Amelia nodded. “We have brought Hiram here, to be buried with his son at Evergreen Cemetery.”
“But won’t it be hard for you, to cover the miles when you want to visit their graves?”
“I’m not leaving.” Her tone was laced with triumph. “There is nothing left for me in Ohio, not without Father. Now he and Levi are here. This is where our family is now. Including you.” Amelia reached across the table and held Libbie’s hand. “You are all I have left in this world. We belong together in these uncertain times. You don’t deserve to be alone, my girl. I am your family, and I’ve done you wrong by not showing it more. But from now on, I’ll stand shoulder to shoulder with you.”
Libbie’s mouth went dry. Family? She didn’t know Amelia. She barely knew Levi when they married! “Where will you stay?”
“Here, of course. I can help you: cooking, preserving, sewing, needlework. We’ll make a fresh start of it, together. The two of us. Hiram and Levi would have wanted it this way.”
“But I—” Liberty’s spirit flinched, but she could not say exactly why. Wasn’t this what she had wanted? To not be alone? Yet this solution did not seem right. Like an ill-fitting store-bought dress, it pinched where there should be freedom; it hung loosely where it should have been snug. She licked her lips and tried again. “I mean no disrespect to you, nor to the memory of Levi or Mr. Sanger, God rest their souls. But death has severed the marriage bond that tied me to Levi. I could not ask you to stay and tie yourself to me, then.”
“But I can help you! And Lord knows, my dear girl, I can’t possibly go back to Cincinnati now. I had to sell Hiram’s shop, and with the money I have from that, we can start over. Together. It would give me such pleasure to be close to you, dear. I want to know you and love you, because Levi did. I want to be close to him. You’ll not deny me that privilege, will you? Levi would have taken good care of you had he been here. Hiram wanted the money he left me to benefit you, as well. You can’t deny you could use a little help around this acreage—”
“I don’t—I don’t want to farm anymore. Very soon, I’m afraid there will be very little for you to do here.”
“And just how will you make a living? Without a husband? Without a harvest?”
“I’m turning the farmhouse into an inn. This is a large house, with seven bedrooms not in use. The great hall upstairs can be turned into a recreational room of sorts, with a billiard table at one end and tables for checkers on the other. Perhaps a piano, too. If I can fill even some of the rooms more often than not each month, it will be enough money to live on and enough to put away for the future. I can even sell some of my quilts, and jars of applesauce and preserves. Adams County is famous for its apples. Travelers would be happy to bring some token home with them.” Liberty took a deep breath.
“I see.” Amelia’s tone was thick with condescension. “And how many customers have you right now?”
“None.”
“Well then, how many have you had up to this point?”
“I am still in the process of converting the farm’s purpose. I haven’t had any customers yet.”
“Yet you need money in order to make the place a pleasant accommodation, do you not? Let’s see, you want to buy a piano, a billiard table, more beds, linens, washstands, basins and pitchers. Bureaus and writing desks would be ideal for each room, too. You can use my horses and wagon for the time being, but at some point you’ll want to buy a horse of your own, too. Not to mention the expense of repairing the damages caused last night. Am I right?”
Out of nervous habit, Liberty reached for the ring that spun on her finger before crossing her arms instead. My, how the list did go on. At length, she nodded.
“Done!” Amelia beamed and grasped Libbie’s hand. “Congratulations on your first customer!”
“You mean—”
“That’s right, my girl! If you won’t accept me as family, I’ll rest content as a paying customer. Would you accept one dollar per night?”
Liberty gasped as she did the math in her head. Seven dollars a week! Of course, she’d need to use some of that money for more provisions if she would be feeding another mouth. And much of the funds should go toward obtaining a horse and purchasing furnishings for the rest of the rooms … Every room could have a theme, with the quilt as its centerpiece. She knew just what to do …
“I can work, too,” Amelia added. “I’m still strong. Give me some chores, and I’ll see to them.”
