I TRAINED. IT HAD RAINED ALL DAY. AT FIRST IT HAD BEEN a quick, warm rain gusted by fitful southern winds, but in the late afternoon the wind had turned east and the rain became malevolent. It pelted down; a stinging, slashing, heavy rain fit to float an ark. It drummed on the armies’ inadequate tents; it flooded the abandoned Yankee earthworks at Centreville; and it washed the shallow dirt off the grave mounds beside the Bull Run so that an army of fish-white corpses, scarcely a day or two buried, surfaced like the dead on Judgment Day. The Virginia dirt was red, and the water that poured in ever-widening muddy streams toward the Chesapeake Bay took on the color of the soil so that it seemed as if the whole tidewater was being drenched in blood. It was the first day of September 1862. The sun would not set on Washington till thirty-four minutes after six, yet by half past three the gas mantles had been lit in the White House, Pennsylvania Avenue was a foot deep in mud, and the open sewers of Swampoodle were overflowing. In the capitol the rain slashed through the beams and scaffolding of the half-finished dome to pour onto the newly arrived wounded from the North’s defeat at Manassas, who lay in misery on the rotunda’s marble floor.

Twenty miles west of Washington more fugitives from John Pope’s beaten army trudged toward the safety of the capital. Rebels tried to bar their road, but rain turned the confrontation into confusion. Infantrymen huddled for shelter under soaking trees, artillerymen cursed their rain-soaked powder charges, cavalrymen tried to calm horses terrified by the bolts of lightning that raked from the heavy clouds. Major Nathaniel Starbuck, commander of the Faulconer Legion of Swynyard’s Brigade of Jackson’s Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, was trying to keep a cartridge dry as he poured its powder into his rifle. He tried to protect the cartridge with his hat, but the hat was drenched and the powder that he shook from the wax paper was suspiciously lumpy. He shoved the crumpled paper onto the powder, spat the bullet into the rifle’s muzzle, then rammed the charge hard down. He pulled back the hammer, fished a percussion cap from the box at his belt and fitted it onto the rifle’s cone, then took aim through the silver sheeting of the rain. His regiment was at the edge of a dripping wood, facing north across a rain-beaten cornfield toward another stand of trees where the Yankees sheltered. There was no target in Starbuck’s sights, but he pulled the trigger anyway. The hammer thumped onto the percussion cap that exploded to puff its little wisp of smoke, but the powder in the rifle’s breech obstinately refused to catch the fire. Starbuck swore. He eased back the hammer, prised the shattered percussion cap off the cone, and put another in its place. He tried again, but still the rifle would not fire. “Might as well throw rocks at the bastards,” he said to no one in particular. A rifle fired from the far trees, but the bullet’s passage through the leaves over Starbuck’s head was drowned by the thrashing rain. Starbuck crouched with his useless rifle and wondered what the hell he was supposed to do now.

What he was supposed to do now was cross the cornfield and drive the Yankees out of the farther trees, but the Yankees had at least one regiment and a pair of field guns in that far wood and Starbuck’s combat-shrunken regiment had already been bloodied by those two guns. At first, as the Legion had waded into the tangle of rain-drenched corn stalks, Starbuck had thought the guns’ noise was merely thunder; then he had seen that his left-hand companies were being shredded and broken and he had noticed the Yankee gunners handspiking their weapons about to take the rest of the Legion in the flank. He had ordered his men to fire on the guns, but only a handful of rifles had powder dry enough to fire, and so he had yelled at the survivors to go back before the artillery fired again and then he had listened to the Northerners jeering at his defeated men. Now, twenty minutes later, he was still trying to find a way across or around the cornfield, but the ground to the left was an open space commanded by the enemy guns while the woods to the right were filled with still more Yankees.

The Legion plainly did not care if the Yankees stayed or went, for rain was their enemy now, not the North. Starbuck, as he walked toward the left-hand end of his line, noticed how the men took care not to catch his eye. They were praying he would not order another attack, for none of them wanted to stir out of the trees and go back into the water-logged corn. All they wanted was for the rain to stop and for a chance to make fires and a time to sleep. Above all to sleep. In the last month they had marched the length and breadth of Virginia’s northern countries; they had fought; they had beaten the enemy; they had marched and fought again; and now they were weary with marching and fighting. Their uniforms were rags, their boots were in tatters, their rations were moudly, and they were bone tired, and so far as Starbuck’s men were concerned the Yankees could keep the rain-soaked wood beyond the cornfield. They just wanted to rest. Some of them were sleeping now, despite the rain. They lay like the dead at the wood’s edge, their mouths open to the rain, and their beards and moustaches lank and dripping. Other men, truly dead, lay as though asleep in the bloodied corn.

“I thought we were winning this damned war,” Captain Ethan Davies greeted Starbuck.

“If it doesn’t stop raining,” Starbuck said, “we’ll let the damned navy come and win it for us. Can you see the guns?”

“They’re still there.” Davies jerked his head toward the dark wood.

“Bastards,” Starbuck said. He was angry with himself for not having seen the guns before ordering the first attack. The two cannon had been concealed behind a breastwork of branches, but he still cursed himself for not having suspected the ambush. The small Yankee victory galled him and the gall was worsened by an uncertainty whether the attack had really been necessary, for no one else seemed to be fighting. An occasional gun sounded somewhere in the bleak, wet gloom, and sometimes a rattle of musketry sounded over the crashing rain, but those sounds had nothing to do with Starbuck and he had received no further orders from Colonel Swynyard since the first urgent command to cross the cornfield. Perhaps, Starbuck hoped, the whole battle had been soaked into stalemate. Perhaps no one cared anymore. The enemy had been going back to Washington anyway so why not just let them go? “How do you know the guns haven’t gone?” he asked Davies.

“They tell us from time to time,” Davies answered laconically.

“Maybe they have gone,” Starbuck said, but no sooner had he spoken than one of the Yankee field guns fired. It had been loaded with canister, a tin cylinder crammed with musket balls that shredded apart at the gun’s muzzle to scatter its missiles like a giant charge of buckshot, and the balls ripped through the trees above Starbuck. The gun had been aimed fractionally too high and its fire wounded no one, but the blast of metal cascaded a deluge of water and leaves onto Starbuck’s miserable infantrymen. Starbuck, crouching low beside Davies, shivered from the unwanted shower. “Bastards,” he said again, but the useless curse was drowned by a crack of thunder that split the sky and rumbled into silence. “There was a time,” Starbuck said sourly, “when I thought guns sounded like thunder. Now I think thunder sounds like guns.” He considered that thought for a second. “How often did you ever hear a cannon in peacetime?”

“Never,” Davies said. His spectacles were mottled with rainwater. “Except maybe on the Fourth.”

“The Fourth and Evacuation Day,” Starbuck said.

“Evacuation Day?” Davies asked, never having heard of it.

“March seventeenth,” Starbuck said. “It’s the day we kicked the English out of Boston. There are cannon and fireworks in Boston Garden.” Starbuck was a Bostonian, a northerner who fought for the rebel South against his own kind. He did not fight out of political conviction, but rather because the accidents of youth had stranded him in the South when the war began and now, a year and a half later, he was a major in the Confederate army. He was barely older than most of the boys he led, and younger than many, but a year and a half of battles had put a grim maturity into his lean, dark face. By rights, he sometimes reflected wonderingly, he should still be studying for the ministry at Yale’s Divinity School, but instead he was crouched in a soaking wet uniform beside a soaking wet cornfield plotting how to kill some soaking wet Yankees who had managed to kill some of his men. “How many dry charges can you muster?” he asked Davies.

“A dozen,” Davies answered dubiously, “maybe.”

“Load ’em up and wait here. When I give the order I want you to kill those damn gunners. I’ll fetch you some help.” He slapped Davies’s back and ran back into the trees, then worked his way further west until he reached A Company and Captain Truslow, a short, thick-set, and indefatigable man whom Starbuck had promoted from sergeant to captain just weeks before. “Any dry cartridges?” Starbuck asked as he dropped beside the captain.

“Plenty.” Truslow spat tobacco juice into a puddle. “Been holding out fire till you needed it.”

“Full of tricks, aren’t you?” Starbuck said, pleased.

“Full of sense,” Truslow said dourly.

“I want one volley into the gunners. You and Davies kill the gunners and I’ll take the rest of the Legion over the field.”

Truslow nodded. He was a taciturn man, a widower, and as hard as the hill farm he had left to fight against the Northern invaders.

“Wait for my order,” Starbuck added, then backed into the trees again, though there was small respite from the rain under the thick leaf cover that had long before been soaked by the downpour. It seemed impossible for rain to go on this venomously for this long, but there seemed to be no diminution to the cloudburst that beat on the trees with its sustained and demonic force. Lightning flickered to the south, then a crash of thunder sounded so loud overhead that Starbuck flinched from the noise. A slash of pain whipped across his face and he staggered back, dropped to his knees, and clapped a hand to his left cheek. When he took his hand away he saw that his palm was covered in blood. For a moment he just stared helplessly at the blood being diluted and washed off his hand, then, when he tried to stand, he discovered that he was too weak. He was shaking and he thought he was going to vomit, then he feared his bowels would empty. He was making a pathetic mewing noise, like a wounded kitten. One part of his mind knew that he was not in any trouble, that the wound was slight, that he could see and think and breathe, but still he could not control the shaking, though he did manage to stop the stupid kitten noise and take in a deep breath of humid air. He took another breath, wiped more blood from his cheek, and forced himself to stand. The thunder, he realized, had not been thunder at all, but a blast of canister from the second Yankee gun, and one of the canister’s musket balls had driven a splinter from a tree trunk that had razored his face to the cheekbone. An inch higher and he would have lost an eye, but instead the wound was clean and trivial, though it had still left Starbuck quivering and frightened. Alone in the trees he leaned for an instant on the scarred trunk and closed his eyes. Get me out of here alive, he prayed, do that and I’ll never sin again.

He felt ashamed of himself. He had reacted to the scratch as though it had been a mortal wound, but still he felt bowel-threatening spasms of fear as he walked east toward his right-hand companies. Those companies were the least loyal, the companies that resented being commanded by a renegade Yankee, and those were the companies he would have to provoke out of their miserable shelters into the open cornfield. Their reluctance to attack was not just a question of loyalty, but also the natural instinct of wet, tired, and miserable men to crouch motionless rather than offer themselves to enemy rifles. “Bayonets!” Starbuck shouted as he passed behind the line of men. “Fix bayonets!” He was warning them that they would have to advance again and he heard grumbling coming from some of the soldiers, but he ignored their sullen defiance, for he did not know if he was in a fit state to confront it. He feared his voice would crack like a child’s if he turned on them. He wondered what in God’s name was happening to him. One small scratch and he was reduced to shivering helplessness! He told himself it was just the rain that had soaked his tiredness into pure misery. Like his men he needed a rest, just as he needed time to reshape the Legion and to scatter the troublemakers into different companies, but the speed of the campaign in northern Virginia was denying Lee’s army the luxury of time.

The campaign had started when the North’s John Pope had begun a ponderous advance on Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. That advance had been checked, then destroyed at the second battle to be fought on the banks of the Bull Run, and now Lee’s army was pushing the remaining Yankees back toward the Potomac River. With any luck, Starbuck thought, the Yankees would cross into Maryland and the Confederate army would be given the days it so desperately needed to draw breath and to find boots and coats for men who looked more like a rabble of vagabond tramps than an army. Yet the vagabonds had done all that their country had demanded of them. They had blunted and destroyed the Yankees’ latest attempt to capture Richmond and now they were driving the larger Northern army out of the Confederacy altogether.

He found Lieutenant Waggoner at the right-hand end of the line. Peter Waggoner was a good man, a pious soldier who lived with a rifle in one hand and a Bible in the other, and if any of his company showed cowardice they would be hit by one of those two formidable weapons. Lieutenant Coffman, a mere boy, was crouching beside Waggoner and Starbuck sent him to fetch the captains of the other right-flank companies. Waggoner frowned at Starbuck. “Are you all right, sir?”

“A scratch, just a scratch,” Starbuck said. He licked his cheek, tasting salty blood.

“You’re awful pale,” Waggoner said.

“This rain’s the first decent wash I’ve had in two weeks,” Starbuck said. The shaking had stopped, but he nevertheless felt like an actor as he grinned at Waggoner. He was pretending not to be frightened and pretending that all was well, but his mind was as skittish as an unbroken colt. He turned away from the Lieutenant and peered into the eastern trees, searching for the rest of Swynyard’s Brigade. “Is anyone still there?” he asked Waggoner.

“Haxall’s men. They ain’t doing nothing.”

“Keeping dry, eh?”

“Never known rain like it,” Waggoner grumbled. “It never rains when you want it. Never in spring. Always rains just before harvest or when you’re cutting hay.” A rifle fired from the Yankee wood and the bullet thudded into a maple behind Waggoner. The big man frowned resentfully toward the Yankees almost as though he felt the bullet was a discourtesy. “You got any idea where we are?” he asked Starbuck.

“Somewhere near the Flatlick,” Starbuck said, “wherever the hell that is.” He only knew that the Flatlick ran somewhere in Northern Virginia. They had pitched the Yankees out of their entrenchments in Centreville and were now trying to capture a ford the Northerners were using for their retreat, though Starbuck had seen neither stream nor road all day. Colonel Swynyard had told him that the stream was called the Flatlick Branch, though the Colonel had not been really sure of that. “You ever heard of the Flatlick?” Starbuck now asked Waggoner.

“Never heard of it,” Waggoner said. Waggoner, like most of the Legion, came from the middle part of Virginia and had no knowledge of these approaches to Washington.

It took Starbuck a half hour to arrange the attack. It should have taken only minutes, but the rain made everyone slow and Captain Moxey inevitably argued that the attack was a waste of time because it was bound to fail like the first. Moxey was a young, bitter man who resented Starbuck’s promotion. He was unpopular with most of the Legion, but on this rainy afternoon he was only saying what most of the men believed. They did not want to fight. They were too wet and cold and tired to fight, and even Starbuck was tempted to give in to the lethargy, but he sensed, despite his fear, that if a man yielded to terror once then he would yield again and again until he had no courage left. Soldiering, Starbuck had learned, was not about being comfortable, and commanding a regiment was not about giving men what they wanted, but about forcing them to do what they had never believed possible. Soldiering was about winning, and no victory every came from sheltering at a wood’s edge in the slathering rain. “We’re going,” he told Moxey flatly. “Those are our orders, and we’re damned well going.” Moxey shrugged as if to suggest that Starbuck was being a fool.

It took still more time for the four right-flank companies to ready themselves. They fixed bayonets, then shuffled to the corn’s edge, where a vast puddle was churning with water flooding from between the furrows. The Yankee guns had fired sporadically during the long moments when Starbuck had been preparing the Legion, each shot sending a blistering cloud of canister into the Southern-held trees as a means of dissuading the Confederates from any thoughts of hostility. The cannon fire left a sulphurous cloud of gunsmoke that drifted in the rain like mist. It was getting darker and darker, an unnaturally early twilight brought on by the sodden gray clouds. Starbuck positioned himself at the left-hand side of the attackers, closest to the Yankee guns, drew his bayonet, and slotted it onto his rifle’s muzzle. He wore no sword and carried no badges of rank, while his revolver, which might betray him to the Yankees as a Confederate officer, was holstered at his back where the enemy could not see it. He made sure the bayonet was firm on the rifle, then cupped his hands. “Davies! Truslow!” he shouted, wondering how any voice could cut through the pelting rain and gusting wind.

“Hear you!” Truslow called back.

Starbuck hesitated. Once he shouted the next command he committed himself to battle and he was suddenly assailed with another racking bout of shivering. The fear was sapping him, but he forced himself to draw breath and shout the order. “Fire!”

The volley sounded feeble, a mere crackle of rifles like the snapping of cornstalks, but Starbuck, to his surprise, found himself on his feet and shoving forward into the corn. “Come on!” he shouted at the men nearest him as he struggled through the stiff, tangling stalks. “Come on!” He knew he had to lead this attack and he could only hope that the Legion was following him. He heard some men crashing through the crop near him and Peter Waggoner was roaring encouragement from the right flank, but Starbuck could also hear the sergeants shouting at the laggards to get up and go forward. Those shouts told him that some men were still cowering in the shelter of the trees, but he dared not turn round to see how many were following him in case those followers should think that he was giving up the advance. The attack was ragged, but it was launched now and Starbuck forced himself blindly on, expecting a bullet at any second. One of his men raised a feeble rebel yell, but no one else took it up. They were all too tired and wet to shrill the defiant call.

