The Velvet Shadow (38 page)

Weeks passed. Flanna knew Alden was trying his best to arrange her transport to Port Royal, but the wheels of war and Washington turned slowly. In mid-January he told her that General McClellan insisted that the area around the Sea Islands was yet too unsettled for civilians. Over ten thousand slaves had been abandoned when their owners fled during the Port Royal bombardment, and these “contrabands,” not legally free and yet not enslaved, were in dire need of management. Alden had heard talk of a ship intended to aid these South Carolina blacks, but the ship would not sail until late March or early April.

Flanna swallowed her disappointment as well as she could. In the interim, she was delighted when Alden arranged for Franklin O’Connor to serve as an escort for soldiers traveling to and from the Alexandria Hospital. Many of the wounded from Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff still convalesced there, along with soldiers who fell sick in camp. After riding in the wagon with the sick, Flanna wandered through the hospital wards, watching, listening, and learning. She dared not speak her mind at the hospital for fear of revealing too much about herself, but she enjoyed indulging her medical curiosity far away from Dr. Gluick’s gimlet glance.

Located in an old seminary, the Alexandria Hospital was an irregular structure badly adapted to hospital purposes. Its abrupt halls and cramped stairways were damp and drafty, its wards too small for comfort. An unhealthy odor pervaded the building even on brisk, breezy days.

Though she enjoyed her visits, Flanna shuddered every time she crossed the hospital threshold. One afternoon she discovered the cause of the vile odors—a heap of filthy trash had been allowed to accumulate in the cellar. Because there were no indoor water closets or baths, nurses had to carry chamber pots to a dumping place. At some
time in the recent past, someone had decided it was far easier to dump chamber pots in the cellar than to properly dispose of the waste.

Fortunately, Flanna had been in the army long enough to know how the system worked. On her next visit, she tacked a stern sign to the cellar door. The next nurse to come by with a chamber pot paused at the top of the stairs to read it. “No dumping by order of Colonel Sacks?” She frowned and looked at Flanna, who loitered in the hallway. “Who is Colonel Sacks?”

“A very terrible, awful man.” Flanna pretended to shudder. “All chamber pots must be dumped in the ditch outside, or he’ll have even the nurses out digging trenches. The colonel is awfully fond of trenches.”

The woman took one look at Flanna’s callused palms, then moved to the door that led out into the yard. “I’ll not dig, not even for Old Abe himself,” she muttered, her voice echoing off the damp stone walls. “No sir, I’ll walk to Richmond and dump these blasted pots on Jeff Davis’s head before I’ll pick up a shovel.”

And so Colonel Sacks was born. Flanna left his threats on dirty equipment trays, next to untidy bandages, and tacked to the walls above unwashed floors. She left other notes hinting that the colonel might drop in for a surprise inspection, and gradually conditions at the Alexandria Hospital began to improve.

Unfortunately, Colonel Sacks could not intimidate the hospital visitors. Though there were several dedicated lay-nurses whom Flanna admired, the majority of visitors to the hospital made her writhe in shame. There were two types: the pious and the flashy. The pious folk walked slowly and solemnly up and down the wards, casting horrified glances at the patients. After intense whispered consultations with the surgeons, these men and women offered to pray for the soldiers’ souls. After doing so, they swiftly retired without smiling upon a single soldier or bestowing a word of comfort or cheer. The pious women were far worse than the men, for they went gawking through the wards as if they’d never seen a man before, peeping into every curtained couch and venting their pent-up feelings in outbursts of “Oh, Lord have mercy!” and “Look, dear, how terrible war
is!” One such pair of women—they always seemed to hunt in pairs—paused near the doorway of one ward and clasped their dainty hankies to their noses, exclaiming, “Heavens, what a smell! Worse than fried onions!”

The flashy visitors—young men who ought to be in the army—were no less annoying. These young dandies, usually accompanied by wasp-waisted, almond-eyed, cherry-lipped damsels, behaved as tourists. They moved throughout the hospital like summer shadows, leaving no trace of their goodwill behind but a lingering scent of perfume and a slightly sickened expression on the patients’ faces.

