Daphne shifted her weight before sliding a glance to Sophie and back to the floor. “Daphne.”
He bowed to her, and Sophie’s breath caught at the gesture. “So pleased to make your acquaintances, ladies. Now let’s see what you’ve brought.”
Dr. Wilkes sighed. “I take my leave of you then, Dr. Lansing. Other hospitals await my services.”
Dr. Lansing knelt by the baskets to inspect their contents. “Wonderful.” He stood, swatting mosquitoes and flies from in front of his face. “Ladies, these men suffer from diarrhea, dysentery, typho-malaria, and simple, but fierce, hunger. They are absolutely wasting away. The quicker they eat, the bett—”
“Then let us feed them.” Sophie had not meant to interrupt.
He nodded, his grey eyes glinting like steel. “Did you happen to bring any spoons? Cups? It seems the Confederacy is plumb out of them.”
Daphne pulled a handful from the bottom of her basket.
“Voila!” Dr. Lansing cheered. “Now, small doses of food, very small, even if they say they are ravenously hungry and could eat a horse.” The rest of his instructions drilled into Sophie with a sense of urgency. If she could just help these men get well again, they could return to their regiments, or at least to their families one day.
But the men she fed looked more dead than alive. Large eyes, sunken cheeks, limbs so thin they appeared as fragile as spun glass, bones poking sharply beneath almost translucent skin. Some tugged feebly at the remnants of their clothing to better cover themselves in a lady’s presence. Most of them didn’t bother.
The last patient Sophie came to expelled his dying breath as she tipped the first spoonful of gruel past his lips. With trembling fingers, she wiped the food from his face, then wrung her hands in her apron.
“Dr. Lansing.” Her voice was hoarse as she called for him. She stood, and the room swayed. Not trusting herself to speak, she simply pointed to the shell of the man who expired beneath her touch.
“Ah. I see.” He closed the body’s eyelids, and returned to Sophie, lines framing his careworn eyes.
“What’s going on?” she whispered. “I had no—no idea!”
Lansing nodded. “The worst cases are soldiers from Belle Isle, which has insufficient clothing, food, and shelter. The officers held here in Libby are better off, although still so hungry many are in a state of semi-starvation. By the time the poor fellows are brought to us, particularly from Belle Isle, they’re already past saving. Eighteen were brought to us last night. Ten of them were dead this morning. Sims here—” He motioned to the soldier she’d failed to feed in time. “He makes the eleventh, just out of that batch. Fifty Union soldiers die per day here in Richmond.”
“Fifty? You’re sure?” Sophie asked.
“Quite.” He jabbed his finger toward the west wall. “There are five hundred men out there who should be in the hospital, but there simply isn’t room enough. The number of those who yet live but are becoming permanently broken down in their constitutions must be reckoned by thousands.” He shook his head, then offered a smile as Daphne came near. “Thank you both. I must get back. You still have the two loaves of bread I asked you to save?”
Daphne picked up the two baskets left on the floor. “Yessir.”
“Good. Break each of them into sections small enough to fit between prison bars. Wrap in this newsprint. Fold the paper so no bread shows through. Now. From which direction did you come?”
Confusion pulled Sophie’s brows together. “The east.”
“When you leave, go west on Cary Street and amble down the length of the prison before turning right on Twentieth and going home. Time your steps so the sentinel has his back to you by the time you reach the western third of Libby. Be sure no one is watching you. Walk close to the building, and let the paper-wrapped bread fall to the ground just outside the cellar window bars. Kick them in through the bars. Do not bend down. Walk at the pace of leisure, so your pace is not as noticeably altered. Do you understand?”
Sophie’s mind whirred as she searched his earnest, sun-browned face.
A patient’s groan claimed his attention. “You will,” he said over his shoulder, and returned to his patient’s side.
“What kind of sense does that make?” Daphne hissed. “You trust him, Miss Sophie?”
“There could be only one reason Dr. Lansing would ask us to kick bread into the cellar.”
