by Lexy Timms
“You do not know me.” How could he be so angry? His blood was pounding. She had said nothing he had not said to himself. Indeed, she had been less cruel than he had been in the months since he returned home. It bothered him that she should look at him and see treason when he knew she also saw honor. Desperation grasped him each time he realized that no smile, no rapport, would break her of her duty.
Desperation.
That was what this was. Only now, in the face of a death he had, to be honest, did Solomon see his own cowardice reflected back at him. Neither cowardice nor honor mattered anymore. He was going to go back and stand trial and hang for his crimes.
Chapter 12
Their pace the next day was so slow that Jasper and Cecelia were given leave to walk. What began as a delicious freedom after sore days in the saddle turned quickly to misery. Their sore muscles were much the worse for wear after the constant jostling, pinned in place by their hands tied to the pommels, and now each step jolted, sending shooting pains through them. Filthy socks and disused shoes had their feet bleeding before noon.
Jasper lagged, hoping they might be asked to ride once more. His head still ached fiercely, and the concussion filled him with nausea as he took each unsteady step but the men found his pain nothing more than amusing, and Cecelia was not inclined in the slightest to intervene on his behalf. Once as he stumbled, she merely stepped away so that he fell into the leaves and the muck, and he heard the soldiers laugh. When he looked up, her face was still as stone—and as cold.
As they sat around the campfire, Knox evidently decided to make an example of Jasper. He was hauled from his seat, Cecelia gasping and settling back when Knox motioned that she was not in danger. The next moment, Jasper found himself sprawled on the cold ground, and the toe of Knox’s boot turning him over.
“Tell us about Stuart,” he said. His tone was almost pleasant, unless one looked at his eyes.
Jasper felt only a sinking fear. Men said they did not know things all the time. No one would believe him that he knew no one named Stuart. He had said Horace was dead, hadn’t he? Now he was going to pay for that lie ten times over, with broken ribs and blood pouring from his nose.
“Who?”
“Ambrose Stuart.”
“I don’t know an Ambrose Stuart.” The only way he would get through this was if Knox, by some miracle, believed him. Perhaps, he thought hopefully, they knew Horace had used a fake name, but they were not sure of it.
‘You’re lying, just like you did about Horace. We saw Stuart in the camp with him. What do you know about the man?”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Jasper said desperately. Why Horace should have come with anyone, it didn’t make sense.
Despite himself, he looked to Cecelia, and even though there was no sympathy in her eyes, he saw her give the tiniest shake of her head. The name meant nothing to her either.
“I hope you’re telling the truth, because if not, you’ve found yourself a more painful death than hanging.”
Jasper took a moment to appreciate a threat instead of a blow, but his mind would not be distracted for long.
“Who is Ambrose Stuart?” he asked finally.
“Union spy,” Knox said flatly. “Still going to tell us you don’t know, Perry?”
“Yes. What use would a Union spy have with me?”
Knox gave a bark of laughter, and quieted.
“Either you’re the stupidest man that ever lived, or you really don’t know. And I’ve talked with you, Perry; I know you’re not that stupid. Of course, Jemison here might have whacked you a bit too hard with the butt of his rifle yesterday. So you’re telling me you don’t know a man, oh, up to my shoulder, looks like he should blow away in a stiff wind, all fancy manners?”
Jasper shook his head.
“So how does Horace know him?”
“I...don’t know.” And it was no deception. He truly could not think of how Solomon would know such a man. Had he ever seen someone of that description around the farm? He did not think so. Too late, he realized he should have said nothing, but it seemed his musing honesty had earned him at least a small reprieve.
“You really don’t, do you?” Knox asked.
“He’s lying,” one of the men said nervously.
“I don’t think he is.” Knox sighed. He did not help Jasper up out of the mud.
“How do you know this man?” Jasper asked finally. There was an angry muttering in the camp, but Knox did not pay them any attention.
