1862 (44 page)

Nathan Hunter preferred to wear pajamas at night, preferably silk, although cotton was quite acceptable. He had first discovered the style of nightclothing when Amy had presented him with a set that had been imported from India, where it was commonly worn both as nightwear or for lounging. He had been so taken with their comfort, warmth, and practicality that he rarely wore a nightshirt again.

He propped himself up in bed and looked at his notes from the day’s conferences. The nation, he concluded, was fortunate that a man of General Scott’s experience, wisdom, and integrity was still available. With General Grant departed for his army, General Halleck had tried every means possible to get President Lincoln to change his mind. Grant’s strategy was too dangerous, he’d argued, and it almost guaranteed the fall of Washington.

Halleck’s logic had almost been compelling, and his near hysteria regarding his fears for the capital was not contrived. Halleck was terrified that Washington might be taken. He’d called for reinforcements and even questioned Meade’s strategy, which was to hold back two divisions from the trenches and forts to plug any breaches that might be made in the city’s defenses. Halleck had wanted all men in the trenches and no reserves.

Meade, inexperienced and cautious, had almost been swayed, and Lincoln looked concerned and confused. Then it had dawned on Meade that Halleck really wanted command for himself, at which point the short-tempered younger general had lashed out at his superior officer. Scott had been able to bring the arguing parties to a kind of truce, while Lincoln watched with sadness. The president wanted a unified front in the face of the Union’s enemies, and the petty bickering had to stop.

Finally, Lincoln forcefully reminded Halleck of his duties to support Grant, and Meade of his duties to defend Washington. Thus, when they finally called an end to the day’s work, Grant’s strategy was unchanged. It was amazing: Nathan thought. Did the Confederates have similar problems within their military hierarchy? They had to. They were human: weren’t they? Also: they were Americans: which meant they were as political and venal as anyone else.

He heard a noise in the hall: followed by a gentle tapping on the door. “Come in.”

It opened slowly. Rebecca peered shyly around its edge. “I was afraid you were asleep.”

Nathan sat up in surprise. He saw that she was wearing an incredibly awful-looking nightgown and had a cheap blanket draped around her shoulders. She looked beautiful and it was suddenly difficult for him to breathe.

“Am I making a mistake?” she asked, hesitation apparent on her face. The wrong answer and she would bolt. “Not for one second.”

He stood and walked to her as she closed the door behind her and let the blanket fall to the floor. An instant later they were in each other’s arms and kissing with a pent-up fervor that left them gasping.

They parted breathlessly and he looked at her. He was thoroughly and immediately aroused. With trembling hands he unbuttoned the nightgown until he was able to slide it over her pale shoulders and let it fall freely down to her ankles. Her nakedness took his breath away. She was far lovelier than he had ever hoped to imagine. She had small but perfectly formed breasts, a flat belly, and gently curved legs that were covered by only a wisp of dark hair. He gently traced his hand down from her throat, across her breasts, and below her belly. She closed her eyes and swayed to his caress. Then she took his hand in hers and had him repeat the journey, while, with her other hand, she grasped his hardened penis through the cloth of his pajamas. He gasped and leaned down to kiss the burn scar on her neck.

Rebecca released him and removed his hand from her body. She unbuttoned his pajama top and slid it off his shoulders. He was more muscular than she had thought and not particularly hairy. Then she untied the drawstring of the pants and he, too, was naked. They kissed again and felt the warmth of their thoroughly aroused bodies against each other.

Nathan dimmed the oil lamp but left it on as just an ember that broke the darkness. They lay down in bed and caressed each other until they thought they’d explode. He entered her and they came together, and both cried out as their bodies surged into one. It had been so long, almost too long. For Nathan it was a renewal, while for Rebecca it was a belated beginning.

Outside the storm raged, and the lightning flashed. Outside, great armies moved towards each other in a dance of death. Inside, neither Nathan nor Rebecca cared about any of this as they began to make love a second time.

