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He stopped suddenly, lowering his head and pushing his hand across his brow, forcing his hair back so hard it must have hurt. “I don’t really know what this war is all about, why we have to be at each other’s throats. Why can’t they just leave us alone? Of course there are bad slave owners, men who beat their field slaves, and their house slaves, and nothing happens to them even if they kill them. But there’s poverty in the North as well, and nobody fights about that! Some of the industrial cities are full of starving, shivering men and women-and children-with nobody to take them in or feed them. No one gives a damn! At least a plantation owner cares for his slaves, for economic reasons if not common decency.”
Neither Monk nor Hester interrupted him. They glanced at each other, but it was understood Trace was speaking as much to himself as to them. He was a man overwhelmed by circumstances he could neither understand nor control. He was no longer even sure what he believed in, only that he was losing what he loved and it was rapidly growing too late to have any effect on the horror that was increasing in pace from hour to hour.
Hester was passionately sorry for him. In the two weeks she had known him, on the ship and the train to Washington, she had observed him in moments of solitude when there seemed a loneliness which wrapped around him like a blanket, and at other times when he had had a quick empathy with other passengers, also facing the unknown and trying to find the courage to do it with grace, and not frighten or burden their families even further by adding to their fears.
Aboard ship, there had been one gaunt-faced Irishwoman with four children who struggled to comfort them and behave as if she knew exactly what she would do when they landed in a strange country without friends or a place to live. And alone, staring over the endless expanse of water, her face had shown her terror naked. It was Trace who had gone and stood silently with his arm around her thin shoulders, not offering platitudes, simply sharing the moment and its understanding.
Now Hester could think of nothing to say to him as he faced the ruin of his country and tried to put it into words for two English people who had come on a single, and possibly futile, mission but who could return to peace and safety afterwards, even if they had to explain failure to Judith Alberton.
“We can’t know what we’re doing,” Trace said slowly, now looking up at Monk. “There has to be a better way! Legislation might take years, but the legacy of war will never go away.”
“You can’t change it,” Monk replied simply, but his face showed the complexity of his feelings, and Trace saw it and smiled very slightly.
“I know. I would be better employed addressing what we came for,” he acknowledged. “I’ll say it before you do. We must find Breeland’s family. They’ll still be here, and Merrit Alberton will be with them.” He did not add “if she is still alive,” but the thought was in the quick pulling down of his lips, and it was easy to read because it was in Hester’s mind as well, and she knew it was in Monk’s.
“Where do we begin?” Monk asked. He glanced around the huge dining room, where all the tables were full. Crowds of people had been coming and going all the time they had been there. “We must be discreet. If they hear that English people are asking for them, they may leave, or at worst, get rid of Merrit.”
Trace’s expression tightened. “I know,” he said quietly. “That’s why I propose to do the asking myself. It’s what I came for. At least it’s part of it. You’ll also need help leaving here with her. We may be able to go north, but maybe not. I can guide you south through Richmond and Charleston. It will depend upon what happens in the next few days.”
Monk hated being dependent on someone else, and Hester read it in his face. But there was no alternative, and to refuse would be childish, and risk even less chance of success.
Perhaps Trace was aware of that too. Again the ghost of a smile lit his expression. “Learn what you can about the army,” he suggested. “Movements, equipment, numbers, morale. The more we know, the better we can judge which way to go when we have Merrit … and Breeland, if possible. There will be plenty of war correspondents from British newspapers. No one will think it odd.” He shrugged minutely and a shred of humor filled his eyes. “In this war you are neutral, at least in theory.”
“In fact,” Monk added, “I may wish to see Breeland hang from the nearest tree, but I don’t tar the entire Union with the same brush.”
“Or the slave owners of the South?” Trace’s eyes were wide.
“Or them either.” Monk smiled back and rose to his feet, the last of his breakfast unfinished. “Come on,” he said to Hester. “We are going to research a brilliant and perceptive article for the Illustrated London News.”
They spent the rest of the day moving from one place in the city to another, listening to people, observing those in the streets and in the foyer of the hotel, seeing their anxiety, sensing the frenzy in the air. A few were openly afraid, as if they expected the Confederate armies to invade Washington itself, but the vast majority seemed certain of victory and had hardly any perception of what the cost would be, even if they won every battle.
Monk listened to complaints about the overwhelming presence of the army everywhere, the upheaval to the city, and especially the offensive odor of the drains, which could not cope with the sudden influx of people. And overriding everything there were the political arguments about how the issue of slavery had changed into the issue of preserving the Union itself.
Hester saw the men and women in the street, especially the women, who had sent their sons and husbands and brothers to the battlefront imagining glory, and with only the faintest notion of what their injuries could be, what horror they would be part of which would change who they were forever. The amputated limbs, the scarred faces and bodies would be only the outward wounds. The inner ones they would not have the words to share, and would be too confused and ashamed to try. She had seen it before in the Crimea. It was one of the universals of war that it bound friend and foe together, and set them apart from all those who had not experienced it, however deep the loyalties that tied them.
Twice she spoke to women in the hotel and tried to tell them how much linen they would need for bandages, which simple things for keeping injured men clean, like lye and vinegar and rough wine. But they did not understand the scale of it, the sheer number of men who would be wounded, or how quickly someone can bleed to death from a shattered limb.
Once she tried to say something about disease, the way typhoid, cholera and dysentery can spread through the closely packed men in an army camp like fire through a dry forest. But she met only incomprehension, and in one case deep offense. They were good people, honest, compassionate and utterly blind. It had been the same in Englan
d. The agonizing frustration was not new to her, or the rage of helplessness. She did not know why it should hurt more the second time, thousands of miles from home among a people who were in many ways so different from her own and whose pain she would not stay to see. Perhaps it was because the first time she had been ignorant herself, not seeing ahead, not even imagining what was to come. This time she knew; the reality had already bruised her once, and she was still tender from it, still raw in places she could not reach to heal.
By evening Trace had already managed to find Breeland’s parents and contrived that he and Hester and Monk should dine in the same place. It was forced, but by ten o’clock they were in a small group talking and by five minutes past they were introduced.
“How do you do,” Hester replied, first to Hedley Breeland, an imposing man with stiff white hair and a gaze so direct it was almost discomfiting, then to his wife, a woman of warmer demeanor, but who stood close to him and regarded him with obvious pride.
“Happy to meet you, ma’am,” Hedley Breeland said courteously. “You’ve come at an unfortunate time. They say the weather is always oppressive in Washington in midsummer, and right now we have problems which I daresay you’ve heard of even over in England.”
She was not sure if some of that was intended as a criticism of their choice of time; there was nothing in his face to mitigate the brusqueness of it.
Mrs. Breeland stepped in. “We just wish we could make you more welcome, but all our attentions are taken up with the fighting. Lord knows, we’ve done everything we could to avoid it, but there’s no accommodating slavery. It’s just plain wrong.” She smiled at Hester apologetically.
“It’s not just about slavery,” her husband corrected. “It’s about the Union. You can’t expect foreigners to understand that, but we must be truthful.”
A flicker of annoyance crossed Mrs. Breeland’s face and vanished immediately. Hester could not help wondering what her true feelings were, what emotions filled her life, of which perhaps her husband had no idea.
“Our son has just become engaged to marry an English girl,” Mrs. Breeland went on. “And very charming she is. All the courage in the world to just pack up and come out here with him, all alone, because her father was against it.”
Hester felt a surge of relief that Merrit was here and apparently had come willingly. The girl could not possibly know the truth.
