The Message in a Bottle Romance Collection

by Joanne Bischof

  Muskets popped, cannons boomed, and the air shuddered in cold waves. Cora Mae drew rein, but Samson only turned, skirting the Confederate horseman, unaware she wanted him to slow.

  The ragged rider came alongside and grabbed Samson by the bridle, forcing him to slow. “Just what in God’s green earth are you doing here, miss? Don’t you know you’re on the edge of a battlefield?” His eyes were too large for his thin, gaunt face. “Where are you trying to get to?”

  “Home!” June cried out. “We want to get home to Roswell!”

  “Mill workers, eh? I heard tell about that. But you’re not getting anywhere if you don’t get off this field lickety-split.”

  The high-pitched Rebel yell pierced the air from somewhere beneath the smoke, sending a chill down Cora Mae’s spine. “We’re headed for the railroad to follow to Chattanooga.”

  “Traveling alone? All the way to Roswell?” He narrowed his eyes. “It don’t seem fitting. There’s rogues everywhere. Have you got a gun, at least?”

  She didn’t. But she suddenly felt uneasy about admitting it. “I thank you for your help.” Heels to her horse, she urged Samson onward.

  “I’m Jedidiah Colbert, a Confederate scout. I’ll escort you a piece, just to make sure you get shed of this field.” He positioned his horse between the fighting and Samson, and led the way on a horse so scrawny she could scarcely see how he bore his rider.

  One mile followed another as they covered fields where the grass had turned to jelly. Icy water splashed Cora Mae’s ankles as Samson plunged into and out of shallow creeks. Overhead, clouds brocaded a blue silk sky. But artillery and gun smoke blotted the sky to the north, and the smell of sulfur thickened in her nostrils and throat.

  At last, Colbert turned to face her. “That’s the end of the field, I reckon. Head another four or five miles straight that way, you’ll run smack-dab into the tracks you want. Godspeed!”

  “Thank you!” She watched him ride west again and sent a prayer heavenward for his safety.

  After she’d put three more miles between them and the battlefield, she slipped down from Samson and led him while June occupied the saddle alone. For stretches of time, the child sat directly on Samson’s haunches, drawing heat from the horse’s body. The sounds of battle grew dimmer, but every crack and roar shook her core.

  Two more miles later, they came to the tracks.

  Leaning forward, June buried her hands in Samson’s mane. “Mr. Howard will get here soon.” She nodded confidently. “He’ll get here.”

  Pine trees standing sentinel cast shadows as long as city streets. Wind scraped Cora Mae’s cheeks raw and buffeted her ears through her shawl. Spying a stiff patch of faded grass, she led Samson to it, helped June down, and picketed the horse.

  The air crackled with cold. “We’ll camp here for the night.” Cora Mae unstrapped the bedroll from Samson’s back and brought it closer to the pines, where fallen needles softened the cold ground. After she unfurled the India rubber sheet and wool army blanket, June scrambled between them, groaning about her sore seat from the day’s ride. Her teeth chattered as she curled herself into a ball.

  Hands almost numb with cold, Cora Mae broke hardtack and peeled the lid from a tin of meat for their dinner. Purple velvet twilight melted into gunmetal gray, and stars poked through like saber points. As night dropped its veil, she coaxed a small fire to life. With several handfuls of pine needles and a few pinecones, the flames lapped higher into the dark.

  June stared listlessly at the pluming smoke. “I wish Mr. Howard would hustle.”

  The fire snapped and writhed, and sparks turned to ash in the air. “Why don’t I read to you? It’ll pass the time.”

  “Yes!” Throwing her blanket back, June sprang from the ground and fetched the old bottle Ethan had tucked into the saddlebag, for it contained the only reading material they had. By the time she skipped back to the fire, she had popped off the cork and tipped it up until the scroll fell into her little hand. “Here you go!”

  “Thank you.” Cora Mae took the booklet and the bottle both, slipped the cork inside her pocket, and burrowed the bottle under the ashes. “We’ll heat it up while I read, and then we can take turns warming our hands on it.”

