Heaven and Hell

1

All around him, pillars of fire shot skyward. The fighting had ignited the dry underbrush, then the trees. Smoke brought tears to his eyes and made it hard to see the enemy skirmishers.

Charles Main bent low over the neck of his gray, Sport, and waved his straw hat, shouting "Hah! Hah!" Ahead, at the gallop, manes streaming out, the twenty splendid cavalry horses veered one way, then another, seeking escape from the heat and the scarlet glare.

"Don't let them turn," Charles shouted to Ab Woolner, whom he couldn't see in the thick smoke. Rifle fire crackled. A dim figure to his left toppled from the saddle.

Could they get out? They had to get out. The army desperately needed these stolen mounts.

A burly sergeant in Union blue jumped up from behind a log. He aimed and put a rifle ball into the head of the mare at the front of the herd. She bellowed and fell. A chestnut behind her stumbled and went down. Charles heard bone snap as he galloped on. The sergeant's sooty face broke into a smile. He blew a hole in the head of the chestnut.

The heat seared Charles's face. The smoke all but blinded him. He'd completely lost sight of Ab and the others in the gray-clad raiding party. Only the need to get the animals to General Hampton pushed him on through the inferno that mingled sunlight with fire.

His lungs began to hurt, strangled for air. He thought he saw a gap ahead that marked the end of the burning wood. He applied spurs; Sport responded gallantly. "Ab, straight ahead. Do you see it?"

There was no response except more rifle fire, more outcries, more sounds of horses and men tumbling into the burning leaves that carpeted the ground. Charles jammed his hat on his head and yanked out his .44-caliber Army Colt and thumbed the hammer back. In front of him, strung across the escape lane, three Union soldiers raised bayonets. They turned sideways to the stampeding horses. One soldier rammed his bayonet into the belly of a piebald. A geyser of blood splashed him. With a great agonized whinny, the piebald went down.

Such vicious brutality to an animal drove Charles past all reason. He fired two rounds, but Sport was racing over such rough ground he couldn't hope for a hit. With the herd flowing around them, the three Union boys took aim. One ball tore right between Sport's eyes and splattered blood on Charles's face. He let out a demented scream as the gray's forelegs buckled, tossing him forward.

He landed hard and came up on hands and knees, groggy. Another smiling Union boy dodged in with his bayonet. Charles had an impression of orange light too bright to stare at, heat so intense he could almost feel it broil his skin. The Union boy stepped past Sport, down and dying, and rammed the bayonet into Charles's belly and ripped upward, tearing him open from navel to breastbone.

A second soldier put his rifle to Charles's head. Charles heard the roar, felt the impact — then the wood went dark.

"Mr. Charles —"

"Straight on, Ab! It's the only way out."

"Mr. Charles, sir, wake up."

He opened his eyes, saw a woman's silhouette bathed in deep red light. He swallowed air, thrashed. Red light. The forest was burning —

No. The light came from the red bowls of the gas mantles around the parlor. There was no fire, no heat. Still dazed, he said, "Augusta?"

"Oh, no, sir," she said sadly. "It's Maureen. You made such an outcry, I thought you'd had a seizure of some kind."

Charles sat up and pushed his dark hair off his sweaty forehead. The hair hadn't been cut in a while. It curled over the collar of his faded blue shirt. Though he was only twenty-nine, a lot of his handsomeness had been worn away by privation and despair.

Across the parlor of the suite in the Grand Prairie Hotel, Chicago, he saw his gun belt lying on a chair cushion. The holster held his 1848 Colt, engraved with a scene of Indians fighting Army dragoons. Over the back of the same chair lay his gypsy cloak, a patchwork of squares from butternut trousers, fur robes, Union greatcoats, yellow and scarlet comforters. He'd sewn it, piece by piece, during the war, for warmth. The war —

"Bad dream," he said. "Did I wake Gus?"

"No, sir. Your son's sleeping soundly. I'm sorry about the nightmare."

"I should have known it for what it was. Ab Woolner was in it. And my horse Sport. They're both dead." He rubbed his eyes. "I'll be all right, Maureen. Thank you."

Doubtfully, she said, "Yes, sir," and tiptoed out.

All right? he thought. How could he ever be all right? He'd lost everything in the war, because he'd lost Augusta Barclay, who had died giving birth to the son he never knew about until she was gone.

The spell of the dream still gripped him. He could see and smell the forest burning, just as the Wilderness had burned. He could feel the heat boiling his blood. It was a fitting dream. He was a burned-out man, his waking hours haunted by two conflicting questions: Where could he find peace for himself? Where did he fit in a country no longer at war? His only answer to both was "Nowhere."

He shoved his hair back again and staggered to the sideboard, where he poured a stiff drink. Ruddy sunset light tinted the roofs of Randolph Street visible from the corner window. He was just finishing the drink, still trying to shake off the nightmare, when Augusta's uncle, Brigadier Jack Duncan, came through the foyer.

The first thing he said was "Charlie, I have bad news."

Brevet Brigadier Duncan was a thickly built man with crinkly gray hair and ruddy cheeks. He looked splendid in full dress: tail coat, sword belt, baldric, sash with gauntlets folded over it, chapeau with black silk cockade tucked under his arm. His actual rank in his new post at the Military Division of the Mississippi, headquartered in Chicago, was captain. Most wartime brevets had been reduced, but like all the others, Duncan was entitled to be addressed by his higher rank. He wore the single silver star of a brigadier on his epaulets, but he complained about the confusion of ranks, titles, insignia, and uniforms in the postwar army.

Charles, waiting for him to say more, relighted the stub of a cigar. Duncan laid his chapeau aside and poured a drink. "I've been at Division all afternoon, Charlie. Bill Sherman's to replace John Pope as commander."

"Is that your bad news?"

Duncan shook his head. "We have a million men still under arms, but by this time next year we'll be lucky to have twenty-five thousand. As part of that reduction, the First through the Sixth Volunteer Infantry Regiments are to be mustered out."

"All the Galvanized Yankees?" They were Confederate prisoners who had been put into the Union Army during the war in lieu of going to prison.

"Every last one. They acquitted themselves well, too. They kept the Sioux from slaughtering settlers in Minnesota, rebuilt telegraph lines the hostiles destroyed, garrisoned forts, guarded the stage and mail service. But it's all over."

Charles strode to the window. "Damn it, Jack, I came all the way out here to join one of those regiments."

"I know. But the doors are closed."

Charles turned, his face so forlorn Duncan was deeply moved. This South Carolinian who'd fathered his niece's child was a fine man. But like so many others, he'd been cast adrift in pain and confusion by the end of the war that had occupied him wholly for four years.

"Well, then," Charles said, "I suppose I'll have to swamp floors. Dig ditches —"

"There's another avenue, if you care to try it." Charles waited. "The regular cavalry."

"Hell, that's impossible. The amnesty proclamation excludes West Point men who changed sides."

"You can get around that." Before Charles could ask how, he continued. "There's a surplus of officers left from the war but a shortage of qualified enlisted men. You're a fine horseman and a topnotch soldier — you should be, coming from the Point. They'll take you ahead of all the Irish immigrants and one-armed wonders and escaped jailbirds."

Charles chewed on the cigar, thinking. "What about my boy?"

"Why, we'd just follow the same arrangement we agreed on previously. Maureen and I will keep Gus until you're through with training and posted somewhere. With luck — if you're at Fort Leavenworth or Fort Riley, for instance — you can hire a noncom's wife to nursemaid him. If not, he can stay on with us indefinitely. I love that boy. I'd shoot any man who looked cross­eyed at him."

"So would I." Charles pondered further. "Not much of a choice, is it? Muster with the regulars or go home, live on Cousin Madeline's charity, and sit on a cracker barrel telling war stories for the rest of my life." He chewed the cigar again, fiercely. Casting a quizzical look at Duncan, he asked, "You sure they'd have me in the regulars?"

"Charlie, hundreds of former reb — ah, Confederates are entering the Army. You just have to do what they do."

"What's that?"

"When you enlist, lie like hell."

"Next," said the recruiting sergeant.

Charles walked to the stained table, which had a reeking spittoon underneath. Next door, a man screamed as a barber yanked his tooth.

The noncom smelled of gin, looked twenty years past retirement age, and did everything slowly. Charles had already sat for an hour while the sergeant processed two wild-eyed young men, neither of whom spoke English. One answered every question by thumping his chest and exclaiming, "Budapest, Budapest." The other thumped his chest and exclaimed, "United States Merica." God save the Plains Army.

The sergeant pinched his veined nose. " 'fore we go on, do me a favor. Take that God-awful collection of rags or whatever it is and drop it outside. It looks disgusting and it smells like sheep shit."

Simmering, Charles folded the gypsy robe and put it neatly on the plank walk outside the door. Back at the table, he watched the sergeant ink his pen.

"You know the enlistment's five years —"

Charles nodded.

"Infantry or cavalry?"

"Cavalry."

That one word gave him away. Hostile, the sergeant said, "Southron?"

"South Carolina."

The sergeant reached for a pile of sheets held together by a metal ring. "Name?"

Charles had thought about that carefully. He wanted a name close to his real one, so he'd react naturally when addressed. "Charles May."

"May, May —" The sergeant leafed through the sheets, finally set them aside. In response to Charles's quizzical stare, he said, "Roster of West Point graduates. Division headquarters got it up." He eyed Charles's shabby clothes. "You don't have to worry about being mistook for one of those boys, I guess. Now, any former military service?"

"Wade Hampton Mounted Legion. Later —"

"Wade Hampton is enough." The sergeant wrote. "Highest rank?"

Taking Duncan's advice made him uncomfortable, but he did it. "Corporal."

"Can you prove that?"

"I can't prove anything. My records burned in Richmond."

The sergeant sniffed. "That's damned convenient for you rebs. Well, we can't be choosy. Ever since Chivington settled up with Black Kettle's Cheyennes last year, the damn plains tribes have gone wild."

The sergeant's "settled up" didn't fit the facts as Charles knew them. Near Denver, an emigrant party had been slain by Indians. An ex-preacher, Colonel J. M. Chivington, had mustered Colorado volunteer troops to retaliate against a Cheyenne village at Sand Creek, though there was no evidence that the village chief, Black Kettle, or his people were responsible for the killings. Of the three hundred or so that Chivington's men slew at Sand Creek, all but about seventy-five were women and children. The raid had outraged many people in the country, but the sergeant wasn't one of them.

The dentist's patient shrieked again. "No, sir," the sergeant mused, his pen scratching, "we can't be choosy at all. Got to take pretty near whoever shows up." Another glance at Charles. "Traitors included."

Charles struggled with his anger. He supposed that if he went ahead — and he had to go ahead; what else did he know besides soldiering? — he'd hear plenty of variations on the tune of traitor. He'd better get used to listening without complaint.

"Can you read or write?"

"Both."

The recruiter actually smiled. "That's good, though it don't make a damn bit of difference. You got the essentials. Minimum of one arm, one leg, and you're breathing. Sign here."

The locomotive's bell rang. Maureen dithered. "Sir — Brigadier — all passengers on board."

In the steam blowing along the platform, Charles hugged his bundled-up son. Little Gus, six months old now, wriggled and fretted with a case of colic. Maureen was still wet-nursing the baby, and this was his first bad reaction.

"I don't want him to forget me, Jack."

"That's why I had you sit for that daguerreotype. When he's a little older, I'll start showing it to him and saying Pa."

Gently, Charles transferred his son to the arms of the house­keeper, who was also, he suspected, the older man's wife-without-marriage-certificate. 'Take good care of that youngster."

"It's almost an insult that you think we might not," Maureen said, rocking the child.

Duncan clasped Charles's hand. "Godspeed — and remember to hold your tongue and your temper. You have some hard months ahead of you."

"I'll make it, Jack. I can soldier for anyone, even Yankees."

The whistle blew. From the rear car, the conductor signaled and shouted to the engineer. "Go ahead! Go ahead!" Charles jumped up to the steps of the second-class car and waved as the train lurched forward. He was glad for the steam rising around him, so they couldn't see his eyes as the train pulled out.

Charles slouched in his seat. No one had sat next to him, because of his sinister appearance: worn straw hat pulled down to his eyebrows, the gypsy robe beside him. On his knee, unread, lay a National Police Gazette.

Dark rain-streaks crawled diagonally down the window. The storm and the night hid everything beyond. He chewed on a stale roll he'd bought from a vendor working the aisles, and felt the old forlorn emptiness.

He turned the pages of a New York Times left by a passenger who'd gotten off at the last stop. The advertising columns caught his eye: fantastic claims for eyeglasses, corsets, the comforts of coastal steamers. One item offered a tonic for suffering. He tossed the paper away. Damn shame it wasn't that easy.

Unconsciously, he began to whistle a little tune that had come into his head a few weeks ago and refused to leave. The whistling roused a stout woman across the aisle. Her pudgy daughter rested her head in her mother's lap. The woman overcame her hesitation and spoke to Charles.

"Sir, that's a lovely melody. Is it perchance one of Miss Jenny Lind's numbers?"

Charles pushed his hat back. "No. Just something I made up."

"Oh, I thought it might be hers. We collect her famous numbers in sheet music. Ursula plays them beautifully."

"I'm sure she does." Despite good intentions, it sounded curt.

"Sir, if you will permit me to say so" — she indicated the Gazette on his knee — "what you are reading is not Christian literature. Please, take this. You'll find it more uplifting."

She handed him a small pamphlet of a kind he recognized from wartime camps. One of the little religious exhortations published by the American Tract Society.

"Thank you," he said, and started to read:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending ...

Bitter, Charles faced the window again. He saw no angels, no heaven, nothing but the boundless dark of the Illinois prairie, and the rain — probably a harbinger of a future as bleak as the past. Duncan was undoubtedly right about hard times ahead. He sank farther down on the seat, resting on the bony base of his spine and watching the darkness pass by.

Softly, he began to hum the little tune, which conjured lovely pastel images of Mont Royal — cleaner, prettier, larger than it had ever been before it burned. The little tune sang to him of that lost home, and his lost love, and everything lost in the four bloody years of the Confederacy's purple dream. It sang of emotions and a happiness that he was sure he would never know again.

After midnight of that day, unable to sleep, Madeline left the whitewashed house that now had a wing with two bedrooms. Nearing forty, Orry Main's widow was still as full-bosomed and small-waisted as she had been the day he rescued her on the river road, although age and stress were beginning to mark and roughen her face.

She'd been crying for an hour, ashamed of it, yet powerless to stop. Now she rushed down the broad lawn under a moon that shone, blinding white, above the trees bordering the Ashley River. At the bank where the pier once jutted out, she disturbed a great white heron. The bird rose and sailed past the full moon.

