by John Jakes
“Tell me about your speech,” Constance said as he walked to his place at the other end of the long wooden table. “Was it a success?”
“Magnificent.” He sat down.
“George, I really want to know.” He responded with a tired shrug. “The rally, then. How did it go?”
“Predictably.” One of the house girls set terrapin soup in front of him. “The rebs were consigned to perdition, the flag waved verbally several hundred times, then that pol from Bethlehem issued the call for volunteers. He got eight.”
Some soup helped him relax and readjust himself to this confined but comfortable domestic universe. The dining room was bright with the shimmer of the gas mantles on fine silver and flocked wallpaper. He peeped at Constance over his spoon. What a lucky fellow he was. Her skin still had the smoothness of newly skimmed cream, and her eyes were the same vivid blue that had enchanted him the night they met, at a dance in Corpus Christi arranged for army officers temporarily stranded en route to Mexico. After the war, he had brought her to Lehigh Station to marry her.
Constance was two inches taller than her husband. He took that as a symbolic incentive to be worthy of her. Though Stanley had once predicted in a sniffy way that her practice of Catholicism would disrupt the marriage, it hadn’t. Years of child rearing, intimacies shared, and troubles borne together had deepened their love and kept physical attraction strong in the marriage.
Patricia fidgeted. She stabbed her poached fish with her fork, as if the fish were responsible for her failure to get a hand cooler.
“Did the factory produce a lot of havelocks today?” George asked, addressing the question more to Brett than anyone. She sat on his left, her eyes downcast, her face fatigued. She hadn’t said one word to him.
“Quite a few, yes,” Constance said, simultaneously shooting out her left arm. She thwacked Patricia’s ear with her middle finger. That ended the fish-stabbing.
The meal dragged to its finish. Brett remained quiet. After George gave the customary permission for the children to be excused, he spoke briefly to Constance, then followed his sister-in-law to the library. He closed the doors before he said: “I heard about the trouble today.”
She looked up wearily. “I had hoped you wouldn’t.”
“It’s a small town. And, regrettably, you are very much a center of attention.”
She sighed, absently brushing her palms across the open Leslie’s in her lap. George lit one of his strong dark brown cigars as she said, “I suppose I was foolish to think it would all pass unnoticed.”
“Especially since Fessenden and his cousin are under arrest for assaulting you.”
“Who charged them?”
“Pinckney Herbert. So, you see, you do have some friends in Lehigh Station.” After telling her that he had already written orders discharging both of her attackers from their jobs at Hazard’s, he said in a gentle voice, “I can’t tell you how angry and sorry I am about the whole business. Constance and I care for you just as much as we care for any member of this family. We know how hard it is for you to be so far from home and separated from your husband—”
That broke through. She leaped up, spilling the illustrated paper on the carpet, and flung her arms around his neck like a daughter wanting a father’s comfort. “I miss Billy so terribly—I’m ashamed to say how much—”
“Don’t be.” He patted her back. “Don’t be.”
“The only salvation is, I’ll soon be able to join him somewhere. Everyone says the war won’t last ninety days.”
“So they do.” He released her and turned away so she wouldn’t see his reaction. “We’ll do our best to see that those ninety days pass quickly—without another incident. I know it wasn’t the first. You’re a brave young woman, Brett. But don’t fight every battle alone.”
She shook her head. “George, I must. I’ve always looked after myself.” Forcing a smile: “I’ll be fine. Ninety days isn’t so long.”
What more could he do? Frustrated, he excused himself and left, trailing a blue ribbon of smoke.
Upstairs, he found his son marching in the hall and bellowing the popular song about hanging Jeff Davis from a sour-apple tree. George stopped that and ordered William to his room, where he worked with the boy on ciphering lessons for half an hour. He next spent fifteen minutes with Patricia, trying to convince her that she’d have a hand cooler at the proper time. He failed.
