Читать книгу Copperhead - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 13

GEORGE WASHINGTON’S BIRTHDAY WAS FIXED AS THE day of Jefferson Davis’s formal inauguration as President of the Confederate States of America. He had been inaugurated once before, in Montgomery, Alabama, but that ceremony had only made Davis into the President of a provisional government. Now, hallowed by election and properly installed in the Confederacy’s new capital, he would be inaugurated a second time. The choice of Washington’s birthday as the date of this second ceremony was intended to invest the occasion with a symbolic dignity, but the auspicious day brought nothing but miserable and incessant rains which drove the huge crowd gathered in Richmond’s Capitol Square to shelter beneath a host of umbrellas so densely packed that it seemed as if the speech-makers orated to a spread of glistening black lumps. The drumming of the rain on carriage roofs and tightly stretched umbrella skins was so loud that no one except the platform party could hear any of the orations, prayers, or even the solemn presidential oath of office. After taking the oath President Davis invoked God’s help to the South’s just cause, his prayer punctuated by the sneezing and coughing of the dignitaries around him. Gray February clouds scudded low over the city, darkening everything except the new battle flags of the Confederate’s eastern army. The flag, which was hanging on staffs behind the platform and from every rooftop within sight of Capitol Square, was a fine red banner, slashed with a blue St. Andrew’s cross on which were sewn thirteen stars to represent the eleven rebellious states as well as Kentucky and Missouri, whose loyalty both sides claimed. Southerners who looked for auguries were pleased that thirteen states founded this new country, just as thirteen had founded a different country eighty-six years before, though some in the crowd perceived the number as unlucky, just as they perceived the drenching rain as an omen of ill fortune for the newly inaugurated president.

After the ceremony a procession of bedraggled notables hurried along Twelfth Street to attend a reception in the Brockenborough House on Clay Street which had been leased by the government to serve as the presidential mansion. The house was soon crowded with dripping people who draped wet coats on the twin statues of Comedy and Tragedy that graced the entrance hall, then edged their way from one room to another to appraise and criticize the new President’s taste in furniture and pictures. The President’s slaves had placed protective covers over the expensive carpets in the reception rooms, but the visitors wanted to inspect the patterns and pulled the cotton sheets aside, and soon the beautifully patterned carpets were trodden filthy with muddy boots, while the twin arrays of peacock feathers on the mantel of the ladies’ drawing room were ravaged by people wanting souvenirs of the day. The President himself stood frowning beside the white marble fireplace in the state dining room and assured everyone who offered him congratulations that he conceived of the day’s ceremony as a most solemn occasion and his presidency as a mighty heavy duty. Some army musicians were supposed to be entertaining the guests, but the crowd was so tightly pressed that the violinist did not even have room to draw his bow, and so the soldiers retired to the kitchen where the cooks regaled them with good Madeira wine and cold jellied chicken.

Colonel Washington Faulconer, resplendent in an elegant Confederate uniform that was made even more dashing by the black sling supporting his right arm, congratulated the President, then went through the small fuss of not being able to shake hands with his wounded right arm and offering his left instead.

President Davis finally managed a limp, awkward handshake, then muttered that he was honored by Faulconer’s presence on this solemn occasion which was ushering in these days of heavy duty.

“Heavy duties call for great men, Mr. President,” Washington Faulconer responded, “which means we are fortunate indeed in you.”

Davis’s thin mouth twitched to acknowledge the compliment. He had a piercing headache that made him seem even more remote and cold than usual. “I do regret,” he said stiffly, “that you did not feel able to accept the duty of commissioner.”

“Though I certainly saved myself some inconvenience thereby, Mr. President,” Faulconer responded lightly, before realizing that in war all men were supposed to welcome inconvenience, even if that inconvenience did mean being kidnapped by the U.S. Navy from the comfortable staterooms of a British mail ship. The two commissioners had now been released, thus saving the North from battling the British as well as the Confederacy, but their arrival in Europe had not fetched good news. France would not support the South unless the British made the first move, and the British would not intervene unless the South gave clear signs of being able to win the war without outside help, which all added up to meaningless nonsense. The President, reflecting on the diplomatic failure, had concluded that the wrong men had been chosen as commissioners. Slidell and Mason were raw-mannered and blunt men, accustomed to the homespun texture of American politics, but hardly slippery enough for the sly chanceries of a suspicious Europe. A more elegant commissioner, the President now believed, might have achieved a greater success.

And Washington Faulconer was certainly an impressive man. He had flaxen hair and a frank, honest face that almost glowed with handsomeness. He had broad shoulders, a trim waist, and one of the greatest fortunes in all Virginia; a fortune so large that he had raised a regiment with his own money and then equipped it to a standard equal to the best in either army, and rumor claimed that he could have repeated that generosity a dozen times over and still not have felt the pinch. He was, by any man’s standard, a fortunate and striking man, and President Davis once again felt irritation that Faulconer had turned down diplomatic office to pursue his dream of leading a brigade into battle. “I’m sorry to see you’re not recovered, Faulconer.” The President gestured at the black sling.

