‘My husband and the secretary grew up together.’
‘Also with General Gilmer and his wife. And that you frequently take tea with Mrs Jeff Davis herself.’
Mrs Whipple screwed her little face up and grinned at him. ‘So you think I’m spying on you on Mrs Varina Davis’s orders?’
‘What I wonder – and yet again you must forgive me, madam – is this. If you are an agent of the Union, how much do you feel towards all these good friends of yours? And how do you feel towards the soldiers in the wards of this hospital?’
The widow closed her eyes and the lips narrowed again. ‘That, Mr Searcy, is none of your business. In general I feel that in anything I do for the Union I am helping my friends and helping the boys in the wards. Because the rebellion cannot succeed, sir.’
‘Not everyone, even on the Union’s side, is so sure about that, ma’am.’
She punched the table with her fist. ‘I am sure, sir. I am sure.’
They sat in silence awhile and he looked at her wanly over his big moustache. She laughed. ‘Come now,’ she said, ‘I suppose you’re one of those people who want to judge me because I own inherited slaves. History and Mr Lincoln will free the slaves, sir. In the meantime, I find your timidity a little excessive. What if I did rush straight to Jackson with the news that the Honourable Mr Searcy is a Union spy? Let me tell you, if I did that nothing bad would happen to you. The Confederacy is so busy courting the British parliament that they would not for a moment consider shooting a renowned British journalist whose father is also a peer of the British realm. You would be sent politely away, sir, that’s all. Whereas I … if my connections were known, … well, even if they spared me a noose or a bullet, I doubt I’d last a month in prison.’
She thought awhile about that with her head bent. Her already tiny shoulders seemed to shrink closer to each other. For a second he wanted to touch her in pity, for he could sense the great moral torment inside the tiny body.
He smiled remotely and at last took notes from his breast pocket. They were general notes on the strategic situation, but there were items there as well about what divisions were camped where. His recent chat with Jackson and Kyd Douglas was reported there as well.
‘On this occasion only, I must insist that I retain these jottings of mine. You will need to take copies.’
‘Of course, Mr Searcy,’ she said. ‘That is quite reasonable.’
She got up from the table and went to fetch a writing portfolio from the far side of the room. Returning with it, she began to copy his notes in her cramped little handwriting, the handwriting of someone who is trying to save paper.
He coughed. ‘It is all intelligible?’
‘Of course.’
‘Include the estimate I made of the size of Lee’s army.’
Again a sigh. ‘I’ll put it in. It won’t stop our Union generals multiplying it by four.’
At last she finished copying his notes and handed them back with a broad smile. My God, he thought, you are an appealing little girl in your funny pug-nosed way. He said: ‘It seems to me, my dear Mrs Whipple, there is nothing I could tell you that you couldn’t find out from your distinguished friends.’
‘Not so, Mr Searcy. A single woman can find out very little from generals and Congressmen. Unless one is a wife or a courtesan one discovers nothing of specific value. And I am too attached to widowhood to find either role very attractive. The men go off and drink or play billiards after dinner. Oh, I’ve been patted on the shoulder by Judah Benjamin and told not to worry my fey small head about military matters. Such advice hardly amounts to hard intelligence, Mr Searcy. You are lucky to be a man, to be able to drink with staff officers. And to have a licence to ask them questions. Whereas I am little more than a mere channel. I wish I were more. I wish it very much.’
‘You must be careful, Mrs Whipple,’ he warned her. For he wondered how much information she did get from the houses she visited and from the men in the wards as well.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I must.’ She coughed and her eyes now looked bruised with tiredness. ‘As matron of this hospital, I feel disposed to prescribe you a measure of medical whisky, which I’d be honoured if you drank before you left.’
After the ration of raw spirit, he left glowing. Riding back to his hotel in Franklin Street he wondered if she’d been a spy as early as the battle of Ball’s Bluff and if she’d ever been haunted by the idea that the news she passed on northwards had helped in any way to bring on her husband’s death wound.
