He heard a noise in the hall: followed by a gentle tapping on the door. “Come in.”
It opened slowly. Rebecca peered shyly around its edge. “I was afraid you were asleep.”
Nathan sat up in surprise. He saw that she was wearing an incredibly awful-looking nightgown and had a cheap blanket draped around her shoulders. She looked beautiful and it was suddenly difficult for him to breathe.
“Am I making a mistake?” she asked, hesitation apparent on her face. The wrong answer and she would bolt. “Not for one second.”
He stood and walked to her as she closed the door behind her and let the blanket fall to the floor. An instant later they were in each other's arms and kissing with a pent-up fervor that left them gasping.
They parted breathlessly and he looked at her. He was thoroughly and immediately aroused. With trembling hands he unbuttoned the nightgown until he was able to slide it over her pale shoulders and let it fall freely down to her ankles. Her nakedness took his breath away. She was far lovelier than he had ever hoped to imagine. She had small but perfectly formed breasts, a flat belly, and gently curved legs that were covered by only a wisp of dark hair. He gently traced his hand down from her throat, across her breasts, and below her belly. She closed her eyes and swayed to his caress. Then she took his hand in hers and had him repeat the journey, while, with her other hand, she grasped his hardened penis through the cloth of his pajamas. He gasped and leaned down to kiss the burn scar on her neck.
Rebecca released him and removed his hand from her body. She unbuttoned his pajama top and slid it off his shoulders. He was more muscular than she had thought and not particularly hairy. Then she untied the drawstring of the pants and he, too, was naked. They kissed again and felt the warmth of their thoroughly aroused bodies against each other.
Nathan dimmed the oil lamp but left it on as just an ember that broke the darkness. They lay down in bed and caressed each other until they thought they'd explode. He entered her and they came together, and both cried out as their bodies surged into one. It had been so long, almost too long. For Nathan it was a renewal, while for Rebecca it was a belated beginning.
Outside the storm raged, and the lightning flashed. Outside, great armies moved towards each other in a dance of death. Inside, neither Nathan nor Rebecca cared about any of this as they began to make love a second time.
Lord Palmerston felt his body quivering with a sudden chill. It had nothing to do with age, at least not much. What sent concern and almost fear coursing through his body was the realization that virtually everything that could go wrong had gone wrong in the war with what should have been an enfeebled United States. What the London newspapers and his so-called loyal opposition in Parliament were calling the Massacre at Hampton Roads was yet another case in point. Until recently, it was inconceivable that one single ship could dominate a battle, yet this is precisely what had happened.
When the final tally was taken, a dozen British merchant ships and one armed schooner had been sunk, with more than two score others damaged by shell or fire, or both. A large percentage of the damaged ships would have to be scrapped due to the severity of their wounds, and the insurers at Lloyds were already screaming bloody murder.
Many of the merchant ships had been empty, but about a third contained priceless ammunition, cannon, and other supplies that had gone up in smoke or were now resting at the bottom of Chesapeake Bay. The solitary Union ship, thePotomac had steamed away from Hampton Roads and now rested at anchor under the guns protecting the harbor of Baltimore. Or, Palmerston wondered, was it the other way around?
Metaphorically, he acknowledged that yet another thread had come loose in the fabric of dominance he was attempting to weave for his beloved Great Britain.
Palmerston knew he was an old man, and he sometimes had a hard time dealing with all the changes in technology that had occurred in his lifetime. First was the railroad. Nonexistent in his youth, it began as little more than an interesting toy, then as a means of commerce. Now it was a method of moving huge armies across a continent at speeds that were only dreamed of a couple of decades prior. Even while Lee marched north, Grant was assembling an equally vast army using the North's tens of thousands of miles of rail lines that connected all parts of the Union like a spider's iron web. Lee's army could march twenty miles on a good day, but an army on a train might do ten or fifteen miles an hour for twenty-four hours, even in the worst of weather. The railroad had changed the face of war.
