Bernard Cornwell
COPPERHEAD

THE NATHANIEL STARBUCK CHRONICLES

BOOK TWO

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

The right of Bernard Cornwell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

COPPERHEAD. Copyright © 2006 by Bernard Cornwell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © JULY 2009 ISBN: 9780007339488

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Version: 2017-05-08

Praise for Bernard Cornwell’s
THE NATHANIEL STARBUCK CHRONICLES

“The battle scenes are gripping and realistic and Cornwell has studded the narrative with colorful and…accurate portraits of real civilian and military figures…. [He]’s particularly skillful at portraying the complexity of men in…inner conflict…. A superb series.”

—San Jose Mercury News

“Fast-paced…[and] gripping entertainment.”

—Daily Telegraph

“The most entertaining military historical novels…. Always based on fact, always interesting…always entertaining.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“[A] wonderful series…. A rollicking treat for Cornwell’s many fans.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Highly successful.”

—The Times (London)

Copperhead is for Bill and Anne Moir.

CONTENTS

COPYRIGHT

PRAISE

MAP

PART ONE

THE INVASION BEGAN AT MIDNIGHT

MAJOR ADAM FAULCONER ARRIVED AT THE FAULCONER

WE’RE TOO FAR LEFT.” TRUSLOW HAD GROWLED AT

PART TWO

GEORGE WASHINGTON’S BIRTHDAY WAS FIXED AS THE

COLONEL GRIFFIN SWYNYARD WAS GREEDILY EATING A

JOHN SCULLY AND PRICE LEWIS ADMITTED NOTHING, NOT

TWO SOLDIERS FETCHED STARBUCK FROM HIS CELL

WHAT IS THIS?” BELVEDERE DELANEY HELD A BANK

PART THREE

THE ARMIES CAME TO A STOP IN A CURVE WHICH RAN

THE REBEL ATTACK STALLED AMONG THE ABANDONED

EPILOGUE

HISTORICAL NOTE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

OTHER BOOKS BY BERNARD CORNWELL

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

MAP

PART ONE

THE INVASION BEGAN AT MIDNIGHT.

It was not truly an invasion, just a heavy raid on a rebel encampment that a patrol had spotted among the thick woods that crowned the high bluffs on the Virginia side of the river, but to the two thousand men who waited to cross the bleak slate-gray swirl of the Potomac River this night’s exertions seemed more momentous than a mere raid. This fight across the river was their opportunity to prove their critics wrong. Nursery soldiers, one newspaper had called them; wonderfully trained and beautifully drilled, but much too precious to be dirtied in battle. Yet tonight the despised nursery soldiers would fight. Tonight the Army of the Potomac would carry fire and steel to a rebel encampment and if all went well they would march on to occupy the town of Leesburg, which lay two miles beyond the enemy camp. The expectant soldiers imagined the shamefaced citizens of the Virginia town waking to see the Stars and Stripes flying over their community again, and then they imagined themselves marching south, ever farther south, until the rebellion was crushed and America was reunited in peace and brotherhood.

“You bastard!” a voice shouted loudly from the river’s edge where a work party had been launching a boat carried from the nearby Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. One of the work party had slipped in the clay, dropping the boat’s stern onto a sergeant’s foot. “You no-good son of a bitch goddamn bastard!” The Sergeant hopped away from the boat.

“Sorry,” the man said nervously.

“I’ll give you sorry, you bastard!”

“Silence! Keep it quiet now!” An officer, resplendent in a new gray overcoat that was handsomely lined in red, clambered down the steep bank and helped lift the skiff toward the river’s gray water from which a small mist crept to hide the lower slopes of the far bank. They labored beneath a high moon, no clouds, and a spread of stars so bright and clean they seemed like an augury of success. It was October, the fragrant month when the air smelt of apples and woodsmoke, and when the sweltering dog days of summer gave way to clear sharp weather that held just enough promise of winter to persuade the troops to wear their fine new overcoats that were the same color as the river’s drifting mist.

The first boats pushed clumsily off the bank. The oars clattered in the oarlocks, then dipped and splashed as the boats receded into the mist. The men, who a moment before had been cursing and cumbersome creatures clambering down the clay bank into the clumsy boats, were mysteriously transformed into warrior silhouettes, spiky with weapons, who glided silent and noble through the vaporous night toward the misted shadows of the enemy shore. The officer who had remonstrated with the Sergeant stared wistfully across the water. “I suppose,” he said softly to the men around him, “that this was how Washington felt on the night he crossed the Delaware?”

“A much colder night, that one, I think,” a second officer, a young student from Boston, replied.

“It’ll be cold enough here soon,” the first officer, a major, said. “There’s only two months till Christmas.” When the Major had marched to war, newspapers had promised that the rebellion would be over by fall, but now the Major was wondering whether he would be home with his wife and three children for the family rituals of Christmas. On Christmas Eve they sang carols on Boston Common, the children’s faces lit by lanterns hung on poles, and afterward there were warm punch and slivers of cooked goose in the church vestry. Then on Christmas Day they went to his wife’s parents’ farm in Stoughton, where they harnessed the horses and the children laughed in delight as they trotted down country roads in a cloud of snow and a tinkling of sleigh bells.

“And I rather suspect General Washington’s organization was superior to ours,” the student-turned-lieutenant said in an amused voice. His name was Holmes and he was clever enough to awe his superiors, but usually intelligent enough not to let that cleverness alienate their affections.

“I am sure our organization will suffice,” the Major said just a little too defensively.

“I am sure you’re right,” Lieutenant Holmes said, though he was not sure of that fact at all. Three regiments of northern troops waited to cross, and there were just three small boats to carry them from the Maryland shore to the island that lay close to the river’s far bank, upon which island the troops must land before reembarking on two more boats for the final short crossing to the Virginia mainland. Doubtless they were crossing the river at the spot closest to the enemy encampment, but Lieutenant Holmes could not really understand why they did not cross a mile upstream where no island obstructed the river. Maybe, Holmes surmised, this was such an unlikely crossing place that the rebels would never think to guard it, and that seemed the best explanation he could find.

But if the choice of crossing place was obscure, at least the night’s purpose was clear. The expedition would climb the Virginia bluffs to attack the rebel camp and capture as many Confederates as possible. Some rebels would get away, but those fugitives would find their flight blocked by a second Yankee force that was crossing the river five miles downstream. That force would cut the turnpike that led from Leesburg to the rebel headquarters at Centreville, and by trapping the defeated rebel forces it would provide the North with a small but significant victory to prove that the Army of the Potomac could do more than just drill and train and mount impressive parades. The capture of Leesburg would be a welcome bonus, but the night’s real purpose was to prove that the newly trained Army of the Potomac was ready and able to whip the rebels ragged.

To which end the small boats struggled back and forth in the mist. Each crossing seemed to take forever, and to the impatient men on the Maryland shore the waiting files seemed to get no shorter. The 15th Massachusetts was crossing first, and some men in the 20th Massachusetts feared that their sister regiment would capture the enemy camp long before the few boats succeeded in ferrying the 20th across the river. Everything seemed so slow and clumsy. Rifle butts clattered on gunwales and bayonet scabbards snagged themselves on the bushes at the water’s edge as the men clambered into the row boats. At two in the morning a larger boat was discovered upstream and brought down to the crossing place, where it was greeted with an ironic cheer. It seemed to Lieutenant Holmes that the waiting men were making a lot of noise, enough surely to alert any rebels who might be guarding the Virginia bank, but no challenge sounded through the mist and no rifle shots echoed from the high wooded slope that loomed so ominously beyond the island. “Does the island have a name?” Lieutenant Holmes asked the Major who had spoken so wistfully of Christmas.

“Harrison’s Island, I think. Yes, Harrison’s.”

It sounded an undramatic name to Lieutenant Holmes. He would have preferred something nobler to have marked the 20th Massachusetts’s baptism of fire. Maybe a name with the iron ring of Valley Forge, or the simple nobility of Yorktown. Something that would ring through history and look fine when it was embroidered on the regiment’s battle flag. Harrison’s Island sounded much too prosaic. “And the hill beyond it?” he asked hopefully. “On the far bank?”

“That’s called Ball’s Bluff,” the Major said, and that was even less heroic. The battle of Ball’s Bluff sounded like a poker game rather than the signal event that would mark the resurgence of northern arms.

Holmes waited with his company. They would be the first of the 20th Massachusetts to cross and so the likeliest of their regiment to be in a fight if the 15th had not already captured the encampment. That possibility of battle made the men nervous. None of them had fought before, though all had heard tales of the battle fought at Bull Run three months before and how the ragged gray-clad rebel ranks had somehow clung together long enough to drive the larger Federal army into panicked retreat, but none of the 20th Massachusetts believed they would suffer a similar fate. They were superbly equipped, well-trained, led by a professional soldier, and confident they could outfight any rebel born. There would be danger, of course—they expected and even wanted some danger—but the night’s work would be crowned with victory.

One of the boats coming back from Harrison’s Island brought a captain of the 15th Massachusetts who had crossed with the very first troops and who now returned to report to the commanding officers of the waiting regiments. The Captain slipped as he jumped from the boat’s bows and would have fallen if Lieutenant Holmes had not reached out a steadying hand. “All quiet on the Potomac?” Holmes asked jocularly.

“All’s quiet, Wendell.” The Captain sounded disappointed. “Too quiet. There’s not even an enemy encampment up there.”

“No tents?” Lieutenant Holmes asked in surprise. “Truly?” And he hoped his voice sounded properly disappointed as befitted a warrior denied a chance of battle, and in part he was disappointed because he had been looking forward to the excitement, but he was also aware of a shameful relief that perhaps no enemy waited on the far bluff.

The Captain straightened his coat. “God knows what that patrol thought they saw last night, but we can’t find anything.” He walked away with his news while Lieutenant Holmes passed the word on to his company. There was no enemy waiting across the river, which meant the expedition would most probably march on to occupy Leesburg. A sergeant wanted to know if there were any rebel troops in Leesburg and Holmes had to confess he did not know, but the Major, overhearing the conversation, volunteered that at best there would be only a handful of the Virginia Militia probably armed with the same guns with which their grandfathers had fought the British. The Major went on to say that their new task would be to capture the harvest that would have been newly gathered into the barns and storerooms of Leesburg, and that while such supplies were a legitimate military target, other private property should be respected. “We’re not here to make war on the homes of women and children,” the Major said sternly. “We must show the seceshers that northern troops are their friends.”

“Amen,” the Sergeant said. He was a lay preacher who was trying to rid the regiment of the sins of card-playing, liquor, and womanizing.

The last of the 15th Massachusetts crossed to the island and Holmes’s gray-coated men shuffled down the bank to wait their turn in the boats. There was a feeling of disappointment among the men. They had anticipated a whooping hunt through the woods, but instead it seemed they would merely be disarming a town’s old men of muskets.

In the shadows of the Virginia bank a fox pounced and a rabbit died. The beast’s cry was sudden and shrill, gone almost as soon as it had begun, to leave nothing behind but the scent of blood and the echo of death in the dark, sleeping, and unsuspecting woods.

Captain Nathaniel Starbuck reached his regiment’s campsite at three in the morning. It was a clear night, star-bright and moonlit, with just a hint of mist showing in the hollows. He had walked from Leesburg and was dog-tired by the time he reached the field where the Legion’s tents and shelters were lined in four neat rows. A sentry from C Company nodded companionably at the young black-haired officer. “Hear the rabbit, Captain?”

“Willis? You’re Willis, right?” Starbuck asked.

“Bob Willis.”

“Aren’t you supposed to challenge me, Bob Willis? Aren’t you supposed to level your rifle, demand the password, and shoot me dead if I get it wrong?”

“I know who you are, Captain.” Willis grinned in the moonlight.

“The way I feel, Willis, you would have done me a favor by shooting me. What did the rabbit say to you?”

“Shrieked like he was dying, Captain. Reckon a fox got him.”

Starbuck shuddered at the relish in the sentry’s voice. “Good night, Willis, and may sweet angels sing thee to thy rest.” Starbuck walked on between the remnants of the night’s fires and the handful of Sibley tents where a few men of the Faulconer Legion slept. Most of the regiment’s tents had been lost in the chaos of the Manassas battlefield, so now the majority of the regiment slept either in the open air or in neat shelters made of branches and sod. A fire flickered among the shelters of Starbuck’s K Company and a man looked up as Starbuck approached.

“Sober?” the man asked.

“Sergeant Truslow is awake,” Starbuck declaimed. “Do you never sleep, Truslow? I am perfectly sober. Sober as a preacher, in fact.”

“I’ve known a few drunk preachers in my time,” Sergeant Truslow said sourly. “There’s a snake-oil Baptist down in Rosskill who can’t say the Lord’s Prayer without taking a gut-ful of pine-top whiskey first. He nearly drowned once, trying to baptize a passel of weeping women in the river behind the church. Them all praying and him so full of liquor he couldn’t stand up straight. So what were you doing, caterwauling?”

“Caterwauling” was the Sergeant’s disapproving word for womanizing. Starbuck pretended to consider the question as he settled beside the fire, then he nodded. “I was caterwauling, Sergeant.”

“Who with?”

“A gentleman does not tell.”

Truslow grunted. He was a short, squat, hard-faced man who ruled K Company with a discipline born of pure fear, though the fear was not of Truslow’s physical violence, but rather of his scorn. He was a man whose approval other men sought, maybe because he seemed such a master of his own brutal world. In his time he had been a farmer, a horse thief, a soldier, a murderer, a father, and a husband. Now he was a widower and, for the second time in his life, a soldier, who brought to his trade a pure, uncomplicated hatred of Yankees. Which made his friendship with Captain Nathaniel Starbuck all the more mysterious, for Starbuck was a Yankee.

Starbuck came from Boston, second son of the Reverend Elial Starbuck, who was a famous excoriator of the South, a fearsome opponent of slavery, and an impassioned preacher whose printed sermons had shivered guilty consciences throughout the Christian world. Nathaniel Starbuck had been well on the path to his own ordination when a woman had tempted him from his studies at Yale College’s seminary. The woman had abandoned him in Richmond, where, too scared to go home and face his father’s terrible wrath, Starbuck had joined the army of the Confederate States of America instead.

“Was it the yellow-haired bitch?” Truslow now asked. “The one you met in the prayer meeting after worship service?”

“She is not a bitch, Sergeant,” Starbuck said with pained dignity. Truslow responded by spitting into the fire, and Starbuck shook his head sadly. “Did you never seek the solace of female company, Sergeant?”

“Do you mean did I ever behave like a tomcat? Of course I did, but I got it out of my system before I grew a beard.” Truslow paused, maybe thinking of his wife in her lonely grave in the high hills. “So where does the yellow bitch keep her husband?”

Starbuck yawned. “With Magruder’s forces at Yorktown. He’s an artillery major.”

Truslow shook his head. “You’ll be caught one of these days and have your giblets beaten out of you.”

“Is that coffee?”

“So they say.” Truslow poured his captain a mug of the thick, sweet, treacly liquid. “Did you get any sleep?”

“Sleep was not the purpose of the evening.”

“You’re just like all preachers’ sons, aren’t you? Get one smell of sin and you wallow like a hog in mud.” There was more than a hint of disapproval in Truslow’s voice, not because he disliked womanizers, but because he knew his own daughter had contributed to Starbuck’s education. Sally Truslow, estranged from her father, was a whore in Richmond. That was a matter of bitter shame to Truslow, and while he was uncomfortable with the knowledge that Starbuck and Sally had been lovers, he also saw in their friendship his daughter’s only chance of salvation. Life could sometimes seem very complicated even for an uncomplicated man like Thomas Truslow. “So what happened to all your Bible reading?” he now asked his officer, referring to the half-hearted attempts at piety that Starbuck still made from time to time.

“I am a backslider, Sergeant,” Starbuck said carelessly, though in truth his conscience was not as easy as his flippant tone suggested. At times, assailed by the fears of hell, he felt so trapped in sin that he suspected he could never find God’s forgiveness, and at such moments he would suffer agonies of remorse, but come the evening, he would find himself being impelled back to whatever tempted him.

Now he rested against the trunk of an apple tree and sipped the coffee. He was tall, thin, hardened by a season’s soldiering, and had long black hair that framed an angular, clean-shaven face. When the Legion marched into a new town or village, Truslow always noticed how the girls looked at Starbuck, always at Starbuck. Just as his own daughter had been drawn to the tall northerner with his gray eyes and quick grin. Keeping Starbuck from sin, the Sergeant reflected, was like keeping a dog out of a butcher’s shop. “What time is reveille?” Starbuck now asked.

“Any minute.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus.” Starbuck groaned.

“You should have come back earlier,” Truslow said. He threw a billet of wood onto the small fire. “Did you tell the yellow-haired bitch that we’re leaving?”

“I decided not to tell her. Parting is such sweet hell.”

“Coward,” Truslow said.

Starbuck thought about the accusation, then grinned. “You’re right. I’m a coward. I hate it when they cry.”

“Then don’t give them cause to cry,” Truslow said, knowing it was like asking the wind not to blow. Besides, soldiers always made their sweethearts cry; that was the way of soldiers. They came, they conquered, and then they marched away, and this morning the Faulconer Legion would march away from Leesburg. In the last three months the regiment had been a part of the brigade that was camped close to Leesburg and guarded a twenty-mile stretch of the Potomac River, but the enemy had shown no signs of wanting to cross, and now, as the fall slipped toward winter, rumors were multiplying of a last Yankee attack on Richmond before the ice and snow locked the armies into immobility, and so the brigade was being weakened. The Legion would go to Centreville, where the main body of the Confederate army defended the primary road that led from Washington to the rebel capital. It had been on that road, three months before at Manassas, that the Faulconer Legion had helped bloody the nose of the North’s first invasion. Now, if rumors spoke true, the Legion might be required to do the work all over again.

“But it won’t be the same.” Truslow picked up the unspoken thought. “I hear there’s nothing but earthworks at Centreville now. So if the Yankees come, we’ll cut the bastards down from behind good thick walls.” He stopped, seeing that Starbuck had fallen asleep, mouth open, coffee spilt. “Son of a bitch,” Truslow growled, but with affection, for Starbuck, for all his preacher’s-son caterwauling, had proved himself a remarkable officer. He had made K Company into the best in the Legion, doing it by a mixture of unrelenting drill and imaginative training. It had been Starbuck who, denied the gunpowder and bullets needed to hone his men’s marksmanship, had led a patrol across the river to capture a Union supply wagon on the road outside Poolesville. He had brought back three thousand cartridges that night, and a week later he had gone again and fetched back ten sacks of good northern coffee. Truslow, who knew soldiering, recognized that Starbuck had instinctive, natural gifts. He was a clever fighter, able to read an enemy’s mind, and the men of K Company, boys mostly, seemed to recognize the quality. Starbuck, Truslow knew, was good.

A beat of wings made Truslow look up to see the black squat shape of an owl flit across the moon. Truslow supposed the bird had been hunting the open fields close to the town and was now returning to its roost in the thick stands of trees that grew above the river on Ball’s Bluff.

A bugler mishit his note, took a breath, and startled the night with his call. Starbuck jerked awake, swore because his spilt coffee had soaked his trouser leg, then groaned with tiredness. It was still deep night, but the Legion had to be up and doing, ready to march away from their quiet watch on the river and go to war.

“Was that a bugle?” Lieutenant Wendell Holmes asked his pious Sergeant.

“Can’t say, sir.” The Sergeant was panting hard as he climbed Ball’s Bluff and his new gray coat was hanging open to reveal its smart scarlet lining. The coats were a gift from the Governor of Massachusetts, who was determined that the Bay State’s regiments would be among the best equipped in all the Federal army. “It was probably one of our buglers,” the Sergeant guessed. “Maybe sending out skirmishers?”

Holmes assumed the Sergeant was right. The two men were laboring up the steep and twisting path that led to the bluff’s summit where the 15th Massachusetts waited. The slope was about as steep as a man could climb without needing to use his hands, though in the dark many a man missed his footing and slid down to jar painfully against a tree trunk. The river below was still shrouded by mist in which the long shape of Harrison’s Island showed dark. Men were crowded onto the island as they waited for the two small boats that were ferrying the troops across the last stretch of river. Lieutenant Holmes had been surprised at the speed of the river’s current that had snatched at the boat and tried to sweep it away downstream toward distant Washington. The oarsmen had grunted with the effort of fighting the river, then rammed the small boat hard into the muddy bank.

Colonel Lee, the 20th Massachusetts’s commanding officer, caught up with Holmes at the bluff’s summit. “Almost sunrise,” he said cheerfully. “All well, Wendell?”

“All well, sir. Except I’m hungry enough to eat a horse.”

