Читать книгу An Unexpected Wife - Cheryl Reavis - Страница 11

Chapter Three

“Miss Woodard! Where are you!” The fact that the question was whispered made it no less jarring.

Am I in a hospital? Robert thought. He tried to move, but he couldn’t somehow. Blankets, he decided, tucked in tight. Perhaps he was in a hospital after all—except that it didn’t smell like a hospital. It smelled like...

...coffee. Baked bread. Wood burning in a fireplace. Lavender sachet.

His head hurt—a lot, he soon realized. He managed to get one hand out from under the covers and reach up to touch his forehead.

Yes. Definitely a reason for the pain.

He finally opened his eyes. A fair-haired woman sat on a low stool in a patch of weak sunlight not far from his bed, her arms resting on her knees and her head down. He couldn’t see her face at all, only the top of her golden hair and the side of her neck. Was she praying? Weeping? He couldn’t decide.

“Miss Woodard!” the voice whispered fiercely right outside the door, making her jump.

She turned her head in his direction and was startled all over again to find him awake and looking at her.

She took a deep breath. “I’m hiding,” she said simply, keeping her voice low so as not to be heard on the other side of the door.

He thought it must be the truth, given the circumstances.

“What...have you...done?” he managed to ask, but he didn’t seem to be able to keep his eyes open long enough to hear the answer.

* * *

Kate took a hushed breath. He seemed to be sleeping again, and in that brief interlude of wakefulness, she didn’t think he had mistaken her for the still-mysterious Eleanor, despite his grogginess. She knew that the army surgeon had given him strong doses of laudanum—to help his body rest and to make his return to the living less troubled, he said. The surgeon hadn’t known that Robert Markham had already made his “return to the living,” and thus missed the irony of his remark.

She hardly dared move in case Maria’s brother was more awake than he seemed. She watched him closely instead. He was so thin—all muscle and sinew that stopped just short of gauntness. Both his eyes had blackened from the force of the fall in the hallway, and there was a swollen bruise on his forehead. He hadn’t been shaved. She tried to think if she’d ever been in the actual company of a man so in need of a good barbering.

No, she decided. She had not. She had seen unkempt men out and about, of course—on the streets of Philadelphia and here in Salisbury—but generally speaking, all the men she encountered socially were...presentable. The stubble of growth on Robert Markham’s face seemed so intimate somehow, as if he were in a state only his wife or his mother should see.

But still she didn’t leave the room. She looked at his hands instead, both of them resting on top of the latest warmed and double-folded army blanket the orderlies kept spread over him. The room was filled with the smell of slightly scorched wool.

His fingers moved randomly from time to time, trembling slightly whenever he lifted them up. She could see the heavy scarring on his knuckles, and she was sure Sergeant Major Perkins had been right. These were the kinds of scars that could have only come from fighting.

And rage.

I shouldn’t be here, she thought, Mrs. Kinnard or no Mrs. Kinnard.

But it was too late for that realization. He was awake again.

* * *

Robert stared in the woman’s direction and tried to get his vision to clear. When he finally focused, he could tell that she was the same woman he had seen earlier— in the same place—hiding, she’d said. Did he remember that right? Hiding?

She looked up at a small noise. She seemed only a little less startled to find him looking at her this time. “I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she said after a moment. “I’ll go—”

“I wish you...wouldn’t,” Robert said, his voice hoarse and his throat dry. “I...don’t seem to know...what has happened. Perhaps you could...help me with that.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m somewhat bewildered myself.”

“About what?”

“You, of course. You’re supposed to be dead.”

Robert looked away and swallowed heavily. He was so thirsty.

“Do you know where you are?” she asked, but he wasn’t ready to consider that detail quite yet.

“Is there some...water?” he asked.

“Oh. Yes. Of course.”

She rose from the footstool and moved to a small table near the bed. Someone had put a tray with a tin pitcher and a cup on it. She filled the cup with water, spilling a little as she did so. She hesitated a moment, before picking up one of several hollow quills used for drinking that had been left on the tray, then looked at it as if she wasn’t quite sure how she was going to manage to give him the water.