A bullet flickered through the bent corn tops, shedding water from the drooping cobs as it whipped across the field. The cannon were silent and Starbuck had a terror that the two guns were being slewed round to enfilade his attack. He shouted again, urging his men on, but the attack could only go at a slow walking pace, for the field was too muddy and the corn too entangling to let the men run. Other than the one rifle shot, the Yankees were silent and Starbuck knew they must be holding their fire until the ragged gray attackers were at point-blank range. He wanted to cringe from that expected volley, he wanted to drop into the wet stalks and hug the earth and wait for the war to pass. He was too terrified to shout or think or do anything except plunge blindly on toward the dark trees that were now just thirty paces away. It seemed stupid to die for a ford across the Flatlick, but the stupidity of the endeavor did not explain his fear. Instead it was something deeper, something he tried not to admit to himself because he suspected it was pure unalloyed cowardice, but the thought of how his enemies in the Legion would laugh at him if they saw his fear kept him going forward.

He slipped in a puddle, flailed for balance, and thrust on. Waggoner was still roaring defiance to his right, but the other men were just trudging through the soaking stalks. Starbuck’s uniform was as wet as if he had just waded through a river. He felt he would never be dry or warm again. The drenched heavy clothes made each pace an effort. He tried to shout a battle cry, but the challenge emerged like a strangulated sob. If it had not been raining he would have suspected he was weeping, and still the Yankees did not fire and now the enemy wood was close, very close, and the terror of the last few yards gave him a maniacal energy that hurled him through the last clinging stalks, through another vast puddle and right into the trees.

Where he found that the enemy was gone. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Starbuck exclaimed, not sure if it was a profanity or a prayer. “Jesus Christ,” he said again, staring in sheer relief at the empty wood. He stopped, panting, and stared about him, but the wood really was empty. The enemy had vanished, leaving nothing behind except a few scraps of damp cartridge paper and two sets of deep wheel ruts showing where they had pushed their two guns back out of the trees.

Starbuck called his remaining companies across the cornfield, then walked gingerly through the timber until he reached the far side and could stare over a wide stretch of rain-swept pastureland to where a stream was flooding its banks. There was no enemy in sight, only a big house half obscured by trees on a far rise of land. A fork of lightning whipped down to silhouette the house, then a surge of rain blotted the building like a sea fog. The house had looked like a mansion to Starbuck, a mocking reminder of the comfortable life that a man might expect if his country was not riven by war.

“What now?” Moxey asked him.

“Your men can stand picket,” Starbuck said. “Coffman? Go and find the Colonel, tell him we’re across the cornfield.” There were the dead to bury and the wounded to patch up.

The intermittent sounds of battle died utterly, leaving the field to rain and thunder and the cold east wind. Night fell. A few feeble fires flickered in the depths of woods, but most men lacked the skill to make fires in such rain, so instead they shivered and wondered just what they had done and why and where the enemy was and whether the next day would bring them warmth, food, and rest.

Colonel Swynyard, lean, ravaged, and ragged bearded, found Starbuck after nightfall. “No trouble crossing the cornfield, Nate?” the Colonel asked.

“No, sir, no trouble. No trouble at all.”

“Good man.” The Colonel held his hands toward Starbuck’s fire. “I’ll hold prayers in a few minutes. I don’t suppose you’ll come?”

“No, sir,” Starbuck answered, just as he had answered every other evening that the Colonel had invited him to prayers.

“Then I’ll pray for you, Nate,” the Colonel responded, just as he had every other time. “I surely will.”

Starbuck just wanted sleep. Just sleep. Nothing but sleep. But a prayer, he thought, might help. Something had to help, for he feared, God how he feared, that he was becoming a coward.

 

Starbuck took off his soaking clothes, unable to bear their chafing any longer, and hung them to take what drying warmth they could from the remains of his fire, then he wrapped himself in the clammy embrace of his blanket and slept despite the rain, but the sleep was a wicked imitation of rest for it was a waking sleep in which his dreams were mingled with rain and dripping trees and thunder and the spectral figure of his father, the Reverend Elial Starbuck, who mocked his son’s timidity. “Always knew you were rotten, Nathaniel,” his father said in the dream, “rotten all the way through, rotten like decayed timber. No backbone, boy, that’s your trouble,” and then his father capered unscathed away through a gunfire that left Starbuck dreaming that he was clinging to damp soil. Sally was in his dream too, yet she was no comfort for she did not recognize him, but just walked past him into nothingness, and then he was woken as someone shook his shoulder.

At first he thought the shaking was a part of his dream, then he feared the Yankees must be attacking and rolled quickly out of his wet blanket and reached toward his rifle. “It’s all right, Major, ain’t the Yankees, just me. There’s a man for you.” It was Lucifer who had woken him. “Man for you,” Lucifer said again, “a real smart man.” Lucifer was a boy who had become Starbuck’s servant; an escaped slave with a high opinion of himself and an impish helping of sardonic humor. He had never revealed his true name and instead insisted on being called Lucifer. “You want coffee?” he asked.

“Is there any?”

“I can steal some.”

“Then get thieving,” Starbuck said. He stood, every muscle aching, and picked up his rifle that he remembered was still loaded with its useless charge of damp powder. He felt his clothes and found them still damp and saw that the fire had long gone out. “What time is it?” he called after Lucifer, but the boy was gone.

“Just after half past five,” a stranger answered and Starbuck stepped naked out of the trees to see a cloaked figure on horseback. The man clicked shut his watch’s lid and drew back his cloak to slip the timepiece into a fob of his uniform jacket. Starbuck glimpsed a braided smart coat that had never been blackened by powder nor soaked in blood, then the scarlet lined cloak fell back into place. “Maitland,” the mounted man introduced himself, “Lieutenant-Colonel Ned Maitland.” He blinked a couple of times at Starbuck’s nakedness, but made no comment. “I’ve come from Richmond with orders for you,” Maitland added.

“For me?” Starbuck asked dully. He was still not awake properly and was trying to work out why anyone in Richmond should send him orders. He did not need orders, he needed rest.

“You are Major Starbuck?” Maitland asked.

“Yes.”

“Good to meet you, Major,” Maitland said and leaned out of his saddle to offer Starbuck his hand. Starbuck thought the gesture inappropriate and was reluctant to take the offered hand, but it seemed churlish to refuse and so he stepped over to the horse and clasped the Colonel’s hand. The Colonel withdrew his hand quickly, as though fearing that Starbuck might have soiled it, then pulled his glove back on. He was hiding his reaction to Starbuck who, Maitland thought, looked an atrocious mess. His body was white and skinny while his face and hands were burned dark by the sun. A clot of blood scarred Starbuck’s cheek, and his black hair hung long and lank. Maitland was proud of his own appearance and took care to keep himself smart. He was a young man for a Lieutenant-Colonel, maybe thirty, and boasted a thick, brown beard and carefully curled mustaches that he oiled with a scented lotion. “Was that your mess boy?” He jerked his head in the direction Lucifer had disappeared.

“Yes.” Starbuck had fetched his damp clothes and was pulling them on.

“Don’t you know blacks ain’t supposed to carry guns?” Maitland observed.

“Ain’t supposed to shoot Yankees either, but he killed a couple at Bull Run,” Starbuck answered ungraciously. He had already struggled with Lucifer over the Colt revolver the boy insisted on wearing and Starbuck had no energy to refight the battle with some supercilious colonel come from Richmond. “What orders?” he asked Maitland.

Colonel Maitland did not answer. Instead he was staring through the dawn’s wan light toward the mansion beyond the stream. “Chantilly,” he said wistfully. “I do believe it’s Chantilly.”

“What?” Starbuck asked, pulling on his shirt and fumbling with its remaining bone buttons.

“That house. It’s called Chantilly. A real nice place. I’ve danced a few nights under that roof, and no doubt will again when we’ve seen the Yankees off. Where will I find Colonel Swynyard?”

“On his knees, probably,” Starbuck answered. “Are you going to give me those orders?”

“Aren’t you supposed to call me ‘sir’?” Maitland enquired courteously, though with an undercurrent of impatience because of Starbuck’s antagonism.

“When hell freezes over,” Starbuck said curtly, surprised at the belligerence that seemed to be an ever more salient part of his character.

Maitland chose not to make an issue of the matter. “I’m to hand you the orders in the presence of Colonel Swynyard,” he said, then waited while Starbuck pissed against a tree. “You look kind of young to be a major,” he remarked as Starbuck buttoned his pants.

“You look kind of young to be a colonel,” Starbuck responded surlily. “And my age, Colonel, only matters to me and the fellow who carves my tombstone. If I ever get a stone. Most soldiers don’t, not unless they do their fighting from behind a desk in Richmond.” After delivering that insult to a man who looked like a desk soldier, Starbuck stooped to tie the laces of the boots he had collected off a dead Yankee at Cedar Mountain. The rain had stopped, but the air was still heavy with moisture and the grass thick with water. Some of the Legion had drifted out of the trees to stare at the elegant Lieutenant Colonel who endured their scrutiny patiently as he waited for Starbuck to collect his coat. Lucifer had come back with a handful of beans that Starbuck told him to take to Colonel Swynyard’s bivouac. He pulled his wet hat onto his unruly black hair, then gestured to Maitland. “This way,” he said.

Starbuck deliberately forced the elegant Maitland to dismount by leading him through the thickest part of the timber where the leaves and brush soaked the Colonel’s silk-lined cloak. Maitland made no protest, nor did Starbuck speak until the two men had reached Swynyard’s tent where, as Starbuck had predicted, the Colonel was at his prayers. The tent’s flaps were brailed back and the Colonel was kneeling on the tent boards with an open Bible on his cot’s blanket. “He found God three weeks ago,” Starbuck told Maitland in a voice loud enough to disturb the Colonel, “and he’s been bending God’s ears ever since.” The three weeks had worked a miracle on Swynyard, turning a drink-sodden wretch into a fine soldier who now, dressed in shirtsleeves and gray pants, turned his one good eye toward the men who had disturbed his morning prayers.

“God will forgive you for interrupting me,” he said magnanimously, climbing to his feet and tugging his suspenders over his lean shoulders. Maitland gave an involuntary shudder at the sight of Swynyard, who seemed even more unkempt than Starbuck. Swynyard was a thin, scarred man with a ragged beard, yellow teeth, and three missing fingers from his left hand.

“Bites his nails,” Starbuck explained, seeing Maitland staring at the three stumps.

Maitland grimaced, then stepped forward with an outstretched hand. Swynyard seemed surprised at the offered gesture, but responded willingly enough, then nodded at Starbuck. “Good morning, Nate.”

Starbuck ignored the greeting, jerking his head toward Maitland instead. “Man’s called Lieutenant-Colonel Maitland. Got orders for me, but says he has to see you first.”

“You’ve seen me,” Swynyard said to Maitland, “so give Nate his orders.”

Instead Maitland led his horse to a nearby tree and tied its reins to a drooping branch. He unbuckled a saddlebag and took out a packet of papers. “You remember me, Colonel?” he called over his shoulder as he rebuckled the bag.

“Alas, no.” Swynyard sounded suspicious, wary of someone from his old, pre-Christian life. “Should I remember you?”

“Your pa sold some slaves to my pa. Twenty years back.”

Swynyard, relieved that one of his old sins was not being revisited on him, relaxed. “You must have been a boy, Colonel.”

“I was, but I remember your pa telling my pa that the slaves were good workers. They weren’t. They were no damn good.”

“In the trade,” Swynyard said, “they always say that slaves are no better than their masters.” Swynyard had spoken equably, though the words made it clear he had taken as great a dislike to Maitland as Starbuck had. There was an assumption of Privilege about Maitland that grated on both men, or perhaps the irritation came from the incursion into their lives of a man who so obviously spent his time far from the bullets.

“Lucifer’s bringing some coffee, Colonel,” Starbuck said to Swynyard.

The Colonel hospitably fetched a pair of camp chairs from his tent and invited Maitland to sit. He offered Starbuck an upturned crate and set another as a table. “So where are these orders, Colonel?” he asked Maitland.

“Got ’em right here,” Maitland said, putting the papers on the crate and covering them with his hat to stop either Swynyard or Starbuck from plucking them up. He took off his damp cloak to reveal a uniform that was immaculately cut and decorated with a double line of brass buttons polished to a high gloss. The twin gold stars on each of his shoulders seemed bright enough to be made of gold, while the braiding on his sleeves appeared to be fashioned from gold thread. Starbuck’s coat was threadbare, had no gold or brass or even cloth marks of rank, but only white salt marks where sweat had dried into the material’s weave. Maitland brushed the chair seat then twitched up his pants with their elegant yellow stripes before sitting. He lifted the hat, put the sealed papers aside, and handed another single sheet to Swynyard. “I am reporting to you as ordered, Colonel,” he said very formally.

Swynyard unfolded the sheet, read it, blinked, then read it again. He looked up at Maitland, then back to the paper. “You done any fighting, Colonel?” he asked in what struck Starbuck as a bitter voice.

“I was with Johnston for a time.”

“That ain’t what I asked you,” Swynyard said flatly.

“I’ve seen fighting, Colonel,” Maitland said stiffly.

“Done any?” Swynyard demanded fiercely. “I mean have you been in the rifle line? Have you shot your piece, then stood to reload with a line of Yankees taking a bead on you? Have you done that, Colonel?”

Maitland glanced at Starbuck before answering and Starbuck, puzzled by the conversation, caught a look of guilt in Maitland’s eye. “I’ve seen battle,” Maitland insisted to Swynyard.

“From a staff officer’s horse,” Swynyard said caustically. “It ain’t the same, Colonel.” He sounded sad as he spoke, then he leaned forward and plucked the sealed papers off the crate and tossed them onto Starbuck’s lap. “If I weren’t a saved man,” he said, “if I hadn’t been washed in the redeeming blood of Christ, I’d be tempted to swear right now. And I do believe God would forgive me if I did. I’m sorry, Nate, more sorry than I can tell you.”

Starbuck tore open the seal and unfolded the papers. The first sheet was a pass authorizing him to travel to Richmond. The second was an order requiring him to report to a Colonel Holborrow at Richmond’s Camp Lee, where Major Starbuck was to take over the command of the 2nd Special Battalion. “Son of a bitch,” Starbuck said softly.

Swynyard took Nate’s orders, read them quickly, then handed them back. “They’re taking you away, Nate, and giving the Legion to Mister Maitland.” He pronounced the newcomer’s name bitterly.

Maitland ignored Swynyard’s tone. Instead he took out a silver case and selected a cigar that he lit with a lucifer before staring serenely into the wet trees where the men of Swynyard’s Brigade were coaxing fires and hacking at hardtack with blunt bayonets. “I doubt we’ll get more rain,” he said airily.

Starbuck read the orders again. He had commanded the Legion for just a few weeks and had been given that command by Major General Thomas Jackson himself, but now he was ordered to hand his men over to this popinjay from Richmond and take over an unknown battalion instead. “Why?” he asked, but no one answered. “Jesus!” he swore.

“It ain’t right!” Swynyard added his protest. “A regiment is a delicate thing, Colonel,” he explained to Maitland. “It ain’t just the Yankees who can tear a regiment to bits, but the regiment’s own officers. The Legion’s had a bad stretch, but Nate here was turning it into a decent unit again. It don’t make sense to change commanders now.”

Maitland just shrugged. He was a handsome man who carried his privilege with a calm self-confidence. If he felt any sympathy for Starbuck, he did not betray it, but just let the protests flow past him.

“It weakens my brigade!” Swynyard said angrily. “Why?”

Maitland offered an airy gesture with his cigar. “I’m just the messenger, Colonel, just the messenger.”

For a second it looked as though Swynyard would swear at Maitland, then he conquered the impulse and shook his head instead. “Why?” he asked again. “This brigade fought magnificently! Doesn’t anyone care what we did last week?”

It seemed no one did, or no one for whom Maitland spoke. Swynyard momentarily closed his eyes, then looked at Starbuck. “I’m sorry, Nate, real sorry.”

“Son of a bitch,” Starbuck said of no one in particular. The gall of the moment was particularly bitter, for he was a northerner who fought for the South and the Faulconer Legion was his home and his refuge. He looked down at the orders. “What’s the Second Special Battalion?” he asked Maitland.

For a second it looked as though Maitland would not answer, then the elegant Colonel gave Starbuck a half smile. “I believe they’re more commonly known as the Yellowlegs,” he said with his irritating tone of private amusement.

