"Convene it," Charles said without hesitation. "I'll serve, if you'll permit one."
"I'll place you in charge."
"Where's Cramm now, sir?"
"Confined to quarters. Under guard."
"I believe I'll give him the good news personally."
"Please do," Hampton said, his eyes belying his dispassionate expression. "This man's come to my attention too often. Examples must be made. McDowell will move soon, and we can't mass our forces and overwhelm the enemy if each soldier does exactly as he wishes, whenever he wishes."
"Exactly right, Colonel." Hampton had no formal military training, but he understood that part of the lesson book. Charles saluted and went straight to Private Cramm's tent. Outside, a noncom stood guard. Nearby, Cramm's black body servant, old and hunchbacked, polished the brass corners of a trunk.
"Corporal," Charles said, "you will hear and see nothing for the next two minutes."
"Yes, sir!"
Inside, Private Custom Dawkins Cramm III reclined among the many books he had brought to camp. He wore a loose white silk blouse — no regulation — and didn't rise when his superior entered, though he gave him an annoyed stare.
"Stand up."
Cramm went off like a bomb, hurling down the gold-stamped volume of Coleridge. "The hell I will. I was a gentleman before I joined your damned troop, I'm still a gentleman, and I'm damned if you'll continue to treat me like some nigger slave."
Charles took hold of the fine blouse, ripping it as he yanked Cramm to his feet. "What I'm going to do, Cramm, is chair the special court-martial to which Colonel Hampton appointed me five minutes ago. Then I'll do my utmost to give you the maximum penalty — thirty-one days of hard labor. You'll serve every minute of it unless we go up against the Yankees first, in which case they'll punish you by blowing your head off because you're too stupid to be a soldier. But at least you'll die game."
He pushed Cramm so hard that the young man sailed into his little wooden library cabinet, bounced away, and knocked down the rear tent pole. On one knee, gripping the pole, Cramm glared.
"We should have elected a gentleman as our captain. Next time we will."
Red-faced, Charles walked out.
"Here we come, gentlemen. Nice hot oysters Creole. Got 'em fixed crispy and jus' right for you."
With a politeness so exquisite it approached mockery, Ambrose Pell's slave Toby bent forward to offer a silver tray of appetizers on small china plates; Toby had been dragooned to assist the host's hired servants, a couple of rascally looking Belgians. Toby was about forty, and in contrast to his servile posture, his eyes shone with a sly resentment. So Charles thought, anyway.
Privately, he termed that kind of behavior putting on old massa. He had a theory that the more expert a slave became at the deceptive ritual, the more likely it was that he hated those who owned him. Not that Charles blamed any black very much for such feelings; four years at West Point, and exposure to people and ideas not strictly Southern, had begun a change in his thinking, and nothing since had stopped it or reversed it. He considered all the rhetoric in defense of slavery so much spit in the wind and probably wrong to boot.
The large striped tent belonging to their host was ablaze with candles and filled with music — Ambrose performing some Mozart on the better of his two flutes. He played well. One side of the tent was raised and netted to bar night insects but allow entry of an occasional breeze. Bathed and outfitted in clean clothes, Charles felt better. The trouble with Cramm had put him in a bad mood, but discovery of a parcel from Mont Royal had helped to relieve it. The sight of the inscription on the light cavalry saber touched him. The gilt-banded scabbard rested against his left leg now. Though the sword lacked the practicality of Hampton's Columbia-made issue, Charles would treasure it far more.
With a tiny silver fork, he broke the lightly spiced breading on the oyster. He ate a morsel, then swallowed some of the good whiskey from the Waterford goblet provided by their host and new friend, Pierre Serbakovsky. He and Ambrose had met the stocky, urbane young man during a tour of Richmond's better saloons.
Serbakovsky had the rank of captain but preferred to be addressed as prince. He was one of a number of European officers who had joined the Confederacy. The prince was aide-de-camp to Major Rob Wheat, commander of a regiment of Louisiana Zouaves nicknamed the Tigers. The regiment contained the dregs of the streets of New Orleans; there wasn't a unit in Virginia more notorious for robbery and violence.
"I believe this will be enough whiskey," the prince declared to Toby. "Ask Jules whether the Mumm's is chilled, and if so, serve it at once."
Serbakovsky liked to be in charge, but his manner was too lofty even for a slave. Charles watched Toby swallow twice and compress his lips as he walked out.
He took more whiskey to relieve feelings of guilt. He and Ambrose shouldn't be lolling at supper, but conducting school for their noncoms, which they did almost every night so that the noncoms could attempt to re-teach the lessons on the drill field. The devil with guilt for one evening, he thought. He'd drink it away now and let it return tomorrow.
Abruptly, Ambrose jerked the flute from his lips and scratched furiously under his right arm. "Damn it, I've got 'em again." His face grew as red as his curls. He was a fastidious person; this was humiliation.
Serbakovsky leaned back in his upholstered chair, amused. "Permit me a word of advice, mon frere," he said in heavily accented English. "Bathe. As frequently as you can, no matter how vile and strong the soap, how cold the stream, or how repugnant the notion of standing naked before one's inferiors." "I do bathe, Princey. But the damned graybacks keep coming." "The truth is, they never leave," Charles said as Toby and the younger Belgian entered with a tray of fluted glasses and a dark bottle in a silver bucket of flaked ice, a commodity so scarce in the South it might well have cost more than ten times the champagne. "They're in your uniform. You have to give the vermin a complete discharge."
"What, throw this coat away?"
"And everything else you wear."
"Replacing 'em at my own expense? Damned if I will, Charlie.
Uniforms are the responsibility of the commandant, not gentlemen who serve with him."
Charles shrugged. "Spend or scratch. Up to you."
The prince laughed, then snapped his fingers. The young Belgian stepped forward at once, Toby more slowly. Was Charles the only one who noticed the slave's resentment?
"Delicious," he said after his first drink of champagne. "Do all European officers entertain this handsomely?"
"Only if their ancestors accumulated wealth by means better left unmentioned."
Charles liked Serbakovsky, whose history fascinated him. The prince's paternal grandfather, a Frenchman, had held a colonelcy in the army Bonaparte led to Russia. Along the invasion route, he met a young woman of the Russian aristocracy; physical attraction temporarily overcame political enmity, and she conceived a child, born while the colonel was perishing on the infamous winter retreat. Serbakovsky's grandmother had given her illegitimate son her last name as a symbol of family and national pride; and never married. Serbakovsky had been a soldier since his eighteenth birthday, first in his mother country, then abroad.
While Ambrose vainly tried to drink and scratch at the same time, in came the first course — local shad, baked. This was to be followed by a specialty of the older Belgian, three chickens stewed with garlic cloves in the style of Provence.