Wedded to War Page 8

  Charlotte’s mouth fell open but no sound came out.

  “I can do without children, darling. I can’t do without you.”

  His voice was smooth, his words hypnotic. No one had ever said anything like that to her before. In ten years of courting, not one had come remotely close.

  “You still want me?” She was incredulous.

  “More than ever. Surely you see the depth of my feeling for you now. Be my wife, let me prove it to you for the rest of your life.”

  A fleeting image of Caleb’s face flashed in her mind. Don’t lead Mr. Hastings on if he’s not the right one for you, he had said. But he hadn’t said, “Choose me.” Write to me, he had said. But he hadn’t said, “I want you to be mine.” No, he had walked away. He wasn’t here. If she didn’t accept Phineas’s offer, another one might never come along. She was four years past the age of spinsterhood. Did she truly want to be unmarried forever?

  “You’re sure you still want me?” she asked again.

  “I’ve already told you I do! But if you need to hear it again, yes, I want you, and I’ll tell you every day as long as we both shall live. I’ll give you whatever you want before you even realize you want it. You’ll never have to work again.” He slid closer to her on the bench.

  “I don’t really work now.”

  “Oh be serious! You are working your delicate hands to the bone at the hospital every day.” Phineas reached out to touch one of her hands, but she tucked them in the folds of her skirt.

  “This is what I want to do, Phineas.” She looked him directly in the eyes. “For the first time in my life, I feel as though I may actually have some value to other people. Not for what I look like but for what I do. I am a part of something bigger than myself, saving lives that have been offered to keep our country together!”

  “I have tried to be understanding about this new obsession of yours. As a single woman, I imagine you have seen this as an interesting diversion—although a rather morbid one, I must say—to fill up your time.”

  Charlotte’s heart rate quickened at the insult. “This is no game for me, Phineas! I’m not just filling up time. Our country is at war and I want to help win it! I want to be a nurse. Don’t you see? This is something I have to do.”

  His brow furrowed. “No wife of mine will be around other men and their frustrated desires. I wish you would give this up. With me as your husband, you could have a future ahead of you.”

  Charlotte lifted her chin and pressed her lips together. “I have always had a future ahead of me, Phineas, whether or not it included marriage. A woman’s life is not wasted just because she is unmarried. At least, not unless she spends all of it trying to secure a husband.”

  Phineas’s eyes darted about him. “Calm down.”

  “I can be calm about a great many things, Phineas, but not this.”

  His face darkened. He leveled a stony gaze at her, and she returned it, unyielding. Clearly, this conversation was not going as he had planned. Charlotte sighed and looked down at her hands clasped tightly in her lap. “If marrying you means I must give up nursing, I’m afraid I must regretfully decline.”

  He laughed then, but his eyes were cold and hard. “Afraid you ‘must regretfully decline’? My dear, you sound as though you are declining a dinner invitation, rather than ripping my heart out.”

  But he didn’t look heartbroken. He looked like a volcano about to erupt, his eyes smoldering pieces of coal.

  She shrank away from him and moved to the end of the seat.

  He caught her wrist and gripped it as he would grip the reins of his horses if they were running out of control.

  She could feel her pulse push against his hand. Her fingers began to tingle. She gasped.

  At the rumble of an approaching carriage, Charlotte slid her gaze past Phineas. “You will remember yourself, Mr. Hastings,” she whispered, tilting her head toward the hoofbeats and voices of strangers growing louder. “Let go of me.”

  He released her wrist then and rubbed his hand over his face. After a moment, she heard him mutter, “Uncalled for.” But it was impossible to tell if he was referring to himself or to her.

  No one knows, who did not watch the thing from the beginning, how much opposition, how much ill-will, how much unfeeling want of thought, these women nurses endured. Hardly a surgeon whom I can think of, received or treated them with even common courtesy. Government had decided that women should be employed, and the army surgeons—unable, therefore, to close the hospitals against them—determined to make their lives so unbearable that they should be forced in self-defence to leave. It seemed a matter of cool calculation, just how much ill-mannered opposition would be requisite to break up the system.

