Thieves Of Mercy

The Union officer’s brows came together. He looked from Batchelor to Molly and back, and Wendy recognized her moment.

“Sir, if I may,” she said, her tone tired and defeated. “This is my aunt, Ingrid Nielsen. She is the wife of the Norwegian minister, who is due to arrive on the Norvier. A Norwegian navy ship, sir.”

Wendy paused, as if she thought that explained it. Don’t be too quick with answers, Molly had instructed.

“So what are you doing here?” the Union officer asked.

“Oh, sir, we have had a horrible time. We… my aunt and I… were taking passage to America when we were captured by one of these horrid Rebel privateers. Sir, we have been forever trying to get to Washington, so my aunt might meet her husband.”

“You are not Norwegian,” the lieutenant observed. There was a hint of accusation in his voice.

“I am a Marylander by birth, sir, but have been in Europe these past years. I have been traveling with my aunt, sir, from Norway, where I was visiting, sir.”

The Union officer nodded. “Why didn’t you take passage on the Norvier?”

Wendy began to speak, but Molly cut her off with another tirade, a nearly hysterical shrieking, arm-waving harangue that covered Rebels, Yankees, Americans, ships, everything that had supposedly caused offense in the past month. She spoke in French, and Wendy understood now that the weird accent was Norwegian, or what Molly guessed a Norwegian accent to be.

Again Wendy held up her hands, silenced her. She felt bold, on her game. She was no longer afraid. She was taken with the spirit of the thing.

“Sir, do you speak French?” Wendy asked.

“No.”

“It’s just as well. My aunt is… upset. These few bags are all we have left.”

“Why doesn’t your aunt speak Norwegian?”

“She does, of course. French is the only language we have in common.”

The Union officer nodded. “So what do you want?” He addressed the question to Lieutenant Batchelor.

“Best as I can understand it, this lady’s husband is bound to Washington. I don’t know nothing about this Norvier. Lady keeps sayin the ship’s due here any day. Any event, she’s got no business in the Confederate States. My commanding officer, he told me to get her to the Yankee flagship. Reckoned an admiral would know where she belongs.”

“You want me to take her?”

“No, sir. I just need passage under flag of truce to get her to the Minnesota . Lieutenant, I swear I will give the keys to Richmond to the Yankee admiral who’ll take her off my hands.”

The Union officer paused and stared at the women, clearly unsure of what to do. This entire act was supposed to be played out alongside the flagship, where there would be officers who could make decisions, where two little women would seem rather harmless against the great mass of men and ship.

“Lieutenant, that cockleshell boat can’t be too comfortable. I reckon the gentlemanly thing to do is to take these ladies on board.”

Wendy looked up. The man who had spoken was on the roof of the deckhouse, leaning on the rail. He had been watching the whole proceeding from up there. Wendy had not even

noticed him. “Yes, Mr. President,” the lieutenant replied, crisp and quick. Wendy stared at the man, stared in shock at the lanky form, the

long, horselike features, the part sad, part amused expression on the face of President Abraham Lincoln.

EIGHT

Hope ere long you will be able to test with success the efficiency of your boats, which are now the last hope of closing the river to the enemy’s gunboats.

GENERAL G.T.BEAUREGARD TO GENERAL M. JEFF THOMPSON, RIVER DEFENSE FLEET

Hieronymus Taylor found himself wandering about the decks of the General Page. He had

some tender spots from the previous night’s brawl and he tried not to let them show in the way he moved. He was not bouncing back from the damage done the way he had in earlier years. The fight had not chased away the blue devils.

He climbed up to the hurricane deck, watched the great walking beam go through its teeter-totter motion, driving the side wheels that pushed the ship north against the current.

He climbed up on the platform built on the starboard wheel box, felt the paddle wheel vibrating below him. He leaned on the rail and looked out across the water. The town of Greenville was just going out of sight around a point of land. Taylor knew a girl once from Greenville. Ended up as a whore in New Orleans. He tried to picture her face but couldn’t.

After a while he sighed and stood up straight. The town was lost from sight and the banks were a wild tangle of marsh and forest and swamp. They steamed past wide rafts floating downstream, barely controlled by the long sweeps rigged out astern. In the middle of the rafts, makeshift shelters where men squatted around fires, cooked breakfast, and made coffee. They waved and Taylor waved back.

Tugs with barges pulling astern passed them as well, and paddle wheelers carrying Lord knows what. Two years before it would have been cotton, down-bound, and sundry merchandise coming up-foodstuffs and manufactures that could not be grown or produced on the plantations. But now? There were hardly any manufactured goods coming into the Confederacy through the coils of the Yankee anaconda, and King Cotton for export made it as far as New Orleans, and there it sat on the dock.

No, Taylor corrected himself, not New Orleans. New Orleans was a Yankee-held town now.

Taylor ’s despair became, in his mind, a boiler, steam building inside. The idea of the Yankees at New Orleans made the steam gauge jump, the needle quiver up in the regions of trouble. A good fight was supposed to be a safety valve, blow the excess steam right out. It had failed. It seemed the valve was lashed tight.

He climbed down from the wheel box, down to the main deck, drifted along the side of the deckhouse. From the outside, the deckhouse of a steamship looked to be a spacious affair, running almost the full length of the ship itself, but that was deceptive. The center third of the deckhouse was not a house at all, but a great open space above the engine room, called the “fidley.” The fidley extended from the floor plates of the engine room, which were just below the lowest, or main deck, up through the boiler deck, which was next deck above the main deck, and up to the hurricane deck, two decks above, where skylights provided light to the black gang and air to the engines and boilers.

Taylor paused at the fidley door. The engine room was his domain, but now he felt some invisible force pushing him away, like trying to make opposite poles of a magnet touch.

Ain’t my engine room, he thought. Engineers looked on their engine rooms the way women looked on their kitchens, or dogs on their yards, with a disdain for intruders who might interfere. The message was, “I’ll thank you to stay the hell out of here,” stated verbally or otherwise.

Taylor opened the fidley door, stepped inside. Intruder, perhaps, but Spence would wonder why he was not hanging around, because that was the other thing engineers did on some other engineer’s ship, though they might hate it on their own.

The fidley door opened onto a catwalk above the engine room and a ladder down. Directly in front of him, taking up most of the fidley, was the massive wooden A-frame that supported the walking beam. It rose from its mounting blocks in the bilges below right up through the hurricane deck overhead.

For a moment Taylor stood still as the heat and the sounds washed over him-the dull roar of the fire in the boiler, the pssst, pssst of steam in the cylinder, the knocking of pipes, the creaking of the A-frame, the loud and profane voices of Mike Sullivan and Spence Guthrie as they screamed in each other’s