The Message in a Bottle Romance Collection

by Joanne Bischof

  Still at the rear of the Seventy-Second Indiana columns, Cora Mae and June were the last to reach the southeast corner of the town square, defended by a gleaming Union cannon. The square was packed with white army tents and with more Yankees swarming over the red clay mud between them. Covered army wagons lumbered through the street, and other tents crowded up against a drugstore, Cole Hotel, a three-story Masonic Hall, and other buildings so obscured she couldn’t tell what they were.

  “We’re here.” Sergeant Howard’s hands encircled her waist, helping her down. Pain still pulsing in her ankle, she was mindful to favor it.

  Lieutenant Dooley, face ruddy from the day’s heat, lifted June down from the saddle. The girl hurried to Cora Mae’s side.

  The sergeant cleared his throat and pointed behind them. “This is the Cobb County Courthouse, where you’ll be staying until you continue the journey north.” The brick building rose up on the east edge of the square, facing the lowering sun. The Stars and Stripes snapped from the pole at its top.

  With June’s hand in hers, Cora Mae climbed the building’s steps. Sergeant Howard and Lieutenant Dooley tied their horses to the hitching post at the street’s edge then followed them up the stairs.

  “What are all these for?” June pointed to the tents.

  “Those in the square are where the Second Ohio Cavalry and the Twentieth Connecticut Infantry are camped,” Dooley offered. Snatching his hat from his head, he raked a freckled hand through his red hair and mopped his brow with a handkerchief. He pointed to the tents surrounding the buildings on the outside edge of the square. “All of these are hospital tents. For the sick and wounded.”

  June wrinkled her nose. “There must be a hundred of them!”

  Sergeant Howard chuckled as he surveyed the grounds. His short, dark blond hair curled at the nape of his neck. “Try a thousand. There are five Union army corps here in Marietta, with more than four thousand sick and wounded. They’ve taken the churches and hotels for the patients, but obviously, that’s not enough room.”

  The courthouse’s double doors swung open, and a bearded Yankee in spectacles strode through them. “All right, men, I’ll take over from here. Inside, all you girls.” He motioned to the mill girls still lingering on the street.

  “We’ll sleep inside tonight, Junebug.” Cora Mae forged a smile as a gust of wind, still laden with heat, swept over her.

  “As long as I stay with you.”

  “You Secesh will go where I say you go.” The provost guard rocked back on his heels.

  Sergeant Howard and Dooley looked at each other, brows furrowed. “These two stay together,” said Sergeant Howard.

  “Says who?”

  “Says decency,” Dooley chimed in, jamming his hat back on. “Ain’t no cause for separating kinfolk just to prove you can.”

  The provost guard grunted. “Come on, let’s get you locked up.” Other Roswell girls straggled up the steps and into the courthouse as he spoke. “You’ll find combs, soap, and tooth powder inside, compliments of the Christian Commission that’s set itself up here in Marietta.”

  Sergeant Howard touched Cora Mae’s sleeve, so lightly she almost didn’t notice. “Do you need a doctor? For your ankle?”

  “No.” She didn’t care to see any more bluecoats than she had to. “It’ll mend quick enough.”

  “I pray it does.”

  When she frowned, he added, “Didn’t anyone tell you? Not all Yankees are devils.” Something akin to a smile slanted his lips as he tipped his hat to her then trotted down the stairs, along with Dooley, to their waiting horses.

  The room to which Cora Mae was assigned was crammed with girls, and not much else. The mill hands took turns at pails of water set in the corner, eagerly using the soap, and pocketing the new combs. For dinner, they broke Yankee hardtack.

  June tugged a piece of hair from her braid and sucked the end of it. “I been chewin’ on something. Do you reckon I ought to call you Mama, seeing as you almost are? Weren’t you fixin’ to marry Mr. Ferguson before he had to run off? The mean Yankees might keep us together if they think we’re relations.”

  Cora Mae’s nose pinched. She still couldn’t quite imagine being married to Horace. But she could surely imagine loving this little girl as though she were her own. “Call me Mama if you like,” she whispered.

  As the girls claimed patches of the hard wooden floor and one blanket each, guards paced outside the windows. There was even a pair standing watch at the door to the hallway.

