Sion Crossing

by Anthony Price

  The Senator watched the young man depart, then turned to Latimer with a shake of the head. “Protocol, he calls it! You suffer from that, Mister Latimer?”

  “I suffer from a lot of things, Senator.”

  “I’ll bet you do!” The Senator tossed his head. “And now from me, eh?”

  “And now from you, Senator.” Truth, where it could be used as an ally, was always to be preferred. For truth carried the deceptive labels of honesty and sincerity on it. “What do you want from me?”

  The big American looked at him. “Well, that’s straight—I like that. So maybe we can do business after all, Mister Latimer.”

  “You had your doubts, did you?” The way things were going, perhaps honesty and sincerity need not be false.

  Another look. “Straight both ways, then. Yes—I had my doubts. And I still have them.”

  Straight both ways then. “You were expecting someone else?”

  “I was. A man named Audley. A history man—right?”

  This sudden onrush of truth and honesty was positively disconcerting. “A history man … originally. And just about the best man we’ve got, in terms of pure intellect.” But there were limits. “He has his … disadvantages, of course.” He shrugged.

  “And you should know—because you’re his new boss—eh?” The shrug came back to him, as one top man to another, below the line of official recommendation. “And that’s another problem. Because I think you’re going to be too busy for me, is what I think.”

  That wouldn’t do. “You could be wrong there. I don’t take over for another week. At the moment … I’ve got a little time in hand.” Latimer looked at his watch ostentatiously. “Which I’m thinking you haven’t got—” Another 24 hours would work wonders for the American Civil War “—and, apart from HRH and the North Atlantic Fellowship, I could meet you here tomorrow just as easily, Senator.”

  “Screw that!” The Senator grimaced. “And screw HRH and the North Atlantic Fellowship! This time tomorrow I’ve got to be nice to the goddam’ Frogs—Monsieur Mitterand—who talks left and acts right … And after that Rome … So you can screw that! This is personal—and this is now or never … You’d better understand that.”

  “At the moment, I can’t say that I do.”

  “No.” Senator Cookridge was on a knife-edge.

  “And I’m not David Audley.” But the Senator must slide down on the right side of the knife, no matter what the risk. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t know anything about … history.”

  “No.” The Senator estimated him, second-running against his own risk—his personal risk. “So I’ve been told.” The estimation became more shrewd. “You had someone—your great-grandpa … great-grandfather, would that be … someone who fought in the Civil War?”

  “That’s right.” Latimer almost wished he hadn’t remembered old Mutton-Chops—except that the historic connection appeared to cheer the Senator somewhat.

  “And he fought for the South, Colonel Morris tells me? For the Johnny Rebs? Is that so? And wrote a book?” The Senator nodded. “So that makes you something of an expert, does it?”

  There was the slightest hint of a challenge in that last question, and it had to be met just right.

  He shook his head. “In itself … no.” Another shake. It was Mitchell, not Mutton-Chops, whom he must call to his aid. “But it makes for a personal interest. And, of course, my ancestor overlapped with Henderson.” He toyed with the possibility of claiming a close relationship between Mutton-Chops and Mitchell’s expert, but decided against it; if Henderson was so well-known, then the Senator might have heard of him. “G. F. R. Henderson.”

  “Henderson?” Blissfully, Senator Cookridge didn’t sound as though he knew Henderson from any other name in Queen Victoria’s Army List.

  “Oxford and the Staff College. And the Yorkshire Light Infantry … He was a younger contemporary of my ancestor—a military academic who wrote books about the war—Sherman and Grant and … Stonewall Jackson.” He pronounced the last name with false confidence. He had heard it somewhere, but it had an unlikely ring to it, the christian name element: in that long-lost America the christian names would more likely be actually Christian, out of the Bible. Yet that, surely, had been what Mitchell had said over the telephone—and there was an echo in his memory which confirmed it.

  “Stonewall Jackson?” The Senator recognized the name, and Latimer’s own half-certainty firmed up.

