“And how exactly am I supposed to go back to the year 1863?”
“By letting me put you into a deep trance.”
“You’re kidding,” Jessica croaked, unnerved by the idea.
“Honey, there’s no need to worry,” Darlene said reassuringly as she patted Jessica’s hand. “Us conjure women do this sort of thing all the time.”
Still a Doubting Thomas, the best Jessica could manage was a weak smile.
“Buried deep within each of us are all the memories from all our past lives,” Darlene continued. “That’s the reason why we’re attracted to certain things or certain people. For instance, I suspect that not only were you inexplicably drawn to Highland House, but you and Gideon were hot for each other at the get-go.”
Jessica felt her cheeks flush. “Even before he shaved off his burly beard, I was strongly attracted to him,” she confessed.
“That’s because, on a subconscious level, you and Gideon immediately recognized each other as soul mates.”
“Gideon and I are soul mates.” Jessica gave herself several seconds to test drive the idea before she smiled and said, “I like the sound of that.”
“All right, then. How about making yourself comfortable on the couch while I take care of a few things.” Stepping over to the doorway that separated the back room from the salon, Darlene poked her head through the opening. “Lacey, I need you to take my eleven o’clock appointment. It’s Mrs. Arbuckle’s weekly wash and set. And make sure you use that special silver highlights shampoo.” Orders issued, she closed the door.
Jessica fluffed a couple of pillows behind her head before stretching out on the sofa. As she tried to relax, she was suddenly struck with a worrisome thought. “What if, while I’m deep in the trance, I get stuck in some alternate dimension?”
“It’s not going to happen,” Darlene assured her as she lit a long stick of incense, causing a plume of sickly sweet smoke to waft through the air. “Now I want you to close your eyes, breathe deeply, and concentrate on relaxing your body.”
As she listened to Darlene’s carefully worded commands, Jessica soon succumbed to a weightless sensation, and felt her inner self untethered from the here and now. Continuing to follow Darlene’s voice, she descended to a shifting plane of time where images zoomed past like photographs in an album. When she caught sight of the precise picture that she was searching for—Sarah MacAllister sitting at a roll-top desk in the library—Jessica entered into the scene.
She wasn’t altogether certain, but she thought Sarah glanced up as she approached. Then, as had happened so often in Jessica’s dreams, the two of them merged, becoming one.
Chapter 23
Having removed a ledger from the drawer, Sarah opened a bottle of ink and reached for a pen, not particularly in the mood to post the monthly farm accounts. It was one of the more tedious responsibilities that she’d been forced to undertake in the wake of Gideon’s war time service. And while he was currently at home on a medical furlough, it seemed pointless to ask him to post the ledgers.
Why bother when he would soon be leaving again?
Although glad-hearted that Gideon was nearly recovered from a bullet wound to the chest, she was fearfully aware that, had the bullet struck a few inches closer to his heart, the wound would have been fatal. Needless to say, she’d had many a sleepless night worrying about the dangers he would face once he returned to active duty.
Too listless to put pen to paper, Sarah stared at the book.
In addition to her concern for Gideon’s safety, there was another crisis to contend with—Highland House was going to rack and ruin, and their creditors were threatening to sell the place out from under them. Moreover, she’d been without hired domestic help for months now, tending to all the household chores herself. How Gideon expected her to pay the accounts, put food on the table, and keep the farm running while he was off crusading for a lost cause was a mystery to her. Indeed, there were many mornings when it was a struggle for her to simply get out of bed, each day looming more hopeless than the one before it.
Even with Gideon home on furlough, there was no respite from her melancholia.
About to dip her pen into the ink bottle, Sarah paused in mid-motion as Gideon entered the library, resplendently attired in a new uniform. For some inexplicable reason, the sight of him in that gray tunic angered her, bringing to the fore emotions long held in check. It reminded Sarah that Gideon no longer belonged to her; he now belonged to the Confederate army.
