The Bride Fair Read online

  They were at eye level.

  Had she noticed the piercing blueness of his eyes before? Perhaps not. Perhaps she didn’t dare register such things, because he would become a man and not merely an enemy.

  His eyes were so sad—that, she had noticed. He was looking at her so gravely.

  Such pain.

  What happened to you? she thought.

  Maria had no sense that he reached for her, nor she for him, but she was in his arms somehow. He held her tightly, both of them caught in whatever this moment was. Their foreheads touched; their breaths mingled. And suddenly his mouth was on hers. She gave a soft moan, completely overwhelmed by the feel and the taste of him. It was as if she suddenly couldn’t get close enough, couldn’t touch him enough, kiss him enough. She had never felt such need, such hunger….

  Acclaim for Cheryl Reavis’s recent historicals

  The Captive Heart

  “A sensual, emotionally involving romance.”

  —Library Journal

  “A compelling tale that will keep you on the edge of your seat.”

  —Rendezvous

  Harrigan’s Bride

  “…another Reavis title to add to your keeper shelf.”

  —The Booknook

  1992 RITA® Award Winner

  The Prisoner

  “…a Civil War novel that manages to fill the reader with warmth and hope.”

  —Romantic Times

  #604 MISS VEREY’S PROPOSAL

  Nicola Cornick

  #605 THE DRIFTER

  Lisa Plumley

  #606 DRAGON’S KNIGHT

  Catherine Archer

  THE BRIDE FAIR

  Cheryl Reavis

  www.millsandboon.com.au

  “To the red-shod one—with humble thanks.”

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  Author Note

  Chapter One

  Salisbury, N.C.

  June, 1868

  Who is this woman?

  Colonel Max Woodard watched as the train conductor pointed her in his direction, then stood waiting for her to make her way across the crowded railway platform. The question stayed in his mind as she approached, and it became more and more obvious that she was not happy about having to seek him out. Four years of war and two subsequent years of occupation duty among the vanquished Southerners had made him more than adept at recognizing their barely veiled contempt. Her enmity didn’t surprise him in the least. The fact that she was about to speak to him in broad daylight and in clear view of any number of the townspeople did.

  “You are Colonel Woodard?” she asked without hesitation. She was wearing black—most of the women in the South seemed to be in a kind of perpetual mourning. Or perhaps it was a matter of economics. Perhaps there was nothing but black cloth available to people who had little money to buy even the necessities.

  The woman’s voice had a slight tremor in it. Not enough to disarm him, but enough to pique his curiosity as to the cause.

  Anger? Fear?

  More the former than the latter, he decided. He took the liberty of staring at her. She was too thin and small-breasted for his taste. And she was probably younger than she looked. He had found that to be the case with many of these Rebel women, and he knew from personal experience that near starvation did little to preserve the bloom of youth.

  She had ventured out without her bonnet or her shawl, and she was slightly damp from the intermittent rain that had come in fits and starts since his arrival. But she seemed not to notice her missing garb or the weather. He was her focus.

  “I am,” he said, meeting her gaze. She looked away, but not quite quickly enough to keep him from seeing the antipathy she worked so hard to keep hidden.

  “If you would come with me, Colonel.”

  “Why?” he asked, making no effort to do so.

  “My father couldn’t meet the train. I have come in his place.”

  “And who might your father be?”

  “He owns the house where you will be billeted,” she said, clearly determined not to give any more information than she could help.

  “I see. And the numerous soldiers who are supposedly under my command. Where would they all be, I wonder?”

  Ordinarily, he never objected to spending time in a pleasant and accommodating woman’s company—but this one was neither. And there were certain military protocols to be adhered to. He was the new commanding officer in an occupied town, and no one from the garrison had bothered to meet his train. Indeed, but for a few of his fellow travelers, he didn’t see any of the military about at all.

  The woman took a quiet breath. “Some of the soldiers are maintaining the military headquarters. The rest of them are fighting another fire.”

  There was a slight emphasis on the word “another.”

  “What is burning?” he asked, noticing for the first time a plume of smoke off to his left.

  “The school.”

  “The children are safe?”

  “There were no children there,” she answered, moving away from him. “As you well know.”

  “Now how would I know that?” he said reasonably, and he still didn’t follow after her. “I only just arrived.”

  She stopped and looked at him. “The United States Congress has seen to it that we here are no longer allowed the luxury of public education—but a fire has somehow started in the school building. It is in real danger of spreading. Every able man is required to put it out, lest the whole town go up in flames.”

  He considered it a just fate for this particular town, but he didn’t say so. He glanced skyward. “Perhaps it will rain again,” he said instead.

  It was clear from the expression on her face that she had no intention of discussing the weather.

  “And perhaps the wind will change in time to spare your army’s storehouses.”

  Touché, he thought, and he very nearly smiled.