Robert watched as she carefully brought the cup of water to him. He could see that it was too full and that her hands trembled, but he didn’t say anything. As she came closer he could smell the scent of roses. How long had it been since he’d been this close to a woman who wore rosewater? He lifted his head to drink, his thirst making him forget the pain in his head. It intensified so, he couldn’t keep still. Water spilled on the blanket, more of it than he could manage to swallow.

Appropriate or not, she put her hand behind his head to support him while he drank, but she took the cup away before he had drained it. “Not too much at first,” she said. “As I understand it, when you’re ill, what you want and what you can tolerate can sometimes be at odds.”

“I’m not...ill.”

“Not well, either,” she said. She let his head down gently onto the pillow.

Robert looked at her, trying to decide if he felt up to arguing with her about it. No, he decided. He didn’t. The persistent pounding in his head and the fact that he obviously couldn’t manage something as simple as drinking from a tin cup on his own led him to conclude that, for the moment at least, he was some distance away from “well.”

He watched as she returned the cup to the table and sat down again. He still couldn’t decide who she was. Not Eleanor was the only thing he knew for certain—besides the fact that she was not a Southerner. Her diction was far too precise and sharp edged for her to have grown up below the Mason-Dixon Line. It was too painful to attempt any kind of conversation, so he kept looking at her. She seemed so sad.

Why are you sad, I wonder?

Since the war the whole world seemed to be full of women with sad eyes. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring; he thought she was far too pretty to be unmarried.

“My name is Robert Markham,” he said after a moment because it seemed the next most socially appropriate thing to do.

“Yes,” she said, watching him closely, apparently looking for some indication that she’d let him have too much to drink. “So I’m told. And you’re sometimes called Robbie, I believe.”

Robert frowned slightly. Incredibly, he thought she might be teasing him ever so slightly, and he found it...pleasant.

“Well, not...lately. How is it you know...who I am when I don’t know you...at all?”

“I went through your pockets,” she said matter-of-factly. “I found the Confederate military card inside your Bible. But three ladies who live here in the town actually identified you—Mrs. Kinnard, Mrs. Russell. And Mrs. Justice, of course. She’s the one who calls you Robbie.”

Robert drew a long breath in a feeble attempt to distance himself from the pain, but it only made his head hurt worse. Mrs. Kinnard. He certainly remembered that Mrs. Kinnard had identified him, and it was good that she had been correct in her identification. Mrs. Kinnard, as he recalled, was never wrong about anything. He nearly smiled at the thought that he might have had to assume whatever name she’d given him because no one had the audacity to contradict her. She would undoubtedly be the angry whisperer outside the door. It was no wonder this young woman had felt such a pressing need to stay out of sight.

He looked around the room, certain now of where he was at least, without having to be told.

Home.

In his own bed. It was so strange, and yet somehow not strange at all. It was the noise in the household that was so alien to him. Men’s voices—accented voices and the heavy tread of their boots. Barked military orders and the quick, disciplined responses to them. What he didn’t hear was his brother Samuel’s constant racket; or his sister, Maria, playing “Aura Lee” on the pianoforte in the parlor; or his father and his friends laughing together in the dining room over brandy and cigars.

And he didn’t hear his mother singing the second verse of her favorite hymn, “How Firm a Foundation,” as she went about her daily chores. Always the second verse.

Fear not, I am with thee,

O be not dismayed;

For I am Thy God,

And will still give the aid...

He had never had her kind of faith, and for a long time he had lost all hope that the words of that particular hymn might be true.

I’ll comfort thee, help thee,

And cause thee to stand...

And what about now? Did he believe them now?

He had thought he was prepared for the shame of returning, but he wasn’t prepared at all for the overwhelming sense of loss. That was far beyond what he had expected, the direct result, he supposed, of having been so certain that he would never see his home again. And yet here he was, despite his vagueness as to precisely how he’d gotten here, and that was the most he could say for the situation.

Mrs. Russell suddenly came to mind—and her son, James Darson Russell. He tried to remember...something. Jimmy had died in the war; he was sure of that, and yet the memory seemed all wrong somehow. He frowned with the effort it took to try to sort out what was real and what was not.

Jimmy had been several years younger than he, but he had had the self-assurance not often seen in a boy his age. Most likely it had come from having had to become the head of the household after his father’s death. His mother and his sister had needed him, and he’d accepted that responsibility like the man he was years from being.