She turned and gazed back up the lawn at the house among the live oaks bearded with Spanish moss. A vision filled her mind, a vision of the great house in which she and Orry had lived as man and wife. She saw its graceful pillars, lighted windows. She saw carriages drawn up, gentlemen and ladies visiting, laughing.

The idea came then. It made her heart beat so fast it almost hurt. Where the poor whitewashed place stood now, she would build another Mont Royal. A fine great house to endure forever as a memorial to her husband and his goodness, and all that was good about the Main family and its collective past.

In a rush of thought, it came to her that the house must not be an exact replica of the burned mansion. That beauty had represented — hidden — too much that was evil. Although the Mains had been kind to their slaves, they had indisputably kept them as property, thereby endorsing a system that embraced shackles and floggings and death or castration for those rash enough to run away. By war's end, Orry had all but disavowed the system; Cooper, in his younger days, had condemned it openly. Even so, the new Mont Royal must be truly new, for it was a new time. A new age.

Tears welled. Madeline clasped her hands and raised them in the moonlight. "I'll do it somehow. In your honor —"

She saw it clearly, standing again, the phoenix risen from the ashes. Like some pagan priestess, she lifted her head and hands to whatever gods watched from the starry arch of the Carolina night. She spoke to her husband there amid the far stars.

"I swear before heaven, Qrry. I will build it, for you."

Outside the pine house, Wade Hampton sat on an upright log that served as a chair. Lee's oldest cavalry commander, forty-seven now, carried himself with a certain stiffness. He'd been wounded in battle five times. Since coming home, he'd shaved his huge beard, leaving only a tuft beneath his mouth, though he still wore his great curving mustaches and side whiskers. Under an old broadcloth coat, he carried an ivory-handled revolver in a holster.

"Laced coffee, General," Madeline said as she emerged into the dappled sunlight with two steaming tin cups. "Sugar and a little corn whiskey — though I'm afraid the coffee is just a brew from parched acorns."

"Welcome all the same." Smiling, Hampton took his cup. Madeline sat down on a crate near a cluster of the trumpet-shaped yellow jasmine she loved.

"I came to inquire about your welfare," he said to her. "Mont Royal is yours now —"

"In a sense, yes. I don't own it."

Hampton raised an eyebrow, and she explained that Tillet Main had left the plantation to his sons, Orry and Cooper, jointly. He had done so despite his long-standing quarrel with Cooper over slavery; at the end, blood ties and tradition had proved stronger in Tillet than anger or ideology. Like a majority of men of his age and time, Tillet looked to his sons because he prized his property and had a less than generous view of the business and financial abilities of women. When he wrote his will, he didn't worry about anything more than a token bequest of cash to each of his daughters, Ashton and Brett, presuming they would be provided for by their spouses. The will further stipulated that when one son predeceased the other, that son's title in the estate passed directly to the surviving brother.

"So Cooper is the sole owner of record now. But he's generously allowed me to stay on here out of regard for Orry. I have the management of the plantation, and the income from it, for as long as he remains the owner, and so long as I pay the mortgage debt. I'm responsible for all of the operating expenses too, but those conditions are certainly reasonable."

"You're secure in this arrangement? I mean to say, it's legal and binding?"

"Completely. Only weeks after we got word of Orry's death, Cooper formalized the arrangement in writing. The document makes it irrevocable."

"Well, knowing how Carolinians value family ties and family property, I should think Mont Royal would stay with the Mains forever, then."

"Yes, I'm confident of that." It was her single firm hold on security. "Unfortunately, there's no income at all right now, and no great prospect of any. About the best I can say in answer to your question about our welfare is that we're managing."

"I suppose that's the best any of us can expect at present. My daughter Sally's marrying Colonel Johnny Haskell later this month. That lightens the clouds a little." He sipped from the cup. "Delicious. What do you hear from Charles?"

"I had a letter two months ago. He said he hoped to go back in the army, out West."

"I understand a great many Confederates are doing that. I hope they treat him decently. He was one of my best scouts. Iron Scouts, we called them. He lived up to the name, although, toward the end, I confess that I noticed him behaving strangely on occasion."

Madeline nodded. "I noticed it when he came home this spring. The war hurt him. He fell in love with a woman in Virginia and she died bearing his son. He has the boy with him now."

"Family is one of the few balms for pain," Hampton murmured. He drank again. "Now tell me how you really are."

"As I said, General, surviving. No one's raised the issue of my parentage, so I'm spared having to deal with that."

She looked at him as she spoke, wanting to test him. Hampton's ruddy outdoorsman's face remained calm. "Of course I heard about it. It makes no difference."

"Thank you."

"Madeline, in addition to asking about Charles, I called to make an offer. We all face difficult circumstances, but you face them alone. There are unscrupulous men of both races wandering the roads of this state. Should you need refuge from that at any time, or if the struggle grows too hard for any reason and you want a short respite, come to Columbia. My home and Mary's is yours always."

"That's very kind," she said. "Don't you think the chaos in South Carolina will end soon?"

"No, not soon. But we can hasten the day by taking a stand for what's right."

She sighed. "What is that?"

He gazed at the sun-flecked river. "In Charleston, some gentlemen offered me command of an expedition to found a colony in Brazil. A slaveholding colony. I refused it. I said this was my home and I would no longer think of North and South; only of America. We fought, we lost, the issue of a separate nation on the continent is resolved. Nevertheless, in South Carolina we confront the very large problem of the Negro. His status is changed. How should we behave? Well, he was faithful to us as a slave, so I believe we ought to treat him fairly as a free man. Guarantee him justice in our courts. Give him the franchise if he's qualified, exactly as we give it to white men. If we do that, the wandering crowds will disband and the Negro will again take up Carolina as his home, and the white man as his friend."

"Do you really believe that, General?"

A slight frown appeared, perhaps of annoyance. "I do. Only full justice and compassion will alleviate the plight of this state."

"I must say you're more generous to the blacks than most."

"Well, they present us with a practical issue as well as a moral one. Our lands are destroyed, our homes are burned, our money and bonds are worthless, and soldiers are quartered on our doorsteps. Should we make matters worse by pretending that our cause is not lost? That it somehow might prevail even yet? I think it was lost from the start. I stayed away from the 1860 special convention because I thought secession an impossible folly. Are we to start living our illusions all over again? Are we to invite reprisal by resisting an honorable effort to restore the Union?"

"A great many people want to resist," she said.

"And if gentlemen such as Mr. Stevens and Mr. Sumner try to force me into social equality with Negroes, I will resist. Beyond that, however, if Washington is reasonable, and we are reasonable, we can rebuild. If our people cling to their old follies, they'll only start a new kind of war."

Again she sighed. "I hope common sense prevails. I'm not certain it will."

Hampton rose and clasped her hands between his. "Don't forget my offer. Sanctuary, if you ever need it."

Impulsively, she kissed his cheek. "You're a kind man, General. God bless you."

Away he went on his fine stallion, disappearing where the half-mile lane of splendid trees joined the river road.

At sunset, Madeline walked through the fallow rice square, pondering Hampton's remarks. For a proud and defeated man, he had a remarkably generous outlook. He was also right about the plight of South Carolina. If the state, and the South, returned to old ways, the Radical Republicans would surely be goaded to retaliate.

Something on the ground jabbed the sandal she'd fashioned from scrap leather and rope. Digging down in the sandy soil, she uncovered a rock about the size of her two hands. She and the Shermans had found many similar ones while cultivating the four planted squares, and had puzzled about it. Rocks weren't common in the Low Country.

She brushed soil from it. It was yellowish, with tan streaks, and looked porous. With a little effort, she broke it in half. Rock didn't shatter so easily. But if it wasn't rock, what was it?

She brought both halves up to her face. As she grew older, her eyes were increasingly failing. Since she'd never broken open one of the peculiar rocks, she was unprepared for the fetid odor.

It made her gag. She threw the broken pieces away and hurried back to the pine house, her shadow flying ahead of her over ground as deeply red as spilled blood.

2

At twilight on the day of Hampton's visit to Mont Royal, a young woman dashed around a corner into Chambers Street, in New York City. One hand held her bonnet in place. The other held sheets of paper covered with signatures.

A misty rain was beginning to fall. She hastily tucked the papers under her arm to protect them. Ahead loomed the marquee of Wood's New Knickerbocker Theater, her destination. The theater was temporarily closed, between productions, and she was late for a special rehearsal called by the owner for half after seven o'clock.

Late in a good cause, though. She always had a cause, and it was always as important as her profession. Her father had raised her that way. She'd been an active worker for abolition since she was fifteen; she was nineteen now. She proselytized for equal rights for women, and the vote, and for fairer divorce laws, although she had never been married. Her current cause, for which she'd been collecting signatures from the theatrical community all afternoon, was the Indian — specifically the Cheyenne nation, victimized last year by the Sand Creek massacre. The petition, a memorial to be sent to Congress and the Indian Bureau of the Interior Department, demanded reparations for Sand Creek and permanent repudiation of "the Chivington process."

She turned left into the dim passage leading to the stage door. She had worked for Claudius Wood only a week and a half, but she'd already found that he had a fearful temper. And he drank. She smelled it on him at nearly every rehearsal.

Wood had seen her play Rosalind at the Arch Street Theater in Philadelphia and had offered her a great deal of money. He was about thirty-five, and he'd charmed her with his fine manners and marvelous voice and raffish, worldly air. Still, she was beginning to regret her decision to leave Mrs. Drew's company and sign with Wood for a full season.

Louisa Drew had urged her to accept, saying it would be a great step forward. "You're a mature and capable young woman, Willa. But remember that New York is full of rough men. Do you have any friends there? Someone you could turn to if necessary?"

She thought a moment. "Eddie Booth."

"You know Edwin Booth?"

"Oh, yes. He and my father trouped together in the gold fields when I was little and we lived in St. Louis. I've seen Eddie several times over the years. But he's been in seclusion ever since his brother Johnny killed the President. I would never bother him with anything trivial."

"No, but he's there in an emergency." Mrs. Drew hesitated. "Do mind yourself with Mr. Wood, Willa."

Questioned, the older woman would not elaborate beyond saying, "You'll discover what I mean. I don't like to speak ill of anyone in the profession. But some actresses — the prettier ones — have trouble with Wood. You shouldn't pass up this chance because of that. Just be cautious."

The young woman going down the passage in a rush was Willa Parker. She was a tall, leggy girl, slim enough for trouser roles, yet with a soft, full bosom ideal for Juliet. She had wide-set, slightly slanted blue eyes that lent her an exotic quality, and hair so pale blond it shone silvery when she was onstage in the limelight. Mrs. Drew, with affection, called Willa a gamine. Her charming Irish husband, John, called her "my fair sprite."

Her skin was smooth, her mouth wide, her face given an air of strength by the line of her chin. Sometimes she felt forty years old, because her mother had died when she was three, her father when she was fourteen, and she'd played theatrical roles since age six. She was the only child of a woman she couldn't remember and a free-thinking, hard-working father she loved with total devotion until a heart seizure felled him in the storm scene of Lear.

Peter Parker had been one of those actors who worked at his profession with ardor and enthusiasm even though he had realized as a young man that his talent would provide only a subsistence, never let him shine with his name above the title of a play. He'd begun playing child parts in his native England, growing into older roles done in the dignified classical style of the Kemble family and Mrs. Siddons. In his twenties, he'd performed with the flamboyant Kean, who won him away from classicism to Kean's own naturalism, which encouraged an actor to do whatever the part demanded, even scream or crawl on the floor.

It was after his first engagement with Kean that he forever abandoned the last name he'd inherited at birth, Potts. Too many unfunny uses of it by fellow actors — Flower Potts, Chamber Potts — convinced him to adopt Parker as more practical and more likely to inspire favorable recognition. Willa knew the family name, which amused her, although from her earliest years she'd thought of herself as a Parker.

To his daughter, Parker had passed on various technical tricks of different acting styles and some other characteristics. These included the energy and idealism typical of actors, an encyclopedic knowledge of theatrical superstition, and the defensive optimism so necessary to survive in the profession. Now, going through the stage door, Willa called on that optimism and assured herself that her employer wouldn't be angry.

In the shadows just inside, the elderly janitor was struggling into a rubber rain slicker. "He's in the office, Miss Parker. Shouting for you every five minutes, too."

"Thank you, Joe." So much for optimism. The janitor jingled his keys, preparing to lock up. He was leaving early. Perhaps Wood had given him the night off.

Willa dashed through the backstage area, dodging between bundles of unpainted prop tree branches — Birnam Wood, which would come to Dunsinane in the next production. The vast fly space smelled of new lumber, old make-up, dust. Light spilled from a half-open door ahead. Willa heard Wood's deep voice:

"I go, and it is done — the bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell — that summons thee to heaven or to hell" Then he repeated "or to hell," changing the inflection.

Willa stood motionless outside the office, a shiver running down her back. Her employer was rehearsing one of the leading character's speeches somewhere other than the stage. This play of Shakespeare's was a bad-luck piece, most actors believed, although some noted that it contained a great deal of onstage fighting, and thus the causes of a gashed head, a bad fall, a broken arm or leg were in the text, not the stars. Still, the legend persisted. Like many other actors and actresses, Willa laughed at it while respecting it. She never repeated any of the lines backstage, or in dressing rooms or green rooms. She always referred to it as "the Scottish play"; saying the title in the theater guaranteed misfortune.

She glanced behind her into the darkness. Where were the other company members she'd assumed would be here for the rehearsal? In the stillness she heard only the tiniest creak — perhaps the playhouse cat prowling. She had an impulse to run.

"Who's there?"

Claudius Wood's shadow preceded him to the door. He yanked it fully open, and the rectangle of gaslight widened to reveal Willa with the petition in her hand.

Wood's cravat was untied, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his sleeves rolled up. He scowled at her. "The call was half past the hour. You're forty minutes late."

"Mr. Wood, I apologize. I fell behind."

"With what?" He noticed the papers with signatures. "Another of your radical crusades?" He startled her by snatching the petition. "Oh, Christ. The poor wretched Indian. Not on my time, if you please. I'll dock your wages. Come in, so we can get to work."

Something undefined but alarming warned her then — warned her to run from the silent theater and this burly man, whose handsome face was already giving way to patterns of veins in his cheeks and a bulbous, spongy look to his nose. But she desperately wanted to play the difficult role he'd offered her. It called for an older actress, and an accomplished one. If she could bring it off, it would promote her career.

And yet —

"Isn't there anyone else coming?"

"Not tonight. I felt our scenes together needed special attention."

"Could we do them onstage, please? This is the Scottish play, after all."

His bellow of laughter made her feel small and stupid. "Surely you don't believe that nonsense, Willa. You who are so intelligent, conversant with so many advanced ideas." He flicked the papers with his nail, then handed them back. "The play is Macbeth, and I'll speak the lines anywhere I choose. Now get in here and let's begin."