“We’ll have breakfast in Leesburg,” the Colonel said enthusiastically. “Ham, eggs, cornbread, and coffee. Some fresh southern butter! That’ll be a treat. And no doubt all the townsfolk will be assuring us that they aren’t rebels at all, but good loyal citizens of Uncle Sam.” The Colonel abruptly turned away, startled by a sudden barking cry that echoed rhythmically and harshly among the trees on the bluff’s summit. The heart-stopping noise had made the nearest soldiers whip round in quick alarm with rifles raised. “No need to worry!” the Colonel called. “It’s just an owl.” He had recognized the call of a barred owl and guessed the bird was coming home from a night’s hunting with a belly filled with mice and frogs. “You keep going, Wendell”—Lee turned back to Holmes—“down that path till you come to the left-flank company of the 15th. Stop there and wait for me.”

Lieutenant Holmes led his company behind the crouching men of the 15th Massachusetts. He stopped at the moon-bright tree line. Before them now was a brief meadow that was dotted with the stark shadows of small bushes and locust trees, beyond which rose another dark stand of trees. It was about there on the previous night that the patrol had reported seeing an enemy encampment, and Holmes guessed that frightened men could easily have mistaken the pattern of moonlight and black shadow in the far woods for the shapes of tents.

“Forward!” Colonel Devens of the 15th Massachusetts shouted the order and his men moved out into the moon-whitened meadow. No one fired at them; no one challenged them. The South slept while the North, unhindered, marched.

The sun rose, glossing the river gold and lancing scarlet rays through the misted trees. Cocks crowed in Leesburg yards where pails were pumped full of water and cows came in for the day’s first milking. Workshops that had been closed for the Lord’s Day were unlocked and tools picked up from benches. Outside the town, in the encampments of the Confederate brigade that guarded the river, the smoke of cooking fires sifted into the fresh fall morning.

The Faulconer Legion’s fires had already died, though the Legion was in no great hurry to abandon its encampment. The day promised to be fine and the march to Centreville comparatively short, and so the regiment’s eight hundred men took their time in making ready, and Major Thaddeus Bird, the regiment’s commanding officer, did not try to hurry them. Instead he wandered companionably among his men like an affable neighbor enjoying a morning stroll. “My God, Starbuck.” Bird stopped in amazement at the sight of K Company’s captain. “What happened to you?”

“I just slept badly, sir.”

“You look like the walking dead!” Bird crowed with delight at the thought of Starbuck’s discomfort. “Have I ever told you about Mordechai Moore? He was a plasterer in Faulconer Court House. Died one Thursday, widow bawling her eyes out, children squalling like scalded cats, funeral on Saturday, half the town dressed in black, grave dug, the Reverend Moss ready to bore us all with his customary inanities, then they hear scratching or the coffin lid. Open it up, and there he is! One very puzzled plasterer! As alive as you or I. Or me, anyway. But he looked like you. Very like you, Nate. He looked half decayed.”

“Thank you very much,” Starbuck said.

“Everyone went home,” Bird went on with his tale. “Doc Billy gave Mordechai an examination. Declared him fit for another ten years and, blow me, didn’t he go and die again the very next day. Only this time he was properly dead and they had to dig the grave all over again. Good morning, Sergeant.”

“Major,” Truslow grunted. Truslow had not been known to address any officer as “sir,” not even Bird, the regiment’s commanding officer, whom Truslow liked.

“You remember Mordechai Moore, surely, Truslow?”

“Hell yes. Son of a bitch couldn’t plaster a wall to save his life. My father and I redid half the Cotton house for him. Never did get paid for it either.”

“So no doubt the building trade’s better off for having him dead,” Bird said blithely. Pecker Bird was a tall, ragged, skeletal man who had been schoolmaster in the town of Faulconer Court House when Colonel Washington Faulconer, Faulconer County’s grandest landowner and Bird’s brother-in-law, had established the Legion. Faulconer, wounded at Manassas, was now in Richmond, leaving Bird to command the regiment. The schoolmaster had probably been the least soldierly man in all Faulconer County, if not in all Virginia, and had only been appointed a major to appease his sister and take care of the Colonel’s paperwork; yet, perversely, the ragged schoolmaster had proved an effective and popular officer. The men liked him, maybe because they sensed his great sympathy for all that was most fallible in humankind. Now Bird touched Starbuck’s elbow. “A word?” he suggested, drawing the younger man away from K Company.

Starbuck walked with Bird into the open meadow that was scarred with the pale round shapes showing where the regiment’s few tents had been pitched. Between the bleached circles were smaller scorched patches where the campfires had burned, and out beyond those scars were the large cropped circles marking where the officers’ horses had grazed the grass out to the limit of their tethering ropes. The Legion could march away from this field, Starbuck reflected, yet for days afterward it would hold this evidence of their existence.

“Have you made a decision, Nate?” Bird asked. He was fond of Starbuck, and his voice reflected that affection. He offered the younger man a cheap, dark cigar, took one himself, then struck a match to light the tobacco.

“I’ll stay with the regiment, sir,” Starbuck said when his cigar was drawing.

“I hoped you’d say that,” Bird said. “But even so.” His voice trailed away. He drew on his cigar, staring toward Leesburg, over which a filmy haze of morning smoke shimmered. “Going to be a fine day,” the Major said. A splutter of distant rifle fire sounded, but neither Bird nor Starbuck took any notice. It was a rare morning that men were not out hunting.

“And we don’t know that the Colonel really is taking over the Legion, do we, sir?” Starbuck asked.

“We know nothing,” Bird said. “Soldiers, like children, live in a natural state of willful ignorance. But it’s a risk.”

“You’re taking the same risk,” Starbuck said pointedly.

“Your sister is not married to the Colonel,” Bird answered just as pointedly, “which makes you, Nate, a great deal more vulnerable than I. Allow me to remind you, Nate, you did this world the signal service of murdering the Colonel’s prospective son-in-law, and, while heaven and all its angels rejoiced at your act, I doubt that Faulconer has forgiven you yet.”

“No, sir,” Starbuck said tonelessly. He did not like being reminded of Ethan Ridley’s death. Starbuck had killed Ridley under the cover of battle’s confusion and he had told himself ever since that it had been an act of self-defense, yet he knew he had cradled murder in his heart when he had pulled the trigger, and he knew, too, that no amount of rationalizing could wipe that sin from the great ledger in heaven that recorded all his failings. Certainly Colonel Washington Faulconer would never forgive Starbuck. “Yet I’d still rather stay with the regiment,” Starbuck now told Bird. He was a stranger in a strange land, a northerner fighting against the North, and the Faulconer Legion had become his new home. The Legion fed him, clothed him, and gave him intimate friends. It was also the place where he had discovered the job he did best and, with the yearning of youth to discern high purpose in life, Starbuck had made up his mind that he was destined to be one of the Legion’s officers. He belonged.

“Good luck to us both, then,” Bird said, and they would both need luck, Bird reflected, if his suspicions were right and the order to march to Centreville was part of Colonel Washington Faulconer’s attempt to take the Legion back under his control.

Washington Faulconer, after all, was the man who had raised the Faulconer Legion, named it for himself, kitted it with the finest equipment his fortune could buy, then led it to the fight on the banks of the Bull Run. Faulconer and his son, both wounded in that battle, had ridden back to Richmond to be hailed as heroes, though in truth Washington Faulconer had been nowhere near the Legion when it faced the overpowering Yankee attack. It was too late now to set the record straight: Virginia, indeed all the upper South, reckoned Faulconer a hero and was demanding that he be given command of a brigade, and if that happened, Bird knew, the hero would expect his own Legion to be at the heart of that brigade.

“But it isn’t certain the son of a bitch will get his brigade, is it?” Starbuck asked, trying in vain to suppress a huge yawn.

“There’s a rumor he’ll be offered a diplomatic post instead,” Bird said, “which would be much more suitable, because my brother-in-law has a natural taste for licking the backsides of princes and potentates, but our newspapers say he should be a general, and what the newspapers want, the politicians usually grant. It’s easier than having ideas of their own, you see.”

“I’ll take the risk,” Starbuck said. His alternative was to join General Nathan Evans’s staff and stay in the camp near Leesburg where Evans had command of the patchwork Confederate brigade that guarded the riverbank. Starbuck liked Evans, but he much preferred to stay with the Legion. The Legion was home, and he could not really imagine that the Confederate high command would make Washington Faulconer a general.

Another flurry of rifle fire sounded from the woods that lay three miles to the northwest. The sound made Bird turn, frowning. “Someone’s being mighty energetic.” He sounded disapproving.

“Squabbling pickets?” Starbuck suggested. For the last three months the sentries had faced each other across the river, and while relations had been friendly for most of that time, every now and then a new and energetic officer tried to provoke a war.

“Probably just pickets,” Pecker Bird agreed, then turned back as Sergeant Major Proctor came to report that a broken wagon axle that had been delaying the Legion’s march was now mended. “Does that mean we’re ready to go, Sergeant Major?” Bird asked.

“Ready as we’ll ever be, I reckon.” Proctor was a lugubrious and suspicious man, forever fearing disaster.

“Then let us be off! Let us be off!” Bird said happily, and he strode toward the Legion just as another volley of shots sounded, only this time the fire had not come from the distant woods, but from the road to the east. Bird clawed thin fingers through his long, straggly beard. “Do you think?” he asked of no one in particular, not bothering to articulate the question clearly. “Maybe?” Bird went on with a note of growing excitement, and then another splinter of musketry echoed from the bluffs to the northwest and Bird jerked his head back and forth, which was his habitual gesture when he was amused. “I think we shall wait awhile, Mr. Proctor. We shall wait!” Bird snapped his fingers. “It seems,” he said, “that God and Mr. Lincoln might have sent us other employment today. We shall wait.”

The advancing Massachusetts troops discovered the rebels by blundering into a four-man picket that was huddled in a draw of the lower woods. The startled rebels fired first, sending the Massachusetts men tumbling back through the trees. The rebel picket fled in the opposite direction to find their company commander, Captain Duff, who first sent a message to General Evans and then led the forty men of his company toward the woods on the bluffs summit where a scatter of Yankee skirmishers now showed at the tree line. More northerners began to appear, so many that Duff lost count. “There are enough of the sumbitches,” one of his men commented as Captain Duff lined his men behind a snake fence and told them to fire away. Puffs of smoke studded the fence line as the bullets whistled away up the gentle slope. Two miles behind Duff the town of Leesburg heard the firing, and someone thought to run to the church and ring the bell to summon the militia.

Not that the militia could assemble in time to help Captain Duff, who was beginning to understand just how badly his Mississippians were outnumbered. He was forced to retreat down the slope when a company of northern troops threatened his left flank, which withdrawal was greeted by northern jeers and a volley of musket fire. Duff’s forty men went on doggedly firing as they backed away. They were a ragged company dressed in a shabby mix of butternut-brown and dirty gray uniforms, but their marksmanship was far superior to that of their northern rivals, who were mostly armed with smoothbore muskets. Massachusetts had taken immense pains to equip its volunteers, but there had not been enough rifles for everybody, and so Colonel Devens’s 15th Massachusetts regiment fought with eighteenth-century muskets. None of Duff’s men was hit, but their own bullets were taking a slow, steady toll of the northern skirmishers.

The 20th Massachusetts came to the rescue of their fellow Bay Staters. The 20th all had rifles, and their more accurate fire forced Duff to retreat still farther down the long slope. His forty men backed over a rail fence into a field of stubble where stooked oats stood in shocks. There was no more cover for a half mile, and Duff did not want to yield too much ground to the Yankees, so he halted his men in the middle of the field and told them to hold the bastards off. Duff’s men were horribly outnumbered, but they came from Pike and Chickasaw counties, and Duff reckoned that made them as good as any soldiers in America. “Guess we’re going to have to give this pack of black-assed trash a lesson, boys,” Duff said.

“No, Captain! They’re rebs! Look!” one of his men shouted in warning, then pointed to the tree line where a company of gray-clad troops had just appeared. Duff stared in horror. Had he been firing at his own side? The advancing men wore long gray coats. The officer leading them had his coat open and was carrying a drawn sword that he used to slash at weeds as he advanced, just as though he were out for a casual stroll in the country.

Duff felt his belligerent certainties drain away. He was dry-mouthed, his belly was sour, and a muscle in his thigh kept twitching. The firing all across the slope had died away as the gray-coated company marched down toward the oat field. Duff held up his hand and shouted at the strangers, “Halt!”

“Friends!” one of the gray-coated men called back. There were sixty or seventy men in the company, and their rifles were tipped with long shining bayonets.

“Halt!” Duff tried again.

“We’re friends!” a man shouted back. Duff could see the nervousness on their faces. One man had a twitching muscle in his cheek, while another kept looking sideways at a mustachioed sergeant who marched stolidly at the flank of the advancing company.

“Halt!” Duff shouted again. One of his men spat onto the stubble.

“We’re friends!” the northerners shouted again. Their officer’s open coat was lined with scarlet, but Duff could not see the color of the man’s uniform because the sun was behind the strangers.

“They ain’t no friends of ours, Cap’n!” one of Duff’s men said. Duff wished he could feel the same certainty. God in His heaven, but suppose these men were friends? Was he about to commit murder? “I order you to halt!” he shouted, but the advancing men would not obey, and so Duff shouted at his men to take aim.

Forty rifles came up into forty shoulders.

“Friends!” a northern voice called. The two units were fifty yards apart now, and Duff could hear the northern boots breaking and scuffing the oat stubble.

“They ain’t friends, Cap’n!” one of the Mississippians insisted, and just at that moment the advancing officer stumbled and Duff got a clear view of the uniform beneath the scarlet-lined gray coat. The uniform was blue.

“Fire!” Duff shouted, and the southern volley cracked like a canebreak burning and a northerner screamed as the rebel bullets slapped home.

“Fire!” a northerner shouted and the Massachusetts’s bullets whipped back through the smoke bank.

“Keep firing!” Duff shouted and emptied his revolver into the haze of powder smoke that already obscured the field. His men had taken cover behind the shocks of oats and were steadily reloading. The northerners were doing the same, except for one man who was twitching and bleeding on the ground. There were more Yankees off to Duff’s right, higher up the slope, but he could not worry about them. He had chosen to make his stand here, plumb in the middle of the field, and now he would have to fight these bastards till one side could stand no more.

Six miles away, at Edwards Ferry, more northerners had crossed the Potomac and cut the turnpike that led to Centreville. Nathan Evans, thus caught between the two invading forces, refused to show any undue alarm. “One might be trying to fool me while the other one gets ready to rape me, ain’t that how it’s done, Boston?” “Boston” was his nickname for Starbuck. They had met at Manassas where Evans had saved the Confederacy by holding up the northern attack while the rebel lines reformed. “Lying, thieving, black-assed, hymn-singing bastards,” Evans said now, evidently of the whole northern army. He had ridden with an order for the Faulconer Legion to stay where it was, only to discover that Thaddeus Bird had anticipated him by canceling the Legion’s departure. Now Evans cocked his ear to the wind and tried to gauge from the intensity of the rifle fire which enemy incursion offered the most danger. The church bell in Leesburg was still ringing, summoning the militia. “So you’re not going to stay with me, Boston?” Evans remarked.

“I like being a company officer, sir.”

Evans growled in response, though Starbuck was not at all sure the small, foulmouthed South Carolinian had heard his answer. Instead Evans was switching his attention back and forth between the competing sounds of the two northern incursions. Otto, his German orderly, whose main duty consisted of carrying a barrel of whiskey for the General’s refreshment, also listened to the gunfire so that the two men’s heads twitched back and forth in unison. Evans was the first to stop, clicking his fingers for a drop of whiskey instead. He drained the tin mug, then looked back at Bird. “You’ll stay here, Pecker. You’re my reserve. I don’t reckon there’s so many of the bastards, they’re not making enough noise for that, so we might as well stay put and see if we can’t give the bastards a bloody nose. Killing Yankees is as good a way to start the week as any, eh?” He laughed. “Of course, if I’m wrong we’ll all be stone dead by nightfall. Come on. Otto!” Evans put spurs to his horse and galloped back toward the earth-walled fort that was his headquarters.

Starbuck climbed onto a wagon loaded with folded tents and slept as the sun burned the mist off the river and dried the dew off the fields. More northern troops crossed the river and climbed the bluff to mass under the trees. General Stone, the commander of the Federal forces guarding the Potomac, had decided to commit more troops to the crossing and sent orders that the invaders should not just occupy Leesburg but reconnoiter the whole of Loudoun County. If the rebels had gone, Stone commanded, then the Yankees should occupy the area, but if a strong Confederate force opposed the reconnaissance, then the Federal forces were free to withdraw across the river with whatever foodstuffs they might confiscate. Stone dispatched artillery to add firepower to the invading force, but also made plain that he was leaving the decision whether to stay in Virginia to the man he now placed in command of the whole northern operation.

That man was Colonel Ned Baker, a tall, clean-shaven, silver-haired, golden-tongued politician. Baker was a California lawyer, a United States senator from Oregon and one of President Lincoln’s closest friends, so close that Lincoln had named his second son after the Senator. Baker was an impetuous, emotional, warmhearted man, and his arrival at the river crossing sent ripples of excitement through those men of the 15th Massachusetts who still waited with the New York Tammany Regiment on the Maryland bank. Baker’s own regiment, the 1st Californian, now joined the invasion. The regiment was from New York, but had been recruited from men who had ties to California, and with them came a fourteen-pounder rifled cannon from Rhode Island and a pair of howitzers manned by U.S. Army regulars. “Take everything across!” Baker shouted ebulliently. “Every last man and gun!”

“We’ll need more boats,” the Colonel of the Tammanys cautioned the Senator.

“Then find them! Build them! Steal them! Fetch gopher wood and build an ark, Colonel. Find a beautiful woman and let her face launch a thousand ships, but let us press on to glory, boys!” Baker strode down the bank, cocking his ear to the staccato crackle of musketry that sounded from the river’s far shore. “Rebels are dying, lads! Let’s go and kill some more!”

The Tammany Colonel attempted to ask the Senator just what his regiment was supposed to do when it reached the Virginia shore, but Baker brushed the question aside. He did not care if this was a mere raid or a historic invasion marking the beginning of Virginia’s occupation, he only knew that he had three pieces of artillery and four regiments of prime, unbloodied troops, which gave him the necessary power to offer President Lincoln and the country the victory they so badly needed. “On to Richmond, boys!” Baker shouted as he pushed through the troops on the riverbank. “On to Richmond, and may the devil have no mercy their souls! On for the union, boys, on for the union! Let’s hear you cheer!”

They cheered loud enough to obliterate the splintering sound of musketry that came from the river’s far bank where, beyond the wooded bluff, powder smoke lingered among the stooked oats where the day’s long dying had begun.

MAJOR ADAM FAULCONER ARRIVED AT THE FAULCONER Legion a few moments after midday. “There are Yankees on the turnpike. They gave me a chase!” He looked happy, as though the hard riding of the last few minutes had been a cross-country romp rather than a desperate flight from a determined enemy. His horse, a fine roan stallion from the Faulconer Stud, was flecked with white foam, its ears were pricked nervously back, and it kept taking small nervous sidesteps that Adam instinctively corrected. “Uncle!” he greeted Major Bird cheerfully, then turned immediately back to Starbuck. They had been friends for three years, but it had been weeks since they had met, and Adam’s pleasure at their reunion was heartfelt. “You look as if you were fast asleep, Nate.”

“He was at a prayer meeting late last night,” Sergeant Truslow interjected in a voice that was deliberately sour so that no one but he and Starbuck would know he made a joke, “praying till three in the morning.”

“Good for you, Nate,” Adam said warmly, then turned his horse back toward Thaddeus Bird. “Did you hear what I said, Uncle? There are Yankees on the turnpike!”

“We heard they were there,” Bird said casually, as though errant Yankees were as predictable a feature of the fall landscape as migrating wild fowl.

“The wretches fired at me.” Adam sounded astonished that such a discourtesy might occur in wartime. “But we outran them, didn’t we, boy?” He patted the neck of his sweating horse, then swung down from the saddle and tossed the reins to Robert Decker, who was one of Starbuck’s company. “Walk him for a while, will you, Robert?”

“Pleased to, Mr. Adam.”

“And don’t let him drink yet. Not till he’s cooled,” Adam instructed Decker, then he explained to his uncle that he had ridden from Centreville at dawn, expecting to encounter the Legion on the road. “I couldn’t find you, so I just kept going,” Adam said cheerfully. He walked with a very slight limp, the result of a bullet he had taken at the battle at Manassas, but the wound was well-healed and the limp hardly noticeable. Adam, unlike his father, Washington Faulconer, had been in the very thick of the Manassas fight even though, for weeks before, he had been assailed by equivocation about the war’s morality and had even doubted whether he could take part in the hostilities at all. After the battle, while he was convalescing in Richmond, Adam had been promoted to major and given a post on General Joseph Johnston’s staff. The General was one of the many Confederates who was under the misapprehension that Washington Faulconer had helped stem the surprise northern attack at Manassas, and the son’s promotion and staff appointment had been intended as a mark of gratitude to the father.

