The Jackal’s Mistress

Chapter 3

3

The Colt revolver must have weighed a couple of pounds, Libby thought. The stock was walnut. It had six chambers, and the trespasser had brought it fully loaded to the property. It wasn’t much of an armory, but it was more than they had before he had appeared in her kitchen. Six shots. She might have practiced shooting if they had had more ammunition. But they didn’t.

In the distance, she heard thunder, but she knew it wasn’t a storm. The skies were blue. The rains had left yesterday.

“We got no powder and we got no bullets—other than what’s in that gun,” Joseph was saying. “We need to get both.”

The four of them—Libby, her niece Jubilee, and Joseph and Sally—were sitting around the dining room table, having what passed for supper, because they wanted to preserve for the winter what they could from the kitchen garden. Tonight, it was biscuits and okra. Milk for the girl, who looked less and less like a child and more and more like a woman. She would be thirteen in November, and now Libby could see both her own brother, Robert, and her late sister-in-law in the girl’s face.

Sometimes, she wondered: what would her parents think of her dining with the Negroes? And she knew the answer.

The pistol sat on the table near the silver candlesticks, which weren’t lit because the sun was pouring in through the western windows. She and Joseph had agreed on a story to explain to Jubilee the source of the weapon: a corporal with the quartermaster, a fellow infatuated with Libby, had wanted her to have it because the fighting had been so fluid lately.

“More ammunition would change nothing,” said Sally. She looked older than she had a month ago. She and Joseph had fought because she didn’t believe her husband should have killed the man. She’d been unnerved by the vein of violence that she hadn’t known had coursed through him—she had supposed him better than other men, constitutionally exempt from the ferocity and viciousness that marked the gender—and worried desperately now for his soul. But Libby maintained, along with Joseph, that he hadn’t had a choice. The marauder was drunk and had this gun. And these were dangerous times. They could hear the artillery right now.

“It might,” Joseph disagreed.

Libby sat upright in her chair. “I’m not sure what we’d do with more ammunition, either. But I do want more, I know that. And I want another gun. A rifle. Something that shoots further than this pistol.”

Sally shook her head. “If the Yankees found a rifle here, they’d think we were hiding Mosby’s men. And if Mosby’s men found it, they’d think—”

“They’d think it was my husband’s and we used it to hunt for food,” said Libby, cutting off the older woman.

“Sorry, ma’am,” said Sally.

Libby gazed down at the tines of her fork, suddenly unable to meet Sally’s eyes. Libby was not fond of the Federals: she was angry that her husband, if he was still alive, was in one of their prison camps. She held a grudge because they couldn’t leave her and her people alone—because they wanted to tell them all what to do. Her brother, an infantry captain, was fighting somewhere to the southeast, near Petersburg, and had not been in the Valley since May. Moreover, she and her family had never owned a human being, and her husband had set free her father-in-law’s servants. She was eating with two of them right now, for God’s sake. It didn’t seem fair that she and her kin should be punished for the sins of others.

But she saw the stubbornness—the sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy—of her own people as misguided, too. She wouldn’t have dared say such a thing aloud, but the abolitionists, even the madmen who breathed fire like John Brown, were right: slavery was a stain on the Confederacy. Independence, and all they had sacrificed across the South, would have been easier if they weren’t trying to build a nation where the Negroes were sold like livestock.

Joseph sopped up some of the oil from the okra with a piece of his biscuit. “That depends on what kind of rifle. A carbine? That’d be trouble. That old musket of Peter’s? No one would care.”

Peter had brought his musket with him when he’d enlisted. He’d expected to be home within months.

“Aunt Libby?”

She turned to Jubilee.

“The Covingtons have bullets,” the girl said. “I’m sure of it.”

The Covingtons lived down the road. Of course they had bullets, Libby thought. Leveritt Covington was too old to fight, but he had his guns. Shot them a deer last year and sometimes bagged smaller game. He’d used his rifle to put down a horse in June. He lived with his sister, the poor woman mostly bedridden since…since forever. Libby squeezed the girl’s hand, the skin still soft and smooth, despite the time she spent now tending to the chickens and milking the cow, and managing with Sally the garden and the horses.

“They do,” she agreed.

