Ghosts of Time (4 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

“Director Rutherford is quite correct about female spies in the American Civil War,” declared Dabney. He was addressing a full meeting of the expedition, including Nesbit as well as himself, and he was settling happily into what Jason recognized from long experience of similar types as lecturing mode. “Not only was Mary Elizabeth Bowser a woman, but so was her ‘control,’ a certain Elizabeth Van Lew. The whole story is full of obscure and contradictory elements. This was, to a great extent, intentional; Bowser deliberately concealed and even falsified certain elements of her story—possibly even her real name, which may have been Mary Richards. Besides which, after the war the United States government destroyed the records of many of its Southern spies, to protect their lives from retaliation.”

“Typical of the kind of paper trails left by clandestine espionage agents,” Mondrago commented.

“Yes. I’m hoping to be able to clear up some of the mysteries. Although,” Dabney added hastily, catching sight of Jason’s expression, “I do realize that’s not our primary objective.”

“Doctor,” said Logan slowly, “we’ve all gotten the basic orientation, through sleep-teaching and the other standard means, concerning the facts and figures and issues of the American Civil War era. But can you tell us the specifics concerning Mary Bowser?”

“Certainly, to the extent that the story can be pieced together. She was born in Richmond in or about 1839 as a slave to one John Van Lew. After his death, his daughter Elizabeth, who had strong anti-slavery opinions, freed the family’s slaves. Mary remained with the family as a servant until Elizabeth, recognizing her exceptional intelligence, sent her to Philadelphia to be educated in the Quaker School for Negroes. It turned out she also had a photographic memory. She returned to Richmond just before the Civil War began, to marry a free black man and resume working in the Van Lew household.

“Early in the war Elizabeth Van Lew, who was already considered eccentric because of her anti-slavery and anti-secession views, became positively unpopular with her neighbors by taking food, medicine and other items to the Union officers being held in Richmond’s notorious Libby Prison. She would have been even more unpopular had they known that she was helping some of those prisoners escape, and providing safe houses. She also got information from them about Confederate dispositions and smuggled it out of Richmond to the Union high command via her household staff of freed slaves, written in a code she had devised and hidden in things like shoe soles and hollow eggs.”

Aiken looked perplexed. “Wasn’t she sort of bringing suspicion on herself by openly being a Union sympathizer? I would have thought she would have wrapped a Confederate flag around herself and sung ‘Dixie’ at the top of her lungs.”

“That would have been suspicious in itself, since her views were already well known. Instead, she turned her reputation for eccentricity to her advantage. She made sure she wasn’t taken seriously by talking and humming to herself and generally acting demented at every opportunity, so much so that she came to be known as ‘Crazy Bet.’”

“Hiding in plain sight,” said Mondrago approvingly. “Still, surely the Confederates must have suspected that
something
was going on.” The naiveté of earlier eras in matters of counterintelligence was a never-ending source of wonder to him. He had declared himself unsurprised when Dabney had told them that Antietam (or Sharpsburg, as the Confederates called it), one of the most decisive battles of the war, had been lost because secret orders had been found in a field along with the cigars they had been used to wrap.

“Oh, yes. Her home was searched repeatedly. But they never found anything incriminating. She kept all her materials, including a detailed journal of her activities, buried in a hole in her backyard.”

“A hole in her backyard,” Mondrago repeated with a dazed headshake.

“Eventually Elizabeth Van Lew was running a spy ring that included clerks in Confederate government departments and a high-ranking officer at Libby Prison. And her lines of communication with General Grant had become so routine that she was sending him a daily copy of the Richmond newspaper! But her greatest coup was inserting her former slave Mary Bowser into the ‘Confederate White House.’ Through a friend, she had Bowser brought in as an illiterate, somewhat dim-witted servant named Ellen Bond—”

(“Another alias!” Aiken groaned.)

