Most men dismissed the rumor of armed slaves as unthinkable, but a week after the Legion retreated from Cedar Mountain, Captain Murphy found confirmation of the story in a two-week-old copy of the HartfordEvening Press that had somehow found its way into the rebel lines. "See!" Murphy exclaimed to the officers sharing a jug of whiskey around a fire. "It is true!" He tilted the newspaper toward the campfire. "'Congress has extended permission for the President to enrol colored men into the army,'" Murphy read aloud. "'Congressman Matteson of New Jersey claims that the sable brethren of America are fervent in their desire to contribute their blood toward the great crusade and that, so long as their childlike and excitable nature proves tractable to military discipline, there is no reason why they should not fight at least as well as any treasonable rebel.'" A chorus of jeers greeted the last two words. Afterward there was much discussion of the newspaper's report, and Starbuck sensed a nervousness among the officers. There was something very nightmarish in the thought of black troops coming to take vengeance on their old masters.

"Though how many of us ever owned a slave?" Lieutenant Davies asked resentfully.

"I own some," Murphy said mildly and then, after a pause, "Mind you, I pay the buggers well enough. I don't think we Irish are very good at slaveholding."

"Major Hinton owns a dozen," Lieutenant Pine of Murphy's D Company added.

"And Swynyard's owned plenty enough in his lifetime," Starbuck said.

"Though not any longer," Lieutenant Davies observed in wonderment, and indeed, to everyone's astonishment, the Colonel had manumitted his two slaves when Jackson pulled the army back across the river. The Colonel, despite coming from one of Virginia's most prominent slave-trading families, had set free at least a thousand dollars' worth of prime Negroes by sending the two men north to the Federal lines. Somehow it was that sacrifice, even more than the Colonel's astonishing achievement of staying away from liquor, that had impressed on the whole Brigade that their second-in-command truly was a converted man. "He's even given up cigars," Davies added.

Murphy took the stone jug from Starbuck. "God knows why you Protestants have such an unpleasant religion."

"Because it's the true religion," Lieutenant Ezra Pine averred, "and our reward will be in heaven."

"And heaven," Murphy insisted to his Lieutenant, "is a place of all pleasures, is it not? Which means that there'll be rivers running brimful with the tastiest of whiskeys and boxes of the choicest cigars waiting ready lit at every corner, and if those pleasures are good enough for the angels they're good enough for me. God's blessing on you, Pine," Murphy added and lifted the stone jug to his lips.

Ezra Pine wanted to start a theological argument about the nature of heaven, but he was shouted down. Out in the darkness a man sang a love ballad, and the sound of it made the officers silent. Starbuck guessed they were all thinking about that horde of convicts, Hessian mercenaries, and vengeful freed slaves that was supposedly massing on the Rapidan's far bank.

"If Lee was here," Murphy broke the silence, "he'd have us all digging trenches. It'd be sore hands, so it would."

Everyone agreed that Robert Lee would have fought a defensive battle, but no one understood what Thomas Jackson might do. "I wish Lee would come," Murphy said wistfully, "for there's nothing on God's earth so good for stopping a bullet as a yard or two of good clean dirt."

The next day Starbuck heard the first rumor that confirmed that Lee was indeed coming to take command of the rebel forces on the Rapidan. Starbuck heard the rumor from an old friend who rode into the Legion's encampment brandishing two bottles of fine French wine. "We took ten cases off the Yankees three miles beyond the Rappahannock!" The jubilant speaker was a Frenchman, Colonel Lassan, who was ostensibly a foreign military observer, but who actually rode with the rebel cavalry for the sheer delight of fighting. He had just come back from a raid deep behind the Yankee lines and brought news of the enemy's preparations. "There are lines of wagons as far as the eye can see, Nate! Mile after mile of them, and every one crammed full with food, powder, and shot."

"Is that McClellan's army?" Starbuck asked.

Lassan shook his head. "That's Pope's army, but McClellan's coming." The Frenchman sounded happy at such a gathering of armies with its implicit promise of fighting.

"And if McClellan comes," Starbuck said, "Lee will come, and that'll mean digging mile after mile of trenches."

The Frenchman gave Starbuck a look of surprise. "Dear Lord, no. Lee can't afford to wait. He dug trenches to protect Richmond, but trenches won't help here"—he waved at the open country—"and Lee has to break the Yankees before they join their armies together. Lee's no fool, Nate. He knows which end of a pig makes the mess."

Starbuck laughed at the quaint phrase. Lassan spoke perfect English, the legacy of a British father, but at times he transposed a Norman peasant's language into his father's tongue. Lassan himself was no peasant but a professional soldier who had fought in Italy, the Crimea, and North Africa, and who bore the scars of those wars across his eye-patched face. They were terrible scars, scars to terrify a child to nightmare, yet Lassan himself was an easygoing man whose besetting sins were warfare and women. "Both dangerous pursuits," he liked to tell Starbuck, "but why settle for dullness in this sad, bad world?"

Now, with his horse picketed, the Frenchman strolled with Starbuck through the Legion's camp lines. The weather was such that none of the men had bothered to make turf shelters, preferring instead to sleep on the open ground, and so the lines were little more than piles of belongings interrupted by the remnants of cooking fires. The Legion's new draftees were being drilled by Sergeant Major Tolliver while the veterans not on picket duty were either sleeping, playing cards, or reading.

Lassan, who seemed to have taken it on himself to educate Starbuck in matters military, was explaining why Lee could not afford a defensive strategy. "Dig trenches and gun emplacements behind this river, my friend, and how are you to stop the Yankees simply strolling round the end of your earthworks ? You don't have enough men to guard a trench dug from the Chesapeake Bay to the Blue Ridge Mountains, so instead of digging you will have to march and tip the enemy off balance. It will be a war of maneuver, a cavalryman's war! Naturally you infantrymen will have to do the real fighting and dying, that's why God made infantrymen, but we cavalrymen will do your scouting for you." Lassan scratched beneath his mildewed eye patch. "You'll know things are getting warm, Nate, when Lee arrives." "Or when the Yankees attack," Starbuck said. "They won't. They're too sluggish. The North is like a man who has grown so fat he is unable to move fast. He just wants to roll over you and so crush you to death, while you have to slice him up into little pieces."

Starbuck walked a few paces in silence. The two men had left the Brigade lines behind and were now walking toward a stand of trees that screened the south bank of the Rapidan. "Can we win this war?" Starbuck finally asked the Frenchman.

"Oh, yes," Lassan said without hesitation, "but it will be expensive. If you kill enough Yankees, then they may think the game isn't worth the candle. You'll also need luck." The Frenchman had sounded confident, but it nevertheless struck Starbuck as a gloomy prescription. "Of course," Lassan went on, "if you could get European support, then everything changes."

"Can we?" Starbuck asked, as if the question had not been debated endlessly in the Confederacy.

Lassan shook his head. "France won't do anything unless Britain leads the way, and Britain has been burned too badly by its past American adventures, so Britain won't intervene unless the South looks capable of winning the war by itself, in which case you wouldn't need their help anyway, which all means, mon ami, that it is up to the South to fight and win its own war." They had reached the edge of the trees now, a place made ragged by the axes of men seeking firewood, and Starbuck hesitated to go further, but Lassan gestured him on. "I wanted to talk to you in private," the Frenchman said, and so he led Starbuck down a vague path that zigzagged erratically through the underbrush. Pigeons clattered through the upper leaves while a woodpecker's staccato rattle sounded sudden and close. "I have to tell you"—Lassan, half turned to Starbuck as he spoke—"that I have set myself up in an establishment in Richmond."