One Wore Blue (24 page)

Much of this went on while the Washington Peace Convention was still playing with hope at the Willard Hotel.

At home, Kiernan waited, wishing desperately that she could be where all the action was taking place. She read every newspaper she could get her hands on, and she waited.

Virginia remained steady for the moment, and both Cameron brothers remained with their regiments. Kiernan heard frequently from Daniel, who was eager to explain his position. “My heart lies with this new Confederacy,” he wrote, “with the states and the people with whom we have so very much in common. I think that I am a southerner, a Confederate—a Rebel, if you will! But first and foremost, I am a Virginian, and I will abide by the will of the state I love so dearly. Actually,” he went on to admit, “I believe that I have stolen that sentiment from Colonel Lee, but then, you know how we both admire him, and he expresses what we feel.” The letter rambled on. It ended with a postscript. “Jesse sends his love.”

His love—and his silence, Kiernan thought.

Throughout the South, major events were taking place.

In Florida, warlike actions had begun even before the
state had seceded. Militia had been trained. In Pensacola, Federal troops had been forced off the mainland forts of McRee and Barrancas to Fort Pickens in the harbor. Fort Marion at St. Augustine had been seized, and Alabama and Florida troops had taken over the navy yard at Pensacola. Southern military leaders wanted to attack Fort Pickens, but they also wanted to avert war, and so they waited.

Similar events were taking place throughout the Confederacy. In South Carolina, Brigadier General Pierre Beauregard watched the Union troops at Fort Sumter and feared that Washington would send reinforcements.

Everywhere, the tension increased.

And still Kiernan waited. Anthony no longer plagued her with his constant, patient proposals, for he had hurried home. He had left his position with his local militia, for many of its members were pro-Union, as were many of the western counties of the state. Politically, Anthony was everything that Kiernan longed for Jesse to be—passionately, loyally, unshakably sympathetic to their cotton and tobacco neighbors.

Anthony scarcely even wrote, though his words were passionate when he did. He and his father were recruiting and arming a unit of cavalry. They were busy buying horses and designing uniforms.

Then, in early April 1861, Kiernan’s time of waiting came to an end.

Christa came riding by to tell her with a great deal of jubilation that both her brothers were soon coming home. “I’m so delighted! They’ve both gotten leave to come for my birthday. I wanted to tell you as soon as I heard from the both of them. Thank goodness Daniel is such a wonderful correspondent!”

“Yes, thank goodness,” Kiernan agreed.

“Oh, I can’t wait to see them!”

“Neither can I,” Kiernan told her fervently. “Oh, neither can I!”

Two days later, Christa was back. She met Kiernan on her porch and did not dismount from her horse. She smiled
mischievously. “A soldier just stopped by, a friend of Jesse’s who resigned his commission.”

“Oh?” Kiernan said, her heart thundering.

Christa laughed. “Well, it seems that Jesse is capable of writing after all. He sent me a note, and in it is a request for you.”

“Yes?”

Christa handed her an envelope. Kiernan raised a brow to her, then reached for the letter inside.

Her eyes scanned the brief but affectionate passages to Christa, asking about the house, servants, the weather, and Christa’s state of mind and health.

The last paragraph referred to her.

Christa, please see Kiernan for me. And ask her to meet me at the summer cottage. Dusk, the night of the sixteenth
.

“What do I tell him?” Christa asked her.

Kiernan lowered her lashes swiftly, not wanting Christa to see the wild elation within her eyes. She fought for control, then raised her eyes to Christa’s once again and smiled demurely. “Tell him I’ll be there.”

Christa smiled and started to turn her horse away. Then she paused, turning back. “Oh, I forgot. There’s a postscript on the back. He says that it might be cold. He suggests you wear fur.”

Kiernan smiled and lowered her head quickly. She folded her hands before her, but despite her best efforts, her voice was filled with a soft tremor.

“Tell him … tell him I’ll wear fur.”

She turned and ran back into the house, unable to look into Christa’s eyes any longer.

She’d wear fur. It was what Jesse wanted.

Jesse was coming home.

Eleven

Looking out from the breezeway doors of the gazebo, Jesse could see the monuments of the cemetery and beyond in the evening light. The lawn sloped up to the house, and the garden was just coming out from its winter’s cloak of green to flower again.

It had been a beautiful day.

April in Virginia was often a whimsical month. Sometimes a dead heat lay over the coastal land. The heavy humidity of summer came creeping in early, and the nights were sultry and warm. Sometimes, it was just the opposite. The day could be bitterly cold, and it was even possible for a light spattering of wet snow to fall, the kind that could chill you to the bone.

Then sometimes, it was just beautiful, everything that came with the promise of spring. The sun would shine throughout the day, hot and radiant, throwing a bold new yellow light over the soft new grass that was just bursting through the old. The first of the spring flowers would be bathed in that light, their colors the brighter for it. But the heat of the sun was softened and tempered by the coolness of the air coming in from the river, and it was easy to walk, easy to breathe, easy to love to be alive. Newborn foals frolicked and played in the fields, and the horses bred from Arabian stock whipped their tails up incredibly high and seemed to dance within their paddocks.

