“An explosion,” he continued, “stunned me early on, back on the first day. I fell on a pile of bodies, I don’t know whose—theirs or ours. They thought I was dead until I made a noise, and then someone carried me back to a field hospital. There was a great deal of blood—thank God, none of it mine—and while I was coming back to my senses, getting ready to rejoin my men, I saw … I heard some talk among the doctors and I asked them, you see, and they showed me … showed me …” He lapsed into silence.
There was a rustle of cloth, and Ella stepped into the room, her arms hugging her chest tightly. Cass saw the look on her face and turned away, appealing silently to Geoff not to bring her the news she knew was coming.
“Rafe,” her mother said finally. “And Greg.”
Geoff sighed and nodded his head at each name before lowering his eyes to the quilt.
“We’re done,” Aaron said flatly.
Cass felt as though a knife had been thrust into her stomach, twisted and permanently embedded. Her knuckles turned a dead white as she clasped her hands at her waist, and her legs threatened to buckle and cast her to the floor. It isn’t fair! she shouted silently; what kind of justice is there that takes a man’s sons, a girl’s brothers away before they’d even had a chance to know what living was like? For a long moment she glared at Geoff with intense hatred, wondering why he had been spared while Rafe and Greg had not. She did not know what kept her on her feet during that terrible moment. Shock? Grief? What she did recognize and did not fight was a sullen rage that drove out reason—Rafe and Greg, not two days’ hard ride from their home, two days’ ride, and they were dead.
“Lee began pulling out his men last night,” Geoff said into the funereal silence. “A number of rebs, though, fled without sticking to their commanders. I was dispatched to recapture as many as I could. We were caught back in the woods sometime around midnight. The others were killed straight off. We never had a chance. But all I could think of … all I wanted to do was get here. I—I wanted to be the one … to tell you.”
Cass did not know for whom she was weeping when the tears finally broke and flowed onto her cheeks. But weeping she was, soundlessly, leaning against the wall and shaking her head slowly.
“We’re done,” Aaron said again. “The farm is finished. It’s too late in the season. I can’t afford to hire a man.”
Ella picked her way across the room to a rocking chair by the window. Her face had gone pale and lifeless, and her work-hardened hands wove meaningless patterns in the air above her lap.
Cass thought wildly, searching for the proper words, and it was a fearfully long minute before she realized that the pounding in her ears was not the frantic thumping of her heart or the coursing of her blood. It was the approach of a group of riders who had left the road and were now thundering up the lane toward the house. Geoff stiffened, and grimaced in pain as he tried to swing his legs clear of the bed.
“Lie still!” Aaron commanded him, moving quickly to place a firm hand on his shoulder. Geoff was still too weak from his loss of blood to argue.
“Cass,” Aaron said then, “come downstairs with me.”
He strode purposefully from the room, pausing only long enough to place a solid hand on Ella’s shoulder and pat it once when she did not look up. Cass did not look for their tears. She knew they would weep, but it would be later, when the shock had worn off and the reality had had a chance to set in. Geoff grunted, and she looked at him, seeing the perspiration form droplets on his forehead, knowing that the exertion of telling his story had exhausted him. She smiled quickly, then followed her father down the steps to the front door.
She was puzzled and uncertain as Aaron appraised her for a long and silent moment, then understood that he was seeing her as Rafe, as Greg, and she wondered with a slight shudder of fear if he hated her for being the one to survive, a woman instead of a man. He nodded, though, in satisfaction, and pulled a rifle from the rack of six that hung by the door. Without speaking, he began to load, jerking his head in an order for her to do the same.
“Father, I—”
“Be quiet, girl!” he snapped. “Didn’t you hear the man upstairs? There’s rebs loose around here. Rebs!”
Cautiously, Cass pulled aside the curtain on the front window nearest her and peered out. The light was still strong, though the sun had already begun to drop below the hills, and she stared anxiously at the lane. “Father, they could be ours,” she said.
When he did not answer, she looked up and into the rage that flared from his mourning eyes. “Our soldiers killed my sons—your brothers, Cassandra!—just as surely as the rebs, and don’t you ever forget it, girl! I don’t want you ever to forget that.”
