by Lois Leveen
Up on Church Hill, Bet paced and wrung her hands while Mistress Van Lew stared dull-eyed out the window at the neighborhood matrons passing by on their way to endless rounds of sewing parties. The Union Guard was now the Virginia Guard, and nothing would do but to outfit them all over again in flamboyant new uniforms. Though the maiden daughters of Church Hill made a show of sewing, too, mostly they flirted and waved their handkerchiefs at passing soldiers, welcoming the war as an opportunity to court more beaux than their elder sisters ever had.
In Shockoe Bottom, factories and foundries prepared for the grim reality of battle. The clang of metal from Mahon’s smithy rang stronger and longer each day, and I watched exhaustion eat away at what happiness Papa had found during my courtship with Wilson.
As the days stretched hot into summer, Papa grew so sullen, I tried to guard him from all I was thinking. “What you done to Mary El?” he asked, eyeing us across a platter of cold chicken at Sunday dinner on the twenty-first July. “She never this quiet.”
Wilson frowned as he reached for the lemonade, pretending Papa’s question made no sense. “Day as warm as this, flies can’t even be bothered to buzz.”
“Don’t much care about the flies. Mary El ain’t bothered to talk to her papa, is my concern. Just set there with her face all pinched up in worry, staring at the parlor window.”
“Whole city’s quiet today,” I said, lifting my fork toward my plate.
Papa wasn’t about to be put off. “Don’t start pushing them taters round again. You been at that for near a quarter hour, ain’t so much as took a bite. What’s the matter?”
I laid out the truth in such a way as I hoped would keep him from catching my worry. “Reason it’s so quiet is the soldiers are all gone from the city. They’re fighting a full-on battle, Secesh against the Federals, way up near the Maryland border. If the Federals win, they may be able to take Richmond. But if they lose, the Secesh say they’ll march right from Manassas on to Washington.”
“Manassas, molasses, what it matter?” Papa replied. “Don’t see how that’s gonna change the fact that it’s Sabbath day, a daughter ought to have two civil words to say to her own papa.”
“Lewis does have a point,” Wilson said. Meaning, Sunday was Papa’s only time away from the smithy, from the labor that bent him and bent him until I thought for sure he would break. The day for Wilson and me to dote on him, give him a decent meal and love enough to last through the week. “You bought that big basket of strawberries for dessert,” my husband reminded me. “And I have a mind to get my share, so hurry up and eat that dinner.”
Worried as I was that the Confederates might get their sixty-day victory after all, I did what I might to oblige my menfolk, nibbling and conversing, even wresting out a smile at Papa’s amazement when Wilson set down our biggest wooden bowl brimming with fruit, alongside a tin cup full of cream. The price of strawberries was the lowest anyone in Richmond could remember, farmers from the nearby countryside crowding the markets with rich, ripe fruit that couldn’t pass any farther on account of the Federal blockade.
I chattered with Papa as best I could while we savored the sweet tang of the berries. My fingernails were still stained red with their juice the next morning. But all my delicate fruit and cream hopes soured when word reached Richmond from Manassas that the Confederates had won.
“What do you want with going out there?” Wilson asked as I wrapped a scarf around my head late the next night. “It’s raining to beat the Flood, hours past curfew, and the streets crowded with Secesh.”
I searched through our clothes-chest for my merino shawl. Though the thick night air was plenty warm, I needed something to guard against the downpour. Just as surely as I needed to make sense of the Confederate victory. “Whatever they’re unloading from those rail cars, it’s more true war than all the marching and carrying on we’ve seen in Richmond these months past. I want to see it for myself.”
“Then I’ll come with you.”
I settled the shawl onto my shoulders and looked my husband in the eye. “A negro couple would catch more trouble out there at this hour of the night than a slavewoman will alone. If anyone stops me, I can say I’m with my mistress, got separated from her while looking for my master.” Not waiting to hear more of his disapproval, I kissed him with all the passion of a three-month bride, then hurried down the stairs and out into the night.
