by Ann Rinaldi
"I wouldn't let anybody trade on my name," I said.
"Half the soldiers fighting in this war are trading on the names of those whom they've met, and flashing souvenirs. It happens in all wars," she said.
"You. You're a spy. Else why would you be here?"
"I told you once. Yes, I spy for him."
I shrugged. "Well, your big report tonight can be that Jenny Anderson has a ball and chain tied around her ankle. Twelve pounds it weighs. And don't you dare say she deserves it or I'll hit you over the head with something. Just don't you sleep near me. Go somewhere else. You don't know the trouble you got me into with my brother."
Jenny Anderson whimpered pitifully. I could see the form of Martha putting a pillow under Jenny's ankle to try to make it more comfortable.
While Martha was doing this, the ball rolled off Jenny's bunk and slammed onto the wooden floor, making an earsplitting sound.
The Yankees must have thought Quantrill and all his raiders were attacking. They burst through the door from their private quarters in various modes of undress, some without shirts, some without boots, some in their Skivvies, but all with guns.
"What in the name of purple hell is going on here?" the head Yankee roared.
He carried a lantern. It cast shadows all over the place. I wished, like Charity McCorkle Kerr, that I had a rag doll to cling to. She, incidentally, was still in her corner, "playing the piano" for that doll.
The head Yankee looked at her and frowned. "Somebody shut that kid up or I'll shoot her," he threatened.
Martha went over to do so.
I slept fitfully that night, and in the morning when the gruel was handed out, I could not bring myself to eat it, though my stomach rumbled with hunger. Sue Mundy came over with a dish of eggs and bacon and sat down beside me.
"I'd give you some of this if only you'd be friends."
She was bargaining. I was wise enough, taught by Seth, to know that. What did she want? "Always find out what the other person wants first," Seth had taught me. "You'll place him at a disadvantage if you know."
"What is it you want from me?" I asked her.
She laughed softly. "Somebody's schooled you. You'd make a good spy. Here, take a piece of bacon and I'll tell you."
I humiliated myself by taking a piece of bacon. A "Judas kiss," Seth called it, though he wasn't much on the Bible.
"All I want to know is where Seth's house is," she said quietly. "And not for me. Or the Yankees. But for you. I think, when all this is over, you should go there for safety. The Yankees are talking of some order being written up, sending the others out of this district. I don't think you should go. Seth is here, and Seth is all you have."
"I know where it is," I said. "Seth took me there. What does it matter to you?"
"It doesn't. I was just making conversation. Look, sweetie. I'm sorry if I hurt you and got you into trouble with Seth. You're a darling girl, and I want to make it up to you. So I'm telling you this: Go to your brother's farm. You can make things up to Seth there. Prove you're no little pest of a girl."
I was about to come back with a sassy reply when the building seemed to tremble. It shook for about three minutes. "An earthquake," Amanda Selvey said.
"No, this place is falling down!" yelled Chloe Fletcher. She was not joking.
I opened my mouth. No words came out. My whole being shook. The walls trembled, and the floor bucked. Some girls were screaming. The door to the Yankees' room blew open and a guard yelled in to us. "Come on. Get out! Now!"
Chapter Eleven
I OPENED MY mouth to say something, but no words came out. I was, for the moment, oddly fascinated with the way the bunks were sliding across the floor. By then the whole building was shuddering and there were grinding and screeching noises coming from the wood and bolts that held it together.
Plaster started falling from the ceiling, hitting some of the girls on the shoulders or heads. I saw blood where it shouldn't be, on blond curls and chestnut braids. Joists and timbers fell with terrible noises. Then came the sound of gunshots.
Gunshots? Were the Yankees attacking now, too? No, those sounds were the walls popping open.
All was confusion. Clothes caught on wood and ripped. Girls fled by me with looks of horror in their eyes. Where were they going?
