LIEUTENANT COLONEL SWYNYARD Stood at the river's edge and thanked his God .that he had been spared to witness this moment. A small breeze rippled the water to splinter up a myriad of bright sparkles reflected from a sun that blazed in a cloudless summer sky. At least three bands were playing and in this place, on this day, there was only one tune that they would ever play, though the Colonel thought it was a pity that they did not play in unison, but instead competed merrily as they celebrated the momentous event. Swynyard's maimed left hand beat against his sword scabbard in time to the closest band, then, almost unaware of it, he began to sing. "Dear mother," the Colonel sang softly, "burst the tyrant's chain. Maryland! Virginia should not call in vain, Maryland!" His voice became louder as the emotion of the hour embraced him. "She meets her sister on the plain; Sic semper 'tis the proud refrain that baffles minions back amain, Maryland, my Maryland."

A burst of clapping sounded from the nearest company of the Faulconer Legion and Swynyard, oblivious that he had raised his voice loud enough to be heard, blushed as he turned and acknowledged the ironic applause. There had been a time, and not long before either, when these men cursed the very sight of Griffin Swynyard, but they had been won over by Christ's grace, or rather by the workings of that grace inside Swynyard, and now the Colonel knew that the men liked him and for that blessing he could have wept this day, except that he was already weeping for sheer joy at this moment.

For the Southern army of Robert Lee, which had fought again and again against the northern invaders of its country, was crossing the Potomac.

They were going north.

The Confederacy was taking the war into the United States of America. For a year now the Yankees had marched on Southern soil, had stolen from Southern farms, and boasted of sacking the Southern capital, but now the invaded had become the invaders and a great dark line of men was crossing the ford beneath the battle flags of the South. "I hear the distant thunder-hum," Swynyard sang and this time the Legion sang with him, their voices swelling beside the river in wondrous harmony. "Maryland! The old line's bugle, fife arid drum, Maryland! She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb; Huzzah! She spurns the northern scum! She breathes, she bums, she'll come, she'll come! Maryland, my Maryland!"

"They're in good voice, Swynyard, good voice!" The speaker was Colonel Ned Maitland, the Legion's new commander, who spurred his horse to Swynyard's side. Swynyard was on foot because his horse, the one luxury he possessed, was being rested. A man like Maitland might need three saddle horses and four pack-mules loaded with belongings to ensure his comfort on a campaign, but Swynyard had forsworn all such fripperies. He owned a horse because a brigade commander could not do his job without one, and he had inherited a tent and a servant from Thaddeus Bird, but the tent belonged to the army and the servant, a half-witted soldier called Hiram Ketley, would return to Bird's service when Bird was recovered from the wound he had taken at Cedar Mountain.

"What will you do, Maitland, when Bird comes back?" Swynyard asked, needling the self-satisfied Maitland, who rode to war with two tents, four slaves, a hip bath, and a canteen of silver cutlery with which to eat his scumbled vegetables.

"I hear he won't return," Maitland said.

"I hear he will. His wife wrote to Starbuck saying he was mending well, and when he does come back I'll have to give him the Legion. He's their proper commander."

Maitland waved the problem away. "There'll be plenty of other vacancies, Swynyard."

"You think I might be killed, eh? You reckon you'll be brigade commander? You look the part, Maitland, I'll say that for you. What did that uniform cost?"

"Plenty enough." Maitland was a placid man who rarely rose to Swynyard's baiting, perhaps because he knew that his connections in Richmond would ensure his smooth rise up the army's senior ranks. The trick of that rise, Maitland reckoned, was to have just enough battle experience beneath his belt to make it plausible; just enough and no more. He took a pair of field glasses from a saddlebag and trained them on the distant Maryland shore while Swynyard watched a squadron of Stuart's cavalrymen spur into the river. The troopers reached down with their hats to scoop up water that they flung at each other like children at play. The army was in a holiday mood.

"I wish the Legion still had a band," Swynyard said as the nearest musicians launched into "My Maryland" for the umpteenth time. "We did have one," he said, "but it got lost. At least, the instruments did."

"A lot of things seem to get lost from the Legion," Maitland said airily.

"What on earth does that mean?" Swynyard asked, trying to disguise his irritation at Maitland's condescension.

Swynyard was not certain that Maitland intended to give the impression he did, but that impression was of a superior man who observed and disapproved of all he encountered.

"Officers, mainly," Maitland said. "Most of the officers seem to have come up from the ranks in the last few weeks."

"We were fighting," Swynyard said, "which meant officers got killed. Didn't you hear about it in Richmond?"

"A rumor of it reached us," Maitland said mildly, cleaning the lenses of his field glasses. "Even so, Swynyard, I reckon I need some better men."

"Fellows who know what knife and fork to use on their hardtack?" Swynyard guessed.

Maitland let the sarcasm sail past him. "I mean more confident fellows. Confidence is a great morale booster. Like young Moxey. Pity he's gone." Captain Moxey had gone to Richmond to serve as Washington Faulconer's aide.

"Moxey was useless," Swynyard said. "If I was going into battle, Maitland, I wouldn't want weak reeds like young Moxey, but men like Waggoner and Truslow."

"But they're hardly inspirational men," Maitland observed tartly.

"Victory's the best inspiration," Swynyard said, "and men like Truslow deliver it."

"Maybe," Maitland allowed, "but I'd have liked to have held onto Moxey. Or that Tumlin fellow."

Swynyard had to think for a second to place Tumlin, then remembered the man from Louisiana who claimed to have been a prisoner in the North since the fall of New Orleans. "You wanted him?" he asked, surprised.

"He seemed a decent fellow," Maitland said. "Eager to serve."

"You think so?" Swynyard asked. "I thought he was a bit plump for a fellow who'd spent five months in a Yankee prison, but maybe our erstwhile brethren can afford to feed their captives well. And I have to say I thought young Tumlin was a bit glib."

"He had confidence, yes," Maitland said. "I suppose you sent him back to Richmond?"

"Winchester," Swynyard said. Winchester, in the Shenandoah Valley, was the campaign's supply base and all unattached men were now being sent there to be reappointed. "At least he won't get wished onto poor Nate Starbuck," Swynyard added.

"Starbuck could count himself lucky if he had been," Maitland said, raising the glasses again toward the far riverbank. That bank was heavily wooded, but beyond the trees Maitland could see enemy farmland basking in the strong sunlight.

"If Starbuck's lucky," Swynyard said, "he'll be back with this brigade. I requested that his battalion be given to us if it's ordered to the army. No one else will want them, that's for sure."

Maitland shuddered at the thought of seeing the Yellowlegs again. His appointment to its command had been the nadir of his career and only the most energetic string-pulling had rescued him. "I doubt we'll see them," he said, unable to hide his relief. "They aren't ready to march and won't be ready for months." Not ever, he reflected, if Colonel Holborrow had his way. "And why would we want them anyway?" he added.

"Because we're Christians, Maitland, and turn away no man."

"Except Tumlin," Maitland retorted tartly. "Looks as if they're ready for us, Swynyard."

A messenger was spurring toward the brigade. A horse-drawn ambulance had just splashed into the ford accompanied by a cheer from the closest troops. Robert Lee was inside the vehicle, put there by injuries to his hands when he tried to quiet his frightened horse. A wounded commander, Swynyard thought, was not a good omen, but he put that pagan thought behind him as the messenger rode to Maitland under the assumption that the elegant Lieutenant-Colonel was the brigade commander. "He's the fellow you want," Maitland said, indicating Swynyard.

The messenger brought orders for Swynyard's brigade to cross the river and Swynyard, in turn, gave the Legion the honor of leading the brigade onto Northern soil. The Colonel walked down the Legion's column of companies. "Remember, boys," he shouted again and again, "no looting! No roguery! Pay in scrip for whatever you want! Show them we're a Christian country! Go now!"

Truslow's A Company waited until a battery of South Carolinian guns had splashed into the ford, then followed onto the road and down the muddy ramp into the water. The color party followed with the Legion's single flag held aloft by young Lieutenant Coffman, who found it a struggle to hold the big battle flag high against the wind while his slight body was buffeted by the Potomac's swirling current, which rose above his waist. He pushed on gamely, almost as though the whole war's outcome depended on him keeping the fringed silk out of the water. Many of the men were limping, not through wounds but because their ill-booted feet were blistered and to those men the river's cool water was like the balm of Gilead. Some men, though, refused to cross. Swynyard paused to talk with half a dozen such men who were led by a gaunt young corporal from D Company. The corporal's name was Burridge and he was a good soldier and a regular worshipper at the Colonel's prayer meetings, but now, as respectful and stubborn as ever, Burridge insisted he must disobey Swynyard's orders. "Ain't our task to go north, Colonel," he said firmly.

"It's your task to obey a lawful order, Burridge."

"Not if it's against a man's conscience, Colonel, and you know it. And it is lawful for us to defend our homes, but not to attack other folks' homes. If a Yankee comes south then I'll kill him for you, but I won't go north to do my slaughtering," Burridge declared and his companions nodded their support.

Swynyard ordered the men back to where the provosts were collecting other soldiers whose consciences could not abide carrying the war off their home soil. It grieved Swynyard to lose the six men, for they were among the best in the brigade, but it had been a confrontation he could never win and so he bid them farewell then followed the Legion into the river. Some of the men ducked their heads into the water to give their hair a brief washing, but most just pressed on toward the Northern bank, climbed onto Maryland soil, then crossed the bridge over the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that lay just beyond the river. And thus they entered the enemy country.

It was a fine place of comfortable farms, good wooded land, and gentle hills; no different from the landscape they had left, only these hills and farms and woods were ruled by an enemy government. Here a different flag flew and that gave a piquancy to the otherwise unremarkable countryside. Not that most of the men in the five regiments in Swynyard's Brigade considered Maryland an enemy; rather they believed it was a slave state that had been forced to stay with the Union because of geography, and there were high hopes that this incursion of a Confederate army would draw a flock of recruits to the rebels' slashed cross flags. But however sympathetic Marylanders might be to the rebellion, it was still an enemy state and here and there some farms yet flew a defiant stars and stripes to show that this was Yankee territory.

But such stars and stripes were far outnumbered by rebel flags, most of them homemade things with faint colors and uncertain design, but they were hung to welcome Lee's army and when, at midafternoon, Swynyard's men marched through Buckeystown they were greeted by a small crowd that was hoarse from cheering the arrival of the rebels. Buckets of water or lemonade were placed beside the road and women carried trays of cookies along the weary columns. One or two of Buckeystown's houses, it was true, were shuttered close, but most of the village welcomed the invasion. A Texan band played the inevitable "My Maryland" as the column passed, the tune becoming ever more ragged and the harmony more cacophonous as the bandsmen were supplied with cider, beer, and whiskey by the villagers.

