Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  “I am not complaining,” Huger said indignantly. “I am above such petty considerations, and in the exigencies of this army such insults are to be expected. But it would have been civil of Johnston to have asked if I minded my troops being yielded to the orders of a mere paymaster. Would it not have been civil?” he inquired of his own aides, who both nodded their eager agreement.

  “I am certain General Johnston means you no slight, sir,” Adam said.

  “You may be certain of what you like, young man, but I am more experienced in these matters.” Huger, who reckoned himself to be something of a natural aristocrat, drew himself erect so he could look down his nose at Adam. “Perhaps General Johnston needs my men to guard the army’s wages, is that it?” This joke was again signaled by a series of snorting snuffles that caused Huger’s aides to smile in companionable appreciation. “There was a time,” Huger said, folding the orders into a tight square, “when military matters were performed properly in North America. When such things were done in a soldierly fashion. As in a well-organized army.” He tossed the folded orders onto a bench suspended by chains hanging from the verandah’s beams. “Very well, young man, tell Johnston I’ve received his orders, even if I cannot understand them. I’m sure you’ll want to return to your master before the rain comes, and so I’ll bid you good day.” This curt dismissal, delivered without even offering Adam as much as a glass of water, was a deliberate snub, but Adam did not mind. He had taken his huge risk and he had played his part well, but he did not think he could go on parrying the General’s questions. My God, Adam thought with a pang of terror, but there would be hell to pay when Johnston discovered what had happened. Then, once again, Adam reassured himself that he was guilty of nothing worse than forgetfulness.

  He put the signed receipt into his pouch and went back to his horse. It was a Friday evening and he knew he would find Julia in the nearby Chimborazo Hospital. He was feeling guilty about her letter, and knowing that he had this whole evening free, he rode to meet his fiancee. His route took him past one of General Lee’s new star-shaped forts that ringed the city. The earthwork was crowned with rows of freshly filled sandbags donated by the sewing circles of Richmond. The ladies had used every spare scrap of available fabric so that the newly placed ramparts looked like a quilt of flowery chintzes, deep velvets, and gaily patterned cottons, and in the sinister light of the storm-threatening dusk, that patchwork effect was oddly cheerful, a domestic touch in a warlike scene. The air, which had been sultry and still all day, suddenly stirred as an unexpected gust of wind lifted the folds of the Confederate battle flag above the gaily colored bastions. The country to the south, beyond the river, was lit by some last slanting rays of sunshine that reached far beneath the clouds so that the land seemed brighter than the sky. Adam, his new act of treachery completed, tried to read into that distant shaft of golden sunlight an augury of happiness and success.

  He had to show his headquarters pass to one of the sentries at the guardpost that barred the road into the city. A far-off rumble of thunder sounded like gunfire coming from the land between the rivers. The sentry grimaced. “Reckon there’ll be a storm tonight, Major. Right big one, too.”

  “It looks bad,” Adam agreed.

  “Never known a spring like it,” the sentry said, then paused as a second clap of thunder rolled ominously over the sky. “Maybe it’ll drown a Yankee or two. That’ll save us having to kill all the sumbitches.”

  Adam did not respond, but just took his pass back and spurred onward. Lightning stuttered in the northern sky. He urged the horse into a trot, racing against the rain that began to fall in huge and ominous drops just as he turned into the hospital grounds. An orderly told Adam which ward was having the missioner’s service and he galloped the horse through the sudden gusting wind that snatched at the smoke dribbling from the thin metal chimneys jutting from each hut. The rain began to fall harder, drumming on the tin roofs and quivering the taut canvas of the tents which had been erected as supplementary wards. He found the right hut, tied his horse to the porch upright, then plunged inside just as an explosion of thunder seemed to tear the heart out of the skies and trigger a veritable cloudburst of rain that rattled so loud on the ward roof that the Reverend John Gordon’s voice was quite drowned out. Julia, seated at the wheezing little harmonium, smiled her pleasure at Adam’s unexpected arrival. Adam, closing the door behind him, saw that this was one of the Friday nights when Julia’s mother had chosen not to come to the hospital. There were just Julia, her father, and the inevitable Mr. Samworth, who looked nervously up at the roof as another crash of thunder bellowed over the sky.

