Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  The old man led the way through double doors into a room that was pure magnificence, though a magnificence that had been allowed to decay horribly. Beautifully carved bookcases reached from the hardwood floor to the decorated plaster ceiling twelve feet above, but the plaster was crumbling and the gold leaf on the bookcases was worn away, and the leather-bound books had spines hanging loose. Old tables were littered with books swollen with moisture and the whole sad room reeked of damp. “My name is death,” the old man said in his beguiling voice.

  “Death?” Starbuck could not hide his surprise.

  “Small D, E, apostrophe, A, T, H. French origin: de’Ath. My father came here with Lafayette, never went home. Nothing to go back to. He was a bastard, Starbuck, born to the wrong side of an aristocratic whore’s blanket. Whole family got what they deserved in the French terror. Heads chopped off by Doctor Guillotine’s splendid device. Ha!” De’Ath settled behind the largest table, which was a mess of books, papers, inkwells, and pens. “The excellent Doctor Guillotine’s machine made me the Marquis of something or other, except under the wisdom of our former country we are not allowed to use titles. Do you believe in that Jeffersonian nonsense that all men are created equal, Starbuck?”

  “I was brought up to believe it, sir.”

  “I am not interested in what nonsenses were thrust into your infant head, but rather what nonsenses are lodged there. Do you believe all men are created equal?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then you are a fool. It is obvious to the meanest intelligence that some men are created wiser than others, some stronger, and a fortunate few more ruthless than the rest, from which we might fairly deduce that our Creator intended us to live within the comfortable confines of a hierarchy. Make all men equal, Starbuck, and you elevate foolishness into wisdom and lose the ability to tell the one from the other. I told Jefferson that often enough, but he never listened to other men’s sense. Sit down. Tap your ash onto the floor. When I die it will all rot away.” He waved a thin hand to show that he was talking about the house and its glorious but decaying contents. “I don’t believe in inherited wealth. If a man can’t make his own money, then he should not have the disposition of another man’s fortune. You have been ill-treated.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “It was your misfortune to be considered a Confederate. If we capture a northerner and think him a spy we don’t beat him in case the northerners beat our spies. We don’t mind hanging them, but we won’t beat them. Foreigners we treat according to what we desire from their countries, but our own people we treat abominably. Major Alexander is a fool.”

  “Alexander?”

  “Of course, you did not meet Alexander. Who questioned you?”

  “A little bastard called Gillespie.”

  De’Ath grunted. “A pale limpid thing who learned his techniques from his father’s lunatics. He still believes you’re guilty.”

  “Of taking bribes?” Starbuck asked scornfully.

  “I should hope you did take bribes. How else can anything ever get achieved in a republic of equals? No, Gillespie thinks you’re a spy.”

  “He’s a fool.”

  “For once I agree with you. Did you enjoy the hanging? I did. They botched the job, didn’t they? That’s what happens when you entrust responsibility to cretins. They’re supposed to be our equals, but they can’t even hang a man properly! How difficult can it be? I daresay you or I would get it right first time, Starbuck, but you and I were endowed by our Creator with brains, and not with a skullful of stale semolina. Webster suffered from rheumatic fever. The worst punishment would have been to let him live in a damp place, but we were merciful and strung him up. He was reputed to have been the North’s best and brightest spy, but he can’t have been very bright if we managed to catch him and bodge him to death, eh? Now we have to catch another one and bodge him to death as well.” De’Ath climbed to his feet and walked to a grimy window through which he stared at the thick damp vegetation that screened the house. “President Davis has appointed me, ex officio, to be his witch-finder general or rather to be the man who rids our country of traitors. You think the task is possible?”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir.”

  “Of course it isn’t possible. You can’t draw a line on the map and say henceforth everyone on this side of the line will be loyal to a new country! We must have hundreds of people who secretly wish for the North to win. Hundreds of thousands if you count the blacks. Most of the white ones are women and preachers, that kind of harmless fool, but a few of them are dangerous. My job is to cull the truly dangerous and use the rest to send false messages to Washington. Read this.” De’Ath crossed the room and tossed a piece of paper into Starbuck’s lap.

