Every afternoon, men camped on the lawn and barnyard of this mansion heard Miss Unison practice at a keyboard instrument. Chaplain—who’d led the Seminary Glee Club at university—explained the thing’s distinction. Their hostesses owned one of the three finest harpsichords presently at large in the commonwealth. Dutch-made in the 1600s, it had been barged up the river James to this plantation’s dock.
UNISON’S fate is of interest. Warriors expect to die—or should. Those who survive them learn to live around the hollow that their absence daily makes. But just the way you hear how kids—playing near a brook two dozen years after a war—find this nice metal ball and beat it with a rock to see what-all’s inside and set off an explosion that costs kids hands and eyes—just that way, the punishment of survivors, child—it’s what really interests me the most.
That’s what grabbed me, and boy, I hate it. Even at my age, I still expect a little fairness! That’s the meanest trick of all. How do they keep doing that to us, darling?
Who can teach me to quit expecting?
AS FOR Prothero in battle, nobody hoped for much. Watching him preen, others guessed that under siege the Charleston heir would prove both bossy and gun-shy—a losing comb. A skirmish happened the one morning before his first meeting the ladies. Northern scouting parties had been spotted down the river James. Prothero and three young officers plus a ragtag crowd of thirty volunteers rode out from the Randolph farm.
Others predicted Prothero would falter or bolt. But on overtaking the enemy along the riverbank, the Lieutenant was seen to jump out front right quick. Pince-nez in place, he led a charge that caught the Blues unawares and sent Vermonters scurrying like allergic girls.
Under fire, the highborn Prothero seemed to grow both chestier and taller. Beckoning and scolding, running, swearing, pointing—the youth appeared fearless—he was exposed during the heaviest of firing. His blue eyes would widen, blond whiskers stiffening like some riled lynx’s. He waved his silver sword around like he was some French warrior posing for a picture. Prothero’s Rebel yell—especially coming from so genteel a officer—terrified even his own men. When the Lieutenant gave off this hellion’s screech, veins big as garden hoses forked across his temples. At the sound you could hear enemy fire cease for about three seconds, like taking a break to swallow onct, hard, then blast again extra loud. In battle, on foot or astride his asthmatic animal going “Ah her,” this smiling Charlestonian seemed to swell toward the perfect target and then press beyond that into some screaming scarecrow puppet exempt from harm.
Well, even the lad’s worst critics had to concede Prothero’s unexpected mettle. The night after battle, he seemed changed. He plainly did not sleep, he did not plan to sleep.
Prothero stayed near his lit mirror. Nobody blamed him now. The evening of his first great showy battle, men watched the nightly ritual with a warier respect. What was Prothero primping for? The memory of some sweetheart? The idea of young Miss Randolph in her cliff-top mansion pouring tea tomorrow evening? Civilian life awaiting him in smooth clubby Charleston? Or did he groom for tomorrow’s slaughter of the enemy?
That same night while young Willie cared for and whispered to Prothero’s horse, older men started wandering out towards the animal. They acted eager to pat the officer’s beautiful jumpy Morgan. Will felt proud of the attention Target got. He took part credit. Admiring hands all over the gelding made it really go, “Ah her, Ah her.”
(Later, the braver Prothero acted on a given day, the more nightly comforting Target got from shy enlisted men.) Still, everybody agreed: Target was a poor name to give your own war-horse.
2
NOW FOR a tea party in the Randolphs’ beautiful west parlor! Just four-thirty and the March sun had a strawish pink tone. Head-on light made this mammoth farmhouse seem a palace. The whole hilltop home sat circled by porches like hoopskirts. Porches offered quite some view of the James River’s most dramatic (and strategic) bend.
Men found the mansion’s mirrors yet hung with black crepe. Both hostesses wore dark clothes and four armbands apiece. The parlor’s walls were nearbout paved with family oil portraits of now-deceased men. The sons had been painted as young boys. They were shown gripping the reins of favorite ponies. In the background—one mild-looking black manservant held his cap and watched riders (the same man from picture to picture, hair going whiter), approving, grinning.
The Chaplain smiled at Prothero. “And may I, sir, present our division’s chiefest ornament, Miss Unison Randolph?”