  “Do you usually run errands for the military?” he asked to keep her off balance, and she stiffened slightly.

  “My father was asked—ordered—by Major Hunt to retrieve you from the station and take you wherever you want to go. But he isn’t well enough to do so. I came in his stead. I obey my father’s wishes.”

  “I see,” he said again. And he was beginning to. She was going to be a dutiful daughter—if it killed her.

  “I’ve brought you a horse,” she said, indicating a nearby animal with a military saddle and brand. “I will show you the way either to the house or to your headquarters—or to the fire,” she added as an afterthought. “As you wish.”

  She walked on and stepped into a nearby buggy without assistance, then waited for him to untie the horse at the hitching post and mount.

  “I am much in your debt, Miss…?”

  “Don’t be,” she said. “It was none of it done freely.”

  The remark was more matter-of-fact than hostile. He stared at her, impressed by her temerity in spite of himself.

  “I prefer the buggy,” he said, for no other reason than to inconvenience her. Her remark warranted at least that—inconvenience.

  He had already made arrangements for his belongings to be sent to military h
eadquarters, and he climbed into the buggy beside her without waiting for her permission, sitting down on a goodly portion of her black skirts before she could get them out of the way. She sat there for a moment, struggling not to let him see how much his presence disturbed her. Then, she snapped the reins sharply and sent the horse on.

  “No,” he said, when she would have turned the buggy toward the center of town. “That way.”

  He pointed in the direction he wanted to go, toward the railroad cut and the outskirts of town. “I insist,” he added in case she believed their destination to be a matter for discussion.

  She continued in the direction he indicated, her back ramrod-straight. He could just smell the rosewater scent of her clothes and hair. There were only a few people on the street. All of them turned and stared curiously as they rode past.

  “I fear I may have compromised your reputation,” he said.

  She made no reply, reining the horse in sharply when it elected to trot.

  “Sir, there is nothing out this way,” she said, still struggling with the reins. “If you—”

  “I know what is out here,” he interrupted. “And I want to see it.”

  It was the third time in his life he had taken this route. The first time had been in the early summer of 1864. He had disembarked from the train—much as he had today—except that then he had arrived in a boxcar with fifty other men and under an armed guard.

  He had made a return trip to the depot in late February of 1865. That excursion he didn’t remember at all. He’d been too ill to walk, and several kind souls, who were probably not much better off than he, had carried him. His good friend, John Howe, wasn’t among them, of course. He and John had been captured and sent to the Confederate prison here at the same time, but John had made his escape a month earlier—and with a Rebel girl in tow. John Howe had never been one to do things by halves when it came to women.

  The horse finally settled down, and Max indicated where exactly he wanted the woman to take him. When she hesitated, he took the reins from her hands and effected the maneuver himself. She made no protest, regardless of how badly she wanted to, and she kept glancing at him as they rode along.

  He had no difficulty locating the entrance to the prison—or what was left of it. He drove the buggy directly over the railroad bridge and into the weeds that now covered the grounds. The stockade walls had disappeared, but there was still more of the place left standing than he had expected. Until now, he had liked to think that General Stoneman, who had been a prisoner of war himself, would have celebrated his raid of the town by leveling the prison entirely and sowing the ground with salt.

  But the outer walls of the huge three-story factory building used to confine as many prisoners as was inhumanly possible remained. He got some small satisfaction from seeing that the roof and windows were gone and that the hospital and the cookhouses were mostly rubble. Part of a wall stood here, a chimney there—and all of the giant oak trees inside the compound had been cut down. Only the stumps remained. He couldn’t tell where the stone wells had been, but he could still see the huge burrows in the red clay earth where men had been forced to live and where so many had died. It was only by the grace of God that he had not been one of them.

  He abruptly handed the woman the reins and got out of the buggy, standing for a moment to get his bearings. Then he began to walk. The weeds were taking over, but he could still see the scattered evidence of the men who had been held here. Broken glass, the bowl of a clay pipe, a belt buckle, a brass button. He could smell the jimpson weed, but it was an altogether different stench he kept remembering.

  He turned and forced himself to walk in the direction of what had once been a cornfield and a dead house, but that, too, was gone. He walked up and down, looking for the burial trenches. He wanted—needed—to stand there again—to be reminded why he’d stayed in the army after Lee’s surrender, in spite of his precarious health and his family’s protests.

  It began to rain. A few random drops at first, and then a sudden downpour. He couldn’t see any landmarks. Nothing.

  He kept walking back and forth in the area he thought the trenches would be, but there were no markers and no sunken earth.

  Where are they?

  He had friends buried here—good men who deserved better, men who would have never made their own escape and left him behind to die. He could see their faces again, hear their entreaties.

  Please, Sir. You tell my mama how to find where I am—

  But he couldn’t tell anyone’s mother where her son had been buried. The lay of the land was different somehow, overgrown and unrecognizable. There was nothing to guide him anymore, not even the foundation of the house where the bodies had been kept until somebody found time for another mass burial.

