Love and War

49

"Mounted men up ahead, sir."

Charles, seated on Sport beneath a dripping tree where they had halted to await the scout's report, drew a quick breath. There were six of them, returning from Stuart's headquarters on this third day of 1862: Charles; the lieutenant shipped in to replace Ambrose; the junior lieutenant, bland Julius Wanderly; two noncoms; and the scout, Lieutenant Abner Woolner, who had just ridden out of the white murk to utter those five words and set Charles's stomach churning.

He tugged down the scarf tied around the lower part of his face. The Virginia winter was proving cruel — snow, winds, drizzle. Though it was above freezing this morning, the cold somehow struck through all his layers of clothing. The time was a little after seven. Visibility was down to a few yards. The world consisted of muddy ground, the wet black pillars of tree trunks, and the fog, luminous because the sun shone above but could not penetrate.

"How many, Ab?" Charles asked.

"Couldn't see them in this soup, Cap, but I reckoned it to be at least a squad." The scout, a lanky man of thirty, wore cord trousers, covered with mud, a farmer's coat, and a crushed soft hat. He wiped his dripping nose before continuing. "Moving nice and quiet, right on the other side of the tracks."

The Orange & Alexandria. Charles's party had to cross the right of way on this return trip from Camp Qui Vive. "Which way are they headed?"

"Toward the Potomac."

Hope took a tumble. The direction almost certainly meant Yanks. Perhaps they had slipped through the lines to tear up stretches of track during the night. He was depressed by the possibility of a scrap, perhaps because it was the last thing he had expected.

Calbraith Butler had sent the detachment to Stuart's camp for three reasons. Two were military, one personal. The cavalry had run short of corn, and the major wanted the loan of some; he guessed that a request carried by an old friend of the brigadier — Stuart now had his promotion; Hampton was still awaiting his — might get more prompt and positive attention than a letter by courier.

The detachment stayed two nights, and Beauty, who seemed jollier than ever, thriving in the atmosphere of war, entertained Charles at the small house in Warrenton where he had installed his wife, Flora, and his son and daughter. Of course he could spare some corn for fellow cavalrymen in need; he had brought back a whole wagon train of fodder from Dranesville in the autumn, though not without a price. He had maneuvered too boldly, as was his wont sometimes. Pennsylvania infantry had ambushed and threatened him in a two-hour battle, in which the wagon train had almost been lost.

But it hadn't been after all, so wagons would quickly be on their way to Major Butler, compliments of Brigadier Stuart, who asked politely about the health of Colonel Hampton. From that, Charles knew nothing had changed; Stuart had a professional regard for the older officer, but no affection.

Calbraith Butler's second reason concerned the replacement for Ambrose Pell. The new man had come from Richmond two days before New Year's, having waited sixty days to be posted to the lines, so he said. Butler wanted to know how he would behave in the field. The day after his arrival, Butler spoke privately to Charles.

"He was foisted on us because he's somehow connected with Old Pete or his family" — Old Pete was Major General Longstreet, a South Carolinian by birth — "and, after I reported Pell missing, he showed up so fast I suspect someone was just waiting for an opportunity to get shed of him. I have talked with your new man no more than a half hour, but I received two strong impressions.

He's a dunce and a schemer. A bad combination, Charles. I suggest you be on your guard."

First Lieutenant Reinhard von Helm was a German from Charleston, eight or nine years older than Charles. He was a small, slim man, bald except for an encircling fringe of dark hair. His artificial teeth fit badly. Twice already, Charles had spied him standing alone in the open staring off to some private hell. Each time, he remained motionless for about half a minute, then bolted off like a rabbit.

Von Helm said he had given up a law practice to answer the call to arms. This, together with the names of noted Charlestonians he dropped into his conversation, greatly impressed Wanderly. The young lieutenant and von Helm became a chummy pair the first day they met.

On New Year's Day, an officer from another troop, Chester Moore, from Charleston, had invited Charles to his hut for a drop and the purveying of additional facts about Lieutenant von Helm.

"He was a lawyer, all right, but not much of a one. It was his father who had the successful practice, with three partners. He forced 'em to take sonny into the firm. Bad mistake. All the inherited money and high life ruined him. It does that to some. When he wrote a brief or was permitted to argue some unimportant case, he was usually drunk. The moment his father went to his grave, the partners showed von Helm the door. No other firm would touch him. That of your cousin's husband, Huntoon, rejected him in a trice. Only his money kept him from sinking out of sight. He's worthless, Charles. What's more, he knows it. Failures are often vindictive. Be careful."

The personal reason for the mission was Charles's own state of mind; gloom had possessed him ever since Christmas Eve, and Calbraith Butler recognized it. But the famed festivity of a Stuart encampment had done little to dispel this mood, even though Charles had been personally entertained by the brigadier, and he and his two lieutenants had received a cordial welcome at the officers' mess. Charles soon learned that the famed Black Horse, the Fourth Virginia, now rode horses of different colors.

The South Carolinians found innumerable visitors of the fair sex bustling around the camp at all hours; Stuart's frequent parties and his reputation for gaiety attracted them. One to whom Charles was introduced was Miss Belle Ames of Front Royal. In cold need of a woman, he arranged a rendezvous at a nearby country inn where Miss Ames was staying the night.

Miss Ames had forgotten to put away the certificate the prettiest visitors received. The certificates named them Honorary Aides-de-Camp to General Stuart, and each was authenticated by his signature and an impression of his signet ring in wax. After Charles and Miss Ames made love twice in a vigorous but essentially empty way, they found the certificate crumpled under her thin buttocks. He laughed, but she was vexed. Miss Ames never suspected her lover was astonished and disturbed because, right in the middle of things with her, he had seen a vision of Gus Barclay.

"Sir?" the scout said. "Want me to ride back and try to get a close look at 'em?"

"Why?" von Helm said, pushing his horse up beside theirs. "Can't be any boys but ours."

Charles felt tired, colder than ever. "Sure of that, are you, Lieutenant?"

Von Helm's oddly vacant eyes fixed somewhere beyond him. "Of course. Aren't you?" The question implied stupidity on Charles's part. "Best thing is to hail them, so they don't fire at us by mistake. I'll do it."

"Just a minute," Charles said, but von Helm was already spurring into the fog.

Second Lieutenant Wanderly beamed admiration. "Has a touch of the Stuart dash, doesn't he?"

Charles had no chance to express an uncomplimentary opinion. Von Helm's voice rang from the white murk hiding the tracks. Other voices, none Southern, answered the hail, overlapping-al­most too quickly for comprehension.

"Who goes there, a reb?"

"Sure he's a reb. Can't you tell?"

"Hey, how many nigger wives you got?"

Gunfire then. Charles yanked his shotgun up and didn't allow himself the luxury of even one curse. "Trot — march." He led, ducking, dodging, the fog and low-hanging branches dangerous impediments to speed.

Behind him, Wanderly let out a long yipping cry of excitement or released tension. A ball snipped off a twig that nicked Charles's eye and further hampered his vision. Ahead, von Helm's rifle boomed. Charles took a fearful risk in view of the fog and the terrain but felt compelled to do it to save the witless lieutenant.

"Gallop — haaaa!" In a fight, niceties of pronunciation disappeared.

Sport took the touch of spur and the knee pressure perfectly. Charles heard von Helm cursing, trying to reload, he assumed. Damn fool, he thought. Hampton would never fight this way, unsure of the enemy's strength —

He bent beneath branches flying past overhead. Glimpsed squirts of ruddy light in the fog. Heard explosions whose rapidity defied belief. Unless they had run into a much larger body of men than Woolner estimated, some Yank was shooting almost without pause.

He had broken his concentration, failed to see the fallen trunk of an immense elm directly ahead. Because of his speed and his position in the lead, it was too late to turn. The scout galloped behind him, reins in his teeth, a revolver in each hand. "Woolner, veer left!" he shouted. "There's a tree down ahead."

Charles and Sport were nearly on the obstacle. None of the pages in the tactics manual on leaping the ditch and the bar by trooper and by platoon would help; he had to rely on instinct and faith in the gray. He signaled by bunching his thighs and calves in tight, reining slightly.

Jesus, that trunk's five feet high —

Charles leaned forward as Sport readied to spring. He raised his buttocks off the saddle, and suddenly, up from the ground and away, man and animal sailed over, stirring the murk. At the top of the arc his heart nearly burst with love. He was riding the strongest, bravest horse on God's earth.

Down they came, striking, jarring Charles's teeth. Woolner's hurrah said the scout had heeded the warning and avoided the obstacle in time. Wanderly, a mediocre rider, reined in too fast before he reached the elm and shot forward over the head of his mount. The two noncoms, frightened, just galloped by, one passing each end of the log.

Riding hard, Charles saw the Yanks between Sport's laid-back ears. Three or four, off their horses, fired from behind the raised roadbed. Von Helm, likewise dismounted, had taken cover and alternately shot with rifle and revolver.

Whoever commanded the Yankees abruptly ordered them to mount and retreat. A ball whizzed past Charles's ear; a noncom following him cried out, slapped his other arm, and almost fell off before he caught the dropped reins again. The wounded man just hung on as his horse galloped away to the left oblique.

Charles searched the line of enemy soldiers, mounted now, for the source of the rapid firing. He found it; the single marksman was within range. He reined Sport to a trot and with the shotgun steadied discharged both barrels. The blast hurled the Yank backward. His eyes rolled up in his head, horrifyingly white, the instant before he dropped.

Woolner blew down two more Yanks and von Helm a third. The rest, their total number still a mystery, quickly vanished in the fog.

As the hoofbeats faded, von Helm stamped toward the track embankment, brandishing his rifle and shouting: "Go tell the Gorilla we ignore our nigger wives when there are Yanks to be whipped!"

"Whoo-ee!" the corporal cried approvingly. He slapped his kepi on his leg and doubled back to find his fallen comrade. Clearly the enlisted man was impressed with the Dutchman's bravado — even though his rashness could have gotten them all killed.

Charles slid from the saddle, laid the hot shotgun against a tree, and tried to fight away shivers of shock setting in as he realized how close he had come to a fatal spill. He should check on his wounded trooper; but he was distracted by a thought of the shoulder weapon fired with such speed; was distracted from that by the sight of von Helm turning his back and bobbing forward, like some drinking bird. Charles glimpsed a silver flash and something slipped back into a side pocket.

Turning to the rear, Charles shouted into the fog, "How's Loomis?"

"Just nicked, sir. I'm tying it up."

Charles walked toward the embankment. The fog was whiting out, thinning as the sun climbed. "Fortunate that we weren't really facing a platoon or a troop, though it sounded like it," he said to von Helm, who started moving forward at the same time he did, evidently with the same idea.

"But we weren't." The Dutchman sounded belligerent.

They found three Union cavalrymen dead and a fourth, a sergeant, groaning from a gory belly wound. They would have to take him back for treatment, but he wouldn't last long; stomach wounds usually proved fatal.

Woolner and the unhurt trooper came racing forward, ready to scavenge. The first time Charles had indulged in it, after a skirmish last fall, he had felt like a ghoul. Now, scarcely bothered at all, he went after anything that would help him fight harder or longer.

He stepped onto the crossties. The trooper knelt on the chest of one dead man, busily went through jacket and pants pockets. He found nothing except some tobacco and a pipe, and said, "Shit." Simultaneously, Charles saw what he wanted lying in dead yellow weeds beyond the embankment. Von Helm saw it, too, tried to hurry past his captain. Charles pivoted, nearly causing the lieutenant's shiny head to crash against his jaw.

"Mine," Charles said. "And one more thing. Next time, wait for my orders, or I'll have you up on charges."

Von Helm clenched his denture-filled jaws and wheeled away; Charles had already smelled the spirits. All the warnings were right. He had a bad one on his hands.

"Just proves what they say," the trooper complained, bending over the feet of the dead soldier. "Damn Yanks ain't worth nothing but a pair of shoes." He stripped off the right one, swearing when he saw the upper separated from the sole. He peered inside. "Lashbrook of Lynn. What's that mean?"

No one bothered to answer him. Calming a little, Charles slipped down the side of the embankment and retrieved the weapon from the weeds. The look of the piece was completely new. About four feet long, it had a mysterious aperture in the butt of the stock. It bore the maker's name on top of its receiver.

SPENCER REPEATING-RIFLE CO.

BOSTON, MASS.

PAT'D. MARCH 6, 1860

A memory door clicked open, showing Charles a paragraph from one of the many Washington papers read behind Southern lines. A specially commissioned corps of marksmen led by some famous New York sharpshooter had received or was to receive a new type of rapid-repeating rifle. Could he be holding one — perhaps stolen? The sharpshooters were still in Washington, so far as he knew.

Death had relaxed the bodies of the Yanks; the stench was ripening over the roadbed. But he refused to leave without the ammunition for the piece. He found the dead man who had fired it. Woolner had already carried off his shoes and pocket items but left behind three odd tubular magazines. Charles plucked one from the weeds where it lay beside a stiffening hand. He opened it and discovered seven rimfire copper cartridges, one behind the next. He now understood the function of the opening in the butt.

Woolner appeared. "That the piece that was bangin' away so fast? Never seen one like it."

"Let's hope we don't see many more. I recovered some of the ammunition. I want to fire it."

The sun broke through the fog in long shining shafts. They slung the wounded Yank across the back of Loomis's horse and, leaving the dead, proceeded on toward camp. Julius Wanderly had missed the brief action, so von Helm rode beside him, describing it.

The Yank's belly bled all over the horse. When they arrived in camp, Loomis reached around and touched the man — "Hey, Yank, wake up." — and found him dead. Loomis suddenly paled, fainted, and fell off his horse.

Exhausted and still a little shaken, Charles arranged for disposal of the Yank's body, dismissed the men, then saw to Sport: the unsaddling, rubbing down and brushing, feeding, and watering. In casual, slipshod fashion, von Helm put up his mount in a third of the time.

Finished at last, Charles patted the gray and went to the mess to fill his growling stomach. Von Helm had headed for the quarters he now shared with Charles. Their first few days as hut-mates had included little except remarks required by duty or politeness. Henceforth there would be even fewer exchanges if Charles had anything to do with it.

It was late in the day before he found Calbraith Butler and reported on the trackside fight. "It was a totally pointless action, in my opinion. One we should have avoided."

Butler leaned back in his camp chair, silhouetted against the sun now shining brightly outside. "You're not telling me everything. Ab Woolner's been by. He seconded your opinion, but he also described the way the detachment got into the muss. The Dutchman dragged you."

"First and last time, sir," Charles promised.

"I warned you," Butler said, not to reprimand but to sympathize. "Maybe I can get the little rodent transferred again. I must say he made quite an impression on Wanderly. Your second lieutenant is singing hosannas and comparing the new man to Stuart. He's telling everyone von Helm exemplifies Stuart's first axiom — gallop toward your enemy, trot away — and never mind that there may not be anyone left to trot after you gallop."

"I'll handle Lieutenant von Helm," Charles said, though with less confidence than his tone demonstrated. "Any further word from headquarters about Ambrose?"

"No, nothing again today. I honestly don't think we'll ever know what happened."

Unsmiling, Charles bobbed his head to agree. He then described the shoulder weapon he had confiscated. "I want to take it to the drill ground tomorrow and test it. It'll be no use to me later — there's no ammunition beyond those three tubes. Twenty-one rounds."

"I should like to be there for the test."

"I'll let you know when I go, sir." A weary salute, and he left his commanding officer, who stared at the fallen tent flap for some moments after Charles disappeared. Then Butler shook his head in a melancholy way and went back to work.

Still reluctant to rejoin von Helm in the hut, Charles trudged back to the horse shelters, to be sure Sport was properly blanketed and standing on the planks instead of the soggy ground. He rubbed his hand slowly over the gray's warm neck. He felt terrible, sorrowful and angry at the same time.

Well, that was the soldier's portion after almost any engagement. No one could explain why the reaction was so common, but experience had taught him that it was. To see Gus Barclay might pull him out of it. Even as the wish welled up, he reminded himself that it wasn't a wise one. War was no time for liaisons, except the sort he had had with Stuart's Honorary Aide-de-Camp.

About one variety of love he had no reservations. He flung his arm around the gray head of the animal who had saved his life and pulled it close. Sport nipped his other wrist, which was rubbing the gelding's muzzle. But the nip was careful, inflicting no pain. Nothing mattered then except that affection. One thing sure: he and this incredible horse must survive the strange slippage, impossible to understand but equally impossible to miss, that seemed to be taking place in his life.

The report went roaring away through the woodlands. The paper target pinned to the tree snapped in the pale afternoon light, hit dead center.

Charles levered the trigger guard downward, springing the spent cartridge from the breech. Lever up, cock the piece manually, fire. Lever down, up, cock, fire. Half a dozen men lounged about, watching. With each round, their jaws fell a little lower. Ab Woolner pulled at his crotch to loosen his underwear, muttering, "Sweet God."

Thickening smoke drifted upward. Calbraith Butler had been counting by tapping his silver-mounted riding whip against his leg. As the sound of the final round faded, the bottom part of the target fell away and fluttered to earth. Butler looked at Charles.

"I make it seven rounds in approximately thirteen seconds."

A couple of the watchers picked up the spent copper cartridges for souvenirs. Charles butted the piece on the cracked toe of his boot and nodded glumly. The heat of the blued barrel seeped through his gauntlet.

It was the scout who spoke for all of them: "Let's hope them Yanks don't get too many rifles like that. They could load 'em on Monday and shoot at us the rest of the week."

Charles trudged back to his hut, where he laid the repeater in the gun rack. Von Helm was absent — all to the good, given the renewed gloom that followed the test. Charles stored the two remaining tubes in his field trunk, recalling Cousin Cooper's warnings about the North's industrial superiority. Wasn't this new rifle more evidence of that superiority? Why the hell had no one listened?

Or was he the man out of step? The negative thinker? The cynic who couldn't subscribe to the belief that was widespread in the army — the absolute certainty that nerve and spirit would prevail over numbers and better weapons? That might be true occasionally. But every time?

He lit a vile cigar bought from the sutler at three times the fair price. Hanged if he knew who was right, the skeptic who haunted his head or all his braggy troopers who discovered great omens in week-old Yankee newspapers. Because McClellan had failed to move, certain Republicans were already calling for his replacement.

Encouraging rumors reached the camp from Norfolk, too. Some awesome new dreadnought was nearly off the ways. This Virginia was a rebuilt Union vessel, Merrimack, which the Yanks had tried to scuttle when they abandoned the navy yard. She had been raised and refitted with a sheathing of plate; an ironclad, they were calling her. Men spoke as if she might end the war by firing one or two salvos. The skeptic in Charles's head looked askance.

Next day's delivery of the mail brought a pleasing surprise, a package posted in Fredericksburg late in November. Inside it Charles found a small leather-bound book: An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope. On the flyleaf she had written:

To Captain Charles Main

= = At the Front = =

Christmas, 1861

She had signed herself A. Barclay and tucked in a separate card that read: I am very sorry I missed your visit and hope you will return soon. He could see her vividly in the lines and loops of her graceful hand.

Many soldiers carried small Testaments in their coats or shirt pockets. That gave Charles an idea. He scrounged a piece of soft leather and with his sewing kit fashioned a small bag with a draw­string. He added a longer thong to slip over his head and put the little volume in the bag. He carried it beneath his shirt against the flat of his chest. It felt good there.

The gift buoyed him for several days, even given the presence of von Helm. The Dutchman bustled in and out of the hut with barely a word, though he seldom lost that demented glint in his eye. One evening, when Charles had a stomach complaint and didn't feel like attending a performance of Box and Cox being presented by some camp thespians, his first sergeant unexpectedly called on him.

"What brings you here, Reynolds?"

"Sir, it's just —" the man blushed — "I feel it's my duty to speak to you."

"Go ahead."

"It's Lieutenant Wanderly and Private Cramm, sir. Those two are spending a lot of their own money at the sutler's, treating the other boys. They're, uh, campaigning."

"For what?"

The sergeant answered first with a huge gulp. "For Lieutenant von Helm."

Tired, his middle hurting, Charles was cross. "I still don't understand. Goddamn it, man, say it plainly."

Peterkin Reynolds gave him a miserable look. "They want to elect him captain, sir."

An hour later, von Helm returned, trailing fumes of bourbon. "Missed a fine show this evening. Those actors —" His brown eyes grew vacant, then surprised, as he perceived the condition of the hut. "What's happened here? Where are my things?"

"I had them moved." Charles lay in his bunk, speaking around the smoldering cigar stub jammed between his teeth. "To the hut of your campaign manager."

"My —?" Von Helm blinked. "Oh." Somehow, Charles's eyes didn't intimidate him; perhaps he was too drunk. His mouth tucked up at the corners as if pulled on puppet strings. "Very well. Good evening, Captain." He left.

Charles yanked the cigar from his mouth and indulged in a string of oaths whose fervor concealed his sense of tired defeat. He was still in his twenties and felt twice that. He stood for a while, feeling the book in the pouch under his shirt. At least the battle lines were clear now. Captain Main against the posturing schemer from Charleston.

He remembered something, went outside, and pulled and pried until the small sign came loose. He threw it into the fireplace and watched the flames slowly consume Gentlemen's Rest. The words might be appropriate to some other army, but they no longer fit this one.

50

Stanley knocked and entered the secretary's office in a state of nerves. He was sure he had been accused and would be demoted or dismissed.

He was astonished to find the boss in a sunny mood, stepping around the office inspecting boxes and barrels packed with personal files and mementos. Cameron's cheeks had a pink sheen, left by a fresh shave; he smelled of lavender water. His desk was bare, which was unprecedented.

"Stanley, my boy, sit down. I'm clearing out in a hurry, but I wanted a chat with you before I leave." He waved the younger man to a seat while he took his regular place behind the desk.

Trembling, Stanley lowered his heavy body to the chair. "I was shocked when I heard the news of your resignation last Saturday, sir."

Cameron put the tips of his thumbs together and touched his index fingers above them, creating a triangle through which he peered at his visitor. "Even in this building, it can be Simon again — or Boss. I'm not particular. The one thing that won't fit any more is Mr. Secretary."

"That's a tragic loss for the war effort, sir."

The lame remarks brought a tight smile to Cameron's mouth. He snickered. "Oh, yes, any number of contract holders will say so. But a loyal fellow goes where his superiors think he can do best. Russia's a mighty long way from home, but I'll tell you the truth, Stanley — I won't miss the hurly-burly and backbiting of this town."

A lie, Stanley thought; the boss had bitten with the best. But all the departmental irregularities had finally forced Lincoln to act, although Cameron was allowed the face-saving fiction that becoming United States minister to Russia was a promotion.

"I imagine you'll get along with the new man," Cameron continued in a relaxed way. "He won't be as loose as I've been. He's a champion of the colored people" — Cameron's brief fling as an apostle of abolition had been forgotten by virtually everyone, including himself — "and pretty hard on those who don't come up to expectations. Now you take me — I was more inclined to overlook a mistake or a slight." The smile hardened ever so little. "Or an act of will. Yes, sir, you'll have to toe the mark for the next occupant of this office."

Stanley gnawed his bottom lip. "Sir, I'm in the dark. I don't even know the name of the new secretary."

"Oh, you don't?" Up flew the white brows. "I thought Senator Wade would have confided in you. If he didn't, I spose you'll just have to wait for the public announcement."

And there he left it, while Stanley twisted on the hook Cameron had snagged into him. Surprisingly, the older man laughed before he went on.

"I don't blame you too much, Stanley. I'd have done the same thing in your position. You turned out to be an apt pupil. Learned how to apply each and every lesson I taught you. 'Course, now I look back and reflect that maybe I taught you one too many."

The smile spread, infected with a jolly malice. "Well, my lad, let me give you one final bit of advice before we shake hands and part. Sell as many pieces of footwear as you can, for as much as you can, for as long as you can. And save the money. You'll need it, because in this town someone is always waiting. Someone who wants to sell you out. Someone who will sell you out."

Stanley felt he might have a heart seizure. Cameron sprang around the desk, clasped Stanley's hand so hard it hurt, then said, "You must excuse me now," and turned his back. Stanley left him rummaging cheerfully among the packed ruins of his empire.

The next night, George came home with news for Constance. "It's Stanton."

"But he's a Democrat!"

"He's also a zealot who can please the radicals. Those who favor him call him a patriot. If you're on the other side, the descriptions include dogmatic and devious. They say he's willing to gain his ends by any means. And likely to use the suspension of habeas corpus — I mean use it widely. I wouldn't want to be a dissenting newspaper editor or an advocate of a soft peace and come to Mr. Stanton's attention. He may be Lincoln's appointee, but he's the creature of Wade and that crowd" A bemused smile softened his severity. "Did you know Stanton once tried a case involving McCormick's reaper, and Lincoln went along as a junior counsel? Stanton snubbed him as a bumpkin. Incredible how people change. This lunatic world, too —" "Not you and I," she said, kissing him gently.

General McClellan recovered from his severe case of typhoid but remained the victim of another disease, for which all but his fiercest partisans excoriated him. Lincoln called the malady the slows. Under increasing internal and external pressures, the President issued Special War Order Number 1 on the last day of January. The order commanded the general-in-chief to get the Army of the Potomac moving toward Manassas by February 22, no later.

The February issue of the Atlantic printed new verses for "John Brown's Body" written by Mrs. Howe; George and his wife and son sang the stirring "Battle Hymn" while Patricia played. The song fit the new, more aggressive mood of the capital. The figure of Stanton, small and fierce, was being widely seen at all hours in the buildings on President's Park. George observed him several times in the Ordnance Department but had no reason to speak with him.

From the Western theater came a burst of news so glorious it produced mobs and drunken jubilation outside the newspaper offices, where long sheets summarizing the latest telegraphic dispatches hung. A combined river and land offensive had brought the surrender of Fort Henry, a key rebel bastion on the Tennessee, just below the Kentucky border.

Ten days later, Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland, fell. Both victories were theoretically the work of the departmental commander, General Halleck. But the man given the hero's wreath by the correspondents was an Academy graduate who had been out of George's thoughts a long time. As a West Point first classman, Sam Grant had once taken Orry's part when Elkanah Bent was deviling him.

Sam Grant. Astonishing. He and George had drunk together in cantinas after the Mexico City campaign. A likable officer and brave enough. But a soldier without the stamp of brilliance that was now on Tom Jackson, for example. The last George had heard, Grant had failed in the army out West and resigned because of problems with drinking.

Now here he was, just promoted from brigadier to major general of volunteers and nicknamed "Unconditional Surrender" because, when answering a request for terms from Donelson's commander, he said he would accept nothing less. I propose to move immediately upon your works, he wrote Buckner — and then he did it, breaking the Confederacy's hold on western Kentucky, western Tennessee, and the upper Mississippi. The South reeled, the North rejoiced, and Grant's name became known to every schoolboy whose parents read a paper.

Offsetting this, bad rumors continued to seep from the Executive Mansion. The President suffered from depression so profound some said it bordered on insanity. He roamed sleeplessly at night or lay motionless for hours, to rise and tell of queer prophetic dreams. The Washington gossip chefs, whom Constance said must be nearly as many as the uniformed men in town, had a variety of tidbits to offer, something for every political or emotional palate. Lincoln was going mad on behalf of the Union. Mary Lincoln, who acknowledged a lot of rebel relatives in Kentucky and the Confederate Army, was a spy. Twelve-year-old Willie Lincoln was fighting typhoid. That turned out to be true; the boy died two days before McClellan was to take Manassas.

McClellan did not; the army stayed put. And Lincoln did not show up at any of the official observances of Washington's birth­day, although the armies on both sides celebrated the holiday, as was the custom before the war.

Billy paid a surprise visit one night. The brothers fell to exchanging complaints over whiskey before supper.

Billy: "What the devil's wrong with Mac? He was supposed to save the Union — week before last, wasn't it?"

George: "How should I know what's wrong? I'm nothing but a glorified clerk. All I hear is street talk. You should know more than I; he's your commander."

"He's your classmate."

"What a sarcasm. You sound like a Republican."

"Staunch."

"Well," George said, "all I hear is this. Little Mac outnumbers the enemy two or three to one, yet he keeps asking for postponements and reinforcements. Otherwise, he says, he can't be certain of success — which, he then repeats in the next breath, is guaranteed once he does move. God knows what goes on inside his head. Tell me about your new men."

"They've had nearly seven weeks of training, but of course good work in training is no yardstick of performance in a fight. Last week the battalion built a big floating raft on the canal — the next best thing to a pontoon bridge, which we've yet to try. The President came down to watch. He did his best to show interest in the work, but looked worn out. Positively ancient. He —"

Both looked up as Constance came in, pale.

"There's an orderly from your battalion at the door."

Billy rushed from the room. George paced, trying to overhear the muted voices. His brother returned, settling his cap on his head. "We're ordered to camp to prepare for departure on the cars."

"Where are you going?"

"I don't know."

They embraced hastily. "Take care of yourself, Billy."

"I will. Maybe Mac's finally moving."

And out Billy went into the dark.

51

Charles knew it meant trouble when Calbraith Butler summoned him after tattoo and he found the colonel as well as the major waiting.

"Please sit if you wish, Charles," Hampton said after Charles presented himself formally. He found Hampton's sober tone ominous.

"No, thank you, sir."

Hampton continued. "I rode here because I wanted to speak to you personally. I am faced with a thorny situation in Major Butler's command."

Butler said, "Sir, I prefer the word nasty."

Hampton sighed. "I'll not deny the rightness of that."

Charles marveled at how fit the colonel looked in a winter that was ruining the health of much younger men. He noticed the colonel's sword — slimmer, not the one he usually wore. Could it be the one Joe Johnston had given him in token of friendship — and until the rank of brigadier could be offered in fact?

"There is no point wasting words, Charles. Major Butler is in receipt of a petition from members of your troop. They request a new election of officers."

His cheeks numbed suddenly. Once aware of the electioneering, he had tried to monitor it discreetly. Von Helm wanted the captaincy and had promised Julius Wanderly a promotion if he got it. Peterkin Reynolds remained deferential to Charles but had grown less friendly. Was he to be raised to second lieutenant?

"Signed by how many men, sir?" Charles asked.

Embarrassed, Butler said, "Over half the troop."

"God above." Charles managed a laugh. "I knew I wasn't well liked, but that downright makes me sound like a Yankee. I had no idea —"

"You are an exceptionally good officer —" Hampton began.

"I agree," Butler said.

"— but that isn't the same as being a popular one. As you know, Charles, the men are not entitled to hold new elections until their one-year enlistments come up for renewal. However, I thought I should advise you of how matters stood and ask —"

This time he interrupted Hampton. "Let them go ahead. Tomorrow — I don't care." He did but hid it, standing rigidly straight.

Frowning, Butler asked, "But what if you lose?"

"Begging the major's pardon—why do you state it that way? You know I'll lose. The number of signatures on the petition guarantees it. I still say let them hold the election. I'll find some other way to serve."

The senior officers exchanged looks. Charles realized this had been planned with some care, and not solely to administer bad medicine.

Hampton spoke quietly: "I appreciate the spirit in which you said that, Charles. I appreciate all the qualities that make you a fine officer. Your bravery is beyond dispute. You have a father's concern for your men. I suspect it's your discipline that precipitated this, since so many in the legion still fancy themselves Carolina gentlemen, rather than soldiers awaiting the sanguinary pleasure of General McClellan. Also, your Academy training may have worked against you."

It hadn't worked against Stuart or Jackson or a score of others, Charles reflected with bitterness. But it was stupid to blame anyone else for his own shortcomings.

Hampton's voice rose emphatically. "I do not want you lost to this command. Nor does Major Butler. Therefore, if you don't care to campaign against your, ah, opponent —"

"I wouldn't waste a minute on that stupid Dutchman!" Charles caught his breath. "I'm sorry, sir." Hampton waved the apology aside.

"We have another arrangement to propose," Butler said. "You're a loner, Charles, but that can be valuable. Would you consider leading Abner Woolner and a few more of my best men in a squad of scouts?"

Hampton leaned forward, half his face in darkness. "It's the most necessary and most dangerous of all mounted duty. A scout is constantly at hazard. Only the best can handle the job."

Charles pondered, but not long. "I'll accept on one condition. Before I start, I'd like a short furlough."

That brought another frown from the major. "But the whole army's moving, or soon will be."

"To the rear, I'm told. To the Rapidan and the Rappahannock. The lady lives near the Rappahannock. Fredericksburg. I can rejoin the legion quickly if necessary."

Hampton smiled. "Request granted. Do you concur, Major Butler?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then," said Charles, "I accept duty as a scout. With pleasure."

