Thieves Of Mercy

He came to the north end of the wall, the northern boundary of the shipyard. Beyond that, the town of Portsmouth consisted of wood frame houses and various businesses tucked into red brick buildings. Trolley tracks cut parallel lines down the hard-packed dirt streets.

He crossed the road at an angle, heading for the water. With the breeze blowing the smoke from the burning yard off toward Norfolk, he could smell the fish and coal dust and brackish mud flats of the waterfront.

A Negro in a big slouch hat stepped from an alley to Newcomb’s left. Newcomb rested a wary hand on the butt of his gun, but the man stopped short twenty feet away. Their eyes met, and the black man took a step back, his face registering fear and revulsion. He turned and fled back the way he had come.

Stupid nigger, what got into him? Newcomb thought as he hurried on. Then he recalled his own reflection in the mirror, the crusted blood, the hair wild and matted. He was a frightening thing to look at.

The waterfront consisted of wharf after wooden wharf, stretching north along the Elizabeth River and piled with barrels and bales of sundry goods, cotton and hay and straw. Rising above them was a tangle of masts and smokestacks like a forest in winter-seagoing ships and brigs and schooners, fishing smacks, tugs, packet boats. They were all tied up and seemingly abandoned in the panicked town.

Newcomb paused, let his breath settle, looked around. There was nothing moving on the river. He waited for a minute, then another, to be certain he was not being watched. He took a step toward the docks, then stopped.

The river was not entirely deserted. He could see a boat now, about two hundred yards away, and coming up from somewhere downriver. The boat was driven by a dipping lug sail, a crew of seamen leaning on the weather rail to steady it. It had to be a manof-war’s boat, it could be nothing else.

Newcomb sucked in his breath. He felt the sweat stand out on his forehead, though he was not certain why. Is it them? If so, why would they be coming upriver? They should be heading to Richmond, or to hell, or wherever secesh trash went.

He pulled his telescope and focused it on the boat. Six men that he could see. They seemed to be wearing the bibbed frocks of navy men, but there was no uniformity, and that, to Newcomb, meant Rebel. He swept the glass aft to the officer in the stern sheets. His coat might have been faded blue, but Newcomb did not think so. More likely the gray of the Confederate Navy.

Newcomb felt a tremor in his stomach, felt an impulse to run inland and hide. He lowered the glass, took a step back.

Wait, wait, wait, he thought. I’m a civilian, aren’t I? Nothing about him indicated that he was a Union naval officer. That fact might get him hung as a spy if the secesh caught him, but it also meant that the men in the boat, even if they did pay any attention to him, would not see him for what he was.

He lifted the glass again, pretended that he was entirely calm, and watched the boat approach. All right, if they land anywhere near here I’ll hide, he decided at last, but the boat made no move to approach, and soon Newcomb realized they must be heading for the navy yard.

All right, all right, what does this tell me? The Federal forces have not yet taken Norfolk, or those bastards would not dare come sailing upriver like it was a holiday. Whoever those Rebs are, they do not know the yard is abandoned. Damned secesh, just what you’d expect… left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing…

He continued to watch as the boat swept by, making good time with the sail set and the tide flooding. None of the boat crew even looked in his direction. Finally it was lost from sight behind a warehouse upriver of where Newcomb stood.

I need a boat…

He needed to find a boat that he could handle by himself. A fast boat, one that could outsail the Rebel boat that had just passed him, in case it came to that.

Through the maze of rigging and spars he saw a single thin mast, no more than twenty feet high. It looked like a possibility. He walked out along the wooden wharf to which it was tied.

The boat floated four feet below the level of the wharf, a long, lean thing, ketch rigged. It was what the people of the Chesapeake called a log canoe, with a hull that looked for all the world as if it were planked up, but was in fact burned and carved from a few big logs fastened together. They were generally used in the oyster fishery, as apparently this one was, judging from the dried mud, broken shells, and dark pool of fetid bilgewater in the bottom.

But that did not matter. The boat was simple to sail and fast and that made it ideal. Newcomb looked around to see if the owners were near, but the only people he could see were a hundred yards away and paying no attention to him. He climbed down into the boat, lowered the centerboard, cast off the dock fasts, and pushed away from the wharf.

He raised the jib and then the mainsail, which was an odd-looking thing. It had no gaff, but rather a triangular head and a loose foot, rather like the jib. The clew was cut off and a short spar was laced there and the sheet attached to that.

The sails flogged as they went up and the boat began to drift downwind. Newcomb took his place at the tiller, leading the sheets aft. He hauled both sheets taut, the sails hardened up, and the boat began to gather way, heeling over and moving so nimbly that Newcomb sucked in his breath in surprise. He rounded up a bit to slow her down, then fell off the wind, letting the lean boat gather way. In less than a minute he was cleaving the small chop at four knots, the tiller firm and responsive in his hand.

Soon the town of Portsmouth dropped away and the river opened up before him. He turned the bow more northerly. The quick and weatherly log canoe pointed so high he thought he might well fetch Hampton Roads on that one tack. Newcomb was well versed in small boat handling, had sailed nearly every kind of rig imaginable, but he could not recall any boat so nimble and fast.

He kept to the center of the river, well away from the tricky mud banks, equidistant from Portsmouth to the west and Norfolk to the east, since he did not know who was in control of either town. He scanned them with his telescope as best he could, but the glass revealed nothing beyond the fact that they both seemed deserted, that virtually no one and no vessels were moving along the waterfront.

The town of Norfolk yielded to the brown fields and clumps of trees to the north, and Newcomb had to tack once to stand more into the center of the river, then again to return to his northerly course. The low western shoreline dropped away where the southern and western branches of the river met, and four miles down-river the great expanse of Hampton Roads and the mouth of the James River opened up before him.

He picked up his telescope, twisted around, and looked astern. Nothing. Just empty river and a shoreline crowded with idle shipping. He looked forward, his pulse quickening. He made himself be calm, be methodical. Swept the glass west to east.

There was a boat. It was under sail, about a mile or so ahead. It was on a starboard tack, sailing roughly southwest, but as New-comb watched, it turned up into the wind, tacking around. It seemed to stall, sail flogging, caught in irons for a moment. It was too far to see what was happening, but whoever was sailing the boat was apparently no expert.

Newcomb’s hands were trembling. He was grinding his teeth together and he made himself stop.

You bitch…

TWENTY-THREE

HAMLET: O it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise.

SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET, ACT III, SCENE 2

Mississippi Mike steadfastly refused to allow his literary doppelganger to die at the end of the book. “I admire the knife fight, an the poison an all that,” he said to Bowater, sitting on the edge of a frail-looking chair in his cabin aboard the General Joseph Page. “I surely do. But it don’t