Copperhead

“Can’t say, sir.” The Sergeant was panting hard as he climbed Ball’s Bluff and his new gray coat was hanging open to reveal its smart scarlet lining. The coats were a gift from the Governor of Massachusetts, who was determined that the Bay State’s regiments would be among the best equipped in all the Federal army. “It was probably one of our buglers,” the Sergeant guessed. “Maybe sending out skirmishers?”

Holmes assumed the Sergeant was right. The two men were laboring up the steep and twisting path that led to the bluff’s summit where the 15th Massachusetts waited. The slope was about as steep as a man could climb without needing to use his hands, though in the dark many a man missed his footing and slid down to jar painfully against a tree trunk. The river below was still shrouded by mist in which the long shape of Harrison’s Island showed dark. Men were crowded onto the island as they waited for the two small boats that were ferrying the troops across the last stretch of river. Lieutenant Holmes had been surprised at the speed of the river’s current that had snatched at the boat and tried to sweep it away downstream toward distant Washington. The oarsmen had grunted with the effort of fighting the river, then rammed the small boat hard into the muddy bank.

Colonel Lee, the 20th Massachusetts’s commanding officer, caught up with Holmes at the bluff’s summit. “Almost sunrise,” he said cheerfully. “All well, Wendell?”

“All well, sir. Except I’m hungry enough to eat a horse.”

“We’ll have breakfast in Leesburg,” the Colonel said enthusiastically. “Ham, eggs, cornbread, and coffee. Some fresh southern butter! That’ll be a treat. And no doubt all the townsfolk will be assuring us that they aren’t rebels at all, but good loyal citizens of Uncle Sam.” The Colonel abruptly turned away, startled by a sudden barking cry that echoed rhythmically and harshly among the trees on the bluff’s summit. The heart-stopping noise had made the nearest soldiers whip round in quick alarm with rifles raised. “No need to worry!” the Colonel called. “It’s just an owl.” He had recognized the call of a barred owl and guessed the bird was coming home from a night’s hunting with a belly filled with mice and frogs. “You keep going, Wendell”—Lee turned back to Holmes—“down that path till you come to the left-flank company of the 15th. Stop there and wait for me.”

Lieutenant Holmes led his company behind the crouching men of the 15th Massachusetts. He stopped at the moon-bright tree line. Before them now was a brief meadow that was dotted with the stark shadows of small bushes and locust trees, beyond which rose another dark stand of trees. It was about there on the previous night that the patrol had reported seeing an enemy encampment, and Holmes guessed that frightened men could easily have mistaken the pattern of moonlight and black shadow in the far woods for the shapes of tents.

“Forward!” Colonel Devens of the 15th Massachusetts shouted the order and his men moved out into the moon-whitened meadow. No one fired at them; no one challenged them. The South slept while the North, unhindered, marched.

The sun rose, glossing the river gold and lancing scarlet rays through the misted trees. Cocks crowed in Leesburg yards where pails were pumped full of water and cows came in for the day’s first milking. Workshops that had been closed for the Lord’s Day were unlocked and tools picked up from benches. Outside the town, in the encampments of the Confederate brigade that guarded the river, the smoke of cooking fires sifted into the fresh fall morning.

The Faulconer Legion’s fires had already died, though the Legion was in no great hurry to abandon its encampment. The day promised to be fine and the march to Centreville comparatively short, and so the regiment’s eight hundred men took their time in making ready, and Major Thaddeus Bird, the regiment’s commanding officer, did not try to hurry them. Instead he wandered companionably among his men like an affable neighbor enjoying a morning stroll. “My God, Starbuck.” Bird stopped in amazement at the sight of K Company’s captain. “What happened to you?”

“I just slept badly, sir.”

“You look like the walking dead!” Bird crowed with delight at the thought of Starbuck’s discomfort. “Have I ever told you about Mordechai Moore? He was a plasterer in Faulconer Court House. Died one Thursday, widow bawling her eyes out, children squalling like scalded cats, funeral on Saturday, half the town dressed in black, grave dug, the Reverend Moss ready to bore us all with his customary inanities, then they hear scratching or the coffin lid. Open it up, and there he is! One very puzzled plasterer! As alive as you or I. Or me, anyway. But he looked like you. Very like you, Nate. He looked half decayed.”

