Love and War

side.

As usual, Cooper managed to make his fine clothes look untidy. It was his height, his lankiness, his preoccupied scholar's behavior that caused it. He paid almost no attention to the children's sight­seeing, which horrified his wife, a flat-bosomed woman with thin arms, a long nose, and a great deal of curly dark blond hair, all of which Cooper found extraordinarily beautiful.

'Pa, there's a river,' exclaimed Judah, hanging half in, half out of the compartment as he looked ahead, his hair shining in the hot July sun.

'Let me see, let me see!' Marie-Louise wedged her way into the window beside him.

'Both of you get in here this instant,' Judith said. 'Do you want that bridge to lop your heads off?' Forceful tugs ensured that it wouldn't. They tumbled back on the upholstery beside her, complaining, while the diamond patterns of the crossed beams began to flicker in the compartment. The express from London rattled over the Runcorn bridge, the river Mersey shining beneath like a field of mirror splinters.

Judah jumped across the aisle and pressed against his father's coat. 'Will we be in Liverpool soon?'

'Yes, in half an hour or less.' He began to roll the plans in preparation for hiding them in his luggage.

Marie-Louise scrambled over to his right side. 'Will we stay for a while, Papa?' 'Several months anyway.' He smiled and patted her. 'Captain Bulloch will meet us?' Judith asked. 'That was the meaning of the classified insertion in the Times. Of course it's possible that some Union agent did away with him in the past three days.'

'Cooper, I don't think you should joke about this work. Secret messages sent by advertisement, enemy spies lurking everywhere — hardly subjects for humor, in my opinion.' She glanced from her husband to the children in a pointed way. But they were totally absorbed by the slow-moving shadows.

'Perhaps not. But we can't be grim all the time, and although I take my duties seriously — and I'm sensitive to the cautions Bulloch expressed in his letter — I refuse to let all of that spoil England for us.' Leaning forward, he smiled and touched her. 'For you most of all.'

She squeezed his hand. 'You're such a dear man. I'm sorry I snapped. I'm afraid I'm tired.'

'Understandably,' he said with a nod. They had left King's Cross in the middle of the night and watched the sun rise over the peaceful canals and summer-green countryside, neither admitting that uncertainty, homesickness, and worries about possible dangers beset them.

The family had sailed from Savannah on the last ship that got out before the Union blockade closed the Southern coast. The vessel had called at Hamilton, Bermuda, before steaming on to Southampton. Since their arrival in London, they'd been living in cramped rooms in Islington. Now, however, there was a promise of better, larger quarters in Liverpool, where Cooper was to assist the chief agent of the Confederate Navy Department, who had arrived some weeks earlier. Their mission was to expedite construction of ocean-going raiders to harass Yankee shipping. Behind the program lay a sound strategy. If the Confederacy could destroy or capture enough merchant vessels, insurance rates would rise prohibitively; then the enemy would be forced to draw ships from its blockading squadron to protect its own commerce.

Maritime matters were not new to Cooper. He had a long history of interest in and love for the sea. Unable to tolerate the family plantation or repeated quarrels with his late father on the issues of slavery and states' rights, he had gone to Charleston to manage a frowzy little commercial shipping firm that had come into Tillet Main's possession almost by accident. Through study, determination, and hard work, Cooper had turned the Carolina Shipping Company into the most innovative line in the South and built it to a level of profit only slightly lower than that of its larger but more conservative rival in the port city, John Eraser & Company. That company was now guided by another self-made millionaire, George Trenholm. Its Liverpool cotton-factoring office, operating as Fraser, Trenholm, would secretly channel funds into the illegal work Cooper was to undertake.

Before the war, on a plot of ground overlooking Charleston harbor, Cooper had started to create his great dream — a ship patterned after the immense iron vessels of Isambard Kingdom Brunei, the British engineering genius he had twice visited. He wanted to demonstrate that a Southern shipbuilding industry was a reasonable possibility, that prosperity in the state need not depend entirely on the drip of sweat from black skin.

