Prologue

South of Atlanta, Summer 1864

“A woman?” the field surgeon cried.

Alice groaned, both from pain and humiliation. Damn that dirty Reb who shot me! A white‑hot blaze shot through her leg when she tried to shift on the makeshift cot. Gritting her teeth to keep from crying out, she clutched her thigh as if she could drive the excruciating pain away. The medics had ripped her red uniform breeches up to the crotch and one of them had discovered she wasn’t exactly…well…a male. Alice grimaced. She’d been angrier about being found out than about being shot.

In fact, she hadn’t even realized she’d been shot until she’d fallen trying to help another wounded soldier to the back of the lines. “What happened to Reilly?” she asked but her question was ignored.

Throughout the one long year she’d devoted herself to fighting with the New York 17^th Zouave Infantry unit in the Union Army, she’d struggled to hide her identity. No one had ever guessed straight‑shooting, hard‑fighting, cursing, cat house visiting Al was actually Mary Alice O’Malley.

After Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation, she’d decided the sword was mightier than the pen and she’d donned the Zouave unit’s distinctive red, blousing breeches and blue, cutaway jacket decorated with gold piping. She’d volunteered and immediately boarded a train south.

Despite a few short‑lived skirmishes, her unit had been engaged mostly in guard duty in Decatur, Alabama—until they marched east to Georgia where John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee dueled furiously for every foot of the red clay soil. Although she’d fought gallantly alongside the men of her company, she’d fallen trying to drag one of the other soldiers to safety.

Before the war, she’d been a staunch abolitionist, passing out leaflets and fliers all over Boston—until the priest of her parish discovered Alice wasn’t like the other girls.

She’d always thought she’d been born in the wrong body, that she should have been born a man. She’d never cared for crinolines and corsets but rather preferred breeches and boots.

She also preferred the fairer sex. Although she felt more comfortable in the company of men, she’d always been attracted to women. She loved their delicate skin and voluptuous breasts, their soft thighs, their even softer lips. Her Catholic upbringing preached against such aberrations but Alice felt an all‑knowing God would never have made mistakes. She loved her brothers in arms but she didn’t love them, not the way she could ever love a woman.

Not the way she had loved a woman.

Her insides tangled at the memory of Faith McLeary, of her soft kisses stolen under the sheets at night back in Boston, of her fingers, exploring, touching—proclaiming. Alice swallowed thickly. She’d known then that she was not like other girls.

Poor Faith had been shipped off to a convent for her transgressions and rather than face such a fate, Alice decided to flee to New York where she discovered she got along quite well disguised as a man.

“That leg needs to come off,” the surgeon declared.

Alice shifted back on the cot. “You’ll not be taking my leg off!” she wailed, her Irish brogue evident.

The surgeon eyed her over his spectacles. “You’re right. I’ll not be. And neither will any other surgeon in this hospital. We’ve got soldiers to attend to. Men. Not girls playing dress up.” He turned to a couple of orderlies. “Get that disgrace out of here.”

Disgrace? Anger obliterated Alice’s pain. “Disgrace? Listen here, I’ve fought for my country. I carried a gun at the front instead of hiding behind the lines like you’ve done. I’ve fought for these poor enslaved people down here and you dare to call me a disgrace?” She knew it was unladylike—though no one had ever accused Alice O’Malley of being a lady—but she coughed up the bile in her throat and hawked it straight in the surgeon’s face.

The surgeon inhaled angrily as he removed his spectacles and wiped them on his bloody apron. “Refuse her any laudanum. If women don’t know their place, they should be forced to learn it.”

“What should we do with her, sir?” one of the orderlies asked.

“Leave her behind. We’ve got no room or inclination to cart a wounded harridan all over Georgia.”

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