The Secrets of Mary Bowser (42 page)

The last day of January had me on my knees, scrubbing streaks of who knows what the children had grimed along the wall of the nursery. Hortense and Sophronia were downstairs, laying the table for another of the martial dinners Jeff Davis now hosted with such frequency. Queen Varina must have caught sight of all the places they were setting, because she stormed into her husband’s office, her flint-and-steel temper striking loud enough to be heard right through the wall.

“Jefferson, do you realize that a turkey costs thirty dollars these days, and coffee is twenty times what it was three years ago? How am I to run this household with a hundred-dollar dinner three times a week, no income from Brierfield, and only your meager salary to keep us?”

“Our soldiers are living on eighteen ounces of flour and four ounces of pork fat a day. Do you suppose there is a one of them who wouldn’t give his month’s wages for a turkey?” Davis hacked liked a whole ward of lung disease patients. “You spend twice what this meal costs to host luncheons for Mary Chesnut and the Preston girls.”

“If I entertain the wives and daughters of important men, it’s only so the people might have a chance to love and admire their president. You are so much a general, and not enough a politician. I must tend to the difference.”

“There will be time enough for politicking when the war is won. But so long as the recapture of Fort Donelson, the skirmishing at Mingo Swamp, and the protection of the Yazoo Pass occupy me, military men shall occupy our dining room.”

Queen Varina couldn’t have known half what he was talking about. She probably couldn’t even have pointed to those places on a map. But I smiled and set myself back to leaching the Davis children’s dirt from the cream and rose clusters of the wall paper, satisfied that my afternoon’s service in the dining room would furnish me with plans of the Confederate forces in Tennessee, Missouri, and Mississippi.

The day’s snow had turned to rain by the time I left the Gray House, but I hardly marked the downpour as I made my way among the crowds on Broad Street. General Joseph Wheeler was preparing to move two brigades of cavalry on Dover, Tennessee, in an effort to overtake the Federals who held Fort Donelson. I rushed upstairs to set down the day’s report, as though my haste could marshal the Union forces that much faster. Only after I finished encoding the message did I trouble myself that Wilson wasn’t home, wasn’t in his shop either.

I ran my finger along the stack of writing paper McNiven brought me the week before. Paper was such a dear commodity these days, Wilson joked the pickets along Osborne Turnpike could arrest him just for finding a sheet of it on his person, whether they could decode the message inscribed on it or no. I hadn’t seen the humor in such jesting, and his absence now didn’t have me any more amused.

With the last bit of light disappearing from the sky, I tried to occupy myself by starting supper, as though all that was fretting me was the thought of Wilson coming home tardy and teasing me about my poor cooking. As the pot of dried peas came to a boil, I heard the door swing open and my husband’s familiar footfall on the stairs. But when Wilson entered our kitchen, the vexation tugging at his face told me there was yet more to worry about.

He hung back, holding fast to his news. Whatever he didn’t want to tell, I didn’t want to hear. The silence pulled on both of us like a leaden weight, until at last he said, “McNiven just got word, Lewis is at Howard’s Grove.”

The hospital out on Mechanicsville Turnpike was where they put smallpox patients, hoping it was far enough beyond the city limits that they wouldn’t spread the epidemic. “How long has he been there?”

“Heard it was a week Tuesday.”

Today was already Saturday. Papa’d probably been infected two weeks before anyone realized he had smallpox. And then he’d lain suffering eleven days, without me even knowing. “Please don’t let tomorrow morning be too late.”

I didn’t realize I’d said the words aloud, until Wilson answered. “You can’t go up there. It’s too contagious.”

“Mama and I were vaccinated, back when the Van Lews were.”

Wilson found faint comfort in that. “Maybe you’ve noticed there’s no vaccination scar on my arm.”

I told him I would stay with Bet while I nursed Papa. The Van Lew mansion was a mile and a quarter closer to Howard’s Grove anyway. “Will you find McNiven first thing tomorrow, tell him he needs to come up with a story for Queen Varina about why his slave won’t be serving her the next little while?”

“From what you say, that woman doesn’t have the patience to wait for a hired girl.” Wilson’s eyes searched mine. “How are you going to feel if you go to Lewis and then lose your place at the Gray House?”

“How am I going to feel if I don’t?”

