Courting isabella, p.1
Courting Isabella, page 1
COURTING ISABELLA
WHISKEY SPRINGS SERIES
KATHRYN KALEIGH
To learn more about Kathryn Kaleigh, visit
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www.kathrynkaleigh.com
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COURTING ISABELLA
PREVIEW: WRITTEN IN THE WIND
Copyright © 2022 by Kathryn Kaleigh
All rights reserved.
Written by Kathryn Kaleigh
Published by KST Publishing, Inc., 2022
Cover by Skyhouse24Media
www.kathrynkaleigh.com
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, or incidents are products of the author’s imagination and used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual people, places, of events is purely coincidental or fictionalized.
Created with Vellum
CONTENTS
Part I
PART 2
WRITTEN IN THE WIND PREVIEW
Also by Kathryn Kaleigh
TRAPPED
CHAPTER 1
ISABELLA CHAMPLAIN
Vicksburg
1863
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My blood-stained cotton dress clung to my back with sweaty dampness. I shoved my hair back with the back of my wrist and didn’t so much as cringe, knowing that I’d just smudged a man’s blood across my own skin.
I’d grown so used to the scent of rotting flesh and fresh blood, that I no longer noticed the putrid and metallic scents that worsened in the broiling heat.
Green-backed flies with red eyes buzzed around a pile of unwashed bandages tossed and forgotten in a pile less than three feet away.
I knelt next to a young soldier, not a day over seventeen, stretched on the ground beneath a makeshift canopy.
I dipped a rag into a bowl of murky water, squeezed it out, and placed it over the boy’s forehead. A man, I corrected myself.
The soldier, whose name I didn’t know, had gone to war a boy, but he deserved to be called a man now.
And today he would die a man.
He sucked in a breath. His last.
I should have found it disturbing that I knew that, but I did not. It came with the territory.
Much like the young soldier, I had been a girl of fifteen-years-old when the war began, but now, two years later, I had earned the distinction of being a woman. I’d go toe to toe with anyone who tried to say otherwise.
I was not afraid. There was nothing that scared me. Not anymore.
The soldier put his head back, gasped, and I took his hand in mine. Held it tightly.
I sat with him as the beauty of the sunset painted the sky’s canvas with reds, golds, and a lovely shade of pink.
With the sky’s artwork as witness, the soldier’s death rattle brought tears to my eyes and I let myself cry for this man in a boy’s body. A man whose name I would never know.
A man who had died defending a cause he probably didn’t even understand.
A lark, they’d called it.
The war would be over in a matter of weeks, they’d said.
The Yankees would turn tail and run back north like the devil himself was at their heels, they’d boasted.
Instead, the Union soldiers rained mortars over our heads and reduced the proud southern soldiers to a diet of rats and musty-pea bread.
We had not heeded the warning to get out. At the time, no one could have predicted this particular predicament that we now found ourselves in.
Cornered, like wounded animals, we waited, teeth bared, refusing to give up.
As the sun dropped over the horizon, I dried my tears and, with no sheet to be had, closed the soldier’s eyes and covered his face with his battered gray soldier’s kepi hat.
“May you find peace now,” I murmured, then got to my feet and stretched my back.
There would be others to tend and the havoc did not stop with nightfall.
CHAPTER 2
BENJAMIN LEJEUNE
I wasn’t supposed to be here. My men, a small unit of fifteen, and I were supposed to be west of here, on the other side of the Mississippi River, but the Union army had set upon Vicksburg with such a sudden reign of hell, that we could not abandon them, especially since women and children were the ones most affected.
The enemy did not care where their mortars landed, nor did they care whether they killed a southern soldier, a woman, or a child.
Thomas, my second in command had questioned my decision to stay within the city limits instead of leaving the area as we’d planned. I didn’t blame him for that.
Our task wasn’t here. Our task was to ride west. To join the Texas cavalry in their western defense of northern Louisiana.
Vicksburg had enough soldiers, the commanders said. Johnson and his men would be arriving at any moment.
I set the shovel aside and crawled out of the ditch.
The siege was a great equalizer. Our horses stabled, we worked side by side, regardless of rank, to protect the city from outright invasion.
General Pemberton was the only exception, to my knowledge at least. He had taken up residence in one of the homes in town, providing moral support and guidance to a city brought to its knees by the constant barrage.
I met with General Pemberton once every few days, usually in the mornings for breakfast. I didn’t tell my men when I had a real breakfast. The general shared his breakfast, whatever the ladies of Vicksburg pulled together for him. Sometimes eggs and ham. I didn’t question where they got it.
The rest of my days were literally spent in the trenches with my men.
