Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  The infantry band was playing “Dixie.” Children with sticks instead of muskets swaggered beside the troops who all wore daffodils in their hats. Even from the third floor Alexander could see how ragged and ill-uniformed the soldiers were, but they marched steadily enough and their morale seemed high. They tossed daffodils to the prettier girls. A mulatto girl standing among the spectators on the far pavement had a whole armful of the flowers and laughed as the soldiers piled on yet more blooms. The infantry was being deliberately routed through the city so that Richmonders would know an army had come to their defense, though the soldiers themselves needed defending from the city, or rather from its diseased whores, and so the marching column was escorted by lines of provosts with fixed bayonets who made sure that no man slipped away into the crowds.

  “We can’t just release Starbuck,” Gillespie complained. He had gone to stand at the second window.

  “We can accuse him of bribery, I suppose,” Alexander conceded, “but we can’t haul him in front of a court-martial looking like he’s on his deathbed. Clean him up, let him recover, then we’ll decide whether to put him on trial for taking bribes.”

  “So how do we find our real traitor?” Gillespie asked.

  Alexander thought of an old man with long hair and gave an involuntary shudder. “I guess we’ll have to sup with the devil, Gillespie.” Alexander turned from the window and stared morosely at a map of Virginia that hung on his office wall. Once past Yorktown, he thought, there was nothing to stop the Yankees. They would burst against the defenses of Richmond like a spring tide pushed by an onshore gale. They would surround the city, then strangle it, and what of the Confederacy then? In the west, despite the southern newspapers’ attempts to paint a victory, Beauregard had retreated after taking massive casualties at a place called Shiloh. The North was claiming victory there and Alexander feared their claims would prove true. How soon before the North claimed victory here in Virginia as well? “Have you ever thought,” he asked Gillespie, “that maybe this is all a waste of effort?”

  “How can it be?” Gillespie was puzzled by the question. “We have the moral right. God won’t desert us.”

  “I was forgetting God,” Alexander said, then put on his hat and went to find the devil.

  TWO SOLDIERS FETCHED STARBUCK FROM HIS CELL.

  They woke him in the darkness, making him cry aloud in sudden fear as they pulled the blanket off his cot. He was still not properly awake as they hurried him into the corridor. Expecting another interrogation, Starbuck instinctively turned to his right, but one of the soldiers pushed him in the other direction. The prison was sleeping, its corridors smoky from the small flames of the tallow candles that burned every few paces. Starbuck shivered despite the palpable warmth in the spring air. It had been days since Gillespie had last administered croton oil to him, but he was still painfully thin and cemetery-pale. He was no longer retching and he had even managed to eat some prison gruel without his stomach immediately voiding the coarse food, but he felt kitten-weak and hog-filthy, though the ending of his interrogation had at least given him a sliver of hope.

  Starbuck was taken to the prison guardroom where a slave was ordered to knock the anklets off his feet. On the guardroom table was a perpetual calendar made of pasteboard cards in a wooden frame. The cards recorded that it was Monday, April 29, 1862. “How are you feeling, boy?” the sergeant behind the table asked. He was cradling a tin mug in his big hands. “How’s your stomach?”

  “Empty, raw,” Starbuck said.

  “Best thing for it today.” The sergeant laughed and sipped at the cup before making a wry face. “Parched goober-pea coffee. Tastes like Yankee shit.”

  The soldiers ordered Starbuck into the prison yard. The absence of the leg chains caused him to lift his feet unnaturally high, making his gait grotesque and clumsy. A black-painted prison coach waited in the yard with its single rear door open and a swaybacked, blinkered horse in the shafts. Starbuck was pushed into the vehicle. “Where am I going?” he asked.

  There was no answer. Instead the coach door was slammed on him. There was no handle inside the door and there were no windows in the coach. It was just a felon’s van; a wooden box on wheels with a slatted bench on which he sat and groaned. He heard the guards climbing onto the back step of the vehicle as the driver cracked his whip.

  The coach lurched forward. Starbuck heard the prison gates creak open, then the clumsy vehicle jolted over the gutter and into the street. He shivered in the lonely darkness, wondering what new indignities were about to be heaped on him.

