Confederates (11 page)

‘You know not me, you goddam scum!'

Cate's long head, imprisoned still by Usaph's forearm, gave a little nod.

‘I feel I might, Bumpass. That's all. I feel I might know you, from your wife's words.'

Usaph released Cate, pulled away as if he weren't fit to touch, then shaped to hit him but despaired of it doing any good.

‘You might be funny, Cate, when you stand there talking with paints in your goddam hand. We'll jest see how good you'll make with the jolly jokes when your Republican friends in the army of the Union are pouring cannister at you.'

Not knowing what else to do, Usaph turned and at first felt a little easier. But before he was fully back to his own campfire he understood that the question of Cate and Ephephtha still stood. Seeing two young conscripts talking over a dying fire, he kicked the skillet out of the hand of the one who held it, he kicked the chunks of kindling wood out of the fire. There was a cascade of sparks in the conscript boys' faces and so much fright there that Usaph felt ashamed. Had his father raised him to treat people this way?

He got back to his own fire. The Irish fiddler was sawing away at some sad love song, but no one seemed to be listening any more. The conscript boy still sat beside him and the only good things were that Gus Ramseur, the true musical talent, was cooler, and that mocking Bolly Quintard was working at dropping off to sleep under the tree where he and Joe Murphy had opted to spread their blankets.

9

On the same evening that Bumpass and Cate had first tussled with each other, an English journalist, the Honourable Horace Searcy, was riding down the Charles City Road towards the Thomas plantation. Searcy resembled Cate in being a lonesome soul and in having a father who disapproved of his son's trade. He also had, like Cate, been expelled from a university, in his case the University of Oxford, for wounding a fellow student in a fencing match involving epees with no protective tips on them. It was not that Horace Searcy was a vicious man. He had daring, that was all, and misfortune sometimes attended his daring.

Searcy's father, Lord Grantham, was in some ways a reformer – helped ease the Bills doing away with child slavery in mines and factories through the House of Lords. Just the same, he thought journalism was a vulgar profession, but he had had enough influence at the time to have Horace taken onto the staff of
The Times
, which was the nearest thing to a proper newspaper.

Then, to Lord Grantham's pain, his son became a storm bird, and began to attend wars as if they were boxing matches. His first war was the Crimean, then the war in Italy in '59, and finally the most vulgar of all wars, the conflict between all those former British colonies in North America.

In later days, people would call Searcy a war correspondent, but there wasn't such a term then, for Searcy was just about the first of the species. As his trade demanded, he travelled without much luggage. In his saddlebags he carried whisky, three shirts and a pair of drawers, a sketch book and two novels of Fielding,
Joseph Andrews
and
Tom Jones
. In his heart any affection he carried was for his three-year-old daughter. She was what people called a natural child, a bastard. She lived with her mamma on the edge of London. But she was not the only secret to be found beneath the journalist's ribs.

One of his profounder secrets was that he detested Southern institutions, that he had all the passion of an abolitionist, and that he carried a secret commission from U.S. Secretary of War Stanton to gather intelligence. It was a sign of his world-wide reputation that he sported, in his breast pocket, letters of introduction and safe passage from such Confederate generals as Longstreet and Magruder. He rode his horse comfortably, a dark, solid young man who resembled an Elizabethan pirate; and he looked forward to seeing once again the remarkable Tom Jackson.

The Confederate lieutenant escorting him pointed to the Thomas house. ‘That's it, Mr Searcy. That's Jackson's headquarters.'

Searcy thought, not for the first time, what a plebeian war this was. American generals often as not headquartered in broken-down farmhouses with peeling whitewash. It wasn't like that French-Austrian War of a few years back. Nothing but castles suited an Austrian general and even the French never camped in anywhere less than a hunting lodge. Searcy approved more of these democratic knock-about Americans, North and South, than he did of European generals. Only the bad ones here – McClellan and Fremont say – expected castles. Whereas any decaying tidewater house suited the good ones, suited Burnside and Phil Kearny and Longstreet and Jackson.

