Read the book: «The Bride Fair»

Chapter One

Salisbury, N.C.

June, 1868

Who is this woman?

Colonel Max Woodard watched as the train conductor pointed her in his direction, then stood waiting for her to make her way across the crowded railway platform. The question stayed in his mind as she approached, and it became more and more obvious that she was not happy about having to seek him out. Four years of war and two subsequent years of occupation duty among the vanquished Southerners had made him more than adept at recognizing their barely veiled contempt. Her enmity didn’t surprise him in the least. The fact that she was about to speak to him in broad daylight and in clear view of any number of the townspeople did.

“You are Colonel Woodard?” she asked without hesitation. She was wearing black—most of the women in the South seemed to be in a kind of perpetual mourning. Or perhaps it was a matter of economics. Perhaps there was nothing but black cloth available to people who had little money to buy even the necessities.

The woman’s voice had a slight tremor in it. Not enough to disarm him, but enough to pique his curiosity as to the cause.

Anger? Fear?

More the former than the latter, he decided. He took the liberty of staring at her. She was too thin and small-breasted for his taste. And she was probably younger than she looked. He had found that to be the case with many of these Rebel women, and he knew from personal experience that near starvation did little to preserve the bloom of youth.

She had ventured out without her bonnet or her shawl, and she was slightly damp from the intermittent rain that had come in fits and starts since his arrival. But she seemed not to notice her missing garb or the weather. He was her focus.

“I am,” he said, meeting her gaze. She looked away, but not quite quickly enough to keep him from seeing the antipathy she worked so hard to keep hidden.

“If you would come with me, Colonel.”

“Why?” he asked, making no effort to do so.

“My father couldn’t meet the train. I have come in his place.”

“And who might your father be?”

“He owns the house where you will be billeted,” she said, clearly determined not to give any more information than she could help.

“I see. And the numerous soldiers who are supposedly under my command. Where would they all be, I wonder?”

Ordinarily, he never objected to spending time in a pleasant and accommodating woman’s company—but this one was neither. And there were certain military protocols to be adhered to. He was the new commanding officer in an occupied town, and no one from the garrison had bothered to meet his train. Indeed, but for a few of his fellow travelers, he didn’t see any of the military about at all.

The woman took a quiet breath. “Some of the soldiers are maintaining the military headquarters. The rest of them are fighting another fire.”

There was a slight emphasis on the word “another.”

“What is burning?” he asked, noticing for the first time a plume of smoke off to his left.

“The school.”

“The children are safe?”

“There were no children there,” she answered, moving away from him. “As you well know.”

“Now how would I know that?” he said reasonably, and he still didn’t follow after her. “I only just arrived.”

She stopped and looked at him. “The United States Congress has seen to it that we here are no longer allowed the luxury of public education—but a fire has somehow started in the school building. It is in real danger of spreading. Every able man is required to put it out, lest the whole town go up in flames.”

He considered it a just fate for this particular town, but he didn’t say so. He glanced skyward. “Perhaps it will rain again,” he said instead.

It was clear from the expression on her face that she had no intention of discussing the weather.

“And perhaps the wind will change in time to spare your army’s storehouses.”

Touché, he thought, and he very nearly smiled.

“Do you usually run errands for the military?” he asked to keep her off balance, and she stiffened slightly.

“My father was asked—ordered—by Major Hunt to retrieve you from the station and take you wherever you want to go. But he isn’t well enough to do so. I came in his stead. I obey my father’s wishes.”

“I see,” he said again. And he was beginning to. She was going to be a dutiful daughter—if it killed her.

“I’ve brought you a horse,” she said, indicating a nearby animal with a military saddle and brand. “I will show you the way either to the house or to your headquarters—or to the fire,” she added as an afterthought. “As you wish.”

She walked on and stepped into a nearby buggy without assistance, then waited for him to untie the horse at the hitching post and mount.

“I am much in your debt, Miss…?”

“Don’t be,” she said. “It was none of it done freely.”

The remark was more matter-of-fact than hostile. He stared at her, impressed by her temerity in spite of himself.

“I prefer the buggy,” he said, for no other reason than to inconvenience her. Her remark warranted at least that—inconvenience.

