Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Mr. Samworth reads Scripture very well,” Mrs. Gordon said.

  “Perhaps, Caleb, you would read from God’s word?” the Reverend John Gordon asked, “and after that”—he turned to his guests again to explain the form of service—“we have a time for prayer and testimony. I encourage the men to witness to the power of God’s saving grace in their lives, and then we sing another hymn and I make a few remarks before we close our worship with a last hymn and a blessing. We then give the patients some time for private conversation or prayer. Sometimes they need us to write letters for them. Your assistance”—he smiled first at Sally, then at Starbuck—“will be very greatly appreciated, I’m sure.”

  “And we shall need help distributing the hymnals,” Mrs. Gordon said.

  “It’ll be a pleasure,” Sally said warmly, and to Starbuck’s amazement she really did seem to be enjoying herself, for when the conversation became general once more her laughter sounded clear and often across the small room. Mrs. Gordon frowned at the sound, but Julia was plainly enjoying Sally’s company.

  At five o’clock the sallow maid collected the tea plates, and afterward the Reverend John Gordon said a word of prayer in which he begged Almighty God to shower blessing upon their worship this evening, and then Caleb Samworth fetched the wagon which was kept in a yard just around the corner in Charity Street. The wagon was painted black and had a black canvas cover supported by hoops. Two benches ran on either side of the wagon’s bed, while a pair of shining steel rails were fixed down its center. “Is that where they put the casket?” Sally asked as Caleb helped her up the steps built into the folded-down backboard.

  “Indeed, Miss Royall,” he said.

  Sally and Julia shared a bench with Adam, Starbuck sat with the Reverend and Mrs. Gordon, while Caleb Samworth perched on the driver’s box swathed in an oilskin cape. It took the hearse twenty minutes to reach the hill where the newly constructed hospital sheds spread across the grass of Chimborazo Park. It was dusk and a dim yellow lamplight was showing through scores of tiny windows. A haze of coalsmoke lingered in the rain over the shed’s tarred roofs. The mission party alighted outside the ward chosen for this night’s service, then Caleb and Adam took the wagon to fetch the hospital’s harmonium while Julia and Sally distributed copies of the mission’s hymnal.

  Starbuck went with Adam. “I wanted a word in private,” he confided to his friend as the undertaker’s cart jolted over the wet ground. “Have you spoken to your father?”

  “I haven’t had a chance,” Adam said. He did not look at Starbuck but stared into the wet night.

  “All I want is to be back with my company!” Starbuck appealed.

  “I know.”

  “Adam!”

  “I’ll try! But it’s difficult. I have to choose the right moment. Father’s touchy, you know that.” Adam shook his head. “Why are you so keen to fight? Why don’t you just sit the war out here?”

  “Because I’m a soldier.”

  “A fool, you mean,” Adam said with a touch of exasperation, then the wagon lurched to a halt, and it was time to carry the harmonium back to the ward.

  There were sixty sick men in the wooden shed. Twenty of their cots were arranged against each long wall while another twenty cots were set in a double row in the hut’s center. A potbellied stove occupied a central position, its hot plate crowded with coffeepots. The nurse’s table was pushed aside to make room for the harmonium. Julia pumped the carpeted pedals, then played a few wheezy chords as though clearing the cobwebs out of the instrument’s reeds.

  The Reverend and Mrs. Gordon went around the cots shaking hands and saying words of comfort. Sally did the same, and Starbuck noted how her presence cheered the wounded men. Her laughter filled the shed with brightness and Starbuck thought that he had never seen Sally so happy. Water buckets were placed about the ward so that the patients’ wound dressings could be kept damp, and Sally found a sponge and gently moistened the dark-stained bandages. The ward stank of decaying flesh and human waste. It was cold and damp despite the stove, and dark despite the half-dozen lanterns that hung from the rough-sawn rafters. Some of the men were unconscious, most were fevered, only a few had battle wounds. “Once the fighting starts proper again,” a sergeant who had lost an arm told Starbuck, “that’s when you’ll see the wounded arrive.” The Sergeant had come for the service with a score of other patients from neighboring sheds, bringing chairs and extra lanterns. The Sergeant had been injured in a train accident. “Fell onto the rails,” he told Starbuck, “when I was drunk. My own fault.” He looked appreciatively at Sally. “There’s a rare-looking girl, Captain, a girl to make a man’s life worth living.”

