"Battle Flag" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cornwell Bernard)

PART TWO

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JACKSON, LIKE A SNAKE THAT HAD STRUCK, hurt, but not killed its prey, retreated sullenly back across the Rapidan River, thus abandoning the battlefield at the foot of Cedar Mountain with its blackened swathes of scorched turf and long raw mounds of newly turned graves where turkey vultures gorged on bodies uncovered by dogs.

The Yankees were left in possession of Culpeper County and counted its possession as a victory, though no one really believed Jackson was defeated. The snake still had fangs, which meant that the Northern generals must try to scotch it again. Yankee troops poured southward and spread their camps along the Rapidan's northern bank while, south of the river in Gordonsville, the railcars brought fresh rebel troops from Richmond.

On both banks of the river there was a nervous sense of great events waiting to happen, and inevitably rumors fed that apprehension. The rebels feared that McClellan's Army of the Potomac had joined forces with Pope's Army of Virginia, and if that prospect was not frightening enough, a Northern newspaper hinted that the Yankees had emptied every jail between Washington and the Canadian border and put the convicts in uniform, handed them guns, and sent them to lay Virginia waste. Another tale insisted that the North was recruiting mercenaries in Europe, Germans mostly, and that each foreigner had been promised an acre of Indian territory for every rebel killed. "I knew we'd end up fighting Hessians," Truslow remarked, "but we beat the sumbitches in '76 so we'll beat the sumbitches in '62 as well." Yet the most persistent rumor of all was that Abe Lincoln was enlisting freed slaves into his army. "Because he can't find anyone else willing to fight against us," Lieutenant Coffman averred patriotically.

Most men dismissed the rumor of armed slaves as unthinkable, but a week after the Legion retreated from Cedar Mountain, Captain Murphy found confirmation of the story in a two-week-old copy of the HartfordEvening Press that had somehow found its way into the rebel lines. "See!" Murphy exclaimed to the officers sharing a jug of whiskey around a fire. "It is true!" He tilted the newspaper toward the campfire. "'Congress has extended permission for the President to enrol colored men into the army,'" Murphy read aloud. "'Congressman Matteson of New Jersey claims that the sable brethren of America are fervent in their desire to contribute their blood toward the great crusade and that, so long as their childlike and excitable nature proves tractable to military discipline, there is no reason why they should not fight at least as well as any treasonable rebel.'" A chorus of jeers greeted the last two words. Afterward there was much discussion of the newspaper's report, and Starbuck sensed a nervousness among the officers. There was something very nightmarish in the thought of black troops coming to take vengeance on their old masters.

"Though how many of us ever owned a slave?" Lieutenant Davies asked resentfully.

"I own some," Murphy said mildly and then, after a pause, "Mind you, I pay the buggers well enough. I don't think we Irish are very good at slaveholding."

"Major Hinton owns a dozen," Lieutenant Pine of Murphy's D Company added.

"And Swynyard's owned plenty enough in his lifetime," Starbuck said.

"Though not any longer," Lieutenant Davies observed in wonderment, and indeed, to everyone's astonishment, the Colonel had manumitted his two slaves when Jackson pulled the army back across the river. The Colonel, despite coming from one of Virginia's most prominent slave-trading families, had set free at least a thousand dollars' worth of prime Negroes by sending the two men north to the Federal lines. Somehow it was that sacrifice, even more than the Colonel's astonishing achievement of staying away from liquor, that had impressed on the whole Brigade that their second-in-command truly was a converted man. "He's even given up cigars," Davies added.

Murphy took the stone jug from Starbuck. "God knows why you Protestants have such an unpleasant religion."

"Because it's the true religion," Lieutenant Ezra Pine averred, "and our reward will be in heaven."

"And heaven," Murphy insisted to his Lieutenant, "is a place of all pleasures, is it not? Which means that there'll be rivers running brimful with the tastiest of whiskeys and boxes of the choicest cigars waiting ready lit at every corner, and if those pleasures are good enough for the angels they're good enough for me. God's blessing on you, Pine," Murphy added and lifted the stone jug to his lips.

Ezra Pine wanted to start a theological argument about the nature of heaven, but he was shouted down. Out in the darkness a man sang a love ballad, and the sound of it made the officers silent. Starbuck guessed they were all thinking about that horde of convicts, Hessian mercenaries, and vengeful freed slaves that was supposedly massing on the Rapidan's far bank.

"If Lee was here," Murphy broke the silence, "he'd have us all digging trenches. It'd be sore hands, so it would."

Everyone agreed that Robert Lee would have fought a defensive battle, but no one understood what Thomas Jackson might do. "I wish Lee would come," Murphy said wistfully, "for there's nothing on God's earth so good for stopping a bullet as a yard or two of good clean dirt."

The next day Starbuck heard the first rumor that confirmed that Lee was indeed coming to take command of the rebel forces on the Rapidan. Starbuck heard the rumor from an old friend who rode into the Legion's encampment brandishing two bottles of fine French wine. "We took ten cases off the Yankees three miles beyond the Rappahannock!" The jubilant speaker was a Frenchman, Colonel Lassan, who was ostensibly a foreign military observer, but who actually rode with the rebel cavalry for the sheer delight of fighting. He had just come back from a raid deep behind the Yankee lines and brought news of the enemy's preparations. "There are lines of wagons as far as the eye can see, Nate! Mile after mile of them, and every one crammed full with food, powder, and shot."