“You’ve brought us orders?” Bird now asked Adam.

“Just my good self, Uncle. It seemed too perfect a day to be stuck with Johnston’s paperwork, so I came for a ride. Though I hardly expected this.” Adam turned and listened to the sound of rifle fire that came from the far woods. The gunfire was fairly constant now, but it was nothing like the splintering crackle of battle. Instead it was a methodical, workmanlike sound that suggested the two sides were merely trading ammunition because it was expected of them rather than trying to inflict slaughter upon each other. “What’s happening?” Adam demanded.

Major Thaddeus Bird explained that two groups of Yankees had crossed the river. Adam had already encountered one of the invading parties, while the other was up on the high ground by Harrison’s Island. No one was quite sure what the Yankees intended by the double incursion. Early on it had seemed they were trying to capture Leesburg, but a single company of Mississippi men had turned back the Federal advance. “A man called Duff,” Bird told Adam, “stopped the rascals cold. Lined his fellows up in the stark middle of a field and traded them shot for shot, and damn me if they didn’t go scuttling back uphill like a flock of frightened sheep!” The story of Duff’s defiance had spread through Evans’s brigade to fill the men with pride in southern invincibility. The remainder of Duff’s battalion was in place now, keeping the Yankees pinned among the trees at the bluffs summit. “You should tell Johnston about Duff,” Bird told Adam.

But Adam did not seem interested in the Mississippian’s heroism. “And you, Uncle, what are you doing?” he asked instead.

“Waiting for orders, of course. I guess Evans doesn’t know where to send us, so he’s waiting to see which pack of Yankees is the more dangerous. Once that’s determined, we’ll go and knock some heads bloody.”

Adam flinched at his uncle’s tone. Before he had joined the Legion and unexpectedly became its senior officer, Thaddeus Bird had been a schoolmaster who had professed a sardonic mockery of both soldiering and warfare, but one battle and a few months of command had turned Adam’s uncle into an altogether grimmer man. He retained his wit, but now it had a harsher edge, a symptom, Adam thought, of how war changed everything for the worse, though Adam sometimes wondered if he alone was aware of just how the war was coarsening and degrading all it touched. His fellow aides at the army headquarters reveled in the conflict, seeing it as a sporting rivalry that would award victory to the most enthusiastic players. Adam listened to such bombast and held his peace, knowing that any expression of his real views would be met with scorn at best and charges of chickenhearted cowardice at worst. Yet Adam was no coward. He simply believed the war was a tragedy born from pride and stupidity, and so he did his duty, hid his true feelings, and yearned for peace, though how long he could sustain either the pretense or the duplicity, he did not know. “Let’s hope no one’s head needs to be bloodied today,” he told his uncle. “It’s much too fine a day for killing.” He turned as K Company’s cooks lifted a pot off the flames. “Is that dinner?”

The midday dinner was cush: a stew of beef, bacon fat, and cornbread that was accompanied by a mash of boiled apples and potatoes. Food was plentiful here in Loudoun County where the farmland was rich and Confederate troops few. In Centreville and Manassas, Adam said, supplies were much more difficult. “They even ran out of coffee last month! I thought there’d be a mutiny.” He then listened with pretended amusement as Robert Decker and Amos Tunney told of Captain Starbuck’s great coffee raid. They had crossed the river by night and marched five miles through woods and farmland to raid a sutler’s stores on the outskirts of a northern camp. Eight men had gone with Starbuck and eight had come back, and the only northerner to detect them had been the sutler himself, a merchant whose living came from selling luxuries to troops. The sutler, sleeping among his stores, had shouted the alarm and pulled a revolver.

“Poor man,” Adam said.

“Poor man?” Starbuck protested his friend’s display of pity. “He was trying to shoot us!”

“So what did you do?”

“Cut his throat,” Starbuck said. “Didn’t want to alert the camp, you see, by firing a shot.”

Adam shuddered. “You killed a man for some coffee beans?”

“And some whiskey and dried peaches,” Robert Decker put in enthusiastically. “The newspapers over there reckoned it was secesh sympathizers. Bushwhackers, they called us. Bushwhackers! Us!”

“And next day we sold ten pounds of the coffee back to some Yankee pickets across the river!” Amos Tunney added proudly.

Adam smiled thinly, then refused the offer of a mug of coffee, pleading that he preferred plain water. He was sitting on the ground and winced slightly as he shifted his weight onto his wounded leg. He had his father’s broad face, squarecut fair beard, and blue eyes. It was a face, Starbuck had always thought, of uncomplicated honesty, though these days it seemed Adam had lost his old humor and replaced it with a perpetual care for the world’s problems.

After the meal the two friends walked eastward along the edge of the meadow. The Legion’s wood and sod shelters were still in place, looking like grass-covered pigpens. Starbuck, pretending to listen to his friend’s tales of headquarters life, was actually thinking how much he had enjoyed living in his turf-covered shelter. Once abed he felt like a beast in a burrow: safe, hidden, and secret. His old bedroom in Boston with its oak paneling and wide pine boards and gas mantels and solemn bookshelves seemed like a dream now, something from a different life. “It’s odd how I like being uncomfortable,” he said lightly.

“Didn’t you hear what I said?” Adam demanded.

“Sorry, dreaming.”

“I was talking about McClellan,” Adam said. “Everyone agrees he’s a genius. Even Johnston says McClellan was quite the cleverest man in all the old U.S. Army.” Adam spoke enthusiastically, as though McClellan were the new southern commander and not the leader of the north’s Army of the Potomac. Adam glanced to his right, disturbed by a sudden crescendo in the sound of musketry coming from the woods above the distant river. The firing had been desultory in the last hour, but now it rose to a sustained crackle that sounded like dry tinder burning fierce. It raged for a half minute or so, then fell back to a steady and almost monotonous mutter. “They must cross back to Maryland soon!” Adam said angrily, as though he were offended by the stubbornness of the Yankees in staying on this side of the river.

“So tell me more about McClellan,” Starbuck said.

“He’s the coming man,” Adam said in a spirited voice. “It happens in war, you know. The old fellows begin the fight, then they get winnowed out by the young ones with new ideas. They say McClellan’s the new Napoleon, Nate, a stickler for order and discipline!” Adam paused, evidently worried that he maybe sounded too enamored of the enemy’s new general. “Did you really cut a man’s throat for coffee?” he asked awkwardly.

“It wasn’t quite as cold-blooded as Decker makes it sound,” Starbuck said. “I tried to keep the man quiet without hurting him. I didn’t want to kill him.” In truth he had been scared to death of the moment, shaking and panicked, but he had known that the safety of his men had depended on keeping the sutler silent.

Adam grimaced. “I can’t imagine killing a man with a knife.”

“It’s not something I ever imagined myself doing,” Starbuck confessed, “but Truslow made me practice on some ration hogs, and it isn’t as hard as you’d think.”

“Good God,” Adam said faintly. “Hogs?”

“Only young ones,” Starbuck said. “Incredibly hard to kill, even so. Truslow makes it look easy, but then he makes everything look easy.”

Adam pondered the idea of practicing the skills of killing as though they were the rudiments of a trade. It seemed tragic. “Couldn’t you have just stunned the poor man?” He asked.

Starbuck laughed at the question. “I had to make sure of the fellow, didn’t I? Of course I had to! My men’s lives depended on his silence, and you look after your men. That’s the first rule of soldiering.”

“Did Truslow teach you that too?” Adam asked.

“No.” Starbuck sounded surprised at the question. “That’s an obvious rule, isn’t it?”

Adam said nothing. Instead he was thinking, not for the first time, just how unlike each other he and Starbuck were. They had met at Harvard, where they had seemed to recognize in each other the qualities each knew he lacked in himself. Starbuck was impetuous and mercurial, while Adam was thoughtful and painstaking; Starbuck was a slave to his feelings, while Adam tried desperately hard to obey the harsh dictates of a rigorous conscience. Yet out of those dissimilarities had grown a friendship that had endured even the strains that had followed the battle at Manassas. Adam’s father had turned against Starbuck at Manassas, and Starbuck now raised that delicate subject by asking whether Adam thought his father would be given command of a brigade.

“Joe would like him to get a brigade,” Adam said dubiously. “Joe” was Joseph Johnston, the commander of the Confederate armies in Virginia. “But the President doesn’t listen to Joe much.” Adam went on, “He likes Granny Lee’s opinion better.” General Robert Lee had started the war with an inflated reputation, but had earned the nickname “Granny” after an unsuccessful minor campaign in western Virginia.

“And Lee doesn’t want your father promoted?” Starbuck asked.

“So I’m told,” Adam said. “Lee evidently believes Father should go as a commissioner to England”—Adam smiled at the notion—“which Mother thinks is a dandy idea. I think even her illnesses would disappear if she could take tea with the Queen.”

“But your father wants his brigade?”

Adam nodded. “And he wants the Legion back,” he said, knowing exactly why his friend had raised the subject. “And if he gets it, Nate, then he’ll demand your resignation. I guess he’s still convinced you shot Ethan.” Adam was referring to the death of the man who would have married Adam’s sister.

“Ethan was killed by a shell,” Starbuck insisted.

“Father won’t believe that,” Adam said sadly, “and he won’t be persuaded of it either.”

“Then I’d better hope your father goes to England and takes tea with the Queen,” Starbuck said carelessly.

“Because you’re really going to stay with the Legion?” Adam asked, sounding surprised.

“I like it here. They like me.” Starbuck spoke lightly, disguising the fervid nature of his attachment to the Legion.

Adam walked a few paces in silence while the gunfire splintered remote, and distant like a skirmish in someone else’s war. “Your brother,” Adam said suddenly, then paused as though he suspected he was trespassing on a difficult area. “Your brother,” he started again, “is still hoping you’ll go back north.”

“My brother?” Starbuck could not hide his surprise. His elder brother, James, had been captured at Manassas and was now a prisoner in Richmond. Starbuck had sent James gifts of books, but he had not asked for any furlough to visit his brother. He would have found any confrontation with his family too difficult. “You’ve seen him?”

“Only as part of my duties,” Adam said, and explained that one of his responsibilities was to match lists of captured officers who were to be exchanged between the North and the South. “I sometimes visit the prison in Richmond,” Adam went on, “and saw James there last week.”

“How is he?”

“Thin, very pale, but hoping to be released on exchange.”

“Poor James.” Starbuck could not imagine his worried and pedantic brother as a soldier. James was a very good lawyer, but had always hated uncertainty and adventure, which were the very things that compensated for the dangerous discomforts of soldiering.

“He worries about you,” Adam said.

“I worry about him,” Starbuck said lightly, hoping to deflect what he suspected was an imminent sermon from his friend.

“He’ll certainly be pleased to hear you’re attending prayer meetings,” Adam said fervently. “He worries for your faith. Do you go to church every week?”

“Whenever I can,” Starbuck said, then decided this was a subject best changed. “And you?” he asked Adam. “How are you?”

Adam smiled, but did not answer at once. Instead he blushed, then laughed. He was clearly full of some piece of news that he was too embarrassed to tell outright, but nevertheless wanted prised out of him. “I’m really fine,” he said, leaving the opening dangling.

Starbuck caught the inflection exactly. “You’re in love.”

Adam nodded. “I really think I might be, yes.” He sounded surprised at himself. “Yes. Really.”

Adam’s coyness filled Starbuck with affectionate amusement. “You’re getting married?”

“I think so, yes. We think so, indeed, but not yet. We thought we should wait for the war’s end.” Adam still blushed, but suddenly he laughed, hugely pleased with himself, and unbuttoned a tunic pocket as though to take out a picture of his beloved. “You haven’t even asked what her name is.”

“Tell me her name,” Starbuck demanded dutifully, then turned away because the sound of rifle fire had swollen again to a frantic intensity. A slight haze of powder smoke was showing above the trees now, a gauzy flag of battle that would thicken into a dense fog if the guns kept up their present rate of fire.

“She’s called…” Adam began, then checked because hooves thumped loud on the turf behind him.

“Sir! Mr. Starbuck, sir!” a voice hailed, and Starbuck turned to see young Robert Decker galloping across the field on the back of Adam’s stallion. “Sir!” He was waving excitedly to Starbuck. “We’ve got orders, sir! We’ve got orders! We’re to go and fight them, sir!”

“Thank God,” Starbuck said, and started running back to his company.

“Her name’s Julia,” Adam said to no one, frowning at his friend’s back. “Her name’s Julia.”

“Sir?” Robert Decker asked, puzzled. He had slid out of the saddle and now offered the stallion’s reins to Adam.

“Nothing, Robert.” Adam took the reins. “Nothing at all. Go and join the company.” He watched Nate shouting at K Company, seeing the excitement of men stirred from repose by the prospect of killing. Then he buttoned his pocket to secure the leather-cased photograph of his girl before climbing into the saddle and riding to join his father’s Legion. Which was about to fight its second battle.

On the quiet banks of the Potomac.

The two Yankee river crossings were five miles apart and General Nathan Evans had been trying to decide which offered his brigade the greater danger. The crossing to the east had cut the turnpike and so appeared to be the bigger tactical threat because it severed his communications with Johnston’s headquarters at Centreville, but the Yankees were not reinforcing the handful of men and guns they had thrown over the river there, while more and more reports spoke of infantry reinforcements crossing the river at Harrison’s Island and then climbing the precipitous slope to the wooded summit of Ball’s Bluff. It was there, Evans decided, that the enemy was concentrating its threat, and it was there that he now sent the rest of his Mississippians and his two Virginia regiments. He sent the 8th Virginians to the near side of Ball’s Bluff, but ordered Bird to make for the farther western flank. “Go through the town,” Evans told Bird, “and come up on the left of the Mississippi boys. Then get rid of the Yankee bastards.”

“With pleasure, sir.” Bird turned away and shouted his orders. The men’s packs and blanket rolls were to be left with a small baggage guard, while every one else in the Legion was to march west with a rifle, sixty rounds of ammunition, and whatever other weapons they chose to carry. In the summer, when they had first marched to war, the men had been weighed down with knapsacks and haversacks, canteens and cartridge boxes, blankets and groundsheets, bowie knives and revolvers, bayonets and rifles, plus whatever other accoutrements a man’s family might have sent to keep him safe, warm, or dry. Some men had carried buffalo robes, while one or two had even worn metal breastplates designed to protect them from Yankee bullets, but now few men carried anything more than a rifle and bayonet, a canteen, a haversack, and a groundsheet and blanket rolled into a tube that was worn slantwise around their chests. Everything else was just impediment. Most had discarded their pasteboard-stiffened caps, preferring slouch hats that protected the backs of their necks from the sun. Their tall stiff boots had been cut down into shoes, the fine twin rows of brass buttons on their long jackets had been chopped away and used as payment for apple juice or sweet milk from the farms of Loudoun County, while many of the skirts of the long coats had been cut away to provide material to patch breeches or elbows. Back in June, when the Legion had trained at Faulconer Court House, the regiment had looked as smart and well-equipped as any soldiers in the world, but now, after just one battle and three months picket duty along the frontier, they looked like ragamuffins, but they were all far better soldiers. They were lean, tanned, fit, and very dangerous. “They still have their illusions, you see,” Thaddeus Bird explained to his nephew. Adam was riding his fine roan horse while Major Bird, as ever, walked.

“Illusions?”

“We think we’re invincible because we’re young. Not me, you understand, but the boys. I used to make it my business to educate the more stupid fallacies out of youth; now I try to preserve their nonsense.” Bird raised his voice so that the nearest company could hear him. “You’ll live forever, you rogues, as long as you remember one thing! Which is?”

There was a pause, then a handful of men returned a ragged answer. “Aim low.”

“Louder!”

“Aim low!” This time the whole company roared back the answer, then began laughing, and Bird beamed on them like a schoolmaster proud of his pupils’ achievements.

The Legion marched through the dusty main street of Leesburg where one small crowd of men was gathered outside the Loudoun County Court House and another, slightly larger, outside Makepeace’s Tavern across the street. “Give us guns!” one man shouted. It appeared they were the county militia and had neither weapons nor ammunition, though a handful of men, privately equipped, had gone to the battlefield anyway. Some of the men fell in with the Legion, hoping to find a discarded weapon on the field. “What’s happening, Colonel?” they asked Adam, mistaking the scarlet trim and gold stars on his fine uniform as evidence that he commanded the regiment.

“It’s nothing to be excited about,” Adam insisted. “Nothing but a few stray northerners.”

“Making enough noise, ain’t they?” a woman called, and the Yankees were indeed much noisier now that Senator Baker had succeeded in getting his three guns across the river and up the steep, slippery path to the bluffs peak, where the gunners had cleared their weapons’ throats with three blasts of canister that had rattled into the trees to shred the leaves.

Baker, taking command of the battle, had found his troops sadly scattered. The 20th Massachusetts was posted in the woods at the summit while the 15th had pushed across the ragged meadow, through the far woods and into the open slopes overlooking Leesburg. Baker called the 15th back, insisting that they form a battle line on the left of the 20th. “We’ll form up here,” he announced, “while New York and California join us!” He drew his sword and whipped the engraved blade to slash off a nettle’s head. The rebel bullets slashed overhead, occasionally clipping off shreds of leaf that fluttered down in the warm, balmy air. The bullets seemed to whistle in the woods, and somehow that odd noise took away their danger. The Senator, who had fought as a volunteer in the Mexican War, felt no apprehension; indeed he felt the exhilaration of a man touched by the opportunity for greatness. This would be his day! He turned as Colonel Milton Cogswell, commander of the Tammany Regiment, panted up to the bluff’s summit. “‘One blast upon your bugle horn is worth a thousand men!’” Baker greeted the sweating Colonel with a jocular quotation.

“I’ll take the goddamn men, sir, begging your pardon,” Cogswell said sourly, then flinched as a pair of bullets slapped through the leaves above his head. “What are our intentions, sir?”

“Our intentions, Milton? Our intentions are victory, fame, glory, peace, forgiveness of our enemies, reconciliation, magnanimity, prosperity, happiness, and the assured promise of heaven’s reward.”

“Then might I suggest, sir,” Cogswell said, trying to sober the ebullient Senator, “that we advance and occupy that stand of trees?” He gestured at the woods beyond the patch of ragged meadowland. By pulling the 20th Massachusetts out of those woods Baker had effectively yielded the trees to the rebels, and already the first gray-coated infantry were well-established among the undergrowth.

“Those rogues won’t bother us,” Baker said dismissively. “Our artillerymen will soon scour them loose. We’ll only be here a moment or two, just long enough to assemble, and then we’ll advance. On to glory!”

A bullet whipsawed close above both men, causing Cogswell to curse in angry astonishment. His anger arose not from the near miss, but because the shot had come from a high knoll on the eastern end of the bluffs. The knoll was the highest part of the bluff and dominated the trees where the northern troops were gathering. “Aren’t we occupying that height?” Cogswell asked Baker in horror.

“No need! No need! We’ll be advancing soon! On to victory!” Baker strolled away, blithe in his self-assurance. Tucked inside the sweatband of his hat, where he had once stuffed his legal notes before going into court, he had pushed the orders he had received from General Stone. “Colonel,” the order read in a hurried scribble, “in case of heavy firing in front of Harrison’s Island, you will advance the California regiment of your brigade or retire the regiments under Colonels Lee and Devens upon the Virginia side of the river, at your discretion, assuming command on arrival.” All of which, in Baker’s view, meant very little, except that he was in command, the day was sunny, the enemy lay before him, and martial fame was in his grasp. “‘One blast upon your bugle horn,’” the Senator chanted the lines from Sir Walter Scott as he marched through the northern troops gathering under the trees, “‘were worth a thousand men!’ Fire back, lads! Let the rascals know we’re here! Fire away, boys! Give them fire! Let them know the North is here to fight!”

Lieutenant Wendell Holmes took off his gray greatcoat, folded it carefully, then placed it beneath a tree. He drew his revolver, checked that its percussion caps were properly in place over the cones, then fired at the far, shadowy shapes of the rebels. The Senator’s fine voice still echoed through the woods, punctuated by the crack and cough of Holmes’s revolver. “‘Hail to the chief,’” Holmes quietly spoke the line from the same poem Baker was declaiming, “‘who in triumph advances.’”

Senator Baker pulled out an expensive watch that had been a gift from his associates and friends of the California bar on the occasion of his appointment to the U.S. Senate. The day was hurrying by, and if he wanted to capture and consolidate Leesburg before nightfall he would need to hurry. “Forward now!” Baker pushed the watch back into his fob pocket. “All of you! All of you! On, my fine boys, on! On to Richmond! On to glory! All for the union, boys, all for the union!”

The colors were lifted, the glorious Stars and Stripes, and beside them the white silk colors of Massachusetts with the arms of the Commonwealth embroidered on one flank and the motto Fide et Constantia stitched bright on the other. The silk streamed in the sunlight as the men cheered, broke cover, and charged.

