“You’ve done yourself a great disservice, Seamus. You should go back north from whence you came. Forget you ever saw us here.”
He laughed again. “What unit you men with?”
“Stuart’s.”
“Your unit is Stuart? I said which unit?”
“1st Virginia Cavalry.”
“The 1st Virginia Cavalry. Really? Where are you camped at?”
Wolf gulped, his throat moving with guilt despite his best efforts to hide it. “Charlottesville.”
“Charlottesville. Interesting. Pretty far from there.”
“On official business.”
“Just like our town crazy old maid.”
Van Lew put her hand under her dress grasping for her pistol. One shot. Put this infuriating man down then they run. He must die though. He knows too much. Her fingers found the short handle barely large enough to fit in part of her palm.
Seamus must have seen something in her eyes because he was faster on the draw. He closed several feet before the pistol escaped her dress. He pressed a knife to her breast with a wicked smile. “Who would have thought Crazy Bet was a spy? Seamus MacAllister is the one who uncovered Richmond’s most notorious spy ring.” He turned to face the men. “1st Virginia is camped near Fredericksburg. Your accents don’t belong to loyal sons of the South, but somewhere further north. Wisconsin or Michigan? In fact, I bet if I marched you two over to Libby Prison, we might find that two of their rats escaped.”
Wolf slowly moved toward them.
“Ah. Hold it right there or Bet gets it.” The tip of his blade pressed painfully into her chest causing her to gasp. A droplet of blood formed at the blade’s point, growing in size before it trickled down her breast leaving a thin red stream in its wake. “Nice and slow, you boys get on the ground.”
She eyed them, the scowl on Wolf’s face expanding.
“Just have to sit tight here until Jimmy and Ben finish making their patrol. It’ll be the best breakup yet. Caught in the act.”
No. It won’t be. She grasped at his arm, throwing her body weight into it. His eyes grew larger, and he flung her to the side. She felt the pain as she hit the mud-caked cobbles but ignored it.
Wolf was upon him, and the two men slashed and jabbed at each other with knives. Seamus laughed as they circled one another. “You hold that like it’s an axe.”
Darting forward, Wolf thrust with the pointy end while Seamus parried with slashes of his own. Roberts tried to flank the man, but without a weapon, his part was limited.
She pushed herself seated. Her hands found her pistol and released it. It was surprisingly light, almost like a paperweight in her hand. “Seamus!” she said.
The Plug Ugly turned her way, his brutishly intelligent eyes shifting toward the single round barrel of violence.
The pistol shook. She’d never shot a man. She’d never killed a man. She knew she could, but could she really do it?
“Stop,” she said. He stood more upright. He tried to turn her way before Wolf rammed his long knife into his belly. The sound was like a butcher chopping into a piece of meat. Seamus gasped as Wolf closed on him, getting near his face as he forced the blade deeper.
“You cheatin’, dirty bastard,” Seamus muttered, gritting his teeth.
“Never doubt a desperate man.” Wolf removed his blade with a flourish of crimson, and Seamus fell to the ground holding his abdomen. Blood flowed over his hands like a red river breaking free of a dike.
“Finish him,” Van Lew said. She slipped her pistol back into her sleeve. “We don’t have time before his compatriots return.”
Wolf bent close to the Plug Ugly.
“Do it, you bastard,” Seamus spit.
Cupping the man by the chin, Wolf ran his blade along his neck, and Seamus gurgled and coughed as he bled out on the cobbles, a pink grin gaping from his throat. She helped the men shove him into the coffin, upright and on display for the world to see their crime, but not until morning.
The two prisoners eyed her. Her breath came sharp and she could feel the slash across her breast. The warm blood ran along her skin and soaked into her black dress. She felt it with her fingers then forced them down upon the cut like she was trying to keep it all in.
“Ma’am,” Roberts said.
“I’m fine. Follow this street. It twists all the way to a safe location on the river. There will be a boat there. The man’s been paid. You can trust him.” Her head felt a bit fuzzy and she tried to blink it away.
