Thieves Of Mercy sb-2

by James L. Nelson

  “I’m sorry, son, but I’m afraid we have to ask you to come aboard.”

  “What? We came under flag of truce! This is an outrage, sir, contrary to all-”

  “I understand, sir, depend on it. You are not prisoners, don’t think of yourselves as prisoners. You are… guests. We will set you free in due time, but for now it would not be convenient for it to be generally known that I’m aboard. You will agree, I’m sure,” Lincoln added, and the sad and amused face was back, “that there are some over there who might wish me harm.”

  Batchelor frowned and said nothing. A sailor tossed the line back to the boat and pulled it alongside. Grudgingly, slowly, Batchelor and the two men climbed aboard. They were led away, courteously, but at gunpoint. Wendy made a point of not watching them go.

  The lieutenant of the tug and his petty officers were swarming now, eager to extend any consideration to the two women whom their commander-in-chief had deigned worthy of courtesy. They escorted first Molly, then Wendy, up the steep ladder to the roof of the deckhouse, which formed the boat deck.

  That place had undergone an amazing transformation in the several minutes since Wendy had see it from the water. A table and chairs were set up halfway between the wheelhouse and boats hanging from their davits aft, and on the table a jug of some liquid so cold the porcelain was covered in condensation. Four glasses stood around the jug. A gang of sailors were pulling tight the corners of an awning that cast a blessed shade over the deck. It was only nine in the morning, but already hot.

  “Please, ma’am, won’t you sit?” The lieutenant held a chair for Molly, it being understood all around which of the two women was the most important. Molly nodded imperiously and sat, and then the courtesy was extended to Wendy.

  A moment later Lincoln appeared on the boat deck, and trailing behind, another man, also a civilian, but with the air of one close to power. The deference he showed the President was subtle, a man used to Lincoln ’s company. Not an equal, perhaps, but close.

  “Madam”- Lincoln made a shallow bow to Molly-“is there anything more you might need?”

  Wendy translated. “Merci, non,” Molly replied.

  From the wheelhouse a bell rang out and the tug gathered way. Lincoln said, “May I present Mr. Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War for the United States?”

  Wendy translated. Molly made some reply that was polite but not fawning, the remarks of a woman to whom Secretaries of War were common enough.

  Stanton made a bow, and to Wendy’s surprise replied in perfect French, “It is an honor to meet you, ma’am, and I look forward to the honor of meeting your husband as well.”

  Molly, if she was surprised, did not show it in any way. “That is very kind, sir,” she said, then, gesturing at the chairs, said, “Won’t you join us?” She was already treating the tug as if it were hers, and Lincoln and Stanton her guests. Her self-confidence was so overwhelming that it carried all before her, like a cannonball blowing through a wooden palisade.

  “Thank you,” Lincoln said, taking his seat, and Stanton sat as well. Wendy, least significant in that crowd, poured the lemonade.

  “Tell me, Mr. President,” Molly said, “is it common for Presidents of the United States to be found sailing about in such small ships?” This time Stanton translated.

  Lincoln smiled at the question. “No, ma’am, not generally. This President in particular tries to avoid floating conveyance of any kind. Didn’t have so good a time at supper the other night, did we, Stanton?”

  “No, sir,” Stanton agreed. Wendy translated.

  “ America is so vast,” Molly said. “You may live a thousand miles from the sea, never have any connection to it. There is no place in Norway that is more than one hundred miles from saltwater. We Norwegians cannot help but be bred to the sea.”

  Wendy translated. She wondered if that was true, about no place in Norway being more than one hundred miles from the sea.

  “I was bred to rivers, ma’am, and was a fair hand once at driving a river raft, out west, but that’s the sum total of my knowledge of boats.”

  “So what brings you out now?” Molly asked. “Not a yachting holiday, surely, in the middle of a war? Or am I impertinent to ask such a thing?” Her attitude was softening. She was no longer the angry, mistreated woman who had come on board. She was gracious, disarming, and Wendy was embarrassed to think that she had considered her own performance masterful. Molly was the real thing.

  “Please, Mr. President,” Molly continued, “I am sometimes far too curious. My husband has often said as much. Please tell me to mind my own business.”

