Siege of the Heart (Southern Romance Series, #2) (12 page)

Who are you
? Jasper mouthed at him.

Solomon looked over at Violet, bloodied and bruised; at Cecelia, open-mouthed and terrified. He turned back to Jasper. He was weary of lies, down to the depths of himself. Too weary to go on.

“Tell them the truth,” he said. “All of it.”

T
ell them the truth.

Jasper felt tears come to his eyes. Had he really doubted his friend, after all this time? The measure of a man was not in the company he kept, or the state he had been born in. It was in his actions, and Horace had proved himself a thousand times over.

He heard himself begin, but did not recall making the choice to speak. It was as if his mouth opened of its own accord.

“We were set upon outside Martinsburg,” he said. The forest still seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for his confession. “I took a bayonet between two ribs near my heart. I thought I was done. I lay on the battlefield and I listened to men crying out for mercy, for water, and then sometime after dawn, I saw a man with no coat. He walked out of the mist, and I thought he was a Union soldier.” He swallowed. He could not look at Solomon as he told this; how did he remember it? “I asked him to make it quick. I’d heard stories of what they did to prisoners.”

The man, Ambrose, gave a strangled noise of protest, and the men holding him gave him a hard shake to shut him up.

“But he gave me water instead. He knelt down at my side and he looked at the wound, and told me I would live. I thought it had pierced my heart, but he knew it hadn’t. I told him you had left without me.” Jasper raised his head, meeting their eyes, and they looked away.

Every man there knew what happened to wounded soldiers. They were left to die on the battlefields for want of soldiers to tend to them, at the mercy of the enemy and the elements. If they made it to the field hospitals, they were just as likely to die, only surrounded by the screams of wounded and dying men, caught by the infections that raged through the confined mass of humanity. Leaving a soldier on the battlefield meant he might at least see the sky while he died, but it didn’t suit a soul well to leave his brother in arms. Jasper could only hope they remembered that now. It wouldn’t be enough to get their sympathy, but at least they might remember that they had all made desperate decisions.

“He brought me to the hospital and made me a bed on the ground outside. For weeks, he made sure I had bandages and blankets. He helped me walk and made sure my wound was clean. He didn’t speak much at first, just listened to me talk about home...and then he started telling me about his family: his father dead, his sisters left to run the farm because he’d marched to war.

“None of you knew him then. His accent was strange, but I didn’t remember until later. I remember how he sat at the fireside with everyone and soaked up the stories, the way you all talked about northerners. He seemed... hungry for it, and later, when he talked before battles, when we were all scared. He was so sure. He spoke of liberty and justice and a world without pain.”

“And then we got to Monterey Pass, and I saw the bullet coming for him and I couldn’t stop it, I couldn’t get to him in time.” Jasper’s throat closed on the memory. He could see it in his mind’s eye, Solomon knocked backwards off his feet with the impact, blood spreading bright down his arm, and Jasper running, heedless of the bullets, heedless of anything to his side.

“I don’t know how I got him off the field,” he said. “We should have been shot. We should have been trampled. Later, it felt like it must have had meaning, us getting away. Maybe it did. I couldn’t get anything out of Horace. We knew there was something about him, didn’t we? We all knew. I couldn’t get out of him where he was from, but I remembered something he’d said once, about fishing in the creek near his house.”

“I remember thinking that nothing mattered as long as he got out alive—and that nothing mattered if he didn’t. Horace was the best of us, you know that. He gave from his rations to feed the younger ones. He ran out to get us back behind cover. He always led when we charged. And when we doubted—and we
all
doubted—” Jasper met their eyes defiantly “He was there to reassure us. I’d seen his sureness fading as the battles went by, and when he begged me to leave him to die, I just thought I couldn’t leave him to die while he doubted.”

Jasper swallowed, looking around himself. They had lost themselves in the story. Cecelia knew it and yet she did not; not like this. Her mouth was hanging open, and she was slumped to the ground, tears wet on her cheeks. In the back, the spy was listening intently, hazel eyes sad, and the men who were to hold him captive seemed to have forgotten their duty.

