In this Civil War love story, inspired by a real-life friendship across enemy lines, the wife of a missing Confederate soldier discovers a wounded Yankee officer and must decide what she’s willing to risk for the life of a stranger, from the New York Times bestselling author of such acclaimed historical fiction as Hour of the Witch and The Sandcastle Girls.
Virginia, 1864—Libby Steadman’s husband has been away for so long that she can barely conjure his voice in her dreams. While she longs for him in the night, fearing him dead in a Union prison camp, her days are spent running a gristmill with her teenage niece, a hired hand, and his wife, all the grain they can produce requisitioned by the Confederate Army. It’s an uneasy life in the Shenandoah Valley, the territory frequently changing hands, control swinging back and forth like a pendulum between North and South, and Libby awakens every morning expecting to see her land a battlefield.
And then she finds a gravely injured Union officer left for dead in a neighbor’s house, the bones of his hand and leg shattered. Captain Jonathan Weybridge of the Vermont Brigade is her enemy—but he’s also a human being, and Libby must make a terrible decision: Does she leave him to die alone? Or does she risk treason and try to nurse him back to health? And if she succeeds, does she try to secretly bring him across Union lines, where she might negotiate a trade for news of her own husband?
A vivid and sweeping story of two people navigating the boundaries of love and humanity in a landscape of brutal violence, The Jackal’s Mistress is a heart-stopping new novel, based on a largely unknown piece of American history, from one of our greatest storytellers.
CW/TW – attempted sexual assault, Mild Gore (Descriptions of various types of injuries, dead bodies, victims of violence), racism
Dear Mr. Bohjalian,
Whether reading about the last days of WWII in eastern Germany or about a Princess Di impersonator in Las Vegas I’m pretty sure I’m going to at least get an interesting book when I read something of yours. As I’m weak for a good cover, it was the image of Libby Steadman holding a rifle that drew me into asking to review this book.
Libby Steadman, along with a freedman named Joseph and his wife Sally, works the mill that her husband’s father built. The Valley has little love for Libby or her husband, Peter, who freed his enslaved people after his father’s death. Then the war came. Peter enlisted, was injured and captured at Gettysburg, and Libby hasn’t gotten a letter from him in over a year. While she isn’t loved by her neighbors, the fact that she mills flour for the Confederacy keeps her and her little family safe. For now.
But when a battle finally arrives near them and Vermont Captain Jonathan Weybridge is injured and then left behind by the Union Army (for reasons), Sally hears his calls for help. Libby might tell herself that she’s only doing what she hopes a Yankee woman would do to help Peter but she also has a plan. Maybe she can barter Weybridge for information about her husband or perhaps even work a POW swap. As Jonathan – or the Jackal, as Libby’s niece Jubilee calls him – improves, he begins to try and help as he can. He and Libby also develop a habit of talking late into the night. Rumors are swirling, though, that Libby is hiding a Yankee and when danger comes calling, can they all survive?
The opening scene “sets the stage” for the violence that we will see in this story. I will agree with the blurb that this is a love story but maybe not quite what we romance readers expect. There is a strong found family vibe. When Peter Steadman freed his family’s “servants” – a term Weybridge calls Libby on and which Libby and her niece discuss – all but Joseph and Sally left. As Joseph tells Weybridge, he and his wife were too old to want to start over somewhere else and Peter promised to pay him a fair wage. Then the war came. Libby freely acknowledges that without Sally and Joseph, she could never have kept up the mill.
“When you help here at the mill…when you help feed the rebels…”
“I am keepin’ that woman alive. I am keepin’ that child alive. If she didn’t? If we didn’t?” He brushed sawdust off the back of his hand. “The army don’t pay much, and their dollars ain’t worth the paper they’re printed on. But it’s something. And, more important than the money is this: so long as she grinds their grain, she’s safe. And my Sally is safe. And I’m safe.”
But neither Joseph nor Sally have forgotten the bondage they were in and even though Peter’s father didn’t stop them from learning to read and write, he sold one of their children. Peter and Libby have always treated them well. It’s clear that Libby, whose family never owned people, respects them both but she also faces and eventually admits the fact that she’s not thought of them the same way she would think of white people. So no, Libby and Peter haven’t been and are not perfect nor do they get a pass on the actions of the family’s past.
But people in these parts will shun her for as long as she lives, first ’cause her husband was a turncoat in their eyes, and then ’cause of the rumors that she saved a bluebelly. That she saved you. Now, me? I thank you, Captain. I thank you with all my heart. But the rebels in this Valley who are about to lose the little they got left—and they asked for it, they asked for it, just as did the people who lived in Sodom and Gomorrah—they are never goin’ to look kindly on the Widow Steadman.”
Libby and Jonathan are tough people. Libby wasn’t raised to work but she can operate the mill and heft large, heavy bags of flour now. Jonathan, a professor at home, had spent the early years of the war basically defending DC before the need for warm bodies got his regiment moved into action. He could have given up and died from his injuries but something kept him trying to live in spite of them.
The character I adore is Jubilee. Twelve going on twenty-five, Jubilee is a force of nature. The girl has also faced the loss of her mother and the fact that her father, a captain in the CSA, might likely die before the war is over. When Libby moves into Jubilee’s bedroom to allow Weybridge to sleep in her room – because Libby feels that any southern officer who might come prying would stop at entering a married woman’s bedroom – Jubilee acts as a twelve year old who’s lost her privacy would – sulking and put upon. Jubilee verbally takes some of her frustration and anger out on Weybridge as his presence also increases the workload around the house and farm for her but gradually eases into a friendship with him. She does ask Jonathan pointed questions about how Yankees think of and treat freed people – questions that make him consider that while he’s fighting for their freedom, he’s in some ways not much better than Southerners.
“… right now, the future’s darker than the sky before a twister. And when the storm comes, which it will. I defy anyone to underestimate me.”
Danger is always there. The land near them has changed hands back and forth, a battle has taken place close by, skirmishes occur daily, Mosby’s (often scoundrel) Rangers are a constant threat, and of course Libby’s neighbors follow up on the rumors of a Yankee in the area. Ducking, dodging, and maintaining their cool become almost daily occurrences. The bold trip Libby and Joseph take to the Union forces at Harper’s Ferry to obtain supplies is its own form of stress to read. But Libby is no fainting flower and Joseph has quick wits.
Sooner or later though, everyone knows that Weybridge has to be smuggled out before they’re caught hiding him. The showdown is violent and heartbreaking. It also speeds a wrenching change for the Steadman “family.” I guessed along the way how things might turn out. There are little things that are mentioned which I wondered if they were meant to be Chekov’s guns. But this is done so lightly and woven in so well that I was never sure. How a relationship will go is another question. Would it or wouldn’t it happen? I’m satisfied overall except for one person’s fate. The choice of narrator for the epilogue is clever but I do wish that one of the people on the final journey was mentioned in it and what happened to that person. Overall, this was a fast read but one still packed with emotion and humanity. B
~Jayne
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Jayne
Another long time reader who read romance novels in her teens, then took a long break before started back again about 25 years ago. She enjoys historical romance/fiction best, likes contemporaries, action- adventure and mysteries, will read suspense if there’s no TSTL characters and is currently reading more fantasy and SciFi.
