by Alyssa Cole
1. Some things are in our control and others are not.
Ewan had looked up at his mother and her steady hands and realized that the mending was in her control, while his father was not. He was still frustrated and still angry, but a new respect formed for his mother in that moment; what he had taken for a weakness, and tolerance of abysmal behavior, was actually a strength. Ewan read the short tome quickly, and then read it twice more before bed that night. The rules of The Enchiridion made more sense than “Turn the other cheek” or “Honor thy father.” There was no need for forgiveness and false praise in this conception of life, only deciding what was essential and what was not.
His father was not essential. It was only a couple of years later that his father came to the same conclusion. If Ewan’s quiet reprimands had helped his father to understand that fact, he did not regret it.
That this woman would give him this book—the book that had saved his life, if not his soul? Ewan wasn’t superstitious, but even he could appreciate that this was a coincidence of the highest magnitude. He could understand how a thing like this might make a simpler man believe it held some greater meaning, but he was not a simple man. The sensation of dizzy warmth he felt was simply gratitude, he was sure.
“This book means a great deal to me. Thank you.” He ran his fingers over the textured cover, and when he looked up her gaze was following their path.
Her shoulders lifted and fell in a manner that indicated the gift was of no consequence, which was at odds with the warmth Ewan felt in his cheeks and neck and chest. She began moving away with her cart.
“Something told me you’d appreciate this sort of thing.” There was a teasing tone to her voice that thrummed an ancient scar in him, the one that had sealed over the wound incised by the whispers of “The boy is strange” and the shouts of “What kind of nonsense is he up to now?”
“You didn’t? Appreciate it?” He didn’t know why the idea upset him—he was quite open to differences of opinion. You cannot control the actions of others, he reminded himself. But if she found this book, which was such an essential part of his being, ridiculous, then that meant . . .
She glanced at him, amusement dancing beneath those long, sooty lashes of hers. Little bolts of anxiety tightened at Ewan’s neck at the thought that she might be amused by him.
“I enjoyed some parts more than others. I left my thoughts for you, in case you were interested in them.”
“Always.” I look forward to your notes more than the books, and everyone knows how strongly I feel about books. But he didn’t tell her that. “Engaging the arguments of those who hold differing opinions is always a worthy use of one’s time. It’s how we strengthen our rhetorical skills and broaden our knowledge.”
He sounded pretentious, ridiculous, but she smiled at him anyway and he had to fight back a groan at how sharply the slightest curve of her mouth cut into him.
“I’ll have to disagree with that,” she said. “Some arguments are not worth engaging. If you tried arguing for the validity of the Confederacy, this conversation would be over.”
One of the things that drew Ewan to Marlie was that there was always a certain softness about her, but the look in her eye as she regarded him was serrated.
Ewan nodded his agreement.
“Quite right. There’s discussion and there’s tomfoolery.” Even a confirmed pedant had some sense of decorum.
“Marlie!” a deep voice called out from a few feet away. “Time to go.”
A black man, obviously older than Marlie but not old enough to be an uninterested father figure, stood watching them. He was standing beside one of the squabbling officers from earlier. The officer gave him a friendly clap on the arm and walked off.
Marlie’s companion held a book in his hands that he quickly slipped into one of the large pockets of his wool coat. There was something in the movement that drew Ewan’s attention—it was overly casual.
The man nodded toward Ewan; there was amusement in his gaze when their eyes met.
Get in line, son, his expression seemed to say.
Am I that obvious? Ewan’s gaze flicked back to Marlie, not of his own accord, and he forced himself to meet the man’s eye again.
The man shook his head and turned away.
Yes, I’m that obvious.
“Coming, Tobias!” Marlie gave Ewan a brief smile and then she was off, lugging her cart behind her. Ewan knew he should stop looking after her like a lost calf, so he turned to head back to his tent. He’d taken about four steps before he stopped and turned to the flyleaf.
Any man who believes he can control his emotions has already been bested by them, Socrates.
