Then he began to wonder if the shooting was a coincidence or not. It seemed rather unlikely that a rebel patrol would be hanging around Fort Stephens just at the time Mr. Lincoln decided to take a stroll on its walls.
The soldier struck by the first bullet was dead. Looking at the wound that had blown his face away, it seemed that he had died virtually instantly and that any motion observed earlier had been nothing more than involuntary spasms.
“I thought this place was safe,'^: said John Hay. He, too, was visibly shaken. People who work in the White House do not ordinarily see violent death close up even though they frequently cause it.
“The observation balloons and the patrols can find armies,” Nathan said, “but a handful of men bent on murder can generally slink in like what just happened.”
The cannon had ceased and Nathan saw with relief that a large unit of soldiers had clambered out and was headed towards the place where the gunfire had been observed. He noticed that they were having a great deal of difficulty moving through their own defenses. At least that much works right, he thought. General Heintzelman commanded the forts and their garrisons under the overall command of Meade. Heintzelman had been near Lincoln on the parapet and was in telegraphic communication with neighboring Fort De Russey, which had also sent out a patrol.
President Lincoln had just about made it to his carriage when there was another brief burst of gunfire. One of the patrols had stumbled onto the Confederates' hiding place. A distant shout informed them that at least one prisoner had been taken. Now they might find out just how and why a Confederate patrol just happened to be at that place and at that time.
Nathan glanced towards the president, who smiled quizzically. “Do you believe in coincidences, Mr. Hunter?”
“Not really, sir.”
“Nor do I. Mr. Hunter. Coincidences belong in novels.”
Abigail Watson had hung back in the hallway while General Wade Hampton was carried into his room by men who awkwardly handled his stretcher up stairs and around corners. She had not been noticed by his accompanying officers and doctors as they finally managed to carry his stretcher into the Haskills' largest bedroom. She was just a darky slave and nothing more important to them than a piece of furniture.
It had not been the first time that a wounded or ill Confederate officer had been brought there instead of to one of the numerous military hospitals that ringed Richmond. The city's hospitals were overwhelmed, overworked, staffed by unqualified personnel, and hideously unsanitary, even by the lax standards of the time. People stayed in hospitals to die, not to get better. The powerful, important, and those who could afford it found their own doctors and medicines.
General Hampton had stayed at Haskill's Hotel on a couple of previous occasions, so his presence was taken pretty much in stride. The only difference was that he had taken a Union bullet in the shoulder and now required both care and continuous observation lest the wound reopen and cause him to bleed to death.
With only so many people available, some of the responsibility for watching over Hampton while he slept as soundly as the drugs given him would permit had fallen on Abigail's slender shoulders. Abigail would sit on a chair in the corner and simply watch while the general slept, his chest heaving rhythmically beneath the massive bandages that swathed him.
She had mixed emotions about her assignment. Part of her rejoiced that a Confederate of Hampton's stature was out of the war, while another part of her was angered that he hadn't been killed outright. She wondered if she was capable of finishing the job by putting a pillow over Hamptons face and suffocating him.
She decided it wasn't worth the risk. First, he might wake up and push her away. Even in his weakened state he looked like an enormously strong man. If caught, even if she succeeded, she would guarantee herself the same awful death that had befallen Hannibal. No, she wanted to live. She had a son and, while he hadn't seen his mother in a long time, she knew he needed her alive and not a martyr.
Other thoughts impeded her ability to commit murder. There was the practical matter that Hampton, while both famous and important, wasn't all that essential to the Confederate war cause. He would be replaced, and both slavery and the war would continue without missing a step. Next was the fact that Hampton, in his previous stays at Haskill's had been correctly courteous in his dealings with her. No swearing, no hollering, and certainly no physical punishment or attempts to force himself on her sexually like so many other guests had done.
In short, Wade Hampton had been a gentleman and Abigail considered herself a lady, and ladies do not murder gentlemen.
The thought of her being a lady to a white man’s gentleman made her smile while she kept watch over the lightly snoring general. Bored, she stood and walked about the room. There was a pile of papers on a desk near the bed. He had informed his aide and secretary that he intended to keep up with his business ventures and other correspondence while he recovered from his wounds.
Abigail Watson reached a conclusion. If she could not kill the man, then the least she could do was read his mail. Keeping careful watch over his prone form for any changes that might indicate that he was awakening, she began to shuffle though the correspondence for anything interesting. Much was the stuff of routine. Forms from the army needed completion, and there were reports from his landholdings that told of wealth that was inconceivable to her. But there was nothing that was particularly interesting or compelling.
But then she noticed two documents that were pinned together. The signature on the second one was that of Jefferson Davis and it was in response to an earlier one sent by Hampton. She read the two in growing wonderment. She knew little of the ways of the world outside Virginia, except that there was such a world and that there was a place called England that fought on the side of the Confederacy. Until just a moment earlier, she hadn't given any thought to what life was like in this place called England. She simply presumed that it was a land full of plantations and fields that were tilled by Negro slaves. Now she knew differently.
Abigail breathed deeply. With trembling hands, she took both letters, folded them, and hid them in her dress. If they were discovered as absent from the pile, their loss would easily be attributed to the administrative chaos the pile of papers represented. Abigail was confident she would not be blamed for their loss. After all. what would a nigger want with letters she couldn't read?
She had no idea what to do with the letters. She only hoped an answer would come to her.
“Retreat is an abominable word,” said Knollys. His eyes were focused on the small campfire on which an unknown something in a small greasy pan was trying to form itself into a biscuit.
“So, too, is starvation,” Wolsey responded from the other side of the fire. “Of the two, I'll choose the former any time. Starving to death is so final, while one can always recover from a retreat. Well, almost always.”
“True enough.”
“As they say, Knollys, there is a time and a place for everything, and, God knows, this is the time to pull back to Virginia and determine just what, if anything, we have accomplished.”
And what had they accomplished? Knollys wondered. As feared, there had been no major battle with Grant's forces, which had stayed maddeningly out of reach of the longed-for climactic battle. There had been many skirmishes and small battles, some involving corps-sized detachments, but Grant had not permitted the size of the conflicts to escalate. When a Union force had been threatened by a reinforced Confederate one, he had withdrawn the Union force rather than match the rebel one.
It had resulted in a campaign of attrition that had only benefited the Union. In the weeks of campaigning, the combined Anglo-Confederate army had lost nearly twenty thousand men. It was estimated that the Union forces had lost several thousand more, but they had more to begin with and continued to gather reinforcements. Thus, the Union forces actually grew while the Confederates dwindled.