A Hope Divided by Alyssa Cole (2)

CHAPTER 1

 

Somewhere outside of the prison walls, a Kentucky Warbler chirruped, reminding Ewan McCall of days spent searching for flashes of brilliant yellow plumage in the underbrush near his family’s home. He wasn’t a man prone to nostalgia, but the sound stirred something in him before it was lost amidst the racket of hammer meeting metal and men shouting as they worked.

Ewan pulled his thin jacket, a poor barter for a pair of shoes he’d purchased from a guard, closer around him in the chill afternoon air. Some of the prisoners longed for the warmth of late spring to arrive, but after his bids at Libby, Castle Thunder, and Florence during the warmer months, Ewan didn’t count himself among them. Fleas and other vermin reveled in the sun’s warmth like contented picnic goers; he didn’t relish the thought of what the prison would be like when the first heat wave hit.

He didn’t intend to be around to find out.

He rubbed his hands together and watched as prisoners laid pieces of curved metal over the creek that traversed the prison grounds; officers and infantrymen were lined up along the creek, some referring to the plans Ewan had sketched, others running back and forth carrying supplies. The project had given the men something to keep themselves occupied and, more importantly, it would benefit the prison population. The water source had served a number of uses for the thousand or so men in the camp, Union soldier and Rebel deserter alike, turning it into a source of disease. That would change now.

“Make sure the pieces are aligned correctly here,” Ewan said, kneeling beside a sallow-skinned man who struggled with a wrench. “There should be an opening to allow for outflow when there’s heavy rain.”

The man nodded, clearly not as invested in the outcome as Ewan but, like most soldiers, willing to follow orders.

Warden Dilford walked up and stood beside them, gaze jumping anxiously between Ewan and the work being done. The man had come to Randolph around the same time as Ewan, and after four months of command still hadn’t acclimated to his position of power. Given what most men did with power when they hadn’t worked overmuch for it, Ewan was glad of that.

“So, because the prisoners will no longer be able to pollute the stream with their various, er, bodily functions, there will be fewer outbreaks of sickness and fewer deaths.”

Dilford spoke slowly, making sure he understood Ewan’s earlier explanation thoroughly, likely because he would soon be passing it off as his own idea. That was fine by Ewan. If Dilford claiming the idea meant it would be utilized at other prisons, all the better. Ewan had no need of glory; he was quite comfortable on the margins of life, observing. He also had other, more pressing reasons for avoiding attention.

“Yes, that’s exactly it, Warden.” Ewan stood, his gaze still fixed on the work, tracking the placement of rivets and nails. The small details were the only things one really had control over, though most men overlooked them in search of some grand purpose. Fools. Ewan knew that true power resided in life’s minutiae, like exactly how far back a finger could bend before breaking or how much pain a man could take before he forgot about loving Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy, and even his own mother. But Ewan was in prison now, free from the kind of details that had become his field of study since the War Between the States had commenced.

A burst of noise erupted from a group of officers as they haggled over a small shovel with a soldier clad in a threadbare shirt. Ewan was surprised to see them clamoring for such base work. They lived in the nicer—relatively—clapboard accommodations instead of a patched-together tent like Ewan’s, and generally avoided the lower ranking men. Ewan wasn’t a lower ranking man, of course, but they wouldn’t have known that. Ewan had gone to some pains to ensure that no one would.

Ewan noticed a fellow Union man from Ohio holding his hammer incorrectly as he battered at a nail, but ignored the itch to correct him. One need only worry about one’s own faults, and Ewan had plenty to think on. The men at Randolph felt they didn’t belong there, and with good reason, as they were generally imprisoned for the crime of fighting for the Union. That was one of the many differences between Ewan and his fellow inmates. He did belong there, and for the same reason.

When he’d enlisted, everyone had thought his reserved, peculiar nature meant he’d make a terrible soldier. They’d been correct. However, he’d quickly been given an assignment that made use of his attention to detail and his unbending sense of logic. Logic could be applied to all kinds of situations, and not all of them pleasant.

He scrubbed his fingers through the itchy auburn scruff that he still hadn’t acclimated to. A daily shave had been sacrosanct before his capture, but the beard kept him warm in the Carolina winter—and unrecognizable to any Rebs he might have interrogated before his capture.

“The spigots along the sides will allow prisoners access to the water for drinking, washing, and cooking, but the metal laid over the creek will cut down on the detritus,” Ewan explained to Dilford again, “as will the mesh over the opening of the pipe’s entrance through the stockade. That will have to be cleaned, daily if possible.”

“Detritus. Right. We can get the Negro workers to do that when they come clean the officers’ quarters and the latrines,” Dilford said.

