Jack stepped up to the back door while the others washed up at the well in the backyard. “There’s an Irish Brigade forming in St. Louis.” With a glance over his shoulder, he stepped into the room. “You’ll be fine. You’ve Paddy to help with the chores, the planting is nearly done, and the neighbors will help with the harvest if we aren’t back. It’s almost perfect timing, when you think about it.”
Maggie sputtered a protest. “There’s nothing ‘perfect’ about it.”
Jack refused to argue. “Dr. Feeny’s seen the brigade flag. Green silk, with a gold harp that harkens back to our own Cuchlainn,” Jack said. “Wouldn’t Da have loved to see an Irish warrior honored that way?”
“Don’t you be bringing Da into it, may the good Lord rest his soul. As if he’d like seeing his sons march off to—to who knows what.”
Jack poured himself a cup of tea and settled at the table. “One man buyin’ and sellin’ another is wrong, Maggie.”
“No one’s sayin’ otherwise, but it’s someone else’s quarrel. Let the Americans settle it and leave us be, that’s what I say.”
Jack’s blue eyes flashed with emotion as he said, “I’m an American now, Maggie-girl, and if I’m to fight, I’ll be on the side I choose. As will Seamus.”
Maggie snatched the basket of leftover breakfast biscuits from atop the stove and plopped it onto the table. “Are you tellin’ me I’ve nothing to say in the matter?”
“You’ve said plenty, Maggie-girl,” Jack said gently, “and we’ve listened. To every word. And now we’re going to do our duty.”
Maggie swallowed. She looked toward the back door, where Seamus and Dr. Feeny stood, with Uncle Paddy barely visible just behind them. “Well, don’t just be standin’ there. I’ve hot tea and biscuits and I suppose the lot of ya will be talkin’ half the night.” She motioned them into the room and toward the table. “Get on with it, then.” She glanced Dr. Feeny’s way. “There’s stew in the soup pot and you’re welcome to share our supper, such as it is. I’ve a cow to milk down at the barn. If you all get hungry before I’m back, help yourselves.”
“It’s early yet,” Uncle Paddy protested. “There’s no need—”
Maggie didn’t wait to hear what he said. She made her escape just as the first tear leaked out. She swiped it away with the back of one hand and trudged down the hill to the barn, where she could be safely out of sight before any more tears dared make their appearance.
Chapter 2
So this is what it feels like when your heart breaks. Maggie pressed one palm to her chest in a vain attempt to relieve the pain as she watched Jack and Seamus march away, up the road and toward the distant ridge, with Kerry-boy padding along at their side. Not until she caught the last glimpse of Jack’s broad shoulders and Seamus’s narrow ones did Maggie turn away.
Just at that moment, the sun lost the battle it had been fighting with gathering clouds all day. As Maggie retreated through the gate leading into the farm yard and hurried onto the front porch of the family’s log house, great drops of rain began to fall, rattling the dry leaves still lying at the base of the oak trees in the pasture just east of the house. Sheltered from the rain, she glanced after the boys again, and then toward Uncle Paddy’s unpainted two-room shack south of the barn.
Paddy was probably in the barn. He tended to work things off by polishing harness and mucking out stalls. If that didn’t work, he’d grab a currycomb and go over the Belgian team’s already-gleaming coats. Babe and Banner more than earned their keep, but thanks to Paddy Devlin, they also knew a more pampered life than most of the humans in nearby Littleton.
As rain began to fall in earnest, Maggie lingered on the porch, wishing with everything in her that she’d made good on her threat in recent days to tie the boys to their respective bedposts—if that was what it took to keep them home. “Should have put collars on the both of them,” she muttered, and then winced at the memory of the first time she’d seen a collar used to control a man. Men. Three of them, connected by a chain and shuffling their way off a steamboat under the watchful eye of an auctioneer bringing “new stock” for a spring auction in nearby Lexington. The memory made her shudder.
Stepping to the edge of the porch, Maggie extended her hand out into the storm, cupping her palm upward as the rain fell. Absent the narrow fringe of lace at the edge of her sleeve, it would be easy to mistake that hand for a man’s. You’ll be all right, Jack had said, confident that between the two of them his sister and uncle could keep the farm going. She supposed he was right, but that didn’t make it any easier to see them leave. Pulling her hand back out of the rain, Maggie flicked the moisture away and swiped her palm against her apron.
