Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  The two Yankee guns fired a last futile time and their shells skipped and slapped across the marsh. The river’s turmoil subsided until the water once again slid slow and gray past the blackened remnants of the bridge to carry its dead cargo of white-bellied fish toward the sea. A mist crept off the wetland to mingle with the gunsmoke. The woods were filled with whippoorwills, and Major Bird, who did not believe in God, suddenly wished to Almighty God that this goddamn war was over.

  PART THREE

  THE ARMIES CAME TO A STOP IN A CURVE WHICH RAN around Richmond’s northeastern flank. General Johnston had now retreated so far that the northern soldiers could hear the hours being tolled on Richmond’s church bells and, when the wind was in the west, smell the city’s rich stench of tobacco and coalsmoke.

  Richmond’s newspapers grumbled that the Yankees had been allowed too close to the city and the doctors of both armies complained because so many troops were stationed in the disease-ridden marshes of the Chickahominy River. The hospitals filled with men dying of the river’s fever, an ailment that, even as the days warmed toward summer’s stifling heat, made its victims shake with uncontrollable fits of shivering. Doctors explained that the fever was a natural consequence of the invisible miasma that crept from the river with the sepulchral mists which whitened the marshes at dawn and dusk, and if the armies could but move to higher ground then the fever would disappear, but General Johnston insisted that the fate of Richmond depended on the river and that his men must therefore endure the mist-borne miasma. There was a strategy, Johnston insisted, and in the face of that military word the doctors could do nothing but abandon their arguments and watch their patients die.

  At the end of May, on a Friday afternoon that was sultry and still, Johnston assembled his aides and explained that strategy. He had pinned a map to the parlor wall of the house that served as his headquarters and was using a walnut-handled toasting fork as a pointer. “You see, gentlemen, how I have forced McClellan to straddle the Chickahominy? The northern army is a divided force, gentlemen, a divided force.” He emphasized the remark by rapping the map north and south of the river with the toasting fork. “One of the first rules of war is never to divide your force in the face of the enemy, but that is just what McClellan has done!” Johnston was in one of his didactic moods, treating his aides as though they were a group of new cadets at West Point. “And why should a general never divide his force?” he now asked, peering expectantly at his aides.

  “Because it can be defeated in detail, sir,” one of the aides replied smartly.

  “Precisely. And tomorrow morning, gentlemen, at dawn, we shall obliterate this half of the northern army.” Johnston tapped the toasting fork on the map. “Obliterate, gentlemen, obliterate.”

  He had indicated that portion of the map which lay east of Richmond and south of the Chickahominy River. The river’s source lay northwest of the city, then, widening swiftly, the watercourse ran slantwise across the city’s northern approaches and down through the lowlands that lay to the east of Richmond before it joined the wider flow of the James. Johnston’s Confederate army was all south of the river, but McClellan’s larger force was divided; half the troops were north of the Chickahominy’s malarial swamps and half were south. It was Johnston’s intention to crash out of the dawn mists and tear that southern half into bloody ruin before the Yankee troops north of the river could march over their replacement bridges to rescue their beleaguered colleagues. “And we shall do it tomorrow morning, gentlemen, at dawn,” Johnston said, and could not resist a satisfied smile when he saw their astonishment.

  He was pleased because their surprise was exactly the response he wanted. Johnston had informed no one of his plans; neither his second-in-command, General Smith, nor even his President, Jefferson Davis. There were too many spies in Richmond, and too many men who might be tempted to desert to the enemy with the news, and to prevent that betrayal Johnston had hatched his plans in secret and kept them hidden until now, the afternoon before battle, when his aides must carry his orders to the divisional commanders.

  Daniel Hill’s division would lead the attack, striking at the center of the enemy lines. “Hill must fight alone for a while,” Johnston explained to his aides, “because we want to suck the Yankees in, embroil them, then we’ll hit their flanks, here and here.” The toaster rapped on the map, tearing it each time and showing how, like the outer tines of a trident, the twin attacks would slam into an enemy who would have conveniently impaled himself on the trident’s central spike. “Longstreet strikes their northern flank,” Johnston continued, “while General Huger’s division hits their southern, and by midday, gentlemen, the Yankees will be dead, prisoners, or fugitives in the White Oak Swamp.” Johnston could taste the victory already; he could hear the cheers as he rode into Richmond’s Capitol Square and see the envy on the faces of his rival generals like Beauregard and Robert Lee. The plan, he knew, was brilliant. All that lay between this moment and glory was the battle that would begin when his gray-clad troops swarmed out of the dawn mists, and if those troops had surprise on their side, then victory, Johnston believed, was assured.

  Three aides were given the sealed orders to carry to the three generals of division. Adam Faulconer was ordered to ride to General Huger’s headquarters, which lay on the very edge of Richmond. “One set of orders,” Johnston’s chief of staff, an affable man called Morton, said as he handed the sealed packet to Adam, “and your signature here, Adam.” Colonel Morton held out a receipt which acknowledged that Adam had indeed taken possession of the envelope. “You get Huger to sign the receipt here, see? Old Huger will probably invite you to supper, but be back here by midnight. And for God’s sake, Adam, make sure he knows what he’s supposed to be doing tomorrow.” That was why Johnston had taken such care to demonstrate his strategy to his aides; so that they, in turn, could answer his generals’ questions. Johnston knew that if he had fetched the generals to his headquarters the army would have smelt the imminent excitement and some wretched man would have been bound to slip over to the enemy in the night and warn them that trouble was brewing.