Cass said nothing as she loaded her rifles. Her hands were trembling so badly she seemed to be putting more powder on the floor than into the barrels, and the ramrod’s weight increased tenfold as she worked it. Nevertheless, she finished quickly and loaded the twin-barreled pistols that were hung on the wall beneath the rack. Then she stared at her work. She understood completely what her father expected of her, but she had never killed a man before, nor even taken a shot at one. Could she do it now? Was her hate as strong as her father’s, so strong that she could actually take someone’s life? On any number of occasions she had shot animals for food and pelt, and each time tears had sprung to her eyes. She wanted desperately to believe she was as hard as any man, and suddenly prayed that her father’s fury would touch her with madness.
The riders grew closer, and she could glimpse them now through the trees that marked the far end of the wide, grassy lawn in front of the house. She supposed they had been trying to keep off the main road and probably had not known there would be a house at the end of the lane. Within moments they came into view, and Cass gasped, then glared, her hand tightening around a rifle barrel while her father carefully released the door latch.
There were eight of them. Their once gray uniforms were caked with dust and the sweat of their hard riding.
None of them wore caps, none had swords, and only half of them carried rifles or long-barreled country muskets. Their mounts were flecked with yellowed lather and their nearly bone-thin flanks were heaving convulsively as they skidded to a milling halt. One of the horses stumbled in its obvious weariness, its coatless rider leaning over its neck to whisper and pat it. They were, Cass saw with grim satisfaction, an uncertain group, vulnerable in that open space, anxious and frightened men who had just ridden out of hell. Men who had, by design or support, contrived to destroy the very family they now faced.
Cass’s hands began to perspire and she wiped them angrily against her skirt. A constriction in her throat made it difficult to breathe, and she had to stretch her neck to shake loose the unpleasant sensation. She watched, then, as her father slowly drew the door inward. Upstairs, she could hear the faint, steady sound of the rocking chair in Geoff’s room.
“Now!” Aaron suddenly shouted, and kicked back the door.
He stepped out and to one side to allow Cass room, and they aimed and fired simultaneously. Horses and men screamed piercingly, and two of the Confederate soldiers pitched, lifeless, from their saddles. One horse reared, then, and bucked his rider off; another whirled and raced headlong down the lane despite the efforts of his master to hold him back. Cass and Aaron dropped their rifles, snatched up those at their sides, and fired again in less than the space of a single breath. A third man fell and was dragged toward the road, his foot snared in a stirrup; a fourth slumped over his pommel though his mount remained steady. The surprise had been complete, and it wasn’t until the four deadly shots had been fired that the first was fired in retaliation. A ball slammed into the wall close to Cass’s bed, but she was too angry to move, too enraged to see anything but the dust smoking under rearing hooves, the lifeless piles of unmoving gray clumped on the ground.
The remaining trio scattered instantly, two falling back to the trees, the other racing out of sight behind the house. Cass darted back into the house and grabbed at the remaining two rifles. One she tossed to her father who was bolting the door and smashing out the panes of a window; the other she took for herself, along with one of the pistols, and raced back into the kitchen, the sound of careful firing thundering in her ears.
Three against two, she thought as she shoved aside the table and yanked the curtains from the window and door. She wondered, with a mirthless bark of a laugh, what they would think if they knew one of the defenders was a woman.
She stood flattened against the wall between door and window and searched the yard and the open land beyond the fence. She could see nothing as the evening light began to fade and there were no sounds but occasional shots from the front accompanied by an explosive curse from her father’s lips. Again she scanned as much of the farm as she could see and guessed that the rest had taken refuge in the barn; the tall double doors were now open, and she could hear the nervous whinnying of the horses inside.
Suddenly she was distracted by the sound of someone scuffling along the floor upstairs. She knew without turning around that somehow Geoff had found the strength to leave his bed, his soldier’s training refusing to allow him to remain prone while those he cared for were besieged below. But as soon as she knew it, she heard her father barking an order, twice more and louder, and the noise stopped.
