Kary, Elizabeth (68 page)

But
from the miscarriage has come some good; now I understand as never before what
a tie of blood can mean. I know how you must have felt when you thought your
son was in danger, and I think I can understand the emotions that drove you
into Vicksburg to see to his safety.

Please
forgive me for all I said that last night in St. Louis. I know now how wrong I
was. My most fervent wish is to see things resolved between us.

I
love you, Hayes; I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to bear
you children and grow old at your side. Let's end the estrangement between us;
I crave word of your safety. I need your strength as never before and urge you
to break your silence.

I
will be at Chattanooga after tomorrow and will mail this from there. I am sorry
for the news I have been compelled to send you, but I have hope for our future
together.

I
love you, Hayes, with all my heart.

Leigh

There
was no question of the letter's sincerity, no question that she had meant every
word, and somewhere deep inside Hayes a knot of doubt and tension eased.

Leigh's
footsteps made no sound as she approached the clearing, and she froze where she
stood when she saw the paper in her husband's hands. She recognized it
instantly and knew that as she watched him, Hayes was reading the painful words
of love and loss that had been inscribed upon her heart. In the year and a half
since she had penned those words, she had read the letter a thousand times,
sometimes as a penance for having come to the understanding of her husband too
late and sometimes as a reward to remind her of all the sweetness she'd known.
There was no question in her mind about how the letter had come to be in the
basket. Mother Bickerdyke had known about the letter and had put it there for
Hayes to find.

Leigh
waited silently, studying her husband, waiting for his reaction to the
sentiments she had written at a different juncture in her life. His head was
bowed and his shoulders hunched so she could not read his expression. But when
he did not move, when the edges of the page began to flutter in the wind, Leigh
moved closer, drawn by burgeoning hope and devastating uncertainty.

"Hayes?"
she asked softly. "Hayes?"

There
was no response to the sound of her voice, and as the thread of anticipation
tightened, she stroked one hand along his cheek to turn his face to hers. It
came up slowly, torturously, and as it did, she saw the sheen of tears in his
eyes.

With
a soft cry she sank to her knees beside him, drawing Hayes close and tangling
her hands in his hair. His arms came around her too, crushing her fiercely to
his chest.

"Oh,
God, Leigh, I'm so sorry," he murmured, his words muffled and harsh
against her ear.

"Oh,
Hayes, I'm sorry, too."

"I'm
sorry you went through the miscarriage alone. I'm sorry that you doubted I
loved you."

"Hush,
Hayes, hush."

"I'm
sorry for the way we parted in St. Louis. That estrangement was as much my
fault as yours."

"It
doesn't matter now," she told him. "Nothing matters as long as you're
safe and here with me."

They
clung tight, breast to breast and thigh to thigh, hugging with the vicious
tenacity of those who had suffered long separation. This was the true reunion
of their lives, going beyond love, beyond need, to the very core of their
emotions. They had been separate and now were one, had been divided and had
rediscovered unity.

They
clung close for a very long time, bound fast in defiance of all that had
conspired to keep them apart. But as the need for security was gradually
satisfied, another need arose. The touching became more tender and less
desperate, more sensual and less binding. Their physical proximity brought
awareness of other desires long denied, and a warmth began to envelop them.
Strokes became caresses, expressions of sorrow became words of love, kisses
fluttered to hair and eyes, lips brushed and brushed again. Mouths merged,
tongues played, bodies pressed until they sank down onto the quilt together,
the expression of their love burning bright and hot between them.

Side
by side they lay beneath the blaze of the cerulean sky, their intimacy as
natural and right as the spring alive around them. They kissed, and Leigh
thrilled Hayes with the ease of her surrender; they touched, and she offered
him the balm of true affection. From the well of her secret longings, Leigh
gave more than he could ask. She whispered words of provocation soft against
his skin and assuaged his devastating loneliness with tenderness and love.

He
sought the corners of her mouth, nibbled the deeply indented bow, lavished care
on the pouting lower curve, before he dipped between her lips to tease her
tongue with his. He took what she so willingly gave, accepted the fervor of her
kiss, tasting the sweet nectar of her femininity deep within his mouth.

He
retreated to brush her collarbone with a kiss, tracing a delicate, tingling
line to where her neckline barred his way. His hand skimmed across her bodice
to trap her swelling breast, spanning the fullness with his palm as his thumb
found and pressed the peak.

"I've
dreamed of touching you like this more nights than you know," he told her.
"I've wanted to see that warm, sleepy glow in your eyes, hear your voice
go hushed and deep with longing. In the prison camp the thought of you was my
salvation, even when wondering if you loved me defined the scope of my private
hell."

"Oh,
Hayes, I do love you—" she began, but he silenced her with an eager
caress, feeling as he did the subtle, provocative press of her hips against
him. Their lips brushed, pillowed, merged. Their hands stroked and aroused,
giving inarticulate proof of all their reassurances.

Beneath
the ruffled hem of her gown, he stroked up her fabric-covered thigh, to find
the opening of her underclothes and probe tenderly inside.

"Hayes."

"Yes,
love," he answered her, touching deep, sending billowing waves of languor
seeping through her limbs. "Oh, Hayes."

She
was drifting, sinking, succumbing to the sensual world he had wrought, but she
generously wanted to share her pleasure with the man who lay beside her. She
needed to show Hayes the tenderness he'd been denied, needed to satisfy his
passions as well as her own. Her hands moved over him, running along his throat
and down his arms, opening the buttons on his shirt and touching the warmth of
his skin. She loved the vitality of his flesh beneath her fingers, the brush of
the hair on his chest against her palms. She pressed her mouth to the sensitive
place at the base of his throat, swirling her tongue against it.

