Only the Gallant (18 page)

Jesse gathered a handful of the delicate yellow blooms while the roan looked on.

“They’re not for you,” he told the animal matter-of-factly, and rode the stallion out of the woods. He had barely begun to cross the cotton fields when he realized what had been nagging at his thoughts since arriving at the plantation. No dark-skinned men labored in the fields beneath the hot Mississippi sun. No children played along the wheel-rutted road leading up to the house. No long-limbed ebony women, who might have been tribal queens had they not been brought in bondage to a strange new world or been born into that world and sucked on the breasts of mothers for whom slavery was their only memory. No such women tended the garden or lingered by their cabins or prepared food for the menfolk. The slave cabins were as devoid of life as the rest of Dunsinane.

Jesse began to feel uneasy and crossed the field at a brisk pace. The closer he came to the house, the greater the sense of dread that tightened his chest. For a moment he had a premonition of flames and crashing timber and the roar of guns. He gasped and brought the roan to such a savage halt that the stallion reared in protest.

“Jesse McQueen, what on earth? You looked about to ride that horse right up on the porch. I hope these flowers are for me.”

His mind cleared, though the aftermath of those images left him unsettled. He could not explain what had happened. No doubt his half-breed grandmother would have an answer for him. Spirit talk, maybe from the fox spirit he had encountered in the woods. But fox was a cunning trickster, often leading men to ruin who were foolish enough to follow his dreams.

And yet he sensed that he had been given a warning.
No matter
, he told himself,
dwell on it later.
Miss Ophelia Tyrone was waiting for him, her back to a column. Jesse had to blink and rub his eyes. It had only been a week since his last visit, but in that time everything had changed. Ophelia was certainly not dressed like a belle of the South. Bon Tyrone’s sister wore baggy canvas trousers, a butternut-colored shirt, and scuffed boots. Her hair was pulled back and tied with a leather string. Could this be the same Southern belle who in her silks and laces had danced the night away at Christmastime in Vicksburg? As if to make this strange transformation complete, Ophelia even had a smudge of dirt on her left cheek and the tip of her nose. Jesse wondered if this were another hallucination, the work of the trickster fox.

“Jesse, my heaven, you act as if you’ve never seen me before.”

“Maybe I haven’t,” Jesse managed to say, climbing down from the stallion. No black stableman came forward to take the animal to a stall, comb it, and give it water and food.

“You best see to your horse. And wash up. I’m cooking dinner.” Ophelia hurried down from the steps, patted Jesse on the arm, kissed him on the cheek, then headed for the summer kitchen—a hearth, two ovens, and a long oaken table and benches arranged beneath a pitched roof supported by four stout red oak posts. “I’ll explain while we eat.”

Jesse couldn’t wait to hear.

Dunsinane was not as large or ostentatious as some of the fine manors in Vicksburg. There were three rooms downstairs. A spacious dining room was dominated by a rectangular black walnut table that seated ten and a glass-inlaid hutch and sideboard that once displayed a variety of china and silver cutlery. Most of the silver had been sold to support the war. Across the main hall was the study and toward the rear of the house a sun parlor. In the center of the house, a plain, functional stairway led to the upstairs bedrooms. The master bedroom now belonged to Ophelia. A second bedroom across the hall contained several beds and was often used by Bon Tyrone and any officer guests that might have accompanied him to the plantation.

Indeed, thought Jesse McQueen as he stood on the back porch and surveyed his surroundings, Dunsinane was not so much a place as a way of life, a self-sufficient existence that for sixty years had stood apart from the outside world and the changing order of things. From the shade of the house he watched the shadows of the trees stretch like groping hands across the ground to ensnare first the weaver’s cottage and next to it the tutor’s cabin and beyond to the potter’s workshop and reaching still farther across the garden to the slaves’ quarters, where a few banners of smoke trailed from sagging chimneys.

There was the problem, the source of the strange stillness that hung over the plantation like a shroud. Word had come of the Emancipation Proclamation. “Father Abraham” in Washington had set the slaves free. With rumors rampant of Union troops approaching from north and south, every able-bodied man, woman, and child had abandoned the plantation three days past, leaving Ophelia to care not only for herself but for the elderly men and women who had been too frail to attempt the journey to freedom. Jesse found it ironic that Ophelia now cooked the meals and brought food to the old ones who had spent much of their lives toiling for the Tyrones.

