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FIVE

DUST SIFTED THE AIR above Richmond’s Central Fair Grounds. The dust was being kicked up by the eleven regiments that were marching and countermarching on the massive field that had been abraded free of every last blade of grass, then pounded into a fine powder by the endless exercises of drill that Major General Robert Lee insisted on inflicting upon the recruits who came to defend the Confederacy. The reddish-brown dust had been carried by the wind to settle on every wall, roof and hedge within a half mile of the Fair Grounds so that even the blossoms of the magnolias that edged the site seemed to have been dulled into a curious pale brick color. Ethan Ridley’s uniform was powdered with the dust, giving the gray cloth a fleshlike tinge. Ridley had come to the Fair Grounds to find his plump and myopic half-brother, Belvedere Delaney, who was mounted on a sway-backed piebald horse, which he sat with all the elegance of a collapsing sack as he watched the regiments march smartly past. Delaney, though in civilian clothes, saluted the passing troops with all the aplomb of a full general. ‘I’m practicing for when I join the army, Ethan,’ he greeted his half-brother, showing no surprise at Ridley’s sudden appearance in the city.

‘You’ll not join the army, Bev, you’re too soft.’

‘On the contrary, Ethan, I am to be a legal officer. I invented the post myself and suggested it to the governor, who was kind enough to have me commissioned. I shall be a captain for the moment, but I shall promote myself if I find that rank too lowly for a man of my tastes and distinction. Well done, men! Well done! Very smart!’ Delaney called these encouragements to a bemused company of Alabamian infantry that was marching past the applauding spectators. A visit to these Fair Grounds was a popular excursion for the citizens of Richmond, who now found themselves living in the new capital of the Confederate States of America, a fact that gave especial pleasure to Belvedere Delaney. ‘The more politicians there are in Richmond then the greater will be the corruption,’ he explained to Ridley, ‘and the greater the corruption, the greater the profit. I doubt we shall ever compete with Washington in these matters, but we must do our best in the short time God grants us.’ Delaney bestowed a beatific smile on his scowling half-brother. ‘So how long shall you be in Richmond this time? I presume you will be using Grace Street? Did George tell you I was here?’ George was Delaney’s manservant, a slave, but with the manners and demeanor of an aristocrat. Ridley did not really like the supercilious George, but he had to put up with the slave if he was to use his brother’s rooms on Grace Street. ‘So just what brings you to our fair city?’ Delaney inquired. ‘Beyond the charms of my company, of course.’

‘Cannon. Two six pounders that Faulconer discovered in Bowers Foundry. The guns were supposed to be melted down, but Faulconer’s bought them.’

‘No profit for us there, then,’ Delaney said.

‘He needs ammunition’—Ridley paused to light a cigar—‘and limbers. And caissons.’

‘Ah! I hear the soft chink of dollars changing hands,’ Belvedere Delaney said with delight, then turned to watch a regiment of Virginian militia march past with the fine precision of shuttles on a mechanical loom. ‘If all the troops were as good as that,’ he told his half-brother, ‘then the war would be as good as won, but my Lord, you should see some of the rabble that turns up wanting to fight. Yesterday I saw a company that called itself McGarritty’s Mounted Lincoln Killers, McGarritty being their self-proclaimed colonel, you understand, and the fourteen mudsills shared ten horses, two swords, four shotguns and a hanging rope between them. The rope was twenty feet long, with a noose, and more than adequate for Abe, they told me.’

Ethan Ridley was not interested in the rarer breeds of Southern soldier, but only in the profits he might make with his half-brother’s help. ‘You’ve got six-pounder ammunition?’

‘In lavish quantities, I’m afraid,’ Delaney confessed. ‘We’re virtually giving the round shot away. But we can certainly make an indecent profit on the canister and shell.’ He paused to touch his hat to a state senator who had been avid for war before the first guns fired, but who had since discovered a lame leg, a crooked back and a troublesome liver. The invalid politician, propped up with lavish cushions in his carriage, feebly raised his gold-headed cane in response to Delaney’s salute. ‘And I can certainly find some limbers and caissons at a wicked profit,’ Delaney went on happily.

