White held up a hand. “No. No,” he said. “He meant no harm.”
Across the table, the Catholic chaplain, Hypolite Gache, reached to hold his remaining hand. “Isaac,” we have talked of this. You must deal with it in some reasonable way…”
Smoot visibly relaxed. “Thank you, father.” He thought for a minute. “You are in charge?” he asked Fowle.
“Yes, and I will not say anything like that again. It’s not my business.”
Smoot nodded. “Word does get around among you old Alexandrians. He looked at Early. “Can I be with Balthazar and the boys?”
“Yes.”
”All right, I’m in. Can I finish lunch now?”
CHAPTER SIX
— A Growing Staff —
Claude Devereux arrived at work on 17th Street one morning to see that there were two unknown or nearly unknown people waiting in his outer office.
They sat behind a small table watching the door, ready for his arrival.
He looked at his watch. Eight thirty. We don’t open the office until nine.
They were quite different one from each other. One had a single arm and wore the blue uniform and red backed shoulder straps of a colonel of artillery. The colonel’s uniform looked unbalanced. A sleeve was neatly folded and pinned against his upper arm. It appeared that the arm had been amputated just above the elbow.
The other was in civilian clothes. He was short, and fat with a brown handlebar mustache. His suit fit poorly but was well made.
Off the rack, Devereux thought, displeased with himself for his instinctive snobbery. Your mother would be unhappy with you, he thought.
Master Sergeant John Quick, Devereux’s enlisted assistant, sat behind his big desk. This piece of furniture was placed to block access to Claude’s private office. The immigrant Irishman was as loyal to Devereux as a dog and was, as well, his “partner in crime.” They were both “line crossers,” sent to find positions of trust among the enemies of the South. Johnny Quick had served in Devereux’s rifle company of the 17th Virginia Infantry before his commander was sent on this unwanted mission.
Devereux put out his hand to the one armed man.
The paneled walls and dark wood of the government furniture made the meeting seem almost friendly.
“I am Wilson Ford,” the colonel said. “This is James Topham from the Detective Bureau in Chicago. Secretary Stanton has sent us to work for you…”
Devereux now remembered Ford. The first investigation of his possible treason and espionage had reached a climax a year before. This man had been in Lafayette Baker’s Pennsylvania Avenue office the day that he and his dead brother, Patrick, were accused. Baker was the head of the Detective Bureau, the counter intelligence arm of the Union Army.
Ford, and his superior Major Johnston Mitchell had been summoned to explain the accusation contained in an investigation report that lay on Baker’s table…
Ford and Mitchell were defeated in that verbal confrontation with Claude Devereux, defeated by the quickness and resourcefulness of his mind. In the process they both had lost their jobs. Devereux crushed their evidence and then their reason. He routed their mere facts and logic with a tissue of facile lies and deception built on careful cultivation of the French embassy and the willingness of the French government to support the illusion current among the Americans that he was a means for the American government to feed the French whatever the US wanted them to think.
Devereux’s mother was French by birth, a subject of the emperor Louis Napoleon. Her Devereux sons were bilingual dual nationals. The French government believed, because Claude wanted it to believe, that he was really their man., and not the “property” of either American country.
Johnston Mitchell was “exiled” to New York to work among his War Democrat friends and patrons.
Ford went back to the artillery in the Army of the Potomac. Secretary Stanton and Colonel Lafayette Baker, USV, the chief spy catcher, were bringing him back now, bringing him back to sap Devereux’s strength as an incubus camped in his office…
They hate you, you bastard, Ford thought. Baker and Stanton, they hate you for your treason and your condescension, but I hate you for her, for Amy, for what you have made of her. You’ve made her your whore and you will pay for that.
Claude was easy to hate. His easy courtesy, his fluent conversation, his impeccably tailored clothes, these things alone would have made him easy to hate, but the unavoidable realization that the woman Ford loved lived for Devereux alone and was his willing whore made the one armed man hate him even more.
Lafayette Baker
“Davenport. It was William Davenport in Baker’s office that day,” Devereux said, remembering the moment of triumph. He was referring to an assistant secretary of war who had been present to insure “fair play” for the Devereuxs. President Lincoln had insisted on that. Now, Devereux looked so comfortable with the memory of his brush with disaster and disgrace that it might have been a casual meeting at a wedding that he spoke of. In fact, his guts churned with anger. “Amy, Amy Biddle, I believe you know her?” he said. He knew the man was deeply attached to her. He knew this because she had told him of this soldier’s passion for her. She told him that in a moment’s remorse for her “lapse” in fidelity to him, her only real lover. There had been tears. It had meant little to him at the time except that it fixed in his mind the memory of Captain Ford’s taut features in the scene in Baker’s office. “I am so sorry,” she had said.” Her disheveled, grey head looked very vulnerable on the pillow case. They were in her bedroom behind the office rooms in the “Soldier’s Rest” convalescent camp on Shuter’s Hill in Alexandria. “You owe me nothing,” he said. “I can give you nothing.”
