by Jana Petken
She was beset with thoughts of Jacob. His last letter had arrived three days ago. He had been able to correspond with her at least once a week in the past month, but she doubted very much that he would have time or energy to let her know where he was now. She imagined him bloodied and dusty, pleading for help, just like all these poor souls in front of her. She followed every order, completed every chore, but she could not silence a voice in her mind, praying to God that he keep Jacob safe and away from this terrible place. Where was he?
As midnight approached, more help arrived from Richmond. Women and men past fighting age, upon hearing about the mounting casualties, had not hesitated to offer their services. Mercy sighed with relief. She was dead on her feet, looked like a dead cat in a dustbin, and just couldn’t stay on her feet a moment longer. These new nurses could take over, she thought. She needed to sleep, even if it was just for an hour or two.
She left the main building and walked past an ambulance which was just about to leave. She hadn’t managed to speak to any of the drivers before now, but this, she thought, would be the perfect opportunity to ask these men if they knew where the Ninth Cavalry was. The men looked as filthy, bloodied, and worn out as she. The poor souls were staggering on their feet. She caught their attention just as the wagon pulled away. “Stop, stop, please. I know this might be a silly question, but do you know where the Ninth Cavalry is? Did you see them?” she asked.
The taller of the two men took off his cap and looked at her with impatience. “Lady, we had our heads down pickin’ up bodies all night, and come morning, we’ll be picking up some more. We ain’t got no time to wonder where a bunch of horsemen are. If they weren’t on the battlefield where we was at, they could be anywhere from here to the James River.”
Mercy felt the strain in his voice. She was sure she sounded vague and pesky, but there was no harm in asking again, was there? “Will you ask about the Ninth tomorrow? It would mean so much to me.” She quickly wrote Captain Jacob Stone on a scrap of paper which she had used to take wounded soldiers’ names. She rested her hand on the man’s sleeve and looked at him with eyes bright with tears. Lina would be proud of her, she thought, for if charm and vulnerability were needed here to get information, then charm and tears she would display in spades.
“I’m just worried to death. Here I am nursing these poor gallant men and all the time worrying about my beloved – I’m just filling up with misery. Please … I need to know where the cavalry was last seen. Surely someone must know. Won’t you take pity on me?” Mercy sighed with relief when she saw the tall man’s sympathetic nod. She might look like a pathetic woman, she thought, but acting like one occasionally certainly got things done.
“All right, lady, we’ll be back here tomorrow, I reckon, if the good Lord wills it. I’ll ask around, but you gotta know that it ain’t easy keeping up with the cavalry.”
Mercy smiled. “Oh, thank you! Thank you so much. You come find me and I’ll make sure you brave fellows get some coffee and cornbread. Ask for Mercy Carver.”
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Mercy rode under the stable arch at Mrs Bartlett’s house and jumped off her horse without saying a word to the stable boy. She was blinded by tears and fighting to catch her breath between sobs. She had not stopped crying from the minute she’d found out, even though she had willed herself to calm down, to take deep breaths, and to believe that the ambulance men must be mistaken.
She ran inside the house, through the kitchen, and into the hallway. Anna was there, sitting outside the drawing room door. She was humming a tune, and she jumped in fright at the sight of Mercy standing before her with blood on her once-white shirt. “Anna, tell me Mister Bartlett’s awake.”
“He’s awake. Dey in the drawing room,” Anna said.
Mercy noted Anna’s frightened expression, and she looked down at herself. “I look a mess. I’m sorry. I didn’t have time to change … Anna, will you please bring me a cup of tea? I could drink a bucket of the stuff.” She attempted a smile, but she couldn’t control her trembling lips. She pulled up her braces strap and put her hand on the door handle. She thought better of marching in unannounced looking like a ragged London orphan, deciding to knock first and wait for an answer. She hoped to God that Mrs Bartlett was in a sympathetic mood. If anyone could get the senator to do something, she could.