Robert smiled slightly as another memory came into his mind. Jimmy had been confident and self-possessed—until he’d gotten anywhere near Maria. Then he couldn’t seem to walk and talk at the same time. He’d turned into an awkward, inelegant boy who couldn’t put two words together without sounding like a dunce. It was strange what a certain kind of woman could do to a man when he ardently believed her to be unattainable. He himself had suffered the same affliction when he’d been courting Eleanor and perhaps still would, had not a war intervened. But absence hadn’t made her heart grow fonder; it had made it grow more discerning. So much so that shortly before the disaster at Gettysburg, she had written him a letter—her final letter to him—telling him plainly that she had decided that their reckless personalities, hers as much as his, would make for nothing but misery if they wed. He had been stunned at first, and then resigned—because he couldn’t deny that their relationship was as volatile as she said it was. He’d lost the letter along with all the rest of his belongings somewhere on the Gettysburg battlefield, where it must have lain, who knew how long, soaked in blood and rain, and unreadable.

“He was killed at...” he said abruptly, aloud without meaning to.

“Who?” the woman sitting on the footstool asked. He had forgotten she was there. She was looking at him intently.

“Mrs. Russell’s son. James Darson—Jimmy,” he said with some effort, not remembering if she knew who Mrs. Russell was or not. “She was one of my mother’s friends. Mrs. Russell and Mrs. Justice. And Mrs. Kinnard,” he added as an afterthought. He deliberately called up the women’s names because he’d lost his place in the conversation—if there had actually been a conversation—and he didn’t want her to think he was any more addled than he was.

“Jimmy Russell had red hair—the good luck kind—a carrot top. I used to chase him down and rub his head before every card game and every horse race. He was always threatening to have his head shaved—just to break me of my gambling habit. Once, though, he hunted me down—because he heard I was going to play poker with Phelan and Billy Canfield’s Up North cousins—do you know the Canfield brothers?”

“No—except by reputation,” she added. He thought there was a slight change in her tone of voice, enough to signify something he didn’t understand.

He looked at her for a moment. Yes. Her eyes were sad.

“Harvard men, these cousins were,” he continued without really knowing why he should want to tell her—or anybody—about any of these things. Perhaps it was because he was starved for the company of another human being. Or perhaps it was the fact that she seemed to be listening that made his rambling recollections seem—necessary. “You could say they were arrogant.”

“I can imagine,” she said.

“Almost as arrogant as I was,” he said. “It was important—a matter of honor—to win, you see.”

“And did you?”

“I had to. Jimmy said he’d shave my head if I...didn’t. Billy and Phelan would have helped him do it, too. I can’t believe he’s gone...so many of them...” His voice trailed away. He had to force himself to continue. “Jimmy’s life was full of burdens, but he was always laughing...” He trailed away again, overwhelmed now by the rush of memories of the boy who had been his friend. He shook his head despite the pain. He had something important to do; he had to pull himself together. “I can’t seem to recall where it happened—what battle. Early in the...war, I think. He was Mrs. Russell’s life. It must have been...hard for her.”

“It still is,” she said quietly.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway again, but they continued past the door toward the back of the house. “I always...liked Mrs. Justice,” he said when it seemed that they were safe from any outside intrusion.

“I believe the feeling is mutual.”

“I liked all my mother’s friends...but it was a little harder with...Mrs. Kinnard.” He supposed that she must know about Mrs. Kinnard and her bossy nature—unless things had changed radically, everyone in this town longer than a day would know. But he only made the remark to see if she would smile. It pleased him that she did.

“All your mother’s friends vouched for you. If they hadn’t, I suspect you would have awakened in the stockade rather than in your own bed.”

“I...don’t look the same.”

“Even so, they didn’t hesitate.”

“I’m most grateful, then.”

They stared at each other until she became uncomfortable and looked away. It was time for her to identify herself, and he wasn’t sure why she didn’t. He supposed that hiding was one thing, and introductions were something else again.

“Miss Woodard,” she said finally.

Robert frowned, trying to remember if he’d ever known a Woodard family. “Miss Woodard,” he repeated. Half a name was not helpful. He still had no idea who she was. “And that would be the...Miss Woodard who...hides.”

