Slaves of Obsession (15 page)

Memory crowded in on her as she saw the young faces of the men, tense, frightened and trying desperately to hide it, each in his own way. Some talked too much, voices loud and jerky, laughing at nothing, a paper-thin veneer of bravado. Others sat silently, eyes filled with thoughts of home, of an unknown battle ahead, and perhaps death. She was horrified to see how many of them had no canteens of water and carried weapons that were so old, or in such a state of disrepair, that they posed more danger to the men who fired them than to any enemy. They were of such variety that no quartermaster could be expected to obtain ammunition for all of them. They were all muzzle-loaders, but smoothbore, not rifled. Some were old flintlock muskets which misfired much more often and were far less accurate than the new precision weapons that Breeland had stolen.

Hester found herself sick with anticipation of the blind slaughter which would follow if the war came to a pitched battle. From the snatches of desperate, youthful boasting she heard, or the passion to preserve the Union, it could not be far away.

She overheard snatches of conversation during the times she stood up and stretched her back and legs.

A thin, young redheaded man wearing a Highland kilt
was leaning up against the partition, speaking with a fresh-faced youth in gray breeches and jacket.

“We’ll drive those Rebels right out of it,” the kilted youth said ardently. “There’s no way on earth we’re gonna let America break up, I’m tellin’ ye. One nation under God, that’s us.”

“Home by harvest, I reckon,” the other youth said with a slow, shy smile. He saw Hester and straightened up. “Pardon me, ma’am.” He made room for her to pass and she thanked him, her heart lurching to think what he was going into so innocently. From his lean body, work-hardened hands and threadbare clothes, he clearly knew poverty and labor well, but he had no conception of the carnage of battle. It was something no sane person could create in the imagination.

She smiled back at him, looking into his blue eyes for a moment, then moved on.

“You all right, ma’am?” he called after her. Perhaps he had seen the shadow of what she knew, and recognized its hurt.

She forced herself to sound cheerful. “Yes, thank you. Just stiff.”

On the way back she passed an older man chewing on the stem of an unlit clay pipe.

“Got to go,” he said gravely to the bearded man opposite him. “Way I see it, there’s no choice. If you believe in America, you’ve got to believe in it for everyone, not just white men. In’t right to buy an’ sell human beings. That’s the long an’ the short of it.”

The other man shook his head doubtfully. “Got cousins in the South. They in’t bad people. If all the Negroes suddenly got free, where are they gonna go? Who’s gonna look after ’em? Anybody thought o’ that?”

“Then what are you doin’ here?” The first man took the pipe out of his mouth.

“It’s war,” the other said simply. “If they’re gonna fight us, we gotta fight them. Besides, I believe in the Union. That’s what America is, isn’t it … a Union?”

Hester continued back to her seat, oppressed by the sense of confusion and conflict in the air.

They stopped in Baltimore and more people got on board. As they pulled out she was sitting by the window, having changed places with Monk for a while. They both looked out at the passing countryside. Opposite them, Philo Trace sat growing more and more tense, the lines in his face etched more deeply and his hands clenched together, one moment moving as if to do something, then knitting around each other again.

Looking through the window, Hester saw for the first time pickets guarding the railroad tracks. Occasionally to begin with, then more and more frequently. She saw beyond them the pale spread of army camps. They increased in both size and density as the train moved south.

It had been hot in New York. As they approached Washington the heat became suffocating. Clothes stuck to the skin. The air seemed thick and damp, heavy to breathe.

As they pulled into Washington itself the wasteland around the outskirts was covered with tents, groups of men marching and drilling, white-covered wagons and all manner of guns and carts drawn up. The fever of war was only too bitterly apparent.

They drew into the depot and at last it was time to alight, unload cases and begin to look for accommodation for such time as they would be in the city.

