There was a clatter of hooves and a moment later voices raised.
“Hurry! Get those wagons! The battle will be tomorrow for certain, at Manassas! We must get there by dawn!”
Hester responded without hesitating even an instant for thought. There was only one thing to do now. Breeland, Merrit, the questions of hostage or murderer must all wait. There were men who the next day would be wounded, and the tide of war drowned everything else. Horror filled her, familiar as an old nightmare, and she answered as she always had. “We’re coming.”
5
H
They traveled at the best speed they could make out through the streets and then the strange, open patches where one day the city might stretch, across the Long Bridge over the river to the now almost deserted camps in Alexandria. The men here were those wounded in earlier skirmishes to the south and west, and the numerous sick with fevers, typhoid and the dysentery that plagued all such groups of people where there were no sanitary arrangements. Here it was even worse than it might have been in a cooler climate, or among men with military training. These were raw recruits with no knowledge of how to take the smallest precautions against disease, lice, or poisoning from spoiled or contaminated food and water. Each man was responsible for cooking his own provisions, which were given him in bulk. Most of them had no idea how to ration them so they lasted, and very little notion of how to cook.
Hester passed through trying not to stop and recognize everything. There was so much needless suffering, and the stench of it assailed her as they joggled over the rough track in the stifling heat, choked by the dust of those ahead of them. She heard the groans of distress, and fury mounted inside her at the agony she could picture in her mind as vividly as if Scutari and the dying there were only yesterday. She was clenched up inside, all her muscles locked tight, her body aching from the tension of it, her mind trying not to picture it, and failing.
Merrit sat beside her in silence. Whatever her thoughts were, she did not voice them. She was white-faced, her eyes on the road even though it was Hester who drove the cart. She might have been thinking of the battlefield ahead, wondering and fearful of what they would find, whether they had supplies remotely fit for the task, whether her own courage would be good enough, her nerve steady, her knowledge adequate. Or she might have been remembering her furious parting with her father and the things she had said to him which could not now be taken back. It was too late to say she was sorry, that she had not really meant it, or even that for all their differences she loved him, and that her love was far greater; it was lifelong, part of who she was. Or perhaps she was thinking of her mother and the grief that must now be consuming her.
Or maybe she wondered what had happened in the warehouse yard, and what had been Lyman Breeland’s part in it. That was assuming she did not know. And Hester could not believe she did.
The noonday heat was almost unbearable. It was over ninety even in the shade. What it was in the glare of the dust-choked road could not even be guessed.
They drove all day, stopping only as was necessary to rest the horse and allow the animal to cool itself in the shade of roadside trees, and to take a little water. They had to watch carefully that neither it nor they drank too much. They did not speak, except of the other traffic bent on the same errand as themselves, or how much longer the journey would be and where they would finally settle.
Once Merrit looked as if she were going to broach the subject of Breeland’s honor again. She stood on a patch of withered grass, swatting away the tiny, black thunder flies that irritated all the time. But at the last minute she changed her mind, and spoke of the outcome of the battle instead.
“I suppose the Union will win.…” It was not quite a question. “What happens to the wounded of the side that loses?”
There was no point in indulging in euphemisms. The truth would be apparent within hours. To be prepared for it at least reduced the paralysis of shock, if not the horror.
“It depends how fast the battle travels,” Hester replied. “With cavalry it moves on and leaves them. They help each other as they can. With infantry it goes only as fast as a man can run. Everyone does his best to stagger away, to carry others, to find wagons or carts or anything else to move those who can’t walk.”
Merrit swallowed. Other wagons were passing along the road, dust swirling up behind them. “And the dead?” she asked.
Memory washed over Hester with such power for a moment that her vision blurred and a wave of grief and nausea engulfed her. She was back in the Crimea, stumbling across the floor of the valley strewn with bodies of the dead and dying after the massacre of the Light Brigade, the earth trampled and soaked with blood, the smell of blood in the air, clogging her nose and throat, the sounds of agony all around her. She was helpless with the enormity of it. She could feel the tears running down her face again, and the hysteria and despair.
“Mrs. Monk!” Merrit’s voice brought her back to the dust and sweat of the moment, to Virginia, and to the battle yet to happen.
“Yes … I’m sorry.”
“What happens to the dead?” Merrit’s voice shook now, as if she knew the answer in her heart.
“Sometimes they’re buried,” Hester said huskily. “You do if you can. But the living are always more important.”
Merrit turned away and went to fetch the horse. There were no more questions to which she wanted to know the answers, except the simple, practical ones of how to harness a horse, of which she had no idea.
They reached the small town of Centreville at dusk. It was no more than a stone church, a hotel and a few houses lying between five and six miles from Bull Run Creek and Henry Hill beyond it.
Hester was exhausted and certainly aware of how dirty she was, and she knew Merrit must feel the same, only she would be far less accustomed to it. But the girl had a fever of enthusiasm for the Union cause to spur her on, and if she wondered about Lyman Breeland even for a moment, it did not show in the deliberation with which she
