High Hearts (42 page)

“I’m a soldier in the shadow army of the Confederacy.” Lutie quietly smiled back at him. “But I don’t have the sash of an officer. I get to tie an apron around my waist instead.”

“Shadow army?” Bullette asked.

“I think of the women of Virginia as a shadow army. You have your duties, and we have ours.”

Kate smiled in agreement. “Are we ready? We’ve got three left.”

“Let’s get on with it.” Jeffrey cracked his knuckles.

The two synagogues closest to the capital formed a Hebrew Military Aid Society. Kate almost cried for joy when she opened her front door early in the morning to behold two ladies carrying bedding, bandages, and a crate of medicines.

“We hope this will be of help, Mrs. Vickers,” a good-looking woman of about thirty said.

“Won’t you come in, Mrs.…”

“Mrs. Reisman, and may I introduce my dear friend, Miss Roth.”

“I am very pleased to meet you both. Please come in.”

The moans in the background were not inviting. “Thank you, but we must complete our rounds.” The women returned to their huge supply wagon.

Lutie joined Kate on the front step. She waved to the women driving off. “The smell is strong this morning.”

“I feel like I’m living in the charnel house of the nineteenth century.”

“We are.” Lutie lightly touched Kate’s elbow. “Jennifer Fitzgerald is sick. I put her to bed, so now we’re short a pair of hands. Everyone’s ready to drop as it is. Can you think of anyone we can petition to help us?”

“What about Miriam Gallard?”

“She is rather an elderly blossom.”

“Perhaps you’re right. Surely, Kate, there must be someone.”

A milk wagon pulled up across the street. Kate crossed her arms against the doorway. “Actually, I do know who might help us. Bebe Austin and her girls.”

“That’s cutting cards with the devil.”

“I think it only fair that I ask the other ladies.”

Kate explained to Hazel, Rise, and Miranda the nature of
Bebe Austin’s business. Maud already knew Bebe ran a house of ill repute. This was met with stony silence.

“Some people already think that nursing is not proper for a lady.” Rise spoke first. “I hear that in the Delta, they won’t even let a lady near a hospital.”

“Are we willing to work side by side with these women or not?” Hazel had neither the patience nor the humor today for a long ramble.

Maud Windsor said, “If it’s our reputation or a man’s life, then I vote for life.”

Put that way, no one could disagree.

“I’ll go then.” Kate dreaded being a supplicant before such a woman, but it was her idea in the first place.

“Wait, I’ll go with you.” Lutie was already half out the door.

The huge, oiled walnut door with a shiny brass knocker glistened on Grace Street. Taking a deep breath, Kate cracked the knocker against the brass plate underneath.

An overdressed servant opened the door. His eyes bugged out of his head. Everyone in Richmond knew who Kate Vickers was.

“My card. May I please see Miss Austin?”

Bowing low, he replied, “Won’t you ladies please have a seat in the waiting room?”

“Wait a moment,” Lutie called. “My card, too.”

As the butler retreated at a fast clip, Kate whispered, “You needn’t have done that.”

“She can have proof positive that I was here, too, and I don’t give a fig whom she shows it to!”

A flustered Bebe Austin slowly walked down the hall, trying to compose herself. She could converse with cabinet members, senators, and generals, but a lady of quality was a horse of a different color. Nor was this a chance encounter where the lady did not immediately know Bebe’s identity and profession. Bebe nervously appraised herself in the ornate, oblong mirror in the hall. Her fancy dress was the calling card of a courtesan. In vain she tore off some of her jewelry. Why could she never master the art of the exact right combination? Bebe knew she loaded herself with too much jewelry, too many petticoats, and indiscreet colors. She couldn’t seem to help herself. If she didn’t have “papers,” by hell, she had
money. Right now, she was acutely embarrassed by her twenty-carat sapphire necklace. The huge center stone was flanked by diamonds in a lacy pattern that drooped clear down into her cleavage. She silently motioned for the butler to bring her a glass of ice water. She drank a sip, put a dab on her wrists and her forehead, then walked into the room. “Misses Vickers and Chatfield, I am speechless at this honor. What may I do for you?”

“Miss Austin, we are here to ask you if you will help us. We cannot properly care for the wounded in my house. One of our number has taken sick, and the house already has thirty-five men in it.” Kate was polite.

