Slaves of Obsession - Anne Perry [47]
There seemed to be copies of every kind of military dress from Europe and the Near East, even French Zouaves looking like Turks with enormous baggy trousers, bright sashes around their waists and turbans or scarlet fezes with huge tassels hanging to the shoulder.
The star-spangled banner flew from every hotel and church they passed, and was echoed in miniature on the trappings of the omnibus horses and in rosettes on private carriages.
Business seemed poor, and the snatches of talk she overheard were of prizefights, food prices, local gossip and scandal, politics and secession. She was startled to hear suggestions that even New York itself might secede from the Union, or New Jersey.
She, Monk and Philo Trace took the first available train south to Washington. It was crowded with soldiers in both blue and gray, the same chaos of uniform prevailing here. How they were meant to know one another on the battlefield Hester could not imagine, and the thought troubled her, but she did not speak it aloud.
Memory crowded in on her as she saw the young faces of the men, tense, frightened and trying desperately to hide it, each in his own way. Some talked too much, voices loud and jerky, laughing at nothing, a paper-thin veneer of bravado. Others sat silently, eyes filled with thoughts of home, of an unknown battle ahead, and perhaps death. She was horrified to see how many of them had no canteens of water and carried weapons that were so old, or in such a state of disrepair, that they posed more danger to the men who fired them than to any enemy. They were of such variety that no quartermaster could be expected to obtain ammunition for all of them. They were all muzzle-loaders, but smoothbore, not rifled. Some were old flintlock muskets which misfired much more often and were far less accurate than the new precision weapons that Breeland had stolen.
Hester found herself sick with anticipation of the blind slaughter which would follow if the war came to a pitched battle. From the snatches of desperate, youthful boasting she heard, or the passion to preserve the Union, it could not be far away.
She overheard snatches of conversation during the times she stood up and stretched her back and legs.
A thin, young redheaded man wearing a Highland kilt was leaning up against the partition, speaking with a fresh-faced youth in gray breeches and jacket.
“We’ll drive those Rebels right out of it,” the kilted youth said ardently. “There’s no way on earth we’re gonna let America break up, I’m tellin’ ye. One nation under God, that’s us.”
“Home by harvest, I reckon,” the other youth said with a slow, shy smile. He saw Hester and straightened up. “Pardon me, ma’am.” He made room for her to pass and she thanked him, her heart lurching to think what he was going into so innocently. From his lean body, work-hardened hands and threadbare clothes, he clearly knew poverty and labor well, but he had no conception of the carnage of battle. It was something no sane person could create in the imagination.
She smiled back at him, looking into his blue eyes for a moment, then moved on.
“You all right, ma’am?” he called after her. Perhaps he had seen the shadow of what she knew, and recognized its hurt.
She forced herself to sound cheerful. “Yes, thank you. Just stiff.”
On the way back she passed an older man chewing on the stem of an unlit clay pipe.
“Got to go,” he said gravely to the bearded man opposite him. “Way I see it, there’s no choice. If you believe in America, you’ve got to believe in it for everyone, not just white men. In’t right to buy an’ sell human beings. That’s the long an’ the short of it.”
The other man shook his head doubtfully. “Got cousins in the South. They in’t bad people. If all the Negroes suddenly got free, where are they gonna go? Who’s gonna look after