Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  “The Yankees must be pretty cock-a-hoop,” Sally said with a grimace.

  And with good reason, Delaney thought, for the northern army was just a day’s march from the city now. “Which client told you about the recruiting offices?” he asked Sally.

  “Wasn’t no customer,” Sally said. “It was Nate.”

  “Starbuck?” Delaney asked in surprise. “He was here?”

  “Last night. They’d just let him out of jail.”

  “I saw he’d been released,” Delaney said. The news had been in both the Examiner and the Sentinel. “Is he in his old room? I should say hello.”

  “Silly bastard’s being a damn fool.” Sally lit herself a cigar. “God knows where he is.”

  “Meaning what?” Delaney asked. Sally had been trying to disguise the anxiety in her voice, but Delaney was far too acute to miss her tone and he knew just how fond of Starbuck she was.

  “Because he’s risking his damn life,” Sally said, “that’s what. He’s taking a letter across the lines and he wanted me to go with him.”

  Delaney scented a rich morsel here, but he dared not be too eager in his questioning lest he rouse Sally’s suspicions. “He wanted you to go to the Yankees? How odd.”

  “He wanted me to marry him,” Sally corrected her employer.

  Delaney smiled at her. “What sophisticated taste our friend Starbuck has,” he said gallantly. “And yet you turned him down?” He teased her very gently with the question.

  Sally grimaced. “He reckoned we could set up a dry goods store in Maine.”

  Delaney laughed. “My dear Sally, you would be wasted! And you’d hate Maine. They live in icehouses, suck on salt fish for their subsistence, and sing Psalms for entertainment.” Delaney gave a rueful shake of his head. “Poor Nate. I shall miss him.”

  “He says he’s coming back,” Sally said. “He didn’t want to come back, not if I’d run off with him, but since I ain’t moving he says he’ll deliver his letter, then get himself back here.”

  Delaney pretended to hide a yawn. “What sort of letter?” he asked innocently.

  “He never said. Just a letter from the government here.” Sally paused, but then her worry for Starbuck drove her to explain further and she never once suspected that her explanations might endanger Starbuck. Sally trusted Delaney wholly. The lawyer was a friend, a uniformed Confederate officer, and a man of gentle kindness. Other whores put up with beatings and scorn, yet Belvedere Delaney always behaved with consideration and courtesy to the women he employed; indeed he seemed as concerned for the happiness and health of his employees as for the profits they made him, and so Sally felt free to pour her worries into his sympathetic ear. “Nate reckons there’s a spy,” she said, “a real dangerous one who’s telling the Yankees everything our army plans on doing, and if he can deliver the letter safe then that’ll finish off the spy. He didn’t tell me more than that, but it’s enough. He’s an idiot. He don’t want to be mixed up in that nonsense, Delaney. He’ll end up hanging like that man they strung up at Camp Lee.” Webster’s end had made a rich story for the newspapers, which had depicted the hanging as the deserved fate of a spy.

  “We certainly don’t want poor Nate to hang,” Delaney said gravely, and he saw that his right hand was trembling slightly, just enough to make the smoke from his cigar shiver as it rose toward the molded ceiling. His first reaction was that Starbuck was on a mission to entrap him, then he dismissed that fear as self-indulgent nonsense. Richmond was full of spies, ranging from the open and eccentric like the rich and crazy Betty Van Lew, who stumped about the city muttering treason and carrying gifts to northern prisoners, to the subtle and secretive like Delaney himself. Yet Delaney was privy to remarkably few military secrets, and Sally’s words suggested that the spy Starbuck was hunting was a military man and one who had access to all the Confederacy’s secrets. “So what do you want me to do?” Delaney asked Sally.

  Sally shrugged. “I reckon Nate’ll only be happy if he can get back into the Legion. He likes being there. Can’t you fix it? If he gets back from seeing the Yankees, of course.”

  “And if there’s still a Confederacy,” Delaney said dubiously.

  “Of course there’ll be a Confederacy. We ain’t whipped yet. So can’t you talk to General Faulconer?”

  “Me!” Delaney shuddered. “Faulconer doesn’t like me, my dear, and he positively hates Nate. I can tell you now that Faulconer won’t let Nate back into his precious Legion.”

  “Then can you get Nate into another regiment? He likes being a soldier.”

  More fool him, Delaney thought, but kept that opinion to himself. “I can try,” he said, then he glanced at an ormolu clock that graced the mantel. “I think I should be going, my dear.”

