The Velvet Shadow (29 page)

Alden had been ordered to oversee a small detachment to guard Harrison’s Island while the other regiments made the crossing from the island to the Virginia shore. The last troops had just been ferried over, and Alden and his men were ready to cross and join their comrades atop the bluff.

“Come on, hurry!” he called, herding the last of his men into a bateau. They piled in, a pair of privates picked up the oars, and Alden climbed in after them, his heart pounding in anticipation. Colonel Baker, with his “First California” regiment—so named to honor Senator Baker when the regiment was in fact the Seventy-first Pennsylvania—had taken the lead position, while Roger and the other Twenty-fifth Massachusetts companies marched somewhere in the center of the line. Alden wasn’t sure how his regiment had regrouped, since the men were scattered in the disorganized river crossings.

“Are we going to miss the best of it, Major?”

Alden looked at the man next to him. Idly scraping the callused tip of his forefinger across the blade of his fixed bayonet, the man looked almost relaxed, though a feral light gleamed in the depths of his blue eyes. Alden struggled to recall the man’s name. He was from Company M—yes, Sheahan, the one who’d fought in the European war. He was a professional fighter, swarthy and seasoned, and probably a better soldier than most men in the regiment. Alden didn’t completely trust him, though, for the man spoke with the broad, slow
accent of a Georgia planter.

“The best of what?” Alden reached out to balance himself as the boat wobbled in the swift current. “This is a scouting expedition, not a battle. Word has it that the camp atop this ridge has been abandoned.”

“I don’t think so.” Sheahan’s scarred face cracked in a smile. “Can’t you feel it? It’s in the air; I can smell it. Hunger. Battle lust. This day will end with blood.”

“Quiet, Sheahan. You’re gloomier than Valentine,” Sergeant Marvin called from the front of the boat. Alden caught the sergeant’s eye and grimly smiled his thanks. The men didn’t need to hear prognostications of doom before their first outing.

Sheahan didn’t speak again, but a bright mockery invaded his stare as he studied the bluff above them. Alden turned away from the man and looked out over the rippling waters. As much as he hated to admit it, Sheahan probably knew more about what might happen up there than he did. Alden had studied Napoleonic strategy. He had memorized facts regarding historical battles. He had proved himself as a sharpshooter and swordsman. But he had never smelled powder away from the firing range, never felt blood on his hands.

He didn’t particularly want to.

Flanna caught her breath and forced her heavy feet to climb the steep trail. She had never visited Virginia and had no idea it was so rocky. The path they climbed had not looked so steep from the water, but now every step carried her more upward than forward. The weight of her knapsack threatened to pull her backward into a long line of men who might topple like dominoes if she missed a single step.

The air was cold and damp; the morning’s gray promise had been fulfilled with a slow drizzle that soaked her clothing as she walked skyward. Her hands and face felt as cold as glass, but perspiration had dampened her undershirt as her legs worked to push her up the path. She had congratulated herself on being able to keep up with her companions
on the long march to Sugar Loaf Mountain, but she’d never realized that climbing upward would exhaust her strength.

A cold wind blew past her with a soft moaning sound. Her comrades walked without speaking, each man uncomfortably aware that he walked in Johnny Reb’s territory. They were moving through Virginia hills, over a Virginia mountain, with red Virginia clay beneath their feet. Flanna heard the far-off knocking of a woodpecker and the liquid duet of a pair of birds from somewhere across the river. But the space along the line of men was quiet, the silence filled with dread.

At last they crested the knoll. Relieved smiles lit the faces of the men who’d arrived the night before. A few of them had stretched out on the grass, their canteens open as they splashed their faces with water. “Quite a climb, eh?” they called to those who came up the narrow trail. “And all for naught. Just look at the encampment we came to spy upon!”

One of the revelers pointed toward the woods, and Flanna saw nothing but a row of pale trees shimmering like silver in the afternoon light. “What?” She looked at the soldier in confusion. “Trees?”

“The idiots who flew over in the spy balloon thought they were a line of tents,” the soldier said, grinning. “Guess they never saw a white tree before.”

“What’s been happening here?” she asked.

The soldier jerked his thumb toward the trees. “The Fifteenth Massachusetts started out for Leesburg as soon as they got up here, but I don’t know how far they’ll get. Johnny Reb is out there, but we don’t know where.”

Flanna folded her arms and looked around. She stood in a field of about six acres, open to the cliff and the river on one side, and bordered on three sides by thick trees. Colonel Cogswell and his Forty-second New York artillery were dragging howitzers up the muddy path, men tugging like pack animals as they struggled to maneuver the heavy guns over the circuitous path.

The soldier grinned when he caught her eye again. “Too steep for
the horses. So they make men do what horses cannot.”

Flanna opened her mouth, about to reply, but halted when a bugle sounded and Colonel Baker strode into the center of the clearing.

“Fall in, men!” The rich timbre of his orator’s voice echoed in the clearing. “To your regiments!”