  “That’s right.” But it would be advisable to steer away from the man Jackson, who sounded more like a tail-end cricketer than a general, towards someone he could invest with more proof of his expertise. “And Sherman, of course.”

  “Sherman?” Senator Cookridge visibly perked up at the repetition of this name, as though encouraged by it.

  “Yes.” Desperation once again elongated Latimer’s memory. Not only had Mitchell mentioned Sherman, but there was also a recollection of prep school music lessons for the unmusical, which had been glorified sing-songs of catchy tunes from the tattered song-books of the music department, some of which had been quite dreadfully wet—

  Nymphs and shepherds, come away—

  —but some of which had at least been honestly patriotic—

  Heart of oak are our ships,

  Heart of oak are our men—

  —and a few of which had been honestly jolly, if quite incomprehensible at the time—

  Allons, enfants de la patrie,

  Le jour de gloire est arrivé—

  —and

  Hurrah! hurrah! we bring the Jubilee!

  Hurrah! hurrah! the flag that makes you free!

  So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea!

  As we were marching through Georgia.

  And that, murmured prep school memory in a loud stage-whisper, was what Mitchell and “Bruce Catton” both had meant by Sherman’s “March to the Sea”, of course.

  “Actually, opinions differ about Sherman, Senator.” He cocked his head knowingly. Mitchell had said something quite incomprehensible, quoting Bruce Catton, comparing what Sherman had done with what Bomber Command had done in the Second World War. But he wasn’t about to chance his luck with that.

  “You know about Sherman, then?”

  Like the man at the top of the stairs, Latimer was just one fraction of a second ahead of the possibility of that question, reaction out-guessing action. “I’ve only got a British opinion of him. It wasn’t our war … so I’m open to argument.”

  “You’ll do.” Cookridge moved from one phase of estimation to the next. “I guess you’ve got the background. And—I’ll be frank—that’s a lot more than I expected, even if it isn’t the most important thing.” He paused there.

  The pause lengthened. “And what is the important thing, Senator?”

  A sharp tap-tap punctuated the question.

  “Okay!” Cookridge lifted his voice to the sound. “First, you’ve got the time—a couple of days—three-four days, maybe … you sound like you’ve got that?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Possibly.” Cookridge acknowledged the qualification. “Colonel Morris indicated as much. Second, you have the general inclination to help me—the willingness, shall we put it like that? The time and the willingness, they are really what counts. Being an expert on this old war of ours—” Cookridge held up his hand quickly “—I know! You don’t want to admit that—that’s not the British way… . But I guess you are one, and that’s a bonus. But it’s just a bonus, no more than that. Because it wasn’t the real qualification—it wasn’t what I was looking for. You’ve already got what I need, you see, Mister Latimer.”

  He was being complimentary, if it was Howard Morris’s “brains” to which he was referring. But he was also making Latimer uneasy. “But it was Dr Audley you were after in the first place, Senator.”

  “Same thing.” Cookridge smiled. “‘Not a historian’, Morris said. ‘But the same type of man’. And he was right.”

  In ordinary circ
umstances Latimer might have taken that as derogatory, if not grossly insulting. But these were not ordinary circumstances.

  “I know what you’re thinking.” The Senator raised a finger.

  Latimer swallowed. “You do?”

  “I surely do. You’re thinking what I’d be thinking.” The smile twisted wryly. “But we’ll come back to that … We’re talking about types now. The man for the job—that isn’t half the battle. The battle’s just the footnote to your decision, telling you whether you got it right or wrong. You chose the wrong general—you already lost the battle. You chose the right man—start working on the peace treaty, don’t worry about the battle, that’s his business.”

  Latimer thought for a moment. “Senator—tell me about your peace treaty.”

  Cookridge stared at him for a moment, then chuckled. “I like that, goddam’it! You don’t even want to know what I want you to do—I like that! Morris was right, the son-of-a-bitch!”

  Latimer’s unease increased. “I’d quite like to know that too.” Beneath the homespun Mid-West frankness, this old American was sharp as a needle: he had manoeuvred his victim into a position from which he could hardly withdraw now without loss of face, no matter what he wanted.