  The sound of the hymn singing brought yet more patients to the ward, together with some unwounded officers who had been visiting friends and who now crowded at the back of the shed. Some of the wounded were Yankees, but all the voices swelled in melody, filling the shed with a sentimental comradeship that made Starbuck suddenly yearn for the company of his soldiers. One man alone seemed unaffected by the singing; a bearded, pale, gaunt creature who had been sleeping, but who suddenly woke and began to scream in terror. The voices faltered, then Sally crossed to the man’s side and pulled his head into her arms and stroked his cheek, and Starbuck saw the man’s fluttering hands calm down on the threadbare gray blanket that was his cot’s covering.

  The gaunt man stayed silent as the voices sang on. Starbuck watched Julia at the harmonium, then suddenly felt the pull of his old faith tug at him. Maybe it was the yellow light, or the faces of the wounded who looked so pathetically pleased to have God’s word brought to them, or maybe it was Julia’s absorbed beauty, but Starbuck was suddenly assailed with a sinner’s guilt as he listened to the Reverend John Gordon pray that God’s blessings would shower upon these wounded souls. The missioner proved to have a gentle and effective manner that seemed far more suitable than the strong rant that Starbuck’s father would have employed. The Scripture was from Ecclesiastes chapter twelve and Samworth read it in a high, nervous voice. Starbuck followed the passage in his brother’s Bible, which Adam had sent with the invitation to take tea.

  The words of Scripture struck sharp at Starbuck’s soul. “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth,” the passage began, and James had written beside it in his tiny handwriting, “Easier to be a Christian in later life? Years bring wisdom? Pray for grace now,” and Starbuck knew he had fallen from grace, that he was a sinner, that the doors of hell gaped as wide as the flaming maw of the blast furnaces down by Richmond’s river, and he felt the trembling terror of a sinner come face to face with God. “‘Because man goeth to his long home,’” Samworth read, “‘and the mourners go about the street. Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern,’” and the words filled Starbuck with the sudden premonition that he would die an untimely death: flensed by a Yankee shot, disemboweled by a vengeful, righteous shell, a sinner gone to his long and fiery home.

  He did not hear much of the sermon, or many of the testimonies in which the wounded men gave praise to God for His blessings on their lives. Instead Starbuck was lost in the dark pit of remorse. After the service, he decided, he would seek a word with the Reverend John Gordon. He would lay his sins before God and, with the missioner’s help, seek to return his soul to its proper place. But how could he ever take his proper place? He had quarreled with Ethan Ridley because of Sally, and he had killed Ethan Ridley because of the quarrel, and that one act alone would surely damn his soul forever. He told himself the killing had been self-defense, but his conscience knew it was murder. Starbuck blinked back tears. All was vanity, but what use was vanity in the face of eternal damnation?

  It was well past eight o’clock when the Reverend John Gordon pronounced his blessing on the patients, and then the missioner moved from bed to bed, praying and offering encouragement. The wounded seemed so young; even to Starbuck they seemed like mer
e boys.

  One of the hospital’s senior surgeons arrived, still in his bloody apron, to thank the Reverend John Gordon. With the surgeon was a clergyman, the Reverend Doctor Peterkin, who was the hospital’s honorary chaplain as well as one of the city’s more fashionable ministers. He recognized Adam and went to talk with him, while Julia, her music put away, crossed to Starbuck. “How did you find our little service, Mr. Starbuck?”

  “I was moved, Miss Gordon.”

  “Father is good, isn’t he? His sincerity shines.” She was worried by Starbuck’s expression, mistaking his sinner’s guilt as a distaste for the ward’s horrors. “Does it deter you from soldiering?” Julia asked.

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.” He looked at Sally, who was now devoting herself to the ragged, frightened man who gripped her hands as though she alone could keep him alive. “Soldiers don’t think they’ll end up in places like this.”

  “Or worse,” Julia said drily. “There are wards here for the dying, for men who can never be helped. Though I’d like to help them.” She spoke wistfully.

  “I’m sure you do,” Starbuck said gallantly.

  “I don’t mean by visiting and playing hymns, Mr. Starbuck, I mean by nursing them. But mother won’t hear of it. She says I will contract a fever, or worse. Nor will Adam permit it. He wants to protect me from the war. You know he disapproves of it?”

