Confederates (25 page)

When Mrs Coleman and her sister threatened to stick to the steps the following night as well, Mrs Whipple had unwisely let her use the laundry. Mrs Whipple knew it was foolish, but Mrs Coleman had shamed her into it.

After that there were always reasons for Mrs Coleman to stay on at Chimborazo. Her husband got a new fever, and Mrs Coleman didn't want to go home till that had worked itself out. And when it had and Private Coleman was sent back to Daniel Hill's division, Mrs Coleman said she'd dreamed her husband would be back within a week with a wound, and could she just stay till the big battles round Richmond had ‘fit' themselves out? Well, it made good enough sense, for the woman had already been in the laundry three weeks and another week made little difference. Within the week, Private Coleman was back as his slant-browed spouse had dreamed, and there was a wound in his neck he'd got at Malvern Hill.

Of course now the wife had to stay on till she knew whether he'd live or develop the ‘gangreeny'. By the time it was clear that the wound was healing, she was so close to what she called ‘whelpin'' that she couldn't be moved. Just at dawn that morning, Mrs Whipple, helped by a sulky and hung-over assistant surgeon from Ward 8, delivered a hearty boy-child to Mrs Coleman. Mrs Coleman said she meant to call it Malvern Chimborazo Coleman. And of course she did and little Malvern Chimborazo would have to stay on a few more weeks yet, she didn't want the wee thing fetching a fever on one of them slow trains down to North Carolina.

After the baby's birth, Dora Whipple left the laundry which had been set up snug with beds and didn't look like a laundry any more, thinking,
I'll never get rid of that woman
, and feeling already tired and desperate, even though the day hadn't got going yet.

Mrs Whipple hadn't reached the door of her quarters before she saw one of the medical orderlies running towards her.

‘It's Mr Greenhow,' he was calling. ‘In Maryland.'

Maryland was Wards 30 and 31. She'd put all the Marylanders together in there because soldiers from other states seemed to resent them. Mrs Whipple liked Wards 30 and 31. None of the boys in there were like Private Coleman. Most of them were cultivated gentlemen from Baltimore. And Captain Greenhow, a lawyer from Baltimore, was one of the gentlemen in Maryland that Dora Whipple liked best. She hurried down the alleyways between the wards with the orderly hobbling behind and rushed up the steps of 30. Inside, most of the boys were still asleep. Alec Greenhow was in his bed, his eyes clear and wide-open, and the sheet over his lower body sodden with blood. Dora Whipple tore the sheet away and lifted Greenhow's blood-wet nightgown and saw that all the mess was pulsing out of a little hole high up on the boy's thigh.

‘Wake the surgeon,' she yelled at the orderly, and he went to do so. In his absence, Dora Whipple looked at Alec Greenhow, and Alec looked at her. He was twenty or so years old and he knew what had happened, and so did she. He'd had a hip wound and had been waiting here four months for the shattered bone to knit. She had designed a sort of cast of cardboard and wood that let him hobble a little way on his shattered hip. But now a splintered edge of bone had cut a deep artery.

‘I'll just put my thumb on that little nick,' she said briskly, but only because brisk was her nature. She located amongst all that gore the exact spot from which the mess was rising – it was only a small opening in the flesh. She forced her thumb down on it as she had promised. That was enough to stop the surge.

After a minute the surgeon came in, a young one, a good one, a Marylander himself.

‘Sprung a leak, have you, Greenhow?' he asked brightly. ‘Just take your thumb away, Mrs Whipple, let us have a look.'

She did it and he stared awhile, and felt the hip with the tips of his fingers. Then he got Mrs Whipple to come aside, leaving the orderly to thumb the puncture in the thigh. He said in a low voice, ‘It's one of the deep arteries, Mrs Whipple.'

‘Well, what can you do, doctor?'

‘Nothing. It can't be reached. If it were lower down the leg, I could try to amputate …' He shrugged and bit his lip. ‘He … I can't tell him, Mrs Whipple.'

He bowed jerkily and walked, almost fled away down the aisle. Alec Greenhow's eyes followed him and seemed to know exactly what it meant. Oh God, Dora Whipple thought, what is it about
me
that people always think
I
can do these things. My shoulders are only nineteen inches across.

She moved back to the bed. ‘I'll take your place,' she told the orderly. ‘Please get Captain Greenhow new sheets.'