“Let us escort you back home.”
“I know where it is well enough. When Seamus’s gang returns, the city will be crawling with them. You make sure Ulric’s body finds its way back to his father. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I can take care of them here. Now go and take care of yourself.” She took in a breath. She’d been stabbed. Mary would help her at home. “Tell Butler I think of his embrace often.”
“We will. Thank you,” Wolf said.
“You have our best,” Roberts added.
“Godspeed.”
The men disappeared down the street, the limp body between them swaying.
She didn’t think she could die from this wound, but she best get it bandaged or risk passing out next to a dead body. She could explain the entire assault away and how brave Seamus tried to stop the Northern brigands but fell to their evil blades. He’d been a hero. She stopped and ran her eyes over the Plug Ugly.
His eyes were open. Blood saturated his shirt and coat as if he’d been caught in a red rainstorm. His ugly head was covered in scars. The man was cruel, and he probably deserved to die long ago. One knife fight too many. For him it was only a matter of time; the odds were against dying an old man in bed.
She’d have to be more careful. She was known to his associates, and she knew they would come knocking. She gave him a slight tilt of her chin. Their game had ended in blood.
Chapter Six
April 30, 1864
Fort Monroe, Virginia
Their guide hadn’t said a word through the night. He had only given the terse command to sit and be quiet. Then he tugged his cap low over his eyes, leaning on the rudder almost as if he were asleep. Wolf and Roberts did as he bade, and with the rising sun, they crept upon the fortress.
Fort Monroe was an irregular bastion fort with seven bastions. It was constructed on a narrow isthmus that stuck directly into the James River. The formation of the land itself led to a natural control of the waterways, something realized early when the United States were British colonies. It was positioned to control maritime access to the James and York rivers as well as the bay leading to the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers.
The fortress was built into the interior of the isthmus with ten-foot-thick brick and masonry walls and had an eight-foot-deep moat. Numerous red-brick support buildings sat outside the defensive position as well as docks and a harbor. Newer crude hovels made from pieced together wood peppered the landscape, filling in any open space, and giving it a shoddier non-military look.
Originally it had been designed and built after the War of 1812 as part of a series of coastal fortifications to protect the coastal interior of the United States. It was a lesson learned in American blood, sweat, and tears after the British sailed through the Chesapeake and burned the White House and Washington, D.C.
It had been in Federal hands throughout the entirety of the war, having been a starting point for McClellan’s Peninsula campaign. Now it headquartered Major General Benjamin Butler’s newly formed Army of the James.
The boatman steered the small single-sail skiff toward a dockside harbor under the watch of a cannon mounted in turrets along the walls like metal sentinels.
Colored men fished with makeshift fishing rods off the docks. Others unloaded cargo from a steamship, carrying crates and pushing carts. They all wore coarse linen, wool, or jean cloth shirts, mostly drab in nature of browns and whites that hung loose on their torsos and baggy trousers or breeches.
A few wore hats made from plaited straw or wide-brimmed brown hats that Wolf had seen rank-and-file rebel soldiers wear.
“You ever seen so many?” Roberts said.
“I haven’t.” They’d seen slaves while on their foray near the rebel capital as part of Kilpatrick’s raid and even more from afar on the docks in Richmond from the windows of Libby Prison, but here there were so many. “Must be freemen.”
Roberts grinned and slapped him on the back. “Just like us.”
Wolf cringed as pain spiderwebbed over his back.
“Sorry. Forgot,” Roberts said.
The boatman let his vessel reach a dock, and he hurled a rope to a young barefoot colored boy who was waiting. The boy moored the boat, and the boatman tossed him an apple. Catching it with both hands, the boy flashed a grin. He turned and jogged away.
“I can’t stay long.” The guide gave an irritated glance at the decaying corpse of Colonel Dahlgren. He lay across the width of the ship covered in a blanket. “Hurry along now.”
