Rebel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Are you saying I’m attached to your brigade?” Faulconer asked.

  “I ain’t got orders for you, if that’s what you mean, but why the hell else were you sent here?”

  “I have an appointment with General Beauregard at six in the morning to discover just that,” Faulconer said.

  There was a pause as Evans evidently uncapped a flask, pulled at it, then screwed the cap back into place. “Colonel,” he finally said, “why in hell’s name were you put out here? This is the left flank. We’re the last sons of bitches that anyone thought to position. We’re here, Colonel, in case the goddamned Yankees attack up the Warrenton Pike.”

  “I have not yet received my orders,” Faulconer insisted.

  “So what are you waiting for? A choir of goddamned angels? For Christ’s sake, Faulconer, we need men on this flank of the army!” Nathan Evans’s temper had plainly snapped, but he made an effort to explain matters calmly again. “Beauregard plans to push north on our right, so what if the shit-faced Yankees decided to push south on theirs? What am I supposed to do? Hurl kisses at them? Ask them to delay the war while you fetch your damned orders?”

  “I shall fetch those orders from Beauregard,” Faulconer said stubbornly, “and no one else.”

  “Then while you’re fetching your goddamned orders why don’t you move your goddamned Legion to the wooden bridge? Then if you’re needed you can march to the stone bridge over the Run and give my boys a hand.”

  “I shall not move,” Faulconer insisted, “until I receive proper orders.”

  “Oh, dear God,” Adam murmured for his father’s obduracy.

  The argument went on two minutes more, but neither man would shift. Faulconer’s wealth had not accustomed him to taking orders, and least of all from diminutive, ill-smelling, bow-legged, coarse-tongued brutes like Nathan Evans, who, abandoning his attempts to snare the Legion into his brigade, stormed out of the tent and hauled himself into his saddle. “Come on, Meadows,” he snarled at his aide, and the two men galloped off into the darkness.

  “Adam!” Faulconer shouted. “Pecker!”

  “Ah, the second in command is summoned by the great leader,” Bird said caustically, then followed Adam into the tent.

  “Did you hear that?” Faulconer demanded.

  “Yes, Father.”

  “So you understand, both of you, that whatever that man may order, you ignore. I shall bring you orders from Beauregard.”

  “Yes, Father,” Adam said again.

  Major Bird was not so obliging. “Are you ordering me to disobey a direct command from a superior officer?”

  “I am saying that Nathan Evans is a lunkhead addicted to stone-jug whiskey,” the Colonel said, “and I did not spend a damned fortune on a fine regiment just to see it thrown away in his drink-sodden hands.”

  “So I do disobey his orders?” Major Bird persisted.

  “It means you obey my orders, and no one else’s,” the Colonel said. “Damn it, if the battle’s on the right then that’s where we should be, not stuck on the left with the dregs of the army. I want the Legion on parade in one hour. Tents struck, fighting order.”

  The Legion paraded at half past four by which time the hilltop was bathed in a ghostly twilight and the farther hills were dark shapes receding ever more obscurely until, at last, there was nothing but an opaque darkness in which dimly mysterious points of red light suggested far-off camp fires. There was just enough gray half-light to see that the nearer countryside was littered with carts and wagons, giving the scene an odd resemblance to a camp meeting site on the morning after the preaching had ended, except that among these wagons were the satanic shapes of limbers, portable forges and cannons. The smoke of the dying camp fires clung in the hollows like mist beneath the last fading stars. Somewhere a band was playing “Home, Sweet Home” and a man in B Company tunelessly sang the words until a sergeant told him to be silent.

  The Legion waited. Their heavy packs, blankets and ground-sheets had been piled with the tents at the rear of the band so that the men would simply carry their weapons, haversacks and canteens into battle. Around them, mostly unseen, an army took up its positions. Pickets gazed across the stream, gunners sipped coffee beside their monstrous guns, cavalrymen watered horses in the dozen streams that laced the pastureland, and surgeons’ assistants tore up lint for bandages or sharpened flesh knives and bone saws. A few officers galloped importantly across the fields, vanishing into the farther darknesses on their mysterious errands.

