“You are fortunate, Colonel, in being able to honorably carry out your vital duty and yet remain in the bosom of your family.”
“I often think so,” Gorgas said.
“As you should; such circumstances are given to few, and ought not to be taken for granted, And now I will let you return to your duties. No, you need not see me out; I can find my way.” Given that permission, Gorgas was already reaching for a pen as Lee shut the door behind him. The man was a glutton for work. Lee wished the Confederacy had more like him.
Piles of shells in the yard around the armory testified to the diligence of Gorgas and his crews. The muscular men loading some of those shells onto a wagon for transport to a railway station and thence to the field paused when Lee came out and walked over to his carriage. A couple of them lifted their caps to him. He nodded in return. They grinned as they went back to work.
Luke breathed whiskey fumes into Lee’s face as Lee got in behind him. “You give ‘em somethin’ to brag on, Marse Robert, just because they see you.” Lee glanced down, but the black man had his flask out of sight. He asked, “Where you want to go to now?”
Lee considered the question. He’d had no definite plans for the rest of the day. His first impulse was to rush headlong to the treasury, beard Secretary Memminger in his lair, and demand of him if he knew what an impossibly good bargain he was getting in Rhoodie’s repeaters. But finance was not his own province. He said, “Take me back to the War Department.”
“Yassuh, Marse Ropert.” Tight or sober, Luke could handle horses. He swung the team around another wagon coming into the armory to be loaded with shells, then drove back to Mechanic’s Hall. Lee eyed with keen interest the building across the street from the War Department, a three-story, brown brick structure he’d gone by countless times before but scarcely noticed. His scrutiny was rewarded by the sight of a man in the mottled outfit that seemed the trademark costume of Andries Rhoodie and his comrades passing in through the building’s marble-faced entranceway.
Officers with lace on their gray sleeves and civilians in black claw-hammer coats bustled in and out of Mechanic’s Hall, as if the place were an ant’s nest, with some workers going forth to forage and others returning with their spoils. Luke pulled up right in front of the building. A Confederate with the two stars of a lieutenant colonel on his collar shouted, “You damned stupid nigger, what do you think you’re doing, blocking the—” The words stuck in his throat when Lee got out of the carriage. He pulled himself to attention and snapped off a salute that would have done credit to a cadet from the Virginia Military Institute.
Lee turned and said, “Thank you, Luke,” before he returned it. The black man smiled a secret smile as he took the team around the corner to find a place to hitch it. The walk from the street into the foyer of Mechanic’s Hall was only twenty or thirty feet, but in that short space Lee was saluted close to a dozen times.
He paused in the foyer to let his eyes adjust to the dimmer interior light. Then he walked over to a desk where a clerk was industriously jotting in a ledger or notebook. After a glance at the enameled brass nameplate in front of the fellow, he said, “Excuse me, Mr. Jones, does Colonel Lee still maintain his office on the second floor?”
The clerk—John Beauchamp Jones his nameplate proclaimed him to be, as if by trumpeting his middle name he could make up for the utter plainness of those that flanked it—finished writing his sentence before he looked up. His thin, clean-shaven face bore a sour expression at the interruption. That quickly changed when he saw who stood before him. “Yes, General, he does. He’s there now, I believe; I saw him go up this morning.”
“Thank you, sir.” Lee had not taken two steps toward, the stairway before Jones returned to his writing.
He fielded more salutes on the second floor as he made’ his way down the hall to his son Custis’s office. Custis was writing when he tapped on the open door, though with less zeal than John Jones had displayed. “Father! Sir!” he exclaimed, springing to his feet. He too saluted, then stuck out his hand.
Lee took it, swept his eldest son into an embrace. “Hello, my dear boy. You’re looking very well. I see it is possible to find adequate victuals in Richmond after all.”
Custis laughed. “I’ve always been heavier than you, Father. Here, sit down. Tell me what I can do for you. Is it—I hope it is—a post in the field?”
“I have none to give, son; I wish I did. I know how you chafe as President Davis’s aide,” Lee said.
