Sweet Persuasions

“Pregnant!”

Her heart jumped. She knew her brother and his wife had been trying to have a baby, and after more than ten years of marriage Keith and Christine had begun talking adoption. “No!”

“Yes, and with twins.”

“I can’t believe I’m going to become an aunt.”

“If everything goes well, then you’ll become a double aunt.”

“When is the baby… I guess I should say when are the babies due?” Selena asked.

“March fifteenth.”

Selena calculated that Christine was approximately twelve weeks into her pregnancy. She found it odd that when she’d spoken to her mother, Geneva Yates, she hadn’t mentioned she was going to be a grandmother. Perhaps, she mused, her brother and sister-in-law didn’t want to say anything until after the first trimester.

“Do you know the sex of the babies?” she asked.

A soft chuckle came through the earpiece. “One looks like a boy, but the doctor couldn’t tell about the other one.”

“Perhaps you’ll get one of each.”

“That would be nice,” Christine crooned. “Enough talk about me. How’s business?”

Staring at the rose color on her pedicured toes, the corners of Selena’s mouth tilted upward when she smiled. “Business is better than I’d anticipated, especially the mail orders.”

“Maybe one of these days you’ll be a completely mail-order business.”

“Maybe,” she said, noncommittally. Sweet Persuasions had only been open for six months and that wasn’t long enough to go from retail to exclusively mail order.

“Business is good, but what about you?” Christine questioned. “Are you seeing anyone?”

“I don’t have time to see anyone,” Selena said much too quickly.

“Yeah, right,” Christine snorted. “Even the president and first lady have date nights.”

She didn’t want to talk about her lack of a love life since she’d moved from Los Angeles to Charleston. “You’re right, Christy. Maybe now that Sweet Persuasions is doing well I’ll think about accepting an occasional date or two.”

“Don’t you dare get sarcastic with me, Selena Yates.”

Selena chatted with her sister-in-law for the next ten minutes and hung up. She always enjoyed talking to Christy, because just hearing her voice reminded her of home. It had been a long time since she’d been to West Virginia. She decided she needed to relax and decided to take a leisurely bubble bath.

After her bath, she planned to prepare a salad to go along with the leftover beef stew, watch an hour or two of television before going to sleep. Her life had become as predictable as the sunrise. Every day she left her apartment in the morning to go to the shop, and then back home again in the evening. It was becoming a routine, but more important, it was safe—safer than it had been in L.A. before she’d been forced to leave when her ex-lover became a stalker. If Derrick Perry hadn’t been the son of one of California’s most powerful political power brokers, he would’ve been in jail.

When she left L.A., Selena didn’t go to West Virginia because she knew that would be the first place Derrick would look for her. Whenever she did go home, for holidays and family get-togethers, her father or her brothers would always pick her up at the airport. And because her father was in law enforcement, he always carried a handgun.

Her decision to move to Charleston wasn’t capricious, but rather something she’d given a great deal of thought. With a population of more than one hundred twenty thousand, Selena knew she would be able to blend in easily in South Carolina’s second-largest city. It was a Southern city, which better suited her temperament, making her feel more at home than she had in California. What she never imagined is that at twenty-six years old, she would be forced to change careers and start her life all over again in a new place. In Charleston, Selena had been give a second chance and she intended to take advantage of what the future held.

Xavier stood ramrod straight, his hands clasped behind his back, in the front of the classroom, meeting the curious eyes of the students in his class. Twenty years ago he’d been one of those students. He’d joined the faculty at Christopher Munroe Military Academy as a temporary instructor. The teacher he’d replaced was currently on medical leave and expected to return to the military academy the next school year. Xavier had accepted the position to get some teaching experience.

He hadn’t known why he’d become obsessed with military life. But at the age of seven he’d asked his father whether he could go to military school. It had taken one day for Boaz to discuss it with his wife, and a month later Xavier went from a suburban Philadelphia public school to a military academy in a nearby town. Many of the cadets were there because of disciplinary problems. But there were some who, like Xavier, had taken to the rigid structure like a duck to water.

Knowing what to expect from the time he woke until he went to bed provided a certain comfort and sense of order. There was no gang violence. No competing with other boys for a girl’s attention and on-campus substance abuse did not exist.

Unfolding his hands, he crossed his arms and smiled at the students seated in a semicircle. With a student-faculty ratio of eight-to-one, he much preferred the more informal seating arrangement to the usual classroom setup. All Munroe cadets wore uniforms, which helped foster a sense of camaraderie and put all the students on equal footing, giving them a chance to excel and be recognized.

