Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Europeans,” Pinkerton explained to James, “can travel the Confederacy more easily than Yankees. Mr. Lewis and Mr. Scully will pose as blockade runners seeking business.”

  “And it will all be dandy as long as no one recognizes us,” Scully said cheerfully.

  “Would that be possible?” James asked worriedly.

  “A wee chance, but hardly one to fret over,” Scully said. “Price and I spent some time ferreting out southern sympathizers in Washington and throwing the rascals back across the border, but we’re about as certain as a man could ever be that none of those bastards are in Richmond. Isn’t that a fact, Price?”

  Price bowed his head in grave acknowledgment.

  “It seems you put yourselves in great danger,” James said in fervent tribute to the two men.

  “Bulldog pays us to endanger ourselves, don’t you now?” Scully said cheerfully. “And I hear the women of Richmond are as beautiful as they are desperate for real Yankee money. And Price and I do love obliging the ladies, ain’t that God’s honest truth, Price?”

  “If you say so, John, if you say so,” Lewis said airily, still gazing loftily at the activity at the quay.

  “I can’t wait to get my hands on one of those southern girls,” Scully said lasciviously. “All airs and graces, eh? All frills and furbelows. Too good for the likes of us until we chink a few good northern coins, and then we’ll watch the skirt hoops roll away, eh, Price?”

  “If you say so, John, if you say so,” Price Lewis said, then put a hand to his mouth as though disguising a yawn.

  Pinkerton moved to end the small talk, explaining to James that Lewis and Scully were traveling south to discover what had happened to Timothy Webster. “He’s not been a well man,” Pinkerton said, “and there’s always the risk that he could be in his sickbed or worse, in which case Mr. Lewis and Mr. Scully will need to get the information direct from your friend. Which means, Jimmy, that they need a letter from you claiming they can be trusted.”

  “Which we can be, Major,” John Scully said happily. “Except with the ladies, isn’t that a fact, Price?”

  “If you say so, John, if you say so.”

  James sat at the table and wrote the requisite letter. It would be used, he was assured, only if Timothy Webster had disappeared, otherwise the letter would stay securely hidden inside John Scully’s clothing. James, writing at Pinkerton’s dictation, assured Adam that the need for information about the defenses on the peninsula behind Fort Monroe was as urgent as ever, and that he should trust whatever instructions accompanied this covering letter, which came with prayerful good wishes from his brother in Christ Jesus, James Starbuck. He then addressed the envelope to the Honorary Secretary of the Confederate Army Bible Supply Society, and Pinkerton sealed the envelope with a common gummed seal before handing it with a flourish to Scully. “There’s a message board in the vestibule of St. Paul’s Church, and that’s where you put it.”

  “St. Paul’s now, would that be a prominent church?” Scully asked.

  “In the very center of the city,” Pinkerton assured him.

  Scully kissed the envelope, then put it in a pocket. “We’ll have your news within the week, Bulldog!”

  “You’ll cross tonight?”

  “And why not?” The Irishman grinned. “The weather looks fine, and there’s a good wee wind for us.”

  James had learned enough to know that Pinkerton’s preferred method of infiltrating the Confederacy was for his men to travel across the wide mouth of the Potomac by night, leaving from one of the deserted lonely creeks on the Maryland shore and running silent under a dark sail to the Virginia coast. There, somewhere in King George County, a northern sympathizer provided the agents with horses and papers. “Allow me to wish you well,” James said very formally.

  “Just pray the women are glad to see us, Major!” Scully said happily.

  “And send us news as soon as you can!” Pinkerton added sternly. “We need numbers, John, numbers! How many thousands of troops are stationed in the peninsula? How many guns? How many troops in Richmond stand ready to support Magruder?”

  “Worry not, Major, you’ll have your numbers,” John Scully answered cheerfully as the two agents went back to their waiting buggy. “Two days to Richmond!” John Scully cried happily. “Maybe we’ll wait for you there, Bulldog! Celebrate victory in Jeff Davis’s wine cellar, eh?” He laughed. Price Lewis raised a hand in solemn farewell, then clicked his tongue at the horse. The buggy rattled back across the rail tracks.

