The Jackal’s Mistress

Chapter 23

23

Weybridge had always been outwardly calm before a fight, but inside he was a riot of anxiety. It was usually less about his own mortality (though always there was that) than it was his fear that his inexperience would cost some good boys their lives. The waiting was always the worst, but tonight, it seemed, they wouldn’t have to wait long.

No sooner had Libby extinguished the lantern and Joseph dashed through the puddles and great runnels of water at the end of the walkway to his home than Weybridge heard what might have been a nicker. A whinny that carried through the lashing rain and the window that, thank God, Libby had had the good sense to open. But he saw no horses; he saw nothing but the rain pelting the dooryard and the walkway and even the kitchen. It seemed Morgan, though a cavalryman, had learned the penchant for stealth made famous by Mosby’s Rangers and dismounted down the road. But surprise, Weybridge knew, was still on their side. Nevertheless, he began to see flaws in his plans. What if they approached Joseph and Sally’s home from the rear? What if right this moment they were stealing their way behind Libby’s house? What if they had caught Clark on his way back to the Covingtons’ and forced the man to confess all?

He glanced over at Libby but could not make out her countenance in the dark. He could barely make out her shape beside the front door.

And then, suddenly, they were upon them, and the battle was on. Libby sensed them first, before he did, and spun and fired, and so he whirled with her and shot, too, the salvos piercing because they were inside and echoing across the kitchen, and there was the grunt he’d heard before when a man was knocked back—or down—by a bullet. Without the sill it was hard to hold the carbine and so he dropped it and grabbed the Colt, but he couldn’t see precisely where to shoot; he knew only that they had come inside through the back, an idea he had pondered but a problem he’d failed to solve, and before he could fire again a bullet splintered part of the window frame by his head, a piece of wood dinging off his temple.

But he had seen the spark from the gun and shot toward it, firing twice, and yelling for Libby to get down. He rolled toward the kitchen table and was upending it, planning to use it for cover, but one of the intruders was a step ahead of him and the tabletop met resistance—human hands pushing it back—and so he shot around the side and this time it was not a grunt he heard, but the close-quarters howl of a man taking a round ball in what was, essentially, hand-to-hand combat. The rebel collapsed, not even trying to use his fingers to break his fall, and Libby fired over Weybridge’s head toward the doorway, but this time no one fired back.

For a long second the kitchen was silent but for the storm outside, and when the room was lit by another dagger of lightning, he saw Libby on her knees, holding a Colt, and two men, one likely dead and one who would be soon, but for now was pressing both hands hopelessly upon his stomach, as if his fingers could staunch the bleeding.

“Are you hurt?” he asked her, the room already black again.

“No,” she answered.

He was relieved and took in a deep breath through his nose. He couldn’t believe this was it, but perhaps it was. He fixed his eyes as best he could on the dying man, a husk in a shadow, and wondered if he could help him. If the attack was over, he supposed they’d try and save him, though it would be an effort likely to fail. He crawled over to him, but already the man’s hands were slipping away from his stomach and falling limply beside him. Weybridge reached him almost at the very moment he expired.

“Either of these men Henry Morgan?” he asked Libby.

“No.”

He fingered his hair beside where the wood dinged him, and felt blood. Because Morgan was not among the attackers, it was likely there were more men on the property.

“How many shots you fire?” he asked, worried that she had emptied—or almost emptied—the pistol.

But before she could answer, someone was kicking in the front door and he was unsure how many rebels were storming the room, but they were too close to Libby for him to risk a single shot in this dark or retrieve the carbine, and one was ordering him to drop the gun while at least two more were lifting Libby off the ground and ripping the Colt from her fingers.

Henry Morgan tossed Weybridge’s crutches into the corner and dragged Libby outside into the dooryard.

“Crawl to us like a goddamn darkie!” Morgan shouted at him, holding his pistol against the woman. “C’mon, Billy Yank, crawl like the goddamn slaves—animals, Billy Yank, animals—you love so goddamn much!”

And so, with no other choice, he did.

The South was, in theory, a culture that prided itself on old-world chivalry, and so Weybridge was surprised that Henry Morgan and the two surviving rangers had insisted that Libby sit beside him on the sodden ground by the walkway, her hands—like his—tied behind her back, as the cold rain pounded them and turned the dooryard to mud. Joseph had surrendered the moment Morgan brought Libby outside with that Colt pressed against her head and told him to come out, too.

Now, at gunpoint himself, Joseph was being forced by one of the rangers to show them the slave quarters, the barn, and the mill, because Morgan had the good sense to disbelieve Libby when she insisted that Sally and Jubilee had gone to a friend of Libby’s family in Charlottesville, precisely because she was hiding a Yankee and knew there might be repercussions.

As soon as they found Sally, Morgan told them calmly, they would hang her alongside her husband and the two of them. They’d hang them where both Sheridan’s men and any Southerners tired of the fighting—those ready to bow before Lincoln’s hirelings—surely would notice. Tomorrow morning when the sun came up, they’d be dangling like branches on weeping willows.

