by P. B. Ryan
She shrugged. “You look like a perfect gentleman today.”
“You’ve got a strange definition of ‘perfect,’” he said, underscoring that observation by helping himself to a second, if smaller, dose of Black Drop.
“Yes, well...”
“Let’s walk some more, shall we?” Rising, he handed her up from the bench. His gait was, if not flawless, certainly less halting than before. “Present appearances notwithstanding, I happen to be a professional gambler and opium fiend who will almost certainly hang for murder before the year is through. Hardly what any little girl would want in a father. Far better if she never learns of my existence.”
“You’re much more than those things, Dr. Hewitt. Didn’t General Grant once call you the best battle surgeon in the Union Army? Jack Thorpe praised your skill and fearlessness—he told me you saved countless lives.”
“I sawed off countless legs,” he said, “and if the cut wasn’t too close to the hip, they had a better than even chance of making it. Any corner butcher worth his salt could have done as well. Jack wasn’t at Andersonville, Miss Sweeney. He doesn’t know how pathetically useless I became there. I was surrounded by filth and contagion, with no medications, no tools—except for my folding bistoury, which I’d hidden in the hem of my trousers. Not that it helped much. Four out of every ten men who walked into that place were buried there, and I did little to improve on those statistics.”
“Jack told me you allowed yourself to be captured in order to take care of the wounded men.”
“It was Robbie I was mostly concerned with.” He lit a cigarette and blew a plume of smoke into the frosty sky, stained lavender now that the sun had dipped below the horizon. “The others weren’t so bad off, but Robbie had taken a Minié ball just above his right elbow, and it had ruptured everything—bone, soft tissue, arteries... I didn’t dare move him. I put off the decision to amputate as long as I could, but I finally did it, while our regiment was retreating. The other men had to hold him down, because there was no chloroform, but he hardly made a sound, just gritted his teeth and took it. He held his screams in for me so I could do what I had to do without...” He shook his head, adding hoasely, “So I could get through it.”
“My God,” Nell whispered. “I didn’t know he’d lost an arm—and under such circumstances. Your mother didn’t tell me.”
“I don’t suppose she knows. No reason she should.”
No reason she should know, Nell wondered, or no reason Nell should tell her? “I won’t mention it,” she said.
He nodded stiffly as he drew on his cigarette.
Interesting. “It’s a credit to your skills that Robbie survived at a place like Andersonville after something like that.”
“It helped that it was February, and cold, which tends to keep certain types of infection at bay. I remember, it was snowing when we got there. I’d never realized it snowed so far south. The men with no shelter lay curled up on the ground, thousands of them, their bones showing through their clothes, no blankets...”
“Did you have shelter?”
“I dug a hole for Robbie and me—not a real hole, because the ground was half-frozen, just a sort of depression in the earth, but it was ours alone. Two raiders tried to take it over, but—”
“Raiders?”
“The Andersonville Raiders. They were a gang of prisoners who’d banded together to steal what they could from the rest of us, and they didn’t stop at murder. The two who went after our hole had clubs, but I had my bistoury. I got one of them in the throat when he raised his club over Robbie’s head—big blond fellow, looked like a Viking. They left us alone after that.”
Got him in the throat? “Did he die? The one you...?”
“I imagine so. That was the last I saw of him, in any event. We rounded up the rest of the raiders in July and put them on trial. The commandant let us hang the ringleaders.”
“Ah—when we first met, at the police station, you told me you’d seen six men hanged at once.”
“I often wish I hadn’t.”
“The commandant himself was executed after the war, wasn’t he? What was his name? Something German, I think.”
“He was Swiss. Henry Wirz. I saw him hanged. He died as hard as those raiders. Took a long time for him to stop struggling.”
“Jack Thorpe was part of the legal team that prosecuted him. But he probably told you that.”
