Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  The house door was marked in chalk. “Major E.J. Allen and Staff, KEEP OUT.” Starbuck half expected the sentries to bar him entry, but instead they unquestioningly let him into the entrance hall that was hung with etchings of European cathedrals. A hallstand made from stag antlers was thickly draped with blue coats and sword belts. Men’s voices and the sound of cutlery scraping on china came from a room that opened off the hall to Starbuck’s left. “Is someone there?” a voice shouted from the dining room.

  “I’m looking for…” Starbuck began, but his voice was slightly cracked and he needed to start again. “I’m looking for Major Starbuck,” he called again.

  “And who in the name of holy hell are you?” A short, bearded man with a hard voice appeared in the open doorway. He had a napkin tucked into his collar and a piece of chicken speared onto a fork in his right hand. He gave Starbuck’s bedraggled uniform a scornful look. “Are you a miserable rebel? Eh? Is that what you are? Come to beg a decent meal, have you, now that your miserable rebellion has collapsed? Well? Speak up, you fool.”

  “I’m Major Starbuck’s brother,” Starbuck said, “and I have a letter from Richmond for him.”

  The belligerent man stared at him for a few seconds. “Christ on His cross,” he said at last in astonished blasphemy. “You’re the brother from Richmond?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then come in, come in!” He gestured with his speared chicken morsel. “Come in!”

  Starbuck walked into a room where a dozen men sat around a well-laden table. Candles burned in three candelabras along the polished board, a score of plates held fresh bread, green vegetables, and roasted meat, while red wine and heavy silverware glinted in the flamelight. Starbuck, hungry though he was, noticed none of it; instead he saw only the bearded man on the table’s far side who had begun to stand up, but who now seemed frozen motionless halfway up from his chair. He stared at Starbuck, his eyes showing incredulity.

  “Jimmy!” the man who had accosted Starbuck in the hallway said. “He says he’s your brother.”

  “Nate,” James, still crouched half in and half out of his chair, said in a faint voice.

  “James.” Starbuck suddenly felt a great rush of affection for his brother.

  “Oh, thank God,” James said, and he collapsed backward onto his chair as if the moment were too much for him. “Oh, thank God,” he said again, touching a napkin to his closed eyes as he prayed his thanks for his brother’s return. The other men about the table stared at Starbuck in a still silence.

  “I’ve brought you a message,” Starbuck interrupted his brother’s silent prayer.

  “From?” James said in a tone of eager hope, almost adding the name, but then remembering his promise to keep Adam’s identity a secret. He checked his question and even placed a finger to his lips as though warning his brother not to say the name aloud.

  And Starbuck knew then. His brother’s warning motion intimated that he would indeed know the spy’s identity, and that could only mean that the traitor was Adam. It had always had to be Adam, though that inevitability had not stopped Starbuck from hoping and praying that the spy might turn out to be some total stranger. He felt a sudden and immense sadness for Adam, and a despair because he would now need to use this new certainty. James was still waiting for an answer and Starbuck nodded. “Yes,” he said, “from him.”

  “Thank God for that too,” James said. “I feared he might be captured.”

  “Jimmy’s at his prayers again,” the short, bearded man broke cheerfully into the brothers’ conversation, “so you’d better sit and eat something, Mr. Starbuck. You look fair famished. You have the message on you?”

  “That is Mr. Pinkerton,” James introduced the short man. “The chief of the Secret Service Bureau.”

  “And honored to meet you,” Pinkerton said, thrusting out a hand.

  Starbuck shook hands, then gave Pinkerton the square of oilcloth. “I guess you’ve been waiting for this, sir,” he said.

  Pinkerton unfolded the sheets and looked at the carefully disguised handwriting. “It’s the real thing, Jimmy! From your friend! He’s not let us down! I knew he wouldn’t!” He stamped a foot on the rug as a sign of happiness. “Sit down, Mr. Starbuck! Sit! Eat! Make room for him! Next to your brother, yes?”

