by John Jakes
“King Jeff is trying eleventh-hour ploys to save the regime he’s already destroyed. I’ll not help such a mad and desperate man. That’s what I told the people in Nassau, and when they didn’t like it, I told them to go to hell.”
Those were Powell’s remarks at luncheon yesterday. Huntoon was in his bunk at the time. To sit opposite her lover and be unable to do so much as clasp his hand frustrated Ashton. They hadn’t enjoyed a moment of privacy since leaving Hamilton. Always, there were crewmen close by or passengers. The steamer was carrying several Canadian business travelers and three couples returning from an autumn holiday in the tropics. In the dining saloon, Powell haughtily refused to speak to any of them.
Ashton rose, smoothing her skirt and catching a flash of her image in a small, cracked glass on the wall. The sight was sickening. Her hair was dull, her arms bony, her bosom shrinking. She clung to an imagined future in which she would be attractive again, sharing Powell’s bed in the presidential mansion.
From time to time she pressed him for specifics about the new state. Where would he create it? On how much land? How many settlers did he expect, and how many armed men to defend them? He claimed to have all the answers but preferred to keep them to himself—an additional reason Ashton would give him her body but not her money. Not just yet.
“Ohhh!” Huntoon clutched his middle. “I think I’m going to die.”
I wish you would. She stamped her foot. “I know I’ll go insane if you don’t stop your childish complaining.”
“But I feel so terrible—”
“Believe me, you’ve made that clear. Whine, whine, whine! You hated the hotel in Wilmington, even after we were lucky enough to get there without being caught and arrested. You complained about the seediness of the man who sold us forged passports for three times what they’re worth. You didn’t want to sail to Bermuda on a fishing boat, even though there was no other vessel to take us. You hate this steamer, Canadians, the sea—What would make you happy?”
He dragged his legs over the side of the berth and pulled off his glasses. His eyes looked wet and weak. Like a boy’s. She could have sunk through the deck when he answered: “To go back to South Carolina—to be done with this business. I’ve thought it over, endlessly. I can’t stand the strain. The possibility of danger, death. It’s tearing my nerves to pieces.”
“Do you think our poor Southern boys on the battlefield feel any differently? You enlisted when there was glory in the air, but now you want to desert. Well, you can’t.” He cringed away from the denunciation. “There will be a new Confederacy, and we are going to be important in it. Very important.”
“Ashton, I just don’t know if I have the courage—”
“Yes, you do.” She clawed hold of both shoulders and shook him, fairly spitting. “By God, you do or you’re no husband of mine. Now go to sleep. I want some air.”
She snatched a cape, blew out the lamp, slammed the flimsy slatted door behind her. Hurrying away, she cursed foully when she heard him crying.
Her rage didn’t abate as she struggled up the steeply tilting stair to the main deck. Only one passenger was in the saloon, a bald man sleeping with a month-old London Times tented on his paunch. Treading softly, Ashton reached the outside door and leaned against the weight of the wind to push it open.
The spill of light revealed Powell at the rail. His hair, much more gray than brown now, tossed in the wild gusts. He had run out of his favorite dye pomade; he had searched the apothecary shops in Nassau, but they had none.
“You shouldn’t be out here in this terrible weather, Ashton. Beware the deck—it’s wet and slip—”
The warning ended as the Royal Albert rolled sharply to port. Ashton’s heels flew out from under her. She shrieked, tumbling toward the rail. Only Powell’s body, with which she collided painfully, kept her from being flung overboard.
She leaned against him, queasy and terrified by the enormous white-topped waves visible in the glow from the ship’s portholes. As a degree of calm returned, the physical contact suddenly aroused her. She pushed her breasts against Powell’s sleeve, crushed them, almost to the point of pain. She didn’t see him smile when he pulled her head down on his shoulder.
They were motionless a moment, then abruptly separated. A seaman in rubber foul-weather gear rushed by, reiterating the danger of being on deck in a heavy sea.
