by Beth White
Hixon yanked on the back of his coat and hissed, “Shut up, you fool!”
Schuyler ignored him. “I hope you’ll let me do my part to maintain the civilized and educated American way of life we’re in danger of losing. Just tell me what to do.”
A muttering of approval, or maybe protest, ruffled through the company. Then a man standing off to Schuyler’s left moved out of the shadow. “You’ll prove you’re not a Lincolnite plant is what you’ll do first,” the man growled. Tall, broad-shouldered, and brawny, he gestured with an unlit cigar in his hand. There was something familiar about his build and his voice. Schuyler would have sworn the man had been in that courtroom in Tuscaloosa. Possibly one of the two deputy sheriffs. What were their names? Benton or Denton? No, Dent. Foster was the other, Newborn Foster—Schuyler would never forget an oddball name like that.
The presence of people who had seen him in Alabama put him in even greater danger.
“I’m no Lincolnite,” he said evenly. “I served on a Confederate naval vessel when I was still in my teens.”
“Don’t mean you’re not a turncoat.” The tall man turned to the smaller man beside him. “In Alabama we’ve got ways of finding out who’s full-blooded and who’s not.”
“How do I know you’re who you say you are?” Schuyler asked, casting a direct challenge.
Hixon tugged more violently. “Are you trying to get us killed?”
Schuyler jerked free and swaggered toward the front of the room. He wheeled to face the crowd. “I’ll take whatever oath of loyalty you want. My father was killed by some federalist who didn’t like conservatives of any stripe, and I want revenge.”
That set up a responding whoop from several parts of the room. Schuyler lifted a fist high and let out his best Rebel yell.
Then somebody behind him threw a sack over his head. “I’m sorry, Sky,” muttered Jefcoat from behind him just before pain exploded across the back of his head.
Joelle had been in a deep sleep for perhaps an hour when something woke her. She sat up in bed, rigid, disoriented, but wide-awake, and tugged down the nightgown that had tangled around her legs. Rain slopped in through the open window, so she got up to pull it shut. Standing there in the pitch-blackness, she considered lighting a lamp.
But she didn’t want to chance waking ThomasAnne or Aurora. Instead, she fumbled for the softer light of a candle and set it on her dressing table. With the window closed, the room was damp and stuffy, and the flickering candle threw weird shadows over the wall. Sleep wasn’t going to come back anytime soon.
She sat in her rocker, pulled her feet up under her nightdress, and wrapped her arms around her legs. She’d managed to make it through the evening—dinner with that tableful of strangers, listening to Levi entertain them at the piano afterward—without thinking of Schuyler more than once every ten minutes. Wondering where he’d gone. Denying her chaotic feelings. She’d laughed and deflected questions about her whereabouts that afternoon with the truth—she’d been scrubbing the bathhouse as a surprise for their guests. Wouldn’t an old-fashioned swimming party be fun? Deliberately she’d avoided ThomasAnne’s concerned gaze.
Now she wondered about her cousin’s cryptic response to that spate of self-flagellation that afternoon. Someday I’ll tell you about real shame. What did she mean? What could ThomasAnne, the most rigorously upright and rules-conscious person she knew, possibly have to be ashamed of?
And even more puzzling, she’d called Dr. Kidd “Benjamin,” offhandedly, as if she thought of him that way in her most private thoughts. Come to think of it, they’d been spending an inordinate amount of time together of late. Doc claimed to be teaching ThomasAnne some nursing skills, so that he’d have an extra pair of hands when he came to treat the employees of the hotel. That might be true, but there also seemed to be a kindling friendship between them, growing stronger every day.
Was it, perhaps, more than friendship?
Imagination rolling as usual into places it ought not go, Joelle tried to picture eccentric Benjamin Kidd and her straitlaced, middle-aged cousin involved in anything remotely as “charged”—as ThomasAnne herself had put it—as her own interactions with Schuyler.
Good gracious, she thought, putting her head on her knees. The mind positively recoiled.
Which brought her inevitably back to Schuyler himself.