Finally, the rain began to let up. The clouds broke, dappling her new flower bed with pale sunlight. Maggie stepped down and began to pull weeds, inhaling the pungent aroma of fresh-washed earth. While she worked, she relived the final argument she’d had with Jack and Seamus, thankful that she’d finally relented and made peace with her brothers. She’d sat up half the night making Seamus his own mending kit—a replica of the one a teary-eyed Bridget Feeny had presented to Jack yesterday afternoon. The soldiers called them housewives, Bridget said. Making one for Seamus had given Maggie something productive to do last night, when sleep simply would not come.
She would cherish the memory of Seamus’s smile when he’d found his own “housewife” waiting on his breakfast plate this morning. They’d joked the next few moments away, almost as if the day were like any other, and Maggie was grateful. She could never stay angry with either of her brothers for long. They’d been good boys and they’d grown into good men. She’d die for them if it came to it.
There it was again. That word dying. Sniffing as she pulled yet another handful of weeds, Maggie stood up and headed inside. Reaching into her apron pocket, she withdrew a kerchief and blew her nose. Just as she stepped across the threshold, she thought she heard a distant bark.
Wheeling about, she saw the dog just as he bounded into view from the direction the boys had taken only moments ago. Dog. Kerry-boy was nearly the size of a pony. Thanks to the rain, his wiry, wheat-colored fur stuck out in all directions. Dark whiskers made it look as though he’d shoved his face in a pile of ashes. Were they coming back, then? Joy surged through her as Maggie called out, “Kerry-boy! Here, boy!”
At the sound of her voice, the dog skidded to a halt in the middle of the road. He gazed back the way he’d come, waiting. Or… not waiting. Just… wishing. When the dog finally turned about and padded to her side, Maggie placed one broad hand atop his massive head and muttered, “Sent you home, did they.”
Kerry-boy snorted.
“I know,” Maggie said. “I’m of the same mind. I’d have gone with them myself, if it weren’t for the farm.” Of course it was a ridiculous notion, two brothers going off to war with a sister in tow. Who ever heard of such a thing?
Slapping her thigh to encourage Kerry-boy to follow her, Maggie made her way toward the well at the back of the house, intent on drawing a bucket of water, both to give Kerry-boy a drink and to wash her hands. Maybe the boys were right. Maybe they’d be home in a few weeks—home, with grandiose tales of bravery in battle and oh, please God, whole in body and in spirit. They both seemed to think that going off to war was a grand adventure. As if marching across a field in the face of cannon and artillery fire were nothing more than a lark.
With a crash and a flash, the skies opened again. Maggie dashed in the back door with Kerry-boy at her heels, hoping the boys were already on board the steamboat they’d be riding downriver to St. Louis, warm and dry and safe. Safe. Dear, sweet Lord in heaven… keep them safe. She looked about her at the empty house. And then, sinking into the rocking chair by the fireplace, Maggie hid her face in her hands and wept.
In the days after Jack and Seamus left, Maggie plunged into the work of the farm at a feverish pace. Hating the way her footsteps echoed in the empty house, she spent most of her time in the garden, in the barn, i
n the pasture—anywhere but inside. She cleaned out the chicken coop and reinforced the wire fence about the chicken yard to the point that Uncle Paddy asked if she was expecting an entire army of raccoons to attack some night.
“Well, if it were to happen,” Maggie said, grinning, “we wouldn’t lose a feather.”
She didn’t know when she first noticed the change about Paddy, but it dawned on her toward the end of the first week of life without the boys that whenever she saw him, Paddy’s old musket was either cradled in his arms or leaning against a nearby fencepost or barn wall. When she teased him about it, all Paddy did was shrug and mutter something to the effect that it didn’t hurt to be prepared.
“Prepared for what?” Maggie asked.
“I promised your brothers I’d mind the place ’til they returned.” He paused. “And watch over their sister.”