“He was dispatched to us from command after you left. Rode with us for a week. Gave us orders, brought brandy with him. Said how proud they were of us.”
Jasper blinked. It seemed to him to be an odd way of spying on people.
“He...brought you information?”
“Not real information,” Knox snapped. “None of us saw it coming. Someone comes to tell you something, and you think...” Embarrassment turned his face a ruddy shade, but the incomprehension he saw in Jasper and Cecelia’s faces seemed to mollify him somewhat. “Even Union people don’t seem to know that trick then.”
“What did he do?” Cecelia asked, before she could stop herself. She colored and looked down, murmuring an apology.
Knox, however, was not inclined to lecture her on speaking out of turn; he only gave a bitter laugh and considered his words. “It’s a good question,” he said finally. “And I’ll tell you plain, I don’t even know all of it. What he was looking for...something small. One fact, command said later. Even they didn’t know. He’d gone to other groups as well as ours. He’d show up, say he had orders, and ride with the men for a few days. Unusual, but it was wartime and nothing is simple then. When a man shows up, never asks a thing...
“He has this way, see. It’s not like he’s listening, but it’s a quiet you want to fill, and you tell him things. We told him much more than he needed to know. I told him about my younger sister, Jemison told him about the crops at home, and somewhere in there, someone told him whatever fact he needed to know. He left us after a few days, and soon after that, we showed up where he told us we were supposed to be. Empty field.”
Jasper said nothing. He was still frowning. This still did not make as much sense as he hoped it would.
“And you know where we weren’t?” Knox asked him bitterly. “Where they needed us. He’d taken our troops and scattered them to the wind, and some big offensive, some... Well, it didn’t happen. A few of our spies got caught for it, I heard. We must have given him the information, and no one knows how.”
The mood in the camp was grim, almost eerie. Jasper tried to see such a man in his mind’s eye. He would not look sly and shifty, oh, no. He would look trustworthy, open. And his smile was meaningless. Who was he? A wraith, a ghost. He looked around at the men and saw their fear, and as if entertaining the same thoughts, Cecelia shivered and looked over her shoulder involuntarily.
“And now he’s working with Horace Delancy,” Knox mused. “Which makes me wonder...”
Jasper’s blood turned to ice. How could he refute this? He had thought the same about Solomon when he learned the truth, and there had not even been a Union spy to damn him by association. How could he possibly convince them that this man and Horace were acquaintances at best, perhaps connected by some coincidence but nothing more? They would never believe him, not after he’d lied about Solomon being dead in the first place. Now they would think he was a spy, and what they would do to him would be far, far worse than what they would do to Jasper.
He opened his mouth in a desperate appeal and stopped.
Could he say, truly, for certain, that Solomon wasn’t a spy?
This was what war did, he thought bitterly. It turned man against man and made enemies from friends. It sowed discord and mistrust where there should be none. He had rescued Solomon. He had defected. Surely if Solomon had been passing intelligence after...
...but now Solomon rode with a man who had come to their troop after Solomon and Jasper left.
Jasper squeezed his eyes shut. It was too much. He could not tell truth from fiction any longer.
“So why’s Horace come for this one, then?” Knox asked, breaking the tortured whirl of thoughts in Jasper’s mind. He jerked his head at Cecelia. “Heard him call her name.”
Jasper pushed himself up, hoping the spasms of pain on his face would block any other emotion that dared show itself. He had to think quickly, had to come up with something. Any association with Solomon would do Cecelia more harm than good.
“He knows her, aye,” Jasper said wearily. “He’s still alive, he visited the farm before.”
“So he’s come to rescue her?”
“I don’t know why he’s here,” Jasper lied with as much alacrity as he could manage.
“You called out for him.”
“He wasn’t doing you any favors, and you did kidnap us,” Jasper pointed out.
“I see.” Knox did not seem to believe him. “Well, it won’t be a mystery for long. They have ways to get things out of people.”
