Author's Note: Hello! This story is the result of a plot bunny that popped up right as I was going to bed. I ended up writing it all in one go until the wee early morning hours. It is by no means historically accurate, but I tried to get some of the basics down. The title comes from a popular Civil War song on the Union side called Tenting on the Old Camp Ground by Walter Kittridge (1864). Here is a good rendition of it if you're curious.
Chapter 1
In 1864, Rey Plutt was a common name on the lips of gossips in the starving farming towns of South Carolina. Once a beautiful British mail order bride brought over the Atlantic for a wealthy tobacco yeoman in Louisiana, she was now a war widow who travelled alone in her tattered mourning clothes, trailing behind the troops.
If the nurses were white "angels of mercy," Rey was a black "angel of death." She solemnly granted death to the grievously injured soldiers, both blue and grey, on the battlefield in any way they requested. Strangulation, a bullet to the head, or a quick slice of a knife to the throat—it didn't matter to her. In exchange for her twisted generosity, she took whatever she wanted from their body to sell at market or to her regular clients, whether it be their clothes, keepsakes, weapons, or their teeth.
As her infamy grew, mothers began to warn their offspring that Rey was also an emaciated witch who stalked children at night and stole their livers to eat on hoecakes. Of course, this claim was preposterous. A lie made up to scare children into returning home before sundown. One, Rey wasn't a witch. Two, she only collected in the muted early morning light right before sunrise, before soldiers from the victorious side came to recover their dead, bayonet the dying soldiers of their opposition still clinging to consciousness, and bury some others in a mass grave. When possible, Rey preferred to avoid the messy rips that bayonets caused—they took forever to repair by hand and greatly devalued the wool cloth she harvested from a soldier's round-about jacket or trousers.
Now, Rey stood at the edge of the battlefield, the crisp fall air nipping at her fingertips. Her heart dropped as she surveyed the expanse of withered tan grass and rocky outcrops in front of her. While the early morning fog still clung low to the ground, it quickly became evident that the rumors were true. The number of dead Billy Yanks in their deep blue garments stained with their own blood vastly outnumbered the dead Johnny Rebels in worn brownish-grey on this field.
Aside from a small prayer to a God that she wasn't sure existed anymore, Rey didn't have too much time to mourn soldiers, most of whom were young, untrained Northerners or Southerners who thought they could make a difference by throwing themselves into the line of fire. She had to act immediately. The three days of mortar shots and gunshots had gradually ceased around midnight and hadn't restarted. The conflict was over. The other looters would be upon the site by the afternoon when the soldiers had finished their duties, packed up their camps, and left the area to continue their reign of terror elsewhere. If she waited so much as a day, all the good stuff would be gone and the smell of fresh blood and gore would be replaced by the scent of maggoty rot.
Rey set forth down the hill to be among the bodies. She approached cautiously, peering this way and that especially along the tree line for humans that may be trying to spy of her activities. When she decided that not a single living soul worth worrying about was near, she retracted the pocket knife that she brandished and reaffixed it to her makeshift belt.
Rey still wore her black mourning dress out to the aftermath of battles, but she had long abandoned the customary veil and gloves that society expected her to wear. They did nothing but get in the way in circumstances like this. On her feet, she wore a particularly small pair of brogans that she took from a short drummer boy who wouldn't have been more than fourteen years old. He had been blown in half by a cannon, the poor chap.
The first promising body she came across was a young black soldier dressed in blue laying on his side. A rifle bullet destroyed his neck and exposed yellow fat, muscle and his depressed jugular veins. His open eyes were cloudy and unseeing. He'd been dead for at least several hours—Rey struggled to remove his undamaged round-about jacket due to his rigor mortis but eventually got it off. She felt around in the makeshift pockets and pulled out a small folded piece of paper. It was a reprinted daguerreotype image of a handsome dark-featured man in a dark waistcoat. On the back in smudged ink, it said:
To my Patroclus. From your Achilles—April 1861.
Rey leaned over and tucked the photograph into the young man's waistband. Finding evidence of who these men were in life, whether that be a letter or a photograph of a loved one, immediately soured her enthusiasm to loot their person. She closed his eyelids and gathered his jacket in her arms before setting off to find the next more or less intact body.
She found three more undamaged blue jackets and two undamaged pairs of pants before she struck gold with a small silver necklace around the neck of a blond soldier in grey. While she giddily tried to close the necklace's clasp at the nape of her neck, her eyes set upon the body of a man she would never forget.
