by John Jakes
Over Custer’s shoulder, a captain blustered, “Your brother’s entrenched behind a War Department desk, is he? Brave fellow.”
Billy’s self-control weakened. “He’s a major in the Ordnance Department. The work he does is damned important.”
“What is that work?” asked Custer with a droll smile. “Blacking Stanton’s boots? Serving refreshments to Stanton’s darky visitors?”
The captain said, “Kissing the secretary’s fundament on demand?”
“Damn you,” Billy said, and went for him.
Even Custer reacted with dismay. “Captain Rawlins, that goes a bit beyond—” Billy pushed Custer aside and flung a fist at the captain, who was a head taller. It glanced off the man’s chin. Others in the tent were up and shouting like cockfight spectators.
“Give the gentlemen room!”
“Not in here,” the sutler protested, waving a billy. Everyone ignored him. The captain unfastened his collar, a loose grin pushing up his cheeks. Stupid of me, Billy said to himself as he clenched and unclenched his hands. Plain stupid.
Someone entered the tent and called his name. But he was focused on the captain sidling forward.
“I’ll accommodate you, you little piece of Republican dung.” His fist zoomed up, landing in the center of Billy’s face while Billy was still raising his hands.
He spun away, fell across the counter, blood threads trickling from each nostril. The bigger man aimed another punch. Billy pushed upright, locked his hands, and struck the forearm of the fisted hand, diverting the blow. The captain drove a knee into Billy’s crotch, and he went down on his back. Grinning, the captain raised his boot over Billy’s face.
“There you are,” the familiar voice said from behind the other men crowding in.
Custer exclaimed, “That’s plenty, Rawlins. He may be a nigger Republican, but he deserves fair treatment.”
“The hell you say.” Down came the boot. Billy started to roll, knowing he was too slow.
Suddenly, mysteriously, Rawlins tilted backward. The boot intended to stomp Billy’s face made funny, jerking motions in midair. Billy elbowed himself from the dirt, blinked, and saw the reason. Lije Farmer was holding the captain’s shoulders, his face full of fury. He flung Billy’s adversary. Captain Rawlins sat down so hard he squealed.
Lije pulled Billy to his feet. “Conduct yourself out of this iniquitous establishment.” No one smiled. Given Lije’s size and the way he let his eye rove around the ring of McClellanites, no one had the nerve. To Rawlins he said, “It would be foolish to invoke rank in this matter. If you try, I shall testify against you.”
Billy took his kepi from the counter and walked out. A few steps from the tent, he heard Custer laugh again, joined by his friends and even by his barking dog.
Billy’s bruised, bloody face felt hot. Lije touched his sleeve. “‘But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn on him the other also.’”
“Sorry, Lije, I couldn’t do it. He hit low, then tried to mash my face with his boot. ’Course, it might have improved my looks—What do you think?”
Farmer neither smiled nor answered. Billy sobered and probed some tender spots. “Officers like that are tearing this army to pieces. I’d heard others say it, but I didn’t believe it until tonight.”
“It’s to be expected. The general possesses a profound knowledge of the military arts, but he also possesses a profound and raging ambition. It can be read in his orders, heard in his orations to the troops, seen in the nature and demeanor of his staff.”
“That curly locks lieutenant is one of them.”
“Yes. I have noticed him before. One cannot help it. He dresses to draw attention.”
“I know I was a fool to fly off that way. But they made remarks about my brother George that I couldn’t tolerate. I thank you for pulling that captain off me. One minute longer and there wouldn’t have been much left of my face. Your timing was remarkable.”
“It was not entirely coincidence. I have been searching for you. We are ordered to move out before daylight. Let the others fight the political wars. We’ve our own to wage, and it will keep us busy enough.”
Thinking of the tangly forests through which they had hacked a path with axes, of the roads they had planked and the streams they had bridged, Billy said a heartfelt, “Yes. I still thank you, Lije.” He felt the same warm regard for Farmer that he had felt for his late father. The older man bucked him up with a clap on the back, then fell to humming “Amazing Grace.”
