by John Jakes
He replaced his uniform with his black broadcloth suit. He donned a wide-brimmed dark hat bought secondhand and tacked Madeline’s Bible in one pocket. In another he placed a pass he had written for himself; that is, for the Reverend O. O. Manchester.
He set off on a hired nag at least twenty years old. Badly swollen hock joints indicated a case of bog or bone spavin; Orry hoped the animal could make it the forty-odd miles to Fredericksburg.
He had read reports of the devastation that had struck the town, but reality proved far worse. He saw burned wagons and a decomposing body in ruined fields on the outskirts. He glimpsed a small band of men at a smoky fire back in some woods. Deserters, probably. Fredericksburg itself had an abandoned air; half the houses were empty, and many business establishments boarded up. Some homes and commercial buildings had been blown down by artillery fire. Foundations remained, but the rest lay strewn along the cratered streets, together with shot-away tree limbs, pieces of glass and fragments of furniture.
With his Bible in plain view under his arm, Orry asked an elderly man for directions to Barclay’s Farm. He reached it an hour later, appalled by what he found. Charles had described the place in some detail, and its most prominent features, the barn and the two red maples, were gone, the former razed, the latter cut down. Only stumps remained in the dooryard.
Boz and Washington recognized and hailed him as he climbed down from his quaking mount. The black men were attempting to plow a trampled field. Washington guided the plow; Boz pulled it in place of a horse. That spoke of how completely the farm had been stripped.
He found Gus in the kitchen, listlessly churning butter. Her plain dress, its color gone in repeated launderings, fit her tightly at the waist; she was plumper than he remembered. Haggard, too, especially around her blue eyes.
“More than half the townspeople ran away when the Yankees came,” she said after she got over the surprise of his arrival. “A good many who stayed took in enemy wounded. I did. I had one captain here, a polite fellow from Maine who was covered with bandages but acted very lively. He refused to let me help change the dressings. I had Boz watch him. He wasn’t hurt. The bandages were borrowed from someone else. I have no idea how he got them, but he must have put them on and run away to avoid fighting. I turned him out and replaced him with a pair of real patients. New York boys. Irish—sweet and gentle and never in battle before. One left after eight days. The other died in my bed.” She resumed the slow, tired churning.
“I don’t know why we hang on here,” she said, sighing. “Stubbornness, I guess. And if I left, Charles wouldn’t know where to find me. Have you—have you seen him?” That catch in her voice said much about her emotions.
“Once, before the spring campaign heated up.” Seated at the sun-drenched table with a cup of tasteless imitation coffee, he described Billy’s escape from Libby.
“Remarkable,” she said when he finished. “But Charles would do that. The old Charles.” The odd statement puzzled Orry. “I imagine he hasn’t had time to ride up this way. Have you had any further word from him since the escape?”
“None. But I’m sure he’s fine. I watch the casualty rolls carefully. I haven’t seen his name.” There was no reason to add that many of the dead and lost were never identified.
His encouragement lightened her mood a little. “I can’t tell you how startled I was to see you on the back porch—Reverend Manchester. You do fit the role.”
“Ah, but the reverend is protected against worldly emergencies—and Yankees.” He showed her the knife concealed in his boot. “I also have a used but serviceable navy Colt in my saddlebag. Let me tell you why I’m here, Augusta. I need your help—that is, I need the help of one of your men, to escort Madeline to Washington.”
Weary astonishment: “Washington? Have you forgotten which side we’re on?”
“No, but I must get her out of Richmond, and with Grant entrenching all around Petersburg, it will be much easier and safer to send her to my friend George’s home in Pennsylvania, where my sister is—the one married to Billy Hazard—than back to South Carolina.”
He explained more of his plan. She readily agreed to help, even insisting that Boz accompany him back to Richmond to assist Madeline with her packing. After Orry ate some stale bread and homemade cheese—the invaders had graciously allowed Gus to keep one milk cow—he and the freedman prepared to leave. “You ride first while I walk,” Orry said to Boz. “That nag can’t carry two of us.”
