Copperhead Page 39

  Starbuck laughed, then gasped as one boot slid out from beneath him on a greasy patch of log. He managed to keep his balance, though the sudden movement seemed to stretch the nearest pontoon’s guy ropes so that the whole bridge lurched under the assault of the river water that bubbled and surged between a crack in the logs. Starbuck and his horse both stood motionless until the worst of the bridge’s shaking subsided and they could step cautiously on. “Are you really a viscount?” Starbuck asked the Frenchman, and he remembered that de’Ath too had claimed a French title, though if James’s gossip was right, then de’Ath’s parentage was even more distinguished.

  “I’m never sure,” Lassan answered carelessly. “It’s an old title, officially abolished at the Revolution, but my grandfather used it and I’m his only direct male descendant. I suppose I lost any right to membership in the nobility when my mother and father made love on the wrong side of the blanket, but every now and then I resurrect the title to astonish the local peasantry.”

  “And you said you were a general?”

  “Brevet only. Once the Austrian wars were over I reverted to being a plain and humble colonel.”

  “And your government sent you here to see how we fight?” Starbuck asked, astonished that such a man would have been ordered to America.

  “Oh, no. They wanted me to command a recruiting depot, nothing but lumpish plowboys, spavined remounts, and drunken sergeants. They sent some bores from the academy and a couple of dull infantrymen to be their official observers here, but I wanted to look for myself so I took an indefinite leave of absence, and the government reluctantly accredited me once they realized I couldn’t be stopped. I think of myself as being on holiday, Starbuck.” Lassan tugged his horse onward. “Nearly there. I don’t know what those silly bastards are fretting over. I could have waltzed a blindfolded division of galloping whores over this bridge.”

  Starbuck smiled at the outrageous claim, then twisted around as a stern voice hailed them from the river’s northern bank. It was Colonel Ellis who called from beside the telegraph tent. “Stop!” Ellis shouted. “Right where you are! Stop!”

  Starbuck waved as though he had misunderstood Ellis’s order, then kept walking. He was almost off the bridge now and approaching the soggy, uncertain footing of the approach road. He began to hurry, dragging the horse behind him.

  “Stop!” Ellis shouted again, and this time he reinforced the order by pulling out his revolver and firing a shot well above Starbuck’s head. The bullet ripped into the leaves of the trees that now lay some fifty yards ahead.

  “Turn the horse toward him,” Lassan said softly, “so he thinks you’re obeying. Mount up at the same time, then keep the horse swinging around and ride like hell. Understand?”

  “I understand,” Starbuck said, and he waved again at the Engineer Colonel and he pulled the horse around to make it clear he was not trying to run away, and at the same time he put his muddy left boot into the stirrup. He gripped the saddle’s pommel with his left hand and with a quick effort swung himself up into his brother’s saddle. Lassan also mounted.

  Colonel Ellis was hurrying toward the bridge, beckoning to the two fugitives. “Come back!”

  “Good-bye, mon Colonel,” Lassan said softly and turned his horse away. “Now ride with me!” the Frenchman shouted and Starbuck slashed back with his heels and his horse took off after the Frenchman’s mount. The corduroy road was slippery and treacherous, but somehow the two horses kept their footing. “Ride!” Lassan encouraged Starbuck, and Colonel Ellis offered yet more encouragement by firing his revolver, only this time he was not aiming over the fugitives’ heads, but at their horses. Yet the two men were already over a hundred yards away and revolvers were uncertain weapons at anything over forty or fifty yards. The Colonel fired his first two bullets much too fast and his aim was lamentably wide. Then he checked himself to take more careful aim, but Lassan was already in the shadow of the trees where he turned the black horse, drew his own revolver, and fired back past Starbuck. Lassan’s shots splashed into the marsh or drove wet splinters up from the road. The Frenchman was not shooting to kill, but rather to throw off the engineer’s aim, then Starbuck spurred past him and turned a bend and so rode out of Ellis’s sight.