No wonder the atmosphere on the peninsula was poisoned, Billy thought. They were practically at the door of the Confederate capital, which was defended by inferior numbers, yet the campaign dragged on, indecisive and costly. Tonight he had run smack into one of the reasons. Billy feared that before the campaign ended, scores of men might be sacrificed needlessly because of the general’s ambition and feelings of persecution. He would not care to be one of them.
55
BY THE LAST WEEK IN May, the end seemed near. Each morning Orry confronted that fact as he rose and drank the foul brew of parched corn the boardinghouse served in lieu of coffee. Since New Orleans fell, there wasn’t even sugar to sweeten it.
Like everyone in Richmond, while he went about his daily routine Orry listened for resumption of the heavy artillery fire that shook windowpanes all over town. He was glad Madeline had so far been unable to join him; his mother was recovering too slowly. News of her seizure had struck him hard when he first read it in a letter. McClellan’s guns had magically changed a sorrow to a blessing.
How ironic to recall that in February local papers had bragged about military success in the Southwest and the creation of the Confederate Territory of Arizona, whose boundaries not one person in a hundred thousand could define. Of what earthly use was a southwest bastion after Forts Henry and Donelson fell—and Orry’s friend and superior, Benjamin, slid over to the State Department because someone had to be blamed. Benjamin had survived, but barely.
George Randolph replaced him. An earnest man, a Virginian with impeccable family background, an outstanding legal reputation, and recent military experience—he had commanded artillery under Magruder—Randolph held the War Department portfolio but could do little with it. By now everyone knew the real secretary of war lived in the President’s mansion.
Island No. 10 had gone last month, a major weakening of control of the lower Mississippi. The Yankees had Norfolk, too; in desperation, the navy had sunk the already legendary Virginia to prevent her capture.
April had brought another, even more dire, indication of the Confederacy’s plight. Davis approved a bill conscripting all white males from eighteen to thirty-five for three years. Orry knew it was a needed measure and grew angry when the President was cursed by street vagrants and state governors alike. Two of the latter said they would withhold as many men as they pleased for home defense, law or no law.
McClellan was close now, feinting toward the city. Though his strategic plan was not apparent, his mere presence plunged Richmond into a time of trial. Davis has already packed his family off to Raleigh. Jackson was still performing brilliantly in the valley, but that did little to mitigate Richmond’s fear of the pincers that might snap shut from the peninsula and from the north at any moment.
The terror had become acute on a Thursday in mid-May. Five federal vessels, including Monitor, steamed up the James to Drewry’s Bluff, within seven miles of the city. Winder’s thugs dragged men off the street and out of saloons to build a temporary bridge to the fortified side of the James. The windows of Richmond rattled from cannonading that eventually drove the federal vessels away. But the city had whiffed the winds of defeat for a few hours, and no one could forget the smell.
After Drewry’s Bluff, Orry had trouble sleeping more than an hour or two each night. With the crisis building, he questioned whether his duties were appropriate to a supposedly sane man. As a favor to Benjamin, he went to General Winder in search of a house servant who had disappeared
while Winder’s bullies were recruiting bridge builders at gunpoint. The provost marshal denied such tactics and shelved Orry’s inquiry without answering it or bothering to hide his animosity, which was now deep and vicious. The two had quarreled at least once a month ever since Orry’s arrival.
Refugees poured into the city on foot and in every conceivable kind of conveyance. They slept in Capitol Square or broke into the homes of those who had already left by train, carriage, or shank’s mare. Orry heard that Ashton was one of those refusing to leave. It leavened his dislike of her, but not much.
Soldiers swelled the population, too. Wounded sent back from the Chickahominy lines; deserters who had shot or stabbed themselves—who could say which were which? Specters in torn gray, they walked or limped everywhere, thin from hunger, hot-eyed from fever, befouled by dirt, and covered with bandages stained by blood and pus. Some women of the town aided them, some turned away. All night and all day, the wagons and buggies and carts rumbled in and rumbled out, and the windowpanes hummed and cracked, and sleep became impossible.
