Julia reached her parents’ house. She stood for an instant and listened to the muffled percussion of the heavy guns firing on the river and she closed her eyes and said a prayer that all the young men would come home safe. Unbidden, she had an image of Starbuck and was so surprised at that incursion that she burst into laughter. Then she carried the rabbits indoors and closed the house against the sound of war.
Belvedere Delaney’s letter to Lieutenant Colonel Thorne stayed hidden for a whole week in the cobbler’s shop in Catlett’s Station. Each day the cobbler added more letters to the hiding place until, at last, he had enough to make his journey worthwhile. Then, with sixteen letters to Colonel Wilde all resealed into one large envelope, he locked his shop and told his friends he was delivering finished shoes to distant customers. Then, carrying a heavy bag of patched shoes with the clandestine mail hidden in its lining, he walked north. Once out of his own district he traveled only at night, taking care to avoid the partisan patrols of horsemen who had been known to string up a free Negro on the nearest hanging tree, passport or no passport.
It took him two nights’ travel to reach the Federal lines south of the Potomac, where he simply strolled into a camp of Pennsylvania infantry. “You looking for work, Sambo?” a sergeant challenged him.
“Just the mail clerk, sir.” The cobbler pulled off his hat and bobbed his head respectfully.
“There’s a mail wagon by the sutler’s shed, but I’m watching you! You thieve anything, you black bastard, and I’ll have my men use your hide for target practice.”
“Yes, sir! I’ll behave, sir! Thank you, sir!”
The postal service clerk took the one large envelope, franked it, then pushed the change across the counter and told the cobbler to make himself scarce. Next day the sixteen letters were placed on Lieutenant Colonel Wilde’s desk in the Inspector General’s Department in Washington, D.C., where they waited with over a hundred other letters that needed the Colonel’s attention. The Colonel’s office was woefully undermanned, for, in the rapid expansion of the U.S. Army, the Inspector General’s Department had perforce become a convenient place to delegate tasks that no other department seemed competent or willing to perform. Among those tasks was the appreciation of intelligence received from the Confederacy, a job which might have been more properly performed by the Secret Service Bureau, but not everyone in the U.S. government shared General McClellan’s faith in Detective Pinkerton, and so a separate intelligence service had sprung up in Washington, which, like every other orphaned responsibility, had landed in the Inspector General’s Department.
It was that haphazard delegation of responsibility which had first guided Belvedere Delaney’s original offer of help to Lieutenant Colonel Thorne’s desk. Ever since that day Delaney, like a score of other northern sympathizers in the Confederacy, sent his material to Thorne, who added such correspondence to the great flood of information that threatened to overwhelm an office already overburdened with extraneous duties. Thus, when Delaney’s latest letter reached his office, Thorne was nowhere near Washington, but was in Massachusetts conducting an inspection tour of northern seacoast forts, which tour was expected to last for much of the month of May, and so Delaney’s letter waited in Washington while Colonel Thorne enumerated Fort Warren’s fire buckets and latrines. It was not, Thorne told himself, why he had joined the army, but he still lived in hope that one day he might gallop across a smoke-torn field and save his country from disaster. Colonel Thorne, for all his ramrod-straight back and hardened face and unyielding eye, could still dream a soldier’s dreams and pray a soldier’s prayer, which prayer was that he would get to fight at least one battle for his country before the Young Napoleon brought America a lasting peace.
And the letter gathered dust.
The land torpedo had been left so that the commander of the Army of the Potomac could see for himself to just what abject depths the rebel forces had sunk. “It’s only by the grace of Almighty God we discovered this one before it blew, though God knows too many others have exploded without warning.” The speaker was a short, brusque major of the Corps of Engineers who was dressed in shirtsleeves and suspenders and had an air of competent efficiency that reminded Starbuck of Thomas Truslow.
Major General McClellan alighted from his horse and walked stiffly across to examine the land torpedo that had been concealed in a barrel stenciled with the misspelled legend “Dried Oisters, Messrs Moore and Carline, Mt Folly, Va.” McClellan, immaculate in a blue frock coat with twin rows of brass buttons and a fine gilded belt, approached the barrel gingerly.