“Yes.” He smiled indulgently as he stamped out his cigarette. “I gather it was an attempt on his part to make up for having let Robbie and me go to Andersonville without him. He always did have a painfully earnest streak.” Will dosed himself with a few more drops from the little blue bottle.
Nell said, “Wirz was hanged in November of sixty-five. You were in Washington then?”
He nodded as he shoved the cork back in the bottle, his eyes heavy-lidded. “I got there just in time for the victory parade along Pennsylvania Avenue at the end of May. Stuck around for a few months, till I felt like myself again. It had taken me the better part of a year just to make my way back north after I got out of Andersonville.”
“That long?”
“Eight or nine months, anyway. Let’s see, I escaped August ninth, the day after Robbie was killed, then I spent the next—”
“Killed?” Nell stopped in her tracks. “It wasn’t dysentery?”
He stilled, his back to her for a moment, before turning and regarding her gravely, if a little blearily, given all the Black Drop he’d consumed. “No, Miss Sweeney. It wasn’t dysentery.”
“Then how did...” It came to her then. “He was trying to escape, too, wasn’t he? You were going to get out together, on August eighth, but he was killed. That’s when you were shot.”
“Oh, that busy little mind of yours.” He stuck his hands in his coat pockets, smiling as if at a precocious child. “And then?”
“I suppose you... Oh. You had a bullet in your leg.”
“I also had a bistoury.”
“Don’t tell me you took it out yourself.”
“Would have been untidy to leave it in. We surgeons loathe that sort of thing.”
“How did you control the bleeding? You had no way to suture the wound.”
“Cauterization—also with the bistoury, heated up a fire.”
Nell winced, imagining it. “Handy little implement.”
“Hence my sentimental attachment to it.”
Nell shook her head. “Performing surgery on yourself in those conditions... You’re lucky to be alive.”
“You think I’m alive?” Turning, he continued down the path.
Lifting her skirts to catch up with him, she said, “How did you manage to escape, with a fresh bullet wound? Jack said the stockade was made of solid pine logs, with sentries standing watch.”
“You’re quite the relentless interrogator, Miss Sweeney.”
“I’m just trying to—”
“There was a thunderstorm,” he said as he fished the little bottle out of his pocket again.
“You’re taking an awful lot of that,” she observed as he tossed back a few more drops.
“Helps me to remember without reliving.” Stuffing the bottle back in his pocket, he said, in a slightly slurred voice, “It was the worst summer storm I’ve ever seen, before or since. The sky went utterly black around noon, except for the lightning. You know what a mountain howitzer sounds like?”
“Um...”
“The thunder sounded just like that—a sudden, concussive roar that rattles your teeth in your head. The problem was, of course, that most of us had no shelter. Runoff had flooded the creek we used for drinking water, and it dammed up against the stockade wall till parts of it started collapsing.”
“You mentioned Stockade Creek at the Charles Street Jail, when you were delirious.”
He stopped walking. “I talked about Andersonville?”
She paused, wondering why he seemed so anxious. “I suppose. It was all pretty—”
“What did I sa
y?”
“It’s hard to recall. It sounded like gibberish at the time. It seemed there was something you wanted to do, or were willing to do. You said, ‘I would have done it.’ You seemed very upset. Oh, and you said the Stockade Creek was full of typhoid.”
He grunted as he continued walking. “That and about a dozen other wretched diseases. The sewage used to back up in there.”
Walking alongside him, she said, “I gather you saw an opportunity when the stockade wall started collapsing.”
He nodded. “No one else would come with me. Most of them were half-starved and wasted from disease, and no one thought we could make it back to the North alive—we were in the deep South, don’t forget.”
“What made you think you could?”
“I didn’t think I could—I’ve always been fairly good at calculating odds—but I’d lost Robbie, and I knew my own days were numbered if I stayed there, so I took the gamble. I scratched my name and unit on the back of my belt buckle and exchanged belts with one of the corpses in the mud. There were scores of them, so I picked a fellow I happened to know had no family waiting for news of him. I darkened my skin with charcoal, but I had to swim through the creek to get out of there, so most of it washed off—but with all the chaos, I made it into the woods without being spotted. It was slow going, what with the leg, but by nightfall I was in an orchard a couple of miles away, feasting on peaches. They came back up immediately, of course—I was pretty malnourished myself by then.”
