“You know what I want.”

“Two hundred rifles?” Delaney shook his head. “The rifles will have been sold long ago. I doubt Holborrow can lay his hands on fifty, but I’ll do my best. But do you really want to be sent to Lee’s army?” That was Starbuck’s main request; that Holborrow would affirm that the Special Battalion was ready for combat and so release it to the war. “Why?” Delaney asked in genuine puzzlement. “Why don’t you just take the God-given rest, Nate? Haven’t you fought enough?”

Starbuck was not really sure of the answer. One part of him, a great shadowed horrid part of him, feared combat like a small child feared the night-ghouls, but still he felt compelled to take his battalion to war. He doubted if he could live with the knowledge that he was skulking while other men fought, but it was more than that. All he now possessed in the world was his reputation as a soldier. He had no family, no wealth, and no position other than his Confederate commission and if he betrayed that commission by skulking then he was abandoning his pride. He did not want to go to battle, he only knew he had to go to battle. “I’m a soldier,” he answered inadequately.

“I shall never understand you,” Delaney said happily, “but maybe the next few weeks will give me an answer. I’m joining Lee myself.”

“You?” Starbuck asked, astonished. He stopped on the sidewalk and looked at his friend. “You’re going to the army?”

“My country calls!” Delaney said grandiloquently.

“To do what?”

Delaney shrugged and walked on. “My idea, really. No one ordered me to go, Nate, but it seemed like a good idea when it occurred to me. Lee’s invading the North, did you know? Well, he is and there are bound to be tricky points of law involved. If a man steals from enemy property, is it theft? It might seem a trivial thing to you, even irrelevant, but when this war does end there’s bound to be all sorts of legal settlements to be made between the two jurisdictions and it seems only prudent to try and anticipate the issues.”

“You’ll hate campaigning,” Starbuck said.

“I’m sure I shall,” Delaney said fervently. In truth the lawyer had absolutely no wish to join Lee’s army, but the orders had come from an angry man in Washington, and Delaney, who was convinced the North would win the war and had no desire to be attached to the losing side, had weighed his future and decided that the discomforts of a brief campaign should prove a good investment. He still resented Thorne’s peremptory demand that he should spy on Lee’s headquarters, for Delaney had reckoned he could do all his spying from Richmond’s comfortable parlors rather than from some muddy and dangerous bivouac in the countryside, and he doubted that he would be made privy to any useful information. It was all, he reckoned, a waste of time, but he dared not refuse Thorne’s demand, not if he wanted the rewards that would be in Washington when the war ended, and so he had invented a reason for attaching himself to Lee’s army and now, with a mixture of horror and apprehension, he planned to travel north. “Tomorrow morning!” he announced. “George has packed us some wine and tobacco, so we won’t be comfortless.” George was his house slave.