The Jackal’s Mistress

Chapter 17

17

“If it had been two of John Mosby’s men, I doubt they would have let a lady’s bedroom be. They’re not known for that sort of nicety,” Libby told Weybridge that evening, as dusk turned slowly to night. Nicety. Some of them, she knew well, were pigs.

A bat had been darting back and forth, harvesting mosquitoes and moths. Venus was high above the fields where once the Steadmans had grown corn. She’d carried a wooden rocker onto the front porch for Weybridge and sat down on the top step beside it. Jubilee was inside, cleaning up the kitchen while there was still a little light. Libby found that her shoulder was throbbing more than usual tonight, and couldn’t believe that at the age of twenty-four, she had the aches and pains of a grandmother. She felt the weariness coming on that lived inside her now like a vital organ.

“That water pitcher wasn’t much of an arsenal. I wish we had a gun. Even one,” he murmured.

She pulled her sweater more snugly around herself, aware of the hitch in her shoulder. Did she tell him? He had used the word arsenal. She and Joseph had amassed one.

“But,” he continued, “my God. The damage a Colt can do at close range? I hope you never have to see such a thing, Libby. There is nothing on this earth as violent as a cannon or a gun. I hope you never have to see—”

“I’ve seen your hand. I’ve seen your leg.”

“Fair enough. I hope you never have to experience that sort of bloodshed as it happens.”

He seemed to have no secrets from her. She had so many from him.

She and Joseph had some they hid from Sally and Jubilee.

Two men from Sally. Three from Jubilee.

There had been a point that afternoon, alone in the kitchen with Sally, when she’d almost told the other woman of the two dead bandits in the woods on the way to Harper’s Ferry. She’d wanted desperately to unburden herself after the property search and…confess. Tell someone what she had done. But she couldn’t because Joseph didn’t want his wife to know. And he was right. Neither Sally nor Jubilee could ever know—for their own good. For their own safety. It was bad enough that Sally was aware of the dead ranger on their land. Libby supposed it was possible that she would be taking the story of the men she had killed to her grave.

“I want to be able to protect myself,” he was insisting. “That’s a problem. But a bigger one is that I also want to be sure you can protect yourself.”

“I can.”

“But if I had a weapon, a gun, I—”

“I have a gun,” she said. She hadn’t planned on telling him. The words just came out. “Don’t ask me how or why, but, yes, I have one.”

He stared down at her.

“It’s a Colt,” she said. She didn’t mention that, in fact, she had five Colts and a carbine. “And I have bullets and powder.”

“Was it Peter’s?”

“It doesn’t matter whose it was.”

“Are you a good shot?”

“No. I’m not even sure I know how to load it.”

“What about Joseph?”

“A Negro? Not a chance. It’s against the law for him to have a gun.”

She looked at the tangle of dead leaves and vines that had given life to the tomatoes in the kitchen garden. It had all gone to weed now, the whole garden, some of the interlopers already knee high. She heard the chickens settling in for the night in their coop.

“Tomorrow, show me the gun,” he said. “I need to teach you how to load it.”

“Oh, my: the bluebelly houseguest expects me to hand him a pistol? I must look awfully gullible.”

“You don’t honestly feel that way.”

“No, of course not.”

“So, tomorrow I’ll give you your first lesson?”

“Fine. Thank you.”

“The idea there were two more soldiers here today worries me. The doctor, perhaps.”

“I know.”

“Is it possible that, by accident, Jubilee said too much?”

She scowled. “No. It’s not. That girl talks and talks, but she is too smart to have a slip like that.”

“Fair enough.”

“Her life is not easy. Like mine, it’s not the life she expected. Or, I suppose, yours.”

“No. But my life is much better than it was a few weeks ago. Thank you.”

“Mine, too,” she said, careful not to make eye contact with him.

Once more, the bat darted past them. She decided she would light the lantern and they would sit out here a little bit longer.

“You really think you can carry a pail of milk to the house?” Jubilee asked Weybridge the next morning, as he stood beside the cow on his crutches. The tip of one crutch was lost to the straw, dry and tinged with the scent of manure, as were the legs of the girl’s stool. Her hands moved with the rhythm of a pianist, and the streams of milk broke the liquid surface near the top of the pail like boys jumping from high cliffs into a lake. She’d clearly been at this a while and was almost done.