Another change was the fact that the Union was experimenting with repeating rifles. The fundamental weapon of the British and other armies had always been the musket, which had been essentially unchanged for nearly two hundred years. Now the rifled musket had increased range and firepower, and a repeating rifle, if manufactured in quantity, would again change the face of war.
How many faces did war have? he wondered.
But the most chilling change had been the steamship, which had spawned the ironclad. Again, only a few decades earlier, steamships went from unknown, to a novelty, to a necessity of commerce, and now, clad in iron, an invincible weapon of war, England depended on the wooden walls of her ships just as had ancient Athens, but now these walls were being smashed by shells from smoke-belching iron ships.
Admirals Chads and Parker had tendered their resignations following the debacle against thePotomac. Palmerston had rejected them for two reasons: first, because he had no one to replace them, and second, because of the nagging doubt that anyone else would have done any better,
The Admiralty had informed him that England would begin building new ironclad warships immediately, although it was hard for him to see what good that would do in this war. It took months, even years, to build a ship like theWarrior and she was already obsolete, Ironically, so was the originalMonitor, along with theNew Ironsides. The newer ships would have turrets, which theWarrior and theNew Ironsides lacked, and would have more than one, like thePotomac, which doomed theMonitor to the scrap yard. New ships, the wizards of the Admiralty had said, would have higher free-boards than the current Monitors to facilitate ocean crossings. American Monitors were so low in the water that even a gentle sea washed over their decks. This made them difficult to hit, but perilous in a rough sea.
New ships would have sloping armored decks and round turrets, which meant that any shell striking one would be a deflection and not a direct hit. This was one of the reasons why the Monitors had sustained so little apparent damage in the three battles in which they'd been engaged. The new ships would have at least two turrets, maybe three or four, and each turret would contain at least two large guns. Because of the weight inherent in the turrets, the new ships would have to be much larger.
The technology race was going at a speed that was dizzying and almost incomprehensible to him.
So, he thought, in a year or so Great Britain would have some ironclads with which to challenge the Americans. However, the Americans were building coastal Monitors as quickly as a chicken lays eggs. It was even rumored that both the Union and the Confederacy were experimenting with ships that could operate underwater. It was a naval armaments race that Britain might not win, and Palmerston found the thought of sharing or even losing supremacy of the seas almost nauseating.
Lee and Grant, he thought sadly. It all depended on two previously unknown men named Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. The course of the British Empire depended on the skills of a pair of Americans he'd never met, and who represented social orders he found repugnant, slavery in the case of Lee, and the levelling of the aristocracy in the case of Grant. Lee was the one with the most skill, according to what Winfield Scott had written about him, but Grant was the new man, the American Cromwell, and one in whom Scott had placed his faith. Was this faith misplaced? Not likely. Grant had proven a deadly and dangerous adversary, and one who might defeat Lee, the Confederacy, and the British army.
What had happened? How had this terrible situation occurred? And how does one get out of this mess?
<
br /> Chapter Twenty-One
Arrival at the crowded Philadelphia train station had been the end of a virtual triumphal march for General Patrick Cleburne and the men of the Irish Legion. Wherever their packed trains had gone, they had been cheered by the local population, with Cleburne and the other senior officers feted by local dignitaries and politicians. It was a heady experience with effusive compliments, good food, and liquor in abundance. Mornings often meant sore heads, and the rocking of the trains induced copious nausea. There were, however, few complaints.
Most amazing to the officers and men of the Irish Legion, the adulation came from the same population that had thought of Irish immigrants as little more than savages and not much better than the darkies the Union was fighting to free. The Irish immigrant, the Catholic shantyman, and the bog-trotter were well on their way to being accepted by Protestant America.
“Incredible.” said Cleburne as he finally fought his way through this latest crowd while his men prepared to get in marching order. They would not be staying in Philadelphia. Instead, they would be moving west to join the rest of General Thomas's army, which was encamped in that direction.
