Beyond All Price

by Carolyn Poling Schriber

  “And they believed him? When he was practically frothing at the mouth?”

  “Oh, Father. You have to understand it’s not one instance. Reverend Browne accused the two of you back at Christmas, and he pointedly moved out of the Leverett House, telling people he didn’t approve of what was going on there. You can deny it all you want, but as far as the men are concerned, it makes a good story.”

  “What about you, Geordy? Do you believe it?”

  “Of course not! But you’re going to have to find a way to put a stop to the rumors.”

  “I know that, Geordy. Nellie will be leaving us as soon as we make port.”

  Geordy sighed and shook his head. “It’ll be a real shame to lose her. I’ve always liked her, and I think half the soldiers in the regiment have been in love with her at one point or another. Maybe they’ve been assuming you’d feel the same way they do.”

  “Whatever their reasons, the matter is becoming disruptive, and I can’t afford to let it continue. I’ll see to it she gets home safely, and I’ll take care of the cat, too.”

  Geordy hesitated at the door. “You wouldn’t really throw that cat overboard, would you?”

  “Geordy, you must know me better than that! I’m not the kind of man who is ever unfaithful to his wife, nor have I ever treated an animal cruelly.” Colonel Leasure was a bit irritated with his son. “ I have an idea for the cat. I have to work out a few details first. I’d appreciate it if you demonstrated a bit of faith in me.”

  It took several hours for Colonel Leasure to put all the pieces together, but by late afternoon, he was ready for his meeting with Nellie. He sent Private Stevenson to her cabin to summon her. Nellie had evidently been waiting, for they returned promptly. “Thank you, Private. Please wait in the passageway and see to it we are not disturbed. And no, don’t close the door! I have nothing to hide in here.” He motioned Nellie to a seat across the desk from him.

  For a few minutes, he said nothing, nor did Nellie. Both seemed willing to let the other set the tone of the meeting. At last, Daniel spoke. “I’m disappointed in you, Nellie.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had no idea bringing Cotton aboard the ship would set off this storm. I thought she would be quiet, and she doesn’t eat much. No one would have to know.”

  “All of that is irrelevant,” the colonel said. “The point is, I asked you to do something, and you completely ignored me.”

  “But I thought. . . .”

  “It was not your place to have an opinion. I gave you a direct order, and I expected you to obey it.”

  “I . . . I apologize. It was juvenile and silly of me, and I should have known better.”

  “Yes, you should have. But it’s too late for you to apologize and expect me to pat you on your head and send you back to work.”

  “You’re firing me.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yes, I am. But first, I want to be sure you understand the damage you have caused.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand. The kitten was in the passageway for only a couple of minutes. Mary and I would have caught her at the foot of the gangway, and no one would have been the wiser if General Stevens had not happened along at that moment. It was unfortunate timing, but I still don’t see the great harm it caused.”

  “Don’t you? Well, let me enlighten you. On a ship this size, there are always observers. General Stevens has become a laughingstock among the men because he was frightened of a kitten. The story is being passed around even now, and every time it is repeated and embellished, he looks weaker and sillier. There’s the first piece of damage. Your actions have managed to destroy the respect a general deserves from his troops.”

  “But it was hardly my fault he mistook. . . .”

  “I don’t want to hear it. The second piece of damage occurred when the general confronted me on deck in front of who knows how many men. He called you my ‘lady friend’ and blamed me for letting you wrap me around your little finger. Among the terms he used to describe you were ‘impertinent,’ ‘pushy,’ and ‘undisciplined’. By the time he was through, he had confirmed every rumor, every accusation Robert Browne made against us. Now, my son tells me even the Roundhead soldiers believe we are somehow carrying on an affair under their noses. I have lost their respect and every bit of moral control I might have once held over them.”

  “But you know that’s not so! Can’t you tell them. . . ?” Nellie’s voice was rising to near hysteria.

  “Please keep your voice down. Everybody aboard this ship is going to want to know what’s going on in here. We don’t need to add a third act to this little drama.”

  “So I’ll leave. Is that what you want?” she said.

  “I wish the solution were that simple, Nellie. The harsh truth is this is going to haunt all of us for a long time. In a few short weeks, General Stevens and I will be leading these men into another battle, one potentially more dangerous than the debacle at Secessonville. And I don’t know what will happen. At Secessionville, I asked the men to come to me and regroup in the face of overwhelming odds, and they did so because they trusted me. Now they believe I’ve lied to them. Will they trust me again? I don’t know. Will they obey an order from General Stevens? That’s even more doubtful. It may sound ridiculous, but the lives of good men may be lost because of a half-grown deaf cat running down a passageway.”

