Trail Angel

by Derek Catron

  Annabelle hadn’t been looking for Josey when she left camp for a ride. That’s what she told herself. The wagons stopped early for the day near Bridger’s Ferry. With other wagons already waiting to cross, their turn wouldn’t come before morning. Annabelle missed her long rides with Josey. When she didn’t see him in camp, she headed out on her own. Finding him swimming in the river was a coincidence. She would swear to it.

  Tethering her horse near Josey’s, Annabelle perched on the stone where Josey had piled his clothes. He moved briskly against the stream and didn’t see her as she admired his purchases.

  “New clothes. How nice.” He spun around toward the sound of her voice so fast, she smiled to see him startled. “Don’t worry, it’s just me. Not a band of Sioux.”

  “The Sioux I could handle,” he said, crouching to keep his body below the waterline.

  “I wasn’t spying on you.”

  “Then why do you feel the need to say so?”

  He joked so rarely Annabelle couldn’t take offense. “I’m not going to answer that.” She stood with her back to him. “I’ll look away until you get dressed. You must be freezing.”

  “The water’s not so bad if you keep moving. You should try it.”

  She feigned anger. “A proper lady doesn’t bathe in the river.”

  “I don’t know why not. It’s faster than washing one part at a time with your underclothes on. It feels good, too. Besides, a proper lady doesn’t wear pants or ride like a cowboy, either.”

  Though she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of admitting to it, Josey had a point. Every time she did something that would have seemed improper at home, she found she liked it. Looking around, Annabelle reassured herself of their isolation from camp. No one would be likely to stumble across them. Still, some lines shouldn’t be crossed.

  “I won’t look.” Josey seemed to be reading her thoughts. He turned from her, struggling slightly to keep his balance as he hunched in the water.

  “How do I know you won’t peek?”

  “You have my word as a gentleman.”

  “I’m not sure how much that’s worth.”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  The water looked refreshing. Annabelle had assumed the blistering heat of the prairie would give way to something more comfortable as they neared the mountains, but that hadn’t happened yet. The thought of dunking her head in the water to wash away days of dust appealed to her, and the notion of fully immersing her body won her over. She hadn’t had a proper bath since the last night in Omaha. Plus, she carried a luxury item purchased in Fort Laramie: a bar of Castilian soap.

  “I’m holding you to your word.” She loosened her hair and began to unbutton her riding shirt. “And you better keep your distance once I’m in there.”

  “You won’t even know I’m here.” He moved upstream from her.

  “Don’t go too far.” Privacy was one thing, it was quite another to be alone so close to Indian country.

  She fetched the soap from her saddlebag and started to pile her clothes next to his. She had intended to leave on her undergarments, but it occurred to her she would be unable to put on her shirt and pants if her drawers and chemise were wet.

  The sun warmed her bare skin, yet she shivered with a frisson of wickedness as she stripped. Her skin prickled at the slightest movement of air. With no intention of leaping in, Annabelle stepped tentatively onto a dry rock where the water eddied into a calm pool. She moved slowly, her eyes shifting from the rock to Josey to be sure he kept his promise. He had stopped swimming but kept his back to her.

  “Aren’t you in yet?”

  “Be patient.”

  “It’s better if you jump.”

  Annabelle dangled a toe toward the water, still watching Josey as she leaned forward. With a slight drop from the rock to the river, she balanced herself on one bended knee. The cold water sent a shock through her leg, as if she’d stuck her foot into a campfire rather than a stream.

  “That’s cold.”

  With a jolt, she pulled back her leg, losing her balance. She had misjudged the depth of the pool, and her leg went into the water to just past the knee, her foot sinking into squishy river bottom. She shouted again and tried to leap from the frigid water, turning as her wet and muddy foot slipped on the rock. Annabelle’s arms spun like a windmill, seeking something, anything, to regain her balance.

  There was nothing.

  For the briefest moment, Annabelle viewed the perfect blue sky as if it stood before her on a painter’s easel. Before she had time to consider this unnatural perspective, she went under.

