‘Grand goddam weed this is, sir,’ said the chatty one.
‘Indeed,’ said Searcy, smiling for the first time that morning.
And as they rode away, he knew now he had some chance of not being killed. The orders were off his hands. No one would be sure about him even if they suspected something. And they could not, without being sure, shoot or torture an English gentleman.
21
It had been towards midnight when Hanks sent Usaph and Gus to seek out the Creel house and tell the colonel that orders had come and he was needed. They’d found the place by recognising Wheat’s horse which was still drowsing under the tree by the gate. When they knocked, an old black lady came and took their message and went and fetched Wheat. Wheat didn’t seem happy at first to see them. He was in his shirt and britches and his boots looked somehow like they’d been pulled on in a hurry. But the grievance he felt was directed at Hanks. He was thinking, Hanks should have been the goddam preacher and dear dead Diggie the lawyer.
He ordered Gus and Usaph to go and wait under the sycamore with the horse.
Gus seemed happy enough about that. When Hanks had first ordered them to go and fetch Wheat, the music teacher had been a little sullen about spending his evening seeking out a particular house on a particular back road. But it hadn’t been a hard search and now Gus leaned against the fence and said: ‘Nice little place.’
It was Usaph who was feeling a sort of bilious unease. ‘It’s someone’s place,’ he said. ‘Someone’s wife or someone’s widder.’
‘Oh Lord, Usaph,’ Gus said softly. ‘You do talk a deal about wives and widows.’
‘I wasn’t aware,’ said Usaph. ‘I wasn’t aware I talked so damn much on them-there topics.’
At last they saw the door open again and Wheat came out fully clothed from the darkness of the house into the clear night. But he seemed to baulk and turn back, and from the hallway right out on to the porch rushed a woman in a long loose gown. She hung on to him. She was tall. Wheat hardly had to bend to clamp his mouth on hers. Then they whispered a little and she went inside, and the door closed with a slow, regretful crunch.
Even though they came from the Valley, where men were a lot more truly equal, one to another, than they were down in the tidewater, Gus and Usaph would have been most comfortable if Wheat had come down the path, swung himself into the saddle and pretended that his orderly and his runner had seen nothing. If he’d done that they could have just looked at him out of the corner of their eyes, making their separate judgements about him, whether he was to be admired or condemned. Instead of that, Wheat felt bound to explain everything.
‘That lady,’ he told them, not even getting into his saddle, leading his horse away instead, staying on their level, ‘that lady, boys, is … a lady. What you jest beheld, boys, I want you to know … maybe Usaph understands these things, being wed – what you jest beheld is nothing but generosity.’ Wheat coughed. He was finding these words harder to form than was usual with him. ‘The quality of mercy is not strained, is how the poet puts it, and that means that this generosity I speak of is a virtue, and all tightness, boys, and strictness, and for a man never to be passions’s goddam slave – all that is a curse. And people who are tight and strict, boys, might as well be bankers, or find some such other abominable way of putting in the golden days that are the portion of a man on this earth. Do you understand that, boys?’
Gus said he did. ‘Of course, of course,’ said Gus, wanting to put an end to the conversation.
Usaph thought, if the colonel can talk frank to me, I can talk frank back.
‘Is the lady some man’s wife?’ Usaph’s voice was so taut the colonel looked at him. There was a sort of gentle hurt in the colonel’s eyes.
‘Usaph,’ he murmured, ‘I believe she was.’
Gus caught Usaph’s eye and made a disapproving mouth and frowned at him, and they continued back through Frederick in silence. When they got back to the encampment, and stood amongst all the prone sleeping figures, and when they’d said goodnight and Gus had started to move away, Wheat detained Usaph by the elbow.
‘You oughtn’t to judge me, son.’
‘No sir, colonel,’ said Usaph in the same tight voice as before.
‘Goddamit, Usaph, it’s time you loosened up your thoughts a little. I did not touch that lady’s affections, boy, they are stuck as ever on her absent husband. Only the flesh wavers, Usaph, not the goddam heart.’
