The Outcast (2 page)
“Step back, Reeve,” Jonah prompted at last. “I don’t know if these boys can shoot, and I’d just as soon you not catch a stray. I don’t need you to hold me up anymore.”
“I never had to,” he answered softly. Then he turned and marched briskly to the end of the firing line.
Jonah refused a blindfold after words of eternal comfort were spoken by the brigade’s chaplain. Instead, he stared straight ahead, into the blaze of the sun, while the orders were called out in crisp, clear sequence.
“Ready arms … take aim … fire.”
Reeve’s body jerked with a violent recoil as a volley of rifle reports exploded through the clean morning air. His eyes squeezed shut of their own accord, sparing him from the instant of impact. When he looked at last, it was to assure himself that the end had been quick and merciful.
Nothing like his own would be.
He’d seen thousands of graves over the past four years, some dug by his own hands, some just trenches or ravines where bodies lay frozen in death when there was no time to do right by them. But of all those final resting places, none touched more deeply to the heart of Reeve Garrett than the simple whitewashed cross with two words scratched into it: Abigail Garrett. No date, no cherished words of remembrance.
And no inclusion in the fancy Glendower plot up behind the main house.
His mother wouldn’t have wanted that. For twenty-four years, she’d done her best not to create a breath of scandal for the Glendower family. With one exception. Him. Even then, she’d given him her name, not his father’s, and continued to live in the discreet shadows, raising her son, asking for nothing but a decent wage in exchange for her skill with
a needle and a place for her child to grow up. It wasn’t her way to demand her due. She’d loved Byron Glendower as much as her son came to hate him. A quiet, gentle, forgiving soul, accepting of her place in life, she’d tried her best to instill those virtues within her headstrong son. To no avail.
Reeve knelt and placed a hand upon the neatly tended earth. Someone had trimmed back encroaching grasses and had recently placed a bouquet of flowers beneath the cross. Someone had taken the time to care for her. Where had that conscientious soul been when his mother was alive?
He drew a quick breath, unable to fight down the sentiments his Abigail disapproved of: resentment, bitterness, anger. She’d always bid him to be grateful for what he had. Perhaps for her, it had been enough. But never for him. His mother hadn’t understood what it meant for a man to control his destiny, to take pride in his possessions, to provide for his loved ones. Those things were denied him by the same man who gave them a place to live but not own, who allowed them things to care for but not to claim. The man who time and again extended a name but no dignity.
Home for Reeve wasn’t the big plantation house set in the center of lush bluegrass acres. Unlike his half brother, Jonah, he’d passed his years in a modest clapboard cabin, sweltering under the eaves in the summer, huddled close to the main room’s hearth in the winter. There was no ballroom, no parlor, no ladies’ receiving room. Theirs held a pantry, a great room and his mother’s bedroom down, and his own loft area up, framed by big windows to let in the breeze, and a narrow front porch to while away leisure hours they never seemed to
have. A house, not a home, because it didn’t belong to them. A token to remind them of who they belonged to.
The place was in sad repair, boards in need of paint, several windowpanes gone, porch rails missing. But those weren’t the details that bothered Reeve. It was the sense of emptiness, of rooms devoid of life or love. For four years he’d dreamed of the scents of beeswax and brown gravy, for the sound of soft singing and the hum of thread pulled in endless repetition as his mother plied her trade as seamstress for the Glendower family, for the sight of his mother’s head bent over sumptuous fabrics he could never afford to buy her, affixing lace and baubles for cotillions they could never attend. Instead he was greeted by silence and sorrow. A grim homecoming after a grim four years.
The sun-warmed earth clumped within his palm as his hand fisted. He’d never had the chance to do the things he’d promised that would better her life. He’d never taken her to Louisville to see a play with real actors and stage sets. He’d never seen her wear a gown made by someone else’s hands. Though she smiled, he’d never heard her laugh. Contentment wasn’t quite the same as happiness. But she never complained. And she never knew what she was missing.
“Oh, Mama, why couldn’t you have waited. I wanted to see you again so bad. There were so many things I never told you.”
