Southern Sea Hawk Read online

  You know me as a naval officer of considerable experience, and you will now find me a man with fire in his very soul …

  He pauses. Then nearly adds, A man who would sell that soul for a fighting ship. Give me a ship!

  2

  District of Columbia

  FEBRUARY 13-14, 1861

  “I love to look at your body.”

  Maude Galway lies in her bed beneath a crimson comforter, propping herself up on an elbow. Thick, copper hair covers all of her bare skin except milky-white forearms as she surveys her man’s back from across the room. Stepping into his small clothes, he stares out the window at the railway tracks leading to the station near Capital Hill, says nothing.

  “Aye, but I mean it, Raffy. Your back is so broad, and the cords in your hips … You look like—” “Stop, lass!”

  “A gladiator.” She says this word with the triumph of discovery. The image of her lover as a Roman warrior has just popped full-blown into her mind.

  “Don’t flatter me. I’m old enough to know a lie when I hear one.” There’s rebuke in his voice. A hint of amusement, tenderness too.

  She bunches the top sheet into the warm wetness between her legs and sighs.

  She did not mean to patronize. Truly, as these shadows of late afternoon in mid-February bathe the boarding house room in a fuzzy, violet light, the man who spends his days shuffling paper for the navy appears to have the raw-boned body of a Bantry Bay waterman.

  She suddenly sits up in bed, holding the comforter over her breasts.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, lassie. Nothing’s wrong.”

  He stops watching the smoke belching from a locomotive as it puffs its train south. Turns, stares at the green-eyed witch smiling up at him from her bed. His eyes soften with each second she holds his gaze. His mustache begins curling into a subtle grin.

  I’m a selkie to him. He called me that once. His West Irish mermaid. She can still hear some of that delight in his voice every time he says “lassie.”

  “I have to go back to the office.” A complaint. Not an excuse. He snatches his white shirt from the back of a wicker chair, is midway through jamming his right arm into a sleeve, when she speaks. “It’s Saturday. Come to me again.”

  She reaches out her hand. He crosses the shadowy room to her as if on wires. When he stands almost directly above her, she takes his fingers, rises to him, kisses the light fur on his belly.

  “Lord have mercy.”

  Then he is on her like a mink, fumbling the nightstand for his lambskin sheath.

  “Now who do you love?”

  His breath burns her neck.

  It’s after seven thirty in the evening on St. Valentine’s Day when they finish their poached rockfish and oyster stew in a dark corner of the Ebbitt Grill on Fifteenth St. There is a long pause in their conversation. She can hear the piano player across the room shuffling through a slow and dissonant “Oh, Susanna.”

  Finally he speaks.

  “I’m leaving Washington. Perhaps as soon as tomorrow, lassie.” His voice sounds hollow.

  Her ears prick beneath the coils of hair pinned to the sides of her head.

  “Another lighthouse to see somewhere?”

  He says nothing and stares at the glass of Bordeaux in his left hand. She sees a cloud forming over his face. His uniform seems to be pinching his shoulders, neck. His breath comes fast, shallow. A cat’s.

  “Raffy?” She wipes her lips quickly with her napkin and stuffs it back in her lap to hide her fingers that have suddenly started to tear at each other.

  “I’m on the first train I can get to Alabama.” He inhales deeply, pulls a yellow telegram from his inside breast pocket, passes it across the table for her to read.

  Montgomery

  Sir—On behalf of the Committee on Naval Affairs, I beg leave to request that you repair to this place at your earliest convenience.

  Your obedient servant,

  C.M. Conrad, Chairman

  “I hope to get a ship and fight for Jefferson Davis and my new country. Even though the South has no navy whatsoever now, I have thought long about her naval defense. It is right clear to me that the best defense is a bold offense. So if Davis gives me my chance, I will raid the enemy like an avenging angel, a demon from their worst nightmares.”

  He has a dreamy look, stares right over her shoulder and out the front window of the restaurant.

  Her cheeks flush. She raises her hands to the corners of her jaw.

  “Damn you. Damn you!” she says under her breath. But he must not hear her because he rambles on.

