“Yes, sir,” Gorgas said. “We have put last spring’s misfortune behind us and go on, as we must. My wife fatigued herself very much, visiting and relieving the poor sufferers injured in the blast.”
“How many died?” Lee asked.
“Ten women were killed at once; another twenty perished over the next several weeks. A considerable number more were burned but recovered.”
“Terrible.” Lee shook his head. “And as terrible that we must employ women and girls to produce the sinews of war for us. But with even our armies ever short of men, I suppose no good choice exists. You and your wife have your living quarters here in the armory, do you not?”
“Yes, sir, just a couple of doors down from here, as a matter of fact.”
“You are fortunate, Colonel, in being able to honorably carry out your vital duty and yet remain in the bosom of your family.”
“I often think so,” Gorgas said.
“As you should; such circumstances are given to few, and ought not to be taken for granted, And now I will let you return to your duties. No, you need not see me out; I can find my way.” Given that permission, Gorgas was already reaching for a pen as Lee shut the door behind him. The man was a glutton for work. Lee wished the Confederacy had more like him.
Piles of shells in the yard around the armory testified to the diligence of Gorgas and his crews. The muscular men loading some of those shells onto a wagon for transport to a railway station and thence to the field paused when Lee came out and walked over to his carriage. A couple of them lifted their caps to him. He nodded in return. They grinned as they went back to work.
Luke breathed whiskey fumes into Lee’s face as Lee got in behind him. “You give ‘em somethin’ to brag on, Marse Robert, just because they see you.” Lee glanced down, but the black man had his flask out of sight. He asked, “Where you want to go to now?”
Lee considered the question. He’d had no definite plans for the rest of the day. His first impulse was to rush headlong to the treasury, beard Secretary Memminger in his lair, and demand of him if he knew what an impossibly good bargain he was getting in Rhoodie’s repeaters. But finance was not his own province. He said, “Take me back to the War Department.”
“Yassuh, Marse Ropert.” Tight or sober, Luke could handle horses. He swung the team around another wagon coming into the armory to be loaded with shells, then drove back to Mechanic’s Hall. Lee eyed with keen interest the building across the street from the War Department, a three-story, brown brick structure he’d gone by countless times before but scarcely noticed. His scrutiny was rewarded by the sight of a man in the mottled outfit that seemed the trademark costume of Andries Rhoodie and his comrades passing in through the building’s marble-faced entranceway.
Officers with lace on their gray sleeves and civilians in black claw-hammer coats bustled in and out of Mechanic’s Hall, as if the place were an ant’s nest, with some workers going forth to forage and others returning with their spoils. Luke pulled up right in front of the building. A Confederate with the two stars of a lieutenant colonel on his collar shouted, “You damned stupid nigger, what do you think you’re doing, blocking the—” The words stuck in his throat when Lee got out of the carriage. He pulled himself to attention and snapped off a salute that would have done credit to a cadet from the Virginia Military Institute.
Lee turned and said, “Thank you, Luke,” before he returned it. The black man smiled a secret smile as he took the team around the corner to find a place to hitch it. The walk from the street into the foyer of Mechanic’s Hall was only twenty or thirty feet, but in that short space Lee was saluted close to a dozen times.
He paused in the foyer to let his eyes adjust to the dimmer interior light. Then he walked over to a desk where a clerk was industriously jotting in a ledger or notebook. After a glance at the enameled brass nameplate in front of the fellow, he said, “Excuse me, Mr. Jones, does Colonel Lee still maintain his office on the second floor?”
The clerk—John Beauchamp Jones his nameplate proclaimed him to be, as if by trumpeting his middle name he could make up for the utter plainness of those that flanked it—finished writing his sentence before he looked up. His thin, clean-shaven face bore a sour expression at the interruption. That quickly changed when he saw who stood before him. “Yes, General, he does. He’s there now, I believe; I saw him go up this morning.”
“Thank you, sir.” Lee had not taken two steps toward, the stairway before Jones returned to his writing.
He fielded more salutes on the second floor as he made’ his way down the hall to his son Custis’s office. Custis was writing when he tapped on the open door, though with less zeal than John Jones had displayed. “Father! Sir!” he exclaimed, springing to his feet. He too saluted, then stuck out his hand.
Lee took it, swept his eldest son into an embrace. “Hello, my dear boy. You’re looking very well. I see it is possible to find adequate victuals in Richmond after all.”
Custis laughed. “I’ve always been heavier than you, Father. Here, sit down. Tell me what I can do for you. Is it—I hope it is—a post in the field?”
“I have none to give, son; I wish I did. I know how you chafe as President Davis’s aide,” Lee said.
Custis nodded, tugging at his beard in frustration. Though he was past thirty, it remained boyishly thin and silky on his upper cheeks. He said, “How am I ever to deserve command if I have not led men ill the field?”
“Soon, I am sure, you will take the field in some capacity—everyone who has ability will be needed when spring comes. Do not think you have no value in your current post, either; you render the President and the nation important service.”
“It is not the service I would give,” Custis said stiffly.
“I know. I have been in that predicament myself, in western Virginia and then in the Carolinas. At the moment, however, your presence in Richmond may prove of considerable advantage to me.”
“How so, sir?” The younger Lee still sounded dubious, as if he suspected his father of devising some make-work assignment to reconcile him to remaining in the Confederate capital.
But interest flowered on his face when Lee asked, “Do you remember the organization that calls itself America Will Break, of which I wrote you? The one which appears centered in the town of Rivington, North Carolina?”
“The people with those amazing repeaters?” Custis said. “Yes, of course I do. I shouldn’t mind getting my hands on one of their carbines myself.”
“That can be quite simply arranged, I think: you need only walk across the street, as the organization has established offices right opposite Mechanic’s Hall. But I wish you would not.”
Custis smiled. “You’d best have a good reason, Father, for if they are so close, I think I shall straightaway beat a path to their door.”
“I believe I do have a good reason, Custis, or rather several of them.”
Lee briefly outlined his conversations with Major Venable back at army headquarters and with Colonel Gorgas not an hour earlier. When he finished by telling Custis what the Rivington men were selling their repeaters for, his son stared and exclaimed, “You’re joking!”
“No, my dear boy, lam not,” Lee assured him. “And so you: will grasp that I have cause to wonder about these people who call themselves America Will Break. They are on their way to becoming a power in the Confederacy, and I do not know whether they will prove a power for good or ill. There is a great deal I do not know about them, and I wish I did. That is where you come in.”