Thieves Of Mercy sb-2

by James L. Nelson

  “Sit, Roger,” she said, softly, as if she were offering him tea, and Roger sat. “Are you all right, Wendy, dear?” Molly said next. Wendy nodded, too shocked to speak. There was a bright, roughly circular spot of light on the cabin side, daylight shining in through the hole the bullet had made.

  The sound of the gunshot was just fading in Wendy’s ears when she heard the footsteps on the deck, running. They stopped by the cabin door, and were followed with a knocking, and a voice. “Sir? Are you all right? Is everything all right, sir?”

  Molly raised the.36 a little higher. She and Newcomb held one another’s eyes. Molly nodded her head.

  “We’re fine, Mr. Pembrook. A bit of an accident,” he said. His voice was stiff, but convincing enough.

  There was a pause beyond the door. “Very well, sir,” Pembrook replied, though he did not sound altogether certain. “I’ll be in the wheelhouse if I am needed, sir.”

  “Very well.”

  They listened while Pembrook’s footsteps disappeared, and then they sat in silence for a moment. Then Molly and Newcomb began at once, trampling one another’s words, both stopping at the same instant.

  “Roger, dear,” Molly said, “I get to speak first because I have the guns. Now here’s what is going to happen. When we get to the Norvier-”

  “Under no circumstances,” Newcomb cut her short, “will I cooperate with you. Never. I’ll die first.” His voice sounded strained and unnatural.

  Molly smiled her coquettish smile. “You may yet, but actually you will listen first. Now, it is entirely possible that what Wendy and I have done could be construed as spying. And you know what the punishment is for that. Hanging. By the neck. Until dead. So really, Wendy and I have nothing to lose in shooting you, if need be, to help our escape.

  “Here are your choices. Take us to the Norvier and leave us, tell them you were ordered to deliver us to a neutral, steam off before they can ask questions. Tell Lincoln I really was the minister’s wife, and that will be an end to it. All will be fine.

  “Or, you can resist, and I will shoot you.” The timbre of Molly’s voice changed as she spoke, the volume lower, more menacing, a voice with no compassion. “I’ll shoot you, and your legacy will be that you were shot in your own cabin, with your own gun, by a woman who had disarmed you first. I’ll see they find you with your trousers around your ankles. Is that how you wish to be remembered? Your death will at least be a source of unending amusement for generations of naval officers.”

  That, Wendy could see, had struck home, as deadly a shot as the one she nearly put through his forehead. A man only had one opportunity to die well. A proud fool like Newcomb might go willingly to an honorable death, but to leave a legacy of such dishonor, to be laughed at in death, that was another thing entirely.

  “You wouldn’t,” Newcomb said. “I know you too well, Cathy. I know you couldn’t do such a thing.”

  “No? Then why don’t you go for the gun?” Molly raised the pistol, pointed it right at Newcomb’s face. “Go ahead, Roger. See if you can grab it before I pull the trigger.” There was not a single note of compassion in her words, and she spoke in the voice of a woman who could, in fact, do such a thing, and would, if forced to.

  “What-” Newcomb began, the confidence drained from him. He grabbed at his watch, feeling for it, pulled it out and looked at it. He held it in his palm as he continued. “What happens when Lincoln has the minister to the White House? Meets his real wife, if he has one?”

  Molly shook her head. “Roger, do you think the President of the United States really cares a fig about any of this? Do you think a man who is fighting a war will lie awake wondering about some tart he knew for a couple of hours? He has forgotten it already. It’s dead. Let it rest in peace.”

  Wendy watched the two of them, felt the palpable tension like some invisible energy move between them. Hieronymus Taylor had once told her that pure steam was absolutely invisible. That was what they were making, the heat of their passions turning the air between them to pure steam.

  And then, almost imperceptible in the dim light, a tear rolled down Newcomb’s cheek. He did not move, made no effort to brush it aside. It disappeared into his close-cropped beard.

  Something in him had broken, some bulwark of resolve collapsed. Wendy wondered if sitting there he had seen in his mind the image of his own dead body laid out on the deck of the cabin, pants pulled down, revealing white, spindly, hairy legs. The sailors exchanging knowing grins as they lifted his stiff corpse onto a litter. He snapped his watch shut and slowly replaced it in the pocket of his vest.

