Annie, Between the States Read online

  Annie, Between the States

  L. M. Elliott

  For my beautiful family:

  Megan,

  Peter, and John

  Contents

  Map

  Chapter One

  Stop being such a pea-wit.

  Chapter Two

  In her mind, Annie was running, skirt hitched up, feet…

  Chapter Three

  “Is this the same sister I had to pull out…

  Chapter Four

  For the next few hours, Annie fell to helping Confederate…

  Chapter Five

  Annie was sitting in the parlor of her father’s cousin,…

  Chapter Six

  Annie didn’t stop to consider how dangerous warning the Confederates…

  Chapter Seven

  “They’re pulling in a Yule log the size of a…

  Chapter Eight

  Annie sat up, shaking all over. She forced her eyes…

  Chapter Nine

  “Steady, Angel, steady.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Interesting fowl they have around here,” said the man pointing…

  Chapter Eleven

  “What are we going to do, Missus Miriam?” Isaac asked.

  Chapter Twelve

  Annie and Miriam sat huddled together, reading two letters that…

  Chapter Thirteen

  Annie stopped to gaze up at the grand Greek revival…

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Oh, listen, listen, can you hear?” Eliza called out. “They’re…

  Chapter Fifteen

  It rained that night, great torrents, as if God had…

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow…

  Chapter Seventeen

  “After this round of warring right through my fields, I…

  Chapter Eighteen

  He was down there, General Stuart, down among the tents…

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was the night before New Year’s Eve, the dawn…

  Chapter Twenty

  “They won’t be hauling you off, will they, Annie?” Her…

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Jamie, what in the world are you doing?” Annie grabbed…

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  A Confederate rider arrived carrying a letter from Laurence. He…

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Annie stood among a grove of ferns that had been…

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “It was terrible, Annie,” Laurence said quietly, describing a surprise…

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “I hoped that our paths would cross again, Miss Sinclair.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Robert E. Lee’s northern campaign did seem to break the…

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  It had been the worst possible news.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “I thought the children would like her.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Miss Annie! Miss Annie! Come quick! Lord have mercy! Miss…

  Chapter Thirty

  “How bad is it, Laurence?” Annie hovered behind her brother…

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Annie snuffed out her short candle and watched the smoke…

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  With morning came a visitor.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “Room change. Come this way.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “What’s all the excitement?” Annie stood looking out the window…

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  There it was—home. But no longer her home. Annie pulled…

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Jamie’s bitterness and his base condemnation of her haunted Annie…

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Timeline

  About the Author

  Other Books by L.M. Elliott

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Map

  CHAPTER ONE

  July 21, 1861

  Manassas, Virginia

  Stop being such a pea-wit.

  Annie shook her head slightly as she muttered to herself. She hated being so cowardly and sickened by a little blood. She squeezed the ball of lint in her hand to quiet her trembling. It was simple enough to do. The lint would help the wound clot. All she had to do was stuff it in. Taking a deep breath, Annie knelt down and tried again.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said to the soldier lying on the porch floor. “Can you unbutton your jacket for me?” Modesty kept her from touching his clothes.

  The Union officer blinked to clear his eyes and focus. “Yes, of course, miss.” His voice was hoarse and small. “I’m sorry to be troubling you with this at all.”

  With a grimace, he undid the long row of brass buttons and tried to ease the blue jacket off his left arm. The motion caused a little gusher of blood to spurt up through his torn shirt.

  “Oh, dear.” Annie plopped to the floor, her brown muslin skirts popping air out like a blacksmith’s bellows as she landed on her bottom. The house whirled. Her stomach lurched. Her ribs heaved against the wall of her corset. She fought to pull in the hot, dusty air. But it only made her feel more nauseous. Annie couldn’t believe that not only was she having to tend to a Yankee, she might retch right there in front of him.

  BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.

  The windows behind her rattled hard and the floor quaked. Annie forgot her queasy stomach. Lord save us. Those were closer—she was sure of it. She was no expert; she’d known the sounds of war for only a few hours now. But she was learning fast.

  When she’d first heard the cannons at daybreak, she’d thought the noise was way-off thunder, a squall line gathering itself up against the Bull Run Mountains. She’d prayed for rain. The cornfields and hay fields needed it badly. But her naïve thought lasted only a few minutes. There had been skirmishing recently at Blackburn Ford, a mile or so away. Annie had mistaken that artillery fire for distant thunder. This morning, Annie quickly realized that it was guns, and the beginning of something horrible.

  It’d have to be, given all the soldiers who had swarmed the area. She’d stood by the gate with Aunt Molly’s brood of children, watching Confederate troops pass by. Their cannons were pulled by burly plow horses that strained with the weight. They were thick black barrels, menacing and cold-looking, almost as long as train cars.

  “Great God Almighty, Annie, look at them,” her little cousin Will had breathed in awe. “They could blow down giants. Do you suppose the Yankees got guns like that?”

