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The Starbuck Chronicles: The Complete 4-Book Collection
Bernard Cornwell
Bernard Cornwell’s bestselling series The Starbuck Chronicles, on the American Civil War, now in one complete eBook for the first time.REBELIt is summer 1861. The armies of North and South stand on the brink of America’s civil war. Nathanial Starbuck arrives in the capital of the Confederate South, where he enlists in an elite regiment. He is a northern boy fighting for the southern cause. But nothing can prepare him for the shocking violence to follow in the war which broke America in two.COPPERHEADNathanial Starbuck is a Copperhead: a northerner fighting for the rebel South in America’s Civil War. Expelled from the Faulconer Legion, Starbuck must travel a hard road before he can rejoin his comrades. His journey will take him through the savage prisons of Richmond, across the blood-sodden battlefields of Virginia, and into the deadly high command of the northern army.BATTLE FLAGThe epic battle for control of the Confederate capital continues through the hot summer of 1862. It’s a battle that Captain Nate Starbuck, a Yankee fighting for the Southern cause, has to survive and win.THE BLOODY GROUNDIt is late summer 1862 and the Confederacy is invading the United States of America.Nate Starbuck, a northern preacher’s son fighting for the rebel South, is given command of a punishment battalion – a despised unit of shirkers and cowards. His enemies expect it to be his downfall, as Starbuck must lead this ramshackle unit into a battle that will prove to be the bloodiest of the Civil War.
BERNARD CORNWELL
THE COMPLETE STARBUCK CHRONICLES
REBEL
COPPERHEAD
BATTLE FLAG
THE BLOODY GROUND
Copyright (#ulink_0037f20f-4df7-5f16-a6aa-fa12e2fb5d58)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Rebel first published by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993
Copperhead first published by HarperCollinsPublishers 1994
Battle Flag first published by HarperCollinsPublishers 1995
The Bloody Ground first published by HarperCollinsPublishers 1996
Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996
Cover layout © HarperCollinsPublishers 2013. Design by stuartpolsondesign.com (http://www.stuartpolsondesign.com)
Cover illustration © Gino D’Achille
Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publicaton
Source ISBNs: 9780007339471, 9780007339488, 9780007339495, 9780007339501
Ebook Edition © 2013-11 ISBN: 9780007531981
Version: 2017-05-08
Table of Contents
Cover (#u086500c4-8153-5d18-b626-e7c223a0d774)
Title Page (#u7c56255f-4294-5bbc-ad58-ca1851165cee)
Copyright (#ue5855441-bc01-517d-ba9c-2f430bc25897)
Rebel (#u9fbfdc7e-261b-5157-a1bf-91aaf007ca5d)
Copperhead (#u5e9ada02-e0f7-57b6-9962-78c85b56cd93)
Battle Flag (#u59efc3f6-2166-5866-b4fd-ed8de5cb3e83)
The Bloody Ground (#u64ce6465-3391-529a-83b8-ab896c8b32ab)
Keep Reading (#u3b0a43da-77bc-5df1-a918-781b3c93aace)
About the Author (#ud8175f25-de95-53a0-b2be-006316a0062a)
Also by Bernard Cornwell (#uc651e525-44b9-5ffe-87ee-92fee4351d8c)
About the Publisher (#u0d11f139-ae14-59fa-b72f-7720b3e885ce)
BERNARD CORNWELL
The Starbuck Chronicles
Rebel
REBEL
is for Alex and Kathy de Jonge,
who introduced me to the Old Dominion
CONTENTS
Cover (#u9fbfdc7e-261b-5157-a1bf-91aaf007ca5d)
Title Page (#u6bc8c89b-20ee-5e1c-ab56-9e99aaaa6cd9)
Dedication (#u05d1ed31-bc35-5ea7-b3b2-624a64381f1c)
Map (#uec1fcd33-7013-5103-87e0-4a5a4937b56c)
Part One (#u015c4913-b4a3-506f-ab4a-a9f53d635048)
Chapter One (#u2eea8ebd-8a1b-5203-bad6-0a8faf957914)
Chapter Two (#u2576d46e-d104-5046-980a-2dc58bd2b0af)
Chapter Three (#ud41b3e7b-49d2-5db7-83bd-a8a1389e4e3f)
Chapter Four (#u102b5dd0-4f14-5eeb-a81c-b4cde0ad7d9c)
Part Two (#ua03d168d-f5a8-552b-a311-ec283a3bf295)
Chapter Five (#ude2c417b-dfe9-55b6-b577-51ca990ce9e1)
Chapter Six (#u924e3e14-5832-5ecd-a325-da3e779bc6d3)
Chapter Seven (#ub2cfcba2-83c6-5b5b-9f5a-96d6a221b354)
Chapter Eight (#u2d23dde6-e0e2-52d2-972c-9925ae02ed30)
Part Three (#u9ddbc5f0-20c9-5b4f-b9a7-709dd27f55c8)
Chapter Nine (#uc9650e7b-e32d-58b8-92c5-25a2ff113821)
Chapter Ten (#u50ee921b-05a1-5473-a81d-d3a8ca8f70c5)
Chapter Eleven (#u36722513-aaef-52a0-9ee7-c161be5e2269)
Chapter Twelve (#ufc916d5d-c881-52aa-87d7-a5f0774b7172)
Chapter Thirteen (#uaf3d2665-6fe2-5177-9456-5a78dc45f3d3)
Chapter Fourteen (#u4e7902e6-2b9b-5429-881d-355831163dfd)
Historical Note (#u73757461-4aa2-5c25-85e5-2d3e6ef6cd55)
PART ONE (#ulink_d20a6741-9831-58fb-a4f3-226445fb4fe3)
ONE (#ulink_1ef3d0c7-037b-5af2-a43d-9018b2fc49e2)
THE YOUNG MAN was trapped at the top end of Shockoe Slip where a crowd had gathered in Cary Street. The young man had smelt the trouble in the air and had tried to avoid it by ducking into an alleyway behind Kerr’s Tobacco Warehouse, but a chained guard dog had lunged at him and so driven him back to the steep cobbled slip where the crowd had engulfed him.