His happiness was occasioned by the profits that stemmed from Washington Faulconer’s insistence that not one boot or button be bought for his Legion from the state, which obstinacy Delaney had seen as his opportunity. Delaney had used his extensive friendships within the state government to buy goods from the state armories himself, which goods he sold on to his half-brother, who acted as Washington Faulconer’s purchasing agent. The price of the goods invariably doubled or even quadrupled during the transaction, and the brothers shared the profits equally. It was a happy scheme that had, among other things, brought Washington Faulconer twelve thousand dollars’ worth of Mississippi rifles that had cost Belvedere Delaney just six thousand dollars, forty-dollar tents that had cost sixteen dollars, and a thousand pairs of two-dollar boots that the brothers had purchased for eighty cents a pair. ‘I imagine a gun limber must cost at least four hundred dollars,’ Delaney now mused aloud. ‘Say eight hundred to Faulconer?’

‘At least.’ Ridley needed the profits far more than his older brother, which was why he had been so happy to return to Richmond, where he could not only make money, but also be free of Anna’s cloying affections. He told himself that marriage would surely make things easier between himself and Faulconer’s daughter, and that once he had the security of the family’s wealth behind him he would not so resent Anna’s petulant demands. In affluence, Ridley believed, lay the solution to all life’s griefs.

Belvedere Delaney also liked affluence, but only if it brought power in its wake. He checked his horse to watch a company of Mississippians march by; fine-looking bearded men, thin and tanned, but all armed with old-fashioned flintlocks like the ones their grandfathers had carried against the redcoats. The coming war, Delaney hoped, must be brief, because the North would surely wipe away these enthusiastic amateurs with their homely weapons and gangling gait, and when that happened Delaney intended to realize an even larger profit than the paltry dollars he now made from equipping Washington Faulconer’s Legion. For Belvedere Delaney, though a Southerner by birth and breeding, was a Northerner by calculation, and though he had not yet become a spy he had quietly permitted his friends in the Northern states to understand that he intended to serve their cause from within the Virginian capital. And when that Northern victory came, as it surely must, then Delaney reckoned that the Southern supporters of the legitimate Federal government could expect a rich reward. That, Delaney knew, was a long view, but holding the long view while all around him fools gambled their lives and property on the short gave Belvedere Delaney an immense amount of satisfaction. ‘Tell me about Starbuck,’ he suddenly asked his brother as they walked their horses about the Fair Grounds perimeter.

‘Why?’ Ridley was surprised by the abrupt question.

‘Because I am interested in Elial Starbuck’s son.’ In truth it had been thoughts of Southerners supporting the North and Northerners fighting for the South that had made Delaney think of Starbuck. ‘I met him, did you know?’

‘He didn’t say anything.’ Ridley sounded resentful.

‘I rather liked him. He has a quick mind. Much too mercurial to be successful, I suspect, but he’s not a dull young man.’

Ethan Ridley sneered at that generous assessment. ‘He’s a goddamn preacher’s son. A pious son of a Boston bitch.’

Delaney, who fancied he knew more of the world than his half-brother, suspected that any man who was willing to risk his whole future for some strumpet off the stage was probably much less virtuous and a deal more interesting that Ridley was suggesting, and Delaney, in his long drunken meal with Starbuck, had sensed something complicated and interesting in the younger man. Starbuck, Delaney reflected, had immured himself in a dark maze where creatures like Dominique Demarest fought against the virtues instilled by a Calvinist upbringing, and that battle would be a rare and vicious affair. Delaney instinctively hoped that the Calvinism would be defeated, but he also understood that the virtuous aspect of Starbuck’s character had somehow got under his half-brother’s skin. ‘Why do we find virtue so annoying?’ Delaney wondered aloud.

‘Because it is the highest aspiration of the stupid,’ Ridley said nastily.

‘Or is it because we admire virtue in others, knowing we cannot attain it ourselves?’ Delaney was still curious.

‘You might want to attain it, I don’t.’

‘Don’t be absurd, Ethan. And tell me why you dislike Starbuck so much.’

‘Because the bastard took fifty bucks off me.’

‘Ah! Then he did touch you to the quick.’ Delaney, who knew the extent of his half-brother’s greed, laughed. ‘And how did the preacher’s son achieve this appropriation?’

‘I wagered him that he couldn’t fetch a man called Truslow out of the hills, and goddamn it, he did.’

‘Pecker told me about Truslow,’ Delaney said. ‘But why didn’t you recruit him?’

‘Because if Truslow sees me near his daughter, he’ll murder me.’

