Down the Sky: Volume Three of the “Strike The Tent” Trilogy

by W. Patrick Lang

  Devereux observed these events and decided that the “end game” had begun. In early December, he gathered Hope, Victoria, his mother, Jake and Bill White to talk about the future. They sat in the kitchen on Duke Street with the elder Whites hovering in the background.

  “This will soon be over. When will it be over?” His mother wished to see an end.

  “Sherman will re-supply after he reaches the Atlantic and then turn north to proceed through the Carolinas to arrive in Lee’s rear. Grant wanted him to do something different but Sherman won the argument. Grant is feeling for Lee’s right flank at Petersburg. He is bringing in more and more troops to extend farther and farther to the left until he overlaps the end of the Confederate line. That is why Early’s defeat in the Valley was so important. It made available more federal troops for that extension. Taken together the actions of Grant and Sherman spell certain defeat and the end for our country.”

  “What shall we do?” Jake enquired.

  “The only one of us who is personally vulnerable is me,” Claude replied. “The rest of you are paroled, have taken the oath or seem to be innocent civilians. I am what I am. If enough records are captured in Richmond or enough people in the right offices are interviewed it will be revealed that I am…”

  “A spy,” his wife whispered.

  “Yes, and Lincoln will not save me from that.”

  “What do you intend to do?” Bill White asked.

  “I have directed the biggest of our vessels, the ‘Elizabeth Mayo’ to be brought to Alexandria and refitted to carry as many passengers as possible to France. I will resign from the army very soon and we will depart. The ship will sail to Halifax, re-victual and then across…”

  “They will let you leave?” Jake asked.

  “Oh, I think so. Stanton detests me and will be glad to see the back of me.”

  “And the president?” his mother asked. “It appears that he relies on you…”

  “I can persuade him, but first I must retrieve your husband from their grasp,” he said to Victoria.

  She no longer liked Claude but after that statement he had her undivided attention. “How?”

  “The French embassy will ask for him. He is at Johnson’s Island at the officers’ prison. We need to get him out of there before he becomes seriously ill. The place is a death trap situated in the ice on Lake Erie. When I get him back we will leave. Hope and I will go to France. I presume that you and John and the children will leave as well?”

  “Yes, of course. I have no further interest in the United States.”

  “What about me?” Jake demanded.

  Claude looked surprised. “I thought you would want to stay with maman and run the business. No?”

  “Yes, but I would have like to be consulted.”

  “Richmond will not want you to leave,” Hope said. “You are a part of what they plan to do.” She looked at him with a peculiarly immobile face. “I will pass the question. If you leave without their permission they may decide to reveal your identity.” The threat was clear. His old friends were now her present friends and her loyalties had changed.

  He had not expected anything like that. His desperation and anxiety caused him to miss this new factor in his life. She was still responsive to him as his wife and his ego had kept him from imagining that she would say or do anything like this. He regained control of himself and managed to tell her that he would await Richmond’s decision.

  When approached by Claude for French government intervention to free Balthazar, Colonel Edouard Jourdain scoffed at the idea. He laughed aloud. “Why would we do that? The fool got himself into this difficulty. Let him extricate himself from prison.”

  “Your government ordered him to America…”

  “Yes, but we did not order him to join your army, nor to command a unit. We did not order that. He did that of his own will.”

  “But you accepted it, and you would not want him to discuss the basis on which he was present in America…”

  Jourdain looked trapped. His aristocratic looks and bearing looked slightly “dented” by the prospect of a public scandal involving his tenure as military attaché in Washington. “The ambassador will have to be consulted. It takes time for ships to come and go and for action in Paris. It will take months.”

  “Yes, I think it will be March before you have a reply,” Claude said. “You had better get started, Edouard, better get started. I, too, will have to leave the country and I cannot go without Balthazar. My family will not allow it. Ah, I almost forgot, I will want to fly French colors on my schooner when we have cleared Washington. I will need the papers for that. She is the ‘Elizabeth, Mayo,’ three masted. I will send you the tonnage and dimensions.”

  The notion of Devereux’s family “not allowing it” amused Jourdain. This showed in his face. “Very well, I will have this go to the Ministry of War by courier tomorrow.”

  Claude rose and departed without ceremony or courtesy.

  In December Sherman reached Savannah and found the navy present and guarding a convoy of supply vessels. He rested his men and animals preparing for the invasion of the Carolinas.

  Lee’s army continued to starve and freeze in the trenches at Petersburg. At home women with children and farms to run saw that defeat was coming. They wrote their men summoning them home. Many left the army in that winter, unable to sustain belief in the face of inevitable doom.

  Christmas approached. The houses on Duke and Fairfax Street were filled with the scent of fir and pine. The family’s treasured tree ornaments were produced from storage for display in the parlors. Several large Christmas trees stood cheerily in the ground floor rooms. On the 20th Clotilde held her traditional Christmas Party. Because of the political variety of the family’s acquaintances, there were two groups of invitees. They were asked to arrive an hour and a half apart.

