Copperhead

by Bernard Cornwell

  Washington Faulconer felt his certainty crumble like a battle line shredding under cannon fire. He licked his lips. “What do you have to talk about?” he asked his son.

  “Please, Father!”

  “What’s going on?” Faulconer demanded. Swynyard was crouching at the tent flap, trying to listen. “What’s happening?” Faulconer appealed. “Tell me, Adam!”

  Adam, his face still pale and sickly, just shook his head. “Please, Father.”

  But Washington Faulconer was not ready to surrender yet. He put his hand back to his pistol and glared at Starbuck. “I’ve had enough,” he said. “I’m not standing here while you make our lives a misery again, so just get the hell away from us. Now!”

  “General?” Starbuck said in a tone so mild and respectful that it momentarily took Washington Faulconer aback.

  “What is it?” Faulconer asked suspiciously.

  Starbuck gave his enemy a glimmer of a smile. “All I’m asking of you, sir, is permission to rejoin the Legion. Nothing else, sir, that’s all I want.”

  “I’m calling the provosts,” General Faulconer said flatly and turned toward the tent’s entrance.

  “For whom?” Starbuck asked in a voice steely enough to check Washington Faulconer. “If I don’t talk to Adam now,” Starbuck went on remorselessly, “then I promise you that the name of Faulconer will go down in Virginia history alongside that of Benedict Arnold. I’ll drag your family through mud so deep that even the hogs won’t lie in your bedding. I’ll break your name, General, and a whole nation will spit on its fragments.”

  “Nate!” Adam appealed.

  “Faulconer and Arnold.” Starbuck rubbed the threat home, and as he named the traitor, he felt the elation of a gambler, the same high feeling that had soared through him at the moment when he had turned the Yankee flank at Ball’s Bluff. He had come here alone, armed only with a powerless shred of paper, and he was defeating a general surrounded by his own brigade. Starbuck could have laughed aloud for the arrogant success of this moment. He was a soldier, he was taking on a powerful enemy, and he was winning.

  “Come and talk!” Adam said to Starbuck, and he twisted away toward the tent’s entrance.

  “Adam?” his father called after him.

  “Soon, Father, soon. Nate and I have to talk first!” Adam said as he ducked out into the sunlight.

  Starbuck smiled. “Nice to be back in the Legion, General.”

  For a second Starbuck thought Washington Faulconer was going to unstrap the holster and pull out the revolver, but then the General turned and stalked out of the tent.

  Starbuck followed. The General and Swynyard were striding away, scattering the knot of spectators who had gathered to listen to the conversation inside the tent. Adam seized Starbuck’s arm. “Come,” he said.

  “You don’t want to talk here?”

  “We’ll walk,” Adam insisted, and he led Starbuck through the ring of bemused and silent officers. They crossed the field and climbed to the summit of a wooded knoll where redbuds and hornbeams grew. The redbuds were in blossom, cloudy pink and glorious. Adam stopped beside a fallen tree and turned to stare across the camp toward the distant city. “So how much do you know?” he asked Starbuck.

  “Most everything, I guess,” Starbuck said. He lit one of his cigars, then sat on the fallen trunk and watched the distant smoke trail of a locomotive. He guessed the train was hauling casualties to Richmond, more bodies for the sheds on Chimborazo Hill or the blossom-shaded graves at Hollywood.

  “I want the war to end, you see.” Adam broke the silence. “I’ve been wrong, Nate, all along. I should never have worn the uniform, ever. That was my mistake.” He was flustered, uncertain, maybe unnerved by Starbuck’s stillness. “I don’t believe in the war,” Adam went on defiantly. “I think it’s a sin.”

  “But not a sin shared equally by both sides?”

  “No,” Adam said. “The North is morally right. We’re wrong. You can see that, can’t you? Surely you can see that?”