“The slaves,” Ewan corrected. “The term ‘worker’ implies that payment is provided to them for their services. It is not.”

Ewan had learned to rein in the impulse for correction when in general company—his brother, Malcolm, and sister, Donella, had grown so tired of his pedantry over the years that they’d taken to throwing things whenever he went on a tear—but some things he didn’t allow to pass without comment. If Ewan wanted to be more precise, he might call them illegally detained emancipated slaves, given Lincoln’s recent proclamation, but ‘slave’ sufficed. If the Southerners couldn’t bear to call their human chattel by the proper name for them, then why had they started this ungodly war?

“Warden, got some fresh meat coming!” a guard called out.

“The, um. They can ensure that’s done,” Dilford said, looking back over his shoulder to nod at the guard. “Thank you for your assistance.”

He turned and walked off toward the watch house. Guards in gray uniforms strolled along the ramparts, their eyes trained on the dead line that surrounded the perimeter of the prison—so named because anyone who crossed it was a dead man. Ewan saw the next shift of guards approaching and noted, again, how the on-duty guards looked away from their posts for a minute or so as they chatted and traded friendly jibes with their replacements. Such details always had some kind of value, and Ewan was excellent at exploiting the finer points in life.

“Hey, Red, the library is here,” his business associate Keeley said, sidling up with a grin and drawing Ewan’s attention back to the present. The dark-haired Irishman knew that Ewan spent as much time as he could with his face between the pages of a book. He also knew that when the book cart came, so did more supplies for the little prison business that kept them both afloat in an environment that led men to desperation and despair if they weren’t resourceful. Did Keeley suspect anything else?

Ewan fought the growing sense of urgency that pushed him to turn and search through the camp until he found the wagon of books—and the woman who pulled it. He spotted familiar faces among the Negroes who came every two weeks with an offer of succor for the prisoners from their employer—he didn’t call them slaves because they were actually paid, or so he’d heard. The woman who dispatched her staff every other week, Sarah Lynch, pushed every boundary a person could in the Confederate South without waving the Stars and Stripes, but always stayed just shy of anything that could get her charged with treason. He’d seen her once, soon after his first arrival: small, straight-backed, and lying through her teeth as she convinced the warden that it was simple Christian charity that drove her actions.

Ewan valued honesty, but he wouldn’t fault her for lies made in the service of the greater good. His brother, Malcolm, lied to preserve the Union, and Ewan had done much worse in the same service. Sarah Lynch’s lies meant that the inmates at Randolph were able to live slightly better than most prisoners of war—and that information flowed in and out that otherwise wouldn’t. It helped her cause that if the prisoners shared in the bounty of her farm’s harvest, so did the soldiers guarding them. The Rebel guards borrowed books from the same book cart, and the sick men of both sides asked for assistance from the woman he was currently seeking—not Sarah, but the woman whose gentle smile made Ewan question his principles each time she appeared within the confines of the stockade.

Something drew his gaze to the left, and there she was, kneeling next to a man laid out on the ground—one of the draft dodgers who had been hauled in by the Home Guard. The hunt for deserters had been in full swing since the winter, and their number at the prison camp grew every day. It was starting to seem to Ewan that the men in Randolph County who were against the Confederacy just might outnumber those who were for the blasted Rebels.

“This will get your fever down, John,” she said, handing him a small bottle full of amber liquid, then digging into her apron pocket. “Take a sip when you wake up, at midday, and at night before you sleep. And chew one of these after you eat—do not swallow, you hear? That will help you keep your food down.”

The sick prisoner took the handful of dark green leaves she pressed into his hand and nodded weakly.

Ewan’s feet started to move toward her, acting seemingly of their own accord.

“You know how my Hattie’s doing? And the chil’ren?” John asked. “I don’t think David can handle the sowing alone, and Penny kills every crop she touches. Nicknamed her Pestilence.” He chuckled, then shifted uncomfortably. “Hattie was sick, last I saw her. I told her to stop bringing me food into the woods, that she’d catch her death or get caught by the militia, but she was too good to me.”

“They’re faring well,” Marlie said. There was the slightest hitch in her voice before the word “well,” as if she’d considered another less optimistic one. “The crops didn’t take, but we’ve been making sure they’ve got food. Don’t you worry about that.”

John nodded and she gave him a pat on the shoulder, then stood and brushed the dust from her skirts. Her gray gown was well made but simple; it lacked the hoops and other gaudy accoutrements that would have distracted from her figure beneath it.

My kingdom for a crinoline, Ewan thought as he turned his eyes away from the clearly outlined curves that strained against the material as she bent to adjust her hem. He couldn’t look away from her for long though; he’d counted to five once, and that was the longest he’d lasted.

