Emma shook her head. “I’m a wee bit shocked at you. Or maybe I just didn’t hear you right all these months we’ve been sewing together. This thing called grace. You say it’s changed your life, changed who you are.”
“It has!”
“Then why be afraid to tell him something that has already been—what’s the word you like to use? Redeemed. Aye, that’s it. Aren’t you redeemed?”
Ruby’s pulse quickened. “Yes. I’m redeemed. But to name my past is to relive it! I only want to move on and never look back.”
“You’re lookin’ back now, Ruby Shannon. And on your wedding night, it’s going to come back to you clear enough. Don’t you think that if Edward understands grace, he will give some to you, when you tell him the truth? He adores you, you know.”
Warmth spread in her cheeks. “It will hurt him, immeasurably.”
“Better coming from you than from someone else.”
Ruby locked eyes with Emma. “What does that mean? Are you going to take it upon yourself, like Sean did?”
“No, darlin’. It’s not my place. It’s yours.”
Ruby sighed. “What he doesn’t learn won’t hurt him.”
“If you don’t mind my sayin’ so, it already has. You can’t think he enjoys that cold shoulder you’re so fond of turning, can you?”
“He is very patient.”
“He won’t be forever.”
Further argument refused to form on Ruby’s tongue. Emma was right. But, “I can get past this.”
Emma cocked an eyebrow. “Your wedding is not three weeks away.”
Ruby swallowed the anxiety growing sharp against her throat. “I’ll be all right and there will be nothing to explain. He never has to know.”
New York City
Saturday, June 4, 1864
“I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride.”
Edward’s heart tripped over itself as his lips met Ruby’s. The touch of her sweet lips sent desire charging through his veins, and for the first time since he’d started courting her, he was not afraid of it, or ashamed. She was his wife now. Soon they would be bonded in God’s eyes, too.
Just a little while longer, he told himself as they stood apart from each other and faced the people who had gathered for the wedding. As the reverend introduced “Rev. and Mrs. Edward Goodrich,” every smile he saw tugged on him. For there, in the garden of the Waverly brownstone, were the people he and Ruby held most dear.
Dappled with sunlight, Caroline Waverly and her daughter Charlotte beamed, two-year-old Aiden waddling back and forth between them, bunches of grass in his fists. Alice and Jacob Carlisle took turns cuddling their cooing three-month-old baby girl, Josephine. Nose red, Aunt Vivian dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, and Edward thought he even saw George smile. Rounding out the group was brave Emma Connors, Ruby’s oldest friend.
The rest of the celebration was a blur to Edward. The summer evening whirred with cicadas and laughter, and glowed with sunset and congratulations. During the feast, Jacob had said something about the campaign for Atlanta being critical to Lincoln’s reelection, and Aunt Vivian had whitened. Though Charlotte must have longed for Caleb Lansing, her fiancé in the Army of the Potomac, she had flashed Edward a brilliant smile and warmly squeezed his hand. Thank God she did not affect him the way she once had. Edward only had eyes for Ruby.
My wife. He rolled the words over in his mind as he watched her with Aiden and the rest of their guests. He could scarcely believe she was the same woman she was when he met her two years ago. And he could hardly believe she was his. Truly, the Lord had blessed him with a woman who was both upstanding and beautiful. The violet gown she had made for herself skimmed her curves perfectly before the skirt draped becomingly over their hoops. His hands burned to draw her close. But if he had waited this long, he could wait a few hours longer.
“Did you get lost in there, darling?” Edward’s voice prodded gently from the other side of the water closet door.
Ruby stared at her reflection in the mirror. “I’ll be right out.” Lord, help me. Her hair fell in a curtain to her waist, draping the ivory satin nightgown Caroline had given her for her wedding night. I love him, she reminded herself. I love him. I can do this. Though they had agreed not to spend money on a true honeymoon, he had surprised her with this night at the St. Nicholas hotel, and had arranged for Aiden’s care during their absence.
When she emerged, Edward rose from his perch on the edge of the bed, his merlot-colored robe falling open slightly to reveal his bare chest. Her breath hitched and she fought the urge to look away.