“It’s fifty yards,” he told her.

For a moment, her head fell forward in exhaustion, but quickly she rallied. Kindly she patted the animal’s haunches and climbed to her feet, the milking complete, and put the stool by the wall of the small barn, alongside the chains and ropes and horseshoes. Beside the yoke and a scythe and yet more buckets and pails. “Even if you can hold a bucket, which I doubt, you’ll spill most of it. And milk and flour and eggs is about all we got. And fish, which I don’t like. At least not very much.”

“No?”

She ignored his question and motioned at the cow. “And Flora here ain’t gonna give us another bucket of milk just ’cause you bounced most of this one onto the yard as you hobbled your way to the kitchen.”

She picked up the bucket and started to leave him alone in the barn. But then she stopped and turned back to him. “You hankerin’ to earn your keep? Okay, then. Walk Flora to the field, so I don’t have come back out here and do it. I think you can herd a cow. She ain’t no ignoramus. She’ll probably lead you.”

And then she stamped to the house, lugging the pail full of milk.

Weybridge was wary of the physician now. He suspected that Norton was the leak, though he wasn’t sure the doctor had done it on purpose. It was possible that the man had just been wallpapered—Weybridge knew how much whiskey Libby already had given him—and spoke without thinking. The doctor may not even have realized that he’d tipped someone off that a wounded Yankee was recuperating at Libby Steadman’s place. As Norton dabbed carbolic acid on the remains of his right leg, he muttered, “You won’t win any running races, Captain, but someday you’ll walk without those.” He pointed at the crutches, which were leaning against the wall beside Libby’s bed.

“A peg leg,” he said to the physician.

“Better than that. Last year we started giving our boys legs with knee joints. Ankle joints. I’ve seen some in action.”

Weybridge took this in. He’d seen plenty of men with false legs, but he’d never studied one.

“Still mostly wood?”

“No, iron,” Norton said sarcastically. “Of course, they’re still mostly wood.” He pulled Weybridge’s pant leg back over the stump, and tied off the bottom section with twine. “You’re a lucky man,” he said after he was finished.

“I am,” he agreed. He was crippled—but alive.

“I think this is the last time I’ll bother with this,” he added, putting a stopper on the bottle of carbolic acid, and then placed the bottle in his bag.

“It hasn’t bled in days. My hand, too.”

“You have a strong constitution, Captain. You did more to save yourself than I did. Libby did more than I did. Getting you off the floor and getting some food and water into you? Best medicine we have. You in pain?”

“Not much. Not much at all, these days.”

“Good.”

“One thing,” said Weybridge.

The doctor didn’t look up. He continued packing his satchel.

“We had some company the other day,” Weybridge told him.

“Very nice. Libby needs more company than a couple of freed Negroes, a girl, and a Yankee who should be in a prison camp. She’s a young woman whose husband—”

“Not that kind of company,” Weybridge said, cutting him off. Now he had Norton’s full attention.

“Then what kind?”

“Two soldiers.”

“Stragglers? Deserters?” he asked. “What did they want?” He was staring back at Weybridge. He was closer to sober than drunk this afternoon, and now seemed to be on alert. Weybridge couldn’t decide yet whether the man was surprised and worried about Libby or a very good actor.

Still, even if he was startled by the news, that didn’t mean he should be exonerated. Not yet. Maybe he’d been inebriated when he told someone of Weybridge’s presence and honestly didn’t remember.

“Me,” he replied. “They were looking for me. Obviously, they didn’t succeed. They didn’t find me.”

“Why did they think you might be here?”

“I have no idea. Do you?”

He stood up straight and regarded Weybridge with inimical weariness. “Don’t insult me. I’m a man of my word. I said I’d tell no one, and I haven’t. We have an arrangement, and I am abiding by it.”

“In that case, it seems I’m mistaken,” said Weybridge, though he didn’t suppose that he was. Still, he could only make his relationship with the doctor even more prickly than it already was by pressing him. “I’m sorry. I had to ask. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

Norton shook his head ruefully, as if disappointed in a child. “Once a Yankee, always a Yankee. You are a people without honor,” he said. Then he took his bag and started down the stairs without saying goodbye. When Weybridge went to the window to watch him leave, he saw that the healer was bringing with him another jug of whiskey.

