Rebel

by Bernard Cornwell

  Starbuck wondered why no signal had been readied to tell everyone to withdraw. A series of gunshots would have served much faster than a damp scramble up the gorge’s side to deliver the messages, but he knew this was no time to ask the Colonel a question that would doubtless be construed as critical, and so he simply climbed the gorge’s eastern flank, then crossed the trestle bridge to find that Sergeant Truslow had made a huge barricade of felled pine trees to block the line’s western approach. Captain Hinton, a short and cheerful man, had been content to let Truslow manage affairs. “I suspect he’s stopped trains before,” he explained to Starbuck, then proudly showed how, beyond the barricade, the rails had been ripped up and hurled down toward the North Branch. “So the Colonel’s ready?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Pity. I would rather have liked to have robbed a train. It would have been a new line of work for me, but horribly complicated.” Hinton explained that the Truslow method of train robbery demanded that the thieves wait some distance from the barricade, then leap aboard the passing locomotive and its cars. “If you wait for the train to stop before climbing aboard then you’re likely to have pesky passengers jumping off with guns and then everything gets rather untidy. You also have to have men on each car to wind the brakes if the train is to stop properly. It seems there’s quite an art to these things. Ah well, will you go and fetch the rogue, Nate?” Truslow, with the remainder of Hinton’s squad, was a quarter mile down the track, evidently prepared for the complicated business of stopping a train. “Off you go, Nate,” Hinton said, encouraging Starbuck.

  But Starbuck did not move. Instead he stared down the line to where, beyond the shoulder of the hill, a sudden plume of white smoke was showing. “A train,” he said dully, as though he did not really believe his own eyes.

  Hinton wheeled round. “Good God, so there is.” He cupped his hands. “Truslow! Come back!” But Truslow either did not hear or chose to ignore the summons because he began running west, away from the barricade and toward the train. “The Colonel will just have to wait.” Hinton grinned.

  Starbuck could hear the train now. It was coming very slowly, its bell clanging and pistons laboring as it climbed the slight gradient toward the curve and the waiting ambush. Behind Starbuck a voice shouted from the gorge, urging him to hurry the withdrawal, but it was all too late for any haste to be of any help. Thomas Truslow wanted to rob a train.

  Thaddeus Bird and Priscilla Bowen were married at eleven o’clock in the morning in the Episcopal Church opposite the Faulconer County Bank in the main street of Faulconer Court House. It had been threatening rain since dawn, but the weather stayed dry through most of the morning and Priscilla had dared to hope that the rain would hold off altogether, but a half hour before the ceremony the heavens opened. Rain seethed on the church roof, splashed on the graveyard, flooded the main street and drenched the schoolchildren who, in honor of their teachers’ wedding, had been given a morning off to attend the service.

  Priscilla Bowen, nineteen years old and an orphan, was given away by her uncle who was the postmaster in the neighboring town of Rosskill. Priscilla had a round face, a quick smile and a patient disposition. No one would have called her beautiful, yet after a few moments in her company no one would have dismissed her as plain either. She had light brown hair, which she wore in a tight bun, hazel eyes, which were half hidden by steel-rimmed spectacles, and work-roughened hands. For her wedding she carried a spray of redbud blossoms and wore her best Sunday gown of blue-dyed cambric on which, in celebration of the day, she had pinned a garland of white handkerchiefs. Thaddeus Bird, who was twenty years older than his bride, wore his best black suit, which he had carefully mended himself, and a smile of deep content. His niece, Anna Faulconer, was present, but his sister stayed in her bedroom in Seven Springs. Miriam Faulconer had fully intended to be at the wedding, but the threat of rain and the onslaught of a cold wind had brought on a sudden attack of neuralgia complicated by asthma, and so she had remained in the big house where the servants banked the fires and burned niter papers to relieve her labored breath. Her husband was somewhere beyond the Shenandoah Valley, leading his cavalry raid, and that absence, if the truth were to be told, was why Pecker Bird had chosen this day for his wedding.

