Candle in the Darkness - Lynn N. Austin [185]
Caroline made her servants bring blankets and pillows into the drawing room where they would sleep that night, dressed in their street clothes and shoes. They tethered the mare right outside the doors to the backyard. She armed Eli and Gilbert with her father’s pistols. Even so, no one slept much, except for the baby.
Close to midnight, Caroline heard the cry of a train whistle as President Davis and the last of the Confederate government officials left town on the Danville Railroad. She lay awake in the darkness, praying for Charles and for all the people she loved, huddled in the drawing room beside her.
A long time after that, she finally managed to drift off into a very light sleep.
Chapter Twenty-six
April 1865
The sky was barely turning light the next morning when a monumental explosion jolted Caroline right off of the sofa and onto her feet. It was as though a hundred cannon had fired at the same time. Moments later there was a second blast, every bit as powerful as the first. Then a third. The concussions seemed to shake the house to its foundations. Caroline cowered in terror as windows on the south side of her house shattered from the force of the explosions.
For a moment, she felt dazed, then panic-stricken. She was afraid that the house would collapse on all of them. Isaac was screaming in fear, Luella and Ruby were crying, Gilbert was holding his head and moaning. Her own head ached from the detonation. She wanted to run but didn’t know in which direction to flee.
“It’s okay. We’re all okay,” Eli said, holding Esther in his arms. Then he saw the terrified mare, straining at her rope as a shower of splinters and glass rained down on her, and he hurried outside to soothe her.
When Caroline had calmed down enough to think, she decided to run upstairs to her father’s balcony and try to see what had happened. She had to step carefully over the broken glass that littered the floor. Three Confederate warships had long been anchored in the James River below, ready to defend the city in case the Union fleet made it past Drewry’s Bluff. Now they were gone. The retreating Rebels had blown them to pieces rather than allow the Yankees to retrieve their cannon and stores of ammunition. Dense smoke, filled with thousands of fiery fragments, billowed into the sky where the ships had been anchored.
“Oh, God, help us,” she murmured. Those ships probably weren’t the only things the fleeing Confederates would destroy. In the past, each time Richmond had been threatened, city officials had talked of torching the town rather than leaving anything for the Yankees to gloat over.
She hurried downstairs to tell the others. “I think that was just the beginning,” she said. “The Rebels will probably blow up everything they don’t want the Yankees to get. There will be more blasts when the arsenal goes up. I’m afraid they’re going to set the entire city on fire.”
It took everyone a moment to digest the news. “I think we’ll be all right, up here on the hill,” Eli finally said.
“Probably,” Caroline agreed, “but each of us had better pack some belongings, just in case. We can watch from the balcony, and if the fire starts spreading this way, we’ll be ready to run.”
She climbed the stairs again with Gilbert, and they watched in horrified fascination as all the ships docked at the wharf caught fire. A row of tobacco warehouses near her father’s went up next, flames licking through the windows and roofs. As time passed, fire and smoke began to curl into the sky from several more locations in the lower city, and Caroline could hear the hungry crackle and roar of the