by Lynda J. Cox
A renewed sense of guilt bore down, nearly crushing him. Georgianna was dead because of his damned sense of honor. His need to serve in the capacity he knew best, as a doctor, killed her. Even sending her and their unborn child to her family near Atlanta hadn’t protected them from the ravages of war. When Sherman began his march to the sea with the stated goal to “make Georgia howl,” Mathew, along with many of the men held in Northern prisoner of war camps, felt the agony inflicted on the civilian population. He still couldn’t understand how any force could wage war on defenseless women, children, and old people and claim to be civilized.
Mathew unclenched his fist, closed his eyes, and tried to force a return of a sense of calm. As if he sensed Mathew’s anger, Ethan stirred but didn’t wake. Mathew opened his eyes to watch his sleeping child. He brushed the shock of curls off his son’s brow. He continued to stroke the soft curls in a soothing manner as he had seen Georgianna do when he’d been home on a four-day furlough. Ethan had been an infant and it was the only time he had seen his son until he found him in that hellhole deemed an orphanage.
One of the sisters stirred, Miss Eva, he thought... or was it Ava? She leaned across the aisle. “What’s his name?”
“Ethan.”
Both women nodded and smiled. The spinster he thought to be Ava asked, “Is that a family name?”
“It’s the name his mother and I agreed upon.”
“Are you taking him to his mother?”
Mathew shook his head. “No. She’s dead.”
The spinster covered her opened mouth with a lace-gloved hand. “I am so sorry for your loss.”
He should thank her for her condolences, but the empty platitudes would mean nothing to either of them. He considered donning his hat and pulling it down low over his eyes, as the enigma in the back of the car had done, so he could avoid this utterly banal conversation. Instead, he feigned a yawn. “I apologize. It has been a rather long and tiring day.”
“Of course. It must be very exhausting caring for a child by yourself. Men just aren’t meant to be the sole caregivers for children.” Ava reached across her sister and the aisle and patted Mathew’s withered arm. “You just rest. Sister and I will stop prattling.”
“The late unpleasantness took so much from so many,” Eva, the more garishly dressed of the middle-aged women said, nodding in a seemingly knowing manner. He doubted if either sister had suffered the slightest deprivation at any point in their lives. While he knew precious little about the current fashions for ladies, he knew silk, satin, and taffeta when he saw it, and both she and her sister were drenched in the fabrics. Eva’s pointed gaze cut to the young parents at the front of the railroad car. “That War...it took away so many brave and gallant young men and livelihoods and property...”
Mathew bristled. When he joined the Confederacy, it wasn’t to fight for property, as the woman labeled the young family. Rather, Mathew fought against an invading army and an over-reaching, ever-growing, intrusive Federal government.
Mathew jerked his arm out from under the spinster’s hand, well past the point of caring about politeness and convention. “Ma’am, I am a physician” —or he had been, until he couldn’t bear the loss of one more life at Camp Douglas— “and I can assure you that so-called ‘property’ has the same intellect, emotions, and their blood is the same color as yours or mine.”
Ava recoiled. Eva’s jaw dropped before she recovered and snapped her mouth closed. As one, the two women huffed, puffed, and flounced on the seat, presenting a rigid profile to him. He could swear he heard the man seated alone snort with laughter. Mathew slouched as far as he could on the bench without disturbing Ethan. He rolled his head back, pulled his hat down low, and closed his eyes.
AT FIRST LIGHT, THE train arrived at a small town in Louisiana and slowed to a stop. The conductor walked through, announcing the train would be halted for thirty minutes to fully fill the water reservoirs and load the fuel car. Ethan tugged on Mathew’s sleeve. “Hungry.”
Though he wanted to coach Ethan’s language skills, trying to engage the child when he was hungry had proved to be an exercise in futility. Mathew reached into his pocket and pulled out the change the widow woman in Atlanta had given him. A quick mental calculation left him feeling queasy. Purchasing Ethan’s ticket left him nearly penniless. Even with the generosity of the widow, if he and Abigail couldn’t reach terms to this supposed marriage, he would be destitute with no manner to secure lodging for himself and Ethan. And none of that assuaged Ethan’s hunger.