When Rufus Crydenwise was sent to the hospital for an infected toe, Flanna sat by his bedside for two days, watching in horror as doctors in blood-stained coats prodded his foot and debated whether or not he’d find it difficult to march with a toe missing. One surgeon moistened his finger with saliva, then dabbed the toe with spit, declaring that it merely needed a tobacco poultice.

Flanna waited until after the “experts” moved away, then she fetched a bottle of alcohol and a basin of clean water. “I’m not going to let them take your toe off,” she assured Rufus as she washed the swollen digit with alcohol and water. “They’ll have to get through me to take it, and though I’m not the biggest fellow in the company, I may be the most stubborn.”

Rufus grinned at her, wincing as she dabbed at the swollen area.

Flanna offered a weak smile as she shrugged. “Sorry.”

“That’s all right. You’re not nearly as bad as some of those Washington women.” He folded his hands behind his head and braced himself against the pain. “Lots of ladies come here to visit. Though they’ve tried, they haven’t rubbed the skin off my face yet.”

Flanna grinned, imagining the sentimental pawing the poor boy endured, then she cleared her throat. “Rufus, I think I can help. There’s pus under the skin, you see, and the skin needs to be broken. If you’ll let me lance the toe and clean it, I think it’ll be better by tomorrow.”

His smile vanished. “You won’t let them take the toe?”

“I said I wouldn’t.” She grinned at him. “Wasn’t I right about the lice? You shaved your head and cleaned your clothes, and didn’t the lice go away?”

Rufus nodded, but fear, stark and vivid, glittered in his eyes. “But this is different. ’Cause if they take my toe, it’ll gangrene, and then I’ll lose my foot. Heck, I might even lose my leg—”

“You’re not going to lose anything.” After glancing around to be sure no one paid her any mind, Flanna opened her bag and pulled out her scalpel. Without hesitation, she swished the blade in alcohol, then made one swift, sure cut on Rufus’s toe.

He yelped, then slapped his hand over his own mouth. The fellow in the next bed, a man whose eyes had been burned when his rifle overheated and exploded, turned his sightless eyes toward Rufus. “You all right over there?” His mouth grinned crookedly beneath his bandaged eyes. “Did she hurt you?”

Flanna kept working, though anxiety spurted through her. The blind man couldn’t see her, but he’d heard enough to guess she was a woman.

“I’m not hurt,” Rufus answered, gritting his teeth against the pain as Flanna poured alcohol into the oozing wound. “And you’d better apologize to the private here. He’s little, but he’s one tough son of a nut.”

An impenitent grin flashed across that wounded face. “My mistake.”

Indeed. Flanna continued her work, wondering if Rufus would remember the man’s remark, but the boy was clenching his teeth and straining against the iron bars of the headboard, probably cursing the day she walked into Company M.

She smiled to herself and kept working.

Dr. Garvey paused outside one of the wards. “And here, of course, we have several patients from your regiment, Major.”

Alden paused in the doorway, bored with his tour of the hospital. He’d come only because Colonel Farnham insisted that his officers be acquainted with all procedures regarding the wounded.

McClellan had some grandiose plan to fully educate his soldiers before sending them out to battle. This was just one aspect of what Alden and the other infantry officers had privately begun to refer to as “the grand stall.”

His eyes flitted over the men in the beds and the spare figures of two nurses in dark dresses. A young woman stood in the corner, vainly trying to encourage a sick man to take a cup of tea, and a soldier sat in a rectangle of sunlight at his buddy’s bedside, dabbing at the man’s foot with a cotton cloth.

He took a wincing breath as the sun sparked on the soldier’s copper hair. Flanna!

Dr. Garvey must have heard his gasp, for he straightened as his gaze took in Flanna’s ministrations. “What in the name of—” he began, striding into the room. “Soldier! What do you think you are doing?”

Flanna looked up, surprise siphoning the blood from her face. She opened her mouth as if to speak, then dropped her hand to her side.

“Answer me! What have you done to this patient?” The doctor grasped the wounded man’s toe and twisted it, causing the boy to howl in pain.

