by John Jakes
Love and War
The North and South Trilogy (Book Two)
John Jakes
For
Julian Muller
No writer ever had a better friend
Two things greater
than all things are,
The first is Love,
and the second War.
KIPLING
CONTENTS
Prologue: Ashes of April
Book One: A Vision From Scott
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Book Two: The Downward Road
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Book Three: A Worse Place Than Hell
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Book Four: “Let Us Die to Make Men Free”
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Book Five: The Butcher’s Bill
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Book Six: The Judgments of the Lord
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Chapter 146
Chapter 147
Afterword
Prologue:
Ashes Of April
THE HOUSE BURNED AN hour before midnight on the last day of April. The wild, distant ringing of the fire bells woke George Hazard. He stumbled through the dark hallway, then upstairs to the mansion tower, and stepped outside onto the narrow balcony. A strong, warm wind blew, strengthening the flames and intensifying their light. Even from this height above the town named Lehigh Station, he recognized the blazing house—the only substantial one remaining in the seedy section near the canal.
He raced down to his dimly lighted bedroom and grabbed clothing with hardly more than a glance. He tried to dress quietly but inevitably woke his wife, Constance. She had fallen asleep reading Scripture—not her own Douay version but one of the Hazard family Bibles, into which she’d slipped her rosary before closing the book and kissing George good night. Since the fall of Fort Sumter and the outbreak of war, Constance had spent more than her usual time with the Bible.
“George, where are you rushing?”
“There’s a fire in town. Don’t you hear the alarms?”
Still sleepy, she rubbed her eyes. “But you don’t chase the pump engines whenever the bell rings.”
“The place belongs to Fenton, one of my best foremen. There’s been trouble in his household lately. The fire may be no accident.” He bent and kissed her warm cheek. “Go to sleep. I’ll be back in bed in an hour.”
He turned off the gas and moved swiftly downstairs and to the stable. He saddled a horse himself; it was far faster than waking a groom, and concern spurred him to haste. This acute involvement puzzled him, because, ever since Orry Main’s visit two weeks ago this very night, George had been submerged in a strange, numb state. He felt at a distance from most life around him and especially from that of the nation, one part of which had seceded and attacked the other. The Union was sundered; troops were mustering. As if that somehow had no bearing on his existence, or any impact on his emotions, George had resorted to self-willed isolation.
On horseback, he raced from the rear of the mansion he’d named Belvedere and down the twisting hillside road toward the fire. The strong wind gusts blew like blasts from one of the furnaces of Hazard Iron; the foreman’s house must have become an inferno. Was the volunteer company on the scene? He prayed so.
The road, high-crowned and bumpy, required tight control of his mount. The route took him by the many buildings of the ironworks, generating smoke and light and noise even at this hour. Hazard’s was running continuously, rolling out rails and plate for the Union war effort just commencing. The company was also about to sign a contract to cast cannon. Just now, however, business was the farthest thing from the mind of the man riding swiftly past the terraces of the better homes, then into the flat streets of the commercial district toward the heat and glare of the fire.
The trouble in Fenton’s house had been known to George for some time. Whenever a worker had a problem, he usually heard ab
out it. He wanted it so. Occasionally discipline was required, but he preferred the remedies of discussion, understanding, and advice, wanted or no.
The previous year, Fenton had taken in his footloose cousin, a muscular, energetic chap twenty years his junior. Temporarily without funds, the young man needed a job. The foreman found him one at Hazard’s, and the newcomer did well enough for a month or two.
Though married, Fenton was childless. His handsome but essentially foolish wife was nearer the cousin’s age than his own. Soon George noticed the foreman losing weight. He heard talk of an atypical listlessness when Fenton was on duty. Finally George received a report of a costly mistake made by the foreman. And a week later, another.
Last week, both to prevent new errors and to help Fenton if he could, George had called him in for a talk. Usually easygoing—responsive in conversation, even with the owner—Fenton now had a cold, tight, tortured look in his eyes and would make only one statement of substance. He was experiencing domestic difficulty. He emphasized the two words several times—domestic difficulty. George expressed sympathy but quietly said the errors had to stop. Fenton promised to ensure it by remedying the difficulty. George asked how. By insisting the cousin move out of his house, the foreman said. Uneasily, George left it there, suspecting the nature of the domestic difficulty.
