Love and War

by John Jakes

  “You mustn’t take offense at that. I am known in this town. I am also a married man.”

  “Then you’ve got no business being here, have you? So if you won’t take me out, don’t bother to rent a new flat for me. Or come backstage again—ever.”

  Her dark eyes and her pout undid him. He heaved his pale body out of bed, found the bottle, and swigged the last of it. “All right. I suppose we could go for an hour—though I want you to appreciate the risk I’m taking.” He reached for his oversized underdrawers.

  “Oh, loves, I do, I do,” she squealed, scented arms around his neck, breasts mashed flat against his flab. Moments like these somehow canceled Stanley’s awareness of his age and banished every thought of Isabel. At such times, he felt like a young man.

  The sight Miss Canary wanted to see was the Patent Office, above the avenue on F Street. They caught a hack—Stanley never brought his own carriage and driver to the island—and on the way he attempted to explain why he and his friends despised Lincoln. He started with the different plans for reconstruction, descriptions of which confused her and stiffened her smile, a sure sign she was growing cross again. He immediately tried the military approach.

  “The President chose Grant, but Grant’s campaign is virtually at a standstill. Cold Harbor was a disaster, the dimensions of which we are just discovering. The general has lost something like fifty thousand men—nearly half the original force with which he advanced across the Rapidan, and almost the same number as you’ll find in Lee’s entire army. The nation won’t tolerate a butcher’s bill that high—especially with Richmond still not captured.”

  “I’m not exactly sure where Richmond is, loves. Down near North Carolina?”

  Sighing, he patted her hand and gave up. Jeannie Canary was sweet and droll, but her talents, while delicious, were limited. One shouldn’t expect more of actresses, he supposed.

  “I want to get out,” she insisted when the hack stalled in the crowd at the corner of Seventh and F. He tried to persuade her that they shouldn’t, but she opened the door anyway. With a quiver of fear, he followed.

  Fireworks exploded overhead, thunderous. The crowd whistled and cheered the red, white, and blue star bursts. On the front of the Patent Office building, great illuminations had been created—huge transparency portraits of Lincoln and the unknown Johnson and tough-jawed Grant blazed in the night. Miss Canary squealed and clung to his arm, and he watched strangers take notice of them. A shiver chased along his spine. The danger had a certain piquant quality, something like the thrill experienced by a soldier, he felt sure.

  “Good evening, Stanley.”

  Paling, he swung sharply and saw Congressman Henry Davis of Maryland tip his hat, skewer Miss Canary with a glance—she was oblivious—and pass on.

  Oh, my God, oh, my God, was all that passed through Stanley’s head for the next couple of moments. What a fool he was, what an absolute ass. The danger here wasn’t piquant; it was deadly.

  And he was now a casualty.

  Charles wanted to mourn for Beauty Stuart, but no tears would come.

  Instead, he examined memories; shining bits of glass in the great bright window of the Stuart legend, a window fashioned partly by Stuart’s admirers, partly by his detractors, partly by the man himself. At the end, Charles could forgive Stuart’s suspicion and shabby treatment of Hampton early in the war and remember instead how lustily he sang. They said that while he was dying he had asked friends to sing “Rock of Ages” at his bedside.

  As senior brigadier, Hampton stood next in line to command the cavalry. He immediately got a large part of the responsibility, but not the promotion. Charles and Jim Pickles and every other veteran knew why. Lee distrusted Hampton’s age. Was he fit enough to withstand the rigors of the command?

  Charles thought it a ridiculous issue. Hampton had long ago proved himself able to endure hardships, bad weather, long rides, and campaigns that would fell many men who were years younger. Still, those high up seemed determined to test him further. Charles felt bad because he suspected the delay also had something to do with Fitz Lee wanting the promotion for himself.

  Once back from Richmond, Charles had no time away from duty, no chance to visit Gus, though he thought of her often. He had decided that the love affair must be cooled off if not ended completely. The war was helping.

  At the same time, he worried that harm would come to her as ferocious campaigning started in the Wilderness. He knew the Federals had overrun Fredericksburg again and many of the inhabitants had fled. A note from Orry in answer to one of his said Gus and her freedmen weren’t in Richmond or, if they were, they hadn’t come to Orry and Madeline for sanctuary. From that, Charles guessed she was still at the farm. He wanted to find out if she was all right but couldn’t do it.

