Rebel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “He believes drill will only blunt the men’s enthusiasm.”

  “How interesting! Perhaps your Faulconer is cleverer than I thought. These poor devils begin their drill at six in the morning and don’t cease till the moon rises.” Delaney touched his hat in salute of a judge he frequently met at the brothel on Marshall Street that was always known as Mrs. Richardson’s house, though in fact the major shareholder in the house was Belvedere Delaney himself. In times of war, Delaney believed, a man could do a lot worse than invest in weapons and women, and so far Delaney’s investments were all showing a fine profit.

  “Faulconer believes war should be enjoyed,” Ridley said caustically, “which is why he’s going on a cavalry raid.”

  “A cavalry raid?” Delaney said in a surprised tone. “Tell me.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Describe me the nothing, then.” Delaney sounded unnaturally petulant.

  “Why?”

  “For God’s sake, Ethan, I am a friend to half the lawmakers in the state, and if Virginia’s citizens are waging a private war on the North then the government is supposed to know about it. Or Robert Lee is. In fact Lee’s supposed to sanction military movements, even by your incipient father-in-law. So tell me.”

  “Faulconer’s leaving on a raid, or maybe he’s already left, I’m not sure. Does it matter?”

  “Where? What?”

  “He’s upset because we let the Yankees occupy Alexandria. He thinks Richmond doesn’t care about the war. He says Letcher has always been soft on the North and is probably a secret Union man. He thinks Lee is too cautious, and so is everyone else, and if someone doesn’t go and kick the Yankees where it hurts then the Confederacy will collapse.”

  “You mean the idiot is going to attack Alexandria?” Delaney asked in astonishment. Alexandria was the Virginian town across the Potomac from Washington that, since its abandonment by southern troops, had been heavily fortified.

  “He knows he can’t attack Alexandria,” Ridley said, “so he’s planning to cut the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.”

  “Where?”

  “He didn’t tell me,” Ridley sounded sour, “but it can’t be east of Cumberland, because the trains aren’t running between there and Harper’s Ferry.” Ridley suddenly became alarmed. “For God’s sake, Bev, you’re not going to stop him, are you? He’ll kill me if you do!”

  “No,” Delaney said soothingly, “no, I’ll let him have his fun. So how many men has he taken? The whole Legion?”

  “Just thirty men. But you promise me you’ll say nothing?” Ridley was terrified that he had been indiscreet.

  Delaney could see Robert Lee inspecting recruits on the far side of the Fair Grounds. Delaney had deliberately made himself useful to Lee’s office and had found himself being unwillingly impressed by the general’s combination of intelligence and honesty. Delaney tried to imagine Lee’s fury if he were to discover that Faulconer was freelancing a raid on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, but tempting though it was, Delaney decided he would say nothing to his friends in Virginia’s government. Instead he would let the North do the stopping.

  For there was still time to write one last letter to a friend in Washington who, Delaney knew, was intimate with the northern government’s secretary of war. Delaney reckoned that if the North discovered that he could be a source of useful military information, then their full trust would surely follow.

  “Of course I’ll say nothing to the governor,” he now reassured his terrified younger brother, then sawed on his reins to stop his horse. “Do you mind if we turn back? The dust is irritating my throat.”

  “I was hoping…,” Ridley began.

  “You were hoping to visit Mrs. Richardson’s house.” That enticement, Delaney knew, was Richmond’s main attraction for his half-brother. “And so you shall, my dear Ethan, so you shall.” Delaney spurred back toward the city, his good day’s work well done.

  The raiding party reached the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad two hours before dawn on the sixth day of a journey that Washington Faulconer had confidently predicted would last no more than three. The ride would have taken a full week if Faulconer had not stubbornly insisted on riding throughout the final night. Starbuck, reeling from tiredness and in whimpering agony from his saddle sores, was not at first aware that their journey was almost done. He was slumped in the saddle, half-sleeping, half-scared of falling, when he was suddenly startled by a brilliant glare of light that flared far beneath him in a deep, moon-shadowed valley. For a moment he thought he was dreaming, then he feared he was not dreaming at all but had instead reached the trembling edge of the Valley of Gehenna, the Bible’s hell, and that at any moment he would be cast down into the flaming pit where the devils cackled as they tormented the sinners. He even cried out in terror.