I looked down to see an object sliding toward me. It was Charity McCorkle Kerr's rag doll. I looked beyond it to see her still in her same corner, playing a lullaby on her piano. I picked up the rag doll and held it close. The floor was rocking back and forth now, the windows coming loose from their frames and falling to the ground, the glass shattering all over the place, the wood splintering.
"Out!" The guards pulled Eugenia Gregg and Lucy Younger out the door and tried to come back for more, but the doorway was blocked by a piece of ceiling that had fallen in the meantime.
"The front windows!" someone yelled. "Jump out the front windows!"
"I'm not leaving without my sister Jenny," Martha Anderson announced, as if people were cajoling her to leave. Her voice no longer reminded me of a fairy tale; it was a voice of determination. She pulled Jenny off her bunk, ball and chain with her, across the floor, which already had cavernous holes in it, to the front windows, where she picked her up.
"Come on, before the roof caves in on us," Sue Mundy said. I hadn't seen her in the last several minutes, hadn't even thought of her. She was from another world already, a world I'd had to put aside. The world of my childhood. And whether she was man or woman—and who was in love with her or not—was no longer of concern. This was the here and now. Buildings falling in. Girls screaming and unable to escape. Knowing they were going to die.
This was the Yankee twenty-cent special on how to grow up fast.
"I can't," I told Sue Mundy. "What about the other girls?"
In answer came a long, drawn-out grinding noise, then dust, thick and in my eyes, wood and bricks falling all over. And then I felt myself being lifted. By a man. And then, of a sudden, flying through the air and landing hard on the street below, then rolling over and over.
Was it Seth? Had he come to rescue me? When I was small, Seth used to hold me in his arms like this and we would roll down the hill at home and I'd scream with the thrill of it.
But this wasn't a grassy hill. There were bricks underneath us, and people standing all around. And there was blood on the side of my face and my head felt as if it had cracked open. I felt like Humpty Dumpty who had fallen off the wall, never to be put together again.
And for some reason I was holding a rag doll like the one I used to own. But the man holding me was not Seth.
It was Marcellus Jerome Clark, strong as Seth and still dressed as Sue Mundy.
In the next instant he was gone, whispering, "Someone will help you." In the minute after that, somebody landed with a dull thud right next to me. I could scarce turn my head to look for the terrible jagged pain. My eyes and ears didn't work so good with the dust settling in them and the screams and shouts of the people assembled all around.
The person who had landed next to me was Martha Anderson, on top of her sister Jenny with the ball and chain. There was a long beam on top of Martha and one end of it had landed on top of me, but I didn't feel it. Is this what they mean when they say people are in shock? I wondered.
"Hold on, honey, we'll help you." It was the man with the eye patch, Leonard Richardson.
"They need help more than I do." I pointed at Martha and Jenny, though it hurt to talk.
It took only a few minutes for them to remove the beam and to see that Martha had a gash in her side from landing on the chain. She was crying hysterically because she thought she had killed her sister.
"No," Richardson told her. "That's what killed her."
The twelve-pound ball had gone right through Jenny's body. There was more blood coming out of Martha than any one person had the right to have. Richardson and some others had bandages now and were attempting to stanch it. After they had bound Martha's side, sh
e sat half up and asked for her sisters. "Where's Mary?" she asked. "Where's Fanny?"
"Being taken care of, ma'am," Richardson told her.
But when I looked him in the eye, I could see he was lying. At least one of them was dead.
"Where are you taking her?" I asked. "You must let me know. She's my brother's promised."
"Don't worry, you're going with her." He bandaged my head, which was badly gashed, and gave me laudanum and water. My left arm was fractured, too. "I'm known in town as Richardson, but my real name is Jack Andrews. I'm a spy for Quantrill." He said it quietly.
My head was muddled. I kept going in and out of consciousness. "Why does everybody have two names?" I asked. "And why does everybody spy for Quantrill?"
He gave me some kind of an answer, but I could make no sense of it. They were putting Martha on a stretcher now, and he explained that they were taking us to a special ward at the army hospital at Fort Leavenworth.