  The paper was very thin and covered with block capitals that had been written very small, but with a huge ambition to betray. Even Starbuck, who knew nothing of the army’s dispositions, realized that if this message reached McClellan’s headquarters it would be of immense use. He said as much.

  “If McClellan believes it, yes,” de’Ath allowed, “but our job is to make sure he doesn’t get the chance. You see who it’s addressed to?”

  Starbuck turned the page over and read his brother’s name. For a few seconds he stared at the ascription in sheer disbelief, then he cursed softly as he understood just why he had spent the last few weeks in jail. “Gillespie believed I wrote this?”

  “He wants to believe it, but he’s a fool,” de’Ath said. “Your brother was a prisoner here in Richmond, was he not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see him when he was here?”

  “No,” Starbuck said, but he was thinking that Adam had seen James during his imprisonment, and he lifted the letter again and looked closely at the handwriting. It was disguised, but even so he felt a sinking fear that this was his friend’s writing.

  “What are you thinking?” De’Ath sensed something in Starbuck’s manner.

  “I was thinking, sir, that James is ill-suited for matters of deception and guile,” Starbuck lied smoothly. In truth he had been wondering if Adam was his friend anymore. Adam could surely have visited him in jail, could even have stopped Gillespie’s torture, yet as far as Starbuck knew Adam had not tried to do either of those things. Was Adam so horrified by Starbuck introducing Sally into a respectable home that he had cut off his friendship? Then Starbuck imagined Adam being pushed up the scaffold’s ladder and standing on the trapdoor while the hangman clumsily pinioned his ankles and tugged the hood over his head and, however strained the friendship, Starbuck knew he could not countenance that sight. He told himself that just because Adam had talked to James did not make Adam a traitor. A score of Confederate officers must have visited the prisoners in Castle Lightning.

  “Who does your brother know here in Richmond?” De’Ath’s voice was still suspicious.

  “I don’t know, sir. James was a prominent lawyer in Boston before the war, so I guess he must have met plenty of southern attorneys?” Starbuck made his voice sound innocent and speculative. He dared not reveal Adam’s name, else his friend would be taken to the damp cells at Castle Godwin and stuffed with Gillespie’s croton oil.

  De’Ath glowered silently at Starbuck for a few seconds, then lit a cigar, tossing the spill into the dirt that littered the grate. “Let me tell you what is about to happen, Starbuck. Let me tell you the war’s grim news. McClellan pours men and guns into his siege works at Yorktown. Within a day or two we shall retreat. We have no choice. That means the northern army will be free to advance on Richmond. Johnston believes he can stop them at the Chickahominy River. We shall see.” De’Ath sounded dubious. “By this time next week”—de’Ath blew a plume of smoke toward an oil painting so darkly varnished that Starbuck could hardly see the picture beneath—“Richmond may well be abandoned.”

  That made Starbuck sit up straight. “Abandoned!”

  “You think we’re winning this war? My God, man, do you believe those tales of victory at Shiloh?
We lost that battle. Thousands of men dead. New Orleans has surrendered, Fort Macon is taken, Savannah is threatened.” De’Ath growled the list of Confederate reverses, astonishing and dispiriting Starbuck. “The North has even closed its recruiting offices, Starbuck, and sent their recruiters back to their battalions. You know why? Because they know the war is won. The rebellion is over. All that remains for the North to do now is to take Richmond and mop up the pieces. That’s what they think and maybe they’re right. How long do you think the South will survive without Richmond’s factories?”

  Starbuck did not reply. There was nothing to say. He had not dreamed that the Confederacy was so precarious. In prison he had heard rumors of defeats at the southern and western extremities of the Confederate States, but he had never guessed that the North was now so close to victory that it had closed its recruiting offices and returned the recruiting officers to their regiments. All the North needed to do now was capture Richmond’s hellish tangle of blast furnaces and molten metal, of slave quarters and coal dumps, of shrieking whistles and crashing steam hammers, and the rebellion was history.