To die.

“Fire!” Two whole regiments of Mississippi men were in the trees now, and their rifles whipped flames across the clearing to where the northerners had suddenly appeared. Bullets splintered the locust trees and shredded the bright yellow leaves of the maples. A dozen northerners went down in the volley. One, a man who had never sworn in his life, began cursing. A Boston furniture maker stared astonished at the blood spreading on his uniform, then called for his mother as he tried to crawl back to cover.

“Fire!” Colonel Eps of the 8th Virginia had the high ground that dominated the Yankees’ eastern flank and his riflemen poured a slaughtering fusillade down onto the northerners. So many bullets whined and sang off the bronze barrels of the Yankee howitzers that the gunners fled down the precipice of the bluff to where they were safe from the hornets’ whine and hissing slash of the rebel bullets.

“Fire!” More Mississippians opened fire. They lay flat among the trees, or knelt behind trunks and peered through the powder smoke to see that their volleys had sent the northern attack reeling back. Scattered among the Mississippians were men from Leesburg and from the surrounding farms who fired fowling pieces and shotguns at the faltering Yankees. A New York sergeant cursed at his men in Gaelic, but the curses did no good and a bullet shattered his elbow. The northerners were retreating back into the trees, seeking shelter behind trunks and fallen logs where they reloaded their muskets and rifles. Two of the Massachusetts companies had been recruited from German immigrants, and their officers shouted in that language, exhorting them to show the world how Germans could fight. Other northern officers feigned indifference to the storm of bullets that whipped and hissed across the bluffs crest. They strolled among the trees, knowing that a display of insouciant bravery was the quality necessary for rank. They paid for the display with blood. Many of the men from the 20th Massachusetts had hung their fine new scarlet-lined coats from branches and the garments twitched as the bullets plucked and tore at the rich gray cloth. The sound of the battle was constant now, like calico tearing or a canebreak burning, but under that splintering crackle came the sobbing of wounded men and the screams of hurt men and the rattle of dying men.

Senator Baker shouted at his staff officers to man one of the abandoned howitzers, but none of them knew how to prime a vent and the hail of Virginia bullets drove the officers back into the shadows. They left a major dead and a lieutenant coughing up blood as he staggered back from the gun. A bullet slashed a shard of wood from a howitzer’s wheel spoke, another smacked on the muzzle’s face, and a third punctured the water bucket.

A group of Mississippi men, enraged because their Colonel had been shot, tried to charge across the patch of rough meadowland, but as soon as they showed themselves at the tree line the frustrated northerners poured fire at them. It was the rebels’ turn to pull back, leaving three men dead and two wounded. At the right flank of the Massachusetts line the fourteen-pound cannon was still firing, but the Rhode Island gunners had used up their small stock of canister and now had nothing to fire but solid iron bolts. The canister, tearing itself apart at the cannon’s muzzle to scatter a lethal spray of musket balls into the enemy ranks, was ideal for close-range killing work, but the solid bolts were intended for long-range accurate fire and were no good for scouring infantry out of woodland. The bolts, which were elongated iron cannonballs, screamed across the clearing and either vanished into the distance or else struck slivers of freshly splintered timber from tree trunks. The smoke from the cannon pumped its foul-smelling cloud twenty yards in front of the muzzle, forging a smokescreen that hid the right flank companies of the 20th Massachusetts. “Come on, Harvard!” an officer shouted. At least two-thirds of the regiment’s officers had come from Harvard, as had six of its sergeants and dozens of its men. “Come on, Harvard!” the officer shouted again and he stepped forward to lead his men by example, but a bullet took him under the chin and jerked his head sharply back. Blood misted around his face as he slowly crumpled to the ground.

Wendell Holmes, dry-mouthed, watched the stricken officer kneel and then slump forward. Holmes ran forward to help the man, but two other soldiers were closer and dragged the body back into the trees. The officer was unconscious, his bloodied head twitching, then he made a harsh rattling sound and blood bubbled at his throat. “He’s dead,” one of the men who had pulled the body back to cover said. Holmes stared at the dead man and felt a sour surge of vomit rise in his throat. Somehow he kept the vomit down as he turned away and forced himself to stroll with apparent carelessness among his company. He really wanted to lie down, but he knew he needed to show his men that he was unafraid and so he paced among them, his sword drawn, offering what help he could. “Aim low, now. Aim carefully! Don’t waste your shots. Look for them now!” His men bit cartridges, souring their mouths with the salty taste of the gunpowder. Their faces were blackened with the powder, their eyes red-rimmed. Holmes, pausing in a patch of sunlight, suddenly caught the sound of rebel voices calling the exact same advice. “Aim low!” a Confederate officer called. “Aim for the officers!” Holmes hurried on, resisting the temptation to linger behind the bullet-scarred trunks of the trees.

“Wendell!” Colonel Lee called.

Lieutenant Holmes turned to his commanding officer. “Sir?”

“Look to our right, Wendell! Maybe we can outflank these rogues.” Lee pointed to the woods beyond the field gun. “Find out how far the rebel line extends. Hurry now!”

Holmes, thus given permission to abandon his studied and casual air, ran through the trees toward the open right flank of the northern line. To his right, below him and through the trees, he glimpsed the bright, cool surprise of the river, and the sight of the water was oddly comforting. He passed his gray greatcoat folded so neatly at the foot of a maple tree, ran behind the Rhode Islanders manning their cannon and on toward the flank, and there, just as he emerged from the smoke and could see that the far woods were indeed empty of rebel enemy and thus offered a way for Colonel Lee to hook around the Confederate left flank, a bullet struck his chest.

He shuddered, his whole frame shaken by the bullet’s whipsaw strike. The breath was knocked hard out of him, leaving him momentarily unable to breathe, yet even so he felt oddly cool and detached, so that he was able to register just what he was experiencing. The bullet, he was sure it was a bullet, had struck him with the impact he imagined equal to the kick of a horse. It had left him seemingly paralyzed, but when he tried to take a breath he was pleasantly surprised to discover his lungs were working after all, and he realized it was not true paralysis, but rather an interruption of his mind’s control over physical motion. He also realized that his father, Professor of Medicine at Harvard, would want to know of these perceptions, and so he moved his hand toward the pocket where he kept his memorandum book and pencil, but then, helpless to stop himself, he began to topple forward. He tried to call for assistance, but no sound would come, and then he tried to raise his hands to break his fall, but his arms seemed suddenly enfeebled. His sword, which he had been carrying unsheathed, fell to the ground, and he saw a drop of blood splash on the mirror-bright blade and then he fell full-length across the steel and there was a terrible pain inside his chest so that he cried aloud in pity and agony. He had a vision of his family in Boston and he wanted to weep.

“Lieutenant Holmes is down!” a man shouted.

“Fetch him now! Take him back!” Colonel Lee ordered, then went to see how badly wounded Holmes was. He was delayed a few seconds by the Rhode Island artillerymen who shouted for the infantry to stand clear as they fired. Their cannon crashed back on its trail, jetting smoke and flame far out into the sunlit clearing. Each time the gun fired it recoiled a few feet farther back so that its trail left a crudely plowed furrow in the leaf-covered dirt. The gun’s crew was too busy to haul the weapon forward again and each shot was fired a few feet farther back than the one before.

Colonel Lee reached Holmes just as the Lieutenant was being lifted onto a stretcher. “I’m sorry, sir,” Holmes managed to say.

“Be quiet, Wendell.”

“I’m sorry,” Holmes said again. Lee stopped to retrieve the Lieutenant’s sword and wondered why so many men assumed that being wounded was their own fault.

“You’ve done well, Wendell,” Lee said fervently, then a burst of rebel cheering turned him around to see a rush of new rebel troops arriving in the woods opposite, and he knew he had no chance now of hooking around the enemy’s open flank. Indeed, it looked as if the enemy might hook around his. He swore softly, then laid Holmes’s sword beside the wounded Lieutenant. “Take him down gently,” Lee said, then flinched as a corporal began screaming because a bullet had plowed into his bowels. Another man reeled back with an eye filled with blood, and Lee wondered why in God’s name Baker had not ordered a retreat. It was time to get back across the river before they all died.

On the far side of the clearing the rebels had begun making the demonic sound that northern veterans of Bull Run claimed had presaged the onset of disaster. It was a weird, ulullating, inhuman noise that sent shivers of pure terror up Colonel Lee’s spine. It was a prolonged yelp like a beast’s cry of triumph, and it was the sound, Lee feared, of northern defeat. He shuddered, gripped his sword a little tighter, and went to find the Senator.

The Faulconer Legion climbed the long slope toward battle. It had taken longer than anyone expected to march through the town and find the right track toward the river, and now it was late afternoon and some of the more confident men were complaining that the Yankees would all be dead and looted before the Faulconer Legion could get its share of the spoils, while the timid noted that the battle still crackled on unabated. The Legion was close enough to smell the bitter stench of gunpowder carried on the small north wind that sifted the gunsmoke through the green leaves like a winter fog shifting through branches. At home, Starbuck thought, the leaves would all have changed color, turning the hills around Boston into a glorious surprise of gold, scarlet, flaming yellow, and rich brown, but here, on the northern edge of the southern Confederacy, only the maples had turned gold and the other trees were still heavy with green leaves, though their greenness was being plucked and twitched by the storm of bullets being fired from somewhere deep inside the woods.

The Legion marched across the leprous scatter of scorched stubble that showed where Duff’s company of Pike and Chickasaw County men had fought the advancing Yankees to a standstill. The burning wads of their rifles, coughed out with the bullets, had started the small fires that had burned and died away to leave ashy scars in the field. There were a couple of patches of blood too, but the Legion was too distracted by the fight at the hilltop to worry about those signs of earlier battle.

More detritus of battle showed at the woodland’s edge. A dozen officers’ horses were picketed there, and a score of wounded men were being tended by doctors. A mule loaded with fresh ammunition was led into the trees while another, its panniers empty, was brought out. A slave, come to the battle as his master’s servant, ran uphill with canteens he had refilled at the wellhead in the nearest farm. At least a score of children had come from Leesburg to watch the battle and a Mississippi sergeant was attempting to chase them out of range of the northern bullets. One small boy had fetched his father’s huge shotgun to the field and was pleading to be allowed to kill one Yankee before bedtime. The boy did not even flinch as a fourteen-pound solid bolt streaked out from the trees and slapped close overhead. The shot appeared to fly halfway to the Catoctin Mountain before it fell with a mighty splash into a stream just beyond the Licksville Road. The Legion had now come to within sixty yards of the trees, and those officers who still rode horses dismounted and hammered iron picket pins into the turf while Captain Hinton, the Legion’s second-in-command, ran ahead to establish exactly where the left flank of the Mississippi boys lay.

Most of Starbuck’s men were excited. Their relief at surviving Manassas had turned to boredom in the long weeks guarding the Potomac. Those weeks had hardly seemed like war, but instead had been a summer idyll beside cool water. Every now and then a man on one or other riverbank would take a potshot across the water and for a day or two thereafter the pickets would skulk in the shadows, but mostly the two sides had lived and let live. Men had gone swimming under the gunsights of their enemies, they had washed their clothes and watered their horses, and inevitably they had struck up acquaintances with the other side’s sentries and discovered shallow places where they could meet in midstream to exchange newspapers or swap southern tobacco for northern coffee. Now, though, in their eagerness to prove themselves the best soldiers in all the world, the Legion forgot the summer’s friendliness and swore instead to teach the lying, thieving, bastard Yankees to come across the river without first asking for rebel permission.

Captain Hinton reappeared at the edge of the trees and cupped his hands. “A Company, to me!”

“Form on A Company’s left!” Bird shouted to the rest of the Legion. “Color party to me!”

One of the cannon bolts slashed through the trees, showering the advancing men with leaves and splinters. Starbuck could see where an earlier shot had ripped a branch from a trunk, leaving a shocking scar of fresh clean timber. The sight gave him a sudden catch in the throat, a pulse of fear that was the same as excitement.

“Color party to me!” Bird shouted again and the standard-bearers raised their flags into the sunlight and ran to join the Major. The Legion’s own color was based on the Faulconer family’s coat-of-arms and showed three red crescents on a white silken field above the family motto “Forever Ardent.” The second color was the national flag of the Confederacy, two red horizontal stripes either side of a white stripe, while the upper quadrant next to the staff showed a blue field on which was sewn a circle of seven white stars. After Manassas there had been complaints that the flag was too similar to the northern flag and that troops had fired on friendly units believing them to be Yankees, and rumor had it that a new design was being made in Richmond, but for today the Legion would fight beneath the bullet-torn silk of its old Confederate color.

“Dear sweet Jesus save me, dear sweet Jesus save me,” Joseph May, one of Starbuck’s men, prayed breathlessly as he hurried behind Sergeant Truslow. “Save me, O Lord, save me.”

“Save your breath, May!” Truslow growled.

The Legion had been advancing in columns of companies and now it peeled leftward as it turned itself from a column of march into a line of battle. A Company was first into the trees and Starbuck’s K Company would be the last. Adam Faulconer rode with Starbuck. “Get off that horse, Adam!” Starbuck shouted up to his friend. “You’ll be killed!” He needed to shout for the crackle of musketry was loud, but the sound was filling Starbuck with a curious elation. He knew as well as Adam that war was wrong. It was like sin, it was terrible, but just like sin it had a terrible allure. Survive this, Starbuck felt, and a man could take anything that the world might hurl at him. This was a game of unimaginably high stakes, but also a game where privilege conferred no advantages except the chance to avoid the game altogether, and whoever used privilege to avoid this game was no man at all, but a lickspittle coward. Here, where the air was foul with smoke and death whipped among green leaves, existence was simplified to absurdity. Starbuck whooped suddenly, filled with the sheer joy of the moment. Behind him, their rifles loaded, K Company spread among the green leaves. They heard their Captain’s whoop of joy and they heard the rebel yell sounding from the troops on the right, and so they began to make the same demonic wailing screech that spoke of southern rights and southern pride and southern boys come to make a killing.

“Give them hell, boys!” Bird shouted. “Give them hell!”

And the Legion obeyed.

Baker died.

The Senator had been trying to steady his men whose nerves were being abraded by the whooping, vengeful, southern fiends. Baker had made three attempts to break out of the woods, but each northern advance had been beaten bloodily back to leave another tide mark of dead men on the small meadow that lay like a smoke-palled slaughter field between the two forces. Some of Baker’s men were abandoning the fight; hiding themselves on the steep escarpment that dropped down to the riverbank or sheltering blindly behind tree trunks and outcrops of rock on the bluffs summit. Baker and his aides rousted such timid men out from their refuges and sent them back to where the brave still attempted to keep the rebels at bay, but the timid crept back to their shelters just as soon as the officers were gone.

The Senator was bereft of ideas. All his cleverness, his oratory, and his passion had been condensed into a small tight ball of panic-stricken helplessness. Not that he showed any fear. Instead he strolled with drawn sword in front of his men and called on them to aim low and keep their spirits high. “There are reinforcements coming!” he said to the powder-stained men of the 15th Massachusetts. “Not much longer, boys!” he encouraged his own men of the 1st Californian. “Hot work now, lads, but they’ll tire of it first!” he promised the men of New York Tammanys. “If I had one more regiment like you,” he told the Harvards, “we’d all be feasting in Richmond tonight!”

Colonel Lee tried to persuade the Senator to retreat across the river, but Baker seemed not to hear the request and when Lee shouted it, insisting on being heard, Baker merely offered the Colonel a sad smile. “I’m not sure we have enough boats for a retreat, William. I think we must stand and win here, don’t you?” A bullet spat inches above the Senator’s head, but he did not flinch. “They’re only a pack of rebels. We won’t be beaten by such wretches. The world is watching and we have to show our superiority!”

Which was probably what an ancestor of Baker’s had said at Yorktown, Lee reflected, but wisely did not say aloud. The Senator might have been born in England, but there was no more patriotic American. “You’re sending the wounded off?” Lee asked the Senator instead.

“I’m sure we are!” Baker said firmly, though he was sure of no such thing, but he could not worry about the wounded now. Instead he needed to fill his men with a righteous fervor for the beloved union. An aide brought him news that the 19th Massachusetts had arrived on the river’s far bank and he was thinking that if he could just bring that fresh regiment across the Potomac he would have enough men to throw an attack against the knoll from which the rebels were decimating his left flank and preventing his howitzers from doing their slaughtering work. The idea gave the Senator instant hope and fresh enthusiasm. “That’s what we’ll do!” he shouted to one of his aides.

“We’ll do what, sir?”

“Come on! We have work!” The Senator needed to get back to his left flank and the quickest route lay in the open where the gunsmoke offered a fogbank in which to hide. “Come on,” he shouted again, then hurried down the front of his line, calling to the riflemen to hold their fire until he had passed. “We’re being reinforced, boys,” he shouted. “Not long now! Victory’s coming. Hold on there, hold on!”

A group of rebels saw the Senator and his aides hurrying in the shifting smoke, and though they did not know Baker was the northern commander, they knew that only a senior officer would carry a tasseled sword and wear a uniform so tricked out with braid and glitter. A gold watch chain hung with seals was looped on the Senator’s coat and caught the slanting sun. “There’s their gang boss! Gang boss!” a tall, stringy, redheaded Mississippian called aloud, pointing to the striding figure who marched so confidently across the battle’s front. “He’s mine!” the big man shouted as he ran forward. A dozen of his companions scrambled after him in their eagerness to plunder the bodies of the rich northern officers.

“Sir!” one of Baker’s aides called in warning.

The Senator turned, raising his sword. He should have retreated into the trees, but he had not crossed a river to flee a rabble of seceshers. “Come on then, you damn rebel!” he shouted, and he held the sword out as though ready to fight a duel.

But the red-haired man used a revolver and his four bullets thudded into the Senator’s chest like axe blows hitting softwood. The Senator was thrown back, coughing and grasping at his chest. His sword and hat fell as he tried to stay on his feet. Another bullet ripped his throat open and blood spilt in a scarlet wash down the brass-buttoned tunic of his double-breasted coat and clogged in the links of the gold watch chain. Baker was trying to breathe and was shaking his head as though he could not believe what was happening to him. He looked up at the lanky killer with a puzzled expression, then collapsed onto the grass. The red-haired rebel ran to claim his body.

A rifle shot spun the red-haired man around, then another bullet put him down. A volley drove the other Mississippians back as two of the Senator’s aides dragged their dead master back into the trees. One of the men retrieved the Senator’s hat and took out the sweaty, folded message that had launched this madness across a river.

The sun was low in the west. The leaves might not have turned, but the nights were drawing on and the sun would be quite gone by half past five, but darkness could not save the Yankees now. They needed boats, but there were only five small craft, and some of the wounded had already drowned as they tried to swim back to Harrison’s Island. More wounded were climbing clumsily down the bluff to where the northern casualties already filled the small area of flat-land that lay between the base of the steep hill and the riverbank. Two aides carried the Senator’s body through the press of moaning men to one of the boats and ordered a space cleared for the corpse. The Senator’s expensive watch fell from his pocket as his carcass was manhandled down the bank. The watch swung on its bloody chain, first dragging in the mud, then striking hard against the boat’s timbers. The blow broke the watch’s crystal and scattered small sharp scraps of glass into the bilges. The Senator’s bloody corpse was rolled on top of the glass. “Take him back!” an aide ordered.

“We’re all going to die!” a man screamed on the hilltop, and a Massachusetts sergeant told him to shut his damn noise and die like a man. A group of rebels tried to cross the clearing and were hurled back by a crescendo of musket fire that twisted them around and plucked scraps of wood from the trees behind them. A Massachusetts color bearer was hit and his great, beautiful, bullet-beaten silk flag fluttered down toward the dirt, but another man seized its tasseled fringe and lifted the stars back toward the sun before the stripes had touched the ground.

“What we’ll do,” said Colonel Cogswell, who had finally established that he was the senior officer alive and thus had command of the four Yankee regiments stranded on the Virginia shore, “is fight our way downstream to the ferry.” He wanted to take his men out of the murderous shadows and into the open fields where their enemies would no longer be able to hide behind trees. “We’ll march fast. It means we’ll have to abandon the guns and the wounded.”

No one liked that decision, but no one had a better idea, and so the order was relayed back to the 20th Massachusetts, who lay at the right-hand flank of the Yankee line. The fourteen-pounder James rifle would have to be abandoned anyway for it had recoiled so far that at last it had toppled back over the bluff. As it had fired its final shot a gunner had shouted in alarm, then the whole heavy cannon had tilted over the escarpment’s crest and crashed sickeningly down the steep slope until it smashed against a tree. Now the gunners gave up their attempts to haul the gun back to the crest and listened instead as Colonel Lee explained to his officers what the regiment was about to do. They were to leave their wounded to the mercy of the rebels and gather at the left-hand flank of the northern line. There they would make a mass charge through the rebel forces and so down to the water meadows which led to where the second Yankee force had crossed the river to cut the turnpike. That second force was covered by artillery on the Maryland bank of the river. “We can’t cross back into Maryland here,” Lee told his officers, “because we don’t have enough boats, so we’ll have to march the five miles downstream and fight the rebels off all the way.” He looked at his watch. “We’ll move in five minutes.”