“Some small loss of dexterity, Mr. President, but not sufficient to prevent me from wielding a sword in my country’s defense,” Faulconer said modestly, though in truth his arm was entirely mended and he wore the sling only to give an impression of heroism. The black sling was especially inspiring to women, an effect that was made more convenient by the absence from Richmond of Faulconer’s wife, who lived an invalid’s nervous existence on the family’s country estate. “And I trust the sword will be so employed soon,” Faulconer added in a heavy hint that he wanted the President’s support for his appointment as a brigadier.

“I suspect we shall all soon be fully employed in our various duties,” the cadaverous President answered vaguely. He wished his wife would come and help him deal with these eager people who wanted more enthusiasm than he felt able to give. Varina was so good with small talk, while on these social occasions the President felt the words shrivel on his tongue. Was Lincoln similarly afflicted by office seekers? Davis wondered. Or did his fellow President have a greater ease of manner with importunate strangers? A familiar face suddenly appeared beside Faulconer, a man who smiled and nodded at the President, demanding recognition. Davis scrabbled for the man’s name which, thankfully, came in the very nick of time. “Mr. Delaney,” the President greeted the newcomer unenthusiastically. Belvedere Delaney was a lawyer and gossip whom Davis did not remember inviting to this reception, but who had typically come anyway.

“Mr. President.” Delaney inclined his head in recognition of Jefferson’s high office. The Richmond lawyer was a small, plump, smiling man whose bland exterior concealed a mind as sharp as a serpent’s tooth. “Allow me to extend my sincere felicitations on your inauguration.”

“A solemn occasion, Delaney, leading to heavy duties.”

“As the weather seems to intimate, Mr. President,” Delaney said, appearing to take an unholy glee in the day’s damp character. “And now, sir, if I might, I have come to request Colonel Faulconer’s attention. You cannot monopolize the company of our Confederate heroes all day, sir.”

Davis nodded his grateful assent for Delaney to take Faulconer away, though the release only permitted a plump congressman to heartily congratulate his fellow Mississippian on being inaugurated as the Confederacy’s first President.

“It is a heavy duty and solemn responsibility,” the President murmured.

The Mississippi Congressman gave Jefferson Davis’s shoulder a mighty slap. “Heavy duty be damned, Jeff,” the Congressman bellowed in his President’s ear. “Just send our boys north to cut the nuts clean off old Abe Lincoln.”

“I must leave strategy to the generals.” The President tried to move the Congressman on and accept the more limpid good wishes of an Episcopalian clergyman instead.

“Hell, Jeff, you know as much ’bout war as any of our fine soldier boys.” The Congressman hawked a tobacco-rich gob toward a spittoon. The stream of brown spittle missed, spattering instead on the rain-soaked hoop skirt of the clergyman’s wife. “Time we settled those chicken-shit Yankees once and forever,” the Congressman opined happily, then offered the new President a pull on his flask. “Finest rot-skull whiskey this side of the Tennessee River, Jeff. One slug will cure whatever ails you!”

“You’re demanding my company, Delaney?” Faulconer was irritated that the short, sly lawyer had taken him away from the President.

“It ain’t me who wants you, Faulconer, but Daniels, and when Daniels calls, a man does best to respond,” Delaney said.

“Daniels!” Faulconer said in astonishment, for John Daniels was one of the most powerful and reclusive men in Richmond. He was also famously ugly and foulmouthed, but important because it was Daniels who decided what causes and men the powerful Richmond Examiner would support. He lived alone with two savage dogs that it was his pleasure to make fight while he cackled from the vantage point of a high barber’s chair. He was no mean fighter himself; he had twice faced his enemies on the Richmond dueling ground in Bloody Run and had survived both fights with his malevolent reputation enhanced. He was also regarded by many southerners as a first-rate political theorist, and his pamphlet, “The Nigger Question,” was widely admired by all those who saw no need to modify the institution of slavery. Now, it seemed, the formidable John Daniels waited for Faulconer on the elevated back porch of the new Executive Mansion where, horsewhip in hand, he stared moodily at the rain.

He gave Faulconer a sideways glance, then flicked his whip toward the water dripping off the bare trees. “Is this weather an augury for our new President, Faulconer?” Daniels asked in his grating, hard voice, eschewing any more formal greeting.

“I hope not, Daniels. You’re well, I trust?”

“And what do you think of our new President, Faulconer?” Daniels ignored Faulconer’s courtesy.

“I think we are fortunate in such a man.”

“You sound like an editorial writer on the Sentinel. Fortunate! My God, Faulconer, the old U.S. Congress was full of mudsills like Davis. I’ve seen better men drop out the backside of a hog. He impresses you with his gravity, does he? Oh, he’s grave, I’ll grant you that, because there’s nothing alive inside him, nothing but notions of dignity and honor and statesmanship. It ain’t notions we need, Faulconer, but action. We need men to go and kill Yankees. We need to soak the North in Yankee blood, not make fine speeches from high platforms. If speeches won battles we’d be marching through Maine by now on our way to taking Canada. Did you know Joe Johnston was in Richmond two days ago?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Know what Johnston calls you, Faulconer?” Daniels asked in his unpleasant voice. It did not matter to Daniels that Faulconer was one of the South’s richest men, so rich that he could have bought the Examiner a dozen times over; Daniels knew his own power, and that power was the ability to mold public opinion in the South. That same power gave him the right to lounge in the President’s wicker rocking chair with his shabby boots up on the President’s back rail while Faulconer, in his gaudy colonel’s uniform, stood beside him like a supplicant. “He calls you the hero of Manassas,” Daniels said sourly. “What do you say to that?”