  The service limped on, interrupted by thunder and muted by the noise of the rain. Adam, standing by a window, watched the night fall across Richmond and saw the new darkness punctuated by slivers of lightning that offered a hellish luminosity to the city’s spires. The storm seemed to intensify like the echoes of a war in heaven, while the rain pounded the roof with such a malevolent force that the Reverend Mr. Gordon gave up the unequal struggle and called for a hymn. Julia pumped the small instrument and led the ward in “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow.” Once the singing was done the missioner pronounced an inaudible blessing and so abandoned the storm-racked service.

  “This must pass over soon!” The Reverend Mr. Gordon had to shout at Adam to make himself heard, yet the storm seemed fixed above the city and relentless in its fury. The ward’s roof leaked in a dozen places and Adam helped move the cots away from the cold streams. Julia wanted to see the storm for herself, and wrapping her coat about her, went to stand on the small verandah at the back of the ward where, under the shelter of the shingled lean-to roof, she and Adam watched the great storm shudder the skies above Virginia. Bolt after bolt of lightning cracked down to earth, and crash after crash of thunder echoed in the clouds. Night had fallen, but it was a night riven by fire and made huge by the sky’s explosions. A dog howled somewhere in the hospital, while rivers of water ran and gurgled and poured into the black depths of the Bloody Run.

  “Mother has a headache. She can always tell when a storm’s coming by her headaches,” Julia told Adam in an unsuitably cheerful voice, but Julia had always liked storms. She apprehended something very special in nature’s fury, believing that she was witnessing a feeble echo of the chaos out of which God had created the world. She clutched her coat tightly about her and, in the lightning flashes, Adam saw that her eyes were bright with excitement.

  “You wanted to see me?” Adam asked her.

  “I hope you wanted to see me too!” Julia said teasingly, though inwardly she yearned for him to offer a passionate declaration that he would have ridden through a dozen such storms just to be beside her.

  “Of course I did, yes,” Adam said. He stood decorously apart from Julia though, like her, he had his back pressed hard against the shed’s wall, where he gained most benefit from the verandah’s small roof. Water poured off the shingles to make a curtain that was lit by a silver sheen whenever lightning flickered from the clouds. “But you wrote to me,” Adam reminded her.

  Julia had almost forgotten the letter with its hint of an important message and now, so long after, she suspected that the message had probably lost most of its urgency. “It was about your friend Nate Starbuck,” she explained.

  “Nate?” Adam, half expecting to be told that his engagement was ended, could not hide his surprise.

  “He came to call on you just after he’d been released from prison,” Julia said. “I happened to be at your father’s house and I know I shouldn’t have invited him inside, but it was raining almost as hard as it is now and he seemed so desolate that I took pity on him. You don’t mind, do you?” She stared up at Adam.

  Adam had almost forgotten the impulse that had made him warn his father’s servants to turn Starbuck away from the house. At the time and in the wake of the appalling introduction of a fallen woman into the missioner’s house, the ban had seemed a just precaution, but Adam’s outrage h
ad cooled since that terrible night. “What did he want?” Adam now asked.

  Julia paused as a torrent of thunder cracked and faded above the city. Lightning backlit the clouds, flickering across the hidden sky like misted rivers of airborne silver. One lightning bolt had started a fire somewhere in the town of Manchester across the James River, for there was a dull red stuttering glow that lasted a few seconds before the rain drowned it out. “He had a message for you,” Julia said. “I thought it was all very mysterious, but he wouldn’t explain it to me. He just said you’d understand. He says you’re to stop corresponding with his family.”

  Adam felt a chill run through him. He said nothing, but just stared into the dark river valley where the rain hammered at the sullen water.

  “Adam?” Julia inquired.