“Well, what do you think?” her husband asked, rubbing his hand back and forth along his jaw, drawing Sarah’s gaze to his clean-shaven face. “Personally, I thought the mustache gave me a certain gallant air.”
“I don’t know what to think anymore,” she retorted. “The man I married didn’t wear a uniform or walk about the house with a gun strapped to his hip.”
“I know why you’re upset.” Gideon stepped behind her chair and placed his hands on her shoulders. As he gently kneaded the muscles in her upper back, he said, “These last two and a half years have been hard on you. You’re dispirited, as am I, by the long separation imposed upon us. But you must learn to be more self-reliant.”
“Why must I learn to be more self-reliant?” she snapped in a noticeably peevish tone, twisting in her chair so that she could look him in the face. “You are my husband. You took a vow to protect and cherish me. I am but a woman. I know nothing about running a large farm or managing thousands of acres.”
“Need I remind you, Sarah, that there is a war being fought not far from here?” As he spoke Gideon emphatically gestured to one of the opened windows. “The world is not as it once was. You must adapt to these uncertain times. If I do not survive the war—”
“No! I beg you, Gideon. Do not utter those words.”
Grim-faced, her husband exhaled a deep breath. “I understand the hardships that you face. And I know that you must feel—”
“How could you possibly know my feelings?” she interjected, unable to temper her runaway emotions. “Your only concern these days is for the Confederate army.”
“That is an unfair accusation, as well you know.”
“Is it? If you had to choose between the Confederate army and your wife, which would you choose, Gideon?”
Clearly astounded by her brazen question, he said, “Good God, woman. How can you even think, let alone ask, such a thing?”
“Because I am interested in hearing the answer.” Refusing to back down, Sarah leveled her husband with an unrelenting stare. “Which would you choose, Gideon… me or the army?”
“You might as well hold a double-edged sword to my throat as to ask a question like that.” Gideon ran a hand through his hair, his expression one of beleaguered frustration. “Truth be told, I don’t know what it is that you want from me.”
“I want you to remain at Highland House. Today, and all the days to follow,” she informed him, refusing to mince words. “You can receive a medical discharge by informing your commanding officer that—”
“You know full well that I cannot,” Gideon affirmed.
“And why is that? Plenty of men have received medical discharges. You’ve served long enough. Let some other poor deluded fool take your place.”
The muscles in Gideon’s jaw visibly clenched. Absent for more than two years, he was clearly unaccustomed to his wife playing the shrew.
“Is that what you think I am, Sarah—a deluded fool?”
“Can you honestly claim otherwise?” she scoffed, not knowing what hidden demons drove her to malign him so. “Indeed, the Confederacy is full of men just like you, parading around in fancy uniforms and charging into battle like a pack of overgrown schoolboys.”
“Despite your lowly opinion of the Confederate army, I have a responsibility to the men under my command who—”
“Spare me the soliloquy,” she interjected, raising a hand to forestall his explanation. “Obviously, being promoted to the rank of colonel has gone to your head. You a
lso have a responsibility to your wife. Or have you conveniently forgotten about that?”
A deep furrow materialized between Gideon’s brows. “How can you throw these accusations at me when our country is at war? Have you no patriotism?”
“Patriotism?” she parroted with a full measure of sarcasm. “What good is the Confederacy to me if you are killed in battle?”
Letting the question go unanswered, Gideon began to restlessly pace back and forth in front of the desk. Sarah observed his every expression, able to discern in his silent deliberation a fierce inner conflict between honor and duty. And love.
Coming to a halt, Gideon executed a crisp, soldierly about-face. From his steadfast expression, Sarah could see that he’d come to a decision.
“I know this is not how we’d planned to live our lives,” he said. “Unfortunately, we cannot subvert the course of history to suit our individual needs. This cruel war will soon end. And when it does, everything will be as it once was.”