Starbuck swore and raised his eyes to the clouded heavens. The Yellowlegs had gained their nickname and lost their reputation during the week of springtime battles in which Lee had finally turned McClellan’s Northern army away from Richmond. Jackson’s men had come from the Shenandoah Valley to help Lee and among them were the 66th Virginia, a newly raised regiment that saw its first and, so far, last action near Malvern Hill. They had run away, not from a hard fight, but from the very first shells that fell near them. Their nickname, the Yellowlegs, supposedly described the state of their pants after they pissed themselves in fright. “Pissed in unison,” Truslow had told Starbuck on hearing the story, “and made a whole new swamp.” Later it was determined that the regiment had been too hastily raised, too skimpily trained, and too badly officered, and so its rifles had been given to men willing to fight and its men taken away to be retrained. “So who’s this Colonel Holborrow?” Swynyard asked Maitland.

“He’s in charge of training the punishment battalions,” Maitland answered airily. “Wasn’t there one at the battle last week?”

“Hell, yes,” Starbuck answered. “And it was no damn good.” The punishment battalion at the previous week’s battle had been a makeshift collection of defaulters, stragglers, and shirkers, and it had collapsed within minutes. “Hell!” Starbuck said. Now, it seemed, the 66th Virginia had been renamed as a punishment battalion, which suggested its morale was no higher than when it had first earned its nickname and, if the performance of the 1st Punishment Battalion was anything to go by, no better trained either.

Lucifer put two mugs of coffee on the makeshift table and then, after a glance at Starbuck’s distraught face, backed far enough away so that the three officers would think he was out of earshot.

“This is madness!” Swynyard had found a new energy to protest. “Who sent the order?”

“The War Department,” Maitland answered, “of course.”

“Who in the War Department?” Swynyard insisted.

“You can read the signature, can’t you, Colonel?”

The name on the order meant nothing to either Starbuck or to Swynyard, but Griffin Swynyard had a shrewd idea where the papers might have come from. “Is General Faulconer posted to the War Department?” he asked Maitland.

Maitland took the cigar from his mouth, spat a speck of leaf from his lips, then shrugged as if the question were irrelevant. “General Faulconer’s been made Deputy Secretary of War, yes,” he answered. “Can’t let a good man idle away just because Tom Jackson took a dislike to him.”

“And General Faulconer made you the Legion’s commanding officer,” Swynyard said.

“I guess the general put in a good word for me,” Maitland said. “The Legion’s a Virginia regiment, Colonel, and the general reckoned it ought to be led by a Virginian. So here I am.” He smiled at Swynyard.

“Son of a bitch,” Starbuck said. “Faulconer. I should have known.” General Washington Faulconer had been the Legion’s founder and the brigade’s commander until Jackson had dismissed him for incompetence. Faulconer had fled the army convinced that Starbuck and Swynyard had been responsible for his disgrace, but instead of retreating to his country house and nursing his hurt, he had gone to Richmond and used his connection and wealth to gain a government appointment. Now, safe in the Confederate capital, Faulconer was reaching out to take his revenge on the two men he saw as his bitterest enemies. To Swynyard he had bequeathed a man of equal rank who would doubtless be an irritant, but Faulconer was trying to destroy Starbuck altogether.

“He’d have doubtless liked to get rid of me too,” Swynyard said. He had led Starbuck away from the tent and was walking him up and down out of Maitland’s hearing. “But Faulconer knows who my cousin is.” Swynyard’s cousin was the editor of Richmond’s Examiner, the most powerful of the five daily papers published in the Confederate capital, and that relationship had doubtless kept Washington Faulconer from trying to take an overt revenge on Swynyard, but Starbuck was much easier meat. “But there’s something else, Nate,” the colonel went on, “another reason why Maitland took your job.”

“Because he’s a Virginian,” Starbuck said bitterly.

Swynyard shook his heard. “I guess Maitland shook your hand, yes?”

“Yes. So?”

“He was trying to see if you’re a Freemason, Nate. And you’re not.”

“What the hell difference does that make?”

“A lot,” Swynyard said bluntly. “There are a lot of Masons in this army, and in the Yankee army too, and Masons look after each other. Faulconer’s a Mason, so’s Maitland, and so am I, for that matter. The Masons have served me well enough, but they’ve done for you, Nate. The Yellowlegs!” The colonel shook his head at the awful prospect.

“I ain’t good for much else, Colonel,” Starbuck admitted.

“What does that mean?” Swynyard demanded.

Starbuck hesitated, ashamed to admit a truth, but needing to tell someone about his fears. “I reckon I’m turning into a coward. It was all I could do to cross that cornfield yesterday and I’m not sure I could do it again. I guess I’ve used up what courage I ever had. Maybe a battalion of cowards deserve a coward as their commander.”

Swynyard shook his head. “Courage isn’t like a bottle of whiskey, Nate. You don’t empty it once and for all. You’re just learning your trade. The first time in battle a boy reckons he can beat anything, but after a while he learns that battle is bigger than all of us. Being brave isn’t ignorance, it’s overcoming knowledge, Nate. You’ll be all right the next time. And remember, the enemy’s in just the same funk that you are. It’s only in the newspapers that we’re all heroes. In truth we’re most of us frightened witless.” He paused and stirred the damp leaves with the toe of a boot from which the sole was gaping. “And the Yellowlegs ain’t cowards,” he went on. “Something went wrong with them, that’s for sure, but there’ll be as many brave men there as in any other battalion. I reckon they just need good leadership.”

Starbuck grimaced, hoping Swynyard told the truth, but still unwilling to leave the Legion. “Maybe I should go and see Jackson?” he suggested.

“To get those orders reversed?” Swynyard asked, then shook his head in answer. “Old Jack don’t take kindly to men questioning orders. Nate, not unless the orders are plumb crazy, and that order ain’t plumb crazy. It’s perverse, that’s all. Besides,” he smiled, trying to cheer Starbuck, “you’ll be back. Maitland won’t survive.”

“If he wears all that gold into battle,” Starbuck said vengefully, “the Yankees will pick him off in a second.”

“He won’t be that foolish,” Swynyard said, “but he won’t stay long. I know the Maitlands, and they were always high kind of folk. Kept carriages, big houses, and acres of good land. They breed pretty daughters, haughty men, and fine horses, that’s the Maitlands. Not unlike the Faulconers. And Mister Maitland hasn’t come to us because he wants to command the Legion, Nate, he’s come here because he has to tuck one proper battlefield command under his belt before he can become a general. Mister Maitland has his eye on his career, and he knows he has to spend a month with muddy boots if he’s ever going to rise high. He’ll go soon enough and you can come back.”

“Not if Faulconer has anything to do with it.”

“So prove him wrong,” Swynyard said energetically. “Make the Yellowlegs into a fine regiment, Nate. If anyone can do it, you can.”

“I sometimes wonder why I fight for this damn country,” Starbuck said bitterly.

Swynyard smiled. “Nothing to stop you going back North, Nate, nothing at all. Just keep walking north and you’ll get home. Is that what you want?”

“Hell, no.”

“So prove Faulconer wrong. He reckons that a punishment battalion will be the end of you, so prove him wrong.”

“Damn his bastard soul,” Starbuck said.

“That’s God’s work, Nate. Your’s is to fight. So do it well. And I’ll put in a request that your men are sent to my brigade.”

“What chance is there of that?”

“I’m a Mason, remember,” Swynyard said with a grin, “and I’ve still got a favor or two to call in. We’ll get you back among friends.”

Maitland stood up as the two ragged officers walked back to the tent. He had drunk one of the two cups of coffee and started on the second. “You’ll introduce me to the Legion’s officers, Starbuck?” he said.

“I’ll do that for you, Colonel,” Starbuck said. He might resent this man displacing him, but he would not put difficulties in Maitland’s way because the Legion would have to fight the Yankees whoever commanded them and Starbuck did not want their morale hurt more than was necessary. “I’ll talk you up to them,” he promised grudgingly.

“But I don’t think you should stay after that,” Maitland suggested confidently. “No man can serve two masters, isn’t that what the good book says? So the sooner you’re gone, Starbuck, the better for the men.”

“Better for you, you mean,” Starbuck said.

“That, too,” Maitland agreed calmly.

Starbuck was losing the Legion and had been consigned to a battalion of the damned, which meant he was being destroyed and would somehow have to survive.

LUCIFER WAS NOT HAPPY. “RICHMOND,” HE TOLD STARBUCK soon after they had arrived in the city, “is not to my taste.”

“Then go away,” Starbuck retorted grumpily.

“I am considering it,” Lucifer said. He was liable to pompousness when he perceived that his dignity was under assault, and that dignity was very easily offended. He was only a boy, fifteen at the very most, and he would have been small for his age even if he were two years younger, but he had crammed a lot of living into those few years and was possessed of a self-assurance that fascinated Starbuck quite as much as the mystery of the boy’s past. Lucifer never spoke directly about that past, nor did Starbuck ask about it, for he had learned that every query merely prompted a different version. It was plain the boy was a contraband, an escaped slave, and Starbuck suspected Lucifer had been trying to reach the sanctuary of the north when he had been apprehended by Jackson’s army at Manassas, but Lucifer’s life before that moment, like his real name, remained all mystery, just as it was a mystery why he had elected to stay with Starbuck after his recapture.

“He likes you, that’s why,” Sally Truslow told Starbuck. “He knows you’ll give him plenty of rope and he’s mischievous enough to want rope. Then one day he’ll grow up and you won’t ever see him again.”

Starbuck and Lucifer had walked from the rain-soaked battlefield to the railhead at Fredericksburg, then taken the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad to the capital. Starbuck’s travel pass gave him admission to one of the passenger cars while Lucifer traveled in a boxcar with the other Negroes. The train had puffed and jerked and clanked and shuddered and thus crept south until, at dawn, Starbuck had been woken by the cry of a Richmond milkmaid. The Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac depot was in the heart of the city and the rails ran right down the center of Broad Street, and Starbuck found it a strange experience to see the familiar city through the soot-smutted window of a slow-moving railcar. Newspaper boys ran alongside the train offering copies of the Examiner or Sentinel, while on the sidewalk pedestrians edged past the carts and wagons that had been herded to the street’s sides by the train’s slow, clangorous passage. Starbuck stared bleary-eyed through the window, noticing gloomily how many doors were hung with black, how many women were in mourning, how many cripples begged on the sidewalk, and how many men had crêpe armbands.

Starbuck had convinced himself that he would not call on Sally. He told himself that she was no longer his woman. She had found a lover, Starbuck’s good friend Patrick Lassan, a French cavalryman who was ostensibly observing the war on behalf of the French army but who really rode with Jeb Stuart. Starbuck told himself that Sally was no longer his business and he was still telling himself that truth when he knocked on the blue painted door beside the tailor’s shop on the corner of Fourth and Grace. Sally had been glad to see him. She was already up, already busy, and she ordered her slaves to bring Starbuck a breakfast of coffee and bread. “It’s bad bread,” she said, “but there ain’t any good bread. Nor any good coffee, for that matter. Hell, I’m using acorns, wheat berries, and chicory for coffee. Nothing’s good now except the cigars and business.” Sally’s business was to be Madame Royal, Richmond’s most expensive medium, who offered expensive seances to reunite the living with the dead. “It’s all tricks,” she said scornfully, “I just tell ’em what they want to hear and the more I charge the more they believe me.” She shrugged. “Dull business, Nate, but better than working nights.” She meant the brothel on Marshall Street where Sally had first discovered her business acumen.

“I can imagine.”

“I doubt that you can, Nate,” Sally said good humoredly, then gave him a long searching look. “You’re thin. Look worn out like a mule. That a bullet cut on your face?”

“Tree splinter.”

“The girls will love it, Nate. Not that you ever needed help in that department, but tell them it’s a bullet and they’ll all want to pet you. And you got a slave too?”

“I pay him when I can,” Starbuck said defensively.

“Then you’re as damn fool,” she said fondly. “Bad as Delaney.” Belvedere Delaney was a lawyer officially attached to the War Department, but his duties left him plenty of time for running his various businesses, which included Richmond’s most exclusive brothel as well as the crêpe-curtained premises where Sally manufactured conversations with the dead. Sally had first met Delaney by being one of his employees in the brothel, and not just any employee, but the most sought-after girl in Richmond. She was Captain Truslow’s only child and had been raised to hard work and small reward on Truslow’s hill farm, but she had fled the farm and embraced the city, a transition made easy by her striking looks. Sally had a deceptively soft face, a mass of golden hair, and a quick spirit to liven her attractiveness, but there was far more to Sally Truslow than nature’s accident of beauty. She knew how to work and knew how to profit from that work, and these days she was Delaney’s business partner rather than his employee. “Delaney’s a fool,” she said tartly. “He lets his house boy twist him round his little finger, and you’re probably just as bad. So let’s have a look at your boy. I want to know you’re being looked after.” And thus Lucifer was summoned up to the parlor where he quickly charmed Sally who recognized in the boy someone who, like herself, was working up from rock bottom. “But why are you carrying a gun, boy?” she demanded of Lucifer.

“’Cos I’m in the army, miss.”

“The hell you are. You get caught with a gun in this town, boy, and they’ll skin your backside and then send you down the river. You’re damn lucky to have survived this long. Take it off. Now.”

Lucifer, who had resisted every former effort to disarm him, meekly unbuckled the gunbelt. It was plain that Lucifer was awestruck by Sally, and he made not even the smallest complaint as she told him to hide the revolver in Starbuck’s baggage and then dismissed him to the kitchen. “Tell them to feed you up,” she said.

“Yes, miss.”

“He’s got white blood,” Sally said when Lucifer had gone.

“I guess.”

“Hell, it’s obvious.” She poured herself more of the strange-tasting coffee, then listened as Starbuck told her why he was in Richmond. She spat derisively when Washington Faulconer’s name was mentioned. “The city was full of rumor about why he’d left the army,” she said, “but he rode right over the rumor. Arrived here bold as brass and just claimed Jackson was jealous of him. Jealous! But your General Jackson, Nate, he makes enemies like a louse makes itches and there are plenty of men here ready to sympathize with Faulconer. He got office soon enough. I guess you’re right and the Masons looked after him. Delaney will know, he’s a Mason. So what do you do now?”

Starbuck shrugged. “I have to report to Camp Lee. To a Colonel Holborrow.” He was not looking forward to the moment. He was unsure of his ability to lead the worst battalion in the South’s army, and he already missed the companionship of the Legion.

“I know Holborrow,” Sally said, “not personally,” she added hastily, “but he’s pretty considerable in town.” Starbuck was not surprised at her knowledge, for Sally kept an ear very close to the ground to snap up every trifle of gossip that she could turn into a mystical revelation in her seances. “He’s got money,” she went on, “God knows how, ’cos he wasn’t nothing but a penitentiary governor in Georgia before the war. A prison man, right? Now he’s in charge of training and equipping the replacements at Camp Lee, but he spends most of his time down in Screamersville.”

“The brothels?”

“Them and the cockpit.”

“He gambles?” Starbuck asked.

Sally shook her head at Starbuck’s naïveté. “He don’t go there to admire the birds’ feathers,” she said tartly. “What the hell did they teach you at Yale?”

Starbuck laughed, then perched his muddy boots on a tapestry-covered ottoman that stood on an Oriental rug. Everything in the room was in the best of taste; understated but expensive. Napoleon’s bust glowered on the mantel, leatherbound books stood ranked in glass-fronted cases, while exquisite pieces of porcelain were displayed on shelves. “You live well, Sally,” Starbuck said.

“You know any merit in living badly?” she asked. “And you can get your boots off the furniture while you think about the answer.”

“I was thinking of going to sleep,” Starbuck said, not moving.

“Hell, Nate Starbuck,” Sally said, “are you reckoning on staying here?”

He shook his head. “I thought I might let you buy me lunch at the Spotswood, then walk with me to Camp Lee.”

Sally waited until he had moved the offending boots from the ottoman. “Now why,” she asked, “would I want to do that?”

Starbuck smiled. “Because, Sally, if I’ve got to take a pack of skulking cowards to war, then they need to know I’m a lucky man. And how much luckier can a man be than to show up with someone like you on his arm?”

“Glad to see the Yankees haven’t shot your glib tongue out,” she said, disguising her pleasure at the compliment. “But are you reckoning on going into the Spotswood looking like that?”

