The Jackal’s Mistress

Chapter 8

8

Libby stood in the doorway, a candle in a tin holder in her hand, and stared at the man in her bed. The stretcher had made easy work of carting Weybridge up the stairs hours ago. Once more it was quiet in Winchester, the fighting done for the day. Perhaps for a while. Somehow, the servants always knew first what had occurred at the battles in the Valley, and the servants who worked the Covington plantation had told Joseph and Sally that this was no mere skirmish, but it was over now. She hoped so. She hoped so for a great many reasons, but mostly because she still planned to head northeast tomorrow to Harper’s Ferry.

The Yankee was sound asleep. He’d eaten the catfish that Joseph had caught for dinner, but, again, he’d vomited some of it back up. Maybe most of it. A setback, for sure. Unless, perhaps, Vermonters just didn’t appreciate catfish. Maybe that was it. Perhaps Sally could hook some more while she and Joseph were gone tomorrow, and this time it would be agreeable to him. The truth was, they ate a lot of fish these days, because the armies—the North some years in this war, the South in others—commandeered almost any farm animal they saw with four legs. The only reason they still had two horses was because of the mill. Once they’d had four cows and a steer. Now they had just the one.

Thank God a mill needed running water, because it meant that they lived by a river and, thus, had access to fish.

She went to the bed and watched the coverlet rise and fall atop Weybridge’s chest. He was a handsome man cleaned up, even though his face had been hollowed by his ordeal. Once, she and Peter had slept beneath that light quilt in this very bed. The Yankee was wearing one of her husband’s nightshirts.

Peter was, she had told the physician, the reason why she was going to Harper’s Ferry: she would want someone to do for her husband exactly what she was doing for Weybridge. But there was more to it than that, an idea she had been turning around in her head almost since they had brought him here. Perhaps she could use this man as barter with the Yankees or, at least, as a sign of her goodwill. In return for saving him (or trying her best to save him), maybe they would use their boundless resources to find her husband and free him. Send him home to her.

Or, if nothing else, find out for her what had happened to him.

She put her free hand on Weybridge’s forehead, relieved to find it cool. She was about to turn away when he opened his eyes.

“Shhhhhh,” she murmured. “Go back to sleep.”

He looked up at her and then around the room. “I forgot…”

“Yes?”

“I forgot where I was.”

Abruptly he flinched and shut tight his eyes. When he reopened them, he apologized.

“For what?”

“For…wincing. I alarmed you.”

“Hardly.”

“I think I made a face my boy makes.”

“You have a son?”

“Two.”

“They must be young.”

“Five and three. You?”

“No children. Just my niece. My brother’s girl. You must be tired. Go back to sleep.”

He stared up at the top of the canopy, and she could tell he was trying to remember something. “Whatever it is, it’ll keep,” she whispered.

Then, after a deep breath that caused him to shudder on the exhalation, he whispered back, “Lord that lends me life…lend me a heart with thankfulness.”

“I don’t recognize that Bible verse.”

“Shakespeare.”

“Play or sonnet?”

“Play. And you don’t recall it because I butchered it. I’m missing words.”

“I haven’t read much Shakespeare. But some. You’re a teacher, aren’t you?”

“A professor.”

“Ah. I insulted you.”

He managed the smallest of smiles. “It takes more than that to insult me. And I had only been doing it a few years when I enlisted.”

“I’m glad I didn’t offend you. Now, you need rest.”

“This bed…”

She waited.

“With the Shakespeare. All I meant was…was I want to thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

He nodded and then shut his eyes and, almost instantly, once more was asleep.

It dawned on her, after she left him and closed the bedroom door, that among all the preparations that she and Joseph had made for tomorrow’s journey, they’d forgotten one important chore: asking the captain if he had any proof of his identity they could present at Harper’s Ferry. Credentials, of some sort. They’d neglected this task, and she considered whether to wake the soldier and ask him what he might suggest. But she recalled that his clothes were behind the house under an eave, in an empty washing tub. Tomorrow, Sally was planning to clean them. Libby wondered what she might find in his shirt or pants pocket. She decided to search them and only awaken the Vermonter if there was nothing in his uniform and she had to.