  “Anne and the children will be leaving for her brother’s house in Cumberland.”

  He takes a slow sip of wine.

  Her gaze rises from the table to his face.

  “My god, Raffy. Would you look at me? Just look at me?”

  His gaze leaves whatever it is beyond the window of the restaurant, sees for the first time the lightning in her green eyes.

  “Raffy, listen to yourself! Spewing on about your wife and children. Do you even know who you’re talking to? Can’t you see? You’re killing me. Killing us. Snuffing us out like a …”

  Her voice chokes. She rubs her cheeks with the palms of her hands before continuing.

  “And here I sit trying to hold back bloody tears. For what? For a man who wants to make himself a demon or an angel? Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Raffy!”

  He raises his chin as if to look cavalier, but his thick brows sag as he pulls a fresh kerchief from inside his dress-blue jacket with one hand. His other takes her right hand across the narrow table. The hand on which she wears the silver band set with emeralds. The band that he gave her for her twenty-sixth birthday almost a year ago, when he first told her he would love her unto death.

  Tears begin rolling down her cheeks. He laces his fingers through hers. Then he leans toward her across the table and begins wiping the tears off her face with the kerchief. She thinks he suddenly looks older than her father did when he was laid out at his wake. How very, very pale.

  “Maude … lassie. This is the hardest thing I have ever done. Forgive me. Leaving you …”

  Her body shudders then slumps in the cane chair, the purple organdy dress folding up around her … before she gathers herself and pounces.

  “I hope you die! Right here before God and the bloody Congress.”

  Barely have her words begun to explode over the other diners at Ebbitt’s, when she hits him with a gale of wine from her glass. It turns his shirt a slick, dark red.

  “Oh dear,” says a matron at another table.

  “I’ve heard enough of your boyish fantasies of glory … you faithless coward!” She stands up, throws her napkin on the table. Storms off to the coat check for her fur.

  “Bravo!” A woman cheers from across the room.

  He’s not drunk when he shows up at her door some time after midnight. But he’s wobbling like a loose jib. The north wind has been swirling snow along Pennsylvania Avenue since sunset. Now, he has a white paste covering him from head to foot as if he has been walking into the blizzard for hours.

  “Go away!” She stands in the doorway wearing the blue satin robe she keeps for his use.

  “Lassie, I’m on my knees.”

  “Then crawl home to your wife.”

  “I love you.”

  A man of snow is crumpling at her feet in the hallway of her boarding house.

  “You’re too late, Raffy. Damn you for coming here!”

  “I’ve been a fool. I did not see what I was doing to you. Forgive me. I’ve been so bound up in the Southern cause, so moved by the idea of going to sea again … May the Holy Redeemer strike me down if I lie. You are the best thing …”

  She bites her lower lip, stares at him with the curiosity of a woman who has discovered St. Jude, the patron of lost causes, on her doorstep. How different he is now from the officer and gentleman she met twenty-two months ago. Aglow in the blue and gold of his full-dress uniform, he had sliced a sprig of apple blossoms from a tree outside the Smithsonian castle with his saber, presented it to her with a courtly bow. Lady, may these blossoms bring you some small measure of the pleasure that gazing upon you has brought to me on this noontime in May. Later he bought her ice cream, made with the first strawberries of the season, before she returned to her pupils at the little school on Capitol Hill.

  “Knock it off with the noise!” The shout comes from somewhere down the hall.

  She throws her hands up in the air as if begging God for a sign as to what to do next.

  “Let him in or throw him out. People are trying to sleep!” A woman’s voice echoes through the drafty boarding house on H St.

  He catches her eye with his lost little boy face. She groans.

  “Come on … before you catch your death of cold.”

  She reaches out, brushes the slush off his brows, cheeks, the mustache drooping in surrender.

  Later, after drying him before the coal stove, after filling him with onion broth, after the apologies and the love making—after it all—he holds her with a force that almost scares her.

  “My heart breaks from what I must do. Believe me, lassie.”

  She feels her chest heave.

