by Jo Goodman
"Hasn't anyone ever told you not to look a gift horse in the mouth?" she asked. An honest answer to Logan's question meant that she would have to tell him how lonely she was. Ria's pregnancy confined her to her room. Victor was at the store all day, and Michael had to be avoided. That left the servants, and she was not certain they liked her. Certainly none of them struck up a conversation with her. She was not invited to join the same exclusive circles to which Ria belonged, and her friends from the theatre were uncomfortable coming around to her home. It was a solitary existence in too many ways. She had not realized how solitary until she found herself playing hostess to Logan Marshall. "I may still have you thrown out," she said. "What brings you here, Logan? I cannot imagine what could tear you away from the paper in the middle of the afternoon."
"My hours are my own. That is a publisher's prerogative. Today, anyway." He set down his cup. "You are looking very well, Katy. It seems that this marriage agrees with you."
She looked away briefly, uncertain of herself beneath Logan's thorough study. "You are not going to ruin it for me, are you?" she asked quietly.
"No. No, I swear I'm not. Look at me, Katy. I'm telling you the truth."
Looking at Logan was a mistake. His gray eyes were gentle now, faintly imploring. He made her believe him. Quite against her will she found herself wondering about the child they had made together. Would their baby have Logan's dark, copper-struck hair, his handsome patrician features? She could imagine holding a little boy to her breast with slumberous, heavy-lidded eyes or teasing a little girl who had a wonderfully warm smile when she wanted to be charming. It would be better if the baby resembled her. No one would ever think to question the parentage then.
"All right," she said. "I believe you. But you still have not answered my question. Why are you here?"
Picking up the folder, Logan leaned forward in his chair and handed it to her. "Here is your answer."
Katy took the folder and opened it. She stared at the photograph, her face paling alarmingly. "How did you get this?" Her throat was constricted, making it difficult to speak. Were all the Marshalls liars? she wondered. Jenny had promised her that Logan would not know about the photographs so soon, yet here he was. Logan promised he was not trying to ruin her marriage, yet he had something like this to use against her. "What will this cost me?"
Logan took the folder from Katy's shaking fingers, closed it, and set it aside. "I found it on the stairway to the studio," he told her. "It was obviously dropped there by accident. As to your second question, it is clear you don't believe me after all. I have no intention of asking for anything. The photograph is yours. I want you to have it."
When he gave it to her, she shredded the photograph into small unrecognizable pieces, missing Logan's wince as she did so. Katy dropped the folder and the shredded photograph into the fireplace, took a match from the mantel, and lighted the paper. The evidence disappeared in a flash of fire and some black curling smoke. She dusted off her hands, returned to her seat, and picked up her teacup. "What's wrong?" she asked, seeing Logan's odd expression for the first time. "You said it was mine, didn't you? That photograph was an accident anyway. I didn't pose for it."
"I would not have known that," he said. "I've seen a lot of Jenny's work. That photograph was one of her best. Everything about it was exactly as it should have been: the lighting, the mood, the depth of shadow. It was not under or overdeveloped. It was a stunning piece of work, Katy."
If he had wanted to make her feel guilty about what she had done, then he had succeeded. "Perhaps you should have saved it for Jenny. You obviously think it was more her work than mine."
"It was," he said. "I found it over a week ago. I did not decide until today whom I wanted to have it. I think I made the right choice. It was Jenny's work, your privacy."
"Thank you," she said when their eyes caught and held.
It was Logan who broke the silence. "Tell me how Jenny came to photograph you."
Katy passed Logan a teacake and related how the photographs had come about.
Logan enjoyed listening to her. Sometimes her southern origins softened the edges of her speech. It was as if she tasted her words, melting them in her mouth in the moment before she spoke them aloud. "You said the one I showed you was an accident," he said when Katy's explanation trailed off. "What sort of accident?"
"Holland tipped the screen while I was changing. I think Jenny dropped that piece that goes over the glass."
