Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  Starbuck held her close again and stared across the shadows of Bloody Run to where the ironwork fires shimmered their reflections on the rain-pocked river. He had not understood till this moment just how alone in the world he was, an outcast, a wolf running alone. Sally was the same, rejected by polite society because in her desperation for escape and independence she had broken its rules, and for that she would never be forgiven, any more than Starbuck would be forgiven. Which meant he must make it alone, he would spit on these people for rejecting him, and he would do it by being the best soldier he could be. He had always known that his salvation in the South lay in the army, for there no man cared what he was as long as he proved a fighter.

  “You know what, Nate?” Sally said. “I was thinking in there that maybe I had a chance. Like a real chance? That I could be good.” She said the last word fervently. “But they don’t want me in their world, do they?”

  “You don’t need their approval to be a good person, Sally.”

  “I don’t care anymore. One day I’ll have the likes of them begging to stand on my carpet, just you watch and see.”

  Starbuck smiled in the dark. They were a whore and a failed soldier, declaring war on the world. He stooped and kissed Sally’s rain-wet cheek. “I must take you home,” he said.

  “To your room,” Sally said. “I don’t feel like working.”

  Beneath them a train pulled out of the city, the light of its firebox throwing a lurid glow along the damp grass beside the stream. The locomotive was hauling cars of ammunition bound for the peninsula where a thin line of playacting rebels was holding off a horde.

  Starbuck walked Sally home, then took her to his bed. He was a sinner and this night, after all, was not for repentance.

  Sally left Starbuck just after one o’clock in the morning, so he was alone in the narrow bed when the troops came. He was sleeping soundly, and the first he knew of the incursion was the splintering sound of the outside stable door being broken down. There was no light in the room. He fumbled for his revolver as feet pounded on the stairs and he had just succeeded in pulling the ivory-handled weapon out of its holster when the door crashed open and a wash of lantern light flared bright in the small dingy attic room. “Put the gun down, lad! Down!” The men were all in uniforms and carried rifles with fixed bayonets. Throughout Richmond a fixed bayonet was the mark of “plug-ugly,” a provost of General Winder’s martial police force, and Starbuck sensibly let the revolver fall back onto the floor. “Your name’s Starbuck?” the man who had ordered him to lay the gun down now asked.

  “Who are you?” Starbuck shielded his eyes. Three lanterns were in the room now and what seemed to be a whole platoon of soldiers.

  “Answer the question!” the voice roared. “Is your name Starbuck?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take him! Quick now!”

  “Let me dress, for God’s sake!”

  “Hurry, lads!”

  Two men seized Starbuck, dragged him naked from the bed, and thumped him hard and painfully against the flaking plaster wall.

  “Put a blanket round him, boys. We don’t want to frighten the horses. Manacle him first, Corporal!” Starbuck’s eyes had adjusted and he could see that the commanding officer was a broad-chested, brown-bearded captain.

  “What the hell…” Starbuck began to protest as the Corporal produced chains and wristbands, but the soldier holding Starbuck pushed him hard against the wall.

  “Silence!” the Captain roared. “Take everything, lads, everything! I’ll take that bottle as evidence, thank you, Perkins. All papers to be cased up properly; that’s your responsibility, Sergeant. And that bottle too, Perkins, to me.” The Captain put the whiskey bottles in his uniform’s capacious pockets, then led the way down the stairs. Starbuck, his wrists chained and his body loosely swathed in a rough gray blanket, stumbled after the Captain through the empty coach house and out into Sixth Street where a black carriage with four horses waited under the streetlight. It was still raining, and the horses’ breath steamed in the gaslight. A church clock struck four and a window at the back of the main house rattled up. “What’s going on?” a woman’s voice cried. Starbuck thought it might be Sally, but he could not tell.

  “Nothing, ma’am! Back to your bed!” the Captain called, then he pushed Starbuck up the carriage steps. The Captain and three soldiers followed. The rest of the party were still searching Starbuck’s lodgings.

  “Where are we going?” Starbuck asked as the carriage jolted away from the sidewalk.