The brigade trudged on, their broken boots kicking up a plume of white dust that drifted westward on the breeze. Once, a mile beyond Buckeystown, a sudden crackle of firing sounded far away to the east and some of the men touched the stocks of their worn rifles as if preparing for battle, but no more shots sounded. The countryside stretched warm away, bounteous and calm under the summer sun. God was in His heaven, all seemed well in the world, and Lee's rebel army was loose in the North.

Starbuck walked into Richmond where he left Lucifer, his small luggage, and the letter for Belvedere Delaney at Sally's house, then he led Martha Potter on a tour of Richmond's drinking dens. Alcohol was officially banned from the city, but the government might as well have tried to outlaw breathing for all the difference their high-mindedness had made.

Starbuck began with the more respectable houses close to the Byrd Street depot of the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad, where Martha had last seen her husband. Starbuck spared her the brothels, reckoning that no whore would have endured a drunk for three days. Instead they would have picked Matthew Potter clean on the first night and then pitched him into the street to be swept up by the provosts. Once sober the Lieutenant would have been sent to Camp Lee and his failure to arrive suggested that he had discovered some liquor-sodden haven, or worse.

Starbuck worked his way down the hierarchy of liquor shops. The first places he searched had some pretensions to gentility, maybe a gilded mirror or a stretch of tobacco-soaked carpet, but gradually the furnishings, like the liquor, worsened. He knocked on a half dozen doors in Locust Alley; but found no sign of the missing Lieutenant. He tried Martin Street, where the whores hung out of the upper windows and made Martha blush. "He didn't have the money to drink all these days, sir," she told Starbuck.

"He might have," Starbuck insisted.

"There weren't more than three dollars in my purse."

"Three dollars will take you a long way in this town, ma'am," Starbuck said, "and I daresay he had a coat? He had a pair of boots? A revolver?"

"All those, yes."

"Then he could sell those and be drunk for three months. Hell," he said, then apologized. "Forgive my language, ma'am, but that's where he is. The Hells. I think, ma'am, I'd better take you back to Miss Sally's."

"I'm coming with you," Martha insisted. For all her timidity she was a dogged girl and no amount of Starbuck's persuasion could convince her to abandon the search.

"Ma'am, it ain't safe in the Hells."

"But he might be injured."

He might be dead, Starbuck thought. "I must insist, ma'am."

"You can insist all you want, sir," Martha said stub-bornly, "but I'm still coming. I'll just follow you if you won't escort me."

Starbuck took out his revolver and checked that all five cones were primed with percussion caps. "Ma'am," he said, "where I'm going ain't called the Hells for nothing. It's in Screamersville, down by Penitentiary Bottom. Ugly names, ma'am, ugly place. Even the provosts don't go there under company strength."

Martha frowned. "They outlaws there?" she asked.

"In a manner, ma'am. Some deserters, a lot of thieves, and a lot of slaves. Only these slaves aren't under orders, ma'am, they're out of the Tredegar Iron Works and they're tougher than the stuff they roll in the mills."

"Hell," Martha said, "I ain't afraid of niggers."

"Then you should be, ma'am."

"I'm coming with you, Major."

He led her down the hill past Johnny Worsham's barn-like establishment where gambling tables crowded close to the stage on which a troupe of girls danced in between entertaining their clients upstairs. Two black men in bowler hats guarded the door and watched Starbuck with flat, cold stares. He led Martha over a wooden bridge that spanned a creek flooded with sewage and then into an alley that ran between damp brick walls. "You know the town pretty well, sir?" Martha asked, lifting her skirts as she stepped between the fetid rubbish that lay on the cobbles.

"I served a few weeks with the provosts here," Starbuck said. They had been miserable weeks that had ended with his imprisonment on suspicion of being a Northern spy. A gutless little officer called Gillespie had made Starbuck's life a hell in that prison, and that was one prospect of revenge that Starbuck treasured.

He stepped over a pile of garbage and turned into an unnamed street. The stench of the iron works hung heavy here and the sound of the furnaces roared to rival the foaming of the nearby river where it cascaded over the rapids. A dozen slaves lay in the smoke-dimmed sunlight with stone bottles of liquor, which they raised in an ironic salute as Starbuck passed. "Why ain't they at work?" Martha demanded.

"They work hard enough," Starbuck said. "You can't whip a man into working hard, ma'am. You have to give them some rope and once the slaves are trusted in the Iron Works they can come and go pretty much as they please. Long as they stay down here and don't go into the upper town, no one minds. This is their territory, not ours."

"Matthew wouldn't come here, would he?"

"Lots of soldiers do. There aren't any rules here, and the liquor's real cheap."

A mad preacher in an ankle-length black coat stood on a corner yelling the good news of Christ to a town that was not listening. A dwarf woman, drunk to the wind, reeled down the cobbles singing, but otherwise there were not many people in the streets. Midday was the witching hour for the Hells, the time when the sun shone brightest and Screamersville's denizens slept indoors as they prepared for the night's business. Starbuck chose a random tavern and plunged inside. A few soldiers slouched on benches, but none was Potter. One offered Martha a dollar if she would go upstairs with him, while another looked up at her, sighed with lust, and then vomited. "I told you," Starbuck said as he led her back into the street, "that this is no place for a lady."

"Hell, Major," Martha said sturdily, "no real lady would have married Matthew Potter. Besides, I've heard worse."

She did hear worse that day, but she stayed close to Starbuck as they searched the canalside shacks where most of the Hells business was done. The smell of the place was nauseating; a mix of coal smoke, vomit, sewage, and raw liquor. They were summarily ejected from one house by four black men who had been playing cards. A thin white woman sat in the room's corner with a bruised face. She spat when Starbuck entered and one of the men picked up a shotgun and rammed it into the stranger's face. "She don't want you here, mister," the black man said.

Starbuck took the hint and backed out into the alley. "I'm looking for a friend," he explained hurriedly.

"Not me, soldier, not them," the slave gestured at his companions, "not her, not no one in here." He paused and gave Martha a long speculative look. "She can come in, though."

"Not today," Starbuck said.

"He shouldn't talk uppity like that," Martha protested when the door was slammed on them. "And why's he got a gun? That ain't allowed!"

"Ma'am," Starbuck sighed, "I told you there weren't any rules here. He'd love me to pick a fight and a minute later you'd have a dozen black folk beating me to pulp."

"It ain't right."

"The underside of Dixie, ma'am. Sweet liberty." He gently edged Martha into the entry of an alley to keep her out of the way of a furious woman who pursued a man onto the street and hurled insults after him. The row became general as neighbors joined in. "Social gravity," Starbuck said.

"What does that mean?"

"It means we all go downhill, ma'am, till we hit the bottom."

"Some of us didn't start very high up."

"But keep going up, ma'am, keep going up." Christ, Starbuck thought, but if it were not for the rebel army then he would probably be down in these same slums. He had fled New England for a woman, and for her he had become a thief, and only the outbreak of war had offered him a chance of escape. What would he have done without the war, he wondered. Become a clerk and sought the solace of cheap drink and women, probably. And what would he do when the war was over, he wondered.

"Are you married?" Martha suddenly asked him.

"No, ma'am." Starbuck pushed open a door to find a cockpit made of straw bales arranged in a circle. Three rats fled the pit's floor, which was stained with blood and feathers, as Starbuck flooded the hovel with daylight. A soldier lay asleep on the bales stacked for the spectators, but he was not the missing Lieutenant.

"Matthew's real good looking," Martha said after she had inspected the sleeper, who was missing one eye and most of his teeth.

"Is that why you married him?" Starbuck asked, going back into the street.

"Marry in haste, my grandma always said, and repent at leisure," Martha said sadly.

"I've heard the advice," Starbuck said, and crossed the road to push open another shaky door. And there they discovered Matthew Potter.

Or rather Martha recognized the man sleeping on the wooden verandah that creaked under their weight as they stepped onto its thin boards. Rats scuttled from under the planks and ran along the canal's edge. "Matthew!" Martha called and knelt beside her husband, who was dressed in nothing but gray pants.

Potter did not wake up. He groaned and stirred in his sleep, but did not open his eyes.

"I wondered when some soul would come for him," a black woman appeared at the verandah door.

"Been here long, has he?" Starbuck asked her.

"So long I thought he'd take root. Likes his liquor, don't he?"

"I hear he's fond of it."

The woman wiped her nose with a corner of her apron, then grinned. "He's a nice boy, though. Speaks nice. Kind of took pity on him. Tried to feed him, even, but he didn't want food, just his guzzle."

"Sold you his shirt, did her'

"And his coat, and his shoes. Just about every damned thing he had."

"His revolver?" Starbuck asked.

"He wouldn't have done that, sir. 'Gainst the law, isn't it?" She grinned at Starbuck, who grinned back. "He says he's from Georgia," the woman said, peering at the prostrate Lieutenant.

"He is."

"A preacher's son, see? They're always the worst." The woman laughed. "He was dancing for a time, and he even spoke poetry. Such nice poetry, I could have listened to him all night except that he fell over. Is that his wife?"

"Yes."

"Born to trouble. I never did understand why good women marry bad men." "Lucky for us they do, eh?" She smiled. "You going to take him away?" "I reckon."

"Well, he had a good time. He won't remember it, but he did. Sad to think he'll probably go down to a Yankee bullet, a nice boy like that."

"He won't wake up!" Martha wailed.

"He will," Starbuck promised, then he pulled her away from her husband and made her go inside the shack. "Wait there," he told her, and once he had shepherded her off the verandah and closed the door he put his hands under Potter's armpits and hauled him first to a sitting position and then upright. It was not difficult, for Potter, though tall, was frailly built and as thin as a rail. Starbuck leaned the Lieutenant against the shack's wall.

Potter stirred at last. "Time is it?" he asked. He was, as Martha had said, a good-looking man with fair lank hair and a week's growth of pale beard. His face was long and thin and had a delicacy, almost a look of noble suffering that, when Potter was sober, might have suggested spirituality or some artistic sensitivity, but now, in the throes of his monumental hangover, the Lieutenant simply looked like a whipped and sick puppy. A young puppy too, Starbuck guessed; certainly not more than nineteen. The Lieutenant tried to raise his head. He blinked slackly at Starbuck. "How do ye do," he managed to say.

Starbuck thumped him in the belly. He thumped him real hard, grunting with the effort of the blow that made Potter open his eyes wide, then double over. He almost fell, but Starbuck shoved him back against the wall before stepping smartly to one side as Potter threw up. Starbuck skipped further aside to stop the stream of vomit from splashing onto his boots.

