The Sapphire Brooch (The Celtic Brooch Trilogy Book 2) (49 page)

Pain flooded in again. Now it rated a nine, maybe ten. The gain of one or two points on the pain scale were the result of his carefully sealed heart cracking open. If Charlotte could find the courage to risk her life for him again, could he find the courage to love her?

Loving her was the easy part. Living without her would keep his heart chained to the iron ball for the rest of his life.

Slowly, he gathered his thoughts, sorted through them, and then set aside the ones he could deal with later. He opened his fist, and his fingers explored the items she’d placed in his palm. Pills? She had given him pills? As Jack would say, “What the fuck?” Jack would have slipped him a gun or knife. Damn women. They were naturally inclined to comfort a man, not protect him. If Charlotte was going to dress like a man, she should damn well think like one.

He dipped the ladle into the pail of stagnant water and swallowed the tablets, which he hoped were pain pills. If they were, the pain would start to slip away within minutes, and he’d have a few moments of peace, the first he’d had since he’d been thrown into the cell.

Braham managed his first smile in days. Cracks rutted into his dry lips. Freedom was hours away. Jack would be waiting to rescue him. But another problem hovered in the distance. Charlotte would want him to return to her time so she could put him back together again. The thought created one of those odd moments when his brain seemed to stop working. He forgot about loving her and living without her, and for the briefest of seconds he wished she had only been a dream.

56

Richmond, Virginia, April 1, 1865

C
harlotte limped out
of Castle Thunder. Her grunts of pain harmonized with the guns stuttering in the background. Sweat soaked her shirt, her scalp itched under her wig, her foot hurt, her heart weighed a ton inside her chest, and she’d bet her brass buttons there were tooth marks on her boots. “Damn rats.” Her curse included not only the vermin, but the warden and guards, who were inhuman assholes.

She was spitting anger and frustration, and even shame for being part of a race which could birth such evil, vile people. Her lungs begged for a breath of unadulterated air. But the outside air was tainted, too. Not ripe with the stink of the prison, but with smoke from cannons and the sulfur byproduct of gunpowder. Bile churned in her stomach, inching up her esophagus. She couldn’t remember the last time she threw up, but it was about to happen. Fortunately, when she reached the street corner, a cool breeze coming off the river brought a reprieve. She gulped in fresh air, forcing her lungs to expel the prison poisons.

Braham was alive. Injured, yes, but from what she’d seen, his injuries, while not minor, weren’t as bad as she had feared. Concern for his emotional state, though, had her mind buzzing with speculations of all sorts. How much damage had the trauma of being locked in a claustrophobic, windowless hole and tortured for days done to his already troubled soul?

A hand tapped her on the back. Startled, a new surge of adrenaline pumped into her bloodstream. Grimacing, she jerked her head to look over her shoulder.

The red-headed soldier jumped back, saluting.

Her nostrils flared with disdain for the prison and everyone associated with it, even the one person who had seemed almost humane. “
What do you want
?”

“Sorry, sir, but Libby Prison is the other way.” He pointed in the opposite direction. “I can get a wagon to carry you there. If’n your leg’s bothering you.”

Charlotte whirled around to face him, putting more of her weight on her bruised foot. The pain rocketed through her, and she wanted it to be visible in her face as a living, breathing thing. “It’ll have…to wait.” The words came out in a gasp. “Shouldn’t have…climbed the stairs. I have to rest.”

A closed carriage stopped on the street only a few feet away, and Jack leaned his head out. His face was white with worry and fatigue, and his features were drawn. While he didn’t have the carved-in-marble appearance, he was close. Both his hair and beard stubble appeared darker in the shadow of the carriage.

“I noticed you limping, Major. Can I give you a ride?” he asked.

Her lips tightened into a thin line, and she clasped the guard on the shoulder. “Thanks for your help, Private, but I’ll ride in this carriage.”

“If’n you need assistance later, I’ll be here to escort you.”

Charlotte gave him a tight smile. Since he had helped her already, he needed to continue believing he had a vested interest in her assignment. “I’ll find you. In the meantime, keep an eye on the prisoners in solitary. They need to walk out of here tonight. They don’t need to be interrogated again beforehand.”

The private saluted. “I’ll do what I can, sir.”

“I’m sure I can count on you, son,” she said.

Jack opened the carriage door and scooted over to make room. “I’ve been waiting for over an hour.” The edge to his voice had been honed and stropped to a fine point.

She stretched out her leg, resting it on the opposite bench seat. “I can’t tell from your tone if you’re relieved or angry.”

“Both.” His eyes remained on her, steady and unblinking. “You look horrible.”

“Gee, thanks.” Her voice wobbled a bit, but the tone echoed the intensity of his emotion.

He stretched out his arms and cracked all his knuckles simultaneously, something she’d only seen him do a couple of times, when his anger got out of control. The months he spent at the monastery had taught him how to manage his emotions.

“What happened? You’re not hurt, are you?”

She shook head and steeled herself against the riptide of god-awful memories. “They didn’t hurt me.”

A hot blast of relief gusted out of Jack’s pinched mouth, and he relaxed his arms. “Did you find someone to get a message to Braham?”

Recalling the face of Private Jeff Dougherty, she moaned softly then said, “No.”

In the split second it took Jack to close his eyes and shudder, the red color of anger faded from his cheeks.

“I saw him.”

“Sweet Jesus. He’s in solitary. Don’t tell me you went there.”