Even though the rejection hurt, and would for a long time, he felt, at the same time, set free. He was happy. Did a manumitted black man experience similar feelings, he wondered as he walked back to his hut at a brisk pace, whistling.

His military passport, countersigned in Richmond, noted his age, height, complexion, hair and eye color, and stated that he had permission to travel to the vicinity of Fredericksburg, subject to the discretion of the military authorities. If that discretion had somehow proved an obstacle, Charles would have put the spurs to Sport, jumped over the authorities, and taken his chances.

As he crossed the miles to Spotsylvania County, first through rainstorms, then a cold snap that whitely crisped the dead fields and bare trees, his eagerness to reach Barclay's Farm increased, together with anxiety that he would find her gone again. At last he saw the sturdy stone house and wooden barns and outbuildings on the north side of the narrow road.

"And smoke coming out of the chimney," he yelled to the gelding.

It was a fine farm, well maintained despite the war. From the appearance of the fields, he judged that her property spread on both sides of the road. The main house had a look of great age and strength, fortresslike behind a pair of ninety-foot red oaks that must have sprung up wild, hunting the sun they needed. Since the house was old, the trees had probably been saplings when it was built. Now they had grown and spread until their thick limbs hung over the wooden roof shakes and touched the front dormers of an upstairs floor or attic. Wonderful trees, made for climbing and making him wish he was a boy again.

As he reined in, in the dooryard, he heard a squeak and whine. Away to his right he glimpsed a jet of sparks in the dark interior of an outbuilding. He dismounted, and the pedals of the grinding wheel stopped squeaking. A Negro of about twenty emerged from the building. He wore heavy plow shoes, old pants, a mended shirt. He had both hands on the curved scythe he had been sharpening.

"Something we can do for you, sir?"

"This man's all right, Boz."

The new voice belonged to another Negro, older, moon-faced, with few teeth; he appeared from behind the house, a sack of henhouse feed over his shoulder. Charles had met him in Richmond the night of the ball.

"How are you, Captain?" the older black asked. "You look like you rode through eighty acres of mud."

"I did. Is she home, Washington?"

He let out a kind of hee-hee laugh. "Indeed she is. It's early for a social call, but don't you mind that — she's always up before daylight. Probably frying our morning ham right now." Washington jerked his head to the right. "Back door's quicker."

Charles walked past him and up the wooden stoop, spurs jingling. "Put the captain's horse in the barn, Boz," the older freed-man said to the younger. Charles knew he should look after Sport himself, but all he wanted to do was rap on the door, hoping he didn't appear or smell filthy. He could scarcely believe his own excited state.

The door opened. Gus gasped, and a flour-white hand flew to her chin. "Charles Main. It is you?"

"So my passport says."

"You confused me for a moment. The new beard —"

"Is it all right?"

"I'll get used to it."

He grinned. "Well, it's warm, anyway."

"Are you on your way somewhere?"

"I didn't realize the beard was that repulsive."

"Stop that and answer me." She had liked his retort.

"I am responding, ma'am, to your kind invitation to visit. May I come in?"

"Yes, yes — certainly. I apologize for making you stand in the cold."

Her old cotton dress, much laundered and nearly bleached of its yellow dye, still became her. She looked a trifle sleepy, yet pleased and excited. He noticed a button missing in the row rising over the swell of her breast and saw flesh in a momentary gap. He felt faintly wicked and fine.

She had been stirring batter. She laid the spoon aside and put her fist against her hip. "One question before we get down to visiting in earnest. Are you going to insist on calling me by that wretched name?"

"Most probably. This is wartime. We all have to put up with a few unpleasantries."

He had tried to mimic her tart style. She picked that up and smiled again. "I shall make a patriotic effort. Breakfast will be ready shortly. There's plenty. I'll heat some water if you want to wash first."

"I'd better, or your house will look like a mudhole."

She surprised him by grasping his left sleeve. "Let me look at you. Are you all right? I hear there may be heavy fighting soon. You've survived the winter so far — so many men haven't, they say." She responded to his reaction with an annoyed shake of her head. "Are you laughing at me?"

"No, ma'am. But I counted about half a dozen statements and questions whizzing by. Which shall I take first?"

She blushed, or so he thought. It was hard to be sure because only the fire in the great stone hearth illuminated the room, and the day was dark.

The kitchen was huge, peg-floored and furnished with tables, chairs, a work block on thick legs. All were simply but well designed, with an appearance of strength that matched the house. Like Ambrose, Barclay must have been a good woodworker, Charles thought with a jealous twinge.

"First?" she repeated, lifting and turning pieces of frying ham in a black iron skillet. "This. How are you? I didn't hear from you. I was worried."

"Didn't I ever tell you I'm a bad letter writer? I especially lack the nerve to write someone as well educated as you. Another thing — the army mails are slow as glue. Your gift arrived late. I thank you for remembering me."

"How could I not?" Then, hastily averting her head: "At Christmas."

"The book's handsome."

"But you haven't read it."

"No time yet."

"That's a hedge, if I ever heard one. How long can you stay?"

Underneath the lightness of the question he believed he heard something different, unexpected, vastly pleasing. "Until tomorrow morning, if it won't compromise you. I can sleep in the barn with my horse."

Hand on hip again: "With whom would it compromise me, Captain? Washington? Bosworth? They're both discreet, tolerant men. I have a spare room with a bed and no neighbors closer than a mile."

"All right, but I still have reason to worry about you. There's liable to be fighting around here, and you're—"

A soft clunk. He glanced down. A lump of mud had dislodged from his pants and lay on the floor. Sheepish, he picked it up. She waved the spoon.

"Off with those things, then we'll eat and talk. Go into my room — straight down there. I'll send one of the men with water for the tub and a nightshirt that belonged to Barclay. Some of his things are stored in the attic. Leave your uniform in the hall, and I'll brush it up." Through all this urging, she prodded him with the spoon, determined as any sergeant drilling a recruit. A last prod — "Now scat." He left, laughing.

Gus Barclay's mere presence drew him out of the dank inner places where he had dwelled of late. He sank into hot water in the zinc tub and scrubbed himself with a cake of homemade soap, having first removed the thong from around his neck and laid the leather bag where it couldn't get wet.

He put on the nightshirt and returned to the kitchen, where she filled him with plain, hearty food. The freedmen ate, too. They regularly took their meals in the kitchen, she explained. "Though they always come and go by the back door. Some of my neighbors — fine religious folk, church every Sunday — would probably burn me out if they saw black men crossing my threshold at all hours. Washington and Boz and I talked it over, and we decided we could all stand a bit of injury to our pride if that's the price of keeping the roof over our heads."

The freedmen smiled and agreed. The two of them and Gus were a family, Charles realized; one into which he was immediately welcomed.

After he dressed in his cleaned-up clothes, she showed off her fields and buildings in a leisurely ramble on foot. The frost melted, the temperature rose, bare earth oozed moisture and scents of a coming spring. They spoke of many things. Of Richmond, where she had sold produce from the farm twice in the fall. "It was my impression that every person in that city is engaged in swindling every person in some fashion."

Of his disillusionment with the army. "Staff officers are a pretty busy lot. I calculate they spend fifty percent of their time politicking, fifty percent fiddling with pieces of paper, and fifty percent fighting."

"That's a hundred and fifty percent."

"That's why there hasn't been much fighting."

Of her uncle, Brigadier Jack Duncan. She wished she knew his whereabouts so that she could write him. Unofficial couriers — smugglers — could carry almost anything across Confederate and Union lines, using a combination of forged passports and bribes.

Then, without prompting, she spoke of things past. "I wanted a child, and so did Barclay. But I became pregnant only once, and then only with extreme difficulty."

They were strolling along a lane bordering a small apple orchard. The lowering sun threw a web of branch shadows down upon them. She was bundled in an old hip-length coat, a coat for chores, and had crossed her arms over her breast and tucked her hands under her sleeves. She didn't look at him while she discussed the subject of childbearing, but otherwise there was no sign of embarrassment. Nor did he feel any.

"I was sick almost constantly for the first four and a half months. Then one night I lost the child spontaneously. I would have had a fine son if he'd lived. I may be able to quote Pope, but I'm not as good at simple things as the old cow in the barn who keeps us in milk and calves."

She made a joke of it, but she kept her head down, kicking at stalks of long grass beside the lane.

For the evening meal she spit-roasted a round red roast of beef. Washington said he and Boz had chores and so would not be able to join the others for supper. Gus accepted the fiction without question. She and Charles ate by the light of the kitchen hearth — one of the best meals he had ever tasted. Thick slices of browned potatoes grown on her land. Hot corn bread unlike the army's; no wiggling visitors revealed themselves when he broke a piece in half. And the juicy, tender beef, free of the stink of brine and the Commissary Department.

She brought a jug of rum to the table and poured a cup for each of them.

He shared more of his thoughts about the war. "Independence is a fine, laudable quality in a man. But an army that wants to win can't accommodate it."

"Seems to me the government is caught in the same dilemma, Charles. And suffering. Each state puts its own wishes and welfare ahead of every other consideration. The principle we're fighting for may turn out to be what destroys us. But here — we're getting too gloomy. Will you have some more rum? Tell me about your command."

"Shrunk considerably since we danced in Richmond." He mentioned the petition and his reassignment to Butler's scouts.

Solemnly, her blue eyes fixed on his. "I've read about the duties of scouts. Very dangerous."

"But less trying than leading men who want to go fifty ways at once. I'll be all right. I value my horse and my hide — in that order."

"My, you're in a good mood."

"It's the company, Gus."

"Odd —" A log broke in the hearth; fire and shadow moved sinuously over the walls, the stove, the handmade shelves holding her dishes. "I can almost listen to that name without cringing. As you say" — eyes on him again, briefly — "the company."

Each felt, then, the isolation of the house, the sex and rising emotion of the other. Charles brought his legs together under the table. She began to fuss with dishes, forks, spoons, clearing things. "You must be worn out — and you have a long ride tomorrow, don't you?"

"Yes and yes." He wanted to follow her as she moved away, sweep his arms around her, let only one bedroom in the dark house be occupied tonight. It wasn't propriety that prevented him, or fear that she would say no, though she certainly might. It was a self-spoken warning from the silences of his mind, one he had heard before. A warning about time and place and the circumstances that had brought them together.

He pushed away from the table. "I suppose I had better turn in." He did feel pleasantly tired, his muscles loose, his body warm, his heart content except in one regard. "It's been a wonderful day."

"Yes, it has. Good night, Charles."

Going to her, he leaned down and gently kissed her forehead. "Good night." He turned and walked to the spare bedroom.

He lay under the comforter an hour, reviling himself. I should have touched her. She wanted it. I saw it in her eyes. He flung the cover off. Strode to the door. Listened to the night house, the tiny creaks and shifts. Reached for the knob. Stopped with his fingers an inch from it. Swore and went back to bed.

He wakened with his heart beating fast and caution gripping him. He heard noise in the hall, sounds not normal for a house at rest. Light flashed under the door. Barefoot, in the borrowed nightshirt, he jerked the door open. Augusta Barclay stood in a listening attitude near the foot of the attic stairs. She wore a cotton flannel bed gown with an open throat, and had braided her yellow hair.

"What's wrong?" he said.

She hurried along the hall, an old percussion rifle in one hand, a lamp casting tilting shadows in the other. "I heard something outside." Saying this, she stopped close to him. He clearly saw her nipples raising the soft flannel. Restraint and good sense deserted him. He put his right hand on her breast and leaned down, inhaling the night warmth of her skin and hair.

She pressed to him, eyes closing, lips opening. Her tongue touched his. Then knocking began.

She pulled back. "What have you done to me, Charles Main?"

The knocking grew louder, overlaid by Washington's urgent voice. Charles fetched his revolver from the bedroom and ran after her to the back door, where he found the two freedmen, obviously upset.

"Powerful sorry to wake you in the middle of the night, Miz Barclay," Washington said. "But they's all sorts of commotion on the road." Charles heard it: axles creaking, hoofs clopping, men cursing and complaining.

Gus motioned with the rifle. "Come inside and close the door." She put down the lamp and cocked the weapon.

Charles strode through the dark to the parlor, crouched by the window, and returned presently with reassurance. "I saw the letters CSA on the canvas of two wagons. They're moving toward Fredericksburg. I don't think we'll be bothered."

Back in the parlor, standing side by side at the window but careful not to touch, Charles and Gus watched the train of heavy vehicles pass in bright moonlight. When they were gone and the bellowed complaints of the teamsters, too, Charles saw daylight glinting. There was no time to go back to bed, for any reason.

Washington and Boz said they were cold. Gus began brewing coffee. So the night and the visit ended. He left after breakfast. She walked to the road with him. Sport, well rested, was frisking, eager to be off.

She touched his gauntleted hand where it lay on his left leg. "Will you come again?"

"If I can. I want to."

"Soon?"

"General McClellan will have a lot to say about that."

"Charles, be careful."

"You, too."

She lifted his hand and pressed it to her lips, then stepped away. "You must come. I haven't felt so happy in years."

"Nor I," he said, and gigged Sport into the road the wagons had rutted with their wheels.

He waved as he spurred away, gazing over his shoulder at the dwindling figure against the backdrop of the stone house and the two red oaks. Impossible to deny his feelings any longer.

You'd better try. In wartime no man could make a promise to a woman with any certainty of keeping it.

He remembered the warmth of her bosom, her mouth, her hair, that exquisite touch of tongues before Washington knocked.

He mustn't become entangled.

He was entangled.

He wasn't falling in love —

It had already happened.

What the hell was he supposed to do now?

52

On the first Saturday in April, the mood in James Bulloch's Liverpool office was light as the spring air. Captain Bulloch had lately returned from a swift but uneventful dash through the blockade; at Savannah he had conferred with some of Mallory's men, though he had imparted no details to Cooper.

The office still basked in the success of its first project. On March 22 the screw steamer Oreto had slipped away from the Toxteth docks without crown interference; two of Consul Dudley's detectives had watched and cursed from the dockside, but that was all.

Bulloch had invented the name Oreto to confuse the authorities. While she was under construction at William Miller's, the yard had listed her as a Mediterranean merchantman, and when she cleared to sea her destination was shown as Palermo. In fact, it was Nassau. The British captain hired for the transatlantic run would there hand over command to Captain Maffitt of the Confederate Navy, for Oreto was far from a humble freighter. Her design and engineering followed standard plans for gunboats; two seven-inch rifles and half a dozen smoothbores were on their way to Nassau separately, on the bark Bahama. When Oreto was armed, she would be a formidable fighting ship.

How long this scheme to foil British law would work, no one could be sure. It must be long enough for their second vessel to be launched. Bulloch had said this when he and Cooper retired to their safest meeting place — Bulloch's parlor — a few nights after the captain's return.

A mail pouch just in from the Bahamas had brought an urgent message, he told Cooper. The second gunboat must be rushed to completion, because Lincoln's plan to bottle up the South was rapidly changing from a contemptible paper blockade to a real and damaging one as more and more Yankee warships went on line. Florida — that would be Oreto's name when she was commissioned — had a clearly defined mission: to capture or sink Northern merchant vessels, thus causing a steep rise in the cost of maritime insurance. Next, according to Confederate assumptions, Lincoln would hear howls from commercial shipowners and demands for increased protection. He would be forced to pull vessels from the blockade squadrons for this duty.

A second fast, armed raider could increase the pressure. They had such a ship nearing completion over at Laird's. Though resembling Oreto, she was superior in several respects. Bulloch's code name for her was Enrica. On the shipyard books she was Number 290 — the two hundred ninetieth keel laid down at Laird's, whose founder, old John, had moved into politics while sons William and John Junior looked after the enormous business that had grown from a small ironworks making boilers.

Work on Enrica must be speeded; that was the message Cooper had to deliver this spring Saturday. It was not as easy as it sounded, because neither he nor Bulloch nor anyone from the office dared step onto Laird property. Dudley had spies everywhere. If they saw Southerners at the yard, or even meeting openly with one of its owners, the Yankee minister, Adams, would press for an investigation and the game would be up. That was the reason the contract for Enrica had been negotiated in clandestine meetings at Number 1 Hamilton Square, Birkenhead, the residence of John Laird, Junior.

Cooper rather enjoyed the intrigue. Judith called it dangerous and his zest for it foolhardy. Well, perhaps, but it lent his days a sense of purpose and put an edge of excitement on them. As the hour for departure neared, he could feel a not unpleasant tingling on his palms.

The office remained unusually cheerful this balmy afternoon. Yesterday's pouch had brought several papers from home, including a Charleston Mercury for March 12. In it, Cooper read details of THE GREAT NAVAL BATTLE IN HAMPTON ROADS, as it was headlined. On March 9, a Confederate steamer plated with iron had exchanged fire with a strange-looking Union ship alternately referred to as an Ericsson Battery, after the inventor of her revolving turret, and Monitor.

Thrilled, Cooper read of the "sharp encounter" between Virginia and the Yankee ironclad; they had dueled with only thirty to forty yards of water separating them. The paper said Virginia had achieved a "signal victory." The naive writer failed to grasp the real significance of the meeting.

With a shiver up his spine, Cooper reread the piece, remembering Brunei, the great British engineer whose ship designs he had studied and attempted to duplicate in South Carolina. Brunei would have understood and seen what Cooper saw: the last rites of wood and sail; the accelerating ascendancy of steam-driven iron on the oceans and the continents as well. Brunei had predicted it years ago. It was an incredible time in which to live, a time of marvels amidst the perils.

He checked his pocket watch, collected his things, and started for the stair. Bulloch emerged from the partitioned space that formed his tiny office.

"Convey my regards to Judith."

"And mine to Harriott."

"I trust you'll have a restful Sabbath."

"I shall after I go to church."

"You have our donation?"

"Yes." Cooper tapped his tall hat. Looks and half-smiles during the exchange conveyed a second set of questions, responses, meanings. Two of the clerks in the office were new; one couldn't be perfectly sure of loyalties.

Going downstairs, he tipped his hat to Prioleau, the manager of Fraser, Trenholm, who was just returning to the building. Cooper crossed the shadowed cobbles of the court and hurried through the short tunnel beneath the offices fronting Rumford Place. He turned left as the bells of the Church of St. Nicholas rang the quarter hour. He would be able to make the 4:00 p.m. ferry easily.

At the corner he checked to the left, to the right, then to the rear. He saw no one suspicious among those hurrying or idling in the spring sunshine. He turned right toward the Mersey. The sun was sinking over the Wirral, and the span of water between the city and Birkenhead dazzled him with thousands of moving splinters of light. A freighter passed, outbound. He heard the faint ring of the ship's bell.

Cooper missed South Carolina now and then. But with Judith and the children and his job all here, he had concluded he was better off and probably happier in Liverpool. Except for Prioleau and two others at Fraser, Trenholm, no one in the city knew his history, hence no one remarked on the inconsistency of working for a cause in which he did not entirely believe. He himself couldn't adequately explain this dualism, in which one Cooper Main continued to loathe slavery, while another loved and served the South with a new, war-born fervency.

He wasn't even sure the Confederacy would survive. Recognition by the two most important European nations, Britain and France, was still a hope, nothing more, and little seemed to be happening militarily except for the stunning triumph at Hampton Roads. A prudent man, a man who wanted to retain his sanity, did as he was doing now: he concentrated on the task of the moment, not the dour issues beneath.

"England off’ring neutral sauce to goose as well as gander" — he softly sang the Southern doggerel put to the old tune as he proceeded across the landing stage from the ticket booth to the ferry — "was what made Yankee Doodle cross and did inflame his dander." Relaxed by the warm sunshine, he found a spot at the rail and leaned there, thinking of his wife and other pleasant subjects. The ferry, packed with families, shoppers, and workers whose offices closed early on Saturday, left the city stage at a minute past four, bound for the Woodside stage across the Mersey.

Cooper had succumbed to Liverpool as he had long ago succumbed to the charms of Charleston, though the two cities could not have been more unlike. Charleston was a pale lady who napped away the hot afternoon, Liverpool a freckled girl who poured the beer at a public house. But he had come to love the second as much as the first.

He loved the bustle of the port. Into the Mersey poured the commerce of the empire, and out of it went old ships freshly loaded and new ones freshly launched. He loved the banter of the seafaring men who came and went like the tides. Whether they were Liverpudlians or lascars from the East Indies or even would-be shipbuilders from the Carolinas, they spoke a common tongue and belonged to the same restless, frequently lonely brotherhood.

Cooper loved Liverpool's dark, square buildings, as solid as the good-humored people who inhabited them. He loved the comfortable town house he and Judith had found, directly across Abercromby Square from Prioleau's. He had even learned to eat black pudding, a local specialty, though he would assuredly never love that.

He did love the people, a fascinating, cross-grained lot, from the magnates who sent men sailing around the storm capes with a pen stroke to lesser mortals such as Mr. Lumm, his greengrocer, who had abruptly been made a childless widower at thirty-seven and never remarried because he had discovered the world's enormous population of willing women, a population unknown to him when he wed at fifteen.

Now seventy-four, Mr. Lumm continued to operate his shop a full six days each week and boasted to Cooper, man to man, of the enormous resources of his goolies. "Nuff ter popyoulate an ole country, assa fack." While still in his fifties, he had discovered that the secret of keeping his nudger in trim was to exercise it often, with any quim but a House of Commons. Cooper loved the roguish old fellow as much as he loved the white-haired vicar of the parish, who bred bull terriors, led wildlife walks in the Wirral, and took pains to visit the Mains at least once a week because he knew strangers in a foreign land lacked friends. The vicar strongly opposed slavery and the South, but on a personal basis that made no difference.

Of an evening, Cooper liked to stroll the Toxteth docks and gaze at the stars above the Mersey and the Wirral hills, and tell himself it was a good time, a good place, even if he was far from home. "Dirty old town," Mr. Lumm often said in a tone of great affection. Cooper understood perfectly.

His mind drifting and his eye on the panorama of docks and coaling floats on the Liverpool shore, he suddenly had a tight-drawn feeling. He turned, and saw the man for the first time.

About fifty, Cooper judged. Bulbous nose. A mustache of heroic proportions. Cheap suit, too heavy for the weather. Paper sack in one hand. The man stubbornly occupied one end of a bench overloaded with a thin woman and her five children. From the sack the man drew a leek. He bit the white bulb with great relish.

Chewing and chewing, the man gave Cooper a glance — not unfriendly, merely curious. But Cooper was by now experienced at spotting those who might be Dudley's thugs. He checked the width of the man's shoulders. Very possibly this was a new one.

He felt jittery as Birkenhead's yards and old, soot-black buildings rose ahead. The ferry bumped in, and Cooper was one of the first to get off, moving quickly but not at a pace to suggest panic. He wove through the rank of lounging hackmen and climbed the cobbled street to a lane tucked behind Hamilton Square. He darted in and, halfway down, turned around. He watched the mouth of the lane, but there was no sign of the man who ate leeks.

Relieved, he entered the public house, the Pig and Whistle, where the lane dead-ended.

As usual, only a few sailors and dockworkers were in the place at this hour. Cooper took a seat at a small, round table, and the landlord's gray-haired wife soon brought him a pint of ale without receiving an order. "Afternoon, Mr. Main. Evensong is delayed two hours."

"That late?" He couldn't suppress anxiety. "Why?"

"I know nothing about the reason, sir."

"All right, Maggie, thank you."

Damn. Two hours to kill. The man on the ferry and now this — was there trouble? Had Charles Francis Adams somehow convinced the crown to seize the 290? A flock of alarming fantasies flew around in his head and robbed the ale of its savor. He jumped when the bell over the door jangled. A bulky figure filled the rectangle of light.

The man with the sack of leeks came straight to his table. "Mr. Cooper Main, I believe?" A smarmy smile; a pudgy hand extended. "Marcellus Dorking. Private inquiry agent." He withdrew his hand. "Mind if I sit and have a word?"

What the devil was the game? Matt Maguire, Broderick — none of Dudley's other detectives operated this boldly. Heart hammering, Cooper said, "I don't know you."

Dorking slid onto the long seat beneath the window of dirty bottle glass. He laid the much-handled sack on the table, called for a gin, took a leek from the sack, and began to toy with it, his huge smile unwavering.

"But we know you, sir. Bulloch's chap — right, eh? No problem there. We admire a man of conscience."

"Who is we?"

"Why, the parties who requested me to approach you, sir." He bit the leek in half, masticating noisily. From the bar, a small man with coal-dusted hand complained about the stink. Dorking glared, then shone his smile on Cooper again. He ate as he spoke. "Parties discomforted by Captain Bulloch's interpretation of the Foreign Enlistment Act."

Cooper sensed he was in trouble, perhaps caught. Would he be searched? The message in his hat discovered? Unwise to put that sort of thing on paper, he realized belatedly, but no one in Bulloch's office was a professional spy.

Would he be arrested? Jailed? How would he notify Judith?

Dorking reached for another leek. "You're on the wrong side, sir. This nigger slavery stuff — m' wife's very strong against it. So 'm I."

"Does your conviction spring from your conscience or your pocketbook, Dorking?"

The man scowled. "I wouldn't joke, sir. You are a foreign national, involved in serious violations of the Enlistment Act. Oh, I know the dodge, sir — shipyards cannot arm and equip vessels of war for belligerents with whom Great Britain is at peace. But nothing in the act says it's illegal to build a ship here" — he waved the green stem near Cooper's nose — "and buy guns and powder and shells there" — the leek flew away as he extended his arm — "and bring 'em together three or more nautical miles from our coastline. Not illegal, but it is definitely a Jesuitical interpretation of our law, wouldn't you say, sir?"

Cooper stayed silent. Dorking leaned in again, intimidating. "Very Jesuitical indeed. In your case, however, it could be overlooked — even a small stipend paid — if my clients received one or two brief reports as to the purpose and status of a certain vessel sometimes identified as the 290 and sometimes as Enrica — Still sailing the same course, aren't we, sir?"

Pale with rage despite his fright, Cooper said, "You are offering me a bribe, is that it, Mr. Dorking?"

"No, no! Merely a little more financial security, sir. Just for a few helpful facts — such as an explanation of the odd behavior of some sailor boys lately seen on Canning Street. They were marching along with fife and drum, playing a tune called 'Dixie's Land.' The same sailor boys had been spotted at John Laird's not long before. Spotted inside the gate. Do I make myself clear? Now what does that say to you, Mr. Main?"

"It says they like the tune of 'Dixie's Land,' Mr. Dorking. What does it say to you?"

"That Laird's might be hiring a crew, sir. For the proving run of a new Confederate States war vessel, could it be?" The inquiry agent flung his half-eaten leek on the table, roaring at Maggie. "Where's my damn gin, woman?" He then gave Cooper time to observe his narrowed eyes and clenched teeth before he said, "I shall be candid with you, sir. There's more than a fee if you help us. There's assured safety for your wife and little ones."

Maggie had reached the table. Cooper snatched the glass from her hand and dashed the gin in Dorking's face. The man cursed, dripping and wiping. Cooper grabbed his throat with his left hand.

"If you touch my wife or my children, I'll find you and personally kill you."

"I'll fetch Percy," Maggie said, starting away. "Me husband. He weighs seventeen stone."

Hearing that, Dorking bolted to the door, pausing long enough to shout back, "Slave-owning nigger-beating bastard. We'll stop you." He shook the paper sack. "Rely on it!" Jangle went the bell, vibrating long after the door slammed.

"You all right, sir?" Maggie asked.

"Yes." Cooper swallowed; shock set in. He couldn't believe he had seized Dudley's man so violently. It was the threat against his family that had provoked him — without thought or hesitation. The Confederate banners could sink to oblivion, Jeff Davis and all the rest could die and go to glory — he wouldn't care so long as nothing harmed the three human beings he held dear.

The incident left him shaken, and not solely because of the personal aspect. It showed him the hour was growing later, the stakes larger, the mood more desperate on both sides of the table. He finished his ale and drank a second, and still felt church-sober; no relief there.

Shadows heavied in the lane, and finally it was time to leave for the Church of St. Mary, Birkenhead. The church was situated near the Mersey, practically next door to Laird's and the ship he had never seen. "Want Percy to tag after you for safety's sake?" Maggie whispered before he went out. He did, desperately, but he shook his head.

The walk to the church was tense. The narrow streets of the Birkenhead waterfront struck him as peculiarly empty for a fine early evening. He kept glancing behind but reached the church, a cruciform structure of Gothic design built early in the century, without incident.

A nondescript man stepped away from the side of the building. He offered an apology and brief explanation for the delay. Then, after both checked the surrounding area for possible observers once more and saw none, Cooper removed his hat and passed the folded message to the man, who walked quickly away, and that was all.

Cooper ran most of the way to the ferry stage but missed the boat by three minutes and had to wait an hour for the next. The terminal smelted of dust and sausages and the odors of a drunk snoring on the floor in a corner. The short trip in the gathering evening was far less sunny than the earlier, one. Cooper again leaned on the rail, seeing not the water or the city but the eyes and mustache and chomping teeth of Marcellus Dorking.

We'll stop you.

Into his mind there stole a question that, even a week ago, would have revolted him and brought derisive laughter. But now —

"Sir?"

"What's that?" He started, then showed embarrassment; the person who had stolen up behind him was a crewman.

"We've docked, sir. Everyone else has got off."

"Oh. Thank you."

And away he went, frowning in the spring dusk, silently repeating the question that was ludicrous no longer: Should I get a gun?

53

"Take the regiment, Colonel Bent."

Over and over, he heard the command in his head. Heard it despite the crashing of artillery in the cool Sunday air. Heard it despite the clatter of guns and limbers wildly wheeling up to defend the line. Heard it despite the hurt or frightened cries of the untrained Ohioans he was to rally and hold in position. Heard it despite all the hell-noise of this April morning.

"Take the regiment, Colonel Bent."

The division commander's eye had fallen on him at staff head­quarters near the little Shiloh Meeting House, an hour after the first faint firing and the return of the first patrols to confirm its dire meaning. Albert Sidney Johnston's army was out there to the southwest and had caught them by surprise.

Bent was in this spot because the division commander disliked him. The commander could have ordered a junior officer to lead the Ohio regiment when its colonel, lieutenant colonel, and adjutant were all reported killed. Instead, he sent a staff colonel — one to whom he had been curt and unpleasant since their first meeting.

Had any officer ever served in worse circumstances? The general was a besotted incompetent, the division commander a little martinet, who last fall had been prostrated by an attack of nerves brought on by fear of Albert Sidney Johnston. Bent was convinced William Tecumseh Sherman was a madman. Vindictive, too. "Take the regiment, Colonel Bent."

After that, Sherman said something that made Bent hate him as he had never hated anyone except Orry Main and George Hazard: "And don't let me hear of you standing behind a tree with your hand out, feeling for a furlough. I know about you and your Washington connections."

Those connections had rescued Elkanah Bent. Or so he thought till this Sabbath morning. The day he boarded the westbound train with Elmsdale, he wrote and posted a polite, apologetic letter — a last appeal — to lawyer Dills. When he arrived in Kentucky, he found new orders, reassigning him from line command to staff duty with Anderson.

Then commands were shuffled, as they were endlessly shuffled. Anderson left, replaced by Sherman, whose brother was an influential Ohio senator. Had the little madman somehow gotten wind of wire-pulling? Bent didn't know, but he knew the division commander had been waiting for an opportunity to punish him.

Squinting into the smoke, Bent saw his fears made visible: a new assault wave forming down there in the woods. Hardee's men, a dirty rabble, many in shabby butternut-dyed uniforms. At the summit of the gentle slope the rebs would climb, Bent's green Ohioans lay behind trees or clumps of weeds. The Federals had been caught over their breakfast fires, no entrenching done, because General Grant had neglected to order any. Brains Halleck had good reason for distrusting Grant.

Trembling, Bent saw the rebel charge beginning. "Hold your positions, boys," he called, forcing himself to step clear of a thick oak and raise his field glasses. He wanted to crouch behind the tree and cover his head.

The first gray wave commenced firing. Bent winced and jumped back to the protection of the tree. The butternut rabble began to utter wild yells, the yells that had become a staple of Confederate charges, though no one quite knew when or why. To Bent they sounded like the howling of mad dogs.

He heard balls buzzing all around. To his left, a kneeling soldier stood suddenly, as if lifted under the arms. A slice of his right cheek sailed away behind him, then he toppled backward as the ball entered his brain.

On they came, up the hill in a wide line, the bank ranks firing when the men in front knelt to load and fire a second time from that position. Then the whole line swept forward again, bayonets fixed, officers screaming as loudly as enlisted men.

