Only the Gallant (12 page)

“Perhaps we ought to go inside. It might be safer,” Ophelia said, placing her slender white hand through the crook of Jesse’s left arm.

McQueen nodded and led her out from under the honeysuckle and back to the ballroom, where Caitlin Brennan and Colonel Henri Baptiste prowled among the guests.

Safer?
McQueen thought. I doubt it. He reentered the ballroom with all the enthusiasm of a man ascending a scaffold. Ophelia was immediately whisked from his arms by Bon Tyrone, who insisted on having at least one slow waltz with his sister, whom he claimed was the most beautiful woman in the room. Jesse wasn’t, however, alone for long. Caitlin Brennan refused her way through a parade of disappointed officers to stand at McQueen’s side.

“I believe you asked for my hand in this waltz,” she mentioned.

Jesse started to refuse then considered how this might look and changed his mind.

“Good things come to those who wait,” he gallantly replied, and led her into the throng. He wasn’t a good dancer, and to his profound gratitude, the orchestra kept up a slow steady rhythm.

“Smile,” Caitlin whispered.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“That was quite a scene in the garden. Please. Don’t tell me—she loves you for your gallant self.”

“You sound jealous,” Jesse chided.

“And pigs have wings,” she said. “Now hush and hear what I have to say.” Bon Tyrone and his sister danced past. Ophelia seemed surprised at Jesse’s choice of partners. As for Caitlin, she never missed an opportunity for mischief and changed her tone of voice, laughed aloud, and said, “Lieutenant, you
are
a rogue.” As the Tyrones gracefully spun away Jesse closed his eyes, lost a step, and stumbled over himself, much to Caitlin’s amusement.

“
Your
feet may be next,” he threatened.

“There are rumors that construction has been completed on a Confederate ironclad to rival anything afloat. It is supposedly anchored somewhere on the Yazoo within striking distance of Porter’s fleet. Grant needs to know if it exists and what sort of armament it carries. Abbot wants you to find out.” Caitlin spoke swiftly, keeping her voice low and her features animated, as if she were flirting with her partner. She concluded her message with another merry laugh and, willing herself to blush on cue, gave the impression that Jesse had made the most scandalous of suggestions.

“How do I contact Abbot?” Jesse asked as the musicians finished playing and the guests heartily applauded. The bombardment had been brief and distant, and word had already spread through the crowd that Rebel gunners had driven the Yankee mortar boats back up the Mississippi. This good news immediately buoyed up the spirits of everyone present.

“I’ll carry your report to Memphis,” Caitlin said as President Davis led the guests in a rousing cheer for the Confederate artillerymen who were defending the city. “I’ll meet you behind the theater by the alley door. No one will suspect me.”

“Indeed?” Jesse said, the hairs rising on the back of his neck. He was being watched. He didn’t have to guess by whom. “Tell that to my old friend Colonel Henri Baptiste. He’s here in the room.” He bowed and kissed Caitlin’s hand and pretended to thank her for the dance. By the change in her expression he knew his words had struck home. Caitlin had never been formally introduced to the colonel, but they had traveled in the same social circles and he might remember her. If so, he might well be wondering what this cultured Confederate bride, who had supposedly been awaiting her husband’s arrival in New Orleans, was doing here in Vicksburg with a new name and entertaining at the local theater. It was hardly the proper calling for a lady of breeding.

McQueen scanned the faces surrounding him, trying not to appear obvious. He discovered Baptiste in a corner, studying them both with a troubled expression. Jesse avoided eye contact with the diminutive Creole. Ophelia intercepted “her lieutenant” and flashed a look of defiance in Caitlin’s direction as she bore him away from the clutches of this Mademoiselle DuToit.

Jesse was just as happy for Ophelia’s company as she was for his and was about to tell her so when a shadow fell between them.

“Excuse me, Lieutenant.”

Jesse’s gaze grew cold and guarded and he turned to find the silver-haired Creole standing at his side. Baptiste stroked his silvery goatee. “Ma’am,” he said, acknowledging Ophelia.

“Yes?” Jesse felt a trickle of sweat trace a path behind his ear.

“I feel as if we’ve met. I’ve been trying to place you. I am Colonel Henri Baptiste, lately of New Orleans. Don’t I know you?”

“A pleasure to meet you, sir. But rest assured, you do not know me.”

