Cheryl Reavis (13 page)

She smiled slightly at the memory, touching the fine wood of the box with her fingertips. But that memory was fleeting at best, and she was suddenly thinking of Robert Markham again. That he had lived here in this house, grown up here, left here most likely in the same flurry of duty and patriotism that Max and John had left their own homes. And he had loved his family, just as they had; she was certain of that—which made his choosing not to come home all the more inexplicable.

“What is
wrong
with me?” she said out loud.

What with her recent penchant for hiding and her preoccupation with a man who had been her country’s enemy
and
a prizefighter, she hardly recognized herself.

She began lifting her dresses out of the trunks and spreading them on the bed until she decided which one she would wear to dinner tonight. Her anxiety regarding the upcoming evening seemed to be growing, likely because neither sequence of events was desirable—that Robert wouldn’t come, and his chair would sit there empty for the entire meal, or that he
would,
and she would see the look in his eyes and likely feel a pressing need to worry about him even more than she already did.

She eventually decided on a dress, a plain pale beige one with a blue iridescence to the fabric and blue edging on the collar, cuffs and bustle. No ruffles. No pleats. No lace. It would do nicely. She had no doubt that Valentina would arrive in all her splendor, and in this dress, Kate could all but disappear into the background, where she would happily remain for the duration of whatever social torture was about to unfold. She knew Max would try hard for Maria’s sake, and she thought that Robert—if he came—would, as well. But they were, after all, men, and bitter enemies at that. Who knew what would happen, especially with Mrs. Kinnard in the mix? It would be so easy for any one—or all—of them to take offense.

She took a long bath and even longer to arrange her hair and dress. She ultimately decided on leaving her hair “careless,” pulling the front and sides back into a topknot and allowing the blond tresses to fall free down her back. The simplicity of no padding and no false hairpieces suited the dress and her mood.

It was growing dark outside, and the noise level in the house rose as did the aroma of baked bread, apples and roasting meat coming from the kitchen. She continued to look out the window from time to time for some sign of Robert, but she didn’t see him.

She stayed upstairs as long as she could—until it was absolutely necessary that she be on hand to greet Mrs. Kinnard and Valentina when they arrived. As she headed downstairs, she smiled slightly to herself, wondering if Private Castine would be on hand somehow to see Valentina.

Max was standing in the foyer, resplendent in his uniform.

“Very handsome and military,” she said as she reached the bottom of the stairs, knowing her teasing him about the way he looked would annoy him.

“I see you’re not wearing
your
uniform this evening.”

“No,” she said, trying not to smile. “I am not.” For a moment it was like the old days, she, joyfully on the verge of becoming the woman she hoped to be, and he, the big brother who teased her unmercifully and yet was always kind.

“You look very nice, anyway,” he said, making her smile in earnest. She was on the verge of asking him if Robert had returned, but then she didn’t. Having
all
the women in the house fixated on Robert Markham would do nothing for his mood this evening.

She turned her head sharply at some commotion on the porch, but it was only Private Castine, stamping his feet to stay warm. She left Max with a sympathetic pat on the arm and went into the parlor, leaving the door ajar and sitting were she had a good view of the foyer. Maria stood by the window, tense with the effort it took not to wring her hands.

“I don’t believe Robert will be here,” she said. “He’s gone off somewhere, and I have no idea where that might be.”

“Private Castine brought him a note earlier. Maybe he would know.”

“I’ll ask,” Maria said, heading for the door.

“He’s on the veranda,” Kate called after her.

Maria was gone only a moment.

“He says the note was from Reverend Lewis, but he doesn’t know what it was about. Max told me about Robert asking for an army chaplain. I simply do not understand my brother’s sudden interest in the clergy.”

“Surely there are worse things he could be doing, don’t you think?”

“It’s the
reason
he’s doing it that worries me. It’s not like him. At all.”

Kate looked at her without comment, thinking how changed Max had been when he’d come home. She thought it was to be expected, but she didn’t say so.

They sat for a time in silence—until Kate suddenly made up her mind to ask what she wanted to know.