“Thank you very much,” Starbuck said.

“Everyone went home,” Bird went on with his tale. “Doc Billy gave Mordechai an examination. Declared him fit for another ten years and, blow me, didn’t he go and die again the very next day. Only this time he was properly dead and they had to dig the grave all over again. Good morning, Sergeant.”

“Major,” Truslow grunted. Truslow had not been known to address any officer as “sir,” not even Bird, the regiment’s commanding officer, whom Truslow liked.

“You remember Mordechai Moore, surely, Truslow?”

“Hell yes. Son of a bitch couldn’t plaster a wall to save his life. My father and I redid half the Cotton house for him. Never did get paid for it either.”

“So no doubt the building trade’s better off for having him dead,” Bird said blithely. Pecker Bird was a tall, ragged, skeletal man who had been schoolmaster in the town of Faulconer Court House when Colonel Washington Faulconer, Faulconer County’s grandest landowner and Bird’s brother-in-law, had established the Legion. Faulconer, wounded at Manassas, was now in Richmond, leaving Bird to command the regiment. The schoolmaster had probably been the least soldierly man in all Faulconer County, if not in all Virginia, and had only been appointed a major to appease his sister and take care of the Colonel’s paperwork; yet, perversely, the ragged schoolmaster had proved an effective and popular officer. The men liked him, maybe because they sensed his great sympathy for all that was most fallible in humankind. Now Bird touched Starbuck’s elbow. “A word?” he suggested, drawing the younger man away from K Company.

Starbuck walked with Bird into the open meadow that was scarred with the pale round shapes showing where the regiment’s few tents had been pitched. Between the bleached circles were smaller scorched patches where the campfires had burned, and out beyond those scars were the large cropped circles marking where the officers’ horses had grazed the grass out to the limit of their tethering ropes. The Legion could march away from this field, Starbuck reflected, yet for days afterward it would hold this evidence of their existence.

“Have you made a decision, Nate?” Bird asked. He was fond of Starbuck, and his voice reflected that affection. He offered the younger man a cheap, dark cigar, took one himself, then struck a match to light the tobacco.

“I’ll stay with the regiment, sir,” Starbuck said when his cigar was drawing.

“I hoped you’d say that,” Bird said. “But even so.” His voice trailed away. He drew on his cigar, staring toward Leesburg, over which a filmy haze of morning smoke shimmered. “Going to be a fine day,” the Major said. A splutter of distant rifle fire sounded, but neither Bird nor Starbuck took any notice. It was a rare morning that men were not out hunting.

“And we don’t know that the Colonel really is taking over the Legion, do we, sir?” Starbuck asked.

“We know nothing,” Bird said. “Soldiers, like children, live in a natural state of willful ignorance. But it’s a risk.”

“You’re taking the same risk,” Starbuck said pointedly.

“Your sister is not married to the Colonel,” Bird answered just as pointedly, “which makes you, Nate, a great deal more vulnerable than I. Allow me to remind you, Nate, you did this world the signal service of murdering the Colonel’s prospective son-in-law, and, while heaven and all its angels rejoiced at your act, I doubt that Faulconer has forgiven you yet.”

“No, sir,” Starbuck said tonelessly. He did not like being reminded of Ethan Ridley’s death. Starbuck had killed Ridley under the cover of battle’s confusion and he had told himself ever since that it had been an act of self-defense, yet he knew he had cradled murder in his heart when he had pulled the trigger, and he knew, too, that no amount of rationalizing could wipe that sin from the great ledger in heaven that recorded all his failings. Certainly Colonel Washington Faulconer would never forgive Starbuck. “Yet I’d still rather stay with the regiment,” Starbuck now told Bird. He was a stranger in a strange land, a northerner fighting against the North, and the Faulconer Legion had become his new home. The Legion fed him, clothed him, and gave him intimate friends. It was also the place where he had discovered the job he did best and, with the yearning of youth to discern high purpose in life, Starbuck had made up his mind that he was destined to be one of the Legion’s officers. He belonged.

“Good luck to us both, then,” Bird said, and they would both need luck, Bird reflected, if his suspicions were right and the order to march to Centreville was part of Colonel Washington Faulconer’s attempt to take the Legion back under his control.

