Jack had been hanging back. There was much to see in this meeting of husband and wife. He knew he was incapable of understanding all of it, but he could tell that there was plenty that was not being said.
‘And who the hell is Jack?’ John pushed his wife to one side and came to stand foursquare in front of Jack.
‘He was staying with us. Pa took him in. He was sick.’ Martha gave Jack’s story in a clipped tone. ‘He saved my life when the men who killed Pa came.’
John was studying Jack carefully, measuring him up. ‘You brought my wife all this way?’
‘I did.’ Jack saw anger flare in the man’s eyes.
‘All that way? Just the two of you?’
‘All that way. Just the two of us,’ Jack answered evenly. He could sense the violence in the man standing in front of him. He tried to understand it, to wonder what it would be like to have another man take care of your wife during a dangerous journey. He failed. Empathy was not one of his strongest skills.
‘And why would you do that?’ John’s hands went to his hips. He had the build of a man who slept by the fire and ate most of the time he was awake. But his mates surrounded him, and their presence gave him the confidence to confront a stranger, one who had done him either the greatest service or the greatest wrong. It was clear that he was trying to figure out which one of those it was, and in the meantime he had defaulted to a defensive posture that clearly painted Jack as a villain.
‘We were both heading in the same direction. I figured I was in her debt for her taking care of me when I was sick. So I repaid that debt by bringing her to you.’
‘So I should be thanking you?’ John shook his head at the notion.
‘Yes, yes, you bloody should.’ Jack tasted the first stirrings of anger. Martha’s husband was clearly a prick.
‘So you treated her right?’
‘Yes.’
‘All that way?’
‘Yes.’ Jack felt not even a shred of guilt as he lied. Perhaps he should act with more meekness, or even feel remorse at making this man a cuckold. But he couldn’t do it. He just didn’t have it in him.
‘And I’m supposed to believe you?’ John fired out questions that were more accusations than requests for answers.
‘Yes.’ Jack held onto his growing anger with difficulty. ‘And now you get to take care of your wife.’
‘You telling me what to do?’ John’s face turned sour. ‘I don’t need a goddam Englishman telling me what I should or shouldn’t be doing.’ He had clearly picked up on Jack’s accent.
‘Fine. Do whatever the fuck you want, chum. But your wife risked her life to find you. I would think you would cherish her for that. Instead here you are acting like a dog with a dick up its arse.’
John took a step forward. Martha moved quickly to come between them. ‘We owe Jack our thanks, John. I wouldn’t have made it here without him. He kept me safe and acted like a gentleman the whole time.’ She placed her hands on her husband’s chest and spoke firmly, even as she lied. ‘Now,’ she turned and faced Jack, keeping her back against her husband’s chest, ‘I think it’s best if you go, Jack.’
Jack looked at her then, holding her gaze. Then he nodded and turned on his heel, walking away without another word. He had done as he had promised and delivered Martha to her husband. The moment should have brought him satisfaction at a job well done. He did not understand quite what he felt, but he knew there was not an ounce of pleasure as the ties that had bound him to her were cut away.
‘The Yankees are here!’
Jack rose to his feet as the cry was shouted around the encampment. He had been eating, but the hardtack that was all he had managed to find was almost inedible. He tossed it into the mud without a second thought.
He had been sitting in the damp shelter he had shared with Martha, his mind dwelling on the encounter with her husband. There was no denying there was a sense of relief at having handed her into another man’s care, but there was another emotion trying to force its way to the forefront of his mind, one that he refused to acknowledge. He did not want to admit, even to himself, that he missed her.
Around him, the Confederate lines were a hive of activity. Men streamed away from their huts, rushing to their allotted places in the rifle pits. Bugles and drums hastened them on, whilst sergeants and officers shouted orders at their men.
Jack had no place to be, and would play no part in whatever was ahead. Yet there was something in the cacophony that resonated deep in his gut. Feeling his heartbeat beginning to race, he grabbed his rifle and made sure his revolver was in its holster, then jogged after the nearest soldiers.
The rifle pits were built across a ridge of slightly higher ground, and he followed them to the west, keen to discover the rest of the Confederate position. They stretched away from him, tracing the contours of the ground, until they ended in a deep ravine with a fast-moving creek running along its bottom.
When he reached the ravine, he picked his way down and across, taking his time. He had no desire to twist an ankle on the treacherous ground. He had just crossed the creek when he heard the first rifle shots. They came individually. He did not have to see the Confederate lines to know that they had sent out sharpshooters to interfere with the progress of the Union troops. It told him the blue-coated army was close, so he increased his pace as he scrambled up the far side of the ravine, unwilling to miss whatever was going to happen next.
He emerged to see more entrenchments stretching away in front of him. Like the ones closer to Dover, they had been dug deep and reinforced with sturdy tree trunks and mounds of clay. Another long abatis covered the approach to these pits, the dense tangle of branches blocking much of his view of the ground to the south and west, the direction he expected the Union army to come from. The pits themselves were packed with Confederate troops, the men, like him, waiting for events to unfold.