“I’m most grateful,” Faulconer said. In truth the soubriquet was a mistake, for General Johnston had never discovered that it was not Faulconer who had led the Legion against the North’s surprise flank attack at Manassas, but the unsung Thaddeus Bird, nor had Johnston ever learned that Bird had made that decision in deliberate disobedience of Faulconer’s orders. Instead, like so many other folk in the Confederacy, Johnston was convinced that in Washington Faulconer the South had a brilliant and fitting hero.

That belief had been carefully nurtured by Washington Faulconer himself. The Colonel had spent the months since Manassas lecturing on the battle in halls and theaters from Fredericksburg to Charleston. He told his audiences a tale of disaster averted and victory snatched from certain defeat, and his tale was given drama and color by a small group of wounded musicians who played patriotic songs and, at the more dramatic moments of the narration, played imitation bugle calls that gave the audience the impression that ghostly armies maneuvered just outside the lecture hall’s dark windows. Then, as the story reached its climax and the whole fate of the Confederacy hung in history’s balance, Faulconer would pause and a snare drum would rattle a suggestion of musketry and a bass drum crash the echoes of distant cannon fire before Faulconer told of the heroism that had saved the day. Then the applause would ring out to drown the drummers’ simulated gunfire. Southern heroism had defeated dull-witted Yankee might, and Faulconer would smile modestly as the cheers surrounded him.

Not that Faulconer had ever actually claimed to be the hero of Manassas, but his account of the fight did not specifically deny the accolade. If asked what he had done personally, Faulconer would refuse to answer, claiming that modesty was becoming to a warrior, but then he would touch his right arm in its black sling and he would see the men straighten their backs with respect and the women look at him with a melting regard. He had become accustomed to the adulation; indeed, he had been making the speech for so long now that he had come to believe in his own heroism, and that belief made his memory of the Legion’s rejection of him on the night of Manassas hard to bear.

“Were you a hero?” Daniels now asked Faulconer directly.

“Every man at Manassas was a hero,” Faulconer replied sententiously.

Daniels cackled at Faulconer’s answer. “He should have been a lawyer like you, eh, Delaney? He knows how to make words mean nothing!”

Belvedere Delaney had been cleaning his fingernails, but now offered the editor a swift, humorless smile. Delaney was a fastidious, witty, clever man whom Faulconer did not wholly trust. The lawyer was presently in Confederate uniform, though quite what his martial duties entailed, Faulconer could not guess. It was also rumored that Delaney was the owner of Mrs. Richardson’s famous brothel on Marshall Street and of the even more exclusive house of assignation on Franklin Street. If true, then the collected gossip of the two brothels doubtless provided Delaney with damaging knowledge about a good number of the Confederacy’s leaders, and doubtless the sly lawyer passed all that pillow talk on to the scowling, diseased, twisted-looking Daniels.

“We need heroes, Faulconer,” Daniels now said. He stared sourly down at the flooded paths and muddy vegetable beds of the soaking garden. A wisp of smoke twisted up from the presidential smokehouse where a dozen Virginia hams were being cured. “You heard about Henry and Donelson?”

“Indeed,” Faulconer said. In Tennessee Forts Donelson and Henry had been captured and now it looked as if Nashville must fall, while in the east the Yankee navy had again struck from the sea; this time to capture Roanoke Island in North Carolina.

“And what would you say, Faulconer”—Daniels shot an unfriendly look at the handsome Virginian—“if I were to tell you that Johnston is about to abandon Centreville and Manassas?”

“He can’t be!” Faulconer was genuinely aghast at the news. Too many acres of northern Virginia were already under enemy occupation, and yielding more of the state’s sacred turf without a fight appalled Faulconer.

“But he is.” Daniels paused to light a long black cheroot. He spat the cheroot’s tip over the railing, then blew smoke into the rain. “He’s decided to pull back behind the Rappahannock. He claims we can defend ourselves better there than in Centreville. No one’s announced the decision yet, it’s supposed to be a secret, which means Johnston knows, Davis knows, you and I know, and half the goddamn Yankees probably know too. And can you guess what Davis proposes doing about it, Faulconer?”

“I trust he’ll fight the decision,” Faulconer said.

“Fight?” Daniels mocked the word. “Jeff Davis doesn’t know the meaning of the word. He just listens to Granny Lee. Caution! Caution! Caution! Instead of fighting, Faulconer, Davis proposes that a week tomorrow we should all have a day of prayer and fasting. Can you believe that? We are to starve ourselves so that Almighty God will take note of our plight. Well, Jeff Davis can tighten his belt, but I’ll be damned if I shall. I shall give a feast that day. You’ll join me, Delaney?”

“With enormous pleasure, John,” Delaney said, then glanced around as the door at the end of the verandah opened. A small boy, maybe four or five years old and carrying a hoop, appeared on the porch. The boy smiled at the strangers.