At hearing that, Sarah mockingly laughed aloud. “Do you have any idea what I do after each battle? I search the casualty lists, all the while praying to God that I won’t see your name. Once I’ve ascertained that you aren’t listed among the dead, I am filled with a joyful euphoria.” As she spoke, Sarah held up her fist, clutching an imaginary casualty list. “Can you not see what this unholy war has done to me that I can hold a list with the names of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of slain men, and be rendered deliriously ecstatic? No, Gideon, we shall never again be as we once were. Those days ended when you ran off to join the army.”
“Even as we speak, invading troops are marching through the whole of Virginia, burning and vandalizing every step of the way,” Gideon said, a hard cast to his features. “I refuse to stand by and allow that to happen. The very reason I put on this uniform was to safeguard our home.”
Her lips twisted, a bitter smile in the making. “So you claim.”
“Are you actually questioning my motives?”
Pointedly ignoring him, Sarah dipped her pen into the open bottle of ink. Putting pen to paper, she very neatly wrote out the day’s date on a clean page of the ledger. As she stared at the date that she’d just written—November the 7th, 1863—she mentally calculated it had been two years, seven months, and eight days since her husband first left for the army.
Without warning, Gideon slapped his palm on the open book. “Damn it, Sarah. I’m talking to you.”
“You can talk all you want; however, I have no intention of listening to you.”
Again, she dipped the pen, startled to have the ink bottle snatched out from under her. With a muttered oath, Gideon hurled the bottle against the library wall.
“Maybe you’ll listen to me now.”
“You’ve killed so many men, violence has become second nature to you,” she said stiffly as she rose from her chair. “I want nothing further to do with you. If you will excuse me, I need to—”
“Sit down!” Grabbing her by the upper arm, Gideon shoved Sarah back into the chair. “You’re not going anywhere.”
A tense silence stretched between them, each armored behind an impregnable wall of anger.
“You are not the man I married,” Sarah said at last, the truth painful to acknowledge.
“Don’t you think I know that?” Gideon rasped, his voice thick with emotion. “If I could somehow change all of this, spirit us away to another time and place, I would do so. You must believe that.”
“Unlike you, Gideon, I no longer have the capacity for such fanciful dreams. All I ask is that you resign your commission and—”
“Stay here at Highland House tied to your apron strings.” As he spoke, Gideon straightened to his full, imposing height. “Even then, I suspect you wouldn’t be satisfied until you had completely divested me of my manly honor.”
“If your manly honor is so important to you, then by all means return to your Confederate comrades. Go on, leave! Get yourself killed and be done with it,” Sarah lashed out, her fury fueled by too many months of lonely separation.
Wordlessly, Gideon slipped a hand into the inner pocket of his uniform tunic and removed a leather purse. With careful deliberation, he extracted from it a large wad of paper money. “It’s obvious, madam, that I’m no longer welcome in my own home,” he said, disdainfully tossing the money onto the desk. “I trust this will sufficiently cover my funeral expenses.” That said, he stormed out of the room.
Trying to collect her shattered emotions, Sarah focused her attention on the rivulet of ink that stained the far wall, strangely fascinated by the tentacle-like ribbons of dark color. How long she sat there, she had no idea. It wasn’t until she heard the front door slam shut, followed soon thereafter by the reverberating pounding of horse hooves that she realized Gideon was taking his leave of Highland House.
Her heart in her throat, Sarah rushed over to the French doors and flung them wide open. Without a thought to propriety, she raised her skirts to her knees and raced across the lawn, hoping to stop him. “Come back to me, Gideon… come back to me!” she yelled.
Her wild dash was in vain. By the time she got to the front of the house, he was nowhere in sight.
Dear Lord. Why had she said all of those hateful things to him? If she could, she’d take it all back. Every spiteful word.
Heavy-hearted, Sarah returned to the house. Once inside, she went about her household chores, much like a puppet on a string, afraid to do otherwise. Certain that if she stopped long enough to think, she would surely lose her mind.
