Glory (23 page)

“Let me go this instant, Julian McKenzie—”

“There you go, you’ve got it!”

“Julian—”

“Remember me.”

He still held her so tightly. His lips touched hers once again. Now the touch was light and swift, like the whisper of a flame against her soul.

When he released her, she was scarcely aware. She lowered her head, suddenly bereft of strength.

And when she lifted her eyes again ...

He was gone.

She wasn’t to see him again until he touched her in her dreams.

“W
HY, MISS SYDNEY, WELCOME
, how are you this evening?”

“Fine, Sergeant Granger, just fine, thank you, sir,” Sydney McKenzie replied to the man on duty at Capitol Prison, Washington, D.C. She offered him a pleasant smile. She smoothed back a straying lock of rich dark hair that glittered with a touch of auburn in the lamplight. “Come to see my boys, of course.”

“Yes, Miss Sydney, don’t worry none. We might sit here and wish you were coming to pay a visit to us Yank fellows, but we sure do know better.” Sergeant Granger was an old enlisted man. A bit grizzled, a bit worn, but a pleasant family man; the kind who made her realize at times that the war was all about fighting their own ex-fellow countrymen. But though she’d acquired a fondness for him along with some of the other Yanks she encountered in the Federal capital, her fondness didn’t go so far as to cause her to feel any guilt for what she was doing: anything she could to get the Southern boys out and back home.

Or anything she could to carry important messages where and when they needed to go.

She’d first come north to help free her brother Jerome when he’d been a prisoner here. He was to have been exchanged for Captain Jesse Halston, a dashing young cavalryman wounded and imprisoned in the South. But the exchange had been halted, mainly because of Jerome’s father-in-law. Union General Magee had thought that his son-in-law would better survive the war in prison. He hadn’t known Jerome well enough; Jerome had been determined to leave one way or the other.

Sydney had been Jesse Halston’s nurse at Chimbarizo Hospital in Richmond. He’d been an important prisoner, one for whom the South had known they could exchange an officer dear to their own cause. He’d been a model patient, and he was a handsome, reckless, daring young man. They’d formed a friendship.

Destroyed completely, of course, once he’d stopped her from leaving with Jerome. Oh, he’d done it well. Though the North had refused to exchange Jerome, Jesse had been exchanged for a Confederate general. Jerome had been determined to leave, and one of the other prisoners’ old Irish grandmother had brought some friends—Southern sympathizers—and so a number of the men had escaped dressed as part of the Irish ladies’ singing group. Jesse, however, had caught on to their plan, and in the middle of the Confederate flight he’d caught up with her—threatening to alert the authorities about the prison break if she attempted to leave the city with her brother. He’d been adamant, and she’d had to put on one of the performances of her life to convince Jerome she had meant all along to stay in Washington. Of course, Jerome had been very aware of the danger she would have been in traveling with him, and since she had been the one to introduce Jerome to Jesse back in Richmond, her brother had trusted her. He had even been relieved that she would be out of danger.

Jesse had forced her to stay behind, detained in the parlor of the handsome town house he had inherited from his father. For hours she eyed him with barely controllable rage. “I’m making you stay for your own good,” he had told her, “so you can’t go chasing after your brother and wind up with a bullet in your head.”

She’d finally fallen asleep on his sofa, and she’d slept there ten hours after all that. When she’d awakened, however, he was watching her. She’d told him, “You can deliver me to President Lincoln, for all I care. Jerome is gone. And now I’m going. You can arrest me, or shoot me—I’m not staying in this parlor any longer.” He had turned his back on her and told her to leave.

At Old Capitol, the Irish ladies were no longer admitted, but Sydney, who hadn’t been blamed for the escape, was allowed to come to see the prisoners, to bring them food and clothing and other donations. Her brothers were Rebels, but her cousin Ian was a Northern cavalry hero—very much like Jesse Halston himself—and so she was often granted special privileges. People seemed to trust her.

Jesse had been sent back to war.

