Mary Custis Lee put down her needles. “There; this sock is finished, and a good enough place to call the day’s work finished as well. Knitting by the light of lamp and candle is hard on the eyes.”
“Which does not stop you from doing so, Mother,” Agnes said reprovingly.
“Not on most nights,” her mother agreed. “But tonight we find Robert here, so halting early is easier to square with my conscience.”
“I wish I were here with you and my girls every night, both for the pleasure of your company and because it would mean the war was over and our independence won,” Lee said. He yawned again. “Tonight, though, I own myself tired. Riding the train with the rails in their present sadly decrepit state is hardly more enjoyable than driving a light buggy headlong down a corduroy road.”
“Then let us seek our beds,” his wife said. “Surely you will rest better in a real bed and a warm house than in your tent by the Rapidan. Mary, dear, if you would be so kind?” Mary got up and wheeled her mother to the base of the stairs.
Lee rose quickly too, to go with them. As he stood, he felt a probing pain in his chest. That pain had been with him now and again all through the winter. Doctors thumped his chest and made learned noises, without finding its source or doing him any good to speak of. He endured it stoically; Mary, he knew, suffered far worse.
At the foot of the stairs, she used her left arm to push herself out of her chair and upright, then grabbed the banister with her right hand. Lee stepped up beside her, slid his arm around her waist. The feel of her body against his was strange from separation, yet at the same time infinitely familiar. “Shall we ascend, my dear?” he said.
He took most of her weight as they climbed to the second floor. “You are smoother at helping me than anyone else, I think,” she said. “You have a gentle touch.”
“Who is likely to know you better than your husband?” he replied as he guided her down the hallway toward the bedroom. He had nursed her many illnesses through their marriage whenever they were together; before that, his mother had spent her last years as an invalid. He was long practiced in dealing with the sick.
He helped Mary change into a warm flannel nightgown, then put on the pajamas Julia had left out for him. “And a nightcap, too,” he exclaimed as he set it on his head. “Such luxury is bound to spoil me.” His wife snorted. He walked over to her bed and kissed her. “Good night, dear Mary.” He went back to his own bed, blew out the candle by it. The room plunged into darkness.
“Sleep well, Robert,” Mary said.
“Thank you. I’m sure I shall,” he answered. After so long on his cot, the bed felt almost indecently soft. But the room was warm, at least compared to a tent in the hills close by the Rapidan. He had no trouble dropping off.
Luke and his carriage showed up in front of the house on Franklin Street at breakfast time. When Lee went out to him, he seemed none the worse for wear for however much drinking he had done the night before. “Where to today, Marse Robert?” he asked.
“The armory,” Lee answered. “I need to confer with Colonel Gorgas.”
“Whatever you say, Marse Robert.” Luke, plainly, could not have cared less whether Lee went to the armory to confer with Gorgas or with George Washington’s ghost. But he flicked his whip over the team and got them moving, which was what mattered.
The carriage rolled down Seventh Street toward the James River. The armory sprawled at the foot of Gamble’s Hill, diagonally between Seventh and Fourth. The Kanawha Canal ran behind it. Luke pulled up to the columned central entranceway; the dome that surmounted it did not seem to be of a piece with the rest of the long, low brick building.
The armory rang with the sounds of metalwork and carpentry. Drills and lathes and dies and punches and molds turned wood and iron and lead into small arms and bullets. No other Confederate arsenal came close to matching its production. Without the machines captured at Harpers Ferry and moved here in the first days of the war, the South would have been hardpressed for weapons.
“General Lee.” Josiah Gorgas came up and saluted. He was a heavyset, moon-faced man in his forties, his close-trimmed beard just starting to be streaked with gray. “I’m very glad to see you, sir. I’d hoped to have the opportunity to speak with you, and here you are.”
“And I with you, Colonel. I suspect we have in mind a similar topic of conversation, too.”
“Likely we do, sir. Will you come up to my office, where we can talk more comfortably?” He led Lee up to the second floor.
Lee took the stairs slowly, worried that the pain in his chest might recur. To his relief, it did not. He sat opposite Gorgas, pointed to the AK-47 on the ordnance chief’s desk. “Yes, there it is, the marvel of the day.” Gorgas looked at him sharply. “I meant no sarcasm, Colonel, I assure you. I am in your debt—the Confederacy is in your debt—for sending Andries Rhoodie on to me.”
“I hoped you would feel so, General, after seeing it demonstrated. I certainly did, and I am glad to have my judgment vindicated by a soldier in the field. I do endeavor to give satisfaction so far as arms go.” He spoke with some diffidence; a shipment of cavalry carbines the summer before had been almost as dangerous to the men who held them as to those at whom they were aimed.
Lee said, “My only possible reservation about these repeaters is that they have not yet seen combat. But I think they will answer. Though they are so different from our usual rifles, they are easy to learn and use and maintain, and the troops are much taken by the volume of fire they deliver. I like men to be confident in their arms; it makes them more belligerent.”
“General, I think you yourself are the most belligerent man in your army,” Gorgas said.
Lee considered. “Henry Heth said something to that effect to me once,” he remarked. “It may be so. Hemmed in as I am by responsibility, I have few opportunities personally to demonstrate it, if it is. But I would surely rather strike a blow than either flee of remain quiet, waiting to be struck. Enough of my ramblings now, sir—to business. I thank God for these gentlemen from Rivington and for the arms with which they are supplying us. I am not, however, eager to forever depend on them for weapons. If anyone, if any establishment in the Confederacy can manufacture their like, you are the; man, and this is the place.”
Gorgas looked baffled and unhappy, like a hound that has taken a scent and then lost it in the middle of an open meadow. “General Lee, I do not know. I thank you for being thoughtful enough to provide me with more of these carbines and a stock of ammunition. I already had one, and a couple of magazines, from Andries Rhoodie. I have been puzzling at it since before he departed for Orange Court House. And—I do not know.”
“What perplexes you so about the rifle?” Lee asked. He had his own list; he wanted to see what the Confederacy’s ordnance wizard would add to it.
“First, that it springs ex nihilo, like Minerva from love’s forehead.” Colonel Gorgas evidently had a list, too—he was ticking off points on his fingers. “Generally speaking, a new type of weapon will have defects, which may in some cases be ameliorated through modifications made in the light of experience. The next defect I discover in this AK-47 will be the first. The gun works, sir, which is no small wonder in itself.”
“I had not thought of it in those terms,” Lee said slowly. “You mean it gives the impression of being a finished arm, like, for example, a Springfield.”
“Exactly so. The Springfield rifle musket has a great number of less efficient ancestors, So, logically, must the AK-47. Yet where are they? Even a less efficient rifle based on its principles would be better than anything we or the Federals have.”