“Breeland will be here all right,” Trace said with assurance. “The Confederate armies are only about two days’ march away to the south. We should stay at the Willard if we can, or at least go there to dine. It’s the best place to pick up the news and hear all the gossip.” He smiled with painful amusement. “I think you’ll hate the noise. Most English people do. But we haven’t time to indulge in dislikes. Senators, diplomats, traders, adventurers all meet there—and their wives. The place is usually full of women and even children too. An evening there, and I’ll know where Breeland is, I promise you.”

Hester was fascinated with the city. Even more than New York had been it was unlike any she had seen before. It was apparently designed with a grand vision, one day to cover
the whole of the land from the Bladensburg River to the Potomac, but at present there were huge tracts of bare grass and scrub between outlying shanty villages before they reached the wide unpaved main thoroughfares.

“This is Pennsylvania Avenue,” Trace said, sitting in the trap beside Hester, watching her face. Monk rode with his back towards them, his expression a curious mixture of thought and suspense, as if he were trying to plan for their mission here but his attention was constantly being taken by what he saw around him. And indeed it was highly distracting. On one side, the buildings were truly magnificent, great marble structures that would have graced any capital in the world. On the other were huddled lodging houses, cheap markets and workshops, and now and then bare spaces, unoccupied altogether. Geese and hogs wandered around with total disregard for the traffic, and every so often one of the hogs would get down and roll in the deep ruts left by carriage wheels after rain had turned the street into mire. There was no rain or mud now, and their movement caused clouds of thick dust that choked the lungs and settled on everything.

Far ahead of them, the Capitol looked at first glance like some splendid ruin from Greece or Rome surrounded by the wreckage of the past. Closer, it was clear that the opposite was true. It was still in the process of being built. The dome had yet to be constructed, and pillars, blocks and statues stood amid the rubble, the timber and the workers’ huts and the incomplete flights of steps.

Hester wanted to say something appropriate, but all words escaped her. There seemed to be flies everywhere. It had not occurred to her in England, or even on the ship, that America would feel like somewhere tropical, the clammy air like a hot, wet flannel wrapping.

They reached the Willard, and after a great deal of persuasion from Trace were shown to two rooms. Hester was exhausted and overwhelmingly relieved to be, for a few moments at least, in private away from the noise, the dust and the unfamiliar voices. The heat was inescapable even here, but at least she was out of the glare of the sun.

Then she looked across at Monk and saw the doubt in his face. He stood very still in the center of the small room, his jacket crumpled, his hair sticking to his forehead.

She was suddenly aware of the ridiculousness of their situation. It was a moment either to laugh or to cry. She smiled at him.

He hesitated, searching her eyes, then slowly he smiled back, and then sat down on the other side of the bed. At last he began to laugh, and reached over and took her in his arms, falling back with her, kissing her over and over again. They were tired and dirty, totally confused and far from home, and they must not allow it to matter. If they even once looked at it seriously, they would be crippled from trying.

They met Philo Trace again at breakfast the following morning. It was an enormous meal. It put even the English country house breakfast to shame. Here as well as the usual ham, eggs, sausages and potatoes, were fried oysters, steak and onions and blancmange. This was apparently the first of five meals to be served through the day, all of equal enormity. Hester accepted two eggs lightly poached, some excellent strawberries, toast with preserves which she found far too sweet, and coffee which was the best she had ever tasted.

Philo Trace looked tired; his face was marked with lines of fatigue and distress. There were shadows around his dark eyes and his nostrils were pinched. But he was immaculately shaved and dressed, and obviously he intended to make no parade of the emotions which must torment him as he saw too closely his country lurch from the oratory of war to the reality of it.

The hotel dining room was full, mainly of men, several army officers among them, but there were a considerable number of women, more than there would have been in a similar establishment in England. Hester noticed with surprise that several of the men had long, flowing hair, which they wore loose, resting over their collars. Very few were clean-shaven.

Trace leaned forward a little, speaking softly.

“I’ve already made a few enquiries. The army left two days ago, on the sixteenth, going south towards Manassas.” His voice cracked a little; he could not keep the pain from it. “General Beauregard is camped near there with the Confederate forces, and MacDowell has gone to meet him.” A shadow covered his eyes. “I expect they have Breeland’s guns with them. Or I suppose I should say Mr. Alberton’s guns.” His food sat on his plate ignored. He did not say whether he had held any hope of stopping the arms from reaching the Union forces. Hester thought him blind to reality if he had, but sometimes one cannot bear to look, and blindness is a necessity, for a while.