Since then, she’d twice been able to relay information from prisoners. She knew it was a dangerous game—other family members had played it. But she was careful, and she was charming and good at her game, and she never trusted anything to paper. The messages she carried were by voice alone, her own or that of Marla Kelly, a young Irish girl she’d met during her brother’s escape. Marla’s brother, with whom she’d come to America, had been killed at Sharpsburg. The young husband she’d married just before the war had perished protecting Richmond during McClellan’s Peninsula campaign. Left so alone and bereft and far from home, Marla wanted revenge. She was acquainted with Rose Greenhow, the bewitching Washington widow who had charmed the capital society while informing Southern generals of Federal military movements. Rose had been caught, sent to Old Capitol herself, and finally brought South—where she still worked for the Confederacy. Many women were managing to help the Confederacy. Her cousin-in-law Alaina—wed to Ian, that most ardent of Yanks!—had become a Confederate spy, working with Rose. In the end she had been caught, but by Ian, and so, on her honor, she was done with spying. Sydney’s older half-sister, Jennifer, had also turned to espionage after her husband’s death—the pain and bitterness had made her reckless as well. Jennifer had actually been hanged, but Ian had found her before the rope had strangled her, and she had ceased her far too dangerous activities.

Sydney never felt that she was in danger. Nothing could be proven against her. She was different from Jennifer—she wasn’t in pain and she wasn’t bitter—she was just angry. Therefore, she wasn’t reckless. And she knew so much. About both sides. She had lived in both Richmond and Washington, D.C., and knew the hearts of both countries. She was loyal to her cause, knowing the terrible weakness of the South—and the strengths. The South, despite her fabulous generals, excellent cavalry, and the fact that her young men were defending their homeland and their way of life, couldn’t win a war waged on manpower and technology alone. The North did have the factories, and the capabilities of drawing from far greater resources of manpower. Dead Northern soldiers could be replaced. Some died without ever speaking the English language.

The South, however, could win on morale. The Northern people had to tire and sicken of the war. They had to want to let their Southern sister go, say good riddance to the bloodshed. The South could win if politics swung to the Southern favor, and every time the South won a battle, every time lists of the Union dead were read, the people came a little bit closer to wanting it all to be over.

She knew how that felt herself. She wanted it over. She was sick to death of worrying about her brothers, her cousins, her friends. She wanted to be able to go home, and find her family there, and she wanted to see her mother and her new baby sister. She had been with her brother Brent in Richmond for a long time, and now she missed him as well. She was living among the enemy. She needed to go home, except that she was useful here. Please, God, she’d heard it here, among the whispering Yank soldiers and from the prisoners of the South—Lee wanted to take the war to the North. If he could only win his great battle on Northern soil, strip the North as the North had stripped the South. Lay so much waste ... like so much of her homeland. Not the far south of the state, where she had been born. But the more northern cities. Jacksonville. The Yanks had been in and out, burning, looting, destroying. St. Augustine, taken over. And so many of the people so fickle! The city just couldn’t make it, it seemed, without her Yankee tourist dollars! Inlets and coves, shelled and lambasted. Salt and cattle scavenged, when every little bit of supplies was so desperately needed by an army growing evermore ragged and malnourished, day by day.

It was high time for the South to scavenge cattle from the Northern states, trample the crops, steal the corn.

“You’re a bit late tonight, aren’t you?” Granger asked.

“I guess I am. May I still come in?”

“The boys are in the public room having just finished their suppers, so I suppose I can let you in. But I’m going to have to see your basket, Miss Sydney, you know,” Granger told her.

“Why, of course.”

She handed him the basket she had brought. There was no danger in it. She carried nothing but food—meat pies, sweetments, fresh breads, apples, and cherry marmalade.

Granger carefully looked through all that she had brought.

“It just confounds me,” he said, shaking his head, “that we have so many women living here—in our own capital, no less!—who are so willing to feed the boys killing their own sons and husbands!”

“Why, Sergeant, you just don’t understand the cause of the Ladies of the Convention,” she said, explaining the group of women who helped her. “They do believe in the Union, and I swear to you, sir, they do love their sons and husbands just the same as all women, but they want them home. They want the war over, and they just can’t see forcing the Southern states to remain in the Union if they want to go.”

