The Deserter

The Deserter

Murder at Gettysburg

Jane Langton

A
MysteriousPress.com

Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

For Anna Caskey

G. K. Chesterton's fictional detective,
Father Brown, posed two riddles.

Where would a wise man hide a leaf?
In the forest.

Where would a wise man hide a body?
On a battlefield.

IDA

T
hrough the entire course of her expectation, Cornelia had been sickly. As her time grew short, she sent a whining letter from Philadelphia to her cousin in Concord, way up north in Massachusetts. Cousin Ida was also in a family way.

Dear Ida
,

Why dont you come? You still have two or three months to go and you are strong as a cow and if I should die Ida wont you be ashamed
.

Yr affectnt Cousin Cornelia

Ida was willing. She told her mother, “I'll just stay a little while and then I'll come straight home.”

“Well, I don't know what your husband will think,” said her mother, helping her up the high step into the car at the depot. “If anything happens, Seth will blame me.”

Ida smiled as the cars picked up speed and rattled past the pond on the way to Boston. She had felt well from the beginning, so her mother had no call to be worried. And perhaps somehow she might see Seth, because his regiment was somewhere down there in Pennsylvania.

In Philadelphia Cornelia's frantic husband met Ida at the station, “You're only just in time,” he said, and indeed she was. At the door of the house they were greeted by Cornelia's shrieks and the strong loud voice of the midwife.

At once Ida tore off her bonnet and pulled on an apron. She knew what to do, having helped to care for her mother when little Alice was born.

But no sooner did Cornelia stop screaming and her infant daughter utter her first cry than a strange noise began somewhere outside.

It was a sultry afternoon in early July. Coming from Massachusetts, Ida had never heard the sound before. It was soft and far away but it went on and on, a faint booming like the rumble of thunder in another county.

“What is that noise?” said Ida.

Holding her baby close to her breast, Cornelia turned her face away. The midwife looked disapprovingly at Ida and said, “My dear girl, you should be at home. What are you, six or maybe seven months gone?”

Cornelia's husband sank into a chair. “They'll telegraph the list,” he said. “The Boston paper will have a list.”

A list of the dead and missing, that was what he meant. Ida remembered the terrifying list after the Battle of Antietam. Colonel Dwight of the Second Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry had been among the dead, but, thank God, not First Lieutenant Seth Morgan. And after Chancellorsville there had been another list, but once again Seth's name was not there.

The distant noise was now incessant. It trembled the crimson water in the basin and shook the limp curtains at the window. Cornelia's baby whimpered and waved its little fists.

“I'll stay,” said Ida.

PART I

THE TABLETS

The Memorial Hall of Harvard consists of three main divisions: one of them a theatre, for academic ceremonies; another a vast refectory covered with a timbered roof, hung about with portraits and lighted by stained windows … and the third, the most interesting, a chamber high, dim, and severe, consecrated to the sons of the university who fell in the long Civil War
.

—H
ENRY
J
AMES
,
T
HE
B
OSTONIANS

THE SHAME

Y
our great-great-grandfather did something shameful?” Homer couldn't believe it. “But all you Morgans are so stalwart with Yankee integrity. Your ancestor couldn't have done anything very bad.” Homer stared up at the names on the marble tablet. “He was in the class of 1860? Then he must have known all these men.”

“Well, I suppose so,” said Mary. “But then in the Civil War there was some sort of scandal. Nobody wanted to talk about it. I can remember my father shaking his head and keeping his mouth shut about Seth Morgan.”

“Gettysburg,” murmured Homer, still gazing at the tablet. “They all died in the Battle of Gettysburg.”

The pale inscribed stone was enshrined within a wooden frame. The pointed gothic arch was only one of many, each with its solemn tablet, lining the central corridor of the monumental building that towered above the city of Cambridge next to the firehouse. Above the tablets rose the wooden vaults, gleaming with new varnish, and the upper reaches of the walls glittered with heroic Latin remarks in gold.

But nobody any longer understood the quotations and hardly anyone paused to read the names of the 135 men who had walked so long ago in Harvard Yard and read the
Iliad
with Cornelius Felton and modern literature with James Russell Lowell and mathematics with Benjamin Peirce before going out to die for the Union cause in the bloody battles of the Civil War.

All those young men had lived and died so long ago. Widows no longer wept for their husbands, mothers no longer sorrowed for their sons. The Civil War was several wars back in time.

But Memorial Hall was still a familiar landmark in Cambridge, celebrated for its medieval immensity and for the polygonal tower that loomed above the university. It was especially famous for Sanders Theatre, the wooden chamber that rounded out one end of the building like the apse of a cathedral.

Otherwise, Mem Hall was useful for the enormous dining hall that projected like the nave of a church from the transept of the memorial corridor. Here the first-year students ate their meals in the colored light of stained-glass windows, never glancing at the marble busts of long-forgotten professors that lined the walls, never looking up at the painted portraits of Union soldiers. But the soldiers looked blandly down at them year after year, and the busts gazed out at them with their white stone eyes.

Until today, Homer and Mary Kelly had been as oblivious as everyone else to the tablets, the portraits and the marble busts. They had taught classes in the building for years, they had lectured in Sanders Theatre. Homer had even climbed the tower, where he had looked down on the wooden vaults from above, teetered along swaying catwalks, climbed shaky ladders and hurled himself across perilous chasms to witness something amazing. Gaping upward, he had seen a president of the university fall from the topmost rung of the topmost ladder and break his neck in one of the upside-down vaults.

Well, all of that had happened long ago. But Memorial Hall was still one of the spindles around which their lives were wound. Therefore it was odd that in all these years they had paid so little attention to the marble tablets in the memorial corridor.

But today a yellow ray from the colored window over the south door had fallen on one of the tablets like a pointing hand, and they had stopped, transfixed.

“Maybe you could find out what your great-great-grandfather did that was so shameful,” said Homer, glancing sideways at his wife.

“I'm not sure I want to know.”

“I'll bet there are records somewhere. If you looked up these men from his class you might learn something about—what was his name?”

“Seth. Seth Morgan.”

The yellow beam from the stained-glass window drifted away, and now the tablet was flushed with red.

“Good,” said Mary. She whipped out a notebook and wrote the names down. “I'll ask about Seth, and then I'll get to work on Mudge, Fox, Robeson and—who's the other one?”

“Pike, Otis Mathias Pike.”

PART II

THE SECOND
MASSACHUSETTS

T
HE
S
ECOND
M
ASSACHUSETTS
V
OLUNTEER
I
NFANTRY

The sons of the first gentlemen of New England generously vied with each other in seeking commissions therein.… From the first it was often spoken of as the model regiment in the army for its admirable drill; and so tenaciously has it preserved its early distinction, that in its last battle, when half its number of privates and eleven of its officers had fallen, it manoeuvred still under the severest fire with “every man in his place;”—a proud deed
!

—B
OSTON
H
ERALD,
J
ULY 1863

PRIVATE OTIS PIKE

O
TIS
M
ATHIAS
P
IKE
Class of 1860