Custis nodded, tugging at his beard in frustration. Though he was past thirty, it remained boyishly thin and silky on his upper cheeks. He said, “How am I ever to deserve command if I have not led men ill the field?”
“Soon, I am sure, you will take the field in some capacity—everyone who has ability will be needed when spring comes. Do not think you have no value in your current post, either; you render the President and the nation important service.”
“It is not the service I would give,” Custis said stiffly.
“I know. I have been in that predicament myself, in western Virginia and then in the Carolinas. At the moment, however, your presence in Richmond may prove of considerable advantage to me.”
“How so, sir?” The younger Lee still sounded dubious, as if he suspected his father of devising some make-work assignment to reconcile him to remaining in the Confederate capital.
But interest flowered on his face when Lee asked, “Do you remember the organization that calls itself America Will Break, of which I wrote you? The one which appears centered in the town of Rivington, North Carolina?”
“The people with those amazing repeaters?” Custis said. “Yes, of course I do. I shouldn’t mind getting my hands on one of their carbines myself.”
“That can be quite simply arranged, I think: you need only walk across the street, as the organization has established offices right opposite Mechanic’s Hall. But I wish you would not.”
Custis smiled. “You’d best have a good reason, Father, for if they are so close, I think I shall straightaway beat a path to their door.”
“I believe I do have a good reason, Custis, or rather several of them.”
Lee briefly outlined his conversations with Major Venable back at army headquarters and with Colonel Gorgas not an hour earlier. When he finished by telling Custis what the Rivington men were selling their repeaters for, his son stared and exclaimed, “You’re joking!”
“No, my dear boy, lam not,” Lee assured him. “And so you: will grasp that I have cause to wonder about these people who call themselves America Will Break. They are on their way to becoming a power in the Confederacy, and I do not know whether they will prove a power for good or ill. There is a great deal I do not know about them, and I wish I did. That is where you come in.”
“How?” Now Custis seemed eager, not doubtful. Before his father could answer, he went on, “Fifty dollars Confederate? Fifty dollars Confederate won’t buy a pocket knife, let alone a repeating rifle.”
“That is why I want you,” his father said. “I cannot personally investigate these AWB establishments myself. Even if I had the time, I am too readily recognizable. For that matter, you may be as well; you favor your mother as much as me, but the name Lee draws attention to its bearer.”
“Thanks to you, sir—what you have done makes me proud to bear it.”
“You have made your own contributions to it, and will, I am confident, make more. You can aid your country now by recruiting a band of men—I care not whether soldiers or civilians—whose names and faces will certainly draw no notice, and by using them to keep watch on the men and offices of America Will Break. Report what you learn to me and, if it is of sufficient urgency, directly to President Davis. Your being his aide may well prove valuable in this task, for it gives you his ear.”
Custis’s face grew set and abstracted. Lee knew the look; his son was thinking through the task he had been given. It was not a formal order; he was not under his father’s command. But he said, “Of course I’ll
take it on, sir. I see the need. Perhaps I ought to enlist some Negroes among my—my spies, not to mince words. To a white man, no one is more invisible than a slave.”
“That may be an excellent notion. If you make sure they are trustworthy and can be relied upon not to gossip, by all means make use of them. Do not stint in rewarding them, either; if they give you good service.”
“I promise, Father, I shan’t be niggardly.”
“Good, for mostly being poor, they are—” Lee broke off and did his best to stare severely at his son, who was grinning to see his delayed reaction. “You young scamp!”
“I’m sorry, sir. I couldn’t resist.”
“You might have tried,” Lee said. “I think I shall take myself away, before I find myself under further bombardments.” He got up. So did Custis. They hugged again. “Take care of yourself, my dear son.”
“And you, Father. Give my love to Rob when you get back to the army, and to Cousin Fitzhugh as well.” One of Custis’s brothers was in the artillery, his cousin a cavalry officer.
“I shall,” Lee promised.
“Any word on Rooney?” Custis asked. His other brother, also a cavalry officer, had been wounded at Brandy Station the year before and captured while recuperating; for a time, he had been under threat of death.
Lee said, “The exchange talks seem to be moving forward at last. God willing, we’ll have him back again next month.”
