Gwyneth Atlee (19 page)

“Sorry, but it’s needful,” he told her. “I’m a surgeon, and I’m obliged
to get you out of these wet things to warm you.”
Somehow she clutched the blanket wrapped around her in the
hopes he wouldn’t take it off. No one—not even a medical officer—
was going to strip her of her clothes! Sodden or not, Union blue or not,
they now composed the sum total of her possessions.
He pulled harder, so hard that the blanket drew tight around her
injured elbow. She gave a hoarse cry and let go, then wept silent tears
as he carefully cut away the jacket.
“Smart of you to put on a boy’s clothes before you went overboard,”
he commented. “Something would have likely caught your skirts and
drowned you if you’d kept to female dress. You’re the first live woman
we’ve pulled out of the river.”
Clumsily, she tried to cover her exposed breasts with her left arm.
“Here. Allow me, miss,” the surgeon told her as he wrapped her in
another, drier blanket. It effectively shielded her from view as he
pulled something from the remnants of her jacket. “What’s this?”
Yvette stared at the sodden black mass in surprise. Her reticule,
which she’d swung behind her back beneath the jacket, remained
with her. Incredibly, her reticule, with its precious secret in the lining,
had survived. She loosened her grip on the blanket to clutch the ruin
of her bag.
Fresh tears blurred her vision, for what good would the pulpy mass
of Russell’s letter do her? After hours in the water, every damning ink
stroke would be river-washed, destroyed. She choked out a sob of
frustration as the surgeon removed her trousers. Even the possibility
of revenge had been lost now.
The silver-haired man tried to console her. “I’ve a daughter your
own age back home in Michigan, and I promise, I’ll watch after you
just as I would her. My name is Henry Millard. When we get back to
Memphis, I’ll take you to the hospital and see to any wounds. In the
meantime, you’ll need to drink from this. It will warm you from the
inside out.”
He pressed a flask to her mouth and tipped it. Yvette swallowed
reflexively and felt the whiskey burn a path from throat to stomach.
She coughed and spat, trying to clear the awful taste of both the
whiskey and humiliation from her mouth.
“Now, you just rest here real quiet,” he admonished, and she realized that this Yankee, like her Gabe, was a kind man. “I have to see to
others now.”
Once more, she tightly shut her eyes against both pain and grief.
How could she rest here when her thoughts were still out
there,
focused like a ray of sunlight through a lens upon the future—and the
man—the Mississippi River had snatched away from her?
Despite Yvette’s pain, despite the whiskey and exhaustion that
blurred the ragged edges of her consciousness, that focused beam
tightened and intensified until she felt her very heart burst into flame.
Instead of using tears to douse that fire, she lay very still, imagining
she watched it burn away, leaving behind only a layer of fine white
ash that could not conceal the glowing coal of hatred beneath it.

By daylight, the Memphis waterfront boiled with activity. Surgeons,
nurses, and medical attendants of every sort had gathered, along with
representatives of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Rescue boats came in
and disgorged drenched, half-frozen passengers from the
Sultana.
The
survivors were covered with dry blankets and assessed for transport
to several area hospitals. The dead were merely covered and left in
long, grim lines.

Darien Russell, a blanket wrapped around his sodden waistcoat,
strode amid the chaos, searching each knot of survivors for a familiar
face. If Yvette Augeron had by some miracle survived this, he had better damned well find her before she started talking.

Darien had always deplored the aftermath of battle, with its bloody
puddles and its shattered limbs, the muteness of the corpses, the wails of
the survivors. The scene at the riverfront this morning was equally
revolting but very different. Instead of gunshot wounds, many of these
victims suffered the peeling, reddened flesh of scalds from the boiler’s
steam or fractures caused by the explosion. Nearly all of these men,
many of whom were emaciated wrecks to start with, shuddered with the
bone-deep cold of the river and the night. The keening cries of the living
rose hideous around him. Only the stillness of the corpses was the same.