Weybridge had met men like Morgan before. On the surface, they were civilized. And, perhaps, without war they would have remained that way. But war gave them permission to be who they really were, men who were comfortable killing all the kindness and magic and beauty in the world, men whose souls were bleak and, therefore, dangerous.

Morgan squatted before him, his hat and his cloak keeping some of the rain at bay, but when the lieutenant leaned into Weybridge, the rain ran like tears down his cheeks, too, and he had to blink against the deluge.

“You should have taken a gun to yourself, Captain,” he said, sneering. “Then I wouldn’t have to hang a lady.”

“Then let’s go and be done with it. Shoot me, hang me, whatever. And then say good night,” Weybridge said. “No need to have a woman on your conscience. You don’t want that.”

“Oh, I am sensing from your hurry a distinct corroboration of my instincts. No one’s in Charlottesville.”

“I’m telling you the truth,” said Libby, her tone venomous. “I’m not a liar.”

He turned toward her. “Ma’am,” he said, the word awash in sarcasm, “I won’t do anything to hurt your niece. She’s just a child. Father’s fighting down near Petersburg. And I’m a man of my word. Just like you all are going to die, she’s going to be fine. But you, Libby Steadman?”

Weybridge had no idea what more there could be after telling her she was going to die.

“The pain you’ve caused? You are a woman who should be ashamed. Tell me something,” Morgan said.

She waited.

“You two brush up in that big bed of yours? You and the Yankee cripple here?” he asked, his eyes moving back and forth between Weybridge and her, his smirk licentious and mean.

She seemed to be deciding how to respond. Then she leaned forward as if she were going to answer him. Instead she spat at him, the saliva only adding to the rain and muck on Morgan’s cheek.

Weybridge wanted to believe that they had never had a chance. Morgan had brought four men with him. He and Libby had killed two. But there was so much Weybridge knew he would do differently if he could go back in time even half an hour. Morgan and one of his two remaining rangers, a tall fellow with a mountain man of a beard who had pulled his slouch hat down to his eyebrows, were a dozen feet away, conversing quietly, waiting for the other soldier and Joseph to return with Sally and Jubilee. They hadn’t yet gone to the mill, but they would soon. And then?

Perhaps Sally would shoot the soldier and this pair would hear the pop through the storm. If he were Morgan, Weybridge decided, he’d immediately shoot his captives and prepare for whatever was coming next. But Morgan couldn’t know what that gunshot meant. That was the thing about battle. It could mean that his own soldier was dead or Joseph was dead or even Sally or the child had been killed.

Or it could mean nothing.

The thunder and lightning seemed to have passed now, but the rains had continued.

Weybridge was still rehashing his mistakes in his mind when he heard that shot. There it was. Instantly, Morgan and his man knelt, drawing their guns and staring through the sheets of rain at the direction from which it had come. And yet it seemed to have been louder and closer than a Colt fired inside the very top of a stone gristmill some forty yards distant, where the report would have been further muffled by the downpour.

Libby looked at him. He wished he had the slightest idea what would happen now; he wished he could tell her anything of comfort or value.

“Lucas, that you?” Morgan called into the darkness and pelting rain. “Lucas?”

When there was no reply, the soldier with Morgan, possibly now the last of the men the lieutenant had brought with him, shouted, “Lucas!” Morgan stilled him by making a slashing motion with the side of his hand across his neck, as if he himself hadn’t just shouted the man’s name.

Which was when there was a second shot, this one so loud it was definitely fired outside the mill. That, too, could have been Morgan’s man. But at whom was he shooting? And why? It was possible that Joseph had made a run for it, but that didn’t seem like Joseph. And it was possible that first shot had been Joseph’s execution, and now the ranger—this fellow named Lucas—was firing into the night at an old woman or a twelve-year-old girl. But the shot was so close that Weybridge didn’t believe it was either of those scenarios.

And Lucas had never answered.

“It ain’t him,” Morgan whispered, and then he was on his feet and grabbing Libby by her biceps and hoisting her off the ground. He pulled her against him with his left arm so she was a shield and placed his Colt against her temple with his right, and hollered into the dark, “Joseph, you have five seconds to show yourself or I shoot her! And I’m counting now!”

But he hadn’t gotten far when a third crack ripped the curtain of night and Morgan’s knees buckled. He crumpled, pulling Libby down with him because she was entwined in his arm, and Weybridge was close enough that he could see the back of Morgan’s head was gone and there, right behind him, stood Sally with the Colt, the weapon still raised in her perfectly straight arm. Weybridge, though his hands were bound, tried to roll into the other ranger before he could fire, but he lacked purchase with just the one leg. And so the ranger got a shot off, hitting Sally squarely in the chest, before kicking out at Weybridge and aiming his pistol down at him.

Which was when Joseph screamed at the rebel, a biblical keening as loud as Weybridge had ever heard a man yell in the heat of battle. He ran at the ranger, emptying a handgun into the burly man and sending him to the earth, dead, half on top of Weybridge and half in the spongy grass of the dooryard.