Copperhead

“Sorry, dreaming.”

“I was talking about McClellan,” Adam said. “Everyone agrees he’s a genius. Even Johnston says McClellan was quite the cleverest man in all the old U.S. Army.” Adam spoke enthusiastically, as though McClellan were the new southern commander and not the leader of the north’s Army of the Potomac. Adam glanced to his right, disturbed by a sudden crescendo in the sound of musketry coming from the woods above the distant river. The firing had been desultory in the last hour, but now it rose to a sustained crackle that sounded like dry tinder burning fierce. It raged for a half minute or so, then fell back to a steady and almost monotonous mutter. “They must cross back to Maryland soon!” Adam said angrily, as though he were offended by the stubbornness of the Yankees in staying on this side of the river.

“So tell me more about McClellan,” Starbuck said.

“He’s the coming man,” Adam said in a spirited voice. “It happens in war, you know. The old fellows begin the fight, then they get winnowed out by the young ones with new ideas. They say McClellan’s the new Napoleon, Nate, a stickler for order and discipline!” Adam paused, evidently worried that he maybe sounded too enamored of the enemy’s new general. “Did you really cut a man’s throat for coffee?” he asked awkwardly.

“It wasn’t quite as cold-blooded as Decker makes it sound,” Starbuck said. “I tried to keep the man quiet without hurting him. I didn’t want to kill him.” In truth he had been scared to death of the moment, shaking and panicked, but he had known that the safety of his men had depended on keeping the sutler silent.

Adam grimaced. “I can’t imagine killing a man with a knife.”

“It’s not something I ever imagined myself doing,” Starbuck confessed, “but Truslow made me practice on some ration hogs, and it isn’t as hard as you’d think.”

“Good God,” Adam said faintly. “Hogs?”

“Only young ones,” Starbuck said. “Incredibly hard to kill, even so. Truslow makes it look easy, but then he makes everything look easy.”

Adam pondered the idea of practicing the skills of killing as though they were the rudiments of a trade. It seemed tragic. “Couldn’t you have just stunned the poor man?” He asked.

Starbuck laughed at the question. “I had to make sure of the fellow, didn’t I? Of course I had to! My men’s lives depended on his silence, and you look after your men. That’s the first rule of soldiering.”

“Did Truslow teach you that too?” Adam asked.

“No.” Starbuck sounded surprised at the question. “That’s an obvious rule, isn’t it?”

Adam said nothing. Instead he was thinking, not for the first time, just how unlike each other he and Starbuck were. They had met at Harvard, where they had seemed to recognize in each other the qualities each knew he lacked in himself. Starbuck was impetuous and mercurial, while Adam was thoughtful and painstaking; Starbuck was a slave to his feelings, while Adam tried desperately hard to obey the harsh dictates of a rigorous conscience. Yet out of those dissimilarities had grown a friendship that had endured even the strains that had followed the battle at Manassas. Adam’s father had turned against Starbuck at Manassas, and Starbuck now raised that delicate subject by asking whether Adam thought his father would be given command of a brigade.

“Joe would like him to get a brigade,” Adam said dubiously. “Joe” was Joseph Johnston, the commander of the Confederate armies in Virginia. “But the President doesn’t listen to Joe much.” Adam went on, “He likes Granny Lee’s opinion better.” General Robert Lee had started the war with an inflated reputation, but had earned the nickname “Granny” after an unsuccessful minor campaign in western Virginia.

“And Lee doesn’t want your father promoted?” Starbuck asked.

“So I’m told,” Adam said. “Lee evidently believes Father should go as a commissioner to England”—Adam smiled at the notion—“which Mother thinks is a dandy idea. I think even her illnesses would disappear if she could take tea with the Queen.”

“But your father wants his brigade?”

Adam nodded. “And he wants the Legion back,” he said, knowing exactly why his friend had raised the subject. “And if he gets it, Nate, then he’ll demand your resignation. I guess he’s still convinced you shot Ethan.” Adam was referring to the death of the man who would have married Adam’s sister.

“Ethan was killed by a shell,” Starbuck insisted.

“Father won’t believe that,” Adam said sadly, “and he won’t be persuaded of it either.”

“Then I’d better hope your father goes to England and takes tea with the Queen,” Starbuck said carelessly.

“Because you’re really going to stay with the Legion?” Adam asked, sounding surprised.

“I like it here. They like me.” Starbuck spoke lightly, disguising the fervid nature of his attachment to the Legion.

Adam walked a few paces in silence while the gunfire splintered remote, and distant like a skirmish in someone else’s war. “Your brother,” Adam said suddenly, then paused as though he suspected he was trespassing on a difficult area. “Your brother,” he started again, “is still hoping you’ll go back north.”

“My brother?” Starbuck could not hide his surprise. His elder brother, James, had been captured at Manassas and was now a prisoner in Richmond. Starbuck had sent James gifts of books, but he had not asked for any furlough to visit his brother. He would have found any confrontation with his family too difficult. “You’ve seen him?”

“Only as part of my duties,” Adam said, and explained that one of his responsibilities was to match lists of captured officers who were to be exchanged between the North and the South. “I sometimes visit the prison in Richmond,” Adam went on, “and saw James there last week.”

