Thieves Of Mercy

Both officers were nodding assent before Tattnall had even finished speaking. “It is the most judicious course, sir,” Catesby Jones said.

“I agree,” John Jones said.

“Very well,” said Tattnall, “assemble the men.”

Catesby Jones saluted and summoned the boatswain, who began piping the men topside. Soon they were all there, crowding on the casemate roof, over three hundred men: naval officers, blue-water sailors, landsmen, mechanics, dockworkers, laborers, soldiers, whoever they had been able to scrape up to haul a gun tackle or shovel coal into a furnace. But whatever they had been before, however disparate a group, they were now the crew of the Virginia, battle tested, and Flag Officer Tattnall loved them, just as he loved the ship under his feet.

“Men,” he said, speaking as loudly as his weak lungs would permit, “here is the situation. I’ll give it to you straight. The army has abandoned Norfolk. The navy yard is in flames.”

A murmur like a breeze through long grass swept through the men. When it subsided, Tattnall went on. “We must get Virginia up the James River, as close up to Richmond as she will go. We can aid in the defense of the capital, maybe take some of the enemy’s ships, or sink ’em. But that means we have to lighten her, toss over everything but the guns and powder. It will take a prodigious effort on your part, but it is the only way to save our ship. What say you?”

They replied with cheers-three loud, genuine, enthusiastic cheers-and Tattnall could see that these men would do everything that they were capable of doing to see the Virginia safe, just as he would.

“You make me proud,” he said over the dying cheers. “Go to it.”

He watched the officers telling off the work parties, and he was grateful for their loyalty and their youth, their intelligence and energy, and he was jealous of it too. He wanted more than anything to be foremost in the effort to save the ship. He wanted to fling himself into the work with the kind of unfathomable energy he had known forty years ago. But he could not. He was old and sick. He made his way carefully back to his cabin, lay down on his bunk, and closed his eyes.

endy watched Roger Newcomb pace and stare out over the water and pull his shattered watch

from his vest pocket and stare at it and she thought, God alone will be able to save us from this madman.

His grip on reality-apparently weak from the start-was getting weaker still. His muttering had increased in quantity while going down in volume, so that now what came out of his mouth was no more than an incoherent babble, like someone speaking in tongues. It was unnerving.

Wendy’s wrists, like Molly’s, were still bound, the skin rubbed

agonizingly raw by the rough cordage that now grated on the sores

it had opened. She could feel the occasional trickle of blood running down her fingers. She could not see Molly’s hands, but she guessed they were just as bad.

The gags, at least, had been removed. Once the Confederate boat had passed well clear of them, beyond shouting range, New-comb had removed the strips of skirt from their mouths and interrogated them as to the identity of the men in the boat. Since Wendy had drawn his attention to the boat, she bore the brunt of his questioning.

“Who are they? Who are they?!” He had kicked Wendy hard, sent her sprawling into the dirt. She spit out sand and blood.

“You little cowardly bastard!” she shouted. “Strike a woman whose hands are tied?”

Newcomb grabbed a handful of Molly’s hair, jerked it painfully so her head was back. He held the pistol to her temple. He did not speak and he did not have to.

“Confederate Navy. We met them when they were going upriver. The officer said his name was Jones. Lieutenant John Jones.”

“Lieutenant John Jones… What else did he say?”

“Nothing. He asked if we needed help. He was a gentleman.”

Newcomb ignored the implication, paced to the water, looked north and south. He came back again. “What else?”

“Nothing.” Wendy could see the anger, driven by madness, and she thought she had better come up with something.

“He called himself a ‘flag lieutenant,’ ” she offered. It had meant nothing to her, but apparently it meant something to New-comb. He stood straighter, regarded her as if trying to divine the truth, paced back to the water. Jerked his watch from his vest and replaced it without even looking at it.

It had been several hours since that questioning, and they had not moved from their place in the high grass on Tanner’s Point. Once, Newcomb had said, “We’ll just wait here until the United States Navy comes upriver, and then we shall see.” The words had come out so lucid, so conversational that they took Wendy by surprise. But soon he was muttering again, and she could catch the words flag officer and Virginia and a few obscenities and other words that she thought she could understand, but she was not sure.

Madness… There was no method in it.

The sun went down, blazing red and orange right in their eyes as they faced west, and the moon rose in the deepening blue sky, until the land on the far side was no more than a dark shape in the moonlight and the ruffled surface of the water just visible.

Wendy’s wrists were agony now, and she could hardly feel her hands. They seemed swollen and dull, dead things, and cool, like touching wet gutta-percha. She wondered how long her hands could remain tied like that before the damage was permanent. She wondered if she would live long enough for it to matter.

With the fading light, the insects swarmed. They attacked her bleeding wrists with vigor, biting the torn flesh. She flailed her arms to the extent that she could, but she could not rid herself of them. She shook her hair over her face to drive the biting flies and mosquitoes away, but they would not be thwarted. She wanted to scream. She looked over at Molly. Their eyes met; the mutual fear and misery passed between them. But there was fire there, too, in Molly’s eyes, and Wendy was pleased to see it. Molly had not given up.

Roger Newcomb paced the shoreline, looking out over the water, as if he were waiting for a ship that would arrive at any moment. But nothing came. Nothing moved on the water.

The sharp edge of fear began to dull, misery began to overtake her, and despite the pain and the torment of the insects, Wendy felt her eyes begin to close. She lay down on her side, fell in the sandy dirt with a thump, unable to ease herself down with her hands. She closed her eyes. She thought of Newcomb putting a bullet through her head as she slept, and it no longer seemed the worst thing that could happen.

Some time later she woke, startled awake by something, but she did not know what. She had no notion of how long she had been asleep, but she was stiff and groggy and she guessed it had been a few hours at least. She looked over at Molly, who apparently had also been asleep, and who was also now awake. Molly was looking toward the shore.

The moon was higher now, casting more light on the land and the water. It fell on Roger Newcomb as he paced, waved his arms, stared up the shoreline, paced again. His movements were more frenetic than ever.

“He saw something on the water,” Molly said, speaking in a barely audible whisper. It was the first thing she had said since Newcomb had taken their boat, and Wendy felt an irrational sense of relief at the sound of her voice.

“What do you think?”

Molly shook her head. “Yankee navy ship?”

They were quiet again, listening. The frogs and the buzz of the insects made a blanket of sound through which little else could be heard. But there was something else. Wendy could hear it, just hear it, far off. The occasional clanking sound, the huff, the rippling water of a bow wave. It sounded like a steamer. A steamship coming down from Hampton Roads. The Yankee navy.

The ten-foot path between where the women were lying in the grass and the open shoreline was pretty well trampled now, after hours of Newcomb’s obsessive shifting between his prisoners and his vigil on the beach, and Wendy could see a good section of the water from where she lay. She struggled to her knees, pushing up with