  “But maybe we can yet win.” De’Ath broke into Starbuck’s gloomy thoughts. “Though not if spies like that bastard are betraying us.” He gestured toward the letter on Starbuck’s lap. “We found that letter hidden in Webster’s hotel room. He never had a chance to send it north, but sooner or later another man will get the news across the lines.”

  “So what do you want of me?” Starbuck asked. Not a name, he prayed, anything but a name.

  “Why are you fighting?” de’Ath suddenly asked.

  Starbuck, taken aback by the question, just shrugged.

  “Do you believe in slavery as an institution?” de’Ath challenged him.

  It was a question Starbuck had never really considered because growing up in the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s house meant that he had never needed to consider it. Slavery was plain evil and that was the end of the matter, and that attitude was so deeply ingrained in Starbuck that even after a year in the Confederacy he felt uncomfortable in the company of slaves. They made him feel guilty. Yet he was also sure that the real argument was not about whether slavery was right or wrong; most people knew it was wrong, but just what the hell could be done about it, and that dilemma had baffled the best and most benign minds of America for years. The question was simply too deep for a glib answer and, once again, Starbuck merely shrugged.

  “Were you unhappy with the government of the United States?”

  Before the war Starbuck had never given the government of the United States a moment’s thought. “Not particularly,” he said.

  “Do you believe there are vital constitutional principles at stake?”

  “No.”

  “So why are you fighting?”

  Again Starbuck just shrugged. It was not that he did not have an answer, but rather that his answer seemed so very inadequate. He had begun fighting for the South as a gesture of his own independence from an overpowering father, but in time it had become something more than mere rebellion. The outcast had found a home, and that was enough for Starbuck. “I’ve fought well enough,” he answered belligerently, “not to need to say why I fight.”

  “And you still want to fight for the South?” de’Ath asked in a skeptical voice. “Even after what Gillespie did to you?”

  “I’ll fight for K Company, the Faulconer Legion.”

  “Maybe you won’t get a chance to. Maybe it’s all too late.” De’Ath drew on his cigar. A nub of ash fell from its tip to smear his coat. “Maybe this war is over, Starbuck, but on the chance that we might yet see these bastards off our land, then will you help?”

  Starbuck nodded cautiously.

  De’Ath blew smoke across the room. “Tomorrow’s newspapers will report that the charges against you are dropped and that you have been released from prison. You need that in print so that your brother believes your story.”

  “My brother?” Starbuck was confused.

  “Think about it, Starbuck.” De’Ath lowered himself into a porter’s chair that stood beside the hearth. The chair’s capacious hood shrouded his face in shadows. “There is a spy, a very capable spy, who has been in contact with your brother. He has been sending intelligence through Webster, but Webster’s illness cut the flow of information and so the North sent two fools called Lewis and Scully to restore it. Lewis and Scully are now captured, Webster is bodged to death, and the North must be wondering just how in the name of God they are to get in touch with their man again. Then, out of the blue, you turn up in their lines carrying the spy’s message. Or rather you turn up with a false message that I shall concoct. You will tell your brother that you are disenchanted with the South, that your experiences in jail have disabused whatever romantic notions you once had about supporting the rebellion. You will tell him that you allowed your disenchantment to be known in Richmond, which is why some person unknown passed you a letter in the hope that you would deliver it to your brother. You will then volunteer to return to Richmond to serve as a messenger for any further communications. You will convince your brother that your newfound passion for the North has persuaded you to take Webster’s place. It’s my belief that your brother will believe you and that he will tell you how you may get in touch with this spy, and you, if you are truthful about serving the Confederacy and not your native North, will then tell me. Thus we shall set a trap, Mr. Starbuck, and give ourselves the exquisite pleasure of watching a fool bodge another spy to death.”

