Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  The rain turned the roads leading inland from Fort Monroe into strips of slick yellow dirt. The pale strips looked firm enough, but as soon as a horse put a hoof to the surface the sandy crust broke to expose a quagmire of glutinous red mud beneath.

  A troop of northern cavalry abandoned the road to ride southward under a low, gray sky and a spitting rain. It was April, and the trees were in bud and the meadows a lovely green, yet the wind was cold and the troopers rode with their collars turned up and their hats pulled low. Their commander, a captain, peered through the rain in case the enemy cavalry should suddenly appear like gray-clad devils in the murk, but to his relief the land seemed empty.

  A half hour after they had left the road the patrol emerged from the shelter of some skinny pine trees to see the red scars of freshly turned earth marking the line of rebel fortifications that stretched from Yorktown to Mulberry Island. The earthworks were not continuous, but consisted rather of earthen forts with heavy guns that enfiladed the intervening stretches of flooded water meadow. The Captain led his patrol southward, stopping every few hundred yards to examine the enemy works with a small telescope. The Colonel had been particular in his demand that all his cavalry patrols should attempt to determine whether the enemy cannons were real or made of wood, and the Captain sourly wondered how in the name of God he was supposed to attempt that piece of research. “You want to ride up to the rampart and give one of those guns a rap with your knuckles, Sergeant?” the Captain asked the man riding beside him.

  The Sergeant chuckled, then disappeared beneath his greatcoat to light a cigar.

  “The guns look real to me, Captain!” one of the men called.

  “So did the guns at Manassas,” the Captain said, then jumped with astonishment as one of the distant cannons suddenly fired. The smoke from the gun jetted thirty yards out from the embrasure to shroud the tongue of fire in the smoke’s heart. The missile, evidently a solid ball or a shaped bolt of iron, crashed through the newly green trees just behind the patrol.

  “Bastards,” the Sergeant said, and rammed his spurs back. None of the cavalry had been hurt, but their sudden acceleration provoked a jeer from the distant rebel gunners.

  A half mile farther on the Captain came upon a small knoll that protruded a few feet above the flat, water-laced landscape. He led his men to the knoll’s summit where they dismounted and where the Captain discovered a tree that had a convenient crutch in which he could rest his telescope’s barrel. From here he had a view between two of the rebel redoubts, a view across a stretch of marshland where hyacinths grew bright and deep into the rebel rear where he could just make out a road running among some shadowed pine trees. There were troops marching on the road, or at least struggling along the muddy road’s verges. He counted them, company by company, and realized he was seeing a whole rebel battalion marching south.

  “Listen, sir.” The Sergeant had come to stand beside the Captain. “Can you hear it, sir?” The Captain turned down his collar and, by listening hard, caught the sound of distant trumpets carried on the cold wind. The sound was thin and far away. One trumpet sounded, another answered the call, and now that the Captain had turned his ears to those elfin noises it seemed as though the whole of this damp land was filled with the calls. “There are enough of the bastards,” the Sergeant said with a shudder, as though the ghostly noise presaged a mysterious enemy.

  “We’ve only seen the one battalion,” the Captain said, but then another column of gray-clad troops appeared on the far road. He watched through the telescope and counted another eight companies. “Two battalions,” he said, and no sooner had he spoken than a third regiment came into view.

  The cavalry stayed on the knoll for two hours, and in that time the Captain saw eight rebel regiments marching south. One hopeful rumor had claimed that the rebels only had twenty battalions to guard all the Yorktown defenses, yet here, five miles south of the famous town, the Captain had watched regiment after regiment march by. The enemy was plainly in far greater strength than the optimists had hoped.

  The cavalry remounted their horses in midafternoon. The Captain was the last to leave the knoll. He turned at the last moment and saw yet another rebel regiment appearing in the far trees. He did not stay to count heads, but instead carried his news eastward through the waterlogged meadows of rich clover and past sullen farmhouses where unsmiling people watched their enemy pass.

