The Bloody Ground

  "Just a petty revenge, sir." He was ashamed of it now, but he could not undo the juvenile prank. "Nothing to worry you," he added.

  "Your lads did well," Swynyard said, "real well, and I guess they'll prove just as sound when we have to fight a proper battle. Well done, Nate, well done." He paused. "You know why the Legion was slow?"

  "No, sir."

  "Then I'd better find out," he said grimly and paced toward Maitland.

  And Starbuck tipped back his hat and wiped the sweat off his face. His battalion had fought its first proper fight. The Yellowlegs had not run away and life seemed suddenly sweet.

  ADAM FAULCONER HAD once opposed the war. Before it began, when debate had raged like prairie fire across America, he had been passionate in his quest for peace, but that passion had been overwhelmed by the bitterness of his country's division. Adam had then returned home to fight for his native state, but he could find no allegiance there. His love stayed with a United States and so, risking breaking his family's heart, he had crossed the lines and replaced his gray coat with a blue.

  He had not regained his passion in the North. Instead he had found a dull anger that served as a replacement for what he now perceived had been youthful fervor touched with youthful ignorance. One man, Lyman Thorne had told Adam, can make a difference, and Adam wanted to be that man. He wanted the war to end, but he wanted it to end with complete Northern victory. The man who had once opposed war now embraced it like a lover, for war would be God's punishment on the South. And the Southerners, Adam believed, had to be punished, not because they were at the heart of American slavery, but because they had broken the Union and so defiled what Adam knew to be God's country. The South was the enemy of God, and Adam His self-appointed champion.

  But a champion who felt useless. True, Colonel Thorne had given him a task and it was a task that could make the difference Adam craved, but Thorne had been unable

  to give Adam any guidance as to how that task might be completed. He was living by hope, not by plans, and felt nothing but frustration.

  The frustration was made worse by General McClellan's sluggishness. News arrived on Thursday afternoon that the rebel army had finally abandoned Frederick City to march westward, but McClellan merely filed the report and instead spoke about the need to preserve Washington. The withdrawal from Frederick could be a ruse, he claimed, a device to suck the 100,000 men of the Federal army away from Washington while a second army of rebels poured across the lower Potomac to engulf the capital. Or else, McClellan feared, the rebel withdrawal might be merely a bait to draw the Northern army out of its camps and onto a battlefield of Lee's choosing, and Lee, McClellan now believed, possessed 200,000 fighting men; 200,000 wolf-colored demons who attacked with fearful shrill cries and a desperate ferocity. McClellan would not risk that ferocity, nor uncover Washington. He would be steady.

  And so, while the rebels vanished beyond the barrier of mountains that lay west of Frederick City, McClellan's army inched its way forward. There was no pursuit of the rebels and even the news that the fifteen thousand men at Harper's Ferry were under siege did not provoke the Young Napoleon into haste. Harper's Ferry must look after itself while McClellan, fearing every rumor, tried to protect his army against all eventualities. The army, he decreed, would advance on a broad front, but there was to be no unseemly haste. Caution ruled.

  Adam had no say in the matter. Adam was an unwanted major attached to McClellan's headquarters and Adam's opinion was of no interest to anyone, least of all to Allan Pinkerton, who commanded McClellan's Secret Service Bureau. Adam attempted to influence Pinkerton, and through Pinkerton, McClellan, by arguing with Pinkerton's chief of staff, who was a friend of Adam's and the older brother of Adam's erstwhile friend, Nate Starbuck. James Starbuck was utterly unlike Nate. He was a Boston lawyer, honest, careful, and conscientious, and his cautious nature only reinforced Pinkerton's inflated estimates of the rebels' numbers. Adam, arguing with James at supper on the Thursday evening when they had first heard about the rebels leaving Frederick City, protested that Lee could not possibly muster 200,000 men, not even 100,000. "Maybe sixty or seventy thousand," Adam said, "but probably no more than fifty."

  James laughed at the figure. "We are meticulous, Adam, meticulous. Give us credit for that. We have hundreds of reports! I know, I collate them. I compare them."

  "Reports from who?" Adam demanded.