"Is that McClellan's army?" Starbuck asked.

Lassan shook his head. "That's Pope's army, but McClellan's coming." The Frenchman sounded happy at such a gathering of armies with its implicit promise of fighting.

"And if McClellan comes," Starbuck said, "Lee will come, and that'll mean digging mile after mile of trenches."

The Frenchman gave Starbuck a look of surprise. "Dear Lord, no. Lee can't afford to wait. He dug trenches to protect Richmond, but trenches won't help here"—he waved at the open country—"and Lee has to break the Yankees before they join their armies together. Lee's no fool, Nate. He knows which end of a pig makes the mess."

Starbuck laughed at the quaint phrase. Lassan spoke perfect English, the legacy of a British father, but at times he transposed a Norman peasant's language into his father's tongue. Lassan himself was no peasant but a professional soldier who had fought in Italy, the Crimea, and North Africa, and who bore the scars of those wars across his eye-patched face. They were terrible scars, scars to terrify a child to nightmare, yet Lassan himself was an easygoing man whose besetting sins were warfare and women. "Both dangerous pursuits," he liked to tell Starbuck, "but why settle for dullness in this sad, bad world?"

Now, with his horse picketed, the Frenchman strolled with Starbuck through the Legion's camp lines. The weather was such that none of the men had bothered to make turf shelters, preferring instead to sleep on the open ground, and so the lines were little more than piles of belongings interrupted by the remnants of cooking fires. The Legion's new draftees were being drilled by Sergeant Major Tolliver while the veterans not on picket duty were either sleeping, playing cards, or reading.

Lassan, who seemed to have taken it on himself to educate Starbuck in matters military, was explaining why Lee could not afford a defensive strategy. "Dig trenches and gun emplacements behind this river, my friend, and how are you to stop the Yankees simply strolling round the end of your earthworks ? You don't have enough men to guard a trench dug from the Chesapeake Bay to the Blue Ridge Mountains, so instead of digging you will have to march and tip the enemy off balance. It will be a war of maneuver, a cavalryman's war! Naturally you infantrymen will have to do the real fighting and dying, that's why God made infantrymen, but we cavalrymen will do your scouting for you." Lassan scratched beneath his mildewed eye patch. "You'll know things are getting warm, Nate, when Lee arrives." "Or when the Yankees attack," Starbuck said. "They won't. They're too sluggish. The North is like a man who has grown so fat he is unable to move fast. He just wants to roll over you and so crush you to death, while you have to slice him up into little pieces."

Starbuck walked a few paces in silence. The two men had left the Brigade lines behind and were now walking toward a stand of trees that screened the south bank of the Rapidan. "Can we win this war?" Starbuck finally asked the Frenchman.

"Oh, yes," Lassan said without hesitation, "but it will be expensive. If you kill enough Yankees, then they may think the game isn't worth the candle. You'll also need luck." The Frenchman had sounded confident, but it nevertheless struck Starbuck as a gloomy prescription. "Of course," Lassan went on, "if you could get European support, then everything changes."

"Can we?" Starbuck asked, as if the question had not been debated endlessly in the Confederacy.

Lassan shook his head. "France won't do anything unless Britain leads the way, and Britain has been burned too badly by its past American adventures, so Britain won't intervene unless the South looks capable of winning the war by itself, in which case you wouldn't need their help anyway, which all means, mon ami, that it is up to the South to fight and win its own war." They had reached the edge of the trees now, a place made ragged by the axes of men seeking firewood, and Starbuck hesitated to go further, but Lassan gestured him on. "I wanted to talk to you in private," the Frenchman said, and so he led Starbuck down a vague path that zigzagged erratically through the underbrush. Pigeons clattered through the upper leaves while a woodpecker's staccato rattle sounded sudden and close. "I have to tell you"—Lassan, half turned to Starbuck as he spoke—"that I have set myself up in an establishment in Richmond."

It seemed an oddly unnecessary confession to Starbuck, perhaps because he was not entirely sure what the Frenchman meant by an "establishment." "A business, you mean?" he asked.

"Dear Lord God, no!" Lassan laughed at the very thought. "I've no head for commerce, none! No, I mean I have established a household. It's on Grace Street. You know it?"

"Very well." Starbuck was amused by the thought of Lassan fussing with domestic arrangements.

"It's an apartment," Lassan said. "We have five rooms above a tailor's shop on the corner of Fourth Street. Then we have slave quarters downstairs at the back where there's a kitchen, a small garden for herbs, a peach tree, and a wooden stable. It's rented, of course, and the kitchen chimney smokes when the wind's in the west, but otherwise it's really very comfortable." The middle-aged Lassan had never counted comfort as one of life's priorities, and he gave the word an ironic twist.

"You've got slaves?" Starbuck asked, surprised. Lassan shrugged. "When in Rome, mon ami." He took a cigar from his pouch, lit it, and handed it to Starbuck before lighting one for himself. "I can't say that I'm comfortable with the arrangement," he went on, "but I convince myself that the slaves are better off with me than with anyone else. I have a stable boy, there are two kitchen girls who clean as well, and of course an upstairs girl who looks after clothes and all the rest of the flummery."

