“No. Miss Kent says I shouldn’t have to do that.”
“What?” Caitlin’s skin tingled. “Susan, is that true?”
Susan rose, but in the shadows Caitlin could not read her face. “Yes, it is. I never picked up as a child. That’s what your slaves are for.”
Caitlin bristled. “You’ll forgive me for saying so, but one of the main reasons Mr. Becker hired me as Ana’s governess was that I believe in taking responsibility for ourselves. Each of us should clean up our own mess.” It was a lesson Susan would do well to learn herself.
“I disagree.” Susan’s voice was cold, hard. “I will say it again. That’s what we have slaves for. That is, that’s what I had slaves for. Obviously you can’t afford to keep them here.”
“And I wouldn’t even if I could. But we are skirting the matter now. I am Ana’s governess. You will please refrain from undermining my authority.” She turned to the girl. “Please go pick up the rest of your things. I’ll be up in a moment to see that it’s been done before tucking you in for the night.”
“Annie, don’t do it.” Susan’s voice rang out, but Ana’s footsteps faded up the stairs nonetheless. Fire kindling in her bones, Caitlin stalked over to Susan, who couldn’t even remember Ana’s name right. “What in heaven’s name do you think you’re doing?”
“You speak of undermining your authority. I say you are undermining our Southern way of life. I don’t know who you are or where you come from, but it’s plain as day you’re not from Dixie.”
“Susan!” Minnie gasped. “Being a Southern woman is not about being pampered and petted, and consumed with our own selfish vanity while waiting on others to pander to us.”
“Oh! How convenient for a woman without a single suitor to say! Little wonder, though, with those pockmarks all over your face.” Susan’s words leeched into the air like poison.
Caitlin’s jaw dropped. But Minnie held her own.
“Your own tongue betrays you, Susan. A true Southern woman demonstrates ladylike behavior: cheerfulness, a gentle nature, and service to others as a source of happiness and satisfaction for oneself. You possess none of these qualities. If you had any true breeding at all, you would show—or at least have the good sense to feign—traits of the true woman.”
“You will cease speaking to me in that way.”
“I will not. Clearly you need an education. Amiability, piety, a desire to please others. Cleanliness, neatness, patience, industry, kindness, modesty, politeness, respect for elders, obedience. These are the characteristics we should be cultivating in Ana, not laziness and self-importance. Above all, ladies are not to become vexed, let alone show it.”
“I don’t have to listen to this.” Susan seethed. “Just who do you think you are?”
“Minerva Taylor is an instructor at the Atlanta Female Institute, my friend, and a guest in this home.” Caitlin held her voice steady. “As are you, may I remind you.”
“Oh no. I’m much more than that, make no mistake.”
“Really? And just who might that be?” Naomi pushed herself up from the sofa and crossed her arms, the maturity of her forty-some years evident in her matriarchal gaze.
An unearthly glow lit Susan’s bright blue eyes. Eyes, Caitlin realized, that were the very color of forget-me-nots. The resemblance to Ana’s was truly remarkable.
No. The impossible idea sliced through her. She is gone, Noah had said. Susan could not be—
“Annie’s mother.” Susan lifted her chin. “I’d say that gives me a sight more authority around here than you have, wouldn’t you?”
Caitlin’s heart plunged as her throat grew tight. “I don’t understand.”
“How simple can you be? We’re divorced. He left me. Took the child and left me.”
Divorced! What kind of a man takes a woman’s baby from her? Caitlin wondered. But what kind of a woman returns to find her long-lost daughter and does not scoop her up into her arms at once?
“How can we be sure you’re her mother?” Naomi asked evenly.
“Her birth date is January 14, 1856. I’ll never forget it because I thought she would be the death of me on her way out. The doctor had to break her right collarbone to get her out, and I suspect there is a bump where the bone healed.”
Caitlin’s heart skipped a beat. Ana had grown so thin lately, Caitlin had, indeed, noticed a curious bump just where Susan had said it was. Could she have made up the story to match? Impossible. Susan was never with Ana when she bathed or changed clothes.
“Mama?”