“—to help Jefferson Davis’ wife Varina with social functions. Soon she was taken on full-time. You must understand that servants were effectively invisible, and were assumed to be unable to read and write, or to understand anything beyond simple commands. So there was no attempt to prevent her from reading the state papers lying around Davis’ office, and listening in on meetings and conversations.”

Mondrago gave an even more incredulous headshake-and-sigh.

“With her phenomenal memory, Bowser was able to retain information verbatim, and being educated could write it down. She then passed it on to another of Elizabeth Van Lew’s spies, a baker named Thomas McNiven who made regular deliveries to the Davis household. Eventually, it became obvious that there was a huge leak in the Confederate White House, and McNiven was caught. It was only then that Bowser began to come under suspicion. She was aware that her position had become precarious, and after unsuccessfully attempting to burn the Confederate White House down she fled in January, 1865.”

“The month after we’re due to arrive,” Jason nodded. “Where did she go after that, Dr. Dabney?”

“I cannot say. As I mentioned, both she and the Union authorities did their best to obscure the facts about her. After the war, she simply vanishes from history. There are indications that she moved north, which certainly would have been prudent. But no one knows when or where she died.”

Nesbit spoke up. “Nowhere in what you’ve told us is there anything about any connection between Mary Bowser and some secret organization of African-Americans in that period.”

“No, nor is any such organization known to history. I was quite taken by surprise when we of Inspector Da Cunha’s expedition learned, if only in vague terms, of its existence.”

“Sounds almost like the kind of things the Transhumanists are trying to fill the ‘blank spaces’ of human history with,” Logan remarked.

“Except that, according to Rutherford, Pauline’s impression was that they were opposed to the Transhumanists.” Jason gave a dismissive gesture. “There’s no point in speculating on that until we have some hard data. For now, let’s concentrate on completing our orientation.”

That orientation, and the rest of their preparation, was not as time-consuming as it would have been for earlier epochs, such as those Jason had recently visited. One example was the elimination from their bodies of forcibly-evolved microorganisms to which people before the twentieth and early twenty-first-century era of reckless antibiotics overuse had no immunity. It wasn’t as much of a problem as it had been when he had gone back into the Bronze and Iron Ages of ancient Greece. Since those eras, the microorganisms had had additional thousands of years of natural evolution. And as always, the subcutaneous implantation of their TRDs under the insides of their upper left arms was merely routine.

But the orientation involved, among other things, the acquisition of mid-nineteenth-century American English—and, specifically, its Southern variant—by Nesbit, Logan and Aiken. They did so by direct neural induction, as Jason, Mondrago and Dabney already had. It was another area in which the Temporal Regulatory Authority had successfully argued for an exemption from the Human Integrity Act on the basis of sheer practicality. In this case, the language in question was sufficiently similar to twenty-fourth century Standard International English as almost to constitute a different dialect of the same tongue. This simplified the process, but was not altogether a good thing. They would have to constantly be careful not to let familiarity cause any of their own century’s neologisms and loan-words to slip into their speech.

Of course the imposition of a language directly on the speech centers of the brain did not magically confer the ability to speak it like a native of the locality. Thus time travelers, wherever they happened to be, always claimed to be from somewhere else, so oddities and eccentricities of pronunciation were only to be expected. Fortunately, in this case they had a perfect opening, as Dabney explained to them.

“At the time we will be arriving, there were. . . .” He trailed to a halt at the realization of the mixed tenses.

“Everyone has problems like that when discussing time travel,” Jason assured him.

“Thank you. At any rate, there were units from the Deep South in Lee’s army of Northern Virginia—specifically, in the cavalry.” He manipulated controls, and an organization chart appeared on the briefing room’s viewscreen.

“As you can see, the Cavalry Corps, under the command of Major General Wade Hampton, consisted of three divisions, one of which was commanded by Brigadier General Wade Butler. Butler had two brigades, of which the one we are concerned with was led by Brigadier General Pierce Young.”

Mondrago studied the chart. “I don’t see any numerical designations for these units.”