Later in the night he found himself waking, her pinched face showing up sharp in his imagination. ‘My God, you’ve a weakness for nurses, old boy!’ he told himself. For the mother of his three-year-old had been a nurse in the Crimea. He no longer loved that one, if ever he had. But Mrs Whipple’s features returned to him all night like those of a familiar face he had travelled a long way to see, and found – by good luck – in a barbarous place.
BOOK TWO
1
The grand movement northwards began because of the actions of a Union general. It did not begin because Tom Jackson, Kyd Douglas, Ephie Bumpass, Danny Blalock and De Bow’s Review believed it should; but because General Johnny Pope of the U.S., the one who was mocked because of the rumour that he sent despatches from ‘Headquarters in the Saddle’, began to move south from the Washington area. His orders were to shield Washington. He moved his divisions well. By the time Richmond knew anything about it, he was concentrated around the town of Culpeper, some sixty miles southwest of the Union capital, and just a little more than that north of Richmond. Culpeper was a main depot on the Orange and Alexandria, and anyone could see what Pope was trying. For if you follow the Orange and Alexandria south, it meets the Virginia Central beyond Gordonsville. The Confederacy needed the Virginia Central both for feeding Richmond and for sending troops and finished products to other areas. Tom Jackson was told to make Gordonsville secure.
‘They don’t give us rest,’ said old Harman, the General’s commissary officer. ‘They’re always knockin’ on either our front door or our goddam back.’
Tom Jackson, who had lived such a quiet life for ten years as professor of optics at the V.M.I., now he was a general took idle days as an insult. He was full of a quiet ecstasy as he packed up at Thomas’s place.
‘Battle is a Heraclitean thing,’ he told Kyd. ‘πxντx ρει, as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said. Everything changes in war and if you don’t believe so, you lose.’
Kyd knew he didn’t talk at such lengths and quote Greek philosophers unless he was very happy.
One of the less amusing sides of the ‘Heraclitean thing’ was getting eleven thousand men out of the encampment they’d been enjoying for two weeks and on to the road.
It got to be Tuesday noon before Lafcadio Wheat’s regiment marched into the crowded depot in Broad Street, Richmond, and climbed on board the third-class carriages of the Virginia Central. Usaph Bumpass and Gus Ramseur had been waiting at the depot overnight. Because of his respect for Gus’s talents, Usaph had got the adjutant’s permission to bring Ramseur up to Richmond by waggon. It happened that one half of the depot porch had been set aside for the Southern Comfort Society, and from dawn till midnight each day nice young women of Richmond served cookies and cakes and ham between slices of bread, and as good a coffee as you could find, and lemonade to the boys who were passing through.
Usaph and Gus had spent all yesterday evening and all this morning feasting at the hands of those nice young women. Whereas those boys who arrived at noon were lucky to get one small wedge of pie and half a cup of coffee, Gus and Usaph had spent last evening and all that very morning eating whole pies, had joined the queue at the Comfort Society’s bench so many times that the girls had got to know and favour them. By the time the officers crowded them with all the rest of the regiment into those plain timber railroad coaches, Gus and Usaph felt fat and spacious, and Gus said he was sure he had his wind back.
These third-class coaches me
ant hardwood seats. If they’d had glass in their windows when the war started, then soldiers had soon attended to that. It meant though that at least the insides of the travelling compartments got plenty of air. And that was as well, considering the way transport officers crammed them out.
‘Move up there, son!’
‘Why, sir, captain, this-here seat’s already full.’
‘Full. You call three boys full? Why that seat is patented to take six fat gran’mas. Move on up there!’
When the seats were full, those officers would sit a hundred, a hundred and fifty boys down in the aisle, so that the only exit you had from the carriage was through the windows. Yet no one seemed resentful. Danny Blalock had picked up a smuggled copy of the Knickerbocker at the depot and read through the whole journey. The others laughed and sang and the Irish fiddler who had played in camp took up the fiddle he still had but which he would jettison as soon as the marching got hard. The conscripts were allowed to sit on the floor, and sometimes a veteran would show his power by walking from one end of the carriage to the other across their shoulders and their knees. The conscript boys spoke low because they knew anything they said could be idly mocked. Though their clothes were as bad and maybe worse than the veterans, you could still tell them by the relative softness of their complexions, even the softness of the complexions of those who’d been farmers. For nothing harshened the skin more than long marches and the kind of outdoor sleeping soldiers did. How much the softer was the painter Decatur Cate’s face, which Usaph often watched secretly from his seat. Cate, whose harshest tool up to now had been a paint brush!
