Robin Oliveira Read online

  Inside, the clerk—cousin, Mary thought to the one at the Surgeon General’s office—sighed and asked why she wanted to go to such a rough place as Fort Albany.

  “To see my brother.”

  “I am sorry, but there are no passes for civilians to visit soldiers at the forts.” In the heat, his wool uniform smelled like a wet dog.

  “I have to see him. My mother begged me, and I’ve come all this way—”

  “We are aware that many mothers are worried. That is why the Sanitary Commission is allowed across the Long Bridge for inspections, but under no circumstances are family members allowed.”

  “But I have to see him.”

  “Pardon me, but are you a Miss or a Mrs.?”

  “A Miss. Miss Mary Sutter.”

  “Write him a letter, Miss Sutter,” the clerk said, “and be done with it.”

  “But—”

  “Virginia is enemy territory. There are no passes to be had for sisters or mothers or anyone else. Unless you are a bawdy girl, and then that is an entirely different matter, one for the provost guard to attend to. We are not issuing passes. Go home.”

  He walked away from her then and busied himself with something in the corner. Mary slipped outside. Her hack driver had gone. She stood for a moment, watching the traffic swell in the streets, then walked toward the Willard, where the bellman would hail her another cab.

  A charwoman. Not yet a nurse; certainly not a surgeon. Not even a good sister or daughter. Perhaps it didn’t matter, she thought, as she dodged traffic on the avenue. The war could end tomorrow and they’d all be back in Albany anyway, just like before, except that Jenny and Thomas were expecting a baby, and Mary would certainly have her chance to be a good sister then.

  On the way back to Georgetown, she wondered what ambition was worth, and whether her family would love her if she failed. She had grieved the loss of Thomas, had resolved on this other path, and it was further away now even than it had been in Albany. And now she wasn’t even able to comfort Amelia on the state of Christian’s well-being. She had never felt so defeated in her life.

  At the Union Hotel, the walls throbbed with heat. She hid her purse, repinned her hair, and went upstairs to begin stripping sheets from the beds.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “We have received certain information that the Confederates are at Manassas,” John Hay said. “Are you aware of this?”

  It was Monday, July the fifteenth, six a.m., two weeks before Lincoln’s seventy-five thousand men were to return home to their plows and wives, and not a thing between the warring states had been settled. Apart from incessant drilling and parades, the growing ring of forts beginning to encircle Washington, and the increasing public outcry for a resolution to the seemingly insoluble conflict, you could barely tell there was a war on. In the past three months there had been the occasional skirmish—small battles scattered here and there, most notably in western Virginia, where a general named George McClellan was successfully harassing the Confederates in the interest of protecting both the C&O Canal and the railroads—but for the most part, the willing civilians-turned-soldiers who had engulfed Washington City had fired no shots, engaged in no battles, and achieved only the dubious distinction of having fallen ill by the thousands. If the issue of secession was ever going to be settled, it had to be settled soon, before the idle seventy-five thousand returned home. On this point at least everyone agreed.

  Everyone this morning included General Winfield Scott, seventy-four years old, a brevet lieutenant general who had commanded forces in both the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War and then served as military governor in Mexico City and had once even run for president. He was the commander general of all the Northern forces. General Irvin McDowell, forty-three, also brevetted, was in charge of the Army of Northeastern Virginia, the Northern contingent encamped on the Virginia side of the Potomac. They had ridden down Pennsylvania Avenue through the simmering dawn to the Mansion for this meeting. McDowell felt himself subordinate to everyone in the room, even the annoying Hay, and was holding himself in an exaggerated posture of diffidence that was making him vastly uncomfortable, not the least because he knew that both Scott and Lincoln had preferred Robert E. Lee for McDowell’s current position before Lee had decided to secede with his home state of Virginia. The president, who had slept that night in the Mansion rather than at the Soldiers’ Home where his wife, Mary, and their children were spending the summer away from the sweltering bog of the Potomac, was leaning over an incomplete map of Virginia spread across his desk that the two generals had brought with them.

  Hay cleared his throat. “I asked, gentlemen, are you aware?”

  Both Scott and McDowell sized up Hay, with his linen vest and oiled hair, and decided these dandifying vanities were further evidence of his youthful ignorance and that he was far too young to be advising the president, especially in military matters. Besides, how did the impertinent boy know where the Rebels were? Manassas was thirty miles away—in Virginia, no less.

  Punishing Hay with a humorless smile, Scott instead directed his answer to Lincoln.

  “Of course we are aware of the situation. Our scouts reported last night that the enemy recently moved a large force through the Shenandoah Valley. If they have indeed settled at Manassas—and of course,” Scott said, both bowing and smirking in Hay’s direction, “given the delays between reception of intelligence and any corresponding reaction, a military man never assumes that the information in his possession is either current or accurate—however, now might be our best chance to destroy the Rebel force and win the war. And then we can shame the Rebels back into submission.”

  The four men could almost hear the clock ticking. Even the public had lost patience. Forward to Richmond! the newspapers were crying, splashing their impatience across dailies all over the North.

