And yet he made her skin prickle with excitement…made her feel so aware…so alive…
“You can ride with me to Elmwood, or I’ll go alone,” Cameron told Jackson coldly as they descended the curved grand staircase. They’d met in the hall by accident. She didn’t know where he had slept last night and she didn’t care. “But I’m going and no one is going to stop me.”
“Not me or Grant’s army,” Jackson said, equally snappish. “Fine. We ride to Elmwood, together. But first, I’m having something to eat. I’m starving. And I’m warning you, if you try to leave without me, I’ll tie you to the damned dining room chair.”
At the bottom of the staircase she passed him, head held high, and strode away. Jackson halted, grabbing the carved newel. Damn her! Did she realize how beautiful she looked this morning. Even as angry as he was with her, he could not deny that her cheeks glowed with color or—
He swallowed and groaned silently as memories of the previous night rolled over him. He could still smell the womanly scent of her body…still taste her. Jackson’s mouth curved downward in a frown. God, he wanted her badly. But he wouldn’t force her. He had meant what he said last night. And if she was going to deny him the physical pleasures of their marriage bed, he would seek them elsewhere. Marie would never have denied him. Never.
Cameron entered the dining room, suddenly realizing she was starved. Since her illness, her appetite had seemed to return twofold. “Good morning,” she announced.
Taye was seated at the far end of the dining table. Beside her was Falcon Cortés, Jackson’s friend from the war. Cameron found him a bit disconcerting. She had never met an Indian before. He did not act or speak like other men she knew and was, therefore, an unknown. Cameron preferred to know what, or who in this case, she was up against.
“Good morning,” Taye said, popping up from her chair. Her voice sounded high and oddly strained.
“Morning, puss. Mr. Cortés.” Cameron nodded politely, looking from his face to Taye’s. Did they know each other? They couldn’t possibly, and yet—
“Please,” Falcon said, rising from his chair. “I am called Falcon by my friends.”
Cameron nodded as she picked up a plate. “Falcon it is.” She began to stack bacon on her plate. “Did you get enough to eat, Falcon? I hope the fare was to your liking.”
“It was good, thank you.” Falcon hesitated. “But there was no raw bear meat.”
It took a moment for Cameron to realize the straight-faced man was joking. Jackson laughed first, then Cameron. The moment she laughed, Falcon smiled.
Taye plopped down in her chair as if annoyed.
Still chuckling, Cameron filled her plate and joined the others for breakfast.
It was after ten by the time Jackson at last completed his meal and announced he was ready to go to Elmwood. When Cameron stepped out the front door to join her husband, she frowned at the open carriage that had been parked at the veranda steps.
“We’re not going by horseback?”
He opened the carriage door for her. “After last night, I would think you might have come to realize that maybe it’s time you slowed down and began acting like a married woman who will soon be a mother.”
“And I suppose married women with children take carriages.”
“Usually.”
Cameron crossed her arms over her chest. “I should have made a run for it when I had the chance,” she said sourly.
“And I should have tied you to the dining room chair when I had the chance.”
She made a face at him. “You know, my riding won’t hurt the baby.” She met his gaze defiantly. “Having a baby is what a woman’s body was made to do. Do you know we had slaves who gave birth in the evening and returned to the fields the very next day?”
“Commendable. I’ll keep that in mind. Should I want to plant tobacco, I know you’ll be available.”
She glowered at him as she accepted his hand to help her into the carriage. “Don’t think you’ve won the battle here, Captain. This is merely an insignificant skirmish.”
“Duly noted.”
As Cameron settled on the front seat, Taye came out the door. She had changed into a simple, pale blue traveling gown that looked quite fetching on her. It matched her eyes perfectly.
Jackson helped Taye into the carriage. As she sat down, Falcon appeared from around the house on horseback. He was riding a massive black steed that looked, Cameron noted, as if it had German blood in it.
“He’s beautiful,” Cameron breathed, turning in her seat to get a better look at the stallion, in awe of the magnificent creature.