Her skin was a smooth light brown, throwing up undertones of yellow where the sun hit it. Her dark, curly hair was pulled back into a chignon, leaving her face, with its full mouth and pert nose, open for perusal. He’d noticed every detail of her face the first time he saw her, but it still took him aback with its loveliness every time. He’d once visited an exhibition of Greek art and seen a beautifully restored amphora. He’d been overwhelmed with the desire to hold it in his hands, an all-consuming urge that had nearly driven him to climb over the ropes separating the art from the public and seize it. The feeling that built in him when he saw Marlie was frighteningly similar.

She grabbed the handle of her cart and pulled, starting off in the opposite direction.

“Miss Marlie?” He felt a tickle of anxiety that she might leave before they had a chance to speak.

She looked over her shoulder at him and Ewan’s heart leapt up into his throat. He knew it was anatomically impossible, but the strange shift in his chest and tightness in his trachea only happened when she appeared. He couldn’t pretend it was simply the fact that she was a woman—other women had come and paraded along the ramparts, watching the imprisoned Union men like they were animals in a zoological exhibition, with little effect on him. Mastering his emotions had been the work of a lifetime, for both personal and practical reasons, and yet . . . there he stood, staring at Marlie like a raccoon caught in the grain silo.

Her mismatched eyes were still as shocking as the first time he’d seen her. It should have been an imperfection, one brown eye and one green, but instead it gave her an ethereal air.

Was that pleasure in her expression? It wasn’t something he was used to seeing directed toward him, and his heart thudded a bit harder. If she knew him for what he truly was, those indentations around her mouth wouldn’t have deepened as she smiled.

“Oh. Good morning, Socrates. I’ve been looking for you.”

Ewan felt his cheeks flame at the nickname she’d given him after their first encounter: He’d requested Greek philosophy from her book cart, and when she handed him a book of mythology, he’d responded with a lengthy correction on the difference between the two. He hadn’t meant to; something about her had jangled his nerves. The more attentively she’d listened as he droned on about the difference between Homer and Hermagoras, the more donnish he’d become. He’d finally cut himself off and proffered an apology, as he’d been instructed by his mother and brother, but she’d simply smiled indulgently and said, “Never apologize for sharing your knowledge,” before moving on to the next man.

Ewan had wanted to kick himself. His older brother, Malcolm, had been gifted with the talent of making women swoon from a hundred paces, while Ewan could bore them to sleep within a hundred words. He thought flirting and seduction to be petty wastes of a man’s wit, but for the first time he’d wished he knew what to say to make a woman—Marlie specifically—think him dashing instead of dreary. He chalked up the strange impulse to prison-induced boredom.

The next time she’d come, she’d handed him a book entitled The Stoics of Ancient Greece. There’d been comments penciled into the margins of the book, agreeing with or challenging certain points. It was in a copy of Plato’s Republic that the first note directed to him had appeared on the flyleaf page. “Dear Socrates, No one else in my acquaintance cares for my thoughts on a long dead Greek, so I shall share them with you. . . .”

She’d gone on to impugn everything he believed in, but that hadn’t stopped him from carefully ripping the page out and rereading each looping word by the light of the fires that dotted the prison yard every night. He had several such pages, stuffed into his pocket. They passed a few moments discussing her thoughts each time she came, cordially, as if he didn’t know the loop and slope of her words intimately.

“Hello,” he said when he finally reached her. His voice sounded overly forceful even to his own ears, and he tried to inject a bit of diffidence into his tone. “I have another letter to send to my family, if that’s all right. And I was wondering if you’d perhaps been able to procure the supplies I requested.” He wondered more than that as he watched the corners of her lips turn up. The shape of her mouth, wide and lush, was perfection. Literally. He’d spent enough time reflecting on it to know it was symmetrical, harmonious, and well-proportioned: the Golden Mean in the flesh, and inspiration for thoughts that no man who was truly master of himself should be having.

She looked around, making sure no guards were watching, and then handed him a small pouch, grabbing the letter at the same time and tucking it into her bag in a smooth, practiced motion. The bag landed in his palm with a metallic clink. “I have no idea what you need these for, but here they are. I have something else for you as well. I saw it and thought of you.”

Marlie moved aside some books in her cart and pulled out a thin beige tome with black words pressed in block print on the front: The Enchiridion.

A peculiar feeling came over Ewan as he reached for the book. He distinctly remembered the first time he’d read it. It had been during one of the ever-increasing bad spells, with his father drunk and muttering darkly at his mother, who’d sat quietly doing the mending. Ewan had been frightened, as he often was when it came to his father, but his mother had focused on the intricate stitchwork that brought in money to the household, her expression unperturbed in the face of the unseemly abuse.

