The Ironclad Alibi

by Michael Kilian

  An exploding shell struck near the gun port, causing one sailor to jump back as flying embers spattered around him.

  “They’ll tell you what to do. Step lively!”

  He was given the job of fetching powder. He decided on the spot that, if the time ever came for him to put on a uniform in defense of his country, it would not be a Navy one. There were advantages to the Secret Service, and one of them was the luxury of sitting out naval engagements in the comfort of a hotel bar.

  Another solid shot kabanged against the outside casement wall near him, showering Harry with more sooty dust. Then a shell exploded in almost the same spot, its smoke drawn in through the ventilator and darkening the deck.

  Harry coughed like all the others.

  They were now very near the frigate, which was firing every weapon it had at the Virginia, in concert with its sister frigate to the right.

  One of his crew grabbed his arm and pulled him back. Harry looked at him strangely, then heard the shouted word, “Fire!” From the corner of his eye, he saw someone pull the lanyard, and then the Parrot let loose, its great weight snapping back along its wood and metal slide as though it were a child’s toy. The report was so deafening, Harry thought at first something had gone wrong and the cannon had burst. But it was intact. Harry looked through the port again, just in time to see the shot strike the Yankee frigate’s starboard quarter rail, sending up a shower of broken wood and dismembered men.

  He had contributed to those deaths. His own people. His country. He recalled General Lee saying that he had declined the command of all Union forces because he could not possibly bring himself to raise his sword against Virginia. Harry had helped strike such a blow, against his country. He felt ill—and angry.

  He would get off this vessel—somehow. In the meantime, he had to change onboard occupations, fast. He went to the stack of shot and pretended to better arrange it, very deliberately causing one ball to come loose.

  It struck the deck, not his foot, as he intended, but then proceeded to roll over two of his toes anyway, which had not been his plan. He howled as loudly as his erstwhile comrade had done, though the man had been much worse injured.

  The gunnery officer succumbed to a daft mix of rage and bewilderment. The former gained the upper hand and for a moment Harry thought the man was going to strike him with his sword—or shoot him.

  Instead, he just shoved Harry backward, then returned to his duties. Several of the Virginia’s guns were now in play. Already deafened, Harry could hear their reports only as muffled sounds, but the shudders of the deck came close to toppling him.

  He careened backward, seizing upon the upright beam. There was so much smoke and confusion now the gunnery officer seemed to have forgotten him. The Union ship was looming large now, orange flares appearing along its hull, smaller, sparklike flashes showing along its rail.

  If those meant bullets, Harry could not hear the ping of their hits.

  His two injured toes had turned nearly crimson, the nails dark, doubtless from blood. The pain had been replaced with numbness, which Harry did not take as a good sign.

  “Go to the surgeon!” Someone shouted close by him.

  Limping, he started aft, glad to escape.

  He did not get far. Returning to the main gun deck, whose crews as yet had nothing to do, he asked after the doctor’s whereabouts. He’d taken no more than two steps in the indicated direction when he was grabbed by the shoulder from behind and spun around.

  “Raines! What are you doing?”

  Harry gave Mills an honest, disgusted answer. “Helping the Southern cause.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m on a gun crew.” He looked down at his partially disfigured foot. “Anyway, I was.”

  Mills took his arm, hard.

  “Have you lost your mind?” His face came nearer, as though Harry’s held some secret he was only just divining. “Why are you here on the Virginia?”

  Harry had another question.

  “The child, Palmer—is it yours?”

  “What in hell are you talking about?”

  “Did you father a child by the slave woman Estelle?”

  Three or four Union cannon shots hit the thick, iron-plated wall beside them nearly simultaneously, jostling them where they stood. Mills looked an insane man. He turned around, completely, looking first to the helm, where Buchanan was barking out a stream of orders; then to the inside of the battered bulkhead, and then back to Harry.

  “What hold do you have on her?” Mills demanded. “What magic spell have you cast?”

  “On Estelle?”

