The night spread slowly in dreadful suspense and awful expectation, and she swiped at a tear. Wasn’t she to blame with her duplicity, and her cruel taunts spoken out of sheer perversity? How despicable she was in choosing the right words to infuriate him and provoke him with her mythical lover. But to admit the truth now was like scattering ashes in the wind.
With a lump forming in her throat, Rachel was unable to define her feelings, or explain how she loved Lucas, more than herself, more than her own life.
She pushed away a long-ago notion of a loving and devoted husband and a house full of children. No time for self-pity. In a few short hours, they’d swing from a tree, so it didn’t matter anyway. With an effort of will, she opened her eyes to find Lucas standing quietly in front of her.
With the callused pads of his thumbs, he reached out and wiped her tears from her cheeks, then cupped her face in his hands and lifted it, so she had no other alternative but to look at him.
“Lovely Rachel, your eyes mirror your heart.”
Rachel sniffed and gave him a watery smile.
“It’s okay to be scared,” Lucas said.
He’d mistaken her thoughts.
The door scraped open and Lucas dropped his hands. A weary guard thrust a plate of charred roasted rabbit through the bars, and then sat guard on a stool, staring at them.
“This will be the last supper.” He laughed at his morbid joke, and then with a jaundiced eye, looked Rachel up and down. “A woman? Doesn’t surprise me.”
Lucas plucked a piece of meat, gobbled it down, and then grabbed a thigh bone, pointed it at the guard and said, “This is the best I’ve eaten for a long time. Back in camp they made us soup with the shadow of a pigeon that had been dead for a long time.”
The soldier tipped back on his seat and guffawed. “You is funny for a Yank.”
“One of Lee’s soldiers had both arms shot off, but he was so devoted, he shouldered his way through the battle,” said Lucas, making himself agreeable. Soon his wonderful sense of mimicry had the sentry in stitches. The guard shared a piece of wormy bread and Lucas regaled him with hours of anecdotes.
“Why one time…” Lucas began and deliberately lowered his voice.
“What’s that?” the guard said, and a dribble of tobacco juice oozed down his beard.
Lucas slapped his leg and bent over laughing as if the joke’s ending were too hilarious to repeat. He swiped at his eyes and mumbled something. The guard leaned forward to catch it. Lucas’ knee came up through the bars at a right angle, caught the sentry in the pit of the stomach. His fist smashed square into the man’s jaw, like the crack of a cane slapped against rock. In a thud, the guard dropped to the floor. Lucas seized the keys off the guard’s belt and, in seconds, they were free. He grabbed the rifle and her hand.
“I told you to trust me.” He yanked her out the door. The figures of men outlined against the leaping fire, lay rolled in their blankets.
“The prisoners are escaping.”
Men stumbled to their feet. Rifles exploded, flying wide of their marks. Fleeing under the cover of darkness, Rachel and Lucas disappeared into the forest.
“Ever been caught in a firestorm? Stay low, or you’ll be slashed to ribbons.”
Musket balls cut branches from trees and splintered saplings, showered wood chips over them. Rachel pushed off rough cracked ridges of tree bark, unable to discern anything in the cold black night except for the fiery torches behind them.
Lucas fired a shot. A man screamed. A storm of shot burst through the woods from behind. A miasmic smell clung to the air. The ground disappeared beneath her feet. Her arms flailed in the air. Her stomach flew up into her throat. In the obsidian darkness, she grabbed at vines, branches, clawed at roots, and dirt to break her fall. A thorn jabbed in her backside. She slammed into wet leaf mold in the bottom of a ravine, her breath whooshing out.
Lucas wrenched her to her feet and shoved her up the opposite embankment. “You want us to be sitting ducks?”
Zigzagging through the forest like phantoms, they bounded over treefalls and circling trees. Lucas stopped and bit open a cartridge package, sprinkled powder and spat the bullet into the muzzle. Slamming the ramrod down, he slotted the rifle on his shoulder, took aim and fired. With no more ammunition, he dropped the rifle.
“What do we do now, throw rocks?” she said, out of breath, as they approached a roadway. Rachel tripped, snaring her foot in a woodchuck hole and stuck in a tangle of roots. Shouts came from behind. The Home Guard militia charged hot on their trail…a matter of seconds.
“Go,” she yelled at Lucas and sagged against the ground like a cornered rabbit.
“I’d never leave you, Rachel.”
Holding torches high, a wall of ragged men surrounded them, bearing rifles and drawing revolvers out of leather holsters. The cold steel of a Colt barrel touched the back of her head. Rachel heard the hefty click.
As promised, the captain of the Home Guard had returned. Lucas’ glib tongue was unable to turn the tide. The militia stayed too full of rage and whiskey for fast talk.
Rachel stumbled to rise. A guard yanked her up by her long hair. His two front teeth were gone, and he lisped, “Pretty thing, ain’t she, Captain?”
