Fein had been watching with a concerned expression, and now he spoke up. “This man is going to die tonight. So might we all. What harm is there in showing a little mercy?”
Josephine took the young man’s note, cast a defiant stare at anyone who seemed likely to offer further contradiction, and tucked it into her satchel with her own writing.
The rowboat was roughly a third the way across the Mississippi when fire caught Josephine’s eye from upstream. What was at first a flickering light became a billowing bonfire drifting toward them. The navy had set loose one of their fire rafts to float down at the federal fleet.
This put down any further talk about the prisoner. The rowing sailors cried out at the unexpected inferno roaring toward them and redoubled their efforts. The officers snarled profanities, both at the sailors for not rowing fast enough and at the navy itself for not bothering to find out whether anyone was attempting to cross before sending down a raft. Viewed from the parapets, the fire rafts had seemed so slow and lazy as they drifted downstream, that it was never a surprise to Josephine that the Union invariably snared them and dragged them harmlessly away from the big ships. But viewed from a rowboat in the river, the raft seemed to be barreling down at them. It was still a hundred yards away when Josephine could feel the heat.
It looked as though they would just squeak past before it hit them. But then one of the sailors leaped overboard and swam toward the near shore. One of his fellows cursed him. A lieutenant pulled out a revolver and calmly plugged shots into the water, but none hit the coward, who escaped into the darkness. The man had jettisoned the oar as he went, and it now slipped out of the oarlock and fell into the river. A second sailor leaped overboard while the others were grabbing at it.
Josephine had been holding it together until the second man hit the water. Then suddenly she was back on Cairo Red the night the boiler exploded. Firemen and engineers had leaped overboard and left the passengers to die. Burned, scalded, blown to pieces. And drowned, like her mother.
The fire raft now towered above them. Heat roiled over the water. Both raft and rowboat were now drifting downstream toward the barrier.
She ignored her carpetbag but clutched her satchel. If she went over, she would lose all of her writing of the past few days, now amounting to at least forty pages.
Another splash. It was the engineer, who bobbed up and began paddling to safety. He was followed moments later by the two remaining sailors and one of the lieutenants. One remained, plus the young prisoner, who stared at the fire with a wide, slack-jawed expression, as if stunned. Plus the two reporters from the Crescent.
Josephine moved to untie the young prisoner.
“What are you doing?” the remaining officer demanded. He wasn’t the one who’d been speaking so angrily moments earlier about the prisoner’s cowardice—that one had fled in terror—but this officer still looked uncertain, and made as if to draw his firearm.
Her hands struggled with the knot. “He’s a man, not an animal. Will you see him burned alive?”
The lieutenant dropped his hand from his weapon and came over. “Move.”
While he untied the young man, Josephine wedged her satchel under the seat where it would be safest from the flames. Even if she died, the Union might find the rowboat only partly scorched and rescue her papers. Meanwhile, she had to save herself. They were approaching the barricade, which had been partially separated so the fire raft could pass. Men stood on the deck of one of the hulks, shouting and waving their arms in warning, as if the people on the rowboat had somehow missed the inferno bearing down on them.
The moment he was untied, the prisoner dove overboard and disappeared beneath the water, resurfacing a few feet away. He flailed inexpertly at the water in an attempt to swim clear. Josephine rose to follow him into the river.
Fein grabbed Josephine’s arm. His face glowed red in the light of the fire now only yards away. “Don’t leave me! I can’t swim!”
Fort Jackson loomed above them. Flashes of light emerged from the guns. More lights from incoming fire splashed against the walls and parapets. The rumbling, booming sound of battle continued unabated, but above it all came the crackle and roar of pitch and pine from the fire raft. It was approaching swiftly on their right side and threatened to catch them on the bow and drag them up against the barrier where they would all burn to death. Unless . . .
“The oars!” Josephine shouted. She shoved at the lieutenant to get his attention. “Go!”
Fein grabbed one of the remaining oars, but now that he’d freed the prisoner, the lieutenant seemed stunned, staring rigid and petrified at the roaring inferno bearing down on them, even while the others shouted to get his attention. At last Josephine got him out of the way, and then she joined Fein in rowing furiously away from the fire raft.
It drifted by on Josephine’s right, so close it felt as though her clothes would catch fire. Josephine didn’t stop. Then the raft was past. But it didn’t slip safely through the barrier. Instead, the current carried it up against the nearest hulk anchored to the river bottom. The fire illuminated two figures in the water, clinging to the hulk. Two of the men who had leaped overboard to safety. The fire raft nudged up against the hulk. Men on the deck used long, iron-tipped poles to shove it back into the current, while others came running with buckets to douse the flames that leaped from the raft to the barrier ship.
The men in the river screamed as they were caught between the fire raft and the hull of the ship. Their voices joined into a single high, terrified screech, and Josephine slapped her hands over her ears. She let go of the oar and it strained against the oarlock, trying to tug free in the current.
Once again she was back at Cairo Red, this time standing on the deck as the boiler blew into the sky. People burning, screaming, the heat . . .
They were through the barrier and floating downstream. The fire raft came through as well, but by now it was far to their right and no longer a threat.
