“Home?” Mercy asked.
“I’m going back to Ireland,” Deirdre said. “I’m leaving the order. I’ve been lying to myself and everyone else about hearing God’s call.”
Oona stepped closer. “You will always be my sister in Christ, Deirdre. And you, too, Mercy. Always.”
“Three minutes, Sisters,” the guard called out.
Mother Helena pulled a chain from the pocket of her habit. “I brought you something,” she said, holding out the mercy medallion. “I found it with your things, and I thought you might want it, Mercy.”
Mercy ducked her head so Mother Helena could slip the chain around her neck. “Thank you.”
“We haven’t much time left,” Mother Helena said. “I’m a poor substitute for a priest, but if you’re willing, I will perform the sacrament of the last rites for you.”
Mercy nodded. Mother Helena held out her hand, and Oona placed a small vial of oil into her palm.
Oona and Deirdre bowed their heads. Mercy’s eyes met Mother Helena’s, and in them she saw nothing but compassion and love.
“Oh, Holy Host above, I call upon Thee as a servant of Jesus Christ, to sanctify our actions this day in preparation for the fulfillment of the will of God.”
Mercy concentrated on the lyrical sound of the nun’s voice, the words washing away the grime of her life, the moment tender despite the harsh surroundings.
Mother Helena continued, “Oh Lord, Jesus Christ, most merciful, Lord of the earth, we ask that You receive this child into Your arms …”
Tears ran down Mercy’s face.
“… that she might pass in safety from this crisis, as Thou hast told us with infinite compassion.”
“I’m so sorry,” Mercy whispered.
Mother Helena dipped her thumb into the vial of oil and made a cross on Mercy’s forehead. “By this sign thou art anointed with the grace of the atonement of Jesus Christ, and thou art absolved of all past error and freed to take your place in the world He has prepared for us.”
Elijah had been praying the same thing over and over since galloping away from Fort Wallace toward St. Louis. “Please, God, get me there in time.”
He’d traded horses at an outpost when stars still covered the dark, cloudless sky. And while he rode, he went over and over in his mind what could have happened. He had so many questions about how Mercy had come to be tried and convicted and he hadn’t even been subpoenaed. Surely she would have told someone about his part in all this—surely she must have told someone it wasn’t John Henderson she’d been after, but Elijah. She was certainly culpable for some of her actions, but to be convicted without all the evidence was a tragic ending to the situation, one he didn’t want on his conscience.
Dawn light filled the sky, and he pushed the horse even harder, hoping against hope that the animal would hold out until the end. Every muscle in his body ached, but the drive to get to St. Louis before the next sunrise was stronger than his fatigue. He pressed on.
Elijah didn’t slow the hard gallop of the horse until he hit St. Louis proper just as dawn broke on the morning of May third. He all but stampeded past the buggies and horse riders on the street and made his way toward Gratiot Street.
People must have gathered in the predawn light because the noise from the crowd in front of the gallows could be heard a block away. The celebratory air of the spectacle was something Elijah had never understood, but he knew without question that as long as there were public hangings, people would show up to witness them. He caught sight of the gallows built at least ten feet in the air with steps that led to the platform. The executioner was slipping a noose over the head of a black-hooded prisoner standing with bound hands and feet.
The air of excitement among the spectators rose to a crescendo as the executioner moved to the side of the platform and put his hands on a large metal lever.
“No!” Elijah yelled out, pulling hard on the reins of his horse and stopping short behind the crowd.
The executioner looked toward a man on the other side of the platform who dipped his head once.
“Stop!” Elijah screamed.
The lever sliced through the air.
Elijah saw every detail of the prisoner’s reaction: the shoulders tensed, the head thrown back as if the eyes under the hood wanted one more glimpse of the sky they would never see again.
“Oh, God, no,” Elijah called out.
There was a horrendous screech of a pulley.
The crowd roared in anticipation.
The prisoner did a quick dance in the air, bound feet trying to find purchase as everything solid went out from under them.
Elijah felt the air go out of his lungs at the same time the prisoner’s body jerked once beneath the space in the gallows.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Sick to his stomach, Elijah stared in horrified disbelief. He had been too late to save her. Still on his horse, he watched as two men moved to cut her body loose from the ligature around her neck. A band started to play a hymn, and in his peripheral vision he was aware of a man moving through the crowd, selling paper cones filled with nuts.
She was dead, and Elijah wondered if there was something he could have done differently. Maybe he should have gone directly to Rand himself and not given Mercy a choice in the matter. It had proven to be too much for her, and for that he was sorry.
Elijah’s eyes moved over the crowd, even as he wondered what they were all still doing there when the barbaric show was over.
From his vantage point on the horse, he saw a nun making her way toward the gallows, weaving in and out of people until she stopped at the edge of the wooden structure. Elijah remembered the diminutive stature of Mother Helena, and even without seeing her face, he knew it must be her.
A ripple of excitement went up from the crowd again. Elijah rose out of the saddle, standing in the stirrups—looking behind the gallows to see guards leading another prisoner to the platform.