  “On Louise!” He stepped forward again, taking Harry by the shoulders. “Why wouldn’t she let me kill you?”

  Harry had no answer. He never knew what he should believe about Louise Devereux.

  “I’m going to leave this ship, Palmer. Now. But I must know this. Whose child was Arabella going to sell down the river? Was it yours, or Samuel’s?”

  Mills turned away, looking to two nervous marines who held muskets at order arms. He pointed to Harry.

  “Arrest this man! He’s a Yankee agent!”

  Startled at first, then seemingly glad to have something useful to do with the sea battle raging all around them, the two marines stepped forward. Harry hobbled backward, then bent low and shoved his way past them, his foot hurting horribly as he banged the injured toes on an iron bar.

  He headed straight for Buchanan, who looked at him now with some alarm. A moment later, the Virginia crashed to a halt. Harry was knocked to his knees and sent rolling forward. As he painfully got to his feet, finding both of the pursuing marines also down, a great cheer went up within the ship.

  Harry looked past the fierce-countenanced Buchanan, eyes fixed on the viewing port just beyond the man. It appeared just wide enough. It would have to be.

  With only two scrapes of sharp metal against his right side, he shoved his way through, gulping marvelously fresh air and sliding down the sloping casement to the iron deck. The sea water cascading over it was cold. Harry lifted his eyes. No wonder the otherwise sluggish Virginia had so suddenly stopped. She’d rammed the Union frigate near her bow. The two ships were jammed tight together, nearly prow to prow. Union marines on the deck of the sailing ship were laying down a compelling small arms fire. It seemed almost that Harry could dance on the bouncing bullets.

  Ignoring the pain in his foot, as well as that in his arm, back, and skull, he ran across the deck to the left, hurling himself into the water.

  Chapter 24

  Harry could not tell which side was shooting at him. For a time, it seemed to be both. He kept underwater as much as he could, swimming alongside the federal vessel but not toward it, not until he reached the stern and swung himself behind it grabbing hold of the rudder chain—for the time being, out of the musket fire.

  The name of the ship was writ large just above him. The Cumberland.

  It looked to be a hard climb up to the deck, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to be up there just yet. The Virginia’s fire was devastating, each shot striking true and throwing up clouds of smoke, debris, and men. The Confederate gunners had cleared the fore and after decks and were now going after the federal cannon.

  The Union vessel made no effort to escape this punishment. Harry at first thought it might have run aground on a shoal, for it had full sail up and hadn’t budged an inch. But another look found the sails hanging slack. The ship was becalmed. Its fate would be shared by all the other sailing vessels in the Yankee fleet, if the wind would only stir.

  Peering around the side of hull, he watched as the Cumberland kept up its fire despite the slaughter progressing along its own deck. From here, he could observe the magical phenomenon. Every ball bounced straight up or to the side, denting the Virginia’s plating, but causing the ironclad little bother. The exploding shells, though spectacular to see, damaged nothing.

  Buchanan had stopped his return fire, concentrating on a more pressing matter. Und
er the waterline, the Virginia’s mighty ram had gored the Cumberland mortally, but it was stuck fast.

  Among the cries of pain and anger above him, Harry heard a new burst of shouting. The wooden-sided Cumberland was sinking. But in her death throes, she was performing a noble service for her sister ships. The Virginia was straining, black smoke pouring from her stack, but she could not pull herself free of her victim. Harry had no idea of the depth of water here, but if it was enough to put the federal frigate completely under, she could take the Monster to a watery grave with her. He felt like cheering, but refrained. The desperate Cumberland crew would misunderstand.

  The Virginia shuddered, then paused in her labors, as if to catch breath. Oddly, her prow still impaling the side of the Cumberland, she began to drift sideways. There was no wind, but the tides were strong in these waters, and the incoming current was pushing the ironclad back onto the beam of the sailing ship, making an opportunity for broadsides.

