Confederates (37 page)

There were the sort of amused catcalls you'd expect from the crowd, both on the verandah and in the square.

‘That's good, thank you, sir. We have enine hunthred and eseventy-fife and we can, as God pertects us, expect more. We have enine hunthred and … and we have ah-one athousand. We have ah-one thousand. Oh, gentlemen, oh, gentlemen! No more? I have instructions concerning the reserve price on this fine specimen whose owner is selling him merely to employ the sale price in setting up a company of Emerald Guards to fight against the Northern tyranny. Any advance … Reserve is ah-one thousand. Ah-one ethousand is accepted, sir. Would you kindly join the nigger and meself, sir, at the notary's, where the exchange will be formalised. I thank you gentlemen one and all for your attention.'

‘That nigger went cheap,' said a slow-chewing Alabaman voice on the hotel porch.

‘Yessir. Niggers is going cheap these days. Why, a man could well speculate in 'em at a time like this, but I for one don't think I will.'

What Searcy witnessed a week later on the steamer
Southern Republic
, travelling down the steep-banked River Alabama from Montgomery to the Mississippi, made the passionate exception he took to slavery even stronger. The captain of the steamer was another Irishman called Meagher, the ship a top-heavy floating wooden fortress of saloons and smoking rooms and cabins. At godforsaken landings along the way, the steam whistle screamed and the calliope atop the steamer played ‘Dixie'. The framework of the
Southern Republic
was of such raw and resinous pine that turpentine oozed out from the joints; and a visit to the engine room, where blacks naked to the clout thrust pine beams into the mouths of the boilers, convinced you the whole light, over-driven structure would explode any second. In contrast, life on the upper decks was pretty gracious by Southern standards. The whole ship, from engine room to calliope, seemed to Searcy like a great floating symbol of the South itself.

At the captain's table in the dining room, while the calliopes screamed and the
Southern Republic
moved through crowds of mosquitoes and populations of alligators, Southern gentlemen started to speak of the captain's success running slaves to Mobile a few years back. Captain Meagher had taken a ship to the west coast of Africa, loaded up with Ashantis and returned to Mobile. The collector of duty on slaves imported into Mobile heard about the ship, but somehow the sheriff couldn't be found anywhere in the town and the U.S. Marshal was missing, both of them of course well paid by the captain's partners to vanish for a few days. Meagher trans-shipped all the negroes to a river steamer called
The Czar
that night, and by the time the collector got out to inspect the slave cargo there was no cargo at all.

But it wasn't only the collector he duped, it was his partners too. When they asked for their cut of the slaves he smiled sweetly and said he didn't understand them. To show his good faith though he gave them a couple of old niggers each. They were beaten, those partners – there was no one they could complain to, for running niggers illegally was Subject to capital punishment. And so suddenly Meagher had had slaves and land and wealth, and he built a fleet of steamers of which
Southern Republic
was the newest and proudest.

Searcy watched the way Meagher listened to the others tell this story about him, watched the broad leer on the man's face. ‘Well now,' he said, winking and nudging, ‘so you think these biggers I got aboard here come from Africa? I'll show you.'

He called to a fine jet-skinned boy of maybe sixteen years. ‘Jest come here, Bully.'

The boy came over. He was near-naked, his cheeks were marked with a tribal pattern of scars and his chest also had tattoos.

‘What's your name, boy?'

‘Mah name Bully, sah!'

‘Where you born?'

‘Me born Sout' Karliner, sah!' ‘There, you see he weren't taken out of Africa. Bully, I got a power of the South Car'lina niggers aboard, ain't that so?'

‘Yessah!'

‘You happy, Bully?'

‘Yessah.'

‘Show these gen'lmen here how you're happy.'

The boy grinned maniacally and started to rub his belly. ‘Yummy, yummy, plenty bellyful, sah!'

‘That's what I calls a really philosophical chap. Now, Mr Searcy, I wager you got a lot of people in your own country cain't pat their bellies an' say what Bully here jest said.'

Everyone laughed except Searcy. It wasn't that he couldn't disapprove of his own country. It was the boy, Bully, who interested him. ‘Did he get those tribal marks in South Carolina?' Searcy asked the captain.