"Jesus," Potter complained and cuffed at his mouth. He groaned. "You do that?"

"Stand up, Lieutenant."

"Oh, Jesus. Sweet Jesus. Sweet Lord Jesus." Potter tried to straighten. "Oh, suffering Jesus," he moaned as a stab of pain rammed down from his head. He pushed a long hank of hair off his race. "Who are you?' he demanded. "Announce yourself."

"The best son of a bitch friend you ever had," Starbuck said. "Is anything left in your belly?"

"It hurts," Potter said, rubbing his yellow-white skin where Starbuck had hit him.

"Stand straight!" Starbuck barked.

"Soldier! Soldier!" Potter said as he made a feeble effort to stand to attention. "Jesus wants me for a soldier." He retched again. "Oh, my God."

Starbuck pushed him back onto the wall. "Stand up straight," he said.

"Discipline," Potter said as he tried to straighten up. "The cure for all that ails me."

Starbuck took a handful of Potter's long, fair hair and rammed it back against the shack's wall, thus forcing the Lieutenant to look into his eyes. "What's going to cure you, you son of a bitch," he said, "is looking after your wife."

"Martha? Is she here?" Potter immediately cheered up and looked left and right. "Don't see her."

"She's here. And she's been looking for you. Why the hell did you leave her?"

Potter frowned as he tried to remember his last few days. "I didn't precisely leave her," he finally said. "I wandered, true, and did misplace her for a time. I was in need of a drink, you understand, and met a friend. Do you notice how that happens? You go to a strange city, incur a thirst, and the very first person you meet is someone you were at school with. The workings of providence, I suppose. Would you mind, sir, very much letting go of my hair so that I can be sick again? Thank you," he managed to say the last two words before jack-knifing forward and spewing up a last pathetic throatful of vomit. He moaned, closed his eyes, and slowly stood up again. "Rinsed out now," he said reassuringly as he looked at Starbuck. "Do I know you?" "Major Starbuck."

"Ah! Starbuck! A famous name!" Potter said and Starbuck tensed himself for the usual attack on his father, a notorious enemy of the South, but Matthew Potter had a different Starbuck in mind. "First mate of the Pequod, aren't I right?"

"Think of me as Captain Ahab, Lieutenant," Starbuck said.

Potter gazed momentarily at Starbuck's legs. "Rather over-endowed with pins, aren't you, for such a role? Or is one of those an ivory peg?" Potter giggled, then winced as another pain lashed at him. "Should I be pleased to meet you?"

"Yes, you damn well should. Now come on, you son of a bitch, we're going to fight a duel."

Potter stared with horror at Starbuck, then shook his head. "Not in my line of business, sir. Really not. Don't mind battle, but not pistols at dawn."

"It's swords at dusk. Now come on! Don't tread in that!" Too late.

Potter placed a bare foot in his puddle of vomit, grimaced, then followed Starbuck into the tavern where an emotional Martha threw herself into her husband's enfeebled arms. Starbuck thought about offering to buy back the Lieutenant's shoes and shirt, then decided against wasting his money. Potter could be equipped from the thin stores at Camp Lee, and until then he could go barefoot and barechested.

He persuaded a now-remorseful Lieutenant out into the street. Martha led Potter by the hand while he tried to explain his conduct. "Not intentional, my most darling one, not with malice aforethought, as the lawyers would say. It was merely a whim, a notion, a gesture of amity for an old friend. Thomas Snyder. That is his name and Snyder will vouch for the purity of my motives. He is an artilleryman now, he told me, and has gone partly deaf. All those loud bangs, you see? Whatever, I merely kept him company. We were at school together and together we mastered McGuffey's readers, together we added and subtracted and divided, and together we got drunk, for which I apologize. It will not happen again until the next time. Oh God, do I really have to walk?"

"Yes," Starbuck said, "you do."

"I do dislike strong, noisy men," Potter said, but stumbled obediently behind Starbuck up the hill toward Main Street. "The army is filled with strong, noisy men. The life must attract them. You didn't, I suppose, bring anything to eat, my dearest chick?" he inquired of Martha.

"No, Matthew."

"Or a mouthful to drink, perhaps?" "No, Matthew!"

"Water, dearest love, mere water. A moment, Captain Ahab!" Potter called, then pulled away from his wife and staggered over the street to a horse trough that was already occupied by a shaggy cab horse. Potter stood beside the horse and plunged his face into the water, scooped it over his hair, and then drank greedily.

"I'm so ashamed," Martha said to Starbuck.

"I like him," Starbuck said, realizing as he spoke that it was true. "I do like him."

Potter stood and belched. He apologized to the horse, patted its neck, and walked unsteadily back to his wife. "My father," he said to Starbuck, "always maintains that self-knowledge is the harbinger of self-improvement, but

I'm not entirely persuaded of that truth. Do I improve myself by knowing I am eternally thirsty, overeducated, and sadly fallible? I think not. Would you both excuse me for another trifling moment?" He walked to the nearest wall, unbuttoned his pants, and pissed noisily onto the brick. "Oh, dear God," he said, raising his eyes, "in one end and out the other"

"So ashamed," Martha whispered.

"Did you say ashamed, sweet love of my benighted life?" Potter called loudly from the wall. "Ashamed? Do not the poets piss? Does not an anointed king empty his royal bladder? Did not George Washington micturate? Was our dear Lord spared the need to sprinkle?"

"Matthew!" Martha protested, shocked. "He was perfect!"

"And that, sweetest one, was a perfect piss." He turned back to them, buttoning his trousers, then waved imperiously at Starbuck. "Onward, Captain Ahab! Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death! Onward, dear souls!"

Sally, as she had promised, was waiting outside Mitchell and Tyler's jewelry store on Main Street and with her, as Starbuck had hoped, was Belvedere Delaney. The lawyer was dressed in one of the expensive uniforms he bought from Shaffer's, but no amount of tailoring could disguise Delaney's unmilitary soul. He was a short, plump, kindly man whose talents were making money and taking amusement from other men's weaknesses. Officially he was a captain in the legal office of the Confederate War Department, an appointment that seemed to require no duties except to take the pay and to wear a uniform when it was convenient. Today he sported a major's stars. "You've been promoted?" Starbuck asked, gladly greeting his old friend.

"I deemed the rank appropriate," Delaney answered grandly. "No one else seems to have the power to promote or demote me, so 1 assumed the rank as one more fitting for my dignity. In time, just like a gas balloon, I shall rise to the dizziest of heights. Dear Nate, you look dreadful! Scarred, dirty, used up. Is this what soldiering does to one?"

"Yes," Starbuck said, then introduced the barechested Lieutenant Potter, who seemed rather frightened by Delaney. Martha nervously shook the lawyer's hand, then fell back to cling to her disreputable husband.

"Here," Sally said to Starbuck as they began to walk eastward along Main, "you need this," and she held out one of Patrick Lassan's sabers.

Starbuck buckled the sword belt round his waist. "Did you find anything?" he asked Delaney.

"Of course I didn't find anything," the lawyer said testily. "I am not a detective bureau, I am merely an attorney." Delaney paused to raise his peaked cap to a passing acquaintance. "But it's quite obvious," he went on, "what Holborrow is doing. He is using the Special Battalion as a milch cow. He feeds it scraps and it yields him money. He doesn't want it to go to war, because that would mean he loses the income."

"What does that mean?" Starbuck asked.

Delaney sighed. "It's obvious, isn't it? The government issues the Special Battalion boots, so Holborrow sells the boots to another regiment, then complains to the government that the boots were faulty. In time he will receive more boots that will also be sold. The same for rifles, canteens, coats, and anything else he can gouge out of the system. He's doing it quite cleverly, for the system hasn't discovered him, but I'm sure that's his game. Are you really going to fight a duel?"

"Son of a bitch challenged me," Starbuck said belligerently, then, unable to hide his disappointment, glanced back at the lawyer. "So you can't help me?" he asked. Starbuck, in the careful letter he had written to Delaney that morning, had described his suspicions that Holborrow had purloined the rifles meant for the Special Battalion and then sold them. He had hoped that somehow Delaney might discover some evidence in the War Department, but his hopes had been dashed.

"I can help you," Delaney said, "by being a lawyer."

"You mean you'll threaten Holborrow?"

Delaney sighed. "You are so blunt, Nate, so hopelessly blunt. How can I threaten him? I know nothing. I can, however, drop broad hints. I can insinuate. I can pretend to know what I do not know. I can suggest a formal investigation might be undertaken, and it is possible, just possible, that he'll come to an arrangement rather than call my bluff. How many men in the battalion?"

"A hundred and eighty nine."

"Ah, that's something. He's drawing rations and pay for two hundred and sixty." Delaney smiled, seeing an advantage. "I can tell you one other thing. Holborrow was never wounded by a Yankee bullet. That bad leg came from a fall off his horse and the damage isn't half so bad as he pretends. He doesn't want to go to war, you see? So he's playing up the wound. What he wants is a nice, safe, profitable war in plump Richmond, and I guess he'll do quite a lot to make sure he gets it. But what do you want, Nate?"

"You know what I want."

"Two hundred rifles?" Delaney shook his head. "The rifles will have been sold long ago. I doubt Holborrow can lay his hands on fifty, but I'll do my best. But do you really want to be sent to Lee's army?" That was Starbuck's main request; that Holborrow would affirm that the Special Battalion was ready for combat and so release it to the war. "Why?" Delaney asked in genuine puzzlement. "Why don't you just take the God-given rest, Nate? Haven't you fought enough?"

Starbuck was not really sure of the answer. One part of him, a great shadowed horrid part of him, feared combat like a small child feared the night-ghouls, but still he felt compelled to take his battalion to war. He doubted if he could live with the knowledge that he was skulking while other men fought, but it was more than that. All he now possessed in the world was his reputation as a soldier. He had no family, no wealth, and no position other than his Confederate commission and if he betrayed that commission by skulking then he was abandoning his pride. He did not want to go to battle, he only knew he had to go to battle. "I'm a soldier," he answered inadequately.

"I shall never understand you," Delaney said happily, "but maybe the next few weeks will give me an answer. I'm joining Lee myself."

"You?" Starbuck asked, astonished. He stopped on the sidewalk and looked at his friend. "You're going to the army?"

"My country calls!" Delaney said grandiloquently. "To do what?"

Delaney shrugged and walked on. "My idea, really. No one ordered me to go, Nate, but it seemed like a good idea when it occurred to me. Lee's invading the North, did you know? Well, he is and there are bound to be tricky points of law involved. If a man steals from enemy property, is it theft? It might seem a trivial thing to you, even irrelevant, but when this war does end there's bound to be all sorts of legal settlements to be made between the two jurisdictions and it seems only prudent to try and anticipate the issues."