“I need air; I’ll be careful,” Ashton called to the disappearing figure. She was; she clutched the varnished rail with both hands. “I do need air,” she said to Powell, “but more than that, I need some relief from James. He’s driving me insane with his complaining. I can’t stand this, I can’t stand that—” Her high-pitched voice mimicked him cruelly. “But I’m the one who’s breaking, Lamar. I can’t come to your stateroom alone. I can’t kiss you or even touch you.” Half ill and overcome with love, she reached down and closed her hand on him. “This is what I want. Using nothing else, you chained me up as completely as some nigger plantation girl. You made me lose sleep—respectability—my sanity sometimes—just wanting this. You made me a slave to it, and then you took it away.”
The whispered tirade delighted him. She lowered her head, realizing what she had done. She let go. He patted her arm in a way that was almost avuncular.
“I took it away, as you so delightfully put it, out of necessity. What’s upset you?”
“Wanting you!”
“Nothing else? Has James forced himself on you?”
“Do you think I’d allow that?” An unsteady laugh. “But, my God—you don’t know how resisting him has taxed my capacity for lying. I’ve gone through the unmentionable monthly complaint, nerves, headaches, the vapors—an encyclopedia of excuses. Can you imagine how happy I was when he got seasick? For a while I even found the smell of the bucket tolerable. Doesn’t that tell you how desperate I am?”
“Patience,” he murmured, stroking her arm although the seaman was returning. “Patience.”
“I don’t have any left!” She was almost in her husband’s state, ready to cry.
When the crewman was gone, he said, “Patience is vital. We need James awhile longer. Israel Quincy is gone and that Bellingham fellow—he was peculiar, but he had the makings of a splendid aide-de-camp. I need at least one man to go with me to Virginia City and help transport the gold from the mine.” They had already argued violently about his plan for Ashton to travel separately to the destination in the Southwest he had not yet revealed. “There are some rough fellows I can enlist in Nevada, but none’s as loyal, dependable—or pliable—as your husband.”
She started to speak, started to tell him Huntoon’s dependability was questionable, his loyalty all but gone. She decided against it. Things were bad enough.
Powell interpreted her silence as agreement. The steamer rolled again; spray burst over them, soaking her hair and streaming down her cheeks. Here with him, she didn’t mind. Powell flung a look each way along the deck, then bent quickly and slid his tongue between her lips.
Weak, she grasped the rail again. Seconds passed, then he drew away, smiling. “What you talked of a moment ago, sweet—what you covet—will soon be placed back where it belongs.”
“I can’t live without you much longer, Lamar. James is more than disgusting—” she tried to warn him then “—he’s weak. Things in Richmond changed him. The arrogance of the Virginians. His loss of faith in Davis. Certainly our deteriorating relationship played a big part. In any case, he isn’t the man I married or even the windbag who gasconaded bravely so long as he was safe on some lecture platform. Don’t put too much faith in him.”
“Ashton, my dear, I place no faith in anyone but myself. Remember how I characterized James before I revealed my plans to him? How I described his role? He’s a soldier. Useful so long as he obeys orders. Should he prove himself unwilling or unable to do that—well—” He shrugged. “The greatest factor separating the general from the private is the latter’s expendability.”
“Expendabilit
y? You mean you’d—?”
He smiled. “Without a qualm.”
“Oh, God, I love you, Lamar.” She gripped his arm and leaned her damp cheek against his lapel. That was the moment the purser chose to thrust his knobby head out the saloon door.
“Really, sir—madam—you are taking grave and unnecessary risks by remaining on deck in this weather. I saw you through the porthole. Since I am responsible for the welfare of passengers, on this voyage, I really must insist you come inside.”
Powell gave the stuffy little man a disdainful look, murmured a good night to Ashton, and sauntered away down the glistening deck without touching anything for support. Tired, wet, but filled with renewed confidence, Ashton went into the saloon.
A few days later, Cooper returned from Charleston along the river road, riding an old nag borrowed from a neighbor. Though he detested firearms, he had traveled with a loaded pocket pistol because Judith insisted.
