The Crescent Spy (22 page)

“Or his brains,” the first one said.

“Sound like he don’t have none to spare,” the other said with a grin.

She chuckled at this. “I was wondering. Anyhow, I ’spect he’ll recover, if the doctor is any good.”

“Doc Gibbons is the best, they say. ’Course, he won’t be in ’til morning.”

Franklin groaned.

“I figured as much,” Josephine said with a glance at her patient. “But the captain’ll be needing something stronger than whiskey for the pain. There now,” she said as they got him up the stairs and in the front door. “I don’t suppose one of you boys could help me find a bed for Captain Beaudoin?”

“Be happy to, miss.”

“I’ll come, too,” the other said.

She’d meant the query as a way of discerning their general discipline. Could they be coaxed away from their posts? But she realized an added benefit as they picked their way through the first building and into the rear ward where the officers kept beds. They passed two orderlies, but because she was being escorted, nobody questioned Josephine and Franklin.

The officer ward only had three other patients. One lay in bed on the far end of a long, open hall, a book on his chest, an oil lamp at a little desk next to his bed. Even from a distance, she could see the mass of blisters and scabs on his face and neck. A second man, this one nearer, was also reading a book by lamplight.

As soon as Josephine had Franklin’s boots off and got him in bed, she sent the young soldiers back to their post. She found a chair and pulled it up next to the bed.

“Now we wait?” she asked in a low voice. He nodded without speaking.

The nurse appeared a few minutes later. She was heading toward the poxied man in the corner, but veered in their direction as soon as she spotted them. Josephine rose to her feet.

“Who is the patient?” the woman asked.

“Captain Beaudoin. I’m his private nurse, but I won’t get in your way.” Josephine sketched out the same story she’d told the soldier, then added, “I promised to stay with the captain until Dr. Gibbons arrives in the morning. I don’t mean to be any trouble—I’ll only sit here waiting.”

“Of course. Do you need anything else?”

“I don’t suppose you have laudanum? I gave him whiskey, but he’s still in pain.”

On cue, Franklin let out a groan.

“I’m afraid not. If we did, it would be shipped to Virginia for our boys on the front line.”

The woman looked familiar to Josephine from her visit to the hospital a couple of weeks earlier, but it was dark in the hall, and with Josephine’s accent disguised, she hoped she wouldn’t be recognized.

The woman looked like she was going to say something else, so Josephine spoke first to put off any potentially difficult questions. “They don’t have a quarantine room for smallpox?”

The woman glanced toward the patient in the corner. “It’s not smallpox. It’s something . . . more delicate.” She reached into the pocket of her apron and pulled out a little vial. “A night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.”

Ah. The man was suffering from syphilis, the treatment of which was mercury salts. One more soldier who had succumbed to the fleeting pleasures offered by the bordellos of the Irish Channel. Better the smallpox. If it didn’t kill you, it left you scarred, but you’d never suffer it twice. Syphilis was a lifelong companion.

“Well, thank you,” Josephine said. “Please don’t trouble yourself with us. The captain only needs some rest and a visit from the doc.”

As soon as the nurse left, the third patient in the room got out of his bed and hobbled over using a pair of crutches. He had a bandaged leg, but there was nothing wrong with his tongue. He wanted to know what unit the captain served with. Josephine stammered something about the Eleventh Louisiana Rifles, to which Franklin shook his head and muttered something incomprehensible. It seemed really important for the second man, a fellow captain, to figure out, and he kept at it for several rounds before he gave up.

Josephine took it only as excessive inquisitiveness, because the man then went on to proudly explain how he was the head of the Wilson Rangers, a group of “gentlemen who would defend the honor of the city against Yankee scoundrels.”

She almost laughed. She’d written a story about the rangers, who called themselves the Blackleg Cavalry—former river gamblers and other sorts who’d gained large sums of money through sharp practice. Her article in the
Crescent
had been glowing, speaking of their fine spirit, the handsome figures they cut in the saddle. Her private report for Northern eyes had painted a different picture. She told how they spent more time lounging in the shade reading and swilling beer from jugs than they did drilling. How they seemed to be in it for the adventure and the opportunity to romance grateful Southern girls. If trouble came, the company would melt away like sugar snipped into hot coffee.

