The King’s Gambit

11: Creating the Game

Lou Preston closed the heavy, leather-bound journal, its pages smelling faintly of old paper and cedar. He pressed the heels of his palms into his tired eyes until colors bloomed behind his lids. Pushing himself up from the worn indentation in the couch, he began pacing the small den; the journal tapping a restless rhythm against his calloused left hand.

It was a cascade of impossible things. How could any of his great-grandfather Harley Preston’s wild account be believed? It read like a history of the Civil War refracted through a cracked lens. Lou read familiar names and dates on the surface, but beneath, Harley told a story of a shadow war of clandestine treaties and whispered negotiations. The sheer audacity of it was staggering. Yet, the few threads Lou could pull—a name here, a date there—matched verifiable records with an accuracy that was deeply unsettling. It fit, and that was the most troubling part of all.

But why was none of this story common knowledge? Why was his great-grandfather’s story buried like one of its own secrets?

An idea, simple and clear, cut through the noise. He sat at the cluttered desk, the old wood groaning under his weight, and woke his computer. The blue light filled the dim room as he typed “Paul DuPont + North Carolina” into the search bar. No military records surfaced which tracked; a man would hardly enlist under a name he planned to discard. But he found remnants of a family: DuPont Meats, now a packing company, but once prominent ranchers in the state’s central piedmont. Digging deeper, he uncovered archived supply ledgers showing they had provisioned the Confederate Army with beef, poultry, and dairy. Lou’s mouth twisted into a grim line. They’d profited handsomely, emerging from the war’s ruin wealthier than most of their neighbors. They’d been war profiteers cloaked in southern gentility.

Ancestry.com yielded nothing, but Findagrave.com delivered: a Paul DuPont resting in Union Cemetery, Fairfield, Pennsylvania. The death date—June 30, 1863—was a perfect match to Harley’s journal entry. The location was mere miles from where Colonel Donaldson, a.k.a. Paul DuPont, was supposed to have fallen.

The decision was instantaneous. Lou had to see it for himself. The drive along PA-116 was a straight fifteen-minute shot southwest of Gettysburg. It was the reason he didn’t immediately notice the sedan keeping a steady distance behind him. Traffic between Gettysburg and Fairfield was common; it was only when he signaled and turned into the cemetery gates that the car sped past, only to reappear a minute later driving back in the opposite direction without stopping. Odd, but not overtly threatening.

He parked on the crushed-gravel lane and stepped out into the quiet. The air was still and carried the scent of cut grass and damp earth. He began to walk, his eyes scanning the rows of marble, granite, and weathered sandstone headstones. Those who died in 1863 would likely be grouped together. He pulled a printed screenshot from his pocket, smoothing its creases against his thigh, looking for a simple square of granite.

As he moved between the rows, his peripheral vision caught two men loitering on the sidewalk at the cemetery’s edge. One spoke intently into a phone, the other attempting an air of casual indifference that failed completely amidst the purposeful silence of the graves. People walk through cemeteries; they don’t linger at their perimeters like sentries. Lou ignored them. As long as they didn’t approach him, they were of no concern to him. His focus was on stone and dates.

And then he found it.

The marker was modest, unadorned. He ran his fingers over the carved letters:

Paul DuPont

Died June 30, 1863

A man of peace.

This was him. The date aligned perfectly, and the epitaph echoed Harley’s description of the peace-seeking colonel. But who had buried him here under his real name? Someone who knew his secret but not his birth date? And why here, in Pennsylvania soil, instead of being returned to North Carolina? Had his family cast him out entirely?

Lou shook his head as if to clear it. Every answered question spawned three new ones.

He raised his phone and took a picture of the headstone, then pivoted to photograph discreetly the two watchers. One noticed and turned his back sharply, but Lou captured a serviceable image of the other before stowing his phone.

A new thought struck him then, looking at the photo on his screen. The cemetery grounds, with their orderly rows of obelisks, slabs, and crosses, suddenly resembled nothing so much as a chessboard laid out with an army of stone pieces. The illusion was broken by the scale of the place, hundreds of graves stretching into the distance, but through the narrow lens of his camera, framed by trees, it condensed into a manageable grid of a few dozen.

You just had to look at it differently.

Look at it differently.

He moved quickly back to his car, this time acutely aware of the sedan falling in behind him once he merged back onto the road. He tested it, turning down narrow country lanes lined with oak trees; it followed at a discreet distance each time. He considered calling the police, but what would he say? Being followed isn’t illegal if they don’t harass you.

On a quiet stretch, he pulled onto the gravel shoulder and feigned taking a call, elbow propped on the windowsill. The sedan slowed, then passed. As it did, he lifted his phone and snapped a clean picture of its Pennsylvania license plate.

Satisfied with this small victory, he continued home. Soon enough, he spotted the same car waiting patiently in a shaded driveway; it eased out behind him once he passed.

At his house, he locked the door firmly behind him and took the stairs two at a time to the den. A wave of relief washed over him to find Harley’s maps and journal still spread across his desk; part of him had expected them to be gone. They needed a better hiding place.

He carefully lifted the top map from the pile. It was a detailed topographic survey of Gettysburg. He laid it on the desk and smoothed it flat. For days he had studied it with north firmly at the top. Now he gripped its corners and rotated it forty-five degrees.

He leaned in close, squinting.

Something was there… almost visible…

He bolted downstairs to the kitchen junk drawer and retrieved a ball of white twine he used for bundling recycling. Back at the desk, he used scissors to cut several long strands. With painstaking care, he laid them across the reoriented map. One vertical strand ran along Seminary Ridge, another ran along Cemetery Hill. Horizontal lines connected them, crisscrossing over roads and fields. When he finally leaned back…

He was staring at a chessboard.

Harley hadn’t just drawn a map; he had moved entire monuments and removed others to force geography itself to conform to squares on a grid.