He turned and went back in the office. Willa followed, a part of her saying he was right, that she was infantile to worry about the superstitions. Peter Parker would have worried, though.

Overhead, a rumbling sounded — the storm growing worse. The actor-child in Willa was convinced that baleful forces were gathering above Chambers Street. Her hands turned cold as she followed her employer.

"Take off your shawl and bonnet." Wood moved chairs to clear a space on the shabby carpet. The office was a junkshop of period furniture and imitation green plants in urns of all sizes and designs. Handbills for New Knickerbocker productions covered the walls. Goldsmith, Moliere, Boucicault, Sophocles. The huge desk was a litter of bills, playscripts, contracts, career mementos. Wood pushed aside Macbeth's enameled dagger, a metal prop with a blunted point, and poured two inches of whiskey from a decanter. Green glass bowls on the gas jets seemed to darken rather than lighten the room.

Nervous, Willa put the signed petitions on a velvet chair. She laid her velvet gloves on top, then her shawl and bonnet. All in a pile in case she needed to snatch them quickly. She had started to mature at twelve, and men who worked around the theater soon began responding to her beauty. She'd learned to stand them off with good humor, even a little physical force when necessary. She was expert at running away.

Wood strolled to the door and closed it. "All right, my dear. First act, seventh scene."

"But we rehearsed that most of yesterday."

"I'm not satisfied." He walked back to her. "Macbeth's castle." Grinning, he reached out and ran his palm slowly down the silk of her sleeve. "Begin in the middle of Lady Macbeth's speech, where she says 'I have given suck.'"

He relished the last word. The gas put a highlight on his wet lower lip. Willa struggled to suppress fear and a sad despair. It was so obvious now, so obvious what he'd wanted all along, and why he'd engaged her when there were scores of older actresses available. Mrs. Drew had done everything but tell her in explicit language. She wasn't flattered, only upset. If this was the price for her New York debut, damn him, she wouldn't pay.

"Begin," he repeated, with a harshness that alarmed her. He caressed her arm again. She tried to draw away. He simply moved and kept at it, blowing his bourbon breath on her.

"I have given suck, and know —" She faltered. "How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me."

"Do you, now?" He bent and kissed her throat.

"Mr. Wood —"

"Go on with it." He seized her shoulders and shook her, and that was when freezing terror took hold. In his black eyes she saw something beyond anger. She saw a willingness to hurt.

"I would — while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums —"

Wood's hand slid from her arm to her left breast, closing on it. "You wouldn't pluck it from mine, would you?"

She stamped her high laced shoe. "Look here, I'm an actress. I won't be treated like a street harlot."

He grabbed her arm. "I pay your salary. You're anything I say you are — including my whore."

"No," she snarled, yanking away. He drew his hand back and drove his fist against her face. The blow knocked her down.

"You blonde bitch. You'll give me what I want." He caught her hair in his left hand, making her cry out when he pulled her head up. His right fist pounded down on her shoulder, and again. "Does that convince you?"

"Let go of me. You're drunk — crazy —"

"Shut up!" He slapped her so hard, she flew back and cracked her head on the front of his desk. "Pull up your skirts." Lights danced behind her eyes. Pain pounded. She reached up, fingers searching for some heavy object on the desk. He stood astride her right leg, working at his fly buttons. "Pull them up, God damn you, or I'll beat you till you can't walk."

Out of her mind with fright, she found something on the desk — the prop dagger. He reached for her wrist, but before he could stop her she swung it down. Although the point was blunt, it tore through the plaid fabric of his trousers because she struck so hard. She felt the dagger meet flesh, stop a second, then sink on through.

"Jesus," Wood said, groping with both hands for the prop weapon buried two inches in his left thigh. He struggled with it, bloodying his fingers. "Jesus Christ. I'll kill you!"

Wild-eyed, Willa pushed him with both hands, toppling him sideways. He shouted and cursed as he overturned a fake palmetto plant. She crawled to the chair, snatched her things, and ran from the office and through the dark. At the door she struggled with the bolt, shot it open, and half fell into the rainy passage, expecting to hear him in pursuit.

3

"I must take this oath?" Cooper Main asked. He'd ridden all the way to Columbia to see about the matter, and suddenly had doubts.

"If you want a pardon," said lawyer Trezevant, from the other side of the flimsy table serving as a desk. His regular offices had burned in the great fire of February 17, so he'd rented an upstairs room at Reverdy Bird's Mortuary on the east side of town, which the flames had spared. Mr. Bird had converted his main parlor to a shop selling cork feet, wooden limbs, and glass eyes to maimed veterans. A buzz of voices indicated good business this morning.

Cooper stared at the handwritten oath. He was lanky man and had a lot of gray in his untrimmed hair, though he was only forty-five. The scarcity of food had reduced him to gauntness. Workdays lasting sixteen hours had put fatigue shadows under his deep-set brown eyes. He was laboring to rebuild the ware­houses, the docks, and the trade of his Carolina Shipping Company in Charleston.

"See here, I understand your resentment," Trezevant said. "But if General Lee can humble himself and apply, as he did in Richmond last week, you can, too."

"A pardon implies wrongdoing. I did nothing wrong."

"I agree, Cooper. Unfortunately, the federal government does not. If you want to rebuild your business, you have to free yourself of the onus of having served the Confederate Navy Department." Cooper glowered. Trezevant continued. "I went to Washington personally, and, within limits, I trust this pardon broker, even though he's a lawyer, and a Yankee on top of it." The bitter humor was lost. "His name is Jasper Dills. He's greedy, so I know he'll get your application to the clerk of pardons, and to Mr. Johnson's desk, ahead of many others."

"For how much?"

"Two hundred dollars, U.S., or the equivalent in sterling. My fee is fifty dollars."

Cooper thought a while.

"All right, give me the papers."

They talked for another half hour. Trezevant was full of Washington gossip. He said Johnson planned to appoint a provisional governor in South Carolina. The governor would call a constitutional convention and reconvene the state legislature as it was constituted before Sumter fell. Johnson's choice was not unexpected. It was Judge Benjamin Franklin Perry, of Greenville, an avowed Unionist before the war. Like Lee, Perry had proclaimed his loyalty to his state, despite his hatred of secession, saying: "You are all going to the devil — and I will go with you."

"The legislature will have to fulfill Mr. Johnson's requirements for readmission," Trezevant said. "Officially abolish slavery, for example." A sly expression alerted Cooper to something new. "At the same time, the legislature may be able to, ah, regulate the nigras so that we'll have a labor force again, instead of a shiftless rabble."

"Regulate them how?"

"By means of — let's call it a code of behavior. I'm told Mississippi is thinking of the same thing."

"Would such a code apply to whites, too?"

"Freedmen only."

Cooper recognized danger in such a provocative step but the morality of it didn't concern him. The end of the war had brought him, his family, and his state a full measure of humiliation and ruin. He no longer cared about the condition of the people responsible — the people the war had set free.

By noon, Cooper's slow old horse was plodding southeast on the homeward journey. The route carried him back through central Columbia. He could hardly stand the sight. Nearly one hundred and twenty blocks had been burned down. The smell of charred wood still lay heavy in the air of the hot June day.

The dirt streets were littered with trash and broken furniture. A wagon belonging to the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees and Abandoned Lands dispensed packets of rice and flour to a large crowd, mostly Negro. Other blacks crowded the few stretches of wooden sidewalk still in place. Cooper saw military uniforms and some civilian gentlemen, but well-dressed white women were notably absent. It was the same everywhere. Such women stayed indoors, because they hated the soldiers and feared the freed Negroes. Cooper's wife, Judith, was an exception, which irritated him.

General Sherman had destroyed the wooden bridge spanning the Congaree River. Only the stone abutments remained, standing in the stream like smoke-stained gravestones. The slow crossing on the ferry barge gave Cooper an excellent view of one of the few buildings the fire had spared, the unfinished statehouse near the east shore. In one granite wall, like periods on paper, three Union cannonballs testified to Sherman's fury.

The sight of them raised Cooper's anger. So did the burned district, which he reached soon after leaving the ferry. He rode along the edge of a lane of scorched earth three-quarters of a mile wide. Here, between flaming pines, Kilpatrick's cavalry had pillaged, leaving a black waste marked by lonely chimneys — Sherman's Sentinels, all that remained of homes in the path of the barbaric march.

He stayed the night at a seedy inn outside the city. In the taproom he avoided conversation but listened closely to the impoverished yeomen drinking around him. To hear them, you'd think the South had won, or at least was able to continue fighting for its cause.

Next morning, he rode on, through heat and haze promising another fierce summer in the Low Country. He traveled on dirt roads left unrepaired after Union supply trains tore them up. A farmer would need a strong new wagon to get through the eight-inch ruts in the sandy soil and reach market with his crop — if he had a crop. Probably the farmer couldn't find a new wagon to buy, or the money for it, either. Cooper seethed.

Riding on toward Charleston and the coast, he crossed a roadbed; all the rails were gone and only a few ties were left. He met no white people, though twice he saw bands of Negroes moving through fields. Just past the hamlet of Chicora, on his way to the Cooper River, he came upon a dozen black men and women gathering wild herbs at the roadside. He reached into the pocket of his old coat and took hold of the little pocket pistol he'd bought for the trip.

The blacks watched Cooper approach. One of the women wore a red velvet dress and an oval cameo pin, probably, Cooper thought, stolen from a white mistress. The rest were raggedy. Cooper sweated and clutched the hidden pistol, but they let him ride through.

A big man with a red bandanna tied into a cap stepped into the road behind him. "You ain't the boss 'round here any more, Captain."

Cooper turned and glared. "Who the hell said I was? Why don't you get to work and do something useful?"

"Don't have to work," said the woman in red velvet. "You can't force us and you can't whip us. Not no more. We're free."

"Free to squander your lives in sloth. Free to forget your friends."

"Friends? The likes of you, who kept us locked up?" The bandanna man snickered. "Ride on, Captain, 'fore we drag you off that nag and give you the kind of hidin' we used to get."

Cooper's jaw clenched. He pulled out the pocket pistol and pointed it. The woman in velvet screamed and dived into the ditch. The others scattered, except for the bandanna man, who strode toward Cooper's horse. Suddenly, good sense prevailed; Cooper booted the nag and got out of there.

He didn't stop shaking for almost ten minutes. Trezevant was right. The legislature must do something to regularize the behavior of the freedmen. Liberty had become anarchy. And without hands to labor in the heat and damp, South Carolina would slip from critical illness to death.

Later, when he calmed down, he began to consider the work to be done at the shipping company. Fortunately, he didn't have the extra burden of worrying about Mont Royal. Decency and propriety had prompted him to make his arrangement with Orry's widow, and she now bore all the responsibility for the plantation to which he held title. Madeline was of mixed blood, and everyone knew it, because Ashton had blurted it to the world. But no one made anything of her ancestry. Nor would they so long as she behaved like a proper white woman.

Melancholy visions of his younger sisters diverted him from thoughts of work. He saw Brett, married to that Yankee, Billy Hazard, and bound for California, according to her last letter. He saw Ashton, who'd involved herself in some grotesque plot to unseat Davis's government and replace it with a crowd of hotspurs. She'd disappeared into the West, and he suspected she was dead. He couldn't summon much sorrow over it, and he didn't feel guilty. Ashton was a tormented girl, with all the personal difficulties that seemed to afflict women of great beauty and great ambition. Her morals had always been despicable.

The sun dropped down toward the sand hills behind him, and he began to wind through glinting salt marshes, close to home. How he loved South Carolina, and especially the Low Country. His son's tragic death had transformed him to a loyalist, although he still perceived himself to be a moderate on every issue but one: the inherent superiority of the white race and its fitness to govern society. Cooper was at this moment about ten minutes away from an encounter with a man who carried Southern loyalty far beyond anything he ever imagined.

His name was Desmond LaMotte. He was a great scarecrow of a man, with outlandishly long legs, which hung almost to the ground as he rode his mule through the marshes near the Cooper River. His arms were equivalently long. He had curly carrot-colored hair with a startling streak of white running back from his forehead; the war had given him that. He wore a neat imperial the color of his hair.

He came from the old Huguenot stock that dominated the state's town and plantation aristocracy. His late mother was a Huger, a Huguenot name pronounced You-gee. The war had cut down most of the young men in both families.

Des was a native Charlestonian, born in 1834. By the time he was fifteen he'd reached his adult height of six feet four inches. His hands measured ten inches from the tip of the little finger to the tip of the thumb when the fingers were spread. His feet measured thirteen inches from heel to big toe. So naturally, like any strong-willed, contrary, and defiant young man with those physical characteristics, he decided to become a dancing master.

People scoffed. But he was determined, and he made a success of it. It was an old and honorable profession, particularly in the South. Up among the hypocrites of New England, preachers always railed against mixed dancing, along with dancing in taverns, Maypole dancing (it smacked of pagan ritual), or any dancing with food and drink nearby. Southerners had a more enlightened view, because of their higher culture, their spiritual kinship with the English gentry, and their economic system; slavery gave them the leisure time for learning how to dance. Both Washington and Jefferson — great men; great Southerners, in Des's view — had been partial to dancing.

Early in life, whether riding or thrusting with a foil or idly tossing a horseshoe with some of the children of Charleston's free Negro population, Des LaMotte demonstrated an agility unusual in any boy, and remarkable in someone growing so large so quickly. His parents recognized his ability, and because they believed in the benefits of dance instruction for young gentlemen, they started his lessons at age eleven. Des never forgot the first stern words of his own dancing master. He'd committed them to memory and later used them with his own pupils:

In the five years preceding the war, well and happily married to Miss Sally Sue Means, of Charleston, Des had established a school in rooms on King Street, and developed a thriving trade among the Low Country plantations, through which he made a circuit three times annually, always advertising in local papers in advance of his visit. He never lacked for pupils. He taught a little fencing to the boys, but mostly he taught dances: the traditional quadrilles and Yorks and reels, with the dancers in a set or a line that would not compromise their morals through too much physical contact. He also taught the newer, more daring importations from Europe, the waltz and polka, closed dances with the couples facing one another in what some considered a dangerous intimacy. An Episcopal divine in Charleston had preached against "the abomination of permitting a man who is neither your fiancé nor your husband to encircle you with his arms and slightly press the contour of your waist." Des laughed at that. He considered all dancing moral, because he considered himself, and every one of his pupils, the same.

The five years in which he taught from the standard text, Rambeau's Dancing Master — his worn copy was in his saddlebag this moment — were magical ones. Despite the abolitionists and the threat of war, he presided at opulent balls and plantation assemblies, watching with delight as attractive white men and women danced by candlelight from seven at night until three or four in the morning, hardly out of breath. It was all capped by the glorious winter social season in Charleston, and the grand ball of the prestigious St. Cecilia Society.