  The shock of the cold made Annabelle want to scream, even as the impact with the streambed forced the breath from her body. Water rushed over her. She heaved for air—too late. Droplets tore at her throat like swallowing shards of glass. She flailed, convinced she was drowning, becoming aware only gradually that something had her, lifting her body and turning her as she coughed and fought for breath.

  The coughing and wheezing probably lasted only a few seconds, though it seemed an eternity before Annabelle regained her wits. She hovered over the water, across Josey’s knee so the pressure on her stomach forced out the water. He brushed her hair from her face with his fingers, saying something, the sound soothing even if the ringing in her ears precluded understanding. She coughed her throat raw. She moved when the pressure from his knee made it difficult to breathe.

  “You all right?”

  She nodded, her breath coming in short gasps. She had fallen to her knees, the water nearly to her navel. He was behind her, his arm around her waist. He shook slightly, but not from the cold.

  “Are you laughing?”

  “No,” he insisted.

  He drew back before she swung at him. The motion reminded her of their nakedness. She averted her eyes. “Oh.” She sank to her bottom so the water reached her shoulders.

  “You should have let me drown.” She failed to stifle a laugh. “I suppose you will never let me forget this.” Her voice rasped from the coughing. “And I suppose you looked, you devil.”

  “I wish I had been looking, but I only turned around when you started shouting. I thought that Sioux war party had come after all.”

  Laughter brought on another coughing fit. From behind, he enveloped her in his arms. She didn’t object. His body warmed hers, and he held her until the coughing stopped. She turned to look and felt she was falling again, into his eyes, big as saucers, brown like sugary coffee. He wanted to say something but before he drew a breath her lips sealed his.

  The kiss ended quickly, but there was no denying it happened.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Because I knew you wouldn’t.”

  He offered no argument. His eyes looked even bigger as he leaned into her and lifted her chin so her mouth met his.

  “You won’t need to think that again.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  “War leads to lovemaking.”

  That’s what the old woman had said. The ladies were taking tea on the piazza overlooking the garden, where a profusion of ivy, vines and roses shrouded them from the foot traffic on the street. A gentle breeze found its way from the battery, carrying the fragrance of magnolias in bloom. Annabelle could almost forget the war on such a glorious June day, if only there had been anything else to talk about.

  Mrs. Huger, their hostess, was in a philosophical mood. A large woman, she had the unfortunate habit of choosing short-sleeved dresses, leaving exposed fleshy arms that dangled like chicken wattles whenever she raised a hand to make a point.

  “Soldiers do more courting here in a day than they would do at home, without a war, in ten years.”

  Some of the younger women giggled. More than a year after the fighting had begun, Annabelle held no more illusions about war than she did of love. She kept her silence for the benefit of her young friend Rebecca, whose reading of a letter from her beau inspired Mrs. Huger’s philosophical turn. The ardent young man served
alongside Annabelle’s brothers in Virginia. He wrote to Rebecca as if she had just come from a convent. To hear his letters, he must think she had never flashed her innocent blue eyes on a man before he came along. Annabelle knew her brother Johnny could dispel him of that notion, but she kept silent on that point as well.

  With so much mourning in the world, Rebecca’s letter was a harmless distraction, and Annabelle urged her to continue. “I’m not sure I should,” Rebecca said, her face growing as crimson as one of Mrs. Huger’s roses.

  “That’s the part you should read,” Cassandra McLean said with more than a hint of naughtiness. The other girls pleaded, and Rebecca made a show of appearing reluctant before she continued.

  “My dearest Rebecca, my love for you burns so hot within me that I feel I am waterproof. The rain may fall, but it merely sizzles and smokes away, no more dampening my clothes than my ardor for you.”

  Oh, good Lord. Annabelle focused on her knitting. She was not as gifted a seamstress as the other ladies, but she had vowed to knit a pair of socks every day for the soldiers.