The rain hit me as soon as I pushed open the door, stinging hard as pellets and soaking through my sleeve. The deluge had turned the dirt of Broad Street into an oozing brown mass. It pulled at my ankle boots as I crossed to where the dead and dying Confederate soldiers were being unloaded from the train. Knots of white Richmonders and their slave attendants struggled against the mire like flies in molasses. They surged forward and circled back, echoing the eddying mudriver in the street, as here and there a wounded man called out from a stretcher, or a lantern was held up to identify a motionless form.
Somewhere along the dark depot, a familiar voice kept repeating, “My cousin is at the Spotswood. She heard it from Mrs. Davis herself, by telegram from the president. Dreadful news, but he died a hero for Our Cause.”
I heard the refrain two or three times before I placed the speaker. Mrs. Whitlock, one of the ladies who sewed with Bet’s mother for the Union Guard. And who shunned her once the group became the Virginia Guard.
Mrs. Whitlock pushed through the mass of people, presenting herself to the soldier attending one of the cars. “I am here on behalf of my cousin, Mrs. Gardner. The colonel is to be laid in state at my home on Marshall Street. Please see to it.”
“I don’t have orders to see to nothing but the unloading of the train.” The soldier’s voice weighed heavy with whatever part he played in the battle.
“All I am asking is that you send the … the …” Mrs. Whitlock seemed unable to finish. “Colonel Gardner is to be laid in state at my home on Church Hill. Is that clear?”
The soldier turned to answer a call from inside the car, leaving Mrs. Whitlock to shove her way up and down the length of the platform, peeving out the same demand to anyone assigned to the train detail and waxing more indignant with each refusal. She went on about her poor cousin and the telegram, and clearly these soldiers were no Virginians, and wouldn’t she see to it they were reprimanded for such impertinence. She moved oblivious to the cries of the injured, and the howls of grief from those who found their menfolk already dead.
As I turned to take myself home, I caught sight of Palmer Randolph. Only a few years my senior, Palmer tramped about Church Hill tagging after Bet’s brother John when we were children. Now he wore the uniform of the Virginia Guard, and he stared at me, a glimmer of confused recognition flashing across his face. As I backed out of the circle of light cast by his lantern, Mrs. Whitlock bore through the sodden crowd to him.
“Palmer, is my husband about? I am sure he will attend to the arrangements at once.”
His face paled. “I guess you haven’t heard the news, ma’am.”
“Yes, yes, of course I’ve heard. My cousin received the news by telegram at the Spotswood. She is proud of his sacrifice, but dreadfully distressed. She asked me to see to the arrangements. But no one will assist me.”
Palmer laid a hand on her arm. “Mrs. Whitlock, I’m sorry. Sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Colonel Gardner, though only my relation by marriage, was a man for whom I had a great affection.”
“I didn’t mean the colonel, ma’am. I meant”—he paused, coughing a bit—“I meant Mr. Whitlock. Major Whitlock. He took only a flesh wound at first, led us back into the fighting almost immediately. But they hit him again, right in the face. We carried him from the field quick as we could, but it was too late. I’m sorry.”
Mrs. Whitlock stared at him. “You must be mistaken. I have received no telegram.”
“I don’t know anything about a telegram. I only know your husband served, and was brave, and was lost. My condolences.”
“But I have received no telegram.”
“Mrs. Whitlock, I’m sorry.”
She kept repeating her refrain about no telegram, he kept apologizing. For all the pathos in the little scene, no one else in the crowd noticed them. And they were equally unmindful of the gangrenous smell of rotting flesh and the shrieks of misery all around them.
“Out the way there, gal, coming through.” The man addressing me was one of a pair of negroes who were maneuvering a stretcher off the cars. “Marse Randolph,” the other called out, “where’ll we put it?”
