The Jackal’s Mistress

Chapter 6

6

Sally and Jubilee greeted them when the wagon arrived at the house. Sally told the child to wait in the doorframe, but the girl ignored her and the two of them surrounded the wagon.

By the light of her lantern, Sally saw that she was correct: the fellow she had seen in the window that day was indeed a Union soldier. He was a big man with a short, scraggly, unkempt beard the color of molasses. She could tell the beard was new, its growth likely beginning when he had been wounded. His hair, including his beard, was matted like a dying animal that no longer even tried to groom itself. Despite the chill in the night air, he was sweating, and he squinted up at her now with eyes heavy-lidded, mere slits, eyes that were beaten from exhaustion and pain.

Joseph climbed down first and helped Libby to the ground. “The ride nearly killed that man,” he told Sally, pulling her aside and speaking quietly. “I don’t know if he makes it through the night.”

“I see he lost a leg,” she said.

“And a good part of a hand. Couple fingers. He ain’t eaten in days.”

Sally turned to Libby and said, “We got a chicken we could boil.” She wanted to keep this man alive. He was wearing blue so he might be an abolitionist: the worst sort of hellhound in these parts for lots of white people, but not to her. They had five chickens left, all still laying eggs.

Libby met her gaze, and Sally couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Then the mistress of the house, still so young in Sally’s mind, nodded. “Let’s get him inside first.”

“Where?”

Libby had been thinking about this all the way here, the reality of what she was doing driven home each time the Yankee gasped or cried out against the agony from the jostling wagon. They couldn’t leave him on the first floor. She never knew when either regular army or Mosby’s men might ride by. But scaling the stairs would be harder than climbing a mountain. And even the second floor didn’t ensure his— their —safety. Still, it was safer than the first floor.

“My room,” she said. “My bed.”

“Your bed?” Sally asked, incredulous. She could not have heard the woman correctly.

“Yes. Someone comes looking for him? No decent soldier would dare peer into my bedroom.”

“A lot of Mosby’s men ain’t decent,” Sally reminded her.

“No,” Libby agreed. She knew this firsthand. “But it seems the best of our bad options.”

“Where are you gonna sleep?” her niece asked, but Libby could tell from the tone that the girl knew. The child would have a roommate. They would share her small bed.

“Why don’t we keep him in the parlor for now?” Joseph suggested. “If he’s alive in the morning, we’ll get him upstairs then.”

Libby paced and found herself staring into the back of the wagon. She could see through the ticking and bandages that Weybridge’s stump had started to bleed. His left hand, too. And so she relented. The parlor was probably a better idea than trying to ascend the stairs after dark with close to two hundred pounds of dying human flesh. They’d get him inside, kill one of their remaining hens, feed him, and see if he made it to sunrise.

In the night, Libby sat on her bed with her bare feet dangling above the floor, the lantern still lit, and wondered what Peter would do—and what he would think of what she was doing now for this Union captain. The moon was close to setting. It was almost four in the morning.

Northern women were supposed to be coarse. She had only met a few, and, in all fairness, they were more judgmental than vulgar. But if Peter had ever been left behind to die in Maryland or Pennsylvania, she believed the women there were enough like her that they would tend to him. Care for him. Nurse him. You couldn’t leave a man to die alone.

Peter, she supposed, would expect the same of her in regard to this soldier.

The bleeding from Weybridge’s leg and his hand had been easy to stop, once they had him lying quietly on comforters and pillows on the parlor floor. He ate small pieces of the chicken and then bigger bites. She wasn’t sure what else she would need to help him heal if he were still alive when she woke up. She wished they had alcohol, both for his pain and for the wounds. They didn’t, and she wasn’t sure where she could get some.

She brought her right foot up to the mattress and, in the moonlight, stared at her toes and ran her fingers up to her knee, the hem of her shift sliding down to her hip. She was fascinated by the bones and touched them now in ways that she never had before, fascinated by the smallness of the ones in her feet, the roundness of her kneecap, and the way her shin exuded both strength and fragility at once. How did one exist without those bones? Without half a leg?

But, somehow, men did. Women, too, though she had never seen a woman who was missing a leg.

Of course, women were not subject to the belch of cannons and the horrors of rifles.

Peter had been wounded charging into canister fire. He did not write her that. She learned that from a friend of their family in Staunton who had a cousin in the Second Virginia.

When she had left Weybridge, he’d been asleep. His breathing was less labored. He’d kept down the chicken she had fed him.

She finally concluded that it was more likely than not he would still be alive in the morning.

Which was good.

Mostly.

It would also be the start of myriad complications she had not foreseen when she had awoken some twenty-one hours ago, her life already so much harder than she had imagined when she and Peter had fallen in love. Those days? A lifetime ago, it seemed. A life she could recall, but no longer fathom.

