“What?” Daniel demanded sharply.
“I’m sorry, you didn’t know? Flora mentioned in a letter to me that she had heard both your sister-in-law and your wife were working at the hospital. You know that I’m not a man to take leave often, and that I don’t appreciate time taken by my officers. But as you were so close …”
Daniel gritted his teeth. He hadn’t known that Callie was in Richmond.
Callie didn’t write.
But he hadn’t heard from Kiernan, either.
“As we are still so close,” Daniel said, “when you feel that I might be spared again, I would highly appreciate just a day or two to see to her welfare, and that of my sister-in-law and son.”
Beauty acquiesced.
Once again, Daniel bided his time.
Winter was fading; spring had come. With warmer weather, the fighting would intensify.
He wanted to see Callie. Soon.
Callie’s first days in the hospital seemed to bring her from one horror to the next.
She had seen men die before. She had seen them die all over her yard. She had nursed Daniel when he was wounded, and she had feared for her life.
None of it had prepared her for the hospital.
There were not enough drugs, and now there was barely enough whiskey to be prescribed for the patients.
Amputations were the order of the day. By the end of her first week, Callie couldn’t count the number of operations in which she had assisted. At first, she had nearly passed out. Kiernan had warned her to pinch herself, and thus save herself such an embarrassment.
There was much more to helping in the hospital than the horror of seeing whole men lose their limbs. Some soldiers tried to bring their whole families in to sleep, and she had to part clinging wives from their soldier husbands and insist that the hospital was for the sick. She read until she was hoarse, and she wrote endless letters.
She wrote letters for men who died before they finished dictating them.
She and Kiernan and Janey had rented a small row house right by the hospital for themselves and the boys, and while Kiernan and Callie put in their endless hours with the wounded, Janey minded the boys and did what she could to put food on their own table.
Callie couldn’t have said that she was happy. To live in the midst of such pain and misery could not make one happy.
But she felt useful.
She was also, upon occasion, able to visit Varina Davis. One evening she and Kiernan both stripped off their worn work gowns and attended one of Varina’s receptions. Kiernan tried to tell Callie that she was really not very welcome because of her marriage to Jesse, and Callie commented that it was very strange that she—the one who was the Yank—seemed to fare better than a full-blooded Confederate like Kiernan.
“I’m afraid it’s a man’s world,” Kiernan said. “And we are judged by our men.” She grinned. “You, at least, are thereby a national hero.”
“I don’t think that Daniel would agree.”
“But you must take advantage of his situation, right?”
It was impossible not to come to love Kiernan dearly, and Callie was very grateful for her. No matter what other women might be saying about Kiernan, Varina was, as always, the ultimate hostess.
Varina was expecting another baby that spring, and despite the lines drawn into her beautiful face by the tensions of her position, she seemed to hold a special beauty.
“You manage to be happy, despite it all,” Callie told her.
“And you seem to serve us well, even if your heart lies elsewhere!” Varina told her. She smiled a beautiful smile, even if her slender face seemed drawn. In her way, Varina was happy. She loved her husband, and she loved her children. She was willing to ride out any storm with him, to rise to the heights, to endure any hardship.
Callie was suddenly very envious. She could suddenly see clearly what she wanted more than anything in the world.
A love so simple, and a love so complex.
It might well be something she could never have. She and Daniel might never come to an understanding. He didn’t trust her; there was the possibility that he never would.
It was a division every bit as deep as the Mason-Dixon line.
Kiernan had told her that Daniel did love her. Maybe in time.
She smiled ruefully and told Varina, “I’m glad to be at the hospital. Well, I think I am. It’s terrible to watch the men suffer. Sometimes, it’s pure agony to write their letters, and help them say good-bye, telling their mothers or wives or children that they love them so. But when they’re in the hospital, it doesn’t seem that they are Yankees or Rebels anymore, it just seems they are men, God-fearing and all alike.”
“And once we were,” Varina murmured. She flashed Callie a smile. “I have a wayward child slipping down the stairway once again. Excuse me!”
Callie laughed. Through the open foyer doors she could see a dark-haired little boy with a brilliant smile to defy any mention of warfare, inching down the elegant stairway.
Again, she felt a little tug of envy for Varina Davis.
The world, it seemed, was crumbling down around her. But she had her “dear old Banny,” and her beautiful children.
Callie and Kiernan enjoyed the evening, but retired early.
Richmond was crawling with refugees. Even in the late evening, the streets were filled with people. Many of them were living on the streets, Callie had heard. They had been burned out of their homes, or were in the way of a northern army determinedly destroying any source of supply it could.
The Yankees were very close. And still, the southern spirit was a determined one.
The Yankees might come close, but they wouldn’t take Richmond.
Working in the hospital again, Callie discovered that more and more of the injured men were coming in from skirmishes extremely close to the capital. She was startled to discover that she was hanging on every word that the soldiers told her.
She began to hear about her husband. He was close with his flamboyant commander, that dashing cavalier Stuart, and they were keeping close tabs on Union General Custer’s troops now.
