Copperhead

“Swynyard,” Daniels said to Faulconer, “served in the old U.S. Army. He graduated from West Point, when?”

“Class of twenty-nine, Johnny.” Swynyard clicked his heels together.

“Then served in the Mexican and Seminole wars. Is that right?”

“Took more scalps than any white man alive, Colonel,” Swynyard said, grinning at Faulconer and revealing a mouthful of rotted yellow teeth. “I took thirty-eight headpieces in one day alone!” Swynyard boasted. “All with my own hands, Colonel. Squaws, papooses, braves! I had blood to my elbows! Spattered to the armpits! Have you ever had the pleasure of taking a scalp, Colonel?” Swynyard asked with a fierce intensity.

“No,” Faulconer managed to say. “No, I haven’t.” He was recovering from Daniels’s refusal to countenance Adam’s appointment, and realizing that promotion would carry a price.

“There’s a knack to it,” Swynyard went on. “Like any other skill, there’s a knack! Young soldiers always try to cut them off and, of course, it don’t work. They end with something which looks like a dead mouse.” Swynyard believed this was funny, for he opened his gap-toothed mouth to breathe a sibilant laugh at Faulconer. “Cutting don’t work for a scalp, Colonel. No, you have to peel a scalp off, peel it like the skin of an orange!” He spoke lovingly, demonstrating the action with his wounded, clawlike hand. “If you’re ever in the Tidewater I’ll show you my collection. I’ve three cabin trunks full of prime scalps, all cured and tanned proper.” Swynyard evidently felt he had made a good impression on Faulconer for he smiled ingratiatingly while the tic in his cheek trembled fast. “Maybe you’d like to see a scalp now, Colonel?” Swynyard suddenly asked, pawing at the button of his top pocket as he spoke. “I always keep one about my person. As a good-luck charm, you understand? This one’s from a Seminole squaw. Noisy little bitch she was, too. Savages can squeal, I tell you, how they can squeal!”

“No, thank you.” Faulconer managed to prevent the trophy from being produced. “So you’re a Virginia man, Major?” he asked, changing the subject and disguising his distaste for the wretched-looking Swynyard. “From the Tidewater, you say?”

“From the Swynyards of Charles City Court House,” Swynyard said with evident pride. “The name was famous once! Ain’t that so, Johnny?”

“Swynyard and Sons,” the editor said, staring into the rain, “slave traders to the Virginia gentry.”

“But my daddy gambled the business away, Colonel,” Swynyard confided. “There was a time when the name Swynyard meant the selfsame thing as nigger trading, but Daddy lost the business with the sin of gambling. We’ve been poor men ever since!” He said it proudly, but the boast suggested to Washington Faulconer exactly what proposition was being made to him.

The editor drew on his cigar. “Swynyard’s a cousin of mine, Faulconer. He’s my kin.”

“And he has applied to you for employment?” Faulconer guessed shrewdly.

“Not as a newspaperman!” Major Swynyard intervened. “I don’t have skill with words, Colonel. I leave that to the clever fellows like cousin Johnny here. No, I’m a soldier through and through. I was weaned on the gun’s muzzle, you might say. I’m a fighter, Colonel, and I’ve got three cabin trunks crammed full of heathen topknots to prove it.”

“But you are presently unemployed?” Daniels prompted his cousin.

“I am indeed seeking the best place for my fighting talent,” Swynyard confirmed to Faulconer.

There was a pause. Daniels took the editorial from his pocket and pretended to cast a critical eye over its paragraphs. Faulconer took the hint. “If I should find employment for myself, Major,” he told Swynyard hastily, “I should count it as a great honor and a privilege if you would consider being my right-hand man?”

“Your second-in-command, don’t you mean?” John Daniels interjected from the President’s rocking chair.

“My second-in-command indeed,” Faulconer confirmed hurriedly.