Wolf and Roberts climbed onto the dock and the boatman helped them lift the corpse. The more they moved the long-dead colonel, the worse he stank. Roberts gagged as they untied the watercraft and their guide steered his small craft back down the James, giving a steamship a wide berth.
Voices behind them murmured then grew into a din. Colored workers and children eyed the two gray-coated men with mistrust and fear and even anger.
Roberts spoke from the corner of his mouth. “They all like this?”
The crowd was growing as more came to gawk at them. “We’re wearing reb jackets,” Wolf said.
“No, no, no,” Roberts called at them waving his hands. “We be Union men.”
“We escaped!” Wolf said, trying to reason with them.
A few of the freed slaves held sticks and clenched fists. Wolf and Roberts took a step back. He didn’t think they’d go after white men, even ones in rebel uniforms, but who knew? If they thought they could get away with a good rebel beating, they may.
“We come in peace,” Wolf said. His hand fell on the hilt of his blade. He wouldn’t take a beating if he didn’t have to, misunderstanding or not.
“We’re Lincoln’s boys. True Union men. Loyal to the United States thru and thru. Not a secesh bone in our bodies.”
The crowd crept forward with an excited energy. A man shouted something intelligible in the back.
“Take your jacket off,” Wolf said. Both the men scrambled to remove the rebel coats then tossed them on the docks.
A man yelled as he made his way through the congregation of people. “Move on now, contraband. Get outta the way.” The freemen parted ways as a man in blue nudged through. He wore a captain’s uniform and a kepi with long bushy sideburns. He folded his arms across his chest.
“Well, what do we have here? A couple reb spies?”
***
An hour later, they stood in Major General Benjamin Butler’s study. He was a short squat man, reminding Wolf of a stretched barrel. He gave into going bald with very little grace, and while the top of his head was free of hair, along the crown and down the back it hung to his collar. His mustache drooped like it was depressed to be his, and he held the appearance of a stubborn yet intelligent mule with ambition.
His military reputation was poor despite having some of the first successes of the war. His Federal oversight of the captured Southern port of New Orleans had earned him the nickname “Beast Butler.” He’d forced a series of draconian laws on the citizens which had made him popular with radicals in the North and subsequently politically palatable in the Union. Now he’d found himself at Fort Monroe leading the relatively insignificant Army of the James. He viewed the young men from the side with one of his eyes.
“Heard you boys had a bit of a mix-up on the docks,” Butler said with a slimy grin.
“We did, sir,” Wolf said.
The major general’s study held more than the regular opulence of a general’s status indicating wealth from outside the military command structure. Fine gold candlesticks adorned his desk. A stack of oil paintings leaned on the wall in a corner. A large wooden chest rested behind him, secured with a heavy metal lock.
Butler took a seat and stared at them as if he expected a story. “Well. Did Bet say anything about me?”
“She mentioned you, sir.”
A grin belonging to the devil himself formed on Butler’s lips. “Of course she did.” He licked his lips fiendishly. “Anything specific?”
Roberts glanced around uncomfortably. “That she thinks of your embrace often.”
“Just grand. Just grand. Been almost six months since I’ve seen her. Let me tell you, it cost me an entire shipment of confiscated cotton to get her from Richmond and back again. But it was worth every dollar.”
“Not sure I understand, sir. You shipped her here?”
“I think you understand perfectly well,” Butler said with a broad grin on a button-like mouth. “She is a grand woman.”
In Wolf’s mind, anyone who helped him escape was the grandest of people. Her fortitude and bravery with a knife pointed at her breast made her exceptional. “She’s a brave woman. Forgive us. We didn’t spend much time together.”
Butler continued to smile. “She is.” He sighed, looking them up and down. “I can see how that lot outside thought you were rebels. Starving, ugly, and desperate.”
The two former prisoners stood silent.
Raising his eyebrows, Butler continued. “Humorless lot. Suppose that’s what Libby does to a man. I trust Ross wasn’t too hard on you.”