The man was tall, long-legged and bareheaded with shaggy overgrown black hair. He laid face down in the muddied grass, but he undoubtedly dressed in the garb of a Northern captain with the double gold bars insignia on his shoulders. From where she stood, the body looked to be in one piece and possibly still in possession of weapons on his person. Rey drew closer and circled the body warily. When she saw his shoulders heave in a shallow breath, her heart squeezed in alarm. She quickly stooped and braced herself to turn the man over, tightening her grip around his bicep. Rey tightened her abs and heaved, pulling him onto his back. He rolled over and pinned down Rey's skirt with his weight.
A thin mixture of blood and mud covered his face, but her eyes fixated on the dirty wound which all but flayed open his face and narrowly avoided blinding his left eye.
A sword wound.
She pulled out her black mourning handkerchief and pressed it against the endless bleeding.
The man coughed weakly and peered through his eyelashes up at Rey with his good right eye.
"Sir, stay still."
He made noise of discomfort and pressed his hand against his stomach. His lips moved in an attempt to speak.
Rey went immediately to his jacket and undid his buttons with nimble fingers. The shirt underneath was soaked with bright red blood. She peeled it up and gasped in horror. A horizontal gash across his pale blood-stained belly opened up his torso and eviscerated him. A large section of pink small intestine poked out of the wound.
The man moved his hand down and rested it lightly against his crotch with a pained expression. Rey complied and pulled down his wool trousers and drawers. Whoever attacked him with that bladed weapon left two muscle-deep vertical gashes on his upper left thigh and one even deeper diagonal slash on his upper right thigh. A flash of white confirmed to Rey that that cut went to his femur. Two puncture wounds were also present on his thigh near his right knee. The visibly worse cut was to his genitals: the head of his oddly uncut penis hung by a thread of flesh and his testicles were damaged. After examining this wound, she covered it back over with his drawers to preserve his modesty as best she could.
She looked back into his mangled face, trying to keep a neutral expression as best as she could. He had no more than an hour or two at best left. "Sir…"
"Ben…I'm Ben." The labored words came in a voice barely louder than a whisper.
"Shhh, Ben. Do not speak. I'm—"
"Rey. Angel Rey. I've heard."
Rey fumbled for the pocket knife at her belt. "I can end this for you before the other men come back—"
"No," Ben feebly shook his head and looked at Rey with wide and desperate hazel eyes. "Just stay."
"Stay?"
"Can't…feel now. Just stay."
Rey hesitated and looked about the battlefield. Nothing but mangled corpses surrounded them. A strong sense of pity flooded her heart. Few deaths are worse than bleeding out alone on the battlefield with such wounds.
"I will until you're unconscious."
"Mm."
Rey went to support gently Ben's head and stroked his unmarred cheek. If not for his breathing, Rey would have already mistook him for a corpse. His skin was ghostly white and clammy. The moles on his face stood starkly against his pallor.
With effort, Ben spoke again after a long spell.
"Story?"
"Tell a story? About me?"
"Do not care."
"Hm. Well, I was born on the outskirts of London. I worked in my grandfather's machinery shop until I was seventeen. I miss tinkering with one particular automaton that he owned and could never figure out how to fix it. It was a little girl in a blue skirt who was supposed to write out poems in cursive on her little hand carved writing desk. Of course, this was all before I began exchanging letters with my husband and moved to Louisiana."
"…Husband?"
"My dearly deceased husband. He died a year ago in a mill accident."
"My…condolences." Ben gave another weak cough.
Rey shrugged. "He was insufferable. I miss his wealth more than him. Everything I inherited burned in a fire that the rebs started," she sighed. "Are you married?"
"No."
"That's a shame. You're handsome, even like this."
Rey saw the smallest grimace of a painful smile from Ben. She smoothed his hair back from his face.
"If I were eighteen again, you're the type of man I would try to steal a kiss from."
"Oh?"
"Yes! I've always admired men who resemble the Greek marble statues. I once saw an entire gallery of them in Charleston and stared at their faces for a full two hours."
"You…can steal a kiss, still." The sentence came out as hoarse wheeze as he looked up at her with his good eye.
Rey raised her eyebrows. "I can?"
"Yes."
"Would you like me to?"
"Mm."
"Very well, then." Rey paused in her battle against curbing his head wound's bleeding. She placed her hands on either side of Ben's head and lowered her face to him, taking great pains not to lean on him in any capacity.
