Read Online The Spymistress by Jennifer Chiaverini - Free Book Online Page B

from the garden. They pretended not to notice the man with the tobacco-stained beard as they left the house, and rather than take the carriage, they walked to the soldiers’ encampment to better display their feigned devotion to the cause. There they found rows upon rows of perfectly aligned small white tents, most with small fire circles at the entrance, a few with stovepipes poking up rakishly out back. Small wooden buildings, so new the pine boards were still yellow, were clustered along one end of the field, and Lizzie observed officers and their aides bustling in and out, delivering messages and carrying out orders. The First South Carolina Regiment drilled on the parade grounds while a flock of admiring ladies watched from behind a fence a few dozen yards away. Other ladies strolled among the neat rows of tents, pausing to offer a blanket to one soldier, a meat pie to another.
    Lizzie and her mother followed their example and walked through the encampment chatting with soldiers, distributing writing materials and helping compose letters, offering flowers and sincere good wishes. Lizzie truly did not want any harm to come to those young men, enemy soldiers though they were. Each cordial greeting to a young rebel placed another weight upon her heart, for they seemed not to realize what lay ahead. Blinking back tears, she resisted the urge to warn them not to be driven like cattle but to resist the call to arms, but she said nothing, not only because they would be shot as deserters if they heeded her, but because she knew they would not listen. The newspapers had described the soldiers as gallant gentlemen, but the young recruits Lizzie and her mother met were of a different class entirely—uneducated, rough boys whose fathers toiled in trades in the cities or eked out a living on tiny plots of land. When Lizzie offered them Chambers’s Miscellany and poetry chapbooks and collections of instructive essays, some politely declined, explaining that they could not read, while one asked if she had any “ballard books” instead—hymnals, or so she eventually puzzled out.
    “Why have you come to Virginia?” she asked one young fellow, inspired by the eagerness with which he thanked her for a well-read copy of Emerson’s The Conduct of Life . “Why leave home and come so far?”
    The young fellow exchanged a look of surprise with his partner before answering, “Why, we come to protect Virginia, Ma’am.”
    “Why?” Lizzie was genuinely curious. “Protect Virginia from what?”
    “From them Yankees, Ma’am,” the other soldier replied. Freckled and dark-haired, he seemed little older than the young volunteer drummer boys, and for a moment Lizzie wondered if he had wandered into the wrong part of the camp.
    “Mr. Lincoln said he’s coming down to take all our Negroes and set them free,” the first soldier explained, tucking the book beneath his arm. “If they dare to do so, we’ll be here to protect you women.”
    “If this should come to pass, we’ll be grateful for your protection, of course.” Lizzie ignored her mother’s warning look, the subtle shake of her head. “But why do you believe it will?”
    They regarded her with twin expressions of bewilderment. “Because the papers said so, Ma’am,” said the freckled soldier.
    “Lizzie, dear,” her mother murmured, “let it be.”
    But Lizzie couldn’t. Looking around the tent the two young men shared, she quickly surmised that they would benefit greatly from a visit by Mary and her sewing circle. “Do you have sufficient warm clothing and blankets?”
    “We got uniforms,” said the first soldier proudly, tugging on the brim of his cap and drawing himself up to show off his jacket. “Finest suit I ever had.”
    “And we don’t need blankets so much anyway,” said the second. “The nights are warm enough with a good fire, and they’re bound to get warmer with summer comin’ on.”
    But autumn would follow soon enough, and then winter—but