Jesse watched Ophelia walk toward him through the garden. She had just taken food to a silver-haired black man sick with fever. She paused and knelt in the garden to check the snap beans whose green tendrils sprouted from the furrowed earth. By midsummer the vines would be chest-high and ready for picking. She stood and resumed walking. She passed rows of butter beans and tomatoes, summer squash and cucumbers, beds of parsley and mint and plantings of tiny green peppers hot enough to blister the tongue if some fool were to eat one raw. There’d be sweet potatoes later in the year, but the onions were ready to be pulled, purple and nearly as sweet as an apple.

Sweat beaded her forehead and streaked her features by the time Ophelia reached the back porch. Jesse was amazed at how unperturbed she seemed about having been deserted by the slaves whose presence was so essential to Dunsinane’s survival.

“You appear almost happy,” he said, after voicing this thought. “Yet you’re alone. And such a plantation cannot be maintained with only a young woman to tend things.”

“Well, I am not leaving. This is my home.” She dabbed at her forehead with a white lace-trimmed kerchief incongruously tucked in the hip pocket of her dungarees, a touch of delicate femininity to offset her plebian costume. She yawned and looked down at her blistered hands. For the past three days she had been working from sunup until well after dark. What she didn’t know about farming she was learning the hard way, by trial and error. The weary young woman managed a brave smile. “In a way, I am almost relieved they’re gone.” She noticed his expression. “You don’t believe me? It’s true. Bon and I inherited what our parents built. But we neither bought nor sold slaves after Papa died. In truth, my brother and I were always uncomfortable with such commerce. Neither of us felt it was right to own someone, yet we were too … weak … to free those slaves we had. How could the plantation even exist without them?” Her eyes took on a dreamy quality as if she were trying to peer beyond the veils of time and see what the future held. “Now the matter has been resolved and I need no longer wrestle with my guilt.”

“You begin to sound like an abolitionist,” Jesse chided her. “Why do you and your brother fight to preserve an institution neither of you cares to maintain?”

“We fight because the Northerners are here in our homeland, trampling on our way of life and trying to tell us how to live and what to think and believe in.” Ophelia shook her head. “Right or wrong, we must solve our own problems for a solution to last.” She studied the man at her side. “But that’s enough politics. We are alone here, Mr. Jesse Redbow McQueen. All alone and free to do anything we want.” She lowered her face a moment and then looked up at him, a provocative glint in her gray-green eyes. “Anything.”

Jesse gulped. His stomach started growling as he followed her into the house. He didn’t know about supper, but dessert promised to be a handful and more. His mind already began to wrestle with his baser instincts. Ophelia was as courageous as she was lovely. And if she were willing to invite him to her bed, how could he refuse? But there had to be a way. I must be mad, he thought. For weeks he’d wanted nothing more than to take her in his arms. Now the opportunity was about to present itself and he was looking for a way out.

They entered the winter kitchen at the rear of the house and Ophelia continued through a side door into the sun parlor.

“I have to make an entry in Papa’s ledger. That’s the way he ended each day. I’ve picked up the habit. I’ll only be a minute,” she said over her shoulder. “Then we can get down to more important things.” She disappeared into the study.

Jesse headed for the coffeepot, filled a clay cup with the bitter black liquid, and as quickly drained it. He slammed the cup down on the table in the center of the kitchen and clutched the edge of the table to steady himself. He sucked in a mouthful of air. Damnation, if she hadn’t emptied near a quart of whiskey into the pot. Another cup of coffee like that and he wouldn’t need an excuse. No doubt, it eased her aching muscles.

He rejected the easy way out and left the coffeepot on the woodstove. It was already late enough in the spring for the fire in the stove to make the kitchen uncomfortably warm. He blamed his discomfort on the smoldering log in the firebox and, thinking himself the grandest fool of all, went to find Ophelia.

The parlor was a familiar room, his favorite in the house, with its cane-backed furniture carved of sweet-gum wood and windows all around and a mahogany sideboard complete with bottles of sherry, brandy, and strawberry wine. But he resisted the temptation to linger in the room and entered the study.

