The Guns of the South

* III *

The locomotive snorted and hissed as it slowed. The shriek of the locked driving wheels against sanded rails reminded General Lee of the cries of wounded horses, the most piteous sound on any battlefield. The train stopped. There was a last jolt as the cars came together with a clanking clatter of link-and-pin couplings.

Lee and the other passengers got to their feet.” All out to Richmond!” the conductor called before hurrying down to the next car to repeat the cry.

Carpetbag in hand, Lee descended to the muddy ground outside the Virginia Central Railroad depot at the corner of sixteenth and Broad. The depot was a plain wooden shed; much in need of paint. A banner on the door of the tavern across the street advertised fried oysters at half price in honor of George Washington’s birthday.

The banner made Lee pause in mild bemusement: strange how the Confederacy still revered the founding fathers of the United States. Or perhaps it was not so strange. Surely Washington, were he somehow to whirl through time to the present, would find himself more at home on a Southern plantation than in a brawling Northern factory town like Pittsburgh or New York. And, of course, Washington was a Virginian, so where better to celebrate his birthday than Richmond?

A young man’s brisk voice brought Lee out of his reverie and back to the here and now: “General? I have a carriage waiting for you, sir.”

He turned around, exchanged salutes with a lieutenant who wore a uniform nattier than any still to be found in the Army of Northern Virginia. “I hope you were not waiting long for me?”

“No, sir.” The lieutenant pulled out a pocket watch. “It’s but a few minutes after four. The train was due in at a quarter past three. I arrived then, on the off chance it might be on time.” Both men smiled, knowing how unlikely that was. But a wise lieutenant did not take chances, not when he was meeting the senior officer of his army. He held out his hand for Lee’s bag, “If you’ll come with me, sir—”

Lee followed him to the carriage. Its black driver tapped a finger against the brim of his tall silk hat as Lee got in. “Evenin’, Marse Robert.”

“Hello, Luke. How are you today?”

“Oh, middlin’, sir; I expect I’m about middlin’.”

“That’s a fair enough place to be,” Lee said judiciously.

The lieutenant put a snap of command in his voice: “Back to the President’s office, Luke.”

“Yassuh.” Luke flicked his whip. The two-horse team started northwest up Broad Street. Like the lieutenant, both animals were in finer fettle than the beasts Jeb Stuart’s troopers rode. It was the same in Washington City, Lee had heard. He believed it. The farther one drew from the front lines, the easier one found comfort.

Train tracks ran down the middle of Broad Street, connecting the Virginia Central depot with that of the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac eight blocks away. Lee heard an engine coming their way, puffing at full throttle to haul a fully laden train up steep Shockoe Hill. The horses heard, too, and tossed their heads to show they did not approve. Luke calmed them with a few soft words.

Before the bellowing, cinder-belching monster appeared, the carriage turned left onto Twelfth Street. It rattled through capitol Square on the way to the new building that had been the customhouse before Virginia left the Union.

Off to the left, twin rows of oaks led to the governor’s mansion. To the right, Lee got a quick glimpse of the equestrian statue of George Washington before it vanished behind the severely classic bulk of the Virginia state capitol, now also the home of the Confederate Congress. The white columns and walls were remarkably handsome in spring and summer, when set against the rich green of the lawns and shrubbery and trees that surrounded them. Now the lawns were dead and yellow, the trees skeletal without their cloak of leaves.

The Confederate flag waved bravely over the Capitol, red canton with blue saltire cross and thirteen stars on a white ground. The Stainless Banner would come down soon; sunset was near. It was both like enough to the Stars and Stripes and different enough from it to stir conflicting feelings in Lee. He remembered the day, almost three years gone now, when he had gone into the House of Delegates to take charge of Virginia’s forces. He shook his head. Four days before that, Winfield Scott had offered him command over the armies of the United States, to lead them against their seceded brethren. He still thought he had made the right—for him, the only—choice.

The massive rectangle of the former customhouse took up a whole city block. Built from concrete and steel, it might have served duty as a fortress. Unlike most of Richmond’s major buildings, it was in Italianate rather than neoclassic style, its three stories shown by the tall windows with arched tops.

Luke hitched his team to the rail in front of the building. The lieutenant said, “He will be at your disposal for the length of your stay in the city, sir. Now I will take you up to President Davis. Let me have your bag there, if you would.”

“That’s very kind of you, sir.” Lee followed the lieutenant inside.

The first floor housed the Treasury Department. Most of the time, busy men there would pause to look and point as Lee walked to the stairs. Those men needed to be busy, he thought with less than perfect forbearance, to print all the paper money that was pushing prices in the Confederacy to the sky. But even they had Washington’s birthday as a holiday.

The second floor was always quiet, today no more so than usual. That floor belonged to the Department of State; no foreign nation had recognized the Confederate States of America, nor did any seem likely to unless the South won more victories than she had thus far.

President Davis’s offices were on the third floor. The lieutenant tapped on a closed door. “Yes?” Jefferson Davis called from within.

“I have General Lee with me, sir.”

“Excellent. I will see him. You may return to your other duties.” The lieutenant opened the door, saluted Lee one last time, and hurried away.

“Mr. President,” Lee said.

“Come right in, General. I’ll be with you directly.” Davis was going around with a tallow dip, lighting lamps. His bearing was military—indeed, extraordinarily erect; he was a West Point man himself, from the class a year ahead of Lee’s. He came back to his desk last, and lit two lamps there. “Go on, sit down. Make yourself comfortable.”

“Thank you, sir.” Lee waited for Davis to seat himself before he sank into an overstuffed armchair. The lamplight played up the hollows in Davis’s gaunt cheeks, lit his pale eyes within the shadows of their deep sockets. He was aristocratically handsome, while Abraham Lincoln had no claim to either breeding or good looks, but the two presidents, Lee thought irrelevantly, had faces of similar shape and leanness.

Davis said, “How was your journey south?”

“Well enough, sir,” Lee answered with a shrug. “I left this morning and am here now. If I am a trifle later than the railroad men claimed I would be when I set out, well, what train ever runs dead on time?”