  The Reverend Ernest Moss conducted the affair, pronouncing Thaddeus and Priscilla man and wife just as a clap of thunder rattled the church shingles and caused some of the children to call out in fright. Afterward the wedding guests all splashed down Main Street to the schoolroom where two tables had been set with corn cake, apple butter, jars of honey, hung beef, apple pie, smoked hams, pickled cucumber, pickled oysters and buckwheat bread. Miriam Faulconer had sent six bottles of wine to her brother’s wedding feast and there were also two barrels of lemonade, a jug of beer and a vat of water. Blanche Sparrow, whose husband owned the dry goods store, made a vast pot of coffee on the church stove and ordered two of the Legion’s soldiers to carry it to the schoolroom where Major Pelham, dressed in his old United States uniform, made a fine speech. Doctor Danson then gave a humorous speech during which Thaddeus Bird smiled benignly on all the guests and even managed to smile when six of the schoolchildren, coached by Caleb Tennant, who was the Episcopal choirmaster, sang “Flora’s Holiday” in thin, rather unconvincing voices.

  Afternoon school was necessarily less demanding than usual, yet somehow Thaddeus and Priscilla Bird managed to subdue the excited schoolroom and even persuade themselves that some decent work had been achieved. Priscilla had been appointed as Bird’s assistant, which appointment had been intended to release Pecker Bird to his duties in the Faulconer Legion, but in fact Bird still ran the school, for his military duties had proved happily light. Major Thaddeus Bird kept the regiment’s books. He compiled the pay lists, noted the punishments, and kept the guard rosters and commissary invoices. The work, he claimed, could have been adequately discharged by a bright six-year-old, but Bird was happy to perform it because, as an integral part of his duties, he was expected to pay himself a major’s salary out of his brother-in-law’s bank account. Most of the officers were receiving no pay, having private means, while the men were being paid their eleven dollars a month in newly printed Faulconer County Bank dollar bills, which depicted the town’s courthouse on the one side and had a portrait of George Washington and an engraved bale of cotton on the other. A legend printed across the bale of cotton read “States’ Rights and Southern Liberty. The Faith of the Bank is Pledged to Pay One Dollar on Demand.” The bills were not very well printed and Bird suspected they might easily be forged, which was why he took good care to have his own Legion salary of thirty-eight dollars a month paid in good old-fashioned silver coins.

  On the evening of his wedding, when the schoolhouse had been swept and the water pumped for the next morning and the firewood stacked beside the newly blacked stove, Bird could at last close his front door, edge past the piled books in the hallway, and offer his new wife a shy smile. On the kitchen table was one bottle of wine left from the wedding feast. “I think we shall have that!” Bird rubbed his hands in anticipatory glee. In truth he was feeling extraordinarily timid, so much so that he had deliberately dallied over his evening chores.

  “I thought perhaps we might eat what was left from the wedding?” Priscilla, equally timid, suggested.

  “Capital idea! Capital!” Thaddeus Bird was hunting for a corkscrew. He did not often get to drink a bottle of wine in his own house, indeed he could hardly remember the last time he had enjoyed such a luxury, but he was sure there was a corkscrew somewhere.

  “And I thought perhaps I might rearrange the shelves.” Priscilla watched her husband’s frantic attempts to find the corkscrew amidst the jumble of handle-less skillets, holed pans and chipped plates that Bird had inherited from the previous schoolmaster. “If you have no objection,” she added.

  “You must do whatever you wish! This is your home, my dear one.”

  Priscilla had already tried to cheer up the dingy kitchen. She h
ad put her wedding spray of redbud blossoms in a vase and pinned strips of cloth to either side of the window to suggest curtains, but somehow the touches did little to alleviate the gloom of the dark, low-beamed, smoke-stained room, which contained a stove, a table, an open hearth with an iron bread oven, two chairs and two old dressers, which were stacked with chipped plates, mugs, bowls, pitchers and the inevitable books and broken musical instruments that Thaddeus Bird accumulated. The illumination in the kitchen, as in the rest of the small house, came from candles, and Priscilla, who was ever mindful of the cost of good wax candles, lit only two as night fell. It was still raining hard.

  The corkscrew was at last discovered and the wine opened, but Bird immediately declared himself dissatisfied with the glasses. “Somewhere there are a pair of proper glasses. Ones with stems. The kind they use in Richmond.”