  “I never did see so much blue in all my life,” June whispered. A snatch of a psalm scrolled through Cora Mae’s mind. “Have you ever heard this verse? ‘Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.’ ”

  “I can’t say. What does it mean?”

  “Preacher said it means the Lord is hemming us in. He’s in front of us, and He’s behind us. He’s even got His hand directly on us.”

  “Well, that sounds like the Yankees sure enough! They’re everywhere!”

  Cora Mae smiled. “I think so, too. Let’s play a game. Every time we see a blue-coat, let’s say or think to ourselves, ‘God’s there.’ Because He is!”

  From somewhere outside, campfire smoke wafted into the courthouse, along with the Northern twang of Union soldiers swapping tales.

  June sucked in her breath. “God’s out there.” Then she giggled.

  Cora Mae savored the rare sound.

  Rolling onto her side, June yawned. “I like it. Thank you.” Her breathing grew slow and steady.

  Thank You, Lord. Hem us in now, and my own mama, too. Bring us back together again.

  Sighing, Cora Mae let her gaze drift to the window. Outside, twilight banked the blazing sun, taking the fever from the air. Every few seconds, a soldier with a musket on his shoulder paced by, dissolving any plan to sneak out and run away.

  “Psst. Miss Stewart.” A whisper sounded at the window. “It’s Sergeant Howard. I’ve got news for you.”

  She rose and went to him.

  “You weren’t sleeping, were you?”

  “Not yet,” she said, leaning on the windowsill. “What do you want?”

  He straightened his hat. “General Dodge—the Union general commanding the sixteenth corps here—he thinks Sherman’s order is absurd.”

  Hope flickered. “So will he let us go home?”

  “I told you. You can’t go home, not yet.” His sharp tone needled her.

  “Well, then, what use is Dodge’s opinion for us?”

  “Dodge told the chief surgeon here to hire as many of you girls as he can. You could be a nurse, paid in greenbacks, with rations to eat, all while you stay here in Marietta.”

  She held his unblinking gaze. The sharp smells of illness and ammonia drifted from tents and trenches outside. “Work for Yankees.”

  “Stay here in Georgia,” he countered. “A half day’s journey from Roswell. You’d be as close to your mother as you could possibly hope to be.”

  “Could I visit her?”

  The sergeant shifted his rifle to his other shoulder. “You’d have to stay here, or go where the army goes. Do you think you could nurse wounded Yankee soldiers, Miss Stewart?”

  Fireflies blinked against the lavender sky. She cupped one in her hands, and its yellow glow pulsed from between her fingers. “So they could heal up and go on out and kill more Johnny Rebs?” Her heart throbbed against the notion.

  “It’s the only way to stay.”

  She opened her hands and let the firefly take wing. “I can’t do it,” she whispered as she watched its flight. “I can’t support the Yankee army.”

  “You’re looking at it backward. Let the Yankee army support you.”

  Cora Mae shook her head, incredulous. “I can’t understand why you care.”

  Ethan leaned his rifle against the outside of the courthouse, swiped his forage cap off his head, and crushed it onto the windowsill. “Look past my uniform for one second and recognize that I’m not your enemy.” />
  She raised an eyebrow. “I don’t hate you, you know.” Her tone lost its black-coffee bitterness.

  “Don’t you?”

  She blew an exaggerated sigh from her lips. “Not allowed. ‘Love your enemies.’ Heard of it?” The corner of her mouth curved in a half grin, and a dimple pressed into her cheek.

  Caught off guard by the tease in her eyes, Ethan stifled a laugh. “Just so happens I have. Didn’t notice?”

  A strand of hair blew in front of her eyes, and she tucked it behind her ear. “I still won’t stay and nurse.” She looked away, and his gaze skimmed her silhouette, from her bristly lashes to the tip of her delicate nose, over lips shaped like cupid’s bow, and down her slender throat. He swallowed and wondered if she knew how beautiful she was, even with sun-browned skin and dusty hair. Coughing into his elbow, he silently cursed the dust in his lungs.

  Miss Stewart watched him with wide, inquisitive eyes. “That sounds familiar.”

  “Coal,” he explained simply. But that wasn’t what he wanted to discuss. “Miss Stewart, what did that mill hand mean when she said leaving Roswell was a dream come true for you?”

