Читать книгу The Fire Within - Lynda Trent - Страница 9

Chapter One

Caleb Morgan leaned close to his horse’s neck as the animal reared and plunged. His long sword gleamed in the sunlight, red streaks running from its tip. He was exhausted from the battle but he couldn’t sound retreat. Not when there was still a chance they could defeat the Rebels. His dark blue uniform was stained with gunpowder and enemies’ blood, and his horse was lathered with sweat.

With a shout, Caleb encouraged his men to greater effort. As their captain he had their loyalty and their respect. He never sent a man into territory too dangerous for him to go as well. Caleb turned the horse into the fight and kicked him into a charge. The horse had seen many battles and plunged forward, his ears flattened viciously. When it came to a heated battle, this mount was priceless.

All around him Caleb saw men, some in blue, others in gray or butternut, slashing at one another and shouting in pain or battle fury. In the midst of a battle, they looked curiously the same. The acrid odor of gunpowder filled Caleb’s nose and he shoved his sword at the nearest Rebel. It made contact and the man shouted as he grabbed at the wound on his arm. Caleb took him down with the next thrust.

His horse reared again, pawing at a man who had run too close. The animal liked battle more than Caleb did. In quieter times Caleb wondered if the animal would ever be docile again—assuming the cursed war would ever end. At times it seemed as if the fighting and ceaseless marching would go on forever. To a man like Caleb who loved his home and family, it was as if hell had broken out on earth. Caleb was gentle by nature and a soldier by necessity. He was good at both.

“Captain Morgan! The flag!” a voice shouted beside him.

Caleb looked up to see the flag bearer stagger and fall. He spurred his horse forward and caught the flag before it could hit the ground. He wouldn’t allow the enemy to capture it. His men shouted approval and one grabbed at the wooden pole. Caleb released it and went back into the thick of the battle.

He had no idea how long he fought. He was beyond tired. His arms and legs were numb from exhaustion and his breath came in short gasps. Suddenly he felt his horse tremble and stumble. He looked down to see a wound gaping in the animal’s shoulder. The horse tried to lunge, but Caleb could tell he was finished. He looked up to see a Rebel soldier aiming another shot at him. Although the horse tried to dodge at his command, Caleb felt the thud of the bullet into his own leg. At first there was no pain and he watched the spreading blood as if it had nothing to do with him.

A Rebel ran toward him, sword raised and Caleb slashed at him, but not before the enemy’s blade sank into his arm. Caleb shouted in anger as much as in pain. The bullet wound started throbbing at the same time. Caleb reeled in the saddle, marveling that his horse was still on his feet and that he was in the saddle. A curious lightness was making his head spin. Caleb shook it to clear it, this was no time for weakness.

“Captain! Should I sound retreat?” The bugler was a young boy. Too young in Caleb’s opinion.

“Sound retreat!” he commanded. The day was lost. He wondered why he couldn’t hear the sound of the bugle as the boy put it to his mouth. A glance at his leg told him he was losing blood fast, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter to him. “Retreat!” he shouted to his men. He reined his horse aside to let the men pass before him.

At the edge of the woods his horse stumbled again and Caleb knew he would never be able to carry him to safety. He roared his anger at losing such a precious fighting mate. He had no love for this particular animal, but he respected his strength of heart. Another bullet sang past his ear and he felt the horse stagger. He was shot again.

The animal traveled several yards into the woods, then fell heavily to one side. Caleb felt himself falling with the horse, but it was as if it were happening to someone else. In slow motion, the floor of the forest came to meet him and he tasted dry leaves. Then nothing.

The autumn air felt crisp on Megan’s face as she bent to hoe up the last of the year’s potatoes. Her garden was small but filled most of the level space between her house and the slope of the mountain. She had spent all her life in Black Hollow, Tennessee and she felt as much a part of the tan earth as were the potatoes she was digging for the root cellar.

