The Bloody Ground. Bernard Cornwell

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СКАЧАТЬ So?”

      “He was trying to see if you’re a Freemason, Nate. And you’re not.”

      “What the hell difference does that make?”

      “A lot,” Swynyard said bluntly. “There are a lot of Masons in this army, and in the Yankee army too, and Masons look after each other. Faulconer’s a Mason, so’s Maitland, and so am I, for that matter. The Masons have served me well enough, but they’ve done for you, Nate. The Yellowlegs!” The colonel shook his head at the awful prospect.

      “I ain’t good for much else, Colonel,” Starbuck admitted.

      “What does that mean?” Swynyard demanded.

      Starbuck hesitated, ashamed to admit a truth, but needing to tell someone about his fears. “I reckon I’m turning into a coward. It was all I could do to cross that cornfield yesterday and I’m not sure I could do it again. I guess I’ve used up what courage I ever had. Maybe a battalion of cowards deserve a coward as their commander.”

      Swynyard shook his head. “Courage isn’t like a bottle of whiskey, Nate. You don’t empty it once and for all. You’re just learning your trade. The first time in battle a boy reckons he can beat anything, but after a while he learns that battle is bigger than all of us. Being brave isn’t ignorance, it’s overcoming knowledge, Nate. You’ll be all right the next time. And remember, the enemy’s in just the same funk that you are. It’s only in the newspapers that we’re all heroes. In truth we’re most of us frightened witless.” He paused and stirred the damp leaves with the toe of a boot from which the sole was gaping. “And the Yellowlegs ain’t cowards,” he went on. “Something went wrong with them, that’s for sure, but there’ll be as many brave men there as in any other battalion. I reckon they just need good leadership.”

      Starbuck grimaced, hoping Swynyard told the truth, but still unwilling to leave the Legion. “Maybe I should go and see Jackson?” he suggested.

      “To get those orders reversed?” Swynyard asked, then shook his head in answer. “Old Jack don’t take kindly to men questioning orders. Nate, not unless the orders are plumb crazy, and that order ain’t plumb crazy. It’s perverse, that’s all. Besides,” he smiled, trying to cheer Starbuck, “you’ll be back. Maitland won’t survive.”

      “If he wears all that gold into battle,” Starbuck said vengefully, “the Yankees will pick him off in a second.”

      “He won’t be that foolish,” Swynyard said, “but he won’t stay long. I know the Maitlands, and they were always high kind of folk. Kept carriages, big houses, and acres of good land. They breed pretty daughters, haughty men, and fine horses, that’s the Maitlands. Not unlike the Faulconers. And Mister Maitland hasn’t come to us because he wants to command the Legion, Nate, he’s come here because he has to tuck one proper battlefield command under his belt before he can become a general. Mister Maitland has his eye on his career, and he knows he has to spend a month with muddy boots if he’s ever going to rise high. He’ll go soon enough and you can come back.”

      “Not if Faulconer has anything to do with it.”

      “So prove him wrong,” Swynyard said energetically. “Make the Yellowlegs into a fine regiment, Nate. If anyone can do it, you can.”

      “I sometimes wonder why I fight for this damn country,” Starbuck said bitterly.

      Swynyard smiled. “Nothing to stop you going back North, Nate, nothing at all. Just keep walking north and you’ll get home. Is that what you want?”

      “Hell, no.”

      “So prove Faulconer wrong. He reckons that a punishment battalion will be the end of you, so prove him wrong.”

      “Damn his bastard soul,” Starbuck said.

      “That’s God’s work, Nate. Your’s is to fight. So do it well. And I’ll put in a request that your men are sent to my brigade.”

      “What chance is there of that?”

      “I’m a Mason, remember,” Swynyard said with a grin, “and I’ve still got a favor or two to call in. We’ll get you back among friends.”

      Maitland stood up as the two ragged officers walked back to the tent. He had drunk one of the two cups of coffee and started on the second. “You’ll introduce me to the Legion’s officers, Starbuck?” he said.

      “I’ll do that for you, Colonel,” Starbuck said. He might resent this man displacing him, but he would not put difficulties in Maitland’s way because the Legion would have to fight the Yankees whoever commanded them and Starbuck did not want their morale hurt more than was necessary. “I’ll talk you up to them,” he promised grudgingly.

      “But I don’t think you should stay after that,” Maitland suggested confidently. “No man can serve two masters, isn’t that what the good book says? So the sooner you’re gone, Starbuck, the better for the men.”

      “Better for you, you mean,” Starbuck said.

      “That, too,” Maitland agreed calmly.

      Starbuck was losing the Legion and had been consigned to a battalion of the damned, which meant he was being destroyed and would somehow have to survive.

      LUCIFER WAS NOT HAPPY. “RICHMOND,” HE TOLD STARBUCK soon after they had arrived in the city, “is not to my taste.”

      “Then go away,” Starbuck retorted grumpily.

      “I am considering it,” Lucifer said. He was liable to pompousness when he perceived that his dignity was under assault, and that dignity was very easily offended. He was only a boy, fifteen at the very most, and he would have been small for his age even if he were two years younger, but he had crammed a lot of living into those few years and was possessed of a self-assurance that fascinated Starbuck quite as much as the mystery of the boy’s past. Lucifer never spoke directly about that past, nor did Starbuck ask about it, for he had learned that every query merely prompted a different version. It was plain the boy was a contraband, an escaped slave, and Starbuck suspected Lucifer had been trying to reach the sanctuary of the north when he had been apprehended by Jackson’s army at Manassas, but Lucifer’s life before that moment, like his real name, remained all mystery, just as it was a mystery why he had elected to stay with Starbuck after his recapture.

      “He likes you, that’s why,” Sally Truslow told Starbuck. “He knows you’ll give him plenty of rope and he’s mischievous enough to want rope. Then one day he’ll grow up and you won’t ever see him again.”

      Starbuck and Lucifer had walked from the rain-soaked battlefield to the railhead at Fredericksburg, then taken the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad to the capital. Starbuck’s travel pass gave him admission to one of the passenger cars while Lucifer traveled in a boxcar with the other Negroes. The train had puffed and jerked and clanked and shuddered and thus crept south until, at dawn, Starbuck had been woken by the cry of a Richmond milkmaid. The Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac depot was in the heart of the city and the rails ran right down the center of Broad Street, and Starbuck found it a strange experience to see the familiar city through the soot-smutted window of a slow-moving railcar. Newspaper boys ran alongside the train offering copies of the Examiner or Sentinel, while on the sidewalk pedestrians edged past the carts and wagons that had been herded to the street’s sides by the train’s slow, clangorous passage. Starbuck stared bleary-eyed СКАЧАТЬ