Thieves of Mercy

by James L. Nelson

  “Oh, Roger! You recognized me right off. If you felt nothing for me, why did you not tell the President then? Come now, you can’t deny it. I need you, Roger. Help me.”

  Roger stared at her, tight-lipped, standing very straight. “Yes, I had feelings for you. I might even have loved you. I don’t deny it. But after Fortress Monroe, that is over. I have my duty. No more.”

  Molly turned to Wendy. “When this is over, we’ll talk,” she said.

  “It will be over soon,” Newcomb said, crossing back to the door. The watch came out, was consulted and replaced. “I will take you to the flagship and explain the situation to the admiral and President Lincoln.”

  “Wait!” Molly said. Newcomb stopped, hand on the doorknob. He did not move. Finally he turned back.

  “Yes?”

  “There is nothing I can do to stop you,” Molly said. “I do not even have a gun.”

  Newcomb nodded.

  “I don’t have a gun,” Molly repeated.

  “Oh!” Wendy said as she understood Molly’s meaning. “Oh!” The room swam in front of her. All her daydreams of pulling the pistol strapped to her thigh, and here was the moment to do it. She snatched up the hem of her skirt and petticoat, not caring in her panic if Newcomb saw her legs or drawers. Her hand reached for the butt of the gun, her fingers slick with sweat.

  “Oh, son of a bitch!” Newcomb shouted. Wendy looked up. The officer had a panicked look, eyes on the gun. He lunged forward, hand out, to snatch the derringer away. Molly’s leg came up in front of him and Wendy saw him go down, arm outstretched, fingers brushing her skirts as he hit the deck.

  Wendy leaped up, pulling the little gun as she did. Newcomb was sprawled out at her feet, still reaching for her. She pointed the gun at his face, looking over the short barrel into his startled eyes. Her thumb pulled the hammer back, her finger was slick on the trigger.

  “Don’t shoot him!” Molly cried out. “For God’s sake, don’t shoot him.”

  Wendy took a step back. Her hands began to tremble and the gun shook with jerky little spasms. If Molly had not spoken, she would have put a bullet right between Newcomb’s eyes. Without even thinking about it, she knew that in her panic, that was what she would have done. Her breath was coming fast and shallow.

  Molly was on her knees beside Newcomb. “Don’t move, Roger, dear, or I will have Wendy shoot you, and the Lord knows I do not want to.” As she spoke she rifled Newcomb’s pockets, extracted the pepperbox and the Navy .36 from his holster. She stepped back, both guns trained on the Yankee.

  “Very well, Wendy, you may put up your gun.”

  Wendy did not move. She heard the words, but they meant nothing. She was still stunned by how very close she had come—an insignificant twitch of her trigger finger—to killing a human being.

  “Wendy, sit down and put your gun away,” Molly said, more sternly this time, and Wendy obeyed. She took another step back, flopped down in the desk chair, stared at the gun in her hand. Everything seemed to have a weird light around it. The shocking events of the last few minutes, coupled with her profound exhaustion, were warping her perspective.

  “Now, Roger, let’s discuss this situation,” she heard Molly saying, but she was still looking at the gun. The hammer was cocked, and she knew she could not put it back in its holster that way, but how to get the hammer down again? Molly had never explained that. She tried pushing it with her thumb, but it would not move. She frowned. Perhaps pulling the trigger, just a bit.

  She squeezed the trigger, very gently. The hammer snapped and the percussion cap flashed and the gun leaped in her hand with a sound like a cannon blast in that little room.

  “Oh!” Wendy jumped, the gun slipped from her hand. Newcomb leaped to his feet, going for Molly, but Molly, quick as a snake, whipped up the .36, thumbed the hammer back with a crisp click, and aimed it right at Newcomb’s chest, three feet away. The pistol looked huge in her little hand, as if a child were holding her father’s gun, but the aim was steady and unflinching.

  “Sit, Roger,” she said, softly, as if she were offering him tea, and Roger sat. “Are you all right, Wendy, dear?” Molly said next. Wendy nodded, too shocked to speak. There was a bright, roughly circular spot of light on the cabin side, daylight shining in through the hole the bullet had made.