  Firelight danced on the open pages of the Soldier’s Prayer and Hymn Book as she turned to Hymn 177. The words came slowly at first, as she sounded them out, but the discovery of the meaning made up for it. “Guide me, O thou great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land.” Recognizing the hymn from church, she recited the rest from memory. “I am weak, but thou art mighty; hold me with thy powerful hand…. Feed me with the heavenly manna in this barren wilderness; be my sword, and shield, and banner; be the Lord my righteousness.”

  June yawned beside her then tucked herself under the wool blanket. “That’s a mighty good prayer for us this night, isn’t it?”

  “I reckon it is.” Cora Mae dug the bottle from the ashes, wiped it clean with the edge of her petticoat, and handed it to June to hold.

  Hoofbeats pounded the ground, riveting their attention. A deserter? A guerrilla? Ethan? Cora Mae stood and waited.

  Ethan’s pulse galloped faster than the Confederate horse that carried him alongside the railroad. The danger of the battle was behind him, but guerrilla raiders might yet be between him and Cora Mae. They roamed Tennessee and north Georgia, plundering homes, burning houses, and brutalizing anyone they pleased. A woman alone with a young child would be far too easy a target for such men to resist.

  A small fire beckoned him, and he rose up in his stirrups as he charged toward it. Easing back into the saddle, he squeezed his legs around his mount’s flanks and pulled back on the reins as evenly as he could with one in his left hand, and the other in a loop over his right elbow. “Miss Stewart? June?”

  “We’re here!” Cora Mae called out.

  “Whoa, Johnny.” Halting the gaunt Kentucky Saddler, he slipped the rein off his elbow, awkwardly dismounted, and then rushed toward the fire whose glow had been his guiding light. “Are you hurt? You’re all right? Both of you?”

  “We’re fine.” Stepping forward, Cora Mae reached out to him then just as quickly pulled back, crossing her arms instead.

  “Thank God.” Exhaling relief, Ethan knelt, and June clambered onto his lap. He draped his arm protectively around her waist.

  “Don’t you leave us again, Mr. Howard! Not ever!” At that, June took Ethan’s face between her small hands.

  “Why aren’t your hands cold?” he asked in wonder.

  Cora Mae’s cloak fanned about her as she sank to the ground beside them. She pressed his bottle into his palm. “We warmed it in the ashes.” Wrapping his fingers around it, warmth flowed into his skin.

  With Spero in his grip, Ethan bowed his head and studied June’s earnest face, from her dirt-smudged cheeks, to her deep velvet eyes, to the determined set of her little chin. She nestled against his chest again, her hair snagging on his stubbled jaw. A lump forming in his throat, he looked up and locked eyes with Cora Mae.

  She wiped at the tears streaking her face. “How did you manage?”

  “Stayed out of the way, mostly.” And felt for all the world like a cowardly skulker as he’d watched Union troops defend Nashville without him. He pointed to his pitiful new mount. “Found Johnny Reb there caught in a bramble at the edge of the battlefield. His rider no longer had need of him.” The Confederate cavalry officer had stared up at Ethan from the bloodied ground, unseeing, his mouth frozen agape in a silent scream. He shook his head to dislodge the image from his mind. “I’d have been here sooner, but it took Johnny and me a while to get used to one another.” The horse was fifteen and a half hands high, and mounting him without a right hand was only the first hurdle. Handling the reins was the other.

  Freezing raindrops pattered through the branches above them, spitting and sizzling into the fire. He rose, listening for thunder. “We’ll not stay here this night.”

  After packing up the bedroll and his bottle,
Cora Mae helped June into the saddle and then seated herself behind her. Ethan took Johnny’s reins and a thatch of mane in his left hand, and with an ungraceful, lopsided heave, mounted the horse and took the lead.

  Lightning stabbed the night. The rain drove harder, its icy chill spilling down his neck and between his shoulder blades. Beneath the flashing sky, he found what he was looking for. Wrapped in shadows, the abandoned cabin leaned drunkenly like others he’d come across on the Chickamauga campaign through Tennessee to Georgia. It offered some protection, however scant.

  Ethan dismounted and picketed the horses, wishing he had a dry stable for them instead. As he slung his haversack over his shoulder and slid the saddlebags from Samson, Cora Mae pulled the bedrolls from their backs.