“It took you nine months to make it up north?” Nell asked.
“Oh, it was quite the odyssey. In the beginning, I had two major concerns—keeping my wound clean and stealing anything I could find that contained enough opium to keep me on my feet. Before long, I needed it not just for pain, but to avoid withdrawal. I learned I could imitate a passable Georgia accent—the inflections are actually quite British—and that helped. And I’d always been good at cards, so before long I was able to honestly purchase my laudanum and Black Drop—when it was available. The Confederate Army was so low on opium that they actually had farm wives growing poppies. There were times when I aroused suspicion, and I had a few narrow escapes, but mostly it was a matter of just limping northward. By the time Lee surrendered, I was in Washington.”
“Why didn’t you let your family know you were alive?”
“At first, I just kept putting it off. I couldn’t bear the prospect of all their questions, their pity, their loathing of me because I was alive and Robbie was dead.”
“They wouldn’t have loathed you for that.”
“Why not? I did.” Will stopped, withdrew his Bull Durham tin and flipped it open.
He still does, Nell realized. It may have been physical pain that first drove Will into the arms of Morphia, but it was a different kind of pain that kept him there. His self-imposed exile among the hop fiends and cardsharps was a sort of penance for having crawled out of the Hell that had consumed so many of those “pink-cheeked youths” he’d failed to save—most especially Robbie.
“Eventually it just got too late to go back, and I came to realize it was the last thing in the world I wanted.” He lit the cigarette, expelling the smoke in a lingering stream. “God, what a relief it was to be dead.”
He flicked the match out, and she realized night had fallen while they were walking. There were a few gas lamps in the park, but none close by. The nearest source of light was the orange-hot tip of Will’s cigarette, and all it illuminated was his face as he studied her in the dark.
“You owe me now,” he said, his voice so low that she felt it humming all along her skin. “I’ve allowed you to hammer me with questions, some quite personal, and I believe I’ve been admirably forthcoming. You, on the other hand, remain a creature of mystery. It’s your turn to open up a bit.”
Turning, he crossed in two long strides to a bench, and gestured for her to sit.
Not budging from where she stood, Nell said, “I’m afraid I’ve no mysteries to uncover.”
“Nonsense. All I know about you is that you grew up on Cape Cod, and that your father was a day laborer on the docks. And, of course, that you were apprenticed to Dr. Greaves for four years. I can only speculate as to what became of your family...and how you got that intriguing scar.”
She rubbed her arms. “It’s cold. We should—”
“It’s been cold all along. If you’d minded, we would have left before now. What are you afraid of, Miss Sweeney—that I’ll disclose your secrets to my parents? You must know there’s no chance of that. And of course anything you tell me will die with me, so...” He sat and patted the bench next to him.
She hesitated a moment longer, then sat.
He finished his cigarette in silence, stubbed it out. “What was his name?” he asked quietly.
She turned to find him looking at her. It was too dark to tell for sure, but he seemed to be focusing on the tiny scar near her left eyebrow.
“Duncan,” she said. The name came out sounding rusty, as if from lack of use; in fact, she hadn’t spoken it in years.
“He was the man you were with before Dr. Greaves?”
So he knew about her and Dr. Greaves, or else it was exploratory surgery. In any event, she said simply, “Yes.”
“For how long?”
“Two years. We met when I was sixteen.” There was a dizzying sense of liberation, after years of taking such care not to reveal too much, in answering his simple questions with simple, truthful answers.
“Where is he now?”
“Serving a thirty year sentence at the state prison in Charlestown.”
That quieted him for a moment. “For what he did to you?”