  The sound of the gunshot was just fading in Wendy’s ears when she heard the footsteps on the deck, running. They stopped by the cabin door, and were followed with a knocking, and a voice. “Sir? Are you all right? Is everything all right, sir?”

  Molly raised the .36 a little higher. She and Newcomb held one another’s eyes. Molly nodded her head.

  “We’re fine, Mr. Pembrook. A bit of an accident,” he said. His voice was stiff, but convincing enough.

  There was a pause beyond the door. “Very well, sir,” Pembrook replied, though he did not sound altogether certain. “I’ll be in the wheelhouse if I am needed, sir.”

  “Very well.”

  They listened while Pembrook’s footsteps disappeared, and then they sat in silence for a moment. Then Molly and Newcomb began at once, trampling one another’s words, both stopping at the same instant.

  “Roger, dear,” Molly said, “I get to speak first because I have the guns. Now here’s what is going to happen. When we get to the Norvier—”

  “Under no circumstances,” Newcomb cut her short, “will I cooperate with you. Never. I’ll die first.” His voice sounded strained and unnatural.

  Molly smiled her coquettish smile. “You may yet, but actually you will listen first. Now, it is entirely possible that what Wendy and I have done could be construed as spying. And you know what the punishment is for that. Hanging. By the neck. Until dead. So really, Wendy and I have nothing to lose in shooting you, if need be, to help our escape.

  “Here are your choices. Take us to the Norvier and leave us, tell them you were ordered to deliver us to a neutral, steam off before they can ask questions. Tell Lincoln I really was the minister’s wife, and that will be an end to it. All will be fine.

  “Or, you can resist, and I will shoot you.” The timbre of Molly’s voice changed as she spoke, the volume lower, more menacing, a voice with no compassion. “I’ll shoot you, and your legacy will be that you were shot in your own cabin, with your own gun, by a woman who had disarmed you first. I’ll see they find you with your trousers around your ankles. Is that how you wish to be remembered? Your death will at least be a source of unending amusement for generations of naval officers.”

  That, Wendy could see, had struck home, as deadly a shot as the one she nearly put through his forehead. A man only had one opportunity to die well. A proud fool like Newcomb might go willingly to an honorable death, but to leave a legacy of such dishonor, to be laughed at in death, that was another thing entirely.

  “You wouldn’t,” Newcomb said. “I know you too well, Cathy. I know you couldn’t do such a thing.”

  “No? Then why don’t you go for the gun?” Molly raised the pistol, pointed it right at Newcomb’s face. “Go ahead, Roger. See if you can grab it before I pull the trigger.” There was not a single note of compassion in her words, and she spoke in the voice of a woman who could, in fact, do such a thing, and would, if forced to.

  “What—” Newcomb began, the confidence drained from him. He grabbed at his watch, feeling for it, pulled it out and looked at it. He held it in his palm as he continued. “What happens when Lincoln has the minister to the White House? Meets his real wife, if he has one?”

  Molly shook her head. “Roger, do you think the President of the United States really cares a fig about any of this? Do you think a man who is fighting a war will lie awake wondering about some tart he knew for a couple of hours? He has forgotten it already. It’s dead. Let it rest in peace.”

  Wendy watched the two of them, felt the palpable tension like some invisible energy move between them. Hieronymus Taylor had once told her that pure steam was absolutely invisible. That was what they were making, the he
at of their passions turning the air between them to pure steam.

  And then, almost imperceptible in the dim light, a tear rolled down Newcomb’s cheek. He did not move, made no effort to brush it aside. It disappeared into his close-cropped beard.

  Something in him had broken, some bulwark of resolve collapsed. Wendy wondered if sitting there he had seen in his mind the image of his own dead body laid out on the deck of the cabin, pants pulled down, revealing white, spindly, hairy legs. The sailors exchanging knowing grins as they lifted his stiff corpse onto a litter. He snapped his watch shut and slowly replaced it in the pocket of his vest.

  It was another ten minutes of sitting there before Pembrook once again knocked on the door and announced their approach to the Norvier. Molly removed the percussion caps from Newcomb’s pistol and handed it back to him. She kept the pepperbox in her hand, with her shawl draped over it. The three of them made their way to the wheelhouse.

  Newcomb hailed the Norwegian man-of-war and asked permission to come alongside. After some confusion, which involved finding an English speaker aboard the Norwegian vessel, permission was granted.