Prothero noted the girl’s lowered modest eyes. He took the hand she offered, shy, he bowed and kissed it. Other officers smirked, rolling their eyes. But, undiscouraged, Prothero studied only Unison. Her face was a fine and simple oval—maybe too much of one. Her hands, he saw up close, were very good. Black clothes set off her stark half-transparent complexion.
Prothero, stirred by Unison’s severe Virginia charm, soon filled the west parlor with his own perfume. It was a wonderful scent, not manly exactly—but not silly. There was simply way too much of it. He told a story of a riding accident he’d had before the war. He made it funny—he made the faults all his own faults. He made the ladies like him. He praised their home, its view. He talked in a way he never talked to other men, even ones he seemed to like. The aged Chaplain stood smiling in the corner. He gloried in this olden style of conversation—confiding, gentle, light—the type of talk the war had sunk for good. Chaplain sometimes said how this wasn’t the least of war’s crimes. War hogs conversation, kills it.
Prothero soon offered Unison Randolph the very highest praise. He jokingly claimed she was almost worthy of Charleston. He grilled both Randolphs, trying to turn up some well-placed South Carolina relation of theirs. Prothero joked that he was sure such fine ladies could not be mere Virginians.
The mistress of the house excused herself at onct. She held a lace hankie to her face. The young daughter smiled at the Lieutenant but her face looked tense, “You mustn’t mind Momma, sir. You meant it civilly, I know, but—in the first place—you do bear a strong resemblance to my eldest brother, Edmund, in the picture there. Secondly, Mother feels that Poppa and my brothers died less for our Confederacy, more for Virginia itself. So, you see, it’s hard on her just now, sir.”
And Unison smiled. Prothero apologized, he bowed. Like the other gents present, he’d found her speech most pretty and most kind.
Unison treated all soldiers the same. That way they all could love her equally—and purely. Around the girl now, Prothero acted agitated and charming but glazed. He had told both the Chaplain and his groom: Back home, he depended so much on the company of women. Unison was the first refined young lady he had addressed for months. Ladies of his circle had always checked and improved his moral progress in the world. By teasing and scolding, they kept him well in line. He seemed to need that, he admitted. To meet another such young woman—after so long—it half alarmed him, he admitted, smiling, stroking his platinum mutton chops. He was scared that, while learning certain other, ungenteel skills in battle, he’d lost his oldest, surest knack—his luck with ladies. Prothero now explained how he regretted causing Mrs. Randolph grief on his first meeting. Young Unison accepted this and said she must go attend her parent, if you gentlemen will excuse me. The party broke up.
Prothero wandered to the latticed garden house with its view of a far cliff now shadowed purple. Armaments could be heard to echo up the river. Other officers watched Prothero mulling there, his Revolutionary scabbard glinting in last light. It seemed right romantic to them. He had gone off to pine for the young lady. Okay. Fine. He was hardly alone in adoring Miss Unison. But, seeing that the dandy could be moved, men liked him more. Tried to.
3
THREE youngish officers had regularly led the charges before Prothero arrived. But, understanding how freely this new man lunged into the open, hearing the donkey-devil sounds pump from that boy’s bow-mouth, older leaders soon begun holding back. Seemed they could now afford to act a wee bit
less courageous. And—once Prothero rallied for a second then a fifth attack—these men started to feel a stupefying type of relief, child.
By that I mean—when recalling their own earlier exploits they grew amazed, dizzy, even almost ashamed of their onetime swagger. Nights especially, as they watched him prepare for battle (or for maybe meeting Miss Randolph over tea), gents wondered: Had their reasons for bravery been any better than jolly self-satisfied young Prothero’s? Was he being brave because his great-granddad had done so whilst fighting Cornwallis? Had the lad noticed or chose this? In some way, he didn’t seem to know he was at war. In other ways, he seemed born to be cavalry.—Both.
You studied him there at his nightly mirror. Fog would roll uphill off the river James and one hundred yards from the central campfire, you’d spy him there near his four candles repeating theirselves glass to glass, a glimmer set off in the blue haze.