He turned northwards, making his way up the sloping ground to where he guessed he would find the fort itself. He had been walking a while and he estimated he was a good mile from Dover. The area between the entrenchments and the higher ground was lined with more of the shacks and huts the soldiers had built to shelter from the winter weather, deserted now that the men were down in the rifle pits.
He paused near one of the larger huts, taking a moment to check that no one was there to watch him before ducking inside. As he had suspected, the hut belonged to some officers. The interior looked cosy, the men who lived there lucky enough to have found themselves a couple of cots to sleep in. Many of their belongings had been left behind, and he found what he was looking for no more than ten seconds after he went inside. A standard-pattern infantry officer’s sabre was lying on a table in its scabbard, and a pair of field glasses in a leather case hung from a nail driven deep into one of the hut’s supporting pillars. He felt a pang of guilt as he tucked the sabre under his arm, but it was not enough to stop him grabbing the leather strap of the glasses case and slinging it over his shoulder. They were a valuable pair of items, and he was sure their owner would feel their loss keenly. But he consoled himself with the notion that whoever owned the equipment was clearly a fool to leave it behind when faced with the enemy. And fools got what they deserved.
He scurried out of the hut, then pushed on, stretching his legs as he walked up the slope, only pausing long enough to fasten the scabbard’s belt around his waist. When he reached the top, he opened the leather case and pulled out the field glasses. They looked new and smelled of the protective oil that their former owner had applied to prevent them from rusting.
It was something of a relief to stop. His chest heaved with the exertion of his walk, but at least he had a fine view of the surrounding terrain. He was standing on high ground surrounded by the trenches and buildings that he guessed constituted the fort itself. To the east, around two miles away, were the buildings of Dover. To the north of the town he could see the wide Cumberland river. The long line of rifle pits ran around the eastern and southern flanks of t
he town, stretching all the way from the river to the ravine he had crossed. They then continued around the south of the fort before turning northwards until they reached another, smaller river that flowed from south to north.
From what Jack could see, the Confederate generals had sited the fort and its surrounding entrenchments well. The wide Cumberland river protected the northern flank, and the second, smaller river he had just seen for the first time protected the fort from the west. The southern and eastern approaches were open to attack, but the long line of rifle pits and their protective abatis had been located to cover any attack from those directions. It was a strong position, but he could not help thinking back to what the Confederate corporal, Hightower, had said. There was indeed a feeling of being shut in, the same rivers that protected the place also trapping the soldiers there. The risk of the army being encircled was a real one.
He looked south. From where he stood, he could see over the rifle pits and the abatis, so he put the field glasses to his face and searched the ground beyond for a sighting of the Union army. He saw nothing.
Disappointed, he turned to the north and looked over the fort. It was nothing like he had imagined, being little more than an irregularly shaped fieldwork with ten-foot-high walls of earth and logs occupying the highest area of ground around one hundred feet above the Cumberland river. The line of rifle pits to its southern flank was interspersed with positions for field guns, while nearer to the river he could make out a line of three interlinked gun emplacements that had been hacked from the mud of the bluff high above the waterline, designed to protect both the heavy guns that had been dragged up to the fort and the men who served them. Each cannon stood in its own position, with its barrel aimed over a parapet. Both the parapets and the sides of the emplacements had been reinforced with stout wooden planks, which were topped with coffee sacks filled with sand. The cannon sat on barbette carriages rather than the two-wheeled gun carriages he was used to seeing on a battlefield. The barbette was made up of a stout wooden chassis with fixed iron rails running along its length, mounted on a level platform with a fixed iron pintle at the front and a pair of small traversing wheels at the rear. The gun barrel sat on a separate wooden carriage with iron rollers that rested on the chassis’s fixed iron rails. When fired, the massive recoil would drive it back up the rails where it would be held in place with heavy wooden chocks to be reloaded before being levered back into position when ready to fire.
As he ran his eyes over the position, he realised very quickly that the cannon had been sited to cover an approach by river, being aimed out to the north and west, the direction any Union flotilla would take were it to sail down the Cumberland to launch an attack on the fort. There were three cannon sited in the first battery he saw: two 32-pounders alongside a much larger rifled cannon. Further to the west, and cut lower into the bluff, was a second battery housing another nine cannon: eight 32-pounders and a huge columbiad. He was no artilleryman, but it was clear that any Union ships seeking to steam down the Cumberland river would meet a devastating fire from the two gun batteries.
He studied the river through his field glasses, concentrating on the western approaches to the fort, and saw immediately that upstream, the river bent around to the north. Its natural path would screen any boats heading their way from sight until they were almost in range of the heavy cannon in the water batteries. He panned westwards until he could see where the second river, which ran along the western edge of the fort, flowed into the much wider Cumberland. From what he could make out, the backwater from the Cumberland was flooding back along the smaller river, making it a formidable obstacle. The fort was safe from attack from the west.
He had seen enough. There were gunners working around their precious cannon and he had no intention of getting any closer to them. He was satisfied with what he had seen, and he now carried a solid mental picture of the ground the Confederates had chosen to defend.
With the sound of gunfire increasing, he returned to his earlier vantage point on the southern flank of the fort. He studied the ground to the south and this time he was rewarded with his first glimpse of the Union army.