  Once inside the cabin, he pulled a lucifer and candle from his haversack before letting his bags drop to the ground. They nested in his hand, mocking him, just as the battle had. “I cannot hold this candle and light it, too.” The confession cost him.

  The walls shuddered. Cora Mae’s silhouette was barely visible as she reached for him. “Let me.” When she swept her hand over his jacket to find his sleeve, and ran her fingers down his arm to his hand, she could not know the ache she left in her wake. Her skin was cold on his palm as she laid her hand over his.

  When he felt the slight weight of the wax leave his hand, he struck the match, and watched the wick dip into its flame, chasing the shadows away. As she held the light, Ethan shoved the door back into its frame and scanned the barren space. Not a stick of furniture remained. He spread out the bedroll, and June caught the end of it to help lay it on the floor, away from the rain that sprayed through the walls.

  “Can’t we have a fire?” June pointed to the fireplace. Wind moaned through its chimney, stirring ashes and leaves over the dirt floor.

  “Wood’s too wet,” Ethan explained.

  June scuttled under the blanket. “It’s so dark and scary.”

  “We’ll let this burn for a while.” He took the candle from Cora Mae’s hand. Stooping, he burrowed the taper into the dirt floor until it stood upright and then pulled the saddlebags and his haversack with him as he lowered himself to sit. “I’m not tired, so I’m going to stay up anyway. Get some rest.”

  Weariness rested in blue shadows beneath Cora Mae’s eyes. “Thank you.”

  “Miss Stewart, before you retire…” He motioned for her to sit next to him and then wet a handkerchief with water from his canteen.

  Hesitantly, she accepted the linen and used it to wipe her face clean before giving it back to him. “We’ve done this before,” she said, and memory washed over him, bringing him back to that red-hot day in July when he first met her.

  “Ah, yes. And you told me we wouldn’t be friends.” He smiled. “Not that I blamed you.”

  Candlelight flickering over her shining face, she held his gaze. “I was wrong.” A raw, wet wind swirled about them. Her arresting gaze slid to June, asleep under the blanket, then back to him. “You’re more than that.” The words dangled in the air.

  “Excuse me?”

  Rain pounded against the warped planks, sharpening the sweet smell of rotting wood. “I reckon you’re missing that right hand of yours, and I’m sorry for the pain and trials losing it has caused you. But you have what’s more important by far. The last time I saw Mama, she told me to love my enemies. It was a bitter pill to swallow to even say I’d try after what you Yankees did to me and my town. But you—” She pressed her lips together.

  He braced himself, even as the damp cold began to numb his senses. The candle’s struggling flame was no match for Cora Mae’s hazel eyes.

  “I know you had your orders to follow, just like every soldier on both sides. Now I don’t know exactly what you were like before I met you, but it sure seems to me you’ve been getting better ever since. You loved your enemy when you told me how to stay in Georgia. You loved your enemy when you chased after those scoundrels invading that lady’s home. You hate what that injury did to your body, and rightly so. But when I see you, I see a man who knows how to love his enemy. You’re still doing it, every step of this journey back to Roswell.”

  The truth sat on his tongue until it burned, and he had no choice but to admit: “You were never my enemy.”

  She shivered, chafing her arms. “Then what am I?” she whispered. The tip of her nose was pink with cold. “Ethan?” A lock of hair blew across her face, bronzed by the candle’s glow. She pinned him with her gaze. Waiting.

  “The keeper of my heart,” he admitted. “You stole it away from me, and I’ve never been able to get it back.”

  Her composure crumbled. A tear traced her cheek as she drew a ragged breath.

  Outside the battered cabin, rain crescendoed to a low roar. “I shouldn’t have said it.” He swallowed, at a loss. “I’m sorry, Cora—Miss Stewart.”

  “Oh don’t, please don’t call me that. Not tonight. Not right now.”

  The pleading in her eyes lanced his heart. He wiped the tear from her face with the pad of his thumb then let his fingers slide into her silky hair. “If I could take your sorrow away, I would. Every trouble, every heartache. Gladly would I shoulder every burden you bear.”

  “I know.” Her words were a whisper. She covered his cheek with her hand in a gesture so tender, he could barely hear his conscience over the pounding of his heart.