  “I don’t know, honey,” she’d said, putting her arm around him. “General Beauregard’s waiting for the Federal invaders at Bull Run. And General Johnston’s on the way from the Shenandoah Valley. They’ll take care of things.”

  BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.

  Cannon answered cannon. Yes, clearly the Union had guns just as big.

  Annie thought of her brother, Laurence, good, kind Laurence who’d taken his two best thoroughbreds and joined Jeb Stuart’s 1st Virginia Cavalry. Would Laurence be in the fight? What would she and her mother do if Laurence were hurt or…or …She couldn’t allow the idea. Defensively, she replaced fear with anger. South Carolina had gotten Virginia into this mess, South Carolina and six of her Deep South sister states. Ever since they had seceded in the winter, Confederate men had swaggered about, shouting about states’ rights and the fact that the Federal government existed only by the consent of the governed. They’d seemed to want the fight, as if it’d be fun, a good frolic.

  And the North was no better. Rather than letting states leav
e the Union as the Constitution guaranteed they could do if they no longer agreed with its policies, President Lincoln declared war and called for seventy-five thousand volunteers to put down the insurrection—eight thousand recruits were required of Virginia, he said. That was when, in May, Virginia finally, reluctantly, opted to secede from a government that demanded it wage war against its closest friends. Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee did the same, and the Confederacy held eleven states. Everyone started wearing rosettes and singing songs of glory.

  Both sides expected quick, easy victory. The nearby village of Centreville was clogged with senators and people from Washington who’d hired carriages, packed picnic lunches, and traveled thirty miles over eight hours to watch the battle as if it were a Fourth of July celebration. Those guns certainly didn’t sound like a picnic to her.

  BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.

  Annie covered her ears. She shouldn’t be trapped, smack-dab in the middle of a battle. She wasn’t supposed to be here. She should be home, safe in Upperville, west toward the Blue Ridge, shielded from the advancing Federals by a long, thick line of Confederate brigades. She’d just been on her way home from school and gotten stuck.

  Annie attended Baker’s Seminary for Young Ladies in Alexandria. Well, she had until the Union bluecoats crossed the Potomac River and occupied the town in May. Then she and most of the other girls had left. Usually, she would have ridden the train out the Orange & Alexandria Railway to Manassas Junction and spent the night with her aunt, who lived just a few miles away. But the Federals had shut down the rail line. She’d had to beg a carriage ride from a classmate and then walked the remaining distance from Centreville. Her mother, Miriam, had come in their rig to fetch her home. During their visit, Aunt Molly came down with measles, a gift from the Confederate soldiers camping nearby. Several neighbors caught it, too. Miriam insisted they stay to nurse Aunt Molly. And so here they were, sitting on the edge of Hades.

  Mother never thought of such things. She was always taking care of everybody else but herself. This time, though, she’d dragged Annie into her dangerous do-gooding. It was selfish, is what it was, Annie fumed.

  She looked over to her mother, who was bandaging a mud-slathered Yankee. He lay among a dozen Union soldiers who’d been carried in on stretchers and were being tended by a Federal surgeon. No apologies or asking permission. The Union army had just taken over Aunt Molly’s yard with their wounded. They’d run off with Mother’s carriage horses and the few work horses Aunt Molly had, too. Something about the cavalry and preserving the glorious Union. How would Aunt Molly travel now, or bring back supplies from town? How would she and Mother get home to Upperville?

  Of course, the absolute worst part of all this was the fact that her mother was insisting on helping the surgeon—and making Annie do the same. Most true ladies would never dream of facing so much blood and horror. Ladies were supposed to be delicate and dignified. If her classmates at Baker’s could see her now, it would confirm their cruel whispers that she wasn’t as well bred as she pretended to be.

  “Miss.” The hoarse voice from the ground jerked Annie back from her frightened and angry thoughts.

  “I can probably do it myself if you hand me that lint.”

  Long before they knew there was like to be a battle to defend a critical railway juncture where the Orange & Alexandria line tied in to the Manassas Gap line, Annie and her mother had joined other Confederate women in scraping petticoats and bed linens for lint to stuff into wounds and staunch the bleeding of their soldiers. They hadn’t planned on using it for Unionists. But the Federal surgeon had only what bandages and medicines he could carry in his saddlebag, hardly enough to treat five men, much less twenty. Evidently, the Yankees had left the majority of their medical supplies back in Centreville. And they had just a few ambulances to carry the wounded back to their encampment.

  How could they be that foolish? Annie wondered. Or maybe it was plain arrogance, figuring they’d scare off the Confederate army with nary a scratch to themselves. Well, they’d misjudged Southern boys, for sure. And they’d obviously misjudged what slaughter their weapons could bring.

  The officer tried to sit himself up. He fell back with a thud.