  "You know I can't say," James said reprovingly. He paused to extract a scrap of chicken bone from between his teeth then laid the bone chip carefully on the edge of his plate. "But the contrabands tell the same tale, the exact same tale. I interviewed two more today." The contrabands were escaped slaves who were brought to Pinker-ton's tents and quizzed about the rebel forces. They all told the same story; thousands upon thousands of rebels, endless marching columns and vast guns crushing the dusty roads beneath their iron-rimmed wheels. "Even if we allow for some small exaggeration," James said with a flourish of his fork, "we must still credit Lee with a hundred and seventy thousand. And that's far more men than we have!"

  Adam sighed. He had ridden with the rebel army as late as the spring campaign and knew there could never be 170,000 men in gray coats. "How many were bivouacked at Frederick City?" he asked.

  James looked owlishly solemn. "At least a hundred thousand. We have direct reports from the town."

  Adam suspected the townspeople's reports were about as much use as the rumors printed in the newspapers. "What does our cavalry say?" he asked.

  James frowned and probed his cheek with a forefinger before extracting another sliver of bone. "Very skeletal, this chicken," he said disapprovingly.

  "Maybe it's rabbit," Adam said. "So what did the cavalry say?"

  James peered at his food in the candlelight. "Don't think it's rabbit. Rabbits don't possess wishbones, do they? I'm sure they don't. And I don't think our cavalry were ordered as far as Frederick City today. In fact, I'm sure they weren't. Maybe the problem is that our cooks can't joint chickens properly? I found one kitchen fellow attack' ing a carcass with a cleaver! Can you credit that? With a cleaver! No attempt to joint the bird, just hacking it apart. Never seen such behavior. Wasn't even plucked properly either. I told him, do as your mother does, I said, run the skin over a candle flame and that will get rid of the feather-gristle, but I don't think he listened."

  "So why don't you and I go to Frederick City," Adam ignored the culinary problems, "tomorrow morning. At dawn."

  James blinked at Adam. "For what purpose?"

  "Because if a hundred thousand men were encamped at Frederick," Adam said, "they'll have left traces. Fire-marks. Say ten men to a campfire? So if we count the scorched patches in the fields we'll have a shrewd idea of Lee's numbers."

  James laughed gently. "My dear Adam, do you have any idea how long it would take two men to count ten thousand burned patches of grass?" He shook his head. "I appreciate your interest, I surely do, but I don't think we need, if you'll forgive my bluntness, amateur help in the Secret Service. Mind you, if you can help us with some signaling problems, we would be grateful. You're something of an expert on telegraphy, aren't you? Our fellows seem unable to grasp the equipment. They probably send their messages with cleavers!" He snorted with amusement at the thought.

  But Adam had no time for heavy-fisted telegraphers, but only to indulge his dull anger at the slowness of the North's army and the plodding obtuseness of its Secret Service. He decided he would ride to Frederick City himself in the dawn, not to count fire patches, but to talk to the people in the town who might give him some indication of Lee's numbers. Civilians, Adam knew, usually overestimated numbers of troops, but maybe there was someone in the town who could give him some facts that the US Cavalry had not found time to seek out themselves.

  He saddled his horse before the dawn and was well through the picket line by the time the sun blazed up behind to cast the horse and rider's shadow long across the verge of the white dusty road. He breakfasted as he rode, eating bread
and honey and drinking cold tea as his path wended north eastward in parallel with the unfinished railbed of the Metropolitan Rail Road. He felt redundant and useless. In truth he had small purpose for visiting Frederick, for he knew that whatever he discovered, if he found anything at all, would be discounted by Pinkerton's staff, who were busy constructing their own elaborate picture of the rebel army, but Adam was filling in time because any activity was better than another indolent day in McClellan's camp.

  The countryside was curiously silent. It was the absence of cocks crowing that was strange, but that, Adam knew, was because rebel foragers must have combed these gentle farms for their supplies. It would be a hungry winter in Maryland.