“No, for beating and knifing a man during a robbery. He tied him up and...mutilated him. He did things he didn’t have to do.”
Will took out his blue bottle, looked at it for a moment and put it back unopened. “How did you meet him?”
An interesting alternative, Nell thought, to What were you doing with him? “My brother Jamie introduced us. I knew he was a petty thief, like Jamie, but he was incredibly handsome, and he had quite a winning way about him, when he wanted to. And compared to the men I’d known growing up...” She steeled herself and forged on. “My father ran off with a barmaid when I was ten. A year later, my mother died of Asiatic Cholera, along with two of my brothers and a sister. The rest of us—me, Jamie, and my baby sister Tess—we got sent to the Barnstable County Poor House. I lived there till Duncan took me away.”
“Your knight in shining armor.”
“It felt that way at the time.”
“Where are they now, your brother and sister?”
“I don’t know where Jamie is—behind bars somewhere, probably. Tess died of diphtheria in the poor house when she was about Gracie’s age. She even looked a little like Gracie, with that dark hair and her impish little—” She was going to say “smile,” but her throat closed up.
“I’m sorry,” Will said with quiet sincerity.
“I’ve always felt there should have been some way for me to save her, something I could have done...”
“I feel the same way about Robbie. But diphtheria... No, Miss Sweeney, I’m quite certain there was nothing you could have done, so you should put your doubts out of your mind and just be grateful for the time you had with her.”
She looked at him, but it was too dark to make out his expression. He lit a cigarette, briefly illuminating his face, but he looked away from her as he did so. They were sitting closer than before, she realized as she caught a whiff of Bay Rum mingled with tobacco.
“And how did you meet Dr. Greaves?” he asked.
“After Duncan...” There were no words to describe the horror of what he’d done to her. “He... I’d been...hurt, rather badly.”
She heard Will take a breath and let it out, saw his free hand, the one not holding the cigarette, tense on his leg. He turned toward her, and she saw it in his eyes: he knew what she meant by “hurt.” There had been that, yes.
..but so much more. It had been a nightmare she had no desire to recreate.
“I found myself in Dr. Greaves’s care. He saved my life,” she said, omitting the details, because it wouldn’t do to tell him everything. “He let me stay in his house in East Falmouth because I had nowhere else to go, and Duncan was still out there somewhere. His cook and housekeeper lived there, too, so it didn’t seem too improper. It took months for me to get back on my feet. He was very kind, very undemanding. Eventually he offered me an apprenticeship, and I jumped at it. I’d been living there for almost a year before...things changed between us.”
She could still feel it...Dr. Greaves’s tentative, surprising touch on the back of her neck as she sat on the floor in front of his drawing room fireplace that night, bent over her French exercise. The last thing I’d want to do, he’d said, is force my attentions on you, after everything you’ve... She’d touched her fingers to his lips. He’d closed his eyes, pressed her palm to his mouth.
The first time, it had been because he’d saved her life, and he’d been so kind and needful, and she couldn’t turn him away.
The second time, it was because he’d been so tender the first time, so different from what she’d known before.
“I didn’t begrudge it,” she told Will. “I don’t want you to think it was just repayment for what he’d done for me. It was...complicated.”
“These things always are.” Golden light suffused his face as he drew on his cigarette. “I’m surprised he let you go. He might have offered to marry you, if only to keep you there.”
“He already had a wife.”
“Ah.” He sounded surprised, and a little dismayed.
“It’s not what you think. She’s been a psychiatric patient at Massachusetts General for about twelve years now. He loved her. He still loves her, I’m sure, but...” She shrugged sadly.
“Still, one would think he would have tried to hold onto you somehow, offered you money, anything...”
Nell bristled.
“Not that you would have taken it. I’m not implying...what you think I am. It’s just, in his situation, I would have moved heaven and earth to keep you.” An odd, unsettled expression shadowed his eyes. He turned away to smoke his cigarette.