"I've
wanted this too," she told him, "wanted to have you beside me, wanted
to make you ache with wanting me."

Her
eyes were cloudy, hungry, hot, and he moved above her restlessly. "I do
want you, Leigh," he whispered at last. "Dear God, I want you more than
you can know!"

"And
I want you. I want you to be a part of my body, as you are of my heart and
life."

Driven
by needs they could no longer deny, by the separation they had endured, they
undressed each other tenderly and made love beneath the sky.

"Slowly,"
Hayes whispered as they began to come together. "Slowly, because we've
waited so long; slowly, so we can savor each moment."

Their
gaze held as their bodies merged, green eyes meeting blue, the simple magic of
their love welling up between them. The union was bliss couched in rapture,
sweetness pure and true. It was delight that blazed into ecstasy, binding them
as close together as two lives could ever be. In this moment, the culmination
of their love, there was no other world, only the one of affection and
selflessness, of truth and wondrous unity. They shuddered as the crest began to
build, felt the madness and the frenzy take them. They ascended to a realm of
pure sensation: whole, unafraid, and strong, their hearts and souls inseparable
through all eternity.

After
a time reality drifted back. It was too soon for them to stir, too soon for
them to part. But because they were lying tangled and bared to the world, Hayes
pulled one of Leigh's petticoats to cover them.

"This
is a peculiar coverlet," she observed drowsily, still luxuriating in the
sensual world they'd explored.

Hayes
brushed a kiss along her brow, then tucked the ruffled hem around her.
"Still, there were plenty of nights last winter," he whispered wryly,
"when I would have sold my soul for this."

With
the half-teasing comment Hayes began to talk, urgently, volubly, helplessly,
suddenly needing to ease the snarl of conflict inside him. A flood of words was
coming, bursting the restraints he had tried to impose, pouring from his mouth
in a never-ending tide. He told Leigh about the day he had been captured, about
a prisoner's life in the Rebel camp, of being marched to Libby Prison in
Richmond and the conditions there. He had thought Libby was as near to hell as
a living man could come, but then he had been sent to Andersonville, and
Andersonville was worse than hell. Being bigger and stronger than most of the
prisoners had saved him from the marauding gangs of inmates that preyed upon
the weak, but it also drew the attention of the guards who seemed to take
sadistic pleasure in their power over the prisoners.

From
the other men who had come to Wilmington, Leigh had heard stories of the
cruelties, the lack of food and shelter in the prison compound. Now Hayes spoke
of those things, holding nothing back, letting the strings of unencumbered
words sear away all that haunted him. Sometimes his voice went angry and sharp
or soft and deep with pain. Still, the words seemed to purge a festering mass
of memories that lost their threatening power once they saw the sun.

He
talked as they dressed and ate, talked as they drank their wine, and Leigh
stubbornly held her tongue, never once interrupting.

She
shed tears of anger for all he had suffered, tears of pain for the inhumanity
he had known. She wept with fury, loss, and outrage as Hayes himself could not.
Finally, he held her close and dried her eyes with a ruffled, threadbare
handkerchief he produced from the pocket of his trousers.

"Why,
this is mine!" she noted in astonishment, looking down at the sodden
cloth.

"I
found it wrapped around the note the morning you left St. Louis," he
offered quietly, "and I've kept it with me ever since."

There
was no need for him to tell her that there were times when clinging to that
piece of cloth was all that kept him sane. It had represented memories of
something beautiful and a future he hoped to claim. She seemed to know what the
handkerchief meant to him, to understand without a word a hundred things she
had not known before.

At
last, they lay back on the quilt together, contentedly watching the clouds
drift by, enjoying the sunshine and the solitude, the silence and their unity.

"What
about the future, Hayes?" she asked in an uncertain tone. "What shall
we do now that the war is ending, now that the armies will be going home?"

There
was no question that they would be together; he knew just as she did that after
this they would never part.

"I
don't know, Leigh," he murmured. "For so long there were no
possibilities, and now there are so many." He drew a long breath and
frowned thoughtfully, considering the future that was theirs. "I think
going back to Cincinnati and the shipyard makes some sense, or had you made
plans of your own?"

Leigh
smiled and touched her husband's cheek in a gentle, soothing caress. "Yes,
I've made a few plans of my own, but they fit quite nicely with yours. There is
a very good medical school in Cincinnati, and I have been accepted for classes
there come fall."

Hayes
nodded slowly. "You told me you wanted to be a doctor that first night on
the porch."

"It
was the first time I admitted to anyone what I'd dreamed of all my life."

"Then
I'm glad that you told me, glad you trusted me with your dreams. I've known
from that first afternoon how good you are with the ill, and I think you'll
make a fine doctor after all the experience you've had. But why did you choose
Cincinnati when there are medical schools in St. Louis you could attend?"

"I
did it because of you, because when I wrote your mother to tell her you were
missing, I realized I wanted some kind of bond. I needed to keep contact
somehow, and I hoped your family would accept me, if not as your wife, then as
a friend."

"Oh,
they'll accept you, all right." His voice was deep and warm.
"Especially my mother. She likes determined women, and my sister Rose
does, too."

"And
how about you, Mr. Banister?" she teased him gently. "Do you like
determined women, too?"

Hayes
grinned and rolled above her. "They're my favorite kind."

And
then the brief moment of humor passed, and he lowered his mouth to hers. "Oh,
Leigh, this is all I've ever wanted, a life for us together, a life that we can
share."

She
knew that there were still things she needed to tell him, questions they both
would need to ask. But they had time: time to talk, time to love, time to live.
They had the future. They had a lifetime, a lifetime filled with love.