Damon unbuttoned his tunic, his eyes, those compelling dark eyes, never leaving her face. She watched as he undressed, lips parted, her body trembling. When he stood naked before her, baring his broad shoulders, narrow hips, and rigid manliness, he said, “Well—isn’t this what you wanted?”
“No,” she whispered, “I thought you would . . .”
“Play with you a bit, is that it? Well, dammit!”—he grabbed hold of her wrists and drew her from the bed—“I’m not going to be your toy, my pretty. You want me, you’ve been watching me for hours. And now . . .”
He began to untie the moire ribbon that fastened the neck of her gown and when it became tangled and knotted, he wrapped it about his wrist and ripped the collar open.
“You can’t . . . ! Wait . . . I’ll do it!”
She undid her gown, slipping out of it, hurrying because she was afraid he would tear it from her. Crinolines, basque, stockings. But she was too slow and he too impatient and he threw her on the bed while she was still in her pantaloons. Kneeling over her he pulled them down from her waist, stripping them from her legs. Then he fell upon her, brutally thrusting her legs apart. But she wasn’t going to be cheated of her game and she managed to twist out from under him, intending to run and have him chase her. He caught her, dragging her to the bed, throwing her on her back again, grasping her naked hips between his knees.
“You’re drunk!” she accused.
“So I am,” he growled between clenched teeth. “But you ...” He brought his hands to her throat. For one terrible moment she thought he meant to throttle her, so fierce and angry was the fire in his eyes. But he withdrew his hands and began to knead her breasts, kissing them with hot lips, his breath burning her skin. He seemed to be torturing rather than making love to her and for one fleeting moment she wondered if he imagined he had Amélie there instead of herself. But that was absurd. Damon might dislike Amélie but why would he want to punish or torture her?
Then as his kisses and his hands became more sensuous and adept she forgot Amélie, forgot everything, losing herself in a sweeping sense of exquisite pleasure. The feeling grew and grew into a restless, moaning agitation.
“Please!” she begged in an ecstasy of desire. She tried to grasp his manhood to guide it inside where an unbearable yearning throbbed. “Please!”
But he brushed her hand away. Pinning her arms to the mattress he entered her with a violence that sent shock after shock quivering through her body. Her hips arched convulsively, a hot flush searing her cheeks, as he began to ride her unmercifully. Every jolt sent her spiraling upward and upward into the blinding light of sheer mindlessness.
It was over. She felt bruised, subdued, euphoric.
Babette, her thoughts returning to the present, continued to stare at her husband as he slept. Yes, there wasn’t another man like Damon Fowler. And she didn’t care if he had to have three brandies before she could persuade him to come to her bed, didn’t care that he sometimes drunkenly mumbled Amélie’s name, didn’t care that he all but ignored her during his sober moments. She had him. She was Mrs. Damon Fowler.
Damon was not asleep but lay with closed eyes, listening to the heavy sighs of his wife. His wife! God, what a fool he had been to have taken her to bed. But on the night of the officer’s party he had been drunk and her family resemblance to Amélie had made him hot with rage and lust. For several blind moments when he had her there on the bed, legs splayed, upthrusting breasts peaked with hard, little nubs, he had thought she was Amélie. His hands had gone about her throat ready to throttle the life out of her as if in so doing he could erase the memory of her betrayal.
He had loved her. Here in Nashville he had laid bare his innermost feelings, had stripped himself of arrogance, of vanity, of pride as he had done for no other man or woman. And she, without a word, had risen from their lovemaking, from their exchange of passionate embraces and whispered endearments, and gone off, left him, refusing to see him again. Why? Was she more like her sister than he imagined? Underneath her talk of principle and honor did she have the same whorish instincts? Or had she been hoping to gain a few tidbits of knowledge for the Confederacy by sleeping with him?
