Blood Moon (32 page)

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Mercy rode under the stable arch at Mrs Bartlett’s house and jumped off her horse without saying a word to the stable boy. She was blinded by tears and fighting to catch her breath between sobs. She had not stopped crying from the minute she’d found out, even though she had willed herself to calm down, to take deep breaths, and to believe that the ambulance men must be mistaken.

She ran inside the house, through the kitchen, and into the hallway. Anna was there, sitting outside the drawing room door. She was humming a tune, and she jumped in fright at the sight of Mercy standing before her with blood on her once-white shirt. “Anna, tell me Mister Bartlett’s awake.”

“He’s awake. Dey in the drawing room,” Anna said.

Mercy noted Anna’s frightened expression, and she looked down at herself. “I look a mess. I’m sorry. I didn’t have time to change … Anna, will you please bring me a cup of tea? I could drink a bucket of the stuff.” She attempted a smile, but she couldn’t control her trembling lips. She pulled up her braces strap and put her hand on the door handle. She thought better of marching in unannounced looking like a ragged London orphan, deciding to knock first and wait for an answer. She hoped to God that Mrs Bartlett was in a sympathetic mood. If anyone could get the senator to do something, she could.

The comfortable sitting room looked peaceful and far away from the reality of war, she thought. Mrs Bartlett had an air of perfect contentment, which sickened Mercy, who was sure she was going die of grief at any moment. “Mrs Bartlett – Senator – please tell me you have not heard that Jacob is missing,” she blurted out, sobbing between words. “I think something terrible has happened to him. There were ambulance men – they told me …” Mercy stopped speaking. Mrs Bartlett was not contented at all, she saw at second glance. She looked miserable. Senator Bartlett wore a worried frown, wrinkling his brow. “Oh God, no, please don’t tell me …”

“Mercy, you look frightful – and that blood!” Mrs Bartlett exclaimed.

“Oh, it’s not mine,” Mercy sobbed. “I apologise to both of you for running in here like this. I know you weren’t expecting me tonight, but I had to come.”

“Hush, child,” Mr Bartlett said. “Tell us exactly what you have heard – and for God’s sake, sit down.”

              “But the blood!” his wife’s booming voice rang out.

“That blood belongs to Confederate soldiers, if I’m not mistaken, and I say Mercy should sit.”

Mercy sat, wringing her hands and taking deep throaty breaths. Her pain and grief were choking her words, but she had to make herself sound sensible, for she had so many questions to ask. “An ambulance driver told me tonight that the Ninth Cavalry is with General Jackson.”

“That’s right,” the senator said.

“But he also said that thirty cavalrymen from the Ninth scouted near Beaver Dam Creek yesterday. Some infantry saw them there and sent them to chase down some Yankees. They said that only twelve went back their way.” Mercy couldn’t continue. She looked at the senator and for the first time in her life wanted someone other than Jacob to hold her. “Please, Senator, do you know anything?” She looked then at Mrs Bartlett, whose face told a tale. “You know, don’t you?” Mercy whispered.

Mrs Bartlett shook her head in denial, but Senator Bartlett was more open to the truth as he saw it. “I received dispatches this morning from General Jackson. He sent out a thirty-man scouting party. Thirteen, not twelve, made it back to the encampment. Jacob led the mission – he didn’t return.”

“No! It can’t be true!”

“Mercy, I’m not done. According to the report, they rode right into an ambush. They were outnumbered and cut down by rifle fire coming at them from all sides. They never saw the Yankees coming, and they didn’t have time to defend themselves. They were slaughtered, plain and simple.”

“I can’t – I can’t …”

“You can and you will believe it,” Mrs Bartlett said.

Mercy gave her a hateful look, but Mrs Bartlett was not being cruel, Mercy thought scolding herself for being mean. There was only kindness and sympathy in the eyes that stared back at her. “But Jacob is clever. He would never put himself or his men in danger like that,” she said. She was still determined not to believe that her beloved was gone.