“Help me!” a voice cried from the water. It was the young soldier. He floated a dozen yards or more off starboard, still in the path of the fire raft.
His cries jolted Josephine from her terrified inaction. She urged him toward the boat until he came within range of an outstretched oar. He grabbed on, and they reeled him in and hauled him up, wet and coughing up water.
Moments later, they came across one of the sailors and managed to pull him in as well. Two other men had burned, and one had presumably swum safely to shore. That left only one man unaccounted for. They couldn’t see him anywhere.
A row of Union sloops lay downstream in an arc across the river. Their cannons flashed, one after the other, until the air filled with such a roar that it became like a never-ending clap of thunder. The federal ships weren’t shooting at the rowboat, but at the fire raft, trying to sink it before it became a threat. But the cannons were close enough that it felt as though the rowboat had come under fire all the same.
Shells splashed into the water and whistled overhead. Timed shots exploded above them. Answer fire came from the fort, and while it was trying to protect the raft, not sink it, some of these shots also splashed into the river when they fell short of their targets.
There was no question of stemming the current and making for the bank, so they kept their heads down and rowed only to keep clear of the fire raft that kept pace with them. The guns were so loud and continuous that they shook Josephine’s bones and made the rowboat vibrate as if it would be torn apart.
Josephine never saw the shot that hit them. Never heard it above the general din. But it was as if a giant fish had come swimming from the muddy depths of the Mississippi and given the underside of the boat a shove with its mighty snout. Her stomach lurched out from underneath her.
The boat lifted above the water—or at least half of it did. The other half was still below her. She was looking down on it. For a moment she caught Fein’s surprised, terrified expression in the flash of light. He looked up at her, even as the nose of the
rowboat on which he sat buried itself in the water. Then the light was gone, and Josephine came crashing down.
Her head slammed into an oarlock, and she went black as she pitched into the river.
When Josephine came to, she was sputtering water and flailing. For a moment, she didn’t know where she was, only that she was in the river, fire lighting up the night, and for an instant she thought it was Cairo Red, burning on the river, a thousand miles to the north.
But as her head cleared, she realized that the explosions were coming from the Union fleet downstream and from Fort Jackson above. One hit the water nearby, sending a spout skyward. Water crashed on her head and pushed her under again.
When she came up, something nudged into her back. It was the back half of the rowboat, overturned and still floating. Two figures were clinging to it.
“Help us!” one of the men called.
It was Fein. He’d lost his glasses and squinted at her through the light of the fire raft still burning a few yards away. He gripped the side of the broken boat with one hand and the back of a slumping man with the other.
“My writing!” Josephine said, remembering her satchel.
She flailed about, desperate to find the leather case floating by so she could haul it out of the water before the pages were destroyed.
“Josephine! Help me, please.”
“Where’s my satchel? It has all my papers.”
“The devil take your story. You can rewrite it. I can’t—” He grabbed again at the man he was holding on to, who threatened to pull loose and drift away. “I can’t hold on.”
And Fein couldn’t swim, either, she remembered. Josephine gave a final, desperate search for her satchel in the inky water before giving up to paddle over to the overturned boat. She grabbed on with one hand and dug the fingers of her other into the unconscious man’s shirt to help Fein hold him in place.
A shell exploded, and she saw the unconscious man’s face in the flash of light. It was the young soldier. Josephine tightened her grip with a new urgency. She couldn’t let him go, couldn’t let him drown. Not now. God help her, she had to hold him up.
A shell hit nearby and drenched them anew. Lights flashed from Fort Jackson, a whole row of them, and they ducked down as more shells screamed overhead.
“I’m losing my grip,” Josephine cried. She gave the soldier a shake. “Wake up!” she pleaded. Then, to Fein, “He’s slipping. Help me!”
With Josephine and Fein each using one arm to hold the boat and the other to lift, they dragged the young man onto the keel of the overturned, partially destroyed boat. He was surprisingly light and easy to move higher.
“Dear God!” Fein said, his voice strangled.
Such horror filled his voice that Josephine turned to look downstream, wondering what fresh terror they were floating toward. The river below was filled with warships, many of them blasting toward the fort, but they were close enough now to Farragut’s fleet that the Union shells were soaring overhead. It was only the Confederate guns that threatened them now.
It wasn’t until she looked back to the unconscious soldier that she saw what had horrified Fein. The young man’s arms and torso were completely out of the water now, sprawled across the keel. As for his waist and legs, they were somewhere else. All that was left of his lower half was a mess of uncoiled intestines and other internal organs. The shell that tore the rowboat apart had cut him in two.
Fein turned away as if he would be sick into the water. Or maybe he was sick, but she didn’t see it. She could only stare at the young man—a boy, really. Remember his trembling voice, his fear, the way he’d begged her to help him escape the bombardment. The letter he’d given her to take to his mama.
Movement on the river dragged her attention to the Union fleet. One of the ships had thrown over a grapnel to snag the fire raft and tug it out of the way, but either they missed or the line snapped. The raft drifted toward one of the large sloops, where men scrambled around on the decks with what looked like buckets of sand and water at the ready. Fire roared to the height of the masts, but in the end, the raft drifted by harmlessly.
