The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 (15 page)

Holborrow clambered inside the coach, Delaney followed, and the carriage door slammed shut. The Negro driver watched impassively from the high box as Starbuck gave his saber another practice cut. "You ready, Captain?" he asked Dennison.

"You're Starbuck?" Dennison asked in a faint voice.

Starbuck frowned, looked left and right as though for inspiration, then gazed back into Dennison's face. "Sir," he said, "I'm a major and you're a captain, so that makes you a shad-bellied piece of ordure, otherwise known as a captain. Isn't that right?"

"Sir," Dennison said miserably.

"Yes," Starbuck answered the original question, "I'm Starbuck."

"I ain't got a quarrel with you," Dennison said, then, after a pause, "sir."

"But you do, Dennison, you do. Would it matter whose wife you insulted? As it happens, that lady is not my wife," he gestured toward Sally, who watched from the ground's far end, "but she is a dear friend."

"I didn't mean to give offense, sir," Dennison said, desperate to escape the wicked curved blade in Starbuck's hand.

"The offense you gave me, Dennison," Starbuck said, hardening his voice, "was by thinking you could bully a man of lower rank. Do that again in my battalion, Captain, and I'll whip your backside bloody and break you down to private. You understand me?"

Dennison stared into Starbuck's eyes for a second, then nodded. "Yes, sir," he said.

"Now let's discuss your disease, Captain," Starbuck said.

Dennison glanced up into Starbuck's eyes again, but could find nothing to say.

"It sure ain't ringworm," Starbuck said, "and it ain't psoriasis, and I've never seen a case of eczema that bad. Just what is your proper doctor giving you?"

"Turpentine," Dennison said softly.

Starbuck laid the flat of his saber blade against one of the open, gleaming sores on Dennison's cheek. The Captain flinched from the pain, but then submitted meekly to the weapon's touch. "It ain't turpentine, is it?" Starbuck asked. Dennison said nothing. Starbuck twitched the blade, making Dennison flinch. "It's croton oil, Captain, that's what it is, and no doctor gave it to you. You're rubbing it on yourself, ain't you? Every morning and every night you slap the stuff on. Must hurt like hell, but it makes damn sure no one can transfer you to a fighting battalion, ain't that it? Keeps you away from the nasty Yankee bullets, don't it?"

Dennison could not even meet Starbuck's eyes, let alone speak as Starbuck drew the blade slowly back along the sore. Starbuck remembered croton oil, the foul purgative that Lieutenant Gillespie had forced down Starbuck's throat in an effort to force an admission that he was a Northern spy. Where the oil had spilled onto Starbuck's cheeks it had formed smallpox-like pustules, and it was plain that Dennison was using the purgative as a means of fabricating an illness that would keep him safely in Richmond. "What will it be next, Captain?" Starbuck asked. "Swallowing gunpowder to make yourself vomit? I know all the tricks, you bastard, every last one of them. So what you're going to do now is throw away your croton oil, you hear me?"

"Yes, sir."

"Throw it away, wash your face in good clean water, and I guarantee you'll be as handsome as ever by the time you face the Yankees in battle."

Dennison forced himself to look up at Starbuck and the look was of utter hatred. He was a proud man and he had been utterly humbled, but he had no belly to try and retrieve his pride by fighting his new commanding officer. Starbuck picked up his scabbard and coat. "We've started badly, you and I," he told Dennison, "but no one but you and me knows what passed between us here, and I won't be telling. So you can go back to Camp Lee, Captain, repair your face, and make damn sure that your company is ready to fight. Because that's what I intend to do with the battalion, fight." H
e had meant his words to be con
ciliatory, but he saw no grateful response in Dennison's dark eyes, only bitterness. Starbuck was tempted to let Dennison go and let the bastard rot in his own self-inflicted misery, but he needed every officer he could get and besides, why should Dennison evade his duty? Dennison must fight like every other man defending his country.

