The one thing Dr Sawyer could not fault the Sisters on was their absolute dedication to the wounded.
A ‘Society Sister’, as Dr Sawyer called those others who infrequently came to minister to the men, and generally at that, only the handsome ones – arrived one day in a flurry of fuss and feathers. Mary, unregarding of the flim-flam which accompanied the woman – a local doctor’s wife – brought her to the nearest bed. It contained a young soldier recently admitted with a macerated face and who still bore the stench of his wounds.
Mary addressed him. ‘Mr Addison, you have a kind lady visitor who will tend to you a while.’
The young man turned to face his Lady Bountiful. She, upon seeing the decayed state of his face, immediately drew down her fan between herself and the offending sight.
‘Oh, Sister, could we not turn to some other poor soul. Less … you know, Sister?’ she asked, in the soldier’s hearing.
Dr Sawyer overheard Mary’s reply. ‘Whatsoever you do to the least of mine you do also to me.’
To her credit, he observed that the lady remained awhile with the man, her gaze averted.
It was not the way with the Sisters. All were equal in their eyes. North and South, damaged and whole. Generals and the lowest foot-soldier, Protestant or Catholic. If only they weren’t always so damned busy trying to save souls as well as bodies. He supposed that was their raison d’être. What he did out of duty to country, they did out of duty to God. They had no side and it granted them a moral superiority which, if forced to, they used like a velvet-covered battering ram. The Sisters never flinched that higher duty – even when faced with the dreaded smallpox. The lay nurses, even the good ones, would not venture near smallpox victims. The Sisters and the Lavelle woman were the very opposite. They, he observed, would not venture away from any poor soul needing help. Smallpoxed or not.
Dr Sawyer wondered about the Lavelle woman?
The two nuns were her children: the quiet one, Sister Mary, her birth child; the other one, Sister Veronica, or Louisa as the woman called her, who would cross swords with the Devil, an adopted child.
The Lavelle woman had been seeking her husband and son. One, she thought with the Union, the other Confederate. With the two nuns, she would scour the battlefield after every encounter, painstakingly examining each body, or what remained of it. Each fresh intake arriving at the hospital, she would run to, searching the faces for any sign of recognition. Dr Sawyer had long ago imagined them dead – but she had never given up hope. Now with her son found, delivered to her as a corpse, hope had been dashed from her. Now, with even more desperate fervour, she sought her husband.
Already hundreds of thousands had fallen from minié ball and cannon; many more from disease. It would be a miracle if she found him alive. Dr Sawyer hoped she yet would.
A strange case the three of them – no care for the gentility of their looks or attire. Their garments, like his own, festooned with the blood of the two score of men he had amputated that morning, she and her daughters holding steady the atrophied limbs for the bite of his surgeon’s saw.
He tensed himself as Louisa approached him. ‘Cross swords with the Devil,’ he whispered under his breath, awaiting the opening thrust.