Unharmed on the evening of a battle day when others had fallen all around him, the young man’s candlelit grooming came to seem a strange new putting on of armor. His power appeared to spring from those three mirrors or the scent he wore into the field—some kind of magic. Will Marsden noticed that other older men now started borrowing one of the division’s communal combs. When combat seemed surefire, when you heard the clatter bounding through the woods this way, big-eyed troops—using fingers and shared combs—commenced a new and frantic primping. It was pitiful. It distracted some. They got hurt.
• • •
AMONG his own enlisted men, the Lieutenant inspired a gloomy boldness. But at night or during the long days between fighting, nobody much spoke to him unless he addressed them direct. Around this society boy returning from the woods and his private potty chair, even the cordial First Lt. Hester grew stiff, formal. When Prothero strolled among his troops, some men wearing arm slings or on crutches would hold their noses, pretended to gag in his sweet trailing scent.
But nobody made such jests to his face. Though nobody quite said so, men understood—he was really needed here. But this very respect meant: People were a bit afraid of him. He’d have been the last to guess their fear. This spooked them even more.
NOBODY could figure why his last division had transferred such a overwilling soldier against his will. Even so, little Willie Marsden and the others watched him hard.
An expeditionary party rode out from headquarters at the Randolphs’ river home. It was after Prothero’s fifth successful charge. Two Southern privates noticed him circulating among the fallen enemy. A sorghum field lay strewn with groaning Northern survivors. Men too wounded to march away as prisoners of war waited till battle lines shifted, till their own medics could scurry out and attend them. Prothero was seen to walk from Yank to Yank. He carried a ladle and a oak water bucket. Reared an Anglican, he was so High Church, he crossed himself and often. He did that now, drifting among the wounded, speaking to them. But the privates, admiring this aristocrat’s kindness, later reported: The Lieutenant would first speak to those Northerners who begged loudest for water. He would stoop, lift a man’s head onto his knee, use the dipper with great care, finally lowering the fellow to the ground. Then, making sure the soldier was conscious, Prothero stood back up and—onto the person he’d just treated so carefully—he would slop more unexpected wet. He sometimes emptied the whole bucket over a wounded man’s head. Then speaking to this fellow gasping in the dust-gone-mud, Prothero would ask, “Thirsty? Still thirsty?” He crossed hisself, refilled the bucket, moved on to help a next victim crying aloud for water. While the privates watched, he left a dozen wounded men gasping toward the sun, half drowned.
News of this little incident spread fast among enlisted men and, slower, worked its way up to other officers. The white-haired Chaplain defended Prothero against such tales. Chaplain claimed the lad’s family on both sides were deeply civic-minded, great patriots and patrons. Chaplain recalled Prothero’s governor father—a man, the Reverend said, of exceptional grace, talent, piety. “I care very little for this mumbling against him.” Chaplain acted hurt.
AS PROTHERO seemed to get on better and better with Miss Unison, he grew haughtier and tighter. He freely told now about his father’s two terms as governor, how his granddad—Washington’s buddy—served in the U.S. Senate’s earliest days. If he’d had a nip to drink, he fell to a kind of ruthless Charleston name-dropping that—considering this present city of tents, given the deep Virginia mud and this probably losing cause—impressed nobody and would’ve angered a few if they hadn’t considered Prothero, with his fuss and toiletries, frivolous to start with, frivolous if lucky.
One night after a downriver skirmish with the enemy, the much-talked-of gent abandoned his mirror. He wandered over, settled near the others’ fire and card game. He must’ve had a drink or two: Prothero grew quickly sentimental. His was a dry splendid accent, the voice ran deep, full of surprising wayside compassions. Touching his pale whiskers, still holding one heavy silver hairbrush, he sat praising his mother’s musicianship, he described his family’s homeplace. (Off in the distance, Prothero’s three-panel mirror reflected its lit candles.) He loved to quote pet sayings learned from some wise old slave woman who’d helped rear him. His favorite: “The soul of another is a dark forest.” Tipsy, the lad would speak this line at the end of his own tales and others’. To the Lieutenant, it seemed the moral of every story. Men, watching him with unsure feelings, would sometimes nod at the seeming truth of this, but all whilst giving each other certain serious side looks.