  Starbuck sat on Pocahontas just behind the Legion’s color party and wondered if he was dreaming. Was there really to be a battle? The short-tempered Evans had hinted as much and everyone seemed to expect one, yet there was no sign of any enemy. He half-wanted the expectations to be true, and was half-terrified that they would come true. Intellectually he knew that battle was chaotic, cruel and bitter, yet he could not rid himself of the belief that it would turn out to be glorious, plumed and oddly calm. In books, stern-faced men waited to see the whites of their enemies’ eyes, then fired and won great victories. Horses pranced and flags whipped in a smokeless wind beneath which the decorous dead lay sleeping and the pain-free dying spoke lovingly of their country and of their mothers. Men died as simply as Major Pelham had died. Oh sweet Jesus, Starbuck prayed as a sudden burst of terror whipsawed through his thoughts, but don’t let me die. I regret all my sins, every one of them, even Sally, and I will never sin again if you will just let me live.

  He shivered even though he was sweating under his thick woolen uniform coat and trousers. Somewhere to his left a man shouted an order, but the sound was small and faraway, like a voice heard from a sickbed in a distant room. The sun had still not risen, though the eastern horizon was now suffused with a rosy brilliance and it was light enough for Colonel Faulconer to make a slow inspection of his Legion’s ranks. He reminded the men of the homes they had left in Faulconer County, and of their wives, sweethearts and children. He reassured them that the war was not of the South’s making, but of the North’s choosing. “We just wanted to be left alone, is that so terrible an ambition?” he asked. Not that the men needed the Colonel’s reassurance, but Faulconer knew that a commanding officer was expected to rouse the spirits of his men on the morning of battle, and so he encouraged his Legion that their cause was just and that men fighting for a just cause need not fear defeat.

  Adam had been supervising the piling of the Legion’s baggage, but now rode back to Starbuck’s side. Adam’s horse was one of the best beasts from the Faulconer stud—a tall, bay stallion, glossily beautiful, a disdainful aristocrat among beasts just as the Faulconers were lords among common men. Adam nodded toward the small house with its dimly glowing windows that stood silhouetted on the hill’s flat top. “They sent a servant to ask us whether it would be safe to stay there.”

  “What did you say?”

  “How could I say anything? I don’t know what will happen today. But do you know who lives there?”

  “How on earth would I know that?”

  “The widow of the Constitution’s surgeon. Isn’t that something? Surgeon Henry, he was called.” Adam’s voice sounded very stilted, as though it was taking all his self-discipline to contain his emotions. He had put on a soldier’s coat for his father’s sake, and worn a captain’s three metal bars on his collar because to do so was simpler than wearing a martyr’s sackcloth, but today he would pay the real price of that compromise, and the thought of it was making him sick to his stomach. He fanned his face with his wide-brimmed hat, then glanced to the east where the cloudless sky looked like a sheet of beaten silver touched with a shimmer of lurid gold. “Can you imagine how hot it will be by midday?” Adam asked.

  Starbuck smiled. “‘As they gather silver, and brass, and iron, and lead, and tin, into the midst of the furnace, to blow the fire upon it, to melt it; so will I gather you in mine anger and in my fury, and I will leave you there, and melt you.’” He imagined himself writhing in a blast of furnace heat, a sin
ner burning for his iniquities. “Ezekiel,” he explained to Adam, whose expression betrayed that he had not placed the text.

  “It isn’t a very cheering text for a Sunday morning,” Adam said, then shuddered uncontrollably as he imagined what this day might bring. “Do you really feel you might make a good soldier?” he asked.

  “Yes.” He had failed at everything else, Starbuck thought bitterly.

  “At least you look like a soldier.” Adam spoke with a touch of envy.

  “How does a soldier look?” Starbuck asked, amused.

  “Like someone in a Walter Scott novel,” Adam answered quickly, “Ivanhoe, maybe?”

