The Scandalous Miss Howard Read online

  So she made it a point to be cheerful in their presence. She collected the mail on the way home from school and secreted Ladd’s love letters away to be read when she was alone. She kept up her good grades at Miss Hunnicutt’s Academy for Young Ladies. She accepted invitations to parties she didn’t really want to attend. She continued her piano lessons, proudly demonstrating, to Miss Foster’s delight, that she had finally mastered Chopin’s polonaise. Could play it almost as well as Ladd. She successfully convinced everyone that she was still the sassy, fun-loving, adventurous girl she had always been, despite the fact that Ladd was gone.

  But when she was alone, when bedtime came and she could flee to the privacy of her room, Laurette let down her guard. There she would read and reread Ladd’s letters, press them to her breasts and allow the hot tears of loneliness to slip down her cheeks.

  Many late nights, long after everyone was asleep, she would sit on the wide front windowsill, knees drawn up, arms hugging them, gazing out at the lights of Mobile and the darkened bay beyond.

  Thinking about Ladd.

  Missing him.

  Wanting him.

  Her heart would pound as she recalled the ecstasy of being held in his arms and loved by him. She could almost feel his hot, bare body pressed against her own sensitive flesh, his lips feasting on hers. She shivered at the vivid recollection of the last time they had made love.

  The two of them naked and enveloped in hot, shielding darkness while only few short yards away their unsuspecting parents, along with a host of friends, laughed and talked. Ladd standing with his bare feet apart, holding her in his arms.

  On one such late, sultry night, Laurette’s flat stomach contracted at the vivid memory. Her nipples tightened and she exhaled heavily. Her nightgown was suddenly uncomfortably warm and tight. It clung to her sensitive flesh. She was perspiring. She was miserable.

  Laurette leaned forward and looked out and checked to make sure no one could see in. Satisfied her solitary perch on the tall windowsill was safely in the concealing darkness, Laurette got up and stripped off her nightgown, tossed it to the carpeted floor. Naked, she climbed back onto the windowsill and sat there as before, with her knees bent and raised, bare feet on the sill.

  Oh, Ladd, Ladd, she sighed in her yearning.

  She closed her eyes and touched a bare breast with a tentative hand. Pretending that it was Ladd who was touching her, she toyed with a sensitive nipple and recalled how sweet it felt to have his warm, wet mouth enclosing it.

  Shamed by her burning desire, but desperately in need of some small measure of relief, Laurette soon allowed her hand to slowly slip down from her breast to settle on her flat stomach. For a time she rubbed her bare belly, breathed through her mouth and finally gave in to her relentless need. Slowly, she allowed her bent knees to fall apart. Eyes closed, breasts aching, Laurette licked her fore and middle fingers, briefly touched her pebble-hard left nipple, then slipped her moistened fingers between her legs and touched herself. Awkwardly, anxiously, she rubbed the pulsing flesh and within a matter of minutes had to viciously bite the back of her hand to keep from crying out in her sudden release.

  Immediately ashamed of herself, Laurette leaped down from the windowsill, dashed on weakened legs into her bathroom and washed thoroughly. When she came back into the bedroom, she snatched up the discarded nightgown and anxiously slipped it on, hoping that she hadn’t committed some terrible sin for which she would be direly punished.

  Admittedly more relaxed than she’d been in ages, Laurette climbed back onto the windowsill, sighed, and turned her thoughts to the things she and Ladd had done together, of all the good times they had shared through the years. And she told herself that before she knew it, it would be summertime and he would get his first furlough and come home.

  Home to her.

  Laurette smiled, closed her eyes and attempted to envision the glorious scene: a warm, perfect day beneath a cloudless, blue Alabama sky. She would be in her prettiest summer dress. He’d be wearing his snappy dress uniform. She’d be at the levee to meet him, waving madly. He’d race down the gangplank to her and she’d fly straight into his outstretched arms.

  Laurette’s smile faded and finally disappeared. Her eyes slowly opened and a wistful expression came into them. Her brows knitted and she frowned. A clear vision of the happy occasion refused to appear.

  She could not see it.

  She shuddered.

