Love and War

by John Jakes

  Locating the War Department offices next day proved easy. Bent watched the building for half an hour but didn’t go in. Finding the flat on Marshall in the fashionable Court End district proved a little harder. He offered three-cent silver pieces to several black children before he found one who knew the colonel and his wife. The youngster pointed out their residence, a large house evidently converted into suites of rental rooms for the duration.

  He approached from the opposite side of the street. The brim of his black hat protecting him from the May sunshine, he surveyed the house and got a shock when a lovely woman with a parasol came out and turned left on the walk.

  Bent felt as if a thunderbolt had come down to smite him. The woman passing from view was instantly familiar because he often sat gazing at her, or someone very much like her, in the canvas stolen from New Orleans. This woman’s mouth, shape of nose, color of eyes and hair were not identical with those in the picture. But the resemblance could not be mistaken.

  Sweating, Bent lumbered up the steps of her residence and rang the bell. A wispy old woman answered. He swept his hat off.

  “Your pardon, ma’am. I have business with a Mrs. Wadlington, whom I don’t know. I was told she lived in this block, and I just passed a lady who fits the sketchy description I was given. The lady came out this door, so I wondered—”

  “That’s Colonel Main’s wife. Never heard of a Mrs. Wadlington, and I know everyone. But I don’t know you.” Slam.

  Flushed, elated, and short of breath, Bent went reeling away. His luck had turned at last. First the Baker connection and now this. Orry Main, a high military official, was married to a nigger whore—and he had the evidence. How he would use it, he was too overwrought to determine just now. But use it he would, of that he was—

  “Murder! Mysterious stabbing by the canal!”

  The shout of the newsboy on Broad Street interrupted the vengeful reverie. He bought a paper and scanned it as he walked. The cold of panic replaced his steamy delirium. They had found the corpse of Bent’s informant, though he was not named. The victim was a white male of the kind commonly called “albino.”

  In less than an hour, Elkanah Bent packed his valise, vacated his room, saddled his horse, and took the road north.

  80

  THAT SAME EVENING, STANDING knee deep in the James River, Cooper sneezed.

  He had caught cold. It didn’t matter. Nor did the miserable, weary state of his assistant and two helpers. “One more,” he said. “Rig the shell.”

  “Mr. Main, it’s nearly dark,” said his assistant, an earnest but fundamentally untalented boy named Lucius Chickering. A Charleston aristocrat, nineteen-year-old Chickering had enrolled in Mallory’s Confederate Naval Academy, whose campus consisted of the old side-wheeler Patrick Henry, anchored in the river. Chickering had rapidly failed basic astronomy, navigation, and seamanship, and been dismissed, with Lieutenant Parker’s regrets. Only his father’s influence saved him from absolute disgrace; a job was found for him in the scorned Navy Department. Cooper liked Chickering, but he knew the boy kept quiet about where he worked.

  Lucius Chickering had a huge nose with a hump in the middle. His upper teeth jutted over his lower lip, and he had more freckles than anyone deserved. His ugliness somehow contributed to his likability. And he was right about the lateness of the hour. A deep red sunset covered the James with sullen reflections. Birds wheeled against high scarlet clouds, and downstream a barge had already become a blot of shadow dotted yellow by a single lantern.

  Replying to his assistant, Cooper said, “We have time. If you’re all too lazy, I’ll rig it myself.”

  He hadn’t eaten since daybreak. They had been down here in the rushes, a mile from the city limits, struggling with these driftwood torpedoes the entire day. They had not been successful even once, and Cooper knew why. The concept was wrong.

  A wood cradle, newly designed within the department, held a metal canister of powder with a small opening in its domed lid. Into the opening went an impact-type percussion fuse. Cradle and canister were painted grayish brown, like the pieces of Atlantic driftwood to which they were lashed. The problem was, the movement of the driftwood in the river current—and therefore on a harbor tide—was uncontrollable. The experimenters found the wrong end of the torpedo bumping against the test target: three barrels anchored in midstream with enough open water on either side for barges and small steam sloops to pass.

