Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (130 page)

Prothero wandered to the latticed garden house with its view of a far cliff now shadowed purple. Armaments could be heard to echo up the river. Other officers watched Prothero mulling there, his Revolutionary scabbard glinting in last light. It seemed right romantic to them. He had gone off to pine for the young lady. Okay. Fine. He was hardly alone in adoring Miss Unison. But, seeing that the dandy could be moved, men liked him more. Tried to.

THREE
youngish officers had regularly led the charges before Prothero arrived. But, understanding how freely this new man lunged into the open, hearing the donkey-devil sounds pump from that boy’s bow-mouth, older leaders soon begun holding back. Seemed they could now afford to act a wee bit less courageous. And—once Prothero rallied for a second then a fifth attack—these men started to feel a stupefying type of relief, child.

By that I mean—when recalling their own earlier exploits they grew amazed, dizzy, even almost ashamed of their onetime swagger. Nights especially, as they watched him prepare for battle (or for maybe meeting Miss Randolph over tea), gents wondered: Had
their
reasons for bravery been any better than jolly self-satisfied young Prothero’s? Was he being brave because his great-granddad had done so whilst fighting Cornwallis? Had the lad noticed or chose this? In some way, he didn’t seem to know he was at war. In other ways, he seemed born to be cavalry.—Both.

You studied him there at his nightly mirror. Fog would roll uphill off the river James and one hundred yards from the central campfire, you’d spy him there near his four candles repeating theirselves glass to glass, a glimmer set off in the blue haze.

Unharmed on the evening of a battle day when others had fallen all around him, the young man’s candlelit grooming came to seem a strange new putting on of armor. His power appeared to spring from those three mirrors or the scent he wore into the field—some kind of magic. Will Marsden noticed that other older men now started borrowing one of the division’s communal combs. When combat seemed surefire, when you heard the clatter bounding through the woods this way, big-eyed troops—using fingers and shared combs—commenced a new and frantic primping. It was pitiful. It distracted some. They got hurt.

•   •   •

AMONG
his own enlisted men, the Lieutenant inspired a gloomy boldness. But at night or during the long days between fighting, nobody much spoke to him unless he addressed them direct. Around this society boy returning from the woods and his private potty chair, even the cordial First Lt. Hester grew stiff, formal. When Prothero strolled among his troops, some men wearing arm slings or on crutches would hold their noses, pretended to gag in his sweet trailing scent.

But nobody made such jests to his face. Though nobody quite said so, men understood—he was really needed here. But this very respect meant: People were a bit afraid of him. He’d have been the last to guess their fear. This spooked them even more.

NOBODY
could figure why his last division had transferred such a overwilling soldier against his will. Even so, little Willie Marsden and the others watched him hard.

An expeditionary party rode out from headquarters at the Randolphs’ river home. It was after Prothero’s fifth successful charge. Two Southern privates noticed him circulating among the fallen enemy. A sorghum field lay strewn with groaning Northern survivors. Men too wounded to march away as prisoners of war waited till battle lines shifted, till their own medics could scurry out and attend them. Prothero was seen to walk from Yank to Yank. He carried a ladle and a oak water bucket. Reared an Anglican, he was so High Church, he crossed himself and often. He did that now, drifting among the wounded, speaking to them. But the privates, admiring this aristocrat’s kindness, later reported: The Lieutenant would first speak to those Northerners who begged loudest for water. He would stoop, lift a man’s head onto his knee, use the dipper with great care, finally lowering the fellow to the ground. Then, making sure the soldier was conscious, Prothero stood back up and—onto the person he’d just treated so carefully—he would slop more unexpected wet. He sometimes emptied the whole bucket over a wounded man’s head. Then speaking to this fellow gasping in the dust-gone-mud, Prothero would ask, “Thirsty? Still thirsty?” He crossed hisself, refilled the bucket, moved on to help a next victim crying aloud for water. While the privates watched, he left a dozen wounded men gasping toward the sun, half drowned.

News of this little incident spread fast among enlisted men and, slower, worked its way up to other officers. The white-haired Chaplain defended Prothero against such tales. Chaplain claimed the lad’s family on both sides were deeply civic-minded, great patriots and patrons. Chaplain recalled Prothero’s governor father—a man, the Reverend said, of exceptional grace, talent, piety. “I care very little for this mumbling against him.” Chaplain acted hurt.