  McDowell shifted. He didn’t agree with Scott. Despite intensive drilling, his troops were still unready to face an army, unready even to march the proposed thirty miles to Manassas. They were an undisciplined lot, who despite having wielded shovels more than muskets these past months, were out of shape for a hike of that length, not in the least because a good number of them were still unshod. To say nothing of the fact that he didn’t know how he would feed them once he got them there. Ammunition was scarce, the supply trains hadn’t been established, ambulances were unmanned. That the Rebels would have none of this in place either did not comfort him. An army needed to be prepared. Politics and the military should not be bedfellows; he had believed it at West Point, and he believed it now. Of course, that Lincoln wanted the war to end swiftly was not a crime. He did too. The trouble was, under these circumstances, he needed an advantage. His only hope of victory was surprise, and his unprepared troops, much as he disliked sending them in their inexperience, should have already been on the march. And yet here they were, conferring, when they should already be five miles down the road.

  Lincoln seemed not to have heard Scott’s answer. He was still perusing the inadequate map, his palms flat down on its curling edges to hold them back. The president’s easy manner, so often interpreted as ignorance, seemed now almost disinterested to McDowell. The president’s enemies called him a monkey, an ape, with arms far too long, a head too large, a long gawky string of a man, who wanted war. But McDowell didn’t think so. He thought instead that the man was resigned to the tactic, was courageous in fact, in not backing away from it, even though he knew nothing.

  Scott sighed and heaved himself into a chair. He was too old to wait while a new president, totally ignorant of the mechanics or stratagems of warfare, dawdled in indecision.

  Lincoln finally looked up at McDowell and asked, “What of the train depot?”

  Both McDowell and Scott exchanged glances. They had bet on the way over that Lincoln wouldn’t be able to tell a regiment from a company, to say nothing of understanding the battle plans that McDowell had prepared.

  Straightening, though at six feet he was nearly as
tall as Lincoln, McDowell said, “Our best chance of victory is to destroy the railroad leading from Manassas into the valley, just as you suggested, Mr. President. I’ll have to get a better look on the field, but I’m thinking of a five-pronged attack. One division to attack the Rebels holding the bridge over Bull Run. Another to run to the right over Sudley’s Ford, there.” He made a large circling gesture toward the map. “Possibly another on the Centreville Heights. Our troops, however, are untested in battle, and I should have left with them yesterday.”

  John Hay said, “But can you win?”

  Before McDowell could answer, General Scott said, “It’s a good enough plan.” But he was still thinking of his own plan, one that called for control of the Mississippi and a blockade of key Southern ports that would strangle the South without having to fire any ammunition. He was tired of war, tired of fighting, and too infirm to travel into the field, and he would feel a good deal more confident of the success of this plan if it were Lee standing now before the president instead of McDowell, but he would never upset the president’s confidence in the proposed action.

  Hay asked again, “Will you win?”

  Irvin McDowell, a general for as long as Hay had been alive, wished that he could speak plainly, but it was past time for that. He’d already lodged his objections, and no one, not even Scott, had listened. “Mr. President, I promise you that I will not tolerate defeat.”

  No one else in the North would either, least of all Abraham Lincoln, who, after a moment’s more perusal of the maddeningly incomplete map, said, “God’s speed, then.”

  “They don’t seem to like you much,” Lincoln said to Hay after the generals left, but he said it with a glimmer of amusement at his young secretary, whose company he trusted far more than he did the generals’. They were standing at the window overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, watching their carriage clatter out the gates.

  “It was good you hired that spy,” Hay said, “or else I do believe those two would have denied the Rebels were anywhere near here. For generals, they don’t seem to like war very much.”

  “They don’t, do they?”

  “At least we’ll know in a few days who has won,” Hay said, “and then the matter of secession will be resolved.”

  “You think so?” Lincoln said, and Hay turned to him to discern whether it was hope or doubt that had so altered the president’s voice, but Lincoln had turned away, and would say no more.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “You. And you.” Room by room, floor by floor, Dr. Stipp flicked his index finger at the recumbent dyspeptics who had been his patients for the past three months. He spared only the most feeble, expelling the rest. Men who that morning couldn’t even wash themselves now had to pack up their belongings, retrieve what goods they had stored under their beds—an extra shirt saved for Sundays, another pair of pants—and limp down stairways they hadn’t navigated since their arrival, clutching the railing as they descended to finally spill from the hospital that Mary Sutter had named the Pestilential Palace. They pressed Mary’s shoulders and palms as they passed her where she stood in the doorway, murmuring good-bye, scarcely able to believe they had been cut off to fend for themselves. They climbed the hill toward the omnibus stop, but most failed to make it, instead crawling under awnings and trees to get away from the July sun searing their pale skin. Watching from the hotel step, Mary could not help but think that they all looked as helpless as newborns.

  That morning she had already set fires under the laundry cauldrons and stripped all the beds, but not one of the laundresses she had summoned had yet shown her face. And they had so little time. Even before the messenger had arrived with the directive to empty the hotel, the men had thought they heard the percussion of artillery.

