The Bloody Ground

“Not if Faulconer has anything to do with it.”

“So prove him wrong,” Swynyard said energetically. “Make the Yellowlegs into a fine regiment, Nate. If anyone can do it, you can.”

“I sometimes wonder why I fight for this damn country,” Starbuck said bitterly.

Swynyard smiled. “Nothing to stop you going back North, Nate, nothing at all. Just keep walking north and you’ll get home. Is that what you want?”

“Hell, no.”

“So prove Faulconer wrong. He reckons that a punishment battalion will be the end of you, so prove him wrong.”

“Damn his bastard soul,” Starbuck said.

“That’s God’s work, Nate. Your’s is to fight. So do it well. And I’ll put in a request that your men are sent to my brigade.”

“What chance is there of that?”

“I’m a Mason, remember,” Swynyard said with a grin, “and I’ve still got a favor or two to call in. We’ll get you back among friends.”

Maitland stood up as the two ragged officers walked back to the tent. He had drunk one of the two cups of coffee and started on the second. “You’ll introduce me to the Legion’s officers, Starbuck?” he said.

“I’ll do that for you, Colonel,” Starbuck said. He might resent this man displacing him, but he would not put difficulties in Maitland’s way because the Legion would have to fight the Yankees whoever commanded them and Starbuck did not want their morale hurt more than was necessary. “I’ll talk you up to them,” he promised grudgingly.

“But I don’t think you should stay after that,” Maitland suggested confidently. “No man can serve two masters, isn’t that what the good book says? So the sooner you’re gone, Starbuck, the better for the men.”

“Better for you, you mean,” Starbuck said.

“That, too,” Maitland agreed calmly.

Starbuck was losing the Legion and had been consigned to a battalion of the damned, which meant he was being destroyed and would somehow have to survive.

LUCIFER WAS NOT HAPPY. “RICHMOND,” HE TOLD STARBUCK soon after they had arrived in the city, “is not to my taste.”

“Then go away,” Starbuck retorted grumpily.

“I am considering it,” Lucifer said. He was liable to pompousness when he perceived that his dignity was under assault, and that dignity was very easily offended. He was only a boy, fifteen at the very most, and he would have been small for his age even if he were two years younger, but he had crammed a lot of living into those few years and was possessed of a self-assurance that fascinated Starbuck quite as much as the mystery of the boy’s past. Lucifer never spoke directly about that past, nor did Starbuck ask about it, for he had learned that every query merely prompted a different version. It was plain the boy was a contraband, an escaped slave, and Starbuck suspected Lucifer had been trying to reach the sanctuary of the north when he had been apprehended by Jackson’s army at Manassas, but Lucifer’s life before that moment, like his real name, remained all mystery, just as it was a mystery why he had elected to stay with Starbuck after his recapture.

“He likes you, that’s why,” Sally Truslow told Starbuck. “He knows you’ll give him plenty of rope and he’s mischievous enough to want rope. Then one day he’ll grow up and you won’t ever see him again.”

Starbuck and Lucifer had walked from the rain-soaked battlefield to the railhead at Fredericksburg, then taken the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad to the capital. Starbuck’s travel pass gave him admission to one of the passenger cars while Lucifer traveled in a boxcar with the other Negroes. The train had puffed and jerked and clanked and shuddered and thus crept south until, at dawn, Starbuck had been woken by the cry of a Richmond milkmaid. The Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac depot was in the heart of the city and the rails ran right down the center of Broad Street, and Starbuck found it a strange experience to see the familiar city through the soot-smutted window of a slow-moving railcar. Newspaper boys ran alongside the train offering copies of the Examiner or Sentinel, while on the sidewalk pedestrians edged past the carts and wagons that had been herded to the street’s sides by the train’s slow, clangorous passage. Starbuck stared bleary-eyed through the window, noticing gloomily how many doors were hung with black, how many women were in mourning, how many cripples begged on the sidewalk, and how many men had crêpe armbands.

Starbuck had convinced himself that he would not call on Sally. He told himself that she was no longer his woman. She had found a lover, Starbuck’s good friend Patrick Lassan, a French cavalryman who was ostensibly observing the war on behalf of the French army but who really rode with Jeb Stuart. Starbuck told himself that Sally was no longer his business and he was still telling himself that truth when he knocked on the blue painted door beside the tailor’s shop on the corner of Fourth and Grace. Sally had been glad to see him. She was already up, already busy, and she ordered her slaves to bring Starbuck a breakfast of coffee and bread. “It’s bad bread,” she said, “but there ain’t any good bread. Nor any good coffee, for that matter. Hell, I’m using acorns, wheat berries, and chicory for coffee. Nothing’s good now except the cigars and business.” Sally’s business was to be Madame Royal, Richmond’s most expensive medium, who offered expensive seances to reunite the living with the dead. “It’s all tricks,” she said scornfully, “I just tell ’em what they want to hear and the more I charge the more they believe me.” She shrugged. “Dull business, Nate, but better than working nights.” She meant the brothel on Marshall Street where Sally had first discovered her business acumen.

