by Lois Leveen
“Why, here is Flora Stuart at last,” one of the ladies called out. Shifting my gaze to the other doorway, I watched the guest of honor make her way from the entry hall.
The grief etched across her young face stung me. Through all the talk of the pitiable widow, I expected a woman equal to Varina Davis in years. It caught me quick to see Mrs. Stuart couldn’t be more than two or three years past twenty-five—the age I was to turn that week.
Queen Varina rose. “My condolences. I am sorry we do not meet under happier circumstances, for either of us.” She gestured at her own mourning attire, a lace-trimmed silk rather finer than her guest’s worn black poplin.
“Thank you, Mrs. Davis, and my condolences to you. General Stuart and I lost our own little girl back in ’62, when she was the same age as your Joe.”
“They say there is no grief like that over a child, and I believe it is true.” Queen Varina laid a hand on her swollen belly, an indelicate gesture she’d taken up to emphasize her maternal condition. “I only pray the next one will come to us healthy, and remain so.”
Flora Stuart looked at her with red-rimmed eyes. “I suppose there is great comfort in knowing you are to have another child. For a widow, there can be no such solace.”
The portly matron on the sofa fidgeted with her hoops, trying to distract Mrs. Stuart. “It was a lovely service today.”
But Queen Varina wouldn’t let well enough alone. “I am sorry I could not attend, but even the shortest refrain from the Dead March reminds me of how they played it for my little one only a fortnight ago.”
“You needn’t have worried,” the widow said. “There’s not a military band to be had in Richmond. With the Federals advancing so closely on all sides, there were barely half a dozen able-bodied men left in the city to bear my husband’s coffin to the hearse.”
Before Queen Varina could reply, Aunt Piss came into the parlor, bowing and greeting each of the women in turn. “I hope I am not interrupting you ladies.”
One of the dowagers laid her hand on his arm, waiting for a round of cannon fire that rattled the leaden windows to die off before she asked, “Is Richmond in great danger?”
I shifted the fan from my right hand to my left, turning to hear his answer.
“It is the men serving under Grant who are in danger. Unconditional Surrender has turned into Unremitting Slaughterer. He sends his troops to their deaths like steers to the abattoir.”
“Even the smallest skirmish can take lives on both sides.” Flora Stuart’s quiet observation sent chills up my spine.
“I’m sorry if my reference to casualties upset you. It is in contrast to such fine officers as your late husband that we see the inadequacies of the Union commanders.” Aunt Piss turned to lecture the other ladies. “To the north of us, we have Grant the butcher, assaulting where he cannot win. To the south is the coward Butler, faltering even where he might win.” He smiled and gave just such a prediction as he knew would keep the ladies cooing and praising him long after he joined the gentlemen in the drawing room. “I pledge to you on my honor, Richmond will stand as safe this spring as it did two years ago, when we gallantly repelled McClellan’s forces though they so outnumbered our own.”
But I smiled, too. McClellan lost Richmond in ’62 because he didn’t know he outnumbered his enemy—didn’t know because I chose not to tell him. Now, with Mr. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation written into law and my own husband serving in the Army of the James, I was more than ready to see the Confederacy face its final defeat. I’d make sure the Federals received every scrap and seed that could bring the war to a quicker end.
I set a hand onto my waist, meaning to let it rest against the fabric covering Wilson’s letter. But when I felt my skirt, I realized his missive was gone.
That very day and every one thereafter, I searched the Gray House, my house, and each step in between, desperate to find the folded page covered with my husband’s steady hand. I wasn’t just worried over who might find the letter, whether they would link it to me—it was a deeper dread that held me. If I couldn’t safeguard that single sheet, how could I expect that Wilson himself would remain unscathed?
More than a full month later, on the seventeenth June, Jeff Davis received a long report the Confederates had intercepted en route from Butler to Grant. It told of the initial Federal attack on Petersburg, twenty miles south of Richmond, and how the Union gains had come at a cost, to the USCT especially. The 22d alone had lost fourteen men killed, one hundred and sixteen wounded, and eight missing.