“And I don’t know if Mr.Covington has a Colt, but we know he’s got a pistol,” Joseph observed. “So, he might have ammunition we could use.”

“Maybe I should go for a visit,” Libby said.

It seemed as if the rumbling was starting to slow. That meant that either Virginians were charging now into Yankees, or the Yankees were attacking General Early’s men. They spoke endlessly in these parts about Northerners and Southerners, and she was most assuredly a Southerner. But she also lived in a part of Virginia that was north of Washington, D.C. They were no more than twenty miles south of Harper’s Ferry. (She still recalled the jubilation in Berryville when the rebels hadtaken the armory there at the start of the war, though it had struck her at first as a Pyrrhic victory: when the Yankees had retreated, they’d burned the arsenal, destroying thousands of muskets. Only later would she learn that the Virginia Militia had captured dozens of gun-manufacturing machines that the rebels had then shipped to their own factory in Richmond.) If the Army of Northern Virginia hadn’t left Gettysburg so quickly after their defeat there the July before last, she would have traveled even to Pennsylvania in search of her husband. At first, she had heard he was wounded; only later would she learn he had been wounded and then captured.

“May I come with you?” Jubilee asked.

“No, you may not,” Sally told her.

“It takes over half an hour to walk there. Don’t you want someone to talk to?”

“I’d love your company, Jubilee, but those are cannons we heard,” Libby said to her niece. “Sally’s right. I’m sorry. I’ll go after Joseph and I’ve finished at the mill—if we don’t hear any more fighting.”

But she wondered if just as she herself needed to learn how to use the pistol, perhaps so might her niece. She had never anticipated that she would want the girl to know how to shoot, but neither had she imagined even four years ago that she would be running a gristmill and, one day, pushing off her the dying man, his blood on her face and dress, who had wanted to rape her.

The sounds of the battle died down, and so Libby set off for the Covingtons’. She and Joseph tacked up the smaller of their two plow horses, a bay named Cinnamon that didn’t mind a saddle. Libby wasn’t a good rider: she hadn’t even been atop a horse until she’d met Peter and come to Berryville. Cinnamon was patient, however, and she was only riding a mile and a half. Usually when she went to town—or the Covingtons—she walked. But after the skirmish that afternoon, she wanted to spend as little time on the road or away from home as possible.

When she arrived, Leveritt Covington greeted her at the door. The man was old enough to be her grandfather. He was in his seventies, but he was still an excellent horseman and, before the war, would travel to Kentucky and Louisiana for the races. He had become a widower the same year as her own father, 1856, but had now outlived her father by two years. His servants were bundling the tall stalks of wheat into sheaves as Libby passed the field, and her mind was calculating when the wagons would arrive at the mill. At…her…mill.

No: at Peter’s mill. Still. Always. She could not allow herself to think otherwise.

Leveritt tolerated her more than other folks in the Valley, and she suspected that was mostly because he was a horndog and thought she was pretty. But she was still both an outsider here in Berryville, and the wife of the man who had freed his servants.

He assumed she was here to discuss his next—and likely last—delivery for the season, but she told him it was something else and he nodded gravely. He didn’t invite her inside but, instead, motioned at one of the two rockers on the porch. He had not lost an inch of height to the natural decrepitude that marked most men his age, and still towered above her, but his skin looked as brittle and dry as old newspaper. His hair was no longer as lush and thick as it once was and had rolled back behind his ears, but she had heard stories about how he had never been at a loss for company at night when he would venture outside the Valley to wager on the horses, even well into his sixties. But he had an avuncular relationship to Peter and had always been kind to her, and some men are just—a phrase her father would use—rascals in need of forgiveness. He did not judge sinners such as Covington, which, in hindsight, had caused her on occasion to wonder about her own father’s fidelity.

Still, she missed him desperately. She missed her mother. She missed her sister-in-law. The rolls of the absent had grown long, and none of these were casualties from the war. They were merely the dead swallowed by the uncaring earth as it spun.

“The Yankees gave our boys a black eye today,” Leveritt was saying, sitting himself once she was settled. “But we fought hard, I hear.”

“I heard the cannon fire,” she said.

“And you came here anyway? I wish you hadn’t, Libby. A woman alone on the road today? No.”

“It’s a mile and a half, Leveritt. Good Lord, the Yankee army was our neighbor for half this war.”