“They?” Jasper felt fear skitter down his spine. At his side, Cecelia was suddenly very still.
“Command. They’ll want to talk to Horace before we get him back, and they’ll want Ambrose too. Think what that man knows.”
“Knox...” The thought of Solomon being tortured made Jasper want to be ill. He could not allow it to happen. He had promised Clara he’d get Solomon back, not lose him to a fate worse than death.
But what if he was a—
No. Don’t even think it.
Then why was he in the company of a spy?
“Don’t tell me you pity the spies,” Knox said, clearly enjoying himself. “That would suggest you had some lingering attachment to them.”
“I pity men about to be tortured, and you know I was Horace’s friend! Still am. Was. I don’t know. Knox, if he’s a spy, I swear I knew nothing of it, but it doesn’t matter. They’re hardly going to come back again.”
“Oh, you think so? So they aren’t circling around us right now?” Knox’s face broke into a smile, and the men started laughing.
“And you’re happy about that?” Jasper retorted before he could stop himself. “They killed how many of your men?”
Knox’s face closed down in a moment, and Jasper regretted is words.
“Doesn’t matter,” Knox said, through gritted teeth. “Last time, we underestimated them. That won’t happen again.”
“That’s why we’ve been going so slowly,” Jasper said suddenly. His heart sank.
“How smart. Maybe you should have been the spy.” Knox’s voice dripped with sarcasm.
“You think you’re going to lure them into a trap.” Oh, my god. And there was no bargaining his way out of it. Jasper, by far more valuable than Cecelia, was now the least valuable of the men Knox wanted.
“We get you, and Horace. When they’re done with him, and they get Ambrose Stuart.”
“You weren’t here for them! You were here for me.”
“Plans change, Perry. You didn’t start the war thinking you’d turn traitor...did you?”
Anger boiled up at once, fury obscuring his good sense.
“I am not,” Jasper said, blood pounding in his ears, “a traitor.”
The camp fell silent. Knox stood slowly.
“I left,” Jasper said. “I saved the life of the man that saved mine. I watched hundreds die in those field camps and I took him away from that. I took him north, to go home, and while I was there, I fell in love, but I never gave aid to the Union. I never gave them information. I didn’t fight our men.”
All things that Solomon had done, but he did not say that.
“You tend their fields. You take aid from us. You haven’t set to burning their crops or poisoning their food. You left us when we needed you, Perry.”
For an unjust war. And God help them, he was too much of a coward to come out and say it.
“So sit back down.” Knox’s face was right in Jasper’s. He pressed down on Jasper’s shoulder, on one of the many bruises; not a deliberate cruelty, but he did not relax his grip when Jasper went white. “You can’t claim you didn’t know what you did. You can’t claim to be better than anything.”
He went back to the fire as Jasper sank his head into his hands.
“You were right,” he said finally. “We should have run.”
“Well, it’s too late now, isn’t it?” Cecelia’s voice was a whisper, but hysteria ran in her words.
“Cecelia, I swear to you, I meant this for the best. If I escaped, I thought they would come again, and again. I’ve been waiting for this since I left. I thought the best that could be salvaged was your safety.”
There was a pause while the sounds of the forest continued as if nature cared nothing for the death and dying and betrayal and pain humans wrought below. I give you dominion over the earth, God had said, and yet sometimes it seemed that nature was the mask of God, watching, uncaring, as humanity destroyed itself.
“I know,” Cecelia said finally. “But it doesn’t matter anymore. They’re going to come back for us, and we won’t just lose you—we’ll lose Solomon too; and whoever that spy is, I wouldn’t want to be him. Nothing you could give me to trade places.”
Chapter 13
It went wrong from the start. The woods were too quiet, even the birds strangely hushed as if they were holding their breath. Solomon lagged behind and Violet urged him onwards sharply.
“Something’s wrong,” Solomon murmured to her, and she shook her head.
“Stop being nervous,” she hissed and then shook her head. “You’re not one for this sort of thing, are you?”