“Nurse says I can play here,” the boy, whom Washington Faulconer guessed was the President’s oldest son, explained himself.

Daniels shot a venomous look at the child. “You want a whipping, boy? If not, then get the hell out of here, now!”

The boy fled in tears as the editor turned back to Faulconer. “Not only are we withdrawing from Centreville, Faulconer, but as there isn’t sufficient time to remove the army’s supplies from the railhead at Manassas, we are torching them! Can you credit it? We spend months stocking the army with food and ammunition and at the very first breath of spring we decide to burn every damn shred of material and then scuttle like frightened women behind the nearest river. What we need, Faulconer, are generals with balls. Generals with flair. Generals not afraid to fight. Read this.” He took from his vest pocket a folded sheet of paper that he tossed toward Faulconer. The Colonel needed to grovel on the porch’s rush matting to retrieve the folded sheet, which proved to be the galley proof of a proposed editorial for the Richmond Examiner.

The editorial was pure balm to Faulconer’s soul. It declared that the time had come for bold action. The spring would surely bring an enemy onslaught of unparalleled severity and the Confederacy would only survive if it met that onslaught with bravery and imagination. The South would never prevail by timidity, and certainly not by digging trenches such as those with which General Robert Lee seemed intent upon surrounding Richmond. The Confederacy, the editorial proclaimed, would be established by men of daring and vision, not by the efforts of drainage engineers. The writer grudgingly allowed that the Confederacy’s present leaders were well-meaning men, but they were hidebound in their ideas and the time had surely come to appoint new officers to high position. One such man was Colonel Washington Faulconer, who had been unemployed since Manassas. Let such a man loose on the North, the article concluded, and the war would be over by summer. Faulconer read the editorial a second time and pondered whether he should go to Shaffers this very afternoon and order the extra braid for his sleeves and the gilded wreaths that would surround the stars on his collar wings. Brigadier General Faulconer! The rank, he decided, sat well on him.

Daniels took the editorial back. “The question is, Faulconer, do we publish this?”

“Your decision, Daniels, not mine,” Faulconer said modestly, hiding his elation as he shielded a cigar from the wind and struck a light. He wondered if publication would offend too many senior officers, then realized he dared not express such a timid reservation to Daniels or else the editorial would be changed to recommend that some other man be given a brigade.

“But are you our man?” Daniels growled.

“If you mean, would I attack and attack and go on attacking, yes. If you mean, would I abandon Manassas? No. If you mean, would I employ good men to dig drainage ditches around Richmond? Never!”

Daniels was silent after Faulconer’s ringing declaration. Indeed he was silent for so long that Washington Faulconer began to feel rather foolish, but then the small, black-bearded editor spoke again. “Do you know the size of McClellan’s army?” He asked the question without turning to look at Faulconer.

“Not precisely, no.”

“We know, but we don’t print the figure in the newspaper because if we did we might just cause people to despair.” Daniels twitched the long whip as his voice rumbled just a little louder than the seething and incessant rain. “The Young Napoleon, Faulconer, has over a hundred and fifty thousand men. He has fifteen thousand horses, and more than two hundred and fifty guns. Big guns, Faulconer, slaughtering guns, the finest guns that the northern foundries can pour, and they’re lined up wheel to heavy wheel to grind our poor southern boys into bloody ruin. And how many poor southern boys do we have? Seventy thousand? Eighty? And when do their enlistments run out? June? July?” Most of the southern army had volunteered for just one year’s service, and when that year was over the survivors expected to go home. “We’ll have to conscript men, Faulconer,” Daniels went on, “unless we beat this so-called genius McClellan in the spring.”

“The nation will never stand for conscription,” Faulconer said sternly.

“The nation, Colonel, will damn well stand for whatever brings us victory,” Daniels said harshly, “but will you lead those conscripted men, Faulconer? That’s the proper question now. Are you my man? Should the Examiner support you? After all, you’re not the most experienced officer, are you now?”

“I can bring new ideas,” Faulconer suggested modestly. “New blood.”

“But a new and inexperienced brigadier will need a good and experienced second-in-command. Ain’t that right, Colonel?” Daniels looked malevolently up at Faulconer as he spoke.

Faulconer smiled happily. “I should expect my son Adam to serve with me. He’s on Johnston’s staff now, so he has the experience, and there isn’t a more capable or honest man in Virginia.” Faulconer’s sudden sincerity and warmth were palpable. He was desperately fond of his son, not just with a father’s love, but also out of a gratified pride in Adam’s undoubted virtues. Indeed, it sometimes seemed to Faulconer that Adam was his one undoubted success, the achievement that justified the rest of his life. Now he turned smilingly to the lawyer. “You can vouch for Adam’s character, can’t you, Delaney?”

But Belvedere Delaney did not respond. He just stared down into the sopping garden.

Daniels hissed in a dubious breath, then shook his ugly head warningly. “Don’t like it, Faulconer. Don’t like it one goddamn little bit. Stinks of favoritism to me. Of nepotism! Is that the word, Delaney?”

“Nepotism is the very word, Daniels,” Delaney confirmed, not looking at Faulconer, whose face was like that of a small boy struck brutally hard.