  She crossed her arms on the windowsill. A white-winged moth fluttered between them before flitting into the courthouse. “It was a long time ago.”

  “What was a long time ago?”

  Cicadas ticked and whirred above the moans of the sick nearby. She looked beyond him, and he suspected she saw more than the hospital tents spilling into the street. “By the time I was fifteen, I’d already pined for years to be anywhere else but Roswell. All I knew was the inside of the cotton mill, my family’s apartment, and the path between the two. Then a textile engineer from New York came to fiddle with our machinery. When he talked about places he’d been, I longed to see it all for myself. The ocean. Mountains. Snowdrifts higher than my head. A menagerie full of animals from all over the world.”

  Her voice grew smooth and warm as she lovingly spoke each dream. A smile, slow and beautiful, broke over her face like a sunrise.

  “The more I realized I was stuck in Roswell, the stronger my urge to leave.” Tears glimmered in her hazel eyes. “I just felt—” She spread her hands.

  “Trapped,” Ethan finished for her. “I know.”

  Crickets chirped in her hesitation. Miss Stewart peered at him, head tilted. “Do you?”

  “For me, it was books.” It wasn’t easy, learning to read while working in the coal mines, but once he did, the world opened up to him and beckoned. “Every place I read about, I wanted to visit. An impossible dream.”

  “Like mine.” The hint of a smile on her lips, she waited for him to continue.

  Raucous laughter turned Ethan’s head toward soldiers passing into the square. He waited until their footsteps receded before facing Miss Stewart again. “I was twelve when my mother died of cholera. My father couldn’t bear anything that reminded him of her, so he moved us from Kentucky to a town in Indiana, where he and my two brothers and I found work in a coal mine. Samuel and Andrew were ten and eight. We broke the mined coal into pieces by hand and separated the coal we wanted from whatever we didn’t, like rock, slate, clay, and soil. The coal dust was so thick sometimes we could barely see what we were doing. I hated it. But we couldn’t leave. In the end, my father was the one who left us. Black lung.”

  Ridges lined her brow. “I’m sorry.” Wind rattled the trees above the courthouse, and she chafed her arms, though the night was still warm. “Do you have other siblings? Besides the two brothers killed in the war?”

  Ethan fought the sorrow expanding in his chest. “Just Sam and Andrew.” Ethan hadn’t even been with them when they died. They were killed in battle while he was delirious with typhoid fever in a field hospital away from the fighting. And they’d been his responsibility. “You’re blessed to have June, you know. And your mother, too.” Eager to change the subject, he asked, “You told your friends you wanted to explore?”

  She didn’t respond right away. Then with her fingertip, she traced a crack in the sill’s white paint. “They laughed at my foolishness. So I stopped talking about it and just worked at the mill like everyone else. Even if I had the means to leave, I wouldn’t have abandoned my family.”

  “I understand.” For hadn’t he done the same, year after year, until an army recruiter showed him the way out of life underground? In her soulful eyes, he saw himself: loyalty to family; commitment to provide; and deep down, the rare spark of hope for a better life. He knew the ache of forfeited dreams, the sting of wishing for something different when everyone else is content with the same. “Do you still dream, Miss Stewart?”

  “I really shouldn’t.” Her voice trembled. “My family needs me. God has a plan for my life, and I aim to hold tight to that hope.”

  Such faith, even now. “He does. Don’t give up on that.” An owl gurgled in the deepening night. Darkness closed in around them, blotting out Marietta and its thousands of troops and horses. For a fleeting moment, even the war fell away. All he saw was Miss Stewart’s moonlit face. When a tear traced a silver path down her cheek, he covered her hand, his wool sleeve catching on the brick wall between them. “I understand you,” he said again. “We’re not so different, you and I.”

  A sad smile bent her lips. “Said the guard to his prisoner.” Withdrawing her hand from beneath his, she picked up his forage cap and placed it on his head in a gesture so endearing, he hardly knew what to make of it. “Good night, Sergeant Howard,” she whispered. Her Southern drawl gentled his name.

  “Miss Stewart—if it weren’t for the war, we’d get along just fine.”