All heads turned toward the voice that crept from the doorway. Ana had not obeyed and gone to bed after all. She had heard every word.
“You’re my mama?” she asked again, her fingers pinching the bump in her collarbone.
Silence pulsed in the shadows. Caitlin held her breath.
Finally, Susan spoke, as though exasperated. “Well? Aren’t you going to put the child to bed?”
Atlanta, Georgia
Friday, November 13, 1863
“Do you think I should sleep in Mama’s room with her instead?”
Caitlin tugged Ana’s nightgown down over her head and looked into the girl’s questioning eyes. “Did she ask you to?”
“No …” Her eyes rolled sideways. “But maybe—maybe she just forgot! I know! Why don’t I just go ask her? She’s in the parlor; I can be fast as a flash.”
Reluctantly, Caitlin nodded, and Ana rushed out of Noah’s room, where she and Caitlin had been sleeping ever since Minnie came to join them. Surely he wouldn’t want a total stranger sleeping in his own room, Caitlin had reasoned. It must be better that Caitlin and Ana sleep here while Naomi, Minnie, and Susan took the other three rooms.
Moments later, footsteps whispered in the hall until Ana came back and wrapped her arms around Caitlin. “She’s a light sleeper. I don’t want to wake her up.”
Caitlin clenched her teeth before her true opinion of Susan Kent could escape. “That’s very considerate of you. And you know your Papa would be happy to know you are keeping his bed warm. I am always glad that you keep me company, too. What would I do if I had a bad dream and you were not here?”
Ana smiled. “Grown-ups don’t get scared. That’s silly.”
“Certainly we do! So I will have to thank Miss Kent for being a light sleeper. That way I can keep you with me.”
Sighing, Ana pulled away and unplaited her hair. “Do you think my mother loves me?”
The question pierced. A child should never have to ask such a thing! Worse still, was the suspicion needling Caitlin’s heart. “I think she doesn’t know you very well yet. I think she is far from home and perhaps Miss Kent is scared too.”
Ana frowned. “Scared of what?” Her eyes popped wide, and her horsehair brush stilled on her hair. “Scared that I might not like her? Or that I’m angry she waited so long to find me? Scared that Papa might not come home?”
The humble fire behind Caitlin hissed and crackled. She was grateful shadows veiled her face. “I don’t know her very well either.”
“I’ll be as kind as I can be to her in the morning. Do you think she’d like me to draw a picture for her?”
“I should think she would love that.”
“Then I will draw one for her and one for Papa. Can you send it to him tomorrow?”
Caitlin assured her that she would, then pulled back the counterpane as Ana scrambled beneath it. Together, they prayed for Noah, the refugees under their roof, and for peace. “Please God,” Ana added. “Help me be very very good so Mama will learn to love me.”
Tears pooled in Caitlin’s eyes as she kissed Ana goodnight. Instead of joining the others in the parlor now, she decided to turn in early herself. Suddenly, the fatigue she’d been fighting all day won out.
Once she was settled in bed herself, questions hammered inside her mind. What had happened between Noah and Susan? Had Susan always been so disagreeable? If so, why had Noah married her at all? He had seemed so honorable, so committed to his
family. Then why would he have abandoned Susan and taken her infant daughter with him?
Every question seemed to dredge up another one, like fishing line snagging only the flotsam and jetsam of a wreckage. Real answers only drifted further away. Tomorrow, she would write Noah and ask him for the truth.
Gently, she turned onto her side and stared blankly at the orange glow spilling from the fireplace. She should not be surprised that Ana was desperate for her mother. Caitlin often wished she could have her own mother back, as well. But she was gone. Just like Da. Just like Jack. Noah may never come back, and now little Ana would turn from her if only Susan would open her arms to her.
Caitlin begged sleep to cover her, but it proved to be as thin as her worn-out dress. It was certainly not enough to mask what she did not want to see.
Herself at twenty-one, peeling potatoes with her mother in their kitchen. Her hair in a braid reaching her waist. Completely oblivious to how the course of the night would change the course of her life forever.
