Slaves of Obsession (17 page)

“Positive,” she answered succinctly. “Have you ever seen a battle?”

“No.” He looked suddenly vulnerable, as if she had unwittingly obliged him to face the reality of the coming war at last.

“I’ll start in the morning,” she said simply.

Trace stood up. “God be with you. Good night, ma’am.”

It was as uncomplicated as Monk had said for Hester to join the efforts of the many women trying to assemble some help for the one assistant army surgeon to each regiment and to convey supplies nearer the battlefield, which was going to be almost thirty miles away. A little questioning, frequently interrupted by her own overwhelming sense of urgency to help what she knew was coming far better than these optimistic, good-hearted and innocent women, and at last she found herself in a yard with Merrit Alberton. They were handing up rolls of linen into a cart which would serve to carry the wounded back to the nearest place where they could set up a field hospital. It was dirty and exhaustingly hot. The air seemed too thick to breathe, clogging the lungs as if it were warm water.

It was a moment before Merrit recognized her. At first she was just another pair of arms, another woman with hair tied back, sleeves rolled up and skirts scuffed and stained with dirt from the unpaved streets.

“Mrs. Monk! You’re staying to help us!” Her expression softened. “I’m so glad.” She pushed her hair out of her eyes with a dusty hand. “I hear you have experience that will be invaluable to us. We are grateful.” She took a bundle of supplies—bandages, splints, a few small bottles of spirits—from Hester.

“We’ll need far more than this,” Hester said, avoiding the truth for a moment, although perhaps she spoke about a reality that mattered more. They were hopelessly unprepared. They had never seen war, only dreamed it, thought of great issues, causes to be fought for without the faintest idea of what the cost would be. “We’ll need far more vinegar and wine, lint, brandy, more linen to make pads to stop bleeding.”

“Wine?” Merrit asked dubiously.

“As a restorative.”

“We have enough for that.”

“For a hundred men. You may have a thousand badly wounded … or more.”

Merrit drew in her breath to argue, then perhaps she remembered something of the conversation at the dinner table in London. Her face pinched with recognition that Hester knew the enormity of what they were facing. There was no point in saying this was different from the Crimea. Certain things were always the same.

Hester could not put off her mission any longer. For a few moments they were alone as the other women moved away to begin a different task.

“There was another reason I wanted to speak to you,” she said, hating what she was about to do, the pain she would cause and the judgments she must make.

There was no shadow of premonition in Merrit’s face, which was beaded with perspiration, a smear of dust on her cheek.

Time was short. War overshadowed murder and would soon sweep it away, but for every person bereaved, their own loss was unique.

“Your father was killed the night you left home,” Hester said quietly. There was no way to make it kinder or blunt the edge of it, nor could she afford to. She, Monk and Trace would decide their actions upon what Hester judged to be Merrit’s complicity in the crime.

Merrit stood still, as if she had not understood the words, her face blank.

“I’m sorry,” Hester said slowly. “He was murdered in the yard of his warehouse in Tooley Street.”

“Murdered?” Merrit struggled for sense in what seemed incomprehensible. “What do you mean?”

Hester stared at her, watching every shadow of emotion in her face, every trace of pain, confusion and grief. It was grossly intrusive, but if they were to keep their promises to Judith Alberton, she had no choice.

“He was tied up and shot,” she said clearly. “So were the two guards. Then the whole shipment of guns and ammunition was taken—stolen.”

Merrit looked stupefied, as if a friend had struck her so hard she was breathless, gasping to fill her lungs. Her knees wobbled and she sank back and sat awkwardly on the wheel of the cart behind her, still staring at Hester, wide-eyed with horror.

Hester could not afford to show pity, not yet.

“Who … who did it?” Merrit said hoarsely. “Philo Trace? Because Papa sold the guns to Lyman after all!” She let out a long groan of misery and rage, her hands clenched tight.

Only with difficulty did Hester restrain herself from bending to her. She would have sworn to anyone, to Monk or to Judith, that Merrit believed what she was saying. But she must test it further. This chance would never come again.

“Lyman Breeland’s watch was found in the yard,” she went on. “The one he gave you and you swore you would never let out of your sight.”

Merrit’s hand unclenched and flew to her breast pocket, but it was instinctive, not thought, because the moment after, she remembered. “I changed my dress,” she said in a whisper. “I put it down.…”

“The watch was found in the mud in the yard,” Hester said again. “And there was no money paid for the guns. They were stolen.”

“No! That’s impossible!” Merrit stood up quickly, staggering a little. “Philo Trace must have done it … and I don’t know what happened to the money. But Lyman bought the guns! I was there! He would never … never steal! And … and to think he would … murder … is monstrous … it couldn’t be true, and it isn’t!” Her belief was not a matter of will; it was absolute, shining in her face. There was anger in her, and grief, but nothing that looked like guilt.

Hester could not disbelieve her. There was no judgment to make, no weighing of evidence one way or another. Breeland must have taken the watch himself and left it in the yard, either by mistake or intentionally. But why?

There was a clatter of hooves and a moment later voices raised.

“Hurry! Get those wagons! The battle will be tomorrow for certain, at Manassas! We must get there by dawn!”

