do you know how close you are to insubordination?”
“No, sir. It’s high praise I’m giving and not insubordination at all, sir. You have turned yourself into a good, sensible officer…” The rest of the sentence hung in the air unsaid.
Until now.
“Thanks to you, you mean,” Thomas said.
“It was my pleasure, sir,” La Broie said, almost but not quite smiling.
“Get going,” Thomas said. “I mean it.”
He went back upstairs. Abiah seemed to be asleep. He opened the armoire and searched until he found her portmanteau, but then immediately disregarded it as too awkward to carry. He took a pillow slip instead and went from drawer to drawer, dumping in things he barely bothered to identify—stockings, undergarments, a frayed wool shawl, a hairbrush.
There was a sudden commotion downstairs. He swore and drew his revolver, trying to identify the source.
“Cap!” La Broie yelled, and Thomas ran to the landing. The sergeant had ridden his mount into the front hall and he was leading Thomas’s bay. Both horses were having trouble getting their footing and both were wild-eyed at the straight chairs and small tables crashing around them.
“Hand your lady down, sir!” La Broie yelled. “The sons of bitches are almost here!”
Thomas ran back to do just that. Abiah was trying to get out of bed. He gave her no explanation of any kind. He grabbed her and the pillow slip and a quilt, leaving everything else behind and carrying her bodily out of the room. Halfway down the stairs, he handed her roughly over the banister to La Broie and tossed the pillow slip after her. The sergeant’s mount pranced and reared at the loose-flowing quilt, but La Broie held him in.
“Hurry, sir!”
Thomas mounted the bay with some difficulty, then took Abiah out of La Broie’s arms. She was completely limp, and he could hardly hold on to her.
“I’m going to let them see me, Cap,” La Broie said. “I’ll meet up with you at the river—”
He gave Thomas no time to approve or disapprove the plan as he urged his captured horse back out the front door and leaped in a great arc off the porch.
What’s happening? Abiah kept thinking. She tried to follow the conversation around her, but it made no sense.
“Will you kindly shoot this man, Sergeant La Broie? My hands are full.”
“My pleasure, Cap. Or if you want him skinned alive and roasted over a hot fire with a stick—”
Abiah winced at the specifics.
“—I can do that, too, sir.”
“No. No, a ball between the eyes will do. You’ll have to excuse the sergeant here. He’s just come from the West. They handle things a bit differently out there. You and I are more apt to just kill a man outright when he irks us. But where the sergeant comes from, they like to savor the demise. Who was it you learned that from, Sergeant?”
“Apaches, sir. And, of course, the—”
“All right! I’ll take you across,” a third voice said. “You Yankees are damned attached to your whores, is all I got to say—”
There was scuffling then. Abiah cried out.
“Abby,” Thomas’s voice said close to her ear. She tried to answer him and couldn’t. Then she lost his voice and the others in a wave of soft, white nothingness.
It was raining when she heard voices again. She could feel the raindrops beating down on her face.
“I’ve got no room here, Captain.”
“Well, make room, damn it!”
“Where? We’ve got more wounded men than we can handle! You wouldn’t want to leave her here, even if there was a place for her. Who would take care of her, sick as she is? Look, why don’t you try one of the churches? Maybe there’s somebody there who can take her in.”
And then they were riding through the darkness again.
“I think you better let me take her, Cap,” a man’s voice said. “You go get Major Gibbons satisfied so he don’t have you shot. I’ll see to your lady.”
She heard Thomas swear.
“Ain’t no other way, Cap,” the man said. “I got a notion about what we can do—where I can take her.”
“We’ve been everywhere,” Thomas said.
“I’m thinking Gertie would take care of her—but she’d have to have money to replace what she’d get otherwise. How much have you got?”
“Are you out of your mind? She’s a camp follower. She is not somebody who goes around ministering to the sick with a basket on her arm.”
“We ain’t got much choice, Cap—and Gertie ain’t had much in the way of choices, neither. She’s a good girl, Gertie is. You can’t fault a woman for what’s she’s had to do to keep herself alive. I’m telling you, she’ll take good care of Miss Abiah—if she’s got money enough to do it with. Like you said, we’ve been everywhere. The only thing we ain’t done is break down somebody’s front door and hold a gun on them until they turn into the Good Samaritan. I say we quit going around Robin Hood’s barn here and get Miss Abiah in out of the rain, sir—and I don’t think she’d be very happy if she knew she was the cause of your court-martial.”
Abiah stirred at the last remark, trying to raise up. But she couldn’t manage it, no matter how hard she tried.
“We ain’t far from the Lacey house,” the man said. “You go on there and let Major Gibbons see you. Tell him, if he asks, that I was wrong. Say the colonel didn’t send you no place, you been around here all the time. Say you been trying to account for the wounded and missing out of your company. I’ll take care of Miss Abiah and then I’ll find you.”
“La Broie—”
“Give me your money and your lady, sir.”
“Abby, can you hear me?” Thomas said, his breath warm against her ear. “Abby…?”
She strained toward the sound of his voice, but the harder she tried to hear it, the more it drifted away. The soft whiteness closed over her.
What’s happening?
She tried to focus on her surroundings, but the light was too poor. She could see a candle burning on a table to her right, and a fire burning in the fireplace. It was raining still—it always seemed to rain after a battle. She could distinctly hear the patter of raindrops against the window.