“None, I think; none on our railroads, at any rate.” Davis glanced to a tall clock that ticked in a corner of the office. His nostrils flared with exasperation. “Nor is Mr. Seddon. I had hoped him to be here half an hour ago.”

Lee shrugged again. The Secretary of War had doubtless expected his train to run even later than it did; unlike the young lieutenant, he was sufficiently important in his own right to take such chances. In any case, President Davis was for all practical purposes his own Secretary of War. Lee knew he would sooner have been commanding Confederate armies in the field than governing from Richmond.

As luck would have it, James Seddon walked into the office n()t fifteen seconds after Davis had complained about him. Lee rose to shake his hand. Seddon was tall, thin, and resembled nothing so much as a tired vulture. He wore his gray hair combed straight back from his forehead (it was thin in those parts anyhow) and long enough on the sides to cover his ears. At the president’s murmured invitation, he drew up a chair beside Lee’s. They sat together.

“To business,” Davis said. “General Lee, I’ve heard great things of these new repeating carbines the soldiers are being issued. Even General Johnston has written to me from Dalton, singing hosannas in their praise.”

If anything, praise from Joe Johnston was liable to make the President suspicious about the new rifles; if Johnston said it looked like rain, Davis would expect a drought, and the lack of affinity was mutual. Lee said quickly, “For once, Mr. President, I would say the reports are, if anything, understated. The repeaters are robust, they are reasonably accurate with adequate range, and they and their ammunition appear to be available in quantities sufficient to permit us to take the field with them. When spring comes, I intend to do so.”

“They improve our prospects by so much, then?” Seddon asked.

“They do indeed, sir,” Lee said. “The Federals have always had more weight than we, could they but effectively bring it to bear. These repeaters go far toward righting the balance. Without them, our chances were become rather bleak. In saying this, I know I catch neither of you gentlemen by surprise.”

“No, indeed,” Davis said. “I am most pleased to hear this news from you, General, for some of the counsel I have had from others approaches desperation.” He rose from his desk, strode over to close the door that led out to the hallway. As he turned back, he went on, “What I tell you now, gentlemen, must not leave this room. Do you understand?”

“Certainly, Mr. President,” said Seddon, who usually said yes to whatever Jefferson Davis wanted. Lee bent his head to show he also agreed.

“Very well, then, I shall hold you to that promise,” Davis said. “To give you the full import of the remedies which have been contemplated out of anxiety for our future, let me tell you that last month I received a memorial from General Cleburne of the Army of Tennessee”

“Ah, that,” Seddon said. “Yes, that needs to stay under the rose.” He was familiar with the memorial, then.

“Cleburne is an able officer,” Lee said. “He fought well in the Chattanooga campaign, by all accounts.”

“As may be. He stirred up a fight of his own, among the generals of his army. You see, in his memorial, he proposed freeing and arming some portion of our Negroes, to use them as soldiers against the Yankees.”

“Many might say, what point to the Confederacy, then?” Seddon remarked. “What point to our revolution?”

Lee’s brows came together as he thought. At last he said, “The Federals let some of their Negroes put on the blue uniform. They will surely take away ours if we are defeated. Would it not be better to preserve our independence by whatever means we may, and measure the cost to our social institutions once that independence is guaranteed? Fighting for their freedom, Negroes might well make good soldiers.”

“Put that way, it might be so,” Seddon said. “Still, the agitation and controversy which must spring from the presentation of such views by officers high in the public confidence are to be deeply deprecated.”

“I agree. We cannot afford such controversy now,” Davis said…Cleburne’s memorial is a counsel of the last ditch. At the last ditch, I would consider it—at the last ditch, I would consider any course that promised to stay our subjugation by the tyranny in Washington. What I hope, however, General Lee, is that, newly armed as we shall be, we succeed in keeping ourselves from that last ditch., and thus preserve our institutions unblemished by unwelcome change.”

“I hope so, too, Mr. President,” Lee said. “It may be so. That our prospects are better with these repeating carbines than they would be without them cannot be denied. Whether they will bring us victory—God alone can answer that. I shall do my best to foster that victory, as will your other commanders.” That was as much as Lee felt he could say. He wished Davis would trust General Johnston further, wished the two of them could compose their quarrel. He was not, however, in a position to suggest it. Both proud, touchy men would surely take it wrong.

Davis said, “General, am I to understand that these amazing rifles spring from Rivington, North Carolina? I had not thought of Rivington as a center of manufacture. Indeed”—he smiled frostily—”up until this past month I had not thought of Rivington at all.”

“I’d never heard of the place, either,” Seddon put in.

“Nor had I,” Lee said. “Since it was brought to my attention, my staff officers and I have inquired about it of train crews and soldiers who pass through the place. Their reports only leave me more puzzled, for it has not the appearance of a manufacturing town: no smelting works, no forges, no factories. There has lately been a good deal of building there, but of homes and warehouses, not the sort of buildings required to produce rifles, cartridges, or powder. Moreover—Mr. President, have you had the opportunity to examine these rifles for yourself?”

“Not yet, no,” Davis said.

“Among other things, they bear truly astonishing gunsmiths, marks. Some proclaim themselves to have been manufactured in the People’s Republic of China, a part of that country no one has been able to locate in any atlas. Others say they were made in Yugoslavia, a country which appears in no atlas. And still others are marked in what, after some effort, we determined to be Russian. I have learned they were made in the SSSR, but what the SSSR may be, I cannot tell you. It is, I confess, a considerable puzzlement.”

“By what you are telling us, Rivington seems more likely a transshipment point than one where the weapons are actually made,” Seddon said.

“So it does.” Lee looked toward the Secretary of War in some surprise. Why couldn’t Seddon make such cogent suggestions more often? Or was it cogent? Lee went on, “From where could the rifles be transshipped? Granted, Rivington is on the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, but the blockade runners are not bringing them in at Wilmington. They seem to originate directly at Rivington, coming, I cannot tell you how, from these unknown places I have mentioned, and travel from Rivington to us and, I gather, to other armies.”