“Maria, when you and Robert talked, were you able—”

But the question was interrupted before Kate could finish asking it. Mrs. Kinnard and Valentina were arriving, much to Private Castine’s obvious delight. Kate could see him through the window as he bounded off the veranda to hurry and open the door of Mrs. Kinnard’s carriage.

But his obvious pleasure must have been short-lived. Valentina had no time to pay him even a backhanded compliment this evening. She disembarked from the carriage and swept past him with barely a glance in his direction.

“What a chilly evening,” she said to Max as she entered the foyer. “But I’m sure it’s colder in Philadelphia.”

“Much colder,” Max said. “Miss Kinnard, Mrs. Kinnard—and Mrs. Russell—I am very glad you could join us this evening.”

He might be glad, Kate thought, but there was something in his voice that suggested he hadn’t known Mrs. Russell was on Maria’s guest list. Somewhere along the way, Kate suspected, it had become Mrs. Kinnard’s guest list. If there were any more additions, Max was going to be decidedly outnumbered at the table.

“I understand there are
soldiers
cooking the meal,” Mrs. Kinnard said bluntly.

“Yes—and I would be very glad if you would give me your opinion of the food. Secretary of War Belknap—when he was here making his inspections—found their efforts too Southern for his liking.”

“Too
Southern?
” Mrs. Kinnard said in a tone that all but guaranteed that whatever showed up on the dinner table tonight, it would be—in her opinion—exceptional.

“I’m afraid so,” Max said. “Thanks to Maria’s fine cooking, I am quite partial to Southern cuisine, myself.”

Kate could hear that Private Castine was still attending to his duties and was now on hand to take the ladies’ wraps. He carried them to the chairs that had been brought from somewhere and placed in the hallway just for that purpose and carefully draped each one over the back as if his life depended on it.

“Miss Woodard!” Valentina said as soon as she spied Kate. “You have dresses! Or a dress, at any rate.” She was wearing a bustled frock in a shimmering blue color—“Independence Blue,” it would be called in Philadelphia, and likely “Bonnie Blue” here. It had a ruched overskirt with a smooth long skirt beneath it. Two rows of deep ruffles adorned the hem. There were ribbons of a lighter shade of blue at her wrists and a large bow of the same color over white lace at her throat. Her hair was elaborately arranged in two large chignons. She was—as always—stunning.

“I do. My trunks have found me again,” Kate said, but she was thinking,
Poor Castine.
She was also listening for some sound inside or outside the house that would indicate that Robert had returned.

“Everyone, please do sit down,” Maria was saying. “Valentina, what a beautiful dress. You look lovely. If you’ll excuse me, I must check on our dinner—”

“Kate can do that,” Max said over Valentina’s demure thanks, looking at his wife hard. In her condition and after the emotional upheaval of last night, he did
not
want her tiring herself out—and that was that. “Kate?”

“Yes, of course,” Kate said, happy to have a reason the leave the gathering in the parlor. She walked quickly down the hallway, thinking as she went of the leather-bound, handwritten book of etiquette her mother had made her read—study—so that she could at least supervise the running of a household. She remembered a particular notation that said that the number of dishes served at a sit down meal with guests didn’t need to be many—but they did need to be excellent.

She wasn’t the least bit worried about Max’s soldier-cooks; it was the atmosphere at the table that concerned her. According to the book, such a meal wasn’t to be hurried on any account—and that alone was a major drawback to her way of thinking. The sooner this evening was over, the better. But the worst departure from the rules was that one should make certain that the invited guests were “compatible.” Mrs. Kinnard and Mrs. Russell, because of their strong personalities, were barely compatible with each other, despite their highwayman history, and if Robert managed to get here in time, even a modicum of harmony would be unlikely, if not impossible.

Kate stood for a moment in the kitchen doorway before she interrupted the bustle of food preparation that seemed to be going on everywhere at once. Every soldier in the room seemed to be busy at some cooking task, except for the one who held a happy Robbie on his knee while he ate a mashed up...potato, it looked like—with the wrong end of a spoon.

Little General,
she thought. She doubted he would have any of the prejudices associated with the war that must afflict both his father and his uncle.

