Dreadnought (37 page)

“We? You mean, you and me?”

She said, “That’s right. You and I. For a brief and maddening minute I almost considered asking your Texian friend if he might be inclined to assist us, but for some reason or another, he seems to have vacated the train. I do pray he won’t be joining us again, but that’s neither here nor there.”

“He’ll be back. He’s picking up telegrams.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. Even so, he might’ve been just the man to barrel past Mr. Purdue, or to sneak past that other boy who does Mr. Purdue’s bidding. If nothing else, I doubt he’d have too many compunctions about shooting past the pair of them. Those Texians. Dreadful lot, the whole breed.”

“I’ve often said the same about Yankee women, but you don’t see me going on about it, now, do you?” Mercy retorted.

This shut down Miss Clay momentarily, but she chose not to read too far into the statement. After all, there were class distinctions among the northern regions same as in the southern regions, and everyone knew it. Either Miss Clay was choosing to believe she was being insulted by a Midwesterner, or she’d already concluded she dealt with a gray traitor and had come to terms with it, because she did not call attention to the remark.

Instead she said, “Come now, Mrs. Lynch. There’s no need to be rude. I want us to work together.”

The nurse asked, “And why is that?”

Theodora Clay leaned forward again, speaking softly enough that her aunt, napping nearby, would not be roused by her words. “Because I want to know what killed those lads.”

“I reckon it was a cannonball to the chest, or something similar. Or a missing arm or leg. Like as not, if there are real war veterans dead back there, that’s what killed them.”

She nodded. “That, or infection, or . . .” She dropped the whisper another degree. “Poison.”

“Poison?” Mercy responded, too loudly for Miss Clay’s liking.

She shrugged and waved her hands as if she wasn’t certain of where she was going, but the plan was forming and she was determined to exposit it. “Poison, or some kind of contamination. I . . . I overheard something.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, those Mexican inspectors, they—”

“Are they still on board?”

“Yes,” Miss Clay said quickly, eager to get back to her idea. “They’ve moved to the next car up. They were talking about some kind of illness or poison that they think might’ve contaminated their missing men. I know you spoke with them.”

“They might’ve mentioned it.” Or
she
might’ve mentioned it, but she didn’t say so.

Nearly exasperated, Miss Clay said, “Mr. Purdue was talking to that fellow, that Mr. Hayes.”

“About the missing Mexicans?”

“Yes. He was reading a newspaper—while he was back there, like a toad in a hole—and I was only trying to get some breakfast. He was telling Mr. Hayes that something that could alter so many hundreds of people all at once would make a tremendous weapon, if that’s what had happened. And before long, if he had his way, the Union would be in a position to produce just such a weapon.”

It was Mercy’s turn to frown. “Turning a disease or a poison into a weapon? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“
I
have,” Miss Clay informed her. “During the French and Indian war, the government gave smallpox-infected blankets to hostile tribes. It was cheaper and easier than exterminating them.”

“What a gruesome way of looking at it!”

“Gruesome indeed! It’s an
army,
Mrs. Lynch, not a schoolyard full of boys. It’s their job to destroy things and kill people in the
name of their own population. They do what they must, and they do it as inexpensively as they can, and as efficiently as possible. What could be more insidious and efficient than an unseen contagion?”

Mercy lifted a finger to pretend to doodle on the table between them as she responded. “But the problem with an unseen contagion is obvious, ain’t it? You’re gonna infect your own folks with it, sure as you infect other people.”

“Clearly some amount of research and development would be required, but isn’t that what Mr. Purdue does on his own time, in order to justify his continued existence as a passenger on this train? He’s a
scientist,
and he’s guarding a scientific treasure trove.
For the military,
” she emphasized this final point.

“It sounds awful, but I don’t guess I’d put it past him.”

“Neither would I,” Miss Clay said with a set of her mouth that wasn’t quite a smile, but conveyed the fact that she thought that now she and the nurse might finally be on the same page. “And that’s why we must take this opportunity while the train is stationary, to sneak into that rear car and see what’s inside.”

Mercy’s eyebrows bounced up. “You can’t be serious.”

“Of course I can. I’ve even changed my shoes for the occasion.”

“Bully for you,” Mercy said. “What are you going to do? I’ve already done my best to persuade the captain to intervene. Shall you seduce your way past Mr. Purdue and—”

“Don’t be revolting. And please recall, I’ve requested your own involvement as well. It’ll be disgusting, no doubt. And it wouldn’t be necessary if that blasted captain would stand up to the hierarchy and insist for himself that the things under his purview are all known quantities. But alas, I can’t convince him to budge on the matter. Ridiculous man, and his ridiculous sense of duty.”

“He’s all right. You leave him alone.”

Miss Clay made a little sniff and said, “If you say so. Now, come on.” She changed the subject, rising to her feet. “You and I are going to perform some reconnaissance.”

“We’re going to do what?”

“We’re going to poke around, and let ourselves into that car.”

Mercy asked, “How? The doors are sealed and chained. You’ve seen that yourself, I bet, when we’ve stopped at stations and stretched our legs. And even if they weren’t, Mr. Purdue and his very large gun are standing between us and that car. Or, Mr. Hayes, as the case may be.”

“Think bigger. Think
higher
.” She pulled on a pair of thin calfskin gloves and fastened their buttons while she said, “We’ll go over. There’s an emergency hatch on the roof. It’s designed to let people out, not
in,
but unless I’m sorely mistaken, it will work both ways.” Finished with her gloves, she continued, “Here’s what we’ll do: We’ll go to the last passenger car, take the side ladder up to the roof, and crawl across the top of the caboose, then jump over to the final car.”

Mercy said, “You’re daft!” but she was already getting excited about the plan.