  “No, no,” Lincoln said, after listening to Wendy’s translation. “No harm in my telling you what we’re about. Stanton and I came down here to start a little fire under our admirals and generals. The American President is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, did you know that?”

  “I did.”

  “And sometimes, I find, I have to be a little more active in that role than I might wish. My officers seem to think all the legions of hell are arrayed against them, and not some ragtag bunch of Rebels. McClellan’s over there in Williamsburg with more than one hundred thousand men and he tells me he can’t take a step forward unless he has twenty thousand more. Now General Wool at Fortress Monroe, over there”- Lincoln pointed to the fortress several miles across the water-“seems ready to let the Rebels stay in Norfolk for as long as it pleases them. Yesterday I had some of the navy’s ships bombard Sewell’s Point to see if there were still troops there.”

  “We heard that,” Wendy offered. “A terrific firing.”

  “Where were you, ma’am, if I might ask?” Stanton asked.

  “We were in Norfolk, sir, trying to find a way to get to the flagship.”

  “We have heard that Norfolk is being abandoned. A tug deserted to us yesterday and reported as much. Did you see that?”

  “Well, sir, there is great confusion. It seemed as if any number of civilians were trying to leave town. Whether the army was leaving or not, I could not say. I do not recall seeing any soldiers on the roads, or at the train station.”

  “Hmm,” Stanton said. He and Lincoln exchanged looks. Wendy felt a shot of panic. Damn it! Did I say something they know is a lie?

  “It is hard sometimes, in such circumstances, to know what is going on, even when it is right under your eyes,” Lincoln said, and his tone was friendly and reassuring. He reached out a hand, long bony fingers, and wrapped them around his glass and took a drink, and Wendy could not help but contemplate the extraordinary circumstances. How utterly bizarre the events of a life could be.

  She saw the reticule in Molly’s lap, felt the weight of the pistol still strapped to her thigh. The nearest sailors were thirty feet away in the wheelhouse, and they were not armed. She had it within her power, with one simple motion, to alter forever the tide of history. A clandestine move of her hand under the table, the squeeze of a trigger, and she could, at the cost of her own life, change entirely the fortunes of her new nation. She remembered the feel of the little gun’s recoil, jerking her arm back as it discharged, the sense of lethal potential that the loaded weapon embodied.

  She reached out her hand and picked up her glass and savored the secret knowledge that the hand that held the glass might just as easily have picked up a gun, that it was her decision whether Abraham Lincoln lived or died, and he did not even know it.

  Oh, God, save me from such hubris!

  She glanced at Molly, but her aunt was staring like a sightseer at the shore beyond and did not appear to have assassination on her mind. Molly looked back at Lincoln. “But today you take a boating holiday?” she asked. Stanton translated.

  “No, ma’am. Today I am looking for a suitable place to land troops.”

  Molly nodded, as if the news was only of vague interest to her, like hearing a story about someone you do not know. Wendy took a long drink of her lemonade because it seemed to her the best way to disguise her elation.

  Looking fo
r a suitable place to land troops! She and Molly had managed to land in exactly the right place. Had they been on board the flagship they could not have uncovered nearly as much information as they would in the next hour, their source the most unimpeachable of informants.

  They would return to Captain Tucker with just the information he needed to make the best use of the ironclad Virginia. Tucker would be grateful, and beholden to them.

  Wendy felt a pride, a sense of accomplishment, unlike any she had felt before. For the first time, she was not just supporting the cause of the Confederate States, she was fighting for it.

  Lincoln is a fool, she thought, to be so free with his information. One never knows to whom one is talking.

  And then she remembered, and her elation collapsed like a bonfire burned through. Lincoln was not a fool. He knew perfectly well that even if she and Molly were Confederates, there was nothing they could do with the information. He had seen to it. They had no way to get off the tug.

  TEN

  U.S. Flag-steamer Benton Off Fort Pillow, May 11, 1862 SIR: I have the honor to inform the Department that yesterday morning, a little after 7 o’clock, the rebel squadron, consisting of eight ironclad steamers, four of them, I believe, fitted as rams, came around the point at the bend above Fort Pillow and steamed gallantly up the river, fully prepared for a regular engagement.