  The northern cavalry patrols all returned to tell identical stories of massive troop movements behind the rebel lines, of hidden units signaling with trumpets, and of real guns packed in newly dug earthworks. McClellan listened to the reports and shuddered. “You were right,” he told Pinkerton. “We’re facing at least seventy thousand men, maybe a hundred thousand!” The General had taken over the commandant’s comfortable quarters in Fort Monroe from where he had a view of the massed shipping that had brought his army south from Alexandria. That army was ready for action now and McClellan had hoped to use it in a lightning-fast lunge toward Richmond, a maneuver that would have cracked through the eggshell defenses anchored on Yorktown, but today’s cavalry reconnaissances meant there could be no sudden lunge after all. The capture of Yorktown and Richmond would have to be done the old-fashioned way, the hard way, with siege guns and patience and counter-trenching. His one hundred and twenty-one thousand men would have to wait while the besieging redoubts were constructed and the massive siege guns were dragged from Fort Monroe along the nightmare roads. The delay was a pity, but Pinkerton had cautioned him that the rebel defenses were manned in far greater strength than anyone supposed, and now the General thanked the head of his Secret Service Bureau for that timely and accurate intelligence.

  Meanwhile, behind the rebel earthworks, the single battalion of Georgia troops that had marched nine times along the same stretch of muddy road, and had doubled back nine times through the trees before trudging the road again, shivered in the dusk and grumbled that their time was being wasted. They had joined the army to beat the living hell out of Yankees, not to march around and around in damn circles listening to scattered buglers serenade the empty trees. Now, in the lonely woods, they lit fires and wondered if the rain would ever stop. They felt very lonely, and no wonder, for there were no other infantry battalions within three miles. Indeed, there were only thirteen thousand men stretched across the whole damp peninsula, and those thirteen thousand troops were supposed to stop the largest army ever assembled in America. It was no wonder that the Georgia men shivered and grumbled about having played the damn fool all day in the rain.

  In the twilight the trees were filled with the screeching call of birds. The sound was subtly different from the call of the same bird in Georgia, but the men who had marched around in circles all day were country boys and knew well enough what bird made such a racket in the evening trees.

  General Magruder knew too, and he at least smiled at the sound because he had spent these days trying to fool the Yankees into thinking that they faced a host when in truth the defensive line was pitiably manned. Magruder had marched and countermarched his men all day, putting on a show of force, and now in the evening rain he prayed that the birdsong was for McClellan and not for him.

  Because in the dusk the mockingbirds sang.

  It seemed it would never cease raining. Water poured down the gutters of Richmond to where the river frothed white with the effluents pumped from the ironworks and the tobacco factories and the tan-yards and the slaughteryards. The few people in the streets hurried beneath somber black umbrellas. Even at midday coal-gas lamps were lit in the chamber where the Confederate Congress debated a measure that would encourage the development of a synthetic saltpeter for the manufacture of gunpowder. The voices in the chamber had to fight against the sound of rain outside. A handful of the Congressmen listened, some slept, while others sipped whiskey that had been sold by pharmacies as medicine and was thus free of the liquor ban imposed on the city. One or two of the Congressmen worried that the Yankee army closing on Yorktown wou
ld make all these discussions futile, but no one dared articulate such a thought. There had been too much defeatism lately, and too many good reasons for it; too many coastal forts captured by the U.S. Navy and too many hints that the Confederacy was encompassed by an implacable enemy.

  Sally Truslow, arm in arm with Nate Starbuck, did not care about the Yankees seventy miles away, or about the rain. Sally was elated at the thought of taking tea in a respectable house, to which end she had dressed in a dark, high-necked dress with long sleeves and a skirt barely plumped by a mere two petticoats. She had forsworn all cosmetics other than a brushing of powder and a hint of black about her eyes.

  Sally and Starbuck ran down Franklin Street, half protected by the umbrella Starbuck held, then sheltered in the doorway of a bakery on the corner of Second Street until a horsecar came into sight. They crowded aboard and paid the fare to Shockoe Cemetery. “Maybe they won’t go to the hospital in this weather?” Sally said. She pushed close against Starbuck in the damp, crowded bus and peered through a filthy glass window at the rain.

