Charlotte’s needles clicked to the rhythm of her knitting. No one had questioned her explanation that she was making socks for her older brother, even though the Union officers knew he was a Confederate soldier. Except for Ben Chandler, none of them appeared to notice what she did with her days. Emboldened by the thought – and by Colonel Williams’ obvious distraction - she decided to push further.
“Perhaps I should see these orders,” Charlotte ventured. She followed with a self-deprecating shrug. “Not that I could make any sense of them, but the two of us could compare the handwriting with that on the letter General Branard gave me yesterday. It was very thoughtful, very eloquent – a letter of condolence.”
As she recalled how the words had touched her heart, Charlotte’s eyes filmed with moisture. She fought back her tears. No matter how noble her goal, she could not bear using her grief as a tool to gain it.
Colonel Williams hesitated, and Charlotte’s heart raced with the fear that she had been too obvious. At any moment, he would surely leap to his feet to accuse her.
Instead, he nodded. “We’ll look at them side by side. But afterwards, I may need to borrow your letter for a short while.”
“All right, though I would like it returned.” Relieved, she slowed her knitting’s frantic pace. “You still haven’t told me why you believe Captain Chandler would deliberately conceal a serious problem.”
From around the back corner of the house, she heard Alexander’s laughter and the barking of the puppy. The sounds put Charlotte at ease. Though she suspected such a huge animal would offer no end of inconvenience, she could not help being grateful for its presence during these past few difficult days.
“I’m not certain what his scheme is, only that he has one. Men like Ben Chandler don’t do anything unless it fits into their plans,” Gideon said.
“Ben? That doesn’t sound at all like him to me.” The thought slipped out before Charlotte realized she was speaking.
Gideon looked at her strangely. “Ben?”
Charlotte hadn’t realized she’d called Ben by his first name, but the mistake seemed natural. Lately, she’d given up on the notion of charming him out of his senses and simply talked to him about safe subjects: Alexander and his new dog, the childhood journeys she’d made aboard her father’s riverboats, Ben’s cattle ranch in eastern Texas. She might just as well chat with him about such matters, she decided, for he’d convinced her that he had the discipline – and the good sense - to resist her attempts to beguile him until the world’s end. Or perhaps that was merely an excuse she gave herself so she might know the peace of a conversation without manipulation as its goal. With Ben Chandler, at least, she could be honest – or as near to it as she dared come.
Charlotte smiled at Gideon. “Yes, I did say Ben. He’s asked me to call him that, just as you’ve asked me to use your given name.”
“Then I see that he’s made progress with this ploy of his.”
“What ploy is that?” Charlotte asked. Was Gideon growing jealous, too?
Gideon gestured toward the back yard, where Honeybee was once more barking. “The young elephant, of course. You can’t really think a flint-hearted soldier like Ben Chandler is any great lover of children.”
“No?” Charlotte thought back to Sunday afternoon, when she’d watched Ben playing with the boy and the dog. When Honeybee had bowled him over in her enthusiasm, the joy that Charlotte heard in Ben’s laughter had sounded so true and uncomplicated that she’d felt something in her humming in response like a well-struck tuning fork.
Though the changes in Ben Chandler had surprised her, she’d caught him in the past few days hesitating and looking almost sheepish, as if he surprised himself as well. Charlotte suppressed another smile at the thought, for Gideon’s gaze had grown intent.
“Chandler thinks you’re hiding something,” Gideon told her. “I’ve heard him say as much. It’s obvious he’s only trying to convince you to drop your guard with this pretense of concern about your brother.”
Charlotte felt a coldness grip her stomach. Both Jonathan Snyder and Delaney McMahon, who had returned safely late on Saturday, had resented Ben’s gift. But both had feared the captain meant to win her heart; Gideon’s suggestion meshed with all the suspicions Ben had so bluntly voiced before. Could the truce she’d thought they had tacitly agreed upon be only one-sided?
