Traces of Mercy (31 page)

The guards yanked Elijah by the arm. “Let’s go, Captain,” one of them said.

“Elijah!”

John Henderson was striding toward him with the governor right on his heels. “This better be good,” John said through clenched teeth. “My reputation is on the line here.”

Governor Fletcher stopped just a foot from Elijah and nodded at the guards. “Turn ’im loose.”

Elijah looked up at the gallows, where Mercy was being led from the platform.

“Your actions here today are outrageous, Captain,” Governor Fletcher continued. “I was a colonel before I was governor, and I’m here to tell you, this could warrant a court-martial.”

“I’m aware of your service record, sir,” Elijah responded. “I’ve heard of your bravery at Chickasaw and Chattanooga. I know you to be a man who abhors injustice—and that’s what it will be if you hang that woman today.”

Governor Fletcher stared at him.

“Fifteen minutes, Governor. Give me fifteen minutes to tell you what I know,” Elijah said.

Governor Fletcher looked at the guards still surrounding Elijah. “We’ll use the warden’s office.”

It was an hour later when Judge Young, Prosecutor Don Shepherd, and Mercy’s attorney, Frank Collins, all arrived after being summoned to join Elijah, Henderson, and Governor Fletcher in the warden’s office. Elijah sat in a chair against the wall, his arms resting across his knees, his head sagging in exhaustion. A final tap on the door admitted Charles and Rand Prescott to the room.

They both looked surprised when they saw the group of men waiting for them. “We came as quick as we could,” Charles said. “Governor, what’s this about?”

“Captain Hale is convinced we were about to hang an innocent woman,” Governor Fletcher said.

“Innocent?” Rand asked. “Perhaps you should have taken the time to catch up on your reading, Hale! Mercy’s own journal is proof of her guilt.”

Judge Young held up his hands. “We’ve agreed to hear him out, Rand.”

“Am I the only one here who remembers that a jury of her peers found her guilty of treason?” Don Shepherd asked.

Elijah got to his feet, three days of beard growth on his chin, his eyes bloodshot and tired. He managed to square his shoulders as he faced Rand.

“They didn’t have all the evidence,” Elijah said.

“I’d say it’s a little too late for that now, Captain,” Shepherd said.

“She’s not dead yet, Mr. Shepherd,” the judge said. “I want to hear what he has to say.”

“Go ahead, Captain,” Governor Fletcher said. “Tell me why I stopped an execution today.”

“The first time I met Mercy wasn’t that night at your engagement party,” Elijah said, looking at Rand. “I’d met her months prior—on a battlefield in Tennessee.”

Elijah went on to tell the story of the day his brother died. The day his own life had been spared by Mercy. And he told them about the day he paid a visit to an excited bride-to-be and shattered her dreams of the future by insisting she tell the truth about a past she couldn’t remember.

“You’re lying,” Rand said.

Elijah shook his head. “No. I wish to God I’d never seen Mercy again after that day in battle. But I did. When I recognized her, I wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth about her amnesia, but I quickly came to believe she was.”

“Her journal says she remembers being a soldier,” Rand said.

“No,” Frank Collins said. “All it says is that she
knows
she was a Confederate soldier—but now we know that’s only because Captain Hale told her. There is never any mention of her memory returning.”

“She plotted to commit murder—to kill a sitting member of our government,” Charles said. “Surely no one here has forgotten that!”

“Her entries never refer to the congressman by name,” Collins said. “They only say
he
.”

“She admitted that she started the fire that could have burned down John and Mary’s house,” Charles said.

“She wasn’t after John,” Elijah said. “She planned to kill me. I knew her past and had threatened to expose her. With me out of the way, she could still marry Rand and keep the secret.”

“Well, then, by all means, let’s stop her punishment and throw her a party,” Charles said.

“The point is that we can’t execute a young woman for treason if she didn’t intend to actually kill a government official,” Judge Young said.

Rand pointed at Elijah. “Hale just said she planned to kill him. He’s a member of the military—doesn’t that make him a government official?”

“Admittedly, there is a gray area about that, but in my interpretation of the law, it has to be a duly elected member of the government that is killed or threatened before it constitutes treason. Captain Hale volunteered for his post.”

“She still planned to kill a man.”

“She changed her mind,” Elijah said.

“We found the evidence that says otherwise,” Shepherd said. “We have the round she fired.”

“I won’t argue with the fact that she fired,” Elijah said. “But I am standing here to tell you, gentlemen, if Mercy had truly wanted me to die—I would be dead.”

“She missed, is all!” Rand said. “She was too far away to hit her target. That is why you’re here, Hale. Not out of some eleventh-hour cry of conscience on Mercy’s part.”

Hale shook his head. “No. She’s too good. Too accurate. She changed her mind and spared my life—for the second time, I might add. Did she hate me? Yes. Why wouldn’t she? I threatened to take away all her happiness by insisting she reveal a truth about herself that she didn’t even remember. She was panicked, backed into a corner—and the clock was ticking toward your wedding. I had promised her I would seek you out and tell you myself, Rand, if she didn’t.”

“So what you’re saying is that while she planned to kill you,” John said, “she made it appear as though she meant to kill me. She wanted everyone to think she had it in for me because of my allegiance and support of the North.”

Hale nodded. “She is guilty of plotting and planning revenge, Governor,” he said, looking at Fletcher, “but you can’t execute a woman for that. I would wager there’s not a man among us who hasn’t wished someone dead at one time or another.”

“I would have to agree with Captain Hale,” the judge said. “If what he says is true, and Mercy did not intend to kill the congressman, then hanging her is out of the question. Can you imagine the uproar among Southern sympathizers if it ever got out we hung an innocent woman?”

