Yankee in Atlanta Read online

  “I am not a spy,” Caitlin broke in.

  Lee’s eyes brightened. “You see! You heard it for yourself, she is a Northerner!”

  “She’s Irish, and you know as well as I do that we have plenty of immigrants in these parts, and them as loyal to the cause as you are.” Her tone was thick with disdain.

  “I would beg you to remember that as the provost marshal of this fine city, it is my oath-bound duty to ferret out deserters, spies, foreigners, Northern sympathizers, and any other such like as would be harmful to the good of our country.”

  “Humph!” Miss Periwinkle snapped opened the wooden shutters and light flooded the small space. “You’ll not bully me or anyone in this establishment or you may find the good doctor not nearly so inclined to oblige that nasty cough of yours. Now good day to you.”

  “Do be advised, Miss McKae.” Colonel Lee leaned against the doorway again. “We do not abide spies in our midst.”

  “I told you, I am not a spy.”

  “Funny. That’s what all seven of those Yankee devils said, all the way to the gallows. The Andrews raiders said they were Union soldiers, but they were dressed as civilians when they tried stealing our train. As I said, we do not abide spies. No matter what they’re wearing.” His eyes seemed to bore through hers.

  Though she did not blink, Caitlin hugged the sheet to her chest as she watched him leave.

  Miss Periwinkle bustled back to Caitlin’s side. “I’m so sorry about that, dear. Rude introductions, indeed.”

  Blood still rushing in her ears, Caitlin wore a tight mask of counterfeit composure as Miss Periwinkle prattled on. “I’m Prudence. Now drink this tea of dandelion root for the pain in your shoulder. I do wish we had some opium for you, but Lil Bit says our tea will do nicely.”

  “I do wish you’d stop calling me that around the patients, Prudence.”

  A white-haired gentleman stepped to Caitlin’s bedside, one hand cradling a pipe and the other resting on the stethoscope about his neck. “Older by fourteen months, and my sister still won’t let me forget it.” The doctor placed the stethoscope on Caitlin’s chest, listening. “You gave us quite a scare, my dear.”

  “What happened?” Her voice creaked. She struggled to sweep the remaining cobwebs from her mind.

  “Quite simply, the Richmond hospitals ran out of room after the Battle of Seven Pines, so they shuttled all who could safely be moved down to us. You’ve had a hard go of it, my girl. Your wound was only part of your trouble. By the time you arrived here, you were in the throes of typho-malarial fever, and unconscious. I imagine you had been for days. Do you remember any of this?”

  Caitlin pressed her fingers to her aching forehead while snatches of memory flickered over her. The wrenching abdominal pain, headache, nausea, fever, and chills. The bullet that tore through her arm, and the Rebel who gave her his jacket as a tourniquet. “I remember some,” she whispered, mind still reeling. Slowly the pieces fit together.

  She’d been reading the Rebel’s Bible, marked with his Georgia regiment, when she passed out. Slowly, the pieces fit together. It must have been in her hand when Confederate medical officers found her with her wound wrapped in butternut grey, an apparent Southern casualty. To Jack and the rest of her own regiment, she was now missing in action.

  Dr. Periwinkle unwound a bandage on her upper arm. “It’s a miracle the ball passed through you without shattering the bone,” he murmured while inspecting the entry and exit wounds. “There is still risk of infection and secondary hemorrhage.” He paused, stroked his handlebar mustache downward. “But you’ll be fine. You remind me so of my own daughter, when she was about your age, Miss McKae.”

  The words pricked Caitlin’s ears. “How do you know my name?”

  Prudence raised her eyebrows. “You told us yourself, dear. But you were in the fever’s grip and I reckon you’ve forgotten the worst of it.”

  Her heart plunged. “Where am I?”

  “Periwinkle Place boarding house. Since war came, we care for convalescents here, too. Wounded Rebels come in from all over to us, on account of our railroads. Lil Bit brought you to me directly so you may recover with privacy, now that you won’t be soldiering anymore.”

  “The South has sent its sons to war—including mine—but we need not send our daughters.” The twinkle returned to the doctor’s eyes. “Your patriotism does you credit, child, but it’s time you just get well and stop pretending to be someone you’re not. No more soldiering, all right? You’re safe now, in Atlanta.”