We’d taken charge of a section on the northern area of the city. At first, civilians had passed through daily on their way to the caves. Now, weeks into the siege, only the occasional civilian passed through our ranks.
It was as though the city had silently divided itself into two camps. Those who took refuge in the caves and those who stayed in their homes, refusing to huddle in the caves like cowards. Each camp believed they were doing the right thing.
Personally, if given a choice I would choose to brave the possible shelling in the city to the musty hell of hiding out in a dank cave, though I had to admit the trenches we dug probably weren’t much better and offered very little protection in all reality.
Yesterday, our youngest man, a boy really, had been hit by a mortar. Thomas and another man had hauled him to the makeshift hospital run by civilian women with no medical training.
This morning, I would learn whether or not he had survived. Despite being an optimist at heart, I had very little optimism about John’s fate.
I’d told him he was too young. That he needed to stay home. Wait his turn to join our ranks, but he’d been determined. And it had been that determination that had led to my relaxing my rule to only take men who were clearly grown into my ranks.
“Your turn,” I told Thomas as I dipped a cup in a bucket of water and drank deeply.
“You need a bath,” Thomas said.
“Don’t we all?” I shot him a glance.
Like me, Thomas shaved daily. The other men didn’t bother. But a bath was a luxury none of us had at the moment.
“John didn’t make it.”
“Damn it.” I put my hands on my hips and bowed my head. Then I looked up at him. “How do you know?”
“Marcus went over to the hospital for dysentery.”
I nodded. “About time.” What passed for a hospital was actually the two-story home of Doc Champlain. The Doctor had turned his own home into a hospital, keeping only the second story for himself.
Unfortunately, even that wasn’t enough. The wounded spilled out across his lawn.
I’d heard it rumored that Doc’s daughter was one of the nurses who helped him tend the sick and wounded. I’d never seen her myself, but the men called her an angel.
CHAPTER 3
ISABELLA
I woke early to the sound of a rooster crowing, followed shortly by the sound of a mortar coming right for us.
Closing my eyes, I waited for it to explode. It did, but it was somewhere in the distance. They always sounded like they were coming right for us.
I mostly ignored them now. God help us if one ever landed on the house.
I was actually more curious about where the rooster had come from.
My gown damp with sweat, I crawled out of the bed draped in mosquito netting. The netting kept the mosquitoes at bay, but it also reduced the amount of fresh air circulating.
I rinsed off with cool water, found a clean light green dress and pulled it over my head.
Sitting at my dresser, I brushed my long brunette hair before putting it up and fastening it at the back of my head.
For a brief moment, I remembered what it had been like a million years ago before the war. One of those evenings when I’d sat on this very bench and brushed my hair. Only then I wasn’t preparing to minister sick and wounded soldiers. I’d been preparing to go downstairs to play the piano for my parents and their guests.
It had been a different time in a world that no longer existed.
The piano still stood downstairs, although now it was silent and my fingers hadn’t touched the keys in ages. It was doubtless terribly out of tune.
It was quiet when I went downstairs and found Father sitting at the kitchen table.
“Is that coffee?” I asked.
“It’s passable,” he said.
I went to the cupboard for a mug.
“Anything to eat?” I asked over my shoulder.
“Some biscuits.”
“Mrs. Green?” I poured what looked more like lemonade than coffee into my mug. But it smelled enough like coffee to wake my senses.
“She’s a good woman,” Father said and I caught the hint of a smile that crossed his features before he caught himself.
I sat in a chair next to him and took a cautious sip of the coffee.
“Not bad,” I said.
“Had worse.”
I lifted the cloth napkin in the small basket in the center of the table and took out a biscuit.
My mother had died in childbirth, leaving my father to raise me on his own. Any other man would have sent the child to live with his family in Alabama, but not my father.
Fortunately, he was a handsome man. Women, mostly widows, lined up at the door to help the handsome doctor with his baby.
I’d been raised by a village.
To the dismay of the widows, my father appeared to have been blind to the women who wanted to capture his attention.
My father had never remarried, but one of the widows, Mrs. Heather Green, seemed to have caught my father’s attention as of late.
“She didn’t stay for breakfast?” I asked.
Father shrugged. “She had something she had to do.”
I hid a small smile of my own behind my coffee mug.
I’d spent enough time around women, mostly widows, to have learned that a man needed a bit of a challenge in order to notice a woman.
Mrs. Green, a lovely woman in her early thirties, seemed to have getting my father’s attention down to an art.
She’d bring him food now and then… another way to a man’s heart. But she didn’t stay. If Father wanted to visit with her, he had to call upon her.
A woman who threw herself at a man may as well know that she stood no chance with that man.
“I’ve been meaning to speak with you,” Father said, setting his mug on the table and looking at me over his spectacles.
