The woman clutched the remnants of her dress to her breasts and pushed herself across the floor. "He was attacking me, mister!" she called to Adam. "He was going to —"
"Get out!" Blythe shouted at Adam.
But Adam knew the time had come to make his stand. He drew his revolver, cocked it, then aimed the weapon at Blythe's head. "Just leave her alone."
Blythe smiled and shook his head. "You're a boy, Faulconer. I ain't attacking her! She's a rebel! She fired on us!"
"I never!" the woman called.
"Step away from her!" Adam said. He could sense his heart pounding and recognized his own fear, but he knew Blythe had to be confronted.
"Shoot the interfering son of a bitch, Kemble!" Blythe shouted past Adam to the Corporal.
"Touch the trigger, Corporal, and I'll kill you." Sergeant Huxtable spoke from beyond the door.
Blythe seemed to find the impasse amusing, for he still grinned as he brushed scraps of hay from his uniform. "She's a traitor, Faulconer. A damned rebel. You know what the penalty is for firing on a Northern soldier? You've read General Order Number Seven, ain't you?" He had taken the silver case of lucifers from his pocket.
"Just step away from her!" Adam repeated.
"I never wanted to be near her!" Blythe said. "But the bitch kept trying to stop me from doing my job. And my job, Faulconer, is to burn this property down like Major General John Pope ordered." He began to strike the lucifers, then to drop the burning matches into the hay. He laughed as the woman tried to beat the flames out with her bare hands. Her torn dress dropped open and Blythe gestured at her. "Nice titties, Faulconer. Or can't you make a comparison on account of never having seen none?" Blythe chuckled as he dropped more matches and started more fires. "So why don't you shoot me, Faulconer? Lost your nerve.
"Because I don't want to tell the partisans we're here. There's a group of them a mile north of here. And coming this way."
Blythe stared at Adam for a heartbeat, then smiled. "Nice try, boy."
"Maybe two dozen of them," Sergeant Huxtable said flatly from the barn door.
Behind Blythe the hay had started to burn fiercely. The woman retreated from the heat, crying. Her hair had come loose to hang either side of her face. She clasped her bodice, then spat at Blythe before running out of the barn. "Thank you, mister," she said as she passed Adam.
Blythe watched her go, then looked back to Adam. "Are you lying to me, Faulconer?" he asked.
"You want to stay here and find out?" Adam asked. "You want to run the risk of meeting that woman's husband?"
"Goddamn partisans!" Sergeant Seth Kelley shouted his sudden warning from the sunlight outside. "'Bout a mile away, Billy!"
"Jesus hollering Christ!" Blythe swore, then ran past Adam and shouted for his horse. "Come on, boys! Get out of here! Take what you can, leave the rest! Hurry now! Hurry!"
The hay was well alight, the smoke churning out the barn door. "Where to?" Sergeant Kelley asked.
"South! Come on!" Blythe was desperate to escape the farm before the partisans arrived. He snatched a bag of plunder, rammed his spurs back, and galloped south toward the woods.
His men followed in ragged order. Adam and his troop were the last to go. They found Blythe a half-mile inside the woods, hesitating over a track leading west and another going south. There were men's voices in the distant air, and that was enough to make Blythe choose the southward track that promised a faster escape because it went downhill. Adam's horses were tired, their lungs wheezing asthmatically and their flanks wet with white sweat, yet still Blythe pressed the pace, not stopping until they had ridden a good six or seven miles from the farmhouse. There was no evidence of any pursuit. "Bastards probably stopped to put out that fire, Billy," Seth Kelley opined.
"Can't tell with partisans," Blythe said. "Cunning as serpents. Could be anywhere." He looked nervously around the green woods.
The horsemen had stopped beside a stream that flowed eastward through sunlit woodlands. The horses were all winded, and a couple of the beasts were lamed. If the partisans had followed, Adam knew, then every man in Blythe's command would either be killed or captured. "What do we do now?" one of the men asked Blythe.
"We find out where the hell we are," Blythe snapped irritably.
"I know where we are," Adam said, "and I know where we're going."
Blythe, panting hard and with his red face covered in sweat, looked at his fellow officer. "Where?" he asked curtly.
"We're going to get some decent horses," Adam said, "and then we're going to fight like we're supposed to."
"Amen," Sergeant Huxtable said.
