A Hope Divided

by Alyssa Cole

  He stared at her across the table, the coldness in his gaze worse than the hatred in Melody’s. This man felt nothing at all; he regarded her as one does a fly while debating whether to swat it or shoo it out the window; he seemed the type to err on the side of swatting.

  “I’ve seen those devil eyes before. Down at the prison with some other darkies giving out food and such.” He put his glass down and turned to look at Melody. “You the one offering aid and comfort to those Yanks and deserters?”

  Melody smiled brightly and pointed her skewer toward Sarah. “That occurred prior to my arrival. Regardless of what happened then, the Lynch household will never again offer succor to those who are enemies of the Confederacy. I’ll see to that.”

  Marlie’s stomach lurched like she was atop a horse that had just reared back to throw her. Her visits to the prison had been her sole source of freedom since the war had begun; it was the only time she’d traveled without Sarah, been able to make decisions without checking in with her ever-helpful sister. They hadn’t exactly been pleasant, but they’d made her feel as if she was of use to her country. It was there that she had listened for information to relay to LaValle, and spoken to men who treated her as if what she did made a difference. It was there where her hope had been renewed, as she saw all the men willing to fight and die—or not fight and still die—in order to preserve the Union.

  With one boastful sentence, Melody had snatched that away from her, too. The thought of no longer being able to help those who needed it took her breath away, and the realization that followed was just as painful: no more Socrates. No more conversations on philosophy. No more clear blue gaze and peculiar smile. He was the only person outside of Lynchwood she could call a friend. And she’d just lost him.

  “Food from the farm is also distributed to the army hospitals and Confederate regiments,” Stephen said quietly. His eyes were trained on his fork and knife as he cut his meat into ever smaller pieces. “Very little of it went to the prison.”

  “Very little?” Cahill’s lip curled. “Should have been none. That prison is filled with Yanks, the enemy of this country, and skulkers—traitors to their own land, and their own kind. Scarcely a night goes by without deserters robbing or abusing some loyal citizen. And you see fit to coddle them once they’re captured?”

  “If you’re speaking on abuses, you might bring up the fact that women and children are scared to leave their homes lest they encounter the Home Guard,” Sarah said hotly, then caught herself. She was more composed when she spoke again. “I’m a Christian, sir. War doesn’t change the fact that we’re all God’s children and that we must help our fellow man, especially the most misguided among them.”

  Cahill stared at her, and then let out a low, ugly laugh. “What Black Republican codswallop is that? The only God in these parts goes by Old Jeff, and anyone not for his dominion has chosen the side of the damned. You’d best remember that.”

  “Even Old Jeff cannot compel a man who does not want this war to take up arms,” Sarah retorted. “If forcing a man to take your views on as his own were so simple, this rift between the North and the South would never have occurred.”

  Cahill smiled then, an ugly expression that held neither joy nor amusement. “Compel? I’m not here for any such task, Miss Lynch. I promised Governor Vance that I would smite all enemies to our glorious cause. If these men truly cannot be compelled, they will be exterminated.”

  He held Sarah’s gaze until she shivered and looked away.

  Melody took a sip of champagne, mirth in her eyes as she surveyed the table over its rim. “Well, what are you waiting for, darkie? Bring out the next entrée.”

  Marlie walked out of the room, numbness slowing her steps. Cahill’s vile words were like a yoke thrown over her shoulders, and Melody’s pleasure in them added to the weight. Sarah’s silence was what nearly crushed her into the ground, though. She had defended the skulkers against Cahill’s tirade, but had said not a word as he menaced her own flesh and blood.

  In the kitchen, she picked up the book she’d been writing in and ripped out the page covered in her scrawling handwriting, balled it up, and tossed it into the flames.

  “What was that?” Pearl asked.

  Marlie watched as the paper burned down to ash.

  “Nothing of import.”

