The reward of loyalty was money, and money was Ridley’s god. He had watched his father impoverish a family and seen the pity on his neighbors’ faces. He had endured his half-brother’s condescension just as he endured Anna Faulconer’s cloying attentions, and all because he was poor. He was patronized for his skill with a pencil and paintbrush, as though he could always earn his living as a portrait painter or as an illustrator, but he had no more wish to earn his living as a painter than as a coal heaver or as a lawyer. Instead he wanted to be like Faulconer, to be the possessor of wide acres and fast horses and of a mistress in Richmond and a fine big country house. Of late, since Adam’s return, Ridley had doubted that even being Faulconer’s son-in-law would be enough to secure an adequate share of the Faulconer wealth, but now the god of battle had played into Ridley’s hands. Colonel Washington Faulconer had left one firm order—that the Legion was to ignore Nathan Evans, and Ridley’s rivals for the Colonel’s gratitude had combined to disobey that order. It was time to betray that disobedience.
But first Ridley had to find Colonel Faulconer, which meant discovering General Beauregard, and so he spurred down from the hill into the undulating landscape of deep woods and small pastures. His horse cleared two fences, running as gamely as though she were following the hounds in the winter hills. He swerved left into a wide path that led under trees where a regiment of southern Zouaves in their distinctive red pantaloons and baggy shirts lolled at their ease. “What’s happening?” one of the Zouaves shouted at Ridley.
“We whipping the bastards?” a sergeant called.
“You looking for us?” An officer ran into Ridley’s path.
“I’m looking for Beauregard.” Ridley curbed his horse. “You know where he is?”
“Go to the end of the wood, turn left, there’s a road in your front, and like as not that’s where he is. He was there a half hour ago, anyways. You got any news?”
Ridley had no news, so just cantered on, turning left to see a horde of infantrymen resting beside the road at the far end of the clearing. The soldiers were in blue coats and for a second Ridley feared he had galloped clean into the Yankee lines, then he saw the triple-striped Confederate flag over the troops and realized they were southerners in makeshift uniforms of northern blue. “Do you know where the general is?” he called to a blue-coated officer, but the officer just shrugged, then pointed a helpful hand vaguely to the north and east. “Last I heard he was at a farmhouse thataway, but don’t ask me where the hell that is.”
“He was here,” a sergeant offered, “but he ain’t here now. You know what’s happening, mister? Are we whipping the sumbitches?”
“I don’t know.” Ridley carried on, coming at last to an artillery battery that was comfortably ensconced on the southern bank of the Bull Run behind a breastwork of wicker baskets filled with dirt.
“This here’s Balls Ford,” an artillery lieutenant said, taking a pipe from his mouth, “and the general sure was here an hour ago. Can you tell us what’s happening out there?” He gestured westward from where the sound of cannon fire grumbled and crackled in the sultry air.
“No.”
“Making enough noise about it, ain’t they? I thought the war was being held over here, not over there?”
Ridley crossed Balls Ford to the enemy side of the Bull Run. The water came up to his horse’s belly, making Ridley lift his boots and stirrups above the quick flow. A company of Virginian infantry lay in the shade on the far bank, waiting for orders. “You know what’s happening?” a captain asked.
“No.”
“Nor me. An hour back they said as we should wait here, but no one said why. I kind of think we’re forgotten.”
“Have you seen the general?”
“I ain’t seen anything above a major for three hours now. But a sutler said as how we’re attacking, mister, so maybe all the generals are that way.” The man pointed north.
Ridley rode northward under tall trees, going slow so that his sweating horse did not break a leg in one of the savage ruts cut into the dirt road by artillery wheels. A quarter mile beyond the ford at the edge of a trampled cornfield Ridley found a battery of heavy twelve-pounder cannon. The guns had been unlimbered and deployed to point their lethal barrels across the growing corn, but the battery commander had no idea why he was there or what he was expected to see emerge from the dark green woods at the farther side of the cornfield. “You know what’s making all that damned noise?” The artillery major gestured toward the west.
“They seem to be firing at each other over the stream,” Ridley said.
