WHAT TO do about Robert.
Robert deserved a second chance, I decided. Everyone did. So somehow he lost or dropped the order from General Lee. Should a person die or be put into prison for life for that? Should a person’s life be ruined because of an innocent mistake?
Of course I could say no, because I was not in the army. It did not have its tentacles wrapped around me. I was not a doctor, with another whole barrel of fish to account for. And if I did what I wanted to do, no shame would come down on my family.
But first, before I set out to become a heroine, I had to get to know Robert, proper like. I had to at least spend some time with him and find out what he was about.
We were at breakfast. We had food now, anyway, thanks to Landon. No one was to know it, of course. It was to be shared with no one. This was difficult. No one was to know that Landon had been treated “special” and allowed to bring his family food. For the simple reason, he’d been told by his commanding officer, that the Yankee army believed that the only way it would finally take Vicksburg was to starve its people out.
Mama said, “The idea of starving our neighbors out, while we eat in plentitude, bothers me, Landon.”
“You want me to leave off bringing food, Ma?” he asked.
Landon could always come up with a reply that made you stand by your statements and abide by them, even while they squirmed beneath your feet.
“You know better,” Mama said. “I’ve got to take care of my family.”
Mama looked at him, long and hard. “The Yankees know that’s the only way they’ll get the city, don’t they? Our soldiers can hold them off as long as they want to. We can’t be beat with shelling. Only with starvation.”
We ate in silence for a while then. Everyone but Robert. He wasn’t eating.
“Did you decide whether you’re going to work at writing those letters for our boys?” Mama asked me.
I nodded yes. “I’ve got to do something. I just can’t sit around and do nothing,” I told her.
“All right. I’ll send a courier with a note to Dr. Balfour this morning that you’ll come.”
“I need you this morning, too,” Landon announced. “I’ve got three patients due in the surgery. You can come over and play nurse and receptionist.”
“I was going to read some Dickens to Robert this morning.”
“Robert can wait.” He winked at his friend. “He can have you when I’m finished. All right, old friend?”
Robert said it was all right. He was tired anyway, he said. Neither he nor Landon knew that this was the day I’d picked to get to know him.
I DIDN’T mind helping Landon in Pa’s surgery. He didn’t ask me to do much except take the patients’ names and ailments down in the waiting room, then bring them into the surgery in order of their arrival.
“How’s your pa?” they all asked me.
I told them we’d received only two letters, that he couldn’t give out his destination but that he was with General Lee and in good health and said he would write to us soon. They all missed him.
“Landon’s a good doctor,” I told them.
They came with all kinds of ailments, from poison ivy to deep coughs, from sprained wrists to earaches. One woman came, she said, because she had nervous spasms from the sounds of the shelling, and she wanted to see if the young Dr. Corbet was as good as his father.
Once I had escorted the patient inside the surgery and fetched what Landon wanted, he would not let me stay. About six patients came that Saturday morning, even while we were being shelled and cannonaded and the musketry exploded overhead, and added to this treacherous music was the smashing of windows in nearby houses from the percussion of the explosions.
Landon dismissed me before noon to go and have lunch. But first I took him a tray fixed by Clothilda. He was as if lost in that surgery, time frozen for him.
WHEN I returned to the cave, Mama asked me to take a tray to Robert. I watched him eat. He liked rice and mushrooms, and Mama had made him his own concoction. But he didn’t eat much.
“Your brother is convinced I have brain fever,” he told me quietly, “but the only fever I have is to go home.”
“I can understand that,” I said.
“Suppose the quinine won’t break the fever. You think your brother will let me go anyway?”
I had no way to answer. Landon told me, only last evening when we were putting away the food he’d brought, that he’d decided he had to turn Robert over to Pemberton. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever had to do,” he’d said, “but it’s the only thing I can do in my position.”
“Your mother was in here this morning giving me a decoction of sprigs and leaves from the hemlock spruce tree,” Robert was saying. “She asked your brother first, of course. He said yes. I think I’m feeling better. But how will we know whether it was the quinine or her remedy if the fever breaks?”