“Got nothing else to wear.” He frowned at his disheveled uniform. “Hell, if it’s good enough for fighting battles it’s good enough for the Spotswood Hotel.” Six hours later a well-fed Starbuck walked with Sally and Lucifer west out of the city. Sally wore a bonnet and shawl over a simple blue dress that was nowhere near plain enough to hide her beauty. She carried a fringed parasol against the sun, which had at last appeared from the clouds and was sucking up the remnants of the rainstorm into drifting patches of mist. They walked past the State Penitentiary, crossed the head of Hollywood Cemetery where the freshly turned earth lay in grim rows like the battalions of the dead, and skirted the municipal waterworks, until at last they could see Camp Lee on its wide bluff above the river and canal. Starbuck had visited the camp earlier in the year and remembered it as a grim, makeshift place. It had once been the Richmond Central Fairgrounds, but the onset of war had turned it into a giant dumping ground for the battalions that had flocked to the defense of Richmond. Those battalions were now on Virginia’s northern border and the camp was a dirty stretch of muddy ground where conscripts received a rudimentary training and where stragglers were sent to be assigned to new battalions. At the war’s beginning the camp had been a favorite place for Richmonders to come and watch the troops being drilled, but that novelty had worn off and these days few people visited the dank, derelict-looking barracks where old moldering tents stood in rows and tarpaper huts flapped in the breeze. The gallows of the camp jail still topped the hill, and round the jail was clustered an array of wooden huts where most of the camp’s present occupants seemed to be billeted. Two sergeants playing horseshoes confirmed to Starbuck that the huts were the Special Battalion’s quarters and he walked slowly uphill toward the flat crest where a half dozen companies were being drilled. A few lackluster work parties were patching the decrepit buildings among which, like a palace among hovels, stood the house that the sergeants had said was Holborrow’s headquarters. The house was a fine two-story building with a wide verandah all around and slave quarters and kitchens in its backyard. Two flagpoles stood in front of the house, one with the Confederate’s stars and bars and the other flying a blue flag crested with the coat of arms of Georgia.

Starbuck paused to watch the companies being drilled. There seemed small point to the activity, for the men were proficient enough, though every tiny fault was enough to force the sergeant in charge to a barrage of obscene abuse. The sergeant was a tall, gangling man with an unnaturally long neck and a voice that could have carried clean across the river to Manchester. The troops had no weapons, but were simply being marched, halted, turned, and marched again. Some were in gray coats, but most wore the increasingly common butternut brown that was easier to produce. At least half the men, Starbuck noted with alarm, had no boots, but were marching barefoot.

Sally put her arm into Starbuck’s elbow as they walked closer to the headquarters, where a group of four officers was stretched out in camp chairs on the verandah. One of the idling officers trained a telescope toward Starbuck and Sally. “You’re being admired,” Starbuck said.

“That was the point of me wasting an afternoon, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Starbuck said proudly.

Sally paused again to watch the troops on the parade ground who, so far as the screaming sergeant allowed, returned her inspection. “They’re your men?” she asked.

“All mine.”

“The pick of a bad bunch, eh?”

“They look all right to me,” Starbuck said. He was already trying to imbue himself with a loyalty toward these despised troops.

“They can kill Yankees, can’t they?” Sally said, sensing Starbuck’s apprehension. She brushed at the ingrained dirt on his uniform sleeve, not because she believed the dirt could be swept off, but because she knew he needed the small consolation of touch. Then her hand paused. “What’s that?” she asked.

Starbuck turned to see that Sally was gazing at a punishment horse that had been erected between two of the huts. The horse was a long beam that was mounted edgewise on a pair of tall trestles, and the punishment consisted of a man being forced to straddle the beam’s edge and stay there while his own weight turned his groin into a mass of pain. A prisoner was on the horse with his hands bound and his legs tied to prevent him dismounting, while an armed guard stood beside the steps that were used to mount the instrument. “A punishment,” Starbuck explained, “called a horse. Hurts like hell, I’m told.”

“That’s the point of punishment, ain’t it?” Sally said. She had taken her share of beatings as a child and the experience had thickened her skin.

The man beneath the horse appeared to ask a question of the straddling man. The prisoner shook his head and the man yanked down on his bound ankles so that the man screamed.

“Shit,” Starbuck said.

“Ain’t that a part of it?” Sally demanded.

“No.”

Sally looked at the distaste on Starbuck’s face. “You going soft, Nate?”

“I don’t mind punishing soldiers, but not torture. Besides, think of them.” He nodded toward the companies on the parade ground who were mutely watching the horse. “A regiment’s a fragile thing,” he said, echoing Swynyard’s words to Maitland. “It works best when the men are fighting the enemy, not each other.” He flinched as the guard tugged on the prisoner’s ankles again. “Hell,” he said, reluctant to intervene, but also unwilling to watch any more brutality. He strode toward the horse.

The guard who had tugged on the prisoner’s ankles was a sergeant who turned and watched Starbuck’s approach. Starbuck wore no badges of rank and had a rifle slung on his left shoulder, both of which suggested he was a private soldier, but he carried himself confidently and had a woman and servant, which suggested he might be an officer and the sergeant was consequently wary. “What’s he done?” Starbuck demanded.

“Being punished,” the sergeant said. He was a squat, bearded man. He was chewing tobacco and paused to spit a stream of yellowish spittle onto the grass. “Sergeant Case’s orders,” he added as though that should be sufficient explanation.

“I know he’s being punished,” Starbuck said, “but I asked what he had done.”

“Being punished,” the sergeant said obstinately.

Starbuck moved so he could see the drawn face of the prisoner. “What did you do?” he asked the man.

Before the prisoner could give any answer the drill sergeant abandoned the companies on the parade ground and marched toward the horse. “No one talks to prisoners under punishment!” he screamed in a terrifying voice. “You know that, Sergeant Webber! Punishment is punishment. Punishment is what will turn this lily-livered rabble of squirrel shit into soldiers.” He slammed to a halt two paces from Starbuck. “You have questions,” he said forcefully, “you ask them to me.”

“And who are you?” Starbuck asked.

The tall sergeant looked surprised, as though his fame must have been obvious. He gave no immediate answer, but instead inspected Starbuck for clues to his status. The presence of Sally and Lucifer must have convinced him that Starbuck was an officer, though Starbuck’s age suggested he was not an officer who needed to be placated. “Sergeant Case,” he snapped. Case’s long neck and small head would have looked risible on any other man, and his ridiculous appearance was not helped by a wispy beard and a thin broken nose, but there was a malevolence in the sergeant’s dark eyes that turned amusement into fear. The eyes were flat, hard, and merciless. Starbuck noted too that Case’s gangly body was deceptive; it was not a weak, thin frame, but lean and muscled. He was uniformed immaculately, every button polished, every crease hot-pressed, and every badge shining. Sergeant Case looked just as Starbuck had imagined soldiers ought to look like before he discovered that, at least in the Confederacy, they were generally ragged as hell. “Sergeant Case,” Case said again, leaning closer to Starbuck, “and I,” he stressed that word, “am in charge here.”

“So what did the prisoner do?” Starbuck asked.

“Do?” Case asked dramatically. “Do? What he did is of no business to you. Not one scrap.”

“What battalion is he?” Starbuck demanded, nodding toward the prisoner.

“He could belong to the Coldstream bloody Guards,” Case shouted, “and it still ain’t your business.”

Starbuck looked up at the prisoner. The man’s face was white with pain and rigid with the effort needed not to show that pain. “Battalion, soldier?” Starbuck snapped.

The man grimaced, then managed to say a single word. “Punishment.”

“Then you are my business,” Starbuck said. He took his folding knife out of a pocket, unsnapped the blade, and sawed at the rope binding the prisoner’s ankles. The motion made the prisoner whimper, but it provoked Sergeant Case to leap forward threateningly.

Starbuck paused and looked up into Case’s eyes. “I’m an officer, Sergeant,” he said, “and if you lay a damned hand on me I’ll make sure you spend the rest of today on this horse. You won’t walk for a goddamn week. Maybe not for a goddamn month.”

Sergeant Case stepped back as Starbuck cut through the last strands of hemp and put a hand under one of the prisoner’s boots. “Ready?” he called, then heaved up hard, throwing the prisoner off the beam. The man thumped onto the damp ground where he lay still as Starbuck crouched and sliced through the rope about his wrists. “So what did he do?” Starbuck asked Sergeant Case.

“Son of a bitch!” Case said, though whether of Starbuck or the prisoner it was impossible to tell, then he turned abruptly and strode away with his companion.

The prisoner groaned and tried to stand, but the pain in his crotch was too savage. He crawled to one of the horse’s supporting trestles and dragged himself to a sitting position, then just clung to the timber. His eyes watered and his breath came in small, stuttering gasps. Even Sally flinched at his evident pain. “Guns,” he finally said.

“Guns?” Starbuck asked him. “What about them?”

“Son of a bitch is stealing guns,” the freed prisoner said, then was forced to stop because of the pain. He clutched his groin, held a deep breath, than shook his head in an effort to banish the dreadful agony. “You asked why I was on the horse? Because of guns. I was on a detail to unload rifles. We got twenty boxes of them. Good ones. But Holborrow made us put them in crates marked CONDEMNED and then gave us muskets instead. Richmond muskets. Hell,” he spat, then momentarily closed his eyes as a spasm of pain made him grimace. “I don’t want to go shooting no Yankees with buck and ball, not if they’ve got minie balls. That’s why I argued with that son of a bitch Sergeant Case.”

“So where are the rifles now?” Starbuck asked.

“Hell knows. Sold, probably. Holborrow don’t care so long as we never go to war. We’re not supposed to fight, see? Just get supplies that the son of a bitch sells.” The man frowned up at Starbuck. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Potter!” A new and angry voice yelled from the headquarters building. “Potter, you son of a bitch! You bastard! You lunkheaded piece of dog shit. You black-assed fool!” The speaker was a tall, lean officer in a braided gray coat who stumped toward Starbuck with the help of a silver-tipped cane. Sergeant Case marched behind the officer, who had a neat blond goatee beard and a narrow mustache that had been carefully waxed into stiff points. He shoved the cane hard into the turf to aid each step and in between he brandished it toward the astonished Starbuck. “Where the hell have you been, Potter?” the officer demanded. “Just where the hell have you been, boy?”

“He’s talking to you?” Sally asked Starbuck in bemusement.

“Hell, boy, are you drunk?” The limping officer bellowed. “Potter, you black-ass lunkhead piece of leper shit, are you drunk?”

Starbuck was about to deny being either Potter or drunk, then a mischievous impulse welled up inside him. “Don’t say a word,” he said quietly to Sally and Lucifer, then shook his head. “I ain’t drunk,” he said as the officer came close.

“Is this how you repay a kindness?” the officer demanded fiercely. He had the stars of a colonel on his shoulders. “My apologies, ma’am,” the colonel touched his free hand to the brim of his hat, “but I can’t abide tardiness. Can’t abide it. Are you drunk, Potter?” The colonel stepped close to Starbuck and thrust his goatee up toward the younger man’s clean-shaven chin. “Let me smell your breath, Potter, let me smell your breath. Breathe, man, breathe!” He sniffed, then stepped back. “You don’t smell drunk,” the colonel said dubiously, “so why the hell, forgive me, ma’am, did you throw Private Rothwell off the horse. Answer me!”

“It was upsetting the lady,” Starbuck said.

The major looked at Sally again and this time he registered that she was a startlingly pretty young woman. “Holborrow, ma’am,” he said, snatching off his brimmed hat to reveal a head of carefully waved gold hair, “Colonel Charles Holborrow at your service.” He gaped at Sally for a second. “I should have known,” he said, his voice suddenly softening, “that you come from Georgia. Ain’t girls anywhere in the world as pretty as Georgia girls, and that’s a plain straight fact. ’Pon my precious soul, ma’am, it’s a fact. The Reverend Potter did say as how his son was married and was bringing his good lady here, but he never did say just how pretty you are.” Holborrow shamelessly leered down to judge Sally’s figure before grasping her hand and giving it a firm kiss. “Sure pleased to meet you, Mrs. Potter,” he said, still holding on to her hand.

“Pleasure’s all mine, Colonel.” Sally pretended to be flattered by Holborrow’s admiration and left her hand in his.

Holborrow leaned his cane against his hip so he could fold his other hand over Sally’s. “And you were upset by the punishment, ma’am, is that it?” he inquired solicitously, massaging Sally’s hand between his.

“Reckon I was, sir,” Sally said humbly, then sniffed.

“Right upsetting for a lady,” Holborrow agreed. “But you have to understand, ma’am, that this lunkhead prisoner struck Sergeant Case. Struck him! A serious military offense, ma’am, and your husband here had no business interfering. None at all. Ain’t that the case, Sergeant Case?”

“Sir!” Case snapped, evidently his way of articulating an affirmative to officers.

Holborrow let go of Sally’s hand to step closer to Starbuck. “Sergeant Case, boy, is from North Carolina, but he spent the last fourteen years in the British army. Ain’t that the case, Case?”

“Sir!” Case snapped.

“Which regiment, Case?” Holborrow asked, still staring into Starbuck’s eyes.

“Seventh, sir, Royal Fusiliers, sir!”

“And while you were still sucking the milk from your mother’s titties, Potter, forgive me, ma’am, Sergeant Case was fighting! Fighting, boy! Ain’t that the case, Case?”

“Battle of the Alma, sir! Siege of Sevastopol,” Case snapped, and Starbuck got the impression that he was listening to a much practiced dialogue.

“But Sergeant Case is a patriot, Potter!” Holborrow continued, “and when the Yankees broke the Union by attacking us, Sergeant Case left Her Majesty’s service to fight for Jeff Davis and liberty. He was sent here, Potter, to turn the Yellowlegs into a proper regiment instead of a bunch of schoolgirls. Ain’t that the case, Case?”

“Sir!”

“And you,” Holborrow spat at Potter, “dare to countermand a man like Sergeant Case! You should be ashamed of yourself, boy. Ashamed! Sergeant Case has forgotten more about soldiering than you ever learned or ever will learn. And if Sergeant Case says a man deserves punishment, then punished he shall be!” Holborrow stepped back and took Sally’s hand into his again. “But seeing as how you’re a ray of Georgia sunshine, ma’am, I’ll spare you from seeing any more unpleasantness this afternoon. I think your husband has learned his lesson, so thank you, Sergeant Case.” Holborrow nodded to the sergeant, who scowled at Starbuck, then marched stiffly back to the parade ground. Holborrow ordered the freed prisoner to make himself scarce, and then, his grip still enfolding Sally’s hand, he turned back to Starbuck. “So where have you been, boy? Your father wrote that you’d left Atlanta ten days back. Letter got here, but you didn’t! Ten days! It don’t take ten days from Atlanta to Richmond, boy. You been drinking again?”

“It was my fault,” Sally said in a frightened little voice. “I had the fever, sir. Real bad, sir.”

Lucifer giggled at Sally’s invention and Holborrow’s head snapped round. “You snigger once more, boy, and I’ll whip the flesh clean off your black bones. Is he your nigger?” he asked Starbuck.

“Yes,” Starbuck said, wondering how the hell he would back out of this deception.

“Yes, sir,” Holborrow said, correcting him. “You forgetting I’m a Colonel, Potter?”

“Yes, sir. I mean no, sir.”

Holborrow, still holding Sally’s hand, shook his head at Starbuck’s apparent confusion. “So how is your father?” he asked Starbuck.

Starbuck shrugged. “I guess,” he began, then shrugged again, suddenly bereft of imagination.

“He’s mending,” Sally said. She was enjoying the play-acting much more than Starbuck who, though he had started it, was now regretting the deception. “Thank the Lord,” Sally said as she finally extricated her fingers from Holborrow’s grasp, “but he is surely mending.”

“Praise the Lord,” Holborrow said. “But you’ve been a burden to him, boy, a burden,” he snarled at Starbuck, “and you’ll forgive my bluntness, Mrs. Potter, but when a man’s son is a burden it’s right he should be told plain.”

“It sure is,” Sally agreed firmly.

“We was expecting you a week ago!” Holborrow snarled at Starbuck, then gave Sally a yellow-toothed smile. “Got a room all set up for you, ma’am. Bed, washstand, clothes press. The reverend wanted you comfortable. Not to be pampered, he said, but comfortable.”

“You’re too kind, sir,” Sally said, “but I’m sleeping with my cousin Alice in the city.”

Holborrow looked disappointed, but Sally had spoken firmly and he did not contest the issue. “Your cousin’s gain is our loss, ma’am,” he said, “but you’ll stay for a lemonade and maybe partake of a peach? I’m partial to a fine peach, as all Georgians ought to be.”

“Pleasure, sir.”

Holborrow glanced at Lucifer, who was carrying Starbuck’s shabby bag. “Get to the kitchen, boy. Move your black ass! Go!” Holborrow turned to starbuck again. “Hope you’ve got a decent uniform in that bag, boy, because the one you’re wearing is a disgrace. A dis-grace. And where the hell are your lieutenant’s bars?” He gestured at Starbuck’s shoulders. “You sell your bars for liquor, boy?”