Washington Faulconer, after all, was the man who had raised the Faulconer Legion, named it for himself, kitted it with the finest equipment his fortune could buy, then led it to the fight on the banks of the Bull Run. Faulconer and his son, both wounded in that battle, had ridden back to Richmond to be hailed as heroes, though in truth Washington Faulconer had been nowhere near the Legion when it faced the overpowering Yankee attack. It was too late now to set the record straight: Virginia, indeed all the upper South, reckoned Faulconer a hero and was demanding that he be given command of a brigade, and if that happened, Bird knew, the hero would expect his own Legion to be at the heart of that brigade.

“But it isn’t certain the son of a bitch will get his brigade, is it?” Starbuck asked, trying in vain to suppress a huge yawn.

“There’s a rumor he’ll be offered a diplomatic post instead,” Bird said, “which would be much more suitable, because my brother-in-law has a natural taste for licking the backsides of princes and potentates, but our newspapers say he should be a general, and what the newspapers want, the politicians usually grant. It’s easier than having ideas of their own, you see.”

“I’ll take the risk,” Starbuck said. His alternative was to join General Nathan Evans’s staff and stay in the camp near Leesburg where Evans had command of the patchwork Confederate brigade that guarded the riverbank. Starbuck liked Evans, but he much preferred to stay with the Legion. The Legion was home, and he could not really imagine that the Confederate high command would make Washington Faulconer a general.

Another flurry of rifle fire sounded from the woods that lay three miles to the northwest. The sound made Bird turn, frowning. “Someone’s being mighty energetic.” He sounded disapproving.

“Squabbling pickets?” Starbuck suggested. For the last three months the sentries had faced each other across the river, and while relations had been friendly for most of that time, every now and then a new and energetic officer tried to provoke a war.

“Probably just pickets,” Pecker Bird agreed, then turned back as Sergeant Major Proctor came to report that a broken wagon axle that had been delaying the Legion’s march was now mended. “Does that mean we’re ready to go, Sergeant Major?” Bird asked.

“Ready as we’ll ever be, I reckon.” Proctor was a lugubrious and suspicious man, forever fearing disaster.

“Then let us be off! Let us be off!” Bird said happily, and he strode toward the Legion just as another volley of shots sounded, only this time the fire had not come from the distant woods, but from the road to the east. Bird clawed thin fingers through his long, straggly beard. “Do you think?” he asked of no one in particular, not bothering to articulate the question clearly. “Maybe?” Bird went on with a note of growing excitement, and then another splinter of musketry echoed from the bluffs to the northwest and Bird jerked his head back and forth, which was his habitual gesture when he was amused. “I think we shall wait awhile, Mr. Proctor. We shall wait!” Bird snapped his fingers. “It seems,” he said, “that God and Mr. Lincoln might have sent us other employment today. We shall wait.”

The advancing Massachusetts troops discovered the rebels by blundering into a four-man picket that was huddled in a draw of the lower woods. The startled rebels fired first, sending the Massachusetts men tumbling back through the trees. The rebel picket fled in the opposite direction to find their company commander, Captain Duff, who first sent a message to General Evans and then led the forty men of his company toward the woods on the bluffs summit where a scatter of Yankee skirmishers now showed at the tree line. More northerners began to appear, so many that Duff lost count. “There are enough of the sumbitches,” one of his men commented as Captain Duff lined his men behind a snake fence and told them to fire away. Puffs of smoke studded the fence line as the bullets whistled away up the gentle slope. Two miles behind Duff the town of Leesburg heard the firing, and someone thought to run to the church and ring the bell to summon the militia.

Not that the militia could assemble in time to help Captain Duff, who was beginning to understand just how badly his Mississippians were outnumbered. He was forced to retreat down the slope when a company of northern troops threatened his left flank, which withdrawal was greeted by northern jeers and a volley of musket fire. Duff’s forty men went on doggedly firing as they backed away. They were a ragged company dressed in a shabby mix of butternut-brown and dirty gray uniforms, but their marksmanship was far superior to that of their northern rivals, who were mostly armed with smoothbore muskets. Massachusetts had taken immense pains to equip its volunteers, but there had not been enough rifles for everybody, and so Colonel Devens’s 15th Massachusetts regiment fought with eighteenth-century muskets. None of Duff’s men was hit, but their own bullets were taking a slow, steady toll of the northern skirmishers.

