Free Gwyneth Atlee by Against the Odds

“C’est de la foutaise! This is nonsense—just a disgraceful
Yankee trick!”
    As far as Yvette knew, her friend had not yet admitted that her
husband was truly dead. She could well imagine Honorée turning
away all visitors who might insist she face the truth and not run to
the window to peek out through the curtains every time a rider or
carriage approached. She was too young to be a widow, she’d told
Yvette and Marie. As if that fact could undo his death. As if the
typhoid that killed him could be cured by the empty arms of his
desperate twenty-year-old bride.
    If that memory wasn’t enough, Yvette could call forth so many
others. The day their flag had been torn down, her city captured.
Pierre’s shame at returning home minus his right arm. Sweet François,
the youngest of her three brothers, who’d been fighting in Tennessee
when she’d last heard from him, about five months before. And Jules’s
bitterness at being the brother left behind, his heart too weakened by
rheumatic fever to survive the hardships of campaigning.
    Juste ciel, but she could cry a bucket for each of them, her city and
her brothers and her friends. And a river for Marie, perfect, prim
Marie, who’d been misled by a Northerner with manners of silk and
morals of coarse ash.
    “What’s wrong?” the Yankee asked her, concern furrowing his
forehead.
She must think of him as a Yankee, she admonished herself. Not as
Gabriel Davis or as another young man wounded by this war. As
damaged and as haunted as the men who’d fought on the right side.
“I am counting up the thousand reasons I should hate you,” Yvette
admitted.
“It must be working. You look mad as h— You look very angry.”
She suppressed a smile at the way he’d corrected his language to
appease her. Then she shrugged. “Mostly, I am angry with myself. A
thousand reasons should be enough for anyone. I could recite them
endlessly, but still I listen to your words and wonder. Could it be the
Yankees suffered, too?”
“War causes pain enough to go around, Miss Alexander.”
“This I will concede. Now tell me how it is that you are feeling? I
have washed away the blood, but you have quite a bump there. Shall
I try to find a doctor?”
“No doctors, please. I’m feeling better now.” Something in his tone
suggested he was lying. He didn’t want to draw any more attention to
himself. This she understood, and it brought her to the last, best
reason she must steel herself against his story. She could not afford the
chance he might grow too curious about her.
Still, she hesitated, though she knew she ought to hurry him away.
The hour had grown late, and propriety bespoke one danger if he
lingered, her situation quite another.
She was a fool, she thought, even as she clutched at this opportunity
to talk with someone. She’d been on the run for days, lonely among
strangers, she who had never spent so much as one day totally on her
own. How she missed her family, her friends! Lafitte was some comfort,
for he reminded her of home, but Lafitte could never answer, and she
was deathly tired of their one-sided conversations.
That was why she put aside the thousand reasons she should hate
the Yankee long enough to say to him, “Tell me, Mr. Davis, what happened next to you. I’ve seen stories in the newspapers about
Andersonville. Tell me about that place.”
His polite expression melted into something darker, graver, until he
looked far older than she’d guessed he could be. “I can’t tell you what
that place was. Not without saying things about your fellow Rebels
and using language that you would certainly object to. But you don’t
need the words to understand. You looked around as you boarded
today, didn’t you, Miss Alexander? You must have seen the men with
open sores, the ones without enough meat on them to make a decent
soup bone. Some of them don’t even speak. They gape and drool, and
they make noises, but hunger and sickness have broken their minds.”
“I