  It was another ten minutes of sitting there before Pembrook once again knocked on the door and announced their approach to the Norvier. Molly removed the percussion caps from Newcomb’s pistol and handed it back to him. She kept the pepperbox in her hand, with her shawl draped over it. The three of them made their way to the wheelhouse.

  Newcomb hailed the Norwegian man-of-war and asked permission to come alongside. After some confusion, which involved finding an English speaker aboard the Norwegian vessel, permission was granted.

  Ten minutes later, Wendy and Molly stood on the Norvier’s white and perfectly ordered deck, in front of her gracious and flustered captain, while the dispatch boat, with smoke rolling from her stack, plowed a straight wake back toward Sewell’s Point. Wendy was surprised to see that the small former tug could move so fast.

  “Forgive me, sir,” Molly said, speaking French again, but this time with a French accent. “We have had a terrible time, and wish to beg the assistance of a gentleman.”

  FOURTEEN

  Where all acted so handsomely it would be invidious to discriminate, and I will simply state that the captains and crews of this [River Defense] fleet deserve the confidence which has been reposed in them, and my officers and men acted, as they always have, bravely and obediently.

  BRIGADIER GENERAL M. JEFF THOMPSON TO GENERAL G.T.BEAUREGARD

  By the time they dragged Hieronymus Taylor back on board the General Page, the Battle of

  Plum Point was over. Thirty minutes after the River Defense Fleet had steamed around the bend and into the startled faces of the Yankees, Captain James Montgomery, aboard the screw ram Little Rebel, ordered the recall flag run aloft, and reiterated the order with a series of blasts from his steam whistle.

  Some of the Defense Fleet did not need recalling. The General Bragg, first of the fleet into the brawl, had had her tiller ropes cut by a lucky Yankee shell, and thus disabled she had drifted downstream and out of the fight. The General Price was thoroughly torn up, and though most of the damage had been to her superstructure, one shot to the supply pipes in the engine room had knocked her out as well.

  The other vessels of the fleet, the Sumter, Van Dorn, General Page, Jeff Thompson, General Lovell, Beauregard, and Little Rebel, all

  suffered damage to greater or lesser degrees, mostly lesser. For all the extraordinary amount of metal flying around, the casualties were light: the steward on the Van Dorn, W. W. Andrews, killed; third cook on the Bragg mortally wounded, and eight or ten more slightly wounded.

  They left behind them a Yankee fleet that was much worse off than they were.

  As Bowater helped lay Taylor easy on the side deck, someone up in the wheelhouse was spinning the General Page around, heading her downstream. Taylor cursed anyone who came into his line of sight, and Bowater guessed that cradling the engineer in his arms and cooing soothing words in his ear would be pointless, so he ignored the wounded man and looked out over the rail.

  The river swept past like a panorama painting. The Union ironclads were still coming down, firing like mad, like some kind of prehistoric herd, wreathed in their own smoke as they steamed downriver. Bowater recalled reading how Blackbeard the Pirate used to do that-burn a slow match in his beard to make himself look like some demon from hell. Well, here they were, Satan’s war machines, the genuine article, but they were too late.

  You’d think Satan would know to keep
his steam up, Bowater thought.

  The ironclad they had struck, the one from which they had rescued Taylor, was nearly sunk. She sat at an odd angle, her bow near the shore, the water lapping over the bottom edge of her casement, and Bowater was certain she was sitting in the mud. A perfectly designed machine for river combat, but the River Defense Fleet had found her Achilles’ heel, her unarmored wooden hull, four feet below the waterline.

  The Page continued her left wheel, and the western side of Plum Point Bend came into view. From aft, the thirty-two-pound stern gun fired. Bowater felt the deck shudder underfoot. The paddle wheeler had never been intended to absorb that kind of shock.

  “Ahhh!” Taylor shouted. He was writhing a bit now, and his hand was gripping his thigh, as close as he could get, or dared get, to grabbing at his wounded calf. The bone was broken, Bowater was sure. The leg was not quite straight.