  Nellie could only shake her head in despair as tears flowed down her cheeks.

  “Here’s what is going to happen, Nellie, and it is not open to discussion. Private Stevenson will see you safely back to your cabin, where a soldier will be standing guard at your door. Then he will take the cat from you and deal with it as I have instructed.”

  “You’re going to kill her!”

  “You lost your right to determine the cat’s fate when you failed to leave her with the slaves who would have taken care of her. You may think whatever you will of me. You will spend the next few days under house arrest. Your meals will be delivered, but you will neither see nor talk to anyone except your guard until we reach port. You will be the last person to disembark from the ship. You will be provided a ride to the depot, and someone will put you on a train back to Pittsburgh. Where you go from there, I really don’t care, as long as you never try to contact a member of the Roundhead Regiment again. Do you understand me?”

  Nellie could only nod as she stood and made her way to the door. Her back was straight, her face was resolute, but her heart felt as if it had been ripped from her chest. She had known the terror of running away from a bad situation. She had been doing that most of her life. But never before had she been driven away, and the pit of despair that loomed before her seemed bottomless.

  Nellie didn’t remember much about the rest of the voyage. She might have been able to accept the firing without falling apart. But when Colonel Leasure suggested her actions might have contributed to his own future inability to lead his men into battle, she was devastated. A small part of her argued that he was exaggerating. Her sin was too small to have such widespread results. But then came the other voices, led by that of Reverend Browne, all saying, “You’re the sinner. Their blood is on your hands.”

  She crawled into her berth and lay there shivering for a long time. Days? Perhaps. Gradually she became aware of a piercing pain in her right side. It felt like a sharp dagger inserted between her ribs. When she tried to stand, she could only mange to stay erect at all by clutching that side and bending over. She was feverish, too, but she could not bring herself to call for help. She pulled the covers tighter under her chin and hoped she was going to die there. The guard delivered her meals on schedule, but she always pretended to be asleep. Once in a while she tried to manage a few bites, but everything tasted like sawdust. The guard made no comment when he took the untouched meals away.

  She knew they would be saying Nellie was being melodramatic again, but she didn’t really care what anyone thought. She could not bear to think of the same people who had condemned h
er offering false sympathy if she did indeed prove to be ill. She simply waited for time to pass. She could not think about the future, because she could not imagine how horrible it would be. They were sending her back to Pittsburgh, that filthy, evil city she had worked so hard to escape. The boarding house loomed, more offers of prostitution, more gossipy folks ready to carry the word of her return to Otis Leath. Fear and revulsion fought for top place on her list of emotions.

  When the ship docked in Newport News, the colonel sent Private Stevenson to be sure Nellie was ready to depart. He found her still lying in her berth, unable to make herself move.

  “Nellie, are you ill?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you stand up?”

  “I suppose so.” But when she tried to stand, the pain in her side was so severe she had to grasp the side of the berth to keep from falling over. She clutched it while sweat beaded on her forehead.

  “I’m going to get Colonel Leasure,” he said in a panic.

  “No,” she managed to gasp. “Get Ludington.” While he was gone she lowered herself gingerly into a sitting position, and it was there the kindly doctor found her.

  “My God,” she heard him say. “Nellie, how long have you been like this? You look ghastly.”

  She simply shook my head. “I don’t know.” Ever since the colonel locked me in here, she wanted to say, but the room started to spin and go dark.

  The next thing she remembered was waking up on a cot in a military tent. Mary Pollock was there with her, waiting to take orders from the doctors who stood around her.

  “It seems like appendicitis,” one young orderly suggested. “But the pain is on the wrong side.”

  “Her temperature is not all that elevated. I think she has fretted and stewed herself into this state. The guard reports she hasn’t eaten in three days. That alone could cause her to faint and suffer cramps.”

  “I don’t think so,” she heard Colonel Leasure argue. “Mary, get her undressed and into this overlarge gown. I’m going to want to see that portion of her side where she keeps touching and then wincing.”

  Mary had a struggle getting her clothes removed, because Nellie was unable to be of any help. All she could do was cry out whenever someone touched her too firmly. But at last the task was finished. The doctors returned, and with a great show of preserving her modesty, they gradually managed to uncover a portion of her right ribcage below the breast. There was a collective intake of breath.

  “What is that?” someone asked.

