The Courageous Brides Collection

by Johnnie Alexander, Michelle Griep, Eileen Key, Debby Lee, Rose Allen McCauley, Donita Kathleen Paul, Jennifer Uhlarik, Jenness Walker, Renee Yancy

  Kate had brought only one dress proper enough to wear in polite society. After Henry’s death, she had spent two days dying her dresses and cloaks black. This particular dress had originally been a rich aubergine silk, a special favorite of Henry’s. “It makes your hair look like flames, my love,” he had said. If she concentrated hard, she could remember the feel of his lips on hers before the familiar pain surfaced.

  She was thankful that all these weeks of hard work with her “boys” had allowed her no time to think about Henry. She pulled the locket from her bodice, warm from her skin. Since the first night sleeping on the floor of the sanctuary in Paducah, she hadn’t opened it. Slowly she unlatched the filigreed gold oval. The lock of his blond hair still curled underneath the glass. Scripture told her she must forgive others, in order to be forgiven her own sins. But what about forgiving yourself? So far she hadn’t been able to do that. Would she ever be able to look at the locket without the terrible guilt and regret that cleaved her heart like an ax and turned her blood cold? It felt like an albatross around her neck, and before she knew it, she had taken it off and hidden it in a pocket of her valise.

  Time to get dressed.

  And that meant putting on her corset. If Mrs. Ennis and Mrs. Blake knew that she taken to leaving it off during the days she labored in the ward they would be scandalized. But a woman couldn’t bend or move freely in a corset. They were absolutely not suited to hospital work. So one day she let out the waists of her work dresses and decided to simply leave the corset off. With an extra chemise over the first, her dress, and the bibbed apron she wore, no one was the wiser. Kate picked up the detested thing. There would be no avoiding it tonight in this dress.

  First the chemise, then the corset, fortunately laced in front. Then the drawers, the under-petticoat, the hoop skirt, the ruffled petticoat, and the plain petticoat. Then the silk skirt and the bodice. She put on her pearl earbobs and placed a white lace collar at her throat, as the first year of her mourning had passed. Amethyst hat pins secured the spoon bonnet to her curls. The bonnet had been a bit crushed in her valise, but it would have to do. She didn’t have the time or inclination to steam it back to its original shape.

  Major Logan waited for her next to a covered carriage he’d commandeered from somewhere. Clad in his dress uniform, with gold oak leaves on the epaulettes at his shoulder and a ceremonial sword thrust through the emerald green silk sash around his waist, he cut quite a dashing figure. His eyes widened at the sight of her, and her cheeks grew warm at his admiring look. He offered his hand to assist her in, and why in the world would she now be aware of the warmth of his fingers after all these months?

  The major had brought four soldiers to accompany them in case of trouble on the road, but they had a peaceful ride. Wild roses lined the lane to the church, their sweet scent on the evening air powerfully evocative of home, where she’d had her own rose garden. The day’s heat had softened into a mellow warmth, and she realized that she hadn’t been outside the hospital wards for at least three months.

  “Mrs. Wilkes,” Major Logan said suddenly, and she jerked on the seat next to him.

  “Yes, Major?”

  “I’ve been meaning to speak to you about that—that night in the tent at Pittsburg Landing.”

  “Oh?” she said stiffly. “I’d quite forgotten about it.”

  He stole a sideways look at her. “That can’t be true, Mrs. Wilkes, for you haven’t spoken to me since. But let me finish.” He rushed on. “I want to apologize for speaking out of turn. I never meant to offend you…and I was wrong.”

  Actually he’d been far more perceptive than he knew, unnervingly close to the truth. But she wouldn’t—couldn’t—give him the satisfaction of knowing it. She inclined her head graciously. “I accept your apology, Major.”

  “Thank you.”

  He clucked to the horses and whistled a tune. “Camptown Races.” How ironic, since the fiddle had played that song the night he returned from Cairo and found her still in residence at the camp hospital. But he had noticeably relaxed, and she found herself glad that he had made the effort to smooth things over.