  Ten minutes later, Wendy and Molly stood on the Norvier’s white and perfectly ordered deck, in front of her gracious and flustered captain, while the dispatch boat, with smoke rolling from her stack, plowed a straight wake back toward Sewell’s Point. Wendy was surprised to see that the small former tug could move so fast.

  “Forgive me, sir,” Molly said, speaking French again, but this time with a French accent. “We have had a terrible time, and wish to beg the assistance of a gentleman.”

  FOURTEEN

  Where all acted so handsomely it would be invidious to discriminate, and I will simply state that the captains and crews of this [River Defense] fleet deserve the confidence which has been reposed in them, and my officers and men acted, as they always have, bravely and obediently.

  BRIGADIER GENERAL M. JEFF THOMPSON

  TO GENERAL G. T. BEAUREGARD

  By the time they dragged Hieronymus Taylor back on board the General Page, the Battle of Plum Point was over. Thirty minutes after the River Defense Fleet had steamed around the bend and into the startled faces of the Yankees, Captain James Montgomery, aboard the screw ram Little Rebel, ordered the recall flag run aloft, and reiterated the order with a series of blasts from his steam whistle.

  Some of the Defense Fleet did not need recalling. The General Bragg, first of the fleet into the brawl, had had her tiller ropes cut by a lucky Yankee shell, and thus disabled she had drifted downstream and out of the fight. The General Price was thoroughly torn up, and though most of the damage had been to her superstructure, one shot to the supply pipes in the engine room had knocked her out as well.

  The other vessels of the fleet, the Sumter, Van Dorn, General Page, Jeff Thompson, General Lovell, Beauregard, and Little Rebel, all suffered damage to greater or lesser degrees, mostly lesser. For all the extraordinary amount of metal flying around, the casualties were light: the steward on the Van Dorn, W. W. Andrews, killed; third cook on the Bragg mortally wounded, and eight or ten more slightly wounded.

  They left behind them a Yankee fleet that was much worse off than they were.

  As Bowater helped lay Taylor easy on the side deck, someone up in the wheelhouse was spinning the General Page around, heading her downstream. Taylor cursed anyone who came into his line of sight, and Bowater guessed that cradling the engineer in his arms and cooing soothing words in his ear would be pointless, so he ignored the wounded man and looked out over the rail.

  The river swept past like a panorama painting. The Union ironclads were still coming down, firing like mad, like some kind of prehistoric herd, wreathed in their own smoke as they steamed downriver. Bowater recalled reading how Blackbeard the Pirate used to do that—burn a slow match in his beard to make himself look like some demon from hell. Well, here they were, Satan’s war machines, the genuine article, but they were too late.

  You’d think Satan would know to keep his steam up, Bowater thought.

  The ironclad they had struck, the one from which they had rescued Taylor, was nearly sunk. She sat at an odd angle, her bow near the shore, the water lapping over the bottom edge of her casement, and Bowater was certain she was sitting in the mud. A perfectly designed machine for river combat, but the River Defense Fleet had found her Achilles’ heel, her unarmored wooden hull, four feet below the waterline.

  The Page continued her left wheel, and the western side of Plum Point Bend came into view. From aft, the thirty-two-pound stern gun fired. Bowater felt the deck shudder underfoot. The paddle wheeler had never been intended to absorb that kind of shock.

  “Ahhh!” Taylor shouted. He was writhing a bit now, and his hand was gripping his thigh, as close as he could get, or dared get, to grabbing at his wounded calf. The bone was broken, Bowater was sure. The leg was not quite straight.

  “All right, stand aside, you sons of whores! Shove!” The cook, Doc, pushed his way through. A short man, with a thick yellow beard and blond hair tied back, he looked like an ill-tempered elf. He was carrying lengths of wood and bandages. He was still wearing his apron.

  He knelt beside Taylor, chewed his plug, looked over the leg while Taylor glared up at him.

  “Leave me alone, you filthy son of a bitch!” Taylor shouted, but Doc did not acknowledge him.

  “I said leave me alone!” Taylor reached up, grabbed a handful of Doc’s apron, but the former cook, now surgeon, plucked his hand off as if it were a child’s. “Aw, shut up,” he said. He nodded to some of the riverboat men standing over them. The river rats knelt down, grabbed hold of Taylor’s arms, and held them through a storm of obscenity, while Doc went to work setting and splinting the leg.