  Starbuck thought of Adam hanging, his golden head canted at the rope’s stark angle, his tongue swollen between parted teeth, his urine dripping from his swinging boots. “Suppose my brother doesn’t trust me?” Starbuck asked.

  “Then you will still have delivered some false information that will help our cause and you can slip back here in your own good time. Conversely you can betray us, of course, by persuading your brother’s superiors that we are a beaten force reduced to cavilling tricks of intelligence in an effort to survive. I must confess, Mr. Starbuck, that the North so outnumbers us at present that we shall probably not survive, but I would like to think we shall play our hand to the very last card.” De’Ath paused, drawing on his cigar so that its tip glowed bright in the dark of the chair’s hood. “If we are to be beaten,” he went on softly, “then let us at least give the bastards a mauling that will give them nightmares for years to come.”

  “How do I cross the lines?”

  “There are men called pilots who escort travelers through the lines. I’ll provide you with one of the best, and all you have to do is deliver to your brother a letter I shall write. It will be in the same disguised handwriting as the letter Webster was carrying, only this letter will be a tissue of lies. We shall weave fantasies of imaginary regiments, of cavalry sprung like seeded dragons’ teeth from the soil, of guns innumerable. We shall convince McClellan that he faces a vengeful horde of serried thousands. We shall, in brief, attempt a deception. So will you be my deceiver, Mr. Starbuck?” De’Ath’s eyes glittered from under the hood of the porter’s chair as he waited for Starbuck’s answer.

  “When will you want me to go?” Starbuck asked.

  “Tonight.” De’Ath offered Starbuck a skull smile. “You may enjoy the amenities of this house till then.”

  “Tonight!” Starbuck had somehow imagined he would have a few days to prepare.

  “Tonight,” de’Ath insisted. “It will take two or three days to get you safely through the lines, so the quicker you leave the better.”

  “There’s something I want first,” Starbuck said.

  “Of me?” De’Ath sounded dangerous, like a man unaccustomed to making bargains. “Gillespie? Is that it? You want revenge on that pathetic creature?”

  “I’ll work my revenge on him in my own time,” Starbuck said. “No, I need to make some visits in the city.”

  “Who?” de’Ath demanded.

  Starbuck offered the ghost of a smile. “Women.”

  De
’Ath grimaced. “You don’t like Martha?” He gestured irritably toward the back of the house where, presumably, his slaves were quartered. Starbuck said nothing and de’Ath scowled. “And if I let you make your visits, will you carry my message to your brother?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then you may see your doxies tonight,” de’Ath said sourly, “and afterward ride eastward. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” Starbuck said, though in truth he intended to play a much more difficult game, a game he did not intend should lead to a dawn gibbet with a friend twitching at the rope’s end. “Agreed,” he lied again, then waited for the night.

  It had taken the northern troops four weeks to build the siege works needed to destroy the rebel earthworks at Yorktown. Major General McClellan was an engineer by training and a siege enthusiast by avocation, and he planned to use the siege as a demonstration of his country’s implacable efficiency. The eyes of the world were on his campaign; newspapermen from Europe and America were attached to his army while military observers from all the great powers rode with his headquarters. At Yorktown, where the United States had first made itself free, the world would witness the flowering of a continent’s military prowess. It would see a siege of ruthless ferocity, engineered by the world’s new Napoleon.

  First the roads from Fort Monroe to Yorktown had needed to be corduroyed so that the army’s vast train of wagons could reach the siege ground opposite the Yorktown defenses. Hundreds of axemen felled and trimmed thousands of trees. Teamsters then dragged the trunks out of the woods to where the logs were laid lengthwise on the treacherous mud roads. A second layer of logs was laid crosswise to form the roadway itself. In some places the new log roads still sank beneath the glutinous red mud and yet more layers of newly cut trunks needed to be added until at last the guns and ammunition could be dragged forward.