  For answer Starbuck took the oilskin packet from his pocket and picked its stitches apart. As he plucked at the tightly sewn waxed cotton he told Adam how one of his letters had been intercepted when Webster was arrested, and how the authorities had suspected Starbuck of being its author, and how, once that ordeal had been endured, he had been sent across the lines to entrap the real traitor. “A very frightening man in Richmond sent me, Adam. He wanted to know who’d written that letter, but I knew it was you. Or I guessed it was you.” Starbuck took the tightly folded piece of paper out of its oilskin package. “I’m supposed to take this paper back to Richmond. It’s the proof they want. It names you as the spy.” The piece of paper did nothing of the sort; it was merely the list of questions that Pinkerton and McClellan had concocted before the General went down with the Chickahominy fever, but there was a circular impression of an inked rubber stamp on the bottom of the letter which read “Sealed by Order of the Chief of the Army of the Potomac’s Secret Service Bureau,” and Starbuck let Adam see that seal before he folded the letter into a neat square.

  Adam was too frightened to challenge Starbuck’s bald assertion that the paper was proof of his guilt. He had seen the seal, and he had seen the elaborate precautions taken to protect the paper from damp, and what he had seen was proof enough. He had no idea that it was all a bluff, that the paper failed to incriminate him and that Starbuck’s frightening man in Richmond was lying white-faced in a coffin. Starbuck, in truth, held a lousy hand of cards, but Adam felt too guilty to perceive that his friend was bluffing. “So what will you do?” Adam asked.

  “What I won’t do,” Starbuck said, “is go to the very frightening man in Richmond and give him this letter.” He placed the folded letter into his breast pocket beside the Bible. “What you can do,” Starbuck suggested to Adam, “is shoot me right now. Then you can take the letter and no one will ever know you were a traitor.”

  “I’m not a traitor!” Adam bridled. “My God, Nate, this was all one country just a year ago! You and I took our hats off to the same flag, we cheered each July the Fourth together, and we had tears in our eyes when they played the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ So how can I be a traitor if all that I’m doing is fighting for what I was brought up to love?”

  “Because if you had succeeded,” Starbuck said, “men who are your friends would have died.”

  “But fewer of them!” Adam shouted in protest. There were tears in his eyes as he looked away from Starbuck to gaze across the green land toward the spires and dark roofs of Richmond. “Don’t you understand, Nate? The longer the war goes on, the more deaths there’ll be?”

  “So you were going to end it, single-handed?”

  Adam heard the scorn. “I was going to do the right thing, Nate. Do you remember when you sought the right thing? When you prayed with me? When you read your Bible? When doing God’s will was more important than anything on this earth? What happened to you, for God’s sake?”

  Starbuck looked up at his angry friend. “I found a cause,” he said.

  “A cause!” Adam scoffed at the word. “The South? Dixie? You don’t even know the South! You haven’t traveled south of Rockett’s Landing in all your life! Have you seen the South Carolina rice fields? Have you seen the delta plantations?” Adam’s anger was eloquent and fierce. “You want a view of hell on earth, Nate Starbuck, then you take a journey to see what it is you’re defending. You go down the river, Nate, and hear the whips and see the blood and watch the children being raped! Then you come and tell me about your cause.”

  “So what’s your moral cause?” Starbuck tried to retrieve the upper hand in the argument. “You think by winning this war the North will make the slaves happy? You think they’ll be served better than the poor in northern factories? You’ve been to Massachusetts, Adam, you saw the factories in Lowell, is that your new Jerusalem?”

  Adam shook his head wearily. “America’s had these arguments a thousand times, Nate, and then we had an election a
nd we settled the argument at the ballot box, and it was the South that wouldn’t accept that decision.” He spread his hands as if to show that he did not want to hear any more of the old, pointless discussion. “My cause is to do what’s right, nothing else.”

  “And deceive your father?” Starbuck asked. “Do you remember last summer? In Faulconer County? You asked me how I could be scared of my father and not be scared of battle. So why don’t you tell your father what you believe?”

  “Because it would break his heart,” Adam said simply. He fell silent, gazing north to where a bend in the Chickahominy showed as a flash of light in the green landscape. “I thought, you see, that I could ride both horses, that I could serve my country and my state, and that if the war was over quickly then my father would never know I had betrayed the one for the other.” He paused. “And that might still happen. McClellan only has to push hard.”

  “McClellan can’t push. McClellan is a turkey cock, all strut and no puff. Besides, McClellan thinks we outnumber him. I saw to that.”