Lord Palmerston felt his body quivering with a sudden chill. It had nothing to do with age, at least not much. What sent concern and almost fear coursing through his body was the realization that virtually everything that could go wrong had gone wrong in the war with what should have been an enfeebled United States. What the London newspapers and his so-called loyal opposition in Parliament were calling the Massacre at Hampton Roads was yet another case in point. Until recently, it was inconceivable that one single ship could dominate a battle, yet this is precisely what had happened.

When the final tally was taken, a dozen British merchant ships and one armed schooner had been sunk, with more than two score others damaged by shell or fire, or both. A large percentage of the damaged ships would have to be scrapped due to the severity of their wounds, and the insurers at Lloyds were already screaming bloody murder.

Many of the merchant ships had been empty, but about a third contained priceless ammunition, cannon, and other supplies that had gone up in smoke or were now resting at the bottom of Chesapeake Bay. The solitary Union ship, the
Potomac
had steamed away from Hampton Roads and now rested at anchor under the guns protecting the harbor of Baltimore. Or, Palmerston wondered, was it the other way around?

Metaphorically, he acknowledged that yet another thread had come loose in the fabric of dominance he was attempting to weave for his beloved Great Britain.

Palmerston knew he was an old man, and he sometimes had a hard time dealing with all the changes in technology that had occurred in his lifetime. First was the railroad. Nonexistent in his youth, it began as little more than an interesting toy, then as a means of commerce. Now it was a method of moving huge armies across a continent at speeds that were only dreamed of a couple of decades prior. Even while Lee marched north, Grant was assembling an equally vast army using the North’s tens of thousands of miles of rail lines that connected all parts of the Union like a spider’s iron web. Lee’s army could march twenty miles on a good day, but an army on a train might do ten or fifteen miles an hour for twenty-four hours, even in the worst of weather. The railroad had changed the face of war.

Another change was the fact that the Union was experimenting with repeating rifles. The fundamental weapon of the British and other armies had always been the musket, which had been essentially unchanged for nearly two hundred years. Now the rifled musket had increased range and firepower, and a repeating rifle, if manufactured in quantity, would again change the face of war.

How many faces did war have? he wondered.

But the most chilling change had been the steamship, which had spawned the ironclad. Again, only a few decades earlier, steamships went from unknown, to a novelty, to a necessity of commerce, and now, clad in iron, an invincible weapon of war, England depended on the wooden walls of her ships just as had ancient Athens, but now these walls were being smashed by shells from smoke-belching iron ships.

Admirals Chads and Parker had tendered their resignations following the debacle against the
Potomac.
Palmerston had rejected them for two reasons: first, because he had no one to replace them, and second, because of the nagging doubt that anyone else would have done any better,

The Admiralty had informed him that England would begin building new ironclad warships immediately, although it was hard for him to see what good that would do in this war. It took months, even years, to build a ship like the
Warrior
and she was already obsolete, Ironically, so was the original
Monitor,
along with the
New Ironsides.
The newer ships would have turrets, which the
Warrior
and the
New Ironsides
lacked, and would have more than one, like the
Potomac,
which doomed the
Monitor
to the scrap yard. New ships, the wizards of the Admiralty had said, would have higher free-boards than the current Monitors to facilitate ocean crossings. American Monitors were so low in the water that even a gentle sea washed over their decks. This made them difficult to hit, but perilous in a rough sea.

New ships would have sloping armored decks and round turrets, which meant that any shell striking one would be a deflection and not a direct hit. This was one of the reasons why the Monitors had sustained so little apparent damage in the three battles in which they’d been engaged. The new ships would have at least two turrets, maybe three or four, and each turret would contain at least two large guns. Because of the weight inherent in the turrets, the new ships would have to be much larger.

The technology race was going at a speed that was dizzying and almost incomprehensible to him.