  “I know,” Starbuck said, then glanced at Julia. “And you?”

  “There’s nothing here to merit approval,” Julia said. “Yet I confess I am too proud to want the North to triumph over us. So maybe I am a warmonger. Is that what makes men fight? Mere pride?”

  “Mere pride,” Starbuck said. “On the battlefield you want to prove you’re better than the other side.” He recalled the joy of hitting the Yankees’ open flank at Ball’s Bluff, the panic in the blue ranks, the screams as the enemy were tumbled off the crest and down to the bloody, bullet-lashed river. Then he felt guilty at that remembered pleasure. The gates of hell, he thought, would surely gape especially wide for him.

  “Mr. Starbuck?” Julia asked, concerned for the horror that showed on his face, but before he could respond and before Julia could say another word, Sally suddenly hurried across the ward and took Starbuck’s elbow.

  “Take me away, please.” Her voice was low and urgent.

  “Sal—” Starbuck checked himself, realizing that Julia knew Sally as Victoria. “What is it?”

  “That man,” Sally just breathed the words, not even bothering to indicate which man she spoke of, “recognizes me. Please, Nate. Take me away.”

  “I’m sure it doesn’t matter,” Starbuck said softly.

  “Please!” Sally hissed. “Just take me out of here!”

  “Might I help?” Julia asked, puzzled.

  “I think we should go,” Starbuck said, though the trouble was that Sally’s cloak and his coat were piled at the end of the shed where the bloody-aproned surgeon was standing, and it was the surgeon who had recognized Sally and spoken with the Reverend Doctor Peterkin, who, in turn, now talked to Mrs. Gordon. “Come,” Starbuck said, and he pulled Sally by the hand. He would abandon the coats, even though he regretted losing the fine gray coat that had belonged to Oliver Wendell Holmes. “You will forgive me?” he asked Julia as he edged past her.

  “Mr. Starbuck!” Mrs. Gordon called imperiously. “Miss Royall!”

  “Ignore her,” Starbuck said to Sally.

  “Miss Royall! Come here!” Mrs. Gordon called and Sally, stung by the tone, turned toward her. Adam hurried down the ward to see what was the matter while the Reverend John Gordon looked up from where he knelt beside a fevered man’s cot.

  “I will speak with you outside,” Mrs. Gordon declared, and she turned onto the small porch where, on fine days, the patients could take the air under the shelter of a sloping roof.

  Sally plucked up her cloak. The surgeon smirked and offered her a bow. “Son of a bitch,” Sally hissed at him. Starbuck extricated his coat and went onto the porch.

  “Words fail me,” Mrs. Gordon greeted Sally and Starbuck in the rainy darkness.

  “You wanted words with me?” Sally confronted her.

  “I cannot believe it of you, Mr. Starbuck.” Mrs. Gordon ignored the defiant Sally and looked at Starbuck instead. “That you, raised in a godly home, should have the ill manners to introduce a woman like this into my house.”

  “A woman like what?” Sally demanded. The Reverend John Gordon had come onto the porch and, in obedience to his wife’s sharp command, closed the door, though not before Adam and Julia had crowded onto the small porch.

  “You will go inside, Julia,” her mother insisted.

  “Let her stay!” Sally said. “A woman like what?”

  “Julia!” Mrs. Gordon glared at her daughter.

  “Mother, dear,” the Reverend John Gordon said, “might you tell us what this is all about?”

  “Doctor Peterkin,” Mrs. Gordon said indignantly, “has just informed me that this, this, woman is a…” She paused, unable to find a word she could decently use in front of her daughter. “Julia! Inside this instant!”

  “My dear!” the Reverend John Gordon said. “What is she?”

  “A Magdalen!” Mrs. Gordon shouted the word.

  “She means I’m a whore, Reverend,” Sally said sourly.

  “And you brought her to my house!” Mrs. Gordon shrieked at Starbuck.

  “Mrs. Gordon,” Starbuck began, but he could not interrupt the tirade that now poured on his head like the rain that was drumming on the porch’s tarpaper roof. Mrs. Gordon wondered if the Reverend Elial Starbuck knew to what depths of iniquity his son had sunk, and how far from God’s grace he had fallen, and how evil was his choice of companions. “She is a fallen woman!” Mrs. Gordon screamed, “and you brought her to my house!”

