Confederates (57 page)

‘Goddam you, sir!' she said, very roughly, enough to scare Wheat. But then she laughed and it wasn't a welcoming laugh. ‘You'll go away because I tell you so,' she said.

‘What does the man in the Bible say, ma'am? I am a centurion, accustomed to being obeyed? You'll have to find a general if you want a whisker of a chance of orderin' me away.'

They turned off the main Emmitsburg Road and passed through apple trees on which the summer's last apples hung heavy. Then they came to a white frame house, something that wasn't quite farmhouse but was surely not a residence of the gentry. The girl's old horse pulled the surrey in through the gate and the girl called over her shoulder: ‘I thank you for your escort. I take it you don't intend to force your way into my house?'

‘I was hoping for an invitation, missy.'

‘You can go whistle for an invitation.'

‘I won't go away,' he told her levelly, ‘without one.'

A young black boy of maybe fourteen years took the horse out of its traces for her. She went right indoors without looking at Wheat. The colonel sat his horse for a while by the gate, but by noon it was so warm that he moved beneath a sycamore by the side of the road, and he got down and sat against the trunk. He wished now he had a book, that book about the Austrian legation, any book. I'm being a goddam fool, but I'm proud of it, he told himself.

He fell asleep for a while about one, and then towards two a few Arkansas boys came along, and he gave them a dollar to take a letter to Captain Hanks. ‘Dear Hanks, can be found if needed at the Creel house …' For he owed a knowledge of her name to the old man in the store, and to the insult that woman had shouted from her porch. ‘… a mile north of town and half a mile or so to the left past apple orchards. Slightly indisposed. But can be fetched from her if needed. Lafcadio G. Wheat, Lieutenant-Colonel, C.S.A.'

Sometime past three, the middle-aged black woman appeared at the fence with a jug of lemonade. ‘Did your mistress send you with this, dearie?' Wheat asked. ‘Nassah, Mrs Creel would noways like to see me doing this. But I knows what it is to be dry.' About five the black boy who worked there turned out the gate and headed home. The shadow of the sycamore reached way east then and Wheat felt lost in it and, from a window of the house, looked young and pious. Then the black lady turned up again.

‘Miz Creel tells me you should come in and take sherry with her, sah.'

‘I'm obliged to Mrs Creel,' he said.

He was led into the front parlour and left there alone. There was a picture of the Austrian Alps on the wall. After a little while the girl called Mrs Creel came in. She looked a little pale and her hair just a little astray, as if he'd come straight from working in the kitchen without making use of brush or comb.

‘What did you say your name was?' she asked, like someone settling down to business.

‘Lafcadio Gawain Alfonse Wheat,' said Wheat.

There was a little tremble in her voice as she passed him and as she put her hand on the neck of a crystal sherry decanter. ‘I watched you from the window,' she said. ‘You are a firm-minded man, sir. Take sherry with me. Dudley Creel used always take sherry with me at this time. Then will you please … will you please go.'

As soon as she said that she began to weep. The need to be embraced was sharp in her. He went up to her and held her and soon they were so close, breast to breast and tongue to tongue, that he felt he wasn't a solid being any more and might run downhill like rainwater into the pores of the rejoicing earth.

20

By that evening General Lee's adjutant Colonel Chilton had written out a number of copies of the new orders that would split the army into pieces. He worked at a camp-table in the open at Best's Grove and by the time he got to the last copy, he needed light to continue by.

Each copy was headed
Special Orders No. 191
. It contained ten numbered paragraphs. The first paragraph forbad any men or officers to visit Frederick that night. Colonel Wheat, in Mrs Creel's bed, was out of bounds but ignorant of it. The second paragraph suggested what route sick soldiers or any others unable to march should take back over the Potomac to get back towards Culpeper. The other eight paragraphs were the solid meat.

A copy would go to every general who was specifically mentioned in the orders. It would, Searcy knew, be placed in an envelope marked with the name of the general it was intended for.