“The Civil War marked a change in military warfare in this country that had been in place from the American Revolution to 1861.”

“Was it because of weaponry?” asked a female cadet.

Turning toward the front of the classroom, Xavier picked up a marker and jotted down the word artillery on the board. “The technological advancement in weapons was a key factor. But remember, weaponry is used in all wars—whether it’s pitchforks, axes, knives, swords, bows and arrows, bayonets, guns or cannon fire. Can anyone tell me about communications during this time?”

He was met with blank stares. Xavier enjoyed teaching the military course because it forced students to think. He’d set up a large storyboard with blue and gray toy soldiers. The rendering included mountain ranges, rivers, streams, seaports and railroads. He’d also pinned maps of the Americas, dating from the seventeenth century to the present on two of the four walls.

A rosy-cheeked boy glanced at his classmates and then raised his hand. “Had coded messages become more sophisticated?”

“In what way had they become more sophisticated, Mr. Lancaster?” Xavier responded.

“Spies no longer hid orders or maps in their boots,” Cadet Lancaster announced proudly.

“Where would they hide them?” asked the other female cadet, this one sporting neatly braided hair she’d tucked into a twist on the nape of her neck.

“That is a good question, Ms. Jenkins,” Xavier said, pausing before he wrote the word telegraph on the board, underlining it. “With every war there are intelligence officers, or as they are commonly referred to as—spies.”

Valerie Jenkins gestured for permission to speak. “I read the other day that if Major John André, who conspired with Benedict Arnold during the Revolutionary War, had been dressed as a soldier when he was captured, he would’ve been treated as a prisoner of war and not a spy.”

Xavier was hard-pressed not to show how impressed he was with Valerie’s eagerness to learn. “You’re right. As a student of history, I’ve always wondered why Benedict Arnold would give André papers, written in his own handwriting, papers detailing how the British could take West Point when the British general already knew the fort’s layout.”

“Do you think General Arnold set up André, Major Eaton?” Valerie asked.

Xavier angled his head. “We’ll never know. Major André sealed his own fate when he encountered a group of armed militiamen near Tarrytown, New York, assuming they were Tories because one man was wearing a Hessian soldier’s overcoat. He’d asked them if they belonged to the lower party, meaning the British, and they’d said they did. Then the major told them he was a British officer and he wasn’t to be detained. Imagine his shock when the men told him they were Americans and he’d become their prisoner. The men searched him, found the papers and he was detained as a spy. He’d asked to be executed by a firing squad, but the rules of war dictated that he be hanged.

“Fast forward eighty years and Americans are embroiled in another war—this one unlike any other fought on this soil because it was not an invasion. Widespread use of the telegraph for military communications began with the Civil War. The telegraph wire service was a private enterprise, but its operators were affiliated with the U.S. Army. Using his executive power, President Lincoln put it under federal jurisdiction reporting to the War Department.”

Another cadet raised his hand. “Yes, Mr. Tolliver,” Xavier said, pointing to him.

“Major Eaton, are you saying Confederate troops didn’t have access to the telegraph?”

“No, I’m not. Operators on both sides became adept at taping enemy lines and decoding messages, but the Confederates lacked the infrastructure of Union telegraphers who had more than fifteen thousand miles of telegraph wire and sent approximately six million military telegraphs.” He made a notation next to artillery. “The Minié ball, or minie ball, is a muzzle-loading, spin-stabilizing rifle bullet that came into prominence during the Civil War. Like the musket ball, the minie ball produced terrible wounds. The large-caliber rounds easily shattered bones, and in many cases the field surgeons amputated limbs rather than risk gangrene. The result was massive casualties. The Spencer repeating carbine and rifle and Colt revolver rifle also played a major part when it came to artillery.”

Xavier added photography, newspaper clippings, letters from soldiers, the railroad, transport troops and supplies, water transportation, topography and the science of embalming to the syllabus.

“The discovery that by combining arsenic, zinc and chloride to prevent bodies from decaying so quickly, meant that soldiers could be shipped home for burial rather than in mass graves. I want you to research each of these points and become familiar with their impact on the war for both the Union and Confederate armies.”

Cadet Valerie Jenkins raised her hand again. “There is no comparison when the Union Army controlled the telegraph lines.”

“Are you saying, Cadet Jenkins, that the Confederates were completely inept when it came to communications? And if they were, why then did the war last four years?”

She lifted her shoulders. “I don’t know.”