The rebs were within fifty yards, butternut and gray; beards and tatters; huge fierce eyes and huge open mouths. Shell bursts speckled the blue sky; smoke bannered from the treetops; the earth shook, and Bent heard an even louder scream.

"Oh, no, my God — no."

The first rebs reached the Ohioans, who had never fought a battle — seen the elephant — until this morning. Clumsily, they fended off the stabbing bayonets of the attackers. Bent saw one length of steel bury in a blue coat and pierce through the other side, red. The scream sounded again.

"Oh, God, not"

With his saber he beat at the back of an Ohio soldier. He whacked and he flailed, lumbering through long grass, right on the heels of the fleeing private. The rebs were pouring along the hilltop, the Ohioans breaking and scattering, their position over­run. Bent beat at the private's blue coat until the man stumbled and dropped. Bent sped past, fleet now despite his bulk.

He threw away his field glasses and his sword. Hundreds were running through the trees in the direction of Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. Regiment after regiment was crumbling. He had to save himself even if every other soldier in the command perished; he was worth all of them combined.

Those who had fled ahead of him had already trampled out a path. Following it made Bent's progress easier until he caught up with someone blocking the path — a tiny soldier, limping and holding tight to the blue-enameled rim of a drum. Bent reached for the narrow shoulders of the drummer boy, caught hold, flung the boy to one side, but not before he saw the glare the youngster gave him, scared and scathing at the same time. The boy lost his balance and pitched to the ground beside the path. Bent ran on.

His panic grew worse as he plunged through thicker trees and across a creek. He heard a shell whining in. He leaped to a tree, flung his arms around it, closed his eyes, and buried his face. The instant before everything blew up, he realized who had screamed "Oh, God, no" just before the line broke.

He was the one who had screamed.

He awoke, pelted with rain. In the first incoherent moments he imagined he was dead. Then he began to hear the cries in the dark. Moans. Sudden shrieks. Snuffling, he groped everywhere from his ankles to his groin to his throat, feeling for injuries. He was soaked, stiff, hideously sore. But whole. Whole. God above. He had survived the day.

Lightning flashed above budding tree limbs. As the thunder followed, he started to crawl. He bumped his head against a trunk, went around it, then through some vicious briars. The ground in front of him sloped downward. He thought he smelled water. Crawled faster.

Lightning again; thunder; and with it the constant chorus of the injured. Thousands must be lying in the meadows and woodlands round about Shiloh Meeting House. Who had won the battle? He didn't know or care.

His hands sank in mud. He reached out and plunged them into the water. His mouth was parched. He scooped water in both palms, drank, retched, and nearly threw up. What was wrong with the water?

Lightning glittered. He saw bodies bobbing. Red liquid trickled out of his cupped hands. He doubled over and gagged. Nothing came up. He was confused. I am in Mexico. This is Mexico.

He staggered up, crossed the little stream, gagging at each gentle bump of the floating dead against his legs. He ran through more trees, tripped over a rock, went down with a gasp. One outflung hand struck something, tightened on it, helped check his fall.

From the feel, he believed it to be a bayonet socket. Strings of hair in his eyes, he struggled to his knees. Lucky he hadn't grabbed the bayonet itself.

White light lit everything. The bayonet had pinned another drummer boy to the earth, through the neck. Bent screamed until he had no more strength.

He started on. The shocks piled one upon another began to have a reverse effect: mental clarity returned. He didn't want that. Better to be numb, unaware. It happened anyway, forcing him to examine the realities.

Though he had behaved exactly like the Ohioans — broken, and fled — his was the greater crime because he was in command. Worse, he had been among the first to bolt. He knew the Ohioans would spread the story. The stigma would ruin him. He couldn't let that happen.

Snorting, soaking his trousers with his own urine and not caring, he doubled back in the dark, searching the underbrush. He found the wrong body the first time — put his hand deep into a blown-open chest, a reb's this time, and shrieked. When he was able, he went on and located the little drummer.

I can't, he thought, gazing at the impaled throat in a flicker of lightning.

There's no other way to save yourself.

Sweating and panting, he grasped the bayonet and gently pulled, gently twisted, gently freed it from the boy's flesh. Then, bracing his back against a tree, he steadied himself and gathered his nerve.

Once more he turned his head to the side and shut his eyes. By feel, he placed the point of the bayonet against the front of his left thigh.

Then he pushed.

Both sides claimed victory at Shiloh. But Grant had conducted the offensive on the second day, and ultimately the Confederate Army retired to Corinth, with one of its great heroes, Albert Sidney Johnston, a fatality of the battle. Those facts said more than the declarations of either side.

In the hospital, Elkanah Bent learned that the behavior of the Ohioans was not an isolated instance. Thousands had run. Pieces of regiments had been found all along the bank of the Tennessee, lounging in safety and listening to the pound and roar of the Sunday battle that was a defeat until the Union turned it around on Monday and produced a victory.

None of that alleviated the threat confronting Bent, however. He was soon under investigation for his conduct while in command of the regiment. He grew expert at repeating his story. "I was indeed running, sir. To stop my men. To stop the rout."

To the question about the place where he had been found unconscious — a small tributary of Owl Creek, nearly a mile from the regiment's position — he would reply: "The reb I fought — the one who bayoneted me — caught me right near our original line. I was facing him, not running away. The location of my wound proves that. I have few recollections of what happened after he stabbed me, except that I cut him down, then ran to stop the rout."

The inquiry went all the way to Sherman, to whom he said, "I was running to stop my men. To stop the rout."

"The allegation of some witnesses," said the general coldly, "is that you were among the first to break."

"I did not break, sir. I was attempting to stop those who did. If you wish to convene a general court-martial, I will repeat those statements to that body — and to any witnesses called to accuse me. Let them step forward. The regiment to which you assigned me consisted of men never before in battle. Like many others at Shiloh, they ran. I ran to stop them. To stop the rout."

"God above, will you spare me, Colonel?" Cump Sherman said, and leaned over to spit on the ground beside his camp desk. "I don't want you in any command of mine."

"Does that mean you intend —?"

"You'll find out what it means when I'm ready for you to find out. Dismissed."

Bent saluted and hobbled out on his padded crutch.

His nerves hurt worse than his wound. What would the little madman do to punish him?

On the peninsula southeast of Richmond, McClellan was sparring with Joe Johnston with little result. In the Shenandoah, Stonewall Jackson was maneuvering brilliantly, whipping the Yankees and expunging some of the shame of Shiloh. Down the Mississippi, Admiral Farragut ran past Confederate batteries to New Orleans. Virtually unprotected, the city surrendered to him on April 25. Within a week — almost a month after his thorny meeting with Sherman — Bent was reassigned.

"Staff duty with the Army of the Gulf?" said Elmsdale when Bent told him the news during a chance meeting. "That's principally an army of occupation. A safe berth, but it won't do much for your career."

"Neither did this," Bent growled, pointing at his trouser leg. Some seepage from the dressing stained the fabric.

Elmsdale shook his hand and wished him well, but Bent saw a smugness in the colonel's eyes. Elmsdale had taken a shoulder wound at a section of the battlefield christened the Hornet's Nest; he had received a citation in general orders. Bent had been plunged into new ignominy, for which he held others responsible, everyone from Sherman, the little madman with the scrubby beard, to the drab, drunken architect of the Shiloh victory, Unconditional Surrender Grant.

Elkanah Bent felt his star was descending, and there was little he could do about it.

54

"Bring those wagons up," Billy yelled. "We need boats!"

In mud halfway to his boot tops, Lije Farmer bumped the younger man's arm. "Not so loud, my lad. There may be enemy pickets on the other side."

"They can't see me any better than I can see you. How wide is this benighted stream anyway?"

"The high command does not favor us with such information. Nor do they issue topographical maps. Just orders. We are to bridge Black Creek."

"Hell of a good name for it," Billy said, a scowl on his stubbled face.

The bridging train — pontoon wagons, balk, chess and side-rail wagons, tool wagons, and traveling forge — had labored along gummy roads as rain started at nightfall. It had slacked off a while but was now pouring down again, and the wind had risen. Billy surveyed the unfinished bridge by the light of three lanterns swaying on poles planted in the mud. It was risky to reveal their position that way, but light was necessary; the creek was deep, the water high and swift.

The bridge extended halfway across the broad creek. Pontoon boats spaced by twenty-seven-foot balks were anchored on the upstream side, and every other one by a second, downstream, anchor. Work parties were running out chesses and laying them on the balks while others placed and lashed the side rails where the cross planks were already down. It was rough work, made more difficult because the whole structure heaved under the push of a wind approaching gale force.

No one answered Billy's hail, nor could he see any more boat wagons in the darkness. "I suspect they are mired," Farmer said. "I suggest you go see. I'll handle matters here." He snugged his old musket down in the vee of his left elbow. The infantrymen detailed for this kind of duty were responsible for guarding the construction area. But those in the Battalion of Engineers, Army of the Potomac, had more confidence in themselves than in green­horns, and they seldom worked without a weapon. Billy's revolver rode in a holster with the flap tied down.

Covered with mud and growing numb, he slopped up the bank past a tool wagon. He was not certain of the date; the tenth of April, maybe. General McClellan's huge army, said to outnumber the combined Confederate forces of Joe Johnston and Prince John Magruder two to one, had come down by water to Fort Monroe at the low-lying tip of the peninsula between the York and James rivers. The embarkation began March 17, six days after Little Mac was stripped of his duties as general-in-chief. To explain the demotion, some cited his refusal to move against Manassas. Others merely mentioned the name Stanton; the generals now reported directly to him.

Though McClellan's command had been reduced to the Department and Army of the Potomac, he fought on for what he wanted: more artillery; more ammunition; McDowell's corps, which was being held to defend Washington. When the administration refused most of the demands, McClellan decided to besiege Magruder instead of attack him, a decision to which some, including Lije Farmer, had objected.

"What is wrong with him? They say he takes the number of enemy troops supplied by his Pinkerton spies and doubles it — but even then, our forces are superior. Of what is he so afraid?"

"Losing his reputation? Or the next presidential election maybe?" Billy said, not entirely in jest.

The campaign against Yorktown began April 4. The tasks of the Battalion of Engineers included corduroying roads and bridging creeks so men and siege artillery could advance toward Magruder's line, which stretched almost thirteen miles between Yorktown and the Warwick River. Scouts brought back reports of sighting many big guns in the enemy works.

The peninsula was a maze of unmapped roads and creeks. Movement in the maze became increasingly hard as rainy weather set in. But the engineers were prepared. When Billy left Washington so hastily that winter night, the battalion had been sent up the Potomac to test the training of their seven-week recruits. The successful test, construction of a complete pontoon bridge, had renewed the engineers' almost arrogant pride. Now Billy felt none of it. Nights sleeping in damp tents and eighteen-to twenty-hour stretches of work in ceaseless rain had beaten it out of him. He merely existed, pushing himself and his men through one minute, then the next, to complete one job in order to move to another.

He reached the line of pontoon wagons, stalled a good half mile above the bridge. Each wagon carried one long wooden boat and its gear: oars and oarlocks, anchors and boat hooks and line. As they had suspected, the problem was mud; the first wagon sat hub deep in it.

He surveyed the situation by the light of a teamster's lantern. He suggested unhitching the oxen, moving them forward, and running lines from their yoke over a thick overhanging limb and down again to the wagon to provide a lifting action. The lines were rigged, and the teamster hit his oxen with his quirt. Instead of pulling straight ahead, they headed away at the right oblique. The limb cracked ominously.

"Slack off!" Billy shouted, jumping to knock the teamster out of the way moments before the limb broke and dropped onto the prow of the boat, smashing it and snapping the wagon's front axle with its weight.

Furious with himself, Billy climbed from the mud. The wrecked wagon would prevent the others from coming up; there was no room to pass on the muddy road. "All right, you drivers — I'll send you some men, and we'll carry the boats to the launching site. We're behind schedule."

Away in the dark, some phantom shouted, "Whose fault is that?"

Billy scowled again. Someone else complained. "Carry them? From the last wagon that could be damn near a mile."

"I don't care if it's fifty," Billy said, and stormed back to Lije, full of self-disgust.

On the unfinished bridge, the weary infantrymen had fallen idle. Nothing more could be done until the next boat was floated down and pushed out twenty feet from the last one placed. "I need men to carry the boats, Lije. I tried to free the wagon that's stuck and wrecked it instead. No one can pass."

Standing with his musket in his arms, Farmer gave a majestic slow nod. "I saw. Don't take the guilt so deeply into your soul. There is not an engineer breathing who has not miscalculated in his time — and these are not the best of conditions for sharp thinking. Be thankful you lost a wagon and not a life."

The younger man stared at the older, thinking that when he and Brett raised children, he hoped they could counsel them as wisely and humanely as Farmer counseled those who served with him.

A musket flashed in the woods beyond the stream. On the bridge, a soldier yelled and grabbed his leg. He started to topple into the water, but others pulled him back. Simultaneously, Farmer grasped his musket by the barrel and clubbed the nearest lantern from its pole. Billy leaped for another as musketry and gibbering hoots and cries issued from the dark. They put all the lanterns out, retreated up the bank, and returned fire. In fifteen minutes the rebel sniping stopped. Fifteen minutes after that, Billy and Lije relit the lanterns and work resumed.

By half past two they had launched enough boats and laid enough balks and chesses to reach the opposite bank. Billy wrote a brief dispatch reporting completion of the bridge and sent it back to headquarters with a courier. Lije ordered a rest. The men slept in the open, finding the best available cover for themselves and their gunpowder. Troubling thoughts strayed through Billy's mind as he lay against a tree trunk, a soggy blanket over his legs. Water dripped on him. He sneezed for the fourth time.

"Lije? Did you hear what they said about the Shiloh casualties before we started out tonight?"

"I did," came the answer from the far side of the tree. "Each army is said to have lost a quarter of those engaged."

"It's unbelievable. This war's changing, Lije."

"And will continue."

"But where's it going?"

"To the eventual triumph of the just."

I am not too sure all of us will live to see that, Billy thought as he shut his eyes. His teeth chattered, and he started to shake. Somehow, though, he slept, sitting in the rain.

In the morning the engineers secured the last cables on the bridge, scouted the woods beyond for rebs and found them gone, and settled down to wait. They would be sent somewhere else soon enough.

Bivouacked one night near Yorktown, Charles said to Abner Woolner, "We've ridden together for a few weeks, but I still don't know much about you."

"Hardly a thing worth knowin', Charlie. I don't read good, I spell worse, and I can't cipher at all. Ain't married. Was once. She died. Her and the baby." The straightforward way he said it, devoid of self-pity, made Charles admire him.

"I farm up near the North Carolina line,"' the scout went on. "Small place. Right near where my grandpa fought the redcoats. King's Mountain."

"What do you think about this war?"

Ab pushed his tongue back and forth between front teeth and upper lip for a minute. "Might hurt your feelin's if I told you."

Charles laughed. "Why?"

" 'Cause I don't like you plantation nabobs and your godless high life down on the coast. You dragged us into this muss. There's a few of you who are all right, but not many."

"Do you own slaves, Ab?"

"No, sir. Never have, never would. I can't say I 'specially favor the black folk, though if you pressed me, I'd prob'ly say no man ought to be chained up against his will. I know some judge said Dred Scott and the rest of the darkies wasn't persons, but I know some who are fine persons, so I'm not sure how I feel about the nigra question that's a part of all this. I do know which folks I like. You. Major Butler. Hampton — I could tell he din't think I was enough of a gentleman to be in one of his regular troops when I signed up, but he didn't say that and make me feel bad. He just acted real happy that I'd scout for him. I'll take him over that flashy Jeb Stuart any day."

"So will I. Beauty's an old West Point classmate of mine, but I don't have the regard for him that I once did. I share your feelings about Hampton. About most of the planters, too, matter of fact."

Ab Woolner smiled. "I knew there was a reason I liked you, Charlie."

In his journal, Billy wrote:

When the Confederates pulled back from the Yorktown line early in May, the engineers were among the first into the empty fortifications. Billy raced to a gun emplacement, only to curse what he found. The great black fieldpiece jutting into the air was nothing more than a painted tree trunk with a dummy muzzle cut in one end. The emplacement contained five similar fakes.

"Quaker guns," he said, disgusted.

Lije Farmer's white beard, grown long, snapped in the May breeze. " "Thou has deceived me, and I was deceived. I am ill derision daily — every one mocketh me.' "

"Prince John's a master artillerist. Loves amateur theatricals, too. A deadly combination. I wonder if there are more of these?"

There were. Compounding the insult, a deserter said Magrudei had paraded a few units up and down at Yorktown to convinct the enemy that he was holding the line with many more than the thirteen thousand he had now withdrawn. While Magruder held his foes at bay with tricks and nerve, the main rebel army slipped away to better defense positions being secretly prepared farther up the peninsula. McClellan's huge guns, three weeks in the placing, were now trained on worthless targets. Little Mac's dallying had given Johnston a second advantage — additional time to summon reinforcements from the western part of the state.

"This blasted war may last a while." Billy said. "Our side may have more factories, but it strikes me the other side has more brains."

For that, Lije had no ready Scriptural reply.

In May, on the Pamunkey River, Billy wrote:

The May woods smelled of rain. Charles, Ab, and a third scout, named Doan, sat motionless on their horses, hidden by trees, watching the detachment pass on the country road: twelve Yankees in double file, moving at a walk from the direction of Tunstall's Station toward Bottom's Bridge on the Chickahominy. Johnston had withdrawn to the other side of the river. Pessimists in the army were given to observing that at several points the watery demarcation line was little more than ten miles from Richmond.

The three scouts had been on the Yankee side of the Chickahominy for two days, with inconclusive results. They had checked, the Richmond & York rail line for signs of traffic, found none, doubled back, and were heading for the low, boggy land near the river when they heard the Yanks approaching. The scouts immediately hid in the woods.

A yellow butterfly darted in and out of a shaft of sun a yard to Charles's left. He had his .44 Colt drawn and resting on his right thigh and his shotgun within reach. He wanted a fight far less than he wanted to know the identity of these Yanks and their purpose on this road.

"Mounted rifles?" he whispered, having seen that the pair of officers in the lead wore orange pompons on their hats.

"Not likely 'cept for them two shoulder straps," Ab answered. "If any of the rest of them boys has been on horses more than two hours in their whole lives, I'm Varina Davis."

Doan leaned close. "Who the devil are they, then? Their uniforms are so blasted dirty, you can't tell."

Charles stroked his beard, which now reached to an inch below his chin. He connected mud to riverbanks and riverbanks to his friend Billy. "Bet anything they're engineers."

"Might be," Ab said. "Doin' what, though? Scoutin' the swamps?"

"Yes. For bridges. Places to cross. This may be the first sign of an advance."

Sport shied. Charles steadied the gray with his knees as a far part of his mind noted a queer whispery sound on the ground. He didn't ponder its meaning because Doan was talking.

"Can we shoot 'em up a little, Cap?"

"I wouldn't mind, but I suspect it would be smarter to ride on to the next road. The sooner we're over the river with news of this, the better."

"Rattler," Ab whispered, louder than he should have. The snake tried to slither past the forehoofs of his horse. The horse lanced back and whinnied, long and loud.

"That's done it," Charles said. He heard halloos on the road; someone yelling orders. The snake, more frightened than any of them, disappeared. "Let's ride out of here."

Ab had trouble with his spooked mount. "Come on, Cyclone, damn you —" Accustomed to gunfire but not reptiles, the scout horse reared and nearly unseated its rider. Charles grabbed the headstall, the forehoofs crashed down, and Ab kept his seat. But seconds had been lost, and the horse's erratic behavior had placed it in one of the shafts of light falling through the trees. Two Yankees at the tail of the column spotted Ab and aimed shoulder weapons.

Charles pulled his shotgun, discharged both barrels, then fired his revolver three times with his right hand. As the fusillade faded, the Yanks skedaddled, shouting, "Take cover."

"Come on, boys," Charles cried, leading the way. The Yanks would likely go to ground in the roadside ditches, giving the scouts a margin of time. He spurred Sport through the trees, not away from the road, as he had first intended, but toward it, up the side of an imaginary triangle that should bring them out well ahead of the detachment.

After some hard riding, he burst onto the road, Ab a length behind, Doan bringing up the rear. A glance behind showed him two Yanks standing in the road. The rest were hidden.

Both Yanks fired at the scouts. A ball flipped the side brim of Charles's hat. Another few seconds and they were safely out of range of the enemy muskets. Charles shoved his revolver into the holster and concentrated on riding. The road serpentined through woods where swampy pools glittered.

Another quarter of a mile and the sheets of water were solid on both sides. The trees appeared to rise from a surface fouled by green scum and speckled by tiny insects. A mile or less should bring them to the crossing.

The road behind them erupted in a single jet of flame and a fountain of shrapnel. Ab was so unnerved, he nearly galloped off into the water. Charles reined around, saw a smoking hole and Doan dragging himself from under his fallen horse.

Round-eyed, Doan made choking sounds. The horse was finished. The buried columbiad shell triggered by a friction primer had hurled lethal fragments into the animal's shoulder, chest, and crest.

Doan struggled free of the left stirrup. His horse slid tail first into the hole. Doan walked in a little circle like a confused child. Hidden by the looping curves of the road, the Yanks could be heard coming at a gallop.

Charles began to sweat. He urged Sport to the edge of the hole, but the gray shied from the dying horse, shuddering down there and blowing out its breath in great sad gasps. "Get up," Charles said, reaching behind to slap Sport's croup. Doan's confusion continued. Ab excitedly fired a shot up the road, though no Yankees were in sight. Suddenly Doan began crying. "I can't leave him." "He's a goner, and Company Q is a better post than some Yankee stockade." The first blue horseman came around the bend. Charles seized Doan's collar. "Get up, damn it, or we'll all be caught." Doan managed to climb onto the gray and take hold of Charles's waist. Charles pulled Sport's head around, and they broke for the Chickahominy. Ab stepped his horse to one side to let the gray go by, then emptied his side arm at the oncoming horsemen. He had little chance of a hit, but the firing slowed the pursuers.

Even carrying double weight, Sport performed valiantly, leading the escape to the river. Charles could feel Doan trembling. Suddenly the scout yelled, "Goddamn savages."

"Who?"

"The Yanks who buried that infernal machine in the road."

"You'll have to blame Brigadier Rains or somebody else on our side. Before we pulled out of Yorktown, Rains planted those torpedoes all over the streets and docks. How we doing, Ab?" he called to the scout riding alongside.

"We're way ahead of them thimble merchants and ribbon clerks. Look yonder — there's the bridge."

The sight stopped the shouted discussion of the torpedo that had killed Doan's mount. General Longstreet called the devices inhuman and forbade their use. Lot of good that did. What shook Charles as they raced to Bottom's Bridge was realizing that the slain horse could just as easily have been Sport. A buried bomb didn't differentiate.

The gray hammered across the river bridge, hoofs pounding a rhythmic litany. Just as easily. Just as easily.

Jealousy had as much to do with it as politics, Billy later decided. He had been primed for a scrap when he walked into the sutler's tent that evening toward the close of May.

A dour nervousness had gripped the peninsular armies for days. The rebs were dug in beyond the Chickahominy, prepared to die for Richmond. On the Union side, instead of expectancy or a giddy sense that one fierce blow could end it, there was uncertainty. The high command suffered from it, and the leakage spread. Rumor simmered with fact in a stew of negativism. Jackson was humiliating the Union in the Shenandoah. McDowell, holding near Fredericksburg, might be diverted to meet that threat. Little Mac continued to insist he had not nearly enough men, though he had over a hundred thousand. He also insisted the hounds of Washington were tearing at him, led by the rabid Stanton.

Cliques had formed, holding and arguing each side. Little McNapoleon's detractors claimed that his cadre of senior officers, Porter and Burnside among them, would execute any command of the general's without question and would support and promote his policies and reputation in defiance of Washington and at the expense of a victory.

All of this, together with the normal weariness induced by long hours on duty, wore Billy away, as it wore away many others, and primed him for trouble.

The night he visited the sutler's, a junior officer was present whom he didn't know personally but nevertheless disliked. The young man, another Academy graduate, belonged to staff; Billy had seen him dogging behind Little Mac on horseback. The officer was pale as a girl and bore himself with the relaxed arrogance of a clubman. Even the fellow's uniform irritated Billy. In a season of mud, it was immaculate. So were the sparkling boots. With long, light-colored curls and a red scarf knotted around his throat, he resembled a circus performer more than a soldier.

Most galling to Billy, hunched there at one end of the plank counter with a dirty glass in hand, was the officer's attitude. He was three or four years younger than Billy and wore no shoulder straps at all because of his junior rank. But he behaved like a senior man.

A loud one.

"The general would win posthaste if it weren't for the abolitionist scoundrels in Washington. Why he tolerates them, I don't know. Even our revered President humiliates him. He dared to call the general a traitor last week. To his face!"

Billy drank; it was his second glass. The sutler piously proclaimed that he served only cider. That cider, however, was harder than a New Hampshireman's head. Even so, it was safer to drink than some of the misbegotten combinations — brown sugar, lamp oil, grain alcohol — purveyed as whiskey.

But the cider — the sutler's name for it was oil of gladness — wasn't very good on the gut or the disposition if you hadn't eaten since noon. Superintending a detail making gabions, a routine job of the battalion, Billy had somehow been too busy for food.

The officer paused to toss off a double glass of cider. He had a lithe build and knew how to hold the stage the way actors did. His little coterie, five other officers, captains and lieutenants, waited expectantly for him to resume and paid close attention when he did.

"Have you heard the latest outrage? The estimable Stanton is attacking the general's honor and questioning his bravery — behind his back, of course — while influencing the Original Gorilla to withhold the men we desperately need."

"Sounds like a conspiracy," another lieutenant muttered.

"Exactly. You know the reason for it, don't you? The general likes and respects the Southern people. So do many in this army. I do. The estimable Stanton, however, favors only a certain class of Southerners — those with dark complexions. He's like all the Republicans."

Billy whacked his glass on the counter. "But he's a Democrat."

The long-haired lieutenant parted his group like Moses parting the sea. "Did you address a comment to me, sir?"

Back off, Billy said to himself. For some reason he couldn't. Damn strange that he, no partisan of the colored people, was defending one who was.

"I did. I said Mr. Stanton is a Democrat, not a Republican."

A cold smile from the junior officer. "Since this is an informal meeting place, may I have the pleasure of knowing who is offering such valuable information?"

"First Lieutenant Hazard. Presently assigned to B Company, Battalion of Engineers."

"Second Lieutenant Custer, headquarters staff, at your service." There was no service or respect in it, only conceit and contempt. "You must be from the Academy, then. But a few years before my time. I was in the four-year bunch graduated last June. Last of the lowest — thirty-sixth among thirty-six." He seemed to relish that. His cronies snickered dutifully. "As to your statement, sir, it is only narrowly correct. Shall I set aside considerations of rank and tell you what Stanton really is?"

The young officer walked toward Billy. His hair smelled of cinnamon oil. Behind Custer, his coterie hung on each word. A mangy dog, yellow and muddy, trotted into the tent. There were scores of dogs in camp, pets and stray; this one went straight to Custer and rubbed against his boot. A dozen other officers at flimsy tables stopped their own conversations to listen to the second lieutenant.

"Stanton is a man so vile, a hypocrite so depraved, that if he had lived in the time of the Saviour, Judas would have been respectable by comparison."

Several of the eavesdropping officers reacted angrily. One started to stand, but his companion held him back. Only Billy, with alcohol boiling in his empty stomach, was irked enough, rash enough, to answer.

"That kind of talk doesn't belong in the army. There's too much politicking already."

"Too much? There isn't enough!" The coterie responded with nods and knuckles rapped on the plank.

Billy persisted. "No, Lieutenant Custer, it's winning we should worry about, not whether —" an example flashed into mind "— whether a singing group can or cannot perform in our camps." "Oh, you mean that damn Hutchinson Family?" "I do. My brother's in the War Department, and he wrote me that it was a bad decision. Trivial in the first place, and it offended some important cabinet members and congressmen who heard about it."

Over Custer's shoulder, a captain blustered, "Your brother's entrenched behind a War Department desk, is he? Brave fellow." Billy's self-control weakened. "He's a major in the Ordnance Department. The work he does is damned important."

"What is that work?" asked Custer with a droll smile. "Blacking Stanton's boots? Serving refreshments to Stanton's darky visitors?"

The captain said, "Kissing the secretary's fundament on demand?"

"Damn you," Billy said, and went for him.

Even Custer reacted with dismay. "Captain Rawlins, that goes a bit beyond —" Billy pushed Custer aside and flung a fist at the, captain, who was a head taller. It glanced off the man's chin. Others in the tent were up and shouting like cockfight spectators.

"Give the gentlemen room!"

"Not in here," the sutler protested, waving a billy. Everyone ignored him. The captain unfastened his collar, a loose grin pushing up his cheeks. Stupid of me, Billy said to himself as he clenched and unclenched his hands. Plain stupid.

Someone entered the tent and called his name. But he was focused on the captain sidling forward.

"I'll accommodate you, you little piece of Republican dung." His fist zoomed up, landing in the center of Billy's face while Billy was still raising his hands.

He spun away, fell across the counter, blood threads trickling from each nostril. The bigger man aimed another punch. Billy pushed upright, locked his hands, and struck the forearm of the fisted hand, diverting the blow. The captain drove a knee into Billy's crotch, and he went down on his back. Grinning, the captain raised his boot over Billy's face.

"There you are," the familiar voice said from behind the other men crowding in.

Custer exclaimed, "That's plenty, Rawlins. He may be a nigger Republican, but he deserves fair treatment."

"The hell you say." Down came the boot. Billy started to roll, knowing he was too slow.

Suddenly, mysteriously, Rawlins tilted backward. The boot intended to stomp Billy's face made funny, jerking motions in mid­air. Billy elbowed himself from the dirt, blinked, and saw the reason. Lije Farmer was holding the captain's shoulders, his face full of fury. He flung Billy's adversary. Captain Rawlins sat down so hard he squealed.

Lije pulled Billy to his feet. "Conduct yourself out of this iniquitous establishment." No one smiled. Given Lije's size and the way he let his eye rove around the ring of McClellanites, no one had the nerve. To Rawlins he said, "It would be foolish to invoke rank in this matter. If you try, I shall testify against you."

Billy took his kepi from the counter and walked out. A few steps from the tent, he heard Custer laugh again, joined by his friends and even by his barking dog.

Billy's bruised, bloody face felt hot. Lije touched his sleeve. " 'But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn on him the other also.'"

"Sorry, Lije, I couldn't do it. He hit low, then tried to mash my face with his boot. 'Course, it might have improved my looks — What do you think?"

Farmer neither smiled nor answered. Billy sobered and probed some tender spots. "Officers like that are tearing this army to pieces. I'd heard others say it, but I didn't believe it until tonight."

"It's to be expected. The general possesses a profound knowledge of the military arts, but he also possesses a profound and raging ambition. It can be read in his orders, heard in his orations to the troops, seen in the nature and demeanor of his staff."

"That curlylocks lieutenant is one of them."

"Yes. I have noticed him before. One cannot help it. He dresses to draw attention."

"I know I was a fool to fly off that way. But they made remarks about my brother George that I couldn't tolerate. I thank you for pulling that captain off me. One minute longer and there wouldn't have been much left of my face. Your timing was remarkable."

"It was not entirely coincidence. I have been searching for you. We are ordered to move out before daylight. Let the others fight the political wars. We've our own to wage, and it will keep us busy enough."

Thinking of the tangly forests through which they had hacked a path with axes, of the roads they had planked and the streams they had bridged, Billy said a heartfelt, "Yes. I still thank you, Lije." He felt the same warm regard for Farmer that he had felt for his late father. The older man bucked him up with a clap on the back, then fell to humming "Amazing Grace."

No wonder the atmosphere on the peninsula was poisoned, Billy thought. They were practically at the door of the Confederate capital, which was defended by inferior numbers, yet the campaign dragged on, indecisive and costly. Tonight he had run smack into one of the reasons. Billy feared that before the campaign ended, scores of men might be sacrificed needlessly because of the general's ambition and feelings of persecution. He would not care to be one of them.

55

By the last week in May, the end seemed near. Each morning Orry confronted that fact as he rose and drank the foul brew of parched corn the boardinghouse served in lieu of coffee. Since New Orleans fell, there wasn't even sugar to sweeten it.

Like everyone in Richmond, while he went about his daily routine Orry listened for resumption of the heavy artillery fire that shook windowpanes all over town. He was glad Madeline had so far been unable to join him; his mother was recovering too slowly. News of her seizure had struck him hard when he first read it in a letter. McClellan's guns had magically changed a sorrow to a blessing.