And so she didn’t think.
Instead, she posted the farm accounts, wrote a letter of condolence to a neighbor who’d recently lost her son, and tried, without much success, to clean the ink spot off the wall. After that, she stripped the beds, boiled water, and nearly rubbed her knuckles raw scrubbing bed sheets.
One hour bled into the next until, finally, near collapse, she stepped onto the front porch to catch a breath of fresh air. Overhead, four black ravens ominously circled. A bad omen. An even worse omen was the thunderous roar she heard in the distance. Shielding her eyes from the late afternoon sun, she sighted a group of riders, ten to twelve men in all, galloping at breakneck speed toward the house.
Frantically, she tried to determine whether they wore blue or gray.
Biting back a horrified shriek, she saw that they wore Federal blue—the Huns about to descend upon Highland House.
Amid shouts and hoarsely barked commands, the detail of riders stopped en masse several yards from where Sarah stood at the edge of the porch. Trying to affect a calm manner, she stepped toward them, her legs shaking beneath her skirt. Mercifully, she’d had the foresight to bury the silver and other valuables beneath the azalea bushes.
Several of the Union soldiers dismounted, two of them doffing their hats as they approached.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen.” Sarah clenched her hands at her sides, determined not to show them any fear. “There’s water for your horses around back, and… and I have a pot of beans stewing in the kitchen if you are hungry,” she said, thinking it best to make the offer before they commenced to steal her provisions out from under her.
The officer in charge stepped forward, his kepi politely held in his hands. “Would you by any chance be Mrs. MacAllister?”
“Oh, it’s Mrs. MacAllister, all right,” one of the men in the party remarked snidely.
Sarah turned her head, taken aback to hear a long forgotten, yet eerily familiar, voice. Surely, it couldn’t be—
Her hand flew to her mouth, unable to stifle a gasp at seeing Oren Tolliver standing several feet away from her. “Mr. Tolliver! This is a surprise, to say the least.”
“A pleasant one, I hope.”
Sarah dropped her gaze, unwilling to confirm a lie.
“We’re looking for your husband,” the commanding officer said. “It’s our understanding that he’s here at Highland House.”
Taken aback, Sarah stared at the officer, uncomprehending. �
��What business have you with my husband?”
Oren, evidently amused by her response, snickered. Sarah paid him no heed, thinking it best to direct her remarks to the officer in charge: a major who, thus far, had conducted himself with a measure of civility.
“Begging your pardon, Mrs. MacAllister, but I don’t like this any more than you do,” the major commiserated in a courteous tone of voice. “Capturing an enemy soldier on the field of battle is one thing. Sneaking up on him while he’s sitting down at his own supper table is a different matter, altogether. Be that as it may, I’ve been ordered to—”
“Apprehend your traitorous husband and see that he’s remanded to a military prison,” Oren interjected, taking an almost gleeful delight in doing so.
Sarah silently contemplated the man to whom she’d once been engaged, baffled as to why he had accompanied the detail of Federal soldiers given that he was the only man present who was garbed in civilian attire.
“I hate to disappoint you, Mr. Tolliver, but my husband is not at Highland House.”
“I happen to know differently,” Oren countered. “A loyal Unionist informed us that Colonel MacAllister is home on furlough.”
“And did your informant also mention that Gideon returned to his regiment earlier today?”
Although the upper half of Oren’s face was obscured by the brim of his hat, Sarah could see that his lips had flattened into a thin, hard line. When he purposefully took a step in her direction, she fearfully backed away from him, recalling how he’d struck her that long ago day at Sweet Springs.
“If I discover that you’re lying to me, I’ll—” Oren left the threat unfinished.
“By all means, Mr. Tolliver, search the house if you don’t believe me,” Sarah invited with an expansive gesture to the front door.
Oren turned to one of the soldiers still on horseback. “Sergeant, take two men and search every room of the house.”
Our Time Is Now Page 21