“I’d rather dance with the devil than put that thing on.”
“You may get your wish sooner than you think. We are as near to hell in this house as we’d be on a scaffold.”
A steady barrage of shooting splintered wood and shattered windows. Lucas jerked her to the floor. “They want to make sure we don’t leave the house,” he said, switching out of his clothes and dropping his watch into his pocket.
Rachel tugged on her travel clothes, fought to even her breathing as billowing plumes of smoke filled the house. She seized a bag that she kept for such an emergency and called out to him. “We can escape through the cellar.” A shower of plaster sprayed over their heads from the gunfire. Too close.
They clattered down the stairs, the house burning, and snapping like a fiery wind through a canebrake. Flames licked the walls and swept across the ceiling. Ropes of fire chewed through the drapes and spread across the floor in rippling sheets.
Outside, the Rebels hooted and shouted, “A beautiful fire.”
Memories assailed. Her father…the barn. Rachel froze. Her quicksand feet would not move. Blinded by thick smoke and sweltering heat, she coughed uncontrollably and collapsed. The fire would swallow her up. She would die here, and no one would care. Had Lucas left her behind?
“Where are you, Rachel?”
He was there, beside her. He swept her up in his arms, pushed her face into his shoulder. Broken glass crunched beneath his feet and he stumbled. She looked up. The glowing embers leaped and twirled in a fiery dance. The hot swirling air and noxious smoke clouded her vision, singed her hair and scorched her eyes. How could Lucas see where they were going?
He kicked open the kitchen door and the fire beat a wall of intense heat that threatened to burn their lungs and cook them from the inside. He dropped them to the floor and pushed her. She crawled across the room, bruising her knees, pains skewering her skin as sparks burrowed into her clothing. At the cellar door, he wrapped a rag on a doorknob, hauled it open, and once through, rammed his shoulder against it, sealing them. “I hope you have a good plan because I don’t feel like having a cellar for my coffin.”
Wheezing breaths ripped at her throat as Rachel drew sweet drafts of fresh air into her lungs. The cellar remained the last haven before the house sank into it. She gave her bag to Lucas, lit a lantern and led him to a root cellar. Jars of cherries, peaches, jams, and pickles clinked on the shelves when she stumbled over a crate of potatoes. From a basket, she grabbed a bunch of apples, handed them off to Lucas to place in her bag, and then gave him the lantern.
The hollow wails of the fire caused her to shiver, and then she breathed a sigh of relief, reaching the east wall lined with shelves and baskets. At a side molding, she pressed a button and the wall sprang open, scraping across the dirt floor, and revealing a tunnel.
“Brilliant. I never would have guessed.”
She closed the door. “I had the tunnel built after my father died to help slaves as well as prisoners from Libby Prison escape.”
They hurried through a long and narrow passageway, the moist earth cool beneath their feet. She swiped at her nose, the stink of mildew lingered with smoke, and fluttery cobwebs stuck to her head. Soon shafts of daylight spilled into the dark interior.
“I need you to lift the stone above us,” she said.
Lucas complied and heaved himself up. He extended an arm, pulled her out, and then examined the structure. “A crude replica of an abandoned well. No one would ever guess it’s intended purpose.”
“And concealed in the woods across the field from my home over there,” she pointed where a smoke cloud mushroomed above the trees. “I must go back—”
“Are you crazy? I’m not letting you go back into that inferno. I’m sorry about your home. But nothing can be done.”
A bitter agony welled inside her, the loss of the Bible her father had given her. She sobbed. She cared for no other possession.
He slid his arms around her as her home crackled and exploded, folding into the cellar. Couldn’t stop to worry about the things she couldn’t change. She pushed away, picked up her bag and led him through the woods.
Chapter Eleven
In an open meadow filled with blooming purple aster and goldenrod, two horses grazed, flicking their tails in the late afternoon light. Rachel’s clothes were torn and dirty from Johnson and the fire. Lucas wiped the soot from her face with his thumbs, and then helped her remove a pile of brush, lifting a tarp and hauling out two saddles.
“Amazing, you think of everything,” Lucas said, saddling the horses. After tightening the cinches, he cupped his hand to give her a leg up.
She straddled her chestnut-colored mare and took the reins. “You realize this will not be any stroll in the countryside.”
Lucas mounted and squinted at the sun. He sweated with the heat and lifted the detested wool of his gray collar away from his neck. “It will be dark soon, so we’ll go around Richmond and move north.”
She tied her bag behind her. “No, we will head south. It will be the least likely place they’ll look for us.”
“Are you joking? They’ll believe we’ve perished in the fire. Johnson couldn’t have done us a better favor.”
“He is no fool.” She raised her head in that infuriating stubborn fashion when she took a notion she was right. “We’ll ride south, circling north.”
Lucas was about to argue with her, but when he looked into those eyes of hers, he remembered the ordeal she had just been through, and mentally clicked off everything that had happened to her. She had been brutalized by a sadistic monster. Her magnificent home had been burned to the ground and had almost entombed her within its walls. There was no safety net afforded to her now that her Northern sympathies had been revealed.
