Confederates (42 page)

‘Well of course you ought to do it,' said Tom Jackson. ‘Here?'

‘I wouldn't wish to move him as he is. Not even on a litter.'

Stonewall looked down the hill at the conflict roaring along there by the road. ‘Afterwards? Can he be moved afterwards?' He was thinking all at once of the widow Popeye had courted in Richmond. It wasn't a very passionate business; Popeye firmly called her Mrs Brown whether he was speaking to her or of her. She seemed a sensible woman and, potentially, a good nurse.

‘He can be moved by midnight, General.' Hunter said.

There was a straggle of litter-bearers coming through the railroad cut and Stonewall called to two of them. They staggered near. The boy they were carrying was arguing away in a loud voice. His face was lopsidedly swollen; he'd been shot in the right cheek. He was chiding someone, and it turned out it was his maw. ‘The only thing being, maw,' he kept saying. He was arguing with his maw about putting in a share-crop on the river pasture. His maw must have been some arguer. His brow was knitted in an awful fixed frown.

The litter-bearers, one of them with but one good eye and the other pretty thick-browed, stared at Stonewall. He told them to get that boy down to the surgeons fast and to tell them to treat him straight up and then to come right back here and wait. Did they understand?

They both nodded madly. Their mouths were agape. Maguire hoped it was from the labours of litter-bearing but feared it was dimness of intellect.

Dick Ewell woke and saw Hunter kneeling above him. ‘Jesus have mercy,' he said. ‘It's the Pennsylvania society doctor.'

‘You'll be well, general.'

‘It's a hell of a pain, Hunter. It's a goddam county fair of a pain!'

The orderly was already mixing a quarter grain of morphine in a tin cup of water. ‘Drink this,' said Hunter when the solution was ready. Ewell's popping eyes were nearly on his cheeks with the force of the agony. ‘Holding 'em, Tom?' he called to Jackson.

‘Holding 'em nicely, Dick,' Tom Jackson said over his shoulder though no one could have guessed whether he meant it. So Ewell drank the narcotic cup and his arms went loose and he sighed a long sigh. Even so, Maguire had the orderly kneel at the general's head holding a pad soaked in ether close up to the beaky nose.

This is the first kneeling-down amputation I've ever done, Maguire told himself.

Hunter plied the long shining scalpel and the file and the bright saw and the fresh bone wax to seal off the marrow when the leg came off. The packages of silk and cord and catgut were open only because he'd used them to sew up that Maryland lawyer, Snowdon Andrews, who'd been disembowelled at the Cedar Run. Apart from Andrews and Ewell and a number of the staff now and then who might have got a hot little slug of shrapnel in his cheek, Maguire had hardly practised any surgery in a long day.

Kyd Douglas, back with a report from Bill Telfer, saw Hunter, in an apron that looked fresh but had a smear of gore across its middle, cutting into the leg. Kyd kept his eyes ahead while the rasp of the bone saw went on, and the filing. When it stopped he turned and saw the surgeon working away with those silken threads in the bloody stump and then, with broad movements of the arm, sealing a flap of flesh back over the wound. It was as well Maguire was fast. The star candles were burning out, the last light of day was just about gone.

Later, turning around again, Kyd saw one of the grooms setting off with a crooked lump wrapped in a blanket. He'd been ordered to take Popeye Ewell's leg back to the field surgeries to be burnt with all the other fragments of this evening's conflict. Though Kyd had seen a lot of boys on their backs this evening, that was the only time he felt bile in his mouth. He thought, if I were that boy I'd throw the thing into the first ravine rather than carry it all the way back through the woods. Then I'd sit down and chew tobacco like hell just to get certain tastes out of my mouth and certain stenches from my nostrils.

Which was just about what the groom did anyway.

About an hour later, the Yankees dragged away across the meadows. They gave up the field that is, but Tom Jackson, yawning, said later that evening that they'd done it in a well-ordered manner. And
that
was a sort of praise.

4

When Canty approached her on the second floor of the hospital that morning, Dora Whipple was feeding gruel to an Alabamanan private who had just come through typhus. Canty stood by the soldier's bed, but looked at Dora Whipple instead of at his patient. That was characteristic of him, she thought.

