Love and War: The North and South Trilogy (Book Two) Page 30

  Orry and his wife questioned one another with their eyes; each knew the problems the appeal presented. Since Orry was leaving, Madeline decided she must be the one to resolve them. “We’ll surely help you all we can. Darling, would you find Andy, so he can take them to the cabins?” Orry seemed to understand that she had another purpose in asking; he nodded and walked off, leaving her free to speak.

  “Aunt Belle, my husband is going to Richmond in the morning. He’s going into the army. I’ll be in charge here until I join him. I’m only too glad to give you refuge, with one reservation. Right or wrong, the people at Mont Royal aren’t free to go north, as you plan to do. They might resent you or cause trouble for me.”

  “Ma’am?” Jane said, to get her attention. Madeline turned. “There is no right in slavery, only wrong.”

  Madeline’s reply had sharpness. “Even if I agree with you, the practical solution is another matter.”

  Jane reflected on that with a visible defiance Madeline admired yet couldn’t tolerate. At last Jane uttered a small sigh. “I don’t think we can stay, Aunt Belle.”

  “Think once more. This lady is decent. You be the same. Don’t butt in like a billy goat. Bend.”

  Jane hesitated. Aunt Belle glared. The younger girl said, “Would an arrangement like this be agreeable, Mrs. Main? I’ll work for you to earn our keep. I won’t tell any of your people where we’re going or do anything to stir them up. As soon as Aunt Belle can travel, we’ll pack and go.”

  “That’s fair,” Madeline said.

  “Jane keeps her word,” Aunt Belle said.

  “Yes, she impresses me that way.” Eyes on the girl, Madeline nodded as she spoke. Neither woman smiled, but in that moment, liking began. “Our new overseer may not care for the arrangement, but I believe he’ll accept—”

  Voices in the dusk interrupted her. Orry and the head driver stepped into the orange halo of the lantern beside the kitchen door. “I’ve explained matters to Andy,” Orry said. “There’s an empty cabin available. That is—” The pause asked a question.

  “Yes, we’ve worked out the details,” Madeline told him. “Andy, this is Aunt Belle Nin and her niece, Jane.” She described the bargain she had struck with them.

  “All right,” Andy said. Taken with the girl, the young driver smiled in his friendliest way. Madeline felt sorry for him. The girl was in love with an idea.

  “Mr. Orry says you have a wagon,” Andy continued. “I’ll drive you to the cabin.”

  “Pick up some barbecue in the kitchen,” Orry said. “You two are probably hungry.”

  “Starved,” the tiny octoroon said. “I don’t know you, Mr. Main, but you’re beginning to sound like a good Christian person, too.”

  As the wagon proceeded slowly to the slave community, Andy peeked over his shoulder at Jane. When he had first approached the kitchen porch and saw her there, gathering and reflecting the orange light, he had caught his breath in wonder. He had never set eyes on anyone more beautiful.

  He worked up courage to say, “You speak mighty well, Miss Jane. Can you read?”

  “And write,” she replied from the wagon bed, where she sat with Aunt Belle’s legs resting on top of hers. “I can cipher, too. A year before Mrs. Milsom died, she knew she was going and started to teach me.”

  “That was against the law.”

  “She said the devil with the law. She was a feisty old lady. She said I had to be ready to make my way alone.” The mule plodded; the axle creaked. “Can you read and write?”

  “No.” Then, desperate to make a good impression, he blurted, “I’d like to know how, though. Yes, indeed. A man can’t better himself unless he has learning.”

  “And a man can’t better himself when he’s the property of—” Aunt Belle whacked her niece’s wrist with her fingers. Jane looked chastened as she finished, “I’d be happy to give you lessons, but I couldn’t do it without asking Mrs. Main’s permission.”

  “Maybe we could do that sometime.”

  “Let’s eat first,” Aunt Belle said irritably. “Let’s remember who needs attention here, is that all right?”

  “Just fine,” Andy said, jubilant.

