"I'm wanted in the Navy Department," he told her. "Mallory needs help and evidently believes I'm the one to provide it. James has matters well in hand here, and I know he sent a favorable report on my work after we launched Alabama."
Bulloch had officially commended Cooper's clumsy but effective defensive action on the pier. Cooper had stayed aboard the ship until the middle of August, when she was joined in the remote Bay of Angra, on the island of Terceira in the Azores, by two other vessels. One was Agrippina, a bark that Bulloch had purchased; aboard were a hundred-pound Blakely rifle, an eight-inch smoothbore, six thirty-two pounders, ammunition, coal, and enough supplies for an extended cruise. Bahama brought twenty-five Confederate seamen and Captain Semmes. The new ship was armed, coaled, commissioned, and christened, and Cooper felt another unexpected thrill of pride when the small band blared "Dixie's Land" in the hot tropical afternoon.
The secret mission completed, he returned to Liverpool by passenger steamer. Judith was grumpy the day he told her about his feelings during the ceremony. One of their rare quarrels developed. How could he feel pride in a cause he had once derided? Caustically, he replied that she would have to forgive his lack of perfection. The statements and counterstatements rapidly grew incoherent. It took them a day to patch things up.
Now she asked softly, "How do you feel about Secretary Mallory's request?"
He pressed his shoulder to hers. The wind was cold; the stars shone; the orange horizon-glow was nearly gone. "I'll miss this old town, but I've no choice. I must go."
"How quickly?"
"As soon as I finish a couple of current projects. I would hazard that we'd be on our way by the end of the year."
She lifted his arm and placed it around her shoulders for warmth and because she loved his touch. "I worry about a winter crossing."
What worried him more was the last leg of the trip, the run from Hamilton or Nassau through the blockading squadron. But he refused to upset her by saying it aloud. Instead, he sought to reassure her with a squeeze, a press of his lips to her cold cheek, a murmur.
"As long as the four of us are together, we'll be fine. Together we can withstand anything."
She agreed, then pondered a moment. "I do wonder what your father would say if he saw you so devoted to the South."
He hoped they wouldn't argue again. He answered cautiously. "He'd say I wasn't the son he raised. He'd say I've changed, but so have we all."
"Only in some respects. I loathe slavery as much as I ever did."
"You know I feel the same way. When we win our independence, it will wither and die naturally."
"Independence? Cooper, the cause is lost."
"Don't say that."
"But it is. You know it in your heart. You talked of resources in the North, and the lack of them in the South, long before this horrible war started. You did it the first day we met."
"I know, but — I can't admit defeat, Judith. If I do, why should we go home? Why should I take any risks at all? Yet I must take them — The South's my native land. Yours, too."
She shook her head. "I left it, Cooper. It's mine because it's yours, that's all. The war is wrong, the cause too — Why should you or Bulloch or anyone keep fighting?"
The lamplight fell on her face, so beautiful to him, so beloved. For the first time, sitting there, he admitted her to the small inner chamber where he kept the truth she had already identified, the truth made manifest by the dispatches about Sharpsburg. "We must fight for the best conclusion we can get. A negotiated peace." "You think it's worth going home to do that?" He nodded.
"All right, my dearest. Kiss me, and we will." A gust set leaves chuckling around their legs as they embraced. They were still kissing when a constable coughed and walked by twirling his truncheon. They separated with muddled, chagrined looks. Since Judith wore gloves, the disapproving officer couldn't see her rings. He probably thought she was misbehaving with a lover. It made her giggle as they hurried back across the square. Full dark had come. It would be good to be inside.
In the gaslit foyer, Cooper paled and pointed to a drop of blood on the tile floor. "Good God, look."
Her eyes rounded. "Judah?"
Marie-Louise popped her blonde head out of the parlor. "He's hurt, Mama."
Cooper flew up the stairs, his belly tied up like a sailor's knot, his head hammering, his palms damp. Had his son fallen into the hands of some thief or molester? The slightest threat to either of his children was like a barbed hook in his flesh. When they were ill, he stayed up with them all night, every night, until the danger passed. He ran toward the half-open door of the boy's room. "Judah!"
He thrust the door open. Judah lay on the bed, clutching his middle. His jacket was ripped, his cheek bruised, his nose bloodied.
Cooper ran to the bed, sat, started to take his son in his arms but refrained. Judah was eleven and deemed such contact sissified. "Son — what happened?"
"I ran into some Toxteth dock boys. They wanted my money, and when I said I hadn't any, they swarmed on me. I'm all right." He made the subdued declaration with evident pride.
"You defended yourself —?"
"Best I could, Pa. There were five of them."
Uncontrollably, he touched Judah's brow, brushed some hair back, fighting his own trembling. Judith's shadow fell over his sleeve. "He's all right," Cooper said as the fear began to run out of him like an ebbing tide.
59
In the occupied city of New Orleans, the weather was warm that morning. So was Colonel Elkanah Bent's emotional temperature. It matched that of the local citizens with whom he shared the corner of Chartres and Canal streets, watching the tangible evidence of General Ben Butler's radicalism.
The limpid air smelled as it always did, predominantly of coffee but laced with the Mississippi and the toilet water of gentlemen who had to be out because they were in commerce; gentlemen who had lived off cotton once and were perhaps doing so again, less covertly every day. Those of the better classes were still indoors. Perhaps they had received a hint of what they might see if they ventured out. Most on the corner had been caught there by chance, like Bent, though undoubtedly one or two watched by choice, to keep hatred stoked.
Fatter than ever and puffing a cigar, Bent was fully as angry as the civilians, though he dared not show it. The drums tapped, the fifes shrilled, and with limp colors preceding them, the First Louisiana Native Guards came parading up Canal.
Major General Butler had raised the regiment in late summer in the wake of other outrages, which included hanging Mumford, the man who dared to pull down an American flag from the mint building, and an order of May 15 stating that women who spoke or gestured to Union soldiers in an insulting manner would be arrested and treated as prostitutes.
Those were schoolboy pranks compared to this, Bent thought. He found the mere existence of the guards, officially mustered on September 27, both unbelievable and repulsive. He pitied the officers chosen to command this regiment of ex-cotton pickers and stevedores.
The town was abuzz with rumors generated by aspects of the Butler style. The Yankee general who pillaged private homes for salable silver pieces would be replaced because of such crimes against the civilian population. Lincoln would not allow the guards to serve in the federal army, wanting nothing to upset the delicate potentialities — the chance that a wayward sister might return — before the fateful proclamation deadline. Bent had heard those and many more.