‘No palace,' said Searcy to the young staff man.

‘Palaces ain't so common in Henrico County.'

‘I expect you're right.'

In the plantation avenue the air seemed full of methane, the stink of swamp water mixed with the stench of excreta. Searcy had travelled freely North and South and had seen both Union and Confederate camps. In a report to British readers he had said that Confederate soldiers were on average smellier than Union ones – ‘malodorous' was the word he'd used. It was partly that toilet soap was in short supply in the South, partly that most Northerners had the chance to change their linen more often, partly that they were often more worldly. It was partly the Southerners' suspicion of latrines.

But, whatever their rustic personal habits, Rebels were better behaved than Yankees. They did not regularly steal fence rails or chickens or pigs, whereas, when the Yankees turned up in any farmyard, they would steal a gnat that hadn't been properly hidden away and behave like angels of the sword and the flame – as, however blind, stupid and ill-tutored about the facts they might be, they
were
, in Searcy's eyes at least.

His escort turned back towards Richmond. At the Thomases' front door a soldier took the reins of his horse and a slave in yellow-stained livery with a ratty powdered wig on his head led the two gentlemen into the hall. Searcy pressed his card into the slave's hand. ‘Tell the General the Honourable Horace Searcy begs an audience.'

‘Yassah,' said the old slave. ‘Mastah Thomas and the General is at the dinner table, sah.'

‘So much the better,' the journalist said. ‘I won't be taking up his working time.'

Because the Confederacy believed its chances depended on British good will, because that good will had (according to the South) not been evident, Searcy was used to being badmouthed, as a representative of vicious Britain, by Southern gentlemen. Generals who would have seen him willingly and talked to him freely in the spring, were now less free with him. Jackson had never been easy to speak to in any case, and would be even less so now.

While the slave left him standing in the hallway, Searcy found himself stamping his foot and jolting his head. The liveried slave appeared again. ‘The gentleman can go in,' he said, bowing in a way that wasn't quite like the bows of the footmen at St James's Palace.

In Thomas's living room the air was hot. There weren't any women – Mrs Thomas, it seemed, had been sent out of the room. Thomas himself sat at the end of the table. He was a Southern type Searcy had described often enough for his English readers; a heavy-drinking, malarial man who looked sixty but was likely only 45. A tobacco-chewer who, when drunk, would likely expectorate the juice on the carpet. His collar sweat-stained, his suit stained under the armpits. No wonder he drank! As the crickets started up on these quiet magnolia-scented plantations and a man with half a brain could feel the stir of the slaves and hear their evening singing and their strange enslaved shouts and yelps, any owner might feel a prisoner and reach for the whisky jug.

Besides Thomas, Jackson sat at the table with members of his staff. In a grudging way Jackson introduced Searcy to the others, to Surgeon Maguire and to Douglas and to Hotchkiss, the mapmaker, and to Quartermaster Harman and to Mr Thomas, the plantation-owner himself, who half rose, yelled ‘Honoured, sah!' and sank back into a coma.

They all avoid my eyes, Searcy noticed. All except the General, who bored at him with those dark globes of his from beneath those dark brows. Tom Jackson didn't look unlike John Brown. They both had the look of backwoods prophets. But Jackson was a different sort of killer than Brown. He killed his men with marches and too much green corn for dinner and with wild daring battles in a bad cause. Yet he was still the sort of man who, when he looked at you, gave you an urge to confess something. What? That you are – well, not a spy, that's a dramatic American word – but that you sent back information to Secretary Stanton.

‘Mr Searcy,' the General said without a smile. ‘It must be about a year since I last saw you.'

It was Searcy who smiled, a faint aristocratic smile. He looked cool, but he was struggling a little underneath. He had to go on remembering that
he
was the one with breeding and with the right perspective on history, whereas Jackson was a backwoodsman from Lewis County in the Appalachians, a wild unlettered stretch of country.

‘It was in camp near Centreville,' Searcy supplied. ‘After the battle around Manassas. I remember you had wounded your left hand, sir. May I enquire, were you able to save the finger?'