“I told Falcon you would appreciate him.” Jackson swung into the seat and lifted the reins.
“Is he going, too?” Taye asked, indicating Falcon with a tip of her delicate chin.
Her comment was so unlike her that Cameron stared at Taye. “Why?” she asked quietly. What had she missed in the dining room this morning? Or had something happened last night? Jackson said Falcon had escorted Taye and Naomi to Atkins’ Way. Had the man taken advantage of her in some way? “Is there a problem with Falcon?”
Taye looked down, adjusting the folds of her gown with exaggerated effort. “Certainly not,” she answered stiffly.
“Falcon and I may be entering into a new business endeavor.” Jackson urged the team of sleek horses down the dusty drive. “He may be here at Atkins’ Way for a few weeks.”
Business? Cameron wanted to ask Jackson. She knew very well that the only business that Indian was conducting with Jackson was spying business. Just what the two men were up to, she didn’t know. To her, it appeared Falcon was currently acting as a bodyguard, riding as he was behind the carriage, twin pistols on his belt.
The four took the road to Elmwood, riding mostly in silence. Cameron saw more of what she had viewed from the train: burned houses and fields, neglected meadows, boarded-up windows and untended gardens. Only, now she was home. Now she knew who had lived in each house, who had owned each plot of land, each mill that was now silent. By the time they reached the long drive, lined with elms that would lead home, her heart was heavy.
Jackson halted the carriage on the grown-over driveway that four years before had been hardened dirt, packed down over the years by frequent visitors and daily farm vehicles. “I think we’re going to have to walk in,” he said, setting the brake.
“I’ll ride ahead,” Falcon offered. “Cut a path.”
Cameron climbed out of the carriage, not wanting Jackson’s assistance. Now that she was here, she wanted to run up the drive the way she and Taye and Grant had so many times as children.
But then she realized that neither her father nor Sukey would be there on the veranda to greet her with open arms, and tears gathered behind her eyelids. Her father had been her whole world, and Sukey, Sukey had become her mother after her own mother’s death. In truth, a better mother than the refined, distant Suzanne had ever been.
“The trees survived,” Taye observed as they walked up the lane in the path Falcon beat down for them on his horse through the waist-high grass. “From the train windows we saw so many beautiful old trees that had been cut from drives and yards, just because soldiers had been too lazy to walk into the woods for firewood.”
Cameron gazed up at the tall elms that stretched high into the blue sky on either side of the driveway and offered a canopy of bright green leaves to shield them from the hot sun.
The elm-lined drive brought back a shower of memories. She remembered being a little girl of six or seven and running down the lane, pulling a kite her father had bought for her. She remembered the summer Jackson first came to Elmwood, riding up this lane and into her life. Then there had been that terrible night four years ago when she and Taye returned home to find Grant ranting and raving—and the tragic events that had followed.
She squeezed her eyes shut against the pain of the recollection.
“At least that’s something to be thankful for,” Cameron mused aloud, pushing asi
de the memories.
They followed the bend in the drive, and the house rose up suddenly before them, as if rising from the ashes Cameron thought it had succumbed to. She halted and lifted the back of her hand to her mouth as she gave a little cry…of horror, mixed with relief.
The mansion’s exterior white paint was as faded and water stained as an old discarded dress. Many of the giant glass-paned windows were shattered, eyes that could no longer see. The front porch sagged in places beneath leaning columns that had once stood straight and tall as soldiers.
The lawn was overgrown, a jungle of thistles and weeds. There were overturned wagons without wheels, fallen trees and remnants of rotten canvas where an army had erected tents on the front lawn. To the side of the house, buzzards circled, and there was the stench of something large and rotting.
But it was home. Home.
Taye slipped her slim hand into Cameron’s, and Cameron squeezed it.
“I want to go inside,” Cameron said firmly.