  “You ain’t staying for breakfast?” Sally sounded surprised.

  Delaney stood. “Even lawyers have to do some work from time to time, my dear,” he said. Delaney was a legal adviser to the War Department, an appointment that entailed less than an hour’s work a month, but which paid Delaney an annual salary of $1,560, though admittedly the dollars were in southern scrip. He pulled his jacket straight. “I’ll do my best for Nate, I do promise.”

  Sally smiled. “You’re a good man.”

  “Is that not an astonishing truth?” Delaney kissed Sally’s hand with his customary politeness, put his cash into a leather case, and hurried out into the street. It had begun to rain again; the drops brought on an unseasonably chill wind.

  Delaney hurried one block north to his apartment on Grace Street, where he unlocked his rolltop desk. There were times when the lawyer suspected that the hundreds of northern informants in Richmond were all competing to provide the best intelligence, and that the winner of that secret competition would reap the biggest rewards when the North took over the city. His pen scratched swifly across the notepaper and he reflected that this small nugget of gossip should garner a top prize when that victory came. He wrote down all that Sally had told him. He wrote swiftly, warning the North that Nathaniel Starbuck was a traitor, and then he sealed his letter inside an envelope that he addressed to Lieutenant Colonel Thorne in the Inspector General’s Department in Washington, D.C. He sealed that envelope within another which he addressed to the Reverend Ashley M. Winslow in Canal Street, Richmond, then he handed the packet and three northern dollars to his house slave. “This is urgent, George. It is for our mutual friends.”

  George knew and shared his master’s loyalty. He carried the letter to Canal Street and gave it to a man named Ashley who was owned by a supervisor on the Central Virginia Railroad. George gave Ashley two dollars. By nightfall a train had carried the letter and one of the two-dollar coins to Catlett’s Station in northern Virginia, where a free black who owned a small cobbler’s shop took charge of the envelope.

  While in Richmond, meanwhile, the exodus went on. The President’s wife took her children away from the city. The price of haulage tripled. When the wind was in the east there was sometimes an odd muffled percussion in the air, barely detectable, but there all the same. It was the sound of guns. Belvedere Delaney heard the distant gunfire and laid a northern flag in his parlor ready to hang from the window as a greeting to the victorious Yankees. He wondered if his letter would reach Washington in time, or if the war would end before Starbuck’s treachery was uncovered. In some ways he hoped the young northerner would live, for Starbuck was an attractive rascal, but a rascal all the same, which probably meant he was doomed to the noose anyway. It would be a death Delaney would regret, but in this season of death one more corpse could not make that much difference. It would be a pity, but scarcely more. The lawyer listened to the sound of faraway guns and prayed it signified rebellion’s defeat.

  The first Yankees to take notice of Starbuck were men of the 5th New Hampshire Infantry, who mistook him for a rebel straggler and marched him at bayonet point to their adjutant, a gaunt, wild-bearded captain with pebble-lensed spectacles who sat astride a piebald horse and peered through t
he rain at the bedraggled prisoner. “Have you searched the miserable bastard?” the Captain asked.

  “He’s got nothing,” one of Starbuck’s captors answered. “Poor as an honest lawyer.”

  “Take him to brigade,” the Captain ordered. “Or if that’s too much trouble just shoot the bastard when no one’s looking. That’s what deserters deserve, a bullet.” He gave Starbuck a crooked grin as if daring him to object to the verdict.

  “I’m not a deserter,” Starbuck said.

  “Never thought you were, reb. I just reckon you’re a foot-sore bastard who couldn’t keep up. Reckon I’d be doing the seceshers a favor just by killing you, which is maybe why I’ll let you live.” The Captain gathered his reins and gave a dismissive jerk of his head. “Take the bastard away.”

  “I’m carrying a message,” Starbuck said desperately. “I’m not a deserter and I’m no straggler. I’m carrying a message for Major James Starbuck of the Secret Service. I brought it from Richmond two nights ago!”

  The Captain gave Starbuck a long jaundiced look. “Son,” he said at last, “I’m bone-weary, I’m dog-hungry, I’m wet through, and I just want to be home in Manchester, so if you’re wasting my time I might just get so goddamn tired of you that I’ll bury your miserable carcass without even wasting a bullet on it first. So convince me, son.”

  “I need to borrow a knife.”