"No one will know where to find us," I said, crying at the same time.
"Remember who you're talking to. Seth will know. Now be good and brave so I can tell him."
"Seth doesn't love me anymore." Thank heaven that I was babbling, because he put it down to a fever.
"Tell that to somebody who doesn't know him. Didn't he offer five Yankees for your release? Come now, let the potion do its work. Don't fight it."
All I could see now through my tears as they carried my stretcher to the waiting ambulance were faces peering down at me and women clucking and shaking their heads and murmuring, "Why, they're just children. Since when do we Yankees go to war against children?"
"Somebody said most of them got killed when the building fell," a man was saying.
"Dear God," from another man. "There will have to be some investigation into why this building fell. Answers must be had."
They lifted my stretcher into the back of the ambulance. Every turn of it, every bump, sent me into agony. "Martha," I cried, "where is Martha?"
"You're a good girl for looking out for your brother's intended," Jack Andrews said. "We're putting her right beside you. I'm riding along. And at the hospital I'll make sure you two are together."
"Who's going to tell Seth?"
He winked at me. "It's all been taken care of," he said.
Chapter Twelve
FORT LEAVENWORTH was to the north, they said, but it could have been in heaven for all I knew right then. And I don't know how long it took us to get there. The rocking, horse-drawn ambulance could have been a sweet chariot carrying me home, I was so near unconscious from the laudanum. Next to me on her stretcher, Martha slept and moaned. I reached over and took her hand. I minded that she must be in a very bad state. Would she die? What would Seth do if she did? I knew how smitten he was with her.
With my free hand I hugged Charity McCorkle Kerr's rag doll. Somebody had said Charity was dead. I wondered how many girls had died, and I wondered how I had managed to live.
Sue Mundy, that's how. I hated being beholden to her, but I was.
What with all the rocking and the low talk of the men on horseback outside and my occasional glimpse of the stars in the sky, I fell asleep. I didn't want to do that. Somebody had to stay awake to give them what for if they took us to another prison.
I didn't wake up through all the rest of it, through them carrying us into the hospital and up to the second floor, the floor allotted for "the girls belonging to Quantrill." I slept through the doctor who examined us and fixed our wounds and the sentries who opened the gates in the first place. Sadly, there were only about four other girls besides us who made it.
When I did wake, I saw we were in total darkness, with the exception of one candle burning on a nightstand at the foot of my bed. Someone was talking in a low voice.
"The father will be here in a few minutes."
"We have but a few minutes." Was that Seth's voice? "If the Yankees find us, I'll be hanged. I mustn't be caught. I've too many scores to settle."
"Here comes the father now."
It was Seth talking. I could see two, maybe three, and then four forms standing around Martha's and my beds. "Seth," I called out weakly.
He moved toward me. "Juliet, yes. I'm here."
"Is it really you, Seth?"
"Yes, honey. They came and got us. Bill Anderson is here, too."
"Is Martha dying?"
"No. Why do you say such?"
"Why do you need a priest?"
He was holding my hand. I was crying quietly. Tears were coming down my face. With his free hand he wiped them away.
"Seth," I said, "I'm sorry."
"Hush, don't you dare. Sorry has no place here."
"She saved me. Sue Mundy. Jumped out the window holding me." I didn't dare say Marcellus Jerome Clark. Leave it be. Let it die. Let it crumble under the building. "Do you still want me for a sister?"
"I've got you. I'm stuck with you. The Constitution of the United States says I can't give you back."
"I thought you gave all that up, the Constitution."
He leaned over and kissed me. "I need you to do something for me now. Will you?" His voice was ragged, full of tears.
"What can I do, the way I am?"
"I'm going to marry Martha. Bill Anderson is going to be my best man. Martha and I would like you to be our maid of honor."
"I can't stand up."
"You don't have to. Just be there for us."
The father was putting his priest's long stole around his neck and holding a Bible, though he couldn't see to read. Martha held Seth's hand and the words were said. Low, like the stars outside. Bright like them, too. My own heart was bursting inside me. Those darned tears wouldn't stop flowing down my face.
