His wheezing question wrenched her back from her private anguish. "I'm sorry, Doctor — what did you say?"
"I don't know what you're thinking about, but kindly pay attention to this patient. We must clamp off that artery and try to remove the —"
"Doctor," Miss Kisco called from the other side of the pavilion. "Over here, please —emergency."
Hurrying away, the surgeon said, "I'll tend to him as soon as I can. Put on a new dressing and watch him carefully."
Virgilia withdrew gauze pads from the lacquered box in the center of the pavilion and returned to the cot of Lieutenant O'Grady. How many Union soldiers had the Mississippi boy killed, she wondered. She knew one thing: he wouldn't kill any more. How fitting that his name was so close to that of her dead lover.
She noticed Mrs. Neal at the pavilion entrance, conferring with another of the surgeons. The supervisor, in turn, watched Virgilia for a few seconds. She was always trying to catch her in a mistake, but never could. When Mrs. Neal returned her attention to the doctor, Virgilia carefully and gently rebandaged the wounded thigh.
Without the slightest movement or expression to betray her excitement, she pulled up the wool blanket so it covered the young lieutenant. She found a second blanket and couldn't suppress a little smile as she laid it on top of the first. Softly, soothingly, she stroked the boy's cool forehead, then glided away.
Sudden cannon fire shook the pavilion. All the lanterns swayed. Two more ambulances arrived outside, the horses snorting, the wheels slopping in mud. The rain had diminished to a drizzle. Virgilia decided it must be close to dawn — they had gone to work immediately upon leaving the car — but she' felt energetic, renewed. She could hardly keep from glancing at the unconscious reb while she helped with the new cases coming in.
During the next twenty minutes, the chief surgeon didn't have time to return to Lieutenant O'Grady. But Virgilia found time, walking to the cot with fresh gauzes draped over her arm.
Carefully, she raised the blankets. Bright red arterial blood stained the gauzes applied earlier. The soldier's breathing was louder, labored — as expected. She laid the dressings on the cot and felt for his pulse. Stronger, faster — also as expected. The blankets had raised his temperature, and secondary hemorrhaging had begun. As expected.
Drawing the blankets down, she laid two new dressings on top of the first. It would take some time for the pumping blood to soak through all those layers. Should someone raise the blanket, it was doubtful that a problem would be apparent. Once more Virgilia brought the blanket up and tucked it neatly beneath the boy's chin. She felt not the slightest prick of conscience. This was the enemy. She was a soldier. Grady had long cried out to be avenged.
"Miss Hazard!"
The shout of the chief surgeon drew her back to the center of the pavilion. A captain with a serious chest wound was rushed in on a litter. The only vacant cot was that next to O'Grady, back in the poorly lit corner.
Heart racing, she maneuvered herself into the space between O'Grady's bed and that of the new patient, partially blocking the surgeon's view of the reb. Pressed with so many urgent cases, the surgeon did nothing except nod toward O'Grady and ask, "How's that one?"
"Satisfactory the last time I checked, sir."
"Seems to be breathing hard. Have a look."
"Yes, sir." Terrified, she started to turn.
"I mean after you help me here."
Virgilia's tension melted. They worked over the captain for six minutes, until the exhausted surgeon staggered off to answer another appeal from Miss Kisco, who was receiving a new ambulance-load at the entrance. Virgilia snatched fresh gauzes from the storage box and rushed back to O'Grady. She lifted the blanket and saw the small, bright red stars — just two — on the field of white. Her smile was almost sensual.
She applied an additional dressing and once more drew up the blankets. He was bleeding to death unnoticed. Unmourned. Her best estimate was that he would be gone within a half hour. She returned the other dressings to the box and went about her work with a sense of warmth and happiness.
In three-quarters of an hour, carrying a waste pail, she went back to the corner and disposed of the thoroughly soaked dressings, replacing them with a new one, the last that would be needed. She replaced the blankets on the body, put the pail among others with similar contents, and resumed her other work. Despite the clamor and foulness of the pavilion, she floated in a near-euphoric state for twenty minutes. Then she got a jolt.
Unnoticed by Virgilia, Mrs. Neal had returned to inspect various patients. It was her sharp outcry that drew Virgilia's attention. She saw the supervisor back in the dim corner, her squat body silhouetted against the canvas brightened by the light of the new day.
With her right hand, Mrs. Neal held up the blankets that had covered Lieutenant O'Grady. The startled O of her mouth broke.
"Doctor — Doctor! This boy is dead. Who was charged with watching him?"
105
"Name and rank of the prisoner?"
"Private Stephen McNaughton."
"Caught where?"
"Approximately three miles north of here, sir. He was identified by those." The frog-voiced three-striper hooked his thumb at the prisoner's soiled tartan pantaloons.
The hanging lantern glared in the eyes of the regimental adjutant, a major half the prisoner's age, slight and sandy-haired, with ginger-colored Dundreary whiskers. "Step forward," he ordered, rolling the r slightly. Cap in hand, Salem Jones advanced two paces to the field desk.
"Scum of the streets — that's all we get anymore." The major's complaint drew a nod from one of the two corporals who, together with the sergeant, had brought Jones to regimental headquarters. "Such a depraved, vice-hardened, desperate set of human beings never before fouled any army on the face of God's earth."
Worried as he was, Jones had no fundamental disagreement with the major's opinion. When he had signed on as a replacement in his last regiment, a Pennsylvania reserve unit, he had been held in a Philadelphia stockade for three and a half days, constantly watched by armed guards. The other recruits similarly confined terrified him; they were clearly criminals, men who would have knifed or strangled him and looted his pockets if he hadn't already lost his bounty in a high-stakes poker game.
"What was your original occupation, Private McNaughton?
Cardsharp? Thief? Murderer?" The major's next words sounded like pistol shots. "Never mind, I know the real answers. Opportunist. Coward. You're a disgrace to this regiment, the United States Army, the state of New York, America, and your ancestral homeland."
Pious little prick, Jones thought, envisioning several painful ways he would murder the major, given the chance. Ah, but he mustn't waste time on fantasies. He had to concentrate on saving himself. His was the misfortune of having chosen a Scottish alias, and the adjutant was a Scot. Jones had the feeling this officer wouldn't let him off so lightly as others had.
The major seemed incapable of curbing his temper — understandable, given the great numbers of misfits and jailbirds being shoveled up throughout the North to fuel Grant's war engine. The officer came around the desk and planted himself intimidatingly close to Jones.
"On how many other occasions have you claimed the enlistment bounty, then jumped? Several, I'll wager. Well, McNaughton, if that is your name, which I doubt, it will not be so easy henceforth."
Salem Jones's legs wobbled. His stomach began to slosh as the major said to the sergeant, "Fetch the barber and have him heat the iron. And get this piece of garbage out of my sight."
First the shears, then a razor, the latter applied with little soap and no gentleness. The noncom who functioned as the regiment's unofficial barber twice drew blood as he scraped Jones's skull. Jones didn't dare cry out for fear of provoking him.