by Джон Джейкс
As most battles did, the one for the contested hilltop lost shape and organization and soon swirled into many small, ugly skirmishes. The rebels regained the heights, lost them, rallied to take them again. Riding up a second time, Charles nearly slammed into a knot of Union troopers. He raised his sword in time to parry that of a hot-eyed officer with flowing hair and a red scarf knotted at his throat.
Pushing, pushing down, his sword against Charles's, their horses neighing and shoving, the lieutenant sneered, "Your servant, Reb —"
"I'm not yours." Charles spat in the Yank's face to gain advantage, and would have stabbed him through had not the officer's horse stumbled. Circus rider gone mad, said a voice in his memory as the Yank's eyes locked with his for an instant.
The horse fell; the Yank disappeared. Neither man would forget the other.
"Look sharp, Charlie," Ab shouted above the cannonading, the sabers clashing and sparking, the wounded crying out. Through dust clouds, Charles had a blurry view of Ab pointing behind him. He twisted, saw a Yank sergeant raise a huge pistol.
Ab closed in on the Yank. Using his empty revolver as a club, he chopped at the sergeant's arm. The sergeant changed his aim and shot Ab in the chest at a range of two feet.
"Ab!" A scream did no good. Ab was already gone, sliding sideways, his eyes open but no longer comprehending who or where he was — had been — as he sank from sight. The sergeant vanished in the melee.
Teeth clenched, Charles parried a cut from a Union trooper ramming his horse into Sport. Clang — the trooper hit a second time. Sparks hissed and leaped where metal edges met.
The trooper fought his bucking horse. He was a redhead, scarcely twenty, with a foolish grin showing under his big red mustaches.
"Lost your nerve?" Ab died thinking that. Saved me in spite of it —
"Got you this time," the redhead shouted. With a curse and a skillful dodge, Charles escaped the sword and put his own halfway through the boy's throat. He pulled it out with no remorse. Ab was right: Gus had softened and weakened him. It had taken this bloody June day to reveal the truth.
Driving on up to the heights of Fleetwood again, Charles suddenly realized a riderless horse was running beside Sport. It was Ab's mount, Cyclone. The animal kept on toward the sound of the guns. A bursting grape canister put out one of its eyes and opened a wound in its head. Like any brave, battle-trained war horse, Cyclone didn't neigh or bellow. Cyclone plowed on, slower but still moving forward in blood and silent pain until the wounds and the angle of the slope became too much, and it knelt down on its forelegs, wanting to continue but unable.
Charles sabered like a madman, weaving and feinting so fast, no one could touch him. Then another Yank charged; an ungainly man with the coaly hair and heavy-cream skin and blue eyes of the black Irish. The Yank wore corporal's chevrons and swore at Charles in a tongue he took to be Gaelic. Charles fought him nearly four minutes, blocking cuts, striking the Yank's left shoulder, parrying again, finally running him through the belly. He struck the man's ribs, yanked out the sword, and stabbed again.
The horses bucked and bumped each other. The Irishman swayed. Charles stabbed him a third time. What keeps him up? Why won't he fall? Why couldn't the hapless fools be dragged out of the saddle any more? Who had taught them to ride and fight so fiercely?
"Damned pernicious traitor," cried the trebly wounded Irishman, sounding exactly like a Maine cadet Charles had known at West Point. Were the Yanks also making troopers of lobstermen? God help the South if they could accomplish miracles like that.
A fourth stroke sent the corporal down, sliding sideways, unable to free himself from his right stirrup. An artillery limber rolled over his head and pushed it deep in soft brown loam. The man had been a devil; Charles shook with terror for more than a minute.
In the end the Southerners won and held the hill. But the Union reconnaissance in force had achieved its objective. Lee's army was found.
The Yanks achieved a second, unplanned, objective as well. They put a sword deep into the confidence of the Confederate cavalry. Charles knew it when he fought the Irishman with the Down East voice.