Even so, the ships had scrambled to get out of the way, and many of them were jumbled together trying to regain their former position. One of the big ships narrowly avoided running down the broken rowboat and the people clinging to its side. Some of the larger sloops had put out launches to try to haul the fire raft away, and now one of these veered and came rowing toward Josephine and Fein. They had been spotted. A man on the boat drew a pistol and held it at the ready. Josephine waved a hand to show they were no threat.
“Well, that’s it,” Fein said in a grim voice as the boat drew near, the men on board shouting a challenge. “We’re prisoners, now.”
A man knocked on the door of the cabin where Josephine sat, wrapped in a blanket with a mug of hot soup in hand. The lieutenant who had been interrogating her about the forts hadn’t heard of Josephine Breaux, was only vaguely aware of the Pinkerton detectives, and had refused to take her to Flag Officer Farragut or even to the ship’s captain. He now rose to answer the door.
A flood of relief passed through when she saw the strong jaw, the dark mustache, and broad shoulders of Franklin Gray. A pink scar traced across his forehead, the healed wound from the sabotage at the hospital arsenal.
“I hoped it was you,” he said. “Once I saw your newspaper friend and heard he’d been brought in with a young woman. And once I looked over the remains of your rowboat, I knew for sure.”
“Am I glad to see you.”
“And who are you?” the lieutenant demanded of Franklin after doing a once-over of his civilian trousers and blue frock coat stripped of insignia.
Franklin handed the man a piece of paper. “Government agent, authorized by the secretary of war. Flag Officer Farragut has given me permission to interrogate any prisoners, deserters, or secessionists who fall into our hands.”
“Very well, sir,” said the lieutenant with what sounded like relief. He had been growing increasingly frustrated with Josephine after she’d refused to cooperate. Now he took his leave. Once he was gone, Josephine threw her arms around Franklin and the two friends embraced.
After exchanging more pleasantries, Josephine’s first worry was that Fein not be mistreated. He wasn’t, Franklin assured her, but neither was he cooperating.
She set her mug of soup onto the little desk at which she sat. “He’ll be disappointed in me.”
Franklin pulled up a chair. “Is he a fire-eater?”
“Not at all. He’s a newspaperman. Practical, chases good stories. I figure he’ll settle into his work if we take the city, complaining about the Union when he can get away with it. But he’s a decent man. He shouldn’t be abused.”
“I’ll pass the word.”
The cabin shook from a fresh barrage of outgoing cannon fire. The fighting had settled down in the two hours since she’d been taken aboard, with occasional flare-ups. They waited until the firing stopped.
Franklin sketched in his activities of the past few months. After the sailors carried him off the levee for the cannon barge, he’d banged around from boat to boat inside the coffin-like box until finally a Cajun fisherman on a keelboat pried open the lid two days later. He’d arrived at Pilottown at Head of Passes. From there, it was a simple matter of promising a bribe to get him to the Gulf, where he’d then spent a lazy winter in Farragut’s fleet as it assembled offshore.
Josephine’s intelligence had streamed in with regularity and was one of the key reasons that President Lincoln, the secretary of the navy, and Flag Officer Farragut had pushed through with the plan to come over the bar and into the river with wooden warships.
“So this isn’t a feint?” she asked, still not entirely convinced that the entire battle wasn’t indeed a diversion to allow Flag Officer Foote’s gunboats to steam unopposed down the river, as her phony battle plan had claimed it would be. “What about Foote and General Grant?”
“Not a feint. T
hey have their hands full. No way Foote comes down past all those forts. Vicksburg alone could hold him off for months.”
“What now?”
“My orders are to bring you to Farragut. He wants to hear your intelligence for himself.”
Josephine considered her bedraggled appearance. Her hair was a wet, tangled mess. Her dress was torn, wet, and muddy. She’d lost her shoes, and they’d given her men’s socks and a man’s boots. She didn’t suppose there was a single change of clothing for a woman anywhere in the entire fleet.
Franklin must have seen her looking herself over. “Don’t worry about that. You look like someone who has survived a battle—they’ll understand.”
“It’s not just that. I’m also missing my papers. All gone into the river.”
A self-satisfied smile crossed Franklin’s face, the kind a man wore when he had a clever secret. “Wait here. I’ll be back.”
Josephine hardly dared to hope. When he reappeared moments later, she was so overjoyed to see her satchel in his hand, barely wet, that she once again threw her arms around his neck. She only just stopped herself from kissing him full on the mouth and aimed for his cheek instead.
He laughed at her reaction but was clearly delighted. This time, he held her a moment longer than necessary before releasing her. Josephine snatched out her papers and set them on the desk, turning up the lamp so she could see better. Only the top few were damp at all, and the ink had barely run. The young soldier’s letter was there, too.
And there, beneath the paper, was the Colonel’s Oriental box. Why she’d even brought it downriver was hard to say. It carried nothing but a turtle hair comb and the gilt watch with the curious markings; the money itself she’d hidden back at Miss Nellie’s. The box seemed to live a charmed existence. It was not wet or damaged in any way.
The Crescent Spy Page 26