  Atlanta. The Gate City to the South.

  Caitlin’s spirit flagged, but her face betrayed nothing. She may be able to get well here, but to stop pretending and reveal her true identity would never do.

  Then again, this would be the last place anyone would look for Caitlin McKae.

  Including Jack. The void he left in her heart ached already. And yet, the price she had paid to be with him had exacted a toll only another veteran could understand. Closing her eyes, she allowed herself to imagine a life without marching, drilling, fighting, suffering. A life so far from her past she could stop looking over her shoulder for it.

  She would start over again in Atlanta and make this place her home, at least until she had the means to leave. She had reinvented herself before. She could do it again. She would have to.

  This is not the end, she told herself. It is only a new beginning.

  “ATLANTA HAS BEEN since the commencement of the revolution—a point of rendezvous of traitors, Swindlers, extortionist, and Counterfeiters. The population as a predominant element is a mixture of Jews, New England Yankees, and refugees shirking military duties.”

  —COL. GEORGE WASHINGTON LEE, Provost Marshal of Atlanta

  “WE HAVE LEARNED our lessons well—can cry when we would laugh—and laugh when we would cry … The face must keep its color—white or red—though the heart stops beating or flames up in scorching pain.”

  —CYRENA STONE, Unionist Atlanta resident

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Sunday, July 5, 1863

  Traitor. A rifle butt slammed between Caitlin’s shoulder blades, pitching her forward on the narrow plank. Stumbling, she righted herself again, wrists bound behind her. A dangling rope brushed her face.

  How could you?

  She squinted up at the voice, edged with hatred yet still familiar. Jack? Blood streamed from his chest.

  His hazel eyes blazed. You did this to me.

  No!

  If you do not stand with me, you stand against me.

  The noose was around her neck now, burning like live coals. It is only distance that separates us!

  He shook his head, his hair curling over one eye. It is everything that separates us. The chasm can never be crossed.

  Caitlin looked past Jack to the shallow grave behind him. The seven bodies of the Andrews raiders lay decomposing into one brittle mass. But there was room for one more. Terror pulsed in her ears.

  I had no choice!

  You made your choice. To be one of them.

  I am one of you!

  You are neither.

  A single kick to the scaffold beneath her feet, and—

  “Jack!” With a scream in her throat and fists clenching her collar, Caitlin burst from her nightmare into the hot breath of Atlanta. Surviving in enemy country is not a betrayal! She railed against her recurring dream. I am not a turncoat!

  A knock on the door. “Caitlin? It’s me, Minnie.” She knocked again. “I haven’t got my key.” Caitlin sat up and rolled her neck. The residual fear of her nightmare dissolved under her roommate’s muffled drawl. “You didn’t fall asleep on your books again, did you, honey?”

  At nineteen years of age, Minerva Taylor was four years younger than Caitlin, and she called everyone honey, whether she was truly fond of them or not. As the Atlanta Female Institute’s music teacher whose pupils ranged from the talented to the uncooperative, it was a capacity that proved to be as diplomatic as it was habitual.

&nb
sp; Caitlin tripped on a dog-eared book as she went to open her door. “What else is a Sunday afternoon for if not reading and napping?”

  Minnie shook her head of perfectly coifed sunshine-blonde hair, her face radiant in spite of the pockmark scarring. Parasol in hand, she stepped into the room and shut the door behind her, muting the rowdy conversations of the other boarders at Periwinkle Place. “Reading for pleasure I could understand. But something tells me you’re preparing for your classes. On a Sunday!” She plucked the worn volume from the floor. “Why, we’re almost out for the summer! You’re such a bluestocking!”

  Caitlin’s grin faltered. Her classes were the best thing about Atlanta. When they ended for summer break, she would sincerely miss teaching. Perhaps the Southern sun had addled her brain for her to not hate living here the way she once did. Atlanta had given Caitlin what New York City could not. A way to survive without marrying. Or soldiering.

  She pasted a smile back into place. “And who’s to say I don’t find pleasure in Paradise Lost?”