  He watered his horse at Middlebrook, then rode on past the bottomland where he had outgalloped the rebel patrol. His spirits, which had been depressed by the futility of his assignment, began to rise with the sun as he rode through the good country. Haystacks stood neatly in well-tended fields and woodlots were stacked high, though doubtless the advancing army would soon make short work of all that hard labor. It was an image of peace and it warmed Adam's soul that now soared into a sunlit daydream of the war's ending. He doubted he could go back to Virginia, and doubted that he even wanted to return. Instead, he thought, he would go to New England and study for the ministry. He had a vision of a shingled town built about a steepling white church amidst the heavy woods; a place of honesty and hard work, a place where a man could study and preach and minister and write. He saw a study heavy with books, and maybe with his father's ivory-hilted saber, which Adam had captured and now wore at his side, hanging above the fireplace. The saber had been a gift to Adam's great-grandfather from Lafayette, and its blade was handsomely inscribed. "To my friend Cornelius Faulconer," the inscription read in French, "who joined me in the fight for liberty, Lafayette," and Adam imagined his own great-grandchildren treasuring the weapon as a memento of two wars in which virtue had triumphed over evil. He envisioned a kitchen with a heavy black range, steaming pots, drying herbs, and heaped bowls of fruit picked from his own yard. He thought of Julia Gordon in Richmond, and wondered if at the war's ending she would acknowledge the South's sins and come north to share his imagined haven in the deep, pious silence of the New England woods.

  These thoughts carried him through Clarkstown, Hyattstown, and Urbana, until at last he crossed the Baltimore and Ohio. The rebels had prized up the rails and uprooted the ties to leave a scar across the good land, but Adam knew the North's engineers would soon repair the track and have the cars running east and west again. Ahead of Adam now was Frederick City, but all around him was nothing but deserted fields dotted with the pale marks where tents had stood and the dark smears where fires had burned. The rebels had vanished.

  It was late morning when he entered the town. "Hey! Soldier!" a woman called, spotting Adam's blue coat. "Where are the rest of you?"

  "They're coming, ma'am," Adam answered, courteously touching the brim of his hat.

  "Lee's boys are gone, all gone," the woman said, then plunged her washing down the scrub board. "Thought you'd be here sooner."

  The townsfolk greeted Adam happily. There were more Northern sympathizers than rebel adherents in the town, and the appearance of a single Yankee soldier was sufficient to prompt a display of Stars and Stripes. The flags were hung from upper story windows or hoisted on makeshift poles. Men came to shake Adam's hand and some pressed gifts on him; cigars or flasks of whiskey. Adam tried to refuse the gifts, but was embarrassed by his own apparent ingratitude and so he pretended to drink from one flask, then thrust a handful of the cigars into a coat pocket. He dismounted at Main Street. A dozen people were all talking at once to him, telling him how the rebels had gone, telling him how large their army had been, but admitting that the Southern forces had not laid the town waste. They had expected to be pillaged, but the rebels had behaved themselves, even if they had insisted on paying for their supplies with Confederate money that was next to worthless. The townsfolk wanted to know when McClellan's army would arrive and when the rebel invasion would be whipped back out of the rest of Maryland. Adam, as he tried to cope with this blizzard of talk, noticed how some people crossed the street to avoid him and others even spat as he passed. The loyalties of Frederick, despite the display of Northern flags, was plainly confused.

  Adam wanted to find the mayor or a selectman, but instead he was pressed to go into a nearby tavern and celebrate his one-man liberation of the town. Adam shook his head. He was close to the post office and he decided that the postmaster, being a federal official, might be a source of some authoritative information, and so he tied his horse's reins to a hitching post, took Thorne's gold from the saddlebag to protect it from thieves and, shaking off the importunate crowd, edged into the office. "Sweet Lord above," a woman greeted his appearance, "so you got here."

  "Only me, I'm afraid," Adam said, and asked if the postmaster was available.

  "Jack!" the woman called, then gestured at the empty tables. "No business this last week," she explained. "Guess we'll be catching up soon enough."

  "I guess," Adam said, then greeted the postmaster, a big, redbearded man who emerged from a small office at the back of the building. Some townsfolk had crowded into the post office behind Adam and, to lose their ebullient company, Adam followed the postmaster to the tiny office.

  The man proved less than helpful. "I can tell you there was a mighty number of the rogues," he told Adam, "but how many?" He shrugged. "Thousands. Thousands and thousands. What did you say your name was?"

  "Major Adam Faulconer."

  The postmaster stared at Adam with a look close to suspicion. "You're a major? Not a captain?"

  It seemed an odd question, but Adam confirmed his rank. "I was promoted a week ago," he explained. He had hung Thorne's bag of gold coins from his belt and the dull chink of the coins embarrassed him.

