Fiddlehead (The Clockwork Century) (11 page)

Grant was too drunk to keep the horror to himself. “Dear
God,
woman. If the weapon is half what you claim it is, it ought to be tested in battle—not on dogs, and certainly not horses!”

She smirked at him, and he wanted to punch her—a desire which shamed him even as the thought of it delighted him. The prospect of running a fist into her smug, pretty face. A face that Desmond Fowler could scarcely stop looking at. A lying face. He was as confident of that as the drink in his hand. Except the drink was gone, his glass empty.

Fine, then. He wasn’t sure of anything.

“Very well then, Mr. President. I understand your reluctance, and I’m flattered by it. You give me credit for having created something terrible, and I thank you.”

He shuddered. “What an awful thing to say.”

“More awful than war itself?” she asked. “Terrible things are necessary sometimes. One might argue that any means to the end of hostilities might call itself a virtue, no matter how frightful the initial cost. If we kill a few thousand people in the South and they tremble before the Union’s military might … then we might save the lives of tens of thousands more. How many have died already, Mr. President?”

“More than tens of thousands. Hundreds.”

“Hundreds from battle alone, or hundreds more from the disease, terror, and famine that comes in a war’s wake?”

“I could not say.” He did not know.

“But you’ve seen it yourself. You know the war better than anyone, and I do not think that you love it. I believe you want to see it concluded, in order to begin the long work of reconstructing the nation.”

She had him there. “I hate the war. If I could end it tomorrow, I would do so.”

Her smile was both sharper and more frightening than a line of bayonets, and Grant had walked right into it. “Then we do agree after all. I do think we can work together, Mr. President. I’ll end your war if you let me. I’ll give you back your country, in exchange for a clean reputation.”

He shook his head, not to argue with her but because she was asking for more than he could offer. Immunity from prosecution? That was easy enough to come by; he could hand it over with a signature. But should he? He did not believe her when she’d called herself a scapegoat. He did not believe that she’s unknowingly been party to a war crime, and he did not believe that she wanted nothing else from him—nothing at all. But if he asked her now, she’d only lie some more, and he was too drunk to sort out the particulars.

There was nothing else he could say. He could either play along and pretend he was running the show, or he could fight and lose, and then everyone would know how weak he’d truly become.

And to think, these men wanted him to run for another term. But he hadn’t fought that, either. He’d missed his chance. And now, he was on a ballot, in a yellow oval, in a white house, in a cage of his own making.

Could he survive a fourth term? Would he
want
to?

He stood up without another word, set his glass down on the sideboard by the door, and walked out.

He did not stumble until he was around the corner, so no one saw it, thank God; except then Jemison Simms stuck his head out to ask, “Mr. President?”

Grant did not turn around, only waved and said, “I’m fine. Leave me alone. I need to think.”

Simms, having known the president since they’d served in the war together, on the ground and on horseback, in uniforms instead of suits … decided (wisely, in Grant’s estimation) to leave the matter alone and go back inside.

The president assumed that Simms would settle things and send the cabinet home from what had to be one of the worst War Department meetings in the history of such meetings. Was it even an official meeting? No. Not with that woman there. Not with that cat among pigeons.

And Desmond Fowler—the fattest, worst pigeon of them all—was standing right behind her. His hand on her shoulder, not to control her but to take direction from her. Grant did not like that. Not in the slightest. Because Fowler was right about several things, including a few he hadn’t said, but only implied, like the fact that Grant would lose if he fought him. And that was the crux of it, wasn’t it? He’d brought Fowler in to be the Secretary of State because Fowler understood the way Washington worked. He understood politics, and politicking, as a duck knows water. That’s why he’d needed him eight years before, and that’s why he’d become so powerful: because Grant was a soldier, not a statesman. He did not know—and had never understood, not for five sober seconds—how things worked between men of state.

Maybe war
wasn’t
the most terrible thing of all. It was easy to understand, for all the carnage and misery. Here is one side. Here is another. You try to kill each other, and the best army with the best strategists wins, barring unexpected interference.