“You’re not going to load it on the fly,” he told Libby. “At least you don’t want to. You’re going to load it ahead of time.”

They were alone at the kitchen table, the Colt and the powder flask on the pumpkin pine surface between them. He was grateful to be able to focus on the bullets and the gun, on the task at hand. He found himself losing himself a little bit each time he looked into her eyes.

“I’ve never met one of Mosby’s rangers face-to-face, but I’ve heard they often ride with two Colts, so they have twelve shots ready to fire,” he added.

“Two guns,” she murmured, and he couldn’t decide from her tone whether she found this impressive or excessive.

“Yes.”

“Even the soldiers who came looking for you didn’t have two guns in their holsters.”

“I’m not surprised.” At Cold Harbor, his men’s advance had been stopped cold by withering fire from behind Lee’s breastworks. Pinned down, his men had dug trenches of their own, gathering up the muskets of the dead and using the corpses in their own makeshift earthworks. The wounded had passed their cartridge boxes to the men who could still shoot. The best marksmen would fire and then trade their empty musket for one that was already loaded.

“Your pistol has six chambers in the cylinder,” he said, opening the flask and tipping the black powder into one of the chambers. Then he dropped in a bullet. He could feel her watching him intently, and he recalled the pleasurable sensation of being at the front of a classroom. When he had done this twice, filling two of the chambers, he spun the cylinder and used the loading lever along the bottom of the barrel to press the round balls in tight against the powder.

“It doesn’t seem hard,” she said.

“It’s not. Boys can do it who don’t know their left foot from their right. Even the greenest of Sunday soldiers can manage a musket-loading drill.” He loaded two more bullets. When there were only a pair of empty chambers remaining, he handed her the Colt. “Here. You finish.”

When she had, he gazed at her. She was a fast learner and more dexterous than he was. Nevertheless, she handled the weapon with the prudence of most raw recruits, which meant none at all, and this earthiness was alluring in a way he hadn’t expected. “Now we go shoot something?” she asked, raising a single eyebrow mischievously.

“Are you serious?”

“Dead serious.”

“You really think that’s wise? I said I wanted to teach you how to load it. The noise—”

“My nearest neighbors are a mile and a half away.”

“Libby, we all heard the fighting in Winchester last month.”

“Those were cannons.”

“I know. Trust me, I know what a cannon sounds like.”

She put her hands on her hips. “There has been so much shooting around these parts the last few years, if anyone hears—and that’s a big if, Professor—I tend to believe they’ll steer clear. And what good is a loaded gun if I don’t know how to shoot it?”

He saw her point. “Sure,” he said. “Fine.”

“And we have the bullets.”

He had seen how much ammunition she had and hadn’t pressed her for the source—just as he hadn’t pressed her about where she had gotten this weapon. He reached for one of his crutches and rose, and then grabbed the second one. She scooted ahead of him to open the door, and they moved the lesson outside.

“We’ll empty the chamber, but only one time. Let’s not press our luck,” he said. “I think you have enough ammunition that we can waste six bullets.”

“Waste? It sounds like you are impugning my aim.”

“Oh, I’d never do that. Wrong word. I’ll rephrase: I think you have enough ammunition that we can use six bullets for target practice.”

“How far away should I set up the tins?” she asked. Her eagerness was childlike. She had rounded up two cans that once held condensed milk, and now nails.

He shook his head. “Let’s get a bigger target. Those are tiny.”

“So?”

“I appreciate your confidence, but how about we line up three or four of those barrel staves I saw by the corncrib?” He pointed. “We could jam them into the ground right over there.”

“I’d be aiming awful low.”

“That’s right. I spent a lot of the last year yelling at my men to aim low. After all, they’d been artillerymen until Grant decided he needed the Eleventh as infantry. We all have a tendency to shoot too high.”

“How far?”

“A good shot can hit something twenty yards away. Some even twenty-five. But less on a horse, of course.”

“So…”

“Let’s start at ten yards.”

