To the sound of heavy artillery booming upriver, Jana and the left wing of the Union Cavalry Corps splashed across the Rappahannock River at Kelly’s Ford. She knew their right wing had collided with the enemy prematurely to the plan for the two wings to converge at Brandy Station and make a westward sweep toward J.E.B. Stuart and his Confederate cavalry, amassed at Culpeper Courthouse.
Jana despaired over her failure to find an honorable way out of the line of fire for herself and her friends before some heated battle. Although she’d tried hard since March, she could only find jobs that required some sort of promotion, including hospital steward. Keeley’s popularity might get him elected to a higher post on some officer’s staff. Leanne could become a blacksmith with a portable forge to keep the horses shod and wagon wheels repaired. Jana could shed her men’s clothes to become a nurse. That left Charlie out in the cold, all alone. She refused to leave their sides until she saw them all safe. Just as the Union cavalry had to act as jugglers in a circus—dropping one strategy and picking up another—Jana also had to adjust her laments to refocus on her immediate predicament.
With the left wing further divided, Colonel Hugh Judson Kilpatrick led his unit from the woods into a grassy field. He began readying them for a charge up a sprawling hill.
Jana felt the scorching sun frying her insides as she maneuvered beside the rest of her brigade into step-like formation. When her regiment was positioned at the top of the staircase, followed downward to the right by the Second New York and First Maine Cavalry Regiments, she knew it would take the lead into battle.
An enemy shell shrieked across a blue sky streaked with wispy clouds. It struck the ground behind the Porter Guards with a horrific blast and rumble of the earth.
Maiti snorted and pawed the grass, raring to go, while every horse around her squealed and reared in fright.
Mimicking the instincts of the troopers around her, Jana crouched against her horse’s neck to avoid being maimed or killed by flying shards of metal.
With only plowed-up clumps of earth raining down on them, all brought their mounts under control.
Jana tried to cough up the knob of panic, making her already parched throat feel more choked. It had gotten this way from a morning’s hard ride over roads made dustier by a sun that sizzled on its morning horizon like an egg frying on a hot griddle.
“Are ye all right, Johnnie?” Keeley asked.
Jana nodded and her hand shook as she withdrew her canteen, uncorked it, and pressed its pewter mouth against her lips. Kept cool by the wetted cotton-and-wool covering around her flask, the river water moistened her throat. Up to now, she’d been lucky. The Porter Guards had only nibbled around the edges of war. They’d never been in a battle where the enemy launched their cannon fire on them with such ferocity. She pondered how many Rebel vultures waited behind their grayish-blue sulfur cloud of cannon smoke to swoop down upon them.
With his pencil-thin lips spread wide in demented glee, Kilpatrick galloped his horse across the front of the brigade. He held his sword up high to rally his men.
“It’s gonna be another unfair fight. And us Porter Guards are gonna be the guinea pigs. He’ll kill us all,” Leanne sputtered.
Jana understood Leanne’s meaning. They were about to get their first real taste of Kilpatrick’s reputation for sending his men into battle with reckless disregard, the reason he was called Kill-Cavalry. Although terrified to go up the hill first, she put her finger to her lips to hush Leanne. Nothing could change their impending charge, and it would do no good to unravel anyone’s courage by reminding them of past slaughters by Rebels on heavily fortified and high grounds. Jana patted her breast pocket to make sure the letter to Ma and Pa was still there. In it she divulged her whole truth. She’d made Leanne promise to mail it home in case she was killed today. If Leanne was kept from the task, she hoped some other kind soul would find and forward it.
A Porter Guard hollered out, “Let’s show them Southern horsemen who’s superior,” to which a great cheer erupted.
Only a few besides Jana and her friends sat quiet in their saddles. Although unable to share in the general euphoria, Jana had the utmost confidence in the Union cavalry; it had run circles around the Rebel cavalry this past spring, crippling a considerable expanse of the Confederacy’s lines of supply, communication, and transportation. Still, she feared that their impending undertaking would require more luck than skill to escape unscathed.
Directing his dull, somber eyes at Jana in particular, Keeley said, “Be safe, lads.”
Jana presumed he was experiencing the same numbness that many soldiers claimed to have minutes before they were sent into their first heated engagement. Far too aware of her own torments, Jana wished she could default to his dreamlike state too. But she kept on fretting over her own or her friends’ deaths, never seeing her family again, and never knowing life as a woman—especially with Keeley.
While waiting for the order to charge, Jana frantically called upon her surroundings for help out of this fight. To her front, the enemy’s guns bore down on them like a giant mountain lion with its razor-sharp incisors and claws ready to rip them apart. With her saddle leather creaking, she turned to her left. The sun’s evil rays skimmed off sabers as superior numbers of Rebels thrashed Yankees in a mostly hand-to-hand combat near the railroad station. She flinched with every saber blow that sent a trooper, Yankee or Rebel, reeling to the ground or with every horse that was mowed down, disemboweled, or torn in half by cannon fire. Only the dense forest from which they’d just emerged offered shelter in the shadowy embraces of its outstretched limbs. She’d never reach it, let alone get Keeley, Leanne, and Charlie to follow her, before being spotted and branded a deserter or, worse, a coward. There was no way out, and she shrank into her saddle in defeat.
