The Blue and the Gray Undercover

by Ed Gorman

  “You’re one of the few to deny it,” Mrs. Cunliffe said, her tone musing. “Of course, your carefully chosen words were not an exact denial, were they? More of a way of avoiding the question.”

  That flush still warmed his neck. The woman was smarter than he expected, and not nearly as retiring as most women of his acquaintance. Of course, most women of his acquaintance were matrons who were concerned with their broods, or girls who had Just reached their majority and were interested in becoming an officer’s wife.

  “Such a shy man,” Mrs. Cunliffe said. “Who would have thought such a big strong strapping fellow like you would be shy?”

  He wasn’t shy, just focused. But he would let her take his actions any way she wanted. It was easier that way.

  She led him across the yard directly toward the beauty he had been admiring moments ago.

  “Shoo,” Mrs. Cunliffe said as they got close, waving her arm at the men who were surrounding the younger woman. “I have an introduction to make.”

  To Garrison’s surprise, the men left, several with backward glances at the beauty as if they had expected her to defend them. She said nothing, merely watched Mrs. Cunliffe with a polite and curious smile on her foxlike face.

  “Serena,” Mrs. Cunliffe said, “I would like you to meet one of Washington’s most eligible bachelors. That we even have him here is a rare treat. Lieutenant Nathaniel Garrison, Serena Freneau.”

  Miss Freneau offered her hand, small, delicate, and white, and he took it by the fingers, then bent over it, not quite kissing it. Her fingers were warm and smooth in his own.

  “A pleasure, miss,” he said.

  This time, her smile was all for him. “The pleasure’s mine.”

  “I’ll leave you both,” Mrs. Cunliffe said. “And remember, Lieutenant. This is a party. No need to be so very serious.”

  He looked after her, watching her black skirts sway as she walked away from him. A party, and he was too serious. Of course he was serious. There was a war going on, a war no one seemed to understand except him.

  “Perhaps the city’s most eligible bachelor is interested in the city’s most famous widow.” Serena Freneau’s voice was soft and teasing, with a bit of a bite to it.

  He looked back at her, unable to believe his lack of manners. He hadn’t let go of her fingers yet, and didn’t dare now. It would make him look even ruder than if he continued to hold them.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was just that that was our first conversation. I had no idea she even knew who I was.”

  Miss Freneau’s eves were a shade of brown that matched her hair. They twinkled at him. “You’re at her party, aren’t you? Of course she knows who you are.”

  That flush—why was he cursed with it on this night?—rose again. A trickle of sweat followed the drying path along his back, tickling as it traced his spine. “I meant—”

  “I know what you meant.” Slowly she looked down at his hand, still holding hers. “Aunt Evangeline always surprises people with her knowledge. Perhaps it is because men think knowledge is unusual in females.”

  He almost felt trapped by those fingers in his, the way that she wasn’t protesting what was becoming a faux pas. “I don’t find knowledge unusual in females,” he said. “I’m just surprised that as important a personage as Mrs. Cunliffe would know who I am.”

  “A member of General Scott’s staff? The only one, it’s said, who knows that a short war is what the country needs? Of course she knows who you are.”

  And apparently Miss Freneau did as well. “I didn’t realize that Mrs. Cunliffe was your aunt.”

  Miss Freneau smiled at him, this one soft and rather indulgent. How many different versions of a smile did this woman have?

  “You don’t have time to keep track of social conventions.” Her fingers squeezed his in acknowledgment of their touch, and then she broke the contact. “It’s simply nice to know our fair city is being kept safe by men such as you.”

  “Our fair city is under no immediate danger.”

  “That’s not what they say.” Miss Freneau leaned toward him. “I’ve heard that the Rebels want nothing more than to destroy the capital. What son of disgrace is that?”

  “It’s war, miss,” he said, and wished he hadn’t. When had he gotten so prim around women?

  “Are you saying we should take their capital as well?”