Lee knew it would take that long for the orders to reach all his companies and for the casualties to be gathered under a flag of truce. He hated leaving his wounded, but he knew none of his regiment would reach Maryland this night if he did not abandon the casualties. “Hurry now,” he told his officers and tried to sound confident, but the strain was telling now and his sanguine appearance was fraying under the constant whip and whistle of the rebel bullets. “Hurry now!” he called again, then he heard a terrible screaming noise from his open right flank and he turned, alarmed, and suddenly knew that no amount of hurrying could help him now.

It seemed the Harvards would have to fight where they were. Lee drew his sword, licked dry lips, then committed his soul to God and his beloved regiment to its desperate end.

WE’RE TOO FAR LEFT.” TRUSLOW HAD GROWLED AT Starbuck as soon as K Company reached the battle line. “Bastards are that way.” Truslow pointed across the clearing to where a veil of smoke hung in front of the trees. That smoke lay well to the right of K Company, while directly across from Starbuck’s men there was no gunsmoke, just empty trees and long, darkening shadows among which the maple trees looked unnaturally bright. Some of K Company had begun firing into those empty trees, but Truslow snarled at them to stop wasting powder.

The company waited expectantly for Starbuck’s orders, then turned as another officer came running through the brush. It was Lieutenant Moxey, who had reckoned himself a hero ever since taking a slight wound in his left hand at Manassas. “The Major says you’re to close on the center.” Moxey was filled with the moment’s excitement. He waved a revolver toward the sound of musketry. “He says you’re to reinforce Murphy’s company.”

“Company!” Truslow shouted at his men, anticipating Starbuck’s orders to move.

“No! Wait!” Starbuck was still gazing directly across the clearing to the undisturbed trees. He looked back to his right again, noting how the Yankee fire had momentarily died down. For a few seconds he wondered if that lull in the firing signified that the northern forces were retreating, but then a sudden charge by a yelping group of rebels triggered a furious outburst of northern rifle fire. For a few seconds the gunfire splintered in a mad tattoo, but the moment the rebels retreated the fusillade died away. Starbuck realized that the northerners were holding their fire until they could see targets while the southerners were keeping up a steady fusillade. Which meant, Starbuck decided, that the Yankees were worried about having enough ammunition.

“The Major says you’re to move at once,” Moxey insisted. He was a thin, pale-faced youth who resented that Starbuck had received a captaincy while he remained a lieutenant. He was also one of the few men in the Legion who begrudged Starbuck’s presence, believing that a Virginia regiment had no need of a renegade Bostonian, but it was an opinion he kept to himself, for Moxey had seen Starbuck’s temper and knew the northerner was more than willing to use his fists. “Did you hear me, Starbuck?” he demanded now.

“I heard you,” Starbuck said, yet still he did not move. He was thinking that the Yankees had been fighting in these woods nearly all day, and presumably they had just about used up all the cartridges in their pouches, which meant they were now relying on whatever small amounts of ammunition could be brought across the river. He was also thinking that troops worried about having sufficient cartridges were troops that could be panicked very quickly. He had seen panic at Manassas and reckoned it could bring a victory just as swift and complete here.

“Starbuck!” Moxey insisted on being heard. “The Major says you’re to reinforce Captain Murphy.”

“I heard you, Mox,” Starbuck said again, and still did nothing.

Moxey made a great play of pretending that Starbuck had to be particularly stupid. He tapped Starbuck’s arm and pointed through the trees to the right. “That way, Starbuck.”

“Go away, Mox,” Starbuck said, and he looked back across the clearing. “And on your way tell the Major we’re crossing over here and we’ll be rolling the bastards up from the left. Our left, got that?”

“You’re doing what?” Moxey gaped at Starbuck, then looked up at Adam who was on horseback a few paces behind Starbuck. “You tell him, Adam,” Moxey appealed to higher authority. “Tell him to obey orders!”

“We’re crossing the field, Moxey,” Starbuck said in a kind, slow voice, as though he addressed a particularly dull child, “and we’re going to attack the nasty Yankees from inside the trees over there. Now go away and tell that to Pecker!”

The maneuver seemed the obvious thing to do. The two sides were presently blazing away from either side of the clearing, and though the rebels had a clear advantage, neither side seemed capable of advancing straight into the concentrated rifle fire of the other. By crossing the clearing at this open flank Starbuck could take his men safe into the northerners’ trees and then advance on their undefended wing. “Make sure you’re loaded!” Starbuck shouted at his men.

“You can’t do this, Starbuck,” Moxey said. Starbuck took no notice of him. “Do you want me to tell the Major you’re disobeying his orders?” Moxey asked Starbuck cattily.

“Yes,” Starbuck said, “that’s exactly what I want you to tell him. And that we’re attacking their flank. Now go away and do it!”

Adam, still on horseback, frowned down at his friend. “Do you know what you’re doing, Nate?”

“I know, Adam, I really do know,” Starbuck said. In truth the opportunity to turn the Yankee flank was so straightforward that the dullest fool might have seized it, though a wise man might have sought permission for the maneuver first. But Starbuck was so certain he was right and so confident that his flank attack would finish the Yankee defense that he reckoned seeking permission would simply be a waste of time. “Sergeant!” he called for Truslow.

Truslow once again anticipated Starbuck’s order. “Bayonets on!” he called to the company. “Make sure they’re fixed firm! Remember to twist the blade when you drive home!” Truslow’s voice was as calm as though this were just another day’s training. “Take your time, lad! Don’t fumble!” He spoke to a man who had dropped a bayonet in his excitement, then he checked that another man’s bayonet was firmly slotted onto the rifle’s muzzle. Hutton and Mallory, the company’s two other sergeants, were similarly checking their squads.

“Captain!” one of Hutton’s men called. It was Corporal Peter Waggoner, whose twin brother was also a corporal in the company. “You staying or going, Captain?” Peter Waggoner was a big, slow man of deep piety and fierce beliefs.

“I’m going over there,” Starbuck said, pointing across the clearing and deliberately misunderstanding the question.

“You know what I mean,” Waggoner said, and most of the other men in the company knew too for they stared apprehensively at their Captain. They knew Nathan Evans had offered him a job, and many of them feared that such a staff appointment might be attractive to a bright young Yankee like Starbuck.

“Do you still believe that people who drink whiskey will go to hell, Peter?” Starbuck asked the Corporal.

“That’s the truth, isn’t it?” Waggoner demanded sternly. “God’s truth, Mr. Starbuck. Be sure your sins will find you out.”

“I’ve decided to stay here until you and your brother get drunk with me, Peter,” Starbuck retorted. There was a second’s silence as the men understood just what he had meant and then there was a cheer.

“Quiet!” Truslow snapped.

Starbuck looked back at the enemy side of the clearing. He did not know why his men liked him, but he was hugely moved by their affection, so moved that he had turned away rather than betray his emotion. When he had first been made their Captain he knew the men had accepted him because he had come with Truslow’s approval, but they had since discovered that their Yankee officer was a clever, fierce, and combative man. He was not always friendly, not like some of the officers who behaved just like the men they commanded, but K Company accepted Starbuck’s secretive and cool manner as the trait of a northerner. Everyone knew that Yankees were queer cold fish and none were stranger or colder than Bostonians, but they had also learned that Starbuck was fiercely protective of his men and was prepared to defy all the Confederacy’s authorities to save one of his company from trouble. They also sensed he was a rogue, and that made them think he was lucky, and like all soldiers, they would rather have a lucky leader than any other kind. “You’re really staying, sir?” Robert Decker asked.

“I’m really staying, Robert. Now get yourself ready.”

“I’m ready,” Decker said, grinning with pleasure. He was the youngest of the fifty-seven men in the company, almost all of whom came from Faulconer County, where they had been schooled by Thaddeus Bird and doctored by Major Danson and preached at by the Reverend Moss and employed, like as not, by Washington Faulconer. A handful were in their forties, a few were in their twenties and thirties, but most were just seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen years old. They were brothers, cousins, in-laws, friends, and enemies, not a stranger to each other among the lot of them, and all were familiar with each other’s houses and sisters and mothers and dogs and hopes and weaknesses. To a stranger’s eye they looked as fierce and unkempt as a pack of winter hounds after a wet day’s run, but Starbuck knew them better. Some, like the Waggoner twins, were deeply pious boys who witnessed nightly with the other soldiers and who prayed for their captain’s soul, while others, like Edward Hunt and Abram Statham, were rogues who could not be trusted a short inch. Robert Decker, who had come from the same high Blue Ridge valley as Sergeant Truslow, was a kind, hardworking, and trusting soul, while others, like the Cobb twins, were lazier than cats.

“You’re supposed to reinforce Murphy’s company!” Lieutenant Moxey still lingered close to Starbuck.

Starbuck turned on him. “Go and give Pecker my message! For God’s sake, Mox, if you’re going to be a message boy, then be a good one. Now run!” Moxey backed away and Starbuck looked up at Adam. “Will you please go and tell Pecker what we’re doing? I don’t trust Moxey.”

Adam spurred away and Starbuck turned back to his men. He raised his voice over the noise of the musketry and told the company what he expected of them. They were to cross the clearing at the double, and once on the far side they would wheel to their right and make a line that would sweep up through the far woods like a broom coming at the open edge of the Yankee’s line. “Don’t fire unless you have to,” Starbuck said, “just scream as loud as you can and let them see your bayonets. They’ll run, I promise you!” He knew instinctively that the sudden appearance of a pack of screaming rebels would be sufficient to send the Yankees packing. The men grinned nervously. One man, Joseph May, who had been praying as he climbed the hill, peered at his bayonet’s fixture to make sure it was properly secure. Starbuck saw the boy squint. “Where are your spectacles, Joe?”

“Lost ’em, Captain.” May sniffed unhappily. “Got broke,” he finally admitted.

“If any of you see a dead Yankee with specs, bring them to Joseph!” Starbuck instructed his men, then put his own bayonet onto his rifle’s muzzle. At Manassas, at Washington Faulconer’s insistence, the Legion’s officers had gone into battle with swords, but those officers who survived had learned that enemy sharpshooters liked nothing better than a sword-bearing target and so they had exchanged their elegant blades for workmanlike rifles and their braid-encrusted sleeves and collars for undecorated cloth. Starbuck also carried an ivory-handled, five-shot revolver that he had taken as plunder from the battlefield at Manassas, but for now he would leave that expensive English-made revolver in its holster and depend on his sturdy Mississippi rifle with its long, spikelike bayonet. “Are you ready?” Starbuck called again.

“Ready!” the company answered, wanting to get the battle over with.

“No cheering as we go across!” Starbuck warned them. “We don’t want the Yankees knowing we’re coming. Go fast and be real quiet!” He looked around at their faces and saw the mixture of excitement and nervous anticipation. He glanced at Truslow, who nodded curtly as though adding his approval to Starbuck’s decision. “So come on!” Starbuck called and led the way into the dappled golden-green sunlight that slanted across the clearing and shimmered through the pearly gunsmoke that rested like layered skeins of misty veils between the trees. It was turning into a lovely fall evening and Starbuck felt a sudden and terrible fear that he would die in this sweet light and he ran harder, fearing a blast of canister from a cannon or the sickening mulekick of a bullet’s strike, but not one northerner fired at the company as they pounded over to the inner stand of trees.

They trampled their way into the undergrowth on the Yankees’ side of the clearing. Once he was safe under the trees Starbuck could see a glint of water where the river turned away from the bluff, and beyond that bright curve he could see the long, green, evening-shadowed fields of Maryland. The sight gave him a moment’s pang, then he called to his men to swing right and form a line and he swung his left arm around to show how he wanted them to form the new line of battle, but the men were not waiting for orders; instead they were already pounding through the trees toward the enemy. Starbuck had wanted them to advance on the Yankee flank in a steady line, but they had chosen to race forward in small excited groups, and their enthusiasm more than made up for the raggedness of their deployment. Starbuck ran with them, unaware that he had begun to scream the high-pitched banshee scream. Thomas Truslow was to his left, carrying his bowie knife with its nineteen-inch blade. Most of the Legion’s men had once owned such wicked-looking blades, but the weight of the ponderous knives had persuaded almost all of the soldiers to abandon them. Truslow, out of perversity, had kept his and now carried it as his weapon of choice. Alone in the company he made no noise, as if the job at hand was too serious for shouting.

Starbuck saw the first Yankees. Two men were using a fallen tree as a firing position. One was reloading, working the long ramrod down his rifle while his companion aimed across the trunk. The man fired and Starbuck saw the kick of the rifle on the man’s shoulder and the puff of spark-lit smoke where the percussion cap exploded. Beyond the two men the woods suddenly seemed thick with blue uniforms and, more oddly, gray coats that hung from trees and twitched as rebel bullets struck home. “Kill them!” Starbuck screamed, and the two men by the fallen tree turned to stare in horror at the rebel charge. The man who had reloaded his rifle swung it to face Starbuck, aimed, then pulled the trigger, but in his panic he had forgotten to prime his rifle. The hammer fell with a click onto bare steel. The man scrambled to his feet and ran past an officer who stood with drawn sword and a look of appalled bewilderment on his whiskered face. Starbuck, seeing the officer’s expression, knew he had done the right thing. “Kill them,” he screamed, completely unaware that he was uttering anything so bloodthirsty. He just felt the elation of a man who has outwitted an enemy and so imposed his will on a battlefield. That feeling was intoxicating, filling him with a manic elation. “Kill them!” he screamed again, and this time the words seemed to spur the whole Yankee flank into disintegration.

The northerners fled. Some threw themselves off the bluff’s edge and slithered down the slope, but most ran back along the line of the summit and, as they ran, more men joined the flight, and the retreat became ever more crowded and chaotic. Starbuck tripped on a wounded man who screamed foully, then ran into the clearing where the Rhode Island cannon had plowed its ragged furrow back and over the bluff’s crest. He jumped a box of ammunition, still screaming his challenge at the men running ahead.

Not all the northerners ran. Many of the officers reckoned that duty was more important than safety and, with a bravery that was close to suicide, stayed to fight the rebels’ flanking attack. One lieutenant calmly aimed his revolver, fired once, then went down under two bayonets. He tried to fire the revolver even as he was dying, then a third rebel put a bullet into his head and there was a spray of blood as the shot struck home. The Lieutenant died, though the men with the bayonets still savaged his corpse with the ferocity of hunting dogs rending a fallen buck. Starbuck shouted at his men to let the dead man alone and hurry on. He did not want to give the Yankees time to recover.

Adam Faulconer was riding his horse in the sunlit clearing, shouting for the rest of the Legion to cross over and support Starbuck’s company. Major Bird led the color party across into evening woods full of the shrill sound of rebels attacking, of gunshots and of northern officers shouting orders that stood no chance of being obeyed in the panic.

Truslow told a northerner to drop his rifle, the man either did not hear or decided to defy the demand, and the bowie knife chopped down once with a horrid economy of effort. A group of Yankees, their retreat blocked, turned and ran blindly back toward their attackers. Most stopped when they saw their mistake and raised their hands in surrender, but one, an officer, sliced his sword in a wild blow at Starbuck’s face. Starbuck checked, let the blade hiss by, then rammed his bayonet forward and down. He felt the steel hit the Yankee’s ribs and cursed that he had stabbed down instead of up.

“Nate!” The Yankee officer gasped. “No! Please!”

“Jesus!” The blasphemy was torn from Starbuck. The man he was attacking was a member of his father’s church, an old acquaintance with whom Starbuck had endured an eternity of Sunday school lessons. The last news Starbuck had heard of William Lewis was that he had become a student at Harvard, but now he was gasping as Starbuck’s bayonet scored down his ribs.

“Nate?” Lewis asked. “Is it you?”

“Drop your sword, Will!”

William Lewis shook his head, not out of obstinate refusal, but out of puzzlement that his old friend should appear in the unlikely guise of a rebel. Then, seeing the look of fury on Starbuck’s face, he let the sword drop. “I surrender, Nate!”

Starbuck left him standing over the fallen sword and ran on to catch his men. The encounter with an old friend had unnerved him. Was he fighting a Boston battalion? If so, how many more of this beaten enemy would recognize him? What familiar households would he plunge into mourning by his actions on this Virginia hilltop? Then he forgot his qualms as he saw a giant bearded man howling at the rebels. The man, dressed in shirtsleeves and suspenders, was using one hand to swing an artillery rammer like a club, while in his other he held a short Roman-pattern stabbing sword that was standard issue to gunners. His retreat had been cut off, but he was refusing to surrender, preferring, to die like a hero than yield like a coward. He had already felled one of Starbuck’s men; now he challenged the others to fight him. Sergeant Mallory, who was Truslow’s brother-in-law, fired at the huge man, but the bullet missed and the bearded gunner turned like a fury on the wiry Mallory.

“He’s mine!” Starbuck shouted and pushed Mallory aside, lunged forward, then swayed back as the huge man whirled the rammer. This, Starbuck reckoned, was his duty as an officer. The company must see that he was the least afraid, the most ready to fight. Besides, today he felt unbeatable. The scream of battle was in his veins like a splash of fire. He laughed as he lunged with the bayonet, only to have the blade knocked hard aside by the short sword.

“Bastard!” the gunner spat at Starbuck, then slashed the short sword in quick vicious sweeps, trying to keep Starbuck’s attention on the blade while he swung the rammer. He thought he had tricked the rebel officer and bellowed with a kind of joy as he anticipated the clublike wooden head smashing his enemy’s skull, but Starbuck ducked hard down so that it hissed over his slouch hat and the momentum of the great swing was sufficient to sway the big man off-balance. Then it was Starbuck’s turn to shout in triumph as he rammed the bayonet up, hard up, pushing against the astonishing resistance of skin and flesh, and he was still screaming as the big man jerked and fell, twitching on the blade’s long shank like a gaffed fish dying.

Starbuck was breathless as he tried to pull his bayonet free, but the gunner’s flesh had closed tight on the steel and the blade would not move. The man had dropped his own weapons and was clawing feebly at the rifle in his gut. Starbuck also tried to twist the steel free, but the flesh’s suction gripped like stone. He pulled the rifle’s trigger, hoping to blast the bayonet loose, but still it would not move. The gunner gasped horribly as the bullet struck, then Starbuck abandoned the weapon and left the gunner dying on the forest floor. He unholstered his fine ivory-handled revolver instead and ran after his company only to discover that K Company was no longer alone in the woods, but was merely a small part of a gray and butternut tide that was overwhelming the northern defenders and driving the survivors in a terrible stampede off the bluffs summit and down to the narrow, muddy ledge beside the river. A New York sergeant screamed as he lost his precarious footing and tumbled down the slope to break his leg on a rock.

“Nate!” Adam had spurred his stallion into the trees. “Call them off!”

Starbuck stared uncomprehendingly at his friend.

“It’s over! You’ve won!” Adam said and gestured at the mass of rebels who had begun firing down the bluff’s steep slope at the Yankees trapped beneath. “Stop them!” Adam said, as if he blamed Starbuck for this display of gleeful, vengeful victory, then he turned his horse savagely away to find someone with the authority to finish the killing.

Except no one wanted to end the killing. The northerners were trapped beneath the bluff and the southerners poured a merciless fire into the writhing, crawling, bleeding mass below. A rush of Yankees tried to escape the slaughter by trampling over the wounded to the safety of a newly arrived boat, but the weight of the fugitives overturned the small craft. A man called for help as the current dragged him away. Others tried to swim the channel, but the water was churning and spattering with the strike of bullets. Blood soured the stream and was carried seaward. Men drowned, men died, men bled, and still the remorseless, unending slaughter went on as the rebels loaded and fired, loaded and fired, loaded and fired, jeering all the while at their beaten, cowed, broken enemy.

Starbuck edged his way to the bluff’s edge and stared down at a scene from the inferno. The base of the bluff’s escarpment was like a wriggling, sensate mass; an enormous beast dying in the gathering dusk, though it was not yet a fangless beast for shots still came up the slope. Starbuck pushed his revolver into his belt and cupped his hands and shouted downhill for the Yankees to cease fire. “You’re prisoners!” he shouted, but the only answer was a splintering of rifle flames in the shadows and the whistle of a fusillade past his head. Starbuck pulled his revolver free and emptied its chambers down the hill. Truslow was beside him, taking loaded rifles from men behind and firing at the heads of men trying to swim to safety. The river was being beaten into a froth, looking just as though a school of fish were churning frantically to escape a tidal shallow. Bodies drifted downstream, others snagged on branches or lodged on mudbanks. The Potomac had become a river of death, blood-streaked, bullet-lashed, and body-filled. Major Bird grimaced at the view, but did nothing to stop his men firing.

