The Outcast (4 page)

Patrice stood at the foot of his stairs. She held nothing more deadly than a basket and a stony stare. Feeling foolish about the pistol, he tucked it into the band of his trousers at the small of his back. His expression betrayed no sign of welcome.

When he didn’t address her, Patrice scowled, unhappy with the burden of making the first gesture.

“My mama didn’t like the thought of you down here starving.”

“Bet it didn’t bother you none, did it?”

Patrice ignored that and thrust the towel-draped basket toward him. When he didn’t come forward to take it from her, her displeasure grew. She was forced to climb the steps and come close to him.

“It’s not much, but then nobody around here has much these days.”

“Keep it. I don’t need charity.”

The basket dangled between them in awkward offering, tension escalating with each second it remained unclaimed. To withdraw it would be accepting insult, to expend more words in persuasion was farther than Patrice was willing to go. Through gritted teeth, she said, “I wouldn’t give you any. You know my mother. She has a soft spot for any stray. I won’t have her fretting over your worthless hide. Take it.”

“Well,” he drawled out. “Since you put it like that.”

He watched her starch up as his hand stretched out. He curled fingers around the woven handle, purposefully brushing hers. She let go so quickly the basket took a precarious tip.

“Smells good.”

She smelled good. Like a summer day. Woman smells he hadn’t enjoyed for a long time.

She started to turn away, and suddenly Reeve couldn’t bear for her to go.

“I suppose offering to share this with you wouldn’t be much of a temptation.”

“I have already eaten.” Her gaze said plain that his company would do little for her appetite even if she hadn’t. Again, she started to leave. Reeve took a hurried step forward.

“Then how about sharin’ a little news?”

She didn’t turn. “I don’t want to share anything with you, Reeve Garrett.”

“Patrice … please. I’ve gone out of my mind these past years, not knowing. When I last saw Noble, he was in a skirmish with Morgan after Shiloh.” Reeve closed his eyes against the memory of Noble Banning rushing fearlessly into the jaws of danger. There was an instant when their gazes met and held, exchanging an eternity of shock, gladness, and horror that they would meet again as enemies. Then their horses plunged past one another, getting lost in the confusion of battle. Reeve was shaken for days afterward. He’d haunted the site, checking the Confederate dead, questioning those taken prisoner. But none could tell him the fate of his friend.

Until now.

“He was shot at Barboursville.”

Reeve’s knees buckled, causing him to sway in a moment of weakening remorse. “Killed?” He locked his joints against the inevitable facts, as grief rattled along his bones.

“No. He was taken prisoner.” Patrice revolved slowly, not in time to witness the stark stamp of relief upon his features. He was in control again by
the time she looked up for a grim recital. “Last I heard he was at Point Lookout Prison in Maryland. The judge wrote everyone from Jeff Davis to Lincoln himself, begging for his release. But by then, they weren’t doing any more prisoner exchanges. I don’t know what happened to him.”

Reeve was tormented by the remembered sight of Noble’s hat plume bobbing above the dusty melee. He vowed he’d find out if he had to ride all the way to Maryland. It might take months, records being in an appalling disarray.

“Last we heard of Mede, he was in the Battle of Franklin.”

Reeve flinched, consequence delivering the force of a gut punch. He’d seen the lists; pages and pages of the dead—of those they’d been able to recognize. Many would never have a name put to them. Over a fifth of the Army of Tennessee fell. Was that Mede’s fate? He reeled, buffeted by ungovernable distress. “Tyler?” he managed in a tight-throated whisper.

“His father bought off his conscription. He never left the county. His idea of patriotism was joining the Home Guard with the Dermonts to harass the helpless instead of furthering the Cause.”

The Cause. That stupid, damned Cause that tore families apart, forcing brother to face brother on a field of opposing honor. Madness. Jonah had been right about that. He only half listened as Patrice ran down the other familiar names that would be faces no more. Just ghosts of a past glory. Sacrifices to that bloody Cause. He numbed his mind to it. To the endless lists of tears he’d see forever in his nightmares. Looking back was too hard. Looking
forward was where he had to focus if he was going to claw his way out of hell.

Patrice paused, noting his drifting attention.