“Thirty-four,” Lutie corrected.

“Who?”

“Private Theodore Ingram, early this morning.”

“As you can gather, we are desperate.”

Bebe was stunned. “Do the other ladies know who I am?”

“Yes. We voted that you be invited to help us, help our men.”

“How many of us might you need?”

“We’ll take you all, Miss Austin. We can train your girls, and within the week I will ask other ladies in our predicament if they could use assistants. I will, of course, tell them the source. But I will ask you not to inform the wounded.”

“I understand completely.” Bebe’s sapphire rose and fell with her breathing. “I may be a whore, but I am a patriot!”

“Which is why I came.” Kate smiled.

Rains washed away the flimsy covering of earth over the trenches of the dead. Henley, gagging, refused to vomit. Good sense told him not to look but the fascination of horror on such a grand scale kept his eyes riveted on the rows of
bodies, partially or fully exposed, bloated and stinking. Mud filled their eyes, their opened mouths, and the holes in their bodies where steel ripped them open like rag dolls.

Philosophy, he suspected, was a weakling’s vice, but recently Henley found himself questioning everything he believed in. The only rock which withstood his tidal wave of doubt was Jesus Christ. He did not think that Jesus failed, but rather that man failed. A message of love and brotherhood looked simple enough when read in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John but here on this soggy earth, it was proving nigh to impossible.

Witnessing the rotting corpses did not make him a better Christian. He loved his enemy less than ever. What man could look upon such a sight and not hate the perpetrators of the loathsome deed? The army of the North was a ruthless invader sent by Lincoln and his vulgar henchmen. Hundreds of thousands would suffer. A pang of fear shot through his side. He knew the figures as well as any cabinet member. The South had one million men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. The North had many more. Would this be the first war in which millions died? A million dead men. Henley, paralyzed with the thought of a crisis so huge he could not grasp it, put pressure on his horse’s flanks and cantered. Even cantering, he could not escape the mass graves.

They mocked him, those dead. They stretched out their arms, pointing to heaven in supplication. Were those pieces of rancid meat now with God? Were the twelve thousand Federals who fell at Fair Oaks now in hell? Many of those men were Episcopalians, the same as Henley. Did they not pray to the same God? Men on opposite sides of the war claimed to be good Episcopalians and Christian soldiers.

“I have lived a life of ease,” Henley thought to himself. “Does God mock me now?” He passed the last of the graves. “I am fifty-two years old, and I don’t know much at all. But I know I’m right about this war. Did I subjugate the North? Did I try to take away their liberties? Did I meddle in their means of livelihood and saddle them with tariffs and embargoes? I only asked to be left alone with the sin of slavery on my own shoulders! To go to housekeeping on my own hook.”

These questions haunted him. Yesterday he told Lutie that he was going to find Geneva. There were things he had to tell her. An undeniable force propelled him forward; the
same force that directed him to prepare the manumission papers for this Christmas.

Finding his daughter proved difficult, for a cavalry stays in the saddle, fluid and swift. He finally located her riding within sight of the Federal army. Henley marveled at her coolness in the face of the enemy.

“Daddy!” She rode toward him. “What are you doing this far forward?”

“I’ve come to get you. You’re coming with me to Richmond tonight.”

“I won’t leave my regiment.”

“I’m not asking you to leave your regiment. I’m asking you to return with me to Richmond. You can come back here tomorrow. I want you to see your mother. You haven’t seen her for a year and two months.”

“You won’t tell Colonel Vickers who I really am?”

“No.”

Mars, and Banjo pored over army maps. Mars was using a red pencil to show cow paths, footpaths, or unmarked shortcuts between roads. He was also marking fords in the creeks. He granted Geneva a day’s leave and asked Henley to give his regards to Lutie.

Banjo intently studied Henley. His distinguished face, courtly bearing, and perfect diction depressed him. No wonder Lutie married him. Henley made Banjo feel like a wiry brown squirrel. However, he was cordial to Henley for Jimmy’s sake.

“Lieutenant,” Henley said to Banjo, “my wife told me she spent such a happy day in your presence. I think it did her a world of good. Thank you.”

“Sure.” Banjo offered Henley a cigar.

“Should I not survive this war, will you watch over her when all is past?”

“I will, Colonel. On my honor.” Banjo wondered what in the world had gotten into Lutie’s husband. After all, Henley was a noncombatant.

