Battle Flag

by Bernard Cornwell

  "She wanted to tell you herself," Lassan said, "but I insisted."

  "Thank you," Starbuck said, wondering why he was sud­denly so damned jealous. He had no call for jealousy. Indeed, if he was so in love with Sally, why did he sneak out of the Brigade's lines at night to visit the crude tavern just south of the camp? McComb's Tavern had been put out of bounds, but there was a red-haired girl working one of the upstairs rooms, and Starbuck was happy to risk Washington Faulconer's punishment to visit her. He had no call for jeal­ousy, he told himself again, then began walking north along the cart track. "You're a lucky man, Lassan."

  "Yes, I am."

  "And Sally's lucky, too," Starbuck said gallantly, even though he could not help feeling betrayed.

  "I think so," the Frenchman said lightly. "I am teaching her French."

  Starbuck forced a smile at the thought of Sally Truslow, a girl from a hardscrabble farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, learning to speak French, except it was not so strange, for Sally had journeyed a long way from her father's comfortless house. She had learned society's manners, and how to dress and how to talk, and yet again Starbuck felt a pang of jeal­ousy at the memory of Sally's exquisite beauty; then he again thought how unfair it was for him to be envious, for as often as he thought of Sally he also thought of Julia Gordon, Adam Faulconer's abandoned fiancée, and he did not know which girl he preferred, or whether, in truth, he was simply a fool for any woman, even for a red-haired whore in a coun­try tavern. "I am glad for you, Lassan," he said with forced generosity, "truly."

  "Thank you," Lassan said simply, and then stopped beside Starbuck where the cart track left the trees to run down to the river. A house had once stood on the nearer bank, but all that was left of the house now was a stub of broken brick chimney and the outlines of a stone foundation within which grew a thick and entangling clump of bushes. The farther bank of the river was a forest of shade trees that hung over the swirling water, though immediately opposite the house a cart track led between two willows into the far woods. Lassan stared at that distant cart track, then frowned. "Do you see what I see, Nate?"

  Starbuck had been thinking of Sally's startling beauty and of Julia Gordon's graver face, but now, sensing that he was being tested, he stared at the landscape and tried to see whatever was significant in it. A ruined house, a river, a far bank of thick trees, and then he saw the anomaly just as clearly as Lassan's trained eye had seen it.

  The track that he and Lassan had followed to this spot did not end at the river but rather continued on the farther bank. Which meant there was a ford here. Which was strange because every crossing of the Rapidan was suppos­edly guarded to prevent a surprise Northern attack, yet here was a ford standing empty and unwatched. "Because no one knows the ford's here," Starbuck said. "Or maybe the roadbed is washed away?" he added.

  "There's an easy way to find out," Lassan said. He had the instinctive caution of any soldier coming to a river, espe­cially a river that divided two armies, but he had stared hard at the further bank through a small glass and was satisfied that no Yankees waited in ambush, and so he now walked into the sunlight, where he took off his spurred boots and hitched up his saber. Starbuck followed the Frenchman, wading into the river, which flowed fast, clear, and shallow across a bed of fine gravel. Long weeds trailed upstream, and a few fish darted in the shadows downstream, but nothing obstructed Lassan and Starbuck's progress; indeed, the water scarce reached either man's knees. At the far bank the road reared steeply up from the water, but not so steeply that a horse team could not have pulled a heavy gun and limber out of the river. "If the Yankees knew about this ford," Lassan said, "they could be round your backside in a trice."

  "I thought you said they weren't going to attack us," Starbuck commented as he pulled himself up onto the northern bank.

  "And I've also told you a hundred times that you must always expect the unexpected from your enemy," Lassan said as he sat in the shade of a willow and stared back across the river. He gestured upstream with the cigar. "What units are that way?"

  "None," Starbuck said. "We're the westernmost brigade of the army."

  "So the Yankees really could hook round your backside," Lassan said softly. He smoked in silence for a few seconds, then abruptly changed the subject back to his new house-hold. "Sally hopes you'll visit us when you're in Richmond. I hope so, too."

  "Thank you," Starbuck said awkwardly.