  “You are now a prisoner of the Provost Guard,” the Captain responded very formally. “You will speak when you are spoken to and at no other time.”

  “You’re speaking to me now,” Starbuck said, “so where are we going?”

  It was dark in the carriage so Starbuck did not see the fist that suddenly smacked him hard across the eyes and banged his head against the carriage’s backboard. “Shut the hell up, you Yankee bastard,” a voice said, and Starbuck, his eyes involuntarily streaming with the effects of the blow, did as the man suggested.

  The journey was short, no more than half a mile, and then the iron-rimmed wheels screeched in protest as the carriage slewed around a tight corner before jolting to a stop. The door was thrown open and Starbuck saw the torchlit gates of Lumpkin’s Jail, known now as Castle Godwin. “Move!” the Corporal shouted, and Starbuck was pushed down the carriage steps and through a wicket entrance cut into Castle Godwin’s larger gates.

  “Number fourteen!” a turnkey bawled as the arresting party came through the gate. A uniformed guard led the way through a brick arch and down a stone-flagged corridor lit by two oil lamps until he reached a stout wooden door marked with a stenciled “14.” He opened the door with a heavy key made from gleaming steel. The Corporal unlocked the manacles from Starbuck’s wrists.

  “In there, cuffee,” the guard said, and Starbuck was pushed inside the cell. He saw a wooden bed, a metal pail, and a large puddle. The room stank of sewage. “Shit in the bucket, sleep on the bed, or the other way round, cuffee.” The guard laughed, then the door crashed shut with an echoing din and the cell was plunged into an absolute darkness. Starbuck, exhausted, lay on the wooden bed and shivered.

  They gave him a pair of coarse gray trousers, square leather brogans, and a shirt from which the bloodstains of its last owner had not been removed. Breakfast was a cup of water and the heel of a stale loaf. The city’s clocks were striking nine when two guards came and ordered him to sit on the bed and extend his feet toward them. They chained a pair of iron anklets on his feet. “They stay till you leave,” one of the guards said, “or till they hang you.” He stuck out his tongue and contorted his face into the grotesque leer of a hanged man.

  “On your feet!” the second guard said. “Move!”

  Starbuck was pushed into the corridor. The chains on his feet forced him into an awkward shuffle, but the guards were evidently used to the slow pace for they did not try to hurry him, indeed they encouraged him to linger as they passed through a courtyard that reminded Starbuck of the lurid tales he had heard of medieval torture chambers. Chains hung from the wall, while in the yard’s center was a wooden horse that consisted of a plank mounted sideways on a pair of trestles. The punishment was to sit a man on the plank’s edge and weight his feet so that the wood would drive into his groin. “This ain’t for your kind, cuffee,” one of the two guards said. “They’re trying something new on you. Keep walking.”

  Starbuck was taken to a room with brick walls, a flagged floor with a drain in its center, a table, and a chair. A barred window looked east toward the open sewer of Shockoe Creek, which flowed through the city. One of the small panes was open and the smell of the creek soured the room. The guards, whom Starbuck could observe properly now, stacked their muskets against the wall. They were both big men, as tall as Starbuck, with pale, coarse, clean-shaven faces and the vacant expressions of men who asked and received little of life. One spat a viscous stream of tobacco juice towa
rd the open drain. The discolored spittle landed dead center. “Good one, Abe,” the other guard said.

  The door opened and a thin, pale man entered. He had a leather bag hanging from one shoulder and a small fair beard that merely fringed his chin. His cheeks and upper lip still gleamed from his morning shave and his lieutenant’s uniform was immaculate, brushed spotless and pressed to knife-crease edges. “Good morning,” he said in a diffident voice.

  “Answer the officer, you Yankee scum,” the guard called Abe said.

  “Good morning,” Starbuck said.

  The Lieutenant brushed the seat of the chair, sat down, took a pair of spectacles from a pocket, and hooked them over his ears. He had a very thin and rather earnest face, like a new minister coming to an old congregation. “Starbuck, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Call the officer ‘sir,’ scum!”

