certainly be pleased to hear you’re attending prayer meetings,” Adam said fervently. “He worries for your faith. Do you go to church every week?”
“Whenever I can,” Starbuck said, then decided this was a subject best changed. “And you?” he asked Adam. “How are you?”
Adam smiled, but did not answer at once. Instead he blushed, then laughed. He was clearly full of some piece of news that he was too embarrassed to tell outright, but nevertheless wanted prised out of him. “I’m really fine,” he said, leaving the opening dangling.
Starbuck caught the inflection exactly. “You’re in love.”
Adam nodded. “I really think I might be, yes.” He sounded surprised at himself. “Yes. Really.”
Adam’s coyness filled Starbuck with affectionate amusement. “You’re getting married?”
“I think so, yes. We think so, indeed, but not yet. We thought we should wait for the war’s end.” Adam still blushed, but suddenly he laughed, hugely pleased with himself, and unbuttoned a tunic pocket as though to take out a picture of his beloved. “You haven’t even asked what her name is.”
“Tell me her name,” Starbuck demanded dutifully, then turned away because the sound of rifle fire had swollen again to a frantic intensity. A slight haze of powder smoke was showing above the trees now, a gauzy flag of battle that would thicken into a dense fog if the guns kept up their present rate of fire.
“She’s called…” Adam began, then checked because hooves thumped loud on the turf behind him.
“Sir! Mr. Starbuck, sir!” a voice hailed, and Starbuck turned to see young Robert Decker galloping across the field on the back of Adam’s stallion. “Sir!” He was waving excitedly to Starbuck. “We’ve got orders, sir! We’ve got orders! We’re to go and fight them, sir!”
“Thank God,” Starbuck said, and started running back to his company.
“Her name’s Julia,” Adam said to no one, frowning at his friend’s back. “Her name’s Julia.”
“Sir?” Robert Decker asked, puzzled. He had slid out of the saddle and now offered the stallion’s reins to Adam.
“Nothing, Robert.” Adam took the reins. “Nothing at all. Go and join the company.” He watched Nate shouting at K Company, seeing the excitement of men stirred from repose by the prospect of killing. Then he buttoned his pocket to secure the leather-cased photograph of his girl before climbing into the saddle and riding to join his father’s Legion. Which was about to fight its second battle.
On the quiet banks of the Potomac.
The two Yankee river crossings were five miles apart and General Nathan Evans had been trying to decide which offered his brigade the greater danger. The crossing to the east had cut the turnpike and so appeared to be the bigger tactical threat because it severed his communications with Johnston’s headquarters at Centreville, but the Yankees were not reinforcing the handful of men and guns they had thrown over the river there, while more and more reports spoke of infantry reinforcements crossing the river at Harrison’s Island and then climbing the precipitous slope to the wooded summit of Ball’s Bluff. It was there, Evans decided, that the enemy was concentrating its threat, and it was there that he now sent the rest of his Mississippians and his two Virginia regiments. He sent the 8th Virginians to the near side of Ball’s Bluff, but ordered Bird to make for the farther western flank. “Go through the town,” Evans told Bird, “and come up on the left of the Mississippi boys. Then get rid of the Yankee bastards.”
“With pleasure, sir.” Bird turned away and shouted his orders. The men’s packs and blanket rolls were to be left with a small baggage guard, while every one else in the Legion was to march west with a rifle, sixty rounds of ammunition, and whatever other weapons they chose to carry. In the summer, when they had first marched to war, the men had been weighed down with knapsacks and haversacks, canteens and cartridge boxes, blankets and groundsheets, bowie knives and revolvers, bayonets and rifles, plus whatever other accoutrements a man’s family might have sent to keep him safe, warm, or dry. Some men had carried buffalo robes, while one or two had even worn metal breastplates designed to protect them from Yankee bullets, but now few men carried anything more than a rifle and bayonet, a canteen, a haversack, and a groundsheet and blanket rolled into a tube that was worn slantwise around their chests. Everything else was just impediment. Most had discarded their pasteboard-stiffened caps, preferring slouch hats that protected the backs of their necks from the sun. Their tall stiff boots had been cut down into shoes, the fine twin rows of brass buttons on their long jackets had been chopped away and used as payment for apple juice or sweet milk from the farms of Loudoun County, while many of the skirts of the long coats had been cut away to provide material to patch breeches or elbows. Back in June, when the Legion had trained at Faulconer Court House, the regiment had looked as smart and well-equipped as any soldiers in the world, but now, after just one battle and three months picket duty along the frontier, they looked like ragamuffins, but they were all far better soldiers. They were lean, tanned, fit, and very dangerous. “They still have their illusions, you see,” Thaddeus Bird explained to his nephew. Adam was riding his fine roan horse while Major Bird, as ever, walked.
“Illusions?”
“We think we’re invincible because we’re young. Not me, you understand, but the boys. I used to make it my business to educate the more stupid fallacies out of youth; now I try to preserve their nonsense.” Bird raised his voice so that the nearest company could hear him. “You’ll live forever, you rogues, as long as you remember one thing! Which is?”
There was a pause, then a handful of men returned a ragged answer. “Aim low.”
“Louder!”
“Aim low!” This time the whole company roared back the answer, then began laughing, and Bird beamed on them like a schoolmaster proud of his pupils’ achievements.
The Legion marched through the dusty main street of Leesburg where one small crowd of men was gathered outside the Loudoun County Court House and another, slightly larger, outside Makepeace’s Tavern across the street. “Give us guns!” one man shouted. It appeared they were the county militia and had neither weapons nor ammunition, though a handful of men, privately equipped, had gone to the battlefield anyway. Some of the men fell in with the Legion, hoping to find a discarded weapon on the field. “What’s happening, Colonel?” they asked Adam, mistaking the scarlet trim and gold stars on his fine uniform as evidence that he commanded the regiment.
“It’s nothing to be excited about,” Adam insisted. “Nothing but a few stray northerners.”
“Making enough noise, ain’t they?” a woman called, and the Yankees were indeed much noisier now that Senator Baker had succeeded in getting his three guns across the river and up the steep, slippery path to the bluffs peak, where the gunners had cleared their weapons’ throats with three blasts of canister that had rattled into the trees to shred the leaves.
Baker, taking command of the battle, had found his troops sadly scattered. The 20th Massachusetts was posted in the woods at the summit while the 15th had pushed across the ragged meadow, through the far woods and into the open slopes overlooking Leesburg. Baker called the 15th back, insisting that they form a battle line on the left of the 20th. “We’ll form up here,” he announced, “while New York and California join us!” He drew his sword and whipped the engraved blade to slash off a nettle’s head. The rebel bullets slashed overhead, occasionally clipping off shreds of leaf that fluttered down in the warm, balmy air. The