“I can imagine.”

“I doubt that you can, Nate,” Sally said good humoredly, then gave him a long searching look. “You’re thin. Look worn out like a mule. That a bullet cut on your face?”

“Tree splinter.”

“The girls will love it, Nate. Not that you ever needed help in that department, but tell them it’s a bullet and they’ll all want to pet you. And you got a slave too?”

“I pay him when I can,” Starbuck said defensively.

“Then you’re as damn fool,” she said fondly. “Bad as Delaney.” Belvedere Delaney was a lawyer officially attached to the War Department, but his duties left him plenty of time for running his various businesses, which included Richmond’s most exclusive brothel as well as the crêpe-curtained premises where Sally manufactured conversations with the dead. Sally had first met Delaney by being one of his employees in the brothel, and not just any employee, but the most sought-after girl in Richmond. She was Captain Truslow’s only child and had been raised to hard work and small reward on Truslow’s hill farm, but she had fled the farm and embraced the city, a transition made easy by her striking looks. Sally had a deceptively soft face, a mass of golden hair, and a quick spirit to liven her attractiveness, but there was far more to Sally Truslow than nature’s accident of beauty. She knew how to work and knew how to profit from that work, and these days she was Delaney’s business partner rather than his employee. “Delaney’s a fool,” she said tartly. “He lets his house boy twist him round his little finger, and you’re probably just as bad. So let’s have a look at your boy. I want to know you’re being looked after.” And thus Lucifer was summoned up to the parlor where he quickly charmed Sally who recognized in the boy someone who, like herself, was working up from rock bottom. “But why are you carrying a gun, boy?” she demanded of Lucifer.

“’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.

Starbuck turned to see that Sally was gazing at a punishment horse that had been erected between two of the huts. The horse was a long beam that was mounted edgewise on a pair of tall trestles, and the punishment consisted of a man being forced to straddle the beam’s edge and stay there while his own weight turned his groin into a mass of pain. A prisoner was on the horse with his hands bound and his legs tied to prevent him dismounting, while an armed guard stood beside the steps that were used to mount the instrument. “A punishment,” Starbuck explained, “called a horse. Hurts like hell, I’m told.”

“That’s the point of punishment, ain’t it?” Sally said. She had taken her share of beatings as a child and the experience had thickened her skin.

The man beneath the horse appeared to ask a question of the straddling man. The prisoner shook his head and the man yanked down on his bound ankles so that the man screamed.

“Shit,” Starbuck said.

“Ain’t that a part of it?” Sally demanded.

“No.”

Sally looked at the distaste on Starbuck’s face. “You going soft, Nate?”

“I don’t mind punishing soldiers, but not torture. Besides, think of them.” He nodded toward the companies on the parade ground who were mutely watching the horse. “A regiment’s a fragile thing,” he said, echoing Swynyard’s words to Maitland. “It works best when the men are fighting the enemy, not each other.” He flinched as the guard tugged on the prisoner’s ankles again. “Hell,” he said, reluctant to intervene, but also unwilling to watch any more brutality. He strode toward the horse.

The guard who had tugged on the prisoner’s ankles was a sergeant who turned and watched Starbuck’s approach. Starbuck wore no badges of rank and had a rifle slung on his left shoulder, both of which suggested he was a private soldier, but he carried himself confidently and had a woman and servant, which suggested he might be an officer and the sergeant was consequently wary. “What’s he done?” Starbuck demanded.

“Being punished,” the sergeant said. He was a squat, bearded man. He was chewing tobacco and paused to spit a stream of yellowish spittle onto the grass. “Sergeant Case’s orders,” he added as though that should be sufficient explanation.

“I know he’s being punished,” Starbuck said, “but I asked what he had done.”

“Being punished,” the sergeant said obstinately.

Starbuck moved so he could see the drawn face of the prisoner. “What did you do?” he asked the man.

Before the prisoner could give any answer the drill sergeant abandoned the companies on the parade ground and marched toward the horse. “No one talks to prisoners under punishment!” he screamed in a terrifying voice. “You know that, Sergeant Webber! Punishment is punishment. Punishment is what will turn this lily-livered rabble of squirrel shit into soldiers.” He slammed to a halt two paces from Starbuck. “You have questions,” he said forcefully, “you ask them to me.”

“And who are you?” Starbuck asked.

The tall sergeant looked surprised, as though his fame must have been obvious. He gave no immediate answer, but instead inspected Starbuck for clues to his status. The presence of Sally and Lucifer must have convinced him that Starbuck was an officer, though Starbuck’s age suggested he was not an officer who needed to be placated. “Sergeant Case,” he snapped. Case’s long neck and small head would have looked risible on any other man, and his ridiculous appearance was not helped by a wispy beard and a thin broken nose, but there was a malevolence in the sergeant’s dark eyes that turned amusement into fear. The eyes were flat, hard, and merciless. Starbuck noted too that Case’s gangly body was deceptive; it was not a weak, thin frame, but lean and muscled. He was uniformed immaculately, every button polished, every crease hot-pressed, and every badge shining. Sergeant Case looked just as Starbuck had imagined soldiers ought to look like before he discovered that, at least in the Confederacy, they were generally ragged as hell. “Sergeant Case,” Case said again, leaning closer to Starbuck, “and I,” he stressed that word, “am in charge here.”

