by Dianne Day
My Clara.
I had always known I would see Clara again someday. Now luck had brought her to me, without the slightest effort on my part. Idly I wondered how much time I’d have with her, how long I’d dare to keep her before she had to die.
“Whatever is going on over there, it seems to involve a number of your people, Jackson,” I said.
They couldn’t have found that woman’s body already, I thought. They aren’t likely to find it until it starts to stink.
* * *
COLONEL JOHN ELWELL bit his lip. His mind was not on pain, and he was able to stay his hand only with difficulty.
He wanted to stroke her dark brown hair now, this very minute, while her attention was focused on his leg wound; wanted to touch her before she could see it coming or sense his intent, and with a frown or the merest narrowing of her eyes, shame him into stone.
For a moment John fantasized: If I were to touch her just once, even the merest, lightest touch, then like magic the attraction between us would take hold—must take hold, for it’s truly irresistible—and so we should be forgiven, also like magic, whatever might come next!
But then Clara did something that caused such a sharp twinge in his thigh that he gasped, and groaned as the twinge dissolved into an only slightly lesser wave of pain that traveled all the way down his leg into his very toes. And up the other way as well.
She tilted her head and looked over her shoulder with a little worried frown, at the same time applying a gentle pressure on his wound that brought relief.
“I’m sorry, Colonel,” she said, “but I have to change the dressing, and it was stuck. I should have warned you this might hurt.”
“You just changed dressings yesterday,” John grumbled.
“I know,” she agreed, gathering up some strips of cloth that he had to admit did look rather nasty, “but I’ve observed that wounds heal faster, the cleaner they’re kept.”
Clara whisked the old bandage out of sight and produced a clean length of cloth that she began to fold expertly, without looking. Instead she smiled, her brown eyes with a mischievous glint. “It’s like kitchens.”
“Kitchens?” John felt his own lips twitch in amused response, though he had not the slightest idea what she was talking about. Who could resist this woman, who was not much taller than a child, yet had the hands of an angel—and to boot, a wicked wit?
“The best-tasting food comes from a clean kitchen,” she said, “and the neatest, fastest healing comes from a clean wound.”
John thought about this as he watched her bind that white bandage around his thigh, over the angry, red, raggedly-sewn-together edges of a deep hole where the broken bone had poked through. She had not done the sewing, of course, because she hadn’t yet arrived; he was sure she’d have made a much neater stitch. It was true that soldiers and their male nurses tended to ignore dirt. There was something manly, in fact, about the ability to ignore the muck and the mud along with all the other hardships.
Clara’s insistence on cleanliness seemed a purely feminine thing—and she’d saved his leg, against a lot of odds. If there’d been a surgeon available when his horse fell on him, most likely he wouldn’t have that leg anymore. Amputation, then cauterization, was the preferred method of treatment when a broken bone pierced the skin. But to the Colonel’s everlasting shame, his was not a battle wound—for there was no battle in the area yet, and so no medical personnel on Hilton Head Island. He’d only been out pleasure riding and his horse had stumbled; he’d lost his seat and landed wrong, and so had the horse. A sickening snap of bone was the last thing he’d remembered before blacking out.
John suspected he might have lost not only his leg, but his life as well, if Clara Barton had not arrived a week ago and seen how things were for him. She’d immediately taken over his nursing. He’d been too weak and wracked with fever to protest that no lady should have to tend a man whose wound was in such an intimate place as his inner thigh.
She touched him all the time. Her touch itself was healing. He fancied—or was it mere fancy?—her touch was not always impersonal.
Yet John, being a gentleman, had never allowed himself to touch her at all.
It’s not fair, he thought grumpily.
“There!” Clara said with a note of satisfaction. She pulled the afghan back over his lap and straightened up. For a few more moments she bustled about, washing her hands, tidying things, putting a small bag of refuse outside the door.
Then from one of the pockets inside her voluminous skirt, which seemed to contain any number of wondrous things, she produced a small bottle of some sweet-smelling cream. This she proceeded to rub thoroughly into her hands, taking time to go between each finger.
Aha, John thought, enchanted, that is how she manages to work so hard yet keep those little hands so white.
At last Clara looked around and asked, “Now, where is that book of poems we’ve been reading?”
It was the moment he’d been waiting for all day.
“DID YOU HEAR THAT?” Perhaps half an hour after she’d begun to read to the Colonel from his favorite volume of Keats, Clara paused in mid-poem. She lowered the book to her lap and cocked her head, listening hard.
John Elwell frowned. “It sounds like some sort of disturbance outside.”
“I’ll go see what’s happening, shall I?” she offered, unable to keep an eagerness from her voice, yet so immediately ashamed of it that she forced herself to remain in her chair. It was not Colonel Elwell’s fault that the War seemed to have come to a halt on the sea islands, making Clara feel as if the Army must have sent her—and more important, all the supplies she’d gathered for the fighting men—to the wrong place.
“If you like,” John said, “but it’s not necessary to trouble yourself.”
“Oh, it wouldn’t be any trouble,” Clara said, biting her lip and keeping her seat. Her whole body suddenly seemed to itch and she wanted to fly out the door to see what was happening.