  Calvary Baptist Church was a grand old building in Southern style, with great white pillars rising two stories to a gracious pediment. A tiered balcony ran along both sides of the sanctuary to a soaring roof supported by barrel vaulting. A stained-glass oriel window in the apse poured jeweled sunlight over a sanctuary filled with women of all ages.

  A dignified gentleman with an impressive gray mustache approached Kate. “Mrs. Wilkes?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m Rev. Obadiah Morris. This is my wife, Penelope,” he said, indicating the plump blond woman beaming next to him. “We are so pleased to have you with us tonight.”

  Kate introduced Major Logan.

  “If you are ready, Mrs. Wilkes, I will introduce you now.”

  She nodded and followed him to the podium in the middle of the stage. The buzz of feminine voices filled the air, and her stomach lurched. It had been so long since she had been in “polite” society that she’d forgotten what it was like.

  After the pastor introduced her, she stepped forward, wishing she had thought to write out her remarks beforehand. The crowd quieted, and a sea of raised, expectant faces waited.

  Then she was speaking, telling the story of her arrival at Grace Episcopal Church in Paducah, Kentucky. Of what she was able to do for the men. She kept it light, leaving out the terrible realties of severed limbs, gangrene, infection, and death.

  “The men love packages from home. I try to have a sweet for them every day. Gifts of coffee are always welcome, fresh fruit, jams, and jellies. Then there are certain things we are chronically short of, especially sheets and bandages.”

  She paused as a harebrained idea went through her head. It was an eminently practical thing, something specific and valuable she could take back with her to the camp hospital and put to immediate use. But did she dare?

  “Ladies, you’re here tonight because you want to help.” Heads nodded throughout the sanctuary. “And I have a practical, and rather unusual, suggestion for something you can do right now. But first, Reverend Morris, would you mind leaving the sanctuary for a moment?”

  The pastor’s eyes goggled, and he glanced at his wife, who nodded approval. While he stood and made his way down the aisle she searched the crowd. “Major Logan?” she called. He stood at the back of the sanctuary. “Would you join Reverend Morris, please?”

  He bowed and exited through the front door, as a swirl of excited apprehension swept through the room.

  “Ladies, please rise to your feet.”

  Kate swallowed hard as they complied. If the women took her suggestion the wrong way, it could cause her discharge from the camp hospital. The reverend might be outraged, and she could even be permanently banned from polite society. But for the heartsick men lying on their pallets in the hospital wards she would risk her reputation.

  “Now.” She took a deep breath. Once the words left her lips she couldn’t take them back. “If you can spare a petticoat, please take it off and drop it on the floor.”

  Shocked silence met her words. Women glanced sideways at their neighbors, eyebrows raised. Whatever they had been expecting, it wasn’t this. In polite society one never spoke about their “unmentionables.”

  She tried again. “I know it’s an unconventional request, but think of all the bandages you would be supplying for our wounded men.”

  One brave young matron in the first pew uttered a giggle, bent over, and lifted her skirt. Little screams and titters broke out, and laughter. Then gamely, most of the women, some helping each other, reached under their voluminous skirts, shimmied this way and that, and managed to wriggle out of a petticoat.

  “Ladies, would you bring them here to the front?”

  With wide smiles on their faces, the women trooped to the front and, one by one, piled their petticoats on the dais. When they were finished, the pile of white undergarments surro
unding Kate reached her waist.

  “Thank you so much for your gracious contribution to the care of our sick and injured soldiers. May our Lord richly bless you. And now, good night.”

  Major Logan waited outside in the warm summer air with Reverend Morris. The soldiers who had accompanied them stood off a bit, smoking cheroots. Crickets chirped in the grass, and over the crest of a distant hill, a waxing silver moon rose, but Mrs. Wilkes’s voice inside the church held the greater part of his attention. When she asked the ladies to stand and drop one of their petticoats, Reverend Morris choked as if he’d swallowed a rattlesnake. His accusatory gaze darted to Logan as if he’d brought some horrible corrupter to church instead of a God-fearing woman.

