and at Malvern Hill, just as he and the newly reassigned Orphans’ Guild survivors had.
Sharpsburg.
Malvern Hill.
One thing he had learned in this war. Nothing qualified for cannon fodder more than a company with a true majority of bona fide orphans.
“Jack?”
He looked up.
“She went and got married, Jack,” Ike said.
“Are you going to tell me who ‘she’ is or do I have to guess?”
“Miss Elrissa Barden,” Ike said, his voice full of misery. “My cousin...she says he’s rich,” he added helpfully.
Jack reached for his haversack, rearranging the contents so that he could add the dead Rebel’s belongings. He might find a way to mail the letters, and then again, he might not. “His name?” he asked.
“It’s...Vance.”
Jack looked at him. “Farrell Vance?” he said, surprised by his response to the information. He should have been intensely disturbed, at the very least, but he wasn’t. After a short moment, it seemed...only logical. Farrell Vance had money—a lot of money—more money than good old Jeremiah “Jack” Murphy would ever have, even if a marriage to a wealthy store owner’s daughter had happened. Vance was a store owner, as well—among other things—but his real money came from the war, from army contracts. There was plenty of profit to be made there, especially if a supplier was willing to cut corners. He had no doubt that Farrell Vance fell into that camp.
“That’s him,” Ike said. “My cousin, she wrote it was a really big wedding. Nobody ever seen anything like it in Lexington before, I can tell you that. Her wedding dress come all the way from Paris somehow or other. Must have been hard, what with the war and everything. It had all these...rosettes or some such thing. What do you reckon a rosette is— Ow!” he said, his report interrupted by his nearest comrade’s elbow. “What did you do that for, Boone!”
“I did it hoping you might start using that head of yours for something besides parking your hat!”
“Well, you said to tell him!”
The argument, peppered with insults, continued, but Jack was no longer listening. Elrissa Suzanne Barden...Vance.
Jack had never formally asked her father for her hand. She had wanted him to wait until he came home again, and he had agreed, thinking that Mr. Barden would be more apt to remember how important Jack had been to his business if he was standing right in front of him. He hadn’t really considered that Mr. Barden would say no. The man had set the precedent that his beloved Elrissa could have whatever she wanted a long time before Jack Murphy came along.
But clearly Elrissa had changed her mind. It occurred to Jack that no one in her circle likely knew anything about his marriage proposal much less that she’d accepted him. And when this greater matrimonial opportunity arose, she must have realized she could marry Farrell Vance without consequence. With any luck at all, Jack Murphy would end up like all too many of his fellow orphans and wouldn’t be coming back from the war at all. Or if he did survive, he wouldn’t likely go around telling people he’d been taken for a fool. It occurred to him, too, that it must require many months to put together a wedding that included a dress from Paris with “rosettes,” and Elrissa must have continued writing to him until she was absolutely sure the better marriage was a certainty.
“That’s that, then,” he said, realizing too late that he’d said it out loud.
“That’s right, Jack,” Ike said. “Ain’t no use worrying about it.”
“Whose turn is it to take watch?” Jack asked, ignoring Ike’s comment.
“Fred’s,” somebody volunteered. “And Jacob’s...” The sentence faded away into a different kind of silence.
“Mine, then,” Ike said after a moment. “And Boone’s.”
“Well, don’t the two of you be squabbling like a couple of old women,” Jack said despite the fact that two more of the Orphans’ Guild were dead and gone. He was glad it was Ike’s turn. Ike couldn’t tell when he was putting a foot wrong and stumbling all over something socially, but he had finely honed senses when it came to anticipating danger, probably because of the years he’d spent hiding from his violent drunkard of a father.
“No, Jack,” Ike said earnestly. “We won’t. I ain’t letting them Rebs sneak up on us.”
“That’s good to know, our situation being what it is,” Jack said. “What’s that?” he asked because of a sound in the distance he couldn’t identify.
“Sounds like singing,” Boone said.
And so it was, but Jack couldn’t make out the song. It was something wistful; he could tell that much. A farewell for a fallen comrade, he decided, as more voices joined in, perhaps for the man whose letters he still held. He felt a burning in his eyes suddenly, an ache in his throat. He stuffed the letters into his haversack. His hands were beginning to tremble again. This time he wrapped himself in his blanket to hide them and turned his back to the others. He lay down on the ground and closed his eyes, but he had little hope of sleep. His body ached with fatigue, but his thoughts swirled around and around in his head so fast he couldn’t dwell on any of them. He tried to find some sound to concentrate on—the whip-poor-will, the singing, anything—so that he could shut out everything else, but it didn’t help. The more he struggled, the more his mind raced. Eventually, though, as it had more than once, the sound he so needed turned out to be one inside his own head. After a moment, it rose out of the chaos: Father Bartholomew reading aloud to them on the cool upstairs porch on Saturday afternoons after their chores and their Saturday baths were finally done. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It had been a favorite of the younger boys and, he thought, of Father Bartholomew. The ancient mariner. The man who could not pray.
Jack concentrated on the poem, word by word, line by line, not caring if they were out of sequence or not. After a time he began to whisper random phrases to himself. “‘The praise be given...the gentle sleep from heaven...slid into my soul….’”
But there was no chance of that happening this night.
“Jack,” Boone said, shaking him hard.
“What!” he snapped because he hadn’t been asleep.
“They’re not singing now, Jack. Maybe you better come listen.”
He sat up and struggled to his feet, wishing for the second time tonight that he associated with men who could speak in specifics. He looked toward the battlefield, keeping his fists clenched because the second episode of shaking hadn’t yet subsided. The soldiers he couldn’t see had stopped singing, just as Boone said, but what they were doing instead, Jack couldn’t tell.
“You see anything, Ike?” Jack called.
“Nothing!” Ike called from some distance away. “Whatever it is, it’s coming this way.”
“Us or them?”
“Don’t know!”
“At the ready!” Jack shouted, and they all scrambled to grab up their gear. Then they
