When This Cruel War Is Over (16 page)

Read When This Cruel War Is Over Online

Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: When This Cruel War Is Over
3.94Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“DO YOU STILL LOVE THAT fellow?”
Paul's voice hissed out of the gray dawnlight filling Janet Todd's bedroom. She wondered if this was what bullets sounded like in a battle. Within the sibilance was a kind of death or at the very least disaster—crippling wounds, incomprehensible pain.
“I don't think I ever loved him,” Janet said, struggling to keep her voice calm.
Gabriel Todd had wisely dissolved last night's conclave as soon as Adam Jameson and his father departed. The Sons of Liberty colonels had ridden off to their farms. Paul had said little or nothing while Gabriel Todd tried to apologize for Adam's hostile behavior. Paul abruptly objected to Rogers Jameson's plan to attack Keyport and kill Henry Gentry and the black troopers. Paul insisted they should be given a chance to surrender. He argued it would turn northern opinion against the western confederacy if the blacks were slaughtered. Colonel Todd agreed with him and they had all gone to bed.
Janet had been awake most of the night struggling with the appalling problem Adam Jameson presented. So, apparently, had Paul. He was standing in the doorway of her room, fully dressed.
“The expression on your face—as he left with his father—”
“I pitied him. Love and pity are very different things. Surely you must have felt some sympathy for him. He was so desperate—so exhausted.”
“I was too busy dealing with his unmistakable desire to shoot me.”
The war. It was rampant even in Hopemont's chaste dining room when men who had killed in its name met. That only made it more imperative to end the murderous struggle as soon as possible.
“I think you'd better go see him today and tell him very frankly what's happened to your affections,” Paul said. “Tell him you're going to marry me as soon as the war ends. Otherwise we'll wind up with pistols at ten paces—and only one of us will walk away.”
“I—I wouldn't let either of you do such a thing!”
“Once he issues a challenge there won't be much you can do or say.”
She sensed it was time for her to say she loved him. But she found the words curiously elusive: “I'll go see Adam immediately after breakfast. I'll make sure no such horror ever happens.”
“While you're there, you might ask him some practical questions. Will he bring any artillery with him, if and when he comes? Will he bring ammunition for the guns and for his cavalrymen? I'm frankly rather appalled at the haphazard way this thing is being planned.”
He was profoundly angry with her. Janet found it hard to resist a reciprocal anger. “Do you feel I've been dishonest with you about Adam?” she asked.
“I think you might have been a bit more explicit about your arrangement with him.”
“I never dreamt he'd appear this way. I thought I had time.”
“Maybe you thought the war would solve your problem.”
“You mean—one of you might be killed?”
“One—or both. There's something of the adventuress in you. I sensed that from the start. It was another reason for loving you, as far as I was concerned. I've never had much interest in subservient women.”
He strode to her bed and lifted her in his arms for a possessive kiss. She did not—or could not—respond. “Please go back to your room,” she said. “I'm sure you've already awakened Lucy. If Father or one of the other servants found you here it would be very embarrassing. He wants to believe you're risking everything for a promise.”
“Lucy's not here. I
am
risking everything for a promise. The promise of years and years of happiness to come.”
Again, she sensed he wanted an affirmation from her. He wanted her to say she shared that wish. He was trying once more to center their love on itself, to remove it from this conspiratorial web she had woven around it. But something in the droop of Adam Jameson's big head as he trudged down the hall prevented Janet from responding. She let Paul go back to his bedroom without another word.
Ten minutes later, Lucy slipped into the room. She told Janet she had gone to see her mother, Lillibet, after Janet went to bed. “She's feelin' so poorly I stayed de night with her.”
Janet told Lucy to get out her gray riding habit and tell Sammy, Hopemont's groom, to saddle her favorite horse, the big roan named Trumpeter. At breakfast, Paul had little to say to Colonel Todd and his devious daughter. Her father talked of getting to work on a plan of campaign. He had maps of Indiana in his library. He would tell Paul where the Sons of Liberty planned to gather in each county. With minimal enthusiasm Paul agreed to join him.
Sammy had Trumpeter waiting at the front door. Janet rode along the river road, hoping to catch a few breaths of cool air from the Ohio. But the July sun was relentless. Even at a walk, Trumpeter's neck and flanks were soon streaming sweat. Her riding habit became a
kind of hair shirt. She found herself wishing she were twelve years old again. Until that age, she rode astride like a boy, her skirt hiked up to her knees. Then her mother decreed it was time to make a lady of her and she was ordered to sit sidesaddle in these hot riding habits.
At last Rose Hill appeared on its knoll overlooking the Ohio. She rode up a driveway of cottonwoods a generation older than Hopemont's. Amelia Conway Jameson's family had been one of the first to settle this part of Kentucky. The stately brick mansion, with its eight limestone chimneys, had replaced an earlier house around the same time that Janet's grandfather built Hopemont.
Janet was greeted in the front hall by Robin Jameson, Adam's younger brother. Two beings more unlike would be hard to imagine. Robin was about half Adam's size, with a slim almost fragile body and a face that had an uncanny resemblance to Thomas Jefferson—the same high cheekbones, red hair and sharp features. One of Jefferson's nephews had emigrated to Kentucky before the turn of the century and married into the Conway family.
“Janet darling!” Robin said. “What brings you here in such a
fetching
outfit?”
“I've come to see Adam,” she said.