“You look—you are—so beautiful.” His deep brown eyes captured hers. He cupped her face in his hand and bent his head to hers. Heart pounding, she told herself to return his kiss, and her lips obeyed. His hand slid to the back of her head, his fingers plunging deep in her hair while his other arm circled her waist and pressed her gently to him. His tenderness was unparalleled by any man she’d ever been with, and Ruby’s spirit soared with hope. Of course she could respond to Edward.
“I love you,” he whispered before kissing her ear, her neck, her shoulder. Her knees weakened, and he guided her to the bed and turned the gas lamp down low. “I’m not going to hurt you. We won’t do anything you don’t want to do.”
Ruby nodded, though tears threatened. She took a deep breath and let her head rest on his outstretched arm upon the pillow. “Just give me a minute.”
He did. And then, to her utter shock, he prayed. “Lord, You know what Ruby’s been through. You know how deeply she has been hurt. Please bind up her wounds, and cast the past behind her as far as the east is from the west. Help us, Lord, to enjoy the gift of intimacy as You designed it to be enjoyed between a loving husband and wife. Amen.”
The tears broke free, then, and slid down Ruby’s cheeks as she silently thanked God for Edward’s care.
“Is it too much?” he asked, and she answered him with a kiss. This time, she did not have to tell her body what to do. Her hand cradled the back of his neck before sliding down to his shoulder, inside his robe. A faint moan sounded from his throat as he covered her hand atop his thudding heart. He deepened the kiss, and she breathed him in—until the smell of his hair pomade pried her back like a crowbar.
Suddenly, it was no longer Edward who held her in the shadows of a rented room, but another. The memory, now triggered, was so strong it stole her breath. Her skin crawled as if his mustache tickled her body once again. She felt exposed. Endangered. Vulgarities hissed so loudly in her ears she could barely hear Edward ask what was wrong.
“Stop, stop!” she cried to both memory and Edward. Only her husband obeyed. “I can’t, not yet,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said, but his stricken face betrayed him.
Hot tears coursed down her cheeks and into her ears as she stared at the ceiling, covers pulled up tight beneath her chin. Edward had not hurt her. But her past was enough to hurt them both.
Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia
Saturday, June 25, 1864
After seventeen days of hard rain earlier this month, Noah was grateful for today’s sunshine—even though now his clothes were plastered to his body with sweat instead. While other soldiers felled trees with which to construct defensive works, Noah’s muscles strained against their seams as he heaved his weight into a cannon and shoved it up the rocky slope. The skeletal Rebel mules could not handle the eight-hundred-foot-high camel hump called Kennesaw Mountain. The Yanks would not take it either, some said.
Of course, that’s what they had said about Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, and here he was, shouldering another cannon up another hill, but much farther south and closer to home. Kennesaw was only twenty-two miles from Atlanta.
“Steady, Becker.” An officer muttered next to Noah as he mopped his brow, but Noah did not need the reminder. Sherman had 254 pieces of artillery, Colonel Nisbet had said, while General Johnston, who had replaced Bragg after
the failures at Chattanooga, had 154. “That hunk of iron might save your life.”
And it might not, Noah mused. The Rebel ammunition was just as inferior in quality as it was in quantity. The range on some of these guns was morbidly laughable. Many shells refused to explode at all even if they did reach their targets. Johnston had done as well as a general could be expected to do in his position. The army loved him. But are popularity and valiant efforts enough?
For more than three weeks, the Confederate army had bloodied the pursuing Yanks, felling thousands of their men before falling back themselves. At Dalton. Resaca. Cassville. Allatoona. New Hope Church—now known by those who fought there as Hell’s Hole—Pickett’s Mill, Dallas. The Rebels were outnumbered, 70,000 Confederates to the 90,000 Federals whose pursuit would not relent. Though more Yankees than Rebels had been slain, the Union army seemed to regenerate itself like a giant blue lizard, snaking south over everything in its path. Seventy-five miles of “terrain that could not be crossed” had, indeed, been lost to the Northern army. Sherman would stop at nothing.