He had already made arrangements for his belongings to be sent to military headquarters, and he climbed into the buggy beside her without waiting for her permission, sitting down on a goodly portion of her black skirts before she could get them out of the way. She sat there for a moment, struggling not to let him see how much his presence disturbed her. Then, she snapped the reins sharply and sent the horse on.

“No,” he said, when she would have turned the buggy toward the center of town. “That way.”

He pointed in the direction he wanted to go, toward the railroad cut and the outskirts of town. “I insist,” he added in case she believed their destination to be a matter for discussion.

She continued in the direction he indicated, her back ramrod-straight. He could just smell the rosewater scent of her clothes and hair. There were only a few people on the street. All of them turned and stared curiously as they rode past.

“I fear I may have compromised your reputation,” he said.

She made no reply, reining the horse in sharply when it elected to trot.

“Sir, there is nothing out this way,” she said, still struggling with the reins. “If you—”

“I know what is out here,” he interrupted. “And I want to see it.”

It was the third time in his life he had taken this route. The first time had been in the early summer of 1864. He had disembarked from the train—much as he had today—except that then he had arrived in a boxcar with fifty other men and under an armed guard.

He had made a return trip to the depot in late February of 1865. That excursion he didn’t remember at all. He’d been too ill to walk, and several kind souls, who were probably not much better off than he, had carried him. His good friend, John Howe, wasn’t among them, of course. He and John had been captured and sent to the Confederate prison here at the same time, but John had made his escape a month earlier—and with a Rebel girl in tow. John Howe had never been one to do things by halves when it came to women.

The horse finally settled down, and Max indicated where exactly he wanted the woman to take him. When she hesitated, he took the reins from her hands and effected the maneuver himself. She made no protest, regardless of how badly she wanted to, and she kept glancing at him as they rode along.

He had no difficulty locating the entrance to the prison—or what was left of it. He drove the buggy directly over the railroad bridge and into the weeds that now covered the grounds. The stockade walls had disappeared, but there was still more of the place left standing than he had expected. Until now, he had liked to think that General Stoneman, who had been a prisoner of war himself, would have celebrated his raid of the town by leveling the prison entirely and sowing the ground with salt.

But the outer walls of the huge three-story factory building used to confine as many prisoners as was inhumanly possible remained. He got some small satisfaction from seeing that the roof and windows were gone and that the hospital and the cookhouses were mostly rubble. Part of a wall stood here, a chimney there—and all of the giant oak trees inside the compound had been cut down. Only the stumps remained. He couldn’t tell where the stone wells had been, but he could still see the huge burrows in the red clay earth where men had been forced to live and where so many had died. It was only by the grace of God that he had not been one of them.

He abruptly handed the woman the reins and got out of the buggy, standing for a moment to get his bearings. Then he began to walk. The weeds were taking over, but he could still see the scattered evidence of the men who had been held here. Broken glass, the bowl of a clay pipe, a belt buckle, a brass button. He could smell the jimpson weed, but it was an altogether different stench he kept remembering.

He turned and forced himself to walk in the direction of what had once been a cornfield and a dead house, but that, too, was gone. He walked up and down, looking for the burial trenches. He wanted—needed—to stand there again—to be reminded why he’d stayed in the army after Lee’s surrender, in spite of his precarious health and his family’s protests.

It began to rain. A few random drops at first, and then a sudden downpour. He couldn’t see any landmarks. Nothing.

He kept walking back and forth in the area he thought the trenches would be, but there were no markers and no sunken earth.

Where are they?

He had friends buried here—good men who deserved better, men who would have never made their own escape and left him behind to die. He could see their faces again, hear their entreaties.

Please, Sir. You tell my mama how to find where I am—

But he couldn’t tell anyone’s mother where her son had been buried. The lay of the land was different somehow, overgrown and unrecognizable. There was nothing to guide him anymore, not even the foundation of the house where the bodies had been kept until somebody found time for another mass burial.

Where are they!

He felt unsteady on his feet suddenly. He could feel his heart begin a heavy pounding in his chest. It was hard to breathe, and he had to fight down an incredible urge to run. He took a deep breath and abruptly clasped his hands behind his back to keep them from shaking.

It would pass. He knew that. All he had to do was wait.