Callie felt her heart beating quickly as she cooled fevered foreheads and tried to make men more comfortable. She realized that she was longing to see Daniel again. But as Kiernan had said, she could not surrender. But she could sue for a negotiated peace.
But war gave no quarter to the wants and desires of the contestants locked within it.
Daniel remained on the battlefield, and Callie remained in Richmond, praying that he would come for a day, an hour.
Deeper tragedy struck.
On April 30, the precocious little boy with the beautiful smile, Varina’s Joey, fell from the porch of the Confederate White House.
A servant brought news of the awful event to Callie at the hospital. An old, gaunt black man, tears running down his face, told Callie the tale.
“Miz Varina, she had just left the children playing in her room, and she done bring some tea or some-such into the president. Next thing we all know, that boy—her very pride and joy—why he done crawl up on a bannister and then … then he was on the ground and there was all manner of screaming. Miz Varina, why, she done reach her child mighty quick, and he died in his mother’s arms. She was overcome. Just overcome. But the army, ma’am, it had dispatches coming in for the president all the time, even as he was kneeling there, bowed over his son in grief. He done told them at last that he had to have one day with his child. And there she is, Miz Varina, expecting another babe, weeping over this one, and trying to hold up her husband all the while. She’s strong, Miz Cameron, but Lawd almighty, how strong can a woman be? She sets a store by you, ma’am, and I thought that maybe …”
“I’ll come right away,” Callie promised him.
And she did.
It seemed that there was so little that she could do. The Davises were closeted with their grief.
Callie tried to help with the weeping babes who were so lost and confuse
d at their brother’s death, and she tried to greet the mourners who came to the door. She sat numbly as she saw the small boy dressed out for his burial, and she could think of no words to say when Varina was before her.
There were no words to atone for the loss of a child. Callie thought of how recently she had seen little Joey with his beautiful smile.
And after all the death she had witnessed time and time again, she turned away and wept.
The thunder of cannon fire could be heard as the little boy was laid to rest.
Within days, the Union and Confederate forces were engaged in fierce fighting in the Wilderness. Callie had never seen anything more terrible, for the forests caught on fire, and men brought into the hospital were sometimes little more than charred corpses. And no one knew if their uniforms had been blue or gray.
Then came the battle of Yellow Tavern.
A little less than two weeks after the death of little Joe Davis, the thunder of cannon fire could be heard again as Callie stood in Hollywood Cemetery, eyes glazed as she watched another burial.
James Ewell Brown Stuart, the flamboyant, defiant, passionate, dashing cavalier, was dead.
He had been mortally wounded in battle with General Custer’s forces. An ambulance had been found to bring him back to Richmond.
Jeff Davis had come to his side; some old friends and comrades had come to do the same.
They had sung “Rock of Ages,” his favorite hymn. He had asked the doctor if he might survive the night, just long enough for his wife to arrive.
But Flora Stuart had arrived to a house of silence, and no one had needed to tell her that her husband was dead.
The Yankees were so close that there was no local militia to form an honor guard—the city’s forces were all out fighting for the city’s defense.
Callie attended the church service, her heart heavy. She’d never met Stuart—she had known that he had meant a great deal to Daniel. Stuart had known he was dying; he had ordered his officers not to follow him to his deathbed, but to see to their duty.
So Daniel must be seeing to his duty, collecting bullets. Like Stuart. Like Stonewall Jackson. Like so many others.
Callie didn’t hear the service at the cemetery. She heard the burst of shells, a not too distant sound. She saw the slopes and curves and sections of the cemetery, and she gazed at the place where Jeb’s little daughter—Flora, for her mother—had been reinterred just a year ago. He had accepted his death, they said, because he whispered that he would be with his Flora again.
Callie looked at the sky, and she thought that soon it would rain. She couldn’t pray for the man being buried.
She could only fervently pray for Daniel. He would never falter if asked to lead a charge. All these years, he had been in the thick of things. The fighting was growing more and more fierce daily.
Dear God, don’t let him die.
She could hear Flora Stuart, sobbing softly.
He wouldn’t die, she told herself. Not now, not today. Little Joe had died, and Jeb was dead, and no matter what his general had ordered, Daniel had thought the world of Jeb Stuart. He would leave the front lines; he would come home to be here now. She would close her eyes, and open them, and Daniel would be there, across the crowd.
She closed her eyes, her lips moving in prayer.
She opened her eyes.
But Daniel was not there. He was not coming. He was still in the battlefield, where he had been ordered to stay.
The minister finished the service.
The sky suddenly seemed to burst open, and it began to rain.
4
When Johnny comes Marching Home Again
———— Twenty-six ————
June 7, 1864
Cold Harbor, Virginia
Since the third of June, Daniel was certain that he had done nothing but listen to the moans and cries of the wounded.
They were mostly Yanks out there now, but since battle had been engaged here, the Union man in charge, General U. S. Grant, had refused to seek any parley to remove his dead and wounded from the field.