  Some of the bravest women I have ever known were among this first company of army nurses. They saw at once the position of affairs, the attitude assumed by the surgeons and the wall against which they were expected to break and scatter; and they set themselves to undermine the whole thing.

  —GEORGEANNA WOOLSEY, written in 1864

  Act Two

  CHANGING TIMES

  Chapter Ten

  Friday, June 7, 1861

  Meridian Hill, Washington City

  A log snapped in the fire, sending a shower of sparks under a twilight sky brushed with strokes of pink and gold. Caleb Lansing tugged at the collar of his scratchy blue wool uniform and lowered himself down onto a wooden crate to watch the orange flames dance. He sure didn’t need the heat, but at least it kept the flies away as a pot of coffee boiled.

  Wiping his glistening forehead with the back of his hand, he looked through the haze of smoke at the rest of the camp, most of them sitting on the ground or on overturned barrels, unwrapping small bundles of hardtack from their haversacks. He pulled out his own, placed it on a flat rock, and rammed a Sharp rifle butt onto it, breaking it into pieces.

  “Well, Doc, is it a teeth duller or a worm castle tonight?” A baby-faced private named Hodges dropped down to the ground and reached into his own haversack.

  Caleb groaned. “Worm castle.” Maggots and weevils writhed through the pieces of hardtack and onto the stone.

  “Downright insulting, that’s what it is, Doc. A man marches all day under the sun and what do we get for it? All I got to say is, it’s a good thing we ain’t fightin’ yet, or we’d all drop over in a dead faint like a heap of womenfolk. Uncle Sam says ‘Fight a war!’ but he sure ain’t givin’ us any help, is he now?”

  Caleb chuckled in agreement. “Too hard to chew, too small for shoeing mules, and too big to use as bullets. Utter waste of space, wouldn’t you say, Hodges?”

  “Darn right, Doc.” Hodges scooped up the worm castles, trotted about twenty yards and threw them in the trench.

  “Throw that hardtack out of the trenches, private! Haven’t you been told that often enough?” Caleb overheard the brigade officer of the day say sharply to the young man.

  “I thrown it out two or three times, sir, but it keeps crawling back!”

  Caleb didn’t advocate insubordination to officers, but he couldn’t help laughing at Hodge’s very reasonable response. It was a trial to not have decent food when the soldiers were constantly burning up their energy.

  It had been another long day of marching and drilling for all but those who had come to see him with complaints of nausea, diarrhea, dizziness, or fever. If he had been in a hospital or at home at his own clinic, he could have offered them lumps of ice or oranges to suck on, but here in camp, that was out of the question. They hadn’t seen fresh fruit in at least two weeks. The fruit sent by post from well-meaning mothers and wives was putrid by the time it arrived. So far, he did not feel very effective as a regimental surgeon.

  Dinner suddenly over, Caleb poured the coffee into his tin dipper and swirled it in the cup, hoping it would take the edge off his hunger. Hodges had gone off in search of a card game, so for the first time all day, Caleb was relatively alone.

  His hand immediately went to pat the pocket of hi
s uniform, assuring himself that Charlotte’s letter was still there. He didn’t need to see it anymore; he had it memorized by now.

  So she was going “out of formation,” she said. Caleb rolled the tip of his mustache between his thumb and finger, back and forth, as he mused. He was sure Charlotte’s mother would be appalled at any deviation from the norm, and he wondered how that stuffed shirt Phineas Hinges—Hobbs—Happysack—whatever his name was—was reacting to it. He had always known that Charlotte was meant to do more than just look pretty and be petted. But nursing? Why would she put herself in an army hospital, bound to be the bloodiest place on earth, aside from the battlefield itself? Had she somehow gotten past the haunting memories of her father’s drawn-out death, or was she punishing herself for being helpless to save his life?