Riding back toward the city, Geneva puzzled over her father’s extraordinary behavior. “Daddy, are you sick?”

“No, I don’t think I’ve ever felt better.” He puffed on his cigar. “That’s why I came for you today. I want to tell you something. I have not always been a brave man. Nineteen
years ago I fell in love with a gentle, beautiful woman. Obviously, I was married to your mother. Sumner was eight, I believe, and you had not yet peeped on the horizon. I broke your mother’s heart. I don’t know what happened to me, Geneva. I was possessed by that woman.”

“Those things happen, I guess.” Geneva felt awkward.

“They happen all the time, but some men are wiser than I was. I cried to your mother. I told her I couldn’t live without this woman. To make matters worse, the woman bore a child, a daughter. Your mother was praying for a little girl of her own at the time. She must have suffered very much. I finally saw what I was doing to her and promised to give up the woman, who was a slave. She insisted I sell her. That was the hardest thing I have ever done in this life. I can still see that woman’s eyes when she was led away. Her only fault was that I loved her.”

“Daddy, why do I have to know this?”

“Because my life is more painful than you can imagine right now and much of that pain is within. I’m not putting it very well. Di-Peachy is your half-sister.”

Geneva rode quietly for a while. “I think I’ve always known inside. Why did Mother keep the baby?”

“She found out she was pregnant with you. She said she knew she was going to have a girl, and she wanted you to have a playmate. What she didn’t count on was Di-Peachy growing up to be the spitting image of her mother. By then you two were inseparable. Every time your mother looks at that blameless child, she sees her own humiliation.”

“I am my sister’s keeper then?”

Henley threw away the cigar butt. “You were always responsible for Di-Peachy.”

“Does she know?”

“No, but I’m going to tell her tonight. She deserves to know the truth. The only truth I ever told her was that she was named for Diane De Poitiers, the most beautiful woman in sixteenth-century France. As a child, you shortened all that into Di-Peachy.” He paused. “Don’t be as big a fool as your father. Learn to see reality as it is, not as you wish it to be.”

“Are you referring to my marriage?”

“I have given it some thought. Nash is a young man, and you are outshining him at the things men are supposed to do. That’s asking a lot of him.”

“It’s asking a lot of me to flounce around in starched petticoats. I’m a good soldier.”

“So were they.” Henley gestured toward a trench of mass graves.

“If I can stand, I can fight. And if I die, well, I won’t know about it, will I? I found something, and I won’t ever give it up!”

“You found that you love your country and that you are brave.” He pulled his neckerchief up over his mouth.

“No, I found myself.”

“Friday, all the jaybirds go to see the Devil. You see, there’s jes one Good Friday in the year. The others is given over to the Devil, his imps, and the jaybirds. This being Saturday, you safe as a lamb!” Sin-Sin triumphantly declared to Joseph Rutledge. He survived the amputation, but now he suffered with fever and flies. It was touch and go.

The two beekeepers, Beverly Fyffe from South Carolina and his Pennsylvania counterpart, Gunther Krutzer, were recovering nicely, due in part to one another. Their animated spirits lifted the other men.

Bebe Austin and her girls worked like Trojans. Lutie took it upon herself to give the women demonstrations of cleaning wounds, binding, removing bullets if visible to the naked eye. One hour after sunrise was the appointed time for lessons.

Meanwhile Kate rode from makeshift hospital to makeshift hospital. Sally Tompkin’s hospital was run the best for a household operation. Some ladies refused the assignment of Bebe’s girls, but most, unnerved by the suffering and physically frazzled by the backbreaking labor, agreed so long as it would be kept a secret. By the time Kate got back home, she
was freighted down with secrets. She no longer cared. What would ruin a reputation before the war shrank to insignificance now, but she appreciated shrewdness. Every woman knew the war would end eventually, and they projected into the future. They had reputations to protect. Kate really didn’t give a damn about her own, since she knew she would leave her husband.

She’d gone over it in her mind. Seeing these men bleed to death, listening to them talk about their wives, sweethearts, and mothers, smashed into her own heart with the force of a bullet. She and Mars were killing one another with indifference, punctuated only by a flare-up of hostilities. He deserved the kind of love these poor men spoke of in their agony. There was no reason to burden him with her insights now.