  The Confederates quickly took advantage. The four cannons began a rapid fire, smashing great holes into the frigate’s hull and blasting showers of wreckage into the air. Somehow, the Union gunners kept up a return fire. The space between them began to fill with smoke, weirdly illuminated from within by the orange flame from the cannon barrels.

  Harry swam back to the rudder chain of the frigate, hooking an arm over it. Sailors from the Cumberland were beginning to jump into the water. Some simply fell, splashing into the sea and then floating there, not moving.

  There were two fierce explosions and then a pattering rain of wood and metal fragments over the surface. Looking to his right, Harry saw a Union sailor floundering along.

  “Over here!” Harry shouted. “Grab the chain!”

  The man heard him, and with a clumsy, ineffectual stroke came nearer. Harry feared he’d not make it and so let loose of the chain and went to him, pulling him to the rudder.

  “If she goes down,” said the man, who seemed to be of some high enlisted rank, “this is a bad place to be.”

  “Is she sinking?” Harry asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you swim far?”

  “Yes, but I got a big sliver in my leg. Can’t get it out.”

  There was another broadside from the Virginia, which was swinging yet nearer, almost parallel to the Cumberland. Harry wondered if Buchanan meant to take advantage of this proximity and send a boarding party.

  But there was no need. The Virginia of a sudden broke free, throwing up water over her stern deck as she lurched backward. It occurred to Harry, that with the sideways pressure, the ram must have broken off inside the dying frigate, as Harry once saw happen with a bayonet thrust into a Confederate soldier.

  If gone, the ram had certainly done its work. Without the ironclad’s prow in it, the hole in the Cumberland’s side was now a gaping intake of seawater. The ship began to heel as rapidly as it was settling at the bow.

  Harry looked about, spotting a flat piece of deck wood floating some twenty yards distant.

  “Can you get to there?” he said to his companion.

  The man winced. “Guess I got to.”

  They released the rudder chain and struck out. Harry found himself too weak with fatigue to haul the other man and keep afloat. As he moved along, he kept looking back, fearing the fellow would slip beneath, but somehow the sailor labored on. When they got to the planking, he helped the man shove himself upon it. The splinter he’d talked about was sticking out of both sides of his thigh.

  Holding on to their makeshift raft, Harry began to kick. They were much too close to the Cumberland and it was going down fast. Harry’s hopes that it might simply settle on the bottom with decks above the waterline were quickly dashed. The swirling seas curled over her. In the end, only her masts protruded. The sailors who clung to them were lucky they’d not been shot away.

  Content with its victory, the Virginia began to move away, commencing a slow turn toward the other Union frigate, which had commenced a fight with three small wooden-sided Confederate vessels.

  Harry’s injured sailor friend began cursing, an amazing, seemingly unending stream of words.

  “We’re done for,” the man said.

  Turning to see what had prompted this, Harry realized he was quite right. The Union tugboat he had seen hours earlier was bearing down on them, spewing smoke. On its bow was the name Zouave.

  At the last instant, the tug steered to avoid them, turning nimbly, then hove to just shy of the mizzen mast of the sunken frigate, its crew going to the rails and into the sea to haul aboard what they could of the Cumberland’s crew.

  Harry and his raft companion were seen to quickly and placed side by side on the tug’s aft deck. The wounded sailor, so stoic in the water, began to cry out from pain. Harry, shivering now, ripped open the man’s trouser leg, jarring the jagged splinter and causing more grief. The injury was nasty, and blood was still oozing from both sides of the thigh, but the fellow could count himself lucky. If it had been a musket ball, it doubtless would have smashed the bone and cost him the leg, if not his life.

  Harry snatched at a member of the tug’s crew as he came by.

  “This man needs a surgeon,” Harry said.

  “They all do, mate.”

  “Are we headed for Fortress Monroe?”

  “Not very damn soon. Got to help the Congress.”

  “The what?”

  The crewman gave him a hard squint. “Your sister ship. The Congress.” He pointed forward.

  “Right you are.”

  When the man had moved on, Harry knelt again by the injured sailor, who gave him a forlorn look.