Solomon, his face was white as death. Jasper took a breath and plunged on. “We made our way north. Horace didn’t know anything about it. He was gone with fever. It was harder every day to get him walking, and eventually we ran out of food. I got him to an old cottage in the woods, and then I buried my coat and went for food. I knew he’d die if I didn’t, and his fever was getting worse.”

“I scared Cecelia at the edge of her family’s fields.” He met her eyes ruefully, and she tried to smile, but a tiny sob came out of her instead. Jasper wished he could wrap her in his arms, but the gun at his head had not moved. “Her elder sister came out to scare me off. She was holding a horse bridle.” He felt himself laugh at the memory, but his heart was breaking. “Perhaps once in a life, you meet someone who changes you forever. I was lucky enough to meet two: Horace, and Clara. As soon as I saw her, I knew. But she was scared, and she knew just what I was. She warned me off, even while I pleaded for help.”

“But she came back. She left bread and bacon, and bandages for Horace, and then she offered me a job on the farm, because it was August and they needed the hay brought in. She fed me, always gave me extra, and I fell in love with her. I knew there was no future, none at all. I knew that. But I loved her more than I knew it was possible to love. She was honorable, but she was also
kind.
When Horace’s fever got worse, she took the only money they had and she went into town to get medicine for him, but when she came back...”

Solomon sank his head into his hands. Could he hear Clara’s voice echoing in the glade as clearly as Jasper could? Cursing them both, filled with horror at what her brother had become.

“What?” Knox prompted at last. The metal pressed against Jasper’s scalp. “Finish it.” Hi voice was gruff.

“Horace was Clara’s brother.” There was a hastily-indrawn breath from around the group. “He had defected, like you were afraid he did, Knox, but he defected from the Union to the Confederacy, not the other way around.”

At the back of the group, the Union spy was white as a sheet.

“Clara cursed us both. She told me to leave and never come back. She said she blamed me for Horace leaving, and I suppose she was right. She’d been living in fear for months, hearing he was missing, thinking he was a prisoner, and now here he was home again, but a traitor. When she left, he told me that he hadn’t meant to come home. He didn’t want to shame them.”

“We could have gone back, but Knox, once you’re free of it, you see it as it really is. There weren’t any great ideals on our side. We wanted slaves, and I had been working alongside freedmen. They were as human as you or I, Knox. Clara was teaching one of them to read. He told me about his daughter, sold away from him.”

Another low mutter from the group. He’d never get mercy now.
Tell the truth.
Had Solomon really known what he was asking?

There was no way but forward.

“I couldn’t leave Clara. I loved her. I begged her forgiveness, and in time she understood. She welcomed us back. The brother she thought she had lost, and me. I expected them to hate me, to make mock of me, but they accepted me into the house as if I was one of them. And now...” He let his voice trail off.

“But this is Cecelia,” Knox said after a moment, looking over at the woman.

“You took the wrong woman,” Jasper said harshly. When the soldiers’ faces fell, he cursed himself for not telling them sooner. Would they have returned her?

Yes, and taken Clara in her place.

“I see. So Horace—”

“Wasn’t a spy,” Jasper said wearily. “He’s just another man, Knox, like you and me. Trying to do the right thing.”

“He left us in the end.”

“He fought alongside us before that! He wasn’t a spy.”

“Then why’s he with a spy?”

“Because,” Ambrose Stuart said, managing somehow to look dignified, “I was taking him to stand trial, and he demanded my cooperation in rescuing these two first.”

Knox stared. Jasper stared. Solomon looked at the ground, hands clenched so tightly that his knuckles were a sickly shade.

“Knox, look at this mess.” Jasper twisted his head up to meet the man’s eyes. “I’m not innocent, you know that. Now you know why. If you can condemn Horace for failing to kill a Confederate soldier on the battlefield.”

Knox looked away, but he did not take his finger from the trigger.

“And you saw what the spy did.”

“Stuart just wants revenge on the ones that betrayed the Union. Like he should. Like we didn’t need the help.” Knox’s voice was rough.

“My brother died in an ambush because of men who betrayed their side,” Stuart said. His voice was light, controlled. Almost feminine, Jasper thought. “He deserved a better death. Any man does.”