Far in the distance she heard the sound of a rifle, then another. Megan straightened and listened. It was too late in the day for her father to be hunting. Besides, he rarely took two shots to bring down game. As she listened, several more shots rang out. These seemed closer than the others. The next were closer still. Megan gathered the potatoes into her apron and ran toward the house.

For four years the Civil War had raged. Her mountain had been taken first by one side, then by the other, back and forth. It all meant little to Megan as long as she and the ones she loved were safe.

She closed the door behind her and crossed the room to put the potatoes on the table. Even with the shutters closed she could hear the sounds of the battle. It was taking place in the clearing where her father had shot the bear the summer before. That was too close for safety. Megan went around her small cabin, barring the shutters and doors with the iron straps her brother-in-law had made for the purpose.

The cabin was dim with the door and windows closed but she didn’t waste lamp oil by making a light. Oil was too precious, as was everything else, to be used by day.

She sat in the rocker Seth’s uncle had made for a wedding gift and rocked slowly. The chair’s rockers were slightly uneven so its gait was jerky and it edged across the floor if she rocked for long. Still, it was a rocking chair and it was her own so she didn’t mind. The Brennans had never been much at making furniture.

The cabin was snug and strong. Anything less than a direct strike from a cannonball would bounce off its sides. She told herself that as she listened to the battle, the sounds muffled now by the thick logs. Her father had made the cabin, and Samuel Llewellyn was thorough in everything he did. Once he set his mind to a thing, he didn’t rest until it was accomplished.

At times like this, Megan disliked being up here in her cabin and away from the rest of her family and the small settlement nearer the bottom of Black Hollow. It wasn’t a town and likely never would be. They built their own cabins and the furniture to go in them and planted the food they needed. Patrick Cassidy knew enough about blacksmith work to keep the horses and mules in good shape, but that was as far as they were willing to go. If Black Hollow became a town, strangers would eventually move there, and no one in the settlement welcomed change.

The last stranger to move to Black Hollow had been Megan’s mother, Jane. She had come there as Samuel’s bride, her language still filled with the lilt from her native Ireland. Bridget had taken her bright red hair from Mama’s side of the family. In Megan and Owen it was a darker red, like mahogany.

Samuel had met Jane, courted her and won her during one of his brief visits to his cousins who lived in Oak Ridge. That had been more than twenty-two years ago. Megan knew because her older brother, Owen, was twenty-one and he had been born within a year of their marriage. For a forbidden moment she thought about Owen and wondered if he was well. Since Papa had disowned him, Owen wasn’t to be discussed or even thought of.

Next had come her own birth when Owen was two, then two years later, their sister Bridget. Bridget was a duplicate of their mother and their father’s favorite, just as Owen had been their mother’s. No one had favored Megan, but she understood why. She was much too outspoken and rebellious to suit the settlement. The only boy who ever showed interest in her was Seth Brennan.

She sighed and wondered when Seth would come home. He was impetuous. That was the word her father used, at least. In her opinion, he was simply bullheaded. More than a year ago, Seth had drunk too much whiskey from the still at the bottom of the Hollow and had enlisted in the Confederate army. Unlike Owen, he had chosen the side the settlement favored, but he had chosen to do this the week before they were to be married. Megan had spent the next few months being angry, but her temper had had ample time to cool and now she was just lonely.

Samuel had built the cabin in a pretty spot up the mountain from the others, on the only place flat enough to build one. In some ways Megan enjoyed the privacy. Or at least she did when army troops weren’t passing by or fighting in the clearings. The cabin’s remote location gave her a chance to do the one thing that her family disapproved of most—read.

Books were Megan’s passion, and she had loved them ever since one of her aunts had taught her to read. It had been during a hard winter when there was nothing else to do. Her aunt had meant to teach only Owen, but Megan and Bridget learned as well, by looking over Owen’s shoulder and borrowing his book. Bridget rarely read anything but Megan read everything she could find. When she had a rare bit of money of her own, she would walk to the nearest town, Raintree, and buy a book.

