The Ironclad Alibi

by Michael Kilian

“Yes. Poor man.”

  He refrained from lighting a cigar, knowing her dislike of them. “Do you get out much in society, such as there is any in this war?”

  “Here in Tidewater, yes. I stay away from Richmond.”

  “I am happy to hear that,” he said, pouring more wine.

  “The city has become such a hellish place.”

  “With worse to come.” He sat back, physically content, but bothered in spirit.

  “Has there been gossip about Palmer Mills? Gossip about a slave child?”

  She seemed embarrassed. “Well, there’s always that kind of gossip going around Tidewater. No one is spared.”

  “There’s said to be a child, a child who might have been sold off the plantation. But I could find no record. And they denied it at the Mills’s place.”

  “Then perhaps there is none.”

  Harry stared down at his now empty plate. “The Mills’s coachman, a man named Samuel. He’s dead. Killed in a fight.”

  “I believe he was a friend of Caesar Augustus. Now they’re both gone.”

  “He was defending the Mills’s house in Manchester against intruders. Could a black slave be that loyal to white masters?”

  She made her reply softly. “It has been my hope that our people will prove so—when the day comes for their freedom.”

  Harry rose and walked to the windows that looked out onto the rear gallery. “That day could come soon, if General McClellan would ever get off his behind and bring his army down here.”

  He could see a lantern light out on the river, moving slowly. “But then,” he added, “there is the ‘Monster’ at Norfolk to contend with. It could put an end to the blockade very quickly.”

  “‘Monster?’ Do you mean that iron-sided ship?” She did not like talking about war.

  “Yes. It’s built. It’s almost ready. Could be any day.”

  “Harry, are you here because of that vessel? Is that why you’ve come?”

  “What do you mean?” It offended him to lie to his sister, but he did not want her knowing of such things.

  “I know you, Harry. Better than you …”

  She appeared of a sudden stricken, as though by some paralytic force. He turned to follow the direction of her gaze. In the doorway stood a figure as tall as he, an imperial figure, in gray coat and gold epaulets and braid.

  Colonel Raines looked to them both, but otherwise did not move an inch. “You have disgraced this house,” he said finally to Harry. “You know what you have done, and soon so shall all Virginia. General Lee is much aggrieved by your behavior, but told me he kept his word to you. It is more than you deserve.”

  He took one step into the dining room, but advanced no farther.

  “Father …”

  “Be quiet, Elizabeth!” The older man turned away from her, his attention fixed malevolently on Harry.

  “I will give you fifteen minutes to gather your belongings and leave this house,” he said. “You are not to come back, sir. Not as long as I live.”

  “Father!”

  He swung about and walked somberly out of the room and back down the hall. A moment later, Harry heard a door being slammed shut.

  Elizabeth hung on to his stirrup.

  “I’m so sorry, Harry.”

  “Nothing’s changed.”

  “I keep hoping.”

  “It’s a small matter, compared to everything else.” He leaned down and touched her hair. She took his hand and kissed it. Tears were in her eyes.

  “Damned war,” he said.

  “Damned war.”

  If his father was listening, he was not visible.

  “Elizabeth, I must ask a favor. The woman Estelle, I promised her her freedom.”

  “Yes, you told me.”

  “I fear I must ask you to see to it.”

  “Ask me?”

  “I can’t take her with me. The Union holds Fortress Monroe, and Hampton and Newport News besides. If she could be brought near enough. It’s something you have done before …”

  “I will try.”

  “The Confederate force down here on the Peninsula is said to be very small, but …”

  “I am a Virginia lady, sir. I should come to no harm.”

  “I am grateful for today.”

  “I, too.”

  “I won’t say good-bye.”

  “No. Do not. I will see you again.”

  He smiled, then gently moved his horse forward at a walk. He could not bring himself to look back.

