The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 Read online

  Starbuck pretended to consider the alternatives, then shrugged. "Guess I’ll take the consequences, Captain, sir."

  Dennison gave a grim smile. "You are a miserable fool, Potter, a fool. Very well. Do you know Bloody Run?"

  "I can find it, sir."

  "You find it at six o'clock tonight, Potter, and if you have trouble just ask anyone where the Richmond dueling grounds are. They're by the Bloody Run under the Chimborazo Hill at the other end of the city. Six o'clock. Bring a second if you can find anyone stupid enough to support you. Colonel Holborrow will be my second. And one other thing, Potter."

  "Sir?"

  "Try and be sober. I don't relish killing a drunk."

  "Six o'clock, sir, sober," Starbuck said. "I look forward to it, sir. One thing, sir?"

  Potter turned back. "Yes?" he asked suspiciously.

  "You issued the challenge, sir, so I get to choose weapons. Ain't that the way it's done?"

  "So choose," Dennison said carelessly.

  "Swords," Starbuck said instantly and with sufficient confidence to make Dennison blink with surprise. "Swords, Captain!" he called airily as he turned and walked away. The smell of the medicine had betrayed Dennison's secret and Starbuck was suddenly looking forward to the day.

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL SWYNYARD Stood at the river's edge and thanked his God .that he had been spared to witness this moment. A small breeze rippled the water to splinter up a myriad of bright sparkles reflected from a sun that blazed in a cloudless summer sky. At least three bands were playing and in this place, on this day, there was only one tune that they would ever play, though the Colonel thought it was a pity that they did not play in unison, but instead competed merrily as they celebrated the momentous event. Swynyard's maimed left hand beat against his sword scabbard in time to the closest band, then, almost unaware of it, he began to sing. "Dear mother," the Colonel sang softly, "burst the tyrant's chain. Maryland! Virginia should not call in vain, Maryland!" His voice became louder as the emotion of the hour embraced him. "She meets her sister on the plain; Sic semper 'tis the proud refrain that baffles minions back amain, Maryland, my Maryland."

  A burst of clapping sounded from the nearest company of the Faulconer Legion and Swynyard, oblivious that he had raised his voice loud enough to be heard, blushed as he turned and acknowledged the ironic applause. There had been a time, and not long before either, when these men cursed the very sight of Griffin Swynyard, but they had been won over by Christ's grace, or rather by the workings of that grace inside Swynyard, and now the Colonel knew that the men liked him and for that blessing he could have wept this day, except that he was already weeping for sheer joy at this moment.

  For the Southern army of Robert Lee, which had fought again and again against the northern invaders of its country, was crossing the Potomac.

  They were going north.

  The Confederacy was taking the war into the United States of America. For a year now the Yankees had marched on Southern soil, had stolen from Southern farms, and boasted of sacking the Southern capital, but now the invaded had become the invaders and a great dark line of men was crossing the ford beneath the battle flags of the South. "I hear the distant thunder-hum," Swynyard sang and this time the Legion sang with him, their voices swelling beside the river in wondrous harmony. "Maryland! The old line's bugle, fife arid drum, Maryland! She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb; Huzzah! She spurns the northern scum! She breathes, she bums, she'll come, she'll come! Maryland, my Maryland!"

  "They're in good voice, Swynyard, good voice!" The speaker was Colonel Ned Maitland, the Legion's new commander, who spurred his horse to Swynyard's side. Swynyard was on foot because his horse, the one luxury he possessed, was being rested. A man like Maitland might need three saddle horses and four pack-mules loaded with belongings to ensure his comfort on a campaign, but Swynyard had forsworn all such fripperies. He owned a horse because a brigade commander could not do his job without one, and he had inherited a tent and a servant from Thaddeus Bird, but the tent belonged to the army and the servant, a half-witted soldier called Hiram Ketley, would return to Bird's service when Bird was recovered from the wound he had taken at Cedar Mountain.

  "What will you do, Maitland, when Bird comes back?" Swynyard asked, needling the self-satisfied Maitland, who rode to war with two tents, four slaves, a hip bath, and a canteen of silver cutlery with which to eat his scumbled vegetables.

  "I hear he won't return," Maitland said.