God, I do not want to be rebellious. I am not wise or good enough to know what to do. But you are both wise and good. So I give you myself. I give you my feelings for Schuyler. Please take them away if they are displeasing to you. And I pray that you will protect him and guide him. While I’m at it, I’d better ask you to protect and guide Gil also. Sometimes I think he doesn’t need as much guidance as I do. But that’s silly. We all need you.
She lifted her head, looked at the candle now guttering in its saucer. Even as she watched, it went out, leaving her in darkness once more. Hoping that wasn’t some divine omen, she sat there listening to the rain hit the roof of the cottage, splash against the windowpanes, shake the trees in the yard. She should go back to bed. They would all go to church in the morning, and she would look haggard if she didn’t get some sleep.
But her spirit still felt unsettled, as if her prayer wasn’t finished.
Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me and know my thoughts. And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Watch over Schuyler.
And Gil, she added guiltily. Amen.
The rain saved him. Or maybe it was Gil Reese’s squeamishness—Schuyler would never know which.
In any case, wet and chilled to the bone, his back on fire where his shredded shirt touched the welts, he started the walk back to Tupelo. They’d taken his horse, and every step jarred his injuries with agonizing regularity. Still, he was grateful to be alive.
After the sack went over his head, someone tied his hands and then hauled him reeling through the crowd. Disoriented, he didn’t know where they took him—and judging by the noise, everyone in the room had gone along—except somewhere outside the smokehouse, down a bumpy dirt road. No telling how far he’d walked before the road ended in a cornfield. Dead stalks grabbed his clothes as they shoved him along from behind.
He knew the Tuscaloosa deputy was the one who lashed him to a post, hands looped around it, with his chest against the rough wood. He could smell the tobacco on the man’s breath as huge hands ripped Schuyler’s shirt open in the back, tearing the fabric from bottom to top—the exposure and vulnerability doubly cruel because of the blanketing of his head. He could hardly breathe.
“Take the oath! Take the oath!” The chant went up from the mob behind him, rolling over him like thunder.
Or perhaps that was thunder. Schuyler could see vague flashes of light through the burlap over his face, could all but feel the electricity charging the humid blackness. Rain began to rattle the dead cornstalks, a chattering, eerie rustle.
And then the flogging started, some kind of leather strap that stung like a hundred wasps, at least an inch wide and long enough to wrap from one side of his back to the other, with stitching that dug into his flesh. He jerked and bore it, not sure what they wanted him to say. He’d already claimed loyalty, and he wouldn’t beg for mercy.
The rain was coming down in sheets now, soaking the strap so that it stretched and slapped harder against already bruised muscle and broken skin. His boots slipped in the mud collecting at his feet, and his chin hit the top of the post, hard enough to jar his teeth.
Oh, God, he prayed, hoping he hadn’t groaned aloud. Bear me up.
He regained his balance, dragged himself upright by bracing the ropes around his hands against the stake.
“Admit you’re a Lincolnite scalawag!” demanded someone, maybe Whitmore.
The strap hit again, and Schuyler jerked with the pain. The sack over his head was now so wet that he couldn’t take a full breath. Was he going to end up drowning? What if he fell again? This bunch was so insane now,
they might just kill him to prove a point. Levi had been right to warn him.
Finally he decided he’d better say something. “I’m not a Lincolnite,” he said. “I told you, I was raised a—”
“You’re a liar,” Dent said with cold certainty. “I saw you having breakfast with that Yankee lawyer. No amount of fast talking is gonna convince me you’re not good friends. The preacher says you’re in love with his wife’s sister—and the whole town knows how much she loves her black—”
“Stop it!” That was Gil Reese’s carrying voice. “Don’t say another word about her!”
Schuyler barely heard him. A red haze of rage had consumed his every coherent thought. He was going to get his hands free and choke Dent, if he died in the attempt.