Usaph dragged his arm loose. Wheat said: ‘You worried about your own wife, is that it, son? If so …’
‘If so?’ Usaph called out in a hard challenging voice.
Wheat bared his head and shook it.
‘Don’t judge me, boy,’ he asked again. It sounded like genuine begging.
That morning, by five o’clock, the Confederate army left Frederick by various roads. Tom Jackson’s corps walked away westwards by Mill and Patrick Streets.
Stonewall himself came through town by his own route. He could ride now and went with a few of his staff and an escort of horsemen, Blue Ridge boys called the Black Horse Cavalry. From Best’s Grove he rode to the Presbyterian manse, where an old friend from Lexington lived called the Reverend Doctor John Ross. But it was too early for the Rosses in their side street. Not even the house blacks were up. So, without getting joy from friends, Tom Jackson wrote a note and then rode on into Mill Street and joined the main stream of the march. Like Wheat, he dozed his way out of town.
Years later a poet called John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem that said that, on the way out of Frederick, Tom Jackson had seen a Union flag flying from an attic and had ordered his infantry to fire on it, and that an old woman called Barbara Frietchie, being of German blood and pro-Union, grabbed it before it fell, leaned out of the window with it, and:
‘“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country’s flag,” she said.’
At which Stonewall is supposed to have been shamed and
‘“Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.’
But Barbara Frietchie lived that morning in Patrick Street near the Town Creek Bridge, and Tom Jackson did not leave town that way. Humbler men did: Usaph Bumpass, Gus Ramseur, Lafcadio Wheat. But their thoughts were not broken into by any grey-haired Unionist. In fact, since she was more than ninety years old and the hour was so ungodly early, maybe Barbara was still between her sheets as the Confederacy in all its tatters followed its path out of town.
Searcy travelled at something like his ease beside Lee’s headquarters waggons. After leaving Special Orders No. 191 in that meadow, he’d felt so lightened, so free, that he rode right back to Best’s Grove. The grove was full of officers eating their breakfasts standing up, tents were being pulled down, horses were snuffling and stamping, pricked by the electricity of hope and urgency in the soldiers all around.
And no one took any notice of him. One of Angus’s young friends met him by accident in all that rushing around the grove.
‘Mr Searcy sir. What is it that has befallen Angus? Rumour is he split his head.’
‘He broke his wrist. Jolly bad luck, I say.’
‘It sure is, sir. With all that’s likely to happen.’
And that was all. Adjutant Chilton had packed up his portable table and his pens and his inks and was in a hurry to move, and no one, no one in that great passionate corps of officers wanted to question or punish the Honourable Horace Searcy.
When he knew that, Searcy leaned his forehead against his horse’s saddle and wept silently and ached for Mrs Whipple. Then, because no other course offered, because the army would not let him escape it, he took a long mouthful of brandy and mounted his horse when the order came for the headquarters staff to do it. And rode away with them.
The following Saturday morning, Union Colonel Silas Colgrove of the 27th Indiana saw the fine sloping field where Searcy’s envelope was hidden and moved his men into it about noon. They stacked t
heir muskets and lay on the grass. The marks of old cooking fires were here and there but the Indiana boys wondered if these fires had been set by Confederates, since there weren’t any relics around, no bones or tobacco wrappers or candy papers or old shoes or other army detritus. For the men of the 27th Indiana didn’t have any more idea than McClellan did himself how hard up their enemy was.
A well-liked young soldier called Private Barton W. Mitchell went behind a tree to make water and saw the fat envelope and picked it up. Inside were the cigars and Bart thought them quite a prize. They were the sort you bought in the best hotels. He rushed out in his generous way and showed them to his friend, First Sergeant John McKnight Bloss. Bloss was a generous enough man and said Bart should have two out of the three found cigars. But Bart solved it by cutting the third clean in two.
They did not light them at once, for they did not know what fatigues they might be ordered to do this afternoon that would spoil the savour of the cigars. They decided to leave them till evening, to smoke by their fires in front of other boys who’d be jealous as hell and think they were real worldlings.
