corsets. The heat and humidity had frizzed her hair and dampened her dress under the arms. She had set up her sewing machine in the little room off the kitchen so she could converse with Portia and still run to answer the bell if her grandmother needed her. She’d have been smarter to find a place that would catch a breeze.
She put another length of burlap under the needle and pressed the foot treadle. No telling how many sandbags it would take to construct the redoubts that General Butler had ordered to be built around the northern and western edges of the city. Nothing she did was going to end the war. But if she didn’t help in these small ways, she would be considered disloyal, maybe even Lincolnite.
She shoved her spectacles higher on her nose. She had a lot of respect for Mr. Lincoln, even if he was a Yankee. If the menfolk would talk things over and solve things without blowing each other to smithereens, the world would be a better place. Early in the war, she’d questioned Papa about his stance on secession. Why, she wanted to know, didn’t they work things out through the legislative process, like the Founding Fathers intended?
At first he’d put her off, saying the whole thing was too complicated to explain to a child. When she persisted, he put down his newspaper and glared. “Because there’s more of them than there are of us. They refuse to let us choose the way of life that’s best for us. Every man has the right to examine his conscience and free his slaves or keep them. No Yankee lawyer or mill owner or journalist can understand the economics that drives our plantation system.” Camilla must have looked as if she didn’t understand it either, because her father removed his spectacles irritably. “Camilla, what’s going to happen to all those field slaves when they’re turned loose all of a sudden? The plantations will be bankrupt, so who’s going to support the poor creatures? They’re better off where they are.”
Camilla knew little about economics, and it seemed to her any human being was better off free, but Papa’s refusal to consider a person with black skin totally human made arguing with him pointless. She’d be switched, though, if she’d let him sell his soul by building a Confederate war vessel.
She bit off a thread and threw one more bag onto the pile growing beside her chair. The obvious solution to thwarting the construction of that boat would be to wait until it was built, then somehow sink it, like they’d done in New Orleans. Maybe the waste of time and expense would make them give up. Or maybe by then the war would be over.
A thought occurred to her that she almost pushed away. Disloyal. Crazy. Dangerous.
But she couldn’t seem to shake it, no matter how furiously she ran the sewing machine and sang hymns at the top of her voice.
She was undoubtedly stirring up trouble in her own mind. God wasn’t talking to her, and she couldn’t spy on her own Papa.
But she had already done that, however unwittingly. And look what it was leading to.
Had God allowed her to overhear that conversation so she could do something about it? Get hold of the plans to that boat and pass it to the Yankees? How could she trust some Northern agent she didn’t even know? How could she be sure he’d confiscate the submarine without destroying her family in the process?
Besides, the only Yankees she knew were Harry’s family in Tennessee—and Harry himself. She had no idea where he was. No help there.
She forced herself to sit quietly and pray. I don’t know where to start. I feel like Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, must have felt, waiting for the spies to arrive. You protected her and her family, so You can do the same for me. Just show me the way. Amen.
Sighing, she opened her eyes. In her experience, God sometimes took a long time to answer prayers, and then when He got around to it, He’d do it in strange and often uncomfortable ways.
One of the kitchen bells, attached to strings running all over the house, jangled. Camilla jumped to her feet. “I’ll see what she wants, Portia!” She hurried upstairs, running from her tangled thoughts.
Since Lady liked to have access to the everyday activities of her family and servants, her sitting-room door always stood open. Camilla skidded to a stop and made a rather breathless entrance.
A striking young man rose from his seat on Lady’s pink velvet sofa. At six feet, he seemed a giant in her grandmother’s small, elegant room. His bow was correct, but the hard angles of his face and the assessing gleam in his black eyes struck her as anything but polite.
Camilla dropped a curtsy and forced her gaze to her grandmother.
Lady inclined her head toward the gentleman. “Reverend Leland, I’d like to introduce my granddaughter, Camilla, who occasionally remembers her upbringing. Camilla, this is the Reverend Gabriel Leland, late of Bogue Chitto. We’re going to make him welcome as he begins a new ministry here in Mobile.” Lady smiled and jangled the bell again. “Close your mouth, child, and sit down. Portia will bring our tea.”
Jerking the spectacles off her face and sliding them in her pocket, Camilla obeyed. This dark young man who looked like the incarnation of Lucifer himself was a minister?
With thinly glazed disappointment, Gabriel watched Mrs. St. Clair’s young granddaughter pour tea. Virgil Byrd’s information that his “Missy” lived in the big white house on the corner of Dauphin and Ann streets had given him high hopes that he’d find the mysterious woman he sought—a woman who, granted, could be anybody from daughter of the house to a kitchen maid. To his relief, early this morning he’d been admitted as a visiting minister without question.
Mrs. St. Clair, white hair piled high, dressed from head to toe in pink, had graciously invited him into a room with porcelain butterflies floating on every surface. It always delighted her, she said, to find young people so diligent in serving the Lord and their country. At his request for an introduction to the charity hospitals and soldiers’ libraries, she regretfully confessed that her health no longer permitted her to go about as she once had. She then exceeded his wildest hopes by offering to send her granddaughter to accompany him.
But instead of the clever adventuress he’d been hoping to meet, into the room had burst this little hoyden. She couldn’t be more than fourteen or fifteen years old.
Mrs. St. Clair gently tapped her spoon against the fragile rim of her cup. “Tell me about your people, Reverend Leland.”
Gabriel stuck to a story he’d developed over the course of the past few years. “My father’s family are Louisiana indigo planters. My mother is a Faulkner from East Mississippi.”
“Indeed?” Mrs. St. Clair raised finely arched brows. “Perhaps my daughter, who lives in Columbus, is acquainted with the family.”
“Possibly. We’ve not visited there in several—” A strangled squeak from the granddaughter stopped him. “Miss St. Clair?” He stifled his impatience.
She mopped at a tea stain spreading across her lap. “I’m not Miss St. Clair,” she mumbled, pink-faced.
Gabriel frowned. Southern inbreeding had evidently taken its toll on the poor creature. She didn’t even know who she was.
“Camilla, the purpose of a saucer is to prevent such spills.” Amusement and affection laced Mrs. St. Clair’s admonition. “Reverend, I should explain that Camilla’s mother was my younger daughter. She is, perhaps unfortunately, a Beaumont rather than a St. Clair.”
That was when it hit him that he knew this family. Or knew of