  He brought his cup to his parched lips and absentmindedly gulped, as if it was iced tea instead of scalding hot coffee, burning his tongue. Closing his eyes, he ignored the sting in his mouth and allowed his mind to travel back to a time when there was no war on the doorstep, a time when he and Charlotte had been together.

  It seemed like a lifetime ago that Charles Waverly had died. Caleb was twenty, Charlotte sixteen. She had looked so lost, so abandoned, and she had asked him for help. Death had bonded them together in a way that little else in life can. He longed to shield her from as much pain as he could, the way a father would protect his child, and called often to check in on her throughout the first year of intense mourning. She grew to rely on him, on his strength, his words of comfort, and he relished it.

  What would I do without you? she had often said, and his chest swelled.

  When the grey veil of grief began to lift off her face, she looked at him differently with those caramel-colored eyes, the flecks of gold brilliant with happiness. If he could make her eyes shine, it made his day.

  Not long after her mourning clothes changed from black to grey and deep purple, he realized his affection for her was not as a surrogate father figure toward a pitiable child, but as a man toward a woman who warmed under his gaze.

  The more time they spent together, the more he felt for her. He hoped it was mutual. But when she said, I need you, he began to fear that he had simply stepped into the void in her heart left by her father. That she needed him because he was a safe place, he was reliable, as her father had been.

  The thought needled him until he could no longer sleep at night. He cared for her for who she was, but he had a nagging suspicion that she cared for him just because he was there. He wanted the woman he loved to love him not because she needed him, but because she wanted him, whether he was right there in front of her or miles apart. Would she have loved any man just as much who had happened to be by her side during her darkest days and nights? If Charles could see them from heaven, would he accuse Caleb of putting Charlotte’s grief to his advantage by preying on her wide-open heart?

  She seemed blind to the spell she cast on him. He had made up his mind not to steal a kiss from her willing lips—she was still so young, by then still only seventeen—but the temptation was driving him mad. Once he kissed her, he’d never be able to think with his head and not with his heart again. He would have done everything he could to convince her to be his, while she was still in a state of grieving for her father.

  It wouldn’t have been right.

  So he chose a path that took him away from her—medical school at Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut—not because he didn’t love her, but because he loved her too much to let their relationship simply happen by default. It would have been cheating.

  When he wrote to her several months later, just to wish her a happy birthday, she replied that she was glad he had “abandoned” her, that her feelings for him had turned cold. He tried to forget her, to replace her with other women, but none of them captured his heart as she had.

  So he studied more than anyone else at Yale, graduated at the top of his class, and worked harder than any other doctor in town. Some had suggested he was burying himself in it, but they didn’t understand. With Charlotte out of the picture, it was the only thing that made him feel alive.

  Caleb trusted that God had a perfect plan for his life, and assumed years ago that Charlotte Waverly was simply not part of it. Now, he wasn’t so sure.

  Logs crumbled and hissed in front of him now, and Caleb snapped out of his reverie. On the other side of camp, he could hear strains of men singing “Victory’s Band” to the tune of the Southern anthem, “Dixie’s Land.”

  We’re marching under the Flag of Union,

  Keeping step in brave communion!

  March away! March away! Away! Victory’s band!

  Right down upon the ranks of rebels,

  Tramp them underfoot like pebbles,

  March away! March away! …

  Caleb sighed. He loved the Union, but singing about treading upon the enemy like they were pebbles smacked of a false confidence the size of New England. These soldiers were as of yet untested, unproven in battle. As a regimental surgeon, so was he, and he knew it.

  “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,” he muttered into his tin cup, and swallowed the last of his now lukewarm coffee.

  Chapter Eleven

  New York City

  Monday, June 10, 1861

  My husband is Matthew O’Flannery. He left with New York’s Sixty-Ninth Regiment five weeks ago, and I haven’t heard from him since,” Ruby told the officer behind the desk at the recruiting office on Broadway that had enlisted him.

