The Jackal’s Mistress

Chapter 7

7

Bumblebees, Weybridge thought.

There were bumblebees on the drapes in this room, the curtains billowing in a breeze.

Once, when the world had been awash in bullets—Welden Railroad, June23—Marsh had called them bumblebees.

Get your ass down, Captain, them bumblebees will kill ya!

They’d been cut to pieces. When it was over, a couple of soldiers had draped empty sacks and rags over the faces of the dead on the battlefield. It was, Weybridge supposed, an act of grace for the dead and an act of mercy for the living.

Now he stared up into the ceiling in the parlor. Soon, these people were going to bring him upstairs to the woman’s bedroom. He understood that he had to allow this—have her evicted from her bed—to keep them safe. Because his very presence was a bomb. He wanted to tell them how sorry he was that he was a burden, express his gratitude that they were trying to save him, but it was a task beyond his ken right now to share more than a few words before either exhaustion, pain, or despair stifled him. The Negro woman had been giving him teaspoons of a lavender tincture, but he had no idea if it was helping. Would the waves of white-hot agony that washed over his leg and caused shuddering paroxysms of pain be worse without it? He’d never know. Same with the lights-out spikes that shot up his left arm from the remnants of his fingers, leaving dancing white lights on the backs of his eyelids. He had aches and sores from lying on the floor, from his immobility, from the fact, he supposed, that his body was dying.

When he opened his eyes, he was no longer alone. There, kneeling beside him, was that man named Joseph. Weybridge supposed the fellow a slave, what the white woman might call—a euphemism—a house servant.

“You ate good,” the man said.

Weybridge blinked, recalling the tiny bits of chicken and the broth. More this morning. Some of that breakfast, he knew, did not stay down, one more embarrassment in a parade of humiliations.

“I built a stretcher,” the fellow continued. “I think we can all carry you upstairs. It’ll hurt less than what we did last night.”

He tried to smile, but there was one of those barbs up his thigh and he winced.

“Don’t talk,” said Joseph. “Before we put you in a lady’s bed, I’m goin’ to clean you up. Shampoo your hair. Make sure you don’t got lice. You won’t smell as nice as one of my Sally’s tinctures, but you’ll be clean. Cleaner, anyway. And I’m goin’ to shave you. That okay?”

He nodded. He watched Joseph scoot back with more agility than he expected from a man his age, and then push beside him a basin. “This is warm water. Was hot water. But still warm. You haven’t felt warm water on you in forever, have you?”

“No,” he said listlessly.

Joseph had a washcloth and a towel, and the water indeed felt heavenly on his face and his right hand. His good hand.

“I won’t get soap in your eyes, don’t worry,” the man reassured him. Weybridge allowed Joseph to treat him like a baby. He had no other choice. The few times Emily had washed his hair, it had been a prelude to sex: he’d washed hers, too. He couldn’t remember his mother washing his hair as a boy, and he wondered whether she had been as gentle as Joseph. He doubted it: she would have been scrubbing the scalp of an energetic child, not a half-dead soldier with but one leg and eight fingers.

The man laid his head on another towel on the comforter on the floor and, his own hands lathered in the soap, began to scrub Weybridge’s hair. As he worked, he was saying something about a doctor, but the words were but a stream that, like the water from the basin or on the washcloth, washed over Weybridge, the syllables the comforting babble of a brook.

Later, after Joseph had left him alone in the parlor, a word came to him: fraternization. Weybridge believed the penalty, if found guilty in a court-martial, was two years’ confinement. But he also knew that sometimes the soldiers were just shot. Or hanged.

Certainly, fraternization happened, especially during a long battle or siege. It was an acknowledged secret that Union men would meet up with rebels in no-man’s-land and exchange coffee for tobacco or newspapers. The rebs loved maple sugar, so Vermonters would sometimes write home asking their families to send them some, because a little maple sugar could be bartered for a lot of tobacco. Occasionally, the rival pickets lowered their guns and traded hardtack for Johnny cakes—neither was especially valued by most soldiers, but sometimes it was worth swapping barely edible crackers made of wheat for ones as likely to break a tooth made of corn—or share news of a nonmilitary nature. Horse racing. Music. Whether the wildlife around them in the dark included wolves and bears or merely foxes and squirrels.