  “Brave men,” Pinkerton said with a hint of a sniff. “Very brave men, Jimmy.”

  “Yes, indeed,” James said.

  On the quays the steam derricks lifted boxes and bales of artillery ammunition: cannonballs and bolts, canister rounds and case shot, shells, and grape. Another great ship was turning in the river, its spadelike paddles slapping the water white as it fought against the Potomac’s swift current. More men arrived on the quay, pouring out of a newly stopped train to form in ranks and wait their turn on the river. Their regimental band began to play while the Stars and Stripes, hanging from a dozen jackstaffs, cracked like whips in the fresh spring wind. The army of the North, the greatest army in all American history, was on the move.

  To where just ten thousand rebels guarded a peninsula.

  Belvedere Delaney arranged for Nate Starbuck to work in the Confederate Passport Bureau. Starbuck’s first reaction had been disgust. “I’m a soldier,” he told the lawyer, “not a bureaucrat.”

  “You’re a pauper,” Delaney had responded icily, “and people are willing to pay very large bribes for a passport.”

  The passports were required not just to travel beyond Richmond, but even to be on the city’s streets after dark. Civilians and soldiers alike needed to make applications for passports at the filthy, crowded office which stood on the corner of Ninth and Broad Street. Starbuck, arriving with Delaney’s patronage, was given a room to himself on the third floor, but his presence was as superfluous as it was tedious. A Sergeant Crow did all the real work, leaving Starbuck to stare out of the window or else read a novel by Anthony Trollope that some former occupant of the dusty office had used to prop up the broken leg of the table. He also wrote letters to Adam Faulconer at the army headquarters at Culpeper Court House, begging his friend to use his influence to get him restored to Company K of the Faulconer Legion. Starbuck knew that Washington Faulconer had never been able to resist his son’s entreaties, and for a few days he let his hopes stay high, but no reply came from Adam, and Starbuck, after two more importunate appeals, abandoned his attempts.

  It was a full three weeks before Starbuck realized that no one expected him to be in the office, and that as long as he paid his respects to Sergeant Crow once or twice a week, he was free to enjoy whatever pleasures Richmond offered. Those pleasures were given a dangerous air by the continuing arrival of northern troops at Fort Monroe. A small panic had swept through the city at the first news of those landings, but when the Yankees made no attempt to break out of their lines, the received opinion became that the northerners were merely pausing on their way to reinforce the Federal garrison at Roanoke. Belvedere Delaney, with whom Starbuck lunched often, scorned that idea. “Why land them at Fort Monroe?” Delaney asked at one such luncheon. “No, my dear Starbuck, they’ll be marching on Richmond soon. One battle and the whole fuss will be over. We shall all be prisoners!” He sounded rather pleased at the prospect. “At least the food can’t be worse. I’m learning that the worst thing about war is its effect on luxuries. Half the things that make life worth living are unobtainable, and the other half are ruinously expensive. Isn’t this beef awful?”

  “It tastes better than salt pork.”

  “I keep forgetting you have served in the field. Maybe I should hear the sound of a bullet once before the war ends? It will make my war memoirs so much more convincing, don’t you think?” Delaney smiled, showing off his teeth. He was a vain man and proud of his teeth, which were all his own,
unchipped and clean, almost unnatural in their whiteness. Starbuck had met Delaney the year before, when he had first been stranded in Richmond, and the two had struck up a cautious friendship. Delaney was amused that the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s prodigal son was in Richmond, though his liking for Starbuck ran deeper than that of mere curiosity, while Starbuck’s affection for Delaney arose partly because the lawyer was so ready to be helpful, and partly because Starbuck needed the friendship of men like Delaney and Bird who would not judge his actions by the standards of his father’s unforgiving faith. Such men, Starbuck thought, had traveled a mental road he wanted to follow himself, though sometimes, in Delaney’s company, he wondered if he was clever enough to free himself of guilt. Starbuck knew that Delaney, for all his carefully cultivated exterior of Pickwickian affability, was both clever and ruthless; qualities the lawyer was presently using to amass a fortune from the sale of what Delaney liked to describe as the twin necessities of warriors: women and weapons. Now the lawyer took off his glasses and polished their lenses on his napkin. “People say bullets whistle, is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “In what key?”