  CHAPTER 4

  . . . I did find many parts of the book to offer good advice, but all of this talk of logic makes me laugh. Is the desire to master one’s emotions not at its root just another desire? Thus logic seems, to me, to just take those things which a man—or woman—might enjoy, and replace them with concepts that are invested with just as much emotion but simply more dreary. I’m not an ancient Mediterranean gallivanting about in a toga, but I believe I have the right of it. You can stay close to your ship, Socrates, as this Epictetus fellow endorses, but I imagine you can find other, more enjoyable, things to focus such discipline on if you strayed onto land every now and again.

  Ewan hunkered in his tent and read the snippet of Marlie’s last letter for what was, at a conservative estimate, the thousandth time in the month since she had left him The Enchiridion. Ewan had probably read the book itself as many times over the course of his childhood.

  His original copy had been of a different binding, the wording slightly different, but the feeling it evoked remained the same. The original had been lost to him in one of his father’s violent rages.

  “How can this boy be of McCall stock,” his father sneered, three days of nothing but whiskey and corn meal reeking from his mouth as he loomed over Ewan. “I should have tossed him over the side when he did all that caterwauling on the boat, I should have. Always knew there was something wrong with him.”

  “Ewan is a good boy,” his mother said. “Like his father is a good man when he has a mind to be.” Her voice was calm but firm, and Ewan felt that itch in his skull at the unfairness of it all, but knew he could not control the situation. Epictetus had given him permission to accept his father’s rants and his mother’s stoicism.

  “Always defending him,” his father said. “Maybe he’s a bastard, like little Donella. Maybe those English dogs weren’t the first you opened your legs to, you—”

  “I wish I was!” Ewan was on his feet, tears standing in his eyes not from fear but from anger. “I wish I was someone else’s son. Donella is fortunate not to have your blood in her veins.”

  “Ewan.” His mother’s voice seemed far away, drowned out by the angry hammering of his pulse in his ears. Years of anger sharpened it to a sharp, precise spear of emotion that he aimed at his father.

  “If you hate us all so much, why don’t you just leave! We’d all be happier if you did.”

  The door creaked and he heard Malcolm’s quiet footsteps—his brother hadn’t had reason to learn stealth as Ewan had.

  Ewan braced for a slap. His father had never hit him, but Ewan wanted him to. He was just a slip of a boy, but if his father hit him he would fight back. He would let loose all his fury and frustration. He wo—

  His father snatched The Enchiridion from Ewan’s hands and stormed over to the wood burning stove.

  “Pa, don’t,” Malcolm pleaded from somewhere in Ewan’s periphery.

  “I’ll be respected in my own home,” his father said gravely. He threw the book into the oven and watched as it burned. Ewan watched too, hands clenched at his sides, fighting the desire to wail and kick and scream only for his mother’s sake.

  His father turned to him. His expression was sober, his mouth pulled into a frown. He laid the bottle of whiskey down and left the cabin.

  Sometimes Ewan wondered at the cruelty he doled out during his interrogations and wondered if he weren’t his father’s son after all. He sighed and opened the book again.

  Ewan had recalled The Enchiridion’s lessons often in the years after that, especially in times of fear and uncertainty, and they had always guided him well. Now Marlie had given it to him out of the blue. Marlie, who was his sol
e source of uncertainty in life. A prison could be escaped, a war won or lost, but the feelings she stirred in him defied such cut-and-dry categorization. They were not in his control.

  He read her letter for the 1,001st time.

  He couldn’t even lie to himself as to the why of it—he wasn’t searching for faulty argumentation in her words, although he was sure he could debate her definition of logic and her definition of desire.

  Desire.

  Her use of that word sent his brain veering sharply into the territory he’d become so adept at avoiding, and therein lay the problem. A life spent with his head buried between the pages of a book had fostered a formidable strength in Ewan’s imagination, and when it came to Marlie, his mind was hell-bent on revealing just how easily it could take simple words and breathe them into life.