He didn’t argue. It was why he had defected. Feeling the sick roiling in his gut, thinking that the revulsion he felt creeping up on men as they slept was to do with the Union, not with the act itself. How could he not feel pity? Some of the Confederate soldiers wore grey wool where he wore blue, but many had no coats at all, or the same brown they would have worn in the fields and shops they had come from. Some went barefoot, shivering in the cold air. Solomon had slain poorly trained, poorly armed men, and he had hated himself for it. In time, it had driven him away, him believing that the fervor he saw in his opponents’ eyes was truth.
Only, when he was the Confederacy, it was no better. The same dread, the same horror. Killing brought the same sickness in his gut, and he would spend evenings on his knees, asking absolution from a God he could no longer picture.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” he asked Violet, trying to get himself away from the memories of blood and life fading out of men’s eyes.
“These men,” she said softly, “want to kill your friend for defecting. They don’t mean to give him a fair trial. Whether or not they mean harm to your sister, they’ve kidnapped her and dragged her here against her will. They are not going to offer mercy, or kindness, or truth. They tried to splinter our country.”
“And it’s as simple for you as that?”
“It’s never simple,” she admitted to him. “It’s always a life. Always. I wonder whether I would be where they are if I had been born in the south.”
He stopped. “What do you think?”
“I think I might have. I’d like to think I would have the courage to reject their sentiment, but I cannot know.”
“How do you kill them, if you pity them?”
“You did too, remember?” Her hazel eyes were not condemning, but instead full of pity. “Did you hear me during the fight?
He shook his head.
“I always say, you don’t have to do this. Sometimes, they listen. Those I have spared.”
“You’ve...”
“They wouldn’t take kindly to that, in command.” She swallowed and shook her head. “I don’t know what to say, Solomon. I don’t have any words that will make this palatable to you. I’m not a saint. I never have been. I don’t know if what I’m doing is right, but I believe in the Union, and I’m doing the best I can to see the war ended quickly. I’ve n
ever taken lives for the sake of it.”
That, he could believe, and in the depths of her eyes, he could see some of the same fear that shadowed him: that none of this made sense, that it was all a terrible mistake. I’m no saint. It felt like absolution, after all this time, to hear another person admit to shades of grey. It was not, as the others claimed, good against evil.
“Then let’s go.”
Unfortunately the feeling had not eased; the strange quiet still signaled the coming fury of a storm. As they crept over the ridge, the camp had been eerily quiet, men sleeping though it was midnight and not midday. Solomon could see Jasper and Cecelia nowhere. Had they escaped? Solomon and Violet walked closer, their footfalls careful not to disturb this strange quiet.
The attack came from behind them, a shot that went wide and a yell, and the men in the camp sprang to their feet, running for Solomon and Violet with murder in their eyes. Solomon leveled his rifle, feeling the sickening drop of terror as a pistol was aimed. He was quicker; the man fell. Beside him, he heard Violet’s whispered litany: You don’t have to do this.
No one listened, and the short blade in her hand was covered in blood. Bright red streaked down her shirt, and Solomon spared a moment too long to try to see if it was hers; a fist caught him on the side of the face and he stumbled sideways...
...directly into the hands of Robert Knox, whose blow lifted Solomon up off his feet and sent him skidding across the forest floor when he landed. A scream from somewhere. Cecelia? Violet? He was up and scrambling away as Knox pointed a gun.
Violet came out of nowhere, dropping her shoulder and driving herself against Knox’s thighs, pushing him out of the way so that he dropped the pistol. Violet landed only one blow before having the sense to dance out of reach, but there were too many in the camp.
“Let go of—” Her. Solomon pushed himself up, and stopped dead at Violet’s warning cry. He turned, slowly, and his heart dropped. Jasper and Cecelia were bound, their hands in front of them, and knives at their throat. Where they had been hidden, Solomon did not know. He wanted to scream in fury. “Knox...”