  “I’ll bet you do—” Another tap-tap interrupted the Senator’s enjoyment. “Okay, Bob—just two minutes!” The Senator winked at Latimer. “Protocol—what Bob doesn’t know—I know how to keep the President of the United States waiting—I guess I’m just dam’ good at apologizing, and that’s the truth … We’ve got men back home who are real smart and know their business—give them a rifle and a scent, and some good ol’ dogs, and they’ll chase any varmint on earth, two legs or four, until it’s done running. But they’re the hunters, do you see? And hunting is what comes naturally to most men—it’s in their blood from way back, when it was all that made the difference between having a full belly or an empty one … and some men are better at it than others, but it’s something they all understand well enough. So there’s no shortage of hunters.” He studied Latimer. “But a hunter you’re not, Mister Latimer.”

  “No?” The Senator knew exactly what he was. But a question seemed to be required. “And what am I then, Senator?”

  “Huh! I heard it called a lot of fancy names. In the old times you were the guys who threw the bones to see how they fell, and sang the songs and made the pictures … to see what was true and what was false.” The Senator nodded. “You don’t look for needles in haystacks—you look at the haystack, and you know whether there’s a needle in it. Right?”

  It was a curious description of the work of Research and Development. But it was not altogether wide of the mark in its homespun way, thought Latimer.

  “Son, I’m going to tell you a story—” Senator Cookridge didn’t wait for confirmation of his statement “—but it’s going to have to be a short one… . Fortunately, you already know about General Sherman—okay?”

  Not okay. “I know that he … marched through Georgia. To the sea, I believe?”

  The Senator grinned at what he took to be scholarly modesty. “Spreading fire and the sword sixty miles wide—‘bringing the jubilee’. They still remember him in those parts.” He paused. “Ever heard of a place called Sion Crossing?”

  Now the trouble was starting. “‘Sion’ is biblical—the Holy City, is it? The Promised Land?” He shrugged slightly. “I can’t say I have, Senator.”

  Mercifully, the Senator did not seem surprised. “Billy Sherman’s boys came through there in ’64. It was right on the edge of their march. But they burnt it all the same.”

  Latimer nodded. This was pure Gone With the Wind history. Sherman seemed to have burnt practically everything.

  “Sion Crossing was a great plantation, Mister Latimer. It was the home of the Alexander family—the Alexanders of Sion Crossing. The first Alexander was a Scotsman who fought the Indians and carved his fields out of the forest—had a son killed crossing the river, and built a church on the spot. And his grandson married an heiress from the coast—Marie-Louise de Brissac. And her grandfather was reputedly a pirate, who’d robbed the Spaniards and the English up and down the Spanish Main in his time—”

  Knock knock-knock!

  “I hear you!” Cookridge scowled at the door, and drew a deep breath. “I guess I’ll skip the rest until the war—James Alexander inherited in ’59, after the fever took his parents. There were two younger brothers and a sister, Marie-Louise. The boys were all killed in the war—one died in a prison camp … James died in the trenches in ’65. And Marie-Louise died of small-pox in Savannah in ’66. That was the end of the Alexanders. And Sion Crossing went back to the woods.” He paused.

  “Very tragic.” The pause called for some reaction. “Authentic Gone With the Wind stuff, Senator. But—”

  “But that’s not the full story, son. Colonel James Alexander—James the Third—he was a Republican and a Scotsman at heart, even though he did fight for the Sovereign State of Georgia when it came to the war. So he kept a sizeable part of his fortune in gold, in a bank in Atlanta, and didn’t give it all to ‘The Cause’. And in ’64, when Sherman got close to Atlanta, he had it moved to Sion Crossing for safety.”

  Latimer nodded, remembering from both the book and the film what had happened to Atlanta in 1864. “Very prudent.”

  “Marie-Louise was running the plantation.” Cookridge looked at his watch. “She had the strong-box buried in the garden. She reckoned, if Sherman’s men came, they’d plunder the house from top to bottom—she didn’t reckon on them burning it.”