Daphne shook her head. “Secrets spell trouble, and don’t we got enough of that already? Your pass says you can be here in this room. It don’t say nothin’ else.”
“I’m forbidden from entering the prison, yes. But General Winder didn’t say a word against kicking rubbish from the sidewalk alongside it.”
With nimble fingers, the women divided and wrapped the bread in paper until each small bundle resembled nothing more than crumpled wads of old news. News, ironically, which declared that whatever the Yankee prisoners got to eat was “more than they deserved.”
Outside, the few people on the street didn’t seem to notice yet another woman in mourning and a servant with market baskets. The sentinel neared, and Sophie nodded politely while Daphne tucked her head until their paths crossed and then separated. In ten more paces, they’d be at the barred cellar window.
“I’ll roll ’em down my skirt. You help me kick ’em in,” Daphne whispered, and Sophie nodded. Once they covered the bundles with their hems, no one would be able to see what their feet were doing anyway.
Still, Sophie’s middle fluttered. If they were caught, she might be able to talk her way out of it. If Daphne were caught, the punishment would be stripes. And it would be my fault, completely.
Five more paces.
Three.
Two.
“Halt!”
Sophie’s breath seized in her throat.
“That is—pardon me, Miss!”
“We’ve done nothing,” Sophie whispered to Daphne before facing her accuser.
“I believe you may have dropped something.” A Confederate officer doffed his kepi. Sunlight glanced off his chestnut hair.
Her back still toward the officer, Daphne whispered, “Go stall him.”
“Wait here, Daphne.” Sophie spoke loudly enough for all to hear as she leisurely strolled away, toward the man whose attention was fixed on her like a bead on his prey.
He was of average height, and his uniform, if it once fit him properly, bore evidence that he’d dropped ten pounds, perhaps, since he began service. His neatly trimmed beard and mustache disguised the angles of his face only slightly.
“Please do pardon me, Miss. I should not have shouted for your attention.”
Sophie smiled and swirled around him, so that as he turned to face her, his back was to Daphne. “It’s quite all right, I’m sure.”
“I’m rather used to barking orders, to being barked at myself. My manners are out of practice, I’m afraid, yet another casualty of war.” He cleared his throat. “This belongs to you, I presume?”
His lake blue eyes sought hers as he extended the black-edged handkerchief she must have dropped. Suppressing a sigh of relief, she inspected the ribbon trim and embroidery as much as she dared, to give Daphne more time at her task. “It does,” she said at length, and pressed it to her eyes, though they were as dry as the Sahara. “I’m sorry, the grief is very fresh.”
“Oh.” Clearly, the officer was ill at ease.
“But thank you just the same, Captain … is that right? I’m afraid I read Homer much better than I read shoulder straps.”
“Oh yes! Do forgive me. Captain Lawrence Russell, Ordnance Bureau. I had some business at the James River Towing Company concerning a shipment of ore for Tredegar Iron Works.”
“And I am Sophie Kent. Charmed.” She curtsied, low and long, before lifting her face to his gaze once more.
“The pleasure is all mine, I’m sure. Only, I’m so sorry to not have met you under less trying circumstances. Your husband’s death—was it for Dixie?”
“Wha
t? Oh no, I have no husband. I mean, I never have. It was my mother who passed.”
Something flickered in his eyes. “My deepest condolences. If she was anything like you, your father must be devastated.”
The compliment swirled in her middle, like indigestion. Despite being well past marrying age, Sophie had never played this game. Nor did she want to, not when more important matters begged for her attention.
Bending her lips in a smile, she stole another glance past him and found Daphne facing her now, her baskets resting on the sidewalk. “Please excuse me.”
A line formed between his eyebrows. “Are you quite well?”
“Yes, quite, thank you. Good day, Captain Russell.”
She felt his eyes on her back as she skirted him and strode down the sidewalk toward Daphne. The baskets were empty, save for the covered dishes, and not a newspaper in sight.
“Well done,” she told Daphne, and peeked at the cellar window. A colored man stood at the bars, one eye swollen shut, the other eye wide, his bread unwrapped and uneaten in his hand. He was looking at Daphne. “Do you know that man?”