Maggie snorted. She didn’t need watching over, and surely Jack and Seamus knew it.
Paddy read her mind. “Now, don’t raise your hackles over it, Mary Margaret. The boys promised your father and I promised them, and a young lady should be grateful for family that loves her as much as do your brothers and myself.” The sprightly old man who rarely spoke without some teasing remark or a twinkle in his eye was suddenly serious. “Much as I hate to give breath to it, dearie, I believe we are in for some difficult times. ’Tis best to be prepared. And I’m not speakin’ of reinforcing the chicken coop against a regiment of raccoons.”
Something about Paddy’s tone washed the spunk right out of Maggie’s attitude. “What else do you think needs doing?”
Paddy tugged on his grizzled beard. “Do ya really want to know?”
“I do.”
He looked about the place, considering. “We should take care to lock the barn at sundown. When you retire, you must be certain to lower the bars across both doors—front and back.” He paused. “It wouldn’t hurt if you took the old Plains Rifle down from over the hearth and kept it where you could get to it if the need arose. And if I had my way, you’d get your da’s pocket pistol out of his trunk. I can show you how to clean it. And maybe a little practice shooting at some bottles out in the yard for a few evenings.”
Maggie frowned. “I’m the best shot in the family.”
“Not with that pistol you aren’t,” Paddy said. “Not yet, anyway. But I’ve no doubt that you would be, were you to take my advice.”
He was truly concerned. Maggie asked him why.
Paddy shrugged. “There’s a certain kind of snake that slithers about in times of strife.”
Mention of snakes made Maggie think back to the morning after the boys left, when she’d seen Walker Blair talking to Paddy across the garden fence. “Did Mr. Blair say something worrying?”
“It’s not so much what he said, Mary Margaret, as what he didn’t say.”
Maggie frowned. “So then. What didn’t the man say?”
“He didn’t say he’d be praying for the good Lord to bring our boys back to home safely. And when I asked about news from town, he didn’t say much—beyond a grumble regardin’ a meeting at Turner Hall. Apparently the Unionists have outgrown the room above Irving’s mercantile.”
Maggie had been surprised to see Blair’s gleaming carriage parked in the road that day, the driver waiting patiently while his owner talked to Uncle Paddy. Save for the girls who flirted with Jack and Seamus, neither the planters nor their families paid the Malones any mind. And why would they? The only thing they had in common was that they happened to populate the same Missouri county. Any resemblance ended there.
The Malone men had felled trees and built the log house and every other building on their farm with their own hands. Walker Blair had arrived in Littleton with money to spare and enough slaves to clear his land, plant his hemp, and fire the bricks needed to raise a two-story mansion. The Malones socialized with other farmers at barn dances and box suppers, while the planters hosted cotillions and barbeques. The divide between the two classes of citizens had already been wide when Southern states began to secede from the Union, but it had been peaceable—at least on the surface.
Maggie thought back to that day a few weeks ago, before the boys had left for St. Louis, and how trapped she’d felt when Serena Ellerbe and her friends came mincing into the mercantile. When Maggie had commented on the ride home how Serena had feigned a bout of the vapors, Jack had only laughed.
“ ’Tis a game, Maggie, and a harmless one at that. I’ve no doubt that every one of them will be betrothed to a planter’s son within the year.” He winked. “Or, perhaps, a Virginia cousin. In the meantime, they’re adventuring a bit of a flirtation with an Irishman, in the hopes it will rile their parents. Which it will. They’re spoiled children playing at life.”
If Paddy’s instincts were right, things had changed, now that the war had come to Missouri. No one was “playing at life” now. She remembered the anger in that room above the store when they met that day, the epithets sworn against the rebels and anyone who supported their cause. It only made sense that the planters would be just as firm in their beliefs. Did Walker Blair and the rest of the Lafayette County planters think of the Malones as “the enemy” now? The notion sent a chill up her spine.
“Did ya hear what I said, Mary Margaret?” Paddy’s voice called her out of the fog and back to the moment.
“Da’s pistol. You want me to carry it,” she said.
“Aye. Does it frighten ya to hear me speak of it?”
Maggie shook her head.
