Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [93]
“Mrs. Morgan called this morning, as a matter of fact,” Mary Ann said. “With Mrs. Heard. They’d be honored if you would review their troops.”
“Review them? Review them? Ain’t they no West Pint mollycoddle slinken around as kin review a gang of women soldiers? In all my life I don’t know if I ever heard such a goddamn knee-knocken pack of—”
“Stop!” Mary Ann bumped him with her hip; if the gesture was playful, her voice had hardened. “You oughtn’t to mock them, Mister Forrest. There’s not been an able-bodied man in LaGrange since eighteen sixty-one. Nancy Morgan’s husband went off to war before they’d been married more than six months, and her scarce twenty-one years old. And there’s Mary Heard running two plantations all on her lonesome and a hundred slaves between them. This militia business keeps their spirits up, if nothing else. And who knows if it won’t come in handy before all’s said and done?”
“You want me to review’m, Miz Forrest?” He drew her to him, feeling the round heat of breast and belly come willingly against his side through the thin cloth. “All right then—Ladies, stand to arms!”
“What I want you to do is come back to bed.” She ran her slim fingers up under his shirttail. “It’s been too long and I can’t get—.”
“It’s been fifteen minutes,” Forrest muttered, though happy enough to follow where she led. It was an excellent featherbed too—made of the finest, softest down—though already in need of a thorough good beating and airing.
NEXT MORNING FORREST, his boots and uniform well brushed, stood more or less at attention in the square of LaGrange, with Mary Ann beside him in a Sunday dress just slightly shiny at the elbows, watching the Nancy Hart Home Guard drill. Though he had small patience with such exercises even when performed by professional fighting men, he kept a straight face throughout the proceedings. When First Sergeant Adelie Bull demonstrated how she could shoot the pips out of a playing card at thirty paces, Forrest broke into a genuine smile.
“Lieutenant Morgan, Lieutenant Heard—” he said as those ladies presented their arms, “Now by the long scaly tail of the D—” Mary Ann elbowed him.
“By the beard and the belly of G—”
This time a sharp look was sufficient.
“By all that’s holy if I may say so, I’d sooner be commanded by the pair of you than that shilly-shallying milksop Braxton Bragg.”
Though the two young women looked as much pleased as perplexed, Mary Ann piloted him quickly away, through a circle of onlookers around the square. Matthew was there with a couple of his usual companions and it struck Forrest, not for the first time, how his wife could practically walk through the boy without seeming to see hide nor hair of him.
“You’ve scandalized those poor young ladies,” Mary Ann said, once she’d hauled him into the Bellevue parlor. “Or frightened them, even—I worry you have.”
“I swan they took it as a compliment,” Forrest said. “As for them to be frightened, why we all ought to be.”
Mary Ann walked to the rosewood piano, struck a cluster of notes, and revolved back toward him on the embroidered stool. “What do you mean?”
Forrest had said more than he meant to but he saw there was no retreat. Charge then.
“All right,” he said. “If what we got now is women for soldiers, I reckon I might as well take counsel with you.”
“I reckon you may have had worse counsel,” she came back at him. “I’ve heard of that letter you sent to General Bragg. Captain Anderson says it near scorched his fingers to set down those words.”
“You’ve got no quarrel with Anderson,” Forrest said.
“I don’t.” Mary Ann swung from side to side on the stool, threw back her head of pale hair. “What scares me is you, when you won’t rein yourself in.”
Forrest paced, boot heels snapping on the floor. “Cain’t run on a tight rein all the time. And I’ve held myself in mighty hard—since Shiloh, or the next thing to it.”
Mary Ann parted her lips as if she’d speak and decided not to. Forrest had his