  Adam was suddenly besieged by the image of a noose hanging from a high beam. “He said what?” he managed to ask.

  “He said that you were to cease corresponding with his family. Does that seem strange to you? It seemed very odd to me. After all, the Starbuck family is in Boston, so how can you correspond with them? I’m told people do get letters through to the North, but I’m sure I can’t imagine you going to that kind of trouble just to write to the Reverend Elial Starbuck. And Nate also said that he would explain as soon as he was able, but he was equally mysterious about when that might be.”

  “Oh, dear God,” Adam said and shivered as all the terror came whipping back. He thought of the shame if his father were to discover that his son had betrayed Virginia. And how had Starbuck found out? Had James written to him? There could be no other explanation. How else could Starbuck have discovered it? And if Starbuck knew, who else did? “Where is Nate?” he now asked Julia.

  “I don’t know. How would I know?” In truth Julia had the strangest idea that Starbuck had crossed the lines, but as her source for that belief was Sally Truslow she did not think it wise to make any mention of it. Julia had finally summoned the courage to visit Sally, going to the house armed with a Bible and a bag full of tracts describing the fearsome terrors of hell awaiting all sinners, but the visit had unexpectedly turned into a joyous morning of laughter in which, instead of attempting to lead the younger woman to the Lord, Julia had found herself admiring Sally’s collection of gowns and shawls. They had talked of cambric and chambray, and whether tarlatan could replace tulle as a material for veils, and Julia had fingered Sally’s silks and satins, and after the city’s damp fears, such talk of baubles and frills had been nothing but relief. Julia’s religious beliefs had been offended only by Sally’s enthusiastic plans to establish a spiritualist shrine in the house’s back quarters, but Sally’s evident cynicism and her honest description of how she planned to deceive the clients had ended up sparking Julia’s amusement rather than her disapproval. Julia had also been touched by the concern Sally had shown for Starbuck and flustered when Sally had claimed how much Starbuck liked Julia. It had all been very odd, much too odd to explain to Adam, who would surely have exploded in righteous anger at the mere thought of his fiancee visiting one of Richmond’s courtesans, though in truth Sally’s house had outwardly appeared to be as respectable as any in the city and a good deal cleaner than most. Yet Julia could no more tell Adam of that visit than she could have told her mother. “Does it matter where Nate is?” Julia now asked Adam.

  “I suppose not.” Adam shifted uneasily, his spur chains and scabbard links clinking softly beneath the roar of the rain and the howl of the wind.

  “So what does the message mean?” Julia asked directly. Her curiosity had been piqued by Adam’s reaction, which, to her mind, looked startlingly like guilt.

  Adam shook his head, but then did offer a halting explanation. “It goes back,” he said slowly and not altogether articulately. “Back to when Nate first arrived here. I have been trying. Father anyway tried to restore Nate’s family connections. It seemed important.” Adam was a bad liar, and to cover his embarrassment he pushed away from the hut’s wall and rested his hands on the balustrade. “I think Nate resents our efforts,” he finished lamely.

  “So it isn’t so very mysterious after all?” Julia said, not believing a word Adam had said.

  “No,” Adam said, “not really.”

  Julia listened to the dogs howling and the horses whinnying and the tent canvas flogging in the wind. “What did Nate do?” she asked after a long pause.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean what did Nate do to lose his family’s affections?”

  For a long time Adam did not answer, then he shrugged. “He ran away.”

  “Is that all?”

  Adam was certainly not going to tell Julia that there had been a woman involved, an actress who had used Starbuck as her foil, then dropped him in Richmond. “He behaved very badly,” Adam said pompously, knowing it to be an inadequate explanation and also an unfair one. “Nate isn’t a bad man,” he added, but did not know how to finish his qualification.

  “Just passionate?” Julia asked.

  “Yes,” Adam said, “just passionate,” then fell silent as a massive explosion of thunder tore the sky apart. A sheet of lightning crashed down on the river’s far bank to illuminate the naval yard with a stark white corpse light that was set off with jet-black shadows. “When the Yankees come”—he changed the subject from Nate Starbuck’s character—“you should stay at home.”

