“Duty?” Laurence spat out. “All Mosby’s done is steal from supply wagons and keep the loot for himself. There is no honor in that, Jamie. Choose honorable service, if you must fight. In the end, when this war is over, that’s all we’re going to have left to us. Ride with me instead.”
“And be bossed around by you wherever I go? No, thank you, brother. Mosby not honorable? Shows what you know. We’ve kidnaped a Union general right out of his bed. We’ve cut railroad lines and disrupted supply trains, even when we were outnumbered ten to one. So what if we keep the spoils? The Confederate army sure doesn’t supply us with anything. Had a decent meal recently, brother? I have. I’ve brought food home for everyone here, too. All you’ve done is take our horses.
“I’ve also had the satisfaction of watching Yankees turn tail and run like the dogs they are. You’re so all-fired high-and-mighty—Stuart and his fancy parading cavalry. From what I’ve seen in the last few days of fighting, you boys could use our help. I saw your riders turn and run plenty.”
Laurence drew back and struck Jamie’s jaw. The blow made a horrible cracking noise. Jamie staggered, then flung himself at Laurence, knocking him down. They rolled on the floor, until Laurence surfaced on top of Jamie. Jamie kicked at him from underneath. They came up with their hands wrapped around each other’s throats.
“Laurence! Jamie! For shame,” shrieked Annie, wading into the fray. “Take your hands away!” She tugged on Laurence, who let go instantly, shock and shame registering on his face.
Jamie held fast.
Laurence held his hands down by his side, doing nothing to get his brother off him.
Jamie tightened his grip.
“Jamie!” Annie began pulling at his fingers.
Laurence’s breath began to come in fits, but he didn’t say a word. Didn’t make a move.
“Jamie! Jamie. Let go! You’re choking him.” Annie was sobbing. She tore at his hands.
Suddenly, a little body flung itself on Jamie’s back and began beating him. It was Will.
The surprise of it stopped Jamie. Finally, he let go. Laurence fell back to the floor, coughing. Jamie shoved Will away and stood.
“I am a Mosby ranger, Laurence,” Jamie gasped. “You do not own me. I don’t care what you think of me any longer. And I’m going to do whatever I must to stop the Yankees.” He stormed out the front door, slamming it hard.
It took a long time for Laurence to catch his breath, a long time for Annie to stop shaking. Meanwhile, Will disappeared as silently as he had appeared.
Finally, Annie voiced a question she’d had for years: “Laurence, what is the matter with you? Why are you so hard on Jamie?”
“Hard? You consider that hard? You should have seen Father with me.”
Laurence looked down and changed his tone. “I don’t know, Annie. Mother always told me I was responsible for making a man of him. I don’t know how to do it. How do you be a brother and a father both?” He looked at Annie, but she had no answer for him.
“Really, I just don’t want him to get hurt. I don’t understand why he doesn’t see that and listen to me. I don’t understand why he’s so angry with me all the time. All I’m trying to do is help. Do you know that once he…?” Laurence stopped short.
Annie waited for him to tell the story about Jamie throwing rocks at his horse while Laurence was riding. But he didn’t. He muttered to himself, “My other brothers wouldn’t have done that.”
He shook his head as if trying to shake off an annoying bee. He finished aloud with, “I simply don’t understand the boy.”
But Annie had heard the comment about their other brothers. She recognized something new about Laurence. And felt like a fool for not seeing it before. Laurence missed those dead brothers! Jamie was not a replacement for them, not by a long shot. Spoiled, hotheaded, jealous, he didn’t even compare. She suddenly felt immense pity for both of them. Neither one had what he really wanted—Laurence those long-gone brothers, or Jamie his real father.
But how could Annie speak to that big of an empty space in them? Clearly they loved each other as much as resented each other, or they wouldn’t fight so much. All she knew was that Laurence was going to have to let Jamie make his own mistakes from now on, no matter how painful it was. That was the sad truth. Jamie wasn’t going to listen to advice from either Laurence or Annie. In fact, anything they told him right now, he’d be sure to do the opposite.
“He’s not a child any longer, Laurence,” said Annie. “Nor am I. And if you listen, you may actually learn something from us.”