His overnight visit to the besieged city could hardly be called a success. All he had been able to buy were two badly used Hawkens, twenty years old and caked with rust. Of the .50-caliber ammunition for the muzzle loaders, there was none. But he had found a mold and some bar lead, all of which would be coming up the Ashley on next week’s steamer. Powder couldn’t be had anywhere; they must make do with the small supply left at Mont Royal.
The afternoon was showery, the natural tunnel through the live oaks darker than usual. The closer Cooper and the plodding horse got to the plantation, the louder and more frequent became the cries of the salt crows. He had never known them to be so numerous this far upriver, but when he peered into the brush or the treetops, he couldn’t see a single one. To his left, away from the Ashley, scarcely anything was visible.
In Charleston, he had also searched for little presents for his wife and daughter. Marie-Louise was stricken with girlish grief now that Lucius Chickering had returned to Richmond in the wake of Cooper’s resignation. The best gifts he had been able to find in the depleted shops were two crudely made sachets. He took one from his pocket and peeled back part of the brown wrapping paper. He smelled the sachet. “Damn.” The scent, weak to begin with, was nearly gone. Cheap goods, profiteer’s goods—
A wild burst of crow calls, seeming to surround him, nearly caused him to drop the sachet in the mud. He shoved it in his pocket and heard a disembodied voice. “Mist’ Cooper?”
He snatched the pocket pistol from inside his coat. “Who’s there?”
“Cain’t see me, Mist’ Cooper. But I can see you good.”
Recognizing the voice brought shock to Cooper’s face. Some distance back from the left side of the road, palmetto fronds rattled.
“Cuffey? Is that you?”
There was no denial, so he knew he was right. Unseen crows sent their raucous cries up and down the empty road. Then the voice again. Having gotten over his surprise, Cooper could hear the rage in it.
“They said you was back. Want to tell you som’pin. Bottom fence rail gonna be on top pretty soon.”
“If you’re a man, Cuffey, show yourself.” Silence. “Cuffey?”
CuffeyCuffeyCuffeyCuffey—the shout rolled away into the gloomy distances. The horse shied; Cooper reined him sharply.
“Bottom rail’s gonna be on top, and ol’ top rail’s gonna be broke up. Chopped up. Burned. Gone for good. You count on it—” Word by word, the unseen voice faded till nothing was left but an echo and a final rattle of the fronds.
Sweating, Cooper whirled the pistol muzzle left, then right. There was no target except a bulge-headed blue skink darting across the road in front of the spooked horse. Cooper stared at the pistol he had brandished with abandon. Revulsion on his face, he shoved it back in his pocket with such violence the lining tore.
He forced the nag to gallop up the river road. The salt crows screamed. Why did it sound so much like laughter?
118
GRAY WOLVES SLUNK INTO the trenches of the Petersburg line that autumn. Clawed a den in the mud and turned, growling, to wait for their tormentors.
Gray wolves, they lived on burned corn but wanted most of all another drink or two of blood. Cubs of twenty, they had the eyes of predators grown aged from a hundred seasons of killing.
Colder weather bleached many of the faces. Others remained sun-red from the summer. Whether white or red; they looked mean, they looked deadly.
Toting a tin cup, blanket, cartridge box, gun, they had tramped and straggled and fought across the map of the state—plantation boys, farm boys, town boys, feared out of all proportion to their numbers. They had marched to the last rampart on the thickened skin of bare feet, in scarecrow garments, their bellies making wet complaint, their bowels noisy as pipes in a hotel. They crouched in the trenches with nothing left but their nerve and the reputation that was bigger than all of them. Bigger than five times all of them. So big it would outlast all the slogans and speeches and rallying cries they no longer remembered; outlast those who sent them here in an unjust cause; outlast their very bones.
Gray wolves, they were already passed into legend as the first snow fell. They were the Army of Northern Virginia.
The sound came from the right of the ruined plank road, gone before Orry could make sense of it. He reined in. So did the two orderlies, young and inexperienced Virginians from Montague’s provisional brigade. The orderlies rode one behind the other on the same horse; because of the scarcity of mounts, doubling up was a common sight on the Petersburg lines.
