As Delaney had journeyed north he had not let the problem worry him. He very much doubted whether he would discover any intelligence worth passing on to Thorne; indeed the whole expedition, to both Delaney and to George, was a desperate inconvenience, but Delaney knew he needed to show willingness if he was ever to garner the rewards of his secret allegiance, and so the lawyer had resigned himself to a few weeks of discomfort after which he could return home, soak in a hot bath, sip cognac, and smoke one of his carefully hoarded French cigarettes before sending a message to Thorne in the old safe manner. That message would regret his silence of the past few weeks and explain that he had discovered nothing worth passing along.

Only now he had discovered something. Indeed, within minutes of arriving at Lee’s headquarters, Delaney knew he held the fate of North and South in his hand. Damn it, but Thorne had been right all along. There was a place in Lee’s headquarters for a spy, and Delaney was that spy, and Delaney now knew everything that Robert Lee planned and Delaney might as well have been on the far side of the moon for all the ability either he or George possessed to send that information to the Northern army.

Delaney had caught up with Lee’s men at Frederick, a fine town that lay among wide Maryland fields. Nine streets ran east and west, six north and south, a concentration sufficient to persuade the inhabitants that their town should properly be called Frederick City, a name that was proudly painted above the depot of the spur line that ran north from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The spur had carried the region’s fat harvest of wheat and oats east to Baltimore and south to Washington, leaving only the corn waiting for harvest, though now much of that crop had been stripped by hungry rebels. “I’d rather find shoes than corn,” Colonel Chilton said querulously. Chilton was a Virginian and, like any senior officer who had been stationed in Richmond, was well known to Delaney. Chilton, a fussy man in his middle forties, was now Lee’s chief of staff, a position he had gained through his punctilious diligence rather than from any flair for soldiering. “So Richmond sends us a lawyer instead of shoes,” he greeted Delaney’s arrival.

“Alas,” Delaney said, spreading his hands. “I would it were otherwise. How are you, sir?”

“Well enough, I suppose, considering the heat,” Chilton said grudgingly, “and you, Delaney? Never expected to see a fellow like you in the field.”

Delaney took off his hat, ducked into Chilton’s tent, and accepted the offer of a chair. The shade of the canvas offered small respite from the heat wave that had made his journey a hell of dust and sweat. “I’m well,” he answered and then, asked to explain his presence, launched himself into his well-rehearsed rigmarole about the War Department being concerned about the legal repercussions of actions that, if undertaken on Confederate soil, might be considered felonious, but that, done to the enemy, fell into an unknown category. “It is terra incognita, as we lawyers would say,” Delaney finished lamely. He fanned his face with his hat brim. “You wouldn’t, I suppose, have any lemonade?”