“Finally,” Franklin muttered when the man had returned to his bed. “I thought I’d need to knock him over the head.”

An hour passed before the syphilis patient turned down his oil lamp, followed by the other reader. The Blackleg fellow turned his light down last, and then the nurse made a final pass through the ward, her footsteps quiet as she walked up and down the mostly empty aisle between the beds. When she was gone, they were plunged into darkness, with only a tiny bit of moonlight filtering through a high window to form a luminous square on the middle of the plank floor. And still Josephine and Franklin remained quiet.

It must have been nigh on midnight before Franklin sat up on his cot and grabbed for his boots. He stripped away the bandages and stuffed them into his pockets. Josephine waited until his dark shadow rose in front of her; then she grabbed the carpetbag and led him quietly toward the far door.

J
osephine’s heart was pounding as she held the back door cracked for Franklin to slip outside. It was a dark night, the barest sliver of moon in the sky. They waited in the shadows of the hospital building, looking across the yard.

The two-story brick arsenal sat next to the cartridge factory and its now-quiet smokestack but otherwise was apart from any other buildings in the hospital compound. Even the stables lay some seventy or eighty yards east of the arsenal. This was good. Somehow she’d misremembered the arsenal on the other side, nearer the stables, and worried about the need to throw open the stable doors before the attack. A good horse was also valuable war material, but she didn’t have it in her to burn all those animals alive, never mind the strategic expediency. Fortunately, she now saw that the stables were on the far side of the cartridge factory, which would shield the horses from the blast.

Frogs croaked and trilled from the marshy fields beyond the fence, joining their chorus to the hum, buzz, and chirp of insects. After about ten minutes, a solitary figure trudged through the yard, a musket over one shoulder, and a lamp held in his free hand, swarming with moths. The watchman gave a casual inspection to the shadowy places near the arsenal before disappearing around the corner of the building.

Franklin looked up and down the yard. “Now!” he whispered.

They ran across the open space until they reached the safety of the other building. Franklin fished out a set of keys that clinked noisily. He spent precious moments testing one key after another in the lock.

While he did this, Josephine prepared the rest of the material. First, she checked the fuses to make sure that they were still held together and hadn’t been knocked apart. The fuses were of Confederate design, and likely unreliable, but the general idea was simple. A tapered cylinder of paper was filled with mealed powder soaked in whiskey and marked in tenths of inches. The fuse would be cut to length and stuffed into a shell, enabling it to detonate after five, seven, or ten seconds. In this case, they’d gummed three fuses together, which, after testing on other fuses, seemed to give about twenty-five to thirty seconds. In case of failure, there was a second set of fuses so they could return and try again. Half a minute wasn’t much time to run away, and neither of them could guess at the size of the explosion.

When Josephine was satisfied with the fuses, she verified that the white phosphorus matches were dry, and then wadded up bits of cotton and stuffed them in her ears. She balled two more pieces for Franklin.

It took him several attempts to find the right key, but at last the latch clicked and the door creaked open. He put away the keys, and twisted the cotton and stuffed it into his ears.

“Should I wait here with the spare fuses, or go in with you?” she asked, her voice sounding muffled through the cotton stopping up her ears.

He took the fuses and the matches. “Go back to the ward and wait. I’ll come running and we can join the general evacuation.”

“I’ll stay here. You might need help.”

“I won’t need help, and I worry if you go running around in the dark you’ll trip over your skirts.”

“Don’t worry about me. I won’t trip.”

“Once I get inside I have to light some of these matches just to see where I’m going. If there’s loose powder in the air . . .
boom.
”

“I’ve got good night eyes. I’ll help.”

“No time to argue. Go.”

He slipped inside and pulled the door shut behind him. She thought about following anyway but swallowed her pride and hurried back across the yard instead. Once there, however, she couldn’t bring herself to go inside and wait by his empty hospital bed. Any of a dozen things might go wrong, and there was no way she’d be waiting helplessly inside if that happened.

