make her lose sight of that goal. But that was before she had been threatened with hanging or shooting or rape or burning to death.
Wendy Atkins discovered, during that short and brutal time, that, girlhood fantasies aside, even true love could not take precedence over everything. Wendy nearly forgot her primary objective, but she did not forget it entirely. As she and Molly staggered up the dirt road, leaving the smoldering hulk of the
When Molly finally collapsed at the side of the road, unable to go on after all the blood she had lost from the gunshot wound in her arm, Wendy remembered.
She dressed Molly’s wounds, made her comfortable, sat with her in the shade by the side of the road. And as Molly slept, Wendy thought of Samuel Bowater, of the look he would have on his face when he saw her, after recovering from the shock of her being there. They would run to one another, wrap their arms around each other, kiss in a brazen and heedless way, careless of what the world thought, because they were in love.
Of course, Samuel was not generally the brazen and heedless kind, and Wendy was just starting to worry that perhaps he would be too reticent to kiss her in public that way, when she heard the sound of a cart coming up the road. She left Molly where she was, walked back down the road, skirting the side, in case whoever it was coming up was not someone she wished to meet. Despite what she had seen with her own eyes, the specter of Roger Newcomb still floated in her peripheral vision.
It was not Roger Newcomb, or anyone who might be a threat, but an old cart loaded with a profusion of household goods, a farmer, his wife, their three children, a pig, and sundry chickens in wooden cages. Wendy waved them down.
“Gettin the hell out of here, afore the Yankees show and take every damned thing we got,” the farmer explained, when Wendy asked where they were bound.
“We have been trying to do the same. My aunt and me. Oh, we have had a terrible time. My aunt is hurt. Could we beg a ride of you?”
The farmer followed Wendy to where Molly lay. He had a notion that Molly’s wound looked very much like a gunshot wound, but Wendy explained that it was from a broken sapling on which Molly had torn her flesh when she tripped and fell.
The farmer looked hard at Wendy. Finally he spat a stream of tobacco on the ground. “All right, whatever you say,” he said. “Let’s git her on the wagon.”
It was not a comfortable ride, but it was better than walking, and the farmer took them to a place where they could catch a train to Richmond.
Molly slept a good deal of the time, but when she was awake she was lucid, and she told Wendy of a place in Richmond, the home of a friend, where they would be safe. It took them forty torturous hours of travel, rattling along on trains, waiting on benches at depots while the soldiers took precedence, jamming onto trolleys, before they finally arrived at Molly’s friend’s home, where they were welcomed in like family. Wendy felt as if she had been forty years in the desert, but now it was over.
She stayed for a week, sleeping when she could, between dreams that made her bolt upright, kicking at the bedclothes, cold with sweat. She tended to her aunt, whose recuperation was slow but steady. She helped in the kitchen when she had the strength. For a week she rested, recuperated, and then she knew it was time to go.
“Molly,” Wendy said, hesitant; she did not know how to broach it.
“You want to go to your sailor boy?”
“Yes.”
Molly smiled at her, brushed the hair from her face. “You are a very different woman than you were the first time you set out on that mission.”
Wendy nodded. Molly sighed. “I’m too battered to go on,” she said. “A week or two, perhaps, but not now. Part of surviving is knowing when you must stop. But you are much younger than I am, and stronger. And now I know you’ll be safe.”
Wendy was surprised, but she hid it. She had expected an argument from Molly, along the lines of “Now you know what can happen…” but in fact her aunt’s response was very much the opposite.
She left the next day. Some money in her carpetbag, the bulk of it down the front of her dress, her pistol strapped to her thigh, she set out with none of the trepidation or uncertainty that she had felt in the carriage house in Portsmouth, packing her things. She bid farewell to Molly. Their host took her in his carriage to the railroad depot.
She waited five hours there for a train, reading back issues of the Richmond
It was a long and exhausting eleven days of travel, west toward the Mississippi River. Terrible food, sleepless nights, excruciating delays. At several points she had to walk or beg a ride from one railhead to another because the lines did not connect. At other times she had to take a room in a hotel because the train was delayed for some reason-tracks washed out or torn up, engine broken down, cars diverted-and no one had any idea when it might arrive.
She wondered if the Yankee rail system was in such a shambles, and she had the sinking feeling that no, it was nothing like this. The shopkeepers in the North would keep their trains running on time.
Worst of all were the ribald suggestions of men who assumed a woman traveling unescorted as she was had to be earning her way across country in some manner, and they were willing to give her a job of work. There were times when she wanted to pull the pistol out of its secret holster and jam the barrel into some leering face, just for the satisfaction of seeing the lust dissolve into fear. But she resisted, and managed to satisfy herself with a few cutting words.
It was monotonous, irritating, unpleasant, uncomfortable, but it was a Sunday church picnic compared to the few days it had taken her to get free of Norfolk, and she never once even thought to complain.
Eleven long days, and then she was there.
It was midafternoon when the train arrived at the station and Wendy stood on protesting muscles, stretched as delicately as she was able, and retrieved her carpetbag. She stepped out into a beautiful day, bright and warm. She could smell the nearby river, the pungent smell of late spring flowers. She was there, after all she had endured she was there, and the elation was unlike any she had ever felt.
The fresh air was welcome after the train car, which reeked of tobacco smoke and too many people in too tight and warm a space.
Wendy crossed the platform and pushed her way into the station. She did not imagine that anyone there would know Samuel Bowater by name, but she hoped perhaps someone might know where the navy men were employed. It seemed a wanton question, but Wendy had already left the bonds of propriety way behind, so she steeled herself and asked the ticket man.
“Oh, sure, ain’t a soul here doesn’t know that. They’re pretty near heroes, ’round here. You just follow the River Road south an… well, hell… Tom! Come over here. This here lady needs a ride down to the shipyard.”
Tom, an old black man in an old black sack coat, nodded, smiled, took up Wendy’s carpetbag. He led her out of the station to an old buckboard just outside the door, a tired horse standing in the traces. He set a crate on the ground for her to step on, then joined her on the seat, shook the reins, and the horse stepped off.
They rolled through the streets and then along the wide river, and Tom kept up a running narrative of everything they had done in town to prepare for defense, how the Yankee navy was closing in, but how they would be ready.
Wendy listened with half an ear while she took in the sight of the strange town. She had only been out of Virginia twice in her life, and once was just to Maryland and the other to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, to see Samuel Bowater. This was so different, so exciting-the travel, the new places, the reckless way she had run off to be with her love-it was absolutely intoxicating.
At last the shipyard came into view, a bustle of activity, men swarming around like ants on a hill of spilled sugar. Wendy felt her pulse race, felt a tingling in her hands and feet. After all this time and suffering, would she be reunited with Samuel Bowater, here, in the next five minutes? Would she have the courage to kiss him the way she had dreamed? She was not so certain now.
Tom pulled the buckboard to a stop, made to get out to help her down, but she leaped to the ground before he could even rise out of his seat.