“Lieutenant McQueen hails from the Indian Territory,” Ophelia interjected.

“McQueen? No. Cannot place the name. And I have never been west of the Mississippi. Maybe it’s just a resemblance … to someone else.” Baptiste shrugged and bowed to the lady. “Pardon my intrusion.” He backed off and headed out of the room to join several of the older men who had retired to the parlor to sample Judge Miller’s brandy and cigars.

“An odd little man,” Ophelia said, watching him depart. “Have you ever been to New Orleans, Jesse?”

Jesse ran his fingers beneath his gray collar and scratched at the rope scar on his neck, the legacy of his first encounter with Colonel Henri Baptiste. “Oh, I … hung around there once,” he replied.

The musicians came to his rescue and struck up a lively Tennessee two-step. Jesse caught Ophelia by the arm and whirled her off into the dance before she could ask any more questions.

T
HE REBEL SENTRY NEVER
heard Jesse. He’d been gathering deadwood for a fire and came walking up out of a tangle of thorns and underbrush when the shadow of the intruder fell across him. As the sentry looked up, a gust of wind snatched his cap, revealing his matted, dirty brown hair plastered back from a high forehead.

“Damn!” the sentry muttered.

Jesse clubbed him on the skull with a red oak branch. The Rebel dropped his load of firewood and tumbled back down the ravine he’d just left. Jesse scrambled after the young soldier and pulled him undercover. A bruise the size of a goose egg began to swell on the unconscious man’s scalp.

Jesse paused to check his surroundings, taking care to see if he’d attracted undue attention. The sentry might not be alone. He waited, pulling his greatcoat around him for warmth. It was the twentieth of December, a cold, damp day with the sun a ghostly orb masked by somber gray clouds pushed along by a gentle but insistent north wind.

Jesse had ridden out of Vicksburg before sunup, taking the Jackson road east of town. He was no stranger to the picket lines. They were accustomed to seeing the courier come and go. Once a couple of miles clear of the fortifications, he pointed his mare north to intercept the Yazoo at its juncture with the Mississippi a few miles above Vicksburg.

He’d spent the better part of the day skirting Confederate patrols while making his way along the south bank of the Yazoo. He’d cut inland, keeping to groves of red oaks, and stumbled upon the sentry quite by accident. The private’s situation intrigued him. Cavalry patrols were fairly common, but a sentry posted this far from any town meant he was either on picket duty and there was an army encamped up ahead, or he was there to protect something the Confederates were attempting to conceal.

Jesse McQueen knew the only two Rebel forces of any merit were divided between Vicksburg and Jackson. He grinned and muttered, “I found it,” and began to work his way along the ravine until the ground became too muddy. Then he climbed up the slope and followed a deer trail through the woods lining this bend of the river. He intercepted a bayou and began to wonder whether or not he ought to bring his horse up. But he could spy a patch of river through a stand of moss-hung cypress trees and the temptation was too great to resist.

The deer trail skirted the worst of the bayou. A water moccasin, a yard long and looking for all the world like a gray branch lying across the path, came alive and slithered off into the brackish waters of the bayou. Jesse kept his eyes peeled for more such “branches” as he worked his way up a gentle rise. The trees thinned there but the grass was waist-high, and Jesse walked crouched over in the feeble sunlight until he reached the bend in the river, a narrow little peninsula offering a view up- and downriver. The sluggish gray waters of the Yazoo flowed past on its ancient quest to merge with the Father of Waters and find the sea. Water splashed where a fish broke the surface of the river a few yards away. It would have been enjoyable to find a dry place to relax, to have a fishing pole, maybe smoke a pipe while catching a fat perch for dinner. But Jesse wasn’t there for pleasure. The reason he had braved the elements and Rebel patrols was anchored about seventy-five yards upriver, a massive dreadnought, fully as large as the
Arkansas
, a Rebel ironclad that had chased the Union gunboats clear back to New Orleans before running aground and being destroyed by its crew.

“My God.” McQueen whistled between his teeth and searched his coat pocket for his spyglass. “What a monster.” Indeed, the warship was heavily armored and bristling with rifled cannons from firing ports on every side. Twin stacks trailed oily banners of smoke, residue from no doubt powerful engines that were the heart of the beast. The Union fleet that was keeping Vicksburg under such frequent bombardment was about to find itself in a hell of a lot of trouble when this formidable-looking vessel made its way into battle.