  Chapter 22

  From the next morning on, a cold, driving rain accompanied him every mile of the road down the peninsula, turning it to a thick, soupy mud that slowed his horse to a struggling walk. He cut into woods and across fields, but they improved his progress very little. At times he’d wait for the rain to pass, but each time it slackened only long enough to lure him out onto the soggy highway, then fell upon him again.

  Finally, reaching the old colonial capital of Williamsburg, he realized he had to find a faster means of travel or give up all hope of his goal. He’d become very fond of this strong and steady animal he’d taken from his father, but nevertheless left it at a local stable with a week’s board paid for.

  He anticipated a long, miserable walk from Williamsburg to the banks of the James, but he was spared a large part of that trudge when he found a flatboat pulled up on the shore of a now rain-swollen creek, leading south to the river. It had no oars, and he had to use a broken tree limb as a sort of pole to steer it, but it sufficed to get him to the river.

  In the end, he had to steal two more boats, grateful each time for the cover provided by the heavy rains and hanging mists. Shortly after abandoning the flatboat, he found a small farm barge that he cut loose and steered into the main river current, using the rudder as a scull to increase his speed. When he finally reached the confluence of the James and the Nansemond River, he hauled up on the shore and went looking for a more seaworthy vessel, discovering a small, gaff-rigged skiff with a reefed sail moored in a creek a short distance from a fishing dock.

  He waited until just before dark to take it. There was a Confederate battery across the Nansemond on Pig Point—the Richmond papers had written of it firing on the Yankee blockade fleet—and he wanted to avoid the gun crews’ curiosity.

  The rain came on hard, but with generous wind. Once around Pig Point, he was able to hold course steering by the light at Wise’s Point, though it kept disappearing in the murk.

  The first pale light of dawn found him hauled up at the mouth of the Elizabeth River. The wind had fallen, and he feared he’d make no headway against its current. The Gosport Navy Yard was several miles upstream, adjoining Portsmouth and across the river from Norfolk with its well-armed and white-washed little fort.

  The brightening sky brightened his hopes. It showed clear in the northwest. In a few minutes, the wind breeze shifted to that direction, and he headed into the Elizabeth on a broad reach. The sail was much patched, but held.

  There were Confederate pickets along the shore, and several called out to him, getting no response. One, angered at his refusal to reply, fired his musket at him, but the ball struck the water far short, and he didn’t fire another. The Southern warships Harry passed—a two-masted steam frigate and three armed sloops—paid him no mind, perhaps because his little boat was so small and he was sailing it along with such nonchalance.

  It was mid-morning when the narrowing river yielded his first view of Norfolk, and then the busy Navy Yard across the river on the right.

  The Union Navy supposedly had burned the place upon abandoning it, but much of it seemed to have survived. There were masts, smokestacks, and buildings visible in great profusion, and many small boats moving on the water. The establishment looked to be as busy a works as Tredegar.

  He steered closer to shore. The wind had been a friend back at the mouth of the Elizabeth but had declined the farther upriver he advanced. When he looked up again, it was with a chilling realization. One of the bui
ldings he had noted, a long, barnlike structure with a high smokestack, was actually in the water. He had finally come upon the Monster, waiting in its lair.

  Harry was accosted almost immediately upon docking his boat—seized by two burly sailors and half dragged to a quayside shed and an elderly senior enlisted man who seemed to be functioning as harbor master.

  He explained his arrival by saying he’d come from the War Department in Richmond and had traded his horse for a boat because of the muddy roads. Beyond that, he offered only the letter from Lee endorsing Harry’s enlistment in the Confederate Navy. Much of the ink was smeared, but the general’s signature was still legible, as was a reference to Navy Secretary Mallory.

  It sufficed. Harry now owed the good general considerable in this war, though he doubted that the old gentleman was much delighted with the obligation.