Every day Richmond’s news-sheets would list out the wounded company by company. But only on the Confederate side. I knew my husband’s name would never be among them, but still I sifted and scoured through those lists for what I knew I couldn’t, prayed I wouldn’t, possibly find. Many a woman woke in the morning thinking herself a soldier’s wife, not realizing that sometime in the night she’d already become a soldier’s widow. Weeks or months might pass before a dead man’s family would get word. Some never heard at all, Union and Confederacy both more bent on slaying the other than on identifying who on their own side had been slain.
Twenty-four
Jefferson! Don’t leave me to die with these niggers, Jefferson!”
Not a one of us wanted to be with her, but still Queen Varina cried out like she was our captive. “Don’t pay her no never mind,” Hortense whispered, dipping a face-cloth into the water bowl Sophronia held. “Birthing only kill some womens. This one ain’t about to up and die, so long as she got all us to boss around if she live.”
With the curtains closed and fuel too scarce to run the gasolier, the Davises’ bedchamber was dark as a winter night, though still heavy with the stagnant heat of the June afternoon. I raised the oil lamp a little higher as Hortense laid the moist cloth across that proud forehead. “Doctor on his way,” she soothed. “Hush now, Mistress, ’fore you scare the chiljen.”
“Don’t you dare hush me.” Queen Varina clawed at Hortense’s slender wrist. “Out, every one of you black hell-fiends! Get out!” She shoved Hortense into me. The lamp I held swung wild, sending a spray of oil scalding my arm and throat.
Hortense, Sophronia, and I fled to the hall. “Womens all suffer when they time come?” Sophronia asked.
“She ain’t suffering. We is.” Hortense ran a quick eye over the nailmarks patterning her forearm before turning to me. “You get downstairs, tend them guberment mens. Make sure Marse Davis don’t be running up here, making her hiss and spit even more. All I need is menfolk tramping all over the house during a female time.”
The arc of burns along my neck and arm felt like a thousand hot needles, each peppery point digging deeper as I made my way to the dining room, where Jeff Davis huddled with half a dozen advisers. They’d taken the china and glassware from the étagères, arranging the pieces across the rosewood table to demarcate the positions of the Union and Confederate forces. The porcelain punch bowl stood in the middle of one cluster, representing Atlanta. At the center of another cluster was the silver and crystal berry bowl, Richmond. One of the men adjusted regiments of goblets and corps of saucers, while Burton Harrison read out a dispatch regarding Joe Johnston’s latest clash with General Sherman.
As I hovered about the room refilling glasses, my burns grew harder to bear. I stepped away to grip the sideboard as often as I could, fearful I might faint outright.
“If the mission succeeds,” I heard Custis Lee say, “it will be an end to Lincoln for once and all.”
Those words caught me quick. Forcing myself to listen through the nauseating fog of pain, I struggled to make out what Confederate plotting I’d missed.
“The Union failed at the very same gambit,” Aunt Piss said.
The other men glanced nervously at Jeff Davis while Custis Lee answered, “The Union sent but two thousand men, relying on the command of that imbecile Dahlgren. Even as we speak, Jubal Early is amassing ten thousand of our finest troops, along with munitions to arm all the Confederates
that we will liberate from the Federal prisons.”
Rushes of pain swept across my seared flesh, as though the hooves of those ten thousand horses were thudding along each sharp pepper-point of my burns. James Seddon, who’d held the post of Confederate secretary of war nearly as long as his three predecessors put together, leaned forward to pluck a berry from the bowl at the center of the table. He suffered from strabismus, and his lazy eye seemed to linger on the tabletop, even as he fixed the other on Aunt Piss. “So long as Grant does not suspect Early is riding toward Washington, the Union capital and its president will be ours for the picking.”
Despite all the poultices of beeswax and flaxseed resin I laid on my putrefied skin, that whole week just about any labor rubbed my burns raw. Sophronia and Hortense suffered right along with me, slaving extra hard to make up for my slowness. So long as they worked beside me in Jeff Davis’s office, I stayed as far as I could from his papers, lest my curiosity betray me. Mid-day Friday, as we wrang out rags to wash the windowpanes, Queen Varina, still not recovered from delivering a bawling baby daughter four days earlier, shouted for Hortense.