  Lassan caught up with Starbuck and the two men rode between woods as dank and overgrown as those on the river’s northern bank. “They know where we are now,” Lassan said. “Ellis will telegraph them.” He was reloading his revolver, ramming the bullets down on the powder with the lever attached to the underside of the weapon’s barrel. The sound of battle was louder now, filling the sultry land ahead with the menace of death. Lassan spotted a path in the woods and veered off the road, galloping along an open ride that widened into a field behind a sprawling house. Starbuck followed, tensing himself as the Frenchman jumped a rail fence. Starbuck gripped the reins, closed his eyes, and let the horse bump him up and over. Somehow he clung to the beast’s back and when he opened his eyes again he saw they were trotting on a path that ran between a field and more woods. A drill barrow had been abandoned beside the path, a reminder of more peaceful times, while at the far side of the field there was an artillery park where the horses, limbers, and cannon of a northern battery waited for orders. “Best not to look in too much of a hurry,” Lassan advised Starbuck. “There’s nothing so suspicious on a battlefield as a man in a hurry. Have you noticed that? Soldiers do most things at half speed. The only people in a hurry are staff officers and fugitives.”

  He turned farther eastward, going into the open field and trotting casually behind the waiting guns. Starbuck rode beside him. A half mile to their left was another belt of timber, beyond which lay a range of low wooded hills that concealed the killing ground. A huge smear of smoke rose into the clouds beyond those hills, and Lassan was heading for the edge of that smoke. “No point in getting into the thick of things, Starbuck. We’ll go for the flank.”

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Starbuck said, content to let the more experienced Frenchman be his guide.

  “It’s better than sitting in McClellan’s headquarters reading the New York World for the eighty-ninth time.”

  “But what about your belongings?” Starbuck asked, realizing suddenly that the Frenchman was proposing to move from the Federal to the Confederate lines with no apparent baggage.

  “My belongings are in France. Here in America I have one cloak,” Lassan patted the garment that was rolled at the cantle of his saddle. “Some money here.” He patted a saddlebag. “Enough to make it worth your while to murder me, but I’d advise you not to try.” He smiled happily. “A spare shirt, some tobacco, revolver cartridges, spare underclothes, a copy of Montaigne’s essays, one toothbrush, three notebooks, two pencils, two razors, a steel, one compass, field glasses, one comb, one watch, one flute, letters of credit, and my official papers.” He patted whatever pocket or saddlebag held these various possessions. “Once I’m safe with the rebels I’ll buy a spare horse, and once again I will have possessions enough for all my needs. A soldier shouldn’t carry more, and if I grew a beard I wouldn’t even need the razors.”

  “What about the flute?”

  “A man should possess some civilizing talent, mon ami, or else he’s just a brute. God, I wouldn’t like to fight in this country.” He voiced this opinion as the two horsemen breasted a small rise to see a tangle of small fields and woods ahead. “This is no place for cavalry,” Lassan said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because cavalry hates trees. Trees can hide guns and muskets and we cavalry like the long rolling plains. First you break the enemy infantry with artillery, then you loose the cavalry on them, and afterward you bury them. That’s the old world’s prescription for battle, but you can only do that in open country. And I tell you, my friend, that God gives no finer thrill than the experience of riding down a broken enemy. Hoofbeats, trumpets, the sun above, the enemy beneath, my God, but war is a wicked thrill.” They trotted on, going past the first evidence
of this day’s battle. There was a casualty station in the field where ambulances were bringing the wounded and where nurses in a uniform of long skirts and men’s shirts helped carry the bloody bodies out of the wagons and into the tents. Beside the casualty station was a small group of sullen men with powder-blackened faces, fugitives who had run from the rebel’s first attacks and who had now been rounded up by northern provosts. Mules loaded with panniers of rifle ammunition were being led along a road toward the smoke plume.

  Lassan and Starbuck trotted past the mules and into another belt of trees where northern infantry waited in the shadows. The men’s faces were unstained with powder, evidence that they had not yet fought this day.

  Beyond the trees the road dropped gently down to where the Richmond and York Railroad ran on its embankment through the damp meadows. The rebels had stripped the road of its rails and blown up the bridge across the Chickahominy, but the efficient northern engineers had restored both and a balloon train had stopped just to the right of the place where the road crossed the tracks. A locomotive puffed smoke into the air while the balloon’s crew winched their ungainly vehicle up from a flatbed car. The wind had dropped in the wake of the storm, but even so the balloon’s crew was having a hard struggle with the burgeoning envelope of gas.

