by Simon Rumney
After that momentous breakfast with Count Anton, Julii occupied her mind with nothing but bringing her vindictive schemes to fruition. Even as she took her turn bathing Paul's wounds, she thought of nothing but planning her retribution. Lost in her schemes, Julii somehow overlooked the return of his powerful and very potent self.
It wasn't until she noticed Samantha and Tilly becoming a little too pleased to be taking part in Paul's daily bath times that she realized how inappropriate her distracted soaping technique had become.
After that realization, Julia left the bathing to Samantha and Tilly and neither offered any objection. On day four he spoke a few words, the next day he smiled a little, and a day later, Julii heard him laugh from the next room while being washed by his two admirers.
She was greatly relieved and pleased by Paul's progress. When he volunteered to chop wood for the winter woodpiles, Julii knew Paul was truly on his way to recovery. His wounds over skinny flesh had returned to manly scars over strong muscles, and the giggling maids found more and more pathetic and obvious excuses to make bath time longer and longer.
On the morning Paul refused his morning bath, Julii knew his masculine pride as well as his clear, intelligent mind had returned. She was glad of the change, but Samantha and Tilly were both deeply disappointed. All they saw in Paul's recovery was a lost opportunity to be titillated and naughty, and they did nothing but protest.
The days after Paul no longer wanted to be bathed, Julii realized the proud man was well on the way to complete recovery. Her first clue came as the result of seeing a disgruntled crowd gathering in the side alley next to Miss Dotty's saloon building. They were all looking at the very badly mutilated body of a man.
A few paces further along, she saw a familiar horse tethered to the hitching rail outside the funny little swinging doors of the saloon. The horse looked agitated like it hadn't had food or water for a long time. Adding these two things together, Julii immediately turned Helen's pram around and headed home.
Once home, Julii left Helen in the care of Tilly, walked out to the backyard and found what she guessed would be there. The blood on the axe Paul used to chop firewood had been wiped, but wiped poorly, 'probably in the dark'. The axe was often bloody because it was used to kill chickens for the cooking pot, but never this bloody. Julii happened to know no chickens had been killed in many days.
Moving swiftly, she washed the axe carefully at the pump before setting off for Paul's bedroom. Paul slept deeply as Julii searched every inch of his room. Opening all the draws and looking in the closets, she found a hidden bundle of bloodstained clothes. Julii ordered Samantha to take them outside and burn them immediately.
As the smoke rose from the bonfire in the backyard, Julii filled the beautiful porcelain washing bowl with water from the porcelain jug with the same floral pattern. The water in the bowl turned pink and Julii felt a little relieved. Paul had at least tried to conceal his crime by washing himself, which meant he did not want to be caught, which meant he wanted to survive.
Sitting on the bed, she dipped a flannel into the pretty pink water and washed the stubborn blood she knew Paul would have missed from under his fingernails and his hair line and his ears and the back of his neck.
Waking mid-wash, Paul protested but Julii persevered. She made him stand next to the bed and examined every inch of him, checking for traces of blood left anywhere on his body.
After ripping off the bedclothes, Julii walked to open the door and shouted instructions to Samantha and Tilly. As Julii continued to wash Paul, the two maids made the bed with fresh sheets and pillowcases.
With just a look, Paul understood Julii knew what he had done to the slave catcher. When he cast his eyes down in shame, Julii told him not to. When he tried to speak words of apology, Julii stopped him. When she told him the slave catcher deserved everything he got, he broke down and cried in her arms.
Julii held him and he let go of very deep emotions; his powerful body shuddering in her arms. The raw energy in his body was incredible, it was like holding a struggling deer. So strong, so powerful, so broken, 'so wrong!'
While still holding Paul, she asked the question she had been dying to ask since the day she found him. "Where is Matilda?"
The answer to her question was not an easy one for Paul. His body grew even tenser. He felt like an expanding and contracting rock. In faltering words, he told Julii how he and Matilda had found their way to Shiloh after leaving her and Robert in the thicket. Then, after arriving at the putrefying battlefield, he had introduced himself to a Captain Bush, the Yankee in command of the group of soldiers he called “a burial detail”.
At this stage in the story, Paul could no longer continue. Julii desperately needed to know the rest of the story, but she truly feared for Paul's sanity. Kissing his shaking forehead, Julii covered him with a fresh nightshirt and helped him to the bed where he lay down on the fresh bedclothes.
He fell asleep as Julii and Samantha and Tilly took all of the bloodstained bedclothes out to the little smoldering bonfire in the backyard.
The following day, Paul was stronger and more able to explain how, after his arrival at Shiloh, he had been provided with a brand new blue uniform and put directly to work burying thousands of bodies.
Paul told Julii that burying thousands of decomposing bodies was a nasty job, but he hadn't minded the work because the Yankees offered him pay, food, shelter for him and his new family, and the promise of the chance to fight against “them Johnny Reb crackers” when the time came to do so.
Paul went on to tell Julii that life was pretty sweet until the commander of the burial detail took a shine to Matilda. While Paul toiled in the one mile long “Shiloh trench” from dawn till dusk, Captain Bush did his best to seduce her.