"You'll hate campaigning," Starbuck said.

"I'm sure I shall," Delaney said fervently. In truth the lawyer had absolutely no wish to join Lee's army, but the orders had come from an angry man in Washington, and Delaney, who was convinced the North would win the war and had no desire to be attached to the losing side, had weighed his future and decided that the discomforts of a brief campaign should prove a good investment. He still resented Thorne's peremptory demand that he should spy on Lee's headquarters, for Delaney had reckoned he could do all his spying from Richmond's comfortable parlors rather than from some muddy and dangerous bivouac in the countryside, and he doubted that he would be made privy to any useful information. It was all, he reckoned, a waste of time, but he dared not refuse Thorne's demand, not if he wanted the rewards that would be in Washington when the war ended, and so he had invented a reason for attaching himself to Lee's army and now, with a mixture of horror and apprehension, he planned to travel north. "Tomorrow morning!" he announced. "George has packed us some wine and tobacco, so we won't be comfortless." George was his house slave.

"You'll be a damned fool to carry expensive wine to war," Starbuck said. "It'll be stolen."

"What a suspicious mind you do have," Delaney said. He was hiding his fears, and so was pleased to have this evening's distraction at Richmond's dueling ground. Duels were supposedly illegal, but still the Richmond Anti-Dueling Society had its headquarters not two doors down from Belvedere Delaney's expensive brothel and the society kept itself busy raising funds and prosecuting men known to have fought affairs of honor. But not all the pious efforts of a hundred such societies had succeeded in eliminating dueling from the Confederate states. Richmond's dueling ground lay just beyond the city's limits, beneath the Chimborazo Hill on which was built the sprawling military hospital. Starbuck led his companions up Elm Street, crossed a plank bridge that spanned the dirt and garbage through which the Bloody Run trickled down to the James, and so reached the patch of desolate land squeezed between the shoulder of the hill and the rusting rails of the York River Railroad. Scrubby, soot-darkened trees fringed the dueling ground, which was overshadowed by the tall, gaunt, and windowless facade of a sawmill.

Colonel Holborrow's carriage was standing at the end of a track that led from the sawmill, while Holborrow and Dennison were pacing up and down the worn length of turf where the fights took place.

"Potter!" Holborrow limped forward as Starbuck walked into the slanting late sunlight. "You're under arrest! You hear me, boy? You ain't fighting no duel! You're going back to Camp Lee, where I'm going to break you down to private unless you can explain yourself. Just where the hell have you been all day? Are you drunk, boy? Let me smell your breath!"

"I ain't Potter, Holborrow," Starbuck said. "That's Potter," he pointed to the half-clothed Lieutenant, who was weakly leaning against the balustrade of the wooden bridge that crossed the Bloody Run. "Sorry son of a drunken bitch, ain't he? And that's his wife with him. You want to go talk to them while I teach Dennison some manners?"

The effect of Starbuck's words was everything he could have wished. Holborrow's confused face turned between Potter and Starbuck, but no words came, only a spluttering indignation. Starbuck patted the Colonel's shoulder and walked toward Dennison. "Ready, Captain?" he called.

"Who are you?" Holborrow shouted after him.

Starbuck looked into Dennison's eyes while he answered. "Major Nathaniel Starbuck, Colonel, once of the Faulconer Legion, now commander of the Second Special Battalion. And, according to Captain Dennison, a goddamned Yankee who ain't worth fighting for. Isn't that what you said, Captain?"

Dennison blanched, but did not answer. Starbuck shrugged, unbuckled the sword belt, and took off his jacket. He drew the saber, tossed its scabbard onto the coat then gave the blade two hissing cuts through the evening air. "I kind of reckoned you'd have the Colonel arrest me, Captain," he said to Dennison, "on account of your being a coward. I knew you wouldn't want to fight me, but you ain't got any choice now." He gave another practice cut, then smiled into Dennison's scarred face. "There was a fencing society at Yale," he said in a conversational tone, "where we goddamned Yankees learned to fight." Starbuck had never joined the society, but he did not need to make that plain to his opponent. "It was larded with European rubbish, of course. Derobement of the prise de fer." He gave the naked blade an impressive twisting cut. "Bind from quarte to seconde he gave the sword another meaningless flourish before bringing it up into the salute. "Ready, Dennison?" he asked. "I got business to do tonight, so let's get it over with."

"That's Potter?" Colonel Holborrow had hurried back to Starbuck's side, even forgetting to limp in his haste. "Are you telling me that's Potter?"

"Don't shout so!" Starbuck said chidingly. "Lieutenant Potter is badly hung over, Holborrow. I found the sorry son of a bitch down in the Hells."

"Hell," Holborrow said, still thoroughly confused.

"Then what in hell's name were you doing at Camp Lee?"

Starbuck smiled. "Looking you over, Holborrow, so I could report back to the War Department. See that short, plump fellow there? That's Major Belvedere Delaney from the Legal Department. He's my second tonight, but he also wants a word with you." Starbuck looked back to Dennison. "I decided against bringing a surgeon, Captain. I know it's against the rules printed in Wilson's Code of Honor, but I never did think that a duel was proper unless it ends in death, don't you agree?"

"He's from the Legal Department?" Holborrow rapped Starbuck's arm with his cane and gestured toward Delaney.

"He heads the department," Starbuck said, then turned back to the aghast Dennison. "Ready, Captain?"

Holborrow again demanded Starbuck's attention with a tap of his cane. "Are you really Starbuck?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Then you're a slippery son of a bitch," Holborrow said, but not without some admiration.

"It takes one to recognize another," Starbuck said.

"Inside the carriage, Colonel?" Delaney had joined them and gestured at the vehicle. "I find our sort of business is best done in privacy. Let's leave Starbuck to his slaughter, shall we? He enjoys slaughter," Delaney smiled at Dennison, "but I find the sight of blood upsetting before supper."

Holborrow clambered inside the coach, Delaney followed, and the carriage door slammed shut. The Negro driver watched impassively from the high box as Starbuck gave his saber another practice cut. "You ready, Captain?" he asked Dennison.

"You're Starbuck?" Dennison asked in a faint voice.

Starbuck frowned, looked left and right as though for inspiration, then gazed back into Dennison's face. "Sir," he said, "I'm a major and you're a captain, so that makes you a shad-bellied piece of ordure, otherwise known as a captain. Isn't that right?"

"Sir," Dennison said miserably.

"Yes," Starbuck answered the original question, "I'm Starbuck."

"I ain't got a quarrel with you," Dennison said, then, after a pause, "sir."

"But you do, Dennison, you do. Would it matter whose wife you insulted? As it happens, that lady is not my wife," he gestured toward Sally, who watched from the ground's far end, "but she is a dear friend."

"I didn't mean to give offense, sir," Dennison said, desperate to escape the wicked curved blade in Starbuck's hand.

"The offense you gave me, Dennison," Starbuck said, hardening his voice, "was by thinking you could bully a man of lower rank. Do that again in my battalion, Captain, and I'll whip your backside bloody and break you down to private. You understand me?"

Dennison stared into Starbuck's eyes for a second, then nodded. "Yes, sir," he said.

"Now let's discuss your disease, Captain," Starbuck said.

Dennison glanced up into Starbuck's eyes again, but could find nothing to say.

"It sure ain't ringworm," Starbuck said, "and it ain't psoriasis, and I've never seen a case of eczema that bad. Just what is your proper doctor giving you?"

"Turpentine," Dennison said softly.

Starbuck laid the flat of his saber blade against one of the open, gleaming sores on Dennison's cheek. The Captain flinched from the pain, but then submitted meekly to the weapon's touch. "It ain't turpentine, is it?" Starbuck asked. Dennison said nothing. Starbuck twitched the blade, making Dennison flinch. "It's croton oil, Captain, that's what it is, and no doctor gave it to you. You're rubbing it on yourself, ain't you? Every morning and every night you slap the stuff on. Must hurt like hell, but it makes damn sure no one can transfer you to a fighting battalion, ain't that it? Keeps you away from the nasty Yankee bullets, don't it?"

Dennison could not even meet Starbuck's eyes, let alone speak as Starbuck drew the blade slowly back along the sore. Starbuck remembered croton oil, the foul purgative that Lieutenant Gillespie had forced down Starbuck's throat in an effort to force an admission that he was a Northern spy. Where the oil had spilled onto Starbuck's cheeks it had formed smallpox-like pustules, and it was plain that Dennison was using the purgative as a means of fabricating an illness that would keep him safely in Richmond. "What will it be next, Captain?" Starbuck asked. "Swallowing gunpowder to make yourself vomit? I know all the tricks, you bastard, every last one of them. So what you're going to do now is throw away your croton oil, you hear me?"

"Yes, sir."

"Throw it away, wash your face in good clean water, and I guarantee you'll be as handsome as ever by the time you face the Yankees in battle."

Dennison forced himself to look up at Starbuck and the look was of utter hatred. He was a proud man and he had been utterly humbled, but he had no belly to try and retrieve his pride by fighting his new commanding officer. Starbuck picked up his scabbard and coat. "We've started badly, you and I," he told Dennison, "but no one but you and me knows what passed between us here, and I won't be telling. So you can go back to Camp Lee, Captain, repair your face, and make damn sure that your company is ready to fight. Because that's what I intend to do with the battalion, fight." He had meant his words to be conciliatory, but he saw no grateful response in Dennison's dark eyes, only bitterness. Starbuck was tempted to let Dennison go and let the bastard rot in his own self-inflicted misery, but he needed every officer he could get and besides, why should Dennison evade his duty? Dennison must fight like every other man defending his country.

The carriage door opened suddenly and Delaney jumped awkwardly down to the turf. Colonel Holborrow followed, but more slowly because he was exaggerating his limp. Delaney took Starbuck's arm and steered him out of earshot of Dennison or the Colonel. "The Colonel and I have come to an understanding," Delaney said. "He believes it his patriotic duty to spare the Confederacy an expensive inquiry into his handling of the Special Battalion, even though, of course, he avers that nothing would be discovered by such an inquiry, and he also feels that under your leadership the battalion could well acquit itself nobly in battle."

Starbuck felt a pang of terror at the news. He had got what he wanted. "We're going north then?"

"Isn't that what you wanted?" Delaney asked. He had caught a whiff of Starbuck's fear.

"Yes," Starbuck said, "it is."

"Because you're going in two days," Delaney said. "I don't think Holborrow wants you in his sight a moment longer than possible."

"Jesus!" Starbuck swore. Two days! "What about my rifles?"

"Thirty."

"Thirty!" Starbuck protested.