He sounded embarrassed again. The two men had reached an old cart track that was much overgrown but was wide enough to let them walk side by side. "You sound as if you've taken a wife," Starbuck said lightly.

Lassan stopped and faced his friend. "I have taken a companion," he said very seriously. "We are not married, nor shall we marry, but for the moment, at least, we suit each other." Lassan paused. "You introduced me to her."

"Oh," Starbuck said, coloring slightly and remembering how, when Lassan had first crossed the lines to attach himself to the rebel forces, he had asked Starbuck for an introduction to a house of pleasure in Richmond. Starbuck had sent Lassan to the best of all such houses, the most exclusive house, the house where Sally Truslow worked. "It's Sally?" Starbuck asked.

"Indeed," Lassan said. His one eye examined Starbuck anxiously.

Starbuck was quiet for a moment. Sally was the rebellious daughter of Sergeant Truslow and a girl with whom Starbuck sometimes thought he was in love himself. He had asked Sally to marry him earlier in the year, and at times Starbuck was still convinced that they could have made such a marriage work. He had been delighted when she had abandoned the brothel for the more lucrative job of being a spiritual medium, and Sally's seances were now famous in Richmond, a town obsessed with supernatural phenomena, but there was no doubt that her success had more than a little to do with the fact that the darkened shrine of Madame Royall, as Sally now called herself, was attached to Richmond's most notorious house of assignation, a proximity that added the spice of wickedness to her clients' visits. Starbuck had half dared to hope that Sally might want to complete her conversion to respectability by taking a husband, but instead she had taken a lover, and Starbuck understood that, in the gentlest possible way, he was now being warned away from Sally's bed. "Good for you," he told Lassan.

"She wanted to tell you herself," Lassan said, "but I insisted."

"Thank you," Starbuck said, wondering why he was suddenly so damned jealous. He had no call for jealousy. Indeed, if he was so in love with Sally, why did he sneak out of the Brigade's lines at night to visit the crude tavern just south of the camp? McComb's Tavern had been put out of bounds, but there was a red-haired girl working one of the upstairs rooms, and Starbuck was happy to risk Washington Faulconer's punishment to visit her. He had no call for jealousy, he told himself again, then began walking north along the cart track. "You're a lucky man, Lassan."

"Yes, I am."

"And Sally's lucky, too," Starbuck said gallantly, even though he could not help feeling betrayed.

"I think so," the Frenchman said lightly. "I am teaching her French."

Starbuck forced a smile at the thought of Sally Truslow, a girl from a hardscrabble farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, learning to speak French, except it was not so strange, for Sally had journeyed a long way from her father's comfortless house. She had learned society's manners, and how to dress and how to talk, and yet again Starbuck felt a pang of jealousy at the memory of Sally's exquisite beauty; then he again thought how unfair it was for him to be envious, for as often as he thought of Sally he also thought of Julia Gordon, Adam Faulconer's abandoned fiancйe, and he did not know which girl he preferred, or whether, in truth, he was simply a fool for any woman, even for a red-haired whore in a country tavern. "I am glad for you, Lassan," he said with forced generosity, "truly."

"Thank you," Lassan said simply, and then stopped beside Starbuck where the cart track left the trees to run down to the river. A house had once stood on the nearer bank, but all that was left of the house now was a stub of broken brick chimney and the outlines of a stone foundation within which grew a thick and entangling clump of bushes. The farther bank of the river was a forest of shade trees that hung over the swirling water, though immediately opposite the house a cart track led between two willows into the far woods. Lassan stared at that distant cart track, then frowned. "Do you see what I see, Nate?"

Starbuck had been thinking of Sally's startling beauty and of Julia Gordon's graver face, but now, sensing that he was being tested, he stared at the landscape and tried to see whatever was significant in it. A ruined house, a river, a far bank of thick trees, and then he saw the anomaly just as clearly as Lassan's trained eye had seen it.

The track that he and Lassan had followed to this spot did not end at the river but rather continued on the farther bank. Which meant there was a ford here. Which was strange because every crossing of the Rapidan was supposedly guarded to prevent a surprise Northern attack, yet here was a ford standing empty and unwatched. "Because no one knows the ford's here," Starbuck said. "Or maybe the roadbed is washed away?" he added.

"There's an easy way to find out," Lassan said. He had the instinctive caution of any soldier coming to a river, especially a river that divided two armies, but he had stared hard at the further bank through a small glass and was satisfied that no Yankees waited in ambush, and so he now walked into the sunlight, where he took off his spurred boots and hitched up his saber. Starbuck followed the Frenchman, wading into the river, which flowed fast, clear, and shallow across a bed of fine gravel. Long weeds trailed upstream, and a few fish darted in the shadows downstream, but nothing obstructed Lassan and Starbuck's progress; indeed, the water scarce reached either man's knees. At the far bank the road reared steeply up from the water, but not so steeply that a horse team could not have pulled a heavy gun and limber out of the river. "If the Yankees knew about this ford," Lassan said, "they could be round your backside in a trice."

"I thought you said they weren't going to attack us," Starbuck commented as he pulled himself up onto the northern bank.