Des's knowledge of dancing was wide and eclectic. He had seen frontier plank dancing, in which two men jigged on a board between barrels until one fell off. On plantations he'd observed slave dancing, rooted in Africa, consisting of elaborate heel-and-toe steps done to the beat of clappers made of animal bone or blacksmith's rasps scraped together. Generally, the planters prohibited drums among their slaves, deeming them a means of transmitting secret messages about rebellions or arson plots.

He had dreamed long hours over an engraved portrait of Thomas D. Rice, the great white dancer who'd enthralled audiences early in the century with his blackface character Jim Crow. From Carolinians who'd traveled in the North, he'd heard descriptions of the Shaking Quakers, notorious nigger lovers whose dances gave form to religious doctrine. A single slow-moving file of dancers, each placing one careful foot ahead of the other, represented the narrow path to salvation; three or more concentric rings of dancers turning in alternate directions were the wheel-within-a-wheel, the Shaker vision of the cosmos. Des knew the whole universe of American dance, though to those who paid him he admitted to liking only those kinds of dancing that he taught.

His universe was shattered with the first cannon fire on Fort Sumter. He mustered at once with the Palmetto Rifles, a unit organized by his best friend, Captain Ferris Brixham. Out of the original eighty men, only three were left in April of this year, when General Joe Johnston surrendered the Confederacy's last field army at Durham Station, North Carolina. The night before the surrender, a beastly yankee sergeant and four of his men caught Des and Ferris foraging for food and beat them unconscious. Des survived; Ferris died in his arms an hour after officers announced the surrender. Ferris left a wife and five young children.

Embittered, Des trudged back to Charleston, where an eighty-five-year-old uncle told him Sally Sue had died in January of pneumonia and complications of malnutrition. As if that wasn't enough, throughout the war the whole LaMotte family had been shamed by members of another family in the Ashley River district. It was more than Des could bear. His mind had turned white. There was a month of which he remembered nothing. Aging relatives had cared for him.

Now he rode his mule through the marshes, looking for plantation clients from the past or people who could afford lessons for their children. He'd found neither. Behind him, barefoot, walked his fifty-year-old servant, an arthritic black called Juba; it was a slave name meaning musician. After his return home, Des had signed Juba to a lifetime contract of personal service. Juba was frightened by the new freedom bestowed by the legendary Linkum. He readily made his mark on the paper he couldn't read.

Juba walked in the sunshine with one hand resting on the hindquarters of the mule ridden by a man with only two ambitions: to practice again the profession he loved in a world the Yankees had made unfit for it, and to extract retribution from any of those who had contributed to his misery and that of his family and his homeland.

This was the man who confronted Cooper Main.

A yellow-pine plank thirty inches wide lay across the low spot in the salt marsh, a place otherwise impassable. Cooper reached the inland end of the plank a step or two before the ungainly fellow on the mule reached the other end with his mournful Negro.

On a dry hillock twenty feet from the crossing, an alligator lay sunning. They were common in the coastal marshes. This one was mature: twelve feet long, probably five hundred pounds. Disturbed by the interlopers, it slid into the water and submerged. Only its unhooded eyes, above the water, showed its slow movement toward the plank. Sometimes 'gators were dangerous if too hungry, or if they perceived a man or an animal as a threat.

Cooper noticed the 'gator. Although he'd seen them since he was small, they terrified him. Nightmares of their tooth-lined jaws still tormented him occasionally. He shivered as he watched the eyes glide closer. Abruptly, the eyes submerged, and the alligator swam away.

Cooper thought the young man with the imperial was familiar, but couldn't place him. He heard him say, from the other end of the plank, "Give way."

Hot and irritable, Cooper began, "I see no reason —"

"I say again, sir, give way."

"No, sir. You're impertinent and presumptuous, and I don't know you."

"But I know you, sir." The young man's glance conveyed suppressed rage, yet he spoke in a conversational, even pleasant, way. The contradiction set Cooper's nerves to twitching.

"You're Mr. Cooper Main, from Charleston. The Carolina Shipping Company. Mont Royal Plantation. Desmond LaMotte, sir."

"Oh, yes. The dancing teacher." With that resolved, Cooper started his horse over the plank.

It had the effect of a match thrown in dry grass. Des kicked his mule forward. Hooves rapped the plank. The mule frightened Cooper's horse, causing it to sidestep and fall. Cooper twisted in the air to keep from being crushed, and landed in the shallows next to the horse. He thrashed and came up unhurt but covered with slimy mud.

"What the hell is wrong with you, LaMotte?"

"Dishonor, sir. Dishonor is what's wrong. Or does your family no longer understand the meaning of honor? It may be insubstantial as the sunlight, but it's no less important to life."

Dripping and chilled despite the heat, Cooper wondered if he'd met someone unbalanced by the war. "I don't know what in the name of God you mean."

"I refer, sir, to the tragedies visited upon members of my family by members of yours."

"I've done nothing to any LaMotte."

"Others with your name have done sinful things. You all smeared the honor of the LaMotte family by allowing Colonel Main to cuckold my first cousin Justin. Before I came home, your runaway slave Cuffey slew my first cousin Francis."

"But I tell you I had nothing to do —"

"We have held family councils, those of us who have survived," Des broke in. "I am glad I met you now, because it saves me from seeking you out in Charleston."

"For what?"

'To inform you that the LaMottes have agreed to settle our debt of honor."

"You're talking nonsense. Dueling's against the law."

"I am not referring to dueling. We'll use other means — at a time and place of our choosing. But we'll settle the debt."

Cooper reached for his horse's bridle. Water dripped from the animal and from Cooper's elbows, plopping in the silence. He wanted to scoff at this deranged young man, but was deterred by what he saw in LaMotte's eyes.

"We'll settle it with you, Mr. Main, or we'll settle it with your brother's nigger widow, or we'll settle it with both of you. Be assured of it."

And on he rode, mule shoes loud as pistol fire on the plank. After he reached solid ground, his hunched serving man followed, never once meeting Cooper's eye.

Cooper shivered again and led his horse from the water.

Late that night, at his house on Tradd Street, near the Battery, Cooper told his wife of the incident. Judith laughed.

That angered him. "He meant it. You didn't see him. I did. Not every man who goes to war comes back sane." He didn't, notice her mournful glance, or recall his own mental disarray in the weeks following their son's drowning.

"I'm going to warn Madeline in a letter," he said.

4

Willa woke suddenly. She heard a noise and a voice, neither of which she could identify.

Memory flooded back. Claudius Wood — the Macbeth dagger. She'd fled along Chambers Street in the rain and almost been run down by the horse of a fast hansom when she slipped and fell at an intersection. Only after four blocks had she dared look back at the dim lamplit street.

No sign of Wood. No pursuit of any kind. She had turned and run on.

The noise was a fist pounding the door. The unfamiliar voice belonged to a man.

"Miss Parker, the landlady saw you come in. Open the door, or I'll force it."

"Ruin a good door? I won't permit it."

That was the voice of the harpy who ran the lodging house. Earlier, when Willa had come dashing in from the rainy street, the woman had peered at her from the dining room, where she presided over bad food and the four shabby gentlemen who occupied the other rooms.

Willa had raced away from those hostile eyes and up the stairs to her sleeping room, with its tiny alcove crowded with her books, theater mementos, and two trunks of clothing. Safe inside the room, she'd thrown the bolt over and fallen on the bed, trembling. There she had lain listening for nearly an hour. At last, exhaustion had pulled her into sleep.

Now she heard the man in the hall tell the landlady, "You've got nothing to say about it. The girl's wanted for questioning about an assault on her employer." He pounded again. "Miss Parker!"

Willa hugged herself, not breathing.

The man shouted: "It's a police matter. I ask you one last time to open the door."

She was already dressed. A swift look into the dark alcove was her brief farewell to her few possessions. She snatched her shawl and raised the window. The man heard and started to break the door with his shoulder.

Fighting for breath, fighting terror, Willa climbed over the sill, lowered herself, holding on with both hands, then let go. She plunged downward through rainy blackness. An anguished cry went unheard as the door splintered and caved in.

"God — my God — I've never been through anything like this in my life, Eddie."

"There, there." He pulled her close to his shoulder. His velvet smoking coat had a nubby, comforting feel. While her clothes dried, she wore one of his robes, golden silk and quite snug; he was a small man. A strand of pale blond hair straggled across her forehead. Her bare legs rested on a stool in front of her. He'd wrapped her left ankle in a tight bandage. She had twisted it when she dropped to the alley, and she had been in pain as she hobbled all the way to his brownstone townhouse, Number 28 East Nineteenth Street.

"The policeman nearly caught me. Wood sent him, didn't he?"

"Undoubtedly," Booth said. He was thirty-two, slim and handsome, and had a rich voice critics called "a glorious instrument." His expressive eyes held a look of abiding pain.

Rain poured down on the townhouse and streaked its tall windows. It was half after One in the morning. Willa shivered in the silk robe as Booth continued. "Wood's a foul man. A discredit to our profession. He drinks far too much — on that habit I am an expert. Combine that with his temper and the result is catastrophic. Last year, he nearly crippled a gas-table operator who didn't light the stage precisely as he wanted it. Then there was his late wife —"

"I didn't know he was ever married."

"He doesn't talk about it, with reason. On a crossing for a London engagement, in heavy weather, she slipped and fell into the sea and disappeared. Wood was the sole witness, although a cabin steward later testified that on the morning of the mishap,

Helen Wood had bruises on her cheek and arm, which she'd attempted to cover with powder. In other words, he beat her."

"He can be such a charming man ..." Willa's words trailed off into a sigh of self-recrimination. "How stupid I was to be taken in!"

"Not at all. His charm fools a great many people." Booth patted her shoulder, then stood up. He wore black trousers and tiny slippers; his feet were smaller than hers. "You feel chilly. Let me bring you some cognac. I keep it, though I never touch it."

Nor did he take any other spirits, she knew. When Booth's wife, Mary, lay dying in 1863, he'd been too drunk to respond to pleas from friends that he go to her. That part of the past burdened him almost as much as the fatal night at Ford's Theater.

Willa stared at the rain while Booth poured cognac into a snifter and warmed it in his hands. "I'll slip out tomorrow and try to discover, what Wood's doing now that you have eluded the police." He handed her the snifter. The cognac went down with pleasing warmth and quickly calmed her churning stomach. "Meanwhile, I wouldn't count on his letting matters rest. Among his other wonderful traits is his talent for being vindictive. He has many friends among the local managers. He'll keep you from working in New York, at the very least."

Willa wiggled her bare toes. Her ankle hurt less now. In the fireplace, apple-wood logs crackled and filled the sitting room with a sweet aroma. While she sipped the cognac, Booth stared in melancholy fashion at a large framed photograph standing on a marble-topped table: three men wearing Roman togas. It was from the famous performance of November 1864, when he'd played Brutus to the Cassius and Antony of his brothers, Johnny and June, for one night.

She set the snifter aside. "I can't go back to Arch Street, Eddie. Mrs. Drew has a full company. She replaced me as soon as I gave notice."

"Louisa should have warned you about Wood."

"She did, indirectly. I wasn't alert to what she was trying to say. I have a lot of faults, and one of the worst is thinking well of everyone. Like John Evelyn's knight, I am 'not a little given to romance. It's a dangerous shortcoming."

"No, no, a virtue. Never think otherwise." He patted her hand. "Supposing New York is closed to you, is there somewhere else you can work?"

"Somewhere I can run to? Running is always the remedy that comes easiest to me. And I'm always sorry afterward. I hate cowardice."

"Caution is not cowardice. I remind you again, this is something more than a schoolyard quarrel. Think a moment. Where can you go?"

Forlorn, she shook her head. "There isn't a single — well, yes. There's St. Louis. I have a standing offer from one of Papa's old colleagues. You know him. You and Papa trouped with him in California."

"Sam Trump?" Finally Booth smiled. "America's Ace of Players? I didn't know Sam was in St. Louis."

"Yes, he's running his own theater, in competition with Dan DeBar. He wrote me about it last Christmas. I gather things aren't going well."

Booth walked to the windows. "His drinking, probably. It seems to be the curse of the profession." He turned. "St. Louis might be an ideal sanctuary, though. It's quite far away, but it's a good show town. It has been ever since Ludlow and Drake set up shop there in the twenties. You have the whole Mississippi valley for touring, and no competing playhouses until you reach Salt Lake City. I liked playing St. Louis. So did my father."

He stared out the dark window, smiling again. "Whenever he appeared there, he could always save a few pennies by hiring bit players from the Thespians, a fine amateur company. Unfortunately, he just spent the pennies for one more bottle." He shook off the memory. "More to the point, Sam Trump's a decent man. He'd be a successful actor if he hadn't gone overboard for Forrest's physical technique. Sam turned the heroic style into a religion. He doesn't tear a passion to a tatter; he shatters it beyond repair —"

Another thoughtful pause, then a nod. "Yes, Sam's theater would do nicely. Who knows? You might even straighten him out."

Exhausted and unhappy, Willa, said, "Must I decide right now?"

"No. Only when we find out what Wood's up to. Come." He extended his hand in a smooth, flowing move worthy of a performance. "I'll show you to your room. A long sleep will help immensely."

On the way out, he glanced at Johnny's picture again. Poor Eddie, she thought, still hiding from the world because so many bayed for revenge, even though Johnny had been tracked down and shot to death near Bowling Green, Virginia, almost two months ago. Thinking of Booth's plight instead of hers helped her fall asleep.

She woke at two the next afternoon to find her friend gone. The skies outside were still stormy. A light meal of fruit, floury Scotch baps, and jam was set out downstairs. She was eating hungrily when his key rattled and he walked in, looking rakish in his slouch hat and opera cloak, and carrying an ebony cane.

"Bad news, I'm afraid. Wood swore out a warrant. I'll buy your ticket and advance you some traveling money. You don't dare visit your bank. Or your lodgings."

"Eddie, I can't leave my things. My collection of Mr. Dickens. The sides from all the parts I've played since I first started acting — every side is signed by all the actors in the play."

Booth flung his hat aside. "They may be precious to you, but they aren't worth imprisonment."

"Oh, dear God. Did he really —?"

"Yes. The charge is attempted murder."

A day later, after dark, he spirited her out of the townhouse and into a cab, which rattled swiftly over cobbles and through mud to a Hudson River pier. He handed her a valise containing some clothing he'd bought for her, kissed her cheek long and affectionately, and murmured a wish for God to guard her. She boarded the ferry for New Jersey and on the crossing didn't look back at him or at the city. She knew that if she did, she'd break down, cry, and take the return boat — and that could lead to disaster.