“The Examiner could never stand for nepotism, Faulconer,” Daniels said in his grating voice, then he threw a curt gesture toward Delaney, who obediently opened the verandah’s central door to admit onto the porch a gaunt and ragged creature dressed in a wet, threadbare uniform that made the newcomer shiver in the day’s raw cold. The man was in his early middle age and looked as though life had served him ill. He had a coarse black beard streaked with gray, sunken eyes, and a tic in his scarred cheek. He was evidently suffering from a cold for he cuffed his dripping nose, then wiped his sleeve on his ragged beard that was crusted with flakes of dried tobacco juice. “Johnny!” this unprepossessing creature greeted Daniels familiarly.

“Faulconer?” Daniels looked up at the Colonel. “This is Major Griffin Swynyard.”

Swynyard gave Faulconer a brisk nod, then held out his left hand, which, Faulconer saw, was missing its three middle fingers. The two men made an awkward handshake. The spasm in Swynyard’s right cheek gave his face a curiously indignant look.

“Swynyard,” Daniels said to Faulconer, “served in the old U.S. Army. He graduated from West Point, when?”

“Class of twenty-nine, Johnny.” Swynyard clicked his heels together.

“Then served in the Mexican and Seminole wars. Is that right?”

“Took more scalps than any white man alive, Colonel,” Swynyard said, grinning at Faulconer and revealing a mouthful of rotted yellow teeth. “I took thirty-eight headpieces in one day alone!” Swynyard boasted. “All with my own hands, Colonel. Squaws, papooses, braves! I had blood to my elbows! Spattered to the armpits! Have you ever had the pleasure of taking a scalp, Colonel?” Swynyard asked with a fierce intensity.

“No,” Faulconer managed to say. “No, I haven’t.” He was recovering from Daniels’s refusal to countenance Adam’s appointment, and realizing that promotion would carry a price.

“There’s a knack to it,” Swynyard went on. “Like any other skill, there’s a knack! Young soldiers always try to cut them off and, of course, it don’t work. They end with something which looks like a dead mouse.” Swynyard believed this was funny, for he opened his gap-toothed mouth to breathe a sibilant laugh at Faulconer. “Cutting don’t work for a scalp, Colonel. No, you have to peel a scalp off, peel it like the skin of an orange!” He spoke lovingly, demonstrating the action with his wounded, clawlike hand. “If you’re ever in the Tidewater I’ll show you my collection. I’ve three cabin trunks full of prime scalps, all cured and tanned proper.” Swynyard evidently felt he had made a good impression on Faulconer for he smiled ingratiatingly while the tic in his cheek trembled fast. “Maybe you’d like to see a scalp now, Colonel?” Swynyard suddenly asked, pawing at the button of his top pocket as he spoke. “I always keep one about my person. As a good-luck charm, you understand? This one’s from a Seminole squaw. Noisy little bitch she was, too. Savages can squeal, I tell you, how they can squeal!”

“No, thank you.” Faulconer managed to prevent the trophy from being produced. “So you’re a Virginia man, Major?” he asked, changing the subject and disguising his distaste for the wretched-looking Swynyard. “From the Tidewater, you say?”

“From the Swynyards of Charles City Court House,” Swynyard said with evident pride. “The name was famous once! Ain’t that so, Johnny?”

“Swynyard and Sons,” the editor said, staring into the rain, “slave traders to the Virginia gentry.”

“But my daddy gambled the business away, Colonel,” Swynyard confided. “There was a time when the name Swynyard meant the selfsame thing as nigger trading, but Daddy lost the business with the sin of gambling. We’ve been poor men ever since!” He said it proudly, but the boast suggested to Washington Faulconer exactly what proposition was being made to him.

The editor drew on his cigar. “Swynyard’s a cousin of mine, Faulconer. He’s my kin.”

“And he has applied to you for employment?” Faulconer guessed shrewdly.

“Not as a newspaperman!” Major Swynyard intervened. “I don’t have skill with words, Colonel. I leave that to the clever fellows like cousin Johnny here. No, I’m a soldier through and through. I was weaned on the gun’s muzzle, you might say. I’m a fighter, Colonel, and I’ve got three cabin trunks crammed full of heathen topknots to prove it.”

“But you are presently unemployed?” Daniels prompted his cousin.

“I am indeed seeking the best place for my fighting talent,” Swynyard confirmed to Faulconer.

There was a pause. Daniels took the editorial from his pocket and pretended to cast a critical eye over its paragraphs. Faulconer took the hint. “If I should find employment for myself, Major,” he told Swynyard hastily, “I should count it as a great honor and a privilege if you would consider being my right-hand man?”

“Your second-in-command, don’t you mean?” John Daniels interjected from the President’s rocking chair.

“My second-in-command indeed,” Faulconer confirmed hurriedly.

Swynyard clicked his heels. “I’ll not disappoint you, Colonel. I might lack the genteel graces, by God, but I don’t lack fierceness! I ain’t a soft man, my God, no. I believe in driving soldiers like you drive niggers! Hard and fast! Bloody and brutal, no other way, ain’t that the truth, Johnny?”