Pleasanton ordered a general retreat before dark. As the sun sank and the wind cleared Fleetwood of smoke and dust, legions of glistening bluebottle flies descended on the trampled red grass. The turkey buzzards sailed out of the twilight sky. Charles rode through the detritus of the charges and countercharges he could no longer count or remember separately. He searched until he found Ab's body, a hundred yards beyond the place where he had died. The carrion birds had already reached his face. Charles waved off the birds, but one rose with a piece of pink flesh in its beak. Charles pulled his Colt and killed the bird.
He buried Ab in some woods south of the railroad line, using a borrowed trenching tool. As he dug, he tried to find comfort in the memory of good times he and Ab had shared. There wasn't any.
He put Ab into the hole in the ground, then squatted at the edge, deliberating. A minute passed. He unbuttoned his shirt and lifted the thong over his head. He studied the handmade sack containing the book with the ball embedded in it. The book hadn't protected him, it had emasculated him. He threw the bag in the grave and began to shovel dirt to fill the hole.
He had seen General Hampton a number of times during the fighting, whirling that great Crusader's sword and galloping ahead of his men, as good cavalry generals always did. That night Charles saw him again. The loss of his brother made Hampton look like an old man.
Charles heard that the surgeons didn't think they could save Calbraith Butler's foot. So much had happened on Fleetwood that day — deaths and small heroisms, some noticed, some not. Charles had given up his only good friend and regained something that he had lost.
He rubbed Sport down and fed him and stroked his neck. "We made it through once more, old friend." The gray gave a small shake of his head; he was as spent as Charles.
Brandy Station made the reputation of the Union cavalry. It tarnished Stuart's. And, belatedly, it showed Charles the sharp accuracy of his fear about the relationship with Gus. Such an attachment was wrong in wartime. Wrong for her, wrong for him.
Charles had been observed in action during the assaults on Fleetwood. He received a commendation in general orders from Hampton and a brevet to major. What he got with no official action was a new direction for himself. He must think first of his duty. He loved Gus; that wouldn't change. But speculations about marriage, a future with her, had no place in a soldier's mind.
They dulled his concentration. Made him more vulnerable, less effective.
Gus would have to know how he felt. That was only fair. Questions of how and when to tell her, he was too tired to confront just now.
83
"Pack," Stanley said.
Sticky and ill-tempered from the heat of that Monday, June 15, Isabel retorted, "How dare you burst in on me in the middle of the day and start issuing orders."
He mopped his face, but the sweat popped out again. "All right, stay. I'm taking the boys to Lehigh Station via the four o'clock to Baltimore. I paid three times the normal price of the tickets, and I was lucky to be able to do it."
Uneasy all at once — he never spoke sharply to her — she moderated her tone. "What's provoked this, Stanley?"
"What the newsboys are shouting on every corner downtown. 'Washington in danger.' I've heard that Lee is in Hagerstown — I've heard he's in Pennsylvania — the rebs might have the town encircled by morning. I decided it's time for a vacation. If you don't care to go, that's your affair."
There had been rumors of military movement in Virginia, but nothing definite until now. Could she trust his assessment of the situation? She smelled whiskey on him; he had begun to drink heavily of late.
"How did you get permission to leave?"
"I told the secretary my sister was critically ill at home."
"Didn't he think the timing — well, a bit coincidental?"
"I'm sure he did. But the department's a madho
use. No one is accomplishing anything. And Stanton has good reason to keep me happy. I've carried his instructions to Baker. I know how dirty his hands are."
"Still, you could damage your career by —"
"Will you stop?" he shouted. "I'd rather be condemned as a live coward than perish as a patriot. You think I'm the only government official who's leaving? Hundreds have already gone. If you're coming with me, start packing. Otherwise keep still."
It struck her then that a remarkable, not altogether welcome change had taken place in her husband in recent months. Stanley's survival of the Cameron purge, his increasing eminence among the radicals, and his new-found wealth from Lashbrook's combined to create a confidence he had never possessed before. Occasionally he acted as if he were uncomfortable with it. A few weeks ago, after gulping four rum punches in an hour and a half, he had bent his head, exclaimed that he didn't deserve his success, and wept on her shoulder like a child.