While the shouters stumped for secession, he worked too quietly — which was one mistake. He worked too slowly — which was another. Star of Carolina had scarcely been started when the batteries opened fire on Sumter; he had signed her over to the Confederate Navy, and now, he understood, she had been ripped apart, her metal to be used for other purposes.

It was Cooper's fascination with shipbuilding that helped him shunt aside his doubts about the cause. He had long considered the South to be ignorant and misguided for failing to recognize the world-wide spread of industrialization and for clinging to an agrarian system based on human servitude. He recognized that realistically the problem couldn't be reduced to such a simple statement. But with that caveat, he still contended that a few elitists with wealth and political control had pushed the South to disaster, first by refusing to compromise on slavery and then by promoting secession. The yammering Yankee abolitionists had done their part as well, piling insults on the South for three decades — that the insults had a justifiable base made them no more bearable — and the result was a confrontation decent men, such as his brother Orry and Orry's old war comrade George Hazard, didn't want but didn't know how to prevent. Cooper believed that men of good will on both sides — he counted himself among them — had lacked the power, but they had also lacked the initiative. So the war came.

At that apocalyptic moment, a strange sea change occurred. Much as Cooper detested the war and those who had provoked it, he found he loved his native South Carolina more. So he turned over the assets of his shipping company to the new Confederate government and informed his family that they would be traveling to England to serve the Navy Department.

The situation in Britain vis-à-vis the Confederacy was complex, not to say confused. Nearly as confused, Cooper thought, as the foreign policy of the Davis government. The South needed war and consumer goods from abroad. She could buy those with her cotton, but Mr. Davis had chosen to withhold that from the foreign market because textile mills in Europe and Britain were suffering a severe shortage of their raw material. Thus Davis hoped to force diplomatic recognition of the new nation. All he'd gotten so far was half a pie; while the Cooper Mains crossed the ocean, Britain acknowledged the Confederate States as belligerents in a war with the North.

If full recognition depended on the skills of the three commissioners dispatched to Europe by Secretary of State Toombs, Cooper doubted it would ever be achieved. Rost and Mann were barely adequate mediocrities, while the third commissioner, Yancey, was one of the original fire-eaters — a man so extreme the Confederate government didn't want him. His posting to Britain amounted to exile. An ill-tempered boor was hardly the person to deal with Lord Russell, the foreign minister.

Further, the ambassador from Washington, Mr. Charles Francis Adams, descendant of presidents, had a reputation as a shrewd, aggressive diplomat. He kept pressure on the Queen's government to hold back recognition of the Confederacy. And Cooper had been warned that Adams and his consuls maintained a spy network to prevent the very kind of illegal activity that brought him to Liverpool.

'Lime Street. Lime Street Station.'

The trainman moved on to call at the next compartment. Above the stone-sided cut through which the train chugged, Cooper glimpsed the chimneys of steeply roofed row houses stained with dirt, yet reassuring in their solidity. Cooper loved Britain and the British people. Any nation that could produce a Shakespeare and a Brunei — and a Drake and a Nelson — deserved immortality. Duty in Liverpool might have its dangers, but he felt exhilarated as the train jerked and finally stopped in the roofed shed adjoining Lime Street.

'Judith, children, follow me.' First out of the compartment, he waved down a porter. While the luggage was being unloaded, a man with more hair on his upper lip and cheeks than on his round head wove through the press of passengers, porters, and hawkers to reach the new arrivals. The man had an aristocratic air about him and was well but not extravagantly dressed.

'Mr. Main?' The man addressed him softly, even though loud voices and escaping steam effectively barred eavesdropping.

'Captain Bulloch?'

James D. Bulloch of Georgia and the Confederate Navy tipped his hat. 'Mrs. Main — children. The warmest of welcomes to Liverpool. I trust the journey wasn't too taxing?'

'The children enjoyed the scenery once the sun came up,' Judith answered, with a smile.

'I spent most of the time studying the drawings you sent to Islington,' Cooper added. They had arrived with