Now, silhouetted ahead, he saw spectators, and figures dashing to and fro in front of the blaze, and jets of water spurting ineffectually over the already collapsed residence. The red light reflected on the metalwork of the outmoded Philadelphia-style pump engine and on the black coats of the four horses that had pulled pumper and hose wagons to the site; they pawed and snorted like fearsome animals from hell. George thought of hell because the scene suggested nothing else.
As he jumped from the saddle, he heard a man screaming in the dark street to the left of the burned house. George worked quickly through the spectators. “Stay back, damn you,” the volunteers’ chief shouted through his fire horn as George emerged from the crowd. The chief lowered his horn and spoke an apologetic “Oh, Mr. Hazard, sir. Didn’t recognize you.”
The statement really meant he hadn’t recognized the richest man in town, perhaps in the entire valley, until he saw him clearly; everyone knew stocky George Hazard, thirty-six this year. George’s windblown hair already showed the beginnings of the sun-streaking that lightened it in the spring and summer; it showed some permanent gray, too. The ice-colored eyes, common in the Hazard family, reflected the fire without and George’s anxiety within. “What happened here?”
The words brought a stammering summary from the chief while the volunteers, who years ago had named their company the Station Stalwarts and gilded its motto, Officium Pro Periculo, on every piece of equipment, continued to work the front and back pumping brakes. The water was wasted on the demolished house. All that could be done was protect the nearby hovels and shanties from the spreading effect of the wind. So the chief had time to speak to the most important man in town.
He said it looked like Fenton had discovered his wife in bed with his cousin earlier in the evening. The foreman had taken a large kitchen knife and stabbed his wife and her lover before setting fire to the house. During that time, the mortally wounded cousin managed to turn the knife back on his attacker, stabbing him four times. Tears filled George’s eyes, and he scrubbed at them with hard knuckles. Fenton had been the politest of men; well read, industrious, intelligent, kind to those he supervised.
“That’s him yelling,” said the chief. “But he don’t figure to live long. The other two was dead when we got here. We dragged them out and covered them up. They’re lying over there if you want to look.”
Somehow, George was compelled. He walked toward the two bodies, foul-smelling beneath a square of canvas in the middle of the street. The screaming went on. The wind fanned the fire, gave it a whooshing voice, and swirled embers and glowing debris upward. The volunteers continued to pump furiously, two rows of men on each brake, one row on the ground, the other on the platform running the width of the engine. The riveted leather hoses, brought in two coffinlike wagons, ran clear across the abandoned canal to the river for water. The matched black horses, trained for this work, continued to behave strangely, pawing, and throwing their heads, and flashing their red-reflecting flanks.
George stopped a foot short of the canvas and lifted it. He had lately been investigating the cost of a modern Latta steam pumper for the town, hence knew something of fires and their effects. That didn’t prepare him for the sight of the dead lovers.
Of the two, the wife was charred worse, her blackened skin split and rolled back upon itself in many places. The cousin’s burned-away clothing revealed hundreds of blisters weeping a shiny yellow fluid that mirrored light. The faces, necks, protruding tongues of both victims had swollen in the final agonies of wanting air and drawing only scorching fumes into the lungs. Ultimately, the throats had swollen, too, though in the wife’s case it was hard to tell whether flames or asphyxiation had killed her. With the cousin there was less doubt; his eyes bulged, big as new apples.
George let the canvas fall and managed to suppress vomit as it reached his throat. What he had seen conjured strange specters. Not merely fire. Death. Suffering. Loss. And, in overpowering summation, war.
Shuddering, he walked back to the chief, feeling deep, unexpected things stirring within him.
“Can I be of help, Tom?”
“Mighty good of you to offer, sir, but it’s too late to do anything except wet down them places next door.” A fireman ran up to say Fenton had died. George shivered again; why did he still hear screaming? He shook his head. The chief went on. “It was too late when we got here.” George nodded sadly and walked back to his horse.
What happened to George as he left the scene, mounting and letting the horse walk, was the result of tragedy encountered, of horror witnessed. The numbed state in which he’d lately been drifting vanished.
