“What is it?” Gus and his wife asked simultaneously.
Buck placed his hand consolingly on Sarah’s shoulder and turned to the others. “Randolph Drexel is alive and on his way here to Columbia.”
#
The next two hours were spent in speculation of how a dead man could be alive.
“I was told he was stabbed to death and buried in a mass grave,” Sarah explained. “The camp commandant even showed me his name written in the death ledger.”
“Were you given any of his effects?” Gus asked.
“No. I asked about his gold watch but no one remembered having seen it. Under the circumstances it didn’t seem unreasonable, and I didn’t really care about it. I would have given it to his father, had I received it.”
“So you had nothing but the word of a stranger that he’d been killed?” Gus asked.
His wife glared at him. “What else was she to do? She had no reason to suspect he wasn’t telling her the truth.”
“I meant no disrespect,” he replied. “My point is that she could have been deceived, intentionally or by accident.”
“What’s important,” Buck remarked, “is that Randolph Drexel’s alive and no doubt out for vengeance.”
“Well,” Miriam told Sarah, “you certainly can’t go to Jasmine tomorrow. It’ll be much too dangerous for you to be out in public.”
“I’ll send word to my bank guards,” Gus offered, “and have them come here and protect her while we’re gone. They’re good men. I can assure you, no one will get past them.”
“No,” Buck decreed. “She’s not staying here alone. She’s going with us so I can protect her.”
“That’s very noble of you, doctor,” Ruth remarked, “but I don’t see how you can protect her on the road. The last time—”
“Mother!” Sarah stopped her.
The older woman bowed her head. “I’m sorry.”
“No apology necessary, Mrs. Greenwald. I fully understand. You have my regrets and my sympathy.”
“What do you have in mind?” Gus asked, clearly as interested in learning Buck’s plan as relieving the tension that had developed.
“According to the dispatch—” he stretched it out on the table in front of him “—Randolph is in Charleston and will be leaving in the morning to come here to Columbia. Whether he already knows Sarah is staying at this house isn’t important. It won’t take him long to find out once he arrives. That’s why Sarah and her mother have to go with us to Jasmine. I don’t want him to find anyone here.”
“A good plan,” Gus concluded. “By the way, I meant to tell you earlier. Rexford asked to go with us. Like you, he has fond memories of Emma and wants to see what’s left of Jasmine. Says he spent as much time there as he did at his own home.”
“He still shoot?” Buck asked.
Gus grinned. “Not as well as you, but close. I’ll send word for him to bring his pistol. What about you?”
Buck had thought he’d retired his guns permanently. Obviously not. He would fire cannon, if need be, to protect Sarah.
#
Buck returned to the hotel that evening in a state of agitation. He’d thought the crises in his life were behind him, that he could go forward with the woman he’d grown to love without having to take on more enemies. Once again he was confronted with the ugly fact that the world he’d grown up in, a world that seemed so genteel and orderly, so refined and sophisticated, was no more—and perhaps had never been that way to begin with. Nevertheless he missed the façade of civilization and decorum it had presented.
In his sitting room, he went to the corner where he’d stored the saddlebags he’d brought with him from the battlefields of Virginia. In one pocket were his medical supplies, his bone saw, his scalpels, needles and sutures, bandages and bottles of chloroform and laudanum. He had no use for them, but long habit required him to check that they were intact. He wouldn’t leave them behind—just in case . . .
In the other pocket of the saddlebag, he found what he was looking for. His brother’s Colt pistol. The cartridges were there as well, along with his binoculars. Clay’s Henry rifle was propped up in the corner.
He stared at the firearms. How much he wanted to abandon them. But that apparently was not to be. He loaded the Colt, leaving one chamber empty and lowered the hammer on it. He also filled the magazine of the rifle. Would Randolph Drexel hide in trees, as the redheaded assassin had? Would he be as accurate a marksman as Rufus Snead?
Would Buck have to take his life too?
The thought made him shudder. But if that’s what it took to protect Sarah, he would once again become a mankiller.
Chapter TWENTY-THREE
Buck arrived at the Grayson house soon after seven the following morning. He’d gone first to Jeffcoat’s to make sure the arrangements Gus had earlier made were being followed precisely. The fastidious undertaker confirmed the hearse and gravediggers had departed before sunrise and would get to the plantation in time to prepare the gravesite before the others arrived. The memorial service was scheduled for shortly after noon.
Miriam had seen to it that the breakfast room sideboard was fully laden with victuals: eggs, pan-seared chicken livers, what Buck learned was kippered herring, biscuits, grits, and red-eye gravy, as well as honey and several varieties of jams and jellies.
“You won’t find any butter for your biscuits or cream for your coffee, I’m afraid,” Gus explained to Buck and Rexford who’d arrived earlier. “We don’t mix dairy and meat.” He winked. “At home.”
Fish for breakfast had never been on Buck’s menu before. He was surprised, however, to discover that the salted, dried fish that had been marinated overnight, was delicious.
At eight o’clock the men escorted the ladies out to the waiting vehicles. Gus rode with his wife and Ruth Greenwald in the open landau with a driver. Sarah was in the second with Janey and Job. Gibbeon took the reins. Rexford followed on his feisty young stallion, Scamp, while Buck rode ahead on Gypsy.
The autumn air was cool and refreshing, the sunshine at odds with the mission of the small caravan that trekked east through gently rolling hills and sandy flatlands. The four-hour trip was uneventful and free of the swarms of insects that had plagued Buck’s earlier visit. At last the main road came to the brick columned gate of Jasmine. The carriages turned down the avenue of sprawling old live-oak trees. About halfway to the acre on which the plantation house had stood, Sarah asked Gibbeon to stop the carriage.
Buck’s spine stiffened. Had she seen something that alarmed her?
“I want to take in the view,” she explained. “Buck, this place is lovely.”
“I wish you could have seen it as it once was. To me now it appears desolate.”
“Take another look around. These trees are regal. The fields beg for cultivation.”
“The house is nothing but ashes, charred stone and brick.”
“It can be rebuilt,” she told him, and he thought he heard a plea that it might be.
“It’ll never be the same.”
“I thought you didn’t like it the way it was.”
He stared at her. That certainly wasn’t the response he’d expected. “We better move on. The others are waiting.”
She smiled. “Yes, sir. Let us move on.”
The lead carriage had stopped in the circular driveway in front of what little was left of the looming mansion. Gibbeon pulled up behind it. Buck helped Sarah to the gravel path, while Rexford took Job so that Janey could climb down on her own. They joined the older people.