  It was a half hour before the coach stopped and the door was pulled open. “Out, cuffee,” one of the guards said, and Starbuck stepped down into the crepuscular dawn and saw he had been fetched to Camp Lee, Richmond’s old Central Fair Grounds that lay west of the city. The camp was now the biggest troop depot in the capital. “That way,” the guard said and pointed toward the rear of the coach.

  Starbuck turned and for a second or two he could not move. At first it was incomprehension that kept him motionless, then, as he realized just what he looked at it in this dawn, a wave of terror froze him.

  For there, in the ghost light, was a scaffold.

  The gibbet was newly built of raw, clean wood. It was a monstrous thing, gaunt in the gray remnants of night, with a platform twelve feet above the ground. Two posts on the platform supported a square beam ten feet higher still. A rope hung from the beam, its noosed end presumably coiled on the trapdoor. A ladder led from the grass to the platform on which there waited a bearded man in black shirt, black trousers, and stained white jacket. He leaned on one of the posts, smoking a pipe.

  A small crowd of uniformed men waited at the foot of the scaffold. They smoked cigars and made small talk, but when Starbuck appeared they fell silent as one by one they turned to watch him. Some of them grimaced, and no wonder, for Starbuck was dressed in a filthy shirt, dirty ragged trousers held up with a frayed piece of knotted string, and clumsy leather brogans that flapped on his feet like butter boxes. His ankles had been worn to bloody scabs by the irons, his hair was matted and filthy, and his new beard was a mess. He stank.

  “You’re Starbuck?” a mustachioed major barked at him.

  “Yes.”

  “Stand and wait there,” the Major said, pointing to a space apart from the small crowd. Starbuck obeyed, then turned in alarm as the coach that had fetched him from the city suddenly lurched away. Was he to leave here in the pine coffin that waited beside the ladder? The Major saw the terror on Starbuck’s face and frowned. “It ain’t for you, you fool.” Relief coursed through Starbuck. It made him feel shaky, almost wanting to cry.

  A second carriage arrived as the prison coach pulled away. The newly arrived carriage was an elegant, old-fashioned vehicle with dark varnished panels, gilded axle bosses, and four matching horses. The coach’s Negro driver reined in on the far side of the scaffold, pulled on the brake, then climbed down to open the carriage’s door. An old man appeared. He was tall and thin, with a great mane of white hair that framed a darkly tanned and deeply lined face. He was not in uniform, but was instead dressed in an elegant black suit. The dawn’s light reflected from the man’s watch chain and its pendant seals, and from the silver head of his cane. It also glittered from his eyes, which seemed to be staring straight at Starbuck in a fixed gaze that was oddly disturbing. Starbuck stared back, fighting the discomfort of the old man’s inspection, and just when it seemed that he was locked into a childish competition to discover who would look away first, a commotion behind Starbuck announced the arrival of the scaffold’s victim.

  Camp Lee’s commandant led the small procession, and after him came the Episcopal chaplain who read aloud from the Twenty-third Psalm. The prisoner followed, helped along by two soldiers.

  The prisoner was a big man, fine-looking, with a strong mustache, a clean-shaven chin, and a head of thick dark hair. He was dressed in shirt, trousers, and shoes. His hands were tied in front of him, his legs bore no
chains or ropes, yet even so he seemed to be having trouble walking. He limped, and each step was plainly an agony. The crowd fell silent again.

  The embarrassment and pain of watching a crippled man walk to his death was made worse when the prisoner tried to climb the ladder. His pinioned hands would have made the climb difficult at the best of times, but the pain in his legs made the ascent almost impossible. The two soldiers helped him as best they could, and the white-jacketed executioner tapped the sparks from his pipe, then leaned down to help the prisoner up the last few rungs. The prisoner had made small noises of agony with each step. Now he limped forward to the trapdoor, and Starbuck saw the executioner duck down to pinion the victim’s feet.

  The chaplain and the commandant had followed the prisoner to the platform. The sun’s first rays were touching the scaffold’s crossbeam with a lavish golden light as the commandant unfolded the warrant of execution. “‘In accordance with the sentence passed on you by the Court-Martial lawfully assembled here in Richmond on the sixteenth day of April…’” In the camp’s commandant began to read.

  “There is no law by which you may do this,” the prisoner interrupted the commandant. “I am an American citizen, a patriot, a servant of this country’s lawful government!” The prisoner’s protest was given in a husky voice that still managed to generate a startling power.