  The Union group was first on the scene. General Slough, the military governor of Alexandria came with the civilian “occupation” mayor of the city. General Haupt, head of the military railroad, Lieutenant Colonel Braithwaite, his wife Elizabeth, and Lieutenant Colonel Martin Whitman and his wife, Mary, came together in one large carriage. The vehicle had been built in England and seized by the army from a neighbor who lived on Saint Asaph Street for Haupt’s “official” use. Amy Biddle and Wilson Ford were among the last arriving.

  Maude, the gray wolfhound bitch that Claude found in the Wilderness forest, sat by Hope’s side. She was so large that she looked like another person in the receiving line. She had become devoted to Hope and had found contentment in the Devereux household that she had probably never known before.

  Clotilde, Hope and Claude stood in the receiving line. They were in the front hallway just as they had been two years before for a party in the spring of 1863 following Claude’s return from Europe. Elizabeth Braithwaite, radiant as ever, managed to remind everyone of that night. “Why, Claude it was on a night like this that I first met you,” she remarked. Not content with that, she continued. “I remember that you met Amy that night also…” Her voice trailed off as she looked at Amy Biddle who stood a few feet behind Hope in the front parlor. Neither woman seemed to react. Elizabeth, like several present remembered the memorable scene when Amy touched Devereux’s hand by accident and appeared to have been struck by lightning.

  Amy walked to the black marble fireplace to warm her hands before the blazing hardwood fire.

  The Braithwaite woman looked puzzled.

  In the course of the evening, Mary Whitman brushed past Claude several times. She passed so close that he was enveloped in her fragrance. The last time this occurred she looked back at him over her shoulder as she went by.

  Across the room Amy stared. The wounded expression in her features said much.

  The “Confederate” guests arrived around nine. When they had all arrived and toasts had been drunk to a better New Year, the assemblage settled into glum discussions of conditions in the occupied town and the rising price of food and drink.<
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  Smoot and Hope stood at opposite sides of the room. They looked so self-conscious that people began to wonder… His arm was still in a sling but he kept it that way to avoid unwanted sympathy.

  Frederick Kennedy told Victoria that Patrick Devereux’s mare was doing well in his stable and seemed no worse for wear after service in the field. “Your husband took good care of her.” He wanted to know if she wanted the horse boarded with him for very long. When told that the answer was yes he said he would combine two stalls in the best heated part of his building to give the mare comfort and room to move about.

  Victoria said she wanted the animal exercised in good weather. She asked if he had a donkey that he could put in the stall with her horse.

  “For company?” he asked and then said he would find a suitable “companion” for her horse.

  Between the sets of guests, Claude had gone to his rooms to change into a black civilian suit. In spite of this, many “old Alexandrians” tried to avoid him in his own home. He soon left the party and went to bed.

  Hope came to bed much later. He was asleep and when she got into bed she lay as far away from him as possible. She no longer wanted to touch him. If he had been awake this might have alerted him to the ongoing disintegration of his marriage, but failing that, his long experience of her faithful nature and affection made it virtually impossible for him to perceive that he had probably wrecked this part of his life.

  Maude followed Hope to the bedroom to lie on the floor on Hope’s side of the bed. The women had made the dog a padded bed on which the animal loved to sleep. Maude searched for Hope in the dark and finding her fingers gave them a careful lick before sleeping.

  The next morning Hope was still in bed when she told him that Jimmy Fowle had instructed her to tell him that his brother, Bill, in Richmond had sent a message by courier that Claude was forbidden to leave his post until released from that duty. In response to Devereux’s fear of exposure, Bill Fowle wrote that all documents pertaining to “Hannibal” had been destroyed and that no more than five people had known of Devereux’s code name. Of these, two were dead, and the other three were impeccably trustworthy.

  She told him this while he was shaving in his dressing room. The door was open and he could see her in the mirror. She was propped up on an elbow with the covers pulled up to her chin. The fireplace had gone cold. Her blond hair was spread around her shoulders. He saw in the morning light that she was developing wrinkles around the eyes. He had not noticed before that moment.

  A servant brought hot water every morning and knocked to let him know it was there. When Maude heard the knock she would wait by the door until he went to shave, then she would go out the far door of the little room and down the back stairs to the kitchen where someone would let her out in the garden.

  “Anything else?” he enquired while buttoning his uniform “blouse.”

  “No, General, I suppose that will be enough bad news for today.”

  “You are coming to France, are you not?” he asked her.

  “I am your wife. I had not thought of staying behind. Would you prefer that?”

  “Of course not.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  — Fort Fisher —

  He took the matter up with Lincoln the same day. “My family’s bank in France needs my presence. We have neglected the business because of the war. My father has died and we need to sort out our employees in Paris…”

  “I need you here,” the president responded. “I can’t rely on many of these people… What would you say to an absence of six months while on leave from the army? Ranks in the Volunteers will evaporate soon after peace comes. I told Stanton and Halleck the other day that I would like to see you appointed in the Regular Army as a colonel or some such thing, and brevetted to general so that you would still be available to help with official matters. You could leave the army and still come back when needed in your brevet rank to be of assistance. Would that suit you?”