The comfortable sitting room looked peaceful and far away from the reality of war, she thought. Mrs Bartlett had an air of perfect contentment, which sickened Mercy, who was sure she was going die of grief at any moment. “Mrs Bartlett – Senator – please tell me you have not heard that Jacob is missing,” she blurted out, sobbing between words. “I think something terrible has happened to him. There were ambulance men – they told me …” Mercy stopped speaking. Mrs Bartlett was not contented at all, she saw at second glance. She looked miserable. Senator Bartlett wore a worried frown, wrinkling his brow. “Oh God, no, please don’t tell me …”
“Mercy, you look frightful – and that blood!” Mrs Bartlett exclaimed.
“Oh, it’s not mine,” Mercy sobbed. “I apologise to both of you for running in here like this. I know you weren’t expecting me tonight, but I had to come.”
“Hush, child,” Mr Bartlett said. “Tell us exactly what you have heard – and for God’s sake, sit down.”
“But the blood!” his wife’s booming voice rang out.
“That blood belongs to Confederate soldiers, if I’m not mistaken, and I say Mercy should sit.”
Mercy sat, wringing her hands and taking deep throaty breaths. Her pain and grief were choking her words, but she had to make herself sound sensible, for she had so many questions to ask. “An ambulance driver told me tonight that the Ninth Cavalry is with General Jackson.”
“That’s right,” the senator said.
“But he also said that thirty cavalrymen from the Ninth scouted near Beaver Dam Creek yesterday. Some infantry saw them there and sent them to chase down some Yankees. They said that only twelve went back their way.” Mercy couldn’t continue. She looked at the senator and for the first time in her life wanted someone other than Jacob to hold her. “Please, Senator, do you know anything?” She looked then at Mrs Bartlett, whose face told a tale. “You know, don’t you?” Mercy whispered.
Mrs Bartlett shook her head in denial, but Senator Bartlett was more open to the truth as he saw it. “I received dispatches this morning from General Jackson. He sent out a thirty-man scouting party. Thirteen, not twelve, made it back to the encampment. Jacob led the mission – he didn’t return.”
“No! It can’t be true!”
“Mercy, I’m not done. According to the report, they rode right into an ambush. They were outnumbered and cut down by rifle fire coming at them from all sides. They never saw the Yankees coming, and they didn’t have time to defend themselves. They were slaughtered, plain and simple.”
“I can’t – I can’t …”
“You can and you will believe it,” Mrs Bartlett said.
Mercy gave her a hateful look, but Mrs Bartlett was not being cruel, Mercy thought scolding herself for being mean. There was only kindness and sympathy in the eyes that stared back at her. “But Jacob is clever. He would never put himself or his men in danger like that,” she said. She was still determined not to believe that her beloved was gone.
“Mercy, child, there are many men dying in this war, and not one of them thought himself a fool when he took to the battlefield. This is a tragedy – a terrible calamity that took Jacob from you. For our glorious cause, you must be brave and accept what so many families must accept.”
Mercy’s furious intake of breath was highly audible in the now-quiet room. Glorious! War was not glorious, especially not this one, which had come about because of Southern pride and greed to hold on to what was never rightfully theirs in the first place! God’s truth, was she to hear that word repeatedly every time a man was killed, leaving a wife and children behind, clinging to nothing but the memory of his gloriou
s passing?
“Is he reported dead or missing?” she asked, now in control of her temper.
Senator Bartlett took Mercy’s hand in a rare gesture of affection. She pulled it away, no longer wanting affection from people who had no understanding of the way she thought or of what she believed in. “Please just tell me and be done with it,” she said.
“He was reported dead by his sergeant – but that’s not to say he is dead. Unlike Mrs Bartlett, I believe you should have hope, if it makes you feel better.”
“He might have survived. The ambulance drivers said they had not cleared that field yet,” she responded.
Jacob couldn’t be dead – he couldn’t be! Mercy’s mind screamed. She would know, would feel his passing from the world. Her heart would have stopped beating at the exact same second as his, for their souls were twins, their hearts beat in tandem, and one couldn’t survive without the other!
