“You go sit, Danny my boy,” Billy told him. “I’ll see to the horses. Give ’em a chance to roll.” As he started on the blood bay’s cinch, he said, “Sarah, you reckon that haunch of deer meat is done?”
“’Nuther hour,” she told him, a feeling of futility sucking at her insides as she watched Danny settle himself on her stump before the fire and extend his hands. He was dirty, his eyes baggy, and he stank so powerfully of horse sweat, old burned powder, and long-caked body odor that her stomach surged, causing her to step back, her hand to her mouth.
“Good to sit so,” Danny said to no one in particular, his eyes on the fire.
“Well, after you catch your wind, you go down yonder to the creek and wash up,” she told him, unable to stop from making a disgusted face. “Though, God knows, it’ll probably kill the fish and crawdads when you do.”
He reacted with a slight smile. “Reckon I am a mite ripe.”
He still hadn’t really looked at her since he’d arrived. Maybe he was afraid Billy’d thrash him? As if Billy needed to worry. To put it mildly, she wasn’t particularly keen on any kind of male attention these days.
She busied herself making sassafras tea, warming some of the cattail-root bread, and watched as Billy laid Danny’s saddle forward against the cabin wall.
“This is quite the hideout you got,” Danny called. “Unlash that blanket, Billy. Reckon they’s a bottle in it.”
Billy did, unrolling the dirt-smudged wool enough to retrieve a brown glass bottle three-fourths filled with liquid. This he handed to Danny, who used his teeth to pull the cork. Then he took a swig before handing it over to Billy, and asked, “How come you all are up here instead of down to the big house?”
“On account of the fact that we didn’t kill all of Dewley’s men. Reckon the ones still alive are biding their time, checking on the place periodically. I would.” Billy took a drink, made a face, and wiped his lips with his sleeve. “Besides, there’s too many riders these days. Right on the road like the house is? There ain’t no way for just me to defend it. And the way bands of cavalry run up and down the Huntsville Road? Like as not I’d be swept up as a conscript by one side or the other, or shot as an enemy, or a deserter, or just for the fun of it.”
He handed the bottle back and added, “An’ I got to take care of Sarah. I let her down once. Ain’t gonna happen again.”
Danny didn’t even so much as look up, didn’t bother to ask how Billy might have let her down.
It hit Sarah like a thrown rock: He knows. Knows who Dewley was, why the riders would periodically check on the house. He knows what they did to me!
Every muscle in her body went rigid; her stomach knotted harder than an Irish prizefighter’s fist. First the fear. Then cold anger settled deep in her bones.
Billy told!
She could imagine how it had been. Billy, his face grim, saying, “Now you be damned careful of Sarah. Given what they done to her, don’t you so much as smile at her, or wink, or nothing that might make her remember, you understand?”
Humiliation and shame brought tears to her eyes.
Struggling for breath, she looked away at the somber trees, their branches now heavy with budding flowers, leaves ready to burst. The faint trickle of water in the little creek, the grinding of horses’ teeth, and the crackle of the fire were the only sounds.
She closed her eyes, and the sensation of futility left her swaying on her feet. Billy had told. Danny would tell … who knew? And they would tell. And within months, the whole county—what was left of it—would know.
The story would go from lip to lip: renegade bushwhackers—worse than jayhawkers—had killed Maw Hancock, abducted and violated young Sarah. Then plucky young Billy killed the worst of them, getting her back.
Billy Hancock, the brave and resolute hero. Men would buy him drinks; women would smile and nod their heads out of respect.
For Sarah, however, there would only be the shame and ruin. She’d be the woman to be pitied and kept at arm’s length. A forever peripheral person, sullied and fouled through no fault of her own—but eternally tainted nonetheless. When men gazed at her, they would be seeing her as Dewley’s men did: naked and many times used.
For women she would be the ever-present reminder of “a fate worse than death.” A horrifying living example that even the ironclad walls of chivalry provided no absolute protection. They would want to distance themselves, as though Sarah might be a lodestone that could draw similar disaster to their doorstep. A woman so abandoned by God—perhaps for good reason—as to be living proof that nightmares could become real.
She already understood that no decent man would want her. What gentleman would want to take her into his sacred marriage bed, knowing that as she disrobed before him, he was seeing what others had already ogled in lust? That as he laid her on the sheets what he might have considered a temple had been used by so many as sewer?
She felt faint, head swimming.
How could my own brother do this to me?
Numb to the soul, she leaned against the rough log wall, barely hearing as Billy said, “Critters had been at Maw, but we dug a grave for what remained. Took what little was left in the house, and hightailed it up here.”
“Whole county is empty,” Danny noted. “I been gone since last July so it come as a shock to come home. The farms is all abandoned, and half of ’em burned. Fields growed up with weeds. The roads is like trenches. Bridges all burned.
