by Неизвестный
“But my brother—”
“Perhaps he will find another ford down river. I will mention both of you favorably in my report. His name and rank?”
“Gerard Feraud. Private Feraud.”
Eblé nodded. “Take your men to Vilna for resupply at the depot there. Good luck to you, Captain. My boys and I will take care of the bridges.”
“Understood, my general.”
Etienne’s men trudged along in column westward toward Vilna. Music should direct the pace—a drummer’s tattoo, or a series of marching songs. But they’d lost their drummer long ago and the men were too weary, too hungry, and too dispirited to sing. Etienne followed.
Behind, a great cry rose up from the Berezina, a wail like thousands of tormented souls at their first taste of Hell. Etienne jerked to a halt. He fumbled for his spyglass with icy fingers.
The stragglers were now under full attack. Reinforcements of revenants poured by the hundreds from the woods, joining those thinned by recent battle. Eblé, true to his word, had fired both bridges. Flames surged across the river. Oily smoke smeared the sky.
Galvanized at last, stragglers fought desperately hand to hand. Some raced to the bridges and flung themselves into the conflagration. Still others jumped into the river in a mad attempt to swim across, but the current swept them away.
This is what Hell looks like. This is what Hell sounds like. Good God.
Etienne scanned the far bank for Gerard or his bag of severed heads. He could well imagine him attacking the revenants with the same berserker fury he had turned on Fanchon. Weakened by fever, Gerard would quickly grow weary—his opponents never would.
He saw no sign of Gerard. Soon smoke obscured everything.
I could never forgive you for Fanchon—or for being mother’s favorite—but that is no proper death for a hussar. You offered to share with me and I repaid you with—
“My captain,” d’Hubert said.
Startled, Etienne lost his grip on the spyglass. It slipped from his hand. He swore.
“My captain,” d’Hubert said again, stooping to retrieve the glass from the frozen earth. “You do not look well.” He surrendered the brass tube to Etienne. The lens had cracked.
“None of us look well,” Etienne said, returning the broken spyglass to his pocket.
A crow plummeted to earth at their feet. “One for the stew pot,” d’Hubert said, brightening as he picked the thing up by its feet.
“No!” Etienne put all the force of years in command into that one word.
Shocked, d’Hubert dropped the bird and stood to strict attention.
“It is a carrion-eater,” Etienne said, more gently. “And most likely has eaten of the revenants we have slain. Do you really want to risk putting it in your belly?”
The memory of Gerard offering him a bit of ill-cooked crow flesh made Etienne’s empty stomach spasm and yet at the same time, filled him with guilt. Like the space left by an extracted tooth, he probed Gerard’s absence, worried at the novelty of it, missed the solid, though painful, physicality of him. How can I mourn a brother I never loved?
D’Hubert, too young to dissemble, struggled earnestly with the dilemma of the dead crow. A starving man learns not to be overly particular where food is concerned. Discipline could only stretch so far, Etienne knew.
“Pah!” d’Hubert said at last, and kicked the dead bird aside.
“Good man,” Etienne said. He filled his voice with false heartiness. “We shall find more wholesome food in Vilna. It’s fifty leagues, as the crow flies.” He clapped d’Hubert upon the shoulder and the pair hastened to rejoin the column.
As the crow flies.
Blood drained abruptly from Etienne’s face. Faithful d’Hubert gripped his arm to prevent Etienne’s collapse onto the snow.
Men who eat bread made with tainted rye sicken and die. Ofttimes they first go mad.
Might tainted fowl not have the same effect? Could that explain Gerard’s failure to rejoin the squadron?
Etienne tried to push the thought away. Gerard had always been half mad. And many of the men were sick: fevers, dysentery, typhus, simple exhaustion. Perhaps Gerard had fallen into the river. Perhaps he had simply deserted. Certainly taking orders from a younger brother chafed him.
Yet the possibility remained that the corruption of the revenants could reside in the guts of a carrion eater. How many soldiers could resist the bounty of a dead bird falling like some dark manna from the sky? Suppose they left the revenants behind in Russia, only to produce new revenants in their very midst?
