A Place in Your Heart Read online

  Table of Contents

  Excerpt

  Kudos for Kathy Otten

  A Place in Your Heart

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  A word about the author…

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Also available from The Wild Rose Press, Inc. and other major retailers

  “No. I want you to go home

  before the death of that ten-year-old boy becomes so ordinary that one day you wake up and realize you no longer have the ability to feel.”

  She squared her shoulders and stepped toward him. “Me own husband was a doctor, sir. I’ve birthed babies and stitched wounds. I stood by William’s side during surgeries and passed him instruments. I helped him clean the intestines of a man gored by a bull, before putting it all back inside that man’s belly. Me delicate sensibilities did not send me into a swoon then nor will they here. I thank ye for yer concern, Doctor Ellard, but ’tis who I am. And by the saints, as long as I have breath in me body, I will feel, and I will care.”

  Their gazes locked in that moment and something flickered in his icy depths, overshadowing his usual cynicism with what she suspected might be admiration. The harsh lines of his face softened.

  “Saint Jude must indeed be watching over you, Mrs. McBride.”

  “That he is, Doctor Ellard, that he is.”

  He gave her a brisk nod and opened the door. “You’re not going home then, are you?”

  She turned. “Ye know us Irish, Doctor Ellard. We don’t know what we want, but we’ll fight to the death to get it.”

  Kudos for Kathy Otten

  A PLACE IN YOUR HEART is a Northwest Houston RWA Lone Star Historical Winner.

  Another of Ms. Otten’s books, LOST HEARTS, is a Utah/Salt Lake Chapter RWA Hearts of the West Finalist.

  ~*~

  Other Kathy Otten titles

  available from The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Novels

  A TARNISHED KNIGHT

  LOST HEARTS

  BETWEEN THE LINES

  Novellas

  ANOTHER WALTZ

  AN ORDINARY ANGEL

  A CHRISTMAS SMILE

  Short Stories

  AFTER THE DARK

  SOMEONE TO THE SUNSETS

  REDEMPTION OF A CAVALIER

  A Place

  in Your Heart

  by

  Kathy Otten

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  A Place in Your Heart

  COPYRIGHT © 2018 by Kathleen H. Johnson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by Debbie Taylor

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First American Rose Edition, 2018

  Print ISBN 978-1-5092-2049-6

  Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-2050-2

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  Kristie,

  Someday, the Mütter Museum!

  Love you.

  Chapter One

  Gracie McBride peered around her armload of clean sheets and blankets, trying not to bump into anything as she moved up the aisle of the hospital ward.

  Ahead, Corporal Robert Reid leaned over a wounded private. Robbie, his right arm in a sling, struggled to remove the patient’s shirt, soiled with breakfast spills.

  “Robbie.”

  He looked up. His dark bangs fell across one blue eye.

  “All that pulling and tugging cannot be good for yer shoulder.”

  A smile played at the corners of his mouth, forming a winsome grin that reminded Gracie of her youngest brother, Bryan.

  She couldn’t help but smile back. Her regular orderly, Tom Halleck, was on a month’s leave, and Robbie had been acting in his stead. Though recovering from a bullet wound he received at Fredericksburg, Robbie was still willing to take on duties the regular orderlies wouldn’t attempt without specific instruction from Doctor Ellard.

  Gracie stepped between the beds. “Robbie, take these linens and let me do that.”

  “But, ma’am, Cap’n Ellard, he don’t want ya—”

  “By the saints, Robbie Reid, Captain Ellard be no more than bellow and bluster. I spent me last two days in the storehouse doing inventories and organizing supplies from the Sanitary Commission. That task, ’tis finished. Here is where I be needed.”

  Robbie hesitated for a moment then stepped back. He extended his arm, and she reached to pass him the pile of clean linens. The stack wobbled, and he braced it with his injured arm.

  She turned to the private, whose glassy eyes widened, as though mortified by the prospect of a woman seeing his bare torso. Unconcerned, she lowered herself to the edge of his mattress.

  “Did ye see the snow this morning?” She picked up the clean shirt and dropped it over his head. “By the saints there must be two inches or more out there.”

  Reaching through the open yoke of the soiled shirt, she gently pulled the young man’s arms from the garment. Next, she slipped her hand through the clean shirt cuff, backward through the sleeve. She grabbed the patient’s cold hand and pulled it through. She did the same with the man’s second hand. Before the private could rally the energy to protest, she’d tugged down the new shirt and whipped the old one over his head.

  “And here was I, hoping to see some fine spring weather.” Rising, she tucked the blanket high around him to ward off drafts and gave his shoulder a reassuring pat.

  The bite of sour milk wafted from the dirty garment as she rolled it into a ball and dropped it on a pile of soiled sheets near the end of the bed. She couldn’t help but notice the many faded stains and mended tears scattered throughout the thin flannel.

  “When we finish changing the beds, why don’t ye run to the storehouse for some o’ the new shirts, sent down by the Sanitary Commission?”

