Confederates (32 page)

‘Well, I'd say, James, that the purpose was to exploit the situation.'

‘But this violates the major military principle of concentration.'

‘God help us all, James, what else can we do? Look, with States like Alabama and Louisiana scraping their barrels we can get together 23,000 infantry and some 4000 cavalry to send off with Tom. And you'll be here with 32,000 in your corps. That's the South at floodtide, James. They are the numbers we've got together by the best efforts we can put forward, by using all the laws in all the States as well as the laws of the Confederate Congress. In a week, as I say, and as you well know, there'd be 130,000 Yankees facing us along the Rappahannock. And if by some gift of God we could fight them ragged, all Abe Lincoln and his War Secretary have to do is call for another quarter of a million boys and put in new requisitions for cannons and muskets. We can't win it, James, by keeping to the principle of concentration that we learnt at West Point. And the reason is, if
we
sit still, they can out-concentrate
us
every day of the week.'

James Longstreet bit his thumb and stared off into the middle distance. ‘I know all that,' he told General Lee. ‘But the danger. My wing could be crushed right here, on this ground, after General Jackson marches off.'

‘As a matter of fact, James, I don't intend for your wing to linger long here. I want you just to hold the line while Tom gets away, and of course to cause so much trouble along Johnny Pope's front with raids and artillery fire that he won't for a moment think that half of us are gone. And then, allowing two days for Tom here to get poised, you and I will be off too, James, at night. Leaving our fires burning.'

Long-faced James Longstreet turned to long-faced Tom Jackson. ‘You could be attacked on the march and chewed up.'

‘At the worst,' Jackson told him, not using Christian names since Longstreet wouldn't, ‘I could retreat to the Blue Ridge.'

‘You could really get yourself swamped in the Manassas area. Why there must be at least some 50,000 of the others on the road up that way right now.'

‘It will depend a lot,' said Tom Jackson, closing his eyes like a cat, ‘on the work of my cavalry.'

Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, James Longstreet wanted to say. But he was a sane man. He could see the reasons for the move if it could be well managed. He doubted Jackson could really manage it well.

‘I've already drawn up,' said Lee, almost in apology, ‘the movement orders, James.' He handed a paper to Longstreet.

Longstreet read over the details on the page Lee handed him. He took a minute and a half over it, contorting his long lips here and there and giving little grunts. At last he said: ‘It might work if General Jackson's corps completes the march in two days. That's 25 miles a day. But how can you do that with a waggon train?'

‘There won't be a waggon train,' Tom Jackson said. ‘There'll be a few ambulances. And they'll move along! Oh yes, they'll move along at a good clip! We'll feed and supply ourselves from the Federal trains we find in Manassas.'

Putting both sets of his fingers against his forehead, James Longstreet laughed a silent and bitter laugh at this crazy optimism. These two men, more staid than him, not given at all to cussing, were like men rendered mad by their initial successes at a gambling table.

‘We can depend on you, James,' said Lee quietly. ‘I know that much.'

‘Oh yes,' said James Longstreet, ‘you can depend on
me.'

Lee smiled. ‘I suggest you get Dan Hill's division to move into the camp sites Tom's men vacate tonight. But I leave the fine detail to you two.'

‘Very well,' said James Longstreet and sighed. ‘Very well. I'll talk to Dan Hill.'

‘James, Tom,' said the generalissimo with that chaste smile of his. ‘I think this is just about the biggest thing we ever tried.'

‘And all I hope,' said James Longstreet, ‘is that the Union command stays as lax as it has been up to this.'

‘Amen to that,' General Lee whispered.

But Tom Jackson said nothing. He was staring at the maps, just like a goddam traveller who knows where he'll be at nightfall.

22

When Searcy rode into that street in Orange a week after Mrs Whipple's arrival, masons and carpenters were working on scaffolds outside the warehouse. Mrs Dora Whipple, Searcy thought, has ordered holes knocked in the brute walls, is letting in the light and the air. Doing for the hospital what she's done for me perhaps, for the Honourable Horace Searcy.