"And I've also told you a hundred times that you must always expect the unexpected from your enemy," Lassan said as he sat in the shade of a willow and stared back across the river. He gestured upstream with the cigar. "What units are that way?"

"None," Starbuck said. "We're the westernmost brigade of the army."

"So the Yankees really could hook round your backside," Lassan said softly. He smoked in silence for a few seconds, then abruptly changed the subject back to his new house-hold. "Sally hopes you'll visit us when you're in Richmond. I hope so, too."

"Thank you," Starbuck said awkwardly.

Lassan grinned. "I am becoming domesticated. My mother would be most amused. Poor Mama. I am an adventurer, while my sister lives in England, so Mama is rather alone these days."

"You've a sister?"

"The Countess of Benfleet." Lassan gave a half-mocking grimace at the grand-sounding title. "Dominique married an English nobleman, so now she has a castle, five grown children, and probably twice as many lovers. I hope she does, anyway." He tossed the stub of his cigar into the water. "One of Dominique's sons wants to join this war and she asked me which side he should fight for. I said the North if he wants to be respectable and the South if he wants adventure." Lassan shrugged as if to suggest he did not much care either way. "I wonder if this ford's got a name," he said idly.

"Dead Mary's Ford." A man spoke suddenly from the far side of the track, and the voice so startled Starbuck that he reached for his revolver. "It's all right, massa! Silas is just plain harmless." The unseen speaker chuckled; then the bushes stirred and Starbuck saw that an old Negro had been hiding in the trees just a few feet away. The old man must have been watching them for a long time. "Silas is a free man!" the Negro said as he sidled onto the track and drew from his filthy clothes a scrap of paper that had long lost any legibility. "Free! Massa Kemp gave Silas freedom." He waved the disintegrating scrap of greasy paper. "God bless Massa Kemp."

"You're Silas?" Lassan asked.

"Silas." The old man confirmed his identity with a nod. "Mad Silas," he added as though the qualification might prove useful. He was staring keenly at the stub of Starbuck's cigar.

Lassan took out a new cigar, lit it, and gave it to the old man, who was now squatting in the road. "Do you live here, Silas?"

"Over there, massa." Silas pointed to the ruined house. "Silas has a lair in there." He chuckled, then found the internal rhyme even funnier and almost rolled backward as he laughed at himself.

"How old are you, Silas?" Lassan asked.

"Silas is older than you, massa!" Silas laughed again. "But Silas's daddy now, he saw the redcoats!"

"Why Dead Mary's Ford, Silas?" Lassan asked.

The old man shuffled a few inches nearer. His clothes looked as old as himself, and his hair was white and matted with dirt, while his face was deep lined. Lassan's question had swept the humor from that face, replacing it with suspicion. "'Cos Mary died," he said at last.

"Here?" Starbuck asked gently.

"The white folks came. Looking for Silas, but Silas wasn't here. Mistress Pearce's baby gone, see? They thought Silas took it, so they came and burned Silas's house. And burned Silas's wife." The old man looked very close to tears as he stared at the house, where, Starbuck now saw, a kind of hollowed den was scooped in the bushes under the brick chimney. "But the baby was never gone after all." Silas sighed as he finished the story. "She grown up now. But Silas's Mary, she's still here too."

Lassan lit himself another cigar and smoked in companionable silence for a few moments before giving the old man a smile. "Listen, Silas. More white folk are coming here. They're going to dig trenches along the edge of the trees over there, at the top of your meadow. They don't mean you any harm, but if there's anything in your house that's valuable to you, take it away and hide it. You understand me?" "Silas understands you, massa," Silas said very intensely. Lassan gave the old man two more cigars, then clapped Starbuck on the shoulder. "Time to get back, Nate." The two men waded the ford, pulled on their boots, then walked back through the woods. Starbuck wanted to find Major Hinton, but the Major was out of the lines, and so, accompanied by Lassan, Starbuck went to the big farmhouse that Washington Faulconer had commandeered for his headquarters.

Washington Faulconer had gone to Gordonsville, leaving Colonel Swynyard in command of the Brigade. The Colonel was in the farmhouse parlor, sitting beneath the crossed flags of the Faulconer Legion that Faulconer kept unfurled and draped across the parlor wall. One of the two flags was the Faulconer Legion's own banner derived from the Faulconer family's coat of arms. It showed three red crescents on a white field and had the family's motto, "Forever Ardent," wreathed around the lower crescent. The flag measured thirty-six square feet and had a yellow fringe, just as did its companion flag, which was the new battle flag of the Confederate States of America.

The original flag of the Confederacy had carried three stripes, two red and one white, with a star-spangled blue field in its upper corner, but when the wind dropped and the flag hung limp, it had resembled the Stars and Stripes, and so a new flag had been designed, a scarlet banner blazoned with a blue cross of Saint Andrew, and on that diagonal, white-edged cross were thirteen white stars. The old flag with its stars and three stripes was still the official flag of the Confederacy, but when the Confederacy's soldiers marched into battle, they now marched under their new battle flag.

