Triumph

by Heather Graham

  She pursed her lips, staring at him stubbornly.

  “I can wait.”

  She smiled icily. “Good. I can wait, too. I have no desire at all for you to try to behave ‘gallantly’ in any way, shape, or form.”

  “Fine. We’ll both just wait.”

  To her horror, he stretched out beside her, an arm and a leg continuing to pin her to the ground. Infuriated, she started to struggle, only to find that she did nothing but edge more closely against his blue-clad frame.

  And he watched her. Watched her with those large hazel eyes of his. Again, she felt a strange shivering sensation while meeting his gaze, as if she knew him, or should know something about him. And she grew desperate to free herself from the intimacy he forced.

  “Catherine,” she lied. “My name is Catherine—Moore.”

  That was all it took. He rose, offering a hand down to assist her with all the gallantry he had promised. She would have none of it, of course. Petty, childish, perhaps, but he could hang before she would accept the slightest assistance from him. She scrambled to her feet on her own, eyeing him warily all the while.

  “And now?”

  “Now we ride.”

  “My horse—”

  “Will follow again.”

  She shook her head. “You’re being unnecessarily cruel to a good horse, Yank. The added weight—”

  “Your weight is nothing,” he assured her dismissively, which made her want to draw up to her full height. Except that she was petite, which didn’t seem at all fair. Her brothers were giants; even her mother was tall.

  She wanted to be formidable.

  “You’re mistaken—” she began, but he interrupted her curtly.

  “I will have your silence, madam!”

  “I don’t have to—”

  “I can gag you.”

  She gritted her teeth again, standing with her arms folded firmly across her chest. “Be glad you did find the bullets in that gun, Yank. It doesn’t take a wrestler to fire a lethal shot!”

  “I stand forewarned. Now you shall stand silent,” he said. He just looked at her and spoke with a low, almost pleasant tone. She had been threatened, really threatened, and she knew it. She lifted her hands, arching a brow, not willing to give him the last word, nor really willing to be silent.

  And so she watched him.

  Minutes later, she thought that the most distressing thing about being with the stranger—other than fearing for her life and future—was the uncanny way he seemed to have of knowing exactly where people had been, and where they had gone. He picked up on the trail taken by her party of green soldiers and injured men, though he barely glanced at the tracks in the pine-strewn trails, nor took time to study broken and bent foliage and trees. He quickly assessed the area, set her upon his horse again, and mounted behind her. Then they started riding. And despite the time he had taken pursuing her, capturing her, and returning to this spot along the river, she knew that they would overtake the others. Whether they did so before or after they reached the old abandoned Indian camp, she couldn’t quite determine.

  But they would find her little party of injured. That was a simple fact.

  “You should just take me in,” she told him suddenly. “I am the famed Godiva. I have led thousands of men to their deaths, I have caused ships to crash, I—along with General Lee perhaps, and blessed Stonewall, while he lived, and a few others—have almost single-handedly kept the Confederacy in the war. I have—”

  “Graced many a stage, I imagine?” he queried dryly.

  She bit her lip, lowering her eyes. Once upon a time, her mother had thought to find her livelihood on the stage. Long ago, before she had met and married her father. She certainly hadn’t inherited her mother’s golden coloring, but perhaps she did carry within her a certain talent for the dramatic—and as he had suggested, bald-faced lying.

  “Take me in, I warn you. I am dangerous. If you wait for darkness, terrible things may happen. I’m not even human, really. I’m a shape-changer. I—”

  “The cabin lies just ahead, and I imagine your men are within it,” he said flatly.

  “And what could you possibly want with my injured?” she queried.

  “To see who they are,” he told her.

  “Green boys.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “But—”

  “You’ve lied about everything.”

  “I’m not lying now!”

  “But there’s no way for me to tell that, is there—Catherine?”

  The way he said the name was chilling. As if he knew she had lied even there.

  “I warn you—given the opportunity, I will shoot you down before I’ll let you injure a single one of those boys.”

  “If those boys are who and what you say, they are in no danger from me.”

  “And if they’re not, you may be dead yourself in a matter of minutes!”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She didn’t need to see his face to feel the strange hazel piercing of his eyes. She wondered again what it was that seemed so familiar about him, when she was sure she didn’t know him. He reminded her of someone, and she couldn’t quite place who, or why.

  “Think about it—I could be leading you into a real trap,” she warned quietly.

  “I’m thinking, and I don’t believe that you’re leading me anywhere at the moment,” he replied, his voice a very soft drawl. Then it struck her—he might be wearing a Yankee uniform, but he hailed from somewhere in the South.

  She twisted around to accost him. “What kind of a traitor are you?”

  “I’m true to my convictions, and that makes me an honest man. I wonder if there is any honesty in you whatsoever.”

  She turned again. The light had begun to fall. She might have lost her own way here, as familiar as she considered herself with the area. But he was right; they were almost upon the old Indian cabin in the woods.

  “What do you think you’re going to do? Barge in and shoot down a half-dozen men?” she inquired desperately. “Because, of course, they’ll be forced to shoot at you if you come after them.”

  “Not if you keep them from doing so,” he said.