When she left the train in Chicago, she telegraphed Sam Trump. She stayed in an inexpensive hotel and waited for his reply, which came to the telegraph office the following morning. The message said he would happily provide board, lodging, and a premier place in his small permanent company. For a man in the throes of alcoholic failure, he certainly sounded confident. She was under such stress that she overlooked the obvious: He was an actor.

Like Willa's father, Mr. Samuel Horatio Trump had been born in England, at Stoke-Newington. He'd lived in the United States since the age of ten, but he diligently maintained his native accent, believing it contributed to his considerable and fully merited fame. Self-christened America's Ace of Players, he was also known in the profession, less kindly, as Sobbing Sam, not only because he could cry on cue, but because he inevitably did so to excess.

He was sixty-four years old and admitted to fifty. Without the special boots to which a cobbler had added inserts to lift the heels an inch and a half, he stood five feet six inches. He was a round, avuncular man with warm dark eyes and a rolling gait that jiggled his paunch. His wardrobe was large but twenty years out of date. Managers who flung plagiarized adaptations of Dickens on the stage always wanted to cast him as Micawber. Trump, however, saw himself as a Charlemagne, a Tamerlane, or, truly straining the credulity of his audiences, a Romeo.

In his lifetime Trump had known many women. When sober or even slightly tipsy, he was a blithe and winning man. To anyone who would listen, he confessed to many cases of a broken heart, but the secret truth was that Trump himself had ended every romantic affair in which he'd been involved. As a young man he had decided that the responsibilities of wedlock would only impede a career that was certain to end in international acclaim. So far it hadn't.

Although Willa and many others in the profession practiced the craft of theatrical superstition, Trump raised it to a high art. He refused to tie a rope around a trunk or hire a cross-eyed player. He never wore yellow, never rehearsed on Sunday, and ordered his doorkeeper to throw rocks at any stray dog that approached the stage door during a performance. He always rang down the curtain if he spied a red-headed spectator in the first five rows. He wore a blue-white moonstone mounted in gold for a cravat pin and kept a chrysanthemum — never yellow — in his lapel; he always had both somewhere on his person when onstage. He wouldn't even consider producing or appearing in the Scottish play.

The one superstition he violated was that about discussing the future and thereby jinxing it. Some of his favorite words were "next week" and "tomorrow" and "the next performance," invariably linked with phrases such as "important producer in the audience" or "telegraphed message" or "wanting a full year's engagement."

His theater, Trump's St. Louis Playhouse, had been built by another manager at the northwest corner of Third and Olive Streets; Trump called the latter Rue des Granges. He thought it more elegant to use the town's original French names. The theater held three hundred people, in individual seats rather than the more typical benches.

On the long trip to St. Louis, Willa made peace with herself over what had happened at the New Knickerbocker. Perhaps in a few years the manager would drop the charges, and she could go back. Meanwhile, in case Wood's spite reached beyond New York, she would bill herself as Mrs. Parker. Perhaps that would confuse anyone searching for a single woman, and also deter undesirable men. She refused to go so far as to call herself Willa Potts.

She was in reasonably good spirits by the time the river ferry deposited her on the St. Louis levee. She found Sam Trump painting a forest backdrop at the theater. He cried while they hugged and kissed dramatically, then opened a bottle of champagne, which he proceeded to drink all by himself. Near the bottom of the bottle, he made a startling admission:

"I falsified the tone of my telegraph message, dear girl. You have chosen to inhabit a house in ruin."

"St. Louis looks prosperous to me, Sam."

"My theater, child, my theater. We are months in arrears to all of our creditors. Our audiences are satisfactory. There is even an occasional full house. Yet, for reasons entirely beyond my ken, I can't keep a shilling in the till."

Willa could see one of the reasons, made of green glass and reposing, empty, in a silver bucket from the property loft.

Sam astonished her a second time when he said, with a hangdog look, "It wants a clearer head than mine. A better head than this gray and battered one." Only gray around the ears. He dyed the rest a hideous boot-polish brown.

He seized her hand. "Along with your acting duties, would you perchance consider managing the house? You are young, but you have a great deal of experience in the profession. I can't pay you extra for the work, but I can offer the compensation of billing equivalent to mine." With great solemnity, he added, "That of a star."

She laughed as she hadn't in days. It was the sort of work she had never done before, but, as far as she could see, it needed mostly common sense, diligence, and attention to where the pennies went.

"That's a heady inducement, Sam. Let me think about it overnight."

Next morning, she went to the playhouse office, a room with all the spaciousness and charm of a chicken coop. It also had the inevitable horseshoe nailed over the lintel. She found Trump disconsolately holding his head with one hand and stroking the black theater cat, Prosperity, with the other.

"Sam, I accept your offer — conditionally."

He overlooked the last word, crying, "Splendid!"

"This is the condition. My first act as manager is to put you on an allowance. The theater will pay your living expenses, but nothing for whiskey, beer, champagne, or strong drink of any kind."

He smote his bosom with his fist. "Oh! How sharper than a serpent's tooth —"

"Sam, I just took over this theater. Do you want me to quit?"

"No, no!"

"Then you are on an allowance."

"Dear lady —" His chin fell, covering the moonstone cravat pin. "I hear and I obey."

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

The noon sun shone on the Summerton crossroads. Three great live oaks spread shade over the store and its broken stoop. Near them, clusters of dark green yucca with spear-sharp fronds grew low to the ground. Madeline stood looking at the old man with the rifle on the edge of the porch. He wore filthy pants; his long underwear served as his shirt.

"Ain't nothin' here for you or anybody else," he said.

Sweat darkened the back of Madeline's faded dress. The hem showed dampness and mud left by her trek through the salt marshes. "There's water in the well," she said. "Might I have a drink before I start back?"

"No," said the nameless member of the Gettys clan. "Go get it from the wells of your own kind." He gestured to the empty tawny road winding away toward Mont Royal.

"Thank you so much for your kindness," she said, picking up her skirts and stepping into the blaze of light.

A half-mile down the road, she came upon a detachment of six black soldiers and a white leutenant with a downy, innocent face. The men lay at rest in the hot shade, their collars unfastened, their rifles and canteens put aside.

"Good day, ma'am," the young officer said, jumping up and giving a little salute of respect.

"Good day. It's a hot day for travel."

"Yes, but we must march back to Charleston all the same. I wish I could offer you water, but our canteens are empty. I asked that fellow at the store to let us fill up, and he wouldn't."

"He isn't a very generous sort, I'm afraid. If you'll come along to my plantation — it's about two miles and right on your way — you're welcome to use its well."

5

Ashton let out a long wailing cry. The customer writhing on top of her responded with a bleary smile of bliss. Downstairs, Ashton's employer, Señora Vasquez-Reilly, heard the outcry and saluted the ceiling with her glass of tequila.

Ashton hated what she was doing. That is, she hated the act when she had to do it to survive. Being stuck in this flyblown frontier town — Santa Fe, in New Mexico Territory — was unspeakable. To be reduced to whoring was unbelievable. Moaning and yelling let her express her feelings.

The middle-aged gentleman, a widower who raised cattle, withdrew, shyly averting his eyes. Having already paid her, he dressed quickly, then bowed and kissed her hand. She smiled and said in halting Spanish, "You come back soon, Don Alfredo."

"Next week, Señorita Brett. Happily."

God, I hate greasers, she thought as she sorted the coins after he left. Three of the four went to Señora Vasquez-Reilly, a widow whose burly brother-in-law made sure the señora's three girls didn't cheat. Ashton had gone to work for the señora early in the summer, when her funds ran out. She'd given her name as Senorita Brett, thinking it a fine joke. It would have been an even better one if her sweet, prissy sister knew about it.

Ashton Main — she no longer thought of herself as Mrs. Huntoon — had decided to stay in Santa Fe because of the treasure. Somewhere in the Apache-infested wasteland, two wagons had vanished, and the men bringing them from Virginia City had been massacred. One man, her husband, James Huntoon, was no loss. Another, her lover, Lamar Powell, had planned to create a second confederacy in the Southwest, with Ashton as his consort. To finance it, he'd loaded a false bottom in one of the wagons with three hundred thousand dollars in gold refined from ore out of the Nevada mine originally owned by his late brother.

The massacre had been reported by a wagon driver who reached a trading station shortly before he died of his wounds. In his pain-racked, disjointed telling, he never revealed the site of the killings. Only one person might have that information now: the guide Powell had hired in Virginia City, Collins. Rumor said he'd survived, but God knew where he was.

When she first heard of the massacre, Ashton had tried to find a wealthy patron in Santa Fe. Candidates were few. Most were married, and if they philandered at the señora's, they also showed no desire to get rid of their wives. As for finding a man at Fort Marcy, the idea was a joke. The officers and men who garrisoned the run-down post near the old Palace of Governors weren't paid enough to support their own lusts, let alone a mistress. They had all the prospects of a hog headed for a Low Country barbecue.

Of course she could have avoided working for the señora if she'd written an appeal to her sanctimonious brother Cooper, or to the sister whose name she delighted in muddying, or even to the slutty octoroon Orry had married. But she was damned if she'd stoop to asking any of them for charity. She didn't want to see them or communicate with them until she could do so on her own terms.

Ashton put on her working clothes — a yellow silk dress with wide lace-trimmed shoulder straps, meant to be worn over a blouse with dolman sleeves. The señora had denied her the blouse as well as a corset, so that the bulge of her partly exposed breast would tempt the customers. The dress had been fashionable about the time her damn brother Orry went to West Point. She hated it, along with the coy black mantilla the señora insisted she wear, and the shoes, too — leather dyed a garish yellow, with laces, and thin high heels.

She adjusted the mantilla in front of a small scrap of mirror and ran her palm down her left cheek. The three parallel scratches barely showed, thank heaven. Another of the girls, Rosa, had attacked her in a dispute over a customer. Before the señora pulled them apart, Rosa had scratched Ashton's face badly. Ashton had wept for hours over the bloody nail marks. Her body and her face were her chief assets, the weapons she used to get whatever she wanted.

For weeks after the fight, she'd plastered salve on the slow-healing wounds, and rushed to the mirror seven or eight times a day to examine them. At last she was sure there would be no permanent damage. Nor would Rosa trouble her again. Ashton now carried a small sharpened file in her right shoe.

Occasional thoughts of the mine in Nevada only sharpened her greed. Wasn't that mine hers, too? She'd practically been married to Lamar Powell. Of course, if she wanted to get possession of the mine, she faced two gigantic obstacles: She'd have to convince the authorities that she was Mrs. Powell, and, before she could do that, she had to reach Virginia City. Ashton considered herself a strong and resourceful young woman, but she wasn't crazy. Cross hundreds and hundreds of miles of dangerous wasteland by herself? Not likely. She focused instead on the nearer dream, the wagons.

If she could just find them! She was convinced the Apaches had not stolen the gold. It had been cleverly concealed. Moreover, they were ignorant savages; they wouldn't know its value. With the gold she could buy much more than material comfort. She could buy position, and power. The power to travel back to South Carolina, descend on Mont Royal, and, in some way yet to be devised, rub dirt in the faces of those in the family who'd rejected her. Her consuming desire was to ruin every last one of them.

Meanwhile, it had come down to a choice of starving or whoring. So she whored. And waited. And hoped.

Most of the señora's customers loved Ashton's white Anglo skin and her Southern speech and mannerisms, which she exaggerated for effect. Tonight, when she descended to the cantina with her grand airs, her performance was wasted. No one was there but three elderly vaqueros playing cards.

The cantina looked particularly dismal after dark. Lamplight yellowed everything, and revealed the bullet holes, knife marks, whiskey spills, and general filth on the furniture, floor, and adobe walls. The señora sat reading an old Mexico City newspaper. Ashton handed her the coins.

The señora favored her with a smile that showed her gold front tooth. "Gracias, querida. Are you hungry?"

Ashton pouted. "Hungry for some fun in this dreary old place. I miss hearing a little music."

The señora's upper lip and faint mustache dropped down to hide the gold tooth. "Too bad. I can't afford a mariachi."

The brother-in-law, a stupid hulk named Luis, walked in through the half-doors. The only piece of free goods the señora allowed him was Rosa, who had stringy hair and had had the pox. Soon after Ashton started to work, Luis had tried to fondle her. She couldn't stand his smell or his swinish manners, and she already knew the señora held him in low regard, so she slapped him. He was about to hit back when the señora stepped in and cowed him with shouted profanity. Ever since, Luis never got close to Ashton without letting her see his sullen fury. Tonight was no different. He stared at her while he grabbed Rosa's wrist. He dragged the girl past the door leading to the office and store­room and pulled her up the stairs. Ashton rubbed her left cheek. I hope he works her like a field hand, she thought. I hope she gives him a good case, too.

A hot wind swept dust under the half-doors. No customers showed up. At half past ten, the señora said Ashton could go to bed. She lay in the dark in her tiny room listening to the wind bang shutters and again entertaining the idea of robbing the señora. Now and then customers spent a lot at the cantina, and cash sometimes accumulated for over a week. She couldn't think of how to commit the robbery, though. And there was a great risk. Luis had a fast horse and some bad friends. If they captured her, they might kill her or, just as bad, disfigure her.

Anger and hopelessness kept her from sleep. Finally she re­lighted the lamp and reached under the bed for her lacquered Oriental box. On the lid, bits of inlaid pearl formed a scene: a Japanese couple, fully clothed and in repose, contemplating cups of tea. Raising the lid and holding it against the light revealed the couple, with kimonos up, copulating. The woman's happy face showed her response to the gentleman's mammoth shaft, half inside her.

The box always lifted Ashton's spirits. It held forty-seven buttons she'd collected over the years — West Point uniform buttons, trouser-fly buttons. Each button represented a man she'd enjoyed, or at least used. Only two partners didn't have a button in the box: the first boy who took her, before she started her collection, and her weakling husband, Huntoon. The collection was growing rapidly in Santa Fe.

For a few minutes, she examined one button and then another, trying to put a face with each. Presently, she put the box away, and examined her perspiring body in the mirror. Still soft where it should be, firm where it should be, and the nail marks on her face hardly showed. Gazing at herself, she felt her hope renewed. Somehow, she would use her beauty to escape this damnable place.

She went to sleep then, enjoying a dream of repeatedly pricking Brett's skin with her little file, till it bled.

Three nights later, a coarsely dressed Anglo walked into the cantina. He had mustaches with long points and a revolver on his hip. He downed two fast double whiskeys at the bar, then wobbled over to the hard chairs where Ashton and Rosa waited for customers. The third girl was at work upstairs.

"Hello, Miss Yellow Shoes. How are you this evening?"

"I'm just fine."

"What's your name?"