The Confederacy, however, stops at one meal a day. Noah’s stomach growled audibly as he shoved the cannon into place at the top of the hill. While the Yankee supply line delivered ample food to them, even in enemy territory, Confederate Congress had passed a bill this spring slashing their already meager provisions. One ration a day for every soldier. No matter how many miles marched, or gallons perspired, or rounds fired. One meal was all. One and a quarter pounds of meal, a quarter-pound of hominy, and one-third pound of bacon. Union blockades, loss of farmland, and restrictions on transportation mandates the reduction, Congress said.
Noah’s frustrated sigh sounded more like a growl. Weren’t the odds against them high enough? The next time battle broke, would the hungry men fight harder for their homes, or faint in the Georgia sun?
Atlanta, Georgia
Monday, June 27, 1864
“When will we stop retreating?” “Where will we go if they come to Atlanta?” “Is my Papa coming home?”
Questions flapped madly in the Becker household while black-bordered death notices spread like sores in the newspapers. Fear played upon nerves like a bow screeching across violin strings until Caitlin’s head ached with the clamor.
The world was shifting beneath their feet. Thousands of slaves, impressed from owners all over the county, had trudged by with picks and shovels on their shoulders, and sweat on their brows. Among them, with more swelling in his arthritic knuckles and more salt in his pepper-black hair than Caitlin remembered, was Saul. They were digging more ditches encircling the city, though miles of breastworks already ringed it, farther out. Merely a precaution, the newspapers said. I can hold Atlanta forever, Johnston said, as refugees poured in from upper Georgia, and the backwash of battle’s carnage flowed into Atlanta on railroad tracks that never cooled. Naomi and Minnie nursed in the hospitals, while Caitlin and Ana made biscuits by the wheelbarrowful to send with them, and to the slaves digging ditches, who received no rations at all. Susan did nothing to help.
And then, one grey morning, they heard it.
“Is it thunder?” Ana’s face was white.
Caitlin shook her head, flashes from Bull Run, Williamsburg, and Fair Oaks washing over her, as she whisked batter for corn pone. It was cannon. It was Noah. Was it also Jack?
Later, the din of a crowd drowned the roll of artillery, drawing Caitlin and Ana out from their home. They followed the noise to the City Hall Square and across the railroad tracks, stopping on Peachtree Street just south of its intersection with Marietta. Rain fell in silver gossamer threads, and it seemed that the whole town had packed itself beneath the wooden awnings of the stores.
Some of them tried to cheer for the motley parade blurring in Caitlin’s vision. A lump wedged itself in her throat at the sight of the state militia and the Home Guard bobbing down Peachtree and out of Atlanta via Marietta. They were smooth-cheeked boys and grey-bearded men with faces seamed with age. Some of the men were shielded from the rain by umbrella-wielding slaves, marching along beside them. Scattered between were precious few young men wearing the cadet grey uniform of military academies. The fortunate ones carried old flintlocks. Others had shovels and hoes. Many carried bowie knives in their boots and Joe Brown’s Pikes in their hands, as if long sticks with iron-pointed tips could be a match for shot and shell. Many had no weapons at all, but would have to arm themselves from killed and captured Yankees. Johnston had called for men to replace the thousands he’d lost in retreat. And these were the troops he was getting.
Caitlin shuddered, vivid images splashing against mind. Her own crisp blue regiment marching beneath its emerald-green flag on the Virginia Peninsula. Yellow-faced soldiers tortured by fever and dysentery, mosquitoes, and black flies. The battles that followed anyway, leaving human wreckage in garish shades of red and black. Her hands felt leaden with the memory of the broken bodies she had helped carry off the field as their blood trailed recklessly behind them. You’ll be all right, she had told them then, and was surprised to taste the lie on her lips even now, as she watched the Southern soldiers pass.
Ankle deep in the red mud road, their stamping feet seemed to stomp upon Caitlin’s chest. The hidden piece of her heart now throbbed with hope for Union victory. But the other half bled for the coming slaughter of boys too young and men too old to play at war, and for their families whose brave smiles crumbled as soon as the columns passed them by. Longing for Jack battled yearning for Noah until she feared her aching heart would surely be rent in two.