“I wish they’d give me something to fire at, because I don’t know what in hell’s name I’m doing here.” He gestured at the cornfield as though it were the dark heart of equatorial Africa. “You’re looking at Beauregard’s big attack, Captain. Trouble is there ain’t no enemy here, nor anyone else. Except maybe some boys from Mississippi who went up the road a while, and God only knows what they’re doing.”
Ridley wiped the sweat off his face, pulled his slouch hat back on, and spurred his tired horse up the road. He found the Mississippi infantry sheltering under a break of trees. One of their officers, a major whose accent was so thick Ridley could scarce understand him, said that the Confederate advance had come to a halt here, under these cedar trees, and he was not all of a piece sure why, but he was certain, or at least as certain as a man from Rolling Forks could ever be certain, and that was not altogether certain, but it was pretty certain, that General Beauregard had gone back to the other side of the Bull Run, but by a different ford. A ford farther to the east. Or maybe it was farther west. “So do you know what’s happening?” the Major asked before taking a bite out of a green apple.
“No,” Ridley confessed.
“Nor me!” The Major had a fine feather in his hat, a curved saber and a lavish mustache that had been oiled into sleek elegance. “If you find anyone who does know just what they’re doing, mister, then you tell ’em that Jeremiah Colby is right well eager to get this war over and done with. Good luck to you, mister! Fine apples you boys grow here!”
Ridley turned his horse and rode back to the stream, then began quartering the country between the Bull Run and the railroad. The guns thundered in the distance, their bass sound punctuated by the brushfire sound of rifles and muskets. The noise lent urgency to Ridley’s quest, except he had no idea how to expedite the urgency. The general, his staff and hangers-on seemed to have been swallowed into this warm huge countryside. He stopped his tired horse at a crossroads beside a small wooden cabin. The vegetables in its trim garden had been torn out, all but for a row of unripe squash. An elderly Negress, smoking a pipe, watched him warily from her cabin door. “Ain’t nothing to steal, massa,” she said.
“You know where the general is?” Ridley asked her.
“Ain’t nothing to steal, massa, all stolen already.”
“Stupid cuffee bitch,” Ridley said, then louder and slower, as though he were talking to a child, “Do you know where the general is?”
“All stolen already, massa.”
“And damn you, too.” A shell screamed far overhead, tumbling and wailing as it shrieked across an empty Sunday sky. Ridley swore at the woman again, then chose one of the roads at random and let his weary horse walk at its own slow pace. Dust drifted from the mare’s hooves onto a drunken soldier sleeping beside the road. A few paces farther on a black and white farm dog lay dead in the road, shot in the head by some soldier who had presumably resented the dog worrying his horse. Ridley passed the dog by and began to worry that perhaps Beauregard, and Faulconer with him, had ridden north and west to where the battle sounded, for surely no general could stay in this somnolent, buzzing countryside while his men were dying just three miles away? Then, as his horse cleared the margin of a grove of trees, he saw another of the strange lattice signal towers standing beside a farmhouse, and beneath the tower a huddle of horses picketed by the farm’s fence, and on the farm’s veranda a group of men glint
ing with gold braid, and so Ridley gave his horse spurs, but, just as he kicked her into reluctant speed, so a single horseman mounted a tall black horse in front of the farm and galloped hard down the drive toward him. It was the Colonel.
“Sir! Colonel Faulconer!” Ridley had to shout to get the Colonel’s attention. Washington Faulconer would otherwise have galloped clean past Ridley.
The Colonel glanced at the tired horseman, recognized Ridley, and slowed. “Ethan! It is you! Come with me! What on earth are you doing here? Never mind! I’ve got good news, wonderful news!”
The Colonel had spent a frustrating morning. He had discovered Beauregard shortly after six o’clock, but the General had not been expecting him and had no time to see him, and so Faulconer had been forced to cool his heels as the hours dragged by. Yet now, wondrously, he had received the orders he had craved. Beauregard, desperate to vivify his attack that had mysteriously stalled in the vacant countryside across the Run, had appealed for fresh troops and Faulconer had seen his chance. He had volunteered the Legion and received orders to march the men across to the right wing. General Johnston’s newly arrived men from the Army of the Shenandoah could be left to buttress the rebel left wing, while Beauregard put new impetus into the right. “We need some enthusiasm,” Beauregard had grumbled to Faulconer, “some push. It’s no good playing kitty-bender on a battlefield, you have to show ’em a touch of whip and spurs.” It was all Faulconer wanted; a chance to lead his Legion into a battle-winning charge that would write another glorious page of Virginia history.
