From a distance, the city resembled a
beach: a crescent of white, spreading back from the shore of a river wide
enough to be an ocean. As the steamboat Liberty
drew closer, the white resolved itself into a series of pale-gray buildings,
numbingly uniform in size and shape, set amidst a topography that was equally
monotonous, with nary a hill in sight.
There was no single object to attract the eye, and as a result the city seemed
to blur, to defy attempts to fix it in the mind.
“So much for New Orleans,” Stewart
muttered. Leaning on the rail, he sipped
his coffee and watched, curiosity mingling with distaste, as the wharves of the
Canadian winter capital drew nearer—and, with them, two assignments, neither of
which he had asked for and one he already despised.
In spite of his determination to be
unimpressed, Stewart found himself staring as the Liberty
swung in from the far bank and pointed herself toward the miles and miles of
wharves that connected the winter capital of Canada to the Mississippi. New Orleans was far and away the biggest
city—the biggest anything—Stewart had ever
seen. He tried to will himself to anger—think
of what we could have done with this place—but awe kept distracting
him. In all of North America, he’d
heard, only New York and Philadelphia were larger.
"A big place, isn't it, Stewart?"
Stewart looked over his shoulder, smiling at
the broad-shouldered young man who’d come to join him. "Hello, Patton. Yes, it is big. Awfully ugly, though, isn't it?"
"If you say," said Patton. "Looking forward to exploring it,
myself. Those Creole women are supposed
to be special."
"Good Creole ladies aren't going to want
to have a solitary thing to do with the likes of you."
"You flatter me, sir," Patton said,
and laughed. George Patton had been a
fellow-student at VMI, though he'd only been in his first year, which had made
him pretty much invisible to Stewart.
Patton had apparently known of him, though. The younger man had sought him out early in
the trip, effusively congratulating Stewart on his performance at Harper's
Ferry and moping theatrically about his own lack of prowess as an infantry
officer. If anything was going to make
this trip, this job, bearable, it would be Patton, with his easy sense of humor
and his refusal to take anything too seriously.
Five weeks after leaving Richmond, Stewart
still had trouble seeing the humor in his own situation. His knee had long since healed—well, mostly,
anyway—but somehow he had never been returned to the army’s active list. Instead, he had spent nearly eight months
working as a glorified clerk in the War department, trying not to fight with
his parents and continually pressing his Uncle James to make more efforts to
return him to the field in time for the spring campaigning.
Instead, the Confederacy had decided to go
cap in hand to Canada and her English overlords, and beg for a treaty of
recognition between the CSA and Canada.
The politicians said such a treaty was the only thing that could open
the door to recognition by Great Britain, and only that would open the door to
trade that would let the Confederacy live.
Stewart didn’t care whether or not that was
true. What mattered was that he was
expected to serve as an aide to a treaty commission negotiating with the
English enemy his family had fought since the Jacobite wars of the eighteenth
century in Scotland.
"Seriously, though," Stewart said,
watching as a gang of Negro stevedores rushed about on a wharf, preparing to
receive the Liberty, "do you really
think we're going to have time to chase women?"
"What, do you know something of our
duties that you aren't sharing?"
Patton adjusted his belt, patting his thigh for the sword that wasn't at
the moment hanging there. "What in
the world are we to do here, Stewart, except run errands for Prince
John"—that was the nickname the captains had bestowed on the handsome but
vague General Magruder, senior officer in the commission—"and prevent our
hosts from learning anything useful about us?
By my way of thinking, we'll all be debauched out of sheer boredom
before the week's out."
"For myself, I want to see the old
battlefield," Stewart said. "I
lost a great-uncle here. And I'd like to
see where Andrew Jackson fell."
"Oh, that ought to put you in a diplomatic
mood." Patton turned to stare out
over the buildings north of the river.
"I propose to fall as many
times as I can—into bed, that is. And
I'm going to be the victor in every one of my combats with Venus."
"Don't be disgusting, Patton,"
Stewart said. His stomach seemed to
tremble, though, and Stewart found himself thinking about the possibilities
that this trip presented to him. He'd
never been this far from home before, and certainly never with this little
supervision.
They'd talked a lot about women, both at
school and in the first few days of the Harper's Ferry campaign; but the talk
had been little more than theory, it being impossible to tell if anyone was
being truthful when boasting of his amatory achievements. Stewart had never even had the opportunity to
collect any experience worth boasting about.
The girls he'd met at church had all been chaperoned to within an inch
of their lives; once or twice he'd tried to get himself alone with Sarah, the
negro maid, but Father had taken him aside one morning and warned him in
graphic terms what would happen to him should he ever contemplate miscegenation
with the slaves. So he'd held his
counsel when the others bragged, and wondered whether his time with women would
ever come.
"Mister Charles? There's a message for you about your
billet."
Stewart turned. "Thank you, Thomas." He couldn't resist a prideful smile as he
took the note from the slave's hand.
Thomas was a sign of Uncle James's generosity. A well-formed and well-trained young man,
Thomas was one of his Uncle James’s household slaves. He had been a childhood playmate of Stewart’s
cousin Will, Uncle James’s only son, and when grown had served Will as a body
servant. Now Will was in a dragoon
regiment out west in Tennessee, and he had inexplicably left Thomas
behind. Stewart’s family owned just
three slaves, and Father had made it clear he would not even consider sending
one with Stewart: they were needed to work the farm. Uncle James had saved Stewart’s pride with
his offer of a loan. Thomas was not a
gift outright, but would serve Stewart for the duration of the trip. It was important for a gentleman to have a
body-servant, Uncle James had said, and Thomas was experienced in that regard.
"I surely do envy you, Stewart,"
Patton said as Thomas walked away, presumably to see to the transfer of
Stewart's luggage. "I'd give my
eye-teeth to have a boy as competent as that one." He made a vague gesture in the direction of
the governor's mansion, the top of which was just visible beyond the wharves
and levee. "You really think our
hosts won't try to take our servants away from us?"
"That's what General Magruder
says," Stewart said. "Since
he's the senior officer, it must be the truth." Patton laughed, and after a second Stewart
joined in. Truth to tell, he was a bit
worried. Thomas had never shown any sign
of restlessness, but Stewart had heard too many tales of otherwise-reliable
slaves who'd taken to their heels the moment they were brought within miles of
the Canadian border. Slavery was illegal
in the British Empire, and the Canadians especially were notorious for
accommodating runaway slaves in their sparsely settled western
territories. Worse, Canadian regulations
governing the return of runaways were insultingly stringent, and legend had it
no one had ever succeeded in having a runaway returned.
Watching Thomas disappear, straight-backed, down the stairs from the upper deck, Stewart determined to keep him under close watch for as long as they were required to be in New Orleans. And he prayed that that wouldn't be
long. As the Liberty nudged into the wharf, Stewart closed his
eyes, and thought of combat.
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