“Go and find out, then come back and report to me,” John said at last, in a tone somewhere between command and his usual soft-spokenness.
Even as Clara rose—slowly, so as not to hurt his feelings—and handed him the book, the noise grew louder: Many voices cried out, haphazardly different in tone and pitch, sounding all together as if they must be working up to something, perhaps some sort of riot.
But not a battle.
“It’s some domestic thing, I’m sure,” she said, as much to herself as to him. Nevertheless he’d given a command of sorts and, grateful, she was on her way to the door. She flung it open, stepped out and left the door standing wide, momentarily not thinking about drafts and their possible effect on the Colonel’s fragile state of health.
At Headquarters, the former plantation house had been divided so that the working offices of the Quartermaster Corps were below on the first floor, and the officers’ living quarters were on the second floor, which was accessible only from the veranda that ran across the whole facade. As Commandant, Colonel Elwell occupied the two best center rooms, so Clara emerged midway on the veranda.
She stepped quickly to the railing and looked down. The enclosure on the grounds below, usually sedately patrolled by silent guards, was now a mass of motion, swirling with noise and color and people the likes of which she had heard about, but never seen before.
Their thin arms waved above their dark heads like a writhing thicket of naked, blue-black branches. Their bodies too were thin, clothed in splashes of color that made an exciting contrast to the somber uniforms of the soldiers who stood aside, warily looking on.
Gullah, Clara thought, they are the former slaves, now freemen and women, called the Gullah.
Her first few contacts with the Gullah, she’d been warned, would not be easy—their language was difficult to understand and almost impossible to speak, though the words were a dialect of English. Sure enough, though she tried hard, she couldn’t make out a single intelligible word rising from the crowd below. But
the syntax and cadence of the Gullah speech were exotic, melodious—in fact bewitchingly beautiful—in spite of the sense of urgency she felt coming from them.
They chanted and keened incomprehensibly, and all the while a sense of grief, of mourning, ebbed and flowed in a palpable rhythm, as if through a heavy vocal sea. Most of the voices were high-pitched, the cries of women … and one woman stood out from all the rest.
Swaying near the center of the crowd, she was taller, her uplifted arms rose higher, and she was dressed in all white, even to a turban headdress. The tall woman threw her head back and howled—momentarily a hush fell—and then she broke away. The others parted to let her pass as she rushed toward the staircase.
Soldiers followed, brandishing their bayonet-tipped rifles and yelling “Halt! Halt!” But the woman was already halfway up the stairs, propelled by her own great momentum.
“Let her come!” Clara yelled down, “I take full responsibility!”
The soldiers, though their heads jerked up as if in surprise, responded either to the tone of her voice or to the words “full responsibility.” They backed off and arranged themselves in a barrier at the foot of the stairs before anyone else in the crowd could follow.
The woman who emerged onto the veranda must be nearly six feet tall, Clara judged by making a swift comparison to her own height, which was just under five feet. And the woman was so thin that she seemed even taller. Her eyes were enormous, their whites having a clear bluish cast against her dark skin, and she carried her head in the white turban with an exotic grace, like the queen of a far-off land.
Yet this queen became an immediate supplicant, bending double, babbling and imploring in words Clara could scarcely make out.
George, she thought she heard, and cunnel, no doubt for colonel.
“Shush for a moment,” Clara said kindly, holding out her hands with the palms up in a pleading gesture, “please, I want to help but you must speak more slowly.”
Twice more she repeated both her plea and the gesture, before the woman’s words tumbled to a halt and she raised her head. Clara was finally able to ask, “Can you tell me your name?”
The woman, calmer now, unfolded to her full height. “Annabelle,” she said.
“And who is George?”
One large tear spilled from Annabelle’s right eye and rolled down her cheek, leaving a silvery track on ebony skin that glowed with a purple sheen. “E mah boy,” she said.
“Something has happened to your son, George,” Clara interpreted. She understood the tone, the facial expression, the outpouring of sorrow all too well—these were a common language that needed no words.
Annabelle drew in a sharp breath and nodded. “E don’ binnah los’,” she said.
“And you’ve come to see the Colonel, is that right?”
Annabelle nodded again.
“Colonel Elwell has been injured, he is hurt, do you understand? His horse fell on him and broke the Colonel’s leg bone, high up above the knee.” Clara tapped her own thigh, though her full skirt and petticoats made the gesture fairly meaningless. “It hasn’t been healing right and he’s confined to his room.”
Confined to his bed, and in a weak and precarious state of health if the truth be known—but generally it was not. The Colonel could not leave his bed to receive this woman, nor would it be at all seemly to show her into his bedroom, and so Clara did not know what to do.
Annabelle hung her head, clasped her hands tightly together and brought them to her lips. Whether she was thinking, praying, or crying, was impossible to tell. All three, perhaps. Within the enclosed grounds below the other Gullah still moaned, their voices rising and falling as if in an agreed cadence, with occasionally a single wail that soared high and chill on the winds of afternoon.
Clara reached into the deep pocket of her skirt and took out a palm-sized notebook and a lead pencil. Making notes was second nature to her, though most often she did it in a field hospital, or walking the battlefield to find soldiers still alive among those who’d been left for dead.