Orry had another bad experience in the pine building housing Winder and his men. This time he called at the request of Secretary Randolph, who operated a large family farm near Richmond. Randolph had a friend, also a farmer, who had refused to sell his produce at the lower prices fixed by the provost marshal. In a polemical letter to the Richmond Whig, the farmer called Winder a worse threat to the populace than McClellan. Having expressed that opinion, he was snatched right out of the Exchange Bar one night. Away he went to the foul factory on Cary Street where Winder was now locking up those whose utterances he deemed seditious.
Orry went to the pine building to request an order freeing the prisoner. He sent his name in, but the general wouldn’t see him. Instead he had to speak with one of the civilian operatives, a tall, lanky man dressed completely in black save for his linen.
The man’s name was Israel Quincy. Looking more like a Massachusetts parson than a Maryland railroad detective, he clearly enjoyed having someone of Orry’s rank in his shabby little cubicle as a supplicant. He was quick to answer the request.
“There’ll be no release order from this office. That man made General Winder angry.”
“The general has made Secretary Randolph angry, Mr. Quincy, as well as most of Richmond, because of his absurd tariffs. The city desperately needs food from outlying farms, but no one will sell at the prices set by this office.” Orry drew a breath. “Your answer is no?”
His dark eyes benign, Quincy smiled at the visitor. Then the smile seemed to crack and reveal the venom beneath. “Unequivocally no, Colonel. The secretary’s friend will stay in Castle Thunder.”
Orry rose. “No, he won’t. The secretary has the authority to go over the general’s head and will do so. He preferred to follow protocol, but you’ve made it impossible. I’ll have the prisoner out of that pesthole within an hour.”
Leaving the cubicle, he was stopped by Quincy’s sharp, hard, “Colonel. Think twice before you do that.”
Disbelieving, Orry turned and saw arrogance. He boiled over. “Who do you people think you are, terrorizing free citizens and stifling any opinion that differs from yours? By God, we’ll have no damned Pinkertons operating in the Confederacy.”
Low-voiced, Quincy said, “I caution you again, Colonel. Don’t defy the authority of this office. You might need a favor from us one of these days.”
“Threaten me, Mr. Quincy, and with this one hand I’ll beat you into the ground.”
Forty-five minutes later, Castle Thunder lost one inmate. But there were many more for whom he could do nothing. As for the warnings of the power-drunk guttersnipe in the black suit, he never gave them another thought.
At the War Department, Orry supervised the packing of box after box of ledgers, files, records, as May twisted down to its fearsome end, which brought the battle of Fair Oaks, virtually on the doorstep of the city. McClellan clumsily repulsed the Confederate attack, which saw Joe Johnston seriously wounded and replaced in twenty-four hours by the President’s former military adviser, back from exile.
Granny Lee took charge of the Army of Northern Virginia for the first time. Confidence in him was not high. Boxes were packed with even greater haste, and a special train kept steam up around the clock to haul off Treasury gold if the final assault broke through Lee’s lines. Orry sweated and packed more boxes and picked up a rumor of a plan afloat in Winder’s department. He heard no details, only that he was the target. Quincy’s forgotten threats came to mind again, increasing the tension he felt. He thanked the Almighty that Madeline wasn’t here to face the danger and feel the madness.
“Please,” the woman said.
Scarcely thirty, she looked much older. She smelled of the mud bespattering her clothes. Three children, starved gray mice, hunched against her skirt, and over her shoulder peered an adolescent black girl with decayed teeth and a red bandanna on her head.
The heavily planted garden rustled and dripped. The shower had stopped an hour ago, about half past six. The garden was twenty feet square, wild and green—almost too lush. Ten steps led down to it from the house. At the top, Ashton stood behind Powell, one of her palms pressing the back of his fine linen shirt.
In reply to the woman, he cocked his revolver. The potent sound aroused Ashton unexpectedly.