"Nate! Nate!" Delaney held up a cautionary hand. "I told you I had no ammunition to force that issue. The rest of the rifles are sold, I know that and you know that, but Holborrow's never going to admit it. But he says he can find thirty good rifles, so be grateful. You'll just have to steal the others off the enemy. Aren't you supposed to be good at that?"

Starbuck swore again, but his anger ebbed as he considered the deal Delaney had struck. He had got what he wanted, a battlefield command, and somehow in the next few days he had to make the Special Battalion into a unit that could stand against the Yankees. He would make it so damned special that other Confederate battalions would wish that they too were punishment units. "Thanks, Delaney," he said grudgingly.

"I am overwhelmed by your gratitude." The lawyer smiled. "And now, I suppose, you want to spend an evening of dissipation at my expense?"

"No," Starbuck said, because if the Yellowlegs really were going north then he had work to do. He had men to train and boots to find and a battalion to shake into efficiency and only two days to work his miracle. Two days before they went to where the Yankees waited. Before the Yellowlegs went back to war.

ADAM FAULCONER HAD rarely felt so useless, or so unwanted, for he realized after just a half day at McClellan's headquarters that he had nothing whatever to do. For a time those headquarters had stayed obstinately in Washington, where the Young Napoleon had insisted there were necessary arrangements that could not be made from the saddle nor by telegraph from the field, and so the blue-coated army moved slowly westward while their commander slept in the bed of his comfortable house on Fifteenth Street. A nervous silence descended on Washington when the troops departed; a silence enervated by rumors of rebel activity. Gray horsemen were reported in Pennsylvania, a barn had been burned in Ohio, the state militia was assembling to protect Philadelphia, but in all the rumor there was not one hard fact. No one actually reported seeing Lee or the redoubtable Jackson, though Northern newspapers were more than ready to print elaborate fancies in the factless vacuum. The rebels were said to be 150,000 strong, they were planning to take Baltimore, they had designs on Washington, they were marching against New York, and even Chicago was threatened. The newspapers were eagerly read by the blue army that was bivouacked not far from Washington, in the green Maryland fields, where they waited for McClellan. Meanwhile the Young Napoleon rode about the Federal capital leaving visiting cards in a score of fashionable houses, each scrap of pasteboard carefully inked with the initials PPC, which had the recipients puzzled until the French ambassador explained that the letters stood for Pour Prendre Conge and were the polite manner of indicating that a soldier was leaving home to go on campaign.

"Pour Prendre Conge!" Colonel Lyman Thorne snarled at Adam. "Who the devil does he think he's impressing?"

Adam had no answer. It worried him that he was always so tongue-tied in Thorne's presence. He would have liked to have impressed the Colonel, but instead he found himself trapped into either monosyllabic answers or else saying nothing at all. This time he said nothing, but just kicked his heels gently back to coax an ounce more speed from his horse, then he leaned into the mare's neck as she rose to a snake fence.

Thorne's horse thumped down a second after Adam's. The two men were riding westward through a countryside apparently bereft of inhabitants; a countryside of neat farms and tidy orchards and well-drained fields. "Where is everybody?" Adam asked after they had cantered past another immaculate white-painted farm with a swept yard, a woodlot where the cut logs were aligned between the elm trees as neatly as soldiers in one of the Young Napoleon's beloved reviews, and a newly painted springhouse, but without any sign of a human presence.

"Indoors," Thorne answered. "Didn't you see the upstairs drapes twitch? These people aren't fools. Where would you be if two armies were close by? You put your valuables in the cellar, bury the cash in the kitchen garden, load the shotgun, dirty your daughters' faces so they don't look attractive, harness the wagon, then wait to see who comes."

"No rebels coming this way," Adam said, trying hard to make conversation with the forbidding Thorne, but even that cheerful observation met with a scornful reply.

"Damn the rebels, where are our cavalry patrols? Damn it, Faulconer, but Lee's been two days in the north and we don't know the first damn thing about what he's doing. And where are our scouts? This countryside should be thick with damn scouts. They should be tripping over each other, but McClellan won't release them. He doesn't want their precious horses to get hurt." Thorne's derision was sour and angry. "Little George will inch his way forward like a virgin edging into a barrack room," he said, "and Lee will be running wild. Did I show you Pinkerton's latest work of fiction?"

"No, sir."

The two horsemen had stopped their mounts on the crest of a long green watershed that offered a distant view westward. Thorne took out a massive pair of binoculars, wiped the lenses with the skirt of his coat, then peered at the distant view for a long time. He saw nothing to alarm him and so lowered the glasses. "Pinkerton claims that Lee has one hundred and fifty thousand men in Maryland and he reckons another sixty thousand are poised just south of the Potomac ready to mount an attack on Washington when McClellan goes to deal with Lee." Thorne spat. "Lee's no fool. He won't throw away his army in an attack on Washington's forts! He doesn't have enough men. If Lee even has sixty thousand men fit to fight I'd be surprised, but it's no good pointing out facts to frightened George, it just makes him more stubborn. Little George will believe what he wants to believe, and he wants to believe he's outnumbered because that way there's no disgrace when he doesn't fight. Hell, they should give me the army for a week. There'd be no rebellion at the end of that week, I can promise you."

The Colonel fell silent as he unfolded a map. Adam desperately wanted to know why the army did not give Thorne a fighting command, but he did not like to ask the question, but then the Colonel answered it anyway. "I'm not one of the elect, Faulconer. I wasn't in Mexico, I wasn't at West Point, I didn't spend my peacetime nights flattering other uniformed fools with damnfool stories about slaughtering Comanches. I was brought into the peacetime army to build barracks, so I'm not supposed to understand soldiering. I'm not part of the mystical brother' hood. Have you ever seen Little George talk about soldier-ing? He weeps! Goes misty at the eyes!" Thorne hooted his derision. "Damn the weeping until you've given someone something to weep about. You can't win a war without taking casualties, lots of casualties, blood from one end of the country to the other. After that you can weep. But don't give me all this podsnap about sacred bonds, brotherhood, honor, and duty. We have a duty to win, that's all."

"Yes, sir," Adam said dully. He was not sure he liked what the Colonel was saying, for Adam had an idea that war was somehow mystical. He knew all war was a bad thing, of course, a terrible thing even, but when it was touched by honor and patriotism it was subtly transformed into nobility and Adam did not want to think of it as mere uniformed butchery.

He took the glasses that the Colonel offered and dutifully trained them westward. He was wondering why the older man had so suddenly appeared at the army's headquarters to suggest this long ride into Maryland, but Adam, lonely himself, had no idea of the Colonel's loneliness, nor of the Colonel's fears. Thorne, watching his army led by fools, feared that it would be thrown away before it could win the war and he feared that nothing he could do would prevent that tragedy, but still he must do what he could. "One man," he said suddenly.

"Sir?" Adam lowered the glasses.

"One man can make a difference, Faulconer."

"Yes, sir," Adam said, cringing at the inadequacy of his answer and wanting to ask Thorne more about the strange spy who had given Thorne Adam's name. How was Adam supposed to contact the man? Or the man Adam? Adam had already asked Thorne these questions and received an honest answer; that Thorne did not know, but Adam would have liked to probe the matter further in search of some clue that would tell him how he might prove useful in this campaign.

Thorne took back the field glasses. "I reckon that's Damascus," he said, pointing to a small group of houses clustered atop a low ridge some four or five miles away, "and if the rebels were advancing on Washington, which they're not, they'd be there." Thorne folded the stiff map and shoved it into a pocket. "Let's take a late lunch in Damascus, Faulconer. Maybe we'll be struck by enlightenment on the road."

The horses trotted down the long green slope to where a herd of cows was standing belly deep in a gentle creek. Ahead of Adam now was a long stretch of valuable bottomland, well watered, lush, studded with stands of trees and cut by a tangle of small streams. Doubtless the land had once been all swamp, but generations of hard work had drained the wetland, tamed it, and made it useful, and Adam, looking at the results of that honest labor, was almost overcome by love for his country. That love was real for Adam, real enough to have driven him from his native Virginia to fight for the greater entity of the United States. Other countries might boast grander ceremonies than America, they might boast mighty castles, and possess splendid cathedrals and vast-hailed palaces, but nowhere, Adam fervently believed, displayed the virtue of modest, hard, honest labor like America. This was a plain man's country and Adam wanted it to be nothing more, for nothing, he believed, was worth more than simple, painstaking achievement.

"Daydreaming, Faulconer?" Thorne growled, and Adam jerked his head up to see that three horsemen had appeared from a stand of timber a mile ahead. Three horsemen in gray. "Our friends have their cavalry scouts afield, I see," the Colonel said dryly, curbing his horse, "so it seems we won't be eating in Damascus after all." He took out his field glasses and inspected the rebel trio. "Down at heels, that's for sure, but I'll warrant their carbines are well looked after." He edged the glasses up to stare at the ridge on which Damascus stood. He was wondering if he was wrong and that Lee was advancing on Washington, in which case he expected to see some evidence of gun batteries on the high ground, but he saw nothing. "It's just a patrol," he said dismissively, "nothing more. Lee's not headed this way." He turned his horse. "No point in being captured, Faulconer, let's retire."

But Adam had kicked his horse forward. The Colonel turned back. "Faulconer!" he snapped, but Adam ignored Thorne. Instead he kicked his heels again and the mare tossed her head and lifted her hooves as she began to canter.

The three rebels unslung their carbines, but did not take aim on the lone horseman who rode toward them. The Northerner did not have a saber drawn, nor was he holding any weapon, he was simply riding in a straight line toward his enemies. For a few seconds Thorne wondered if Faulconer was defecting back to the South, then the young man swerved his horse, leapt a brook, and cantered at an angle to the rebel scouts, who suddenly understood his purpose. They whooped like hunters seeing the fox in open ground and kicked back their heels. It was a race, pure and simple. Adam was challenging them, and the three rebels accepted the challenge by racing to catch him. It was a country game as old as time, only this day the prize was survival and the penalty imprisonment. Adam held his horse back, watching over his shoulder as the three pursuing horses lurched into the full gallop. He teased them by continuing to curb his good mare, and only when the closest man was within thirty or forty paces did he let go the curb rein and so give the mare her head.

She flew. She was no ordinary horse, but one of the prize beasts from Washington Faulconer's stud at Faulconer Court House in Faulconer County, Virginia. This was a mare with Arab blood, but crossed with a hardy American strain and Adam trusted his father's horse-breeding far more than he trusted his political judgment. He whooped himself, echoing the wild cries his pursuers made. This, at last, was war! A challenge, a race, a contest, something to stir the blood and add piquancy to days of boredom. The mare leapt a stream, gathered herself, took three or four paces, jumped a fence, then settled into a thumping gallop across a stretch of land newly plowed for winter wheat. The furrows made the going hard, but the mare seemed not to notice.

