Rebel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “He won’t come round, sir.” The assistant was holding an open bottle of ammonia spirits next to the patient’s nose.

  “Give me the chloroform,” the doctor ordered, then took a scalpel to the patient’s torn trousers and cut back the tattered, bloody cloth to reveal the man’s genitals. “Behold a miracle,” the doctor announced and poured a trickle of chloroform onto the unconscious man’s testicles. The man seemed to go into instant spasm, but then opened his eyes, bellowed with pain and tried to sit up. “Frozen balls,” the doctor said happily, “known in the profession as the Lazarus effect.” He stoppered the chloroform bottle and stepped away from the table, looking to his unwilling audience for appreciation of his wit. He spotted Starbuck, sheeted with blood from head to foot. “Christ, but why aren’t you dead?”

  “Because I’m not even wounded. It’s someone else’s blood.”

  “If you’re not wounded, then get the hell out of here. Go and watch your damned dreams being broken.”

  Starbuck went into the yard where he leaned against the house wall. The sun shone cruelly bright on a desolate scene of rebel defeat. To the north, where Evans had led his forlorn companies to stem the triumphant Yankee advance, the meadows were empty, all but for a littering of dead men and broken horses.

  The battle had swept across those fields and, like a vast wave pushed by a storm surge, now climbed the hill toward the Henry House, where the attacking line seethed against the second Confederate defense. Nathan Evans had constructed the first barrier out of a flimsy line of men that had stalled the federal attack long enough for Thomas Jackson to make this second line, which the Yankees now set about dismantling. Newly arrived northern cannon were being dragged to the hill’s crest while long blue columns of fresh infantry climbed past the guns to reinforce their comrades who were already assaulting the hill’s top. The rebel guns that had originally lined the crest had been pushed back by the Yankees’ advance. Starbuck, slumped disconsolate beside the kitchen step of the stone house, saw an occasional Confederate round overshoot the plateau and draw a trail of smoke across the sky. Such wasted rounds were evidence that the rebel army still fought, but the turnpike was now so crowded with northern guns and infantry that Starbuck did not see how the fight could ever be sustained.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” the officious sergeant demanded of Starbuck.

  “The doctor sent me out here.”

  “You shouldn’t be here. You should be over there, with the other prisoners.” The sergeant gestured toward the farthest corner of the yard where a small group of unwounded rebels sat under guard.

  “The doctor said I should wash this blood off,” Starbuck lied. He had just noticed a well beside the road and he hoped the lie would serve to get him a drink of water.

  The sergeant hesitated, then nodded. “Hurry, then.”

  Starbuck crossed to the well and drew up its wooden bucket. He had meant to wash his face clean before drinking, but he was too thirsty to wait and, gripping the pail with both hands, he greedily tipped the water to his face and gulped down great cool mouthfuls. The liquid poured down his face and his bloodied tunic and trousers, and still he drank, slaking a dry thirst stoked by the hours of powder smoke and heat.

  He rested the bucket on the well’s edge, panting, and saw a blue-eyed, pretty face watching him. He gaped back. A woman. He must be dreaming. A woman! And a pretty woman, an angel, a vision, a clean, crisp, pretty woman in a lacy white dress and a pink-trimmed bonnet shaded by a white fringed parasol, and Starbuck just stared, wondering if he was going mad, when suddenly the woman, who was sitting in a carriage in the road just beyond the yard’s fence, burst out laughing.

  “Leave the lady alone!” the sergeant barked. “Back here, rebel!”

  “Let him stay!” the woman demanded imperiously. She was sitting with a much older man in an open carriage drawn by two horses. A Negro driver sat on the carriage’s box, while a federal lieutenant was attempting to turn the carriage back. They had come too far, the young officer explained to the woman’s companion, there was danger here, they should not have crossed the bridge.

  “Do you know who I am?” The man was a middle-aged dandy in a colored vest, tall black hat and white silk tie. He carried a gold-topped cane and had a small gray beard elegantly cut to a jutting point.

  “Sir, I don’t need to know who you are,” the northern officer said, “you should not have crossed the bridge, and I must insist—”

  “Insist! Lieutenant! Insist! I am Congressman Benjamin Matteson, of the great State of New Jersey, and you do not insist with me.”