“I’m not even certain the structure is safe.” Jackson pushed his way through the weeds toward the front porch. “Be careful in the ballroom. Someone built a campfire in the middle of the room and burned through the dance floor.”
“You coming?” Cameron asked Taye.
Taye smiled bravely. “I think I’ll go to my mama’s grave first, if you don’t need me.”
Cameron considered offering to accompany Taye to Sukey’s grave, but she sensed Taye would not welcome her. Sukey had died attempting to cross the Pearl River to escape with other slaves. She had been shot by slavers. But both women knew that Sukey’s life had been over well before she had attempted to flee. She had never been the same mentally after the senator had died from the fall off his veranda the night the Southerners fired on Fort Sumter.
Cameron knew that Taye needed to go up the hill to where the slave quarters had once been, just as she, herself, needed to enter her father’s office. She knew that they each had ghosts to lay to rest.
Jackson eyed Falcon, who waited on horseback, and Cameron knew he would be certain Taye was safe. “You go,” Cameron whispered, patting her sister’s hand.
“I’ll be up in a few minutes.” Taye brushed her lips across Cameron’s cheek, smiled and walked away.
Jackson offered the security of his hand from the warped porch steps and Cameron accepted it for the sake of common sense. As she crossed the wide veranda, she gazed up at a nest of chirping starlings. “It’s only been four years,” she said. “Why does it look like it’s been ten?” she murmured.
At the front door, Cameron twisted the loose knob and it opened, unlocked. She took a breath, almost afraid to step inside.
She forced one boot in front of the other. “Oh,” she murmured as she entered the entry hall that towered two stories overhead. Her mouth was dry and her heart pounded against her rib cage.
The black-and-white marble tile beneath her feet was marred and chipped. The yellow-papered walls with their once majestic magnolias were water stained and peeling. Broken crates were scattered across the floor and her mother’s French gold-gilded mirror was gone. The carved grand staircase was missing its hand-carved newel post that had been in the shape of a pineapple, and the steps, once polished to a sheen, were badly scarred.
But if Cameron closed her eyes, she could see the hall exactly the way it had been before the war. She remembered coming in through the front door the day that Jackson had arrived to discuss the impending war with her father. She could see herself wearing her grass-stained riding habit, and Taye, in her pretty yellow gown, begging her to change before meeting the men in her father’s study.
And if she kept her eyes closed very tightly, if she held her breath, she could almost hear her father’s muffled laughter from his study.
Cameron opened her eyes, fighting the lump that rose in her throat. “Looks like she’s still standing to me,” she said sarcastically.
“Cam—”
Ignoring him, she hurried down the hall, wanting to see the entire house, attic to cellar. But there was one place she needed to go first—her father’s study. She dragged her fingertips along the wallpaper, noting the smudges of soot; someone had burned fires in the middle of the floors. Why hadn’t they used the fireplaces? “The place looks structurally safe enough to me.”
“Cam, listen to me. It’s not just the house I’m concerned with. Damn it, can’t you see it’s not the only reason it’s not safe for you to stay here?” Jackson followed her down the hall. “Wasn’t last night enough? The South has changed. This is not a safe place for you, or for any woman right now.”
Cameron barely heard his words as she reached her father’s office door, pushed it open and halted at the creaking threshold. Floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookcases were turned over and most of her father’s precious books were gone. Burned for fuel, Jackson had told her.
The senator’s great Elmwood carved desk stood on end blocking the veranda door, and his chair was missing. The maps of Mississippi and the United States were gone, torn from the walls.
But the room still smelled faintly of her father and the memory of him filled her heart. “Papa,” she whispered under her breath.
“Oh,” she cried, suddenly crestfallen, “my grandmother’s desk is gone.” She walked over to the place where it had stood and stared at the empty space. The desk had not been of particularly fine construction, or of great monetary worth, but she’d always loved it because her father’s mother had brought it from Scotland. After her father died, she and Taye had found proof that Taye was his daughter in the desk. They had also discovered jewels he had hidden to provide Taye with money so that she could live safely and independently.
