Aunt Sarrie did not speak to her again for two weeks, but just waited for her to say, yes, I want to go back to Granny Ambler yet again. At meals Aunt Sarrie would talk with Bridie the slave, leaving Ephie out, and Ephie sometimes thought, to hell with it, and would speak to Bridie herself.
But Aunt Sarrie was not a vengeful person. At the end of the second week she appeared at Ephie’s door late one afternoon with a plate of pie and a cup of coffee. Ephie wanted the old woman to pass her a kindly cup and plate, but not if it meant the steel needle. ‘It don’t make no difference,’ she muttered ‘I ain’t going back to that Ambler woman.’
‘You can still have the pie if you want. And the coffee.’
‘As long as it don’t mean I agree to go back to the hag.’
‘I said so already. But goddam, Ephie, I hope you’re doing some jumps off tables, gal!’
Ephie wasn’t doing any though, and Aunt Sarrie knew it. She shook her head. ‘We’ll get that little Yankee of yours fostered out.… I know the people who run that Methodist place in Staunton.’
Ephie worked well that summer, did not go out to any social events, even the ones to which Aunt Sarrie took Bridie. The girl did not know what she hoped for from that child she carried or what she wished for the child itself. But she could see it was right what Aunt Sarrie had said. The little creature would need to be fostered out in secrecy.
But in a household of two good slaves and in that still corner of Bath County, secrecy was possible.
16
As they led her in through the schoolhouse door, Mrs Whipple saw that her counsel, Major Pember, was already seated at his table. As one of the elderly soldiers helped her to her chair by the elbow, Pember rose and bowed to her. She nodded back. She watched the shafts of sunlight that fell across the floor from the high windows and dreamed she was a child, sitting in this classroom, taking her ideas of good and evil from a teacher.
‘Ma’am, sit down,’ her counsel invited her.
She took the chair on his left side and put her hands on the table. There were no bonds on her wrists. Somehow she wished there were, wished she had been treated a whole lot rougher than she had been up to now. ‘Ma’am, I believe the good news from Manassas … good news for us … the Confederacy, I mean … might make the judges more rosy. More lenient, I mean …’
She looked at him and smiled. Inwardly she was still plagued by that eternal nausea. ‘Sir,’ she said like an apology, ‘I have given you a rough time.’
Pember smiled. ‘Lawyers are meant for that, ma’am.’ He lowered his voice further still. ‘Surely, surely, Mrs Whipple, you won’t feel bound to make any sort of full confession. Surely you’ll plead your sex, the loss of your husband, the influence of this Mr Pleasance …’
Mrs Whipple raised her chin. ‘We’ve been through that before, sir.’ She looked about her. Across the room, close to the teacher’s rostrum, a man of maybe 35 years stood. He wore a uniform with artillery patches on it, but one of his arms was missing at the shoulder. ‘That the prosecutor?’ she asked.
‘It is.’
‘What sort of man is he?’
‘A little jaunty for my taste, ma’am. A good talker. Pushy. He might even manage to turn the judges our way, ma’am.’
She stared at the one-armed prosecutor. He did not look back.
‘There’s something I want you to do,’ she told Major Pember. ‘I have a friend who will not know I’ve been arrested. If I swore to you that the letter I wrote him is harmless, would you see it is delivered?’
Major Pember frowned.
‘Just answer me straight,’ she advised him.
‘Mrs Whipple, how could I do it? You’ve spent the last week confiding to me that Confederates have consciences that are crippled, ma’am. Forgive me, ma’am, but maybe you consider we deserve to be lied to. You’re asking too much.’
Mrs Whipple turned her face away and stared at the elms beyond the schoolhouse windows. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I shall find someone else to do it.’
At ten a.m. the three judges of the court entered. They had all come up from Charlottesville in the night train, and they looked pale, as if they hadn’t slept well. There were two old men – a brigadier and a colonel. The third was a junior colonel at least thirty years younger than the others. He walked with a stick. A deformed prosecutor, Dora Whipple thought, a deformed judge. And two old men. Two young men with cause to hate me, two old ones to hector and browbeat me.