  “What? Why should I stop them?”

  “Because you want them to live.”

  “The odds are—”

  “That not one of your ‘green’ boys will get off a single shot before I mow them all down.” It didn’t sound as if he was bragging—merely stating a fact.

  He reined to a halt along the trail right before the cove with the small cabin. It had been built and abandoned many years before, during the Seminole War, when the Florida Indians had built their homes with native pine before learning that they had to run so often and so fast that it made far more sense to build platform houses with nothing but thatch roofs—houses above the ground and the vermin in the swamps where they were finally forced.

  Since those days, the cabin had been used often enough. Lovers had known it as a place to tryst; hunters and fishermen had found it a haven in the woods. It was known, however, only to the locals.

  Or so she had thought.

  “Well, Godiva?” he inquired.

  “Let me down. I’ll tell them not to fire. Except, if you think you can drag my wounded boys back to be seized for a wretched Yank camp—”

  “All I want to do is see your wounded boys, Godiva.”

  That was difficult to believe. And the Yankee’s Spencer repeating rifle didn’t just look dangerous, it killed, “mowed” men down, just as he’d suggested.

  “Let me down then.”

  This time, he dismounted from behind her. She braced herself to refuse any assistance to dismount from him.

  She needn’t have bothered. He didn’t offer any assistance, and when she met his strange gold eyes as she dismounted on her own, she saw that he was fully aware she would have prided herself on her refusal of anything he offered. She felt let down—and furious.

  “A hand might have been polite and proper.�
��

  “And you probably would have spit at it. Go, see to your men. Call one of them out and tell them to hold their fire.”

  She walked toward the cabin, tempted to run inside, take cover, and see that he was blasted. But she just didn’t dare. Instinct warned her that this man meant business, and no cover would make her, or the boys, truly safe from his intent.

  “Jemmy! Jemmy Johnson!” she called. “It’s—” She nearly stated her name, then quickly caught herself. “It’s me! Please, come out!”

  The old, weather-beaten door to the cabin opened. Jemmy Johnson, Enfield in hand, stepped out warily. She was glad to see his caution, although it wasn’t quite enough.

  “Miss T—” he began carefully.

  “Private!” she interrupted quickly. “The enemy is among us, but he has sworn to let us be if we are all that we say we are. Hold your fire. Command the others to hold their fire.”

  “But Miss T—”

  “Jemmy, for your lives, and for the blessed love of God! Do as I say!” she pleaded. “Weapons down.”

  “Hell, Jemmy!” someone bellowed from within the cabin. “I ain’t holding no weapon! I’m trying to keep Stuart here from bleeding to death!”

  It might have been a lie; it might not. But the strange Yankee seemed to go by gut instinct as well. He went striding by Tia and straight into the cabin, his Colts secured to the gun belt at his waist, his Spencer held easily in his left hand.

  Easily ...

  She was certain he could spin it around and fire in seconds flat.

  She followed behind him quickly.

  No lie had been spoken by Trey McCormack, the eighteen-year-old standing by Stuart Adair, one of the two patients. He had been laid atop a rough wooden workbench where Trey kept shifting to put more pressure on his friend’s bleeding calf wound. Hadley Blake, the second wounded man, had passed out, and lay with his head supported by a saddle blanket in a corner of the dusky cabin. Gilly Shenley, one of the unwounded recruits, searched the cabin for a proper stick with which to form a tourniquet for Stuart’s dangerously bleeding wound.

  “Move, boys, let me see the source for that,” the Yankee commanded. They stood dead still, staring at him.

  “Move!” he snapped.

  And they did.

  Tia almost cried out as she watched him grip Stuart’s calf and survey the damage. He stared at her. “Come on, Miss Godiva, you’ve surely had some medical training! Get some bandages ripped, a tourniquet going—”

  “Can’t find a sound stick—” Gilly complained.

  “Break up that old broom over there. Come on, lad, a young thing like you can surely snap that pine bough!”

  Gilly did as told. Tia quickly ripped up her hemline, glad that he meant to do his best to save Stuart’s life, humiliated that he was telling them what to do. Hell yes, she knew her business, and if he hadn’t steered her away from her boys, they wouldn’t be in this predicament! She could have stopped the bleeding; she’d worked with her brother through the majority of the war, and she’d dare say she was as competent and efficient as most surgeons in the field.

  Still, he was more efficient, she had to admit. Within seconds, a tourniquet had been fashioned, and the bleeding was slowing. A few seconds more, and it was coming to a halt. And he was telling them how to release it. She was glad she hadn’t stopped him, or made any comments. What mattered here was not who did what, but that a man’s life had been saved.

  “Private Gilly, there, is that your name?” the Yankee asked.

  “Private Gilly Shenley, sir!” said the boy, a straw blond with a sad little scraggle of chin whiskers. To Tia’s sheer annoyance, he then saluted.

  “I need you to go to the brook and bring me back a large quantity of the moss that forms on the stones there. We’ll put some new stitching in here and get a poultice on the wound, and he should heal just fine.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Also, I need some wild mushrooms, the black-tipped ones. Do you know which ones I mean?”

