Chapter 16
16
They moved briskly through the field, toward the woods that sloped down to the river. Weybridge had mastered the crutches quickly, even on the left side where he had but two fingers and a thumb for the handpiece. The empty pants leg, tied off, bounced along with him. Often Libby suggested they slow down, but he had always walked fast. Besides, who wanted to meander when the air was warm but not humid (for a change) and the last of the apples were waiting?
“They’d be long gone if anyone knew about them,” Libby was saying about the apples. “But no one does. A couple trees that grew far from the orchard. My hope is there are enough for pies. I want to make four. Maybe five.”
“Is that your way of telling me that we don’t eat what we pick?”
“Oh, we’ll eat a few. I’m quite sure of that.”
As if he were riding a horse, his eyes were soft, scanning the earth before him so he could see any stones or holes in the ground that might trip him. He knew the woods would be more difficult, but he assured Libby that he wanted to try. You like apples that much? she had asked, and he had answered that he liked the idea of trying to expand his world beyond the yard around the house and the mill that much. This was only his fourth day with the crutches.
“Why so many pies?” he asked.
“Because you’re gaunt.”
“Fair enough.”
“One will be for Jeremiah. I know Joseph is worried about the man, and this is just another small way to buy his silence,” she said, and then she pointed at a copse of evergreen beyond a patch of wildflowers—goldenrod, aster, and a few gangly sunflowers—waffling in the slight breeze. “There’s the path,” she said, pointing. “It’s only steep near the river, and we won’t be going that far.”
“I’m unstoppable with these. You have no idea how good it feels to be moving again.”
“We’re picking the apples and then we’re going home. You’re ready to walk, not run. You don’t want to reopen the wounds.”
“No. I don’t.” And, though he detested the idea of slowing their pace, he did. When they reached the wildflowers, she paused, and so he rested a moment, too. He felt the pressure under his arms. He wiped at his brow, wondering if he was doing too much too soon. He looked back at the house and the mill, small now, and his year as an artillerist in Washington came back to him: he estimated instantly that the buildings were four hundred yards distant.
“When I was growing up in Charlottesville, my mother had a flower garden,” she said. “I always thought I’d plant one by the house. By the front walk.”
“You will,” he said.
“Who has that kind of time? This is the first day this fall I’ve gone anywhere near these trees or this part of the river.”
“The last time I was at the Opequon, I wound up head over heels with a tourniquet on my leg.”
“Thank God, for that—the tourniquet.”
“You ever think of going back to Charlottesville? Wait out the war a little further south?”
“My father’s people would like that. But I live here now. My father’s dead, my mother’s dead. This is my home.”
When they entered the woods, he paused. Before them were tree roots and buckthorn and stones the size of skulls. One of his crutches sank inches through wet dirt and, suddenly, he was unsteady on his feet. His foot. And then Libby was taking him by his arm, holding on tight, her small fingers a reassuring vise on the muscle there.
“You’ll be fine,” she told him.
He turned to her.
“It’s not far,” she added.
Yes, she had found him on the floor, his clothing plastered to his skin by his own urine and excrement, and seen the ruin of his body before and after Joseph had first cleaned him up. She had given him her bed, her husband’s clothes. They had sipped whiskey together in the small hours of the morning, alone in her bedroom. And yet this touch now felt almost too intimate to bear. It was exquisite, and he’d felt a warmth through the cotton of his shirt—no, this wasn’t his shirt, this too belonged to Peter Steadman—as potent, it seemed, as the sun.
And his confidence, bolstered by her touch, returned, even as his lone knee felt a little bit weak.
Weybridge was alone in Libby’s bedroom later that day when he heard the horses. Two. Maybe three. Downstairs, Sally was making the apple pies, not Libby, because that neighbor named Leverett Covington had sent his people over with a wagon load of wheat, and so Libby and Joseph had stopped whatever they were doing and gone to work. Here, Weybridge had learned, the mill came first.