  “Trouble,” Lassan grunted.

  Starbuck had been gazing at the balloon, but now he looked in the other direction and saw that a cavalry patrol was advancing along the railroad embankment.

  “Maybe they’re just hunting for skulkers,” Lassan guessed. “We must risk it. Once we’re in the far woods we’ll be safe enough.” He pointed to a thick belt of trees that lay on the far side of the railroad. “Just let the horse walk.”

  Lassan and Starbuck went slowly down the road. The Frenchman lit a cigar that he offered to Starbuck, then took one himself. The patrol was still a long way off and Starbuck felt his confidence rise as he drew nearer and nearer to the steel rails. The road climbed gently to the embankment’s level between verges dotted with patches of burned grass where sparks from locomotives had started small fires. Two soldiers carried a reel mounted on a stick from which they unrolled a telegraph wire that would connect the balloon’s basket with the wire that had been newly strung along the rail embankment. One of the men shimmied up a pole with a pair of pliers in his teeth. “I hate modern war,” Lassan said as he and Starbuck reached the rail crossing. “War should be drumbeats and trumpets, not electric engineers and steam engines.” Two ambulances were hurrying north along the road and Lassan drew his horse aside to let them pass. The wheels of the two white-painted wagons clattered over the boards that raised the roadbed to the level of the rails. The ambulances left a trail of fine blood drops on the road. Lassan grimaced at the sight of the ambulances’ cargo of moaning, cursing, bleeding passengers, then took out his field glasses to examine the country south of the railroad. Off to the left were rows of tents and a line of earthworks where a battery of guns was emplaced, though the day’s fighting all seemed to be a mile or so farther on beyond the trees. Two wig-wag men, their signal flags a blur of motion, stood on the redoubt’s parapet to pass a message southward. Nearer at hand the cavalry patrol turned off the embankment and spurred onto the meadows.

  “They’ve seen us,” Starbuck warned the Frenchman, who looked leftward to see that the northern horsemen were angling across the fields in a maneuver that seemed designed to head off the two fugitives.

  Lassan gazed for a second through his binoculars. “Your brother’s there. And Pinkerton. I think we should become fugitives, yes?” He grinned at Starbuck, then trotted down the sloping road that led off the embankment’s southern side. At the foot of the slope he looked again at the pursuers and evidently did not like what he saw for he took his heavy metal scabbard with its big, ugly sword and rammed it between his left thigh and the saddle so it would not bounce and bruise him. “Gallop!” he told Starbuck.

  Both men rammed back their heels, and their horses threw up their heads and thumped their hooves into the road’s red mud. A cavalry bugle sounded the charge and Starbuck twisted awkwardly in his saddle to see the blue-coated horsemen spreading across the field. The closest cavalry were still three hundred yards away and their horses were tired, but suddenly a pistol or carbine banged and Starbuck saw the puff of smoke snatched away behind the horsemen. He was not sure, but he thought he saw James, then another weapon cracked and Starbuck just ducked his head and rode hell-for-leather after Lassan. The Frenchman’s horse pounded into the trees where Lassan swerved off the road into the tangled woodland. Starbuck followed, riding desperately around the denser patches of brush and ducking under the low branches until at last Lassan slowed to a trot and looked behind to make sure the pursuit had been avoided. Starbuck, his heart pounding, tried to calm his sweating horse. “I hate riding,” he said.

  Lassan held a finger to his lips, then pointed in the direction he wanted to go. He let the horses walk. Starbuck could smell the rank sweet stench of powder smoke while the sound of the guns was now so close that each gunshot gave a percussive thump to the ears, yet the trees still hid all sight of the battle. Lassan paused again. The Frenchman’s face was alight with happiness. For him this was all a glorious adventure, a spree in the new world. “Onward,” he said, “ever onward.”

  The two men emerged from the wood into a small, irregular meadow where a battalion of northern infantry waited. The officer leading the battalion’s color party whirled his horse around eagerly as Lassan appeared. “Orders?” he asked.

