Copperhead Page 30

  “He did encourage me,” Starbuck lied.

  James shook his head. “So there really are that many rebel soldiers? I must confess I had my doubts. I thought Pinkerton and McClellan were seeing dangers where none existed, but I was wrong! Well, with God’s help we shall prevail, but I admit the fighting will be hard. But at least you have done your duty, Nate, and I shall make it my business to let Father know that.”

  Starbuck gave a quick embarrassed smile. “I can’t see Father forgiving me.”

  “He’s not given to forgiveness,” James agreed, “but if I tell him how valuable your services have been, who knows? Maybe he will see his way to restoring his affections?” He busied himself by polishing his spectacles yet again. “He’s still angry, I must confess.”

  “About the girl?” Starbuck asked brutally, referring to the days when he had fled from both Yale and his father’s wrath. “And about the money I stole?”

  “Yes.” James colored, then smiled. “But even Father can’t deny the parable of the prodigal son, can he? And I shall tell him that it is time to forgive you.” He paused, trapped between his desire to confess an emotion and an upbringing that had taught him to hide all such revelatory feelings. Desire won. “It wasn’t till you were gone that I realized how much I missed you. You were always the rebellious one, weren’t you? I think I needed your mischief more than I knew. After you’d gone I decided we should have been better friends, and now we can be.”

  “That’s kind of you,” Starbuck said, acutely embarrassed.

  “Come!” James suddenly slid forward off his chair and knelt on the hooked rug. “Shall we pray?”

  “Yes, of course,” Starbuck said, and for the first time in months, he went to his knees. His brother prayed aloud, thanking the Lord for the return of this prodigal brother and praying God’s blessing on Nate and Nate’s future and the North’s righteous cause. “Maybe,” James finished, “you’d like to add a word of prayer, Nate?”

  “Just amen,” Starbuck said, wondering what betrayals he would need to make in the next few days if he was to keep the promise he had made to Sally’s father. “Just amen.”

  “Then amen and amen,” James said. He smiled, replete with happiness, because righteousness had triumphed, a sinner had come home, and a family disgrace could be ended at last.

  The CSS Virginia, the ironclad built on the hull of the old USS Merrimack, was run aground and burned when Norfolk, her home base, was abandoned. The loss of the rebel ironclad opened the James River to the northern navy, and a flotilla of warships crept upstream toward Richmond. Rebel batteries on the riverbanks were overwhelmed by naval gunfire, the huge missiles of the flask-shaped Dahlgren guns ripping the rain-sodden parapets apart and the screaming hundred-pound shells of the Parrott rifles tearing up the damp-rotted fire platforms and shattering the gun carriages. Mile by mile the northern squadron of three ironclads and two wooden gunboats churned upstream, confident that there was no secessionist ship left afloat on the James capable of challenging them and discovering no shore battery strong enough to stop their inexorable progress.

  Six miles south of Richmond, just where the squadron’s course turned through a right angle to run straight north toward the heart of the city, one last rebel fort remained. It stood high on Drewry’s Bluff, a great hill on the James’s southern bank, and its heavy guns pointed east toward the river’s mouth. To the north of Drewry’s Bluff, where the river ran so invitingly into the heart of rebellion, a barricade of stone-filled barges had been sunk against great pilings. The water heaped above the barricade and flowed white through its sluices, while a tangled mat of driftwood and floating trees was trapped upstream to make the obstacle look even more formidable.

  The northern squadron came upon the last fort and its barricade just after dawn one morning. The five warships had been anchored in midstream all night, harassed by rifle fire from the enemy banks, but now, with the rising sun behind them, they cleared their turrets and gundecks for the decisive battle. First they would subdue the fort, then blast a gap through the barricade. “Richmond by nightfall, boys!” an officer on the leading ironclad called to his gun crews. Through his telescope he could see the distant city in the new day’s light, could see the sun shining on white spires and on a pillared temple and on the roofs that climbed the city’s seven hills. He could see the wretched rebel flags flying and he swore that before this day was through his ship would land a raiding party to take one of those rags from its Richmond staff. First they would destroy this last obstacle, then they would steam upstream into the city’s heart and shell its citizens into submission. The army would thus be saved the need to mount a siege. Victory by nightfall.

