Glory In The Name

Samuel had been watching her preparation, the graceful, practiced way that she set out her paints, but his eye was drawn to the canvas. It was not a big painting, twenty inches by twelve, perhaps, and hard to make out at that distance. It was approximately the same view that he himself was painting. But even from forty feet there was a quality that seemed to radiate from the picture, an ambiance that dovetailed perfectly with the actual river in front of him, the smell of the trees and grass and hints of smoke. It seemed to have…Bowater did not know the word. It.

He frowned. Now he would have to deal with the distraction of having her close at hand, along with all the other damnable distractions that made his life a misery and his painting a mediocrity.

He turned back to the canvas, and soon the world and his own self-pity were lost in the pure focus of applying paint to canvas. He touched the tiny buildings on the far shore-darks and lights, brick reds and pale yellows-the suggestion of buildings. He ran an eye over what he had done, gave a tiny nod of approval.

“Nice, nice…” Wendy’s voice again, and again Bowater jumped.

“I’m sorry, did I frighten…startle you again?”

Bowater rounded on her, and the first thing that leaped into his throat was the kind of tongue-lashing he was accustomed to giving a subordinate, but he held it back. He cleared his throat. “I find such peering over someone’s shoulder to be the height of intrusiveness,” he managed.

“Oh, come now. People do it to me all the time. It doesn’t bother me.”

“What people do all the time, ma’am, and what you are willing to tolerate are hardly benchmarks for decent society.” He had meant for the words to cut her like a very sharp knife, but instead they sounded pompous and absurd, and Wendy just smiled and leaned over again and looked at his painting.

“And yet…” she said.

“What?”

“I don’t know…technically it is quite right, you know, except perhaps for your color choice there…” she pointed to the water in the shadow of the far shore. “…but there is something…I don’t know…missing.”

“The painting is not complete.”

“Are you familiar with Fitz Hugh Lane?”

“Yes.”

“I should think that sort of thing…why do you not paint naval subjects?”

Bowater was thrown off by the question, and forgot to be indignant about this entire line of interrogation. “The navy is my entire life. I paint, in part, to forget the navy for a while.”

“Perhaps that is the problem.”

“What?”

“Well, you do not let your real life get into your painting.”

This was absurd, and moreover it had destroyed Samuel’s enthusiasm for painting for the day. He took out his bottle of turpentine and began to wash his brushes.

“I do hope I have not chased your muse away,” Wendy said. Bowater looked up, tried to give her an Are you still here? expression.

“My muse, I fear, did not choose to come south with me and is now trapped behind enemy lines.”

Wendy laughed, flashed white teeth. “A sense of humor! Who would have thought it of the stoic lieutenant. On what ship do you serve?”

“The gunboat Cape Fear.” He almost said “tugboat” but did not. “I am her commanding officer.”

“Indeed? I have always been drawn to the sea.”

“Then it is a pity you were not born a man.” Bowater put his paints away and set his canvas on the grass. This Wendy seemed the type who might not realize she was not born a man.

“I have never been aboard a naval vessel,” she said.

“I fear you have missed your chance,” Samuel said. “On board the larger ships, it is not uncommon to stage entertainments that are appropriate for ladies to attend. But the larger ships are all in the Union navy. The gunboats of our Confederate Navy are hardly appropriate places for a woman.”

“Including your Cape Fear?”

“Most certainly including my Cape Fear. Good day now, and good luck with your painting.”

Bowater left her there, walked back to the navy yard, caught a boat to the Cape Fear. He needed the mental holiday that painting afforded him, but his afternoon had been ruined by that Wendy Atkins person. Her words seemed to buzz around his head like a swarm of bees, as noisy and as hard to get rid of. Why, he wondered, did the mind have such a capacity for self-torment? He had allowed himself to be pulled into Taylor’s confidence game, and he had been beating himself over it ever since. Now, try as he might to stop them, his thoughts kept coming back to the person he least wished to think on.

Wendy Atkins dabbed paint on the canvas, looked out across the languid water of the Elizabeth River. There was no traffic moving, not much going on.

She glanced south, toward the navy yard. Wondered if Lieutenant Bowater would make an appearance. It was three weeks ago that she had met him, and she had seen him twice since. They had exchanged something like ten words. He had returned again and again to her thoughts.

She pulled in a big lungful of the brackish air, reveled in it. Wendy was drawn to the sea, though she did not know why. There were no sailors in her family, no grizzled old grandfathers to balance her on their knee and tell her tales of far-distant lands, of storms and golden sunrises at sea, no brothers returning from year-long voyages bearing exotic gifts. Her people were farmers and storekeepers. They showed little interest in traveling to the next town over, let alone distant lands.

Yet there it was; dreams of the romance and beauty of the sea wrapped around her like an old quilt, ever since she was a little girl. Growing up in Culpepper, Virginia, 160 miles from salt water, she based her first childish paintings of ships on magical voyages entirely on woodcuts in books and magazines and on her own imagination, since she had seen neither a ship nor a sea. She filled in the colors absent in the black-and-white images: golden hulls and red and green and yellow sails, oceans of brilliant aquamarine.

The reality, first observed at age thirteen on a visit to her paternal aunt in Norfolk, had been both a thrill and a disappointment. Ships, and the sea on which they traveled, were much more chromatically understated than she had imagined, yet much grander than she could ever have guessed.

She chafed through her teens, chafed through her early twenties, eager to return to the sea, to live by salt water. She read whatever she could get her hands on, stories of Columbus and bold Francis Drake, of John Paul Jones and Nelson. Her fantastic ships became peopled by fearless sailors who strode the quarterdeck in gales of wind and flying metal.

Wendy could not go to sea, she could not even live by the sea, but she could paint. Ships and seascapes done from memory, and the mountains as well and the people in her family, she painted them all with a skill that grew year after year. By the time she was seventeen there was nothing more that anyone in Culpepper or the surrounding area could teach her, because she knew more about art, and painted with more skill than anyone she knew.

She fended off suitors, defended against becoming trapped in Culpepper with a husband and children to care for. And after a while, as her reputation as an eccentric grew, the young men stopped coming, which was fine. They thought of her as some sort of bluestocking, assumed her to be a suffragette, which she might well have been if she had cared enough about politics to pay attention.

But she did not. Painting. The sea. Those were the things she loved. And when the war came, and the possibility of the grand men-of-war sailing from Southern ports, she could stand it no more. Weeks of arguing, pouting, stubbornness won her her parents’ approval to move to Portsmouth and live with her Aunt Molly. Despite the fact that Molly was, in many ways, as suspect as Wendy.

She took the carriage house behind Molly’s larger place as her own, began painting the ocean and river views around Portsmouth and Norfolk. In the month that she had been there, the place had provided more excitement than over two decades in Culpepper. The energy was palpable.

When it exploded on the 20th, Wendy was there, down by the naval yard, walking the streets, unescorted, but she did not care. She let herself get caught up in the swirl and madness of the crowd. Sucking it down. The