When the last bullet had been fired and the smoke cleared Emma could see what she had done to Captain Logan, now writhing on the ground. There was a hole where the right side of his nose used to be, his once fine face caving in on itself. A pink ribbon of lip clung to his mouth by the thinnest thread of skin. She thought of his new bride, and how she would no longer “rejoice in the beauty of that manly face.” He was alive, at least for now, but “sadly spoiled.” She had one second to brace herself for a counterattack.
The rebels rushed at her at once, each of them wanting the pleasure of killing her. They swiped their sabers at her neck, nicked a shallow gash across her horse’s throat. The Union men hurled themselves in the middle, protecting her, driving the enemy back, pouring volley after volley until half of the rebels lay dead. They gathered their prisoners and their wounded and returned to camp, where her commanding officers commended her “coolness.” They also told her she could not go undercover again as long as her regiment remained in Lebanon. “I would not be permitted to go out again in that vicinity, in the capacity of spy,” she wrote, “as I would most assuredly meet with some of those who had seen me desert their ranks, and I would consequently be hung up to the nearest tree.”
Her disappointment about the end of her espionage career was soon eclipsed by news about James Reid. He had resigned his commission, planning to take his children and wife, who had suddenly become gravely ill, back to Scotland. At night Emma grew aware of an intensifying internal heat, her brain burning beneath her skull. Her body couldn’t settle on a temperature and a sheen of sweat formed along her goosebumped arms. She allowed herself to admit what was happening: a recurrence of the malaria she’d contracted nearly a year before, on the banks of the Chickahominy River near Richmond.
She dreamed of her mother, who’d once confessed to a Scottish clergyman her fear that her youngest daughter would meet with a violent death; the clergyman had advised her mother not to worry. “It is an auld saying,” he replied, “an’ I believe a true one. A wean that’s born to be hung will never be drooned.” And now here she was, having survived her childhood, the bloodiest battles of the war, and several narrow escapes from the enemy, prepared to die in a most anonymous and unspectacular manner, shivering on a cot in a tent. She yearned for the touch of her mother’s cool hand. She applied for a medical furlough and was denied, with no reason given. Discovery, she thought, was “far worse than death.” She refused to go to the hospital for reasons only James Reid and Jerome Robbins knew. The latter sat next to her now, feeding her sips of whiskey spiked with quinine sulfate, somewhat ambivalent about the job; he alone understood that Emma’s malaise was partly due to matters of the heart.
Outside her tent, there was a short ripping sound followed by a boom. Then screaming, moaning, heavy huffs of breath. Jerome took her outstretched hand and lifted her. She willed her legs to support her weight and leaned against him, shuffle-dragging her way to the opening of the tent. A shell had exploded randomly, accidentally, near a group of soldiers sitting together. Through swirls of smoke and dust she saw fingers dangling from hands, hands torn from wrists, faces half missing, cubes of unidentifiable flesh, blood leaking from ears. A deck of cards was strewn about the ground, hands half played.
As soon as she felt herself falling she felt herself caught. Jerome led her back to her tent, to her cot, and lowered her down. He stayed a moment, sitting next to her. The carnage was nothing she hadn’t seen before, but yet she felt a sinking inside, a collapse of every last reserve.
She recognized the immediate and acute loss of her “soldierly qualities,” and loathed what she had become: “a poor, cowardly, nervous, whining woman, and as if to make up for lost time, and to give vent to my long-pent-up feelings, I could do nothing but weep hour after hour, until it would seem that my head was literally a fountain of tears and my heart was one great burden of sorrow.” Jerome hurried to tend to the wounded, leaving her alone, both of them aware of words left unsaid.
He said them to himself later that night, alone in his own tent. “I passed most of the day with Frank, who has been and is unwell,” he wrote. He pressed the pencil harder, as if the force of his hand could redirect her attention from James Reid back to him, and what he thought they’d had: “How strange are some of the incidents of life. . . . It is unpleasant to awaken to the conviction that one dear as a friend can forget, in their selfish interest, that others may not be void of the finer sensibilities of the human heart. It is a sad reality to which we awaken when we learn that others are receiving the devotion of one from whom we only claim friendship’s attention.”
She had kept other thoughts from Jerome, as well. She was despondent about the imminent departure of General Poe, her friend and mentor, who was also leaving the regiment. Without Poe she might lose her position as mail carrier, and with it, the freedom—those long, solitary rides—that gave Frank Thompson respite and helped him keep his secret. Many of the men who had enlisted with her in Michigan back in the spring of ’61 were gone, too, transferred to other regiments or wounded or killed. And she privately mourned the loss of someone she’d never met, a woman whose fate warranted one line in the Louisville Daily Democrat: “A young woman wearing soldier’s apparel, and belonging to the Fourteenth Iowa regiment, shot herself in Cairo on Sunday night because her sex was discovered.”
The story made Emma feel a sudden absence, a distancing from herself, as if she were living in the third person instead of the first, caught between pronouns. She had to decide which one of her selves to kill.
Once she made her choice she did so in a manner befitting Frank Thompson, who would not want her to weep or waver or pine. Three weeks after her last mission, on or around the night of April 17, she defied her fever and dressed in full uniform, slipping out of her tent and away from camp, slashing her way through the woods, saying good-bye to no one, each step as liberating as it was lonely. In the morning, at roll call, they would be looking for Frank Thompson and determine that he had deserted, a crime punishable by death. They would be ready to hang someone who had only briefly existed, a man she could make vanish just as easily as she conjured him.