“You have interrogated the railroad workers and our soldiers, you say,” Jefferson Davis said. “Have you not also questioned the men of Rivington, the ones who are with your army as instructors?”

“Mr. President, I have, but I confess only circumspectly,” Lee said. “They turn aside all significant queries; they are as closemouthed a band of men as I have ever encountered. And without your order, I have been unwilling to do anything that might antagonize them, lest the stream of carbines dry up as suddenly as it began to flow.”

Davis rubbed the smooth-shaven front of his chin, plucked at the beard that grew under his jaw.” I dislike our nation’s dependence upon any single small group, let alone one about which we know so little. Under the circumstances, though, General, I must reluctantly concur with your judgment.”

“Perhaps we should send agents to this Rivington, to learn of it what we may—circumspectly, of course,” Seddon said.

“A good plan. See to it,” Davis said. Seddon took a pencil and a scrap of paper from his pocket. He leaned forward, made a note to himself on the President’s desk, and put away the paper.

“Is there anything more, Mr. President?” Lee asked, hoping the Secretary of War would not forget until the next time he chanced to wear that waistcoat.

“No, General, thank you very much. You may go; I know you’ll be eager to see your wife. Please convey my greetings to her. She and her ladies have been of material benefit to the soldiers of the Confederacy, and I would not have her believe herself unappreciated,” Davis said.

Lee stood to go. “I will give her your exact words, Mr. President, as best I can remember them. I know she will be grateful to hear from you.” He nodded to Seddon. “I hope I see you again, sir.”

It was full dark outside, and cloudy, with a feel of rain in the air. Lee put on his hat and buttoned the top buttons of his coat as he walked out to the waiting carriage. Luke looked up at the sound of his footsteps. The black man quickly stowed away a small flask. Lee pretended he had not seen it. If Luke wanted a nip against the nighttime cold, that was his affair. “Gwine home now, Marse Robert?” he asked as he got down to untie the team.

“That’s right, Luke, to Mrs. Lee’s house.” It was hardly home. His proper home, Arlington, lay just across the Potomac from Washington City. It had been in Federal hands since the beginning of the war. For the last two years, he had lived with the Army of Northern Virginia. Anywhere away from it, he felt like a visitor.

“Have you there soon.” Luke returned to his seat. “It only be a couple blocks.”

The horses snorted eagerly as they began to walk. They had been cold, too. The carriage clattered northwest along Bank Street, the lower boundary of Capitol Square. When Luke got to Ninth Street, he turned right. Half a block later, at the corner of Ninth and Franklin, he went left again, onto Franklin.

Despite the holiday, lights burned at several windows of Mechanic’s Hall, which stood at the corner of Ninth and Franklin. Seddon no doubt had come from there: the building housed the War and Navy Departments. Before the Confederate capital moved to Richmond, the convention that had taken Virginia out of the United States had met there, too.

Past Mechanic’s Hall, Franklin Street was quiet and almost deserted. Two blocks away, on Broad Street, another train roared along between the depots of the Virginia Central and the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac. Its racket was in marked contrast to the serenity that seemed to flow from every brick of the United Presbyterian Church on the corner of Eighth and Franklin.

Lee smiled and shifted forward in his seat as the carriage rolled past the church. The house Mary Custis Lee was renting lay halfway down the same block, on the opposite side of the street.

“Yours is the middle house, am I right, Marse Robert?” Luke said.

“Yes, and thank you, Luke.” Lee descended from the carriage before it had quite stopped. Luke flicked the whip over the horses. As they began to move faster again, he reached down for the flask he had put away. He swallowed and sighed with pleasure.

The house across the street from 707 Franklin had in front of it a young maple in a planter painted with chevrons. “As you were, Sergeant,” Lee told it, smiling slightly. He opened the gate to the cast-iron fence in front 707 Franklin, hurried up the short walk to the porch. There he paused to wipe the mud from the unpaved street off his boots before he knocked on the door.

He heard footsteps inside. The door opened. Lamplight spilled onto the porch. Silhouetted by it, Agnes Lee peered out. “Father!” she exclaimed, and threw herself into his arms.

“Hello, my precious little Agnes,” he said. “You must be careful with your knitting needles there behind my back, lest you do me an injury worse than any those people have yet managed to inflict on me.”

She looked up at him with a doubtful smile. All her smiles were doubtful these days, and had been since her sister Annie died a year and a half before; she and Annie had been almost as close as twins. After he kissed her on the cheek, she pulled herself free and called, “Mother, Mary, Mildred—Father’s here!”

Mildred came rushing up first. “Precious life,” he said indulgently as he hugged her. “And how is my pet this evening?”

“Father,” she said, in the tone of voice any eighteen-year-old uses when her elderly and obviously decrepit parent presumes to allude to the unfortunate fact that she was once much younger than her present peak of maturity.

Lee did not mind; his youngest child was his pet, regardless of what she thought of the matter. “How is Custis Morgan?” he asked her.

“He’s happy and fat,” she answered. “Acorns are easier to come by than human provender.”

“Such a happy, fat squirrel had best not be seen in camp,” he teased, “lest he exit the stage in a stewpot-bound blaze of glory.” She made a face at him. He shook his head in mock reproof.

His eldest daughter came into the front hall a moment later, pushing his wife ahead of her in a wheeled chair. “Hello, Mary,” he called to them both. Mary his daughter bore a strong resemblance to his wife, though her hair was darker than Mary Custis Lee’s had been when she was young.

He took three quick steps to his wife, bent a little so he could clasp her hand in his. “How are you, my dear Mary?” he asked her. She stayed in her chair most of the time; rheumatism had so crippled her that she could hardly walk.

“You didn’t write to let us know you were coming,” she said, a little sharply. Even when she’d been young and pretty and well—more than half a lifetime ago, Lee thought with some surprise, he could call up in his mind the picture of her then as easily as if it had been day before yesterday—her temper was uncertain. Years as an invalid had done nothing to soften her.

He said, “I was summoned down to confer with the President, and took the first train south. A letter could hardly have outrun me, so here I am, my own messenger. I am glad to see you—glad to see you all. Your hands, I note, dear Mary, are not too poorly for you to knit.” He pointed to the yarn, needles, and half-finished sock that lay in her lap.

