Trail Angel (23 page)

“That's the part you
should
read,” Cassandra McLean said with more than a hint of naughtiness. The other girls pleaded, and Rebecca made a show of appearing reluctant before she continued.

“My dearest Rebecca, my love for you burns so hot within me that I feel I am waterproof. The rain may fall, but it merely sizzles and smokes away, no more dampening my clothes than my ardor for you.”

Oh, good Lord.
Annabelle focused on her knitting. She was not as gifted a seamstress as the other ladies, but she had vowed to knit a pair of socks every day for the soldiers.

After the women finished tittering about Rebecca's letter, Cassandra asked if Annabelle had anything to read. It was just like her to stir up trouble. Cassandra had been Annabelle's chief rival for Richard. If she felt outclassed by that setback, her subsequent marriage and the birth of two sons were ample compensation.
It's too bad growing bottom-heavy after the birth of her boys prevents her from being charitable about her good fortune.

“I fear I don't,” Annabelle said, careful not to sound irritated by the question. “You know Richard is in the west, and the mail service is not reliable since New Orleans fell.”

Cassandra acted surprised, but it was always the same. Richard only wrote at planting or harvesting time. He would be furious to know Annabelle ordered the men to plant crops they could harvest to feed armies and besieged cities. She told herself she wasn't defying her husband so much as relying on her judgment during his absence. He lacked the perspective to understand the impracticality of cotton so long as the Union blockaded the harbor.

Disputes over planting were the least of Annabelle's problems with Richard. She remembered when she had been like Rebecca, starry-eyed and in love with the idea of being loved. Richard was quite the prize: a handsome man with a respected name and heir to one of South Carolina's largest plantations. He hadn't pursued Annabelle with the poetic fervor of Rebecca's beau because he didn't have to. Richard Holcombe was accustomed to getting what he wanted.

They hadn't been married long before Annabelle realized Richard's ardor had been motivated less by her charms than her father's money and a wish to secure his inheritance. Until the marriage, Richard had debts that would have shamed him in his father's eyes. Annabelle convinced herself their relationship would be different once she gave him a son. Yet he grew cooler toward her once his father died, even after she became pregnant.

The riding accident made for a complete break between them.

Richard warned Annabelle not to ride, but it was one of her few pleasures and her doctor assured her the exercise would be good for her and the baby at that early stage. Harry, the slave boy who worked in the stables, must not have secured the balance girth that day. He was usually so careful about such things.

The fall would have been nothing if not for the baby, more like slipping from the horse's back than falling, she told Richard later. She felt no ill effects, but he insisted she take to bed. He never left her side over the long days that followed and spared no expense in seeing to her care, sending off for a specialist from Savannah. The baby seemed fine at first. Only later the doctor explained how the fall caused irreparable harm to the child, making the miscarriage inevitable. With Annabelle in a laudanum fog, Richard told her the doctor's damning verdict: because of her injuries, she would never conceive.

From that day, Richard looked at her as if she were a murderer. Where he had been indifferent before, he grew practically hostile. Worst of all, Annabelle couldn't blame him. It
was
her fault. For a moment, while bedridden, when Richard held her hand and whispered reassurances, she'd been
glad
for the fall. She still expected the baby would be fine, that the bruises and wound to her pride would be a small price to pay for the demonstration of Richard's feelings. After losing the baby, she couldn't look at Richard without seeing an accusation in his eyes, guilt cutting through her like a rapier.

She'd been unable to tell her parents any of this. Richard had urged her not to tell them of the pregnancy until she was showing. The fall happened before that, during the harvest when her parents were away from Charleston. Even afterwards, Annabelle couldn't share the news with them. She was the smart one. She was the gifted one. She was the pretty one. She was the
perfect
one. Her brothers got into trouble and came away even more loved for it. Annabelle's way to be sure of her parents' affections, especially her father's, was to never disappoint them. It was bad enough that Richard blamed her. She couldn't bear their disappointment as well.

Intelligence, strength, beauty—none of it mattered if Annabelle did not give her husband a son, or at least a daughter to whom he could bequeath his family's land. Within months, Richard spoke of selling the plantation and moving to Europe. Annabelle learned of his plans from her father, who heard it from business associates. She acted with her father as if she knew, as if part of Richard's schemes had been her idea, so that her father wouldn't suspect what she did: that Richard planned to leave her.

The war came upon them before sale of the land progressed beyond talk. Richard fulfilled his patriotic duty in raising a regiment of volunteers and riding off. It was going to be a quick war, everyone said, and Charleston would prosper even more as the business capital of a new Southern nation. With Richard gone, Annabelle proved capable of carrying out his affairs, perhaps even better than he, for no detail was unworthy of her attention.

When Caleb Williams brought back news of Richard's death, Annabelle did not grieve. She'd been mourning for her brothers, whose loss she felt keenly. Richard's death represented something different, something she dared tell no one, in particular the ladies at tea parties. Richard's death marked
her
emancipation. If the war hadn't gone so badly, she would have lived out her days contentedly. The last thing she needed was a man, and she'd been unable to tell her father or mother why no man—at least no man worth having—would want her.
Damaged goods.

Annabelle's bitterness toward sharp-tongued Cassandra McLean that day in Mrs. Huger's garden would be forgotten. Within three years, Cassandra would lose her husband on the battlefield and both boys to the sickness that swept through the city in the war's final year. Cassandra soon joined them, a death Annabelle's mother attributed to heartbreak.