  Which was better, knowing or not knowing? Jim Pickles received letters from home, and each depressed him for days after it arrived. His mother was bedridden. One doctor suspected she had a cancer and might not last the year.

  “I got to go home,” Jim announced one day.

  “You can’t,” Charles said with authority.

  Jim thought for a while. “I s’pose you’re right.” But he didn’t sound convinced.

  Grant’s army reeled past its own dead at Cold Harbor, apparently intent on investing the strategic rail junction at Petersburg. Phil Sheridan’s cavalry feinted toward Charlottesville; Lee was forced to send Hampton in pursuit. Near Trevilian Station, on the Virginia Central line, Charles briefly saw the curly-haired Yankee, a general now, who had marked him at Brandy Station.

  The Federals were about to make off with wagons, ambulances, and around eight hundred horses. Calbraith Butler’s brigade was fighting elsewhere, so Hampton sent Texas Tom Rosser galloping in. Charles rode with Rosser’s men, and it was then that he spied the boy general, recognizing him first by his scarlet neckerchief. Charles fired one shot, which missed. Custer fired back and rode away. It was doubtful that he recognized Charles, who now resembled a bearded bandit more than a soldier.

  The next afternoon, Charles fought dismounted from behind hastily built earthworks on one side of the Virginia Central tracks. He and Jim were back with Butler’s troopers. Across the tracks, Sheridan’s cavalry formed and advanced on foot while brass instruments dinned “Garryowen.”

  “D’ja ever hear such noise?” Jim shouted, ducking at the whiz of a Minié ball not far above him. He wasn’t referring to the gunfire.

  “Little Phil always orders up plenty of music,” Charles replied, emptying his revolver at the enemy, then crouching down to reload. “They say he does it to drown out the rebel yells.”

  Flinging himself up to the fence rails topping the earthworks, he steadied his revolver with both hands, aimed, and slowly squeezed off two shots. A boy in blue crumpled on the tracks. With a grunt expressing satisfaction, Charles hunted his next target.

  “This here’s got to be the most tuneful war anybody ever fought,” Jim observed. “One thing—it sure ain’t the kind of war I expected.”

  Beyond his gunsight, Charles saw a spectral springtime road where natty gentlemen soldiers trotted their matched bays in smart formation. “It isn’t what anybody expected,” he said, and blew a hole in another youngster’s leg. He found he shot with greater accuracy if he considered the Yanks just so many animated clay targets in a gallery.

  On they came, gamely firing carbines braced against their hips. The last assault took place near sunset. When it was repulsed, Sheridan withdrew his men from battle. They began slipping away toward the North Anna during the night. Charles and the other scouts were in the van of the pursuit. Thus they were the ones who discovered the scene of horror.

  Jim came upon it first, near an abandoned federal campsite. He galloped to find Charles, told him what he had found. Then, before he could lean out far enough, he threw up all over his own shotgun, saddle, and surprised horse.

  Charles rode into the sunny pasture, smelling the slaughter before he saw it. He heard
it, too—carrion birds flapping in the weeds, an orchestra of thousands of flies. A couple of minutes later, his mouth set, he turned Sport’s head and trotted the starved-looking gray toward the general’s temporary headquarters.

  Hampton, ever the gentleman, broke that characteristic attitude as he rode bareheaded to the site. The breeze lifted his beard while he stared at the fantastic sculptures of fly-covered horses heaped upon one another.

  “Have you counted?” he whispered.

  “There are so many of them, so close together, it’s hard, General. I figure eighty or ninety, minimum. Jim found as many or more over there near those trees. I searched for wounds—other than those made by the bullets that killed them, I mean—for as long as I could stomach it. I didn’t find any. The Yanks must have decided a horse herd would slow down the retreat.”

  “I’ve shot injured horses but never foundering ones. To kill fine animals wantonly is even worse. It’s a sin.”

  And no sin to chain a nigra? Aloud, his response was, “Yes, sir.”

  “Goddamn them,” Hampton said.