But she mustn't be too harsh. She was the one who had created the new man. And she liked some aspects of that creation — the wealth, the power, the independence from his vile brother. If she meant to control him, she must change her own style, adopt subtler techniques.
He postured in the doorway, glaring. With feigned meekness and a downcast eye, she said, "I apologize, Stanley. You're wise to suggest we leave. I'll be ready in an hour."
That evening, after dark, a curtained van swung into Marble Alley. The driver reined the team in front of one of the neat residences lining the narrow thoroughfare between Pennsylvania and Missouri avenues. Despite the heat, all the windows of the house were draped, though they had been left open so that gay voices, male and female, and a harpist playing "Old Folks at Home" could be heard outside. The establishment, known as Mrs. Devore's Private Residence for Ladies, was doing a fine business despite the panic in the city.
Looking like a moving mound of lard in his white linen suit, Elkanah Bent climbed down from his seat beside the driver with much wheezing and grunting. Two other bureau men jumped out through the van's rear curtains. Bent signaled one into a passage leading to the back door of the house. The other followed him up the stone steps.
The detectives had debated the best way to take their quarry. They decided they couldn't snatch a noted journalist off the street in daylight. His boardinghouse had been considered, but Bent, who was in charge, finally came down in favor of the brothel. The man's presence there could be used to undermine his inevitable righteous protests.
He rang the bell. The shadow of a woman with high-piled hair fell on the frosted glass. "Good evening, gentlemen," said the elegant Mrs. Devore. "Come in, won't you?"
Smiling, Bent and his companion followed the middle-aged woman into a bright gaslit parlor packed with gowned whores and a jolly crowd of army and navy officers and civilians. One of the latter, a satanic sliver of a man, approached Bent. He had mustaches and a goatee in the style of the French emperor.
"Evening, Dayton."
"Evening, Brandt. Where?"
The man glanced at the ceiling. "Room 4. He's got two in bed tonight. Assorted colors."
Bent's heart was racing now, a combination of anxiety and a sensation close to arousal. Mrs. Devore walked over to speak to the harpist, and from there took notice of the bulge on Bent's right hip, something she had overlooked at the front door.
"You handle things down here, Brandt. Nobody leaves till I've got him." Brandt nodded. "Come on," Bent said to the other operative. They headed for the stars.
Alarm brightened Mrs. Devore's eyes. "Gentlemen, where are you —?"
"Keep quiet," Bent said, turning over his lapel to show his badge. "We're from the National Detective Bureau. We want one of your customers. Don't interfere." The satanic detective produced a pistol to insure compliance.
Lumbering upstairs, Bent threw back his coat and pulled his revolver, a mint-new LeMat .40-caliber, Belgian-made. Used mostly by the rebs, it was a potent gun.
In the upper hall, dim gaslights burned against royal purple wallpaper. Strong perfume could not quite mask the odor of a disinfectant. Bent's boots thumped the carpet as he passed closed doors; behind one, a woman groaned in rhythmic bursts. His groin quivered.
At Room 4, the detectives poised themselves on either side of the door. Bent twisted the knob with his left hand and plunged in. "Eamon Randolph?"
A middle-aged man with weak features lay naked in the canopied bed, a pretty black girl astride his loins, an older white woman behind his head, her breasts bobbing a few inches from his nose. "Who in hell are you?" the man exclaimed as the whores scrambled off.
Bent flipped his lapel again. "National Detective Bureau. I have an order for your detention signed by Colonel Lafayette Baker."
"Oh-oh," Randolph said, sitting up with a pugnacious expression. "Am I to be put away like Dennis Mahoney, then?" Mahoney, a Dubuque journalist who held opinions much like Randolph's, had been entertained in Old Capitol Prison for three months last year.
"Something like that," Bent said. The white whore groped for her wrapper. The young black girl, less frightened, watched from a spot near an open window. "The charge is disloyal practices."
"Of course it is," Randolph shot back in a high voice, which Bent instantly loathed. The reporter's receding chin and pop eyes created a false impression of weakness. Instead of cringing, he swung his legs off the bed almost jauntily.
