An Unexpected Wife

“I liked all my mother’s friends...but it was a little harder with...Mrs. Kinnard.” He supposed that she must know about Mrs. Kinnard and her bossy nature—unless things had changed radically, everyone in this town longer than a day would know. But he only made the remark to see if she would smile. It pleased him that she did.

“All your mother’s friends vouched for you. If they hadn’t, I suspect you would have awakened in the stockade rather than in your own bed.”

“I...don’t look the same.”

“Even so, they didn’t hesitate.”

“I’m most grateful, then.”

They stared at each other until she became uncomfortable and looked away. It was time for her to identify herself, and he wasn’t sure why she didn’t. He supposed that hiding was one thing, and introductions were something else again.

“Miss Woodard,” she said finally.

Robert frowned, trying to remember if he’d ever known a Woodard family. “Miss Woodard,” he repeated. Half a name was not helpful. He still had no idea who she was. “And that would be the...Miss Woodard who...hides.”

“The very one,” she said agreeably. “I do apologize for intruding. I didn’t intend to come in here at all, but I thought you were still unaware, and I was quite...trapped. My only excuse is that I’ve been charged not to upset the occupation by offending Mrs. Kinnard. I’m finding it...difficult.”

“Yes, I can...see that. Tell me, do you often...go through men’s pockets?”

“Thus far, only when Sergeant Major Perkins insists,” she said.

“If he’s like the...sergeants major I’ve known, he does that on a...regular basis. Insists.”

“Well, he is formidable. They say my brother knows everything that goes on in this town and in the occupation army. If that is true, I believe the sergeant major is the reason.” She stood and smoothed her skirts. “I must go now and tell him you’re awake.”

“Your brother is...?” he asked, trying to keep her with him longer, though why he wanted—needed—to do that, he couldn’t have said, except that she was an anchor to the reality he suddenly found himself in.

She looked at him for a long moment before she answered. “Colonel Maxwell Woodard. Your brother-in-law. Which makes us relatives, I suppose, by marriage.”

Robert heard her—quite clearly. He even recognized the implication of her brother’s military title. He just didn’t believe it. Maria married to a Yankee colonel was—impossible. It would have been no surprise to him at all to learn that she had wed during his long absence, but she would never have married one of them. Never.

And then he remembered. Never was for people who had viable options, not for the ones who found themselves conquered and destitute and occupied, especially the women. He should have been here. Who knew what circumstances had pushed Maria into such a union, and he had no doubt that she had been pushed.

A sudden downdraft in the chimney sent a brief billowing of smoke and ash into the room. He realized that his alleged sister-in-law was more concerned about him than about the possibility of a singed hearthrug. She was looking at him with a certain degree of alarm, but he made no attempt to try to reassure her. He stared at the far wall instead, watching the shifting patterns of sunlight caused by the bare tree limbs moving in the wind outside. It was his own fault that he was so ignorant. He supposed that some might find the situation ironic, his little brother dead at Gettysburg and his sister married to one of the men directly or indirectly responsible.

“I’m sorry to have put it so bluntly,” she said after a moment. “I should have realized that the news might be...difficult to hear.”

He dismissed her bluntness with a wave of his hand. “Your brother and Maria...?” He couldn’t quite formulate a question to ask; there were so many. Seven years’ worth.

“They live here,” she said, apparently making a guess as to what he might want to know despite her misgivings about him. She couldn’t know if he had been so uninformed by choice or because of the circumstances he’d found himself in.

He had to struggle to keep control of his emotions. He hadn’t expected to hear that the Markham household as he knew it was essentially gone. Finding out that Maria had married one of them was hard enough, but it was even more difficult to accept that this Yankee colonel had taken up residence in the house where his family—especially Samuel—had lived. Lying here now, he wanted to hear Samuel’s boisterous presence in the house just one more time. Samuel, running down the hall, bounding up the stairs, whistling, dropping things, sneaking up on their mother and taking her by surprise with one of his exuberant hugs. Robert smiled slightly. It had cost the household a whole dozen eggs once when Samuel in his joyful enthusiasm had made her drop the egg basket she’d been carrying.

His smiled faded. There was nothing now but the tread of enemy soldiers.

No. The war is over. We aren’t supposed to be enemies anymore.

“And you live here, as well?” it suddenly occurred to him to ask.

“No. I’m only visiting.”

“Visiting,” he said, because it all sounded so...normal. Only it wasn’t normal at all. Nothing was normal anymore.

His head hurt.

“Are you—” she started to say, but he interrupted her.

“Is he good to her?” he asked with a bluntness of his own. “I want to know.” He turned his head despite the pain so that he could see her face. The question was disrespectful at best, and far too personal under the circumstances. He knew perfectly well that she would likely be the last person to give him a truthful answer, especially when the question in and of itself suggested that he had no faith whatsoever that her brother could behave well toward a Southern woman.

But it couldn’t be helped. She was his only opportunity, the only person who might actually know.

She didn’t seem to take offense, however. “He is as good to her as she will let him be,” she said. “He has to be careful of her Southern pride.”

“And you see...that as a...problem?”

“No, I see it more as a token of his regard for her. He was quite smitten.”

“Was. He isn’t smitten now?”

“The word suggests to me a transient kind of emotion, Mr. Markham,” she said, clearly trying to explain. “I believe what my brother feels for Maria is a good deal more than that. Maria has made him happy—when he thought he would never be happy again. The war...”

“Yes,” he said when she didn’t continue. “The war.”

“He was a prisoner,” she said after a moment. “Here.”

“And now he’s the...?”

“Occupation commander.”

“That must be...satisfying, given his...history.”

“If you’re talking about an opportunity for revenge, it might have been just that, but for Maria. He loves her dearly. And it isn’t one-sided, Mr. Markham.”

“What do the townspeople think of the marriage?”

“That would depend upon whom you ask, I believe.”

“Has she suffered for it—for marrying a—the colonel?”

“The fact that Mrs. Justice and the others are here in the house ready to take care of her brother, and have been since you arrived, would suggest that she hasn’t.”

She was still looking at him steadily, trying to decide, it seemed to him, precisely how much he should be told of his sister’s situation. At this point he was certain there was more. Perhaps Mrs. Justice would know. Asking Mrs. Russell and particularly Mrs. Kinnard was out of the question.

He loves her dearly.

And Maria apparently loved him in return. That was the most important thing, wasn’t it? He couldn’t want more for Maria than that. But, whether she was happy or not, he still had to face her—and his father. He closed his eyes. He dreaded it, almost as much as he dreaded facing Eleanor. He had never answered her letter, but even after all this time, there were things still to be said.

He took a wavering breath. The things he’d done—and not done—had become overwhelming and indefinable. His sins were so many he couldn’t separate them out anymore. They had all melded into guilt, into sorrow, into a relentless sense of regret. There would be no fatted calf for his homecoming, nor should there be. He didn’t deserve one, not when he’d abandoned what was left of his family the way he had, and the worst part was that, despite the progress he’d made, he was still lost in the relentless apathy that passed for his life.