The flag-bearers trotted to the lead of their respective regiments. Though the silks lay limp against their staffs on this breezeless day, each regiment’s flag had distinguishing features to follow should the troopers, who all looked alike in their army-issued short coats and hats, become entangled in battle. Jana and the Tenth New York would serve under their yellow-fringed flag with its red, white, and blue cords and tassels. The Second New York would follow its swallow-tailed guidon in the stars-and-stripes pattern. And, for now, the First Maine would stand in reserve behind their standard with its bright blue background.
Lieutenant-Colonel Irvine, commander of the Porter Guards, shouted, “Trot! March! Guide left!”
With their spurs jingling, Jana and hundreds of troopers urged on their mounts. Her forehead broke out in a crazed sweat. Hemmed in amidst the rear ranks, Jana felt like a fox in a foot trap—she was able to see where to run and hide, but she couldn’t shake loose to do it. The landscape rolled by her in a blur, and the wooded sanctuary behind her faded away.
Lieutenant-Colonel Irvine ordered, “Column, walk! Draw sabers! Trot!”
Hundreds of men reined in their horses, holstered their pistols, and drew their sabers with a great clank of steel before picking up the pace.
Jana sucked in a jagged breath to calm her nerves, strung tighter than Union telegraph lines. Daring not even a sidelong glance at her friends for fear she’d fall to pieces fretting over them, she fixed her sights straight ahead and willed her mind to be as sharp as her saber blade.
The bugle blared followed by Irvine’s bellow to “Charge!”
In their earth-quaking surge forward, the Porter Guards neared the tracks of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad as a large column of cavalry advanced toward them. The tornado of dust around them made it impossible to tell which side they were on until the legendary bloodcurdling yell—initially heard at the first battle of Bull Run in July 1861 and everywhere since—betrayed the combatants as Rebels.
A staff officer of a Union cavalry general dashed by on his roan. Pointing at the enemy’s flag, just poking through the head of the oncoming column, he challenged every trooper within earshot to go capture it.
Troopers from Company D swerved to the right, and Maiti followed.
Jana felt her dapple gray’s muscles rippling beneath her calves as she galloped after the Confederate colors. Her detachment didn’t get far when a greater number of the enemy slammed into their rear and cut them off from the rest of their command.
Someone shouted, “Retreat! Retreat!”
The beat of Jana’s heart crashed wildly against her chest as she tried to circle Maiti around and withdraw to the woods with the rest of her company and avoid their slaughter.
Maiti glided over a deep, dry ditch about ten feet wide and landed on the opposite bank with the grace of a horse bred for the steeplechase.
Looking over her shoulder, Jana saw Charlie’s horse clear it too. Too many other horses fell into it, including Keeley’s and Leanne’s. Reining in Maiti and wheeling her around, Jana recoiled with horror at the scene in the ditch: horses thrashed about, crushing or striking down unsaddled troopers with their hoofs as they tried to get their legs under them or claw their way up and out of the gully; saddled and unsaddled Yankees and Rebels lunged at one another with angry thrusts of their sabers; and the clash of metal against metal rang above the chaos.
Whipping up a shower of dirt, Lieutenant Robb’s horse pawed its way up the embankment. It cleared the ditch too late to save its master, killed by an enemy’s sword thrust into his right shoulder and out through his breast. The lieutenant clung to his steed for a few yards before falling to the ground dead.
Leanne spurred her gelding away from the melee, missing a beheading by a hair.
As Keeley latched onto his gelding’s mane to haul himself back up into the saddle, he was forced to halt when three Rebels swarmed around him like angry bees. He let go of the mane, dropped his saber, and held his hands up in surrender.
Crazy with rage over Lieutenant Robb’s death and Keeley’s capture, Jana dug her heels into Maiti’s side and spurred her back toward the ditch, under Leanne’s and Charlie’s protests. She’d slash up or shoot down every Rebel who got in her way of saving Keeley.
As the enemy gained the high ground and charged toward her, Keeley flailed his arms like a madman, signaling for Jana’s retreat.
Pistols popped and rifles cracked behind Jana. Some of the charging Rebels jerked up and out of their saddles.
Jana knew full well they’d been picked off by Leanne and Charlie, trying to save her. With nothing more she could do for Keeley without compromising Leanne’s and Charlie’s lives, she prepared to withdraw. A sting to her left bicep stopped her, and she looked down to see blood saturating her coat sleeve. Frantically holstering her pistol, she wheeled Maiti around and hightailed it after Leanne and Charlie. As they fled through the woods, Jana felt herself growing weaker with each spurt of blood. The forest blurred into a mishmash of green and brown right before Jana slumped over Maiti’s neck and the daylight extinguished.