Blythe straightened up in his saddle. "Are you saying I don't want to fight, Faulconer?"
For a second Adam was tempted to accept the challenge and make Blythe either fight him or back down in front of his men. Then he remembered the partisans and knew he could not afford the luxury of fighting a duel so deep behind the enemy's lines.
Blythe saw Adam's hesitation and translated it as cowardice. He grinned. "Lost your tongue?"
"I'm going south, Blythe, and I don't care if you come or stay."
"I'll let you go, boy," Blythe said, then pulled his horse around and spurred westward. He planned to take his men to the foothills of the Blue Ridge, then follow the mountains north until he came to the Federal lines.
Adam watched Blythe go and knew he had merely postponed their confrontation. Then, after dusk, when his horses and men were rested, Adam led the troop south to where he planned a victory.
PART TWO
Chapter 5
JACKSON, LIKE A SNAKE THAT HAD STRUCK, hurt, but not killed its prey, retreated sullenly back across the Rapidan River, thus abandoning the battlefield at the foot of Cedar Mountain with its blackened swathes of scorched turf and long raw mounds of newly turned graves where turkey vultures gorged on bodies uncovered by dogs.
The Yankees were left in possession of Culpeper County and counted its possession as a victory, though no one really believed Jackson was defeated. The snake still had fangs, which meant that the Northern generals must try to scotch it again. Yankee troops poured southward and spread their camps along the Rapidan's northern bank while, south of the river in Gordonsville, the railcars brought fresh rebel troops from Richmond.
On both banks of the river there was a nervous sense of great events waiting to happen, and inevitably rumors fed that apprehension. The rebels feared that McClellan's Army of the Potomac had joined forces with Pope's Army of Virginia, and if that prospect was not frightening enough, a Northern newspaper hinted that the Yankees had emptied every jail between Washington and the Canadian border and put the convicts in uniform, handed them guns, and sent them to lay Virginia waste. Another tale insisted that the North was recruiting mercenaries in Europe, Germans mostly, and that each foreigner had been promised an acre of Indian territory for every rebel killed. "I knew we'd end up fighting Hessians," Truslow remarked, "but we beat the sumbitches in '76 so we'll beat the sumbitches in '62 as well." Yet the most persistent rumor of all was that Abe Lincoln was enlisting freed slaves into his army. "Because he can't find anyone else willing to fight against us," Lieutenant Coffman averred patriotically.
Most men dismissed the rumor of armed slaves as unthinkable, but a week after the Legion retreated from Cedar Mountain, Captain Murphy found confirmation of the story in a two-week-old copy of the Hartford Evening Press that had somehow found its way into the rebel lines. "See!" Murphy exclaimed to the officers sharing a jug of whiskey around a fire. "It is true!" He tilted the newspaper toward the campfire. "'Congress has extended permission for the President to enrol colored men into the army,'" Murphy read aloud. "'Congressman Matteson of New Jersey claims that the sable brethren of America are fervent in their desire to contribute their blood toward the great crusade and that, so long as their childlike and excitable nature proves tractable to military discipline, there is no reason why they should not fight at least as well as any treasonable rebel.'" A
chorus of jeers greeted the last two words. Afterward there was much discussion of the newspaper's report, and Starbuck sensed a nervousness among the officers. There was something very nightmarish in the thought of black troops coming to take vengeance on their old masters.
"Though how many of us ever owned a slave?" Lieutenant Davies asked resentfully.
"I own some," Murphy said mildly and then, after a pause, "Mind you, I pay the buggers well enough. I don't think we Irish are very good at slaveholding."
"Major Hinton owns a dozen," Lieutenant Pine of Murphy's D Company added.
"And Swynyard's owned plenty enough in his lifetime," Starbuck said.
"Though not any longer," Lieutenant Davies observed in wonderment, and indeed, to everyone's astonishment, the Colonel had manumitted his two slaves when Jackson pulled the army back across the river. The Colonel, despite coming from one of Virginia's most prominent slave-trading families, had set free at least a thousand dollars' worth of prime Negroes by sending the two men north to the Federal lines. Somehow it was that sacrifice, even more than the Colonel's astonishing achievement of staying away from liquor, that had impressed on the whole Brigade that their second-in-command truly was a converted man. "He's even given up cigars," Davies added.
Murphy took the stone jug from Starbuck. "God knows why you Protestants have such an unpleasant religion."