  Lassan grinned. "I am becoming domesticated. My mother would be most amused. Poor Mama. I am an adven­turer, while my sister lives in England, so Mama is rather alone these days."

  "You've a sister?"

  "The Countess of Benfleet." Lassan gave a half-mocking grimace at the grand-sounding title. "Dominique married an English nobleman, so now she has a castle, five grown chil­dren, and probably twice as many lovers. I hope she does, anyway." He tossed the stub of his cigar into the water. "One of Dominique's sons wants to join this war and she asked me which side he should fight for. I said the North if he wants to be respectable and the South if he wants adventure." Lassan shrugged as if to suggest he did not much care either way. "I wonder if this ford's got a name," he said idly.

  "Dead Mary's Ford." A man spoke suddenly from the far side of the track, and the voice so startled Starbuck that he reached for his revolver. "It's all right, massa! Silas is just plain harmless." The unseen speaker chuckled; then the bushes stirred and Starbuck saw that an old Negro had been hiding in the trees just a few feet away. The old man must have been watching them for a long time. "Silas is a free man!" the Negro said as he sidled onto the track and drew from his filthy clothes a scrap of paper that had long lost any legibility. "Free! Massa Kemp gave Silas freedom." He waved the disintegrating scrap of greasy paper. "God bless Massa Kemp."

  "You're Silas?" Lassan asked.

  "Silas." The old man confirmed his identity with a nod. "Mad Silas," he added as though the qualification might prove useful. He was staring keenly at the stub of Starbuck's cigar.

  Lassan took out a new cigar, lit it, and gave it to the old man, who was now squatting in the road. "Do you live here, Silas?"

  "Over there, massa." Silas pointed to the ruined house. "Silas has a lair in there." He chuckled, then found the internal rhyme even funnier and almost rolled backward as he laughed at himself.

  "How old are you, Silas?" Lassan asked.

  "Silas is older than you, massa!" Silas laughed again. "But Silas's daddy now, he saw the redcoats!"

  "Why Dead Mary's Ford, Silas?" Lassan asked.

  The old man shuffled a few inches nearer. His clothes looked as old as himself, and his hair was white and matted with dirt, while his face was deep lined. Lassan's question had swept the humor from that face, replacing it with suspicion. "'Cos Mary died," he said at last.

  "Here?" Starbuck asked gently.

  "The white folks came. Looking for Silas, but Silas wasn't here. Mistress Pearce's baby gone, see? They thought Silas took it, so they came and burned Silas's house. And burned Silas's wife." The old man looked very close to tears as he stared at the house, where, Starbuck now saw, a kind of hollowed den was scooped in the bushes under the brick chimney. "But the baby was never gone after all." Silas sighed as he finished the story. "She grown up now. But Silas's Mary, she's still here too."

  Lassan lit himself another cigar and smoked in compan­ionable silence for a few moments before giving the old man a smile. "Listen, Silas. More white folk are coming here. They're going to dig trenches along the edge of the trees over there, at the top of your meadow. They don't mean you any harm, but if there's anything in your house that's valu­able to you, take it away and hide it. You understand me?" "Silas understands you, massa," Silas said very intensely. Lassan gave the old man two more cigars, then clapped Starbuck on the shoulder. "Time to get back, Nate." The two men waded the ford, pulled on their boots, then walked back through the woods. Starbuck wanted to find Major Hinton, but the Major was out of the lines, and so, accom­panied by Lassan, Starbuck went
to the big farmhouse that Washington Faulconer had commandeered for his head­quarters.

  Washington Faulconer had gone to Gordonsville, leaving Colonel Swynyard in command of the Brigade. The Colonel was in the farmhouse parlor, sitting beneath the crossed flags of the Faulconer Legion that Faulconer kept unfurled and draped across the parlor wall. One of the two flags was the Faulconer Legion's own banner derived from the Faulconer family's coat of arms. It showed three red crescents on a white field and had the family's motto, "Forever Ardent," wreathed around the lower crescent. The flag measured thirty-six square feet and had a yellow fringe, just as did its companion flag, which was the new battle flag of the Confederate States of America.

