Rebel (48 page)

He nodded gravely.

She felt a grateful and relieved fluttering in her heart. She loved the Confederacy—and Ian. And it suddenly seemed possible to love them both.

“I promise I’ll stay in St. Augustine. I wouldn’t dream of moving away. I—”

“And you will behave.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do.”

“Ian, I assist your brother in surgery, I see to his troops—tonight I helped deliver a baby.” She rose to her knees, hands against the rough blue wool of his jacket. “I came to
your
family. I—”

He nodded, and actually smiled, his fingers closing gently around her hand where it lay against his chest. “Promise me you’ll behave, that you’ll be careful, that you won’t risk your life or that of our child.”

With his eyes seeming to project their blue fire into her soul, she nodded. She stared up at him in turn, hot tears burning behind her eyelids with the knowledge that he would leave her again. Her hair tumbled down her back, her body crushed against his.

“Ian …”

He groaned. Then he exhaled suddenly and she found herself swept up, and down beneath him one more time.

“Ian, you’ve got to leave!” she protested.

“Yes,” he whispered against her flesh.

“Ian, please—”

“Alaina …”

She forgot that she wanted him gone before he could be discovered, before he might have to try slipping away in the morning light. She forgot, for too quickly she was engulfed in the intoxicating passion of his kiss, the feel of his warmth, the texture of wool creating sensation against her flesh, the feel of his naked erection set free against her….

She clung to him when it was over, loath to let him go, yet whispering, “Ian, it’s dangerous for you to be here, dangerous for you to try to leave.”

“I know what I’m doing,” he assured her, rising, adjusting his breeches and buckling his scabbard back into place.

“Right. You’re a man, a McKenzie. Bullets will bounce off of you!” she murmured miserably.

He walked back to the bed, cupping her chin so that she looked into his eyes. “The bullets won’t bounce off me; I won’t let them hit me.”

Alaina suppressed her irritation. He was so wrong! “Ian, think of what you’re saying. You’re telling me to be careful, while you walk out into the war.”

“I’m telling you—warning you—not to get involved in spying activities!” he stated with flat anger. “Because if you do, my love, you may prefer to have Lincoln himself arrest you, rather than me coming upon you. And yes, I went to West Point, Alaina, I am an army officer, and I have little choice but to go to war. And I am sorry for it; God knows, I am sorry for it!” he added fiercely.

“Oh, Ian,” she said miserably.

He came to her one last time, holding her, brushing a kiss against the top of her head.

“Behave,” he said softly.

She lowered her head. She knew that she couldn’t promise him she would behave. If there was something she could do to save Confederate lives, she would have to do it.

“If only you could enter the city and come to me every night. …”

“I am good,” he said with a certain dry amusement, “but not even I can come that often, madam.”

She pulled away from him. “No, I don’t want you to
come. I don’t want you to be in danger. Ian, you must stay away.”

He smiled. “And you must stay here,” he reminded her, pulling her back against him. He kissed her lips then released her and walked to Sean’s crib. He watched his sleeping son as seconds ticked by. Then he turned. He picked up his plumed hat from where it sat on her bedside table, swept it low to her in a deep bow, and departed into the darkness of the predawn.

Dark days befell the Confederacy in February 1862. They met with disastrous defeat at Forts Donelson and Henry in Tennessee, and the Secretary of War ordered General Robert E. Lee to withdraw all forces defending the seaboard of Florida and report to Albert Sidney Johnston in Tennessee. The east coast was to be abandoned, left entirely to its own defenses.

Julian prepared to pull out of St. Augustine along with the rest of the military. Alaina was torn, certain that Ian had known full well that the Confederacy was going to virtually rape the east coast of Florida when he’d made her promise to stay. Watching Julian pack up his medical supplies, she wondered if she shouldn’t accompany him anyway; circumstances had changed.

Peter O’Neill came to see her before pulling out with his company.

“It’s deplorable, what has happened here! But don’t despair, Alaina—there will be Rebel soldiers nearby, just across the river.”

“I know, Peter.”

“You haven’t become a traitor, too, Alaina?” he asked her.