  “Bad weather doesn’t stop good works,” Starbuck said dourly. He was not looking forward to the afternoon or evening, for not even Sally’s ebullient company could reconcile him to this encounter with a world he thought he had left far behind in Boston. Yet he could not deny Sally her happiness, and so he had decided to endure whatever discomfort the day presented even though he still did not understand why Sally had been so pleased when Adam’s invitation arrived.

  Sally herself hardly knew, though she did understand that the Gordons were a family and she dimly perceived that in all her life she had never been a member of a family, at least not of an ordinary, unexciting, simple, plain family. She had been the daughter of a horse thief and his woman, two fugitives who farmed a hard patch in the high mountains, and now she was a whore and shrewd enough to know she could climb as high as any ambition desired if she just understood the true value of the services she offered, but she also knew she could never have the satisfactions of belonging to plain, ordinary, straightforward folk. Sally, unlike Starbuck, had a sentimental idea that the commonplace was the reward of success. She had grown up an outcast and yearned for respectability, while Starbuck had grown up respectable and reveled in being a rebel.

  Julia and Mrs. Gordon greeted them in the narrow hallway where there was scarcely room to take off the wet cloak and coat and pile them on a mirrored hallstand around which Sally and Starbuck edged to enter the parlor. The spring day was cold enough to justify a fire in the small cast-iron hearth, though the pile of glowing coals was so small that the heat barely reached beyond the plain iron fender. The floor was covered in strips of painted cotton-canvas, poor man’s carpet, but everything was scrupulously clean, smelling of lye and polish, and suggesting to Starbuck just why Adam would be attracted to a daughter of this house with its suggestion of honest poverty and simple values. Adam himself stood by a piano, a second young man was standing in the window, while the Reverend John Gordon, the missioner, warmed himself before his tiny heap of smoking coals. “Miss Royall!” he greeted Sally, though with a mouth obstructed by cake. “Excuse me, my dear.” He wiped one hand on the skirt of his frock coat, placed the cup and saucer on the mantel, and at last held out a welcoming hand. “It is a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Sir,” Sally said, and dropped a flustered curtsey instead of shaking the offered hand. In her own house she knew how to greet generals and senators, she could tease the city’s most eminent doctors and scorn the witticisms of its lawyers, but here, faced with respectability, she lost all her assurance.

  “It is a pleasure to meet you,” the Reverend John Gordon repeated with what seemed to be a genuine affability. “I believe you know Major Faulconer? So allow me to introduce Mr. Caleb Samworth. This is Miss Victoria Royall.” Sally smiled, curtseyed again, then moved aside to make room for Starbuck, Mrs. Gordon, and Julia. More introductions were made, and then a pale and timid maid brought in another tray of teacups and Mrs. Gordon busied herself with the pot and strainer. Everyone agreed the weather was terrible, quite the worst springtime in Richmond’s memory, and no one mentioned the northern army that was somewhere out on the city’s eastern flank.

  The Reverend John Gordon was a small, thin man with a very pink face and a scalp rimmed with wispy white hair. He had a weak chin that another man might have disguised with a full beard, but the missioner was clean-shaven, suggesting that his wife did not like beards. Indeed, the missioner looked so small and defenseless, while Mrs. Gordon appeared so very formidable, that Starbuck concluded that it was she and not he who ruled this deliberately cramped roost. Mrs. Gordon handed out the tea and inquired after the health of Miss Royall’s aunt. Sally replied that her aunt was neither better nor worse, and there, much to Sally’s relief, the matter of her aunt’s sickness rested.

  Mrs. Gordon explained Caleb Samworth’s presence by revealing that he was the possessor of a wagon in which they would all travel to Chimborazo Hospital. Samworth smiled when his name was mentioned, then stared at Sally like a man dying of thirst might gaze on a distant but unreachable stream of cool water. The wagon, he explained haltingly, belonged to his father. “You may have heard of us? Samworth and Son, Embalmers and Undertakers?”

  “Alas, no,” Starbuck said.

