Siege of the Heart (Southern Romance Series, #2) (2 page)

Solomon, who was the one person that Jasper should have been able to confide in, was suddenly withdrawn. The past days he had been fidgety, heading out into the countryside or town for reasons he would not disclose. Millicent remarked acidly that she had never seen a young man in love look so miserable, and Solomon had only shaken his head curtly. He was not in love, then. So what was it?

Jasper strode out into the fields with an oath, making for the forests. He understood why Clara ran here when she was overwhelmed, why Solomon came to walk among the trees. In the swaying of branches and the rustle of leaves, there was a peace unlike any in a human area. Cecelia might take comfort strolling in the orchard, but for Jasper, the woods could be anywhere. He could be home again.

Home.

He was never going to see it again. His pace quickened. Lord knew there was nothing there anymore. Perhaps when he did not come home from the war, someone would take his family’s ruined homestead and build there again. There would be children toddling in the new house, and plants growing green where he had left ashes. He liked that thought. He did not want to go back to the memories and the grief.

It was one thing not to want to, and another not to be able to, and in any case, when he thought of the homestead, he wanted to lash out at the rest of them and ask if they thought everything the Union did had been so wonderful then. People had died. Civilians had died, had starved—not only those who took up arms, but children too. Mothers and grandfathers and youngest sons, trying desperately to keep the farms and shops running when the fields were burned and the goods no longer came down from the north. What good did cotton do when there were no factories?

They would not understand. They had not seen the innocents caught up in it.

If Jasper went back, he knew what would happen. They had lost, and they would have precious little sympathy for deserters. Any valor he had earned would be gone at once. He was no longer someone who could march home a hero and ask for Daisy’s hand in marriage. He wondered if she expected him to do so. Maybe she would think him dead, and perhaps that was kinder.

“Jasper?” The voice stopped him in his tracks just before he broke into a run.

He turned. “Cecelia.”

Though the day was still warm, she stood with a cloak wrapped around her. Cecelia had been withdrawn the past few days, wearing shawls and walking around pale and quiet. No one else noticed, but Jasper did—he knew misery when he saw it. He knew how easy it was to stop talking and let others continue chattering away while you sat in quiet agony. He could not fault the others for not understanding. He should have spoken to her sooner.

“Is something wrong?” She spoke before he could find the words for his own question.

“Nothing,” he said, forcing a smile, and she studied him with her brown eyes. Solomon’s eyes. Where Solomon and Clara had golden hair, Cecelia was all in shades of golden-brown, even her skin bronzing more easily in the sun. It made her pallor all the more noteworthy.

“You’ve been upset,” she said now. It was not like Cecelia to contradict people, but she was blossoming into a woman of opinions. She had once been timid. Not anymore.

“You know about that?”

“Why does everyone assume I’m stupid?” Cecelia asked, exasperated. “I’m not, you know. I see things. You’ve been miserable.”

“I wouldn’t say miserable,” Jasper said, nettled. He sighed and rubbed his head. “I’m sorry, Cee.”

“You all think I’m still a child,” Cecelia said. She had folded her arms over her chest and she was rigid with anger. “Well, I’m not.”

“I don’t think you’re a child,” Jasper said. “You saved my life, Cecelia. I can’t forget that.” He had a vivid memory of Cecelia with the branch in her hand, panting, and Cyrus on the ground at her feet, and he smiled at the thought. Clara’s shock had been quite amusing. The mighty Cyrus felled by a tiny slip of a girl.

“I suppose I did,” Cecelia said. She looked away, and then back, her brow furrowed. “Is it you and Clara? Is that why you’re so upset? I see you looking at her sometimes and it’s like you don’t know how to feel about her. Do you not love her anymore?”

The question was far more direct than anything Jasper had expected. He gawped for a moment before recovering his wits. “Cecelia...”

“Don’t just keep saying my name like that. Did you expect me to say something polite and timid? She’s my
sister
, Jasper. She protected me while Solomon was gone. She loves you. She finally feels like her life is safe again. If you don’t love her...”

