Harrigan's Bride. Cheryl Reavis

       Chapter One

       December 17, 1862

      The front door stood ajar, and the wind blew dead leaves directly into the wide hallway. Apart from the open door, the Calder place looked very much as it always had. The bloody struggle for the town of Fredericksburg, and General Burnside’s ass-over-teakettle retreat back across the Rappahannock hadn’t disturbed anything here—on the surface at least. There was some comfort in that, but the fact remained that no one who had a choice would leave a door wide-open on a bitterly cold day like today.

      Thomas Harrigan urged his mount slowly forward, still alert, advancing until he could walk the horse along the length of the front porch. He couldn’t hear anything or see anyone inside the house. There was no smoke coming from the chimneys.

      Perhaps the Calder women had gone to a safer place, he thought, then immediately dismissed the notion. He knew Guire Calder’s mother and sister well. As Guire’s classmate and friend, Thomas had been a guest here many times before the fall of Fort Sumter. He knew that neither Miss Emma nor Abiah would ever willingly leave this house, not as long as it was still standing. They loved the place, as he himself did. He had once been welcome here, regardless of his miscreant parent and regardless of his “Yankee” ways.

      Now he had returned, this time uninvited and in the wrong uniform, and he doubted that Miss Emma and Abiah would be happy to see him, in spite of the fact that he had managed to get here at great risk. For all intents and purposes, if he was caught here, it would be assumed that he had willfully and wholeheartedly deserted his post. He supposed that it might be a mitigating circumstance that he had chosen to leave the ranks after the battle instead of during it.

      Not that it mattered. Nothing much mattered to him anymore—except perhaps knowing how the Calders fared. His mind resolutely refused to consider anything else. Not the thousands of good soldiers who still lay dead and frozen on the field at Fredericksburg. Not the consequences of his blatant disregard for military discipline. Not even his grandfather’s reaction to it.

      Thomas realized suddenly that here was the only place he had ever considered his home. He had intended to bring Elizabeth Channing to this quiet valley to live after they were married. Beautiful Elizabeth, who had insisted that she wanted to be his wife and who had been so eager to give him almost everything before they even set a date for the ceremony. What a surprise then, when she had suddenly, inexplicably, broken their engagement. He had read her letter of polite dismissal over and over after it came, as if there was some part of it he might have misunderstood. He had gone to battle with it in his breast pocket, and very interesting reading it would have made for the scavengers, if he’d been killed.

      He abruptly dismounted, stepping up onto the porch as he must have done scores of times. In his experience, the Calder house had always been filled with laughter—something he had never known growing up in Boston with his sad, gentle mother and a father who was never there. Even as a boy, Thomas had understood the humiliation his mother must have felt at having to beg his grandfather—her father—to let her come back home to Maryland after her husband had abandoned her. But Grandfather Winthrop was a charitable and forgiving man—and he never let Thomas or his mother forget it.

      Except that Thomas had forgotten, here in the bosom of the Calder family. The memories, suddenly unleashed, swept into his mind. The summer evenings he’d spent sitting right here, holding his own in a gathering of arrogant and supposedly intellectual young men like himself, drinking brandy and smoking cigars, convinced that there was such a thing as a “just” war. He remembered the fireflies all across the meadow and Miss Emma playing the pianoforte in the parlor. He remembered a solitary moonlit walk and the smell of honeysuckle, and all the while he could hear Abiah somewhere in the house, singing a plaintive ballad in her sweet lilting voice…

      He gave a sharp sigh and drew his revolver. The sudden longing he felt was akin to physical pain. How had he lost all of that and come to be here now with a gun in his hand?

      He stepped inside the open doorway, but he didn’t call out. He walked quietly down the hallway, pushing open the parlor door with his boot and peering inside.

      Empty.

      He moved across the hall to the dining room, leaving tracks in the frost that had accumulated on the bare wood floor. No one else could have walked here for a while.

      He opened the next door, and he saw her immediately in the shaft of sunlight that came in through the window.

      “Oh, Jesus,” he whispered.

      Emma Calder was lying on the great four-poster bed. Someone had wrapped her tightly in a quilt with only her face showing, someone who was perhaps still in the house. He edged closer, trying to keep an eye on the door because there was no other way out of the room.

      She was dead—long dead. The layer of frost was on everything in here as well. And whoever had wrapped her like this had intended a burial. He looked down at the sweet face of the woman who had been more of a mother to him than his own, and he had to struggle hard for control.

       Miss Emma.

      He turned abruptly at a small sound, revolver leveled.

      “Abiah!” he called loudly, no longer caring who else might be here. “Abby—!”

      “It’s me, Cap,” someone said from the hallway. Sergeant La Broie stepped abruptly into the doorway.

      “I could have shot you, man! What the hell are you doing here?”

      “Well, sir, I’m thinking maybe that’s something neither one of us ought to go inquiring into.”

      Thomas looked at him. La Broie was regular army, a man of undeniable military expertise, who had been dragged back—kicking and screaming most likely—from one of the cavalry outposts on the western frontier. He had then been plunked down horseless in a company of infantry in one of Burnside’s Grand Divisions, thereby adding at least one person who knew what the hell he was doing—usually.

      “I asked you a question, Sergeant,” Thomas said.

      “I am trying to make it look like you ain’t deserted, sir,” the man said patiently. “The major got to wondering where you was. I said the colonel sent you someplace, so he sent me to fetch you. You might say I’m the one here officially.”

      “How did you find me?”

      “Weren’t hard, Cap. You been asking the refugees out of Fredericksburg if they knew anything about the Calder family ever since we crossed the river. And then this very fine Reb cavalry mount surrendered itself to me—a prisoner of war, you might say—and somebody pointed me in this direction to get to the Calder farm. She dead?” the man asked, jerking his head in the direction of the bed.