  “As your aunt just reminded me,” he said gently, “this is a party. There’s no need to be so serious.”

  Miss Freneau’s eyes widened and then she laughed—that same musical sound he had heard before. It was entrancing, almost seductive, and he felt a small thrill of pride that he had caused it.

  “Of course,” she said, taking his arm just as her aunt had. “I’m the one being rude. I’m asking you to discuss work, and this gathering is supposed to make you forget about work, relax, and enjoy yourself.”

  He placed a hand over hers, noting the looks he got from the men who had been gathered around her before. He remembered how she hadn’t touched any of them, but she had touched him. Again, that small pride ran through him.

  “Would you like some punch, Miss Freneau?”

  “I thought you would never ask,” she said, leading him to the outdoor table covered with punch and various cakes.

  Her skirts brushed his legs. She wore a light perfume, so unique that it took him a moment to realize it was lilac water mixed with her own scent.

  When they reached the table, he slipped out of her grasp and took the cutglass punch cup an elderly female servant offered him, then handed it to Miss Freneau. He took another glass for himself. He was going to ask if she wanted cakes, when she leaned forward.

  “There will be dancing later, Lieutenant,” she said. “My aunt has given permission for at least two waltzes. We’re being informal—no dance cards—but I would hope you save one waltz for me.”

  This time he smiled. The waltz was a brazen dance not often allowed at social functions, especially social functions of this caliber. “Have you ever waltzed before, Miss Freneau?”

  “Only with my dance instructor,” she said, “and only because I forced him to teach me.”

  Garrison could see that. The woman had a strength about her that could not be denied. “To dance it might compromise your reputation.”

  Her eyes twinkled and this time her smile was wide. “‘Reputation’? Lieutenant, we’re at war. In six months’ time, who will care about reputations?”

  “If we do this right,” he said, “you won’t even notice the war.”

  She tossed her ringlets back and sighed. “And here I was hoping for a measure of freedom.”

  “That seems to be,” he said, “what everyone is hoping for these days.”

  JUNE 17, 1911

  Garrison turned, the remembered scent of lilac water still in his nose. The waltz had been the highlight of his life until that point, Serena Freneau’s small body moving with his in a sweeping motion, her skirts flaring behind her, his hand pressed against the small of her back, her bright eyes holding his as if there were no one else in the room—indeed, no one else in the world.

  It had been the beginning of something, although not quite the something he had thought.

  The laugh again, musical, warm. He scanned the deck chairs, saw no one laughing. Most of the passengers there were reading or talking softly, enjoying the maiden voyage of a ship he couldn’t even have imagined fifty years before.

  The world had changed, so much that at times he barely recognized it.

  He scanned until he saw a grouping around one of the iron tables placed on the deck by the crew before dawn. An umbrella shaded the table itself. The women who sat there were not the young creatures he had thought, but elderly, most of them wearing tasteful black gowns. Not the black silk that Mrs. Cunliffe had worn fifty years before, with reams of material over hoops, but long skirts that covered sensible shoes, black lace around the neck, and in the case of one woman, a long strand of pearls that added a bit
of brightness.

  He was about to turn away when he heard the laugh a third time. It came from the woman wearing the pearls. She had silver hair rolled into a bun at the back of her head, rather like that of an aging Gibson girl. Softly curling tendrils fell along the sides of her narrow face.

  The chin wasn’t as sharp as it had been and the skin looked papery, like some women’s skin got when they aged, but the brown eyes were still sharp, maybe more sharp now that they no longer matched her hair.

  He leaned against the rail, feeling sea spray mist him like tears. His breath was in his throat again, his heart racing like a boy’s.

  It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be possible. She had died, drowned as she tried to escape a U.S. naval blockade runner. The rough seas had pulled her under when the lifeboat she’d stolen capsized.

  He’d seen the obituary, visited her grave. Clenched his fist on top of the stone and pounded until his skin rubbed away, and his blood stained the rounded edge.