  The wagon rolled into the lane between the slave cottages. At the gnarled base of a mammoth live oak rising between two of them, Cuffy sat with his spine against the bark, a twig in his teeth, and his right hand down between his legs, scratching lazily. Spying the unfamiliar girl in the wagon, he sat up. He had heard nothing about purchase of any new slaves. Who was she? He surely wanted to find out.

  Giving a nasty glance at Andy, who paid no attention, Cuffey watched the wagon pass. His eyes returned to the lush line of the girl’s bosom, and his hand grew busier in his crotch.

  In bed, naked beneath a comforter, Orry said, “I liked that little nigra girl. Peppery; just like the old woman. But I have a feeling you can trust her to keep her word.”

  “I wouldn’t have let her stay otherwise,” Madeline touched him. “Everything will be fine. Let’s not spend your last night worrying that it won’t.”

  “Lord, I’m going to miss you these next two or three months.”

  “Show me how much.”

  In the morning, in a hat and frock coat and cravat suitable for a funeral, Orry kissed his vaguely smiling mother. “Thank you for visiting, sir. Do come again, won’t you?” she said.

  As he kissed his wife she held him fiercely, whispering: “God keep you safe, dearest. One day when I was small, a moment came when I suddenly understood the meaning of the word death. I started crying and ran to my father. He took me in his arms and said I shouldn’t let it frighten me too much, because we all shared the predicament. He said it eased the mind and heart to remember we are all dying of life. It took me years to understand and believe him. I do, but—I don’t want it to happen to you any sooner than necessary. Life’s become too sweet.”

  “Don’t worry,” he reassured her. “We’ll be together before long. And I don’t think anyone fires at officers who sit behind desks.”

  He kissed and embraced her once more and went away down the lane, with Aristotle driving.

  41

  CERTAIN AMERICAN CIVILIANS REMEMBERED that two of the chief destroyers of the British Army in the Crimea were dirt and disease. Not long after Sumter fell, these civilians decided to prevent, if they could, a repetition in the Union encampments of those mistakes of half a dozen years ago and half a world away.

  As soon as the plan became public, army surgeons began to scoff and call the civilians meddling amateurs. So did most government officials. The civilians persisted, forming the United States Sanitary Commission. By midsummer, the organization had a chief executive, Frederick Law Olmsted, the man who had designed New York City’s Central Park in 1856 and described slavery in unfavorable terms in a widely read travel memoir.

  Lincoln and the War Department didn’t want to sanction the commission but were forced to do so because important people were connected with it, including Mr. Bache, a grandson of Ben Franklin, and Samuel Gridley Howe, the famous Boston doctor and humanitarian. Even after official recognition, members didn’t forgive the President for saying they were a fifth wheel on the coach.

  Whether the nay-sayers liked it or not, the commission intended to supply soldiers with items they lacked and to police the camps and hospitals to keep them clean. Some of the opposition to this work softened after Bull Run; sixteen commission wagons had driven there to bring out wounded when most of the Union soldiers were fleeing the other way.

  The commission recruited and united great masses of women all across the North, giving focus and direction to volunteer work that had been largely individual during the early weeks of the war. In Lehigh Station, as elsewhere, ladies organized the first of many Sanitary Fairs to raise money and gather goods for the organization.

  While Scipio Brown was bringing the rest of his waifs to the newly expanded building and settling them in with a Hungarian couple hired to supervise the place, Constance was bu
sy planning a Sanitary Fair for the second Friday and Saturday in November. The site was Hazard’s shipping and receiving warehouse down by the railroad tracks beside the canal.

  Wotherspoon kept crews working two days and nights to clear the building by loading huge shipments of iron plate onto a series of special trains. Virgilia helped as a committee member and so did Brett, who justified it on two grounds: her husband was a Union officer and, even if he weren’t, humanitarian concerns in this case outweighed partisan ones. The ultimate aim of the fair and the commission was the saving of lives. Brett’s real problem in connection with the fair was working with Virgilia. It was difficult.