  One of the sailors escorted Harry down a muddy lane that wound between some large buildings, emerging finally near the yard’s enormous dry dock and a slightly smaller wharf to which the ironclad was moored. A military band was playing, and there was a crowd of sorts on the dock, a mix of black-coated civilians and both Navy and Army uniforms. Harry quickly got the idea he was presumed to be one of a number of dignitaries gathering here, presumably for the Monster’s maiden voyage. He expected it would be a sea trial to determine whether the fiendish contraption could actually function as a warship.

  The sailor took him to a Confederate marine posted at the top of the steps leading down to the dock, vouching for him. The man saluted, letting Harry pass. He simply nodded in reply. Wishing he were more presentable, and hoping none of these worthies would recognize him, he moved to the edge of the group, fixing his attention on the huge, fantastic vessel.

  She was easily two hundred fifty feet long, with her dark, forbidding above-deck casement taking up some two-thirds of that length. It had sloping sides, reached a height of two stories, and resembled a sort of malevolent, floating barn. It appeared to be heavily covered with iron plating—as was the low, flat deck extending fore and aft. The plates were so thickly applied it was indeed a wonder the ship did not sink at her mooring, as they had joked in the Richmond bar. As it was, recurring swells from the wakes of passing vessels were spreading water over the deck flooring in intersecting circles. Heavy seas might well cause the craft to founder.

  It was a prospect mightily to be wished. The ship had four, fearsome-looking gunports on the sides, plus another at the stern end, and presumably at the bow as well.

  If the armor proved as impregnable as it looked, there’d be little left useful for Union gunners to shoot at—a single smokestack, two ventilators, a high central mast, and a shorter one from which a Confederate stars and bars now hung limply, for the wind had died completely. There were also two ship’s boats on each side hanging from davits.

  Shooting all that away would likely be no more than a trifling irritant to her captain and crew. There was no way of telling how well this vessel could fight. She looked to have all the maneuvering ability of a giant brick. But she also looked able to withstand anything the North might fire at her. If she were a fort on dry land, she might be impossible to take by assault.

  But every weapon had its flaws and drawbacks.

  Harry moved along the edge of the group, nodding to anyone who looked his way and then turning elsewhere. He caught snatches of conversation. There were complaints that the design had been faulty, leaving the ship so high in the water that, despite the overhanging iron plating, its unprotected wooden hull was exposed at the waterline. To bring it down again, crewmen had labored through the night loading the vessel with a pig iron ballast. The draught of the vessel was deep, and so there were contrary worries about its ability to breast the underwater sandbar where the Elizabeth joined the James at Hampton Roads.

  Workmen were swarming about the sides of the casement, some of them standing on ladders. They appeared to be painting it—which was peculiar, so close to its sailing.

  A few of the dignitaries in the crowd voiced criticism of the choice of captain for the Virginia, as the Monster was now named. Because of seniority—a system as rigid in the Confederate Navy as the Union’s—Secretary Mallory had picked the sixty-one-year-old Franklin Buchanan, who had been the first superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy and now commanded the Confederates’ Chesapeake Bay squadron. The younger Catesby ap Jones, who had served on the ironclad when she was the U.S. Navy steam frigate Merrimack, had been relegated to second in command.

  “There’s the whole damned Yankee blockading squadron out there,” said a man standing next to Harry, a bald-headed civilian in a frock coat who looked about carefully before speaking. “We’re putting all our eggs in this one basket.”

  Secretary Mallory was not fifteen paces away.

  “She looks invincible to me,” said Harry.

  The civilian introduced himself as a Confederate congressman, squinting as he took in Harry’s weather-damaged appearance.

  “I had a rough trip,” Harry said. “Rotten weather.”

  “You didn’t take the train?”

  “Horse and boat.”

  The squint became sharper.

  “Who are you, sir?”

  The telegraph traffic between Richmond and Norfolk was fairly constant, and there was clearly a danger that it might contain warnings about a fugitive named Harrison Raines. The charges General Winder could bring to bear were numerous and even capital.

  “Harrison Raines,” he said, forthrightly. “Colonel Raines’s son.”

  “I don’t know him,” said the congressman, who added he was from Alabama.