She brushed her lips against his and he easily gave away to her curious kisses. They were dry, gentle, and sweet, exactly how she once dreamed that Plutt kissed before she met him. They stayed innocent kisses, and soon Rey began to notice that Ben became less and less physically responsive to her touch.
"Ben?" Rey gave the fallen soldier one more long, chaste kiss before checking his vitals. No detectable pulse in his neck or breath through his nose. She pried open his good eye and saw that the iris had dulled.
Rey gave a shaky breath and gently redressed Ben, taking the time to cross his arms across his chest and straighten his legs. As soon as she was finished, she jumped to her feet at the sound of a shout.
"You! What are you doing here?! We want no curses from you here." A distant coarse male voice shot through the air. Rey could see an outline of a greyback on the opposite side of the field with a rifle in hand.
Rey, with her face and hands now covered in Ben's blood, hitched up her skirts and ran with the wind on her heels, leaving behind her spoils. She heard a gunshot. A bullet whistled close-by and she strained her legs to go even faster, her bad knee protesting from the exertion. When she reached the tree line, she hobbled towards a small cave close to where she set up camp and squeezed herself inside. She remained there for several hours, but no one sent soldiers to track her down.
When men's voices from far away were no more, Rey returned early the next morning to retrieve Ben's body with the idea to bury it. When it was nowhere to be found, her heart ached at the likely prospect that the greyback who shot at her and his associates defiled his body since he was a captain, perhaps tearing it to shreds or hanging it from a tree. For months after her encounter with Ben, she dreamt of his spirit aimlessly wandering through the wild oak and pine forests of South Carolina with no place to rest his soul.
Rey travelled north to Pennsylvania two months after President Johnson signed the war ending proclamation in August 1866. She reinvented her entire identity, changing her last name to the safely neutral and anonymous 'Johnson' and practicing a carefully crafted New Hampshire accent. She found a mechanic's position at a small factory that made textile manufacturing machines. After a prolonged and persistent demonstration of her skill and versatility, Klaud O'Sullivan, the owner, hired Rey for equal pay to his male mechanics, much to her surprise and pleasure.
Rose, one of the factory girls with whom Rey had developed a good comradery with, flounced into the Rey's corner of the building one late Wednesday afternoon in May 1874 right before Rey was supposed to close up shop for the day. "There's a customer outside here to pick up a part. Big factory owner around these parts that I don't feel like dealing with today. Mind processing it?"
"Mhm." Rey put down her wrench and stretched. This new garment that Klaud had gifted her ("jeans," was it?) was incredibly sturdy and rather comfortable. She made her way to the factory storefront and quietly opened and shut the door behind her.
"Hello, may I help you?" Rey asked flatly, wiping the black grease off of her fingers with her apron.
A tall, broad-shouldered man in a narrowly tailored black sack suit stood in the doorway to front of the shop, pouring over a receipt in his hand with a puzzled expression. He looked more like he was going to a fancy society engagement than to the mechanic's workshop portion of the factory.
Rey froze and covered her mouth with both hands. The ugly sword wound that nearly blinded him had healed into a thick red line starting at his forehead and disappearing down his neck behind his collar.
He looked up from his paper and also ceased in his movement, staring at Rey with a bewildered expression. Those were the same striking hazel eyes that dulled on the battlefield in South Carolina.
"Ben?" Tears blurred Rey's vision and her true accent resurfaced.
Ben tried and failed to keep a stiff upper lip. "Rey Plutt?" His healthy voice was a warm tenor to Rey's ears.
"W—welcome back. I've been waiting you. For a very long time."
"Th…thank you." Ben, eyes shiny, gave Rey a huge smile and made several steps towards her with a severe limp. "I have too."
"How…?"
"My unit negotiated by my rescue. I barely made it, but…thinking of you kept me here. Even through the infections. A miracle." He spoke with an endearing Midwestern cadence.
Rey rushed out from behind the counter and nearly threw herself at Ben, wrapping her arms around his middle and squeezing him with all of her might. Ben crushed her, grease and all, to his chest. A series of shuddering sobs wracked his frame. Rey let her own tears fall onto his crisp jacket.
"You'll stay this time?" Rey asked quietly.
"Yes. I'll stay."
Their kiss was soft and sweet as the golden hour of the late afternoon shown through the storefront's tempered window panes.