“I had no choice,” she said quickly, before he started popping knuckles again. “The men in sick bay are dying from untreated illnesses, in atrocious conditions. They couldn’t get a message out of their mouths, much less out of the room.”

A drop of sweat ran down the side of Jack’s face. He didn’t wipe it away. His hands lay folded in his lap. His breathing was easy and deep as he moved into the special trance state where he could find mental and physical calm. She’d let him remain there a few minutes.

As the carriage drove off, Charlotte glared at the prison until it was out of sight. The air was filled with a cloying mixture of Magnolias, gunpowder, and stale sweat, yet she was able to breathe a bit more easily. The crowds in the street had grown larger as more of the city’s population evacuated, clogging the roads and creating impassible conditions.

Jack’s breathing returned to normal. He opened his eyes, a glint of dark blue in them, and he kept them steady on hers. “Tell me what you saw.”

She could do this two ways: Dispassionately, as an objective observer, or passionately, as a woman and a member of the human race. She rested her forearms on her legs, held her hands out in front of her with palms up, and stared at them, amazed to see, even after a day like today, they weren’t shaking.

“Indescribable atrocities. Every man I saw was mired in hunger and despair, and most had bodies ravaged by disease. Wherever I turned, I faced hollowed, sepulchral eyes, and almost inaudible voices. There were dozens of suffering or tortured men, and I couldn’t do one thing to help them. Not even offer a cup of clean water.”

“Are you sorry you went in there?”

She shook her head. “I’ll be forever changed by the experience, but I don’t regret going.” She paused a moment to take a long breath and let it out slowly. “Braham’s had a rough time of it.”

“How rough?”

“It could be worse. He could be dead.”

“Is he in worse shape than the last time?”

“From what I could see, no. Give him a bath, decent food, patch up his cuts and flayed skin, and his body will recover. Processing and coming to grips with the dehumanizing experience will take longer. Braham can tolerate a broken body better than he can live with a broken spirit. He has stamina and resilience. He drove my car hundreds of miles, an astonishing accomplishment for someone who never had a driving lesson. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and will stand up to whatever challenge he’s given, but the loss of dignity and pride he clearly endured will not easily be overcome.”

“You should have given him a gun instead of pills.”

“So he could kill himself?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. A gun would have empowered him.”

She held up her hands in defense of her actions. “It wasn’t in the script you gave me.”

“If Warner Brothers played as fast and loose with my scripts as you did, I’d never sell them another one.”

He reached for her hand, but she jerked it back. “Don’t touch me. I’m crawling with germs. I need a hot bath with strong soap, and then I’ll fully debrief you and Elizabeth.”

The driver drove toward center city passing columns of refugees strung out along the canal towpath toward Lynchburg, a shifting mass of humanity.

“They have no idea where safety lies, do they?” she asked.

“No,” Jack said. “They’ll keep running, hoping they can find it. The Union troops won’t hurt them, but they’ll never believe it. So they’ll run in fear, believing Yankees are fiends with horns and hoofs.”

“Yankees aren’t devils,” she said with a grin. “The worst you can say is they have terrible accents and bad manners.”

“Ah, spoken like a true Southerner.”

57

Richmond, Virginia, April 1, 1865

C
harlotte had stripped
in the kitchen and taken a bath in a wash tub at the back of the room. She asked the servants to burn the uniform. She never wanted to wear the damn thing again. The women had hovered over her, scrubbed her clean, dried, and dressed her. While they took extraordinary care to put her right again, the excruciating pain lodged in her heart couldn’t be washed clean. The death and dying at the Battle of Cedar Creek had destroyed most of her romantic illusions about the Civil War. Castle Thunder destroyed the rest.

Jack had encouraged her to rest, to prepare for the long night ahead, but she couldn’t. She had learned as an intern, resident, and then as a practicing physician, to work through long, sleepless shifts. She could function well, despite being exhausted.

The parlor door was closed, but she could still hear Jack’s crisp, cultivated voice. He must be talking to Elizabeth.

She rapped her knuckles against the paneled wood before sliding the heavy doors open. Candles guttered in the sconces on the wall and flickered from candles placed around the room. Charlotte shied away from shadowy corners and sat closer to the brick hearth, where a warm fire popped and crackled. Knitting her thoughts into coherent sentences had taken some time, but she was now ready to answer their questions about what happened at the prison.

Jack’s mouth twitched a little when she entered. His expression assured her he was glad to see her composed, and he wasn’t going to make a fuss over her decision to come down instead of resting.

“Whiskey?” he asked.

She settled into the wingback chair. “Make it a double.”

He handed Charlotte a whiskey and Elizabeth a sherry. Charlotte passed the crystal under her nose briefly, taking an appreciative whiff of the amber liquid, and then sipped. Hot and delicious warmth started in her throat and spread down into her chest.

“Hmm. That’s good.”

Jack’s long fingers curved lightly around the base of his glass. His expression turned contemplative. He would wait and not push her, although Charlotte knew both Jack and Elizabeth were anxious for her report.

The odd moment of expectant silence ended when Charlotte cleared her throat roughly. “The deprivation was worse than I could have imagined. I counted fifty-two men in sick bay suffering from dysentery, malnutrition, pneumonia and a host of other diseases. Several had infected wounds, but most were dying from secondary contagious diseases. I’d say a half to two-thirds won’t survive the night. Leaving a message for Braham with one of those moribund patients was impossible. They were barely coherent. When I realized I had no other option, I insisted on going to the cells used for solitary confinement.”