Perhaps it was because the commanding general who asked first to bring his wounded from the field was customarily the general admitting to defeat.
Grant had been defeated here, whether he wanted to admit it or not. In these days of almost constant battle, from the Wilderness to Yellow Tavern to Spotsylvania, and now here, at last, to Cold Harbor, Grant had been defeated. Richmond, once again, had been saved.
Grant’s forces were still in their trenches and so were Lee’s. The southerners watched carefully, wondering just what Grant would do next.
Riding in back of the curiously quiet lines, Daniel wondered why he felt no exuberance.
Perhaps there was none left to feel.
Beauty was dead, dead and buried. Daniel still felt numb when he thought of it. Stonewall a year ago, Beauty now, and so many others in between.
Now they had beaten back even Grant, but Grant didn’t retreat. His men lay on the field, screaming and dying, but he didn’t admit defeat.
The Confederates had brought in a number of the Union wounded with their own, risking forays out into the field of battle. To listen to the men scream was torture; it was no hardship to bring them in, be they Yanks or rebels.
Everyone seemed to be waiting.
Daniel reined in. He still smelled like soot and ashes, he thought, and that from the Wilderness.
Never had he seen anything like it, or imagined anything like it. Smoke and fog so thick that Union troops fired on Union troops and southern troops did the same. Then the forest burst into flames, and then again, the horrible screams of men and horses trapped in fallen foliage or wounded too severely to try to escape the lapping flames of the fire.
So much bloodshed in so very few days.
The problem was that they could lick the Yankees. They had licked them time and time again. But more of them came. No matter how many they battled and how many they killed, there were always more.
They were outnumbered and outgunned.
“Colonel Cameron, sir!”
A young soldier on horseback came riding up to him. “We’ve stopped a conveyance on the road, sir. There’s two ladies, two children, and a black woman in it.”
“Yes?”
“Well, the women claim to be kin of yours. Your wife and your sister-in-law.”
His heart suddenly slammed against his chest. Callie, here?
He was instantly torn in two. He had wanted to see her so damned badly for so very long!
They couldn’t possibly be such fools, riding around the countryside with battle waging like this!
“Where is this conveyance, soldier?” Daniel asked. He called to one of his lieutenants to take charge of the forces directly beneath him, and he rode swiftly behind the soldier back to the main road. The Yankees were well to the other side of it, but the fighting here had been so fierce and so vicious that he felt ill thinking of Callie and Kiernan stumbling upon it.
With the children!
It couldn’t be the two of them. Surely, Kiernan would not be so foolish. But it was them.
He reined in his horse and leapt down from it at the road, staring at the wagon.
Callie and Kiernan were both in the front, waiting. Daniel was startled at their appearances, for though nothing could take away the extent of their beauty, they were far different from the women he had last seen at Cameron Hall. Both were in black, the color of mourning. In honor of Beauty, or perhaps in honor of little Joey Davis. They were minus their hoops, their gowns were simple, and they were both very thin.
“Jesu!” Daniel breathed. His eyes fell upon his wife, and only his wife. His stomach and heart seemed to catapult together. His fingers were shaking.
No black costuming could take away the radiance of her color. Silver-gray eyes fell on his, and warmth surged through him. Dear God. It had been so long since he had seen her.
Pretend that you love me!
He had pre
tended through all these awful months of warfare. Dreamed of her through the nights when he had managed to sleep through the screams of the dying.
And she was indeed before him now,
All he could think of was the dangerous mission they had set upon, and how she dared risk herself so!
There were Yanks everywhere!
She was a Yank!
It wasn’t so much that she might have run into Rebels or Yankees, it was the fact they might have stumbled upon deserters, as they had once before, in nearly this same place, and at nearly this same time, years before.
Before he had met Callie, before he had loved her.
Temper! he warned himself. For those silver eyes were on him, brilliant, beautiful. He wanted to crush her into his arms, and hold her so tightly.
But he didn’t embrace her; he was shaking top hard to do so. Long strides brought him to the wagon.
“What in God’s name do you two think that you’re doing?” he thundered.
He reached for Callie, grabbing her around the waist, and bringing her down against him. The warmth of her body seemed to explode against him. Her toes touched the ground, and he met her angry eyes.
“We’re trying to get home,” she informed him.
She had called Cameron Hall her home.
“What?” he said incredulously. He looked from Callie to Kiernan, and back again. “Haven’t you heard? The fighting has been constant here!”
Callie was still against him. She’d made no attempt to fight his hold. He looked down into her eyes again. She smiled suddenly.
Smiled, and the anger faded from her eyes. The silver light was in them once again. Without conscious thought he touched her face, his thumb tracing over her cheek. She really had the face of an angel. She was hatless, and her hair streamed down her back in all its glory, the deepest, richest fire imaginable. I love you, he thought. I have loved you for years now.
“You could have been killed, you little fools!” he murmured.
“Daniel, Kiernan and I must get home. Christa is going to be married, remember? And …”