“So you share his opinion about me?” she asked carefully.
“Lord, no, Charlotte. If I didn’t trust you, why do you think I’ve come talk to you so often, and about such serious matters?”
She averted her eyes in the false display of shyness that she had previously found effective. “I’ve been wondering that myself. I’d thought . . . I’d hoped perhaps that you . . .”
He lifted her chin and stared into her eyes. “Then you hoped correctly. I have feelings for you, Charlotte, feelings I can no longer keep to myself.”
Her lips parted slightly, and she hoped it made her look breathless with anticipation instead of as idiotic as she felt. Heaven knew she’d had experience enough of late in leading Yankees officers along this treacherous path. Except for Ben, a tiny voice reminded her.
As Gideon’s proposal floated past her like chaff upon the wind, Charlotte heard little more than the echo of her heart’s words speaking.
Except for Ben, the voice repeated.
That was when she realized that it sounded disappointed.
Thursday, June 26, 1862
Ben met Charlotte at the bottom of the staircase and reached out to take a basket of laundry she was carrying.
“I could have saved you the trouble of hauling this downstairs,” he said. He reached out to take her burden.
Instead of relinquishing the wicker basket, she tightened her grip. Given what he had learned, Ben should not have been surprised. Still, he felt a flush of disappointment. He had almost convinced himself that Alexander was her only secret. The connection he had felt with her these past few days had seemed so genuine, he still found himself wondering how he could have misread her.
And you thought you were so much smarter than the others. Ben could barely stand the thought that he’d been fool enough to ignore his own horse sense. If a man heard rattling in the tall grass, he damned sure didn’t linger to admire the reptile’s diamond pattern or compliment its hiss.
“No, thank you,” Charlotte said, her sparkling green eyes anything but snakelike. “I’ll just take this to meet Mrs. Perkins. She’ll be at the back door any minute.”
Did she sound nervous? Ben could not be sure. Maybe subterfuge came easily to her, or perhaps she was only well practiced at disguising what she felt.
“Please step into the parlor,” Ben invited with a gesture. “I need to speak with you.”
As she searched his face, her own expression sharpened.
“Mrs. Perkins hates waiting,” she said. “I’ll only be a minute.”
He had the impression the words had been rehearsed, but it was hard to know for certain. Everything he observed in her was tainted by a combination of suspicion and desire.
“Mrs. Perkins isn’t coming anymore.” He started toward his desk. When he turned his head to see if she was following, he saw her bend to set the basket on the floor beside a sculpted goddess. It regarded him coldly with its blank, unseeing eyes.
In contrast, Ben felt unwelcome heat blaze through him at the sight of Charlotte’s supple movements. He wished there were something he could do to dampen his body’s response to her, but the hunger remained a constant, as it had from the first time he had seen her.
Ignore it, then, he told himself. Listen to the warning from the tall grass, and act accordingly. He loosened his top button and cursed the dark wool uniform. Whoever had designed it had surely never sweated through a Southern summer.
Charlotte joined him in the parlor. A day ago, he would have sat beside her, but today he took the chair behind the battered desk, the one he used for his work. He wanted to make it clear from the beginning that this
was no social occasion.
She sat across from him, her face nearly as pale as the statuary in the entry. “What’s happened to Mrs. Perkins? Please don’t tell me that she’s dead.”
Charlotte’s words convinced Ben that her father’s death still weighed heavily upon her. She’d confided earlier that she was particularly concerned about the details of his burial. But she’d received no further information, so at least for the time being, she was denied the finality of a funeral ceremony. That fact, however, might have been a blessing, for her family’s friends had made it clear that they considered Charlotte a traitor to the cause. In the course of his duties, Ben had intercepted several notes addressed to “Miss Randolph” from “loyal daughters of the Confederacy” with the intention of assuring himself that no sensitive information was being exchanged. The content had been so cruel that instead of passing them on to Charlotte, he’d torn them into bits.
