Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  “We’re quite dry, Father,” Julia said, deliberately misconstruing her father’s gentle reprimand. “We were just watching the storm.”

  “The winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock,” the Reverend John Gordon quoted happily from Matthew’s gospel.

  “‘I came not to send peace,’” Julia quoted from the same gospel, “‘but a sword’”. She was looking at Adam as she spoke, but Adam was unaware of her gaze. He was staring across a dark void split by fire and remembering the scraps of white paper shred in a black ditch. That was a trail of treason that should bring northern victory, and in that victory’s blessed wake, peace. And surely, Adam told himself, in peace all would be made whole again.

  Tomorrow.

  The rain-soaked earth steamed in the morning sun. The attack should have been two hours old by now, it should already have ripped the heart from the Yankee lines and be driving the northerners back toward the White Oak Swamp, but nothing moved on the three roads that led from the rebel lines into the Yankee positions.

  General Johnston had planned to use the three roads like a trident. Hill’s division would advance in the center first, attacking down the Williamsburg Stage Road to assail the northern troops massed behind Fair Oaks Station. Johnston hoped that the Yankee infantry would then close on Hill’s advancing troops like swarming bees, only to be struck from the north by Longstreet’s division and from the south by Huger’s. All that was needed for Hill’s division to begin its attack was a message that Longstreet and Huger’s troops had advanced from their camps close to Richmond. Longstreet’s men should be on the Nine Mile Road, close to Old Tavern, while Huger’s division should be on the Charles City Road near White’s Tavern.

  Except both roads were empty. They were puddled deep by the night’s tempestuous rain, but otherwise deserted. The morning mists cleared away to reveal a waterlogged landscape rippled by a brisk cold wind that was strong enough to keep the Yankees’ two observation balloons grounded and to snatch at the smoke of the cooking fires that struggled to consume the rain-soaked wood. “Where the hell are they?” Johnston demanded, and sent his aides splashing through the soaked meadows and along the ominously empty roads in search of the missing divisions. “Find them, just find them!” he shouted. By now, according to his timetable, the attacks should already have broken through the Yankee lines and be driving a mass of panicked refugees toward the treacherous White Oak Swamp. Instead the Yankees were oblivious of their fate and the eastern horizon was misted with the smoke of their cooking fires.

  An aide came back from General Huger’s headquarters to say that he had discovered the General in bed, fast asleep.

  “He was what?” Johnston demanded.

  “Asleep, sir. All his staff were asleep too.”

  “After sunup?”

  The aide nodded. “Fast asleep, sir.”

  “Good God Almighty!” Johnston stared in disbelief at the aide. “Didn’t he get any orders?”

  The aide, a friend of Adam’s, hesitated as he looked for a way to spare his friend.

  “Well?” Johnston demanded angrily.

  “His chief of staff says not, sir,” the aide said, with an apologetic shrug in Adam’s direction.

  “Goddamn it!” Johnston snapped. “Morton!”

  “Sir?”

  “Who took Huger his orders?”

  “Major Faulconer did, sir, but I can assure you the orders were delivered. I’ve got the receipt with the General’s signature. Here, sir.” Colonel Morton produced the receipt and handed it to the General.

  Johnston glanced at the paper. “He did get the orders! Which means he just overslept?”

  “So it would seem, sir,” the aide who had woken General Huger answered.

  Johnston seemed to quiver with a suppressed fury that he was quite unable to express in words. “And where the hell is Longstreet?” he asked instead.

  “We’re still trying to find him, sir,” Colonel Morton reported. He had sent an aide to the Nine Mile Road, but the aide had disappeared as thoroughly as Longstreet’s division.

  “For the love of God!” Johnston shouted, “find me my goddamn army!”

  Adam had hoped to spread confusion by his destruction of Huger’s orders, but he could never have dared to hope that the confusion would have been so thoroughly compounded by General Longstreet, who had airily decided that he did not want to advance along the Nine Mile Road and instead had elected to use the Charles City Road instead. The decision meant that his division had to march clean through the encampments of General Huger’s troops. General Huger, rudely woken with orders that he should have been advancing eastward on the Charles City Road, discovered that it was choked solid with Longstreet’s troops. “Damn the paymaster,” Huger said and ordered breakfast.