  “‘You, Timothy Webster, were sentenced to death for the crime of espionage, carried on unlawfully within the borders of the sovereign Confederate States of America…’”

  “I am a citizen of the United States!” Webster roared his defiance, “which alone has authority over this place!”

  “‘Which sentence shall now be carried out according to the provisions of law.’” The commandant finished in a hurry, then stepped away from the trapdoor. “Have you anything to say?”

  “God bless the United States of America!” Timothy Webster said in his harsh, deep voice. Some of the watching officers had taken off their hats, others half looked away. The hangman had to stand on tiptoe to put the black hood over Webster’s head and the noose around his neck. The chaplain’s voice was a murmur as he began to recite the Psalm again. The sunlight crept down the upright posts toward the condemned man’s hood.

  “God save the United States of America!” Webster cried aloud, his voice muffled by the hood, and then the hangman kicked back the bolt that held the trapdoor in its place and there was a gasp from the spectators as the pinewood hatch swung hard away and the prisoner hurtled downward.

  It all happened so quickly that Starbuck did not recall the details until later, and even then he was not certain that his mind had not embellished the events. The rope seemed to tighten, the prisoner even checked momentarily, but then the noose seemed to ride up over his hooded face and suddenly, with hands and feet tied like a hog, Webster fell to the ground to leave the hanging rope swinging in the dawn with the black hood caught in its empty noose. Webster screamed with pain as he landed on his fragile, rheumatic ankles. Starbuck shuddered at the sound of the man’s pain, while the old white-haired man with the silver-topped cane just stared fixedly at Starbuck.

  One of the watching officers turned away, a hand to his mouth. Another braced himself by leaning on a tree. Two or three pulled on flasks. One man crossed himself. The hangman just gaped down through the open hatch.

  “Again! Do it again!” the commandant called. “Hurry. Pick him up! Leave him, Doctor.” A man, evidently a doctor, had knelt beside Webster, but now backed away uncertainly as two soldiers ran to pick up the fallen man. Webster was sobbing, not from fear, but because of the awful pain in his joints.

  “Hurry!” the commandant shouted again. One of the watching officers vomited.

  “You will kill me twice!” Webster protested in a voice made tremulous with agony.

  “Hurry!” The commandant seemed close to panic.

  The soldiers pulled Webster to the ladder. They had to untie his feet and place them one by one on the rungs. Webster inched up, still sobbing with the pain, as the hangman retrieved the noose. One of the spectators reached up with a drawn sword to push the trapdoor shut once more.

  The hood had fallen off the noose and the hangman was complaining he could not do his job without the black bag. “It doesn’t matter!” the commandant snapped. “Get on with it, for Christ’s sake!”

  The chaplain was shaking so hard that he could not hold the Bible still. The hangman retied the prisoner’s feet, placed the noose back about his neck, then grunted as he tightened the knot beneath the victim’s left ear. The chaplain began to say the Lord’s Prayer, gabbling the words as though he feared he might forget them if he said the prayer too slowly.

  “God bless the United States!” Webster called aloud, though in a voice that was a sob of hurt. He was bent over in pain, but then, in the full wash of the morning sun, he made a supreme effort to beat the agony and to show his killers that he was stronger than they. Inch by inch he forced his crippled, hurt body until he at last stood upright. “God bless the United—”

  “Do it!” the commandant screamed.

  The hangman hit the bolt and once again the trapdoor banged open and once again the prisoner shot through, only this time the rope snapped taut and the body danced for a second as the neck stretched and snapped. One of the watching officers gasped in shock as the body bounced on the rope’s end. Webster had been killed instantly this time, his neck snapped clean so that his canted face seemed to gaze up at the swinging trapdoor that creaked in the early light. Dust sifted down from the platform. The dead man’s tongue showed between his lips and then a liquid began to drip from his right shoe.

  “Get him down!” the commandant shouted.

  The officers turned away, all but a doctor who hurried under the platform to certify the spy’s death. Starbuck, wondering why he had been fetched through the city to witness the barbarous execution, turned to stare at the rising sun. He had not seen an open sky for so long. The air felt fresh and clean. A cockerel called in the camp, its cry counterpointing the sound of hammer and nails as soldiers coffined the spy’s broken body.