  To be correct about it, not all of the driftwood torpedoes had even reached the target. By Cooper’s count, it was five out of two dozen launched. All had failed to detonate because the fuse and canister were on the side opposite that which struck the barrels.

  As Cooper started to work, Chickering exploded. “Mr. Main, I must protest. You’ve worked us like field bucks all day, and now you want us to continue when we can scarcely see what we’re doing.”

  “Indeed I do,” Cooper said, his body a black reed against the red sky. “This is wartime, Mr. Chickering. If you don’t care for the hours or the working conditions, submit your resignation and go back to Charleston.”

  Lucius Chickering glowered at his superior. Cooper Main intimidated and annoyed him. He was a Palmetto State man who acted more like a Yankee. He slopped around in mud and water as if appearances didn’t matter. While the others stood by, Cooper carefully screwed the detonator plug into the canister fuse. His trousers and shirt sleeves soaking wet, he launched the driftwood torpedo and watched it turn aimlessly in the water. Five minutes later a flash of flame marked its detonation against the far bank. It had sailed past the target with twenty feet to spare.

  Curtly, Cooper said to one of the helpers, “Row out there and tow the barrels in. You”—to the other helper—“load the tools in the wagon.” Muttering, the helper picked up a long crosscut saw, which hummed a sad note.

  The sun was down, starlight shone, frogs croaked in the sweet Virginia night The helper grumbled and swore, sneezed again, then said to Chickering, “I’ll tell Mallory the design’s a failure, like the raft torpedo before it and the keg torpedo before that.”

  “Sir, with all respect”—having exploded, Chickering was calmer now—”why do we keep on with these fruitless experiments? Our work is so peculiar, we’re the butt of jokes in every other department.”

  “Be thankful, Lucius. Snide remarks will never wound you the way bullets do.”

  Chickering colored at the suggestion that he might be happy to avoid hazardous duty. But he said nothing because Main’s authority was not to be questioned; he and Mallory were close as two peas. Still, more than one person whispered that the new man was unbalanced. Something to do with his son drowning on the voyage from Nassau to Wilmington.

  Like a humorless schoolmaster, Cooper continued. “We test these odd devices for one reason: our inferior position vis-à-vis the enemy. As the secretary says so often, we don’t outnumber them, we can’t out-spend them, so we have to out-think them. That means experimentation, no matter how ludicrous the experiments may seem to the fashionable young ladies and gentlemen you associate with here in Richmond. Mallory wants to win, you see, not merely negotiate an end to the war. I want to win. I want to whip the damn Yankees on the Atlantic and the rivers if we do it nowhere else. Now pick up that hand saw and put it in the wagon.”

  He sloshed down the bank to help the man who had rowed out to tow the barrels. Together they beached the target and carried the inverted rowboat to the wagon. More water dripped on Cooper’s wet shirt, and he sneezed three times, violently, before they stowed the boat and climbed aboard for the homeward trip, four tired men in a world gone dark except for stars.

  Cooper began to regret his sharp words. To be influenced by others was the way of the young. Chickering understandably resented a department constantly under attack for mismanagement, overspending, and dalliance with ideas that seemed to be the creations of idiots. Yet the boy, like so many others, simply didn’t understand that you had to sift through all that fool’s gold if you hop
ed to discover one nugget—one design, one idea—that might tilt everything in a decisive way.

  Cooper had thrown himself into that search with ferocious energy. Mallory had been complimentary about his work in England and soon took the younger man into his confidence. In Mallory’s opinion, the river war was lost. It was now their task to salvage the situation on the Atlantic seaboard. The commerce raiders, including the one Cooper helped launch, had captured or damaged an astonishing number of Yankee merchantmen. Insurance rates had risen, according to plan, to near-prohibitive levels, causing several hundred cargo ships to be transferred to dummy owners in Great Britain. Yet this Confederate success had failed to achieve its final goal—appreciable reduction of the size and effectiveness of the Yankee blockade squadron.

