Confederates

  ‘I’m obliged to Mrs Creel,’ he said.

  He was led into the front parlour and left there alone. There was a picture of the Austrian Alps on the wall. After a little while the girl called Mrs Creel came in. She looked a little pale and her hair just a little astray, as if he’d come straight from working in the kitchen without making use of brush or comb.

  ‘What did you say your name was?’ she asked, like someone settling down to business.

  ‘Lafcadio Gawain Alfonse Wheat,’ said Wheat.

  There was a little tremble in her voice as she passed him and as she put her hand on the neck of a crystal sherry decanter. ‘I watched you from the window,’ she said. ‘You are a firm-minded man, sir. Take sherry with me. Dudley Creel used always take sherry with me at this time. Then will you please … will you please go.’

  As soon as she said that she began to weep. The need to be embraced was sharp in her. He went up to her and held her and soon they were so close, breast to breast and tongue to tongue, that he felt he wasn’t a solid being any more and might run downhill like rainwater into the pores of the rejoicing earth.

  20

  By that evening General Lee’s adjutant Colonel Chilton had written out a number of copies of the new orders that would split the army into pieces. He worked at a camp-table in the open at Best’s Grove and by the time he got to the last copy, he needed light to continue by.

  Each copy was headed Special Orders No. 191. It contained ten numbered paragraphs. The first paragraph forbad any men or officers to visit Frederick that night. Colonel Wheat, in Mrs Creel’s bed, was out of bounds but ignorant of it. The second paragraph suggested what route sick soldiers or any others unable to march should take back over the Potomac to get back towards Culpeper. The other eight paragraphs were the solid meat.

  A copy would go to every general who was specifically mentioned in the orders. It would, Searcy knew, be placed in an envelope marked with the name of the general it was intended for.

  From his nervous position on the far side of the Grove, the Honourable Horace Searcy watched Adjutant Chilton working there at the table in his relaxed American way, while grooms and lieutenants lazed on the ground round about and chewed tobacco or smoked corncobs, and occasionally cavalry men sauntered by leading their horses. Half a dozen or more envelopes lay haphazard about on the little table, ready to be inscribed with the names of Longstreet, Tom Jackson, Daniel Hill, and anyone else they were meant to go to. Ready to be stuffed full of the most valuable papers in America.

  If Searcy were interested in money he could demand and get $3m. U.S. in bullion for one of those envelopes. Secretary Stanton would consider that a mild price and might even ask if Searcy wanted to sell so low.

  It wasn’t that Searcy didn’t need the money either. The pay from The Times was abominable – £150 sterling a year, which was as much as they paid anyone. He made maybe an extra £50 a year from royalties on his books about the Crimea and the Italian War of 1859. His father gave him an annual allowance of £150. A whole £100 of that went to keep the girl who’d had a child by him three years before. The little girl child. He envisaged her in a cottage garden in South London, pointing at butterflies. He wanted so much to see her just once before he took this risk he was envisaging. He did not have the same urge to see her mother. He did not love her mother.

  While he was here in America he had to keep a town house going in Green Park near Piccadilly. It contained a manservant and a cook, and he had told many of his Oxford friends that they were always free to use it when they were in town. That cost £100 a year to run, even in his absence. If tonight went badly, the manservant and the cook would be out of work, though they wouldn’t get the news for a while.

  Altogether he was left with a little over £150 a year to live off – travel, restaurants, club subscriptions and gifts to women all came out of that. It wasn’t enough to lead a really full life in London. It was just as well he had always been attracted to battlefields. At least they made few demands on the pocket.

  Soon Chilton was handing out envelopes to the young couriers. Angus came striding across the clearing towards Searcy.

  ‘Got your horse saddled, ole chap?’

  Searcy sent an ostler to do it. When the horse was brought to him, he slung a saddlebag over its shoulders.

  ‘Say, ole chap, you don’t need any saddlebag. We’re visiting D. H. Hill’s headquarters. Not Portland, Maine.’

  ‘Some comfort,’ said Searcy, looking cunning and patting the saddlebag as if to hint there was a bottle of whisky in there.