Hortense sucked her teeth and disappeared into the adjacent bedchamber, nodding to me when she returned. “Get the cook to put up a basket a whatever she got for Marse Davis’ dinner, you carry it over to him.” She dropped her voice. “Queen Varina think he too stupid to eat if she ain’t up to feed him herself.”
When I stepped out of the Gray House, the thick July air felt nearly intoxicating. My head echoed from the preternatural quiet of Capitol Square, which stood empty in the noontime heat. White Richmond’s hunger and discontent had grown far worse since the previous year’s Bread Riot. But by now the residents were too weak and wasted to riot. No one even patrolled the Square to enforce the prohibition against negroes crossing the green.
Still and all, a soldier stood guard outside the central archway of the Customs House, and others were stationed on every landing of the stair. I lifted my basket to each one and muttered, “For Marse Davis, from the Gray House,” keeping my eyes low as they waved me past.
When I reached the office that ran the length of the top floor, Burton Harrison gestured for me to set the basket on the massive desk, not even pausing in his address to Jeff Davis, who stood gazing out the window. “We have the report from Early’s scouts today. He’s ridden clear to Winchester with no resistance. He should ford the Potomac within the week.”
Davis kept his back to the room, as though searching the window for a glimpse of his far-off lieutenant general. “A force of ten thousand men riding across Virginia, and Grant without the slightest knowledge of it. Truly, it seems too great a miracle even for us to hope for.”
“Any miracle is but the will of the Lord,” Harrison answered. “He has sustained the Confederacy, and now it seems He sees fit to end Lincoln’s tyranny at last.”
Though I fought to keep my features blank and my gait steady as I left the room, what I heard had me foundering. I’d taken even greater care than usual when I prepared my report the Monday previous. By Tuesday morning, what information I had of Early’s planned attack on Lincoln should have been on its way out of the city. With Union troops only a dozen miles away, it would take no more than one day, two at the most, for the message to reach Grant’s own eyes. Surely he had it by now. What could be keeping him from acting on my intelligence—and what would the price of ignoring it be?
For three years, Mr. Lincoln had prosecuted the war with a constancy that awed even his foes. The Union had lost far more men than the Confederates, was losing still more with every week of Grant’s campaign, Unconditional Surrender sacrificing his own men corpse by corps. But Lincoln never wavered in his determination to preserve the Union, though it might cost deaths another hundred thousandfold. The would-be Confederate assassins knew that without Lincoln in command, Northern politicians might be done enough with death to choose peace over victory. And if they did, the Emancipation Proclamation would have no more force than a fistful of sand tossed into a hurricane wind.
Through every bloody season of the war, the Confederacy had clung to slavery even over the lives of its own sons. If Lincoln’s successor accepted a peaceful dissolution of the Union, the Confederate States of America would never free their slaves.
As Bet pulled her gig up beside the darkened cabin that night, I gagged at the sickly stench of rotting fruit. The people of Richmond were slowly starving, yet here was some farmer letting his crop molder in the field. Bet didn’t seem to pay the least mind to this wonderment, though hunger must have pinched at her stomach just as constantly as at mine.
I’d gone to her as soon as my day’s labor was done in the Gray House, figuring I could count on her devotion to Lincoln. Sure enough, she shared my consternation over how Monday’s report could go unheeded this long. But relieved as I was when she harnessed up her horse and rode us out to where we could get word to the Union command, still I braced myself for whatever she might do, given how reckless she’d grown.
Jumping down from the gig, she secured the reins to the split rail fence, strode to the door of the cabin, and let out a series of short whistles.
The door cracked just wide enough for a hard voice inside to ask, “What do you want?”
Bet answered with her usual self-pride. “I am a lady from Richmond whom Sharpe knows well.”
