Excerpt from Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy by Abbott Kahler, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Be very careful what you say," she warned one trespasser dressed as a photographer. "I was born at the North, but have lived among these people seven years. My sympathies are all with the Northern people. I am trying now to get a pass from General Beauregard that I may visit my sister in New York, who is a teacher in one of the public schools. I will gladly take any message you may want to send to your friends."

The stranger declined her offer, but she would have other opportunities to dupe Yankee men.

This respite at camp was interrupted by reports that the enemy was marching down the Shenandoah Valley; the men went to fight at Falling Waters on July 2 and the women went home. After the Confederates retreated, the Union continued on south toward Martinsburg, scheduled to arrive in time for a victory parade on the Fourth of July. Belle recognized that this day now belonged only to the Yankees—the eighty-fifth birthday of a nation that had amputated a third of itself, split into uneven halves.

Staring out her window onto South Queen Street, she heard the soldiers before she saw them. They announced their presence with laughter and song, hollering about that damned Yankee Doodle riding on his pony, booted feet stomping to the burst of bugle and the grumble of drums. The beat thrummed in the air, keeping time with the tap of her heart against her ribs. It was late afternoon, the sun shedding its heat layer by layer, hunkering down toward the baked dirt roads. The soldiers' song grew louder, their laughter more brazen. They slashed bayonets at the pale Virginia sky, marching closer and closer still.

House "servants," a common euphemism for slaves, rounded up children in the public square and hustled them to safety. John O'Neal locked the doors of his saddle and harness shop. The church bells sat untolled, the hour unmarked. The Baltimore & Ohio railroad depot stood deserted; rebel troops had destroyed forty-eight locomotives and three hundred cars, wrapping one of the engines in an American flag before setting it afire, all to prevent Union supplies from arriving by train. Field hands hid in their quarters instead of harvesting wheat or quarrying native limestone. Clusters of homes sat darkened and deserted, the owners having packed up their silverware and their help and fled farther south. A few bold spectators arrived on horseback from neighboring towns, waiting for whatever came next.

General Robert Patterson's Yankees were everywhere, winding through the cemetery and around the jail, pausing to shatter the windows of a church, pillage the offices of the local newspaper, claim the county courthouse as Union headquarters, and raid the distillery of a Confederate captain to guzzle his whiskey. There were thousands and thousands of them, an endlessly advancing blue line, a menacing horizon almost upon her.

To Belle's side, within reach, lay a Colt 1849 pocket pistol.

Since the abolitionist John Brown's attempt to start an armed slave rebellion, Belle had been terrified of "an uprising of the negroes," and believed that "Northerners were coming down to murder us." She told herself she would not hesitate to use the pistol; she had never hesitated at anything. All her life she had been blissfully unburdened by doubt or introspection. She believed her plain face was striking, her defiance charming, her wit precocious, her every thought clever and significant. "I am tall," she once boasted to her cousin, lobbying him to find her a husband. "I weigh 106½ pounds. My form is beautiful. My eyes are of a dark blue and so expressive. My hair of a rich brown and I think I tie it up nicely. My neck and arms are beautiful & my foot is perfect. Only wear [size] two and a half shoes. My teeth the same pearly whiteness, I think perhaps a little whiter. Nose quite as large as ever, neither Grecian nor Roman but beautifully shaped and indeed I am decidedly the most beautiful of all your cousins."

From Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy by Karen Abbott Copyright © 2014 by Karen Abbott. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.