“And not a good one.”

“They left me alone.”

“The depredations when—if—they return will be very different now. The war has changed: it’s not like it was in 1862. No corncrib or smokehouse is safe. No field will not be burned. You can’t be a lady alone out there, Libby. The Yanks have become a nasty bunch.”

“As have we,” she reminded him.

“If so, it’s only in response to their deviltry. And it’s more the reason you should have stayed off the road.” He tilted back his rocker and added with great solemnity, “Whatever brought you here could have waited.”

She heard movement in the house, and Leveritt stared at her, daring her to react. Footsteps.

“Is that Felicia?” she asked, hoping his sister was—miraculously—up and about.

“No, no. She’s upstairs. Same as ever, I’m sorry to say.”

It could have been his cook and house servant. But there was a challenge to his gaze and she saw in his face the hard shape of his skull, and felt on the breeze a dour hint of something hidden. But she had discovered her own durability these three and a half awful years and asked, “Well, then, do I hear Jessica?” Jessica was the house servant who tended his and his sister’s clothes, fixed their meals, and cleaned their home.

He nodded, a lie of the body. If it were Jessica, he would have had her bring them sweet tea. He would have invited Libby inside.

And those footsteps were heavier than those of the slight woman with infinite energy who maintained this place.

“How is Felicia?” Libby pressed.

“She’s a little more tired than usual. The stress, I suppose, of the proximity of the Federals.”

“It stresses us all,” she agreed politely, playing this game. Because it did not stress them all. Why would Jessica fear the Yankees? Why would any Negro woman? Unlikely. They represented her deliverance. No, those footsteps she had heard—those steps she was hearing—belonged to a man. Or, perhaps, men. In the house right now was one (or more) of Mosby’s guerrillas. It was conceivable that she was near compatriots of the very devil who had attacked her in her own kitchen, and whose body now moldered beneath the dug earth on her own property. Yes, the rangers were viewed as heroes of great courage by many folks in these parts, but since she’d been attacked, the idea that some of them hid by day in private homes felt more reminiscent of cowardice to her. She couldn’t decide whether Leveritt was housing them willingly or because they had given him no choice; they had never approached her, but that was because propriety and decency would have discouraged such a request. Young white men sharing the home of a woman and a nearly adolescent girl while the woman’s husband was in a Union prison camp or had died for the cause? Improper at best, licentious at worst.

“I met your grandson,” she continued. “Henry Morgan.”

“Good lad. Fine horseman. Where did you meet him?”

“He came by the house. Was scouting the ground.”

The older man sat back in his rocker and folded his arms across his chest. “He told me he expects we will not be spared the fighting much longer.” He pointed at the horse and nodded gravely. “You keep your head down, young lady.”

“I have the same fear. I will.”

“Our best hope is their election in November. If Lincoln loses, this war will finally come to an end.”

This was the dream of most women and men in the Valley. She saw it, however, not in the sweep of history, not in the link between secession and independence; rather, it would mean that her husband, if he was still alive, would come back to her.

Inside she heard a cough. A man’s cough. Now there was no doubt that the noise she had heard wasn’t Jessica.

“So, tell me,” he asked, his tone kind, “is there a problem at the mill? Do you and Joseph need help with something? What brings you here?”

Ammunition for that Colt, of course, was the answer.

But Mosby’s men were known for using Colts, usually purloined from the Federals they had captured or killed, often a pair in two holsters. She needed powder, a flask, bullets. It was a most particular ask. And it dawned on her: the only way she would have a Colt was if she had a Yankee’s gun—or the one from a missing guerrilla. Perhaps from the man, now dead, who might very well have been among those billeting at this very house.

She couldn’t ask. She…couldn’t. She glanced down at her fingers and saw a slight tremble. She pressed her nails intoher palm to calm the shudder and steady herself. She steeled herself and met his eyes.

“No,” she said, smiling at him, “the mill is running fine. Joseph and I have it well in hand.”

“Good, good. Joseph is a fine fellow.”

“He is.”

“Then tell me, Libby: What I can do for you?”

She took a breath and gazed out at the wheat. She would play to his ego to get through this. “Tell me more about the election. Tell me more of what your Lieutenant Morgan has seen. Give me reasons to hope as I await Peter’s return.”