“We’ve made it safe, sir, as you’ll see.” The Major must have noticed the General’s nervousness. “But it was a most ungodly device, upon my soul it was, sir.”
“A disgrace,” McClellan said, still keeping his distance from the oyster barrel. “A thorough disgrace.”
“We found it on yon house.” The Major gestured toward a small farmhouse that stood abandoned a hundred yards from the road. “We brought it down here for you to see, sir.”
“And so you should, for all the world to see!” McClellan stood very erect, one hand slipped into an unbuttoned opening of his coat and with a concerned frown on his face. That frown, Starbuck had noted, seemed to be the young General’s perpetual expression. “I would not have believed,” McClellan said loudly and slowly so that the horsemen gathered beside the road could hear every word, “that men born and raised in the United States of America, even men bitten by the envy of secessionism, should stoop to stratagems so low and devices so evil.” Many of the mounted officers nodded gravely while Pinkerton and James, who were accompanying Starbuck on this ride westward with the general, tutted loudly. The foreign newspaper reporters, to whom McClellan was really aiming his remarks, scribbled in their notebooks. The only man who seemed unsurprised and unshocked by the booby-trapped barrel was a scarred, one-eyed French military observer who, Starbuck had noted, seemed roundly amused by much of what he saw, even by this evil device.
The oyster barrel had been half filled with sand in which a three-and-a-half-inch shell had been stood upright. The copper fuse plug had been unscrewed from the shell’s nose to leave a narrow shaft running into the missile’s explosive belly. That shaft had been filled with gunpowder, but not before a crude, old-fashioned flintlock had been soldered onto the shell’s nose. The Major demonstrated how a string attached to the underside of the barrel’s lid should have tripped the flintlock so that it would have struck a spark that would have ignited the powder and so exploded the main charge buried deep inside the shell. “It would have killed a man easily,” the Major said solemnly. “Two or three men if they’d been close enough.”
The retreating Confederates had left scores of such land torpedoes. Some were buried in the roads, some by wells, others in deserted houses; so many that by now the advancing Yankees had learned to search for tripwires or other trigger mechanisms, but every day one or two of the implements still found their victims, and every such victim added to the outrage felt by the northerners. “Tactics,” McClellan announced to the newspapermen accompanying his headquarters staff, “that even heathen savages might hesitate before employing. You would think, would you not, that with the preponderance of men enjoyed by the rebels they would scarcely need to use such desperate measures? Yet such devices are, I suppose, a mark of their spiritual and moral degradation.”
Murmurs of agreement sounded as the General remounted his horse and spurred away from the lethal barrel. The other horsemen jostled into place behind the army’s diminutive commander, struggling to get the great man’s attention, but McClellan, seeking a companion for the next portion of his journey, gestured to Pinkerton. “Bring your man, Pinkerton!” McClellan called, and Pinkerton urged Starbuck forward. They had waited days for this meeting with the General, a meeting that Starbuck had no enthusiasm for, but which Pinkerton insisted must happen. “So this is your messenger, Pinkerton?” McClellan said fiercely.
“It is, sir, and a brave man.
”
McClellan glanced at Starbuck, his face giving nothing away. They were riding through a flat country, past worn-out fields and dark sloughs and dripping pine trees. Hyacinths grew on the margins of the small streams, but little else in the scenery looked attractive or cheerful. “Your name?” McClellan barked at Starbuck.
“Starbuck, sir.”
“His brother, sir, is one of my most valuable men,” Allen Pinkerton gestured toward James with the stem of his pipe. “He’s behind us, sir, if you’d like to greet him?”
“Quite so, good,” McClellan said unhelpfully, then went silent again. Starbuck looked surreptitiously at the Yankee commander, seeing a short, stoutly built man with light brown hair, blue eyes, and a fresh complexion. The general was chewing tobacco and every now and then spat a stream of juice onto the road, taking care to lean well out of his saddle so that none of the spittle would soil his uniform or spatter on his highly polished boots. “Did you know what was in the message you delivered?” McClellan suddenly demanded of Starbuck.