All around them the dining room hummed with the babble of talk, now and then rising in excitement or anger. The air was clouded with tobacco smoke and, even at half-past eight in the morning, clammily hot.

“We can’t stop that.” Monk spoke with calm practicality. “We are here to find Merrit Alberton and take her home.” There was surprising compassion in his voice. “But if you wish to leave us and join your own people, no one will ask you to remain here. It may even be dangerous for you.”

Trace shrugged very slightly. “There are still plenty of Southerners about. Probably every man you see here with long hair comes from the South, the ‘slave states’ as they refer to them.” There was bitterness in him now. “It’s a fashion the North doesn’t follow.”

Hester liked him, but she had wondered many times during the journey how he could espouse something she considered an abomination, by any standards an offense against natural justice. She did not wish to know his answer, in case she despised him for it, so she had not asked. She heard the suppressed anger in him now as he gave it regardless.

“Most of them have never even seen a plantation, let alone thought about how it worked. I haven’t seen many myself.” He gave a harsh little laugh, jerky, as if he had caught his breath. “Most of us in the South are small farmers, working our own land. You can go for dozens of miles and that’s all you’ll see. But it’s the cotton and the tobacco that
we live on. That’s what we sell to the North and it’s what they work in their factories and ship abroad.”

He stopped suddenly, lowering his head and pushing his hand across his brow, forcing his hair back so hard it must have hurt. “I don’t really know what this war is all about, why we have to be at each other’s throats. Why can’t they just leave us alone? Of course there are bad slave owners, men who beat their field slaves, and their house slaves, and nothing happens to them even if they kill them. But there’s poverty in the North as well, and nobody fights about that! Some of the industrial cities are full of starving, shivering men and women—and children—with nobody to take them in or feed them. No one gives a damn! At least a plantation owner cares for his slaves, for economic reasons if not common decency.”

Neither Monk nor Hester interrupted him. They glanced at each other, but it was understood Trace was speaking as much to himself as to them. He was a man overwhelmed by circumstances he could neither understand nor control. He was no longer even sure what he believed in, only that he was losing what he loved and it was rapidly growing too late to have any effect on the horror that was increasing in pace from hour to hour.

Hester was passionately sorry for him. In the two weeks she had known him, on the ship and the train to Washington, she had observed him in moments of solitude when there seemed a loneliness which wrapped around him like a blanket, and at other times when he had had a quick empathy with other passengers, also facing the unknown and trying to find the courage to do it with grace, and not frighten or burden their families even further by adding to their fears.

Aboard ship, there had been one gaunt-faced Irishwoman with four children who struggled to comfort them and behave as if she knew exactly what she would do when they landed in a strange country without friends or a place to live. And alone, staring over the endless expanse of water, her face had shown her terror naked. It was Trace who had
gone and stood silently with his arm around her thin shoulders, not offering platitudes, simply sharing the moment and its understanding.

Now Hester could think of nothing to say to him as he faced the ruin of his country and tried to put it into words for two English people who had come on a single, and possibly futile, mission but who could return to peace and safety afterwards, even if they had to explain failure to Judith Alberton.

“We can’t know what we’re doing,” Trace said slowly, now looking up at Monk. “There has to be a better way! Legislation might take years, but the legacy of war will never go away.”

“You can’t change it,” Monk replied simply, but his face showed the complexity of his feelings, and Trace saw it and smiled very slightly.

“I know. I would be better employed addressing what we came for,” he acknowledged. “I’ll say it before you do. We must find Breeland’s family. They’ll still be here, and Merrit Alberton will be with them.” He did not add “if she is still alive,” but the thought was in the quick pulling down of his lips, and it was easy to read because it was in Hester’s mind as well, and she knew it was in Monk’s.