‘New sheets?' asked the orderly, frowning. He knew they'd only be fouled with further blood, and that he might have to boil them up himself.

‘I said
new
sheets!'

The orderly shrugged and nodded and went off to obey. Captain Greenhow looked her full in the eyes again. ‘How long?' he asked.

‘We can arrange for a series of orderlies to hold the place …'

He smiled. ‘To keep their thumb in the dyke?'

‘I'm sorry, Captain Greenhow. But there may be … letters and so on for you to write.'

He shook his head. His lips were dry and hard to form words with. ‘I couldn't write letters. Perhaps you can send a message to my folk. The address is in my things.'

All at once Mrs Whipple found she was crying. ‘It isn't fair,' she said. ‘Four months healing. And now this.'

He had this terrible calm. ‘It's the way of things,' he said. He didn't mention God or destiny, and she wondered was he perhaps an atheist. ‘You can let go,' he said, and it was more like a sentence on her than a permission.

‘No!' she said. She pressed her thumb harder. ‘No. I'll stay here all day.'

‘Please let go,' he said, and he took by the wrist the hand that was holding the artery. She said, thinking desperately: ‘The orderly isn't back with the clean sheets yet.'

Alec Greenhow grinned as if she'd said something very feminine. He looked so young. ‘All right,' he said. ‘But
then
.'

The orderly was back awfully quickly, and Mrs Whipple wondered why he had to be so damn efficient this one time. He pulled the saturated sheet away and lay the new ones carefully as if Alec Greenhow was going to be occupying that bed a week or more yet. He showed some delicacy of feeling at last, that orderly, the way he did it. The main sound Dora Whipple could hear now was her own blood drumming in her ears. ‘You can go now,' she told the orderly, and he went.

‘So?' said young Captain Greenhow then. ‘No!' she said. Her thumb was biting into his flesh.

But he reached out with both his hands and, an inch at a time, forced her hand away, yet staring all the time at her eyes as if those were the only terms on which he could die properly. She heard the terrible dull splash as the interrupted flow began again, and at that second her hands and feet tingled in a way that terrified her. There was a surging in her ears, and her lips, this summer's morning, turned frost cold. She knew she was falling and losing her hold on the world as sure as Alec Greenhow was. She felt her right hip and shoulder crash against the floorboards.

Later she knew the young Marylander would have been glad she fainted, for she would have made a spectacle of his death if she had had her way. They carried her back to her quarters on a litter, and on the way past the laundry she was still too numb to hear the yelling of Malvern Chimborazo Coleman.

When they carried her in, the widow lay still and numb on her bed. But after half an hour she was beginning to stir. Her black girl brought her a cup of sassafras tea and roused her and handed it to her.

‘Ma'am,' said the black girl, ‘the surgeon … he's azwaiting to see you?'

‘What surgeon, Sally?'

‘Why, that boss surgeon, ma'am.'

‘The surgeon-in-chief? Oh my heaven!

She stood up instantly. Her strong soul had somehow absorbed Alec Greenhow's death and now he was just part of the history she would carry around with her. She shook out her dress and punished her hair into shape.

‘Ask him in and make some tea for him.'

She sat herself down at the table and flexed her mouth to get the wrinkles of recent grief out of it.

‘My dear Mrs Whipple,' said the surgeon-in-chief, entering. He was a tall man of about fifty years, totally clean shaven – he was one of those progressive surgeons who thought a doctor ought not to get his whiskers in his work.

‘Sir,' she said, standing and smiling so calmly he couldn't have guessed that just forty minutes past she had fallen in an hysterical faint.

‘I'll be brief, Mrs Whipple,' he said. ‘Do you feel you can leave here?'

‘I don't understand you, sir.' Have they found out? she wondered. Are they testing me?

‘You might have read that three or four days ago there was a fight north of Orange. It sent Pope scuttling off beyond Culpeper. Just about our whole army has moved up that way, and it's struck the Surgeon-General's Committee that a hospital should be got together at Orange. Nice little town, Orange. You could take in wounded and sick from whatever campaigns are fought, either campaigns in the valley or ones up along the railroad. And the Committee was wondering if … well, if you would care to be the matron of the Orange Hospital.' He rubbed his clean jaw. ‘Not that I shan't be distracted to lose you …'

Dora Whipple studied him for a while. Is it an innocent proposal? she wondered again. Have they caught someone else from the intelligence chain?

