An Extraordinary Union

by Alyssa Cole

  “Since when is it a problem for you to meet a man to discuss the Cause? I know you’ve been in more compromising situations than that.” Timothy scrunched up his face in confusion. “McCall is one of Pinkerton’s top detectives, a legend in the field and the war ain’t even half-started yet. You’re one of the best operatives the Loyal League has, so it made sense for you two to meet, even if I wasn’t off doing the devil’s work.”

  “You’re right,” she said. She held the bucket away from her and overturned it, stepping out of the way as the chickens rushed to feast on the grubs. “It just took me off guard, is all. And I can’t say I like him overmuch.”

  “Aw, I thought that you two would make a mighty fine team,” he said. “That, or hate each other. I guess I was right.”

  He chuckled, but Elle found nothing funny about her situation. If Malcolm hated her, it would make their situation much more tenable. She shrugged. “I sent some correspondence about the movements of the troops that dunderhead Rufus Sewell spilled when he tried to impress Susie two days back. I suggested that the Capital try to intercept the regiment if they can, since there’s intelligence that they’re providing reinforcements to Fort Sumter.” The loss of the fort still smarted, and anything that could be done to prevent further entrenchment would help.

  Timothy nodded, rubbing the grizzled scruff on his chin. “I’ve been busy tracking troop movements that are either part of some greater strategy or proof these Rebel boys got no idea what they’re doing. Seems like regiments could be massing to make a move, but I don’t know if I’m seeing a pattern or pure foolishness.”

  They agreed to keep each other updated. Elle hesitated as Timothy turned away from her, but then took a deep breath and asked one of the many questions that had plagued her since her night on the hill.

  “Do you think McCall is truly trustworthy? I must say, the lack of plain old common sense he’s displayed during our meetings has not inspired the greatest confidence in him.”

  It inspired quite another array of emotions, ones that she wasn’t willing to sort through, now or ever. Her back was to Timothy, and when she turned she found that he was studying her. He worked his lips a bit, as if chewing over some idea, and then shook his head. “I can’t say for certain, Elle, but the man seems all right to me. You got the best instincts I know. Trust your gut, gal.”

  He gave her a faint smile and then tramped out of the chicken coop, leaving a trail of disgruntled fowl in his wake.

  Elle looked after him, part of her wishing that he hadn’t spoken so kindly. Her gut was telling her that Malcolm could be more than merely an ally, and that was more dangerous than anything she’d encountered in Richmond thus far.

  Elle returned to the kitchens, losing herself in the monotonous act of cleaning, prepping, and making order. For a moment, she thought back to how doing her daily chores had been a source of comfort to her in her regular life, how it allowed her to shut out the information her brain was constantly processing whether she wanted it to or not. It wasn’t quite the same being forced to do the work for someone else, and without thanks or recompense. A pang of homesickness hit her then. Would she ever walk into the neat little parlor where her parents sat by the fire again, or would this infernal war would rob her of that bit of happiness, too?

  The little bell in the kitchen jingled, and Elle felt her jaw clench with a preemptive surge of anger and annoyance.

  Susie wanted something, and Elle would have to go provide it. She hadn’t expected this to be the thing she most dreaded every day when she agreed to pose as a slave, but Susie’s constant jibes made Elle choking mad. If she’d been allowed just one cutting remark, or even a glare that wasn’t accidental, she’d be able to tolerate it. But she had to take the abuse and act like such behavior was what she deserved.

  Elle walked toward the parlor and took a deep breath. Missus Caffrey’s cloying voice filtered through the air like powdered sugar, choking with its sweetness. Susie was unbearable, but she’d been created that way in a Frankenstein fashion, cobbled together bits of the Southern belle her mother expected her to be.

  “And really, I know that makeup is wanting right now, but you simply must do something about how sallow your skin is.” Missus Caffrey was pinching at Susie’s cheeks when Elle walked in, and not playfully. Elle saw tears spring up in the woman’s eyes, but she didn’t pull away. “Lucinda is floating about town looking like a ripe peach. You can’t go about like one that’s fallen off the tree and been trampled underfoot, darling.”