When she rejected him and told Paul about his behavior, the Union captain took it upon himself to remove Paul and did a very shady deal with a passing slave catcher. The next day, as he worked in the trench, Paul had been attacked by a bunch of Yankees, stripped of his new blue uniform, and tied to a horse heading south.
The injustice of Paul's treatment made Julii as angry as she had been during her despicable treatment in Atlanta, but the answer to her next question redefined her understanding of anger. When she asked, "Where is your beautiful baby?", Paul answered with an unmistakable hint of pride: "Our little Julii's still with Matilda. She's as strong as an ox, that one."
When he saw Julii’s open-mouthed expression of surprise and awe, he added, "Sure. Matilda made sure we named her after the kind lady that birthed her."
Julii felt proud because Paul and Matilda had chosen her name; no one had ever paid Julii a better compliment. She felt happy, then she became curious, then she became afraid for the child, then she became angry because of the injustice, then she experienced a level of fury that surpassed anything she had felt before. Even greater than the intense anger provoked by Robert's murder. This was a rage she had thought herself incapable of feeling.
'Somewhere out there, in this cruel white man's world, there was a little child who was connected to Julii by an invisible cord.' 'A child, who had simply been a fond memory for over a year, was now her responsibility.'
She had one more quick-fire question for Paul. "What risks are you prepared to take to save Matilda and baby Julii?"
His answer came swiftly without hesitation or question. "I will give my life. I will give my life ten times over."
Revenge
The meeting in Count Anton's kitchen was a somber affair. Samantha and Tilly were in no doubt that the actions Julii was asking their beloved Paul to undertake had a very high chance of becoming his death sentence.
Both maids and the preacher found some solace in the fact Paul was very glad to be taking these risks. They could see he was desperate to get his family back and extremely happy to be striking a blow against the Confederacy as he did so. He was truly ready to go north along the Underground Railroad.
Samantha and Tilly were both out o
f their depth when it came to understanding Julii's complex plan, but it wasn't their fault. They had lived a sheltered life as the children of slaves born on different plantations. They had absolutely no access to education during any of the eight years before they were ripped away from their parents and sold in the Savannah slave markets.
They had both been lucky to be purchased by someone who trained them as house slaves, and even luckier to be purchased by the count when their master was killed at Bull Run and his unfortunate family could no longer afford to keep all of their slaves.
Julii had been trying to teach them “reading and writing”, but they believed they were “too old for book learning”. Their resistance to learn meant they had no understanding of geography or military tactics or logistics, so the subtlety of her plan went right over their heads.
The preacher was in a better position to understand what Julii was getting at, but the immensity and complexity of her idea was too overwhelming even for him.
Julii was very pleased to see that Paul, uneducated as he was, grasped the potential of her plan immediately. Buoyed by his ability to understand, she went on to tell Paul that, as a result of learning about the child who bore her name, Julii had fine-tuned and brought forward a plan she had been hatching for some time.
Now, instead of laying her full plan before the Union Army as she had original intended, Julii had divided her plan into two discreet sections. Each section of the plan would be delivered to the northerners only upon completion of certain tasks. While explaining her aims, Julii laid four envelopes on the table.
The first envelope she pushed across the table to the preacher. He found the envelope full to bursting with bank notes for his cause. Julii called them "Funds to grease the wheels of Paul's passage north."
Sliding the second and third envelope to Paul, Julii explained how the second envelope contained a letter and the third envelope contained half of her original plan. Her exact words were: "Upon your arrival in Washington DC, you must hide the third envelope very well. No one must see it before you deliver the second envelope to the Yankee War Office."
Julii reached across the table and grasped Paul's hand to impress upon him the seriousness of her words. "The first letter mentions the third envelope’s existence and explains all that I am about to tell you. Do you understand?"
Paul was calm and his eyes looked bright and intelligent. "Hide that there envelope before I gets to the Yankees. I got it."
Samantha and Tilly both wrapped their arms lovingly around Paul's shoulders as Julii went on. "You must impress upon the men you meet in Washington that the third envelope contains a meticulously thought-out strategy for a strike against Atlanta. You must tell them that, as in the Vicksburg plan, all roads, resources, crops, troop sizes and locations are laid out in the pages of that letter."
Paul lifted the third envelope and said, "I'm guessing there's a good reason for not giving over both of these here envelopes in one go."
Julii's smile and her tone showed her deep respect for Paul's intelligence as she went on. "The first letter also explains that the plan will not be handed over until Matilda and little Julii are rescued from the Yankee Captain and returned to you."
It was now Paul's turn to reach across the table to take hold of Julii's hands. His thanks was written across his proud and silent face.
Unable to reach for it because of Paul's grip on her hands, Julii nodded to the forth envelope as she said, "Tell the Yankees that inside this envelope is the second half of the plan. You must impress upon them that it is a plan that will bring the war to a swift end with a crushing Union victory."
A little unsure of how to respond to Paul's tears of gratitude, she paused before going on. "You must tell the Yankees that I will deliver this envelope myself, in person. I will only hand it to the commanding officer, who takes Atlanta, and only when I see you reunited with your family with my own eyes."
