The Jackal’s Mistress

Chapter 2

2

Jonathan Weybridge sat on a camp stool atop the crest of a small hill and watched the elegant tendrils of fog in the ravine, the steepled tips of the fir trees piercing the misty clouds like the finials of a wrought-iron fence. He knew for as long as he lived, whether it was forty more days or forty more years, he would always associate fog with the smoke from Lee’s rebel muskets when they’d charged—so many of the advancing Vermonters either green recruits or artillerists pressed into service as infantry—at the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania back in May. The smoke had wafted above the breastworks, a log wall, and his men had been among those who’d stood at the top firing down at the Confederates, firing off one round, maybe two, before they themselves were shot and fell atop the soon chest-high piles of corpses.

Now the sun was rising over the Blue Ridge Mountains behind him, and the sky before him was growing cobalt. The moon, a scythe that was icicle white, was a fading smile, sardonic and calm. He had a feeling the sun that day would be blistering, and the haze in the valley would burn away before long. Virginia was a hell of a lot hotter than Vermont as fall neared.

But blue skies, despite the scorching heat, would be a welcome relief from the rain. Over the past three days, it had misted, drizzled, sprinkled, and poured. There had been intermittent cloudbursts and steadier showers. Mushrooms had bloomed overnight, carpeting great swaths of the forest and peppering the pasture like throw rugs. His men had dug rifle pits in the muddy clay and slept in soggy tents, the sagging canvas sheets they carried no match for the deluge. Dead wood was spongy and every campfire a trial. Hardtack had turned sodden—which, arguably, was a blessing—sugar melted, and salt dissolved. The uniforms of the pickets always were damp.

His own uniform had the faint miasma of mold.

But, so far, he had no orders to form his company and march anywhere today, and so perhaps the sun would allow the men to dry off, instead of exhausting them as they plodded southwest into the Shenandoah Valley with really one purpose: Burn the harvest. Commandeer—steal, if he chose not to mince words—and slaughter the livestock. Ensure this valley was no longer a granary for the Confederacy. Still, prior to settling in, his men had had their share of skirmishes and brawls, the butcher’s bill always high. They’d been refitted and gotten more men (boys, really) after Spotsylvania in May and Cold Harbor in June, fresh fish with big eyes who had no idea what they were in for. He was supposed to have over one hundred soldiers. Most of the time, including today, it was closer to fifty (the company was always, it seemed, at half strength), the attrition largely wounded and sick, but plenty of men had died, too, some from Minie balls and some from disease. Prior to the rains, often there had been small, violent encounters with a mostly elusive enemy.

He was tired this morning. But he had been tired for weeks. Months. Moroseness was easy—he had seen too much and done too much the last four months—but he fought the desire to succumb. He had men to lead and, back in Vermont, a family to comfort. This war felt interminable, but eventually all things came to an end. He had taught his students how there was never permanence when man was at the center. And for the boys in his company? The boys on both sides? Their lives swayed like plumb bobs between boredom and brutality, between tediousness and terror.

For almost a year, from the time he’d enlisted in the early summer of 1863 until the spring of 1864, he’d served in Washington, the 11th Vermont manning the artillery at the forts around the capital. After the Battle of the Wilderness, however, they’d been pressed into service as infantry, and paid dearly for the relative cushiness and safety of garrison duty with the nightmare of Spotsylvania.

He knew the rebels were poised to the south and west of where he was sitting. Jubal Early’s men, a resolute and disciplined army that only this summer had made a dash at Washington and brought Lincoln himself to the breastworks to witness the defense. Mosby’s Rangers, too, an undisciplined bevy of marauders. Men, in Weybridge’s opinion, either too base or, perhaps, too smart, to care about honor. Or what he would deem honor. He supposed they had a code of some sort. But he had planted the folding chair at the edge of a copse of red oak and chestnut trees, and believed he was all but invisible. He was still within the perimeter of the pickets.

He guessed that he had, at best, fifteen or twenty minutes to scribble a note to his wife. He had carried the stool and folding table here himself because he liked the view. His company’s tents were a hundred yards away, stretching along the small, grassy plateau to the northeast. As recently as the summer, cows had grazed there. From this distance, the stench of the regiment almost disappeared. He recalled the joke that scouts shared: you could smell an army before you saw it.