“My heart is with the Confederacy, you know that.”

He smiled at her. “You’re a regular Rebel angel, Alaina. I know we’ll meet again. I’ll be with the fighting men still in the state, don’t you worry. And…”

“And what?”

He hesitated, then swept off his hat. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to kill your husband. I’m going to hunt him down in his lair and kill him. The Panther will die before this war is over.”

She stepped back from him, appalled. He quickly tried to rectify his words.

“Alaina, I’m sorry. This is war, and he is the enemy, and I want you to know, I will be there for you. I will be there.”

“Don’t say this to me, Peter.”

“You’ll see… I’m afraid that one day you’ll need me,” he told her.

He tightened his mouth grimly, mounted his horse, and rode away.

Alaina debated what to do until the last minute. But even as she did so, Dr. Percy came to see her in the guest house. He looked very old, sad, and tired. “A physician, a surgeon in this war must have tools with which to work! Morphine, quinine, and chloroform, astringents, stimulants, and escharotics like nitric acid to burn out bad tissue, form scars! We must keep our men alive; we must keep abreast of the movements of the Union army.”

She stared at him determinedly. Percy knew full well that he could sway her by convincing her that she could save lives. “Percy, I’m not certain that I should abandon St. Augustine.”

“Ah, my dear! You
can’t
abandon St. Augustine. I will take over Julian’s practice in this house. You must stay here and assist me. There will be a skeletal force of volunteers just across the St. Johns River. We are both well acquainted with a certain cipher. If we can just keep them informed, which we should manage easily enough to do under the guise of medical necessity, we can still continue to serve the Confederacy.”

Alaina hesitated, memories of Ian still very strong within her heart.

And memories of Peter’s words to her. The war needed to end, to be over. And if she could do anything that might hasten the South to victory…

Or defeat?

She was good at espionage, she knew. And she knew her state, and the rivers, and the terrain.

Just as Ian did.

But Ian refused to see the duality of his position. He believed in the Union cause, and he had to fight for it. She believed just as passionately in the Confederacy. He would avoid bullets; she would do the same.

And he would never know anything about her activities.

He was known as the Panther, but very few people knew the identity of the Moccasin.

Yes, she would stay in St. Augustine. Just as she had been told to do.

T
he Union had actually not hurried to occupy Florida—even though it had been pointed out frequently enough that the state was scarcely defended—because it was of so little strategic importance. The priority on the South Atlantic coast was Charleston.

But in spring 1862, Union General George McClellan decided that St. Augustine might as well be taken.

The first scout ship arrived off the St. Augustine inlet on March 8, leaving buoys in the channel for the ships that would follow behind. Four days later, Union Commander Rogers left the
Wabash,
flagship of Flag Officer Samuel Du Pont, in a small boat that flew a white flag.

Abandoned, left completely undefended, St. Augustine surrendered to the Federal forces without a whimper. Perhaps the surrender was made easier by the fact that the city had been down to its knees in financial woes. Without Northern tourists to fill the hotels and keep the merchants in business, it had steadily become almost impossible for the citizens to pay their taxes. City government had come almost to a standstill, and food had become as scarce as medical supplies.

Alaina took the carriage with Lilly and Sean, keeping a distance as Mayor Cristobal Bravo met Commander Rogers at the seawall. Rogers appeared quite dignified and assured the mayor and his council and the Unionists who gathered there that he was anxious to restore St. Augustine to the happy state of affairs it had enjoyed before the South’s rebellion.

Watching the event, Alaina felt her heart sink, because she could remember how Ian had told her all along that the South couldn’t possibly win the war. In St. Augustine that morning, it seemed true—for all the reasons Ian had stated. The Union could tighten a noose
around the South. Starve the people. The Union had pharmacies and could produce life-saving drugs, just as the Union had the arsenals and the capability of manufacturing weapons. St. Augustine had been seriously weakened long before it had fallen to Commander Rogers.

She was glad, however, to realize that although the men of the town had given in quietly, a number of the women had chopped down the secession flagpole so that the union flag couldn’t fly from it. And one of the ladies, Hannah Jenckes, called the men who so willingly cooperated with the Union “a bunch of grannies.”