Since she moved to the cabin, she had brought her books out of their hiding place in the barn and had hidden them in the cabin. Seth was no fonder of her reading than was her father, so she didn’t plan to let him know she was still doing it.

That Megan had moved into the cabin at all had been a matter of convenience. It was expected that the war would end soon, and it had been time to put in the garden that would see her and Seth through their first winter together. The cabin was remote enough from her parents’ house for it to be inconvenient for Megan to live at home and walk there. Besides, her parents’ house was crowded with two grown daughters, and it was time for Megan to move on.

Bridget was married now. When Patrick heard Seth had enlisted, he signed up, as well. Before he left, he married Bridget. They had been in love ever since they were children so it was no surprise to anyone, nor was it a question of ensuring that Bridget would wait for him. Bridget was like their mother—once she fell in love, she would follow her man, even to a place like Black Hollow, and be faithful forever.

Although she never told anyone, Megan was disappointed that Seth hadn’t loved her enough to marry her before he went away. Especially since they had made love one night in the clearing where the battle was now being fought. For several long, agonizing weeks Megan had prayed she wasn’t pregnant from her lapse of discretion. Fortunately she hadn’t been and no one knew what she and Seth had done. But Seth knew and he hadn’t married her before he left. That was one reason Megan had been so angry over his rash enlistment. Their wedding had been set for the following week! Why had he chosen to leave at a time like that?

There was no use wondering about it, Megan told herself. Seth did as he pleased, when he pleased. Usually this didn’t bother her and it was unreasonable to mind it one time and not another. At least this was what she told herself during the long, dark nights when she was alone in the cabin with only the calls of night birds for company. At least now she could read or draw when she pleased, for there was no one to hide it from.

Megan also loved to draw. No one had taught her: it came as naturally to her as breathing. With a sliver of charcoal from the hearth she could draw an owl or a raccoon that looked real. Brother Benjamin Grady, the man who was Black Hollow’s self-styled preacher, disliked her drawing even more than he did her reading. He maintained it wasn’t natural to draw a thing on paper, that it wasn’t much different from making graven images, which was clearly against God’s law. But drawing didn’t feel wrong to Megan so she simply hid that, too.

She closed her eyes and tried to block out the sound of the battle by remembering what Seth’s voice sounded like. Lately that had been difficult, though she would never have admitted it.

The sounds of battle had lasted for hours. Megan stopped rocking as the reports from the guns moved farther down the mountain. She could tell one side had overpowered the other. It didn’t really matter to her which had won. Unlike her family, she wasn’t a staunch supporter of either side. The issues that had caused the war didn’t touch her. Tariffs and central banking had no part in Black Hollow, and Megan had never seen a slave in her life.

She cautiously opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. She could still hear the guns but they were too far away now to be accompanied by the soldiers’ shouts or the shriek of the horses. Once again her cabin had been spared.

Megan went inside and got the knife she used for dressing out meat and as many tow sacks as she owned. Horse meat wasn’t something she enjoyed, but she had learned to eat almost anything. There were too many soldiers and stragglers on the road to keep food safe. Her smokehouse had been emptied only the week before when she was visiting her family, and she wasn’t eager to spend the winter without meat on the table.

She made her way through the familiar woods, stopping every few feet and listening to be certain the soldiers weren’t doubling back. When soldiers were around, the only safe place was indoors with the door firmly bolted and barred.

Soon she was in the clearing. Megan stopped and stared at the once familiar meadow. Horses’ hooves had churned the late grasses into the dirt and there was blood everywhere. Horses lay dead on the ground, their saddles still strapped to their backs. There were no men. While part of the conquering troop chased the retreating one down the mountain, the rest of the soldiers had stayed behind to gather the dead and wounded of both sides into wagons and haul them to their headquarters.

The silence was menacing. Megan stepped farther into the clearing and for a moment wondered if she was in the place she remembered. Could this be where she had played as a child and where she had given herself to Seth just before he joined the army? It was no longer a peaceful woodland meadow, but a place of death and destruction. She knew she would never enjoy coming here again.

