The Secrets of Mary Bowser (50 page)

Or so I told myself as I walked slowly back up the steps and set myself down at the kitchen table. I closed my hand tight around the wood handle of my kitchen knife, slid the blade under the seal, and pressed the folded pages flat.

I quite nearly cried when my eyes fell on the first lines.

6 May 1864

My dearest Wife

How I wish you could see me this morning standing in my uniform shoulder to shoulder with all the men of the company the regiment & division. Never was men prouder to serve. We have our first victory already though was hardly a battle to speak of the enemy scurrying off instead of meeting us on the field.

I hope to be as close to you in my person as I am in my heart soon enuff but for that all I can say in this letter is we are moving closer than the enemy would care to find us. Close enuff to hope the end may be at hand.

George is a great friend to me & many an evening entertains me with tales of a girl he used to know at school. She was quite something if only half what he says is true & I look forward to repeating such tales & seeing what you think could become of such a girl now that she is full grown. For my part I suppose her quite wonderfull as ever at least I hope her so.

I bear regards to you from George & throu him from your Hattie. He shows me the letters from her telling of their children Alexander named for her father Beatrice for her mother & a lovely little babe named Mary for a dear friend. That infant is quite colicky & proves a handfull for all who tend her perhaps a contrary nature in the child is why? George & the other men tease cause I havent any offspring to boast about but I tell them my wife has been very busy with important work we pray to be done soon so we can get to the business of raising a family in peace.

With that I bid you goodnight & trust that our friends will get this to you. Who knows when I may send another.

Ever your loving

Husband

The gut twisting fear fell further and further off with each line I read. But whether it was joy or sorrow that replaced it, I couldn’t quite say.

For two and a half months, I’d pored ever more assiduously over Jeff Davis’s papers, hanging all the more intently on every word I heard at the Gray House. Desperate for news of the USCT 22d, yet knowing any tidings the Confederates had might only be such as I didn’t care to hear, of defeat and capture—or worse.

Glad as I was for word from my husband, I saw right off how Wilson wrote that letter as much for the eyes of any Confederate who might intercept it as for my own. It was hard to take comfort from such correspondence, long on longing for us to be together but short on information about where he was while we were apart.

I folded the pages and pinned them to the underside of my skirts, just below my waist. It was danger for a supposed slave to be caught with writing, even if the letter didn’t suggest too directly it was from a colored soldier serving on the Union side. But the deadliest fighting was yet to be, and coming soon most likely. However many hundreds of thousands were killed already, more still would have to die before the war was done. I needed some talisman to carry close against me.

Friday, the thirteenth of May, seemed ill luck enough, for all Sophronia, Hortense, and I had to do readying the Gray House for the funeral reception for General J. E. B. Stuart, who’d passed the day before from a gunshot wound incurred at Yellow Tavern. All the Confederacy seemed to feel his loss. By late that afternoon, the Gray House was thick with guests. And choked with the heat held in by the blanket of smoke from the nearby skirmishes. “Fan them pullet hens till they done cackling at each other,” Hortense said, pushing me toward the knot of ladies gathered in the central parlor.

Cackle they did, as eager to gossip as to grieve. A gray-haired woman was nodding toward the men clustered in the next room. “The president has aged ten years since his dear child passed.”

A cannonade thundered outside, drowning out the murmurs of agreement from the half dozen ladies around her. But the youngest member of the circle told the others, “My aunt says some folks aren’t sorry that at last the Davises know what it is to lose a son during war. Perhaps now Varina Davis won’t hold herself above the rest of us.”

A rotund lady dominating the sofa frowned. “Sally Buxton, you oughtn’t speak that way.”

The chastised Miss Buxton picked at a worn spot on the seam of her skirt. “I’m only repeating what my aunt said.”

“Well you oughtn’t repeat it, and she oughtn’t say it. Oughtn’t even to think such a thing. The South has seen enough death, we needn’t make up accounting sheets to tally whose is worst.”

But Queen Varina herself seemed eager for such computation. In the dismal fortnight since her son’s death, she’d grown as bitter as the parched corn coffee sipped by her guests. Having stopped to seek the sympathy of the men in the adjoining drawing room, she now swept into the parlor, taking the seat closest to my fan.