  A bony hand fell hard on Starbuck’s shoulder. “Come with me, Starbuck, come with me.” It was the old white-haired man who had spoken and who now led Starbuck toward his carriage. “Now that our appetite is whetted,” the old man said happily, “let us go for breakfast.”

  A few yards from the gibbet a grave had been dug. The coach rattled by the empty hole, then jolted south across the parade ground and headed toward the city. The old man, hands clasped on his silver cane, smiled all the way. His day, at least, had started well.

  Hyde House, where the old man lived, occupied a triangular lot where Brook Avenue cut diagonally across Richmond’s grid of streets. The lot was hemmed in by a tall brick wall that was capped with a course of white pitted stone above which a profusion of trees and blossoms showed. Deep inside the unkempt trees, and approached through a metal gate topped with spikes, was a three-story house, grand once, railed around with verandahs on every floor and fronted with an ornate carriage porch. It was not raining, but in the early morning air everything about the house seemed damp. Even the fine blossomed creepers that were draped from the verandah rails drooped disconsolately, while the verandahs themselves had peeling paint and broken balustrades. The wooden front steps up which the old man led Starbuck seemed green and rotted. A slave snatched the varnished front door open an instant before the old man would have walked straight into its heavy panels.

  “This is Captain Starbuck,” the old man snarled at the pretty young woman who had opened the door. “Show him to his room. His bath is drawn?”

  “Yes, massa.”

  The old man pulled out his watch. “Breakfast in forty-five minutes. Martha will show you where. Go!”

  “Sir?” Martha said to Starbuck and beckoned him toward the stairs.

  Starbuck had not uttered a single word during the journey, but now, surrounded by the sudden and fading luxuries of this old mansio
n, he felt his self-assurance drain away. “Sir?” he said to the old man’s back.

  “Breakfast in forty-four minutes!” the old man said angrily, then disappeared through a door.

  “Sir?” Martha said again, and Starbuck let the girl lead him upstairs to a wide and lavish bedroom. The room had been elegant once, but now its fine wallpaper had been spotted and stained by damp, and its lavish carpet was moth-eaten and faded. The bed was draped with threadbare tapestries on which, laid out as carefully as though they were a suit of the finest evening clothes, Starbuck’s own Confederate uniform lay. The coat had been laundered and darned, the belt was polished, and his boots, which stood fitted with trees at the bed’s foot, had been mended and waxed. Even Oliver Wendell Holmes’s overcoat was there. The slave threw open a door that led to a small dressing room where a hip bath stood steaming in front of a coal fire. “You want me to stay, massa?” Martha asked timidly.

  “No. No.” Starbuck could scarcely believe what was happening to him. He walked into the dressing room and put a tentative hand into the water. It was so hot he could scarcely bear its touch. A pile of white towels waited on a cane chair, while a straight razor, soap, and a shaving brush stood beside a white china bowl on a washstand.

  “If you leave your old clothes outside the door…” Martha said, but did not finish the sentence.

  “You’ll burn them?” Starbuck suggested.

  “I’ll come back for you in forty minutes, massa,” she said, and dropped a curtsey before backing through the door and closing it behind her.

  One hour later Starbuck was shaved, scrubbed, dressed, and filled with eggs, ham, and good white bread. Even the coffee had been real, while the cigar that he smoked after the meal was fragrant and mild. The richness of the food had threatened to provoke another spasm of sickness, but he had taken the meal slowly at first, then ravenously when his stomach did not rebel. The old man had scarcely spoken throughout breakfast, except to mock and deride paragraphs in the morning newspapers. He was, to Starbuck’s curious gaze, a creature as extraordinary as he seemed malevolent. His house slaves were plainly frightened of him. Two girls served the meal, both as light-skinned and attractive as Martha. Starbuck wondered whether he was just in a state to find all women desirable, but the old man saw him look at one of the two slaves and confirmed his judgment. “I can’t abide ugly things round the house, Starbuck. If a man has to own women, he might as well possess the prettiest, and I can afford them. I sell them when they’re twenty-five. Keep a woman too long and she fancies she knows your life better than you do yourself. Buy them young, keep them docile, sell them sharp. There lies happiness. Come into the library.”