Eager to do what she had come to do and be away from the place, Megan went to the nearest horse. Kneeling on the ground, she began the task of dressing it out for her smokehouse.

As she worked, she heard a sound. Megan froze, her eyes darting about. Were the soldiers coming back?

The sound came again. She stared into the woods, trying to pierce the shadows and saplings to see who was there. It was no animal sound, but rather that of a man. Apparently he was in pain.

Holding the knife close to her side as Owen had once taught her, she went nearer. Every time she heard the moan she paused, deciding whether to go on or to flee. Not too far inside the woods she saw the body of a horse. A man lay beside it.

As quietly as she could, Megan went closer. He had been thrown clear when the horse fell. Judging by the sluggish way he moved, he had been unconscious when the other dead and wounded were taken away and no one had found him. She edged nearer. She could tell by his uniform he was an officer. His right leg and left arm were covered in blood. If it was all his, it was a miracle he was alive at all, let alone able to move and call out.

Megan lost her fear as she went to him. He was young and handsome with black hair that was matted to his head with sweat. His skin was pale from loss of blood. He wore a Yankee uniform, but so did her brother, Owen.

She knelt beside him. “Lie still. Let me see how badly you’re hurt.”

He tried to focus on her face but the effort was too much for him. “My men...” he said in a hoarse voice.

“Your men are gone. They left you behind.” She looked around, wondering what to do with him. He might be the enemy, but he was also a human and she couldn’t leave him to die. “You sure picked a bad place to get wounded. I don’t know if I can get you to the house or not.” She was speaking as much to herself as to him. She pulled his leg straight and examined the worst of the wounds. “You might recover with some help.”

He tried to sit up but fell back.

“Stop moving around before you bleed to death.” She took her skinning knife and slit his pant leg so she could tie one of the tow sacks around the wound. She made it as tight as she could to stop the bleeding. Then she did the same to his arm.

“Can you hear me?” she asked. He was so pale and so still she wasn’t sure he was conscious. He nodded. “I’m going to try to get you to my cabin but you’re too big for me to carry so you’re going to have to help me.”

This time when he struggled to sit up, she pulled him upright. The bandages seemed to be holding against the loss of any more blood. She braced herself and pulled him to his feet. Before he could fall, she slipped his good arm around her neck and balanced him. “Can you walk? It’s not too far. Just past these woods.”

Leaning heavily on her, he managed to limp at her side. “Too bad they didn’t leave me a short, skinny man,” she complained good-naturedly to boost his spirits. She wasn’t tall and he towered over her by several inches. If he were standing straight, she didn’t think the top of her head would reach past his shoulder. Most of the other men in the Hollow were short or medium in height, including Seth, and this man seemed huge in comparison.

Her determination was finally paying off. Like her father, Megan was too stubborn to give up once she decided to get the soldier safely into her cabin. By the time they went up the sloping grade and across her small yard, she was breathing heavily and aching from supporting his weight. “Steps,” she gasped. “You have to go up three steps now.”

He doggedly lifted his feet. She held to him firmly. They had come this far; she wasn’t going to drop him now. She kicked the door open with the toe of her shoe and took him into the house. He hesitated and blinked, as if he was only now aware of his surroundings.

“Don’t stop now. We have a few more feet to go.” She took him into the tiny bedroom she was to have shared with Seth and let him drop onto the bed. Thank goodness she had covered it with an old quilt. She went to the trunk where she kept her outdoor slicker and carried it to the bed. After some pulling and prodding she managed to get it between him and the quilt.

“Now let me see what you have wrong with you,” she said in the gentling voice she used with hurt animals. She peeled off his uniform and tossed it into the corner. His chest was thick with muscles but his waist was lean. Under his pants he wore white cotton underlinen, now soaked with blood. She cut it away above the wound and studied it for a moment. “Gunshot,” she informed him. Gently she reached beneath his leg. “Thank goodness it went all the way through. I wouldn’t want to have to dig for it.”