He knew he never again would love or trust a woman. He had married Babette because she had claimed she was carrying his child. Knowing Babette’s disregard for convention, her weakness for men, he had not been sure the child was his. Nevertheless he had given her the benefit of the doubt. He had done the honorable thing. Honorable! He wanted to laugh. How had he ever gotten mixed up with these damnable Townsend sisters? Babette he could discard. She meant no more to him than a willing body when brandy made his loins throb for a woman. But the memory of Amélie was like a fever that came and went, a hating and wanting he would carry for the rest of his days.
As the months went by and Babette’s waist disappeared, she grew restless and testy. She did not look forward to motherhood. The loss of her girlish figure— the handspan waist and firm, full breasts—was bad enough, but the memory of little Charles, his salivary mewling and peevish cries, made her shudder at the thought of having a similar creature as her own. There were times when she wondered if the price she had paid for getting Damon to marry her was worth it. He rarely came to her bed now even when drunk. It had been weeks since he had taken her in anger, throwing her crossways on the bed, ravaging her mouth with kisses, his hands hot and hurting as he thrust her thighs apart, entering her with a force that made her cry out. His savagery mixed with her fear and a rising, feverish desire had inflamed her, but she seldom found the release she so yearned for.
In addition, Babette derived no real pleasure from her status as the colonel’s wife. She found General Grant morose and uncommunicative. Smoking endless cigars and drinking great quantities of whisky—which did nothing to loosen his tongue or make him more amusing—he proved to be a boring, ordinary man totally lacking the glitter and glamor Babette had come to equate with a high-ranking military figure. His wife, Julia, a dumpy woman with a disconcerting twitch in her right eye, was amiable enough, certainly more than her husband, but too wrapped up in her spouse’s affairs to be of much interest to Babette. The other wives snubbed her. Babette claimed it was her Southern accent and good looks that put them off. They were an envious, backbiting lot, she told Damon, jealous because their husbands thought her charming. So what if she flirted a bit? No harm was done. The men enjoyed it, and she enjoyed them.
One of the younger officers, Lieutenant Halstrom, a darkly handsome rogue, she found particularly fascinating. At a ball given by Damon’s superior, the lieutenant had waltzed her into an anteroom and there, heated with brandy and lust, had proceeded to kiss her passionately. In the process he had put his hand down the neck of her dress. Babette had done nothing to discourage him, in fact, had leaned ardently into his embrace. The rising hardness between his legs, his hot fingers squeezing her naked breast, tweaking her roused nipple, had sent the blood pounding through her veins. If Damon hadn’t come in upon them she did not know how far she would have allowed Halstrom to go. As it was, after a curt nod to Halstrom, Damon had fetched her cape, made his excuses to his host, and in a cold fury had driven her home. They quarreled and when she taunted him with impotence he had thrown her across the bed.
That incident ended their social life. Damon ordered Babette to refuse all invitations, giving as the reason her “condition.”
To her he said, “I’ll not have you snuggling up to my fellow officers like a strumpet, not because I give a damn who you go to bed with, but because it makes trouble between husbands and wives. You may not like the women here, but they are good, decent, and faithful. And the men, for the most part, are the same.”
“Decent, are they?” Babette sneered. “Is that why you didn’t say one angry word to Halstrom, putting the whole blame on me? Amélie was right about you Yankees. At home a gentleman would have challenged any man who dared take liberties with his wife.”
“Liberties? Who, pray, was taking liberties, you
or the lieutenant? I don’t care how much liquor he drank, if you hadn’t led him on, batting your lashes and tossing your décolletage in his face, he wouldn’t have touched you at sword point.”
“He wanted me,” Babette insisted. “He was dying for me. He said he was madly in love with me.”
“Did he? I venture he would blush should you remind him of that declaration—if he remembers it at all.”
“Well, I don’t care,” Babette said, facing him defiantly. “You can’t keep me prisoner in this place.” They had rented a small house near headquarters furnished with Philadelphia stick furniture, uncomfortable spool beds, and patchwork scatter rugs Babette was constantly tripping over. She hated the house and missed the overstuffed sofas, deep-pillowed chairs, Turkish carpets, and velvet drapes of Arbormalle and the small house she had shared with Amélie in Baltimore. “I’m not going to stay locked up, whatever you say.”
