The surgeon pleaded, but the Rebels would brook no argument, and ten minutes later they were gone, and the surgeon with them, leaving Monk, Hester, Merrit and the two orderlies to help the wounded.
They were carrying men into the carts and about to begin the journey back towards Centreville and Washington when a Union cavalry officer rode up, his arm in a sling across his chest, his tunic dark with blood.
“You’ll have to go west!” he shouted. “You can’t go by the turnpike. The bridge over Cub Run River is blocked. There’s a cart turned over on it and there are civilians all over the place, sightseers out from Washington to watch the battle, picnic hampers an’ all. Now they’re overrun and nothing can get through … not even ambulances.” He waved his good arm. “You’ll have to go that way.” He swung his horse around and headed off, picking up speed and disappearing into the dust and smoke.
“Has the Union really lost?” Hester said miserably.
Monk was standing close to her. He could give his reply quietly enough in the momentary lull that even Merrit could barely hear him.
“This battle, by the look of it. I don’t know what’s going to happen along the road.” He could hardly believe what the cavalryman had said. Who on God’s earth would look at this voluntarily?
But the shock he had expected to see in Hester’s face was not there. He stared, puzzled. Why did it not horrify her?
She read his thoughts.
“It happened in the Crimea as well,” she said with a sad, lopsided grimace. “I don’t know what it is … a failure of the imagination. Some people cannot think themselves into anyone else’s pain. If they don’t feel it themselves, then it isn’t real.” Then she started to move again, picking up what few belongings were most important and passing around the canteens of water to anyone who could carry them.
The firing was growing closer all the time, but it was very sporadic now.
Merrit was standing frozen with dismay. In the distance they could hear the strange, high Rebel yell on the wind.
“Where’s Trace?” Hester said urgently.
Monk made the decision in the instant, even as he spoke. “He’s gone into the battle. He’s hell-bent on finding Breeland, whatever happens. We’ll have to go south if we are to get out. Take Merrit with us. It will be hard, but I think trying to find our way through the chaos here, and get Breeland out through his own people, will be next to impossible.”
Her voice caught for a moment. “Go … that way?” She looked towards the gunfire. But even as she protested he could see in her face that she understood the reason behind his words. “Will we be able to find Trace?”
He thought for a moment of lying. Was it his responsibility to comfort her, show strength and hope, regardless of the truth? They had never told each other what was comfortable. In fact, they had spent the first year or two of their acquaintance being as abrupt, as brutally honest, as possible. To do less now would be like a denial of what was precious between them, a terrible condescension, as if by marrying him at last she had forfeited his friendship.
“I have no idea,” he said with a smile which was a little wild, more than a little crooked.
A flash of humor—and of fear—in her eyes answered him.
He turned, knowing absolutely that she would follow, and bring Merrit with her, dragging her if she must, but surely she would come willingly, towards Breeland?
The battle had become a total flight, with men running and scrambling any way they knew how away from the field and towards the turnpike back to Washington.
“Come!” Hester’s voice interrupted him, and he felt her hand on his sleeve and winced.
She glanced at it.
“Nothing,” he said quickly. “A scratch.”
She shut her eyes tightly for a moment. “William … how could they let it come to this? I thought we were the only ones so … so arrogantly stupid!”
“Apparently not … poor devils,” he answered. Now she was no longer pulling at him; it was he who turned to go, taking her hand and half dragging her until she stopped looking and tore her attention away.
Together the three of them went against the tide, towards the still-advancing Confederate troops, always looking for Philo Trace in his pale jacket and trousers against the blues and grays which were now covered in blood and dirt and barely distinguishable in the clouds of dust rising around everyone.
Twice Monk called out the name of Breeland’s regiment to fleeing Union troops. The first time he was ignored; the second someone waved a frantic arm, and they turned and went as well as they could judge in the direction indicated.
The ground was littered with bodies, most of them beyond all human help but the decency of burial. Once they heard someone crying out, and Hester stopped, almost pulling Monk off his feet.
A man lay with both legs shattered, unable to move to help himself.
Hester stared at him. Monk knew she was horrified, and at the same time trying to judge what she could do to help him—or if he was dying anyway.
Monk longed to keep on going, to not even look at the pain, the welling blood and the despair in the man’s face. And at the same time as all of him shrank from it, he knew he would have lost something irrevocably beautiful if Hester had been willing to leave. He would not have loved her less, but the burning admiration would have dimmed.
The tears were streaming down Merrit’s white, exhausted face. She had moved into that realm of nightmare where even movement was hardly real.
Hester bent down to the man and started talking to him, quietly, in a level, cool voice, her fingers trying to move the torn and mangled cloth out of the wounds so she could see what had happened to the bone.
Monk went to find guns fallen when fleeing men had hurled them aside. He got two, broke off the splintered stocks, and returned with the long, metal barrels and gave them to her.
“Well, at last they’re good for something,” she said bitterly, and with cloth torn from her skirt she padded the wounds and tied the barrels on tightly as splints.
Monk held the man in his arms and gently tilted the one water bottle they had brought to his lips, helping him drink.
“Thank you,” the man whispered hoarsely. “Thank you.”
“We can’t move you,” Hester apologized.
“I know, ma’am.…”
It was too late to think of such a thing. The Confederate soldiers were on them. Long muskets were pointed, then lowered when it was realized they were unarmed.
The wounded man was lifted up and they did not see what happened to him. He was a prisoner of war, but he was alive.
“And who are you?” a Confederate officer demanded.
Monk told the exact truth, ignoring Merrit. “We have come to arrest a Union officer and take him back to England to stand trial for murder.”
Merrit burst into denial, but her words were choked with tears, and there was nowhere for her to run. She could not go back through the confusion of the fleeing Union army. She had no idea what to expect in Washington. No one had. Her only loyalty was to Breeland, and he was somewhere ahead of her, and regardless of his reasons, Monk was doing all he could to find him.
The Confederate officer thought for a moment, turned and asked a man a few yards away, then looked back at Monk, his eyes wide.
“You must surely want him badly to come out here now … or didn’t you all know about this?”
“We knew,” Monk said grimly. “He was a gun buyer for the North, negotiating for six thousand first-class rifles with half a million rounds of ammunition. The dealer and his men were murdered and the shipment stolen for the North, instead of the South. I don’t imagine you would be that fond of him either.”
The officer stared at him, horror in his tired face, smeared with gun smoke and blood. “Oh, sweet Jesus!” he said almost under his breath, his eyes distant on the carnage of the field. “I hope you find him, and when you do, hang him high. Try that way.” He pointed with an arm Monk only now noticed was bandaged and heavily seeping blood. The other arm held his rifle.