  The postmaster seemed not to notice the sound of the money. "What's your posting, Major?" he asked.

  "I'm at General McClellan's headquarters."

  "Then I guess you knew to come here, Major," the postmaster said mysteriously, and unlocked a desk drawer out of which he took a stiff brown envelope that, to Adam's astonishment, had his name written on it. The handwriting was in capital letters and was unfamiliar to Adam, but he felt a tremor of excitement as he pulled the envelope open and unfolded the single sheet of paper.

  The excitement turned to astonishment, almost to disbelief, as he read the Special Order. At first, scanning the opening two paragraphs, he wondered why anyone should have bothered to send him what seemed nothing more than a set of routine housekeeping instructions, but then he came to the third paragraph and, barely able to contain his excitement, he saw that he had been given all of the rebels' dispositions. He had in his hand the whole strategy of the rebel army, the positions of every last division in Lee's forces. The paper was gold, pure unalloyed gold, for Robert Lee had scattered his army. Part was at Harper's Ferry, parts were moving north toward Pennsylvania, and others were presumably guarding the road between. Adam read the order twice and suddenly knew he was not serving his country in vain. Even McClellan, given this paper, would surely realize the opportunity. The Young Napoleon could fight each part of Lee's army separately, defeating them one after the other until the rebellion, at least in Virginia and its neighboring states, would be utterly destroyed. "Who gave this to you?" Adam asked the postmaster.

  "Didn't give his name." "But he was a rebel officer?"

  "He was," the postmaster paused. "I reckoned it was important, because the fellow kind of acted strange. So I kept it separate from the other letters."

  Suppose it was a trap? Adam stared at the signature, R. H. Chilton. He knew Chilton, though not well. Was this a lure? But that was not his decision to make. "What did the man look like?" he asked the postmaster.

  The man shrugged. "Small," he said, "plumpish. A bit, how would you say? Delicate? Like he wasn't supposed to be a soldier."

  "Did he have
a beard?"

  "None."

  Delaney? Adam thought. Belvedere Delaney? Not that the identity of Thorne's spy mattered now, all that mattered was that this precious piece of paper should get back safe to McClellan. "Thank you," Adam said fervently, then he picked up the discarded envelope, but in his haste he tore it as he tried to put the order back inside. "Use this," the postmaster gave him a larger envelope, which Adam used to hide the order. He went to put the envelope in his pocket, but found it filled with cigars.

  "Have these, please," Adam said, spilling the cigars on the desk.

  "Not all of them!" the postmaster protested Adam's generosity.

  "I've more than enough," Adam said. He did not smoke, but Lyman Thorne enjoyed his cigars, so Adam put the last three into the envelope before shaking the postmaster's hand. "Thank you again," he said fervently.

  He hurried back to the street where he thrust the curious onlookers aside and pulled himself into the saddle. He transferred the gold back to its saddlebag and pushed his horse through the crowd until at last he broke free of them and could spur down the street toward the rail depot. A butcher in a bloodied apron came out of a shed as Adam trotted past. "You want to be careful, soldier!" the butcher shouted. "There were some bushwhackers west of the town not long ago."

  Adam reined in. "Rebels?" he asked.

  "Weren't wearing blue," the butcher said.

  "I thought the rebels were gone?"

  "These are bastards from over the river. Come to pick up some plunder, like as not. But they were well to the west when I saw them, but they'll be circling round to the south to look at the rail depot. You go out that road," the man pointed due east, "and you'll be well clear of them. After ten or twelve miles you'll come to Ridge-v'ille and you can turn south there."

  "Thank you," Adam said, then he turned the horse, kicked his heels back, and urged the horse into a trot. He had a long journey ahead and he had to save his mare's strength and so he curbed his instinct to spur her into a canter. He touched his pocket, scarce daring to believe what was hidden there. Delaney? Was Delaney the traitor? And Adam was shocked at himself for having used the word "traitor," even in his thoughts, for whoever had sent the order was no traitor to the United States. But was it Delaney? Somehow Adam could not imagine the foppish, clever lawyer as a spy, but he could think of no one else who fitted both the postmaster's description of the rebel officer and Colonel Thorne's portrait of his reluctant agent. Delaney, the sly Richmond lawyer with the glib tongue, skin-deep smile, and watchful eyes.