When she started toward the stairs, there was Jubilee beside her.

“I thought you were asleep,” Libby said, hoping the fact she was startled was not apparent.

“No.” The girl motioned at the door behind which the soldier was sleeping and asked, “He still breathin’?”

“He is.”

“You were just in there makin’ sure so you don’t get yourself killed going to Harper’s Ferry for nothing?”

“I won’t get killed.”

“You and Joseph. Going to leave Sally and me to clean up this mess all alone.”

She pressed her palm on Jubilee’s back and gently pushed her away from the door and down the corridor. Then she said, “It is a mess, you’re correct. But Joseph and I won’t be gone long. I’m not deserting you.”

“You better not.”

“Don’t worry. I mean that. Don’t worry.”

“It’s the jackal who best be scared if you two don’t come back.”

“Oh?”

“Anything happens to you two, and I am hoistin’ the black flag.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

The girl put her hands on her hips and rolled her eyes. “Pirate flag. When soldiers hoist it, it means they ain’t takin’ prisoners.”

She raised a single eyebrow. “Civilized armies always take prisoners, Jubilee. Civilized people —”

“There are no civilized people wearin’ blue uniforms in the Valley. We’ve all heard tell what they’ve burned. We know all the animals they’ve butchered. When they decide to stop here again? They’ll kill our cow, any chickens we got left, and take our horses. Both of them. If the mill wasn’t made of stone, they’d burn it down.”

Libby didn’t tell her niece that if the Yankees did return, they’d take axes to the sluices and pull off the wooden waterwheels to burn them, rendering the mill useless. It would be months—perhaps years—before it would function again.

“My hope is that they will be civilized because we are caring for one of their own. And he seems like a good man.”

“You bringin’ the pistol?”

“The Colt? Yes.”

The child nodded. “I wish you had more bullets.”

“I do, too,” she admitted.

“Of course, you and Joseph probably couldn’t hit the ground if you shot straight down. You’d both still miss.”

“Depends on how close the ground was. Also…”

Jubilee waited.

“Just showing someone I have it might be enough.”

“If you wave it, you better be ready to use it.”

“I know,” she agreed. And it would be her who would be carrying the weapon. There was no way she could allow Joseph to touch it. Even freedmen were not allowed to carry guns. He’d be hanged in a heartbeat if he were caught with the revolver. Then she said, “I have to get up earlier than usual in the morning. And I still have one task before sleep.”

“And that is?”

Libby sighed. “I’m going to go through the captain’s clothes. I want to see if there’s something—anything—I can bring to Harper’s Ferry. Proof, I suppose, that we have the man.”

“Well, that’s a dandy idea. Sure, bring something of his. But how you gonna prove he’s alive? How you gonna prove you didn’t pluck whatever you got from his cold, dead body?”

Her niece was correct. But Libby remained steadfast in her belief that she could not go to Harper’s Ferry empty-handed. “You should get into bed. I’ll be right up,” she said.

“I’ll go with you.”

“Fine.”

The girl didn’t follow her down the stairs, but ran ahead, all filly, energized even this late at night. She was outside and at the washing tub, empty of water, well before Libby, and already pulling out the pants.

“These smell like a swamp! Why don’t we just burn them? He used his trousers like they was a chamber pot! And there’s blood all over ’em!”

“Hand them to me,” said Libby. She placed the tin holder with the candle behind a beam to prevent a night breeze from extinguishing it.

“With pleasure,” the girl agreed, reaching next for the uniform coat. She brought it to her nose, too, and cringed at the stink. When Libby didn’t take it from her right away, she dropped it back in the tub.

