Wedded to War (48 page)

When Phineas hesitated, Jacob took another step forward, sending her former suitor scurrying toward the door.

“And you will not come back. If you appear on this street again, I’ll have you arrested.” His tone was even, and his face composed. Yet he commanded more respect from his carriage and character than Phineas could ever hope to force with his demands and fits of fury.

As Phineas stormed out of the brownstone, Charlotte breathed a prayer of thanks that she had escaped a life with him. She didn’t need to be bound to such a lowlife. She needed a real man, like Jacob.

No
, she corrected herself.
Like Caleb.

T
he long summer day finally tucked itself away, and Charlotte climbed into a bed that smelled of lilac water. Not brandy or lemon juice or beef tea. Lilac water.

Almost two months had passed since Charlotte had come home on
the, Daniel Webster. Or rather, since I came back to New York.
For her spirit had yet to come home. Though she relished being with her family again, the easy, gentle life she had been raised in and bred for no longer fit her as it once had. It chafed against her skin and pulled tightly in all the wrong places.
Like the shoddy uniforms from Brooks Brothers. Sure to fall to pieces in the rain.

Charlotte felt as though she were a guest here—but she hadn’t even been able to play that role very well. She couldn’t stand to let Ruby serve her afternoon tea or lemonade when she was used to serving beef tea to thousands of soldiers. The soft bed that she had once craved now gave
her nightmares, visions of what she had left behind. She wore the hoop skirts again out of modesty and deference to her mother’s sense of propriety, but she desperately missed the freedom of movement she had enjoyed without them for more than a year. She had dutifully attended ladies teas, brunches, and knitting circles for the soldiers, but she loathed their idle chatter.

Lord, I don’t fit in anywhere anymore
, she prayed.
What am I good for now?

Slumber finally quieted her questions, but didn’t last long.

The shriek of newsboys invaded Charlotte’s dreams, taking her back to the Ebbitt House on the end of Newspaper Row. “The Battle of Bull Run” was on their lips as they hawked the
Evening Star.
It had been such a terrible battle. Charlotte willed herself to wake up before the nightmare became vivid and haunting like all the others.

But with her eyes wide open, and her bare feet on the cool hardwood floor, the shrieking did not stop. She flung open the window and listened carefully.

“Second Battle of Bull Run!” a small boy shouted below her window.

Charlotte gasped.
Not again!
No, no, she had lived this reality once before. She had woken up from the nightmare; this wasn’t happening. “The Bulk of the Rebel Army Engaged! The Great Struggle Still Proceeding!”

By the time she heard, “Arrangements for the Care of the Wounded!” she had already tied a flannel wrapper around herself and was running down the stairs, flying out the front door, still barefoot. She wanted to snatch the words out of the newsboy’s mouth and shake him. She wanted to tell him he was wrong, he had to be wrong.

Instead, she pressed a coin into his hand and snatched only the paper.

Ruby was waiting for her just inside the house, her hair in a braid down her back, her face illuminated by the kerosene lamp in her hand.

“Well?” she said, gently bouncing Aiden in her arms.

Charlotte unfolded the paper on the dining room table and read it out loud. The first line:

The Battle of Bull Run substantially began the war—has been the common remark on the streets this afternoon—and the new Battle of Bull Run is now ending it.

“They thought the war would be over after the First Bull Run, too,” Charlotte muttered. She scanned quickly, hungrily, until she came to the call for volunteers to care for the wounded. It was madness. The War Department “made request for volunteer nurses to proceed immediately to the battlefield.”

“What!” Charlotte’s voice rose. “Just anyone? They must be desperate. If there are so many wounded that they are asking for civilian volunteers, we are definitely not winning the war with this battle!”

Her heart pumped warning through her veins as she read the official request.
Each volunteer will provide himself with a bucket and tin cup, to supply water, and also a bottle of brandy.

“And just how many soldiers do they think one bottle of brandy will serve?” Ruby said, patting Aiden’s back.

“Their own transportation?” Charlotte laughed. “The wounded will need coffins, not nurses, by the time wagons can make their way on those torn-up Virginia roads.” She continued reading.

Charlotte closed her eyes and groaned. “How shameful! The army needs its own working ambulance system. This, my dear Ruby, is what goes wrong when an army doesn’t prepare to take their wounded from the field.”

“Won’t the volunteers do any good?” Ruby asked.

“No! They will bring chaos, not help. They will be terrified and run, causing more confusion, taking up precious time, not to mention space on the railroad cars that should be used to evacuate the wounded.”

The newspaper between them, the women read each other’s faces.

“You’re going, aren’t you?” asked Ruby.

Charlotte smiled even as urgency consumed her. “They asked for volunteers, didn’t they?”

If Frederick Law Olmsted had been surprised to see Charlotte suddenly before him again in her nursing uniform, he did not take the time to show it.

“You must be on your way.” His first words to her. “Forty-three wagonloads of supplies were sent forward by the Surgeon General and they were all captured by the enemy when Pope’s men retreated. They have nothing but what we supply.” He cupped her elbow and escorted her out of the Treasury Building. “We’ve sent fourteen wagons with supplies already, and the last two are on their way out to Centreville right now. You can ride on one of them.”