“They had none; they were referred to as ‘Hampton’s Corps’ and ‘Butler’s Division’ and ‘Young’s Brigade,’” explained Dabney, eliciting a disapproving headshake from Mondrago. “But to continue, Young had four regiments, one of which was called the Jeff Davis Legion.” A cursor flashed, indicating a box on the screen. “The men of its ten companies were drawn from the states of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.”

Dabney’s listeners nodded. In the course of their orientation they had absorbed enough of the political geography of the old United States of America to follow him. In fact, Jason was already fairly familiar with it from previous expeditions. “None from Louisiana?” he inquired. “When Alexandre and I were in this milieu before, we were prepared to claim to be from there. As it turned out, we never needed to. We were only there for a bare three days. And in the middle of the Confederacy’s final collapse, people had other things on their minds besides making searching inquiries as to our origin.”

“That was just as well, for in fact there were no Louisiana units in the Army of Northern Virginia at that time; they were all with the Army of the Trans-Mississippi.”

“Too bad. Alexandre and I both have the Mediterranean kind of looks that the Virginians of that era would have automatically associated with French or Spanish Creoles, who incidentally had a very different way of speaking.”

“It happens I can accommodate you,” said Dabney with a smile. “Of the three Mississippi companies in the Jeff Davis Legion, two were from Chickasaw County and Kemper County, which were in the northeasterly parts of the state, well away from the Gulf coast. But the third company, known as ‘The Natchez Cavalry,’ drew its men from Adams County, on the lower Mississippi River around the town of Natchez—hence the name—where there was a significant Creole element.”

“So,” said Mondrago, “you’re telling me that these people not only had regiments associated with particular states, but that on the company level they were sometimes associated with a particular
county
?” He turned to Jason. “This is starting to remind me of the time we were in fifth century B.C. Athens. Remember the way the army was organized around the ten tribes that the citizenry was divided into?”

“Yes,” Jason nodded. “Very beneficial from the standpoint of unit solidarity, but damned inconvenient for us. These men all knew each other, and each other’s relatives. We’ll have to be very careful not to fall in with the ‘Natchez Cavalry’ we’re claiming to be a part of.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Dabney asserted. “The Army of Northern Virginia, as of our arrival date in December, 1864, was pretty much tied down in the defense of Petersburg, to the southeast of Richmond.” The organization chart vanished, replaced by a map. “This included the cavalry, which was used in a variety of roles—patrols, skirmishing, scouting, reconnaissance, and dispatch duty, among others.”

“But not, er, charges against the enemy?” Nesbit ventured, romantic images visibly fading in his eyes.

Dabney shot him an irritated look but replied with scrupulous patience. “No. Half a century earlier, Napoleon’s heavy shock cavalry had ridden down unshaken infantry a few times—as, for example, at Eylau against the Russians when a snowstorm had soaked their gunpowder—although they failed abysmally at Waterloo. But by the period we are discussing, it was no longer practical. The reasons will become apparent when we get into an in-depth discussion of the revolution in firearms that had occurred since Napoleon’s time. At the moment, the point is that we should not encounter our alleged comrades of the ‘Natchez Cavalry’ as long as we avoid the Petersburg battlefront, as I sincerely hope we do.” Dabney gave a rather nervous laugh. Academic curiosity had its limits, Jason decided.

CHAPTER FIVE

Their transformation into reasonable facsimiles of Confederate cavalrymen came in several stages.

Names were the easiest. Logan, Aiken, Nesbit and Dabney (whose first name wouldn’t seem eccentric in one hailing from the Spanish-influenced Gulf coast) could keep their own. Mondrago had done the same on his brief previous jaunt to 1865, while Jason had adopted the surname “Landrieu” along with the rank of captain, and they would do the same this time. It would avoid the need for awkward explanations if anyone saw them in both of their versions.