  Before him stood Marlie in a toga, her smooth brown shoulders revealed by the draped white fabric. The curves of her calves as they emerged from beneath the pleated material as she took agonizingly slow steps toward him . . . perhaps she had just entered the chamber of a steaming private bath, one shared by just the two of them. Perspiration beaded on her skin, collecting in that sweet well just above her bowed lip and in the crevasse between her full breasts. He was already hard for her beneath the warm waters he was submerged in, and she stood before him, untied the belt of her toga, and let the fabric slide down over her curves....

  Ewan’s cock throbbed painfully, and he folded the letter and slipped it back into his pocket with the others he’d removed from the books before passing them along. He’d thought destroying a book sacrilege until that first short note he’d received. Simple greed had driven him to carefully fold the page near the binding, first one way and then the other, before ripping it cleanly away. He should have known then he was in trouble.

  A pulse of want rippled through him, like a disturbance at the surface of the water caused by powerful currents crashing beneath. His hand strayed down toward the tented groin of his pants. Self-gratification wasn’t grouped with the many other things he denied himself, and yet . . .

  He flopped back onto his hard bedroll and let his hand drop to his side. He wouldn’t sully her by conscripting her into his fantasies, but his imagination was no friend to his resolve. When he had given himself release before, he’d thought of some generic woman, cobbled together superficial traits that had stirred attraction in him over the years. Blond hair, rosy skin, a seductive smile. But now the fantasy stranger who’d been his sexual muse for so long was unable to hold her shape. Her hair was now thick, curly, and dark, her skin the color of Carolina clay baked in the summer sun. And her eyes? One green, one brown, both looking up at him as that suddenly luscious mouth moved toward his cock.

  Ewan took a deep breath and sat up, squeezing his eyes shut at the need that shot through him at the idea of sharing bodily pleasure with Marlie. And that was why he couldn’t unbutton his trousers and have at it. With his previous erotic muse, he’d been in control of every aspect of his own desire. It had been safe. But when Marlie entered his fantasy world, everything spun out of his control, and all his composure was crushed beneath the weight of his want. Sexual pleasure was one thing. Wishing to lose himself in a woman and never come back up for air was another, even just in theory.

  He needed to busy himself. That was the only way to keep his thoughts from straying to that which might be a danger to himself. It wasn’t that he thought Marlie would hurt him, but allowing his want for her to proceed further most certainly could. She was too far from his ship, out along the rosy horizon of things that were not meant for men like him.

  Whatever moral rules you have deliberately proposed to yourself, abide by them as they were laws, and as if you would be guilty of impiety by violating any of them.

  That was toward the end of The Enchiridion, number fifty on the list, but Ewan thought it should have been at least in the top three. For breaking one’s own rules was the greatest temptation a man could face, and that danger grew the more one knew of logic instead of lessening. If the leading minds of the Southern states could convince themselves this war was just, or it was a simple matter of autonomy, then a man could trick himself into going along with anything that suited his desires.

  He reached beside the bed for the stack of small wooden rectangles he’d gathered from the woodpile, and the coil of metal wire. He grabbed the pouch of springs Marlie had given him, ignoring the throb in his chest when he touched the pouch that had been nestled in the pocket of her skirts . . . dammit. Maybe he’d stop obsessing if it hadn’t been exactly twenty-seven days since he had seen her; he saved himself the dignity of recalling the hours. If the prison hadn’t quickly lost the semblance of order that Dilford had managed and begun to descend into hell. If Cahill hadn’t been the cause of it.

  Cahill hadn’t only come to Randolph to drop off the deserters he’d rounded up; he’d also been there to tell Dilford that the soldiers who’d been used as prison guards were being drafted into the Home Guard. The deserters were too numerous, and guerrilla warfare had erupted in the battle to bend them to the will of the Confederacy. Thus, the marginally competent guards had been replaced with men unfit for war—and even less fit to be prison guards.

  In one fell swoop, all of the connections forged in Ewan’s time at Randolph Prison had been lost. The new guards didn’t understand the delicate balance of the prison economy. The import of food and greenbacks had gone dry because the first few Union men who’d tested the waters and tried to sell clothing or other goods to the guards had been beaten or worse for it.