Laurence thought a minute. “I can see that in you, Annie. I was amazed by your calm resolve and cleverness about hiding von Borcke. Very different from the girl who was so afraid at Manassas. But Jamie…Jamie is too young to die for the cause, Annie.”
He looked away from her. “The cause…the accursed cause…I was fighting for Hickory Heights. To save Hickory Heights. To take care of you and Jamie and Mother and everyone else. And I can see that it will probably be for nothing. I don’t know what will be left after all this killing. Look at how Jamie and I instinctively grabbed each other’s throats. That’s what the war has taught us.”
He dropped his head in his hands and wept.
For a long time, he cried. Annie sat paralyzed.
Finally something told her to put her arm around his shoulders. “I’m here, Laurence,” she whispered to the top of his fair-haired head. “I’ll do the best I can to keep home safe.” She turned to teasing, their old way of relating. “If the Yankees come, why, I’ll get one of Jamie’s precious guns, and Aunt May will get her broom, and between the two of us, we can take on all the whole Union army. I promise.”
Laurence laughed. “I imagine you two could,” he said into his hands. He lifted his head and wiped his eyes. “Forgive me, Annie.”
Annie’s heart swelled. Oh, dear brother.
There was a light tap on the door. It was Sam. Rachel stood a few feet behind him. “They’re waiting for us at the end of the lane, Captain.”
Laurence nodded and picked up the saddlebag that Aunt May had stuffed with biscuits and bacon.
He hugged Annie. “You are worth twelve brothers, Lady Liberty. Don’t forget to take care of yourself now.”
He handed her an envelope to post to Charlotte and then pulled himself onto Angel. Sam got onto his horse.
Annie couldn’t help a final embrace for Angel. “Do you know where you’re going, Laurence?”
“North somewhere. Word is General Lee plans for this campaign to break the war. We can only hope.”
There was a gallant sadness, a stoic determination about Laurence as he turned Angel and cantered away. Annie squared her shoulders and tried to adopt the straightforward, no-nonsense courage of her brother. She took Rachel’s hand. “You all right?” she asked.
Rachel shrugged, then nodded. As all right as she could be, watching her husband ride off into another battle, purely out of love and loyalty to a man, a friend, who had once owned him. Laurence had a deep sense of honor, but Sam did, too—both of which outsiders could probably never understand. Together, Annie and Rachel went back into the house, back to their work of tending the sick, stretching their food, and waiting.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
July 11, 1863
Hickory Heights
Robert E. Lee’s northern campaign did seem to break the war. But not the way the Confederate leader had hoped. In a tiny town in Pennsylvania called Gettysburg, Lee turned his army and stumbled onto the Federals who’d been shadowing him without his knowing it. In the stifling July heat, the two armies lunged at each other. Gorged on cherries they had plucked from trees as they marched, the half-starved Confederates suffered horrible dysentery after eating the fruit. They had no clear-cut strategy because Stuart had not arrived to scout the area. Without his cavalry to ride out and back to report what they saw, Lee was blind. As he began the battle, he had no idea what he was facing. He flung his men at the enemy that he could spot through his fiel
d glasses and prayed that thousands more weren’t behind them.
But there were.
Stuart and his cavalry had been delayed at the Potomac River by horrendous summer thunderstorms and misjudgments. When they finally crossed the flooded waters, they found themselves stuck behind the Union army as it pursued the Confederates northward. By that point, Stuart had no idea where Lee was. He simply continued north. Trying to redeem himself for the Union’s devastating surprise attack on him at Brandy Station, Stuart insisted on capturing and then carting along 125 Union wagons full of oats, boots, medicine, and whiskey. The much-needed supplies simply delayed him further.
By the time Stuart and his cavalry arrived in Gettysburg, eight thousand soldiers—blue and gray—already lay dead or wounded on the ground. It was only the first of three days of brutal killing.