  If that were her, if she really lived, it meant she had told yet another he, and another lie might be more than he could bear.

  MAY 20, 1864

  Heat already, even though it was barely noon. Flies, on his face, his arms. Too tired to brush them off. Thinner than he’d ever been. The dysentery was bad. Not as bad as some, dying in the middle of the camp, no one noticing until they’d become so covered with flies that they looked like a strange hive. And the stench …

  A man never got used to the stench.

  Garrison sat, arms around his legs. His uniform was all rags, which was good in this heat. It’d been cool when he was captured, over a year ago now. Over a year and he hadn’t changed clothes since. Hadn’t really bathed except early on, when he didn’t know that he shouldn’t use his drinking water for washing.

  He sat near the edge of the log stockade. Other men were around him, though he barely noticed. He was too weak to notice much. His brain simply hummed as he tried not to think, tried not to think about any of it, from the first awful days.

  Ahead of him, the line drawn in the cracked red Georgia clay, harsh now, deeper than it had been last summer—the days of the miserable heat. He’d tried to bury the dead then, had had some strength, but when he’d collapsed, no one had picked him up. No one had helped. He just kept thinking of the bodies and the disease. Less than sixteen acres this camp was, and, some said, more than twenty thousand men here—living men. Who knew how many dead?

  Who cared anymore?

  Still, he stared at the line. The dead line, they called it. One foot across it and a guard would shoot him, not care if he was only wounded, let him rot in the wretched Georgia sun. Sometimes men cried from out there, whimpered, moaned in pain, and no one dared go help them. No one dared try. Not if he still valued his life.

  Garrison sometimes wondered why he did. It would all end so easily. One foot across, maybe two. The perimeter wasn’t as well guarded here. There weren’t enough guards for all these men. That’s why, he guessed, there was a lack of food, the horrible conditions. Keep the men weak and they couldn’t run. They wouldn’t even try.

  But he stared at the line. The dead line. Like he did every day. So easy to end it all. And so hard.

  One shot, or, maybe, escape. But to what?

  The thoughts were too much and he willed his mind back to the humming. It wasn’t going there, rarely did when he contemplated the dead line. For there was nothing left for him. Nothing at all.

  No way he could face her. Anyone. No way he could face anyone from his past at all.

  A hand on his back, then a crust of bread thrust at him. He looked over, saw Major Tom Winthrop of the New York Zouaves, his gaudy uniform now in tatters, the colors faded and no longer joyful.

  Winthrop thrust the bread at him again, and this time Garrison Cook it. The crust was so dry it crumbled in his hands. He knew how it would feel in his mouth, impossible to swallow without water—and he wouldn’t get his ration until that night, if he was lucky enough to survive that long.

  Lucky enough. The thought almost made him chuckle.

  Still he took a bite, forced himself to chew, swallow, nearly choking on the scratchy stale crust going down. He uttered a weak cough, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then checked it for blood.

  None yet. But it was only a matter of time. Only a matter of time.

  “New recruits today,” Winthrop said, using the term that had once been a joke and wasn’t any longer. More prisoners in the already overcrowded space. Raw and green and unable to know what horrors faced them, thinking at that point that they were better off than their fellows—at least they were alive. “There’s one you should see.”

  It took Winthrop awhile to make the whole sentence, bur it took Garrison awhile to follow it as well. They were well matched, like old men who had said everything they needed to long ago.

  “Why?” Garrison asked.

  “News. About that woman.”

  Winthrop knew everything. Down to the ugliest detail, like a father confessor. There had been nothing else to do in here but talk. Even then, Garrison hadn’t said much. Only to Winthrop, whose unit had left him for dead, thinking he had betrayed them, when in truth he hadn’t. He knew who did, he had said, not that it mattered now. That man was free or dead or in some other camp. Winthrop was concerned with survival here.

  “Don’t need news,” Garrison said.

  “This you do.” Then Winthrop turned, slowly, like a man underwater, and waved his fingers at someone, beckoning him forward.