In bed in his nightshirt, uncomfortably warm despite the summer breeze blowing in, he reached for the comforting curve of his wife’s breast and lay close against her back while he described events at the General Merchandise. “She’s counting on a short war to put an end to that sort of thing.”
“So am I, George. I haven’t heard from Father in months, and I worry about him down there in Texas. You know he never hid his hatred of slavery and slaveowners. Surely it’ll all end soon. I can’t believe Americans will fight each other for very long. It’s inconceivable that they’re doing it at all.”
“As Orry said, we had thirty years to prevent it, but we didn’t. I hate to dash Brett’s hopes or yours—” He broke off.
“George, don’t do that. Finish what you were going to say.”
Reluctantly, he said, “Brett’s forgotten that in May, Lincoln called for another forty-two thousand men. But not for the short term. The boys who signed up at the rally are in for three years.”
Her voice grew faint. “I forgot it, too. You aren’t hopeful about a short war?”
He waited a moment but finally admitted, “If I were hopeful, I’d have thrown away Boss Cameron’s telegraph message the minute it arrived.”
12
WHILE BRETT WAS ENCOUNTERING trouble in the United States, her brother Cooper and his family were nearing the end of a rail journey in Great Britain.
Smoke and cinders kept flying into the family’s first-class compartment because the children, Judah and Marie-Louise, took turns leaning over the sill of the lowered window. Cooper permitted it, but his wife, Judith, considered it dangerous, so she sat forward, her posture tense as she held the waist of one child, then the other.
Cooper Main, forty-one, sat opposite her with a sheaf of naval blueprints unrolled on his knees. He made notes on the blueprints in pencil. Before starting, he’d drawn the curtains of the door and windows on the corridor side.
As usual, Cooper managed to make his fine clothes look untidy. It was his height, his lankiness, his preoccupied scholar’s behavior that caused it. He paid almost no attention to the children’s sightseeing, which horrified his wife, a flat-bosomed woman with thin arms, a long nose, and a great deal of curly dark blond hair, all of which Cooper found extraordinarily beautiful.
“Pa, there’s a river,” exclaimed Judah, hanging half in, half out of the compartment as he looked ahead, his hair shining in the hot July sun.
“Let me see, let me see!” Marie-Louise wedged her way into the window beside him.
“Both of you get in here this instant,” Judith said. “Do you want that bridge to lop your heads off ?” Forceful tugs ensured that it wouldn’t. They tumbled back on the upholstery beside her, complaining, while the diamond patterns of the crossed beams began to flicker in the compartment. The express from London rattled over the Runcorn bridge, the river Mersey shining beneath like a field of mirror splinters.
Judah jumped across the aisle and pressed against his father’s coat. “Will we be in Liverpool soon?”
“Yes, in half an hour or less.” He began to roll the plans in preparation for hiding them in his luggage.
Marie-Louise scrambled over to his right side. “Will we stay for a while, Papa?”
“Several months anyway.” He smiled and patted her.
“Captain Bulloch will meet us?” Judith asked.
“That was the meaning of the classified insertion in the Times. Of course it’s possible that some Union agent did away with him in the past three days.”
“Cooper, I don’t think you should joke about this wor
k. Secret messages sent by advertisement, enemy spies lurking everywhere—hardly subjects for humor, in my opinion.” She glanced from her husband to the children in a pointed way. But they were totally absorbed by the slow-moving shadows.
“Perhaps not. But we can’t be grim all the time, and although I take my duties seriously—and I’m sensitive to the cautions Bulloch expressed in his letter—I refuse to let all of that spoil England for us.” Leaning forward, he smiled and touched her. “For you most of all.”
She squeezed his hand. “You’re such a dear man. I’m sorry I snapped. I’m afraid I’m tired.”
“Understandably,” he said with a nod. They had left King’s Cross in the middle of the night and watched the sun rise over the peaceful canals and summer-green countryside, neither admitting that uncertainty, homesickness, and worries about possible dangers beset them.