From his nervous position on the far side of the Grove, the Honourable Horace Searcy watched Adjutant Chilton working there at the table in his relaxed American way, while grooms and lieutenants lazed on the ground round about and chewed tobacco or smoked corncobs, and occasionally cavalry men sauntered by leading their horses. Half a dozen or more envelopes lay haphazard about on the little table, ready to be inscribed with the names of Longstreet, Tom Jackson, Daniel Hill, and anyone else they were meant to go to. Ready to be stuffed full of the most valuable papers in America.

If Searcy were interested in money he could demand and get $3m. U.S. in bullion for one of those envelopes. Secretary Stanton would consider that a mild price and might even ask if Searcy wanted to sell so low.

It wasn't that Searcy didn't need the money either. The pay from
The Times
was abominable – £150 sterling a year, which was as much as they paid anyone. He made maybe an extra £50 a year from royalties on his books about the Crimea and the Italian War of 1859. His father gave him an annual allowance of £150. A whole £100 of that went to keep the girl who'd had a child by him three years before. The little girl child. He envisaged her in a cottage garden in South London, pointing at butterflies. He wanted so much to see her just once before he took this risk he was envisaging. He did not have the same urge to see her mother. He did not love her mother.

While he was here in America he had to keep a town house going in Green Park near Piccadilly. It contained a manservant and a cook, and he had told many of his Oxford friends that they were always free to use it when they were in town. That cost £100 a year to run, even in his absence. If tonight went badly, the manservant and the cook would be out of work, though they wouldn't get the news for a while.

Altogether he was left with a little over
£
150 a year to live off – travel, restaurants, club subscriptions and gifts to women all came out of that. It wasn't enough to lead a really full life in London. It was just as well he had always been attracted to battlefields. At least they made few demands on the pocket.

Soon Chilton was handing out envelopes to the young couriers. Angus came striding across the clearing towards Searcy.

‘Got your horse saddled, ole chap?'

Searcy sent an ostler to do it. When the horse was brought to him, he slung a saddlebag over its shoulders.

‘Say, ole chap, you don't need any saddlebag. We're visiting D. H. Hill's headquarters. Not Portland, Maine.'

‘Some comfort,' said Searcy, looking cunning and patting the saddlebag as if to hint there was a bottle of whisky in there.

The bag did hold whisky. He had excused himself from the Grove for half an hour this afternoon, ridden at the pelt into town, used his superior British ways to get a Frederick shopkeeper to find him a bottle. And from the same shopkeeper he'd bought the hatpin. There was this long ornamental hatpin in the saddlebag with what could well pass as a lump of jade on the end of it. Searcy could see the storekeeper presuming that this Britisher was having luck with some Frederick lady and that was why the hatpin was being bought. The shopkeeper thought that gifts of hatpins must be some sort of British custom.

Before the couriers rode out, a black man brought Angus and Searcy plates of bacon and beans. Searcy found it hard to eat his. He feared he would retch up the beans.

Ten minutes later he and young Angus were riding through the shuttered town. It looked finally shuttered now, as if it knew the army and all its needs were going to vanish overnight, as if it were now money-counting time and time to take thought about what attitudes to strike whenever the Union army should arrive, as it would surely soon do, pursuing Lee.

Beyond town, they turned east and were amongst cornfields and orchards and the eternal white frame farmhouses. That was the startling thing about America, Searcy thought, it was so big it went on for ever, and the towns kept repeating each other eternally, and every country road you saw was immensely beautiful but immensely the same.

On that stretch trees came down over the road and made it very dark. The fireflies of the summer of 1862 had nearly all done with their breeding and flashed away no more in the branches of oaks. But sometimes you could see campfires. Angus nudged his horse into a run and Searcy nudged his own to keep up. He'd left his saddlebag unlatched and, on this dark length of the road and almost at the gallop, was able to reach in with his right hand and find the hatpin. He spurred his horse till its head came up within Angus's sight, and Angus grinned and hunched further forward like a jockey. Searcy hoped sincerely the boy would not die of whatever injuries his horse was about to do him.

The journalist had the hatpin held overhand and close to his own knee, carrying it as a minute and secret weapon. Next he drove it into the croup of Angus's mount. Two or three inches in and then out again before the muscle and the agonised clenching of the horse's hindquarters held it there. He did it so deftly he reminded himself of those wild Indian Army horsemen who could lean at right angles to their saddles at the gallop and behead a goat in passing, instantly and without apparent pain to anyone.