He peered from the window, hiding behind the curtain like an actor surveying the crowd before the first act, standing now on but one of his crutches. There were two riders, both in butternut uniforms and wearing slouch hats against the sun, one with gold braid along the brim. Weybridge could see the bars on that soldier’s shoulders: he was a lieutenant and he had a private with him. Both men were younger than he was, perhaps even younger than Libby. As they were dismounting, Sally emerged from the front door to greet them.
“Your mistress here?” the lieutenant asked, looping the reins of his horse to the railing by the front steps.
“She’s at the mill, sir.”
“Mind if we come in?”
“Is something the matter?”
“I hope not.”
“I’m baking, sir.”
“I can smell it. Delicious. I’m going to guess a pie.”
“Yes. There were so many apples, I’m baking four.”
The private finished tying his horse to the railing. He stared up at the second floor, and Weybridge knew he had plastered himself against the wall just before he would have been spotted.
“So. Shall we come in?” the officer pressed.
“May I please get Mrs.Steadman? She wouldn’t want to be inhospitable.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“It’s no bother.”
It was clear that Sally could stall for only so long. His mind raced between ways he might defend himself and whether he should turn himself in. But the ramifications of shouting down to the rebels that he was here and would work his way down the stairs would endanger everyone—not just him. Unfortunately, his weapons in this bedroom consisted of his crutches and a water pitcher. Not much against two rebels with pistols.
“I should get her,” Sally was saying. “It’ll just take a minute.”
Sally had no intention of giving him up, which would only make whatever punishment she faced worse. He had no good options, but came to the conclusion that his only chance—the best thing he could do for the people who had saved his life—was fight. The soldiers would start up the stairs looking for him, and he’d be waiting around the corner at the top. If he could push one into the other and send them both spiraling backward down the steps, he or Sally might be able to retrieve one of their guns while they were injured or stunned. If they had drawn their pistols, he might even be able to grab one at the top of the stairs.
And then…what?
Kill them?
Yes. Of course.
He couldn’t fathom what these kind people would think of him killing in cold blood—in their home, not the infernos of Cold Harbor and Spotsylvania, or even a few miles from here at one of the brawls on the Opequon—but this was the choice he was making. He was just starting toward the bedroom door and the top of the staircase when he heard Libby calling to the men, as she marched briskly up from the mill.
“Hello!” she yelled cheerfully.
The men turned and removed their hats in unison.
“Would you gentlemen like some water? Water is about what I have, but Sally sweetens it with mint. We still have some mint.”
“You’re Mrs.Steadman?”
“I am, yes. But, please, call me Libby.”
“Lieutenant Darcy Sears, ma’am,” he said. He didn’t introduce the private with him. “We don’t need anything. But thank you.”
“What can I do for you? Are you with the quartermaster?”
“No. I’ll be straight. We’ve heard talk there’s a Union captain ’round here. Was left down the road at the house of someone named Maude Bingham. Someone says you might have brought him here.”
“Well, wouldn’t that cause a ruckus?”
“At the very least.”
She laughed. “My husband is Peter Steadman, Second Virginia. Captured at Gettysburg. I was just at the mill working to grind more flour for our army. Why in the world would I bring a Yankee here?”
“You tell me.”
“The only person in this world I hate more than Abe Lincoln is Ulysses Grant.”
“Then you won’t care if we search the house?”
“Of course not.”
“And the mill?”
“You can search the house, the mill, the smokehouse, the corncrib. Go search Joseph and Sally’s place, look inside the servants’ quarters. Scour the property, Lieutenant, have at it.”
“And the barn?”
“Yes. Of course.”
The lieutenant ordered the other soldier to start with the mill and then go the barn. He himself would search the house.
“Come with me,” Libby was saying. “I can give you a tour.”
“Thank you,” he said, and then Weybridge saw the private striding off toward the mill and the two women and the lieutenant entering the front door. Weybridge knew that he had had a piece of unexpected good fortune: Sears had sent his man to the mill to look for him. He’d divided his little army in half.
And so Weybridge changed his plan. Silently he shut the door to the bedroom. When Libby opened it and Sears walked in, Weybridge would be ready.