Both men exchanged a glance before Wolf found the words. “He was convincing.”
Holding a piece of paper close to his face, Butler read it with one of his eyes. “Van Lew tells me you kept the Dahlgren letter secret.”
“I did.” And I paid for it with my flesh and blood, he added in his mind.
Butler nodded. He had no idea the scars Wolf’s body bore for the Union. “Wouldn’t put it past the Southern bastards to lie about it. You did good on that. Colonel you say?”
“Colonel Wolf, sir.” The words sounded empty on his tongue and he gulped saliva down a dry throat.
The major general rummaged through a stack of papers in a drawer in his desk, flipping through a few. Wolf’s lie hung over them like a woolen cloud, and he prayed that Butler couldn’t hear the fear in his voice. The general licked his fingers before turning a page over. “Hmm. I don’t see you on my list of potential parolees.” He studied them again. “But your regiment is a relatively new one, and my list hasn’t been updated in some time.” He let the paper fall, and the tension shrank into the corners of the room. The major general folded his hands together. “I have secured you passage back to Alexandria where you can fall back into your parent regiment. I suppose you can accompany young Dahlgren the rest of the way.”
“It would be an honor,” Wolf said. The stench of the man still lingered in his nose and any thoughts of meat were out of the question despite that being the only thing he could fantasize about while imprisoned.
“Thank you, sir,” Roberts added. Even he looked a bit green at the thought.
A knock sounded at the door. Butler rose, lumbered over, and answered it.
“Do you think they know?” Roberts whispered.
Wolf shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“When do we come clean? You know. Tell them we was faking it.”
He had no idea what the penalty was, but impersonating an officer had to be punishable by something severe. This was a mostly volunteer army, so perhaps they would be lenient. Imprisonment. Flogging. Surely nothing capital like they were deserters. Heck, they were trying to escape back to their regiment to fight. “Best to ride this out. Get back to the 13th and blend back in. We tell ‘em we escaped and want back into rank.”
Butler clapped Wolf’s back as he passed. The spot where his hand struck stung, and Wolf grimaced for more than just the pain. He hoped Butler hadn’t overheard any
thing they spoke of.
“Well, we will get you men out of those rags and into your proper uniforms. Then back to Alexandria.” Butler stood behind his desk, placing his hands on it as if to prop up his extra belly weight. “It is a pleasure to meet you men. You did a very good thing and I assume that Admiral Dahlgren will want to greet you upon arrival to commend you.” He flipped open a gold-trimmed cigar box, exposing finely rolled, rich smelling cigars. “Take one on me, boys. You just remember to vote for me when the war’s over.”
“Vote, sir?”
“Well, I don’t suspect you boys will relocate to Massachusetts, but when the time comes, perhaps a vote for president.”
Holding the cigar beneath his nose, Roberts took in its rich scent. “You betcha!”
“Of course, sir,” Wolf said.
“Those are my boys. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I have some business to attend to.”
They left his office. Other men waited outside, each dressed like a civilian ship captain. Long frock coats. Puffy caps. One had a red scarf around his neck.
Wolf and Roberts were shown to an officer’s quarters by a cheeky, portly artillery captain and given new uniforms. They were guided to steaming hot bathtubs where the men soaked and puffed on their cigars, enjoying the finer things in life.
A smile found its way onto Wolf’s face for the first time in weeks. The wounds on his back were healing. His thumbs didn’t ache. And the rich cigar smoke and a glass of whiskey helped the men drift into a deep sleep.
They slept for over twelve hours in beds, and neither man could remember a time they’d slept better. The next day, an officer came and got them, guiding them back to the docks. Everything was golden in their new Union blue uniforms even if they were living a luxurious lie.
Men had even saluted them, and Roberts got a big kick out of saluting back. He even reprimanded a private for slouching at his guard post.
At the docks, they boarded the USS Hunchback, a converted New York ferry. Black smoke puffed from her smokestack, and they sailed their way north toward the capital.
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