  Starbuck laughed. “My grandmother MacPhail always told me I had the face of a preacher. Like my father.” And Sally had said he had her father’s eyes.

  Adam put his hat back on. “I suppose your father will be preaching damnation on all slaveholders this morning?” He was simply wanting to make conversation, any conversation, just noise to divert his thoughts from the horrors of war.

  “Perdition and hell fire will indeed be summoned to support the northern cause,” Starbuck agreed, and he was suddenly assailed by a vision of his comfortable Boston home where his younger brothers and sisters would just be waking up and readying themselves for early morning family prayers. Would they remember to pray for him this morning? His elder sister would not. At nineteen Ellen Marjory Starbuck already had the pinched opinions of crabbed middle age. She was betrothed to a Congregational minister from New Hampshire, a man of infinite spite and calculated unkindness and, instead of recommending Nathaniel to God’s protection, Ellen would doubtless be praying for her older brother James, who, Starbuck supposed, would be in uniform, though for the life of him he could not imagine stuffy, punctilious James in battle. James would be a good headquarter’s man in Washington or Boston—making fussy lists and enforcing detailed regulations.

  The younger children would pray for Nathaniel, though perforce their entreaties would necessarily be silent lest they provoked the wrath of the Reverend Elial. There was sixteen-year-old Frederick George, who had been born with a withered left arm, fifteen-year-old Martha Abigail, who most resembled Nathaniel in looks and character, and last of all was twelve-year-old Samuel Washington Starbuck, who wanted to be a whaling captain. Five other children had died in infancy.

  “What are you thinking?” Adam asked abruptly, out of nervousness.

  “I was thinking of family history,” Starbuck said, “and how congestive it is.”

  “Congestive?”

  “Limiting. Mine, anyway.” And Sally’s, he thought. Maybe even Ridley’s too, though Starbuck did not want to indulge in pity for the man he would kill. Or would he? He glanced across at Ethan Ridley, who sat motionless in the dawn. It was one thing to contemplate a killing, Starbuck decided, but quite another to perform the deed.

  A flurry of far musket shots rattled the last shadows of receding dark. “Oh, God.” Adam spoke the words as a prayer for his country. He stared eastward, though not so much as a leaf moved in the far wooded hollows where, at last, the creeping light was showing vivid green among the dying grays. Somewhere in those hills and woods an enemy waited, though whether the firing was the first flicker of battle or merely a false alarm, no one could tell.

  Another bout of terror rippled through Starbuck. He was frightened of dying, but he was far more terrified of displaying his fear. If he had to die he would prefer it to be a romantic death with Sally beside him. He tried to recall the sweetness of that thunder-laden night when she had lain in his arms and, like children, they had watched the lightning scratch the sky. How could one night change a man so much? Dear God, Starbuck thought, but that one night was like being born again, and that was as wicked a heresy as any he could dream of, but there was no other description that so exactly fitted what he had felt. He had been dragged from doubt into certainty, from misery into gladness, from despair to glory. It was that magical conversion, which his father preached and for which he had so often prayed, and which at last he had experienced, except it was the devil’s conversion that had swamped his soul with calmness, and not the Savior’s grace that had changed him.

  “Are you listening, Nate?” Adam had evidently spoken, but to no avail. “There’s Father. He’s beckoning us.”

  “Of course.” Starbuck followed Adam to the Legion’s right flank beyond Company A where Colonel Faulconer had finished his inspection. “Before I go and find Beauregard,” Faulconer spoke awkwardly, as though he was unsure of himself, “I thought I’d make a reconnaissance that way.” He pointed northward, out beyond the army’s left flank. The Colonel’s voice sounded like that of a man trying to convince himself that he was a real soldier on a real battlefield. “Would you like to come? I need to satisfy myself that Evans is wrong. No point in staying here if there’s no Yankees out in these woods. Do you feel like a gallop, Nate?”

  Starbuck reflected that the Colonel must be in a better mood than he appeared if he called him Nate instead of the colder Starbuck. “I’d like that, sir.”

  “Come on, then. You too, Adam.”