"Brett."

He grinned. "Do I hear the accent of a fallen blossom from the South?"

She tossed her head, flirted with her eyes. "I never fall unless I'm paid first. Since you know my name, what's yours?"

"You might find my first name a bit peculiar. If s Banquo, from Mr. Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth. Last name's Collins. I may be back to see you after I have a couple more drinks."

He ambled back to the bar, while Ashton gripped her chair to keep from toppling off.

Banquo Collins pounded a fist on the bar. "I'll buy for everybody. I can spend ten times that much and never worry."

The señora closed in. "Bold words, my dear sir."

"But they're true, lass. I know where to mine some treasure."

"Ah, I knew you were fooling. There are no mines around here."

Collins swallowed all of a glass of popskull. "I don't mine dirt; I mine wagons."

"Wagons? That makes no sense."

"Does to me."

He extended his arms and began to shuffle his booted feet. "Ought to have music in this place, so a man could dance."

Because everyone was watching him, they missed the wild look on Ashton's face. This was the man — Powell's guide!

"Gonna be rich as Midas," he declared, rubbing his crotch. Rosa primped furiously. Ashton slid the file from her shoe and beneath her left arm. Rosa gasped when the point jabbed her.

"This one's mine," Ashton whispered. "If you take him, I'll put your eye out tomorrow."

Rosa was white. "Take him. Take him."

"Gonna have plenty of music when I see the world. Rome, the Japans —" Collins belched. "But not here. Guess I can get pleasured here, though."

He lurched to the girls. Ashton stood. He grinned again, took her hand, and headed upstairs.

After latching the door, she helped him undress. She was so excited she pulled one trouser button too hard. It flew and ticked against the wall. He sat on the bed while she worked his pants off. "That was interesting talk downstairs," she said.

He blinked, as if he hadn't heard. "Where'd you come from, Yellow Shoes? You're sure no greaser."

"I'm a Carolina girl, stranded here by misfortune." A deep breath, and then the leap. "A misfortune I think we both know something about."

Despite all he'd drunk, and his aroused state, what she said put him on guard. "Are we gonna talk or fuck?"

She bent forward, ministering to him a moment to curb his irritation. "I just want to ask about those wagons —" He grabbed her hair. "Collins, I'm your friend. I know what was in those wagons."

"How come?" Furious, he yanked her hair. "I said how come?"

"Please. Not so hard! That's better." She leaned back, frightened. Suppose he really felt threatened? Suppose he decided to kill her? Then she thought, If you stay here you 're as good as dead anyway.

She collected herself and said carefully, "I know because I'm related to the man who owned the wagons. He was a Southerner, wasn't he?"

His eyes admitted it before he could deny it. She clapped her hands. "Sure he was. Both of them were. And you guided them from Virginia City."

She dragged the shoulder straps down to show off her breasts, red and firm already. Lord, she was all worked up over the mere thought of the gold. "Do you know where those wagons are, Collins?"

He just smirked.

"You do. I know what was in them. What's more, I know where it came from — and how to get hundreds, why maybe a thousand times, more of the same."

She detected a gleam of interest and pushed the advantage. "I'm talking about the mine in Virginia City. It belongs to me, because one of the men who died, Mr. Powell, owned it, and I'm related to him."

"You mean you can prove it's yours?"

Without hesitation or change of expression she said, "Absolutely. You share what's in those wagons, then help me get to Nevada, and I'll split an even bigger fortune with you."

"Sure — an even bigger fortune. And there's seven cities of gold waiting to be found round here, too — never mind that nobody's turned them up since the Spanish started searching hundreds of years ago."

"Collins, don't sneer at me. I'm telling the truth. We need to pool our information. If we do, we'll be so rich you'll get dizzy. We can go all over the world together. Wouldn't that be exciting, lover?" Her tongue gave a moist demonstration of her excitement.

Seconds passed without a response. Her fear crept back.

Suddenly he laughed. "By the Lord, you're a canny lass. Canny as you are hot."

"Say we're partners and I'll treat you to some special loving. Things I won't do for anybody else, no matter how much they pay." She whispered salacious words in his ear.

He laughed again. "All right. Partners."

"Here I come," she cried, dropping her dress and pantaloons and falling on him on the bed.

She kept her word, but after ten minutes his age and his drinking caught up with him, and he began to snore.

Ashton pulled up the covers, toweled herself and slipped in next to him, her heart thumping. Finally, patience had been rewarded. No more whoring. She had the man who had the gold.

Imagination painted pictures of a new Worth gown. The grandest hotel suite in New York City. Madeline cringing while Ashton slashed her across the face with a fan.

Delicious visions. They'd soon be real. She fell asleep.

She woke murmuring his name. She heard no answer. Daylight showed through slits in the shutter. She felt the bed beside her.

Empty. Cold.

"Collins?"

He'd left a penciled note on the old bureau.

Ashton screamed. She screamed until she woke the whole place — Rosa, the third whore, the señora, who stormed in and shouted at her. Ashton spit in her face. The señora slapped her. She kept on sobbing and screaming.

Two days later, she found the button that had popped from Banquo Collins's pants. After examining it, and crying all over again, she put it in her box.

Hellish heat settled on Santa Fe. People moved as little as possible. Every evening she sat on the hard chair, not knowing what to do, how to escape.

She didn't smile. No customers wanted her. Señora Vasquez-Reilly began to complain and threaten her with eviction. She didn't care.

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

If there was a fatter man than the old Whig Unionist Dawkins, Madeline had never met him. Fiftyish, with impeccable clothes specially tailored for him, Dawkins had thighs big as watermelons and a stomach round as that of an expectant mother of triplets. On the parlor wall behind him hung the inevitable array of ancestral portraits. When Madeline entered, Dawkins was already seated in his huge custom-made chair, gazing across the harbor at the rubble of Fort Sumter. He disliked having anyone see him walk or sit down.

She asked about the Mont Royal mortgages. There were two, totaling six hundred thousand dollars and held by Atlanta banks. Dawkins said his own Palmetto Bank would open soon, and he would ask his board to buy and consolidate the mortgages. "Mont Royal is fine collateral. I'd like to hold the paper on it."

She described the sawmill idea. He was less encouraging.

"We won't have much to lend on schemes like that. Perhaps the board can find a thousand or two for a shed, some saw pits, and a year's wages for a gang of nigras. If you can find the nigras."

"I had thought of installing steam machinery —"

"Out of the question if you must borrow to buy it. There are so many wanting to rebuild, begging for help. This is a wounded land, Madeline. Just look around the city."

"Yes, I have. Well, you're very generous to help with the mortgages, Leverett."

"Please don't consider it charity. The plantation is valuable — one of the finest in the district. The owner, your brother-in-law, is an esteemed member of the community. And you, as the manager, are an excellent risk as well. An eminently responsible citizen."

He means, she thought sadly, I am not a troublemaker. How responsible would he think her if he knew the nature of her next call?

"Instead of going back to the company, I stayed here to work on these," Cooper said. At his feet on the dry brown grass of the walled garden lay pencil sketches of a pier for the Carolina Shipping Company. From the house came a hesitant version of the central theme from Mozart's Twenty-first Concerto, in C, played on a piano badly out of tune.

Cooper turned to his wife. "May we have some tea, or a reasonable substitute?" Judith smiled and retired. "Now, Madeline, what prompts this unexpected and pleasant visit?"

She sat down on a rusting bench of black-painted iron. "I want to start a school at Mont Royal."

In the act of bending to gather the penciled sheets, Cooper jerked his head up and stared. His dark hair hung over his pale forehead. His sunken eyes were wary. "What kind of school, pray?"

"One to teach reading and arithmetic to anyone who wants to learn. The freed Negroes in the district desperately need a few basic skills if they're to survive."

"No.'' Cooper crushed all the sketches and threw the ball under an azalea bush. His color was high. "No. I can't allow you to do it."

Equally emotional, she said, "I am not asking your permission, merely doing you the courtesy of telling you my intentions."

A flat-bosomed young girl poked her head from a tall window on the piazza one story above. "Papa, why are you shouting? Why, Aunt Madeline, good afternoon."

"Good afternoon, Marie-Louise."

Cooper's daughter was thirteen. She would never be a beauty, and indeed might be homely in maturity. She seemed aware of her deficiencies and worked hard to overcome them with tomboy energy and a great deal of smiling. People liked her, Madeline adored her.

"Go inside and keep practicing," Cooper snapped.

Marie-Louise gulped and retreated. The Mozart began again, with nearly as many wrong notes as right ones.

"Madeline, allow me to remind you that feelings against the nigras, and anyone who champions them, are running high. It would be folly to exacerbate those feelings. You must not open a school."

"Cooper, again, it isn't your decision." She tried to be gentle with him, but the message was unavoidably harsh. "You gave me management of the plantation, in writing. So I intend to go ahead. I will have a school."

He paced, glowering. This was a new, distinctly unfriendly Cooper Main, a side of him she'd never seen. The silence lengthened. Madeline tried to patch over the difficulty. "I had hoped you'd be on my side. Education of black people is no longer against the law, after all."

"But it's unpopular ..." He hesitated, then burst out, "If you goad people, they'll no longer exercise any restraint."

"Restraint in regard to what?"

"You! Everyone looks the other way now, pretending you're not — Well, you understand. If you start a school, they won't be so tolerant."

Madeline's face was white. She had expected someone, someday, to threaten her about her parentage, but she'd never expected it would be her brother-in-law.

"Here's the tea."

Curls bobbing, Judith brought a tray of chipped cups and saucers down the stairs. On the last iron step she halted, aware of the storm on her husband's face.

"I'm afraid Madeline is leaving," he said. "She only stopped by to tell me something about Mont Royal. Thank you for your courtesy, Madeline. For your own sake, I urge you to change your mind. Good day."

He turned his back and hunted under the azalea for the crushed drawings. Judith remained on the step, stunned by the rudeness. Madeline, concealing her hurt, patted Judith's arm, hurried up the noisy iron stairs, and ran from the house.

6

The U.S. Army trained cavalry recruits at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri. The camp of instruction was located on the west bank of the Mississippi, a few miles south of St. Louis.

When Charles arrived there, a contract surgeon examined him for false teeth, visible tumors, and signs of venereal disease and alcoholism. Pronounced fit, he was marched away, along with a former corset salesman from Hartford who said he craved adventure, a New York City roughneck who said little and probably was running away from a lot, an Indiana carpenter who said he'd awakened one morning to discover he hated his wife, a chatterbox boy who said he'd lied about his age, and a handsome man who said nothing. When the recruits reached a ramshackle barracks, the white-haired corporal pointed to the silent man.

"French Foreign Legion. Can't hardly speak no English. Jesus an' Mary, don't we get 'em all? And for a rotten thirteen dollars a month." He studied Charles. "I seen your papers. Reb, wasn't you?"

Charles was edgy about that. He'd already drawn some sharp looks because of his accent, and had heard "Goddamn traitor" behind his back once. He wanted to snap at the corporal, but he remembered Jack Duncan's caution and just said, "Yes."

"Well, it don't matter to me. My first cousin Fielding, he was a Reb, too. If you're as good a soldier as him, you'll be more use to Uncle Sam than the rest of this flotsam. Good luck." He stepped back and yelled, "All right, you people. Through that door and find a bunk. Hurry it up! This ain't a goddamn hotel you're checkin' into."

Charles took the oath to support and defend the Constitution. He had no problem with that; he'd already taken it Once, at West Point. And when the war ended, he'd made up his mind to raise his son as an American, not a Southerner.

It did seem strange to be issued so much blue again. The light blue kersey trousers with the yellow stripes and the dull gray fatigue shirts reminded him of the Second Cavalry. So did the barracks, with its poor ventilation, smoky lamps, narrow slot windows at each end, and sounds of scurrying rodents at night. So did his Army cot, an iron-framed torture device with wood slats and stringers and a mattress shell filled with smelly straw. So did the Army food, especially the hardtack and the beef served up in tough slices at noon mess, then submerged in a sludgy gravy for supper; the meat tasted better with the gravy, which masked the faint odor of spoilage.

Jefferson Barracks proved to be not so much a training center as a holding pen. Recruits were sent out as soon as a regiment's required number of replacements could be gathered. So training could last two months or two days. That didn't speak well for the postwar Army, Charles thought.

Most of the instructors were older noncoms putting in time until they retired. Charles worked hard to look inexperienced and awkward in front of them. During a bareback equitation class, he deliberately fell of his pathetic sway-backed training horse. He fumbled through the manual of arms, and at target practice never hit the bull, only the edge of the card. He got away with it until one trainer got sick and a new one took over, a runty corporal named Hans Hazen. He was a mean sort; one of the men said he'd been busted from top sergeant three times.

After a saber drill, Hazen drew Charles aside.

"Private May, I got a queer feeling you ain't no Carolina militiaman. You try to look clumsy, but I saw some of your moves when you thought I was watchin' somebody else." He thrust his chin out and shouted. "Where were you trained? West Point?"

Charles looked down at him. "Wade Hampton Legion. Sir."

Hazen shook a finger. "I catch you lyin', it'll go hard. I hate liars near as much as I hate snobs from the Point — or you Southron boys."

"Yes, sir," Charles said loudly. He kept staring. Hazen looked away first, which shamed him to anger.

"I want to see what you're made of. A hundred laps of the riding ring, quick time. Right now. March!"

After that, Corporal Hazen stayed on him, yelling, criticizing, questioning him daily about his past and forcing him to lie. Despite Hazen — maybe, in a strange way, because of him; because Hazen recognized an experienced soldier — Charles felt happy to be back in the Army. He'd always liked the dependable routine of trumpet calls, assemblies, drills. He still felt a shiver up his backbone when the trumpeters blew "Boots and Saddles."

He kept to himself and didn't find a bunky, a partner. Most soldiers paired up to ease their work load and share their miseries, but he avoided it. He survived three weeks that way, although not without some sudden bouts of despondency. Thoughts of the past would return suddenly, the burned-out feeling would grip him, and he'd call himself a prize fool for donning Army blue again. He was in that kind of mood one Saturday night when he left the post and crossed the main approach road to the nameless town of tents and shanties on the other side.

Here a lot of noncoms lived with their wives, who took in post laundry to supplement Army pay. Here civilians hawked questionable whiskey in big tents, docile Osage Indians sold beans and squash from their farms nearby, and elegant gentlemen ran all-night poker and faro games. Charles had even seen a few earnestly stupid recruits betting on three-card monte or the pea and shells.

Other amenities were available in any tent with a red lantern hung in front. Charles called at one of these and spent a half hour with a homely young woman anxious to please. He walked out physically relieved but depressed by memories of Gus Barclay and a feeling that he'd dishonored her.

