They walked down the rows of guns, looking them over, like buyers before a horse auction. “It would be a waste of time to put a smoothbore on board,” Taylor suggested, and Bowater concurred, so they moved quickly past the older guns.
They came at last to the Parrott rifles, and they stopped there and ran their eyes over the long tapered barrels with their distinctive reinforcement at the breech.
“Now this might be more of what we need,” Bowater said. In fact, he had worked out long ago exactly what gun he would like to see on the Cape Fear’s foredeck, but for some reason he could not bring himself to admit as much.
Taylor nodded again. “Ten-pound Parrott weighs just under a thousand pounds… That kind of weight would put the boat down by the head, I should think.”
“It just might.”
Taylor looked up and met Bowater’s eyes, and there was something mischievous in his expression. “Might balance her a bit…one gun off the bow and another off the stern…”
Bowater took a deep breath. He and Taylor had worked out this ruse de guerre over dessert, in the shade of the boat on the Cape Fear’s boat deck. They talked in elliptical, half-finished sentences. Bowater could not bring himself to speak more boldly. This sort of trickery was antithetical to everything Bowater was and believed and was trained to be. If honor and ethics were a rope to climb, then he had just slid down many feet. But he had to get into the fight.
The two men looked down at the guns again.
“Ten-pound Parrott forward. Two twelve-pound howitzers aft,” Bowater said in a tone that suggested the matter was settled.
Footsteps on the granite floor echoed around the building, and Bowater and Taylor looked up to see Commander Archibald Fairfax approach. Fairfax was in charge of ordnance at Norfolk, an able and active officer. He had managed to rework a number of the old smoothbore thirty-two-pounders, reinforcing their breeches and rifling them, bringing them into the modern age.
He was also in charge of fitting out the vessels stationed at the yard. “Captain Bowater, a pleasure, sir,” he said.
“Commander, good day,” Bowater said, extending a hand. “I do not believe you have met my chief engineer. Mr. Hieronymus Taylor, Commander Fairfax.”
“Commander,” Taylor said, shaking his hand. One glance told him Fairfax was old navy, through and through.
“What can I do for you, Captain Bowater?”
Bowater felt a tingling in his hands, an unsettled feeling in his gut. Up until now it had all been theoretical, which was bad enough. But now the moment was there. Now he had to lie to a superior officer, or give it up.
“We came by to see about the new guns for Fort Powhatan,” Bowater said, and when Fairfax looked understandably confused, he added, “The ten-pound Parrott and the two twelve-pound howitzers.”
There…that wasn’t so bad… He felt the rope slip though his hands.
Fairfax shook his head. “I was not aware that Fort Powhatan was to get more guns. Who gave you that order?”
“We were up there yesterday. Captain Cocke said he had sent word to you. He was under the impression it was all arranged.”
“No…this is the first I hear of it.”
“Well, hell, sir…beg your pardon, Commander,” Taylor said. Bowater hoped he would not make a hash of things now. “I can draw the fires, but now we’re going to have to take on more fresh water before we get head up steam again. We’ll need more coal, too. Got just enough on board to steam there and back with steam up now.”
“Very well, Chief,” Bowater said. “There is nothing for it.” He shook his head, turned to Fairfax. “I swear this happens every time, sir. One bureaucratic mix-up and we are set back two days.”
“Well, perhaps not,” Fairfax said. “If Cocke intended to ask for those guns, I should think the paperwork is somewhere. Be a waste for you to leave empty-handed. Why don’t you take those guns aboard and I’ll see what became of Cocke’s requisition.”
“Thank you, sir,” Bowater said. “That sort of efficiency is not something you would have heard of in the old navy.”
“No, indeed, Mr. Bowater. If we have any advantage at all over the United States Navy, it is that we are not so entrenched and somnambulant. Feel free to press whomever you need from the yard to help with the guns. Mr. Taylor, a pleasure to meet you. Good day, gentlemen.”
“Good day,” the officers of the Cape Fear said in chorus. Commodore Fairfax turned and walked away.
Done. They had their guns. And Bowater felt like a new-minted whore, just finished with her first trick. He wondered if that sort of thing got easier, and what the implications were if it did.
14
Our hands nervously toying with the hammers of our rifles, each one felt that his final departure was near at hand and busily repented him of his sins.
— Alexander Hunter, 17th Virginia, Blackburn’s Ford, Bull Run River
A sharp jerk of alarm, a twist of fear. The long slide back into boredom. Alarm, fear, boredom, the cycle went round and round, a grindstone wearing Robley Paine down. Six days now. It was more exhausting than any drill or long march he had encountered yet.
He stood and stretched arms and legs, tore a piece of bacon off with his teeth. It was raw—fires were not permitted that morning—and the meat was chewy and slightly noxious, but he made himself eat. He followed the bacon up with a cracker, and then a drink from his canteen, filled with gritty river water.
The air was warm and sweet-smelling, the sky just growing light through the tangle of young trees along the riverbank. Over the muted conversations of the other soldiers, muttering over their inadequate breakfast, the incompetence of their leadership, he could hear the sounds of the Bull Run River, coursing through its choked and tangled bed, running over the shallow place they were protecting, McLean’s Ford.
It was July 21, a Sunday, and though there would be no church service that morning, Paine did not doubt that there would be a power of praying going on. He had done enough of it himself already, and he reckoned there was more to come.
“Morning, Lieutenant.” Jonathan Paine ambled up, scratching with one hand, rubbing his eyes with the other. “Got any more of that bacon?”
“Where are your rations, Private?”
“Ate ’em last night. I was fearful hungry.”
Robley scowled at his youngest brother, but cut a slice of bacon from his own remaining piece and handed it over. Jonathan, skinny as he was, ate more than any other person Robley had ever met.
“Today’s our day,” Jonathan said through a full mouth, but it was more a question than a statement.
“I reckon.” It had been six days since the great flurry of excitement that saw 3rd Brigade decamp from near the McLean house and tramp the mile down gently sloping hills and through clustered stands of young trees to the banks of the Bull Run. For six days they had been in the proximity of battle, but had yet to enter into it themselves, like so many Moseses looking down on the Promised Land.
On the day after they had taken their position at McLean’s Ford, the firing started, muted, distant, and sporadic. It was Brigadier General Milledge Luke Bonham’s 1st Brigade, lobbing shells at the pursuing Yankees as they fell back from Fairfax Courthouse to the Confederate lines behind the Bull Run.
It had been worse the following day. Then the Yankees had come in force down the road from the cluster of wood-framed houses known as Centreville. They hit James Longstreet’s 4th Brigade hard and repeatedly, not half a mile from 3rd Brigade’s left flank. The soldiers of 3rd Brigade grabbed up their rifles and rifles, yawned with nervousness, fiddled with their equipment, joked, prayed, waited for their orders to splash across the river, to turn the bluebellies’ flank. But that order did not come.