It was while he was dismounting that the thought came to him. Why don't you marry this woman. Like that. Marry an American! He'd never met anyone who'd done that – apart from other Americans of course. Certainly she came from the aristocracy of Boston and had married into the gentry of the Carolinas, but in English society that counted for little more than being the daughter of a Red Indian chief. Searcy smiled. If I marry an American, it will confirm all the governor's worst opinions of me, he thought.

In the lobby of the warehouse he found an orderly in a long dirty coat. Once it had been white, now it was yellow and dappled with the brown of old blood which will not wash out. Oh, Searcy thought, guessing correctly, the surgeon in this place isn't up to Mrs Whipple's standards.

‘Could you direct me to the matron's quarters, please?'

‘Out the back.'

‘Out the back
isn't a very exact description.'

The orderly looked at him and Searcy could just about see him thinking,
a friend of hers!
Searcy was unrepentant at being thought of that way.

‘Come on, ole chap. I asked you where the matron was.'

The orderly got more specific then. Mrs Whipple's quarters were a newly built lean-to of green pinewood in the courtyard behind the warehouse. Stone walls on three sides of this yard. It would be a bitter place in winter. Maybe, however, she wouldn't have to occupy it in winter. She might be in the North. She might be in England. She might be my bride. Searcy started grinning there, in the courtyard, in his enthusiasm for that idea. And as he stood there, the project grew and sent him to her door feeling a grand elation.

He knocked and heard her businesslike voice telling him to come in. Opening the door he found her at the table, kneading gingerbread and cutting it with a knife. The fragrance of gingerbread cookies came from a small portable army oven in one corner.

As he entered, he noticed a certain expectant flinching of her eyes. He guessed she was worried what he thought of her for writing, for sending on her new address. ‘Oh, how can I say welcome?' she said. ‘When I'm all over flour?'

‘No need for welcome,' said Searcy gallantly, bowing broadly. ‘I shall take the welcome as read.'

She made a mouth. ‘You see, I promised gingerbread to some of the boys for supper. It's always so important to tempt their appetites …'

You tempt mine well enough, sweet lady, Searcy thought.

She coughed. ‘I thought I'd better write you about my new location,' she whispered, ‘in view of our … our professional connection.…'

In fact Searcy had been so enchanted since he'd come in that he'd nearly forgotten they had any such connection. ‘Of course you should have. Can we speak freely? Your black girl …?'

‘She's out at market, sir.' She smiled and pointed to a chair just by the table. ‘Sit here. True, a fine layer of flour-dust will cover your clothes, Mr Searcy. I shall try to compensate for that by giving you the first slice of gingerbread to come from my oven.'

‘A bargain, madam,' said Searcy. He sat and they smiled at each other in silence for a while. When Searcy spoke again, it was in a voice which could hardly be heard, even by Dora Whipple. ‘You know the connections you had in Richmond? I don't mean the social connections. I mean the …
other
connections?'

A seriousness came over her small bunched face. ‘I know the kind of connections you mean, Mr Searcy.'

‘Do they operate here? In Orange?'

‘No one has made any contacts with me.'

Searcy thought a moment. ‘I don't ask this in any offensive way, my dear lady. But I wondered if perhaps you'd had a change of heart?'

‘My heart is steady, Mr Searcy; even more so my mind. It's the way I'll stay. No one has bothered to contact me. If you told me anything now I would not know to whom to relay it in my turn.' She punched a particularly massive lump of dough. ‘I imagine someone will come to me in time.'

Searcy smiled. ‘I have nothing in particular to tell, Mrs Whipple. Except the old, old story. That Lee has some 60,000 troops and that's the best he'll ever do. I've said so in one of my despatches to
The Times
. I wonder if they bother to read
The Times
in Washington?'

‘I don't think they can, really,' said Mrs Whipple. ‘Or if they do, I don't think they believe what they read.'

He could see that she'd become very serious. That they had become spy and spy again. He wanted to get back to being man and woman, friend and friend. He shook his head. ‘In any case I visited, madam … because I wanted to visit!'

She looked straight at him. That acute frankness was in her eye. And he wondered what it meant, wondered whether he ought to go to her, be-floured as she was, and solve matters by wrapping her in his arms. But someone new had arrived at the door of her quarters and was hammering.