Raising her eyes, she saw past Canty to the end of the ward. There was a colonel down there in the doorway, a grey-haired man. Two soldiers almost as ancient as him also waited there with muskets in their hands. Mrs Whipple had seen that colonel around Orange. If Orange could have been described as having a garrison, then he would have had to be considered the garrison commander. He controlled a few companies of senior soldiers, nearly all of them over 45, the others limpy or lacking a limb. They worked around the railroad depot and kept order amongst the convalescing patients of Mrs Whipple's hospital.

Canty said, as if it was the best news he'd had in a month: ‘The colonel would like to speak to you.'

‘He's welcome,' said Mrs Whipple. ‘Tell him to come in.'

‘He'd rather speak to you on your own.'

Mrs Whipple sighed and put down the gruel beside the boy. ‘Now you make sure you finish that up,' she told the survivor of typhus.

‘Only cos you say so, ma'am,' the boy told her. ‘But I can't tell why anyone would eat that mush of their own free will.'

They always said things like that, the farm boys. They weren't big on broth or gruel.

Mrs Whipple walked to the door of the ward. The old grey-haired colonel watched her coming. He must have been at least seventy years and very likely 75. Canty, she noticed, was right behind her, had followed her on her passage up the hospital aisle. ‘Thank you, Doctor Canty,' the old colonel said, as if dismissing him. But Canty would not go.

The colonel sighed. ‘Ma'am,' he said, ‘what I do is not of my own choosing. I've orders to arrest and detain you, pending a military trial. In fact, it's shaping up to be a special court-martial.'

Mrs Whipple could not think of anything to say which might talk the old man round. But she frowned and opened her mouth. ‘Don't say anything at all, ma'am. Let me tell you, I cleaned out the lockup down by the depot yard and it's all set up for your comfort. I will accompany you to your quarters here in the hospital right away, in case there's anything you have a mind to bring with you, though mind you, you can't bring more than my boys can carry. There ain't so much room in a cell. I'm sorry, ma'am.'

She had part-way recovered now. ‘This is a fantasy, colonel.'

‘No, ma'am.'

‘Don't I even get told what it all means?'

‘The charge is such, ma'am,' he said, glancing at Canty, ‘that if I said what it was in a halfway public place, it might not be in the interests of your well-being, ma'am. For these are passionate times.'

She laughed. ‘I'm not coming with you, colonel.'

‘Please, ma'am. I wouldn't know what the hell to do if you refused – excusing the expression. My boys here wouldn't know what the hell to do. We got our orders. Why don't you for the moment make it smooth for us? In the end you got to come with us in any case – there ain't no way that
that
can be avoided. Let me tell you, I got manacles, ma'am, I don't want to put on you. We can walk through the streets, you and I, down to the lockup like friends or you can go in chains.…'

Mrs Whipple took thought for a while. ‘I'll come with you, colonel,' she said, like someone granting a favour.

He was so kind to her. He made his ‘boys' walk many paces behind, so that any citizens of Orange who saw them on their way to the lockup that day might have thought they were strolling together. When they reached the lockup, he showed her inside. There were three cells, one of them hung with old green drapes to give her privacy.

‘My men,' he told her, ‘are all family men of mature age, ma'am. You'll find you'll get treated with some delicacy.…'

‘But the reason for the arrest, sir. In this whole ridiculous matter, what is the charge?'

‘There's some army lawyer coming to see you, ma'am, in just a moment. He can tell you more. But the grounds for the arrest, ma'am, is that you are a spy.' He looked away. ‘I ain't saying for a second I believe it.'

He showed her into the cell. Beside the bed, there was a table with a basin on it full of fresh water, and with a little square of yellow soap beside it. There was a covered enamel bucket in one corner. Somehow it was the niceness of these arrangements that gave her her first onrush of terror. She would have liked it better if they'd thrown her in with other prisoners, into a cell with straw on the floor and a foul open bucket in the corner. They were treating her in a way that made it seem as if they pitied her because there wasn't any escape open to her.

She managed to laugh. ‘The whole idea is so stupid. My husband, sir, died for your beloved Confederacy.'

The old colonel waved his hands at this argument, like a man troubled by insects. ‘I know all that, ma'am.'

He left her, and someone locked the door. When she heard the lock shift, her head became light, her ears cold. She had to resist rushing to that enamel bucket and being ill in it.

