"Within half an hour."
Half an hour. Christ. Could he hold out?
"The storm won't delay us?"
"We'll be bound for Head of Passes and the gulf on schedule, sir."
"Good. Excellent." The wind tore the words away. He groped for the rail of the stair, lost his footing, and almost fell. He spewed obscenities into the storm. The purser rushed to him.
"You all right, Mr. Benton?"
"Fine." The man hovered. Bent wanted no undue notice. "Fine!" The purser withdrew, quickly gone in the dark.
It required both hands on the slippery rail to drag his tired body up the stairs toward the safety of his cabin. What did he have left? Nothing but the painting, hate, and a determination that his enemies would not succeed in destroying him.
No — lightning; his eyes shone like wet rocks as he heaved and pulled himself upward in the rain — oh, no. He would survive and destroy them first. Somehow.
Still weak from his sickness, Billy went down to the river again. Under the protection of muskets and artillery, he helped dismantle the bridge he had built. He felt he was committing an act of desecration. He told himself he was taking the military defeat too personally. He couldn't help it.
The pontoon wagons vanished into the winter dark. Encamped at Falmouth again, he wanted to write Brett but feared to do it. He wrote in the journal instead.
Bitter cold again this evening. Someone is singing "Home, Sweet Home," a mournful and curiously ominous refrain, given our place and plight. This week alone, our support regiments have lost a score of men by desertion. It is the same through the entire army. They steal away homeward, disheartened. Even Lije F. prays privately and seldom quotes Scripture any longer. He knows the exhortations and promises ring false. Burnside is done, they say. There is much speculation about his replacement. The bitterest say things like "Oh, don't let your faith waver, boys. They have dozens of equally stupid generals waiting in Washington." Then they reel off a list of mock courses those officers took at West Point: "Principles of Bungling " "Fundamentals of Foolhardiness." It is a terrible medicine to swallow without protest. We might as well be encamped at the rim of the cosmos, so dismal and remote do these huts seem as Christmas nears. Look about and the eye falls upon an unbroken landscape of confusion and cupidity. My men have not been paid for six months. Down in New Orleans, if we may believe the occasional Richmond paper which comes across the river when the pickets make their exchanges — coffee going south, tobacco coming north — General Butler and his brother are busy stealing cotton for personal gain. General Grant occupies himself with ordering all Jews out of his military department — accusing them, as a class, of speculation and lawbreaking. A cabal of Republican senators is said to be agitating for the heads of Mr. Chase and Mr. Seward. Where in God's name is there one iota of concern for this disgraced army? Where is one man whose whole energy is given over to the task of finding generals who can lead us from this swamp of failure in which blunder after blunder has mired us, seemingly for eternity?
If you ever read these scribblings, dear wife, you will know how much I love and need you at this moment. But I dare not try to say it in a missive because other things would surely creep in, and you would be forced to assume part of a burden which is properly mine — the burden of men who feel abandoned, who dare not say aloud that they have no hope.
63
Two nights before Christmas, Charles rode to Barclay's Farm at dusk. A bag made of coarse netting hung from his saddle. The bag held a fine Westphalia ham taken from Yankee stores captured on recent night raids north of the river.
The evening had an eerie quality. The bare limbs, bushes, and roadside fences glittered like glass. It had rained last night while the temperature dropped.
Most of the clouds had gone now; the sky in the west had a purple cast, pale near the tree line, darker above. The moon was visible, a gray sphere with a thin crescent of brilliance on the bottom. There was enough light for Charles to discern the ice-covered farmhouse and the two red oaks standing like strange crystal sculptures.
Sport proceeded at a walk; the road was treacherous. Charles's beard reached well below his collar, and his teeth shone in the midst of it. Anticipation put the smile on his face and helped banish the memories of Sharpsburg that were with him so often. He had never received the promised commendation for helping to move the Blakely gun on the battlefield. Either the major had forgotten Charles's name or unit or, more likely, he had been one of the thousands who had not survived what was the single bloodiest day of the war. This was his first opportunity to visit the farm in months, even though the cavalry had been camped not far away, over in Stevensburg, for several weeks. With his scouts and picked bands of troopers, Hampton had been in the saddle almost constantly since, raiding above the Rappahannock.
Night ghosts, they drifted behind enemy lines and took a hundred horses and nearly as many men at Hartwood Church; rode up the Telegraph Road, cut the enemy wire to Washington, and seized wagons at the supply base at Dumfries; rode again, hoping to go fifteen miles, all the way to Occoquan, only to be forced around when an entire regiment of Yankee horse materialized against them. They escaped with twenty wagons loaded with sutler's delicacies: pickled oysters, sugar and lemons, nuts and brandy, and the hams, one of which he had commandeered as a present for Gus. It would be a hearty Christmas celebration at the encampment, though a short one. Charles had to be back by Christmas night, because Hampton proposed to return to enemy territory the following day.
During the weeks of riding and fighting in snow and thaw, pressure against the town of Fredericksburg had mounted, culminating in savage battle and Burnside's defeat. Charles worried constantly about Gus's safety. If Hampton's lean scavengers crossed the Rappahannock to raid, Union detachments could do the same coming the other way. He had tried to find someone who could tell him whether the Fredericksburg fighting had reached as far as Barclay's Farm, and finally learned it had not. On the road, he experienced a surge of relief. She was there. Transparent smoke rose up to vanish in the starlight. Unseen lamps brightened the rear of the house and shone from the half-open door of the small barn nearest it.
"Sport," he growled, sharply reining the gelding on a crust of ice, which crackled. Hunching forward, he inhaled the piercing air. Lamplight in the barn at this hour?
Tied to the pump, which had a gleaming stalactite at the spout, were two horses. He supposed there was an innocent explanation, yet the sight of them so close to enemy positions across the river set him on edge. He dismounted in the center of the road, led Sport to the side, and tied him to a fence rail. The gray stamped and blew warm breath that plumed in the cold.
Charles set off on foot for the farmhouse, a short walk of a hundred yards. In the silence, his spurs jingled like tiny bells stirred by a breeze. He crouched and with some difficulty removed them. All of this continued to strike him as slightly foolish; he would say nothing to Gus when her callers turned out to be neighbors.
Still — why was that barn door open? And Washington and Boz nowhere to be seen?
Where the fence ended and the dooryard began, Charles paused to study the horses. Old riding saddles, neither Grimsleys nor McClellans, told him nothing. He stole toward the house, whose ice-covered shakes flashed back the light of the moon for a moment. He was conscious of each crunch and crinkle underfoot; he couldn't avoid a certain amount of noise, no matter how carefully he trod.