The Starbuck Chronicles: The Complete 4-Book Collection
Bernard Cornwell’s bestselling series The Starbuck Chronicles, on the American Civil War, now in one complete eBook for the first time.REBELIt is summer 1861. The armies of North and South stand on the brink of America’s civil war. Nathanial Starbuck arrives in the capital of the Confederate South, where he enlists in an elite regiment. He is a northern boy fighting for the southern cause. But nothing can prepare him for the shocking violence to follow in the war which broke America in two.COPPERHEADNathanial Starbuck is a Copperhead: a northerner fighting for the rebel South in America’s Civil War. Expelled from the Faulconer Legion, Starbuck must travel a hard road before he can rejoin his comrades. His journey will take him through the savage prisons of Richmond, across the blood-sodden battlefields of Virginia, and into the deadly high command of the northern army.BATTLE FLAGThe epic battle for control of the Confederate capital continues through the hot summer of 1862. It’s a battle that Captain Nate Starbuck, a Yankee fighting for the Southern cause, has to survive and win.THE BLOODY GROUNDIt is late summer 1862 and the Confederacy is invading the United States of America.Nate Starbuck, a northern preacher’s son fighting for the rebel South, is given command of a punishment battalion – a despised unit of shirkers and cowards. His enemies expect it to be his downfall, as Starbuck must lead this ramshackle unit into a battle that will prove to be the bloodiest of the Civil War.
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BERNARD CORNWELL
THE COMPLETE STARBUCK CHRONICLES
REBEL
COPPERHEAD
BATTLE FLAG
THE BLOODY GROUND
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Rebel first published by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993
Copperhead first published by HarperCollinsPublishers 1994
Battle Flag first published by HarperCollinsPublishers 1995
The Bloody Ground first published by HarperCollinsPublishers 1996
Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996
Cover layout © HarperCollinsPublishers 2013. Design by stuartpolsondesign.com
Cover illustration © Gino D’Achille
Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publicaton
Source ISBNs: 9780007339471, 9780007339488, 9780007339495, 9780007339501
Ebook Edition © 2013-11 ISBN: 9780007531981
Version: 2017-05-08
Table of Contents
BERNARD CORNWELL
The Starbuck Chronicles
Rebel
REBEL
is for Alex and Kathy de Jonge,
who introduced me to the Old Dominion
CONTENTS
THE YOUNG MAN was trapped at the top end of Shockoe Slip where a crowd had gathered in Cary Street. The young man had smelt the trouble in the air and had tried to avoid it by ducking into an alleyway behind Kerr’s Tobacco Warehouse, but a chained guard dog had lunged at him and so driven him back to the steep cobbled slip where the crowd had engulfed him.
‘You going somewhere, mister?’ a man accosted him.
The young man nodded, but said nothing. He was young, tall and lean, with long black hair and a clean-shaven face of flat planes and harsh angles, though at present his handsome looks were soured by sleeplessness. His skin was sallow, accentuating his eyes, which were the same gray as the fog-wrapped sea around Nantucket, where his ancestors had lived. In one hand he was carrying a stack of books tied with hemp rope, while in his other was a carpetbag with a broken handle. His clothes were of good quality, but frayed and dirty like those of a man well down on his luck. He betrayed no apprehension of the crowd, but instead seemed resigned to their hostility as just another cross he had to bear.
‘You heard the news, mister?’ The crowd’s spokesman was a bald man in a filthy apron that stank of a tannery.
Again the young man nodded. He had no need to ask what news, for there was only one event that could have sparked this excitement in Richmond’s streets. Fort Sumter had fallen, and the news, hopes and fears of civil war were whipping across the American states.
‘So where are you from?’ the bald man demanded, seizing the young man’s sleeve as though to force an answer.
‘Take your hands off me!’ The tall young man had a temper.
‘I asked you civil,’ the bald man said, but nevertheless let go of the younger man’s sleeve.
The young man tried to turn away, but the crowd pressed around him too thickly and he was forced back across the street toward the Columbian Hotel where an older man dressed in respectable though disheveled clothes had been tied to the cast-iron palings that protected the hotel’s lower windows. The young man was still not the crowd’s prisoner, but neither was he free unless he could somehow satisfy their curiosity.
‘You got papers?’ another man shouted in his ear.
‘Lost your voice, son?’ The breath of his questioners was fetid with whiskey and tobacco. The young man made another effort to push against his persecutors, but there were too many of them and he was unable to prevent them from trapping him against a hitching post on the hotel’s sidewalk. It was mid-morning on a warm spring day. The sky was cloudless, though the dark smoke from the Tredegar Iron Works and the Gallegoe Mills and the Asa Snyder Stove Factory and the tobacco factories and Talbott’s Foundry and the City Gas Works all combined to make a rank veil that haloed the sun. A Negro teamster, driving an empty wagon up from the wharves of Samson and Pae’s Foundry, watched expressionless from atop his wagon’s box. The crowd had stopped the carter from turning his horses out of Shockoe Slip, but the man was too wise to make any protest.