  He looked her up and down. “You’re sure he enlisted? Could it be that he just—found an opportunity to strike out on his own?”

  “Aye, I’m telling you, he is fighting for your country.”

  “Not yours, though, eh?” He leaned back and put his hands behind his head, smirking.

  “’Tis more your country than it is mine, sir, as I assume you have been here longer and have an easier time of living here.”

  “And yet, this is still better than what you left behind in Ireland, isn’t it?”

  Her face burned, but she bit her tongue. She expected there could be an argument this morning, but this was not the fight she wanted. She hated confrontation as a general rule, but she was so hungry, so desperate for money, she knew she had to stand her ground.

  “Look it up, you’ll see his name in black and white. Matthew O’Flannery. The Sixty-Ninth. I need to know what happened to his paycheck.”

  “I don’t need to look it up, lassie.” He leaned forward. “Even if he’s with them, I wouldn’t expect any money any time soon. The army is regrettably behind in paying its soldiers, but will pay arrears in full as soon as it can.”

  Ruby didn’t know what arrears meant, but she did know about being behind in payments.

  “As for why you haven’t heard from him about it personally, I could only make a guess.” He sneered as he looked over her faded, threadbare dress again. She knew exactly how he saw her, for it was how she saw herself: poor, uneducated, dirty. Unworthy. Well, if she looked the part of a beggar, then beg she would.

  “Saints alive, can’t your office spare a few dollars? We’ll pay it back as soon as the government pays its soldiers.”

  “Have you considered working yourself, or do you insist upon waiting for money to just magically appear for you?”

  Ruby snorted. “Do I look like the sort of person who isn’t accustomed to hard work? I work, Officer Jennings, every hour of daylight and then some, and still I am falling behind. I would not have to beg for money if you would pay my husband his wages in the first place!”

  “Not my fault.”

  “I don’t care whose fault it is, I am asking for a few dollars to tide me over, that’s all.”

  “It’s out of the question. You’re not the only person waiting for word or wages from her soldier. Just call it your own patriotic sacrifice. Good day.”

  Ruby let the door slam behind her as she left the building. Hot tears pricked her eyes as sh
e looked up and down Broadway. Just coming here had cost her precious hours she could have been sewing. A waste of time, only now she was farther behind in her work than before. Her stomach was an empty cavern, and her soul felt just as hollow. She should be praying to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, but her mind couldn’t concentrate long enough to find the right words.

  Crossing her broken-wing arms across her chest, she turned south and began walking the seventeen blocks home. Putting one foot in front of the other was all she could do at the moment.

  “Ruby!”

  Ruby turned, squinting into the bright sunshine, shielding her eyes with a shaky hand. She was so hungry she thought she might collapse.

  “Ruby! Over here!”

  A woman in a bright purple-and-green plaid dress, cut low enough in the bodice for evening wear, waved her over.

  “Ruby, you’re a mess! What are you doing this end of Broadway?”

  The voice belonged to Emma Connors, but this woman looked nothing like her old friend from the Fourteenth Ward. Ruby rubbed the tears out of her eyes and looked again.

  “Emma? What happened?” She waved a hand at her dress, her hair, her bonnet. There was no way she could have afforded to look like that a month ago.

  “Aye, I got smart, Ruby, that’s what happened.”

  Ruby shook her head. She didn’t understand.

  “Let me put it to you this way. How much do you make with your needle and thread? On a good week, when your work is accepted?”

  “A dollar seventy-five.”

  “And how much do you pay for your dark, rotting rooms?”

  Ruby swallowed. “Seven dollars a month.”

  “How much do you work?”

  “Emma, you know how much I work, it’s as much as you. All the time.”

  “No lass, that’s how much I did work. Not anymore. Do you know how much I work now? As much as I bloomin’ want to, that’s what.” She threw a wink past Ruby to a small cluster of men who had been watching her. “And do you know how much I make?” She leaned in. “Ten bucks a week for a couple hours o’ work. More if I want it.”