Palmer shook his head, his mouth shut fast. Mrs. Whitlock turned to see the cause. Slowly, as though everything around her were stopped in time and she was wading alone through the heavy mud molasses, she moved to the stretcher. When she drew back the winding sheet, her scream ran up my spine like a razor, swift and sharp and sure.
There, frozen in death, was what was left of Henry Whitlock. Half his face blown away, bone and muscle left exposed. An empty eye socket gazed up at his wife.
War had come to Richmond at last. And victory though they called it, Manassas took its toll.
The horror of what I saw on the train platform replayed itself in one nightmare after another until Wilson woke me just past daybreak, pulling me close and murmuring words of comfort. But as my lips found his, a pounding sounded through our house. Someone banging on the door with force enough they might have meant to shake the building down. And just as insistently calling out, “Mary, are you there? It’s urgent.”
“That damn Bet can’t have nerve enough to call my wife from our bed, without so much as a good-morning and by-your-leave,” Wilson said.
“You think that, you don’t know Bet.” Sure she’d keep shouting until I let her in, I extricated myself from the bedclothes, pulled on my summer shift, and hurried down to unlatch the door.
“They have them in one of the tobacco factories.” Her torrent of words hit me like the downpour of the night before. “I heard they’ve not been fed nor tended, not even the injured.”
“Come upstairs, where we can talk.” I pulled her inside, hoping to snatch a minute to make sense of what she was saying.
She climbed the stairs right on my heels. “I’ve filled the gig with provisions. We must go to them at once.”
“Them who?” My hastily dressed husband stood in the parlor, arms folded across his shirt front, scowling.
“The Federal prisoners. The so-called Secessionists brought them in by the trainload all night, hounding them into a factory with no food or water.”
Wilson’s scowl deepened. “Usually it’s only slaves they shut up in those factories, working all day without food or water.”
I shot him a look. “Miss Bet has no part in that,” I said. “Now, Miss Bet, you set down just for a minute while I get my hair covered, then we can go.”
I gave her a gentle push toward the sofa and brushed past Wilson into the bedroom. He followed, standing close so Bet couldn’t hear. “So you jump up whenever she orders you to, never mind you’re already scared half to death by what you insisted on seeing last night?”
I tied an apron over my skirt, to make it look like I was a house servant called away from her chores, and peered into our looking glass to plait my hair. “She didn’t order anything, she just asked for my help. At least, that’s about as close as she gets to asking.”
Truth was, I didn’t need ordering, nor much asking, from Bet or anyone. I felt something catch inside me when I thought of Mr. Lincoln’s soldiers. Not kinship exactly, but some sort of camaraderie. If I could figure something to do for the captured Federals, I was ready enough to try it.
But Wilson wasn’t yet going to understand all that as he gazed at our empty bed. “There are times I wish you’d be a little less contrary, for your husband’s sake.”
Pinning my kerchief over my plaits, I gave him a smile. “Husband, I love you, and you know it. But I better see if I can be any use to those prisoners, at least.” Though he didn’t object, I marked how neither he nor Bet would look the other in the eye as I bid him farewell and followed her out.
Bet raced her gig to where factories lined Main Street, two blocks from the York River Rail Line and the Canal Street locks. The name LIGGON’S TOBACCO was painted in large black letters against a white field on the three-story brick building where she stopped. A young soldier lounged before the door, observing with lazy curiosity as Bet tied the horse to a post and I unloaded our baskets of provisions.
“What you got there, ma’am?”
“Charity for the prisoners. If you will be so good as to let me pass.” Bet issued it as a command rather than a request.
He ducked his head, perplexed. “Nobody said anything about visits to the prisoners.”
Bet tipped her chin, looking at him across her long nose, eager to play the scold. “Young man, hasn’t your mother raised you as a Christian?”
Whatever enemy that boyish fellow expected to encounter when he enlisted, it sure wasn’t Bet Van Lew. “ ’Course she has, ma’am.”
“Doesn’t Christ teach us to love our enemies?”
“But these are Yankees we’ve got here, ma’am, damnable Yankees.”