He knew that no Union tribunal would accuse him of fraternizing with the enemy. It was this woman and her family he was worried about.

For the first time, he pondered where her husband was. A soldier was the likely answer. That girl he had seen: was she the woman’s younger sister? The child was too old and the woman too young for them to be mother and daughter. Who else knew he was here, in this house?

He grew alert when, outside, he heard wagons on the road and men, likely teamsters, driving the horses on. He waited for them to pass by the property, but they didn’t. They stopped within earshot, and his heart started to beat a little faster. These were probably Confederate soldiers. At least two, perhaps as many as four. Because it was clear there were two wagons. Among the voices were Joseph’s and the woman’s. Libby’s. The pair must have been nearby or even expecting these men.

He tried to listen more carefully, even sitting up on his right forearm, enduring spurs of pain throughout his body. He scanned the room for a weapon, perhaps a fireplace poker, though he knew he was deluding himself. He hadn’t the strength to swing a wrought-iron bar, and he was unable to stand. What would he do, trip his assailants?

His best hope, if the soldiers came inside, was that they ended it quickly for him with a bullet in the head.

But what would they do to the woman in whose parlor he slept last night and among whose comforters and pillows he was right now oozing pus? To the Negro man who had washed him and trimmed his beard? To that man’s wife? To the child—that girl?

The voices receded, but the teamsters weren’t leaving. At least not yet. He heard the occasional thud of what, in his befuddled mind, sounded like corpses being tossed into the back of a wagon. But it couldn’t be that. There hadn’t been a skirmish here. At least, he didn’t believe so. But time remained a mystery he could no longer parse. He’d been confident only moments ago that he’d been here only one night, but now he was no longer sure even of that.

And then he heard the woman’s voice and one of the men’s, and his fear receded. They were discussing, of all things, flour and payment. It was civilized: she knew these soldiers, and those thumps he had heard were sacks of flour. There must have been a gristmill near this house, and the woman must have been helping to manage it.

Well.

This was the breadbasket of the Confederacy. It seemed that the teamsters had been sent by an army quartermaster. The idea of entering the house hadn’t even occurred to them.

He was surprised that Libby was running the mill, but not dramatically so. Yes, she was young, but she was clearly tenacious and resourceful. After all, he was alive today at least in part thanks to her. Still, the reality was not lost on him that the woman who was saving his life also fed the very same people who had shot off his leg and a chunk of his left hand.

In any other war, this would have been absurd.

But in this conflict?

It almost made sense.

He lay down again and grimaced against the relentless ache where fingers once met his palm and where his thigh once met a knee.

When he awoke, it was still daylight, but the sun was lower. His eyes moved from the window and the drapes, and then he saw her: the girl. She was sitting in the easy chair, using crewel to embroider a handkerchief.

“I didn’t know jackals spent so much time sleepin’. Lazy beasts you are,” she said, not gazing up from her work but aware he had opened his eyes.

“So far today, I have moved everything my aunt owns out of her bedroom and then moved it all right back into her bedroom. Yes, back. I have gotten my room ready for her, because she’s goin’ to move in with me. I weeded around the last of them turnips and carrots we got in the garden—the ones we get to keep, not sell for almost nothing to the army or give for free to them Mosby men when they come by to torment us—and made seven trips with the yoke to the well. Seven. I got us our eggs. I fed the chickens and the horses and the cow. I—”

“You milk the cow?” he asked, his voice guttural and soft.

“She don’t milk herself!”

“Of course.”

“This is the first time I have sat down almost all day. And you, Mr.Jackal? You just sleep and sleep and sleep. And when you ain’t sleepin’, you’re getting’ all prettied up by Joseph—who has much more important things to do—and still, you are just stainin’ that good comforter with all your pus and blood.”

“I’ll try to bleed less.” Her eyes were even rounder than his older boy’s. They were great brown and black and white globes that lived to express indignation and ire. She was a wealth of protests and gripes, and he realized that despite the fact she was trying to shame him (and succeeding), he was enjoying her monologues. He liked, to use one of his wife’s favorite words, her sass.