“How good of you to open your home to Mrs. Stuart,” said the lady who’d spoken last, eager to change the topic of conversation. She could hardly have imagined how Jeff Davis wheedled and pleaded, just to persuade his wife to allow another woman’s mourning to eclipse her own, if only for an afternoon.

“It is hard for me even to think of her as Mrs. Stuart,” another of the guests said. “For I knew her back when she was Miss Flora Cooke. What a figure she cut in her youth. She rode so much as a girl, she was nearly as deft on horseback as her husband.”

Queen Varina clucked at the image. “One more indication of her father’s queer ideas. To think of the way he turned his back on the South and rode against his native Virginia with McClellan’s invading army in ’62.”

“If she rides so well as that,” put in a young redhead, pointedly ignoring her hostess’s harsh words, “perhaps she should take over her husband’s command. We’ve few enough cavalry officers left.”

“You mustn’t make such jokes, Miranda,” the rotund lady said. “There is no amusement in suggesting a lady take up such pursuits.”

“No one would have thought ladies could serve in government,” replied a prim mouse of a woman. “But our whole bureau of clerks is female, and the superintendent says we do as well as any males.”

“Laboring in an office!” Queen Varina waved her handkerchief as though she were leading a military charge against the very idea. “I couldn’t imagine it, with my nervous headaches.”

“I haven’t had a headache since I began working for the Treasury Bureau. Some of us clerks think perhaps it isn’t effort but idleness that makes ladies ill. I shan’t care to give up the position, when the war is over.”

“Perhaps you won’t have to,” the ginger-haired Miranda said. “Far fewer of our menfolk will return than left. Someone shall have to take their places.”

The eldest of the ladies set her cup onto its saucer with an imperious clatter. “You cannot expect us to believe you are in earnest. It is one thing for Southern ladies to exert themselves in this time of great sacrifice, but the female constitution simply is not meant for constant labor.”

I didn’t let out a flicker of contradiction as I held my gaze steady across the fanning of my aching arms, past the tables I dusted and the mantel glass I scrubbed, to where Hortense and Sophronia were toiling in the drawing room, diligently refilling whiskey glasses and deftly keeping cigar ash from the carpet.

“Why, here is Flora Stuart at last,” one of the ladies called out. Shifting my gaze to the other doorway, I watched the guest of honor make her way from the entry hall.

The grief etched across her young face stung me. Through all the talk of the pitiable widow, I expected a woman equal to Varina Davis in years. It caught me quick to see Mrs. Stuart couldn’t be more than two or three years past twenty-five—the age I was to turn that week.

Queen Varina rose. “My condolences. I am sorry we do not meet under happier circumstances, for either of us.” She gestured at her own mourning attire, a lace-trimmed silk rather finer than her guest’s worn black poplin.

“Thank you, Mrs. Davis, and my condolences to you. General Stuart and I lost our own little girl back in ’62, when she was the same age as your Joe.”

“They say there is no grief like that over a child, and I believe it is true.” Queen Varina laid a hand on her swollen belly, an indelicate gesture she’d taken up to emphasize her maternal condition. “I only pray the next one will come to us healthy, and remain so.”

Flora Stuart looked at her with red-rimmed eyes. “I suppose there is great comfort in knowing you are to have another child. For a widow, there can be no such solace.”

The portly matron on the sofa fidgeted with her hoops, trying to distract Mrs. Stuart. “It was a lovely service today.”

But Queen Varina wouldn’t let well enough alone. “I am sorry I could not attend, but even the shortest refrain from the Dead March reminds me of how they played it for my little one only a fortnight ago.”

“You needn’t have worried,” the widow said. “There’s not a military band to be had in Richmond. With the Federals advancing so closely on all sides, there were barely half a dozen able-bodied men left in the city to bear my husband’s coffin to the hearse.”

Before Queen Varina could reply, Aunt Piss came into the parlor, bowing and greeting each of the women in turn. “I hope I am not interrupting you ladies.”