  Twelve

  Without warning the serious disquiet that had been brewing between the North and the South exploded into all-out war when a group of Citadel cadets opened fire on a Northern ship attempting to deliver supplies to the garrison at Fort Sumter.

  The first shot was fired from Fort Johnson at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861. After thirty-three hours of bombardment, the Sumter flag went down. Charleston bragged of victory. Headlines in the North used the word war. And young men, from both the North and the South, began flocking to the banners.

  At West Point, the cadets were almost evenly divided between the Union and the Confederacy. Great, good friends now found themselves on opposite sides in the coming conflict. Cadet Lieutenant James Tigart, a native Kentuckian, chose to remain with the Union. Ladd, a true son of the South, opted to leave the academy at once and ride down to Virginia to join General Robert E. Lee’s army.

  Before going their separate ways, Ladd sought out Jimmy to bid him farewell. On the historic old plain, the childhood friends met and said a strained goodbye as clouds overhead threatened rain.

  “I must and will be loyal to the Union,” Jimmy stated emphatically, a hand gripping Ladd’s shoulder.

  “I understand,” Ladd replied. “Just as I must be loyal to the Confederacy.” Jimmy nodded. Ladd continued, “You will never be the enemy to me, Jimmy.”

  “Always comrades, Laddie,” Jimmy replied.

  Attempting to lighten the mood, Ladd said, smiling, “If I run into you on the battlefield, I promise not to take a shot.”

  Jimmy laughed, shook his head. “Same here, my friend. We’ll meet again, I’m sure of it. You take care, you hear?”

  “Will do. See you after this is over.”

  Jimmy gave no reply. The two young men embraced, then turned and went in opposite directions.

  Neither looked back.

  Mobile was up in arms.

  In every household in the city, men, young and old, were saying goodbye to wives, sweethearts and families before going off to war. The Confederacy, they declared with heartfelt patriotism, needed every able-bodied man.

  At the mansion on Dauphin, T. H. Howard was preparing to leave, while Marion, eyes bright with unshed tears, helped him pack.

  “Now, dear,” said Marion, “I’m putting in two pairs of your nice silk pajamas so that—”

  “Marion,” he cut in, smiling indulgently, “where my command is going, I won’t be needing silk pajamas.”

  “No, of course not,” she said. She removed the pajamas, pressed them to her breasts and finally began to cry.

  “Oh, darling,” her husband soothed, taking her in his arms. “I won’t be gone long. This will all be over soon. We’ll easily lick the Yankees,” he promised. T.H. brushed a kiss to her forehead, and released her. He turned, closed the valise, picked it up and said, “It’s time for me to go, dearest.”

  Marion nodded, sniffed back her tears and went downstairs with him where a distraught Laurette waited. T.H. placed the valise on the foyer floor, took his only daughter in his arms and said softly, “Sweetheart, I know you’re worried about Ladd, but he’ll be fine. He’s a brave, smart, resourceful young man, and after a year at the Point he’ll surely make a superb soldier.”

  Unconvinced, Laurette said, “Oh, Father, I have the most terrible feeling that I will never see Ladd again.”

  “Foolish girl,” he said, hugging her close, “this war will be over before you know it. Ladd will be back in Mobile by summertime and so will I.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Laurette man
aged to reply.

  “I am. Count on it.”

  On the south side of Dauphin, a similar scene was being played out in one of the double parlors of the Dasheroon mansion. Douglas Dasheroon was preparing to leave Mobile. He would reclaim his command and get into the war. Carrie Dasheroon was weeping, her slender shoulders shaking. And she was bitterly protesting the fates.

  “It is not fair,” she sobbed as she watched her big, handsome husband calmly prepare to leave her. “Am I to give up my son and my husband? This Confederacy is asking too much. Ladd’s just a baby, not even eighteen. Oh, Douglas, go find him, bring him home now.”

  Douglas Dasheroon exhaled wearily, turned, clasped his wife’s shaking shoulders. “My love, please pull yourself together and be strong. We must all make sacrifices, but this upside-down world will right itself again, you’ll see. Ladd and I will be back home with you before Ladd turns eighteen.”