  After the women finished tittering about Rebecca’s letter, Cassandra asked if Annabelle had anything to read. It was just like her to stir up trouble. Cassandra had been Annabelle’s chief rival for Richard. If she felt outclassed by that setback, her subsequent marriage and the birth of two sons were ample compensation. It’s too bad growing bottom-heavy after the birth of her boys prevents her from being charitable about her good fortune.

  “I fear I don’t,” Annabelle said, careful not to sound irritated by the question. “You know Richard is in the west, and the mail service is not reliable since New Orleans fell.”

  Cassandra acted surprised, but it was always the same. Richard only wrote at planting or harvesting time. He would be furious to know Annabelle ordered the men to plant crops they could harvest to feed armies and besieged cities. She told herself she wasn’t defying her husband so much as relying on her judgment during his absence. He lacked the perspective to understand the impracticality of cotton so long as the Union blockaded the harbor.

  Disputes over planting were the least of Annabelle’s problems with Richard. She remembered when she had been like Rebecca, starry-eyed and in love with the idea of being loved. Richard was quite the prize: a handsome man with a respected name and heir to one of South Carolina’s largest plantations. He hadn’t pursued Annabelle with the poetic fervor of Rebecca’s beau because he didn’t have to. Richard Holcombe was accustomed to getting what he wanted.

  They hadn’t been married long before Annabelle realized Richard’s ardor had been motivated less by her charms than her father’s money and a wish to secure his inheritance. Until the marriage, Richard had debts that would have shamed him in his father’s eyes. Annabelle convinced herself their relationship would be different once she gave him a son. Yet he grew cooler toward her once his father died, even after she became pregnant.

  The riding accident made for a complete break between them.

  Richard warned Annabelle not to ride, but it was one of her few pleasures and her doctor assured her the exercise would be good for her and the baby at that early stage. Harry, the slave boy who worked in the stables, must not have secured the balance girth that day. He was usually so careful about such things.

  The fall would have been nothing if not for the baby, more like slipping from the horse’s back than falling, she told Richard later. She felt no ill effects, but he insisted she take to bed. He never left her side over the long days that followed and spared no expense in seeing to her care, sending off for a specialist from Savannah. The baby seemed fine at first. Only later the doctor explained how the fall caused irreparable harm to the child, making the miscarriage inevitable. With Annabelle in a laudanum fog, Richard told her the doctor’s damning verdict: because of her injuries, she would never conceive.

  From that day, Richard looked at her as if she were a murderer. Where he had been indifferent before, he grew practically hostile. Worst of all, Annabelle couldn’t blame him. It was her fault. For a moment, while bedridden, when Richard held her hand and whispered reassurances, she’d been glad for the fall. She still expected the baby would be fine, that the bruises and wound to her pride would be a small price to pay for the demonstration of Richard’s feelings. After losing the baby, she couldn’t look at Richard without seeing an accusation in his eyes, guilt cutting through her like a rapier.

  She’d been unable to tell her parents any of this. Richard had urged her not to tell them of the pregnancy until she was showing. The fall happened before that, during the harvest when her parents were away from Charleston. Even afterwards, Annabelle couldn’t share the news with them. She was the smart one. She was the gifted one. She was the pretty one. She was the perfect one. Her brothers got into trouble and came away even more loved for it. Annabelle’s way to be sure of her parents’ affections, especially her father’s, was to never disappoint them. It was bad enough that Richard blamed her. She couldn’t bear their disappointment as well.

  Intelligence, strength, beauty—none of it mattered if Annabelle did not give her husband a son, or at least a daughter to whom he could bequeath his family’s land. Within months, Richard spoke of selling the plantation and moving to Europe. Annabelle learned of his plans from her father, who heard it from business associates. She acted with her father as if she knew, as if part of Richard’s schemes had been her idea, so that her father wouldn’t suspect what she did: that Richard planned to leave her.

