Widow of Gettysburg (38 page)

She didn’t.

This isn’t supposed to happen.
Warning clanged in his mind, but his body didn’t listen. Liberty leaned into his kiss, pressed her hands against the sandpaper of his jaw before stroking down his neck to his shoulders and circling his neck. With every touch, she sent fire coursing through
his veins. His fingers caressed the nape of her neck before sliding down her back and curving around her waist. Her mouth was wine, and he drank deeper, as if he could not get enough of her. This was not brotherly love.

I shouldn’t do this. I’m taking advantage of her.
Placing his hands on her shoulders, he pulled back. “Liberty, I—” Her pupils were large as she looked into his eyes, and he felt that she was seeing clear through his soul. The end of her nose was pink, her full lips slightly parted. The passion rising up in him took his breath away—and any words right with it.

“You what?”

He shook his head and drew her closer, inhaling the peppermint oil scent of her skin. “I don’t recall,” he whispered in her ear.

But he did. If he loved her, he should put her interests above his. And he was not in Liberty’s best interests. The old rhyme chanted in his mind:
Silas Ford, man of the Lord, took slaves to bed … took slaves to bed … took slaves to bed …

He jerked back, and flung her hands away. Groaning, he sunk his head in his hands. What had he done? Was his mother right about him?
You’re no better than your father!
She had screamed at him before ordering him to leave her home.
Full of lust, knowing nothing of love!

Silas couldn’t trust himself. The force of his desire frightened him. He wanted more than her lips. He wanted to explore her throat, her ear lobes, her hair. Silas pushed her away to protect her from his own desire. If he was just like his father, then his mother was right. No woman would be safe around him. And the one thing he wanted most was to make sure Liberty Holloway was safe.

He had failed.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Liberty’s pulse pounded in her ears as she pulled away from Silas, her hands still warm from the heat of his body.

“You’re sorry?
”

Cicadas whirred in her ears, echoing the thrumming of her heart.

Whether he was sorry for kissing her, or sorry for pushing her away, she could only guess.

“I lost my head.” Silas leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You said—”

“I said you are loved.” His face was flushed, his lips swollen. “You are. Lots of people care about you. Look how much good you’ve done here.”

Hurt compressed into anger, and she smacked him clean across his face. “Then I better get back to the ones who
care.
”

Liberty jumped to her feet and did not help him do the same. “I have work to do. Don’t waste my time again.” She hiked up the ruffled hem of her skirt, trotted down the steps and did not look back. Salty tears streamed down her face, tasting of humiliation.

Liberty pressed her fingers to her lips as she hurried toward the summer kitchen. Her mouth still burned from the heat of his kiss. She may have been married once, but she had never felt the fire of passion like that before—from a man, or from herself. She felt like her body would have melted into his like wax under a seal.

And he was sorry.
Well, so am I.
She was sorry she cared about a Southerner so much, sorry she’d deceived herself into believing Silas Ford was trustworthy—and sorry she now knew what it meant to be truly kissed. Most of all, she was sorry that longing awakened inside her.
He’s like a brother to me
, she once told Bella. She’d never say that again.

Myrtle Henderson stepped into her path. “What happened?” She swiveled to look past Liberty toward the porch. “What did you do to Silas Ford? He’s just sitting there, holding his cheek.”

Liberty brushed past her, the sunbaked ruts in the earth punching against the soles of her feet.

“But what did you do to Silas Ford?” Myrtle cried out again, her voice sharper this time.

Liberty had no answer.

And she told
me
to stay away from him?
Bewildered, anger boiled in Myrtle until it burst out of her in a shout. “Liberty Holloway,
you
stay away from Silas Ford!”

Liberty whipped around to face her, fire flashing in her eyes. “What did you say?”

A lump bobbed in Myrtle’s throat. She knew what it felt like to never have anyone defend her. She would stand up for Silas. She had to. “I’m not the only one who hurt him, you know.”

Liberty stared at her, and Myrtle’s skin crawled with the familiar sensation of being thought an idiot. Liberty pressed a hand to her forehead and sighed, her shoulders slumping. Finally, she looked up, eyes rimmed in red. “Myrtle, please go boil the water. You know as well as anyone that if we drink it untreated, we’ll grow sick from the contamination from all the corpses near the water source. You have a very important job. A lot of lives depend on you. All right?”

Myrtle watched her walk away, her head held high while her skirt dragged in the dirt like anyone else’s. Liberty was not so different from Myrtle.

An idea formed in her mind, and anger crystallized into resolve. She would follow orders. She would boil water. For the patients.

After all, a lot of lives depend on me.

Including Liberty’s.

Bella Jamison’s house felt like a tomb: hot, dark, and laced with stink. Her windows were closed to keep out the rancid odors lingering in the town, and her shutters were closed to block the sun. But nothing could keep out the blistering heat.

Back aching, and face damp with sweat, Bella stood over her ironing table and pressed the wrinkles out of a dress. She was lucky, she knew, that
her one-week absence had cost her no more than a fierce reprimand from her employer. Truth was, Mrs. Shriver was desperate for help, and would not fire Bella just to make a point. When Mrs. Shriver had returned home, she found it had been used by Rebel sharpshooters. Two ten-inch holes had been punched through the attic walls for their guns. Blood had congealed on the floorboards, and not a crumb of food had been left in the kitchen or garden. Anything valuable—clothing, linens, tools, curtains, money, silver, liquor—was either gone or destroyed. Both the home and the saloon had been used as hospital.