“Please,” the woman repeated, freighting the word with her tiredness, her desperation. “We came in from Mechanicsville. The Yanks were too close. My man’s with Old Jack in the valley, and we have nowhere to go. The gate was open—”
“Some niggers forced it last night, hunting a place to squat. I wouldn’t have them, and I won’t have you. Go out the way you came.”
One of the youngsters tugged the woman’s skirt. “Ma, where can we stay?”
“Ask President Davis,” Powell said. “He hustled his wife out of town in a hurry—maybe he has a spare bed.” Powell flourished the gun at them. “Get out, you goddamn vermin.”
The woman managed a look of loathing as she herded her brood into the lowering June twilight. The faraway sky reverberated with a sound like tympani. Powell thrust the gun into his pants, walked down the stairs, and kicked the gate shut. “Find me some rope,” he said without turning around.
Ashton darted inside and was back within a minute. He lashed the gate shut and secured it with several knots. Leaves dripped in the silence. Then the sky drummed again.
Upstairs, with all the windows open on the steamy evening, he reclined on his elbows and let her work him to a huge erection, in the fashion he enjoyed. Then he bored into her like a bull. They tore the bedclothes loose and pushed them all over the place with their rolling and straining. He was splendid, inducing, as he always did, a joy she could only express and relieve by screaming.
Overcome by a satiated exhaustion, she fell asleep. She woke presently to find Powell reading a book he kept at the bedside: Poe’s Tales. He had told her that the fantastical stories and the character Dupin were favorites of his. It was fitting to reread them in Richmond, where Poe had edited the Literary Messenger for a period.
In perspiring lassitude, they lay together, Powell speaking in a reflective way, as he liked to do after making love.
“I was discussing the Conscription Act with some other gentlemen yesterday. There was unanimity that it’s an outrage. Are we apes, to be prodded into a cage anytime Jeff says jump? At least there are ways around the law.”
Ashton rested her cheek on the bristly hair of his chest and circled one of his nipples with her nail. “What ways?”
“The exemption for owning a hundred and twenty slaves, for one. I doubt King Jeff will entrain for Valdosta in order to discover that a hundred and eighteen of mine are imaginary.” He chuckled.
“I love you,” Ashton whispered, “but I surely don’t understand you sometimes.”
“How so?”
“You carry on about conscription and King Jeff as you call him, yet you’ve stayed in Richmond when most of the
permanent residents are running for their lives.”
“I want to protect what’s mine. Which includes you, partner dear.”
“A successful partner, I might add.”
“Very successful.”
“You’re the reason I’ve stayed, Lamar.” That was true, but there was more to it. Sometimes the artillery fire frightened her to death, and she wanted to board the first outbound train. She didn’t do it because she believed that if she showed the slightest weakness, Powell might throw her over.
She needed him too much to let that happen. In Lamar Powell she had at last found a man who would rise in the world, ultimately wield great power and control great wealth in the Confederacy if it survived—or somewhere else if it didn’t. She refused to risk a separation.
She planted a light kiss on the nipple she had been touching and continued. “Poor James wants to rush me to the depot all the time. I’m always inventing excuses.”
He kissed her cheek. “Good for you. I wouldn’t want you spineless, like the wife of the tyrant.”
Spineless? she thought. What a rich jest. Ashton had always been absolute mistress of those with whom she had dallied. Every man but Powell had willingly bent to her wishes. That she couldn’t dominate Powell was one of his great attractions.
“You really hate Davis, don’t you, Lamar?”
“Kindly don’t make it sound so peculiar. Yes, I hate him—and there are enough men who share my view to form a division or two right here in Richmond. If he were strong—a dictator, even—I’d support him. But he’s weak. A failure. Do you need more proof than the presence of General McClellan less than a dozen miles from this bed? King Jeff will preside at the South’s funeral unless he’s stopped.”
“Stopped—?”
“That is what I said.” Moist dark had claimed the bedroom, a dark redolent of the garden. Despite its passion, Powell’s voice remained controlled. “And it won’t be oratory that saves the Confederacy and ends the blundering career of Mr. Davis. It will be something more decisive. Final.”