How far might a crow actually fly?
Seneca Falls: First Recorded Outbreak of Strain Z
Recovered by Dayna Ingram
The following, believed to be a chapter excised from her 1898 biography Eighty Years And More, was found among Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s estate in a file marked: “Incinerate upon my death.” Authorities have deemed the document too vital to society’s current struggle to destroy.
Though it was perhaps the most significant chapter in my long and—if I may be so immodest, and certainly at my age I may—quite significant life, still I hesitate to include the truth of those two short days as a chapter in these memoirs. As much as I do not care to admit it, I am frightened. But of what do I have to be frightened? I am an old woman now and the only person I might betray has long ago passed on. She swore me to secrecy that night—more for the one sin than for the other—and I, though the record shall prove it quite contrary to my nature, I have bitten my tongue on this. For her.
All my life I feel as though I have been fighting for her in the only arena I felt equipped to fight: the political arena, the constant struggle for the rights of the marginalized. I am nothing if not a powerful orator, for God blessed me with a voice and a will to speak it and I am afraid I have never been able to turn my back on the Lord’s gifts. She, of course, could speak me under the proverbial table, and did on more than one occasion. It was one of the things that made her so beautiful, that stirred up those things in me. She fought for me—for my life if not for my hand. God forgive me, back then I would have traded it all for that kind of fight. A fight of the heart. But she had other, more pressing matters she had to attend to, as you will read.
Despite my fear, I have decided to write it out for you, whoever you are. Whoever would care to read the accounts of an old woman when she was but a young and impassioned fool of a girl, driven by a need for justice and equality, yes, but—but also by something too dark to name. A dark sort of longing, a dark sort of love. Never to be realized, surely, and, I thought, never to be raised up again. But, as I learned during that awful summer night in 1848, the things we thought we’d buried have a way of lurching after us.
That summer had been the stuff of nightmares, of fevered dreams, of unheard cries in the thick night air. It was the heat that broke us, and the mosquitoes, their relentless bites and buzzing. My husband had thought the country would be relaxing for me; he sent me to our new homestead to fix it up, ready it for our family, enjoy it by myself for a few weeks before the chaos of life returned. But I thrived on the chaos of my family; chasing after my little ones afforded me little time to root around inside my own head, unearthing things that were safer left lost. Alas, the children were with my mother and father, and my husband remained in Boston to tie up some things at work. So there I was, a thirty-three-year-old woman alone on a five-acre homestead in Seneca Falls, New York: a place rich in open air, that was true, and good for the lungs. But painful, painful on the brain. The cravings it brought.
After those initial weeks of ordering around the builders, the housekeepers, the landscapers—anyone who so much as stepped a toe onto my land I tasked with something—after those weeks, word came from my husband that he would be arriving later than expected. Months later, in fact. It seemed to me my fever—always biting at the back of my neck with the mosquitoes—came on stronger the instant I read that telegram. I took to my bed for days. Not even my neighbors could rouse me
with their shouts and terrible rows. I was gone to the world, which held me at arms’ length until my lonesomeness became a physical thing, knotted up inside my head, my chest. Gone into the arms of the darkness of sleep, which was a comfort preferable even to the sound of my husband’s voice. If he were to appear just then, I think I would have throttled him for subjecting me to such loneliness.
Then, a miracle: I received a letter from Mrs. Lucretia Mott informing me of her impending visit. She would be in Seneca Falls for several days on a “political excursion,” she termed it, accompanied by her husband and youngest sister, who was nearer my age. Her escorts concerned me little. All I could think was, finally. Finally, a woman with a brain between her ears. A woman who could hold a conversation about something other than crops or the weather turning or how to properly slaughter a goat. Finally, Mrs. Mott, come to save me from myself.
I did not, of course, allow myself to entertain any other thoughts of Lucretia. In fact, I prayed for the strength to let them die, those thoughts. Those memories. I prayed for the strength to greet her when she came as only another woman who shared my abolitionist interests, a woman who was my friend, my intellectual equal, and no more.