After he’d put away his one and a half fine cigars, Barton Mitchell began reading the papers inside the envelope. He thought someone was joking. The first page said: ‘To Major General D. H. Hill, Commanding Division. Special Orders No. 191. From Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia near Frederick, Maryland.’ Bart Mitchell turned the page and read the signature. ‘R. H. Chilton, Ass. Adj-General.’
‘What’s that-there, Barton?’ asked Sergeant Bloss.
‘Just some stuff,’ Barton Mitchell told him, reading away. The pages said stuff such as that Jackson’s wing was to move beyond Middletown, cross the Potomac and ‘by Friday evening the 12th take possession of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, capture such of them as may be at Martinsburg, Virginia, and intercept such as may try to escape from Harpers Ferry’. It didn’t say who the ‘them’ was, but that was clear enough.
The pages said in addition that John G. Walker’s division of Longstreet’s wing was to come down on Harpers Ferry from the other direction. It said that General McLaws with two divisions was to close in the same unfortunate town from the Maryland side. It said too that Longstreet was to clear out of Frederick and stick at Boonsboro and that D. H. Hill was to stay behind and form a rearguard.
Well, Bart Mitchell was a literate soldier. The armies of North and South in the failing summer of 1862 knew more of generalship than did the poor peasant privates of the armies of Prussia or Austria or England. Bart could readily understand that if these pages were anyway correct, then Lee’s army was going to go four or five ways at once, and that if you wanted to beat them, you should do it while they were all split up. Except all this read more like a Northern pipedream than like something that was likely to happen.
‘Jest look at this here, Johnny,’ he told Bloss, and handed the pages to him.
Bloss had this natty self-importance a sergeant should maybe have. He read the pages and said: ‘Come on, Bart.’ He carried them, as if he’d done all the finding of them, to Captain Kopp of Company E. Kopp read them, looked at the two soldiers, dismissed the private and kept the sergeant with him, and went to show them to Colonel Colgrove.
Colgrove, willing to be thought a fool, took them along the road to the farmhouse where General Alpheus Williams had made his headquarters. It happened that the adjutant in General Williams’s front office was Colonel S. E. Pittman, an old West Point friend of Colonel Chilton in whose firm handwriting Special Orders No. 191 were written. So a despatch rider took the pages straight to McClellan’s headquarters, further still up the road. It wasn’t a bad performance by the standards of the Army of the Potomac. In an hour from the time Private Bart Mitchell found the envelope behind the tree, George B. McClellan was reading the Confederate document.
McClellan called a meeting of his staff and some of his generals and marched into the drawing room of the big house on the Liberty Town Road where it was held waving the papers at the gathering of gold-braided men. ‘Here’s a paper,’ he told them, ‘which if I can’t whip Bobby Lee with it, I’ll willingly go home. Tomorrow we’ll pitch into his centre, and if you folk will only do two good hard days’ marching, I’ll have Lee in a position he’ll find it hard to get out of.’
When some of the gentlemen there knew what was in the orders, they thought McClellan shouldn’t propose to pitch into Lee’s centre tomorrow, he should start off to do it right now, this Saturday afternoon.
George McClellan rode to Frederick then and met businessmen at the Liberty House. He began by making arrangements with them about supplying the army with farm produce and flour. Then, even though he didn’t know what their policies were, he thanked them for staying loyal to the Union while the Confederates were in town. At the end of the meeting, two or three came up to talk to him and he started to get garrulous, with them, as was his way. After a while he told them he had Lee sorted out and by the ears, that he had Lee’s inside orders and that he knew Lee’s army was in fragments.
One of the three he spoke to was Confederate by sympathy and left town that afternoon and rode for hours up over the low spine of the Catoctin Mountains, through Middletown until, late at night, he ran into Jeb Stuart’s Confederate pickets.
Just before dawn on Sunday Lee, sleeping fitfully in the bedroom of a good house a little north of Boonsboro, was woken by Colonel Chilton. Lee levered himself crookedly up in the bed, for his hands and wrists were still paining and he could not put weight on them.
Chilton said: ‘There’s a corn merchant from Frederick out there who says McClellan’s got a copy of your orders.’
