Love and War

'Nor I,' he said, and gigged Sport into the road the wagons had rutted with their wheels.

He waved as he spurred away, gazing over his shoulder at the dwindling figure against the backdrop of the stone house and the two red oaks. Impossible to deny his feelings any longer.

You'd better try. In wartime no man could make a promise to a woman with any certainty of keeping it.

He remembered the warmth of her bosom, her mouth, her hair, that exquisite touch of tongues before Washington knocked.

He mustn't become entangled.

He was entangled.

He wasn't falling in love —

It had already happened.

What the hell was he supposed to do now?

52

On the first Saturday in April, the mood in James Bulloch's Liverpool office was light as the spring air. Captain Bulloch had lately returned from a swift but uneventful dash through the blockade; at Savannah he had conferred with some of Mallory's men, though he had imparted no details to Cooper.

The office still basked in the success of its first project. On March 22 the screw steamer Oreto had slipped away from the Toxteth docks without crown interference; two of Consul Dudley's detectives had watched and cursed from the dockside, but that was all.

Bulloch had invented the name Oreto to confuse the authorities. While she was under construction at William Miller's, the yard had listed her as a Mediterranean merchantman, and when she cleared to sea her destination was shown as Palermo. In fact, it was Nassau. The British captain hired for the transatlantic run would there hand over command to Captain Maffitt of the Confederate Navy, for Oreto was far from a humble freighter. Her design and engineering followed standard plans for gunboats; two seven-inch rifles and half a dozen smoothbores were on their way to Nassau separately, on the bark Bahama. When Oreto was armed, she would be a formidable fighting ship.

How long this scheme to foil British law would work, no one could be sure. It must be long enough for their second vessel to be launched. Bulloch had said this when he and Cooper retired to their safest meeting place — Bulloch's parlor — a few nights after the captain's return.

A mail pouch just in from the Bahamas had brought an urgent message, he told Cooper. The second gunboat must be rushed to completion, because Lincoln's plan to bottle up the South was rapidly changing from a contemptible paper blockade to a real and damaging one as more and more Yankee warships went on line. Florida — that would be Oreto's name when she was commissioned — had a clearly defined mission: to capture or sink Northern merchant vessels, thus causing a steep rise in the cost of maritime insurance. Next, according to Confederate assumptions, Lincoln would hear howls from commercial shipowners and demands for increased protection. He would be forced to pull vessels from the blockade squadrons for this duty.

A second fast, armed raider could increase the pressure. They had such a ship nearing completion over at Laird's. Though resembling Oreto, she was superior in several respects. Bulloch's code name for her was Enrica. On the shipyard books she was Number 290 — the two hundred ninetieth keel laid down at Laird's, whose founder, old John, had moved into politics while sons William and John Junior looked after the enormous business that had grown from a small ironworks making boilers.

Work on Enrica must be speeded; that was the message Cooper had to deliver this spring Saturday. It was not as easy as it sounded, because neither he nor Bulloch nor anyone from the office dared step onto Laird property. Dudley had spies everywhere. If they saw Southerners at the yard, or even meeting openly with one of its owners, the Yankee minister, Adams, would press for an investigation and the game would be up. That was the reason the contract for Enrica had been negotiated in clandestine meetings at Number 1 Hamilton Square, Birkenhead, the residence of John Laird, Junior.

Cooper rather enjoyed the intrigue. Judith called it dangerous and his zest for it foolhardy. Well, perhaps, but it lent his days a sense of purpose and put an edge of excitement on them. As the hour for departure neared, he could feel a not unpleasant tingling on his palms.

The office remained unusually cheerful this balmy afternoon. Yesterday's pouch had brought several papers from home, including a Charleston Mercury for March 12. In it, Cooper read details of THE GREAT NAVAL BATTLE IN HAMPTON ROADS, as it was headlined. On March 9, a Confederate steamer plated with iron had exchanged fire with a strange-looking Union ship alternately referred to as an Ericsson Battery, after the inventor of her revolving turret, and Monitor.

Thrilled, Cooper read of the 'sharp encounter' between Virginia and the Yankee ironclad; they had dueled with only thirty to forty yards of water separating them. The paper said Virginia had achieved a 'signal victory.' The naive writer failed to grasp the real significance of the meeting.

With a shiver up his spine, Cooper reread the piece, remembering Brunei, the great British engineer whose ship designs he had studied and attempted to duplicate in South Carolina. Brunei would have understood and seen what Cooper saw: the last rites of wood and sail; the accelerating ascendancy of steam-driven iron on the oceans and the continents as well. Brunei had predicted it years ago. It was an incredible time in which to live, a time of marvels amidst the perils.

He checked his pocket watch, collected his things, and started for the stair. Bulloch emerged from the partitioned space that formed his tiny office.

'Convey my regards to Judith.'

'And mine to Harriott.'

'I trust you'll have a restful Sabbath.'

'I shall after I go to church.'

'You have our donation?'

'Yes.' Cooper tapped his tall hat. Looks and half-smiles during the exchange conveyed a second set of questions, responses, meanings. Two of the clerks in the office were new; one couldn't be perfectly sure of loyalties.

Going downstairs, he tipped his hat to Prioleau, the manager of Fraser, Trenholm, who was just returning to the building. Cooper crossed the shadowed cobbles of the court and hurried through the short tunnel beneath the offices fronting Rumford Place. He turned left as the bells of the Church of St. Nicholas rang the quarter hour. He would be able to make the 4:00 p.m. ferry easily.

At the corner he checked to the left, to the right, then to the rear. He saw no one suspicious among those hurrying or idling in the spring sunshine. He turned right toward the Mersey. The sun was sinking over the Wirral, and the span of water between the city and Birkenhead dazzled him with thousands of moving splinters of light. A freighter passed, outbound. He heard the faint ring of the ship's bell.

Cooper missed South Carolina now and then. But with Judith and the children and his job all here, he had concluded he was better off and probably happier in Liverpool. Except for Prioleau and two others at Fraser, Trenholm, no one in the city knew his history, hence no one remarked on the inconsistency of working for a cause in which he did not entirely believe. He himself couldn't adequately explain this dualism, in which one Cooper Main continued to loathe slavery, while another loved and served the South with a new, war-born fervency.

He wasn't even sure the Confederacy would survive. Recognition by the two most important European nations, Britain and France, was still a hope, nothing more, and little seemed to be happening militarily except for the stunning triumph at Hampton Roads. A prudent man, a man who wanted to retain his sanity, did as he was doing now: he concentrated on the task of the moment, not the dour issues beneath.

'England off’ring neutral sauce to goose as well as gander' — he softly sang the Southern doggerel put to