Thorne, watching the race as he rode eastward in parallel to the young men, saw at last some quality in Adam above the stolid, worried demeanor that the young Virginian usually displayed. But what Thorne saw he was not sure he liked. Adam, he thought, would seek sensation to test himself, not to amuse himself, not to taste wickedness, but simply to put himself through the crucible of his own expectations. Adam, he thought, might very well kill himself to prove that he was a good man.

But not now. Now he was humiliating a trio of Jeb Stuart's vaunted horsemen. The chase across the plowed field had widened the gap between Adam and his pursuers, so once again he slowed down and the three rebels, seeing the deliberate curbing, became even more determined to catch their mocking enemy. They could see his horse was tired and whitened by sweat and they believed that another half mile would surely bring it to a panting stop and so they raked back with sharp spurs and whooped their hunting call.

Adam slowed even more. Then, picking his path, he suddenly kicked his heels and put the mare toward a wider stream that meandered through steeply cut banks. Rushes fringed the stream, disguising where the banks ended and the stream began, but Adam, who had ridden since the day he could first straddle a pony, showed no hesitation. He did not ride hard at the wide stream, but instead let the mare look at it, pick her own pace, and then he touched her flanks to let her know what was expected of her. To Thorne, watching from afar, it seemed as if the mare was going far too slowly to clear the water, but suddenly she gathered herself and soared effortlessly across the wide run. Adam let her run out her jump on the far bank, then he turned her round and stopped to watch his pursuers.

Two of the rebels swerved aside rather than attempt the water jump. The third man, braver than his companions, kicked back his heels and attempted the jump at a gallop. His horse took off from the same spot where Adam's mare had started her jump, but the rebel's beast crashed down short to plunge into a stiff stand of reeds. The horse's front legs folded and its shoulder thumped with bone-cracking force into the hidden bank. The rider was thrown clear, sprawling in the stream and cursing as his injured horse struggled to its feet. The beast stumbled again, then screamed from the pain of its broken shoulder.

Adam touched the brim of his hat in ironic salute, then turned away. Neither of the two surviving horsemen bothered with their carbines, though the third man, splashing in the welter of mud and water being churned by his wounded horse, drew his revolver and prayed that the half dunking he had received had not soaked the powder loaded into the cylinder's chambers. He cocked the weapon, then cursed his loss. Southern cavalrymen provided their own horses, and a good horse was worth gold. His own horse was useless now, a thing in pain, a broken-shouldered gelding of no use to anyone. He grabbed the bridle and hauled the horse's head toward him. He looked into the beast's terrified eye for a heartbeat, then aimed and fired. The sound of the single shot faded across the warm countryside as the horse, a bullet in its brain, thrashed briefly, then died. "Son of a bitch," the rebel said, watching Adam ride calmly away, "son of a god damned bitch."

The train crept forward, jerking its couplings in a metallic rattle that concertinaed down the long line of cars, then it stopped again.

It was night-time. The engine panted for a few moments, then went silent. A trail of moon-silvered woodsmoke trickled from its huge-bellied funnel to drift across dark fields and black woods. Far off in the night a yellow light showed where some soul was still awake, but otherwise the land was swallowed by blackness shot through with mooncast shadows. Starbuck rubbed the pane of glass by his elbow and peered out, but he could see nothing beyond a window glazed gold by the flickering light of the car's lamps and so he stood and edged his way through the sleeping bodies to the platform at the car's rear, from where he could keep a wary eye on the dozen boxcars that formed the train's tail and which held the men of his Special Battalion. If any of his men wanted to desert, then this stuttering night-time journey gave them a prize opportunity, but the land either side of the stalled train seemed empty. He looked back up the car to see that Captain Dennison was awake and playing solitaire. His face was still not cured, but the sores had dried up and in a week or two there would be no trace of the croton oil's ravages.

It was three days since Starbuck had faced Dennison at the dueling ground, three days in which the Special Battalion had scrambled to prepare itself for this journey north, a journey that had already taken them as far as Catlett's Station, where they had disembarked from the first train and then marched five miles across country to Gainesville where they had waited until this train of the Manassas Gap Railroad had appeared. The cross-country march had saved the battalion from the chaos at Manassas where Confederate engineers were still trying to patch together the junction recaptured from the Yankees the previous month. "Consider yourself lucky," Holborrow had told Starbuck, "that they're sending you by train." The truth, Starbuck knew, was that the authorities did not believe the battalion would survive the long march north. They reckoned the men would either straggle disastrously or else desert in droves, and so the battalion was being carried in comparative luxury to where they must fight. North to Manassas, west now across the Blue Ridge Mountains, and in the morning they would face a two-day march north along the Valley Turnpike to Winchester, which had become Lee's depot for the campaign across the Potomac.

Dennison scooped the cards up, yawned, then shuffled them with practiced fingers. Starbuck, unseen, watched him. Dennison, he had discovered, had been raised by an uncle who had punished the boy because his parents had died impoverished. The result was a vast pride in Dennison, but that knowledge had not increased Starbuck's sympathy for the Captain. Dennison was an enemy pure and simple. He had been humbled by Starbuck and he would choose to take his revenge when he could. Probably, Starbuck reflected, in battle, and the thought of facing Yankee shells and bullets immediately made Starbuck shudder. The cowardice was debilitating him, sapping his confidence.

The locomotive suddenly roared. The firebox was momentarily opened so that the furnace glare blazed across the fields, then the light snapped off as the train crashed and juddered forward. Matthew Potter swayed down the crowded car and pushed open the door. "I don't think," he said, "that we've traveled faster than ten miles an hour since we left Richmond. Not once."

"It's the rails," Starbuck said. "Old, misaligned, half-loose iron rails." He spat into the darkness. "And you can bet the Yankees ain't coming toward us on broken-down rails."

Potter laughed, then offered Starbuck a lit cigar. "Do I hear an echo of Northern superiority?"

"They can build railroads up there, that's for sure. We just have to pray they don't start making soldiers half as good as ours." Starbuck drew on the cigar. "I thought you were sleeping."

"Can't," Potter said. "It must be the effect of sobriety." He half smiled. He had not taken a drop of drink in three days. "Can't say as how I feel any better," he said, "but I guess I've felt worse."

"Your wife's all right?" Starbuck asked.

"She seemed so, thanks to you," Potter said. Starbuck had inveigled Delaney into paying the Potters' arrears of rent, then he had arranged for Martha Potter to stay with Julia Gordon's parents in Richmond. Julia herself now lived at the Chimborazo Hospital where she was a nurse and Starbuck had only seen her for a few moments, but those moments had been enough to confuse him. Julia's grave intelligence made him feel shallow, gauche, and tongue-tied, and he wondered why he could summon the courage to cross a rain-soaked cornfield into the maws of Yankee guns, but could not raise the nerve to tell Julia he was besotted by her. "You're looking miserable, Major," Potter said.

"Martha will be happy enough with the Gordons," Starbuck said, ignoring the Lieutenant's comment. "The mother can be overpowering, but the Reverend Gordon is a decent man."

"But if she stays too long in that house," Potter said grimly, "I'll find myself married to a born-again Christian."

"Is that so bad?"

"Hell, it ain't exactly the quality that attracted me to Martha," Potter said with his lopsided grin. He leaned on the platform's balustrade and stared at the passing countryside. Small red sparks whirled in the locomotive's smoke trail, some sinking to the ground to lie like fallen fireflies that vanished behind as the train labored up the eastern flank of the Blue Ridge. "Poor Martha," Potter said softly.

"Why?" Starbuck asked. "She's got what she wanted, ain't she? Got a husband, got away from home."

"She got me, Major, she got me. Life's short straw." Potter shrugged. Much of the Lieutenant's charm, Starbuck had discovered, lay in just such frank admissions of unworthiness. His good looks and bad ways attracted women's compassion like moths to a candle flame, and Starbuck had watched, amazed, as both Sally and Julia had made a fuss over him. But it was not just women who tried to protect Potter, even men seemed taken by him. The Special Battalion was united in little except resent' ment, but they had combined in an extraordinary surge of protective affection for Matthew Potter. They were amused by his fallibility, envious, even, of a man who could spend three days drunk, and they had made the Georgian the battalion's unofficial mascot. Starbuck had thought the Lieutenant would prove a liability, but so far he was the best thing that had happened to the despised Yellowlegs, because Potter entertained by simply existing.

But they would need more than one charming rogue to unite them. Starbuck had done his best in the two days before this journey began. He had persuaded Colonel Hoi-borrow to produce boots, ammunition, canteens, and even the battalion's arrears of pay. He had marched the men up and down the Brook Turnpike and had rewarded them with cider from Broome's Tavern after one particularly grueling march, though he doubted that either the reward or the experience would matter much when they joined Jackson's hard-marching troops. He had made them load their antiquated muskets with buck and ball, an antiquated charge of shot that fired a musket ball with a scatter of buckshot, then he had purloined two dozen of Camp Lee's shabbiest tents to use as a target. The first volley had riddled the tents' ridges with holes but left the lower canvas almost unmarked, and Starbuck had made the men inspect the tents. "The Yankees don't stand high as a ridge," he had told them. "You're shooting high. Aim at their balls, even their knees, but aim low." They had fired a second volley and this one had ripped the worn canvas at the right height. He could spare no more ammunition for such target practice, but just hoped the Yellowlegs remembered the lesson when the men in blue were advancing.

He had talked to the men, not telling them that they were being given a second chance, but saying instead that they were needed up north. "What happened to you at Malvern Hill," he said, "could have happened to anyone. Hell, it almost happened to me at the first battle." At Malvern Hill, he had learned, part of the battalion broke and ran after a Yankee shell had struck plumb on their Colonel's horse while he was leading them forward. The horse had been torn into bloody shreds that had blown back into the faces of the center companies, and that shock introduction to war had been enough to scare a handful of men into full retreat. The others, thinking they were being ambushed, followed. They were not the first battalion to inexplicably break into flight, but it was their misfortune to do it a long way from where the real fighting was going on and in full view of a score of other battalions. The shame clung to them still and Starbuck knew that only battle could wash it away. "The time will come," he told the battalion, "when men will be proud to say they were a Yellowleg."

Starbuck had talked to the officers and then to the sergeants. The officers had been sullen and the sergeants uncooperative. "The men ain't ready for battle," Sergeant Case insisted.

"No one's ready," Starbuck had answered, "but we've still got to fight- If we wait till we're ready, Sergeant Case, the Yankees will have conquered us."