Uniforms were almost equally simple, for the Authority’s workshops had vast experience in turning out period clothing as well as subtle techniques for giving it a well-worn look. The last part was especially important, for they would be posing as soldiers in the last year of a grueling four-year war—soldiers on the losing side, whose supply facilities had always been chronically inadequate. In fact Jason, as an officer, and Mondrago, as a sergeant, were the only ones who would have something resembling the regulation uniforms of gray with yellow cavalry facings. Jason’s sleeves sported the Confederate officer’s distinctive, elaborate gold braid “Austrian knot” (artfully tarnished and faded), while Mondrago’s had yellow chevrons. The others would wear the light “butternut” brownish-gray shade that was the closest most of the South’s facilities could come to the regulation “cadet gray.” For headgear they all had the “stag hat” that the Confederate cavalry always preferred to the regulation kepi. All the uniforms were of heavy cotton denim. Likewise of cotton were their undergarments, for whose heaviness they would be grateful on their arrival in December. Their boots were as high-quality as they could be made without arousing suspicion in a famously footgear-short army.

As cavalrymen, they would of course be expected to be able to ride horses. Temporal Service personnel learned equestrianism as part of their training, and Dabney proved to be their best rider—he had long done it for recreation, as well as having gone through an introduction to it as part of the course in low-tech survival that the Authority required all would-be time travelers to pass. But that latter course was Nesbit’s only exposure to it, and Jason could only hope he would be able to keep up.

But while they could all ride, they would have no horses to do it with. The energy expenditure necessary for temporal displacement, always staggering (at least using the Authority’s technology), was a function of two factors: the length of time separating the target date from the present, and the total mass being displaced. For a displacement of five hundred and sixteen years, the total combined mass of six men yielded a reasonable energy cost. But six horses complete with tack were out of the question—Rutherford had experienced heart palpitations at the mere thought. They would have to arrive on foot and obtain mounts locally, by hook or crook. It oughtn’t to be necessary to resort to the “crook” part, for Jason was bringing a supply of gold dollars which should serve to purchase practically anything in an economy brought to its knees as much by the hyperinflation of the Confederacy’s paper currency as by the Union blockade. Of course, no amount of money could buy what wasn’t available to be bought, and Jason doubted they would get prime specimens of horseflesh—which, in Nesbit’s case at least, might be just as well. And it would provide them with a cover story to explain their presence in Richmond: they would be there to obtain mounts for their company, the “Natchez Cavalry.”

They would, however, carry their own weapons, manufactured to the Authority’s uncompromising standard of authenticity. For familiarization with these, they went to the armory, where Dabney, very much in his element, began with general background.

“The American Civil War was fought in the midst of a revolution in firearms. The French historian Jean Colin once said, referring to the advent of gunpowder in China around the year 900, ‘More than a thousand years were needed before the invention of gunpowder really transformed war.’ That’s an extreme position, but there’s a grain of truth in it. Up to a couple of decades before our arrival date, the infantry were armed with a muzzle-loading smoothbore musket whose flintlock ignition missed fire one in six times and which was reasonably accurate only out to forty yards.”

“We had some experience with primitive slow-loading, single-shot firearms when we were in the seventeenth-century Caribbean,” Jason affirmed. “Edged weapons still played a big role.”

“Yes. Under such circumstances, a single foot soldier in the open was pretty much at the mercy of a horseman. So the infantry were massed in dense formations designed to maximize volume of essentially unaimed fire, followed by a bayonet charge.”

Mondrago, who often surprised Jason with his knowledge of military history, spoke up. “Wasn’t there a general of the British Indian army who, when he was told the ammunition was running out, said, ‘Thank God! I’ll be at ’em with the bayonet!’”