  If anything, General Scott’s Anaconda was tightening. One point of maximum constriction was Charleston, where Union monitors had attacked in force in April. Harbor and shore batteries had repulsed them, but everyone in the department anticipated further attacks. Not only was Charleston a vital port, but it was the flash point of the war—the city the enemy most wanted to capture and destroy.

  If he didn’t have the department, Cooper doubted that he could survive. Moreover, he believed in the work; he and Mallory were alike in that and in other ways. Each had started out detesting the idea of secession—early in the war, Mallory had been widely quoted after he said, “I regard it as another name for revolution”—but now both were fierce as hawks in pursuit of the enemy.

  The secretary kept everyone busy with schemes. Schemes for new ironclads. Schemes for submersible attack vessels. Schemes for naval torpedoes of every conceivable configuration. Cooper reveled in the frantic effort, because he hated the enemy. But he hated one individual fully as much, though he had said nothing of that to anyone, not even Orry, so far. He wanted to arrange a fitting confrontation. A fitting punishment.

  The struggles of the department had one additional benefit. If he worked himself to a stupor every night, his mind was less likely to cast up memories of Judah in the moonlit sea. Judah calling for help. Judah’s poor scalded face disintegrating—

  As the wagon rattled on toward the lamplit hills, Cooper wondered about the time. It would be quite late when he got home. Judith would be angry. Again. Well, no matter.

  In the city, Chickering was first to jump off. Late for a rendezvous with some belle, Cooper assumed. Cooper’s nose was dripping. It hurt to swallow. “Be at your desk by seven,” he said to his assistant. “I want today’s report written and out of the way by the start of regular working hours.”

  “Yes, sir,” Chickering said. Cooper heard him muttering as he disappeared in the dark.

  The wagon driver let him off in front of the Mechanics Institute on Ninth Street, bidding him a surly good night. Cooper didn’t give a damn about the disapproval; the clod failed to understand the desperate straits of the Confederacy or the problems of the department, which Mallory summed up in two words: “Never enough.” Never enough time. Never enough money. Never enough cooperation. They improvised and lived by their wits. That brought a certain pride, but it was killing work.

  Cooper presumed Mallory would still be in the department’s second-floor offices, and he was. Everyone else had gone except one of the secretary’s trio of assistants, the dapper Mr. Tidball, who was locking his desk as Cooper walked in.

  “Good evening,” Tidball said, tugging each of the desk drawers in turn. He then squared a pile of papers to align it with a corner. Tidball was a drone with no imagination, but with exceptional organizational skills. He complemented the other two members of the triumvirate—Commodore Forrest, a blustery old blue-water sailor who understood the ways of seamen, and Cooper, who served as an extension of Mallory’s inventive nature. Those two men preferred “Let us try” over “Here’s why we can’t.”

  “He’s been waiting for you,” Tidball said with a nod at the inner office. Tidball left, and Cooper went in to find the secretary examining engineering drawings by the light of a lamp with a green glass shade. The wick flickered as the scented oil burned. The gas mantles were shut down, and the perimeter of the cluttered office was dark.

  “Hallo, Cooper,” Mallory said. He was a roly-poly man of fifty, born in Trinidad and reared mostly in Key West by an Irish mother and a Connecticut Yankee father. He had a tilted nose, plump cheeks, and bright blue eyes that often sparkled with excitement. He reminded Cooper of an English country squire.

  “What luck?”

  Cooper sneezed. “None. The design for the cradle and canister are good enough; the problem is the one we saw when we first examined the plans. A torpedo attached to driftwood will do one thing predictably—drift. Without guidance, it’s as likely to blow a hole in Fort Sumter as it is to sink a Yankee. Most probably it would float around Charleston harbor for weeks or months, un-detonated and potentially dangerous. I’ll put it all in my report.”

  “You recommend we forget about it?” The secretary looked extremely tired tonight, Cooper observed.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Well, that’s definitive, if nothing else. I appreciate your conducting the test.”

  “General Rains proved the value of torpedoes in land operations,” Cooper said, sitting down in a hard chair. “The Yankees may think them inhuman, but they work. They’ll work for us if we can find the proper means to deliver them to the target and make certain they fire.”