  But as Charles gazed at what men had done and considered what he had become, he felt the general was a mite late with his request. God had already done a pretty good job on most of the population.

  Cold Harbor rattled the windowpanes of Richmond again. At night Orry and Madeline lay with their arms around each other, unable to sleep because of the guns.

  They had heard them earlier, in May, when Butler pushed up the James to within seven miles of the city. They heard them again on the stifling June nights in the wake of Cold Harbor. Now the fighting raged at Petersburg. After four fruitless days of trying to overcome the fortifications on the old Dimmock Line around the town, the Army of the Potomac halted its attack and settled down to besiege Petersburg instead.

  “Lee always said that once the siege starts, we’re finished,” Orry told Madeline. “If they want, the Federals can keep bringing men and supplies through the river base at City Point till the end of the century. We’ll have to capitulate.”

  “A long time ago, Cooper said it was inevitable, didn’t he?”

  “Cooper was right,” he murmured, and kissed her.

  Everywhere, Orry saw signs of the tide flowing the wrong way. Sheridan’s horse had ridden almost to the city’s north edge, and Butler’s infantry had nearly reached the southern one. Joe Johnston—Retreating Joe, people called him hatefully—was withdrawing toward Atlanta in response to Sherman’s inexorable advance. Another Union general, Sigel, was loose in the valley.

  Few blockade runners got into Wilmington anymore. The nation’s money supply was rapidly becoming so much worthless paper. Cold Harbor had brought déjà vu—scenes of panic like those of the Peninsula campaign. But this time there was little heart or martial courage to sustain the resistance. The mighty generals had fallen: Orry’s classmate Old Jack; Stuart, the singing cavalier. And the greatest of them all, Marse Bob, couldn’t win.

  One morning after Cold Harbor, Pickett appeared at the War Department. Dull-eyed and wasted, he resembled a walking casualty. He still wore his scented hair in shoulder-length ringlets, but a great many tiny coils of white showed now. Orry felt sorry for George, who was gamely trying to maintain an air of youth and jauntiness when every jot of both had been beaten out of him.

  In the hot, dusty silence, Orry shared his personal discontentments with his friend. In reply, Pickett said, “There will always be a place on my divisional staff should the time come when a field command suits you.” A certain dark undertone in his voice hinted that Orry might think twice about such a decision. Was he remembering the charge at Gettysburg that had failed and aged him in a single day?

  “I find myself wanting something like that lately, George. I haven’t discussed it with Madeline, but I’ll keep the offer in mind. I genuinely appreciate it.”

  Pickett didn’t speak, merely lifted his hand and let it fall. He shambled away through slanting bars of sunshine.

  There had been an official inquiry into the escape of a Union prisoner from Libby, abetted by a Confederate officer no one could identify except to say that he was exceptionally tall and heavily bearded, a description that fit several thousand men still in the army. The military threat to Richmond helped reduce the importance of the escape and, slowly, the inquiry. Orry only hoped Billy Hazard had reached and regained the Union lines without harm.

  Mallory paid a call, stiffly informing him that Cooper had resigned after declaring his intention to leave Charleston and return to Mont Royal. Orry heard the alarming story of Cooper’s attack on the Union prisoner.

  “He’s undergone a drastic change,” Mallory said. “An abrupt and, in my opinion, reprehensible shift to favoring peace at any price.”

  Irked by the criticism, Orry said, “It was the shift to favoring war that was abrupt and reprehensible, Mr. Mallory. Maybe the brother I used to know has come back.”

  The secretary didn’t like that and promptly left. Orry wrote a letter to Cooper in care of the plantation, posting it with little hope that it would be delivered. He was glad Cooper had gone home. Yet the possible significance of his brother’s action depressed him for the same reason he was bothered by an incident the next morning.

  “Who is that woman who just applied for a pass?” He asked a departmental clerk.

  “Mrs. Manville. Came here from Baltimore in ’61 to open a sporting house. She just closed it down.”

  “She’s going back to Maryland?”

  “Yes, somehow. She’s determined, and we’ve no reason to stop her.”

  “Is she the first prostitute wanting a pass?”

  “Oh, no, Colonel. There have been a dozen since Cold Harbor.”