How ironic to recall that in February local papers had bragged about military success in the Southwest and the creation of the Confederate Territory of Arizona, whose boundaries not one person in a hundred thousand could define. Of what earthly use was a southwest bastion after Forts Henry and Donelson fell — and Orry's friend and superior, Benjamin, slid over to the State Department because someone had to be blamed. Benjamin had survived, but barely.

George Randolph replaced him. An earnest man, a Virginian with impeccable family background, an outstanding legal reputation, and recent military experience — he had commanded artillery under Magruder — Randolph held the War Department portfolio but could do little with it. By now everyone knew the real secretary of war lived in the President's mansion.

Island No. 10 had gone last month, a major weakening of control of the lower Mississippi. The Yankees had Norfolk, too; in desperation, the navy had sunk the already legendary Virginia to prevent her capture.

April had brought another, even more dire, indication of the Confederacy's plight. Davis approved a bill conscripting all white males from eighteen to thirty-five for three years. Orry knew it was a needed measure and grew angry when the President was cursed by street vagrants and state governors alike. Two of the latter said they would withhold as many men as they pleased for home defense, law or no law.

McClellan was close now, feinting toward the city. Though his strategic plan was not apparent, his mere presence plunged Richmond into a time of trial. Davis has already packed his family off to Raleigh. Jackson was still performing brilliantly in the valley, but that did little to mitigate Richmond's fear of the pincers that might snap shut from the peninsula and from the north at any moment.

The terror had become acute on a Thursday in mid-May. Five federal vessels, including Monitor, steamed up the James to Drewry's Bluff, within seven miles of the city. Winder's thugs dragged men off the street and out of saloons to build a temporary bridge to the fortified side of the James. The windows of Richmond rattled from cannonading that eventually drove the federal vessels away. But the city had whiffed the winds of defeat for a few hours, and no one could forget the smell.

After Drewry's Bluff, Orry had trouble sleeping more than an hour or two each night. With the crisis building, he questioned whether his duties were appropriate to a supposedly sane man. As a favor to Benjamin, he went to General Winder in search of a house servant who had disappeared while Winder's bullies were recruiting bridge builders at gunpoint. The provost marshal denied such tactics and shelved Orry's inquiry without answering it or bothering to hide his animosity, which was now deep and vicious. The two had quarreled at least once a month ever since Orry's arrival.

Refugees poured into the city on foot and in every conceivable kind of conveyance. They slept in Capitol Square or broke into the homes of those who had already left by train, carriage, or shank's mare. Orry heard that Ashton was one of those refusing to leave. It leavened his dislike of her, but not much.

Soldiers swelled the population, too. Wounded sent back from the Chickahominy lines; deserters who had shot or stabbed themselves — who could say which were which? Specters in torn gray, they walked or limped everywhere, thin from hunger, hot-eyed from fever, befouled by dirt, and covered with bandages stained by blood and pus. Some women of the town aided them, some turned away. All night and all day, the wagons and buggies and carts rumbled in and rumbled out, and the windowpanes hummed and cracked, and sleep became impossible.

Orry had another bad experience in the pine building housing Winder and his men. This time he called at the request of Secretary Randolph, who operated a large family farm near Richmond. Randolph had a friend, also a farmer, who had refused to sell his produce at the lower prices fixed by the provost marshal. In a polemical letter to the Richmond Whig, the farmer called Winder a worse threat to the populace than McClellan. Having expressed that opinion, he was snatched right out of the Exchange Bar one night. Away he went to the foul factory on Cary Street where Winder was now locking up those whose utterances he deemed' seditious.

Orry went to the pine building to request an order freeing the prisoner. He sent his name in, but the general wouldn't see him. Instead he had to speak with one of the civilian operatives, a tall, lanky man dressed completely in black save for his linen.

The man's name was Israel Quincy. Looking more like a Massachusetts parson than a Maryland railroad detective, he clearly enjoyed having someone of Orry's rank in his shabby little cubicle as a supplicant. He was quick to answer the request.

"There'll be no release order from this office. That man made General Winder angry."

"The general has made Secretary Randolph angry, Mr. Quincy, as well as most of Richmond, because of his absurd tariffs. The city desperately needs food from outlying farms, but no one will sell at the prices set by this office." Orry drew a breath. "Your answer is no?"

His dark eyes benign, Quincy smiled at the visitor. Then the smile seemed to crack and reveal the venom beneath. "Unequivocally no, Colonel. The secretary's friend will stay in Castle Thunder."

Orry rose. "No, he won't. The secretary has the authority to go over the general's head and will do so. He preferred to follow protocol, but you've made it impossible. I'll have the prisoner out of that pesthole within an hour."

Leaving the cubicle, he was stopped by Quincy's sharp, hard, "Colonel. Think twice before you do that."

Disbelieving, Orry turned and saw arrogance. He boiled over. "Who do you people think you are, terrorizing free citizens and stifling any opinion that differs from yours? By God, we'll have no damned Pinkertons operating in the Confederacy."

Low-voiced, Quincy said, "I caution you again, Colonel. Don't defy the authority of this office. You might need a favor from us one of these days."

"Threaten me, Mr. Quincy, and with this one hand I'll beat you into the ground."

Forty-five minutes later, Castle Thunder lost one inmate. But there were many more for whom he could do nothing. As for the warnings of the power-drunk guttersnipe in the black suit, he never gave them another thought.

At the War Department, Orry supervised the packing of box after box of ledgers, files, records, as May twisted down to its fearsome end, which brought the battle of Fair Oaks, virtually on the doorstep of the city. McClellan clumsily repulsed the Confederate attack, which saw Joe Johnston seriously wounded and replaced in twenty-four hours by the President's former military adviser, back from exile.

Granny Lee took charge of the Army of Northern Virginia for the first time. Confidence in him was not high. Boxes were packed with even greater haste, and a special train kept steam up around the clock to haul off Treasury gold if the final assault broke through Lee's lines. Orry sweated and packed more boxes and picked up a rumor of a plan afloat in Winder's department. He heard no details, only that he was the target. Quincy's forgotten threats came to mind again, increasing the tension he felt. He thanked the Almighty that Madeline wasn't here to face the danger and feel the madness.

"Please," the woman said.

Scarcely thirty, she looked much older. She smelled of the mud bespattering her clothes. Three children, starved gray mice, hunched against her skirt, and over her shoulder peered an adolescent black girl with decayed teeth and a red bandanna on her head.

The heavily planted garden rustled and dripped. The shower had stopped an hour ago, about half past six. The garden was twenty feet square, wild and green — almost too lush. Ten steps led down to it from the house. At the top, Ashton stood behind Powell, one of her palms pressing the back of his fine linen shirt.

In reply to the woman, he cocked his revolver. The potent sound aroused Ashton unexpectedly.

"Please," the woman repeated, freighting the word with her tiredness, her desperation. "We came in from Mechanicsville. The Yanks were too close. My man's with Old Jack in the valley, and we have nowhere to go. The gate was open —"

"Some niggers forced it last night, hunting a place to squat. I wouldn't have them, and I won't have you. Go out the way you came."

One of the youngsters tugged the woman's skirt. "Ma, where can we stay?"

"Ask President Davis," Powell said. "He hustled his wife out of town in a hurry — maybe he has a spare bed." Powell flourished the gun at them. "Get out, you goddamn vermin."

The woman managed a look of loathing as she herded her brood into the lowering June twilight. The faraway sky reverberated with a sound like tympani. Powell thrust the gun into his pants, walked down the stairs, and kicked the gate shut. "Find me some rope," he said without turning around.

Ashton darted inside and was back within a minute. He lashed the gate shut and secured it with several knots. Leaves dripped in the silence. Then the sky drummed again.

Upstairs, with all the windows open on the steamy evening, he reclined on his elbows and let her work him to a huge erection, in the fashion he enjoyed. Then he bored into her like a bull. They tore the bedclothes loose and pushed them all over the place with their rolling and straining. He was splendid, inducing, as he always did, a joy she could only express and relieve by screaming.

Overcome by a satiated exhaustion, she fell asleep. She woke presently to find Powell reading a book he kept at the bedside: Poe's Tales. He had told her that the fantastical stories and the character Dupin were favorites of his. It was fitting to reread them in Richmond, where Poe had edited the Literary Messenger for a period.

In perspiring lassitude, they lay together, Powell speaking in a reflective way, as he liked to do after making love.

"I was discussing the Conscription Act with some other gentlemen yesterday. There was unanimity that it's an outrage. Are we apes, to be prodded into a cage anytime Jeff says jump? At least there are ways around the law."

Ashton rested her cheek on the bristly hair of his chest and circled one of his nipples with her nail. "What ways?"

"The exemption for owning a hundred and twenty slaves, for one. I doubt King Jeff will entrain for Valdosta in order to discover that a hundred and eighteen of mine are imaginary." He chuckled.

"I love you," Ashton whispered, "but I surely don't understand you sometimes."

"How so?"

"You carry on about conscription and King Jeff as you call him, yet you've stayed in Richmond when most of the permanent residents are running for their lives."

"I want to protect what's mine. Which includes you, partner dear."

"A successful partner, I might add."

"Very successful."

"You're the reason I've stayed, Lamar." That was true, but there was more to it. Sometimes the artillery fire frightened her to death, and she wanted to board the first outbound train. She didn't do it because she believed that if she showed the slightest weakness, Powell might throw her over.

She needed him too much to let that happen. In Lamar Powell she had at last found a man who would rise in the world, ultimately wield great power and control great wealth in the Confederacy if it survived — or somewhere else if it didn't. She refused to risk a separation.

She planted a light kiss on the nipple she had been touching and continued. "Poor James wants to rush me to the depot all the time. I'm always inventing excuses."

He kissed her cheek. "Good for you. I wouldn't want you spineless, like the wife of the tyrant."

Spineless? she thought. What a rich jest. Ashton had always been absolute mistress of those with whom she had dallied. Every man but Powell had willingly bent to her wishes. That she couldn't dominate Powell was one of his great attractions.

"You really hate Davis, don't you, Lamar?"

"Kindly don't make it sound so peculiar. Yes, I hate him — and there are enough men who share my view to form a division or two right here in Richmond. If he were strong — a dictator, even — I'd support him. But he's weak. A failure. Do you need more proof than the presence of General McClellan less than a dozen miles from this bed? King Jeff will preside at the South's funeral unless he's stopped."

"Stopped —?"

"That is what I said." Moist dark had claimed the bedroom, a dark redolent of the garden. Despite its passion, Powell's voice remained controlled. "And it won't be oratory that saves the Con­federacy and ends the blundering career of Mr. Davis. It will be something more decisive. Final."

Naked against him, Ashton had a sudden vision of the revolver he had shown the refugees from Mechanicsville. Surely he didn't mean anything like that.

Surely not.

Like the man whose existence he suspected but whose name he didn't know, James Huntoon hated the President of the Confederate States of America. He would have liked to see him out of office, if not dead. The way things were going this June, the Yankees might achieve both objectives.

Huntoon lived in a state of constant nervous exhaustion, unable to sleep soundly, unable to take cheer from reports of Jackson's feats in the valley or of Stuart and twelve hundred men riding completely around McClellan's army — a spectacular stunt, certainly, but one of small practical benefit to the besieged capital.

At Treasury, too, boxes were being packed. Huntoon had to sweat like a slave, which angered him. Adding to his unhappiness were speculations about Ashton's absences. They were frequent these days, usually long, and always unexplained.

What a lunatic world this had become. The Grace Street house was defended against refugees and military stragglers by a musket Huntoon had placed in the hands of Homer, the senior houseman. Never would he have imagined that he would arm a slave, but with rabble skulking everywhere and mobs rushing to the hilltops to listen for firing or watch the Union balloons at all hours, what choice had he?

He listened for the gunfire, too. He listened to the drums and fifes of relief units marching out to the earthworks. And, unwillingly, he listened to the ceaseless creak of ambulances coming in — long lines of them, deceptively festive at night when they were bedecked with lanterns. There was nothing festive about the noises that issued from them. Nothing festive about the church foyers and hotel lobbies where the wounded and dying were laid in rows because the hospitals couldn't hold them.

Huntoon desperately wanted to escape the city. He had purchased a pair of railway tickets — wheedled, schemed, even bribed one man for the privilege of paying triple the regular price — but Ashton flatly refused to leave. She implied he was a coward simply because he possessed the tickets. Did she believe that or was it subterfuge? From whence came this new courage, this patriotism she had never exhibited before? From her lover?

Early one evening, while she was still out, he went quite innocently to the desk where she wrote personal notes to ladies of her acquaintance. Searching for a pen nib to replace his, which had broken, he found the packet of statements and letters.

"What is this bank account in Nassau?" In shirt sleeves, wet rings showing under his arms, he thrust the packet at her an hour later. "We have no bank account in Nassau."

She snatched the packet. "How dare you invade my desk and pry into my belongings?"

He winced and retreated to tall open windows overlooking Grace Street. The street was filled with Southern Express Company wagons doing duty as ambulances. "I — I didn't pry or spy or anything like that. I needed a pen — Damn it, why must I explain to you?" he shouted with uncharacteristic bravery. "You are the one cheating on me. What do those papers mean? I demand you explain."

"James, calm yourself." She saw she had pushed him too far. This had to be handled delicately lest it threaten her liaison with Powell. "Please sit down, and I will."

He fell into a chair that crackled as if it might break. Homer's shadow passed the open windows. The slave made her nervous with that musket. High in the eastern sky, a signal shell exploded. A flat report followed the shower of brilliant blue light-streamers. She began carefully.

"Did you read through all the statements? Study the numbers?" Flushed with heat and tension, she extracted one paper from the packet, unfolded it, and handed it to him. "That shows the balance in our account as of last month."

The fine, looping handwriting blurred. He knuckled his eyes. Our account, she said. Still, he was baffled. "These are pounds sterling —"

"Quite right. At present exchange rates, we have a quarter of a million dollars — sound Yankee dollars, not Confederate paper." Skirts whispering, she ran to him and knelt — humiliating, but it might divert him when she reached the trickiest part. "We have earned a profit of approximately seven hundred percent from just two voyages between Nassau and Wilmington."

"Voyages?" He goggled. "What in God's name are you talking about?"

"The ship, darling. The swift little steamship Mr. Lamar Powell wanted you to invest in, don't you remember? You refused, but I took the risk. She was refitted in Liverpool last fall, sailed to the Bahamas by her British captain and crew — and she's already made us what some would consider a fortune. If she goes to the bottom tomorrow, we've recouped our investment many times over."

"Powell — that worthless adventurer?"

"A shrewd businessman, dearest."

His tiny eyes blinked behind the wire spectacles. "Do you see him?"

"Oh, no. Disbursement of profits takes place in Nassau, and we receive these reports by mail that comes in on blockade runners. Water Witch has done so well because she doesn't carry any war cargo. She brings in coffee, lace — niceties that are scarce and command huge prices — and when she goes out again, she's loaded with cotton. There, I've explained everything, haven't I? It just addles my poor head to do so, but I want you to retire for the evening assured and comforted. You can fall asleep dreaming of your new-found —"

"You defied me, Ashton," he broke in, shaking the paper at her. Still heavy weather ahead. "I said no to Powell, and secretly, behind my back, you took our nest egg —"

She let the sweet belle's smile go now; it hadn't worked. "The money, I remind you, was mine to start with." "Legally it's mine. I am your husband." Creak and creak, the express wagons passed, lanterns bobbing like skiffs in a rough sea. A man shrieked; another wept; two more signal lights burst, cascaded, and died behind the rooftops. "James," she said, "what is the matter with you? I have increased our wealth —"

"Illegally," he shouted. "Unpatriotically. What else have you done that's immoral?"

Instinct said she must attack, and quickly, or he would suspect. "What do you mean by that insulting remark?"

"Noth —" He pushed at hair straggling over his greasy forehead. "Nothing." He turned away.

Ashton jerked him around. "I demand a better answer than that."

"I just —" he avoided her eye — "wondered — is Powell in Richmond?"

"I believe so. I can't swear. I told you, I don't see him. I delivered the initial investment to an attorney handling formation of the syndicate. Powell was there, but I have not met him since." Her breast felt fiery, painful because her heart beat so fast. But she had learned long ago that successful deception depended on strong nerves, a controlled expression, and eyes that never wavered from the person to be deceived. She knew Huntoon's emotional temperature was falling when his shoulders returned to their customary droop. His attempt at masculinity had been brief and unsuccessful.

"I believe you," he said, then noticed her dark eyes fixed behind him. Turning, he saw Homer on the terrace, drawn by the shouting.

Ashton lashed him. "Get back to your rounds!" He disappeared.

"I believe you," Huntoon said again, "but do you realize the stigma you've put on yourself? You're a speculator now. They're a scorned breed. Some say every one of them should be arrested, tried, and hung."

"Too late to worry about that, my sweet. If anyone calls for a noose, two will be needed in this family. So I suggest you follow my example and be discreet about the subject of Water Witch. You might also be glad I had the foresight you lacked."

It was harsh and slipped out, but she was tired of dealing with a child. This child deserved whipping, not coddling. Fortunately, he could no longer summon anger, just his customary whine:

"But, Ashton — I don't know whether I can accept money from —"

"You can. You will." She pointed to the packet. "You already have."

Suddenly he squeezed his eyes shut and clutched the edge of the tall window as the last ambulance rolled out of sight. There came sudden rumblings and boomings. Rooftops flickered red. Responding to pent-up fear, people poured into nearby streets, shouting questions. Was the invasion at hand?

Oblivious, Huntoon whispered, "Jesus, you're so hard." Tears trickled from the corners of his eyes. "So hard — You leave me nothing. I feel — You make me feel like a man not worthy of the name."

How shortsighted and pathetic he was. It made her angry all over again, with no desire to spare him.

"Is the word you want castrated, darling?"

Trembling, loathing her, he watched her affirm her own question with a small, neat nod. Businesslike, she continued. "In this matter and in some others we might name, you're exactly that. We've known it for years, haven't we?"

Red flashes; cannon fire. "You bitch."

Ashton laughed at him.

Huntoon's face changed from red to a color close to purple. He blinked, and again, and kept blinking as he rushed to her, grasping and stroking her hand repeatedly. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, sweetheart. Will you forgive me? I'm sure your decision is an intelligent one. Whatever you want is agreeable. God, I love you. Please say you forgive me?"

After letting him writhe a few moments longer, she did. She even let him fondle and attempt to make love to her when they went to bed. She was relieved when he was unable to finish and withdrew, flaccid, but saying how happy he was that she had forgiven him.

Simpleton, she thought, smiling in the dark.

56

"Never in my life have I spent a more peculiar Independence Day," George said to Constance.

William was leaning from the parlor window, hauling in bunting he and Patricia had hung the night before. "Why, Pa?"

"Because," George said, folding the tricolored material and putting it in a box, "the speeches were so brave and full of hope" — in the afternoon they had attended a long public ceremony — "and down on the peninsula we're whipped."

"It's really over?" Constance asked.

"Nearly. The departmental telegraph reports the army's withdrawing to the James. McClellan almost had Richmond in his hand and couldn't take it."

"Because Lee brought Stonewall marching to help him," William said. George responded with a somber nod. His son sounded like an admirer of Old Jack.

There were none at the Winder Building. How often had George listened to departmental blowhards mock Jackson because he held his arm in the air before or during a battle so the blood would flow properly? How often had he heard it said that some of Jackson's own subordinates declared him certifiably insane? George was often pressed to provide anecdotes of Jackson's bizarre behavior from their cadet days, but, although there were plenty, he declined. The mockery disgusted him because its source was fear. Tom Jackson was smart and relentless as a Joshua. His foot cavalry had quick-marched all the way from the valley and helped save Richmond.

For a full week, the battle for the Confederate capital had seesawed through a series of hot engagements. Mechanicsville — there, inexplicably, Jackson was late to come up to reinforce General A. P. Hill, and his reputation suffered; Gaines's Mill; Savage Station; Malvern Hill. Despite mistakes and minor successes on both sides, at the end of the seven days, the Richmond defense perimeter, which Bob Lee had worked a month to set and strengthen, still held. Old Bob had outthought and outfought Little Mac and his commanders at every turn. He had slipped and slid in the early months of the war, and suffered for it. But the seven days wiped out all that. George feared for the Union's fate if Lee took charge.

Organization of the Bank of Lehigh Station hit a snag. Attorney Jupiter Smith rushed to Washington to report that the legislature respectfully suggested the state participate in the bank's profits, if any. "What they're proposing, George, is that we give the state shares amounting to forty thousand dollars and a ten-year option to buy an equal amount at par."

George barked, "Oh, is that all?"

"No, it isn't. A donation of twenty thousand dollars to the road and bridge fund would be welcome. But I repeat — the suggestions were made very respectfully, George. The legislators realize you're an important man."

"I'm a man with a big club over his head. Goddamn it, Jupe, it's bribery."

The lawyer shrugged. "I prefer to call it accommodation. Or standard practice. The Philadelphia and Pittsburgh banks entered into similar arrangements to get their charters. Whether you want to do it is up to you, of course. But we've bought the building, and if you say no, we'll have to put it up for sale. If you do say no, it won't bother me. I'll be shed of huge amounts of paperwork."

"And huge fees."

Smith looked aggrieved.

George chewed his cigar. "I still say it's bribery." More chewing. "Tell them yes."

George proved a poor prophet of military affairs. McClellan stayed on, evidently for want of a competent replacement. The only West Point officers who seemed capable of winning were those who had gone south. This renewed the outcries against the Academy. In mid-July, George received a letter asking him to serve on West Point's Board of Visitors as a replacement for a member suddenly deceased. The mounting attacks inclined him to accept, so he requested an interview with Stanton. The secretary gave him permission to serve so long as it didn't interfere with his assigned duties.

George was mired in work, but he assured Stanton there would be no problem. From the brief conversation, he gained not the slightest hint as to the secretary's opinion about the Academy. Mr. Stanton, he concluded, was by design a circular fortress — safe from attack from any direction.

Though the Board of Visitors appointment meant more pressure, George was thankful to have it. His job had grown so frustrating he hated to open his eyes in the morning, because that meant donning his uniform and going to the Winder Building. His work with artillery contracts was constantly interrupted by interminable meetings. Should the department recommend adoption of rifle shells — Minie balls with time fuses that exploded after firing? Should the department test shells containing liquid chlorine, which would turn to a heavy, deadly gas when released? George also continued to interview inventors of patently insane weapons. One day he wasted three hours examining drawings of a two-barrel fieldpiece designed to fire a pair of cannonballs linked by a chain. The chain was supposed to decapitate several soldiers when the balls landed.

"We court the lunatics, and the sane inventors stay away," he protested to Constance. "They can get a better hearing from a bootblack than they can from us."

"You're exaggerating again."

"Think so? Read this." Into her hands he thrust the latest Scientific American whose editorializing had sent Ripley into a rage:

"They deem us fools, and they're right," he growled when she finished. She had nothing to say. He went off to see the children in a grumpy, abrasive mood that was becoming a constant in their lives.

Only one thing helped him survive in the Winder Building. It was not possible for Ripley to interfere with everything, and he now seemed inclined to refrain from meddling with the artillery program. The turnabout had come in April when Parrott rifles had proven their worth by quickly reducing Savannah's Fort Pulaski to ruins. Still, George felt like a man hanging from a ledge. How much longer his hands would hold out he didn't know.

Interwoven with his work and the war were the no less important events of day-to-day family life, some amusing, some troublesome, many just mundane and tiring. Constance by some miracle had found a small, snug house for rent in Georgetown, near the college. By mid-July they were into the upheaval of moving. For a week George roared around the place unable to locate his under-drawers, his cigars, or any other necessities of life.

One morning Patricia found the bedclothes reddened, and though her mother had prepared her with information about young womanhood, she wept for an hour.

William was growing rapidly, and his attitude toward girls was changing from loathing to interest tinctured with suspicion. Early in the war he had often said he couldn't wait to grow up, enlist, and have a grand time fighting for the Union. The long day and longer night after Bull Run had put an end to those declarations.

No letters came from Billy — another cause for concern. Often at night, when George had worried all he could about Old Ripley and the army, he would lie awake fretting about his younger brother or his old friend Orry.

Except for Brett, living in Lehigh Station, ties between the Hazards and the Mains were broken. Where was Orry? Where was Charles? A letter smuggler might be hard put to find either of them, though George supposed it could be done if absolutely necessary. What mattered was not that they exchanged letters but that they all came through this dark passage unhurt.

He never worried about Stanley. His older brother was dressing well and living lavishly. Stanley and Isabel were intimate with Washington's most powerful men and seen at the city's most prestigious social gatherings. George couldn't understand how it could happen to someone as incompetent as Stanley.

"There are seasons, George," Constance said by way of answer. "Cycles for all things — the Bible says that. Stanley stood in your shadow for a long time."

"And now I'm to be hidden in his?"

"No, I didn't mean to imply —"

"It's the truth. It makes me mad."

"I feel a bit jealous myself, if you must know. On the other hand, I'm sure Isabel is the chief architect of their success, and I'd hang myself before I'd change places with her."

George puffed his cigar. "You know, I can't forget that I hit Stanley after the train wreck. Maybe this is justice. Maybe it's my punishment."

"Did you notice how friendly the secretary was?" Stanley exclaimed one Saturday night in July. Their carriage was taking them home from a Shakespearean performance at Leonard Graver's new theater on the site of the old National on E Street. "Did you notice that, Isabel?"

"Why shouldn't Stanton be cordial? You're one of his best employees. He knows he can trust you."

Stanley preened. Could it be true? The evidence certainly pointed that way. He was on good terms with the dogmatic but unquestionably patriotic secretary, at the same time maintaining friendly relations with Wade, to whom he occasionally passed bits of information about confidential War Department matters. Lashbrook's was prospering beyond all expectations, and Stanley was now anticipating a trip to New Orleans, there to establish additional trading contracts of a sensitive but potentially lucrative nature. He was making the world not merely his oyster but a whole plate of them. Strange how a savage war could change a man's life so greatly.

There were only a few aspects of Stanley's role of fierce Republican that he didn't like. He mentioned one to Isabel when they got to bed that night.

"The Confiscation Act's to be signed this week. The slaves will be freed in captured territory, and use of colored troops approved. But there's more coming. Stanton told me so during the second intermission, while you were in the toilet."

"Don't utter that word in my presence. Tell me what you learned from Stanton."

"The President's drafting an executive order." Stanley paused to achieve an effect. "He wants to free all the slaves."

"My God. Are you sure?"

"Well, all of them in the Confederacy at least. I don't believe he'll touch slavery in Kentucky or the other border states."

"Ah. I didn't think he was that much of an idealist. It won't be a humanitarian measure, then, but a punitive one." She continued, grudgingly, "Lincoln has all the charm of a pig, but I'll give him this: he's a shrewd politician."

"How can you say that, Isabel? Do you want mobs of freed niggers swarming into the North? Think of the unrest. Think of the jobs decent white men will lose. The whole idea's scandalous."

"You'd better keep that opinion private if you want to keep the friendship of Stanton and Ben Wade."

"But —"

"Stop, Stanley. When you dine at the devil's house, you can't choose the menu. Play your part. The loyal Republican."

He did, although it galled him to hear all the talk of emancipation suddenly flying through the offices and corridors, the parlors and saloon bars of official and unofficial Washington. Lincoln's radical proposal offended many whites who got wind of it, and it was sure to cause social upheaval if it were implemented. Stanley obeyed his wife, however, and kept his views to himself.

Except on one subject. He invited his brother to dine at Willard's, so he could gloat.

"I wouldn't devote much time to that Board of Visitors, George. If Ben Wade and some others have their way, this time next year West Point will be nothing but abandoned buildings and memories."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"There will be no more appropriations to operate that place. It's provided a free education to traitors, but what has it given our side? One general reportedly drunk as a lord at Shiloh, another so egotistical and inept he couldn't win against an army half the size of his. I could also mention — a host of — lesser —"

The sentence became mumbling; George had laid his fork next to the slab of venison and was glaring.

"You said this was a social occasion. No politics. I should have known better than to believe you.''

He walked out, leaving Stanley with the bill.

Stanley didn't mind. He felt expansive that day; affluent — even handsome. He had just achieved a nice little triumph. His strutting brother's precious institution was doomed, and there was not one damn thing he could do about it.

She was black and beautiful. Coppered oak, over two hundred feet long from bowsprit to stern. A single low stack amidships enhanced her rakish appearance. The red of her shield figurehead and the gilt of her stern carvings were her only vivid colors.

Cooper knew her intimately and loved her without reservation. She was a steam barkentine, a thousand and fifty tons, with two oscillating engines of three hundred and fifty horsepower driving a single propeller that could be raised from the water to reduce drag. Her three masts could be donkey-rigged with plenty of canvas. She lay in the Mersey this twenty-ninth day of July with everything from bedding to galley stores in place and her full crew aboard.

A stream of carriages discharged passengers on the cobble­stones of the pier. Bulloch greeted each local businessman or officeholder by name; all had been invited — hastily — for an afternoon's excursion on Number 209.

Captain Butcher, lately second officer on the Royal Mail vessel Arabia, had steam up and was waiting for the last few guests. They might or might not arrive before the order that Bulloch's spies had reported to be on the way from Whitehall: the ship was to be prevented from sailing because her ultimate mission violated British law.

Bulloch maintained a fine front, smiling and chatting as he saw guests to the gangway and directed them to refreshments on trestle tables beneath a striped awning. Cooper paced the pier, snapping his watch open every couple of minutes. If they didn't get away — if Charles Francis Adams succeeded — this beautiful, invaluable commerce raider would be lost to the Confederacy.

A clerk hovering close to Bulloch showed him a list. "All but these two gentlemen are present, sir."

"We shall go without them."

Up the gangway he went, past the seamen recruited from Cunard and other lines to sail Number 209 on the first leg of her voyage. Suddenly, beyond some dockworkers, Cooper saw a hack careen through Canning Street, heading for the ship. From the foot of the gangway, he called, "Our last guests may be here, James."

Quickly, Bulloch stepped to the helm and spoke to young Captain Butcher, whose light whiskers danced in the Mersey breeze. The hack rattled along the pier, slowing. Before it came to a stop, a man jumped out. Cooper's stomach wrenched as he recognized Maguire. Preceded by the smell of leeks, Marcellus Dorking also appeared.

The sight of the man enraged Cooper. Since that afternoon in the Pig and Whistle, he had been followed intermittently by several different spies, all of whom undoubtedly worked for Tom Dudley. Of Dorking, however, he had seen no sign. The threat against Cooper's family had been nothing but air; a coward's way of inspiring fear. That lowered Dorking even further in Cooper's estimation.

Maguire and Dorking bolted toward Cooper, who barred the gangway. Dorking's right hand dipped into the pocket of his garish plaid coat. "Little pleasure cruise, sir?" he asked with his familiar smarmy smile.

"That's right. As you can see, we have local dignitaries on board."

"Be that as it may, we must request that you delay your departure. A train should be arriving at Lime Street right about now bearing a gentleman who wishes to speak with the captain about certain improprieties that —"

"You'll have to excuse me," Cooper interrupted. He started up the gangway.

"Just a minute." Dorking grabbed Cooper's shoulder and roughly turned him around. A couple of seamen called warnings to Butcher. The invited guests murmured and frowned.

Bulloch started down to help Cooper, too late. Marcellus Dorking produced a small silver pistol and shoved it into Cooper's stomach, indenting his waistcoat half an inch.

"Stand aside while we speak to the master of this vessel."

Cooper had never been so scared or so directly confronted with the threat of violent death. Yet that was somehow less important than the need to get Number 209 to her destination. Dorking realized his pistol was in view and tried to hide it from those on deck. As the muzzle dipped down, Cooper stamped on Dorking's shoe.

"Bleeding Christ," Dorking cried, staggering. Maguire tried to strike Cooper, who pushed him, then gave Dorking a knee in the crotch. Consul Dudley's agents spilled onto the cobbles like ill-trained acrobats.

Energized by his success in the face of danger, Cooper loped up the gangway, shouting at Dorking and Maguire, "Invited guests only on this cruise, gentlemen." He passed seamen at the rail. "Take up the gangway."

Captain Butcher bellowed orders. The dockworkers who had watched the fray with puzzled amusement cast off the lines on the double. There was consternation among the guests.

Brown water began to show between the hull and the pier. Maguire regained his feet, then Dorking, who went for the pistol again. "My word," said a guest behind Cooper. There were other, less polite oaths.