  CAPTAIN C.H.DAVIS, COMMANDING MISSISSIPPI FLOTILLA, TO GIDEON WELLES

  Second Master Thomas B. Gregory, United States Navy, in command of Mortar Boat Number Sixteen, was not entirely at ease. The early morning was lovely, the air cool and just a little damp, the sky clear blue. The birds had resumed, in a tentative way, their chirping in the trees, protesting the intrusion of the second master and his ilk. Perfect, the stretch of the Mississippi River at Plum Point Bend, idyllic, like a bit of Eden. It seemed, somehow, disloyal to Second Master Gregory that he should find such beauty and tranquillity in Tennessee. Coming from Amesbury, Massachusetts, he had expected to find the depravity of Southern rural poverty, squalid slave quarters stuck behind grand plantation houses, barefoot people sharing dilapidated cabins with their pigs in the Mississippi mud. He had not expected to find the South as lovely as it was, as peaceful. He had to remind himself of why, and how much, he hated the Rebs.

  He was standing on a wooden crate marked FUSES and looking over the casemate wall of Mortar Boat Number Sixteen, tied by a half-dozen lines to trees on the shore. Number Sixteen, like all its brethren, was an odd-looking thing. Its hull was no more than a barge, twenty feet wide and sixty feet long. On top of the barge was built an iron casemate, the sides angled slightly inward to deflect shot, so that the whole affair looked mostly like a small ironclad without a roof or any means of self-propulsion.

  The area within the walls of the casemate was mostly empty, save for the short, thick mortar mounted in the center of the deck. With its muzzle tilted straight up, it looked like a stew pot with fifteen-inch-thick sides. It sat on a low, heavy carriage. No wheels, there was no need of them. The gun was moved by boat, and when it fired, the water absorbed the recoil.

  Aft of the mortar, a tent was set up, the kind of tent used by soldiers in the field, but here it was used to keep the powder for the mortar dry. Mounted on the sides of the casemate were the various implements for loading and servicing the gun. Arranged on racks along the edge of the deck sat the round shells, thirty-nine inches in circumference, that the mortar would lob a mile or so into the air, and that would, through the judicious application of science, experience, trial, and luck, land amid the Confederate troops holed up at Fort Pillow, out of sight on the other side of Plum Point.

  The gun was the center of the mortar boat, literally and spiritually, and the men were there to service its needs. They did so that morning, slowly, lethargically, but Second Master Gregory did not mind. It was early morning, a morning that seemed to resist any effort to move quickly, and the men were moving fast enough that he could not call them beats.

  The gun captain clipped the lanyard to the friction primer and stretched it out. Gregory automatically clapped a hand over the ear nearest the gun. The captain jerked the lanyard. The birds, the river, the sky, everything was obliterated by the gut-pounding roar of the mortar going off. The deck shuddered, the mortar boat was pushed down into the water, the air was filled with smoke and a noise that was like a physical presence, that seemed to go on and on long after the gun had fired.

  Gregory’s eyes traced the upward flight of the shell, a black dot against the blue sky. Up, up, up it went, hanging at the zenith of its flight, and then down, to drop beyond Plum Point. He listened for the detonation, though he knew there was no chance of hearing it. The first and second shell of the day he could hear explode, sometimes the third. But that was number five for the morning, and by then his hearing was so numb that even the men’s voices a dozen yards away were muted and dull-sounding.

  The gun crew set about swabbing the gun and preparing for the next shell, a slow, steady rhythm they would keep up all the daylight hours. The morning breeze carried the smoke away, and soon, one by one, the birds would set in again until the next blast silenced them. It seemed like a lazy, lethargic sort of warfare to Second Master Gregory, not at all the kind of dashing naval action he had envisioned when he volunteered.

  He looked away from the mortar-there was no need for him to oversee the loading, the men knew the drill as well as he did- and looked off downstream, down the nearly mile-wide, brown, lazy water of the Mississippi, to where it was lost from sight around Plum Point. Mortar Boat Number Sixteen represented the southernmost point of Union control of the northern part of the Mississippi. Everything downriver from them was Confederate country, clear down to Vicksburg.