It had been one of those days today. A cool day, tempered by a warm sun. The night coming on was a gentle and balmy one. The whisper of the breeze was itself sensual, seeming to wrap around him as he waited in the summer house.

He wondered if she would come.

The wire services were alive with the latest developments between the Union and the new-formed Confederacy.

In the early hours of April 12, the southern troops under General Beauregard in Charleston had fired upon the Union position at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor.

Major Robert Anderson had been in command at Sumter, with Captain Abner Doubleday his second in command. Beauregard had set up batteries in Charleston because South Carolina was offended by the Federal troops sitting on its sovereign territory. The Federals had been asked to surrender, but Anderson, expecting supplies from Washington, had refused. He’d had only sixty-six cannon, many of them un-mounted, and he was short of powder-bag cartridges.

At 3:20
A.M
., hostilities came to a head. One last demand for a surrender was made and refused, and the Federals were warned that they would soon be fired upon.

And so they were. Two hours later, a Confederate shell broke over Fort Sumter, and the shelling continued. Anderson gave Doubleday the honor of firing the first Union shot at seven, and the uneven contest began.

It went on all through the day. By nightfall, the shelling slackened, but by dawn of the thirteenth, it came again. Anderson and Doubleday kept their men low to the ground against the smoke inhalation. The supply ship Anderson had awaited came—but it was held in the harbor by the Confederate artillery.

Soon after noon, a Confederate shell blew away the fort’s flagstaff. Secessionist Colonel Wigfall rowed out to Sumter, having seen the flag go down, and demanded a surrender of the fort.

Anderson, having no way to fight, conceded. To that point, he had not lost a man.

Surrender ceremonies were planned for the next day, and Anderson asked and received permission from Beauregard
to salute the American flag before hauling it down. The hundred-gun salute brought about the death of a Union soldier when the fiftieth gun exploded.

Throughout South Carolina, there was tremendous jubilation. Union forces had been thrust away.

In Virginia, the situation was at a crucial peak. A legislature would now decide the fate of the state. Lincoln had made a call to arms. War seemed imminent.

It seemed impossible for Virginia to take up arms against her sister states.

Would Kiernan come? Jesse wondered again in the summer cottage.

Even as the question plagued his mind, he saw movement in the foliage beyond, and then she burst into the clearing and raced into the gazebo.

She closed the doors behind her, leaning against them. Her eyes touched his, filled with life and a blazing green excitement. Her breast rose and fell swiftly with the force of her breathing. Her hair was free and wild, tumbling around her shoulders and down her back in a sweep of sunlit waves.

The fur she wore rimmed an elegant gold cape that swept evocatively around her body.

“Jesse!”

She whispered his name, and then she was in his arms. He quickly discovered that beneath the cape she wore a simple cotton day dress and nothing more. As he slipped the tie on the cape and it fell softly to the floor, he felt her hands upon him, tugging his shirt free from his breeches. He felt her fingers upon his naked flesh and marveled at the touch, shuddering as the hot fires of desire snaked through him.

In the days to come, he would remember this night, remember it with aching poignancy, and he would tremble anew, thinking of all that he had held in his arms.

For in all the long years when they had watched each other and waited, when he had wondered at the beauty she would be when she grew up, he had never imagined this.

He knew that she was his. He had been her first lover, the first to touch her, to teach her. And she had learned to give so very much to him. She had never questioned propriety,
she had simply loved him. And in that, he had never known a feeling more exquisite, never known a power so great. She was sensual, elegant, beautiful, and in his life, he had never imagined a love so great.

She stroked his back, her fingers playing upon muscle and sinew. She rose against him, the soft curves of her body haunting and evocative beneath the simple cotton of her dress as she pressed against his naked chest. She nibbled against his lower lip, then rose to meet him in a wild and sweet open-mouthed kiss that drove every demon known to man to tear into his groin and his blood. He had stripped her of the gown and borne her down upon the fur that had offered them so sweet and heady a haven before.

In the days to come, he would indeed remember this evening! Remember the feel of her lips, moist and searing warm, moving over his body, the feeling of soft, exhilarating fire, wet upon his chest, trailing patterns, circling his nipples where her teeth teased and played. He felt the flow of her hair following the taunt of her lips, soft velvet to bring him to an ever-greater need. And still she loved and teased and taunted him with tender kisses upon his flesh, exotic, erotic, decadent kisses upon his flesh, moving lower and lower against him until, incredibly, she touched the pulsing fullness of his sex with her mouth.

Lightly at first, with kisses that were so soft and sweet that they tormented him nearly to hell. He grabbed hold of her, unable to bear the bursting desire, when suddenly she closed her sweet caress hard around him, and in all his life he had never felt so searing an explosion of desire.

He drew her to him. The hot blood surged and raced throughout his body, and he pressed her down hard into the velvet-soft fur upon the floor. His fingers became entangled in her hair, and he ravished her with burning kisses as her long legs wound erotically around his hips, and he swept inside her, thrusting deeply into the welcoming, sheathing warmth.

When the sweetness of the tempestuous climax claimed them both, he scarce let the cool breeze of the night whisper over them before he turned upon her again, fiercely, needing
the night. In the coming darkness, he smiled down into the misty beauty of her eyes and began to make love to her again.