But two things happened simultaneously that shifted events. The bottom fell out of the heavens, releasing a downpour the likes of which north Mississippi hadn’t seen since the days of Noah. Thunder crashed in concussive strikes that collided one upon another like cannon fire. Even as the storm released its fury, Schuyler felt more than heard someone grabbing at his attackers and tossing them out of the way like matchsticks. The beating ceased, the sack was yanked off his head, and through the driving rain he saw Gil Reese’s tall, bony frame kneeling to work at the sodden knots of the ropes tying Schuyler’s hands. A shotgun lay on the ground in the mud, and the mob had dispersed.
Thank God. But what an idiot.
“You’re going to have to cut them off,” Schuyler said. “Do you have a knife?”
Reese looked up at him, blinking against the rain pelting him in the face. “A knife? No.”
“All right, then pull the post out of the ground.”
Fortunately, the ground was soft enough now that three hard jerks pulled the post free. As Reese slanted it sideways, Schuyler worked his hands upward and over the top. Once free of the post, the ropes fell off his hands.
“I didn’t mean this to happen.” Giving Schuyler a look somewhere between relief and horror, Reese turned and ran.
Which was how Schuyler came to be walking back to town alone, in the wee hours of the night, wet to the skin for the second time in twenty-four hours, beaten to within an inch of his life.
And he could not have been more grateful. Something had saved his life. Some One had saved his life. And he was pretty sure it was neither the rain nor a jealous, miserable preacher named Gil Reese.
nineteen
GIL’S SERMON THE NEXT MORNING featured a lot of gloom and doom. Of course, he’d never been a particularly jolly person anyway, so she shouldn’t have been surprised. But when one happened to be suffering from an excess of anxiety and a dearth of sleep, the verbal tongue-lashing from the pulpit struck Joelle as not only unnecessary but tiresome.
Surely there were biblical passages of hope and encouragement he could occasionally offer up to his little flock? Did one need a constant diet of affliction and warning? Maybe it was just her personal guilt coloring her hearing. On the other hand, could hearing be colored? She really should have stayed in bed, if that was the best imagery she could construct.
Delfina, seated on her right, seemed engrossed in the dour message. Earlier, from her seat at the piano, Joelle had watched the singer enthusiastically join in the hymn singing, her voice much improved from last night’s husky rasp. In fact, everyone else (except Gil, who thought he was required to sing at the top of his lungs) stopped singing to listen to Delfina. Maybe she would be well enough to perform before the end of the week.
Joelle hoped so. Not that she wanted Delfina and her entourage to leave early. But the responsibility of seeing to their constant entertainment was beginning to take its toll. Fortunately, Aurora had taken on meals and transportation, so all Joelle had to do that morning was join everyone in the breakfast room before jumping into the carriages and heading to town for church. But she’d been late to rise, slow to dress—what did one wear to church on the day after she’d placed herself in the role of unintentional seductress?—and not at all in the mood for Italian-accented chatter while consuming grits and eggs.
Lord, what is wrong with me? Help me think past my own feelings for a change.
On the thought, she heard the door open at the rear of the church. The congregation turned its collective head, even Gil stopping midsentence to see who had come in at the end of the service. Everyone knew that Gil preached until 11:50 on the dot, prayed for another two minutes, led the congregation in a final hymn, then released everyone to go home for lunch. Anyone who came in this late must be visiting from out of town.
Schuyler. Perfectly turned out as usual in a buff-colored summer suit with dark blue tie, his golden-wheat hair the only unruly element of his sartorial magnificence. His hat was clamped under his arm at an odd, stiff angle. The entire gathering watched as he shuffled up the aisle at the pace of an octogenarian turtle and stopped beside Levi and Selah. The two of them smiled and moved over for him. As he sat down on the pew, he let out a little grunt, closed his eyes, and gingerly settled back.
Everyone else lost interest and turned back to look at Gil, but Joelle couldn’t take her eyes off Schuyler’s pale face. Strawberry-colored scrapes marred his cheekbones and a livid bruise traced the underside of his jaw. Something awful had happened to him, she knew it in her very bones, and what did that say about her prayer for him last night?
But what if he’d brought some beating on himself? Maybe he’d been drinking with his old college friends, gotten into a brawl of some sort. What if he had come here as an act of repentance?