There was apparent pain, however, in this case. Angus's horse baulked on its front legs and threw its back madly into the air. One of its rear hoofs struck Searcy's horse a blow on the thigh which would before long turn to an abscess.

When it had finished plunging, Angus's horse reared unevenly on its hind legs and started striking at Angus, who was lying on the ground now on his side. Slowly, like a sleeper, the courier drew his legs up out of reach of the striking hoofs. At a risk to himself, Searcy urged his own horse close in, grabbed the other mount's reins and dragged it away from Angus. He still did some rearing and plunging, that horse, but settled down at last. Searcy tethered him to the low branch of a hickory tree and went and knelt by Angus. The boy's forehead was bleeding.

‘Searcy, ole chap,' said Angus, ‘my wrist is done in, I think.'

The left wrist
was
bent back on itself, palm up, and a bulge of misplaced bone showed on the surface of the flesh. Angus turned on his side and retched in the dust and fainted. Searcy lifted him and carried him to the edge of the orchard, laying him down at the base of an apple tree. Angus knew nothing of it when Searcy took the envelope away from him. Standing up, Searcy was able to get some moonlight on the document. The envelope was addressed to D. H. Hill, as Angus had said. The pages inside were written on printed Confederate stationery. Searcy was grateful for that. It woud cause Union generals to take them as authentic.

He began to read the meat of the thing. ‘Holy God in heaven!' he muttered now and then throughout the eight paragraphs. For Lee meant to divide his army not just in two, and not just in three, but in four.

Searcy whistled and did a lot of head-shaking there in the dim orchard, on the question of how this war would have gone if Lee had just stayed on in Arlington last year with the army of the Union.

Once Searcy had done with reading the pages, he put
Special Orders No. 191
in his breast pocket and the envelope with D. H. Hill's name on it in the side pocket of his coat.

‘Come on, Angus, ole chap,' he said, mimicking Angus but almost tenderly. The young officer woke at his name. ‘Searcy, goddamit, my arm's afire.'

‘We're getting you to a surgeon, ole chap.'

Beyond the orchard and across a pasture thickly sown with human excreta, Searcy, toting Angus, staggered into the encampment of a South Carolina regiment. ‘Boys,' he called. The word sounded strange the way he said it. It sounded creaky even to himself.

This regiment came from up country in South Carolina and their accent was so broad and loopy Searcy had as much trouble understanding them as they did him. They crowded round the delirious Angus, admiring his injuries and his staff clothes, which were pretty splendid compared with their rags. ‘Lookee, his chicken guts': they said, pointing at his braid. And: ‘I'd say you'd travel three counties before you'd set eyes on a bust wrist as fine as thetyer one.'

After a while their captain came up, a dark, bearded young man. No more than 22 years, very likely not even that. Searcy took him aside by the thin fibrous arm of his jacket. ‘You know, sir, where the generals are over in Best's Grove.'

‘Generals?' the boy asked as if it were news to him the Confederate Army had any.

‘General Lee in Best's Grove.'

‘Oh yeh. I heard that one,' said the boy, just like Searcy had tried to tell him a profane joke he'd already heard.

Searcy took the envelope from his pocket. ‘This gentleman rode orders to General Hill and on the way back had the accident you can see so clearly. The envelope has to be returned to General Lee's adjutant so that the staff know that the orders have been delivered.'

‘That's procedure, I believe,' said the young captain.

‘Now I have an appointment with my friend General Ambrose Hill, otherwise I'd return the envelope myself. Could one of your boys take it back. Right back to Lee's adjutant, Chilton.'

The boy wasn't quite as simple-minded as Searcy had hoped. He wanted to know who Searcy was and why he'd been riding with Angus, and Searcy had to produce that impressive letter from Longstreet asking all officers to help this British journalist. Once he'd done that, the boy got friendly again. ‘Forgive me, sir,' he said to Searcy, ‘but when a gentleman looms up talking so outlandish and carrying envelopes with generals' names on and all, then it behoves me to ask what's up and what's down.'