  Logan smiled faintly and shrugged. She had surely raised a ruckus. The pastor crossed his arms over his chest and frowned, tapping his foot. There wasn’t anything he could do to stop her now, for he couldn’t enter the church if the women were shucking their underwear.

  A few minutes later, the ladies streamed out of the church, chattering to one another.

  Penelope Morris exited last, and she chuckled at her husband’s grim face. “There, there, Obadiah,” she said as she took his arm. “It’s for a good cause.”

  Logan didn’t wait to see the reverend’s response and went into the church. There the miscreant stood, surrounded by heaps of white.

  “Well, Mrs. Wilkes, I’ve said it before. You definitely have some unorthodox ideas.”

  Kate beamed at him. “Do you have any idea how many bandages I can get out of these?”

  “Knowing you, I’m sure you’ll multiply them like the loaves and fishes.”

  She laughed as if she didn’t have a care in the world, and the sound of it pierced his heart. Her eyes sparkled, and for an awful moment he had a terrible impulse to kiss her right then and there.

  “Let’s get these loaded,” he said brusquely. “We need to get back.”

  He lit the lamps on the carriage, and they stuffed most of the petticoats behind the bench seat. The rest were tied down behind the soldier’s saddles, much to their amusement.

  The major let the horses take their lead as they ambled down the lane. Mrs. Wilkes seemed lost in her thoughts and made no attempt to initiate a conversation. So he remained silent, too, wondering if she had truly forgiven him.

  They were close to camp when she shifted on the seat and looked at him. “Major,” she asked hesitantly, “have you a family back home?”

  He transferred the reins to one hand and adjusted his sword more comfortably. “No. Just my mother, in Buffalo, New York. My father is dead.”

  “No wife?”

  He snorted. “No.”

  “A sweetheart then?”

  He sighed. “No.”

  “I don’t mean to intrude. We’ve worked together all these months, and I’ve never known if you had a family. You never speak of it.”

  “You never speak of yours, either, Mrs. Wilkes.”

  She caught her breath. “I don’t suppose I do.”

  “If you tell me your story, I’ll tell you mine.”

  She hesitated. “I haven’t spoken about it to anyone. I’ve tried to forget.”

  He turned to look at her. “Perhaps it would unburden you to speak of it?”

  The positive response of the Calvary Baptist women and the mellow summer dusk had lulled her into a serenity she had rarely experienced since Henry’s death. That and the underlying note of real interest and concern in Major Logan’s voice. Perhaps it would help if she could relax her guard and speak of it. She could give him the basic facts without revealing the terrible thing she had done to her husband.

  “My husband, Henry, was taken prisoner in late 1861 and sent to a camp in Georgia. I received a telegram that he was being released. I hadn’t seen him in a year, and I stood on the platform in Paducah as the train pulled into the station, searching every window for a glimpse of him.” She cleared her throat. “After the passengers had disembarked, one of the porters approached me. They had Henry in a special car at the rear of the train. They carried him off on a stretcher—” She choked and pulled a handkerchief from her pocket. “I didn’t recognize him. He was filthy and emaciated, delirious with fever. Bloodstained bandages covered the stump of his leg. Somehow I got him home. Cleaned the vermin from his body. Fed him beef tea through a mouth with bleeding gums and teeth missing from scurvy.” She sighed. “When I shaved off his matted beard, his cheekbones were sharp enough to cut paper. The fever broke on the second day, and he recognized me. We had one day together before the fever returned. I held him against me all night, trying to stop the chills that racked his body.” Her voice thickened. “But it was no use. He died in my arms shortly before dawn.”

  She clenched her fists in her lap. “His suffering was over. But I couldn’t forget the stories he told me. Of the sick and injured soldiers left to fend for themselves without a covering to protect from the cold night of winter or the blazing Georgia summer sun. Of rations so rotten they were inedible. Of the nights that he felt so alone that only calling out to God kept him sane, while others around him raved in the fury of fever and hunger.”

  She relaxed her fists and leaned back. “At the end, he was grateful to be able to come home to die in the peace and warmth denied to those men still interned in prison camps and hospitals. That’s why I came, Major Logan. I had to do something, anything to alleviate the pain.”