  “I’ve never noticed.”

  “Maybe different bullets sound different notes? A skilled marksman might be able to play a tune,” Delaney suggested, then happily sang the opening line of a song that had been popular in Richmond all winter long: “‘What are you waiting for, Tardy George?’ though he’s not waiting any longer, is he? Do you think the war’s climacteric shall be reached on the peninsula?”

  “If it is,” Starbuck said, “I want to be there.”

  “You are foolishly bloodthirsty, Nate.” Delaney grimaced, then held aloft a gruesome morsel of gristle for Starbuck’s inspection. “Is this food, do you think? Or something that died in the kitchen? No matter, I shall have something at home instead.” He pushed his plate to one side. They were lunching in the Spotswood House Hotel, and when his own meal was done Starbuck produced a sheaf of blank passports that he pushed across the table. “Well done,” Delaney said, pocketing the passes. “I owe you four hundred dollars.”

  “How much?” Starbuck was shocked.

  “Passports are valuable, my dear Starbuck!” the small sly lawyer said with delight. “Northern spies pay a fortune for these scraps of paper.” Delaney laughed to show that he was teasing. “And it is only right and proper that you should share in my ill-gotten gains. Believe me, I sell these for a rare fortune. I assume you would like payment in northern money?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You do, believe me you do. A northern dollar is worth at least three of our southern ones.” Delaney, careless of the stares of other diners, counted out a stack of the newfangled dollar bills that were replacing much of the North’s coinage. Southern money was supposed to be of equal value, but the whole system of value and price seemed to have gone mad. Butter was fifty cents a pound in Richmond, firewood eight dollars a cord, coffee unobtainable at almost any price, while even cotton, the supposed staple of southern prosperity, had doubled in price. A room which a year before would not have rented for fifty cents a week was now fetching ten dollars a week.

  Not that Starbuck cared. He had a room in the stable block of the huge house on Franklin Street where Sally Truslow and her two companions now lived with their servants, cooks, and dressmaker. The house was one of the finest residences in the city and had belonged to a tobacco merchant whose fortunes had been hard-hit by the northern blockade. The man had been forced to sell, and Belvedere Delaney had then transformed the house into Richmond’s` most exclusive and expensive place of assignation. The furniture, pictures, and ornaments were, if not of the very highest quality, at least fine enough to pass a candlelit inspection, while the food, liquor, and entertainment were as lavish and elegant as wartime privations allowed. The ladies held receptions in the evening, and by day were at home to callers, though only those visitors who had made arrangements beforehand were allowed beyond the sculpted newel post at the foot of the grand staircase. Money changed hands, but so discreetly that the rector of St. James’s had visited the house three times before discovering the nature of its business, after which he never visited again, though the same knowledge did not deter three of his fellow clergymen. Delaney’s rule was that no officer below the rank of major was to be admitted and no civilian whose clothes betrayed a vulgar taste. The clientele, in consequence, was wealthy and on the whole civilized, though the necessary admission of members of the Confederate Congress depressed the house’s sophistication far below Delaney’s extravagant hopes.

  Starbuck had a small, damp stable room that lay at the end of a dank and abandoned garden. In lieu of rent he provided Delaney with passes, while to the women his presence was a deterrent to the crime which preyed on Richmond. Burglaries were so common as to go almost unremarked while street robberies were flagrant and frequent. Which made Starbuck an even more welcome guest in the house, for he was always happy to escort one of the women to Ducquesne’s, the Parisian hairdresser on Main Street, or else to one of the dress shops that somehow discovered enough material to go on manufacturing luxury goods.

  He was idling outside Ducquesne’s one morning, waiting for Sally and reading one of the Examiner’s usual demands for the Confederacy to abandon its supine stance and end the war by invading the north. It was a sunny morning, the first in almost three weeks, and the taste of spring warmth had given the city a jaunty air. The two veterans of Bull Run who guarded Ducquesne’s salon were teasing Starbuck about the state of his uniform. “With a girl like that, Captain, you shouldn’t be wearing rags,” one of the two said.

  “Who needs clothes with a girl like that?” Starbuck asked.