Dorking raised the pistol, a flicker of silver in the summer sunshine. Maguire dragged his arm down. Dorking glared at Cooper, who gripped the rail and yelled, "It never pays to brag, Mr. Dorking. It never pays to say you'll do something when you can't. I hope you didn't tell Dudley you'd stop us."

"Keep quiet," Bulloch said behind him. Red, Cooper turned, ready to apologize. Only he could see Bulloch's smile or hear him whisper, "Sharp work." Swiftly, he returned to the guests, who swarmed around him asking questions.

The figures of Maguire and Dorking receded. Cooper relaxed at the rail, surprised at the quickness of his reactions. He was pleased with himself.

The river shone like gold; the air was salty and not too hot; a perfect afternoon. Bulloch promised to answer all questions shortly but first urged the guests to help themselves to French champagne and the delicacies he had ordered to support the illusion of an innocent outing. When a measure of calm returned, he politely asked for attention and stepped into the sunshine just beyond the awning shadow. From there he addressed the passengers.

"We trust you will all enjoy your cruise on the vessel variously known in Liverpool and Birkenhead as Enrica or Laird's 209. She will have her real name soon. We want you to be perfectly comfortable this afternoon. Eat and drink as much as you like and try not to let that unpleasantness on the pier bother you. I must be honest and confess that your return journey will be aboard a tug awaiting us down the coast at Anglesey."

"What's that?"

"Dammit, Bulloch, what subterfuge are you —?"

"Bloody trick, that's what it —"

"A regrettable necessity, gentlemen," Bulloch said, his deep Georgian voice overriding the protests. "On Sunday we were warned that if this ship remained in the Mersey another forty-eight hours, she'd be impounded. Lost to our cause. You'll have no trouble with the authorities if you simply tell the truth. You were invited on a cruise, which you are now taking. The only difference is, your cruise ship won't be the vessel taking you back to Liverpool. For that, I accept all blame."

"Are the rumors true, then? Was this vessel built illegally?"

"She was built in scrupulous conformity with British law, sir."

"That's no answer," someone else said. "Where's she bound?"

"Up the Irish Channel and then to a port I am not at liberty to name. Ultimately, she will sail in American waters with a different crew."

Cooper felt a strange thrill up his spine — unexpected as his own clumsy bravery at dockside. What a remarkable change had come over him, scarcely noticed, since those days when he had debated the folly of secession and war with anyone who would listen. He was proud of this ship and proud of his part in getting her to sea. He was proud of her name, which Bulloch had confided to him; it was to be Alabama. He was proud to stand on her spanking new deck as she headed down the glittering Mersey to the destination Bulloch quietly announced to the stunned guests.

"She is going to war."

While the Confederate ship escaped to the Isle of Anglesey, George was en route to Massachusetts, having first stopped at Lehigh Station for a day and a half. He had conferred with Jupe Smith, who informed him that the legislature now looked on the bank charter application with great favor — "What a surprise," George muttered — and spent seven hours with Wotherspoon inspecting the books, the manufacturing areas, and samples of Hazard's current output. Before he left, he saw the Hungarian couple and their black charges — fifteen of them now. To relieve her loneliness, Brett said, she sometimes helped Mr. and Mrs. Czorna care for the children. It was the only time during the visit that George saw a sign of animation in his sister-in-law.

After unsuccessfully trying to doze while sitting upright on the train all night, George was exhausted when he reached Braintree. Old Sylvanus Thayer allowed him three hours in a comfortable bed, then woke him and served a breakfast more like a banquet. Usually a Spartan eater, George put away six fried eggs, four slices of ham, and six biscuits at five o'clock of a hot summer afternoon. While he ate, Thayer talked.

"Scapegoats, George. Men need them most — they are driven to find them — when matters are out of control and somehow cannot be set right. The human animal is willful and frequently stupid. Blame is often placed where it doesn't belong simply because any explanation of chaos, however ludicrous, is better than none, and people would go mad without one. I do not claim that is always the case. In the war, the army was the focus of blame, and rightly so." For Thayer, there was always and only one war: the last fought against Britain. "Now, however, I believe the tide's flowing the other way. I take your brother's warning seriously."

He tapped a copy of Harper's pulled from under recent issues of the New York Tribune. "This noxious rag — and Greeley's paper — are both demanding the Academy close forever. Great men have come from our school, but that's of no consequence. The army is failing again, and someone or something must be put up on the cross."

George finished his coffee and lit a cigar. "I get so damn sick of them saying we trained the enemy."

"I know, I know." Thayer's hands, white as the fine linen cloth covering the table, clenched. Dark blue veins rose up on the backs of them. "We have also trained many accomplished officers who have remained loyal. Alas, for all his effort and sincerity, the President can't seem to utilize them properly. Perhaps he interferes too much, as they say Davis does. That is an observation, not an excuse for inaction. We cannot avoid the inescapable, George. West Point is at war."

He plucked the cigar from his mouth. "What's that, sir?"

"At war. Those of us who love the place must campaign as if the enemy has formidable leadership — which it does —" He whacked Greeley's newspaper. "We must fight with intelligence, zeal, our whole soul — and never admit to even the remotest possibility of defeat. We shall not cower. We shall not wait passively to have our position overwhelmed. We shall mount an offensive."

"I'd agree with that strategy, Colonel. But what are the tactics?"

The old man's eyes sparkled. "We do not hide our light under a bushel. We promote our past — our performance on behalf of the republic in Mexico and on the frontier. We trumpet our case and our cause. We whisper into influential ears. We twist reluctant arms. We knock resistant heads. We attack, George —"

Thump went the fist on the table.

"Attack. Attack. Attack!"

They talked on into the night. Graduates and friends of West Point had to be recruited to speak or write in defense of it. George would send letters to six members of the Board of Visitors, and Thayer would do the same with the other ten. On the spot, George decided to visit the Academy on his way home. He didn't put his head down till half-past three, but Thayer was up an hour ahead of him, at six-thirty, and saw him to the station. Even on the noisy platform, Thayer's mind kept working.

"What influential allies have we in the Congress. Any at all?"

"The chief one I can think of is Wade's fellow senator from Ohio — Cump Sherman's brother, John. He and Wade don't particularly like each other."

"Cultivate Senator Sherman," Thayer urged as he pumped George's hand. George felt as though he had received marching orders. Thayer was still bobbing along beside the car calling suggestions as the train pulled out.

After a brief stop at Cold Spring and some mutual complaining with Benét, George crossed the Hudson to the Plain and began campaigning there. Professor Mahan promised to step up his writing about the institution. Captain Edward Boynton, a classmate of George's and Orry's who had returned as adjutant, said he would rush completion of the manuscript of his history of West Point, incorporating rebuttals of its critics into the final text. Washington-bound again on a crowded, sooty train, George felt a little better; the offensive was under way.

He hoped it hadn't been launched too late. The appropriation would come up in Congress early next year. They had less than six months to conduct and win their small war while the larger one rumbled along a murky road whose end no one could see.

Returning to duty, George found criticism of the army more ferocious than ever. Old Brains Halleck had been summoned from the West to be supreme commander. McClellan still had the Army of the Potomac, largely a Washington defense force now, and John Pope had been given the Army of Northern Virginia as a consequence of his success at Island No. 10. Pope quickly alienated most of his men by observing that soldiers in the western theater were tougher and fought harder. He then remarked that he was a commander who could be counted on to take the field; he would keep his headquarters in the saddle. Wags turned headquarters into hindquarters.

Lincoln's Negro policies were causing fights in saloons and army camps. The only part of the Confiscation Act anyone seemed to like was that encouraging emigration of freedmen to some unspecified country in the tropics. "There's all this talk of emancipation, and we're not ready for it," George said to his wife. "No one believes in it."

"They should."

"Yes, of course. But you know the realities, Constance. Most Northerners don't give a damn for the Negro, and they certainly don't think he has the same rights as a white man. This war is still being fought for one reason only — love of the Union and the grand old flag. I'm not saying it's right. I'm saying it's a fact. If emancipation comes, I fear the consequences."

Late August brought a second major battle near Bull Run and a second outcome like the first. Beaten Union armies withdrew to Washington, where fear of a direct attack spread like fire on a prairie. Critics of the war stepped up their attack, saying the whole thing was misbegotten and negotiated peace should be sought at once.

The secretary called Stanley to his office on a stormy day in early September. Stanton had relinquished direct control of the armies to Halleck, but he was quietly gathering the lines of control of other areas into his hands. Once scornful of Lincoln, he had now ingratiated himself with the President and become a trusted adviser and professed friend. Not yet fifty, Edwin McMasters Stanton — small round spectacles, perfumed beard, and Buddha face — was said to be the second most powerful man in the country.

He had emphatic views about the mounting dissent:

"We must stamp it out. We must curb these peace Democrats and their milksop cronies and make it evident that if they continue to attack the government and its actions, they face arrest, prison, even charges of treason. The war must be prosecuted to its conclusion."

Rain spattered the office windows; the noonday was dark as twilight. Thinking of the busy production lines at Lashbrook's, Stanley gave a fervent nod. "I definitely agree, sir."

"Secretary Seward formerly had responsibility for matters of government integrity and security —" Seward's prosecution of those duties was legendary. It was said he had kept a little hand bell on his desk and boasted that if he rang it, any man anywhere could be put behind bars indefinitely. "But I am in charge now."

Stanley wondered why the secretary was stating the obvious. Stanton laced his plump hands together on the desk. "I need a deputy whom I can trust. One who will be zealous in seeing that my policies as well as my specific orders are executed with dispatch and without question."

Stanley gripped the arm of the visitor's chair to steady himself. Rain hit the office window. The vista of power Stanton spread before him in a sentence or two was awesome.

"We must organize the security function more completely and begin to take vigorous action against enemies in our own camp."

"No doubt of that, sir. None. But I wonder how easily the goal can be accomplished. Just the habeas corpus matter has created a storm of debate and outcries about violations of Constitutional rights."

Up jerked the ends of Stanton's mouth, a sneer. Stanley's knees shook. Hoping to demonstrate his grasp of the situation, he had instead enraged the secretary.

"Was the country made for the Constitution, Stanley? I think not. The reverse, rather. Still, I know the warped view of our enemies. If the country sinks to oblivion, they will no doubt take extreme comfort in knowing the Constitution is still safe."

Quickly, Stanley leaned toward the desk. "People like that are not only misguided, they're dangerous. That is all I meant to say, sir."

Stanton leaned back, stroking his beard. Today it was perfumed with lilac. "Good. For a minute I thought I might have misjudged you. You've served me loyally, and absolute loyalty is one qualification for the job I am proposing. I need a man who can be discreet but firm about silencing our critics — and keep any onus from falling on this office."

A plump hand rose to indicate a large inked diagram hanging on one wall. The diagram consisted of many connected circles and boxes, each with its neat legend inside or below. "For example, the official descriptive charts illustrate the structure of this department. Should we find it wise to establish a special unit to suppress treasonous activity, it must never appear on the chart."

"I can make sure of that, sir. I can do everything you ask, and I will."

"Excellent," Stanton murmured. Then, slyly, he peeked at Stanley over his round spectacles. "I should think that if you go about your new duties efficiently, you will still have ample time to sell footwear to the army."

Stanley sat still, not daring to reply.

The secretary murmured on for another fifteen minutes, and toward the end gave Stanley a folder containing his confidential plan for strengthening the police arm of the War Department. At Stanton's suggestion, Stanley took a few moments to leaf through the half-dozen pages of the document, paying special attention to the philosophic preamble.

"This opening statement is exactly right, sir. We need to tighten up. It will be even more important if the President goes through with his plan to free the nig — the black people in the rebelling states."

"He's adamant about doing so. As I see it, in his mind the step has undergone a change from a punitive measure to a moral imperative. Just yesterday he told the cabinet that although he has doubts about a great many things, from generals to weapons, he has none in regard to the lightness of emancipation. However, Seward and I and some others have convinced him to withhold the proclamation until the time is more propitious." He seemed to hunch, his face and form darkening along with the clouds outside. From the dark mound came the intense voice. "The policy change the President proposes is so unusual, not to say radical, we dare not make it public when the war's going against us. For the proclamation to meet even minimum acceptance, it must be announced at a peak of public confidence and euphoria. We must have a victory."

Stanley closed his hand on the folder — his key to expanded authority and power. The secretary had made it clear. He didn't want a brilliant thinker but an obedient soldier. Stanley had learned that kind of soldiering under one of the best, now in exile.

"Most definitely, sir," he said with an excess of sincerity, even though he loathed the thought of all those strange, hostile, dark-skinned people being set free to roam the North at will. "A victory."

After scouting around Frederick, Maryland, Charles and Ab turned back toward White's Ford on the Potomac. It was the fourth of September, autumn coming on.

The scouts, both dressed as farmers, proceeded at a slow trot along a rutty road between steep, heavily treed hillsides. The leaves had not begun to change color, but Charles was already afflicted with the melancholy of the coming season. Despite his aversion to writing letters, he had sent three to Barclay's Farm in recent months and received no replies. He hoped that was just another example of the wretchedness of the army mails, not a sign Gus had forgotten him.

Light through overhanging branches flashed and flickered over the bearded men. Charles had his wool coat open, his revolver within reach. They had found good forage at a stable near Frederick last night. Sport acted livelier today. So did Ab's horse, Cyclone. Of late the army had provided only green corn.

Before hunting up the stable yesterday, they had ventured into Frederick itself — a nervous two hours for Charles because his accent demanded that he remain mute and let Ab do the talking. He poked about the town by himself for a while, speaking to no one and arousing no suspicion. Ab visited a saloon and came back with a disconcerting report.

"Charlie, they ain't a damn bit interested in bein' liberated. You think Bob Lee got the wrong information? I was told we could expect a big uprisin' of locals to help us out when we invaded this here state."

"I was told the same thing."

"Well, most of them boys in that grogshop acted like they didn't care whether I was from hell or Huntsville. I got a few stares, one offer to sit in a card game, a glass of whiskey I bought myself, and a good look at a lot of backs. The people hereabouts aren't gonna feed us or fart on us, either one."

Charles frowned. Had the army miscalculated again? If so, it was too late; the advance was under way. Mr. Davis and the generals did appear to be at odds on the status of Maryland. The President insisted the state belonged to the South, and they would come as liberators — a judgment Ab's report contradicted. Camp talk said they were marching to strike a blow on enemy soil for a change: invading Yankee territory to strip it of cattle and produce and, not incidentally, give the farmers of Virginia a chance to harvest their crops without fear of bluebellies pouring over their rail fences and trampling their fields.

Whatever the answer, they had finished their mission. After leaving Frederick and stopping at the stable, they had slept in a secluded grove, halter tie-ropes fastened to their wrists and shot­guns laid across their bellies.

Now Ab said, "Ask you somethin', Charlie?"

"Go ahead."

"You got a girl? Been curious about it because you never say."

He thought of Private Gervais and Miss Sally Mills. "This is the wrong time and place for a man to have a girl."

The other scout laughed. "That's sure-God true, but it don't answer my question. You got one?"

Charles tugged his dirty felt hat down over his forehead, watching the road. "No."

It was an honest answer. He didn't have a girl except in his imagination. If you had a girl, she wrote to you. Gus had kissed him, but how much did that mean? A lot of females gave away their kisses as if they were no more special than pieces of home­made pie.

The terrain changed rapidly. The hills were higher, steeper. There were no cottages or shanties in the few clearings and level places because there was no way to subsist on the land. Charles suspected they were close to the river and soon heard distant sounds to confirm it — the noise of the army of fifty-five thousand men leaving Virginia by way of the ford.

He saw insects in a shaft of sun and then Gus Barclay's face. Oughtn't to be muddling your head that way. He blinked; the insects returned. The noise grew louder. When Little Mac got word of the invasion, the Yanks would come out from Washington and fight. Scouting for the cavalry on the peninsula, Charles had done his share of fighting and had had two close scrapes, but he would never grow accustomed to it or regard it lightly.

They reached the river in time to watch the coming of the cavalry — five thousand horse, Ab claimed, including new brigades that contained old comrades. His old friend Beauty Stuart, the golden-spurred, plume-hatted, was major general of the division — and not yet thirty. Hampton was his senior brigadier, Fitz Lee his junior. Charles's old friend had risen rapidly; from lieutenant to general in fifteen months.

Stuart's innovative flying artillery batteries went rolling and crashing through the water. Then Ab let out a shout, spying Hampton's men on the Virginia side. The brigade included the newly formed Second South Carolina Cavalry, put together around the nucleus of the four original troops of the legion.

Calbraith Butler was colonel of the regiment. He saw the two scouts hunched on their horses in the shallows and greeted them with a wave of his silver-chased whip. With Butler rode his sec­ond-in-command, Hampton's younger brother Frank.

Charles felt like the schoolroom dunce. He was still a captain, and this was one of the occasions when it hurt. On the other hand, he couldn't deny that he had come to prefer the dangerous but more independent life of a scout.

He reminded Ab that they should find Stuart's headquarters and report. Suddenly spurring into the Potomac from the Virginia shore, came Hampton. He spied the scouts and rode toward them, scattering sunlit water. He took their salutes with a warm smile and shook each man's hand.

Hampton's color was good. He was a massive, martial figure on his prancing horse, even if his uniform did look shabby, like everyone else's. Charles noticed three stars on his collar — the same insignia Stuart wore. You couldn't tell one kind of Confederate general from another.

"I hear you like what you're doing, Captain Main."

"I'm better at it than I was at leading a troop, General. I like it very much."

"Happy to hear it."

"You look fit, sir. I'm pleased you've made such a fine recovery." Commanding infantry at Seven Pines, Hampton had been on horseback when an enemy ball struck his foot. Fearing he would be unable to remount if he climbed down for treatment, he remained in the saddle while a surgeon yanked off his boot, probed and cut until the lump of lead was found and removed. With the wound bandaged, the boot shoved back on, and the bullet hole plugged, he stayed with his men until dark ended the fight and he could be lifted down. His boot was full of blood, which ran out over the top.

"I'm glad to run into you this way," the general said to him, "because it allows me to bring you two bits of news you may regard as vindications." Puzzled, Charles waited for him to continue. "In attempting to drill his men recently, Captain von Helm fell off his horse and cracked his neck. He was intoxicated at the time. He died within the hour. Further, your favorite, Private Cramm, has disappeared without leave."

"He's probably twenty miles behind with a few hundred others."

"Cramm is not a straggler. He deserted. He left a note informing us he had enlisted to defend Southern soil, not to campaign in the North."

"God above. I'm surprised he didn't hire a lawyer to write up his explanation." Charles stifled laughter. So did Ab.

"I thought the news would be of some comfort."

"Shouldn't admit it, General, but it surely is."

"Don't be ashamed. The shame was that a leader as good as you lost that election. If we had only Cramms and von Helms, we'd be finished. Godspeed, Captain. I'm sure I'll be calling for your services and Lieutenant Woolner's quite soon." He galloped off to rejoin his staff.

After presenting their report, Charles and Ab spent the evening awaiting new orders. They didn't get any. They ate, tended their horses, tried to sleep, and in the morning went down to watch Old Jack lead his men into Maryland.

In the mind of Charles Main and many others, Stonewall Jackson had undergone a transformation during the past year. His fame was so enormous, his feats so Olympian, that you tended to think more and more of Jackson as merely a name — a legend that couldn't possibly be connected with a real human being, especially not one like the shy bumpkin Cousin Orry had befriended in his plebe year. But Jack was real, all right, smartly sitting his cream-colored mount as he crossed over the river to the trees while a band blared "Maryland, My Maryland" to welcome him.

Ab gave Jackson some attention, but was more interested in the long column of infantry following him. Jackson's men looked as if they had marched and fought and slept in their clothes for years without washing them. They carried weapons but little else. Gone were the bulging knapsacks and haversacks of "61.

These were the fabled soldiers known as Jackson's foot cavalry because they could march sixty miles in two days, and had. Charles stared in amazement at rank on rank of wild beards, crazy glinting eyes, cheeks and foreheads burned raw by exposure to sun.

"My God, Ab, a lot of them don't have shoes."

It was true. Whatever footwear he saw was torn or in separate pieces kept together by snippets of twine. Watching the column pass, Charles estimated that fifty percent of Jackson's men marched on bare feet that were cut, bruised, stained with old blood, stippled with scabs, covered with dirt. A man might learn to tolerate such misery in warm weather, but when winter came —?

Studying one wrinkled, mean-faced private sloshing through the shallows, Charles presumed the soldier was forty, then saw he was wrong. "They look like old men."

"So do we," Ab said, hunching over Cyclone's neck. "Taken notice of the gray in your beard lately? They say Bob Lee's is almost white. A powerful lot of things have changed in a year, Charlie. And it ain't the end."

Unexpectedly, Charles shivered. He watched the dirty feet marching into Maryland and wondered how many would march back.

57

Ninth of September. Hot light of late summer hazing the rolling country. The green yellowing now, drying and withering. The time of gathering a harvest.

The cavalry strung out a line nearly twenty miles long. Behind it, Lee's divisions maneuvered, ready to strike clear to Pennsylvania, some said. Below the line, over the blurry hills — McClellan, surely. Coming out in force from Washington. Slow as ever, but coming out. Bogus rustics on horseback had been spied along the Potomac, watching the movement through White's Ford. Scouts for the other side.

Hampton encamped at Hyattstown, a few miles south of Urbana. Charles packed all but essential possessions into the field trunk holding his original legion sword and the Solingen blade. Out of the trunk he took his gray captain's coat. It didn't take many brains to conclude that the invasion would lead to some heavy fighting. He wanted his own side to be able to identify him. He watched his trunk lifted into one of the baggage wagons as if for the last time.

He bundled his coat and tied it behind his saddle — his well-worn McClellan model, bought new in Columbia. The saddle had been adapted from a Prussian design by the man so earnestly trying to destroy them. Queer war, this.

Hungry war, too. Ab Woolner complained half the evening. "Nobody around here gonna feed us. It's more green corn for the two-legged as well as the four-legged. We ought to name this the green corn campaign, Charlie boy."

Charles said nothing, seeing to his powder and ball so he could get some sleep. They might need it, wish for it, pray for it soon.

Tenth of September. Charles and eight other scouts out after nightfall, probing. They damn near rode into blue-coated videttes. They charged the videttes on the white-drenched road and heard no yells about Black Horse, Black Horse!

Gunfire. One scout blown down — and luckless Doan lost another mount. The scouts galloped off carrying two wounded; Charles carried Doan, hot wind in his face under the moon. Had they met Pleasonton's men, he wondered. Those boys had shot straight and ridden better than any Yankees he had seen so far. Maybe the shoe salesmen and machinery operators were learning how to fight on horseback. Maybe the Union cavalry would be something to worry about one day.

At Urbana, quite a few hurt Hampton riders went for treatment at a hilltop academy that General Stuart had lit up for the evening. A goddamned ball, of which the vainglorious Virginian couldn't seem to get too many. The sight of bleeding men sort of spoiled the festivities. Most of the girls went home; some — a few — stayed to help. But even their pretty round eyes glared in the candlelight, fearful of the dirt and odors of the strange wild men who had ridden in to say a great force was moving beyond the night horizon.

Ninety thousand, it was, although straggling quickly bled it to less. Bob Lee did not yet know the strength of his opponent. And that army, for a change, did not have the usual McClellan slows. It was not exactly prancing along, but it didn't have the slows. Old Bob didn't know that, either.

Twelfth of September. Westward, Lee boldly, crazily split his army — that much Charles learned, guessing at the rest. Old Bob wanted his supply line down to Winchester open and secure before he struck fiercely north to Hagerstown; hell, maybe even to Philadelphia. That meant nullifying the Harpers Ferry garrison. That meant dividing his forces. The order had been written on the ninth, but Charles didn't know it then.

He had met Lee in Texas, dined with him, talked with him at length — but that wasn't battle, just field duty with occasional Indian skirmishing. Besides, Lee had been away a lot, leaving the command to subordinates. So now, as others did, Charles got reacquainted by sixth-hand hearsay.

Old Bob was universally acknowledged as a polite fellow, slow to anger — and who had ever heard him curse or seen him do a discourteous or ungentlemanly deed? But the sound of guns got his blood up, and when he was making military bets, he sometimes pushed in all the chips he had, like a flash gambler on a Mississippi boat. Charles and Ab decided he had done it again. He had figured he could split his forces — the very idea of which would produce foam on the mouths of writers of strategy texts — and put them back together with time to spare. Because Little Mac, as always, would have the slows. The general had also politely, eloquently asked Marylanders to rise up and embrace their deliverers. Nobody paid attention to that, unfortunately.

Stuart went west out of Frederick, behind Lee, the morning of the twelfth. Charles and Ab and Hampton's troopers lingered behind, the rear guard, looking for men in blue—And God, there they came, marching at incredible speed. What had cured Mac's slows? A cup of Bruised Ego Tea, brewing since the peninsula? A promise of a dose of Dr. Lincoln's Elixir of Demotion?

No time or means to answer that now. Away the rearguard troopers went across the Catoctin Ridge, Charles already fevered with the tiredness he knew would not pass or be relieved, except slightly, for days, possibly weeks.

The threat, the sense of building forces, rose up like the temperature. Something was wrong, but what?

Not many signs of great joy greeted the deliverers. Near Burkittsville, with blue riders clearly visible, chasing them, raising dust, Charles sped past a tiny girl with yellow braids who hung on a farm fence waving a tiny Stars and Bars, but that was the extent of any patriotic uprising he witnessed. Doan, who had appropriated the horse of a dead man, screamed at the girl to get out of the obscene way of the obscene bluebellies coming over the near hill. The child kept waving her tiny flag.

Hampton's boy Preston held his father's overcoat at Burkittsville in a swirling little fight. Charles shotgunned a Yankee from the saddle — he never did such a thing but that it wrenched his stomach — and got his left cheek shaved by another's saber before they were away.

Thirteenth of September. Old Marse Bob's men moving swiftly through the cuts in the beautiful heights of the northern spur of the Blue Ridge, which the locals called South Mountain. Now the army was split for fair, Old Jack whipping around one way, over the Potomac and hooking back, his scab-footed demons marching and marching to invest Harpers Ferry from the southwest, while McLaws's division aimed for the Maryland heights and Walker's for Loudoun Heights, a triangle of force closing upon the point of land at the confluence of the Potomac and the river of that sweet-song name, Shenandoah.

Charles and the scouts exchanged fire with some marching men they thought to be Jacob Cox's Ohioans, but of course there was no way for a man riding fast, hungry, and sleepy, but needing to watch and shoot, to know for certain. The heat grew, and the tiredness.

And that was the day of the cigars, which changed everything. Charles learned of it only later.

Three cigars — found by some dumb-luck Yankee on ground where Daniel Harvey Hill's men had encamped at Frederick. More interesting than the cigars was the paper in which they were wrapped: a beautifully scripted, apparently authentic copy of Order 191. Who left it nobody knew. Who read it was soon clear. McClellan read it and knew Lee had split his army. Fueled with that information, Little Mac began to move like a blue storm. Surprise, initiative, time all began to run like water between Old Bob's fingers.

Fourteenth of September. In the morning, Charles emptied his revolver four times in forty-five minutes of fighting at Crampton's Gap, southernmost of the three mountain passes the Confederates sought to hold. Out of ammunition for the Colt and starting to worry, really worry, that Sport would be hit, he drew his shotgun. Running low on ammunition for that, too.

Stuart ordered Hampton away hastily to support and protect McLaws, with Lee in desperate need of time to reassemble the split army lest Little Mac eradicate its separate parts with hardly any effort. Orders: dig in; hold the passes.

But the passes slowly gave, the shells coming in true and blowing holes in the hillsides and in the gray lines, and all it gained Lee was a day.

Galloping horsemen sped for Harpers Ferry. Nobody knew what would happen next. Charles was uneasy. Had the advantage been lost? As they rode on through the night, he sometimes shut his eyes to sleep ten minutes, trusting Sport to carry him without falter or fall.

Then, soon after dawn, in mist the color of a reb's sleeve, Charles and Ab and Doan and a fourth scout circled back and exchanged shots with more videttes in dark blue jackets that looked black in the foggy gloom — Yanks who had forced through Crampton's Gap and were coming on — coming on — to squeeze them between their guns and the garrison at Harpers Ferry. The passes were lost, surely. The advantage, too. Could Lee save anything now, including his army?

Fifteenth of September. No danger waiting at Harpers Ferry. Instead, they found singing, cheering, feasting. Old Jack had gotten unconditional surrender.

The victors smashed the doors of magazines and granaries. There were thirteen thousand small arms and federal fodder for the starved horses. Eleven thousand men taken, two hundred serviceable wagons, cannon numbering seventy or more. And ammunition in plenty, some for Charles's Colt.

A curious thing happened when Old Jack went abroad late in the day. He wore his dirtiest, seediest coat and filthy old wool hat. He didn't smile. He looked like some ignorant, smelly, mad-eyed Presbyterian deacon from the hills of western Virginia as he rode by. His men saw him and threw their hats in the air and cheered. The captured Yankees cheered him, too. Red-faced, they cheered him. Uttering yells as wild as any reb's, they cheered him. Sitting on Sport, hunched and dizzy-tired, Charles could only shake his head as one boy whooped it up in the improvised prison pen, screaming, "By damn, good for you, Jack! You're something. If we had you, we could whip you boys for sure."

As night came on, Charles tied Sport to his wrist and sat down against the wall of the arsenal and slept. After half an hour Ab woke him.

"I think they're gettin' ready to go at it some place north of here. Jack's ordered rations cooked for two days."

A calm descended with the dark. The peculiar peace of those hours when battle became a certainty. Awaiting orders, Charles went here and there and saw bits of it. Some butternut boys — literally that; eighteen, seventeen — broiling meat and joking and chattering and nudging one another in the cook-smoke. Charles knew they had not seen the elephant before. Troops who had were quieter. They dozed while they had a chance. Wrote letters. The devout Christians meditated, reading little Testaments, readying for a possible journey up the bright stairs to their certain heaven.

Around eleven, the issuing of ammunition began, done late to keep the powder as dry as possible. Fifty rounds of powder and ball per man, someone told Charles, though whether that was true he couldn't say. But the drums would sound the long roll for immediate assembly soon, that he could tell as he continued to walk here and there; now Ab was napping with both horses tied to his wrist.

At huge fires built beside the bubbling rivers, colonels were following the custom of addressing the veterans and the untried alike.

"Remember, men, it is better to wound than to slay, since it takes time to carry an injured man to the rear and sometimes requires two of the enemy rather than one."

In the dark, Charles walked on.

"— and when we are deployed upon the field of Mars, we shall achieve decisive victory and conquer the egalitarian mercenaries dedicated to despoiling your liberties, your property, and your honor. Do not forget for one moment that the eyes and hopes of eight millions and more rest upon you. Show yourselves worthy of your race and your lineage. Of your wives, of your mothers, of your sisters, of your sweethearts — of all Southern womanhood, which is dependent upon you for protection. With such incentive and firm trust in your leaders and in God the most high, you shall succeed. You cannot fail."

In the dark, Charles walked on. Waiting.

Sixteenth of September. Jackson sounded the drums and marched at one in the morning.

Up in the saddle went Charles and the others. Brigadier Hampton looked fresh and fiery-eyed as he organized his regiments for deployment behind the main column. How did he do it at his age, Charles wondered, feeling Sport friskier again, fed and rested. Wish I were.

"Where we goin', Charlie?"

"Tagging after Old Jack. Protecting his backside again."

"I know that. Where's he goin'?"

"Frank Hampton told me Sharpsburg. Little town fifteen, sixteen miles up the road When Old Jack won, I guess Old Bob decided to dig in and fight."

"Way we was all divvied up, 'twas either that or be buried, strikes me." Charles agreed. After a pause, Ab said, "The foot cavalry looks wore out."

"The foot cavalry has plenty of company."

Sharpsburg proved a small, green village in pleasant countryside with a few hills but none of the peaks found along the Potomac. Lee's headquarters was Oak Grove, a short distance south­west of town. His main line, nearly three miles long and attenuated, ran north from the center of Sharpsburg, roughly following the Hagerstown Pike. Stuart's cavalry shifted all the way up to the extreme left, Nicodemus Hill, near a bight of the river. John Hood had two brigades and Harvey Hill five, digging in and peering eastward through high corn in a forty-acre field to the hilly land along Antietam Creek, which, like the pike, ran roughly north and south, though on a course much less straight. From the east Little Mac would come with his seventy-five thousand. Little Mac had stragglers, too, but he was the player with the most chips; he could throw them away by the handful and still dominate the table.