  The bag did hold whisky. He had excused himself from the Grove for half an hour this afternoon, ridden at the pelt into town, used his superior British ways to get a Frederick shopkeeper to find him a bottle. And from the same shopkeeper he’d bought the hatpin. There was this long ornamental hatpin in the saddlebag with what could well pass as a lump of jade on the end of it. Searcy could see the storekeeper presuming that this Britisher was having luck with some Frederick lady and that was why the hatpin was being bought. The shopkeeper thought that gifts of hatpins must be some sort of British custom.

  Before the couriers rode out, a black man brought Angus and Searcy plates of bacon and beans. Searcy found it hard to eat his. He feared he would retch up the beans.

  Ten minutes later he and young Angus were riding through the shuttered town. It looked finally shuttered now, as if it knew the army and all its needs were going to vanish overnight, as if it were now money-counting time and time to take thought about what attitudes to strike whenever the Union army should arrive, as it would surely soon do, pursuing Lee.

  Beyond town, they turned east and were amongst cornfields and orchards and the eternal white frame farmhouses. That was the startling thing about America, Searcy thought, it was so big it went on for ever, and the towns kept repeating each other eternally, and every country road you saw was immensely beautiful but immensely the same.

  On that stretch trees came down over the road and made it very dark. The fireflies of the summer of 1862 had nearly all done with their breeding and flashed away no more in the branches of oaks. But sometimes you could see campfires. Angus nudged his horse into a run and Searcy nudged his own to keep up. He’d left his saddlebag unlatched and, on this dark length of the road and almost at the gallop, was able to reach in with his right hand and find the hatpin. He spurred his horse till its head came up within Angus’s sight, and Angus grinned and hunched further forward like a jockey. Searcy hoped sincerely the boy would not die of whatever injuries his horse was about to do him.

  The journalist had the hatpin held overhand and close to his own knee, carrying it as a minute and secret weapon. Next he drove it into the croup of Angus’s mount. Two or three inches in and then out again before the muscle and the agonised clenching of the horse’s hindquarters held it there. He did it so deftly he reminded himself of those wild Indian Army horsemen who could lean at right angles to their saddles at the gallop and behead a goat in passing, instantly and without apparent pain to anyone.

  There was apparent pain, however, in this case. Angus’s horse baulked on its front legs and threw its back madly into the air. One of its rear hoofs struck Searcy’s horse a blow on the thigh which would before long turn to an abscess.

  When it had finished plunging, Angus’s horse reared unevenly on its hind legs and started striking at Angus, who was lying on the ground now on his side. Slowly, like a sleeper, the courier drew his legs up out of reach of the striking hoofs. At a risk to himself, Searcy urged his own horse close in, grabbed the other mount’s reins and dragged it away from Angus. He still did some rearing and plunging, that horse, but settled down at last. Searcy tethered him to the low branch of a hickory tree and went and knelt by Angus. The boy’s forehead was bleeding.

  ‘Searcy, ole chap,’ said Angus, ‘my wrist is done in, I think.’

  The left wrist was bent back on itself, palm up, and a bulge of misplaced bone showed on the surface of the flesh. A
ngus turned on his side and retched in the dust and fainted. Searcy lifted him and carried him to the edge of the orchard, laying him down at the base of an apple tree. Angus knew nothing of it when Searcy took the envelope away from him. Standing up, Searcy was able to get some moonlight on the document. The envelope was addressed to D. H. Hill, as Angus had said. The pages inside were written on printed Confederate stationery. Searcy was grateful for that. It woud cause Union generals to take them as authentic.

  He began to read the meat of the thing. ‘Holy God in heaven!’ he muttered now and then throughout the eight paragraphs. For Lee meant to divide his army not just in two, and not just in three, but in four.

  Searcy whistled and did a lot of head-shaking there in the dim orchard, on the question of how this war would have gone if Lee had just stayed on in Arlington last year with the army of the Union.

  Once Searcy had done with reading the pages, he put Special Orders No. 191 in his breast pocket and the envelope with D. H. Hill’s name on it in the side pocket of his coat.

