Wedded to War (19 page)

“May I try to make you more comfortable?” Charlotte asked the next patient. He turned to face her then, revealing a gunshot wound in his swollen cheek; only one eye remained.

“Might I have a looking glass?” he asked her.

It wasn’t the wound itself that caused Charlotte’s stomach to revolt.
It was the juxtaposition of the disfigured half of his face next to the other half, still perfect, with its clear brown eye and bristly black lashes, high cheekbone and strong jawline. He had been handsome, indeed, and if one only looked at his left profile, he would have the appearance of all the bright strength of a wholesome youth.

Stuffing down her own emotion, Charlotte found a looking glass and brought it to him, praying he would see himself as a hero.

After a long gaze, he turned away from his reflection, and a tear welled up in his remaining eye. “What on earth will Sarah Brown say?” His voice cracked.

Charlotte took the glass gently from his hand, and knelt down to his level. Placing a hand gently on his left cheek, she said, “If Sarah Brown has any sense at all, she will admire you all the more. You have faced the enemy, full on. You did not turn away, did you? No, you met him. This is your lasting mark of courage and honor.”

“Do you think so?”

Charlotte nodded, willing herself to keep her tears in check. “Women consider a wound to be the noblest decoration a brave soldier could possibly wear. You are honorably distinguished.”

He closed his eye and smiled faintly then as she washed his face as gently as she could before handing him his clean clothes.

When every man in the hotel-turned-hospital had been washed, there was a heap of muddy, soiled, blood-encrusted uniforms to be dealt with.

Dr. Wiggins was now making his rounds, inspecting wounds in the lobby. “Doctor, what shall we do with the dirty clothes?”

“Burn them,” he muttered.

“And send them back to their regiments in hospital gowns? Surely not. Come now, you must have a laundry facility nearby. How do you wash the bed linens?”

He peered over the top of his spectacles at her then. “Do I look like a maid? Since when has laundry been the business of the surgeon in charge?”

“Well it must be somebody’s business—”

“Then make it yours and let me do my job.”

Swallowing the retort on her tongue, Charlotte turned and made her way up the dark, narrow stairway.

“Mrs. Moore?” she called, looking in the small rooms for the matron. “Mrs. Moore, I’m glad I found you. We have mounds of dirty laundry from uniforms the soldiers arrived in. What provision has been made for them?”

“Well, they need to be washed, don’t they? And the bed linens, too; we’re almost out. These fever patients soak them with sweat, and the dysentery patients, well—the poor dears, they can’t help it.”

“I agree. Where are your laundrywomen?”

Anna straightened and placed her hands on the small of her back. “Well, the position is currently open. Do you want a job?”

“What? No laundresses?”

“Oh, we’ve hired plenty of people, but we can’t keep them here. You said you wanted to help, didn’t you? Well, I’m afraid this is the help we need.”

Charlotte’s memory reeled back to the clean wards of New York Hospital, where she was in training, so she supposed, to be a head nurse. To supervise, to give directions.
All the most disagreeable hospital tasks will be handled by others
, they had said.
We would never dare ask the respected, refined ladies of society to work like slaves or immigrant day workers.

“I’m not—I’m not trained for that,” she stammered.

“You want training? I’ll train you. Make a fire. Heat the water in the copper cauldrons. Shave soap into the water, stir it with a broom handle until it foams. Add the clothes, stir them up. Scrub any stains by hand on a washboard. Transfer to rinse water, hang to dry. If you see any piles of clean linens from yesterday, heat some irons and press the stiffness out. Fold. Repeat.”

“You’re serious.”

“It’s not a punishment, dear, though I know it may feel like one to
your soft white hands. It’s just a job that needs to be done. Think of the soldiers. Do it for them. OK?”

“She’ll do it,” said a small figure in a black crepe dress and a cameo brooch at her throat. “You did say you wanted to nurse, didn’t you?”

“Doing laundry is not nursing, Miss Dix. I’m a little overqualified for that task, I’m afraid.”

“I told you weeks ago. You are not a nurse here, for I did not accept you. If you want to stay, you will do as Mrs. Moore says and administer the linen room or I’ll send notice to the Medical Department at once that you are not to be allowed in any hospitals in Washington or the surrounding vicinity.”

