by Mary Mackey
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PART 1 - Brazil
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
PART 2 - Betrayals
Carrie
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
PART 3 - The California Road
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
PART 4 - The Siege of Lawrence
William
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
PART 5 - John Brown
Elizabeth
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
PART 6 - Henry Clark
Carrie
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Carrie
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
“Mary Mackey gives her readers yet another woman warrior, this one a fighter in the Civil War. We thrill to the story of Carrie Vinton as she travels from Brazil to Bloody Kansas to Missouri and courageously takes the side of freedom over slavery.”
—Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior
Praise for THE NOTORIOUS MRS. WINSTON
“A deep look at the Civil War from the viewpoint of a feisty, independent female masquerading as a male . . . Strong, engaging historical fiction starring a wonderful protagonist.”
—Midwest Book Review
“Using the Civil War as a backdrop for her story of a woman’s struggle for freedom and independence, Mackey creates a strong feminist work of fiction that reads like true history. Her fascinating characters and actual events and battles of the war are drawn so clearly you’ll feel you’re in the midst of the war as well as inside the heroine’s heart. This appealing, intelligent story will find a place on your bookshelf and in your heart.”
—Romantic Times
Acclaim for Mary Mackey’s previous novels
“A complex, colorful saga . . . Engrossing and realistic.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Inventive and imaginative.” —The New York Times
“Deserves a place on the shelves next to the work of Jean Auel.”
—Booklist
“Fascinating.”
—Marion Zimmer Bradley, author of The Mists of Avalon
Berkley Titles by Mary Mackey
THE NOTORIOUS MRS. WINSTON
THE WIDOW’S WAR
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2009 by Mary Mackey.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
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PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / September 2009
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mackey, Mary.
The widow’s war / Mary Mackey.—Berkley trade paperback ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-14008-6
1. Abolitionists—Fiction. 2. Women and war—Fiction. 3. African American soldiers—
Fiction. 4. Kansas—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A3165W53 2009
813’.54—dc22 2009021032
http://us.penguingroup.com
For John Edward Mackey
1920-2008
Historical Note
In 1854 fierce fighting broke out in Kansas as abolitionists and pro-slavers flocked to the territory to vote in an election to decide whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state. For the next seven years, until the official start of the Civil War in April of 1861, an undeclared civil war raged on the Great Plains as bands of Southern raiders massacred abolitionists and abolitionists retaliated. The violence in Kansas can be seen as a bloody rehearsal for the Civil War, a conflict that would rip the United States in half from 1861 to 1865 and end with the emancipation of over four million enslaved Americans of African descent.
Chronology
MAY 30, 1854 President Pierce signs the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a law that allows residents of the western territories to vote to decide whether or not those territories will join the Union as free states or slave states. Pro-slavers and free-soilers flock to Kansas.
AUGUST 1, 1854 Lawrence, Kansas, founded by New England abolitionists.
NOVEMBER 29, 1854 Election for first Kansas Territorial Delegate to Congress. Massive fraud as Missourians stream over the border to vote for pro-slavery candidate John W. Whitfield.
OCTOBER 7, 1855 Abolitionist John Brown arrives in Kansas.
MAY 21, 1856 Army of pro-slavers attacks Lawrence, sacks the town, and burns the Free State Hotel.
MAY 22, 1856 Massachusetts Sena
tor Charles Sumner brutally beaten on floor of United States Senate by South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks.
MAY 24, 1856 John Brown kills pro-slavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek.
JUNE 2, 1856 Brown’s men defeat pro-slavery militia at Battle of Black Jack (sometimes considered the first battle of the Civil War).
AUGUST 30, 1856 Pro-slavers attack Osawatomie and massacre Brown’s supporters.
OCTOBER 16, 1859 Brown seizes United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with intent of arming slaves of the South so they can free one another.
DECEMBER 1, 1859 Brown hanged for treason.
JANUARY 29, 1861 Kansas enters Union as a free state.
