An Unexpected Wife

“I don’t see how that will help.”

“As you said, you have things to learn. It’s time to start learning. If you please,” he added respectfully.

“I am not going to lie, Sergeant Major,” she said, despite having lived in a huge web of untruths for more than half her lifetime. The fabrication regarding Harrison’s birth had been foisted upon her; she’d had no choice. In this matter she did.

“There is no lie in what I want you to do. I gave you the easy part. It’s going to be harder to get the colonel’s brother-in-law the chaplain he’s asked for. It might take a while. We have to find him and then we’re likely going to have to sober him up. The man gets into the O Be Joyful every chance he gets.”

Kate frowned. “Then I don’t think he’s going to do.”

“He’s the only one we got who fits the bill,” Perkins said matter-of-factly. “What would be very helpful now is for you to go and mend the fence I just knocked down. If you please,” he said again, tilting his head in the direction Mrs. Kinnard had gone.

She didn’t please. She didn’t please at all. But she went.

“Miss Kate,” he called as she reached the dining room door. “The company baker has made up a big batch of those shortbread cookies you like so much. They’re locked in the pantry. Maybe you and the ladies would like some of them. They’d go nice with a pot of tea.”

“You are bribing me with cookies,” she said incredulously.

“That I am, Miss Kate.”

She shook her head in exasperation, then took a deep breath before she opened the dining room door and went in. She was surprised to find Mrs. Justice and Mrs. Russell sitting at the long mahogany table, as well.

And the gathering felt more like a planned meeting than a happy coincidence. She wondered if she was to have been included, if that was the reason Mrs. Kinnard had been so determined to find her.

“What are you doing here?” Mrs. Kinnard said immediately, her rudeness causing Mrs. Justice to make a small sound of protest.

“This is my brother’s house,” Kate said calmly. “And if by here, you mean this room, I...wanted to ask if you might like some tea and shortbread cookies while we wait for Mr. Markham to see the chaplain—”

Mrs. Kinnard bristled at the mention of the clergyman she hadn’t approved.

“Robert Markham has his own pastor, one who has known him since he was a boy,” she said. “I can’t imagine why he would want anyone else.”

“He didn’t say why. I believe he wants to speak to someone of faith, but he also wants someone who has been in battle, as he has. That’s what ‘seeing the elephant’ means, that one has fought the enemy and survived.”

The women looked at each other. Mrs. Kinnard must have more questions, but apparently she had no intention of asking Kate.

“I would like some tea,” Mrs. Justice offered timidly from her seat at the far end of the table. “And cookies. I dearly love cookies. Mrs. Russell and Mrs. Kinnard do, too.”

“I have no interest in...cookies,” Mrs. Russell said, but Kate heard “her cookies.”

“Nor I,” Mrs. Kinnard assured her.

“Of course you do,” Mrs. Justice said, stopping just short of blatantly insisting. “Remember when all three of us got into trouble for eating the cookies that were left cooling on the windowsill at old Mrs. Kinnard’s house? I can still smell that wonderful aroma after all these years. Don’t you remember? We were all three riding on my brother’s decrepit old brindled mare. We got a whiff of those cookies and off through the spirea hedge we went. And we made the poor old nag go tree to tree and shrub to shrub until we got close enough to snap those cookies up—I don’t know what that horse must have thought. Now these cookies we won’t have to...um, borrow.”

Incredibly, Mrs. Russell smiled. “We did do that, didn’t we?”

“I don’t recall any such thing,” Mrs. Kinnard said. “The very idea. I certainly never took cookies from my mother-in-law’s windowsill.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Acacia,” Mrs. Russell said. “She wasn’t your mother-in-law then. We were only seven. You do remember being seven, I hope.”

“Six,” Mrs. Justice said. “And already well on our way to a highwayman’s life—just as soon as we got a better horse.”

Mrs. Justice and Mrs. Russell looked at each other, then burst out laughing, and Kate couldn’t keep from smiling. Mrs. Kinnard, however, remained unmoved.

There was a polite knock—kick—on the door, and Kate went to open it. A young soldier stood in the hallway, struggling to hold on to a large silver tea tray laden with a matching teapot and a mound of cookies and mismatched china cups and serving plates.