While Old Jack placed his troops to brace the northern sector of the line, Charles was kept busy bearing orders to Stuart and other orders for outposts along Antietam Creek above and below the place where the pike to Boonsboro crossed it. He saw dust in the autumn sky eastward. The outposts pulled back, and Hunt's blue batteries began shelling, answered by those of Pendleton and Stuart, from his relatively higher ground. Booming fieldpieces flashed red light into the darkening day.

Returning to headquarters, southbound on the pike at a gallop, Charles saw pickets slipping forward through the field of corn. When he next encountered Ab, outside headquarters an hour later, the other scout told him, "They say the pickets is so close to each other out there that when one side breaks wind the other side feels it."

There had been sporadic skirmishing, which Charles had heard but not seen, and heavy bombardment throughout most of the twilight hours. At dark Lee's army lay quietly along the Sharpsburg Ridge, with McClellan's off by Antietam Creek and who knew where else; some woods at the left of the line had looked especially ominous to Charles in the daylight. They were thick, dark woods, fine for hiding preparations for an advance.

Things settled down to an occasional shout or bang of a musket. In the small hours of the night it started to drizzle. When daylight broke, the hell began.

Seventeenth of September. The blue waves appeared early, rolling from those suspicious woods Charles had spied. Shoulder weapons showing in the gray mist, banners unfurling, they trotted forward, double line of skirmishers first, then the main force, firing and loading, firing and loading — coming on. A Southern soldier cried, "Joe Hooker!"

Joe Hooker, handsome and a hell of a fighter, raised a hammer of two Union corps and let it fall on the Confederate left flank. Charles was dispatched up through Hood's position, west of the pike in some trees around a small white Dunker church, carrying instructions for the Nicodemus Hill gunners. The Union troops coming out of the woods opened fire on Hood, and Yankee artillery out of sight beyond those same woods let loose, shot coming in, and shell, and the Yankee foot pushed through the corn with heads down or turned aside as if to avoid a rain shower.

The fighting began at six, and by nine the sides had thrown each other back and forth across the cornfield several times. The waving cross of St. Andrew, the Souths battle ensign, had gone down in the noise and smoke and been raised several times. The battle was so huge and swiftly shifting that Charles saw only threads, never the pattern.

Coming back from Nicodemus Hill, head down, revolver in hand, he was caught in a driving charge of federals against Old Jack's men, who lay waiting amid trees on rocky ridges. A colonel who had lost several officers ordered Charles off Sport at gunpoint and screamed, "Hold this position at all hazards."

So he fought in the woods with two squads of the foot cavalry for fifteen incredible minutes, shooting at Yankees who came running over the, pike, bayonets gleaming steadily brighter as the sun burned off the mist and hot, cheerful light broke over the battle. In the midst of Old Jack's men, Charles fired, reloaded, shouted, encouraged — helped repulse the charge that cost the Yankees almost five thousand men in under half an hour. When the jubilant foot cavalry went hollering and countercharging toward the cornfield, Charles, feeling that his duty to the anonymous colonel had been discharged, ran back, untied Sport, and went on his way, shaking from nerves and excitement.

As he rode out from the rocks behind the Dunker Church, a bloodied figure in blue rose up and rammed a bayonet at Sport. Charles shot the soldier — in the face, as it happened; he had been aiming lower. He saw beardless flesh and red tissue and an eye fly away as the boy went down. The sight did something to Charles's sensibilities, set some unwholesome process in motion.

Shells burst; the ground trembled. He shook himself like a wet dog and pressed on, fearing Sport wouldn't survive the morning.

Along about eleven, the cockpit of the battle had shifted to a sunken road east and slightly south of the cornfield, which Charles passed through about this time. In the last three hours at least a dozen charges had gone screaming and lurching and shooting back and forth where the stalks could no longer be seen. Head high yesterday, they were gone, beaten and stamped and crushed down by living men, and dead.

He sensed he was staring into some demonic kaleidoscope, each gory scene a new variation in horror. Seeing them, Charles felt his self-control slipping. He gripped the rein more and more tightly. While turtle's instinct brought his head down beneath another billowy burst in the sky, he thought of a face. A name. Anchored himself to both.

He had an impulse to dismount and hide. It passed, and he kept going in the direction of the sunken road, where Old Bob's officers and men were not just scrapping to save the army now but maybe the whole Confederacy, too.

Charles forced Sport ahead. He was a man adrift on a vast, destructive sea. No cause could save his life; no slogan. Just scraps of memory.

Name.

Face —

Her.

Near the sunken road, he was among madmen — soldiers in gray seeing the elephant for the first time and berserk with fear. He watched one throw his canteen away; another pound one, two, three, four balls down his rifle muzzle without counting, without noticing; a third standing with clenched fists, squalling like an abandoned child. A sky-borne chunk of exploded iron cut off his left leg and his yell in one neat slice. Blood pattered the ground like the earlier drizzle.

"Get up, get up, damn you!"

Charles saw the shouter, a red-faced, red-bearded lieutenant booting a fallen horse. The lieutenant's men crouched around a three-inch Blakely gun foundered in a rut. The lieutenant kept kicking the horse. Charles bent low as another shell burst, then slid from the saddle, found a rock, put it on the loose end of the rein. He ran forward at a crouch and pushed the hysterical officer with both hands.

"Get away. That horse can't pull anything. That leg's broken."

"But — but — this gun's needed up by the road. I was ordered to move it to the road." The lieutenant wept now.

"Stand aside. You men" — Charles pointed — "cut the traces. We'll pick it up by the trail handle and pull it. Some of you push each wheel. One of you watch my horse."

Through Minie balls thick as bee swarms, shell bursts scattering shrapnel, they hauled the little rifled field gun, cursing like dock hands, sweating ferociously, pulling it forward yard by yard till they found a major, who flourished his saber to salute them. "Good for you, boys! Wheel her right up there."

"The captain done it," said one of the horse artillerymen pushing a wheel. "Our lieutenant couldn't. He's scairt out of his pants."

"Who are you, Captain?" the major asked.

"Charles Main, sir. Scout for Hampton's Brigade."

"I'll write up a commendation for this if any of us survive the day."

Charles turned and ran doubled over back through the field to the soldier guarding Sport. The bearded lieutenant sat on the ground beside the lamed horse. Charles put a bullet into the animal to end its suffering. The lieutenant stared at him with wet eyes, as if he wished for the same mercy.

"Come on, Sport," Charles whispered in a raw voice. He must get back to headquarters.

Going was hard. The federal artillery cannonaded from behind a smoke wall on the heights above the creek. Charles never saw the man who shot him. Something struck his chest, and he jerked sideways, nearly falling from the saddle.

Bewildered, he looked down and found a round hole to the left of a shirt button. He opened his shirt and lifted the leather bag. It too had a hole, though not on the reverse side. A ball, maybe partly spent when it struck him but deadly anyway, had been stopped by the book.

He got snarled in Anderson's Brigade, which was being rushed to the sunken road in an attempt to save the position. They made slow progress, and so did he against their flow. What began to effect some permanent change in him wasn't death, which he had seen before, but the staggering multiplication of it. Bodies propped one another up. One, the spattered jacket gray, had no head; green flies crawled on the meaty stump. Bodies hung belly down over farm fences. Bodies of enemies lay twined in accidental embrace.

An artillery piece and its limber were being raced along the Hagerstown Pike for some unknown purpose, and Charles was near it on the lower perimeter of the cornfield, where bodies in blue and gray and butternut had fallen so closely there was hardly any ground visible. Sport had to slip and pick through a terrain of dead backs, lifeless heads cocked at strange angles, groping hands wet with the flow from mortal wounds, mouths that howled for succor, water, God to stop the pain.

He tried to cross the pike in front of the racing artillerymen, wasn't fast enough, reined to the side. He heard the shell coming in, saw the horses hit and blown apart.

Smoke shrouded him. Sport reared, whinnying for the first time all morning. Horse bone, horse flesh, horse entrails, horse blood rained down on Charles in a quarter-minute of baptism. He yelled in rage, saw a wounded Yankee, unarmed, rise to his feet a yard away, started to shoot him, and instead leaned to the right and threw up.

Next thing he remembered, he was again riding toward the northern edge of Sharpsburg. Suddenly, in the reddened grass to the right, he spied a fallen man whose form seemed familiar. The man was prone, and by some happenstance his face had landed or been forced into the inverted crown of his wide-brimmed hat.

Shaky, Charles climbed down. "Doan?"

The scout didn't stir. There were bodies strewn along both sides of the road, but Doan's horse was nowhere visible. "Doan?" This time he said it softly, as if in recognition of what he knew he would find when he rolled the scout over.

It was worse than he expected. A ball had entered Doan's left cheek, in and out, and there had been plenty of bleeding. Doan's whole face dripped when Charles lifted the head. Blood ran off his eyeballs and out his nostrils and over his tongue and lower teeth. His hat was full. Doan had drowned in it.

Eighteenth of September. In the dark of the night, Bob Lee's army went back over the Potomac to Virginia.

Twenty-three thousand had fallen in the battle that had lasted till nightfall on the seventeenth, rolling east across Antietam Creek. Little Mac's plan had lacked a vision of what might be accomplished that day. Attacks had been piecemeal, savage but seemingly unconnected. As a direct consequence, Lee had been unable to seize the initiative, was forced instead to rash masses of men from danger point to danger point, all over the field. He had in effect conducted a series of hasty and relatively disorganized rescue operations, rather than an offensive based on a grand strategic design. The desperate defense efforts had been carried out at enormous cost; a massed frontal assault on Union positions could hardly have been less bloody.

There were moments when everything looked lost. In the afternoon, the Yankees had been within half a mile of Sharpsburg, half a mile from swinging around and cutting Lee's escape route. There were moments to be proud of — as when A. P. Hill's gray-clad Light Division arrived late that same afternoon, Hill having been busy with details of the Harpers Ferry surrender until he found himself urgently needed up where the corn and the boys from both sides lay together in a red harvesting. So Hill came up; forced march — an incredible, legendary seventeen miles in seven hours.

Politicians who had never led troops or even tasted combat often carped because generals slacked off a fight late in the day and failed to pursue an advantage all night long. The carpers were men who did not understand and could not imagine the awesome burden of battle. It was not only mortally frightening but cursedly hard work. It left the combatant drained — starved, thirsty, ready to lie down anywhere there wasn't a corpse.

So the battle day had ended with both sides exhausted but still facing the long, dreadful night of screams and moans and searching for survivors. Candles moved across the fields and through the woods, like the last of summer's fireflies. Pickets held their fire; both sides were searching.

That night Charles saw the ambulances roll with their wailing cargoes. He saw the improvised pavilions where surgeons pushed up their sleeves, took out their saws, and amputated mangled arms and legs by the hundreds. He saw corpses growing huge, ripening with the gasses of death. Near dawn, he saw one explode.

Next day, the eighteenth, assessments began to emerge.

McClellan had assumed a defensive posture, or he might have buried the Confederacy forever. Presented with an opportunity to destroy Lee's army, he merely stopped the invasion. Lee hadn't been whipped, but neither had he won. He had simply rushed his defensive units from one place to another, repelling in succession five apocalyptic attacks between daybreak and dark: at the west woods and cornfield three times; at the sunken road, leaving a lane of the dead six, seven, eight deep in one thousand-yard stretch; and, lastly, at the lower bridge on Antietam Creek.

Reinforced during the early hours of the eighteenth, McClellan chose to stand fast. The Confederate high command chose to withdraw. By now Charles had only fragmentary recollections of the day before. He couldn't remember all the places he had been sent or how many men he had shot at. Several times he had been on his own an hour or more, isolated from his objective or any familiar faces — a not uncommon happening in a battle that slid from here to there like mercury. He knew he would forever carry memories of his constant fear for Sport and his feeling that the September afternoon was eternal, the sun nailed to the sky, never to fall and force an end.

On the retreat, more segments of the tapestry — one an afternoon incident whose site he could not recall, though the images were burned into his mind. Three men in gray, one very young, with drool in the corners of his cracked lips, moved across Charles's line of vision thrusting their bayonets deep into the bodies of dead Union soldiers.

A wisp of a lieutenant colonel, perhaps a schoolmaster or attorney once but now a blood-covered casualty, managed to lift himself in the sunshine and indicate by raising a hand that he was pleading for — anticipating — mercy. The split-lipped boy was the first to stab him, through the bowels. The others stabbed his upper chest, then all lurched on, the smile of a pleased drunkard on each face.

That single memory planted a new conviction in Charles's heart and mind. It would be a longer war than anyone had dreamed and henceforward would be fought without the punctilio of that remote day when Union riders pursued Gus, and the Yankee lieutenant, Prevo, accepted his word as an officer and West Point graduate that she wasn't in the farmhouse. Gentlemanly conduct had disappeared along with the black horses and the brave, shouting lads he had led in that springtime he wanted to remember but could not because of the slain animals, the butchered or bloating bodies, the gray trio with their bayonets and grins.

Who had won, who had lost — who gave a damn? he thought in the strange, light-headed mood that came over him as he and Ab, reunited, rode toward the Potomac in the long procession that stretched away and away, forward and behind, over the hills of Maryland. They were about a mile to the rear of the troopers of the Second South Carolina, who were relatively fresh because they had been held in reserve on the extreme left during the entire battle.

In moonlight, near the river, they passed some infantrymen who had fallen out to rest. One, bitterly jocular, called to them, "Bet you two boys didn't see the scrap, bein' in the critter cavalry."

"That's right," said another, "bein' in the critter cavalry is jes' like havin' an insurance policy nobody will ever cash in."

Ab looked bleak and feverish. He pulled his side arm and cocked and aimed it at the last speaker, who yelped, "Hey, now," and jumped up to run. Charles grabbed Ab's arm and pulled it slowly, steadily, down. He felt Ab's trembling.

The next day, Charles became like many of those who went into a great battle and came out again. He didn't smile; he hardly spoke. He felt his soul clasped by a deepening depression. He could function, obey orders, but that was about all. And when someone asked Ab Woolner why his friend had such a remote look in his eyes, Ab explained.

"We was at Sharpsburg. Charlie still is."

58

Of the battle his army called Antietam, Billy wrote but one line in his journal:

Horror beyond believing.

A sense of it began to infect him on the advance to what became the battlefield. The engineers found it hard to march on the Maryland roads because those roads were jammed with ambulances. From the ambulances came sounds Billy had heard before, though he could never grow accustomed to them.

He saw the smoke and heard the firing from South Mountain but didn't reach the summit of Turner's Gap until after dark on the fifteenth. Reveille roused the battalion at four, and when the light broke they found they had bivouacked among fallen dead from both sides. Even men with strong stomachs lost everything they had eaten for breakfast.

From Keedysville, late in the afternoon, the battalion was rushed to the front. By five Billy and Lije were organizing detachments to search the surrounding farmland for every available stone. Other men carried these to Antietam Creek. Shirtless, Billy worked till the sun sank, seeing to the paving of soft spots in the creek bottom, creating a ford where the artillery could cross. A similar one was prepared for the infantry.

When the tool wagons arrived — late — grading of the approaches commenced. At half past ten the work was finished. Though Billy was yawning and ready to drop, nervousness kept him awake most of the night. Tomorrow there would be a battle. Would Bison be in it? He had thought of Charles frequently in the last few days. Was he still alive?

As was customary, the engineers were issued ammunition — forty rounds for the cartridge box, twenty for the pockets — and rations, but they were withheld from the actual fighting. Billy and Lije and the others sat out the bloody day on a ridge overlooking the fords constructed the night before. In view of what he saw, Billy wished he had been elsewhere. The sight of the dead and wounded induced a disloyal reaction in him for a time; how could any cause be worth so many human lives?

Rushed forward next day, the engineers acted as infantry support for a battery near the center of the line. Sporadic Confederate sniping harassed them, but caused no casualties. The day after that, the battalion withdrew toward Sharpsburg across the lower creek bridge, already being called Burnside's in honor of the general who had stormed it during the battle's final phase.

The federal pontoon bridge at Harpers Ferry had been wrecked by the rebels, so the engineers marched there, and late on the twenty-first fell to rebuilding it. Billy found the work restorative; with hands and backs and minds and a lot of sweat, the battalion created things instead of destroying them. He built a mental barrier and behind it hid the purpose of those creations.

From the shallows they dragged pontoon boats that could be salvaged and repaired them with wood from boxes in which rations of crackers were shipped. By now Billy's beard was two inches long. He existed in a perpetual bleary state and sometimes fell asleep on his feet for five or ten seconds. He longed for Brett.

During the night of the twenty-second, wagons arrived with the regular pontoon train and additional men — the Fiftieth New York Volunteer Engineers. He worked until dawn, frequently wading in chilly water, and at first light on the twenty-third was relieved to sleep a while. He covered himself with a blanket. The long separation from his wife produced night dreams and embarrassing evidence afterward.

After four hours, he woke and ate, feeling he could go on now. Some of the engineers formed a betting pool; each man drew a slip with a date on it. The date was understood to be that on which McClellan would be relieved. Choices were offered all the way through the end of December.

Billy heard no great condemnation of the commanding general, just acceptance of a fact. Little Mac had failed to pursue and destroy Lee's army when he had the opportunity, and the Original Gorilla would not like that.

Two days later came news of what Lincoln had announced publicly on the twenty-fourth. Over the evening fires, men argued and, in the time-honored tradition of armies, garbled the details. "He signed this paper freeing every goddamn coon in the goddamn country."

"You're wrong. It's only them in the states still rebelling come the first of January. He didn't touch Kentucky or places like that."

"Well," said one of the New York pick-and-shovel volunteers, "the thing is still an insult to white men. No one will back him up. Not in this army." Much agreement there.

Unsure of his own reaction, Billy went to Lije's tent and poked his head in. His bearded friend was kneeling, hands clasped, head bowed. Billy withdrew, waited five minutes, coughed and scuffed his feet before entering again. He asked Lije what he thought of the proclamation.

"A month ago," Lije said, "Mr. Lincoln was still meeting with some of our freed brethren, urging them to search out a place in Central America to colonize. So the conclusion cannot be escaped. He has promulgated a war measure, nothing more. And yet — and yet —"

Lije's index finger ticktocked, as if admonishing caution from a pulpit. "I have read books about Washington and Jefferson and foul-mouthed Old Hickory which hint of powers in events — in the presidency itself — that sometimes transmute base metal to gold. It could be so here, with the deed and with the man."

"He exempted any state that comes back in the Union by January.

"None will. That is why it is a war measure." "Then what's the worth of it, except to make the rebs mad and maybe start uprisings that won't amount to much?"

"What is the worth? The worth is in the core of it. The core of it — however equivocated, however compromised — is right. It creates, at last, a moral spine for this war. Henceforward we fight for loosing the shackles on fellow human beings."

"I think it'll bring down a hell of a lot of trouble — inside the army and out."

He hadn't changed his mind at dusk when he went for a stroll along the Potomac. He wanted to shake off lingering revulsion for the sights of the campaign and confusion over this newest twist in the war's course. He concentrated on thoughts of Brett

A melancholy bugle call sounded beneath the bluffs — a new call, played for the first time down in Virginia in June or July. Who had composed it and where, he didn't know. A last salute to a soldier.

Who was it for, who had died, he wondered. And what had died with the stroke of Lincoln's pen? What had been born? All were questions appropriate to the gathering autumn darkness.

He stood motionless, listening to the river's purl and the familiar camp noises and the fading of the final notes of "Taps."

In Virginia, Charles showed Ab An Essay on Man. Touching the lead ball embedded in the center, then the book itself, Ab asked, "Who give you this?"

"Augusta Barclay."

"Thought you told me you didn't have a girl."

"I have a friend who sent me a Christmas present."

"Is that right?" Ab fingered the flattened bullet again. "You was saved by religion, Charlie. You didn't get a Testament wound" — every month or so you heard of someone's life being spared because a shot hit his pocket Scripture — "but it's near as holy."

Silence.

"You got a Pope wound. Says so right here."

Charles didn't smile, just shook his head. Ab looked embarrassed and unhappy. Charles replaced the book, pulled the draw­string, and hid the bag under his shirt.

Cooper took his wife out of the house to tell her.

It was the hour of soft gray, with stars sparkling and a bar of orange light narrowing over the Wirral. Autumn breezes swept Abercromby Square, sending the swans to their sleeping places under the willows around the pond. A few leaves, already crisped and reddened, spun around the black iron bases of the street lamps.

"They want us home again. The message arrived in today's pouch from Richmond."

Judith didn't reply immediately. Hand in hand, husband and wife crossed the square to a bench where they liked to sit and discuss decisions or the events of the day. A part of Cooper never surrendered fatherhood; he had given Judah permission to run a while, on the condition he not stray too far. He repeatedly glanced toward the fence for a sign of the boy returning.

They reached the bench. The wind was sharp. The Mersey smelled of salt and some newly berthed spice ship. "That is a surprise," Judith said at last. "Was a reason given?"

Across the way, an elderly manservant emerged from Prioleau's house to trim the gas lamps flanking the front door. On the second floor, centered in a window lintel, a single star in bas-relief declared Prioleau's loyalty.

"The war isn't going well for the Yankees, but neither is it going well for our side. The toll in Maryland was dreadful."

And lives were not the only loss. When reports of the battle reached Europe, the outcome was construed as a defeat for the Confederacy. Despite false cheer and pretense to the contrary, those in Bulloch's section knew the silent truth of Sharpsburg. The South would never gain diplomatic recognition.

"I'm wanted in the Navy Department," he told her. "Mallory needs help and evidently believes I'm the one to provide it. James has matters well in hand here, and I know he sent a favorable report on my work after we launched Alabama."

Bulloch had officially commended Cooper's clumsy but effective defensive action on the pier. Cooper had stayed aboard the ship until the middle of August, when she was joined in the remote Bay of Angra, on the island of Terceira in the Azores, by two other vessels. One was Agrippina, a bark that Bulloch had purchased; aboard were a hundred-pound Blakely rifle, an eight-inch smoothbore, six thirty-two pounders, ammunition, coal, and enough supplies for an extended cruise. Bahama brought twenty-five Confederate seamen and Captain Semmes. The new ship was armed, coaled, commissioned, and christened, and Cooper felt another unexpected thrill of pride when the small band blared "Dixie's Land" in the hot tropical afternoon.

The secret mission completed, he returned to Liverpool by passenger steamer. Judith was grumpy the day he told her about his feelings during the ceremony. One of their rare quarrels developed. How could he feel pride in a cause he had once derided? Caustically, he replied that she would have to forgive his lack of perfection. The statements and counterstatements rapidly grew incoherent. It took them a day to patch things up.

Now she asked softly, "How do you feel about Secretary Mallory's request?"

He pressed his shoulder to hers. The wind was cold; the stars shone; the orange horizon-glow was nearly gone. "I'll miss this old town, but I've no choice. I must go."

"How quickly?"

"As soon as I finish a couple of current projects. I would hazard that we'd be on our way by the end of the year."

She lifted his arm and placed it around her shoulders for warmth and because she loved his touch. "I worry about a winter crossing."

What worried him more was the last leg of the trip, the run from Hamilton or Nassau through the blockading squadron. But he refused to upset her by saying it aloud. Instead, he sought to reassure her with a squeeze, a press of his lips to her cold cheek, a murmur.

"As long as the four of us are together, we'll be fine. Together we can withstand anything."

She agreed, then pondered a moment. "I do wonder what your father would say if he saw you so devoted to the South."

He hoped they wouldn't argue again. He answered cautiously. "He'd say I wasn't the son he raised. He'd say I've changed, but so have we all."

"Only in some respects. I loathe slavery as much as I ever did."

"You know I feel the same way. When we win our independence, it will wither and die naturally."

"Independence? Cooper, the cause is lost."

"Don't say that."

"But it is. You know it in your heart. You talked of resources in the North, and the lack of them in the South, long before this horrible war started. You did it the first day we met."

"I know, but — I can't admit defeat, Judith. If I do, why should we go home? Why should I take any risks at all? Yet I must take them — The South's my native land. Yours, too."

She shook her head. "I left it, Cooper. It's mine because it's yours, that's all. The war is wrong, the cause too — Why should you or Bulloch or anyone keep fighting?"

The lamplight fell on her face, so beautiful to him, so beloved. For the first time, sitting there, he admitted her to the small inner chamber where he kept the truth she had already identified, the truth made manifest by the dispatches about Sharpsburg. "We must fight for the best conclusion we can get. A negotiated peace." "You think it's worth going home to do that?" He nodded.

"All right, my dearest. Kiss me, and we will." A gust set leaves chuckling around their legs as they embraced. They were still kissing when a constable coughed and walked by twirling his truncheon. They separated with muddled, chagrined looks. Since Judith wore gloves, the disapproving officer couldn't see her rings. He probably thought she was misbehaving with a lover. It made her giggle as they hurried back across the square. Full dark had come. It would be good to be inside.

In the gaslit foyer, Cooper paled and pointed to a drop of blood on the tile floor. "Good God, look."

Her eyes rounded. "Judah?"

Marie-Louise popped her blonde head out of the parlor. "He's hurt, Mama."

Cooper flew up the stairs, his belly tied up like a sailor's knot, his head hammering, his palms damp. Had his son fallen into the hands of some thief or molester? The slightest threat to either of his children was like a barbed hook in his flesh. When they were ill, he stayed up with them all night, every night, until the danger passed. He ran toward the half-open door of the boy's room. "Judah!"

He thrust the door open. Judah lay on the bed, clutching his middle. His jacket was ripped, his cheek bruised, his nose bloodied.

Cooper ran to the bed, sat, started to take his son in his arms but refrained. Judah was eleven and deemed such contact sissified. "Son — what happened?"

"I ran into some Toxteth dock boys. They wanted my money, and when I said I hadn't any, they swarmed on me. I'm all right." He made the subdued declaration with evident pride.

"You defended yourself —?"

"Best I could, Pa. There were five of them."

Uncontrollably, he touched Judah's brow, brushed some hair back, fighting his own trembling. Judith's shadow fell over his sleeve. "He's all right," Cooper said as the fear began to run out of him like an ebbing tide.

59

In the occupied city of New Orleans, the weather was warm that morning. So was Colonel Elkanah Bent's emotional temperature. It matched that of the local citizens with whom he shared the corner of Chartres and Canal streets, watching the tangible evidence of General Ben Butler's radicalism.

The limpid air smelled as it always did, predominantly of coffee but laced with the Mississippi and the toilet water of gentlemen who had to be out because they were in commerce; gentlemen who had lived off cotton once and were perhaps doing so again, less covertly every day. Those of the better classes were still indoors. Perhaps they had received a hint of what they might see if they ventured out. Most on the corner had been caught there by chance, like Bent, though undoubtedly one or two watched by choice, to keep hatred stoked.

Fatter than ever and puffing a cigar, Bent was fully as angry as the civilians, though he dared not show it. The drums tapped, the fifes shrilled, and with limp colors preceding them, the First Louisiana Native Guards came parading up Canal.

Major General Butler had raised the regiment in late summer in the wake of other outrages, which included hanging Mumford, the man who dared to pull down an American flag from the mint building, and an order of May 15 stating that women who spoke or gestured to Union soldiers in an insulting manner would be arrested and treated as prostitutes.

Those were schoolboy pranks compared to this, Bent thought. He found the mere existence of the guards, officially mustered on September 27, both unbelievable and repulsive. He pitied the officers chosen to command this regiment of ex-cotton pickers and stevedores.

The town was abuzz with rumors generated by aspects of the Butler style. The Yankee general who pillaged private homes for salable silver pieces would be replaced because of such crimes against the civilian population. Lincoln would not allow the guards to serve in the federal army, wanting nothing to upset the delicate potentialities — the chance that a wayward sister might return — before the fateful proclamation deadline. Bent had heard those and many more.

The Negro regiment wasn't a rumor; it was right in front of him — yellow faces, tan faces, sepia and blue-ebony faces. How they grinned and rolled their eyes as they pranced past their old oppressors, who were standing still as statues, paralyzed by disbelief and disdain.

The fifes struck up the "Battle Hymn" to heighten the insult. The black unit, one of the first in the army, tramped on toward the river. Bent flipped his cigar into the street. The sight was enough to turn a man into a Southerner — a breed he had always hated but now regarded with a deepening sympathy.

Bent's hands began to itch as he thought of a glass of spirits. Too early. Much too early. But he couldn't banish the desire, to which he gave in with increasing frequency these days. He had no friends among his fellow officers in the occupying army; few even spoke to him except in the line of duty. He cautioned himself not to give in to the temptation, knowing full well he would. Only a drink, or several, would relieve his misery.

Pittsburg Landing had sent his life spiraling downward. He had reached Butler's headquarters in New Orleans after a difficult journey to the East Coast and a steamer voyage around the tip of Florida to the reopened port. After a two-minute meeting with the cockeyed little politician from Massachusetts, Bent found himself attached to the provost's department. The duty was ideal, because it allowed him to give orders to civilians as well as soldiers.

Bent had been in New Orleans before. He enjoyed the city's cultured atmosphere and the delights it offered to gentlemen with money. It was in the bordellos of the town that he had gained a certain limited passion for equality; he would pay a high price to fornicate with a nigger girl, especially a very young one. He had enjoyed that experience last night.

He peered down the street after the regiment — the Corps d'Afrique, the presumptuous darkies styled themselves. White officers had to be coaxed, bribed with brevets, or threatened with a general court before they would accept command of so much as one company of a new Negro regiment — of which there were several.

What a remarkable about-face General Butler had done in organizing them. Initially he had declared himself against the idea. In August he changed his mind, persuaded, it was said, by his wife, his friend Secretary Chase, and perhaps by belated realization that the appearance of black regiments would make local whites apoplectic. At first Butler said he would recruit only the semitrained members of a black unit formed to defend the city before it fell. He reversed himself on that, too, and was soon signing up plantation runaways.

Bent started toward the old square, encountering unfriendly faces on the walks shaded by charming iron balconies. Ah, but the civilians did step aside for him. Indeed they did.

His thoughts drifted to the brothels again. There was one house he particularly wanted to visit at an opportune moment. He had chanced on the place before the war, on his way back from the hellish duty in Texas. In the madam's quarters there hung many fine paintings, including a portrait of a woman connected with the Main family in some way he did not as yet understand. The connection itself was certain. In Texas, in Charles Main's quarters, he had seen a photograph of a woman with virtually identical features.

What stimulated Bent's imagination were facts conveyed to him by the owner of the bordello, Madame Conti. The painting depicted a quadroon who had once worked in the establishment. In other words, a nigger whore.

That painting was one of the few positive aspects of Bent's current exile. He believed it to be a weapon he could use eventually against the Mains. He never forgot or abandoned his desire to harm members of that family; only set it aside periodically because events forced him. He knew the bordello was still operating under Madame Conti's management. He assumed the painting was still there.

By the time he reached Bienville, he knew he must have a drink soon. Just then he noticed a well-dressed white woman alighting from a barouche beyond the intersection of narrow streets. She dismissed the driver and, like Bent, walked in the direction of the cathedral. Two black soldiers were coming the other way, laughing and jostling each other. Yellow stripes on light blue breeches showed they belonged to the cavalry Ben Butler had raised.

The woman stopped. So did the soldiers, blocking the walk. Bent saw the woman's hat bob as she said something. The soldiers replied with laughter. Bent drew his dress saber and lumbered across Bienville.

"You men stand aside."

They didn't.

"I gave you a direct order. Step into the street and let this lady pass."

They continued to block the walk. It was a kind of disobedience not unknown to him, but it angered him more than usual because of their color. They wouldn't have dared defy him if it weren't for Butler and Old Abe. In the wake of the President's proclamation, the darkies thought they ruled the earth.

The tableau held. Bent heard one of the troopers mutter something about white officers, and both eyed him in a speculative way. Foolish of him to interfere with such brutes. Suppose they attacked him?

Then he saw his salvation: three white soldiers coming into sight down at the corner of Conti. The sergeant wore a side arm. Bent waved his sword. "Sergeant! Come here this instant."

The trio hurried. Bent identified himself. "Take these two insubordinate rascals to the provost, and I'll follow to charge them." His breathing slowed; he could ooze contempt on the niggers. "If you hope to be part of the Union Army, gentlemen, you must behave like civilized human beings, not apes. Dismissed, Sergeant."

The noncom drew his revolver. He and his men began to enjoy their assignment. They poked the two blacks and kicked their shins. The cavalrymen looked frightened.

As well they might, Bent thought. They would be tied by their thumbs, with stout cord, to a suitable beam or limb and left to hang with their toes just touching the ground. An hour of it was standard punishment in cases of insubordination. For them he would order three or four hours.