Stuart’s captured supply wagons now only got in the way of an army frantically trying to maneuver. Reprimanded by Lee, condemned by Longstreet for worrying more about his own ego and standing than the lives of the army’s infantry soldiers, Stuart joined the fight with a burning need to rebuild his reputation. On the final day of battle, Stuart ordered a daring saber charge against Michigan cavalry. There was charge and countercharge, until finally the Federals regrouped. The two sides hurled themselves at each other, the lines breaking into mass chaos as riders slashed at one another, demanding surrender. At the end of it, neither side had gained advantage. But hundreds of riders and horses were cut down, crippled and bleeding on the ground, crying, praying, dying.
The next day, before dawn, the Confederates withdrew and staggered toward home. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia had lost twenty thousand men—one out of every three of its fighters. Those left standing were desperate to cross back into Virginia, or they’d be surrounded, trapped against the Potomac River, and beaten for good. The Confederacy would die. Lee had no choice. He left his wounded stranded on the fields, in a torrential rain.
Laurence was among the abandoned.
An anxious gloom settled on Hickory Heights as the inhabitants waited to learn if Laurence had survived. But news of Aunt Molly’s husband came swiftly. Uncle John had been killed. He had fought under General George Pickett. On that last frantic day of slaughter, Lee ordered Pickett’s division of foot soldiers to charge across a mile-wide open field against a thick line of Federals, dug in and waiting behind a stone wall. The place was called Cemetery Ridge. Fifteen thousand gray-clad soldiers obeyed. Ten thousand of them died or were wounded. Pickett’s officers fell, too. Of his thirteen colonels, seven died, six were wounded.
Annie’s little girl cousins didn’t seem to understand what the news meant. It had been so long since they’d seen their father—almost half of Colleen’s short life—that he seemed long gone anyway. But Will understood. And Aunt Molly set up a wail that could have been heard a mile. Miriam had somehow dragged herself down to the parlor to comfort her sister. Annie was embarrassed that her first thought was to worry about how she would continue to feed them all now that they wouldn’t be going home. Perhaps ever. Widows had a hard time running a farm.
Annie didn’t let herself think on what could have befallen Laurence. Or Angel. Annie would wait. She took all her fears, all her what if?s, and shoved them into a cellar in her brain and locked it. If she didn’t, she couldn’t function, couldn’t keep Hickory Heights going, couldn’t look after Miriam. She’d just be hanging, swaying in misery, watching, hoping, agonizing.
The Union army, led by a General Meade, eventually followed Lee into Virginia and took possession of Fauquier and Loudoun counties once more. Meade settled into Warrenton.
Ever defiant, Mosby called for more raids. He captured merchant wagons, hit a Union wagon train out foraging for supplies, and made off with a number of mules from a Federal encampment. Ever more men were joining his ranks.
Thanks to Jamie, Hickory Heights had a new boarder, a Charles Murdock. Annie did not care for him. There was something sly about the angular man. She was glad that von Borcke had been moved out of their home and taken to Richmond. Annie was sure that Mosby’s bold raids would bring them trouble, and she didn’t want to be worrying over hiding the seriously injured Prussian.
On the morning of the eleventh, trouble came.
Again, it was Thomas Walker and the Massachusetts cavalry that arrived to search their home. As much as Annie tried to detest the man, she was relieved that he was there. His unit was respectful; his colonel, by the name of Lowell, was clearly an educated man.
The search lasted only half an hour. Murdock and Jamie were out of the house, catching bullfrogs and fishing for dinner. They had evaporated into the hillside when they heard the horses coming. Just the night before, Isaac had tethered in the woods the Union army mules Mosby had been stabling at Hickory Heights. There was nothing for the bluecoats to find.
It was a different story that evening.
They were all gathered in the dining room—Annie, Aunt Molly, Sally, Colleen, Will, Jamie, and Murdock—enjoying the fat fish Jamie had caught at the creek, when the sound of horses came up the lane.
Murdock and Jamie jumped up. Annie ran to the window. “Thank God,” she called out quietly. “It’s only two riders.” They might even be Mosby men. She strained to see and went cold all over. It was Thomas Walker again.
“Quick, into the cellar,” she hissed at Murdock.
“Jamie, you sit at the table. You live here. You’re minding the farm.”
Everyone scrambled into place.
