Ike suddenly cried. “Did you hear that! Lee surrendered!”
“Stay down!” Jack said sharply, before the rest of his charges forgot where they were in the excitement of Ike’s announcement. He’d been at this too long to trust a voice shouting in the night. And if it was true, he had enough sense to know that the war would be over for the Rebs, not for them.
The shouting grew louder as the news came down the line. He could hear the men clearly now, again and again. “Lee surrendered!”
So.
Just like that. This morning they were at war and now they weren’t. How could it be over? he thought. And they had won. After all this time and all this killing and dying, they had won. But what exactly was the prize, he wondered, and at what cost?
Unable to contain their joy any longer, the men around him sent up a rousing cheer. He tried to feel their elation, but he was too worn down by the events of the day to feel anything.
“Where are the tin cups?” he asked abruptly, not really addressing anyone in particular.
“What tin cups, Jack?”
“Fred’s! Jacob’s! Where are they!” He needed them. Whenever an orphan fell, he sent their army-issue tin cup to Father Bartholomew. He scratched their names and when and where they died on them. He didn’t know what Father Bartholomew did with them. All he knew was that he, Jack Murphy, needed to send them.
“It’s all right, Jack,” Boone said, grasping him by the arm. “Ike took care of it. He wrapped them up good and tagged them to go to the orphanage. The hospital wagon was picking up the wounded, so he sent them back on it. Somebody will see they get there.”
“The names— Did he—”
“He scratched the names. He did all of it. You don’t have to worry.”
“Good,” Jack said. “That’s good.”
He could feel Boone staring at him. He pulled his arm free and sat down on the ground again. He had to pull himself together.
Elrissa’s marriage, he thought, wiping the sweat from his brow with a shaking hand. Her betrayal had laid him lower than he had been willing to admit.
Lee surrendered.
Lee surrendered...
And that was the thing that bothered him so, he suddenly realized. General Robert E. Lee had surrendered.
Too late for Frederick and Jacob and the rest of Father Bartholomew’s dead orphans. Too late for Thomas Henry Garth and for a young woman called Sayer.
Chapter Three
It took the Orphans’ Guild nearly three months to get back to Lexington, though to Jack it seemed hardly any time at all. He’d long ago lost the need to mark the passage of time when it had so little bearing on what he did. Not meals. Not sleep. Nothing. For four years, he had been dedicated only to going where he was told to go and doing what he was told to do—and staying alive while he did it. He’d learned early on to let the passing of the minutes and hours and days take care of themselves. They had nothing to do with him, at least until he returned to Lexington. It was only then that clocks and calendars became important again, because he needed to decide on what day and at what time he might be able to see the new Mrs.Vance face-to-face, and he had no one he wanted to ask for guidance in the matter. He already had too many unsolicited opinions regarding his situation with Elrissa.
His best guess was early afternoon. Elrissa should be at home then and Farrell Vance should not. And with that simple conclusion, he took pains to shave and to wear a freshly starched and ironed white store-clerk shirt and the best suit a sizable chunk of his army pay could buy. It was a long walk from the orphanage, where he was staying in the visitors’ quarters, to Farrell Vance’s impressive new stone residence. The walk itself was pleasant enough, given his recent history of ambulating from battlefield to battlefield over more of this country than he cared to think about. It eventually took him to a cool, shaded street lined with several newly built houses—or new to him at any rate. It rather surprised him that Vance hadn’t acquired a place near Mary Todd Lincoln’s house, and it was just Jack’s luck that his destination turned out to be the biggest house of them all.
Jack recognized the Vances’ new maid the moment she opened the front door, despite the cap covering most of her wild red hair. The freckles were still visible, however, as was the ever-present wariness in the clear blue eyes. She had learned before she could walk not to trust people, and she wasn’t about to let go of the lesson just for Jack Murphy.
“Hello, Mary,” he said easily. “I’m here to see Mrs. Vance—if she’s at home to visitors.”
“Jack, are you crazy!” Mary stepped out onto the huge porch and pulled the door to behind her, her heavily starched, pink-and-white uniform rustling in the process. Clearly, even the maids in Farrell Vance’s house dressed better than the girls at the orphanage ever would. “You can’t come to the front door like this!”
“I can’t? Why not?”
“You’re the hired help. You work for Mr. Barden.”
“I haven’t worked for Mr. Barden for four years,” Jack reminded her. “Nice house,” he added, looking around the front porch at the potted ferns and assorted flowers.
“Mr. Vance won’t like this,” Mary said.
“I’m not here to see Mr. Vance. I’m here to see Elrissa.”
“Why?”
“I want to thank her for her...kindness while I was away—in person, if you don’t mind. All you have to do is ask her if she’ll see me. You can’t be blamed for what happens after that.”
“You’d be surprised what a body can be blamed for in this house. Besides that, you are such a liar. She’s married now. You’ve got no good reason to see her and plenty reasons not to.”
“That’s a matter of opinion, Mary.”
Mary looked at him for a long moment—while Jack struggled to hold on to his impatience. He’d come a long way to stand on Elrissa’s front porch—or was it a veranda?—and he’d done it against the advice of practically every orphan he knew. Only Little Ike had opined that Elrissa needed to own up to her poor treatment of one Jack Murphy. And, in this rare instance, Jack heartily agreed. Now all he needed was to get past Mary.
“I heard she didn’t even send you a letter to tell you she was marrying somebody else,” Mary said, reminding Jack that while the mail wagon for the Army of the Potomac might not have come as often as he and the rest of the Orphans’ Guild would have liked, it did run in both directions. He didn’t need reminding that what one orphan knew, they all knew.
“And that is none of your business,” he said anyway. “I want to see her. The whole rebel army couldn’t stop me from getting what I want, Mary, so I’m not really worried about you.”
She exhaled sharply. “Jack, if you do something to make me lose this job—”
He smiled his best smile, rusty though it might be, and that was all it took.
“Oh,