  James stood as Nate approached. Nate was so happy to see James again that for a second he was tempted to offer an embrace, but the family had never been demonstrative and so the brothers merely shook hands. “Sit,” James said. “I’ll trouble Lieutenant Bentley for some chicken? Thank you. And some bread sauce. You always liked bread sauce, Nate. Sweet potato? Sit, sit. Some lemonade?”

  “Wine, please,” Starbuck said.

  James looked horrified. “You drink ardent spirits?” Then, unable to spoil this moment with pious disapproval, he smiled. “Some wine, then, of course. For your stomach’s sake, I’m sure, and why not? Sit, Nate, sit!”

  Starbuck sat and was assailed by questions. It seemed that every man about the table knew who he was, and all had seen the reports in the Richmond newspapers announcing his release. Those papers had made the journey to Williamsburg a good deal faster than Starbuck, who now assured his brother’s colleagues that his imprisonment had all been a mistake. “You were accused of taking bribes?” James scorned the suggestion. “What nonsense!”

  “A trumped-up charge,” Starbuck said through a mouthful of chicken and bread sauce, “and merely an excuse to hold me while they tried to make me confess to espionage.” Someone poured him more wine and wanted to know exactly how he had escaped from Richmond, so Starbuck told of journeying north to Mechanicsville and there turning east into the tangle of small roads that lay above the Chickahominy. He made it sound as though he had made the journey alone, though in truth he would never have reached the northern lines without de’Ath’s pilot who had led him safely through quiet back lanes and ghostly forests. They had traveled by night, first to Mechanicsville, then to a farm just east of Cold Harbor, and on the last night through the rebel picket line by the York and Richmond Railroad and so down to a pine wood close to St. Peter’s Church where George Washington had married. It was there that the taciturn Tyler had left Starbuck. “You walk from here,” Tyler had said.

  “Where are the Yankees?”

  “We passed them two mile back. But from here on, boy, the bastards are everywhere.”

  “How do I get back?”

  “Go to Barker’s Mill and ask for Tom Woody. Tom knows how to find me, and if Tom’s not there, you’re on your own. Go on, now.”

  Starbuck had stayed under the cover of the pines for most of the morning, then had walked south until he reached the road where the New Hampshire regiment had captured him. Now, satiated with a meal richer than any he had eaten in months, he pushed his chair back from the table and accepted the gift of a cigar. His brother frowned at his use of tobacco, so Starbuck assured James it was merely to alleviate a bronchial condition caught in the rebel dungeons. He then described his treatment in prison and horrified the company with his graphic account of Webster’s hanging. He could give Pinkerton no news of Scully or Lewis, nor of the woman, Hattie Lawton, who had been captured with Webster.

  Pinkerton, busy stuffing a pipe with James River tobacco captured along with the faculty house in which they were quartered, frowned at Starbuck. “Why did they let you witness poor Webster’s death?”

  “I think they expected me to betray myself by recognizing him, sir,” Starbuck said.

  “They must think we’re fools!” Pinkerton said, shaking his head at this evidence of southern stupidity. He lit his pipe, then tapped the sheets of onionskin paper on which de’Ath’s false message was written. “Am I to assume you know the man who wrote this?”

  “Indeed, sir.”

  “A family friend, eh?” Pinkerton glanced from the lean Starbuck to the plumper James, then back to Starbuck again. “And I assume, Mr. Starbuck, that if this friend asked you to deliver the letter he must have known of your
northern sympathies?”

  Starbuck assumed the question was meant as a clumsy test of his loyalty and for a second it actually was, for he understood this was the moment where he must begin telling lies. Either that or confess the truth and see his friends in K Company and in Richmond ground down beneath the northern army. For one blinding instant he felt the temptation to truthfulness, if only for the sake of his soul, but then the thought of Sally made him smile at the expectant Pinkerton. “He knew my sympathies, sir. For some time now I’ve been helping him collect the information he sends you.”