She examined the long cut on his upper left arm. “Must have been a sword. That’s my guess. It looks too long for a knife wound as hard as you must have been fighting.” He gave no sign of having heard her at all, but she was talking as much for herself as for him. “You know? I think you really might live after all.” Until now she hadn’t been all that sure.

Going to the pump in the kitchen, she drew water in a pail, then went back to him. “I need to get you cleaned up. I’ve seen small cuts go bad if they’re not tended properly. I guess large ones would be worse.” She dipped a soft rag into the water and began to sponge the wound. “At least you’ve stopped bleeding.”

She glanced at his face. His eyes were closed and he seemed to be unconscious again. “It seems to me they should have looked harder for you since you’re the captain. I guess that means your side lost. My family would be glad about that. Papa is about as Confederate as they come.”

She paused. “Papa. What on earth am I going to tell my papa?” She went back to cleaning battle grime from the soldier. “I just won’t tell him,” she said to assure the wounded man as much as herself. She just hoped Mama or Bridget didn’t decide to pay her a visit any time soon.

As she washed him, she couldn’t help but notice how well built he was. Even relaxed, his muscles were strong and firm, and his hands were large and capable. There was a virility about him that reminded her of the pumas that occasionally wandered near the settlement. He might be equally dangerous. Megan wondered if her father would shoot a man in his condition, and decided it wasn’t worth taking a chance. After working this hard to save him, she wasn’t going to lose him now.

After hesitating, she cut off the other leg of his underlinen. Short pants on such a large man looked odd, but she couldn’t get him clean with them on and she was reluctant to cut them off completely. She tore up a sheet to make fresh bandages and went into the kitchen to make a poultice of herbs to place on the wounds. Then she bandaged him again. By shoving and pulling, she managed to get the soiled slicker out from under him. The quilt hadn’t fared badly so she left him lying on it and pulled another one over him.

“I’ll be back,” she said in case he could hear her. “I have some butchering to do.”

Although she was already tired, she went back to the clearing and finished the job she had gone there to do. She beat her family to the scene by minutes.

“I was hoping you’d know to come get some meat,” Jane Llewellyn called from one of the other carcasses. “This will taste just like beef once it’s cured.”

“Not to me it won’t. I hate doing this.” Megan wondered what her mother would say if she had any idea what she had been doing only minutes before.

“We won,” Bridget said as she helped Jane with the horse. “Papa saw the Yankees running for all they were worth and our boys chasing after them. I wonder if Patrick was one of them.”

“If our Patrick, or Seth for that matter, were within a mile of here, he’d come see us all,” Jane said. “He’s likely in the next state.”

“I sure hope he’s safe.” Bridget looked over at the stained grass. “You think he’s safe, Megan?”

“Sure he is. We would have heard if he wasn’t.” Megan tried to sound positive for her sister’s benefit. There was no one to send word to her prisoner’s family that he was alive. It was odd to think she had a Yankee prisoner at her house. At the time she hadn’t thought of it that way.

“Be sure and wash this meat before you hang it up to dry,” Jane reminded Megan. “It’s not like butchering a hog where we hang it off the ground to dress it out. You can’t keep it clean like this.”

“I know, Mama.” She glanced around the clearing. Some of the other women from the settlement were arriving and gathering meat for themselves. Megan hoped they would be able to get enough to feed them through the winter. “Once mine is fully smoked, I’m going to hide it in the woods. I’m not taking any chances on losing this, too.”

“Those Yankees will take anything,” Bridget said angrily. “Can you imagine our soldiers stealing from people that don’t have enough to eat as it is? They wouldn’t ever!”

Megan wasn’t sure this was true so she didn’t comment. She had been hungry often since the war started and she didn’t think a soldier would be all that particular if there was food for the taking. Bridget just couldn’t bear to think Patrick would do such a thing. And, knowing Patrick as well as she did, Megan wasn’t sure that he would. Patrick was as good a man as the Hollow had ever produced.

“Hurry and get through, Bridget. The soldiers might come back and we don’t want trouble from them.”