  “Our boys are at it now!” they had cheered, thrilling to a fight they were secretly grateful to be missing.

  Stipp had rushed to the window, cocked his head, listened, and shouted, “It is heat thunder, you idiots.”

  When the last of the discharged patients had left the hotel, Mary found Stipp in the basement kitchen.

  “Is there any food?” she asked.

  “The cook left some oatmeal,” Stipp said.

  Mary fished a bowl and spoon from a basin of rinse water and ladled a glob of the congealed cereal into the dish.

  As she fought the oatmeal down, Stipp said, “Your life in your hands,” but newly wiped from his features was any disdain, replaced by a raw terror whose twin Mary had attempted to suppress in herself with frantic work.

  He leaned forward now, abandoning, for once, his banter. “Prepare what you can. If you have any sheets to spare, tear them into bandages. If you find any of those stupid havelocks the women up north have been sending, rip them in half. Get the cook to make a vat of beef tea, to bake egg puddings if he can. Send someone to root out the last bit of whiskey from the neighbors. I will send the guard if I have to, to get it out of them. I’ll be back in an hour, two at the most—”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get chloroform and morphia powder.”

  Mary yanked her hair back and twisted it into a rope. “We need whiskey and iodine, too. Our cupboard is nearly empty.”

  “How did you manage to find that out? Mr. Mack guards those keys as if they unlocked heaven.”

  “I took them last night while he slept.” Mary had begun calling the steward the keeper of the key, since he never once gave up possession of the fat ring from which dangled the single skeleton key that unlocked the downstairs closet.

  “Thief.”

  “I needed soap,” Mary said. “What will you do if you can’t get any morphine?”

  Stipp leaned back in his chair. “There is nothing for you here but trouble.” But even he knew it was a useless statement. The railroads weren’t running. Anyone leaving town was doing so via carriage, but even which direction to flee was in question.

  Upstairs, a door slammed. Absent the groaning and scrabble of its former residents, sounds that had gone unheard in the hotel now sprang from the walls: the restive settling of the roof, the ravenous gnawing of carpenter ants at post and pillar, the squeak and wobble of mice, the slow hiss of imprisoned air escaping through cracks and crevices as if the entire hotel were audibly sinking into the swampy shores of the Potomac River.

  Outside, the smoke from the cauldrons sent black clouds high into the sky. Line after line of clotheslines, like battalions at the ready, awaited the boiled sheets of the Union Hotel, while inside, Mary looked to the south, where Thomas and Christian were, and began to pray.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was Sunday, July the twenty-first, and the first rumble sounded like horses’ hooves drumming the road. Thomas and Christian, assigned to picket posts on the low bluff of Fort Albany above the Columbia Turnpike, merely glanced over their shoulders down the dusty road and sighed. Five days earlier, they had twiddled their thumbs while Irvin McDowell marched thirty thousand men down the road toward battle. The entire 25th had been left behind, charged only with the humiliating assignment of guarding the road. Five days, and still the battle hadn’t begun, though this morning festive sightseers in a contingent of buggies and barouches had rolled past in the direction of Centreville, champagne bottles protruding from laden picnic baskets. Only Dr. Blevens had marched out with McDowell, added as surgeon to a regiment from New Jersey, which had none.

  The 25th’s three months’ service was nearly up, but Christian’s back and arms were still aflame from the hard work of erecting the fort. He cracked his neck and shifted his gaze to the blue sky. Thomas wasn’t in great shape, either; without the suspenders he had fashioned from twine, he would have been pantsless. Christian had never been so hungry. He missed home, and somehow Amelia’s pleading letter had made it worse. What had Blevens said when he’d told the doctor that Mary was in Washington? That she was the most remarkable woman he knew. No, they were going to miss all of it, the entire war, and all they would have to show for it would be three
months blistering under the southern sun guarding a length of highway, while Mary would show them all up. Their only glory was that two of their number on guard duty at the Long Bridge had arrested a couple of Rebel soldiers disguised as farmers. But it would soon be over. They were due to go home in just a few days.

  A second rumble echoed in the distance, and Thomas and Christian looked again at the sky and then down the road and fingered their triggers. They were twenty-five miles from Centreville, but even they knew the sound of artillery when they heard it.

  A bullet smacked the dust five feet in front of them, sending a puff of dirt whipping into the air. They hit the ground full out.

  “Sorry!”

  Jake Miles was heading toward them from the fort’s gate, a grin erupting even as he held up his hand in contrition. “Just for fun, boys. Just practice in case those Rebels get too close.”

  Christian scrambled to his feet and flung himself at Jake, grabbing him around the neck, even as Jake, unresisting, laughed.

  “I was just waking you two up. You looked kinda sleepy.”

  “Not funny, you bastard.” Christian, spooked more than he wanted to say, let Jake go. Sometimes Jake’s cockiness unnerved Christian, but he was well liked in the fort. He was good with a rifle, and had bagged more birds and hogs for dinner than anyone else. Even Colonel Townsend had praised him, though twice he’d locked him up for drunkenness and had warned him more than a dozen times to lay off the alcohol. But he was the sharpest shooter in the regiment.