APRIL 12, 1861 Confederate batteries fire on Fort Sumter. American Civil War officially begins.
Carrie
The Kansas Territory, September 1856
Nine days ago, I shot my husband. Tomorrow, I am going to lead a band of escaped slaves into Missouri to free eight women, four men, and three children who were kidnapped by Henry Clark and his band of border ruffians. Actually, the escaped slaves are going to lead me. They were trained in the art of war by John Brown himself, and God help any slaver who gets in our way.
When I throw the divining shells and look into the future, I can see that this is only the first battle in a civil war that will soon engulf the entire nation. That war is racing east right now toward New York and Boston, Richmond and Savannah, cracking and roaring like a prairie fire, and there’s not a thing any of us can do but prepare to stand and fight.
Henry Clark welcomes this war. For the past week he’s been hunting me like game. He’s plastered a poster with my description on it on the side of every jail in western Missouri: WANTED: WHITE WOMAN, AGE 25. BROWN EYES, BLOND HAIR, 5’5” IN HEIGHT, APPROXIMATELY 120 LBS. SLAVE-STEALER, ABOLITIONIST, STATION MASTER ON THE NOTORIOUS LAWRENCE LINE OF THE SO-CALLED UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. GOES BY NAMES “CAROLYN VINTON,” “CARRIE VINTON,” “CAROLYN SAYLOR,” AND “MRS. DEACON PRESGROVE.”
He got most of the details right, but that poster also contains additional information that reads as if it were composed by a madman, which leads me to believe Clark himself wrote it. “Armed and dangerous,” I take as a compliment, but what am I to make of the charge that I am known to “consort with satanic spirits,” or “kill men from afar by mysterious means”? Clark makes it sound as if I’m wanted for witchcraft. I wonder what he’d have written if he’d known I was coming after him with a cavalry unit of black soldiers?
To tell the truth, I’m surprised the word “adulteress” doesn’t appear anywhere, because I’m not just riding into Missouri to free the men and women Henry Clark plans to sell back into bondage. I’m riding to a plantation called Beau Rivage to rescue my lover before Clark hangs him. His name is William Saylor, and I’ve loved him almost all my life. The first day I met him, I pulled a late-blooming orchid out of the mud and thrust it into his hands. “Have a Ca lopogon pulchellus,” I said. “You don’t often see them in bloom this time of year.” That was back in Mitchellville, Kentucky, so many years ago I can hardly count them. William was eleven and I was nine—just children both of us, but from the very first it was as if we had been born to spend our lives together.
William examined the orchid and then stared up at me with dark eyes that reminded me of the black waters of the upper Amazon—a tall, skinny, pale boy with thick, silky hair the color of caramel candy. “You speak Latin?” he said in an awed tone that I found very gratifying. Even in those first few minutes of our acquaintance, I wanted to impress him. Neither of us had the slightest suspicion that we’d just fallen in love or that we’d stay in love forever.
Our lives have been full of so many missed opportunities that when I think about them, they drive me half mad. If I’d stayed in Mitchellville instead of going back to Brazil with my father, we would have married as soon as William got out of medical school, but instead I married the wrong man and spent almost an entire year grieving for William while he grieved for me. Each of us thought the other was dead, and by the time we found each other again, every penny of the great fortune my father had left me was gone, and the war in Kansas had begun. If William and I hadn’t been deceived and lied to, I would never have lost him a second time to Henry Clark or seen my baby boy taken away by Clark’s men, trussed up in a pillowcase like a dead rabbit.
Now it’s up to me to undo the damage. I can’t let innocent people be sold back into slavery because they hid us, fed us, and kept our whereabouts secret, so tomorrow we’ll ride into enemy territory and rescue them. I’ll get Teddy back and cut that rope off of William’s neck before Clark lynches him. But I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t afraid. I have a Sharps rifle, plenty of ammunition, a brown gelding, and the bravest companions a woman could wish for, but still I wonder if I’ll be alive this time next week.