As his thoughts tumbled and clattered together, he found his way to a small library, one he’d only ever entered once or twice. It had a door, one he could shut behind himself. It even had a lock, which he used, then turned a switch to raise the dimmed electric lights. Then he turned them down again, because they made his head hurt.

“A patriot,” he mumbled.

That’s what Katharine Haymes had called herself. And he was certain Desmond Fowler thought the same of himself, as did the rest of those men in the War Department—scheduling war without setting foot inside it, or not anymore.

“To hell with the patriots,” he said, scanning the room for a liquor cabinet and not seeing one. He rubbed his eyes and sat down on the floor before his legs gave out underneath him.

“To hell with us
all.
”

Six

It took so little time to reach Richmond from Washington, D.C., that Maria wondered how the two cities managed to fight on opposite sides of the same war. It wasn’t even terribly difficult to travel between them; all it took was a false set of paperwork (provided by Mr. Pinkerton) claiming that she was a Red Cross nurse, a train ticket, and finally a carriage that took her to the doorstep of the Robertson Hospital.

The hospital was once a very large house, owned by a judge who’d fled the premises when the Yankees were coming, back in 1861. As the Confederacy stabilized into a state of war, the house’s original owner had made several attempts to return and reclaim the property; but Captain Sally had countersued, on grounds that possession is nine-tenths of the law … and besides, she was performing a service for the nation, a service she successfully argued was more important than the cowardly relocation effort that left the house abandoned in the first place. Since then, the house had been augmented extensively in order to accommodate the thousand or so men who found their way to Robertson from the fronts each year. Now it sat in the center of a small compound of tents, outbuildings, storage lean-tos, and a carriage house for the single ambulance that operated on the hospital’s behalf.

Maria Boyd stood on the steps in front of the main entryway and took it all in.

She’d heard stories about the Robertson for years, even as a teenager, long before it became the sprawling institution she saw before her. Renowned around the world, it was a first-class facility with a shocking 90 percent survival rate—unheard of for civilian hospitals, much less for a ward that almost exclusively treated battlefield injuries. Doctors visited from distant nations and scholars wrote papers on the exceptional cleanliness of the premises, drawing parallels between the unexpected medical success and routines of boiled laundry, washed floors, and frequent patient baths.

Maybe the cleanliness
did
have something to do with it. Maria didn’t imagine that a filthy hospital was ideal, but as odors billowed forcefully from the open windows, she couldn’t help but wonder precisely what a dirty hospital must smell like, because this was positively
awful.

The air was permeated with a frozen fog of blood and medicine, burned hair, charred skin, body odor, rotting flesh, and some sharp, unidentifiable note. Maria put one gloved hand over her nose and mouth, but it didn’t do anything, so she reached for the door’s latch instead.

It vibrated under her hand, and a humming noise buzzed through her glove. Steeling herself, she pulled down the lever. The door snapped outward with such ferocity that it nearly knocked her back into the yard, but she held on, and planted her feet against the ensuing gust.

Three enormous turbines on rollers stood against the far wall, aimed at the open windows on either side of the door, overlooking the driveway and the carriage house. These giant wind-screws were powered by a diesel generator; they blasted air from the back of the main foyer to the windows on either side of the door, and now they caught Maria in their horizontal tornado.

Her hatpins struggled against the wind; her hair flapped and blew; her skirt whipped around her legs. She squinted against the bitterly cold onslaught and saw no beds, equipment, or people. Then a voice cried out, “Time! Go ahead and turn them off!” And, indeed, the generator clacked to a halt. Within a few seconds the giant blades slowed to a stop, pivoting with a soft creaking sound but making no further commotion.

Shortly thereafter, the room flooded with nurses and retained men in improvised hospital uniforms. They swarmed Maria, rushing past her to close the windows and open the interior doors. And then she saw that yes, the beds were in those
other
rooms. Rows and rows of them, perhaps a couple dozen in each of the clusters she could see from her vantage point right inside the foyer. Each bed had a warmly bundled body upon it, and each small ward had a series of attendants, as well.

Maria realized she hadn’t shut the door behind herself. She hadn’t been able to. She reached back to do so now, and finally someone approached to acknowledge her.