  “Owns the Belle Haven Plantation up the James.”

  “You come from there?”

  Harry shook his head. “From Richmond, the War Department. General Lee.”

  The congressman appeared satisfied. “Does the good general think we’ll win the war with this?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe he’s as smart as they say.”

  Harry nodded, his eyes on the ironclad. “Why are they painting it?” he asked.

  “They’re not.”

  “But those buckets and brushes?”

  “That’s grease. They’re covering the slanting sides of that thing with grease. Make the Union balls fly off all the easier.”

  “Won’t that stuff catch fire?”

  “Let us hope not.”

  “If it did, the poor souls inside would have a hard time getting out of there.”

  “Unless they’re near the gunports.”

  The congressman moved on. Harry went in the opposite direction, asking after Lieutenant Mills. No one seemed to have heard of the man. He was about to give up, for a number of eyes were on him now, but then a young naval officer, standing near a gangplank leading to the vessel, said Mills had gone aboard the ship.

  “He’s going to sail aboard her?” Harry asked.

  The officer started to reply, then looked away from him. Many heads were turning in that direction. Secretary Mallory had climbed aboard a wooden crate and was beginning to speak. With everyone’s attention distracted, Harry began to edge closer to the ship.

  Mechanics were coming out from the Virginia’s interior, stepping out on the ship’s deck, their labors within the huge ironclad complete. Sailors began taking up the mooring lines. High above everyone, a wisp of oily smoke curled up from the top of the smokestack.

  Harry moved closer still, halting at the edge of the dock. When Mallory finished, the assembled dignitaries applauded, then began to shift about. Suddenly, there came the boom of a cannon from across the river over by Fort Norfolk. Captain Buchanan’s red ensign, marking his ranks as a flag officer, went up the rear mast, just as a great, boiling cloud of dark smoke erupted from the stack.

  The spectators were cheering. The men with the grease buckets began to peel away from their work and return to the dock, causing the dignitaries to back up. The full complement of mechanics drew together, then began jumping to
the dock as the deckhands slipped the moorings. As they jumped off, Harry quickly jumped on.

  He heard someone shouting behind him, but wasn’t certain the words were directed at him. Ignoring them in any case, he kept moving. Just as he was about to step through the main hatch, he heard someone on the dock call out: “Go on with your metallic coffin! She’ll never amount to anything else!”

  Harry looked back. The remark seemed to come from an old man standing to the side of the crowd. Harry couldn’t tell for certain, but the man appeared to be vastly amused by the ship and the occasion.

  A sailor bumped against him, but raised no objections to Harry’s presence. He stepped through the iron-framed doorway, entering the noisy, crowded, fume-laden, and forbidding interior.

  A marine holding a musket stood just within, but did not challenge him, perhaps taking him for someone important. Despite hanging lanterns, it was oppressively dark. Harry had only gone a few steps when he began to feel the heat. Moving along past gun crews, he saw that they were preparing for battle. He held out hope that this was all merely part of a drill.

  An officer came by, accidentally colliding with Harry and then giving him a hard look.

  “Who tell hell are you?” he said.

  The man had a full, well-trimmed beard and moustache, intelligent eyes, and an agreeable if somewhat weathered face. He appeared to be in his forties, which was old for his lieutenant’s rank. But the Confederate Navy was small, and rank was limited.

  The officer had a bluff manner and a decided air of command. Harry realized he was talking to Catesby ap Jones.

  “Raines, sir. From the War Department. I was seeking a Lieutenant Palmer Mills.”

  “Why in hell are you looking for him now?” he said, speaking over the engine din. “We’re under way! This is not a river cruise. How did you get aboard?”

  “Just came aboard, sir. I promise you I will not interfere with the operation of this vessel in any way, but I must talk to Mills. Here, I have this letter from General Robert E. Lee.”

  Jones raised his hand to object. “Mills is up forward, with Captain Buchanan. But, damn you, stay out of the way.”