  The father and son led Starbuck down the hill to where a tree-shaded stone house stood beside a crossroads. Two artillery pieces were creaking and jangling eastward along the turnpike, dragged by tired horses. The Colonel galloped between the two guns, then swerved onto the road that led north from the crossroads. The road climbed a long hill between shadowed pastureland, rising to a wooded crest where the Colonel reined in.

  Faulconer unholstered and extended a leather-bound telescope, which he trained north toward a far hill crowned by a simple wooden church. Nothing disturbed the fleeting shadows of darkness on that far hill, nor indeed anywhere else in the gentle landscape. A white-painted farm lay in the distance and leafy woods all around, but no soldiers disturbed the pastoral scene. The Colonel stared long and hard at the distant church on its hill, then collapsed the telescope’s short tubes. “According to that lunkhead Evans’s map, that’s Sudley Church. There are some fords beneath there, and no Yankees in sight. Except for you, Nate.”

  Starbuck took the last words as a pleasantry. “I’m an honorary Virginian, sir. Remember?”

  “Not any longer, Nate,” Faulconer said heavily. “This isn’t a reconnaissance, Nate. The Yankees will never come this far north. I brought you here instead to say good-bye.”

  Starbuck gazed at the Colonel, wondering if this was some kind of elaborate jest. It seemed not. “Good-bye, sir?” He managed to stammer the iteration.

  “This isn’t your quarrel, Nate, and Virginia isn’t your country.”

  “But, sir…”

  “So I’m sending you home.” The Colonel overrode Starbuck’s feeble objection with a firm kindness, just as he might speak to a useless puppy which, despite its potential for amusement, he was about to put down with a single shot to the skull.

  “I have no home.” Starbuck had meant the words to be defiant, but somehow they came out as a pathetic bleat.

  “Indeed you do, Nate. I wrote to your father six weeks ago and he has been good enough to reply to me. His letter was delivered under a flag of truce last week. Here it is.” The Colonel took a folded paper from a pouch at his waist and held it out to Starbuck.

  Starbuck did not move.

  “Take it, Nate,” Adam urged his friend.

  “Did you know about this?” Starbuck turned fiercely on Adam, fearing his friend’s betrayal.

  “I told Adam this morning,” the Colonel said, intervening. “But this is my doing, not Adam’s.”

  “But you don’t understand, sir!” Starbuck appealed to the Colonel.

  “But I do, Nate! I do!” Colonel Faulconer smiled condescendingly. “You’re an impetuous young man, and there’s nothing amiss with that. I was impulsive, but I can’t allow youthful impetuosity to lead you into rebellion. It won’t do, upon my soul it will not. A man should not fight against his own country because of a youthful mistake. So I have determined your fate.” The
Colonel spoke very firmly, and once again pushed the letter toward Starbuck who, this time, felt obliged to grasp it. “Your brother James is with McDowell’s army,” the Colonel continued, “and he’s enclosed a laissez-passer that will see you safe through the northern lines. Once past the pickets you should seek out your brother. I fear you’ll have to give me your sword and pistol, but I’ll let you keep Pocahontas. And the saddle! And that’s an expensive saddle, Nate.” He added the last words as a kind of enticement that might reconcile Starbuck to his unexpected fate.

  “But, sir…” Starbuck tried to articulate his protest again, and this time there were tears in his eyes. He felt bitterly ashamed of the tears and tried to shake them away, but still one drop brimmed from his right eye and ran down his cheek. “Sir! I want to stay with you! I want to stay with the Legion.”

  Faulconer smiled. “That’s kind of you, Nate, truly kind. I’m obliged, so I am, for your saying as much. But no. This isn’t your quarrel.”

  “The North might think otherwise.” Starbuck now attempted defiance, suggesting that the Colonel might be making a fearful enemy in thus sending him away.

  “And so they might, Nate, so they might. And if you’re forced to fight against us, then I’ll pray you live to be reunited with your Virginia friends. Ain’t that so, Adam?”

  “Indeed it is, Father,” Adam said warmly, then held out his hand for Starbuck to shake.