Angels Watching Over Me (Shenandoah Sisters Book #1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Katie’s brother Jason had been killed in the battle. Her other two brothers were off somewhere with the army. He didn’t know when he’d see either of them again.
    Katie’s mother cried for days. By the time she said good-bye to her husband a second time, hard lines of grief had already begun to etch themselves onto her face. Despite her husband’s optimistic words, she was well aware that the war could take the lives of her other sons too, as well as make a widow of her. She did not cry or argue at his departure this time. She was too angry to cry—angry at her husband for getting involved, angry at Abraham Lincoln, angry at Jefferson Davis, angry at them all. Why did men always have to fight? Couldn’t they see the stupidity and senselessness of it?
    With steely eyes she watched him ride off without answers to the questions that had plagued women like her for untold centuries. She loved him. But at that moment she thought Richard Clairborne to be about the most stupid man alive. He was leaving his wife and daughter alone just so he could try to kill other men who had also left wives and daughters behind at their homes. Possibly he would get himself killed by one of those men. Men killing other men . . . and for what?
    She shook her head and turned back into the house. Matthias or not, there was work to do, and it was going to be hard and would test every bone in her body. She knew that well enough by now. If men like her husband thought the war didn’t really matter to the women at home, then they were fools.
    She couldn’t have been more right. When it came, the war came to everyone.
    The fighting dragged on much longer than Richard Clairborne or most Southerners had figured it would. But Katie’s mother was not surprised. She had seen it coming. And she knew it would get worse. Rosalind Clairborne did her best to hold everything at Rosewood together, but daily the hardships increased.
    Especially for rich folks like the Clairbornes, who had been insulated from the harsh realities of life, the difficulties of the war spread like a creeping rot. At first everything on the plantation continued pretty much the same. But without the master and his sons overseeing the slaves, they gradually slacked off, working at a slower pace and accomplishing less. Even Mathias, who had always been as faithful as any black man could be to his master, couldn’t keep the lethargy from setting in.
    The first year’s wheat eventually got harvested and sold, and the cotton crop was about normal. When Mrs. Clairborne and Mathias and Jeremiah took the three loaded wagons of harvested cotton into Mr. Watson’s mill, the money for it was good enough to keep the Clairborne account at the Shenandoah bank full for another year, feeding Katie and her mother, along with the slaves, and providing for some winter repairs about the place. They had most everything they needed.
    But by the following year, Rosalind Clairborne was beginning to see inevitable signs that the work was falling behind. The crops were slow getting sown, and as the summer progressed the fields weren’t as well attended. Fences were starting to require attention, and more than once she had to run through the fields herself to chase away deer nibbling at the shoots of wheat. Sometimes Leroy was late to milk the cows. And she even had to watch Beulah and Elvia a little more carefully with the kitchen and household chores—something she had never had to do before. A drought through most of July didn’t help matters. As a result, the year’s crop was less than half as plentiful as the previous year, and Katie’s mother was feeling the financial pinch. She knew the plantation was suffering. One of the wagons was old, and her husband had talked of buying a new one this year. But now she wouldn’t be able to do so. And throughout the previous winter they had to slaughter more cattle, chickens, and hogs than she would have liked just to feed themselves and the slaves. They