For all his searching, he could find no woman, only prisoner after
prisoner and the occasional guard or male passenger. Had fate solved
the problem of Yvette Augeron? Would her body, like her sister’s, surface
in the Mississippi after a few days? Or was it here already?

He decided he must check among the corpses. As he walked among
the rows, lifting cloth after cloth, he felt gorge rise to his throat. It wasn’t
the ashen pallor of the dead that did it, nor was it their hollowed
cheeks or pitiful condition. It was instead the half-lidded stares, both
vacant and somehow accusing, that looked up at him as if to ask,
“How is it
you
still live?”

Did they know, then? About the ugly act that he’d committed to
ensure his survival? Fear conjured up the blond woman he’d struck
down on the promenade.

“I’ve been watching you.” A female voice rose just behind him,
strong and flat and with the broad tones of New England.
Darien nearly jumped out of his skin. But when he turned, he
had to stifle the impulse to laugh out his relief. No living soul could
possibly be less a threat. Round-faced, stout, and with her brown
hair streaked with gray, the woman wore the somber colors of a
Sister of Charity.
He shook his head at his own foolishness. Exhaustion had him
imagining every sort of fancy.
She placed a plump, stub-fingered hand upon his still-damp sleeve.
“While your efforts to locate your comrades are admirable, you’ll do
none of them any good if you take chill and perish. Truly, you should
have been stripped of those wet things when you were pulled from
the river.”
Strange to hear a woman of God speaking so matter-of-factly about
the need to strip a grown man, but he supposed the sister had
undressed her share of wounded soldiers since the war began.
Darien hesitated only a moment before deciding that, for the time
being, a lie would be his best course of action.
“I must find my fiancée.” He struggled to strike the right note of
desperation, and he could see by the change in her expression that
he’d succeeded.
Emboldened, he continued. “We were separated just before the
blast. I’m afraid we had some foolish quarrel. She may not even wish
to see me.”
“You poor man,” the woman crooned.
“I don’t ask her forgiveness,” Darien told the nurse. He would
swear he saw tears welling in the foolish woman’s eyes. “I only ask to
see that she’s alive.”
She grasped his hands in hers. “You must have faith, sir. Would you
like me to pray with you for her safety?”
Pray for Yvette’s safety? His overtired mind wondered if lightning
would strike for such a ruse. But in an instant he dismissed the
thought. The only divinity he believed in was his grandfather’s
prophecy. Surely praying with an old nurse could do no harm. On the
contrary, it might help bolster sympathy. Who knows to what lengths
such a woman might go to help him find his lost “fiancée”?
He nodded, trying to keep the smile from his lips. He thought
perhaps she might take him somewhere more secluded, but this maelstrom
of activity offered its own brand of privacy. Amid so many prayers
and screams, she merely took his hands and bowed her head.
Fearing he’d be observed otherwise, Darien closed his eyes. And as
the old nun prayed that his fiancée would be found safely, he found
himself whispering his own, slightly different version. He prayed that
he would find her shrouded with the dead.

Yvette awakened to the protests of a badly scalded soldier as two
deckhands carried him off the boat at the Memphis waterfront. Staring
after the huge men, she felt mortified by the thought of their hauling
her nude body like a burlap sack of coffee. She’d have to walk if she
wanted to avoid that indignity.

Although she’d warmed considerably during the trip, her elbow
throbbed so intensely that she wished for the comfort of the surgeon’s
flask. She sat up, arranging the blanket to cover her, and tried to
imagine how she was going to manage her reticule, her arm, and her
dignity at the same time.