She flipped past pages of names of sons, fathers, husbands, lovers, all of whose messages she had promised to deliver and someday she would—until finally she found a blank space and in it she wrote: Annabelle. Then she drew a two-headed arrow, and at its other end she wrote: George, son. Along the shaft of this arrow she wrote missing.
Then Clara moved closer, tipped her head to one side and looked up into Annabelle’s face. Above the Gullah woman’s clasped hands her cheeks were shiny-wet with tears, and the skin around her eyes was creased with sorrow.
“Is George the only one who’s lost?” Clara asked quietly, urgently compelled by some sort of sixth sense she had about people who’d gone missing. “Are there others?”
Annabelle did not reply. Instead she closed her eyes and began to sway ever so slightly forward and back, forward and back.
“Do you understand what I’m asking?” Clara pressed.
The tall woman stilled herself, opened her eyes and wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. Slowly she shook her head back and forth—a negative reply.
“George don’ binnah los’,” she insisted. “Uh tole oonuh. Dem tek um. E don’ binnah onlies’ dem tek.”
Clara bit her bottom lip in frustration—now she was the one who did not understand.
THE COLONEL SHOVED his elbows back hard against the pillows and struggled to raise his shoulders and neck off the bed so as to see through the doorway. He hated not knowing everything that was going on.
Damnation! He still couldn’t see.
Beads of sweat popped out on John’s forehead as he tried harder, leaning all the weight of his upper body first on one elbow, then the other, until at last he’d dragged himself more or less upright. Then he bent forward from the waist—a position that produced an instant nausea in the pit of his stomach—reached back, and quickly balled the feather pillows up behind him for support.
Aaah! Better.
Sitting up he felt less like an invalid. Though he still couldn’t see her—she’d moved out of range. By craning his neck to the left, he got a glimpse of her black skirt. And he could hear some anguished-sounding outpour of the Gullah language, in a woman’s voice.
It would be good experience for Clara to handle it as much as she could, whatever it was—even though he was jealous of his time with her.
Within two days of her arrival, John had freed up a room beside his own in the big house and assigned it to Clara. He’d raided some of the officers’ rooms to provide her a rocking chair and some other, smaller luxuries; he’d ordered that a handsome chest of drawers with parquet inlay from his own room be moved into hers, as well.
All without her knowledge. If he’d asked, she might have declined, and he wasn’t taking that chance. He was the commanding officer, he could give what orders he liked, and if the men made rude remarks behind his back about all this fuss over a woman (he was pretty sure they did), well then, let them.
John’s next step had been to assign David Barton, Clara’s brother and travel companion, to share Sam Lamb’s quarters. Both men already shared the rank of major—they might as well share a suite of rooms.
Better two officers together than force a brother and sister to live in a two-room cabin that had been assigned before their arrival, in the mistaken belief that “David Barton” and “Clara Barton” were man and wife.
Anyway, that was the rationale of the new arrangement, and there was no one entitled to complain about it—no one except John Elwell’s occasionally aching conscience.
Rumor had it that the two majors were not entirely happy, but they had no choice other than to obey orders. Major Lamb was Colonel Elwell’s second-in-command, and what with the Colonel out of commission, he had too much to do. So John had made Major Barton Samuel Lamb’s assistant. It had seemed a good idea, but was not working out, and their living together only exacerbated the situation.
The Colonel grimaced when he thought of Clara’s brother. He di
dn’t like the man, who was much older and yet had so little experience as a soldier that John wondered how he’d earned his rank. Of course John also didn’t like that David was always watching Clara.…
Which was why John had put him in a room on the other side, where it was much harder for him to know his sister’s every move. Smiling at his own cleverness, the Colonel again craned his head to see as much as he could of the pair on the porch. Clara had bent toward the Gullah woman, a motion that set the hoop under her skirt swaying and provided a rare flash of ruffled petticoat.
That’s the trouble with war, far too few petticoats. John was appalled by the frivolousness of his own thought … but it was nice to smile for a change.
Clara’s reputation had preceded her, along with her clearance papers—but she’d turned out to be far different from what any of them had expected. She had her own permits issued by the U.S. Congress, including a battlefield pass that allowed her to go anywhere, even to the front lines, to distribute her supplies and to assist the medical corps. No ordinary citizen got a battlefield pass that circumvented the whole military chain of command, especially not a woman. Such a thing was unheard-of. So they’d anticipated some sort of amazonian bluestocking, and got an energetic little angel instead.
Clara Barton’s battlefield pass was legitimate—John had seen it with his own eyes.
Amazing woman! Smiling again, he shook his head.
Amazing or not, it was time he offered to help in the present situation. He’d been listening, thought he’d recognized the voice of the Gullah woman, who was a kind of leader in their community. And now, he’d just heard Clara say his name.
John cleared his throat and called out: “Clara! Miss Barton!”
After a beat or two there she was, a small woman in a skirt so wide she took up the whole doorway.
“Yes, Colonel? I’m sorry I forgot to close the door. I hope you’re not feeling a chill.”