“Ten?” The idea seemed to exasperate her.

“You’re not going to be shooting charging Yankees, Libby—much as you might want to. If you ever have to fire a gun, and I hope you never do, it will likely be at very close quarters.”

She gazed down at her shoes. It was as if he had inadvertently hit a nerve, and he assumed it was by forcing her to imagine shooting someone so near that she could see his countenance when she killed him.

“Are you all right?” he pressed.

She looked up. “Dandy. Just dandy.”

He held the gun out to her and showed her the notch in the hammer that served as the sight. “The sight is only going to be usable when the revolver is cocked,” he was saying, but she stopped him.

“Wait here,” she ordered. “Let me go get the staves. Then we’ll see what I’m capable of.”

He watched her squint, holding the Colt in both hands. The first shot landed nowhere near any of the three barrel staves, the ball falling in the field behind them. Before she could fire a second time, he lowered her arms.

“That was fun. Except for the waste of a good bullet,” she told him.

“It’s not fun if you’re aiming at a person,” he corrected her.

Her smile vanished instantly. “No,” she agreed. “Probably not.”

“Killing a person is—”

“I understand,” she said. She started to raise the gun again, and he stopped her.

“You didn’t aim too high, which was good. You were off to the left, I believe. So, the correction is—”

“I might like you more as a jackal than a professor, after all,” she told him, and started toward the middle barrel stave, stopping when she was within feet of it. There she raised the Colt and put a round hole through the wood. Then she took a pace back and fired again, once more hitting it and adding a second fissure.

“Libby,” he said, but she ignored him, retreating further, and sending another ball through the stave, this time from perhaps ten yards away.

He expected her to empty the cylinder, but she stopped. There were two bullets left and the smell of black powder filled the air like a smokehouse.

“Professor?” she said, the single word a question.

“Yes?” He wondered what chastisement awaited.

“You are, in fact, a fine teacher,” she told him. Then she spun and emptied the Colt, one ball flying beyond the staves, and one hitting that middle one, splintering it now into kindling. “And I am, for good or ill and probably for ill, a natural.”

He hobbled over to her. “You are,” he said.

She put her left hand atop his on the crutch and looked into the distance at a group of crows on the bare branches of a dead oak tree. “You said you hope I never have to use one of these.”

“I did. And I do.” He had the sense that she was about to tell him something important—to reveal another part of herself. He waited, the feel of her fingers on his causing his heart to race a little bit faster.

“Well,” she said instead, “me too. But right now, the future’s darker than the sky before a twister. And when the storm comes, which it will, I defy anyone to underestimate me.”

He started to assure her that he could not imagine how anyone could underestimate her when he heard Jubilee yelling from the road. Instantly Libby removed her hand from his, and then the girl was upon them.

“Did you mean to make me think U.S. Grant was attackin’, or was that just a happy accident?” Jubilee asked, her tone a mixture of enthusiasm and pique.

“Your aunt is a pretty fair shot…if the target is only a few feet away,” she told her niece.

“So, you got us some more bullets, after all. Where?”

Libby looked back and forth between Weybridge and the girl, and he could see how the woman was formulating an answer. It seemed the gun was not a surprise to Jubilee, but the idea that the family had enough ammunition to shoot it was.

“Mr.Covington had some,” she answered.

“I thought you came back empty-handed.”

“I did. The first time. But when he got some bullets and an extra powder flask, he sent it all over.”

“That old grouch finally did something decent? Well, good for him.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“Jackal here teachin’ you how to shoot?”

“He is.”

The girl turned to him. “Wanna teach me?”

Weybridge glanced at Libby, confident she was going to tell the child that she’d lost her mind. But, once more, she surprised him. “That’s a very good idea, Jubilee. Professor, are you game?”

“Do you have enough bullets and powder?” he asked carefully.

She nodded. “Tomorrow,” she said to the two of them. “Jubilee, after you’ve finished your morning chores.” She tucked the Colt into the belt of her dress.

“Why not right now?” the child asked.

“Because you’re going to muck the stalls and feed the chickens. And I’m going to help Sally with supper.” Then she started briskly toward the house, leaving him and the girl and the barrel staves at the edge of the field.