“Maybe it was meant to be that the board is no longer sending teachers out West,” Caitlin said. “Otherwise who would take care of you and Jack? Surely not Bernard.” As a police officer, her stepfather often worked late, and sometimes didn’t come home at all. When he returned smelling like cheap violet water, Caitlin seriously doubted the nature of the business that detained him.
“Jack enlisted today,” Vivian said, and Caitlin nearly dropped her peeler.
“He what?”
“He’s seventeen years old. No longer a boy.” But her voice faltered against the backdrop of New York’s Seventh regiment marching off to war this very moment.
“Of course he’s a boy! Seventeen years old, that’s—that’s not old enough to fight in a war! How could you let him do such a thing?”
“I could not stop him if I wanted to.” Vivian’s sigh seemed weighted with resignation. “In truth, perhaps he is better off in the army than he would be here in the city.”
But since when had the army been a positive influence on an impressionable young man whose father had left his life at the age of thirteen? What would become of Jack? She gripped the edge of the counter. Her mind reeled as a band struck up a rousing march outside.
“It’s time to move on from this place, for you too, dear. You must stop thinking about me, and go live your own life. You mustn’t let me hold you back. I’m fine.” But Vivian wasn’t fine. It seemed whenever Caitlin was not present, she had an accident of some kind. Burned her wrist on the skillet. Tripped and banged her head onto the table. A book toppled out of the bookcase and hit her. Was her mother’s clumsiness just another sign of residual grief, as Caitlin’s insomnia had been?
Then Bernard came home with bloodshot eyes and a leer for Caitlin that had made her skin crawl. Vivian stepped in front of her. “Home so soon?”
“Yeah.” He scratched his stubbled jaw and tossed his hat on the coat tree. “And I’ll take some of that grub if you haven’t burned it to tarnation yet.”
He stumbled closer and grabbed Caitlin’s braid before she could back away.
“Let her alone.” Vivian’s voice was low. She turned to Caitlin. “Get out. Now.”
“Aw, Viv, I hardly ever get to see her.” Bernard pulled his shirtwaist tails from his trousers while his watery gaze rippled over her form.
Wild-eyed, Vivian pushed her small hand against Bernard’s barrel chest and growled at Caitlin. “Get out! I don’t want to see you here again! You’ve done enough!”
Caitlin glared at both of them. Her stepfather, drunk and slovenly, a disgrace to his badge and a desecration to Da’s memory. Her mother, birdlike, and crazy-eyed in her insistence that Caitlin leave.
“Fine.”
Fuming, Caitlin slammed the door behind her and stood in the hall outside as she coiled her braid up on top of her head.
“Why did you send her away?” Bernard’s snarl snaked under the door, and Caitlin stayed to listen.
“You’ve got no business with her. I’ll do my duty to you, but you leave her out of it.”
A low murmur, followed by a slap. “Get!”
Caitlin’s heart beat in step with the brisk marching outside. All the bruises on her mother’s body swam into focus. It had been Bernard, all along. Hadn’t she prayed for God to bless her family, help her keep it together? Yet He had done nothing to stop this.
Neither did I.
Her Irish blood surged then, and she burst back into the apartment with no other thought but to end her mother’s nightmare. Little did she know it would be the beginning of her own.
Caitlin’s stomach groaned, scattering the vivid memories from her mind. But it would take more than cornbread and peanuts to fill the emptiness that cried out from within her.
Missionary Ridge, Tennessee
Tuesday, November 24, 1863
“Withdraw.”
Noah Becker could still smell Colonel Nesbitt’s bacon and captured coffee as the murmured order clapped his ears like wooden blocks.
“But why?” Ross dared address his officer, perhaps emboldened by the shade of night. “We ain’t through with those Yanks yet!”
Though he would not question orders like his backwoods friend, Noah wondered the same thing. Surely the lack of food and sleep was muddling his mind. Yesterday the Union army had emerged out of the fog like an endless blue python wrapping around Lookout Mountain, squeezing the Confederate army out of its impregnable position. The booming of cannons reverberated between the two mountains—Lookout and Missionary Ridge—until at midnight, after the fusillade had finally ceased, the Sixty-Sixth had pulled away, crossed the valley, and pushed their twelve-pounder Napoleon guns straight up Missionary Ridge. A line of battle rose with the sun today, but from their position over a railroad tunnel, Yankee charges on the Sixty-Sixth’s section of the line had been repulsed. Yet the clamor of heavier fighting from the center left the outcome of the contest open to interpretation.