  Adam signed the receipt, thus acknowledging that he had taken responsibility for one set of orders, then he put the paper into a leather pouch on his belt. “I’d be on your way,” Colonel Morton advised, “before the rain comes. And make sure Huger signs that paper, Adam! Either him or his chief of staff. No one else.”

  Adam waited on the house verandah as his horse was saddled. The air was motionless and stagnant, heavy and dark, matching his brooding and despondent mood. He fingered the precious order, wondering if the destruction of all his hopes lay inside the sealed envelope. Perhaps, he thought, the envelope was the key to southern victory, and he imagined the northern army fleeing as they had at Bull Run, and in his fears he saw panicked men floundering in the chest-high sloughs of White Oak Swamp and being shot down by malicious, gleeful rebels like the cackling fiends who had fired from the summit of Ball’s Bluff. He saw the Chickahominy spilling blood-reddened waters into the James and shuddered at the realism of his imaginings, and for a mad second he was tempted to take his horse and gallop it across the lines, roweling its flanks bloody as he spurred past the astonished Confederate pickets and so to the northern army. Then he thought of the grief that such a desertion would cause his father, and he thought of Julia in Richmond, and all the old turmoil surged up inside Adam. The war was wrong, yet he was a Faulconer and so heir to a family that had ridden into battle beside George Washington. Faulconers did not disgrace their lineage by deserting to the enemy.

  Except how could the country founded by Washington be the enemy?

  Adam fingered the orders in his belt pouch and wondered for the thousandth time why the Young Napoleon had proved so hesitant. Adam had betrayed the South’s weakness on the peninsula and as a consequence had expected McClellan to break out of Fort Monroe like an avenging angel, but instead the northern commander had chosen a stately, cautious approach that had given the rebels ample t
ime to stiffen and thicken the defenses of Richmond. And now, just when the North was within an easy afternoon’s walk of Richmond, the rebels were planning an onslaught that could tear the heart from the northern army, and Adam, standing on the verandah and watching clouds black as night heap ominously above the stagnant forests, knew that he was incapable of stopping the disaster. He did not have the courage to desert.

  “Young Adam! Don’t move!” Colonel Morton pushed his head through the muslin curtains of a window at the verandah’s far end. “We’ve got another letter for you!”

  “Very good, sir,” Adam acknowledged. An orderly had just brought Adam’s horse to the front of the house and Adam told the man to tie the reins to the balustrade. The horse lowered its head and grazed a patch of grass that grew thick by the verandah steps. A slave who belonged to the owner of the commandeered house was digging at the hoof-trampled remains of a vegetable garden. The man was tired and kept pausing, but then he would remember Adam’s presence on the verandah and so he would wipe his brow and bend again to his work. Adam, watching the man, felt an impulse of irrational and unfair anger at the whole black race. Why in God’s name had anyone imported them to America, for without them the country would surely be the happiest, most peaceful land on earth. That unbidden thought made him feel ashamed of himself. It was not the fault of the slaves, but of the slavocracy. It was not the black race, but his own kind who had disturbed the peace and soured the land’s content. “It’s too hot to work, isn’t it?” he called to the slave, trying to make open amends for his private thoughts.

  “Too hot, massa. Certain too hot.”

  “I’d rest if I were you,” Adam said.

  “Plenty rest in heaven, Lord Jesus be praised, massa,” the slave said and thrust the spade’s broad blade back into the reddish, dull soil.

  “Here you are, Adam,” Colonel Morton strode onto the verandah, his spurs clinking as he walked. “We’re lending Pete Longstreet some of Huger’s men. Huger won’t like it, but Longstreet will be advancing closer to the Yankees, so he needs the extra rifles. For God’s sake be politic with Huger.”

  “Of course, sir.” Adam took the proffered envelope. “Will you be requiring…” He had begun to ask whether Colonel Morton would want another signature from General Huger acknowledging receipt of this second set of orders, but then Adam checked his words. “Very good, sir.”

  “Back by midnight, young Adam, we all need our beauty sleep tonight. And be gentle with old Huger. He’s a prickly beast.”

  Adam rode west. Where the road passed through the woods the air seemed even more oppressive. Leaves hung motionless, their stillness oddly threatening. The day felt unnatural, but so much of Adam’s world seemed unreal these days, even Julia, and that thought reminded him that he should make an effort to see her soon. She had written with her mysterious summons, and even though she had insisted that her message was not of a personal nature Adam could not shake a suspicion that Julia wanted to end the engagement. Of late Adam had begun to think that he did not really understand Julia, and to apprehend that her desires were altogether more complicated than he had ever supposed. On the surface she was a conventional, pious, and dutifully gracious young lady, but Adam was subtly aware of a quicksilver vivacity that Julia kept hidden, and it was that quicksilver quality that made Adam feel unworthy of her. He suspected his mother had possessed the same quality and that it had been crushed out of her by his father.