“When I can no. longer knit, you may lay me in my grave, for I’ll be utterly useless then,” she answered. She’d loved to ply the needles since she was a girl. Now she went on, “Since you are here, you may take the next bundle back with you for the men. Between our daughters and me, we’ve finished nearly four dozen pairs since we last sent them. And with them in your hands, the count should be right when they reach camp.”

“Times are hard for everyone,” Lee said. “If a railroad man is needy enough to filch a pair of socks, I dare say he requires them as badly as any of my soldiers.”

His eldest daughter said, “Mrs. Chesnut visited not long ago and said we were so busy we reminded her of an industrial school.” Mary tossed her head to show what she thought of the blue-blooded South Carolina woman. At the same age, her mother would have done the same thing.

“I don’t care what Mary Boykin Chesnut thinks of us,” Mary Custis Lee declared. “It would be altogether improper for me to lead in any entertainments of the social sort when the men you lead are all half-starved, and when you yourself live like a monk in that tent of yours.”

“President Davis’s opinion of you is rather higher than Mrs. Chesnut’s.” Lee passed on Davis’s compliment. “Tell me, then, whose approbation would you sooner have?”

“Yours,” his wife said.

He stooped to kiss her cheek. However her body troubled her, she was loyal to him to the bone, and he to her. They were part of each other. After more than thirty-two years of marriage, he had trouble imagining things being otherwise.

“Julia, turn down the second bed in Mother’s room, please,” Agnes called. The black woman started up the stairs.

Lee said, “That’s thoughtful of you, but I don’t plan on turning in quite yet. I should like to sit up awhile and listen to the doings of the city from the lot of you. If you can stand to hear me, I may even go on a bit about affairs at camp.”

“I’m going to go hide Custis Morgan, so you don’t take him back to Orange Court House with the socks,” Mildred said. “What’s your daughter’s happiness, set against the prospect of squirrel stew for your men?”

Chuckling, Lee told her, “Your pet is safe from me, precious life. He would not go far enough, divided among hungry soldiers, to be worth absconding with. If the Scriptures spoke of the miracle of loaves and squirrels, though, instead of loaves and fishes—”

Everyone laughed at that, even Agnes, briefly. Mary Custis Lee said, “Let’s go back into the parlor, then, and talk.” The wheels of her chair squeaked as Mary turned her around.

“I don’t want to talk about squirrels anymore,” Mildred said.

“Then we shan’t,” Lee promised.

The women’s needles clicked busily as they resumed their interrupted knitting. The war touched them in Richmond almost as hard as it did him with the Army of Northern Virginia. One of the stories Lee’s eldest daughter told was of the mass escape of Federal officers from Libby Prison less than two weeks before. Over a hundred men had got loose, and fewer than half of them were rounded up again.

“Our own soldiers suffer in Northern prison camps,” Lee said, “though the North has more to spare for captives than do we. The North has more to spare for everyone.” He sighed. “I have said that, thought that, wrestled with that for too long. I wish this war had never come; it wastes both sides.”

“I said as much when it began,” his wife observed.

“I know you did, nor did I disagree with you. I wanted no flag but the Star-Spangled Banner, no song besides ‘Hail Columbia.’ But once here, the thing must be fought through.” He hesitated, then continued: “It may even—may, I say—have seen a turn in our favor.”

The knitting needles stopped. His wife and daughters all looked at him. He had always done his best to sound hopeful in his letters and to act so when he saw them, but he was not one to be falsely or blindly optimistic, and they knew it. His daughter Mary asked, “From where has this good news come?”

“From Rivington, North Carolina, as a matter of fact,” Lee said. The name of the place meant no more to his family than it had to him a month before. He quickly told the story of the new repeaters and the curiously accented men who supplied them, finishing, “We cannot outnumber the Federals; if we outshoot them, though, that may serve as well.”

His daughters seemed more interested in his account of the strangers and their gear than in details of the carbines. Mildred said, “I wonder if those are the same men as the ones who not long ago rented a whole floor in the building across from Mechanic’s Hall.”

“Why do you say that, precious life?” Lee asked.

“Any time anyone pays his bills in gold these days, word gets around, and by what you said, these—what did your lieutenant call them?—these all-over-spots fellows appear to have an unmatched supply of it. And if I were selling guns to the War Department instead of making socks, I should like my offices close by theirs.”

“None of which necessarily proves a thing,” he said. Mildred’s lively features started to cloud up, but he went on, “Still, I think you may well be right. It could do with some looking into, perhaps.”

“Why, Father?” Agnes scratched her head. Her hair, now tightly done up with pins, came closest of all his children’s to matching the rich yellow that had been her mother’s. “Why?” she asked again. “From all you’ve said, these men from Rivington mean us nothing but good.”

“The old homely saying is, look not a gift horse in the mouth. If you follow that saying, you will end up with a great many old, hard-mouthed horses in your barn,” Lee answered. “When the gift is of such magnitude as that which these men are giving us, I would examine it as closely as possible to learn if it is in fact as fine as it appears and to see if it comes attached to strings.”

“Even if it does, you will have to accept it, Father, won’t you?” Mary asked.

“You always did see clearly, my dear,” he said. “Yes, I think we must, if our Southern Confederacy is to survive, which God grant.”

“Amen,” Agnes said softly.

The slave woman brought in a tray with cups and a steaming pot. The spicy scent of sassafras tea filled the parlor. “Thank you, Julia,” Lee said as she poured for him. The tea made him think of the “instant coffee” Andries Rhoodie had brought up to the headquarters near Orange Court House.

“Coffee,” his wife said longingly when he spoke of it. “We’ve been some time without it here.”

“Surely it would come to Richmond more readily than to a small town like Rivington, North Carolina, especially if, as you say, Father, it was made in the United States,” Mary said.

“That’s true, and I should have thought of it for myself,” Lee said. “Still, with gold, a great many things become possible. Rivington is on the railroad up from Wilmington; maybe a blockade runner brought it in there, rather than something more truly useful to our cause. Maybe.” He found himself yawning.