His jaw dropped.
Mercy!
It was her. She was still alive. He tried to move the horse through the crowd, but they weren’t budging. He bolted out of the saddle and started to elbow his way through the throng of people.
“Let me through!” he yelled. Some moved back out of deference to the uniform he wore. Some were so caught up in the excitement of the event they couldn’t even hear him.
“Move! Move!” he yelled.
He could see them leading Mercy up the wooden steps to the platform and was close enough now that he could see John Henderson standing on the side of the platform near two other men.
Elijah pushed and shoved people aside. “Out of my way! Let me through!”
Elijah kept his eyes on the platform—saw a look of some relief on Mercy’s face and followed her eye line to Mother Helena.
As he drew closer to the gallows, uniformed guards stepped into his path. “Sorry, Captain, no further,” one man said, putting a hand on his chest.
Elijah shook off the man’s hand. “Stop the execution!”
He tried to push forward, but another guard joined the first. He drew a weapon. “Stay back, Captain,” he said firmly. “We don’t want to fire on a soldier.”
“Five minutes,” Elijah said to the guard. Then yelled, “John! John Henderson!”
Elijah saw John turn and scan the crowd.
“John!” he shouted. This time John spotted him and said something to the man beside him before he hurried down the platform steps.
“Elijah? What’s going on?”
“You can’t let her hang!”
“She was found guilty of treason,” John said.
Elijah’s eyes flew to the executioner, who stepped up with a black hood to put over Mercy’s head. The man on the other side of the platform looked grave, serious. He absently pulled on the end of his thick black beard. Elijah recognize
d him as the governor of the state of Missouri, Thomas Fletcher.
“She tried to kill me, Elijah,” John said.
Elijah turned to him. “You’re wrong! Tell Fletcher to stop. Trust me.”
Tears streamed from Mercy’s eyes as the hood came down over her face. The crowd, equally excited and horrified, murmured their approval at the final steps before her death.
Elijah saw the executioner look toward Governor Fletcher—while John sprinted toward them both. Even though he had reached the bottom of the steps, Elijah could see that the congressman was going to be too late. Before the guards by his side could react, Elijah drew his pistol from a holster on his hip and fired it into the air.
People around him screamed. One of the guards grabbed him while the other took his gun. Elijah looked up in time to see John pleading his case. The governor looked at Elijah, and it felt as though it took forever before he looked back to the executioner and firmly shook his head.
Elijah sagged with relief at the gesture, and as he was being handcuffed, he watched the executioner roughly yank Mercy off the trapdoor. The crowd, incensed at being robbed of a death, booed and yelled toward the gallows. The guards tried to get Elijah to move away, to turn his back on the gallows, but he stood firm until he watched the hood be pulled from Mercy’s ashen face. He saw her confused eyes search the crowd for Mother Helena.
The guards yanked Elijah by the arm. “Let’s go, Captain,” one of them said.
“Elijah!”
John Henderson was striding toward him with the governor right on his heels. “This better be good,” John said through clenched teeth. “My reputation is on the line here.”
Governor Fletcher stopped just a foot from Elijah and nodded at the guards. “Turn ’im loose.”
Elijah looked up at the gallows, where Mercy was being led from the platform.
“Your actions here today are outrageous, Captain,” Governor Fletcher continued. “I was a colonel before I was governor, and I’m here to tell you, this could warrant a court-martial.”
“I’m aware of your service record, sir,” Elijah responded. “I’ve heard of your bravery at Chickasaw and Chattanooga. I know you to be a man who abhors injustice—and that’s what it will be if you hang that woman today.”
Governor Fletcher stared at him.
“Fifteen minutes, Governor. Give me fifteen minutes to tell you what I know,” Elijah said.
Governor Fletcher looked at the guards still surrounding Elijah. “We’ll use the warden’s office.”
It was an hour later when Judge Young, Prosecutor Don Shepherd, and Mercy’s attorney, Frank Collins, all arrived after being summoned to join Elijah, Henderson, and Governor Fletcher in the warden’s office. Elijah sat in a chair against the wall, his arms resting across his knees, his head sagging in exhaustion. A final tap on the door admitted Charles and Rand Prescott to the room.
They both looked surprised when they saw the group of men waiting for them. “We came as quick as we could,” Charles said. “Governor, what’s this about?”
“Captain Hale is convinced we were about to hang an innocent woman,” Governor Fletcher said.
“Innocent?” Rand asked. “Perhaps you should have taken the time to catch up on your reading, Hale! Mercy’s own journal is proof of her guilt.”
Judge Young held up his hands. “We’ve agreed to hear him out, Rand.”
“Am I the only one here who remembers that a jury of her peers found her guilty of treason?” Don Shepherd asked.
Elijah got to his feet, three days of beard growth on his chin, his eyes bloodshot and tired. He managed to square his shoulders as he faced Rand.
“They didn’t have all the evidence,” Elijah said.
“I’d say it’s a little too late for that now, Captain,” Shepherd said.
