He heard himself begin, but did not recall making the choice to speak. It was as if his mouth opened of its own accord.
“We were set upon outside Martinsburg,” he said. The forest still seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for his confession. “I took a bayonet between two ribs near my heart. I thought I was done. I lay on the battlefield and I listened to men crying out for mercy, for water, and then sometime after dawn, I saw a man with no coat. He walked out of the mist, and I thought he was a Union soldier.” He swallowed. He could not look at Solomon as he told this; how did he remember it? “I asked him to make it quick. I’d heard stories of what they did to prisoners.”
The man, Ambrose, gave a strangled noise of protest, and the men holding him gave him a hard shake to shut him up.
“But he gave me water instead. He knelt down at my side and he looked at the wound, and told me I would live. I thought it had pierced my heart, but he knew it hadn’t. I told him you had left without me.” Jasper raised his head, meeting their eyes, and they looked away.
Every man there knew what happened to wounded soldiers. They were left to die on the battlefields for want of soldiers to tend to them, at the mercy of the enemy and the elements. If they made it to the field hospitals, they were just as likely to die, only surrounded by the screams of wounded and dying men, caught by the infections that raged through the confined mass of humanity. Leaving a soldier on the battlefield meant he might at least see the sky while he died, but it didn’t suit a soul well to leave his brother in arms. Jasper could only hope they remembered that n
ow. It wouldn’t be enough to get their sympathy, but at least they might remember that they had all made desperate decisions.
“He brought me to the hospital and made me a bed on the ground outside. For weeks, he made sure I had bandages and blankets. He helped me walk and made sure my wound was clean. He didn’t speak much at first, just listened to me talk about home...and then he started telling me about his family: his father dead, his sisters left to run the farm because he’d marched to war.
“None of you knew him then. His accent was strange, but I didn’t remember until later. I remember how he sat at the fireside with everyone and soaked up the stories, the way you all talked about northerners. He seemed... hungry for it, and later, when he talked before battles, when we were all scared. He was so sure. He spoke of liberty and justice and a world without pain.”
“And then we got to Monterey Pass, and I saw the bullet coming for him and I couldn’t stop it, I couldn’t get to him in time.” Jasper’s throat closed on the memory. He could see it in his mind’s eye, Solomon knocked backwards off his feet with the impact, blood spreading bright down his arm, and Jasper running, heedless of the bullets, heedless of anything to his side.
“I don’t know how I got him off the field,” he said. “We should have been shot. We should have been trampled. Later, it felt like it must have had meaning, us getting away. Maybe it did. I couldn’t get anything out of Horace. We knew there was something about him, didn’t we? We all knew. I couldn’t get out of him where he was from, but I remembered something he’d said once, about fishing in the creek near his house.”
“I remember thinking that nothing mattered as long as he got out alive—and that nothing mattered if he didn’t. Horace was the best of us, you know that. He gave from his rations to feed the younger ones. He ran out to get us back behind cover. He always led when we charged. And when we doubted—and we all doubted—” Jasper met their eyes defiantly “He was there to reassure us. I’d seen his sureness fading as the battles went by, and when he begged me to leave him to die, I just thought I couldn’t leave him to die while he doubted.”
Jasper swallowed, looking around himself. They had lost themselves in the story. Cecelia knew it and yet she did not; not like this. Her mouth was hanging open, and she was slumped to the ground, tears wet on her cheeks. In the back, the spy was listening intently, hazel eyes sad, and the men who were to hold him captive seemed to have forgotten their duty.
Solomon, his face was white as death. Jasper took a breath and plunged on. “We made our way north. Horace didn’t know anything about it. He was gone with fever. It was harder every day to get him walking, and eventually we ran out of food. I got him to an old cottage in the woods, and then I buried my coat and went for food. I knew he’d die if I didn’t, and his fever was getting worse.”
“I scared Cecelia at the edge of her family’s fields.” He met her eyes ruefully, and she tried to smile, but a tiny sob came out of her instead. Jasper wished he could wrap her in his arms, but the gun at his head had not moved. “Her elder sister came out to scare me off. She was holding a horse bridle.” He felt himself laugh at the memory, but his heart was breaking. “Perhaps once in a life, you meet someone who changes you forever. I was lucky enough to meet two: Horace, and Clara. As soon as I saw her, I knew. But she was scared, and she knew just what I was. She warned me off, even while I pleaded for help.”
“But she came back. She left bread and bacon, and bandages for Horace, and then she offered me a job on the farm, because it was August and they needed the hay brought in. She fed me, always gave me extra, and I fell in love with her. I knew there was no future, none at all. I knew that. But I loved her more than I knew it was possible to love. She was honorable, but she was also kind. When Horace’s fever got worse, she took the only money they had and she went into town to get medicine for him, but when she came back...”
Solomon sank his head into his hands. Could he hear Clara’s voice echoing in the glade as clearly as Jasper could? Cursing them both, filled with horror at what her brother had become.
“What?” Knox prompted at last. The metal pressed against Jasper’s scalp. “Finish it.” Hi voice was gruff.
“Horace was Clara’s brother.” There was a hastily-indrawn breath from around the group. “He had defected, like you were afraid he did, Knox, but he defected from the Union to the Confederacy, not the other way around.”
At the back of the group, the Union spy was white as a sheet.
“Clara cursed us both. She told me to leave and never come back. She said she blamed me for Horace leaving, and I suppose she was right. She’d been living in fear for months, hearing he was missing, thinking he was a prisoner, and now here he was home again, but a traitor. When she left, he told me that he hadn’t meant to come home. He didn’t want to shame them.”
“We could have gone back, but Knox, once you’re free of it, you see it as it really is. There weren’t any great ideals on our side. We wanted slaves, and I had been working alongside freedmen. They were as human as you or I, Knox. Clara was teaching one of them to read. He told me about his daughter, sold away from him.”
Another low mutter from the group. He’d never get mercy now. Tell the truth. Had Solomon really known what he was asking?
There was no way but forward.
“I couldn’t leave Clara. I loved her. I begged her forgiveness, and in time she understood. She welcomed us back. The brother she thought she had lost, and me. I expected them to hate me, to make mock of me, but they accepted me into the house as if I was one of them. And now...” He let his voice trail off.
“But this is Cecelia,” Knox said after a moment, looking over at the woman.
“You took the wrong woman,” Jasper said harshly. When the soldiers’ faces fell, he cursed himself for not telling them sooner. Would they have returned her?
Yes, and taken Clara in her place.
“I see. So Horace—”
“Wasn’t a spy,” Jasper said wearily. “He’s just another man, Knox, like you and me. Trying to do the right thing.”
“He left us in the end.”