"Because it's the true religion," Lieutenant Ezra Pine averred, "and our reward will be in heaven."
"And heaven," Murphy insisted to his Lieutenant, "is a place of all pleasures, is it not? Which means that there'll be rivers running brimful with the tastiest of whiskeys and boxes of the choicest cigars waiting ready lit at every corner, and if those pleasures are good enough for the angels they're good enough for me. God's blessing on you, Pine," Murphy added and lifted the stone jug to his lips.
Ezra Pine wanted to start a theological argument about the nature of heaven, but he was shouted down. Out in the darkness a man sang a love ballad, and the sound of it made the officers silent. Starbuck guessed they were all thinking about that horde of convicts, Hessian mercenaries, and vengeful freed slaves that was supposedly massing on the Rapidan's far bank.
"If Lee was here," Murphy broke the silence, "he'd have us all digging trenches. It'd be sore hands, so it would."
Everyone agreed that Robert Lee would have fought a defensive battle, but no one understood what Thomas Jackson might do. "I wish Lee would come," Murphy said wistfully, "for there's nothing on God's earth so good for stopping a bullet as a yard or two of good clean dirt."
The next day Starbuck heard the first rumor that confirmed that Lee was indeed coming to take command of the rebel forces on the Rapidan. Starbuck heard the rumor from an old friend who rode into the Legion's encampment brandishing two bottles of fine French wine. "We took ten cases off the Yankees three miles beyond the Rappahannock!" The jubilant speaker was a Frenchman, Colonel Lassan, who was ostensibly a foreign military observer, but who actually rode with the rebel cavalry for the sheer delight of fighting. He had just come back from a raid deep behind the Yankee lines and brought news of the enemy's preparations. "There are lines of wagons as far as the eye can see, Nate! Mile after mile of them, and every one crammed full with food, powder, and shot."
"Is that McClellan's army?" Starbuck asked.
Lassan shook his head. "That's Pope's army, but McClellan's coming." The Frenchman sounded happy at such a gathering of armies with its implicit promise of fighting.
"And if McClellan comes," Starbuck said, "Lee will come, and that'll mean digging mile after mile of trenches."
The Frenchman gave Starbuck a look of surprise. "Dear Lord, no. Lee can't afford to wait. He dug trenches to protect Richmond, but trenches won't help here"—he waved at the open country—"and Lee has to break the Yankees before they join their armies together. Lee's no fool, Nate. He knows which end of a pig makes the mess."
Starbuck laughed at the quaint phrase. Lassan spoke perfect English, the legacy of a British father, but at times he transposed a Norman peasant's language into his father's tongue. Lassan himself was no peasant but a professional soldier who had fought in Italy, the Crimea, and North Africa, and who bore the scars of those wars across his eye-patched face. They were terrible scars, scars to terrify a child to nightmare, yet Lassan himself was an easygoing man whose besetting sins were warfare and women. "Both dangerous pursuits," he liked to tell Starbuck, "but why settle for dullness in this sad, bad world?"
Now, with his horse picketed, the Frenchman strolled with Starbuck through the Legion's camp lines. The weather was such that none of the men had bothered to make turf shelters, preferring instead to sleep on the open ground, and so the lines were little more than piles of belongings interrupted by the remnants of cooking fires. The Legion's new draftees were being drilled by Sergeant Major Tolliver while the veterans not on picket duty were either sleeping, playing cards, or reading.
Lassan, who seemed to have taken it on himself to educate Starbuck in matters military, was explaining why Lee could not afford a defensive strategy. "Dig trenches and gun emplacements behind this river, my friend, and how are you to stop the Yankees simply strolling round the end of your earthworks ? You don't have enough men to guard a trench dug from the Chesapeake Bay to the Blue Ridge Mountains, so instead of digging you will have to march and tip the enemy off balance. It will be a war of maneuver, a cavalryman's war! Naturally you infantrymen will have to do the real fighting and dying, that's why God made infantrymen, but we cavalrymen will do your scouting for you." Lassan scratched beneath his mildewed eye patch. "You'll know things are getting warm, Nate, when Lee arrives." "Or when the Yankees attack," Starbuck said. "They won't. They're too sluggish. The North is like a man who has grown so fat he is unable to move fast. He just wants to roll over you and so crush you to death, while you have to slice him up into little pieces."