  “All right, stand aside, you sons of whores! Shove!” The cook, Doc, pushed his way through. A short man, with a thick yellow beard and blond hair tied back, he looked like an ill-tempered elf. He was carrying lengths of wood and bandages. He was still wearing his apron.

  He knelt beside Taylor, chewed his plug, looked over the leg while Taylor glared up at him.

  “Leave me alone, you filthy son of a bitch!” Taylor shouted, but Doc did not acknowledge him.

  “I said leave me alone!” Taylor reached up, grabbed a handful of Doc’s apron, but the former cook, now surgeon, plucked his hand off as if it were a child’s. “Aw, shut up,” he said. He nodded to some of the riverboat men standing over them. The river rats knelt down, grabbed hold of Taylor ’s arms, and held them through a storm of obscenity, while Doc went to work setting and splinting the leg.

  Ruffin Tanner was sitting on a crate a ways aft, leaning against the deckhouse side. Bowater went over to him. “Is the arm bad?”

  Tanner looked up. “Naw. Torn up the meat some, but I don’t reckon it hit bone. Bullet went clean on through.”

  “That’s lucky. Comparatively speaking.” Bowater helped him off with his coat, fetched some bandages from Doc, who gave them grudgingly, and bound Tanner’s arm. He left him there, went forward to check on Taylor.

  He stepped up to the group of men watching Doc do his work, and Mississippi Mike’s big arm swung around and gave Bowater the breathtaking bonhomie smack. “Come on, Captain, let’s get back to the wheelhouse!”

  Bowater did not care to follow Sullivan to the wheelhouse, but neither did he care to listen to Taylor curse and shout in pain, and he certainly did not care to have anyone think that the job they were doing on Taylor set his teeth on edge-which it did-so he followed Sullivan up the ladder to the hurricane deck.

  Buford Tarbox was in the wheelhouse, and he nodded and spit in the direction of the spittoon when Sullivan and Bowater came in. “Lookee here,” he said, nodding toward the starboard bow.

  They were just passing the first of the ironclads, the one that had been so savagely mauled by the Bragg and the Price. She had crawled away from the fight and found a mudbank on which to die, sinking into the brown river.

  She was motionless, dead, no smoke coming from her chimneys, her boilers ten feet underwater. The water was well up over her casement and lapping over her hurricane deck. The chimneys seemed to rise straight up out of the river, along with her three tall flagstaffs, forward, amidships, and aft. The wheelhouse and the centerline paddle-wheel box, rising above the hurricane deck, formed two small iron islands onto which the shipwrecked sailors had scrambled-dozens of blue-clad river sailors perched on those two dry places above the river. It was a ridiculous sight, and Bowater smiled.

  Mississippi Mike roared. “Look at them stupid Yankees! Damn me if they don’t look like a bunch of damned turkeys on a damn corncrib!” He laughed until he doubled over, a laugh that Bowater was certain carried across the water to the miserable men on the sunken ironclad, and it must have been salt in their wounds.

  Rub it in, Sullivan, rub it in, Bowater thought with delight, and he wondered when he had become so uncharitable. Was it the river, the war? Age? There had been a decency about him once, a magnanimous spirit that extended to friend and enemy alike. An officer and a gentleman. It was the spirit embodied in that phrase, a phrase he had once held as close and dear as his belief in a benevolent God.

  But he was changing, he felt it. This was a different kind of war they were fighting, an all-out war. Just a month before, at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River, the Confederates had attacked and overwhelmed the Yankees, only to be pushed back again, at a staggering cost to both sides. The bloodshed that day- such unprecedented bloodshed-changed everything. This was not knights of old on proud steeds. This was slaughter.

  Gentlemen of honor, fighting in honorable fashion, Bowater thought. Perhaps that very idea is as dead as the knights themselves. This war seemed to bring with it a kind of savagery that he had never known, certainly not on the ordered quarterdecks of the old navy, showing the flag around the world.

  Perhaps I have never really known war. Certainly the Mexican War had never been anything like this, not in the naval line.

