And One Rode West Read Free Page A

the place alone because of Jesse. Jesse was the oldest male heir, so the place legally came to him. And Jesse had fought for the Union. But the Rebs had left the place alonebecause her brother Daniel had fought for the South. Once, the Yanks had nearly burned it, but for a few bright shining moments her family had all managed to band together, neither Yanks nor Rebs, and fought to preserve it.
    They had all fought for it, but she had saved it. She had stayed here while Jesse had gone north and Daniel had gone south. She had learned to keep the garden when so many of their slaves—freed by an agreement between her brothers—had begun to wonder what they could do with their lives in the North. She had watched them go—and she had watched some return. She had learned to garden, she had learned to plant. She had plowed, she had picked cotton. She had even repaired the roof when it had begun to leak in Jesse’s study. She’d had help from her sisters-in-law, but they’d both been busy with their babies. Jesse, the Yank, had married Kiernan, the Reb, and Daniel, the Reb, had married Callie, the Yank, and so they’d all had each other.
    Christa had had the house.
    The softest whisper of a cooling breeze suddenly swept up. She lifted off her wide-brimmed straw hat and held it before her.
    It might have been different. She might not have had to love a house—brick and wood and paint and shingles—if it hadn’t been for the war. Once upon a time she’d been in love. And it hadn’t been awful, like it had been for her brothers, loving women who were their enemies. She had been in love with a Confederate officer, Liam McCloskey. They’d spent what hours they could together, dreaming and planning and building a better world, one they could live in when the war was over, the brand-new and liberated Confederate States of America. They would have had a half-dozen children, and they would have raised them along with the cotton and tobacco that had built their world, that had made it rich.
    But they wouldn’t raise anything now. Her fair young officer was dead, fallen upon the field of battle. His uniform was his funeral shroud; the bare dark earth of his homeland, the Confederacy, was his coffin.
    She and Kiernan and Callie had all worked endless hours, sewing beautiful beads and lace onto a white taffeta bridal gown. The war had raged around them, food had grown more and more scarce, and a pair of stockings had become a great luxury. But they had created a stunning gown for her to wear for her wedding.
    But though she had dressed in the beautiful white gown, Liam McCloskey never arrived for his wedding. When Liam did not arrive by the time night fell, she had known with a sinking surety in her heart that he was dead.
    They had taken the beautiful wedding gown and had dyed it black. Dressed in her mourning, she had gone to the train station to claim her lover’s remains. All she’d received was word that his body had been buried with countless others in a mass grave.
    At least he had died in Virginia.
    Christa swallowed hard and lifted her face to the sun, her eyes tightly closed. She had ceased to cry. So many were dead. She had grown numb against the news of death. Both Jesse and Daniel had survived, and she was deeply grateful for that, but they had come home to wives with open arms. She had watched her brothers, one in blue and one in gray, coming home together. She had started to run to them herself, but then she had remembered. They had wives to run down the long road to meet them. She could not run, for the man she should have run to, ragged and worn in his gray, was no more than a memory now. He would never walk down any trail toward her, never smile his slow, warm smile, never open his arms to her again.
    And so she had watched.
    Now she was like the house. When the war had begun, they had both been beautiful, vibrant, full of life.
    The house needed paint and repairs.
    She needed her youth back. She had been so very