  Garrison heard the footsteps, the intake of breath, saw a droplet of sweat hit the dry red clay. The man still had enough water in him to waste it in sweat; someday he would think that a luxury.

  “My god in heaven, are you all dying?”

  Garrison looked up, saw a young man’s face, red whiskers sprouting in patches with the growth of a week, hair messy and covered with grime. New recruit, captured nearby. Not a long journey. Not a lot of suffering. Yet.

  “Tell Lieutenant Garrison what you told me,” Winthrop said.

  The boy waited for Winthrop to finish—impatiently, Garrison thought, obviously not used to the pace of life here: the conservation of life, the way energy had to be stored, held, a commodity as precious as water, twice as precious as bread.

  “Lieutenant Garrison?” the boy asked. “Not Nathaniel Garrison?”

  “Yes,” Winthrop said.

  Garrison stared at the boy, the green eyes sliding back and forth, the beginnings of a panic that Garrison didn’t yet understand.

  “I’m sorry, sir.” The boy bit his lower lip. “She said you were dead.”

  “Who?” Garrison’s voice was little more than a whisper. The voice of a man not yet dead. But close. Too damn close.

  “Your wife.”

  Garrison’s hand snaked out before he could stop it, all bone and sinew, and it caught the boy’s wrist, still fat with flesh. The boy looked down, startled, tried to wrench away and couldn’t.

  “How do you know my wife?” Garrison asked.

  “A party, last summer. She held a charity function for the widows-and-orphans campaign.” The boy’s voice was trembling. “Please, sir, you’re hurting me.”

  “Did you sleep with her?”

  “Sir, I—”

  “Did you?”

  The boy swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Garrison envied him the saliva that made such a movement so simple, so involuntary.

  “She said you were dead, sir.”

  Garrison flung the boy away from him. How many lives this time, then? How many?

  “And I suppose you told her everything you knew, figuring it wouldn’t hurt.”

  The boy was rubbing his wrist. He studied Garrison for a moment; then an awful understanding filled his face, an understanding quickly denied. “Sir, I thought she was a loyal officer’s widow.”

  “She was a loyal officer’s wife.” The words caught in Garrison’s throat like the bread crust had, and he coughed agai
n, wiping, checking for blood, seeing none. Not yet. “But she was not loyal. Not loyal at all.”

  APRIL 25, 1863

  In his own bedroom, the window open, the spring air carrying the faint scents of cherry blossoms on the breeze, Garrison could almost see the future. His wife beside him, naked, her warm body pressed against his, both of them still sticky from lovemaking, the softness of the cotton ticking in the well-stuffed mattress lulling him toward sleep, it wasn’t hard to imagine, years from now, the war over, how he would lie here, holding her, trying to make no noise so that the children wouldn’t hear.

  Perhaps it was a fantasy. There were no children yet, neither of them wanting to bring a child into this horror, this world that was so far from the one he had known. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, only four months old, guaranteed that if the North won—when the North won—the world would be a different place from the one Garrison grew up in.

  Serena had just been complaining about how difficult it was to keep help anymore. She had grown up in Evangeline Cunliffe’s house, where the servants had once been slaves, who had stayed with the family after receiving their freedom—or so the Cunliffes had told Garrison. He doubted even that was true when, after the war began in earnest, the servants vanished one by one, like thieves in the night, stealing their freedom the way their counterparts had done for decades down South.

  Serena sighed next to him and he wondered if she was drifting into sleep. They had promised to stay awake together—he only had twenty-four hours until he had to return to hell—but they had not always managed to keep that promise before.

  “Where will you be?” she asked him, her voice sleepy. He felt her breath on his chest, and the softness of her hair beneath his hand.

  “I don’t know for sure,” he said, hating to lie to her. The lie spoiled the beauty of the night. The war came back now in all its bloody terror, the stench of mud, the cold, the smell of gunpowder and smoke filling the air.