The courthouse got quiet for a moment. Even without knowing Forrest’s reputation, no one who heard him could have doubted he meant exactly what he said.
Perhaps seeking to ease the tension that blunt threat had left in the air, Henry Pleasants said, “You know, Melvin, you’re the spit and image of Nate’s lady friend Mollie Bean. Just how close a relative of hers are you?”
Caudell choked and wished he could sink through the floor. Mollie, though, must have anticipated getting asked that sooner or later, for she answered lightly, “We’re right close, Henry—excuse me, I mean Colonel Henry, sir. Lots o’ people say we look alike.”
“You certainly do,” Pleasants said.
General Forrest told Nate and Mollie, “You two go get some sleep; you’ve earned it. My thanks for coming back with word of this here plan.” He turned to Pleasants. “You stay here with me, sir. Sounds like we got ourselves a whole mess o’ talking to get through.”
“Yes, sir,” Henry Pleasants said. “I think we do…”
* XVIII *
Lee wondered how Jefferson Davis had ever managed to inveigle him into accepting the Confederate Presidency. Even without counting the armed guards who surrounded the presidential residence on Shockoe Hill, he found himself a prisoner of his position. To do everything that needed doing, he should have been born triplets. The one of him available was not nearly enough: whenever he did anything, he felt guilty because he was neglecting something else.
He drank coffee as he waded through the morning’s stack of reports. General Forrest was shifting the main effort of his attack to southwest of Rivington, a telegram said. Lee glanced at a map of North Carolina on a stand by his desk, then shrugged. That direction of assault looked no more promising to him than any other, but Forrest usually had a reason for the things he did, even if the reason was not obvious. Often it wasn’t; being without any formal military training, Forrest made up his own rules as he went along. And if Lee couldn’t see what he was up to, likely the Rivington men couldn’t, either. Lee hoped they couldn’t.
The telegram also reported that Forrest had appointed a new officer to his staff, a Colonel Pleasants. The name was vaguely familiar to Lee, but he couldn’t place it. He reached for a book taken from the AWB sanctum: Lee’$ Colonels, by a certain Robert Krick, a man still a lifetime away from being born. It was a better, more comprehensive list of the higher officers of the Army of Northern Virginia than any from Lee’s own time.
It did not, however, mention Colonel Pleasants. Lee looked at the far wall of his office without seeing it as he tried to remember in what connection he’d noticed the colonel’s name. He pulled out the Picture History of the Civil War, a volume that over the past few months had come to seem like an old friend. Sure enough, Pleasants’s name appeared in the index. Lee flipped to page 472.
Reading about the grinding campaign that had not happened in 1864 still made him want to shiver, as if he were going through one of Poe’s frightening tales instead. Hard to imagine his incomparable Army of Northern Virginia trapped within siege lines round Petersburg, with the Federals using every expedient they could think of to break those lines.
He read of the mine Henry Pleasants had proposed; of the tons of powder going off beneath the Confederate trenches; of the Battle of the Crater that the Union forces seemed to have bungled beyond belief, for otherwise how could they have lost? Having read all that, he idly wondered how Pleasants had ended up in the South rather than Pennsylvania.
The idleness fell from him. He slammed the book shut with a noise like a rifle shot. “Mr. Marshall!” he called. “Come in here, please. I need you.”
“Sir?” Behind his spectacles, Charles Marshall’s eyes were worried; Lee rarely sounded so urgent. “What do you require?”
“Send a telegram to General Forrest at once, saying that I order him—be sure to use the word ‘order’—I order him not to include the name of the latest colonel to join his staff in any further dispatches, either telegraphic of postal. Do you have that?”
“I—think so, sir.” The aide repeated the message accurately enough, though his voice was puzzled. “I confess I don’t altogether understand it.”
“Never mind. Just take it to the telegrapher immediately.”
Marshall shrugged but hurried away. Lee returned the Picture History of the Civil War to its place on the shelf. If Henry Pleasants was planning to do now to the Rivington men what had been done to the South in 1864 until those same Rivington men helped change history, Lee did not want them reminded of his existence. If they were tapping the wires between North Carolina and Richmond, and if Pleasants’s name seemed vaguely familiar to one of them, as it had to Lee…
He shook his head, more than a little unnerved at stumbling over a new complication to fighting the men from the future. Not only did they have armaments and armor his forces could not match, they knew a great deal about the events of his own recent past and the people who shaped them. A mere name might have been plenty to warn them of what Forrest likely had in mind.
Lee set Forrest’s telegram aside and read the latest papers from Washington, Philadelphia, and New York. He did not think the British would get the Canadas back any time soon. Vancouver had just fallen to a U. S. force pushing up from Oregon. The Washington Evening Star was even reporting that the Russian Empire, alarmed at the progress of Federal arms, had offered to sell Alaska to the United States as preferable to seeing it conquered like the rest of North America. Lee smiled at that—what good were more square miles of snow and ice to anyone?
His smile faded as he read of continued English success at sea. The blockade of the eastern coast of the United States was probably tighter than the U.S. blockade of the Confederacy had been during the Second American Revolution, and the U.S. merchant fleet reduced to desperate straits. Confederate corn production was booming, to make up for the U.S. wheat no longer available to the British Isles.
That led him into the latest report from Julian Hartridge of Georgia, his Secretary of the Treasury. Reparations from the United States had allowed the Confederacy to payoff most of its wartime debts. That was important. The French had installed Maximilian in Mexico, not least because the previous government owed them money, and he did not want to give any European power a. similar excuse for meddling in Confederate affairs.
But new debts came every day: the manufactured goods the South bought were worth more and could be produced for less labor than the cotton and corn it gave in exchange for them. Gold kept flowing out of the country. Southern industry had made great strides during the war and Lee wanted to encourage it further, but the Constitution forbade a protective tariff.
He made a rueful noise, half grunt, half sigh. When the historians of a century hence came to write about his Presidency, he suspected they might call him the Great Circumventor, because the Confederate Constitution stood foursquare against most of what needed doing. All the South had wanted upon secession was to be left alone, but the world and the South itself had changed too much since 1861 for a return to the halcyon antebellum days to be possible, much less practical.
Or so Lee believed, at any rate. The proof of that belief lay in a draft bill on his desk, a bill with the deliberately innocuous title of “Legislation Regulating the Labor of Certain Inhabitants of the Confederate States.” That word inhabitants brought back his smile, though without much mirth to it: he could not have called the people affected by the legislation citizens, for under existing law slaves were not Confederate citizens. His bill would see to that—if it passed.