The 20th Massachusetts came to the rescue of their fellow Bay Staters. The 20th all had rifles, and their more accurate fire forced Duff to retreat still farther down the long slope. His forty men backed over a rail fence into a field of stubble where stooked oats stood in shocks. There was no more cover for a half mile, and Duff did not want to yield too much ground to the Yankees, so he halted his men in the middle of the field and told them to hold the bastards off. Duff’s men were horribly outnumbered, but they came from Pike and Chickasaw counties, and Duff reckoned that made them as good as any soldiers in America. “Guess we’re going to have to give this pack of black-assed trash a lesson, boys,” Duff said.

“No, Captain! They’re rebs! Look!” one of his men shouted in warning, then pointed to the tree line where a company of gray-clad troops had just appeared. Duff stared in horror. Had he been firing at his own side? The advancing men wore long gray coats. The officer leading them had his coat open and was carrying a drawn sword that he used to slash at weeds as he advanced, just as though he were out for a casual stroll in the country.

Duff felt his belligerent certainties drain away. He was dry-mouthed, his belly was sour, and a muscle in his thigh kept twitching. The firing all across the slope had died away as the gray-coated company marched down toward the oat field. Duff held up his hand and shouted at the strangers, “Halt!”

“Friends!” one of the gray-coated men called back. There were sixty or seventy men in the company, and their rifles were tipped with long shining bayonets.

“Halt!” Duff tried again.

“We’re friends!” a man shouted back. Duff could see the nervousness on their faces. One man had a twitching muscle in his cheek, while another kept looking sideways at a mustachioed sergeant who marched stolidly at the flank of the advancing company.

“Halt!” Duff shouted again. One of his men spat onto the stubble.

“We’re friends!” the northerners shouted again. Their officer’s open coat was lined with scarlet, but Duff could not see the color of the man’s uniform because the sun was behind the strangers.

“They ain’t no friends of ours, Cap’n!” one of Duff’s men said. Duff wished he could feel the same certainty. God in His heaven, but suppose these men were friends? Was he about to commit murder? “I order you to halt!” he shouted, but the advancing men would not obey, and so Duff shouted at his men to take aim.

Forty rifles came up into forty shoulders.

“Friends!” a northern voice called. The two units were fifty yards apart now, and Duff could hear the northern boots breaking and scuffing the oat stubble.

“They ain’t friends, Cap’n!” one of the Mississippians insisted, and just at that moment the advancing officer stumbled and Duff got a clear view of the uniform beneath the scarlet-lined gray coat. The uniform was blue.

“Fire!” Duff shouted, and the southern volley cracked like a canebreak burning and a northerner screamed as the rebel bullets slapped home.

“Fire!” a northerner shouted and the Massachusetts’s bullets whipped back through the smoke bank.

“Keep firing!” Duff shouted and emptied his revolver into the haze of powder smoke that already obscured the field. His men had taken cover behind the shocks of oats and were steadily reloading. The northerners were doing the same, except for one man who was twitching and bleeding on the ground. There were more Yankees off to Duff’s right, higher up the slope, but he could not worry about them. He had chosen to make his stand here, plumb in the middle of the field, and now he would have to fight these bastards till one side could stand no more.

Six miles away, at Edwards Ferry, more northerners had crossed the Potomac and cut the turnpike that led to Centreville. Nathan Evans, thus caught between the two invading forces, refused to show any undue alarm. “One might be trying to fool me while the other one gets ready to rape me, ain’t that how it’s done, Boston?” “Boston” was his nickname for Starbuck. They had met at Manassas where Evans had saved the Confederacy by holding up the northern attack while the rebel lines reformed. “Lying, thieving, black-assed, hymn-singing bastards,” Evans said now, evidently of the whole northern army. He had ridden with an order for the Faulconer Legion to stay where it was, only to discover that Thaddeus Bird had anticipated him by canceling the Legion’s departure. Now Evans cocked his ear to the wind and tried to gauge from the intensity of the rifle fire which enemy incursion offered the most danger. The church bell in Leesburg was still ringing, summoning the militia. “So you’re not going to stay with me, Boston?” Evans remarked.

“I like being a company officer, sir.”