  A half hour later the paymaster himself came to Huger’s headquarters. “Hope you don’t mind me using your road,” Longstreet said, “but my road was too wet for marching. Knee-deep in mud.”

  “You’ll take some coffee?” Huger suggested.

  “You’re damn cool, Huger, for a man facing battle,” Longstreet said, glancing at the generous plate of ham and eggs that had just been served to his fellow General.

  Huger knew nothing of any battle, but he was certainly not going to reveal his ignorance to a jumped-up paymaster. “So what are your orders today?” he asked, masking his growing alarm that he might have missed something important.

  “Same as yours, I imagine. March east till we find the Yankees, then attack. Is that fresh bread?”

  “Help yourself,” Huger said, wondering if the world had gone mad. “But I can’t advance if you’re on my road.”

  “I’ll step aside for you,” Longstreet offered generously. “I’ll get my fellows over the creek, then give them a rest while you march past us. Will that do?”

  “Why not have some ham and eggs too?” Huger asked. “I’m not sure I’m hungry.” He stood and shouted for his chief of staff. He had a division to move and a battle to fight. Good God, he thought, but these things had been arranged better in the old army! So much better.

  Back at the army’s headquarters General Johnston opened his watch for the hundredth time. The battle should have been four hours old and still not a shot had been fired. The wind rippled the puddles but did little to stir the day’s humidity. The muskets would choke up today, Johnston thought. A dry day meant that gunpowder burned clean while wet weather promised fouled rifle barrels and hard ramming for the men. “Where in God’s name are they?” he cried in frustration.

  General Hill’s division had been ready since daybreak. His men, sheltering in woods where great trees had been split apart by the night’s lightning strikes, clutched their rifles and waited for the signal to advance. The foremost ranks could see the Yankee picket posts at the far side of a damp clearing. Those guardposts were rough shelters made from felled branches behind which the northern pickets took what cover they could from the weather. Some of the enemy had hung coats and shirts to dry on their crude windbreaks. One Yankee, not suspecting that the woods across the clearing were crammed with an enemy waiting to attack, took a shovel and walked along the tree line. He waved toward the rebels, assuming that he was merely being observed by the same southern pickets with whom, just the day before, he had exchanged coffee for tobacco and a northern newspaper for a southern.

  General Hill opened his watch. “Any news?”

  “None, sir.” The general’s aides had ridden to White’s Tavern and Old Tavern and seen nothing.

  “Have you heard anything from Johnston?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “Goddamn it. This ain’t no way to win a war.” Hill rammed his watch into his coat pocket. “Give the signal!” he shouted at an artillery battery whose three spaced shots would be the agreed signal for the attack to begin.

  “You’ll advance unsupported?” an aide asked, aghast at the thought of the division taking on half the northern army without any
flanking reinforcements.

  “They’re only goddamn Yankees. Let’s see the bastards run. Fire the signal!”

  The dull, harsh, soulless sounds of the three signal shots broke the noontime peace. The first shot splintered through the far woods, scattering droplets and pine needles, the second skipped up from the wet meadow to smack into a tree trunk, while the third and last brought on the battle.

  “Johnston won’t attack,” James Starbuck assured his brother.

  “How do we know?”

  “McClellan knew him before the war. Knew him well, so he knows his mind,” James explained, oblivious of the irony that the United States Secret Service might be expected to discover a slightly more reliable indicator of enemy intentions than the mind-reading abilities of the commanding General. James reached for the plate of bacon and helped himself. He had always been a healthy eater, and though this was lunchtime and the cooks had provided him with a lavish plate of fried chicken, James had demanded that the bacon left over from breakfast be served as well. “Have some bacon,” he invited his brother.