  ‘Come on, Angus, ole chap,’ he said, mimicking Angus but almost tenderly. The young officer woke at his name. ‘Searcy, goddamit, my arm’s afire.’

  ‘We’re getting you to a surgeon, ole chap.’

  Beyond the orchard and across a pasture thickly sown with human excreta, Searcy, toting Angus, staggered into the encampment of a South Carolina regiment. ‘Boys,’ he called. The word sounded strange the way he said it. It sounded creaky even to himself.

  This regiment came from up country in South Carolina and their accent was so broad and loopy Searcy had as much trouble understanding them as they did him. They crowded round the delirious Angus, admiring his injuries and his staff clothes, which were pretty splendid compared with their rags. ‘Lookee, his chicken guts’: they said, pointing at his braid. And: ‘I’d say you’d travel three counties before you’d set eyes on a bust wrist as fine as thetyer one.’

  After a while their captain came up, a dark, bearded young man. No more than 22 years, very likely not even that. Searcy took him aside by the thin fibrous arm of his jacket. ‘You know, sir, where the generals are over in Best’s Grove.’

  ‘Generals?’ the boy asked as if it were news to him the Confederate Army had any.

  ‘General Lee in Best’s Grove.’

  ‘Oh yeh. I heard that one,’ said the boy, just like Searcy had tried to tell him a profane joke he’d already heard.

  Searcy took the envelope from his pocket. ‘This gentleman rode orders to General Hill and on the way back had the accident you can see so clearly. The envelope has to be returned to General Lee’s adjutant so that the staff know that the orders have been delivered.’

  ‘That’s procedure, I believe,’ said the young captain.

  ‘Now I have an appointment with my friend General Ambrose Hill, otherwise I’d return the envelope myself. Could one of your boys take it back. Right back to Lee’s adjutant, Chilton.’

  The boy wasn’t quite as simple-minded as Searcy had hoped. He wanted to know who Searcy was and why he’d been riding with Angus, and Searcy had to produce that impressive letter from Longstreet asking all officers to help this British journalist. Once he’d done that, the boy got friendly again. ‘Forgive me, sir,’ he said to Searcy, ‘but when a gentleman looms up talking so outlandish and carrying envelopes with generals’ names on and all, then it behoves me to ask what’s up and what’s down.’

  ‘On the way to my friend General Hill,’ said Searcy, ‘I’ll find a surgeon for poor Angus there.’

  ‘Don’t fuss yourself, sir,’ drawled the captain. ‘There’s a passable surgeon jest across the field there. And I mean to send a boy down to the road to fetch this poor feller’s nag.’

  So, no later than 9.30 in the evening, Searcy found himself with the freedom of the night and with those amazing orders in his breast pocket. He went on back through the foul meadow and the orchard and got his horse. He believed it would be some hours before Daniel Hill decided there were orders he should have got and hadn’t. He was hopeful that at Best’s Grove Colonel Chilton would accept the envelope as a sign of delivery and, most likely, crumple it up together with the other envelopes returned by all the other couriers and throw them in the fire.

  Searcy got his horse and rode a little further east. After twenty minutes, he turned off the road and sought out some deep shadow amongst trees. He waited there till midnight. In that time he could have learnt the orders off by heart and destroyed the copy he had on him. But he wanted to hand the pages themselves to the Union as they’d come from Lee’s office, written with Lee’s ink on Lee’s paper, so that no one – not even McClellan – could argue them away as, perhaps, false or forged.

  Searcy had four tries that night at escaping eastwards, in the direction of Baltimore. First he probed down the road where Angus’s horse had thrown its tantrum. He met cavalry who turned him back politely. He cut across the meadows to a road further south and was turned back after travelling down it a little. Next he passed along from farm meadow to farm meadow, using the gates, but even then ran into cavalry vedettes.

  It was hard for him to pretend to be a Maryland farmer or anything other than he was. He put on this act of being lost, a British bumbler, and he always produced that letter of Longstreet’s and they always firmly turned him back, and gave him a lot of friendly directions on how to find his way to the main encampments.

  ‘Sir,’ one of them told him, ‘ole Mac’s cavalry’s jest ten miles up the road in goddam Newmarket, Maryland.’