AS PROTHERO
seemed to get on better and better with Miss Unison, he grew haughtier and tighter. He freely told now about his father’s two terms
as governor, how his granddad—Washington’s buddy—served in the U.S. Senate’s earliest days. If he’d had a nip to drink, he fell to a kind of ruthless Charleston name-dropping that—considering this present city of tents, given the deep Virginia mud and this probably losing cause—impressed nobody and would’ve angered a few if they hadn’t considered Prothero, with his fuss and toiletries, frivolous to start with, frivolous if lucky.

One night after a downriver skirmish with the enemy, the much-talked-of gent abandoned his mirror. He wandered over, settled near the others’ fire and card game. He must’ve had a drink or two: Prothero grew quickly sentimental. His was a dry splendid accent, the voice ran deep, full of surprising wayside compassions. Touching his pale whiskers, still holding one heavy silver hairbrush, he sat praising his mother’s musicianship, he described his family’s homeplace. (Off in the distance, Prothero’s three-panel mirror reflected its lit candles.) He loved to quote pet sayings learned from some wise old slave woman who’d helped rear him. His favorite: “The soul of another is a dark forest.” Tipsy, the lad would speak this line at the end of his own tales and others’. To the Lieutenant, it seemed the moral of every story. Men, watching him with unsure feelings, would sometimes nod at the seeming truth of this, but all whilst giving each other certain serious side looks.

Courteous and drunk, Prothero crossed his arms, pulled both knees together, stared into flames, and bored everybody by recalling finer social seasons in the great city of his birth. The poker games roared on around him. Only a few men even pretended to listen. If Prothero seemed huge in battle, how wizened and kidlike he looked talking here. He described which chandeliers in which hometown ballroom he counted among his town’s five most beautiful, how each distributed the brilliance of hundreds of candles. (When he started in on Charleston street addresses and the merits of their crystal lighting fixtures, men began filing away from the campfire, taking cards with them.) The Lieutenant mentioned certain accomplished young women who’d once considered him a wit, a notable skeet shooter, excellent churchman, fine practitioner of the waltz. (More fellows cleared out quiet.)

When Prothero spoke, you
could
imagine his civilian charms. You wondered why they so failed to translate into this other, harder time. The Chaplain sat nearby. Maybe he’d grown worried by reports about the lad. Now he smiled at a new, more human side to Prothero—but even the Chaplain was surprised by the Lieutenant’s going on like this for fifty minutes straight. His pince-nez, dangling, turning on the end of its cord, would catch campfire glow. Lenses seemed to burn with independent and unhappy sights. The few men left here watched the Lieutenant with some concern.

Next morning, Will found that Target had been badly whipped—great welts were opened along the gelding’s back. Prothero’s enlisted men begun remarking his strange shifts in mood. One day he praised these fellows as the bravest in the war. Next morning, before assembled troops, he called the well-liked Corporal Sal Smith “exceedingly ill-bred.” When first complaints
were made, the Lieutenant’s family ties, his strange and handsome certainty, all helped protect him. Prothero had never onct been wounded—not a scratch on him, he wore more decorations than did most seasoned majors. He seemed shielded both from usual damage and regular regret.

PROTHERO
admitted to Willie: He saw Miss Unison as a test of his own flair with womankind. He felt determined, he said, to “annex” her.

Downriver action took the Lieutenant away on a ten-day scouting mission. Others could now talk of nothing but his genius, his recklessness in the fight. But the boy himself seemed to have no memory beyond his having upset, that first day, his distinguished elder hostess.

The Randolphs sent a graceful note welcoming returned officers. A little celebration would be held next evening in their best parlor. That day at three, Prothero went on a foraging detail with nine men. They came upon a group of stray Northerners bathing downriver. Prothero placed his troops in brush at twelve-foot intervals along the bank. He himself forded the river upstream on Target. He fired from the eastern shore, his men from the west. Ten Northerners, confused and caught in cross fire, were killed. All Prothero’s men handily survived. The Lieutenant returned to camp acting winded and exaggerated. He handed Target’s reins to Will while talking far too loud. He hurried to his mirror, preparing for the party. He’d made sure to get back with time to spare. Ten men dead—now tea.