  “I’ve eaten enough.” Starbuck was leafing through the enormous pile of newspapers that were brought to wherever the Secret Service had its field headquarters. This pile contained the Louisville Journal, the Charleston Mercury, the Cape Codman, the New York Times, the New York Herald, the Mississippian, the National Era, Harper’s Weekly, the Cincinnati Gazette, the Jacksonville Republican, the Philadelphia North American, and the Chicago Journal. “Does anyone read all these papers?” Starbuck asked.

  “I do. When there’s time. There never is enough time. We don’t have enough staff, that’s the trouble. Just look at that pile!” James looked up from the newspaper he was reading and gestured at the telegraph messages that needed decoding and that lay untranslated for lack of sufficient clerical help. “Maybe you could join us, Nate?” James now suggested. “The chief likes you.”

  “When I get back from Richmond, you mean?”

  “Why not?” James was delighted with the idea. “Sure you don’t want some bacon?”

  “Very sure.”

  “You take after Father,” James said, cutting a piece of newly baked bread and slathering it with butter, “whereas I’ve always been fleshy like mother.” He turned a page of the newspaper, then looked up as Pinkerton came into the room. “How’s the General?” James asked.

  “Sick,” Pinkerton said. He paused to steal a rasher of bacon from James’s plate. “But he’ll live. The doctors have wrapped him in flannel and are dosing him with quinine.” General McClellan had gone down with the Chickahominy fever and was alternately sweating and shivering in a commandeered bedroom. Pinkerton’s Secret Service had taken over a neighboring house, for the General never liked to be far from his best source of information. “But the General’s thinking clearly,” Pinkerton went on, “and he’s agreed it’s time you should go back.” He pointed what was left of his rasher of bacon at Starbuck.

  “Oh, dear God,” James said and glanced at his younger brother in consternation.

  “You don’t have to, Nate,” Pinkerton said, “not if you think it’s too dangerous.” He put the rest of the bacon into his mouth and went to the window to peer up at the sky. “Too damn windy for balloons. Never seen a storm like last night’s. Did you sleep?”

  “Yes,” Starbuck said, hiding the pulse of excitement that fluttered inside him. He had begun to suspect that he would never be given the list of questions and never get back to the southern side and never see Sally or her father again. In truth he was bored, and if he were honest he was most bored with the company of his brother. James was as good a soul as any that walked on earth, but he had no conversation beyond food, family, God, and McClellan. When Starbuck had first come to the Yankee lines he had feared his loyalties would be tested and his reverence for the Stars and Stripes would be resurrected so strongly that it would break his rebel allegiances, but the tedium of James’s company had served as a barrier to that renewal of patriotism.

  Besides, he had nurtured the image of himself as an outcast, and in the rebel army Starbuck had a reputation as a renegade, a daredevil, a rebel indeed, while in this bigger army with its tighter organization he could only ever be just another young man from Massachusetts who would forever be bounded by his family’s expectations. In the South, Starbuck thought, he himself defined what he wanted to be and the only limits to that ambition lay within himself, but in the North he would forever be Elial Starbuck’s son. “When?” he asked Pinkerton a little too eagerly.

  “Tonight, Nate?” Pinkerton suggested. “You’ll say you’ve been traveling.” Pinkerton and James had concocted a story to explain why Starbuck had stayed away from Richmond so long. The story claimed that Starbuck had recovered from his prison experience by traveling through the lower Confederacy where he had been delayed by bad weather and unpunctual trains. Pinkerton, like James, had no idea that such a story was unnecessary, that all Starbuck needed was the paper that Pinkerton now produced and that he would deliver to de’Ath, his powerful protector in Richmond. “Putting the General to bed at least made him concentrate on our business,” Pinkerton said happily, “so now you can take these questions to your friend.” McClellan’s questions, just like the false message that de’Ath had provided Starbuck, were sealed inside a sewn oilcloth pouch.

  Starbuck took the packet and thrust it into his pocket. He was wearing one of his brother’s cast-off Yankee coats, a voluminous double-breasted blue uniform jacket that hung from Starbuck’s lean body in great folds.