“Lost them,” Starbuck said hopelessly.

“You are a sad man, Potter, a sad man,” Holborrow said, shaking his head. “When your father wrote and asked my help he had the grace to tell me as much. He said you were a sore disappointment, a reproach to the good name of Potter, so I can’t say as how I wasn’t warned about you, but get drunk with me, boy, and I’ll kick your son of a bitch ass blue, forgive me, ma’am.”

“Forgiven, Colonel,” Sally said.

“Your father now,” Holborrow continued to lecture Starbuck, “he never drinks. Every day we had an execution the Reverend would come to the penitentiary to pray with the bastards, forgive me, ma’am, but he never touched a drop of the ardent. Not a drop! Even after the bastards, forgive me, ma’am, were strung up and kicking away and the rest of us felt the need for a restorative libation, your father would stick to lemonade, but he often said that he feared you’d end up on that same scaffold, boy, with him saying a prayer on one side of you and me ready to push the stool out from under your feet on the other. So he’s sent you here, Potter, to learn discipline!” This last word was shouted into Starbuck’s face. “Now, ma’am,” he turned his attention back to Sally, “give me your pretty little hand and we’ll divide ourselves a peach, and after that, ma’am, if you’ll permit me, I’ll give you a ride back to the city in my carriage. It’s not the best day for walking. A mite too hot and a pretty lady like you should be in a carriage, don’t that sound good?”

“You’re too kind, Colonel,” Sally said. She had thrust her left hand, which was conspicuously lacking a wedding ring, into a fold of her shawl. “I ain’t never ridden in a carriage,” she added in a pitiful voice.

“We must accustom you to luxury,” Holborrow said lasciviously, “like a pretty little Georgia girl should be.” He led her to the house and put his free arm around her waist at the bottom of the steps. “I’ve been riding in a carriage ever since a Yankee bullet took away the use of my right leg. I must tell you the tale. But for now, ma’am, allow me to assist you up the stairs. There’s a loose board or two,” Holborrow half lifted Sally up the verandah’s stairs, “and you just sit yourself down, ma’am, next to Captain Dennison.”

The four officers, all captains, had stood to greet Sally. Captain Dennison proved to be a thin clean-shaven man whose face was horribly scarred by some skin disease that had caused his cheeks and forehead to be foul with lived sores. He pulled a wicker chair forward and brushed at its cushion with his hand. Holborrow gestured at Starbuck. “This here’s Lieutenant Matthew Potter, so he ain’t a rumor after all.” The four captains laughed at Holborrow’s witticism, while the colonel ushered Sally forward with his right arm still firmly planted about her slender waist. “And this his wife. I’m sorry, my dear, but I don’t have the advantage of your name.”

“Emily,” Sally said.

“And a prettier name I never did hear, upon my soul, but I never did. You sit down, ma’am. This here is Captain Dennison, Captain Cartwright, Captain Peel, and Captain Lippincott. You make yourself at home and I’ll settle your husband. You don’t mind if I put him to work straight off? He should have been at work a week ago.”

Holborrow limped ahead of starbuck into a gloomy hall where a tangle of gray officers’ coats hung on a bentwood stand. “Why a good woman like that would marry a no-good son of a bitch like you, Potter,” the colonel grumbled, “the good Lord only knows. Come in here, boy. If your wife ain’t staying then you don’t need a bedroom. You can put a cot in here and sleep by your work. This here was Major Maitland’s office, but then the son of a bitch got himself promoted and given a real battalion, so now we’re waiting for a Yankee son of a bitch called Starbuck. And when he gets here, Potter, I don’t want him pestering me about unfinished paperwork. You understand me? So get those papers straight!”

Starbuck said nothing, but just gazed at the pile of untidy papers. So Maitland had originally been assigned to the Yellowlegs? That was intriguing, but the bastard had evidently persuaded his lodge brothers to pull strings and so Maitland had been promoted and given command of the Legion and Starbuck had got the punishment battalion.

“Are you dozing, boy?” Holborrow thrust his face into Starbuck’s.

“What am I to do, sir?” Starbuck asked plaintively.

“Tidy it up. Just tidy it. You’re supposed to be the adjutant of the Second Special Battalion, ain’t you? Now get on with it, boy, while I entertain your wife.” Holborrow stumped out of the room, banging the door shut behind him. Then the door suddenly opened again and the colonel’s narrow face peered round the edge. “I’ll send you some lemonade, Potter, but no liquor, you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“No liquor for you, Potter, not while you’re under my orders.”

The door slammed shut again, so hard that the whole house seemed to shudder, then Starbuck let out a long breath and sank into a leather-upholstered chair that stood at a desk littered with a mess of papers. What the hell, he wondered, had he got himself into? He was tempted to end the deception right now except that there was a possible profit in it. He was certain that if he announced himself as Major Starbuck then he would learn nothing, for Holborrow would take care to cover up any deficiencies in the training and equipment of the Special Battalion, while the despised Lieutenant Potter was clearly a man from whom nothing needed to be hidden. Besides, Starbuck thought, there was no elegant way out of the deception now. Better to play the tomfoolery through while he spied on Holborrow’s work, then he would go back into the city and find Belvedere Delaney, who would make sure Starbuck had a fine time and a warm bed for the next few nights.

He began to sift through the heaps of paper. There were receipts for food, receipts for ammunition, and urgent letters asking for the receipts to be signed and returned to the relevant departments. There were pay books, lists, amendments to lists, and prison rosters from all the military jails in Richmond. Not every man in the Special Battalion was from the Yellowlegs; at least a fifth had been drafted in from the prisons, thus leavening the cowards with crooks. Under the prison rosters Starbuck found a letter addressed to Major Edward Maitland from the Richmond State Armory acknowledging that the Special Battalion was to be equipped with rifles and requesting that the twenty boxes of muskets be returned forthwith. there was a grudging tone to the letter, suggesting that Maitland had used his influence to have the despised muskets replaced with modern weapons and Starbuck, knowing he would have to fight the battle all over again, sighed. He put the letter aside to find, beneath it, yet another letter, this one addressed to Chas. Holborrow and signed by the Reverend Simeon Potter of Decatur, Georgia. Starbuck leaned back to read it.

The Reverend Potter, it seemed, had the superintendence of the prison chaplaincies in the State of Georgia and had written to his old acquaintance—he seemed no more than an acquaintance and scarcely a friend—Charles Holborrow, to beg his help in the matter of his second son, Matthew. The letter, written in deliberate strokes in a dark black ink, irresistibly reminded Starbuck of his own father’s handwriting. Matthew, the letter said, had been a sore trial to his dear mother, a disgrace to his family’s name, and a shame to his Christian upbringing. Though educated at the finest academies in the south and enrolled in Savannah Medical School, Matthew Potter had insisted upon the paths of iniquity. “Ardent liquor has been his downfall,” the Reverend Potter wrote, “and now we hear he has taken a wife, poor girl, and, furthermore, has been ejected from his regiment because of continual drunkenness. I had apprenticed him to a cousin of ours in Mississippi, hoping that hard work would prove his salvation, but instead of entering upon his duties he insisted upon engaging in Hardcastle’s Battalion, but even as a soldier, it seems, he could not be trusted. It pains me to write thus, but in begging your help I owe you a duty of truthfulness, a duty thrice burdened by my faith in Christ Jesus, to Whom I daily pray for Matthew’s repentance. I also recall a service I was once able to perform on your behalf, a service you will doubtless recollect clearly, and in recompense for that favor I would ask that you find employment for my son who is no longer welcome under my roof.” Starbuck grinned. Lieutenant Matthew Potter, it was clear, was a ton of tribulation and Starbuck wondered what service the Reverend Simeon Potter had rendered to make it worth Holborrow’s while to accept the Lieutenant. That favor had been subtly emphasized in the Reverend Potter’s letter, suggesting that Holborrow’s debt to the preacher was considerable. “I believe there to be good in Matthew,” the letter finished, “and his commanding officer commended his behavior at Shiloh, but unless he can be weaned from liquor then I fear he is doomed to everlasting hellfire. My wife unites with me in sending our prayers for your kind aid in this sad business.” A note, evidently in Holborrow’s handwriting, had been penned at the bottom of the letter. “I’d be thankful if you could employ him.” Maitland must have said yes, and Starbuck wondered how tangible Holborrow’s thanks had been.

The door opened and a rebellious Lucifer brought in a tall glass of lemonade. “I was told to bring this, Lieutenant Potter,” he said sourly, stressing the false name with a mocking pronunciation.

“You don’t like it here, Lucifer?” Starbuck asked.

“He beats his people,” Lucifer said, jerking his head toward the sound of Holborrow’s voice. “You ain’t thinking of staying here, are you?” he asked with alarm, seeing how comfortably Starbuck’s boots rested on the edge of the major’s desk.

“For a short while,” Starbuck said. “I reckon I’ll learn more as Lieutenant Potter than I ever could as Major Starbuck.”

“And what if the real Mister Potter comes?”

Starbuck grinned. “Be one hell of a tangle, Lucifer.”

Lucifer sniffed. “He ain’t beating me!”

“I’ll make sure he doesn’t. And we won’t be here long.”

“You’re crazy,” Lucifer said. “I should have kept going north. I’d rather be preached at in a contraband camp than be living in a place like this.” Lucifer sniffed his disgust and went back to the kitchens, leaving Starbuck to hunt through the rest of the papers. None of the battalion lists tallied exactly, but there seemed to be around a hundred and eighty men in the battalion. There were four captains—Dennison, Cartwright, Peel, and Lippincott—and eight sergeants, one of whom was the belligerent Case, who had joined the battalion just a month before.

Sally came to the office after a half hour. She closed the door behind her and laughed mischievously. “Hell, Nate, ain’t this something?”

Starbuck stood and gestured at the mess in the room. “I’m beginning to feel sorry for Lieutenant Potter, whoever the hell Lieutenant Potter is,” he said.

“You staying on here?” Sally asked.

“Maybe one night.”

“In that case,” Sally said, “I’m saying good-bye to my dearest husband and then the major’s going to take me in his coach back to the city and I just know he’s going to ask me to take supper with him. I’ll say I’m too tired. You sure you want to stay?”

“I’d look an idiot telling him who I am now,” Starbuck said. “Besides, there must be something to discover in all these papers.”

“You discover how the hog’s making his money,” Sally said. “That’d be real useful.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “Watch that Captain Dennison, Nate, he’s a snake.”

“He’s the one with the pretty face, right?”

She grimaced. “I thought it had to be syphilis, but it ain’t ’cos he ain’t shaking or babbling like a loon. Must be nothing but a skin disease. I hope it hurts.”

Starbuck grinned. “Begged you for a kiss, did he?” he guessed.

“I reckon he wants more than a kiss, did he?” he guessed.

“I reckon he wants more than a kiss,” she grimaced, then touched Starbuck’s cheek. “Be good, Matthew Potter.”

“And you, Emily Potter.”

A few minutes later Starbuck heard the jingle of trace chains as the major’s carriage was brought to the front of the house. There was the sound of good-byes being said, then the carriage clattered away.

And Starbuck suddenly felt lonely.

 

A hundred miles north of Starbuck, in a valley where corn grew tall between stands of thick trees, a fugitive crouched in a thicket and listened for sounds of pursuit. The fugitive was a tall, fleshy young man who was now severely hungry. He had lost his horse at the battle fought near Manassas four days before and, with the beast, he had lost a saddlebag of food and so he had gone hungry these four days, all but for some hardtack he had taken from a rebel corpse on the battlefield. Now, a dozen miles north of the battlefield and with his belly aching with hunger, the fugitive reluctantly gnawed at a cob of unripe corn and knew his bowels would punish him for the diet. He was tired of the war. He wanted a decent hotel, a hot bath, a soft bed, a good meal, and a bad woman. He could afford all those things for around his belly was a money belt filled with gold, and all he wanted to do was to get the hell away from this terrible countryside that the victorious rebels were scouring in search of fugitives from the Northern army. The rest of the Northern army had retreated toward Washington and the young man wanted to join them, but somehow he had got all turned about during the day of pouring rain and he guessed he had walked five miles west that day instead of north and now he was trying to work his way back northward.

He wore the blue coat of a Northern soldier, but he wore it unbuttoned and unbelted so that he could discard it at a moment’s notice and pull on the gray coat that he had taken from the corpse that had yielded him the hardtack. The dead man’s coat was a mite small, but the fugitive knew he could talk his way out of trouble if any rebel patrol did find and question him. He would be in more trouble if Northern soldiers found him for, though he had fought for the Yankees, he spoke with the raw accent of the Deep South, but deep in his pants pocket he had his papers that identified him as Captain William Blythe, second in command of Galloway’s Horse, a unit of Northern cavalry composed of renegade Southerners. Galloway’s Horse were supposed to be scouts who could ride the Southern trails with the same assurance as Jeb Stuart’s confident men, but the fool Galloway had taken them right into the battle near Manassas where they had been shot to hell by a Confederate regiment. Billy Blythe knew that Galloway was dead and Blythe reckoned Galloway deserved to be dead for having got mixed up in a full battle. He also guessed that most of Galloway’s men were probably dead and he did not care. He just needed to get away to the north and find himself another comfortable billet where he could stay alive until the war ended. On that day, Blythe reckoned, there would be rich pickings for southerners who had stayed loyal to the Union and he did not intend to be denied those rewards.

But neither did he intend to land up in a Confederate prison. If capture was unavoidable he planned to discard the blue coat, don the gray, then talk his way out of trouble. Then he would fine another way back north. It just took guile, planning, a little intelligence, and a helping of luck, and that should be enough to avoid the numerous folks in the Southern states who wanted nothing more than to put a rope around Billy Blythe’s fleshy neck. One such rope had damn nearly done for him before the war’s beginning, and it was only by the most outrageous daring that Billy had escaped the girl’s family and fled north. Hell, he thought, it wasn’t that he was a bad fellow. Billy Blythe had never thought of himself as a bad fellow. A bit wild, maybe, and a fellow who liked a good time, but not bad. Just faster witted than most others, and there was nothing like quick wits to provoke envy.

He scraped at the raw cob with his teeth and chewed on the tough corn. It tasted foul, and he could already feel a ferment in his belly, but he was half starving and needed strengthening if he was to keep going. Hell, he thought, but his life had gone all wrong these last few weeks! He should never have got mixed up with Major Galloway, nor with the Yankee army. He should be farther north, in New York say. Somewhere the guns did not sound. Somewhere there was money to be made and girls to impress.

A twig snapped in the woodland and Blythe went very still. At least he tried to go very still, but there was an uncontrollable shaking in his legs, his belly was rumbling from the fermenting corn, and he kept blinking as sweat trickled into the corners of his eyes. A voice sounded far away. Pray God the man was a Northerner, he thought, then wondered why the hell the Yankees were losing all the battles. Billy Blythe had wagered his whole future on a Northern victory, but every time the Federals met the men in gray they got beat. It just plain was not right! Now the Northerners had got whipped again and Billy Blythe was eating raw corn and was dressed in clothes still damp from the rainstorm of two days before.

A horse whinnied. It was hard to tell what direction the sound came from, at first it seemed to come from behind him, but then Billy heard the slow thump of hooves from in front of him and so, confused, and very cautiously, he raised his head out of the leaves until he could see across the corn. The shadows were harsh among the farther trees, but suddenly, in a slash of bright sunlight that cut across the dark, he saw the horsemen. Northerners! Blue coats. There were glints of reflected sunlight from saber scabbards, belt buckles, curb chains, carbine hooks, then a flash of white as a horse rolled its eye and sneezed. The ears of the other horses pricked forward. The wary cavalrymen had stopped at the corn’s edge. There were a dozen or so troopers there, carbines at the ready, all watching across the crop toward Billy’s left, and it was their watchfulness that kept Billy motionless. What was worrying them? He turned very slowly, but could see nothing. Were there rebels nearby? A bluebird flitted above the corn and Billy decided the bright feathers were a good omen and he was about to stand fully upright and shout toward the cavalrymen when suddenly their leader made a gesture with his hand and the troopers spurred their horses out into the corn. Billy stayed still. One of the cavalrymen had holstered his carbine and scraped his saber free of its scabbard, and that persuaded Billy that this was not a good time to attract the troopers’ attention. One shout now and a volley of minie balls could be his answer and so he just watched as the horses advanced noisily through the stiff cornstalks.