‘Enjoying yourself down there, Cate?’ Bolly would sometimes call to the artist.
‘Why I pity you up there, Mr Quintard, sitting on that hard seat while I’m down here resting in finest grade dust.’
Usaph didn’t like the change that was coming into the way the others looked at Cate. They saw him as a sort of Mister Interlocutor who said things that riled them in a pleasant way and let them try out their wits. It seemed Cate angered yet fascinated all of them and the idea of having a pet Lincolnite around the place – you could nearly say – tickled them.
Cate understood this and sometimes said things to provoke them from his place on the floor of the carriage. ‘You gentlemen should by rights welcome us boys,’ he said at one time. ‘After all, you lost 20,000 in front of Richmond. Do you think you can afford to write off 20,000 of your brethren like that?’
Old Bolly always replied first, and did so now. ‘Where do y’get that manner of number from, son? Some goddam paper in New Hampshire? Why, we lost mebbe 5000 out of all the army, not a boy over 5000, I tell you.’
‘Why, let me break it to you softly that according to the back page of the Richmond Enquirer you lost 5000 on the afternoon at Malvern Hill alone!’
Now sometimes Cate would go close to the bone, as he had now. And they all sat quiet. 20,000. A figure that made your breath catch.
Even Danny Blalock, who’d started off with Cate a week ago by going into a fine old state of Virginian outrage, had now gone mild on him. Looking up from his Knickerbocker, he murmured: ‘The conscript’s right. 4000 deaths. And given the surgeons we have, some of the wounded will join that number quick enough.’
Secretly, Cate felt burdened and sickened by all the afflictions of his soul and, specifically, of his heart. What am I doing, riding by train to take up a position against the Union? Sometimes he looked for a second in Bumpass’s direction and, in the one second, hated him and wanted him for a friend.
‘You ought to be kinder to these boys,’ he said loudly one time, to the coach in general. ‘These bounty boys and substituters and us Lincoln boys too. Don’t the figures show clear enough that you need us? Why, I am affronted there is no society for the comfort of conscripts.’
Bumpass noticed this was answered by hoots, but not angry ones.
‘Where is there a sock-knitting committee to supply us poor mercenaries?’ Cate shouted.
‘Where is there,’ Ash Judd said, ‘a society for proddin’ your asses with bayonets?’
Every so often the train would halt for five, ten minutes, and the railroad embankments would be dotted with squatting Confederates easing their afflicted bowels. Sometimes those suffering the worst forms of camp diarrhoea could not wait for the luxury of a stop. By the time the train got to Hanover Junction in the late, blazing afternoon, the carriage reeked of sweat and excreta, and there were even tears on the cheeks of some of the new boys, as if this kind of travel weren’t a whole sight better than marching.
2
They camped there in the fields around the little depot for some days. It was not till the Saturday after Bumpass and Gus left the encampment outside Richmond that Wheat’s regiment moved further and lit their fires in the lovely meadows around Gordonsville, facing north along the Orange and Alexandria rail-bed that ran all the way to the edge of Washington. The hills were low and pleasant round Gordonsville, the mosquitoes weren’t there in such swarms, and there was no scum or methane or blood in the flow of crystal waters rushing down from the Blue Ridge.
Yet there was always the chance of Union cavalry striking down from Culpeper, and everyone had to do his picket duty. One evening, when the hills to the west were turning a royal purple, Company B, Guess’s Company, of the Shenandoah Volunteers went out to the north-west of Gordonsville, to a fringe of forest, to stand an all-night picket stint.
Captain Guess led them out. He was the Valley dentist who’d let Usaph visit Ephie that time months ago. This last month, in fact since the fights around Richmond, he’d got sullen and smelt of liquor a lot, whereas before that he had been a pleasant, quiet man who lent newspapers around.
