The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 (22 page)

"There's a distinction?" Delaney asked.

"Oh, indeed." Lee cuffed spilled beans off his beard. "An attacker has to take more risks. Imagine playing chess,

Delaney, where you don't have to make a single move until your opponent has developed his attack. You should win every time." "Should?"

"A good attacker disguises his blows." "As you are now, General?"

Lee smiled. "Poor McClellan will be getting reports from here, there, and everywhere. He won't know where we are or what we're doing. He'll know we're besieging Harper's Ferry, of course, because he'll hear the guns, but I doubt if McClellan will raise a finger to help those poor men. Ah, Chilton! You look harassed."

Delaney felt a surge of fear, but Colonel Chilton's harassment arose from a lack of varnish rather than the loss of Special Order 191.

"Varnish?" Lee asked, finally abandoning his attempt to manipulate fork and spoon with hampered fingers. "Are we trying to smarten this army? A hopeless task, I should have thought."

"News from the north, sir. Parrott guns." Chilton collapsed into a camp chair and fanned his face with his hat brim.

"You've lost me, Chilton," Lee said. "Varnish? Parrott guns?"

"The tubes of the twenty pounders are liable to explode, sir. One of our fellows in the north knows an inspector in the factory and he claims they reckon it's because of friction inside the shell caused by the sudden acceleration upon firing. That friction ignites the shell and causes it to explode inside the tube. The factory's solution is to empty the sheik of their explosive and varnish the interior walls before refilling them. Worth a try, I'd say, only we can't find any varnish."

"Grease?" Delaney suggested, "or wax?"

"We could try that," Chilton said grudgingly. "But wouldn't wax melt?"

"Try grease," Lee said, "but eat first. The beans are excellent." The General wiped sweat off his forehead. The heat was again stupefying.

Delaney might have suggested a solution for exploding Parrott guns, but he had still not devised a method of passing the stolen order back to McClellan's army. During the night, as he had tossed sleeplessly on the hard ground, he had imagined riding desperately eastward until he met a Yankee cavalry patrol, but he knew his horsemanship was not up to such cross-country work. Besides, any rebel cavalry seeing him would be bound to be curious and that curiosity could well lead to the gallows' steps. Now, desperate to rid himself of the incriminating document, he had hit upon one last pathetic idea. "I thought, if you wouldn't mind," he said to Lee, "that I might look at the town before we leave?"

"By all means," Lee said. "Chilton will write you a pass."

"No danger of the Yankees arriving today?" Delaney asked anxiously.

"My dear Delaney!" Lee laughed. "None whatsoever, not with McClellan in command. We'll leave tomorrow, but I doubt he'll be here for at least another three days."

"There's nothing to see in the town," Chilton observed sourly, resenting that he was required to write Delaney a pass.

"One of my mother's cousins was a minister there for a time," Delaney said, inventing a reason for his curiosity, "and I have a notion he might be buried there."

"Your mother's cousins?" Lee said, frowning as he tried to remember Delaney's family tree. "So he was a Mattingley?"

"Charles Mattingley," Delaney said, and there was indeed a Reverend Charles Matt
ingley who had been a cousin of
Delaney's mother, though so far as Delaney knew the Reverend Charles was still alive and ministering to heathen tribes in Africa. "Thomas's second son," he added.

"I never knew that branch of the family," Lee said. "They moved to Maryland, aren't I right?'

"Creagerstown, General. Thomas was a physician there for many years."

"And his son's dead, eh? Poor fellow, he can't have been very old. But it's odd, Delaney, to think of you being related to a minister?"

"Charles was an Episcopalian, General," Delaney said reprovingly. "It hardly counts."

Lee, an Episcopalian himself, laughed, then fumbled open the lid of his pocket watch. "I must be at work," he announced. "Enjoy your afternoon, Delaney."

"Thank you, sir."

An hour later, equipped with the pass that would take him past the provosts guarding the stores in Frederick, Delaney walked into town. In his pocket was the copy of Special Order 191 and he felt sure that the provosts would stop him, search him, and then march him at gunpoint on the journey that would end at a Richmond gallows, but the men guarding the town merely touched their hats as he showed them Chilton's pass.

