The 25th novel from best-selling Weybridge author Chris Bohjalian, The Jackal’s Mistress, is all the more compelling given that it spins a Civil War tale partially based on the true story of a Vermonter. As the story opens, it’s September 1864 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and young bride Libby Steadman doesn’t know whether Peter, her Confederate soldier husband, is alive or dead. The last she heard, he was wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg and being held in a Northern prison.
But, as the distant rumble of cannons grows louder with the approach of the Union Army, Libby has little time to ponder his fate. Tasked with caring for her orphaned niece and running her husband’s gristmill for the Confederate Army with just two newly freed slaves, she knows it’s only a matter of time before her farm becomes a battlefield.
When Libby learns that a gravely injured Union officer, left for dead by his own troops, has been discovered in her neighbor’s vacant house, she makes the perilous, seemingly irrational decision to take him in and save his life.
Captain Jonathan Weybridge of the Vermont Brigade is Libby’s mortal enemy, responsible for much of the hardship that defines her daily existence. But, as she soon learns, he’s also a former Middlebury College professor and a husband and father.
To her household, Libby justifies the treasonous act by expressing her faith that a Yankee wife would do the same, noting the possibility of a prisoner swap to free Peter. Privately, she’s driven by the desire to end her crushing loneliness. Amid the inhumanity of warfare and bloodshed blossoms an improbable and tender relationship.
“[Libby] noticed how, by the light of day, Weybridge’s eyes were green; by the lantern, however, they were black as crows,” Bohjalian writes. “He was, once more, in her husband’s sleep shirt. It smelled of soap, not Peter. It hadn’t held her husband’s musk in years.”
Like much of Bohjalian’s historical fiction, The Jackal’s Mistress gallops ahead with cinematic pacing and intensity, beginning with a scene of Libby fending off an army deserter and would-be rapist with a butcher knife in her own kitchen. The savagery of combat and its gruesome consequences on the human body feature in the story, as they do in any well-researched tale of the Civil War. But Bohjalian’s use of blood and gore isn’t gratuitous, serving to move the narrative forward.
Weybridge, with his left hand shattered in battle and his leg amputated by a field surgeon’s saw, initially struggles to stay alive. Later, he must learn to walk again and become useful to his rescuers despite his new disabilities — while not imperiling Libby’s household or himself.
The real-life inspiration for Weybridge was Henry Bedell of Westfield, Vt., wounded by rebel shelling in 1864 in Berryville, Va., where Bohjalian set his novel. Left for dead, Bedell was discovered by a formerly enslaved woman and brought to the home of Bettie Van Metre, a Confederate who nursed him back to health while keeping his presence secret. Aside from some small but important modifications, notably the nature of the pair’s relationship, Bohjalian cleaves to the historical account, as he explains in the afterword, painting a compelling portrait of the war’s hardships and the lengths to which ordinary people will go to retain their humanity.
Among Bohjalian’s many strengths as a storyteller is his ability to create strong female characters, who are the backbone of The Jackal’s Mistress. Libby’s niece, Jubilee, is a sassy 13-year-old who is simultaneously disgusted by and fascinated with her new houseguest. Sally, newly freed from slavery, stayed behind with her husband to help Libby on the farm rather than flee north after their emancipation. Her willingness to remain in a state that treats her like chattel adds depth and complexity to what could have been a simplistic morality play.
“Everyone else left, including our children,” Sally tells Weybridge. “But Joseph wanted to run the mill with Peter and get paid for it. That was part of it. Other part? We were both too old and too set in our ways to start again somewhere else. And then came the war.”
Exhaustively researched and eminently readable, The Jackal’s Mistress illuminates a tale that was previously known to only a handful of Civil War historians — told by one of Vermont’s best storytellers.
From The Jackal’s Mistress
“He’s a jackal,” Jubilee told her Aunt Libby in the kitchen.
The soldier was in a fitful sleep again on the parlor floor.
“You’ve never even seen a jackal,” her aunt said, focused on the papers before her with the notes she kept for the quartermasters who descended upon the mill. Jubilee knew her aunt was paid — when she was paid — with Confederate blue-backs, money that Libby said was best used as kindling to start a fire. That was its value. But it was the currency that was used in Berryville, and it was better than giving the flour away, though Jubilee knew her aunt had been miffed by how little even the army now paid her.
“No,” Jubilee admitted. “I ain’t ever seen a jackal. But I still know you can’t trust ’em.” She grinned in a way that her father used to call demonic, and because he laughed approvingly when he said it, she did it often, widening her eyes for effect.
“And what has this Federal done to earn your distrust?”
“That’s like askin’ what’s a jackal done to earn your distrust!” She understood on some level the circular illogic to what she was saying, but she knew both that there was truth to her argument, and, more importantly, that she was entertaining her aunt. And she liked that. “It’s in their nature, Aunt Libby. Jackals are just born bad. Criminal. Like that man in the parlor.”
“Born bad: because he’s from the North?”
“He’s on our land. He don’t have business in Virginia, ‘cept burnin’ fields and killin’ our boys.” When the words were out there, she feared she had crossed a line, moving from levity to the realities of war.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Lines Crossed | Book review: The Jackal’s Mistress, Chris Bohjalian”
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This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2025.
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