‘Ah!’ Delaney smiled, and reflected how everyone created their own tangled snares. Starbuck was enmeshed between sin and pleasure, he himself was caught between North and South, and his half-brother was snagged on lust. ‘Does the murderer have cause to kill you?’ Delaney asked, then took a cigarette from a box and borrowed his half-brother’s cigar to light it. The cigarette was wrapped in yellow paper and filled with lemon-scented tobacco. ‘Well?’ Delaney prompted Ridley.

‘He has cause,’ Ridley admitted, then could not resist a boastful laugh. ‘He’s going to have a bastard grandchild soon.’

‘Yours?’

Ridley nodded. ‘Truslow doesn’t know the baby’s mine, and the girl’s been married off anyway, so all in all I came out smelling like rosewater. Except that I had to pay for the bitch’s silence.’

‘A lot?’

‘Enough.’ Ridley inhaled his cigar’s bitter smoke, then shook his head. ‘She’s a greedy bitch, but my God, Bev, you should see the girl.’

‘The murderer’s daughter is beautiful?’ Delaney was amused at the thought.

‘She’s extraordinary,’ Ridley said with a genuine tone of awe in his voice. ‘Here, look.’ He took a leather case from his top uniform pocket and handed it to Delaney.

Delaney opened the case to find a drawing, five inches by four inches, which showed a naked girl sitting in a woodland glade beside a small stream. Delaney was constantly astonished at his half-brother’s talent which, though untrained and lazily applied, was still startlingly good. God, he thought, poured his talents into the strangest vessels. ‘Have you exaggerated her looks?’

‘No. Truly no.’

‘Then she is indeed lovely. A nymph.’

‘But a nymph with a tongue like a nigger driver and a temper to match.’

‘And you’re done with her, yes?’ Delaney inquired.

‘Finished. Done.’ Ridley, as he took back the portrait, hoped that was true. He had paid Sally a hundred silver dollars to keep silent, yet he had remained frightened that she would not keep her side of the bargain. Sally was an unpredictable girl with more than a touch of her father’s savagery, and Ethan Ridley had been terrified that she might appear in Faulconer Court House and brandish her pregnancy in front of Anna. Not that Washington Faulconer probably minded a man fathering bastards, but whelping them on slaves was one thing and having a girl as wild as Truslow’s daughter screaming her outrage up and down the main street of Faulconer Court House was something entirely different.

But now, thank God, Ridley had heard how Sally had been married off to her straw-haired puppy-boy. Ridley had heard no details of the wedding, nothing about the where or the how or the when, only that Truslow had sloughed his daughter off onto Decker and given the couple his patch of stony land, his beasts and his blessing, and by so doing he had left Ridley feeling much safer. ‘It’s all turned out well,’ he grunted to Delaney, yet not without some regret, for Ethan Ridley suspected that he would never again in his life know a girl as beautiful as Sally Truslow. Yet to lie with her had been to play with fire and he had been lucky to have emerged unscorched.

Belvedere Delaney watched a pack of recruits trying to march in step. A cadet from the Virginia Military Institute who looked about half the age of the men he was drilling screamed at them to straighten their backs, to keep their heads up and to stop looking around like mill girls on an outing. ‘Does Colonel Faulconer drill his men like this?’ Delaney asked.

‘He believes drill will only blunt the men’s enthusiasm.’

‘How interesting! Perhaps your Faulconer is cleverer than I thought. These poor devils begin their drill at six in the morning and don’t cease till the moon rises.’ Delaney touched his hat in salute of a judge he frequently met at the brothel on Marshall Street that was always known as Mrs. Richardson’s house, though in fact the major shareholder in the house was Belvedere Delaney himself. In times of war, Delaney believed, a man could do a lot worse than invest in weapons and women, and so far Delaney’s investments were all showing a fine profit.

‘Faulconer believes war should be enjoyed,’ Ridley said caustically, ‘which is why he’s going on a cavalry raid.’

‘A cavalry raid?’ Delaney said in a surprised tone. ‘Tell me.’

‘There’s nothing to tell.’

‘Describe me the nothing, then.’ Delaney sounded unnaturally petulant.

‘Why?’

‘For God’s sake, Ethan, I am a friend to half the lawmakers in the state, and if Virginia’s citizens are waging a private war on the North then the government is supposed to know about it. Or Robert Lee is. In fact Lee’s supposed to sanction military movements, even by your incipient father-in-law. So tell me.’

‘Faulconer’s leaving on a raid, or maybe he’s already left, I’m not sure. Does it matter?’

‘Where? What?’