The town had a deserted air. The presence of the rebel army had stopped all traffic on the rail spur and had inhibited the country folk from coming to do their marketing in Frederick City. The shops, protected by the cordon of provosts, were open, but few people were in the streets. One or two houses flew the rebel flag, but the gesture seemed desultory, a mere formality, and Delaney guessed that when McClellan's army reached the town it would suddenly be gaudy with stars and stripes. The people of Maryland did not seem overgrateful for being liberated by the Southerners. Some were
enthusiastic, but only a hand
ful of young men had volunteered to join Lee's army.

Delaney strolled past a carpenter's shop sandwiched between two churches. A bearded man was turning chair legs in the shop and he looked up as the rebel officer passed, but did not return Delaney's greeting. A cripple, probably a man wounded in one of the war's early battles, sat on a porch taking in the sun. He ignored Delaney, which suggested he had fought for the North. A black woman, probably a slave, came toward Delaney with a bundle of laundry on her head, but turned aside into an alley rather than confront him. A solemn little girl watched him from behind a window, but ducked out of sight when he smiled at her. A pair of cows were being driven down the street, probably to give milk that would be sold to the rebel army, and Delaney called a cheerful greeting to the girl who herded them, but she just nodded curtly and hurried on, probably fearful that he would try to take the cows from her. The stifling heat seemed to condense the town's aroma of sweet hay and animal ordure into a rank stink that offended Delaney's nostrils. He stepped around some fresh cow dung and it occurred to him, with the astonishment that comes from a moment of self-revelation, that the reason he was betraying his country was simply to escape from the constriction of small church-haunted towns like Frederick City with their suspicious populations and their glorification of simple virtues and honest toil. Richmond was a rung above such places, but Richmond stank of tobacco, Washington was a rung higher still, but Washington stank of ambition, while New York and Boston were higher yet, but the one stank of vulgar money and the other reeked of Protestant virtue and Delaney wanted none of them. His reward for treachery, he decided, would be an ambassadorship: a permanent and salaried post in Rome or Paris or Athens, all of them cities that stank of jaded tastes and languid nights. He touched the pocket in which he had the Special Order concealed. It was his passport to paradise.

He found the post office on Main Street. The idea of employing the US mail to deliver the stolen order amused Delaney. There was something obvious, yet also quixotic, in the idea that appealed to his sense of mischief. He doubted whether Thorne would approve, for the vital news in the order was already a day old and it would probably be two or three days staler by the time it reached the US army, but Delaney had no other idea how to send his message.

The postmaster had a cubbyhole office at the back of the building that had the usual wooden counter, a wall of pigeonholes for letters awaiting collection, and two long tables where the mail was sorted. "Not again," the postmaster groaned when he saw Delaney.

"Again?" Delaney asked, puzzled.

"We had a Captain Gage in here this morning," the postmaster protested, "and another fellow yesterday. What was his name, Lucy?" He shouted to one of the women seated at a sorting table.

"Pearce!" she called back.

"A Major Pearce," the postmaster said accusingly to Delaney. The postmaster was a big-bellied, truculent man with a red beard. He was also a Northern sympathizer, or at least he had defiantly kept a stars and stripes hanging on his cubbyhole wall. "But they're all there," he added, gesturing at a pile of mail in a basket on his desk, "so help yourself. But nothing's come in since Captain Gage checked."

Delaney took the mail from the basket and suddenly understood what the postmaster was saying. All of the letters were addressed to places in the north, and all were from Confederate soldiers. Someone, he assumed the provosts, was making certain that no one was trying to send information to the Yankees and so they had opened and read the letters before initialing the envelopes to show that the contents had been checked. "I wasn't here to read the mail," Delaney said, but opened one of the letters anyway. It was from a Sergeant Malone and addressed to his sister in New Jersey. Betty had given birth to another son, but the child had died at a month old. Mother was as well as could be expected. Cousin John had been wounded at Manassas, but not seriously. " 'These are sad times,'" Delaney read aloud, " 'but we remember you in our prayers.'" He shrugged, slipped the letter back in its envelope, then dropped the pile back into the basket. "Would you," he asked the postmaster, "have an envelope you could donate to the army?"