The patients were gone now, either en route to prisons or evacuated to Camp Letterman, a general hospital erected by the Union army a mile north of town. The wounded had been culled from all private homes by now, and the women scrubbed away at the residue of war.

A sharp knock jerked Bella’s attention to the door. Setting her iron back on the stovetop, she opened the door, and the gust of hot air, poisoned with the aftermath of battle, nearly knocked her back.

“Mr. Caldwell!” She covered her nose and mouth with her hand, but stepped aside for him to enter. She shut the door quickly behind him.

His red-orange hair splayed up from his head, evidence he’d been raking his hand through it again. Hat in his hands, the reporter swept a glance over her home.

“You have been spared much, I see.”

“My garden suffered the worst. The same is true for most of my neighbors, but many of them still have not come home.” Some of them never would. The image of several colored folks being marched out of Gettysburg on July 1 was seared on her memory. Thank God at least Aunt Hester had escaped. She’d hid in the belfry of one of the churches for three nights and two days before coming out again.

Bella smoothed her apron over her dress. “What can I do for you?”

“Please, sit down.”

Her hackles raised. “I can stand just fine.”

Harrison reached into his knapsack and tossed a book on the
kitchen table, the cover of which was soiled, the corners bent and frayed. “Read much?”

She narrowed her eyes at him, then edged closer to the table, read the title of the book.
Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839.
By Frances Ann Kemble.

Her heart leapt into her throat. Wood scraped on wood as Harrison slid the chair out from the table and gently guided Bella into it.

“I know who you are, Mrs. Jamison.” He sat across from her and leaned forward over the red-and-white checked tablecloth.

“You do not know me.”

“I know where you came from, which means I know how far you’ve come to get to where you are today.”

She shook her head. He knew nothing.

“You can’t deny it. It’s right here.” He thumped the cover of the book with his finger. “Your mother’s abuse at the hands of Roswell King Junior. The way you tried to stop him, but became his special pet instead. Your plea to Fanny to teach you to read and write and speak like her, your twin sister’s disinterest in anything but her own babies.”

“That proves nothing. You don’t know that’s me.”

“Your name is in the book, Bella. It was your twin, Daphne, I met at the Weeping Time.”

Her breath seized.
Was she well? Where did she go?
her heart cried out. But, “There is more than one Bella in the world, you know.”

He craned his neck to look past her to the front room. Light sparked in his brown eyes. “Shall we sit somewhere more comfortable?”

He walked directly to the couch and lifted off an old quilt, skimming every patch with his fingertip. Until stopping on the red and cream pinstripe flannel. He looked up at her then, the devil’s gleam in his eyes. “I thought so.”

Heat crawled up Bella’s neck. “You thought
what
, Mr. Caldwell?” He could not know. He could not know anything.

“‘Nearly all the women beg for flannel, and my bolt of red and
cream pinstripe is almost gone.’ Page one hundred twelve,
Journal of a Residence.
”

“Pinstripe flannel is not so very unique.” Bella’s chest thrust in and out with breath. She pulled at the collar of her dress.

“But red and cream pinstripe of the same shade, aged exactly the same over the last twenty years?”

Perspiration filmed her face, and she dabbed it with the edge of her apron.

“I have seen this fabric one other place. Holloway Farm. Did you know Liberty cut up an old quilt to fashion a pad for the crutch of a Rebel patient? His name is Silas Ford, I believe.”

She stared at Harrison’s freckle-sprayed face and tried to read it the way he was certainly trying to read hers. He wanted her to admit Liberty was her daughter. But what proof could he have,
real
proof? Perhaps he was even guessing about the piece of flannel. He was a reporter. He hounded up stories for a living.

Bella swallowed hard. “Coincidence.” She would not betray her daughter, no matter how her heart was breaking.

Harrison dropped the quilt back on the couch. “I spoke with Lt. Holmes. Pierce Butler Holmes?”

“He was crazy with chloroform, you know.”

Harrison crossed back to the kitchen and slacked a hip against the sideboard, hands in his pockets. “No. I mean I found him, at West’s Building Hospital in Baltimore, last week. He’s recovering nicely, by the way.”

“Stop.”

“I asked him about you. Turns out he wasn’t just mad with drug, after all.”

“Stop talking.”

“He remembers you, Bella, because you were about the same age, growing up in very different worlds, but inextricably linked by the physician—his father—who cared for all the Butler slaves. Including your mother, after confinements and the beatings she endured from
King’s wife. Including you, after your own row with Roswell King Jr., himself.”

At the mere mention of the memory, the tangled mass of scar tissue ached on Bella’s back. “Leave,” she gasped.

He held up his hands. “He told me you were with child, about to give birth, when you ‘and your increase’ were sold to a man in Virginia named Gideon Holloway. The year was 1843. Liberty Holloway turned twenty this month, didn’t she? It’s quite a story, to hear him tell it. A story that even I could not make up. And if you’re wondering, yes, he went on the record with that. Even better—Pierce Butler himself was there visiting Holmes too, along with his daughter Frances. Butler confirmed the sale.”