Unholy Fire (31 page)

Rolling away from the wall, I turned my head to find her face just a few inches from my own, her big dark eyes gazing into mine. Then her mouth was pressing lightly against my bruised lips.

“Am I hurting you?” she whispered.

“No,” I said.

Maybe it was because she pitied me. Maybe she realized how honest my feelings were for her. I don't know what was going through her mind, but when she pulled back for a moment, there was a sloe-eyed sensuality to the cast of her face. I hated it. And I desired it. I felt my passion for her flow through me again like a summer storm. She had already removed her green organdy dress and was wearing only the sheer white shift.

Then she was in my arms again, her soft kisses a prelude to a seeking, opening, reaching, and giving, before we finally came together. Her moaning became louder and louder, as if it was part of a painful and necessary release.

Suddenly I noticed that the conversation had ceased in the cabins on both sides of ours. I imagined the other officers listening to our lovemaking with their ears pressed against the bulkhead walls.

“Hush, my darling,” I whispered.

Amelie seemed oblivious to my efforts to quiet her. When she arched her head back and let out a loud sob, I covered her mouth with mine to stifle her cries. Our bodies began to move in a slow, steady rhythm. For a long time she continued to come at me with a gentle strength, as if her lovemaking could help to restore my physical well-being. And it did, although something strange happened while we lay locked together in one another's arms.

At one point I found myself wondering if she was making love to me, or whether it was to another lover from the many she had known, perhaps Laird Hawkinshield or General Hooker, or even some faceless being who completed her passionate needs but could have been anyone. Then I was carried away by a rush of pure desire. It took me to a place that harbored no questions or doubts.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

Dawn had not yet broken when the packet boat swung out of the channel and nosed in toward the docks at Aquia Creek. A bitter wind greeted us as we emerged from the passageway and gazed out onto the sprawling wharf, which was lit by hundreds of torches, lanterns, and firepots. In the glaring light, men were rushing in every direction like maddened ants, crisscrossing between small mountains of crated food and ammunition.

“We're across the Rappahannock!” a fat supply sergeant hollered from the dock as our bow and stern lines were heaved across the open water and we were pulled to the jetty. His words caused an immediate roar of approval from the throng of officers lining the rails of the packet boat.

“Hurrah for Burnside!” an officer shouted back. He must have been a member of Burnside's staff, because no one else took up the cry.

Next to us on the wharf, a towering crane was roosting over the hold of a freight schooner. As we watched, it slowly extracted a massive siege cannon. Suddenly, a piercing shriek rent the night sky, overriding the noise of the straining cables and shouting stevedores.

Farther down the wharf, the first in a train of hospital wagons was being unloaded alongside a hospital ship. One of its occupants was screaming in agony, accompanied by a more subdued chorus of groans and cries from those less grievously wounded. Their wailing put a damper on the excitement of the officers disembarking ahead of us. Major Bannister and his friend Posey were nowhere in sight.

I found space for Amelie and me in the back of a Pittsburgh wagon. It was loaded with ammunition and heading down to Falmouth. The canvas canopy over the freight bed gave us protection from the raw wind, and several packing blankets provided a small measure of warmth. Amelie soon fell asleep to the slow, rocking motion of the wagon.

The road was crowded with vehicles of every shape and size, all heading south. We had gone about a mile when the first hint of light illumined the eastern sky. By then, I could hear the echoing thunder of siege guns four miles farther south along the Rappahannock.

The sickly gray dawn revealed the extent of the desolation around us. In just the few days since my last visit, our army had succeeded in stripping the countryside bare. All the trees for miles around were reduced to stumps, the logs being used to corduroy the muddy roads and provide fuel and shelter to the army.

Every house, barn, and outbuilding along the road had suffered a similar fate. The army had dismantled them, leaving just the foundations and chimneys standing forlornly in the middle of the raw wasteland. The only fences still remaining were made of piled stones. Nothing alive stirred on the plain.

