Thieves Of Mercy

could see the landing where the crew of the Virginia had set foot on shore, a weary old wooden dock leading up to the bitter end of sandy road.

Wendy brought the boat alongside and Molly tied the painter to a piling. They climbed up a slick wooden ladder to the dock. Silent, they turned and looked across the water at the burning ironclad. Acting Master Roger Newcomb’s funeral pyre.

“Bastard,” Molly muttered. “I wish I had killed him myself.”

And then the CSS Virginia exploded. The top of the casemate seemed to lift right up, as if a massive creature made of red and orange and yellow flame were standing up inside, tearing it apart as it stood. Black shards of iron and the long guns like exclamation points lifted up, up into the dawn sky. The entire explosion-the light, the noise, the concussion-was so massive that it melded all into one overwhelming sensation, hurling itself at the women standing dumbfounded on the dock.

They looked with wide eyes and open mouths, and then the shock wave rolled over them and knocked them clean off their feet, tossing them to the ground like children’s dolls. They clutched the dirt for protection and felt the earth tremble, and that was the most frightening thing, feeling the only thing in life that is absolutely immovable quivering as if it had no substance at all.

They did not move. The explosion at the shipyard had been a nightmare, but it was a minor affair compared to this Armageddon. Wendy could feel the impact of ironclad parts falling around them. She pictured the huge sections of iron plate, the guns and carriages and shot and massive wooden beams hurling through the air and she wondered if any would drop on them, if Roger New-comb had killed them after all.

When it was quiet they looked up. The sky was lighter overhead. Massive sections of casemate lay smoldering all around them. A falling cannon had shattered a small oak near the side of the road.

They got to their knees and then to their feet. The Virginia was a low dark spot on the water, still burning, like a barge on fire. The casemate was gone, the decks were gone, everything that had made her the invincible ship she was had been blown to the heavens, and now the parts that had once been the USS Merrimack, the hull and machinery that had lived already through one sinking and burning, were dying their final death.

The Virginia no longer existed.

Molly nodded. “Now I am very satisfied that Newcomb is dead.”

The women turned and headed up the road. Behind them, the sun broke the horizon, sent its orange light down the road at their feet, threw long shadows ahead of them. A new day. They headed for Richmond.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Our only hope is to make ourselves useful “upstream,” and we will keep the enemy at this point in check until they are largely reinforced. The enemy’s boats above Fort Pillow are now moored in narrow channels behind sand bars, where we can not attack them again, but we will wait and watch for another opportunity.

BRIGADIER GENERAL M.JEFF THOMPSON TO GENERAL G.T.BEAUREGARD

I was some time after the death of CSS Virginia when Samuel Bowater read the news. It saddened him, the way he would have been saddened by the death of someone he had known briefly in person, knew well by reputation, and had come to deeply respect.

Bowater had been there on the night the USS Merrimack had gone down, scuttled and burned by the men who had been sent to save her. He had helped raise the hulk of the ship and maneuver it into the dry dock at the Gosport Naval Shipyard. While he had been ferrying supplies around the Norfolk area, chafing at the tedium and flailing around for a way to get into the fight in a meaningful way, he had watched the ship’s slow transformation. He had stood by the dry dock on that solemn day in February, just four months before, when she had without fanfare floated free of the blocks.

Four months… Bowater wondered if any ship in the history of naval warfare had done so much, had so influenced strategic thinking, had changed the very nature of shipbuilding as profoundly in a career that had lasted just four months. He did not think so.

Four months… It seemed more like four years, four times four years, since he had stood beside that granite dry dock in Virginia. Since he had been able to spend evenings with Wendy Atkins, enjoy the trappings of civilization, far from the barbaric shores of the Mississippi.

But no, it had only been four months since then, and less than a month since the Battle of New Orleans. Now the army under Ben Butler, whom they were calling “Beast,” was in charge in the Crescent City, and Farragut was coming north.

And Bowater, by order of Secretary Mallory, was not concerned with what was happening downstream. It was the enemy upstream, pushing south, that he was there to help stop. Squeezed from both sides, and the pressure was becoming terrific.

He did not know how much fighting he would be doing with the Tennessee. They were planking her like mad, but the army would not send any shipwrights, and even house carpenters were getting scarce. The men Bowater had brought with him were good for heavy lifting but not much else.

Construction dragged its tedious way along. Two lots of lumber for deck plank sat at the Memphis and Charleston Railroad depot, but the manpower was not there to transport it to the shipyard. The iron plate still sat on the Arkansas side of the river, finished but unpaid for, and despite all Bowater’s prodding, Shirley could not be induced to take possession of it.

The shipbuilder had any number of excuses: he did not want to waste time before the iron was needed, he did not want to clutter up the yard, the boats were not available to bring it over. But Bowater had a good idea of the real and unstated reason for his reticence. Shirley did not want to pay for iron plate for a ship that he believed would never be launched.

And then there were the engine and shafting, sent downriver with the Arkansas. At some point soon it would be time to put them in, and all work would stop until that was done. They couldn’t seal up the casemate without first installing the shaft, at least. And if it was not there, then what?

It was all very depressing, so Bowater made a point of not thinking about it.

Noah, he reflected, had built the whole damned ark by himself in less time than it was taking them to finish this gunboat. And just as Noah had his neighbors to taunt him, so Bowater had Mississippi Mike Sullivan.

The ships of the River Defense Fleet moved up and down the river, staying mostly under the guns of Fort Pillow but sometimes dropping down to Memphis. Sullivan did not miss a chance to come by the yard to inspect the half- built Tennessee, a look of barely suppressed amusement spread across his bearded face.

The River Defense Fleet was quite literally on the front lines of this fight. The fleet and Fort Pillow formed the levee holding back the Yankee flood. That was it. Remove even one of them and the Yankees would be swarming over Memphis in a few days, and the Mississippi River would be in Federal hands from Cairo, Illinois, clear down to Vicksburg. The very fate of the Confederacy, perhaps, was being decided one hundred miles upriver, and Bowater could do nothing but struggle to finish a ship that no one, himself included, believed could be finished. It was intolerable.

Bowater understood-and he hated the fact-that if he hoped to get into the fast-approaching battle, it would have to be at Mississippi Mike’s side.

And that was why, on that perfect morning on the third of June, Lieutenant Samuel Bowater, CSN, found himself just outside the now familiar wheelhouse of the General Page, half a mile upriver from Fort Pillow and a good hundred miles from where he was supposed to be.

He watched the sunlight play over the surface of the river and the scrubby vegetation on the bank, and his thoughts drifted off to how he might paint that scene, how desperately he missed painting, how the intense focus of rendering a scene on canvas gave him, for the time it took, a reprieve from the myriad other thoughts that plagued him. He had given Hieronymus Taylor his music back, and it had made a world of difference to the engineer’s recovery. He could use a similar diversion.

He shook his head. The guilt over his jaunts upriver with Mississippi Mike was bad enough. He could never bring