“They’re long gone from here,” Megan said quickly. “There’s no reason for them to come back.” She wondered if that was true. She didn’t know all that much about soldiers, but wouldn’t someone come looking for a missing officer? But, she reasoned, their side wouldn’t know he was missing and the other would assume he had been killed or captured. Maybe no one would come looking for him at all.

When she had all her tow sacks full, Megan started carrying them to the smokehouse. On each trip the grade seemed steeper. The other women had finished, by the time she made the last trip, and a few of their husbands or sons had come to help them carry the bounty home.

As her mother had taught her, Megan washed the meat, then packed it in salt. Fortunately they still had salt in the settlement. She had heard of a family beyond Raintree that ran out of salt and had to scoop dirt off the smokehouse floor to pack around the meat. The dirt had salt in it from other curings but she couldn’t see how the meat would ever lose its gritty flavor.

She hung the meat onto the iron hooks that were suspended from the ceiling, then brought some hickory wood from the woodpile. Taking care not to make the fire too large, she started one burning in the pit in the center of the tall building. Stepping out into the fresh air, she saw the room fill with silver smoke, then she shut the door and latched it against marauding animals.

When she went into the house, she stripped off her clothes and bathed by the cabinet. Putting on a wrapper, she went in to see about the soldier.

He lay just as she had left him, but she could see the gentle rise and fall of his chest. He wasn’t dead. Every hour he lived through put him that much closer to his recovery, assuming the wounds didn’t turn septic. His skin was hot to the touch so Megan got a bowl of water and a cloth and sponged his forehead. A fever wasn’t unlikely in such a situation and she wasn’t worried. All the same, she sponged him until he was cool to her touch.

She sat in the ladder-back chair and studied him. He was a big man and almost filled the bed. What would he be like when he awoke? It suddenly occurred to her that she was quite isolated from the others and that he might be dangerous if he wasn’t unconscious. She shook her head in her own answer. He had lost too much blood. It would be a while before he would give anyone much trouble.

After a while she went into the kitchen and lit a lamp. The glow filled the cabin and turned the log walls to warm gold. She started a fire in the fireplace and soon the chill was gone. Since she had left the bedroom door open, she knew the man would be warm enough even if he kicked off the cover. The cabin wasn’t that large.

Megan frowned slightly. The cabin wasn’t large at all. Where was she going to sleep? The soldier was on the only bed. She went to the back room and opened the door. It was used to store the things she didn’t need every day. The mattress from Seth’s bedroom was tied into a roll in one corner. He had brought it to the cabin before he knew her family was stuffing them a mattress as a wedding gift. His family hadn’t needed it back so it was still here.

Going to it, Megan hauled it into the middle of the room and untied the cords that bound it. The mattress unrolled at her feet. The ticking was stained from rain that had blown in Seth’s window years before and it was old, but it was a bed of sorts. Certainly it would be more comfortable than the floor.

Megan got her gown from the hook in the bedroom and took it to the back room. Closing the door, she put on the gown and blew out the lamp before opening the door and sitting on the mattress. Unconscious or not, she didn’t trust the soldier and she kept her skinning knife close beside her. She pulled one of the extra quilts onto the mattress and listened to see if the soldier was stirring. There was no sound. She unpinned her hair and let it tumble around her as she sat there in the gloom. Still listening, she braided it into a thick dark-red plait before lying on the bed.

From the main room, the fireplace sent dancing light over the walls and floors. This was the first time since she had moved here that Megan hadn’t slept alone in the cabin. She wished it were Seth in the next room and not some stranger. Although she tried not to worry about Seth, she couldn’t help but worry at night when she had nothing else to occupy her mind. Was he safe? It was probably too much to hope that he was warm and comfortable. She had seen too many tattered Confederate uniforms to believe Seth’s was in better shape. Living outside was too hard on clothes.

At least she had a smokehouse full of meat. She gazed up at the shadowy rafters above her and planned where to hide it once it was cured.