“Uncle!” Adam protested. “Stop them!”

But instead of stopping the slaughter, Bird gazed down on it like some explorer who had just stumbled upon some phenomenon of nature. It was Bird’s view that war involved butchery, and to engage in war but protest against butchery was inconsistent. Besides, the Yankees would not surrender but were still returning the rebel fire, and Bird now answered Adam’s demand by raising his own revolver and firing a shot into the turmoil.

“Uncle!” Adam cried in protest.

“Our job is to kill Yankees,” Bird said and watched as his nephew galloped away. “And their job is to kill us,” Bird went on, even though Adam had long since gone from earshot, “and if we leave them alive today then tomorrow their turn might come.” He turned back to the horror and emptied his revolver harmlessly into the river. All around him men grimaced as they fired and Bird watched them, seeing a blood lust raging, but as the shadows lengthened and the return fire stuttered to nothing and as the fear and passion of the long day’s climax ebbed away, so the men ceased firing and turned away from the twitching, bloodied river.

Bird found Starbuck pulling a pair of spectacles from a dead man’s face. The lenses were thick with clotted blood that Starbuck wiped on his coat hem. “Losing your vision, Nate?” Bird asked.

“Joe May lost his glasses. We’re trying to find a pair that suits.”

“I wish you could find him a new brain. He’s one of the dullest creatures it was ever my misfortune to teach,” Bird said, holstering his revolver. “I have to thank you for disobeying me. Well done.” Starbuck grinned at the compliment, and Bird saw the feral glee on the northerner’s face and wondered that battle could give such joy to a man. Bird supposed that some men were born to be soldiers as others were born to be healers or teachers or farmers, and Starbuck, Bird reckoned, was a soldier born to the dark trade. “Moxey complained about you,” Bird told Starbuck, “so what shall we do about Moxey?”

“Give the son of a bitch to the Yankees,” Starbuck said, then walked with Bird away from the bluffs crest, back into the trees where a company of Mississippi men was gathering prisoners. Starbuck avoided the sullen-looking northerners, not wanting to be recognized by a fellow Bostonian. One Mississippi soldier had picked up a fallen white banner which he paraded through the twilight, and Starbuck saw the handsome escutcheon of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts embroidered on the blood-flecked silk. He wondered whether Will Lewis was still on the bluff’s summit or whether, in the chaos of the defeat, the Lieutenant had sneaked off down to the river and made a bid for the far bank. And what would they say in Boston, Starbuck wondered, when they heard that the Reverend Elial’s son had been screaming the rebel yell and wearing the ragged gray and shooting at men who worshipped in the Reverend’s church? Damn what they said. He was a rebel, his lot thrown in with the defiant South and not with these smart, well-equipped northern soldiers who seemed like a different breed to the grinning, long-haired southerners.

He left Bird with the Legion’s own colors and went on hunting through the woods, looking for spectacles or any other useful plunder that the corpses might yield. Some of the dead looked very peaceful, most looked astonished. They lay with their heads tipped back, their mouths open, and their outreaching hands contracted into claws. Flies were busy at nostrils and glazed eyes. Above the dead the discarded, bullet-torn gray coats of the northerners were still suspended from branches to look like hanged men in the fading light. Starbuck found one of the scarlet-lined coats neatly folded and placed at the bole of a tree and, thinking it would be useful in the coming winter, picked it up and shook out the folds to see that it was unscarred by either bullet or bayonet. A nametape had been neatly sewn into the coat’s neck, and Starbuck peered to read the letters that had been so meticulously inked onto the small white strip. “Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.,” the label read, “20th Mass.” The name brought Starbuck a sudden and intense memory of a clever Boston family, and of Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes’s study with its specimen jars on high shelves. One such jar had held a wrinkled, pallid human brain, Starbuck remembered, while others had strange, big-headed homunculi suspended in cloudy liquid. The family did not worship at Starbuck’s church, but the Reverend Elial approved of Professor Holmes, and so Starbuck had been allowed to spend time in the doctor’s house where he had become friendly with Oliver Wendell Junior, who was an intense, thin, and friendly young man, quick in debate and generous in nature. Starbuck hoped his old friend had survived the fight. Then, draping Holmes’s heavy coat about his shoulders, he went to find his rifle and to discover just how his men had fared in the battle.

In the dark, Adam Faulconer vomited.

He knelt in the soft leaf mold beneath a maple tree and retched till his belly was dry and his throat sore, and then he closed his eyes and prayed as though the very future of mankind depended on the intensity of his petition.

Adam knew that he had been told lies, and, what was worse, knew that he had willingly believed those lies. He had believed that one hard battle would be a sufficient bloodletting to lance the disease that beset America, but instead the single battle had merely worsened the fever, and today he had watched men kill like beasts. He had seen his best friend, his neighbors, and his mother’s brother kill like animals. He had seen men descend into hell, and he had seen their victims die like vermin.

It was dark now, but still a great moaning came from the foot of the bluff where scores of northerners lay bleeding and dying. Adam had tried to go down and offer help, but a voice had screamed at him to get the hell away and a rifle had fired blindly up the slope toward him, and that one defiant shot had been sufficient to provoke another rebel fusillade from the bluffs crest. More men had screamed in the dark and wept in the night.

Around Adam a few fires burned, and around those fires the victorious rebels sat with grinning devil faces. They had looted the dead and rifled the pockets of the prisoners. Colonel Lee of the 20th Massachusetts had been forced to surrender his fine braided jacket to a Mississippi muleskinner who now sat wearing it before a fire and wiping the grease from his hands on the coat’s skirts. There was the raw smell of whiskey in the night air and the sour stench of blood and the sweet-sick odor of the rotting dead. A handful of southern casualties had been buried in the sloping meadow that looked south toward Catoctin Mountain, but the northern bodies were still unburied. Most had been collected and stacked like cordwood, but a few undiscovered corpses were still hidden in the undergrowth. In the morning a work party of slaves would be fetched from the nearby farms and made to dig a trench big enough to hold the Yankee dead. Near the stack of bloody corpses a man played a fiddle beside a fire and a few men sang softly to his mournful tune.

God, Adam decided, had abandoned these men, just as they had abandoned Him. Today, on the edge of a river, they had arrogated God’s choice of life and death. They were, Adam decided in his wrought state, given to evil. It did not matter that some of the victorious rebels had prayed in the dusk and had tried to help their beaten enemy; they were all, in Adam’s view, scorched by the devil’s breath.

Because the devil had taken America in his grip and was dragging the fairest country on earth down to his foul nest, and Adam, who had let himself be persuaded that the South needed its one moment of martial glory, knew he had come to his own sticking point. He knew he had to make a decision, and that the decision involved the risk of severing himself from his family and his neighbors and his friends and even from the girl he loved, but it was better, he told himself as he knelt in the death- and vomit-scented air of the bluffs crest, to lose his Julia than to lose his soul.

The war must be ended. That was Adam’s decision. He had tried to avert the conflict before the fighting ever began. He had worked with the Christian Peace Commission and he had seen that band of pious worthies swamped by the fervent supporters of war, so now he would use the war to end the war. He would betray the South because only by that betrayal could he save his country. The North must be given all the help he could give it, and as an aide to the South’s commanding general Adam knew he could give the North more help than most other men.

He prayed in the dark and his prayer seemed to be answered when a great peace descended on him. The peace told Adam that his decision was a good one. He would become a traitor and would yield his country to its enemy in the name of God and for America.

Bodies floated downstream in the dark, carried toward the Chesapeake Bay and the distant ocean. Some of the corpses were trapped on the weirs by Great Falls where the river turned south toward Washington, but most were carried through the rapids and floated through the night to snag on the piles of the Long Bridge that carried the road south from Washington into Virginia. The river washed the corpses clean so that by the dawn, when the citizens of Washington walked beside the waters and looked down at the mud-shoals by its banks, they saw their sons all clean and white, their dead skins gleaming, though the bodies were now so swollen with gas that they strained the buttons and stretched the seams of their lavish new uniforms.

And in the White House a president wept for the death of Senator Baker, his dear friend, while the rebel South, seeing the hand of God in this victory by the waters, gave thanks.

The leaves turned and dropped, blowing gold and scarlet across the new graves at Ball’s Bluff. In November the rebel troops moved away from the river, going to winter quarters nearer Richmond where the newspapers warned of the swelling northern ranks. Major-General McClellan, the Young Napoleon, was said to be training his burgeoning army to a peak of military perfection. The small fight at Ball’s Bluff might have filled northern churches with mourners, but the North consoled itself with the thought that their revenge lay in the hands of McClellan’s superbly equipped army, which, come the springtime, would descend on the South like a righteous thunderbolt.

The North’s navy did not wait for spring. In South Carolina, off Hilton Head, the warships blasted their way into Port Royal Sound and landing parties stormed the forts that guarded Beaufort Harbor. The North’s navy was blockading and dominating the southern coast and though the southern newspapers tried to diminish the defeat at Port Royal, the news provoked cheers and singing in the Confederacy’s slave quarters. There was more celebration when Charleston was almost destroyed by fire—a visitation from the angel of revenge, the northern preachers said—and the same preachers cheered when they learned that a Yankee warship, defying the laws of the sea, had stopped a British mail ship and removed the two Confederate commissioners sent from Richmond to negotiate treaties with the European powers. Some southerners also cheered that news, declaring that the snub to Britain would surely bring the Royal Navy to the American coast, and by December Richmond’s jubilant newspapers were reporting that redcoat battalions were landing in Canada to reinforce the permanent garrison in case the United States chose to fight Britain rather than return the two kidnapped commissioners.

Snow fell in the Blue Ridge Mountains, covering the grave of Truslow’s wife and cutting off the roads to the western part of Virginia that had defied Richmond by seceding from the state and joining the Union. Washington celebrated the defection, declaring it to be the beginning of the Confederacy’s dissolution. More troops marched down Pennsylvania Avenue and so out to the training camps in occupied northern Virginia where the Young Napoleon honed their skills. Each day new guns arrived on trains from the northern foundries to be parked in giant rows in fields close to the Capitol Building that gleamed white in the winter sun beneath the spidery scaffolding of its unfinished dome. One good hard push, the northern newspapers claimed, and the Confederacy would collapse like a dead, rotted tree.

The rebel capital felt no such confidence. The winter had brought nothing but bad news and worse weather. Snow had come early, the cold was bitter, and the Yankee noose seemed to be tightening. That prospect of imminent northern victory at least cheered Adam Faulconer who, two weeks before Christmas, rode his horse down from the city to the stone quay at Rockett’s Landing. The wind was chopping the river into short, hard, gray waves and whistling in the tarred rigging of the truce ship which sailed once a week from the Confederate capital. The ship would journey down the James River and under the high guns of the rebel fort on Drewry’s Bluff and so through the low, salt-marsh fringed meanders to the river’s confluence with the Appomattox and from there eastward along a broad, shallow fairway until, seventy miles from Richmond, it reached the Hampton Roads and turned north to the quays of Fort Monroe. The fort, though on Virginia soil, had been held by Union forces since before the war’s beginning and there, under its flag of truce, the boat discharged captured northerners who were being exchanged for rebel prisoners released by the North.

The cold winter wind was stinging Rockett’s Landing with snatches of thin rain and souring the quay with the smell of the foundries that belched their sulfurous coalsmoke along the riverbank. The rain and smoke turned everything greasy; the stones of the quay, the metal bollards, the lines berthing the ship, and even the thin, ill-fitting uniforms of the thirty men who waited beside the gangplank. The waiting men were northern officers who had been captured at Manassas and who, after nearly five months in captivity, were being exchanged for rebel officers captured in General McClellan’s campaign in what now styled itself the state of West Virginia. The prisoners’ faces were pale after their confinement in Castle Lightning, a factory building which stood on Cary Street next to the two big storage tanks that held the gas supply for the city’s street lighting. The clothes of the released prisoners hung loose, evidence of the weight they had lost during their confinement in the commandeered factory.

The men shivered as they waited for permission to board the truce boat. Most carried small sacks holding what few possessions they had managed to preserve during their imprisonment: a comb, a few coins, a Bible, some letters from home. They were cold, but the thought of their imminent release cheered them and they teased each other about their reception at Fort Monroe, inventing ever more lavish meals that would be served in the officers’ quarters. They dreamed of lobster and beefsteak, of turtle and oyster soup, of ice cream and apple butter, of venison steak with cranberries, of duck and orange sauce, of glasses of Madeira and flagons of wine, but above all they dreamed of coffee, of real, good, strong coffee.

One prisoner dreamed of no such things, but instead paced with Adam Faulconer up and down the quay. Major James Starbuck was a tall man with a face that had once been fleshy, but now looked pouchy. He was still a young man, but his demeanor, his perpetual frown, and his thinning hair made him look old far beyond his years. He had once boasted a very fine beard, though even that had lost its luster in Castle Lightning’s damp interior. James had been a rising Boston lawyer before the war and then a trusted aide to Irvin McDowell, the General who had lost the battle at Manassas, and now, on his way back north, James did not know what was to become of him.

Adam’s duty this day was to make certain that only those prisoners whose names had been agreed between the two armies were released, but that duty had been simply discharged by a roll call and head count, and once those duties were done he had sought James’s company and asked to talk with him privately. James, naturally enough, assumed Adam wanted to talk about his brother. “There is no chance, you think, that Nate could change sides?” James asked Adam wistfully.

Adam did not like to answer directly. In truth he was bitterly disappointed with his friend Nathaniel Starbuck, who, he believed, was embracing war like a lover. Nate, Adam believed, had abandoned God, and the best he could hope for was that God had not abandoned Nate Starbuck, but Adam did not want to state that harsh judgment, and so he tried to find some shard of redeeming goodness that would buoy James’s hopes for his younger brother. “He told me he attends prayer meeting regularly,” he answered lamely.

“That’s good! That’s very good!” James sounded unusually animated, then he frowned as he scratched his belly. Like every other prisoner held in Castle Lightning he had become lousy. At first he had found the infestation terribly shaming, but time had accustomed him to lice.

“But what will Nate do in the future?” Adam asked, then answered his own question by shaking his head. “I don’t know. If my father resumes command of the Legion, then I think Nate will be forced to look for other employment. My father, you understand, is not fond of Nate.”

James jumped in alarm as a sudden eruption of steam hissed loudly from a locomotive on the nearby York River Railroad. The machine jetted another huge gout of steam, then its enormous driving wheels screamed shrilly as they tried to find some traction on the wet and gleaming steel rails. An overseer bellowed orders at a pair of slaves who ran forward to scatter handfuls of sand under the spinning wheels. The locomotive at last found some purchase and jerked forward, clashing and banging a long train of boxcars. A great gust of choking, acrid smoke wafted over Adam and James. The locomotive’s fuel was resinous pinewood that left a thick tar on the rim of the potlike chimney.

“I had a particular reason for seeing you today,” Adam said clumsily when the locomotive’s noise had abated.

“To say farewell?” James suggested with an awkward misunderstanding. One of his shoe soles had come loose and flapped as he walked, making him stumble occasionally.

“I have to be frank,” Adam said nervously, then fell silent as the two men skirted a rusting pile of wet anchor chain. “The war,” Adam finally explained himself, “must be brought to a conclusion.”

“Oh, indeed,” James said fervently. “Indeed, yes. It is my prayerful hope.”

“I cannot describe to you,” Adam said with an equal fervor, “what tribulation the war is already bringing to the South. I dread to think of such iniquities being visited on the North.”

“Amen,” James said, though he had no real idea what Adam was talking about. In prison it had sometimes seemed as if the Confederacy were winning the war, an impression that had been heightened when the disconsolate prisoners from Ball’s Bluff had arrived.

“If the war continues,” Adam said, “then it will degrade us all. We shall be a mockery to Europe; we shall lose whatever moral authority we possess in the world.” He shook his head as if he had not managed to express himself properly. Beyond the quay the train was picking up speed, its boxcar wheels clattering over the rail joints and the locomotive’s smoke showing white against the gray clouds. A guard jumped onto the platform of the moving caboose and went inside out of the cold wind. “The war is wrong!” Adam finally blurted out. “It is against God’s purpose. I’ve been praying on this matter and I beg you to understand me.”

“I do understand you,” James said, but he could say no more because he did not want to offend his new friend by saying that the only way God’s purpose could be fulfilled was by the Confederacy’s defeat, and though Adam might be voicing sentiments very close to James’s heart, he was still wearing a uniform of rebel gray. It was all very confusing, James thought. Some of the northern prisoners in Castle Lightning had openly boasted of their adultery, they had been blasphemers and mockers, lovers of liquor and of gambling, Sabbath-breakers and libertines; men whom James had deemed to be of the crudest stamp and vilest character, yet they were soldiers who fought for the North while this pained and prayerful man Adam was a rebel.

Then, to James’s astonishment, Adam proved that supposition wrong. “What is necessary,” Adam said, “and I beg for your confidence in this matter, is for the North to gain a swift and crushing victory. Only thereby can this war be halted. Do you believe me?”

“I do, I do. Of course.” James felt overwhelmed by Adam’s sentiments. He stopped and looked down into the younger man’s face, oblivious to a bell that had begun ringing to summon the prisoner aboard the truce ship. “And I join my prayers to yours,” James said sanctimoniously.

“It will take more than prayers now,” Adam said, and he took from his pocket an India-paper Bible that he handed to James. “I am asking you to take this back to the North. Hidden behind the endpapers is a full list of our army’s units, their strength as of this week, and their present positions in Virginia.” Adam was being modest. Into the makeshift slipcase made by the Bible’s leather cover he had crammed every detail concerning the Confederate defenses in northern Virginia. He had listed the ration strengths of every brigade in the rebel army, and discussed the possibility of conscription being adopted by the Richmond government in the spring. His staff job had enabled Adam to reveal the weekly total of newly manufactured artillery reaching the army from the Richmond foundries, and to betray how many of the cannons facing the northern pickets from the rebel redoubts around Centreville and Manassas were fakes. He had sketched the Richmond defenses, warning that the ring of earth forts and ditches was still under construction and that every passing month would render the obstacles more formidable. He told the North of the new ironclad ship being secretly built in the Norfolk dockyard, and of the forts which protected the river approaches to Richmond. Adam had included all that he possibly could, describing the South’s strengths and weaknesses, but always urging the North that one strong attack would surely crumble secession like a house of cards.

Adam desperately hoped this one inclusive betrayal would be sufficient to end the war, yet he was sensible enough to know that whoever received this letter might well demand more information. Now, pacing the greasy quay in the cold rain, Adam told James precisely how a message could reach him from the North. Adam had worked hard on his scheme, attempting to foresee every liability that might reveal his identity to the southern authorities, and he knew that the greatest danger would be posed by northern messages coming south. “Which is why I’d rather you never contacted me,” he warned James, “but if you must, then I beg you never to use my name on the letters.”

“Of course.” James closed his cold hands over the Bible’s leather cover, guiltily aware of an unseemly happiness. It was right and proper that he should be glad of Adam’s espousal of the North’s cause, yet he felt it shameful that he should see in that espousal an advantage for himself, for he was guiltily aware that the letter concealed in the Bible could well assist his military career. Instead of returning North as the humbled aide of a failed general, he was suddenly the carrier of northern victory. His prayers had been answered a hundredfold.

“If necessary I can send you more information,” Adam went on, “but only to you. Not to anyone else. I cannot trust anyone else.” Both sides were riddled with informers who would betray anyone for the price of a bottle of whiskey, but Adam was certain he could trust this Boston lawyer who was as pious and godly a man as any in either army. “Will you give me your Christian word that you will keep my identity secret?”

“Of course,” James said, still dazed by this stroke of good fortune.

“I mean a secret from everyone,” Adam insisted. “If you reveal my identity to General McClellan I have no faith he will not tell someone else, and that someone else could be my ruin. Promise me this. No one but you and I must ever know.”

James nodded again. “I promise.” He turned as the ship’s bell rang again. His fellow prisoners were climbing the gangway, but still James made no move to join them. Instead he delved into an inside pocket of his faded, dirty jacket and brought out an oilcloth-covered packet. The oilcloth was loosely wrapped and James let it fall away to reveal a small, much-thumbed pocket Bible with a worn cover. “Will you give this to Nate? Ask him to read it?”

“With pleasure.” Adam took the thick Bible and watched as James wrapped his new Scriptures in the patch of oilcloth.

“And tell him,” James added in a heartfelt voice, “that if he returns north I will do my best to reconcile him to Father and Mother.”

“Of course,” Adam said, though he could not imagine Starbuck responding to his brother’s generosity.

“You want to stay here, mister?” a sailor called to James from the ship.

“Remember your promise,” Adam said. “Tell no one who gave you that letter.”

“You can trust me,” James assured Adam. “I’ll tell no one.”