  Then he came fully awake and realized that Faulconer’s bedraggled band of raiders had stopped on the crest of a high ridge and were looking down into a dark valley where a train ran westward. The door of the locomotive’s firebox was open, and the furnace’s brilliant glow was reflecting on the underside of the boiling smoke plume which looked, Starbuck thought, like the lurid breath of a great dragon. The boiling smoke moved steadily westward, preceded by the feeble glow of the locomotive’s oil-fired lantern. No other lights showed, suggesting that the locomotive was hauling freight wagons. The noise of the train changed to a hollow rumble as it crossed trestles spanning a river that lay to Starbuck’s left, and he felt a sudden pulse of excitement as he suddenly understood how close they had come to their target.

  For the great spume of fiery smoke that ripped through the night marked where the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad ran along the bank of the North Branch of the Potomac River. Until Thomas Jackson had occupied Harper’s Ferry, and so cut the rail passage to Washington and Baltimore, this line had been the major link between the western states and the American capital, and even since Jackson’s occupation the rails had stayed busy as they fetched supplies, recruits, weapons and food from Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, all of them carried to Cumberland where they were reloaded onto canal boats or else onto wagons that were hauled by teams of horses to the Hagerstown depot of the Cumberland Valley Railroad. Colonel Faulconer claimed that if the Baltimore and Ohio could be cut in the Alleghenies west of Cumberland then it might take months before that busy supply line was restored.

  That, at least, was the military justification for the raid, though Starbuck knew the Colonel expected to gain much more from this foray. Faulconer believed a successful attack would bolster southern belligerence and hurt northern pride. Better still it would begin the history of the Faulconer Legion with a victory, which was the real reason why the Colonel had led a group of thirty picked horsemen who escorted four packhorses loaded with four barrels of black powder, six axes, four crowbars, two sledgehammers, and two coils of quick-fuse—the materials necessary to destroy the tall trestles of the bridges that carried the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad across the streams and rivers that flowed fast through the Alleghenies.

  Three of the Legion’s officers accompanied their Colonel on the raid. Captain Paul Hinton was an easygoing man who farmed eight hundred acres in the eastern part of Faulconer County and was a hunting friend of Faulconer’s. Then there was Captain Anthony Murphy, who was a tall, black-haired Irishman who had emigrated to America ten years before, planted one spread of cotton in Louisiana, sold the spread before harvest, taken a riverboat north and played twenty-card poker for three days and nights, and stepped off the boat with a pretty Italian girl and enough money to last the rest of his days. He had brought his Italian bride to Virginia, put his money in the Faulconer County Bank and purchased himself four farms to the north of Seven Springs. He kept three slaves on the largest farm, rented out the others, got drunk with his tenants every quarter day and could rarely find anyone rash enough to deal him into a game of bluff. The last officer was Second Lieutenant Starbuck, who had never played poker in his life.

  A
mong the twenty-six men accompanying the four officers was Sergeant Thomas Truslow and a half dozen of the rogues who had followed him down from the hills. Truslow’s group rode together, ate together, and treated the three most senior officers with a tolerant disdain, though, to the surprise of all those who knew just how much Truslow hated Yankees, the dour sergeant clearly liked Starbuck, and that acceptance made Starbuck a welcome member of Truslow’s group. No one understood the unlikely association, but then no one, not even Colonel Faulconer, had heard about either the prayer Starbuck had offered by Emily’s grave or how Starbuck had extemporized a wedding ceremony in the Virginian night.