Guess arranged the picket duty so that some of the veterans could keep to the rear and boil up coffee on low fires. For the rest he ordered that each soldier of experience stood beside a conscript.
‘No exclusive goddam clubs,’ he muttered.
This mixing-up took Usaph away from Gus, and somehow he ended with a conscript either side of him. One was a thin boy of at most eighteen years of age, and the other was Decatur Cate. Usaph suspected Cate had arranged his place in line so that Guess would appoint him to Usaph rather than to any other veteran.
They stood in the shadows at the northern end of a forest. ‘Thing is,’ muttered Usaph to his two charges, ‘you spread off aways from me – some seven paces at most for now. After a time, an officer will pass along telling how one of us can sleep. When that occurs, why we spread out a little more to take up the slack.’ He snorted. ‘And you can sleep first of all, Cate.’
The air in front of their picket post, above the gentle pastures, was a deep smoky blue when Usaph and the others took their post amongst hawthorn and sumac. The moon would rise early tonight. Lucius Taber, the new officer and former Immutable, went along the line shooshing people who knew better than he did how to be quiet. Soon he left, he had to go back and dine with Colonel Wheat, and low, low talk began, since the veterans knew talk didn’t carry so far. It was the sound of disturbed underbrush that carried.
Usaph knew you had to talk to stop boredom getting you. He was damn sure he wouldn’t talk to Cate.
‘What’s your name, son?’ Usaph asked the boy three yards on the other side of him.
‘Joe Nunnally,’ the boy hissed. He hadn’t moved anything like seven paces off. Maybe he was scared.
‘You a substitute, Joe Nunnally? You get a few hundred dollars from a rich boy?’
The boy didn’t answer. ‘I ain’t asking for the sake of meanness, boy. I’m jest curious.’
Close to Usaph’s other side, Decatur Cate started murmuring. ‘If he’s a substitute, it means he’s taken blood money. If he’s a mere conscript, why he’s a coward or a Lincoln-lover. You can’t expect people, Mr Bumpass, to answer questions if there’s no benefit in any of the answers they can give.’
Usaph coughed in an irritable way and spat and didn’t reply.
The b
oy said, ‘I’m a substitute. What of it? $200? That ain’t goddam likely. Sixty I got from a lawyer’s son over to Raleigh County.’
Usaph whispered: ‘That ain’t what the papers say you ought to get, Joe Nunnally.’
‘I don’t read no papers.’
‘Sixty ain’t much.’
‘It is to my maw.’
‘Coming from over to Raleigh, you’d be one of them black Republicans like some other people,’ Usaph stated. He still would not include Cate in the talk. As for looking, he looked all the time at the hills before him, without even thinking about it, and Nunnally found himself doing the same, since he believed this must be veteran’s behaviour and everything veterans did – he supposed – was aimed at avoiding death.
‘Maybe I am one of them black Republicans,’ he said. ‘But then maybe I jest got hungry kin. The hungry don’t give a hoot about no politics.’
Usaph laughed soundlessly. Here he stood with a Yankee picket either side of him. That’s what conscription had done, put a Northerner on one flank and one of those Union-loving boys from the western counties on the other. If Lincoln or McClellan could know that tonight, how they’d laugh over their goddam brandy.
But these political thoughts of Bumpass’s, the amusement they gave his mind, were a mere surface thing. The deep tumour, the question that wouldn’t cease its throb, was still whether Ephie had lain with his dead Uncle, that dead boozy man who had engineered Ephie and him together, and now whether Cate had dazzled and possessed her.
Guess walked behind them and said one man in three could rest.
‘Cate,’ Usaph said in the edges of that thicket. And may your dreams reek, and may snakes rise from them!
Cate went without a word, but Usaph believed that he was smiling in the dark.
Virginia, as Usaph Bumpass had learnt, was a mass of clearings cooped off one from the other by thickets. The moon rose and lit up the particular thicket beyond the field that Usaph and Joe Nunnally faced. You could hardly hear anything from the other pickets and the only shuffling was the busy shuffling paws of raccoons and possums all around you, and the only real buzz was the buzz of insects.