  “All true. But we’re making precious little progress with them.”

  “The department’s overtaxed, Stephen. Maybe we need a separate group to develop and test them on a systematic basis.”

  “A torpedo bureau?”

  Cooper nodded. “Captain Maury would be an ideal man to head it.”

  “Excellent thought. Perhaps I can find funds—” Cooper sniffed and Mallory added, “You sound terrible.”

  “I have a cold, that’s all.”

  Mallory received that skeptically. Perspiration glistened on Cooper’s forehead. “Time for you to go home to a hot meal. Speaking of which, Angela remains determined to see you and Judith. When will you take supper with us?”

  Cooper slumped farther down in the chair. “We’ve already refused three invitations from my brother. I’ll have to satisfy that obligation first.”

  “I appreciate your industry, certainly. But you must take more time for yourself. You can’t work every moment.”

  “Why not? I have debts to repay.”

  Mallory cleared his throat. “So be it. I have something else to show you, but it can wait till morning.”

  Cooper unbent his long body and stood. “Now will be fine.” He circled the desk and peered into the soft oval of lamplight. The top drawing showed a curious vessel indicated as forty feet end to end. In the elevation, it reminded Cooper of an ordinary steam boiler, but in plan the bow and stern showed a pronounced taper, much like a cigar’s. The vessel had two hatches, indicated on the elevation as only a few inches high.

  “What the devil is it? Another submersible?”

  “Yes,” Mallory said, pointing to a decorative ribbon in the lower right corner. Elaborate script within the ribbon spelled H. L. Hunley. “That’s her name. The accompanying letter states that Mr. Hunley, a well-to-do sugar broker, was responsible for the concept and some of the first construction money. She was started at New Orleans. Her developers rushed her away to Mobile before the city fell. These gentlemen are finishing the job.” He tapped a line beneath the ribbon: McClintock & Watson, Marine Engineers.

  “They call her the fish ship,” the secretary continued. “She’s supposed to be watertight, capable of diving beneath an enemy vessel”—his hand swooped to illustrate—“dragging a torpedo. The torpedo detonates when the fish ship is safe on the other side.”

  “Ah,” Cooper said, “that’s how she differs from David.” The department had been laboring to develop a submersible for coast and harbor operations. The little torpedo vessel he had just mentioned carried her explosive charge in f
ront, on a long bow boom.

  “That and her mode of attack. She is definitely designed to strike while submerged.” David, though a submersible, was meant to operate on the surface when ramming with her boom.

  An underwater boat wasn’t a new idea, of course. A Connecticut man had invented one at the start of the Revolution. But few government officials, and certainly not the President, believed that the idea might have a current application. Its only proponents were Mallory and his little cadre of determined dreamers. Brunel would have understood this, Cooper thought. He would have understood us.

  After a moment, he said, “Only testing will show us which design’s the best, I suppose.”

  “Quite right. We must encourage completion of this craft. I intend to write the gentlemen in Mobile a warm and enthusiastic letter—and forward copies of all the correspondence to General Beauregard in Charleston. Now go home and get some rest.”

  “But I’d like to see a little more of—”

  “In the morning. Go home. And be careful. I trust you’ve read about all the murders and street robberies lately.” Cooper nodded, unsmiling. The times were dark with trouble. People were desperate.

  He bade Mallory good evening and trudged to Main Street, where he was lucky enough to pick up a hack at one of the hotels. It rattled up to Church Hill, where they had leased a small house at three times the peacetime price. Judith, a book in her lap, raised her head as he came in. Half in sympathy, half in annoyance, she said, “You look wretched.”

  “We splashed in the James all day. To no purpose.”

  “The torpedo—?”

  “No good. Anything to eat?”

  “Calf’s liver. You wouldn’t believe what it cost. I’m afraid it’ll be cold and greasy. I expected you long before this.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Judith—you know I have a lot of work.”

  “Even when you were trying to build Star of Carolina, you seldom stayed out this late. At least not every night. And when you came home, you smiled occasionally. Said something pleasant—”