Damon shrugged. “Do as you like. You can leave if you wish. I’ll be more than happy to pay your way home.”
That silenced her. Damon knew very well she couldn’t go home. After writing to her parents in January announcing her marriage to Damon, she had received a scathing reply from her father. By taking a Yankee as husband she had committed the ultimate sin. “When friends find out,” he had fumed, “as they are bound to do, I’ll not be able to hold my head up. It’s a disgrace, an act that has ruined both your mother and me. As far as I’m concerned I no longer have two daughters.
“You have chosen your own path,” he had concluded. “Should you discover you have made a grave error, then you must do the best for yourself. You will not be welcomed at Arbormalle.”
If Papa doesn’t want me, Babette had thought at the time, there’s always Amélie. She’ll come to my rescue. “If you ever need me, for whatever reason,” she had said, “I’ll come and fetch you.”
Amélie had written her a nice little letter, offering congratulations and wishing her much happiness. Babette hadn’t answered the letter; she was not a good correspondent and kept putting it off. Then when she had finally sat down with pen and paper she had filled page after page, boasting about the clothes Damon had bought her and how happy she was. But she had mislaid Amélie’s address and the letter had never been mailed.
She was thinking of Amélie again when talk of General Grant’s transfer to the east coast began to circulate. The staff would go with him, to Culpepper in Virginia, it was believed. The wives would be housed in Washington or Georgetown. This was cheering news to Babette since it would put her closer to Maryland. Even if she couldn’t go home, she knew people in Baltimore who would receive her. They would understand and sympathize with her for leaving a Yankee husband who had turned out to be a brute.
As rumor grew into fact and Grant’s staff prepared for the move, Babette looked forward to the change with eager anticipation. Her mind, skipping the journey in between and her own burgeoning condition, leapt ahead to a reunion with old friends, imagining how wonderful it would be to see the Jaspers again and how much fun she and Anna Blake would have shopping, gossiping, and attending parties together. For the first time in months she perked up, taking trouble with her hair and her face, chattering like an excited magpie about anything that came into her head to an oblivious and seemingly deaf Damon. Should she tell him about her plans now or later? Would he object, put obstacles in her path? She didn’t think so but to be on the safe side she’d wait until they reached Washington.
Babette might have saved herself the speculation. Traveling with Julia Grant, the Fowlers stopped off briefly in Louisville, where Julia had relatives. There Babette, tripping over a stair, twisted and sprained her ankle. The hastily summoned doctor forbade her to continue the journey.
At first Babette stubbornly insisted she would go on. “If I have to hobble about on one foot or be carried,” she declared. But she was soon persuaded by a friend of one of Julia’s relatives, a young girl Babette’s age, to stay.
“When you’re better you can join your husband,” the girl, Sophie Trask, told Babette. “Meanwhile you can keep me company, as my husband is off somewhere in Arkansas fighting in this awful war.”
Sophie, also in the family way, was pert, saucy, and full of high spirits, just the sort of person that appealed to Babette. Sophie’s family allowed her a great deal of freedom and above all did not believe in keeping young women in isolation just because they were expecting.
It came as no surprise to Damon when he received a brief note from Babette a month later saying that she had decided to remain in Louisville until after the child’s birth.
For some time now he had suspected she would welcome a separation and had guessed once she reached Washington she would bolt for Baltimore. Not that he cared. He only wanted to be sure the child was his. In the event it bore the least resemblance to himself then she would have to remain and care for it as a mother should if he had to wring her fool neck to make her do it. In turn he would try to be a better husband, though God knew it would be next to impossible with someone as selfish and shameless as Babette. He winced when he thought of her behavior in public, at social functions, how she threw herself at the men, teasing, inviting them with bold eyes and half-naked breasts. He would almost prefer having a wife who would shock with rebel opinions than one who played the wanton. Yes, it was a relief to have Babette safely situated in Louisville out of harm’s way.