There was no way to know. His expression was blank, the gray-blue eyes steady on Gil’s face.
Gil himself flushed under that flinty gaze. “So, brothers and sisters, I commend you to the watch-care of the Holy Spirit. I charge you to depart from here ready to uphold and defend one another against the onslaught of the enemy who hates our souls. God is good, but God is just. We must live in sincere holiness, urging each other on toward faith and good works. Greet one another with a holy kiss. That is, hold on to what is good and pure and just and right, forgetting what lies behind and pressing on toward the mark of the high calling that is in—” Gil stood gripping the edges of the lectern, mouth open like a landed fish. He jerked his gaze from Schuyler to look at Joelle. “Amen. Go in peace.”
There was no hymn, no prayer, just a long, awkward silence as Gil walked down the aisle and left the building without looking either right or left. Finally, when it seemed he didn’t plan to come back, the congregation rose. Conversation began to ruffle through the room, someone laughed, and the strange moment was over. Joelle got to her feet.
Delfina reached out to grip Joelle’s hand. “Oh, cara, what pleasing words your young minister preaches! I think I never hear anything so straight to my heart!”
Joelle blinked. “Really? I mean, yes, Gil does a very good job of putting words together. Usually he does, that is.” Perhaps she shouldn’t point out the vapidity of that last chunk of nonsense Gil had spouted. If Delfina hadn’t noticed, how would it help to reduce Gil’s stature in her eyes? “And usually he stands at the door to shake hands with everyone as they leave. I wonder where he went.”
“I think he is so overcome with emotion that he can no longer to bear our critical gaze.” Delfina’s dark brown eyes sparkled with admiration. She clasped her hands at her bosom. “Your young man is such the fine shepherd of the flock. I would please to hear him speak every Sunday for the rest of my life!”
Joelle nearly blurted out that she would gladly trade places, giving Delfina her spot at Gil’s breakfast table and in his bed without a qualm. Then she remembered that a spotlight on a stage, with thousands of people staring at her for a couple of hours while she tried to remember Italian song lyrics, would hardly be the ideal occupation for the Hermit of Ithaca Plantation.
“End this ridiculous engagement,” ThomasAnne had advised.
Well, she would. As soon as she could catch Gil alone. When she had entered the church with her family, he’d
barely said “good morning” to her before closeting himself in the prayer room with the deacons. The fact that Joelle had felt relieved rather than insulted told her a lot about the state of her heart. Love is a decision, she’d heard many times from well-meaning people. Undoubtedly that was true when one was already committed in marriage. But ordering her feelings to respond in one direction, when they insisted on shoving off toward the opposite pole, turned out to be a lot more difficult than she’d anticipated.
During these mental perambulations, Delfina had attracted quite a coterie of music enthusiasts who had heard about the star in their midst. Joelle found herself standing at the outside of a chattering gaggle of women.
“Miss Fabio, we are so honored to have you visit our little church! How did you come to be acquainted with the Daughtry girls?”
“You must tell us all about the great cathedrals and theaters in which you have performed!”
“I simply adore your dress—is it true that the modistes of Europe refuse to design for certain members of the nobility?”
To her credit, Delfina kindly answered as many impertinent questions as she understood, filling in the gaps with charming and unintelligible Italian observations. Bored, Joelle looked around and saw Selah and Levi, still seated and in deep conversation with Schuyler. With the first two there to buffer her against the likelihood of being either ignored or scorned by the third, she squared her shoulders and walked over.
At her approach, Selah gave her a false imitation of her usual bright smile. “Tell Schuyler he’s coming to dinner, and we’re not taking no for an answer.”
Joelle gave Schuyler a hard look. “What’s wrong with you? Why were you late? What have you done to your face? And why are you holding yourself so oddly?”
Releasing an exaggerated whistle, he stretched an arm across the back of the pew behind Selah. “Four questions in one breath. That’s got to be a record. Let’s see. The same thing that’s always been wrong with me. I couldn’t decide which tie to wear. Cut myself shaving. And I fell out of a window last night. Next?”