The Confederate War Department had decreed that infantry regiments should carry a battle flag four feet square, but such a flag was not nearly grand enough for Brigadier General Washington Faulconer, who had insisted on having a banner six feet by six feet made of the finest silk and edged with a tasseled fringe of golden threads. The General had intended that his Legion's two flags should be the finest war banners in all the Confederacy, and so he had commissioned them from the same expensive French factory that had manufactured his ill-fated crescent-badged shoulder patches.

"Which means," Colonel Griffin Swynyard said when he saw the Frenchman admiring the lavish flags, "that every marksman in the Northern army will be aiming for them."

"Maybe you could persuade Faulconer to stand beneath them?" Starbuck suggested sweetly.

"Now, Nate. Let us be charitable," Swynyard said. The Colonel had been busily trying to reconcile the Brigade's accounts and seemed glad to be interrupted by visitors. He stood and shook hands with Colonel Lassan, apologized that General Faulconer was away from the headquarters, and insisted on hearing what circumstances had brought the scarred French cavalry officer to the Confederate army. "You're welcome to a lemonade, Colonel," Swynyard said when the story was told, indicating a jug of pale yellow liquid that was protected from wasps by a beaded cover of fine muslin.

"I have wine, Colonel." Lassan produced one of his captured bottles.

Swynyard grimaced. "Captain Starbuck will tell you that I have forsworn all ardent liquor, Colonel. For over two weeks now!" he added proudly, and it was astonishing what a change the abstinence had wrought in the Colonel. The sallow cast of his skin had vanished, his sweating fits had faded, and the twitch in his cheek that had once convulsed his face into a grotesque rictus had subsided to a faint tic. His eyes were clear and alert, he stood straighter, and he was dressed each day in clean linen. "I am a new man," he boasted, "though alas, my rebirth has not given me a facility for mathematics." He gestured at the Brigade's ledgers. "I need someone who can understand accounts, someone with an education; someone like you, Starbuck."

"Not me, Colonel," Starbuck said, "I was at Yale."

"That must make you good for something," Swynyard insisted.

"Not one whole hell of a lot," Starbuck said, "except maybe discovering unmapped fords." He crossed to a hand-drawn map of the area that lay on a claw-footed table. "Just here," he said, "not a long rifle shot away from the lines."

For a moment Swynyard thought Starbuck was being jocular; then he crossed to the map table. "Truly?" he asked.

"Truly," Lassan confirmed.

"Right there." Starbuck pointed on the pencil-drawn map. "It's called Dead Mary's Ford."

"We waded across it, Colonel," Lassan said, picking up the tale, "knee deep, passable by artillery, and as wide open as a barrack-town whorehouse on a Saturday night."

Swynyard shouted for his horse. Now that he had released his slaves, he was using Hiram Ketley, Colonel Bird's half-witted orderly, as his servant. Bird himself was on his way home to Faulconer Court House and was expected to survive so long as his wound stayed clean. "You don't have a horse, Starbuck?" Swynyard asked as his own mare was brought to the front of the house.

"No, Colonel. Can't afford one."

Swynyard ordered another horse saddled, and then the three men rode north through the woods to where the ruined house stood beside the river. Swynyard rode across the ford, then back again. "Our lord and master," he said to Starbuck, "ordered me not to change the Brigade's dispositions without his permission, but even Faulconer, I suspect, would agree that we have to put a guard here." He stopped talking, distracted by the stooped, ragged figure of Mad Silas, who had suddenly appeared out of the bushes in his ruined house like a beast scuttling out of a burrow. "Who's that?" Swynyard asked.

"Some poor, old, mad black," Lassan said. "He lives there."

"Is that a skull he's carrying?" Swynyard asked in a tone of horror.

Starbuck stared and felt a sudden shock as he realized that the object in Silas's hands was indeed an old yellow skull. "Jesus," he said faintly.

"It's more likely to belong to Dead Mary," Lassan said dryly.

"I suppose he knows what he's doing," Swynyard said as Silas crossed the river and disappeared into the far woods, "which is more than we do." He returned his attention to the ford. "If we've not heard of this crossing, then I can't believe the Yankees know about it, but even so we can't take a chance. Why don't you bring your company here, Starbuck, with B and E as well? I'll make you a separate command, which means you'll bivouac here. You'll have to dig in, of course, and I'll inspect your earthworks at sunset tonight."

For a second Starbuck did not quite understand the implications of the Colonel's words. "Does that mean I'll be in command?" he asked.

"Who else? The tooth fairy?" Swynyard's conversion had not entirely robbed him of savagery. "Of course you're in command. B and E Companies are commanded by lieutenants, in case you hadn't noticed. But, of course," he added, "if you don't feel equal to the responsibility of command?" He left the question dangling.

"I'm up to it, sir, and thank you," Starbuck said, and then he saw Swynyard's triumphant grin and realized that he had actually called the Colonel "sir." But then this was a special occasion, the first time that Captain Nathaniel Starbuck had been given the responsibility of an independent command.

"I suspect the ford is in safe hands now," Swynyard said, pleased with himself. "So, Colonel"—he turned to Lassan– "you've plainly seen more adventure than most. Like me!" He held up his left hand with its missing fingers. "So let us exchange stories of scars. Off you go, Starbuck! Fetch your men. Leave the horse with Ketley."

"Yes, sir," Starbuck said and felt his spirits soar. He had a ford to guard.