"Ladies, please excuse me. I must dress and accompany these thugs. But you're free to go."
Shooting a look at the black whore, Bent brandished the LeMat. "Everyone stays. You're all getting in the van."
"Oh, God," the white woman said, covering her eyes. The black girl slipped into a gown of ivory-colored silk, then hunched forward, looking like a cornered cat.
"He's bluffing, girls," Randolph said. "Leave."
"Bad advice," Bent countered. "I call your attention to the nature of this weapon. It is what some call a grapeshot revolver. I have merely to move the hammer nose like this and the lower barrel will fire. It is loaded with shotgun pellets. I presume you appreciate what they would do to any face I chose for a target —?"
"You won't shoot," Randolph said, bouncing on his bare feet. "You government boys are all yellow dogs. As for that detention order you say you're carrying, toss it in the same fire in which you and Baker and Stanton burned your copies of the first amendment. Now stand aside and permit me to put on my —"
"Guard the door," Bent growled to his helper. He hauled the LeMat up and across to his left shoulder and slashed down. Unprepared, Randolph took the blow's full force on the right side of his face. His skin opened; blood ran and dripped into white hair on his chest.
The white woman sobbed melodramatically. There were footfalls, oaths, questions from the corridor. Bent jabbed the LeMat into Randolph's bare belly, then struck his head again, and his neck twice after that. Eyes bulging, Randolph pitched onto the bed, bloodying the sheets as he coughed and clutched his middle.
Grabbing Bent's sleeve, the other detective said, "Hold off, Dayton. We don't want to kill him."
Bent jabbed his left arm backward, throwing off the detective's hand. "Shut up. I'm in charge here. As for you, you seditious scum —" He brained Randolph with the butt of his revolver. "You're going to be fresh fish for Old Capitol Prison. We have a special room reserved for — Watch her!"
As Randolph writhed, the detective leaped for the black girl. But she already had one bare leg over the sill and quickly vanished. Bent heard a sharp cry as she landed.
Fists beat on the door. The other detective stuck his head out the window. "Harkness! One's getting away."
"Let her go. She's just nigger trash," Bent said. He gave Randolph's shoulder a hard dig with the gun. "Get dressed."
Five minutes later, he and his helper dragged the groggy journalist downstairs. They threw his blanket-bundled body into the back of the van. "You hit him too hard," the other detective said.
"I told you to shut up." Bent was breathing loudly; he
felt as if he had just had a woman. "I did the job. That's all Colonel Baker cares about."
Brandt climbed into the van with them. Detective Harkness sat beside the driver. "The coon got away, Dayton," he said. Bent grunted, calming down. On the floor, the prisoner made mewling noises. Bent began to fret; had he really hit him too hard?
Ridiculous to worry. Far worse took place during many of Baker's interrogations. He would be forgiven. He had done the job.
"Let's go or we'll have the metropolitan police on our necks," he yelled. The driver shook the reins; the van lurched forward.
Take the case of the Slaves on American plantations. I dare say they are worked hard. I dare say they don't altogether like it. I dare say theirs is an unpleasant experience on the whole; but, they people the landscape for me, they give it a poetry for me, and perhaps that is one of the pleasanter objects of their existence.
Wonderingly, Brett reread the remarks of Mr. Harold Skimpole of Bleak House. The author of the novel, which she was enjoying, had toured America, had he not? If he had traveled in the South, however, and if he had found the slaves merely a form of decoration, his understanding had failed him in that instance. Dickens was supposed to be a liberal thinker. Surely he understood what the Negroes really were — human beings converted to parts of an aging, failing machine. Perhaps the views of the elfin, carefree Skimpole weren't really those of the author. She hoped they weren't.
Tired of reading and a little put off by her reaction to Mr. Skimpole, she laid the novel on top of Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, which Scipio Brown had given her. The book, the most famous of the many in the escaped-slave genre, had been published a good eighteen years ago. But she had never seen a copy of it, or any work like it, in South Carolina. She was alternating Dickens with Douglass, and in the latter finding not only vestigial guilt but sympathy for the narrator and anger over his travail.