supposedly guarded to prevent a surprise Northern attack, yet here was a ford standing empty and unwatched. 'Because no one knows the ford's here,' Starbuck said. 'Or maybe the roadbed is washed away?' he added.
'There's an easy way to find out,' Lassan said. He had the instinctive caution of any soldier coming to a river, especially a river that divided two armies, but he had stared hard at the further bank through a small glass and was satisfied that no Yankees waited in ambush, and so he now walked into the sunlight, where he took off his spurred boots and hitched up his saber. Starbuck followed the Frenchman, wading into the river, which flowed fast, clear, and shallow across a bed of fine gravel. Long weeds trailed upstream, and a few fish darted in the shadows downstream, but nothing obstructed Lassan and Starbuck's progress; indeed, the water scarce reached either man's knees. At the far bank the road reared steeply up from the water, but not so steeply that a horse team could not have pulled a heavy gun and limber out of the river. 'If the Yankees knew about this ford,' Lassan said, 'they could be round your backside in a trice.'
'I thought you said they weren't going to attack us,' Starbuck commented as he pulled himself up onto the northern bank.
'And I've also told you a hundred times that you must always expect the unexpected from your enemy,' Lassan said as he sat in the shade of a willow and stared back across the river. He gestured upstream with the cigar. 'What units are that way?'
'None,' Starbuck said. 'We're the westernmost brigade of the army.'
'So the Yankees really could hook round your backside,' Lassan said softly. He smoked in silence for a few seconds, then abruptly changed the subject back to his new house-hold. 'Sally hopes you'll visit us when you're in Richmond. I hope so, too.'
'Thank you,' Starbuck said awkwardly.
Lassan grinned. 'I am becoming domesticated. My mother would be most amused. Poor Mama. I am an adventurer, while my sister lives in England, so Mama is rather alone these days.'
'You've a sister?'
'The Countess of Benfleet.' Lassan gave a half-mocking grimace at the grand-sounding title. 'Dominique married an English nobleman, so now she has a castle, five grown children, and probably twice as many lovers. I hope she does, anyway.' He tossed the stub of his cigar into the water. 'One of Dominique's sons wants to join this war and she asked me which side he should fight for. I said the North if he wants to be respectable and the South if he wants adventure.' Lassan shrugged as if to suggest he did not much care either way. 'I wonder if this ford's got a name,' he said idly.
'Dead Mary's Ford.' A man spoke suddenly from the far side of the track, and the voice so startled Starbuck that he reached for his revolver. 'It's all right, massa! Silas is just plain harmless.' The unseen speaker chuckled; then the bushes stirred and Starbuck saw that an old Negro had been hiding in the trees just a few feet away. The old man must have been watching them for a long time. 'Silas is a free man!' the Negro said as he sidled onto the track and drew from his filthy clothes a scrap of paper that had long lost any legibility. 'Free! Massa Kemp gave Silas freedom.' He waved the disintegrating scrap of greasy paper. 'God bless Massa Kemp.'
'You're Silas?' Lassan asked.
'Silas.' The old man confirmed his identity with a nod. 'Mad Silas,' he added as though the qualification might prove useful. He was staring keenly at the stub of Starbuck's cigar.
Lassan took out a new cigar, lit it, and gave it to the old man, who was now squatting in the road. 'Do you live here, Silas?'
'Over there, massa.' Silas pointed to the ruined house. 'Silas has a lair in there.' He chuckled, then found the internal rhyme even funnier and almost rolled backward as he laughed at himself.
'How old are you, Silas?' Lassan asked.
'Silas is older than you, massa!' Silas laughed again. 'But Silas's daddy now, he saw the redcoats!'
'Why Dead Mary's Ford, Silas?' Lassan asked.
The old man shuffled a few inches nearer. His clothes looked as old as himself, and his hair was white and matted with dirt, while his face was deep lined. Lassan's question had swept the humor from that face, replacing it with suspicion. ''Cos Mary died,' he said at last.
'Here?' Starbuck asked gently.