He glanced back at the woman. She sat in the buggy where he’d left her, pale and on the verge of becoming alarmed. He turned and walked unsteadily in her direction. He wasn’t about to fall on his face and give her any tales to tell about the new colonel.

This time she got her skirts out of the way when he climbed into the buggy. He sat beside her, still fighting down the memories of his captivity.

The rain drummed loudly on the buggy top.

“Do you want to go to military headquarters?” the woman asked after a time.

He looked at her sharply. He’d forgotten all about her.

“Yes,” he said finally.

She snapped the reins and sent the horse forward, turning the buggy in a wide circle and heading back in the direction they had come. He paid no attention to the route she took nor the surroundings until she abruptly stopped.

“It’s there—the upstairs,” she said, indicating a two-story building across from a hotel. Much of the street out front had been taken over by harried-looking civilians—old men, women and children, all of them clearly unmindful of the weather.

“Who are all these people?” he asked, and she kept avoiding his eyes.

“They are…they’ve come because they’re afraid,” she said.

“Of what?”

She didn’t answer him; she merely shook her head, as if it were too complicated for her to explain—or for him to understand.

He stared at her a long moment. “I expect I shall find out soon enough.”

She seemed about to say something, but didn’t. He gave her a curt nod and got down from the buggy, then began walking toward the building that housed the North Carolina Western Division military headquarters. He had to literally push his way inside. Women plucked at his sleeve as he tried to pass, some in supplication and others with an obviously more commercial intent. He ignored all of them to put the fear of God into the first soldier he saw—a hapless private who lolled against a wall happily conversing with a painted woman Max had earlier seen prowling the railroad station for customers.

In spite of Max’s ire, the private somehow found the presence of mind to lead him upstairs, where Max found an unexpectedly young sergeant major in a crowded and disordered room he assumed was an office.

“This way, Colonel Woodard, Sir,” the sergeant major said, as if his new commanding officer hadn’t just kicked a private soundly in the backside.

Max stood where he was, ignoring the fact that the sergeant major clearly expected him to take a seat in the chair behind the cluttered desk. He was not yet ready to delve into the stacks of papers his predecessor had left scattered about, nor was he ready to let go of his pique. He knew that Colonel Hatcher’s departure had been precipitous—the state of the man’s office confirmed that—but he had expected some attempt on Hatcher’s part to effect an orderly change of command.

Max walked to the window and looked down at the street below. The crowd was still there in spite of the rain—and growing, he thought. The woman who had brought him here was trying to drive the buggy through, and she was immediately surrounded by bystanders. But whatever questions were being put to her, she didn’t answer. She kept shaking her head and finally used the buggy whip to send the horse on, giving the crowd no choice but to let her pass.

“Your name, Sergeant Major?”

“Perkins, Sir.”

“What do all those people downstairs want?”

The sergeant major carefully held out a steaming cup of coffee instead of answering.

“I asked you a question, Sergeant Major,” Max said sharply.

“Yes, Sir. Petitioners come to talk to the new colonel, Sir.”

“How is it they knew I was arriving today? Do you ordinarily keep the civilian population privy to the army’s comings and goings?”

“Well, Sir. Sometimes telegraphing gets intercepted up the line—old tricks die hard for some of these so-called ex-Rebs. If the message ain’t got nothing to do with us, they’ll send it on through, like as not. If it does…well—maybe they will and maybe they won’t—either way, word gets out as to whatever information happens to be in them.” He shrugged. He also offered the tin cup of coffee again. This time Max took it.

“These ‘petitioners.’ What exactly do they want?”

“Some of them would be wanting the Oath of Allegiance, Sir. People what finally got wore down enough to come in and ask to take it—so’s they can get some food on the table.”

“It’s taken them three years to get here?”

“Well, I expect you know what the Rebs are like, Sir. Especially the women. They hold out as long as they can. I expect the war would have been over a good year or two before it was, if it weren’t for them.”

Max agreed wholeheartedly—in spite of a noted general’s assertion that he could buy any one of them with a pound of coffee—but he didn’t say so.

“All of them can’t have just decided to take the Oath,” he said. He took a sip of coffee, surprised to find it was quite good. He’d forgotten that some of the best coffee in the world came at the hands of sergeant majors. The skill seemed to come with the rank, regardless of the fact that this particular one didn’t appear old enough to have it.