  The original flag of the Confederacy had carried three stripes, two red and one white, with a star-spangled blue field in its upper corner, but when the wind dropped and the flag hung limp, it had resembled the Stars and Stripes, and so a new flag had been designed, a scarlet banner blazoned with a blue cross of Saint Andrew, and on that diagonal, white-edged cross were thirteen white stars. The old flag with its stars and three stripes was still the official flag of the Confederacy, but when the Confederacy's soldiers marched into battle, they now marched under their new battle flag.

  The Confederate War Department had decreed that infantry regiments should carry a battle flag four feet square, but such a flag was not nearly grand enough for Brigadier General Washington Faulconer, who had insisted on having a banner six feet by six feet made of the finest silk and edged with a tasseled fringe of golden threads. The General had intended that his Legion's two flags should be the finest war banners in all the Confederacy, and so he had commissioned them from the same expensive French factory that had manufactured his ill-fated crescent-badged shoulder patches.

  "Which means," Colonel Griffin Swynyard said when he saw the Frenchman admiring the lavish flags, "that every marksman in the Northern army will be aiming for them."

  "Maybe you could persuade Faulconer to stand beneath them?" Starbuck suggested sweetly.

  "Now, Nate. Let us be charitable," Swynyard said. The Colonel had been busily trying to reconcile the Brigade's accounts and seemed glad to be interrupted by visitors. He stood and shook hands with Colonel Lassan, apologized that General Faulconer was away from the headquarters, and insisted on hearing what circumstances had brought the scarred French cavalry officer to the Confederate army. "You're welcome to a lemonade, Colonel," Swynyard said when the story was told, indicating a jug of pale yellow liquid that was protected from wasps by a beaded cover of fine muslin.

  "I have wine, Colonel." Lassan produced one of his captured bottles.

  Swynyard grimaced. "Captain Starbuck will tell you that I have forsworn all ardent liquor, Colonel. For over two weeks now!" he added proudly, and it was astonishing what a change the abstinence had wrought in the Colonel. The sallow cast of his skin had vanished, his sweating fits had faded, and the twitch in his cheek that had once convulsed his face into a grotesque rictus had subsided to a faint tic. His eyes were clear and alert, he stood straighter, and he was dressed each day in clean linen. "I am a new man," he boasted, "though alas, my rebirth has not given me a facility for mathematics." He gestured at the Brigade's ledgers. "I need someone who can understand accounts, someone with an education; someone like you, Starbuck."

  "Not me, Colonel," Starbuck said, "I was at Yale."

  "That must make you good for something," Swynyard insisted.

  "Not one whole hell of a lot," Starbuck said, "except maybe discovering unmapped fords." He crossed to a hand-drawn map of the area that lay on a claw-footed table. "Just here," he said, "not a long rifle shot away from the lines."

  For a moment Swynyard thought Starbuck was being jocular; then he crossed to the map table. "Truly?" he asked.

  "Truly," Lassan confirmed.

  "Right there." Starbuck pointed on the pencil-drawn map. "It's called Dead Mary's Ford."

  "We waded across it, Colonel," Lassan said, picking up the tale, "knee deep, passable by artillery, and as wide open as a barrack-town whorehouse on a Saturday night."

  Swynyard shouted for his horse. Now that he had released his slaves, he was using Hiram Ketley, Colonel Bird's half-witted orderly, as his servant. Bird himself was on his way home to Faulconer Court House and was expected to survive so long as his wound stayed clean. "You don't have a horse, Starbuck?" Swynyard asked as his own mare was brought to the front of the house.

  "No, Colonel. Can't afford one."

  Swynyard ordered another horse saddled, and then the three men rode north through the woods to where the ruined house stood beside the river. Swynyard rode across the ford, then back again. "Our lord and master," he said to Starbuck, "ordered me not to change the Brigade's disposi­tions without his permission, but even Faulconer, I suspect, would agree that we have to put a guard here." He stopped talking, distracted by the stooped, ragged figure of Mad Silas, who had suddenly appeared out of the bushes in his ruined house like a beast scuttling out of a burrow. "Who's that?" Swynyard asked.