‘You going somewhere, mister?’ a man accosted him.
The young man nodded, but said nothing. He was young, tall and lean, with long black hair and a clean-shaven face of flat planes and harsh angles, though at present his handsome looks were soured by sleeplessness. His skin was sallow, accentuating his eyes, which were the same gray as the fog-wrapped sea around Nantucket, where his ancestors had lived. In one hand he was carrying a stack of books tied with hemp rope, while in his other was a carpetbag with a broken handle. His clothes were of good quality, but frayed and dirty like those of a man well down on his luck. He betrayed no apprehension of the crowd, but instead seemed resigned to their hostility as just another cross he had to bear.
‘You heard the news, mister?’ The crowd’s spokesman was a bald man in a filthy apron that stank of a tannery.
Again the young man nodded. He had no need to ask what news, for there was only one event that could have sparked this excitement in Richmond’s streets. Fort Sumter had fallen, and the news, hopes and fears of civil war were whipping across the American states.
‘So where are you from?’ the bald man demanded, seizing the young man’s sleeve as though to force an answer.
‘Take your hands off me!’ The tall young man had a temper.
‘I asked you civil,’ the bald man said, but nevertheless let go of the younger man’s sleeve.
The young man tried to turn away, but the crowd pressed around him too thickly and he was forced back across the street toward the Columbian Hotel where an older man dressed in respectable though disheveled clothes had been tied to the cast-iron palings that protected the hotel’s lower windows. The young man was still not the crowd’s prisoner, but neither was he free unless he could somehow satisfy their curiosity.
‘You got papers?’ another man shouted in his ear.
‘Lost your voice, son?’ The breath of his questioners was fetid with whiskey and tobacco. The young man made another effort to push against his persecutors, but there were too many of them and he was unable to prevent them from trapping him against a hitching post on the hotel’s sidewalk. It was mid-morning on a warm spring day. The sky was cloudless, though the dark smoke from the Tredegar Iron Works and the Gallegoe Mills and the Asa Snyder Stove Factory and the tobacco factories and Talbott’s Foundry and the City Gas Works all combined to make a rank veil that haloed the sun. A Negro teamster, driving an empty wagon up from the wharves of Samson and Pae’s Foundry, watched expressionless from atop his wagon’s box. The crowd had stopped the carter from turning his horses out of Shockoe Slip, but the man was too wise to make any protest.
‘Where are you from, boy?’ The bald tanner thrust his face close to the young man’s. ‘What’s your name?’
‘None of your business.’ The tone was defiant.
‘So we’ll find out!’ The bald man seized the bundle of books and tried to pull them away. For a moment there was a fruitless tug of war, then the frayed rope holding the books parted and the volumes spilt across the cobbles. The bald man laughed at the accident and the young man hit him. It was a good hard blow and it caught the bald man off his balance so that he rocked backward and almost fell.
Someone cheered the young man, admiring his spirit. There were about two hundred people in the crowd with some fifty more onlookers who half hung back from the proceedings and half encouraged them. The crowd itself was mischievous rather than ugly, like children given an unexpected vacation from school. Most of them were in working clothes, betraying that they had used the news of Fort Sumter’s fall as an excuse to leave their benches and lathes and presses. They wanted some excitement, and errant Northerners caught in the city’s streets would be this day’s best providers of that excitement.
The bald man rubbed his face. He had lost dignity in front of his friends and wanted revenge. ‘I asked you a question, boy.’
‘And I said it was not your business.’ The young man was trying to pick up his books, though two or three had already been snatched away. The prisoner already tied to the hotel’s window bars watched in silence.
‘So where are you from, boy?’ a tall man asked, but in a conciliatory voice, as though he was offering the young man a chance to make a dignified escape.
‘Faulconer Court House.’ The young man heard and accepted the note of conciliation. He guessed that other strangers had been accosted by this mob, then questioned and released, and that if he kept his head then he too might be spared whatever fate awaited the middle-aged man already secured to the railings.
‘Faulconer Court House?’ the tall man asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Your name?’
‘Baskerville.’ He had just read the name on a fascia board of a shop across the street; ‘Bacon and Baskerville,’ the board read, and the young man snatched the name in relief. ‘Nathaniel Baskerville.’ He embellished the lie with his real Christian name.
‘You don’t sound like a Virginian, Baskerville,’ the tall man said.
‘Only by adoption.’ His vocabulary, like the books he had been carrying, betrayed that the young man was educated.
‘So what do you do in Faulconer County, boy?’ another man asked.
‘I work for Washington Faulconer.’ Again the young man spoke defiantly, hoping the name would serve as a talisman for his protection.
‘Best let him go, Don!’ a man called.
‘Let him be!’ a woman intervened. She did not care that the boy was claiming the protection of one of Virginia’s wealthiest landowners; rather she was touched by the misery in his eyes as well as by the unmistakable fact that the crowd’s captive was very good-looking. Women had always been quick to notice Nathaniel, though he himself was too inexperienced to realize their interest.
‘You’re a Yankee, boy, aren’t you?’ the taller man challenged.