Among the things that had struck him about this part of the country was the remarkable, almost unnatural lack of rocks in the dirt. He’d once heard a tale of a Vermont farmer who, his family thought, had died when a horse had kicked him in the head. His wife was sure he’d stopped breathing when she’d found him in the barn. But abruptly he’d sat up and told her and their teenage sons, who had raced in from the fields when they’d heard their mother crying for help, that he had died, but he was back, and when he was dead he had seen heaven in all its majesty, in all its unimaginable glory. And what, his wife had asked, was heaven like? Flat fields as far as the eye could see, he preached, his voice enraptured, and not a rock or a boulder to hoist from the soil.

Weybridge reckoned the tale was apocryphal. His family didn’t own a farm, but he knew how rocky the Green Mountains were, and what an arduous task it was to clear a field and plant anything. He had men in his company who were quite clear about their futures: once the rebels were defeated, they were heading south and west, to places like Ohio and Tennessee and Kansas, because it was just too damn hard to farm in Vermont. Even if he were a farmer, however, he himself couldn’t live here. In the south. It wasn’t that he had such fondness for the frigid tundra of Vermont in the winter; it was his anger at a people who enslaved others and who had unleashed such violence on the country and on his company. On the boys they had killed who shouldn’t have had to die. On the boys who had lost arms and legs. On the women back home widowed young, the children who lost fathers.

One time he had seen John Brown in Vergennes, a small Vermont city thirteen miles north of Middlebury. Brown and his family would take the ferry from the Adirondacks, where they had a farm, to the Green Mountains. They’d cross Lake Champlain, dock at Panton, and then purchase the provisions and supplies unavailable on the western side of the lake. Weybridge knew that he wasn’t far now from the Union garrison at Harper’s Ferry, where the abolitionist and his followers had seized the arsenal, holding it for two days before U.S. marines had swooped in and captured him. Brown had been hanged a few miles away in Charles Town six weeks later.

Today he wrote nothing of Brown or the anger in his own heart to his wife. Not this morning. The sky was too blue, and he knew all that Emily was shouldering. Instead he described his view that moment, reassuring her that he was well and his world lately had been calm—wet, yes, but serene. He asked after their boys, three and nearly five, hoping that Caleb, the older of the two, was taking his chores, slight as they were, seriously. Emily was not alone with the children: both her father and his taught at the college, as he himself had up until a year and a half ago, and the houses of the three families stood among the long line of stately Georgians on South Main Street. Both of their mothers were alive and well. Emily had been spared the sadness—death, ubiquitous and adamant—that Weybridge had learned in the war was the true soul of the world. Until he had enlisted, he had been screened from it, too. His letters now had become a facade, because he saw no reason to share the brutality and the toll it was taking on him.

His reservoir pen in his hand, he was picturing her smile those nights she would debate her father about Melville or Dickens, when he heard the footsteps on the forest floor behind him and smelled the coffee. Burnt and nutty and robust. He turned and saw the man he viewed as an adjutant, a lieutenant from Panton. Eustis Marsh was a farmer, a man ten years his senior who teased him as much as he believed he could badger a captain—even one as allegedly good-natured as Weybridge—without getting himself disciplined. The fact that Weybridge was a college boy from Middlebury was a source of unending mirth for Marsh. The soldier had a tin cup of coffee in each hand and gave one to Weybridge. The tin was warm, and the coffee was thick and sweet with brown sugar.

“Fired up the mucket,” Marsh told him, after tossing onto the ground the piece of straw he was chewing.

“Thank you,” Weybridge said. He had lain his pen on the folding table and a great, round splotch of black ink sat like a raindrop on a wooden slat beside the bottle. He raised the cup in a toast.

“Coffee always tastes better when the cavalry ain’t waterin’ their horses upstream.”

“It does.”

“You seen the sutler this morning?”

“I haven’t. Why?”

“He was sellin’ some ink and pens that I think he took off dead fellers. Pens just like that.”

Weybridge held the pen by the barrel and gazed at the beauty of the nib. “I’ve had this one for years.”

“Shoulda figured that,” said the lieutenant. “So, I’ve come to retrieve ya…sir.”

“Oh?”

“Yer too close and too high up. Yer a goddamn target, Captain. Sorry.”

Weybridge wasn’t sure whether Marsh was apologizing for swearing or because he felt bad he was interrupting his captain’s brief moment of pastoral respite: a man writing a letter on a hillside with a table, a stool, and a bottle of ink. There was birdsong.

“Yer gonna get yerself killed,” he continued.

“Only if Early’s pickets have guns that can shoot farther than ours,” Weybridge said to reassure him. “And I am in the woods.”

“Mostly.”

“Precisely.”