As we got closer to Falmouth, the road became little more than a vast wallow. Although our engineering battalions had tried to reinforce the lowest places, the constant churning of the wheels of the heavy freight wagons made it a roiling quagmire of mud and skewed logs.

When we passed the contraband camps where I had first met Mr. Beecham and his son, Daniel, Amelie stirred from sleep for the first time. The wretched encampment had grown much larger since I had last seen it. Some of the later arrivals must have been skilled carpenters because there were now several well-constructed structures interspersed with the mud hovels.

The rest of the landscape had changed, too. The small evergreen forest where the Beechams had gone to cut down fir boughs for their shelter had entirely disappeared. Like the countryside we had already passed, the terrain around the contraband camps was as bleak as the surface of the moon.

A slim, young black man was standing alongside the road as we passed the last of the blighted dwellings. He was around my age and dressed in a miserable assortment of rags, yet somehow he retained a certain dignity in the midst of the squalor surrounding him.

Amelie was watching him so intently that at first I wondered whether he might be someone she knew. The thought persisted when I realized that the young man was staring back at her with equal intensity. For a moment I thought he was actually going to run after us, but then he turned and slowly began trudging back toward one of the mud shelters.

I felt Amelie's hand come into mine.

We rode next through the vast encampments of the Army of the Potomac. For almost two miles, the seemingly endless vista of Sibley tents stood empty, the tent covers flapping pathetically in the wind. Smoke still drifted from the mud chimneys of a few, but all the men had moved up toward the fighting.

As if to remind us of where they had gone, another train of hospital wagons came bumping and jostling toward us from the direction of Fredericksburg. By then the road was choked with a succession of military caravans heading toward the battle, and the hospital wagons were forced to navigate a route through the rutted and bumpy pastures adjoining it. With each bone-jarring jolt, their human burden let out a collective refrain of the tortured cries I remembered so well.

As we approached the Rappahannock River, a cavalry squadron dressed in tunics with canary yellow trim overtook us in full gallop, their horses scattering clods of mud as they headed toward the front. When our wagon came over the next rise, I saw the first massed army formations preparing for the main attack.

The flat plain ahead of us was filled with men in blue. They blended into the featureless landscape as far as the eye could see, maybe twenty thousand of them spread out in the fields and pastures on both sides of the road. Their combined voices sounded like roaring surf as we rode past.

At the head of each brigade, a colorful pennant snapped tautly in the wind. The brigades were stripped down to their essential gear of rifles, cartridge boxes, and canteens. The men's field packs were stacked in massive piles next to the individual regiments, waiting to be picked up by army teamsters and hauled after them. I wondered whether the packs would be going south toward Richmond after the battle or back where they had come from.

Some of the men were already eating their field rations. Others lay asleep on their sides and backs on the cold ground. In some places they were so tightly packed that there was no room to sit down.

As the endless sea of faces flashed past, I noted a big difference between these soldiers and the ones I had gone into battle with more than a year earlier. Back then there were easy smiles on the men's faces as we prepared to take the high ground at Ball's Bluff. None of us knew what to expect. We thought we were invincible. But in the wake of all the military disasters that had taken place since, these men had no illusions left about what they would soon be facing. There was no banter in them. They looked hard and ready.

We were passing the seemingly endless ranks of the Second Corps when a large black brougham came up fast behind us. The man on the box was screaming a string of obscenities as he cracked his whip repeatedly over the eight-horse team. In the few seconds it took for the coach to hurtle past, I had a split-second glimpse of Gen. Dan Sickles in the rear seat next to the window. He was gesturing angrily at the man sitting next to him. It was Laird Hawkinshield. Neither looked up as the carriage raced past. Amelie was staring out at the men in the fields and never saw them.

As we neared the river, our teamster yelled back that he would soon be leaving the main road to ferry his supplies farther down the Rappahannock. I called on him to stop at the brick-columned entrance to General Hathaway's headquarters, which was the place I had last seen Val.