  All of Claude’s boyhood dreams of a military career flooded back and overwhelmed him with a sense of loss for what might have been. Recently, the old dream of his father and grandfather had come again in the night. In the dream he was still unable to satisfy them. “Of course, sir, I would be most honored.” Perhaps he could satisfy this father.

  Lincoln looked relieved. His long bony body visibly relaxed. The haggard face split in the kind of smile that Claude remembered from the days when he had first met him. He slapped a knee. “Well, we’ll say no more about it for a while. Stanton wants to send you along on Ben Butler’s expedition to Fort Fisher. What do you say to that?”

  “When?”

  “The ships sailed last week but are held up by bad weather. A steam launch will take you to them. They are in Hampton Roads.”

  “What will I do?”

  “Come back and tell me what happened. Merry Christmas, I am sorry to do this to you.”

  “We had our party at home last night.”

  From the look on the president’s face it was plainly true that the Devereuxs had missed two people on their invitation list.

  Who could know? In any event, God knows what Victoria might have said.

  Claude went aboard USS Malvern, Vice-Admiral David Porter’s flagship on the 24th. The modern, side-wheel steamer inspired confidence, but he was amused and flattered at the style with which the navy piped him over the side as the boatswain of the quarter deck watch rang the ship’s bell and announced, “Brigadier General Devereux, arriving,”

  He brought Sergeant John Quick on the trip. He needed someone to watch his back both figuratively and literally. Claude wanted to feel secure. This had become harder and harder to achieve.

  Admiral David Porter

  At dinner in the wardroom mess he met Admiral David Porter, the commander of the armada that would bombard Fort Fisher in preparation for the army landings. Porter was a black bearded man with a reputation for unpleasantness toward those whom he considered “outsiders.” In other words, he did not like to have strange, unfamiliar faces about. The gold braid and the glower might have intimidated someone else, but Claude thought it a godsent opportunity to respond in kind.

  “Devereux, are you here to spy on me,” Butler asked over the syllabub that the navy served for dessert. This question was so frequently asked that Claude expected it.

  “Of course,” he replied. “Why else would I be here at Christmas time? You are so interesting to Secretary Stanton and the president that they sent me along to keep you company in the holiday season.” He did not look up from his coffee to watch Porter absorb the evident unconcern with rank that the words implied. What else I can do to him…

  A number of Porter’s officers were seated in the room. They looked at Devereux in surprise, stunned at the effrontery.

  Porter was silent, a great hulking mass in blue. His face began to color pink.

  “I don’t believe I have met you,” Porter finally managed.

  “I am a creature of headquarters.” Claude replied smiling the while. “Why would you have met me? If you had, that would probably be a bad thing. I am a banker in normal times and hope to return to that soon.” It was half a lie, but the right thing to say.

  “Where do you plan to be tomorrow,” the admiral enquired. The thought of a possibly useful banker acquaintance made Devereux look a little different.

  “I would like to watch your bombardment of the fort from the deck here and then transfer to General Butler’s ship when it arrives, if that is all right with you…”

  “The lookout at the masthead reports that the army troop ship convoy was in sight at dusk. Suit yourself. Will you have breakfast tomorrow?”

  “I will, and move to the transports later.”

  “Good I would like to talk to you about the banking business…” With that he rose and left the wardroom.

  The white coated black stewards offered more coffee from the heavy silver vessels. “USS Malvern” was engraved on the side of the coffee pots. There was
a stain on the table linen where Butler had sat.

  Unexpectedly, the ship’s roll and yaw increased noticeably.

  Devereux looked askance at a steward.

  Ben Butler

  “They’s a gale comin’ up, suh,” the man replied to the mute question. Tomorrow we be at Wilmin’ton again. The bomba’dmunt dint go too good today and the powder ship dint do nothing. The admiral, he unhappy.”

  A cockroach ran up a table leg and across the white linen. The steward swept it into a napkin with a motion born of long practice.

  The navy and marine officers departed. Their exodus left Devereux alone at table surrounded by the scent of a Christmas tree absurdly placed in a corner of this warship.

  Two days later Claude disembarked at the Washington Navy Yard with the corpse of Sergeant John Quick. His need to report to the Secretary of War insured fast transportation from Fortress Monroe. The cold weather helped with Quick’s corpse, but it was already in need of burial.

  The attack on Fort Fisher had failed miserably.

  At dawn on Christmas morning bombardment by scores of navy frigates and monitors had been renewed.

  After several hours the first men of the landing force climbed down the sides of the wooden transports into boats that would carry them to the shore. There were ten thousand Union Army soldiers available for the attack. Two thousand men were in the first “waves” of landings. Their boats reached the beaches north of Fort Fisher without difficulty. Butler had decided to wait to see what would result from this before committing more of his men.

  Confederate shore batteries replied to the ships’ fire with large bore, muzzle loading cannon mounted inside the sand walls.

  Several ships were struck and one of these shells killed John Quick.

  He had been standing with Devereux at the stern of Malvern but, Claude walked away from him to get a better view of the action on the beach from the bow. From that vantage point it was clear that the federal soldiers on the beach were in trouble.