“You know as well as I do that you are using your position to an unfair advantage,” said Charlotte.

Miss Dix smirked. “No, I’m making a point.”

“And that is?”

“That single young women have no business in an army hospital. That my policies were devised for good reason, because what is required of you now will prove to be too much for your gentle sensitivities. That my guidelines must be enforced.” Her voice quavered. “To the letter.”

Charlotte straightened her spine, lifted her chin and turned once more to the wide-eyed Mrs. Moore. “If you’ll please be so kind as to direct me.”

“All the way to the basement. You’ll smell it before you see it.”

Nodding, she turned and headed down the rickety staircase.

The smell of wet, rotting wood grew ever stronger as Charlotte descended into the pit of the hotel. She found the linen room abandoned, heaped high with soiled sheets so rank with filth and human waste she would have vomited if she had eaten any food that day. She tied a couple of her handkerchiefs together, end to end, and wrapped it around her face to shield her nose from the stench. It didn’t help, and only made her feel as though she were suffocating.

Mrs. Moore’s instructions had taken no more than a moment to communicate. Carrying them out, however, took hours. For as much as
she hated to admit it, Miss Dix was right about one thing: Charlotte Waverly had never done laundry in her life. She could have just as easily said she was under qualified for the job as she was overqualified. Precious time ticked away on failed attempts to light a fire, only to have the flame snuffed out when she opened the door to the alley to fill pails with water from the pump. Shaving the soap into the water should have been the easiest part of the job, but she soon learned she needed to soak it in water to soften it; the bar of soap was as hard as a block of wood. The razor skidded across its surface, slicing into a fingertip. She wished she could be washing people again instead of their sheets and clothes.

Her back already aching from lugging the pails of water inside, she picked up piece by stiffened piece of laundry with the end of a broom handle and plunged it into the foaming, boiling water, stirring and agitating it until she thought the lice had died and most of the soil had dissolved out of the fibers. The water turned a yellow-brown. She scrubbed the stubborn stains on a washboard until her knuckles, already raw from the water and caustic soap, cracked and bled.

When her first loads had been washed, they needed to be rinsed, which meant more pails of water to be hauled in from the pump outside in the mud to the wooden tubs inside.

Since it was raining, Charlotte tied lines of twine upon which to hang the sheets until the low-ceilinged room looked like a maze of almost-white linen.

By the end of the afternoon, she had managed to wash three baskets of sheets, while nine more dirty piles waited, reeking even worse now from the humidity of the boiling water in the room. The uniforms hadn’t even been touched yet—these soldiers wouldn’t be needing them for a little while anyway.

She longed for nothing more than to take off her shoes, but her feet had swollen from standing on them all day and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to put them back on.

“Mademoiselle?” It was Maurice, holding his handkerchief over his pinched nose.

“Did you get the medicines Dr. Wiggins asked for?”

“
Oui
, and at Mr. Olmsted’s request, I brought supplies to five other hospitals in the city as well.”

Charlotte nodded her approval, too tired to say anything she didn’t have to.

“Mademoiselle, you must eat. Come up, the cooks have provided buttered rolls, soup, coffee. We are serving the men, and you must eat, too.”

“What’s happening out there?” she asked as she trudged up the narrow stairs in front of him.

“All day long, the army staggers into Washington like sleepwalkers,” he said. “Some residents shout to taunt us, rejoicing in the Confederate victory.”

“Any word from Jacob?”

“
Non.
I checked the Sanitary Commission office and the Ebbitt House. Nothing.”

By evening, the stream of soldiers had slowed, and Charlotte, Alice, and Maurice finally took their leave of the Union Hotel Hospital, promising to come back tomorrow.

After tying Mr. Olmsted’s carriage to a post behind Willard’s Hotel, where he had a room, Charlotte and Alice dragged themselves back to the Ebbitt House, their sodden, mud-splattered petticoats and skirts pulling at their legs; Maurice, just as dirty and wet, beside them. Willard’s was swarming with officers who appeared free of shame and dejection, as would be expected after such a defeat. Newspaper Row was twitching with news that would recant their earlier tales of victory, shocking the North with the ugly truth of retreat, collapse, defeat, as the capital city sat mired in mud, awaiting imminent capture.