“This evenin’, then, for the cleanin’ and such. I’ll retrieve some bottles and cans and set us up for a shootin’ match in the mornin’.” Paddy headed back to the middle of the garden, uprooting weeds with the hoe as he walked.
Maggie retreated to the house for a basket and returned to the garden to harvest green beans. After dousing the mess of beans in a bucket of clean well water, she carried them inside, then took time to swing the soup pot over the fire, where its contents would simmer until she and Paddy came in to supper. She strung green beans to hang from the hooks Seamus had placed at intervals along the bare rafters of the room that took up the entire west side of the cabin. Once they were dried, she’d take them down and store them in the cellar. And all the while, she wondered about Jack and Seamus and worried over what Walker Blair’s talking to Paddy might mean. She wondered when Jack and Seamus would write and wished they hadn’t gone in the first place. She pondered Paddy’s thinking she needed a weapon and that they should lock the barn and bar the door and—ouch.
With a mild curse, she looked down at the drop of blood emerging from where the needle had plunged into the tip of her finger. Taking a deep breath, she set the project aside. She could string beans after the sun went down. At the moment, she needed to do something else. Something outside. She needed fresh air and hard work. The kind of work that would make her too tired to worry.
Taking the old rifle and powder horn down from where they hung over the fireplace, she retrieved ammunition and patch, then stepped outside to call Kerry-boy. “Let’s see if we can scare up a rabbit or two,” she said, and set off in the direction of the field beyond the barn where Uncle Paddy was planting the last of the corn.
“Hunting!” Uncle Paddy exclaimed when she told him what she had in mind. “Just when I’ve said we need to be careful?”
“And aren’t I being careful?” she argued. “I’ve a massive dog that would be at the throat of anyone who dared try to hurt me—not to mention a rifle. And I can shoot the ears off a rabbit at fifty yards.” She thought Paddy might be weakening, and so she added a promise to stay off the road and on Malone property. “I won’t stay away long,” she said. “I just need—I’m as nervous as a colt who’s just been separated from his dam. I need to walk it off.”
“All right,” Paddy said. “But you be back long before sundown or I’ll be settin’ out after ya.” As she marched away, he called after her, “Keep yer wits about ya, and remember what I said about snakes.”
Maggie raised her hand to let him know she’d heard what he said. She already felt better.
“Good dog,” Maggie said as she grabbed the rabbit she’d just shot by the hind leg and held it up for inspection. Kerry-boy whimpered a request. “Not until we get home, boy-o,” Maggie said. Kerry-boy shook his head in what Maggie took to be disdain. It made her laugh. How good it felt to laugh.
As she made her way home, she reveled in the sound of her own sturdy boots stepping along through the tall grass and the whisper of breeze tickling the back of her neck and making the blooming wildflowers bob and sway. She paused before topping the last hill toward home and spoke sternly to the dog. “Now, I’m going to lay this rabbit down while I make myself decent.” She lowered the rifle to the earth first and waggled her finger at the dog, whose golden eyes flicked from the rabbit to her eyes and back again. “I mean it, Kerry-boy. No.”
The dog sat a respectable distance away while Maggie put the rabbit down at her feet and pulled the hem of her plaid skirt down from where she’d tucked it into her belt. Smoothing it into place, she spoke again to the dog. “There, now. The huntress no more.” She’d just picked up the rabbit and the rifle when shots rang out. Kerry-boy leaped to his feet and disappeared over the hill. She heard him snarl. Dropping the rabbit and clutching the rifle in both hands, she broke into a run, but with the first step, her booted foot tangled with the hem of her skirt and she went down on her knees, then fell forward.
Scrabbling her way up to the top of the hill, she peered over the ridge just in time to see Kerry-boy launch himself at a man sitting astride a sway-backed bay down by the barn. The force of the dog’s charge not only knocked the man out of the saddle, but carried him across the bay’s body and at a second rider, who barely had time to turn in the saddle before he, too, was knocked to the ground. Four other riderless horses strained to get free from where they were tied to the barnyard fence. The two men Kerry-boy had attacked now faced a very real danger of being trampled in addition to being torn to pieces by the wolfhound.
Daughter of the Regiment Page 2