We weren't Catholic, but the Andersons were, and Seth stood staunch and proud and I don't think wedding vows ever meant so much, especially with him knowing the Yankees could get word that he and Bill were here any minute, and the result could be a hanging tree.
Bill Anderson produced a ring from somewhere. Said it was his mother's, and Seth put it on Martha's finger, then leaned down to kiss her, long and full of his love.
Bill was tugging at his arm. "We gotta go."
"Yes." He came to my bed and kissed me again. "Martha has instructions. Listen to her and behave."
In the next instant it was as if they never were. The room was empty again, and silent, and dark except for the one candle glowing on the nightstand at the foot of my bed.
Chapter Thirteen
"I NEED YOU," Seth was saying softly. It was the second time in a week that he'd said that to me, and I wasn't upset at hearing it.
"What for?"
He was holding a set of brown trousers and a Quantrill shirt in his hands. He set the clothing down on the bed. "I should say Quantrill needs you. I was sent to bring you along to the camp at White Oak."
My heart beat very fast. Was he joking? He was not. He gave the clothes a small push toward me on the bed. "How is the arm? And the head? Do you still have a fever? Are you still as weak as you were, or are you better?"
He sat down on the side of my bed and felt my head. His hand went gently over the bandages and he felt my arm. "Head still hurts, hey?"
I nodded yes. He ran his hand over the healing cuts on my face. There were many of them. "They'll leave scars," I said, "and I won't be pretty anymore."
"They'll heal. We'll ask Maxine for some of her special concoctions. Look, I wouldn't bother you this morning, but this is important. You feeling up to an assignment from Quantrill?"
That was like asking me if I wanted to walk on the moon. "Yes."
He didn't like the whole idea himself, he said, but Quantrill needed someone who had been at the prison, who would be able to tell him what it had been like, how they'd been treated. And besides Martha and a few girls with bad injuries here in the hospital, all were dead.
"I'll do it," I said solemnly.
"And keep your mouth shut? No questions? Of me or anybody? And take these clothes
off soon as you're done?"
"Yes."
"Good, put them on." The room was near dark in the morning half-light, but he went over to Martha's bed anyway and sat on the edge of it and stroked her hair away from her forehead. She must have come awake because they spoke in low tones while I struggled to dress.
The boys' clothing was rough against my skin. But I didn't mind. An assignment from Quantrill was all I was thinking. Would he make me a spy like Sue Mundy? Where was Sue Mundy, by the way, and why wasn't she doing this, and what in God's name had ever made my brother agree to allow me to take part in something so outrageous?
He answered some of these questions when we were out in the chilly August morning, mounting our horses. He'd managed to secure a horse for me, and for that I was grateful. But he was a man of few words, and, as promised, I asked no questions.
"We're going to Camp White Oak, where Quantrill is holed up," he explained briefly. "Quantrill is brewing a plan in retribution for so many kin of his men being killed in the prison collapse. Sue Mundy is on another spying mission for him. And we all know she wasn't treated as a prisoner, anyway.
"They're going to vote this morning on Quantrill's next attack," he told me quietly. "After you leave. And depending on what you say. No, you cannot know what it is. Or when. Just tell the truth as I've taught you to tell it. No embellishments. No pretty words. Spare the words, instead. Tell everything you saw, everything everyone said to the Yankees and they to our kin. Be polite and respectful. Then I'll take you back to the hospital and you will never, in all your born days, speak of this morning again. Do you hear?"
"Yes, Seth."
"Good girl. Now silence. We don't have far to go."
About a mile from the camp we stopped so he could put a blindfold on me. "For your own safety," he explained. "Now, if asked, you can honestly say you don't know how to get to this camp."
He led my horse by the reins and I held on to the pommel tightly. Soon, very soon, I heard low talking. Then we stopped again and the talking stopped, too, and he removed the blindfold and gave me back the reins.