"Ain't conquered us yet," Case answered, "and from what I hear, sir," he managed to invest the honorific with a dripping scorn, "we're the ones doing the conquering. Just ain't proper to take these poor boys off to a war they ain't ready to fight."

"I thought you were supposed to have got them ready," Starbuck said, unwisely letting himself be drawn into the argument.

"We're doing our job, sir," Case said, carefully enrolling the other sergeants onto his side of the argument, "but as any regular soldier will tell you, sir, a good sergeant's work can be undone in a minute by a glory-boy." He offered Starbuck a feral grin. "Glory-boy, sir. Young officer wanting to be famous, sir, and expecting the lads to die for his fame. Bloody shame, sir."

"We go tomorrow," Starbuck had said, ignoring Case. "The men will cook three days of rations and draw ammunition tonight." He had walked away, ignoring Case's snort of derision. Starbuck knew he had handled the confrontation badly. Another enemy, he thought wearily, another damned enemy.

"So what's happening?" Potter now asked as the train swayed up the incline.

"Wish I knew."

"But we're going to fight?"

"I reckon."

"But we don't know where."

Starbuck shook his head. "Get to Winchester and fetch new orders. That's what I'm told."

Potter drew on his cigar. "You reckon the men are ready to fight?" he asked.

"Do you?" Starbuck turned the question back.

"No."

"Nor me," Starbuck admitted. "But if we'd waited all winter they wouldn't be any more ready. It ain't their training that's wrong, it's their morale."

"Shoot Sergeant Case, that'll cheer them up," Potter suggested.

"Give them a battle," Starbuck said. "Give them a victory." Though how he was to do that with his present officers and sergeants, he did not know. Even to get the men as far as a battlefield, Starbuck thought, would be some kind of miracle. "You were at Shiloh, right?" he asked Potter.

"I was," Potter said, "but I have to confess it was mostly a blur. I wasn't exactly drunk, but sober don't describe it either. But I do remember an exhilaration, which is odd, don't you think? But George Washington said the same, do you remember? When he wrote how he was elated by the sound of bullets? Is it, you think, because we seek sensation? Like being a gambler?"

"I reckon I've wagered enough," Starbuck said grimly.

"Ah," Potter said, understanding. "I only had the one battle."

"Manassas twice," Starbuck said bleakly, "God knows how many times in the defense of Richmond, Leesburg, the fight at Cedar Mountain. Some brawl in the rain a few days back," he shrugged. "Enough."

"But more to come," Potter said.

"Yes." Starbuck spat a shred of tobacco under the train wheels. "And still there are some sons of bitches who think I can't be trusted because I'm a Yankee."

"So why are you fighting for the South?" Potter asked.

"That, Potter," Starbuck said, "is a question I don't need to answer."

The two men fell silent as the train wheels screeched on a curve. The stink of a hot axle-box's grease soured the woodsmoke aroma of the locomotive. They had climbed high enough now for the eastern land to lie revealed beneath the moon. A scatter of tiny lights showed faraway villages or farms, while the livid glow of small grass fires betrayed the double-curving path the train had followed up the gentle slope. "You ever done any skirmishing?" Starbuck asked suddenly. "No."

"Reckon you could handle it?" Starbuck asked.

Potter, faced with a serious question, seemed nonplussed. "Why me?" he finally asked.

"Because the captain in charge of skirmishers has to be an independent son of a bitch who ain't afraid to take risks, that's why."

"A captain?" Potter asked.

"You heard me."

Potter drew on his cigar. "Sure," he said, "I guess."

"You get your own company," Starbuck said. "Forty men. You get the thirty rifles, too." He had been thinking about this all day and finally decided to take the plunge. None of the four existing captains struck him as men willing to take on responsibility, but Potter had an impudent nature that might fit him for the skirmish line. "You know what skirmishers do?"

"Crudely," Potter said.

"You go out ahead of the battalion. Spread out, use cover, and shoot the damn Yankee skirmishers. You fight those sons of bitches hard to push them back so you can start killing their main battle line before the rest of us arrive. Win the skirmisher's battle, Potter, and you're halfway to winning the real thing." He paused to suck smoke into his lungs. "We won't announce it till we've done a day's real marching. Let's see which men can take the pace and which can't. There's no point in putting weaklings into the skirmish line."

"I assume," Potter said, "that you were a skirmisher?"

"For a time, yes."

"Then I shall be honored."

"Damn the honor," Starbuck said. "Just stay sober and shoot straight."

"Yes, sir." Potter grinned. "Martha will be pleased to be a captain's wife."

"So don't disappoint her."

"I fear my darling Martha is doomed to disappointment. She believes it is possible, even essential, for all of us to be Sunday school good. Honesty is the best policy, she tells me, a stitch in time saves nine, never a borrower nor a lender be, be honest as the day is long, do unto others, and all that noble stuff, but I'm not sure any of that's possible if you have a thirst and a little imagination." He tossed the stub of his cigar off the platform. "Do you ever wish the war would last forever?"

"No."

"I do. Someone to feed me, to clothe me, to pick me up every time my wings fold. You know what I'm frightened of, Starbuck? I'm frightened of peace, when there'll be no army to be my refuge. There'll just be people expecting me to make a living. Now that's hard, that's hard, that's real cruel, that is. What the hell will I do?"

"Work," Starbuck said.

Potter laughed. "And what will you do, Major Starbuck?" he asked knowingly.

Hell if I know, Starbuck thought, hell if I know. "Work," he said grimly.

"Stern Major Starbuck," Potter said, but Starbuck had gone back into the car. Potter shook his head and watched the passing night and thought of all the trains clanking and banging and thrusting through this night carrying their loads of blue-coated troops to meet this train that rattled and screeched and shuddered its lonely way north.

All mad, he thought, all mad. As flies to wanton boys. He could have wept.

If there was one thing that terrified Belvedere Delaney it was the fear of being discovered and captured, for he knew only too well what his fate would be. The cell in a Richmond prison, the merciless questions, the trial before scornful men, and the vengeful crowd staring white-faced at the high scaffold where he would stand with a rope about his neck. He had heard that men pissed themselves when they were hung, and that if the executioner bungled the job, and the executioner usually did bungle it, then death was agonizingly slow. The onlookers would jeer while he pissed himself and as the rope bit into his neck. The very thought made his bowels feel liquid.

He was no hero. He had never thought of himself as a hero, but merely as a quick-witted, amoral, genial sort of fellow. It amused him to make money, just as it amused him to be generous. Every man thought Delaney a friend, and Delaney took care to keep it that way. He disliked rancor, reserving his enmities for his private thoughts, and if he did wish to hurt someone he would do it so secretly that the victim would never suspect that Delaney had engineered the misfortune. It was thus that Delaney had betrayed Starbuck during the North's spring campaign to capture Richmond, and Starbuck had come as close as a whisker to a Northern scaffold, and Delaney would have genuinely regretted that fate, but he had never once regretted his part in so nearly causing it. Delaney had been pleased when Starbuck returned, delighted even, for he liked Starbuck, but he would still betray him tomorrow if he thought there was profit in the treachery. Delaney did not feel badly about such a contradiction; he did not even perceive it as a contradiction, merely as fate. Some

Englishman had just written a book that was upsetting all the preachers because it implied that man, like all other species, had not originated in a divine moment of creation, but was muckily descended from God knows what primitive things with tails and claws and bloody teeth. Delaney could not recall the author's name, but one phrase from his book had lodged in Delaney's mind: the survival of the fittest. Well, Delaney would survive.

And survival was his own responsibility, which was why Belvedere Delaney took such exquisite care not to betray his own treachery. Colonel Thorne knew he was a Northern spy, and maybe Thorne had confided in one or two others, though Delaney had asked him not to, but other than Thorne the only human being who knew Delaney's true loyalty was his manservant, George. Delaney was punctilious in describing George as a manservant, he never called him a slave, though he was one, and he treated George with a grave courtesy. "We make each other comfortable," Delaney liked to say, and George, hearing the description, would concur with a smile. When visitors came to Delaney's exquisite apartment on Richmond's Grace Street the servant would behave like any other, though when Delaney and George were alone it seemed they were more like companions than master and slave, and some shrewd folk had scented that closeness and were amused by it. It was simply another part of Delaney's eccentricities and they supposed that master and slave would grow old together and that, if Delaney died first, George would inherit much of his master's wealth along with his own freedom. George had even taken Delaney as his surname.

On the occasions when Delaney had cause to send news to Thorne it had always been George who took the risks. It was George who carried the messages to the man in

Richmond who passed them on northward, but George could not carry the messages now. George was as uncomfortable as his master at being among the rebel army, and George had no skills that could take him through a soldier's picket line. George could dress a salad, roast a duck, or whip up an exquisite custard. He could reduce a sauce to perfection, had a nose for fine wine, and could play with equal facility upon a flute or violin. He could take a coat made at Richmond's finest tailors and, with a few hours' work, so remake it that a man would swear it came from Paris or London. George had a connoisseur's eye for fine porcelain and many a time he had returned to Delaney's apartment with news of a fine piece of Meissen or Limoges being sold by a family impoverished by the war and which would fill a gap in his master's collection, but George Delaney was no man for hiding in thickets like a sharpshooter or riding across country like one of Jeb Stuart's cavaliers.

And those, Delaney knew, were the skills he would need if he was ever to send any useful intelligence to Thorne. Weeks before, when Thorne had despaired of the North's ability to spy on its foe and had demanded that Delaney somehow inveigle himself into Lee's headquarters, Delaney had foreseen the problem. George lacked the skills to carry the messages, while Delaney lacked both the skills and the nerve, and so Delaney had suggested that Adam Faulconer should be the courier, yet even Delaney had not yet devised any means of actually contacting Adam. It was all so very frustrating.

As Delaney had journeyed north he had not let the problem worry him. He very much doubted whether he would discover any intelligence worth passing on to Thorne; indeed the whole expedition, to both Delaney and to George, was a desperate inconvenience, but

Delaney knew he needed to show willingness if he was ever to garner the rewards of his secret allegiance, and so the lawyer had resigned himself to a few weeks of discomfort after which he could return home, soak in a hot bath, sip cognac, and smoke one of his carefully hoarded French cigarettes before sending a message to Thorne in the old safe manner. That message would regret his silence of the past few weeks and explain that he had discovered nothing worth passing along.

Only now he had discovered something. Indeed, within minutes of arriving at Lee's headquarters, Delaney knew he held the fate of North and South in his hand. Damn it, but Thorne had been right all along. There was a place in Lee's headquarters for a spy, and Delaney was that spy, and Delaney now knew everything that Robert Lee planned and Delaney might as well have been on the far side of the moon for all the. ability either he or George possessed to send that information to the Northern army.

