Pemberley Ranch - Jack Caldwell [61]
Beth sighed. “I am. But friends don’t deceive each other.” Beth instantly regretted her words as Anne’s eyes filled with tears. But before she could console her, Charles came into the room.
“Well, he’ll live, but I can’t say he’ll enjoy it.” His jovial manner dissipated with one look at Anne’s unhappy face. “Forgive me, I shouldn’t be joking,” he said, misunderstanding Anne’s concern. “Will’ll be fine. He just needs a day o’ rest. He’ll be fit as a fiddle come tomorrow morning.”
Anne smiled her thanks to Dr. Bingley, and Beth realized she was relieved, too. Anne offered Charles some breakfast, and he sat down.
“Thank you, Miss Anne,” Charles said. “Beth? We’ll leave right afterwards, if you’re ready.”
Beth waited until Charles’s surrey was well out of earshot of the ranch house before she turned to her brother-in-law.
“Charles, I’ve recently learned some disturbing things about the war.”
“Is that so?” A puzzled Charles turned to her. “What brings this up?”
Beth had no answer but the truth. “Will Darcy and I were… talking yesterday, and it just came up.”
“Talking about the war? At a party?” Charles was flabbergasted.
Beth turned away to hide the flush on her face. “All right— we had an argument. He said George Whitehead ran one of the prisons you and Mr. Darcy were in. Is that true?”
“Yeah. Will doesn’t usually talk about those days.”
“Nobody does!” Beth cried. “It’s like it’s a great big secret!”
“Beth, war is a thing a man wants to forget.”
“Have you talked about it to Jane?”
Charles ignored the impertinence of her question. “A little. Where’s all this leading?”
“Last night, when Mr. Darcy got… himself injured, Miss Burroughs and I helped Mr. Bartholomew get him to his room. In the course of caring for him we… we saw his back.” Charles’s eyes grew wide. “Charles, where did those scars come from? Was Mr. Darcy whipped in prison?”
It took a moment for an astonished Dr. Bingley to say, “That’s not my story to tell.”
“Then he was. Charles, you can tell me. Mr. Darcy himself told us stories about horrible mistreatment in the camps, so you wouldn’t be telling me something I haven’t heard. He said George liked to have people whipped. Was it George who had Mr. Darcy whipped?”
Charles stared straight ahead. “Yes,” he admitted in a low voice.
“Why?”
“Because of me.”
“You?”
“Beth, this ain’t easy for me to talk about.” He took a breath. “Will and I were at Vicksburg, but instead of being paroled after the surrender like the others, we were arrested by Whitehead on false charges.”
“What were the charges?”
“Resistin’ the surrender, but that wasn’t the real reason. We knew too much. You see, we saw Whitehead and his men stealin’ from my patients. I complained, but instead of punishing Whitehead, his commanders placed him in charge of bringing us to prison.” Charles went on to talk of their trip to Camp Campbell in Missouri—how the transfer point-turned-prison was totally insufficient for the purpose intended, and how Captain Whitehead essentially became the commander of the place.
“The sanitary conditions were awful,” Charles continued. “The latrine wasn’t suitable for even a third of the men we had there. I was workin’ in the camp hospital—there was a shortage of Yankee doctors—so I went to the Yankee colonel to get permission to have a new latrine dug. The drunkard turned me down flat—said his engineers told him what we had would be more than adequate. Beth, he was wrong. That thing was dysentery waitin’ to happen.
“Food was always scarce, so Whitehead had the idea of us makin’ a vegetable garden for the guards. Each day, a team of men would be issued hoes and tools to work the ground. I saw my opportunity and went to Will with my idea. If the men spent an extra ten minutes a day at the end of their shift diggin’ a new latrine, we’d have it done in less than a week. Will told me to go ahead, as long as the guards knew what we were doin’. I didn’t have any trouble with them, ’cause I had pulled a tooth for the head of the detail, and he took a likin’