“Yes, sir.”
“And? And? What of it? You agree with it?”
“Of course, sir.”
“It’s a bad business,” McClellan said, “a bad business.” He fell silent again and Starbuck noticed that the sardonic French officer had ridden close so he could listen to their conversation. McClellan also saw the Frenchman. “You see, Colonel Lassan, just what we are fighting?” The General twisted in his saddle to confront the Frenchman.
“Exactly what is that, mon General?”
“An overwhelming enemy, that is what! An enemy that can match us two soldiers to one, and what does Washington do? You know what they do? They prevent McDowell’s Corps from reinforcing us. In all the annals of warfare, Colonel, in all military history do you know another piece of treachery to match that? And why? Why? To preserve Washington, which is under no attack, none! They are fools! Cowards! Traitors! Apes!” The sudden passion astonished Starbuck, though he was hardly surprised by it. Most of the army knew of Major General McClellan’s anger that President Lincoln had prevented the 1st Corps from sailing to reinforce the men on the peninsula. McClellan, the President said, must make do with the hundred and twenty thousand men he already possessed, but McClellan declared that the missing thirty-five thousand were the key to northern victory. “If I just had those men I might achieve something. As it is we can only hope for a miracle. Nothing else will save us now, only a miracle.”
“Indeed, mon General,” Colonel Lassan said, though with what Starbuck took to be an extraordinary lack of conviction.
McClellan turned back to Starbuck and wanted to know what units he had seen marching through the streets of Richmond, and Starbuck, who had by now become accustomed to telling monstrous lies, detailed unit after unit that he had neither seen nor heard of. He invented a whole Florida brigade, made up a cavalry regiment from Louisiana, and described batteries of heavy artillery that he conjured from the warm Virginia air. To his astonishment and amusement McClellan listened as avidly as Pinkerton had done, taking Starbuck’s word as proof that a mighty enemy did indeed wait to ambush him in the environs of Richmond. “It’s what we feared, Pinkerton!” McClellan said when Starbuck’s invention had run its course. “Johnston must have a hundred and fifty thousand men!”
“At least that many, sir.”
“We must be cautious. If I lose this army, then the whole war is done,” McClellan said. “We need to know the exact deployments of these new rebel brigades.” This last requirement was addressed to Pinkerton, who assured the General that Starbuck would be ready to travel back to Richmond just as soon as he was given the list of questions which McClellan wanted answered by the prized, mysterious spy who seemed to lie at the very heart of the Confederate high command. “You’ll get your questions,” McClellan assured Starbuck, then raised a hand in response to a cheering group of Negroes who stood beside the road. A woman in a ragged dress and torn apron ran forward with a bunch of hyacinths that she offered to the General. McClellan hesitated, plainly hoping that one of his aides would take the flowers for him, but the woman thrust the blossoms up into his hands. He took them with a forced smile. “Poor people,” he said when they were out of earshot. “They believe we’ve come to liberate them.”
“You haven’t?” Starbuck could not resist the question.
“This is not a war to divest United States citizens of their lawful property, not even those citizens foolish enough to make armed rebellion against their government.” The General sounded peeved at having to make the explanation. “This is a conflict about preserving the union, and if I believed for one moment that we were risking white men’s blood to free slaves I would resign my commission. Isn’t that so, Marcy?” He hurled the request for confirmation over his shoulder and Marcy, a gloomy-looking staff officer, confirmed that was indeed the General’s firm opinion. McClellan suddenly scowled at the hyacinths in his hand and tossed them to the side of the road, where the blossoms scattered across a puddle. Starbuck turned in his saddle and saw that the Negroes were still watching the horsemen. He felt a sudden temptation to dismount and gather up the flowers, but just as he twitched his reins Pinkerton’s horse trod the blossoms into the mud.
The sight of the Negroes provoked Colonel Lassan, who spoke perfect English, to tell of a slave girl he had met in Williamsburg. “Only nineteen, and a pretty thing. She had four sons already and each one of them whelped off a white man. She reckoned that made her boys more valuable. She was proud of that. She said a good half-breed male infant could sell for five hundred dollars.”