  Adam flinched at Starbuck’s tone, but said nothing for a long while. Then he sighed. “Did James betray me?”

  “No one betrayed you. I worked it out for myself.”

  “Clever Nate,” Adam said sadly. “Wrongheaded, clever Nate.”

  “What will your father do if he finds out you were betraying the South?” Starbuck asked.

  Adam looked down at him. “Are you going to tell him?” he asked. “You almost did already, so now you’ll tell him the rest, is that it?”

  Starbuck shook his head. “What I’m going to do, Adam, is walk down to those tents and I’m going to find Pecker Bird and I shall tell him that I’ve come back to be the Captain of K Company. That’s all I’m going to do, unless someone comes to kick me out of the Legion again, in which case I’ll go to Richmond and find a nasty, clever old man and let him deal with things instead of me.”

  Adam frowned at the implied threat. “Why?” he asked after a silence.

  “Because that’s what I’m good at. I’ve discovered I like being a soldier.”

  “In my father’s brigade? He hates you! Why don’t you go and join another regiment?”

  Starbuck did not answer for a moment. The truth was that he had no leverage to join another regiment, not as a captain anyway, because his scrap of paper was only useful as a weapon against the Faulconer family. But there was also a deeper truth. Starbuck was beginning to understand that war could not be approached halfheartedly. A man did not dabble with killing any more than a Christian could flirt with sin. War had to be embraced, celebrated, drunk deep, and only a handful of men survived that process, but that handful blazed across history as heroes. Washington Faulconer was no such man. Faulconer enjoyed the trappings of high military office, but he had no taste for war, and Starbuck suddenly saw very clearly that if he survived the bullets and shells, then he would one day lead this halfhearted brigade into battle. There would be a Starbuck Brigade, and God help the enemy when that day came. “Because you don’t run away from your enemies,” he finally answered his friend’s question.

  Adam shook his head pityingly. “Nate Starbuck,” he said bitterly, “in love with war and soldiering. Is it because you failed at everything else?”

  “This is where I belong.” Starbuck ignored Adam’s bitter question. “And you don’t. So what you’re going to do, Adam, is persuade your father to let me be the Captain of the Legion’s K Company. How you do it is up to you. You don’t have to tell him the truth.”

  “What else can I tell him?” Adam asked despairingly. “You’ve hinted enough.”

  “You and your father have a choice,” Starbuck said, “to do this privately or to have it all dragged out into the open. I think I know which your father would prefer.” He paused, then embellished his bluff with another lie. “And I’ll write to the old man in Richmond and tell him the spy is dead. I’ll say he was killed in battle yesterday. After all, you have finished your career as a spy, have you not?”

  Adam heard the sarcasm and winced. Then he glanced sharply at Starbuck. “I do have another choice, remember.”

  “You do?”

  Adam unbuttoned the flap that held the revolver in his holster and drew out the weapon. It was an expensive Whitney revolver with ivory sideplates on its handle and an engraved cylinder. He took out a small percussion cap and primed one of the loaded chambers.

  “For God’s sake don’t kill yourself,” Starbuck said in alarm.

  Adam turned the cylinder so that the loaded chamber was ready to be turned under the hammer. “I’ve sometimes thought of suicide, Nate,” he said in a mild voice. “In fact I’ve often thought how blessed it would be not to have to worry about doing the right thing, not to have to worry about Father, not to have to worry about whether Julia loves me, or whether I love her. Don’t you find life complicated? Oh, God in His heaven, but I find it so tangled, except in all the prayer, Nate, and in all the thinking of these last few weeks, I did find one certainty.” He gestured with the loaded revolver, sweeping the weapon around the whole wide horizon. “This is God’s country, Nate, and He put us here for His purpose, and that purpose was not to kill each other. I believe in the United States of America, not the Confederate States, and I believe God made the United States to be an example and a blessing to the world. So no, I’m not going to kill myself, because killing myself won’t bring the American millennium one day nearer, just as none of the battle deaths have brought it one day nearer.” He straightened his arm and lowered the gun’s barrel until it was pointing straight at Starbuck’s forehead. “But as you said, Nate, I could kill you and no one would be any the wiser.”