The next morning, I gripped my satchel in one hand and my skirts in the other, navigating the mud of Mechanicsville Turnpike as the earliest dawn lit the sky. When I arrived at Howard’s Grove, I searched out the row of buildings flying white flags, the sign for smallpox wards. I was halfway to them when a dog came barking at me.

Before I could get it to hush, a voice called, “Halt there.”

Maybe the potbellied private was happy at first to draw homeguard duty, rather than being sent into battle. But turning to face him, I could see he didn’t much care for watching over a contagion, nor for being woken early on a Sunday. He’d jumped out of bed so fast when he heard the barking that he forgot his cap, and rain cascaded down his bald pate.

I bowed my kerchiefed head. “Morning, Marse.”

“What do you mean, sneaking about this here facility?”

“Come to tend one of the patients over to the colored hospital, sir.”

He snorted. “We got doctors for that. Don’t need no darkies coming by, stirring up trouble, spreading the pox.”

“I’s vaccinated. Mistress done it years ago.”

“I don’t care if Mistress jigged with the cow that had the pox.” He gestured toward the turnpike with his rifle. “Now git.”

I might have told him it had been decades since anyone used cows to vaccinate against smallpox. But I didn’t suppose he’d take kindly to a medical lesson from a negro. As the white flags flapped in the rising wind, I turned from where Papa lay and headed back to Richmond.

It took me three-quarters of an hour to reach the Van Lew mansion, and not much more than three-quarters of a minute for Bet to pronounce her solution, once I told her what had transpired. “William Carrington is a fair man. He always sees to it the Federal prisoners in his charge get adequate medical care.” To her, that was the singular mark of a person’s decency, but I knew it was no guarantee a prominent FFV would have sympathy for a slave. Still, I was relieved when she marched over to Carrington Row, the austere block of Church Hill, intent on securing me a pass from her neighbor, the surgeon inspector of Richmond’s hospitals.

She came back just as the St. John’s bell was tolling for the morning service. Her pursed lips and pinched brow confirmed what I already feared—though some people survived the smallpox, Dr. Carrington’s prognosis for anyone lying in the colored ward at Howard’s Grove was grim. When I thanked her for the pass, she waved my words away and tramped out to the carriage house, harnessing the horse to her gig so she could ride me back to the hospital.

We arrived to find the private huddled beneath a lean-to that served as the hospital guardhouse. I raised the umbrella so that Bet could sit up a bit straighter as she reined the horse to a halt. She handed down the pass as though she were General Beauregard presenting the man with his marching orders. “Here is a letter from Dr. Carrington, directing that my servant is to nurse a patient in the colored hospital.”

The private pulled out a soiled handkerchief and mopped at his face. “I don’t take my orders from anyone but Captain Babkan, usually.”

“Perhaps you would care to find out for yourself whether the surgeon inspector of Richmond outranks your captain. You would have ample time to review the order of command if you were sentenced to a month in Castle Thunder for insubordination.”

At the mention of the military prison, he squinted at the pass, waving his handkerchief like a flag of surrender. “She’s welcome to tend the lot of them. Skittish as most darkies are, I don’t suppose she can bear the stink in there for long.”

Bet smiled, pleased as ever to get her way with a Confederate. And so long as it served me and Papa, I was pleased enough to let her.

But not even the sentry’s taunting prepared me for the misery of the negro ward. It was a dreary, windowless shed of ten foot by twelve. The air so fetid with rotting flesh, the scented flannel I held over my mouth and nose barely kept me from gagging. Dozens of pox sufferers lay in miserable heaps on the dirt floor. Hideous bumps distorted their features so, it took me several minutes to recognize Papa.

“It’s Mary El,” I whispered, kneeling beside him.

“What you doing here?” His voice cracked as he strained to make out my face in the darkness.

“I’ve come to tend you.”

“I don’t want you here.”

“Don’t worry, Mama and I were vaccinated against the smallpox years ago. Remember?”

He moved his head, just barely, toward a wretched woman huddled about two feet away. Papules crusted across her skin. “I look like that?”

I nodded. Truth was, he looked worse.

“Don’t want you remembering me like that. Go on now.” He grimaced and closed his eyes, slipping into a delirium so deep he didn’t realize I was still there.