Mary Custis Lee put down her needles. “There; this sock is finished, and a good enough place to call the day’s work finished as well. Knitting by the light of lamp and candle is hard on the eyes.”

“Which does not stop you from doing so, Mother,” Agnes said reprovingly.

“Not on most nights,” her mother agreed. “But tonight we find Robert here, so halting early is easier to square with my conscience.”

“I wish I were here with you and my girls every night, both for the pleasure of your company and because it would mean the war was over and our independence won,” Lee said. He yawned again. “Tonight, though, I own myself tired. Riding the train with the rails in their present sadly decrepit state is hardly more enjoyable than driving a light buggy headlong down a corduroy road.”

“Then let us seek our beds,” his wife said. “Surely you will rest better in a real bed and a warm house than in your tent by the Rapidan. Mary, dear, if you would be so kind?” Mary got up and wheeled her mother to the base of the stairs.

Lee rose quickly too, to go with them. As he stood, he felt a probing pain in his chest. That pain had been with him now and again all through the winter. Doctors thumped his chest and made learned noises, without finding its source or doing him any good to speak of. He endured it stoically; Mary, he knew, suffered far worse.

At the foot of the stairs, she used her left arm to push herself out of her chair and upright, then grabbed the banister with her right hand. Lee stepped up beside her, slid his arm around her waist. The feel of her body against his was strange from separation, yet at the same time infinitely familiar. “Shall we ascend, my dear?” he said.

He took most of her weight as they climbed to the second floor. “You are smoother at helping me than anyone else, I think,” she said. “You have a gentle touch.”

“Who is likely to know you better than your husband?” he replied as he guided her down the hallway toward the bedroom. He had nursed her many illnesses through their marriage whenever they were together; before that, his mother had spent her last years as an invalid. He was long practiced in dealing with the sick.

He helped Mary change into a warm flannel nightgown, then put on the pajamas Julia had left out for him. “And a nightcap, too,” he exclaimed as he set it on his head. “Such luxury is bound to spoil me.” His wife snorted. He walked over to her bed and kissed her. “Good night, dear Mary.” He went back to his own bed, blew out the candle by it. The room plunged into darkness.

“Sleep well, Robert,” Mary said.

“Thank you. I’m sure I shall,” he answered. After so long on his cot, the bed felt almost indecently soft. But the room was warm, at least compared to a tent in the hills close by the Rapidan. He had no trouble dropping off.

Luke and his carriage showed up in front of the house on Franklin Street at breakfast time. When Lee went out to him, he seemed none the worse for wear for however much drinking he had done the night before. “Where to today, Marse Robert?” he asked.

“The armory,” Lee answered. “I need to confer with Colonel Gorgas.”

“Whatever you say, Marse Robert.” Luke, plainly, could not have cared less whether Lee went to the armory to confer with Gorgas or with George Washington’s ghost. But he flicked his whip over the team and got them moving, which was what mattered.

The carriage rolled down Seventh Street toward the James River. The armory sprawled at the foot of Gamble’s Hill, diagonally between Seventh and Fourth. The Kanawha Canal ran behind it. Luke pulled up to the columned central entranceway; the dome that surmounted it did not seem to be of a piece with the rest of the long, low brick building.

The armory rang with the sounds of metalwork and carpentry. Drills and lathes and dies and punches and molds turned wood and iron and lead into small arms and bullets. No other Confederate arsenal came close to matching its production. Without the machines captured at Harpers Ferry and moved here in the first days of the war, the South would have been hardpressed for weapons.

“General Lee.” Josiah Gorgas came up and saluted. He was a heavyset, moon-faced man in his forties, his close-trimmed beard just starting to be streaked with gray. “I’m very glad to see you, sir. I’d hoped to have the opportunity to speak with you, and here you are.”

“And I with you, Colonel. I suspect we have in mind a similar topic of conversation, too.”

“Likely we do, sir. Will you come up to my office, where we can talk more comfortably?” He led Lee up to the second floor.

Lee took the stairs slowly, worried that the pain in his chest might recur. To his relief, it did not. He sat opposite Gorgas, pointed to the AK-47 on the ordnance chief’s desk. “Yes, there it is, the marvel of the day.” Gorgas looked at him sharply. “I meant no sarcasm, Colonel, I assure you. I am in your debt—the Confederacy is in your debt—for sending Andries Rhoodie on to me.”

“I hoped you would feel so, General, after seeing it demonstrated. I certainly did, and I am glad to have my judgment vindicated by a soldier in the field. I do endeavor to give satisfaction so far as arms go.” He spoke with some diffidence; a shipment of cavalry carbines the summer before had been almost as dangerous to the men who held them as to those at whom they were aimed.

Lee said, “My only possible reservation about these repeaters is that they have not yet seen combat. But I think they will answer. Though they are so different from our usual rifles, they are easy to learn and use and maintain, and the troops are much taken by the volume of fire they deliver. I like men to be confident in their arms; it makes them more belligerent.”

“General, I think you yourself are the most belligerent man in your army,” Gorgas said.

Lee considered. “Henry Heth said something to that effect to me once,” he remarked. “It may be so. Hemmed in as I am by responsibility, I have few opportunities personally to demonstrate it, if it is. But I would surely rather strike a blow than either flee of remain quiet, waiting to be struck. Enough of my ramblings now, sir—to business. I thank God for these gentlemen from Rivington and for the arms with which they are supplying us. I am not, however, eager to forever depend on them for weapons. If anyone, if any establishment in the Confederacy can manufacture their like, you are the; man, and this is the place.”

Gorgas looked baffled and unhappy, like a hound that has taken a scent and then lost it in the middle of an open meadow. “General Lee, I do not know. I thank you for being thoughtful enough to provide me with more of these carbines and a stock of ammunition. I already had one, and a couple of magazines, from Andries Rhoodie. I have been puzzling at it since before he departed for Orange Court House. And—I do not know.”

“What perplexes you so about the rifle?” Lee asked. He had his own list; he wanted to see what the Confederacy’s ordnance wizard would add to it.

