“Startle you then. That’s not bad.” She nodded toward his painting. Samuel felt himself bristle.
“Thank you, ma’am, for so insightful a commentary.”
“You needn’t get in a huff. Just a friendly critique, one painter to another.”
She took a few steps forward, bent and studied the painting while Samuel Bowater studied her, tried to think how this person had managed to squeeze so many damnably irritating comments into two simple sentences.
“If you don’t mind…” Bowater said. The girl straightened, said, “Oh. Sorry. My name is Wendy Atkins.”
She held out her hand in a very masculine gesture and Samuel took it, shook, said, “I am Lieutenant Samuel Bowater, at your service.”
“‘Lieutenant’? An army officer?”
“Confederate States Navy.” Samuel heard the irritation creep into his voice, and Wendy heard it as well.
“Forgive me, Lieutenant, I don’t want to interfere with your artistry.” She turned and walked off, and Samuel watched her, despite himself. There was something about her, something of the libertine, that made Samuel think of the suffragettes or one of these radical, thoroughly distasteful women’s groups.
Forty feet away she stopped and set up an easel and rested a canvas on it. She had been holding a paint kit and canvas in her hand, but Samuel had not even noticed, and he only now caught her phrase “one painter to another.”
Samuel had been watching her preparation, the graceful, practiced way that she set out her paints, but his eye was drawn to the canvas. It was not a big painting, twenty inches by twelve, perhaps, and hard to make out at that distance. It was approximately the same view that he himself was painting. But even from forty feet there was a quality that seemed to radiate from the picture, an ambiance that dovetailed perfectly with the actual river in front of him, the smell of the trees and grass and hints of smoke. It seemed to have…Bowater did not know the word. It.
He frowned. Now he would have to deal with the distraction of having her close at hand, along with all the other damnable distractions that made his life a misery and his painting a mediocrity.
He turned back to the canvas, and soon the world and his own self-pity were lost in the pure focus of applying paint to canvas. He touched the tiny buildings on the far shore-darks and lights, brick reds and pale yellows-the suggestion of buildings. He ran an eye over what he had done, gave a tiny nod of approval.
“Nice, nice…” Wendy’s voice again, and again Bowater jumped.
“I’m sorry, did I frighten…startle you again?”
Bowater rounded on her, and the first thing that leaped into his throat was the kind of tongue-lashing he was accustomed to giving a subordinate, but he held it back. He cleared his throat. “I find such peering over someone’s shoulder to be the height of intrusiveness,” he managed.
“Oh, come now. People do it to me all the time. It doesn’t bother me.”
“What people do all the time, ma’am, and what you are willing to tolerate are hardly benchmarks for decent society.” He had meant for the words to cut her like a very sharp knife, but instead they sounded pompous and absurd, and Wendy just smiled and leaned over again and looked at his painting.
“And yet…” she said.
“What?”
“I don’t know…technically it is quite right, you know, except perhaps for your color choice there…” she pointed to the water in the shadow of the far shore. “…but there is something…I don’t know…missing.”
“The painting is not complete.”
“Are you familiar with Fitz Hugh Lane?”
“Yes.”
“I should think that sort of thing…why do you not paint naval subjects?”
Bowater was thrown off by the question, and forgot to be indignant about this entire line of interrogation. “The navy is my entire life. I paint, in part, to forget the navy for a while.”
“Perhaps that is the problem.”
“What?”
“Well, you do not let your real life get into your painting.”
This was absurd, and moreover it had destroyed Samuel’s enthusiasm for painting for the day. He took out his bottle of turpentine and began to wash his brushes.
“I do hope I have not chased your muse away,” Wendy said. Bowater looked up, tried to give her an Are you still here? expression.
“My muse, I fear, did not choose to come south with me and is now trapped behind enemy lines.”
Wendy laughed, flashed white teeth. “A sense of humor! Who would have thought it of the stoic lieutenant. On what ship do you serve?”