‘Doctor Maguire did the saving. Splints, water treatments.' Jackson held up the middle finger of his left hand and flexed it. ‘I'm grateful for that.'

‘Our fortunes have not been similar since that day, General,' said Searcy in an ornate British way. ‘You were a brigadier then, now you command an army. Whereas I … I am still merely the correspondent of
The Times
of London.'

Jackson yawned. ‘Your government hasn't changed much either. They're still dragging their feet. I mean, Mr Searcy, in relation to this conflict.…'

‘I am not personally responsible, General Jackson, for the behaviour of my …'

‘Still, it makes you English gentlemen a … well, let's say a less agreeable proposition. A year back you could come to us and say speak up to me and I'll make sure our government in Westminster hears. But we've seen no results of their hearing. I suppose the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, reads
The Times
of London.'

‘Every Englishman of influence does, General.'

‘I'm pleased to hear it. I suppose you'd like another interview now, but I'm not too sure I would care to give it. Apart from that you're welcome to be a guest in our camp. I trust you've brought quinine with you. This is a malarial locale.'

At an interview Searcy had had the week before in a private room of a restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, U.S. Secretary of War Stanton hadn't given him many specific orders. ‘It would be folly of me, Mr Searcy, to do so,' Stanton had told him. ‘All kinds of odd information comes to a journalist, and we would be happy to receive any of it. But there is one thing you can likely find out for us.'

It appeared that the U.S. Ambassador in England, Charles Adams, had a spy in the British Foreign Office. Through this spy Adams had found out that the British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Russell, planned a secret cabinet meeting for early in October. The business of the meeting was to decide once and for all whether Britain should recognise the Confederacy as an independent state. The reason the meeting was secret was because Palmerston and Russell didn't wish to have U.S. and Confederate agents milling on their doorstep, trying to cajole or influence them.

Well, the U.S. knew about it, but a more important question was whether the Confederates did. If they did, they
would
almost certainly try to invade the North before October, so that they could influence that far-off meeting at Palmerston's town house in Green Park.

Searcy had now taken a glass of brandy Surgeon Maguire had poured for him. ‘I would like to be able to raise this glass and say, here's to the hope of your government and my government coming to terms. But I think my government has decided to let the textile towns of England rot. And I believe they do not even talk about the Confederacy any more.'

Harman, a heavy middle-aged man, Jackson's quartermaster, flattened his hand down on the table. ‘Oh no? Is it that way, Mr Searcy? Really?' He had drunk more than all Jackson's other staff, but then he was older than all of them and freer in his ways. Even Jackson was a youth beside him. ‘You haven't heard that your goddam Prime Minister Palmerston and your confounded Foreign Secretary Lord Russell have set a date in October to decide once for all whether to
recognise
us. Recognise us, goddamit! I mean for Christ's sake, we're here, ain't we?
Recognise
us!' Harman subsided. ‘Anyhow, there's this-here meeting and I would've thought an important gentleman of the press such as yourself would have known about it.'

So easy, thought Searcy. So easy. It's as if they don't give a damn.

Searcy turned to Jackson. ‘I take it this means you will try to march into the North?'

‘Why would we march into the North?' Jackson asked, still without a smile.

Thomas belched and grunted in his coma and Jackson went on looking at Searcy, unblinking.

‘Why, to influence Lord Palmerston.'

‘Trying to influence Lord Palmerston hasn't proved a very useful activity,' said Jackson. Yet Searcy knew he didn't mean that. He would march to Canada and back to make an impact on that squinty-eyed Prime Minister of Britain.

‘May I report your disenchantment to the British people?' Searcy asked the General.

‘As long as you don't make a meal of it.'

Kyd Douglas, the wise and natty young aide, often had to take the sting out of his General's bluntness. He began to do it now.

‘I know the General wouldn't want to offend Lord Palmerston. Lord Palmerston has after all permitted the building of three Confederate frigates in British shipyards.'