"The lens cap, you mean."
"Yes, I suppose so. I remember she picked something up and complained about the ruined plate. I righted the dressing screen, and Holland was banished to the downstairs. I felt a little sorry for him. He hadn't meant to do it."
Logan could imagine his nephew slinking off, affecting an injured air. He had probably forgotten all about it by the time he reached the second floor landing. "Then you were not waiting for anyone?" he asked. He saw her puzzled look. "In the picture you seemed expectant, as if you were thinking of someone, waiting for him."
"Is that what you saw? How odd," she said quietly, more to herself than to Logan. "I was afraid in that moment. Nothing more."
"Afraid?"
Old wounds, she thought. Without meaning to, Logan was scratching at old wounds. "If I was expecting anyone," she said, her voice without inflection now, "it was Colonel Allen. Sometimes he used to... used to surprise me when I was dressing. I suppose I might have been thinking of him. I only remember being afraid."
"I'm sorry, Katy. I didn't mean—"
Forcing a smile, Katy sat up a little straighter. "I know. It is just as well I destroyed the photograph. It was too provocative. I understand why you thought what you did."
"Do you ever wonder what happened to Colonel Allen?" he asked.
Her smile faltered. "No. No, I don't." She did not say anything for a moment, then, "Do you know?"
"He is a member of Congress. Has been since just after the war. He represents a district in Pennsylvania."
"Married?" she asked.
"No." He heard the question she was not asking. "No children in his life, no little girls."
The conversation was much too uncomfortable for Katy. She did not know where to look or what to do with her hands. The teacup rattled in its saucer, further betraying her nervousness.
"That was stupid of me," Logan said. "I should not have brought it up. Forgive me."
"No, it's all right. After all this time it shouldn't bother me."
"I don't know why you should be so different from the rest of us mortals. There are matters I still find difficult to talk about. I imagine it's true for most people."
"Do you really think so?"
"You have never heard me talk about Andersonville, have you?"
She shook her head. "I would like to hear about it. I would like to understand why you hate me so."
He had almost forgotten he hated her. He should have been grateful that she reminded him. It had begun to feel too good sitting near her, exchanging pleasantries among the memories.
"Your friends and I traveled a hundred miles together," he said, "before stumbling upon one of the few remaining train lines in the South. That's where they abandoned me. Stuffed me in a boxcar with forty others just like me and let me take my chances in Andersonville."
Logan saw Katy's shiver, and he ignored it. "You'll recall I was never in any real condition to travel in the first place. By the time I reached the train I was out of my head with fever. At least that's what the other prisoners told me later. I don't remember much about the journey except that it was impossible to move, cramped as we were. Somehow I survived the trip, but by the time the prison car reached Andersonville I recalled almost nothing of what had come before it. When I finally saw the light of day in Georgia, I did not know my own name, my family, or where I came from. For lack of a better name, they called me Red. My hair, I suppose."
Katy was very still and watchful. Logan was not looking at her. Rather his cool gray eyes were
lifted up and to the right a bit, recalling the past by focusing on some point beyond Katy's shoulder. His long, lean fingers absently tapped the brass tacks in the curved arm of his chair. She did not want to hear what he was telling her—and yet she did. It seemed that Logan could always make her think and feel contradictory thoughts and emotions.
"How to describe Andersonville?" he asked rhetorically. "The conditions at the camp were so deplorable that our enemies felt compassion for us. Sometimes women met the trains with baskets of biscuits. They tossed them at us as we jumped out of the cars." A glimmer of a smile touched Logan's mouth. "We ducked at first, thinking they were going to pelt us with rocks. When we realized they were biscuits..." His smile vanished. "...we cried."
He looked at Katy then to gauge her reaction. Her eyes were wounded, as if she was feeling his pain. He went on with brutal frankness. "Imagine living in an area the size of this room with a dozen other people. That will give you an idea of how much space each soldier had. Now imagine there is no roof over your head. When it rains you can feel the wet down to your bones. When the sun comes out it is so hot you imagine the shine is bleaching your marrow.