Was he so disinterested in those who’d died standing on the other side of the barrel from him? Her mood chilled as she beheld him, standing there in his Union blue, looking fit and fine—not a scratch on him!—while the rest of the county staggered under the yoke of its losses. And he’d yet to speak a single word about the one life that wedged between him and everyone else in Pride—the life he’d taken in the line of his damnable duty.

He’d yet to say he was sorry about Jonah.

Finally hearing the silence, Reeve glanced up to find himself on the receiving end of Patrice’s contempt. And it wounded as all the stray bullets and flailing bayonets had failed to.

“That’s all the sharing you’ll get from me,” she spat out at him.

Then he completely disarmed her.

“Thanks for seeing to my mama. She’d have liked the flowers.”

Patrice struggled for balance, her equilibrium upset by his unexpectedly intimate approach. Because she wavered and weakened, her words were harshly clipped.

“I liked your mother. It had nothing to do with you.”

He didn’t retract the thanks or add to it. There was nothing for Patrice to do but retreat before the situation worsened. She whirled away, but his voice followed.

“And thank your mama for worrying over me.”

She ran the rest of the way back to the house.

Reeve ate alone. The meal he’d hoped to savor, his first back home, could well have been sawdust.

It was so quiet. He’d gotten used to the rustle of an army settling down for the night. He’d actually taken comfort in it. Here, stillness pressed in all around him, engulfing with a sense of isolation. And with the quiet, came the ghosts.

It wasn’t going to be easy, the squire said. It was going to be hell, for all of them, and Reeve knew it. It would have made so much more sense just to ride on, to where he could start a new beginning, away from past prejudices and future complications. This wasn’t his home, not really. Not so much as a handful of dirt belonged to him. It was Squire Glendower’s home. Home to the wealthy of Pride County, a county that had chosen pride over practicality when casting its lot to the cause of the South. And he would find no welcome. Even before, when he wasn’t quite up to their social standings, at least, he’d been one of them. Now, he was a complete outsider.

Was it worth the effort to win them over?

He’d lived his life not caring what anyone thought or said. He was Byron Glendower’s bastard, and if the squire didn’t care enough to change that, why should he make it matter to him? He’d worked at the Glade to provide for his mother. But if that was the only reason, what held him now?

He was too tired to consider his reasonings, too afraid of what he’d discover now that his defenses were down. Easier to accept the situation than to try to explain it. It always had been.

He bedded down in his mother’s first-floor room, not just because it was clean and well aired, but because her spirit lingered there, allowing him one
last chance to surround himself with her loving presence. He lay back and shut his eyes. He’d trained his body and mind not to waste the opportunity for rest when it came, so sleep engulfed him almost at once.

And he dreamed. Of a bobbing hat plume. Of the deafening report of rifles following the command of “Fire.” He slept but he didn’t rest. He would never rest again.

“Patrice, you’re as restless as a cat tonight. Sit down. You’re positively wearing me out just watching you.”

“I’m sorry, Mama.”

Patrice collapsed into the wicker chair beside her mother’s chaise. Warm evening air stirred across the second-story veranda in a soothing caress, but nothing could calm her feverish state.

“It’s Reeve Garrett, isn’t it?”

Hannah didn’t look up from her embroidery to catch her daughter’s expression of dismay. Patrice was quick to recover.

“I refuse to give that Yankee trash a second thought.”

“Then why haven’t you been able to think of anything else since he got here?”

The gentle chiding goaded Patrice back up to her feet. She prowled the rail, denying in her mind that her gaze strayed to a darkened cabin, denying in her heart that it beat just a bit faster knowing he was there.

“How do you expect me to feel, Mama? He killed my fiancé. He ruined every chance I had at a future. He destroyed the county’s hope of survival.”

“That’s a lot of burden for one man to bear.”

“Oh, Mama, you know what I mean. If it wasn’t his hand, it was his will. He made his choices. And he chose to stand against us. What are we going to do now? Everything was hanging on my marriage to Jonah. We needed the Glendower money to keep the Manor running. The county needed Jonah to keep the bank solvent. Now everything is going to fold. And if Reeve Garrett isn’t to blame, I surely don’t know who is.”