Priscilla Bird had taken over her husband's responsibilities in the small schoolroom of Faulconer Court House where, day by day, she taught fifty-three children whose ages ranged from five to sixteen. She was a good teacher, patient with the slow, demanding of the quick, and firm in her discipline, yet since the war had begun, there were two sounds that were guaranteed to erode all order in her schoolroom. One was the noise of marching feet, and the other the clatter of massed hoofbeats on the road outside, and despite all Priscilla's strictures the older children would always respond to those sounds by first sidling along their benches to see out of the windows, and if they saw soldiers passing, they would then ignore her protests and insist on hanging over the sills to cheer their passing heroes.

Yet as the August temperatures rose to record levels, Priscilla became as sensitive to the sound of horses as any of the children. She expected her wounded husband's return, and that expectation was shot through with apprehension, love, relief, and fear, which was why she no longer protested when the children crowded at the windows, for she was as keen as they to investigate every odd sound in the street. Not that troops passed very often, for, since the Faulconer Legion had marched away a year before, the town had seen precious few soldiers in its streets. The townsfolk read about the battles in the FaulconerCountyGazette, but the tides of war had ebbed and flowed far from the streets of Faulconer Court House. Indeed, in the summer of 1862, hardly a uniform was seen in the town at all until, on an August day as hot as any in memory, the sound of cavalry drew the children to the schoolroom windows. Priscilla joined them, scanning the street for the sight of a wagon that might be carrying her husband, but all she saw was a tired group of horsemen with weapons on their shoulders. The schoolchildren cheered while Priscilla, her heart aching, felt sorry for the weary-looking men and their poor swaybacked horses.

One or two of the troopers smiled at the cheering children, but most stayed grim-faced as they passed the school. There were only twenty of the horse soldiers, but their arrival was stirring the town with excitement and the expectation of news. "Are you with Jeb Stuart?" one boy called repeatedly from the schoolhouse. The Confederacy still buzzed with the remembered pleasure of Stuart's mocking ride clean around the whole of George McClellan's army. "Are you Jeb Stuart's men, mister?" the boy called again.

"Damn Stuart, you black-assed bastard," one of the dusty troopers called back.

Priscilla frowned, stared, and hardly dared to believe the suspicion that suddenly crossed her thoughts. These men wore blue coats, not gray or brown, and the leader of the troop was suddenly familiar beneath the mask of dust on his suntanned face. The man had a square, golden beard and blue eyes that looked up to meet Priscilla's gaze. He half smiled, then courteously touched the brim of his hat. It was Adam Faulconer.

"Get back!" Priscilla shouted at the children, and such was the fear and anger in her voice that all but the most rebellious of her pupils obeyed.

For there were Yankees in Faulconer Court House. Adam had known it was imprudent to take his men through the very center of his hometown, but once he had thought of the notion, he could not shake it free. He wanted to flaunt his new allegiance in front of his father's neighbors, and the very hurtfulness of that disloyal act made it all the more appealing. He suddenly felt free of both his father and of his father's money, and that liberation had made him cast all caution to the wind and bring his blue troopers into the heart of his hometown. "Sergeant Huxtable!" he shouted when he saw Priscilla Bird pull back from the open schoolroom window.

"Sir?" Huxtable called.

"Let the banner fly, Huxtable. Let's not be coy!" "Yes, sir." Huxtable grinned, then ordered Corporal Kemp to pull the cloth cover off the Stars and Stripes. Kemp unrolled the banner, then raised it high on its lance shaft-pole. A last child had been cheering from the schoolroom but fell abruptly silent as the old flag unfurled to the bright Virginia sun. Adam, looking at that flag, felt the familiar catch in his throat.

It was a sweet moment for Adam as he rode through Faulconer Court House beneath his proper flag. He rode proud in a strange uniform, and he enjoyed the astonishment on the townspeople's faces. "Good morning, Mrs. Cobb!" he called happily. "Your husband's well? You'll doubtless be hoping for some rain for your vegetables." He waved to Grandmother Mallory, who was on the steps of the bank, then greeted the blacksmith, Matthew Tunney, who was one of a group of drinkers who had crowded out of Greeley's Tavern to watch the strange horsemen pass. "Keep your hand off your gun, Southerly!" Adam warned an elderly man whose face displayed a livid outrage. Adam's own men had unslung their Colt rifles.

"Traitor!" Southerly called, but kept his hands in clear sight as the dusty, hard-faced horsemen passed by. The horses, some of the townsfolk noted, were mangy and ill-kept. "Should be ashamed of himself, a Faulconer, riding nags like that," Matthew Tunney observed.

Adam led the nags past Sparrow's Dry Goods Store, then by the Episcopal church and the Baptist church, the courthouse and the livery stable. Sleeping dogs were startled awake and slunk out of the road as the horses clattered by. Adam paused by the livery stable to touch his hat to a wan, thin woman. "I was so sorry to hear about Joseph, Mrs. May," he said, "sincerely sorry." Mrs. May just stared in apparent shock. Some townsfolk followed the horsemen, but once Adam had passed Medlicott's water-mill, which marked the eastern extremity of Faulconer Court House, he quickened his troop's pace and so left the curious townspeople behind. "They'll be sending for help," Sergeant Huxtable warned Adam.