There was another shot, and then silence.
Perspiration coated her entire body. She wiped at her face with a ragged sleeve and thought with a slight, rueful grin what her aunt would think if she could see her sweet niece now. Dear Aunt Aggie! A widow living alone in Philadelphia, sending Cass cartons of books every year and letters each week, telling her how wonderful it will be when the war is over and her teacher’s studies can continue under the “proper influences.” She tries so hard, Cass thought sadly.
A flutter of light-colored cloth in the barn door’s dark rectangle alerted her; she lifted the rifle quickly and placed it solidly against her shoulder. She tried to imagine what the rebs were thinking now that they’d had the time to stifle their initial panic. After such a loss of numbers, perhaps they were planning to escape the deadly barrage from the farmhouse; and perhaps, she told herself wryly, she had better stop dreaming.
The rifle grew heavy and she lowered it slowly, waiting, watching, wondering why they just didn’t leave her and her family alone. Why did they bother to stay? Why didn’t they just slip away into the darkness that veiled the valley floor and escape from the Union patrols? It wasn’t fair! Geoff, as weak as he was, no matter how determined, was no help at all, and Mother … despite that strength that had supported her through the roughest years, the death of her only sons had sapped her as surely as if she had been blooded herself.
Three against two.
She wished something would happen. Standing in the darkened room was allowing her too much time to think, too much time for reaction to the first skirmish to set in. She saw again the rebs she had killed dropping from their mounts, the dark patches of blood spreading across their tunics. She saw the black stallion rise on its hindquarters and kick at the air as its rider slid slowly to the ground.
She blinked. There was a light out back. A golden flickering from the recesses of the barn. She stared, puzzled, until she was startled into a soft cry when a great rush of flame exploded from the barn’s roof. There was another, and a third, and the tinder-dry wood burned like straw. She shouted, screamed repeatedly until Aaron raced in from the front.
“Damn those bastards!” he yelled as he shook an impotent fist at the blazing building. He made a sudden move toward the door, but Cass snared his arms with both her hands and tugged him back into the center of the-room.
“You can’t,” she shouted at him over the roar of the flames. “That’s what they want!”
He stared at her dumbly as she repeated her warning, then licked at his lips as he nodded and the rage dimmed in his eyes.
“But we’re not done, Father,” she continued, her voice hoarse with emotion, needing to hear the words as much as he. “We’re not! I’m just as good as … just as good as my brothers. We can do it, Father, can’t you see that? We can do it! You can’t give it up now. Rafe and Greg wouldn’t want you to.”
A wailing moan from upstairs was the only break in the silence that surrounded them. Then a grin broke through his mask of bewilderment and Cass answered it with a broad grin of her own. Aaron leaned down, paused, and kissed her lips and tousled her hair as he had done when she was barely walking.
“Damn, but you’re right,” he said. “Just like your mother. At least we won’t hand the place over to them on a platter, will we?”
Before she could respond, he had rushed back to his position in front. She stared at the place where he had been, then turned to gaze out the window. The fire lit the backyard as brilliantly as a summer’s afternoon, but there were shadows there now that writhed, stretched, reached blackly for the house like spectral claws. Smoke billowed into clouds above the flames, and streamed from the doors and breaks in the planking. Suddenly she was snapped back to caution when the plow horses thundered in panic from the barn. They veered sharply in their headlong rush when they reached the fence, and raced toward the front while a smaller dark figure separated itself from them to vault the fence and sprawl into the yard. Instantly, her rifle was at her shoulder, her finger unhesitating as it squeezed the trigger and a gout of orange flame burst from the muzzle. The window pane shattered and the man screamed as he was hit. He rolled over twice in the hellish bright light, convulsed and lay still. Cass dropped the rifle and snatched up her pistol. Its range was short, but within its limitations she knew she was as good as any man, and as deadly.
The rest of the window suddenly blew inward and she threw herself to the flooring, more in anger than in fear that she had nearly been killed. And two more shots from the front of the house told her that the reb whose horse had panicked earlier had decided to return and help his comrades.