  Nellie wanted to ask the same question, but she was too woozy to formulate the words—or to understand what she heard them saying next: “inflammation, pustules, oozing liquid, scabs forming in layers, like shingles.”

  In her confused state of consciousness, she remembered thinking, They’ve mistaken me for a roof! Or did she say it out loud? She wasn’t really sure. Then they rolled her onto her side and uncovered her back.

  “See how the lesions cover her whole right side while the left side remains unaffected? She definitely has a bad case of shingles.”

  If she hadn’t hurt so badly, she might have giggled. Instead, she passed out again. She regained consciousness once or twice, each time hearing disembodied voices discussing her condition as if she were not in the room.

  “She’s too young to have shingles.”

  “Not if she had recently had an emotional experience.”

  “I still think she’s faking it.”

  “Not with a rash like that!”

  “What can be done for her?”

  “Nothing. Shingles is not usually a fatal disease; it just makes you wish you were dead.”

  “We can’t leave her in this condition.”

  “No, but we can’t take her with us, either. She’s not fit to travel, even if General Stevens would allow it, which he won’t.”

  “Keep giving her morphine—enough to keep her under without killing her—while we find a place to send her.”

  At some point, Reverend Browne arrived. There was no mistaking his booming baritone when he was in full preacher mode. After speculating on the likelihood of her demise, he launched into his own analysis: “Poor woman! Six years of the morning of life spent as the wife of a bad man have laden her so heavily for the future, that one sees with less regret the doors of that home opening to her ‘where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest’.”

  If Nellie had had the strength to be furious, she would have been. She couldn’t be sure whether he thought she was one of the wicked or one of the weary, but it was clear he would not be sorry to hear of her death.

  Then someone was lifting her onto a litter, and two men carried her out of the tent. They had trouble holding the litter steady, and the jostling movement sent such searing pain through her side that she passed out again.

  ggg

  22

  Healing Interlude

  Nellie awoke in a small room with whitewashed walls and a scrubbed pine floor partially covered by a woven rag rug. The furniture was also pine, plain but sturdy. The bed was draped in crisp white sheets, and on the table next to it stood a glass, a basin, and a pitcher of water. At the foot of the bed hung a small crucifix, with a withered palm branch tucked behind it. She was more comfortable than she had been in days, but she was also mystified. Have I died? she asked herself. Is this heaven or the foyer to hell? And whatever it is, how in the world did I get here?

  As if in answer to her unspoken questions, a soft voice responded, “Ah, you are awake. How are you feeling?” From a hidden corner of the room came the rustling of skirts as a diminutive woman enshrouded in black came to stand by the bed. Her hair was tucked under a white wimple, then draped in a black veil. From her waist dangled a string of beads and a silver cross. A high white collar and cuffs set off the blackness of her habit. She laid a cool hand on Nellie’s brow.

  “You’re a nun.”

  “Yes, my child. I am Sister Mary Xavier. I’ve been sitting with you, waiting for you to wake up.”

  “Where am I? Is this a hospital? A convent? I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a bit of both, actually. This is the hospital wing of the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady Of Mercy Convent in Newport News. You don’t remember arriving here?”

  “No, no. There has been some kind of dreadful mistake,” Nellie said. “I’m not a Catholic.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You are ill and were brought to our doorstep. We take in anyone who needs our care, as Our Lord would have us do.”

  “But I’m not even religious. And I’m a terrible sinner. Reverend Browne, our Presbyterian chaplain, said I would rot in Hell for my sins. He didn’t want anyone to help me. I can’t ask help of you, a good Catholic.”

  “A Presbyterian minister told you that? Well, pooh! What does he know? Those Presbyterians can be a hard-nosed bunch. They’re good at preaching guilt, but they’ve not learned much about forgiveness.”

  Nellie smiled despite herself. “But . . . but . . . .”

  “Hush, child. I don’t believe for a moment you are a terrible sinner. But it doesn’t matter. An army colonel delivered you to us and asked if we could nurse you back to health. We agreed to do so, and that is the end of the matter.”

  “An army colonel? Colonel Leasure?”

  “Yes, I believe that was his name. Again, it doesn’t matter. We are here to nurse you back to health. When was the last time you had something to eat? You’re rail-thin.”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t even know what day it is. I know I had a terrible pain, and then the doctors started giving me morphine every time I woke. I’d hear them talking about me. They kept saying I was a roof. I didn’t understand.” Nellie realized she was not making much sense, and hot tears threatened.