Any time I had his full attention, it meant that he had something important to tell me. And it was rarely, if ever, something good.
I braced myself. “What is it, Father?”
“You’re doing too much.”
“What?” I nearly laughed. “I hardly do anything.” I swept a hand toward the door where one of the other young ladies who worked as a nurse had just come inside. Father had turned his study into an examination room and the parlor into a hospital.
But it wasn’t enough. Wounded and sick soldiers spilled out across the lawn, the worst ones being placed beneath canopies to give them a bit of shade from the heat.
“Father, there is so much to—”
Father held up a hand to stop me.
“You were with the young soldier last night.”
I leaned back in the chair and looked away. “Yes.”
“You shouldn’t be seeing things like that.”
“We’re surrounded by death and destruction. I couldn’t avoid it if I tried.”
“People are talking,” Father said on a sigh.
“When did you ever care what people think?”
Father was tired. That was all. Tired and discouraged.
“I don’t care for me,” he said. “I care for you.”
“I don’t care.” I had nothing to be ashamed of. I did nothing wrong. Helping the wounded soldiers was the least I could do while our men were out there dying and for what? For us.
Father stood up, picked up his hat from the table.
“Unfortunately, one day you will.” He put on his hat. “And then it will be too late.”
I watched him walk from the room, heading to his study to do his own part of doing too much.
I knew my father well enough to know that this conversation wasn’t over. He’d told me before, several times, that I was doing too much.
There was more to what he was saying, but he wasn’t telling me yet.
CHAPTER 4
BENJAMIN
Wearing my full butternut gray uniform, I waited in the parlor of what was serving as the Vicksburg army headquarters for General Pemberton.
His assistant had gone upstairs to tell the general that I was here.
I’d gotten here early ahead of what looked to be a nasty thunderstorm.
I wouldn’t have come at all, except I’d gotten a message from him requesting a meeting as soon as possible.
I paced from one side of the room to the other. The room whispered hints of times gone by. A piano, silent now. A large grandfather clock that no one had bothered to wind. A stack of leather-bound books sitting on the end table, forgotten.
Thunder rumbled in the distance. It sounded a lot like cannon fire, but unfortunately, I had enough experience that I could tell the difference. Experience I could have done without.
“Good morning,” General Pemberton said, coming into the room.
“Good morning.” I turned around and walked toward him. “Apologies for being early. Trying to get ahead of the storm.”
“Have a seat.” Pemberton sat down at the little table where we had our meetings and I sat down across from him. “Good of you to come by.”
“My pleasure,” I said. But coming by wasn’t how I would have described this meeting. It was actually a thirty-minute ride from our station to Pemberton’s headquarters. I wasn’t looking forward to the trip back in the storm. But I was a soldier and it was my duty.
“I have fresh biscuits,” his housekeeper said as she set a plate of biscuits on the center of the table. She was an older lady by the name of Mrs. Griffin. Always cordial. “How are you Mr. Nathan?”
“Very well, thank you,” I said. “And yourself?”
“Doing mighty fine,” she said.
I knew she was lying. She wasn’t doing any better than I was. But it was the southern genteel way.
No matter how bad it got, southern pleasantries never dimmed. It was a sign of poor breeding to admit anything less.
“I’ll be right back,” she said. “I have a treat for the two of you.”
Pemberton took a biscuit as she walked out and slathered it with butter. I did the same. Although I was ready to head back to camp, I was at Pemberton’s mercy.
I knew how he operated. He took his time. Instead of just jumping right to the point, he took his time.
“Sorry to hear about the young soldier in your regiment,” Pemberton said. “John.”
“A damn shame.” John would have enjoyed knowing that Pemberton knew him by name. John had limitless aspirations. He’d hoped to move up the ranks and he had been doing a fine job of it when he had been struck down by a mortar.
“Here you go,” Mrs. Griffin said, proudly setting a platter of bacon and scrambled eggs next to the biscuits.
My traitorous stomach grumbled and I sent up a quick prayer of thanks that I hope atoned a little bit for my guilt at eating real food when my men couldn’t.
“I have something I need you to take care of,” Pemberton said.
And there it was.
Pemberton was finally going to get around to it.
CHAPTER 5
ISABELLA
The ground was still damp from the thunder storm that had gone through that morning. The rain had brought a brief reprieve from the heat, but it wouldn’t last long.
Once the sun was in control again, it would the attack dampness with a vengeance, making it even hotter than it had been without the rain.
Father hadn’t told me where he’d gotten the horse, but it seemed that with the right amount of currency—not always money—a man could get just about anything.
This particular dapple-gray mare’s name was Shadow. Shadow seemed unconcerned by the shelling, so she had likely belonged to a soldier at one point.