He picked up the child. “Let’s go find something for you.”
The couple with the small children remained seated, though the little girl tugged against the restraining hand her father had on her wrist. Her mother rummaged through a small carpet bag, her expression growing longer by the moment.
The twin spinsters rushed past Mathew, both pulling their voluminous skirts in as tight as the hoops would allow. With matching noses tilted upward, they flounced across the wooden platform of the small station.
“Chicken,” Ethan said.
A mouth-watering aroma wafted into the early morning air from a small building next to the depot. Mathew forced himself to ease his tight hold on his son, grateful for Ethan’s distracting comment. “No, I think that’s bacon.”
Ethan shook his head and pointed at the spinsters, repeating more firmly, “Chicken.”
Even in their brightly colored finery, the women had all the mannerisms of a pair of angry, puffed up hens. Mathew struggled to keep a laugh contained, and he pulled Ethan’s hand down. “It’s not polite to point.”
A loud metallic squeal drew Mathew’s attention from the women.
The enigma from the passenger car stepped into the livestock car and emerged in short order leading a solid grey horse. The grey followed docilely behind in a manner more like a well-trained hound dog than a horse.
When the man walked closer, hampered by a slight limp, Ethan buried his face in Mathew’s frock coat. Mathew acknowledged the man with nod, expecting him to walk on by.
Mathew startled when the former Confederate officer spoke. “Mister, I need a favor.”
Matthew looked around and then realized the man addressed him. “What can I do for you?”
“Not sure where you’re headed, and it doesn’t really matter.” The man held out a single gold coin. “Take this, so the boy gets enough to eat. And, get something for that couple with the babies.”
“I don’t want your charity, mister.” Mathew shook his head, backing away. “If you want to feed that couple, why don’t you get it for them?”
“You really think they’d take anything from me?” The man glanced down at his attire. “Wearing this? Maybe you don’t need charity, but that couple could use some help.”
He had a point. Mathew recognized the expression of worry on the woman’s dark face when her exploration of the carpet bag came up short on foodstuffs. He took the coin the former cavalry officer held out to him.
“Get them something to eat and use the rest for your boy as payment for your troubles.” He reached up to the horse’s head and slipped his fingers through the cheek-strap on the bridle, buckling the loosened leather.
Mathew’s breath caught in the back of his throat when he glanced at the coin and noted it was a twenty-dollar gold piece. “I can’t take this.”
“Sure you can.” The enigma tugged the leather strings holding a bedroll to the back of the saddle, then tightened the girth. He tossed the reins around the horse’s neck and put his foot into the stirrup. “Did you fight for Jeff Davis?”
“I served in the medical corps with the Tenth Tennessee Cavalry under Longstreet.” Mathew shifted Ethan’s sagging weight. “I didn’t fight for Davis.”
The spinster sisters flounced back to the train, their skirts still gathered as close as possible.
“You carry yourself like most of the physicians I’ve known, but I wouldn’t have taken you to be a cavalry man.” There was neither disbelief
nor accusation in the man’s voice that Mathew could hear, just a simple stating of fact.
Either the man’s hearing was preternatural, and he’d overheard Mathew’s comment the night before about being a physician, or his observational skills were beyond compare. Mathew boosted Ethan higher onto his hip and looked at the coin in his useless hand. “Why me?”
“Why not you? I heard what you told those two last night.” The former officer canted his head at the sisters, answering Mathew’s wondering of how the man had taken him for a physician. He swung into the saddle, and then shifted his weight from stirrup to stirrup to settle in. “Bet you didn’t get paid in anything other than useless Confederate script the last two years, if you were paid at all. Consider that partial payment of wages.”
He didn’t know anyone who had been paid for the time held in a Union prisoner of war camp. Most of the men he talked to after his parole and release hadn’t seen any pay the last few months of the war, either. The unsettling thought occurred to Mathew he was dealing with a robber of some sort. “Where did you get this?”