Inside the Ebbitt House lobby, a single soldier stood waiting, covered in mud and soot, looking as though he were about to fall over.

“Alice, give that man some bread, if you have any left in your pockets.” Charlotte headed to the front desk to send a telegram home.

A muffled cry behind her caused her to turn around again.

“Jacob!” Alice was sobbing into his filthy shoulder now, but no one begrudged them the display.

Charlotte stood back for a few moments while her sister and brother-in-law reunited. Tears mixed with rainwater on her cheeks once again, bitter and sweet together, just as the joy of the moment was tainted by her growing anxiety for Caleb.

I
should never have let her go.
Phineas crumpled Charlotte’s latest letter and jammed it into his pocket, nearly popping the stitches with the force.
I should never have let her out of this city, out of my sight.
The evening’s chorus of chirping crickets seemed to be laughing at him incessantly. His breath came faster, his legs propelled him farther down Twenty-first Street in a blind fury. He kept his head down so no one would see his eyes under the brim of his black bowler.

He had written to Charlotte begging her to come home now that disaster had befallen so near to her. He had been kind. Romantic, even. At least he had thought so. But firm. And she had written back—but not for days—and said no.

She said no to me.

She had defied him, like his mother had always defied his father. The thought made him sick.

He should have known this would happen. There hadn’t been a male influence in the Waverly household for twelve years, and oh how that void had taken its toll. Charlotte was used to thinking for herself, making her own decisions, without any sort of leadership over her to protect her from her own poor choices. She was acting like an overindulged child who thought she knew best.
Were her hands even soft anymore, or were they rough and cracked? Was her skin still lily white, or had she thrown off her bonnet and let herself get tough and brown? Was she gallivanting about town in a dull dress stained with another man’s blood and vomit?
His stomach roiled at the thought.

She can’t do this to me, she just can’t.

She was a lady, proper, refined, beautiful. Everyone knew it. But now, her “adventuresome tales” from Washington were circulating in society circles like wildfire, as if they were Dickens’s latest installment of
Great Expectations.
She was becoming less known as the beautiful, talented daughter of the widow Waverly, and more as the bold, brave, hardworking girl who willingly put herself on the level with low-class servants! She had thrown herself off of her own pedestal to rabble about with the ordinary people. It was bound to stain her. When you mixed clean water with dirty, it always came out dirty. And that was a fact.

The rattle of a horse and carriage grew louder, and Phineas began walking again with measured strides, as if no fire burned within him at all. The carriage trundled by, and he was alone with his thoughts—and those blasted crickets—once more. His eyelid twitched.

He couldn’t stand it. She was moving away from him, and he had no control over it whatsoever. She was doing it to make him angry, the cunning little thing. Oh those eyes, they look innocent enough, but there’s more to Charlotte Waverly than sweetness and light. He knew it. She knew what his wishes were, and she was rebelling against them.

Like his mother had rebelled against his father. Maybe, just maybe, his father never came back from the gold rush because he had given up on his wife ever obeying him, ever following his wishes. His father’s disappearance had always been a mystery, but this now … this made sense.
The constant harping, the willful disobedience … Who could live with that? If his father abandoned them because of his mother, he could understand it.

But it was cowardly. A man shouldn’t be subject to the weaker sex. God made man to rule the woman and woman to be ruled by man. His father should have stayed and made sure he had the upper hand. If his mother didn’t listen, he could have been more—persuasive. He should have been the man of the house. Instead, he had run away.

The coward.

But Phineas Hastings was no coward.

A quick sweep of the street in both directions confirmed he was still alone. Thundering up the steps of 301 West Twenty-first Street, he thrust his key into the lock and cranked it counterclockwise before shoving it open and slamming it shut behind him. He threw his hat on the stand in the hall and strode into the parlor to find that his mother, Fanny, had fallen asleep on the armchair. Her head tipped back, her jaw slack, knitting needles sticking idly out of her round, chubby fist like pins stuck in a pincushion. A gurgling sound rattled in her throat.