Copperhead - Bernard Cornwell

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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!”

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