  “You would.” Minnie laughed, her grey eyes dancing. “But tell the truth. It’s in your curriculum too, isn’t it?”

  “What kind of a literature instructor would I be if it weren’t?” The fact that Caitlin was a literature instructor at all was no small miracle. But the Atlanta Female Institute was only three years old and, with the war calling the men away, in dire need of teachers. Caitlin had been offered the position vacated by an enlisting soldier as a personal favor from the principal to Dr. Periwinkle. That they believed her to be a Confederate veteran had worked to her benefit, as well.

  “What about you?” Caitlin asked, twisting her shoulder-length, cinnamon-colored hair back into place beneath her pins. “Don’t you play the piano and sing when you’re not in class?”

  “Of course I do. But this?” She read the text with a hint of vibrato: “ ‘Live while ye may, Yet happy pair; enjoy till I return, Short pleasures; for long woes are to succeed … ’ That’s just morbid, honey!”

  “What’s morbid is how you completely murdered the iambic pentameter!”

  Minnie shrugged. “I’ve got to let you be better than me in something. Aside from shooting a gun, that is.” Her dimples deepened in rosy cheeks, as they always did when she teased.

  “Let’s leave the past where it lies. I’ve certainly won few friends with mine.”

  “I know you don’t like to talk about your soldiering in the army, but the truth is, I only wish I were as brave as you so I could lick some Yankees myself!”

  But Caitlin had not felt brave in battle. Not with lead tearing toward her and cannons shaking the earth beneath her. Not with men unraveling around her like rag dolls in the mouth of an unseen beast. Not with her lifeblood seeping out of her. She’d been terrified then, and the recollections jangled her still. “Never wish for a fight, Minnie. It is a horrid thing.”

  “But for a just and righteous cause such as ours—”

  “For any cause.”

  Minnie laid a hand on her arm. “I’ve upset you. I’m sorry, honey.” Her gaze traveled to the white line on Caitlin’s jaw, likely assuming it was a mark from the war, and Caitlin did not correct her. “Come, let’s go for a stroll.”

  By the time they stepped out onto Alabama Street, Caitlin’s heart rate had almost returned to its normal pace. Apple peels and peanut shells crunched beneath every step along the busy dirt road where soldiers swarmed between local residents and travelers.

  When two Rebels half-bowed in their direction, Minnie trilled the chorus of the ever-popular Bonnie Blue Flag. “Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights, hurrah! Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.”

  Caitlin smiled at her friend’s beautiful soprano voice, but could not stop the Battle Cry of Freedom from running through her own mind at the same time.

  The Union forever! Hurrah, boys, hurrah!

  Down with the traitors, up with the stars;

  While we rally round the flag, boys, rally once again,

  Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

  “That one’s looking at you,” Minnie whispered.

  Caitlin kept her gaze straight ahead. “Not likely. Or necessary.”

  “Don’t you want to find a beau?”

  “No.”

  “Why ever not? With your education, you could secure quite a husband.”

  “With my education, I don’t need a husband.” She arched an eyebrow. “I can make my own way.”

  Minnie’s jaw dropped. “You don’t mean you’d rather have ‘single blessedness’ instead.”

  “I most certainly do.”

  Their conversation stalled at the corner of Whitehall Street and the railroad tracks. Knots of women and old men huddled in silent groups outside Wittgenstein’s saloon.

  “What is it?” Minnie asked a woman nearby.

  “There is news.” She nodded to the second floor of the building, the Atlanta Daily Intelligencer office. “If we can but survive the waiting for it.”

  Minnie blanched and gripped Caitlin’s hand. “Father.” Jack. “Pray, stay with me until we hear.”

  Hours passed, and the sun glared haughtily down upon them, baking all those who waited, exposed, below it. Sweat pricked Caitlin’s scalp beneath her palmetto hat and bloomed beneath her arms.

  Prudence Periwinkle stood on the fringe of one cluster, clutching a bottle of smelling salts the way young mothers press babies to their chests. Horses swished their tails and pawed at the red dirt road, and the people choked on dust and suspense and fear.

  No one spoke.