"Colonel?"

He swept off his hat; the woman was middle-aged, attractive. "Ma'am? I do apologize for the way those — soldiers harassed you."

"I am most grateful for your intervention." Her accent was that of the city, melodious and warm. "I trust you won't take offense if I remark that you are not typical of members of the army of occupation. Indeed, I would find it more natural for a man of your sensibilities to be wearing gray. Thank you again. Good day."

Overwhelmed, he muttered, "Good day," as she swept into a doorway that was her destination.

It had been so long since anyone had complimented him about anything that he flew along toward the cathedral square in a euphoric state. Perhaps the woman was right. Changing sides was unthinkable, of course, but her insight couldn't be faulted. Perhaps his lifelong loathing for Southerners was misguided. It might be that in certain ways he was more reb than Yank. Pity to learn it too late.

Under the looming facade of St. Louis Cathedral, Bent halted suddenly, attention arrested by two men in the square. One was the commanding general's brother, an army officer much in evidence in New Orleans lately. The other —

He struggled momentarily, then got it. Stanley Hazard. Bent had seen him last at Willard's over a year ago. What was he doing here?

He hurried on, his craving for drink intense. The sudden sight of Stanley reminded him of George and Orry. Soon old litanies were resounding in his head. He must not forget either family or how much he wanted to repay them. Before he left New Orleans, he had to take possession of the portrait in the bordello.

The table linen was blinding, the silver heavy. The gulf oysters were succulent, the champagne French and cold as January. Most of the liveried waiters had woolly white heads. They bent over the diners with such attention and deference that Stanley could almost imagine Abe and his freedom proclamation were fantasies.

The polite, reserved gentleman sharing the table wore the oak leaves and cuff braids of a colonel, though the source of that rank was a mystery to Stanley and many others. He had done some investigation before leaving Washington. In one group of reports, the officer was consistently called Captain Butler, and it was the captain whose appointment as a commissary the Senate had rejected last winter.

Other reports filed in the War Department referred to him as Colonel Butler, though most of these came from his brother. In other words, in the mysterious ways of wartime, when the gentleman got a job on his brother's staff, he underwent a rapid rise in rank. Whether the promotions were brevets or even legal hardly mattered. Nothing mattered but the man's influence and power. He had plenty of each, so Stanley gladly overlooked the irregularities.

Stanley watched his champagne consumption; difficult negotiation lay ahead. While they ate they kept to safe topics: the question of the length of the war; the question of whether McClellan would be replaced and by whom. On the latter, Stanley knew the answers — yes; Burnside — but feigned ignorance.

Butler asked about his journey. "Oh, it was fine. Sea air is salubrious." He hadn't smelled much of it. He had stayed in his bunk for most of the voyage, rising only to vomit into a bucket. But it was important that business adversaries think him competent in every respect — another of Isabel's little lessons.

"Well, sir" — Stanley's guest leaned back — "a fine repast, and I thank you for it. Since your visit is so short, perhaps we'd better get down to it."

"Happily, Colonel. For background, I might tell you that I own the manufacturing firm of Lashbrook's of Lynn, Massachusetts."

"Army footwear," Colonel Andrew Butler said with a nod. A little shiver chased along beneath Stanley's shirt. The man knew all about him.

He raised his napkin to mop perspiration from his lip. He leaned forward into the shadow of a hanging fern basket. "This is a rather public place. Should we —?"

"No, we're perfectly all right here." Butler touched a match to a large Havana. "Similar, ah, arrangements are being concluded at half the tables in this restaurant. Though none is on the scale of what you propose. Please continue."

Stanley got up his nerve and plunged. "I understand there is a desperate need for shoes."

"Desperate," Butler murmured, blowing smoke.

"In the North, cotton is badly needed."

"It's available. One only needs to know cooperative sources and how to get it into the city and onto the docks." Butler smiled.

"You do understand that in every transaction I receive a commission from the purchaser as well as the seller?"

"Yes, yes — it makes no difference, if you can help me ship shoes to the Con — to those who need them and, at the same time, deliver cotton in sufficient quantity to make its resale worth the not inconsiderable risk. There are laws against aiding and trading with the enemy."

"Are there? I've been too busy to notice." He laughed heartily. Stanley joined in because he thought he should.

They went strolling, working out the details. In the mild sunshine of early winter, Stanley suddenly felt marvelous, unable to believe that, in remote places he would never see, men were living in fear and filth, and laying down their lives for slogans.

On his third cigar, Andrew Butler began to philosophize about his brother. "They nicknamed him Beast because he threatened to treat the townswomen as whores if they made disparaging remarks to our boys, and they nicknamed him Spoons because they say he loots private homes. He's guilty of the former and proud of it, but believe me, Stanley, if Ben wanted to steal, he wouldn't traffic in anything so trifling as spoons. After all, his background is Massachusetts politics — and he's a lawyer besides."

Stanley could have mentioned some things he had heard about the general — that, for instance, he had grown wealthy during his short tenure in New Orleans, though no one could say how. The sources of Andrew Butler's burgeoning fortune were, by contrast, widely known.

Moving toward the riverfront where a paddle steamer lay moored, white as a wedding cake in the sunshine, Butler continued, "The people of this town are wrong to condemn my brother. He's a much more fair-minded and efficient administrator than anyone will admit. He cleaned up pestilential conditions he found when he arrived, he brought in food and clothing when it was badly needed, he reopened the port for business. But all you hear is 'Damn the Beast' and 'Damn Spoons.' Fortunately, in our little commercial venture, you and I will deal with gentlemen who put personal profit ahead of public slogan-mongering."

"You're referring to the cotton planters?"

"Yes. Their desire to be practical was enhanced by the experience of a few who initially refused me their cooperation — and their cotton. Those gentlemen found their slaves absent all at once. When they subsequently consented to, ah, share their crop in the general marketplace, the slaves of course reappeared to do the hard labor."

Working under bayonets held by United States soldiers, Stanley thought. The scandalous stories had reached Washington. But he didn't mention it.

"Even in wartime," Butler concluded, "practicality is often a wiser course than patriotism."

"Yes, definitely," Stanley agreed. The champagne and sunshine and success reached him all at once, generating a sense of self-worth unique in all his life. Isabel should be proud of what he had accomplished today. Damned proud. He was.

By the close of November, most officers in the Army of the Gulf knew they would have a new commander by the end of the year. Protests against Butler's style had grown too numerous, accusations of thievery and profiteering too ripe. The coming of a new commandant usually produced a reorganization and many transfers. Elkanah Bent realized he must retrieve the painting at once.

He observed the entrance to Madame Conti's on three randomly chosen evenings. The observation proved that what he had heard was true: the brothel was popular with officers and noncoms alike, though it was against regulations for them to associate, just as it was for them to visit such a place. Both rules were broken by large numbers of men, who went in quietly and came out rowdily — drunk to the eyes. Within one half-hour period he witnessed two fistfights, which further cheered him.

In his disorderly rented room around the corner from the Cotton Exchange, Bent sat down in his undershirt and devised a plan with the aid of his most helpful companion, a fresh bottle of whiskey. He drank as much as a quart a day — and vile stuff it was, too; little better than sutler's slop. But he needed it to clarify his mind and help him cope with his burden of failure.

The woman who ran the bordello would never sell him the portrait. Nor was he willing to risk burglary late at night; he vividly remembered Madame Conti's black helper. He had to steal the painting while others conducted what was known in military parlance as a diversionary demonstration. With the bordello patrons in a volatile state, it should not be hard to provoke one.

It was the best plan he could concoct. He drained the bottle and fell into bed, Wearily reminding himself to secure a knife.

The following Saturday night, in full-dress uniform, Bent ascended the beautiful black iron stair he had climbed once before. He found a large, noisy crowd of soldiers in the parlor and didn't recognize one. A touch of luck there.

He ordered bourbon from the old black man behind the small bar. He sipped and listened. When the men weren't boasting to the whores, they maundered about home or muttered anti-Southern sentiments. Ideal.

He ordered a second drink. His neck prickled suddenly. Someone watching —?

He turned. Sure enough, through the press he saw a large, solid woman approaching. She was well into her sixties, and her mass of white hair was as stunningly arranged as it had been the previous time. She wore a robe of emerald silk embroidered with bridges, pagodas, and Oriental figures.

"Good evening, Colonel. I thought I recognized an old customer."

He started to sweat; insincerity lurked behind his smile. "You have a good memory, Madame Conti."

"I just recall your face, not your name." Shrewdly, she didn't bring up their quarrel over the cost of certain special services obtained from the slut he had bedded.

"Bent." On the first visit he had actually called himself Benton, wanting to protect his real name because he believed he could still have a career in the army. At that time, he had yet to learn that the generals never recognized talent, only influence.

And you don't command any. You know who's responsible: your father, who betrayed you in death. The Mains and the Hazards, the General Billy Shermans, and a host of unknown enemies who have whispered and conspired and —

"Colonel? Are you ill?"

A bulging vein in his forehead flattened out of sight. His breathing slowed. "Just a brief dizziness. Nothing alarming."

She relaxed, musing. "Colonel Bent. Certainly, that was it." He missed the flash of doubt in her eyes. He swallowed whiskey and listened to the din in the place. Excellent.

"I recall you had a Negro working for you — a huge, ferocious fellow." Willing to kill on order. "I haven't seen him tonight. Is he still here?"

Bitterness: "No. Pomp wanted to join your army. He was a freedman, and I couldn't dissuade him. To business, Colonel. In what may we interest you this evening? You know our range of specialties, as I recall."

He wanted one of her young boys, but in this military crowd dared not ask. "A white girl, I think. One with flesh on her bones."

"Come and meet Marthe. She's German, though she's learning English. One caution: Marthe's younger brother is serving in a Louisiana regiment. I advise Marthe and all the other girls that we run a nonpartisan establishment" — damn lie, that; the madam had several times criticized Butler publicly — "but you can assure yourself of congeniality by avoiding direct reference to the war."

"Certainly, certainly." Anxiety quickened the reply. Could he go through with it? He must.

Madame Conti's hypocrisy helped stiffen his resolve. He ordered a magnum of French champagne for some further stiffening, then waddled along to be presented to the whore.

"Very lovely, dear," Marthe said twenty minutes later. "Very satisfying." She had an accent thick as a sausage and china-blue eyes, which she had kept focused on the ceiling throughout. Plump and slightly pink from her brief exertion, she lay touching and fluffing the corkscrew curls over her ears.

Back turned, Bent struggled into his trousers. Now, he said to himself. Now. He picked up the bottle and drained the last inch of flat champagne.

The plump whore rose and reached for her blue silk kimono. Madame Conti's passion for things Asian was evident throughout the house. "It's time to pay, darling. The chap at the bar downstairs will take your mon —"

Bent pivoted. She saw his fist rising, but astonishment prevented an outcry for a moment. He hit her hard. Her head snapped back. She fell on the bed, shrieking in anger and pain.

Turning away to conceal his next action, he raked his nails down his left cheek till he felt the blood. Then he snatched his coat and lurched for the door.

The whore was on him then, pounding with her fists, bellowing German curses. Bent kicked back twice and hurt her enough to stop the hitting. He plunged into the dim hall. Doors opened along it, blurred faces becoming visible. What was the commotion?

He remembered his saber, left behind. Let it go. You can buy another. There's only one painting.

Down the stairs he went, staggering, blood dripping from his chin. "Damn rebel slut attacked me. She attacked me!"

He bolted through the arch to the parlor, where his outcry had already generated angry looks among the lounging soldiers. "Look what the whore did to me!" Bent pointed to his bloody cheek. "She called General Butler a pissing street dog — spat on my uniform — then she did this. I won't pay a penny in this nest of traitors."

"Right with you there, Colonel," said a dark-bearded captain. Several men stood up. Marthe bounded down the stairs, heightening the effect of Bent's story by howling her German damnations. Through heavy smoke tinted by the red glass mantles, he saw the barman's hand drop beneath the counter. Madame Conti rushed from a doorway behind him: the office — exactly where he remembered it.

"All of you be quiet, please. I permit no such —"

"Here's what we do to people who insult the United States Army." Bent seized the nearest chair and brought it down on the marble bar, splintering it.

"Stop that, stop it," Madame Conti cried with a note of despair. Several girls fled squealing; others crouched on the floor. The barman produced a pepper-pot pistol. Two noncoms jumped him, one throwing the gun into a spittoon while the other locked hands behind the man's neck and dragged his face down to the marble, swiftly and hard. Bent heard a nose crack.

He picked up another chair and flung it sideways. It struck a decorative mirror; a waterfall of fragments flowed.

The soldiers, half of them drunk, joined the attack like gleeful boys. Tables flew. Chairs crunched. Madame Conti ineffectually pulled at the arms of those wrecking her parlor, gave up and dashed away as demolition commenced in other rooms. An officer caught her, lifted her, and carried her out of sight on his shoulder.

Panting with excitement and fear, Bent ran to the office. There was the red-flocked wallpaper, the array of paintings, including the great Bingham — and there was the quadroon's portrait in its remembered place, among several canvases behind the madam's desk. Bent produced a clasp knife and began to poke and saw the canvas around the inner edge of the frame. In a minute and a half, he nearly had the portrait loose.

"What are you doing?"

Cut, rip — the picture was his. He began to roll it. "You've ruined that," Madame Conti cried, rushing at him. Bent dropped the painting, balled his fist, and hit her on the side of the head. She would have fallen, but she caught herself on the edge of the desk.

Her splendid hair do undone, she stared at him through straggling gray strands. "Your name wasn't Bent the first time; it was —"

He struck her again. The blow drove her four feet backward and hurled her to the floor. She floundered on her spine and made whimpering noises as he picked up the rolled painting, rushed through the parlor and down the iron stairs, leaving his army comrades to finish their work. From the hurrahs and the sounds of breakage that diminished as he hurried into the dark, they were enjoying the duty.

It had been a good night for everyone.

60

Burnside brought the Army of the Potomac to the Rappahannock in mid-November. The engineers hutted in a huge camp at Falmouth and waited. Seldom had Billy heard such complaining.

"We are delaying so long they will have their best ready to go against us."

"Bad terrain, Fredericksburg. What are we to do, march up the heights like the redcoats at Breed's Hill and be mowed down the same way?"

"The general is a shit-ass, fit for nothing but combing his whiskers. There isn't an officer in the country capable of leading this army to a victory."

Despite Lije Farmer's urgings that he have faith and ignore the malcontents, it was the malcontents Billy was starting to believe. Confidence in Burnside was not enhanced when a story got around that he was asking his personal cook for advice on strategy.

The weather, wet and dismal, deepened Billy's malaise and finally affected him physically. On the ninth of December he started sneezing. Then came queasiness and a headache. The next night, as the pontoon train began its advance to a previously scouted field beside the river, his forehead felt scorching, and he could barely suppress violent shivering. He said nothing.

They moved as quietly as possible. Fog had settled in, helping to muffle sound. At three in the morning, the regular battalion, assisted by the Fifteenth and the Fiftieth New York Volunteer Engineers, unloaded the boats while the teamsters cursed and coddled their horses to minimize noise. Everyone knew the significance of the pale splotches of color in the fog; among the trees and tall houses on the other shore, Confederate picket fires burned.

"Quiet," Billy said every minute or so. The men repeatedly dropped the boats as they labored across the plowed field or blundered into one another and threatened a fight. There was a bad feeling about this campaign so late in the year. It was misbegotten. Cursed.

The fever swirled his thoughts and filmed his vision, but Billy kept on, softly calling directions, maintaining order, lifting and carrying when some weaker man faltered and fell out. A misty drizzle started. Then he began to ache.

During a break in the work, he clasped his arms around his body in a vain effort to warm up. Lije appeared. Touched his shoulder.

"There are plenty to carry on here. Go to the surgeons, where you belong." Billy jerked away from his friend's hand. " 'M all right." Lije stood still, said nothing, but Billy knew he was hurt all the same. He started to apologize, but Lije turned and went back to the men.

Shame overwhelmed Billy, then uncharacteristic contempt for his friend. How could Lije believe all that Scriptural twaddle? If there was a compassionate God, how could He permit this nightmare war to drag on?

They kept at the work, continually watching the picket fires on the other side of the river. The drizzle produced heavy smoke from time to time, but the rebs kept the fires replenished with dry wood. One fire directly opposite the bridge site drew special attention because the soldier on picket duty could be seen with some clarity. He was reedy, bearded, and marched back and forth as if he had all the energy in the world.

It was nearly daybreak when the first boats went in. The men dropped one, and it smacked the shallows, loud as a shot. Superintending the work of moving more boats to the shore, Billy heard someone exclaim, "It's all up," then saw the rebel picket pluck a brand from the fire and wave it over his head, an arc of sparks.

Over the picket's cry, Lije shouted, "Press ahead, boys. No need for silence now."

They rushed forward with balks, chesses, and rails as a small signal cannon banged on the opposite shore. Running figures showed against the watch fires. A detachment of infantry came up behind the engineers, sleepy marksmen readying weapons. Artillery wheeled into place on the bluff above. Billy suspected all of it would be scant protection.

They had five boats anchored and two planked by the time enemy skirmishers appeared and opened fire. Looking bilious in the breaking light, Lieutenant Cross and a crew put out in their boats, the first to strike for the enemy shore, which they might or might not reach.

Billy worked on the end of the bridge, soon extended to midstream; he helped to cleat each boat to a pair of balks, then run it out. He heard the guns begin to crackle. A ball plopped in the water to his right; another thunked the gunwale of the pontoon boat over which he was kneeling.

"Wish I had my fucking gun," someone said.

"Stop wasting breath," Billy said. "Work."

Men ran forward with chesses. One of them jerked suddenly, stepped sideways, and tumbled into the Rappahannock.

Consternation. Hands shot down to seize and lift the wounded engineer. Billy had never felt water so icy. Lije ran out on the bridge. "Courage, boys. 'Our soul waiteth for the Lord. He is our help and our shield.'"

Dragging the man to safety — blood and water streaming from his face — Billy twisted around and said, "Shut up, Lije. The Lord our shield didn't help this man, and He isn't going to help the rest of us, so shut up, will you?"

The white-bearded man seemed to shrivel. Anger flashed in his eyes, quickly replaced by sadness. Billy wanted to bite off his tongue. Men stared at him, but only one mattered. He ran to Lije along the slippery bridge and clutched his arm.

"I didn't mean that. I'm eternally sorry for saying something so —"

"Down," Lije yelled as rebs across the river volleyed. He pushed Billy and dropped on top of him.

Billy's head smacked the bridge. He tried to rise, but too much had worn him down. Too much illness, tiredness, despair. Ashamed though he was, he let himself sink into comforting black.

Later the same day — it was Friday, December eleventh — Billy lay in a field hospital at Falmouth. There he learned that the engineers had worked all morning under constant fire and had finished two of five planned bridges across the Rappahannock by noon.

Too weak to return to duty, he spent the hours of Saturday listening to cannonading. On Sunday, Lije came poking among the cots, found his friend, and sat down on a box beside a pole where a lantern hung. He asked Billy how he felt.

"Ashamed, Lije. Ashamed of what I said and how I said it."

"Well, sir," returned the older man a bit formally, "I do confess I took it hard for some length of time."

"You saved me from a wound anyway."

"None of us is a perfect vessel, and the heart of the Master's ministry was forgiveness. You were ill, we were all exhausted, and the situation was perilous. What man can be blamed for a rash word in such circumstances?"

His prophet's face gentled. "You want the news, no doubt. I am afraid the foreboding expressed by you and many others was justified in full. Even my own faith stretches exceeding thin after events of yesterday."

Amid the rows of sick, wounded, and dying, Lije told his friend how the federals had crossed the river and what had befallen them.

61

That same Sunday night, three men kept a vigil in Secretary Stanton's office.

Potomac mist drifted outside the windows. The gas hissed, and there were soft clickings from an unseen source. Stanley wished the vigil would end so he could go home. He wanted to examine the latest statements from Lashbrook's, which had doubled its already enormous business thanks to the covert contract arranged by Butler. He tried to conceal his impatience, though unintentionally he shifted farther and farther forward to the edge of the chair. His left foot moved up and down, silently tapping.

Major Albert Johnson, the arrogant young man formerly Stanton's law clerk and now his most trusted aide, strode from the main door to that of the adjoining cipher room, where he about-faced, crossed the office, and began the circuit again.

The President lay on the couch he had occupied most of the day. His unfashionable dark suit had wrinkled. His eyes, focused somewhere far below the carpet, suited a mourner. His color was that of a man poisoned with jaundice.

Lincoln had angrily told them that a Mr. Villard, a correspondent for Greeley's Tribune, had returned from the front on Saturday and had been brought to the Executive Mansion at 10:00 p.m. There he had reported what he knew and protested the refusal of the military censor to clear his dispatches about Burnside's futile assaults on Fredericksburg. "I offered him my apology and said I hoped the news was not as bad as he perceived."

None of them knew for certain. The secretary controlled what was published — the military censors reported to him — and he also controlled the telegraph from the front. He had removed the receiving instruments from McClellan's headquarters and installed them in the library upstairs soon after he took office. He had even pirated McClellan's chief telegraph officer, Captain Eckert. Stanley admired the secretary's audacious seizure of the information lines; nothing of substance came into Washington or went out of it without Stanton knowing it first. Stanton used the telegraph like an umbilical cord to tie his department more securely to the Executive Mansion and Lincoln himself. The President continued to profess great trust in Stanton as well as a magnanimous personal admiration for the man who had once snubbed him professionally when both were lawyers. Stanton now termed Lincoln his dear friend, though he had manipulated the relationship so that the President was the dependent, not the dominant, partner.

Stanley, however, continued to regard Abraham Lincoln as a pathetic clod. At the moment, the President was resting on his side on the couch, reminding Stanley of a cadaver or some piece of sculpture by a talentless beginner. Lincoln's secretaries had secret nicknames for various people. Some, such as Hellcat for Mary Lincoln, couldn't be more appropriate. But how could they refer to their chief as the Tycoon unless in mockery? The man would never be reelected, not even if the war reached a swift and successful conclusion, which looked unlikely.

The door of the cipher room opened. Johnson halted. Stanley jumped up. Stanton emerged with several of the flimsy yellow sheets on which decoded dispatches from the front were copied. The secretary smelled of cologne and strong soap, which told Stanley he had been at some large function late in the day. Stanton always scrubbed and anointed himself after contact with the public.

"What is the news?" Lincoln asked.

Reflected gaslight turned the lenses of Stanton's glasses to shimmering mirrors. "Not good."

"I asked for the news, not a description of it." The President's voice rasped with weariness. He shifted higher on his left elbow, his loosened cravat falling over the edge of the couch.

Stanton folded down corners on the first two flimsies. "I regret that it appears young Villard was right. There were repeated assaults within the town."

"What was the objective?"

"Marye's Heights. A position all but impregnable."

Lincoln stared with that bereaved face. "Are we defeated?"

Stanton did not look away. "Yes, Mr. President."

Slowly, as if suffering arthritic pain, Lincoln sat up. Stanley heard a knee joint creak. Stanton gave him the flimsies, continuing quietly, "A dispatch presently being copied indicates General Burnside wished to assault the rebel positions again this morning, perhaps in hopes of compensating for yesterday. His senior officers dissuaded him from that rash course."

Momentary doubts about the worth of the telegraph struck Stanley. Certainly the device was changing warfare in a revolutionary way. Orders could be transmitted to commanding officers at a speed never thought possible. On the other hand, bad news could be returned just as fast, and that had all sorts of ramifications in the stock and gold markets, which tended to fluctuate wildly in response to the war news. Of course, if one had a way to get an early look at key dispatches, then telegraphed appropriate buy or sell orders before the news became known, huge killings could be made. He was delighted with himself for having thought of that. The telegraph was a remarkable creation.

Lincoln leafed through the flimsies, then flung them on the couch. "First I had a general who employed the Army of the Potomac as his bodyguard. Now I have one who celebrates a rout by suggesting another." Shaking his head, he strode to the window and peered into the mist, as if seeking answers there.

Stanton cleared his throat. After a strained silence, Lincoln swung around. His face was a study in aggrieved fury. "I presume the steamers will be bringing us more wounded soon."

"They already are, Mr. President. The first ones from Aquia Creek docked last night. Those flimsies contain the information."

"I didn't read them closely. I can't bear to — instead of numbers, I see faces. I presume the numbers are large and the casualties heavy?"

"Yes, sir, so the first reports would indicate."

Looking paler than ever, the President once more turned to confront the night. "Stanton, I've said it before. If there is a worse place than hell, I am in it."

"We share that feeling, Mr. President. To a man."

Stanley made sure he maintained an appropriately sorrowful expression.

Distant cries woke Virgilia on Tuesday morning. She turned her head toward the small window. Black. Not yet daylight.

The window was unbroken, a rarity in the ancient Union Hotel. New-style hospitals — pavilions on the Nightingale plan — were under construction to supply fifteen thousand beds and promote healing rather than impede it. Construction funds had been appropriated a year ago July. Until the work was finished, however, all sorts of unsuitable structures, from public buildings and churches to warehouses and private homes, had to be used — especially in this bleak December when Burnside's bungling had cost over twelve thousand casualties.

The cries kept on. Virgilia sat up hurriedly. Something fell to the floor from her hard, narrow bed. She groped and retrieved the small book, slipping it under a thin pillow. She reread certain passages in Coriolanus frequently because they seemed to have relevance to her situation. Ironically, the lines she loved most, from the third scene of the first act, were delivered not by her namesake, the insipid wife of Caius Marcius, but by his mother, Volumnia, the Roman matron whose temperament Virgilia shared.

She reached for the lamp on the floor. She had gone to sleep in her plain gray dress and long white apron with the tabard top. She hadn't known when she would be needed because no one had said whether casualties destined for the Union Hotel Hospital would arrive in Washington by rail or by steamer.

She knew how they were arriving in Georgetown. "Those infernal two-wheelers," she muttered as she lit the lamp. The outcries, characterized by abruptness as well as anguish, told her the wounded were coming in the ambulances that were the curse of the medical service. Some of the patients she had attended since joining Miss Dix's corps said that after riding in one of the tilting, bouncing conveyances, they found themselves wishing they had remained where they had fallen. Better four-wheel models were being tested, but getting them took money and time.

The shimmery lamp revealed the room's tawdry furnishings, warped flooring, peeling paper. The entire hotel was like that, a ruin. But it was where she had been sent. Ironically, she was less than half a mile from the house of George and Constance. She didn't know if her brother knew she was a nurse in Washington, but she had no plans to call and inform him.

She did remain grudgingly grateful to Constance and even to Billy's wife for helping her improve her appearance and showing her a better course. Beyond that, if she never saw any of them again, it wouldn't trouble her.

Virgilia straightened her hairnet, left her room, and strode downstairs with the lamp. A neat, full-bosomed figure, with an aura of authority, she smelled of the brown soap with which she was careful to wash frequently. Already she had been put in charge of Ward One. Virgilia accepted the customary salary of twelve dollars a month, which some of the volunteers did not take. For her it was a necessity, a hedge against some future misfortune.

The hotel was astir. She smelled coffee and beef soup from the kitchen. Soldier nurses, men still convalescing, were rising from none too clean pallets and cots in the halls and ground-floor parlors. Her wardmaster, a youthful Illinois artilleryman named Bob Pip, yawned and squinted at her as she approached.

"Morning, matron."

"Up, Bob, up — they're here."

To confirm it, she stopped at a broken window. A little light showed in the bleak sky, revealing a long line of the two-wheeled horrors snaking through the narrow street to the main entrance. Surveying the hall again, she saw no surgeons. They were customarily the last to arrive, something to do with dramatizing their importance, she had decided.

Despite her dislike of the doctors, she realized that all who worked at the hospital had a common cause — succoring and healing men injured in battle with a detestable enemy. Those crying out from the ambulances had fought in behalf of poor dead Grady, against the vicious army of aristocrats and mudsills Virgilia hated more than anything except slavery itself. That was why she worked so hard to replace dirt with cleanliness, pain with ease, despair with contentment.

She had taken to the work. It was honorable. Favorite lines from the Shakespeare play set five centuries before Christ reinforced her view. Every day or so, she silently repeated Volumnia's scornful speech to Virgilia about the shedding of blood. It more becomes a man than gilt his trophy. The breasts of Hecuba, when she did suckle Hector, looked not lovelier than Hector's forehead when it spit forth blood.

Virgilia had the stomach for nursing. Many of the well-meaning volunteers didn't and quickly returned home. She had a person like that in her ward now. In Washington only three days, the young woman was clearly revolted by her duties. Still, Virgilia liked her.

She knocked loudly at the door of a parlor converted to a dormitory for the female nurses; the matrons had small separate rooms, no great blessing.

"Ladies? Get up, please. They've come. Hurry, you're needed immediately."

She heard bustling, soft talk in the parlor. She pivoted with a precision that was unconsciously military and, marched toward the flung-back doors of her ward. On one of them a sorry brass sign hung from a nail in its corner. Reading downward at a forty-five-degree angle, the engraved script said ball room.

The ward consisted of forty beds and a central stove into which Bob Pip was tossing kindling while another soldier nurse lit the mantles. Virgilia marched down the aisles, inspecting to the right and to the left, and when necessary straightening coverlets or the beds themselves. Miss Dix's experiment of employing women had been an unexpected success because the original plan — to place the soldier nurses in charge of the wards — had two flaws: convalescing men tired quickly, and they could not easily and naturally provide the one thing a battle-weary veteran wanted almost as much as he wanted to be well and free of pain — tenderness. Virgilia spent as much time sitting at bedsides, holding hands and listening, as she did changing dressings and assisting surgeons.

As she completed the inspection, her female assistant came in. She was a husky, plain woman, about thirty, with a pleasant face and a great amount of brown hair done up in braids and held by her hairnet. She had told Virgilia she had ambitions as a writer and had already published some articles and verse when patriotic fervor lured her to the volunteer nurses.

"Good morning, Miss Alcott. Please come along and help me bring in our wounded."

"Certainly, Miss Hazard."

With clear command, Virgilia gestured and called out, "Bob — Lloyd — Casey — to the lobby, please."

She marched at the head of her group. A bilious look spread over the face of Louisa Alcott. The lobby was not yet in sight, but they could smell its strong odors — familiar odors that had made Virgilia ill the first time she was exposed to them.

She did hope Miss Alcott would last; something told her the woman had the makings of a fine nurse. She came of a famous family. Her father, Bronson, the Concord educator and transcendentalism conducted experiments with model schools and communal living. But pedigree wouldn't help her here. Virgilia was dismayed when Miss Alcott gulped and said, "Oh, dear heaven," as the group from Ward One entered the lobby.

Similar groups were arriving from other wards to claim their charges. And there they were, walking unaided or on crutches or being carried, the young, brave boys from Fredericksburg, some so encrusted with mud and bloody bandages it was hard to see their uniforms. She heard Louisa Alcott choke and quickly said, "From now on carry a handkerchief soaked in ammonia or cologne, whichever you prefer. You'll soon find you don't need it."

"You mean you've gotten used to —?"

But Virgilia was off among the litter-bearers, pointing. "Take forty that way, to the ballroom."

Her heart broke as she watched them go. A youth with his right hand sawed off and the stump bandaged. A man about her age, wounded in the foot, struggling with his crutch and staring with eyes like panes of glass. A soldier on a litter, thrashing back and forth, tears trickling into his mud-caked beard while he repeated, "Mother. Mother." Virgilia picked up his hand and walked along beside the litter. He quieted; the anguished lines vanished from his face. She held his hand till they reached the ballroom entrance.

The soap and disinfectant sloshed everywhere last night might have been saved for all the good it did now. Very quickly, the wounded generated a reeking miasma of dirt, festering wounds, feces, vomit. As always, the stench had a strange effect on Virgilia. Rather than disgusting her, it sharpened her sense of being needed and her conviction that the struggle would and must end just one way — with the South reduced to a mudhole, as Congressman Stevens put it so splendidly.

The efficient Bob Pip set out towels, sponges, and blocks of brown soap. A black man brought a kettle from the kitchen and poured steaming water into basins. The ambulance drivers helped their charges to beds, then left. Virgilia saw one sleazy brute eying her. She feigned annoyance and turned her back. Men often noticed her, though it wasn't beauty to which they were responding, merely size. She didn't mind. Once, no one had noticed anything.