In the long hours that followed, I saw that his condition was even worse than I’d feared. Pustules coating the inside of his mouth and throat kept him from drinking the water or swallowing the pot liquor I’d brought. Giant scabs of pus encrusted his arms and legs—confluent smallpox, the deadliest form of the disease. If he shed a massive scab, he would surely succumb to an infection of the exposed flesh. That would mean a miserable, rotting death, though I didn’t know if it would bring him more suffering than dying of thirst would.

Immune though I was from contracting smallpox, I felt sick with grief when I emerged from Howard’s Grove that evening. It wasn’t much comfort to find McNiven waiting for me. “Take this to Bet, lass,” he said, holding out a small brown bottle labeled laudanum.

Queen Varina and her friends resorted to the drug every time they had so much as a sick-headache. But I could hardly imagine Bet desiring to grow dull and languid as a laudanum user.

“What use does she have for this?”

“Not she, he”—McNiven jerked his head in the direction of the hospital—“what she will be tending. Tomorrow be Monday, and Varina Davis will be wanting her maid. Likewise the Federals will be wanting word o’ the Confederate movements at Vicksburg.”

“I don’t much care what Varina Davis wants,” I said. “Nor the Federals. I’ll be spending the day nursing my papa. And as many days more until he passes.”

“Aye, so he is dying. What need you to sit watch as he does, when he will not be the better for it, and others will be much the worse? Since Fredericksburg, the tide has changed to favor the Confederates. We maun gain the Mississippi, or all will be lost.”

What more did I have to lose? Mama was long dead. Papa lay ravaged by smallpox. Wilson and I had passed a worrisome year, prickling with apprehension as one after another, supposed spies were hanged in Richmond—after Webster, we never even spoke of the executions, though each of us marked the news-sheet reports closely. And now McNiven thought fit to order me to give up my last days with Papa in order to slave to Queen Varina. I didn’t say another word before walking past him to head down Mechanicsville Turnpike.

When I arrived on Church Hill, Bet led me up to what nine months before she’d declared General McClellan’s room. The vase beside the bed stood empty, and the spyglass was put away. The bright floral pattern of the appurtenances made a mockery of Bet’s hope for Union victory—and mine for Papa’s freedom.

She lit the fire, then brought me some supper. I didn’t care much for eating, and when she left me, I dozed fretfully, haunted by nightmares of orange-haired ogres whose monstrous bodies were riddled with stinking, pus-filled protuberances. I awoke confused, reaching for Wilson, until I remembered how I’d quarantined myself from him. Lonely in the dark, still mansion, I slipped up to the garret that had been Mama’s and my quarters.

I was startled to find the room stripped bare. Mama hadn’t left anything worth wanting when we moved to Papa’s cabin after Bet gave us our freedom. And I’d been glad enough to quit the newer furnishings when I married Wilson. But still, it jarred me to see the space empty, as though all memory of me and Mama had been cleared out along with the scuffed table or the brass candlestick.

Finding no comfort in the empty attic, I stole back down the servants’ stair. A taper flickered in the second-floor hall, and I made out the broad form of Bet’s mother.

“I hope I didn’t wake you, ma’am,” I said as I came along the corridor.

“I am more awake than asleep, most nights. It is the curse of age. Perhaps you would care to sit up with me a while, as long as you are wakeful, too?”

It was a request, I reminded myself, not a command. And her company might at least distract me some. “Thank you,” I said. “I suppose I would.”

I followed her into her dressing room, and we settled into the matching hunter green armchairs. “How is Lewis?” she asked.

“Very bad off. I don’t expect he can recover.”

She stared at the reflection of the candle in her dressing table mirror. “I lost my own father to an epidemic. Yellow fever.” The disease had ravaged Philadelphia years back, coming in nearly annual outbreaks. “He was the mayor, and he stayed in town out of a sense of duty. Sent his family to the country, but didn’t think to save himself.”

“At least he had the choice to stay or go.” It was the only time in all my life I ever sassed her. But her response came in a defeated sigh.

“Do you think that was much comfort to his widow? Or to his infant daughter, who never knew her own father? Be thankful you’ll have memories of Lewis to carry with you after he’s gone.”

What I wouldn’t give to forget the memory of him today, I thought, watching the molten wax of the burning candle form into a bulb, round and swollen like the pustules on Papa’s skin. The curved mass burst, sending a stream of wax to settle at the base of the candlestick.