The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 Read online

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

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

  "Sir?" Adam lowered the glasses.

  "One man can make a difference, Faulconer."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Is that so bad?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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