  “We need to know a lot more about Richmond’s defenses,” Pinkerton explained. “It’s going to become a siege, Nate. Our guns against their earthworks, and we want your friend to tell us which forts are the weakest.” Pinkerton looked back to James. “Is that bread fresh, Jimmy?”

  “Good God.” James ignored his chief’s question and instead stared wide-eyed at a newly secured copy of the Richmond Examiner that lay beside his plate. “Well, I never,” he added.

  “Bread, Jimmy?” Pinkerton tried again.

  “Henry de’Ath’s dead,” James said, oblivious of his chief’s hunger. “Well, I never.”

  “Who?” Pinkerton demanded.

  “Eighty years old, too! A good age for a bad man. Well, I never.”

  “Who in the name of hell are you talking about?” Pinkerton demanded.

  “Henry de’Ath,” James said. “That’s the end of an era, and no mistake.” He peered closely at the newspaper’s smudged ink. “They say he died in his sleep. What a rogue, what a rogue!”

  Starbuck felt a shiver pass through him, but he dared not betray his sudden worry. Maybe Henry de’Ath was not the man who had sent Starbuck across the lines, but some other man with the same surname. “What sort of rogue?” he asked.

  “He had the principles of a jackal,” James said, though not without a note of admiration. As a Christian he had to disapprove of de’Ath’s reputation, but as a lawyer he felt envy for the man’s effectiveness. “He was the only man Andrew Jackson refused to fight in a duel,” James went on, “probably because de’Ath had killed six men by then, maybe more. He was lethal with a sword or pistol. And lethal in a courtroom too. I remember Judge Shaw telling me that de’Ath had once boasted to him of knowingly sending at least a dozen innocent men to the scaffold. Shaw naturally protested, but de’Ath claimed that the tree of liberty was irrigated by blood and told Shaw not to be so particular whether the blood was innocent or guilty.” James shook his head in reproof at such wickedness. “He always claimed to be half French, but Shaw was certain he was a natural son of Thomas Jefferson.” James actually blushed at retelling this scrap of lawyers’ gossip. “I’m sure that wasn’t true,” he added hastily, “but the man attracted that kind of exaggeration. Now he’s gone to his final judgment. Jeff Davis will miss him.”

  “Why?” Pinkerton demanded.

  “They were thick as thieves, sir,” James said. “De’Ath was an eminence grise. Must have been one of Davis’s c
losest advisers.”

  “Then thank God the bastard’s cold in his bed,” Pinkerton said cheerfully. “Now is that bread fresh?”

  “It is, Chief,” James said, “very fresh.”

  “Carve me a piece, if you would. And I’ll thank you for a leg of chicken too. What I thought we’d do”—Pinkerton turned back to Starbuck when he had secured his luncheon—“is send you over the James River tonight. We’ll have to put you two or three hours’ walk from Petersburg and you’ll have to get yourself north from there. You think you can manage that?”

  “I’m sure of it, sir,” Starbuck said and was astonished that his voice sounded so normal, because inside he was consumed with a stomach-churning terror. De’Ath dead? Then who in Richmond would speak for Starbuck? Who in the Confederacy could guarantee that he was not a deserter? Starbuck shook suddenly. He could not go back! That realization flooded cold into his consciousness. Only de’Ath could vouch for him, and without de’Ath he was friendless in Richmond. Without de’Ath he appeared a double turncoat, doubly despicable, and without de’Ath he could surely never return to the South, let alone rejoin the Legion.

  “You’re looking nervous, Nate!” Pinkerton said robustly. “Are you worried about going back? Is that it?”

  “I shall be fine, sir,” Starbuck said.

  “I’m sure you will. All my best agents are nervous. Only fools don’t show a touch of nerves at the thought of going south.” The Scotsman turned in puzzlement as a rumble of gunfire sounded in the long distance. “Is that gunfire?” he asked, “or more thunder?” He crossed the room and opened a window wide. The unmistakable sound of gunfire rolled along the horizon, faded, then swelled again as another battery joined in. Pinkerton listened, then shrugged. “Maybe a gun crew exercising?”