Evans growled in response, though Starbuck was not at all sure the small, foulmouthed South Carolinian had heard his answer. Instead Evans was switching his attention back and forth between the competing sounds of the two northern incursions. Otto, his German orderly, whose main duty consisted of carrying a barrel of whiskey for the General’s refreshment, also listened to the gunfire so that the two men’s heads twitched back and forth in unison. Evans was the first to stop, clicking his fingers for a drop of whiskey instead. He drained the tin mug, then looked back at Bird. “You’ll stay here, Pecker. You’re my reserve. I don’t reckon there’s so many of the bastards, they’re not making enough noise for that, so we might as well stay put and see if we can’t give the bastards a bloody nose. Killing Yankees is as good a way to start the week as any, eh?” He laughed. “Of course, if I’m wrong we’ll all be stone dead by nightfall. Come on. Otto!” Evans put spurs to his horse and galloped back toward the earth-walled fort that was his headquarters.

Starbuck climbed onto a wagon loaded with folded tents and slept as the sun burned the mist off the river and dried the dew off the fields. More northern troops crossed the river and climbed the bluff to mass under the trees. General Stone, the commander of the Federal forces guarding the Potomac, had decided to commit more troops to the crossing and sent orders that the invaders should not just occupy Leesburg but reconnoiter the whole of Loudoun County. If the rebels had gone, Stone commanded, then the Yankees should occupy the area, but if a strong Confederate force opposed the reconnaissance, then the Federal forces were free to withdraw across the river with whatever foodstuffs they might confiscate. Stone dispatched artillery to add firepower to the invading force, but also made plain that he was leaving the decision whether to stay in Virginia to the man he now placed in command of the whole northern operation.

That man was Colonel Ned Baker, a tall, clean-shaven, silver-haired, golden-tongued politician. Baker was a California lawyer, a United States senator from Oregon and one of President Lincoln’s closest friends, so close that Lincoln had named his second son after the Senator. Baker was an impetuous, emotional, warmhearted man, and his arrival at the river crossing sent ripples of excitement through those men of the 15th Massachusetts who still waited with the New York Tammany Regiment on the Maryland bank. Baker’s own regiment, the 1st Californian, now joined the invasion. The regiment was from New York, but had been recruited from men who had ties to California, and with them came a fourteen-pounder rifled cannon from Rhode Island and a pair of howitzers manned by U.S. Army regulars. “Take everything across!” Baker shouted ebulliently. “Every last man and gun!”

“We’ll need more boats,” the Colonel of the Tammanys cautioned the Senator.

“Then find them! Build them! Steal them! Fetch gopher wood and build an ark, Colonel. Find a beautiful woman and let her face launch a thousand ships, but let us press on to glory, boys!” Baker strode down the bank, cocking his ear to the staccato crackle of musketry that sounded from the river’s far shore. “Rebels are dying, lads! Let’s go and kill some more!”

The Tammany Colonel attempted to ask the Senator just what his regiment was supposed to do when it reached the Virginia shore, but Baker brushed the question aside. He did not care if this was a mere raid or a historic invasion marking the beginning of Virginia’s occupation, he only knew that he had three pieces of artillery and four regiments of prime, unbloodied troops, which gave him the necessary power to offer President Lincoln and the country the victory they so badly needed. “On to Richmond, boys!” Baker shouted as he pushed through the troops on the riverbank. “On to Richmond, and may the devil have no mercy their souls! On for the union, boys, on for the union! Let’s hear you cheer!”

They cheered loud enough to obliterate the splintering sound of musketry that came from the river’s far bank where, beyond the wooded bluff, powder smoke lingered among the stooked oats where the day’s long dying had begun.

MAJOR ADAM FAULCONER ARRIVED AT THE FAULCONER Legion a few moments after midday. “There are Yankees on the turnpike. They gave me a chase!” He looked happy, as though the hard riding of the last few minutes had been a cross-country romp rather than a desperate flight from a determined enemy. His horse, a fine roan stallion from the Faulconer Stud, was flecked with white foam, its ears were pricked nervously back, and it kept taking small nervous sidesteps that Adam instinctively corrected. “Uncle!” he greeted Major Bird cheerfully, then turned immediately back to Starbuck. They had been friends for three years, but it had been weeks since they had met, and Adam’s pleasure at their reunion was heartfelt. “You look as if you were fast asleep, Nate.”