The Jackal's Mistress: A Novel
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER • #1 BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER • USA TODAY BESTSELLER • 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.
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.
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Community Reviews
The Jackal’s Mistress was conceived with a question: Reader’s Digest editor Gary Sledge invited Chris Bohjalian to research and write an article about an little known friendship during the Civil War between a Yankee and a rebel: a Vermont lieutenant left to die in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley and the Confederate woman who saved his life.
“‘My name is Jonathan. But you can call me Jackal.’” When southern belle Jubilee meets her aunt Libby’s undercover act of kindness Jonathen Weybridge, she is incensed. “‘I ain't ever seen a jackal. But I still know you can't trust 'em…It's in their nature…Jackals are just born bad. Criminal…The thing about a jackal is this: you can't turn your back on one. Always keep eye contact…We appreciate you givin' a leg and a hand on our behalf.”
Jonathan recalls the expression a West Point officer had heard from an ancient French general who'd served under Napoleon: the term was the mistress bullet. “The French gave it that name because it was the bullet you saved for yourself when all hope was gone. The last bullet. Death with dignity. This was the bullet that would do for you the things your wife never would: that's why they called it the mistress bullet.”
What begins as Libby’s act of kindness transforms her into “The Jackal's mistress…I have not been with a man since Peter was home briefly in the fall of 1862…I don't know what awfulness tomorrow's going to bring. But tonight? I have you, and you have me, and the thing that has me most tired is being lonely. Tonight, I am the goddamn Jackal's mistress and putting us both, at least for a little while, out of our goddamn misery.’”
Yankee and Rebel, Vermonter and Virginian, two married people on opposite sides of the Mason Dixon, these unlikely characters take readers by the hand and lead us through the dark of the story in a kind of Romeo and Juliet Civil War masterpiece.
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