It was hot. He fanned himself with his hat, then shook Gus’s hand. “I’ll bring Madeline back as soon as I can prepare the documents she’ll need for safe conduct. It may take as long as two weeks.”
It took less than one because of continuing pressure from the highest level. Although the department was inundated with work—the news from Georgia was bad; Sherman had advanced to a position near Marietta and at any hour might assault Joe Johnston’s Kennesaw Mountain entrenchments—Benjamin wanted Orry to set everything else aside and concentrate on his wife’s departure. Seddon told Orry he personally sanctioned it.
The Mains and Boz set out for Barclay’s Farm at the end of June, while the war news continued to worsen. Davis, a burned-out man, informed the papers that he had sent Retreating Joe Johnston all the reinforcements that could be spared. Now, whatever happened at the doorstep of Atlanta was the general’s responsibility, the general’s fault. At the same time, Davis tried to persuade journalists and the public that because Grant had neither crushed Lee nor captured Richmond, the Virginia situation was improving.
No one believed him.
The Reverend Manchester once again traveled to Fredericksburg with Scripture, knife, and .36 caliber navy Colt. He and his companions rode in an old buggy whose cost Orry didn’t care to think about. For replacing a broken axle, the wheelwright had charged five times the prewar price.
On a Wednesday, the second-to-last day of the month, Orry and Madeline said good-bye on the front porch of the farmhouse. The weather was appropriate to the occasion. To the northwest, onyx clouds tumbled and spun, speeding over the gutted land through a strange pearly sky. The wind picked up. The first spatters struck the dust of the dooryard. Orry could hardly think of all he must say in a short time.
“—once you’re in Washington, use some of the greenbacks to telegraph Brett.”
“Yes, we’ve gone over that, darling. Several times. Boz will see me safely to one of the Potomac bridges—I’ll be fine.” She touched his face. “Somehow you must send me news about yourself. I’ll worry constantly. At least you haven’t said anything more about that mad idea of field duty.”
“Because I’ve done nothing about it. There never seems to be time.” There was deliberate deceit in the answer, the words chosen and arranged to allay her fear. He hoped she didn’t see through the trick. He added quickly, “I’ll send a letter by courier when I can.”
She came closer, strands of wind-loosened hair blowing around her strangely sad little traveling hat—a sort of cap with a single black-dyed aigrette, which the wind bent and nearly broke. Tears filled her eyes.
“Do you know how much I’ll miss you? How much I love you? I know why you’re sending me away.”
“Because it’s unwise for you to stay in—”
“Thousands of other women are staying in Richmond,” she broke in. “That isn’t the reason—though I love you more than ever for pretending it is. You’ve been protecting me.” Dust blew around them; the landscape whited out in the glitter of lightning. “Your superiors believe Ashton’s accusation. Don’t bother denying it; I know it’s true. A War Department official married to a Negress—that’s intolerable. So I must be gotten rid of. Except for missing you so terribly, I’m not especially sad to leave. I’ve never been happy as a lady-in-waiting at a court of bigots.”
She gave him a quick, intense kiss. “But I do love you for trying to spare me the truth.”
The clouds burst, the rain roared down. Tall and bleak as some Jeremiah, he glowered a
t her. “Who told you?”
“Mr. Benjamin, when I chanced to meet him on Main Street day before yesterday.”
“That slimy, dishonorable—”
“He didn’t say a word, Orry.”
“Then how—?”
“He cut me dead. Saw me coming and crossed the street to avoid me. Suddenly I understood everything.”
He flung his arm around her, wracked by wrath and sorrow. “God, how I hate this damn war and what it’s done to us.”
“Don’t let it do anything worse. To give your life now would be squandering it for nothing.”
“I’ll be careful. You, too—promise me?”
“Of course.” Shining confidence returned to her face as they huddled on the porch, which had grown dark. “I know we’ll come through this and be back together at Mont Royal sooner than either of us expects.”
“So do I.” He eyed the rain beating on the great raw stumps of the vanished trees. “I must go.”
“I’ll wait until it lets up a little.”