The road lay east of Richmond. After fronting north of the James, the division had been shifted even farther from Petersburg, to the extreme left of the defense line. They were presently in position from Battery Dantzler, named for a fellow South Carolinian who had fallen, to Swift Creek. It was nine in the morning, Friday, the day before Christmas.
The horses, peculiarly nervous in the thick fog, snorted and refused to stand still. Orry’s almost stepped into a gap left by a rotted board; there were many such on the half-demolished road. The woodlands on both sides had an evil look, all black tree trunks, leafless limbs, dark clumps of dormant brush between. The white fog muffled sound and slipped through every tiny space.
“Did you hear that?” Orry asked. His hand rested on the hilt of the Solingen sword. He and the two orderlies were returning from First Corps headquarters when the sound, loud enough to be heard above that made by the animals, brought them to a halt.
Wary eyes shifting from tree to tree, both orderlies nodded. “A holler for help, sir,” one said. “Least, I think I heard the word help.”
“Want us to look, sir?” asked the other. Orry’s instinct said no. They were late, held at headquarters too long, and the fog afforded perfect concealment. One man might be lying out there—or a dozen, armed for an ambush. He tried to recreate the sound in his mind. Like the orderlies, he did believe there was pain in it.
“I’ll lead the way,” he said.
The orderlies stepped their horse off the half-demolished planking and walked it to the side so Orry could pass. They drew their revolvers; Orry reached beneath his overcoat and drew his. He nudged his horse forward through the trees at a walk, peering left and ahead and right, then repeating the pattern.
The atmosphere of the morning depressed him. So did the prospect of Christmas without Madeline. Well, he would surely be back at Mont Royal, reunited with her, this time next year. Sherman was advancing to the ocean in Georgia. The next target of the Union Navy was certain to be Fort Fisher, and when that fell, so would the last open port. Bob Lee, stooped and gray and, it was said, atypically grumpy of late, had only sixty-five thousand hungry, worn-out men to defend a line stretching thirty-five miles from the Williamsburg Road here down to Hatcher’s Run southwest of Petersburg. No one spoke seriously of winning anymore, only of holding on and ending the sad business without dishonor.
Orry drew a deep, slow breath. Strangely, eerily, the fogbound forest seemed filled with the fragrance of the sweet olive, a scent he associated with South Carolina,
and going home.
A sudden whinny alarmed his mount. He controlled the animal, cocked his revolver, circled the next large tree, and saw a fallen cavalry gelding with a great bleeding tear in its side. It raised its head and thrashed its legs feebly. Orry studied the gear and the saddle. A Union horse, no doubt of that.
“Where are you?” he called into the fog.
Silence. Trees dripping moisture. The horse of the orderlies crackling the brush.
Then: “Here.”
Orry again walked his mount forward. Over his shoulder he said, “The horse is done for. One of you shoot it.” There was murmured acknowledgment, then the cannon-loud boom of a handgun, the echoes rolling away over the noise of the gelding’s last great thrash.
Stillness again.
Passing another tree, Orry saw him, blue leg with yellow stripe stuck forward, left leg folded beneath the other to help brace him against the wet bark of the trunk.
Eyes met Orry’s. They were full of pain, yet cautious, even cold. The trooper was a heavy-browed, stubble-faced young man, a tough-looking sort. His right hand was wedged near his extended right leg. His left rested on a bloodied rip at the waist of his dark blue coat. A bandage stained brown and yellow encircled his upper left arm. So far as Orry could tell, the Yank had no weapon but his sheathed saber.
“Found him,” Orry said without turning. The orderlies rode up. The semiconscious Yank watched them with sullen eyes. “One of you take his sword.”
The orderly riding behind dismounted and stepped forward, shifting his revolver to his left hand. The saber slid out with a steely sound. The orderly coughed. “My God, he’s dirty. Pus and lice and Lord knows what else.” He faced Orry. “Bad wound, Colonel. Belly wound, looks like.”