“I don’t suppose you would be willing to pluck some chickens, would you? I just so happen to have three dead hens and a rooster we need to make use of before they spoil.” She’d never admit it to Amelia, but she still couldn’t clean a bird without feeling sick to her stomach.
Amelia nodded. “I make a delicious chicken pot pie, if you’ve got the vegetables.”
“There are some onions, carrots, and beans in the garden that are ready for picking. You make dinner. I’ll work on cleaning some of yesterday’s mess. Would that arrangement be agreeable for you?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well then, let me show you to your room so you can freshen up first.” For the first time in a very long time, Liberty felt as young as she really was. “Welcome to Liberty Inn!”
* * *
We hope you enjoyed this excerpt from Widow of Gettysburg. For more from Moody Publishers in this genre and others, visit your favorite local or online bookseller.
“ATLANTA HAS BEEN since the commencement of the revolution—a point of rendezvous of traitors, Swindlers, extortionist, and Counterfeiters. The population as a predominant element is a mixture of Jews, New England Yankees, and refugees shirking military duties.”
—COL. GEORGE WASHINGTON LEE, Provost Marshal of Atlanta
“WE HAVE LEARNED our lessons well—can cry when we would laugh—and laugh when we would cry … The face must keep its color—white or red—though the heart stops beating or flames up in scorching pain.”
—CYRENA STONE, Unionist Atlanta resident
Atlanta, Georgia
Sunday, July 5, 1863
Traitor. A rifle butt slammed between Caitlin’s shoulder blades, pitching her forward on the narrow plank. Stumbling, she righted herself again, wrists bound behind her. A dangling rope brushed her face.
How could you?
She squinted up at the voice, edged with hatred yet still familiar. Jack? Blood streamed from his chest.
His hazel eyes blazed. You did this to me.
No!
If you do not stand with me, you stand against me.
The noose was around her neck now, burning like live coals. It is only distance that separates us!
He shook his head, his hair curling over one eye. It is everything that separates us. The chasm can never be crossed.
Caitlin looked past Jack to the shallow grave behind him. The seven bodies of the Andrews raiders lay decomposing into one brittle mass. But there was room for one more. Terror pulsed in her ears.
I had no choice!
You made your choice. To be one of them.
I am one of you!
You are neither.
A single kick to the scaffold beneath her feet, and—
“Jack!” With a scream in her throat and fists clenching her collar, Caitlin burst from her nightmare into the hot breath of Atlanta. Surviving in enemy country is not a betrayal! She railed against her recurring dream. I am not a turncoat!
A knock on the door. “Caitlin? It’s me, Minnie.” She knocked again. “I haven’t got my key.” Caitlin sat up and rolled her neck. The residual fear of her nightmare dissolved under her roommate’s muffled drawl. “You didn’t fall asleep on your books again, did you, honey?”
At nineteen years of age, Minerva Taylor was four years younger than Caitlin, and she called everyone honey, whether she was truly fond of them or not. As the Atlanta Female Institute’s music teacher whose pupils ranged from the talented to the uncooperative, it was a capacity that proved to be as diplomatic as it was hab
itual.
Caitlin tripped on a dog-eared book as she went to open her door. “What else is a Sunday afternoon for if not reading and napping?”
Minnie shook her head of perfectly coifed sunshine-blonde hair, her face radiant in spite of the pockmark scarring. Parasol in hand, she stepped into the room and shut the door behind her, muting the rowdy conversations of the other boarders at Periwinkle Place. “Reading for pleasure I could understand. But something tells me you’re preparing for your classes. On a Sunday!” She plucked the worn volume from the floor. “Why, we’re almost out for the summer! You’re such a bluestocking!”
Caitlin’s grin faltered. Her classes were the best thing about Atlanta. When they ended for summer break, she would sincerely miss teaching. Perhaps the Southern sun had addled her brain for her to not hate living here the way she once did. Atlanta had given Caitlin what New York City could not. A way to survive without marrying. Or soldiering.
She pasted a smile back into place. “And who’s to say I don’t find pleasure in Paradise Lost?”