“He followed his own beliefs, Patrice. You, of all people, should admire that instead of condemning him for it.”

Patrice stared at her mother as though a stranger sat before her, a stranger who’d remained silently supportive of all the right views, who never voiced an opinion of her own unless it echoed that of her outspoken husband. Hannah Sinclair, the epitome of Southern womanhood: docile, quiet, unobtrusive. She’d never uttered a controversial word in her life, only to take such a shocking stand now.

“You sound as though you approve of what he did! He took arms against our family, against his own family and friends! How can you see that as anything but vile? That’s traitorous talk to the memory of my father … and maybe to Deacon.” Hot tears welled up into her eyes, shimmering with righteous anger.

Hannah Sinclair set aside her needlework and rose with insurmountable dignity to meet her daughter’s fiery glare. “My memories are my own, Patrice, and so are my opinions. I may not have expressed them openly, but I have a right to feel them, nonetheless. If that makes me a villain in your eyes, I suppose I will have to bear that along with all my other sorrows.”

And before Patrice could gather her thoughts to utter a proper apology, the stately lady in her widow’s black moved inside through the open veranda doors.

Patrice stalked to the edge of the balcony, hating herself for bring yet another source of pain to prick her mother’s weary spirit. “Damn you, Reeve,” she cried in frustration. “You varmint. You always manage to turn everythin’ upside down.”

How could her mother fail to see the tragedy Reeve Garrett forced upon them with his self-righteous honor? Why couldn’t he have bent to take up Confederate gray? Though Kentucky was mostly Union in support and sentiment, pockets of it held to Confederate loyalties. Pride was such a county, fierce in its beliefs, quick to fight for the South. Jonah was of the same mind and spirit as Reeve, yet he hadn’t jumped at the chance to betray home and family. Reeve was the one constantly to brook convention, always to turn against the current to battle his way upstream. Why couldn’t he, for once, have done the proper thing instead of the—right thing.

Patrice paced, unhappy with thoughts that bordered on the treacherous, themselves. She was no great supporter of the war but when the call came, she didn’t hesitate to do her part to aid the Confederate Cause. It wasn’t for slavery, though the Manor owned its share. It wasn’t for state’s rights. She had no political leanings and considered the windy debates tiresome at best. It was a feeling that came over her slowly, steadily as she fought to keep the Manor going during the absence of its menfolk. A slow, growing attachment to the land, to tradition, to roots sunk deep into fertile soil. And, for the first
time, she understood her father and Deacon’s obsession.

“It’s more than buildings, Patrice, more than property,” her father had told her. “It’s your heritage, a place of belonging. You don’t own it; it possesses you.”

Apparently, Reeve couldn’t understand these things, or he wouldn’t have chosen the path he did. He had no ties to the land or family. His disrespect for all his father stood for was well-known. Why else would he turn his back on continual pleas for him to take his place within the Glendower home? He allowed what should have been his to pass to Jonah; the land, the house, the responsibilities … her—without a fight, without regret. What did he know of loyalty, of love? Admire him? Hardly! Coward was what he was. A shameless, turncoat coward. She struck at the tears clinging to her lashes, refusing to let them fall.

Jonah had proved to be the better man. He’d done the correct things. He’d given his heart, his soul to the Glade and Pride County. He’d surrendered his own personal dreams to become the son his father desired—the one Reeve refused to be. He’d given himself over to the betterment of the county, devoting his intellect and his time to the formation of the Pride County Bank helping his neighbors, his friends reach for a promising future. And he’d wanted to share it all with her.

She closed her eyes, picturing Jonah Glendower. Handsome, reed-slender, awkwardly self-conscious, bright, always a kind word and quick smile on his lips, never a glower clouding the sincerity of his gaze. A scholar, not a scrapper like his older brother. Why hadn’t she ever appreciated his goodness,
his strength while blinded by Reeve’s blatant appeal? She’d taken the quiet, gentle Jonah for granted, and, now, there was no way to make that up to him.

Take this ring and be my wife. Make me the happiest man on earth.

She accepted his proposal begrudgingly, spitefully, because she couldn’t have Reeve. How ashamed she was of her shallow motives for promising herself to a fine man. He hadn’t deserved the rebound of her affection.