Now, there was a puzzle. Evidently the ship had been sighted at night and chased a column of federal steamers back toward Cairo. But why hadn’t it come to the aid of Vicksburg’s inhabitants? Such a war vessel backed up by Vicksburg’s batteries could drive off Porter’s gunships once and for all. What were the Rebels waiting for?

He lifted the spyglass to his eye, adjusted the focus, and the flag flying from the bow of the dreadnought went from a blur to the defiant stars and bars of the Confederate Navy. McQueen rose up on his knees and parted the tall grass and managed to make out the name
Glen Allen
burned into the hull.

Moisture was seeping through his woolen trousers, soaking his knees. It was too damn cold for such carrying on. Abbot was most definitely having his revenge. Well then, get it over with. “All right
Glen Allen
, tell me your secrets.”

He scanned the ironclad’s sloped sides, taking a quick stock of the vessel’s guns and armor. He frowned, shifted his spyglass, tried to make sense out of what he was looking at. “What the hell … ” Then Jesse grinned. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

The
Glen Allen
’s wooden hull had been painted to resemble iron plating. Its impressive array of cannons was no more than logs painted black to resemble nine-pounder cannons and Dahlgren guns.

“Quaker guns,” McQueen muttered. Utterly harmless. Merely a ruse the undersupplied Confederate Army had tried before with success. Jesse lowered the spyglass and tucked it in his coat pocket. Then he sat back on his heels, taking a moment to digest his discovery. The Rebel dreadnought was about as dangerous as a toothless, clawless panther.

He shivered. It was going to be a tedious and miserable ride back to Vicksburg. But the darkness would hide him from patrols. With some luck, he’d be in Vicksburg sometime after midnight. Out of the frying pan and back into the fire.

It was two o’clock in the morning when the bone-weary rider slipped past the northernmost redoubt, following the twisting, winding course of a steep ravine. Jesse heard the hammering of artillery in the distance, the thud of mortars, the crisp, savage bark of the Napoleans and the deep-throated boom of a Parrot gun. The bombardment kept the attention of the sentries riveted on the beleaguered stronghold.

Once within the Confederate defenses on the outskirts of the city, Jesse walked his mount upslope to stand atop a ridge. The view was spectacular. With its series of bluffs rising two hundred feet above the river, Vicksburg looked for all the world like some impregnable castle. Its buildings clung to every ridge and hillside, its streets rising and falling with the lay of the land, so townsmen seldom stood on level ground, at least outdoors. There were fires in the streets this night and shells bursting overhead like exploding stars. Half a dozen gunboats had entered the bend of the Mississippi and steamed downriver opposite the bluffs, where they kept up a blistering bombardment of the city in a vain attempt to wear down the defenders. The shore batteries returned the fire with ferocious intensity. One of the gunboats, a paddle wheeler converted into a military ship, was already ablaze, and another had had one of its smokestacks shot away. The gunboats had paid a price for their trip downriver. And so had Vicksburg.

Jesse started down the road, a thoroughfare of hard-packed earth bordered by towering red oaks whose branches intersected to form a tunnel above the road. Twenty minutes later he entered the city.

The streets were for the most part deserted. The townspeople had retired to their basements and root cellars or the caves that many of Vicksburg’s inhabitants had dug into the hillsides. From time to time Jesse passed several bucket brigades hurrying from one fire to the next. They paid no attention to the weary gray rider making his way through the cold streets. A patch of the night sky was aglow from the burning wreckage of the Presbyterian church, into the steeple of which an explosive shell had lodged. Jesse watched the burning church from a distance then continued uphill for another couple of blocks until he reached the narrow alleyway that ran behind the Magnolia Theater. Here was a pitch-black corridor lined with discarded crates and barrels. The mouth of the alley opened like the jaws of a trap. All he had to do was deliver his report to Caitlin and leave, and yet some inner sense told him to ride on. With his hat pulled low and his collar turned up against the chill night air, his features were well concealed. What was he worried about? He stared at the alley. The bombardment was lessening in intensity and he imagined the Yankee gunboats were withdrawing back upriver. They’d pummeled the city, disturbed its inhabitants, and taken enough damage from the batteries for one night.