The carriage door opened suddenly and Delaney jumped awkwardly down to the turf. Colonel Holborrow followed, but more slowly because he was exaggerating his limp. Delaney took Starbuck's arm and steered him out of earshot of Dennison or the Colonel. "The Colonel and I have come to an understanding," Delaney said. "He believes it his patriotic duty to spare the Confederacy an expensive inquiry into his handling of the Special Battalion, even though, of course, he avers that nothing would be discovered by such an inquiry, and he also feels that under your leadership the battalion could well acquit itself nobly in battle."

Starbuck felt a pang of terror at the news. He had got what he wanted. "We're going north then?"

"Isn't that what you wanted?" Delaney asked. He had caught a
whiff
of Starbuck's fear.

"Yes," Starbuck said, "it is."

"Because you're going in two days," Delaney said. "I don't think Holborrow wants you in his sight a moment longer than possible."

"Jesus!" Starbuck swore. Two days! "What about my rifles?"

"Thirty."

"Thirty!" Starbuck protested.

"Nate! Nate!" Delaney held up a cautionary hand. "I told you I had no ammunition to force that issue. The rest of the rifles are sold, I know that and you know that, but Holborrow's never going to admit it. But he says he can find thirty good rifles, so be grateful. You'll just have to steal the others off the enemy. Aren't you supposed to be good at that?"

Starbuck swore again
, but his anger ebbed as he con
sidered the deal Delaney had struck. He had got what he wanted, a battlefield command, and somehow in the next few days he had to make the Special Battalion into a unit that could stand against the Yankees. He would make it so damned special that other Confederate battalions would wish that they too were punishment units. "Thanks, Delaney," he said grudgingly.

"I am overwhelmed by your gratitude." The lawyer smiled. "And now, I suppose, you want to spend an evening of dissipation at my expense?"

"No," Starbuck said, because if the Yellowlegs really were going north then he had work to do. He had men to train and boots to find and a battalion to shake into efficiency and only two days to work his miracle. Two days before they went to where the Yankees waited. Before the Yellowlegs went back to war.

adam faulconer had
rarely felt so useless, or so unwanted, for he realized
after just a half day at McClel
lan's headquarters that he had nothing whatever to do. For a time those headquarters had stayed obstinately in Washington, where the Young Napoleon had insisted there were necessary arrangements that could not be made from the saddle nor by telegraph from the field, and so the blue-coated army moved slowly westward while their commander slept in the bed of his comfortable house on Fifteenth Street. A nervous silence descended on Washington when the troops departed; a silence enervated by rumors of rebel activity. Gray horsemen were reported in Pennsylvania, a barn had been burned in Ohio, the state militia was assembling to protect Philadelphia, but in all the rumor there was not one hard fact. No one actually reported seeing Lee or the redoubtable Jackson, though Northern newspapers were more than ready to print elaborate fancies in the factless vacuum. The rebels were said to be 150,000 strong, they were planning to take Baltimore, they had designs on Washington, they were marching against New York, and even Chicago was threatened. The newspapers were eagerly read by the blue army that was bivouacked not far from Washington, in the green Maryland fields, where they waited for McClellan. Meanwhile the Young Napoleon rode about the Federal capital leaving visiting cards in
a score of fashionable houses,
each scrap of pasteboard carefully inked with the initials PPC, which had the recipients puzzled until the French ambassador explained that the letters stood for
Pour Prendre Conge
and were the polite manner of indicating that a soldier was leaving home to go on campaign.

"
Pour
Prendre
Conge
!" Colonel Lyman Thorne snarled at Adam. "Who the devil does he think he's impressing?"

Adam had no answer. It worried him that he was always so tongue-tied in
Thorne
's presence. He would have liked to have impressed the Colonel, but instead he found himself trapped into either monosyllabic answers or else saying nothing at all. This time he said nothing, but just kicked his heels gently back to coax an ounce more speed from his horse, then he leaned into the mare's neck as she rose to a snake fence.