Tilly cried uncontrollably on Paul's shoulder. She was happy for the proud man but sad for herself. Even though she hid her feelings, everyone knew she had fallen in love with Paul.
Samantha looked at Tilly with the concern of a mother for a brokenhearted daughter, and the preacher looked at Julii as he would an atheist. He did not disapprove; he simply could not understand how such a refined woman could think in such extraordinary ways.
After all of the various looks had been given and interpreted, everyone turned to look at Julii. The preacher was the first to break the silence. "I understand how Paul will be smuggled from Savannah to Washington DC. Your generous donation will fund many such passages to freedom. However, can we be sure that a Negro man, just turning up at the Union War Office, is going to garner the attention you desire?"
Julii smiled and nodded her head. "That is a very good point. I signed my previous letter your refugee carried, the Vicksburg letter, with the single initial “R”. That letter resulted in a resounding victory for the North. I believe the Union strategists will welcome another letter from the same hand, don't you?"
The preacher simply nodded his understanding and the meeting came to an end with all at the table setting off to fulfill their agreed tasks.
Two days after that meeting in the kitchen, Paul went north. Two months after that, Julii began scouring the newspapers looking for signs of tell-tale Union activity. She knew full well the southern newspapers no longer printed the truth about their battle losses, but she was hoping to read something “between the lines”.
Even though she knew Paul's uncertain journey, of hiding in churches and barns and farm houses while waiting the next kind person to move him one more leg of his journey north, may take him many months to get to Washington DC, she could not help herself looking for news that would give her the evidence she craved.
Months passed with no sign of the telltale elements of her plan appearing in the news stories. Julii began to feel panic. She knew that Paul's journey north could have no predictable timetable and a campaign such as the one she was proposing would take many months to plan and execute, if the Yankees decided to do it at all, but she still spent every day quietly fretting.
When the news she was dying to read eventually came, it was during a meeting with General Hardee and not through the newspapers. Julii found it hard to conceal her joy. Even more satisfying for Julii, it was an extremely urgent meeting that had been called at short notice by a lone rider who woke her and the count in the middle of the night.
The fatigued Confederate generals who arrived at Count Anton's office the next day had mud on their boots. They looked disheveled like men who had missed more than one night's sleep and, in somber tones, they ordered supplies that would be required for a campaign to halt General Sherman's army moving towards Atlanta.
While writing down the orders for gunpowder, mini balls, cannonballs and rifles, Julii was secretly over the moon. The North had committed one of its most prestigious generals to carrying out her plan. “General Sherman” was a veteran of the battles at Bull Run and Shiloh, he had even been with Grant at her own victory at Vicksburg.
Working diligently, Julii ordered the count's steam clippers to ignore fuel costs and travel at full speed to place all of the urgent orders with Count Anton's European arms manufacturers because she alone knew how precarious the Confederacy was at this moment. She wanted to extract as many valuable commodities as she could for Count Anton before the end came.
While her savior's fleet sped crossed the Atlantic, Julii got to work on the count's behalf, proposing a daring plan of action that would also benefit the Confederate High Command. She formulated it in a way that would pay Count Anton for his shipments, while taking a huge task off of their already busy hands.
The generals immediately agreed and watched in wonder as Julii organized the retrieval of vast quantities of cotton and tobacco and wheat and cattle from under the very noses of the advancing Union Army. It was as though she could read the Union generals’ minds, and they were all very grateful to have the amazing Julii o
n their side.
Three months later, Julii personally supervised the unloading of the ships arriving from Europe and, as Atlanta fell into the hands of Sherman's ruthless Union Army, she supervised the loading of the vast quantities of rescued commodities that would be taken back to Europe on their return journey.
Once the first part of Julii's devastating plan was complete, it became time for her to leave for Atlanta to do her part of stage two. Count Anton protested because he had read General Hardee's reports of Sherman's annihilating march and he feared for Julii's safety. She could not tell him what was actually going on, for fear of incriminating him, so she made up a story about having to confirm logistics and cotton yields and gold supplies in the region still held by the South.
Because Julii knew exactly what she was talking about, it all sounded plausible. Count Anton knew how hard it was to change her mind once it was made up, so he let her go on the condition she take his carriage driver and man servant for protection.
Of course, Julii refused and drove the carriage herself. She believed risking her own life for revenge was one thing, but risking the count's innocent staff was quite another.
Into the fire
The main road from Savannah to Atlanta was choked with fleeing soldiers, desperate civilians, and bewildered slaves all streaming from their vanquished city. Every kind of horse-drawn vehicle was loaded with the rubbish to which first-time refugees attach value.
The further away from their homes these lost people moved, the more unessential their grandfather clocks, or their ancestral linen chest, or the chaise-lounge “that belonged to Napoleon's Josephine” appeared to become.
Things that, just a day before, they “simply could not do without” were now being dumped along the side of the road by their thousands.
This “human roadblock” should have made it impossible for Julii to reach Atlanta, but she had spent months preparing for this day. She had studied every book that referenced the ways of war and of siege and evacuation. Her detailed research had made it clear the roads would be swamped with panicking people who would be capable of carrying out unspeakable atrocities in order to survive, and must be avoided.