“You would.” Minnie laughed, her grey eyes dancing. “But tell the truth. It’s in your curriculum too, isn’t it?”
“What kind of a literature instructor would I be if it weren’t?” The fact that Caitlin was a literature instructor at all was no small miracle. But the Atlanta Female Institute was only three years old and, with the war calling the men away, in dire need of teachers. Caitlin had been offered the position vacated by an enlisting soldier as a personal favor from the principal to Dr. Periwinkle. That they believed her to be a Confederate veteran had worked to her benefit, as well.
“What about you?” Caitlin asked, twisting her shoulder-length, cinnamon-colored hair back into place beneath her pins. “Don’t you play the piano and sing when you’re not in class?”
“Of course I do. But this?” She read the text with a hint of vibrato: “ ‘Live while ye may, Yet happy pair; enjoy till I return, Short pleasures; for long woes are to succeed … ’ That’s just morbid, honey!”
“What’s morbid is how you completely murdered the iambic pentameter!”
Minnie shrugged. “I’ve got to let you be better than me in something. Aside from shooting a gun, that is.” Her dimples deepened in rosy cheeks, as they always did when she teased.
“Let’s leave the past where it lies. I’ve certainly won few friends with mine.”
“I know you don’t like to talk about your soldiering in the army, but the truth is, I only wish I were as brave as you so I could lick some Yankees myself!”
But Caitlin had not felt brave in battle. Not with lead tearing toward her and cannons shaking the earth beneath her. Not with men unraveling around her like rag dolls in the mouth of an unseen beast. Not with her lifeblood seeping out of her. She’d been terrified then, and the recollections jangled her still. “Never wish for a fight, Minnie. It is a horrid thing.”
“But for a just and righteous cause such as ours—”
“For any cause.”
Minnie laid a hand on her arm. “I’ve upset you. I’m sorry, honey.” Her gaze traveled to the white line on Caitlin’s jaw, likely assuming it was a mark from the war, and Caitlin did not correct her. “Come, let’s go for a stroll.”
By the time they stepped out onto Alabama Street, Caitlin’s heart rate had almost returned to its normal pace. Apple peels and peanut shells crunched beneath every step along the busy dirt road where soldiers swarmed between local residents and travelers.
When two Rebels half-bowed in their direction, Minnie trilled the chorus of the ever-popular Bonnie Blue Flag. “Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights, hurrah! Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.”
Caitlin smiled at her friend’s beautiful soprano voice, but could not stop the Battle Cry of Freedom from running through her own mind at the same time.
The Union forever! Hurrah, boys, hurrah!
Down with the traitors, up with the stars;
While we rally round the flag, boys, rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
“That one’s looking at you,” Minnie whispered.
Caitlin kept her gaze straight ahead. “Not likely. Or necessary.”
“Don’t you want to find a beau?”
“No.”
“Why ever not? With your education, you could secure quite a husband.”
“With my education, I don’t need a husband.” She arched an eyebrow. “I can make my own way.”
Minnie’s jaw dropped. “You don’t mean you’d rather have ‘single blessedness’ instead.”
“I most certainly do.”
Their conversation stalled at the corner of Whitehall Street and the railroad tracks. Knots of women and old men huddled in silent groups outside Wittgenstein’s saloon.
“What is it?” Minnie asked a woman nearby.
“There is news.” She nodded to the second floor of the building, the Atlanta Daily Intelligencer office. “If we can but survive the waiting for it.”
Minnie blanched and gripped Caitlin’s hand. “Father.” Jack. “Pray, stay with me until we hear.”
Hours passed, and the sun glared haughtily down upon them, baking all those who waited, exposed, below it. Sweat pricked Caitlin’s scalp beneath her palmetto hat and bloomed beneath her arms.
Prudence Periwinkle stood on the fringe of one cluster, clutching a bottle of smelling salts the way young mothers press babies to their chests. Horses swished their tails and pawed at the red dirt road, and the people choked on dust and suspense and fear.
No one spoke.
