Bernard Cornwell – Copperhead (страница 3)

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

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

“Any minute.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus.” Starbuck groaned.

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

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

“Coward,” Truslow said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I just slept badly, sir.”

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