Bernard Cornwell - Copperhead

“No, thank you.” Faulconer managed to prevent the trophy from being produced. “So you’re a Virginia man, Major?” he asked, changing the subject and disguising his distaste for the wretched-looking Swynyard. “From the Tidewater, you say?”

“From the Swynyards of Charles City Court House,” Swynyard said with evident pride. “The name was famous once! Ain’t that so, Johnny?”

“Swynyard and Sons,” the editor said, staring into the rain, “slave traders to the Virginia gentry.”

“But my daddy gambled the business away, Colonel,” Swynyard confided. “There was a time when the name Swynyard meant the selfsame thing as nigger trading, but Daddy lost the business with the sin of gambling. We’ve been poor men ever since!” He said it proudly, but the boast suggested to Washington Faulconer exactly what proposition was being made to him.

The editor drew on his cigar. “Swynyard’s a cousin of mine, Faulconer. He’s my kin.”

“And he has applied to you for employment?” Faulconer guessed shrewdly.

“Not as a newspaperman!” Major Swynyard intervened. “I don’t have skill with words, Colonel. I leave that to the clever fellows like cousin Johnny here. No, I’m a soldier through and through. I was weaned on the gun’s muzzle, you might say. I’m a fighter, Colonel, and I’ve got three cabin trunks crammed full of heathen topknots to prove it.”

“But you are presently unemployed?” Daniels prompted his cousin.

“I am indeed seeking the best place for my fighting talent,” Swynyard confirmed to Faulconer.

There was a pause. Daniels took the editorial from his pocket and pretended to cast a critical eye over its paragraphs. Faulconer took the hint. “If I should find employment for myself, Major,” he told Swynyard hastily, “I should count it as a great honor and a privilege if you would consider being my right-hand man?”

“Your second-in-command, don’t you mean?” John Daniels interjected from the President’s rocking chair.

“My second-in-command indeed,” Faulconer confirmed hurriedly.

Swynyard clicked his heels. “I’ll not disappoint you, Colonel. I might lack the genteel graces, by God, but I don’t lack fierceness! I ain’t a soft man, my God, no. I believe in driving soldiers like you drive niggers! Hard and fast! Bloody and brutal, no other way, ain’t that the truth, Johnny?”

“The entire truth, Griffin.” Daniels folded the editorial, but did not yet return it to his vest pocket. “Unfortunately, Faulconer,” Daniels went on, “my cousin impoverished himself in the service of his country. His old country, I mean, our new enemies. Which also means he has come to our new country with a passel of debts. Ain’t that so, Griffin?”

“I’m down on my luck, Colonel,” Swynyard confessed gruffly. A tear appeared at one eye and the tic in his cheek quivered. “Gave my all to the old army. Gave my fingers too! But I was left with nothing, Colonel, nothing. But I don’t ask much, just a chance to serve and fight, and a grave of good Confederate soil when my honest labors are done.”

“But you are also asking for your debts to be settled,” John Daniels said pointedly, “especially that portion of the debt which is owed to me.”

“I shall take great pleasure in establishing your credit,” Faulconer said, wondering just how much pain that pleasure would cost him.

“You’re a gentleman, Colonel,” Swynyard said, “a Christian and a gentleman. It’s plain to see, Colonel, so it is. Moved, I am. Touched deep, sir, very deep.” And Swynyard cuffed the tear from his eye, then straightened his back as a sign of respect to his rescuer. “I’ll not disappoint you. I ain’t a disappointer, Colonel. Disappointing ain’t in the Swynyard nature.”

Faulconer doubted the truth of that assertion, yet he guessed his best chance of being named a general was with Daniels’s help, and if Daniels’s price was Swynyard, then so be it. “So we’re agreed, Major,” Faulconer said, and held out his left hand.

“Agreed, sir, agreed.” Swynyard shook Faulconer’s offered hand. “You move up a rank, sir, and so do I.” He smiled his decayed smile.

“Splendid!” Daniels said loudly, then delicately and pointedly inserted the folded editorial back into his vest pocket. “Now if you two gentlemen would like to improve upon each other’s acquaintance, Mr. Delaney and I have business to discuss.”

Thus dismissed, Faulconer and Swynyard went to join the throng which still crowded the President’s house, leaving Daniels to flick his whip out into the rain. “Are you sure Faulconer’s our man?”

“You heard Johnston,” Delaney said happily. “Faulconer was the hero of Manassas!”

Daniels scowled. “I heard a rumor that Faulconer was caught with his pants around his ankles? That he wasn’t even with the Legion when it fought?”

“Mere jealous tales, my dear Daniels, mere jealous tales.” Delaney, quite at his ease with the powerful editor, drew on a cigar. His stock of precious French cigarettes was exhausted now, and that lack was perhaps the most pressing reason why he wanted this war to end quickly. To which end Delaney, like Adam Faulconer, secretly supported the North and worked for its victory by causing mischief in the South’s capital, and today’s achievement, he thought, was a very fine piece of mischief indeed. He had just persuaded the South’s most important newspaperman to throw his paper’s massive influence behind one of the most foppish and inefficient of the Confederacy’s soldiers. Faulconer, in Delaney’s caustic view, had never grown up properly, and without his riches he would be nothing but an empty-headed fool. “He’s our man, John, I’m sure of it.”

“So why has he been unemployed since Manassas?” Daniels asked.

“The wound in his arm took a long time healing,” Delaney said vaguely. The truth, he suspected, was that Faulconer’s inordinate pride would not allow him to serve under the foulmouthed, lowborn Nathan Evans, but Daniels did not need to know that.

“And didn’t he free his niggers?” Daniels asked threateningly.

“He did, John, but there were extenuating reasons.”

“The only extenuating reason for freeing a nigger is because the bastard’s dead,” Daniels declared.

“I believe Faulconer freed his slaves to fulfill his father’s dying wish,” Delaney lied. The truth was that Faulconer had manumitted his people because of a northern woman, an ardent abolitionist, whose good looks had momentarily enthralled the Virginia landowner.

“Well, at least he’s taken Swynyard off my hands,” Daniels said grudgingly, then paused as the sound of cheering came from inside the house. Someone was evidently making a speech and the crowd punctuated the oration with laughter and applause. Daniels glowered into the rain that still fell heavily. “We don’t need words, Delaney, we need a goddamn miracle.”

The Confederacy needed a miracle because the Young Napoleon was at last ready, and his army outnumbered the southern troops in Virginia by two to one, and spring was coming, which meant the roads would be fit once more for the passage of guns, and the North was promising its people that Richmond would be captured and the rebellion ended. Virginia’s fields would be dunged by Virginia’s dead and the only way the South could be saved from an ignominious and crushing defeat was by a miracle. Instead of which, Delaney reflected, he had given it Faulconer. It was enough, he decided, to make a sick cat laugh.

Because the South was doomed.

Just after dawn the cavalry came galloping back across the fields, their hooves splashing bright silver gouts of water from the flooded grass. “Yankees are at Centreville! Hurry it up!” The horsemen spurred past the earthen wall that was notched with gun embrasures, only instead of cannon in the embrasures there was nothing but Quaker guns. Quaker guns were tree trunks painted black and then propped against the firing steps to give the appearance of cannon muzzles.