“I’m daft, and I’m going. And I require your medical . . .” She almost didn’t say it, but in the transparent hope that flattery might get her someplace, she finished with, “expertise.”

“Oh, for the love of God.”

“
Please,
Mrs. Lynch. The repairmen are finished with the rear compartments, and they’ve moved on to the engine and the broken windows in the first car. We won’t be here more than another hour.”

Mercy said, “Fine,” folded her satchel up, and left it on her seat. She rose and adjusted the gunbelt she now wore more often than not and draped her cloak over her shoulders without raising the hood.

As she followed Theodora Clay out of their passenger car and onto the next one, she did not mention that their errand might prove to be a race against time. She did not tell her companion about the
Shenandoah,
the Confederate engine that had ridden a
northwestern track in order to bring those meat-baskets up to the plains and unleash them on the
Dreadnought
. She did not mention that she had indeed been talking to the Texian, and that he believed the
Shenandoah
was still following, tracking to the south and east, but closing ground, despite its defeat. If he was lucky, Horatio Korman was in the process of retrieving a telegram that would inform him of how correct his suspicions were. And if they were
all
lucky, it would say that the
Shenandoah
had given up, turned around, and headed back down to Dallas.

Meanwhile, the engine halted in Denver for only a few hours when it ought to have stayed overnight for an inspection; because a telegram from Union intelligence had been waiting in Denver, no doubt warning of precisely this same possibility and urging haste in any repair work.

While the train sat there, grounded and undergoing the improvements that would keep it rolling the next thousand miles, Mercy Lynch followed Theodora Clay to the spot between the last passenger car and the caboose. It was strange to stand on the junction without the wind putting up a fight, but no stranger than watching Miss Clay scale the external ladder with casual quietness and then, from the top of the car, pivot on her knees and urge Mercy to join her.

When she reached the top rung, Miss Clay whispered, “Move slowly and be quiet. Discretion is the better part of valor in this instance. If we make too much noise, they’ll hear us inside.”

“Sure,” said Mercy, who then pulled herself up on top of the steel-and-tin roof, sliding on her belly like a seal and then climbing to an all-fours position. Her skirts muffled the knocking of her knees, and her wool gloves kept the worst of the frigid surface’s chill from getting through to her fingers. But even with the thick layers of clothes, she could feel the cold seeping up through the fabric, and onto her shins, and into her palms.

The nurse had the feeling that Denver was a gray, smoky
place under the best of circumstances, and while the
Dreadnought
was being addressed in its station, a layer of dirty snow hung over everything. It blurred the edges between buildings, sidewalks, streets, and interchanges, and it made the air feel somehow colder. Atop the caboose, which they very slowly traversed in inches that were gained in calculated shifts, slides, and steps, there was little snow except what had fallen since they’d stopped. This snow was a funny color, more like frozen smog than shaved ice. It collected between her fingers and soaked along her legs and elbows where it met her body heat.

Around the train, men hurried back and forth—most of them soldiers or mechanics, bringing sheets of glass and soldering equipment up to the front of the train; but over the edge Mercy could also spy a station manager with stacks of envelopes, folders, ticket stubs, and telegraph reports.

All she could do was pray that no one looked up.

Even if the women flattened themselves down, anyone standing close enough to the caboose could likely stand on tiptoe and see what they were doing. The crawl was torturous and time consuming, but in what felt like hours (but was surely only ten minutes) they had traversed the car and were prepared to lower themselves back down onto the next platform, the one between the caboose and the final car.

On her way down the ladder, Theodora Clay hissed, “Mind your step. And stay clear of the window.”

Mercy had every intention of following these suggestions to the letter. She slowly traced Miss Clay’s steps down the ladder, across the pass, and then up the next ladder, approximately as silently as a house cat wearing a ball dress. On her way to the top of the final car, she looked over her shoulder to peek through the caboose window, where she saw the back of Malverne Purdue’s head bobbing and jiggling. She thought he must be talking to
someone she couldn’t see, and hoped that she wasn’t in the other speaker’s line of sight.

By the time she was situated and stable, Theodora Clay was already prodding at the edges of the emergency hatch, or ventilation hatch, or whatever the portal’s original purpose might have been. Mercy crept to her side and used the back of her hand to brush the small drifts of snow away from the hinges and seal. Before long, she spotted a latch.

Mercy angled her arm for better leverage and gave the latch a heave and a pull, which Theodora Clay assisted with when the nurse’s progress wasn’t fast enough to suit her. Between them, they forced the handle around and then heard the seal pop, its rubber fittings gasping open.

Theodora Clay asked, “Why would they seal it with rubber, like a canning jar?”

Mercy was already rocking back on her knees, her hand to her face. “To keep the cold in. Or . . . good
God
. To keep the smell contained! Lord Almighty, that’s . . .
Ugh,
” she said, lacking a word with the appropriate heft and reaching instead for a gagging noise.

Her companion didn’t do much better. She, too, covered her mouth and nose, then said from behind her hands, “The smell of death, of course. I’d think you’d be accustomed to it, working in a hospital like you have.”

“I’ll have you to know,” Mercy said, her words similarly muffled and choked. “We didn’t have
that
many men die on us. It was a very good hospital.”

“Must’ve been. Is there a ladder or anything to let us descend?”

“I don’t see one,” Mercy said, taking a deep breath of the comparatively fresh air outside, then dipping her head down low to get a better look. “And there’s more to that smell than just death.”

Inside, she saw only darkness; but as her eyes adjusted, she saw elongated forms that were surely coffins. Her breath fogged when she let it out, casting a small white cloud down into the interior. She sat back up and said, “I see caskets. And some crates. If there’s no better way, we could stack them up to climb back out again. But when they open the car in Boise, they’ll know someone got inside,” she concluded.