“Mostly ain’t totally,” Marsh said. “It only takes one mighty committed sniper to crawl his way through that prickle there and bag himself a captain. Also…”

Weybridge waited, staring up at the lieutenant.

“Think back to when we was manning the cannons in Washington. The johnnies get a couple Napoleons three-quarters or even a mile from here, and you’re in range.”

A mosquito landed on Weybridge’s fingers holding the cup. He flicked it away. A fly had also been drawn to the scent and was buzzing the tin lip. He leaned forward and bowed his head. Was it presumptuous to hope for a little peace? Was it selfish? He saw that the slit on the side of his left boot had grown a half inch or so the last couple of days. The gash had started when a Minie ball had grazed his leg at the last firefight before the rains had commenced. He’d been ordered to take the ridge where his men were now encamped. He had. They had.

“Whole company would be,” Weybridge replied finally.

“We’re back a bit. Not sitting like a horseshoe peg they can aim at.”

“It would be ironic if I survived the last four months and got killed writing a letter home to my wife,” he agreed.

“Careless might be a better word—if ya will forgive me speakin’ the truth.”

“Lieutenant?” He hoped he had added a hint of good-humored menace to the word.

“Yes, sir?”

“Would you see if I can get a new boot? Today?”

“I told ya: there are some mighty good boots available right now by where them surgeons were workin’ before the monsoon.”

“It wasn’t a monsoon,” Weybridge said. What he really wanted to say, but chose not to, was that as much as he needed a new boot, he didn’t crave the footwear of a man who had had his leg sawed off like a tree branch. Since he’d enlisted, he had passed too many waist-high piles of amputated limbs—the fingers curled into fists, the shins revealing ivory bones amidst the hardened black, black blood—to ever stick his hand into the glove of a man who no longer had need of it or his foot into the boot of man who could no longer wear one. “And, thank you, I’d prefer a new boot.”

“Yer a demandin’ man, Captain.”

“It’s the little things, Lieutenant.”

“I’ll keep workin’ on it, sir.”

“I appreciate that.”

Marsh swallowed the last of his coffee. “One of them shoes and boots in the pile had a piece of paper inside it with the number eighteen written on it.” He sounded rueful.

“I’m not following.”

“Must have been just a boy. Didn’t wanna lie when he enlisted, so when he stood on the paper, he could say, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m over eighteen,’ when they asked. I seen it before. Them’s the kinda young’un, well, you gotta check them cartridge boxes on their belts. Gotta remind them to take good care when loadin’ their rifles.”

“I hope he lived.”

“Me too,” Marsh said, pulling off his cap and wiping a line of sweat from his forehead. “Pair a shoes cost the army one dollar and ninety-eight cents. Sutler will sell ya a pair with holes for half that. Without holes, will cost ya three dollars.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Sutler told me when he was tryin’ to sell me new shoes.” The lieutenant peered into the distance. “And, Captain?”

Weybridge waited.

“Please write yer letter closer to camp. Ya can say the same cuddly things to yer wife when yer back there. I promise: no one’s gonna look over yer shoulder and see what yer cooin’ about.”

The river was called the Opequon, and Weybridge had been told that it flowed into the Potomac. Here it was little more than a creek, perhaps ten or twelve yards at its widest and two or three feet deep, and he wouldn’t have been surprised if he had spotted cattle cooling themselves in water that flowed so slowly it was almost still—except, of course, one army or the other would have commandeered any cows they had found. A half mile south he had seen that the water grew deeper and wider, and the current too fast for cows or even cavalry.

Now his eyes were moving between the two Union artillery batteries on the ridge and the tributary before him, the creek oddly unaffected by the cannons which, one by one, were bringing down the thunder on the woods on the far side of the brook. Gilbert’s Ford, it was called. The water was a flat sheen, brown but streaked with silver from the midday sun, even as case shot and explosive shells splintered the trees on the far side. It had only been hours ago he’d been writing his wife.

The plan, he was told as soon as he had returned to camp, was that once the cannons had softened up the Confederates on the other side, his men, along with three other companies, would slosh through the water and storm into the woods, which were dense by the creek but thinned quickly. There were fields a half mile beyond the Opequon and then a hilltop that overlooked the road to Berryville, which he was to occupy. With artillery atop that ridge, the Union would control that stretch of turnpike.

