The woman’s voice had a slight tremor in it. Not enough to disarm him, but enough to pique his curiosity as to the cause.
Anger? Fear?
More the former than the latter, he decided. He took the liberty of staring at her. She was too thin and small-breasted for his taste. And she was probably younger than she looked. He had found that to be the case with many of these Rebel women, and he knew from personal experience that near starvation did little to preserve the bloom of youth.
She had ventured out without her bonnet or her shawl, and she was slightly damp from the intermittent rain that had come in fits and starts since his arrival. But she seemed not to notice her missing garb or the weather. He was her focus.
“I am,” he said, meeting her gaze. She looked away, but not quite quickly enough to keep him from seeing the antipathy she worked so hard to keep hidden.
“If you would come with me, Colonel.”
“Why?” he asked, making no effort to do so.
“My father couldn’t meet the train. I have come in his place.”
“And who might your father be?”
“He owns the house where you will be billeted,” she said, clearly determined not to give any more information than she could help.
“I see. And the numerous soldiers who are supposedly under my command. Where would they all be, I wonder?”
Ordinarily, he never objected to spending time in a pleasant and accommodating woman’s company—but this one was neither. And there were certain military protocols to be adhered to. He was the new commanding officer in an occupied town, and no one from the garrison had bothered to meet his train. Indeed, but for a few of his fellow travelers, he didn’t see any of the military about at all.
The woman took a quiet breath. “Some of the soldiers are maintaining the military headquarters. The rest of them are fighting another fire.”
There was a slight emphasis on the word “another.”
“What is burning?” he asked, noticing for the first time a plume of smoke off to his left.
“The school.”
“The children are safe?”
“There were no children there,” she answered, moving away from him. “As you well know.”
“Now how would I know that?” he said reasonably, and he still didn’t follow after her. “I only just arrived.”
She stopped and looked at him. “The United States Congress has seen to it that we here are no longer allowed the luxury of public education—but a fire has somehow started in the school building. It is in real danger of spreading. Every able man is required to put it out, lest the whole town go up in flames.”
He considered it a just fate for this particular town, but he didn’t say so. He glanced skyward. “Perhaps it will rain again,” he said instead.
It was clear from the expression on her face that she had no intention of discussing the weather.
“And perhaps the wind will change in time to spare your army’s storehouses.”
Touché, he thought, and he very nearly smiled.
“Do you usually run errands for the military?” he asked to keep her off balance, and she stiffened slightly.
“My father was asked—ordered—by Major Hunt to retrieve you from the station and take you wherever you want to go. But he isn’t well enough to do so. I came in his stead. I obey my father’s wishes.”
“I see,” he said again. And he was beginning to. She was going to be a dutiful daughter—if it killed her.
“I’ve brought you a horse,” she said, indicating a nearby animal with a military saddle and brand. “I will show you the way either to the house or to your headquarters—or to the fire,” she added as an afterthought. “As you wish.”
She walked on and stepped into a nearby buggy without assistance, then waited for him to untie the horse at the hitching post and mount.
“I am much in your debt, Miss…?”
“Don’t be,” she said. “It was none of it done freely.”
The remark was more matter-of-fact than hostile. He stared at her, impressed by her temerity in spite of himself.
“I prefer the buggy,” he said, for no other reason than to inconvenience her. Her remark warranted at least that—inconvenience.
He had already made arrangements for his belongings to be sent to military headquarters, and he climbed into the buggy beside her without waiting for her permission, sitting down on a goodly portion of her black skirts before she could get them out of the way. She sat there for a moment, struggling not to let him see how much his presence disturbed her. Then, she snapped the reins sharply and sent the horse on.
“No,” he said, when she would have turned the buggy toward the center of town. “That way.”
He pointed in the direction he wanted to go, toward the railroad cut and the outskirts of town. “I insist,” he added in case she believed their destination to be a matter for discussion.
She continued in the direction he indicated, her back ramrod-straight. He could just smell the rosewater scent of her clothes and hair. There were only a few people on the street. All of them turned and stared curiously as they rode past.
“I fear I may have compromised your reputation,” he said.
She made no reply, reining the horse in sharply when it elected to trot.
“Sir, there is nothing out this way,” she said, still struggling with the reins. “If you—”
“I know what is out here,” he interrupted. “And I want to see it.”
It was the third time in his life he had taken this route. The first time had been in the early summer of 1864. He had disembarked from the train—much as he had today—except that then he had arrived in a boxcar with fifty other men and under an armed guard.
He had made a return trip to the depot in late February of 1865. That excursion he didn’t remember at all. He’d been too ill to walk, and several kind souls, who were probably not much better off than he, had carried him. His good friend, John Howe, wasn’t among them, of course. He and John had been captured and sent to the Confederate prison here at the same time, but John had made his escape a month earlier—and with a Rebel girl in tow. John Howe had never been one to do things by halves when it came to women.
The horse finally settled down, and Max indicated where exactly he wanted the woman to take him. When she hesitated, he took the reins from her hands and effected the maneuver himself. She made no protest, regardless of how badly she wanted to, and she kept glancing at him as they rode along.
He had no difficulty locating the entrance to the prison—or what was left of it. He drove the buggy directly over the railroad bridge and into the weeds that now covered the grounds. The stockade walls had disappeared, but there was still more of the place left standing than he had expected. Until now, he had liked to think that General Stoneman, who had been a prisoner of war himself, would have celebrated his raid of the town by leveling the prison entirely and sowing the ground with salt.
But the outer walls of the huge three-story factory building used to confine as many prisoners as was inhumanly possible remained. He got some small satisfaction from seeing that the roof and windows were gone and that the hospital and the cookhouses were mostly rubble. Part of a wall stood here, a chimney there—and all of the giant oak trees inside the compound had been cut down. Only the stumps remained. He couldn’t tell where the stone wells had been, but he could still see the huge burrows in the red clay earth where men had been forced to live and where so many had died. It was only by