"There's no help nearer than Rosskill," Adam reassured the Sergeant, "and we'll be well gone before anyone can get there and back. And no one in Rosskill will hear that noise!" he added as someone in the town began to tug the rope of the courthouse bell. The bell was still tolling its alarm as Adam turned his troop into a white-gated entrance that opened into an avenue edged by mature live oaks. Beyond the oaks were deep, well-watered pastures, where cows stood to their bellies in cool ponds, while at the end of the avenue was a wide, comfortable house clad in creepers that smothered the house's weatherboards and encroached on its steep-gabled roofs. A weathervane shaped like a galloping horse surmounted a clock tower above the stable entrance. The only warlike aspect of the house was a pair of bronze six-pounder cannons that flanked the main entrance. The twin guns had been purchased by Washington Faulconer at the war's beginning in the expectation that the Faulconer Legion needed to have its own artillery, yet in the rush to reach the first battle the weapons had been left behind and Faulconer had found it simpler to appropriate the two cannons as garden ornaments.

Adam pointed Huxtable toward the stable. "You'll probably find a half-dozen decent horses in there," he said, "and the rest will be in the bottom fields. I'll take you there when I've finished in the house."

Huxtable paused before swerving away. "A nice place," he said, staring up at the house.

"Home," Adam said with a grin, "sweet home."

Home was Seven Springs, Adam's father's country house where Washington Faulconer kept the Faulconer stud that was reputed to breed the finest horses in all Virginia. It was here that Adam would find the remounts for his cavalrymen, and not just any remounts, but horses sprung from the best Arab blood crossed and strengthened with sturdier American strains to breed a fast, willing, and enduring horse that could hunt a long cold winter's day among the short hills and wooded valleys of Virginia, or else be spurred into a winning gallop in the last furlongs of a lung-breaking, sweat-streaked steeplechase. Adam had risked coming this far south to equip his men with the best horses in America– horses that could outrun and outlast the best of the South's famed cavalry. Indeed, they were horses that should have belonged to the Southern cavalry, for the Richmond government had ordered that all saddle horses should be surrendered to the army, but Adam knew his father had chosen to ignore the command. Faulconer horses, according to Washington Faulconer, were too valuable to be wasted on war, and so the stud still existed.

Adam let himself into the house. He did not know whether or not his mother would want to see him, but he intended to pay his respects anyway, though as he walked into the front hall with its four portraits of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Washington Faulconer, the first person he met was Nelson, his father's personal servant. Adam stopped in surprise. "Is my father here?" He asked the question with some trepidation, for though he felt he was making a fine and defiant gesture in stealing a score of horses from Seven Springs, he did not particularly want to meet his father while he made it.

Nelson shook his head, then put a finger to his lips and gave a glance upstairs as though warning Adam of some danger. Then Nelson beckoned Adam along the corridor that led to Washington Faulconer's study. Adam followed the black man. "The mistress sent John to Rockville, Mr. Adam," Nelson said when he was certain that no one in the household could overhear him. "Young Master Finney ran here from the town, saying how you'd arrived with the soldiers, so Mistress sent young John to fetch help."

Adam smiled. "Then no one will be here for at least an hour and a half."

"Maybe," Nelson agreed, "but the mistress says you're to be held here. She says you're mind-sick, Mr. Adam. She says you're to be locked up till the doctors can see you." The two men had reached the study, and Nelson now closed the door to give them privacy. "They say you've clear gone plumb mad crazy, Mr. Adam," the servant said.

"They would say that," Adam admitted sadly. He knew his parents could not stomach his betrayal of Virginia, nor would they ever accept Adam's conviction that Virginia was best served by adherence to the Union. He looked out of a window and saw some of the stable boys running in panic from Sergeant Huxtable's men. "What are you doing here, Nelson?" he asked the servant.

"The General sent me to deliver something," Nelson said evasively. He was a trusted servant, much older than his master, and in charge of three younger black men who served the General as valets and cooks. Nelson, like all Washington Faulconer's servants, was a free man, though freedom, in Adam's experience, rarely lifted a Negro out of poverty or released him from the need to show an obsequious respect to all white men, and Adam suspected that the outwardly servile Nelson still harbored the secret resentments of most slaves. Washington Faulconer, on the other hand, believed utterly in Nelson's loyalty and had provided him with a pass enabling him to travel freely throughout Confederate-held Virginia.

Adam crossed to the giant map of Virginia that hung on a wall of the study. "Do you think I'm mad, Nelson?"

"You know I don't, Mr. Adam."

"Do you think I'm wrong?"

Nelson paused, then shrugged. Somewhere deep in the house a woman's voice called in sharp reproof and a bell rang. "The mistress will be wanting me," Nelson said.

"Where is my father?" Adam asked. "Here?" He stabbed a finger at the peninsula east of Richmond, where he had last seen the Legion.

Again Nelson paused, then seemed to cross whatever Rubicon of loyalty had been restraining him and walked to Adam's side. "The General's here," he said, placing a finger on the banks of the Rapidan River to the west of the road going north from Gordonsville to Culpeper Court House. "They fought against General Banks up here"—Nelson's finger moved up the Culpeper road—"then they went back again. I guess they're just waiting."

