Read Online Cain at Gettysburg by Ralph Peters - Free Book Online Page B

spoke it out loud, for Rafe Granger wore a name still better than hers, even if rumor held that Rafe had already ruined his health as surely as his father had ruined the family fortune. And the Granger boy had time for courting, all the live-long day. Lenore had turned down each of them in turn, enjoying their pain while hinting that, in time, they might ask again. Then the war came. Rafe Granger rode off to join a cousin’s cavalry troop in Virginia. Blake enlisted to match his rival’s gesture.
    Not six months into the war, Lenore had wed a banker down in Raleigh, a man who found his duty closer to home. A year thereafter, Mrs. Curran wrote Blake that Lieutenant Rafael Granger had fallen during a cavalry raid in the Valley. And Mrs. Lenore Bascombe had given birth.
    And here he was, on the eastern side of a Pennsylvania mountain, waiting to take the lives of other men.
    *   *   *
    As the men went hunting sleep in the won’t-quit heat, Colonel Burgwyn came by. What light remained in the heavens caught the gleam of boots shined by his nigger. When the colonel made the rounds, a fight was coming.
    Blake both admired and resented Burgwyn. He admired the young man’s flawlessness, his perfection in all things, and the grace with which he demonstrated his bravery. Although he was a North Carolinian, Burgwyn had graduated, young, from the Virginia Military Institute, where he had studied under Jackson and learned his soldiering. After General Pettigrew, Burgwyn was reckoned one of the smartest young men in the South, as clever of mind as he was princely in his carriage, and the regiment was proud of him. The only time any of the men had seen him shaken had been on the march north, when they made camp on the Blue Ridge on a site that was home to a congregation of rattlesnakes. A soldier had killed a snake over five feet long by the colonel’s tent and it clearly troubled Burgwyn just to look at it. But the colonel had steeled himself to take the dead serpent in hand and pretend to admire it.
    For all that, Blake could not help feeling that the twenty-one-year-old colonel had known privileges untoward in their extravagance. Blake knew jealousy cheapened a man and he fought it. He even had learned that, to the low-country gentry, the Burgwyn family was of little consequence, as well as suspect for its Northern ties. Yet, when it came down to it, Burgwyn was unmistakably an aristocrat, and Blake wasn’t. A Quaker upbringing, Blake recognized, did not suffice to master the heart’s spite.
    After his customary pleasantries, repeated company by company, the boy-colonel grew serious. “You’ll get the formal orders down through your officers, but you might as well hear it now: We’re to be prepared for an early march. And we’ll march light. You’re to leave all knapsacks and blankets for the trains to gather up.” He paused, an actor performing. “There’s a battle waiting down in those plains we saw from the mountaintop. We cannot know precisely where or exactly when that battle will come, but we all know it’s coming.”
    The men murmured in agreement. It was a manner of saluting, of acknowledging the colonel, despite the darkness. Blake was glad that Cobb kept his mouth shut.
    â€œNow, I’ve heard the same ribbing you have,” Burgwyn continued. “Our brethren sometimes belittle us because we haven’t had the privilege of sharing in every one of those battles in which they’ve triumphed. They even poke fun at our new uniforms.” He paused to reset his voice, boy-orator as well as boy-colonel. “It’s true that our duty has led us elsewhere at times … but those labors, too, were of the first importance. Still, I know such mockery can sting.”
    When Burgwyn cleared his throat, the sound came as sharp as a gunshot. “That mockery will soon end. The Twenty-sixth North Carolina will shatter any doubt as to