  “But they did—?” Latimer couldn’t see where the story was going.

  “When it came to burning, she couldn’t bear the thought, Mister Latimer. So she offered to buy them off—the gold in exchange for the house.”

  Latimer frowned. “They chose the house?”

  Cookridge shook his head. “They chose the gold. But she’d also sent off one of the house-slaves—one of the few who hadn’t run away … Because there was a company of Confederate militia camped just down the road. And they turned up just as the Yankess were diggin up the strong-box. So then there was a fight—a skirmish through the woods more like, as the Yankees tried to get back across the river, where their regiment was.” He shook his head. “Maybe they thought she’d delayed them deliberately … maybe they fired the house to delay pursuit—maybe it was just an accident … Nobody knows for sure.”

  “But the gold?” It had to be the gold.

  “They couldn’t carry the strong-box and fight the Johnny Rebs—it was too heavy. So they shot open the lock and divided up what was inside—each man took what he thought he could carry, apparently. And then they fought their way through the woods, and the survivors swam the creek.”

  “The survivors?”

  “The Rebs killed some of them.” Cookridge nodded. “That’s how the whole story of the gold came out… . And … and they reckon some of ’em drowned—the ones who’d taken the most gold, maybe …”

  “So it’s mostly at the bottom of the river?” It was odd how gold fired the imagination.

  “Some of it is, sure. But with what they recovered—and Marie-Louise gave that to the Confederacy, mostly—and what the Yankees got away with …” The Senator shook his head “… there wasn’t one hell of a lot to start with, son. Just one man’s nest-egg in common coin and nuggets … No …”

  No? But, of course, the Senator was probably a rich man. But then … if treasure was not his objective—?

  The door opened and the young man entered, flushed with conflicting priorities.

  “Sir—sir … We do have to go now—with respect, sir.” The priorities resolved themselves. “It’s protocol, sir.”

  “Protocol?” The Senator turned the full weight of his displeasure on the young man. “Hogwash!”

  “No, sir! HRH and the Ambassador—and the Foreign Secretary—I have to insist, sir!” The young man rallied bravely.

  The Senator stared at him, then soften
ed before such courage. “Okay boy—one minute—” He swung back to Latimer.

  “I could meet you later, sir,” said Latimer.

  “There won’t be any later.” The grey head shook regretfully. “It’s like this, Mister Latimer—I have acquired some papers—some original papers, but mostly some original research by a man who is now deceased.” Now he nodded. “He was researching the history of one of Billy Sherman’s regiments, all the way from when they mustered in Iowa, down through Chattanooga to Atlanta, and from Atlanta to the sea, and then to Virginia. And they were the boys who were at Sion Crossing.” The washed-out grey eyes narrowed. “And he’s got something I want an expert to look at, to see whether it smells right, or it smells wrong.”

  Foolish! thought Latimer. “Then you want a trained historian, sir.”

  “No.” The eyes fixed him implacably. “I want you, Mister Latimer. And I want you for two reasons. And one of them is because I think you’re the best, and I like the look of you. And the other … I’ll tell you that one when you report back to me.” He drew a breath. “But I tell you this, Mister Latimer: whatever you tell me—even if you fail—you’ll have a friend in me. And I never forget my friends, Mister Latimer.”

  Put like that, it was as much a threat as a promise. But put another way … it was both an unrepeatable opportunity to establish his credentials at the highest American level—and an irresistible chance to score a point against David Audley.

  “When do you want me to go, sir?”

  “As soon as possible. Bob here has all the details—tickets and expense money—” The Senator waved his hand “—yes, I know you’re not worried about that … but it saves time … My stepdaughter will meet you in Atlanta—she will look after you … She will fill you in on the details—the real details … You can trust her—she’s her mother’s daughter, by God!” The eyes hardened. “Just as I’m trusting you now, Mister Latimer—do you understand?”

  However foolish it was, it mattered to the Chairman of the Atlantic Defence Committee—that was what he had to understand!