Head bowed, Daphne shook her head. “Ain’t never seen that Negro in my life.” But as they turned the corner onto Twentieth Street, he still clutched the prison bar with one hand, and the bread in the other, unblinking.
Libby Prison, Richmond, Virginia
Saturday, September 26, 1863
Flies droned and mosquitoes hummed in the cellar of Libby Prison, undulating between the growing stack of mottled-white corpses, and the bread in the filthy brown hands of those still alive. Abraham Jamison barely noticed. Not until the woman who kicked the bread through the bars rounded the corner, a white lady by her side. Her face—that honeyed tea complexion, those almond-shaped eyes, those smooth, broad cheeks, full lips—he knew that face.
It’s the hunger. I’m seeing things. Turning his back to the outside world, he slid to the floor and devoured his bread. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to keep them alive another day, if the Rebel guards didn’t shoot them for sport first. His body still ached from the butt of the rifle that had hammered him for saying aloud that he was a freeman. Though they came like rain, the blows failed to produce a retraction. I am free, he told himself again, though the shadow of the prison bars lay on the floor at his feet, mocking him. Though his left eyelid still pulsed with pain and his ribs protested every breath, his soul, at least, was not in chains.
But I’m living on borrowed time. Truth be told, Abraham was surprised he hadn’t been killed the moment he was captured. He’d been on his way from Florida to Pennsylvania for furlough, making his way to Bella, wearing his 54th Massachusetts regimental uniform. He was clearly a colored Union soldier, and Jefferson Davis had stated that captured Negro soldiers would be treated as runaway slaves, and their white officers executed. Yet here he festered, along with twenty other colored Union troops.
Yesterday, there had been twenty-one of them. Last week, there had been twenty-five. Where the others had gone, no one knew for sure. They just—disappeared. If Davis’s word held true, they’d been sold into permanent slavery. If they were lucky, Abraham thought, they were already dead. Some of these men had been former slaves before fighting for the Union and knew the fate that awaited just beyond the auction block. Others, like Abraham, had been born free. Were it not for the war, he never would have set his big toe south of the Mason-Dixon line. And now here he was, in captivity in the Confederate capital, wondering if this was mere purgatory to the hell of slavery that awaited.
The guards certainly treated them like slaves already. The black prisoners performed every menial task for the prison, from swabbing floors to emptying chamber pots to loading putrefied bodies onto a dead cart when it was time for them to go to the cemetery. For the most trivial breach—an insolent word, shuffling feet, a question—they were at risk of being stripped, tied to a barrel, and filleted open with a horsewhip or cat-o’-nine-tails. The screams were loud enough to wake the entire prison.
Leaning his head back against the wall, Abraham closed his eyes. His baritone voice reverberated through his chest as it rumbled from his lips. “Oh freedom, oh freedom, oh freedom over me.” Another voice joined his, then another. “And before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free.”
Soon, each man matched his voice to the chorus, either with words, or with the groans of spirits in the deepest distress. And before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free. Urgency seeped from the words. The prospect of death, of meeting Jesus in eternal paradise, seemed far preferable, indeed, to bondage beneath a master’s lash.
But if I die here, how will Bella get along? Thoughts of his wife crowded Abraham’s consciousness as he let his forehead drop to his knees. The squeak of the cellar rats faded beneath the memory of her rich, alto voice. The woman who had kicked the bread in through the bars today had done so while humming a haunting tune. It was her voice he heard now, her skirts he saw swaying on the backs of his eyelids. Who was she? The question nagged, even in his sleep. In his dream, Abraham followed her, somehow drawn to her tragic posture. Head bowed, shoulders hunched, feet shuffling. Careful to never make eye contact with a white person. Obviously a slave.
Suddenly, she turned and looked him full in the eyes, and Abraham wrenched awake, gasping for air. Beneath that yellow head scarf was the face of his wife.
