The Forgotten Debutante (Cotillion Ball) Read online

  Then he called to mind his vow the previous evening to start sowing seeds of friendship. Although he longed to capture those saucy lips and plant another kiss on her, he knew if he rushed things with her, she’d pull away, tucking herself safely behind the body of her brother, and he’d be unable to enjoy her company in any way, shape, or form. His whole purpose in revealing his stint in the military would be so he could be hired full time and share this office space with Saffron. It would not pay to run in like a charging bull and ruin things before they even had a chance to begin.

  He sat in the chair in front of the desk, opened the file with his numb fingers, and pulled out the first sheet of paper, glancing at it. He let out a breath when he noticed the name. “This is the file on Daniel Spencer, who was shot down at the first battle of Manassas. That’s the first real battle my brothers and I participated in, and I recollect this man. I wasn’t aware he’d been killed there, though.”

  Saffron tapped her teeth with a finger. Zeke glanced up from the file and stared at her, noticing how her lips parted as she tapped. He was glad the desk hid his rising manhood. Good Lord, how could he be mere friends with such a tempting woman?

  She quit tapping her pretty, white teeth and raised her eyes from the folder. “I suppose the battle created all kinds of chaos. I can’t begin to comprehend what you lived through. And how you’d lose track of friends you’d made along the way. It’s a miracle all your brothers hung together until the last.”

  He should not be having lustful thoughts when they were discussing the perils of war. What kind of fool was he, anyway? He willed his shaft to calm down and his heart to stop beating so fast.

  He turned his attention back to the folder. “Daniel was a good man. I hope we can find his remains during this trip. He deserves a proper burial.”

  “Well, if we don’t find him on our first outing, we will with the next one. I don’t yet have all the details on how these bodies will be dug up, but it will be systematic since we’ve already assigned a grid system to the battlefield, and his folder is marked with the section of the grid in which we can possibly find him.”

  Saffron shook her head as she flipped through a file. “It’s still going to be hard to find and identify the bodies, since they’ve been exposed to the elements for years now. That’s why every scrap of information we have gathered on the men—what they were wearing when they were buried, if someone attached a nametag to the body, any identifying marks—will all help.”

  Zeke pawed through the rest of the folder’s contents Several people had written to the program about Daniel. Zeke was not alone in his assessment that Daniel had been a good man. Praise for his service and his demeanor in battle, how he had saved many lives before his own was taken, littered his folder. And everyone agreed on the spot where he was buried. They’d have no trouble finding Daniel when they got to the part of the battlefield where he had taken his last breath.

  But the battles happened in several different places spread out over acres of land and forest, so Zeke harbored no illusions about the scope of their work. This program to bring the boys home would take years. He hung his head as he read some of the comments. He didn’t think he could handle reliving these battles for years.

  Saffron reached across the desk and placed her hand over his, sharing her body’s warmth. He raised his head and stared into her big blue eyes that still reminded him of his mother’s hyacinths. She understood how he was feeling without him saying a word. His stomach slowly unclenched, and the feeling returned to his fingers. She was extending the hand of friendship to him once more.

  “You didn’t say much yesterday about your family. You only mentioned your father. What happened to the rest of the alphabet? Who were they again? Frederica, Gertrude, Hortense …”

  “No, it’s Hannah and then Isaiah. I’m surprised you can recall that much.”

  “So there is no Josiah, or Josephine?”

  “No. Isaiah’s the last.”

  Zeke smiled across the desk at her. She’d taken his mind off the grisly work they would be doing on the Manassas battlefield simply by redirecting his attention to his family.

  “Frederica’s now eighteen and has herself a beau. He’s from one of the neighboring farms and is a nice man. Isaiah is fourteen and is growing into a man, although he’s not there yet. Even though he’d be the first to tell you he is. He reminds me of myself when I decided I was a grown man and ran off to join the army.”

  “It sounds as though you miss them a lot. Even though I love being here in DC with Halwyn and his wife, I miss my parents and the rest of my brothers and sisters who have scattered all across the country.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, enough about the families for now. We should get to work. Explain your filing system to me. You mentioned a grid system?”

  The seeds he’d sown were already beginning to blossom. He was one heck of a farmer.

  • • •

  A week later, in a carriage containing Saffron, several other workers, and boxes of files, Zeke was on his way back to a battlefield. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t lost his brothers in the battles at Manassas. It was still a battlefield where he had fought alongside men who had not been fortunate enough to walk away. Where he and his brothers had engaged in combat and survived. As the miles rumbled out under the carriage wheels, his anxiety level rose. Sweat broke out on his body, and he could feel the shirt sticking to his back despite the cool, November air. He wrung his hat between his hands and shifted his body, trying to get comfortable. All to no avail.

  He closed his eyes, and the last day of the Chancellorsville battle rolled out in front of him again. His mind replayed events of that battle’s last day,, when there was only David and he left to fight. One final roar of Confederate cannon put an end to David; Zeke witnessed his brother die in the most grisly way possible. As Zeke tried to retrieve what was left of his brother’s handsome face, he laid down his gun.