The streets were eerily vacant since the army had commandeered
nearly every vehicle on wheels to act as ambulances already. Energy coursed through Charlotte as Olmsted helped her into the last supply wagon on its way out of the city.

“I’m sorry, Miss Waverly,” he said, still holding her hand.

“Whatever for?” She was afraid to hear the answer.

“You’ll understand when you arrive. I’m sorry. I wish I could protect you from what you are about to experience—”

“I do not wish to be protected.” She hoped she sounded brave.

“We need you more than we ever have before.”

“I’m just a nurse, not a surgeon. But I will do what I can.”

“I’m afraid you will do more than that.” The intensity in his eyes almost frightened her. “The inspectors I sent with the supplies, and the relief agents, including Frederick Knapp, they haven’t come back yet. They’ve been dressing wounds.”

Charlotte stifled the urge to call them unqualified for the task. Hadn’t the War Department invited the general public to come help? At least the Commission men wouldn’t be drinking all the brandy on the way to the battlefield.

“It’s quite bad, then, isn’t it?” A sick apprehension settled over her.

“The worst of the war, so far.”

The driver cracked the reins on the horses’ backs, and the wagon began its twenty-five-mile journey to Centreville.

Night had already descended by the time their wagon arrived at the train station, and the thin coating of sweat on Charlotte’s body now chilled her in the night wind. With her flasks already filled and pots of jelly in her apron pockets, she left the driver to unload the boxes and set off for the perimeter of darkness surrounding the railroad platform.

Wind rushed through the pine trees above her with the roar of an ocean tide. She lit her candle and held it high. A sea of broken bodies stretched out before her as far as she could see. She felt a tugging on her skirt, and imagined she was being pulled beneath the surface of this gruesome ocean, that she would surely drown in its current before she escaped.

“Water?”

“Better,” she said, gathering her training about her. “Have some brandy.” She knelt and held the flask to his lips, scanning his body with the candlelight as he choked down the liquid. His legs were broken, bones thrust up through his trousers like jagged branches of driftwood rising up out of the beach. She focused again on his face, on relieving his thirst with stimulants. It was all she was asked to do. She would not be in a position to make the same mistake she had with Marty.

She moved to the next man, and the next, dribbling brandy into their mouths until her flasks ran dry, and scooping jelly into their mouths with her fingers. She had not moved ten feet beyond the platform before she returned to the station for more. Over and over, she repeated the process until her thighs burned from squatting near the soldiers, her back ached from hunching over their forms. Her own throat grew parched and scratchy in the night air, but she barely noticed. Sobs of relief broke from the men and boys at her feet. Some called her an angel, but she was all too aware that she was only human.

Slowly, dawn chased the darkness away, exposing miles of broken bodies. Emaciated, blackened with gunpowder, shattered, suffering.

“We will die here on this field before we ever reach a hospital,” one man told her. “Our ambulances and wagons—we left them on the Peninsula.”

“It’s not so bad.” She tried to smile. “You’ll be on the train soon.”

But the trains were doing nothing. Maybe one, maybe two, had come and gone, while the bodies multiplied on the steaming ground as the sun rose higher in the sky.

Charlotte swatted at the flies now nestling in the edges of the wounds. Standing, she straightened her back and squinted into the distance, but she could find no end to this mass of human suffering.

Some distance away, another man crouched low and spoke calmly to a soldier as he wrapped a tourniquet about his leg. He was thin, but moved with determination from soldier to soldier, his voice a comforting wordless drone to her ears. A gold medical insignia brightened his
armband. This was no drunk civilian nurse.

He stood stiffly to stretch, and spotted her. He waved her over to him, his hand bloody from another man’s wound, and she picked her way between the bodies, watching every footstep carefully until she was close enough to speak to him.

“I need you—” they had both begun at once.

The hint of a smile lifted her lips, and she raised her face to his for the first time.

It was Caleb.

For a single moment, their eyes locked in recognition. Unasked questions stuck in Charlotte’s throat. But this was not the place for personal pain, when the country lay bleeding at their feet.

“I need you.” It was Caleb who broke the spell.

“I’ve been trying,” she said. “But there are so many. I can’t get to them all, and brandy and jellies are not enough!”

“We’ll never save them all,” he said. It was not the answer she wanted. “So we must save the ones we can.”

“What? How?” Exhaustion clouded her brain. She could not understand what he was trying to say.

“There is limited room on the trains. We need to make sure the people we put on them don’t die on the way to the hospitals. Do you understand?” He paused. “We can only send back people who have a good chance of living. The others—God have mercy on their souls—we will load onto the trains later.”

The fog in her mind slowly cleared and panic began to settle in. “As cargo? You mean, not as passengers?”

“I need you to choose,” he said, and she shook her head.

“You want me to choose who will live and who will die?” Dread filled her mouth like an unclean paste.

“No. Only God can do that. I need you to
think.
Look at the wounds around you. Who will have the best chance at a hospital? Get them out first. Even the slightly wounded will die of starvation if left
here long enough. Save the ones we can. Organize them into groups. I need your help, Charlie!”

“I can’t do it!” She took a step backward and thunder rolled in the distance. “I can’t! You don’t understand—you didn’t get my letter—”