Free Love Rules by Rita Hestand

too harsh,” he had
    demanded.
    But it fell on deaf ears. They brought in a guilty verdict, and Maggie was sentenced to hang. Scared out of her mind, she trembled the first time they shut the bars on her after the hearing. She nearly fainted. Fear surrounded her.
    “Are you all right?” the captain’s wife asked as she passed by the homemade jail one day.
    “I’m just a little under the weather, I expect,” Maggie answered, aware that her feeling poorly was happening on a regular basis.
    However the captain’s wife seemed concerned for her and insisted her
    husband move her to better quarters.
    “She’s scheduled to hang, my dear,” the captain protested.
    “It’s only humane. After all, she is a woman,” she insisted. “Besides, I think she might be in a family way.”
    “Very well. I’ll put her in the maid quarters, and she can tend to the laundry until her sentence is carried out, if that will suffice?”
    “Thank you, dear. You won’t regret it.”
    I wonder. She does seem harmless, but we must remember she was the
    black widow.
    “Of course.”
    Maggie was treated decently by the captain’s wife and some of the other ladies, but the guards were cruel and vowed to watch her hang. She endured the rebel guards calling her names, talking ugly to her, even threatening her. She figured she deserved some of it. The Union prisoners treated her almost the same because of her color.
    She’d been guarded in a lone room at the back of the guard’s barracks. But the guards continued to harass her and because she earned sympathy from the captain’s wife, they were even crueler.
    However, when the captain’s wife suggested she might be pregnant, Maggie was shocked. Never had she expected it. Jesse’s baby! Part of her wanted to shout out with glee, and part of her wanted to die. She was to be hanged. How could she be pregnant and hanged?
     

    As time passed, she was pleased to have Jesse’s baby. A part of him he could not take away. Although the captain turned out to be a fair man and allowed her more privileges than most because of his wife’s insistence, Maggie remained under full guard.
    Life at Camp Ford proved easier on her in more ways than one. There was little disease there and when able to earn money, she could eat healthier, too, buying vegetables from the local farmers who were allowed in.
    So at the captain’s wife’s insistence, Maggie became the new washwoman for the fort.
    “I can’t thank you enough,” Maggie was saying as the captain’s wife visited her while she hung wash on the line.
    “Think nothing of it, dear. It’s the very least I could do. My husband is a fair man, most of the time. And…I truly don’t think they will hang you.” The woman smiled kindly at her.
    “But the court has already sentenced me.”
    “True, however, I think the end to this war is coming quicker than anyone thought.”
    Maggie wasn’t as sure. “What is your name?” she asked as she wiped the sweat from her brow.
    “Louisa. Now, don’t you fret so. I’m softening the captain up everyday.” She walked off with a smile.
    The work kept Maggie busy and her mind off her troubles to some extent.
    However, she couldn't blank out the worry, wondering when they were going to come take her away and hang her, but the war seemed to get worse as time went on and they forgot about her. Besides, they couldn’t hang her without hanging an innocent.
    Louisa asked that the court reconsider her execution, and her husband agreed under the circumstances he would prolong the sentence as long as humanly possible.
    Then one day, news came that the war was over. Relief washed over Maggie.
    Prisoners of war would be exchanged once more, and her sentence was
    overturned immediately.
     

    Maggie chose to stay on as the fort’s washwoman to earn money for herself and her baby once she was sure there would be no hanging. Louisa had become such a friend; she hated leaving her. And it was Louisa who delivered Abby,