  That night, on Marshall Street, he said to Madeline, “The so-called scarlet women are leaving. There’s no more doubt. The curtain is starting down.”

  One personal problem continued to plague Orry: the mystery of the cabal, which had disappeared as if it never existed. Seddon had warned President Davis, Judah Benjamin, and others in the cabinet, but could do nothing more in the face of lack of evidence. Powell had vanished, or at least hadn’t shown up at the farm. Twice, at Orry’s insistence, Israel Quincy had returned to survey the place, finding nothing. From his own pocket, Orry paid a departmental clerk to go there at night to verify Merchant’s report. Again, nothing.

  Orry had seen the crated guns. And James Huntoon. And his sister. But the baffling events that followed his secret visit sometimes made him question his own sanity. Whenever he thought about the puzzle, the result was nothing but frustration. If Ashton had been part of a scheme to kill the President, she must be called to account. But how? The department lacked the manpower to watch her day and night, and he couldn’t do it himself. Whenever he expressed the frustration to Madeline, she soothed him and urged him to put the problem away as insoluble. His answer was always the same: “Impossible.”

  The situation left him angry. Angry with himself, with his sister, with her husband. His feelings finally exploded at an unexpected time and place: an evening reception at the Treasury offices given for Secretary Memminger, who had let it be known that he planned to submit his resignation as soon as he finished a couple of important tasks. He expected to be gone by July.

  Several South Carolinians in the capital worked with Treasury staff members to arrange the reception. The guest list included all those in Memminger’s department and people from his home state. Huntoon qualified on both counts. He brought Ashton.

  And Orry brought Madeline.

  The secretary’s humorless personality virtually assured a dreary party. So did its location. No spirits could be served in the Treasury Building, just a bowl of rust-colored punch of some indefinable citrus flavor. The wives of clerks and assistant secretaries had provided vegetable sandwiches, mostly carrots or pitiful slices of cucumber.

  Munching a sandwich, Orry left Madeline chatting with some ladies and drifted toward his sister. She was, inevitably, the lone woman in
a group of five men. It included Huntoon, cheeks puffed big as a toad’s as he listened to a senior clerk declare, “Hang Governor Brown and his opinions. I still say recruiting colored troops is the only way we can continue to wage this war.”

  Huntoon snatched off his spectacles to show the ferocity of his conviction. “Then it’s better to surrender.”

  “Ridiculous,” another man said. “The Yankees aren’t so stiff-necked. My brother-in-law tells me nigra troops are thick as ticks around Petersburg.”

  Ashton, fetchingly gowned yet noticeably haggard—she had lost weight, Orry saw immediately—tossed her head in reply to the last comment. “What else would you expect of a mongrel nation? I agree with James. Better to lose everything than compromise. As it is, we’re close to seeing the Confederacy legislated—dictated—into disaster.”

  Dictated was an obvious reference to Davis. Where had she caught the sickness of fanaticism and from whom, Orry wondered as he lounged against a desk near the group. Was it from Huntoon? No; Powell, more likely.

  She saw him and broke away while the others continued to argue. “Good evening, Orry. I saw you and your lovely wife come in. How are you?” Ashton’s tone and expression said the inquiry was obligatory, nothing more.

  “Reasonably well. You?”

  “Oh, busy with a thousand things. Did you hear that Cooper resigned from the Navy Department?” He nodded. “They say Secretary Mallory was outraged. Really, Orry—we might as well have the Sphinx for a brother. I would understand it more than I understand Cooper.”

  “He isn’t so hard to figure out.” Orry’s response was relaxed and cool. He fixed in mind that she was his quarry, not merely his blood relation. “Cooper’s always been an idealist. High-minded—”

  “Oh, yes, very high-minded—when it comes to disposing of the property of others. He shares that quality with some of our highest officials.”

  As if she hadn’t spoken, Orry finished his sentence: “—fundamentally opposed to demagogues. And deceit.”

  Ashton was clever enough to realize he had introduced an element that had no bearing on what preceded it. Warned, she immediately raised a defense—a brittle smile—and looped her left arm through his while he finished the limp sandwich. She drew him toward a quieter part of the office, where she spoke to him like a pretty, puzzled child.