The door shut, and we heard murmurings inside, low and unintelligible. A bearded face hovered at the cabin window and then disappeared. The door opened again, a pale hand gesturing us inside.
The three men occupying the little room were so scrawny I could tell none of them did a farm man’s physical labor. The crop gone to waste in the field wasn’t their concern. Whether the farm was abandoned, seized, or willingly lent, I couldn’t say. But I guessed from their wary expressions that they occupied the farmstead solely because it sat halfway between the Confederate capital and General Grant’s latest headquarters.
“Who is this Sharpe fellow?” one of the men asked.
“This is no time for nonsense play.” Bet spoke as though the men were her servants, and it were her burden to order them about. “I am a true Unionist, and you know as well as I what that means to Colonel Sharpe.” She let out how Sharpe, Butler, and the rest before them had been the glad recipients of the correspondence she left at the edge of her family’s market farm, farther up the Osborne Turnpike.
The men showed no flicker of acknowledgment, though one of the three likely rode her missives out to City Point himself.
“A message was sent earlier this week, that we fear has been apprehended.” Bet nudged me forward. “Tell them, Mary.”
I didn’t much care to be ordered to speak in front of strange white men. Searching for my voice in the close air of the cabin, I was as nervous as the day I made my first recitation to Miss Douglass. And even less expectant of an approving audience than with my stern schoolmistress.
“Jubal Early is riding north through the Shenandoah with ten thousand men, to attack Washington.”
The men stayed quiet and still. They might have been a father and his two grown sons, the way they shared the same stony semblance.
“Early is within a week of Washington.” Bet’s voice turned high and tight, she was so agitated at their silence. “Grant must be informed.”
“General Grant is quite aware of Early’s location,” the man who’d peered out the window at us said. “He is facing Grant’s troops, before Petersburg. Along with the rest of Lee’s army.”
“No.” I needed no prodding now, knowing how important it was to convince them. “He is past Winchester already. He means to kill Lincoln.”
The man sneered, not at me but at Bet. “A Southerner comes to us from Richmond, driving a finer horse than many a Confederate cavalryman has these days, to bring news of Early that contradicts Grant’s own observations.” He grabbed her arm, twisting it behind her back until she cried out. “Do the Confederates believe we will fall for such deception? Do they send
women and niggers to lead us astray?”
Another of the men yanked me from behind. “Did they tell you what would happen if you were suspected?” he breathed into my ear. “What happens to Confederate spies who are caught by the Federals?”
“Arrest us, then,” I said, “only tell General Grant to send troops against Early. Once they find him, you can free us.”
“I’m not about to send Federal forces on a wild goose chase, weakening our line and giving the Confederates a chance to break the siege at Petersburg. Or to tell General Grant he is wrong, because some ignorant darky appearing out of the night says so.”
“She is not ignorant,” Bet insisted. “She is—”
Hoofbeats thundering toward the cabin cut her off. The rider jumped down just outside the door, not bothering to whistle or knock before he pushed his way in. Shouting his news before he was even fully inside.
“ ’Tis a mercy I hae reached you at last. I am riding two days and nights, over the Blue Ridge from Mount Jackson. Ten thousand rebels came through the very hamlet, telling that they were going on to Washington.”
McNiven didn’t let out a flicker of recognition for me or Bet. He just stood more wild-eyed than I’d ever seen him, as the older man asked, “You are sure of this?”
“As sure as the beating o’ my own heart, rapid grown from journeying fifty hours with nary a rest, to bring the news.” McNiven held out a sealed report.
The man tore open the packet and skimmed the page. “Grant will get this before dawn,” he promised McNiven. He barely took time to order his comrades to let us go, before he stormed out the cabin door and disappeared toward the barn.
“How fortuitous that Thomas arrived just when he did.” We’d ridden in silence for the first mile back to Richmond, McNiven slowing his horse to keep pace with Bet’s gig. But now Bet seemed eager to converse, pleased as she was with the excitement of the evening. “It was most exceptional, don’t you think?”
“Nothing too exceptional about being called a nigger and a darky.” I was more than a little piqued that she could overlook such a thing.