“The very one,” she said agreeably. “I do apologize for intruding. I didn’t intend to come in here at all, but I thought you were still unaware, and I was quite...trapped. My only excuse is that I’ve been charged not to upset the occupation by offending Mrs. Kinnard. I’m finding it...difficult.”

“Yes, I can...see that. Tell me, do you often...go through men’s pockets?”

“Thus far, only when Sergeant Major Perkins insists,” she said.

“If he’s like the...sergeants major I’ve known, he does that on a...regular basis. Insists.”

“Well, he is formidable. They say my brother knows everything that goes on in this town and in the occupation army. If that is true, I believe the sergeant major is the reason.” She stood and smoothed her skirts. “I must go now and tell him you’re awake.”

“Your brother is...?” he asked, trying to keep her with him longer, though why he wanted—needed—to do that, he couldn’t have said, except that she was an anchor to the reality he suddenly found himself in.

She looked at him for a long moment before she answered. “Colonel Maxwell Woodard. Your brother-in-law. Which makes us relatives, I suppose, by marriage.”

Robert heard her—quite clearly. He even recognized the implication of her brother’s military title. He just didn’t believe it. Maria married to a Yankee colonel was—impossible. It would have been no surprise to him at all to learn that she had wed during his long absence, but she would never have married one of them. Never.

And then he remembered. Never was for people who had viable options, not for the ones who found themselves conquered and destitute and occupied, especially the women. He should have been here. Who knew what circumstances had pushed Maria into such a union, and he had no doubt that she had been pushed.

A sudden downdraft in the chimney sent a brief billowing of smoke and ash into the room. He realized that his alleged sister-in-law was more concerned about him than about the possibility of a singed hearthrug. She was looking at him with a certain degree of alarm, but he made no attempt to try to reassure her. He stared at the far wall instead, watching the shifting patterns of sunlight caused by the bare tree limbs moving in the wind outside. It was his own fault that he was so ignorant. He supposed that some might find the situation ironic, his little brother dead at Gettysburg and his sister married to one of the men directly or indirectly responsible.

“I’m sorry to have put it so bluntly,” she said after a moment. “I should have realized that the news might be...difficult to hear.”

He dismissed her bluntness with a wave of his hand. “Your brother and Maria...?” He couldn’t quite formulate a question to ask; there were so many. Seven years’ worth.

“They live here,” she said, apparently making a guess as to what he might want to know despite her misgivings about him. She couldn’t know if he had been so uninformed by choice or because of the circumstances he’d found himself in.

He had to struggle to keep control of his emotions. He hadn’t expected to hear that the Markham household as he knew it was essentially gone. Finding out that Maria had married one of them was hard enough, but it was even more difficult to accept that this Yankee colonel had taken up residence in the house where his family—especially Samuel—had lived. Lying here now, he wanted to hear Samuel’s boisterous presence in the house just one more time. Samuel, running down the hall, bounding up the stairs, whistling, dropping things, sneaking up on their mother and taking her by surprise with one of his exuberant hugs. Robert smiled slightly. It had cost the household a whole dozen eggs once when Samuel in his joyful enthusiasm had made her drop the egg basket she’d been carrying.

His smiled faded. There was nothing now but the tread of enemy soldiers.

No. The war is over. We aren’t supposed to be enemies anymore.

“And you live here, as well?” it suddenly occurred to him to ask.

“No. I’m only visiting.”

“Visiting,” he said, because it all sounded so...normal. Only it wasn’t normal at all. Nothing was normal anymore.

His head hurt.

“Are you—” she started to say, but he interrupted her.

“Is he good to her?” he asked with a bluntness of his own. “I want to know.” He turned his head despite the pain so that he could see her face. The question was disrespectful at best, and far too personal under the circumstances. He knew perfectly well that she would likely be the last person to give him a truthful answer, especially when the question in and of itself suggested that he had no faith whatsoever that her brother could behave well toward a Southern woman.

But it couldn’t be helped. She was his only opportunity, the only person who might actually know.

She didn’t seem to take offense, however. “He is as good to her as she will let him be,” she said. “He has to be careful of her Southern pride.”

“And you see...that as a...problem?”

“No, I see it more as a token of his regard for her. He was quite smitten.”

“Was. He isn’t smitten now?”