  The five ships loaded their guns, hauled their anchors from the river’s mud, and steamed toward battle with their ensigns bright in the rising sun. The rebels fired first, shooting downriver when the leading warship was just six hundred yards away. The rebel shells screamed down from the hill’s crest, each missile trailing a whip-thin wisp of fuse-smoke. The first shots plunged into the river, exploding great fountains of water that streamed away into mist. Then the first shells struck home and the rebel gunners cheered. “Save your breath! Reload! Look lively now!” a gun captain shouted.

  The ironclad USS Galena led the attack, enduring the rebel cannonade as she maneuvered herself into a firing position. First she threw out a stern anchor, then, with her propeller stopped, she let the current swing her around so that the ship’s full broadside could be brought against the small fort on its high bluff. The Galena’s Captain intended to check the current’s swing by letting a bow anchor go when he was broadside to the rebel guns, but no sooner had the makeshift ironclad begun to swing than the rebel shells began to tear her armored sides apart. The iron plates bolted over the Galena’s wooden hull were no match for the fort’s big guns. The armor plates buckled and fell, then the enemy shells ripped through the unprotected wooden skin to turn the gundeck into a sudden slaughterhouse of fire and white-hot steel. Screams echoed under low beams, smoke billowed through hatches, and fire exploded out of gunports. The warship cut her anchor cable and, leaking blood from her scuppers, limped downstream to safety.

  The Monitor, a purpose-built ironclad with a deck and turret of solid metal, thumped up to the point of danger with her nine-foot-wide propeller churning the river brown with bottom mud. The fort’s gunners paused to let the smoke from their eight guns dissipate, then turned the quoins and levered their guns’ carriages to sharpen their aim. The Monitor was an altogether harder target, for she was little more than a flat metal deck flush with the river on which was mounted a circular turret twenty feet across. To the men in the fort she looked like a cake tin afloat on a waterlogged metal tray, then a puff of smoke showed as her auxiliary steam engine engaged the drive that would revolve the ship’s gun turret and so bring her two monstrous cannons to bear.

  “Fire!” the rebel gun commanders shouted and the flames whipped out of the guns that crashed back on their barbette carriages. The shells and shot cracked down on the ironclad. Some drove great gouts of water from the river, others hit their target square on, but only to bounce off the deck armor and wail above the riverbanks in tumbling flight.

  The Monitor’s sailors cranked open the gun ports. The whole boat shivered as an enemy shot struck the deck, then again as another shell made the turret reverberate like a giant drum. “Fire!” The turret’s officer called the command.

  “They won’t go high enough!” a gun captain shouted back. “The guns! They can’t elevate any higher!” Another enemy shell cracked on the turret, starting dust from every rivet and join in the inner armor. Water splashed across the guns from a near miss, then another shell screamed off the armor plate.

  The officer squinted along the gun sights and saw that the weapon’s barrel was pointed at the slope below the fort.

  “They won’t go higher!” the gun captain shouted over the terrible noise of solid shot cracking against the turret’s eight layers of
one-inch armor plates. The ironclad’s main engine thumped in the boat’s deep belly, holding her against the current while every few seconds a whipcrack of sound announced the strike of a sharpshooter’s bullet fired from the rifle pits that lined the riverbank.

  “Fire anyway!” the officer shouted.

  The Monitor fired, but her huge twin shells merely buried themselves on the damp hill slope and churned a small avalanche of wet dirt away from the rock. Enemy shells banged and bounced off the one-inch armor of her deck and drowned the engines’ intake vents with water splashes. The ironclad’s helmsman, fighting against the sideways pull of the monstrous propeller, peered through slits in the solid iron blocks of the pilothouse to see nothing but water and gunsmoke. The ironclad fired again, the boat’s whole stern momentarily settling a foot lower in the water as the two big guns recoiled, but again the shells fell far short of the earth-walled fort that was built so high above the river. “Go astern!” the ship’s captain shouted up to the helmsman. The Monitor, its guns unable to hurt the enemy batteries, drifted downstream after the defeated Galena and the helmsman listened to the mocking jeers of the rebel infantry on the riverbanks.