  The men laughed. One had lost a leg, the other an arm; now they stood guard over a hairdresser’s shop with a pair of shotguns. “Say anything in that paper about the Young Napoleon?” the one-armed man asked.

  “Not a word, Jimmy.”

  “So he ain’t at Fort Monroe?”

  “If he is then the Examiner hasn’t heard about it,” Starbuck said.

  Jimmy spat a long stream of tobacco juice into the gutter. “If he ain’t there, they ain’t comin’ here, and we’ll know they’re comin’ here when he gets there.” He sounded gloomy. The Virginia newspapers might mock McClellan’s pretensions, but there was nevertheless a feeling that the North had found its military genius and the South had no one who would prove his equal. At the war’s beginning the name of Robert Lee had filled Virginia with optimism, but Lee’s bright reputation had been dulled in the early fighting in western Virginia, and now he spent his time digging endless trenches around Richmond, earning himself the nickname “King of Spades.” He still had his supporters, chief among them Sally Truslow, who reckoned Lee to be the greatest general since Alexander, but that opinion was based solely on the fact that the courtly Lee had once raised his hat to Sally in the street.

  Starbuck gave the newspaper to Jimmy, then glanced at a clock in a shop window to gauge how much longer Sally would fuss with her hair. He reckoned she would be at least another quarter hour and so he tipped his hat back, lit a cigar, and leaned against one of the gilded pillars that framed Ducquesne’s entrance. It was then that the voice hailed him.

  “Nate!” The call came from across the street, and for a second Starbuck could not see who had shouted because a wagon team rolled past with a load of cut timber, and after the wagon a smart buggy with painted wheels and fringed cushions rattled by, then Starbuck saw it was Adam who was now hurrying between the traffic with an outstretched hand. “Nate! I’m sorry, I should have written. How are you?”

  Starbuck had been feeling bitter about his friend, but there was such a wealth of affection and remorse in Adam’s voice that the bitterness vanished immediately. “I’m well,” he said lamely. “And you?”

  “Busy, horribly busy. I spend half my time here and half at the army headquarters. I have to liaise with the government and it isn’t easy. Johnston doesn’t
like the President overmuch, and Davis ain’t the biggest admirer of the General, so I tend to get bitten by both sides equally.”

  “Whereas I just got bitten by your father,” Starbuck said, some of his bitterness returning.

  Adam frowned. “I’m sorry, Nate, truly.” He paused, plainly embarrassed, then shook his head. “I can’t help, Nate. I wish I could, but father’s set against you and he won’t listen to me.”

  “Have you asked him?” Starbuck asked.

  Adam paused, then his innate honesty conquered his temptation to prevaricate. “No, I haven’t. I haven’t seen him for a month, and I know it won’t do any good writing to him. Maybe he’ll soften if I ask him directly? To his face? Can you wait till then?”

  Starbuck shrugged. “I’ll wait,” he said, knowing how little choice he had in the matter. If Adam could not change his father’s mind, no one could. “You look well,” he said to Adam, changing the subject. The last time Starbuck had seen his friend was at Ball’s Bluff, where Adam had been hag-ridden with the horrors of battle, but now he had regained all his good looks and enthusiasm. His uniform was clean, his saber scabbard shone in the sun, and his spurred boots gleamed.

  “I am well,” Adam said very emphatically. “I’m with Julia.”

  “The fiancee?” Starbuck asked teasingly.

  “Unofficial fiancee,” Adam offered the correction. “I wish it was official.” He smiled shyly. “But we all agree it would be better to wait until hostilities are concluded. Wartime is no time for marriage.” He gestured across the road. “You’ll come and meet her? She’s with her mother in Sewell’s.”

  “Sewell’s?” Starbuck thought he knew every dress shop and milliner in Richmond, but he had not heard of Sewell’s.

  “The Scripture shop, Nate!” Adam chided his friend, then explained that Julia’s mother, Mrs. Gordon, had opened a Bible teaching class for the free blacks who had come to find work in Richmond’s wartime economy. “They’re looking for simple testaments,” Adam explained, “maybe a child’s version of Luke’s Gospel? Which reminds me, I have a Bible for you.”