With a quick farewell to the soldier at her feet, Flanna hastened to join her company. The air of merriment vanished as Baker directed the troops—the Forty-second New York to the left, Wistar’s First Cavalry to the fore, Lee’s Twentieth Massachusetts to the right, and Farnham’s Twenty-fifth Massachusetts to the rear.

“Do they think the Rebs are playing hide and seek?” A young man running to join his regiment turned and tossed the wisecrack over his shoulder. “If they were there, we’d have seen ’em before this.”

As if in answer, a volley of rattling shots rent the air. An instant later the young man tumbled to the ground at Flanna’s feet, his eyes open to the sky, a dark hole in the center of his forehead. She stifled a scream as she automatically dropped to the ground beside him; then her stomach fell, and the empty place filled with a frightening hollowness.

The trees had disappeared, shrouded in a veil of drifting smoke. They were under attack.

A
lden heard the sharp pop of rifle fire and looked up toward the high ridge. He could see nothing from this vantage point, but the men in his boat instinctively clutched their rifles and pointed their bayonets toward the sky.

“Shall we keep rowing, Major?” one of the oarsmen called, his mouth tight and grim.

Alden hesitated, considering his options. If he kept rowing, he could bring these men as reinforcements, but if the commander on the bluff called a retreat, they’d need this pitiful boat to ferry others back to the safety of Harrison’s Island.

“Go back!” He shouted the order. “At once, reverse, take us back to the island!”

Sheahan shot him a contemptuous glance—undoubtedly he thought Alden a coward.

Alden waited until the boat shivered and changed direction, then he fixed the swarthy soldier in his sights. “Mr. Sheahan, you and I will remain aboard to row the boat back. We may be needed to help the others retreat.”

Sheahan did not answer, but gripped his rifle more tightly as the boat moved into the midst of the river. As a new sort of crashing sound broke above his head, Alden looked up—and what he saw froze his blood. A veritable deluge of men spilled from the crest of the ridge; the rocky brow was blue with retreating men. The ground crumbled
beneath their feet, sending them over the edge like a panic-stricken herd. Screams tore the air as men tumbled like rag dolls from the precipice, their bodies fairly bouncing over the ragged, jutting crags.

Alden blinked, quite unable to believe his eyes. Men who ought to have known better were leaping from the cliff with their rifles clutched in their hands. Without removing their heavy knapsacks, they threw themselves into the river and sank beneath the silver water without resurfacing. The side of the mountain, which only a moment before had been green with fern and scrub and seedlings, was wiped smooth as men rained down upon it in mindless retreat.

“Major! The current!”

Horror snaked down Alden’s backbone and coiled in his belly as the current caught the boat and pushed it into the hail of men. One poor fellow fell straight on an upward bayonet before Alden could command his men to lower their rifles.

The water churned while a savage and continual thunder rumbled from the ridge. Hands reached out to the boat; desperate men pulled at it from all sides. Alden and his men sprang from the flooded vessel in desperation, joining the scores who struggled, screamed, fought, and gasped in the water. Weak men dragged stronger men under, while the very weakest disappeared without a trace.

Without thinking, Alden slipped out of his knapsack and let it sink to the bottom, then kicked his way toward the Virginia shore. Within moments he stood in knee-deep water, offering help to those who needed it. Most of the men who scrambled toward the bank were from his regiment, but the proud faces he knew were now contorted in the desperate lines of hunted beasts. No trace of the innocent arrogance in which they had marched into Washington remained.

Oh, God
Alden prayed, extending his hand to another gasping soldier,
spare your wrath and have mercy!

Flanna felt her heart pounding in time to her running footsteps. She had lain on the ground, frozen with fear, for nearly half an hour, then Colonel Baker came from the right and passed in front of the line of
Union skirmishers. He had opened his mouth to give a command, but a bullet from the trees caught him in the head and he fell, instantly killed.

The line before Flanna shuddered. As the sergeants vainly called for order, the frightened recruits panicked, many of them rushing toward the cliff and the water below. Though the cliff was frightening and the drop formidable, the certainty of the water and the fall seemed preferable to advancing toward whatever forces lay in those trees.

The lines dissolved in mayhem, and finally the order to retreat sounded over the clearing.

All too willing to obey, Flanna turned and ran toward the footpath that had brought her to this deadly place. The trampled ground was slick with rain and the tread of nearly two thousand men, but stout tree trunks and foliage would shield her from sharpshooters’ bullets. Others had taken to the path as well, a few of the more frightened ones shedding their heavy knapsacks along the way. Flanna kept hers, for the heavy weight on her back felt like a sheltering hand, guarding her back as it insistently pushed her away from the danger.

She heard shouts and yelling from the distant trees to her right. Looking up, she saw gray forms scurrying from tree trunk to tree trunk. Now the woods were snapping around her, bullets nicking the saplings at her left and making soft thuds in the clay at her feet.