“Mercy, child, there are many men dying in this war, and not one of them thought himself a fool when he took to the battlefield. This is a tragedy – a terrible calamity that took Jacob from you. For our glorious cause, you must be brave and accept what so many families must accept.”

Mercy’s furious intake of breath was highly audible in the now-quiet room.
Glorious!
  War was not glorious, especially not this one, which had come about because of Southern pride and greed to hold on to what was never rightfully theirs in the first place! God’s truth, was she to hear that word repeatedly every time a man was killed, leaving a wife and children behind, clinging to nothing but the memory of his glorious passing?

“Is he reported dead or missing?” she asked, now in control of her temper.

Senator Bartlett took Mercy’s hand in a rare gesture of affection. She pulled it away, no longer wanting affection from people who had no understanding of the way she thought or of what she believed in. “Please just tell me and be done with it,” she said.

“He was reported dead by his sergeant – but that’s not to say he
is
dead. Unlike Mrs Bartlett, I believe you should have hope, if it makes you feel better.”

“He might have survived. The ambulance drivers said they had not cleared that field yet,” she responded.

Jacob couldn’t be dead – he couldn’t be! Mercy’s mind screamed. She would know, would feel his passing from the world. Her heart would have stopped beating at the exact same second as his, for their souls were twins, their hearts beat in tandem, and one couldn’t survive without the other!

She was finally getting her thoughts in order after shock and then the strange sensation of cold bewilderment. She couldn’t bear to think about Jacob lying in a field dead and alone, and she didn’t want to hear details that would suggest he was. But she had to know more. “Where exactly did this happen?”

“Why do you want to know that?” Mrs Bartlett asked her. “Oh dear Lord, you’re not going to do anything silly, are you?”

Anna brought some tea. Senator Bartlett picked up a decanter of brandy and offered it to his wife and then to Mercy.

“Yes, I will have a drop, thank you. I feel so cold – I can’t stop shivering,” Mercy said, accepting the brandy. “Please continue, Senator. Please tell me everything you know.”

“There’s not much more I do know. There are seventeen officers and men dead or missing, including Jacob. I have their names. There was chaos yesterday, and I’m surprised to have received the information so quickly. It happened yesterday evening, but you’re right in saying that the army has been unable to get into that field to retrieve the bodies or to help the wounded. You have to understand there were casualties piled high in that area.”

“Did any of Jacob’s men see him fall?” Mercy held her breath for the answer.

“Yes, Jacob did fall. His horse raced back to the encampment behind the others, sadly rider-less.”

Mercy looked at the Bartletts’ faces in turn and concluded that both were convinced Jacob was dead. She just knew that’s what they were thinking. But her instincts told her otherwise. Sometimes a gut feeling was much stronger than reason or knowledge, and every part of her told her that he was alive.

“I’m so sorry, Mercy. He was shot, and he’s probably dead. You have to face it,” Mrs Bartlett said.

“That might well be the case, but I’m going to that place at first light, Yankees or no Yankees. I have to find out the truth. I have to see where he fell with my own eyes.”

“This is madness,” Mr Bartlett said with unusual gruffness. “No woman has any business going near a battlefield. For once, I’m saying no to you, not my wife.”

“I’m going,” Mercy insisted. Being told not to do something in the Bartlett household had become exceedingly boring. If Jacob was dead, she had nothing to live for – better a Yankee’s bullet got her than a life without the man she loved. “Don’t try to stop me,” she said quite calmly. “You see, I don’t have the strength to give up. To admit defeat now, after everything I have done and all that I’ve seen, well, I just can’t. Jacob never gave up on me when I went missing, and I won’t give up on him. Help me – tell me where he fell.”

“And what if you do find him?” Mrs Bartlett snapped.

“Well, if he’s injured, I’ll nurse him back to health, and if he’s dead, I’ll give him the burial he deserves.” Her eyes were now clear and probing as she stared at the senator. “Will you help me, sir, or will you allow me to go, blind and lost?”

“I’ll help you. I won’t tie you down or forbid you to do what your heart is set on doing – I will help you, my dear,” he answered.