  “But it’s dangerous here, sir,” the lieutenant protested weakly.

  “A congressman can go wherever he finds the Republic endangered,” Congressman Matteson answered with lordly scorn, while the truth was that he, like so many others from Washington’s society, had merely followed the army so that he could claim a share of the victory’s credit and collect some trifling keepsakes like spent rifle bullets or a rebel’s bloodstained cap.

  “But the woman, sir?” The lieutenant tried again.

  “The woman, Lieutenant, is my wife, and a congressman’s wife can share any danger.” The woman laughed at her husband’s absurd compliment, and Starbuck, still dazzled by her, wondered why so young a beauty would marry so pompous a man.

  Mrs. Matteson’s eyes, blue as the flag’s field of stars, were full of mischief. “Are you truly a rebel?” she asked Starbuck. She had bleached gold hair, very white skin and her lace-trimmed dress was smudged with red dust from the summer road.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Starbuck stared at her as a man dying of thirst might look on a cool, shadowed, clear pool of water. She was so unlike the earnest, plainspoken, obedient girls who worshiped at his father’s church. Instead, this congressman’s wife was what the Reverend Elial Starbuck would have called a painted lady, a Jezebel. She was, Starbuck realized, the very image and model of all Sally Truslow wanted to be, and all he himself wanted a woman to be, for his father’s biblical austerity had put a taste for just such forbidden fruit into Nathaniel Starbuck. “Yes, ma’am,” he said again, “I’m a rebel.” He tried to sound defiant.

  “Secretly,” the woman confided to Starbuck in a voice that carried clean above the cacophony of shells and musketry to reach every prisoner in the yard, “I’m a Lincoln killer too.”

  Her husband laughed too loudly. “Don’t be absurd, Lucy! You’re from Pennsylvania!” He gave his wife a reprimanding tap on her knee with his gloved hand. “From the great State of Pennsylvania.”

  Lucy pushed his hand away. “Don’t be obnoxious, Ben. I’m a Lincoln killer through and through.” She looked at her driver’s stolid back. “Aren’t I a rebel, Joseph?”

  “You are, missus, you are!” The driver laughed.

  “And when we win I shall enslave you, Joseph, won’t I?”

  “You will, missus, you will!” He laughed again.

  Lucy Matteson looked back to Starbuck. “Are you hurt bad?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “What happened?”

  “My horse was shot, ma’am. It fell. I was captured.”

  “Did you,” she said, beginning a question, colored slightly, then a half smile flickered on her face. “Did you kill anyone?”

  Starbuck had a sudden memory of Ridley falling backward off his horse. “I don’t know, ma’am.”

  “I feel like killing someone. We slept in the most uncomfortable farm kitchen at Centreville last night, and the Lord only knows where we’ll rest tonight. If we rest at all, which I doubt. The rigors of war.” She laughed, showing small, very white teeth. “Is there a hotel at Manassas Junction?”

  “I don’t know of one, ma’am,” Starbuck said.

  “You don’t sound like a southerner,” the congressman interrupted with a sour note in his voice.

  Starbuck, unwilling to explain, merely shrugged.

  “You are mysterious!” Lucy Matteson clapped her gloved hands, then held out a ca
rdboard box filled with scraps of tissue paper. “Have one,” she said.

  Starbuck saw there were pieces of crystallized fruit nestling in the tissues. “Are you sure, ma’am?”

  “Go on! Help yourself.” She smiled as Starbuck took a piece of the fruit. “Will they send you back to Washington, do you think?”

  “I don’t know what they plan for the prisoners, ma’am.”

  “I’m sure they will. They’re going to have a mighty victory parade, all honking bands and congratulations, and the prisoners will be marched at gunpoint before being slaughtered in the grounds of the White House.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Lucy. I do beg of you not to be absurd.” The Honorable Benjamin Matteson frowned.