“And who do you think emptied your slop jar?” she asked him.

“I’m…sorry,” he murmured, mortified. He barely remembered using it.

“My aunt one time and me two times. That’s who! And you have the trots, Jackal, the worst trots I ever seen. You should just be livin’ outside in the privy.”

The degradations of dying. What was that expression for men laid up with diarrhea or dysentery? They don’t have the guts to fight.

But now he knew the girl’s relationship to the woman, though it only suggested even more questions, the foremost one being this: Where were her own parents? What had happened to them in the cauldron of war?

“Where is your aunt now?” he asked.

“She ain’t here. But don’t get any ideas, Jackal. I can take care of myself.”

He felt the tremors of a grin. Yes, it was evident that she could. He didn’t think there was deep malevolence in the girl’s name for him: after all, she’d been sitting here with him, likely because one of the grown-ups had told her to watch him and let them know if he took a turn for the worse. Now that he was awake, he was, it seemed, her entertainment.

“She and Joseph are fetchin’ the doctor. Doc Norton. They’re hopin’ he’s not too drunk to help you, but I told them he’s probably ’bout as sober as you need to keep a jackal alive. Besides, who’s got whiskey? We don’t. He don’t. At least not much. Which is why what they’re doin’ shows neither my aunt nor Joseph got any horse sense left. None. Joseph’s big idea? Get so much whiskey and so much medicine from your jackal’s nest at Harper’s Ferry that they can bribe Doc Norton to keep you alive and keep his mouth shut that you’re here. And Aunt Libby is goin’ along with it!”

Geography and distance had grown blurry in the last few days. But the Union garrison and Sanitary Commission at Harper’s Ferry were at least twenty miles distant. Maybe thirty. Land controlled either by Jubal Early or John Mosby. Even if the turnpike weren’t scarred by battle and rains and the endless movement of armies, it would take at least four or five hours to get there. They’d have to hope their luck prevented marauders from spotting them or pickets from shooting them. The journey would be madness even if they set out at dawn. To leave in the afternoon and make most of the trip there and back after dark? They wouldn’t stand a chance.

And, even if they made it, why in the world would the Union soldiers give a Confederate woman whiskey and medicine, and send her back across the lines? They wouldn’t. They’d suppose it was for wounded rebels.

He took a deep breath, gathering himself, and managed to ask, “They’re not going there now, are they?”

“What, don’t jackals have ears? ’Course not. I told you, ’cept it seems you don’t pay attention, they’re gettin’ Doc Norton. He lives in the village, not even a mile past the Covingtons’.”

He had no idea who the Covingtons were, but he didn’t imagine he was supposed to. The girl was content to talk.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Jubilee.”

“I like that name. Leviticus. Coleridge.”

“I ain’t met them.”

“You will,” he said. “My name is Jonathan. But you can call me Jackal.”

“I plan to.”

“How many of you live here?”

She shook her head. “That is a military secret. I ain’t no spy who’s goin’ to tell you something like that.” Then she put down her crewel work and scooted over to him, sitting back on her heels. She stared at him. “I must admit, I thought you was whipped this morning. But you ain’t, are you, Jackal?”

He took this in: she thought he was going to live.

Or, at least, he had a chance.

And this gave him more comfort than he might have expected a few minutes ago.

Did he doze after the girl had left? He might have, he thought, but if he had, it had been brief. He heard in the distance the sound of cannons, and he grew alert. The shelling wasn’t why he had woken up: it wasn’t that close. But he recognized the sounds, and it was close enough. And it was considerably more than a skirmish.

His mind went first to his men, to friends like Eustis Marsh, the lieutenant who had put the tourniquet on his thigh. Were they there? It was possible, and the idea that the 11th Vermont was involved caused him to fret. So many of those boys had been safely in the forts around Washington just that spring, and now they were, once more, in the raging crucible of battle, a world of chaos and smoke and, he knew firsthand, anarchic slaughter and pain.

And he thought of the woman who had brought him here, now retrieving, on his behalf, a doctor.