A horse whinnied again, and this time the sound was definitely behind Billy and he turned softly, parted the screen of leaves, then peered hard through the dappled shadows of the woodland. He was holding his breath and wondering what the hell was going on, then suddenly he saw a movement down by the far end of the cornfield and he blinked sweat away from his eyes and saw that there was a horse there. A riderless, lonely horse. A horse all on its own. A horse that seemed to be tethered. A horse with a saddle and bridle, but no rider. A horse, he thought, for Billy Blythe and he wondered what would be the safest way to attract the attention of the nervous Yankee troopers when suddenly a blast of rifle fire ripped the warm afternoon to shreds.

Billy cried aloud with fear and dropped to his haunches. No one heard his cry. for the Yankee horses were screaming terribly. There was a great thrashing sound from the corn, then more rifles fired and suddenly the hateful rebel yell was sounding and a voice was roaring orders. It had been an ambush. One riderless horse had been the bait that had sucked the Yankees down the long narrow cornfield to where the rebels had been hidden among the trees, and now the horsemen were either dead, wounded, or desperately trying to gallop away. Two more rifles cracked and Billy saw a blue-coated trooper arch his back, let go of his reins, and fall backward off his galloping horse. Two more riderless horses galloped north while a trooper was running desperately with his scabbard held free of his legs. Two Northern horsemen seemed to have made it safely into the shelter of the far trees, but otherwise there seemed to be no survivors from the small Yankee patrol. It had taken less than a minute.

“Fetch the horses!” a voice snarled. A Yankee in the corn was calling for help, his voice desperate with pain. A horse was whinnying, then a flat, hard shot abruptly ended the pathetic sound. Rebel voices laughed, then Billy heard the scraping rattle as a rifle was reloaded. The rebels were evidently collecting the horses; valuable prizes for an army already short for good cavalry mounts, and Billy hoped they would be content with that booty, but then the officer shouted again. “Look for any survivors! Careful now, but look good.”

Billy swore. He thought about running, but he guessed he was too weak to outrun a fit men and besides the noise he made would bring a slew of the bastards chasing after him, so instead he feverishly stripped off his blue coat and pulled on the threadbare gray jacket, and then he pushed the betraying blue garment deep under the bushes where he covered it with a thick layer of leaf mold. He buttoned the gray coat and buckled his belt about its waist and then he waited. Damn, he thought, damn and son of a bitch and damn again, but now he would have to play the rebel for a few weeks while he found another way to get back north.

Footsteps came nearer and Billy decided it was time to play his role. “Are you Southern boys?” he called aloud. The footsteps stopped. “The name’s Billy Tumlin!” he called out, “Billy Tumlin from New Orleans.” There was no future in using his real name, not when so many men in the Confederacy were eager to test a rope on Billy Blythe’s gullet. “Are you boys Rebs?” he asked.

“Can’t see you,” a voice said flatly, neither friendly nor hostile, but then came the unmistakably hostile sound of a rifle being cocked.

“I’m standing up, boys,” Billy said, “standing up real slow. Standing up right plumb in front of you.” Billy stood and held his hands high to show he was not armed. Facing him were a pair of scruffy rebels with bayonet-tipped rifles. “Thank the good Lord above, boys,” Billy said, “praise His holy name, amen.”

The two faces showed only caution. “Who did you say you was?” one of the men asked.

“Captain Billy Tumlin, boys. From New Orleans, Louisiana. I’ve been on the run for weeks now and sure am pleased to see you. Mind if I lower my hands?” He began to lower his arms, but a twitch of a blackened rifle muzzle put them back up fast.

“On the run?” the second man asked.

“I was taken at New Orleans,” Blythe explained in his broadest Southern accent, “and I’ve been a prisoner up north ever since. But I slipped away, see? And I’m kind of hungry, boys. Even a piece of hardtack would be welcome. Or some tobacco? Ain’t seen good tobacco since the day I got captured.”

An hour later Captain Billy Tumlin was introduced to Lieutenant Colonel Ned Maitland, whose men had discovered the fugitive. Maitland’s regiment was bivouacking and the smoke from hundreds of small fires sifted into the early evening air. Maitland, a courtly and generous host, hospitably shared a leg of stringy chicken, some hard-boiled eggs, and a flask of cognac with the newly escaped prisoner. He seemed blessedly uninterested in Blythe’s supposed experiences as a captive of the Northerners, preferring to discuss which prominent New Orleans families might be common acquaintances. Billy Blythe had spent just long enough in New Orleans to pass that test, especially when he figured that Maitland knew less about the city’s society than he did himself.

“I guess,” Maitland said after a while, “that you’d better report to brigade.”

“I can’t stay here?” Blythe suggested. Maitland would be a considerate commander, he reckoned, and the Legion would be serving close enough to the Yankees to give Blythe and easy chance to slip across the lines.

Maitland shook his head. He would have liked to keep Billy Tumlin in the Legion, for the considered most of his present officers to be well below the proper standard, but he had no authority to appoint a new captain. “I could use you,” Maitland admitted, “I surely could. It looks like we’ll all be moving north soon so there’ll be plenty of fighting and I’m not exactly fixed right with good officers.”

“You’re invading the North?” Billy Blythe asked, horrified at the thought.

“There’s nothing north of here but foreign soil,” Maitland observed dryly, “but sadly I can’t keep you in the Legion. Things have changed since you were captured, Captain. We don’t elect or appoint officers anymore. Everything goes through the War Department in Richmond and I guess you’ll have to report there. At least if you want wages, you will.”

“Wages would help,” Blythe agreed and so, an hour later, he found himself in the altogether less prepossessing company of the brigade commander. Colonel Griffin Swynyard’s queries about Blythe’s captivity were brief, but much sharper than Maitland’s. “Where were you held?” he asked.

“Massachusetts,” Blythe said.

“Where exactly?” Swynyard demanded.

Blythe was momentarily flustered. “Union,” he finally said, reckoning that every state in the United and Confederate States had a town called Union. “Just outside, anyway,” he added lamely.

“We must thank God for your escape,” Swynyard said, and Blythe eagerly agreed, then realized he was actually expected to fall onto his knees to offer the thanks. He got down awkwardly and closed his eyes while Swynyard thanked Almighty God for the release of His servant Billy Tumlin from captivity, and after that Swynyard told Billy he would have the brigade major issue a travel pass permitting Captain Tumlin to report to the army headquarters.

“In Richmond?” Blythe asked, not unhappy at that thought. He had no enemies in Richmond that he knew of, for his foes were all further south, so Richmond would be a fine resting place for a short while. And at least in the Confederacy’s capital he would be spared the bloodletting that would surely follow if Robert Lee took this hardscrabble army of ragged-uniformed men across the Potomac into the north’s plump fields.

“They may send you to Richmond,” Swynyard said, “or they might post you to a battalion here. Ain’t my decision, Captain.”

“Just so long as I can be useful,” Billy Blythe said sanctimoniously. “That’s all I pray for, Colonel, to be useful.” Billy Blythe was doing what Billy Blythe did best. He was surviving.

YOU DON’T SOUND LIKE A SOUTHERNER, POTTER,” CAPTAIN Dennison said and the three other captains who shared the supper table stared accusingly at Starbuck.

“My ma was from Connecticut,” Starbuck said.

“Sir,” Dennison corrected Starbuck. Captain Dennison was more than a little drunk, indeed he had almost fallen asleep a moment before, but now he had jerked himself into wakefulness and was scowling at Starbuck down the length of the table. “I’m a captain,” Dennison said, “and you’re a shad-belly piece of ordure, otherwise known as a lieutenant. You call me sir.”

“My ma was from Connecticut, sir,” Starbuck said dutifully. He was playing his role as the hapless Potter, but he was no longer enjoying it. Impetuosity, if not downright foolishness, had trapped him in the deception and he knew that every moment he stayed in the role would make it more difficult to extricate himself with any dignity, but he still reckoned there were things to learn so long as the real Lieutenant Potter did not arrive at Camp Lee.

“So you picked up your momma’s accent with her ditty milk, did you, Potter?” Dennison asked.

“I reckon I must have done, sir.”

Dennison leaned back in his chair. The sores on his face gleamed wetly in the flickering light of the bad candles set on the dinner table that bore the remains of a meal of fried chicken, fried rice, and beans. There were some of Colonel Holborrow’s beloved peaches to end the meal, though Holborrow himself was not present. The colonel, having carried Sally to the city, had evidently stayed to make a night of it, leaving Starbuck to share this evening meal with the four captains. There were plenty of other officers in Camp Lee, but they ate elsewhere for no one, it seemed, wanted to be contaminated by this handful of officers who remained with the Yellowlegs.

And no wonder, Starbuck, thought, for even the few hours he had spend in the camp had proved enough to confirm his worst expectations. The men of the 2nd Special Battalion were bored and dispirited, kept from desertion only by the ever-present provosts and by their fears of execution. The sergeants resented being posted to the battalion and so entertained themselves with petty acts of tyranny that the battalion officers, like Thomas Dennison and his companions, did nothing to alleviate. Sergeant Case appeared to run the battalion and those men who were in his favor prospered while the rest suffered.

Starbuck had talked with some for the men and they, thinking that he was a harmless lieutenant and, besides, the man who had dared to take Case’s prisoner off the horse, were unguarded in what they said. Some, like Caton Rothwell, whom Starbuck had rescued, were keen to fight and were frustrated that Holborrow appeared to have no intention of sending the battalion north to join Lee’s army. Rothwell was not one of the original Yellowlegs, but had been posted to the special Battalion after being found guilty of deserting from his own regiment. “I went to help my family,” he explained to Starbuck. “I just wanted a week’s furlough,” he added, “because my wife was in trouble.”

“What trouble?” Starbuck had asked.

“Just trouble, Lieutenant,” Rothwell said bluntly. He was a big, strong man who reminded Starbuck of Lieutenant Waggoner. Caton Rothwell, Starbuck suspected, would be a good man to have alongside in a fight. Given fifty other such men, Starbuck knew, the battalion could be made as good as any in Lee’s army, but most of the soldiers were near mutinous through boredom and the knowledge that they were the most despised unit in all the Confederate army. They were the Yellowlegs, the lowest of the low, and no one thing was more symptomatic of their status then the guns they had been issued. Those weapons were still in store, but Starbuck had found the key hanging behind the office door and had unlocked the armory shed to find it filled with crates of old smoothbore muskets. Starbuck had brushed the dust off one musket stock and lifted out the weapon. It felt clumsy, while the wooden shaft beneath the barrel had shrunk over the years so that the metal barrel hoops were loose. He peered at the lock and saw the word VIRGINIA stamped there, while behind the hammer was written RICHMOND, 1808. The gun must have been a flintlock originally and at some time updated by conversion to percussion cap, but despite the modernization it was still a horrible weapon. These old muskets, made for killing Redcoats, had no rifling inside the barrel, which meant that the bullet did not spin in its flight and so lacked the accuracy of a rifle. At fifty paces the big-bore 1808 musket might be as lethal as an Enfield rifle, but at any greater range it was hopelessly inaccurate. Starbuck had seen plenty for men carrying such antiquated guns into battle and had felt sorry for them, but he knew for a fact that thousands of modern rifles had been captured from the North during the summer’s campaign, and it seemed perverse to arm his men with these museum pieces. Such antique weapons were a signal to the Special Battalion that they were on the army’s hind teat, but that was probably a truth the men already knew. They were the soldiers no one else wanted.

Sergeant Case had seen the open armory door and come to investigate. His tall body filled the doorway and shadowed the dusty room. “You,” he had said flatly when he saw Starbuck.

“Me,” Starbuck agreed pleasantly enough.

“Got a habit of poking your nose where it don’t belong, Lieutenant,” Case said. His menacing presence loomed in the dusty shed while his flat, hard eyes stared at Starbuck like a predator sizing up its kill.

Starbuck had thrown the musket to the sergeant, thrown it hard enough to make Case step back a pace as he caught it. “You’d want to fight Yankees with one of those, Sergeant?” Starbuck asked.

Case twirled the musket in his big right hand as though it weighted no more than a cornstalk. “They won’t be doing no fighting, Lieutenant. These men ain’t fit to fight. And that’s why you were sent to us.” Case’s small head jerked back and forth on the ludicrous neck as he spat his insults. “Because you ain’t fit to fight. You’re a bloody drunkard, Lieutenant, so don’t give me any talk of fighting. You don’t know what fighting is. I was a Royal Fusilier, boy, a proper soldier, boy, and I know soldiering and I know fighting, and I know you ain’t up to it else you wouldn’t be here.” Case threw the musket hard back, stinging Starbuck’s hands with the impact of the weapon. The tall sergeant stepped further inside the armory and thrust his broken-nosed face close to Starbuck. “And one other thing, boy. You pull rank on me one more time and I’ll nail your hide to a tree and piss all over it. Now put that musket back where you found it, give me the armory key, and bugger off where you belong.”

Not now, Starbuck had told himself, not now. This was not the time to put Case right, and so he had merely put the musket in its box, meekly handed Case the key, and walked away.

Now, at the supper table, Starbuck was again the butt of bullies only this time it was Thomas Dennison and his cronies who had their sport with a man they believed was a weakling. Captain Lippincott rolled a peach to Starbuck. “Reckon you’d prefer a brandy, Potter,” Lippincott said.

“Reckon I would,” Starbuck said.

“Sir,” Dennison said immediately.

“Reckon I would, sir,” Starbuck said humbly. He had to play the fool so long as he decided against revealing his identity, but it went hard on him. He told himself to stay calm and to play the failure for a short while yet.

Lippincott edged his brandy glass toward Starbuck, daring him to take it, but Starbuck did not move. “Of course there’s one thing to be said for being a drunk,” Lippincott said, taking the glass back, “it means you’ll probably sleep away the days here. Better than sitting around doing nothing. Ain’t that right, Potter?”

“Right,” Starbuck agreed.

“Sir,” Dennison said, then hiccuped.

“Sir,” Starbuck said.

“I ain’t saying I’m not grateful for being here,” Lippincott went on gloomily, “but, hell, they could give us some entertainment.”

“Plenty in Richmond,” Dennison said airily.

“If you’ve got the money,” Lippincott acknowledged, “which I ain’t.”

Dennison stretched back in his chair. “You’d rather be in a fighting regiment?” he asked Lippincott. “They could always transfer you. If that’s what you want, Dan, I’ll tell Holborrow you’re eager to go.” Lippincott, a sallow man with a fringe of beard, said nothing. Most of the Yellowlegs officers had been transferred, either to garrison duty or to the provosts, but a few had been posted to fighting battalions, a fate that plainly worried these remaining captains, though not Dennison, whose skin disease was sufficient to keep him out of harm’s way. He gingerly touched one of the horrid sores on his face. “If the doctors could just cure this,” he said in a tone that suggested he was confident that the disease was incurable, “I’d volunteer for a transfer.”

“You are taking the medicine, Tom?” Lippincott asked.

“Of course I am,” Dennison snapped. “Can’t you smell it?”

Starbuck could indeed smell something medicinal, and the smell was oddly familiar; a thin rank odor that disturbed him, but which he could not quite place. “What medicine is it, sir?” he asked.

Dennison paused while he considered whether the question constituted impudence, then he shrugged. “Kerosene,” he answered after a while.

Starbuck frowned. “Is it ringworm?” he asked, then added, “sir.”

Dennison sneered. “One year at medical college and you know it all, is that it? You mind your own damn business, Potter, and I’ll mind the advice of a proper doctor.”

Lippincott looked back at the glistening sores and shuddered. “It’s all right for you, Tom,” he said resentfully, “but what if this Starbuck wants us to fight? Holborrow can’t keep us here forever.”

“Holborrow’s a colonel,” Dennison said, hiccuping again, “and Starbuck’s a major, so Holborrow will get what he wants and Starbuck can go piss himself. And hell,” he went on resentfully, “none of us should be serving under Starbuck. He’s a goddamn Northerner and I ain’t taking orders from any goddamn Northerner.”

Cartwright, a plumpish man with a petulant face and fair curly hair, nodded agreement. “You should have taken over from Maitland, Tom,” he told Dennison.

“I know that, you know that, Holborrow knows that,” Dennison agreed then clumsily extracted a cigar from his pocket and lit it at the nearest candle. “And Mister Starbuck will have to learn it,” he finished when the cigar was lit.

Peel, a thin young man who seemed the best of this unprepossessing bunch, wiped peach juice from his clean-shaven chin then shook his head. “Why did they send us Starbuck?” he asked no one in particular. “They must be wanting us to fight. Otherwise why send him to us?”

“Because he’s an unwanted son of a bitch,” Dennison snapped, “and they want to be rid of him.”

“He’s got a reputation,” Starbuck said, enjoying himself, “sir.”