  Priscilla had never been to Richmond and was about to say that she doubted Richmond glasses could make the wine taste any better, but before she could open her mouth to speak there was a sudden hammering on the front door.

  “Oh, no! This is too bad! I expressly said I was not to be disturbed today!” Bird clumsily extricated himself from the cupboard in which he had been searching for wineglasses. “Davies cannot find the muster roll. Or he’s lost the pay books! Or he cannot add twenty cents eight times over! I shall ignore it.” Davies was a young lieutenant who was supposed to assist Bird with the Legion’s paperwork.

  “It’s raining hard,” Priscilla pleaded for the unknown caller.

  “I don’t care if it’s raining fit to drown the planet. I do not care if the animals are lining up two by two to get aboard. If a man cannot be left in peace on his wedding day, when can he hope for rest? Am I so indispensable that I must be dragged from your company whenever Lieutenant Davies discovers that his education is entirely insufficient for the demands of modern life? He was at Centre College in Kentucky. Have you ever heard of such a place? Is it possible that there could be anyone capable of teaching anything worth knowing in Kentucky? Yet Davies boasts of having been educated there! Boasts of it! Why I entrust the regiment’s books to him, I don’t know. I might as well hand them over to a baboon. Let the fool get wet. Maybe his Kentucky brains will improve after a drenching.”

  The knocking redoubled in intensity. “I really do think, my dear,” Priscilla murmured in the gentlest of all possible reproofs.

  “If you insist. You’re too kind, Priscilla, altogether too kind. It’s a womanly fault, so I won’t dwell on it, but there it is. Too kind altogether.” Thaddeus Bird took a candle into the hallway and, still grumbling, made his way to the front door. “Davies!” he snapped as he pulled the door open, then checked, for the caller was not Lieutenant Davies at all.

  Instead a young couple stood at Thaddeus Bird’s street door. Bird noticed the girl first for, even in the wet windy darkness that threatened to overwhelm his candle’s flame, her face was striking. More than striking for she was, Bird realized, truly beautiful. Behind her was a sturdy young man holding the reins of a tired horse. The young man, scarce more than a boy and still with a child’s innocence on his face, looked familiar. “You remember me, Mister Bird?” he asked hopefully, then supplied the answer anyway. “I’m Robert Decker.”

  “So you are, so you are.” Bird was shielding the candle flame with his right hand, peering at his callers.

  “We’d like a talk with you, Mister Bird,” Robert said courteously.

  “Ah,” Bird said, to give himself time to devise a reason to send them packing, but no reason occurred to him so he stepped grudgingly aside. “You’d better come in.”

  “The horse, Mister Bird?” Robert Decker asked.

  “You can’t bring that in! Don’t be a fool. Oh, I see! Tie it to the hitching ring. There’s a ring somewhere. There, by the step.”

  Eventually the two young people were ushered into Bird’s front parlor. His house had two rooms downstairs, the kitchen and parlor, and a bedroom upstairs, which was reached by a flight of stairs in the next-door schoolroom. The parlor contained a fireplace, a broken armchair, a wooden bench discarded by the church and a table piled high with schoolbooks and sheet music. “It’s been a long time since I last saw you,” Bird remarked to Robert Decker.

  “Six years, Mister Bird.”

  “That long?” Bird remembered that the Decker family had fled Faulconer Court House after their father had been involved in an abortive robbery on the Rosskill Road. They had taken refuge in the hills where, judging by Robert Decker’s clothes, they had not prospered. “How is your father?” Bird now demanded of Robert.

  Decker said his father had been killed by a fall from a bolting horse. “And I’m married now.” Decker, who was standing dripping in front of the empty fireplace, gestured at Sally, who was perched warily among the tufts of horsehair that protruded from Bird’s sorry armchair. “This is Sally,” Decker said proudly, “my wife.”

  “Indeed, indeed.” Bird felt oddly embarrassed, maybe because Sally Decker was a girl of such extraordinary looks. Her clothes were rags and her face and hair were filthy and her shoes were held together with twine, but she was nevertheless as breathtaking a beauty as any of the girls who paraded in their carriages around Richmond’s Capitol Square.

  “I ain’t his real wife,” Sally said cattily, trying to hide a ring on her wedding finger.

  “Yes, you are,” Decker insisted. “We were minister married, Mister Bird.”