  Useless thought. He pushed his damned philosophizing aside and looked astern. The gunners aft were still firing away with the thirty-two pounder, but they were leaving the Yankees upstream, and the Yankees were making no effort to pursue. Astern of the Page, last in the Confederate line, came the Van Dorn, her superstructure badly torn up, her upper works showing a dozen great gaping holes fringed with shattered wood, but the black smoke pouring from her chimneys showed that her engines and boilers were unharmed. The sound of her stern gun, giving the Yankees one last farewell, was proof that the fight was not out of her.

  They steamed around Plum Point Bend, steamed under the guns of Fort Pillow, came to an anchor. From the flagship Little Rebel, one hundred yards away, they heard, clear as a gunshot, the sound of cheering, and one after another, the crews on board all the River Defense Fleet ships took it up, shouting with abandon, letting the tension of the morning, the exhilaration, the fear, the excess of energy, pour out of their throats and up to the heavens.

  Bowater did not cheer, of course. He had not abandoned so much of his dignity or sense of decorum that he would yell like, say, Mississippi Mike Sullivan, who was whooping like a Red Indian, throwing his hat in the air, pounding one and all on the back, firing his pistol at the sky, and generally behaving in an appalling manner.

  Bowater stood with his back to the texas so that Sullivan would not have the clearance to give him another of his backslaps. He watched the celebration with the same mixture of horror and amusement with which he might view a minstrel show or some other crass entertainment. But it was all right. It was good. Good for the men to get that energy out. They deserved it. They had done damned good work that morning. Like the fight at Elizabeth City the previous February, it was one of the only battles so far in that war that could be called a fleet action. Unlike Elizabeth City, this time the Confederates won.

  “Captain Bowater!” a breathless Mike Sullivan said as he staggered over, “I surely do hope you and your boys will join us river rats in a little celebration when we gets back to Memphis. Oh, we’re gonna tear it up good, you can depend on it!”

  Bowater nodded. It was a scene he could happily miss, and one he would prefer his men to miss as well. But that, he realized, might be asking too much. His men had fought as hard as the riverboat men, and they would enjoy the bacchanal as much, and it would do morale no good for him to impose his sense of propriety on them.

  “My men will join you, I’ve no doubt. But I have other business to attend to.”

  “What-all you got to do that takes precedence over our celebrations?”

  “I must get to Shirley’s yard,” Bowater said, and he allowed the irony in his voice free reign. “I must inspect my ironclad.”

  The Tennessee was an ironclad in the same way that an assemblage of giant bones was an iguanodon. The basic structure was there, complete enough
to suggest the final form of the awesome and powerful beast, but the chances of ever fleshing it out complete and bringing it to life were pretty slim.

  Bowater stood at the gate, surveyed the shipyard. The General Page and the other ships of the River Defense Fleet that had suffered damage in the fight the day before had returned to Memphis for repairs. Bowater had walked to the yard from the hospital, after having personally seen to Hieronymus Taylor’s admission, and watching the doctor drip laudanum on his tongue, though by then the engineer was pretty well played out.

  There had not been much activity in the shipyard the first time Bowater saw it, but that had changed in the three days he had been gone. There were a hundred men at least, swarming over the yard and over the Arkansas , the more complete ship. Men running hawsers from the ironclad to the shore, men greasing the ways, men pounding wedges under the launching cradle. It was like the preparations for a wedding, and the Arkansas was the bride, and poor Tennessee the bridesmaid, shoved to the background and ignored.

  Bowater hefted his seabag up on his shoulder, lifted his carpetbag, stepped across the trampled earth of the shipyard.

  He set his gear on a pile of fresh-cut oak beams and, ignoring the chaos surrounding the Arkansas , walked slowly around his own ship, running a professional eye over her, and mostly liking what he saw. She was framed in oak, her planking yellow pine, her scantlings a respectable thickness. With twin screws and her relatively small size she would be nimble, by ironclad standards. He envisioned the iron ram bolted to her bow, the great damage he could do with that weapon, the heavy nine-inch guns sending their shells through the Yankees’ wooden walls.

  He walked around her bow, looked at the run of her hull, and liked the shape of her wetted surface. He liked the low profile of her hull, the elegant round fantail, reminiscent of a tugboat.

  And then a voice, louder than the rest, broke through Bowater’s reverie, a strident order: “Hurry it along there, you lazy bastards, the goddamn Yankees’ll be here, time you get that hawser rigged!”