“Benito Juarez. He paid better than Maximillian, paid in gold, and I knew I wasn’t signing up for another losing cause.” The other man nudged his hat back a little. “It’s not stolen, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
Could a man choke on his own pride? When he checked his meager finances, had it been that obvious how dire the straits where he found himself? Mathew shoved the coin into his pocket. “If they ask, who do I tell them to thank?”
The rider looked over his shoulder. The cultured, highly educated cadence to his voice altered and the hinted at drawl deepened. “You. If you can’t do that, tell ‘em it’s compliments of Micajah Clark.”
Mathew snorted with the reference to the last man who acted as secretary of the Confederate treasury, a position Captain Clark held for less than forty-eight hours. “You’re not Clark.”
“I never said I was.” The Confederate major put his heels into the grey’s sides and rode off at a slow trot.
It wasn’t until later when he handed a loaf of bread and a large piece of cheese to the young couple for their children that Mathew realized he never did learn their benefactor’s name.
Chapter Three
“Are you sure he’s coming?” Victoria English, de facto sheriff for the town of Brokken, asked. She dropped her slouch hat onto the nearly black teak wood of the bar top in the front parlor and leaned her elbows onto the bar. Her weight shifted to a side when she propped a boot on the brass footrail. Before Abigail could answer, Victoria asked, “Have you got anything cold to drink? It’s not even noon, and it’s already hotter than the hinges of hell’s doors.”
“Am I sure who is coming?” Abigail gestured to a glass pitcher on the end of the bar. Condensation slid down the glass, soaked up in the rag under the pitcher. At one time, Abigail had been mortified she and Sam had turned a former brothel into their home and Sam’s medical office, but that emotion had faded. The garish decorations no longer seemed out of place for either a home or a doctor’s clinic. The deep red and gold flocked velvet wallpaper of this room had grown on her, though she avoided looking in the floor-to-ceiling mirror that ran the length of the bar. Having the old bar as a work space to mix tinctures, bottle dried herbs, and prepare remedies was a boon. “Put it back on the rag, so the water doesn’t make a ring on the wood, please,” Abigail said.
“Dr. Knight.” Exasperation edged Victoria’s words, audible over the gurgling of the freshly made lemonade being poured into a glass. “Give me something to put my glass on. I don’t want you mad at me for ruining this lovely bar.”
“You know as much as I do.” Abigail tossed a small, round, crocheted mat to her. She didn’t point out it had taken her and Sam weeks to strip the old, yellowed varnish off the teak to repair the water damage before they resealed the wood. “You delivered his telegram, and I’m pretty sure you read it before you gave it to me.”
Victoria grinned all the way to her dark eyes, amusement sparkling in their depths. “Guilty. Have you seen the preparations going on out there for the street festival? There’s enough bunting to mark the whole border of the state with Louisiana.”
“I don’t think there’s that much, Vic.” Abigail unscrewed the lid on a jar, sniffing the tincture of plantain. It needed a few more days to brew. She twisted the lid down tight. “Are you going to come to the festival?”
“I might. Depends if you’re making a pecan chess pie for the cake walk. I’ll be there for the dance. I’ll be serving punch, so I have an excuse not to dance.” Victoria’s grin stretched from cheek to cheek.
There were times Abigail thought Victoria courted trouble. Her punch was always spiked. “I made two pies. One for the cake walk and one for you. Heaven knows, no one wants you waving that badge around to win my chess pie.”
“Are you accusing me of using this badge for personal gains?”
The feigned injury in her friend’s voice brought Abigail’s laugh bubbling to the surface. “As much as you like my pie, I wouldn’t be surprised if you threatened to arrest anyone who came between you and it.”
Not the slightest shame entered Victoria’s voice or shaded her features. “I’ll have to plead guilty to that, too.”
“A chess pie isn’t hard to make. You could make your own.” Abigail picked up the last bottle of laudanum and tilted it, hoping that somehow, miraculously, the almost empty container might have refilled itself in the past few days. “Thank heavens the train is running again. Maybe I can get more medical supplies.”