‘All my friends are in Richmond,' she said. And so is the thin little man who wears a beaver hat and a frock-coat and meets me at ten o'clock every Thursday evening on open ground west of the hospital, and makes a note of what I can tell him. Perhaps I want to be separated from him now. Perhaps the Alec Greenhow's business has changed my mind on spying.

She tested this idea and found her mind had not altered. The spying business was no flirtation which she could take up and put down whenever she wanted.

‘I must refuse,' she said. ‘I … I must confess I need the recreation which Richmond offers.'

He smiled frankly and stood up. ‘I understand perfectly,' he said. ‘I'll tell the Surgeon-General to find someone else. Might I say, Mrs Whipple, I am pleased to keep you.'

She smiled and left her kitchen, along with the surgeon-in-chief. He went off towards the administration block, and she was on her way to the cookhouse to oversee the breakfast preparations. Passing Ward 30, she noticed that an orderly was toting a bundle of blood-fouled laundry down the steps. ‘Oh what times these are,' she muttered.

Now it was sometimes a bad thing to be too close to powerful people. She had sometimes met the Surgeon-General Jonathan Moore at Richmond dinner parties, and spoken up frankly to him about Chimborazo and its many problems – the skimpy food, the lack of drugs, the reused bandages, the shortage of fuel. Now she found out that Moore was speaking up to her – in a letter that arrived in the hands of a good-looking sergeant early that afternoon.

My dear Mrs Whipple,

The campaigns which shall end this war will be fought rather to the north of Richmond and therefore it has been decided to set up a major hospital at the town of Orange. A girl's seminary and two warehouses have been requisitioned for the purpose, and further wards will be built at the edge of town in due course. I am therefore asking you, my dear Mrs Whipple, as a personal favour, to forgo the company of all the admiring friends you so justly enjoy in the Richmond area, and to act as the matron of this new hospital. It will be hard work indeed, and at first your quarters will be little short of primitive. I can but repeat: would you do this for me as a personal favour, Mrs Whipple, and as a service to our young nation? Could you please let me have your answer as soon as possible?

Yours with warm regards,

J. H. Moore,

Surgeon-General C.S.A.

She sat with her eyes closed for a while when the letter was read, and then she smiled wistfully. She couldn't do anything now except send a letter saying yes. The little man in the beaver hat would wait for her in vain on the open heath next Thursday night unless – as he probably would – he saw a mention of her new position in the
Richmond Enquirer
.

It was only after she'd sent off her reply with the handsome sergeant, that she realised that Orange would put her closer to that English journalist who was up there with Jackson's army. The idea of this excited her. She wondered should she write and tell him, and if she did, what would he think? In the end, because she was an adventurous woman, she wrote anyhow.

14

Aunt Sarrie Muswell
née
Bumpass wasn't, and hadn't ever been, a beauty. But that hadn't soured her against Ephie at all. Sarrie just wasn't a jealous woman. She'd had old Muswell who'd loved her in spite of or even for her average plainness. Dying, he'd left her wide enough logging lands to keep her well all the rest of her days, and in addition to that there was a half share in the profits of a tavern in Goshen and in yet another in Raphine. Aunt Sarrie Muswell had no reason to blush either for the beauty of the rose or of young river-women from South Carolina.

When Ephie arrived at Aunt Sarrie's place in the wild and lovely Cowpasture valley she brought that ailing old black woman with her. She was looking yellow and fevered herself.… Aunt Sarrie had been on the Ohio to Cairo, Illinois and down the Mississippi to New Orleans. She knew that most river people were jaundice-yellow a good part of their lives. So the yellow skin was in character.

‘If you didn't have that stain of colour, gal,' she told Ephie, ‘you'd be jest too ravishing for contemplation and Usaph could by no means have safely let you travel.'

But Ephie was sickening for malaria, which river people also carried with them even in places where the air was sharp and clean, even up in Bath County. The fever struck on a night soon after Ephie's arrival and she had to be nursed for a week by Aunt Sarrie and by Aunt Sarrie's slave Bridie. As well as that, in that first week the slave Lisa got some sort of fit or stroke and lost power over her own bladder.