  “I reckon we would.” A smile bloomed then wilted, and her dimples disappeared. “But there is a war. And we’re on different sides.” She tapped the windowsill that barred them from each other.

  “I’m on your side.” A revelation, even to himself.

  Miss Stewart’s gaze narrowed. “You mean our side—all of us mill girls? Feeling guilty?”

  He shifted his weight and accidentally knocked his rifle to the ground. Snatching it up, he slung his weapon over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “I mean you. You and June.”

  “Why?” A whisper this time. She leaned forward, braid swinging in the musky breeze.

  Why, indeed? Any guilt was eclipsed by something more. Hearing her talk had been like looking at his own reflection, the recognition so complete, it was like coming home. The woman he captured just this morning was now seizing his heart instead.

  With his rifle against his back, and words lodged in his throat, he made a terrible Romeo. He didn’t tell her that she was brave and strong, that when she looked at him an ache throbbed in his chest. He didn’t tell her he admired her for her faith, for daring to dream, and that she shouldn’t stop. All he could say was, “Sweet dreams.”

  Her wistful smile told him she understood.

  Chapter Five

  July 15

  Beneath full-bellied clouds that threatened rain, humidity licked Ethan’s skin. His palms grew slick on his Spencer rifle as he escorted the Roswell mill hands across the muddy town square, between the Second Ohio Cavalry and Twentieth Connecticut Infantry camps. His gaze roved, alert to soldiers eager to molest the girls he guarded. Keeping them away for five days had been no easy task.

  Limping ever so slightly, Miss Stewart trudged beside him, holding June’s hand. He didn’t need to glance at her to see her sun-kissed face in his mind. Nor did she need to speak for him to hear her honeyed voice talk of dreams and faith and hope, though she was a prisoner and homeless. She had softened toward him after their talk the first night at the courthouse. Since then, and between guard duty, he’d read Harper’s Weekly to her and June through the window to pass the time, and she gifted him with unhurried smiles. “You’ve stopped scolding me,” he pointed out yesterday. “On account of I’m a very good Christian,” she replied solemnly then flashed a dazzling, teasing grin. His spirit resonated with hers in a way he’d never known with another.

/>   And she was leaving. The speech he’d rehearsed into his shaving-kit mirror now lodged in his chest like unmined coal.

  The tramping of boots and the gentle plodding of bare feet filled his ears as they passed the brick depot building and into the yard of the Western & Atlantic Railroad half a block beyond it. Sherman’s headquarters, the four-story Fletcher House, towered over the tracks, with a US flag shuddering from its roof. Odors of straw and livestock wafted from open doors of two long trains, hinting at their most recent use.

  Mill workers from Sweetwater Creek and New Manchester, billeted at the Georgia Military Institute, joined the Roswell hands at the depot, bringing their number to eighteen hundred souls. They jostled and tripped over each other, pressing toward the train in an unruly mass.

  The gray sky lowered, pressing down like a lid over the simmering summer day. Ethan put his hand on Cora Mae’s shoulder, and she turned to him with red-rimmed eyes. It took all his restraint to keep from wrapping her in his arms. “Cora Mae.”

  At the sound of her Christian name, her lips parted in surprise.

  He took her hand. “You can’t leave like this. You get on that train, and they’ll take you up to Louisville and dump you on the north side of the river, and that’s it.”

  “What do you mean?” She glanced at June then back at him.

  “No one knows what to do with all of you. Sherman’s order is to send you away and drop you off. You think Indiana townsfolk will take to hundreds of devout Confederates suddenly in the streets? You think there will be enough jobs for all of you? Just what do beautiful young women do when they’re desperate to survive?”

  “Stop,” she gasped. Fear pooled in her eyes. “Why are you telling me this?”

  Mill hands swept around them like a river around a stone. “Marry me.”

  “What?” Eyes suddenly wild, she stepped back.

  Ethan stepped forward, pulled her close enough to hear what he had to say. “Sign the papers and marry me. Don’t get on that train. I’ve got no family left; my paychecks can go to you while I serve in the army. You’ll be provided for while you stay here in Marietta. If I die in the war, you’ll be paid by the US government for the rest of your life. You won’t have to work at the mill. If I don’t die by the end of the war and you decide you’re better off without me, we can annul it before we—”