Chapter Sixty

The household slept bar Anna, who had risen early, insisting that Mercy drink coffee before she left the house. Mercy washed quickly. Her clothes, including hat and gloves, were laid out, as were her gun and holster. She was also armed with a map of the Richmond area, just a stone’s throw from where a battle had taken the lives of thousands near Beaver Dam Creek.

Senator Bartlett had assured Mercy that the fighting was over, but he had also warned her that her safety in such a place could not be guaranteed. It was a redundant statement as far as Mercy was concerned, for stray Yankees could be just about anywhere in the Richmond suburbs these days.

              Mercy felt an icy coldness sweep over her entire body, as though miserable ghostly hands were clawing at her. It was late June, and the air was warm and balmy. The heavens were full of pink ribbons rippling through a deep blue sky tinged with the golden hue of sunrise. She found it quite beautiful and peaceful to look at, unlike the burnt-out and well-trodden ground she was seeing all around her.

After leaving a wooded area, she came upon a stretch of road, more difficult to ride along than the fields and copses she had just left. This main thoroughfare was well trampled, judging by its dire condition. She had followed the senator’s directions to the letter, and she was convinced that she was now entering what had been the outskirts of the main battlefield only two days ago. The deep brown Virginian soil looked black and morbidly dim. Coal’s hooves dug in deep to find solid ground under the thick black layer of watery dirt, and the early morning silence made her eerie shivers even more pronounced.

Farther along the road, she passed an earthenware dugout, abandoned apart from spent bullets glinting in the dawn’s golden rays and a couple of grey caps left behind. She looked to the left and right of the pathway she was now taking. Fields stretching all the way to the horizon were not yet brightened by the sun. There were no dead or wounded in sight, not one body or red puddle of blood. The rain had soaked the earth, but it had also cleansed all signs of death.

When she reached a dilapidated farmhouse and barns, the first thing she saw were horseless army wagons with their two wooden arms reaching towards the sky and the bottom parts of the wheels buried in mire. Soldiers lying on the ground or sitting against the house’s tumbledown walls lifted their heads at Mercy’s arrival. Their expressions were a mixture of surprise, admiration of her beauty, and in some, outright curiosity.

As she got closer, she noticed that most of these particular soldiers were wounded. There was also a group of Union prisoners sitting inside a split-fenced paddock that was guarded by grey coats. Poor souls, she thought. They should not be blamed or punished for the actions of spiteful politicians. Mercy felt her mood grow ever darker just thinking about the futility of war.

Every man’s uniform was caked in dark brown hardened muck, making it almost impossible to tell the rebels and Yankees apart. Every blackened mud-layered face told the same story of exhaustion, shock, loss, and confusion, as though none of the men could quite believe what had happened.

She asked the first group of soldiers if she could speak to the commanding officer or sergeant, after no one seemed to know anything about the cavalrymen killed in an ambush in a cornfield. An officer eventually came outside. She didn’t ask his name, nor did he seem interested in giving it to her, but he did offer her an answer to her question, albeit a casual one without substance. “These cornfields go on for miles. Your captain may still be lying where he fell. There are many casualties we have not gotten to yet. The Yankees were entrenched around the entire Beaver Dam river area, and parts of our army at the front got hit real hard. We’re still trying to get to some parts where men from both sides were left behind.              “Can you tell me how to get to the battlefields from here?”

“Lady, just follow your nose. There was fightin’ all over this place, but if you don’t find what you’re lookin’ for straight away, you’ll smell it. They’re burning horses up that there road …and doin’ some burials.”

Mercy’s heart was pounding at the mention of horses and, more importantly, burials. What if someone had already laid Jacob to rest in a grave with countless other men, Confederate and Union. How would she ever know unless she got to the place before the burial party started covering the bodies?

“If you want my advice, lady, don’t go,” she heard the soldier say. “Turn your horse around and go back to where you came from. What you’ll see up there will live with your innocent womanly heart forever.”