“Well, Sir, one or two of them are here because they can’t take it,” Perkins said. “Them what carried the Reb flag a little too high during the late war—or them what own too much property and ain’t about to get rid of it. They couldn’t get nowhere with Colonel Hatcher, so they’d be here to ask you to pardon them, so they can swear allegiance and get all the benefits thereof. Then there’s the usual civilian complaints, Sir.”

Max decided to sit down, after all. He was tired. He looked healthy enough these days, but he still suffered from a noticeable lack of stamina. The long train ride from Washington and then the visit to the prison grounds had taken its toll. He took another sip of the coffee, then tried to find a place to put the tin cup among the stacks of papers on the desk. “What kinds of complaints? The men in blue accosting their daughters?”

“No, Sir—not that there ain’t plenty of accosting going on, mind you. There’s some real pretty girls in this town and don’t nothing stir up a soldier’s juices more than running into one of them and knowing she’d just as soon gut you as look at you. The boys take it right personal, Sir, if you know what I mean. And they get to feeling all honor-bound to do something about it. Ain’t nothing builds a man up like turning some little old girl’s head, especially if she thinks she hates the air you’re living on.

“But we don’t generally hear about any of that up here. If the accosting’s mutual, it’s either ship the girl off to her relatives or let ’em get married, which is likely what some of them downstairs have come about—permission for a marriage. Getting married to an army officer is pretty popular here of late—what with the latest batch of local females coming of age. They was about too young to get all worked up about the Cause during the war. All they know is there ain’t nobody left much to marry—except one of us. Sometimes you’d think it was a regular bride fair around here and a man could just go out and take his pick.

“But now, if the accosting ain’t mutual, sooner or later, the accoster gets hisself waylaid some dark night and he don’t come out of it looking as good as when he went in. If you get my meaning. And the boys, well, they do have their pride, Sir. They don’t want to say they got the bejesus kicked out of them by some unarmed Reb daddy or big brother. The tales I’ve heard, Sir, about low-hanging tree limbs and stumbling in the dark on the way to the sinks. It’s enough to make you think this here town is the most perilous place in the world for a man to go heeding the call of nature after the sun goes down—begging your pardon, Sir.

“No, Sir, there ain’t many complaints about ‘accosting’ coming our way. I’d say some of them people downstairs are wanting to get paid for the goods the army commandeers and for billeting officers in the private residences. It was Colonel Hatcher’s policy not to get in a hurry about that. He wasn’t exactly what you would call accommodating to the townsfolk.”

Max looked at him, recognizing a prelude when he heard one. “How far behind are we on paying them?”

“Well, Sir, I’d say about as many months as the colonel was here—but that ain’t the main thing. The main thing is all these here fires, Sir. Six of them, so far. Folks pretty much hold us—that is, Colonel Hatcher—responsible for all the incendiary activity that’s been going on.”

“Why?”

“Well, he got to saying how the townsfolk didn’t suffer enough for having the prison here during the war and whatever bad things happened to them was just what they deserved. It didn’t take long for some to take that as an invitation to run wild with a torch.”

“Anybody hurt?”

“Not yet, Sir, but there’s been some close calls. One of the men barely got a little child out of a house when the fire spread the other night. I guess it’s mostly that what’s got folks gathering out front like they are. They’re wanting you to do something about it.”

Max drew a quiet breath. If he had dared hoped for some quietude here, it didn’t appear likely that he was going to find it. He could feel the sergeant major waiting for him to do his job and take command of the situation. He moved a pile of papers instead and uncovered a battered red-velvet box. It contained a pair of garnet-and-pearl earrings of significant quality and value.

“What’s this?”

“Those, Sir? I’m thinking Colonel Hatcher meant those for his…ah…”

“His what?”

“Well, his woman, Sir.”

“What woman? His wife?”

“Whore, Sir.”

“His—”

Max abruptly closed the box and tossed it on the desktop. He was no prude, but it was one thing for an officer to have his entertainments—and something else again to have his staff so privy to them. And Colonel Hatcher’s departure must have been even more precipitous than he’d thought.

“Sir, I reckon they might be a problem, too,” the sergeant major said after a moment.

“For whom?” Max asked pointedly, and he had to wait for the sergeant major to make up his mind about how much he wanted to tell his new commanding officer.