“Speaking of medical supplies, Father wasn’t happy that Dr. Knight insisted the two of you be married by proxy.” Victoria flicked away a fly that landed on her arm.
Being friends with Victoria since the moment she and Sam had arrived in Brokken, Abigail quickly learned how to decipher and interpret her friend’s manner of connecting seemingly unrelated subjects. “Hang your father. “
“Father said pretty much the same about Dr. Knight and his demand of a proxy marriage and your agreement to it. What are you going to do if you can’t stand one another?”
“Well, as you explained it to me, if we both agree that it won’t work, we can have the marriage annulled.” Abigail sighed. “Even if we can’t stand one another, I’m hoping we can all convince him to stay on as the town doctor.”
“You’ve been doing just fine.”
“Not really.” The sinking sense of helplessness when Devon Peters had been hit in the head and fallen unconscious still woke Abigail in the middle of the night, drenched in cold sweats. Even though it had been months since that happened, and the child had regained consciousness within a day and appeared no worse for the wear, a sense of inadequacy continued to eat at Abigail. “We were granted a miracle with Devon.”
Victoria slowly nodded her agreement. Needing to change the subject, Abigail asked, “Did any of the men who wrote here in response to all those ads strike your fancy?”
“No.” Victoria shooed the persistent fly away. “If Jonathan is dead and gone, I have no intention to ever marry again. I like the sense of freedom that comes with being a widow.”
She could well imagine Victoria was appreciative of that freedom. Brokken might not be the height of starched, rigid upper society by any means, but there were still some social conventions even the citizens here followed. As a widow, Victoria could ignore most of those conventions. The revelation a few weeks earlier that Jonathan had been harming her friend came as a total shock to Abigail, and she still had a hard time grasping how she missed all the signs. “Have you told your father you have no intention of ever marrying again?”
“I haven’t screwed up enough courage to tell him that.” Victoria slowly raised her hand, and then slapped it down on the teak bar top, killing the annoying fly. “I want to be able to counter all of his arguments, and I haven’t thought all of those through. I can think of a few arguments Father will make about whether or not I should remarry.”
Abiga
il could frame a few of Pastor Grisson’s arguments, too. She threw a damp rag scrap to Victoria. “Wipe the counter off. That’s disgusting.”
Victoria dutifully did as ordered. “What about you? If Dr. Knight isn’t your knight in shining armor, are you ever going to marry again?” She tossed the rag back to Abigail.
“I’m not looking for a knight in shining armor.” Abigail took the rag between her thumb and index finger and tossed the offending fabric into a wash basket under the bar. As far as it went, it was the God’s honest truth. She doubted that she would ever look at any other man as she had looked at Sam. So whatever physical attributes one Dr. Mathew Knight might possess would be a moot point for her. It was what was in a man’s heart more than his looks that made for a good marriage. Victoria, of all people, should understand that. While Sam hadn’t been the most attractive with his weak chin and scarecrow-like build, he had been a gentle and good man. Victoria’s presumed late husband, Jonathan, had been swooned over by nearly every woman between the ages of nine and ninety in Brokken County, yet his stunning handsomeness had helped him hide a dark and ugly secret. “So long as he’s a competent physician, I don’t care if he’s short, fat, and balding. All I want for this town is a full-time doctor. I don’t have to be married to him for him to stay on as our doctor.”
“Maybe, that’s why he didn’t send a description of himself.” Victoria’s chuckle held a wicked, mischievous undertone. “He is all that, with a nasty temper. To hide how bald he is, he lets his hair grow long to comb it over his head. He probably always has bad breath, too.”
“Stop.” Abigail gestured out the parlor door. “Don’t you have to set up the targets for the shooting contests?”
“Already done.” Victoria’s grin filled with the mischievousness that had been so absent whenever she had been in Jonathan’s presence. “I’ll bet because your doctor is short, fat, and balding, he dresses like a dandy at a fancy ball to try to hide his short-comings. You know, in the same manner some men deliberately ride a huge stallion to make up for an inadequacy elsewhere.”