The postmaster hesitated, then decided there was little point in being obstructive. He opened a drawer and handed Delaney an envelope. Delaney, making no attempt to hide what he did, took the copy of Special Order 191 from his pocket and slipped it inside the envelope, then folded the flap inside. "May I?" he asked and reached over the desk for the postmaster's pen. He dipped it in the inkwell, drained the excess ink from the nib, then wrote Captain Adam Faulconer, US Army, Gen. McClellan's Hdqtrs., in block letters. "It's nothing that needs bother Captain Gage or Major Pearce," he said to the postmaster, then borrowed a pencil and, very carefully, copied Gage's initials. "There," he said, the job done. "I suppose you'll charge me for a stamp now?"

The postmaster looked at the addressee's name, then at the forged initials, and finally up into Delaney's face. He said nothing.

"He's an old friend," Delaney explained airily, "and this might be my last chance to write to him." There was a risk that the postmaster was not a Northern supporter at all, but that was a risk Delaney had to run, just as he had to risk that the provosts did not check the basket of mail a third time.

"You're all leaving then?" the postmaster asked.

"By tomorrow," Delaney said, "the army will be gone."

"Where?"

"Over the hills and far away," Delaney said lightly. Sweat trickled down his cheeks. "But I imagine," he went on, "that the Federals will be here soon?"

"Like as not," the postmaster said with a shrug. He weighed the letter in his hand, then ostentatiously put it in the drawer rather than with the other mail from the Confederate army. "It'll be delivered," he promised, "but I don't know when."

"I'm obliged to you," Delaney said.

Once outside the Post Office Delaney had to lean against the wall. He was shaking like a man with the fever. Dear God, he thought, but he had no stomach for this kind of thing. He felt a sudden need to vomit, but managed to hold it back. Sweat poured off him. He had been a fool! He had been unable to resist flamboyance. He had deliberately tried to impress a man he thought was a Northern sympathizer, but he knew the risk had been stupid and the thought of the hangman's noose made him gag again.

"Are you unwell, Major?"

Delaney looked up and saw an elderly minister in Geneva bands watching him with a sympathetic, but wary, look. Doubtless he feared Delaney was drunk. "It's the heat," Delaney said, "nothing but the heat."

"It is warm," the minister agreed, sounding relieved that it was not liquor that had caused Delaney's distress. "Do you need help? A cup of water, maybe?"

"No, thank you. I shall manage just fine." Delaney suddenly looked up as a rumble of thunder sounded in the distance. There were no threatening clouds in sight, but the sound of the far-off storm was unmistakable. "Maybe the rain will break the heat," he said to the minister.

"Rain?" The minister frowned. "That isn't thunder," he said, realizing what Delaney had meant. "Those are guns, Major, those are guns." He stared west down main street to where the green fields and heavy trees and lines of rebel tents showed. "Harper's Ferry," the minister said, "it must be Harper's Ferry. God help all those poor men."

"Amen," Delaney said, "amen." For the fighting had begun.

The guns slammed back on their trails, spewing smoke sixty feet ahead of their muzzles and scattering flaming scraps of wadding onto the grass where small fires flickered from the previous shots. The sound of the guns was huge, so huge that it was more than just a sound, but a physical sensation as though the very earth was being buffeted in space. The shells screamed across the valley to leave little smoke trails from their burning fuses, then exploded in gouts of dirty gray-white smoke above the farther ridge. The smoke trails twisted in the wind, became feathery and tenuous, then another battery fired and the grass in front of the muzzles flicked flat again as another set of smoke trails whipped across the sky. Cannon barrels hissed as the wet swabs were thrust down the muzzles. On the far ridge a Yankee- battery returned the fire, but the