One of the dowagers laid her hand on his arm, waiting for a round of cannon fire that rattled the leaden windows to die off before she asked, “Is Richmond in great danger?”

I shifted the fan from my right hand to my left, turning to hear his answer.

“It is the men serving under Grant who are in danger. Unconditional Surrender has turned into Unremitting Slaughterer. He sends his troops to their deaths like steers to the abattoir.”

“Even the smallest skirmish can take lives on both sides.” Flora Stuart’s quiet observation sent chills up my spine.

“I’m sorry if my reference to casualties upset you. It is in contrast to such fine officers as your late husband that we see the inadequacies of the Union commanders.” Aunt Piss turned to lecture the other ladies. “To the north of us, we have Grant the butcher, assaulting where he cannot win. To the south is the coward Butler, faltering even where he might win.” He smiled and gave just such a prediction as he knew would keep the ladies cooing and praising him long after he joined the gentlemen in the drawing room. “I pledge to you on my honor, Richmond will stand as safe this spring as it did two years ago, when we gallantly repelled McClellan’s forces though they so outnumbered our own.”

But I smiled, too. McClellan lost Richmond in ’62 because he didn’t know he outnumbered his enemy—didn’t know because I chose not to tell him. Now, with Mr. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation written into law and my own husband serving in the Army of the James, I was more than ready to see the Confederacy face its final defeat. I’d make sure the Federals received every scrap and seed that could bring the war to a quicker end.

I set a hand onto my waist, meaning to let it rest against the fabric covering Wilson’s letter. But when I felt my skirt, I realized his missive was gone.

That very day and every one thereafter, I searched the Gray House, my house, and each step in between, desperate to find the folded page covered with my husband’s steady hand. I wasn’t just worried over who might find the letter, whether they would link it to me—it was a deeper dread that held me. If I couldn’t safeguard that single sheet, how could I expect that Wilson himself would remain unscathed?

More than a full month later, on the seventeenth June, Jeff Davis received a long report the Confederates had intercepted en route from Butler to Grant. It told of the initial Federal attack on Petersburg, twenty miles south of Richmond, and how the Union gains had come at a cost, to the USCT especially. The 22d alone had lost fourteen men killed, one hundred and sixteen wounded, and eight missing.

Every day Richmond’s news-sheets would list out the wounded company by company. But only on the Confederate side. I knew my husband’s name would never be among them, but still I sifted and scoured through those lists for what I knew I couldn’t, prayed I wouldn’t, possibly find. Many a woman woke in the morning thinking herself a soldier’s wife, not realizing that sometime in the night she’d already become a soldier’s widow. Weeks or months might pass before a dead man’s family would get word. Some never heard at all, Union and Confederacy both more bent on slaying the other than on identifying who on their own side had been slain.

Twenty-four

J
efferson! Don’t leave me to die with these niggers, Jefferson!”

Not a one of us wanted to be with her, but still Queen Varina cried out like she was our captive. “Don’t pay her no never mind,” Hortense whispered, dipping a face-cloth into the water bowl Sophronia held. “Birthing only kill some womens. This one ain’t about to up and die, so long as she got all us to boss around if she live.”

With the curtains closed and fuel too scarce to run the gasolier, the Davises’ bedchamber was dark as a winter night, though still heavy with the stagnant heat of the June afternoon. I raised the oil lamp a little higher as Hortense laid the moist cloth across that proud forehead. “Doctor on his way,” she soothed. “Hush now, Mistress, ’fore you scare the chiljen.”

“Don’t you dare hush me.” Queen Varina clawed at Hortense’s slender wrist. “Out, every one of you black hell-fiends! Get out!” She shoved Hortense into me. The lamp I held swung wild, sending a spray of oil scalding my arm and throat.

Hortense, Sophronia, and I fled to the hall. “Womens all suffer when they time come?” Sophronia asked.

“She ain’t suffering. We is.” Hortense ran a quick eye over the nailmarks patterning her forearm before turning to me. “You get downstairs, tend them guberment mens. Make sure Marse Davis don’t be running up here, making her hiss and spit even more. All I need is menfolk tramping all over the house during a female time.”