  The war came upon them before sale of the land progressed beyond talk. Richard fulfilled his patriotic duty in raising a regiment of volunteers and riding off. It was going to be a quick war, everyone said, and Charleston would prosper even more as the business capital of a new Southern nation. With Richard gone, Annabelle proved capable of carrying out his affairs, perhaps even better than he, for no detail was unworthy of her attention.

  When Caleb Williams brought back news of Richard’s death, Annabelle did not grieve. She’d been mourning for her brothers, whose loss she felt keenly. Richard’s death represented something different, something she dared tell no one, in particular the ladies at tea parties. Richard’s death marked her emancipation. If the war hadn’t gone so badly, she would have lived out her days contentedly. The last thing she needed was a man, and she’d been unable to tell her father or mother why no man—at least no man worth having—would want her. Damaged goods.

  Annabelle’s bitterness toward sharp-tongued Cassandra McLean that day in Mrs. Huger’s garden would be forgotten. Within three years, Cassandra would lose her husband on the battlefield and both boys to the sickness that swept through the city in the war’s final year. Cassandra soon joined them, a death Annabelle’s mother attributed to heartbreak.

  They buried Cassandra in the white frock she wore at her engagement in a churchyard beside her husband and sons. Just before her death, as she lay wasting away, Cassandra spoke to Annabelle of her joy when her first son was born. It was before the war. Her husband was with her, and the idea of the lives that stretched before them in that moment created a sense of what she called “a perfect happiness.”

  Annabelle mourned Cassandra’s passing, but she did not pity her onetime rival. How many people ever know a perfect happiness? Annabelle never had, and on the day they buried Cassandra she expected she never would.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Annabelle and Josey lay together afterwards on a grassy spot where the bank rose steeply, shielding them from any prying eyes that might pass. Not that Annabelle worried. Her mind had been blessedly empty when Josey swept her in his arms and carried her from the river. There had been no time to think, only to feel, to react to his urgent need, a need she found rising within herself as well, as unexpected as it was welcome.

  She smiled as she nestled her head against him. The sun dried their bodies, and the high grass protected them from the breeze that ran along the stream. Josey felt so warm against her and was so still she wondered if he sl
ept. It amused her to think he could sleep while her mind buzzed like hummingbird wings.

  She had never expected to be intimate with Josey. She had thought her fear too great to allow anything to happen. The darkness in Josey frightened her, especially when she thought of herself vulnerable to him. Yet there was a thoughtfulness to him, too. In all her flailing about in the water, he had even managed to save her precious soap.

  Something shifted inside Annabelle when Josey carried her from the river. He had been hungry, eager for her, yet he acted with a gentleness she had never known with Richard. She responded to Josey’s touch as she never had with her husband, so that she urged him on. His eyes as he entered her were filled with a tenderness she didn’t know a man could possess. The painful thrusts she had come to expect from her husband, with Josey were like a gentle rocking, a motion as natural as waves lapping at the shore, filling her rather than penetrating her, his arms around her, his body against hers, enveloping her in warmth, comfort, love?

  Then, a new urgency, not violent, but no longer gentle. Their movements faster, like racing heartbeats. Her back arching to meet him, her arms pulling him to her again and again, feeling him grow inside her in a final burst of pleasure.

  It might have been a moment of perfect happiness if Annabelle could have kept her mind from wandering to the past— and what that might mean to her future. She stroked his hair, and he turned toward her, kissing her hand.

  So he was lying there, just like her, his head filled with thoughts . . . of what? She feared asking. The poets never spoke of how fraught love could be for a woman. One moment Annabelle had been afraid of being with Josey. Now she feared being without him. What if he doesn’t feel as I do? Perhaps he only wanted her body for what soldiers called “horizontal refreshment.”

  Worst of all, he might really love her—until he learned she couldn’t give him children. The thought terrified her. Rising on an elbow, Annabelle studied him. He looked younger without his clothes, his body as white as hers but harder, his bones and muscles creating sharp angles where hers curved. “Did you sleep?”