“It might be parallel to the uproar that’s already happened because she wasn’t hung this morning,” Shepherd said. “The Radicals were out for blood, gentlemen, and they didn’t get it. There have been some documented cases of women masquerading as male soldiers, and that in and of itself is disturbing, but this case escalates the degree of deception—and the thirst for revenge—even further. A Confederate soldier who was about to marry the son of one of the Union’s biggest supporters! I’ve already heard rumblings from the underground groups that go after Confederates who’ve stayed true to the Southern cause. It won’t matter now to them if she’s found to be innocent. They won’t believe it.”

“Who says she is innocent?” Charles demanded. “There’s still no proof.”

“That’s right, Hale. Do you think we’re just going to take your story as gospel, turn her loose, and let her go on her merry little way after all the misery she has put me—us—through?” Rand asked.

“He’s right, Captain,” Judge Young said. “I can’t just let her go because
you
had a bout with your own conscience and want me to free her. We live in a civilized society with laws against taking matters into your own hands when you feel threatened.”

“I would ask everyone in this room to remember that our civilized society just came through a bloody war because a way of life was threatened,” Elijah said.

“The bottom line isn’t that we have her plans on paper, or even that she set a fire that did minimal damage to some property. The fact that we have the minié ball she fired still screams intent to kill,” Don Shepherd said. “You are here, Captain, because she missed.”

“She does
not
miss,” Elijah said. “And if you’ll let me—I can prove it.”

The men stared at him, but it was John Henderson who broke the silence. “What exactly are you proposing, Elijah?”

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-
F
IVE

The police wagon carrying Mercy came to an abrupt stop.

One of the armed guards opened the bars on the back of the wagon.

“Let’s go,” he ordered.

“Where are we?” she asked, not moving.

“Jake’s Meadow,” he answered. “Let’s go. Now.”

The handcuffs on her wrists made stepping out of the wagon awkward. The guard held her arm and kept her steady until her feet were planted firmly on the ground. She looked at the guard.

“What am I doing here?” she asked. He looked over her shoulder, and she turned to follow his eye line. There were men. A group of men standing and chatting together while they stared at her. She moaned out loud. Could they really be so cruel as to stop short of hanging her only to bring her to the middle of nowhere so they could take their time killing her? Or maybe death would be kinder than something else they might have planned. Her mind refused to participate in the rest of the horrible thoughts trying to push their way through. Instead, she focused on a man in the group with streaks of gray in his hair and a dark beard—the same man who’d stood on the platform of the gallows earlier that day.

He looks nice
, she thought, as she turned her back on reality and closed her eyes.
He looks like a father should look
. She saw herself as a little girl, wearing a pinafore and shiny black shoes, ringlets cascading around her shoulders. A man lifted her off her feet and settled her on his knee, and though she couldn’t see his face, she could smell pipe tobacco and soap. He hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her close and read from a book of fairy tales that made her smile when he made up voices. She felt so safe. So loved. She sucked in her breath and didn’t dare move lest the memory disappear.

“Mercy?”

She felt herself jarred back to the present by a voice she never thought she’d hear again. Her eyes opened to see Captain Elijah Hale standing in front of her—or was this just another cruel joke of her mind?

“Mercy? Are you all right?”

Mirages didn’t speak. She narrowed her eyes. “I haven’t been all right since the day I met you, Captain.” Her voice trembled, but whether from hate or fear she had no idea. At the moment, she had plenty of both.

“I didn’t know about the trial until it was over,” Elijah said, “or I would have come sooner.”

“To see the spectacle—or gloat at the sentence?”

“To set the record straight,” he said.

Her hand actually ached to slap him. To hit him and hurt him and make him pay for all the ways he’d ruined her life. But instead, she looked around. “What is this? Why am I here?”

Frank Collins and the man with the beard approached her. “Mercy, this is Governor Fletcher. He stayed your execution based on some new evidence that Captain Hale brought forth,” Frank said.

“Hale says you’re a crack shot, young lady. That you can hit any—and I do mean any—target you set out to hit.”

She refused to look at Elijah. “What does that matter?”

“If you can hit anything you’re aiming at, Mercy,” Frank said, “then the court will have to concede that Captain Hale is alive not because you
missed
him when you fired that gun—but because you couldn’t go through with your plan to kill him.”

Mercy swallowed hard. “You mean Congressman Henderson.”

Frank shook his head. “Captain Hale told us how he pressured you into telling Rand the truth. He has convinced us that he was the one you planned to kill.”

Her eyes cut to Hale of their own accord, but there was no denial in them.

“Why didn’t you tell them?” Elijah asked.

She stared at him. “One of the problems with a lie is that once you change your story, which lie will be believed?”

The governor cleared his throat. “There can be no lying your way out of today, young lady. Today is all about proof. There is a no-trespassing sign about a hundred yards that direction.” He pointed toward the north end of the meadow. “See if you can hit it.”

The governor nodded at one of the guards, who produced a key to unlock her handcuffs. “Bear in mind that if you so much as turn that rifle even a fraction of an inch toward any of the men standing here today, I’ve given standing orders to shoot you.”

She nodded and looked over at the men who were still watching her. Rand’s face remained impassive, but the other men almost looked as if they were watching some kind of sport. Don Shepherd was offering the judge a cigar, and Charles had clamped his pipe between his teeth.

With the cuffs off, she rubbed the soreness from her wrists. She still wore the mercy medallion, and her hand went to close around the medal. She saw Elijah’s eyes go to the medal as he held out the rifle. “It’s loaded.”

He’s actually handing me a loaded gun
, she thought, turning loose of the medal and reaching out a shaking hand to take the rifle. “I’m not sure … I’m exhausted.”