They buried Cassandra in the white frock she wore at her engagement in a churchyard beside her husband and sons. Just before her death, as she lay wasting away, Cassandra spoke to Annabelle of her joy when her first son was born. It was before the war. Her husband was with her, and the idea of the lives that stretched before them in that moment created a sense of what she called “a perfect happiness.”

Annabelle mourned Cassandra's passing, but she did not pity her onetime rival.
How many people ever know a perfect happiness?
Annabelle never had, and on the day they buried Cassandra she expected she never would.

Annabelle and Josey lay together afterwards on a grassy spot where the bank rose steeply, shielding them from any prying eyes that might pass. Not that Annabelle worried. Her mind had been blessedly empty when Josey swept her in his arms and carried her from the river. There had been no time to think, only to feel, to react to his urgent need, a need she found rising within herself as well, as unexpected as it was welcome.

She smiled as she nestled her head against him. The sun dried their bodies, and the high grass protected them from the breeze that ran along the stream. Josey felt so warm against her and was so still she wondered if he slept. It amused her to think he could sleep while her mind buzzed like hummingbird wings.

She had never expected to be intimate with Josey. She had thought her fear too great to allow anything to happen. The darkness in Josey frightened her, especially when she thought of herself vulnerable to him. Yet there was a thoughtfulness to him, too. In all her flailing about in the water, he had even managed to save her precious soap.

Something shifted inside Annabelle when Josey carried her from the river. He had been hungry,
eager
for her, yet he acted with a gentleness she had never known with Richard. She responded to Josey's touch as she never had with her husband, so that
she
urged
him
on. His eyes as he entered her were filled with a tenderness she didn't know a man could possess. The painful thrusts she had come to expect from her husband, with Josey were like a gentle rocking, a motion as natural as waves lapping at the shore, filling her rather than penetrating her, his arms around her, his body against hers, enveloping her in warmth, comfort,
love
?

Then, a new urgency, not violent, but no longer gentle. Their movements faster, like racing heartbeats. Her back arching to meet him, her arms pulling him to her again and again, feeling him grow inside her in a final burst of pleasure.

It might have been a moment of perfect happiness if Annabelle could have kept her mind from wandering to the past— and what that might mean to her future. She stroked his hair, and he turned toward her, kissing her hand.

So he was lying there, just like her, his head filled with thoughts . . .
of what
? She feared asking. The poets never spoke of how fraught love could be for a woman. One moment Annabelle had been afraid of being with Josey. Now she feared being without him.
What if he doesn't feel as I do?
Perhaps he only wanted her body for what soldiers called “horizontal refreshment.”

Worst of all, he might really love her—until he learned she couldn't give him children. The thought terrified her. Rising on an elbow, Annabelle studied him. He looked younger without his clothes, his body as white as hers but harder, his bones and muscles creating sharp angles where hers curved. “Did you sleep?”

“Almost. I couldn't.” He turned to her. “I have to ask you something.”

He has to ask
me
something
?

“You don't regret what we've done?”

She almost thought he was joking. “Should I?”

Josey leaned on his elbow. With his free hand, he touched her shoulder tentatively, like reaching for a butterfly. “I hope not. I don't know what I would do if you regretted this.”

She sighed heavily, her relief confusing him, so she added, “I'm delighted this happened.”

It was his turn to sigh. “This changes things.”

She nodded.
I should tell him now.

“The war changed me,” he said. “I can't be the man I've been and be with you.”

She wasn't sure she understood. Wasn't sure it mattered.
He wants to be with me.
“You're not the man you were. I see the goodness in you. We can be anything we want to be.”

That was what she wanted. Everything was different here. Rules and expectations that seemed important back home didn't exist on the frontier. It was on her lips to tell him the rest, tell him now when the disappointment in his eyes could only wound. But Josey spoke first, his need for confession apparently greater than hers.

“I would be the man you make me want to be.”

Annabelle closed her eyes, hearing his words echo in her mind.
Can he really care for me the way I imagined love would be?
Josey looked at her, as if waiting for an answer. A moment of perfect happiness.
Why spoil it with premature confessions?
The sun shone on her back, she felt clean and warm and, what?
Loved.
That was the word.
This is how it's supposed to feel.
Annabelle leaned into him, her breath a whisper in his ear.

“How do I know all your pretty words won't flit away with the breeze once you've had what you want?”

“That's not how I am.”

Josey could be so earnest, he didn't always recognize when she teased. There was something solid about him that Annabelle liked. Her tongue flicked lightly against his ear. “A man can be hungry until he's fed. Then he can forget he ever wanted food.”

He leaned away, a crooked smile showing he was in on the jape. He rolled on top of her. “Until it's time for the next meal.” Annabelle felt him stir, and her legs opened to him like the petals of a flower to the sun.

The next day the wagons turned north, leaving behind the North Platte. Josey ranged farther ahead than usual, his task growing more difficult with every mile. Bozeman's trail was no more than worn buffalo and Indian paths across alkaline flats, tracing along coulees that wound through forbidding cliff faces. The route followed a more direct route to Montana, but there were no signposts—and they were drawing near the disputed lands of the Powder River country.

The sun was setting as Josey rode toward camp. Instead of picketing his horse, he rode directly to where a circle of men had gathered. As he dismounted, Josey overheard talk about how the teamster called Caleb was missing.