Courteous and drunk, Prothero crossed his arms, pulled both knees together, stared into flames, and bored everybody by recalling finer social seasons in the great city of his birth. The poker games roared on around him. Only a few men even pretended to listen. If Prothero seemed huge in battle, how wizened and kidlike he looked talking here. He described which chandeliers in which hometown ballroom he counted among his town’s five most beautiful, how each distributed the brilliance of hundreds of candles. (When he started in on Charleston street addresses and the merits of their crystal lighting fixtures, men began filing away from the campfire, taking cards with them.) The Lieutenant mentioned certain accomplished young women who’d once considered him a wit, a notable skeet shooter, excellent churchman, fine practitioner of the waltz. (More fellows cleared out quiet.)
When Prothero spoke, you could imagine his civilian charms. You wondered why they so failed to translate into this other, harder time. The Chaplain sat nearby. Maybe he’d grown worried by reports about the lad. Now he smiled at a new, more human side to Prothero—but even the Chaplain was surprised by the Lieutenant’s going on like this for fifty minutes straight. His pince-nez, dangling, turning on the end of its cord, would catch campfire glow. Lenses seemed to burn with independent and unhappy sights. The few men left here watched the Lieutenant with some concern.
Next morning, Will found that Target had been badly whipped—great welts were opened along the gelding’s back. Prothero’s enlisted men begun remarking his strange shifts in mood. One day he praised these fellows as the bravest in the war. Next morning, before assembled troops, he called the well-liked Corporal Sal Smith “exceedingly ill-bred.” When first complaints were made, the Lieutenant’s family ties, his strange and handsome certainty, all helped protect him. Prothero had never onct been wounded—not a scratch on him, he wore more decorations than did most seasoned majors. He seemed shielded both from usual damage and regular regret.
4
PROTHERO admitted to Willie: He saw Miss Unison as a test of his own flair with womankind. He felt determined, he said, to “annex” her.
Downriver action took the Lieutenant away on a ten-day scouting mission. Others could now talk of nothing but his genius, his recklessness in the fight. But the boy himself seemed to have no memory beyond his having upset, that first day, his distinguished elder hostess.
The Randolphs sent a graceful note welcoming returned officers. A little celebration would be held next evening in their best parlor. That day
at three, Prothero went on a foraging detail with nine men. They came upon a group of stray Northerners bathing downriver. Prothero placed his troops in brush at twelve-foot intervals along the bank. He himself forded the river upstream on Target. He fired from the eastern shore, his men from the west. Ten Northerners, confused and caught in cross fire, were killed. All Prothero’s men handily survived. The Lieutenant returned to camp acting winded and exaggerated. He handed Target’s reins to Will while talking far too loud. He hurried to his mirror, preparing for the party. He’d made sure to get back with time to spare. Ten men dead—now tea.
Prothero civilized his uniform with French perfume. For those who’d heard his scary Rebel yell today downriver, this proved comforting—his grooming, hard. It hinted that the young officer got gussied up for others, not just himself, not just as a battle ritual.
Greeting the ladies, he gestured and purred. You could see that Mrs. Randolph looked on Prothero with strange feelings. Maybe it grieved her to see a face so like her late son’s. Could be she was straining to forget his earlier remark about Virginia. But both ladies seemed right well disposed to him. He quoted: “The soul of another is a dark forest.” In such a time and at such a party, nobody argued. Prothero’s charm—lost on his enlisted men, his horse—now seemed placed where it belonged. He told three stories in a row that were funny, clever, kind. Other officers who’d felt muddy and graceless in this brocaded room were grateful to the dandy. He kept cleaning his pince-nez while staring at Unison. Prothero drank more mulled wine. Then he did something that startled everybody, especially hisself. You could see he never planned to nor expected it. You could see he only wanted to be liked. Standing near Unison, within easy hearing distance of her mother, Prothero made a joke about girls’ loving duty toward soldiers who’re about to lose their lives. He said it was a patriotic duty: There should be no female Confederate virgins above the age of thirteen. Prothero drew alongside Unison, he stared directly past her armbands at her bodice.