  Eight months at West Point had not prepared Ladd for the horrors of war. The fighting was fierce and he was frightened. Death and destruction were his constant companions. He lived with both each moment of every day and night. The sights, sounds and smells were nightmarish. But Ladd carefully kept his fear to himself so that it could never be said that he was a coward.

  The bloody skirmishes were continuous and Ladd realized, at the very beginning of the war, that any hopes he had entertained of going home to see Laurette come summer had been duty-dashed.

  A good officer, he doggedly fought the enemy with the fervent pride and passion of a true Southerner. And any time he got the opportunity, when there was a blessed lull in the bombardment, he sat down on the ground and wrote to his beloved Laurette, never knowing if she got his letters.

  Summer, 1863

  The war continued. Even the proud Southerners had come to face the sad truth: they were not going to whip the better armed, better trained Yankees as easily as they had thought.

  After two years on the front lines, Ladd was a tough, seasoned captain. He had managed to lead his troops through battle after battle with only close calls and minor losses.

  And then one hot still day in May, his luck ran out.

  The Battle of Chancellorsville was a prolonged battle in which General Lee brilliantly outmaneuvered the enemy. However, the Union Army’s rifled firepower extracted such heavy casualties, the victory yielded no decisive advantage for the South.

  In the thick of it and temporarily cut off from Jackson’s mighty Rebel force, Captain Dasheroon was trapped. “Stay close behind me and I’ll do my best to get you through this alive,” he calmly commanded his soldiers.

  It was not to be.

  When the ferocious battle ended, Ladd was the sole survivor of his small command. Badly wounded, but alive, he had taken a minieé ball in the right side and was bleeding profusely. He lay in the warm Virginia sun amid the dead, anguished that he had let his men down, had lost them all. But fully accepting of the fact that, like his fallen men, this was likely to be his last day on earth. He was having difficulty breathing, could feel the very life ebbing out of him. His thoughts turned to his beloved Laurette. A faint smile touched his chapped lips as in his mind’s eyes he saw the impetuous, cute as a button, six-year-old Laurette turn somersaults on the lawn. Then the precocious child faded and the lovely sixteen-year-old Laurette took her place.

  Grimacing with pain, the wounded Ladd pressed a hand to his bloodied, shattered ribs and swallowed hard, recalling, with vivid clarity, his last night in Mobile.

  “Lollie,” Ladd mouthed her name without sound. “Dearest Lollie.”

  The high, bright sun began to dim. The distant sounds of gunfire began to fade. Ladd gave a sigh of resignation as blessed darkness enveloped him.

  Winter, 1863

  Gone now were the snappily uniformed, bright-eyed West Point cadets with their daredevil performances, their youthful elegance, their respect for duty and honor, their gleaming white smiles, sleek muscles and chiseled jaws, and courage of a sort rarely seen.

  Those young, brave, proud cadets from both the North and the South were now either hardened veterans engaged in bloody battle, dead and buried where they fell, or incarcerated in military prisons.

  Prisons with romantic names like Belle’s Isle, Castle Thunder, Hope Slater, Governors Island, Myrtle Street and Point Lookout.

  Ladd Dasheroon was in such a prison.

  A prison with a romantic name—Devil’s Castle.

  Captured by the advancing Union soldiers that May day at Chancellorsville, the near-dead Ladd had been immediately shipped to Devil’s Castle. The old stone fortress with its thick, high walls was located on a small rocky island in Chesapeake Bay, just off the Maryland shore.

  Built as a fort more than a hundred years earlier, then used as a penitentiary until it was considered too inhumane for even hardened criminals, it had been deserted for decades. Now it overflowed with sick, starving, dead and dying Confederate prisoners. Eighteen hundred men in a facility meant to contain five hundred.

  As soon as the prison’s chief surgeon released Ladd from the hospital, he was tossed—literally—into the large, overcrowded common room that held hundreds of men. He landed atop a couple of startled prisoners: Captain Andrew Scott, 5th N. Carolina regiment, who was a cadaverously thin, thirty-eight-year-old who had lost an arm in battle; and Private Duncan Cain, 3rd Alabama regiment, a young boy of twenty.