“She’s not dead yet, Mr. Shepherd,” the judge said. “I want to hear what he has to say.”
“Go ahead, Captain,” Governor Fletcher said. “Tell me why I stopped an execution today.”
“The first time I met Mercy wasn’t that night at your engagement party,” Elijah said, looking at Rand. “I’d met her months prior—on a battlefield in Tennessee.”
Elijah went on to tell the story of the day his brother died. The day his own life had been spared by Mercy. And he told them about the day he paid a visit to an excited bride-to-be and shattered her dreams of the future by insisting she tell the truth about a past she couldn’t remember.
“You’re lying,” Rand said.
Elijah shook his head. “No. I wish to God I’d never seen Mercy again after that day in battle. But I did. When I recognized her, I wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth about her amnesia, but I quickly came to believe she was.”
“Her journal says she remembers being a soldier,” Rand said.
“No,” Frank Collins said. “All it says is that she knows she was a Confederate soldier—but now we know that’s only because Captain Hale told her. There is never any mention of her memory returning.”
“She plotted to commit murder—to kill a sitting member of our government,” Charles said. “Surely no one here has forgotten that!”
“Her entries never refer to the congressman by name,” Collins said. “They only say he.”
“She admitted that she started the fire that could have burned down John and Mary’s house,” Charles said.
“She wasn’t after John,” Elijah said. “She planned to kill me. I knew her past and had threatened to expose her. With me out of the way, she could still marry Rand and keep the secret.”
“Well, then, by all means, let’s stop her punishment and throw her a party,” Charles said.
“The point is that we can’t execute a young woman for treason if she didn’t intend to actually kill a government official,” Judge Young said.
Rand pointed at Elijah. “Hale just said she planned to kill him. He’s a member of the military—doesn’t that make him a government official?”
“Admittedly, there is a gray area about that, but in my interpretation of the law, it has to be a duly elected member of the government that is killed or threatened before it constitutes treason. Captain Hale volunteered for his post.”
“She still planned to kill a man.”
“She changed her mind,” Elijah said.
“We found the evidence that says otherwise,” Shepherd said. “We have the round she fired.”
“I won’t argue with the fact that she fired,” Elijah said. “But I am standing here to tell you, gentlemen, if Mercy had truly wanted me to die—I would be dead.”
“She missed, is all!” Rand said. “She was too far away to hit her target. That is why you’re here, Hale. Not out of some eleventh-hour cry of conscience on Mercy’s part.”
Hale shook his head. “No. She’s too good. Too accurate. She changed her mind and spared my life—for the second time, I might add. Did she hate me? Yes. Why wouldn’t she? I threatened to take away all her happiness by insisting she reveal a truth about herself that she didn’t even remember. She was panicked, backed into a corner—and the clock was ticking toward your wedding. I had promised her I would seek you out and tell you myself, Rand, if she didn’t.”
“So what you’re saying is that while she planned to kill you,” John said, “she made it appear as though she meant to kill me. She wanted everyone to think she had it in for me because of my allegiance and support of the North.”
Hale nodded. “She is guilty of plotting and planning revenge, Governor,” he said, looking at Fletcher, “but you can’t execute a woman for that. I would wager there’s not a man among us who hasn’t wished someone dead at one time or another.”
“I would have to agree with Captain Hale,” the judge said. “If what he says is true, and Mercy did not intend to kill the congressman, then hanging her is out of the question. Can you im
agine the uproar among Southern sympathizers if it ever got out we hung an innocent woman?”
“It might be parallel to the uproar that’s already happened because she wasn’t hung this morning,” Shepherd said. “The Radicals were out for blood, gentlemen, and they didn’t get it. There have been some documented cases of women masquerading as male soldiers, and that in and of itself is disturbing, but this case escalates the degree of deception—and the thirst for revenge—even further. A Confederate soldier who was about to marry the son of one of the Union’s biggest supporters! I’ve already heard rumblings from the underground groups that go after Confederates who’ve stayed true to the Southern cause. It won’t matter now to them if she’s found to be innocent. They won’t believe it.”
“Who says she is innocent?” Charles demanded. “There’s still no proof.”
“That’s right, Hale. Do you think we’re just going to take your story as gospel, turn her loose, and let her go on her merry little way after all the misery she has put me—us—through?” Rand asked.
“He’s right, Captain,” Judge Young said. “I can’t just let her go because you had a bout with your own conscience and want me to free her. We live in a civilized society with laws against taking matters into your own hands when you feel threatened.”
“I would ask everyone in this room to remember that our civilized society just came through a bloody war because a way of life was threatened,” Elijah said.
“The bottom line isn’t that we have her plans on paper, or even that she set a fire that did minimal damage to some property. The fact that we have the minié ball she fired still screams intent to kill,” Don Shepherd said. “You are here, Captain, because she missed.”
“She does not miss,” Elijah said. “And if you’ll let me—I can prove it.”
The men stared at him, but it was John Henderson who broke the silence. “What exactly are you proposing, Elijah?”
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