Chapter One

1

Coal.

The Noble Cause bleeding to death, starving to death. The Northern aggressors with their dirty heels in the sacred ground of Louisiana, Georgia, Virginia; his generation largely in its graves, or soon to be. And here he was watching the empty horizon from a coal-laden merchant steamer off the coast of West Africa. Three decks below him, his crew bent to dismal duty, the drudgework of the high seas. They were securing the ship’s bunker coal—her fuel supply—and preparing her cargo, of yet more coal, for heavy weather. The description given to those sweating wretches who had to carry it out said it all: “coal heavers.”

Coal.

A mundane cargo for this fine fast ship running now in front of the wind, racing for her life, almost due south, and almost diametrically away from the Confederate States of America. Within her, a cargo weighing almost as much as the ship itself and a valuable cargo indeed: 800 long tons of almost smokeless Welsh coal. A cargo so expensive its owners had sent a man on the voyage to look after it, to see it wasn’t pilfered for fuel, to see it was delivered as planned. A cargo almost as mundane as the young “coal agent’s” undercover alias: “George Brown.”

To be hauling coal, not Enfields, at this moment of the Confederacy’s most parlous plight: Atlanta, proud citadel of the Confederacy, lost to Sherman; Lee in the trenches at Richmond since June; Sheridan’s cavalry chasing Jubal Early’s ragged men up the Shenandoah Valley, burning the fields and barns and mills behind them.

Norfolk, Virginia, or those remnants that had not been burned, wa