Ben clamped down on his misplaced sympathy. He needed to be strong and focused if he meant to put a stop to Charlotte’s mischief. If it was only mischief and not something deadlier. Had the men he’d assigned followed his direction, he would already know for certain. But since they’d failed in that, he must rely on his own instincts.
“Not dead,” he told her, “but detained.”
He watched carefully for her reaction.
“Detained? By whom?” Charlotte looked alarmed but not frightened.
“By federal soldiers, on my orders.”
“What would you want with her? She’s only an old woman who takes in laundry.”
“Is she?” Ben asked, leaning forward.
Charlotte did not rise to the bait. “What else? Do you imagine she’s a cannon -- or a Confederate garrison in disguise?”
“She was found with an incriminating document.” He let the statement hang, hoping that Charlotte would offer what his soldiers had not – proof that the message had come from or was meant for her. Unfortunately, the document had been in some sort of code that he’d been so far unable to decipher. Not only that, it had been ripped in two; the soldiers felt they’d interrupted the old laundress in the act of devouring the evidence.
If the soldiers had obeyed Ben’s orders to the letter, they would have detained Mrs. Perkins on her way to or from the Randolph mansion. Instead, they’d gone to her home and found the message there. Since the Perkins woman could neither read nor write, Ben knew she could never have produced the neatly printed, if still meaningless, series of letters and numerals written on the tiny squares of paper found in a pouch secreted beneath the false bottom of a wicker basket. The basket, which had been taken into evidence, looked remarkably similar to the one that Charlotte had just carried downstairs.
“Documents? What type of documents?” Charlotte was either confused or feigning it expertly, but he still detected no sign of fear.
“You tell me, Miss Randolph.” He stared at her, his gaze unblinking.
Her face, so pale but a moment before, reddened, and she leapt to her feet. “I thought we’d gotten past this, Ben. I’d imagined – wrongly, I can see – that you and I were becoming – becoming -”
She broke off, shaking her head hard enough that a pin flew and a thick, gold lock rolled free from her chignon. “Colonel Williams was right about you! He said you were only being kind to Alexander as a way to get close enough to prove I was some sort of – of I don’t know what you’ve imagined. But do you know what hurts worst of all, Ben Chandler? That I defended you; that I told him I was certain you weren’t that kind of man. I said you would – would never use Alexander, would never hurt him in that way.”
She was trying to manipulate his feelings; that was all. Ben knew it, but it didn’t stop regret from twisting in his stomach. Neither did it stop him from trying to defend himself.
“You were right,” he said. “I’d never do that.”
But he could not help wondering if he had. After all, hadn’t that been his plan at one time, to use the child as a key to unlock the secrets of the woman?
“You’re not much of a liar,” she accused.
“Maybe you ought to give me lessons then.”
Her eyes widened in outrage, but he continued talking before she could respond.
“It’s not only the message we found with Mrs. Perkins. There have been other problems, too. Documents have turned up missing from the library where General Branard has been working. We’d believed he had the only key.”
“Now you’re calling me a thief, too? I swear to you, if there’s another key, I don’t have it. And I don’t know a thing about any missing papers. Are you certain that the general didn’t just misplace them?”
He had, in fact, suspected the same thing, but the tone of her question made him wonder if she’d seen something in Hank Branard’s behavior that he’d missed. Or if someone had been repeating gossip to her. The last idea was most dangerous, for it implied that she’d gained a firm foothold in the confidence of some officer or other. What else had she been told?
“McMahon and I have already searched most of the house. If the papers are still here, they’re not on the lower floors.”
She stepped around the desk, so close that he caught the fresh, light scent of her, so close that instinctively, he pushed back his chair.
“Then by all means, Captain Chandler, come with me to check the nursery, too.” Her voice had frosted over with artificial sweetness. She surprised him even further by grasping his hand and tugging on it until he, too, stood.