“First, that it springs ex nihilo, like Minerva from love’s forehead.” Colonel Gorgas evidently had a list, too—he was ticking off points on his fingers. “Generally speaking, a new type of weapon will have defects, which may in some cases be ameliorated through modifications made in the light of experience. The next defect I discover in this AK-47 will be the first. The gun works, sir, which is no small wonder in itself.”

“I had not thought of it in those terms,” Lee said slowly. “You mean it gives the impression of being a finished arm, like, for example, a Springfield.”

“Exactly so. The Springfield rifle musket has a great number of less efficient ancestors, So, logically, must the AK-47. Yet where are they? Even a less efficient rifle based on its principles would be better than anything we or the Federals have.”

“That is the case, I have noticed, with much of the equipment borne by Andries Rhoodie and his colleagues,” Lee said, remembering a tasty tin of desiccated stew. “Carry on.”

“From the general to the particular.” Gorgas reached into a desk drawer, took out a couple of rounds for the AK-47. He passed them over to Lee. “You will observe that the bullets are not simply lead.”

“Yes, I had seen that,” Lee agreed, putting on his glasses for a clearer look at the ammunition. The cartridges were surely brass. As for the bullets—”Are they copper an the way through?”

“No, sir. They have a lead interior, sheathed with copper. We might be able to match that, though it is expensive, and we are short of enough copper even now to be commandeering coils from whiskey cookers’ stills. Then again, unsheathed lead might serve at need. But do you see the cleverness of this ammunition? It all but eliminates lead fouling of the barrel.”

“Less need for Williams bullets, then,” Lee said. The Williams bullet had a zinc washer at the base of the lead slug, which served to scour away fouling from the inside of a rifle barrel when it was fired. Lee went on, “But would a copper-sheathed bullet not be too hard to take rifling well? And would it not wear away the interior grooves in short order?”

“With any normal barrel, the answer to both those questions would be yes.” Gorgas ticked off another point. “The steel—or whatever alloy it may be—in the barrel of this weapon, however, Is hard enough to lessen the difficulties. Again, I doubt we could produce its like, let alone work it once manufactured.”

“They seem to manage in Rivington,” Lee said.

“I know they do, sir. But—I—don’t—know—how.” The colonel ground out the words one by one through clenched teeth. He was a man of sanguine temperament and great resource, as he had to be to keep the Confederacy supplied with armaments in the face of an ever-tightening Federal blockade and its own inadequate factories. When he said, “I am thwarted; I admit it,” it was as if he threw down his sword to surrender to superior force.

“Tell me what else you do know,” Lee urged, not liking to see such a capable officer so downhearted.

“Very well, sir. You mentioned the Williams bullet. As you must know, the chief fouling problem it is designed to alleviate comes not from the lead of the Minié ball but rather from the powder which propels it. Whatever powder is in these AK-47 cartridges, it produces far less fouling than even the finest gunpowder with which I was previously familiar.”

“Has that a connection with the lack of smoke from this powder upon discharge?” Lee asked.

“Exactly: fouling consists of smoke and tiny bits of unburned powder that congeal, so to speak, on the inside of a gun barrel. With this powder, there is next to no smoke and, thus, next to no fouling.”

“I have sent a good deal of ammunition down to Colonel George Rains at the powder works in Augusta, Georgia,” Lee said. “With his knowledge of chemistry in general and gunpowder in particular, I thought him the man best suited to penetrate the mystery of these rounds, if anyone can.”

“If anyone can,” Gorgas echoed gloomily. But after a moment, he brightened a little.” As you say, if anyone can, Colonel Rains is the man. Without his expertise, we should be much the poorer for powder.”

“There I quite agree with you, Colonel. Chemical knowledge is too uncommon in the Confederacy. Of course, the same also obtains among the Federals.” Lee smiled at a memory. “When I administered West Point a few years ago, I had to dismiss from the academy a cadet who informed his instructor and fellow chemistry students that silicon was a gas. Do you know, Colonel, were silicon truly a gas, that lad would likely be a Federal general today.”

As Lee had hoped, Gorgas also smiled at the story. His amusement, though, soon faded. He said,” And now, General, I come to the particular most baffling of all, and when I speak of this weapon, that is no small claim. Do you know, sir, what these Rivington men charge the Ordnance Bureau for each AK-47 carbine? Fifty dollars, sir.”

“It hardly seems excessive. A Henry rifle goes for a similar price in the North, I understand, and this weapon is surely far superior to a Henry. Of course, the Treasury Department will doubtless be anguished at the prospect of discovering sufficient specie to purchase the number of carbines we require, but—what is it, Colonel?”

Gorgas had lifted his hand, as if he wanted to speak. Now he said, “You misapprehend, General, not that I can blame you for it. The asking price is fifty dollars Confederate paper per carbine.”

“You must be mistaken,” Lee said. Gorgas shook his head. Lee saw he knew whereof he spoke. “But how is that possible? While I love our country, I am not blind to our financial straits. Fifty dollars of Confederate paper will not buy two gold dollars.”

“Nor much of anything else,” Gorgas said. “Save these AK-47s. The asking price for their ammunition is similarly, ah, reasonable.”

Lee frowned ferociously, as if facing foes in the field. “You are correct, Colonel; the cost of an AK-47 is even more perplexing than any of its mechanical aspects, extraordinary as those are.”

“Yes, sir. The only thing I thought of was ‘that these Rivington men are such strong patriots that they insist on our dollar’s equality to that of the North. But no one is that patriotic, sir.”

“Nor should anyone be, with the manifest untruth of the proposition demonstrated every day of the year,” Lee said. “Yet the Rivington men, despite the money they surely lose on every repeater they sell us, seem to have plenty of it. When they came to Rivington, they paid gold for homes and warehouses and slaves, and I am given to understand they have also put down gold here in Richmond for offices across from Mechanic’s Hall.”

“I’d heard that, too,” Gorgas said. “Even the rumor of gold, let alone the sight of it, will set tongues wagging here. What are we to make of it, though? That they have so much money, they care nothing for how much these carbines bring them? The notion is logical but not reasonable, if you take my distinction, sir.”