  “And you have done some remarkable work, Mrs. Wilkes,” he said gruffly.

  “Even though you were ready to send me home the first day?”

  “Yes. I admit it now. You’ve proved a blessing to the men.” And me, he thought. When had it begun, this awakening in the morning with his first thought about her? Seeing her face. Knowing she was there.

  “Your turn,” she said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “You said you’d tell me your story, if I told mine.”

  “Yes.” He shrugged. “There isn’t much to tell. I lost my leg at Bull Run. Minie ball. Like so many other men.”

  She nodded.

  “I was engaged to be married to a girl back in Buffalo. Beth.” A pang went through him as he spoke her name. “I wrote to tell her of my injury. Of course, she was horrified and said she would do her best to take care of me after the war. After the wedding we would live with her parents until we could have our own home. She had plans, she said. She was sewing tablecloths and embroidering napkins. Collecting things for the house.”

  He pulled a pipe out his pocket. “Do you mind?”

  She shook her head. “Go on.”

  He lit the pipe, puffed, and blew a smoke ring into the air. “The strange thing was, while she sounded happy, planning our future, it struck me wrong somehow. As if she was trying to convince herself. It didn’t ring true.” He snorted. “Turned out I was right. I didn’t have a letter for a solid month, and then one finally came. After much prayer and contemplation,” he said, in a sarcastic tone, “she had come to realize that it wouldn’t work. She attributed the fault to herself, said she was weak. That she’d never been good around blood or illness. So that was that.”

  “I’m so sorry, Major.”

  “So was I.” He smiled faintly. “Perhaps it was for the best. I couldn’t have borne it if she had married me out of pity.”

  “She doesn’t know what a good man she’s put aside. You deserve better.”

  “Thank you for that.”

  “I mean it,” she said. “I have no use for insincere flattery.” She smiled then, and his heart turned over in his chest. She was so beautiful.

  When the carriage pulled into camp, he dismounted and helped her down, resisting the urge to let his hands linger about her waist. Together they stacked the petticoats on a long table in the camp kitchen.

  “Thank you, Major,” she said when they had finished. She hesitated and then smiled at him. “There is someone special out there for you, Major. I know it.”

  I know it too, he thought, watchin
g the petite redhead walk away.

  Chapter Seven

  General Sherman marched farther south and Kate, Major Logan, Private Bennett, and the portable hospital moved with him. President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, had deprived the South of much of its labor force, and the tide of war was slowly turning in the Union’s favor. The siege of Vicksburg, the “Gibraltar of the South,” had begun. Army units surrounding the city reported heavy casualties, and the camp hospital overflowed with the wounded.

  Extra pots of beef stew and corn bread had been made for the units passing by the camp all day, and Kate and her ladies fed every soldier they could. With no time to think and barely time to eat or sleep, the nurses took shifts around the clock to attend the sick and injured.

  A young soldier was brought in soaked with blood from head to toe. A bullet had ploughed a furrow along the side of his head, and he remained unconscious, although the wound had been field bandaged and the bleeding had stopped. As Kate washed the blood off his still form, the gray color of his bloodstained jacket became visible.

  A Confederate boy.

  Kate swiftly removed his uniform and hid it under the thin mattress. Across the aisle a soldier stirred and rose up on his elbow. “Well,” he drawled, “whatcha got there, ma’am? Looks like a Johnny Reb.”

  It was Lieutenant Baldwin, a grizzled, foulmouthed farmer from Missouri brought in a week ago with a compound fracture of the tibia. Although Major Logan had set it, the wound became gangrenous and the leg had to be amputated above the knee. Each day Baldwin became more bitter and morose and less interested in anything going on in the ward. Until now.

  She turned and shot him a fierce glare. “You don’t have a dog in this fight, Lieutenant.”

  He smirked back at her. “Couldn’t find his own people, I guess. We jes’ might have to do somethin’ about that.”

  “You will do nothing,” she said in a low voice, not wanting to attract any more attention. “He’s a boy.”