But—my strength, my strength, my strength. By the time I met her at the train station, I had no strength to speak of.
It was a sweltering day; the heat lingered in the air in oily waves, creating mirages. Everywhere, you thought you saw puddles along the road, only to come upon them and have them evaporate into dust. I dressed as coolly as my woman’s modesty would allow: a skirt of loose fabric to my ankles, powder white blouse unbuttoned at the neck, the sleeves rolled up to reveal a hint of wrist. My hair was tightly pinned, in the fashion of the day, and I wore no hat so as not to trap the heat beneath. My feet sweated in my riding boots, but I wore them in case we decided to walk. Though I had hired a carriage to take me to the train station in Waterloo to meet her, I knew Mrs. Mott was a woman of simple means; she would not go in for anything so extravagant when she had two perfectly good legs to carry her.
I forced myself to think of her only as Mrs. Mott, and to remind myself that her husband would be on her arm today. Yes, on her arm, for whenever they linked in that way she was most assuredly in the lead. I remember walking with them from the World Anti-Slavery Convention to our rooms in London eight years ago—a first of many casual strolls—and she seemed to drag him along, his reedy fingers clutching at her elbow, exerting himself to keep up. One day she offered her arm to me. I was so frightened to take it, and abashed at my fear, that I almost laughed. But when I laid my hand on her forearm she clasped it warmly with her other hand and led me gently down the street, until at one point we were holding hands and laughing and practically skipping like school girls through the busy squares of London. I would never forget it.
Her train pulled in a few minutes after noon. The sun was at its highest and all the ladies and gentlemen with good sense were finding reasons to be inside—a shop, a bakery, the station, anything. I sent my driver on with a generous tip and stood on the platform, waving away mosquitoes until I was waving at my three visitors.
The sister, Martha Wright, approached me first, and we embraced warmly. She was, of course, sheathed in layer upon layer of dress, with a bonnet and boots, and yet somehow her youngish face avoided the gleam of the overheated. She kissed my cheek and thanked me for meeting them, and then came the husband. He wore a bright blue suit and vest, tailored to his unusual short height, which I judged to be only a head taller than myself. I didn’t even have to tilt my head back to look into his eyes. His smile was generous and spread wide across his shaven face, and he tipped his wide-brimmed hat to me, his hair molded into a perfect silver bowl thanks to some slick oil. I insisted on shaking his hand, which he was ready for and took graciously. Then he stepped aside, and all that remained was Lucretia.
With her, I did have to tilt back my head to see her eyes. The sun caught them and lighted them a brilliant green. Her face, though hardened by the years since I’d last looked upon it, remained soft at the corners of those eyes and around her mouth. Her thin lips pressed together in a closed smile, and I wished they’d open—open, open, open to reveal what was forbidden to me. A curl of brown hair escaped from beneath her bonnet to hang charmingly across her forehead. Her skin was pink and slick with heat. I drew closer to her but she held her gloved hand out to shake mine. I was meant to take this as a sign of respect, so I did.
“Mrs. Stanton, you are so kind to receive us,” she said. Her formality did not surprise me, considering the company she kept, but it stung nonetheless. This is meant to be a confession of the truth and so I must hold nothing back. It hurt me deeply, a mortal wound, that she could not even say my name.
“Lucretia,” I said her name with as much passion as our audience would allow. She did not even blink. “It’s so lovely to see you again.” I turned to her family, “To see all of you.”
A moment of shared pleasantries, and then Lucretia got down to business: “I’d like to visit the Wesleyan Methodist church in Seneca Falls. I’ve written the pastor there and he’s expecting me this evening.”
“Of course. May I ask why?”
“My sister is plotting to change the world,” Martha put in with a sisterly leer.
“I dislike that word, ‘plotting.’” Lucretia screwed up her face, as if she had just smelled something foul. “I simply wish to put into action all the myriad things you and I, Mrs. Stanton, have so frequently discussed. It is time, it’s beyond time, to elevate the voices of women in these United States. I mean to do that, and I know you mean to help me.”
