Fire by Night (Refiner’s Fire, Book 2) by Lynn Austin

Author:Lynn Austin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-02T20:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Sharpsburg, Maryland

September 1862

Phoebe crawled out of her tent shortly before dawn and made her way through the woods to the creek, alone. Her fever, which had raged all night, had finally broken. She still felt weak from this latest bout of malaria, but at least she had stopped shaking. Poor Ted couldn’t have gotten much sleep with her moaning and thrashing beside him in their tent all night. He’d finally fetched her a dose of quinine from the regimental surgeon, and that had done the trick. She couldn’t remember if she had thanked him.

Her symptoms had been coming and going ever since she’d marched through White Oak Swamp last July—every few days at first, but now dwindling down to every few weeks. In early September, the regiment had boarded a steamship at Harrison’s Landing and sailed up the Potomac River toWashington City. They’d come right back to where they’d started from seven months ago with nothing to show for it. The Union was still split in two. Richmond was still the Rebel capital. The Negroes were still slaves. All that equipment, all that time, all those dead and wounded soldiers—for nothing. The waste of it made Phoebe sick.

The regiment had barely had time to make a proper camp in Washington before they’d learned that the Rebels were on the move, marching north into Maryland. Fearing an attack on Washington or Baltimore, General McClellan had ordered his army to go after them. Phoebe and Ted had packed their knapsacks again and marched into Maryland with the eighty-five-thousand-man army and a train of three thousand wagons, strung out for miles. There was no mud this time, only billowing clouds of choking dust, kicked up by thousands of horses and tramping feet.

Now, after several days of marching and a long night of fever, Phoebe felt filthy. She had risen early to cool off in Antietam Creek before anyone else was awake. Leaving her uniform on shore, she waded into the chilly water in her union suit, which she never took off. But it had been almost a year since she had wrapped the muslin around her bosom to flatten it, and the filthy cloth had rotted into shreds from dirt and sweat and age. Her fingers poked through it like paper. Phoebe quickly unbuttoned her underwear and stripped off the tattered cloth, letting it float away downstream. Then she took out the bar of soap she had tucked into her sleeve and washed her sweaty skin before buttoning up again.

It felt good to be clean, even if the water was cold enough to make her shiver. She lay back in the creek and wet her hair then scrubbed it clean with the soap, holding her breath and ducking under to rinse it. When she finished, Phoebe rose up out of the water, her wet union suit clinging to her body.

Ted stood on shore.

They stared at each other for a long, horrible moment before Phoebe shrieked and dove behind the bush where her uniform was.

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