Tears didn’t come, though his anguish crested. He guessed he was all cried out by the end of the second year of war. After that, he’d stopped feeling things. After Jonah. He thought coming back to the Glade would wake those dormant emotions, the
tender ones that had no place on the battlefield. But he was as empty inside as the cabin behind him, no life or love left in either of them.
He was wrong about that. He realized it the second he glanced up from his mother’s grave.
Patrice stood, still and startled. With the aura of the sun framing her in hazy gossamer, for a moment, he doubted his vision. Then slowly, one by one, the blossoms she held clutched to her bosom began to fall.
And a whole flood of sensation surged through him, a tidal wave of emotion. The rip and ebb of them tore his control to pieces.
He’d imagined their meeting so many times, it was etched upon his heart and mind. But when confronted with the reality, each tiny discrepancy caused a confusing shock to his senses.
She’d aged. That surprised him. His memories were so sure, so strong; that picture of her clinging with a prideful disdain to Jonah’s arm as he rode off to join the Federal army. She’d been furious with him, hadn’t even told him good-bye. There were so many pleasant slices of the past he could have held to, but that was the moment he remembered right down to the detailing on her frothy blue day dress. Maybe because he feared he would never see her again.
Or that the next time he did, she’d be another man’s wife.
He’d been wrong on both counts.
He’d seen her again at Jonah’s burial.
She’d slapped him and vowed to hate him until the day she died. He believed her. But that didn’t stop him from dreaming about her.
Patrice Sinclair was no flashy beauty. Her finest
qualities didn’t dazzle or bewitch. Hers was a cool loveliness, classic lines, sleek, refined; a thoroughbred, not a show pony. He’d probably been in love with her ever since the day she’d sassed him when he told her she couldn’t ride a frisky colt. Then she’d gone ahead and proved she could. She’d ripped her pretty party dress and caused her family no end of embarrassment, but as her brother dragged her away, she’d looked back over her shoulder to give him one last superior smile.
I
told you I could!
And his heart was gone.
But thoroughbreds didn’t mix with ordinary stock. Trust Patrice to go against that grain.
For all her sophisticated ways, Patrice had a temperament as fiery as her unmanageable hair. She was a rebel. No brush or net could control her mane of auburn curls, and no rules of etiquette or tradition could tame her independent spirit. He figured she kept company with him just to defy the tenets of society that said she shouldn’t. He’d tried not to let that matter to him. He tried not to cling so desperately to the memory of her whispering close to his ear in adolescent fervor, “I will love you until the day I die.”
She’d changed. He no longer saw the gleefully defiant child. Before him stood a symbol of the South; battle-scarred, weary, worn, and resentful. Instead of silks, she wore a gown of plain calico. Without hoops, its drape accentuated the lean line of her legs. Milk-soft skin that never felt the harsh effects of the sun was now tanned and showing creases at the corners of her eyes, one for every hardship she’d endured. Where before he’d seen spunk, now he sensed a certain toughness. It made her all the more appealing to his hungry eyes.
“Reeve …”
“Hello, Patrice.”
Spoken with the neutrality of near strangers. They were anything but.
“You came back.” Firmness conquered the tremulous disbelief of moments before.
“I told you I would.”
Reeve stood, and he swore the way her stare swept over him from uncovered head to scuffed toes burnt with the same brushfire longing that streaked through his veins.
Then the heat was gone.
Her voice held frostbite in every word. “You’re a fool if you thought you’d find a welcome here.”
He saw it then, a bitterness as hard as the diamond set in Jonah’s betrothal ring. She still wore it on one clenched hand, a symbol of all that stood between them.
He’d seen hurt in her eyes when he’d ridden away the first time, hate upon the second. Some small wounds healed and were quickly forgotten. Others filled with ugly poison. Patrice’s had festered for quite some time.
And obviously, her feelings hadn’t changed.
Without another word, she turned to stride away in a majestic indifference, not bothering to observe how it cut him to the bone.
After a long minute passed, Reeve bent to pick up the scatter of flowers she’d dropped in her dismay. They weren’t the fragile hybrid roses once nurtured in the Sinclair gardens. But then, neither was Patrice. Not anymore. She’d brought an armful of wildflowers, the kind that grew plentifully without rhyme or reason across the countryside. Hardy, colorful blossoms that could weather just about
anything and still thrive. Like the Patrice who walked away from him without a backward glance.