“Stop—no!” The poor boy kicked his foot free of the doctor’s hand and lowered it, slowly, to the bed. “It’s all right.” His jaw was clamped hard and he breathed through his mouth with a heavy panting sound, but he met the doctor’s hard gaze. “This is O’Connor, from my company. I told him to take care of my foot.”

“You told him?” The doctor’s voice dripped with contempt. “You are my patient! What right have you to decide anything?”

“Beggin’ your pardon, Doctor,”—the young man glared at the surgeon with burning, reproachful eyes—“but as it’s my foot and my toe, I figured I ought to have some say in the matter.”

“This is my hospital, my hospital bed, and you are my patient. You have no say in anything, for you are nothing but a lowly private.”

“Excuse me, Doctor.” Alden came forward, his hands behind his back, studiously avoiding Flanna’s gaze. “With all due respect, you’re
wrong about that. This is an army hospital, this is an army bed, and at the moment, this soldier belongs to Uncle Sam.”

The doctor flashed Alden a look of disdain. “Mind your step, sir.”

“I intend to.” Alden turned to the patient, trying to place the young man’s name. “You are from the great state of Massachusetts?”

“Yes sir.” The boy cast a glance of well-mannered dislike toward the doctor, then looked at Alden. “I’m Rufus Crydenwise, Company M, of the Twenty-fifth Massachusetts.”

Alden smiled. “Then you are one of my men.”

“Yes, Major.” A smile found its way through the boy’s mask of uncertainty. “Indeed, sir, I am, and so is Private O’Connor.”

Alden turned to Flanna. “Are you, Private?”

Her long lashes shuttered her eyes, and he had to strain to hear her voice. “Yes sir.”

“If you’re proud, speak up.”

Her eyes flashed at him then, gleaming green and dangerous in the sunlight. “Yes sir,” she said, her voice cold and exact.

“I fail to see what this has to do—” the doctor began, but Alden interrupted.

“Do you, Private, intend to harm your companion?”

“No sir.” She frowned with cold fury.

“Well then.” Alden turned to the doctor and smiled. “I believe we’ve established that there is nothing amiss here. Private O’Connor is merely tending to his companion as men often do out in the field. And since Private Crydenwise has no objection—”

“Major.” The doctor stood very still, his eyes narrow. “I have important things to do and have no time for this foolishness. If these men want to doctor each other, have them do it someplace else, not in my hospital. And as for you, if you’ve seen enough, I’d like to get back to my work.”

Alden inclined his head. “Thank you, sir, for your time. I believe I’ll have Private O’Connor escort me back to camp.”

The doctor gave an irritable tug at his sleeve. “That would be a most excellent idea, Major. Good day.”

Dr. Garvey moved away, his footsteps thundering over the wooden floors. Relaxing, Alden looked at the young man in the bed. “You all right, soldier? O’Connor didn’t hurt you too badly?”

“Naw.” A broad smile lifted the youth’s pendulous cheeks. “It just stung a little, that’s all.”

“Good.” He turned to Flanna, noting her flushed cheeks. “Pack your bag, Private, and let’s depart. I trust you have no further business here?”

“No,” she whispered, thrusting several implements into her medical bag.

“Good.” Alden moved toward the doorway and waited while she said her farewells to Crydenwise. She moved confidently over her patient, checking the toe one last time and removing the rag she’d used to clean it.

Alden felt an inexplicable, lazy smile sweep over his face as he watched her. Flanna knew what she was doing, and she had not flinched before Dr. Garvey’s commanding gaze. But she hadn’t spoken up for herself either. Alden leaned against the doorframe, thinking. When the war was over, Roger would dress her in red velvet ball gowns and set her on a shelf in his house, a lovely figurine for his fellow politicians to view and admire. And Flanna would surrender her calling in order to please him, for she was a lady, thoroughly schooled in obedience and genteel deference to one’s husband.

He saw her lean over Crydenwise, her eyes soft with concern, her hand lightly brushing the short stubble that grew on his head. Though she wore a shapeless uniform and a shadow of dirt unmistakably smudged that alabaster cheek, Alden thought she’d never seemed lovelier than at that moment.