Thorne
's horse thumped down a second after Adam's. The two men were riding westward through a countryside apparently bereft of inhabitants; a countryside of neat farms and tidy orchards and well-drained fields. "Where is everybody?" Adam asked after they had cantered past another immaculate white-painted farm with a swept yard, a woodlot where the cut logs were aligned between the elm trees as neatly as soldiers in one of the Young Napoleon's beloved reviews, and a newly painted springhouse, but without any sign of a human presence.

"Indoors,"
Thorne
answered. "Didn't you see the upstairs drapes twitch? These people aren't fools. Where would you be if two armies were close by? You put your valuables in the cellar, bury the cash in the kitchen garden, load the shotgun, dirty your daughters' faces so they don't look attractive, harness the wagon, then wait to see who comes."

"No rebels coming this way," Adam said, trying hard to make conversation with the forbidding
Thorne
, but even that cheerful observation met with a scornful reply.

"Damn the rebels, where are our cavalry patrols? Damn it, Faulconer, but Lee's been two days in the north and we don't know the first damn thing about what he's doing. And where are our scouts? This countryside should be thick with damn scouts. They should be tripping over each other, but McClellan won't release them. He doesn't want their precious horses to get hurt."
Thorne
's derision was sour and angry. "Litt
le George will inch his way for
ward like a virgin edging into a barrack room," he said, "and Lee will be running wild. Did I show you Pinkerton's latest work of fiction?"

"No, sir."

The two horsemen had stopped their mounts on the crest of a long green watershed that offered a distant view westward.
Thorne
took out a massive pair of binoculars, wiped the lenses with the skirt of his coat, then peered at the distant view for a long time. He saw nothing to alarm him and so lowered the glasses. "Pinkerton claims that Lee has one hundred and fifty thousand men in Maryland and he reckons another sixty thousand are poised just south of the Potomac ready to mount an attack on Washington when McClellan goes to deal with Lee."
Thorne
spat. "Lee's no fool. He won't throw away his army in an attack on Washington's forts! He doesn't have enough men. If Lee even has sixty thousand men fit to fight I'd be surprised, but it's no good pointing out facts to frightened George, it just makes him more stubborn. Little George will believe what he wants to believe, and he wants to believe he's outnumbered because that way there's no disgrace when he doesn't fight. Hell, they should give me the army for a week. There'd be no rebellion at the end of that week, I can promise you."

The Colonel fell silent as he unfolded a map. Adam desperately wanted to know why the army did not give Thorne a fighting command, but he did not like to ask the question, but then the Colonel answered it anyway. "I'm not one of the elect, Faulconer. I wasn't in Mexico, I wasn't at West Point, I didn't spend my peacetime nights flattering other uniformed fools with damnfool stories about slaughtering Comanches. I was brought into the peacetime army to build barracks, so I'm not supposed to understand soldiering. I'm not part of the mystical brother' hood. Have you ever seen Little George talk about soldier-ing? He weeps! Goes misty at the eyes!" Thorne hooted his derision. "Damn the weeping until you've given someone something to weep about. You can't win a war without taking casualties, lots of casualties, blood from one end of the country to the other. After that you can weep. But don't give me all this podsnap about sacred bonds, brotherhood, honor, and duty. We have a duty to win, that's all."

"Yes, sir," Adam said dully. He was not sure he liked what the Colonel was saying, for Adam had an idea that war was somehow mystical. He knew all war was a bad thing, of course, a terrible thing even, but when it was touched by honor and patriotism it was subtly transformed into nobility and Adam did not want to think of it as mere uniformed butchery.

He took the glasses that the Colonel offered and dutifully trained them westward. He was wondering why the older man had so suddenly appeared at the army's headquarters to suggest this long ride into Maryland, but Adam, lonely himself, had no idea of the Colonel's loneliness, nor of the Colonel's fears. Thorne, watching his army led by fools, feared that it would be thrown away before it could win the war and he feared that nothing he could do would prevent that tragedy, but still he must do what he could. "One man," he said suddenly.

"Sir?" Adam lowered the glasses.