“Come on, Ethan!” Washington Faulconer now called back. “We’ve got permission to attack!”
“But they’ve gone!” Ridley shouted. His tired horse was much slower than the Colonel’s well-rested stallion, Saratoga.
The Colonel curbed Saratoga in, turned him and stared at Ridley.
“They’ve gone, sir,” Ridley said. “That’s what I came to tell you.”
The Colonel swatted at a fly with his riding crop. “What do you mean, gone?” He sounded very calm, as if he had not understood the news Ridley had just fetched across the battleground.
“It was Starbuck,” Ridley said. “He came back, sir.”
“He came back?” the Colonel asked, incredulous.
“He claimed to have orders from Evans.”
“Evans!” Faulconer pronounced that name sulfurously.
“So they marched off to Sudley, sir.”
“Starbuck brought orders? What the hell did Pecker do?”
“He ordered the men to Sudley, sir.”
“Under that ape Evans’s command?” The Colonel shouted the question and his horse, unsettled, whinnied softly.
“Yes, sir,” Ridley felt the satisfaction of delivering damning news. “That’s why I came to find you.”
“But there’s no damned battle at Sudley! That’s a feint! A lure! The General knows all about that!” The Colonel was goaded into a sudden and incandescent fury. “The battle will be here! Christ! On this side of the field! Here!” The Colonel slashed down with his riding crop, whistling the air and frightening an already nervous Saratoga. “But what about Adam? I told him not to let Pecker do anything irresponsible.”
“Adam let himself be persuaded by Starbuck, sir.” Ethan paused to shake his head. “I opposed them, sir, but I’m only a captain. Nothing more.”
“You’re a major now, Ethan. You can take Pecker’s place. Goddamn Pecker, and Goddamn Starbuck! Damn him, damn him, damn him! I’ll kill him! I’ll feed his guts to the hogs! Now come on, Ethan, come on!” The Colonel slashed his spurs back.
Major Ridley, following as fast as he could, suddenly remembered the wig-wagger’s message for Beauregard. He pulled the wafer-sealed paper from his pocket and wondered whether he should mention its existence to the Colonel, but the Colonel was already pounding ahead, his horse kicking up dust, and Ridley did not want to be left too far behind, not now that he was a major and the Colonel’s second in command, and so he threw the message away, then galloped after the Colonel toward the sound of the guns.
On the tree-lined crest where Evans’s scratch brigade had repelled the first northern attack the battle had become a grim one-sided pounding match. For the Yankee gunners it was little more than a session of unopposed target practice, for both of the small Confederate cannon had been destroyed; the first thrown off its carriage by a direct hit from a twelve-pounder roundshot, while the second had lost a wheel from another plumb hit and, within minutes, another twelve-pound ball had shattered the spokes of its replacement wheel. The two stricken cannon, still loaded with unfired canister, lay abandoned at the edge of the wood.
Major Bird wondered whether there was anything he should be doing, but nothing suggested itself. He tried to analyze the situation and came up with the simple fact that the southern troops were holding off a far greater number of northerners, but that every moment the southerners spent at the tree line the more men they lost and that eventually, by a process as ineluctable as a mathematical equation, there would be no living southerners left and the northerners would march across the rebel corpses to claim the battle and, presumably, the war. Major Bird could not stop that happening because there was nothing clever he could do; no flank attack, no ambush, no manner of outthinking the enemy. The time had simply come to fight and die. Major Bird regretted it had come to such a hopeless plight, but he saw no elegant way out, and so he was determined to stay where he was. The odd thing was that he felt no fear. He tried to analyze that lack and decided he was privileged by possessing a sanguine temperament. He celebrated that happy realization by sneaking a fond look at his wife’s picture.