She was finally getting her thoughts in order after shock and then the strange sensation of cold bewilderment. She couldn’t bear to think about Jacob lying in a field dead and alone, and she didn’t want to hear details that would suggest he was. But she had to know more. “Where exactly did this happen?”
“Why do you want to know that?” Mrs Bartlett asked her. “Oh dear Lord, you’re not going to do anything silly, are you?”
Anna brought some tea. Senator Bartlett picked up a decanter of brandy and offered it to his wife and then to Mercy.
“Yes, I will have a drop, thank you. I feel so cold – I can’t stop shivering,” Mercy said, accepting the brandy. “Please continue, Senator. Please tell me everything you know.”
“There’s not much more I do know. There are seventeen officers and men dead or missing, including Jacob. I have their names. There was chaos yesterday, and I’m surprised to have received the information so quickly. It happened yesterday evening, but you’re right in saying that the army has been unable to get into that field to retrieve the bodies or to help the wounded. You have to understand there were casualties piled high in that area.”
“Did any of Jacob’s men see him fall?” Mercy held her breath for the answer.
“Yes, Jacob did fall. His horse raced back to the encampment behind the others, sadly rider-less.”
Mercy looked at the Bartletts’ faces in turn and concluded that both were convinced Jacob was dead. She just knew that’s what they were thinking. But her instincts told her otherwise. Sometimes a gut feeling was much stronger than reason or knowledge, and every part of her told her that he was alive.
“I’m so sorry, Mercy. He was shot, and he’s probably dead. You have to face it,” Mrs Bartlett said.
“That might well be the case, but I’m going to that place at first light, Yankees or no Yankees. I have to find out the truth. I have to see where he fell with my own eyes.”
“This is madness,” Mr Bartlett said with unusual gruffness. “No woman has any business going near a battlefield. For once, I’m saying no to you, not my wife.”
“I’m going,” Mercy insisted. Being told not to do something in the Bartlett household had become exceedingly boring. If Jacob was dead, she had nothing to live for – better a Yankee’s bullet got her than a life without the man she loved. “Don’t try to stop me,” she said quite calmly. “You see, I don’t have the strength to give up. To admit defeat now, after everything I have done and all that I’ve seen, well, I just can’t. Jacob never gave up on me when I went missing, and I won’t give up on him. Help me – tell me where he fell.”
“And what if you do find him?” Mrs Bartlett snapped.
“Well, if he’s injured, I’ll nurse him back to health, and if he’s dead, I’ll give him the burial he deserves.” Her eyes were now clear and probing as she stared at the senator. “Will you help me, sir, or will you allow me to go, blind and lost?”
“I’ll help you. I won’t tie you down or forbid you to do what your heart is set on doing – I will help you, my dear,” he answered.
Chapter Sixty
The household slept bar Anna, who had risen early, insisting that Mercy drink coffee before she left the house. Mercy washed quickly. Her clothes, including hat and gloves, were laid out, as were her gun and holster. She was also armed with a map of the Richmond area, just a stone’s throw from where a battle had taken the lives of thousands near Beaver Dam Creek.
Senator Bartlett had assured Mercy that the fighting was over, but he had also warned her that her safety in such a place could not be guaranteed. It was a redundant statement as far as Mercy was concerned, for stray Yankees could be just about anywhere in the Richmond suburbs these days.
Mercy felt an icy coldness sweep over her entire body, as though miserable ghostly hands were clawing at her. It was late June, and the air was warm and balmy. The heavens were full of pink ribbons rippling through a deep blue sky tinged with the golden hue of sunrise. She found it quite beautiful and peaceful to look at, unlike the burnt-out and well-trodden ground she was seeing all around her.