  The gaunt Captain Scott wrapped his one arm around Ladd—who was freezing cold despite the stifling heat—lifted him gently and said, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.” Scott glanced at Duncan Cain. “Won’t we, Duncan?”

  The boy nodded, took the thin, folded blanket he was sitting on and carefully spread it over the shivering, ashen-faced Ladd. “Sorry there’s no pillow,” said Duncan.

  Ladd managed a weak smile, thanked the two men with his eyes and fell asleep.

  Andrew Scott and Duncan Cain worked tirelessly for the next several days to nurse Ladd back to health. The three became good friends. They looked out for each other. They stayed close in the overcrowded common room. They talked together of home and family and happier days. Each worked to keep the others’ spirits up.

  But life inside the old stone prison was harsh and cold. The big common room where they were confined had only four small-size windows at each end that admitted a limited amount of light. At the room’s center, it was too dark for reading, even in daytime.

  But that didn’t matter. There was nothing to read. Letter writing or receiving was strictly prohibited. As were newspapers. Every channel of communication was cut off, leaving the poor souls inside to wonder what was going on in the war and how their families were faring back home.

  At Devil’s Castle, there was never enough to eat, and what was served was often unappetizing, even spoiled. Hunger gnawed constantly and Ladd, like his fellow prisoners, quickly became emaciated and weak. But no matter how sick or weak a prisoner became, he had no cot to stretch out on, no pillow on which to lay his weary head. Except for a couple of stoves, there was no furniture in the room. The prisoners sat and slept on the cold stone floor, many with no blankets to keep them warm.

  All that, Ladd could easily have endured.

  But he was called on to endure much more.

  Thirteen

  Gilbert LaKid, the upperclassman who had caused Ladd so much grief at West Point, was Captain of the Guards at Devil’s Castle. LaKid, who’d lost an eye, but gained thirty plus pounds during the war, encouraged his guards to inflict punishment and show contempt to the prisoners.

  Especially to Ladd Dasheroon.

  LaKid’s fleshy face, when it twisted into an evil smile, was the face of a monster. And that nasty smile appeared any time he caught sight of Ladd.

  Prisoners were punished only for insulting prison officials, for trying to bribe guards, for fighting, for stealing and for attempting to escape.

  Ladd was guilty of none of those transgressions, but he was often punished as if he were the worst offender at De
vil’s Castle. Any time he saw the beefy, one-eyed LaKid swagger into the prison’s common room, he was immediately filled with dread. Still weak and tired, Ladd would sit on the crowded stone floor between Captain Scott and Private Cain, hugging his knees, slumping, attempting to make himself invisible in the mass of humanity.

  It never worked.

  LaKid always spotted Ladd. And when he did, he tromped forward into the sea of hovering men, knocking them out of his way, stepping on those who didn’t move quickly enough. His smile became broader, nastier, the closer he got to Ladd.

  As the sadistic bully approached, Ladd purposely stiffened his spine. As his side began to slowly heal and he regained his strength, he assured himself that he could withstand any punishment LaKid had planned for him. He would no longer allow the evil Captain of the Guards to break him. He was a whole man now, and he had been hardened by two and half years on the battlefield. He could and would take whatever LaKid meted out without complaint.

  On one such occasion, a miserably cold, gray December afternoon near Christmas of 1863, LaKid came looking for Ladd. When the guard’s big, booted feet stopped directly before him, Ladd raised his head and met his tormenter’s one-eyed gaze.

  With a nasty grin, LaKid inquired, “How is our sickly little Alabama boy feeling this afternoon?”

  “How kind of you to inquire,” Ladd replied sarcastically, as was now his habit. “While many of the guests in this fine luxury hotel of yours seem to be dying, I myself feel tip-top, thank you very much.” Ladd flashed a wide smile at the frowning LaKid as the admiring prisoners within earshot silently applauded Ladd’s unshakable nerve.

  “Get to your feet, you uppity southern son of a bitch!” snarled LaKid.

  “My pleasure,” said Ladd, using all of his will-power to rise without the use of his hands. “Anything else?”

  LaKid’s one eye narrowed. “It has been called to my attention that you mocked a night guard. We don’t tolerate that kind of behavior at Devil’s Castle. You will be punished.”