The Soldier's Wife - Cheryl Reavis Mills & Boon Love Inspired Historical

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sure they were aware only of the latter. She didn’t want them to ever feel the way she had felt in her uncle’s house. Her real worry was that she was neither brave enough nor strong enough to keep them safe. She believed she might have long since given up trying to hang on to Thomas Henry’s land if not for them. They were the true Garth family legacy until Thomas Henry came home again, and she hoped desperately that she wouldn’t fail them.

      The winters had been particularly hard, and she had no doubt that they would have starved if it hadn’t been for old Rorie Conley, who lived atop the ridge on the other side of Deep Hollow. It was a short distance to Rorie’s cabin as the crow flies, but a hard trek down into the hollow and back up again to the other side on foot. The big sack of shelled corn she’d brought them on the back of a mule would last them for a while, and Sayer had taken great pains to make sure both girls understood that they were not to tell anyone—anyone—where the corn had come from, lest Rorie begin to suffer the same mishaps and accidents Sayer had: crops decimated by deer and other wild animals because of mysteriously downed fences; chickens and pigs stolen, supposedly by deserters from both armies hiding in the mountains; her one milk cow inexplicably shot.

      The only clue Sayer had as to the cause of these troubles was Halbert Garth’s overconfident smile. Thomas Henry’s uncle constantly urged her—in the face of all her “bad luck” and her ignorance of farming—to write to Thomas Henry about the supposedly generous offer he had made to buy the Garth land. Surely, he kept telling her, Thomas Henry would want her and the girls to go live “somewhere safe,” though the Lord only knew where that might be. He had already written to Thomas Henry himself, of course, but he thought that it would be better for him to hear the truth from her. Halbert Garth didn’t realize how much of the “truth” Sayer was actually privy to. She knew that he had expected to inherit all the Garth land when his father died and that he considered the acreage Sayer and the girls were living on his birthright, to claim and to dispose of as he pleased, despite the fact that old Mr. Garth had made it plain in his unbreakable will that he intended the land to be a family legacy for all the Garths who followed after him and not the ante in some high-stakes Louisville poker game.

      * * *

      “Sayer! Sayer!” the girls suddenly called to her, and she began walking in their direction.

      “Will you read to us after supper?” Beatrice wanted to know, twirling again around and around the pan of corn. Sayer suddenly imagined her all grown-up and dressed in a white gown with gardenias in her hair, dancing the evening away at the Harvest Moon Ball in Salisbury, the event Sayer had heard so much about when she still lived in her uncle’s house, the one she had known even then that she’d never be allowed to attend.

      Poor Cinderella, Sayer thought a little sadly, thinking of them both. No white dresses and gardenias for us.

      “What shall I read to you?” she abruptly asked, putting her fanciful notions about the social events in Salisbury aside. She smiled, because she already knew their answer. She had diligently tried to make sure that neither of them forgot their brother, despite the lost daguerreotype and the years that had passed, especially Amity, who had been only four when he left.

      “Read us a letter from Thomas Henry!” they both cried.

      Chapter Two

      “What’s wrong?” Jack asked. There were too many of his comrades still awake. All of them should have been lying exhausted on the ground save the two on watch, but it looked as if the entire group was alert and waiting—for him, apparently.

      “Nothing,” Little Ike said after a silence that went on too long.

      Jack sat down on the ground close to his blanket and haversack. He was emotionally and physically spent. He’d managed to get the dead Rebel wrapped in his blanket and more or less buried. Jack impulsively kept the man’s letters and personal belongings and stuck them inside his jacket. He took them out now and began looking at them. Not a single man asked him what he had or what he was planning to do with whatever it was.

      He glanced in Little Ike’s direction. “You get your letter read?”

      “Oh! Well—” Ike said. “I— It was—” He stopped. He took his battered cap off and twirled it in his hands. Then, as if suddenly wondering how it had gotten there, popped it back on his head again.

      “You know,” Jack said after a long moment, “I didn’t think the question was all that hard.”

      “We got the canteens filled,” Ike said, clearly hoping to move Jack along to some other topic of interest.

      “Did you get the letter read?” Jack asked again. He looked at the soldiers closest to him—Boone. Donoho. Weatherly. James. All of them looked elsewhere.

      “Are we the Orphans’ Guild or not?” he asked. It was the name that had been given to them the first day the company mustered, one they’d taken for their own with a fierce kind of pride. They looked out for each other and they didn’t keep secrets, especially not from him.

      “Tell him, Ike,” Boone said finally.

      But Little Ike was fiddling with his hat again.

      “Tell him!”

      “It was in the letter,” Ike said in a rush. Most of the words went down his jacket front.

      Jack waited, but that seemed to be the only information Ike was willing to impart. He didn’t suggest that he continue, however. Jack had learned early on, from his days in the orphanage, that the quickest way to a revelation was not to demand it. He went back to looking through the dead Reb’s personal effects: a Bible, a clay pipe bowl, an empty leather tobacco pouch, a daguerreotype he couldn’t see in the erratic moonlight, a packet of letters tied up with a ribbon, the color of which he also couldn’t determine. He could feel the watchful attention of every man around him, but he didn’t look up. He pulled one of the letters free and tried to decipher the address. He could only make out part of the handwriting: Co. G Highland Guards. He had heard of the Highland Guards, but that was after what was left of the Orphans’ Guild had been shifted from the Army of the Ohio into an equally decimated company in the Army of the Potomac. Jack had been half convinced that the Guild soldiers had been the ante in some kind of high-stakes poker game. A general from the Army of the Ohio folded, and off the orphans went. Even so, he and the rest of them still thought of themselves as soldiers of the Kentucky regiment they’d volunteered for, regardless of what the generals said.

      He turned the letter over in his hands, but he made no attempt to read it. The Highland Guards had been at Sharpsburg and at Malvern Hill, just as he and the newly reassigned Orphans’ Guild survivors had.

      Sharpsburg.

      Malvern Hill.

      One thing he had learned in this war. Nothing qualified for cannon fodder more than a company with a true majority of bona fide orphans.

      “Jack?”

      He looked up.

      “She went and got married, Jack,” Ike said.

      “Are you going to tell me who ‘she’ is or do I have to guess?”

      “Miss Elrissa Barden,” Ike said, his voice full of misery. “My cousin...she says he’s rich,” he added helpfully.

      Jack reached for his haversack, rearranging the contents so that he could add the dead Rebel’s belongings. He might find a way to mail the letters, and then again, he might not. “His name?” he asked.

      “It’s...Vance.”

      Jack looked at him. “Farrell Vance?” he said, surprised by his response to the information. He should have been intensely disturbed, at the very least, but he wasn’t. After a short moment, it seemed...only logical. Farrell Vance had money—a lot of money—more money than good old Jeremiah “Jack” Murphy would ever have, even if a marriage to a wealthy store owner’s daughter had happened. Vance was a store owner, as well—among other things—but his real money came from the war, from army contracts.

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