“Canister?” the doctor asked, smelling the wound on his leg and then probing it with his fingers.

“I think so,” Weybridge answered, flinching at the touch. Occasionally, he—all of them—could still hear cannonade.

“Very little foreign matter in what’s left. No uniform. No lead. That’s good. Probably why the infection was less ferocious. I see they used silk to sew up the blood vessels and the flap. We often have to use horsehair,” he muttered. “Their work was professional. Nice sutures. Did they drop morphine where they sawed—or on the wound on your hand?”

“I don’t know.”

“The fact you don’t know means they probably did.”

He put a stethoscope against Weybridge’s chest and listened. Told him to breathe. Then the physician held his remaining foot in both hands, murmured that it felt healthy and the circulation seemed good, and checked his pulse. When he was through, he took a step back and looked at Libby. “You know you are aiding and abetting the enemy,” he said, irked, his tone clipped. “The Yankees right now are fighting just outside of Winchester.”

“I couldn’t very well leave him to die,” Libby responded.

“You could. You chose not to. Soldiers die by the hundreds every day. Some days, perhaps this day, by the thousands. We’ve all lost—”

“There was no need for this one to die, too.”

“Need? Our lives, because of men like him”—and he pointed at Weybridge, his eyes narrowing, his face curdling—“are nothing but need.”

Weybridge could tell that Doc Norton was older than his father back in Vermont. He was a slender, still hard-charging man with a great shock of white hair, a manicured Dutch beard also the color of snow, and a spider’s web of thin red lines spreading from the bridge of his nose across his face. His eyes were bloodshot, his eyelids loose like empty sacks. Weybridge, recalling what Jubilee had told him, was surprised that he didn’t smell whiskey on the physician when the man was examining him. He seemed sober and competent, if rather aggressive with his touch: he had no inclination toward gentleness when he explored the effectiveness of Confederate artillery on Weybridge’s hand or the work of the Union surgeons on the remains of his leg.

The fellow leaned against the wall beside the window, the sun almost behind the trees, speaking to the other three adults as if Weybridge weren’t present. “The only reasonable course is to tell the army you have him. Let an army doctor tend to him. If, by some miracle, he lives, then they can send him to a camp with other Yankee prisoners.”

“I’m not doing that. He’s better today than yesterday. Already he’s improving,” Libby countered.

“Because you got food and water into him. Maybe his improvement will continue. And maybe it won’t.”

“You said there was good pus.”

“Laudable pus, Libby. The term is laudable pus.”

“Fine.”

“He still needs more than I can do for him with what I have. If I had any common sense left, any at all, I’d turn you all in.”

“But you won’t.”

“Don’t be so sure. It would be for your own good, because if I don’t? He’s either going to die or someone will find out you’re harboring him. The man’s a Lincoln hireling.”

“We have a plan.”

“For what? To get Joseph and Sally hanged? To get yourself sent to prison?”

Weybridge saw Sally flinch when she heard that. “The doctor’s right,” he said, his voice a croak, as he tried to project. It was hard to fathom how once he could command his men above the din of battle and, before that, be heard in even the most cavernous lecture halls at the college. “Turn me in.”

The physician looked down at him. “Well, the Yankee is wiser than the people who saved him.”

“No one’s going to turn you in,” Libby said.

Weybridge shook his head. They must.

“Doc Norton,” said Joseph, “you heal people. It’s what you do. You—”

“I can’t heal him. I don’t have the right medicines.”

“We can get them.”

“How? How in the world would you be able to round up the very things that I and the Confederate Army lack?”

“Harper’s Ferry.”

The physician looked back and forth between Joseph and Libby. “Suddenly, Libby, you’re a Union sympathizer?”

“Of course not.”

“You think you’re going waltz into the Union stockade and leave with whatever you like? And how would you even get there with—”

“Winchester’s west of us. Harper’s Ferry is northeast. Besides, the bluebellies have been fighting in and around Winchester since, it seems, this war began. This battle is just one more round in a boxing match that’s been going on practically since Peter left.”

“You’re set on this, aren’t you?”

“You know I am. And you know I’m not being unreasonable.”