The voices came and went like waves. One moment he heard them clearly, and then their conversation became the distant burble he might have perceived while submerged beneath the skin of a pond. The house wasn’t large, but it was big enough: it took time to traverse the four rooms downstairs, opening cabinets and inspecting the pantry.
In the meantime, his plan grew firm. He was standing on but one crutch, his back to the wall behind the door, with the porcelain water pitcher in his hand. The biggest problem was that he had to use his left hand to grip the pitcher, so his right could hold the crutch that had replaced his missing leg—which, in turn, meant that he was grasping his weapon with but a thumb and two fingers. Whatever blow he landed with the pitcher would be feeble. (Once, he’d regularly held a sword that weighed not much more than this pitcher. He knew other men who carried heavier ones they nicknamed “wrist breakers” because of their heft, but Weybridge had never seen the point. A sword for him was more like a flag than a weapon: it was a way of showing his men where he was.)
But, perhaps, the pitcher would weigh just enough. He only had to stun the lieutenant enough to grab the pistol. Surprise was on his side, and if you’re going to attack, there was no better ally.
Libby would notice the door was shut but, very likely, intuit he was awake. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like for her to witness the violence that loomed: she was a formidable woman, that was clear, but he was confident that she’d never witnessed a brawl or seen a man killed.
“How many rooms you have upstairs?” the lieutenant was asking, and he heard their feet on the stairs.
“We have three.”
“This place always been in the Steadman family?”
“Yes. It was my husband’s father who built it.”
“You from around here?”
“Charlottesville,” she answered. “This is where my niece sleeps. It’s her bedroom.”
“So, it’s just you and her and the two slaves.”
“They were slaves. My husband freed them.”
“How come they didn’t run off with the others?”
“Ask them. Sally’s right downstairs in the kitchen. I suppose it’s mostly because they’re older. Don’t we all get a little set in our ways when we get to be that age? And the others didn’t run off. That implies they’re runaways.”
Weybridge heard his heart in his head as he listened, a sensation he’d experienced before in the calm that existed between cannonade and charge.
“And this is the sewing room?”
“And storage. But, as you can see, we’re not hiding a Union captain.”
He heard what sounded like a table being moved.
“May I open that trunk?”
“Of course.” Then: “See? No sign of a Federal hiding with my old fabrics.”
“That your bedroom?”
“It is. And I will open the door so you can see inside and peer all you want. But only from the doorway.”
“Mrs.Steadman, that—”
“That will do. That will have to do. We have not sunk so low that you are entering a married woman’s bedroom to leer while her husband is in a bluebelly prison camp. You are an officer and I am married to an officer, and I trust you will stand in the doorway and behave like a gentleman.”
And then the door was swinging open, not enough that it hit him, but close, and he raised the pitcher aloft, prepared to strike the rebel in the head and then, as likely as not, collapse upon him and fight for his gun.
But the lieutenant did not enter the room. Weybridge held his breath, waiting, waiting…
And then he heard the sound of both Libby and the soldier retreating.
“Satisfied?” she was asking.
“I’m satisfied he isn’t in the house. If Private Sanderson doesn’t find him in the mill or smokehouse or any of the outbuildings, I’ll be even more comfortable tipping my hat and leaving you be.”
“Who told you this nonsense that I have a Yankee here?” Libby asked, as they started back down the stairs. He exhaled and lowered the pitcher. But he didn’t move. He didn’t dare. He wouldn’t move until the lieutenant was back outside.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me,” said Libby. “I want to know who is defaming my character.”
“It wasn’t like that. Just a…a rumor,” he told her, and now they were downstairs and the front door was swinging open, and the private was calling from the smokehouse that there was no sign of the Yankee there or in the gristmill, and he was going to search the slave quarters now. The lieutenant said he would join him.
“Would you mind if I returned to the mill?” Libby asked.
“No, ma’am. Thank you for feeding the army.”
“Of course. And if I see a Yankee captain, I’ll be sure and let you know,” she said, and Weybridge found himself smiling at the faint hint of derision in her tone. But there was also the nagging concern that someone was sharing more than they should.