With Ana’s hand in hers, and tears and rain mingling on her face, Caitlin sent up a desperate prayer, not for victory or defeat, but for the end, and that God would be her anchor in this storm.
Kennesaw Mountain
Monday, June 27, 1864
Cautiously, Noah raised his head over the ditch, feeling for all the world like a sleep-deprived gopher just waiting to be stomped on by a blue-clad giant. His nerves pulled tight as he scanned the horizon beneath the glaring sun. The earth looked as if it were made of iron, the sky as though made of brass. Sweat rolled down Noah’s face and spilled between his shoulder blades. The mercury was 110 degrees in the shade. Not a sound could be heard, save a peckerwood tapping an old trunk for his breakfast.
Then hell broke loose in Georgia.
The high-pitched yipping of the Rebel Yell rent the air as, up the hill, the Yankees came. Closer and closer, on and on, massed in columns forty men deep, until it seemed the entire Union army was hurling itself head-on up the hill. Foolhardy! Noah’s revolver spent of its bullets, he grabbed a musket from a dying comrade nearby, ripping the cartridge box off his belt as well. Rebel fire lashed out from the ditches, cutting the enemy down like wheat before the scythe. Before Noah’s eyes, hearty Yanks with repeating rifles were mown down by gaunt Rebs with revolvers and muskets that took at least twenty seconds to load for each shot. The ditches filled up with Yankee prisoners, but still they came marching on, and still they dropped, bleeding, to the ground.
It was slaughter.
Sweat stung Noah’s eyes and sulfur filled his mouth and nostrils. A haze of gunpowder hovered above the entrenchments, amplifying the stupefying heat even further, until he could not see the muzzles spewing their fire.
Minié balls whizzed and zinged over his head, while artillery continued to tear the sky above. Pain slashed Noah’s neck as he loaded the rifle, and blood splattered his face. I am a dead man. But when he brought his hand to the burn, it came away dry. He had only been singed by a passing bullet. The bullet had killed the man next to him, spilling the dead man’s life in a scarlet arc from his neck.
Noah slammed his ramrod down the barrel, then yanked it back out. Before he could pull a cartridge from the box, the earth exploded next to him, ripping his weapon from his sweaty grip, and hurtling him, as though weightless, through the spray of dirt and shrapnel. Noise dimmed as though the battle suddenly raged underwater, and he alone floated above it, between w
aves of lead and the unblinking eye of the sun.
He landed, pain shuddering through his body. The sharp taste of metal. His face and neck slick with bubbling blood. This time it was his own.
Atlanta, Georgia
Tuesday, July 5, 1864
The panic that had pulsed just below the surface of Atlanta now erupted in reckless gaiety. Johnston had defeated Sherman at Kennesaw Mountain! Atlanta was saved after all! Yet for the first time in years, Susan Kent did not join the merrymaking.
The newspapers jumped from discussing General Johnston’s “retrograde movements” to praising the godlike qualities of the Southern army. “There is an invincible host still between Atlanta and our ruthless foe, which, like a wall of fire, will resist his advance into it,” the Intelligencer stated, expressing “the utmost confidence that if battle is made before the city, we will scatter the enemy like leaves before an autumnal frost.” And the people were converted.
The city grew drunk on relief and hope. Rashes of parties broke out quicker than smallpox while Susan sulked with her scars in her ex-husband’s house. When any soldiers were in town from the fighting, dinners were given in their honor, followed by dances where the ladies outnumbered the men ten to one, everyone said, and fought for their attention. Revelry rattled the windows, taunting Susan. She could not decide which was worse: the day last month when the deceased Bishop General Polk had lain in state and Atlanta choked on dour mourners, or this raucous pursuit of pleasure, whose wild crush she did not enter.
If Atlanta was full before, it was absolutely glutted now. In addition to government officials, refugees, and wounded, families of the men entrenched at the mountain came to be nearby in case their soldiers were injured. Hordes of girls came in from the country—where all the men between sixteen and sixty years old were gone—to bat their eyes in thrice-turned frocks.
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