‘He’s upset because we let the Yankees occupy Alexandria. He thinks Richmond doesn’t care about the war. He says Letcher has always been soft on the North and is probably a secret Union man. He thinks Lee is too cautious, and so is everyone else, and if someone doesn’t go and kick the Yankees where it hurts then the Confederacy will collapse.’

‘You mean the idiot is going to attack Alexandria?’ Delaney asked in astonishment. Alexandria was the Virginian town across the Potomac from Washington that, since its abandonment by Southern troops, had been heavily fortified.

‘He knows he can’t attack Alexandria,’ Ridley said, ‘so he’s planning to cut the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.’

‘Where?’

‘He didn’t tell me,’ Ridley sounded sour, ‘but it can’t be east of Cumberland, because the trains aren’t running between there and Harper’s Ferry.’ Ridley suddenly became alarmed. ‘For God’s sake, Bev, you’re not going to stop him, are you? He’ll kill me if you do!’

‘No,’ Delaney said soothingly, ‘no, I’ll let him have his fun. So how many men has he taken? The whole Legion?’

‘Just thirty men. But you promise me you’ll say nothing?’ Ridley was terrified that he had been indiscreet.

Delaney could see Robert Lee inspecting recruits on the far side of the Fair Grounds. Delaney had deliberately made himself useful to Lee’s office and had found himself being unwillingly impressed by the general’s combination of intelligence and honesty. Delaney tried to imagine Lee’s fury if he were to discover that Faulconer was free-lancing a raid on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, but tempting though it was, Delaney decided he would say nothing to his friends in Virginia’s government. Instead he would let the North do the stopping.

For there was still time to write one last letter to a friend in Washington who, Delaney knew, was intimate with the Northern government’s secretary of war. Delaney reckoned that if the North discovered that he could be a source of useful military information, then their full trust would surely follow.

‘Of course I’ll say nothing to the governor,’ he now reassured his terrified younger brother, then sawed on his reins to stop his horse. ‘Do you mind if we turn back? The dust is irritating my throat.’

‘I was hoping …’ Ridley began.

‘You were hoping to visit Mrs. Richardson’s house.’ That enticement, Delaney knew, was Richmond’s main attraction for his half-brother. ‘And so you shall, my dear Ethan, so you shall.’ Delaney spurred back toward the city, his good day’s work well done.

The raiding party reached the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad two hours before dawn on the sixth day of a journey that Washington Faulconer had confidently predicted would last no more than three. The ride would have taken a full week if Faulconer had not stubbornly insisted on riding throughout the final night. Starbuck, reeling from tiredness and in whimpering agony from his saddle sores, was not at first aware that their journey was almost done. He was slumped in the saddle, half-sleeping, half-scared of falling, when he was suddenly startled by a brilliant glare of light that flared far beneath him in a deep, moon-shadowed valley. For a moment he thought he was dreaming, then he feared he was not dreaming at all but had instead reached the trembling edge of the Valley of Gehenna, the Bible’s hell, and that at any moment he would be cast down into the flaming pit where the devils cackled as they tormented the sinners. He even cried out in terror.

Then he came fully awake and realized that Faulconer’s bedraggled band of raiders had stopped on the crest of a high ridge and were looking down into a dark valley where a train ran westward. The door of the locomotive’s firebox was open, and the furnace’s brilliant glow was reflecting on the underside of the boiling smoke plume which looked, Starbuck thought, like the lurid breath of a great dragon. The boiling smoke moved steadily westward, preceded by the feeble glow of the locomotive’s oil-fired lantern. No other lights showed, suggesting that the locomotive was hauling freight wagons. The noise of the train changed to a hollow rumble as it crossed trestles spanning a river that lay to Starbuck’s left, and he felt a sudden pulse of excitement as he suddenly understood how close they had come to their target.

For the great spume of fiery smoke that ripped through the night marked where the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad ran along the bank of the North Branch of the Potomac River. Until Thomas Jackson had occupied Harper’s Ferry, and so cut the rail passage to Washington and Baltimore, this line had been the major link between the western states and the American capital, and even since Jackson’s occupation the rails had stayed busy as they fetched supplies, recruits, weapons and food from Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, all of them carried to Cumberland where they were reloaded onto canal boats or else onto wagons that were hauled by teams of horses to the Hagerstown depot of the Cumberland Valley Railroad. Colonel Faulconer claimed that if the Baltimore and Ohio could be cut in the Alleghenies west of Cumberland then it might take months before that busy supply line was restored.