Libby found nothing in the pants, and so she retrieved the coat. The first pocket was empty, but there were two pieces of paper in the second. One was an empty envelope addressed to him, but it had the stamp of the Union War Office on it. The other was a letter, the folds adhering as if glued. When she examined it more closely, she saw it was a letter from his wife, and the epoxy was dried blood. Including that envelope, she would be bringing two pieces of evidence. Not proof that he was alive, but proof that she had at the very least come across the man they’d deserted and left to die. Here it was—the reality that they left Weybridge behind—the ace in her hand. Aces, in fact. She would bank on the fact that she was doing for him what the bluebelly cowards would not.

“You got what you want?” her niece asked.

She nodded.

“You expectin’ anyone at the mill tomorrow?”

“No.”

“Good. But if someone does come, what do you want me to tell ’em?”

“Tell them Joseph and I are getting some part for the mill.”

“What part?”

She thought for a moment. “A damsel. It’s why we have the wagon.”

“What, you don’t want me to tell everyone you’re getting medicine for a Yankee?” the girl asked sarcastically.

“Jubilee, I am too tired for this right now. Don’t even joke like that. Am I clear?”

The girl glared at her, but nodded. It was rare for her niece to acquiesce so easily.

“Come on, then. Let’s go to bed.”

Libby carried both pieces of paper inside the house. Tomorrow, assuming she made it to Harper’s Ferry, these were the cards she would play.

It may have been an invasion of Weybridge’s privacy to read the letter, but Libby couldn’t help herself. Its proximity to her half of Jubilee’s bed was keeping her awake, and she needed to rest: tomorrow would be a long day and she knew she would need a cool head and a sharp mind. And so, once Jubilee was asleep, she took the letter into the corridor with a lantern and carefully unfolded the paper, sliding a fingernail through the dried blood to open it.

Parts of the letter were no longer legible, the ink badly smeared or obscured by sweat and blood. Still, the correspondence was chatty, and from it she learned that one of his two boys was, apparently, climbing trees. If Weybridge were still at the college, he would see that fewer students than even last year were returning this autumn: so many more had signed up. He and his wife, Emily, lived in Middlebury, and it was evident that both her family and his were affiliated with the college there, and the grandparents helped with the boys. She described a dinner at the school with tables of meat and cakes, and how one of the professors, a fellow who knew Charles Dickens personally, insisted that the writer was planning to return to America once the war was over. The letter did not mention hardship and was utterly lacking in complaint, other than that she missed her husband.

It all made Libby hate the woman.

Weybridge woke up, shivering. Squinting into the darkness, he recalled where he was. The comfort of the bed was disorienting. It was a fourposter with a canopy.

But the cold. The cold.

It was cold within him, not in the air.

And the relentless ache in his hand, the throbbing of his…stump.

Stump. He loathed the word.

The drapes in the window were open, and he saw white clouds passing against a silver-black sky like horses. Horses that raced. That ran. That galloped, that cantered, that bucked, that bolted, that trotted. That reared up.

Never again would he do any of that. Never would he climb a tree with his sons, one of whom had, in Weybridge’s absence, been given the nickname “Squirrel” because of his proficiency scaling the largest red maple in their yard.

He felt an obligation to live, though the grip of breath was weakening. He was just so tired of pain, of humiliation, of clinging to life by the filaments of a spider’s web. He had no idea what actually happened to a man with one leg, what future existed for him in a world where he would be so horrifically diminished. God, did a one-legged man with eight fingers even dance? There was Emily, a memory of her in a silk dress the color of lemons, cinched at the waist, the two of them twirling at a Christmas formal, in the days when they had had just the one boy. A baby, then. They had danced past midnight. There was more champagne than either of them had ever seen or, he supposed, would ever see again. He’d worn his finest black broadcloth suit, a matching waistcoat, and silver cufflinks. Neither of them believed that war was coming, though others at the gala did. Others were sure of it. South Carolina was insisting that it was going to secede now that Lincoln had been elected president.

