On the night before Samuel departed for America, Belle took his hand and slid onto one finger a small diamond-cluster ring, telling him it had once been the property of an African princess and that it carried a curious power: if it dropped or was taken off, it meant the wearer was in danger. She tried to focus on writing her memoir but was distracted by reports of Rose’s death—the tragic news reached Europe by the end of October—and by thoughts of her husband visiting her childhood home.
The entire Shenandoah Valley was now under Union control, and in Martinsburg a tentative serenity had settled over the streets. The provost marshal checked Samuel’s pass and bag before waving him through, and by the time he reached the Boyd home the sky was black and gilded with stars. A servant—it had to be “Mauma Eliza,” whom Belle spoke of often—greeted him with, “You’s Miss Belle’s husband, isn’t you?” Belle’s mother was visiting a friend in Kennysville ten miles away, and so he spent the evening talking with Belle’s grandmother, who wept and welcomed him like a son.
Another servant, Jim, showed him to Belle’s room. Samuel removed his hat before stepping across the threshold and surveying her things—hair combs and books and a polished palmetto pin—in reverent silence. Sitting before the fire, he opened his journal and composed a passage intended only for Belle’s eyes: “This was your room; here you had been held a prisoner, and had suffered the torture of an agonizing doubt as to your fate. Here lay your books just as you had left them. Writings, quotations, every thing to remind me of you, were here; and I do not know how long a time I should have stood gazing about me in silence. . . . When I retired to bed that night, and Jim had been dismissed from further attendance upon me, I lay for a long time thinking, looking into the fire that glimmered and glared about the room, picturing you here, there, and everywhere about the chamber, and thinking of you sadly, far away from me in England—the exile, lonely and sad.”
Belle was so charmed by her husband’s writings that she included them in her memoir, calling them an “after-piece” that offered another facet of their unlikely love story—albeit one that Samuel, at least, never intended to convey. “Of the two characters,” mused an early reviewer of Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison, “he is—we say it without meaning disrespect—the truly feminine one.”
In the morning, after a servant prodded the fire back to life, Samuel sat near its heat and turned Belle’s princess ring on his finger, absentmindedly twisting it off. He recalled her warning and moved through the rest of his day feeling like a “marked man,” a premonition that clung to him as he set off for Baltimore in the afternoon. He got as far as Monocacy Station just outside Frederick, Maryland, where Union detectives approached. It was clear to Samuel that the men recognized him. They asked if his wife, Belle Boyd, was “lurking somewhere in the vicinity” and arrested him for desertion—a pretext to take him into custody, since he had already been dismissed from the Union navy. After transporting him to Harpers Ferry, they brought him before General John Stevenson.
The general’s face was dominated by a coarse gray mustache, the tips wilting toward his collar like unwatered ferns. He stared at Samuel with a peculiar intensity.
“Is there anything remarkable about me, or that you admire?” Samuel asked.
“Yes, sir,” the general replied. “Your duplicity . . . you are a spy. Where are your papers, passes, dispatches?”
“I have none,” Samuel insisted.
They were joined by one of the general’s aides. “You’re the husband of Miss Belle Boyd,” he said, delivering the words as an accusation, “and you ought to be hung.”
Union officials conveyed him to Washington and conducted another search, confiscating his tall beaver hat and cane and the $14 hidden in his pocket. At Carroll Prison, where Belle had spent four months the previous year, he was tossed into a cell with a blockade runner and a rebel spy. With a crude piece of charred wood he scrawled all three of their names on the wall and sketched a Confederate flag beneath.
Superintendent Wood stopped by to greet him: “Ho, ho, here we are! So you’re the husband of the famous Belle Boyd, are you? Well, we haven’t got her, but we’ve got her husband.” Samuel received a letter from Belle’s mother, who was refused permission to visit him, and despaired because he was unable to hear news of Belle at all. “I have not smiled today,” he wrote, “but two or three times my eyes have been filled with tears; for I have been thinking of you, Belle, a stranger in a strange land, waiting sad and lonely for my return.”
Belle, meanwhile, had read all about her husband’s predicament: he was in “daily danger,” one London paper reported, “of meeting with the greatest outrages” at the Yankees’ hands. She knew it would be up to her to save him.
In Harpers Ferry, not far from where Samuel Hardinge had been held for questioning, another former Union soldier was reclaiming a piece of her old life. Emma never became a missionary, as she once told Jerome Robbins she might, and instead returned to nursing, working at a hospital run by the US Sanitary Commission, a relief agency that supported sick and wounded soldiers. Not one of her female colleagues knew of Frank Thompson—she would keep that secret for a while longer—and it had taken time to relearn how to move and speak like them, to see herself as they did. Her own eye cataloged curious distinctions: the most highly cultivated and refined women were the least bothered by the hardships of the job, and invariably made better nurses than those from the lower classes. She had no time for the foolish, sentimental girls who expected the hospital to look like a drawing room where, Emma wrote, they might “sit and fan handsome young mustached heroes in shoulder straps and read poetry” instead of combing matted hair and washing dirty skin. Even the hardiest of this sort lasted only days.
She thought often of her own war heroes, General Poe (currently assisting with Sherman’s devastating March to the Sea), General McClellan (who just lost the presidential election to Lincoln), and all the men of the 2nd Michigan. She never saw Jerome again, but he wrote and described the siege of Vicksburg with such brutal specificity that she felt as if she’d been there. James Reid disappeared for good, most likely back to Scotland with his family. Now there was someone new, but from an old part of her life: Linus Seelye, also a native of New Brunswick, who had come to Harpers Ferry seeking work as a carpenter and randomly made her acquaintance. “Her whole life was an interesting conundrum,” Linus said of her, “for every week something would come up—something she could accomplish, overcome, move or manage, that would eclipse the last.” Like Jerome, he was smart and soft-spoken; like James, he was tall and blond and married; his wife remained back home in Canada. He was thirty-two, nine years older than Emma, and listened to all of her stories, even the ones she only pretended were true.
She began writing those stories, beginning with her divinely inspired decision to join the army and including everything she wished to be remembered for: her valor during some of the war’s deadliest battles, her inventive disguises and risks behind enemy lines, her care for the wounded and the dead. She titled the book Unsexed; or, The Female Soldier—a risqué choice, she knew—and would later rename it Memoirs of a Soldier, Nurse and Spy: A Woman’s Adventures in the Union Army. Lest she appear too feminine, she chastised all the able-bodied men of the North who failed to enlist, even quoting a famous poem written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, then a young soldier, called “The Sweet Little Man”:
We send you the buttonless garments of woman!
Cover your face lest it freckle or tan;
Muster the apron-string guards on the common,
That is the corps for the sweet little man.
At the same time she emphasized that her every violent and “masculine” act—shooting a female rebel through the hand, unloading her pistol in a rebel soldier’s face—stemmed from self-sacrifice, that most feminine of qualities; she saw now that her two selves had worked in perfect concert. She mentioned Jerome Robbins only in passing, offering no hint that he knew her secret, and never mentioned Frank Thompson at all, remaining deliberately vague about her name, her background, and exactly what her comrades saw when they looked at her. It was a meticulous balancing act, one that Emma masterfully transferred from her life to the page, leaving the story open to interpretation while its hero kept parts of herself hidden.