“Nothing more than we deserve.” responded Attila Flynn. He tried to sound blase, but his emotions betrayed him and there was a tremor in his voice. Philadelphia's welcome rivaled that of New York's. Philadelphia was yet another great city, and one of many he'd never visited before, but one that gave further indication of the strength of the Union. At the time of the American Revolution, Philadelphia had been the second-largest city in the British Empire, second only to London itself. Now it had been eclipsed in size by New York, and possibly Boston, but Philadelphia was still an enormous assemblage of people and industry. He'd never been in the Deep South, but he'd been told that none of the Confederate cities had anything like the wealth, population, and industrial power of the North. Nor, he thought happily, did England. Oh, she had her Liverpools and her Birminghams, but none so many and none so numerous, powerful, and vibrant as what the Union had to offer. God help England. No. he corrected himself. God damn England.
“I won't argue that.” Cleburne said, interrupting Flynn's mental wanderings, “but I do wonder just what we've done to deserve all this.” They had managed to work their way into a decent-looking restaurant near the train station. Cleburne's general's star had gotten them a table, and they'd cheerfully accepted the offer of a free meal. The men of the Legion were eating far less elegantly in the streets in preparation for the march out of town, but were suffering no hardships. Sympathetic townspeople were showering the troops with breads, cakes, and other delicacies, which the men gobbled up like children.
Flynn chuckled. “Let's just say that, thanks to some well-placed articles with sympathetic newspapers, the Irish Legion is considered one of the reasons Toronto fell and Britain is abandoning Canada.”
Cleburne was aghast. His Legion had done nothing to warrant such praise. Aside from some minor skirmishes, his men had done damned little since the fall of Toronto for the very good reason that the war in Canada had entered a lull. His men were far from combat veterans. The vast majority had yet to fire a shot at anything other than a stationary wooden target.
“You shouldn't tell lies,” he said.
“And what of it.” Flynn sniffed. “Every regiment is sending songs of its own praise back to the folks at home. Are we the only unit winning the war single-handed? I fervently doubt it. Politics and war go hand in hand and don't doubt it for one minute.”
Cleburne knew that Flynn's actions also served another purpose in that he was laying the groundwork by building the history of a blood debt the American government and people owed to the oppressed men and women of Ireland. The debt might be fictional, but the people of the North seemed to be enamored of men travelling from far-off lands to help preserve the Union. It also helped that the men of Ireland spoke a kind of English, unlike the more numerous Germans who, it was told, couldn't be understood by their mothers. It was something the devious Flynn hoped would be collectible from the U.S. government at a time in the very near future.
“Always planning ahead, aren't you?” Cleburne jibed. He no longer detested the angry Fenian leader, although he couldn't yet quite bring himself to like the man.
“One has to. And that is why I left those fools up in London to keep raising the flag every day on our new Irish Republic in Canada. That place is now a political backwater, although its presence and continued existence serve a purpose. For instance, as a hemorrhoid for Palmerston.”
“Not a bad thought,” Cleburne conceded. “And where are you off to now? Washington?”
“You don't want me tenting with your army?”
Cleburne laughed. “Not for one second. Winter's coming and I don't want to be held responsible for your freezing to death, which I am confident you'd manage to do in the middle of summer if forced to live outdoors.”
“You are correct, of course, both as to my destination and my abilities in the wilderness. I am off to Washington, where I am confident I will receive a better welcome than the last time. I have, for instance, been corresponding with Secretary of State Seward.”
“Ah, but has he been responding to you or are you just pelting him with letters?”
Flynn smiled. “Let's just say the correspondence has been one-sided; however, I attribute that to the confusion in the mails as caused by the war.”
“Of course.” Cieburne said drily.
Of course, Flynn thought. His smile and comments hid a growing desperation that nothing was going to happen to help free Ireland. He had to gain access to Seward, had to convince him that Ireland's cause was the Union's cause as well.