Joseph entered Libby’s house just before dawn to check on the bluebelly. See if he was breathing. He moved with stealth because it was only hours ago that he and Sally had left Libby and the soldier, and he hoped that she and Jubilee were still asleep. He himself had only dozed the last couple of hours. Sally, too.

At first, he was unsure if Weybridge had survived the night when he gazed down at the man on the floor. The comforter atop him wasn’t moving. He squatted and peered at him, the sun still so low in the east that the room remained dusky.

The soldier reeked.

If he was dead or died today, it would be but one small tragedy in the midst of many. They would clean the bedding, and, perhaps, heaven would have one more angel. The firmament had been overrun with angels the last three years.

Abruptly, however, the man on the floor coughed, small but consequential. His eyes remained shut. But he was indeed alive, and Joseph exhaled. He hadn’t realized his anxiety had him holding his breath.

And an idea came to him. Before they moved him upstairs, assuming he survived the coming hours, Joseph would bathe him and shampoo his hair. Trim that beard. Maybe even get out the tooth powder and a brush and clean his teeth.

And though Libby disagreed, he was going to broach once again the idea of approaching the doctor. He had an inkling of how they might bribe a scalawag like Doc Norton for his help.

Jubilee was aware of the light in her room. The sound of the chickens outside. She could tell she had slept later than usual; of course, she had been up so much later than usual.

She sat up in bed, remembering the night before.

The man on the floor below her, the stranger in the parlor, was her enemy. Her father and her uncle were fighting men just like him.

But she understood her aunt’s predicament. She herself couldn’t have left the man, even if he was a jackal, to die alone at Mrs.Bingham’s place.

She had chores to do, and, she supposed, the jackal—and that was what she was going to call him, even to his face, she decided, if he lived—would make for even more work. And so she went to the slop jar and did her business, and then threw some water from the porcelain basin on her dresser onto her face. As she got dressed, she looked at her bed, aware that tonight or tomorrow, the jackal would have her aunt and uncle’s big bed to himself, and she would be sharing her small one with Libby.

There was an injustice to this, but it was a minor one. The last few years, there had been far worse ones, including her mother’s death from what the doctor had said was malaria, but no one else caught it, and so even now she had her doubts. But, somehow, her mother had died while battling the seemingly incompatible, dueling symptoms of fever and chills. Ague. That was the word.

She’d died in her sleep, while Jubilee had cried alone in the next room, because the doctor would not allow her near the bed, and her father was fighting far, far away.

Her Aunt Libby wasn’t that much older than she was now when first her own mother and then, a few years later, her own father had died. She didn’t speak of them much. Jubilee found this baffling. She loved quoting her own mama, even if she was usually making the quotes up. It kept the woman’s face fresh and her voice alive. And given the way the war always seemed about to knock on your door, how the only news was bad news, the good memories otherwise could get buried like the dead.

Not forgotten, certainly. That never happened.

Jubilee had a feeling that her aunt carried her memories inside her, one more great burden. Maybe the woman was afraid to talk about her missing husband or her own dead parents. Maybe she was afraid that speaking too much of the deceased would bring all that sadness and grief to the surface like algae. Pond scum. And the bad, bad air that killed people.

The simples for pain were lavender, rosemary, and mint. Sally had had the most success against body aches and sore muscles with rosemary tinctures, but all she had now was one made from lavender she used for headaches that she began steeping the last day of August. She liked the leaves to soak in vinegar for months, not weeks, but it would have to do.

Still, she knew, it would not do much. They needed bark juice—hard liquor—or opium, and they had neither.

Nevertheless, midmorning she and Libby sat on the floor in the parlor, surrounding the Federal, his head propped up by an additional pillow from Jubilee’s bed, and spooned him lavender oil and broth from the chicken they had boiled last night. He was weak, but he’d improved overnight, at least a little bit. He seemed stronger, though it was clear the pain was excruciating. He murmured that his fingers—his hand, he meant, since he was motioning at digits that were gone—hurt as much as the remains of his leg.

Sally hated to see him suffering. She hated to see any creature, man or animal, so uncomfortable, but the agonies of this one in particular caused her the same frustration she’d experienced when her children had been sick or when her parents had been dying. The anxiety was not as deep, nor would be the grief if he died. Not at all. But this was a man fighting for her people, and she wanted to do right by him. God’s plan was what it was, and her simples would not change His mind or the trajectory of this Northerner’s death, if that was what God envisioned. Nevertheless, her inability to mitigate this soldier’s discomfort and misery was vexing her. If he were a horse, they would have shot him by now, an end that, arguably, was more merciful than prolonging his torment.