Dora Whipple wiped her hands on a towel and crossed the room and opened. Searcy saw at the door a tall man with the white, slightly purplish complexion of a boozer. He wore an untidy surgeon's uniform.

‘Doctor Canty,' said Mrs Whipple.

The surgeon did not answer. He handed Mrs Whipple a note, which she unfolded and read.

‘I'm too busy with gingerbread to answer this nonsense,' she told the surgeon when she'd finished reading. ‘There are hundreds of men needing a whisky issue many times a day. If you give me a clerk, I can make sure these records you ask for are kept … how much whisky is given, when and to whom …'

‘It is not satisfactory, ma'am,' the surgeon told her. ‘It is too easy for you to play favourites with the whisky keg, as happens with some of them Marylander officers you spend your time with in Ward 4.'

‘Do I read you right, Surgeon Canty …?'

‘You read me any way you like, ma'am.'

Searcy got to his feet now, delighted to be able to do something definite for her. ‘Go before I take you with my fists, sir,' he told the surgeon in what Mrs Whipple thought of as his best Britannic manner.

Surgeon Canty went a dangerous purple. ‘This is my hospital. I have authority over every square foot of it.'

Searcy was so anxious to get at him that he span Mrs Whipple aside and took the lapels of the man's uniform. ‘Apologise to the matron,' he said. Mrs Whipple was close to Searcy's elbow, saying softly: ‘Let him go.'

The surgeon's eyes were bulging but he would not formulate any answer.

‘Apologise to this lady, you drunken pig-doctor!'

‘Please,' Mrs Whipple whispered. ‘
I
have to stay on here with him.
I
have to work with him.'

Searcy pushed the man away and was surprised how he toppled. Canty had that strange weakness of the inebriate, the man who drinks more than he eats.

‘I shall send a goddam corporal's guard,' he was calling, ‘to evict your guest, Mrs Whipple!'

‘And I, sir, on my return to the army,' Searcy announced, ‘shall mention your charming manners to General Jackson.

Canty turned away and vanished into the hospital. Searcy closed the door, and he and Mrs Whipple returned to the table, panting fiercely.

‘Oh, Mr Searcy, you've taken my hand,' Mrs Whipple said all at once in a high breathy voice. For he had her hand, pallid with dough, clamped in his, and seemed to be studying it deeply. She laughed. ‘If you waited half an hour you could have it in its normal state.'

But he could hear her excited breathing. He put his lips to her wrist and they came away comically marked with the gingerbread mix. That made both of them laugh. ‘Look at yourself in the mirror,' Mrs Whipple advised Searcy.

‘Marry me, Mrs Whipple,' Searcy said simply.

‘No,' she said, equally simply. The laughter had vanished. ‘It can't be done.' She nodded over her shoulder. ‘Boys perish in that place, you know, my dear Searcy. Any need of ours isn't as sharp, sir, as theirs.'

‘There are other matrons to take over the management, Mrs Whipple.'

‘Few as accomplished as I,' she told him. ‘I have to say it.
Few
as accomplished as I.'

‘Listen to me,' Searcy said, starting to argue hard. ‘Lee and Jackson have to come to grief in the North. There must be a retreat in the autumn …'

‘And oceans of wounded boys, my dear Searcy.
Oceans!'

He waved that aside, ‘Perhaps about Christmas matters will have settled. We can get out to the North with one of the blockade runners. We could go back to England. My father has a fine house in the West Country. Imagine us living there, Mrs Whipple, in such peace. In such happiness. I have a book to write there about North and South. You also ought to write a book.'

‘Which book?' she asked, and her laugh was very nearly bitter. ‘The one about the matron or the one about the spy.'

‘Come, Mrs Whipple! I stagger round the earth from one battlefield to another. Like the ghost of Hannibal or someone like that. I tell you, my dear Mrs Whipple, if I had you, I could happily come to rest. We could live together in a well-ordered household.'

She laughed again. ‘It sounds as if all you need is a good housekeeper.'

‘I tell the story badly, Mrs Whipple,' he said with a confessional grin. ‘Let me say this. I desire you. Oh yes, more than anything. I desire you.'