“The entire truth, Griffin.” Daniels folded the editorial, but did not yet return it to his vest pocket. “Unfortunately, Faulconer,” Daniels went on, “my cousin impoverished himself in the service of his country. His old country, I mean, our new enemies. Which also means he has come to our new country with a passel of debts. Ain’t that so, Griffin?”

“I’m down on my luck, Colonel,” Swynyard confessed gruffly. A tear appeared at one eye and the tic in his cheek quivered. “Gave my all to the old army. Gave my fingers too! But I was left with nothing, Colonel, nothing. But I don’t ask much, just a chance to serve and fight, and a grave of good Confederate soil when my honest labors are done.”

“But you are also asking for your debts to be settled,” John Daniels said pointedly, “especially that portion of the debt which is owed to me.”

“I shall take great pleasure in establishing your credit,” Faulconer said, wondering just how much pain that pleasure would cost him.

“You’re a gentleman, Colonel,” Swynyard said, “a Christian and a gentleman. It’s plain to see, Colonel, so it is. Moved, I am. Touched deep, sir, very deep.” And Swynyard cuffed the tear from his eye, then straightened his back as a sign of respect to his rescuer. “I’ll not disappoint you. I ain’t a disappointer, Colonel. Disappointing ain’t in the Swynyard nature.”

Faulconer doubted the truth of that assertion, yet he guessed his best chance of being named a general was with Daniels’s help, and if Daniels’s price was Swynyard, then so be it. “So we’re agreed, Major,” Faulconer said, and held out his left hand.

“Agreed, sir, agreed.” Swynyard shook Faulconer’s offered hand. “You move up a rank, sir, and so do I.” He smiled his decayed smile.

“Splendid!” Daniels said loudly, then delicately and pointedly inserted the folded editorial back into his vest pocket. “Now if you two gentlemen would like to improve upon each other’s acquaintance, Mr. Delaney and I have business to discuss.”

Thus dismissed, Faulconer and Swynyard went to join the throng which still crowded the President’s house, leaving Daniels to flick his whip out into the rain. “Are you sure Faulconer’s our man?”

“You heard Johnston,” Delaney said happily. “Faulconer was the hero of Manassas!”

Daniels scowled. “I heard a rumor that Faulconer was caught with his pants around his ankles? That he wasn’t even with the Legion when it fought?”

“Mere jealous tales, my dear Daniels, mere jealous tales.” Delaney, quite at his ease with the powerful editor, drew on a cigar. His stock of precious French cigarettes was exhausted now, and that lack was perhaps the most pressing reason why he wanted this war to end quickly. To which end Delaney, like Adam Faulconer, secretly supported the North and worked for its victory by causing mischief in the South’s capital, and today’s achievement, he thought, was a very fine piece of mischief indeed. He had just persuaded the South’s most important newspaperman to throw his paper’s massive influence behind one of the most foppish and inefficient of the Confederacy’s soldiers. Faulconer, in Delaney’s caustic view, had never grown up properly, and without his riches he would be nothing but an empty-headed fool. “He’s our man, John, I’m sure of it.”

“So why has he been unemployed since Manassas?” Daniels asked.

“The wound in his arm took a long time healing,” Delaney said vaguely. The truth, he suspected, was that Faulconer’s inordinate pride would not allow him to serve under the foulmouthed, lowborn Nathan Evans, but Daniels did not need to know that.

“And didn’t he free his niggers?” Daniels asked threateningly.

“He did, John, but there were extenuating reasons.”

“The only extenuating reason for freeing a nigger is because the bastard’s dead,” Daniels declared.

“I believe Faulconer freed his slaves to fulfill his father’s dying wish,” Delaney lied. The truth was that Faulconer had manumitted his people because of a northern woman, an ardent abolitionist, whose good looks had momentarily enthralled the Virginia landowner.

“Well, at least he’s taken Swynyard off my hands,” Daniels said grudgingly, then paused as the sound of cheering came from inside the house. Someone was evidently making a speech and the crowd punctuated the oration with laughter and applause. Daniels glowered into the rain that still fell heavily. “We don’t need words, Delaney, we need a goddamn miracle.”

The Confederacy needed a miracle because the Young Napoleon was at last ready, and his army outnumbered the southern troops in Virginia by two to one, and spring was coming, which meant the roads would be fit once more for the passage of guns, and the North was promising its people that Richmond would be captured and the rebellion ended. Virginia’s fields would be dunged by Virginia’s dead and the only way the South could be saved from an ignominious and crushing defeat was by a miracle. Instead of which, Delaney reflected, he had given it Faulconer. It was enough, he decided, to make a sick cat laugh.

Because the South was doomed.

Just after dawn the cavalry came galloping back across the fields, their hooves splashing bright silver gouts of water from the flooded grass. “Yankees are at Centreville! Hurry it up!” The horsemen spurred past the earthen wall that was notched with gun embrasures, only instead of cannon in the embrasures there was nothing but Quaker guns. Quaker guns were tree trunks painted black and then propped against the firing steps to give the appearance of cannon muzzles.

The Faulconer Legion would be the last infantry regiment to leave the Manassas positions, and the last, presumably, to march into the new fortifications that were being dug behind the Rappahannock River. The retreat meant ceding even more Virginia territory to the northerners, and for days now the roads south through Manassas had been crowded with refugees heading for Richmond.