  For the last time.

  He crouched in a crevice and shielded their bodies until nightfall, when he dug a shallow grave for David beside his other brothers. Then he walked away from the battlefield, hoping never to look back.

  Yet here he was. Willingly putting himself back into the middle of the horror he had witnessed. He ran a hand over his quivering stomach and inhaled some deep breaths, hoping he wouldn’t throw up, as he had with each brother lost. His task had to be done. He’d made a promise to his father. The first step was underway.

  On the other side of the carriage, Saffron stood and moved across the aisle, losing her balance as she got to him, and falling into the seat beside him.

  “Whoops.” She laughed as she hit the upholstered seat. She straightened herself out beside him, took a moment to run her hands down her black flannel skirt, and then stared into his eyes.

  “There was nothing you could have done to prevent the outcome of what happened here. Stop blaming yourself.”

  Her voice was low and modulated, yet the words she said hung like weights in the air. How had she guessed where his dark ideas were heading? He sent her a small smile before he turned his head and glanced out the tiny window. He couldn’t bear to have her see the tears in his eyes.

  And then she reached over and clasped his hand. He turned back around, and all the air he had in his lungs whooshed out from his body. He clung to her hand as if it were a life raft. Maybe it was.

  “Zeke, it’s going to be all right. And if you can get through this first battlefield, all the others we’ll be going to will be easy.”

  “There won’t be so many others for me. All I need is to bring my brothers home, which will happen next spring when we go to Chancellorsville. Then I’ll wash my hands of the war and all the damage that’s been done to everyone, everywhere, for the last time. I’ll go back to the farm and spend the rest of my days there.”

  Saffron released her hold on him and placed her hands in her lap. “Well, it would be a shame to hurry back to the farm when we now have the wo
rld at our feet. Don’t you see what a big adventure we’re on? How we can help the Reburial Program and still have some fun? After so many years of oppression, we can once again dance and have a good time. Isn’t that what you hoped for as well?”

  “What I hope for,” his words ground out around his teeth, “is to figure out why I’m the one left. Why I didn’t perish with the others. There must be a reason for it, yet I fail to see it.”

  Saffron shook her head. “Well, I can see it. You are to take over your family’s farm. To grow crops to feed the many Americans who are now setting up families as their loved ones return home. You’re poised to take over from your father once you get the brothers home.”

  “But it’s not my dream. Has never been my dream. It was always Adam who was supposed to take over. I had bigger plans.”

  With a sigh, Saffron replied, “Well, if being a farmer isn’t to your liking, alter it. Dreams can change with time and circumstances. There was a time when I was so angry with the war and how it upset all my plans and dreams. I had longed to go to the debutante balls and dance the night away with handsome men. I’d dreamed of doing so every year since childhood, especially when it’d been one of my sisters’ turns to come out at her ball. Now I realize what a foolish and shallow dream that was.”

  She glanced sidelong at him. “Don’t get me wrong. I still long to dance. With a suitably handsome man, of course.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Are you certain you can, without stepping on the feet of your escort?”

  She huffed out a breath. “There’s to be a Christmas dance for members of the program in a few weeks. We’ll see how well I dance then, won’t we? All those military men who are involved will be in attendance, vying for my attention. It’ll be almost as if I were at a debutante ball. Besides, I danced around the issue pretty well when the soldiers stopped me during our mad dash out of town three years ago, didn’t I? I performed some pretty fancy footwork then, if I do say so myself.” She turned away from him in a show of annoyance.

  They hadn’t brought up their earlier encounter since the first day they’d reconnected. Zeke had assumed their first meeting hadn’t had as profound an impact on her as it had on him. Yet she remembered details and had finally given some reference to the ride that had changed his life.

  Immediately, Zeke craved kissing her again. He wanted to once again taste her lips. Every time he’d eaten a peach in the past three years, he’d been reminded of her taste. And even though there was not a peach in sight right now, he longed to kiss her. His mind left the impending battlefield in favor of another memory of a mad dash out of the city, and his first-ever kiss.

  He reached over and intertwined their fingers. “Thank you.”

  She whipped her head around to him. “For what?”

  “For giving me something else to occupy my mind other than the battles we’re about to reconstruct.”

  “Oh, that,” she said as she played with her blonde locks. “What did I manage to give you to ponder?” She glanced up at him from under her lashes, a coy, proper, flirtatious young lady.

  He couldn’t help himself. His gaze went from being locked on her blue eyes to down her face to her full, plump lower lip. She followed his gaze and worried her lip with her teeth. He was making her nervous. But, at the moment, he didn’t care. He had to ask the question that had been foremost in his mind since the day he’d walked into the program’s offices.

  “Do you relive it often?”

  “What?” She whispered, even though she didn’t really need an explanation, if he were any judge.

  “Our first kiss.” He ran a callused thumb over her knuckles.

  She removed her hand. “You talk about it as if there will be another kiss.”

  He smiled. “That’s not exactly what I meant. Unless I miss my guess, our little encounter three years ago was your first time being kissed. It was mine as well. That’s not something you forget. Ever.”