Dennison’s dark eyes inspected Starbuck through the flickering light of the guttering candles. “It don’t take much of a reputation to impress a drunkard,” he said dismissively, “and I don’t recall anyone here inviting you to speak, Lieutenant.”

“Sorry, sir,” Starbuck said.

Dennison went on inspecting Starbuck and finally prodded his cigar toward him. “I will say one thing for you, Potter, you’ve got a pretty wife.”

“Reckon I have, sir,” Starbuck agreed.

“Pretty, pretty, pretty,” Dennison said. “Pretty enough to turn a head or two. Too pretty for a lunkhead like you, don’t you agree?”

“She’s sure pretty,” Starbuck said, “sir.”

“And you’re a drunk,” Dennison observed, “and drunks ain’t no good where it counts with a lady. Know what I mean, Potter? Drunks ain’t up to it, are they?” Dennison, half drunk himself, laughed at his own wit. Starbuck held the Captain’s eyes, but said nothing and Dennison mistook his silence for fear. “You know where your pretty wife is tonight, Potter?”

“With her cousin Alice, sir,” Starbuck said.

“Or maybe she’s dining with Colonel Holborrow?” Dennison suggested. “The Colonel sure had his hopes up. Put on his best uniform coat, shined his boots, and oiled his hair. I reckon he thought your Emily might appreciate a little entertainment. Maybe a cockfight?” The other captains laughed at this jest while Dennison sucked on his cigar. “And maybe,” he went on, “your Emily’s so desperate after being married to you that she’d even say yes to Holborrow. You reckon she’s playing the mattress to Holborrow’s quilt, Potter?” Starbuck said nothing and Dennison shook his head scornfully. “You’re a weak passel of shit, Potter, you truly are. God knows what that girl sees in you, but I guess she needs her pretty little eyes fixing.” He drew on his cigar again as he stared at Starbuck. “Reckon I just might call on the little lady myself. Would you object, Lieutenant Potter, if I paid my respects to your lady wife? My skin might just benefit from a lady’s healing touch.”

Peel looked embarrassed, but the other two captains smiled. Both were weak men and were enjoying this chance to see an apparently weaker man being mercilessly bullied. Starbuck leaned back in his chair, making it creak. “What do you reckon your chances are with her, sir?” he asked Dennison.

Dennison seemed surprised that the question had been asked, but he pretended to consider it anyway. “A good-looking girl like that? And a handsome fellow like me? Oh, pretty fair chances, I’d say, Lieutenant.”

“Out of five,” Starbuck insisted, “what do you reckon, sir? Two chances out of five? One chance? Three?”

Dennison frowned, not entirely sure whether the conversation was going entirely to his liking. “Pretty fair, I’d say,” he repeated.

Starbuck shook his head ruefully. “Hell, sir, I know Emily, and Emily never did take overmuch to poxed sons of bitches like yourself, sir, begging your pardon, sir, and I can’t reckon you’ve got more than one chance in five. Pretty good odds, though, seeing as how pretty she is, but how lucky are you? That’s the question, sir, ain’t it?” He smiled at Dennison who was not smiling back. None of the captains was smiling; instead they were watching Starbuck, who had drawn out his Adams revolver while he was talking and had used a fingernail to lever four of the five percussion caps off the gun’s cones. He tipped the caps onto an empty plate then looked up at Dennison through the candle flames. “How lucky are you, sir?” Starbuck asked and leveled the revolver’s blued barrel at Dennison’s scared eyes as he thumbed the hammer to half cock so that the cylinder was free to turn. He spun the cylinder and not one of the captains moved as the gun sounded a series of tiny clicks that only stopped when the cylinder came to rest. Starbuck eased the cock all the way back. “One chance in five, Captain, sir,” he said, “so let’s see how good those odds are.” He pulled the trigger and Dennison gave a tiny jump of alarm as the hammer fell onto an empty cone. “You didn’t make it that time,” Starbuck said, “sir.”

“Potter!” Dennison shouted, then stilled his protest as Starbuck half cocked the gun and spun the cylinder a second time.

“Of course a gentleman like you wouldn’t be content with a lady’s first refusal, would you, sir?” Starbuck asked and eased the hammer all the way back once more. It made two tiny clicks as the pawl engaged. He could see that the cone under the hammer was empty, but none of the others around the table knew which of the chambers was primed. They would be able to see the bullets nestled inside the lower chambers, but not the cones at the cylinder’s rear. Starbuck smiled. “So my Emily’s refused you once, Captain,” he said, “but you’d surely ask her a second time, wouldn’t you? I mean you don’t have the manners of a goat, so you’re sure to ask her a second time.” He straightened his arm as though bracing himself for the gun’s recoil.

Cartwright fumbled for his own revolver, but Starbuck pointed the gun momentarily at the frightened face and Cartwright immediately subsided. Starbuck shifted the gun back to Dennison. “Second chance coming up, Captain, sir. Dear Emily, please lay yourself down and play mattress for me. Let’s see how lucky you are the second time of asking, Captain.” He pulled the trigger and once again Dennison shuddered as the dead click echoed loud in the room. Starbuck immediately spun the chamber a third time and straightened his arm.

“You’re mad, Potter,” Dennison said, suddenly seeming very sober.

“I’m sober too,” Starbuck said and reached out with his left hand for Cartwright’s brandy, which he drank in one go. “I’ll be madder still when I’m drunk,” he said, “so how many chances do you reckon you’ve got with my wife, Captain? Are you going to ask her three times for the favor of a ride?”

Dennison considered reaching for his own revolver, but it was buttoned in its holster and he knew he would have no chance to free the weapon before a bullet slashed through the candle flames and shattered his skull. He licked his lips. “I guess I don’t have any chance, Lieutenant,” he said.

“I guess you don’t, Captain,” Starbuck said, “and I guess you owe me an apology too.”

Dennison grimaced at the thought. “You can go to hell, Potter,” he said defiantly.

Starbuck pulled the trigger, then immediately half cocked the gun and spun the cylinder a fourth time. When it came to rest he pulled the cock back and this time he could see the single percussion cap was waiting under the hammer. He smiled. “Three times lucky, Captain, but how good is your luck? I’m waiting for that apology.”

“I apologize, Lieutenant Potter,” Dennison managed to say.

Starbuck eased the hammer down, thrust the Adams into its holster, and stood up. “Never start what you can’t finish, Captain,” he said, then leaned forward and picked up the half full bottle of brandy. “Reckon I can finish this, though, but in privacy. You all have a nice conversation now.” He walked out of the room.

 

It was a humid, rainy night in Washington with no wind to take away the thick stench of the garbage dump that lay at the southern end of Seventeenth Street just a few yards from the hospital tents pitched on the ellipse. The sewage in Murder Bay added its own fetid smell to the air above the Northern capital that was more than usually crowded with soldiers. They were men who should have been marching in John Pope’s army toward Richmond, but instead they had been whipped backward by Robert Lee from the banks of the Bull Run and now they filled the tented camps inside Washington’s ring of forts and thronged the capital’s taverns.

One young cavalry officer hurried along Pennsylvania Avenue to the corner of Seventeenth Street, where he took off his wide-brimmed cavalryman’s hat to peer up at the street lamp. At every corner in Washington the lamps had their street’s name painted in black on the glass covering the mantel, an intelligent device, and once the young man was sure he was in the right place he walked up Seventeenth until he reached a three-story brick building that was thickly surrounded by trees. Gas lights showed where the building’s narrow end abutted onto the sidewalk and where a flight of steps led to a door guarded by two blue-coated sentries, though when the young cavalryman presented himself at that door he was told to go back to the garden entrance on Pennsylvania Avenue. He retraced his steps and discovered a driveway that led through night-blackened trees to an imposing portico of six massive columns that protected and dwarfed a small doorway guarded by a quartet of blue-coated infantrymen. Gas lamps hissed yellow under the portico, lighting a carriage that waited for its owner.

A clock struck nine as the cavalryman was granted entrance into the hallway where yet another guard demanded his name. “Faulconer,” the young man replied. “Captain Adam Faulconer.” The guard consulted a list, ticked off Adam’s name, then told him to put his scabbarded saber into an umbrella stand and afterward climb one flight of stairs, turn left at the stairhead, and walk to the very end of the corridor where he would find a door marked with the name of the man who had summoned him. The guard rattled off these directions, then went back to his copy of The Evening Star, which heralded Major General George McClellan’s reappointment as commander of the Northern army.

Adam Faulconer mounted the stairs and walked down the long, gloomy corridor. This building was the War Department, the very center of the North’s military effort, yet there was little sense of urgency in its darkened passages where Adam’s footfalls echoed as forlornly as the steps of a man pacing a deserted sepulcher. Most of the fanlights above the office doors were dark, though one light showed at the corridor’s far end and in its small glow Adam saw the name COL. THORNE painted in white letters against one of the door’s black panels. He knocked and was summoned inside.

He found himself in a surprisingly large room with two tall windows that were shut against both the rain and the moths that beat against the panes. The walls of the room were covered with maps, and one large desk stood beside one window, while two smaller clerks’ tables occupied the rest of the room. All the desks were covered in papers that had flowed onto the chairs and hardwood floor. Two cast-iron gasoliers hissed beneath the high ceiling, while a longcase clock ticked hollowly between the windows. The room’s only occupant was a tall uniformed man who stood with a ramrod-straight back as he stared at the scatter of lit windows showing above the trees in the White House. “Faulconer, yes?” the man asked without turning from the window.

“Yes, sir.”

“My name is Thorne. Lyman Thorne. Colonel Lyman Thorne.” Thorne had a coarse, almost angry voice, very deep toned, and when he abruptly turned toward Adam he revealed a face that matched the voice perfectly, for Thorne was a gaunt, white-bearded man with fierce eyes and with deep lines carved into his sun-darkened cheeks. His most prominent feature was his white hair, which grew thick, long, and wildly enough to make Thorne appear like a bearded version of Andrew Jackson. The Colonel carried himself straight and proud, though when he moved he favored his right leg, which suggested that his other might have been injured. He gazed at Adam for an instant, then turned back to the window. “There have been celebrations in Washington these last two days,” he growled.

“Yes, sir.”

“McClellan is back! John Pope is dismissed and the Young Napoleon has been given charge of the army again, and thus Washington celebrates.” Thorne spat into a brass cuspidor, then glared at Adam. “Do you celebrate this appointment, young Faulconer?”

Adam was taken aback by the question. “I haven’t considered it, sir,” he eventually admitted lamely.

“I do not celebrate, young Faulconer. My God, I do not. We gave McClellan a hundred thousand men, shipped him to the Virginia peninsula, and ordered him to take Richmond. And what did he do? He took counsel of his fears. He havered, that’s what he did, he havered! He dithered while the rebels scraped together a handful of rapscallion soldiers and trounced him straight back out to sea. Yet now the ditherer is to be our commanding general again, and do you know why, young Faulconer?” This question, like the rest of Thorne’s words, was directed at the windowpane rather than toward Adam.

“No, sir,” Adam answered.

“Because there is no one else. Because in all this great republic we cannot find one better general than little George McClellan. Not one!” Thorne spat into the cuspidor again. “I admit he can train troops, but he doesn’t know how to fight them. Doesn’t know how to lead. The man’s a humbug!” Thorne snarled the last word, then abruptly turned and glared at Adam once more. “Somewhere in the Republic there’s a man who can beat Robert Lee, but on my soul we haven’t found him yet. But we will, Faulconer, we will, and when we do we shall pulverize the so-called Confederacy into bone and blood. Bone and blood. But until we do find that man then it is our duty to mollycoddle the Young Napoleon. We have to pat him and soothe him, we have to tell him not to be frightened of ghosts and not to imagine enemies where there are none. In short, we have to wean him off Pinkerton. Do you know Pinkerton?”

“I know of him, sir.”

“The less you know, the better,” Thorne growled. “Pinkerton isn’t even a soldier! But McClellan swears by him, and even as you and I stand here talking Pinkerton is being given command of all the army’s intelligence once more. He had that same command in the peninsula, and what did he do with it? He summoned rebel soldiers out of thin air. He told the Young Napoleon that there were hundreds of thousands of men where there was nothing but a huddle of hungry rogues. Pinkerton will do the same again. Faulconer, mark my words. Within one week we shall be told that Lee has two hundred thousand men and that little McClellan dare not attack for fear of being beat. We shall haver again, we shall dither, and while we piss our collective pants Robert Lee will attack. Do you wonder that Europe laughs at us?”

“Do they, sir?” Adam, confused by the tirade, asked the question feebly.

“Oh they do, Faulconer, they do. American pride is being humbled by a rebellion we seem powerless to defeat and Europe takes pleasure in that. They pretend not, but if Robert Lee destroys McClellan then I daresay we’ll see European troops in the South. The French would love to join in, but they won’t jump till Britain decides, and Britain won’t join the game until they know which side is winning. Which is why Lee will attack us, Faulconer. Look!” Thorne strode to a map of the eastern seaboard that hung behind his desk. “We’ve made three efforts to capture Richmond. Three! And all have been defeated. Lee now controls all of northern Virginia, so what’s to stop him coming further north? Here, Faulconer, into Maryland, and maybe farther north still, into Pennsylvania.” The Colonel demonstrated these threats by sweeping his hand across the map. “He’ll grab our good harvest for his starving men and beat up little McClellan and so demonstrate to the Europeans that we can’t even defend our own territory. By next spring, Faulconer, there could be a hundred thousand European troops marching for the Confederacy, and what will we do then? Treat for peace, of course, and so the Republic of Washington and Jefferson will have lasted a mere eighty years and North America, Faulconer, will be fatally weakened for the next eighty years.” Thorne leaned over his desk and glared at Adam. “Lee cannot be allowed to win, Faulconer. He cannot,” the colonel said in a grave voice, almost as if he were charging Adam with the personal responsibility for saving the Republic.

“No, sir,” Adam said, and felt it was a weak response, but he was being swamped by the sheer force of Lyman Thorne’s personality. Sweat trickled down Adam’s face. The night was oppressive, and the rain had not diminished the humidity at all, while the gasoliers’ flaring mantles only added to the room’s stifling heat.

The colonel waved Adam toward a chair, then sat down himself and lit a cigar from a gas flame that burned from a tabletop gas jet connected to a long rubber extension cord that snaked down from the nearest gasolier. Once the cigar was lit he pushed the gas jet and papers aside, then leaned back and rubbed his face as though he was suddenly tired. “You’re a scalawag, right?” he demanded.

“Yes, sir,” Adam said. A scalawag was a Southerner who fought for the North, the opposite of a Copperhead.

“And three months ago,” Thorne went on, “you were a rebel on Johnson’s staff, am I right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And back then, Faulconer, our Young Napoleon was marching on Richmond. No, that is the wrong verb. He was crawling toward Richmond, while Detective Pinkerton,” Thorne mocked the description with his tone, “was convincing little George that the rebels had two hundred thousand troops. You sent information that would have corrected that misapprehension, only the news never got through. Some clever bastard on the other side replaced your dispatch with one of their own devising and so Richmond survived. I almost stopped that clever bastard, Faulconer, indeed I broke a leg trying, but I failed.” He grimaced, then sucked on his cigar. The smoke hung in the room like the lingering skein of a rifle shot.

“Back then, Faulconer,” Thorne continued, “I was working for the Inspector General’s Department. I did the jobs no one else wanted. Now I am more exalted, but still no more popular with this army than I was when I inspected their damned latrines or wondered why they needed so many clerks. But now, Faulconer, I have a measure of power. It is not mine, but belongs to my master and he lives in that house there.” He jerked the cigar toward the White House. “You follow me?”

“I think so, sir.”

“The president, Faulconer, believes as I do that this army is largely commanded by cretins. The army, of course, believes that the country is ruled by fools, and perhaps both are right, but for the moment, Faulconer, I’d put my money on the fools rather than the cretins. Officially I am a mere liaison officer between the fools and the cretins, but in reality, Faulconer, I am the president’s creature in the army. My job is to prevent the cretins from being more than usually cretinous. I want your help.”

Adam said nothing, not because he was reluctant to help, but because he was astonished by Thorne and his words. He was also cheered by them. The North, for all its power, seemed to be wallowing helplessly in the face of the rebellion’s energy and that made no sense to Adam, but here, at last, was a man who had a vigor to match the enemy’s defiance.

“Did you know, Faulconer, that your father has become Deputy Secretary of War for the Confederacy?” Thorne asked.

“No, sir, I didn’t.”