  “Peace, Harding, peace.” The Lieutenant frowned in evident disapproval of Harding’s rudeness. He had placed the leather bag on the table and now he took a folder from it. He untied the folder’s green ribbons, opened its covers, and examined the papers inside. “Nathaniel Joseph Starbuck, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Presently residing at Franklin Street, the old Burrell house, yes?”

  “I don’t know who lived there.”

  “Josiah Burrell, a tobacco factor. The family fell on hard times, like so many these days. Now, let me see.” The Lieutenant leaned back, making his chair creak ominously, then took off his glasses and tiredly rubbed his eyes. “I’m going to ask you some questions, Starbuck, and your role, as you might surmise, is to answer those questions. Normally, of course, these things are subject to law, but there’s a war on and I fear the necessity of eliciting the truth cannot wait upon the rigmarole of lawyers. Do you understand?”

  “Not really. I’d like to know what the hell I’m doing here.”

  The guards behind Starbuck growled a warning for his truculence, but the Lieutenant held up a placatory hand. “You shall find out, Starbuck, I do promise you.” He fixed the glasses back on his nose. “I forgot to introduce myself. How remiss. My name is Lieutenant Gillespie, Lieutenant Walton Gillespie.” He spoke the name as though he expected Starbuck to recognize it, but Starbuck merely shrugged. Gillespie took a pencil from his uniform pocket. “Shall we begin? You were born where?” Gillespie asked.

  “Boston,” Starbuck said.

  “Where exactly, please?”

  “Milk Street.”

  “Your parents’ home, yes?”

  “Grandparents. My mother’s people.”

  Gillespie made a note. “And your parents live where now?”

  “Walnut Street.”

  “Do they now? How very pleasant for them! I was in Boston two years ago and had the privilege of hearing your father expound the gospel.” Gillespie smiled in evident pleasure at the memory. “On we go,” he said, and he took Starbuck through a series of questions about his schooling and Yale Theological College and how he had come to be in the South when the war started and what service he had seen in the Faulconer Legion.

  “So far, so good,” Gillespie said when he had finished hearing about Ball’s Bluff. He turned a page and frowned at whatever was written there. “When did you first meet John Scully?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Price Lewis?”

  Starbuck shook his head.

  “Timothy Webster?”

  Starbuck simply shrugged to show his ignorance.

  “I see,” Gillespie said in a tone which suggested that Starbuck’s denial was particularly puzzling. He made a pencil mark, still frowning, then took off his spectacles and massaged the bridge of his nose momentarily. “Your brother’s name is what?”

  “I’ve got three brothers. James, Frederick, and Sam.”

  “Their ages?”

  Starbuck had to think. “Twenty-six or -seven, seventeen, and thirteen.”

  “The oldest. His name is?”

  “James.”

  “James.” Gillespie repeated the name as though he had never heard it before. In the courtyard a man suddenly screamed and Starbuck heard the distinct sound of a whip slashing through the air, then the crack of the lash slapping home. “Did I shut the door, Harding?” Gillespie asked.

  “Tight shut, sir.”

  “So noisy, so noisy. Tell me, Starbuck, when you last saw James?”

  Starbuck shook his head. “It has to be long before the war.”

  “Before the war,” Gillespie said as he wrote it down. “And the last time you received a letter from him?”

  “Again, before the war.”

  “Before the war,” Gillespie repeated again slowly, then took a small penknife from his pocket. He opened the blade and sharpened the point of his pencil, fussily brushing the shards of wood and lead into a neat pile at the table’s edge. “What does the Confederate Army Bible Supply Society mean to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I see.” Gillespie laid his pencil down and leaned back in the rickety chair. “And just what information did you send to your brother about the disposition of our forces?”

  “None!” Starbuck protested, at last beginning to understand what this whole farrago was about.

  Gillespie once again took off his spectacles and rubbed them against his sleeve. “I mentioned to you earlier, Mr. Starbuck, that we are forced, regrettably forced, to extreme measures in our attempts to elicit the truth. Usually, as I said, we would have recourse to a process of law, but extreme times demand extreme measures. Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “Then let me ask you again. Do you know John Scully and Lewis Price?”