“Thank you, but my heart can abide whatever tragic scene I find,” she told him pointedly. “What it wouldn’t bear is not finding out what happened to my fiancé.”

She left the man and rode on, eventually reaching a crossroads. She halted there and caught a glimpse of bedraggled Confederates in a flattened cornfield beyond the road. She gasped in horror as she neared the men. She had spent time with Jacob in his encampment. She had seen death and sickening cruelty, but nothing in her life so far could compare to what she was witnessing in this field, where a raging battle had taken place only two days earlier.

A light morning mist still hovered above the ground, like a blanket covering the dead. Grey coat soldiers, staggering with tiredness, were picking through the debris left behind after the battle. Some of the men carried baskets, looking as though they were on a shopping expedition.

She sat on her horse, mesmerised at the terrible scene and panting heavily at the powerful stench of death and burning horseflesh. Rebels were whooping with delight at finding shoes, rifles, canteens, and half-used cartridge boxes, even though dead bodies were still being removed. This field had been partially cleared, Mercy thought, but Union and Confederate dead were still being laid to rest.

“Excuse me, Corporal, might I speak with you for just a minute?” she asked a soldier with two cotton stripes on his sleeves. The soldier stared at her for a second. He was angry, Mercy thought. He was very angry at her presence.

“Lady, where in hell’s fire did you come from?”

“I’ve come from Richmond.”

“Well, it ain’t safe for no woman here, on account of this still bein’ a battle zone,” he told her. “I reckon you should turn around right about now – you can’t go no farther. What’s a little lady like you doin’ here, anyhow, dressed like a man and carrying a Colt. You wanna git yourself shot and killed by a damn Yankee?”

“No, I don’t want to get shot or killed.” Mercy’s lips pouted with annoyance. She didn’t like this man’s tone of voice at all. “What I want is for everyone I meet to stop telling me to turn around when my only intention is to move forward and finish what I started. May I please ask my question now?”

“I reckon.” The corporal took off his cap and scratched his balding head.

Mercy realised that her nervous, antagonistic state was not going to get her anywhere. She dismounted and stood a foot from the soldier. A memory surfaced of Lina sitting on a wagon’s driver’s seat, urging her to use charm. “Charm is the most potent power a woman has, alongside womanly tears,” Mercy recalled Lina saying. “There ain’t nothin’ a man loves more than to puff out his manly chest in front of a vulnerable woman.”

“I’m sorry, Corporal. I’m ashamed of myself for talking to you like that – I really am. You must be exhausted after all that fighting. You and you men are so brave, and I’m just overcome with gratitude. She took her handkerchief from her breeches pocket and dabbed her eyes. “I prayed for every single one of you. I can’t stop praying.”

“We’re just doin’ our duty, ma’am.”

“Oh, I know that. It’s so comforting to know that you and your comrades are defending us poor civilians, but you see I’ve come all this way to find out what’s happened to my fiancé. He was with the Ninth Cavalry Regiment. Captain Jacob Stone’s his name. He and his men were in this very field – or maybe the one over there. I’m not sure. Do you know anything about them? Did you hear anything about the Ninth?”

“I weren’t here, so I don’t rightly know what to tell you. I don’t know much about what went on, except there was a lot of fightin’ and dyin’. That squad over there, sitting by the trees – they might know somethin’. They’ve been here for a couple of days. Lost their regiment, by all accounts.”

Mercy’s eyes followed the soldier’s pointed finger and smiled. “Thank you so much, corporal. You’ve been very kind.”

“Take my advice and go back to the capital!” he shouted after her.

She reached the squad and asked the same question about Jacob, expecting much the same answer. Her heart missed a beat, however, when a sergeant nodded that he had seen the Ninth.

“Yep, I recall them coming here, late for the fight but not too late to chase them Yankees to the other side of them far-off trees. We heard rifle shots in the distance, but we didn’t have no horses and them trees are almost a mile from here. Next thing we knew, them cavalry boys came gallopin’ back here like the devil was chasin’ their horses’ tails. Some of them men were cut up real bad.”