Then as April merged into May and the spring campaign got underway he forgot all about her. The army of the Potomac led by Ulysses S. Grant was on the move again in central Virginia. With flags flying and bands playing, brigade after brigade crossed the Rapidan River on pontoon bridges and fords, 118,000 men led by mounted officers, an unbroken marching column of glinting bayonets sweeping down narrow roads toward a dense and gloomy forest. The general was taking his men through this thickly wooded section known as the Wilderness to meet Lee beyond it. There in open country he planned to engage the Confederates in what he hoped would be a decisive battle, crushing the army of northern Virginia in final defeat.
However, through ineptness, bad luck, and the unwillingness of Lee to stand and wait on the other side, the two armies met head-on among the maze of trees and almost impenetrable underbrush. It proved to be a disaster, a muddled clash with a fearful loss of life from which neither side emerged as victor.
The Wilderness tested Damon’s commitment to the Union’s cause more than any battle he had fought yet. Shiloh might someday fade, but the Wilderness he would never forget. The memory of that spring when Virginia’s countryside, a flower-dotted verdancy, bordered by leafy forests, became soaked in blood and strewn with mangled, corpses would stay with him for the rest of his life. It was in this ill-conceived engagement where the men went crashing through overgrown saplings and tangled shrubs beneath a pall of acrid smoke, firing desperately, wildly, at an enemy they could not see, where bodies piled up, the wounded struggling beneath the fallen dead to free themselves, where fires set by artillery incinerated the fleeing, that Damon suddenly understood Grant’s grand strategy. It was to make sure more Southerners were killed than Northerners. An elementary case of numbers. The North had a larger population than the South, and so their casualties could be indefinitely replaced. Eventually the South would run out of bodies and the North would win. Perhaps this analysis was an oversimplification. Perhaps there was some underlying design that Damon had failed to grasp. But by this time he was aware of too many mistakes paid for in butchery to have much faith in the military mind.
Yet his subsequent encounter with a rebel horseman had nothing to do with his disillusionment. He had been surprised while carrying a message from Grant to John Sedgewick of the Sixth Corps. The reb appeared from nowhere, it seemed, out of the gloomy smoke, brandishing his sword, galloping at Damon before he had a chance to draw his own. The Confederate’s saber caught him on the right cheek. There was no outcry, no sensation, no pain, only a sudden dimness. As he found himself falling into a dark, bottomless void a picture
of Amélie flashed through his mind, Amélie, her lips curved in a tender smile, her arms outstretched as she came to him that night in Nashville.
Chapter
❖ 19 ❖
The spring and summer of ’64 had gone by without a word from Babette. Amélie, aware of her sister’s poor record as a correspondent, nevertheless fretted over her long silence. She had written several times since that first note congratulating Babette on her marriage but thus far had received no reply. She also had written to the Emorys asking for news of Babette and had gotten a vitriolic communication from them, denouncing Babette for leading Mr. Geyser on. They had no idea of Babette’s whereabouts and did not care to know. A much delayed letter from Therese Townsend made no mention of Babette at all. Irritated but not unduly alarmed Amélie consoled herself with the thought that Babette would write if she were ill or unhappy. She could only surmise that her sister, along with Damon, had accompanied General Grant on his move east, which, according to the Gazette, would establish the general and his staff somewhere near Washington, D.C.
Then one overcast, chill afternoon in January the long awaited letter arrived. It had been written months earlier but apparently had strayed in the mails, meandering through various points in Missouri as well as Illinois and Tennessee, and possibly Kentucky. It was hard to be sure; the postmarks by now were so blurred as to be illegible. The letter itself, however, was brief and all too clear.
Dear Amélie:
Well! Would you believe it? I've made you an aunt! Yes, yes! A month ago on September 4th little Toby was born. A big boy with a lusty yowl . . .
Oh, Babette no!
To Amélie this announcement was just as devastating as the one she had received a year ago. The old wound reopened and bled. The pain ate at her heart in a torment of envy. A baby, a boy. Damon’s and Babette’s. She forgot that she hated Damon, that he was her betrayer. She only thought of the child that Damon had fathered. It should have been mine! she wanted to cry. Mine!
Honor's Fury Page 23