His Heart's Revenge (The Marshall Brothers Series, Book 2) (5 page)

Twisting around, Logan caught Mary Catherine by the wrists and quieted her while the colonel slipped away. "Shh, Katy. Hush. Your mama wants to know this secret. Trust me."

But that was the same thing the colonel had said, and he was as much the enemy as Logan Marshall. Mary Catherine did not trust anyone. The tears that flooded her eyes dripped over her cheeks. "Don't tell," she pleaded. "Everything will change. Terrible things will happen. You can't understand about secrets like this."

Logan hugged Mary Catherine to him. The front of his shirt was damp with her tears. He watched Colonel Allen move toward the door. "Don't bother sending for someone to throw me out," he said, correctly divining Allen's intentions. "I'm leaving, and I'm taking Katy with me. She's not coming back here unless Rose decides that's what she wants."

It was happening already, Mary Catherine thought. Only it wasn't Colonel Allen who was going to make her leave—it was Logan. "I'm not leaving! I can't! Please don't make me go!"

"What the hell have you said to her?" Logan said. His jaw was rigid with anger, his eyes steely.

"Listen to her, Marshall," Allen advised. "She's not supporting whatever crack-brained notion you've taken into your head. I suggest, for your own good, you get the hell out of my home and leave Mary Catherine here. You won't like the consequences otherwise."

"I'll take my chances." He picked up Mary Catherine, who was struggling and squirming in his grasp, and carried her out of the study, past Allen, and into the bright morning sunshine.

* * *

Rose, Megan, and Mary Catherine left Washington later that day. Their destination was the farm homestead of Rose's second cousin just west of Richmond. There was no scandal, nor would there be. With the exception of Logan Marshall, what happened would remain a family secret. The story that circulated as a result of their hasty departure was the convenient sick relative fable. At Rose's insistence they took only a few belongings. Everything the colonel had given them seemed soiled now. Rose blamed herself for not knowing what was happening to her own child. Megan blamed her sister. Mary Catherine blamed Logan.

That very afternoon, after an uncomfortable farewell with Rose and her daughters, Logan began the journey back to his unit at Chancellorsville. Let Allen handle the dispatch, he thought. He'd done what he was supposed to do. For the first time in recent memory Logan was actually glad to be returning to the field.

He wasn't particularly surprised when he didn't make it. He had anticipated the colonel would make some kind of move against him, though the swiftness of Allen's actions caught him off guard. He estimated he was ten miles from the road junction near the farm when a Rebel scouting party cut him off. He looked for a way around them, couldn't find one, and spent the night writing a letter to his family in New York, preparing them for his imminent capture.

It happened the following morning, just after daybreak. Allen's betrayal became clear when the scouting party returned directly to their unit immediately after taking Logan prisoner. He did not have to be hit over the head to realize they had been sent out to assure his capture. Logan did not have time then to contemplate how the colonel had managed such timely intervention. Too many other incredible things had begun to happen.

Mary Catherine's carefully copied dispatch, delivered into Confederate hands by Rose and Megan, and sent on to the rebel troops at Chancellorsville, was no mere correspondence now, but a true godsend. General Robert E. Lee took fierce exception to Major General Hooker's boast to President Lincoln, "The rebel army is now the legitimate property of the Army of the Potomac." Since the Union general made his boast based on superior Union forces and superior tactical positioning, but did not account for the fact that no shots had yet been fired, nor any flag raised, Lee found Hooker's brash statement a trifle premature.

In a daring series of maneuvers Lee split his army into three sections, and over the next four days, from May 1 to May 4, drove Hooker and the Union forces back across the Rappahannock River. In terms of casualties it was not the decisive victory Lee could have wished for. Although the South suffered fewer losses, the percentage of deaths in relation to troop strength was far greater than the North's. Still, the victory kept the Union at bay and opened up Lee's second drive into the North, a drive that would culminate in a sleepy little Pennsylvania village called Gettysburg.

Chapter 2

November 1864—Richmond, Virginia

"I got me twenty-four! Twenty-four! Lookee here!" John Edward held out his hand, keeping the palm flat. He had a black piece of cloth, ragged at the edges, lying over his palm. Standing out in small relief against the black background were two dozen nits that he had pulled from his beard.

"Twenty-five," said Logan, reaching into his own dark beard. He carefully extracted the lice egg with a fine-toothed comb half the length of his pinky finger. He smiled at the group of six men surrounding him. "Gentlemen. Make good your wagers."

"Dammit, Marshall!" Edward swore. "I'm thinkin' you're cultivatin' the critters! This wager weren't open to farmers!" He pointed accusingly to the lice comb that Logan was pocketing. "You never said nothin' about no equipment! Ain't fair!"

"Don't be a poor sport," one of the other men grumbled. "It was a good wager."

Logan didn't say anything as the bounty started pouring in. He got half a potato from Billy Waters, a compass from the Covington twins, Able and Joe, a watch fob made from a lock of some sweetheart's hair, courtesy of Tom Jenkins, and two carrots—a plump, bright orange stump from Davey Powell, and a scrawny, limp one from John Edward. Logan wrapped everything into a kerchief and tucked the whole of it in a black lacquered box he had won on a previous wager. Thanking the others, he turned away, keeping the box securely under his arm, and went in search of other amusement.

In Libby Prison amusement was whatever, wherever one could make or find it. Logan survived in part because he sought it out in the most unlikely places, and where it didn't exist, he created it.