Swynyard clicked his heels. “I’ll not disappoint you, Colonel. I might lack the genteel graces, by God, but I don’t lack fierceness! I ain’t a soft man, my God, no. I believe in driving soldiers like you drive niggers! Hard and fast! Bloody and brutal, no other way, ain’t that the truth, Johnny?”

“The entire truth, Griffin.” Daniels folded the editorial, but did not yet return it to his vest pocket. “Unfortunately, Faulconer,” Daniels went on, “my cousin impoverished himself in the service of his country. His old country, I mean, our new enemies. Which also means he has come to our new country with a passel of debts. Ain’t that so, Griffin?”

“I’m down on my luck, Colonel,” Swynyard confessed gruffly. A tear appeared at one eye and the tic in his cheek quivered. “Gave my all to the old army. Gave my fingers too! But I was left with nothing, Colonel, nothing. But I don’t ask much, just a chance to serve and fight, and a grave of good Confederate soil when my honest labors are done.”

“But you are also asking for your debts to be settled,” John Daniels said pointedly, “especially that portion of the debt which is owed to me.”

“I shall take great pleasure in establishing your credit,” Faulconer said, wondering just how much pain that pleasure would cost him.

“You’re a gentleman, Colonel,” Swynyard said, “a Christian and a gentleman. It’s plain to see, Colonel, so it is. Moved, I am. Touched deep, sir, very deep.” And Swynyard cuffed the tear from his eye, then straightened his back as a sign of respect to his rescuer. “I’ll not disappoint you. I ain’t a disappointer, Colonel. Disappointing ain’t in the Swynyard nature.”

Faulconer doubted the truth of that assertion, yet he guessed his best chance of being named a general was with Daniels’s help, and if Daniels’s price was Swynyard, then so be it. “So we’re agreed, Major,” Faulconer said, and held out his left hand.

“Agreed, sir, agreed.” Swynyard shook Faulconer’s offered hand. “You move up a rank, sir, and so do I.” He smiled his decayed smile.

“Splendid!” Daniels said loudly, then delicately and pointedly inserted the folded editorial back into his vest pocket. “Now if you two gentlemen would like to improve upon each other’s acquaintance, Mr. Delaney and I have business to discuss.”

Thus dismissed, Faulconer and Swynyard went to join the throng which still crowded the President’s house, leaving Daniels to flick his whip out into the rain. “Are you sure Faulconer’s our man?”

“You heard Johnston,” Delaney said happily. “Faulconer was the hero of Manassas!”

Daniels scowled. “I heard a rumor that Faulconer was caught with his pants around his ankles? That he wasn’t even with the Legion when it fought?”

“Mere jealous tales, my dear Daniels, mere jealous tales.” Delaney, quite at his ease with the powerful editor, drew on a cigar. His stock of precious French cigarettes was exhausted now, and that lack was perhaps the most pressing reason why he wanted this war to end quickly. To which end Delaney, like Adam Faulconer, secretly supported the North and worked for its victory by causing mischief in the South’s capital, and today’s achievement, he thought, was a very fine piece of mischief indeed. He had just persuaded the South’s most important newspaperman to throw his paper’s massive influence behind one of the most foppish and inefficient of the Confederacy’s soldiers. Faulconer, in Delaney’s caustic view, had never grown up properly, and without his riches he would be nothing but an empty-headed fool. “He’s our man, John, I’m sure of it.”

“So why has he been unemployed since Manassas?” Daniels asked.

“The wound in his arm took a long time healing,” Delaney said vaguely. The truth, he suspected, was that Faulconer’s inordinate pride would not allow him to serve under the foulmouthed, lowborn Nathan Evans, but Daniels did not need to know that.

“And didn’t he free his niggers?” Daniels asked threateningly.

“He did, John, but there were extenuating reasons.”

“The only extenuating reason for freeing a nigger is because the bastard’s dead,” Daniels declared.

“I believe Faulconer freed his slaves to fulfill his father’s dying wish,” Delaney lied. The truth was that Faulconer had manumitted his people because of a northern woman, an ardent abolitionist, whose good looks had momentarily enthralled the Virginia landowner.