“The family hero is still snoring. He and Father stayed up until dawn killing a bottle of bourbon.”
“Is your mother at home?”
“She's down in the slave quarters administering the latest formula for worms. We're having an epidemic.”
“Could you tell Adam I'm here?”
Robin summoned one of the house servants and told her to wake up Colonel Jameson. “In the meantime you can entertain
me
,” he said, gesturing Janet into one of the small parlors off the front hall. “What's this I've heard about you being plighted to a Yankee?”
“Who told you that?” Janet asked.
“One of your niggers told one of ours. Your Lucy, I suspect. She's down here all the time. It's all over the county by now.”
“There's absolutely nothin' to it. He's not a Yankee, in the first place. He's from New Jersey, a very pro-Southern state. He's been payin' some attention to me—that's all.”
Her face was hot. She was blushing. She was a wretched liar. Was she regretting what she had done with Paul? She suddenly saw the moral side of it. She had
wanted
him. She had yielded to that desire as much as to the wish to bring him into the conspiracy.
“Methinks you doth protest too much, dear Janet,” Robin said with a skeptical smile.
“I intend to do more than protest to Lucy. She's likely to get the whipping of her life.”
The front door slammed. Amelia Conway passed down the hall in an old calico dress. “Mother!” Robin called. “Look who's turned up for a visit.”
“Janet!” Amelia rushed into the parlor and kissed her on the cheek. “What a rare pleasure. You should have given me fair warning so I could put on some decent clothes. You've come to see Adam?”
“Yes,” Janet said.
“He'll be so pleased. I suppose he found you at your house last night?”
“Yes,” Janet said, growing more and more embarrassed. Amelia was beaming at her as if she were practically her daughter-in-law.
“He can't go out of the house in the daytime. Awful to think it, but there are people around here who would be glad to betray him.”
“The federals are offering two thousand dollars for him, dead or alive,” Robin said.
Scrunching his shoulders and slipping his hands between his legs, Robin smiled as if he found this idea more than a little amusing.
“It's not funny, Robin!” Amelia said.
“Of course not, Mother,” Robin said, hastily assuming a grave expression. “I just find it hard to believe—that anyone would want to kill my dear sweet brother.”
“I've told you many times, Robin—he loves you in spite of your—your oddities.”
Not for the first time, Janet sensed there were secrets inside the Jameson family that she did not want to explore. The father clearly detested his second son. At sixteen, their sister, Alicia, had married a forty-year-old Keyport merchant, and she seldom if ever visited her parents. Janet could not comprehend how someone as elegant, as refined as Amelia Conway had married an oaf like Rogers Jameson.
Maybe she had just wanted him
, whispered the voice that had just convicted Janet of sinning with Paul. She angrily rejected this inner antagonist She was a leftover from her devout teenage years at St. Mary-of-the-Woods.
“I sent Betsy up to wake Adam,” Robin said.
“I'll make sure he got the message,” Amelia said.
She left them in the side parlor. Robin pulled a book off the shelf and offered it to Janet. “Have you seen these poems by the marvelous new English poet, Algernon Swinburne?”
“I'm afraid I haven't read much poetry lately,” she said.
“There's one that could be an elegy for the South. It's a lament for Itylus, the child accidentally slain by his mother, Aedon, the queen of Thebes. If you remember your mythology, she mourned him so bitterly, the gods changed her into a nightingale. Listen to this.
“‘O swallow, swallow, O fair swift swallow
Why wilt thou fly after spring to the south
The soft south whither thy heart is set?
Shall not the grief of the old time follow?
Shall not the song thereof cleave to thy mouth?
Hast thou forgotten ere I forget?'”
“There's no need for elegies yet,” Janet said.
“Oh no? Why is my brother hiding in his own house like a fugitive?”
“Wars are won by the winner of the last battle,” Janet replied.
“I didn't realize you'd become so bloodthirsty, dear Janet. Maybe you and the behemoth will make a perfect match, after all. I see the whole thing as mass insanity on both sides.”
“I see it as a struggle for civilization! Our civilization, the one our parents, our grandparents, our ancestors created—”
“You're wrong, dear Janet. Utterly, totally wrong. I hope you don't end up singing—”
He glanced at the book.
“‘O swallow sister, O fleeting swallow
My heart in me is a molten ember
And over my head the waves have met.'”
Unnameable fear swept Janet's mind and body. Was she moving into a future beyond her control? She gazed into Robin Jameson's Jeffersonian face and wondered if he was one of those prophets who are not honored in their own country.
“What the hell's this?”
Adam towered over them in his worn gray uniform. He snatched the book out of Robin's hand. “Algernon Swineburn?” he said, pronouncing the last name as if the writer were part pig. “There's a good name for a poet.”
“He's quite talented,” Robin said.
“Get out of here, little sister,” Adam said. “Janet and I need to talk.”
“Sticks and stones can break my bones—and words can also hurt me,” Robin murmured. “I hope you can stay for dinner, Janet.”
“I doubt if I can, thank you,” she said.
Adam slouched in the chair Robin had vacated, engulfing it. His beard made it impossible to read his expression. “Sorry about the way I acted last night. I was a little out of my head.”
“I came over to clear up certain things, Adam.”
“You don't have to clear up anythin'. I'm going to take care of that myself.”
“What do you mean?”
“Pompey's on his way to Hopemont with a challenge for Major Stapleton. It expresses my contempt for a man who'd seduce the affections of a woman while the man she's pledged to marry is fightin' a war he's too cowardly to go anywhere near.”

Other books

Circles by Marilyn Sachs
The Other Half of Me by Emily Franklin
Chains Of Command by Graham McNeill
The Best Bet by Roman, Hebby
Pulse by Edna Buchanan
Over You by Lucy Diamond
Barefoot in the Head by Brian W. Aldiss
This Is What I Want to Tell You by Heather Duffy Stone