“So what did the prisoner do?” Starbuck asked.

“Do?” Case asked dramatically. “Do? What he did is of no business to you. Not one scrap.”

“What battalion is he?” Starbuck demanded, nodding toward the prisoner.

“He could belong to the Coldstream bloody Guards,” Case shouted, “and it still ain’t your business.”

Starbuck looked up at the prisoner. The man’s face was white with pain and rigid with the effort needed not to show that pain. “Battalion, soldier?” Starbuck snapped.

The man grimaced, then managed to say a single word. “Punishment.”

“Then you are my business,” Starbuck said. He took his folding knife out of a pocket, unsnapped the blade, and sawed at the rope binding the prisoner’s ankles. The motion made the prisoner whimper, but it provoked Sergeant Case to leap forward threateningly.

Starbuck paused and looked up into Case’s eyes. “I’m an officer, Sergeant,” he said, “and if you lay a damned hand on me I’ll make sure you spend the rest of today on this horse. You won’t walk for a goddamn week. Maybe not for a goddamn month.”

Sergeant Case stepped back as Starbuck cut through the last strands of hemp and put a hand under one of the prisoner’s boots. “Ready?” he called, then heaved up hard, throwing the prisoner off the beam. The man thumped onto the damp ground where he lay still as Starbuck crouched and sliced through the rope about his wrists. “So what did he do?” Starbuck asked Sergeant Case.

“Son of a bitch!” Case said, though whether of Starbuck or the prisoner it was impossible to tell, then he turned abruptly and strode away with his companion.

The prisoner groaned and tried to stand, but the pain in his crotch was too savage. He crawled to one of the horse’s supporting trestles and dragged himself to a sitting position, then just clung to the timber. His eyes watered and his breath came in small, stuttering gasps. Even Sally flinched at his evident pain. “Guns,” he finally said.

“Guns?” Starbuck asked him. “What about them?”

“Son of a bitch is stealing guns,” the freed prisoner said, then was forced to stop because of the pain. He clutched his groin, held a deep breath, than shook his head in an effort to banish the dreadful agony. “You asked why I was on the horse? Because of guns. I was on a detail to unload rifles. We got twenty boxes of them. Good ones. But Holborrow made us put them in crates marked CONDEMNED and then gave us muskets instead. Richmond muskets. Hell,” he spat, then momentarily closed his eyes as a spasm of pain made him grimace. “I don’t want to go shooting no Yankees with buck and ball, not if they’ve got minie balls. That’s why I argued with that son of a bitch Sergeant Case.”

“So where are the rifles now?” Starbuck asked.

“Hell knows. Sold, probably. Holborrow don’t care so long as we never go to war. We’re not supposed to fight, see? Just get supplies that the son of a bitch sells.” The man frowned up at Starbuck. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Potter!” A new and angry voice yelled from the headquarters building. “Potter, you son of a bitch! You bastard! You lunkheaded piece of dog shit. You black-assed fool!” The speaker was a tall, lean officer in a braided gray coat who stumped toward Starbuck with the help of a silver-tipped cane. Sergeant Case marched behind the officer, who had a neat blond goatee beard and a narrow mustache that had been carefully waxed into stiff points. He shoved the cane hard into the turf to aid each step and in between he brandished it toward the astonished Starbuck. “Where the hell have you been, Potter?” the officer demanded. “Just where the hell have you been, boy?”

“He’s talking to you?” Sally asked Starbuck in bemusement.

“Hell, boy, are you drunk?” The limping officer bellowed. “Potter, you black-ass lunkhead piece of leper shit, are you drunk?”

Starbuck was about to deny being either Potter or drunk, then a mischievous impulse welled up inside him. “Don’t say a word,” he said quietly to Sally and Lucifer, then shook his head. “I ain’t drunk,” he said as the officer came close.

“Is this how you repay a kindness?” the officer demanded fiercely. He had the stars of a colonel on his shoulders. “My apologies, ma’am,” the colonel touched his free hand to the brim of his hat, “but I can’t abide tardiness. Can’t abide it. Are you drunk, Potter?” The colonel stepped close to Starbuck and thrust his goatee up toward the younger man’s clean-shaven chin. “Let me smell your breath, Potter, let me smell your breath. Breathe, man, breathe!” He sniffed, then stepped back. “You don’t smell drunk,” the colonel said dubiously, “so why the hell, forgive me, ma’am, did you throw Private Rothwell off the horse. Answer me!”

“It was upsetting the lady,” Starbuck said.