Bernard Cornwell – Copperhead (страница 15)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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