Ophelia sat in a high-backed chair behind a desk that faced the front window. Her father had been a cautious man and, while working at his desk, preferred to keep an eye on the front drive. Again, she was her father’s daughter. Jesse cleared his throat, found a shelfful of books to his liking, then cursing his cowardice, returned his attention to the task at hand.

“Ophelia … I have grown quite fond of you these past months. No, fond is hardly strong enough. I deeply care for you. And would not hurt you for the world.” He rubbed a hand across his stubbled cheeks. There was the rub—how to explain without revealing the truth, that he was a Union spy playing a deadly gambit in the Confederate heartland. “I am more than I appear to be.”

Very good, Jesse. Now tell her how much you’d like to make love to her. And yet that would be the cruelest deception of all. She believes you to be someone you are not. Go ahead, lay the truth before her like a patient naked to the surgeon’s knife and we’ll see whether the patient lives or dies.

“Ophelia,” he said, his resolve momentarily weakening. He crossed the room to stand alongside her. “Ophelia.” She sat motionless, her head, drooped forward on her chest, rising and falling with each breath. Her father’s ledger lay open upon her lap. A large undulating scrawl marked the spot where she had fallen asleep in mid-entry. Her hand still grasped the quill pen.

Jesse smiled, leaned down, and scooped her up. The long hours had taken their toll, and she was deadweight in his strong arms. Gently, he carried her from the room and out into the hall. The stairs creaked beneath his weight as he started up. He reached her bedroom without incident, carried her into the darkening interior, and fumbled his way to the big brass bed that dominated the spacious room. He lowered the sleeping woman to the feather mattress, and as he turned to go, caught a glimpse of his gray-clad reflection in the mirrored door of a chifforobe. In the dim light, the image startled him and he reached for his gun. Of course his mirror image made the identical move. His Colt had cleared leather in the time it took him to realize he was about to gun himself down. He slid the gun back into his holster and shook his head. The rug muffled his footsteps as he approached the mirror and studied his reflection in the faint light drifting in through the open doorway. He was older looking, his eyes deep set, betraying the strain he’d been under.

The role had begun to wear on him and he was uncertain how much longer he could play it. Eventually, he’d make a mistake. The information he had collected would be discovered and traced to him. Or perhaps Pike and Bascomb, the two soldiers who had survived his rescue of Caitlin Brennan, might somehow recognize him despite his efforts to conceal his identity. All it took was a hint of suspicion to land a man in serious trouble.

He fumbled with the buttons at his neck and opened his shirt to reveal the English coin hanging against his chest. He lifted the silver coin and rubbed his fingertips across its surface. Though it was too dark to see, he could feel the jagged initials George Washington had carved in the coin before presenting it to Jesse’s great-grandfather as a unique medal of valor.

And Jesse began to understand that he wasn’t alone in this damnable war. Three generations of McQueens were standing with him. His sacrifice was theirs. They had fought to preserve the United States. He could do no less. If that meant sacrificing himself and the feelings he harbored in his heart, so be it.

He turned from the chifforobe and crossed to Ophelia’s bedside, where he knelt and leaned forward to kiss her forehead. Even in this innocent good-night, the medal dangled forward, coming between them, like a call to duty or a warning impossible to ignore.

“All right. All right,” Jesse muttered. “I hear you.” He tucked the medal back in his shirt and left the room and its slumbering occupant, the Lady of Dunsinane, undisturbed.

O
N THE SIXTH OF
May, three horsemen made their way in the predawn hours along a deer trail that wound through the heart of a particularly dense stand of timber that the locals quite simply called “the thicket.”

Captain Bon Tyrone had taken the lead, for he had been raised in this country and the dense stand of red oaks and sycamores, sweet gums and black walnuts held no mystery for him. The trees grew close to one another, vying for space. The sun would have to be well above the horizon before it could penetrate this thicket. Most men would have been hopelessly lost.

“Reminds me of the bayous below New Orleans,” Spider Boudreaux remarked, eyeing the gloomy underbrush. An army of hobgoblins could be lying in wait among such shadows. “Only we aren’t riding ankle-deep in muck.”