Copperhead. Bernard Cornwell

a northerner shouted and the Massachusetts’s bullets whipped back through the smoke bank.

      “Keep firing!” Duff shouted and emptied his revolver into the haze of powder smoke that already obscured the field. His men had taken cover behind the shocks of oats and were steadily reloading. The northerners were doing the same, except for one man who was twitching and bleeding on the ground. There were more Yankees off to Duff’s right, higher up the slope, but he could not worry about them. He had chosen to make his stand here, plumb in the middle of the field, and now he would have to fight these bastards till one side could stand no more.

      Six miles away, at Edwards Ferry, more northerners had crossed the Potomac and cut the turnpike that led to Centreville. Nathan Evans, thus caught between the two invading forces, refused to show any undue alarm. “One might be trying to fool me while the other one gets ready to rape me, ain’t that how it’s done, Boston?” “Boston” was his nickname for Starbuck. They had met at Manassas where Evans had saved the Confederacy by holding up the northern attack while the rebel lines reformed. “Lying, thieving, black-assed, hymn-singing bastards,” Evans said now, evidently of the whole northern army. He had ridden with an order for the Faulconer Legion to stay where it was, only to discover that Thaddeus Bird had anticipated him by canceling the Legion’s departure. Now Evans cocked his ear to the wind and tried to gauge from the intensity of the rifle fire which enemy incursion offered the most danger. The church bell in Leesburg was still ringing, summoning the militia. “So you’re not going to stay with me, Boston?” Evans remarked.

      “I like being a company officer, sir.”

      Evans growled in response, though Starbuck was not at all sure the small, foulmouthed South Carolinian had heard his answer. Instead Evans was switching his attention back and forth between the competing sounds of the two northern incursions. Otto, his German orderly, whose main duty consisted of carrying a barrel of whiskey for the General’s refreshment, also listened to the gunfire so that the two men’s heads twitched back and forth in unison. Evans was the first to stop, clicking his fingers for a drop of whiskey instead. He drained the tin mug, then looked back at Bird. “You’ll stay here, Pecker. You’re my reserve. I don’t reckon there’s so many of the bastards, they’re not making enough noise for that, so we might as well stay put and see if we can’t give the bastards a bloody nose. Killing Yankees is as good a way to start the week as any, eh?” He laughed. “Of course, if I’m wrong we’ll all be stone dead by nightfall. Come on. Otto!” Evans put spurs to his horse and galloped back toward the earth-walled fort that was his headquarters.

      Starbuck climbed onto a wagon loaded with folded tents and slept as the sun burned the mist off the river and dried the dew off the fields. More northern troops crossed the river and climbed the bluff to mass under the trees. General Stone, the commander of the Federal forces guarding the Potomac, had decided to commit more troops to the crossing and sent orders that the invaders should not just occupy Leesburg but reconnoiter the whole of Loudoun County. If the rebels had gone, Stone commanded, then the Yankees should occupy the area, but if a strong Confederate force opposed the reconnaissance, then the Federal forces were free to withdraw across the river with whatever foodstuffs they might confiscate. Stone dispatched artillery to add firepower to the invading force, but also made plain that he was leaving the decision whether to stay in Virginia to the man he now placed in command of the whole northern operation.

      That man was Colonel Ned Baker, a tall, clean-shaven, silver-haired, golden-tongued politician. Baker was a California lawyer, a United States senator from Oregon and one of President Lincoln’s closest friends, so close that Lincoln had named his second son after the Senator. Baker was an impetuous, emotional, warmhearted man, and his arrival at the river crossing sent ripples of excitement through those men of the 15th Massachusetts who still waited with the New York Tammany Regiment on the Maryland bank. Baker’s own regiment, the 1st Californian, now joined the invasion. The regiment was from New York, but had been recruited from men who had ties to California, and with them came a fourteen-pounder rifled cannon from Rhode Island and a pair of howitzers manned by U.S. Army regulars. “Take everything across!” Baker shouted ebulliently. “Every last man and gun!”

      “We’ll need more boats,” the Colonel of the Tammanys cautioned the Senator.

      “Then find them! Build them! Steal them! Fetch gopher wood and build an ark, Colonel. Find a beautiful woman and let her face launch a thousand ships, but let us press on to glory, boys!” Baker strode down the bank, cocking his ear to the staccato crackle of musketry that sounded from the river’s far shore. “Rebels are dying, lads! Let’s go and kill some more!”

      The Tammany Colonel attempted to ask the Senator just what his regiment was supposed to do when it reached the Virginia shore, but Baker brushed the question aside. He did not care if this was a mere raid or a historic invasion marking the beginning of Virginia’s occupation, he only knew that he had three pieces of artillery and four regiments of prime, unbloodied troops, which gave him the necessary power to offer President Lincoln and the country the victory they so badly needed. “On to Richmond, boys!” Baker shouted as he pushed through the troops on the riverbank. “On to Richmond, and may the devil have no mercy their souls! On for the union, boys, on for the union! Let’s hear you cheer!”

      They cheered loud enough to obliterate the splintering sound of musketry that came from the river’s far bank where, beyond the wooded bluff, powder smoke lingered among the stooked oats where the day’s long dying had begun.

      MAJOR ADAM FAULCONER ARRIVED AT THE FAULCONER Legion a few moments after midday. “There are Yankees on the turnpike. They gave me a chase!” He looked happy, as though the hard riding of the last few minutes had been a cross-country romp rather than a desperate flight from a determined enemy. His horse, a fine roan stallion from the Faulconer Stud, was flecked with white foam, its ears were pricked nervously back, and it kept taking small nervous sidesteps that Adam instinctively corrected. “Uncle!” he greeted Major Bird cheerfully, then turned immediately back to Starbuck. They had been friends for three years, but it had been weeks since they had met, and Adam’s pleasure at their reunion was heartfelt. “You look as if you were fast asleep, Nate.”

      “He was at a prayer meeting late last night,” Sergeant Truslow interjected in a voice that was deliberately sour so that no one but he and Starbuck would know he made a joke, “praying till three in the morning.”

      “Good for you, Nate,” Adam said warmly, then turned his horse back toward Thaddeus Bird. “Did you hear what I said, Uncle? There are Yankees on the turnpike!”

      “We heard they were there,” Bird said casually, as though errant Yankees were as predictable a feature of the fall landscape as migrating wild fowl.

      “The wretches fired at me.” Adam sounded astonished that such a discourtesy might occur in wartime. “But we outran them, didn’t we, boy?” He patted the neck of his sweating horse, then swung down from the saddle and tossed the reins to Robert Decker, who was one of Starbuck’s company. “Walk him for a while, will you, Robert?”

      “Pleased to, Mr. Adam.”

      “And don’t let him drink yet. Not till he’s cooled,” Adam instructed Decker, then he explained to his uncle that he had ridden from Centreville at dawn, expecting to encounter the Legion on the road. “I couldn’t find you, so I just kept going,” Adam said cheerfully. He walked with a very slight limp, the result of a bullet he had taken at the battle at Manassas, but the wound was well-healed and the limp hardly noticeable. Adam, unlike his father, Washington Faulconer, had been in the very thick of the Manassas fight even though, for weeks before, he had been assailed by equivocation about the war’s morality and had even doubted whether he could take part in the hostilities at all. After the battle, while he was convalescing in Richmond, Adam had been promoted to major and given a post on General Joseph Johnston’s staff. The General was one of the many Confederates who was under the misapprehension that Washington Faulconer had helped stem the surprise northern attack at Manassas, and the son’s promotion and staff appointment had been intended as a mark of gratitude to the father.

      “You’ve brought us orders?” Bird now asked Adam.