But she felt calmer now she’d seen their faces.
The president of the court, the ancient general of brigade, read a paper in a muttery flat voice which said she was charged with wilfully passing information designed for the aid and comfort of the enemies of the Confederate States of America. When he had finished reading, he blew his nose in a grandfatherly way and nodded to the prosecutor. He had made an atmosphere in court that was drowsy and easy, like say, the atmosphere in a realty office in a small town. The prosecutor tried to change all that.
He got up, stuck out his chest, arranged his empty sleeve with his remaining hand, and began to speak. ‘Mr President and members of the court, the evidence indicates that Mrs Whipple has willingly consorted with an enemy of these states, a man who has already paid the ultimate penalty for treason. I shall use my best efforts to show that this lady wilfully passed information to our enemies by means of her association with that person. As I do so, I shall be aware that the members of the court may feel disposed to go gently on the prisoner on account she represents a sex given to unpredictable and flighty behaviour, that she belongs to a gender known for its susceptibility to be influenced unduly by the personalities of others, particularly by the personalities of males. Let me therefore suggest with respect right now that these considerations should not enter the minds of the court. Consider the means by which the information she passed was gained. It was culled cold-bloodedly from the mouths of the delirious, the maimed, the dying, whom she had undertaken to nurse. While her hand might have sponged the brow, fed the broth and staunched the bleeding, her tongue questioned and her ears listened. Her connection with the late Pleasance and with other persons presently under arrest indicates that she was willing – no – not willing, gentlemen, but anxious – that the numbers of Confederate dead, dying, wounded and fevered should increase. Only a very cool and very satanic mind could behave in such a two-handed manner, gentlemen, a manner so remote from the normal delicacy and gentility of female behaviour …’
Dora Whipple found that to block out the prosecutor’s oratory, she fell back not on thoughts of Horace Searcy but on the remembrance of Major Yates Whipple. She remembered him as concretely as if he were standing in court today. A gingery man, solid, of only average height. Already getting a paunch when the battle at Ball’s Bluff had finished his life. How we would have grown old! she thought. Him a plump and happy and ginger little man, me his loving scrap of a wife. He knew whether I had the delicacy of a woman or not. Yates Whipple knew and knows and would willingly cry out against this one-armed stranger if he were in court now.
At last the prosecutor got to his peroration. ‘I do not delight to see anyone suffer fierce penalties, and women less than others,’ he said. ‘But the extent of Mrs Whipple’s guilt will be shown in this special court-martial. I am prepared to say, right now in front of this court, in front of the defendant, that I can see but one final penalty for this traitorous woman – and that penalty, the penalty already suffered by her associate Pleasance.’
Mrs Whipple, distracted by the pleasing thought of Yates Whipple, did not even bother taking in that last sentence. She heard the prosecutor call his first witness, a peace officer for Henrico County. This man said that when Pleasance was arrested a notebook had been found on him. In it a list of names and a series of dates and times beside them. One of the names belonged to a clerk in the War Department who had already confessed to passing on documents to Mr Pleasance. Yet another man listed in Pleasance’s book, a schoolteacher from Petersburg, confess
ed also to buying War Department memoranda from a local officer and giving them to the same Pleasance. And so on. Mrs Whipple heard the instances pile up, but her strange indifference did not leave her.
The prosecutor asked the peace officer if Mrs Whipple’s name was present in the notebook in the same terms as those in which the name of the other two gentlemen were?
‘Yes,’ said the peace officer. ‘In the exact same terms. And the others were listed as agents. Therefore, so was Mrs Whipple.’
It was Pember’s turn to question the peace officer. He asked were there other names in Mr Pleasance’s book that had nothing to do with spying?
‘Well, there were the names of tradesmen, you know. Plumbers and such.’
‘Were there the names of any officers?’
‘There were. Names he’d noted down – the staff of this general or that. He noted down.’