  The third ironclad, the USS Naugatuck, edged past the frustrated Monitor to take the lead position in the narrow river. Her first salvo went low, her next broadside screamed above the fort to splinter the tall trees beyond, then her gunners reckoned they had the proper elevation and rammed a one-hundred-pound shell into the twelve-foot barrel of their big Parrott gun. They stood back, the gunner yanked the lanyard to scrape the friction fuse and fire the gun, but instead the whole barrel, over four tons of iron, exploded in a blinding crack. Men whipped away in sprays of blood as jagged fragments of the burst breech whistled across the gundeck. Fire licked the deck, exploding a ready charge at the next gun. That smaller explosion laid open a man’s ribs as cleanly as if they’d been cut with a knife and split his intestines like a dribble of butcher’s offal across a rope-hauled ammunition hoist. An enemy shell added to the horror, coming through the open gun port to kill two men who were dragging a firehose aft. Flames roared along the gundeck, driving the gun crews up onto the poop where they made easy targets for the rebel sharpshooters on the banks. The ship’s pumps brought the fire under control, but not until the Naugatuck, like the Galena and the Monitor, had drifted on the current out of range of the enemy guns. The two smaller gunboats fired on at long range, but neither dared take her fragile wooden hull close to the unscathed heavy guns on Drewry’s Bluff and inch by inch, as though unwilling to admit defeat, the wounded flotilla fell back downstream.

  In Richmond the guns sounded like summer thunder, rattling casements and shivering the colored water that filled the long-necked flasks in the windows of Monsieur Ducquesne’s hairdressing salon. The twelve hundred slaves who labored in the hellish five acres of the Tredegar Iron Works silently cheered the unseen attackers while their overseers glanced nervously through grimy windows as if they expected to see a monstrous fleet of Yankee ironclads come steaming around the river bend at Rockett’s Landing with their smokestacks blackening the sky and their great guns raised to tear the heart from the secessionist capital. But nothing moved on the bend except the wind-stirred water. The guns cracked on, their sound muffled in the long, hot morning.

  The sound gave urgency to a meeting of the free citizenry that had been summoned to assemble at the foot of the great steps of the State House. At the top of the steps, framed and given nobility by the soaring columns of Jefferson’s architecture, the Mayor of Richmond and the Governor of Virginia both swore that the city would never surrender as long as there was breath in their bodies and pride in their hearts. They vowed to fight street to street, house to house, and promised that the James would run crimson with Yankee blood before Virginia’s city yielded to northern tyranny. The crowd, encumbered with weapons, cheered the sentiments.

  Julia Gordon, walking home with a pair of skinned rabbits that she had bartered at the Union Street market for a fine damask tablecloth that had formed a part of her mother’s wedding goods, paused at the edge of the crowd and listened to the speakers. She noted in the pauses between the cheers how the guns’ sound seemed to rise, fall, fade, and echo like some far-off thunderstorm. A famous Confederate congressman had begun speaking, using as his text a copy of the New York Herald which told how the citizens of Albany, the capital of New York State, were celebrating the imminent victory of the North over secession. They were dancing in the northern streets, the Congressman claimed, because the overweening Yankees reckoned their war was won. And why do they reckon thus? the orator asked. Because the great McClellan was marching on Richmond. “And shall McClellan win?” The orator roared the question.

  “No!” the crowd roared back.

  The Young Napoleon, the speaker said, would meet his Waterloo and the capering in Albany’s streets would turn into the shuffle of mourning. The dancing bands would give way to muffled drums and the harlequins to grieving widows. For every brave hero buried in Richmond’s Hollywood cemetery, the orator promised, twenty corpses would be interred in the North, and for every teardrop shed by a southern widow, a bucketful would flow in the hated union. Richmond would not surrender, the South would not yield, the war was not lost. The crowd cheered and the far guns echoed.