“The word suggests to me a transient kind of emotion, Mr. Markham,” she said, clearly trying to explain. “I believe what my brother feels for Maria is a good deal more than that. Maria has made him happy—when he thought he would never be happy again. The war...”

“Yes,” he said when she didn’t continue. “The war.”

“He was a prisoner,” she said after a moment. “Here.”

“And now he’s the...?”

“Occupation commander.”

“That must be...satisfying, given his...history.”

“If you’re talking about an opportunity for revenge, it might have been just that, but for Maria. He loves her dearly. And it isn’t one-sided, Mr. Markham.”

“What do the townspeople think of the marriage?”

“That would depend upon whom you ask, I believe.”

“Has she suffered for it—for marrying a—the colonel?”

“The fact that Mrs. Justice and the others are here in the house ready to take care of her brother, and have been since you arrived, would suggest that she hasn’t.”

She was still looking at him steadily, trying to decide, it seemed to him, precisely how much he should be told of his sister’s situation. At this point he was certain there was more. Perhaps Mrs. Justice would know. Asking Mrs. Russell and particularly Mrs. Kinnard was out of the question.

He loves her dearly.

And Maria apparently loved him in return. That was the most important thing, wasn’t it? He couldn’t want more for Maria than that. But, whether she was happy or not, he still had to face her—and his father. He closed his eyes. He dreaded it, almost as much as he dreaded facing Eleanor. He had never answered her letter, but even after all this time, there were things still to be said.

He took a wavering breath. The things he’d done—and not done—had become overwhelming and indefinable. His sins were so many he couldn’t separate them out anymore. They had all melded into guilt, into sorrow, into a relentless sense of regret. There would be no fatted calf for his homecoming, nor should there be. He didn’t deserve one, not when he’d abandoned what was left of his family the way he had, and the worst part was that, despite the progress he’d made, he was still lost in the relentless apathy that passed for his life.

I need Your help, Lord, he thought. I have to make this right if I can. If I haven’t waited too long. If the damage can be undone.

“Who is here in the house?” he asked abruptly.

“Right now? Mrs. Kinnard—she comes and goes. Mrs. Russell and Mrs. Justice are here on a more permanent basis for propriety’s sake. And Sergeant Major Perkins. Several soldiers from the garrison who are usually assigned to the infirmary—they’ve been taking care of you. The army surgeon is in and out. And there are one or two other soldiers whose job it is to keep Mrs. Kinnard happy.”

“And my father?” he asked. “Where is he?”

She looked surprised by the question. “I’m sorry, Mr. Markham. Your father died not long after Maria and Max were married,” she said.

He took a deep breath, and then another, trying to distance himself this time from a different kind of pain. Coming home, getting this far, had been the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life. He had known that the old man might not still be alive, but he had hoped—prayed—that that would not be the case. Incredibly, he hadn’t realized how much he was counting on his father being here.

Dead and gone. Like Samuel. Like Jimmy Russell. Like so much of his life. His faith was strong enough for him to believe that they would all meet again; in his heart he knew that. But surely he hadn’t thought he could come home after all this time and find that the important things would have remained the same? The sorrow he felt at this moment told him that he had.

He knew she watched him as he tried to process the information she had given him so ineptly. He was grateful she hadn’t just left him to try to understand all the things she’d told him on his own.

“My father— Do you know...what happened?” he asked after a moment.

“He was very ill. It was his heart,” she said. “They had to hurry the wedding on account of it—at his request, because he wanted to see Maria as a bride. And his doctors advised that there could be no delay.”

“My father approved of the marriage, then.”

“Yes. He was quite fond of Max, and he...” She hesitated, apparently uncertain as to whether he was up to hearing the details of his sister’s marriage to a Yankee colonel.

“Go on,” he said. “I need to know.”

“He made sure that Maria could live here as long as she wanted. It was in his will. He was worried that something might happen with the occupation and the house might be confiscated if Maria owned it. So he left it to Max. Your father trusted him to take care of her—they had long talks together about it. The ceremony was held here in the upstairs, the wide hallway right outside his room on the other end of the house. He could see and hear everything. Maria looked beautiful—she wore the earrings you and Samuel gave her before you left for the war—”

“We thought she would marry Billy Canfield. Where is he? Why didn’t she?”

“You would have to ask her about that,” Kate said.