  From the first hour, the fair was a success, drawing huge crowds from the valley. Great loops of patriotic bunting decorated the walls and rafters of the warehouse. The most popular display featured posed photographs of some of the brave boys of Colonel Tilghman Good’s Forty-seventh Pennsylvania Volunteers, the valley’s own regiment, together with a greatly enlarged newspaper likeness of General McClellan. The sketch artist for the local paper exhibited satiric portraits of Slidell and Mason, the reb commissioners to Europe who had been dragged off the British mail packet Trent early in the month; the pair was presently imprisoned in Boston, which outraged the Queen’s government and provoked threats from Lord Lyons, British minister in Washington.

  There were military exhibits—stacked arms, contents of a typical haversack, an authentic canteen authentically pierced by a ball—and booths for collection of food, reading material, and clothing. Virgilia manned the clothing booth. A committee member had somehow obtained a regulation army tunic of dark blue shoddy, from which small squares had been cut. Every fifteen minutes, Virgilia would gather a crowd, then conduct her demonstration. Holding a square of shoddy over a bowl, she poured water on the material. The shoddy disintegrated into little pellets, which she distributed to the outraged spectators, coupling this with a request for decent clothing to be deposited in the barrels provided.

  The work excited her; she was striking a small but useful blow against the South. She also felt quite pleased with her appearance. Constance had loaned her a shawl and Brett a cameo brooch to pin it at the bosom of her dark brown dress. She had done her hair in a silk net and put on teardrop earrings of iridescent opal, also borrowed. Because of her speaking skills, polished by appearances at abolitionist rallies, she was by far the best demonstrator in the hall. She earned a compliment from her sector chairman and a more important one from a man she didn’t know.

  He was a major from the Forty-seventh. While Virgilia tore the shoddy apart verbally and literally, he watched from across the aisle, in front of the cologne booth; soldiers were begging for perfume to defend against the stench of camp sinks and open drains.

  The officer studied Virgilia during the demonstration. She lost her train of thought and faltered when his eye dropped from her face to her breasts, then shifted back. He left supporting the arm of a woman, perhaps his wife, but those few moments in which he looked at Virgilia were immensely important to her.

  Always before, feeling and looking ugly, she had never appealed to any men except outcasts, like poor Grady. But there had been a sea change, and the major of volunteers had found her, if not beautiful, at least worthy of notice. The profundity of the change couldn’t be denied; realizing it left her euphoric.

  Virgilia experienced a letdown following the final day of the fair. She roved the house and town, knowing she must leave, must find a direction for herself. The days passed, and still she couldn’t.

  Nearly two weeks after the fair, Constance brought a letter to the dinner table. “It’s from Dr. Howe, of the Sanitary Commission. He’s an old friend.”

  “Is he? From where?” Virgilia asked.

  “Newport. He and his wife summered there when we did. Don’t you remember?” Virgilia shook her head and bent to her plate; she had managed to forget almost everything about those years.

  Brett spoke. “Does the doctor say anything about the fair?”

  “Indeed he does. He says ours was one of the most successful thus far. At a dinner party, he reported the fact to Miss Dix herself—here, read it.” She passed the letter to Brett, seated on her right.

  Brett scanned the letter, then murmured, “Miss Dix. Is she the New England woman I’ve read about? The one who’s worked so hard for reform of the asylums?”

  Constance nodded. “You probably saw the long piece about her in Leslie’s. She’s very famous and very dedicated. The article said Florence Nightingale inspired her to go to Washington when war broke out. Miss Nightingale landed at Scutari, in the Crimea, with thirty-seven Englishwomen, and they saved scores of lives that might have been lost otherwise. Miss Dix has been superintendent of army nurses since the summer.”

  Virgilia looked up. “They are using women as nurses?”

  “At least a hundred,” Brett replied. “Billy told me. The women get a salary, a living allowance, transportation—and the privilege of bathing soldiers, most of whom are pretty unenthusiastic about the idea, Billy said.”

  “I understand the surgeons are violently opposed to the nurses,” Constance added. “But that’s a doctor for you—guarding his little scrap of territory like a dog.” She hadn’t missed Virgilia’s sudden animation. She turned to her. “Would nursing work interest you?”

  “I think it might—though I don’t suppose I’d qualify.”