My father always told me courage is the ability to do what you have to do no matter how frightened you are. Dear Papa, that was good advice, but I don’t want to face the guns of the most vicious gang of raiders ever to make Kansas bleed. I’d rather go back to Rio before all this began and fix things so they don’t turn out this way. But although you taught me the name of every orchid in the jungle, you never taught me how to fix the past, the terrible, beautiful past that is forever as unchangeable as death . . .
PART 1
Brazil
Chapter One
Rio de Janeiro, October 1853
Their child is conceived in a time of plague. Here is how Carrie remembers it: She and William in her bed in her father’s house on the Ladeira da Glória with the shutters closed. Outside, panic in the streets as refugees flee the city, black flags in the port, ships in quarantine, the sound of church bells tolling ceaselessly. Inside, light slanting through the wooden slats of the shutters, the scent of freshly turned earth drifting in from the garden, William’s eyes filled with despair, the tenderness and fierceness of his lovemaking, his hair thick and soft as brown silk.
Speaking his name, she pulls him closer and tells herself they will be together for the rest of their lives. That is the moment she first realizes he is burning with fever. And when she sits up, sweating and shaking, she understands that she is burning, too . . .
Chapter Two
She wakes several days later in an unfamiliar place where she can see nothing but a net of white lines and a brilliance so intense it makes her scream. Footsteps hurry toward her, shadowy white shapes loom up through the netting, and she’s examined by terrifying figures in black robes with huge white wings sprouting from their heads. I’m dead, she thinks, and these are either angels come to take me to heaven or devils come to take me to hell.
She struggles to lift her head and the pain is so intense, she screams again. Every bone in her body feels as if it’s been broken. Dear God, if she’s dead, why is she in so much pain?
“Senhorita,” a female voice asks in Portuguese. “Who are you?”
She tries to reply, but she can’t form words, and she has forgotten her name. Heat rises from her feet to her head in a long, shuddering coil. This must be hell then. The devils are tormenting her for her sins, feeding her to the flames, turning her slowly over hot coals. Again she tries to speak, but the sweet smut of fever fills her mouth, choking her.
“Senhorita, your name. We need to know your name.”
Suddenly she remembers: the plague, her father’s death, the hellish two weeks of tending the dying, and then . . . A pain sharper than broken bones fills her chest. Where is William? He was so sick, so terribly sick. She remembers sponging him down with alcohol in a desperate attempt to break his fever, begging him to drink a little water, kissing him and crying over him. What happened to him? Where is he?
She tries to ask one of the things that is hovering over her, but she has gone mute, and no matter how hard she struggles, she can’t utter a single word. For a while she fights to speak, because she must know—even if she is dead and in hell—if William survived the sma
llpox epidemic. But the effort is too much and the pain too overwhelming. The net of light begins to dim, and a vast incoherent roaring fills her ears. She makes one last attempt to speak William’s name and then falls into blackness as if into a deep well.
When she wakes again, the pain is still there but beaten back to a more bearable level. This time she understands that the net of white lines is not an infernal trap but merely a loosely woven cotton bandage someone has tied over her eyes. She lies still for a long time, too exhausted to move. All around her she can hear women’s voices. They’re speaking Portuguese, which must mean she’s still in Brazil, perhaps still in Rio. Although they speak mostly in whispers, she understands a word here and there. She has been hearing Portuguese since she was six and her father and mother took her from her grandparents’ house and plunged her into the wild, beautiful tropics. For a moment she’s comforted by the sound of this melodious language, which she speaks as if she’d been born beneath the slopes of Corco vado. Then again, she remembers.
“Senhoras!” she cries. The conversations stop abruptly and footsteps approach. Through the bandage, she sees a large woman dressed in a black robe. The woman is wearing a starched white headdress that flutters like the wings of a bird. Not a devil or an angel but simply a nun in a wimple.