“You have already given me more than I had,” she whispered. Her back was to him but he remembered the sweet depth of her bosom, the tenderness of her need for him…
“I am sure that she will be happy to see you,” Devereux said while watching for a reaction. “She is often at our residence in Alexandria. Perhaps you could come to dinner…”
Ford flinched.
He recoiled enough for Devereux to know that the man would want to injure him in any way that he could manage.
“I would like that,” Ford managed to say.
“And what can I do for you gentlemen,” Claude asked looking at the other one.
The small, round man stared back.
“Secretary Stanton…” Ford began, a little hesitantly. The aggressive assumption of control that Devereux had displayed unnerved him for the moment.
James Topham never looked from Devereux’s eyes. “Secretary Stanton wishes you to be the connection between the War Department and the “National Detective Bureau,” he said. “Colonel Baker has been told…”
Devereux considered Ford and then the short, round man. “Ford, I suppose you will be doing this for me as your sole duty? I have a number of other tasks from Secretary Stanton.”
Colonel Ford nodded.
“And Topham here will work for you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Sergeant Quick will find a room for you here in the building. I will want you where I can see you both daily.” The general smiled. “Someone has a sense of humor. Is it you, Ford? So, now, I am to be involved in the catching of spies… Whatever happened to that major you worked for last year, the one who thought my brother and I were spies? Johnston? Was that his name?”
Ford reddened. “Johnston Mitchell. He is dead, killed by the mob in the draft riots last July in New York City.”
Devereux knew that was not true. One of his men had killed Mitchell. He had been sent specifically to do the job.
“Really! How terribly sad. Topham! You look like him a bit, better stay out of New York… Come and see me when you are settled in, Ford. I must remember about dinner at the house. Miss Biddle will be so happy to see you.”
With that last cruelty left hanging in the air, he entered his office closing the door behind him. He could be he
ard humming.
CHAPTER SEVEN
— Lexington —
Lieutenant Colonel John Balthazar thought the Blue Ridge Mountains resembled a lot of the country in the Massif Central of his native France. The green of the summer foliage and the rocky cliffs reminded him of hunting trips in the province of Auvergne. All that was missing from the landscape were the stone villages and the stolid farmers of that far off place. He remembered their sullen suspicion of strangers and their unwillingness to talk. Actually, the few local people that his battalion column of march had encountered here were like that.
The macadamized road followed the course of the wooded defile that held the bed of the James River.
Rain had begun to fall steadily as his men entered the mountains from the piedmont hills to the west of Lynchburg.
The infantry of the Second Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia filled the road for many miles ahead of and behind his battalion. The cavalry was to the west somewhere, out of sight as usual.
Early’s force was following the withdrawal of Major General David Hunter’s army corps from the Lynchburg area. These were the same Union troops that had quickly pulled back when they first began to meet Early’s men a few days before in Lynchburg itself. There had not been much of a fight. The Confederates had jumped down from the trains that had brought them to Lynchburg. They reached the city at just the right time to stop Hunter’s capture of the town. The Confederates made their way through streets filled with smiling citizens happy to be “saved” from impending Yankee occupation. When they made contact with the enemy on the west side of town, the Union force began moving back, away from them. Soon they had disappeared into the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west.
Early rested and concentrated his column for two days and then pursued Hunter into the mountains.
The rain made the road soft on the edges. The wagons and guns kept to the center to avoid sinking to their wheel hubs.
Rain fell on the broad summer leaves of the trees by the road.
Balthazar found himself listening to the music of the forest. He was wet all the way through in the way that field soldiers expect. He had bought a special rubber rain cape for Victoria’s mare. She was a patient, loving beast. The rain flowed off her in streams, running down into the red mud and gravel. He resolved to find another saddle horse. He would bring the mare along as a pet. He feared that she might be injured or damaged by exhaustion. Balthazar thought of his wife, now in her seventh month of pregnancy. My God, I want to be with you. I never felt this way before. I am a fool. He went back down the column, walking in the road, and leading the mare as he often did.
The men, his men, looked at him.
He smiled and paused for a few words here and there. Those not spoken to crowded forward to hear. What he was, or what he might be, meant so much to them and their fate that they instinctively wanted to know as much about him as they could.
Down the line, behind the two gun section of Napoleons that they captured in the Wilderness, he found the ambulance in which Major Isaac Smoot, still his second in command, lay in a makeshift bed. Bill White rode beside him in the wagon with Balthazar’s battalion surgeon, the man who amputated Smoot’s hand in the rain soaked mud of an artillery emplacement in the Mule Shoe.
Captain John Smith was a rifle company commander in the battalion but the battlefield revelation of his identity as a “defrocked.” medical man had been the saving of Smoot. A Union soldier had shot Smoot through the hand. If the hand had not been removed, he would have died of blood loss or infection.
At this moment in the mountains Smith held two posts in the battalion, but the papers appointing him to the medical corps had arrived and someone had sewn the black cuffs of a surgeon on his sleeves.
Joe White, Balthazar’s “batman” and his unacknowledged cousin, Captain Jake Devereux stood in the rain beside the wagon. They looked very much alike. Joe was slightly darker but they looked like brothers…
The bay horse team stood shivering in the cold rain. Jake searched in the wagon box for the horse blankets and covered the animals to keep their warmth in. He stood next to the “off” horse petting the gelding’s neck. The big animal turned to nuzzle him, rubbing his nose on the officer’s chest.