Waiting for him across the water were remnants of Jubal Early’s army, but the scouts insisted that the Confederates were widely dispersed. After the colonel had given Weybridge the order to form his men, an adjutant had joked that his troops should be more wary of the slippery stones as they waded across the creek than the rebels waiting for them on the other side. Weybridge hadn’t seen the humor. The reconnaissance was that there were only a hundred or so rebels defending the stretch of ground that his and three other Union companies were to capture, but his company was barely half strength, and those other three were dramatically undermanned, too. He wished they were throwing more men into the fight, despite the logistics of concentrating that many soldiers in this hollow.

“Artillery like that don’t make me piss my drawers,” said Marsh, who seemed ever by his side.

“No?” Weybridge asked.

He smiled darkly. “Now, canister? Them tin cans packed with lead balls? That’s a different tune. They’ll make me shit.”

Marsh was mostly right. Mostly, but not entirely. Yes, charging into canister was deadly. Still, the scent of shattered pine from the forest had wafted up here to the ridge, and Weybridge recalled the times that summer he’d huddled on the ground when Confederate artillery had left his men cowering in small balls, their hands on their ears, as the earth around them had shaken like the world itself was coming apart. He had seen men butchered by shrapnel, killed instantly and killed slowly by weapons fired hundreds of yards away. Man was an animal that broke and bled as easily as pigs and cows, and was no more impressive beneath the skin.

Behind the two of them, the men had formed, awaiting his order to emerge from this copse of chestnut and oak, still leafy and lush in September, and run down the hill, traverse the stream, fight their way through the woods, and then storm the rebels atop the neighboring hummock. His heart was beating hard in his chest, and he was sweating; he had prayed to a God he doubted really existed that this would not be another Bloody Angle or Cold Harbor.

And maybe it wouldn’t be. He might not witness another boy from Middlebury, a fellow ten years his junior, swinging his empty musket like a club at a swarm of rebels, some reloading and some trying to spear him with bayonets, before, mercifully, one of those Virginians had put a Minie ball into his skull and finished him off.

But his men would be easy targets as they waded into the water, slowed by the current and the stones, and then when they entered the woods. Through his field glasses, he had seen buckthorn as high as the snowbanks back home in December. And when the survivors emerged from that wood, there was a fence along the crest of the meadow, offering the rebels one last place to make a stand. The Virginians, even if they were outnumbered, had advantages both natural and man-made.

“You know somethin’, Captain?”

“I know many things, Lieutenant.”

“If there are only a hundred johnnies over there, I’d have preferred we just went in cold. Surprised ’em.” He nodded toward the artillery on the ridge. “A couple baby wakers? We know what they can and can’t do. Them cannons will weaken their defenses a bit. But not enough. Sir? I’m expectin’ one hell of a brawl.”

“Perhaps.”

“They’re just waitin’ for us now,” the lieutenant continued. “This next hour? Goin’ to be fearful ugly. We is just wakin’ snakes.”

“You never did find me that boot. My wet foot is going to be on your conscience.”

“Water was goin’ to go over the top, anyway. At least for a step or two. And—well, forgive me, sir—if yer goin’ to be so goddamn precious and not wear a dead man’s boot, that’s yer decision.”

Weybridge glanced at the lieutenant. The man was gazing intently at the woods before them, his eyes squinting as if that would help him see through the smoke. “Fair point, Lieutenant,” he agreed. Then he pulled his watch from his uniform jacket pocket. In ten minutes, the artillery would stop, he would command his bugler to signal the attack, the colors would rise up, and the Vermonters would start their advance. He had been assured that there were no rebel batteries on the far side. Marsh didn’t need to fear they would be running headfirst into canister.

The men formed their line of battle and began in good order, the colors high, as they emerged from the woods, and there was no fire from the far side of the river. Weybridge could spot the great swaths of fallen trees carved by the bombardment on the other side of the gorge and found himself hoping (though not believing) that the rebels had pulled back. Just ducked and then retreated from the fusillade. Perhaps his boys would make it across the water, through the woods, and then up the steep meadow, and soon their flag would be atop that far hill and the hospital tents would be no more crowded than this morning. It was possible. Anything was possible.

He raised his sword, the grip firm, always surprised at how little it weighed when he pulled it from the scabbard, and yelled for his men to charge, to attack, to give ’em hell.

It was almost exactly when his left foot broke the surface of the Opequon, the water flooding through the hole and filling the boot, that the rebel muskets opened fire. They were hidden by trees that had fallen and trees that had stood the barrage, their evidence the puffs of smoke, darker than the exhalations of snoring farm animals on a frigid morn but reminiscent nonetheless, and the orderly lines began to ripple. Some of the men not yet in the water had stopped to fire back, and some already were hit, slowing or falling, their flesh no match for a Minie ball, but others had splashed into the creek, even a few of the wounded trundling and staggering ahead. He’d placed his sword back in its scabbard now, and raising his pistol high, he urged his soldiers to keep moving, to advance, as he himself arose on the far side of the water.