Two young boys ran after him as he walked through the tent town. They taunted him with a chant:

"Soldier, soldier, will you work?

No indeed, I'll sell my shirt..."

The public certainly held the Army in high esteem. As soon as the war ended, soldiers had again become the unwashed, the unwanted. Nothing ever changed.

He'd been at Jefferson Barracks four weeks when orders came through: He and seven other recruits were given twelve hours to prepare to leave on a steamer bound up the Missouri River to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, all the way across the state of Missouri. Established in 1827 by Colonel Henry Leavenworth, the great cantonment on the right bank of the river was the most important post in the West. It was headquarters for the Department of the Missouri and the supply depot for all the forts between Kansas and the Continental Divide. At Leavenworth they would find transportation, they were told, to carry them to duty with the Sixth Cavalry, down on the northern Texas frontier. The prospect pleased Charles. He'd loved the natural beauty of Texas when he was stationed at Camp Cooper before the war.

While a thunderstorm flashed and roared above the barracks, he packed his carpetbag and a small wooden footlocker in which he kept his Army-issue clothing. He put on his blue blouse, which had a roll collar, and his kepi with the enlisted man's version of the cavalry's crossed sabers. The storm quickly diminished, and he walked through light rain to the tent town, whistling a jaunty march version of the little tune that reminded him of home.

The storm had toppled some of the smaller tents and muddied the dirt lanes. Charles headed for the largest and brightest of the drinking tents, the Egyptian Palace, whose owner came from Cairo, Illinois. The tent was shabby. A piece of canvas divided an area for officers from the one for enlisted men and civilians. The whiskey was cheap and raw, but Charles felt a rare contentment as he sipped it.

Right after he'd ordered a second drink, a trio of noisy noncoms stumbled in. One was Corporal Hazen, wobbling. Evidently he'd been drinking for some time. He spied Charles at the end of the plank bar and made a remark about a foul smell.

Charles stared at him until he looked away and shrilly ordered a round for his friends. Charles was thankful Hazen didn't feel like pushing it. He felt too good.

That lasted ten minutes.

Passing by on his way to the officers' entrance, a small, slight man saw a familiar face among the enlisted men inside. He looked away, took three more steps, then halted, his mouth open. He about-faced and peered into the smoky tent —

There was no mistake.

Color rose in his face as he went in. The men noticed his look and stopped talking.

The officer walked toward the end of the bar with an aggressive swagger — probably to make up for standing only five feet six. His shoulders were pulled back with the stiffness of someone preoccupied with Army formality. Everything about him suggested fussiness: the waxy points of his mustache, the impeccable trim of his goatee.

Yellow facings and trouser stripes identified him as cavalry. A lieutenant colonel's silver-embroidery oak leaf decorated his shoulder straps. He marched down the bar and, as he passed a burly, bearded civilian wearing a notched turkey feather in his hair and a buckskin coat decorated with porcupine quills and gaudy diamond-shaped pony beads, he accidentally bumped the man's arm, spilling whiskey.

"Hey, you jackass," the man said. As he turned, the beads on his coat shot darts of reflected light through the tent. A brindle dog at his feet responded to his tone and growled at the officer, who strode on without apology, tightly clutching the hilt of his dress sword.

"Cap'n Venable, sir," Charles heard Hazen say as the officer reached the three noncoms. The silver oak leaf was from a war­time brevet, then.

"Hazen," the man said, striding on. Charles watched him, and the back of his neck started to itch. He didn't recognize the officer. Yet something about the man bothered him.

Venable halted two feet from Charles. "I saw you from the street, Private. What's your name?"

Charles tried to place the accent. Not truly Southern, but similar. One of the border states? He said, "Charles May. Sir."

"That's a damn lie." The officer snatched the whiskey glass from Charles's hand and threw the contents in his face.

A sudden uproar of talk; then, just as suddenly, silence. Whiskey dripped from Charles's chin and ran off the edge of the plank bar. Charles wanted to hit the little rooster but held back because he didn't understand what was happening. He was certain there was some mistake.

"Captain —" he began.

"You'll address me as colonel. And don't bother to keep on lying. Your name isn't May; it's Charles Main. You graduated from West Point in 1857, two years before I did. You and that damn reb Fitz Lee were thick as this." The officer held up two fingers. Instantly, the bearded face acquired a past that Charles remembered.

He bluffed. "Sir, you're mistaken."

"The hell. You remember me, and I remember you. Harry Venable. Kentucky. You put me on report four times for a messy room. Twenty skins each time. I damn near accumulated two hundred and took the Canterberry Road because of you."

Even in a stupor, Hazen caught on. He wiped his nose and exclaimed to his friends, "Didn't I tell you? Didn't I spot it?" He stepped away from the bar, in case Charles tried a dash to the entrance.

Charles didn't know how to extricate himself peacefully. More memories came back, including Venable's cadet nickname. It was Handsome, usually spoken sarcastically. No one liked the little bastard. He was too correct, a fanatic perfectionist.

"You had to lie to get in the cavalry again," Venable said. "West Point graduates are excluded from the amnesty."

"Colonel, I have to earn a living. Soldiering's all I know. I'd be in your debt if you could overlook —"

"Overlook treason? Let me tell you something. It was men from your side — John Hunt Morgan's men — who overran my mother's farm while I was serving on General Sherman's staff. Those men ran off our stock, burned the house and outbuildings, cut my mother down with sabers, and committed —" he reddened and lowered his voice — "sexual atrocities on my twelve-year-old sister, God knows how many times. Then they killed her with three minié balls."

"Colonel, I'm sorry, but I'm not responsible for every Confederate partisan, any more than you're responsible for all of Sherman's bummers. I am truly sorry about your family, but —"

Venable slammed Charles's shoulder with the palm of his hand. "Stop saying sorry like some damn parrot. Sorry doesn't begin to pay the bill."

Charles wiped whiskey from his cheek. The tent was very still. "Don't push me again."

Venable quickly surveyed the crowd, saw Hazen and his friends ready to help. He flexed his fingers at his sides, closing them in a fist. "I'll push you whenever I please, you fucking traitor." He gut-punched Charles.

Charles wasn't expecting the blow. It doubled him. He grabbed his middle, choking. Venable pounded his jaw, spinning him sideways. Hazen and the other two noncoms jumped forward to seize Charles as he flailed, off balance.

Venable signaled toward the tent entrance. The noncoms dragged Charles the length of the bar and threw him outside. Still off balance, he landed in the mud.

Venable by then had removed his dress sword. He unfastened his brightly polished buttons and stripped off his dress coat. To the crowd he said, "Before that lying reb gets a bad-character discharge, he's going to get a little something from me. Come help out if you want."

Most of the soldiers and civilians grinned and clapped, although the burly man in the beaded coat said, " 'Pears to me those odds are kind of unfair, Colonel."

Venable turned on him. "If you don't want to join in, keep quiet. Else you'll get what he gets."

The burly man stared and restrained his growling dog as Venable strode out.

In the light rain, Charles struggled to rise from the mud. Hazen darted past Venable, yanked Charles's head up by the hair, and smashed his nose with his other hand. Blood spurted. Charles flopped on his back. Hazen stamped on his belly.

"I want him," Venable said, pushing the corporal away. He gazed down at Charles, who was clutching his middle and trying to sit up. Venable's mouth wrenched as he drew his right boot back. He kicked Charles in the ribs.

Charles cried out and fell on his side. Venable kicked him in the small of the back. Flushed, he said, "A couple of you get him up."

Hazen and a companion grabbed Charles under his arms and pulled. Charles's head rang. His ribs ached. Usually he could take care of himself, but, taken by surprise, he'd lost the advantage.

On his feet, he wrenched away from the noncoms hanging on him. He was slimy with mud. It glistened in the lamplight and dripped from his hair and mingled with the blood running from his nose. He swayed in the circle of rain-slicked faces, most of them laughing; few took this with the unsmiling ferocity Venable displayed. Charles knew his second chance in the Army was lost. All he could do now was extract some punishment. Like a bull, he lowered his head.

He charged Venable, who leaped back. Charles pivoted and caught the startled Hazen, as he'd planned. Teeth clenched, he pulled Hazen's head down with both hands while raising his knee. Hazen's jawbone cracked like a firecracker going off.

The corporal reeled away, shrieking. One of the other noncoms flung himself at Charles from behind, battering Charles's neck with the side of his hand. Charles staggered. Venable punched his head twice, kicked his groin. Charles flew backward into the crowd. They pushed him forward again, laughing, jeering.

"What happened to that ol' fighting spirit, reb?"

"Got no more rebel yells left, reb?"

"Pass him around the circle, boys. We'll get a yell out of him."

So they began, one man holding him while the man on the right punched him. Then the holder passed him to the next man and became the one who punched. When Charles sagged, they pulled him back up. They were about to pass him to a fourth man when someone said, "Leave him be."

Venable started to swear. Something hard and cool slipped across his throat and, from nowhere, a hand shot under his left arm and up to his neck. He was caught between a callused palm pushing on the back of his neck and a hand holding the cutting edge of a huge Bowie against his throat.

It was the man in the beaded coat. He smelled of wet buckskin and horses. A civilian snarled, "Another goddamn Southron."

"No. And I don't even know this fella. But you wouldn't treat a four-legged cur that bad. Drop him."

The men holding Charles watched Venable. With the knife at his throat, he blinked rapidly and whispered, "Do it." The men released Charles. He toppled facedown, sending up splatters of mud. With a contemptuous shove, the bearded man let go of Venable, who started to swear again. The bearded man stopped him by laying the point of the Bowie against the tip of Venable's nose.

"Anytime, little man. Just anytime, one to one, 'thout a platoon to help you."

Venable shook his finger at Charles, sprawled in the mud. "That son of a bitch is through in the U.S. Army. Done!"

The bearded man twisted the knife. A little ruby of blood appeared on Venable's nose. "Light outa here, you slime. I mean right now."

Venable blinked and blinked and somehow managed a sneery smile. He turned and limped into the Egyptian Palace. "Follow me, lads. I'm buying this round."

They gave him three cheers and a tiger, carried Hazen inside, and didn't look back.

The rain fell harder. The man in the beaded coat sheathed his knife and watched Charles struggle to rise, fail, and flop back in the mud face first.

The man, who looked to be fifty or so, walked toward the lee of the tent. The dog, trotting after him, was good-sized, gray with white and black markings. A circle of black ringed its left eye, a piratical touch. It shook itself twice, showering water. Then it whined. Its owner merely said, "Shut up, Fen."

Standing in the shadows by the tent was a large, fat boy of fifteen, pale and beardless. He wore an old wool coat and jeans pants, heavily mended. His limpid dark eyes had a slight slant, and above his eyebrows and ears his head was much larger, round and almost flat on top, resembling a section of fence post.

The youngster looked frightened. The man laid a hand on his shoulder. "You're all right, Boy. The fightin's over. There won't be no more. You don't need to be scairt."

The boy reached out with both hands and clasped the right hand of the older man, a pathetic look of gratitude on his face. The man reached over with his left hand and patted the boy's, reassuringly. "I'm sorry I gave in to my thirst and made you wait out here. But you can stop bein' scairt."

The boy watched him, eager to understand. In the lane, Charles groaned and jammed his fists in the mud. He raised his head and chest two feet off the ground and wearily looked toward the speaker. The man in the pony-bead coat knew the soldier didn't see him.

"Determined cuss," he said. "Plenty of sand. And he sure can't go back in the Army now. Maybe we found our man. If we didn't, we can at least do the Christian thing and shelter him in our tipi."

He pushed the youngster's hands down and gently took hold of one, squeezing it. "Come on, Boy. Help me pick him up." Hand in hand, they walked forward.

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

"Painted stakes?" Johnson fumed.

"Yes, Mr. President. Sold to colored men in South Carolina for as much as two dollars."

Andrew Johnson flung the ribbon-tied report on his desk. "Mr. Hazard, it's disgraceful."

The seventeenth president of the United States was a swarthy man of forty-eight. He was in a choleric mood. His visitor, Stanley Hazard, thought him canaille. What else could one expect of a backwoods tailor barely able to read or write until his wife taught him? Johnson wasn't even a Republican. He'd run with Lincoln in '64 as a National Union Party candidate, to create a bipartisan wartime ticket.

Canaille and a Democrat he might be, but Andrew Johnson still meant to have an explanation. His black eyes simmered as Stanley picked up the report with hands that trembled slightly. Stanley was one of Edwin Stanton's several Assistant Secretaries at the War Department. His particular responsibility was liaison with the Freedmen's Bureau, an administrative branch of the department.

"Yes, sir, it is disgraceful," he said. "I can assure you the Bureau had no hand in it. Neither Secretary Stanton nor General Howard would tolerate such a cruel hoax."

"What about the rumor that inspired the swindle? Every free nigra down there to be given a mule and forty acres by Christmas? Forty acres — his to stake out in patriotic colors. Who spread that story?"

Sweat shone on Stanley's pale, jowly face. Why did Howard, chief of the Bureau, have to be away from Washington, leaving him to answer the summons to the President's office? Why couldn't he speak forcefully, or at least recall some of Howard's religious platitudes? He wanted a drink.

"Well, Mr. Secretary?"

"Sir" — Stanley's voice quavered — "General Saxton assured me that Bureau agents in South Carolina did nothing to inflame the Negroes, create false hope, or spread the rumor."

"Then where did it come from?"

"So far as we know, sir, from a chance remark by —" He cleared his throat. He hated to criticize an important member of his own party, but he had to think of his job, much as he loathed it. "A remark by Congressman Stevens."

That scored a point. Johnson sniffed as though smelling bad fish. Stanley went on. "He said something about confiscating and redistributing three hundred million acres of rebel land. Perhaps that is Mr. Stevens's wish, but there is no such program at the Bureau, nor any intent to begin one."

"Yet the story spread to South Carolina, didn't it? And it enabled unprincipled sharps to sell those painted stakes far and wide, didn't it? I don't think you understand the extent of the mischief, Hazard. Not only is the rumor of forty acres and a mule a cruel deception of the Negroes, but it also affronts and alienates the very white people we must draw back as working partners. I dislike the planter class as much as you —" More, Stanley thought. Johnson's hatred of aristocrats was legendary. "But the Constitution tells me they were never out of the Union, because the Constitution makes the very act of secession impossible."

He leaned forward, like a truculent schoolmaster. "That is why my program for the South consists of three simple points only. The defeated states must repudiate the Confederate war debt. They must overturn their secession ordinances. And they must abolish slavery by ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment. They are not required to do more because the federal government cannot, constitutionally, ask more. General Sherman failed to understand that when he confiscated coastal and river lands with his illegal Field Order 15, now rescinded, thank the Almighty. Your Bureau doesn't understand. You talk widely and blithely of the franchise, when qualifying a voter is a matter for the individual states. And no one at all seems to understand that if we threaten to give away their land, we will further harden the hearts of the very Southerners we want back in the fold. Do you blame me for being exercised? I am signing pardons at the rate of a hundred a day, and then I receive that report."