"Think about a tall pine forest just beyond the fifteen-foot-high stockade, a place that could supply shelter if camp commanders had either axes or nails. As it was, straying too near the stockade could get you a bullet in your back. Guards set up a railing nineteen feet inside the pine walls. So close,"—Logan shrugged—"and you died. There were men who found suicide at the deadline preferable to dying slowly of hunger.
"Some of the latrines emptied into the drinking water. Disease was part of life there. We had sweetgum for malaria, pokeweed plaster for pneumonia, and pine resin for dysentery. I arrived long after the prisoner exchange system had broken down. The only real hope for release was in waiting out the war. Some tried tunneling. They exploded canteens on a campfire and used shrapnel as digging tools. The hard red Georgian clay consumed their energies and offered little in return. There were two dozen tunnels while I was there, and I only ever heard of one escape. Like most of the other prisoners, I prayed for the gates of hell to open from the outside.
"Everyone knew the South was losing, but no one talked about it within earshot of a guard. Those poor bastards were almost as hungry as we were, twice as mean, and they carried guns."
Logan shook his head slowly, smiling faintly and humorlessly. "No, we never talked about the South losing the war."
Katy's mouth was dry and her eyes were wet. After a moment she managed to ask, "What did you talk about?"
His voice softened. "The usual things. Family. Friends. Sweethearts. I was a curiosity. They used to make things up for me just to give me a past. We made it a contest once, to see who could compose the best life story. Monroe Needlemeyer won an extra ration of corn bread."
"Was it a good story?"
"I thought so at the time."
Katy thought he might elaborate, but he didn't. She watched unhappy memories cloud his eyes.
"Of the forty men I traveled to Andersonville with, only twenty-eight walked out. Libby Prison was a sinkhole, but Andersonville was something else again. Blankets were scarce; food scarcer. Robust men were reduced to skin over bone. The government seemed to have abandoned us, and our captors were murdering us by slow degrees. The camp commander was hanged later for war crimes. A lot of men cheered his passing, but I was too weary by that time. God, I just wanted to put it behind me."
Katy was the first to speak after a long silence held their most private thoughts. "You did not come north after the war was over, though. Why not?"
He looked at her sharply. "How do you know that?"
"I asked Victor some time ago."
Logan shifted in his chair, stretching his legs. He pretended interest in the toes of his shoes rather than stare at Katy. He damn well did not want her pity. That was the last emotion he meant to elicit from her. "I had no reasons to go north, no expectations of being able to find family. There were no assurances I even had family. It seemed impossible to me that of the tens of thousands of men at Andersonville, I never met anyone who knew me. I moved all around the camp, hoping that I would be able to change that fact. I never did."
Katy would have taken some tea if she could have raised her cup with steadier fingers. "You stayed in the South, then?"
He nodded. "In Georgia. Savannah, to be exact. Oddly enough, I gravitated toward a job on a newspaper."
"Really."
"Really. The Savannah Press. I started out doing odds and ends, sweeping up, inking the press, setting type, anything anyone wanted. Gradually I began to do some stories."
"They accepted a Yankee?"
"I made up my own past for the paper. No one knew anything about me except what I wanted them to know."
"You still did not remember anything?"
"Nothing. I had given up ever knowing. The life I had seemed reasonable and satisfying enough. I was doing some photography and making woodcuts for the paper. The publisher liked me, and I thought I had a good future with the Press."
"Was there anyone special?" she asked. "Someone... someone—"
"Female?"
"Yes."
"No. No one special." Because he did not want Katy to arrive at the wrong conclusion, he added, "There were women, but in the back of my mind I thought I might already be married. It kept me from pursuing any kind of permanent attachment."
That was her fault as well, she realized. Somehow she was to blame for his loneliness, and if Logan had denied he was ever lonely she would not have believed him.