“For you, I reckon, Sir. This here whor—I mean, woman—I seen her downstairs just now, and I reckon she’ll be wanting them.”

“Then give them to her.”

“Well, they ain’t exactly hers, Sir, even if the colonel did promise them to her. Colonel Hatcher, he called them contraband, because of who they really belong to—but I’m thinking it’s too late in the day for them to be that.”

Max stared at the man, trying to follow his convoluted tale.

“‘Who they really belong to,’” Max repeated. “Yes, Sir. Miss Maria Rose Markham. Colonel Hatcher billeted hisself in her daddy’s house. Them earbobs belong to her and they went missing. See, the colonel had a bit of interest in the lady, but she wouldn’t have it—she had two brothers and a fiancé killed at Gettysburg—her brothers gave her them earbobs before they went off to war—one of them weren’t but fifteen. But even if she hadn’t lost her brothers and her beau like that, she just weren’t the kind to be impressed with the—”

Perkins abruptly stopped, and clearly had no intention of continuing.

“Speak freely, man,” Max said, but Perkins still had to think about it. It was not a sergeant’s prerogative to assess a colonel’s character, even when asked.

“Well, Sir,” he said finally, “Colonel Hatcher, he was fond of telling people that his family came from these parts—he said he had this here relative what was a big Indian fighter and military advisor a hundred years ago. Only these people here keep records of everything, and somebody found a mention of a Hatcher in the court accounts—how he was put in stocks all the time for drunken and lewd behavior—insulting decent women and the like. Didn’t take word long to get around.”

“No, I don’t expect it did.”

“People were kind of laughing behind their hands about it, and that got Colonel Hatcher all the more determined about Miss Markham. Some thinks the earbobs was a kind of punishment for her. That it might have amused the colonel to take something what was dear to her and give it to a whore. Or maybe he thought he could make her trade for them. Sir,” the sergeant major added as an afterthought.

Max sat there. He had enough trouble with the apparently ongoing arson in this town. He had no inclination whatsoever to deal with the epic drama his sergeant major had just revealed.

“Dare I hope arrangements have been made regarding my quarters?” he asked after a moment.

“Ah—yes, Sir. The major was thinking to put you in the same house as was Colonel Hatcher. It could get kind of crowded over there, though, Sir, if Miss Markham happened to move a bunch of kinfolk in now that Colonel Hatcher is gone. It might be you’d be wanting a hotel, Sir,” he added hopefully. “Mansion House or Howerton’s right across the street—”

Max looked at the sergeant major. So. Miss Markham—apparently the woman who had met him at the station—had a champion in this sergeant major, one who wanted the new colonel to know that his behavior regarding her would be duly noted.

But Perkins could rest easy. Max had no designs on Miss Markham’s virtue. He did, however, wish to continue to inconvenience her. He wasn’t all that different from the men under his command. He had just been on the receiving end of a Rebel woman’s disdain, and, like his men, he took it personally.

“No,” Max said. “The Markham house will suit me. If there are additions to the household and I find it too noisy, I have the authority to thin them out. My belongings will be sent here from the station. Have them moved to the house—and make sure the Markham pantry is full and there is somebody to cook and to orderly. And find me a decent mount so I can see about this latest fire. Then, I want you to take some men and close this town down. Every store, every saloon, every bar and grog shop. And the whorehouses, too, while you’re at it. All church services and public and private gatherings are canceled until further notice. The citizens are to be off the streets and in their homes. Start with that bunch downstairs.”

“Yes, Sir! Anything else, Sir!”

“I want all these papers sorted, by date and by urgency—and then I want a burial detail.”

“Burial detail, Sir?”

“That’s what I said. And find me some small pine blocks—like so,” he said, showing him the size with his hands. “Make sure they’re finished—no bark—scraps from a lumber mill if there is one—but you can put that at the bottom of the list for now.”

“Yes, Sir!” Perkins gave a smart salute and left a happy man, in spite of Max’s choice of residence and his mishmash of orders. Occupation duty was tedious at best, and enacting what amounted to martial law was clearly more to the soldier’s liking.

Max sat at the desk, then reached for the red-velvet box again, turning it over in his hands before he opened it. After a moment he abruptly closed the box and put it into his uniform pocket.