  “Good, good. Whatever.” Bird, mindful of his own new minister-married wife in the kitchen, wondered what on earth these two wanted of him. An education? Sometimes a grown pupil came back to Bird and asked the schoolmaster to repair the years of inattention or truancy.

  “I came to see you, Mister Bird, because they said you could enlist me in the Legion,” Decker explained.

  “Ah!” Bird, relieved at the commonplace explanation, glanced from the honest-faced boy to the sullen beauty. They were, he thought, an ill-assorted couple, then he wondered if folks thought the same of Priscilla and himself. “You want to enlist in the Faulconer Legion, is that it?”

  “I reckon I do,” Decker said, and glanced at Sally, which suggested that she, rather than he, had engendered the wish.

  “Is it a petticoat?” Bird asked suddenly, struck by a sudden and unsavory thought.

  Decker looked puzzled. “Petticoat, Mister Bird?”

  “You haven’t received a petticoat?” Bird asked intensely, clawing his left hand through his ragged beard. “Left on your doorstep?”

  “No, Mister Bird.” Decker clearly thought his old schoolmaster was at best eccentric, at worst crazy.

  “Good, good.” Bird did not offer an explanation. In the last two weeks a number of men had discovered petticoats left on their porches or in their wagons. All were men who had failed to volunteer for the Legion. Some were men with ailments, some were the only supporters of large families, others were boys with glowing futures promised at colleges, and only a few, a very few, might have been considered timid, yet the mocking gift of petticoats had lumped them all together in the category of cowardice. The incident had led to bad feeling in the community, dividing those who were enthusiastic for the threatened war against those who believed the war fever must pass. Bird, who knew full well where the petticoats had come from, had kept a politic silence.

  “Sally says I ought to join,” Decker explained.

  “If he wants to be a proper husband,” Sally explained, “then he has to prove himself. Every other man’s gone to war. Or all the proper men have.”

  “I wanted to go anyway,” Robert Decker went on, “like Sally’s father did. Only he’d be real angry if he knew I was here, so I want to be enlisted proper before I go to the camp. Then he can’t have me put out, can he? Not if I’ve been properly signed on. And I want it arranged so that Sally can draw my pay. I’m told they can do that, is that right, Mister Bird?”

  “Many wives draw their husbands’ pay, yes.” Bird glanced at the girl, and was agai
n astonished that such beauty could have been bred in the ragged hills. “Your father’s in the Legion?” he asked.

  “Thomas Truslow.” She said the name bitterly.

  “Good God.” Bird could not hide his surprise that Truslow had whelped this girl. “And your mother,” he asked tentatively, “I’m not sure I know your mother, do I?”

  “She’s dead,” Sally said defiantly, intimating that it was none of Bird’s business anyway.

  Nor was it, Bird allowed, so busied himself by explaining to Decker that he should go to the Legion’s encampment and there seek out Lieutenant Davies. He almost added that he doubted anything could be achieved before morning, but he checked himself in case such an observation might suggest he should offer the couple a night’s shelter. “Davies, he’s your man,” he said, then stood up to signify that their business was finished.

  Decker hesitated. “But if Sally’s father sees me, Mister Bird, before I’m all signed in, he’ll kill me!”

  “He’s not here. He’s gone away with the Colonel.” Bird gestured his visitors toward the door. “You’re quite safe, Decker.”

  Sally stood up. “Go and look after the horse, Robert.”

  “But—”

  “I said go and look after the horse!” She snapped the order, thus sending the hapless Decker scuttling back into the rain. Once he was safe out of earshot Sally closed the parlor door and turned back to Thaddeus Bird. “Is Ethan Ridley here?” she demanded.

  Thaddeus Bird’s hand clawed nervously in his tangled beard. “No.”

  “So where is he?” There was no politeness in her voice, just a bald demand and a hint that she might unleash a violent temper if her demands were frustrated.

  Bird felt overwhelmed by the girl. She had a force of character not unlike her father’s, but where Truslow’s presence suggested a threat of violence coupled with a dour muscular competence, the daughter seemed to possess a more sinuous strength that could bend and twist and manipulate other folk to her wishes. “Ethan is in Richmond,” Bird finally answered.