Richmond's Libby Prison was nothing more than a tobacco warehouse converted for warehousing Union soldiers. On the outside it was unimposing. Red-bricked and tidy, with uniform windows and well-maintained grounds, it appeared to be a satisfactory, even humane answer to the problem of what to do with Federal prisoners. But each evening, a few hours after dusk, when the dead were collected and taken to wagons waiting in the rear, Libby Prison's true nature was exposed.

It was not planned, intentional cruelty that made the prison the site of pestilence, starvation, disease, and death. It was the ravages of war. Richmond was constantly besieged by Federal forces trying to force the great city and capital to its knees. As her citizens suffered shortages of food, inadequate medical supplies, and epidemics of typhus, the prisoners—blamed as they were by their caretakers for all the ill that had befallen the South—fared far worse.

Logan Marshall knew the South was losing the war. The guards would never say it in so many words, but their actions, the negligence and apathy, the increasingly common vicious act, the retaliatory strikes against the prisoners, told the story just as eloquently. Real news of the war was hard to come by. Each new prisoner had his own tale, frequently inaccurate and always self-centered. It was difficult to know the large picture when a man's worldview was confined to a small section of the battlefield and his battle had been lost.

Logan had heard about Lee's defeat at Gettysburg in July of '63. Yet, seventeen months later, he still did not know that his brother David died there, or that his brother Christian had been seriously wounded. He did not know that by the time his letter reached Marshall House his mother was already dead of an illness she contracted while nursing the wounded. He didn't suspect that his father's grief was slowly killing him.

On the contrary, Logan spent as little time as possible thinking about family—it hurt too much. Instead he thought about surviving Libby Prison, thanked God he had narrowly missed being sent deeper into the South, planned his escape, and plotted his revenge on Colonel Richard Allen. That, and the occasional amusement, was enough to keep him busy.

The air inside Libby Prison was oppressive, stifling. In one part of the warehouse a thousand officers were confined to eight rooms. The stench was almost a visible thing, rising above bodies huddled for warmth in a cold room. Logan walked among the men, the exercise keeping him warm, and knew in his heart he probably could not survive another winter.

His copper-threaded hair was dull, shaggy, and overlong. He kept it tucked inside the frayed collar of his shirt as a kind of insulation. His skin was pale from lack of sunlight—prison gray, they called it—and he was fifteen pounds underweight. He kept himself as healthy as he could by making, and usually winning, bets for extra bits of meat or vegetables, and exercising daily to keep some muscle tone. The downy scrub that had marked his chin in more youthful days was gone now. He had a full beard and mustache that, as proved by his wager, was home for a fair-sized colony of vermin.

He felt a decade older than his twenty-two years and believed he looked it as well. The swagger was missing from his stride and his eyes, even when he smiled, were bleak. All evidence of the high-spirited, green youth that was Logan Marshall had been thoroughly snuffed out.

He was realistic now, if not completely hardened. Each day he forced himself to consider all the good fortune in his life—for a way to certain insanity in Libby Prison was to contemplate all the things one didn't have. Logan didn't, for instance, dwell on fresh fruit, clean water, clothing that fit, liquor, tobacco, or women. Most especially he didn't let himself think about women.

Logan thrust his hands inside his pockets and stood in a tiny patch of sunlight upwind of a gangrenous wound. Billy Waters, who had given half of his potato to Logan, joined him. He was small and angular with extraordinarily long arms. The guards called him Monkey Man.

"The twins and me," Billy said in a low voice, "we're thinkin' on goin' tonight. You with us?"

There was no hesitation on Logan's part. "No. I've decided to take my chances on my own." He was silent, wondering if Billy and the twins were disappointed or relieved. "Damn foolish of Able and Joe to lose their compass to me."

Billy looked down at the floor. He shuffled his feet in place to improve his circulation. "About that compass... you don't suppose..."

"No, I don't suppose. I won it fair and square."

"Damn you, Marshall, can't you—"

"You can have it on one condition."

"Name it," Billy said eagerly. His blue eyes brightened in anticipation.

"Are you and the Covingtons helping collect the dead tonight?"

"Sure, that's part of the plan. We're leaving—"

"I don't want to know the details," Logan interrupted. "Just tell me, can you put me on one of the wagons?"

Billy's jaw went slack. "You mean like you was dead?"

"Exactly like I was dead. Can you do it?"

"Sure, but—"

Logan didn't want to hear objections either. "Then it's settled. Put me on the wagon and you can pick my pockets. That's how the Covingtons got the compass in the first place, isn't it?" He shot a quick glance at Billy and saw by the embarrassed, guilty look that he had guessed correctly. "Well, that's how they can get it back."

Twenty-six men were removed from Libby Prison on the death wagon that night, Logan Marshall among them. Billy Waters and Abel Covington were shot and killed while trying to escape once they were outside the warehouse. Joe Covington got the compass and headed north. During the prisoners' flight the wagon was left unattended, and Logan, his mind mercifully numb to what he was doing, pushed and clawed his way free of the stiff and malodorous bodies. He chose the direction he thought least likely to be pursued, west along the James River, deeper into the heart of Virginia. He remembered Rose Allen and her second cousin's farm and prayed that if he found them they would offer sanctuary.

It was only when he tasted freedom and breathed the sharp, sweet scent of pond pines and bayberry, the rich, heady fragrance of Virginia's fertile soil, and drank icy cold water from the James, that Logan Marshall allowed himself one luxury he could ill afford in prison.

Kneeling on the riverbank, protected by an outcropping of rocks, Logan buried his face in his hands and wept.