“Thank heaven.”
“Yes. I expect to be down here a few more days, doing this and that. Perhaps you and your wife will be able to stop by the house on Franklin Street before I have to return. If not, tell her I know I owe her a letter. And, Custis, I do attach much importance to this business of the Rivington men, believe me.”
“I had not doubted it, sir. You are not in the habit of concerning yourself with trifles. I‘ll learn all I can of them.”
“I’m sure you will. God bless you and keep you, Custis.”
Lee walked out of his son’s office and down the stairs. His way out to the street carried him past John Jones’s desk. The clerk was turned away from him, talking to the man at the next desk: “My boy Custis’s parrot happened to be loose from its cage. It swooped down on the meat as if it were a hawk, the miserable bird, and gulped it down before we could get it back again. Meat is too hard to come by in Richmond these days to waste on a parrot; we’ll go without on account of it. I wish the damned talking feather duster would flyaway for good.”
Luke was waiting patiently outside Mechanic’s Hall. He waved when he saw Lee, and called, “I’ll get the carriage for you, Marse Robert.” He hurried off to fetch it. Lee went down the marble stairs and stood to one side of them so he would not be in the way of people going in and out on War Department business.
“Good to see you smiling, General Lee, sir,” a friendly passerby said, tipping his stovepipe hat. “Now I know things can’t be bad.” Without waiting for an answer, he went up the stairs two at a time and disappeared into Mechanic’s Hall.
Lee’s smile grew broader, though the stranger had been cheered by an amusement which had nothing to do with the prospective course of the war between Confederacy and Union. The thought uppermost in Lee’s mind was that Custis Jones’s parrot ought to make the acquaintance of Custis Morgan the squirrel.
*IV*
With his small, bald head, long nose, and long neck, Richard Ewell inevitably reminded everyone who met him of a stork. Having lost a leg at Groveton during Second Manassas, he could now also imitate the big white bird’s one-footed stance. He was sitting at the moment, however, sitting and pounding one, fist into the other palm to emphasize his words: “We smashed ‘em, sir, smashed ‘em, I tell you.” His voice was high and thin, almost piping.
“I am very glad to hear it, General Ewell,” Lee replied. “If those people send raiders down toward Richmond with the intention of seizing their prisoners there—and perhaps even the city itself—they must expect not to be welcomed with open arms.”
“Oh, we met ‘em with arms, all right,” Jeb Stuart said with a grin, patting the AK-47 that leaned against his camp stool. The repeater’s woodwork was not so perfectly varnished as it had been fresh out of the crate; it had seen use since then. Stuart patted it again.” And we sent Kilpatrick’s riders back over the Rapidan with their tails between their legs.”
Lee smiled. He’d liked Stuart for years, ever since the young cavalry corps commander’s days at West Point with Custis. He said, “Excellent. But don’t you think that leather might better have gone into shoes for the men?”
Ever flamboyant, Stuart wore crossed leather belts over, his shoulders, each one with loops enough to hold a magazine’s worth of brass AK-47 cartridges. The effect was piratical. But Stuart instantly became a contrite swashbuckler, saying, “I’m sorry, General Lee; it never crossed my mind.”
“Let it go,” Lee said. “I doubt the Confederacy will founder for want of a couple of feet of cowhide. But I take it I am to infer from your ornaments that you are pleased with the performance of the new repeaters in action.”
“General Lee, yesterday I sold my LeMat,” Stuart said. Lee blinked at that; Stuart had carried the fancy revolver with an extra charge of buckshot in a separate lower barrel ever since the war was young.
“The rifles are outstanding,” General Ewell agreed. “So are the men who furnish them. If I had a drink in my hand, I’d toast them.”
“I have some blackberry wine here in my tent, brought up from Richmond,” Lee said. “If you truly feel the need, I should be glad to bring it out.”
Ewell shook his head. “Thank you, but let it be. Still, had we not heard from those America Will Break fellows that Kilpatrick was on the move, who knows how much mischief he might have done before we beat him back?”
“As it was, I understand, some of their cavalry captured a train station on the line up from the capital not long after I passed through on the way back to the army,” Lee said.