“God bless you.” Adam felt a sudden great warmth for this good, clumsy man who was so obviously a brother in Christ. “And God bless the United States.”

“Amen to that,” James responded, then held out his hand. “I shall pray for you.”

“Thank you,” Adam said, and he shook James’s hand before walking the northerner to the waiting ship.

The gangplank was heaved inboard and the warps cast off. James stood at the rail, the new Bible clutched tight in his hands. As the last warp dropped away and the boat perceptibly moved into the river’s current, the freed prisoners cheered. The sidewheels began to turn, their great paddles churning the greasy water white. The motion of the paddles made the released prisoners cheer again, all but James, who stood silent and apart. A plume of dirty smoke sagged from the ship’s tall funnel to blow across the river.

Adam watched as the ship dropped past the navy yard, its progress helped by a cold, wind-fretted current. He gave James a last wave, then looked down at the pocket Bible to see that its margins were smothered in tightly written notes. It was the Bible of a man who wrestled with God’s will, the Bible of a good man. Adam closed and held the book tightly, as though he could take strength from the word of God, and then he turned and limped back toward his tethered horse. The wind gusted fresh and cold, but Adam felt an immense calm because he had done the right thing. He had chosen the course of peace, and by so doing he would bring nothing but blessings on his country; it would be one country again, North and South, united in God’s purpose.

Adam rode toward the city. Behind him the truce boat splashed and smoked its way around the bend and so headed south carrying its cargo of treachery and peace.

PART TWO

GEORGE WASHINGTON’S BIRTHDAY WAS FIXED AS THE day of Jefferson Davis’s formal inauguration as President of the Confederate States of America. He had been inaugurated once before, in Montgomery, Alabama, but that ceremony had only made Davis into the President of a provisional government. Now, hallowed by election and properly installed in the Confederacy’s new capital, he would be inaugurated a second time. The choice of Washington’s birthday as the date of this second ceremony was intended to invest the occasion with a symbolic dignity, but the auspicious day brought nothing but miserable and incessant rains which drove the huge crowd gathered in Richmond’s Capitol Square to shelter beneath a host of umbrellas so densely packed that it seemed as if the speech-makers orated to a spread of glistening black lumps. The drumming of the rain on carriage roofs and tightly stretched umbrella skins was so loud that no one except the platform party could hear any of the orations, prayers, or even the solemn presidential oath of office. After taking the oath President Davis invoked God’s help to the South’s just cause, his prayer punctuated by the sneezing and coughing of the dignitaries around him. Gray February clouds scudded low over the city, darkening everything except the new battle flags of the Confederate’s eastern army. The flag, which was hanging on staffs behind the platform and from every rooftop within sight of Capitol Square, was a fine red banner, slashed with a blue St. Andrew’s cross on which were sewn thirteen stars to represent the eleven rebellious states as well as Kentucky and Missouri, whose loyalty both sides claimed. Southerners who looked for auguries were pleased that thirteen states founded this new country, just as thirteen had founded a different country eighty-six years before, though some in the crowd perceived the number as unlucky, just as they perceived the drenching rain as an omen of ill fortune for the newly inaugurated president.

After the ceremony a procession of bedraggled notables hurried along Twelfth Street to attend a reception in the Brockenborough House on Clay Street which had been leased by the government to serve as the presidential mansion. The house was soon crowded with dripping people who draped wet coats on the twin statues of Comedy and Tragedy that graced the entrance hall, then edged their way from one room to another to appraise and criticize the new President’s taste in furniture and pictures. The President’s slaves had placed protective covers over the expensive carpets in the reception rooms, but the visitors wanted to inspect the patterns and pulled the cotton sheets aside, and soon the beautifully patterned carpets were trodden filthy with muddy boots, while the twin arrays of peacock feathers on the mantel of the ladies’ drawing room were ravaged by people wanting souvenirs of the day. The President himself stood frowning beside the white marble fireplace in the state dining room and assured everyone who offered him congratulations that he conceived of the day’s ceremony as a most solemn occasion and his presidency as a mighty heavy duty. Some army musicians were supposed to be entertaining the guests, but the crowd was so tightly pressed that the violinist did not even have room to draw his bow, and so the soldiers retired to the kitchen where the cooks regaled them with good Madeira wine and cold jellied chicken.

Colonel Washington Faulconer, resplendent in an elegant Confederate uniform that was made even more dashing by the black sling supporting his right arm, congratulated the President, then went through the small fuss of not being able to shake hands with his wounded right arm and offering his left instead.

President Davis finally managed a limp, awkward handshake, then muttered that he was honored by Faulconer’s presence on this solemn occasion which was ushering in these days of heavy duty.

“Heavy duties call for great men, Mr. President,” Washington Faulconer responded, “which means we are fortunate indeed in you.”

Davis’s thin mouth twitched to acknowledge the compliment. He had a piercing headache that made him seem even more remote and cold than usual. “I do regret,” he said stiffly, “that you did not feel able to accept the duty of commissioner.”

“Though I certainly saved myself some inconvenience thereby, Mr. President,” Faulconer responded lightly, before realizing that in war all men were supposed to welcome inconvenience, even if that inconvenience did mean being kidnapped by the U.S. Navy from the comfortable staterooms of a British mail ship. The two commissioners had now been released, thus saving the North from battling the British as well as the Confederacy, but their arrival in Europe had not fetched good news. France would not support the South unless the British made the first move, and the British would not intervene unless the South gave clear signs of being able to win the war without outside help, which all added up to meaningless nonsense. The President, reflecting on the diplomatic failure, had concluded that the wrong men had been chosen as commissioners. Slidell and Mason were raw-mannered and blunt men, accustomed to the homespun texture of American politics, but hardly slippery enough for the sly chanceries of a suspicious Europe. A more elegant commissioner, the President now believed, might have achieved a greater success.

And Washington Faulconer was certainly an impressive man. He had flaxen hair and a frank, honest face that almost glowed with handsomeness. He had broad shoulders, a trim waist, and one of the greatest fortunes in all Virginia; a fortune so large that he had raised a regiment with his own money and then equipped it to a standard equal to the best in either army, and rumor claimed that he could have repeated that generosity a dozen times over and still not have felt the pinch. He was, by any man’s standard, a fortunate and striking man, and President Davis once again felt irritation that Faulconer had turned down diplomatic office to pursue his dream of leading a brigade into battle. “I’m sorry to see you’re not recovered, Faulconer.” The President gestured at the black sling.

“Some small loss of dexterity, Mr. President, but not sufficient to prevent me from wielding a sword in my country’s defense,” Faulconer said modestly, though in truth his arm was entirely mended and he wore the sling only to give an impression of heroism. The black sling was especially inspiring to women, an effect that was made more convenient by the absence from Richmond of Faulconer’s wife, who lived an invalid’s nervous existence on the family’s country estate. “And I trust the sword will be so employed soon,” Faulconer added in a heavy hint that he wanted the President’s support for his appointment as a brigadier.

“I suspect we shall all soon be fully employed in our various duties,” the cadaverous President answered vaguely. He wished his wife would come and help him deal with these eager people who wanted more enthusiasm than he felt able to give. Varina was so good with small talk, while on these social occasions the President felt the words shrivel on his tongue. Was Lincoln similarly afflicted by office seekers? Davis wondered. Or did his fellow President have a greater ease of manner with importunate strangers? A familiar face suddenly appeared beside Faulconer, a man who smiled and nodded at the President, demanding recognition. Davis scrabbled for the man’s name which, thankfully, came in the very nick of time. “Mr. Delaney,” the President greeted the newcomer unenthusiastically. Belvedere Delaney was a lawyer and gossip whom Davis did not remember inviting to this reception, but who had typically come anyway.

“Mr. President.” Delaney inclined his head in recognition of Jefferson’s high office. The Richmond lawyer was a small, plump, smiling man whose bland exterior concealed a mind as sharp as a serpent’s tooth. “Allow me to extend my sincere felicitations on your inauguration.”

“A solemn occasion, Delaney, leading to heavy duties.”

“As the weather seems to intimate, Mr. President,” Delaney said, appearing to take an unholy glee in the day’s damp character. “And now, sir, if I might, I have come to request Colonel Faulconer’s attention. You cannot monopolize the company of our Confederate heroes all day, sir.”

Davis nodded his grateful assent for Delaney to take Faulconer away, though the release only permitted a plump congressman to heartily congratulate his fellow Mississippian on being inaugurated as the Confederacy’s first President.

“It is a heavy duty and solemn responsibility,” the President murmured.

The Mississippi Congressman gave Jefferson Davis’s shoulder a mighty slap. “Heavy duty be damned, Jeff,” the Congressman bellowed in his President’s ear. “Just send our boys north to cut the nuts clean off old Abe Lincoln.”

“I must leave strategy to the generals.” The President tried to move the Congressman on and accept the more limpid good wishes of an Episcopalian clergyman instead.

“Hell, Jeff, you know as much ’bout war as any of our fine soldier boys.” The Congressman hawked a tobacco-rich gob toward a spittoon. The stream of brown spittle missed, spattering instead on the rain-soaked hoop skirt of the clergyman’s wife. “Time we settled those chicken-shit Yankees once and forever,” the Congressman opined happily, then offered the new President a pull on his flask. “Finest rot-skull whiskey this side of the Tennessee River, Jeff. One slug will cure whatever ails you!”

“You’re demanding my company, Delaney?” Faulconer was irritated that the short, sly lawyer had taken him away from the President.

“It ain’t me who wants you, Faulconer, but Daniels, and when Daniels calls, a man does best to respond,” Delaney said.

“Daniels!” Faulconer said in astonishment, for John Daniels was one of the most powerful and reclusive men in Richmond. He was also famously ugly and foulmouthed, but important because it was Daniels who decided what causes and men the powerful Richmond Examiner would support. He lived alone with two savage dogs that it was his pleasure to make fight while he cackled from the vantage point of a high barber’s chair. He was no mean fighter himself; he had twice faced his enemies on the Richmond dueling ground in Bloody Run and had survived both fights with his malevolent reputation enhanced. He was also regarded by many southerners as a first-rate political theorist, and his pamphlet, “The Nigger Question,” was widely admired by all those who saw no need to modify the institution of slavery. Now, it seemed, the formidable John Daniels waited for Faulconer on the elevated back porch of the new Executive Mansion where, horsewhip in hand, he stared moodily at the rain.

He gave Faulconer a sideways glance, then flicked his whip toward the water dripping off the bare trees. “Is this weather an augury for our new President, Faulconer?” Daniels asked in his grating, hard voice, eschewing any more formal greeting.

“I hope not, Daniels. You’re well, I trust?”

“And what do you think of our new President, Faulconer?” Daniels ignored Faulconer’s courtesy.

“I think we are fortunate in such a man.”

“You sound like an editorial writer on the Sentinel. Fortunate! My God, Faulconer, the old U.S. Congress was full of mudsills like Davis. I’ve seen better men drop out the backside of a hog. He impresses you with his gravity, does he? Oh, he’s grave, I’ll grant you that, because there’s nothing alive inside him, nothing but notions of dignity and honor and statesmanship. It ain’t notions we need, Faulconer, but action. We need men to go and kill Yankees. We need to soak the North in Yankee blood, not make fine speeches from high platforms. If speeches won battles we’d be marching through Maine by now on our way to taking Canada. Did you know Joe Johnston was in Richmond two days ago?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Know what Johnston calls you, Faulconer?” Daniels asked in his unpleasant voice. It did not matter to Daniels that Faulconer was one of the South’s richest men, so rich that he could have bought the Examiner a dozen times over; Daniels knew his own power, and that power was the ability to mold public opinion in the South. That same power gave him the right to lounge in the President’s wicker rocking chair with his shabby boots up on the President’s back rail while Faulconer, in his gaudy colonel’s uniform, stood beside him like a supplicant. “He calls you the hero of Manassas,” Daniels said sourly. “What do you say to that?”

“I’m most grateful,” Faulconer said. In truth the soubriquet was a mistake, for General Johnston had never discovered that it was not Faulconer who had led the Legion against the North’s surprise flank attack at Manassas, but the unsung Thaddeus Bird, nor had Johnston ever learned that Bird had made that decision in deliberate disobedience of Faulconer’s orders. Instead, like so many other folk in the Confederacy, Johnston was convinced that in Washington Faulconer the South had a brilliant and fitting hero.

That belief had been carefully nurtured by Washington Faulconer himself. The Colonel had spent the months since Manassas lecturing on the battle in halls and theaters from Fredericksburg to Charleston. He told his audiences a tale of disaster averted and victory snatched from certain defeat, and his tale was given drama and color by a small group of wounded musicians who played patriotic songs and, at the more dramatic moments of the narration, played imitation bugle calls that gave the audience the impression that ghostly armies maneuvered just outside the lecture hall’s dark windows. Then, as the story reached its climax and the whole fate of the Confederacy hung in history’s balance, Faulconer would pause and a snare drum would rattle a suggestion of musketry and a bass drum crash the echoes of distant cannon fire before Faulconer told of the heroism that had saved the day. Then the applause would ring out to drown the drummers’ simulated gunfire. Southern heroism had defeated dull-witted Yankee might, and Faulconer would smile modestly as the cheers surrounded him.

Not that Faulconer had ever actually claimed to be the hero of Manassas, but his account of the fight did not specifically deny the accolade. If asked what he had done personally, Faulconer would refuse to answer, claiming that modesty was becoming to a warrior, but then he would touch his right arm in its black sling and he would see the men straighten their backs with respect and the women look at him with a melting regard. He had become accustomed to the adulation; indeed, he had been making the speech for so long now that he had come to believe in his own heroism, and that belief made his memory of the Legion’s rejection of him on the night of Manassas hard to bear.

“Were you a hero?” Daniels now asked Faulconer directly.

“Every man at Manassas was a hero,” Faulconer replied sententiously.

Daniels cackled at Faulconer’s answer. “He should have been a lawyer like you, eh, Delaney? He knows how to make words mean nothing!”

Belvedere Delaney had been cleaning his fingernails, but now offered the editor a swift, humorless smile. Delaney was a fastidious, witty, clever man whom Faulconer did not wholly trust. The lawyer was presently in Confederate uniform, though quite what his martial duties entailed, Faulconer could not guess. It was also rumored that Delaney was the owner of Mrs. Richardson’s famous brothel on Marshall Street and of the even more exclusive house of assignation on Franklin Street. If true, then the collected gossip of the two brothels doubtless provided Delaney with damaging knowledge about a good number of the Confederacy’s leaders, and doubtless the sly lawyer passed all that pillow talk on to the scowling, diseased, twisted-looking Daniels.

“We need heroes, Faulconer,” Daniels now said. He stared sourly down at the flooded paths and muddy vegetable beds of the soaking garden. A wisp of smoke twisted up from the presidential smokehouse where a dozen Virginia hams were being cured. “You heard about Henry and Donelson?”

“Indeed,” Faulconer said. In Tennessee Forts Donelson and Henry had been captured and now it looked as if Nashville must fall, while in the east the Yankee navy had again struck from the sea; this time to capture Roanoke Island in North Carolina.

“And what would you say, Faulconer”—Daniels shot an unfriendly look at the handsome Virginian—“if I were to tell you that Johnston is about to abandon Centreville and Manassas?”

“He can’t be!” Faulconer was genuinely aghast at the news. Too many acres of northern Virginia were already under enemy occupation, and yielding more of the state’s sacred turf without a fight appalled Faulconer.

“But he is.” Daniels paused to light a long black cheroot. He spat the cheroot’s tip over the railing, then blew smoke into the rain. “He’s decided to pull back behind the Rappahannock. He claims we can defend ourselves better there than in Centreville. No one’s announced the decision yet, it’s supposed to be a secret, which means Johnston knows, Davis knows, you and I know, and half the goddamn Yankees probably know too. And can you guess what Davis proposes doing about it, Faulconer?”

“I trust he’ll fight the decision,” Faulconer said.

“Fight?” Daniels mocked the word. “Jeff Davis doesn’t know the meaning of the word. He just listens to Granny Lee. Caution! Caution! Caution! Instead of fighting, Faulconer, Davis proposes that a week tomorrow we should all have a day of prayer and fasting. Can you believe that? We are to starve ourselves so that Almighty God will take note of our plight. Well, Jeff Davis can tighten his belt, but I’ll be damned if I shall. I shall give a feast that day. You’ll join me, Delaney?”

“With enormous pleasure, John,” Delaney said, then glanced around as the door at the end of the verandah opened. A small boy, maybe four or five years old and carrying a hoop, appeared on the porch. The boy smiled at the strangers.

“Nurse says I can play here,” the boy, whom Washington Faulconer guessed was the President’s oldest son, explained himself.

Daniels shot a venomous look at the child. “You want a whipping, boy? If not, then get the hell out of here, now!”

The boy fled in tears as the editor turned back to Faulconer. “Not only are we withdrawing from Centreville, Faulconer, but as there isn’t sufficient time to remove the army’s supplies from the railhead at Manassas, we are torching them! Can you credit it? We spend months stocking the army with food and ammunition and at the very first breath of spring we decide to burn every damn shred of material and then scuttle like frightened women behind the nearest river. What we need, Faulconer, are generals with balls. Generals with flair. Generals not afraid to fight. Read this.” He took from his vest pocket a folded sheet of paper that he tossed toward Faulconer. The Colonel needed to grovel on the porch’s rush matting to retrieve the folded sheet, which proved to be the galley proof of a proposed editorial for the Richmond Examiner.

The editorial was pure balm to Faulconer’s soul. It declared that the time had come for bold action. The spring would surely bring an enemy onslaught of unparalleled severity and the Confederacy would only survive if it met that onslaught with bravery and imagination. The South would never prevail by timidity, and certainly not by digging trenches such as those with which General Robert Lee seemed intent upon surrounding Richmond. The Confederacy, the editorial proclaimed, would be established by men of daring and vision, not by the efforts of drainage engineers. The writer grudgingly allowed that the Confederacy’s present leaders were well-meaning men, but they were hidebound in their ideas and the time had surely come to appoint new officers to high position. One such man was Colonel Washington Faulconer, who had been unemployed since Manassas. Let such a man loose on the North, the article concluded, and the war would be over by summer. Faulconer read the editorial a second time and pondered whether he should go to Shaffers this very afternoon and order the extra braid for his sleeves and the gilded wreaths that would surround the stars on his collar wings. Brigadier General Faulconer! The rank, he decided, sat well on him.

Daniels took the editorial back. “The question is, Faulconer, do we publish this?”

“Your decision, Daniels, not mine,” Faulconer said modestly, hiding his elation as he shielded a cigar from the wind and struck a light. He wondered if publication would offend too many senior officers, then realized he dared not express such a timid reservation to Daniels or else the editorial would be changed to recommend that some other man be given a brigade.

“But are you our man?” Daniels growled.

“If you mean, would I attack and attack and go on attacking, yes. If you mean, would I abandon Manassas? No. If you mean, would I employ good men to dig drainage ditches around Richmond? Never!”

Daniels was silent after Faulconer’s ringing declaration. Indeed he was silent for so long that Washington Faulconer began to feel rather foolish, but then the small, black-bearded editor spoke again. “Do you know the size of McClellan’s army?” He asked the question without turning to look at Faulconer.

“Not precisely, no.”

“We know, but we don’t print the figure in the newspaper because if we did we might just cause people to despair.” Daniels twitched the long whip as his voice rumbled just a little louder than the seething and incessant rain. “The Young Napoleon, Faulconer, has over a hundred and fifty thousand men. He has fifteen thousand horses, and more than two hundred and fifty guns. Big guns, Faulconer, slaughtering guns, the finest guns that the northern foundries can pour, and they’re lined up wheel to heavy wheel to grind our poor southern boys into bloody ruin. And how many poor southern boys do we have? Seventy thousand? Eighty? And when do their enlistments run out? June? July?” Most of the southern army had volunteered for just one year’s service, and when that year was over the survivors expected to go home. “We’ll have to conscript men, Faulconer,” Daniels went on, “unless we beat this so-called genius McClellan in the spring.”

“The nation will never stand for conscription,” Faulconer said sternly.

“The nation, Colonel, will damn well stand for whatever brings us victory,” Daniels said harshly, “but will you lead those conscripted men, Faulconer? That’s the proper question now. Are you my man? Should the Examiner support you? After all, you’re not the most experienced officer, are you now?”

“I can bring new ideas,” Faulconer suggested modestly. “New blood.”

“But a new and inexperienced brigadier will need a good and experienced second-in-command. Ain’t that right, Colonel?” Daniels looked malevolently up at Faulconer as he spoke.

Faulconer smiled happily. “I should expect my son Adam to serve with me. He’s on Johnston’s staff now, so he has the experience, and there isn’t a more capable or honest man in Virginia.” Faulconer’s sudden sincerity and warmth were palpable. He was desperately fond of his son, not just with a father’s love, but also out of a gratified pride in Adam’s undoubted virtues. Indeed, it sometimes seemed to Faulconer that Adam was his one undoubted success, the achievement that justified the rest of his life. Now he turned smilingly to the lawyer. “You can vouch for Adam’s character, can’t you, Delaney?”

