Chapter Two

      “What’s wrong?” Jack asked. There were too many of his comrades still awake. All of them should have been lying exhausted on the ground save the two on watch, but it looked as if the entire group was alert and waiting—for him, apparently.

      “Nothing,” Little Ike said after a silence that went on too long.

      Jack sat down on the ground close to his blanket and haversack. He was emotionally and physically spent. He’d managed to get the dead Rebel wrapped in his blanket and more or less buried. Jack impulsively kept the man’s letters and personal belongings and stuck them inside his jacket. He took them out now and began looking at them. Not a single man asked him what he had or what he was planning to do with whatever it was.

      He glanced in Little Ike’s direction. “You get your letter read?”

      “Oh! Well—” Ike said. “I— It was—” He stopped. He took his battered cap off and twirled it in his hands. Then, as if suddenly wondering how it had gotten there, popped it back on his head again.

      “You know,” Jack said after a long moment, “I didn’t think the question was all that hard.”

      “We got the canteens filled,” Ike said, clearly hoping to move Jack along to some other topic of interest.

      “Did you get the letter read?” Jack asked again. He looked at the soldiers closest to him—Boone. Donoho. Weatherly. James. All of them looked elsewhere.

      “Are we the Orphans’ Guild or not?” he asked. It was the name that had been given to them the first day the company mustered, one they’d taken for their own with a fierce kind of pride. They looked out for each other and they didn’t keep secrets, especially not from him.

      “Tell him, Ike,” Boone said finally.

      But Little Ike was fiddling with his hat again.

      “Tell him!”

      “It was in the letter,” Ike said in a rush. Most of the words went down his jacket front.

      Jack waited, but that seemed to be the only information Ike was willing to impart. He didn’t suggest that he continue, however. Jack had learned early on, from his days in the orphanage, that the quickest way to a revelation was not to demand it. He went back to looking through the dead Reb’s personal effects: a Bible, a clay pipe bowl, an empty leather tobacco pouch, a daguerreotype he couldn’t see in the erratic moonlight, a packet of letters tied up with a ribbon, the color of which he also couldn’t determine. He could feel the watchful attention of every man around him, but he didn’t look up. He pulled one of the letters free and tried to decipher the address. He could only make out part of the handwriting: Co. G Highland Guards. He had heard of the Highland Guards, but that was after what was left of the Orphans’ Guild had been shifted from the Army of the Ohio into an equally decimated company in the Army of the Potomac. Jack had been half convinced that the Guild soldiers had been the ante in some kind of high-stakes poker game. A general from the Army of the Ohio folded, and off the orphans went. Even so, he and the rest of them still thought of themselves as soldiers of the Kentucky regiment they’d volunteered for, regardless of what the generals said.

      He turned the letter over in his hands, but he made no attempt to read it. The Highland Guards had been at Sharpsburg and at Malvern Hill, just as he and the newly reassigned Orphans’ Guild survivors had.

      Sharpsburg.

      Malvern Hill.

      One thing he had learned in this war. Nothing qualified for cannon fodder more than a company with a true majority of bona fide orphans.

      “Jack?”

      He looked up.

      “She went and got married, Jack,” Ike said.

      “Are you going to tell me who ‘she’ is or do I have to guess?”

      “Miss Elrissa Barden,” Ike said, his voice full of misery. “My cousin...she says he’s rich,” he added helpfully.

      Jack reached for his haversack, rearranging the contents so that he could add the dead Rebel’s belongings. He might find a way to mail the letters, and then again, he might not. “His name?” he asked.

      “It’s...Vance.”

      Jack looked at him. “Farrell Vance?” he said, surprised by his response to the information. He should have been intensely disturbed, at the very least, but he wasn’t. After a short moment, it seemed...only logical. Farrell Vance had money—a lot of money—more money than good old Jeremiah “Jack” Murphy would ever have, even if a marriage to a wealthy store owner’s daughter had happened. Vance was a store owner, as well—among other things—but his real money came from the war, from army contracts. There was plenty of profit to be made there, especially if a supplier was willing to cut corners. He had no doubt that Farrell Vance fell into that camp.

      “That’s him,” Ike said. “My cousin, she wrote it was a really big wedding. Nobody ever seen anything like it in Lexington before, I can tell you that. Her wedding dress come all the way from Paris somehow or other. Must have been hard, what with the war and everything. It had all these...rosettes or some such thing. What do you reckon a rosette is— Ow!” he said, his report interrupted by his nearest comrade’s elbow. “What did you do that for, Boone!”

      “I did it hoping you might start using that head of yours for something besides parking your hat!”

      “Well, you said to tell him!”

      The argument, peppered with insults, continued, but Jack was no longer listening. Elrissa Suzanne Barden...Vance.

      Jack had never formally asked her father for her hand. She had wanted him to wait until he came home again, and he had agreed, thinking that Mr.