  All eyes were on the arched door leading up to the Atlanta Daily Intelligencer office, waiting. News from the West reported that Vicksburg had surrendered. The Confederacy lay cut in two. But every breath still hinged on the news that would come from a little town in the North called Gettysburg.

  Minnie’s whispered prayers were for her father, while Caitlin’s only thought was of Jack.

  “There it is!” someone cried.

  In the shadow of the door’s alcove, someone reached out and fed a ream of papers to hungry hands. Finally, the casualty list had arrived.

  The sheets of names passed through the crowd, sending up wails and moans from nearly all who touched them. When it was Minnie’s turn to read them, her hands shook so fiercely she thrust the pages into Caitlin’s hand.

  “Please,” she whispered, eyes squeezed shut. “Thomas Taylor. Quickly, quickly, I can’t bear another moment.”

  Caitlin scanned the tiny columns of names, the fresh ink now blurred and smudged. Hastily, she skipped to the Ts.

  And found the name.

  “He is …”

  Minnie’s eyes popped open, and Caitlin labored to force out the words. “He was …” She shook her head. “He is at peace.”

  For a moment, Minnie sat in silence, as if frozen by the incomprehensible news. Then her face crumbled, yet she did not make a sound. Caitlin wrapped her arms around Minnie, and the grief of a father’s daughter bled out onto her shoulder. Caitlin’s face was wet with empathy.

  Around them, sorrow thickened in the air, souring every breath. Caitlin tasted no victory in their despair.

  In the edge of her vision, she saw a woman drop to her knees in the dusty road. Heart hammering on her ribs, Caitlin looked once more at the casualty list, slowing when she found the Ps.

  Pelton, Pemberly, Pendleton, Periwinkle … Blood rushed in Caitlin’s ears. Periwinkle, Stuart. Dr. Periwinkle’s son. Prudence’s precious nephew, the one she helped raise and love as a mother would have done. Gone. Prudence bowed down on the street, clawing fistfuls of dirt and letting them crumble over her silver hair.

  The war would not come to Atlanta, they said. But from the fields of Pennsylvania, its long fingers wrapped around its throat with an iron grip. The sons of the city had been slain. They had even been defeated.

  The fissures in the House of Dixie were running deeper, yawning wider. How long would it be before it came crashing down, as
the crack in Edgar Allen Poe’s “House of Usher” had sent it rushing into the sea?

  And if I am here when the Confederacy collapses, will I be saved by the North? Or will I go down with the South?

  Words from her nightmare reverberated in her spirit. You are neither.

  Caught between two nations desperately at war, Caitlin McKae was on her own.

  New York City

  Sunday, July 5, 1863

  “Jesus loves me—this I know, For the Bible tells me so.” Ruby O’Flannery rocked her one-year-old son and relished his warm weight on her lap. “Little ones to Him belong—They are weak, but He is strong.” She hummed the refrain and mused what a difference the truth of the song had made in her life, and in his. Before he was born, she had not wanted him, for reasons too painful to dwell upon. Now however, she could not imagine life without him. He had brought joy back into her life and laughter to her lips.

  Aiden’s eyes drifted closed, and his dimpled hands loosened their grip on the zebras from his wooden Noah’s Ark set. Pressing a kiss to his pillowy cheek, Ruby laid him in his crib and gently brushed copper curls off his forehead.

  “Sleep well, darlin’” she whispered.

  Ruby tiptoed out of the room and descended the wide walnut staircase of the Waverly brownstone just as a knock sounded on the front door. Caroline Waverly, her employer, was reading in the rear parlor, but no matter. This caller was for Ruby—the only caller she ever had.

  She opened the door, a smile already on her lips, to see Edward Goodrich still in his Sunday best. He was not devilishly handsome—she wouldn’t trust him if he was, given her previous experience with that sort. But he was genuine. Kind. His coffee-colored eyes were deep and warm, not mischievous—and certainly not lustful, thank heaven.

  “Is he down?” Edward looked past her to the stairway.

  “You just missed him. You know, sometimes I wonder if you come here for our Bible studies or to play with my wee babe.” Tilting her head in mock disapproval, her smile didn’t fade. “Come in, come in.”