  Not that Faulconer would have been in any mood to have listened to such stories for, as the raiders had moved north and west into the Alleghenies, his dreams of a swift, slashing victory had become mired in rain and fog. The journey had begun well enough. They had crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains into the wide, rich Shenandoah Valley, then climbed into the Alleghenies, and that was when the rains had struck, not gentle rains to swell the growing grain in the valleys, but a succession of sky-lacerating storms that had cracked and ripped the sky as the raiders struggled through the inhospitable mountains. Faulconer had insisted they avoid all settlements, for these regions west of the Shenandoah were hostile to the Confederacy, indeed, there was even talk of this part of Virginia seceding to form a new state altogether, and so Faulconer’s men had slunk through the rain-drenched mountains like thieves, not even wearing uniforms. There was no point, the Colonel said, in taking unnecessary risks with the traitorous mudsills of the Alleghenies.

  Yet the weather proved far more hostile than the inhabitants. Faulconer became lost in the steep cloud-wrapped mountains, spending one whole day groping west into a blind valley, and it was only Thomas Truslow’s canny sense that had brought them back to the right route, and from that moment it had seemed to many of the raiding party that Thomas Truslow had become the real leader of the expedition. He gave no orders, but the horsemen all looked to him rather than the Colonel for a lead. It was Washington Faulconer’s resentment of that usurpation of his authority that had made him insist that the raiders keep traveling through the fifth night. It had been an unpopular order, but by enforcing it the Colonel had at least demonstrated who was in command.

  Now, perched at last above the railroad, the horsemen waited for the dawn. The clouds of the last few days had torn ragged and a few stars showed around a mist-shrouded moon. Far to the north a tiny spot of light flickered in the far hills that Starbuck realized could be in Pennsylvania. The view from this high crest looked over the misted river, across a strip of Maryland and deep into the hostile north. It seemed incredible to Starbuck that he was poised above a frontier between two warring states; indeed, that America could be at war at all seemed unreal, a denial of all childhood’s certainties. Other lesser countries went to war, but men had come to America to avoid war, yet now Starbuck shivered on a mountaintop with the Savage revolver at his side and armed men all around him. No more trains passed. Most of the men slept while a few, like Truslow, squatted at the crest’s edge and stared north.

  The light seeped slowly from the east to reveal that the horsemen had chanced upon an almost perfect place to cut the railroad. To their left a swift river churned across rocks to join the North Branch of the Potomac, and a high trestle bridge spanned the tributary on a latticework of stilts sixty feet high. There were no guards on the bridge and no blockhouse. Nor were there any farms or settlements within sight; indeed if it had not been for the dull sheen of the steel rails and the spindly lattice of the trellis this could have been unexplored wilderness.

  Faulconer gave his final orders as the sky lightened. The raiders would divide into three parties. Captain Murphy would take a dozen men to block the rails leading east, Captain Hinton would take another dozen men west, while the six remaining men, led by the Colonel, would clamber down into the tributary’s gorge and there destroy the tall contraption of trestles and rails. “Nothing can go wrong now,” Faulconer said, trying to cheer his damp and somewhat dispirited troops. “We’ve planned it properly.” In fact even the most optimistic of the raiders must have realized that the Colonel’s planning had been slipshod. Faulconer had not foreseen the possibility of drenching rain and so the powder barrels and quick-fuses had been bereft of tarpaulins. There had been no proper maps provided so that even Truslow, who had crossed these hills a score of times, was not entirely sure what bridge they now threatened. Yet despite all the doubts and difficulties they had succeeded in reaching the railroad, which had proved unguarded, and so, in the first weak light of the new day, they slid and slithered down the steep slope toward the North Branch.

  They picketed the horses beside the railroad close to the bridge. Starbuck, shivering in the gray dawn, walked to the gorge’s edge to see that the trestles, which had looked so flimsy from the hilltop, were in truth massive timbers that had been stripped of their bark, coated with tar, then sunk into the earth or else braced against the huge boulders that protruded from the chasm’s slopes. The trestles were fastened to one another with metal collars, thus linked into a dense trellis structure that rose sixty feet from the stream and spanned two hundred feet across the gorge. The timbers, despite their tar coating, felt clammy, just as the wind that gusted cold from the river felt damp. The clouds were once more building, promising rain.