He was tall and heavyset, missing part of his left hand and the whole of his right eye. His voice was all Alabama vowels when he asked her, “Excuse me, ma’am … can I help you with something?”

“Yes, I … I…” But she couldn’t gather her thoughts, not while she was testing the integrity of her hat and hoping the feeling would come back into her frozen cheeks sooner rather than later. She also remembered her accent. Chicago had been filing off its edges, so she sharpened them afresh to make sure she sounded like a local. “I’m sorry, could I ask you—those fans…?”

He nodded and gestured at them with his good arm. “Just installed ’em a month ago. And I do apologize for the temperature in here; they chill the place up good. We only run them for a quarter-hour, twice a day. It circulates the air, keeps the smell down, and dries the laundry good.” He pointed up at the ceiling, where hundreds of dangling sheets were strung across a jungle of tightly stretched cords. “Don’t worry, we warm ’em up before we put ’em back on the beds.”

“But isn’t it hard … on the patients, I mean? It’s colder in here than it is outside!”

“No, ma’am, it only feels that way. And as you can see”—he cocked a thumb at the newly opened doors—“the patients are all tucked away. There aren’t any fans in the wards—just ductwork and ventilation to draw the bad air, so we can shoot it out the windows. The furnaces will kick on in a minute, and the whole place will come up toasty, quick as can be. Now, what can I do for you, Miss…?” he tried uncertainly.

“Boyd,” she supplied. She sniffled, and her nose stung. “Miss Boyd. And if you could direct me to Captain Sally, I would dearly appreciate it. Is she in? And might I have a word with her?”

The greeter’s demeanor shifted very slightly. His remaining eye darkened, and he sized her up again. “Could I ask what business you have with the captain?”

She reached into her bag, pulled out the paperwork Mr. Pinkerton had arranged from Chicago, and offered it to him. “I’m with the Red Cross,” she said. She hadn’t expected to need a more in-depth story than this, perhaps with the addition of “I’m a nurse,” but she didn’t say that. Her instincts suggested another direction, so she ran with them. “I want to speak with her about what happened when she testified before Congress. We want to hear what she tried to say. What she wasn’t
allowed
to say.”

Now the man relaxed, even brightened. “Well, thank God!” he exclaimed. “Come on, now. I’ll bring you up to her office. I’d offer to take your coat, but I expect you still want it.”

As if on cue, the diesel generator rumbled to life once more—but this time it wasn’t for the fans. A lower sound, coming from deeper in the basement, suggested that the circuit had now been shifted to serve the heating system. “Yes, thank you. I’d prefer to wear it, if that’s all the same to you.”

Through one of the sickrooms he led her, past men who slept, men who groaned, men who stared at the wall. They were all tucked in beneath quilts. A good idea, Maria thought, since it seemed they couldn’t work both the fans and the furnace at the same time.

He took her through a corridor, around a bend, and up a set of stairs. At the top of the stairs they were stopped by a man who was larger still than her guide. He did not look injured, so perhaps he wasn’t one of the retained men, too badly wounded to return to the war. In fact, he looked physically fit, and prepared to hit somebody.

He asked her companion, “Who’s this?”

“Red Cross woman. Wants a word with the captain about the wheezers,” he said, unable to keep a note of excitement out of the explanation.

“Red Cross? Do you have the papers to prove it? Miss Barton and Captain Sally are friendly, you know. They have more in common than in difference, never mind the lines. I didn’t hear word that she’d sent anyone … and I wonder why she didn’t come herself. The captain’s been trying to reach her for weeks.”

“Of course I have papers,” she said, and handed them over, hoping they were good.

The man at the top of the stairs perused them, his frown never melting. Finally he said, “Fine. I’ll take you to see my sister. Thanks for bringing her up, Richard.”

Richard took the hint, bowed, and left Maria there.

“Your … your sister?” she asked her new escort.

“Sister-in-law, if you like that better.” He put one arm behind her shoulders, not quite touching her, but urging her forward. “And I hope you don’t mind, but I’ll be coming with you, to have whatever word it is you want.”