‘Why yes, he did,' said the captain, winking. ‘It's the way them nigger women have of marking their offspring to recognise 'em. Ain't that so, Bully?'

There was laughter, laughter and the spitting of tobacco juice.

‘Mind you,' the captain went on, all mock serious. ‘We're obliged now and then to let some niggers in to keep up the balance ‘gainst the niggers you run into Canada.'

Well, they could laugh. Tonight, the night Dan Hill's division edged west, they might be about to pay for their laughter. Not their laughter against the Honourable Horace Searcy, who was willing to believe he might seem a little ridiculous to Americans. But for their laughter against the black race and all the blows that were innate in that laughter.

After supper, feeling wistful about Mrs Whipple, Searcy loaded his two Derringers and put one in his breast pocket and one in the side pocket of his jacket. In the dark they made no difference to the contours of his clothing. He had the farmer's boy saddle his horse. Dan Hill's division had passed on up the road towards Amissville. Soon General David Rumple Jones's boys would take to it, slipping away from Pope's front in the dark. There was no sign of it yet though.

Travelling across country, Searcy kept off small roads and lanes and rode over low hills towards the river, veering west all the time, keeping to tiny foot tracks amongst the undergrowth. He could see fireflies burning in the lower branches of trees like festive lights, and the air was cool. Virginia was a fair land, he thought, and he was about to lose it and the treasure it held – Mrs Whipple. But no one stopped him.

The paths he took led him down to the flat by the river. Here it was still quaggy from the recent rain and all the sound was of chirping insects and the muddy noise of his horse's hooves in the mushy earth. He thought he must be beyond the picket screen now. You've got round it, Searcy, he told himself. There is now only the acceptable risk of being drowned in crossing the river or shot by Union pickets on the far side. But as he was thinking about this, three horsemen stepped their horses from the woods to his left. One of them called, ‘Stand, friend!'

For a second he wondered if he could outride them, but it was too high a risk. Confederate countrymen were self-taught, yet no trained equestrian such as he was could be sure of outracing them in this manner of country. Maybe if he could stand on his dignity with them they could let him go on or at least send him home. Then perhaps he could attempt it again later in the night.

‘What do you want?' he asked, as if they were interrupting what was for him just a pleasant night's ride.

They drew nearer to him. Ragged Rebel cavalry. Most of what they had was taken from the U.S. – their cavalry boots, their harness, their britches, their shirts, and the Spencer repeating rifles two of them had levelled at him. One of them had a bandana tied jauntily round his neck and a lieutenant's bars on his shoulders.

‘You British?' the lieutenant asked. His own accent sounded Texan and very likely was.

‘I am the Honourable Horace Searcy, correspondent of
The Times
of London. I have accreditation from General Longstreet.' He took out of his breast pocket the letter which had been nestling by the Derringer. It said who he was and that the Confederate officer should extend every courtesy and co-operation to him within reasonable bounds.

The lieutenant held this up to the moon and read it with one eye shut. ‘Fetch the cap'n,' he told one of the others. Then, to Searcy, ‘And where are you going, sir?'

‘I was merely riding for my health,' said Searcy. ‘Of course there is always the chance I'd meet up with Confederate pickets and engage them in conversation. You must understand, lieutenant, that the Confederate cavalryman is a picturesque and romantic figure to the average city-bound Englishmen.'

‘Well, I'll be switched,' said the Texan drily. ‘And here I was thinking I was jest average myself.'

The third horseman rode back now with an officer in a big hat. ‘Mr Searcy,' said this officer in a voice which was a little Norfolk and a little East London, a sort of English yeoman voice.

Searcy decided to sound warm and see how far the claims of a common race would get him with this captain.

‘That's right, sir. Do I have the honour of speaking to another Englishman?'

The officer laughed at this. ‘Well, when these boys are around me I'm bound to call meself a Texican. But I am English, yes, by birthright.' He took his hat off. ‘Sir, I often saw you in the Crimea.'

‘Oh?' said Searcy, all warmth. ‘What regiment?'