  “Ma’am, I did go there, whilst ya ate your breakfast, but Corporal Weston, he said the new shirts was all gone.”

  “What? Five thousand shirts, gone in two days?”

  Robbie shrugged.

  There were only a thousand beds in the whole hospital, and with the army in winter camp at Falmouth, the hospital wasn’t even half full. Yesterday a couple of orderlies from other wards had each requested a hundred shirts, but by the saints, there should still be plenty in stock.

  One of the first bits of gossip she’d heard when she arrived was how the previous ward surgeon had been arrested for being aware of, and not reporting, a ring of thieves who were not only stealing hospi
tal supplies meant for the wounded, but selling them for personal profit.

  She would have to address this shirt issue with Doctor Ellard. He wouldn’t like it, but he was the new ward surgeon, and short of taking her complaints to the hospital’s surgeon-in-charge, Doctor D. Willard Bliss himself, Doctor Ellard would just have to listen.

  She and Robbie continued, moving from patient to patient, changing sheets, giving water, or an extra blanket where needed.

  After smoothing a blanket over the top of another bed, she looked up and found Robbie with his gaze once again fixed on the door at the end of the ward. “Robbie, please.”

  She sighed. From the day she arrived three weeks ago to replace one of the male nurses being reassigned, she and the tall, dark-haired surgeon had locked horns. Yet, despite their differences, if things ran smoothly Doctor Ellard had no complaints. Robbie needn’t be so nervous.

  She glanced at the watch pinned to the bodice of her black dress. Nearly time for that doctor to start his daily walk through the ward.

  “Could ye pass me that red quilt with the embroidered border and let me worry about Doctor Ellard.”

  She’d been saving this quilt especially for the ill drummer boy whose bed was partitioned off behind a curtain at the end of the ward. She forced her brightest smile as she tucked the extra warmth around his shivering body and brushed back his damp hair. “There ye go, Gilbert.”

  That any mother would allow her ten-year-old child to march off to war was beyond her ken. She tamped down her rage at the insanity of it all before it paralyzed her.

  “I’ll be back later to help ye write a letter to yer mother.”

  He nodded and closed his eyes. She patted his knee, thin and bony beneath the quilt then hurried to the patients on the other side of the ward before the sting in her eyes could form into tears.

  Robbie trailed along behind her. “Ma’am, maybe ya should hurry, so’s Cap’n Ellard don’t see ya when he comes through. Ya know he don’t want ya in the ward.”

  “And where would he be thinking I belong? Back in Boston, scrubbing floors and polishing silver for the gentry on Beacon Hill? By the saints, if me lot in life is to do such work, then ’tis me choice to be doing it here.”

  She stopped at bed thirty-six then looked back. “For who would ye rather have nurse ye back to health, Robbie Reid, me or the lazy attendants stealing peaches meant for the wounded?”

  With a wave of her hand, she gestured down the wide aisle toward the men playing cards around a table beside one of the stoves.

  Robbie laughed as patients in nearby beds and chairs chuckled.

  Gracie’s cheeks grew hot as she recalled the ruckus from Wednesday night. “Now lads,” she conceded glancing around. “Doctor Ellard had the right of it. I did go a wee bit too far, sneaking that purgative into those jars of peaches. But in me own defense, Dr. Ellard did refuse to believe me when I told him those men were eating the food meant for all ye fine lads. ’Twas the only way I knew to prove it.”

  “It was pretty funny,” Robbie added. “Watchin’ ’em moanin’, all doubled over, pukin’ an’…an’…” His cheek bones flared red.

  She turned away, hiding a smile. Like her brother Bryan, Robbie was a brash, confident young man one minute, and the next, mortified by the idea that she knew anything of a man’s bodily functions.

  They moved on to Major Carlton who’d lost his leg at Fredericksburg. While most of the officers chose to pay for care in private homes, the major had chosen to remain here and pay for his meals until his family could come for him. She helped support him as he maneuvered into the wheeled chair beside his bed. After draping a clean blanket across his lap, she poured him a cup of water while Robbie continued talking.

  “We was all worried about ya though, when Cap’n Ellard grabbed your arm an’ dragged ya outta here the other night.”

  “An’ I be telling ye true, Robbie Reid. Banishing me to the storehouse ’twas all he did. Doctor Ellard be a fine man. He’d not lay one finger on me.”

  Robbie glanced at the floor, as she yanked the linens from the major’s bed.

  “Well,” Robbie whispered, leaning close to her ear. “Some a the men figgered he hurt ya, cause ya wasn’t around fer two days. He’s got a temper ya know and got himself demoted fer assaultin’ some lieutenant after Fredericksburg.”

  “Robbie—”

  “I know ya don’t like hearin’ gossip, but they say he had some kind’a breakdown durin’ the battle. That he’s a coward, that he abandoned his post, walked away from the field hospital an’ when they found him—”

  Raising her hand, she silenced Robbie. “Stories about the man are all I be hearing for nearly a month. Stories be not truth, and I’ll not be spreading them behind his back.”