“I do love her,” Jasper said gently, not sure he wanted to know the end of Cecelia’s ultimatum. “I love her with all my heart.”

“Then what is it?” Cecelia demanded of him. “Jasper, you’re going away more and more often now. I see you at dinner. You don’t speak. What is it?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” As much as Cecelia would be glad it wasn’t a fading love for her sister, Jasper wasn’t sure she would take homesickness on his part any better.

“Can I...help?” she asked cautiously.

“No,” Jasper answered after a moment. “I don’t think you can.” He took the opportunity to study her profile as she looked away. “What’s been troubling you, then?”

She looked back at him, wide-eyed.

“I’ve noticed,” he said simply. “It takes one to see one, Cee. You don’t talk either. You look miserable too. So what is it?”

“I don’t want to talk about it either,” she said after a moment. She opened her mouth and closed it a few times, as if she thought of confiding in him and then thought better of it.

“Are you not going to tell anyone?” he asked her. “Does Clara know?”

“Don’t mention it to Clara!” Her voice was emphatic, slightly panicked. “Please don’t.”

“I won’t. But why—”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Cecelia.” Jasper studied her face, and her brown eyes met his defiantly. She was terrified. What on earth could have gotten into her? “You know I will help you with anything. I’m going to be your brother.”

She relaxed fractionally as the importance of his words sank in. If only, he thought, he could take as much pure joy in the thought of marriage as she did. The thought of living here in the face of muted spite all his life was enough to...

He shook his head slightly to clear it and looked away.

“What’s that?” Cecelia asked, and Jasper did not look back at once.

“Hmmm?”

“Jasper.” The panic was back, but sharper. “There are men in the forest.”

His attention snapped back to her at once.

“There are
what?
” As he saw what she had been looking at, his heart twisted.

There
were
men in the trees: some burly, some taller. None of them wore uniforms, but all of them had rifles strapped to their backs. Jasper had seen the Union soldiers come home, resplendent in their blue, marching proudly to the cheers of the townsfolk. If these weren’t Union soldiers, then...

Oh, no.

“Run,” he told Cecelia, and when she looked over at him sharply, he knew she saw his sickening fear.

If these were not Union, they were Confederate. And if they were Confederate, they were here for a raid, or...

Or to track down a missing soldier. A soldier who had defected. They were here for revenge. Jasper’s breath caught. He’d just gotten Cecelia caught in the middle of it.

S
olomon banged his way out of the house. He was in a very bad mood indeed. It had been a bitch of a morning, and there was no one—no one—he could tell what was wrong. They would think he was crazy, and if they did not, they would be terrified. He could not do that to his family.

Someone was following him.

He knew they would call him crazy, and still he could not help believing it. Even he thought he was crazy sometimes, but he knew, deep down, that he was not. That it was real. It was little things he caught out of the corner of his eye, glimpses of movement on the street that didn’t seem normal, and he could never catch a glimpse of who it
was
.

It was maddening, which was refreshing as an emotion because it was also damned well terrifying.

Who would be tailing him? He knew the answer to that, and he did not like it. Those in the taverns in town mentioned it without any reserve, none of them suspecting the truth about him—that the Union army was tracking down defectors, traitors, spies. That now the business of the war was done for civilians, but it was not over yet for the army. Some people, they confided, had betrayed the Union. They deserved to hang, some said. Other said a great deal more violent things, and Solomon would always swallow and look down into his beer.

They thought he was quiet because of Jasper, and sometimes they took the time to clap him on the shoulder and say quietly that Jasper seemed a good man, that maybe some southerners weren’t so bad. But not all of them had met Solomon, they said. Not all of them had seen the light. And those in the Union who had not supported the cause...

He did not know who would come for him, but he had been sure from the start that someone would. It would all come tumbling down to him being hauled away and his family disgraced, because it wouldn’t take too many questions before someone noticed a very large gap between when Solomon had disappeared and when he’d re-emerged, rescued. It wouldn’t take very much for people to begin to piece the story together, particularly when Cyrus clearly knew more than he was saying. Cyrus, who people were curious about, who had held his tongue in the wake of his broken engagement, but how long might that last?