  “Oh. That kind of first kiss.”

  “But there could be a second if you wish.” He reached for her hand again.

  She tore it away from his grasp. “Surely you jest. Why would I bestow on you a second kiss? I’m angling for a military man, not a farmer.” She rose from her seat just as the carriage hit a rut. Saffron lost her balance and fell into his lap. As she struggled to right herself and move off, a laugh rumbled up from his stomach. He held her in place for a moment before he let her get back on her feet. Yes, Saffron had taken his mind off the final days of his war, along with giving him other ideas to replace his thoughts about the bleak work they were about to do.

  For the moment, anyway. He was certain he’d be back by her side the next time he needed to find something else to fill his mind with. Especially if he could find a peach.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Zeke stepped from the carriage onto the field. Ground that had been the center of two separate battles. The First Battle of Bull Run, which was the start of the great Civil War’s carnage, marked the first time lives were lost. Then, a second battle took place on the same soil a year later. Lots of blood had seeped into this very ground, both Union and Confederate. He glanced at the dirt, certain it would still be tinged with red. His knees weakened, and he held on to the carriage wheel. Then he raised his eyes, searching for the graves.

  Saffron alighted from the carriage as well, worry marring her pretty face. Her eyebrows drew together, carving a line down the middle as she studied him. “Are you going to be able to do this?”

  “It’s just the initial shock of being back on a battlefield. I’ll be fine in a minute.”

  “You’d better be, since we have a lot of work facing us. Here, take a box.”

  She handed him a file box, and he had no choice but to stand up straight and take it from her. A smile raced over his lips. Saffron might be young and a bit naive when it came to men, but she had an instinctive grasp of what he needed at any given moment. He didn’t need to be coddled; he needed a distraction. And she was very good at distracting him.

  He helped her unload the carriage, and he and a few other men worked together to erect a tent. The large tent would be the headquarters for the Reburial Program as the bodies began to be dug up and tagged in accordance with the correspondence and notes they had in their files. The tent was where Saffron would be stationed and where they’d take their meals, while Zeke worked outside, doing the hard physical labor of actually uncovering the bodies. He was glad she didn’t have to see the atrocities they were about to unveil. The physical work would be hard, but the mental strain he was about to undergo would be even more difficult. He steeled himself in readiness, even though his stomach churned.

  The digging began the very day they set up camp. No sense in delaying the inevitable. Especially with November’s cold creeping over the state of Virginia with greater insistence every day. The ground would soon be too frozen to dig. But Manassas was a test to prove the Reburial Program would work. Those in charge were systematically combing the grounds, marking the points on the grid. They’d clean out only one section of the grid before they returned to DC for the remainder of the winter where they would strategize on the best way to accomplish their goal in the spring.

  The crew Saffron was detailed to work with handled the files and gave the men instructions on where the bodies were likely located. The information was sometimes sketchy and sometimes incredibly detailed, noting under which tree the man had been buried or some other landmark denoting the body’s location. Zeke and the other men began to pull remains from the ground. If a positive identification could be made from the information that had been gathered, the bones were tagged according to their records, placed in a blanket, and stacked on a wagon. They were bringing the boys home. Home to Union soil. Zeke’s shoulders began to ache as he turned the soil over, inhaling the familiar scent of the earth, but it didn’t come close to soothing the ache in his heart as he recalled how these men died. Screams of the dying soldiers filled his mind as he continued to dig them up, o
ne at a time. He had to keep his focus, get through the initial shock of setting foot again on a battlefield. The sooner he could locate his brothers’ remains and remove them, the better. He’d be back home again, working alongside his father, and would be able to get back to his job as a farmer. Then he’d stop mooning over a wealthy, young, city lady who could never be his.

  Logically, they were so wrong for one another, but his heart said otherwise. His life would be complete if he could give her a second kiss. And then a third. He volunteered to get the information from the tent on where to dig next just so he could see her bustling around with her files, her face lit with excitement.

  He longed to put another kind of excitement on her face as well. To be the one to coax a laugh from her, to make her fan herself in an effort to ease the heat he caused in her. To give her kisses two, three, and four. And more kisses than she could count, for the rest of their days.

  “My, my, Zeke, you are one dirty man.”

  Had she read his mind? His out-of-control lustful scenarios screeched to a halt as he came to a stop in front of her. He stared at Saffron as if she were an apparition. She stared back, her gaze taking in the dirt on every part of his body. He let out a breath, thankful she was unable to read his racy mind. She had been talking about his physical appearance and the filth he had accumulated during the day’s dig.

  “It’s, uh, a dirty business we’ve gotten ourselves into.”

  His hands reached for her, and she shrieked and ran out of range. “Don’t touch me. You’re filthy.” Her laughter permeated the air, erasing the gloom of the work he’d been doing. If she had any idea the direction his mind was racing, she’d surely dash away from him for good. What he craved was to make her so hot with lust she’d fan herself. But it was November, and she was in a tent, so it didn’t seem possible she could get overheated. He took a drink of water, some more files, and headed back to the field.