  “No.”

  “Have you been in communication with your brother?”

  “No.”

  “Have you received letters care of the Confederate Army Bible Supply Society?”

  “No.”

  “And did you deliver a letter care of Mr. Timothy Webster at the Monumental Hotel?”

  “No,” Starbuck protested.

  Gillespie shook his head sadly. When Major Alexander had arrested Timothy Webster and Hattie Lawton he had also discovered a letter written in tight block capitals that described the entire disposition of Richmond’s defenders. The letter was addressed to Major James Starbuck, the same name that appeared on the communication taken from John Scully. The letter would have been a disaster to the South’s cause for it had even offered a description of the playacting with which General Magruder had been attempting to deceive McClellan’s patrols. All that had prevented Webster from delivering the letter was a terrible rheumatic fever that had kept the man in bed for weeks.

  Starbuck, questioned again about the letter, shook his head. “I’ve never heard of a Timothy Webster.”

  Gillespie grimaced. “And you insist upon those answers?”

  “They’re the truth!”

  “Alas,” Gillespie said, and he pulled open the leather bag and took out a funnel of bright brass and a bottle made of blue-colored glass. He unstoppered the bottle, letting a thin, sour smell fill the room. “My father, Starbuck, like yours, is a man of some eminence. He is the medical superintendent of the Chesterfield Lunacy Asylum. You know it?”

  “No.” Starbuck gazed at the bottle apprehensively.

  “There are two schools of opinion governing the treatment of lunacy,” Gillespie said. “One theory claims that madness can be coddled out of patients by fresh air, good food, and kindness, but the second opinion, to which my father adheres, insists that lunacy can be shocked out of the sufferer’s system. In essence, Starbuck”—Gillespie looked up at the prisoner and his eyes seemed oddly bright—“we must punish the lunatic for his aberrant behavior and so drive him back into the company of civilized men. This”—he held up the blue-glass bottle—“has been declared the finest coercive substance known to science. Tell me about Timothy Webster.”

  “There’s nothing to tell!”

  Gillespie paused, then n
odded at the two guards. Starbuck turned to resist the nearest man, but he was too slow. He was hit from behind and thrown down to the floor, and before he could twist around he was pinned onto the stone. The chains around his ankle clanked as his hands were pinioned behind his back. He swore at the two guards, but they were big men accustomed to subduing prisoners and they ignored his oaths, instead turning him onto his back. One of them took the brass funnel and rammed it into Starbuck’s mouth. When he resisted by gritting his teeth the man threatened to hammer the funnel down and so break his teeth, and Starbuck, knowing when he was beaten, released his jaw.

  Gillespie knelt beside him with the blue bottle. “This is croton oil,” he told Starbuck, “you know of it?”

  Starbuck could not speak, so he shook his head.

  “Croton oil is drawn from the seeds of the Croton tiglium plant. It’s a purgative, Mr. Starbuck, and a very violent one. My father employs it whenever a patient exhibits offensive behavior. No madman can be violent or perverse, you see, when he is having a score of bowel movements every ten minutes.” Gillespie smiled. “What do you know about Timothy Webster?”

  Starbuck shook his head, then tried to twist his way out of the guards’ grip, but the two men were far too strong for him. One of them pushed Starbuck’s head hard back onto the flagstones while Gillespie poised the bottle over the funnel. “In times past the treatment of lunacy depended upon simple physical punishments,” Gillespie explained, “but my father’s contribution to medicine was the discovery that an application of this cathartic is far more efficient than any amount of whipping. A small taste first, I think.” He poured a thin stream of the oil into the funnel. It tasted fatty and rank in Starbuck’s mouth. He choked on it, but one of the guards clamped a hand around his jaw and Starbuck had no choice but to swallow the oil. It left a burning sensation in his mouth.

  Gillespie eased the bottle away and motioned for the guards to free Starbuck. Starbuck gasped for breath. His mouth burned and his gullet seemed raw. He sensed the thick oil hitting his stomach as he struggled to his knees.