Bet nodded in triumph. “All the more in need of Christian charity. Think of how proud your mother will be of your aiding such a pious act. Why, I daresay your company chaplain will commend you for your participation.” She turned to me. “Come along, we mustn’t dawdle when there’s charity to be done.”
I bowed my head, stifled my smile, and followed her past the bewildered guard.
Once inside, we found ourselves in a cavernous room, some seventy feet by forty. Massive machinery for pressing tobacco took up most of the floor, with scores of Union soldiers crowded among the menacing contraptions.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Bet said. “We have brought you food, and some lint and bandages for the wounded. A few books, as well, for you to pass the time. But now I see so many of you, I fear we haven’t nearly enough to feed you all.”
The unkempt men surged forward, extending their hands to beg like street urchins, until a sudden banging called them to a halt. The clattering came from the middle of the room, where a short soldier had taken off his boot and was striking its heel against the long handle of a tobacco press.
“Gentlemen, remember, we represent order in this land of rebellion.” He spoke in the hard Yankee accent I knew from the New England abolitionists who visited Philadelphia on their lecture tours. “Dear lady, forgive this uncouth welcome, but we’ve had nothing to eat since we entered battle on Sunday.”
He looked ridiculous making such a formal speech in his stocking foot, his boot held up like a saber raised to lead the charge. But Bet was entranced, all gallant Federal that he was in her mind. “It is I who ought to ask forgiveness of you, on behalf of all the loyal Unionists of my native state,” she said. “What may I offer you from our meager supplies?”
He waved his boot to indicate she needn’t bother. “Someone else can have my share of the provisions. But can you get a message to my family? The Rebels refuse to report our names to the Federal commanders, and I cannot bear to think that Mother would believe me dead on the battlefield.”
“I will be honored to send a missive. What is your name, and where is your family?” Bet glanced my way, meaning for me to memorize whatever the man might say.
But before he could answer, the door was swung open by a stout man in a heavily decorated Virginia uniform. Announcing himself as Brigadier General John Winder, he demanded to know what we were doing in his prison.
“I am Elizabeth Van Lew, and my servant and I are on a Christian mission of charity.” Bet smiled and coquetted, though the general was twenty years her senior. “Surely a man with the intellect I see in your eyes will understand that such kindness on our part will impress the world with the worthiness of the Southern cause.”
General Winder ran a hand through his silvered hair. “This influx has been so sudden, your c
ontribution could be of some use to us.” He called to the guard, who skulked in red-faced. “Private, see to it that this lady has an escort whenever she enters this facility. I would not trust so charming a creature to these ruffians.”
The New Englander’s face seeped disappointment as he realized he’d have no chance to dictate out a message for his family. Never one to look her own failings in the eye, Bet turned away from him to distribute food on the far side of the room, with the lanky guard at her elbow all the while.
I wasn’t about to give up so easily. After all, Mama raised me on a steady regimen of stealth and surreption, especially when it came to doing right by those in need, and Mr. Jones took up where Mama left off. I worked my way through the group of prisoners, dispersing the contents of my basket until only one item remained. By then I’d reached the place where the bootless Federal leaned against a tobacco press, struggling to hide his chagrin. I drew out the small book I’d kept in reserve and offered it to him.
“Marse, take this book instead of your breakfast. Only be mindful once you got it. Mistress takes such care with her books, she’s sure to notice any little mark someone makes in it.” I pressed the leather-bound tome into his hands with a nod. “Any mark at all,” I repeated, hoping my meaning was clear.
Bet fumed so hard as we took our places in the gig, she didn’t notice me worrying my sleeve over the prisoner. Nor did she mark my distraction as we made our way among the stalls at First Market, laying in another round of comestibles for our charges. When we returned to the impromptu jail, a new guard had taken over the watch, one with enough experience soldiering to demand a pass from Bet. Which meant we had to spend an hour or more chasing down General Winder, and then another quarter hour while he flirted with Bet, before we had the pass in hand.