Love and War

'Murder! Mysterious stabbing by the canal!'

The shout of the newsboy on Broad Street interrupted the vengeful reverie. He bought a paper and scanned it as he walked. The cold of panic replaced his steamy delirium. They had found the corpse of Bent's informant, though he was not named. The victim was a white male of the kind commonly called 'albino.'

In less than an hour, Elkanah Bent packed his valise, vacated his room, saddled his horse, and took the road north.

80

That same evening, standing knee deep in the James River, Cooper sneezed.

He had caught cold. It didn't matter. Nor did the miserable, weary state of his assistant and two helpers. 'One more,' he said. 'Rig the shell.'

'Mr. Main, it's nearly dark,' said his assistant, an earnest but fundamentally untalented boy named Lucius Chickering. A Charleston aristocrat, nineteen-year-old Chickering had enrolled in Mallory's Confederate Naval Academy, whose campus consisted of the old side-wheeler Patrick Henry, anchored in the river. Chickering had rapidly failed basic astronomy, navigation, and seamanship, and been dismissed, with Lieutenant Parker's regrets. Only his father's influence saved him from absolute disgrace; a job was found for him in the scorned Navy Department. Cooper liked Chickering, but he knew the boy kept quiet about where he worked.

Lucius Chickering had a huge nose with a hump in the middle. His upper teeth jutted over his lower lip, and he had more freckles than anyone deserved. His ugliness somehow contributed to his likability. And he was right about the lateness of the hour. A deep red sunset covered the James with sullen reflections. Birds wheeled against high scarlet clouds, and downstream a barge had already become a blot of shadow dotted yellow by a single lantern.

Replying to his assistant, Cooper said, 'We have time. If you're all too lazy, I'll rig it myself.'

He hadn't eaten since daybreak. They had been down here in the rushes, a mile from the city limits, struggling with these drift­wood torpedoes the entire day. They had not been successful even once, and Cooper knew why. The concept was wrong.

A wood cradle, newly designed within the department, held a metal canister of powder with a small opening in its domed lid. Into the opening went an impact-type percussion fuse. Cradle and canister were painted grayish brown, like the pieces of Atlantic driftwood to which they were lashed. The problem was, the movement of the driftwood in the river current — and therefore on a harbor tide — was uncontrollable. The experimenters found the wrong end of the torpedo bumping against the test target: three barrels anchored in midstream with enough open water on either side for barges and small steam sloops to pass.

To be correct about it, not all of the driftwood torpedoes had even reached the target. By Cooper's count, it was five out of two dozen launched. All had failed to detonate because the fuse and canister were on the side opposite that which struck the barrels.

As Cooper started to work, Chickering exploded. 'Mr. Main, I must protest. You've worked us like field bucks all day, and now you want us to continue when we can scarcely see what we're doing.'

'Indeed I do,' Cooper said, his body a black reed against the red sky. 'This is wartime, Mr. Chickering. If you don't care for the hours or the working conditions, submit your resignation and go back to Charleston.'

Lucius Chickering glowered at his superior. Cooper Main intimidated and annoyed him. He was a Palmetto State man who acted more like a Yankee. He slopped around in mud and water as if appearances didn't matter. While the others stood by, Cooper carefully screwed the detonator plug into the canister fuse. His trousers and shirt sleeves soaking wet, he launched the driftwood torpedo and watched it turn aimlessly in the water. Five minutes later a flash of flame marked its detonation against the far bank. It had sailed past the target with twenty feet to spare.

Curtly, Cooper said to one of the helpers, 'Row out there and tow the barrels in. You' — to the other helper — 'load the tools in the wagon.' Muttering, the helper picked up a long crosscut saw, which hummed a sad note.

The sun was down, starlight shone, frogs croaked in the sweet Virginia night. The helper grumbled and swore, sneezed again, then said to Chickering, 'I'll tell Mallory the design's a failure, like the raft torpedo before it and the keg torpedo before that.'

'Sir, with all respect' — having exploded, Chickering was calmer now — 'why do we keep on with these fruitless experiments? Our work is so peculiar, we're the butt of jokes in every other department.'

'Be thankful, Lucius. Snide remarks will never wound you the way bullets do.'

Chickering colored at the suggestion that he might be happy to avoid hazardous duty. But he said nothing because Main's authority was not to be questioned; he and Mallory were close as two peas. Still, more than one person whispered that the new man was unbalanced. Something to do with his son drowning on the voyage from Nassau to Wilmington.

Like a humorless schoolmaster, Cooper continued. 'We test these odd devices for one reason: our inferior position vis-a-vis the enemy. As the secretary says so often, we don't outnumber them, we can't out-spend them, so we have to out-think them. That means experimentation, no matter how ludicrous the experiments may seem to the fashionable young ladies and gentlemen you associate with here in Richmond. Mallory wants to win, you see, not merely negotiate an end to the war. I want to win. I want to whip the damn Yankees on the Atlantic and the rivers if we do it nowhere else. Now pick up that hand saw and put it in the wagon.'

He sloshed down the bank to help the man who had rowed out to tow the barrels. Together they beached the target and carried the inverted rowboat to the wagon. More water dripped on Cooper's wet shirt, and he sneezed three times, violently, before they stowed the boat and climbed aboard for the homeward trip, four tired men in a world gone dark except for stars.

Cooper began to regret his sharp words. To be influenced by others was the way of the young. Chickering understandably resented a department constantly under attack for mismanagement, overspending, and dalliance with ideas that seemed to be the creations of idiots. Yet the boy, like so many others, simply didn't understand that you had to sift through all that fool's gold if you hoped to discover one nugget — one design, one idea — that might tilt everything in a decisive way.

Cooper had thrown himself into that search with ferocious energy. Mallory had been complimentary about his work in England and soon took the younger man into his confidence. In Mallory's opinion, the river war was lost. It was now their task to salvage the situation on the Atlantic seaboard. The commerce raiders, including the one Cooper helped launch, had captured or damaged an astonishing number of Yankee merchantmen. Insurance rates had risen, according to plan, to near-prohibitive levels, causing several hundred cargo ships to be transferred to dummy owners in Great Britain. Yet this Confederate success had failed to achieve its final goal — appreciable reduction of the size and effectiveness of the Yankee blockade squadron.

If anything, General Scott's Anaconda was tightening. One point of maximum constriction was Charleston, where Union monitors had attacked in force in April. Harbor and shore batteries had repulsed them, but everyone in the department anticipated further attacks. Not only was Charleston a vital port, but it was the flash point of the war — the city the enemy most wanted to capture and destroy.

If he didn't have the department, Cooper doubted that he could survive. Moreover, he believed in the work; he and Mallory were alike in that and in other ways. Each had started out detesting the idea of secession — early in the war, Mallory had been widely quoted after he said, 'I regard it as another name for revolution' — but now both were fierce as hawks in pursuit of the enemy.

The secretary kept everyone busy with schemes. Schemes for new ironclads. Schemes for submersible attack vessels. Schemes for naval torpedoes of every conceivable configuration. Cooper reveled in the frantic effort, because he hated the enemy. But he hated one individual fully as much, though he had said nothing of that to anyone, not even Orry, so far. He wanted to arrange a fitting confrontation. A fitting punishment.

The struggles of the department had one additional benefit. If  he worked himself to a stupor every night, his mind was less likely to cast up memories of Judah in the moonlit sea. Judah calling for help. Judah's poor scalded