She sat there half an hour and made use of the Bible they'd left on the pillow of the bed. She read Psalm 147 over and over, and was just finished it for the tenth time when another officer appeared at her cell door.

This one was much younger than the colonel. He looked as if he had just stepped off the train from Richmond via Charlottesville. He had not done much campaigning, she decided, for his uniform was fresh and well tailored.

‘Major Pember,' he said, ‘from the Judge Advocate's Department, ma'am. I believe you've been worried as to the cause for your arrest, so the first thing I'll do is read this to you.'

He'd taken from a valise he carried a document which he began to read aloud to her. It was the formal charge of treason. His voice was gentle and ordinary as he read, and took the sting out of the words he was conveying to her. He quoted the Act of Congress under which the charges against her made her liable to the judgement of a military court. When he finished he lowered the paper. ‘May I come in, ma'am? I've been detailed to act as your counsel.'

She smiled and shook her head, amazed. ‘This cell is no property of mine, sir. You know well you can come in here if you wish.'

The lawyer nodded his head to the turnkey, who unlocked her cell door. Then he came through, his eyes looking about in a well-mannered way for a place to sit. There was only the one chair.

‘Please,' Mrs Whipple said, ‘you can sit on the edge of my … rather of
this
cot.'

When they had both seated and settled themselves he studied her awhile. ‘It seems to me, ma'am, that we will have little trouble defeating this charge.'

‘And if I do defeat it and walk free again, what are my chances of surviving the mob feeling, the crowds in the streets, Major Pember?'

‘We are not making any grand show out of your trial, ma'am. You will be protected.'

‘But why was I arrested? And on what evidence?'

‘It seems, ma'am, a Union spy called Mr Rupert Pleasance was arrested in Richmond two days ago. Did you perhaps know a Pleasance?'

‘I did not know anyone by such a name.'

‘A man of maybe 45 years,' said Major Pember. ‘Slight in the shoulders. Reddish hair. When arrested, he was wearing a light seersucker suit and a beaver hat.…'

‘There are many men of 45 who wear beaver hats,' Dora Whipple said. But she knew, of course, that the man described was the one she used to meet on the waste ground west of Chimborazo on Thursday evenings. ‘Why would anyone arrest me for a connection with a man of middle age in a beaver hat?' she asked ironically.

‘The gentleman in question had a notebook with your name in it – other names as well. I believe that all persons named in a certain way in that notebook have been arrested … as you have been yourself … and charged with treason. Now, ma'am, I do not fully know the prosecutor's case, but it seems to me to be circumstantial. Therefore, do not be too distressed at this stage, my dear lady.'

‘The man in the beaver hat?' she asked. ‘Does he have grounds to be distressed?'

‘Yes, ma'am. He has already come to a painful end. It might be better if you did not enquire …'

‘I am no infant, sir.'

‘Then I have to tell you he was hanged in Richmond this morning.'

Her knees jumped at the idea of the rope, and the nausea she'd felt when first arrested came over her again. The next time Horace Searcy arrives at that door and asks me to go to England, I will not hesitate, she promised herself.

‘It is best if you admit nothing,' said the counsel. ‘But I must know. Had you met the gentleman?'

‘I think I may have. But as I told you, I did not know him by name.'

‘Did he perhaps use you – all innocent as you no doubt are – as a kind of source, ma'am, for insignificant news on Confederate military matters?'

It came to Dora Whipple as he uttered this cunning lawyer's type of question that she had no chance of lying to the Confederacy. That she despised it too much to lie to it – to lie to its judges and even to this pleasant lawyer from the Judge Advocate's Department would be to come down to the level of that Confederate cause. The idea that she was above lying did not fill her with serenity but with panic. There are things I cannot do, she thought, and if I am not careful those things will kill me. There are lies I cannot tell, and that is my grand handicap. She thought a little more. Well, she considered, two months ago I wouldn't have believed I could visit a man in his hotel room and perform intimate acts with him. So try, Dora Whipple, try to learn to tell the correct lies, at least to answer blankly. ‘I wasn't an innocent source of information, sir,' she said in a voice that sounded outraged. ‘I am devoted to the Union. I willingly passed on information of
some
value to this Mr … Mr Pleasance.'