  Starbuck stared into the gun. He could see the pointed cones of the bullets in the lower chambers and he knew that one such bullet faced him down the dark muzzle. The weapon shook slightly in Adam’s hand as Starbuck looked up beyond the gun into his friend’s pale and earnest face.

  Adam cocked the revolver. The sound of the hammer engaging sounded very loud. “Do you remember when we used to talk at Yale?” Adam asked. “How we took pride in the fact that God made being virtuous so difficult? It was easy to be a sinner, and so hard to be a Christian. But you gave up trying to be a Christian, didn’t you, Nate?” The gun still shook, its muzzle catching and quivering the day’s last sunlight. “I remember when I met you, Nate,” Adam went on. “I used to worry so much about life’s hardships, about the difficulties of knowing God’s will, and then you came along and I thought nothing would ever be quite so hard again. I thought you and I would share the load. I thought we’d walk God’s path together. I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

  Starbuck said nothing.

  “What you’re asking of me,” Adam said, “is what you’re not strong enough to do yourself. You’re asking me to face my father and break his heart. I always thought you were the stronger of the two of us, but I was wrong, wasn’t I?” Adam seemed very close to tears.

  “If you had the courage,” Starbuck said, “you wouldn’t shoot me, but go fight for the Yankees.”

  “I don’t need your advice anymore,” Adam said. “I’ve had enough of your filthy advice to last me a lifetime, Nate.” Then he pulled the trigger.

  The gun crashed loud, but Adam had raised the barrel at the very last moment to fire into the tree above Starbuck’s head. The bullet smashed through a bunch of redbud blossoms to scatter the petals across Starbuck’s shoulders.

  Starbuck stood. “I’m going to the Legion. You know where to find me.”

  “Do you know what they call that tree?” Adam asked as Starbuck walked away.

  Starbuck turned and paused while he tried to find the trick in the question. He could find none. “A redbud, why?”

  “They call it the Judas tree, Nate. The Judas tree.”

  Starbuck looked into his friend’s face. “Good-bye, Adam,” he said.

  But there was no answer, and he walked down to the Legion alone.

  “You’ve heard the news?” Thadd
eus Bird said when Starbuck presented himself at his tent.

  “I’m back.”

  “So you are,” Bird said, as though Starbuck’s sudden appearance were entirely ordinary. “Does my brother-in-law know you’re under his command again?”

  “He’s finding out right now.” Starbuck had watched Adam walk to his father’s tent.

  “And you think the General will approve?” Bird asked dubiously. He had been writing a letter and now rested his pen on the edge of the dry goods box that served as his table.

  “I don’t think he’ll throw me out of the Legion.”

  “You are full of mystery, young Starbuck. Well, I’m sure Mr. Truslow will be pleased to see you. For some reason he seems to have regretted your absence.” Bird picked up the pen and dipped its nib in ink. “I assume you’ve heard the news?”

  “What news?”

  “We have a new army commander.”

  “We do?” Starbuck asked.

  “Robert E. Lee.” Bird gave a shrug as if to suggest that the news were hardly worth mentioning.

  “Ah.”

  “Exactly. Ah. It seems the President didn’t trust Smith to replace Johnston, so Granny Lee, our King of Spades, has got the job. Still, even the King of Spades cannot be any worse than Johnston, can he? Or maybe he can. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that Lee is slightly better than his reputation.”

  “McClellan thinks Lee lacks moral strength,” Starbuck said.

  “You know that for a fact, do you, young Starbuck?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. McClellan told me last week.”

  “Splendid, good, go away.” Bird waved imperiously.

  Starbuck paused. “It’s nice to be back, sir.”

  “Get an early night, Starbuck, we’re on picket duty from midnight. Major Hinton will have your orders.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And give Sergeant Truslow a dollar.”

  “A dollar, sir?”

  “Give him a dollar! That’s an order.” Bird paused. “I’m glad you’re back, Nate. Now go away.”

  “Yes, sir.” Starbuck walked through the lines, listening to the distant sad sound of a violin. Yet the sadness did not touch him, not now, for now he was back where he belonged. The copperhead was home.