It didn’t matter. Within a few days, the Union had settled into St. Augustine.

And even when, a few days later, Federal troops pulled out of Jacksonville, they remained in St. Augustine.

The Union had apparently come to stay.

The Panther’s men rowed silently through the night, heading toward a landfall against a smooth stretch of beach a good fifty miles south of St. Augustine.

Sam Jones, in the front of Ian’s dinghy, shook his head. “Don’t see you how you’re gonna do it, Major. Can’t see a blasted thing in this darkness!”

“You’ll see. When the clouds lift, we’ve got a full moon,” Ian told Sam. “They’ll have been transporting heavy materials, and there should be a trail through the brush and foliage as clear as an ink line.”

The moon shifted obediently to Ian’s will.

“There!” he exclaimed triumphantly.

Sam stared at him, as if Ian might have had a bit of warlock in him.

Their dinghy beached, Ian lifted a hand, indicating that his men should come ashore quietly. The men moved quickly to hide their boats. He led the way, moving swiftly across the sand toward the patch of sea grapes and low brush that lined the beachfront. With such foliage, there would have been no way to move any number of men and materials without leaving a flattened trail.

Ian had seen it from the water.

“I’ll be damned, I’ll be damned,” Sam said.

“Wish we had the horses, Major,” Simon Teasdale complained with a sigh. “A cavalryman—walking the beaches. Sir, I ask you, what’s this war coming to?”

The men laughed.

“Quiet, men,” Ian warned. “There’s a mighty slim possibility of us running into other Union troops here. They have been saying that folks east of the St. Johns River are sympathetic to the Union now, but there still is a damned good chance of us coming upon a company of Rebs, so keep it quiet.”

“Yessir!” he heard in the night.

“Whichever side we come upon, I hope they’ve got some horses,” Simon grumbled.

Once again, they moved in silence.

They were after the goods taken off of the
Stalward,
a Union ship trapped by the Reb raiders just three days ago. The
Stalward
had been sunk; her cargo of ammunition, on its way to Key West, had been taken. They’d heard about the ship’s fate through her sailors who’d been set off in dinghies by the captain of the Rebel boat who had attacked them. Apparently the captain had admitted to knowing about the plans of
Stalward,
which had anchored off St. Augustine before starting her ill-fated journey south. Intelligence reports had named a Rebel spy who was somehow slipping information to the Confederate volunteers in the interior of the state—the east side of the St. Johns—and then to the blockade runners. Three ships had been lost since the Union had taken St. Augustine. The spy was called the Moccasin; Ian had seen broadsides posted in Union-held towns and bases. There was a reward out for the Moccasin—dead or alive.

Ian and his men had already been shipboard, heading north for a consultation with General Brighton, when word of the
Stalward’s
demise had reached them. A large cache of arms had been taken, and they’d been close enough to attempt to do something about it. There might be little opportunity to bring the weapons back, depending on the size of the Rebel forces they came up against, but if they couldn’t reclaim the arms, they could at least see them destroyed.

They followed the trail through the night, not a man complaining about the insects, the sharp foliage along
the trail, the bog they traveled at one point. Near dawn, he called a halt for two hours, allowing his crew to catch an hour’s sleep, taking turns at guard duty.

Ian didn’t sleep at all himself. They were so close to St. Augustine, he felt that he could almost smell Alaina’s perfume, feel her flesh, taste her….

He lay in the darkness, eyes open, staring upward at the heavens and feeling as if beasts gnawed at his heart. This was war, and he had his part in it. But God knew, there were times when he wanted nothing more than to forget the conflict, times he prayed that someday, somewhere, he’d have a peaceful home and family again. The one night he’d slipped into St. Augustine seemed little enough to survive by now. Yet he’d held her, and in that time, whether he’d been a fool or not, he’d believed in what lay between them, in what strange bond had been forged by time and passion. He’d believed that she loved him.

Even if he was equally certain that she’d damn well been guilty of some sort of espionage in Washington. And even if…