An Unexpected Wife. Cheryl Reavis
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are you?” he asked bluntly and with all the authority of someone whose business it was to know.
If her presence in the house had been authorized, she wouldn’t have been so taken aback by the question, but as it was, she didn’t reply. They stared at each other, Kate trying all the while to decide whether or not she was afraid.
“Why is the house so cold?” he asked next. He reached out as if to steady himself, but there was nothing in the hallway for him to grab onto. “There’s plenty of wood...in the...box.”
Kate eased backward, intending to make a run for the front door, snowstorm or no snowstorm. But she had the lamp. She couldn’t run with it and she couldn’t set it down without the man realizing her intent. The last thing she wanted was to light her unsuspecting brother’s house ablaze.
“My apologies, miss,” he said with some effort but in a slightly more genial tone. She tried to identify his accent. It was Southern, and yet it wasn’t.
He took a few steps in her direction. “I didn’t think...the questions were...that difficult.”
“Who are you?” she asked finally, recovering at least a modicum of the snobbishness that was hers by birthright if not personality.
He took a few more steps, and she realized suddenly that something was indeed wrong. He was clearly unsteady on his feet now, and he seemed to want to say something but couldn’t.
Drunk? Ill? She couldn’t tell.
He suddenly pitched forward. She gave a small cry and jumped back in an effort to keep him from colliding with her and the lit oil lamp. He went sprawling face first on the parquet floor, his head hitting the bare wood hard.
“Sir,” she said, keeping her distance. “Sir!”
He didn’t move. She set the oil lamp on the floor and came as close to him as she dared. He was so still.
Someone rapped sharply on the front door, making her jump, and whoever it was didn’t wait to be admitted. Sergeant Major Perkins, her brother’s extremely competent orderly, came striding into the foyer and down the hallway, bringing much of the winter storm in with him.
“Miss Kate! I wondered why there were lamps burning— Who’s that?”
“I don’t know,” Kate said, bending down to look at him again. He was still motionless.
“You didn’t go and shoot him, did you?”
“No, I did not shoot him, Sergeant Major.”
“What is he doing in here?”
“I don’t know that, either.”
“Then what are you doing in here? Colonel Woodard didn’t say you were going to be on the premises.”
“My brother doesn’t know everything,” she said obscurely.
“Well, you just go right on thinking that if you want to, Miss Kate, but if you want my advice, you’ll revise that opinion, the sooner, the better. Don’t much get by that brother of yours. Every soldier in this town can tell you that.”
“Could we just address this first?” Kate said, waving her hand over the man still lying on the floor.
“That we can. Move the lamp so I can roll him over. I’m going to hang on to him. You see what’s in his pockets.”
Kate hesitated.
“We want to hurry this along, Miss Kate,” he said pointedly. “While he’s unaware.”
“Yes,” she decided, seeing the wisdom of that plan. She slid the lamp out of the way and knelt down by him again.
“He’s not dead, is he?” it occurred to her to ask.
“If he was dead, we wouldn’t need to be hurrying. Go ahead now. Look.”
Far from reassured, she reached tentatively and not very deeply into a coat pocket.
“I don’t reckon he’s got anything in there that bites,” Perkins said mildly.
She gave him a look and began to search in earnest. He didn’t seem to be carrying anything at all.
“You let him in?” Perkins asked.
“No,” Kate said pointedly, moving to another pocket. “He was just...here.”
“Kind of like you are, I guess,” he said. He was clearly suspicious about the situation, and he wasn’t doing much to try to hide it. “You miss your train?”
“I didn’t ‘miss’ it. I didn’t get on.”
“Colonel Woodard know about the...change in plans?”
“He does not.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“There is nothing for you to worry about, Sergeant.”
“And yet here I am. Down on the floor with an unconscious and unknown man, helping you riffle through his pockets.”
“The riffling was your idea,” Kate reminded him.
“So it was,” he agreed. “Anybody else here?”
“Just him—as far as I know.”
“You’re not sick or anything, are you?” he persisted, the question impertinent at best.
She didn’t answer. Her fingers closed around a small book in the man’s other coat pocket—a well-worn Bible, she saw as she pulled it free. She opened it. There was some kind of...card between the pages. The texture felt like a carte de visite. She moved closer to the lamp so she could see. It wasn’t a photograph. It was a Confederate military card.
“Robert Brian Markham,” she read. She looked at Perkins. “Max’s wife was a Markham. She had a brother named Robert,” she said, forgetting how long he had been Max’s right hand and how likely it was that he knew more details about Maria Markham Woodard and her family than Kate did.
But that Robert Markham had been killed at Gettysburg, along with a younger brother, Samuel. Kate had understood for a long time why Max tried to be elsewhere during the first three days of July. His wife’s heart had been broken by her brothers’ deaths, and he was the last person who could comfort her. He had been at Gettysburg, too, fighting for the other side.
Kate picked up the lamp and held it near the man’s face so she could see it better. It didn’t help. She didn’t recognize him at all and she couldn’t see any family resemblance. She’d never actually met anyone with his kind of rugged features. She thought that he might have been handsome once, but then his face must have gotten...beaten and battered somewhere along the way.
She realized suddenly that Perkins was watching her. “He’s not bleeding,” she said, moving the lamp away.
Perkins reached out and briefly took the man’s hand. “Prizefighter, would be my guess,” he said. “Men fresh out of a war can have a lot of rage still. And they have to get rid of it.”
“By beating another human being for sport?” Kate asked.
“There are worse ways to live—especially if you need to eat.”
Kate looked at the man’s face again. How much rage could be left after that kind of brutality? she wondered.
Perkins took the card from her, then stood. “I want you to go upstairs and lock yourself in, Miss Kate,” Perkins said.
“Why?”
“I need to take care of all this and I’m going to have to leave to do it. I’ve only got the one horse and the snow’s too bad to try it on foot. You’ll be all right if you stay quiet and keep your door locked.”
“I don’t think he’s in any shape to do me harm,” Kate said, trying to sound calmer and more competent than she felt.