  “I can go,” Tia said. “I know exactly what—”

  “No, he’ll go,” the Yankee said, his eyes hard on her. “I’m assuming you can do excellent stitches?”

  Her needles and a length of surgical thread—supplied to her by her cousin Jerome McKenzie, one of the few men still successfully running the blockade—were in her pocket. She withdrew them, then stared at her needle for a moment, well aware she had no matches left with which to burn the tip. Then she was startled as the Yank withdrew a box of matches from his pocket and lit one.

  She held the tip of the needle in the flame to sterilize it, then threaded the needle, and proceeded very carefully to mend the tear ripped around the young man’s wound during their forced flight.

  She felt the Yankee watching her for a while, and when she was done, she looked up and saw the first light of approval in his hazel eyes.

  “Perfect,” he said.

  “I’ve had experience,” she told him dryly.

  “You’ve been in Florida the whole war?”

  “I have, and I assure you, we’ve had a constant flow of injuries and disease.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting that your talents were wasted here. I was just thinking how appreciated they might have been during the really tragic battles when tens of thousands of men fell in a single day.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know what good I would have been elsewhere. I learned everything I know from ...” She hesitated, not wanting to give herself away in any manner.

  “She learned from her brother, the best surgeon in the field!” Trey McCormack provided.

  Still watching her, the Yank slowly smiled. “The best surgeon in the field! And who might that be, Private?”

  “Don’t you tell him, Trey! I don’t want this man knowing my name, and certainly not that of my brother. I don’t want my brother—”

  “Or yourself?” the Yank suggested, interrupting her.

  “I don’t want my brother jeopardized in any way!” she finished.

  “But Miss Ti—”

  “Trey!”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The Yankee didn’t force the point, but still she felt uneasy, aware that he was studying her, perhaps seeing more than she wanted him to see.

  “What now?” she asked him.

  “We wait for Gilly to get back with the poultice.”

  “I can make the poultice. I’m as familiar with the healing qualities of mosses and molds as most physicians.”

  “More so than most, I imagine,” he said.

  “Are you a physician yourself?”

  He shook his head, hesitating slightly. She realized he had decided not to reveal too much about his own identity. “I have a witch doctor or two in my background.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Like you, I’ve learned from experience.”

  Gilly came back in then, breathing hard, but carrying the moss and the mushrooms in his mess plate.

  “They need to be mashed together ...” the Yankee began.

  “Truly, I do this well. Let me make the poultice,” Tia said. “Gilly, you can help me. Bring them just outside. Bring your mess plate.”

  Gilly did as she had ordered. He knelt down by her side when she found a fallen log to use as a worktable.

  “Gilly, don’t turn around and look back as I talk to you, do you understand?”

  “Don’t turn around?”

  “Gilly, we’ve got to take him by surprise somehow.”

  “Take him by surprise? But he hasn’t come to hurt us.”

  “Gilly! He’s a Yankee officer—he isn’t coming through to applaud us on medical technique!”

  “But Tia, he just saved Stuart’s life.”

  “Yes, and I’m grateful for that, though if we hadn’t been running, Stuart might not have ripped his previous stitches so badly! The point is, Gilly, we can’t chance letting him leave, going for help, and bringing a score of men to take us in.”

  “A score of Yankees—”

/>   “The state is riddled with them now, Gilly! They’ve decided that we are to be taken, that we are a danger. Troops are amassing to the north of the state, west of Jacksonville and St. Augustine. We know that they’ve decided on making a real movement against us here. Trust me, please, Gilly, if he leaves here, he might come back with plenty of reinforcements!”

  “And how do we stop him?”

  “By surprise, somehow by surprise!”

  “Have you taken note of his weapons?”

  “Yes, of course, and I’m sure he’s adept at using them. We need to divert his attention, and you’ll have to take him from the back. It will be our only chance.”

  “You want me to shoot a man in the back? I don’t care if this is war, Miss Tia. That’s cold-blooded murder. There are still such things as honor in this world, and if we survive the war, no matter who wins it, I’m still going to have to live with myself.”

  She stared at the very young man who seemed to know his own purpose so well. “I understand. I’m really not suggesting cold-blooded murder, though how our actions out in the field aren’t murder, I don’t know. You don’t have to kill him. Taken by surprise, he can be knocked out. We can leave him hog-tied and immobile and we can move west again, hook up with Dixie’s troops, and then, our wounded will have a far better chance of survival!”

  “Leave him tied? There’s varmints aplenty out here, Miss Tia.”

  “I’m sure he’ll untie himself. I can only pray that it will take him time.”

  “But how will we divert him?”

  “I don’t know yet!” she admitted, exasperated. “Be ready for my signal. When you get the chance, warn Jemmy and Trey.”

  “Miss Tia, we can move Hadley now; but if we were to try to move Stuart, I’m afraid the bleeding would start up again.”

  “Have we got any food on us?”

  “What?”

  “Food, Private, food. To eat!”

  Gilly shook his head. “First you want me to shoot him down. Now you want to invite him to dinner, Miss Tia?”

  She sighed, losing her patience. She was dealing with children here! Children already shot up in the defense of their native state, she reminded herself.

  “I’m simply trying to buy time.”