Nor was Adam Faulconer feeling fear. He could not say he was enjoying the morning, but at least the experience of battle had reduced life’s turmoil to simple questions, and Adam was reveling in that freedom. Like all the other officers, he had abandoned his horse, sending it back among the trees. The Legion’s officers had learned that the enemy’s rifle fire was too high to be of much danger to crouching men, but not so high that the bullets could miss a man on horseback, and so they had abandoned the Colonel’s precious orders to stay mounted and had become infantrymen.
Nathaniel Starbuck noted how some men like Truslow and, more surprisingly, Major Bird and Adam, seemed effortlessly brave. They went calmly about their business, stood straight in the face of the enemy, and kept their wits sharp. Most of the men oscillated wildly between bravery and timidity, but responded to the leadership of the brave men. Each time Truslow went forward to shoot at the northerners a dozen skirmishers went with him, and whenever Major Bird stalked along the line of the trees the men grinned at him, took heart from him and were pleased that their eccentric schoolmaster was so apparently unmoved by the dangers. Harness those middling men, Starbuck understood, and the Legion could achieve miracles. There was also a minority of men, the cowards, who huddled far back in the trees, where they pretended to be busy loading or repairing their guns, but who were in fact just cowering from the eerie whistling sound of the minié bullets and the sizzling crack of the shellfire.
The bullets and shellfire had reduced Nathan Evans’s Confederate brigade to a ragged line of men crouched in the shadows at the edge of the trees. Every now and then a group of soldiers would dash to the open ground, fire their shots, then scurry back, but the Yankees now had a horde of skirmishers in the pasture and every appearance of a rebel sparked a bitter flurry of rifle fire. The bravest rebel officers strolled at the wood’s margin, speaking encouragement and making small jokes, though Adam, determined to be seen by his father’s Legion, refused to walk in the shadow but strolled openly in the sunlight, calling aloud as he strolled to warn men not to fire as he passed in front of their guns. The men shouted at him to take cover, to get back in the trees, but Adam would have none of it. He flaunted himself, as though he believed his life was charmed. He told himself he feared no evil.
Major Bird joined Starbuck and watched Adam in the sunlight. “Do you note,” Bi
rd said, “how the bullets are going high?”
“High?”
“They’re aiming at him, but are shooting high. I’ve been noting it.”
“So they are.” Starbuck would probably not have noticed if the Yankees had been firing at the moon, but now that Thaddeus Bird pointed it out he saw that most of the northern rifle fire was indeed clipping at the leaves above Adam’s head. “He’s a fool!” Starbuck said angrily. “He just wants to die!”
“He’s making up for his father,” Bird explained. “Faulconer ought to be here, but he’s not, so Adam is sustaining the family honor, though if his father had been here, Adam would probably be having a fit of conscience. I’ve noticed how Adam usually benefits from Faulconer’s absence, haven’t you?”
“I promised his mother I’d keep him safe.”
Bird yelped with laughter. “More fool you. How are you supposed to do that? Buy him one of those ridiculous iron breastplates that the newspapers advertise?” Bird shook his head. “My sister only charged you with that responsibility, Starbuck, to belittle Adam. I assume he was present?”
“Yes.”
“My sister, you understand, married into a family of serpents and has been teaching them the secrets of venom ever since.” Bird chuckled. “But Adam is the best of them,” he allowed, “the very best. And brave,” he added.
“Very,” Starbuck said, and felt ashamed of himself, for he had done nothing brave in this morning’s clash. The confidence that had so filled him in the railroad depot at Rosskill had evaporated, stolen by the sight of his country’s flag. He had still not fired the revolver, nor was he sure that he could shoot at his own countrymen, but neither was he willing to desert his friends within the Legion’s ranks. Instead he fidgeted at the wood’s edge and watched the far-off gouts of smoke spitting from the Yankee guns. He wanted to describe the smoke to Sally and so he had watched it carefully, seeing that it was white at first and how it darkened rapidly into a grayish blue. Once, gazing intently down the slope, Starbuck had sworn he could see the dark trace of a missile in the smoky air, and seconds later he had heard a shell clatter destructively through the branches overhead. One of the northern guns had been placed beside a hayrick in the farmyard at the bottom of the slope and the flame of the gun’s firing had set the hay alight. The flames leaped and curled furiously, pumping a darker smoke into the gun-fouled air.
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