“How is he?”

“Thin, very pale, but hoping to be released on exchange.”

“Poor James.” Starbuck could not imagine his worried and pedantic brother as a soldier. James was a very good lawyer, but had always hated uncertainty and adventure, which were the very things that compensated for the dangerous discomforts of soldiering.

“He worries about you,” Adam said.

“I worry about him,” Starbuck said lightly, hoping to deflect what he suspected was an imminent sermon from his friend.

“He’ll certainly be pleased to hear you’re attending prayer meetings,” Adam said fervently. “He worries for your faith. Do you go to church every week?”

“Whenever I can,” Starbuck said, then decided this was a subject best changed. “And you?” he asked Adam. “How are you?”

Adam smiled, but did not answer at once. Instead he blushed, then laughed. He was clearly full of some piece of news that he was too embarrassed to tell outright, but nevertheless wanted prised out of him. “I’m really fine,” he said, leaving the opening dangling.

Starbuck caught the inflection exactly. “You’re in love.”

Adam nodded. “I really think I might be, yes.” He sounded surprised at himself. “Yes. Really.”

Adam’s coyness filled Starbuck with affectionate amusement. “You’re getting married?”

“I think so, yes. We think so, indeed, but not yet. We thought we should wait for the war’s end.” Adam still blushed, but suddenly he laughed, hugely pleased with himself, and unbuttoned a tunic pocket as though to take out a picture of his beloved. “You haven’t even asked what her name is.”

“Tell me her name,” Starbuck demanded dutifully, then turned away because the sound of rifle fire had swollen again to a frantic intensity. A slight haze of powder smoke was showing above the trees now, a gauzy flag of battle that would thicken into a dense fog if the guns kept up their present rate of fire.

“She’s called…” Adam began, then checked because hooves thumped loud on the turf behind him.

“Sir! Mr. Starbuck, sir!” a voice hailed, and Starbuck turned to see young Robert Decker galloping across the field on the back of Adam’s stallion. “Sir!” He was waving excitedly to Starbuck. “We’ve got orders, sir! We’ve got orders! We’re to go and fight them, sir!”

“Thank God,” Starbuck said, and started running back to his company.

“Her name’s Julia,” Adam said to no one, frowning at his friend’s back. “Her name’s Julia.”

“Sir?” Robert Decker asked, puzzled. He had slid out of the saddle and now offered the stallion’s reins to Adam.

“Nothing, Robert.” Adam took the reins. “Nothing at all. Go and join the company.” He watched Nate shouting at K Company, seeing the excitement of men stirred from repose by the prospect of killing. Then he buttoned his pocket to secure the leather-cased photograph of his girl before climbing into the saddle and riding to join his father’s Legion. Which was about to fight its second battle.

On the quiet banks of the Potomac.

The two Yankee river crossings were five miles apart and General Nathan Evans had been trying to decide which offered his brigade the greater danger. The crossing to the east had cut the turnpike and so appeared to be the bigger tactical threat because it severed his communications with Johnston’s headquarters at Centreville, but the Yankees were not reinforcing the handful of men and guns they had thrown over the river there, while more and more reports spoke of infantry reinforcements crossing the river at Harrison’s Island and then climbing the precipitous slope to the wooded summit of Ball’s Bluff. It was there, Evans decided, that the enemy was concentrating its threat, and it was there that he now sent the rest of his Mississippians and his two Virginia regiments. He sent the 8th Virginians to the near side of Ball’s Bluff, but ordered Bird to make for the farther western flank. “Go through the town,” Evans told Bird, “and come up on the left of the Mississippi boys. Then get rid of the Yankee bastards.”

“With pleasure, sir.” Bird turned away and shouted his orders. The men’s packs and blanket rolls were to be left with a small baggage guard, while every one else in the Legion was to march west with a rifle, sixty rounds of ammunition, and whatever other weapons they chose to carry. In the summer, when they had first marched to war, the men had been weighed down with knapsacks and haversacks, canteens and cartridge boxes, blankets and groundsheets, bowie knives and revolvers, bayonets and rifles, plus whatever other accoutrements a man’s family might have sent to keep him safe, warm, or dry. Some men had carried buffalo robes, while one or two had even worn metal breastplates designed to protect them from Yankee bullets, but now few men carried anything more than a rifle and bayonet, a canteen, a haversack, and a groundsheet and blanket rolled into a tube that was worn slantwise around their chests. Everything else was just impediment. Most had discarded their pasteboard-stiffened caps, preferring slouch hats that protected the backs of their necks from the sun. Their tall stiff boots had been cut down into shoes, the fine twin rows of brass buttons on their long jackets had been chopped away and used as payment for apple juice or sweet milk from the farms of Loudoun County, while many of the skirts of the long coats had been cut away to provide material to patch breeches or elbows. Back in June, when the Legion had trained at Faulconer Court House, the regiment had looked as smart and well-equipped as any soldiers in the world, but now, after just one battle and three months picket duty along the frontier, they looked like ragamuffins, but they were all far better soldiers. They were lean, tanned, fit, and very dangerous. “They still have their illusions, you see,” Thaddeus Bird explained to his nephew. Adam was riding his fine roan horse while Major Bird, as ever, walked.

“Illusions?”