  Adam and the wilting Samworth invited Sally to sit with them in the window. Adam moved a great heap of empty cloth bags that the ladies of the house, like almost all the ladies in Richmond, were stitching out of whatever scraps of old material they could spare. The bags were being taken to Granny Lee’s new earthworks to be filled with sand, though how much good such ramparts would prove against the northern horde that pressed forward from Fort Monroe no one could tell. “You sit here, Mr. Starbuck,” the Reverend John Gordon said, drawing up a chair beside his own, then he launched into a long lamentation for the problems secession imposed on the American Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to the Poor. “Our headquarters, you understand, are in Boston.”

  “Mr. Starbuck knows well enough where the Society’s headquarters are, Gordon,” Mrs. Gordon interjected from her throne behind the tea tray. “He is a Bostonian. Indeed his father is a trustee of the Society, is that not so, Mr. Starbuck?”

  “Indeed he is,” Starbuck said.

  “One of the trustees,” Mrs. Gordon added pointedly, “who has depressed the missioners’ emoluments these many years.”

  “Mother,” the Reverend John Gordon chided his wife timidly.

  “No, Gordon!” Mrs. Gordon would not be deflected. “While God gives me tongue I shall speak, indeed I shall. One of the blessings of the South’s secession has been to free us of our northern trustees! God clearly intended it to be so.”

  “We have heard nothing from headquarters in nine months!” the Reverend John Gordon explained in a worried voice to Starbuck. “Fortunately the mission’s expenses are being met locally, praise God, but it is worrying, Mr. Starbuck, most worrying. There are accounts missing, reports half finished, and visitations undone. It is irregular!”

  “It is a providence, Gordon,” Mrs. Gordon corrected her husband.

  “Let us pray so, Mother, let us pray so.” The Reverend John Gordon sighed and took a bite from his slice of dry and mealy fruitcake. “Your father, then, is the Reverend Elial Starbuck?”

  “Yes, sir, he is.” Starbuck sipped his tea and managed to stop himself from grimacing at the bitter taste.

  “A great man of God,” Gordon said rather glumly. “Strong in the Lord.”

  “But blind to the needs of the Society’s missioners!” Mrs. Gordon observed tartly.

  “I find it strange, forgive me, that you should be wearing southern uniform, Mr. Starbuck?” the Reverend John Gordon inquired diffidently.

  “I’m sure Mr. Starbuck is doing the Lord’s work, Gordon.” Mrs. Gordon, who had found Starbuck’s loyalty equally inexplicable when she had met him outside the Scripture shop, now chose to defend her guest against her husband’s quieter cu
riosity.

  “Indeed, indeed,” the missioner said hurriedly. “Even so, it is tragic.”

  “What is tragic, sir?” Starbuck asked.

  The Reverend John Gordon waved his hands in a helpless gesture. “Families divided, a nation divided. So sad.”

  “It would not be sad if the North would simply withdraw its troops and allow us to live in peace,” Mrs. Gordon said. “Don’t you agree, Miss Royall?”

  Sally smiled and nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “They won’t withdraw,” Adam said gloomily.

  “Then we’ll just have to beat the hell out of them,” Sally said unthinkingly.

  “I was wondering”—Julia played a tinny note on the pianoforte to cut across the sudden surprise that had filled the room after Sally’s words—“that perhaps we should not use such mournful hymns in the ward tonight, Father?”

  “To be sure, my dear, to be sure,” her father said. He explained to Sally and Starbuck that he began his ward services with a selection of hymns and a prayer, and afterward one of the party would give a reading from God’s word. “Perhaps Miss Royall would like to read the Scriptures?” he suggested.

  “Oh no, sir, no.” Sally, aware that she had blundered once already, blushed as she declined the offer. She was learning to read and, in the last year, had progressed so far that she could actually open a book for pleasure, but she had no faith in her ability to read aloud.

  “You are saved, Miss Royall?” Mrs. Gordon asked suspiciously as she peered hard at her guest.

  “Saved, ma’am?”

  “You have been washed in the blood of the Lamb? You have accepted Jesus into your heart? Your aunt, surely, has introduced you to your Savior?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sally said timidly, not having a clue as to what Mrs. Gordon meant.

  “I should be happy to read for you,” Starbuck interjected to the Reverend John Gordon.