Long seconds passed. Her heart was pounding in her temples, and it felt like a swarm of crickets had been turned loose in her belly. She stared at a spot in the black wall opposite her where she supposed the door must be, willing it to open. It had been too long. Something had gone wrong. The guard would be returning shortly. She set down the carpetbag and descended the porch, ready to cross over and go inside.

The door swung open on the factory. A figure came running across the flat, muddy ground. There wasn’t enough moonlight to pick out his features, but his wildly churning legs and flailing arms bespoke panic. He seemed to spot her, and waved wildly.

“Go! Get inside. Too close!”

There was a low thump, like an artillery shell burying itself in the ground and detonating, together with a flash of light in the windows of the factory. Josephine threw herself to the ground.

A split second later, the building exploded. She was still in midair, halfway between standing and falling to the ground, when there was a blinding flash of light and a shuddering, terrific, bone-crushing detonation. The shock wave threw her away, and she found herself on her back, stunned, a column of fire boiling into the sky. In its light she caught sight of chunks of mortared brick the size of large carriages lifting skyward, enormous beams hurling outward.

Suddenly, she was in the water next to the exploding
Cairo Red
, and she saw in her mind’s eye the killing debris of that explosion raining down and knew she had only an instant before it happened here, too. Franklin was a few yards away, also down, but trying to regain his feet.

“No!” she cried. She could barely hear her own voice over the roar of the fire, the thump of secondary explosions, and the deafness from the original detonation.

The heavier debris landed first, huge beams and flaming chunks of roof. They were followed by brick and metal shards falling like lethal rain. There was nothing she could do but curl in a ball, hands over her head, trying to survive the bombardment. Something struck her shoulder with the force of a hammer blow, and she cried out.

At last it stopped, and she struggled to her feet. Her right shoulder ached, and she could barely lift her arm. The factory was a raging fire, with a dozen smaller fires across the yard. Franklin lay groaning in the middle of a heap of broken bricks. He bled from a nasty gash on his forehead, and clutched at his ribs. But he was alive, thank God. They were both alive.

She clawed away the bricks, grabbed him with her left hand, and tried to pull him up. “Move! We’ll be caught.”

The guard came running, shouting for help. But his attention was on the fire, not the two figures struggling in the middle of the open yard.

Franklin seemed to be recovering his wits. He grimaced in pain as he struggled to his feet, but he didn’t make a sound. Josephine got the door open, grabbed the carpetbag—all with her left hand—and they slipped into the hospital ward. She told Franklin to hand over the bandages, grabbed them out of his pockets when he was slow to respond, and gritted her teeth against her own pain as she quickly wrapped them around his bloody forehead. Then she led him limping toward the front door of the officers’ ward.

Chaos enveloped the Marine Hospital as they picked their way toward the front gates. The small garrison of a dozen or so men seemed equally divided between those rushing to fight the conflagration at the arsenal and those racing in the direction of town to fetch help. Those patients who could move streamed out the gates, risking cuts on their bare feet from all the blown-out glass from the windows.

Josephine dragged Franklin along with this group of men. His head was bleeding right through the bandages, and if anyone was paying attention they might wonder why he seemed to have fresh wounds, not to mention that both of them were filthy from falling in the muddy yard and then having a cascade of brick dust and wood chips come raining down on them.

Lamps and gaslights were on all along the edge of the city to their north, and men on foot and horse soon came hurrying up the road even as the patients evacuated in the opposite direction.

Josephine didn’t dare hail a cab, not with dozens of people streaming toward the hospital. The fewer people who saw Franklin with his bloody head, the better. Rumors would be flying as people searched for the saboteur. So the two of them kept to darkened streets, which took them down several disreputable alleys. In one of them, two men came out of a grog house, apparently decided that Franklin was drunk and should be robbed, and threatened them with knives. Franklin drew his pistol, and the men slunk off like a pair of river rats. It’s a good thing they were so cowardly; Franklin could barely hold the gun steady.