His brother, Malcolm, had watched the scene from the corner of his eye as he bounced Donella on his knee, but Ewan had cracked open his newest book, inhaling the musty scent of escape. The first words he read went through him like a bolt of lightning, illuminating a world that had been cloaked in darkness.

 

 

Ewan had looked up at his mother and her steady hands and realized that the mending was in her control, while his father was not. He was still frustrated and still angry, but a new respect formed for his mother in that moment; what he had taken for a weakness, and tolerance of abysmal behavior, was actually a strength. Ewan read the short tome quickly, and then read it twice more before bed that night. The rules of The Enchiridion made more sense than “Turn the other cheek” or “Honor thy father.” There was no need for forgiveness and false praise in this conception of life, only deciding what was essential and what was not.

His father was not essential. It was only a couple of years later that his father came to the same conclusion. If Ewan’s quiet reprimands had helped his father to understand that fact, he did not regret it.

That this woman would give him this book—the book that had saved his life, if not his soul? Ewan wasn’t superstitious, but even he could appreciate that this was a coincidence of the highest magnitude. He could understand how a thing like this might make a simpler man believe it held some greater meaning, but he was not a simple man. The sensation of dizzy warmth he felt was simply gratitude, he was sure.

“This book means a great deal to me. Thank you.” He ran his fingers over the textured cover, and when he looked up her gaze was following their path.

Her shoulders lifted and fell in a manner that indicated the gift was of no consequence, which was at odds with the warmth Ewan felt in his cheeks and neck and chest. She began moving away with her cart.

“Something told me you’d appreciate this sort of thing.” There was a teasing tone to her voice that thrummed an ancient scar in him, the one that had sealed over the wound incised by the whispers of “The boy is strange” and the shouts of “What kind of nonsense is he up to now?”

“You didn’t? Appreciate it?” He didn’t know why the idea upset him—he was quite open to differences of opinion. You cannot control the actions of others, he reminded himself. But if she found this book, which was such an essential part of his being, ridiculous, then that meant . . .

She glanced at him, amusement dancing beneath those long, sooty lashes of hers. Little bolts of anxiety tightened at Ewan’s neck at the thought that she might be amused by him.

“I enjoyed some parts more than others. I left my thoughts for you, in case you were interested in them.”

“Always.” I look forward to your notes more than the books, and everyone knows how strongly I feel about books. But he didn’t tell her that. “Engaging the arguments of those who hold differing opinions is always a worthy use of one’s time. It’s how we strengthen our rhetorical skills and broaden our knowledge.”

He sounded pretentious, ridiculous, but she smiled at him anyway and he had to fight back a groan at how sharply the slightest curve of her mouth cut into him.

“I’ll have to disagree with that,” she said. “Some arguments are not worth engaging. If you tried arguing for the validity of the Confederacy, this conversation would be over.”

One of the things that drew Ewan to Marlie was that there was always a certain softness about her, but the look in her eye as she regarded him was serrated.

Ewan nodded his agreement.

“Quite right. There’s discussion and there’s tomfoolery.” Even a confirmed pedant had some sense of decorum.

“Marlie!” a deep voice called out from a few feet away. “Time to go.”

A black man, obviously older than Marlie but not old enough to be an uninterested father figure, stood watching them. He was standing beside one of the squabbling officers from earlier. The officer gave him a friendly clap on the arm and walked off.

Marlie’s companion held a book in his hands that he quickly slipped into one of the large pockets of his wool coat. There was something in the movement that drew Ewan’s attention—it was overly casual.

The man nodded toward Ewan; there was amusement in his gaze when their eyes met.

Get in line, son, his expression seemed to say.

Am I that obvious? Ewan’s gaze flicked back to Marlie, not of his own accord, and he forced himself to meet the man’s eye again.

The man shook his head and turned away.

“Coming, Tobias!” Marlie gave Ewan a brief smile and then she was off, lugging her cart behind her. Ewan knew he should stop looking after her like a lost calf, so he turned to head back to his tent. He’d taken about four steps before he stopped and turned to the flyleaf.

 

 

Turmoil across the yard caught his attention before he could process the words. Ewan slammed the book shut and shoved it into the waistline of his pants. The noise could be guards come to raid the tents and take whatever the Lynch woman had provided for the prisoners, as they were wont to do. It could have been one of the gangs preying on the weakest among them for the same reason. A man couldn’t get too attached to his possessions in a prison, even a man who wielded some small amount of power, as Ewan did. You had to keep what was important to you close.

