Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [92]
September 1863
UNDER THE SHADE of a great magnolia, Henri stretched on his back in Jerry’s wagon bed, his head pillowed on fresh sweet straw. He’d just had a tremendous dinner served to him and Jerry and Matthew in Bellevue’s kitchen: fried ham and turnip greens and black-eyed peas and biscuits with cold butter and peach preserves. So now he dozed, full and heavy, opening one eye now and again to watch the pale undersides of the waxy green leaves above him shivering whenever a breeze passed through them. It was twilight and the doves were calling, their liquid voices burbling as they left the ground for the eaves of the mansion or the branches of the four magnolias that framed the white-columned portico.
Matthew sprawled facedown beside him, snoring in the straw. Beside him was a snarl of half-mended harness, a spool of pack thread and an awl. Jerry sat on the wagon box, brushing dried mud from Forrest’s riding boots.
“I don’t believe he’s had theseyear boots off in six months,” Jerry said. “Not by the way they smells …”
At the sound of tramping in the street, Henri pulled himself up by a wagon rail. A cartridge popped and Matthew shot up like a rocket, clawing a revolver from his belt before his sleep-glazed eyes were well open. Henri pushed the barrel down and away from him.
“It can’t be anything,” he said. “There’s not a Yankee in a hundred miles of here.”
But he climbed out of the wagon and peered down the slope from the house to the street. The view was obscured by a high boxwood hedge. Behind him the front door of the house swung open and Doctor Cowan came trotting down the steps, buttoning his coat. Henri and Matthew straggled after him, to the gate of the spear-point iron fence that enclosed Bellevue’s front lawn.
“I heard it but I didn’t believe it,” Cowan said. “Boys, it’s the Nancy Harts.”
Down the street came marching some forty women, all ages and sizes but most appearing to be in their twenties, most wearing their everyday dresses and hats but a couple of them got up in hoop skirts. They were armed with a motley of old shotguns and muskets from the previous century, barrels lashed to the stocks with rusting wire. Their leader, a young woman with a flushed face and hair beginning to come loose from the pins under her hat, wore a Revolutionary War sword belted to her slender hips. The scabbard’s point dragged a furrow in the dirt behind her.
“Did you ever …” Cowan said, and Henri admitted that he never did.
“THE HELL?” Forrest stood in his shirttail, bare toes curling on the board floor, gazing across the portico roof at the end of the queer parade. A threesome of spotted dogs trotted at the heels of the last pair of women in the passing column. He glanced over his shoulder, then looked back toward the street. Mary Ann sat up in the bed, closing her gown at her throat with one hand.
“It’s the Nancy Hart Home Guard,” she said. “Nancy Morgan and Mary Cade Heard got it up between them.”
Forrest shot her a queer look. “How many battles has they fit?”
“Well …” Mary Ann slipped her feet to the hearth rug beside the half-tester bed and crossed to the window to join him. She glanced a bit wistfully at the ashes in the black marble fireplace. Her bare feet felt chilly once they’d walked off the rug. It was not quite cold enough for a fire, but she’d ordered one for last night notwithstanding, and she had it in mind to order another. Senator Hill had taken his wife to their place in Athens, leaving the Forrests the run of Bellevue and command of its servants—in honor of Forrest’s first leave in eighteen months. Mary Ann had not stopped anywhere quite so fine as this in a very long time and she wanted to try all the mansion’s amenities before the whole situation melted away.
“They knocked down a hornets’ nest with a stray ball once,” she told him. “That engagement was counted a defeat, I believe. And then they killed a neighbor’s cow, which one might consider a Pyrrhic victory I suppose. But all that was in the early days, when they were still learning how to shoot.”
Forrest looked at her sidelong,