In a way, the desk was Cameron’s life, filled with compartments, some that made her very happy and some very sad. “It’s gone,” she whispered, lowering herself to the floor. She looked up at Jackson who stood in the doorway. “My grandma’s desk is gone. Burned for firewood, I suppose.” She lifted one shoulder and let it fall in dejection.
Jackson stood over her, looking uncomfortable. “You need to think about that plantation I’ve bought on the Chesapeake. I want you to look at the plans I have for the addition on the house. If you could just see it, I know you would love it.”
She leaned back on the paneled wall and covered her face with her hands, ignoring him, feeling as if every ounce of energy had been sapped from her. As if she were walking through a nightmare. “Don’t speak of that place again.”
As she pressed against the dusty wood panel, it seemed to give a little. She gazed down at where she rested her hand and pushed again. “What in heaven?”
“What is it?”
She turned around, rising up on her knees. “This panel of wood in the wainscoting, I think it moved.”
Jackson kneeled beside her. “I don’t think—” He pushed the wood with one hand. “Damn if it didn’t.”
“It’s a secret door or something.” She pushed it a little harder. The wood squeaked and a panel not much larger than a Bible magically swung open.
She thrust her hand into the dark hole in the wall. She couldn’t see anything, but beneath her fingertips, she felt a familiar object. Leather binding.
“It’s a book!” she breathed. She jiggled it, trying to release it from where it was wedged inside the wall, but it stuck.
“Let me try.”
Reluctantly, Cameron pulled her hand out of the wall and allowed Jackson to thrust his inside. He grimaced, then pulled a dusty, leather-bound book from the secret compartment and handed it to Cameron. She sat down on the floor and lowered the book into her lap. Brushing her hand across the dark blue leather cover, she wiped away cobwebs and dust.
Apprehensively, she opened the book, and on the very first page she recognized her father’s distinctive handwriting. “Oh,” she breathed, seeing the date.
“June 7, 1817. Elmwood Plantation, Jackson, Mississippi. I begin to write today because today my life has changed forever,” she read al
oud.
She looked up at Jackson. “I think it’s a…a diary. My father’s diary from 1817. He would have been only twenty years old and just returned from William and Mary College. He hadn’t even married my mother yet.” She lowered her head to read on.
“My life has changed today because I have met a woman who makes my heart sing.”
Cameron pressed her lips together. It was difficult for her to think of her father younger than she was now, young and in love with the woman who would be his bride two years later. At that moment in time, David Campbell had his whole life before him—a marriage, children, a seat on the United States Senate floor.
She bit down on her lower lip and read on, aloud. “Today we received a new shipment of slaves, and Papa sent me to Jackson to bring them home in a wagon. Mother’s palsy is worse and she has need of additional workers in the kitchen. I accepted on two males and two females. It is impossible to say exactly how old they are, but they all appear to be between fourteen and twenty years of age. Of course, there is nothing extraordinary about the events of today. We buy slaves often. What is extraordinary is the striking young woman among them called Sukey. I think I have fallen in love with her.”
15
Stunned by what she had read, Cameron slammed the diary shut. “Oh, heavens,” she breathed. “Oh, heavens.” She felt as if she were a child again and had just listened in on a very private conversation she shouldn’t have. Her own father’s private conversation.
“You didn’t realize your father had known Sukey that long,” Jackson said. It was a statement, not a question.
Cameron shook her head, understanding what had not been said. Jackson had known. How or why, she didn’t comprehend, but this was not the time to ask. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to know. The revelation that David Campbell had known Sukey since he was twenty years old made her realize that she hadn’t been as close to her father as she had always perceived, and that suggestion was distressing.
“Papa never spoke of his relationship with Sukey.” Before Jackson could ask what she knew would be his question, she met his gaze, almost feeling as if she had to defend herself to her husband. “No, of course I didn’t ask. I knew she was his mistress, everyone knew. I simply assumed—”
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