  The lie came smoothly. He had even made it sound modest, and for a second or two he was aware of the room’s silent admiration, then Pinkerton slapped the table in approbation. “So you did deserve imprisonment, Mr. Starbuck!” He laughed to show it was a jest, then slapped the table again. “You’re a brave man, Mr. Starbuck, there’s no doubting it.” Pinkerton spoke feelingly and the men around the table murmured their approbation of their chief’s sentiments.

  James touched Starbuck’s arm. “I always knew you were on the right side. Well done, Nate!”

  “The North owes you a debt of gratitude,” Pinkerton said, “and I’ll make it my business to see it’s paid. Now, if you’re through with your victuals, maybe you and I can talk privately? And you, Jimmy, of course. Come. Bring your wine, Mr. Starbuck.”

  Pinkerton led them into a small and elegantly furnished parlor. Theology books lined the shelves while a sewing machine stood on a walnut table with a half-finished shirt still trapped beneath its foot. Silver-framed family portraits were lined up on a side table. One, a daguerrotype of a small child, had its frame draped with a strip of crepe to signify that the child had died recently. Another showed a young man in Confederate artillery uniform. “Pity that one’s not swathed in black, eh, Jimmy?” Pinkerton said as he sat down. “Now, Mr. Starbuck, what are you called? Nathaniel? Nate?”

  “Nate, sir.”

  “You can call me Bulldog. Everyone does. Everyone except Jimmy here because he’s too much of a cold Boston fish to use nicknames, ain’t that so, Jimmy?”

  “Quite so, Chief,” James said, gesturing for Starbuck to sit opposite Pinkerton beside the empty fireplace. Wind gusted in the chimney and rattled rain on the curtained windows.

  Pinkerton took de’Ath’s forged message from his vest pocket. “The news is bad, Jimmy,” the detective said gloomily. “It’s just as I feared. There must be a hundred and fifty thousand rebels facing us now. See for yourself.” James fixed some reading glasses on the bridge of his nose and placed the proffered letter directly under an oil lamp. Starbuck wondered if his brother would spot the counterfeit handwriting, but instead James tutted at the news and shook his head in evident sympathy with his chief’s pessimism.

  “It’s bad, Major, very bad.”

  “And they’re sending reinforcements to Jackson in the Shenandoah, you see that?” Pinkerton pulled on his pipe. “That’s how many men they’ve got! They can afford to send troops away from the Richmond defenses. It’s what I’ve been fearing, Jimmy! For months now the rascals have been trying to convince us their army is small. They want to draw us in, you see? Suck us in. Then they would have hit us with everything!” He shadowboxed two punches. “My God, if it hadn’t been for this message, Jimmy, it might have worked too. The General will be grateful. ’Pon my soul he’ll be grateful. I shall visit him in a moment or two.” Pinkerton seemed obscurely pleased at the bad news, almost energized by it. “But before I go, Nate, tell me what’s happening in Richmond. Don’t pull your punches, lad. Tell me the worst, spare us nothing.”

  Starbuck, thus enjoined, described a rebel capital thronged with soldiers from every part of the Confederacy. He reported that the Tredegar Iron Works had been forging cannon day and night since the war’s beginning and that the guns were now pouring from the factory gates toward the newly dug defenses that ringed Richmond. Pinkerton leaned forward as though eager for every word and winced at each new revelation of rebel strength. James, sitting to one side, made notes in a small book. Neither man challenged Starbuck’s inventions, but instead swallowed his outrageous inventions whole.

  Starbuck finished by saying he had seen trains steam into the Richmond depot of the Petersburg railroad loaded with crates of British rifles that had been smuggled through the U.S. Navy’s blockade. “They reckon every rebel soldier has a modern rifle now, sir, and ammunition enough for a dozen battles.” Starbuck said.

  James frowned. “Half the prisoners we’ve taken in the last week were armed with old-fashioned smoothbores.”

  “That’s because they’re not letting their newest weapons leave Richmond,” Starbuck lied smoothly. He was suddenly enjoying himself.