The silver-haired surgeon returned to see to her.
“Don’t try to get up,” he told her. “I’ll carry you myself.”
Gratefully, she nodded. Although she’d prefer to walk on her own

two feet, the idea that she might drop the blanket had begun to seem
an alarming probability.
“Please be careful of my left arm. It’s terribly painful.”
“May I have a look?”
She felt heat rise to her face. “Surely, not here.”
He smiled sympathetically. “I can see you have a lady’s sensibilities,
but unfortunately, this disaster has left many without clothing. I
assure you, no one is going to be unduly shocked by your bare arm.”
Reluctantly, she rearranged the blanket to let him look at the injured
limb. The inside of the elbow joint had blossomed with angry black
and purple bruising. Swollen to twice its normal size, the arm looked
as if it belonged to someone else.
Yvette had to look away. The sight of the damage made her head
whirl and her stomach lurch.
He asked her to squeeze his hand. She managed, but when he asked
if she could bend the elbow, she turned and glared at him.
“No, and if you attempt to do so, I promise I shall utter the least
ladylike language ever to scorch your ears.”
She could see him struggling to fight back a smile.
“Very well,” he told her. “Instead, I’ll see what I can find to make a quick
sling so we can get you to the hospital without having you pass out.”
Less than ten minutes later, Union surgeon Henry Millard carried
her off the cutter and onto a crowded wharf boat. Crossing it, he
hurried ashore. Instead of stopping to place her among the wounded
soldiers, he carried her directly toward a hack that had been hastily
converted to an ambulance.
Yvette peered over his shoulder and caught a glimpse of something that nearly tore her breath away. Darien Russell, head bowed
and eyes closed, his hands clasped between those of an older
woman in dark dress. An instant later, he disappeared from sight
behind the backs of a group of similarly dressed women carrying
blankets to the new arrivals.
Had that really been Russell, or was she hallucinating? That
possibility seemed more likely than the thought of that Yankee demon
in an attitude of prayer.

“I think this one’s dead. Hasn’t twitched a muscle since we pulled
him off that bale.” The speaker lifted his wrist, then dropped it.
Gabriel wanted to respond, wanted to shout that yes, he was alive,
but his body refused him. He began to wonder, Was it possible he
had
died? Did his spirit merely linger, not understanding that his life had
dissipated in the dark, cold water?
He felt a slight weight settle on his face. Whatever it was itched like
wool. They’d pulled a wool blanket over him. His whole body
twitched in repugnance.
The blanket was pulled back. “Damned if he ain’t still breathin’. I
didn’t feel no pulse. He’s mighty cold, though. Let’s get him one more
blanket and send him on the ambulance.”
Thank God they wouldn’t bury him alive. The thought should have
relaxed him, but something that he must do nagged him urgently.
What? What could it be?
Yvette.
She was still out there, floating with the mule. How much
longer could she last? He had to tell somebody! He had to send them
back to find that floating mule before it was too late. Before she
slipped down beneath the river’s surface, just as he had. Before she
was lost to him forevermore.
Shouted orders reached his ears, and all around him he saw people
moving. Other survivors had been brought here, too, he realized.
Could his friends be among them?
By focusing every shred of energy he possessed, Gabriel managed
to croak out, “Must find them!”
But his effort went unheard amid the confusion and exhausted him
so utterly that he plummeted into a deep sleep.

Darien laid his hand on one of the two attendants loading the
young private into a waiting ambulance.
“Where are you taking him?” he asked.
The brawny, towheaded fellow paused.
“I’m his commanding officer,” Darien lied by way of explanation.
“I’ll need to notify his family.”
The man nodded. “They’ll find him at the Soldiers’ Home, providing that he lives.”
“He doesn’t look too badly burned.”
“Hard to tell. Cold water’ll kill plenty. Excuse me, but we need to
move along.”
Darien nodded and watched the two men load the modified buckboard wagon with several injured men. He didn’t even know the
name of the unconscious private. All he knew was that the man had
twice helped Yvette escape him. If she were still alive, she would likely
check on him. Yvette’s flaws were legion, but she was fiercely loyal,
the least likely person he could think of to abandon a friend in need.
Even one she’d only met in the past few days.
Russell shivered, and his stomach growled its need for hot food
and black coffee. He walked in the same direction the retreating
ambulance had taken. He must restore his strength so he would be
prepared to use the injured private to end this deadly game of cat
and mouse.