Dabney nodded. “General Gough, at Sobraon during the First Sikh War—a battle which, incidentally, he won. But that was in the 1840s, just as the great change was beginning.” He reached behind him to a shelf holding a variety of small arms and held up a longarm. “The British Pattern 1853 Enfield rifled musket, widely used in the American Civil War alongside the very similar American Springfield. It’s still a single-shot muzzle-loader, and at first glance it looks much like the good old flintlock musket. But there’s a world of difference. In the first place, instead of a flintlock it uses percussion ignition: the hammer strikes a copper cap full of fulminates fitted over a little steel nipple, so it was a near-certainty that it would actually fire when you squeezed the trigger.

“But the most important change was reflected in the name
rifled
musket. Unlike the old smoothbores, it has spiral grooves along the inside of the barrel. This puts a spin on the projectile and give it far greater range and accuracy.”

Logan looked perplexed. “Then why hadn’t they rifled the barrels of the old flintlocks?”

“They sometimes did, for hunting weapons like the ‘Kentucky long rifle.’ But it wasn’t practical for the military because it was even slower-loading than the smoothbores; it took time to ram a round lead ball down a rifled barrel from the muzzle if the ball was large enough to grip the rifling. What brought about the revolution was
this
.” Dabney picked up an object so small that they had to lean forward to see it. “It’s a French invention called the Minié ball.”

“It doesn’t look like a ‘ball’ to me,” said Aiken skeptically. “It’s shaped more like a stubby bullet.”

“Precisely the point. This established the form and function of the bullet. The flat base is expands when the gun is fired, forcing the lead of the bullet into the rifling grooves. It also confines all the expanding gasses of the exploded powder behind the projectile where they belong, further enhancing range and hitting power.

“The horrific casualties of the war resulted in part from the fact that the generals, as young cadets at West Point, had been taught to study the campaigns of Napoleon. When they tried to use that era’s tactics in the new combat environment, the result was the slaughter of thousands of men. They didn’t fully grasp the consequences of the revolution in firepower that had occurred. The soldiers, however, caught on by the second half of the war. They had a tendency to ‘lose’ their bayonets, but were very careful to keep their spades. They dug earthworks without orders, and by the time of our arrival the ten-month deadlock in the trenches at Petersburg had become almost a foretaste of World War I’s Western front.”

Mondrago examined the Minié ball critically. “So you still had to load the gunpowder charge separately?”

“Yes. The self-contained brass cartridge was still in the experimental stage. Some were used, and by late in the war there were a number of breechloaders and even repeaters like the Henry rifle, which the Confederates called ‘that damn’ Yankee gun that can be loaded on Sunday and fired all week.’ But they were plagued by the problem of fouling of the breech and bore until smokeless powder was invented in the 1880s, and at any event they were few. The masses of infantry continued to use rifled muskets like this one. But those were enough to render the classic Napoleonic tactics obsolete. For example, the artillery was surprisingly ineffective on the battlefield; gun crews could not survive if they got close enough to the enemy’s infantry to use antipersonnel case shot ammunition.”

“I’m beginning to understand what you told us before,” Jason mused. “By this period, a cavalry charge against disciplined infantry fire must have been just an unnecessarily dramatic form of suicide.”

“Well put. We cavalrymen—” (Dabney permitted himself a smile) “—had other functions. Scouting, for one, and screening the army’s movements from the other side’s scouts. Another was long-range raids against the enemy’s supplies and communications, tearing up railroad tracks and cutting telegraph lines—a primitive wire-electricity system that was the only means of instantaneous messaging they had in those days. This sort of thing could also unnerve the enemy commander, as in the case of J.E.B. Stuart’s famous ‘ride around McClellan.’ And finally, of course, countering all of this when the other side was doing it. There were a fair number of cavalry-against-cavalry action.”

“What sort of weapons have we got?” It was Mondrago’s usual question.

Dabney took up a sword from the shelf and drew it from its scabbard. “This, of course, is the traditional arm. Specifically, it’s the Model 1860 cavalry saber. Despite the name, it doesn’t bear much resemblance to what’s used in the sport of sabre-fencing; it’s intended for slashing from horseback when level with your opponent.”