St. John’s Church, Richmond, Virginia
Sunday, September 27, 1863
In a rustle of black crepe, Sophie slipped into the pew box at St. John’s Church and greeted Mrs. Blair, who sat in front of her. This was not just where her family had worshiped ever since her father, Preston, moved to Richmond as a bachelor. This was Patrick Henry’s stage as he delivered his famous speech during the Second Virginia Convention, prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. She had learned the words well in grammar school, and never had forgotten the stirring conclusion.
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
“Miss Kent?” A woman’s voice, unfamiliar, whispered from behind her. “Don’t turn around. Just listen.” Palms sticking to her gloves, Sophie itched to turn around.
“My servant saw you leaving Libby Prison yesterday. My heart is true, as well. We are watched. Continue your work. Trust no one.”
Sophie gave no sign that she heard the words. Her blood turned to ice in her veins as she realized perhaps even this disembodied voice was not a friend.
“Deflect suspicion. We are watched. Do not greet me.”
Where the woman’s voice had just been, a chorus of whispers now filled Sophie’s ears. The ladies across the aisle may have been hard of hearing, but Sophie certainly wasn’t. They remarked on her presence after such a long absence, and set sail to the rumor that she had entered the “vile Yankee prison” yesterday. Heat bloomed in Sophie’s cheeks just as a retort formed on the tip of her tongue. But there it would stay.
After the closing prayer, Sophie exited through the church’s back door, grateful that her bonnet eclipsed most parishioners from her view. As ever, she preferred to remain as anonymous as possible. Am I watched even now by unfriendly eyes? Her grip tightened on her Bible.
Stepping into the sunshine, Sophie inhaled deeply, but humidity had thickened the air. A hot wind sloughed through treetops that bent as though sharing secrets among themselves. Her face tight with unease, Sophie could not get home fast enough.
“Miss Kent? Miss Sophie Kent?”
Surprise plucked her nerves, and she whirled toward the voice to find Captain Lawrence Russell striding over to greet her.
“Lawrence Russell. We met yesterday.”
Heads turned toward his commanding presence. Young belles in made-over gowns peeped up at him while their mothers nudged them closer. It was attention Sop
hie did not want, yet she could not break away.
“Forgive me. I’m sure you meet dozens of officers in Richmond every day. We met on Cary Street, next to Libby Prison. Remember?”
All around her, eyebrows raised at the mention of the prison. All except for those belonging to Elizabeth Van Lew, a known Union sympathizer. When Elizabeth and her mother brought aid to prisoners at Ligon’s tobacco factory during the first summer of the war, they’d been virtually thrown into the stocks in the local paper. Elizabeth caught Sophie’s eye now and steadied her.
She fixed a smile on her face. “Of course I remember. You had business at the towing company. Checking on a delayed shipment of ore for Tredegar, correct?”
Faint lines fanned from his eyes. “So you were listening after all. I confess you did seem a bit—distracted—and I was afraid I had bored you to no end. I hoped I’d see you again, but did not dare to dream it would be so soon. Is your father here this morning?”
A sigh escaped Sophie. She was as eager to leave as the captain seemed to detain her. “He worships elsewhere.”
“Ah. St. Paul’s?”
“Fort Delaware.”
He blanched. “How very hard.” Captain Russell’s voice dropped, his blue eyes softened in his chiseled face.
His sympathy touched something raw and painful, an abscess on her spirit she rather preferred to ignore. “Everyone has suffered in this war. Not just me.” Her gaze slid toward Mrs. Blair, who had paused to watch, as well.
The captain studied Sophie a heartbeat too long. “That does not erase your own pain, Miss Kent.”
She turned her head, furious that her eyes misted without her permission. I am only tired, she told herself. “Good day to you.”
“Please, allow me to escort you home.”
Sophie had nothing more to say to a Confederate officer, especially one whose words brought tears to her eyes. She certainly didn’t feel compelled to lead him to her house. But, standing just to his side, Elizabeth Van Lew cocked one eyebrow, just slightly, and barely nodded. Whispers filled Sophie’s hesitation. Deflect suspicion, she heard again, and realized the voice had belonged to Elizabeth.
Spy of Richmond Page 4