Mr. Mott reached out a hand to pat Lucretia’s shoulder, saying softly, admiringly, “My darling.”
“You know me well, Lucretia,” I said. “I’ll fetch us a carriage.”
“Nonsense,” she said, “The day is fine. We’ll walk.” And she began to lead us in long strides out of the station.
“It’s three miles,” I argued, though I knew it was futile.
“Lucretia loathes idleness, Mrs. Stanton,” Martha said, taking her sister’s hand in hers as much to slow her down as to convey companionship. “Makes her feel old.”
“I am old,” Lucretia said, smiling. She was fifty-five, and looked it, but her spirit was younger than all of us. “And when my body gives out, you can cart me around by any means you like. Until that day, I will walk, and wear my blisters with pride.”
All of us laughed, and, laughing, Mr. Mott kissed Mrs. Mott on the forehead and started off in the opposite direction down the heat-heavy street.
“Mr. Mott—” I began to call after him, but Lucretia interrupted: “Mr. Mott will be staying with friends here in Waterloo.”
Despite the heat and my lingering fever, I shivered. “But—”
“Just us ladies,” Martha said gaily. “Now, wouldn’t you like to hear all about my sister’s plot to empower all us fine American women?”
Lucretia playfully pinched her sister’s arm for her repeated use of the word “plot.” As we hiked our way back to Seneca Falls beneath the wrathful eye of the sun, Lucretia spoke at length about an idea to draw up a declaration of women’s rights and to hold a democratic convention to debate and vote on the issues. It was her hope that a convention, spread over two days at the Methodist church, would garner attention not only from local newspapers but from papers states away. It would be exactly like the sewing circles where we discussed these issues among ourselves, but the larger scale would spread the message farther and wider. Martha worried that press coverage might not be desirable, as most journalists were certain to paint such a convention as the fanciful flights of “unnatural women,” but I disagreed: “Even if the convention is mocked and ridiculed, our ideas will be out there. There will be no danger of the Women Question dying for want of notice.” Lucretia smiled at me, then looked at her feet.
We reached Seneca Falls as the sun was setting, the darkening sky streaked a rich crimson. We stepped into a little café
whose owner kept it open late in summers, and nourished ourselves with water and sandwiches. It was here Martha decided to wait for us as Lucretia and I went on to speak with the Methodist pastor.
The building was a solid brown brick square with two front-facing windows flanking wide double doors. These were shut against us, locked or barred from the inside as Lucretia tried tugging then pushing with only slight give. I peered into the windows only to be met by a curtained darkness.
“You said the pastor was expecting you.”
“That is what I said.” Lucretia pulled roughly at the fingertips of her right glove until the thing slipped off. She pounded on the door with her naked fist.
From inside, I heard a low moaning like that of a keening calf. I pressed my ear to the window pane and plugged my other ear with an index finger. The moaning echoed through the hollow belly of the church, vibrating the pane against my cheek. Then suddenly there was a great crash, as a table or perhaps a pew turned over, and the sound of glass shattering, and a man’s voice shouting. The moaning grew sharper in pitch then abruptly cut off. Lucretia grabbed my shoulders and pulled me roughly from the window.
“We’ll return another night,” she said. A knuckle of her de-gloved hand brushed the underside of my chin. My shivers returned. Before she could release me, I clasped my hand around hers, skin to skin, cold and warm at the same time. “Lucretia—”
But there was a loud scraping sound of wood on wood, and something heavy tossed to the ground, and the double doors opened.
An older gentleman—older than Lucretia—stood in the darkened doorway, his white mussed hair standing out against the shadows. As the sun slowly died behind us, it washed his face in a thick orange light, which was creased and worn like an old pair of trousers. His shirt was nearly as wrinkled as his skin, unbuttoned to an absurd degree down his chest, his hair there sticking out in white puffs. One suspender drooped down his left shoulder, and he reached a shaking hand to pull it back into place.