‘And have you arrested those officers because their names are in the book?’
‘Their names appeared in exact different way.’
‘Is that so? I’ve looked at Pleasance’s book, sir. Is it not true that on the same page as Mrs Whipple’s name there is the name of a drainer Mr Pleasance wanted to employ for digging a ditch. And that as well as that there’s the name of General Magruder’s chief of artillery?’
‘There’s the name of the drainer at the bottom of the page and a note that says N.B. Major Henderson Magruder’s C.O.A., but at the top of the page is the name of Mrs Whipple and dates and times set out just the way the name smack under hers is – and the name smack under hers is that of a schoolteacher from Petersburg.’
Poor Pember could tell the thing was going badly. ‘My question,’ he said pedantically, ‘is whether Mrs Whipple’s name appeared on the same page as that of General Magruder’s chief of artillery.’
‘When you put it in terms like that …’
‘I do put it in terms like that, sir.’
‘Then that much is true. Her name’s on the same page. For what that means.’
Major Pember thanked him.
Mrs Whipple kept on being inattentive through all this. All that was being said seemed to have little to do with her. It was like someone else’s ritual – the prosecutor’s ritual, the judge’s. All she could do was wait till the end and see what they intended for her.
When she looked up again, she saw with something like a shock that Canty had entered the schoolhouse door. The prosecutor called his name. He came forward in his worn uniform. He looked better brushed than she’d ever seen him before. Yes, she thought, he would dress up well to come and do me a disfavour. Oh well …’
He trod up the length of the court steadily, but his livid face showed he’d been fortifying himself to give his evidence.
The prosecutor asked him what Mrs Whipple’s hospital work was like. ‘Efficient,’ he said, just like a man struggling to be fair. But of course, Canty hadn’t come here to run her nursing down.
‘Did Mrs Whipple receive any visits from people you wouldn’t normally expect her to associate with?’
‘She did, sir. One of her visitors was an Englishman, a newspaper man, a lord or something. Searcy was his name.’
‘The Honourable Horace Searcy?’
‘Yessir.’
The prosecutor turned to the judges and explained to them that the Honourable Horace Searcy was a correspondent for The Times of London. He turned again to Canty. ‘The time the Honourable Searcy visited Mrs Whipple, how long did he stay?’
‘He came early afternoon. And stayed till after supper. I know that because the day he came Orderly Harris showed him out, and Orderly Harris did not come on duty that day till six p.m.’
‘And was this the one occasion you know of that the lady met this Searcy?’
Major Pember got up bravely and said mixing with an Englishman was surely no crime. The prosecutor asked the judges to tolerate his line of enquiry until the meaning of it emerged. The judges nodded.
‘Yes,’ Canty said, ‘I had the feeling this meeting with Mr Searcy might not be for the best of reasons. So I set Orderly Harris to watching Mrs Whipple. The night of the day Searcy visited my hospital, Mrs Whipple went to the Lewis House where Searcy was staying. She was wearing a veil like she was trying to hide her face.’
Mrs Whipple’s Major Pember stood up yet again. ‘Please, gentlemen, natural delicacy prevents us …’
Mrs Dora Whipple herself hardly cared about Canty’s slur on her. She knew she should have, but somehow couldn’t manage it. She feared for Searcy a little, however. Yet they wouldn’t dare touch Searcy, she thought. If they did, he might have been arrested already. The idea there was someone close to her they couldn’t touch was a great comfort.
Anyhow, the prosecutor said he’d finished his questioning of Surgeon Canty. Major Pember took over. He set out to make Canty look unreliable, he asked the surgeon whether he had any idea why Mrs Whipple spoke to Mr Searcy.
‘Maybe I didn’t have much idea in the afternoon,’ said Canty, grinning broadly and trying to involve the judges in his humour, ‘unless it was to set up the meeting of the evening.’
‘Sir, in any other surroundings you could not get away with such an insinuation. Do you realise that?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Did you therefore know that the purpose of their meetings had any criminal intent to it?’