Delaney had caught up with Lee's men at Frederick, a fine town that lay among wide Maryland fields. Nine streets ran east and west, six north and south, a concentration sufficient to persuade the inhabitants that their town should properly be called Frederick City, a name that was proudly painted above the depot of the spur line that ran north from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The spur had carried the region's fat harvest of wheat and oats east to Baltimore and south to Washington, leaving only the corn waiting for harvest, though now much of that crop had been stripped by hungry rebels. "I'd rather find shoes than corn," Colonel Chilton said querulously. Chilton was a Virginian and, like any senior officer who had been stationed in Richmond, was well known to Delaney. Chilton, a fussy man in his middle forties, was now Lee's chief of staff, a position he had gained through his punctilious diligence rather than from any flair for soldiering. "So Richmond sends us a lawyer instead of shoes," he greeted Delaney's arrival.

"Alas," Delaney said, spreading his hands. "I would it were otherwise. How are you, sir?"

"Well enough, I suppose, considering the heat," Chilton said grudgingly, "and you, Delaney? Never expected to see a fellow like you in the field."

Delaney took off his hat, ducked into Chilton's tent, and accepted the offer of a chair. The shade of the canvas offered small respite from the heat wave that had made his journey a hell of dust and sweat. "I'm well," he answered and then, asked to explain his presence, launched himself into his well-rehearsed rigmarole about the War Department being concerned about the legal repercussions of actions that, if undertaken on Confederate soil, might be considered felonious, but that, done to the enemy, fell into an unknown category. "It is terra incognita, as we lawyers would say," Delaney finished lamely. He fanned his face with his hat brim. "You wouldn't, I suppose, have any lemonade?"

"Water in the jug," Chilton gestured at a battered enamel pot, "sweet enough to drink without boiling. Not like Mexico!" Chilton liked to remind people that he had served in that victorious war. "And I can assure you, Delaney, that this headquarters knows quite well how to treat enemy civilians. We're not barbarians, despite what those damned newspapers in the North say of us. Carter!" he shouted toward an adjacent tent. "Bring me Order One-ninety-one."

A sweating clerk with ink-stained hands came to the tent with the required order, which Chilton scanned quickly, then thrust into Delaney's hands. "There, read it for yourself," the Chief of Staff said. "I'll be back in a few moments."

Delaney, left alone in the tent, almost did not bother to read beyond the first paragraph of the order, which was headed "Special Orders, No. 191. Hdqrs. Army of Northern Virginia. September 9, 1862." In pencil, next to the heading, a clerk had written "Gen. D. H. Hill." The first paragraph, which Delaney idly scanned, was a prohibition against soldiers going into the town of Frederick without written permission from their divisional commander. A provost guard was stationed in the town to enforce the order, which was designed to allay the inhabitants' fears about being overrun and looted by a rapacious horde of half-starving, ill-dressed soldiers. The paragraph entirely met the manufactured concerns that justified Delaney's presence in the army. "And quite right, too," Delaney said to no one in particular, though in truth he would not have cared if the soldiery had dismantled Frederick City shingle by shingle.

He poured himself a mug of warm water, drank, grimaced at the taste, then, for lack of anything else to read, went back to the order. The second paragraph arranged that local farm vehicles be commandeered to transport the army's sick to Winchester. "Poor bastards," Delaney said, trying to imagine the rigors of a fever-racked journey in a dung-stinking farm wagon. He fanned himself with the order, wondering where in hell Chilton had vanished. He leaned forward to look out of the tent and saw George standing stiffly beside the horses, but no sign of Chilton.

He leaned back and read paragraph three. "The army will resume its march tomorrow," the paragraph began, and suddenly Delaney went chill as his eyes scanned the rest of the closely written page. The order might have begun with commonplace arrangements for policing the army and providing transport for its wounded, but it ended with a complete description of everything Robert Lee planned to do in the next few days. Everything. Every destination of every division in all the army.

"Sweet Jesus," Delaney said, and was overcome by a rush of terror as he thought what would follow his capture. One part of him wanted to thrust the order away and pretend he had never seen it, while another yearned after the glory that would surely be his if he could just smuggle this paper across the lines.

General Jackson will recross the river and, by Friday morning, take possession of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. He would occupy Martinsburg and cut off the road by which the Federal garrison at Harper's Ferry might retreat.

General Longstreet was ordered to advance to Boonsborough, wherever in hell that might be. General McLaws would follow Longstreet, but then branch off to help capture Harper's Ferry. General Walker was to cooperate with Jackson and McLaws by cutting off another road to Harper's Ferry, and once that Northern garrison was taken, the three generals were to join the rest of the army at Boonsborough or Hagerstown. Hagerstown? Delaney's geography was shaky, but he was fairly certain Hagerstown was a Maryland town close to the Pennsylvania border while Harper's Ferry was in Virginia! Which surely meant one part of Lee's army was going north, the other south, and so leaving the two parts vulnerable to separate attacks.

Delaney's hands felt almost nerveless. The paper fluttered. He closed his eyes. Maybe, he told himself, he did not understand these things. He was no soldier. Perhaps it made sense to split an army? But it wasn't his responsibility to decide if it made sense, but merely to send this news to the Northern army. Copy it, you fool, he told himself, but just as he opened his eyes to search Chilton's table for a pen or pencil, he heard footsteps outside the tent.

"Delaney!" a cheerful voice called.

Delaney ducked out of the tent to see that Chilton had returned with General Lee himself. For a moment the usually suave Delaney was lost in confusion. The order was still in his hand, and that flustered him, then he remembered he had been given it by Chilton and so no guilt could be attached to its possession. "Good to see you, General," Delaney finally managed to greet Lee.

"You'll forgive me if I don't shake hands?" Lee said, holding up his splinted and bandaged hands as explanation. "I had an altercation with Traveller. Well on the mend, now. And the other good news is that McClellan is back in command of the Federals."

"I heard as much," Delaney acknowledged.

"Which means our foes will dawdle," Lee said with satisfaction. "McClellan is a man of undoubted virtues, but decision-making is not one of them. Chilton tells me you're here to make sure we behave ourselves?"

Delaney smiled. "I'm truly here, General, because I wanted to see some action." He told the lie smoothly. "Otherwise," he continued, brushing his gray coat, "it would seem to me that this uniform is not properly earned."

Lee returned the smile. "Witness your action, Delaney, by all means, but don't get too close to McClellan's men, for I should be sorry to lose you. You'll dine tonight?" He turned as the clerk who had brought the copy of Order 191 to Chilton's tent reappeared with a sheaf of envelopes that he hesitantly held toward Colonel Chilton. "That's the order?" Lee asked Chilton.

"Seven copies," the clerk confirmed, "and Colonel

Chilton's original is in that gentleman's possession," he indicated Delaney, who guiltily flourished the original copy.

"Eight copies in all?" Lee frowned and took the envelopes from the clerk and, as swiftly as his awkward bandages allowed, leafed through them to read the addressees' names. "Do we need one for Daniel Hill?" Lee asked, flourishing the empty envelope addressed to General D. H. Hill that was evidently waiting for the original copy of the order in Delaney's hand. "Jackson will surely copy Hill the relevant parts?" Lee said.

"Best to be sure, General," Chilton said soothingly, retrieving the envelopes from the General and the single copy from Delaney. He folded the order and slipped it inside the envelope.

"You know best," Lee said. "So, Delaney, what news from Richmond?"

Delaney retailed some government gossip while Chilton placed the last copy of Order 191 in General Hill's envelope, which he laid with the others at the edge of a table just inside his tent. Lee, in affable mood, was telling Delaney his hopes for the next few days. "I'd have liked to march north into Pennsylvania, but for some reason the Federals have left their garrison in Harper's Ferry. That's a nuisance. It means we have to snap them up before we march north, but the delay can't be long and I doubt McClellan will summon the nerve to interfere. And once we've cleared Harper's Ferry we'll be free to make a nuisance of ourselves. We'll cut some Pennsylvania rail roads, Delaney, while McClellan makes up his mind what to do about us. In the end he'll have to fight and when he does I pray we can so mangle him that Lincoln will sue for peace. There's no other point in coming north, except to make peace." The General made this last pronouncement gravely for, like many other Southerners, he worried about the propriety of invading the United States. The legitimacy of the Confederacy's war depended on being the aggrieved party. They proclaimed that they merely defended their land against an external aggressor, and many men questioned their right to carry that defense outside their border.

Lee stayed a moment or two longer with Delaney, then turned away. "Colonel Chilton? A word?"

Chilton had been summoning the dispatch riders, but now followed Lee across to the General's tent. Delaney was again left alone and the bowel-loosening terror almost swamped him as he looked at the pile of orders awaiting dispatch. General Hill's envelope was uppermost on the pile. Dear God, Delaney thought, but dare he do it? And if he did, how would he ever send the stolen order across the lines? His hand was shaking, then an idea struck him and he ducked into Chilton's tent and sorted through the piles of paper on the trestle desk. He found a copy of Lee's proclamation to the people of Maryland and that, he reckoned, would have to serve his purpose. He folded the proclamation twice, hesitated, looked into the innocent sunlight, then snatched up the envelope with Hill's name. It was still unsealed. He took out the order, inserted the proclamation, then pushed the stolen paper deep into a pocket of his jacket. His heart was thumping terribly as he placed the still unsealed envelope back on the pile and then stepped out into the sunlight.

"You look feverish, Delaney," Chilton said, returning to his tent.

"It will pass, I'm sure." Delaney sounded weak. He was amazed he could even stand upright. He thought of the gallows' raw pine beams oozing turpentine and dangling with a noose of rough-haired hemp. "The heat of the journey," he explained, "brought on a stomach fever, nothing else."

"Tell your man to add your baggage to ours. I'll give you a tent, then get some rest. I'll send you some vitriol for your stomach if it's still troubling you. You're dining tonight with us?" Chilton spoke about these domestic arrangements as he gummed a wafer over the unsealed envelope's flap. He had not looked inside the envelope and so had not detected Delaney's substitution. "Signatures, gentlemen," he reminded the junior officers who would now carry the orders to their destinations. "Make sure they're all signed for. On your way, now!"

The staff officers rode away. Delaney wondered if Hill would think it odd to receive Lee's proclamation, for surely he would already have received his own copy of the document that tried to justify the South's invasion of the North. "Our army has come among you," the proclamation said, "and is prepared to assist you with the power of its arms in regaining the rights of which you have been despoiled." But Delaney, if he was not caught, and if he could just devise a way of reaching Thorne or Adam Faulconer, would despoil the South of its victory. There would be no peace, no truce, no Southern triumph; just Northern victory, complete, crushing, and implacable.

If only Delaney knew how to achieve it.