  Captain Hinton’s men crossed the bridge, Murphy’s went eastward while the Colonel’s party, which included Starbuck, struggled down to the bed of the gorge. The slope was slippery and the brush still soaked from the previous day’s rain so that by the time the six men reached the bank of the fast-flowing stream their already damp clothes were drenched through. Starbuck helped Sergeant Daniel Medlicott, a morose and uncommunicative man who was a miller by trade, maneuver a barrel of black powder down the steep slope. Washington Faulconer, watching them struggle with the cask, shouted a warning for Nate to beware of a patch of poison ivy, a warning that seemed to disappoint Medlicott. The other three barrels of powder were already at the bottom of the chasm. The Colonel had considered saving two of the gunpowder casks but had decided it was better to make certain that this one substantial bridge was utterly destroyed than to look for a second trestle later in the day. Medlicott stacked the fourth barrel with the others, then knocked its bung out so as to insert a length of quick-fuse. “Powder feels mighty damp to me, Colonel.”

  “Sir.” Faulconer snapped the word. He was trying to persuade his erstwhile neighbors to use the military honorific.

  “Still feels damp,” Medlicott insisted, obstinately refusing to humor Faulconer.

  “We’ll try the fuse, and we’ll light a fire as well,” Faulconer said, “and if the one doesn’t work, the other will. So get on with it!” He walked a few paces upstream with Starbuck. “They’re good fellows,” he said morosely, “but with no idea of military discipline.”

  “It’s a difficult transition, sir,” Starbuck said tactfully. He was feeling somewhat sorry for Faulconer, whose hopes for a jaunty and defiant raid had turned into this damp nightmare of delay and difficulty.

  “Your fellow Truslow’s the worst,” the Colonel grumbled. “No respect there at all.” He sounded disappointed. He had so wanted Truslow in the Legion, thinking that the man’s character would give the regiment a fearsome reputation, yet now he found himself resenting Truslow’s truculent and independent manner. Washington Faulconer had corralled himself a tiger and did not know how to handle the beast. “And you’re not helping me, Nate,” the Colonel suddenly said.

  “Me, sir?” Starbuck, who had been feeling sympathy for the Colonel, was taken aback by the accusation.

  The Colonel did not respond immediately. He was standing beside the stream and watching Medlicott’s men use bowie knives to cut the timber that would be used as firewood around the barrels of gunpowder. “You don’t want to be too familiar with these fellows,” the Colonel finally said. “One day you’ll have to command them in battle and the
y won’t respect you if you don’t keep a distance.” Washington Faulconer, did not look at Starbuck as he spoke, but instead gazed through the trestle at the sliding gray river down which a twisted black tree branch was being carried. Faulconer appeared very miserable. His beard was untrimmed, his clothes damp and dirty, and his normally brisk manner subdued. Bad weather soldiering, Starbuck reflected with surprise, did not seem to suit the Colonel. “Officers should keep company with other officers.” The Colonel embroidered his criticism petulantly. “If you’re forever with Truslow, how will you command him?”

  That was unfair, Starbuck thought, for he had spent far more time on the journey with Washington Faulconer than with Truslow, yet Starbuck dimly understood that the Colonel was jealous that Starbuck, and not he, had so earned Truslow’s regard. Truslow was a man whose good opinion other men wanted, and the Colonel clearly thought he deserved it more than some stray student from Massachusetts, so Starbuck said nothing and the Colonel, his complaints against his aide delivered, turned back toward Medlicott. “How much longer, Sergeant?”

  Medlicott stepped back from his work. He had stacked the powder kegs around one of the bridge’s tallest legs, then surrounded the gunpowder with a thick stack of brush and logs. “There’s a terrible lot of wet in everything,” he observed gloomily.

  “You’ve got kindling in there?”

  “Plenty of that, Colonel.”

  “Paper? Cartridges?”

  “There’s enough to make a fire,” Medlicott allowed.

  “So when will we be ready?”

  “We’re as good as ready now, I’d say.” Medlicott scratched his head as he considered the answer he had just given, then nodded. “It should do, Colonel.”

  “You’ll go to Hinton.” Faulconer turned to Starbuck. “Tell him to pull back over the bridge. Warn Captain Murphy to ready the horses! Tell everyone to look lively now, Nate!”