‘That’s easy for a corn merchant to say,’ said Robert E. Lee. ‘How would he know what that general has and hasn’t?’
‘McClellan told a bunch of Frederick merchants. According to this corn-dealer, ole Mac waved a copy of your orders and said “I’ve got these orders written in Lee’s own hand” …’
‘But they were in your hand, Chilton.’
‘Exactly, sir.’ Chilton winced. ‘I don’t think we can afford to ignore the idea that they were an original copy, sir. In my hand. And ole Mac said they were in your hand just to make a splash.’
‘That man is, I think I can safely say,’ said Lee, ‘a fool. He could have had any old document in his hand, he could have been lying.’
‘I wish I could believe it, sir. You see this corn-jobber says further that McClellan called out, “I got ’em, gentlemen. They’ve sent Jackson off to the Ferry and Longstreet over to Boonsboro. And all I’ve got to do to get right in between them is knock Dan Hill out of the way.”’
‘No one,’ Lee murmured after a silence, ‘could speak like that. Unless they had some idea of what was in 191.’
Most men would have panicked now, in that instant, but the commander-in-chief just sat there staring at the plaster on his right hand and yawning a little.
‘Do you want to speak to this corn-jobber?’
‘Indeed.’ He tried to pick up a watch with the hand in which the bones were broken.
‘It’s 4.30, sir.’
‘I’ll be with him in five minutes.’
‘Yessir.’
‘And, Chilton … are you satisfied this man is not a Union plant?’
‘I’m watching him close. But he does have two boys in Early’s brigade.’
‘I want you to start making enquiries then. About 191, I mean. Did you get all the envelopes back?’
‘I did, general.’ Chilton seemed a little hurt by the suggestion.
‘Begin by questioning your staff. And the staff couriers.’
‘Yessir. As bad luck would have it, one of them’s gone back to Virginia with a nasty broken wrist.’
Lee said: ‘Do what you can.’
‘Of course,’ said Chilton, ‘I can’t make enquiries with the various generals until the army reassembles again. But I’m sure they treated 191 with care. Jimmie Longstreet, I believe, chewed his copy up and swallowed i
t.’
This tickled Lee. ‘Did it help with his diarrhoea?’ he asked.
Chilton left and Lee sat on his bed, considering whether his army should go home to Virginia before the fragments were gobbled in five easy pieces.
BOOK FOUR
1
High up above the steep-streeted town of Harpers Ferry, Usaph lay at dawn in a misty forest. At his side, Gus stirred and sat. Cate and Judd and Daniel Blalock, schoolmaster, were stirring too. The frosty vapours of this mountain place hung between the pine trees with that sort of false stillness things and people can have when you feel that until the second you looked at them they were moving about and working on some plot against you, and that as soon as you look away, they’ll start again.
The bladder can be a stronger influence than that kind of mad suspicion and Usaph got up, went through the trees across somewhat slanting ground and urinated near the place where Brynam’s black guns stood, their barrels darkened with moisture this morning. The battery was only four guns these days. Their gun-crews had sighted them the afternoon before, when the town and the Union defence lines down below had stood so sharp-defined in the sabbath light. So they could fire blind if they had to, sending cannister and grape and case shell down through the cloud.
They had wanted to start firing the afternoon before, but the rumour was Stonewall was giving the Union general a chance to move the folk of Harpers Ferry out of town. There was the rumour too that the idea was to offer the Yankees the chance of giving in. Others said that Stonewall, being a good Presbyterian, hated to call a battle on a Sunday, seeing that he’d done just that so often in the past.
Usaph had this terrible hunger for a good farm breakfast; he could taste the eggs that were not to be had here on this mountain. That phantom flavour of breakfast eggs wasn’t half so sharp though as his puzzlement over Colonel Wheat. He found he’d forgiven Wheat because Wheat, though a colonel and a member of the Virginia Bar, was so anxious to be forgiven. He had forgiven the adulterer! It was a dangerous thing to do; it raised questions, he didn’t like it. But it had just happened. He hoped it wouldn’t happen with goddam Cate.