Bernard Cornwell - The Bloody Ground

“’Cos I’m in the army, miss.”

“The hell you are. You get caught with a gun in this town, boy, and they’ll skin your backside and then send you down the river. You’re damn lucky to have survived this long. Take it off. Now.”

Lucifer, who had resisted every former effort to disarm him, meekly unbuckled the gunbelt. It was plain that Lucifer was awestruck by Sally, and he made not even the smallest complaint as she told him to hide the revolver in Starbuck’s baggage and then dismissed him to the kitchen. “Tell them to feed you up,” she said.

“Yes, miss.”

“He’s got white blood,” Sally said when Lucifer had gone.

“I guess.”

“Hell, it’s obvious.” She poured herself more of the strange-tasting coffee, then listened as Starbuck told her why he was in Richmond. She spat derisively when Washington Faulconer’s name was mentioned. “The city was full of rumor about why he’d left the army,” she said, “but he rode right over the rumor. Arrived here bold as brass and just claimed Jackson was jealous of him. Jealous! But your General Jackson, Nate, he makes enemies like a louse makes itches and there are plenty of men here ready to sympathize with Faulconer. He got office soon enough. I guess you’re right and the Masons looked after him. Delaney will know, he’s a Mason. So what do you do now?”

Starbuck shrugged. “I have to report to Camp Lee. To a Colonel Holborrow.” He was not looking forward to the moment. He was unsure of his ability to lead the worst battalion in the South’s army, and he already missed the companionship of the Legion.

“I know Holborrow,” Sally said, “not personally,” she added hastily, “but he’s pretty considerable in town.” Starbuck was not surprised at her knowledge, for Sally kept an ear very close to the ground to snap up every trifle of gossip that she could turn into a mystical revelation in her seances. “He’s got money,” she went on, “God knows how, ’cos he wasn’t nothing but a penitentiary governor in Georgia before the war. A prison man, right? Now he’s in charge of training and equipping the replacements at Camp Lee, but he spends most of his time down in Screamersville.”

“The brothels?”

“Them and the cockpit.”

“He gambles?” Starbuck asked.

Sally shook her head at Starbuck’s naïveté. “He don’t go there to admire the birds’ feathers,” she said tartly. “What the hell did they teach you at Yale?”

Starbuck laughed, then perched his muddy boots on a tapestry-covered ottoman that stood on an Oriental rug. Everything in the room was in the best of taste; understated but expensive. Napoleon’s bust glowered on the mantel, leatherbound books stood ranked in glass-fronted cases, while exquisite pieces of porcelain were displayed on shelves. “You live well, Sally,” Starbuck said.

“You know any merit in living badly?” she asked. “And you can get your boots off the furniture while you think about the answer.”

“I was thinking of going to sleep,” Starbuck said, not moving.

“Hell, Nate Starbuck,” Sally said, “are you reckoning on staying here?”

He shook his head. “I thought I might let you buy me lunch at the Spotswood, then walk with me to Camp Lee.”

Sally waited until he had moved the offending boots from the ottoman. “Now why,” she asked, “would I want to do that?”

Starbuck smiled. “Because, Sally, if I’ve got to take a pack of skulking cowards to war, then they need to know I’m a lucky man. And how much luckier can a man be than to show up with someone like you on his arm?”

“Glad to see the Yankees haven’t shot your glib tongue out,” she said, disguising her pleasure at the compliment. “But are you reckoning on going into the Spotswood looking like that?”

“Got nothing else to wear.” He frowned at his disheveled uniform. “Hell, if it’s good enough for fighting battles it’s good enough for the Spotswood Hotel.” Six hours later a well-fed Starbuck walked with Sally and Lucifer west out of the city. Sally wore a bonnet and shawl over a simple blue dress that was nowhere near plain enough to hide her beauty. She carried a fringed parasol against the sun, which had at last appeared from the clouds and was sucking up the remnants of the rainstorm into drifting patches of mist. They walked past the State Penitentiary, crossed the head of Hollywood Cemetery where the freshly turned earth lay in grim rows like the battalions of the dead, and skirted the municipal waterworks, until at last they could see Camp Lee on its wide bluff above the river and canal. Starbuck had visited the camp earlier in the year and remembered it as a grim, makeshift place. It had once been the Richmond Central Fairgrounds, but the onset of war had turned it into a giant dumping ground for the battalions that had flocked to the defense of Richmond. Those battalions were now on Virginia’s northern border and the camp was a dirty stretch of muddy ground where conscripts received a rudimentary training and where stragglers were sent to be assigned to new battalions. At the war’s beginning the camp had been a favorite place for Richmonders to come and watch the troops being drilled, but that novelty had worn off and these days few people visited the dank, derelict-looking barracks where old moldering tents stood in rows and tarpaper huts flapped in the breeze. The gallows of the camp jail still topped the hill, and round the jail was clustered an array of wooden huts where most of the camp’s present occupants seemed to be billeted. Two sergeants playing horseshoes confirmed to Starbuck that the huts were the Special Battalion’s quarters and he walked slowly uphill toward the flat crest where a half dozen companies were being drilled. A few lackluster work parties were patching the decrepit buildings among which, like a palace among hovels, stood the house that the sergeants had said was Holborrow’s headquarters. The house was a fine two-story building with a wide verandah all around and slave quarters and kitchens in its backyard. Two flagpoles stood in front of the house, one with the Confederate’s stars and bars and the other flying a blue flag crested with the coat of arms of Georgia.

Starbuck paused to watch the companies being drilled. There seemed small point to the activity, for the men were proficient enough, though every tiny fault was enough to force the sergeant in charge to a barrage of obscene abuse. The sergeant was a tall, gangling man with an unnaturally long neck and a voice that could have carried clean across the river to Manchester. The troops had no weapons, but were simply being marched, halted, turned, and marched again. Some were in gray coats, but most wore the increasingly common butternut brown that was easier to produce. At least half the men, Starbuck noted with alarm, had no boots, but were marching barefoot.

Sally put her arm into Starbuck’s elbow as they walked closer to the headquarters, where a group of four officers was stretched out in camp chairs on the verandah. One of the idling officers trained a telescope toward Starbuck and Sally. “You’re being admired,” Starbuck said.

“That was the point of me wasting an afternoon, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Starbuck said proudly.

Sally paused again to watch the troops on the parade ground who, so far as the screaming sergeant allowed, returned her inspection. “They’re your men?” she asked.

“All mine.”

“The pick of a bad bunch, eh?”

“They look all right to me,” Starbuck said. He was already trying to imbue himself with a loyalty toward these despised troops.

“They can kill Yankees, can’t they?” Sally said, sensing Starbuck’s apprehension. She brushed at the ingrained dirt on his uniform sleeve, not because she believed the dirt could be swept off, but because she knew he needed the small consolation of touch. Then her hand paused. “What’s that?” she asked.