Deadly Night by Heather Graham
Prologue
The Flynn Plantation
Outside New Orleans
1863
It was there….
Home.
Everything he knew and loved, so close.
Sloan Flynn sat atop Pegasus, the tall roan that had taken him from the battlefields at Sharpsburg, Williamsburg, Shiloh and beyond, and looked to the south.
Farmland. Rich and fertile, as far as the eye could see.
When he turned to the north, though…
Tents. Arranged in perfect military order. Campfires burned; weapons were being cleaned. One view was of beauty, peace and perfection. The other promised a land drenched in the blood of its sons, a land laid to waste.
He had no more illusions about war. It was ugly and brutal. It wasn’t just death. It was maimed and broken men screaming on the battlefield. It was a man walking blindly, crying out for help, because cannon fire had burned away his vision. It was the earth strewn with severed limbs, with the bodies of the dismembered, the dead and the dying. And, in the worst of times, it was their loved ones, as well, weeping over them.
Any man who still saw war as a way to solve differences had not been at Sharpsburg, Maryland, had not seen Antietam Creek running as crimson as the Red Sea, so choked with blood that it looked like a garish ribbon across the landscape.
Sloan had begun the war as a cavalry captain in a Louisiana unit. But that had been then. And this was now. Now he was militia, assigned to Jeb Stuart and the Army of Northern Virginia. They’d been sent south to scout out areas of the Mississippi, but this morning they had been recalled north.
It would be so easy to just go home….
But a man didn’t quit a war. He didn’t wake up and tell his commanders or his men that he knew war was wretched and created nothing but misery, so he was leaving. He fought, and he fought to win, because winning, too, was war. The indignant rallying cry to support the great cause of states’ right, which had once rung as clear as a bugle’s call in his heart, was now a silent sob. If they could go back—if they could all go back—and drag the politicians and the congressmen out to the battlefield and force them to look at the mangled and crimson-soaked bodies of their sons, they would not have come to this.
But they had. And now they were gearing up for another confrontation. They weren’t going to try to take back New Orleans. Not now. They were gathering to head north. General Robert E. Lee was ordering troops from all over the South to head north. He wanted to take the war to the cities, farms and pastures of the Union. His beloved Virginia was in tatters, stripped again and again of its riches, marked by carnage.
Sloan looked longingly once again in the direction of home.
The Flynn plantation wasn’t one of the biggest, wasn’t one of the grandest. But it was home. And it was his.
She would be there. Fiona MacFarlane. Fiona Fair, as they liked to tease her. In truth, though—and secretly, because of the war—she was Fiona MacFarlane Flynn.
It had been so long….
Her own home, Oakwood, had fallen into ruin soon after the war had begun, so Fiona had come to stay at Flynn Plantation, his family’s home. It wasn’t grand—his family hadn’t come to Louisiana with money; they had come with a desire to work—but there was room for Fiona. There would always be room for Fiona.
The plantation was barely hanging on now, he knew. Despite the war, he had exchanged letters with his cousin Brendan, a lieutenant with the Union army, and he knew the property wasn’t doing well. Since New Orleans had fallen under Yankee control, Brendan had spent time out at the plantation, and his letters had been honest. The two men might be mortal enemies on the battlefield, but they were still cousins, which made the correspondence dangerous for them both. Brendan had written about “Beast” Butler, Union military commander in the parish, and how he had warned the family to avoid contact with the Union forces at all costs.
And if that warning had come from a Union officer…well, Sloan didn’t like to think about what that meant.
Sloan hesitated for a moment, knowing he should be riding north; his reconnaissance mission had yielded a promise of heavy skirmishing if the troops were to approach too near to the heart of the parish.
But he was so close…
To home.
To Fiona.
He could steal an hour. Just an hour. A host of soldiers riding in would bring instant reprisal, but he could slip in alone.
No. This was war, and he’d been given his orders.