  Searcy made the last attempt at the first glint of dawn. He moved through woods to the south, but as had happened before, horsemen rode out from the foliage and closed round him. This time they sent him back with two couriers to guide him.

  One of these was a talkative young man from the Kentucky–Tennessee border. He had a loud laugh too that kept on setting the birds twittering wherever he passed in that first light. He asked Searcy about farming in England, how big was your average British farm, and where the farmer hired his labour from without slaves to help out. Searcy answered with only half a mind on what he was saying. Special Orders No. 191 weighed in his breast pocket like two pounds of soil. ‘Goddamit, but don’t you look all whey-faced, Mr Searcy,’ the chatty one said. ‘You look like you could sleep a goddam week.’

  As they came out on the road towards Frederick, they could see ahead, closer to the centre of the army, lots of dust rising even this early, and they could hear shouts and the creak of axles. They paused to watch some 600 Tarheels march out of a field, led by the flag of their State. Searcy’s escort said they were Daniel Hill’s young’uns. He’d spent all the spring bivouacked with those gentlemen. His cavalry squadron had been their flank guard, no less. And that-there body of men was not one regiment but the leftovers of a brigade. There’d been a lot of falling by the wayside, the young horseman told Searcy.

  ‘Did you say those are Daniel Hill’s chaps?’ Searcy asked.

  ‘Sure I did.’

  So D. H. Hill had got his movement orders from somewhere. And that would seem to mean Chilton and maybe Lee knew of the theft. And that soon, maybe within two minutes, the headquarters cavalry will be along this road, looking for me.

  The field the Tarheels had left was a pleasant one, sloping slowly up to woods. A stream cut round its far margin and then bubbled along under a little stone bridge further down the road. It came to Searcy at once that when the Union army came to Frederick, a portion of it must surely camp in this sweet field. The first brigade commander who saw it and its freshet would want it for his men. The Union army being twice in number what the Confederate was, there would be some competition for a field like this!

  ‘I say,’ said Searcy. ‘I’m taken short, old man. I must ask you to let me make use of that field.’

  The horseman nodded; ‘Willie and me, we could likely benefit from a squat ourselves.’

  The rail fence round the field was still intact, as it would not be once the Union t
roops arrived. Searcy and the two boys tethered their horses there. Searcy opened his bag and took out some soap and a long envelope of heavy weave. ‘Like a cigar, you gentlemen?’ he asked, dredging a handful up out of the saddlebag.

  ‘Why, obliged!’ they both said and each took one. He transferred the other three to his pockets as if he meant to smoke as he crossed the field. They moved through the fence, the cavalry men unbuttoning and unbelting as they went and squatting after no more than twenty paces. Searcy went as far in as he could, till he reached a family of sizable shade trees just at the point where the field took a sharper slope up to the woods. The horsemen seemed to think it was natural for a British gentleman to want a little more privacy than ordinary men and to walk further off to excrete.

  Beyond the shade tree, Searcy dropped his own trousers. He noticed that his member barely existed after this fearful and frustrating night he’d spent. Since it knew there was the risk of a bullet, it behaved like some sort of sensible tortoise. As Searcy laughed at it, it grew by a few millimetres. His bowels came in a gush. God help me, he thought. Too much bacon fat, too many beans, too many flapjacks.

  While he was hunched there, with his back to the tree and the trunk between himself and the others, he took out Special Orders No. 191, placed the three cigars he had left squarely in its pages, wrapped them up in it and placed them in the envelope. It happened to be an envelope from Stiles Bros. Stationers of St James’s, and was said to be ideal for military staff work and for explorers and foreign correspondents. Stiles Bros. claimed that it was waterproof and that there was a sealskin lining inside to keep contents dry. It didn’t feel to Searcy that it had a sealskin lining, but it would not be like Stiles Bros. to say it had if it hadn’t. He placed the whole package, the cigars wrapped in the orders and the orders packaged in the envelope, half in under some weed but in clear sight. Then he cleaned himself up and went to the stream and washed.

  When he got back to the fence the two young horsemen were already waiting there, puffing away on the cigars he’d given them.