The family had sailed from Savannah on the last ship that got out before the Union blockade closed the Southern coast. The vessel had called at Hamilton, Bermuda, before steaming on to Southampton. Since their arrival in London, they’d been living in cramped rooms in Islington. Now, however, there was a promise of better, larger quarters in Liverpool, where Cooper was to assist the chief agent of the Confederate Navy Department, who had arrived some weeks earlier. Their mission was to expedite construction of ocean-going raiders to harass Yankee shipping. Behind the program lay a sound strategy. If the Confederacy could destroy or capture enough merchant vessels, insurance rates would rise prohibitively; then the enemy would be forced to draw ships from its blockading squadron to protect its own commerce.
Maritime matters were not new to Cooper. He had a long history of interest in and love for the sea. Unable to tolerate the family plantation or repeated quarrels with his late father on the issues of slavery and states’ rights, he had gone to Charleston to manage a frowzy little commercial shipping firm that had come into Tillet Main’s possession almost by accident. Through study, determination, and hard work, Cooper had turned the Carolina Shipping Company into the most innovative line in the South and built it to a level of profit only slightly lower than that of its larger but more conservative rival in the port city, John Fraser & Company. That company was now guided by another self-made millionaire, George Trenholm. Its Liverpool cotton-factoring office, operating as Fraser, Trenholm, would secretly channel funds into the illegal work Cooper was to undertake.
Before the war, on a plot of ground overlooking Charleston harbor, Cooper had started to create his great dream—a ship patterned after the immense iron vessels of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the British engineering genius he had twice visited. He wanted to demonstrate that a Southern shipbuilding industry was a reasonable possibility, that prosperity in the state need not depend entirely on the drip of sweat from black skin.
While the shouters stumped for secession, he worked too quietly—which was one mistake. He worked too slowly—which was another. Star of Carolina had scarcely been started when the batteries opened fire on Sumter; he had signed her over to the Confederate Navy, and now, he understood, she had been ripped apart, her metal to be used for other purposes.
It was Cooper’s fascination with shipbuilding that helped him shunt aside his doubts about the cause. He had long considered the South to be ignorant and misguided for failing to recognize the world-wide spread of industrialization and for clinging to an agrarian system based on human servitude. He recognized that realistically the problem couldn’t be reduced to such a simple statement. But with that caveat, he still contended that a few elitists with wealth and political control had pushed the South to disaster, first by refusing to compromise on slavery and then by promoting secession. The yammering Yankee abolitionists had done their part as well, piling insults on the South for three decades—that the insults had a justifiable base made them no more bearable—and the result was a confrontation decent men, such as his brother Orry and Orry’s old war comrade George Hazard, didn’t want but didn’t know how to prevent. Cooper believed that men of good will on both sides—he counted himself among them—had lacked the power, but they had also lacked the initiative. So the war came.
At that apocalyptic moment, a strange sea change occurred. Much as Cooper detested the war and those who had provoked it, he found he loved his native South Carolina more. So he turned over the assets of his shipping company to the new Confederate government and informed his family that they would be traveling to England to serve the Navy Department.
The situation in Britain vis-à-vis the Confederacy was complex, not to say confused. Nearly as confused, Cooper thought, as the foreign policy of the Davis government. The South needed war and consumer goods from abroad. She could buy those with her cotton, but Mr. Davis had chosen to withhold that from the foreign market because textile mills in Europe and Britain were suffering a severe shortage of their raw material. Thus Davis hoped to force diplomatic recognition of the new nation. All he’d gotten so far was half a pie; while the Cooper Mains crossed the ocean, Britain acknowledged the Confederate States as belligerents in a war with the North.
If full recognition depended on the skills of the three commissioners dispatched to Europe by Secretary of State Toombs, Cooper doubted it would ever be achieved. Rost and Mann were barely adequate mediocrities, while the third commissioner, Yancey, was one of the original fire-eaters—a man so extreme the Confederate government didn’t want him. His posting to Britain amounted to exile. An ill-tempered boor was hardly the person to deal with Lord Russell, the foreign minister.