“Actually, Libby, I don’t know that. I know only that you’ve been headstrong since you came here.”

“I’ve been headstrong since I was born, Jeremiah. It’s why that mill still runs and I can help feed our boys.”

He shook his head ruefully.

“This man is a Northern captain,” she said. “One of theirs, I know. But that also means, yes, at Harper’s Ferry we’d try and get you the things you need. Whatever you ask for. We would make it”—and she paused ever so briefly—“worth your while.”

“You insult me. I’m a doctor. If I could save him, I would,” he said, but his voice betrayed him. He had heard something in Libby’s entreaty that intrigued him.

“I didn’t mean to suggest you wouldn’t. But think of all the good you could do right here if you had whiskey for your patients. If you had the right medicines.”

Weybridge was impressed by her skills as a negotiator but still thought she shouldn’t take risks on his account. “Libby, don’t,” he told her. But it was as if he weren’t there.

“I’d need more than whiskey,” Norton said.

“Of course. Tell us what you need, and—”

“They killed my two boys,” he reminded her, cutting her off.

“I know, Jeremiah,” Libby murmured. “I know. I’m asking a lot. But not everyone has to die. And, someday, this war will end.”

“If Lincoln wins in November, then the war is lost,” the doctor said. “Who knows what the Federals will do to us after that.”

“I agree.”

“If you bring me whiskey—and other medicine—and I try to help this captain, you will need to vouch for me. You and this Yankee, if he’s still alive, both will. Speak to my character and what I risked to try and save his life.”

“Certainly.”

“Obviously, I hope Lincoln loses.”

“Obviously.”

He ran his fingers through the beard along his chin. “The surgeons who debrided the man’s wounds did a good job. There’s inflammation, of course, but no sign of putrefaction. I suppose there’s still a chance of pyemia.”

“Blood poisoning?”

“That’s right. But I don’t think that’s likely.”

“This all sounds very promising.”

“We’ll see.” He rolled his neck and glanced once more at the man on the floor. “I would need the following: Lint. Carbolic acid. Iodine. Morphine. Materials for decent splints. And, yes, whiskey. A good deal of whiskey,” he told her, tapping out on his fingers what he deemed essential. “Our own soldiers in the Valley aren’t getting most of those things. Some of the boys getting shot right now. Our own women and children don’t get them. So, add to the list potassium iodide and castor oil. You would do us all a great service if, somehow, you actually could retrieve those items from Harper’s Ferry.”

“I’m willing to try.”

“Maybe even bromine and chloroform. I’m not a surgeon, but if you were able to acquire some, our army could surely use it. I haven’t seen chloroform in these parts since Stonewall Jackson captured a supply train in Winchester, and that was a long, long time ago.”

“I can ask.”

“And quinine. Quinine, too.”

“Won’t they know a lot of that isn’t for their captain?”

“They might. They might not. Depends on who you’re talking to. The chloroform is the one to avoid if they have doubts. But if the infection goes beyond his hand and leg, he’ll die. So, things like carbolic acid and iodine and whiskey—plenty of whiskey—are critical.”

“We could leave before sunup tomorrow,” Joseph said. “Be back before day’s over.”

“If you’re lucky,” Norton reminded them. “If you’re not attacked on the way there. If the Yankees let you return. For all you know, if you even get there, you’ll be in the Union stockade by sunset. Maybe you’ll be fortunate enough to get the same room as John Brown before they moved him to Charles Town.”

“I understand the risks,” said Libby.

“And yet you still want to do this? Your husband—”

“My husband is the reason I’m doing this,” she snapped. “I’d want a Union wife to do the same thing for him. I’d expect it. This war hasn’t turned us all into animals. At least not yet.”

“Well. Tell the bluebellies not to stint on the bark juice. I will need plenty.”

“Of course, you will,” Libby agreed.

“One more thing,” the doctor said.

She waited.

“Get this man off the floor. And get him hidden.”

“We will,” Libby told him, nodding, pretending neither suggestion had crossed her or Joseph’s minds, or that Joseph hadn’t already constructed a stretcher to bring the patient up the stairs.