  “They’ll have no surgeon aboard,” Harry said. “Do you want me to pull out that wood splinter?”

  “It’s hurtin’ worse.”

  The wound was oozing more blood, but not in great volume.

  “No whiskey,” Harry said.

  “Just do it.”

  Harry tore of a strip of cloth from the pants leg, rolled it into a thickness, then handed it to the man to bite down upon. When he had it in place, Harry quickly put his foot on the man’s leg, took hold of the offending wood projectile, and yanked.

  It came out with ease, though blood spattered on Harry’s foot and began to flow from the puncture. The sailor cried out only once, though his hands kept clenching at the air.

  Using what remained of the torn cloth, he made a sort of bandage, winding and tying it tight.

  “That’s the best I can do.”

  “You’re not off the Cumberland,” the man said.

  “No.”

  “What ship then?”

  Harry hesitated. “The one that sank you.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “I’m not one of their crew.”

  Lies, lies. The gun crew he had assisted may well have fired the shot that injured this man.

  The man’s face had blanched white. In a moment, he lapsed into sleep—or unconsciousness. Rising, Harry went forward, A crewman who took note of his shirtless state reached into a bag and gave him a sailor’s blouse. He was grateful, but it didn’t stop the shivering.

  Finding a place finally at the bow, he sat down on a coil of heavy rope, wishing for a country not so insanely bent on destroying itself. He yearned for Louise’s bed as though it was some impossibly distant paradise.

  It was easy to divine the tugboat captain’s intent. The other frigate; presumably the Congress, was under fire from the three smaller Confederate vessels, all wooden hulled. The frigate, still becalmed and lacking steam power, was taking a pounding from these inferiors. If the Virginia joined the contest, it would be as doomed as the Cumberland.

  The Virginia was slow, the tug much faster. If it reached the Congress in time, it might be able to take the frigate under tow and move it to safer waters.

  For a time, it seemed that the Zouave might succeed. Reaching the Congress well ahead of the Virginia, the tug took a hawser off the frigate’s bow and began chugging shoreward. The orders
came from the Congress’s captain. Neither Fortress Monroe nor the federal batteries on Newport News Point were near enough, but if they could get the vessel into shoal waters, she could at least be kept from sinking. With her guns above water, she could still fight.

  All went as hoped. Drawing the frigate into the shallows obliquely, the tug was able to put her aground with her hull turned broadside to the open water and her pursuer. But Buchanan was highly sensible to his ironclad’s peril out of its depth and halted her some two hundred yards off—a cat contemplating its mouse.

  The Congress began firing its guns, but, stuck in the mud, could only traverse them so far. Buchanan, blessed with an incoming tide, shifted his ship until the Union weapons could no longer bear.

  Then he proceeded to murder the Congress. An initial broadside took off the figurehead and bowsprit forward and the pilot house aft. Those that followed chewed off bit and parts, the exploding shells starting several fires.

  As the ship was being savaged, so was the crew. Crouched down in the bow of the tug, looking up at the frigate, Harry saw a human head go sailing into the air like a ball in a game, then plummet into the sea. The Zouave worked to take aboard the injured, but came under fire also, a shell whizzing not six feet above the bow and Harry’s own head. Small boats came out from shore intent on rescue, but the Virginia punished them for their good deed with some long-distance fire.

  But she hadn’t forgotten the Congress. After intimidating the rescue boats, her guns returned to the stricken frigate. Another shot came across the bow of the Zouave. A second, following closely, hit the Congress forward, the explosion setting off a fireworks of huge sparks and fiery trails. Two men appeared at the ship’s rail, both aflame. One rolled over the side and into the sea. The other fell back.

  Harry stood up, driven to this exposure by an uncontrollable anger. The malevolent form of the ironclad lay off at some distance, but he felt as though its regard was directed at him. Its menace took on a human form as he imagined Mills standing at one of the gun ports, contemplating Harry the target as he had in their encounter with pistols.