In Washington and points north, just the opposite reaction. Elation, renewed hope. Samuel wondered if anyone on either side still had any sense of proportion. To compare the successful shelling of an undermanned and poorly built fort by a vastly superior enemy to what the Confederate Army had done at Manassas was simply absurd. If the people of the South—or the North—allowed themselves to play at such emotional tug-of-war, they were all in for a sorry time.
Back in early September, Samuel had been confined to bed, weak, arm hurting like hell, drifting in and out of sleep. He was tossing in feverish dreams when he heard a soft voice call. “Captain Bowater?” The voice incorporated itself into his dream, a woman calling from far off, and he was running to her, but he could not seem to move, for all his flailing legs.
“Captain Bowater?” His eyes fluttered open. He looked Wendy Atkins straight in the face and could not place her.
“Captain…? It’s Wendy Atkins…”
“Wendy Atkins…” Samuel said the name as the memory came back with the sound of her voice. It had been two months at least since he had seen her. He tried to picture her by the riverfront park, in paint-spattered clothing. She had annoyed him to no end, he recalled, but with all he had been through he could not recall why.
“What are you doing here?” It was all Bowater could think to say.
“I am volunteering as a nurse,” she said. “Oh, I know, the height of scandal, a female nurse.” She sat on the edge of his bed, leaned down, and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “They think we women will become too aroused, working among the men. I tell you, after all the blood and wounds and pus and worse I have seen, I am in danger of never being aroused again!”
Bowater smiled, smiled at what he understood he would have considered shockingly forward half a year before. But not now. He felt bits of his old propriety flaking off, like paint from an unprimed canvas.
“And how do you happen to be here, Captain?”
Bowater told her, in the barest terms, of Hatteras and the awful shelling, and she listened and she nodded and she did not say any of the stupid things—“Oh my…how dreadful…surely you were afraid”—that most people who had not been under fire said. Instead she just listened, which was just what Samuel Bowater wanted, though not even he himself knew it.
By midmonth, Samuel’s strength was coming back, and he made a point of walking up and down the whitewashed, airy halls of the naval hospital, to the limits of his endurance. On these jaunts Wendy accompanied him, lent an arm when necessary, and sometimes they talked and sometimes they did not and it was fine either way.
The broken arm still hurt, but he could move it now, and rather than remain in bed he often sat by the big windows that looked down over the water, or strolled around the hospital grounds. Then one afternoon Wendy appeared, carrying canvas and easel and paints, all quite new.
“Are you going to paint?” Bowater asked. “I would love to watch you, if you would not mind.”
“No, these are for you,” Wendy said, and there was hesitancy, uncertainty, in her voice.
Insouciance…that is it… Bowater thought. He had tried to pin it down, the thing he had so disliked about Wendy Atkins. Insouciance. That was the word. An arrogant boldness.
But the insouciance was gone now, and in its place a kind of calm understanding, a maturity he would not have thought could be gained in a few months. Something had happened, and now he could hardly recall the Wendy who had so annoyed him. Nor could he entirely recall the Samuel Bowater who had been so annoyed.
“Very well, then.” Bowater sighed, set the canvas up. He looked at the paints and the brushes. Something frightened him, and he did not know if it was an inability to get what was in his heart on canvas, or fear that it would all pour out, that he would make it all appear before him, and have to look on it again.
September turned to October and the cheerless days of autumn, with the cold wind tearing brown leaves from the trees, swirling them down the cobbled streets of Norfolk. Bowater, for all the pleasure he was now taking in Wendy’s company—they walked together, set up their easels, painted side by side, working away for hours in companionable silence—was desperate now to get back to the Cape Fear. He extended his walks beyond the confines of the hospital, strolling along the waterfront, looking longingly out over the river, assessing the shipping that plowed the gray water under gray skies.
Wendy urged him not to overtax his strength, and he did not, mostly, but he pushed himself to the brink.
In mid-October he sent word that he would be rejoining the Cape Fear, that he would take passage to Elizabeth City and meet her there. On that very day he read with some amusement how a band of ad hoc Confederate gunboats had chased the mighty Richmond and two other men-of-war from the Head of the Passes below New Orleans. Employed an ironclad ram, first such vessel built on the American continent. The CSN stealing a march on the Yankees.
Rams… That ancient weapon of Athens and Rome, made obsolete with the ascendancy of sail over the oar. Now with the rise of steam, the oldest of naval weapons was voguish once more.
He read of the first of the Yankee ironclad gunboats, the Carondelet, sliding down the ways. He hoped she was as unreliable as this Manassas appeared to be.
At last the doctors pronounced him fit to leave. With great enthusiasm he packed his few belongings, dressed in the new uniform he had ordered, his third, the second of cursed gray cloth. Tailored to the same measurements as the last, but he found it hung loose on him, was ill-fitting. He ignored that, ignored the aches he still suffered, the short-windedness. He would have ignored a missing limb to get out of the hospital and back to his command.
He said goodbye to Wendy, and it was an awkward thing, with a part of him wanting to embrace her, even kiss her, the other part quite unsure of how it was with them. In the end he gave her a hug, she gave him a sisterly peck on the cheek.
“We are in Elizabeth City quite often,” he said to her, a veiled suggestion.
“I could take the train down…” she said.
Bowater took passage aboard the Raleigh, which was transporting supplies from Norfolk to Roanoke Island. He could see the Cape Fear, tied to the dock, a half mile away, as they steamed down the Pasquotank River, leaving the Great Dismal Swamp Canal astern.
Samuel Bowater felt a charge he had not expected, a delight at seeing his little command, as he looked her over through a pair of field glasses. She looked good. Trim, tidy, her paint freshened, the brass howitzers on the afterdeck glowing dull under the overcast skies.
“She look good, Massa Samuel,” Jacob said.
“Here, have a closer look.” He handed Jacob the field glasses. “Are you eager to get back to her?”
“Oh, yassuh. Hospital ain’t no place for no navy men like us, suh.”
The Raleigh ’s skipper brought his boat neatly alongside the Cape Fear. Bowater stepped aboard his own vessel to the kind of formal greeting he would have expected Lieutenant Harwell to organize. There were bosun’s calls and a sergeant’s guard with rifles and lines of men at attention. It was all very stirring, but Bowater did not really notice.
It was the smell that struck him at first. The smell of the Cape Fear. Before, he would not have said there was such a thing, a distinct odor to his ship. But now, coming back aboard after a month and a half absence, he realized there was. Paint and coal smoke and tar and the unique smell of Johnny St. Laurent’s galley—oh, how he had missed St. Laurent’s cooking! They all melded together to give the boat a unique and distinct ambiance. Bowater breathed deep, happy to have that in his lungs again.