  Constance considered it a kindness to withhold certain details from the piece in Leslie’s. Miss Dix required no medical or scientific training from her recruits; all she asked was that they be over thirty and not attractive. So Constance could truthfully say, “I disagree. You’d be perfect. Would you like me to write Dr. Howe for a letter of introduction?”

  “Yes.” Then, more strongly, “Yes, please.”

  That night, Virgilia was sleepless with excitement. Perhaps she had found a way to serve the Union cause and strike at those responsible for the death of her lover. When she finally closed her eyes, she dreamed lurid dreams.

  Grady’s grave opened. He rose from it, bits of earth falling from his eyes and nose and mouth as he held out his hand, pleading for someone to avenge him.

  The picture blurred, replaced by an unfamiliar plantation where dreamy black figures bucked up and down, impregnating moaning colored girls to beget more human chattels.

  Then, a long row of men in gray; she watched each being shot, shot again, shot a third and fourth time, blood spatters multiplying on the breasts of their tunics while one man in Union blue fired endlessly. She knew the slayer. She had nursed him in a field hospital till he was once more fit for duty.

  She awoke sweating and excited.

  In the note included with his letter of introduction, Dr. Howe offered two pieces of advice: Virgilia should not dress too elaborately for her interview with Miss Dix, and although the superintendent of nurses would be quick to detect raw flattery, a discreet bit of praise for Conversations on Common Things would not be out of order. Miss Dix’s little book of household advice had sold steadily ever since its publication in 1824. It was in its sixtieth printing; the author was proud of her child.

  Virgilia reached Washington during an early December warm spell. When she stepped down to the sunlit train platform, she wrinkled her nose at the odor arising from eight pine crates on a baggage wagon. Water stained the wood, seeped from the joints, and splashed on the platform. She asked a baggage man what the boxes contained.

  “Soldiers. Weather like this, the ice don’t hold.”

  “Has there been a battle?”

  “Not any big ones that I know about. These boys likely died of the flux or something similar. You hang around a while, you’ll see hundreds of them boxes.”

  Swallowing back something in her throat, Virgilia moved away, carrying her own portmanteau. No wonder the commission considered its work so necessary.

  At ten the next morning, she entered the office of Dorothea Dix. Miss Dix, a spinster of sixty, was neat and orderly in
her dress, her gestures, and her speech. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Miss Hazard. You have a brother in Secretary Cameron’s department, do you not?”

  “Two of them, actually. The second is a commissioned officer working for General Ripley. And my youngest brother is with the engineers in Virginia. It was his wife who recommended your book, which I thoroughly enjoyed.” She prayed Miss Dix wouldn’t ask a question about the contents, since she hadn’t bothered to buy or borrow a copy.

  “I am happy to hear it. Will you see your brothers during your stay in the city?”

  “Oh, naturally. We’re very close.” Did it sound too exaggerated, making the lie apparent? “It’s my hope that my stay will be permanent. I would like to be a nurse, though I’m afraid I have no formal training.”

  “Any intelligent female can quickly learn the technical aspects. What she cannot acquire, if she does not already possess it, is the one trait I consider indispensable.”

  Miss Dix folded her hands and regarded Virgilia with gray-blue eyes whose sternness seemed at odds with the femininity of her long neck and her soft voice.

  “Yes?” Virgilia prompted.

  “Fortitude. The women in my nurse corps confront filth, gore, depravity, and crudity that good breeding forbids me to describe. My nurses are subjected to hostility from patients and also from the doctors, who are, in theory, our allies. I have definite ideas about the work we do and how it must be done. I tolerate no disagreement—a characteristic that further alienates certain politicians and surgeons. Those are challenges we face. Yet the greatest one remains the challenge to human courage. What you will do if you join us, Miss Hazard, is what I have done for many years, because someone must. You will not merely look into hell; you will walk there.”

  Virgilia breathed with soft sibilance, trying to conceal the sensual excitement seizing her again. In blinding visions that hid Miss Dix, windrows of young men in cadet gray fell bleeding and screaming. Grady grinned at the spectacle, showing the fine artificial teeth she had bought to replace the ones pulled out to mark him as a slave—