Confederates (58 page)

‘On the way to my friend General Hill,' said Searcy, ‘I'll find a surgeon for poor Angus there.'

‘Don't fuss yourself, sir,' drawled the captain. ‘There's a passable surgeon jest across the field there. And I mean to send a boy down to the road to fetch this poor feller's nag.'

So, no later than 9.30 in the evening, Searcy found himself with the freedom of the night and with those amazing orders in his breast pocket. He went on back through the foul meadow and the orchard and got his horse. He believed it would be some hours before Daniel Hill decided there were orders he should have got and hadn't. He was hopeful that at Best's Grove Colonel Chilton would accept the envelope as a sign of delivery and, most likely, crumple it up together with the other envelopes returned by all the other couriers and throw them in the fire.

Searcy got his horse and rode a little further east. After twenty minutes, he turned off the road and sought out some deep shadow amongst trees. He waited there till midnight. In that time he could have learnt the orders off by heart and destroyed the copy he had on him. But he wanted to hand the pages themselves to the Union as they'd come from Lee's office, written with Lee's ink on Lee's paper, so that no one – not even McClellan – could argue them away as, perhaps, false or forged.

Searcy had four tries that night at escaping eastwards, in the direction of Baltimore. First he probed down the road where Angus's horse had thrown its tantrum. He met cavalry who turned him back politely. He cut across the meadows to a road further south and was turned back after travelling down it a little. Next he passed along from farm meadow to farm meadow, using the gates, but even then ran into cavalry vedettes.

It was hard for him to pretend to be a Maryland farmer or anything other than he was. He put on this act of being lost, a British bumbler, and he always produced that letter of Longstreet's and they always firmly turned him back, and gave him a lot of friendly directions on how to find his way to the main encampments.

‘Sir,' one of them told him, ‘ole Mac's cavalry's jest ten miles up the road in goddam Newmarket, Maryland.'

Searcy made the last attempt at the first glint of dawn. He moved through woods to the south, but as had happened before, horsemen rode out from the foliage and closed round him. This time they sent him back with two couriers to guide him.

One of these was a talkative young man from the Kentucky–Tennessee border. He had a loud laugh too that kept on setting the birds twittering wherever he passed in that first light. He asked Searcy about farming in England, how big was your average British farm, and where the farmer hired his labour from without slaves to help out. Searcy answered with only half a mind on what he was saying.
Special Orders No. 191
weighed in his breast pocket like two pounds of soil. ‘Goddamit, but don't you look all whey-faced, Mr Searcy,' the chatty one said. ‘You look like you could sleep a goddam week.'

As they came out on the road towards Frederick, they could see ahead, closer to the centre of the army, lots of dust rising even this early, and they could hear shouts and the creak of axles. They paused to watch some 600 Tarheels march out of a field, led by the flag of their State. Searcy's escort said they were Daniel Hill's young'uns. He'd spent all the spring bivouacked with those gentlemen. His cavalry squadron had been their flank guard, no less. And that-there body of men was not one regiment but the leftovers of a brigade. There'd been a lot of falling by the wayside, the young horseman told Searcy.

‘Did you say those are Daniel Hill's chaps?' Searcy asked.

‘Sure I did.'

So D. H. Hill had got his movement orders from somewhere. And that would seem to mean Chilton and maybe Lee knew of the theft. And that soon, maybe within two minutes, the headquarters cavalry will be along this road, looking for me.

The field the Tarheels had left was a pleasant one, sloping slowly up to woods. A stream cut round its far margin and then bubbled along under a little stone bridge further down the road. It came to Searcy at once that when the Union army came to Frederick, a portion of it must surely camp in this sweet field. The first brigade commander who saw it and its freshet would want it for his men. The Union army being twice in number what the Confederate was, there would be some competition for a field like this!

‘I say,' said Searcy. ‘I'm taken short, old man. I must ask you to let me make use of that field.'

The horseman nodded; ‘Willie and me, we could likely benefit from a squat ourselves.'