Joseph watched this. “You are like your mother,” he finally said, “like Madame Devereux.”
“And you, like yours,” Jake replied, “like Aunt Betsy. I could never tell which of them loved us all more.”
Joe remembered something he had wanted to say for a long time. “I want to learn Latin. I want to learn Latin, like you”
Jake did not look up. “We can do that,” he said. “We can do that. I have a book somewhere in my baggage.” He had been at the University of Virginia before the war.
“Are we going to die out here somewhere, somewhere in the woods?” Joe asked.
“Probably,” his cousin answered.
“If that is so, then I want to be buried in the family plot, Joe said, “near Pat.”
The memory of Jake’s brother, Pat, came to them. Patrick Henry Devereux, the second eldest of the Devereux brothers had died at Gettysburg, a civilian victim of a stray bullet. John Balthazar had married the widow, Victoria.
“If I live, that will happen,” Jake replied, “but, maybe we will come through this.”
“No, we are all going to die,” Joe said, standing in the rain.
“We should try to save the colonel,” Jake said. “Victoria has suffered too much.”
They thought about that for a moment and then smiled together in the rain. They knew that such a thing was beyond their power.
The doctor climbed out of the back of the ambulance. He saw the look on their wet faces. He shook his head and brushed by them.
In the wagon, Smoot lay on his right side, the stump of his left wrist cradled against his chest. He was flushed and feverish.
“I am going to leave you where you will be properly taken care of,” Balthazar said. “This was idiotic. The fool who decided to do this to you…”
Smoot held the bandaged stump out away from himself looking at it. “Let’s see what I feel like tomorrow. If you don’t mind, John, I would like to sleep now.” With that he rolled over on his other side and pulled up his blanket, pulled it up to his chin.
Balthazar and Bill White climbed down from the wagon.
It was about three in the afternoon.
“Are you driving the ambulance,” Balthazar asked.
White nodded. “I’m the lead teamster of the 17th Virginia, sir,” he replied.
Balthazar nodded. “Good. I am happy to have you with us. Your brother Joseph has been a great help to me…” He did not know Bill well enough to make a reference to the blood relationship that tied the two sides of the White-Devereux clan together.
The sun began to come out, peering through the clouds and then escaping behind them. Light and darkness chased each other over the forest. The grey masses of cloud scudded across the mountains, fleeing, like geese to the east.
Balthazar walked back to the front of the column. Joe brought him the mare. He mounted and looked down the long slope ahead to the west, looked down into the most beautiful valley he had ever seen. The green of the trees rolled down to pastures and yellow fields in crop. Little streams wandered through the scene. A village sat steaming in the new sunshine. He pointed at the little town.
“Glasgow,” Joe said from his place beside the mare. “I was here once on a hunting trip with Mr. Patrick before he was hurt so bad by a horse and crippled…”
Balthazar remembered that Victoria’s dead husband had been close to Joe. He turned to Rafael Harris, his adjutant, and told him to get the battalion moving. Below, he could see the head of Early’s infantry column entering the village. Civilians lined the streets with their little blue flags.
In Lexington, the seat of Rockbridge County, Balthazar marveled at the scale of destruction that the Union Army had inflicted in a few days of occupation…
He p
ut his battalion into bivouac on the parade ground of the Virginia Military Institute a few yards from Early’s headquarters camp.
The burned out skeletons of the school’s buildings surrounded the grassy field. Along the west side were the blackened stones of professors’ houses built in the Gothic revival style. To the north was the three story ruin of the cadet barracks. Only one building survived. It was a professor’s house that David Hunter spared because the occupant’s daughter had been sick and confined to bed.
VMI Barracks in 1864
Balthazar learned the reason for the reprieve from a man he met in Lexington, a man who sought him. The Frenchman was standing at the front of his command post tent smoking his stubby little briar pipe, and lost in contemplation of the ruined buildings, when the man approached him. The evening was pleasantly warm. Insects “sawed” busily in the uncut grass. Fireflies winked and glowed.
“Lovely things these houses were,” the searcher said. “Designed by the best architects in New York City they were.” The man was sandy haired and of middle height, slight in build but with the look of a man who had led an active life. “I stood here and watched them burn.” He sounded disgusted.
“Why did they do this?” Balthazar asked him.
“Oh,” we were making small arms ammunition in some of the buildings…”
Balthazar laughed, laughed deep in his chest. “Well, that is something that my wife would approve of,” he said.
Seeing that the stocky, dark haired colonel was amused,” the man continued. “And then, of course, we were a ‘hotbed’ of rebellion” as Black Dave put it.”
“Hunter said that?”
“He surely did, and right over there is where he said it,” the man said pointing to a place in front of the destroyed superintendent’s quarters. “He doesn’t seem to have a sense of humor. But, it is also true that nearly every man who was schooled here has chosen the South, including me, and I was just a teacher…”
Down the Sky: Volume Three of the “Strike The Tent” Trilogy Page 5