"What 'n the divil is this goddamn place?" The booming voice had an Irish lilt. Behind the stove, now radiating heat, Virgilia saw a broad-shouldered soldier in his twenties, red-haired and red-bearded, thrashing about on his cot. "Don't look like Erie, Pennsylvania — nor the old sod neither —"

Pip told the soldier he was in the Union Hotel Hospital. The man started to climb out of bed. Pip restrained him. The soldier cursed and made a second effort. We will begin with him, Virgilia thought. Others were watching, and establishing authority in the ward was important.

She strode to the Irishman's cot. "Stop that foul talk. We're here to help you."

The bearded soldier squinted at her. "Skip the help, woman, an' give me something to eat. Ain't had a thing but hardtack since Burny sent me up that damn hill to die." He wiggled his left foot, wrapped in stained bandages. "Feels like all I did was surrender me toes, or a bit more."

The movement had pained him; that caused anger. "Jasus, woman, don't stand there. I want food."

"You will get nothing until we remove those filthy clothes and wash you down. That is standard hospital procedure."

"An' who the fu — Who's gonna do the washing, might I ask?" The Irishman rolled his eyes around the room, clearly telling her he saw no one capable by sex or training.

"One of my nurses will do it. Miss Alcott."

"A woman bathe me? I should say to God not!"

Above his beard, his cheeks were red. Pip set a bowl of water beside the cot, then handed Miss Alcott two towels, sponge, and brown soap. The soldier attempted to roll away from the women. Virgilia gestured.

"Bob, help me."

She seized the Irishman's shoulders and with some effort kept him in bed. "We do not want to inflict more pain on you, Corporal, and we won't if you cooperate with us. We intend to remove everything except your undergarments and scrub you thoroughly."

"All over?"

"Yes, every inch."

"Mother of God."

"Stop that. Other men besides you need attention. We have no time to waste on the false modesty of fools."

So saying, she ripped his collar open. Buttons flew.

The Irishman didn't struggle much; he was too weak and hurting. Virgilia showed the stupefied Miss Alcott how to ply a soapy sponge, then a towel. The towel was dark gray after two passes over the corporal's skin.

The Irishman kept his body rigid. Virgilia lifted his right arm and washed under it. He wriggled and giggled.

"Let's have none of that," she said, showing a slight smile.

"Jasus, who'd of thought it? A strange woman handlin' me like she was my mother." Sheepish then. "It don't feel too bad after what I been through. Not too bad atall."

"Your change of attitude is very helpful. I appreciate it. Miss Alcott, take over, and I'll start on the next man."

"But Miss Hazard —" she swallowed, pink-faced as the Irishman — "may I speak to you alone?"

"Certainly. Let's step over there."

She knew what was coming but dutifully bent her head to hear the whispered question. She answered with similar softness so as not to embarrass Miss Alcott. "Bob Pip or one of the other soldiers finishes each man. They have a saying: the old veterans wash the new privates."

Miss Alcott was too relieved to be shocked. She pressed a fist to her breast and breathed deeply. "Oh, I'm thankful to hear it. I believe I can handle the other work. I'm getting accustomed to the odors. But I don't believe I could bring myself to — to —" She couldn't even bring herself to say it.

"You'll do splendidly," Virgilia said, giving her an encouraging pat.

Louisa Alcott did do well. In two hours, with the help of a third volunteer nurse who joined them, they had stripped the entire population of the ward of unwearable clothing and all but essential dressings and bandages. Then the orderlies brought in coffee, beef, and soup.

While the men ate, the surgeons began to appear, distinguishable by the green sashes worn with their uniforms. Two entered the ballroom, one an elderly fellow Virgilia hadn't met before. He introduced himself and said he would handle all cases not requiring surgery. She knew the other doctor, a local man who went straight to work inspecting patients on the far side of the ward. Virgilia found army surgeons a mixed lot. Some were dedicated, talented men; others, quacks without professional schooling, qualified by only a few weeks of apprenticeship in a physician's office. It was those in the latter group who most often acted as if they were eminent practitioners. They were brutal with patients, curt with inferiors, vocal about lowering themselves to serve in the army. She was able to tolerate the pomposity of such quacks only because they shared a common purpose — the healing of men so they could return to their regiments and kill more Southerners.

The surgeon approaching was no quack, but a Washington practitioner of solid reputation. Erasmus Foyle, M.D., barely reached Virgilia's shoulder, but he bore himself as if he were Brobdingnagian. Bald as an egg except for a fringe of oiled black hair, he sported mustachios with points and sweetened his breath with cloves. At their first meeting, he had made it evident that Virgilia interested him for reasons that were not professional.

After an ingratiating bow, he said, "Good morning, Miss Hazard. May I have a word outside?"

The last soldier Foyle had examined, a man with both legs bandaged from knee to groin, began to roll to and fro and moan. The moan slid upward into a high-register shriek. Miss Alcott dropped her bowl, but Pip caught it before it broke.

Virgilia called, "Give that man opium, Bob."

"And plenty of it," said Foyle, nodding vigorously. He slipped his right hand around Virgilia's left arm; his knuckles indented the bulge of her breast. She was about to call him down when something occurred to her.

Men looked at her differently from the way they did in the past. How useful could that be? Perhaps she should find out. She let Foyle's hand remain. He blushed with pleasure.

"Right along here—" He guided her through the doorway and to the left into a dingy hall where no one in the ward could see them. He stood close to her with his small, bright eyes on a level with her breasts. Grady had loved her breasts, too.

"Miss Hazard, what is your opinion of the condition of that poor wretch who's screaming?"

"Dr. Foyle, I am no physician —"

"Please, please — I respect your expertise." He was practically dancing from boot to polished boot. "I have respected and, may I say, admired you since chance first threw us together. Kindly give me your opinion."

The foxy little man reached for her right arm as he said that. He slipped his fingers around and under. Now he knows how the other one feels. Amused, she was also slightly bewildered by this unexpected power.

"Very well. I don't believe the left leg can be saved." She hated to say it; she had watched men as they regained consciousness after going under the saw.

"Amputation — yes, that was my conclusion also. And the right leg?"

"Not quite so bad, but the difference is marginal. Really, Doctor, shouldn't you ask your colleague instead of me?"

"Bah! He's no better than an apothecary. But you, Miss Hazard, you have a real grasp of medical matters. Intuitive, perhaps, but a real grasp."

Just as he had a grasp of her arm. His knuckles pressed into her bosom again. "Surgery for that man as soon as possible. Could we perhaps discuss other cases at supper this evening?"

The sense of power intoxicated her. Foyle was no great physical specimen, but he was well off, respected, and he wanted her. A white man wanted her. It couldn't be clearer. She had changed; her life had changed. She was grateful to Dr. Erasmus Foyle. Not as grateful as he wished her to be, however. "I should love that, but how would it be construed by your wife?"

"My —? Dear woman, I have never mentioned —" "No. Another nurse did."

His pink changed to red. "Damn her. Which one?" "Actually, it was several. In this hospital and also in the one previous to this. Your reputation for protecting your wife's good name is widespread. They say you protect it so zealously, hardly anyone knows she exists."

Taking wicked delight in his reaction, she lifted her right arm, a peremptory signal that he should remove his hand. He was too astonished. She did it for him, dropping the hand as if it were soiled.

"I'm flattered by your attentions, Dr. Foyle, but I think we should return to our duties." "Attentions? What attentions?" He snarled it. "I wanted a private discussion on a medical matter, nothing more." He jerked down the front of his blue coat, adjusted his sash, and quick-marched into the ballroom. In other circumstances Virgilia would have laughed.

"Well, Miss Alcott?" Virgilia asked when the tired nurses ate their first full meal, at eight that night. They had worked without interruption. "What do you think of the nursing service?"

Worn out and irritable, Louisa Alcott said, "How candid may I be?"

"As candid as you wish. We are all volunteers — all equal."

"Well, then — to begin — this place is a pesthole. The mattresses are hard as plaster, the bedding's filthy, the air putrid, and the food — have you tasted this beef? It must have been put up for the boys of '76. The pork brought out for supper might be a secret weapon of the enemy, it looked so terrible. And the stewed blackberries more closely resembled stewed cockroaches."

She was so emphatic she generated laughter among the women on both sides of the trestle table. She looked tearful, then laughed, too.

Virgilia said, "We know all that, Miss Alcott. The question is — will you stick?"

"Oh, yes, Miss Hazard. I may not be experienced at bathing naked men — at least I was not until today — but I shall definitely stick." As if to prove it, she put a chunk of the beef in her mouth and chewed.

The familiar hospital sounds crept to Virgilia in her room that night. Cries of pain. The weeping of grown men. A woman on duty singing a lullaby.

She was restless, remembering the awkward, seriocomical encounter with Foyle. How marvelous that he had wanted her. Not a field hand, not some fugitive, but a respectable white man. She had today discovered a truth only suspected before. Her body had a power over men, and because of that, she had power as a person. The discovery was as dazzling as a display of rockets on Independence Day.

Sometime in the future, when she met a man more solid and worthy than the randy little surgeon, she would put the new­found power to use. To lift herself higher than she had ever thought possible. To help her find a place to play a truly important part in the final crushing of the South.

In the dark, she slipped her hands down to her breasts and squeezed. She began to cry, the tears streaming while she smiled an exalted smile no one could see.

62

That same Tuesday, the day on which General Banks was to relieve General Butler in New Orleans, Elkanah Bent was summoned before the old commandant at eleven o'clock. He had been steeling himself for an inquiry about the brawl at Madame Conti's but hadn't expected the inquiry officer to be the general himself.

"A fine business to deal with on my last day with the department." Petulant, Butler whacked a file in front of him. Bent was numb. A bad tone was already set, and he hadn't said a word.

Ben Butler was a squat, round man, bald and perpetually squinting. His eyes went different ways, and subordinates joked that if you looked at the wrong one, the bad one, he would demote you. He seemed in that kind of mood now.

"I suppose it never occurred to you that the proprietress of the house would file a complaint with the civil authorities and with me as well?"

"General, I —" Bent tried to strengthen his voice but couldn't. "Sir, I plead guilty to effecting rough justice. But the woman is a prostitute, no matter how grand her manners. Her employees insulted you, then attacked me." He fingered the healing nail marks. "When I and others protested, she provoked us with more insults. I admit matters got somewhat out of control —"

"That's putting a nice gloss on it," Butler interrupted, squinting harder than ever. His voice had the nasal quality Bent associated with New England. "You totally destroyed the place. To go by the book, I should request that General Banks convene a court-martial."

Bent almost fainted. Seconds went by. Then Butler said, "Personally, I would prefer to exonerate you completely." Buoyed, Bent was quickly cast down again: "Can't do it, though. You're one reason, she's the other."

Confused, Bent muttered, "Sir?"

"Plain enough, isn't it? It is because of your record that I can't extend leniency." He opened the file and removed several pages; the topmost ones had yellowed. "It's covered with blemishes, and you have now added another. As for the woman, of course you're right; she's a prostitute, and I know she's vilified me more than once. But if I hanged everyone who did that, there'd be no more hemp in the Northern Hemisphere."

Bent's forehead began to ooze and glisten. With a grunt, Butler launched himself from his chair. Hands behind his back and paunch preceding him, he walked in small circles, like a pigeon.

"Unfortunately, Madame Conti's charges run deeper than inciting to vandalism, which is bad enough. She accuses you of theft of a valuable painting. She accuses you of assault on her person in order to accomplish that theft."

"Both — damned lies." He gulped.

"You deny the charges?"

"On my honor, General. On my sacred oath as an officer of the United States Army."

Butler knuckled his mustache, chewed his lip, stepped in a circle again. "She won't like that. She hinted that if she could get her property back, she might drop the charges."

Something told Bent it was a critical moment. Told him to attack or he'd be finished. "General — if I am not speaking out of turn — why is it necessary to accommodate in any way a woman who is both a traitor and disreputable?"

"That's the point," Butler exclaimed crossly. "She isn't as disreputable as one might expect. Her family goes back generations in this town. Haven't you ever noticed the street in the old quarter that bears her last name?" Of course he had, but he had drawn no conclusions from it. "What I'm telling you, Colonel, is that some of Madame Conti's clients are also friends and highly placed in the municipal government. They're men I dislike but men I was forced to depend upon to keep the cily running. General Banks is in the same unfortunate position. So I have to throw her a bone, don't you see?"

That was it, then; accommodation with traitors. In the wake of the realization came rage. Butler, meantime, sank back into his chair, a little comic-opera man. Ludicrous. But he had dangerous power.

"I suppose I could put you in command of a black regiment" — Bent almost fainted a second time — "but I doubt Madame Conti knows I can't find white officers for that duty. She wouldn't see the nicety of the punishment. Regrettably, I must find a more visible alternative."

From under the contents of the file — the record of humiliations and reversals engineered by others — Butler plucked a crisp new sheet, the ink stark black. He spun the order around and laid it on the desk for Bent to read. The junior officer was too dazed and upset.

"Effective today, your brevet is revoked. That will keep the bitch from barking till I get out of town. Someone from General Banks's staff will speak to you about financial reparations. I am afraid you may spend the rest of your army career paying for this little escapade, Lieutenant Bent. Dismissed."

Lieutenant Bent? After sixteen years, he was to be reduced to the rank he had when he came out of the Academy? "No, by God," he shouted to the disordered room near the mint. He hauled his travel trunk from a cluttered alcove and kicked the lid open. He packed a few books, a miniature of Starkwether, and, last, cushioned by suits of cotton underwear, carefully rolled, wrapped in oiled paper, and tied, the painting. Into the trunk went everything he owned except one civilian suit, a broad-brimmed hat he had purchased an hour after leaving Butler, and all of his uniforms, which he left in a heap on the floor.

Sheets of rain swept the levee, lit from behind by glares of blue-white light. The storm shook the ground, shivered the slippery incline, dimmed the yellow windows of the city.

"Watch that trunk, boy," Bent yelled to the old Negro dragging it up the rope-railed gangway ahead of him. Rain dripped from his hat brim as he staggered aboard Galena in the light-headed state which had persisted since his interview yesterday. His military dreams lay in pieces, ruined by jealous, vindictive enemies. He had chosen to desert rather than serve an army that betrayed years of loyalty and hard work with demotion. He was fearful of discovery but awash with hatreds surpassing any experienced in the past.

A terrifying figure with a blue halation blocked him at the head of the gangway. Calm down, else they'll suspect, you'll be caught, and Banks will hang you.

"Sir?" rumbled a voice as the halation faded and the thunder, too. Relieved, Bent saw it was merely the purser of the steamship, holding a damp list in the hand protruding from his slicker. "Your name?"

"Benton. Edward Benton."

"Happy to see you, Mr. Benton. You're the last passenger to come aboard. Cabin three, on the deck above."

The wind roared. Bent stepped away from the exposed rail, but the rain found him anyway. He shouted, "How soon do we leave?"

"Within half an hour."

Half an hour. Christ. Could he hold out?

"The storm won't delay us?"

"We'll be bound for Head of Passes and the gulf on schedule, sir."

"Good. Excellent." The wind tore the words away. He groped for the rail of the stair, lost his footing, and almost fell. He spewed obscenities into the storm. The purser rushed to him.

"You all right, Mr. Benton?"

"Fine." The man hovered. Bent wanted no undue notice. "Fine!" The purser withdrew, quickly gone in the dark.

It required both hands on the slippery rail to drag his tired body up the stairs toward the safety of his cabin. What did he have left? Nothing but the painting, hate, and a determination that his enemies would not succeed in destroying him.

No — lightning; his eyes shone like wet rocks as he heaved and pulled himself upward in the rain — oh, no. He would survive and destroy them first. Somehow.

Still weak from his sickness, Billy went down to the river again. Under the protection of muskets and artillery, he helped dismantle the bridge he had built. He felt he was committing an act of desecration. He told himself he was taking the military defeat too personally. He couldn't help it.

The pontoon wagons vanished into the winter dark. Encamped at Falmouth again, he wanted to write Brett but feared to do it. He wrote in the journal instead.

63

Two nights before Christmas, Charles rode to Barclay's Farm at dusk. A bag made of coarse netting hung from his saddle. The bag held a fine Westphalia ham taken from Yankee stores captured on recent night raids north of the river.

The evening had an eerie quality. The bare limbs, bushes, and roadside fences glittered like glass. It had rained last night while the temperature dropped.

Most of the clouds had gone now; the sky in the west had a purple cast, pale near the tree line, darker above. The moon was visible, a gray sphere with a thin crescent of brilliance on the bottom. There was enough light for Charles to discern the ice-covered farmhouse and the two red oaks standing like strange crystal sculptures.

Sport proceeded at a walk; the road was treacherous. Charles's beard reached well below his collar, and his teeth shone in the midst of it. Anticipation put the smile on his face and helped banish the memories of Sharpsburg that were with him so often. He had never received the promised commendation for helping to move the Blakely gun on the battlefield. Either the major had forgotten Charles's name or unit or, more likely, he had been one of the thousands who had not survived what was the single bloodiest day of the war. This was his first opportunity to visit the farm in months, even though the cavalry had been camped not far away, over in Stevensburg, for several weeks. With his scouts and picked bands of troopers, Hampton had been in the saddle almost constantly since, raiding above the Rappahannock.

Night ghosts, they drifted behind enemy lines and took a hundred horses and nearly as many men at Hartwood Church; rode up the Telegraph Road, cut the enemy wire to Washington, and seized wagons at the supply base at Dumfries; rode again, hoping to go fifteen miles, all the way to Occoquan, only to be forced around when an entire regiment of Yankee horse materialized against them. They escaped with twenty wagons loaded with sutler's delicacies: pickled oysters, sugar and lemons, nuts and brandy, and the hams, one of which he had commandeered as a present for Gus. It would be a hearty Christmas celebration at the encampment, though a short one. Charles had to be back by Christmas night, because Hampton proposed to return to enemy territory the following day.

During the weeks of riding and fighting in snow and thaw, pressure against the town of Fredericksburg had mounted, culminating in savage battle and Burnside's defeat. Charles worried constantly about Gus's safety. If Hampton's lean scavengers crossed the Rappahannock to raid, Union detachments could do the same coming the other way. He had tried to find someone who could tell him whether the Fredericksburg fighting had reached as far as Barclay's Farm, and finally learned it had not. On the road, he experienced a surge of relief. She was there. Transparent smoke rose up to vanish in the starlight. Unseen lamps brightened the rear of the house and shone from the half-open door of the small barn nearest it.

"Sport," he growled, sharply reining the gelding on a crust of ice, which crackled. Hunching forward, he inhaled the piercing air. Lamplight in the barn at this hour?

Tied to the pump, which had a gleaming stalactite at the spout, were two horses. He supposed there was an innocent explanation, yet the sight of them so close to enemy positions across the river set him on edge. He dismounted in the center of the road, led Sport to the side, and tied him to a fence rail. The gray stamped and blew warm breath that plumed in the cold.

Charles set off on foot for the farmhouse, a short walk of a hundred yards. In the silence, his spurs jingled like tiny bells stirred by a breeze. He crouched and with some difficulty removed them. All of this continued to strike him as slightly foolish; he would say nothing to Gus when her callers turned out to be neighbors.

Still — why was that barn door open? And Washington and Boz nowhere to be seen?

Where the fence ended and the dooryard began, Charles paused to study the horses. Old riding saddles, neither Grimsleys nor McClellans, told him nothing. He stole toward the house, whose ice-covered shakes flashed back the light of the moon for a moment. He was conscious of each crunch and crinkle underfoot; he couldn't avoid a certain amount of noise, no matter how carefully he trod.

The horses grew aware of him, shifted and stamped softly. He held still near the house, listening.

He heard laughter. But not hers. It came from the owners of the horses.

One of the animals stepped to the side, whinnying. Charles held his breath. The laughter stopped. Perhaps that had no connection with the horses. He might be imagining the whole —

The horses had changed position, giving him an unobstructed view of the barn. Inside, outstretched legs projected into his line of sight. The ankles were lashed with rope. The parson and his wife didn't tie people when they called, did they? They didn't visit on a night so brutally cold, did they?

He leaned against the house, his heart beating at frantic speed. Gus was threatened. The woman he cared about was inside — threatened.

Backed against the building, he knew how much he loved her. So deep was the reverse of that emotion, his fear for her, he couldn't move for half a minute. His mind was in confusion. Suppose he took rash action and got her killed?

Another minute went by. Do something, damn you. Do something.

He broke free of the numbing confusion and pictured the back porch. He didn't dare enter that way. It would be ice-covered, noisy. He twisted his head toward the road. The red oaks. Great climbing trees. Could he reach one of the dormers and prize it open? If so, he had a chance of surprising the men holding Gus in the kitchen or one of the back rooms. That they were Yankees he now took as a certainty. Everything depended on surprise and silence.

He stole to the front of the house and over to the stoop, where he sat and jerked off his boots. Then, crossing the porch, he slowly turned and tested the doorknob.

Locked. All right, it had been a faint hope anyway. He put his filthy right sock onto the top step, and his whole body tilted wildly. He went flying off the steps; the edge of one cracked him across his spine. He bit back a yell but made a loud bump. He rolled on his side on the hard ground, listening —

After a few seconds, he exhaled. They hadn't heard the noise. He had to be more careful. The ice was everywhere.

Under the tree, he stretched, grabbed, threw a leg over, and pulled himself up on the lowest limb. From there on it wasn't so easy. He wasn't clinging to bark with his knees and elbows, his gauntlets and filthy socks; he was clinging to frozen grease. He went up with excruciating slowness and nearly fell three times. Finally he reached a large branch that hung over the roof.

Taking hold of a thinner one above it, he stood up, then began to move along the icy branch, sliding his right foot toward the house a few inches, then his left one, then his right again. Progress was slow because of the cold; he had lost nearly all feeling below his ankles.

Save for the stars and the crescent moon, the sky was black from horizon to horizon. Balanced on the branch near one of the dormers, he studied the situation. He would have to lean out, grasp the dormer peak, and hope he could hang on. Attempting to stand or kneel on the roof itself would be futile because of the slope and the ice. He swallowed. Extended his hand. Stretched — His fingers were three inches short of the peak. Still holding the limb above, he stepped six inches nearer the house. The branch sagged, began to crack. "Holy hell," he whispered, gambling, letting go and flinging both hands forward. He felt himself falling, caught hold of the peak. The sudden weight shot excruciating pain along his arms. His knees banged the shakes of the dormer. They would hear that all the way to the Floridas.

He hung from the peak by both hands, then removed his right one, reaching downward to the window. He tugged. Nothing. Again. Nothing.

Locked, goddamn it. He let out an enraged groan and yanked a third time, thinking he would have to smash his fist through —

The window rose an inch.

His left hand slipped on the peak, but he held on, panting. He slipped his other hand under the window and slowly, slowly pulled it up far enough to allow him to swing through into the dry, chill dark of some cobwebby place. Eyes closed, he rested on his knees. He felt tremors in his quaking left arm.

He waited until a little of that passed. His vision adjusted, and he picked out certain shapes: trunks, an old dress form. This was an attic. A pale oblong showed where the stairs descended to the house proper.

He heard laughter again, then blurred words from Gus. She sounded angry. Next came a smacking sound. She retorted, still angry. A second smack silenced her. He almost felt the blow himself.

He controlled his rage and stood up cautiously, so as not to creak the floor or thump a beam with his head. He stripped off his gloves, blew on his fingers, flexed them, blew again until he felt circulation returning. He unbuttoned his old farmer's coat and eased the loaded Colt from the tied-down holster.

He advanced to the stairs and crept down, a silent step at a time. The anger thickened, possessing him. At the bottom, he took half a minute to twist the handle, ease the door open — no squeak, thank the Lord — and slide through to the warm hall.

To the right, the kitchen doorway. The voices were distinct.

"Meant to ask you, Bud. You ever been with a female?"

"No, Sarge." That voice was light; the speaker sounded younger than the previous one, who seemed to have an accumulation of phlegm in his throat.

"Well, m' lad, we'll change that pretty quick."

Charles moved, sliding toward the kitchen, his back to the wall.

"Ever spied a plumper pair of tits, Bud?"

"No, sir."

"Want to take a look at them 'fore we start the real festivities?"

"If you do, Sarge."

"Oh, yessiree, I do. Sit still, missy."

"Get away from me." Charles was a yard from the door when Gus said that.

"You be quiet, missy. I wouldn't want to bruise up a pretty little reb like you, but I'm gonna open that dress and have a look at them plump things hangin' —"

Charles lunged to the doorway, thumb and finger of his gun hand ready as he spied the two Yanks. Neither wore a uniform — scouts, then, like himself.

The nearest, a blue-eyed youngster with a scraggly yellow mustache, saw him first. "Sarge!"

The older Yankee blocked his view of Gus, who was evidently seated in a chair. Charles stepped into the room and thoughtlessly made an error; he jumped a pace to the right to see if she was hurt. "Gus, are you —?"

Almost too late, he saw what he had missed before — the horse pistol in the waistband of the younger Yank. Out it came, looming huge. Charles fell to his knees and fired at the same time as the younger man.

Only the drop saved him. The Yankee ball passed over his head. His ball flew into the boy's open mouth and through the back of his head, carrying parts of it and splattering them on the wall. Gus screamed. The sergeant goggled at the boy blown backward against the stove. Then he stared at Charles on one knee, his Colt curling out smoke.

The sergeant was scared and consequently slow. Even while he groped for his side arm, he realized he had no time. Wetting himself, he staggered on a crooked path to the back door.

Charles lunged forward, next to Gus's chair, and aimed at the man's back. "You piece of Yankee shit." He squeezed the trigger and simultaneously Gus pulled his arm.

The ball went low, hitting the sergeant's left leg. With a yell he pitched through the door he had opened a moment earlier. He slid belly down across the porch and dropped off the edge, leaving a blood-swath on the ice.

"I'm going to kill the —"

"Charles."

Pale, she gripped his arm and gazed at him, unable to countenance what she saw. The fever in his eyes, the death's-head expression —

"Charles, I'm all right. Let him go."

"But he may —"

They heard a horse whinny, weight on it suddenly. It went clattering toward the road. Boz and Washington shouted from the barn. Slowly, Charles released the hammer of the Colt and laid the gun on the table. He was shaking.

He grasped the shoulders of her plain dress, leaned down. "I've never shot a man in the back, but I'd have shot that one. You certain you're all right?"

A small nod. "Are you?"

"Yes." The madman's glint was dimming; his facial muscles relaxed. He knelt and freed the ropes they had wound around her and the chair. Yes, she said, they were scouts, unable to resist a bit of foraging in a warm place.

"When you stormed through that door, I thought I'd taken leave of my senses." She managed a broken laugh, standing, stretching. "I thought it was a vision. It's been so long since I've seen you."

"I sent letters."

"I got them. I sent some, too. Half a dozen."

"Did you?" The start of a smile.

"You received them, didn't you?"

"Not a one. But that's all right. I'd better go to the barn and untie your men. Sport's down the road — my spurs, too. My gauntlets are in the attic. I came in by the roof. I'm strung out all over this farm." His mood swinging wildly back to elation, he left the house across the bloody ice.

An hour later, down to his long underwear and bundled in three blankets, he rested by the great hearth. The Westphalia ham reposed on the chopping block. Gus had scrubbed the wall, and the boy's corpse was gone; Washington and Boz had seen to that, after repeatedly shaking Charles's hand and thanking him for saving their mistress and them.

Shivering, Charles stared at the fire, still astounded by his own behavior. He had shot a stripling without a qualm about the victim's age. Then he had been ready, even eager, to kill the sergeant with a bullet in the back — and not on a battlefield, but in a kitchen. Those were extreme and alarming changes. What was happening in this damned war? What was happening to him?

He tried to puzzle it out. It was the duty of a soldier to destroy the enemy, but not with pleasure. Not without some human feeling other than rage. The boy with the scraggly mustache wasn't a counter on a board or a figure in a report. There were parents, a home, innocent ambitions, perhaps a sweetheart — none of that had entered his head until this minute. All he had wanted to do was shoot, as casually as if the target were some game bird in an autumn field.

Gus returned to the kitchen, moving straight to his side. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"You looked frightful when I walked in."

"Cold, that's all."

"Can you spend Christmas?"

"If you want me to."

"Want you to — oh, Charles," she cried as the firelight shimmered on the walls, revealing one stain not quite wiped away. "I was so frightened during the fighting in town. I lay awake listening to the guns and wondering where you were." She knelt in front of him, resting her forearms on his blanketed knees, her face soft, damp, no defenses in place. "What have you done to me, Charles Main? I love you — oh, my God, I can't believe how much I love you," she exclaimed, reaching up, pulling him down to a kiss.

With his arm around her, he led her along the hall, worried about his dirty underwear. Her room was cold. They tumbled into bed, groping for one another. "Gus, I need a bath before —"

"Later. Hold me, Charles. I want to forget how that poor boy died."

"He was a damned evil boy."

"He thought he was punishing the enemy."

"There's no manual prescribing the kind of punishment they wanted to inflict on you."

"Well, it was horrible, but it's over, so do stop debating and love me as hard as — what's this?"

Her fingers had found the leather bag. She insisted on lighting a candle while he unbuttoned his underwear and, after some coaxing, slipped the thong over his head and handed her the bag.

Delight spread over her face as she opened it. "You've kept the book with you all this time?" The smile vanished. "The book was hit. You were hit. This is a bullet."

"What's left of it. Mr. Pope saved my life at Sharpsburg."

She burst into tears, seized him, began raining kisses on him. They pulled each other's clothes off. The coupling was quick, almost desperate, with a certain clumsiness because the shock of earlier events still lingered. In less than five minutes he fell away from her and fell asleep.

He woke an hour later to find her jogging his shoulder. "Hot water's in the tub." She had donned a robe, had better color. Her hair, undone, hung nearly to her waist. "I'll wash your back, and we'll go to bed again."

This time, less numb and stunned, Charles lay with her in the cave of warmth beneath the comforter. She kissed his eyes and beard. His hand touched and played with each round breast, then strayed lower. She gripped his wrist and pressed.

Their breathing quickened. Yet there were warnings in his head on this night of shocks and changes.

"Are you sure we should go on? I'm a soldier — I can't get here for months at a time —"

"I know what you are," she said, caressing gently in the dark.

"Do you? I could ride away and never get back."

"Don't say such things."

"Have to, Gus. I'll get out of this bed this minute if you think I should."

"Do you want that?"

"God, no."

"I don't either." Kissing him. Touching him. Rousing him to such rigidity he hurt. "I know the times are fearful and dangerous. We must accept Pope's advice —" Her mouth slipped across his bearded face, found his lips, opened. Tongues wet and loving touched a moment.

"What's that?"

" 'Whatever is — is right.' " Another deep, long kiss. "Love me, Charles."

He did, and toward the end, she hung her head back and breathed, "I want you always. Always, always."

"I love you, Gus."

"I love you, Charles."

"— love you —"

"— love you —"

"— love —"

The word cycled up the scale like human music as he pushed to the center of her, and she rose and cried her joy in a voice that shook the room.

Still later, deep in the night, she slept against his shoulder, making occasional small sounds. They had shared themselves a third time, and she had closed her eyes afterward. He couldn't seem to doze or even calm down. What he had done tonight, learned tonight, kept his eyes open and his heart beating much too fast for a man in the soft aftermath of love.

He was fearful because his feelings were no longer hidden. He knew he loved her when he stood by the house unable to force himself to action for a few moments because he cared so much.

Then his emotions rendered him mistake-prone. In the kitchen he looked at Gus first, instead of at the young Yank. In the army he had seen men rendered impotent as soldiers by worry over loved ones. The worst cases deserted. He held them in contempt. But after his own near-fatal error, how could he? How was he different?

Finally, and perhaps worst, he had been prepared to kill the coward's way, with a ruthless joy, and to do it in a place supposedly safe from violence and all of the other spreading poisons of the war.

You oughtn't to be here. But how could he be anywhere else? He had been falling in love since he first saw her.

How was it possible to be so fulfilled and so torn? He saw the conflict in a homely little mind picture: two liquids from an apothecary's shelf poured into a mortar and swirled with a pestle.

He loved Gus. She was passion, peace, merriment, contemplation, companionship. He admired her nature, he wanted her physically, she was everything he had ever desired in a woman without expecting to find it.

But there was Hampton, and the Yankees.

The pestle swirled. The hours went by. The apothecary's hopes counted for nothing. The liquids would not mix.

Problem was, he couldn't give up as easily as an apothecary could. Couldn't give up Gus and couldn't give up his duty. Love and war were opposite states, and he was inescapably caught in both. He had no choice except to go forward, wherever the disparate forces might carry him — and her.

Full of foreboding he slipped his arm under her warm shoulders and held her close.