  “You see, Jimmy? They’re sucking us in! Luring us!” Pinkerton shook his head at this evidence of rebel perfidy. “They’ll pull us in, then hit us. My God, but it’s clever.” He puffed on his pipe, deep in thought. A clock ticked on the mantel, while from the wet darkness came the sound of men’s voices singing. Pinkerton finally threw himself back in his chair as though he had been unable to see a way through the thicket of enemies that sprang up around him. “Your friend, now, the fellow who writes these letters,” Pinkerton said, pointing his pipe at Starbuck, “how is he planning to send us further letters?”

  Starbuck drew on his cigar. “He suggested, sir, that I go back to Richmond and that you use me as you would have used Webster. Ad—” He stopped himself from saying Adam’s name just in time. “Admittedly I’m not ideal, perhaps, but it could be done. No one in Richmond knows I’ve crossed the line.”

  Pinkerton stared hard at Starbuck. “What is your status with the rebels, Nate? They let you out of prison, but are they fool enough to expect you back in their army?”

  “I asked for some furlough, sir, and they agreed to that, but they’ll want me back in the Passport Bureau by the end of the month. That’s where I was working when I was arrested, you see.”

  “My word, but you could be mighty useful to us in that bureau, Nate! My word, but that would be useful!” Pinkerton stood and paced the small room excitedly. “But you’re running a fearful risk by going back. Are you really willing to do it?”

  “Yes, sir, if it’s necessary. I mean if you don’t finish the war first.”

  “You’re a brave man, Nate, a brave man,” Pinkerton said, and he went on pacing up and down while Starbuck relit his cigar and sucked the smoke deep into his chest. De’Ath, he thought, would have been proud of him. Pinkerton stopped his pacing and stabbed the stem of his pipe toward Starbuck. “The General might want to see you. You’ll hold yourself ready?”

  Starbuck hid his alarm at the thought of facing the northern commander. “Of course, sir.”

  “Right!” Pinkerton scooped up the false letter from the table in front of James. “I’m away to see his lordship. I’ll leave the two of you to talk.” He swept out of the room, shouting for an orderly to bring his coat and hat.

  James, suddenly embarrassed, sat in the chair Pinkerton had vacated. He shyly caught his brother’s eye, then smiled. “I always knew you weren’t a copperhead at heart.”

  “A what?”

  “Copperhead,” James said. “It’s an insult for northerners who sympathize with the South. Journalists use the word.”

  “Nasty beasts, copperheads,” Starbuck said lightly. One of his men had almost been bitten by a copperhead the previous year and he remembered Truslow barking a warning and then slashing the snake’s brown head clean off with his bowie knife. The snake had smelt, Starbuck remembered, of honeysuckle.

  “How is Adam?” James asked.

  “Earnest. In love, too. She’s the daughter of the Reverend John Gordon.”

  “Of the ASPGP? I’ve never met him, but I’ve heard good things of him.” James took the reading glasses off his nose and polished them on the skirt of his coat. “You’re looking thin. Did they really use purgatives on you?”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “Terrible,
terrible.” James frowned, then offered his brother a smile of wry sympathy. “Now we’ve both been in prison, Nate. Who would ever have thought it? I must confess that when I was in Richmond I took great comfort from the Acts of the Apostles. I believed that if the Lord could deliver Paul and Silas from the dungeon then He would surely deliver me. And He did!”

  “Me too,” Starbuck said, squirming with embarrassment. There was a certain pleasure in deceiving Pinkerton, but none in hoodwinking James.

  James smiled. “Adam encouraged me to believe you might come back to our side.”

  “He did?” Starbuck asked, unable to hide his surprise that his erstwhile friend should have so misunderstood him.

  “He told me you’d been attending prayer meetings,” James said, “so I knew you must have been laying your burden before the Lord and I thanked God for it. Did Adam give you the Bible?”

  “Yes, thank you. It’s here,” Starbuck said, tapping his breast pocket. The Bible had been waiting with his uniform at de’Ath’s house. “Would you like it back?”

  “No! No. I would like you to have it, as a gift.” James breathed on his glasses and polished their lenses again. “I asked Adam to persuade you to come home. Once I knew his real feelings on the war, of course.”