“A pretty half-breed girl would fetch a deal more,” Pinkerton offered.
“And some are damn near white,” a staff officer observed. “Damned if I could tell the difference.”
“Buy a white one, Lassan, and take her home,” Pinkerton suggested.
“Why just one?” the Frenchman asked with mock innocence. “I could manage a boatload if they were all pretty enough.”
“Is it true,” McClellan broke into the conversation in a tone which suggested he disapproved of such idle and lascivious talk, “it is true,” he repeated as he stared intently at Starbuck, “that Robert Lee is made second-in-command to Johnston?”
“I’d not heard as much, sir,” Starbuck said truthfully.
“I pray it is true,” McClellan said with a thoughtful frown. “Lee’s always been too cautious. A weak man. He doesn’t like responsibility. He lacks moral firmness, and men like that prove timid under fire. I’ve noticed it. What do they call Lee in the South?” he asked Starbuck.
“Granny, sir.”
McClellan gave a short bark of a laugh. “I suspect a young Napoleon can manhandle a grandmother, eh, Lassan?”
“Indeed, mon General.”
“But can he handle a hundred and fifty thousand rebels?” McClellan asked, then fell silent as he pondered that question. They were riding through an area where infantry was encamped and the northern troops, discovering that their General was in the vicinity, ran to the road and began cheering. Starbuck, dropping back from McClellan’s side, noted how the small General was immediately encouraged by the troops’ adulation and how genuine that adulation was. The men were invigorated by McClellan’s presence just as the General was vivified by their cheers. There were even greater cheers when he stopped his horse and begged a soldier to lend him his smoking pipe so he could light himself a cigar. That homely touch seemed especially moving to the infantrymen who crowded around to touch the General’s big bay horse.
“Tell us when we’re going to beat the rebs, General!” a man shouted.
“In good time! All in good time! You know I won’t risk your lives unnecessarily! All in good time!” One of the men offered the General a piece of hardtack and McClellan raised huge cheers by disingenuously inquiring whether you were supposed to eat the thing or use it to shingle a roof.
“He’s a wonderful man,” James confided to his brother.
“Isn’t he?” Starbuck
said. In these last few days he had discovered that the best way to handle James was to offer a bland agreement to everything his brother said, yet even that small gesture was sometimes hard. James’s relief and pleasure at the prodigal’s return were heartfelt and he wanted to make Starbuck happy as a reward for that change of heart, but his attentions could be cloying. James might believe, like his father, that tobacco was the devil’s weed, but if Starbuck wanted to smoke then James was happy to buy cigars from the army’s sutlers whose wagons acted as trading posts wherever a regiment was encamped. James even pretended to believe Starbuck’s claim that he needed wine and whiskey to settle his dyspeptic stomach and used his own money to buy the so-called medicine.
James’s tender assiduity only increased Starbuck’s guilt, a guilt that was worsened when he saw how much his brother liked having his company. James was proud of his brother, envied him indeed, and took pleasure in spreading the story that his brother, far from having been a copperhead this past year, had in fact been an agent for the North ever since the war’s first shots. Starbuck did not deny the story, but James’s pleasure in it only made the younger brother’s conscience more tender as he contemplated betraying the trust. Though, perversely, the prospect of that betrayal became ever more inviting because it meant returning to Richmond and so escaping James’s attentions. All that was delaying Starbuck’s return was the list of questions which he was supposed to deliver to Adam. Those questions were being devised by McClellan and Pinkerton, but as each day brought fresh rumors of rebel reinforcements, so each day added more questions and amended those already on the list.
Another rush of eager soldiers came to surround the General, so many that James and Starbuck were driven apart by the press of bodies. Starbuck’s horse edged sideways and began cropping at the grass growing between the muddy ruts cut into the road’s verge. General McClellan delivered his customary speech about leading his precious boys to victory, but only when the time was right and the circumstances propitious. The men cheered the words as the General rode on westward.