“I’ll never make it,” Franklin said a couple of blocks later.

“Where do you live?”

“Canal and Rampart.”

That was still nearly two miles away. “Let me get a cab.”

“We can’t risk it. Find a dark alley and leave me. I’ll take my chances. In the morning I’ll feel better.” He pointed. “Right there, behind that rubbish.”

“You won’t feel better, and I’m not leaving you. Keep going.”

“I tell you, I can’t make it home.”

“My place is only a mile away. We’ll come in the side door. Nellie will either be asleep or on the corner, gossiping with the neighbor ladies about the explosion.”

“A mile?” He groaned. Then he seemed to straighten, gather his reserves. “I’ll try.”

He grew weaker as they continued, and she worried that he was carrying some secret wound. She threw his arm around her shoulder again during the last two blocks. Finally, they reached Nellie Gill’s cottage.

Josephine only just got Franklin up the back stairs and onto the bed before Nellie came up looking for her. Nellie said she’d been awake in the parlor, unable to sleep after the blast, when she heard her lodger come in. Josephine claimed that she’d thrown on clothes and rushed toward the fire after hearing the explosion, hoping to cover the story. Soldiers had turned her away at the hospital gates. All this was said from behind a cracked door so Nellie wouldn’t see what a mess she was.

Nellie prodded her to come out, anxious for more gossip.

“I’ve already begun to undress,” Josephine said.

“Undress? There are Yankees in the city! We’re under attack!”

“We’re not under attack,” Josephine said calmly. “It was a lone saboteur—that’s what they’re saying. Anyway, it’s late, and if I don’t write what I saw, there will be the devil to pay tomorrow at the paper.”

At last Nellie gave up and went back downstairs.

Josephine latched the door and hurried to Franklin’s side, where she lit the lamp on the bedside table. He had a pale, sickly appearance, but when she peeled away the bandage from his head, the wound had mostly clotted. She wet a cloth at the basin and dabbed at his forehead until she could get a better look. The wound was superficial, and the skull didn’t appear fractured. But he didn’t look well at all.

“Where do you hurt?”

“All over. Like I was jumped in an alley and beaten up with bricks and chains.”

He had his gun on his lap, and she set this aside. She tugged off his boots and began to unbutton his shirt. He put his hands up.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m worried you’ve got another injury. I need to look.”

“Do you have training as a nurse?”

“Only what I learned from observation at military hospitals in Washington. But I should be clever enough to notice if something is amiss. Once I know, I’ll call a doctor if necessary. The bricks-and-chains story will hold well enough. You almost
were
jumped.”

“If you do that, your landlady will know I’ve been here.”

“Let me worry about that.”

She pulled away his hands and finished unbuttoning his shirt, which she peeled off and set to one side. Franklin had strong shoulders and arms, and curly black hair that trailed down from his chest to his navel and his strong abdominal muscles. A curious flutter entered her belly as she looked up to his handsome face. His eyes were closed.

Not now, you fool. Stay focused.

Josephine felt at his chest, running her fingers down his sternum. She hesitated at his belly but, given that her primary concern was some injury to his internal organs, felt along his stomach for anything that seemed amiss. She watched his face as she did so, as she’d seen a surgeon at a military hospital do. There was no grimace of pain.

Since nothing seemed amiss on his front torso, she urged him to roll onto his side. If she couldn’t find anything on his back, she’d have to take off his trousers, a thought that made her blush. Franklin sucked in his breath as he obeyed.

“What hurt just now?”

“Ribs.”

She got him all the way onto his stomach and lifted the lamp for a better look. Ugly purple bruises splotched his back where bricks had rained down, leaving marks from his shoulders to the small of his back. Her own shoulder was still aching, and no doubt if she took off her dress and held up a mirror she’d see her own bruising there. It would be sore for days, she guessed. But Franklin’s injuries seemed much worse than her own.

Franklin drew in his breath as she prodded the bruises. When she got to his left side, he made a sound far back in his throat. She touched again, poking at the ribs where they curved along the spine.