“Yes, good idea—” He was wasting time on commonplaces. He swept his arm around her again and kissed her for nearly half a minute, with passion. “I love you, my Annabel Lee.”
“I love you, Orry. We’ll come through.”
“I am sure of it,” he said, smiling for the first time.
She stayed on the porch until the falling rain hid the buggy on the road.
On the return trip, Orry started sneezing. By the time he reached the city at noon the next day, his head felt light. Madeline’s absence created a gloom in the silent rooms on Marshall Street. As he changed into his uniform to return to the department, he vowed to spend as little time as possible in the flat. He would immerse himself in work till a transfer came through. He could even sleep on one of the office couches if he chose.
It might be wise to do that for the first night or two. He missed Madeline fiercely, and there were too many memories here. Seddon wouldn’t object if he stayed in the building. After all, he had proved himself a model bureaucrat by disposing of the troublesome Negress.
God, the bitterness. He couldn’t help it. He no longer had the slightest wish to fight or die for any of the bankrupt principles of Mr. Jefferson Davis. He could hardly believe that just three years earlier he had been willing. Joining Pickett was not a matter of patriotism, but of survival. He was answering the drum, as he had when he went to West Point and soldiered in Mexico, because of the drumbeat, not the rhetoric of the drummer. I’d damn near fight for the Yankees to get out of this town, he thought as he left the flat.
He had been at work less than ten minutes when a sound made him look up. Foot scraping, Josea Pilbeam struggled to Orry’s desk and whispered, “I must see you at once. It’s urgent.”
On a staircase heavy with darkness and humidity in the aftermath of the storm, Pilbeam said, “Last night the lady and her spouse left the city for nearly four hours.”
“Where did they go?”
“To that location you described. They conferred with a heavy-set man I’ve never seen before.”
They were using the farm again. Patience had been repaid. He would show Seddon, Benjamin, the lot of them that he was no lunatic. Excited, he said, “Did you hear the man’s name?”
Pilbeam shook his head. “No one used it while I was listening.”
“Where exactly did they meet?”
“In the building right at the edge of the bluff. After about a quarter of an hour, they were joined by someone I did recognize. He’s been in our office many times.”
Orry put a handkerchief to his dripping nose, suppressed a sneeze. “Who was it?”
The marble walls and steps seemed to rumble and quake when Pilbeam said, “Winder’s plug-ugly. Israel Quincy.”
111
SO INFERNALLY SIMPLE, ORRY thought as he slipped across the field, following the same route he had taken the first time. Ever since his conversation with Pilbeam, he had marveled at the beauty of the obvious—effective because it was almost always overlooked. The investigator from Winder’s office had found no evidence of a plot because he was part of it.
The evening was moonless and still. Orry’s broadcloth felt heavy with dampness; his shirt was already soaked through. Halfway to the implement building, he paused to survey the field by the fitful pulses of red light accompanying the federal bombardment to the south.
The earth around him had lately been subjected to digging and trampling. He cast his mind back. His first night here, he remembered, the field was weedy. Then he had ridden out a second time and discovered—
What? He cudgeled his tired mind while sniffing through his dripping nose. He choked off an unexpected sneeze with both hands clapped over his face. He distinctly remembered plowed soil on his second visit. Curious that someone would work the field of an abandoned—
“Stupid. Stupid!” The obvious again, and he had missed it. He knew how the Whitworth rifles and ammunition had disappeared. They had been hidden right under everyone’s nose.
“Feet,” he corrected in a whisper. The trick came straight from Edgar Poe’s famous detective tale of the stolen letter. As a Poe fancier, he was doubly humiliated. And I’ll wager Mr. Quincy took charge of inspecting this part of the farm. Mr. Quincy strolled over the newly plowed field and noticed nothing unusual.
Had Powell himself hidden somewhere on the property all the time? With Quincy involved, it was certainly possible. Orry rubbed his nose with his damp handkerchief while red light ran around the southern horizon and the artillery storm muttered again. He put the handkerchief away, reached across beneath his coat, and drew the navy Colt from the bulky holster tied to his left leg. He pulled the hammer back to half-cock and resumed his cautious advance.
