenced further
protests with a kiss that blended the salt taste of tears and the promise of
ecstasy, the sting of remorse and the poignancy of their love.

"Leigh,
sweet Leigh." His voice had a deep and desperate timbre. "We only
have tonight, my darling, so we'll have to make it last for all eternity."

***

June 1863—Outside Vicksburg, Mississippi

Battlefield
nursing hadn't gotten any easier. That wasn't a surprise to Leigh, but she had
grown used to the niceties of working in an established hospital and going home
to a hot bath and a soft bed. The best accommodations Vicksburg could offer
were canvas tents overrun with lizards and lumpy cots, their legs set in jars
of water to keep the "critters" from crawling between the sheets. The
hospitals themselves were typical of Army field hospitals anywhere in the war:
under equipped, understaffed, existing in the most primitive conditions. Nor
was the landscape around the beleaguered city welcoming. The terrain must have
been broken and rugged at the best of times, with ravines slashing between the
high, steep hills, but now with the open gashes of rifle pits and the gun
emplacements scarring the rust-red earth, the land itself lay like a grisly
wound exposed to the pitiless sky.

In
spite of their bleak surroundings Leigh's reunion with Delia and Mother
Bickerdyke was a happy one, and she found that other women who had proved
themselves in battle had come to the city as well. The likes of Mrs. Livermore
and Mrs. Hoge from the Chicago office of the Northwestern Sanitary Commission
and Annie Wittenmyer, who had been at Shiloh, were quite different from the
ladies who came to the camp to visit. These "bombastic dress-parade
workers" as Annie called them, invariably arrived to see the
fortifications in dainty shoes and their finest gowns. They usually decamped
quickly, though, when they found that virtually every inch of the fifteen
mile-long line of entrenchments Grant had strung around the city was under
fire, and that a visitor might as likely be cut down by the Rebel sharpshooters
as the men in the trenches.

Bombardment
by both Union and Confederate forces went on twenty-four hours a day, with the
only lulls in the firing coming at mealtime. Parrot guns, rifled guns, mortars,
and grenades boomed and screeched in regular measure while musketry rattled to
add staccato snatches to the chorus. Firing became the counterpoint to any
conversation or activity, and gradually the gunshots became as familiar as the
sound of peepers in a summer night. In spite of the yellow medical flags waving
from the tent tops, one of the hospitals was scored a direct hit, and that only
added to the death and destruction in this ravaged land.

There
had been 3,400 casualties with Grant's troops when they had arrived outside
Vicksburg, and the two attempts to storm the city on May 19 and 22 had added
2,500 more men
to their number. With those soldiers to care for and new casualties every day,
the nurses were very busy, indeed.

The
summer heat had begun early in Mississippi that year, and Leigh spent much of
her time when not cooking, washing, attending the surgeons, or dispensing
supplies, sitting with men who burned with heat of their own. They were poor,
half-delirious wretches who responded to the touch of a woman's hand and the
cool water Leigh sponged over their feverish bodies with such murmurs of
appreciation that she often sat up with them all night and managed to save more
than a few.

One
evening as she sat by one of her "causes," as Delia called them,
Delia herself sought Leigh out. "I came to see why you weren't in
bed," she said as she pulled a second stool up beside the man her friend
was nursing. "You know, Leigh, you really should get more rest. I hate to
be a scold, but you are looking rather peaked."

"I
know," Leigh conceded, brushing the perspiration from her brow, "but
tending these men makes such a difference. I can hardly sleep soundly when I
know they need me."

"No,
none of us can do that. But you aren't doing them any good by wearing yourself
out. And I've noticed you aren't eating properly, either."

"It's
only the heat, Delia," Leigh murmured, bending above her charge.
"Nothing seems to appeal to me just now."

Delia
watched her friend for a long moment. "You haven't heard from Hayes
either, have you?" she asked pointedly.

A
frown came and went on Leigh's face. "Not a word since I left St. Louis. I
told him to send his letters through the Sanitary Commission, but now I wonder
if that was wise."

"Oh,
he'll write." There was a quiet assurance in the blond woman's voice.
"It's just that most men aren't at their best with pen and paper. Shall I
ask Nathan to look in on him the next time he's in the city?"

Leigh
shook her head. "Hayes accepted that commission with the Corps of
Engineers and has to report the first of July. If he decided to visit his family
in Cincinnati on the way, he's probably gone already."

Delia
was quiet for a moment. "And have you tried writing to him?" she
persisted.

Leigh
shook her head. "No, I've been far too busy here." It was a lame
excuse, and Leigh knew it. Besides, she had said everything she wanted to say
in the note she had left for Hayes in St. Louis.

"Weren't
things all they should be when you left home?" Delia pressed her.

Leigh
shook her head again.

The
younger woman didn't mean to pry into her friend's affairs, but Nathan had told
her what happened at Vicksburg in April, and both of them were genuinely
concerned for Hayes and Leigh. "Was it that woman and her son who caused
the problem?"

"They
were only part of it." Leigh sighed heavily and prepared another cool cloth
for her patient's brow. "Really, Delia, I'd rather not talk about what
happened. Hayes and I will work this out one way or another."