Around him, as loud as the rifles and the bullets pinging off the trees, the whistles of the ones flying past, a cacophony he’d heard before and felt in his bones, he heard the grunts and curses of the boys—they would be sobs when this was over, at least for some of them—but their fear usually was lost to the urgency of the moment. You moved ahead because otherwise you would die where you stood. There was no safety in stillness.

Buckthorn stuck into the hole in his boot, pinpricks through his wet sock against his wet skin.

How could he be aware of something so minor?

But he was, even as he was yelling again to move ahead, move on, forward, forward. Beside him was Sergeant Porter, his moustache oiled with blood from a wound on his cheek, pushing aside the brush, and in the hazy maelstrom on his left Weybridge saw one young soldier pausing to aim his rifle and another, bareheaded, firing into the smog, aiming at God alone knew what. Porter yelled for the men to push ’em back, but momentum was hard when there was a steady fire from behind boulders and trees, and you were battling bramble and chokeberry for purchase. Someone else was shouting Give ’em steel!, crying it over and over, Give ’em steel! Eustis Marsh was beside an oak, his body plastered against the trunk, aiming his rifle, but when he fired, it was almost as if Weybridge was suddenly hard of hearing, because he saw the recoil against the lieutenant’s shoulder and the smoke from the barrel, but he didn’t perceive that particular weapon in the tumult.

No, he was not deaf. It was just one shot in the midst of many, one more pop lost in the uproar.

And then Weybridge was stepping into more muck, sprawl from the Opequon, he supposed, but when he glanced down he saw that his boot was in the stomach—the entrails as pulpy as any slaughtered steer—of a dead man, a rebel eviscerated in the shelling. He yanked his foot up and away, as if his toes had been in boiling water, and drove himself onward, exhorting his men forward, the open eyes of the dead rebel driven deep into his memory like a fence post. To his left, a battle flag fell, but another Vermont boy scooped it up, and Weybridge saw the Confederates rising before him, ghostly in the smoke, but they were turning to run, not fight, and he aimed his pistol at one and…

And chose not to fire. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

Because the rebs were running, their own great red banners of treason billowing in retreat. He knew he had killed men before, even if often he was just shooting through smoke and haze, and he would kill them again.

But then, when he saw Porter was no longer beside him and knew it was likely the sergeant was dying or dead, he did squeeze the trigger on the Colt. One of the rebels collapsed, not dead, not yet, but also not going to kill any more of Weybridge’s men this September afternoon, and he ran past the body, the scrub dissipating and opening up, because he had reached the meadow. Grass that was high and still a little damp from the rains, and there was the fence at the top of the hill, where the rebels were going to make a stand.

Which was when he saw that the ridge was no longer held only by infantry. Now there were cannons at the crest, limbers and caissons, and gunners were packing the barrels, and some of the great guns already were firing, and the ground beneath his feet was rippling like waves. Boys near him were soaring, legs and arms pinwheeling amidst dirt and grass that was swirling in the air like fallen leaves in a windstorm, and the blue sky disappeared behind a curtain of smoke and flying earth. He spied one private standing, staring down where once he had had a left arm, his right arm raised, the hand empty and the fingers splayed like a statue’s, and then the body wobbled—but not that right hand—and he collapsed, his remaining arm doing nothing to cushion the fall.

Weybridge felt someone grabbing his sleeve, and it was Marsh.

“The fence, Captain, the fence! That’s the ticket!” he was shouting, and just as they were starting toward the line of split rail, there was a massive blast and Marsh was no longer beside him and the air was gone from his lungs and he, too, was above the world. The flight was soundless. The sky was speckled, like a duck, with black dots that he understood were soil. Dirt.

He hit the ground hard, struggling to breathe, aware that his sword and his pistol had vanished, and there was Marsh above him, kneeling, and then the lieutenant’s lips were moving and his mouth was open wide—there were his teeth, his tongue—but the planet had gone quiet. Weybridge started to sit up, to try and retrieve his gun, but Marsh held him down, shaking his head, and from the corner of his eye Weybridge saw his own left hand and thought of the Devil, of Satan, because the fingers were a deep red, as if he had dipped them all in a surgeon’s bucket of blood.