I smiled. “My mother often has that problem with Pa,” I told him. “They always decide it doesn’t matter as long as the patient gets well.”
He then asked me to tell him about Pa, so I did. He listened carefully, then told me about his pa, a plantation owner, now under the Yankees, since Jackson, Mississippi, was captured a while back. He told me about his own little sister, Cassie Lea, who could ride better than he could, and about his brother, Billy, who had been in a military academy before the war and now, at only seventeen, had joined up with the army and had a thirst for Yankee blood. He told me how he longed for some of his mammy’s biscuits and ham and chocolate cake.
“My pa hates the Yankees with a passion,” he told me. “Wait’ll I tell him that my new friend is a Yankee and how he saved me.”
I went solemn.
“What’s wrong, Claire Louise? Did I offend you in any way?”
I shook my head. He really did think Landon was going to save him.
The realization came down on me like a mortar shell, exploding in shards and lights all around me. The noise made me unable to focus. Robert was mouthing some more of his truths.
“Did Andy give you any money?” I asked him outright.
He looked startled at first, then he understood. “Yes. He hired himself out and worked for it and gave it to me. How did you know?”
“I was there when he asked my brother if he could. He said it was for your trip home.”
“Yes, I have enough, thank you.”
“You’ll need some food to take along. And someone to accompany you on the way out of town. To show you the best way, where you won’t be hit by shells and bothered by people. Eight o’clock at night is the best time. Everyone is out then and one more person seen ’round and about won’t be noticeable.”
“You sound as if you discussed this with your brother. Did you?”
I picked up his lunch tray from the bed. The book Great Expectations lay there next to it. I admired the gold title on the cover. We hadn’t even opened it.
“No, we haven’t discussed it,” I said. I took a deep breath. It might as well be now, I told myself. And so I told him.
“You won’t like this, Robert. And you won’t believe it. But it’s true. Your friend, Landon, isn’t going to help you escape. He’s going to turn you in to Pemberton before he reports to Milliken’s Bend hospital. I heard him tell Mama. He doesn’t want to. But he can’t do anything else in his position as a doctor and a captain in the Yankee army. You see, you’re his prisoner, technically. He told me that if he helps you escape, he’s an accessory to your running away and could be court-martialed.”
He just stared at me. His eyes were so blue, and into the blueness now came tears, but he kept them in check, he wouldn’t let them overflow.
“Claire Louise Corbet, are you funnin’ me?” he asked.
“No, sir. No. I’m not. I wish I were. I’ve been thinking about it, you see, and I decided I want to help you escape. I want to help you get home. To your own mama and pa and Cassie Lea and those biscuits and ham and that chocolate cake. Even if the Yankees there make you a prisoner. Because it’ll all end soon, and if you’re a prisoner of Pemberton’s it won’t end, ever.”
The silence stretched between us like we were pulling taffy. He was taking it all in. I could tell by his eyes, by the way he was slowly nodding his head.
And then he said something that summed it all up. “You love that brother of yours, but you’re making your own decision, because you know it’s the right thing to do,” he said gravely. “I hope someday my sister, Cassie Lea, will have the sense you have.”
“So you’ll let me help you then?”
“Have at it, Claire Louise. What would you have me do?”
“You’ve only to be dressed and ready. I’ll give you a sack of food and a Colt Navy revolver that was Pa’s from the house. I’ll walk you as far down as the spring where we met, where I was picking blackberries. I’ll draw a map that will take you east from there.”
“When?”
I paused only a moment. “In two nights,” I said. “At the eight o’clock respite from shelling. Landon will likely be in Pa’s surgery then. It’s when people come. All right?”
“He’ll punish you when he finds out.”
“He won’t find out. The lie is that you left on your own. You just picked up and skedaddled. I know how to lie, don’t worry. I have to go now. Get plenty of rest and try to eat good between now and then.”
He was perplexed, taken with the audacity of it. For one of Lee’s officer’s, I thought, he was powerful innocent. He must have come reluctantly to new plans.
I left.