Glory In The Name

City Quintet, certainly.

A blast of wind hit the Cape Fear , whistled around her superstructure, made her dock fasts groan. It was mid-November, cold and bleak. Hard on one’s optimism, with the gales coming in off the Atlantic, churning Albemarle Sound into steep chop, gray water capped with marching rows of white horses, cold, driving rain.

They were dockside at Elizabeth City, just in from a week’s patrol of the sound, running supplies down from Norfolk to the 3rd Georgia, dug in on Roanoke Island, taking long shots at the Yankees in Pamlico Sound. Uninspiring, miserable business, but Samuel was glad to be back at it. There had been moments enough during the past two months when he thought he might never step foot on shipboard again.

It was more than two months before, on August 29th, that Fort Hatteras was surrendered to the Yankees. The ten-inch shell from Wabash that had destroyed the fort’s Number 8 gun carriage, killed one of the gun crew, shattered Lieutenant Murdaugh’s arm, and knocked Flag Lieutenant Sharp galley west had nearly done for Samuel Bowater as well. He was tossed into a sea of hurt. He lost a lot of blood.

He had, besides the wounds to thigh and shoulder and arm, three broken ribs, a fractured humerus, and a mild concussion. He could not remember most of what had happened that morning at Fort Hatteras, even less of the trip back to Norfolk. He recalled some sort of shouting match between Hieronymus Taylor and the lockkeeper at the Great Dismal Swamp Canal locks, but little else.

The first sensation that he felt, once the doctor had backed off the laudanum a bit, was anxiety.

The Cape Fear, he was told, had been sent back to Albemarle Sound to join with the little fleet defending Roanoke Island. Roanoke sat square in the middle of the single passage between Pamlico and Albemarle Sound. It was the key to Albemarle Sound and so the key to control of the rivers that wound their way into North Carolina-the Roanoke, the Chowan, and the Pasquotank, as well as the inland passage between Elizabeth City and Norfolk.

It was inconceivable that the Yankees would not push up Pamlico Sound, fast and in force, and capitalize on their victory at Hatteras Inlet. Indeed, it was no more than half a victory if they did not.

While Samuel had no doubts about Lieutenant Harwell’s enthusiasm, he was deeply concerned about the luff’s ability to command the ship in his absence. Every day Bowater asked for the news from North Carolina. And every day the news was the same. The Yankees were in possession of the inlet, the Confederates held Roanoke Island, and they all seemed content to stay where they were.

Finally he stopped asking, and contented himself with the newspapers.

Jacob, whom he had kept to aid him during his convalescence, was dispatched daily for the Richmond Examiner or the Whig, in which Bowater read, “Whose fault it may be, that the little garrison at Hatteras was so poorly provided with ammunition, we leave the proper authorities to enquire. We take it for granted that the marauders will not be permitted to stay long where they are.”

Bowater smiled. If you had stood in that rain of shells, sir, you might not take that so much for granted.

When he could find it, Jacob also picked up the New York Post or Tribune. Samuel read the gloating headlines:

THE WAR ON THE COAST

GOOD NEWS FROM BUTLER’S FLEET

FORT HATTERAS BOMBARDED

SURRENDER OF THE REBELS

CAPTAIN BARRON AND 300 MEN TAKEN

THE TRAITORS OUT OF POWDER

He read about the panic and dismay that had seized the South in the wake of Hatteras, the first successful Union invasion of the Confederacy. From the highs of Manassas to this new low.

In Washington and points north, just the opposite reaction. Elation, renewed hope. Samuel wondered if anyone on either side still had any sense of proportion. To compare the successful shelling of an undermanned and poorly built fort by a vastly superior enemy to what the Confederate Army had done at Manassas was simply absurd. If the people of the South-or the North-allowed themselves to play at such emotional tug-of-war, they were all in for a sorry time.

Back in early September, Samuel had been confined to bed, weak, arm hurting like hell, drifting in and out of sleep. He was tossing in feverish dreams when he heard a soft voice call. “Captain Bowater?” The voice incorporated itself into his dream, a woman calling from far off, and he was running to her, but he could not seem to move, for all his flailing legs.

“Captain Bowater?” His eyes fluttered open. He looked Wendy Atkins straight in the face and could not place her.

“Captain…? It’s Wendy Atkins…”

“Wendy Atkins…” Samuel said the name as the memory came back with the sound of her voice. It had been two months at least since he had seen her. He tried to picture her by the riverfront park, in paint-spattered clothing. She had annoyed him to no end, he recalled, but with all he had been through he could not recall why.

“What are you doing here?” It was all Bowater could think to say.

“I am volunteering as a nurse,” she said. “Oh, I know, the height of scandal, a female nurse.” She sat on the edge of his bed, leaned down, and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “They think we women will become too aroused, working among the men. I tell you, after all the blood and wounds and pus and worse I have seen, I am in danger of never being aroused again!”

Bowater smiled, smiled at what he understood he would have considered shockingly forward half a year before. But not now. He felt bits of his old propriety flaking off, like paint from an unprimed canvas.

“And how do you happen to be here, Captain?”

Bowater told her, in the barest terms, of Hatteras and the awful shelling, and she listened and she nodded and she did not say any of the stupid things-“Oh my…how dreadful…surely you were afraid”-that most people who had not been under fire said. Instead she just listened, which was just what Samuel Bowater wanted, though not even he himself knew it.

By midmonth, Samuel’s strength was coming back, and he made a point of walking up and down the whitewashed, airy halls of the naval hospital, to the limits of his endurance. On these jaunts Wendy accompanied him, lent an arm when necessary, and sometimes they talked and sometimes they did not and it was fine either way.

The broken arm still hurt, but he could move it now, and rather than remain in bed he often sat by the big windows that looked down over the water, or strolled around the hospital grounds. Then one afternoon Wendy appeared, carrying canvas and easel and paints, all quite new.

“Are you going to paint?” Bowater asked. “I would love to watch you, if you would not mind.”

“No, these are for you,” Wendy said, and there was hesitancy, uncertainty, in her voice.

Insouciance…that is it… Bowater thought. He had tried to pin it down, the thing he had so disliked about Wendy Atkins. Insouciance. That was the word. An arrogant boldness.

But the insouciance was gone now, and in its place a kind of calm understanding, a maturity he would not have