Annie went to the door. Emotions she didn’t understand took possession of her again. This Walker was a kind, polite man. Yet she responded to him with rage. He represented the force that was destroying her life, plundering her house, killing people she cared for, forcing a multitude of hungry cousins on her, robbing her of her youth and her hope in life. Perhaps it was because she instinctively liked Thomas Walker that his part in crushing her homeland infuriated her more.
Annie opened the door and her mouth. Out came rudeness that normally would have shamed her: “Have you come to take the meager dinner I could manage tonight away from our children, Major Walker?”
Thomas had just dismounted his horse. He stiffened, but didn’t take the bait this time. “No, Miss Sinclair. I’ve brought a surgeon to see your mother.”
Annie caught her breath, embarrassed, grateful, ashamed.
“May we come in?”
She nodded, for once at a loss for words.
Annie showed the surgeon upstairs. Oh, what she’d do, Lord, if this doctor had something to help her mother. For the past month a terrible fear had festered in Annie that she didn’t want to voice or consider, a fear that Miriam was slowly slipping away as Annie and Aunt May kept watch, helpless. Even though Annie had been running the household for almost a year now, Miriam was still upstairs. Annie half expected her mother to just get up one day and again take up her duties. Miriam was strength. Miriam was hope. Miriam would somehow return Hickory Heights to normalcy. If she died, it meant the life Annie once knew could never be retrieved. Annie would become the linchpin, the one who would have to fix everything, the one who would have to comfort everyone else. And she was only seventeen. She’d fail; she knew it. And now that Laurence might be…Annie shook her head with the thought. No, she wouldn’t even think on it.
Annie opened Miriam’s door for the doctor. He was a large but fit man, younger than Middleburg’s doctor, and the saddlebag he carried seemed to actually have supplies in it. “Please, sir,” Annie whispered. “Please help my mother.”
“I’ll do the best I can, miss,” he said. “Major Walker told me how she saved his life. He went through quite a lot to bring me here. He pushed Colonel Lowell about as hard as he could without being cited for insubordination. You should know that.”
Annie sighed at the surgeon’s relatively subtle reprimand. She owed Thomas an apology, certainly her thanks.
“Mother?” Annie gently held Miriam’s hand to rouse her.
Miriam
opened her eyes slowly and a smile spread across her face. “Hello, darling,” she answered. “I was remembering a day when Jamie was a baby and you were just a slip of a thing. We were out in the garden with all my boys. They were playing tag and carousing, and you so wanted to play with them.” She feebly reached out to touch Annie’s face. “My little firebrand. As brave as any boy, God help you.”
Annie smiled back. “Mother, there’s a doctor here.”
Miriam looked alarmed. “Is someone sick, darling?”
In the corner, Aunt May buried her face in her apron. Annie heard her cry.
Annie swallowed hard. “You’re the one sick, Mother. And we want you to get well. That Thomas Walker from Massachusetts, remember the man wounded at Manassas? The man whose mother sent that beautiful cloth for Christmas? He’s brought a Union doctor for you. A Federal doctor has medicine that we can’t get. May he look at you, please, Mother?”
Tenderly, Miriam spoke, “Annie, my darling, you can’t be doing much for me now. You must know that. It’s all right. Don’t be grieving for me. I’ve lived to see you grow into such a good lady. I marvel at you. I just wish I could see you married and happy and have headstrong babies of your own.”
The doctor spoke up. “Ma’am, why don’t you let me be the judge of your condition?” He snapped open his bag.
Annie stepped back to give him room. If this doctor helps, I promise to be a better person, Lord. I promise to be polite to Thomas Walker no matter how many times he searches this house.
Oh my God! Annie had a sudden, terrible realization. Thomas is downstairs with Jamie!
Hastily, Annie excused herself and fled down the staircase. She tried to glide into the dining room without seeming flustered. The scene she found sent her heart racing.
Jamie sat glowering at Thomas. Her little cousins were frozen in their seats as well, not eating. Only Aunt Molly was consuming her food. Normally, Annie might have been mightily annoyed that her plump aunt was happily eating in such a tense situation, but next to Molly was something of far greater concern. Next to her was Charles Murdock’s plate, still full of food! No one had thought to remove the extra setting.
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