“That could ruin your whole day,” said Aiken, eyeing the wickedly curved blade.

“Yes: they had, as you’ve observed, a certain intimidation value. But by 1865 their day was pretty much over, although they continued to be issued to cavalry—whose officers, at least, felt naked without them—as late as World War I.”

“So what sort of firearms are we talking about?” Mondrago persisted.

Dabney held up a longarm smaller than the Enfield. “Sometimes the cavalry fought as mounted infantry, dismounting to fight. For this they used carbines like this, the Sharps. It’s a breechloader, even though at that technological level it was hard to prevent gas leakage at the breech. By the very end of the war the Union cavalry was starting to use the Spencer carbine, one of the experimental repeaters I mentioned earlier, which made them
very
effective mounted infantry—or would have if the Union commanders had employed them in this role as well as the Confederates did.

“But even for close cavalry-on-cavalry melees, the saber was being superseded by this.” He produced a large handgun. “The Colt Model 1860 .44 caliber Army revolver.”

“I’ve heard of Colt revolvers!” Aiken piped up happily. “Cowboys and Indians!”

“I’m not surprised that you have. Samuel Colt—who may or may not have had the right to style himself ‘Colonel’ Colt—didn’t invent the revolver; he just turned out good ones on a mass production basis. But the ones you’re thinking of, the fully developed double-action revolvers of gunslinger fame, came later, after the war, when brass cartridges had been perfected. This is a single-action revolver, which means you have to cock the hammer with your thumb every time you fire.” Dabney demonstrated. “Also, it’s what is known as a front-loading revolver. To load it, you remove the cylinder. For each of the six chambers, you take a paper cartridge like this one, tear it open and pour the powder into the chamber, then insert the bullet. After loading all the chambers, you tamp the bullets in using the hinged loading lever under the barrel. Then you grease the heads of the bullets to prevent sparks. Finally you put a percussion cap into the rear of each chamber, where the hammer strikes it and ignites the powder.”

“It seems a frightfully complicated and cumbersome process,” Nesbit observed dubiously.

“By later standards, yes. But once you’ve completed it, you can fire six shots without interruption. That gives you a terrific edge over an opponent who has to ram powder and ball down the barrel after every shot. Needless to say, cavalrymen went into battle with at least one revolver already loaded.”

“May I?” Jason took the revolver by the rather elegantly shaped grip of its walnut stock. “Pretty long and heavy.”

“At two pounds eleven ounces, and fourteen inches in length, it seems that way to anyone used to modern handguns. But the weight has a certain steadying effect which enhances accuracy, as does the single-action feature. It still has a tendency to shoot high, but for close action it is deadly. And, as you know, ours incorporate certain special features.”

“Yes, I know.” In particular, the handgrip of Jason’s revolver held a sensor that could detect functioning bionic enhancements, short-ranged as the inevitable price of extreme miniaturization, and linked to his implant display.

They went through repeated exercises in the loading process before going out onto the firing range for target practice. Jason, Mondrago and Logan all had experience in the field with low-tech handguns. Aiken hadn’t yet had occasion to acquire that, but he had a knack for firearms in general. Nesbit, as Jason already knew, definitely did not. Not even the extremely miniaturized laser target designator embedded in the loading lever under the barrel of his otherwise authentic Colt helped much.

As for Dabney, he proved as good as his word regarding his expertise with these weapons. But Jason knew the difference between unhurried, undisturbed target shooting and the terrifying chaos of battle, where marksmanship counted for less than coolness under fire. That was especially true of close cavalry action, where there was no leisure to draw a careful bead.

He broached the subject to Dabney afterwards, in private. “I understand, Commander,” the historian assured him, sounding a bit nettled, like one stating what ought to be obvious. “I don’t think I’m in any danger of falling into cockiness.”

“Good. It is my hope that you won’t be exposed to that danger. I do not intend for us to get into any fights unless we’re in a position where we have no other choice.”