“Did you see a Captain Stone?”

“Nope.”

“Did you go into the field afterwards?” Mercy found herself once again trembling, choking back wretched sobs and imagining the scene, as though she too had been there. The soldier looked at her quizzically.

“I don’t know no Cap’n Stone, ma’am, and we didn’t get the chance to look and see what had happened. The cavalry boys that made it out said the field was crawling with Yankees, and they was riding back to General Jackson. Then them Union soldiers came back in here counter-attacking, with four times the number we’d chased off earlier. We lost many good men. The Yankees held the ground in there till early this mornin’ and then upped and left. They all gone now, but we’re scouting the area, just in case there’s some wounded live Yankees with a mind for shootin’ before dyin’.”

“Thank you. You’ve been very helpful,” Mercy sniffed. “I’ll just go take a look.”

“My apologies, ma’am, but I can’t be lettin’ you do that. Like I said, it ain’t safe. Anyhow, we got men in there clearing the field. There ain’t no dead cavalrymen fir you to look at. We’re burying bodies in here, and we’re doin’ the same in there.”

Mercy saw Coal’s head jerk up in fright when rough hands grabbed his bridle. She had come so far only to be turned back right at the place she wanted to be. No, she couldn’t put up with that – she wasn’t going to be stopped, not now. “Just a quick look, then I promise I’ll leave,” she pleaded.

“You need to be going back, lady,” the sergeant said with increasing gruffness.

“Why does everyone keep telling me that? I’m going!” Mercy made a feeble attempt at wrangling Coal’s bridle out of the soldier’s hand. The soldier gripped it even tighter. Two more soldiers approached. Mercy was furious, but she remained silent as the soldier repeated the order that she leave immediately.

She was tired, dusty, hungry, and filled with terrible grief at the thought of Jacob lying dead close by, being pecked by birds and eaten by horrible maggots and fleas. She was going, and no man would bloody well stop her!

She drew her Colt and pointed it at the three soldiers in turn. All three men stared at the gun barrel with disbelieving eyes, and they jumped when Mercy spoke in her loudest voice. “I am going to see if the man I love is alive, dead, or missing!” she stated. “I can shoot the eye of a bloody rabbit at twenty yards and not miss its pupil, so don’t test me – and don’t tell me again to leave! And if you want to shoot me in the back when I head for that bleedin’ field, then do it. I really don’t care. I’m so upset and wretched right now that a shot to my heart might be just what I need to put me out of my misery. Please, boys, I’m asking you nicely – let go of my horse and let me get on!”

The sergeant gave Mercy a pitiful look and then shook his head. “Lady, your idea of asking fir somethin’ nicely ain’t my idea of bein’ nice. C’mon now, put the gun back where it belongs. There ain’t no call for this.”

“There’s
every
call,” Mercy said. “Will you let me go to that field or not?”

“I reckon I won’t, ‘cause like I said, any dead cavalrymen that were there would be buried by now. Any live one would have been taken away and treated. Don’t make us arrest you. C’mon now – git going.”

Mercy felt tears running down her cheeks and decided she was probably the most pathetic sight these men had ever come across. She lowered her gun and re-holstered it. She gave the men an apologetic look and mounted Coal in silence. She had made a fool of herself, had acted like a madwoman, and she was very lucky they hadn’t shot her. “I’m sorry – so very sorry. I wouldn’t have shot anyone,” she whispered. “I’m leaving.”

              The soldier she had first spoken to gave her a sympathetic nod. “I figured. Best you not pull that gun out again, though...I have orders, ma’am. No civilians are to get past here, and there ain’t no exceptions. Me and the men are real sorry about your captain. Hell, I hope one day my wife comes lookin’ fir me if I go missin’. Don’t you give up hope, lady. We got plenty of prisoners, and them Union fellas did too. Your captain might be hurt but alive – alive with the Yankees. We been treating the injured prisoners and savin’ more than one life. I reckon the Union doctors won’t leave no man to die, even a grey coat captain.”