  The Captain looked at the two burly men who had captured Starbuck and grinned as he thought of the prisoner trying to fight them. “You feeling heroic, reb, or just plain lucky?”

  “A small knife,” Starbuck said tiredly.

  The Captain fumbled through layers of damp clothing. Behind him the New Hampshire infantry trudged along the muddy road, rain dripping from greatcoats worn like capes over their haversacks. Some gave Starbuck an inquiring look, trying to see in this captured rebel’s frayed gray jacket and patched baggy pants the lineaments of devilry that the northern preachers had described.

  The Captain produced a small scrimshaw penknife which Starbuck used to pick at the stitches of his waistband. He brought out the oilcloth pouch, which he handed up to the horseman. “It shouldn’t get wet, sir,” Starbuck said.

  The Captain unfolded the pouch, then slit its stitching to reveal the sheets of onionskin paper. He swore as a raindrop splashed on the top page to dissolve a word into instant oblivion, then hunched forward to shelter the papers from the weather. He pulled the rain-smeared spectacles down on his nose and peered close over their rims at the tight handwriting, and what he read plainly convinced him of Starbuck’s truthfulness, for he carefully folded the papers back inside their oilcloth pouch, which he handed back to Starbuck. “You’re putting me to a world of trouble, son, but I reckon Uncle Sam would want me to exert myself. You need anything?”

  “A cigar.”

  “Give the man a cigar, Jenks, and take your bayonet out of the poor bastard’s ribs. Looks like he’s on our side after all.”

  Horses were found, and an escort formed of two lieutenants who welcomed a chance to ride to Williamsburg. No one was entirely sure where the Army of the Potomac’s headquarters was, but Williamsburg seemed the obvious place, and one of the lieutenants had seen a girl there the previous day whom he swore was the prettiest thing he could ever hope to see this side of paradise, and so to Williamsburg they rode. The Lieutenant wanted to know if the girls of Richmond were just as pretty, and Starbuck assured him this was so. “I sure can’t wait to get there,” the Lieutenant said, but his companion, a much less optimistic man, asked Starbuck how formidable the rebel defenses around the city were.

  “Pretty formidable,” Starbuck said.

  “Well I guess our cannon boys can’t wait to chew ’em up. Not since the seceshers skedaddled from Yorktown without waiting to be killed first.”

  The lieutenants assumed, and Starbuck did not disillusion them, that he was a northern patriot who had risked his life for his country and they were naturally curious about him. They wanted to know where he came from, and when Starbuck told them he was a Bostonian they said they had gone through Boston on their way to the war and what a fine city it was, better than Washington, which was all windy avenues and half-finished buildings and scalpers trying to make a buck or two out of honest country soldiers. They had met President Lincoln there, and he was a good kind of man, plain and straight, but for the rest of the city, they said, there were hardly words bad enough.

  The lieutenants were in no particular hurry and stopped at a tavern where they asked for beer. The tavern keeper, a surly man, said he had been drunk dry of beer and offered instead a bottle of peach wine. It was sweet and thick, sickly to the tongue. Starbuck, sitting on the tavern’s back porch, saw hatred for the invaders on the tavern keeper’s face. In turn the two lieutenants derided the tavern keeper as a long-haired ignoramus in desperate need of northern enlightenment. “It isn’t a bad-looking country!” The more cheerful of the two lieutenants gestured at the scenery. “If it was drained proper and cultivated scientifically, a man could make money here.”

  In truth the rainy landscape looked desperately uninviting. The tavern was built in a clearing of trees just north of the swamps which edged the Chickahominy River. The river itself was no wider than Richmond’s Main Street, but it was fringed by broad strips of dank and flooded marshland that gave off a heavy, rank smell. “Looks a sick kind of place to me,” the more pessimistic Lieutenant observed. “That kind of swamp breeds illness. It isn’t a land for white men.”

  The lieutenants, disappointed in the thick sweet wine, decided to ride on. Their journey took the three horsemen against a tide of oncoming infantry and Starbuck noted how well the northern soldiers were equipped. None of these men had shoe soles held to uppers with lengths of string, none wore frayed rope belts, none carried flintlock smoothbore muskets like those that had been used by George Washington’s men when they had marched these same roads to pin the British against the sea at Yorktown. These troops did not have uniforms patched with butternut, nor did they need to grind roasted goober peas and smoke-dried apples to make a substitute coffee. These northerners looked well-fed, cheerful, and confident, an army trained and equipped and determined to end a sad business swiftly.