‘Well, we can all guess, sir,’ said Canty, just falling short of winking at the president of the court.
‘Even if you guessed right, sir, in your snide hints, it would not make the defendant subject to the judgment of this tribunal. I take some pleasure, therefore, sir, in finishing with you for the purposes of this court.’
Major Pember, sitting again, seemed pretty pleased with himself, and his pleasure lasted some thirty seconds, till the next witness appeared and was questioned. This one happened to be an intelligence officer from Longstreet’s command. The prosecutor asked the intelligence officer what he could tell the court regarding Searcy. The officer said he had to tell the court in confidence that Searcy had at least attempted to get information to the North. The officer himself (so he said) had searched the body of captured General Phil Kearny, U.S., before it was shipped North for burial and had found in its pockets notes written by Searcy concerning the disposition and numbers of Lee’s army. The president seemed to be agitated for the first time during the trial. He began tugging at his whiskers and asked: ‘Why haven’t you people arrested this Searcy?’
‘Well,’ said the intelligence officer, ‘he is being watched. But the whole affair is a mite delicate, sir. His father is powerful with the British government.…’
‘We care too much concerning the British government,’ the president barked, and the intelligence officer shrugged.
Poor Major Pember, more shaken now, asked the officer if he had any proof that Searcy and Mrs Whipple knew each other for any reason that had to do with the passing of intelligence.
‘No,’ said the intelligence officer. ‘But I’ve got to say this: it seems to me that is a fair presumption.’
Dora, blushing inwardly perhaps, weeping somewhere in her chest, but not giving the court the benefit of seeing her lower her eyes, noticed that when Major Pember sat down again he no longer looked at her with little encouraging lifts of his eyebrows.
So she ended in front of the prosecutor herself. She answered his questions in a level voice, and the interrogation went along at a clipped pace, without hesitations. She was determined not to give him the chance to be pompous.
First he asked her, had she got information about regimental and divisional movements from patients in Chimborazo?
She said: ‘Yes, sir, but it was often inaccurate.’
‘And did you pass this information to Pleasance?’
‘Yes, sir, after trying to separate out the unreliable material.’
‘And did you pass to Mr Pleasance information obtained from the English correspondent, the Honourable Horace Searcy?’
‘
On one occasion only. Yes, sir.’
And so it went. She made no explanations. She knew explanations weren’t any use, would be to these men a worse insult than blunt honest answers.
‘And what was the nature of the information Mr Searcy passed to you?’
‘The Union generals show an unwillingness to believe that the resources of the Confederacy are stretched and that the Confederate States have problems in gathering more than 70,000 men in any one zone of war. Mr Searcy’s information regarded the size of the army in Virginia, the size and disposition of the various corps.’
She glanced across at her own lawyer, who was cringing at all these free admissions she was making. The president of the court, who’d been patting his whiskers during the earlier evidence of the intelligence officer, was fairly hauling on them now. ‘Ma’am, do I hear you right?’ he asked. ‘What was your purpose in passing on these figures and so forth?’
‘You know the purpose, sir, fully as I do. It was in the hope that the Union generals would behave with more purpose than they have up to now displayed.’
You are certainly destroying yourself, Dora Whipple, she thought, but there’s nothing you can do with yourself to stop it.
After she returned to her seat, even the prosecutor made a chastened speech. He accused her of no foul intentions. He just said again the judges had no choice. Everyone in court, apart from Dora Whipple, seemed to be suffused with a great sadness. Even when the president began to speak, Dora heard him with composure.
‘Ma’am, this court believes that you have done fine work amongst the sick and wounded. Did you not see any contradiction between that work and those politics of yours?’
She sighed, because she had to give the old answer, the one she’d given already to Searcy.
‘Sir, I simply believe this rebellion can end but one way, and that the greatest mercy is to attempt to end it quick.’
The president said, almost apologetically, ‘We all on this bench believe that, ma’am, that it can end but one way. In the triumph of the Confederacy. I don’t suppose you happen to mean that?’