Starbuck walked a few paces in silence. The two men had left the Brigade lines behind and were now walking toward a stand of trees that screened the south bank of the Rapidan. "Can we win this war?" Starbuck finally asked the Frenchman.
"Oh, yes," Lassan said without hesitation, "but it will be expensive. If you kill enough Yankees, then they may think the game isn't worth the candle. You'll also need luck." The Frenchman had sounded confident, but it nevertheless struck Starbuck as a gloomy prescription. "Of course," Lassan went on, "if you could get European support, then everything changes."
"Can we?" Starbuck asked, as if the question had not been debated endlessly in the Confederacy.
Lassan shook his head. "France won't do anything unless Britain leads the way, and Britain has been burned too badly by its past American adventures, so Britain won't intervene unless the South looks capable of winning the war by itself, in which case you wouldn't need their help anyway, which all means, mon ami, that it is up to the South to fight and win its own war." They had reached the edge of the trees now, a place made ragged by the axes of men seeking firewood, and Starbuck hesitated to go further, but Lassan gestured him on. "I wanted to talk to you in private," the Frenchman said, and so he led Starbuck down a vague path that zigzagged erratically through the underbrush. Pigeons clattered through the upper leaves while a woodpecker's staccato rattle sounded sudden and close. "I have to tell you"—Lassan, half turned to Starbuck as he spoke—"that I have set myself up in an establishment in Richmond."
It seemed an oddly unnecessary confession to Starbuck, perhaps because he was not entirely sure what the Frenchman meant by an "establishment." "A business, you mean?" he asked.
"Dear Lord God, no!" Lassan laughed at the very thought. "I've no head for commerce, none! No, I mean I have established a household. It's on Grace Street
. You know it?"
"Very well." Starbuck was amused by the thought of Lassan fussing with domestic arrangements.
"It's an apartment," Lassan said. "We have five rooms above a tailor's shop on the corner of Fourth Street
<
br /> . Then we have slave quarters downstairs at the back where there's a kitchen, a small garden for herbs, a peach tree, and a wooden stable. It's rented, of course, and the kitchen chimney smokes when the wind's in the west, but otherwise it's really very comfortable." The middle-aged Lassan had never counted comfort as one of life's priorities, and he gave the word an ironic twist.
"You've got slaves?" Starbuck asked, surprised. Lassan shrugged. "When in Rome, mon ami." He took a cigar from his pouch, lit it, and handed it to Starbuck before lighting one for himself. "I can't say that I'm comfortable with the arrangement," he went on, "but I convince myself that the slaves are better off with me than with anyone else. I have a stable boy, there are two kitchen girls who clean as well, and of course an upstairs girl who looks after clothes and all the rest of the flummery."
He sounded embarrassed again. The two men had reached an old cart track that was much overgrown but was wide enough to let them walk side by side. "You sound as if you've taken a wife," Starbuck said lightly.
Lassan stopped and faced his friend. "I have taken a companion," he said very seriously. "We are not married, nor shall we marry, but for the moment, at least, we suit each other." Lassan paused. "You introduced me to her."
"Oh," Starbuck said, coloring slightly and remembering how, when Lassan had first crossed the lines to attach himself to the rebel forces, he had asked Starbuck for an introduction to a house of pleasure in Richmond. Starbuck had sent Lassan to the best of all such houses, the most exclusive house, the house where Sally Truslow worked. "It's Sally?" Starbuck asked.
"Indeed," Lassan said. His one eye examined Starbuck anxiously.
Starbuck was quiet for a moment. Sally was the rebellious daughter of Sergeant Truslow and a girl with whom Starbuck sometimes thought he was in love himself. He had asked Sally to marry him earlier in the year, and at times Starbuck was still convinced that they could have made such a marriage work. He had been delighted when she had abandoned the brothel for the more lucrative job of being a spiritual medium, and Sally's seances were now famous in Richmond, a town obsessed with supernatural phenomena, but there was no doubt that her success had more than a little to do with the fact that the darkened shrine of Madame Royall, as Sally now called herself, was attached to Richmond's most notorious house of assignation, a proximity that added the spice of wickedness to her clients' visits. Starbuck had half dared to hope that Sally might want to complete her conversion to respectability by taking a husband, but instead she had taken a lover, and Starbuck understood that, in the gentlest possible way, he was now being warned away from Sally's bed. "Good for you," he told Lassan.
Battle Flag Page 14