  Elle walked up to them and paused, head bowed.

  “Perhaps if you paid more attention to this kind of thing, John wouldn’t have gone off to war without offering for your hand. With the way this war is going, claiming our brave young boys, you’ll have to compete to win a man’s attentions.”

  Elle glanced at Susie, who sat with a stiff back and a blank expression. She was many things, most of them unsavory, but being an annoying wench hadn’t made her any less beautiful.

  “I try, Mother. I’ve been trying. You can’t blame me for the shortcomings of the men around me.” Susie said the words haughtily, as if she didn’t care, but she tugged at one of her curls without thought, ruining its set.

  “What do you think this life holds for you without a husband?” Missus Caffrey asked. “Don’t think your . . . exploits are unknown to me. You may have your fun, but without a husband you are powerless. I worked hard to ensure your father chose me out of all the women fawning over him, and I got exactly what I wanted.”

  She motioned to the fine furnishings and paintings that adorned the room.

  Susie’s lip curled. “What power do you have, Mama? Picking out patterns, then changing your mind the next month and having them done again? Making a fancy menu that you don’t even know how to cook yourself?”

  The crack of skin meeting skin, hard, echoed through the room, shocking Elle.

  “There. Now you have some color in your face,” Missus Caffrey said in the same pleasant tone she would have used to ask Susie to pass the salt. With that she turned and walked out of the room.

  Susie’s hard gaze turned to Elle. “What are you doing standing about?”

  Elle inclined her head toward the rope Susie had tugged to indicate she wanted to be waited on. Was it such force of habit that she’d forgotten she’d called for a slave?

  “Never mind. Get out of my sight, you ugly thing.” She picked up one of her gossip sheets and turned away.

  Elle nodded and headed back to the kitchen, the angry heat in her blood making her feel like she might leave singed footsteps on the carpet behind her.

  Susie was lashing out and Elle just happened to be there to take the hit, but the words still stung. She knew that, just as she knew that looks didn’t matter a bit, that it was intelligence and fortitude that carried one through the twists and turns of life. Still, the words had hit her at a soft spot. She could catalogue in her mind all the things people considered beautiful, straight from hundreds of source works. Skin pale like cream, light eyes in shades of blue and violet. Lips that seduced with their pink sweetness. Hair that flowed like silk. Elle remembered when she was on the road with the abolitionists, how they tutted and pulled at her hair as if it was something designed to spite them.

  All the supporting text of years of devoted reading and remembering pushed up behind Susie’s careless insults, giving it power, but one memory began to crowd the other words out.

  “I think you’re beautiful. Maybe the loveliest woman I’ve ever clapped eyes on.”

  She shouldn’t care what Malcolm said or thought—he wasn’t a man whose words should carry weight with her. But as she recalled the many ways he had annoyed her with his looks and flattery and caresses, her anger slowed from a boil to a simmer. It seemed an annoying rake of a detective could prove useful after all.

  “Elle!” Timothy whispered, but his voice was urgent. She didn’t see him at first, then realized he was in the pantry.

  She walked in wi
th a smile, determined not to let Susie’s cruelty affect her. When she saw the look on Timothy’s face, her smile faltered.

  “Read this.” He handed her a note and pushed her into the pantry, away from prying eyes. “I’m sorry, Elle.”

  As Elle scanned the scathing letter from LaValle, she sank down onto a sack of peas, unable to stand the weight of her disappointment. The words swam in front of her eyes and she searched her brain for how they could be true.

  Malcolm McCall came to mind again, but any goodwill she felt toward him had been crushed by the letter she held in her hands.

  McCall was a dead man.

  CHAPTER 8

  Malcolm awoke in the comfortable bed of his fine hotel room, but he may as well have slept on a rock. He’d spent his day quashing thoughts of a woman who didn’t want him and in whose presence he lost all sense of reality. She was just a woman—three fifths of a woman if the Constitution was to be believed—and yet he couldn’t shake the taste of her lips or stop reliving that moment when her mouth had opened to allow his tongue entry.