“The gunboat Cape Fear.” He almost said “tugboat” but did not. “I am her commanding officer.”
“Indeed? I have always been drawn to the sea.”
“Then it is a pity you were not born a man.” Bowater put his paints away and set his canvas on the grass. This Wendy seemed the type who might not realize she was not born a man.
“I have never been aboard a naval vessel,” she said.
“I fear you have missed your chance,” Samuel said. “On board the larger ships, it is not uncommon to stage entertainments that are appropriate for ladies to attend. But the larger ships are all in the Union navy. The gunboats of our Confederate Navy are hardly appropriate places for a woman.”
“Including your Cape Fear?”
“Most certainly including my Cape Fear. Good day now, and good luck with your painting.”
Bowater left her there, walked back to the navy yard, caught a boat to the Cape Fear. He needed the mental holiday that painting afforded him, but his afternoon had been ruined by that Wendy Atkins person. Her words seemed to buzz around his head like a swarm of bees, as noisy and as hard to get rid of. Why, he wondered, did the mind have such a capacity for self-torment? He had allowed himself to be pulled into Taylor’s confidence game, and he had been beating himself over it ever since. Now, try as he might to stop them, his thoughts kept coming back to the person he least wished to think on.
Wendy Atkins dabbed paint on the canvas, looked out across the languid water of the Elizabeth River. There was no traffic moving, not much going on.
She glanced south, toward the navy yard. Wondered if Lieutenant Bowater would make an appearance. It was three weeks ago that she had met him, and she had seen him twice since. They had exchanged something like ten words. He had returned again and again to her thoughts.
She pulled in a big lungful of the brackish air, reveled in it. Wendy was drawn to the sea, though she did not know why. There were no sailors in her family, no grizzled old grandfathers to balance her on their knee and tell her tales of far-distant lands, of storms and golden sunrises at sea, no brothers returning from year-long voyages bearing exotic gifts. Her people were farmers and storekeepers. They showed little interest in traveling to the next town over, let alone distant lands.
Yet there it was; dreams of the romance and beauty of the sea wrapped around her like an old quilt, ever since she was a little girl. Growing up in Culpepper, Virginia, 160 miles from salt water, she based her first childish paintings of ships on magical voyages entirely on woodcuts in books and magazines and on her own imagination, since she had seen neither a ship nor a sea. She filled in the colors absent in the black-and-white images: golden hulls and red and green and yellow sails, oceans of brilliant aquamarine.
The reality, first observed at age thirteen on a visit to her paternal aunt in Norfolk, had been both a thrill and a disappointment. Ships, and the sea on which they traveled, were much more chromatically understated than she had imagined, yet much grander than she could ever have guessed.
She chafed through her teens, chafed through her early twenties, eager to return to the sea, to live by salt water. She read whatever she could get her hands on, stories of Columbus and bold Francis Drake, of John Paul Jones and Nelson. Her fantastic ships became peopled by fearless sailors who strode the quarterdeck in gales of wind and flying metal.
Wendy could not go to se
a, she could not even live by the sea, but she could paint. Ships and seascapes done from memory, and the mountains as well and the people in her family, she painted them all with a skill that grew year after year. By the time she was seventeen there was nothing more that anyone in Culpepper or the surrounding area could teach her, because she knew more about art, and painted with more skill than anyone she knew.
She fended off suitors, defended against becoming trapped in Culpepper with a husband and children to care for. And after a while, as her reputation as an eccentric grew, the young men stopped coming, which was fine. They thought of her as some sort of bluestocking, assumed her to be a suffragette, which she might well have been if she had cared enough about politics to pay attention.
But she did not. Painting. The sea. Those were the things she loved. And when the war came, and the possibility of the grand men-of-war sailing from Southern ports, she could stand it no more. Weeks of arguing, pouting, stubbornness won her her parents’ approval to move to Portsmouth and live with her Aunt Molly. Despite the fact that Molly was, in many ways, as suspect as Wendy.