Turmoil across the yard caught his attention before he could process the words. Ewan slammed the book shut and shoved it into the waistline of his pants. The noise could be guards come to raid the tents and take whatever the Lynch woman had provided for the prisoners, as they were wont to do. It could have been one of the gangs preying on the weakest among them for the same reason. A man couldn’t get too attached to his possessions in a prison, even a man who wielded some small amount of power, as Ewan did. You had to keep what was important to you close.
Across the yard, the throng of prisoners began to part and Ewan could see Warden Dilford hurrying alongside two men. One was slim and pointy all over, with squinty eyes and a long nose that reminded Ewan of a hungry dog glancing about in search of food. He was leading three or four men, all badly beaten, by a rope that bound each of them at the wrists with not enough space between them to walk without stumbling. Each time a man misstepped, the slim man gave the rope a vicious pull. Ewan winced. He knew how much damage coarse rope against skin could cause; he’d learned all about how fragile the human body was while carrying out his work.
“Got some more treasonous skulkers,” the man said. “Worse than the Yanks, these skulkers.”
“The word of my Lord is above the petty squabbles of man,” one of the men responded. He was older, his skin leathery from a life working the fields. “You wish to force me to fight, but my only battle is righteous resistance to that which is unjust. Slavery and avarice are not just.”
That drew murmurs of support from the crowd, likely from fellow War Quakers—those who followed the teachings of the Friends, but hadn’t registered before the Conscription Act. All of the deserters fascinated Ewan, but these men the most. They chose not to fight out of a strong sense of morality, while Ewan had joined up for the same reason. Yet it was in committing the most immoral acts that he’d aided his country the most. He didn’t regret being good at something so terrible—it had been made quite clear that he wasn’t like other men, and this was just further proof of that—but he did wonder at the cost. If souls were real, his was irrevocably stained by what he had been assigned to do for the sake of the Union. Saying no had never occurred to him.
“Why should the poor yeomen fight for the rich slaver who can buy his way out of service while sacrificing those who have nothing to gain in this fight?” the man continued, encouraged by the crowd. “Twenty slaves is all that stands between a skulker and a righteous man in the eyes of Governor Vance!”
A larger figure lumbered up behind the man, sword drawn. He raised the weapon and brought it down, and for a moment Ewan thought he’d see a defenseless man hacked to death before his eyes. But instead the attacker leveled several blows with the flat of his sword, beating the older man like a beast of burden instead of hewing him like a fattened calf.
“That resistance will be whipped out of you once you reach the Camp of Instruction. We’ll see what the good Lord says when you get to Raleigh,” the man said, and then he looked up, bringing his face into full view for the first time.
Cahill.
Ewan’s stomach constricted into a tight ball of disbelief, and a surge of anger and fear went straight to his head, leaving him with a raw, sick feeling, like a soldier dosed with too much morphine. Months and months had passed. Ewan had thought he’d come to terms
with what happened in that Georgia farmhouse. The itch in his skull and the clench of his teeth told him otherwise. Cahill walked with a severe limp—Ewan knew precisely how the man had developed it—and his gaze swept over the prisoners like a wintry gale. When he got to Ewan, it lingered a moment, eyes narrowing.
He can’t recognize you.
Ewan’s instinct was to meet Cahill’s gaze. No, that’s not true—his instinct was to push through the crowd, grab the bastard’s sword, and run him through with his own steel. But it was that exact instinct that had made Ewan question everything about himself. There was carrying out his duty to his nation, and there was what had happened during his interrogation of Cahill. There was the blinding rage at injustice that had left Ewan ashamed and Cahill with a brace beneath his trouser leg. There was the knowledge that Cahill hadn’t paid dearly enough.
Ewan scratched his beard and looked up at the darkening sky. The late afternoon sunlight wasn’t enough to burn through the haze of awful memories Cahill had drawn up. Blood and laughter and brown bodies falling one after the other.