“I do indeed, Colonel.” Lee started to rise, then paused and sat Down again. “May I please have a pen and a scrap of paper?” Gorgas passed him pen and inkwell. He sketched rapidly, gave his drawing to the ordnance chief.” Are you by any chance familiar with this emblem that Rhoodie and his comrades use?”

“Yes, I’ve seen it. Funny you should ask, for it interested me. Not long after I first made Rhoodie’s acquaintance, I made a copy of it and showed it to a friend of mine who knows something of heraldry. He said it reminded him of the arms of the Isle of Man, save that those show three bent legs—don’t ask me for the proper terms, please, sir—instead of mere lines.”

“The Isle of Man, you say? Most interesting. Manxmen have a distinctive way of speaking, do they not? Perhaps that is the accent Rhoodie and his comrades bear. It might form a useful basis from which to begin inquiries, at any rate.”

“So it might.” Gorgas smiled ruefully. “A pity to have to think about investigating men who are helping us so greatly, but they do seem rather too good to be true.”

“You are not the first to use those very words about them, Colonel, and when something seems too good to be true, it is all too apt to be so. Well, now I have spent enough of your time this morning; with all my fretting about our benefactors, you will no doubt be thinking of me as Granny Lee—a nickname I assure you I was not sorry to lose after the first year of the war.”

“I don’t blame you for that, sir,” Gorgas said, “nor for the other. Too many peculiar things hover about Rhoodie and his carbine for me to be easy with them, no matter how useful the gun may prove.”

“That is exactly my view.” Lee really stood this time. Through the window in Gorgas’s office, he saw the white frame buildings of the Confederate laboratory on Brown’s Island, separated from the mainland by a thin stretch of the James. Pointing across to them, he said, “I trust everyone at the cartridge loading works is busily engaged.”

“Yes, sir,” Gorgas said. “We have put last spring’s misfortune behind us and go on, as we must. My wife fatigued herself very much, visiting and relieving the poor sufferers injured in the blast.”

“How many died?” Lee asked.

“Ten women were killed at once; another twenty perished over the next several weeks. A considerable number more were burned but recovered.”

“Terrible.” Lee shook his head. “And as terrible that we must employ women and girls to produce the sinews of war for us. But with even our armies ever short of men, I suppose no good choice exists. You and your wife have your living quarters here in the armory, do you not?”

“Yes, sir, just a couple of doors down from here, as a matter of fact.”

“You are fortunate, Colonel, in being able to honorably carry out your vital duty and yet remain in the bosom of your family.”

“I often think so,” Gorgas said.

“As you should; such circumstances are given to few, and ought not to be taken for granted, And now I will let you return to your duties. No, you need not see me out; I can find my way.” Given that permission, Gorgas was already reaching for a pen as Lee shut the door behind him. The man was a glutton for work. Lee wished the Confederacy had more like him.

Piles of shells in the yard around the armory testified to the diligence of Gorgas and his crews. The muscular men loading some of those shells onto a wagon for transport to a railway station and thence to the field paused when Lee came out and walked over to his carriage. A couple of them lifted their caps to him. He nodded in return. They grinned as they went back to work.

Luke breathed whiskey fumes into Lee’s face as Lee got in behind him. “You give ‘em somethin’ to brag on, Marse Robert, just because they see you.” Lee glanced down, but the black man had his flask out of sight. He asked, “Where you want to go to now?”

Lee considered the question. He’d had no definite plans for the rest of the day. His first impulse was to rush headlong to the treasury, beard Secretary Memminger in his lair, and demand of him if he knew what an impossibly good bargain he was getting in Rhoodie’s repeaters. But finance was not his own province. He said, “Take me back to the War Department.”

“Yassuh, Marse Ropert.” Tight or sober, Luke could handle horses. He swung the team around another wagon coming into the armory to be loaded with shells, then drove back to Mechanic’s Hall. Lee eyed with keen interest the building across the street from the War Department, a three-story, brown brick structure he’d gone by countless times before but scarcely noticed. His scrutiny was rewarded by the sight of a man in the mottled outfit that seemed the trademark costume of Andries Rhoodie and his comrades passing in through the building’s marble-faced entranceway.

Officers with lace on their gray sleeves and civilians in black claw-hammer coats bustled in and out of Mechanic’s Hall, as if the place were an ant’s nest, with some workers going forth to forage and others returning with their spoils. Luke pulled up right in front of the building. A Confederate with the two stars of a lieutenant colonel on his collar shouted, “You damned stupid nigger, what do you think you’re doing, blocking the—” The words stuck in his throat when Lee got out of the carriage. He pulled himself to attention and snapped off a salute that would have done credit to a cadet from the Virginia Military Institute.

Lee turned and said, “Thank you, Luke,” before he returned it. The black man smiled a secret smile as he took the team around the corner to find a place to hitch it. The walk from the street into the foyer of Mechanic’s Hall was only twenty or thirty feet, but in that short space Lee was saluted close to a dozen times.

He paused in the foyer to let his eyes adjust to the dimmer interior light. Then he walked over to a desk where a clerk was industriously jotting in a ledger or notebook. After a glance at the enameled brass nameplate in front of the fellow, he said, “Excuse me, Mr. Jones, does Colonel Lee still maintain his office on the second floor?”

The clerk—John Beauchamp Jones his nameplate proclaimed him to be, as if by trumpeting his middle name he could make up for the utter plainness of those that flanked it—finished writing his sentence before he looked up. His thin, clean-shaven face bore a sour expression at the interruption. That quickly changed when he saw who stood before him. “Yes, General, he does. He’s there now, I believe; I saw him go up this morning.”

“Thank you, sir.” Lee had not taken two steps toward, the stairway before Jones returned to his writing.

He fielded more salutes on the second floor as he made’ his way down the hall to his son Custis’s office. Custis was writing when he tapped on the open door, though with less zeal than John Jones had displayed. “Father! Sir!” he exclaimed, springing to his feet. He too saluted, then stuck out his hand.

Lee took it, swept his eldest son into an embrace. “Hello, my dear boy. You’re looking very well. I see it is possible to find adequate victuals in Richmond after all.”