  “Did you think I was planning to welcome them to Richmond?” Julia asked tartly.

  “You have a flag? I mean a United States flag?” Adam asked.

  “No.”

  “I’m sure there’s one in my room in Clay Street. Ask Polly to give it to you. Hang it out of a window at home.”

  That sounded very supine advice to Julia. “You seem very sure that they will enter Richmond,” she said.

  “They will,” Adam said fervently. “It’s God’s will.”

  “It is?” Julia was surprised. “Then why, I wonder, did God allow this war to happen at all?”

  “We declared war,” Adam said. “Man did that, not God, and it was the South that made the declaration.” He fell silent for a while, examining his own conscience and finding it wanting. “I believed everything my father said back then. He told me America just needed a little bloodletting, like a doctor leeching a disease. One sharp battle and we would all learn the wisdom of peaceful negotiations. Now look at it!” He waved a hand out toward the storm and Julia dutifully stared across the valley to where a blue-white splinter of lightning silhouetted the tracery of ships’ rigging on the river and spilt white fire along the waterway. The rain drummed the earth and splashed off the ward’s roof and poured out of gutters and flooded in the run below the hospital. “We’re going to be punished,” Adam said.

  Julia remembered Starbuck’s bravado, quoting John Paul Jones’s fine defiance. “I thought we hadn’t begun to fight?” She echoed Starbuck’s words and rather surprised herself by her belligerence. She had never thought of herself as a supporter of the war party, but she was too engaged in the discussion to realize that she was using a political allegiance as a means of arguing about a personal relationship. “We can’t just admit defeat without fighting!” she insisted.

  “We’re going to be punished,” Adam said again. “We unleashed the evil, you see. I saw that today.” He fell silent and Julia, thinking he must have witnessed some appalling injury, did not probe, but then Adam offered a quite different explanation, saying how he had found himself blaming a slave for the war. “Don’t you see how war brings out the worst in all of us?” he asked her. “All the ropes that bind us to decency and to God are being cut away and we’re drifting on a rotten tide of anger.”

  Julia frowned. “You think the South deserves to lose because you were uncharitable to a slave?”

  “I think America is one country,” Adam said.

  “It sounds to me,” Julia said, doing her best to curb a rising anger, “that you’re fighting for the wrong side.”

  “Maybe I am.” Adam sai
d quietly, but not so quietly that Julia could not hear him over the seething rain.

  “Then you should go north,” Julia said coldly.

  “Should I?” Adam asked in an oddly meek voice, as if he really did want her advice.

  “You must surely fight for what you believe in,” Julia said bluntly.

  Adam nodded. “And you?” he asked.

  Julia remembered something Sally had said, something that had surprised her: that men, for all their boasts and show, were as weak as newborn kittens. “Me?” Julia asked as though she had not immediately understood what Adam was implying.

  “Would you abandon the South?”

  “Would you want me to?” Julia asked, and in truth it was an invitation for Adam to woo her and to declare that great love deserved extravagant gestures. Julia did not want love to be commonplace, she wanted it to hold the same life-changing mysteries as religion and to be as tempestuous as the storm that now racked its anger across the whole peninsula.

  “I would want you to do whatever your heart and soul tells you to do,” Adam said stiffly.

  “Then my heart tells me to stay in Virginia,” Julia responded just as coldly. “It tells me I should work here, in the hospital. Mother doesn’t approve, but I might have to insist. Would you object if I were to become a nurse?”

  “No,” Adam said, but without the slightest conviction. He seemed bereft, like a traveler marooned in a strange land, then he was saved from saying anything more because the door from the ward opened and the Reverend John Gordon peered anxiously onto the verandah.

  “I was fearing the two of you had been washed away,” Julia’s father said in as strong a reproof as he was capable of delivering. His wife would have protested at the impropriety of Adam and Julia being alone in the darkness, but the Reverend Mr. Gordon could not bring himself to discern anything sinful in their behavior.