Valley of the Shadow: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

frustration.”
    Opening the scrawled report, Wallace thought: The poor bugger put it better than I could myself. We need to give them “the loveliest bit of frustration.”
    “Rest your horse, man,” Wallace told the courier. “You’re apt to need him over the next few days.”
    “Yes, sir, and that I will, sir. But if I may…”
    “What?”
    “Well, the good colonel up there, he’s feeling a touch of the lonesome. If O’Malley’s a judge of the weather.”
    “We all are,” Wallace told him.
    July 7, 3:00 p.m.
    Sharpsburg, Maryland
    Too damned hot for biscuits. The butter had separated on the plate, leaving pools for drowning flies, and the stink was downright grisly. Lemonade was fine, though.
    Early waved Sandie Pendleton back up onto the porch, interrupting the boy’s conversation with Ramseur’s quartermaster.
    Ascending in an aura of dust and spur clank, Pendleton called, “Yes, sir?” The boy had a narrow face and a wide writ. Twenty-three-year-old chief of staff. Damnedest thing. Inherited from Jackson and Ewell, no less. Tom Jackson must have lifted him out of the cradle.
    “Here, now,” Early said. “Eat up these biscuits. Before that woman comes back out on the porch. Be quick now.”
    Accustomed to Early’s ways, the young lieutenant colonel made no protest, but tucked in with all the appetite of youth.
    Between swallows, Pendleton asked, “Take one down for—”
    “No. You eat ’em. Then you fetch me up that message from Bobby Lee again.”
    “About Point Lookout?” Pendleton brushed a crumb and a streak of butter from his chin.
    “That’s right. The one from Robert E. Lee’s book of fairy tales for good Confederates. Have to read it a second time to believe it.” Early drew a twist of tobacco from his pocket and tore off a chaw. “Take yourself some of that lemonade now. Not all of it. And get along.”
    He did appreciate that lemonade, had to admit. Woman of the house meant well. They always did. Most always. But the utility of womanhood was limited.
    Sharpsburg. No good memories. That hateful hour in the cornfield, that bloody, wretched day. McClellan should have et them alive, but Little Mac’s appetite failed him. Man afraid of his own shadow, of spooks and hants in gray. Jubal Early had never seen a battle waged with such determination at the front and such blissful incompetence in the rear. Yankees had almost done it, though, almost wiped Lee’s army off the map. Old Marse Robert letting himself get pinned against the river like that. And Hill off gallivanting.
    He figured he had seen worse since that day nearly two years before—at Spotsylvania, certainly—but nothing had marked him deeper than the slaughter amid those cornstalks. Remarkable business, what canister could do to men unprepared and utterly unsuspecting. One blunder after another. On both sides.
    Ramseur himself now. At the end of the street, waving his troops on. Bully lad, that one. But there were times when gallantry had to give way to judgment. Ramseur needed to keep himself out of the sun, he was obviously still weak from his latest—third—wound. Tried to hide it, but Early could tell. Another man-child. Major general commanding a division, and just turned twenty-seven in the distinctly unmerry month of May 1864. That’s what the army had come to now: scarecrows led by children barely got into long pants. And the cavalry … he didn’t want to think about those sonsofbitches and spoil the afternoon.
    Ramseur would do. Fighting man, North Carolina boy. He’d do. If he didn’t fall over with sunstroke.
    Pendleton, Ramseur … it was enough to make a man in his prime, a seasoned forty-seven, feel old as Methuselah. He spit tobacco juice from the high porch, careful to keep it short of the marching men.
    Pendleton returned with the dispatch. It had been carried from Petersburg by Lee’s youngest son, as if the kinship might lend the foolishness gravity. Sheer, damned foolishness. Here he was, up