The only defenses left behind at Manassas and Centreville would be the Quaker guns, the same fake weapons that had brooded across the landscape all winter to keep the Yankee patrols far from Johnston’s army. That army had been wondrously supplied with food that had been painstakingly hauled to the Manassas depot by trains all winter long, but now there was no time to evacuate the depot and so the precious supplies were being burned. The March sky was already black with smoke and rich with the smell of roasting salt beef as Starbuck’s company torched the last rows of boxcars left in the rail junction. The cars had already been primed with heaps of tinder, pitch, and gunpowder, and as the burning torches were thrust into the incendiary piles, the fire crackled and bellowed fiercely upward. Uniforms, bridles, cartridges, horse collars, and tents went up in smoke, then the boxcars themselves caught fire and the flames whipped in the wind and spewed their black smoke skyward. A barn full of hay was torched, then a brick warehouse of flour, salt pork, and dry crackers. Rats fled from the burning storehouses and were hunted down by the Legion’s excited dogs. Each company had adopted at least a half-dozen mongrel mutts that were lovingly cared for by the soldiers. Now the dogs seized the rats by their necks and shook them dead, scattering blood. Their owners cheered them on.

The boxcars would burn till there was nothing left but a pair of blackened wheels surrounded by embers and ash. Sergeant Truslow had a work party pulling up rails and stacking them on burning piles of wooden ties soaked in pitch. The burning stacks generated such a fierce heat that the steel rails were being bent into uselessness. All about the regiment were the pyres of other fires as the rearguard destroyed two months’ worth of food and a winter’s worth of stored equipment.

“Let’s be moving, Nate!” Major Bird strode across the scorched depot, jumping in alarm as a box of ammunition caught fire in one of the boxcars. The cartridges snapped like firecrackers, forcing an incandescent blaze in one corner of the burning wagon. “Southward!” Bird cried dramatically, pointing in that direction. “You hear the news, Nate?”

“News, sir?”

“Our behemoth was met by their leviathan. Science matched wits with science, and I gather that they fought each other to a standstill. Pity.” Bird suddenly checked and frowned. “A real pity.”

“The Yankees have a metal ship too, sir?” Starbuck asked.

“It arrived the day after the Virginia’s victory, Nate. Our sudden naval superiority is all for naught. Sergeant! Leave those rails, time to be on our way unless you wish to be a guest of the Yankees tonight!”

“We lost our ship?” Starbuck asked in disbelief.

“The newspaper reports that it floats still, but so does their monstrous metal ship. Our queen is now matched by their queen, and so we have stalemate. Hurry up, Lieutenant!” This injunction was to Moxey, who was using a blunt knife to cut through the hemp rope of a well bucket.

Starbuck’s spirits sank. It was bad enough that the army was yielding Manassas Junction to the Yankees, but everyone had been cheered by the sudden news that a southern secret weapon, an iron-sided ship impervious to cannon fire, had sailed into the Hampton Roads and decimated the northern blockading squadron of wooden warships. The U.S. Navy’s ships had turned and fled, some going aground, others sinking, and the rest simply making what desperate speed they could to escape the clanking, smoke-dark, plodding, but vengeful Virginia, the ironclad fashioned from the hulk of an abandoned U.S. Navy ship, the Merrimack. The victory had seemed compensation for Manassas’s abandonment and promised to destroy the strangulation of the U.S. Navy’s blockade, but now it seemed that the North had a similar beast which had succeeded in fighting the CSS Virginia to a standstill.

“Never mind, Nate. We’ll just have to settle the war on land,” Bird said, then clapped his hands to encourage the last of the men to leave the burning railyard and form up on the road leading south.

“But how in God’s name did they know we had an iron ship?” Starbuck asked.

“Because they have spies, of course. Probably hundreds of them. You think everyone south of Washington suddenly changed their patriotism overnight?” Bird asked. “Of course they didn’t. And some folks undoubtedly believe that any accommodation with the Yankees is better than this misery.” He gestured toward another group of pitiful refugees and was suddenly assailed by an image of his own dear wife being forced from her home by the invading Yankees. That was hardly a likely fate, for Faulconer County lay deep in the heart of Virginia, yet Bird still touched the pocket in which Priscilla’s portrait was carefully wrapped against the rain and damp. He tried to imagine their small house with its untidy piles of music and its scatter of violins and flutes being burned by jeering Yankee troops.

“Are you all right?” Starbuck had seen the sudden grimace on Bird’s face.

“Enemy horse! Look lively!” Sergeant Truslow shouted at his company, but he also intended the sudden bellow to startle Major Bird out of his reverie. “Yankees, sir.” Truslow pointed north to where a group of horsemen was silhouetted against the pale trunks of a far wood.

“March on!” Bird shouted toward the head of the Legion’s column, then he turned back to Starbuck. “I was thinking of Priscilla.”

“How is she?” Starbuck asked.