He approached the same light crack through which he had spied before. When close to the building, he discerned a buggy and two saddle horses near the main house. He pressed his cheek to the wood and bit down on his lower lip in a flash of rage. There, perched on one of the dirt-covered Whitworth crates resurrected from the field, James Huntoon.
Gaps showed between the buttons of Huntoon’s bulging waistcoat. He had removed his outer coat, rolled up his sleeves, and was holding a large piece of paper by the edges. Some sort of plan or diagram. He tilted it forward, resting it on his paunch so others could see it.
“May I have your attention?” someone else said. “This is the device Mr. Powell described before he was called away for a few days to attend to other details of our campaign.” Orry frowned; the speaker was out of his line of sight, but the voice was maddeningly familiar.
He knelt to change position and his angle of vision. Beside Huntoon on the rifle case he now saw a bright lantern. To the right of that, lounging against a beam and picking his teeth with a straw, the benign Mr. Quincy. Orry seethed.
He heard his sister’s voice next. “Are you sure it will work, Captain Bellingham?”
Bellingham? Had he found the man who had shown her the painting—?
“My dear Mrs. Huntoon, infernal devices invented by General Rains at the Torpedo Bureau have a notable success record.”
A corpulent man waddled into view. Only his back was visible, but something about the shape of his head tantalized Orry as much as his voice did. The man extended his right hand; Orry saw a large lump of coal in his palm. If this was indeed the Bellingham responsible for Madeline’s humiliation and flight, Orry was tempted to shoot him in the back.
Lifting his hand slightly to call attention to the coal, the man said, “A device similar to this was placed in the coal bunker of the captured blockade-runner Greyhound when she lay at anchor farther down the James. A stoker shoveled it into the boiler with his coal scoop, and if Ben Butler and Admiral Porter had been standing in slightly different locations when the device exploded, there would be two more Yankees in hell.”
Orry identified the voice. That is, he put a name to it—the right name—though he could hardly believe it. To the bubbling stew of his anger, the recognitio
n added memories going all the way back to his first summer at the Academy; memories involving George and, later, Charles in Texas, when Charles wrote to express surprise and dismay at the unexplained vendetta of a senior officer of the Second Cavalry.
Israel Quincy made a sucking sound. “Sure is a fooler, Captain. Nobody could tell it from real coal.”
“Not unless they handled it.” He gave the device to Quincy, whose hands sagged beneath the weight. “Examine the casting. The shape, the texture, the perfect pigmentation of the iron—genius.”
That was the moment Orry saw the profile of the former Union officer who had somehow become involved in a Confederate conspiracy. To be positive, he scrutinized the three chins, the receding hair, the one small, dark eye visible to him. There was no doubt. He was looking at Elkanah Bent—alias Bellingham.
If Orry hadn’t seen Bent, made the identification, the rest might not have happened as it did; he might have crept away and ridden back to Richmond to turn out a full company of the provost’s men, before the Whitworths could be buried again. But the lifelong vendetta of Elkanah Bent of Ohio—a vendetta that had continued down to the present, with the revelation to Ashton—twisted some key in Orry’s head. A door that should have remained locked burst open.
There were just three men inside, but in his state of mind it wouldn’t have mattered had there been thirty. He stood and strode around the corner of the building. He had the navy Colt on full cock when he booted the door inward.
“Everyone stand still.”
Ashton clapped hands over her mouth. Huntoon dropped the diagram and slid sideways along the edge of the crate. As for Bent—no mistake as to who it was, none—his face was full of bewilderment that swiftly melted into terrified recognition.
“Orry Main—?”
“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” said the calmly professional Quincy, shooting his right hand beneath his parson’s coat. Orry twisted toward him and fired. The bullet flung Quincy backward against the beam. Orry heard his head smack as he dragged out his pepperbox, trigger finger jerking and jerking even as he slid down to land on his rump. The barrels discharged one after another; the last shot blew off the toe of Quincy’s left boot as he toppled sideways.