  Ruffin Tanner was sitting on a crate a ways aft, leaning against the deckhouse side. Bowater went over to him. “Is the arm bad?”

  Tanner looked up. “Naw. Torn up the meat some, but I don’t reckon it hit bone. Bullet went clean on through.”

  “That’s lucky. Comparatively speaking.” Bowater helped him off with his coat, fetched some bandages from Doc, who gave them grudgingly, and bound Tanner’s arm. He left him there, went forward to check on Taylor.

  He stepped up to the group of men watching Doc do his work, and Mississippi Mike’s big arm swung around and gave Bowater the breathtaking bonhomie smack. “Come on, Captain, let’s get back to the wheelhouse!”

  Bowater did not care to follow Sullivan to the wheelhouse, but neither did he care to listen to Taylor curse and shout in pain, and he certainly did not care to have anyone think that the job they were doing on Taylor set his teeth on edge—which it did—so he followed Sullivan up the ladder to the hurricane deck.

  Buford Tarbox was in the wheelhouse, and he nodded and spit in the direction of the spittoon when Sullivan and Bowater came in. “Lookee here,” he said, nodding toward the starboard bow.

  They were just passing the first of the ironclads, the one that had been so savagely mauled by the Bragg and the Price. She had crawled away from the fight and found a mudbank on which to die, sinking into the brown river.

  She was motionless, dead, no smoke coming from her chimneys, her boilers ten feet underwater. The water was well up over her casement and lapping over her hurricane deck. The chimneys seemed to rise straight up out of the river, along with her three tall flagstaffs, forward, amidships, and aft. The wheelhouse and the centerline paddle-wheel box, rising above the hurricane deck, formed two small iron islands onto which the shipwrecked sailors had scrambled—dozens of blue-clad river sailors perched on those two dry places above the river. It was a ridiculous sight, and Bowater smiled.

  Mississippi Mike roared. “Look at them stupid Yankees! Damn me if they don’t look like a bunch of damned turkeys on a damn corncrib!” He laughed until he doubled over, a laugh that Bowater was certain carried across the water to the miserable men on the sunken ironclad, and it must have been salt in their wounds.

  Rub it in, Sullivan, rub it i
n, Bowater thought with delight, and he wondered when he had become so uncharitable. Was it the river, the war? Age? There had been a decency about him once, a magnanimous spirit that extended to friend and enemy alike. An officer and a gentleman. It was the spirit embodied in that phrase, a phrase he had once held as close and dear as his belief in a benevolent God.

  But he was changing, he felt it. This was a different kind of war they were fighting, an all-out war. Just a month before, at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River, the Confederates had attacked and overwhelmed the Yankees, only to be pushed back again, at a staggering cost to both sides. The bloodshed that day—such unprecedented bloodshed—changed everything. This was not knights of old on proud steeds. This was slaughter.

  Gentlemen of honor, fighting in honorable fashion, Bowater thought. Perhaps that very idea is as dead as the knights themselves. This war seemed to bring with it a kind of savagery that he had never known, certainly not on the ordered quarterdecks of the old navy, showing the flag around the world.

  Perhaps I have never really known war. Certainly the Mexican War had never been anything like this, not in the naval line.

  Useless thought. He pushed his damned philosophizing aside and looked astern. The gunners aft were still firing away with the thirty-two pounder, but they were leaving the Yankees upstream, and the Yankees were making no effort to pursue. Astern of the Page, last in the Confederate line, came the Van Dorn, her superstructure badly torn up, her upper works showing a dozen great gaping holes fringed with shattered wood, but the black smoke pouring from her chimneys showed that her engines and boilers were unharmed. The sound of her stern gun, giving the Yankees one last farewell, was proof that the fight was not out of her.

  They steamed around Plum Point Bend, steamed under the guns of Fort Pillow, came to an anchor. From the flagship Little Rebel, one hundred yards away, they heard, clear as a gunshot, the sound of cheering, and one after another, the crews on board all the River Defense Fleet ships took it up, shouting with abandon, letting the tension of the morning, the exhilaration, the fear, the excess of energy, pour out of their throats and up to the heavens.