  "I hear he will. His wife wrote to Starbuck saying he was mending well, and when he does come back I'll have to give him the Legion. He's their proper commander."

  Maitland waved the problem away. "There'll be plenty of other vacancies, Swynyard."

  "You think I might be killed, eh? You reckon you'll be brigade commander? You look the part, Maitland, I'll say that for you. What did that uniform cost?"

  "Plenty enough." Maitland was a placid man who rarely rose to Swynyard's baiting, perhaps because he knew that his connections in Richmond would ensure his smooth rise up the army's senior ranks. The trick of that rise, Maitland reckoned, was to have just enough battle experience beneath his belt to make it plausible; just enough and no more. He took a pair of field glasses from a saddlebag and trained them on the distant Maryland shore while Swynyard watched a squadron of Stuart's cavalrymen spur into the river. The troopers reached down with their hats to scoop up water that they flung at each other like children at play. The army was in a holiday mood.

  "I wish the Legion still had a band," Swynyard said as the nearest musicians launched into "My Maryland" for the umpteenth time. "We did have one," he said, "but it got lost. At least, the instruments did."

  "A lot of things seem to get lost from the Legion," Maitland said airily.

  "What on earth does that mean?" Swynyard asked, trying to disguise his irritation at Maitland's condescension.

  Swynyard was not certain that Maitland intended to give the impression he did, but that impression was of a superior man who observed and disapproved of all he encountered.

  "Officers, mainly," Maitland said. "Most of the officers seem to have come up from the ranks in the last few weeks."

  "We were fighting," Swynyard said, "which meant officers got killed. Didn't you hear about it in Richmond?"

  "A rumor of it reached us," Maitland said mildly, cleaning the lenses of his field glasses. "Even so, Swynyard, I reckon I need some better men."

  "Fellows who know what knife and fork to use on their hardtack?" Swynyard guessed.

  Maitland let the sarcasm sail past him. "I mean more confident fellows. Confidence is a great morale booster. Like young Moxey. Pity he's gone." Captain Moxey had gone to Richmond to serve as Washington Faulconer's aide.

  "Moxey was useless," Swynyard said. "If I was going into battle, Maitland, I wouldn't want weak reeds like young Moxey, but men like Waggoner and Truslow."

  "But they're hardly inspirational men," Maitland observed tartly.

  "Victory's the best inspiration," Swynyard said, "and men like Truslow deliver it."

  "Maybe," Maitland allowed, "but I'd have liked to have held onto Moxey. Or that Tumlin fellow."

  Swynyard had to think for a second to place Tumlin, then remembered the man from Louisiana who claimed to have been a prisoner in the North since the fall of New Orleans. "You wanted him?" he asked, surprised.

  "He seemed a decent fellow," Maitland said. "Eager to serve."

  "You think so?" Swynyard asked. "I thought he was a bit plump for a fellow who'd spent five months in a Yankee prison, but maybe our erstwhile brethren can afford to feed their captives well. And I have to say I thought young Tumlin was a bit glib."

  "He had confidence, yes," Maitland said. "I suppose you sent him back to Richmond?"

  "Winchester," Swynyard said. Winchester, in the Shenandoah Valley, was the campaign's supply base and all unattached men were now being sent there to be reappointed. "At least he won't get wished onto poor Nate Starbuck," Swynyard added.
/>   "Starbuck could count himself lucky if he had been," Maitland said, raising the glasses again toward the far riverbank. That bank was heavily wooded, but beyond the trees Maitland could see enemy farmland basking in the strong sunlight.

  "If Starbuck's lucky," Swynyard said, "he'll be back with this brigade. I requested that his battalion be given to us if it's ordered to the army. No one else will want them, that's for sure."

  Maitland shuddered at the thought of seeing the Yellowlegs again. His appointment to its command had been the nadir of his career and only the most energetic string-pulling had rescued him. "I doubt we'll see them," he said, unable to hide his relief. "They aren't ready to march and won't be ready for months." Not ever, he reflected, if Colonel Holborrow had his way. "And why would we want them anyway?" he added.

  "Because we're Christians, Maitland, and turn away no man."

  "Except Tumlin," Maitland retorted tartly. "Looks as if they're ready for us, Swynyard."