“Name’s Cahill,” Keeley whispered to Ewan as he sidled up beside him. Keeley was a man who drew information like other prisoners drew flies—it was why he and Ewan worked so well together. Casual conversation wasn’t Ewan’s forte. “He was the worst kind of overseer before the war. He’s head of the Home Guard old Zebulon pulled together for sniffing out deserters, petitioned for the job. Vance has told him to do anything under the sun to drag skulkers out of hiding and into the service, and Cahill’s more than happy to oblige. They say he’d do it even if Vance had turned him down, that’s how much he hates skulkers.”
Cahill was Sons of Confederacy, too, but Ewan didn’t give Keeley that information. If he did, he’d have to explain why he knew about the hardcore Secesh group’s existence and how he knew Cahill in particular was a member.
“I’ve heard some things, some nasty things, Red. Holding men over campfires, toasting their bits like chestnuts. And sometimes they get ahold of a skulker’s wife or kid . . .” Keeley spat, then wiped at his mouth with his sleeve. “Him being here can’t mean nothing good.”
“We’re already in prison,” Ewan said, clapping his friend on the back. “Things can’t get much worse now, can they?”
Ewan didn’t like lying, but sometimes you had to for the greater good.
CHAPTER 2
Marlie focused all her attention on the liquid working its way through the coiled glass tubes of the condenser in front of her, on the scent of perfumed steam pushing through plant matter and the drops that gathered at the tube’s tip and dripped into the waiting bottle below.
She often wondered what her mother would say about her work space, which was both different from and similar to the one they’d shared in her childhood home. Leaves, roots, and bark of all types littered every surface, as they had in her previous life, but Marlie’s walls were now covered with tacked-up schematics for new distillation processes. Small pots holding the many different medicinal plants she’d nurtured from clippings lined the windowsill and balanced on the edges of shelves stuffed with books on botanical medicine.
Marlie had once brought her Illustrated American Botany with her for a visit and Vivienne had leafed through it disdainfully.
“You need a white man to teach you what you know in your bones?” she’d asked before tossing the book aside and returning to her work.
Marlie had tucked the book back into her bag and never mentioned it again, or any of the other books and what she’d learned from them. For Marlie, who had only ever traveled between her childhood home and Lynchwood, the books had been a doorway to the world. She knew of the latest advances from France, could test whether the specifications Helmhein of Germany suggested were worth recalibrating her production process for. She learned there were reasons certain plants elicited certain responses, reasons that could be quantitated and explained. Now when people looked at her strange eyes and called her a witch woman, she told them she was a scientist, something they found even more baffling.
Marlie got up and ducked through the door of the small room next to her work space to grab a few sprigs of dried rosemary for the decoction she was making. Baskets of the herbs and plants needed for her work covered the dark wood shelves and tabletops, and leaves crunched beneath her boots as she crossed the dusty wooden boards. Their comforting scents hung in the cool air that seeped in through the cracks in the window frame.
She moved between the drying room and her desk several times, her mind focused on the individual steps that would result in an effective tonic. Outside there was the noise of coaches making the weekly delivery from the Lynch farm, but it barely filtered up to her domain—work space, drying room, and bedchamber. The entire attic was hers. As a girl, she hadn’t been sure whether it was because Sarah wanted to hide her from guests or an indulgence to make up for past wrongs, and it had felt lonesome. But she’d grown to appreciate having her own private space, and Sarah’s love had made itself clear over time—her attention to Marlie’s well-being was occasionally even cloying, which was one of the reasons why Marlie had never moved down to the rooms more fitting for a lady. The other reason was that Marlie wasn’t quite sure she belonged there.
Sarah was her . . . friend. Benefactor. Partner in treason. Sister was what always came to mind first, but was never said. Sarah’s father had been a slave master, though it was always explained that he’d only bought slaves to succeed in business with his Southern compatriots, as if that caveat absolved him. Marlie’s mother had been one of the slaves he purchased. Everything else was conjecture, and after so many years, Marlie didn’t know how to ask for more information.