  "Some poor, old, mad black," Lassan said. "He lives there."

  "Is that a skull he's carrying?" Swynyard asked in a tone of horror.

  Starbuck stared and felt a sudden shock as he realized that the object in Silas's hands was indeed an old yellow skull. "Jesus," he said faintly.

  "It's more likely to belong to Dead Mary," Lassan said dryly.

  "I suppose he knows what he's doing," Swynyard said as Silas crossed the river and disappeared into the far woods, "which is more than we do." He returned his attention to the ford. "If we've not heard of this crossing, then I can't believe the Yankees know about it, but even so we can't take a chance. Why don't you bring your company here, Starbuck, with B and E as well? I'll make you a separate command, which means you'll bivouac here. You'll have to dig in, of course, and I'll inspect your earthworks at sunset tonight."

  For a second Starbuck did not quite understand the implications of the Colonel's words. "Does that mean I'll be in command?" he asked.

  "Who else? The tooth fairy?" Swynyard's conversion had not entirely robbed him of savagery. "Of course you're in command. B and E Companies are commanded by lieu­tenants, in case you hadn't noticed. But, of course," he added, "if you don't feel equal to the responsibility of com­mand?" He left the question dangling.

  "I'm up to it, sir, and thank you," Starbuck said, and then he saw Swynyard's triumphant grin and realized that he had actually called the Colonel "sir." But then this was a special occasion, the first time that Captain Nathaniel Starbuck had been given the responsibility of an indepen­dent command.

  "I suspect the ford is in safe hands now," Swynyard said, pleased with himself. "So, Colonel"—he turned to Lassan— "you've plainly seen more adventure than most. Like me!" He held up his left hand with its missing fingers. "So let us exchange stories of scars. Off you go, Starbuck! Fetch your men. Leave the horse with Ketley."

  "Yes, sir," Starbuck said and felt his spirits soar. He had a ford to guard.

  Priscilla Bird had taken over her husband's responsibilities in the small schoolroom of Faulconer Court House where, day by day, she taught fifty-three children whose ages ranged from five to sixteen. She was a good teacher, patient with the slow, demanding of the quick, and firm in her discipline, yet since the war had begun, there were two sounds that were guaranteed to erode all order in her schoolroom. One was the noise of marching feet, and the other the clatter of massed hoofbeats on the road outside, and despite all Priscilla's strictures the older children would always respond to those sounds by first sidling along their benches to see out of the windows, and if they saw soldiers passing, they would then ignore her protests and insist on hanging over the sills to cheer their passing heroes.

  Yet as the August temperatures rose to record levels, Priscilla became as sensitive to the sound of horses as any of the children. She expected her wounded husband's return, and that expectation was shot through with apprehension, love, relief, and fear, which was w
hy she no longer protested when the children crowded at the windows, for she was as keen as they to investigate every odd sound in the street. Not that troops passed very often, for, since the Faulconer Legion had marched away a year before, the town had seen precious few soldiers in its streets. The townsfolk read about the battles in the Faulconer County Gazette, but the tides of war had ebbed and flowed far from the streets of Faulconer Court House. Indeed, in the summer of 1862, hardly a uni­form was seen in the town at all until, on an August day as hot as any in memory, the sound of cavalry drew the chil­dren to the schoolroom windows. Priscilla joined them, scanning the street for the sight of a wagon that might be carrying her husband, but all she saw was a tired group of horsemen with weapons on their shoulders. The school­children cheered while Priscilla, her heart aching, felt sorry for the weary-looking men and their poor swaybacked horses.

  One or two of the troopers smiled at the cheering chil­dren, but most stayed grim-faced as they passed the school. There were only twenty of the horse soldiers, but their arrival was stirring the town with excitement and the expec­tation of news. "Are you with Jeb Stuart?" one boy called repeatedly from the schoolhouse. The Confederacy still buzzed with the remembered pleasure of Stuart's mocking ride clean around the whole of George McClellan's army. "Are you Jeb Stuart's men, mister?" the boy called again.