  A messenger was spurring toward the brigade. A horse-drawn ambulance had just splashed into the ford accompanied by a cheer from the closest troops. Robert Lee was inside the vehicle, put there by injuries to his hands when he tried to quiet his frightened horse. A wounded commander, Swynyard thought, was not a good omen, but he put that pagan thought behind him as the messenger rode to Maitland under the assumption that the elegant Lieutenant-Colonel was the brigade commander. "He's the fellow you want," Maitland said, indicating Swynyard.

  The messenger brought orders for Swynyard's brigade to cross the river and Swynyard, in turn, gave the Legion the honor of leading the brigade onto Northern soil. The Colonel walked down the Legion's column of companies. "Remember, boys," he shouted again and again, "no looting! No roguery! Pay in scrip for whatever you want! Show them we're a Christian country! Go now!"

  Truslow's A Company waited until a battery of South Carolinian guns had splashed into the ford, then followed onto the road and down the muddy ramp into the water. The color party followed with the Legion's single flag held aloft by young Lieutenant Coffman, who found it a struggle to hold the big battle flag high against the wind while his slight body was buffeted by the Potomac's swirling current, which rose above his waist. He pushed on gamely, almost as though the whole war's outcome depended on him keeping the fringed silk out of the water. Many of the men were limping, not through wounds but because their ill-booted feet were blistered and to those men the river's cool water was like the balm of Gilead. Some men, though, refused to cross. Swynyard paused to talk with half a dozen such men who were led by a gaunt young corporal from D Company. The corporal's name was Burridge and he was a good soldier and a regular worshipper at the Colonel's prayer meetings, but now, as respectful and stubborn as ever, Burridge insisted he must disobey Swynyard's orders. "Ain't our task to go north, Colonel," he said firmly.

  "It's your task to obey a lawful order, Burridge."

  "Not if it's against a man's conscience, Colonel, and you know it. And it is lawful for us to defend our homes, but not to attack other folks' homes. If a Yankee comes south then I'll kill him for you, but I won't go north to do my slaughtering," Burridge declared and his companions nodded their support.

  Swynyard ordered the men back to where the provosts were collecting other soldiers whose consciences could not abide carrying the war off their home soil. It grieved Swynyard to lose the six men, for they were among the best in the brigade, but it had been a confrontation he could never win and so he bid them farewell then followed the Legion into the river. Some of the men ducked their heads into the water to give their hair a brief washing, but most just pressed on toward the Northern bank, climbed onto Maryland soil, then crossed the bridge over the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that lay just beyond the river. And thus they entered the enemy country.

  It was a fine place of comfortable farms, good wooded land, and gentle hills; no different from the landscape they had left, only these hills and farms and woods were ruled by an enemy government. Here a different flag flew and that gave a piquancy to the otherwise unremarkable countryside. Not that most of the men in the five regiments in Swynyard's Brigade considered Maryland an enemy; rather they believed it was a slave state that had been forced to stay with the Union because of geography, and there were high hopes that this incursion of a Confederate army would draw a flock of recruits to the rebels' slashed cross flags. But however sympathetic Marylanders might be to the rebellion, it was still an enemy state and here and there some farms yet flew a defiant stars and stripes to show that this was Yankee territory.

  But such stars and stripes were far outnumbered by rebel flags, most of them homemade things with faint colors and uncertain design, but they were hung to welcome Lee's army and when, at midafternoon, Swynyard's men marched through Buckeystown they were greeted by a small crowd that was hoarse from cheering the arrival of the rebels. Buckets of water or lemonade were placed beside the road and women carried trays of cookies along the weary columns. One or two of Buckeystown's houses, it was true, were shuttered close, but most of the village welcomed the invasion. A Texan band played the inevitable "My Maryland" as the column passed, the tune becoming ever more ragged and the harmony more cacophonous as the bandsmen were supplied with cider, beer, and whiskey by the villagers.

  The brigade trudged on, their broken boots kicking up a plume of white dust that drifted westward on the breeze. Once, a mile beyond Buckeystown, a sudden crackle of firing sounded far away to the east and some of the men touched the stocks of their worn rifles as if preparing for battle, but no more shots sounded. The countryside stretched warm away, bounteous and calm under the summer sun. God was in His heaven, all seemed well in the world, and Lee's rebel army was loose in the North.

