by John Jakes
Bent hurried into the square and paused by the great statue of Washington, whose birthday those on both sides continued to celebrate. He lingered until the couple emerged and entered a barouche driven by an old Negro. The barouche rolled past Bent where he lounged in the shade of the statue’s pedestal. The woman took no notice of him or any of her surroundings; she was busy berating her husband. She struck Bent as arrogant, but she definitely resembled Orry Main. She was worth investigating.
Now that he had accomplished his first mission without a hitch, he was full of confidence. On the spot he decided to risk one more day in the Confederate capital.
In bed that night, he formulated his plan. Next morning he called at the post office as soon as it opened. He introduced himself as Mr. Bell, a native of Louisville, and persuaded the clerk to overlook any deficiencies in his accent by passing a folded bill over the counter. The clerk opened a thick book and found the address of James Huntoon.
Hiring a hack, Bent drove past the Grace Street residence twice. Then, downtown again, he searched the stores till he found some over-priced linen that could be torn up to simulate bandages. He fretted through the next few hours at his lodging house. He planned to call late in the day, before the government offices closed.
Around four, he walked out Grace Street and, when he was unobserved, paused for a swig from a metal flask kept in his side pocket. In an alley two blocks from his destination, he tied the linen into a sling and slid his left forearm through. A few minutes later, the same black man he had seen driving the barouche admitted him to the foyer.
“Yes, Miz Huntoon’s at home, but she wasn’t expectin’ callers.”
“I’m a visitor in the city. Tell her it’s important.”
“Your name again, sar?”
“Bellingham. Captain Erasmus Bellingham, on furlough from General Longstreet’s corps.” Longstreet was currently far from Richmond, which was the reason for that particular lie. “I must soon return to duty, so kindly ask your mistress to see me at once.”
Homer led Bent to a small sitting room, then trudged off. Bent was too nervous to sit. He paced and chewed a clove to cover his whiskey breath. Underneath his white shirt and alpaca suit, sweat soaked him. Just as he had decided to flee, he heard a swish of skirts in the hall. Ashton Huntoon swept in, cross and sleepy-looking.
“Captain Bellingham?”
“Erasmus Bellingham, currently with General—”
“My nigger told me that.”
“I dislike interrupting you without prior warning, ma’am—” Her expression made clear that she disliked it as much as he did. Though her resemblance to her brother automatically generated rage, Bent kept his unctuous smile in place as he went on. “However, I haven’t much more time in Richmond. I am nearly recovered from this wound I received at the siege of Suffolk. Before I return to Longstreet’s command, I wanted to inquire about an old acquaintance.”
“You don’t sound like a Southerner, Captain.”
Bitch. He broadened the smile. “Oh, there are all degrees of Southern speech, I find. You don’t sound like a Virginian”—careful; mustn’t let any hostility show—“and the truth is, I was born and raised on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I left it the moment I heard the Confederacy’s call to arms.”
“How interesting.” Ashton didn’t conceal her boredom.
Bent explained that while on duty in the lower part of the state, he had heard that one of his West Point classmates was stationed in Richmond. “Last evening I was conversing with a gentleman at my lodging house—some chap with friends at the Treasury Department—and when I mentioned my classmate, he brought you and your husband into the conversation. He said you both hailed from South Carolina, as my classmate did, and that your maiden name was the same as his.”
“Is your classmate Orry Main?”
“Yes.”
She acted as if he had dumped a spittoon on her. “He’s my older brother.”
“Your brother,” Bent echoed. “How extraordinary! I haven’t seen him in years. Come to think of it, though, I do recall him mentioning you in an affectionate manner.”
Ashton dabbed her upper lip with a bit of lace. “I doubt that.”
“Please, tell me, is Orry in Richmond?”
“Yes, and so is his wife. I don’t see either of them. By choice.”
“Is he perchance in the army?”
“He’s a lieutenant colonel attached to the War Department.” Gathering her skirts, Ashton rose. “Is there anything else?” Her tone said she hoped not.
“Only the location of his residence, if you’d be so kind—”
“They have rooms on Marshall near the White House. I’ve never been there. Good day, Captain Bellingham.”
Rudely dismissed, Bent nevertheless managed to reach the street without displaying his anger. He had brief, dizzy visions of tearing Ashton Huntoon’s clothing and subjecting her to punishments that would also yield certain perverse pleasures.
The spiteful mood passed. Turning toward town, he strode along as if there were clouds under his feet. In another alley he stripped off the sling and threw it away. Orry Main was here. Bent was close to one of the objects of his hatred—closer than he had been since Charles Main eluded and disgraced him in Texas. He ought to walk into the War Department, find Main’s desk, and shoot him right between—
No. Not only would hasty action imperil his life, it would rob the vengeance of savor. Bent also had the new job to think about. Baker would be expecting him in Washington. He should collect his horse from the stable and leave at once.
Instead, he decided to remain an additional night. He wanted to be thoroughly familiar with the terrain when he returned to Richmond on another mission, as he undoubtedly would. He wanted to know precisely where to look for Orry Main.
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, vacat
ed 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 hoped 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 won
dered 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.