  As he stared south, Gregory saw plumes of black smoke rise up over the wooded point like a line of campfires and his first thought was that the mortar had managed to set Fort Pillow on fire. But the smoke did not look like smoke from a fire, more like smoke from a smokestack, or a number of smokestacks. The dark columns were not stationary, but moving steadily toward them. One, two, three, four, Gregory counted. Hallo, now what in the world could this be?

  Fifty yards upriver, also made fast to the trees on shore, lay the United States gunboat Cincinnati. She was one of the seven City Class gunboats, also known as “Pook Turtles”: “Pook” for their constructor, Samuel Pook, and “Turtle” for their undeniable resemblance to that creature. A thin trail of smoke rose from her twin funnels, the output of fires that were banked and nearly out. Most of her crew were on hands and knees, holystoning the wooden deck that formed the roof of her iron casement. A lazy morning, playing nursemaid to the mortar boat downstream as it lobbed its shells at the invisible Confederates beyond the point.

  In his cabin below, in his shirtsleeves, sitting behind his desk, Commander Roger Stembel fretted over his paperwork and dreamed of commanding a seventy-four-gun ship of the line, going toe-to-toe with two French first-rates at Trafalgar. Hand-to-hand combat across the massive decks of line-of-battle ships, a beautiful thing, lost to history, killed, like so many things, by the steam engine and rifled ordnance.

  He sighed, perfectly aware of how juvenile his daydreams were, on a par with dime novels read by boys who dreamed of the romance of war. Stembel was at least beyond that. There was nothing romantic in the ugly war in which he was now engaged. The romance of naval combat belonged to an earlier age.

  Downriver the mortar boat fired, and Stembel felt the concussion of the blast and the recoil against the sides of his ship, like sitting inside a drum while someone beats it. Then quiet, and above his head the steady scrape, scrape, scrape of holystones on decks. It was the same sound that Nelson would have heard above his great cabin, the morning of Trafalgar. Some things had not changed, but it was mostly the mundane things. Paperwork. Holystones.

  Then the sound of footsteps, and Stembel sat upright. He could hear the urgency in the steps as if they were speaking in some familiar, rhythmic code. He heard the step
s on the ladder and he felt his heart race, heard the steps outside his cabin door stop, the fist banging the door, the voice of a midshipman calling, “Captain Stembel, sir!” and all he could think was, Oh, dear God, why do I not have steam up?

  The River Defense Fleet came on in line ahead, just as they had planned the night before. The General Bragg, long and lean, her walking beam engine driving her with a bone in her teeth, the General Sumter next in line, a side-wheeler like Bragg but smaller. Next came the General Sterling Price, big and boxy, awkward-looking compared with the ships in the van. In the Price’s wake came the General Joseph Page and the General Earl Van Dorn, almost side by side, as if in a race, and behind them, more or less in line, the rest of the fleet, the flagship Little Rebel and the others.

  To Samuel Bowater, standing beside the wheelhouse, it seemed clear that one of them, the Page or the Van Dorn, was getting out of line, trying to charge ahead of her assigned position. Since he was not privy to the battle instructions, Bowater did not know which of the ships was breaking formation. But he could guess.

  “Yeeeeehaaa!” Mississippi Mike screamed with the sheer thrill of the thing. Plum Point seemed to fall back and the river opened up in front of them, and there, tied to the bank, with no steam up that Bowater could see, one of the despised Union gunboats; just below it, one of the floating mortars, which, with virtual impunity, inflicted such misery on troops huddled in the river forts. They were alone. The rest of the fleet was farther up the river, tied to the bank, pants around their ankles.

  “Yeeeehaaaa! Son of a bitch!” Mike grabbed the engine room bell and rang it again, though to Bowater’s certain knowledge he had already rung up full speed five minutes before. Bowater could all but hear Guthrie cursing from three decks down.

  The black smoke poured from the Page’s twin stacks, the walking beam worked itself up and down as if it was possessed. Bowater grinned. It was infectious.