“Well, at least he’s taken Swynyard off my hands,” Daniels said grudgingly, then paused as the sound of cheering came from inside the house. Someone was evidently making a speech and the crowd punctuated the oration with laughter and applause. Daniels glowered into the rain that still fell heavily. “We don’t need words, Delaney, we need a goddamn miracle.”

The Confederacy needed a miracle because the Young Napoleon was at last ready, and his army outnumbered the southern troops in Virginia by two to one, and spring was coming, which meant the roads would be fit once more for the passage of guns, and the North was promising its people that Richmond would be captured and the rebellion ended. Virginia’s fields would be dunged by Virginia’s dead and the only way the South could be saved from an ignominious and crushing defeat was by a miracle. Instead of which, Delaney reflected, he had given it Faulconer. It was enough, he decided, to make a sick cat laugh.

Because the South was doomed.

Just after dawn the cavalry came galloping back across the fields, their hooves splashing bright silver gouts of water from the flooded grass. “Yankees are at Centreville! Hurry it up!” The horsemen spurred past the earthen wall that was notched with gun embrasures, only instead of cannon in the embrasures there was nothing but Quaker guns. Quaker guns were tree trunks painted black and then propped against the firing steps to give the appearance of cannon muzzles.

The Faulconer Legion would be the last infantry regiment to leave the Manassas positions, and the last, presumably, to march into the new fortifications that were being dug behind the Rappahannock River. The retreat meant ceding even more Virginia territory to the northerners, and for days now the roads south through Manassas had been crowded with refugees heading for Richmond.

The only defenses left behind at Manassas and Centreville would be the Quaker guns, the same fake weapons that had brooded across the landscape all winter to keep the Yankee patrols far from Johnston’s army. That army had been wondrously supplied with food that had been painstakingly hauled to the Manassas depot by trains all winter long, but now there was no time to evacuate the depot and so the precious supplies were being burned. The March sky was already black with smoke and rich with the smell of roasting salt beef as Starbuck’s company torched the last rows of boxcars left in the rail junction. The cars had already been primed with heaps of tinder, pitch, and gunpowder, and as the burning torches were thrust into the incendiary piles, the fire crackled and bellowed fiercely upward. Uniforms, bridles, cartridges, horse collars, and tents went up in smoke, then the boxcars themselves caught fire and the flames whipped in the wind and spewed their black smoke skyward. A barn full of hay was torched, then a brick warehouse of flour, salt pork, and dry crackers. Rats fled from the burning storehouses and were hunted down by the Legion’s excited dogs. Each company had adopted at least a half-dozen mongrel mutts that were lovingly cared for by the soldiers. Now the dogs seized the rats by their necks and shook them dead, scattering blood. Their owners cheered them on.

The boxcars would burn till there was nothing left but a pair of blackened wheels surrounded by embers and ash. Sergeant Truslow had a work party pulling up rails and stacking them on burning piles of wooden ties soaked in pitch. The burning stacks generated such a fierce heat that the steel rails were being bent into uselessness. All about the regiment were the pyres of other fires as the rearguard destroyed two months’ worth of food and a winter’s worth of stored equipment.

“Let’s be moving, Nate!” Major Bird strode across the scorched depot, jumping in alarm as a box of ammunition caught fire in one of the boxcars. The cartridges snapped like firecrackers, forcing an incandescent blaze in one corner of the burning wagon. “Southward!” Bird cried dramatically, pointing in that direction. “You hear the news, Nate?”

“News, sir?”

“Our behemoth was met by their leviathan. Science matched wits with science, and I gather that they fought each other to a standstill. Pity.” Bird suddenly checked and frowned. “A real pity.”

“The Yankees have a metal ship too, sir?” Starbuck asked.

“It arrived the day after the Virginia’s victory, Nate. Our sudden naval superiority is all for naught. Sergeant! Leave those rails, time to be on our way unless you wish to be a guest of the Yankees tonight!”

“We lost our ship?” Starbuck asked in disbelief.