“Sergeant Major Perkins asks if you would like tea and cookies, Miss Woodard,” he said as if he’d rehearsed the line any number of times. Clearly, Perkins wasn’t taking any chances that Kate wouldn’t carry out his plans for fence mending.

“Do we?” Kate asked, looking over her shoulder at Mrs. Kinnard, giving her the final word.

“Wouldn’t it be rude not to accept Miss Woodard’s hospitality?” Mrs. Justice said behind her hand to Mrs. Kinnard—as if Kate couldn’t hear her. “I believe all three of our mothers taught us how to behave in someone else’s home, no matter what the circumstances might be.”

“Oh, very well,” Mrs. Kinnard said, clearly exasperated. “Since it’s here. Bring in the tray,” she said to the soldier. “Put it there. Will you pour or shall I?” she asked, clearly startling him to the point that even she realized it.

“Good heavens! Not you,” Mrs. Kinnard snapped—to the young soldier’s obvious relief. “Her.”

“I would much prefer that you poured, Mrs. Kinnard, if you would be so kind,” Kate said, assuming that she was the target of Mrs. Kinnard’s remark. “Unfortunately I haven’t had that much practice. My mother always chose to use the Woodard heirlooms rather than storing them, and she was always worried I would break something—with good reason.” She was telling the truth, but she was also trying to do as Perkins wanted and lay some groundwork before she made an attempt to soothe Mrs. Kinnard’s decidedly ruffled feathers. Besides that, she wanted to focus her attention on what was happening upstairs with Robert Markham.

“Indeed,” Mrs. Kinnard assured her. Believing that a catastrophe would be imminent if anything breakable found its way into Kate’s hands was clearly no hardship for her at all.

Mrs. Kinnard frowned at the mismatched cups and saucers on the tray, and for a moment Kate thought she was going to comment on it. But then she must have remembered what had likely happened to the set. “Maria went to such great trouble to hide her mother’s things when the house was looted,” she said. “We must do our best to preserve her tea service, after all.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Kate said, smiling. She understood perfectly that she was supposed to cringe at the insinuation that she had political and regional ties to the looters, and that as a hostess, she left much to be desired. But being able to preside over the pouring of tea didn’t matter to her in the least and hadn’t since Harrison was born. She gave a soft sigh at the sudden thought of him. She wanted desperately to be away from Mrs. Kinnard and the others so she could at least write to him. She had been so faithful in her correspondence to him that she liked to think he might even anticipate the arrival of her letters. She always tried to make them as interesting as she could in the hope that he would look forward to the next one. Perhaps she would tell him about the strange return of the man upstairs.

The tea pouring proceeded in silence and without mishap.

“Tell me, Mrs. Justice,” Kate said at one point in an attempt to foster enough mild conversation to carry out her mission. “What other adventures did you have when you were a little girl?”

Mrs. Kinnard gave her a warning look. She clearly didn’t want any more disclosures regarding her childhood. Kate tried not to smile again at the mental image of the three of them riding an ancient horse and trying to make it to those cookies on the window ledge without being seen. Somehow she couldn’t get past imagining them dressed just as they were now.

But Mrs. Justice was saved having to answer by a loud commotion in the foyer. Kate thought for a moment that Mrs. Kinnard was going to get up and go see what was occurring for herself, lest the chaplain get by her without her having the opportunity to give him both his instructions and her opinion of his being brought here in the first place.

“Well, how drunk is he!” they all heard Perkins say.

Kate couldn’t make out the reply. She worked on looking as if she had no idea what that comment might mean.

“Get him in here and sober him up! Stick his head in a bucket of snow if you have to!”

“Soldiers do seem to have unusual solutions to their predicaments, don’t they?” Mrs. Justice commented mildly as the commotion intensified and moved past the dining room door toward the back of the house. She took another sip of tea and looked at Kate. “What did Robbie say, my dear? Did he mention where he’d been at all?”

“I didn’t ask him anything about that,” Kate said.

“Oh! Of course not,” Mrs. Justice said, apparently alarmed that she’d dared suggest such a rude and thoughtless thing. “That wouldn’t have been a good idea at all. But you did talk to him?”

“He had...questions. He didn’t seem to remember what had happened to him.” She took a quiet breath. “He didn’t know his father had died.”

“Oh, that poor, poor boy,” Mrs. Justice said.

“And did he know about Maria’s marriage?” Mrs. Kinnard asked.