So, he thought, in a year or so Great Britain would have some ironclads with which to challenge the Americans. However, the Americans were building coastal Monitors as quickly as a chicken lays eggs. It was even rumored that both the Union and the Confederacy were experimenting with ships that could operate underwater. It was a naval armaments race that Britain might not win, and Palmerston found the thought of sharing or even losing supremacy of the seas almost nauseating.

Lee and Grant, he thought sadly. It all depended on two previously unknown men named Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. The course of the British Empire depended on the skills of a pair of Americans he’d never met, and who represented social orders he found repugnant, slavery in the case of Lee, and the levelling of the aristocracy in the case of Grant. Lee was the one with the most skill, according to what Winfield Scott had written about him, but Grant was the new man, the American Cromwell, and one in whom Scott had placed his faith. Was this faith misplaced? Not likely. Grant had proven a deadly and dangerous adversary, and one who might defeat Lee, the Confederacy, and the British army.

What had happened? How had this terrible situation occurred? And how does one get out of this mess?

   Arrival at the crowded Philadelphia train station had been the end of a virtual triumphal march for General Patrick Cleburne and the men of the Irish Legion. Wherever their packed trains had gone, they had been cheered by the local population, with Cleburne and the other senior officers feted by local dignitaries and politicians. It was a heady experience with effusive compliments, good food, and liquor in abundance. Mornings often meant sore heads, and the rocking of the trains induced copious nausea. There were, however, few complaints.

Most amazing to the officers and men of the Irish Legion, the adulation came from the same population that had thought of Irish immigrants as little more than savages and not much better than the darkies the Union was fighting to free. The Irish immigrant, the Catholic shantyman, and the bog-trotter were well on their way to being accepted by Protestant America.

“Incredible.” said Cleburne as he finally fought his way through this latest crowd while his men prepared to get in marching order. They would not be staying in Philadelphia. Instead, they would be moving west to join the rest of General Thomas’s army, which was encamped in that direction.

“Nothing more than we deserve.” responded Attila Flynn. He tried to sound blase, but his emotions betrayed him and there was a tremor in his voice. Philadelphia’s welcome rivaled that of New York’s. Philadelphia was yet another great city, and one of many he’d never visited before, but one that gave further indication of the strength of the Union. At the time of the American Revolution, Philadelphia had been the second-largest city in the British Empire, second only to London itself. Now it had been eclipsed in size by New York, and possibly Boston, but Philadelphia was still an enormous assemblage of people and industry. He’d never been in the Deep South, but he’d been told that none of the Confederate cities had anything like the wealth, population, and industrial power of the North. Nor, he thought happily, did England. Oh, she had her Liverpools and her Birminghams, but none so many and none so numerous, powerful, and vibrant as what the Union had to offer. God help England. No. he corrected himself. God damn England.

“I won’t argue that.” Cleburne said, interrupting Flynn’s mental wanderings, “but I do wonder just what we’ve done to deserve all this.” They had managed to work their way into a decent-looking restaurant near the train station. Cleburne’s general’s star had gotten them a table, and they’d cheerfully accepted the offer of a free meal. The men of the Legion were eating far less elegantly in the streets in preparation for the march out of town, but were suffering no hardships. Sympathetic townspeople were showering the troops with breads, cakes, and other delicacies, which the men gobbled up like children.

Flynn chuckled. “Let’s just say that, thanks to some well-placed articles with sympathetic newspapers, the Irish Legion is considered one of the reasons Toronto fell and Britain is abandoning Canada.”

Cleburne was aghast. His Legion had done nothing to warrant such praise. Aside from some minor skirmishes, his men had done damned little since the fall of Toronto for the very good reason that the war in Canada had entered a lull. His men were far from combat veterans. The vast majority had yet to fire a shot at anything other than a stationary wooden target.

“You shouldn’t tell lies,” he said.

“And what of it.” Flynn sniffed. “Every regiment is sending songs of its own praise back to the folks at home. Are we the only unit winning the war single-handed? I fervently doubt it. Politics and war go hand in hand and don’t doubt it for one minute.”