After leaving a wooded area, she came upon a stretch of road, more difficult to ride along than the fields and copses she had just left. This main thoroughfare was well trampled, judging by its dire condition. She had followed the senator’s directions to the letter, and she was convinced that she was now entering what had been the outskirts of the main battlefield only two days ago. The deep brown Virginian soil looked black and morbidly dim. Coal’s hooves dug in deep to find solid ground under the thick black layer of watery dirt, and the early morning silence made her eerie shivers even more pronounced.
Farther along the road, she passed an earthenware dugout, abandoned apart from spent bullets glinting in the dawn’s golden rays and a couple of grey caps left behind. She looked to the left and right of the pathway she was now taking. Fields stretching all the way to the horizon were not yet brightened by the sun. There were no dead or wounded in sight, not one body or red puddle of blood. The rain had soaked the earth, but it had also cleansed all signs of death.
When she reached a dilapidated farmhouse and barns, the first thing she saw were horseless army wagons with their two wooden arms reaching towards the sky and the bottom parts of the wheels buried in mire. Soldiers lying on the ground or sitting against the house’s tumbledown walls lifted their heads at Mercy’s arrival. Their expressions were a mixture of surprise, admiration of her beauty, and in some, outright curiosity.
As she got closer, she noticed that most of these particular soldiers were wounded. There was also a group of Union prisoners sitting inside a split-fenced paddock that was guarded by grey coats. Poor souls, she thought. They should not be blamed or punished for the actions of spiteful politicians. Mercy felt her mood grow ever darker just thinking about the futility of war.
Every man’s uniform was caked in dark brown hardened muck, making it almost impossible to tell the rebels and Yankees apart. Every blackened mud-layered face told the same story of exhaustion, shock, loss, and confusion, as though none of the men could quite believe what had happened.
She asked the first group of soldiers if she could speak to the commanding officer or sergeant, after no one seemed to know anything about the cavalrymen killed in an ambush in a cornfield. An officer eventually came outside. She didn’t ask his name, nor did he seem interested in giving it to her, but he did offer her an answer to her question, albeit a casual one without substance. “These cornfields go on for miles. Your captain may still be lying where he fell. There are many casualties we have not gotten to yet. The Yankees were entrenched around the entire Beaver Dam river area, and parts of our army at the front got hit real hard. We’re still trying to get to some parts where men from both sides were left behind. “Can you tell me how to get to the battlefields from here?”
“Lady, just follow your nose. There was fightin’ all over this place, but if you don’t find what you’re lookin’ for straight away, you’ll smell it. They’re burning horses up that there road …and doin’ some burials.”
&nb
sp; Mercy’s heart was pounding at the mention of horses and, more importantly, burials. What if someone had already laid Jacob to rest in a grave with countless other men, Confederate and Union. How would she ever know unless she got to the place before the burial party started covering the bodies?
“If you want my advice, lady, don’t go,” she heard the soldier say. “Turn your horse around and go back to where you came from. What you’ll see up there will live with your innocent womanly heart forever.”
“Thank you, but my heart can abide whatever tragic scene I find,” she told him pointedly. “What it wouldn’t bear is not finding out what happened to my fiancé.”
She left the man and rode on, eventually reaching a crossroads. She halted there and caught a glimpse of bedraggled Confederates in a flattened cornfield beyond the road. She gasped in horror as she neared the men. She had spent time with Jacob in his encampment. She had seen death and sickening cruelty, but nothing in her life so far could compare to what she was witnessing in this field, where a raging battle had taken place only two days earlier.
A light morning mist still hovered above the ground, like a blanket covering the dead. Grey coat soldiers, staggering with tiredness, were picking through the debris left behind after the battle. Some of the men carried baskets, looking as though they were on a shopping expedition.
She sat on her horse, mesmerised at the terrible scene and panting heavily at the powerful stench of death and burning horseflesh. Rebels were whooping with delight at finding shoes, rifles, canteens, and half-used cartridge boxes, even though dead bodies were still being removed. This field had been partially cleared, Mercy thought, but Union and Confederate dead were still being laid to rest.