"For what? For the North to attack?"

"Don't know, sir. But on my way here, sir, I saw ever so many troops marching north. I reckon there'll be fighting soon.

Adam stared at the map. "How's my friend Starbuck?" he asked, half ironically, yet also interested in the fate of the man who had once been his closest friend.

"That's why the General sent me here, sir," Nelson said mysteriously, and then, when Adam frowned in puzzlement, the servant gestured across the study to where a flag lay draped across the General's desk. "Mr. Starbuck captured that flag, sir, from the Yankees. The General took it from Mr. Starbuck and made me bring it back here to be kept safe. It's a Pennsylvania flag, sir."

Adam crossed the study and picked up the powder-stained, scorched, bullet-torn flag of purple cloth. He smoothed out the embroidered eagle with its long talons above the German motto: Gott und die Vereinigten Staaten. "God and the United States," Adam murmured aloud, and the sight of the captured Northern banner gave him a sudden and exciting idea. He went back to the map and asked Nelson to describe the Faulconer Brigade's deployment, and as he listened Adam found his idea becoming ever more practicable. He was remembering the Reverend Elial Starbuck's fervent wish to be presented with a rebel battle flag, and Adam suddenly saw how he might be able to fulfill that desire.

For the moment, however, he contented himself with confiscating the Pennsylvanian banner. "I'll return it to its rightful owners," he told Nelson, "but first I should visit Mother."

"And your sister," Nelson said, "she's upstairs, too. But don't be long, master. Young John can ride fast."

"I won't be long." Outside the study window Sergeant Huxtable's men were busy saddling their wonderful new horses. Adam smiled at the sight, then crossed to the study door. God willing, he thought, those horses would carry him to a coup that would make the North ring with triumph and the South cringe with shame.

Then, his mother's bell clanging loud, he climbed the stairs and nerved himself for combat.

By sunset Dead Mary's Ford was properly protected. At the edge of the woodland Starbuck had dug a line of fifteen rifle pits that were invisible from the river's far bank. The red excavated earth had all been thrown back into the undergrowth, and the pits' parapets disguised with brush and dead logs so that if an enemy did try to cross the river, they would be met with a blast of rifle fire from an apparently deserted tree line. The advance picket was hidden inside Silas's ruined house, where four men could keep a close watch on the far woods, but the majority of Starbuck's 130 men were bivouacked two hundred yards behind the rifle pits. There they had made their encampment, and there they would wait in case they were needed to reinforce the men serving their turn of duty in the ruins or in the rifle pits.

Colonel Swynyard approved all he saw. "Have you sent anyone over the river?" he asked.

"Sergeant Truslow!" Starbuck called, and Truslow came and told the Colonel what he had found on the far bank.

"Nothing," Truslow said. He spat tobacco juice, hitched his pants higher, then told how he had led a dozen men up the far track until the trees ended. "That's a fair ways, 'bout a long mile. Beyond that's a farm. Family called Kemp lived there, but they're gone." He spat again. "Yankee lovers," he explained both his expectoration and the absence of the Kemp family. "Saw a neighbor at the farm. She lives another half-mile north and says she ain't seen a live Yankee in weeks."

"So you're probably in for a restful time, Captain," Swynyard said. "Did you consider putting pickets on the far bank?"

"I'd rather not," Starbuck said. "I don't want anyone shooting one of our own men by mistake."

"I told the woman at the Kemp farm to stay away from the river," Truslow said. "And the Captain said the same to the old nigger."

"But a sentry post a hundred yards up that track would give you more time to rouse your reserves," Swynyard pointed out.

Truslow answered for his Captain. "I laid a dozen felled trees over the track, Colonel. There ain't a Yankee born who can come down that road without waking the dead."

Swynyard nodded his approval, then turned and gazed westward, where another track followed the riverbank. "Where does that lead?" he asked.

"To Lieutenant Davies and twelve men," Starbuck answered. "There's a ruined barn just out of sight. That's our western picket."

"You seem to have thought of everything!" Swynyard said approvingly. "Including, I hope, the need to provide me with supper? And after that, Captain, you'll doubtless allow me to lead a small prayer group for those men who care about their souls?"

Starbuck shrugged. "We're pretty short of food, Colonel. Not that you ain't welcome, but supper's nothing but rough rice, stewed squirrel, and pea coffee if you're lucky. But I'm staying here." He wanted to see the night fall across the river so he would know what to expect when he took the late sentry watch.

"Don't get too tired," Swynyard advised; then he strode back to where the cooking fires sifted their smoke into the leaves. Starbuck stayed at the tree line and watched as darkness fell and as the moon climbed above the far trees to silver the shallow water hurrying across its gravel bed. He walked along the rifle pits and was filled with pride because this was his first independent command. If a Yankee cavalry patrol should come south and prove foolish enough to force its way past the felled trees, then Starbuck would fight his very own battle, and if he recognized the truth, he wanted to fight that battle because he knew he would win. He would turn the silver ford bloody and add a pack of Yankee ghosts to join the unquiet spirit of poor Dead Mary.

The river ran quick, the moon threw black shadows, and Starbuck prayed that God would send him his own, his very own, small battle.