"I stayed with the Press for about two years. One day we picked up a story out of New York about an heiress in hiding who exposed a bank fraud. She used a simple device called a pinhole camera. It was the pinhole camera that struck some lost memory chord. It vibrated for days inside my head. Gradually I began to remember things: odd, silly things that could have only given me pleasure. A week later I was in New York, disrupting everything at Marshall House, including my brother's wedding day. The heiress in the story was Jenny, and the man who helped her with the pinhole camera was my brother Christian."
"That's astonishing. I had no idea."
"Not many people know what brought me back."
"Victor doesn't know. He did tell me about your family though."
"Then you understand that because of you, I never again saw my father alive."
"Because of me, you are still alive," she said.
Logan's eyes turned frigid. "You think I should be grateful to you for not letting me hang? After you returned from your trip to church and blocked my escape with that calculated seduction scene of yours? That's what caused my capture. You delayed me long enough for your aunt to bring help. I hold you as much responsible for that as for anything you ever did to me."
Katy's eyes glittered, and she raised her chin. "You think you know so much about what happened that day! You cannot possibly attribute my actions to anything but—" She broke off, horrified by what she had nearly revealed to Logan.
Katy stood abruptly. "I think it would be for the best if you left now, Mr. Marshall."
"Mr. Marshall? Katy, sometimes you are ridiculous."
She flushed, embarrassed and angry. "All right. Logan. I would like you to leave."
"Of course." He saw that she was surprised by his easy acquiescence. "I did not come here to harass you," he said, his voice gentle.
Logan stood, and let Katy precede him to the door. As she passed him he caught her fragrance. Her fragrance. It elicited a flood of memories that were almost overwhelming in their power. Logan had to stop himself from reaching for the braid that had fallen over her shoulder.
"Is something wrong?" she asked, turning to Logan as she opened the door. The expression on his face was one she could not identify. His eyes had narrowed slightly and his head was tilted to one side.
He blinked. "Nothing's wrong," he said. His mouth hinted at a smile; mostly it was sad. "Good day, Katy."
* *
*
Victor looked up from the work that surrounded him on the bed. He slipped off his spectacles, put them on the night table, and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger.
Katy stopped brushing her hair and regarded him with curiosity and worry.
"I wish you would not work so hard," she said softly, sitting down on the edge of the bed. Papers slid from their neat stacks, and she made no attempt to make the piles right again. Her thumb passed back and forth over the brush bristles as she spoke. "Ever since we returned from the Willows you have been obsessed with your work. There is no room for me in your bed anymore." She waved her hand over the papers and ledgers and bonds and certificates. "Is it me? Is it the baby?"
Victor closed the ledger in his lap and pushed it aside. "It is not you, and it is certainly not the baby."
"Then it's you." Her large, almond-shaped eyes appealed to him. "Please, Victor, tell me what it is. I miss being with you, being held by you. I miss talking to you and laughing with you. I don't want to sleep in that other room any more. I want to be with you."
He leaned across the bed and took the brush from her nervous fingers. His hand circled her wrist, and he needed only to tug lightly to bring Katy to his side. Leaning against the headboard, a pillow at the small of his back, Victor held Katy so that her cheek rested against his shoulder. Her nightshift had ridden up to her thighs so that her beautiful long legs were pale and smooth as cream against the deep blue of his robe. She was curled in the crook of his body, one of her arms across his chest. She laid a finger against the side of his neck. He caressed her knee with his palm.
"I could hold you for a lifetime, Katy," he said softly. "Believe that."
She frowned, her brows drawing together slightly.
"It is just what you said: it's me. I am afraid I have been rather a poor excuse for a husband."
"That's not true."
He chuckled. It was laugh or cry, and he was not going to cry in front of Katy. "It most certainly is. If you had more experience you would know that. I want to make love—"
"I don't care about that! I don't!"