Carefully, he arranged the bouquet upon the gently mounded soil of his Kentucky homeland, then reached back for the reins to his mount. It was time to face the moment he’d dreaded for four years.
Time to go up to the main house to see what kind of welcome awaited.
“Patrice Sinclair, you take those stairs like a young lady.”
The gentle reproof caught Patrice in mid-stride, her skirt hiked up nearly to her knees. Immediately, just as if she were once again a child of privilege struggling to learn social graces, Patrice paused, smoothed the calico the way she would finest sateen, then continued up the porch steps to where her mother sat in the shade.
“I’m sorry, Mama. I forgot myself.”
Her modulated voice didn’t fool Hannah Sinclair. She set aside her needlepoint to take a closer look at her daughter. Noting her high color and the frantic brightness of her quickly downcast gaze, panic settled within a heart attuned to personal sorrow.
“What is it, Patrice? Is it Deacon? Have you had news?” When no answer came at once, Hannah drew a tight breath. “You wouldn’t think to keep such information from me, would you, thinking I’m too frail and foolish to accept it?”
Her mother’s pain cut through Patrice’s private agonies and she swiftly knelt at her mother’s feet.
“Oh, Mama, no. It isn’t Deacon. I wouldn’t hide news, good or bad, from you. I’m so sorry I frightened you.”
Air left Hannah’s lungs in a tremulous whisper.
“Not a day passes when I’m not praying to hear something, but at the same time, dreading what that word might be.”
Tears glistened as gazes met and the two women shared an empathetic embrace. Then Hannah pushed away, ending Patrice’s hope that her mother had forgotten the cause of her concern.
“What’s got you all upset, honey?” A gentle palm skimmed one flushed cheek, holding Patrice in place when she thought to rise up and escape the question. “Talk to me, Patrice. You used to confide in me. I know you carry more burdens than a young lady should, and I don’t want you to think you can no longer come to me with your troubles. I’m not much good for anything but advice these days.”
“Mama, that’s not true.”
“Of course it is.”
Patrice wouldn’t insult her by arguing. Both knew the fragile state of Hannah Sinclair’s health. Though Patrice often longed to pour out her soul to a sympathetic ear, she couldn’t risk the strain upon her mother’s delicate nerves. What would the protected and pampered Southern flower who’d gone from the nurturing of one overbearing man as father to another as husband, know of the havoc in her heart? How could she advise on matters of disloyalty and forbidden love when she’d never made an independent suggestion on her own? Her finely bred mother would be distraught if she knew of the dark passions torturing her daughter’s soul. So Patrice hoarded the hurts and the anger to herself, heaping them upon a spirit already bowed by more miseries than it was meant to hold. Just this one more wouldn’t break her, not this atop all the others.
News of Avery Sinclair’s death left Hannah a puppet whose strings had been cut. Without the master to manipulate her movements in the proper way, she couldn’t function on her own. She fell into a listless despair, unable to make a decision as small as what to wear without Patrice to coax it from her. While she lay upon her couch, rereading old letters from courtship days until illegible from her weeping, Patrice was forced into the roll of mistress of Sinclair Manor. She’d had to push aside her own fear, her own pain to deal with the daily crises of finding food or selling off the silver to buy seed for vegetables. While Hannah drifted through the hazy afternoons upon daydreams of long ago, Patrice was on her knees in the dirt, using a sterling pie server as a spade to plant tiny seedlings that would feed them over the long winter months. She and Jericho Smith, their only remaining servant, sat together over the last of the coffee discussing their defense should marauders return to take what little they had left while Hannah asked again for two lumps of the sugar they’d run out of months ago. And as Hannah slept smiling in the thrall of her memories, Patrice wept into her pillow, afraid that every night sound bore a threat, terrified that the next day would bring the news that with her brother’s death, all was lost. As matriarchal figurehead, Hannah was a symbol of poise and refinement, but for a source of strength and courage, Patrice learned to look inward.
“Go back to your needlework, Mama. Everything’s fine.”