“Hmmph,” Granger murmured. He’d placed all the food on the desk in front of him and went on to carefully inspect the basket itself. Sydney made a mental note never to underestimate Granger for being a suspicious old coot—if a good enough fellow.

“Admit it—you like some of the prisoners kept here,” she challenged him flirtatiously.

“I like some of them well enough. Young lady, I find a man in here now and then who used to be an old friend or acquaintance. Before the war, you know, I sold carriages. Only the best. Sold plenty of them to folks down in the South.”

She smiled. “May I see the boys now? As you can see, I came in carrying no rifles, knives, cannons, or the like.”

“Fine, you go see the boys, Miss Sydney.” Granger nodded to one of the guards who had waited to escort her to a courtyard where the Rebel men were sometimes allowed to gather. As she started from the outer office, he called her back. “Miss Sydney.”

“Why, yes, Sergeant?”

“You watch your step, young lady. You’re a might too charming for your own good.”

“Why, thank you, Sergeant, I am always careful.”

“That’s what scares me,” he muttered.

The guard let her through the building and to the back. It was a strange prison. Called Old Capitol because for a time it had served the government, it had also been a boarding house before taking in its current inhabitants. There were worse places to be, Sydney had heard, including Southern prisons.

The Federalists were outraged by the conditions at Southern prisons, but what they didn’t seem to understand was that, in most cases, the authorities weren’t cruel on purpose—they offered their prisoners the same pitiful and rotten rations that went to the boys in the field. As far as supplies went, the blockade against the South was ever tightening, and the boys in the field were often starving just the same as the men in the prisons.

The men were in a crude hall with long tables and simple chairs. In winter, it was their exercise room, in summer, it was a common room. As she came in with her basket, she saw that there were about twenty-five men in attendance there that night. They spilled forward, polite, eager to see her. Treated well enough in this prison, they were still all far too thin and tattered looking. They were the proud boys who had started off so dashingly just a few years ago. Their pride remained, but their weariness was visible as well.

“Miss McKenzie, dear Miss McKenzie!” Lieutenant Aaron Anderson, an artillery man from Alabama, strode through the crowd of men, taking her hands. “Miss McKenzie, you are a sight for sore eyes. The boys and I are so grateful to you for these visits! What have you brought us tonight?”

“Treats, gentlemen, do take the basket and dig in!”

“Why, my mouth is watering already!” said Private Thompson of Mississippi.

“Thompson, take over and distribute, will you please?” Anderson said.

It was a way to keep the two of them in the center of the floor with the men milling all around them. Although guards remained in the room, they couldn’t hear the exchange between Anderson and Sydney while the commotion went on.

“Listen carefully,” Anderson said, his smile and his leisurely manner gone. “A Union General Pratt is in the process of bringing a supply train down the small pike just off the Harpers Ferry Road in what used to be Virginia.” Even among the noise, he said those words with deep contempt. At the end of 1862, Virginia had been split into Virginia and West Virginia. Southerners were convinced that the vote to secede from the state by the West Virginians had been forced at gunpoint. Now, West Virginia was about to be admitted to the Union, and there were two separate and distinct Virginias, the old Virginia, and West Virginia, and a sad affair it was.

“Pratt,” Sydney said.

“You know the road?”

“I do, sir.”

“Get the information to Jeffrey Watts at the Watts Mercantile down by the bridge, and he’ll see to it that it’s brought on over where it’s needed. There’s only a small party of men escorting the train, because it’s mainly medical supplies. Not so important to the Yanks—just ether, bandages, morphine, quinine—but it could keep some of our boys alive. There won’t be more than fifteen men on it, three drivers, an escort of ten to twelve. Oh, and I hear there’s a shipment of shoes packed in with the medical supplies, something we need in a dire way, as I’m sure you’ve heard. I can’t tell you just how desperate the Army of Northern Virginia is getting for something so simple as shoes! Half our boys are wearing Northern boots, stolen off the dead with honest apologies. The old pike just south of the Harpers Ferry Road. Both armies are moving already, and the South sure could use those supplies. Have you got it straight, Sydney?”