Abigail Watson was usually required to work on Sunday mornings, which meant that she could not go to church until well after any services were over. Her current owners, the Haskills, were decent people, but there were too many breakfasts to make and rooms to clean at the Haskills’ small but tasteful hotel where she worked to permit her to leave until her tasks were done. Besides. since when did Negroes have to go to church? Their needs were supposed to be taken care of by their owners.
Abigail had to admit that her owners didn't even have to permit her to leave at all. Most Southerners didn't agree that blacks had souls, so how could they be in need of salvation? What the Haskills thought about Abigail's salvation didn't matter. At least they were decent enough to permit her a degree of privacy, and time to pray, and she appreciated that.
All the while, however. Abigail prayed not for salvation but for a means to betray the Haskills and every other slave owner in the Confederacy.
A few of Richmond's churches tolerated the presence of Negroes so long as they didn't disrupt proceedings or didn't sit where they weren't supposed to. Abigail knew of several in the neighborhood who would let her in and let her sit in the back. She chose one. sat in the darkness, and made herself small. It didn't matter to her which church she was in, as the differences in Christian beliefs meant nothing to her. She believed in salvation and a God who would someday make things right for people like her. She believed in a God of justice. And of vengeance.
Hannibal Watson's sudden reappearance in her life and his equally sudden and brutal demise had brought feelings of rage to the surface, emotions that she had almost forgotten she'd had or was capable of.
Some people thought that most slaves were happy with their lot and used that as a reason for perpetuating slavery. What fools, she thought. How could someone who was owned by someone else ever be happy?
Oh, there were those slaves who knew no other life and were owned by fairly benign owners who treated them well. Those slaves had a level of contentment simply because they could comprehend no other way. Kind of like a blind man who had never seen a sunset, she thought. And there were those slaves who realized that the world outside slavery could be savagely hostile to anyone with a dark skin and who wished to improve themselves. For them, freedom was frightening.
Freedom, shed decided, was l
ike that blind man getting sight. Once perceived, it could not be replaced, and a real human would never let anyone take it from them.
Abigail Watson had never known freedom, but she knew people who had. One was her son. She had just received a letter from him up in Boston. It thrilled her that he was able to read and write and be able to do so openly. Abigail was self-educated, but since teaching slaves to be literate was generally illegal, she had prudently disguised the fact of her learning. Why, she wondered, did anyone have to hide the value of their mind?
But, more important, how soon would God's righteous wrath bring down the Confederacy? How could she help? Could she kill someone important? Wealthy and influential people frequently stayed at the Haskills’ hotel, but certainly no one whose loss would end slavery. Worse, any act like that on her part would result in her own execution, and it would be just as dreadful as Hannibal's. What kind of civilization would treat its people like animals and then destroy them as if they were even less than animals?
She would pray. Maybe the God who delivered the Israelites from captivity would have an answer for her.
“I am flat damned exhausted, and I don't even have to do a lot of the work,” said Billy Harwell as he sat on the ground in front of his and Olaf’s campfire and waited for dinner to cook. Tonight it was a kind of stew. Olaf cooked, and Billy didn't want to know too much about what went into Scandinavian specialties. If they tasted good, then that was fine with him.
When word first reached them that Lees army was headed north and across the Potomac, there had been a lot of marching and countermarching until fear that the Confederate army was hiding over the next hill had subsided. Then, however, General Meade had taken a page from Grant's book and decided that the soldiers under his control should be worked hard and thus be in shape to fight a coming battle. As a result, the marching back and forth had continued until the men's blistered feet subsided into calluses. Now they could march barefoot on coals if need be. Billy wondered why, since right feet and left feet were shaped differently, shoes or boots didn't reflect that. Instead, shoes were shaped the same, and only continued painful wear served to shape a boot into the shape of the foot. It worked, but it took so much time and hurt like the devil until the shoe was gotten under control.
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