  Starbuck walked into Richmond where he left Lucifer, his small luggage, and the letter for Belvedere Delaney at Sally's house, then he led Martha Potter on a tour of Richmond's drinking dens. Alcohol was officially banned from the city, but the government might as well have tried to outlaw breathing for all the difference their high-mindedness had made.

  Starbuck began with the more respectable houses close to the Byrd Street depot of the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad, where Martha had last seen her husband. Starbuck spared her the brothels, reckoning that no whore would have endured a drunk for three days. Instead they would have picked Matthew Potter clean on the first night and then pitched him into the street to be swept up by the provosts. Once sober the Lieutenant would have been sent to Camp Lee and his failure to arrive suggested that he had discovered some liquor-sodden haven, or worse.

  Starbuck worked his way down the hierarchy of liquor shops. The first places he searched had some pretensions to gentility, maybe a gilded mirror or a stretch of tobacco-soaked carpet, but gradually the furnishings, like the liquor, worsened. He knocked on a half dozen doors in Locust Alley; but found no sign of the missing Lieutenant. He tried Martin Street, where the whores hung out of the upper windows and made Martha blush. "He didn't have the money to drink all these days, sir," she told Starbuck.

  "He might have," Starbuck insisted.

  "There weren't more than three dollars in my purse."

  "Three dollars will take you a long way in this town, ma'am," Starbuck said, "and I daresay he had a coat? He had a pair of boots? A revolver?"

  "All those, yes."

  "Then he could sell those and be drunk for three months. Hell," he said, then apologized. "Forgive my language, ma'am, but that's where he is. The Hells. I think, ma'am, I'd better take you back to Miss Sally's."

  "I'm coming with you," Martha insisted. For all her timidity she was a dogged girl and no amount of Starbuck's persuasion could convince her to abandon the search.

  "Ma'am, it ain't safe in the Hells."

  "But he might be injured."

  He might be dead, Starbuck thought. "I must insist, ma'am."

  "You can insist all you want, sir," Martha said stub-bornly, "but I'm still coming. I'll just follow you if you won't escort me."

 
; Starbuck took out his revolver and checked that all five cones were primed with percussion caps. "Ma'am," he said, "where I'm going ain't called the Hells for nothing. It's in Screamersville, down by Penitentiary Bottom. Ugly names, ma'am, ugly place. Even the provosts don't go there under company strength."

  Martha frowned. "They outlaws there?" she asked.

  "In a manner, ma'am. Some deserters, a lot of thieves, and a lot of slaves. Only these slaves aren't under orders, ma'am, they're out of the Tredegar Iron Works and they're tougher than the stuff they roll in the mills."

  "Hell," Martha said, "I ain't afraid of niggers."

  "Then you should be, ma'am."

  "I'm coming with you, Major."

  He led her down the hill past Johnny Worsham's barn-like establishment where gambling tables crowded close to the stage on which a troupe of girls danced in between entertaining their clients upstairs. Two black men in bowler hats guarded the door and watched Starbuck with flat, cold stares. He led Martha over a wooden bridge that spanned a creek flooded with sewage and then into an alley that ran between damp brick walls. "You know the town pretty well, sir?" Martha asked, lifting her skirts as she stepped between the fetid rubbish that lay on the cobbles.

  "I served a few weeks with the provosts here," Starbuck said. They had been miserable weeks that had ended with his imprisonment on suspicion of being a Northern spy. A gutless little officer called Gillespie had made Starbuck's life a hell in that prison, and that was one prospect of revenge that Starbuck treasured.

  He stepped over a pile of garbage and turned into an unnamed street. The stench of the iron works hung heavy here and the sound of the furnaces roared to rival the foaming of the nearby river where it cascaded over the rapids. A dozen slaves lay in the smoke-dimmed sunlight with stone bottles of liquor, which they raised in an ironic salute as Starbuck passed. "Why ain't they at work?" Martha demanded.

  "They work hard enough," Starbuck said. "You can't whip a man into working hard, ma'am. You have to give them some rope and once the slaves are trusted in the Iron Works they can come and go pretty much as they please. Long as they stay down here and don't go into the upper town, no one minds. This is their territory, not ours."