“That’s why you came to spy on us?”

“I didn’t lead you into an ambush! I could have. I didn’t.”

“Knox, you know the men who fought for the Union believed just as much as we did, and you know there were widows there too and mothers without sons and daughters without fathers. You know this war was nothing from the start. You want to hang me for going? Do it. But you wanted to know why I went, and that’s why: to give a man I thought was Confederate the burial he deserved. I went so that his family wouldn’t wonder forever where he died.

“And him? He told me he turned because he wanted the belief we had. The fact that we fought so bravely? That brought a soldier to us, away from the Union, and you know you’d rather fight alongside Horace than against him.” He waited, heart in his throat, while the man considered.

Cecelia had dropped her face into her hands and was rocking back and forth, and Solomon was trying to comfort her.

“No,” Knox said finally.

“No?”

“No. You don’t know how it’s been. You should know, but you’ve forgotten! Because you don’t want the guilt. People are starving, Perry! They’re dying in the fields! Their farms are burned! Their sons are gone! There are families that will never rebuild, and when you could have come back to us, you turned tail and ran. Not just away from the war, away from everything. We’ve suffered too much for you to forget it. Now you’re going to suffer too.” He hauled Jasper up, oblivious to the gasp of pain from bruises, cuts, and cracked ribs. “Move. We’re only a couple of days out.”

“H
ow could you never have told me?” Cecelia asked Solomon. She was sitting back against a tree, her filthy skirts spread out neatly on the ground.

As if she was courting
, Solomon thought.
As if she was entertaining guests like a proper lady
. The image of her perfectly tilted head and her careful posture was jarring when one added in her bound hands, the dirt on her face, the guards with their guns nearby.

“What do you wish I had told you?” Solomon asked her.

Nearby, Violet was tending to Jasper’s wounds, her fingers deft, probing for genuine injuries in amongst the bruises.

Jealousy heated Solomon’s blood to see her hands all over his friend, and he pushed it back down. He should not be jealous. Jasper did not even know who Violet truly was, and certainly the touch was bringing him more agony than pleasure.

“About how it really was, being away at war.”

“Are you...” Solomon looked at his little sister in horror. Her brown curls were escaping from her braid, and her face was the same innocent face he had always known. Even now, she looked kind. “Are you mad? I would never tell you that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I never, ever want you to know,” he said forcefully. “Never, Cee. I want you to wake up every morning in the same world you’ve always known. Because we kept it that way for you. That’s how I make sense of it, that you’re still alive and living as we used to.”

“But it’s not like we used to,” Cecelia said, frowning. “We have Jasper now, and we knew that something happened to you, that you...” She looked away. “Those things don’t just happen because of nothing. You think you’re protecting us, and maybe you are, from the truth. What you have to understand is, we watched you die every night in our dreams, and until you tell us what’s true and what’s not, we’re going to carry every one of those nightmares.”

Every one of those nightmares is true,
Solomon wanted to say, but he did not. He looked over instead to where Violet was leaning close to peer at a wound in Jasper’s side, studying the blood and broken skin alongside the jagged scar when Solomon had nursed the man back to life.

“It’s okay,” she said finally. “I know what it’s like to need to keep secrets.” She watched him, almost as if she was hoping for something, and he saw a fleeting disappointment when he patted her hand absently.

“You were always the understanding one, Cee.”

She sighed. Seconds ticked by in the rustling of the trees.

“Why do you look at him like that?” Cecelia asked finally, as if she knew Solomon would never tell her what she wanted to know.

“Like what?” Solomon felt his heart leap strangely.

“Your face...comes alive.” Cecelia fumbled for the words. “It’s like when you look at him, you don’t know if you’re happy or sad, but it’s eating you alive inside. Are you...” Her eyes widened, and Solomon tipped his head back against the tree with a sigh. “
Solomon.
”

“All right, hush.” He rolled his head slightly. Cecelia could only trust Violet more if she knew the truth, he reasoned, and she was hardly likely to share the information with the soldiers here. “Ambrose,” he said, his voice barely a thread of sound, “is a woman. Her name is Violet.”