“Well, he is. In time, maybe, that will be useful, but not now.” Thorne pulled a sheet of paper toward him and in so doing toppled another pile that spilt close to the gas jet. A corner of paper burst into flames that Thorne slapped out with the air of a man forever extinguishing such accidental fires. “You left the Confederacy three months ago and joined Galloway’s Horse?” he asked, taking the facts from the paper he had selected.

“Yes, sir.”

“He was a good man, Galloway. He had some bright ideas, which is why, of course, this army starved him of men and resources. But it was still a damn fool idea for Galloway to get mixed up in battle. You were supposed to be scouts, not shock troops. Galloway died, yes?”

“I’m afraid so, sir.”

“And his second in command is missing, maybe dead, maybe captured. What was his name?”

“Blythe, sir,” Adam said bitterly. He had never liked, much less trusted, Billy Blythe.

“So Galloway’s Horse, so far as I can see, is a dead beast,” Thorne said. “No employment for you there, Faulconer. Are you married?”

The sudden question surprised Adam. He shook his head. “No, sir.”

“Quite right, too. A mistake to marry early.” Thorne went silent for a moment. “I’m making you a major,” he said abruptly, then waved Adam’s embarrassed thanks to silence. “I’m not promoting you because you deserve it, I don’t know if you do, but because if you work for me you’ll be constantly harassed by brainless staff officers and the higher your rank the less obnoxious that harassment will be.”

“Yes, sir,” Adam said.

Thorne drew on his cigar and stared at Adam. He liked what he saw. Major Adam Faulconer was a young man, fair haired and bearded, with a square, trustworthy face. He was, Thorne knew, an instinctive Unionist and an honest man, but maybe, Thorne reflected, those were the wrong qualities for this job. Maybe he needed a rogue, but the choice had not belonged to Thorne. “So what are you to do, Faulconer? I shall tell you.” He stood again and began pacing up and down behind his desk. “We have hundreds of sympathizers behind the enemy lines and most of them are no damn good. They see a rebel regiment march past and they’re so overawed by the column’s length that they report ten thousand men where in truth they’ve only seen a thousand. They send their messages and Detective Pinkerton multiplies their figure by three and Little George quakes in his fighting boots and begs Halleck to send him another army corps, and that, Faulconer, is how we’ve been conducting this war.”

“Yes, sir,” Adam said.

Thorne tugged up a window sash to let some of the cigar smoke out of the room. The city’s sewage stench wafted in with a flutter of moths that flew suicidally toward the yellow-blue flames of the gas jets. Thorne turned back to Adam. “But I have a handful of agents of my own, and one of them is of particular value. He’s a lazy man and I doubt that his allegiance to the North is anything other than a cynical calculation as to the war’s outcome, but he has the possibility of revealing the rebel’s strategy to us, everything! How many? Where? Why? The same kind of thing you tried to reveal on the peninsula. But he’s also a timid man. His patriotism is not so strong that he fancies a hempen rope round his neck on a rebel gallows, and for that reason he is a cautious man. He will send us dispatches, but he will not use any means except those of his own devising. He won’t risk his neck trying to ride through the lines, but said I could provide a courier who could run that risk, but he insisted it would have to be someone he could trust.” Thorne paused to draw on his cigar, then jabbed it toward Adam. “He named you.”

Adam said nothing. Instead he was trying to think of someone who matched Thorne’s description, someone he obviously knew well in his native Virginia, but he could pluck no name or face out of his tangled memories. For a few wild seconds he wondered if it was his father, then he dismissed that thought. His father would never betray Virginia as Adam had done. “Might I ask—” Adam began.

“No,” Thorne interrupted. “I’m not giving you his name. You don’t need his name. If a message reaches you then you’ll probably realize who he is, but it won’t help you to know now. To be frank, Faulconer, I don’t know what will help you. All I know is that one weak man in the Confederacy has told me he’ll address his dispatches to you, but beyond that all is mystery.” Thorne spread his arms in a gesture that expressed his own dissatisfaction with the clumsy and imprecise arrangements he was describing. “How my man will reach you, I don’t know. How you will reach him, I cannot guess. He won’t take risks, so you’ll have to. All I can tell you is this. Just over a week ago I sent this man a message demanding that he find an excuse, any excuse, to attach himself to Lee’s headquarters and I have no reason to think he will disobey. He won’t like it, but he will do as I ask. He will stay close to Lee’s headquarters and you will stay close to McClellan’s. Little George will think you’re a nuisance, but you’ll have papers saying that you work for the Inspector General and are preparing a report on the efficacy of the army’s signaling systems. If Little George does try to hobble you, tell me and I’ll rescue you.” For a moment Thorne faltered, suddenly beset by the hopelessness of what he tried to do. He had told Adam the truth, but he had not revealed how ramshackle the whole arrangement was. His man in Richmond had provided Adam’s name weeks before, not in connection with this scheme, but as a messenger who could be trusted and now, in utter desperation, Thorne was recruiting Adam in the hope that somehow his reluctant Southern agent could discover Lee’s strategy and communicate it to Adam. The chances of success were slender, but something had to be done to neutralize Pinkerton’s defeatist intelligence and to ward off the dreadful prospect of a Southern victory that would invite the damned Europeans to come and dance on America’s carcass.

“You’ve got a good horse?” Thorne asked Adam.

“Very good, sir.”

“You’ll need money. Here.” He took a bag of coins from his desk drawer. “United States gold, Faulconer, enough to bribe rebels and maybe get you out of trouble. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that my man will send you a message saying where he will leave his dispatches. That place will be behind enemy lines, Faulconer, so you’ll need a good horse and the ability to bribe any rebel scum who give you trouble. Tomorrow morning you go to the camp on Analostin Island to meet a Captain Bidwell. He’ll tell you all you need to know about the signals system so that you can talk intelligently to Little George about telegraphs and wig-waggers. After that you follow Little George and wait for a message. Take the gold with you. That’s all.”

Adam, so summarily dismissed, hesitated. He had a score of questions, but Thorne’s brusqueness discouraged him from asking any of them. The colonel had uncapped an inkwell and had begun writing, so Adam just went to the desk and lifted the heavy bag, and it was not until he had reached the hallway downstairs and was buckling on his sword belt that it occurred to him that Thorne had never once asked him whether he was willing to risk his life by riding behind the rebel lines.

But maybe Thorne had already known the answer. Adam was a patriot, and for his country that he loved so passionately, any risk was worth taking and so, at a spy’s bidding, he would ride into treachery and pray for victory.

 

Starbuck carried the brandy back to the office, locked the door, and lay down with the fully loaded Adams beside him. He heard Holborrow return, and later he heard the four captains go to their beds upstairs, and sometime after that he slept, but he was wary of Captain Dennison’s revenge and so his sleep was fitful, though he was dreaming by the time Camp Lee’s bugles called a raucous reveille to startle him awake. The sight of the undrunk brandy bottle reminded him of the previous night’s confrontation and he took care to strap his revolver about his waist before he went through the house to the backyard, where he pumped himself a bucket of water. A mutinous Lucifer glared at him from the kitchen door. “We’ll be leaving here in an hour or so,” Starbuck told him. “We’re going back to the city.”

“Heaven be praised.”

“Bring me some coffee with the shaving water, would you? And bread?”

Back in Maitland’s old office Starbuck went through the papers to glean whatever other information he could about the battalion. This, he had decided, was the day that he revealed his true identity, but not till he had bargained the knowledge he had gleaned for some advantage and to do that he needed a bargainer. He needed the lawyer, Belvedere Delaney, and so he spent the dawn hours writing Delaney a long letter. The letter enabled him to put his ideas into order. He decided he would have Lucifer deliver the letter, then he would wait at Sally’s apartment. The letter took the best part of an hour, but at last it was done and he shouted for Lucifer. It was well after reveille, but no one else was stirring in the big house. It seemed that neither Holborrow nor the battalion’s four captains were early risers.

The door opened behind Starbuck. “We can go,” he said, without turning round.

“Sir?” A timid voice answered.

Starbuck whipped round. It was not Lucifer at the door, but instead a small anxious face surrounded by brown hair that hung in pretty long curls. Starbuck stared at the girl who stared back at him with something akin to terror in her eyes. “I was told—” she began, then faltered.

“Yes?” Starbuck said.

“I was told Lieutenant Potter was here. A sergeant told me.” The girl faltered again. Starbuck could hear Holborrow shouting down the stairs for his slave to bring hot shaving water. “Come in,” Starbuck said. “Please, come in. Can I take your cloak?”

“I don’t want to cause no trouble,” the girl said, “I truly don’t.”

“Give me your cloak. Sit, please. That chair will be fine. Might I have your name, ma’am?” Starbuck had almost called her miss, then saw the cheap wedding ring glinting on her left hand.

“I’m Martha Potter,” she said very faintly. “I don’t want to be no trouble, I really don’t.”

“You aren’t, ma’am, you aren’t,” Starbuck said. He had suspected from the moment the brown curls had timidly appeared around the door that this was the real Mrs. Potter and he feared that the real Lieutenant Potter could not be far behind. That would be a nuisance, for Starbuck wanted to reveal his true identity in his own way and not have the dénouement forced on him by circumstance, but he hid his consternation as Martha timidly perched on the edge of a chair. She wore a homespun dress that had been turned so that the lower skirt had become the upper to save the material’s wear and tear. The pale brown dress was neatly sewn, while her shawl, though threadbare, was scrupulously clean. “We were expecting you, ma’am,” Starbuck said.

“You were?” Martha sounded surprised, as if no one had ever paid her the compliment of expectation before. “It’s just—” she began, then stopped.

“Yes?” Starbuck tried to prompt her.

“He is here?” she asked eagerly. “My husband?”

“No, ma’am, he’s not,” Starbuck said and Martha began to cry. The tears were not demonstrative, nor loud, just a helpless silent weeping that embarrassed Starbuck. He fumbled in his coat pocket for a handkerchief, found none, and could see nothing suitable to mop up tears anywhere else in the office. “Some coffee, ma’am?” he suggested.

“I don’t want to be no trouble,” she said through her quiet sobs, which she tried to staunch with the tasseled edge of her shawl.

Lucifer arrived, ready to leave for Richmond. Starbuck waved him out of the room. “And bring us a pot of coffee, Lucifer,” he called after the boy.

“Yes, Lieutenant Potter,” Lucifer said from the hall.

The girl’s head snapped up. “He…” she began, then stopped. “Did I?” she tried again, then sniffed back tears.

“Ma’am.” Starbuck sat opposite her and leaned forward. “Do you know where your husband is?”

“No,” she wailed the word. “No!”

He gradually eased the tale out of the waiflike girl. Lucifer brought the coffee, then squatted in the office corner, his presence a constant reminder of Starbuck’s promise that they were supposed to be leaving this hateful place. Martha cuffed at her tears, sipped at the coffee, and told the sad tale of how she had been raised in Hamburg, Tennessee, a small river village a few miles north of the Mississippi border. “I’m an orphan, sir,” she told Starbuck, “and was raised by my grandma, but she took queer last winter and died round Christmas.” After that, Martha said, she had been put to work by a family in Corinth, Mississippi, “but I weren’t never happy, sir. They treated me bad, real bad. The master, sir, he—” she faltered.

“I can guess,” Starbuck said.

She sniffed, then told how, in May, the rebel forces had fallen back on the town and she had met Matthew Potter. “He spoke so nice, sir, so nice,” she said, and marriage to Potter had seemed like a dream come true as well as an escape from her vile employer and so, within days of meeting him, Martha had stood in the parlor of a Baptist minister’s house and married her soldier.

Then she discovered her new husband was a drunkard. “He didn’t drink those first few days, sir, but that was because they locked all the liquor up. Then he found some and he didn’t never look back. Not that he’s bad drunk, sir, not like some men. I mean he don’t hit anyone when he’s drunk, he just don’t ever get sober. Colonel Hardcastle threw him out of the regiment for drunkenness, and I can’t blame him, but Matthew’s a good man really.”

“But where is he, ma’am?” Starbuck asked.

“That’s it, sir. I don’t know.” She began sobbing again, but managed to tell how, after Potter had been dismissed from the 3rd Mississippian Infantry Battalion, he had used Martha’s small savings to take them back home to Georgia, where his father had refused to receive either Potter or his new wife. “We stayed in Atlanta awhile, sir, then his pa told us to get ourselves up here and see Colonel Holborrow. He sent us the money to come here, sir, which was real Christian of him, I thought. Then Matthew and me got here three days since and I ain’t seen him once in all those days.”

“So he’s drunk in Richmond?” Starbuck suggested flatly.

“I guess, sir, yes.”

“But where have you been staying?” Starbuck asked.

“At a Mrs. Miller’s house, sir, in Charity Street, only Mrs. Miller says her rooms ain’t charity, if you follow me, and if we don’t pay her the rent by this morning she’ll throw me out, sir, and so I came here. But I don’t want to be no trouble.” She looked as if she would cry again, but instead she frowned at Starbuck. “You ain’t Colonel Holborrow, are you, sir?”

“No, I’m not, ma’am,” Starbuck paused, then offered Martha what he hoped was a reassuring smile. He liked her, partly because she seemed so very fragile and timid, and partly, he guiltily confessed to himself, because there was an appealing prettiness under her mask of misery. There was also, he suspected, a streak of stubborn toughness that she would probably need to survive marriage to Matthew Potter. “I’m a friend of yours, ma’am,” he told her. “You have to believe that. I’ve been pretending to be your husband and doing his work so that he wouldn’t get into trouble. Can you understand that? But now we have to go and find him.”

“Hallelujah,” Lucifer murmured.

“You’ve been doing his work, sir?” Martha asked, incredulous that anyone would perform such a kindness for her wastrel husband.

“Yes,” Starbuck said. “And now we’re all going to walk out of here and go find your Matthew. And if anyone speaks to us, ma’am, then I beg you to keep silent. Do you promise to do that for me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then let’s go, shall we?” Starbuck handed Martha her thin cloak, collected his papers, paused to make certain no one was outside the door, then ushered Lucifer and Martha through the hall and across the verandah. It promised to be a hot, sunlit day. Starbuck hurried toward the nearest huts, hoping to make good his escape without being seen, but then a voice shouted at him from the house. “Potter!”

Martha uttered an exclamation and Starbuck had to remind her of the promise to say nothing. “And stay here,” he went on, “both of you.” Then he turned and walked back toward the house.

It was Captain Dennison who had called and who now jumped down the verandah steps. The captain looked as if he had just risen from his bed, for he was in his shirtsleeves and was pulling bright red suspenders over his shoulders as he hurried toward Starbuck. “I want you, Potter,” he called.

“Looks like you found me,” Starbuck said as he confronted the angry captain.

“You call me ‘sir.’” Dennison was standing close to Starbuck now and the smell of the ointment the captain had smeared on his diseased face was almost overpowering. It was a peculiarly sour smell, not kerosene, and suddenly Starbuck placed it, and the memory of his time in the Richmond prison came flooding back in a wave of nausea. “You call me ‘sir’!” Dennison said again, thrusting a finger hard into Starbuck’s chest.

“Yes, sir.”

Dennison grimaced. “You threatened me last night, Potter.”

“Did I, sir?”

“Yes you damn well did. So either you come into the house, Potter, right now and apologize in front of the other officers, or else you face the consequences.”

Starbuck pretended to consider the alternatives, then shrugged. “Guess I’ll take the consequences, Captain, sir.”

Dennison gave a grim smile. “You are a miserable fool, Potter, a fool. Very well. Do you know Bloody Run?”

“I can find it, sir.”

“You find it at six o’clock tonight, Potter, and if you have trouble just ask anyone where the Richmond dueling grounds are. They’re by the Bloody Run under the Chimborazo Hill at the other end of the city. Six o’ clock. Bring a second if you can find anyone stupid enough to support you. Colonel Holborrow will be my second. And one other thing, Potter.”

“Sir?”

“Try and be sober. I don’t relish killing a drunk.”

“Six o’ clock, sir, sober,” Starbuck said. “I look forward to it, sir. One thing, sir?”

Dennison turned back. “Yes?” He asked suspiciously.

“You issued the challenge, sir, so I get to choose weapons. Ain’t that the way it’s done?”

“So choose,” Dennison said carelessly.

“Swords,” Starbuck said instantly and with sufficient confidence to make Dennison blink with surprise. “Swords, Captain!” He called airily as he turned and walked away. The smell of the medicine had betrayed Dennison’s secret and Starbuck was suddenly looking forward to the day.

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 and drum, Maryland! She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb; Huzzah! She spurns the northern scum! She breathes, she burns, 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 rebel’s 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 closed, 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 stubbornly, “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 he?”

“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 face. “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 jackknifing 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 overendowed 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 bare-chested.

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 I 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 and 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.