  Despite the gossip, she refused to believe a surgeon as fine as Doctor Ellard could have ever walked away from men who desperately needed his skills, no matter how tired and cold he’d been.

  She’d heard the whispers among the patients about Fredericksburg. In wave after wave of frontal assaults against Confederates entrenched behind a stone wall along a ridge known as Mayre’s Heights, whole brigades had been cut down by muskets and canister shot, including the 28th Massachusetts and her two oldest brothers.

  One wizened old sergeant told her how they’d used pick axes to free the bodies frozen to the earth, which lay in heaps at the base of that high ground along the Sunken Road. A shudder rippled through her. She refused to picture Michael and Callum dying that way.

  She rubbed her arms and shoved the images to that special corner of her mind reserved for dying drummer boys and brothers charging toward Confederate lines, cut down with the battle cry of the Irish Brigade still on their lips.

  Faugh-a-Ballagh, be damned.

  “Come, Robbie,” she snapped briskly. “Let’s give the storehouse another look. I saw to the unloading of the supplies from the Sanitary Commission meself, and by the saints, I know I entered five thousand shirts in that ledger.”

  Robbie followed her down the wide aisle toward the door which led outside. Ahead, a table and chairs had been arranged close to one of the stoves where the orderlies and recovering patients gathered to play cards.

  Two of the attendants narrowed their gazes on Gracie as she walked toward them. They had both been recipients of her tainted peaches, and she bravely met their threatening glowers with one of her own. The first man, Sergeant Clive Paul, sat with his chair rocked back on two legs.

  He didn’t even rise as she approached the table, nor did he have the decency to button his coat. His slovenly appearance drew her eye to the front of his shirt and the familiar style of yoke and buttons she’d seen recently—five thousand times—over the past two days.

  That louse! Pressing her lips together, she marched straight toward him and grabbed his collar. Off balance, the chair tipped over, and Sergeant Paul fell flat on his back. Unwilling to release the shirt, Gracie landed right on top of him.

  She held tight, nearly choking him as he tried to roll away. With her free hand, she grabbed the collar of his military jacket and tugged it half way down his arms.

  She clung to him like a vine as he tried to crawl away amid the hoots and hollers of the patients. Once she’d tossed aside his coat, she pulled back the shirt and clearly visible were the inked letters U-S-S-C on the inside of the neck.

  “By the saints, remove that shirt!”

  He pulled free of her grip and pushed to his feet.

  She reached out and grabbed his ankle.

  He crashed to the floor.

  Gracie crawled forward and latched onto his shirt again, this time pulling the hem from the waistband of his trousers. At the bottom of his shirt tail, again were the initials of the United States Sanitary Commission.

  Sergeant Paul shoved her hands away, but she pushed him down and managed to sit herself on his stomach. Pulling and tugging, she yanked the shirt off his body then whirled it around above her head in triumph. The ward erupted in a thun
derous chorus of cheers loud enough to rival an entire division of charging Rebels.

  Suddenly a hush descended, as though God himself had entered the ward. Except God didn’t wear shoes that thudded hollow against the wood floor, resonating the long deliberate stride of the man who approached.

  Afraid of what Dr. Ellard would say this time, she froze, hoping against hope, that he somehow wouldn’t notice her sitting on a half-naked orderly in the middle of the ward.

  The footsteps stopped behind her. She glanced at Robbie, but he’d averted his blue eyes, to stare shame-faced at the floor.

  Without warning, strong hands slid under her arms and lifted her straight off the sergeant. She hung suspended for a moment, long fingers pressing into her ribs, her feet dangling above the floor. Was he about to shake her like a rag doll? Instead, he shifted and set her firmly on her feet.

  Sergeant Paul scrambled to stand. “Sir, did ya see what that red-headed Irish wen—lady nurse did? Why it ain’t decent, a woman actin’ like—”

  “Get out.” Doctor Ellard’s voice sliced through Sergeant Paul’s tirade like a shard of glass through parchment.

  Gracie smiled, feeling vindicated. Doctor Ellard was finally on her side. But when she glanced at the sergeant, he was looking straight at her. A smug grin curled back the edges of his mouth.

  Puzzled, she turned. Doctor Ellard’s ice blue gaze was narrowed right on her face.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. You have disrupted my ward for the last time, Mrs. McBride.”

  Drawing a deep breath, she planted her fists on either side of her apron’s waist band. “Doctor Ellard, I did not spend two days o’ me life bogged down with inventories and requisitions, only to be learning that the shirts and produce meant for the wounded have been stolen by these—”

  “And what would you have me do, Mrs. McBride?” he fired back. “Poison every orderly in the hospital then strip them naked?”

  Anger jerked her chin up. “No, Doctor Ellard, ye’d best be leavin’ that to me.”

  A few snickers skittered around the room.

  He drew a deep breath, as though he were about to give her a piece of his mind, but caught himself.