Too near, he thought as he gazed into her face, felt the way it pulled him like a moon drawing the tide. When she tried to release his hand, he held on, caressing with his thumb. In that moment, he wanted to tell her he was sure he’d been mistaken, that it would not be necessary to search the third floor, too, that the incident with Mrs. Perkins proved nothing. Overheated as Ben had felt before, her body’s warmth compelled him, filling him with painfully arousing images of bodies twining within flame.
Maybe it was his mind’s way of warning him that if he didn’t regain control now, he would be damned forever, that he might be the one fooled into sharing dangerous secrets with this woman. He heard Mrs. Martin’s warnings about Charlotte’s father as if the old shrew were standing behind him, hissing in his ear.
He believes in mind as weapon, in business as well as warfare. And he has always made his children’s education his top priority.
What might such a man have taught his daughter? Could he have fashioned a weapon of her youth and beauty as well as her brain?
Ben dropped Charlotte’s hand, reminding himself of how foolish he had thought the two lieutenants and Colonel Williams, even General Branard for the way they treated her like a princess from a fairytale. Was he any smarter?
“Good,” he told her, though his voice had gone hoarse. “You can come upstairs with me, and we’ll put all this to rest.”
o0o
Charlotte felt her heart’s pounding and heard blood rushing in her ears. The way he spoke made her wonder what he meant to do with her up in the nursery.
Her nails dug into her palms, and pain refocused her. This was Ben Chandler she was with, and though he suspected her, she could not reconcile the thought of him hurting her with the memory of the man who had laughed and romped with Alexander and the puppy.
The puppy, she was certain, had not been a trick meant to disarm her. Even now, after he’d accused her, Charlotte’s every instinct shouted that the friendship he had offered and his affection for the boy were as genuine as his commitment to his duty. She had argued otherwise in an attempt to throw him off her scent, just as she’d moved close to him to exploit his obvious attraction to her.
She hadn’t counted on her own. Yet it had been there, lying dormant until they had stood so close and she’d stared up into those cool gray eyes. A chill rippled along her backbone at the thought of his thumb stroking her hand. She had to concentrate on the ugliest of memories to remind herself of the dangers of this course.
As she walked upstairs with Ben, Charlotte realized she had more to worry over than desire. Though she knew nothing of General Branard’s missing papers, she was certain that the message taken from Mrs. Perkins had been one of hers. She had not only coded the information but, of late, she’d torn the messages down the middle, then sent half with Mrs. Perkins and the other half with Ida April. Nothing in any of the notes, neither signature nor information, should implicate Charlotte, but she could not put aside the thought that something else might. Something she’d been too distracted to remember.
At least she needn’t worry about the contents of the nursery. She’d been careful to leave no trace of any evidence . . . except, she remembered as her heart sank, her father’s copy of The Iliad in the original Greek. Could Ben use that clue to deduce the origin of the code?
As the two of them neared the staircase leading to the second floor, Charlotte hesitated. “Shouldn’t you get one of the others to come with us?”
“General Branard’s busy,” Ben explained. “I’m certain I could find one of the lieutenants, but I thought you might prefer to keep this private for the moment.”
“So when you’re wrong, you won’t look like such a fool,” she guessed.
He denied it with a shake of his head. “I’ve been a fool before, and I’ll be one again. If I couldn’t live with that possibility, I couldn’t do my job. If I’m wrong, I’ll regret it. I’d regret it more if I needlessly embarrassed you.”
She lifted her skirt enough that she would not tread upon it as she climbed. “You’ll regret it, all right.” Her voice echoed on the stairs, along with their footsteps. “First of all, because you are wrong, but mostly, because you’ve proven that you’ll never really trust me.”
As they reached the upper hall, Ida April started past them, a feather duster in her hand.
“Stay right here, girl,” Charlotte told her, once more taking on a haughty tone. “I thought I heard a mouse inside the nursery, and the captain was kind enough to offer to have a look for it. Wait here, and we’ll leave the door wide open.”
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