Custis laughed. “I’ve always been heavier than you, Father. Here, sit down. Tell me what I can do for you. Is it—I hope it is—a post in the field?”

“I have none to give, son; I wish I did. I know how you chafe as President Davis’s aide,” Lee said.

Custis nodded, tugging at his beard in frustration. Though he was past thirty, it remained boyishly thin and silky on his upper cheeks. He said, “How am I ever to deserve command if I have not led men ill the field?”

“Soon, I am sure, you will take the field in some capacity—everyone who has ability will be needed when spring comes. Do not think you have no value in your current post, either; you render the President and the nation important service.”

“It is not the service I would give,” Custis said stiffly.

“I know. I have been in that predicament myself, in western Virginia and then in the Carolinas. At the moment, however, your presence in Richmond may prove of considerable advantage to me.”

“How so, sir?” The younger Lee still sounded dubious, as if he suspected his father of devising some make-work assignment to reconcile him to remaining in the Confederate capital.

But interest flowered on his face when Lee asked, “Do you remember the organization that calls itself America Will Break, of which I wrote you? The one which appears centered in the town of Rivington, North Carolina?”

“The people with those amazing repeaters?” Custis said. “Yes, of course I do. I shouldn’t mind getting my hands on one of their carbines myself.”

“That can be quite simply arranged, I think: you need only walk across the street, as the organization has established offices right opposite Mechanic’s Hall. But I wish you would not.”

Custis smiled. “You’d best have a good reason, Father, for if they are so close, I think I shall straightaway beat a path to their door.”

“I believe I do have a good reason, Custis, or rather several of them.”

Lee briefly outlined his conversations with Major Venable back at army headquarters and with Colonel Gorgas not an hour earlier. When he finished by telling Custis what the Rivington men were selling their repeaters for, his son stared and exclaimed, “You’re joking!”

“No, my dear boy, lam not,” Lee assured him. “And so you: will grasp that I have cause to wonder about these people who call themselves America Will Break. They are on their way to becoming a power in the Confederacy, and I do not know whether they will prove a power for good or ill. There is a great deal I do not know about them, and I wish I did. That is where you come in.”

“How?” Now Custis seemed eager, not doubtful. Before his father could answer, he went on, “Fifty dollars Confederate? Fifty dollars Confederate won’t buy a pocket knife, let alone a repeating rifle.”

“That is why I want you,” his father said. “I cannot personally investigate these AWB establishments myself. Even if I had the time, I am too readily recognizable. For that matter, you may be as well; you favor your mother as much as me, but the name Lee draws attention to its bearer.”

“Thanks to you, sir—what you have done makes me proud to bear it.”

“You have made your own contributions to it, and will, I am confident, make more. You can aid your country now by recruiting a band of men—I care not whether soldiers or civilians—whose names and faces will certainly draw no notice, and by using them to keep watch on the men and offices of America Will Break. Report what you learn to me and, if it is of sufficient urgency, directly to President Davis. Your being his aide may well prove valuable in this task, for it gives you his ear.”

Custis’s face grew set and abstracted. Lee knew the look; his son was thinking through the task he had been given. It was not a formal order; he was not under his father’s command. But he said, “Of course I’ll take it on, sir. I see the need. Perhaps I ought to enlist some Negroes among my—my spies, not to mince words. To a white man, no one is more invisible than a slave.”

“That may be an excellent notion. If you make sure they are trustworthy and can be relied upon not to gossip, by all means make use of them. Do not stint in rewarding them, either; if they give you good service.”

“I promise, Father, I shan’t be niggardly.”

“Good, for mostly being poor, they are—” Lee broke off and did his best to stare severely at his son, who was grinning to see his delayed reaction. “You young scamp!”

“I’m sorry, sir. I couldn’t resist.”

“You might have tried,” Lee said. “I think I shall take myself away, before I find myself under further bombardments.” He got up. So did Custis. They hugged again. “Take care of yourself, my dear son.”

“And you, Father. Give my love to Rob when you get back to the army, and to Cousin Fitzhugh as well.” One of Custis’s brothers was in the artillery, his cousin a cavalry officer.

“I shall,” Lee promised.

“Any word on Rooney?” Custis asked. His other brother, also a cavalry officer, had been wounded at Brandy Station the year before and captured while recuperating; for a time, he had been under threat of death.

Lee said, “The exchange talks seem to be moving forward at last. God willing, we’ll have him back again next month.”

“Thank heaven.”

“Yes. I expect to be down here a few more days, doing this and that. Perhaps you and your wife will be able to stop by the house on Franklin Street before I have to return. If not, tell her I know I owe her a letter. And, Custis, I do attach much importance to this business of the Rivington men, believe me.”

“I had not doubted it, sir. You are not in the habit of concerning yourself with trifles. I‘ll learn all I can of them.”

“I’m sure you will. God bless you and keep you, Custis.”

Lee walked out of his son’s office and down the stairs. His way out to the street carried him past John Jones’s desk. The clerk was turned away from him, talking to the man at the next desk: “My boy Custis’s parrot happened to be loose from its cage. It swooped down on the meat as if it were a hawk, the miserable bird, and gulped it down before we could get it back again. Meat is too hard to come by in Richmond these days to waste on a parrot; we’ll go without on account of it. I wish the damned talking feather duster would flyaway for good.”

Luke was waiting patiently outside Mechanic’s Hall. He waved when he saw Lee, and called, “I’ll get the carriage for you, Marse Robert.” He hurried off to fetch it. Lee went down the marble stairs and stood to one side of them so he would not be in the way of people going in and out on War Department business.

“Good to see you smiling, General Lee, sir,” a friendly passerby said, tipping his stovepipe hat. “Now I know things can’t be bad.” Without waiting for an answer, he went up the stairs two at a time and disappeared into Mechanic’s Hall.

Lee’s smile grew broader, though the stranger had been cheered by an amusement which had nothing to do with the prospective course of the war between Confederacy and Union. The thought uppermost in Lee’s mind was that Custis Jones’s parrot ought to make the acquaintance of Custis Morgan the squirrel.