The sight of the blue uniforms brought him up short. They were advancing in column, the men moving slowly and carefully towards the Confederate position. The glimpse of the familiar uniform stirred emotions he had buried deep. Less than a year before, he had fought alongside men like the ones he now watched. The 1st Boston had been his home for several months, and he had come to care deeply about its men. Yet now he stood on the opposite side of the war, amidst ranks dressed in brown and grey instead of blue.
The Union army advanced with caution, but the Confederates did not send anything more than a few dozen sharpshooters to challenge their arrival. The main body of men stayed in their rifle pits, watching the enemy approach. They catcalled and hooted as the hated Northerners came into sight, but that was all. The Union army would be left without interference to take up the positions that would pin the Confederates in their defences. It smacked of weakness and timidity. As Jack watched the Union columns, he imagined what he would do if he were in charge. It would be simple enough to clear channels in the abatis and send forward men to contest the enemy’s arrival. The Confederates could give the Union troops a bloody nose, and perhaps even force them to retreat, whilst knowing they themselves had a strong defensive position to fall back to.
In his mind’s eye, he imagined the Confederate soldiers swarming forward, the men yipping and yelling like fiends. If they fought cohesively, they could form line and flense the Union columns with musket fire. The Union troops, in their denser formations, would be sure to take heavy casualties. Even if it did not force a retreat, it would make the Union generals more cautious whilst also boosting the morale of the Confederate soldiers defending Fort Donelson. Doing nothing handed the initiative to the Union, and Jack could only imagine what it was doing to the spirits of the men standing idle in the rifle pits, forced to watch as their doom approached.
He sighed. The Confederate generals clearly had their own ideas. As he watched the Union columns creep forward unopposed, he was forced to remind himself that this was not his war. He fought only for himself now, for his own aims and ambitions. The two sides in this bitter struggle could find their way to hell without his assistance.
He looked away from the main body of the Union army and panned east. Almost immediately he spotted a column of Confederate cavalry riding into the eastern approach to Dover. They looked little like the cavalry he had seen during his time with the British army. There was no pomp or splendour about these riders. They wore little that could be thought of as a uniform, and what they did wear was mud-splattered and filthy. Yet even from a distance he could sense their confidence. He could see it in the set of their shoulders and the busy, purposeful bustle as they dismounted.
He kept the field glasses pressed to his face and continued to scan the ranks, searching for the one face he wanted to see. He found it within the span of a single minute. He took a sharp intake of breath, then held the field glasses still as he studied the man he had come so far to kill.
Men surrounded Lyle. As Jack watched, the grey-haired Confederate officer strode through the dismounted ranks, clapping one man on the back, then stopping to bawl out another. Suddenly he stopped, staring into the half-distance, as if somehow aware of Jack’s distant scrutiny. It allowed Jack to sharpen the image in the field glasses, bringing his enemy’s face fully into focus. He held it there, committing it to memory, so that every pore, every wrinkle, every whisker became indelibly etched into his mind.
It was time to simplify matters. He was alone once more, beholden to no one but himself. He would no longer waste time dwelling on the war, on Martha, on states’ rights or the fate of a million slaves. He would just do what he had come here to do.
He would try to remember Rose. And he would kill Lyle.
Dover, Tennessee, 14 February 1862
Jack sat in his meagre shelter as the dawn of a
nother day arrived and shivered. He was not sure which was worse, the bitter icy wind that now cut through the air, or the previous night’s blizzard. Snow now smothered the ground, and the encampment around Dover had been reduced to little more than a frozen wasteland through which the men moved like ghosts.
The Confederate army hid away in its huts and suffered. Like Jack himself, it had done precious little the previous day. The Union army had launched a single attack. There had been an exchange of artillery fire along with a long-range bombardment from a single Union ship, and Jack had heard of a body of Union infantry attempting an assault on a part of the Confederate line. Nothing had come of the isolated attack.
For his part, Jack had spent the day wandering the encampment. He had gathered a few supplies, securing himself some hardtack, salted meat and coffee beans that would sustain him for the next week or more. The gunners up at the fort had fed him, the men serving the huge guns happy to share their stew with the lone Englishman wandering through their lines. They had seemed pleased to have him visit, and he had spent an hour in their company, talking of London and making up answers to their questions as to how an English officer had found his way into the Confederate army. It had been a diversion, the conversation a fair price to pay for the hot meal. Yet the talk of his former home had been unsettling, and he had turned the conversation to the defence of the fort.
He had expected to be told of plans for a long, resolute defence of the strong position. Instead, he had heard about a breakout, the commanding officers already committed to abandoning the fort to the Union forces and forcing their way through towards Nashville.
To Jack’s mind, such a plan made little sense. If the Confederate army had wanted to avoid a confrontation with the Union forces pushing deep into the South, they could have pulled back long before the Northerners had arrived. Instead they had waited, creating a strong defensive position around the fort and holding ground that governed access to part of the strategically important river network. To give that ground up without a fight had to be nothing short of folly.
THE REBEL KILLER Page 23