  He’d never been a man for severe infatuations; he’d cringed in vicarious shame whenever one of his comrades had confessed to such weakness. He’d never been one for love in any form; not after seeing the havoc it wreaked upon his father. The once-proud man had loved Malcolm’s mother with every fiber of his being, and after the Clearances and their wretched trip to the Americas, he’d been undone by the very thing that had once sustained him.

  A memory came to Malcolm then, from their first small Kentucky cabin that was more hovel than home. It was before Father had pulled himself together, before that brief period when the McCalls had prospered. When it had seemed they would shake the ghosts of Scotland that hadn’t been scoured away by the Atlantic’s relentless waves as they were pushed toward the Americas.

  His mother had been cooking at the wood-fired stove, humming the little tune that always made Malcolm think of warm milk and stolen hugs before bed. He’d felt a surge of love for the resilient woman with hair like copper wire. But when he’d turned to his father, a sick feeling had crept up in his throat. His pa stared across the room with sunken eyes that glittered with a wild possessiveness. The look in his eyes had been love, but love that had been corrupted, like a tree whose root rot has finally begun to wither the branches.

  “Did you like it, Catherine?” his father had asked, then paused to slug his whiskey straight from the bottle. He spoke through gritted teeth. “Did you truly fight them off, or did you moan as you took them into you, one by one?”

  His mother hadn’t answered, or even turned around; she’d simply stopped stirring the boiling potatoes and walked briskly out of the kitchen. His father’s face had immediately crumpled with regret.

  “Cath, I’m sorry. Jesus, I didn’t mean that. I love you, a chuisle mo chroí!” He hadn’t gone after her, though. He’d placed his head in his hands and wept, mindless of the starchy water boiling over and hitting the stove with a hiss. Malcolm had run and taken over his mother’s duty. He looked to his younger brother, Ewan, who had his face stuck in a Latin book he’d borrowed from a neighbor. Reading was his favorite form of escape. Don, his sister, was still a burbling babe, unaware that she was a daily reminder of all that had gone awry for them.

  That was when Malcolm had learned the true power of love: It could take a good man, hollow him out, and fill him with something caustic. He’d steered well clear of it as he grew into a man, and his nomadic lifestyle had aided him well in his avoidance. But now there was Elle. Elle with the sharp tongue. Elle with the brilliant mind. Elle who was a million times too good for a man like him, but who would always be seen as less than.

  Malcolm thought of her bleeding in the streets of Baltimore. The men whose group he had infiltrated had laughed as she fell, or ignored her, as if a bleeding woman shouldn’t be a shock to Southern Gentlemanhood. Malcolm could already feel that anger he’d seen in his father creeping into his blood; maybe it was a curse, placed on the McCalls that fateful day when the English lapdogs had swarmed into their village. Or maybe it was the only recourse of a man who couldn’t protect the woman he cared about.

  She’s not your woman. Oh, that was true, but not for lack of wanting it to be so.

  Malcolm sighed. Pinkerton had joked that thirty-two was a bit old for a detective, and perhaps he’d been right. He was going soft or his brain was addled. There was no other explanation for his preoccupation with the woman. None that he wanted to admit, that is.

  Malcolm performed his morning ablutions, dressed in the thick woolen uniform that was comfortable in this January cold but had given men heatstroke during the marches in the warmer months. He stared at himself in the reviled gray and for a moment he was weary. The constant pretending, the fear of discovery, the rootless nature of his life. What he’d for so long thought of as a boon was now beginning to feel like a burden.

  When he’d strapped on his gun, pulled on his hat, and stepped outside into the quiet side street where his hotel was located, he began to feel more like himself. He set his mouth at the perfect angle to signal he was thinking of something amusing, but private. He kept his gaze before him, a bit unfocused to show he was deep in thought. He’d long since discovered that presenting an air of contented solitude was the quickest way to have loquacious people approach.

  It took about two minutes, and that was on the long side.