“Good evening,” she said, startling everyone except Robbie, who waved his backward spoon in her direction. “Is your spoon broken, Robbie?” she asked him, making him grin.

“Aye, miss,” the soldier holding him said. “I believe it is. He doesn’t like the big end, and he’s a clever lad. He finds his own way.”

“The Colonel’s lady would like to know when you will be ready to serve,” Kate said to the group at large because she didn’t really know which of them held the highest rank. A grizzly-looking man with a large piece of food-stained muslin wrapped around his waist stepped forward.

“Twenty-five minutes, miss,” he said. “No sooner. No later, if it’s all going to come out right.”

“Excellent,” Kate said. “Thank you...Sergeant. Is that apple pie I smell?” she asked.

“It is, miss.”

“My very favorite,” she told him. “I shall look forward to it.”

On her way back to the parlor one of the lower ranked soldiers called to her. “Miss!” She stopped and waited for him to catch up.

“Mr. Markham says for you to come to the summer kitchen, miss,” he said in a rush. “Now, if you please.”

“What?” Kate said, thinking she’d heard wrong.

“Brother to the Colonel’s lady, miss. He says for you to come now—and hurry, if you please.”

Kate frowned because it was disconcerting to realize that she wasn’t even going to hesitate. She immediately followed the soldier back into the kitchen, sidestepping the cooks, and boxes and baskets, and waving to Robbie again as she made her way to the back door.

A lantern hanging from a post lit the slate path that led to the summer kitchen door. She had no difficulty seeing where she was going.
Why
she was going was something else again.

She didn’t knock, and she didn’t stand in the cold and wait for Robert to open it. She pushed the door open and went inside. There was a fire burning on the hearth, and the stone structure was not nearly as frigid as she might have expected. There was also a man lying flat on his back on the long harvest table Maria must use for food preparation and preserving.

“I need you to bring me some things from the house,” Robert said immediately, standing in her way as if he didn’t want her coming any closer.

She could still see the man, and the most significant thing about him was that he was obviously in the Union army.

“Who—?” she began.

“It’s the chaplain,” he said, heading her off.

“The one who’s ‘seen the elephant’?”

“Yes. He’s in a bad way.”

“Drunk, you mean,” she said because she could smell the whiskey on him from where she stood.

“No— Yes. And he’s used up all his second chances. They’ll put him in the stockade this time. He’s a friend of Reverend Lewis’s—they were in the seminary together. Reverend Lewis doesn’t think the man is well enough to be hauled off to the stockade. Mrs. Lewis is temperance in the extreme and won’t have him in the house. He’s asked me to hide him until he sobers up.”

Kate stared at him. “Well, you picked the worst possible place I can think of to do it,” she said. “Mrs. Kinnard’s in the house. And Mrs. Russell. I don’t know where Mrs. Justice is—”

“Will you help or not?” he asked, apparently trying to hurry this along.

“Yes, I’ll help. What do you want me to do?”

“Can you get out of the house with some coffee and blankets?”

“No,”
she said with some trepidation. “But I will. Somehow.”

And that turned out to be much harder than she anticipated. When she opened the summer kitchen door, Valentina, in all her blue shimmering splendor, fell into the room.

“What’s happening?” she asked as she righted herself, clearly not concerned that she had been caught spying. She kept bobbing up and down on tiptoe, trying to see for herself.

“There’s a problem,” Kate said, and she knew from experience that there would be no getting rid of Valentina now. It would be impossible to fob her off with some concocted story, even if Kate had been so inclined—which she wasn’t. The only thing left was to recruit her. “I have to get some hot coffee and some blankets out of the house. It’s important that my brother doesn’t see me,” she said, keeping the details to a minimum.

Valentina kept trying to see the man on the table. Clearly this was not what she’d expected to find.

“We have about twenty minutes before dinner is served. I will need you to either help me or stay out of the way,” Kate said, and Valentina finally stopped bouncing up and down.

“Oh. All right. Yes. I’ll help,” Valentina said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Go back to the parlor, tell everyone that dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes time. And don’t look like there is anything going on.”