“She says she’s very well, but she wouldn’t say anything else, would she? The dear girl isn’t one to worry me with complaints.” Bird had married a girl half his age and, in the manner of a confirmed bachelor falling at last to the enemy, regarded his new bride with an adoration that verged on worship. “She says she’s planted onions. Is it too early to plant onions? Or maybe she means she planted them last year? I don’t know, but I am so impressed that the dear thing knows about onions. I don’t. Lord knows when I’ll see her again.” He sniffed, then turned to look at the distant horsemen who seemed very wary of the lavish display of wooden guns that threatened their approach. “Onward, Nate, or backward rather. Let us yield this field of ashes to the enemy.”

The Legion marched past the burning storehouses, then through the small town. A few of the houses were empty, but most of the inhabitants were staying behind. “Hide your flag, man!” Bird called to a carpenter who was defiantly flying the new Confederate battle flag above his shop. “Fold it away! Hide it! We’ll be back!”

“Is anyone behind you, Colonel?” The carpenter inadvertently gave Bird a promotion.

“Just some cavalry. After that it’s all Yankees!”

“Give them bastards a good whipping, Colonel!” the carpenter said as he reached for his flag.

“We’ll do our best. Good luck to you!”

The Legion left the small town behind and marched stolidly along a wet and muddy road that had been torn apart by the passage of refugee wagons. The road led to Fredericksburg, where the Legion would cross the river, then destroy the bridge before joining the bulk of the southern army. Most of that army was retreating on a road farther west which went direct to Culpeper Court House where General Johnston had his new headquarters. Johnston was assuming that the Yankees would swing wide in an attempt to turn the river line and that a great battle would therefore need to be fought in Culpeper County; it would be a battle, Bird observed to Starbuck, which would make the fight at Manassas look like a skirmish.

The Legion’s retreat took them through that old battlefield. To their right was the long hill down which they had fled in disorder after stalling the Yankees’ surprise attack, and to their left was the steeper hill where Stonewall Jackson had finally held, turned, and repelled the northern army. That battle was eight months in the past, yet still the steep hill showed the scars of artillery strikes. Close by the road was a stone house where Starbuck had watched the surgeons slash and saw at wounded flesh, and in the yard of the house was a shallow grave trench that had been washed thin by the winter’s rain so that the knobbly-headed stumps of bones showed white above the red soil. There was a well in the yard where Starbuck remembered slaking his thirst during the day’s terrible, powder-exacerbated heat. A group of stragglers, sullen and defiant, now squatted beside the well.

The stragglers, all of them from regiments that were marching ahead of the Legion, annoyed Truslow. “They’re supposed to be men, ain’t they? Not women.” The Legion passed more and more such laggards. A few were sick and could not help themselves, but most were simply tired or suffering from blistered feet. Truslow snarled at them, but even Truslow’s savage scorn could not persuade the stragglers to ignore the blood filling their boots and to keep on marching. Soon some of the men from the Legion’s leading companies began dropping back. “It ain’t right,” Truslow complained to Starbuck. “Go on like this and we’ll lose half the army.” He saw three men from the Legion’s A Company and he stormed over to them, bellowing at the chickenhearted bastards to keep walking. The three men ignored him, so Truslow punched the tallest of the three, dropping him to the ground. “Get up, you son of a bitch!” Truslow shouted. The man shook his head, then squirmed in the mud as Truslow kicked him in the guts. “Get up, you slime-bellied bastard! Up!”

“I can’t!”

“Stop it!” Starbuck called the order to Truslow, who turned in astonishment at receiving a direct reprimand from his officer.

“I ain’t letting these sons of bitches lose the war because they’re gutless weaklings,” Truslow protested.

“I don’t intend to allow that to happen either,” Starbuck said. He walked over to the man from A Company, watched by a score of other stragglers who wanted to see just how the tall, dark-haired officer could succeed where the squat, fierce sergeant had failed.

Truslow spat into the mud as Starbuck approached. “You plan on talking reason to the sumbitch?”

“Yes,” Starbuck said, “I do.” He stood above the fallen man, watched by the whole of K Company, who had paused to enjoy the confrontation. “What’s your name?” Starbuck asked the straggler.

“Ives,” the man said warily.

“And you can’t keep up, Ives?”

“Reckon I can’t.”

“He always was a useless sumbitch,” Truslow said. “Just like his pa. I tell you, if the Ives family were mules you’d have shot the whole damn lot at birth.”

“All right, Sergeant!” Starbuck said reprovingly, then smiled down at the wet, miserable Ives. “You know who’s following us?” he asked.

“Some of our cavalry,” Ives said.

“And behind the cavalry?” Starbuck asked gently.

“Yankees.”

“Just hit the no-good bastard,” Truslow growled.

“You leave me alone!” Ives shouted at the Sergeant. Ives had been emboldened by Starbuck’s gentle and considerate manner and by the support of the other stragglers, who murmured their resentment of Truslow’s brutality and their appreciation of Starbuck’s reasonable tone.

“And do you know what the Yankees will do to you?” Starbuck asked Ives.

“Reckon it can’t be worse than this, Captain,” Ives said.

Starbuck nodded. “So you can’t go on?”

“Reckon I can’t.”

The other stragglers murmured their agreement. They were all too tired, too pained, too wet, too desperate, and too unhappy even to think of continuing the march. All they wanted was to collapse beside the road, and beyond that thought of immediate rest they had no cares or fears.