  “Our Lord consorted with sinners,” the Reverend John Gordon said feebly.

  “But He didn’t give them tea!” Mrs. Gordon was beyond argument. She turned on Adam. “And you, Mr. Faulconer, I am shocked by your friendships. There is no other word. I am shocked.”

  Adam looked remorsefully at Starbuck. “Is it true?”

  “Sally is a friend,” Starbuck said. “A good friend. I’m proud to know her.”

  “Sally Truslow!” Adam said, the identity of Miss Royall at last yielding to his memory.

  “Are you saying you know this woman?” Mrs. Gordon challenged Adam.

  “He don’t know me,” Sally said tiredly.

  “I am forced to wonder if you are a fit companion for my daughter, Mr. Faulconer.” Mrs. Gordon pressed her advantage on Adam. “This night has been a providence of God; maybe it has revealed your true self!”

  “I said he don’t know me!” Sally insisted.

  “Do you know her?” the Reverend John Gordon asked Adam.

  Adam shrugged. “Her father was one of my family’s tenants once. A long time ago. Beyond that I don’t know her.”

  “But you do know Mr. Starbuck.” Mrs. Gordon had not wrung a full measure of remorse from Adam yet. “Are you telling me you approve of the company he keeps?”

  Adam looked at his friend. “I’m sure Nate didn’t know Miss Truslow’s nature.”

  “I knew it,” Starbuck said, “and as I said, she is a friend.” He put an arm around Sally’s shoulder.

  “And you approve of your friend’s choice of companion?” Mrs. Gordon demanded of Adam. “Do you, Mr. Faulconer? For I cannot have my daughter attached, however respectably, to a man who consorts with the friends of scarlet women.”

  “No,” Adam said, “I don’t approve.”

  “You’re just like your father,” Sally said. “Rotten to the core. If you Faulconers didn’t have money you’d be lower than dogs.” She pulled herself free of Starbuck’s arm and ran into the rain.

  Starbuck turned to follow Sally, but was checked by Mrs. Gordon. “You’re making a choice!” she warned him. “This is the night you choose between God and
the devil, Mr. Starbuck!”

  “Nate!” Adam added his voice to Mrs. Gordon’s warning. “Let her go.”

  “Why? Because she’s a whore?” Starbuck felt the rage rise in him, a filthy rage of hatred for these sanctimonious prigs. “I told you, Adam, she’s a friend, and you don’t abandon friends. God damn you all.” He ran after Sally, catching up with her at the edge of the sheds where the muddy slope of Chimborazo Park fell steeply down into the Bloody Run, where the city’s dueling ground was set beside a stream. “I’m sorry,” he told Sally, taking her arm again.

  She sniffed. The rain made her hair dank and straggling. She was crying and Starbuck pulled her into his body, covering her with the scarlet lining of his coat. The rain stung his face. “You were right,” Sally said, her voice muffled. “We shouldn’t have gone.”

  “They shouldn’t have behaved like that,” Starbuck said.

  Sally cried softly. “I sometimes just want to be ordinary.” She managed to speak through the tears. “I just want a house and babies and a rug on the floor and an apple tree. I don’t want to live like my father and I don’t want to be what I am now. Not forever. I just want to be plain. Do you know what I mean, Nate?” She looked up at him, her face lit by the fires of the forges that burned day and night beside the river on the far side of the run.

  He stroked her rain-dampened face. “I know,” he said.

  “Don’t you want to be ordinary?” she asked.

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  “Jesus,” Sally swore. She pulled away from him, cuffed her nose, and pushed her wet hair off her forehead. “I thought if the war ends I’d have enough money to buy a small store. Nothing fancy, Nate. Dry goods, maybe? I’m saving my money, you see, so I can be ordinary. No one special. Not Royall anymore, just plain ordinary. But my father’s right,” she said with a new note of vengeance, “there are two kinds of folk in this world. There are sheep and wolves, Nate, sheep and wolves, and you can’t change your nature. And they’re all sheep.” She jerked a contemptuous thumb toward the hospital sheds. “Including your friend. He’s like his father. He’s frightened of women.” It was a scathing judgment.