  This was simply too much. Annie knew entire sections of Milton’s Paradise Lost, how to play the piano, some French, all the psalms in the King James Bible, even a little botany. She didn’t know anything about keeping a man from dying from a battle wound.

  “Mother!” Annie wailed. “Mother, please come here. Please. He’s dying. I just know it.”

  Miriam Sinclair reassuringly patted the face of the boy she was tending before standing and sweeping across the lawn to Annie. How did she always look so calm? Annie marveled. Her anger vanished. Even though she was fifteen years old, she just wanted her mother, wanted her the way she had when she was little and woke from a bad dream.

  “Annie, darlin,’ don’t be silly now. You’ll be scaring the lieutenant.” Miriam’s parents had been Irish immigrants. Even though Miriam was Virginia born, her parents’ old way of talking now and then slipped into her speech, something she typically squelched back home in the Anglican stronghold of Fauquier County. Annie’s father, Thaddeus, had ignored his social standing when he’d married the beautiful but Irish-Catholic Miriam. She tried hard during his lifetime to shed her heritage for him, even dropping her heartfelt religion to become Episcopalian. But Miriam’s roots always showed when she comforted someone.

  Miriam undid the officer’s shirt and pulled it back. As a mother and the head of a large working farm, she’d nursed too many to be squeamish about propriety. Annie gasped when she saw the ugly gash along the officer’s side. She turned her eyes away and covered her mouth.

  “It’s just a flesh wound,” Miriam said after a quick assessment. “I can dress this easily. See, Annie. It’s not even as bad as the time your brother ripped up his leg when he fell off that firebrand stallion of his.”

  “Are you certain, ma’am?” the officer murmured as he turned to Miriam. He had that look of relief all sick people did when Miriam got near them. “The doctor left me. I heard him say that he couldn’t treat a wound to the body, only the arms and legs. I thought…I thought maybe he’d given up on me…left me, you know, to…to…”

  “Hush, now, son. It’s really just a deep scrape. Look here.” She held up a thick book that had fallen out of his jacket. The volume was in shreds, blackened and singed. “I do believe your book saved you. It must have deflected the bullet so that it just skipped along your side as it went on its way. Best be telling your surgeons to take a closer look next time if you Yankee boys are going to insist on this foolishness.” She smiled down at him as she spoke.

  He smiled back sheepishly. “Yes, ma’am.”

  With surprise, Annie picked up the book. Poetry by John Keats. She loved Keats. She didn’t think a Northerner would like such gentle verse. Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. She looked at the young Union officer more carefully. He had dark, questioning eyes, and a lean, clean-cut face with none of the bombastic whiskers so many of the men grew that made them look like walruses.

  He was trying to say more, but his voice was getting fainter. “Cannon explosion killed my horse…. Beautiful horse, called him Ulysses…perhaps not the most auspicious name, after all…Rolled over on me when he went down…. I think maybe a rib or two is broken…but I can breathe all right…. Must not have punctured the lung…”

  “What’s your name, boy?” Miriam interrupted.

  “Thomas. Lieutenant Thomas Walker, from Massachusetts, serving with Palmer’s cavalry battalion.”

  “That’s fine, Mr. Thomas Walker from Massachusetts. No more talking. Don’t worry. This cut isn’t much at all, and ribs mend themselves if you give them time. Later you can write home to your mother and tell her all about your misadventures. Don’t forget to write her. She’ll be worrying.

  “My name is Miriam Sinclair and this is my
daughter, Annie. You are enjoying the hospitality of my sister, Molly, whose lawn this is. There now, we’ve been properly introduced.”

  Miriam reached over and squeezed Annie’s hand. “There, you see? It’s all right, child. Now fetch me a bowl of soap and water and a clean needle and thread. A horse hair would be better, but they’ve taken the horses, haven’t they? As if they didn’t have enough of their own to be stealing poor Molly’s old horses. Well, a thread will do. See if Molly keeps some crushed yarrow or garlic to help this heal. And then draw some fresh water for these other boys, Annie. This heat is awful.” Fear shadowed her face for a moment, and she whispered, “Don’t forget to say a prayer for your brother.” Then she went back to business.

  Annie was grateful for the walk to the well in back of the house. She fanned her face as she went, knowing from the hotness she felt on it that her cheeks were flushed as red as her hair. She pulled up water, cool and sweet, from the dark deepness of the earth, and cupped some on the back of her neck. If only she could slip down to the branch and wade into the water that splashed along rocky shoals there, the way they had as children. Maybe later. Maybe later all these soldiers would be gone. Surely Laurence and his friends would run them off. Laurence. She closed her eyes to recite, “Dear Lord, in all your mercy, protect our boys in their hour of need. Grant them…”

  BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.

  Annie covered her ears against a long, screaming whistle and then another deafening BOOM. There was a crash and a lightning spark, and the top of one of the walnut trees at the bottom of the lane exploded and cracked down to the ground.