  Wind churned through the cabin from between the chinks in the wall, snuffing out the candle, leaving only the scent of melted wax behind. Darkness blanketed Ethan and the woman he loved.

  Stifling a groan, he denied his impulse to claim her with a kiss that would heat them both. Instead, “Come here.” His left hand found her shoulder and guided her to sit in front of him on the floor. She leaned back against his chest, and he wrapped his arms around her shoulders to warm her shaking body.

  In the dark, she reached up and touched his arm. “You are everything a man should be, and more.”

  Disoriented, Ethan could form no response.

  Shifting slightly, Cora Mae rested her head on his shoulder, her forehead against his cheek. The weight of her body warmed him.

  “I can’t do this.” Nor should he. He released her, and rain gusted into the space between them. “You aren’t mine to hold.”

  A rustling sound told him that she was already moving away. As Cora Mae curled up next to June under the blanket, Ethan settled on the dirt floor near the door with nothing but cold to cover him.

  When dawn came, Cora Mae still ached with a longing she could not—would not—name. Her heart was as divided and ravaged as the land they traveled, one portion loyal to the South and to the promise she’d made Mr. Ferguson, June, and Mama. The promise Pap himself had wanted her to keep. The other portion beat only for Ethan.

  The days were bitter and short as they traveled deeper into the South. Near Chattanooga, mountains rose in bristly mounds, their trees a delicate black embroidery on the hem of a slate-blue sky. As they crossed the state line, snow powdered horses and travelers alike, but the flakes melted as soon as they landed, so that Georgia was laid bare.

  It was desolate. Sherman’s destruction blighted the land with a savagery that stole Cora Mae’s breath. The Union armies had scorched fields of golden wheat and snow-white cotton to nothing but blackened stubble. Poor folk who gave her, Ethan, and June a place to sleep warned of nationless bushwhackers claiming to be Wheeler’s Confederate cavalry. Also called guerrillas, they’d ransacked neighbors’ homes—looking for deserters, they’d said. But the scoundrels ravaged women and stole their last pigs before setting their houses aflame.

  Iron rails ripped from the railroad tracks lay forlornly on the ground, twisted into spirals or looped and crossed like neckties. The scars left in the landscape made the trail they followed to Roswell—where their journey began, and would end.

  All sense told Cora Mae she should not love a man who’d helped ruin the South, even if she hadn’t promised to marry Mr. Ferguson. But even as she rode i
n the wake of destruction, the thought of bidding him good-bye carved a hollow inside her that threatened to swallow her whole.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Roswell, Georgia

  December 27

  Cora Mae should have been prepared for the shell that Roswell had become and for the memories that rose up to haunt her. Samson and Johnny Reb plodded quietly through the town square that was now only dirt, and beyond it to the mill village.

  Ethan looked over his shoulder. “Let’s get there,” he murmured.

  Clucking her tongue, she urged Samson into a trot that took her to Factory Hill. Weeds spread and mounded erratically, reclaiming the yards, choking the paths to the apartments. She dismounted the horse, reached down, and furiously yanked a clump of weeds from the path that led to Mama’s door. “You gonna go in?” June came and held her hand.

  “I’m going.” Casting the weeds aside, Cora Mae brushed off her hands and glanced at Ethan, who offered her a half smile.

  Then she heard it. Coughing.

  Bounding up the porch stairs with June in tow, she rushed into her old home, fisted her cloak and skirts, and took the stairs two at a time to reach the top.

  “Mama, I’m here! We’re home!” She burst into the bedroom, tearing the shawl from about her head.

  “Darlin’?” Mama gasped from her rocking chair and spread wide her arms.

  Cora Mae fell into them, weeping. “Oh, how I missed you!” Only then did she notice the walls and floor had all been whitewashed, and remember it had been a Yankee hospital. The only color in the room was the patchwork quilt on the bed and the braided rag rug at her feet.

  Footsteps sounded heavily on the stairs before stomping into the room behind her. “What the devil?”

  Rising, Cora Mae wheeled around. Each heartbeat was a blow against her breastbone.

  Dust danced in the sunbeams streaming between the window’s homespun curtains. Striped with light, Mr. Ferguson gaped, and the mismatched teacup and saucer in his hands listed to one side.