The rail fence round the field was still intact, as it would not be once the Union troops arrived. Searcy and the two boys tethered their horses there. Searcy opened his bag and took out some soap and a long envelope of heavy weave. ‘Like a cigar, you gentlemen?' he asked, dredging a handful up out of the saddlebag.

‘Why, obliged!' they both said and each took one. He transferred the other three to his pockets as if he meant to smoke as he crossed the field. They moved through the fence, the cavalry men unbuttoning and unbelting as they went and squatting after no more than twenty paces. Searcy went as far in as he could, till he reached a family of sizable shade trees just at the point where the field took a sharper slope up to the woods. The horsemen seemed to think it was natural for a British gentleman to want a little more privacy than ordinary men and to walk further off to excrete.

Beyond the shade tree, Searcy dropped his own trousers. He noticed that his member barely existed after this fearful and frustrating night he'd spent. Since it knew there was the risk of a bullet, it behaved like some sort of sensible tortoise. As Searcy laughed at it, it grew by a few millimetres. His bowels came in a gush. God help me, he thought. Too much bacon fat, too many beans, too many flapjacks.

While he was hunched there, with his back to the tree and the trunk between himself and the others, he took out
Special Orders No. 191
, placed the three cigars he had left squarely in its pages, wrapped them up in it and placed them in the envelope. It happened to be an envelope from Stiles Bros. Stationers of St James's, and was said to be ideal for military staff work and for explorers and foreign correspondents. Stiles Bros. claimed that it was waterproof and that there was a sealskin lining inside to keep contents dry. It didn't feel to Searcy that it had a sealskin lining, but it would not be like Stiles Bros. to say it had if it hadn't. He placed the whole package, the cigars wrapped in the orders and the orders packaged in the envelope, half in under some weed but in clear sight. Then he cleaned himself up and went to the stream and washed.

When he got back to the fence the two young horsemen were already waiting there, puffing away on the cigars he'd given them.

‘Grand goddam weed this is, sir,' said the chatty one.

‘Indeed,' said Searcy, smiling for the first time that morning.

And as they rode away, he knew now he had some chance of not being killed. The orders were off his hands. No one would be sure about him even if they suspected something. And they could not, without being sure, shoot or torture an English gentleman.

21

It had been towards midnight when Hanks sent Usaph and Gus to seek out the Creel house and tell the colonel that orders had come and he was needed. They'd found the place by recognising Wheat's horse which was still drowsing under the tree by the gate. When they knocked, an old black lady came and took their message and went and fetched Wheat. Wheat didn't seem happy at first to see them. He was in his shirt and britches and his boots looked somehow like they'd been pulled on in a hurry. But the grievance he felt was directed at Hanks. He was thinking, Hanks should have been the goddam preacher and dear dead Diggie the lawyer.

He ordered Gus and Usaph to go and wait under the sycamore with the horse.

Gus seemed happy enough about that. When Hanks had first ordered them to go and fetch Wheat, the music teacher had been a little sullen about spending his evening seeking out a particular house on a particular back road. But it hadn't been a hard search and now Gus leaned against the fence and said: ‘Nice little place.'

It was Usaph who was feeling a sort of bilious unease. ‘It's someone's place,' he said. ‘Someone's wife or someone's widder.'

‘Oh Lord, Usaph,' Gus said softly. ‘You do talk a deal about wives and widows.'

‘I wasn't aware,' said Usaph. ‘I wasn't aware I talked so damn much on them-there topics.'

At last they saw the door open again and Wheat came out fully clothed from the darkness of the house into the clear night. But he seemed to baulk and turn back, and from the hallway right out on to the porch rushed a woman in a long loose gown. She hung on to him. She was tall. Wheat hardly had to bend to clamp his mouth on hers. Then they whispered a little and she went inside, and the door closed with a slow, regretful crunch.

Even though they came from the Valley, where men were a lot more truly equal, one to another, than they were down in the tidewater, Gus and Usaph would have been most comfortable if Wheat had come down the path, swung himself into the saddle and pretended that his orderly and his runner had seen nothing. If he'd done that they could have just looked at him out of the corner of their eyes, making their separate judgements about him, whether he was to be admired or condemned. Instead of that, Wheat felt bound to explain everything.