Across the yard, the throng of prisoners began to part and Ewan could see Warden Dilford hurrying alongside two men. One was slim and pointy all over, with squinty eyes and a long nose that reminded Ewan of a hungry dog glancing about in search of food. He was leading three or four men, all badly beaten, by a rope that bound each of them at the wrists with not enough space between them to walk without stumbling. Each time a man misstepped, the slim man gave the rope a vicious pull. Ewan winced. He knew how much damage coarse rope against skin could cause; he’d learned all about how fragile the human body was while carrying out his work.

“Got some more treasonous skulkers,” the man said. “Worse than the Yanks, these skulkers.”

“The word of my Lord is above the petty squabbles of man,” one of the men responded. He was older, his skin leathery from a life working the fields. “You wish to force me to fight, but my only battle is righteous resistance to that which is unjust. Slavery and avarice are not just.”

That drew murmurs of support from the crowd, likely from fellow War Quakers—those who followed the teachings of the Friends, but hadn’t registered before the Conscription Act. All of the deserters fascinated Ewan, but these men the most. They chose not to fight out of a strong sense of morality, while Ewan had joined up for the same reason. Yet it was in committing the most immoral acts that he’d aided his country the most. He didn’t regret being good at something so terrible—it had been made quite clear that he wasn’t like other men, and this was just further proof of that—but he did wonder at the cost. If souls were real, his was irrevocably stained by what he had been assigned to do for the sake of the Union. Saying no had never occurred to him.

“Why should the poor yeomen fight for the rich slaver who can buy his way out of service while sacrificing those who have nothing to gain in this fight?” the man continued, encouraged by the crowd. “Twenty slaves is all that stands between a skulker and a righteous man in the eyes of Governor Vance!”

A larger figure lumbered up behind the man, sword drawn. He raised the weapon and brought it down, and for a moment Ewan thought he’d see a defenseless man hacked to death before his eyes. But instead the attacker leveled several blows with the flat of his sword, beating the older man like a beast of burden instead of hewing him like a fattened calf.

“That resistance will be whipped out of you once you reach the Camp of Instruction. We’ll see what the good Lord says when you get to Raleigh,” the man said, and then he looked up, bringing his face into full view for the first time.

Cahill.

Ewan’s stomach constricted into a tight ball of disbelief, and a surge of anger and fear went straight to his head, leaving him with a raw, sick feeling, like a soldier dosed with too much morphine. Months and months had passed. Ewan had thought he’d come to terms with what happened in that Georgia farmhouse. The itch in his skull and the clench of his teeth told him otherwise. Cahill walked with a severe limp—Ewan knew precisely how the man had developed it—and his gaze swept over the prisoners like a wintry gale. When he got to Ewan, it lingered a moment, eyes narrowing.

Ewan’s instinct was to meet Cahill’s gaze. No, that’s not true—his instinct was to push through the crowd, grab the bastard’s sword, and run him through with his own steel. But it was that exact instinct that had made Ewan question everything about himself. There was carrying out his duty to his nation, and there was what had happened during his interrogation of Cahill. There was the blinding rage at injustice that had left Ewan ashamed and Cahill with a brace beneath his trouser leg. There was the knowledge that Cahill hadn’t paid dearly enough.

Ewan scratched his beard and looked up at the darkening sky. The late afternoon sunlight wasn’t enough to burn through the haze of awful memories Cahill had drawn up. Blood and laughter and brown bodies falling one after the other.

“Name’s Cahill,” Keeley whispered to Ewan as he sidled up beside him. Keeley was a man who drew information like other prisoners drew flies—it was why he and Ewan worked so well together. Casual conversation wasn’t Ewan’s forte. “He was the worst kind of overseer before the war. He’s head of the Home Guard old Zebulon pulled together for sniffing out deserters, petitioned for the job. Vance has told him to do anything under the sun to drag skulkers out of hiding and into the service, and Cahill’s more than happy to oblige. They say he’d do it even if Vance had turned him down, that’s how much he hates skulkers.”

Cahill was Sons of Confederacy, too, but Ewan didn’t give Keeley that information. If he did, he’d have to explain why he knew about the hardcore Secesh group’s existence and how he knew Cahill in particular was a member.

“I’ve heard some things, some nasty things, Red. Holding men over campfires, toasting their bits like chestnuts. And sometimes they get ahold of a skulker’s wife or kid . . .” Keeley spat, then wiped at his mouth with his sleeve. “Him being here can’t mean nothing good.”

“We’re already in prison,” Ewan said, clapping his friend on the back. “Things can’t get much worse now, can they?”

Ewan didn’t like lying, but sometimes you had to for the greater good.