All eyes were on the arched door leading up to the Atlanta Daily Intelligencer office, waiting. News from the West reported that Vicksburg had surrendered. The Confederacy lay cut in two. But every breath still hinged on the news that would come from a little town in the North called Gettysburg.
Minnie’s whispered prayers were for her father, while Caitlin’s only thought was of Jack.
“There it is!” someone cried.
In the shadow of the door’s alcove, someone reached out and fed a ream of papers to hungry hands. Finally, the casualty list had arrived.
The sheets of names passed through the crowd, sending up wails and moans from nearly all who touched them. When it was Minnie’s turn to read them, her hands shook so fiercely she thrust the pages into Caitlin’s hand.
“Please,” she whispered, eyes squeezed shut. “Thomas Taylor. Quickly, quickly, I can’t bear another moment.”
Caitlin scanned the tiny columns of names, the fresh ink now blurred and smudged. Hastily, she skipped to the Ts.
And found the name.
“He is …”
Minnie’s eyes popped open, and Caitlin labored to force out the words. “He was …” She shook her head. “He is at peace.”
For a moment, Minnie sat in silence, as if frozen by the incomprehensible news. Then her face crumbled, yet she did not make a sound. Caitlin wrapped her arms around Minnie, and the grief of a father’s daughter bled out onto her shoulder. Caitlin’s face was wet with empathy.
Around them, sorrow thickened in the air, souring every breath. Caitlin tasted no victory in their despair.
In the edge of her vision, she saw a woman drop to her knees in the dusty road. Heart hammering on her ribs, Caitlin looked once more at the casualty list, slowing when she found the Ps.
Pelton, Pemberly, Pendleton, Periwinkle … Blood rushed in Caitlin’s ears. Periwinkle, Stuart. Dr. Periwinkle’s son. Prudence’s precious nephew, the one she helped raise and love as a mother would have done. Gone. Prudence bowed down on the street, clawing fistfuls of dirt and letting them crumble over her silver hair.
The war would not come to Atlanta, they said. But from the fields of Pennsylvania, its long fingers wrapped around its throat with an iron grip. The sons of the city had been slain. They had even been defeated.
The fissures in the House of Dixie were running deeper, yawning wider. How long would it be before it c
ame crashing down, as the crack in Edgar Allen Poe’s “House of Usher” had sent it rushing into the sea?
And if I am here when the Confederacy collapses, will I be saved by the North? Or will I go down with the South?
Words from her nightmare reverberated in her spirit. You are neither.
Caught between two nations desperately at war, Caitlin McKae was on her own.
New York City
Sunday, July 5, 1863
“Jesus loves me—this I know, For the Bible tells me so.” Ruby O’Flannery rocked her one-year-old son and relished his warm weight on her lap. “Little ones to Him belong—They are weak, but He is strong.” She hummed the refrain and mused what a difference the truth of the song had made in her life, and in his. Before he was born, she had not wanted him, for reasons too painful to dwell upon. Now however, she could not imagine life without him. He had brought joy back into her life and laughter to her lips.
Aiden’s eyes drifted closed, and his dimpled hands loosened their grip on the zebras from his wooden Noah’s Ark set. Pressing a kiss to his pillowy cheek, Ruby laid him in his crib and gently brushed copper curls off his forehead.
“Sleep well, darlin’” she whispered.
Ruby tiptoed out of the room and descended the wide walnut staircase of the Waverly brownstone just as a knock sounded on the front door. Caroline Waverly, her employer, was reading in the rear parlor, but no matter. This caller was for Ruby—the only caller she ever had.
She opened the door, a smile already on her lips, to see Edward Goodrich still in his Sunday best. He was not devilishly handsome—she wouldn’t trust him if he was, given her previous experience with that sort. But he was genuine. Kind. His coffee-colored eyes were deep and warm, not mischievous—and certainly not lustful, thank heaven.
“Is he down?” Edward looked past her to the stairway.
“You just missed him. You know, sometimes I wonder if you come here for our Bible studies or to play with my wee babe.” Tilting her head in mock disapproval, her smile didn’t fade. “Come in, come in.”
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