‘That lady,' he told them, not even getting into his saddle, leading his horse away instead, staying on their level, ‘that lady, boys, is … a lady. What you jest beheld, boys, I want you to know … maybe Usaph understands these things, being wed – what you jest beheld is nothing but generosity.' Wheat coughed. He was finding these words harder to form than was usual with him. ‘The quality of mercy is not strained, is how the poet puts it, and that means that this generosity I speak of is a virtue, and all tightness, boys, and strictness, and for a man never to be passions's goddam slave – all that is a curse. And people who are tight and strict, boys, might as well be bankers, or find some such other abominable way of putting in the golden days that are the portion of a man on this earth. Do you understand that, boys?'

Gus said he did. ‘Of course, of course,' said Gus, wanting to put an end to the conversation.

Usaph thought, if the colonel can talk frank to me, I can talk frank back.

‘Is the lady some man's wife?' Usaph's voice was so taut the colonel looked at him. There was a sort of gentle hurt in the colonel's eyes.

‘Usaph,' he murmured, ‘I believe she was.'

Gus caught Usaph's eye and made a disapproving mouth and frowned at him, and they continued back through Frederick in silence. When they got back to the encampment, and stood amongst all the prone sleeping figures, and when they'd said goodnight and Gus had started to move away, Wheat detained Usaph by the elbow.

‘You oughtn't to judge me, son.'

‘No sir, colonel,' said Usaph in the same tight voice as before.

‘Goddamit, Usaph, it's time you loosened up your thoughts a little. I did not touch that lady's affections, boy, they are stuck as ever on her absent husband. Only the flesh wavers, Usaph, not the goddam heart.'

Usaph dragged his arm loose. Wheat said: ‘You worried about your own wife, is that it, son? If so …'

‘If so?' Usaph called out in a hard challenging voice.

Wheat bared his head and shook it.

‘Don't judge me, boy,' he asked again. It sounded like genuine begging.

That morning, by five o'clock, the Confederate army left Frederick by various roads. Tom Jackson's corps walked away westwards by Mill and Patrick Streets.

Stonewall himself came through town by his own route. He could ride now and went with a few of his staff and an escort of horsemen, Blue Ridge boys called the Black Horse Cavalry. From Best's Grove he rode to the Presbyterian manse, where an old friend from Lexington lived called the Reverend Doctor John Ross. But it was too early for the Rosses in their side street. Not even the house blacks were up. So, without getting joy from friends, Tom Jackson wrote a note and then rode on into Mill Street and joined the main stream of the march. Like Wheat, he dozed his way out of town.

Years later a poet called John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem that said that, on the way out of Frederick, Tom Jackson had seen a Union flag flying from an attic and had ordered his infantry to fire on it, and that an old woman called Barbara Frietchie, being of German blood and pro-Union, grabbed it before it fell, leaned out of the window with it, and:

‘“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,

But spare your country's flag,” she said.'

At which Stonewall is supposed to have been shamed and

‘“Who touches a hair of yon gray head

Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.'

But Barbara Frietchie lived that morning in Patrick Street near the Town Creek Bridge, and Tom Jackson did not leave town that way. Humbler men did: Usaph Bumpass, Gus Ramseur, Lafcadio Wheat. But their thoughts were not broken into by any grey-haired Unionist. In fact, since she was more than ninety years old and the hour was so ungodly early, maybe Barbara was still between her sheets as the Confederacy in all its tatters followed its path out of town.

Searcy travelled at something like his ease beside Lee's headquarters waggons. After leaving
Special Orders No. 191
in that meadow, he'd felt so lightened, so free, that he rode right back to Best's Grove. The grove was full of officers eating their breakfasts standing up, tents were being pulled down, horses were snuffling and stamping, pricked by the electricity of hope and urgency in the soldiers all around.

And no one took any notice of him. One of Angus's young friends met him by accident in all that rushing around the grove.

‘Mr Searcy sir. What is it that has befallen Angus? Rumour is he split his head.'