  “But my mind is right firm in its resolve. And my soul knows that to do anything else but serve the South at this moment would be to render myself so clearly an abject cretin and coward that I would not be fit for your arms. Let me go.”

  He nuzzles the hollow between her neck and gleaming shoulder.

  “Let me do what I must, and let me have your love and blessing. Pray for me that I can do what must be done to bring this secession conflict to a quick end. Then I swear with all the fire in my soul, I will make my peace with Anne and come to y
ou as an obedient servant if you will still have me.”

  She feels his tears running down the plane of her chest, sliding over a breast. Remembers how home and hearth kept her soldier father from a campaign and the regiment he loved. How the bottle took him early because he used it to mute the calls of duty and his own strange passion for the warrior’s life.

  “Will you stand by me?” His voice is pleading.

  3

  The Hudson River

  MID-MARCH, 1861

  The waves look black even though it is morning. “Lord how I hate rivers.” He stands high up on the promenade deck of the packet Queen of the Mohawk as the steamer beats her way north against the current. She’s bound for West Point, then Albany, to the rhythm of laboring pistons, churning side wheels. A squadron of low clouds rush overhead trailing fits of sleet and showers, casting the rocks of the Hudson Palisades in an eerie, violet light.

  “Confounded rivers!” He speaks as if there’s a shipmate standing next to him to listen. “No sea room. Nowhere to run. No place to set a sail. Wind and current always on your nose or tearing at your ass.”

  A woman passenger who’s standing at the rail nearby when Semmes lapses into his soliloquy casts a sidelong glance at the figure in the black overcoat, listens to his rant for a while, then shrugs him off as a drunk, a looney. She slips away.

  He takes a sip from a mug of coffee a steward offered him a few minutes earlier. It tastes like snake blood, and he walks to the larboard rail to spit the poison overboard. Then he stands there hugging the shoulders of his coat and watching the broad river ahead vanish in a haze of blue. He purchased the coat, made of a puny worsted, before leaving Montgomery on this mission to the North. It was good enough to keep the March chill off him in the South and even in Washington. But ever since he came north from purchasing gun powder from the Du Pont people in Delaware, he has suffered.

  He shivered in New York. Then just plain froze his tail off in Hartford and Springfield. His warm, blue sea coat molders in a closet because he quit his post as Pharaoh’s pennyboy to be Jeff Davis’ special envoy. Meanwhile in places like Charleston, Savannah, and Biloxi, other men—less seasoned mariners—are outfitting privateers, preparing to put to sea, waiting for the first shots of a civil war to be fired.

  He’s not what the politicians, neither Yanks nor Rebs, think of when they picture an officer of the line. To the politicos he’s a good old boy, born and bred on the Potomac in Charles County, Maryland. A fellow with talents for impeccable dress and small talk over tea or sour mash. An officer who knows the diplomatic and supply sides of the military trade. A gentleman and lawyer, who came of age at his uncle’s home in Washington’s Georgetown amid the balls, cotillions, society outings to the race course. He’s an agent who can carry a secret letter from Jeff Davis tucked in his small clothes, or talk to himself on a steamer, without raising much suspicion.

  Present circumstances have conspired against his dreams of sea duty, and he’s more than disappointed. But he gave Jefferson Davis his pledge to serve the South “however needed,” right there in Jeff’s room at the Exchange Hotel.

  “I will not recant!” He scowls at the river.

  The crack of small explosions like gunshots sounds at his back. Old habits from his soldiering days ashore in Mexico after the wreck of the Somers take over. The Rebel envoy drops into a crouch alongside the cabin house on the promenade deck of the Queen.

  “Die, you fuckers! Piss off and die!” Someone’s shouting from the stern.

  More cracks.

  He sees no one on deck. He reaches inside his coat and draws a new, husky .44 Colt revolver from its shoulder holster.

  His knees ache as he moves toward the shooting in a low crouch. “Eat shit and die.”

  A single crack, two more, then a man’s laughter. The voice is coming from the deck below at the very stern of the ship.

  He stays low as he approaches the balcony railing overlooking the main deck and the fantail stern.

  Another shot. He’s close enough now that it makes his ears ring.

