“How?” Now Custis seemed eager, not doubtful. Before his father could answer, he went on, “Fifty dollars Confederate? Fifty dollars Confederate won’t buy a pocket knife, let alone a repeating rifle.”
“That is why I want you,” his father said. “I cannot personally investigate these AWB establishments myself. Even if I had the time, I am too readily recognizable. For that matter, you may be as well; you favor your mother as much as me, but the name Lee draws attention to its bearer.”
“Thanks to you, sir—what you have done makes me proud to bear it.”
“You have made your own contributions to it, and will, I am confident, make more. You can aid your country now by recruiting a band of men—I care not whether soldiers or civilians—whose names and faces will certainly draw no notice, and by using them to keep watch on the men and offices of America Will Break. Report what you learn to me and, if it is of sufficient urgency, directly to President Davis. Your being his aide may well prove valuable in this task, for it gives you his ear.”
Custis’s face grew set and abstracted. Lee knew the look; his son was thinking through the task he had been given. It was not a formal order; he was not under his father’s command. But he said, “Of course I’ll take it on, sir. I see the need. Perhaps I ought to enlist some Negroes among my—my spies, not to mince words. To a white man, no one is more invisible than a slave.”
“That may be an excellent notion. If you make sure they are trustworthy and can be relied upon not to gossip, by all means make use of them. Do not stint in rewarding them, either; if they give you good service.”
“I promise, Father, I shan’t be niggardly.”
“Good, for mostly being poor, they are—” Lee broke off and did his best to stare severely at his son, who was grinning to see his delayed reaction. “You young scamp!”
“I’m sorry, sir. I couldn’t resist.”
“You might have tried,” Lee said. “I think I shall take myself away, before I find myself under further bombardments.” He got up. So did Custis. They hugged again. “Take care of yourself, my dear son.”
“And you, Father. Give my love to Rob when you get back to the army, and to Cousin Fitzhugh as well.” One of Custis’s brothers was in the artillery, his cousin a cavalry officer.
“I shall,” Lee promised.
“Any word on Rooney?” Custis asked. His other brother, also a cavalry officer, had been wounded at Brandy Station the year before and captured while recuperating; for a time, he had been under threat of death.
Lee said, “The exchange talks seem to be moving forward at last. God willing, we’ll have him back again next month.”
“Thank heaven.”
“Yes. I expect to be down here a few more days, doing this and that. Perhaps you and your wife will be able to stop by the house on Franklin Street before I have to return. If not, tell her I know I owe her a letter. And, Custis, I do attach much importance to this business of the Rivington men, believe me.”
“I had not doubted it, sir. You are not in the habit of concerning yourself with trifles. I‘ll learn all I can of them.”
“I’m sure you will. God bless you and keep you, Custis.”
Lee walked out of his son’s office and down the stairs. His way out to the street carried him past John Jones’s desk. The clerk was turned away from him, talking to the man at the next desk: “My boy Custis’s parrot happened to be loose from its cage. It swooped down on the meat as if it were a hawk, the miserable bird, and gulped it down before we could get it back again. Meat is too hard to come by in Richmond these days to waste on a parrot; we’ll go without on account of it. I wish the damned talking feather duster would flyaway for good.”
Luke was waiting patiently outside Mechanic’s Hall. He waved when he saw Lee, and called, “I’ll get the carriage for you, Marse Robert.” He hurried off to fetch it. Lee went down the marble stairs and stood to one side of them so he would not be in the way of people going in and out on War Department business.
“Good to see you smiling, General Lee, sir,” a friendly passerby said, tipping his stovepipe hat. “Now I know things can’t be bad.” Without waiting for an answer, he went up the stairs two at a time and disappeared into Mechanic’s Hall.
Lee’s smile grew broader, though the stranger had been cheered by an amusement which had nothing to do with the prospective course of the war between Confederacy and Union. The thought uppermost in Lee’s mind was that Custis Jones’s parrot ought to make the acquaintance of Custis Morgan the squirrel.
*IV*
With his small, bald head, long nose, and long neck, Richard Ewell inevitably reminded everyone who met him of a stork. Having lost a leg at Groveton during Second Manassas, he could now also imitate the big white bird’s one-footed stance. He was sitting at the moment, however, sitting and pounding one, fist into the other palm to emphasize his words: “We smashed ‘em, sir, smashed ‘em, I tell you.” His voice was high and thin, almost piping.
“I am very glad to hear it, General Ewell,” Lee replied. “If those people send raiders down toward Richmond with the intention of seizing their prisoners there—and perhaps even the city itself—they must expect not to be welcomed with open arms.”
“Oh, we met ‘em with arms, all right,” Jeb Stuart said with a grin, patting the AK-47 that leaned against his camp stool. The repeater’s woodwork was not so perfectly varnished as it had been fresh out of the crate; it had seen use since then. Stuart patted it again.” And we sent Kilpatrick’s riders back over the Rapidan with their tails between their legs.”
Lee smiled. He’d liked Stuart for years, ever since the young cavalry corps commander’s days at West Point with Custis. He said, “Excellent. But don’t you think that leather might better have gone into shoes for the men?”
Ever flamboyant, Stuart wore crossed leather belts over, his shoulders, each one with loops enough to hold a magazine’s worth of brass AK-47 cartridges. The effect was piratical. But Stuart instantly became a contrite swashbuckler, saying, “I’m sorry, General Lee; it never crossed my mind.”
“Let it go,” Lee said. “I doubt the Confederacy will founder for want of a couple of feet of cowhide. But I take it I am to infer from your ornaments that you are pleased with the performance of the new repeaters in action.”
“General Lee, yesterday I sold my LeMat,” Stuart said. Lee blinked at that; Stuart had carried the fancy revolver with an extra charge of buckshot in a separate lower barrel ever since the war was young.
“The rifles are outstanding,” General Ewell agreed. “So are the men who furnish them. If I had a drink in my hand, I’d toast them.”
“I have some blackberry wine here in my tent, brought up from Richmond,” Lee said. “If you truly feel the need, I should be glad to bring it out.”
Ewell shook his head. “Thank you, but let it be. Still, had we not heard from those America Will Break fellows that Kilpatrick was on the move, who knows how much mischief he might have done before we beat him back?”
“As it was, I understand, some of their cavalry captured a train station on the line up from the capital not long after I passed through on the way back to the army,” Lee said.
“Fugitives from the main band, after we scattered them,” Stuart said. “I’m glad they got to the station too late to nab you. Otherwise, however badly the rest of their plan failed, they would have won a great victory.”
“If a republic will stand or fall on the fate of any single man, it finds itself in grave danger indeed,” Lee observed.
But Ewell said, “Our republic is in great danger, as well you know, sir. We would be in graver danger still, were it not for your Andries Rhoodie and his fellows. When Meade sent Sedgwick west with the VI Corps, when Custer went haring off toward Charlottesville, I would have shifted the entire army to meet them had Rhoodie not warned me of a possible cavalry thrust south from Ely’s Ford.”