He thought of the lamplighters in Middlebury, and the ones he had seen in Boston and New York, and how they would stand like rare birds on their toes or a single leg in the gloaming.

And yet after all he had endured since the battle at the Opequon—and because the days and nights had bled into one, the length of his travail since then was unknown to him—how could he give up now? After all this rebel woman and this Negro couple had done for him, how could he stop fighting? He would still be able to teach, and so there was that. He and Emily and the boys would not become a fiscal burden on their families.

If, of course, he lived. If he died here in Virginia, Emily and the boys would become entirely dependent on his parents and hers.

With his right hand, he pulled the comforter over his shoulders. Even a task this pedestrian sapped his strength. He was on his back, as he was always these days. He had grown tired of the position, rather than accustomed to it. Once upon a time, he had slept on his side. He couldn’t anymore. At least, not these nights—and days.

Was it a minister or a poet who had said that all of living was but saying goodbye? That we wept because of the utter transience of our lives? He felt that truth now in his bones, his soul, his ever-breaking heart.

In a few hours, the rebel woman would be going to Harper’s Ferry. She was risking her life for him. He turned his head into the pillow and was embarrassed to feel wetness against his cheek. He had been crying again in his sleep, the tears coming then because in slumber there were no sandbags to stem the flood.

There would be no meat or fish for this breakfast, but they certainly had flour, and so Sally baked biscuits. She also boiled carrots into mash, fried eggs, and steeped sassafras tea. There was just enough chicory for a little faux coffee for Joseph and Libby. There would be milk for Jubilee. It was a bigger meal than usual, but Sally wanted to be sure that she had filled her husband’s and Libby’s stomachs before they set off.

“You’ll bring the captain some breakfast when he wakes up?” Libby asked Sally.

“Yes, of course,” she answered.

“Have you heard anything more about the battle yesterday at Winchester?”

“A lot of the city’s a hospital again. But it’s quiet. ’Cept for the wounded, I suppose. Fighting is done for now.”

“For now,” Libby repeated. She was exasperated.

Jubilee, who had awakened with Libby, complaining that her aunt was a bed hog and monopolized the quilt, spooned some of the carrot mush into her mouth and observed, “That jackal has four human beings waiting on him hand and foot. It’s like he’s died and gone to heaven.”

“You don’t really believe that,” Sally said to her.

“I do.”

“The man’s in a lot of pain and, if he lives, is always going to be crippled,” the older woman corrected her. “Don’t sound like heaven to me.”

“Sally’s right,” Libby said. “If something happened to your father? You’d want people to care for him.” But the contents of the letter she was bringing to Harper’s Ferry had stayed with Libby, and she was, once more, feeling a twinge of resentment. She understood well Jubilee’s aggravation. Based on what the wife of the man upstairs had written to her husband, the woman wanted for little in Vermont. There was no brigand who had tried to rape her decomposing in the dirt on her property. She didn’t know hunger. Her hands hadn’t become callused from running a gristmill and her back didn’t ache from hoisting bags of flour, day after day. She wasn’t wondering if she had enough bullets for her pistol. She was surrounded by family: her parents and her husband’s parents all lived in the same village and the men worked at the same college. It was as if the war had barely touched their idyllic world.

Some moments, the fact that Libby had not heard from Peter in months weighed more heavily on her than others. Now it was an anchor.

For the first time, an idea came to her: perhaps she wasn’t going to Harper’s Ferry to retrieve the provisions she needed to save this man’s life or learn more about her husband’s whereabouts. Perhaps this wasn’t about doing what was right and because she would want a Yankee woman to do the same for her man. Perhaps she was hoping in the dark, subterranean part of her soul that when she reached the Union garrison, the Federals there would inform her that she wasn’t going back. They wouldn’t let her return, and, for her, this long war—and the fear and loneliness and deprivation and sweat and sadness and loss that defined it—would finally be over.