You shouldn’t have to ask.
She shoved the thought away, as she always did. She was lucky; most children like her ended up sold off or working their father’s fields. Marlie had been granted a life of luxury. She was free. That should be enough.
Should.
She turned down the heat on the burner and then opened the copy of Gulliver’s Travels Tobias had retrieved at the prison while she’d been talking with Ewan. The lending library had been a particular stroke of genius on her part. While the guards were bribed to allow Marlie, Tobias, and the other supposed slaves to carry out letters tucked away in the pages of their books, the real benefit was the pinprick messaging that allowed her to pass on information to the Loyal League, a group of Negroes and others dedicated to helping preserve the Union. She ran her fingertips over the page, retracing the messages she’d decoded earlier that day: EscAPe possible. wIll attEmpt aT WanINg MoOn.
She put the book down and took a deep breath at what had been set into motion with a few pricks of a pin. Her acts of rebellion were small in the grand scheme of the war—other members of the Loyal League went undercover, put themselves in grave danger by fighting on the front lines of the war to reunify the nation. Sarah thought the little Marlie did to aid the resistance was already too much, but Marlie clung to each small victory as something her mother would have been proud of. She hadn’t expected an escape to result from it, but she certainly wouldn’t turn down a request for help. And though she wouldn’t be participating directly in this escape, she knew Sarah wouldn’t approve of her being even marginally involved.
So she simply wouldn’t tell her.
She hadn’t told Sarah many things, of late. She hadn’t told her about the pinpricks or the new invisible ink she’d concocted to pass on what she learned to the Loyal League. She hadn’t told her how much she spoke to the prisoners, either. She’d learned of troop movement in the Piedmont, and morale levels at Rebel camps—or the lack thereof. Each trip to the prison, Marlie gathered more intelligence, from her library and from talking with the men as she treated their illnesses. And after each trip she realized how little she knew about the world outside of Lynchwood. A world she’d rarely been allowed to see because she was “safer at Lynchwood,” according to her sister. Marlie had begun to understand that birds were kept i
n gilded cages because that was safer for them, too.
She’d met men from tiny towns as far North as Maine, from cities as large and bustling as New York. They had accents so different from the slow drawl she was familiar with, and spoke of places that she could never imagine visiting, even given the Lynch family wealth. And then there was Ewan. Another unexpected benefit that had arisen from her library, and one that had nothing to do with the resistance.
Marlie reached out and wiped a speck of dirt off a warm glass tube, and the thought of Ewan’s finger sliding over the cover of the book she’d given him popped into her mind. There had been such reverence in that caress. If he treated his lovers with anywhere near the same tenderness . . .
She stood, rubbed her palms against her apron. There was nothing to be gained from thinking of such things, and so she searched for a better use of her time. She walked to the large rolltop desk on the other side of the narrow room. Sunlight poured in through the window, and when she grabbed up the stack of papers atop the desk, it was warmed through, hot in her hand like a living thing. Marlie stilled and closed her eyes, remembering for a moment the feel of her mother’s palm against hers the last time she’d seen her. Vivienne had looked at Marlie as if searching for her reflection in a cloudy mirror, and then dropped her hand and turned away as if she hadn’t found it.
“Sometimes I wish I hadn’t sent you there, you so much like them now. But that’s the best protection you can have in this world, chérie.”
Marlie sifted through the pages that were smudged with dirt and sticky with pine sap. When she lifted them to her nose she could still catch a hint of the rosemary balm her mother had used to keep her hands soft. The packet had been delivered the year before, along with a trunk full of Vivienne’s belongings and the shocking news of her mother’s sudden passing. Vivienne had seemed immortal, and Marlie still hadn’t reconciled herself to the truth, even after visiting her mother’s grave. Sarah had seen to it that Vivienne had a beautiful tombstone, but the cold marble didn’t ease the fact that her mother had died and Marlie hadn’t known. Nothing had prepared her; she hadn’t sensed a thing.