  Where are they!

  He felt unsteady on his feet suddenly. He could feel his heart begin a heavy pounding in his chest. It was hard to breathe, and he had to fight down an incredible urge to run. He took a deep breath and abruptly clasped his hands behind his back to keep them from shaking.

  It would pass. He knew that. All he had to do was wait.

  He glanced back at the woman. She sat in the buggy where he’d left her, pale and on the verge of becoming alarmed. He turned and walked unsteadily in her direction. He wasn’t about to fall on his face and give her any tales to tell about the new colonel.

  This time she got her skirts out of the way when he climbed into the buggy. He sat beside her, still fighting down the memories of his captivity.

  The rain drummed loudly on the buggy top.

  “Do you want to go to military headquarters?” the woman asked after a time.

  He looked at her sharply. He’d forgotten all about her.

  “Yes,” he said finally.

  She snapped the reins and sent the horse forward, turning the buggy in a wide circle and heading back in the direction they had come. He paid no attention to the route she took nor the surroundings until she abruptly stopped.

  “It’s there—the upstairs,” she said, indicating a two-story building across from a hotel. Much of the street out front had been taken over by harried-looking civilians—old men, women and children, all of them clearly unmindful of the weather.

  “Who are all these people?” he asked, and she kept avoiding his eyes.

  “They are…they’ve come because they’re afraid,” she said.

  “Of what?”

  She didn’t answer him; she merely shook her head, as if it were too complicated for her to explain—or for him to understand.

  He stared at her a long moment. “I expect I shall find out soon enough.”

  She seemed about to say something, but didn’t. He gave her a curt nod and got down from the buggy, then began walking toward the building that housed the North Carolina Western Division military headquarters. He had to literally push his way inside. Women plucked at his sleeve as he tried to pass, some in supplication and others with an obviously more commercial intent. He ignored all of them to put the fear of God into the first soldier he saw—a hapless private who lolled against a wall happily conversing with a painted woman Max had earlier seen prowling the railroad station for customers.

  In spite of Max’s ire, the private somehow found the presence of mind to lead him upstairs, where Max found an unexpectedly young sergeant major in a crowded and disordered room he assumed was an office.

  “This way, Colonel Woodard, Sir,” the sergeant major said, as if his new commanding officer hadn’t just kicked a private soundly in the backside.

  Max stood where he was, ignoring the fact that the sergeant major clearly expected him to take a seat in the chair behind the cluttered desk. He was not yet ready to delve into the stacks of papers his predecessor had left scattered about, nor was he ready to let go of his pique. He knew that Colonel Hatcher’s departure had been precipitous—the state of the man’s office confirmed that—but he had expected some attempt on Hatcher’s part to effect an orderly change of command. />
  Max walked to the window and looked down at the street below. The crowd was still there in spite of the rain—and growing, he thought. The woman who had brought him here was trying to drive the buggy through, and she was immediately surrounded by bystanders. But whatever questions were being put to her, she didn’t answer. She kept shaking her head and finally used the buggy whip to send the horse on, giving the crowd no choice but to let her pass.

  “Your name, Sergeant Major?”

  “Perkins, Sir.”

  “What do all those people downstairs want?”

  The sergeant major carefully held out a steaming cup of coffee instead of answering.

  “I asked you a question, Sergeant Major,” Max said sharply.

  “Yes, Sir. Petitioners come to talk to the new colonel, Sir.”

  “How is it they knew I was arriving today? Do you ordinarily keep the civilian population privy to the army’s comings and goings?”

  “Well, Sir. Sometimes telegraphing gets intercepted up the line—old tricks die hard for some of these so-called ex-Rebs. If the message ain’t got nothing to do with us, they’ll send it on through, like as not. If it does…well—maybe they will and maybe they won’t—either way, word gets out as to whatever information happens to be in them.” He shrugged. He also offered the tin cup of coffee again. This time Max took it.

  “These ‘petitioners.’ What exactly do they want?”

  “Some of them would be wanting the Oath of Allegiance, Sir. People what finally got wore down enough to come in and ask to take it—so’s they can get some food on the table.”

  “It’s taken them three years to get here?”

  “Well, I expect you know what the Rebs are like, Sir. Especially the women. They hold out as long as they can. I expect the war would have been over a good year or two before it was, if it weren’t for them.”

  Max agreed wholeheartedly—in spite of a noted general’s assertion that he could buy any one of them with a pound of coffee—but he didn’t say so.

  “All of them can’t have just decided to take the Oath,” he said. He took a sip of coffee, surprised to find it was quite good. He’d forgotten that some of the best coffee in the world came at the hands of sergeant majors. The skill seemed to come with the rank, regardless of the fact that this particular one didn’t appear old enough to have it.