  “So maybe they’ll parole you instead,” Lucy Matteson smiled at Starbuck, “and then you’ll come to supper. No, Benjamin, don’t argue, I’m quite decided. Give me a carte de visite, quick!” She held out her hand until her husband, with obvious reluctance, surrendered a pasteboard card which, with a smile, she passed down to Starbuck. “We rebels shall exchange war stories while these cold northerners frown at us. And if you need anything in prison, you are to ask me. I wish I had something more than scraps of fruit to give you now, but the congressman ate all our cold chicken because he said it would go bad once the pounded ice melted.” There was a pure venom in her words that made Starbuck laugh.

  The lieutenant who had originally tried to turn the congressman’s carriage around now reappeared with a major whose authority was considerably greater. The major would not have cared if half the U.S. Congress had been in the carriage, it still had no business blocking the turnpike in the middle of a battle and so he touched his hat to Lucy Matteson and then insisted that the driver turn the carriage round and take it back across the Bull Run.

  “Do you know who I am?” Congressman Matteson demanded, then half ducked as a rebel shell exploded a hundred yards away and a piece of shrapnel rustled overhead and cracked harmlessly against the stone house.

  “I don’t care if you’re the emperor of France. Get the hell out of here! Now! Move!”

  Lucy Matteson smiled at Starbuck as the carriage jerked forward. “Come and see us in Washington!”

  Starbuck laughed and stepped back. Above him the hill smoked like a volcano and the shells cracked and the rifle fire splintered and the wounded limped back to the crossroads where the prisoners waited for jail and the Yankees waited for victory and the dead waited for burial. Starbuck, ignored now by the sergeant who no longer seemed to care whether he joined the other prisoners or not, sat with his back against the sunwarmed stone of the house and closed his eyes and wondered what his future held. He supposed the whole southern rebellion was being beaten to death in these hot fields, and he thought how much he would regret the premature ending of this war. He had seen the elephant, and he wanted to see more of it. It was not the horror that attracted him; not the memory of the severed leg spinning across the road, nor the man’s face disappearing in powder smoke and gore, but rather the rearrangement of all creation that appealed to Starbuck’s soul. War, Starbuck had learned this day, took everything that was, shook it, and let the pieces fall where they might. War was a gigantic game of chance, a huge gamble, a denial of all predestination and prudence. War would have saved Starbuck from the fate of family respectability, while peace was duty. War had relieved him of obligation, but peace offered dullness, and Nathaniel Starbuck was young enough and self-confident enough to hate dullness above all other things in the world.

  But now he was a prisoner and the battle hammered on while, warmed by the sun and wearied by the day, Starbuck slept.

  THE REMNANTS OF THE FAULCONER LEGION HAD STUMBLED UPHILL to where, in a tangle of small woods and fields behind Jackson’s Virginia Brigade, the survivors of Nathan Evans’s force recovered. The men were exhausted. At Evans’s insistence they made a crude line that faced toward the Bull Run, but they were on the flank of the reconstituted southern defense and far enough from the turnpike to be spared the renewed federal attacks. The men sat on the grass, dull-eyed and thirsty, wondering if there would be any food or water.

  Doctor Danson extracted the bullet from Adam Faulconer’s leg, working fast and without chloroform. “You’re lucky, Adam. No major blood vessels hit. You may even have a slight limp to attract the ladies, but that’s all. You’ll be dancing with the ladies in ten days.” He poured lunar caustic into the wound, bandaged it, and moved on to the Colonel. He worked just as swiftly to extract the bullet from Washington Faulconer’s belly muscles, sewed up the mangled flesh of his arm, then splinted the broken bone. “You’re not quite as lucky as your son, Washington”—the doctor could still not get used to treating his neighbor as a superior officer—“but in another six weeks you’ll be back to rights.”

  “Six weeks?” Colonel Faulconer was still furious that his precious Legion had been decimated under Thaddeus Bird’s command and at Nathaniel Starbuck’s bidding. He wanted his revenge, not on Bird, whom he had always known was a fool, but on Starbuck, who had become the Colonel’s personification for the Legion’s failure. Instead of marching to glorious victory under Washington Faulconer’s personal command the regiment had been thrown away in some miserable skirmish at the wrong end of the battlefield. The Legion had lost all its baggage and at least seventy men. No one knew the full total, though the Colonel had established that Starbuck was himself among the missing.