“You idiot.” The officer snarled, the glow of a fitful fire yellowing his complexion. “Bragg’s headquarters has been captured and the enemy is on the ridge at this very moment. A very thin line holds them back. Colonel Nesbitt says we are to withdraw at once. You’ll draw rations at Chickamauga Station.”
“Yes, sir.” Noah spoke before Ross had a chance, and the officer left, twigs snapping beneath his heavy footsteps.
“How the deuce did them Yanks get up here with all of us across the ridge, anyway?” Ross muttered. “If we go, who’s keeping ’em outta Georgia? That’s what I want to know.”
Noah shook his head, and let the questions fall like pine needles scattering to the wind. Some answers were too painful to voice.
“Ross.” A second lieutenant approached them, his pine-torch casting light and shadow on his face. “You’re on the picket line tonight. Spread out, keep up a brisk firing until four a.m. to cover our withdrawal, then fall back quietly. Meet us at the station. Do not leave your post until four o’clock, understood, private?”
Ross grumbled in the affirmative.
“Becker, you’ll come this way. The horses are tired. We’ve got six cannons to get off this godforsaken ridge, and there’s no way the beasts will do it for us. The roads are far too steep. The horses are barely able to stand.”
Noah did not point out that he felt barely able to stand himself. The Sixty-Sixth had not slept in almost forty-eight hours, and empty stomachs only added to their fatigue. They hadn’t eaten all day. What they’d been eating before that were half-rations only half-worth eating by the time the food reached them after a sixty-mile journey over hard terrain.
“Each company takes a gun. You’ll lock the wheels and let the carriages and cannon down gently, all the way to the bottom.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hunger carved through his middle and the world swayed, yet Noah put one foot in front of the other until he had joined his company. Were they not all exhausted past the point of ordinary limits? Were they not all just as cold as he in t
he shivering November wind?
At the top of a little old wood road, Noah and his grim-faced comrades clenched stiff fingers around a rope and leaned back to compensate for the leaden burden on the other end. The sky spit sleet into their faces as they began their tedious descent. Noah’s palms grew slick against the coarse hemp he clutched, and the earth slid beneath his heels and into the open seams around his toes. Sweat mixed with the cold rivulets tracing down his face as he strained against weight that now seemed to come alive, taunting him silently as it dragged the men down the east side of the ridge.
The rope slid in Noah’s hands, stripping his skin with it. Steady. Rain and blood mixed to loosen his grip, though he tried desperately to harness the dregs of his strength.
Unbidden, the screams he had heard earlier today and the sharp rattle of muskets coming from the center of the line echoed between his ears, followed by the rushing sound of men running for their lives. According to his officers, Union soldiers had pushed their own cannons up the ridge and fired after the retreating Confederates. How many more cannons had the Rebels added to their number by abandoning them during their retreat? Noah’s legs shook, and his hands burned, and the sleet had now soaked into his very bones, it seemed. He knew the same was true for every one of his aching comrades. Steam rose from their bodies, and groans from their lips, but they would preserve their cannon. Too many had been abandoned on the ridge for the Yankees’ use already.
A few inches at a time, Noah’s company eased the gun and carriage down the five-hundred-foot-high ridge—and right into the frigid, muddy waters of Chattanooga Creek. Shock sliced through Noah as the freezing water swallowed his body. Torchlight wrinkled on water seething and sloshing with men and horses and cannon. With herculean effort, they pushed their guns across the creek and up the bank. Soon the carriage wheels were unlocked and the horses took over the burden once more.
Quaking with cold and gulping the wintry air, Noah forced his chilled, water-logged feet to follow though his sodden body begged to collapse. Another private handed him a torch, and he followed the retreat, the hope of a campfire pulling him forward.
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