He had known there was—would be for many weeks, possibly months—a civil war. But knowing was not the same as understanding. He had known and not understood, and that was true even though he’d fought in Mexico. But the Mexican campaign was a long time in the past. As he rode slowly back up the hillside with wind-driven ash blowing overhead, he at last came to grips with reality. The nation was at war. His younger brother, Billy, an officer in the Corps of Engineers, was at war. His dearest friend in all the world, West Point classmate, comrade in Mexico, sometime financial partner, was at war. He didn’t remember the writer, but he remembered the passage: No man is an island—
He cast his thoughts back over the past two weeks, attempting to discover in the national mood an explanation of his own. To many, perhaps most, citizens in the North, the final relieving of three decades of tension by the bombardment of Fort Sumter on the twelfth of this month of April, 1861, had been a welcome, if not a joyous, event. George’s principal reaction had been sadness; the guns said that men of good will had failed to solve a grievous human problem conceived the first day white traders sold black men and women on the coast of the American wilderness.
Sadness because the problem had been so long deemed insoluble—and, toward the last, not even capable of examination, so thick were the barbicans of rhetoric surrounding the opposing camps. For others, the forever self-occupied and self-serving, the issues were not threatening, or even serious, merely nuisances to be stepped around—treated as invisible, as one would treat beggars sleeping in some gutter.
But in the years in which the war cauldron came to the boil, America had not consisted of two classes only—the fanatical and the indifferent. There were men and women of decent intention. George thought of himself as one of them. Might they have kicked the cauldron over and soaked the coals and called a council of the reasonable? Or were the divisions so deep, so pervasive, that the hotheads on both sides would never have permitted that? Whatever the answer, the men of good will had not prevailed, had let the rest take charge, and the cloven nation w
as at war.
Sadness. Orry Main had shared it when he visited Lehigh Station. Just two weeks ago, it was. His courageous journey from South Carolina to Pennsylvania was laced with menace, and the visit itself had become a night of desperate danger when George’s sister, Virgilia—extreme abolitionist, obsessive hater of all persons and things Southern—had betrayed Orry’s presence to a mob that George held off at gunpoint until he could get his dear and honorable friend out of town.
After that had come—what? Not lassitude, not quite. He had coped with daily problems: contract proposals; uneasiness about Fenton’s plight at home; a hundred things, small and large, with one excepted. Until tonight, he had somehow walled out understanding of the meaning of the war. The fire and the knife had destroyed that wall and retaught a basic lesson. The hell with fools who blithely predicted “only” a ninety-day conflict. You needed nothing but brief moments for death and ruin.
His head pounded. His stomach felt vile. Beyond the leveled wall he saw the threat from which he’d been trying to hide these past two weeks. It was a threat to the lives of those for whom he cared most in the world, a threat to the slowly forged bond between his family and that of the Mains of South Carolina. He’d been hiding from the truth about those lives, that bond. The fire had shown him they were perilously fragile. Fragile as Fenton, and the other two, and the house that had held them with all their passions, imperfections, dreams. Of them, that house, those emotions, nothing remained but that which followed George on the wind, spotting his collar, flicking his ear—ashes; blowing, blowing all around him.
Riding up the Pennsylvania hillside after midnight on the first of May, he could turn his back on the glow of a small, soon-to-be-forgotten domestic tragedy—a cliché in its commonness; so goddamn horrifying and heartbreaking in its specifics. He could turn his back but not his mind. His inward vision swept beyond the past two weeks to embrace two decades.
The Hazards, ironmasters of Pennsylvania, and the Mains, rice planters of South Carolina, had formed their first ties when a son from each house met by chance on a New York City pier on a summer afternoon in 1842. George Hazard and Orry Main became acquaintances on a northbound Hudson River boat that day. As soon as they left the boat, they became new cadets at West Point.
There they survived much together, much that strengthened their natural affinity for one another. There was the skull work—easy for George, who had no great desire for a military career; hard for Orry, who wanted nothing else. They managed to endure the hazing of a deceitful, some said lunatic, upperclassman named Elkanah Bent, even conspired to get him dismissed after a series of particularly heinous acts on his part. But influence in Washington had returned Bent to the Military Academy, and he had graduated promising George and Orry a long memory and full accounting for their sins against him.