The soldiers of Gen. Thomas Meagher's Irish Brigade filled the park-like grounds on both sides of the gravel driveway heading up to the mansion house. The proud Gaelic cast to their faces and their green flags made them immediately recognizable. As we started through their ranks, I remembered their incomparable bravery along the sunken road at Antietam. Now, as they waited to cross the river, I saw that all the men had pinned little sprigs of evergreen on their caps.

From the moment I helped Amelie down from the back of the wagon, she drew the stares of every man within sight. The closest ones stopped whatever they were doing and grew quiet as she came past them up the drive. It was as if a silent message was being carried up the line from one face to the next.

Perhaps she reminded some of them of a sweetheart back home. For others, it might have been a wife, a sister, or a lover. All of them seemed to share an innocent longing as they took in her delicate beauty and physical grace. I knew that for many of those Irish boys, Amelie would be the last woman they would ever see.

“She's wearin' the colors!” one of them suddenly shouted out, as he noticed her dark green cape and emerald organdy dress.

“It's our lucky day,” came back another.

When she smiled at them, the men erupted in a resounding cheer.

As we approached the mansion, two more brigades were forming up beyond the house to move across the river for the main attack. It struck me that somewhere in that vast crowd of officers and men, the murderer of Anya Hagel might be watching us at that very moment, perhaps fearing his discovery if Amelie was not permanently silenced.

I had to find a safe place for her right away. My first thought was to take her straight to Sam's office in the mansion, but there was a small horde of general staff officers streaming in and out of the front portico, any one of whom could also have been the murderer or an accomplice.

I thought of one place where the killer could not be and headed for the long brick stables where the newspapermen were billeted. There I hoped to find Phil Larrabee, who had sketched the likeness of Anya Hagel for me.

I found him shaving with a straight razor in the horse stall that had been assigned to him. Phil was wearing crimson long johns and standing in front of a small hand mirror that was wedged between the iron rungs of a hayrack. When he looked up and saw Amelie standing next to me, his hand jerked uncontrollably upward. For a moment I thought he had sliced off part of his nose, but it had only grazed the skin. He pressed a hand towel against the cut to stanch the bleeding.

“Your first honorable wound, Phil,” I said, as he nervously grabbed his monogrammed bathrobe from the cot and wrapped it around his scrawny shoulders.

“This is Amelie Devereaux,” I said.

“Yes … well, of course,” he replied, completely flustered.

While he continued to dab at his bleeding nose, I explained that Amelie was an important witness in the murder of the girl whose picture he had sketched for me, and that she needed to remain out of sight until I could find Val Burdette.

“She is in serious danger here, Phil,” I said.

He was having a problem looking at her directly for more than a second at a time.

“Of course … glad to help her,” he said, with a besotted smile.

I pulled Amelie aside.

“Do not leave for any reason until I come back for you,” I whispered, taking her hand for a moment. “Promise me that you will stay here.”

“I will,” she said.

As I was walking away, Phil called after me, his nose now covered by a tiny wedge of cheesecloth.

“They say the battle is going to start soon, Kit,” he said, as if unsure whether that was more important than his current assignment. “Will you be back before then?”

I smiled at him and nodded.

Back outside I buttoned my greatcoat against the wind, and headed across the grounds to the field hospital. It was on the far side of the formal gardens, which were now filled with wounded. More than a hundred men were laid out on litters in uneven rows. Their uniforms were soaked, and the smell of wet wool hung over them.

I went to the tent where I had last seen Val, but he was no longer there. Three wounded officers were occupying the space where his lone cot had stood. A strange object was lying on the ground in the rear corner of the tent. It took me a moment to recognize it as the contraption that had been used to immobilize Val's neck. The metal struts appeared to be bent in half. I went looking for his doctor and found him talking to another surgeon in front of one of the surgical tents.