Thieves Of Mercy

“It’s fine, fine. Just lovely.”

“Yet I perceive it does not have quite the depth and timbre of your old one.” And that was true; Bowater had noticed as much midway through the piece.

Now Taylor shrugged, a dismissive gesture. “The old one was a Guarneri, been around since the 1650s. We ain’t gonna see its like on the Mississippi agin.”

Bowater’s eyes went wide, despite himself. “A Guarneri?” Some people held the Guarneri family to be superior even to the Stradivari in violin-making. “Dear God, and you took it to sea? Into battle?”

“Only fiddle I had.”

Bowater was speechless. His head was filled with images of that exquisite instrument being blown to splinters by a Yankee shell. “How did you happen to come by a Guarneri?”

Taylor smiled. “Gift from my pa.”

“This would be the pa you told me spent his whole life loading freight on the docks of New Orleans?”

Taylor smiled, a smile of shared and unspoken understanding. “It was somethin like that,” Taylor said.

“What a terrible waste,” Bowater said.

“Lost a lot worse’n a fiddle that night, Cap’n,” Taylor said, and there was a catch in his voice, as if a word had caught momentarily, blocking the rest in his throat, just for an instant. He choked it out, looked down at the violin, coughed as if trying to clear the source of his discomfort.

So that is it, Bowater thought. “In any event, I had best be running along,” he said, trying to breeze through the awkwardness of the moment.

“Yeah, yeah… and thanks, Cap’n, again, for the fiddle.” Taylor met his eyes. There was sincerity there. It was an unusual look for Hieronymus Taylor.

“You’re welcome. I’ll come again.” The men shook hands and Bowater took his leave.

In the lobby of the hospital he paused, stared out one of the windows. Was it the nightmare of death on board the Yazoo City, in that last desperate hour below New Orleans, that had so affected Taylor ’s mind as to set him on this path of self-destruction? It was certainly possible.

And what, Bowater wondered, does that say about me? Taylor ’s reaction was perfectly understandable, but what kind of a person became more upset over the destruction of a rare violin than over the deaths of ordinary men?

Bowater shook his head. He had seen death before, of course, more than Taylor, he imagined. He had seen the casualties of the Mexican War, the men blown apart by naval gunnery at the bombardment of Veracruz. Men died all the time at sea, from falls or disease or any of a countless number of shipboard accidents, circumstances unknown on riverboats.

Death was a constant, as much as foul weather or rocks and shoals. Bowater had seen more men go over the standing part of the foresheet than he could remember. He had been aboard the captured slavers during cruises off the African coast, had seen the horrors of the lower decks. Was he beyond feeling now?

He thought of Thadeous Harwell, first officer aboard his first command, shot down at the Battle of Elizabeth City. Young, enthusiastic Harwell, and the memory gave him a sharp knife thrust of sadness, and with it came genuine relief that he could still feel such an emotion.

SIXTEEN

On the next day, at 10 o’clock A.M., we observed from the Virginia that the flag was not flying on the Sewell’s Point battery and that it appeared to have been abandoned.

FLAG OFFICER JOSIAH TATTNALL TO STEPHEN R.MALLORY

The Norwegians were kindness itself to the pair of exhausted-looking, disheveled, French-speaking American women who had appeared on their deck, transported there by a United States dispatch boat and requesting they be returned to the Confederacy.

The crew of the Norvier acted with such dispatch, in fact, that Wendy had the clear impression that the Norwegians were eager to be rid of them. Molly began with her usual sort of explanation- believable, detailed, but not overly so, spoken in a fluent French that oozed sincerity and vulnerability. She explained how the Federals refused to take them to a Confederate port, despite their being citizens of the Confederate States, after the ship they were on was captured by Yankees off Cape Hatteras.

She had got no further than that when the officer to whom they were speaking, who Wendy assumed to be the captain, cut her off with an apology, hands held up to ward off further explanation. He turned to another man, who had approached them in midconversation, a man in finely made civilian clothing who, though having just completed a trans-Atlantic voyage, looked as if he was ready for an evening at the opera. This Wendy took to be the Norwegian minister. If he had a wife, she was not in evidence.

The two men spoke in rapid Norwegian and the women could do no more than listen and try to deduce, from the tone and the hand motions, what was being said. Wendy worked out her best-guess translation:

CAPTAIN: Your Honor, I don’t know what these lunatic women are talking about. Something about the Federals not allowing them to go home.

MINISTER: What do they want from us?

CAPTAIN: Apparently they want us to take them over there.

(The captain at that point gestured toward the south.)

MINISTER: Very well, let us get them the hell off this ship and have no more to do with this. Lord, we don’t want to start an incident an hour after the anchor has dropped!

That was just Wendy’s guess, but she would have wagered all the money pressed against her breasts that she was within a biscuit toss of being right. Before Molly could begin again, the captain informed her that they would be taken ashore, and he turned and shouted for a boat to be cleared away, shouting orders over the two women’s attempts to thank him.

An hour later, with the sun just lost in the west, they fetched the beach at the foot of the battery at Sewell’s Point, the very spot from which they had left that morning in the first light of day. Lincoln ’s boat and the other Federal vessels that had been shelling the fort were long gone, the Virginia , hulking and dark, riding on her mooring half a mile away.

The Norvier’s launch was crewed by twenty young Norwegian sailors, tricked out in blue-and-white-striped shirts and flat-topped hats that they wore at a jaunty angle, bound around with a strip of black ribbon embroidered with the name of their ship. They were handsome, blond, smiling men who seemed to appreciate the women in the stern sheets. They took every opportunity to meet their passengers’ eyes and smile, while Molly smiled coquettishly back and Wendy blushed and the officer sitting beside them scowled at his men in disapproval.

The boat ground up on the gravel shore and the oarsmen hopped out one by one and dragged the boat up on the beach, until at last they were able to assist Wendy and Molly out onto the dry ground. Molly thanked them all in French, and though it was clear they did not understand the words, her meaning was obvious, and they smiled and gave their welcomes in Norwegian. The humorless officer ordered the boat to be pushed back into the water and hustled the sailors back aboard, and soon they were pulling for the Norvier, a gray and indistinct object, half lost in the gloom.

“Lord, I would sign aboard that ship in a minute if they would promise to put me in the fo’c’sle!” Molly said. Wendy was too exhausted to be scandalized.

“Now what, Aunt?” Wendy said. She sat with a thump on a knee-high rock. The gentle surf pulsed against the shore and the saltwater washed over Wendy’s shoes but she did not have the energy to move them. Whatever spirit had been driving her along through the chaotic day was now entirely drained from her. Her body seemed to know it was safe to collapse now, with her feet back on Southern soil, her neck apparently free from the hangman’s noose, and the question of whether or not she should blow out the brains of the President of the United States decided for her. She felt like a chicken, beheaded, hung by its feet, all the life juices drained from her.

“That’s quite an image,” Molly said.

“What?”