  They’d driven off the men who’d made a pretty penny setting up shop outside the prison gates, using guards as the middlemen for selling their wares. They’d chopped down the trees that attracted birds and other food sources beyond the meager offerings of the prison, which had reached sickening lows since the flow of food from Lynchwood had ceased. Rations had been cut and what they received was often rancid and wormy, as the guards skimmed the better-quality food for themselves and their families. Sadly, the worsening conditions ensured Ewan’s newest venture would thrive.

  He bent the wire strip efficiently, the task simple after several days of practice, and fitted each end into pre-gouged holes in the sides of the wood block. He screwed down the spring, building the tension on the little machine, and thought of Cahill. The man hadn’t screamed all those months ago, tied down to a chair, the knee of his trousers soaked through with blood. Ewan had been sweaty, breathing heavily, and angry. Anger was nothing new to him—it was always there, really, just below the surface—and that was why his composure was so very important to him. Cahill had caused Ewan to lose that, and even though the Rebel was the one who now limped, he’d never broken. He’d been the victor in that makeshift interrogation room, and he’d known it.

  An excellent reminder of what happens when you allow your emotions to get the best of you.

  “Hey, Red, ya in there? There’re some fellows interested in the product.” Keeley stuck his fingers through the tent flap to announce his presence.

  Ewan double-checked that his Marlie-induced state had subsided, and then gathered the finished products. When he stuck his head outside the tent, he saw a group of pathetic-looking men huddled around it. Ewan tried not to feel pity for the men—pity served no purpose in this world. But then again, their well-being wasn’t entirely outside of his control. The disturbance created by the new guards had initiated a chain reaction: Lack of trade meant a stagnation in the prison economy, one that matched the desperately deprived one that held the rest of the nation in its grip. Ewan couldn’t do anything about the world beyond the stockade—not yet, at least—but reason dictated that his ingenuity be put to use for the greater good. He’d used the same thinking when gathering evidence from Northern traitors and captured Rebels. Moral laws, indeed.

  Keeley, looking gaunter and grubbier than usual, pulled up a wooden crate and made a grand gesture toward it.

  “Your audience awaits,” he said,
before grimacing through a cough and rubbing at his chest.

  Ewan took to the box, imagining himself a great orator for just a moment. But instead of a crowd of Grecian intellectuals, he was met with the piteous sight of sunken cheeks and hollows under eyes. Clothes that hadn’t been washed in weeks, and bodies that hadn’t had access to clean water, made Ewan’s eyes water. He didn’t smell like roses himself—the guards rarely allowed the clearing of the grate that protected the water pipe, meaning now instead of detritus passing through, it was piling up, breeding the disease the grate had been intended to stop.

  “Hello there, fine gentlemen of the Union forces,” Ewan began. He paused, feeling suddenly aware that he was the center of attention. He worked past the discomfort, as he would if it were a physical pain.

  “We ain’t all Yanks,” one man said irritably, and there were grumbles of approval from the crowd as it grew ever larger.

  “Correct,” Ewan said without taking offense. He corrected people as a matter of course; it was only right that he be open to receiving critique. “Hello there, fine gentlemen of the Union forces; deserters of the Confederate forces; Quakers and fallen Friends; Copperheads and Bushwhackers. Whatever offense you’ve committed against Jefferson, one thing is certain: If you’re here, you’re hungry. Food supplies have dwindled. Our new guards seem to enjoy using the five meters inside the dead line for target practice, so we can’t grab birds like we used to. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and we passed desperate two trading posts behind.”

  “Get on with it!”

  “Interrupting me is counterproductive to my doing just that,” Ewan said.

  “Red,” Keeley said, the nickname rolling off his tongue with a lilt of annoyance.

  “Apologies. All right. We might be short on food here at Randolph, but if there’s one thing we have plenty of, it’s vermin.” He pulled the project he’d been working on out of his pocket. “I have a solution to both of those problems.”