  A mile or two short of their destination they passed an artillery park where Starbuck paused to gape in sheer amazement. He had not imagined there were so many guns in all the world, let alone in one small Virginia field. The cannon were lined wheel to wheel, all with newly varnished limbers, all polished, and beyond them were lines of brand-new covered wagons which held the gunners’ supplies and spare ammunition. He tried to count the guns, but it was dusk and he could not see clearly enough to make even a rough estimate. There were rows of workmanlike twelve-pounder Napoleons, and lines of Parrott guns with their bulbous breeches, and acres of three-inch rifles with their slender barrels. Some of the guns had blackened muzzles, reminders that the rebels had fought a brisk and bloody delaying action in Williamsburg to slow the Federal advance. Groups of artillerymen gathered around cooking fires among the parked guns, and the smell of roasting meat made the three riders urge their horses on toward the comforts of the nearby town.

  The first lantern lights were showing through windows as they trotted into Williamsburg with its fine spread of ancient college buildings. They approached the college along a street of shingled houses. Some of the houses were pristine and neat, but others, presumably those abandoned by their owners, had been rifled by the Yankees. Torn curtains hung at broken windows and smashed china littered the yards. A doll lay in the mud of one yard, and a torn mattress was draped over the splintered remains of a cherry tree. One house had burned to the ground so that all that remained were two gaunt and blackened brick chimney stacks and some twisted, half-melted bed frames. Troops were billeted in all the houses.

  The College of William and Mary had suffered just as much as the town itself. The lieutenants tied their horses to a hitching post in the main yard and explored the Wren Building in search
of the Secret Service headquarters. A sentry on the college gate had assured them that the bureau was in residence, but he was not certain just where, and so the three men wandered lantern-lit corridors littered with broken books and torn papers. To Starbuck it looked as if a barbarian horde had come to destroy learning. Every bookshelf had been emptied and the books tipped into piles, or burned in grates or simply kicked aside. Paintings had been slashed and old documents taken from chests that had been broken up for firewood. In one room the linenfold paneling had been prised from the plaster walls by bayonets and splintered into so much matchwood that was now just ash in a wide grate. The corridors stank of urine. A crude effigy of Jefferson Davis with a devil’s horns and forked tail had been painted in limewash on a lecture-room wall. Troops were encamped in the high-ceilinged rooms. Some had found professors’ gowns hanging in a cupboard and now swooped up and down the corridors swathed in the black silk robes.

  “You’re looking for headquarters?” A New York captain, his breath stinking of whiskey, pointed the three men toward some houses that lay a short distance away in the darkness. “Faculty houses.” He hiccupped, then grinned when a woman’s laughter sounded from the room behind him. Someone had chalked “Amalgamation Hall” over the room’s doorway. “We have captured the college’s liquor and are presently amalgamating its liberated kitchen girls,” the Captain announced. “Come and join us.”

  A New York sergeant offered to escort Starbuck to the house where he believed the Secret Service had its quarters while the two New Hampshire lieutenants, their duty discharged, went to join the New Yorkers’ celebrations. The Sergeant was angry. “They’ve no notion of duty,” he said of his officers. “We’re on a righteous crusade, not a drunken debauch! They’re just kitchen maids, scarce out of childhood! What do we want those poor innocent blacks to think? That we’re no better than southerners?”

  But Starbuck could spare no sympathy for the Sergeant’s unhappiness. He was too consumed by nervous apprehension as he walked down a puddled path toward the row of elegant, lamplit houses. He was just seconds away from meeting his brother and discovering for certain whether his erstwhile friend was a traitor. Starbuck also had to play a deceiver’s game and he was not sure he could continue to play it. Maybe, seeing James’s face, he would lose his resolve? Maybe this whole deception was God’s way of restoring him to righteousness? His heart felt flabby and loud in his chest; his belly, still soured by Gillespie’s mistreatment, felt raw. Unto thine own self be true, he told himself, but that just threw up Pilate’s question. What is truth? Did God want him to betray the South? For a pittance he would have turned and fled from this confrontation, but instead the Sergeant gestured at a house that was brightly lit by candles and guarded by two blue-coated sentries who huddled from the wind against the red brick wall. “That’s the house,” the Sergeant said, then called to the two sentries. “He’s got business inside.”