  “Ashes to ashes, hag!”

  Almost overhead, one of the terns that some mariners call “hags,” the birds that follow river and coastal ships, explodes into a cloud of feathers as it swoops above the stern.

  Bang. Another bird off to the left literally bursts into flames, cartwheels down into the Hudson.

  “Hot damn! Wings of fire.”

  He feels his stomach churn. Someone’s killing birds. He cocks his gun, creeps to the balcony rail, looks down.

  Below on the fantail stands a lumpy-looking fellow in the powder blue uniform of the steamship company. Semmes recognizes him as the purser who took his ticket after boarding. He has a glowing slow match wedged in a joint on the stern rail, and he’s using it to light firecrackers that he throws up to the birds like pieces of toast.

  Now as the purser fishes another firecracker out of his pocket and reaches toward the slow match for a light, Semmes takes aim with his pistol and fires. He surprises himself with his total lack of hesitation, his instant impulse to redress a wrong.

  The slow match shatters in a hail of sparks. The purser’s jaw drops open.

  “My next bullet’s for you, friend, if you ever try that jackass stunt on another bird.”

  “Who … who in Hell are you?”

  “Somebody who likes birds … You don’t want to cross swords with me.”

  “Tough guy.”

  “Don’t make me show you. I got a cannon, and I’m in a right mean mood, son.”

  He cocks the .44, steadies it with both hands at arms’ length and points it at the purser’s head.

  The man raises his arms in surrender, retreats indoors. “Lard-ass lubber.”

  He pulls a cap and ball from the ammo pouch tucked in an inside coat pocket. Then he reloads, holsters his gun, strolls toward the steamer’s bows where the wind, spitting sleet and rain, braces his face. When the hot blood in his forehead and ears cools, he turns his back on the weather and takes a letter from inside his coat. The letter is almost three months old, and the author his son Oliver, a third-year cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

  Father,

  I am feeling most wretchedly torn asunder, sir. Even though there is not yet war between the states, we Southern boys, like Custis Lee (I think you may know his father Robert of Virginia who was once superintendent here) and yours truly, roam this academy like restless shadows, cut off from our own souls. Is war to come now that Lincoln has been elected as the next president? Or will the Union let the South go its own way? If the split is amicable, and the North and South should become American allies in the future, could I finish my schooling and accept my commission in the Federal army? Will you stay with the navy?

  He had finally written back last month.

  What do I know, Son? I have no crystal ball to help me read the future. After much soul searching, I have resigned my commission. But my circumstances of age, career, family, and loyalty to the South are so different from yours, I can hardly hold my choice to leave the Federal service as a model for you.

  His letter was balderdash. Cowardly horse manure. A half-truth at best.

  “You must give the boy an honest answer,” Anne said. “Go to him, Raphael, when you are in the North. Please. The boy needs you.”

  So now he’s coming to his son. To talk. For better or for worse. He promised Anne that he would make this visit, and he will not renege on a promise to her. So what if he and Anne ceased to kindle flames on a promise to her. So what if he and Anne ceased to kindle flames in each other’s loins years ago? They have a shared history. A man has to respect that. And family. His own baser needs be damned.

  West Point smells like war. The acrid scents of fear, brass polish, and gun oil ooze from everything, even the leafless oaks around the parade ground. But the rain and the sleet have passed off to the east, leaving a sunny afternoon that warms with a southerly wind and the promise of spring.

  On the muddy parade ground the regiment stands its afternoon muster. Hundreds of cadets box themselves into platoons and companies to the calls of unit leaders. The superintendent and his officers sit upon chestnut mares, prance around the perimeter. When the fife and drum boys march past playing a popular march from the Mexican War, “The Rose of Alabama,” he almost raises his right arm in salute. Then he remembers he’s not in uniform … and this is the enemy army’s camp, a Yankee nursery for young vipers soon be at the throat of the South. Yet, right now, the whole confounded gaggle look like toy soldiers with gray tunics, gold chest buttons, shiny black campaign hats painted over the bodies of boys, framing the faces of cherubs.