Hester responded without hesitating even an instant for thought. There was only one thing to do now. Breeland, Merrit, the questions of hostage or murderer must all wait. There were men who the next day would be wounded, and the tide of war drowned everything else. Horror filled her, familiar as an old nightmare, and she answered as she always had. “We’re coming.”

5

H
ESTER AND
M
ERRIT
left Washington and set out on the journey towards Bull Run. The immediacy of war overtook even personal tragedy, and perhaps Merrit at least found it easier for a few hours to think of the small, practical difference she could make to the scores of men who would be wounded, rather than fill her mind with what had happened in the warehouse yard in London.

They traveled at the best speed they could make out through the streets and then the strange, open patches where one day the city might stretch, across the Long Bridge over the river to the now almost deserted camps in Alexandria. The men here were those wounded in earlier skirmishes to the south and west, and the numerous sick with fevers, typhoid and the dysentery that plagued all such groups of people where there were no sanitary arrangements. Here it was even worse than it might have been in a cooler climate, or among men with military training. These were raw recruits with no knowledge of how to take the smallest precautions against disease, lice, or poisoning from spoiled or contaminated food and water. Each man was responsible for cooking his own provisions, which were given him in bulk. Most of them had no idea how to ration them so they lasted, and very little notion of how to cook.

Hester passed through trying not to stop and recognize everything. There was so much needless suffering, and the stench of it assailed her as they joggled over the rough track
in the stifling heat, choked by the dust of those ahead of them. She heard the groans of distress, and fury mounted inside her at the agony she could picture in her mind as vividly as if Scutari and the dying there were only yesterday. She was clenched up inside, all her muscles locked tight, her body aching from the tension of it, her mind trying not to picture it, and failing.

Merrit sat beside her in silence. Whatever her thoughts were, she did not voice them. She was white-faced, her eyes on the road even though it was Hester who drove the cart. She might have been thinking of the battlefield ahead, wondering and fearful of what they would find, whether they had supplies remotely fit for the task, whether her own courage would be good enough, her nerve steady, her knowledge adequate. Or she might have been remembering her furious parting with her father and the things she had said to him which could not now be taken back. It was too late to say she was sorry, that she had not really meant it, or even that for all their differences she loved him, and that her love was far greater; it was lifelong, part of who she was. Or perhaps she was thinking of her mother and the grief that must now be consuming her.

Or maybe she wondered what had happened in the warehouse yard, and what had been Lyman Breeland’s part in it. That was assuming she did not know. And Hester could not believe she did.

The noonday heat was almost unbearable. It was over ninety even in the shade. What it was in the glare of the dust-choked road could not even be guessed.

They drove all day, stopping only as was necessary to rest the horse and allow the animal to cool itself in the shade of roadside trees, and to take a little water. They had to watch carefully that neither it nor they drank too much. They did not speak, except of the other traffic bent on the same errand as themselves, or how much longer the journey would be and where they would finally settle.

Once Merrit looked as if she were going to broach the subject of Breeland’s honor again. She stood on a patch of
withered grass, swatting away the tiny, black thunder flies that irritated all the time. But at the last minute she changed her mind, and spoke of the outcome of the battle instead.

“I suppose the Union will win.…” It was not quite a question. “What happens to the wounded of the side that loses?”

There was no point in indulging in euphemisms. The truth would be apparent within hours. To be prepared for it at least reduced the paralysis of shock, if not the horror.

“It depends how fast the battle travels,” Hester replied. “With cavalry it moves on and leaves them. They help each other as they can. With infantry it goes only as fast as a man can run. Everyone does his best to stagger away, to carry others, to find wagons or carts or anything else to move those who can’t walk.”

Merrit swallowed. Other wagons were passing along the road, dust swirling up behind them. “And the dead?” she asked.

Memory washed over Hester with such power for a moment that her vision blurred and a wave of grief and nausea engulfed her. She was back in the Crimea, stumbling across the floor of the valley strewn with bodies of the dead and dying after the massacre of the Light Brigade, the earth trampled and soaked with blood, the smell of blood in the air, clogging her nose and throat, the sounds of agony all around her. She was helpless with the enormity of it. She could feel the tears running down her face again, and the hysteria and despair.

“Mrs. Monk!” Merrit’s voice brought her back to the dust and sweat of the moment, to Virginia, and to the battle yet to happen.

“Yes … I’m sorry.”

“What happens to the dead?” Merrit’s voice shook now, as if she knew the answer in her heart.

“Sometimes they’re buried,” Hester said huskily. “You do if you can. But the living are always more important.”

Merrit turned away and went to fetch the horse. There were no more questions to which she wanted to know the
answers, except the simple, practical ones of how to harness a horse, of which she had no idea.

They reached the small town of Centreville at dusk. It was no more than a stone church, a hotel and a few houses lying between five and six miles from Bull Run Creek and Henry Hill beyond it.

Hester was exhausted and certainly aware of how dirty she was, and she knew Merrit must feel the same, only she would be far less accustomed to it. But the girl had a fever of enthusiasm for the Union cause to spur her on, and if she wondered about Lyman Breeland even for a moment, it did not show in the deliberation with which she greeted the other women who had come to share in the work and offer their help also, or the few men from the army who were detailed off for medical duties.