And One Rode West Read Free Page B

young before it had all begun! The hostess of Cameron Hall, her father’s daughter, her brothers’ pride. Men from across the country had vied for her attention at parties and balls. She was known as the “Cameron Rose,” for they joked that she was the beauty between two thorns, Jesse and Daniel. They’d all been blessed with the Cameron eyes, eyes that were near cobalt-blue, and the Cameron hair, a deep dark shade that was nearly as black as ebony. In those days her face had been ivory with just the right touch of rouge in her cheeks. She had been so quick to smile, so quick to laugh.
    Maybe now she needed a paint job too.
    Her big floppy hat hadn’t kept the sun from her face. She had burnt, she had peeled. No matter what lotions Janey had given her for her hands, they had callused and grown rough. She’d acquired startling muscles. Very unladylike.
    But Cameron Hall still stood. She had done it. Despite war, despite devastation. She had kept the hall standing, and she had seen to it that they all ate while they waited and prayed.
    Now the war was over, and she was still out here working with the tomato plants.
    It wouldn’t be long now. She was alone with the house again because Jesse and Kiernan were in Washington on business and Daniel and Callie were in Richmond trying to help sort out some of the confusion of getting wounded Rebs back south from northern prison camps while returning wounded Yanks to their homes. The babies—her three little nephews and one little niece—were all gone with their parents. The Millers’ twins, Kiernan’s young sister and brother-in-lawfrom her first marriage, were also in Washington. Janey had gone with them, just as Jigger had determined to go along with Daniel to help him and Callie with their little brood.
    And so now it was just her again, her and Cameron Hall. She wasn’t completely alone. Jesse and Daniel had agreed to free their slaves long before any emancipation proclamation had been written. Many of their slaves had left, but many had returned.
    Many had stayed even at those times when she’d had nothing to pay them with but worthless Confederate scrip. Big Tyne, the huge, handsome black man Kiernan had brought home with her from Harpers Ferry, was with her, but his cottage was down by the stables.
    She was alone in the house she had been born in.
    She suddenly wondered if she was destined to grow old and die here.
    She’d be Aunt Christa—a maiden relative. Living on the fringes. She could almost hear the children at some later time, telling a visitor about her. “Ah, yes, that’s our aunt, poor dear! She is wrinkled and withered now, but once upon a time, she was one of the greatest beauties in all of the South. Men flocked around her like daisies in the summer. Her fiancé was killed in the war, but she’s—well, she’s been with us always, keeping up with us as children, making delicious little things to eat, knitting, sewing …”
    Hanging on. Hanging on to other people’s lives, Christa thought.
    She should marry sometime.
    There wasn’t anyone left to marry. Far more than the devastation of buildings and land had been the devastation of human life. So many men, in the flower of youth, cut down to bleed, like her beloved Liam, that blood feeding the land they had fought for, died for.
    It wouldn’t matter if there had been a thousand menleft to marry. Christa had been in love. She had buried her heart in that unknown mass grave along with the tattered remnants of her lover’s body.
    What was left? Cameron Hall. It had kept her going through the war. She had clung to one of the tall proud pillars while her sisters-in-law had rushed to greet her brothers. And there were those long empty years ahead when her nieces and nephews would say, “Yes, that’s Aunt Christa, and there was a time when she was beautiful, when she was young.”
    She bent down again, pressing the soft dirt around her tomato plant. A faint trembling in the earth caused her to