Instead, later she and Joseph and Libby would begin the arduous process of bringing the man upstairs to Libby’s bedroom. Jubilee was stripping the bed now, and Joseph was fashioning a litter from grain bags and two of the wooden staffs they used to clear the sluice that steered rushing water from the Opequon into the mill. They were going to carry him on the makeshift stretcher up the stairway. It was one thing to allow gravity to help Joseph and Libby bring him down the stairs at Maude Bingham’s; Sally knew it would be quite another to expect that he would be able to ascend the steps with but a pair of old people, a young woman, and one weak leg to shoulder his weight.

Abruptly he gagged on the broth and spat it out, shaking his head in apology. Then he sunk into the pillow, his eyes closed against the pain, the indignity, the shame.

Yes, he was alive.

But only just.

“He’s a jackal,” Jubilee told her Aunt Libby in the kitchen. The soldier was in a fitful sleep again on the parlor floor.

“You’ve never even seen a jackal,” her aunt said, focused on the papers before her with the notes she kept for the quartermasters who descended upon the mill. Jubilee knew her aunt was paid—when she was paid—with Confederate bluebacks, money that Libby said was best used as kindling to start a fire. That was its value. But it was the currency that was used in Berryville, and it was better than giving the flour away, though Jubilee knew her aunt had been miffed by how little even the army now paid her.

“No,” Jubilee admitted. “I ain’t ever seen a jackal. But I still know you can’t trust ’em.” She grinned in a way that her father used to call demonic, and because he laughed approvingly when he said it, she did it often, widening her eyes for effect.

“And what has this Federal done to earn your distrust?”

“That’s like askin’ what’s a jackal done to earn your distrust!” She understood on some level the circular illogic to what she was saying, but she knew both that there was truth to her argument, and, more importantly, that she was entertaining her aunt. And she liked that. “It’s in their nature, Aunt Libby. Jackals are just born bad. Criminal. Like that man in the parlor.”

“Born bad: because he’s from the North?”

“He’s on our land. He don’t have business in Virginia, ’cept burnin’ fields and killin’ our boys.” When the words were out there, she feared she had crossed a line, moving from levity to the realities of war. But her aunt was too preoccupied to feel an emotional twinge.

“Your uncle: did he have business in Pennsylvania?” she asked, speaking like a schoolteacher.

“The thing about a jackal is this: you can’t turn your back on one. Always keep eye contact.”

“Where did you hear such nonsense?”

The honest answer would have been nowhere. But whenever she said something outrageous, she’d learned to say that her mother had told her, because her mother had died tragically, and so no one questioned her—even if, often enough, they knew she was lying. She had milked her mother’s death too many times to count, and she believed this was her due. “My mama,” answered Jubilee. The word mama, when she uttered it, always elicited a small pang.

But her aunt, upon hearing the word, finally looked at her, just as Jubilee expected she would. The woman raised a single eyebrow, her left, something Jubilee herself could not do. (It tormented her that she couldn’t.) “Your mother knew a great many things and I loved her.”

“But…”

“But, like me, she was no expert on jackals.”

“Any wild animal, then.”

“I don’t think the man—”

“Ol’ Billy Yank.”

“Could hurt a kitten right now.”

“I’ll watch him.”

“You do that,” her aunt said. Then she asked, “Is my room ready for him?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And is your room ready for me?”

Jubilee knew it was not. First she had lost her home, when she was forced to come live here after her mother had died. The bedroom there that she treasured. Oh, if her daddy survived the war, she’d get it back. But, for now, it was gone. And now she was about to lose half her bed. Her privacy. Nevertheless, she did what she was told and went upstairs. She made the bed for the jackal, and started to move her aunt’s clothing and perfume and jewels from the woman’s room to hers. But then she stopped. Her aunt’s things were sitting in piles in the hallway. There they were, the corsets and cloaks, the crinolines and caps, the camisoles and cotton stockings and dresses and gloves and boots and shoes. She had not yet made room for any of it in her own small dresser.

Because it was an impossible task. Her aunt had a massive armoire and a wall with a row of pegs. Her aunt had a dresser with six drawers. Her own dresser had but three.

Which was when an idea came to her, and she raced back downstairs to the kitchen.

“Aunt Libby?”

“Yes?”

“We’re movin’ the jackal into your room ’cause nobody would dare look for him in there.”

“Correct.”

“Well, he stinks. They’ll smell him in Berryville. You can’t hide stink.”

“We’ll clean him up. Joseph will. I assure you, as that soldier is now, he would be most unwelcome upstairs.”

“Anyway, suppose Mosby’s people do come here and search the house. Search my room. If they see all your clothes there, they’ll know something’s wrong. And there ain’t room in my dresser for all you got. You got—”

“You’re right,” her aunt said. “You’re absolutely right. Move only my jewelry into your room.”

Jubilee stood up a little straighter. This was a thrilling victory. Not only would she preserve a modicum of her life as she knew it—her things, few as they were, would remain sacrosanct—but clearly her aunt hadn’t completely lost her mind. She knew not to leave this Federal jackal alone with her garnet pin and pearls and gold ring.