But Belvedere Delaney did not respond. He just stared down into the sopping garden.

Daniels hissed in a dubious breath, then shook his ugly head warningly. “Don’t like it, Faulconer. Don’t like it one goddamn little bit. Stinks of favoritism to me. Of nepotism! Is that the word, Delaney?”

“Nepotism is the very word, Daniels,” Delaney confirmed, not looking at Faulconer, whose face was like that of a small boy struck brutally hard.

“The Examiner could never stand for nepotism, Faulconer,” Daniels said in his grating voice, then he threw a curt gesture toward Delaney, who obediently opened the verandah’s central door to admit onto the porch a gaunt and ragged creature dressed in a wet, threadbare uniform that made the newcomer shiver in the day’s raw cold. The man was in his early middle age and looked as though life had served him ill. He had a coarse black beard streaked with gray, sunken eyes, and a tic in his scarred cheek. He was evidently suffering from a cold for he cuffed his dripping nose, then wiped his sleeve on his ragged beard that was crusted with flakes of dried tobacco juice. “Johnny!” this unprepossessing creature greeted Daniels familiarly.

“Faulconer?” Daniels looked up at the Colonel. “This is Major Griffin Swynyard.”

Swynyard gave Faulconer a brisk nod, then held out his left hand, which, Faulconer saw, was missing its three middle fingers. The two men made an awkward handshake. The spasm in Swynyard’s right cheek gave his face a curiously indignant look.

“Swynyard,” Daniels said to Faulconer, “served in the old U.S. Army. He graduated from West Point, when?”

“Class of twenty-nine, Johnny.” Swynyard clicked his heels together.

“Then served in the Mexican and Seminole wars. Is that right?”

“Took more scalps than any white man alive, Colonel,” Swynyard said, grinning at Faulconer and revealing a mouthful of rotted yellow teeth. “I took thirty-eight headpieces in one day alone!” Swynyard boasted. “All with my own hands, Colonel. Squaws, papooses, braves! I had blood to my elbows! Spattered to the armpits! Have you ever had the pleasure of taking a scalp, Colonel?” Swynyard asked with a fierce intensity.

“No,” Faulconer managed to say. “No, I haven’t.” He was recovering from Daniels’s refusal to countenance Adam’s appointment, and realizing that promotion would carry a price.

“There’s a knack to it,” Swynyard went on. “Like any other skill, there’s a knack! Young soldiers always try to cut them off and, of course, it don’t work. They end with something which looks like a dead mouse.” Swynyard believed this was funny, for he opened his gap-toothed mouth to breathe a sibilant laugh at Faulconer. “Cutting don’t work for a scalp, Colonel. No, you have to peel a scalp off, peel it like the skin of an orange!” He spoke lovingly, demonstrating the action with his wounded, clawlike hand. “If you’re ever in the Tidewater I’ll show you my collection. I’ve three cabin trunks full of prime scalps, all cured and tanned proper.” Swynyard evidently felt he had made a good impression on Faulconer for he smiled ingratiatingly while the tic in his cheek trembled fast. “Maybe you’d like to see a scalp now, Colonel?” Swynyard suddenly asked, pawing at the button of his top pocket as he spoke. “I always keep one about my person. As a good-luck charm, you understand? This one’s from a Seminole squaw. Noisy little bitch she was, too. Savages can squeal, I tell you, how they can squeal!”

“No, thank you.” Faulconer managed to prevent the trophy from being produced. “So you’re a Virginia man, Major?” he asked, changing the subject and disguising his distaste for the wretched-looking Swynyard. “From the Tidewater, you say?”

“From the Swynyards of Charles City Court House,” Swynyard said with evident pride. “The name was famous once! Ain’t that so, Johnny?”

“Swynyard and Sons,” the editor said, staring into the rain, “slave traders to the Virginia gentry.”

“But my daddy gambled the business away, Colonel,” Swynyard confided. “There was a time when the name Swynyard meant the selfsame thing as nigger trading, but Daddy lost the business with the sin of gambling. We’ve been poor men ever since!” He said it proudly, but the boast suggested to Washington Faulconer exactly what proposition was being made to him.

The editor drew on his cigar. “Swynyard’s a cousin of mine, Faulconer. He’s my kin.”

“And he has applied to you for employment?” Faulconer guessed shrewdly.

“Not as a newspaperman!” Major Swynyard intervened. “I don’t have skill with words, Colonel. I leave that to the clever fellows like cousin Johnny here. No, I’m a soldier through and through. I was weaned on the gun’s muzzle, you might say. I’m a fighter, Colonel, and I’ve got three cabin trunks crammed full of heathen topknots to prove it.”

“But you are presently unemployed?” Daniels prompted his cousin.

“I am indeed seeking the best place for my fighting talent,” Swynyard confirmed to Faulconer.

There was a pause. Daniels took the editorial from his pocket and pretended to cast a critical eye over its paragraphs. Faulconer took the hint. “If I should find employment for myself, Major,” he told Swynyard hastily, “I should count it as a great honor and a privilege if you would consider being my right-hand man?”

“Your second-in-command, don’t you mean?” John Daniels interjected from the President’s rocking chair.

“My second-in-command indeed,” Faulconer confirmed hurriedly.

Swynyard clicked his heels. “I’ll not disappoint you, Colonel. I might lack the genteel graces, by God, but I don’t lack fierceness! I ain’t a soft man, my God, no. I believe in driving soldiers like you drive niggers! Hard and fast! Bloody and brutal, no other way, ain’t that the truth, Johnny?”

“The entire truth, Griffin.” Daniels folded the editorial, but did not yet return it to his vest pocket. “Unfortunately, Faulconer,” Daniels went on, “my cousin impoverished himself in the service of his country. His old country, I mean, our new enemies. Which also means he has come to our new country with a passel of debts. Ain’t that so, Griffin?”

“I’m down on my luck, Colonel,” Swynyard confessed gruffly. A tear appeared at one eye and the tic in his cheek quivered. “Gave my all to the old army. Gave my fingers too! But I was left with nothing, Colonel, nothing. But I don’t ask much, just a chance to serve and fight, and a grave of good Confederate soil when my honest labors are done.”

“But you are also asking for your debts to be settled,” John Daniels said pointedly, “especially that portion of the debt which is owed to me.”

“I shall take great pleasure in establishing your credit,” Faulconer said, wondering just how much pain that pleasure would cost him.

“You’re a gentleman, Colonel,” Swynyard said, “a Christian and a gentleman. It’s plain to see, Colonel, so it is. Moved, I am. Touched deep, sir, very deep.” And Swynyard cuffed the tear from his eye, then straightened his back as a sign of respect to his rescuer. “I’ll not disappoint you. I ain’t a disappointer, Colonel. Disappointing ain’t in the Swynyard nature.”

Faulconer doubted the truth of that assertion, yet he guessed his best chance of being named a general was with Daniels’s help, and if Daniels’s price was Swynyard, then so be it. “So we’re agreed, Major,” Faulconer said, and held out his left hand.

“Agreed, sir, agreed.” Swynyard shook Faulconer’s offered hand. “You move up a rank, sir, and so do I.” He smiled his decayed smile.

“Splendid!” Daniels said loudly, then delicately and pointedly inserted the folded editorial back into his vest pocket. “Now if you two gentlemen would like to improve upon each other’s acquaintance, Mr. Delaney and I have business to discuss.”

Thus dismissed, Faulconer and Swynyard went to join the throng which still crowded the President’s house, leaving Daniels to flick his whip out into the rain. “Are you sure Faulconer’s our man?”

“You heard Johnston,” Delaney said happily. “Faulconer was the hero of Manassas!”

Daniels scowled. “I heard a rumor that Faulconer was caught with his pants around his ankles? That he wasn’t even with the Legion when it fought?”

“Mere jealous tales, my dear Daniels, mere jealous tales.” Delaney, quite at his ease with the powerful editor, drew on a cigar. His stock of precious French cigarettes was exhausted now, and that lack was perhaps the most pressing reason why he wanted this war to end quickly. To which end Delaney, like Adam Faulconer, secretly supported the North and worked for its victory by causing mischief in the South’s capital, and today’s achievement, he thought, was a very fine piece of mischief indeed. He had just persuaded the South’s most important newspaperman to throw his paper’s massive influence behind one of the most foppish and inefficient of the Confederacy’s soldiers. Faulconer, in Delaney’s caustic view, had never grown up properly, and without his riches he would be nothing but an empty-headed fool. “He’s our man, John, I’m sure of it.”

“So why has he been unemployed since Manassas?” Daniels asked.

“The wound in his arm took a long time healing,” Delaney said vaguely. The truth, he suspected, was that Faulconer’s inordinate pride would not allow him to serve under the foulmouthed, lowborn Nathan Evans, but Daniels did not need to know that.

“And didn’t he free his niggers?” Daniels asked threateningly.

“He did, John, but there were extenuating reasons.”

“The only extenuating reason for freeing a nigger is because the bastard’s dead,” Daniels declared.

“I believe Faulconer freed his slaves to fulfill his father’s dying wish,” Delaney lied. The truth was that Faulconer had manumitted his people because of a northern woman, an ardent abolitionist, whose good looks had momentarily enthralled the Virginia landowner.

“Well, at least he’s taken Swynyard off my hands,” Daniels said grudgingly, then paused as the sound of cheering came from inside the house. Someone was evidently making a speech and the crowd punctuated the oration with laughter and applause. Daniels glowered into the rain that still fell heavily. “We don’t need words, Delaney, we need a goddamn miracle.”

The Confederacy needed a miracle because the Young Napoleon was at last ready, and his army outnumbered the southern troops in Virginia by two to one, and spring was coming, which meant the roads would be fit once more for the passage of guns, and the North was promising its people that Richmond would be captured and the rebellion ended. Virginia’s fields would be dunged by Virginia’s dead and the only way the South could be saved from an ignominious and crushing defeat was by a miracle. Instead of which, Delaney reflected, he had given it Faulconer. It was enough, he decided, to make a sick cat laugh.

Because the South was doomed.

Just after dawn the cavalry came galloping back across the fields, their hooves splashing bright silver gouts of water from the flooded grass. “Yankees are at Centreville! Hurry it up!” The horsemen spurred past the earthen wall that was notched with gun embrasures, only instead of cannon in the embrasures there was nothing but Quaker guns. Quaker guns were tree trunks painted black and then propped against the firing steps to give the appearance of cannon muzzles.

The Faulconer Legion would be the last infantry regiment to leave the Manassas positions, and the last, presumably, to march into the new fortifications that were being dug behind the Rappahannock River. The retreat meant ceding even more Virginia territory to the northerners, and for days now the roads south through Manassas had been crowded with refugees heading for Richmond.

The only defenses left behind at Manassas and Centreville would be the Quaker guns, the same fake weapons that had brooded across the landscape all winter to keep the Yankee patrols far from Johnston’s army. That army had been wondrously supplied with food that had been painstakingly hauled to the Manassas depot by trains all winter long, but now there was no time to evacuate the depot and so the precious supplies were being burned. The March sky was already black with smoke and rich with the smell of roasting salt beef as Starbuck’s company torched the last rows of boxcars left in the rail junction. The cars had already been primed with heaps of tinder, pitch, and gunpowder, and as the burning torches were thrust into the incendiary piles, the fire crackled and bellowed fiercely upward. Uniforms, bridles, cartridges, horse collars, and tents went up in smoke, then the boxcars themselves caught fire and the flames whipped in the wind and spewed their black smoke skyward. A barn full of hay was torched, then a brick warehouse of flour, salt pork, and dry crackers. Rats fled from the burning storehouses and were hunted down by the Legion’s excited dogs. Each company had adopted at least a half-dozen mongrel mutts that were lovingly cared for by the soldiers. Now the dogs seized the rats by their necks and shook them dead, scattering blood. Their owners cheered them on.

The boxcars would burn till there was nothing left but a pair of blackened wheels surrounded by embers and ash. Sergeant Truslow had a work party pulling up rails and stacking them on burning piles of wooden ties soaked in pitch. The burning stacks generated such a fierce heat that the steel rails were being bent into uselessness. All about the regiment were the pyres of other fires as the rearguard destroyed two months’ worth of food and a winter’s worth of stored equipment.

“Let’s be moving, Nate!” Major Bird strode across the scorched depot, jumping in alarm as a box of ammunition caught fire in one of the boxcars. The cartridges snapped like firecrackers, forcing an incandescent blaze in one corner of the burning wagon. “Southward!” Bird cried dramatically, pointing in that direction. “You hear the news, Nate?”

“News, sir?”

“Our behemoth was met by their leviathan. Science matched wits with science, and I gather that they fought each other to a standstill. Pity.” Bird suddenly checked and frowned. “A real pity.”

“The Yankees have a metal ship too, sir?” Starbuck asked.

“It arrived the day after the Virginia’s victory, Nate. Our sudden naval superiority is all for naught. Sergeant! Leave those rails, time to be on our way unless you wish to be a guest of the Yankees tonight!”

“We lost our ship?” Starbuck asked in disbelief.

“The newspaper reports that it floats still, but so does their monstrous metal ship. Our queen is now matched by their queen, and so we have stalemate. Hurry up, Lieutenant!” This injunction was to Moxey, who was using a blunt knife to cut through the hemp rope of a well bucket.

Starbuck’s spirits sank. It was bad enough that the army was yielding Manassas Junction to the Yankees, but everyone had been cheered by the sudden news that a southern secret weapon, an iron-sided ship impervious to cannon fire, had sailed into the Hampton Roads and decimated the northern blockading squadron of wooden warships. The U.S. Navy’s ships had turned and fled, some going aground, others sinking, and the rest simply making what desperate speed they could to escape the clanking, smoke-dark, plodding, but vengeful Virginia, the ironclad fashioned from the hulk of an abandoned U.S. Navy ship, the Merrimack. The victory had seemed compensation for Manassas’s abandonment and promised to destroy the strangulation of the U.S. Navy’s blockade, but now it seemed that the North had a similar beast which had succeeded in fighting the CSS Virginia to a standstill.

“Never mind, Nate. We’ll just have to settle the war on land,” Bird said, then clapped his hands to encourage the last of the men to leave the burning railyard and form up on the road leading south.

“But how in God’s name did they know we had an iron ship?” Starbuck asked.

“Because they have spies, of course. Probably hundreds of them. You think everyone south of Washington suddenly changed their patriotism overnight?” Bird asked. “Of course they didn’t. And some folks undoubtedly believe that any accommodation with the Yankees is better than this misery.” He gestured toward another group of pitiful refugees and was suddenly assailed by an image of his own dear wife being forced from her home by the invading Yankees. That was hardly a likely fate, for Faulconer County lay deep in the heart of Virginia, yet Bird still touched the pocket in which Priscilla’s portrait was carefully wrapped against the rain and damp. He tried to imagine their small house with its untidy piles of music and its scatter of violins and flutes being burned by jeering Yankee troops.

“Are you all right?” Starbuck had seen the sudden grimace on Bird’s face.

“Enemy horse! Look lively!” Sergeant Truslow shouted at his company, but he also intended the sudden bellow to startle Major Bird out of his reverie. “Yankees, sir.” Truslow pointed north to where a group of horsemen was silhouetted against the pale trunks of a far wood.

“March on!” Bird shouted toward the head of the Legion’s column, then he turned back to Starbuck. “I was thinking of Priscilla.”

“How is she?” Starbuck asked.

“She says she’s very well, but she wouldn’t say anything else, would she? The dear girl isn’t one to worry me with complaints.” Bird had married a girl half his age and, in the manner of a confirmed bachelor falling at last to the enemy, regarded his new bride with an adoration that verged on worship. “She says she’s planted onions. Is it too early to plant onions? Or maybe she means she planted them last year? I don’t know, but I am so impressed that the dear thing knows about onions. I don’t. Lord knows when I’ll see her again.” He sniffed, then turned to look at the distant horsemen who seemed very wary of the lavish display of wooden guns that threatened their approach. “Onward, Nate, or backward rather. Let us yield this field of ashes to the enemy.”

The Legion marched past the burning storehouses, then through the small town. A few of the houses were empty, but most of the inhabitants were staying behind. “Hide your flag, man!” Bird called to a carpenter who was defiantly flying the new Confederate battle flag above his shop. “Fold it away! Hide it! We’ll be back!”

“Is anyone behind you, Colonel?” The carpenter inadvertently gave Bird a promotion.

“Just some cavalry. After that it’s all Yankees!”

“Give them bastards a good whipping, Colonel!” the carpenter said as he reached for his flag.

“We’ll do our best. Good luck to you!”

The Legion left the small town behind and marched stolidly along a wet and muddy road that had been torn apart by the passage of refugee wagons. The road led to Fredericksburg, where the Legion would cross the river, then destroy the bridge before joining the bulk of the southern army. Most of that army was retreating on a road farther west which went direct to Culpeper Court House where General Johnston had his new headquarters. Johnston was assuming that the Yankees would swing wide in an attempt to turn the river line and that a great battle would therefore need to be fought in Culpeper County; it would be a battle, Bird observed to Starbuck, which would make the fight at Manassas look like a skirmish.

The Legion’s retreat took them through that old battlefield. To their right was the long hill down which they had fled in disorder after stalling the Yankees’ surprise attack, and to their left was the steeper hill where Stonewall Jackson had finally held, turned, and repelled the northern army. That battle was eight months in the past, yet still the steep hill showed the scars of artillery strikes. Close by the road was a stone house where Starbuck had watched the surgeons slash and saw at wounded flesh, and in the yard of the house was a shallow grave trench that had been washed thin by the winter’s rain so that the knobbly-headed stumps of bones showed white above the red soil. There was a well in the yard where Starbuck remembered slaking his thirst during the day’s terrible, powder-exacerbated heat. A group of stragglers, sullen and defiant, now squatted beside the well.

The stragglers, all of them from regiments that were marching ahead of the Legion, annoyed Truslow. “They’re supposed to be men, ain’t they? Not women.” The Legion passed more and more such laggards. A few were sick and could not help themselves, but most were simply tired or suffering from blistered feet. Truslow snarled at them, but even Truslow’s savage scorn could not persuade the stragglers to ignore the blood filling their boots and to keep on marching. Soon some of the men from the Legion’s leading companies began dropping back. “It ain’t right,” Truslow complained to Starbuck. “Go on like this and we’ll lose half the army.” He saw three men from the Legion’s A Company and he stormed over to them, bellowing at the chickenhearted bastards to keep walking. The three men ignored him, so Truslow punched the tallest of the three, dropping him to the ground. “Get up, you son of a bitch!” Truslow shouted. The man shook his head, then squirmed in the mud as Truslow kicked him in the guts. “Get up, you slime-bellied bastard! Up!”

“I can’t!”

“Stop it!” Starbuck called the order to Truslow, who turned in astonishment at receiving a direct reprimand from his officer.

“I ain’t letting these sons of bitches lose the war because they’re gutless weaklings,” Truslow protested.

“I don’t intend to allow that to happen either,” Starbuck said. He walked over to the man from A Company, watched by a score of other stragglers who wanted to see just how the tall, dark-haired officer could succeed where the squat, fierce sergeant had failed.

Truslow spat into the mud as Starbuck approached. “You plan on talking reason to the sumbitch?”

“Yes,” Starbuck said, “I do.” He stood above the fallen man, watched by the whole of K Company, who had paused to enjoy the confrontation. “What’s your name?” Starbuck asked the straggler.

“Ives,” the man said warily.

“And you can’t keep up, Ives?”

“Reckon I can’t.”

“He always was a useless sumbitch,” Truslow said. “Just like his pa. I tell you, if the Ives family were mules you’d have shot the whole damn lot at birth.”

“All right, Sergeant!” Starbuck said reprovingly, then smiled down at the wet, miserable Ives. “You know who’s following us?” he asked.

“Some of our cavalry,” Ives said.

“And behind the cavalry?” Starbuck asked gently.

“Yankees.”

“Just hit the no-good bastard,” Truslow growled.

“You leave me alone!” Ives shouted at the Sergeant. Ives had been emboldened by Starbuck’s gentle and considerate manner and by the support of the other stragglers, who murmured their resentment of Truslow’s brutality and their appreciation of Starbuck’s reasonable tone.

“And do you know what the Yankees will do to you?” Starbuck asked Ives.

“Reckon it can’t be worse than this, Captain,” Ives said.

Starbuck nodded. “So you can’t go on?”

“Reckon I can’t.”

The other stragglers murmured their agreement. They were all too tired, too pained, too wet, too desperate, and too unhappy even to think of continuing the march. All they wanted was to collapse beside the road, and beyond that thought of immediate rest they had no cares or fears.

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