  Adam stopped his horse in a stretch of woods where no army camps were visible. His journey had taken him through a score of regimental camps, but suddenly he was alone in a heavy, dark, and still forest and able to tease into the light an idea that had been flickering in the back of his mind. He opened his pouch and brought out the two messages. They were wrapped in identical light brown envelopes, sealed with identical blobs of scarlet wax, and addressed in the same spiky black handwriting. The battle orders were thicker than the second set of instructions, but otherwise there was nothing to distinguish one envelope from the other.

  He brought out the receipt. It mentioned one set of orders only.

  Adam looked back at the envelopes. Suppose, he thought, he simply forgot to deliver the battle orders? Suppose Huger did not march in the morning. Suppose then that the North won tomorrow’s battle and took Richmond; who would then care about a missing set of orders? And if, by some outlandish chance, the South won tomorrow without Huger’s troops, who would care? And even if his dereliction were discovered—and Adam was not so foolish as to presume that it would not eventually be found out—then it need not be construed as an act of treason, but rather as one of simple forgetfulness or, at worst, of carelessness. The dereliction would doubtless cost him his job on Johnston’s staff, but it would not bring disgrace, merely an unfortunate reputation for carelessness. And maybe, he told himself, he should spend this war sheltering beneath his father’s wing. Maybe he would be happier as his father’s chief of staff where, if nothing else, he could at least try to preserve his father’s tenants and neighbors in the Legion from the worst rigors of war. “Oh, dear God,” he murmured aloud, and it was really a prayer for his own happiness and not for guidance because he already knew what he was going to do.

  Slowly, deliberately, and with due ceremony, Adam tore the battle orders across, and then across again, and then he tore the ragged pieces into further shreds. He tore them as though he were rending the very fabric of history, and when the orders were reduced to a handful of scraps, he scattered the specks of paper into the black waters of a ditch beside the road. And with that act of treacherous destruction there came a sudden leaping happiness. He had sabotaged victory! He had done the Lord’s work on a black day and he felt as though a wearisome burden of guilt and indecision had rolled away from him. He spurred his horse westward.

  A half hour later Adam came to the small house that served as Huger’s headquarters where, with a punctiliousness that verged on insubordination, Adam insisted on receiving the General’s signature before he handed over the single remaining envelope. He then stood respectfully aside while Huger opened and read the single sheet of orders. The General, proud of his French ancestry, was a fussy, cautious man who had enjoyed a successful career in the old U.S. Army and now relished making unfavorable comparisons between his old employer and his new. “I don’t understand!” he told Adam after reading the order a second time.

  “I’m sorry, sir?” Adam was standing with Huger’s aides on a verandah that looked down on Gillies Creek. The house was so close to Richmond that Adam could see the sprawl of roofs and chimneys that lay behind Rockett’s Landing where the masts and yards of a dozen ships trapped by the barricade at Drewry’s Bluff showed in the evening’s gloom. Beneath the house, at the end of a long meadow dotted with the wagons and guns belonging to Huger’s artillery, the Richmond and York Railroad ran beside the creek, and in the fading light that was made worse by the mass of dark cloud, a train steamed slowly toward the city. The train drew a curious collection of flatcars on which was mounted the Confederacy’s balloon unit. The balloon itself was a fine confection made from the best silk dresses donated by Richmond’s ladies and was raised and lowered by means of a giant winch that was bolted to one of the flatcars. Other flatcars housed the chemical apparatus that manufactured the hydrogen. The balloon, which had been observing the enemy lines beyond the torn-up railhead at Fair Oak Station, was still being winched down as the train clanked and crashed and puffed beneath General Huger’s headquarters. “Am I to understand”—the white-haired Huger now peered over a pair of reading glasses at Adam—“that some of my men are being given over to General Longstreet’s command?”

  “I believe that is so, sir, yes,” Adam said.

  Huger gave a series of small snuffling snorts that were evidently intended to denote sarcastic laughter. “I suppose,” Huger finally observed, “that General Johnston is aware, even dimly aware, that I am senior to General Longstreet?”

  “I am sure he is, sir.”

&nbs
p; Huger was working his dudgeon into a fine display of wounded vanity. “General Longstreet, I seem to remember, was a paymaster in the old army. A mere major. I don’t believe he was ever made more than a major or entrusted with any duty more onerous than distributing the troops’ wages. Yet now he is to give men under my command their orders?”

  “Only a few of your men, sir,” Adam observed tactfully.

  “And why?” Huger demanded. “Surely Johnston has his reasons? Has he thought to explain those reasons to you, young man?”

  Johnston had, but it would have defeated Adam’s purpose to have passed on the explanation, so he contented himself with the lame observation that General Longstreet’s division was camped closer to the enemy and that therefore it had been thought prudent to beef up his brigades with the extra men. “I’m sure it’s only a temporary expedient, sir,” Adam finished, then stared past the unhappy Huger to where the train had come to a complete halt while the balloon was winched down the last few feet. The smoke from the locomotive looked oddly white and bright against the black cloud.