Solomon did feel bad about his sister’s broken engagement, but Cyrus wouldn’t speak to him anymore. He showed up at the shop, and Cyrus looked right through him. Solomon did not dare push it, not when he knew his life hung in the balance.

Then there was Jasper himself, Jasper and Clara, looking at one another like they were so in love they couldn’t see the rest of the world. Clara and Jasper...

That, Solomon would never have seen coming. No matter how many times he had watched Jasper’s quiet good manners and honor, and wished they had been born in another time and place when he might introduce Clara and Jasper and hope they would court. He had thought Clara would bend, someday, to Cyrus, and he had thought Jasper might love Cecelia. But, now that he saw their love, he was not so much admiring and happy as deeply envious. It was an ungracious emotion, as Millicent would say. Gracious friends did not envy.

How could Solomon not envy when he had come home to his farmstead and he had nothing he had imagined; not glory, for he could claim nothing when the guilt wormed cold in his gut; not a clear conscience, for he had seen far too much even before he became a traitor. No wife, as he had thought he might have when he came home. He could see none of the women of the town without thinking bitterly that they knew nothing. They rejoiced to see the South brought to heel, and as well they might, when their siblings and sons had died on the battlefields, but they had not seen the suffering those same men inflicted.

War was not as simple as anyone wanted it to be, and even Solomon would make it simple if he could. He just could not forget.

“Solomon?” Clara rounded the house, her brows drawn together and a smudge of flour on her cheek.

“What’s wrong?” Solomon felt his anger melt away as he looked at her. Whatever envy he felt in his loneliest hours, whatever awful jealousy and sadness, he could feel none of it while looking at Clara. She was radiant these days, awaiting her marriage to Jasper with joy. All was right in her world once more, and if there was still a delicacy between her and Solomon...

It would ease in time. He must believe it. More and more, they fell back into their old patterns, little jokes and easy moments. He wished he could confide in her now, but how could he lay this at her doorstep when it troubled her conscience so? She would tell him that it served him right, that he should make amends for what he had done.

He did not know how.

“I can’t find Cee,” she said now, frowning. “She was going to help me with the baking, but she’s gone.”

“She’s been...” Cecelia had been walking on air for a few weeks before this, bright-eyed and pink-cheeked, shining with health. Solomon knew it pleased her to have her family happy and whole once more, and he knew she had seen more than Clara ever thought. But her depression, what could be causing it?

“I’ll check the stables.”

“I looked in the stables.”

“Odd.” Solomon peered through the orchard. “Have you seen Jasper?”

“No.” Her frown deepened. “I thought he was with you.”

“No, I haven’t seen him all morning.”

Jasper too had been acting oddly. He often stared into the distance at nights, contributing little to the dinner conversation. Solomon knew it had been difficult for him to acclimate, that sometimes the townsfolk took Cyrus’s side in the marriage scandal. Oh, yes, it was the best gossip the town had had in years, and Millicent was determined that they wait long enough on the marriage to show that Clara had not gotten in the family way, but surely that would cause Jasper frustration and anger, not melancholy.

“She said she was going out to the fields,” Clara murmured. She dusted her hands off on her skirt and marched towards the corner of the house.

“Perhaps...” But Solomon’s voice trailed off. He could think of nothing.

“Naught.” Clara announced, disgusted. She was surveying the fields when Solomon arrived, fields that were conveniently bare. The scent of ripening apples and peaches filled the air, and a crisp wind was blowing up between the trees.

Suddenly Solomon saw the flash of movement. How many times had he watched, lying in wait for enemy soldiers trying to gain ground by stealth? He knew the look of men as they advanced through the trees, melting into the dappled shadows. He knew them, and...

A flash of color.

“God in Heaven.” He was running, running as fast as he could.

Clara hiked up her skirts and hastened after him. “Solomon! What is it?” But she saw it too, before long, and he heard her scream Cecelia’s name, her voice taken by the wind.