  Doctor Danson had heard that Starbuck had been captured by the pursuing Yankees, or maybe worse. “A boy in B Company thought Starbuck might have been shot,” he told the Colonel as he bandaged the splinted arm.

  “Good,” the Colonel said with a savagery that might have been excusable in a man suffering from the pain of a newly broken arm.

  “Father!” Adam nevertheless protested.

  “If the damned Yankees don’t shoot him, we shall. He killed Ridley! I saw it.”

  “Father, please,” Adam pleaded.

  “For God’s sake, Adam, must you always take Starbuck’s side against me? Does family loyalty count for nothing with you?” The Colonel shouted the hurt words at his son who, appalled by the accusation, said nothing. Faulconer flinched away from the splints that Danson was trying to put on his upper arm. “I tell you, Adam,” Faulconer went on, “that your damned friend is nothing but a murderer. Christ, but I should have known he was rotten when he first told us that tale of thieving and whores, but I trusted him for your sake. I wanted to help him for your sake, and now Ethan’s dead because of it and, I promise you, I’ll snap Starbuck’s neck myself if he has the gall to come back here.”

  “Not with that arm, you won’t,” Doctor Danson said dryly.

  “Damn the arm, Billy! I can’t leave the Legion for six weeks!”

  “You need rest,” the doctor said calmly, “you need healing. If you exert yourself, Washington, you’ll invite the gangrene. Three weeks of exertion and you’ll be dead. Let’s fashion a sling for that arm.”

  A thunderous crash of musketry announced that Jackson’s Virginians were greeting the enemy. The battle was now being fought on the plateau about the Henry House, a flat hilltop edged with flame and thunder. The waiting Confederate guns tore great gaps in the advancing federal lines, but the northern infantry outflanked the batteries and forced them back, and northern guns unlimbered to take the rebel cannon in the flank. To Captain Imboden, the lawyer turned gunner, the ground around his outnumbered cannon looked as though it was being truffled by a horde of hungry hogs. The northern shells burrowed deep before exploding, but some were finding more solid targets. One of Imboden’s limbers exploded from a direct hit and one of his gunners screamed in brief, foul gasps as his guts were sliced open by a jagged-edged scrap of shell casing. More gunners dropped to the marksmanship of northern sharpshooters. Imboden was serving one of his guns, ramming a canister down on top of a roundshot, then stepping back as the lanyard was pulled and the lethal missiles flensed through a northern regiment of infantry that was advancing t
hrough the smoke and stench.

  The flags were bright squares of color in the gray. Stars and Stripes came forward while the three stripes of the Confederacy edged backward, but then stopped where Thomas Jackson, his well-thumbed Bible safe in his saddlebag, had decreed they would stop. Jackson’s men stood hard in the smoke and discovered that the hated hours of drill were transmuted by battle into the unconscious motions of efficiency, and that somehow, despite the flail of northern canister and musketry, and despite the terror of men surrounded by the screaming of the wounded, the sobbing of the dying, the horrors of shattered flesh and of disemboweled friends, their hands still kept ramming bullets and charges, kept feeding percussion caps onto cones, kept aiming, kept firing. Still kept fighting. They were terrified, but they had been trained, and the man who had trained them glowered at them, and so they stayed like a stone wall built across a hilltop.

  And the northern attack broke on the wall.

  Jackson’s Virginians should have been beaten. They should have been swept away like a sand ridge struck by a sea, expect they did not know the battle had been lost and so they fought on, even edged forward, and the northerners wondered how you were supposed to beat these bastards, and the fear lodged in the northern hearts and the southerners edged another pace forward over dry grass scorched by burning cartridge wadding. The federals looked behind for reinforcements.

  Those northern reinforcements came, but the southerners were being reinforced too as Beauregard at last realized that his whole plan of battle had been wrong. It had been about as wrong as any plan could be wrong, but now he was making amends by plucking men from his unbloodied right and hurrying them toward the plateau about the Henry House. Irvin McDowell, irritated that such a stubborn defense was delaying the sweet moment of victory, was busy ordering more men up the slope and into the sights of Captain Imboden’s cannon and into the ghastly carnage of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John’s canister, and into range of General Thomas Jackson’s rifle-muskets.