  “Oh, Mr. McCall! Say, Mr. McCall!” A youngish man was quickly approaching, maneuvering his way between carriages pulled by emaciated horses and drivers that were only marginally better nourished. The blockade’s effects were showing more and more every day.

  The man arrived, eyes bright and out of breath from his exertions.

  “Just the man I want to see,” the man said excitedly. “Just the one.” He stared at Malcolm in adoration, unblinking.

  Malcolm gave an inward groan as he realized what the man was about. The sweaty, panting men were always after the same thing. Glory.

  “Well, sir, tales of your exploits as told to Senator Caffrey made today’s paper. I just want to shake the hand of a man who came so close to ridding our nation of the scourge of that traitor Lincoln.”

  “Well, I failed at my task, so I’m not worthy of any special attention,” Malcolm said. He’d succeeded, of course, spectacularly so since President Lincoln had escaped the Rebel plot unscathed. He wished he could rub that knowledge in this man’s face. He was so tired of the spineless hangers-on who thirsted for blood as long as someone else’s hand was on the hilt of the sword or pulling the trigger. He wasn’t pleased to hear that he had made the papers either. Even if the rags bolstered him as a son of the South, making headlines was the sort of attention a man like him didn’t court.

  “Well, that’s not true. It’s just heartening to know that fellows like you and Stevens are working in support of Davis’s government. We beat the tar out of the Northmen at Manassas, and it’s only a matter of time before we’ve defeated them completely.”

  Malcolm looked away in a show of modesty, but the truth was he couldn’t look the man in the eye. This misplaced nationalism was another kind of corrupted love, and it was just as unpalatable.

  He gave the man a friendly clap on the shoulder. “I’m sure you’re right, friend. I’m sure you’re right. Good day to you.”

  There was nothing further to say. Although he was positive the stranger could spend days pontificating on the righteousness of the Confederacy, he had no tolerance for such tomfoolery at the moment.

  Malcolm wound his way through the city, seeing what drew his eye. He meandered down side streets and stopped to chat with an old acquaintance. He hooted and cheered at an intersection as a regiment of young soldiers marched by.

  He told himself that he was simply surveying the city, seeing if there was any intelligence that could be conveyed to the Capital, but when his boots carried him to MacTavish’s store he admitted the truth: Although he’d do anything for the Union, he was in search of some
thing other than secessionist plots.

  He stooped through the door into the dusty store. Many shelves were empty, and they would remain so if smugglers didn’t get through with goods. If he’d wanted bread or oats, he would have been sorely disappointed, but he wanted Elle and it seemed luck was on his side.

  She stood at the counter, her back to him. She only turned because MacTavish glared over her shoulder at him. When she moved toward him, he was so taken with the heat in her eyes and the scowl pulling at her pretty lips that he didn’t notice the gun until it was pressed into his belly.

  “Have you changed your mind since our carriage ride? If so, I prefer the knife.” He kept his voice light. He didn’t want to die, but if she was to be his executioner, then he might consider it.

  “I’m going to take him to the back, Tav,” she said. Her voice was low and lovely and altogether dangerous. There was a thread of something in her words, the way they caught in her throat, that warned him of just how angry she was. Had he been mistaken about her? Could she possibly have reason to turn on him? Perhaps he’d underestimated how seriously his kiss had offended her.

  “Elle, what madness is this?”

  “I’m wondering the same thing myself, McCall,” she said through gritted teeth. “Why don’t we go discuss it further? Alone.”

  She pressed the gun into him and the most ill-timed thread of desire began to unspool in his belly.

  “As you may have noticed, I’m more than amenable to spending time with you,” he said quietly, using the lazy tone he knew annoyed her. “No need for drawn weapons.”

  “When dealing with possible traitors, a gun is a valuable accessory. Now, are you going to move or am I going to shoot you?”

  Malcolm didn’t know what she was about, but the anger in Elle’s eyes grabbed his attention. She wasn’t one for histrionics that he could tell of. Something had to have occurred for her to resort to such brusque behavior. He decided not to resist. The room was small and he would have the size advantage, despite her weapon.