Copperhead - Bernard Cornwell

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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

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