“Fugitives from the main band, after we scattered them,” Stuart said. “I’m glad they got to the station too late to nab you. Otherwise, however badly the rest of their plan failed, they would have won a great victory.”
“If a republic will stand or fall on the fate of any single man, it finds itself in grave danger indeed,” Lee observed.
But Ewell said, “Our republic is in great danger, as well you know, sir. We would be in graver danger still, were it not for your Andries Rhoodie and his fellows. When Meade sent Sedgwick west with the VI Corps, when Custer went haring off toward Charlottesville, I would have shifted the entire army to meet them had Rhoodie not warned me of a possible cavalry thrust south from Ely’s Ford.”
“But Fitz Lee was sitting there waiting for the bold Kilpatrick,” Stuart said with the smile of a cat who has caught his canary. “General Kill-Cavalry killed a good many of his Yankees by Spotsylvania Court House.”
“I’m delighted Fitz Lee was there,” Lee said, thinking kind thoughts about his nephew.
“So am I,” Stuart said. “Also there was Rhoodie’s friend Konrad de Buys. General Lee, that man is wilder in battle than any of Stand Watie’s red Indians in the trans-Mississippi. He awed me, damn me if he didn’t.”
Any man about whom a warrior like Stuart would say such a thing had to be a man indeed. Lee said, “I wondered how the Rivington men would fare. But I wonder more how Rhoodie and de Buys knew Kilpatrick was coming. General Ewell, you say the Army of the Potomac feinted to the west to draw your attention to your left wing, and that the feint was competently executed?”
Ewell’s pale eyes turned inward as he pondered that. “Very competently. Sedgwick’s as good a corps commander as the Federals have, and Custer—what can I say about Custer, save that he wishes he were Jeb Stuart?” Stuart smiled again, a smile the brighter for peeping out through his forest of brown beard.
“Under normal circumstances, you might have been deceived, then, General Ewell, at least long enough for Kilpatrick to slip past you and ma
ke for Richmond?” Lee asked. Ewell nodded. “And you had picked up nothing from spies and agents to warn you Kilpatrick might be on the move?” Ewell nodded once more. Lee plucked at his beard. “How did Rhoodie know?”
“Why don’t you ask him, sir?” Jeb Stuart said.
“I think I shall,” Lee said.
Walter Taylor stuck his head into Lee’s tent. “Mr. Rhoodie is here to see you, sir.”
“Thank you, Major. Have him come in.”
Rhoodie pushed his way through the tent flap. With his height and wide shoulders, he seemed to fill up the space the canvas enclosed. Lee rose to greet him and shake his hand. “Have a seat, Mr. Rhoodie. Will you take a little blackberry wine? The bottle is right there beside you.”
“If you are having some, I wouldn’t mind, thank you.”
“I believe I set out two glasses. Would you be kind enough to pour, sir? Ah, thank you. Your very good health.” Lee took a small sip. He was pleased to see Rhoodie toss off half his glass at a swallow; wine might help loosen the fellow’s tongue. He said, “From what General Ewell tells me, the Confederacy finds itself in your debt once more. Without your timely warning, Kilpatrick’s raiders might have done far worse than they actually succeeded in accomplishing.”
“So they might.” Rhoodie finished his wine. “I am pleased to help in any way I can. Can I fill you up again, General?”
“No, thank you, not yet, but by all means help yourself.” Lee took another sip to indicate he was not far behind Rhoodie. He nodded imperceptibly to himself when the big man did pour again, as a fisherman will when his bait is taken. He said, “Interesting how you got wind of Kilpatrick’s plans when the rest of the army would have been hoodwinked by Meade’s motion toward our left.”
Rhoodie looked smug. “We have our ways, General Lee.”
“Marvelously good ones they must be, too. As with your rifles, they altogether outdistance that which anyone else may hope to accomplish. But how do you know what you know, Mr. Rhoodie? Be assured that I ask in the most friendly way imaginable; my chief concern is to be able to form a judgment of your reliability, so I may know how far I may count on it in the crises which surely lie ahead.”
The Guns of the South Page 10