Surrender at Orchard Rest by Hope Denney, Linda Au

after the ambush and they had never really been able to reclaim lost ground.
    Joseph spent two months in a hospital recovering from a head wound. He spent two months at Orchard Rest and then returned to the front, only to be captured and shipped to Elmira Prison. He’d starved and been disciplined in every way imaginable. Theodore and Sawyer waited for him in New York to accompany him home after his release.
    Theodore was already a married man with a family. He returned to Charleston and ran a profitable indigo foundry. Somerset was never his pet after he married Amelia, but she seldom gave him much thought beyond her mother’s obsessive love for him. Helen and Theodore were members of a world she had never taken part in. Somerset did not know what it meant to be young and wealthy or to have every wish fulfilled all because of one’s name. She found it appropriate that she had grown close to Joseph and Victoria while her two oldest siblings were vague impressions of people, almost like characters in a novel.
    Sawyer met her in Atlanta, sacrificing a furlough, when he passed her at the depot when he was slated to return home. He spent two weeks searching through the wounded with her, making sure she ate, and otherwise protecting her in a time when the town went into upheaval. They inquired at jails, searched cemeteries, and sorted through the dead on battlefields only to come up empty-handed. Somerset kissed him at a moment when her emotions were verging on the hysterical, but he was a gentleman about it and never brought it up again until years later when they fell in love.
    Yes, she knew it all. The story he had told her before was as familiar to her as any nursery story she was told as a child because she never stopped replaying it in her mind. As the alcohol burned within her tender stomach, she felt her thoughts shifting and her tongue loosening.
    “Thank you for telling me all that again,” she said. “I need to bring something up to you, though, something I’ve never said. This is the part where I’m afraid of what you’ll think of me.”
    “After this night, I fail to see where you would fear judgment from me. What is it?”
    “Could Eric still be alive out there?”
    “No.” Joseph’s answer was confident.
    “There was no body, Joseph. His grave is empty. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
    “There are lots of empty graves in this country now, Somerset. Lots of bodies never made it home.”
    “I don’t see it that way. Why did Eric’s body disappear while you were left to die? There were four of you together, and two of you were dead from any man’s reasonable perspective. Sawyer was knocked out from his fall. Theodore had to run down the ridge for quite a stretch to even get to his rope to make it down. There were the two of you lying dead together in the brush, and only Eric’s body disappeared. He might have dragged himself to safety. He could have forgotten who he was and wound up in a new life anywhere. He might be in a home for veterans or he might be out west somewhere. Think how many men started over in the west. He could have even been captured and taken to prison and died there. The possibilities are disturbing. All I know is that my darling’s body is not here and I would be amiss not to ask why.”
    “I understand your perspective, Somerset, but listen to mine. There was only one other man involved in the ambush. He knocked my head in. He wouldn’t possibly have been able to drag off both of us in the time it took Theodore to get down and Sawyer to come to consciousness. So it strikes me as a little personal. Eric was the first of our party to be injured and only his body disappeared. I don’t mean to intimate that we all have a dark enemy out there and we should all fear for our safety. What I mean is that whoever murdered him probably did it in retribution for a kill Eric made. Some wealthy socialite or powerful officer lost a husband or brother to Eric and decided that he would