Prothero civilized his uniform with French perfume. For those who’d heard his scary Rebel yell today downriver, this proved comforting—his grooming, hard. It hinted that the young officer got gussied up for others, not just himself, not just as a battle ritual.

Greeting the ladies, he gestured and purred. You could see that Mrs. Randolph looked on Prothero with strange feelings. Maybe it grieved her to see a face so like her late son’s. Could be she was straining to forget his earlier remark about Virginia. But both ladies seemed right well disposed to him. He quoted: “The soul of another is a dark forest.” In such a time and at such a party, nobody argued. Prothero’s charm—lost on his enlisted men, his horse—now seemed placed where it belonged. He told three stories in a row that were funny, clever, kind. Other officers who’d felt muddy and graceless in this brocaded room were grateful to the dandy. He kept cleaning his pince-nez while staring at Unison. Prothero drank more mulled wine. Then he did something that startled everybody, especially hisself. You could see he never planned to nor expected it. You could see he only wanted to be liked. Standing near Unison, within easy hearing distance of her mother, Prothero made a joke about girls’ loving duty toward soldiers who’re about to lose their lives. He said it was a patriotic duty: There should be no female
Confederate virgins above the age of thirteen. Prothero drew alongside Unison, he stared directly past her armbands at her bodice.

Silence fell and then a real loud attempt at talking. The Chaplain asked could he please speak to young Prothero out of doors, at once, please? The Chaplain was a dignified-looking man, a gaunt gentleman of exalted standards. He’d been entertained in the best homes of the Southern nation and he said so often. He smiled a lot and was held to have a good heart but his interest in the Confederate Army seemed a snob’s. Loss of life among the leading families’ sons made him speak of tragedy. Deaths among the sons of grocers seemed to him inevitable, if sad. The Chaplain’s features appeared to have benefited from sixty years of German music and the most serious available reading. As a preacher, he was cursed—or so his untutored men felt—by a fondness for musical terms. “God,” he would say, “has transposed our parts down a minor third and
still
our voices crack.” On the veranda, he now grabbed Prothero’s arm, almost twisting it. “I resist saying so … but you’ve just acted nearly unchivalrous as our barbaric enemies. Why are we
fighting
them if you choose to adopt their very debased style? In a boy of your connections this resounds with especial discord, sir.”

Prothero strolled off to one side, cleaned his spectacles, he was smirking, shaken. He put glasses on and, absentmindedly, crossed himself. When he returned to the party (probably a mistake) old Mrs. Randolph cut Prothero directly, then rushed upstairs. The pale daughter seemed nervous to be near him now. He twice tried to joke with the girl. She twice drew other gents into the conversation. The Lieutenant, acting hurt, stepped away from her and stood, silent, in one dark corner. For the rest of the party he looked only at her. Prothero’s respect for the girl appeared to slowly turn into a jolly kind of hatred.

Next afternoon, he was seated alone in the Randolphs’ garden house. Unison had been out gathering the season’s first grape hyacinths and an armful of forsythia. Seeing him here, she braced herself. First she headed the other way but then duty or resolve or interest changed her route. “April!” she said to him. It was a general comment and intended to be harmless.

He jumped to his feet, fumbling to set his pince-nez in place. “My sentiments exactly. Forgive me … Spring forgives everything and you must, too. The strain works on my mind in ways I fear I cannot quite predict, Miss.”

They talked then. Alone with her, he relaxed. She settled as far from him as the small round gazebo would permit. He spoke about his entertaining married sisters. He frankly said how lonely a warrior’s life was. He said he’d heard her practice, he sensed she was a brilliant musician, he longed to hear Unison play something difficult straight through. He stared at her. Dark mourning clothes handsomely contrasted with the spring bouquet. She held flowers with the same brisk care Unison brought to everything she did. He said, “I so wish I could lay my head upon your lap. If that sounds
scandalous, it shouldn’t … in these times.” He said how propriety must alter along with the great historical events.