  “Not from us, good luck though,” Lassan shouted in answer as he spurred past the color party. To Starbuck’s left the country opened out and he could see wagons and gun limbers parked at a crossroads, and jets of smoke showing where the guns fired. There were a group of pine trees there and two gaunt houses that seemed to lie right beneath the plume of smoke. A Union flag lifted its scarlet and white stripes in the smoky breeze, then Starbuck lost sight of the crossroads as he followed Lassan into another belt of timber.

  Lassan led him through a tangle of briers, over a fallen and fungi-ridden log, then they were in another clearing, and this time Starbuck could see the rail embankment to his right. There were no soldiers visible. “We’ve lost those cavalry,” Starbuck said to the Frenchman.

  “They’re not so far away,” Lassan cautioned. “We threw them off for a moment, but they’ll be back. This way.”

  Their path led into trees again, then into another patch of open ground which proved to be so swampy that they had to dismount and lead their horses through the glutinous, sucking turf. Beyond the swamp was a patch of low scrub oak, then a stand of pines. The noise of the battle went on incessantly, but somehow, oddly, every evidence of soldiers had disappeared; indeed the woodland was so undisturbed that Lassan suddenly pointed to his right and Starbuck saw three wild turkeys in a small clearing. “Good eating?” Lassan asked.

  “Very.”

  “Not today, though,” Lassan said and turned to look ahead as an outbreak of rifle fire splintered the humid air. Then, over that fusillade, came the peculiar and chilling noise of the rebel’s battle yell, and the sound of that defiant yelp gave Starbuck’s heart a leap of excitement. “If I were you,” Lassan said, “I’d take off that blue coat.”

  Starbuck was still wearing his brother’s jacket. Now he hurriedly searched the pockets, taking out the Bible that James had left him in Richmond, then his handful of cheap cigars, the box of matches, the penknife, and the oilskin packet of papers. He pushed them all into a saddlebag, then peeled off his brother’s coat and let it fall to the ground. Now he just wore his old gray rebel trousers, red suspenders, new shoes his brother had bought him from the sutler of a Pennsylvania regiment, and a broad-brimmed hat as ragged and stained as Lassan’s eccentric headgear.

  The Frenchman led him on through the trees. From time to time Starbuck would catch a glimpse of the rail embankment to their right, but he still could not see the troops who were giving the rebel yell. Eve
ry few seconds a stray rifle bullet tore through the leaves overhead, but it was hard to determine just where the fire was coming from. Lassan was picking his way carefully, as alert as a hunter edging toward a trapped prey. “We may have to cross the rails again,” the Frenchman said, then there was no time for deliberation or thought, only for escape as a shout to their rear betrayed that the cavalry had found them again. Both men instinctively kicked their horses into a gallop.

  A bullet slapped overhead, another cracked into a tree. Lassan whooped and ducked under a branch. Starbuck followed, gripping the pommel of his saddle as his horse thumped up a muddy path, across a small crest, and down to a road where a double file of Yankee infantry waited. “Make way! Make way!” Lassan shouted in his authoritative voice and the infantry moved magically aside to let the two horsemen pound past. They jumped a low hedge, crossed a field of arable, then once again the bullets came from behind and Starbuck feared that the whole infantry battalion would open fire, but suddenly he was in the woods again and could see soldiers to his left, only these soldiers were in full flight, running from some enemy ahead, and he let his hopes rise in anticipation. The fugitives were northerners, so surely there were rebels close by.

  Lassan saw the running men and swerved away from them. Starbuck could hear hooves behind him now and he dared to snatch a glance over his shoulder to see a bearded horseman some twenty paces away. The man had a drawn saber, its blade wickedly bright in the day’s cloudy gloom. There were infantry fusillades ahead, a rebel shout again, and more northerners running. Lassan looked over his shoulder and saw the cavalryman closing on Starbuck. The Frenchman pulled his horse left, slowed, and dragged his big sword from its scabbard. He let Starbuck overtake him, then he cut hard across the northerner’s path and slammed the sword brutally down onto the skull of the man’s horse. The blade drove into the horse’s forehead and the beast screamed as it went down onto its knees. It was thrashing its head, spraying blood, then it collapsed and its rider went flying, cursing as he slid into a tangle of thorns beside the track. Lassan had already cut back to his left and was catching Starbuck again. “Always go for the horse, never the man,” he shouted as he galloped to catch up with Starbuck.