She took the carriage house behind Molly’s larger place as her own, began painting the ocean and river views around Portsmouth and Norfolk. In the month that she had been there, the place had provided more excitement than over two decades in Culpepper. The energy was palpable.
When it exploded on the 20th, Wendy was there, down by the naval yard, walking the streets, unescorted, but she did not care. She let herself get caught up in the swirl and madness of the crowd. Sucking it down. The shouting, the gunfire, the bitter smell of smoke, rolling over the low walls surrounding the yard, the towering columns of flames-it was all so thrilling that she could barely tear herself away with the coming of dawn and the bone-weariness that dragged her back to her little carriage house.
Living in Portsmouth, she was learning a great deal about the reality of the maritime world, discovering that real sailors were not necessarily the gentleman heroes of her dreams, the lovable rogues.
But Wendy Atkins was a romantic, and like any good romantic, she would not let the empirical truth trounce the fine fantasy world she had created. She longed, above all, to get underway on a ship, a man-of-war. She still felt there was romance and excitement to be found there. She longed to see it from beyond the passenger’s perspective. But that did not seem possible.
Or had not seemed possible. She was growing more hopeful of her chances. There were a lot of navy men around. And while none of them was the Hawkins or John Paul Jones of her dreams, there were some possibilities there.
She seemed to draw them like a lodestone, standing on the bank, brazen with her hoopless skirt and paint-spattered clothes, painting. They were an odd lot; boys who would look over her shoulder and try and fail to think of some insightful comment; they usually ended up with something along the lines of “Boy, ain’t that pretty!”
Those she dismissed out of hand.
There were others who were more intriguing, officers, mostly, some of whom knew a thing or two about art. And officers, she understood, were the ones to know if one wished to see a man-of-war in some significant way.
And there was Samuel Bowater. Most intriguing of all, because he was a painter, and not an altogether bad one. He did not make an attempt on her affections, hardly spoke to her when he did see her, and she did not know if that was his means of piquing her interest or if he genuinely did not care.
Wendy laid her thin brush aside, picked up the thicker one, touched it to the white paint, and began to build high cumulus clouds. There were some men who were more subtle. By way of example, the man sitting on the bench twenty yards away, ostentatiously tuning his violin. He wore a blue frock coat with some kind of shoulder boards, but what rank or position he might hold she could not imagine.
He dragged the bow across the strings, made a horrible noise that set her teeth on edge as he fiddled with the pegs.
If he can’t play that thing, I am going to have to move, she thought. Her concentration could not suffer through amateur fiddling twenty yards away.
Finally the man stopped tuning, rested the bow on the strings, looked out over the water. Wendy stole glances at him. Unkempt, to some degree, he could use a shave, but his features were strong and he was not unattractive.
He closed his eyes, moved the bow across the strings. Wendy paused, brush hovering over her painting, listened. The tune was familiar, some folk song, though this fellow played it slow and solemn, not the way she had heard it before.
She listened. He was no amateur, he made the instrument speak, threw in delicate fingerwork, flourishes of music where the original, simple melody had none.
“Rosin the Beau,” Wendy realized. That was the tune, “Rosin the Beau.” Her father used to sing it to her when she was a girl. But there was magic in the way this fellow played it, the simple folk tune as foundation, the clever but subtle improvisation on the old song.
Wendy went back to her work as the music floated over her, as if it was the leitmotif of her art, orchestral accompaniment; it dovetailed with her mood, or pulled her mood along with it, she did not know which. The effect was the same.
She built oil-paint clouds and the violinist ended his song, moved on to “The Dark-Eyed Gypsy” and from there to the tunes she knew as “forebitters,” the songs of the sailor men, not the chanties, the work songs, but the plaintive songs they sang on the forecastle head at night. The music entranced her.
She painted on, wrapped in the sound, and then somehow the folk songs and the forebitters were over and she was getting snatches of Mozart and Bach and Beethoven. She smiled as she dabbed paint. And then the music stopped and soon she heard footsteps. Here we go… she thought.