  Julia walked slowly on, the two bloody carcasses dripping from her hand. She skirted the crowd and took the path that led down to the Bell Tower. Crippled beggars sat by the railings that edged the tower, all of them wounded at the battle of Manassas. Beyond the tower, parked beside St. Paul’s in Ninth Street, a hearse waited behind a team of horses wearing tall plumes of black feathers. The Negro postilions wore white gloves and black frock coats. Behind the hearse a small military band with black armbands waited for the casket to be brought from the church.

  Julia crossed the road in front of the plumed horses, climbed the steps to the War Department, and asked the clerk in the hall office whether Major Adam Faulconer of General Johnston’s staff was in the building. The clerk did not even need to examine his book. “All the General’s staff are out of the city, miss. We haven’t seen Major Faulconer for a month now.”

  “Did he send a letter for me?” Julia asked. Sometimes staff officers circumvented the postal service by using the army’s messengers to carry their private mail into the city. “For Miss Gordon?” Julia said.

  The clerk sorted through the letters on his table, but there was nothing for Julia. She thanked him and walked slowly uphill, turning into Franklin Street and trying to decide whether she was disappointed by Adam’s silence or whether, in an odd way, it was a relief. Julia had written to tell Adam she had a message for him, but she had received no reply and was beginning to suspect that Adam’s silence was perhaps a symptom of his change of heart.

  Julia had been surprised when Adam first courted her, but she had also been flattered, for he was a remarkably handsome man and known to be both honorable and honest. Adam was also—and Julia was not so dishonest to pretend to be blind to the advantage—sole heir to one of Virginia’s greatest fortunes, and while Julia constantly told herself that her affection for Adam was in no wise altered by that circumstance, she also knew that the circumstance must have an effect as marked and constant as the unseen pull of the sun on the earth’s tides. Julia’s mother lived with the constant shame of poverty, which shame made her husband’s life a misery, and by marrying into the Faulconer family, Julia knew she could alleviate the unhappinesses of both her parents.

  Yet, and Julia fell into a reverie as she walked slowly through the city, there was something which did not ring true about her feelings for Adam. The word “love,” she thought, was so imprecise. Did she love Adam? She was sure she did, and she anticipated a married life of good and charitable works that would stretch far ahead, even into the next century, and whenever she thought about that useful good life she saw it in terms of being briskly busy, but never in terms of being happy. Not unhappy, certainly, but not happy either, and then
she would chide herself for an un-Christian selfishness in even wanting happiness. Happiness, she told herself, was not a product of pleasurable pursuits, but an effect brought about by being engaged in ceaseless good works.

  Yet sometimes, in the middle of the nights when she awoke to the sound of the wind sighing across the roofs and the rain bubbling in the gutters, she felt melancholy because she sensed a lack of joy. Did Adam, she wondered, ever worry about joy? He seemed so gloomy, so full of high purpose and deep troubles. He said it was the war that oppressed his soul, but Julia was not blind to other young people whose love and happiness transcended the fighting.

  Julia realized she was walking west on Franklin Street, which meant she must soon pass the house where Sally Truslow lived. Julia had not yet summoned the courage to make that call and was ashamed of that failure. She walked past the house on the far side of the road and felt intimidated by its grandeur. A hazy sun glossed the windows, but could not quite hide the chandeliers that hung in the rooms beyond. The front door gleamed in the unfamiliar sunlight. She had a sudden impulse to cross the road and pull the polished brass bellpull, but then decided that carrying two bloody rabbits into a house, even a house of ill repute, was hardly the best way to save a soul. And that, she assured herself, was why she wanted to visit Sally.

  She walked on home, passing houses tightly shuttered and locked because their inhabitants had fled the Yankee approach. The city was safer because of that evacuation for the army had increased the provost patrols in an effort to protect the otherwise unguarded property. Other patrols had searched the city’s poorer quarters to root out deserters, while the newspapers also proclaimed that the authorities were hunting down northern spies who sought to betray the Confederacy. The city was full of rumors and fear, and now it shivered to the sound of gunfire. The enemy was at the gates.