“Charles Mattingley,” Delaney said, and there was indeed a Reverend Charles Mattingley who had been a cousin of Delaney’s mother, though so far as Delaney knew the Reverend Charles was still alive and ministering to heathen tribes in Africa. “Thomas’s second son,” he added.

“I never knew that branch of the family,” Lee said. “They moved to Maryland, aren’t I right?”

“Creagerstown, General. Thomas was a physician there for many years.”

“And his son’s dead, eh? Poor fellow, he can’t have been very old. But it’s odd, Delaney, to think of you being related to a minister?”

“Charles was an Episcopalian, General,” Delaney said reprovingly. “It hardly counts.”

Lee, an Episcopalian himself, laughed, then fumbled open the lid of his pocket watch. “I must be at work,” he announced. “Enjoy your afternoon, Delaney.”

“Thank you, sir.”

An hour later, equipped with the pass that would take him past the provosts guarding the stores in Frederick, Delaney walked into town. In his pocket was the copy of Special Order 191 and he felt sure that the provosts would stop him, search him, and then march him at gunpoint on the journey that would end at a Richmond gallows, but the men guarding the town merely touched their hats as he showed them Chilton’s pass.

The town had a deserted air. The presence of the rebel army had stopped all traffic on the rail spur and had inhibited the country folk from coming to do their marketing in Frederick City. The shops, protected by the cordon of provosts, were open, but few people were in the streets. One or two houses flew the rebel flag, but the gesture seemed desultory, a mere formality, and Delaney guessed that when McClellan’s army reached the town it would suddenly be gaudy with stars and stripes. The people of Maryland did not seem over grateful for being liberated by the Southerners. Some were enthusiastic, but only a handful of young men had volunteered to join Lee’s army.

Delaney strolled past a carpenter’s shop sandwiched between two churches. A bearded man was turning chair legs in the shop and he looked up as the rebel officer passed, but did not return Delaney’s greeting. A cripple, probably a man wounded in one of the war’s early battles, sat on a porch taking in the sun. He ignored Delaney, which suggested he had fought for the North. A black woman, probably a slave, came toward Delaney with a bundle of laundry on her head, but turned aside into an alley rather than confront him. A solemn little girl watched him from behind a window, but ducked out of sight when he smiled at her. A pair of cows were being driven down the street, probably to give milk that would be sold to the rebel army, and Delaney called a cheerful greeting to the girl who herded them, but she just nodded curtly and hurried on, probably fearful that he would try to take the cows from her. The stifling heat seemed to condense the town’s aroma of sweet hay and animal ordure into a rank stink that offended Delaney’s nostrils. He stepped around some fresh cow dung and it occurred to him, with the astonishment that comes from a moment of self-revelation, that the reason he was betraying his country was simply to escape from the constriction of small church-haunted towns like Frederick City with their suspicious populations and their glorification of simple virtues and honest toil. Richmond was a rung above such places, but Richmond stank of tobacco, Washington was a rung higher still, but Washington stank of ambition, while New York and Boston were higher yet, but the one stank of vulgar money and the other reeked of Protestant virtue and Delaney wanted none of them. His reward for treachery, he decided, would be an ambassadorship: a permanent and salaried post in Rome or Paris or Athens, all of them cities that stank of jaded tastes and languid nights. He touched the pocket in which he had the special order concealed. It was his passport to paradise.