'The white folks came. Looking for Silas, but Silas wasn't here. Mistress Pearce's baby gone, see? They thought Silas took it, so they came and burned Silas's house. And burned Silas's wife.' The old man looked very close to tears as he stared at the house, where, Starbuck now saw, a kind of hollowed den was scooped in the bushes under the brick chimney. 'But the baby was never gone after all.' Silas sighed as he finished the story. 'She grown up now. But Silas's Mary, she's still here too.'
Lassan lit himself another cigar and smoked in companionable silence for a few moments before giving the old man a smile. 'Listen, Silas. More white folk are coming here. They're going to dig trenches along the edge of the trees over there, at the top of your meadow. They don't mean you any harm, but if there's anything in your house that's valuable to you, take it away and hide it. You understand me?' 'Silas understands you, massa,' Silas said very intensely. Lassan gave the old man two more cigars, then clapped Starbuck on the shoulder. 'Time to get back, Nate.' The two men waded the ford, pulled on their boots, then walked back through the woods. Starbuck wanted to find Major Hinton, but the Major was out of the lines, and so, accompanied by Lassan, Starbuck went to the big farmhouse that Washington Faulconer had commandeered for his headquarters.
Washington Faulconer had gone to Gordonsville, leaving Colonel Swynyard in command of the Brigade. The Colonel was in the farmhouse parlor, sitting beneath the crossed flags of the Faulconer Legion that Faulconer kept unfurled and draped across the parlor wall. One of the two flags was the Faulconer Legion's own banner derived from the Faulconer family's coat of arms. It showed three red crescents on a white field and had the family's motto, 'Forever Ardent,' wreathed around the lower crescent. The flag measured thirty-six square feet and had a yellow fringe, just as did its companion flag, which was the new battle flag of the Confederate States of America.
The original flag of the Confederacy had carried three stripes, two red and one white, with a star-spangled blue field in its upper corner, but when the wind dropped and the flag hung limp, it had resembled the Stars and Stripes, and so a new flag had been designed, a scarlet banner blazoned with a blue cross of Saint Andrew, and on that diagonal, white-edged cross were thirteen white stars. The old flag with its stars and three stripes was still the official flag of the Confederacy, but when the Confederacy's soldiers marched into battle, they now marched under their new battle flag.
The Confederate War Department had decreed that infantry regiments should carry a battle flag four feet square, but such a flag was not nearly grand enough for Brigadier General Washington Faulconer, who had insisted on having a banner six feet by six feet made of the finest silk and edged with a tasseled fringe of golden threads. The General had intended that his Legion's two flags should be the finest war banners in all the Confederacy, and so he had commissioned them from the same expensive French factory that had manufactured his ill-fated crescent- badged shoulder patches.
'Which means,' Colonel Griffin Swynyard said when he saw the Frenchman admiring the lavish flags, 'that every marksman in the Northern army will be aiming for them.'
'Maybe you could persuade Faulconer to stand beneath them?' Starbuck suggested sweetly.
'Now, Nate. Let us be charitable,' Swynyard said. The Colonel had been busily trying to reconcile the Brigade's accounts and seemed glad to be interrupted by visitors. He stood and shook hands with Colonel Lassan, apologized that General Faulconer was away from the headquarters, and insisted on hearing what circumstances had brought the scarred French cavalry officer to the Confederate army. 'You're welcome to a lemonade, Colonel,' Swynyard said when the story was told, indicating a jug of pale yellow liquid that was protected from wasps by a beaded cover of fine muslin.
'I have wine, Colonel.' Lassan produced one of his captured bottles.
Swynyard grimaced. 'Captain Starbuck will tell you that I have forsworn all ardent liquor, Colonel. For over two weeks now!' he added proudly, and it was astonishing what a change the abstinence had wrought in the Colonel. The sallow cast of his skin had vanished, his sweating fits had faded, and the twitch in his cheek that had once convulsed his face into a grotesque rictus had subsided to a faint tic. His eyes were clear and alert, he stood straighter, and he was dressed each day in clean linen. 'I am a new man,' he boasted, 'though alas, my rebirth has not given me a facility for mathematics.' He gestured at the Brigade's ledgers. 'I need someone who can understand accounts, someone with an education; someone like you, Starbuck.'
'Not me, Colonel,' Starbuck said, 'I was at Yale.'