“Forgive me, ma’am,” the man said, and she turned and he tipped his hat, a wool cap with a leather visor, the kind the naval officers wore. “I have been terribly rude. I do hope I haven’t disturbed you.” His accent was not Virginia, but Deep South.
“Your question is disingenuous, I think,” she said, turning back to her canvas.
“Pardon?”
“You are being disingenuous. It means…”
“I know what it means.”
“Then you know you are being that.” She turned to him and smiled. “You play wonderfully, and a very catholic repertoire, but I do not think you were worried about disturbing me.”
The man lifted his cap, scratched his head, gave her an odd sort of smile. “Maybe not.”
“Are you just a musician, sir, or do you fancy painting as well?”
“Oh, I don’t know much about painting…I know what I like.” He looked at Wendy’s painting, all but finished. “I could say somethin’ like ‘My, ain’t that pretty,’ but I don’t reckon that would be what you call an insightful comment.”
“I reckon not.”
She turned back to her painting, let the man hang in the uncomfortable silence, and just as she heard him begin to shuffle in preparation of walking away, she said, “Are you a naval officer, sir? I do not recognize your insignia.”
“Well, they still gettin all that insignia nonsense straightened away. I am a naval officer. Chief engineer on a gunboat.”
“Chief engineer…” Wendy had never cared for engines and such. She thought them dirty and vulgar. They were the barbarians at the gate, ready to drive off the tall, elegant sailing ships of which she had dreamed for so long.
“That’s right,” the man said, as if reading her mind. “I am one of those loathsome and dirty mechanics who labor in those Stygian depths.”
Wendy turned and met his eyes. He was smiling at her, playful and ironic. She tried to see into him, tried to look through his brown eyes. He is a tricky one, she thought. If Samuel Bowater was a hard man to plumb, this one seemed more complicated still. Stygian?
“My name is Hieronymus Taylor,” the man said, held out his hand.
Wendy took it and shook. Most men did not offer to shake hands with her. “Wendy Atkins, a pleasure. �
�Hieronymus’?”
“Now, you ain’t gonna ask if I’m named after some ol painter, are you?”
“Well, yes…I was. Were you?”
“Damned if I know…beg pardon. My daddy never did tell me, an he’s dead now, so I reckon it’s too late to ask. Though where the old man would have heard of a fella like that, on the docks of N’Orleans, I can’t figure.”
Ahh… Wendy thought. New Orleans, waterfront, dock rat… She filed him away in the right pigeonhole. “Wherever did you learn to play the violin like that?”
“Old black fella taught me. Rollin Jones was his name, somethin of a legend down in the delta. He seen I had a natural ability, taught me up.”
“Surely he did not teach you Mozart.”
“No. Was I playin Mozart?”
“Yes you were. How could you not know that?”
“Well, I hear bits of music, they stick in my head. Can’t forget ’ em if I try. Guess I heard that somewhere. Which one was Mozart?”
Wendy hummed a few bars and Taylor took up with her and they hummed together. “Right, right…I sure do love that bit of music.”
“It is lovely,” Wendy said, and she was quiet again, but it was not uncomfortable now. “You know,” she continued, and the words came out way ahead of any thought, “I have always wanted to sail aboard a man-of-war. Just once.”
Taylor nodded. “You might be talkin to the right fellow.”
“During a fight at sea,” Wendy added, firing the second barrel. Insane…
Taylor laughed out loud. “That’s getting a bit trickier.”
Wendy nodded. “Forgive me. Girlish daydreams of Lord Nelson and such. I don’t know where that came from.”
Taylor folded his arms and regarded her with a curious look. Then, to Wendy’s full amazement, Taylor clarified. “I said that was a bit trickier. I didn’t say it was impossible.”
16
Our brave men fell in great numbers, but they died as the brave love to die-with faces to the foe, fighting in the holy cause of liberty.
– Captain Thomas Goldsby, 4th Alabama
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