Further, the ambassador from Washington, Mr. Charles Francis Adams, descendant of presidents, had a reputation as a shrewd, aggressive diplomat. He kept pressure on the Queen’s government to hold back recognition of the Confederacy. And Cooper had been warned that Adams and his consuls maintained a spy network to prevent the very kind of illegal activity that brought him to Liverpool.
“Lime Street. Lime Street Station.”
The trainman moved on to call at the next compartment. Above the stone-sided cut through which the train chugged, Cooper glimpsed the chimneys of steeply roofed row houses stained with dirt, yet reassuring in their solidity. Cooper loved Britain and the British people. Any nation that could produce a Shakespeare and a Brunel—and a Drake and a Nelson—deserved immortality. Duty in Liverpool might have its dangers, but he felt exhilarated as the train jerked and finally stopped in the roofed shed adjoining Lime Street.
“Judith, children, follow me.” First out of the compartment, he waved down a porter. While the luggage was being unloaded, a man with more hair on his upper lip and cheeks than on his round head wove through the press of passengers, porters, and hawkers to reach the new arrivals. The man had an aristocratic air about him and was well but not extravagantly dressed.
“Mr. Main?” The man addressed him softly, even though loud voices and escaping steam effectively barred eavesdropping.
“Captain Bulloch?”
James D. Bulloch of Georgia and the Confederate Navy tipped his hat. “Mrs. Main—children. The warmest of welcomes to Liverpool. I trust the journey wasn’t too taxing?”
“The children enjoyed the scenery once the sun came up,” Judith answered, with a smile.
“I spent most of the time studying the drawings you sent to Islington,” Cooper added. They had arrived with a man pretending to be making a delivery of wallpaper samples.
“Good—fine. You-all come right along, then. I have a hack waiting to whisk us over to Mrs. Donley’s in Oxford Street. Temporary quarters only—I know you’ll want something larger and more suitable.”
Turning slightly, he directed the remark to Judith. As Bulloch smiled at her, Cooper noticed his eyes. They moved constantly, scanning faces, compartment windows, trash-strewn corners of the great arched shed. This was no lark.
“You might like the Crosby area,” Bulloch continued as he led the family and the porter outside. He flourished his gold-knobbed cane to discourage three sad-faced urchins with trays of old, damaged frui
t. The Mains piled into the hack while Bulloch remained on the curb, studying the crowds. Finally he hopped in, rapped the ceiling with his cane, and they were off.
“There’s plenty to be done here, Main, but I don’t want to rush you. I know you need to settle in—”
Cooper shook his head. “The waiting in London was worse than overwork. I’m eager to get started.”
“Good for you. The first man you’ll meet is Prioleau. He runs Fraser, Trenholm, on Rumford Place. I also want to introduce you to John Laird and his brother. Got to be careful about that meeting, though. Mrs. Main, you understand the problems we contend with here, don’t you?”
“I think so, Captain. The neutrality laws don’t permit war vessels to be built and armed in British yards if the vessels will go into the service of any power with whom Britain is at peace.”
“By Jove, that’s it exactly. Clever wife you have, old chap.” Cooper smiled; Bulloch was adapting rapidly. He continued energetically. “The laws cut both ways, of course. The Yankees can’t build any warships either—but then, they don’t need to, and we do. The trick is to construct and arm a vessel without detection or government interference. Fortunately, there’s a gap in the laws—one we can sail right through if we have nerve. A solicitor I hired locally pointed it out. I’ll explain it in due course.”
“Will the local shipbuilders violate the laws on neutrality?” Judith asked him.
“Britons are also human beings, Mrs. Main. Some of them will if there’s profit in it. Fact is, they’ve more offers of contracts than they can handle. There are gentlemen in town who have nothing to do with our Navy but who still want ships built or refitted.”
“Ships to run the blockade?” said Cooper.
“Yes. By the way, have you met the man we work for?”