“My father was pleased about her marrying your brother,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but the whole idea of such a thing was hard for him to believe.

“Yes. He was. I think it was a very enjoyable day for him. Lots of food and drink and good company, and I’m certain he sneaked at least one cigar.”

Robert smiled briefly at hearing that his father’s love of cigars had never waned. At least he had had something pleasant to focus on at the end of his life. “An enjoyable day. That’s good. I’m...glad.”

“I liked Mr. Markham very much,” she said after a moment. “We would talk sometimes.”

“Did he ever—” He suddenly stopped, unable to bring himself to ask the question.

“What were you going to ask?”

“I— Nothing.”

“He spoke of you once,” she said, and once again he thought she was trying to second-guess what he might want to know.

“He said you were his warrior son. And Samuel, his poet.”

Robert looked away. He had thought he was ready to hear these things, but he wasn’t. Had he not been such a hotheaded “warrior,” Samuel might be alive today.

He forced himself to push the conversation in a different, but no less painful, direction.

“The colonel—isn’t here?” he asked.

“He and Maria and the boys left for New Bern three days ago.”

“Boys? There are...children?”

“Three. Two are adopted. One, the youngest, is their birth child. My brother had military business to attend to in New Bern and he wanted his family with him. And Mrs. Hansen.”

He looked at her sharply. “Mrs. Hansen?”

“She helps Maria with the children. The boys are quite a handful.”

“You’re talking about Warrie Hansen?”

“Yes. You would know her, I think.”

“I did,” he said. “A very long time ago.”

So, Robert thought. Now he knew where he could find Eleanor’s mother at least.

“How...long have I been...?” He couldn’t quite find a word to describe his current condition. He felt as if he had slept a long time, but he didn’t know why or how. He reached up to touch his forehead again. It still hurt.

“You arrived the day they all left,” she said.

“Poor...timing on my part. Or perhaps not,” he added after a moment, primarily because of the look on her face.

“Given the circumstances,” Kate said, “it would have been alarming for Maria to suddenly come upon you the way I did, but, given the state that you were in that day, I think it would have been even worse. When you fell in the hallway, you hit your head on the parquet floor. Hard. The army surgeon says your collapse was caused by hunger and exhaustion from trying to travel on foot through the deep snow. That, and the wound you received, I assume, at Gettysburg. He says it left you—”

“I know how it left me,” Robert said. He lived with the pain every day and with being less than he’d once been both physically and mentally. He was thirty-three years old, and he felt like an old man.

But he suddenly remembered. “Mrs. Kinnard was there—when I was on the floor.”

“Yes,” she said.

“I remember...bits of it. She was upset with me. It was like...when the Canfield brothers and I tipped over...one of her outhouses.”

She looked at him with raised eyebrows. “I can see why Maria thinks Robbie may demonstrate a mischievous streak when he’s older.”

“Robbie?”

“Max and Maria’s little boy. He’s named for you. The other two, Joe and Jake, are Suzanne and Phelan Canfield’s sons. Max adopted them after she died.”

Robert closed his eyes, his mind reeling. A nephew named after him? Suzanne Canfield dead? And Eleanor. What had happened to Eleanor?

“I shouldn’t be in here,” she said suddenly. She moved quietly to the door, opening it slightly and peering into the hallway for some sign of Mrs. Kinnard.

“I think you should rest,” she said over her shoulder. “The night you arrived, you were in no condition to either get or give explanations. You’re better now, and you’re going to need all the strength you can muster if you intend to try to make Maria understand why you did what you did. I don’t think it will be easy. I know how I would feel if I were in her place and Max had suddenly come back from the dead. Truthfully, I don’t envy you the attempt.”

Robert didn’t say anything. She was quite straightforward, this new sister-in-law of his.

“I have a favor...to ask,” he said, despite the inappropriateness of doing so. “Two favors.”

“All right. Ask.”

“Would you tell the sergeant major that I’d like to talk to an army chaplain. Tell him I want to talk to one who has seen the elephant. Someone who’s fought in battle and survived. Will you do that?”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation.

“And I would consider it a kindness if you would find out whatever you can about Miss Eleanor Hansen—where she is.”

He expected her to ask him for explanations, but she didn’t. She nodded, and after one final cautious look into the hallway, she slipped away.