‘I was a sergeant in the 11th Hussars.'

Searcy blinked. The 11th Hussars were the Light Brigade that crazy Lord Cardigan had ordered up the avenue of death at Balaclava. They had been told to attack the Russian artillery that was withdrawing from Voronzdof Heights, but the order got mixed and Cardigan sent them fair down the valley at the centre of the Russian line. Searcy had watched it all from a ridge just above the hill where the Light Brigade formed up. Despite Lord Alfred Tennyson's silly poem about the event, it was the worst thing Searcy had ever seen in any war other than this one.

‘You lived?' was all Searcy, genuinely reverent, could say for the moment.

‘Roundshot killed my horse, and I was just trying to get away on foot when some Russian infantry ran out from their redoubt and took me prisoner. I was eleven months a prisoner of the Russians, but it wasn't bad at all there in Odessa, though I got the black fever once …'

‘And you emigrated to America?'

The three horsemen seemed bored – they'd probably heard their captain's story often enough before.

‘The old world seemed a mite dangerous to me, Mr Searcy. As it is, I own an emporium in Houston now; my wife runs it for me. She's a Texican, sir. They're a different breed of women.'

Searcy laughed indulgently. He couldn't think of anything much worse than marrying a Texas woman, but then the man's opportunities in England had probably been a little narrow. Searcy said, ‘I wonder if I could have a word with you in private, sergeant … I mean, captain?'

‘D'you mind, boys?' the captain said to his horsemen.
D'you mind, boys?
They never spoke like that in the 11th Hussars. Searcy however was halfway willing to admit that that might well have been the 11th Hussars' tragedy.

Anyhow the others rode back into the woods and hid themselves again.

‘I wanted to know, captain,' Searcy muttered, ‘if you intend to restrict my movements tonight. I have all manner of private interviews to make this side of the river and I would appreciate being allowed to proceed with them.'

‘I could give you a section of cavalry, Mr Searcy sir, to go with you.'

‘Well, a section of cavalry would tend to detract from the privacy of the arrangement, don't you think?'

‘Mr Searcy, I know I can't permit you, sir, to go about this area without supervision.'

‘Are you implying something, sir?'

‘Of course not.' The captain thought awhile. When he spoke he was tentative, because the old English class difference was working on him when he spoke to Searcy, the same as Texan lack of class difference worked on him when he spoke to his troopers.

‘Mr Searcy, I know what I have been ordered to do. In the first place, this is a dangerous area for a man of your reputation, sir. Picket fire is likely to break out at any time …'

‘Allow me take care of my own safety, captain. Look here now. You've seen me in the Crimea, as you say. You know I am an English gentleman.'

‘Indeed, Mr Searcy.'

‘If I gave you my word as an English gentleman that my purposes are quite licit this evening, and involve no danger to my Confederate hosts – would that suffice?'

The captain got more thoughtful. ‘It would suffice no better than the word of any other man,' he said in the end.

Searcy turned his face away. ‘I consider your suggestion an insult.'

The cavalry captain thought about this. ‘I think you'd better go home to bed, sir. I saw an English shipping agent hanged in New Orleans last year as a Union spy. You and I, sir, know these things can happen almost by accident …'

‘If I don't, sergeant,' said Searcy, making no bones now about himself being younger son to a baronet and the captain what Searcy's mother called ‘an upjumped commoner', ‘what would you do?'

The captain had taken a pistol out and had it pointed. ‘Well, there is always arrest, and if I arrested you then your movements would be cramped worse than if you just went back now.'

Searcy didn't know whether to be grateful to him or not. If I can't get through the lines, he thought, then I have no reason not to go down to Gordonsville and lay siege to Mrs Whipple. The only thing was: laying siege, even to a woman like Mrs Whipple, wouldn't change the history of modern times. Getting over the river might.

‘This is ridiculous,' Searcy snarled, but turned his horse's head back towards the farmhouse where he was lodging. He could hear the captain breathe out. He didn't have to tax his brain any more on what to do with a renowned London scribe.

The scribe seemed pretty piqued anyhow and had now reined his horse in again, this time (the captain felt sure) to get a parting insult off his chest.