"Mr. President, I must respectfully repeat, the Bureau is not in any way responsible for —"

"Who else spread the promise of forty acres? In lieu of any evident culprit, I hold the Bureau responsible. Kindly convey that to Mr. Stanton and General Howard. Now be so good as to excuse me."

These days Stanley Hazard's life was unremitting misery. To try to make it bearable, he regularly took his first drink before eight o'clock in the morning. He kept various wines and brandies locked in his desk in the old office building temporarily housing the Freedmen's Bureau. If he drank too much during the day, and so misunderstood a question or stumbled or dropped something, he always muttered the same excuse, that he was feeling faint. But he fooled few.

Stanley did have reasons for being wretched. Years ago, his younger brother George had denied him any control of the family ironworks. Deep down, Stanley knew why. He was incompetent.

His wife, Isabel, two years older, was an ambitious harpy. She'd borne him twin sons, Laban and Levi, who were in trouble so often Stanley kept a special bank fund for bribing magistrates and jailers and paying off pregnant girls. The twins were eighteen, and Stanley was desperately shoveling bribe money — Isabel referred to it as "philanthropic donation" — to Yale and to Dartmouth, hoping to get the boys admitted and out of his house. He couldn't stand them.

Nor, paradoxically, could he understand or deal with the enormous wealth generated by his shoe business during the war.

The factory up in Lynn was now on the market. Isabel insisted they get out of the trade, because normal competition was returning. Stanley knew he didn't deserve his success.

Then, too, his former mistress, a music-hall artiste named Jeannie Canary, had deserted him after Isabel discovered the relationship. Jeannie was bound to leave him anyway, Stanley had decided. Many other suitors had as much money as he did, and he was not a good lover; stress and whiskey made it impossible for him to get it up often enough to satisfy her. Miss Canary was rumored to be the mistress of some Republican politician, thus far nameless.

All Stanley had to show for a life of struggle and suffering was more of the same, and a horsy, pretentious wife he faced every night in the huge, beautiful, desolate dining room in their mansion on I Street. So he drank. It kept him going when he was awake. And, mercifully, it put him to sleep.

"Johnson is after the Bureau, is that it, Stanley?"

"Yes. He'd like to see it dismantled. He believes that by acting in accordance with Radical objectives, we're tampering with states' rights."

"I suppose it isn't surprising," Isabel mused. "He's a Democrat and essentially a Southerner. I'm curious about land in the South. Why should it be fought over? Is it that valuable?"

Stanley swallowed the rest of his third glass of champagne. "Not at the moment. Some confiscated by the Treasury can be bought for almost nothing. Of course, long term, it's very valuable. Property is always valuable. And cash crops are the whole basis of the Southern economy. They have no industrial economy and never did."

Isabel's eyes gleamed above the candles. "Then perhaps we should look into investments in the South, to replace the factory."

He sat back, astounded as always by her audacity, and the way her mind leaped to sink fangs into some prey he hadn't even spotted. "Are you saying you'd like me to make inquiries at the Treasury?"

"No, sweet. I'll make them. In person. I am going to leave you for a week or so — I'm sure that grieves you terribly," she added with venom. He silently called her a witch, smiled a sickly smile, and poured more champagne.

Philo Trout, a cheerful, muscular young Treasury agent, met Isabel's steamer in Charleston. Their inland journey was delayed twenty-four hours because a tropical storm came onshore, ripping the city with gale winds and pouring out more than six inches of rain before moving inland.

Once they set out, Trout's covered buggy labored along muddy roads, and Isabel surveyed submerged fields on either side. She asked about the standing water. Trout said, "Storm surge from the tidal rivers. The salt will poison those fields for a few seasons."

This immediately banished the idea that had brought Isabel south: absentee ownership of Carolina farmland. The storms, which came regularly, created too great a risk for her taste, or her money, although she didn't say this to Trout.

On the river road along the Ashley, he pointed out various plantations including Mont Royal. Isabel reacted with silent disgust, but she never so much as hinted that she knew the owners.

A few miles farther on, Trout stopped the buggy at a cross­roads store, whose crookedly hung sign said GETTYS BROS. Nailed over the front door was a board painted with one word:

C L O Z E D.

Trout pushed back his straw planter's hat and put his boot on the footboard. "Now here's an interesting proposition, though it isn't what you said you wanted. Still, someone could make money on this little store and never have to worry about the salt in the rivers."

Isabel wrinkled her nose. "How could such a sorry place be profitable?"

"Three ways, ma'am, all predicated on having the capital to stock it properly. Real money, not Confederate paper. The local planters need goods. Implements, staples, seed. First, the store could charge plenty at the time of the sale. But the planters and the freedmen don't have real money to pay. So the store could treat each sale as a loan — the cost, at any price you set, plus interest, at any rate you determine. Fifty percent? Ninety? They'd have to take it or starve."

Just then, despite the cloying heat of the marshy country, and the insects, and the stench of decay, Isabel decided that the discomforts of the trip were worth it.

"You mentioned a third way, Mr. Trout."

"Yes indeed. To secure every loan with goods, you also demand a fixed percent of the next rice or cotton crop." He grinned. "Ingenious?"

"I couldn't think of anything more ingenious myself." She dabbed her moist lip. "Who could run a store like this?"

"Well, ma'am, if you bought it, you'd undoubtedly want a new manager, your husband being with the Bureau and all. The fellow who ran it before it closed, Randall Gettys, is pretty much of a secesh. I know him. If he stayed on, and assuming he'd even consider selling to nig — uh, the colored, he'd charge them eight or ten times what he charged whites, just for spite."

Isabel beamed. "Why, dear Mr. Trout, what of that? It's true that my husband and I are Republicans, but I really don't care about the prejudices or operating policies of a store manager if he makes money."

"Oh, Randall Gettys could do that, definitely. He knows everybody around here. Used to print a little newspaper for the district. Wants to start it again."

"He may charge the nigras ten times what he charges white people, so long as no one in Washington finds out, and my husband and I are never connected with the business. That point would have to be impressed on him."

"Randall and his kinfolk are so desperate, they'd sign a contract to sell ice in hell."

Isabel could hardly contain her excitement. As usual, it was she who prospected and struck gold, while Stanley stayed behind.

"Everything could be arranged," Trout assured her. He picked up the reins and turned the buggy around. "I can buy the property for you at tax auction next month."

The horse plodded back toward Mont Royal. Shadows of Spanish moss drifted across Isabel's perspiring face.

"We have one more consideration to discuss, ma'am."

"Your fee for services — and silence?"

"Yes, ma'am." Trout's sunny face shone. "You know, I worked as a telegraph operator in Dayton, Ohio, before my uncle got me this job. I've made more in six months than I'd make in a lifetime up North."

"The South is proving a land of opportunity for all, isn't it?" said Isabel with another smugly charming smile.

7

"Too short a visit," George said, raising his voice above the racket of baggage being loaded two cars ahead. He hugged Brett. Despite her voluminous skirts, he was conscious of her stomach. "Take care of that youngster I'm not supposed to mention — and get to San Francisco in plenty of time."

Steam blew around them. Brett's lavender-scented cheek felt damp against his. "Don't worry. He'll be born a Californian."

"You're certain it's he?" Constance said.

"Positive," Billy answered. He looked spruce in his new sack-style coat of dark gray and trousers and cravat of lighter gray. He and Constance embraced, then the ladies hugged. George shook his brother's hand.

"I can't hide it, Billy. I wish you'd stay in Pennsylvania."

"Too many memories on this side of the Mississippi. I'll always love West Point, but, like you, I've had my bellyful of armies." And what armies are sent out to do. George heard that unspoken conclusion.

"God protect you and everyone, George," Billy said.

"And you and Brett and your new son. Since Constance is the religious one in the family, I'll ask her to pray for calm seas while you sail down South America and around the Cape."

"It's winter there, but we'll manage."

Better than I'm managing, George thought, with a deep melancholy. It had held him in its grip, making him unreasonably pensive and lethargic, ever since his confrontation with Stevens in Washington.

Constance said, "If your ship calls at the port of Los Angeles for more than a few hours, please visit my father's law office, and give him my love."

"By all means," Billy said, nodding. The conductor called, "All aboard." From a few steps away, Patricia waved at the departing travelers. William had his eye on an attractive girl hurrying into a rear car. Through her smile, Patricia hissed, "Wave, you rude beast!" William stuck out his tongue at her, then waved.

The Lehigh Valley local began to move. George rushed along the platform beside Billy and Brett's car, calling out, "Do press Madeline about another loan if she needs it." "We will," Brett called back. "Billy, send a message when you're safely settled." "Promise," his brother shouted. The whistle shrilled. "You let me know if the War Department finds Charles."

George replied with an emphatic nod; the car was drawing away. So far the Department had failed to answer two letters from Billy asking the whereabouts of his best friend, who was supposed to be serving in the cavalry out West.

George ran faster, waving his shiny plug hat and shouting other things, which no one heard. Constance called to him to come back. The train chugged past the end of the platform and gained speed, following the riverbank and the old canal bed. Billy and Brett disappeared.

How George envied their youth, their independence. He admired their bravery, too, in setting out for a state they'd only read about in unreliable Gold Rush guidebooks. Americans were prospering in California, though. Four businessmen were blasting and tunneling through the Sierras to build part of a transcontinental rail line, and in a few years the Pacific coast would be linked with the rest of the country. Billy was determined to start a civil engineering firm, and no promise from George of a secure and lucrative future with Hazard's would deter him.

"Damn," George said, stopping at the end of the platform. He wiped his eyes before turning back to his family. He knew what his brother meant about memories east of the Mississippi. They had discussed it for hours one night, after everyone else was asleep. The war had touched both of them — changed them, perhaps damaged them, in ways that were deep, fundamental, and, in some cases, beyond understanding.

George described a meeting with two ex-soldiers before he left Washington. In the saloon bar at Willard's Hotel, the men had been drinking heavily; they were blearily candid. One and then the other admitted that he felt bereft now that the highly charged excitement of the war was but a memory.

As the night grew older, each of the brothers told of his own ghosts. Billy would forever be haunted by memories of his comrade, old Lije Farmer, who'd died in battle despite his unshakable belief in God's goodness. Nor could he forget his internment in Libby Prison, or the mistreatment there; he still had nightmares about it. He probably would have died there but for his wild, desperate escape, planned and carried, out by Charles and Orry Main. And, from the end of the war, he remembered the ruthless, bleak look of his best friend, Charles, the last time they met.

George couldn't forget the moment he learned of Orry's death, or the half hour he'd knelt by Orry's empty grave at Mont Royal, burying there a letter of friendship written in 1861 but never sent. The letter expressed his hope that the ties of affection between the Mains and the Hazards would survive the war, and that each of the family members would survive, top. For Orry, it had been a vain wish.

Sunk in despondency, George walked back to his family. Constance saw his condition. She took his arm as they returned to the lacquered phaeton, its hinged top section folded down in the August heat. The driver held the door for the Hazards, then took his seat and popped the whip over the heads of the fine matched bays.

My town, George thought as the phaeton proceeded toward the hill road. He owned a majority interest in the Bank of Lehigh Station, one square over, and he owned the Station House Hotel, on his left, and about a third of the real estate within the town limits. Most of it was in the commercial section along the river, but he also owned fourteen substantial brick homes on the higher, terraced streets. These were rented by foremen at Hazard's and by some of the wealthier merchants.

As the carriage rolled along, George searched the streets for the town's three war casualties. He saw the blind boy begging on the crowded sidewalk near Pinckney Herbert's general store. He didn't see the peg-legged boy, but in the next block he spied Tom Hassler.

"Stop, Jerome. Just for a moment."

He jumped from the carriage; Patricia and William sighed with impatience. George's short legs carried him to the boy he'd given a job at Hazard's. But Tom couldn't manage even the simplest task, so he shambled through Lehigh Station every day, rattling a tin cup in which his mother put pebbles to suggest that others had already given. George stuffed a ten-dollar note in the cup. The sight of Tom's slack mouth and dead brown eyes always destroyed him. Like the town's other two maimed veterans, Tom Hassler was not yet twenty.

"How are you today, Tommy?"

The boy's vacant eyes drifted across the hazy river to the laurel-covered slopes on the far side. "Fine, sir. Waiting for orders from General Meade. We'll charge those rebs over there on Seminary Ridge before dark."

"That's right, Tom. You'll carry the day, too."

He turned away. How shameful, this urge to weep that came upon him so often of late. He climbed into the phaeton and slammed the half-door, avoiding his wife's eye. How shameful! What is happening to me?

What was happening, he sometimes understood, was exactly what had happened to his brother and to thousands of other men. Powerful and unfamiliar emotions in the wake of the surrender. Bad dreams. Thoughts of friendships formed in the strange giddy atmosphere of ever-present death. Memories of good men slain in pointless skirmishes, and of fools and pale trembling cowards who survived by accident or by means of a feigned illness the night before a battle ...

What had happened to George, and to America, was a four-year struggle of a kind never before experienced in the world. Not only had cousin slain cousin, brother slain brother — that was not new — but mechanized weapons, the railroad, the telegraph, had brought a new efficiency to the art of slaughter. In meadows and creek bottoms and pretty, rustic glens, innocents had fought the first modern war.

It was a war that refused to release George now. Constance saw that in her husband's pained, lost eyes as the phaeton followed the winding road up toward Belvedere, their mansion on the summit. She wanted to touch him, but she felt that his pain was beyond her reach — perhaps beyond anyone's.

George spent the afternoon at Hazard's. The firm was almost completely converted from war production to the fabrication of wrought iron for architectural embellishment, cast-iron parts for other products, and, perhaps most important, rails. Nearly all of the South's railroads were in ruins. And in the West, two lines had created another huge new market. The Union Pacific, along the Platte route, and the Union Pacific, Eastern Division, in Kansas — no connection despite similar names — were racing each other to the hundredth meridian. The first to lay track to the meridian would win the right to go the rest of the way and link up with the Central Pacific, building east from California.

George didn't arrive home until the family members had dined and were gathered around their new treasure, a grand piano, sent as a gift by Henry Steinweg and his sons in New York. Hazard's provided much of the iron plate for the firm's pianos, which were called Steinways, because Steinweg thought that name more euphonious, commercial, and American. Steinweg had come a long way from the red field of Waterloo, where he'd soldiered against Napoleon. George liked him.

He greeted the family and in the kitchen found some slices of cold roast, all he needed for supper. On the veranda, he sat down, put a foot on the rail, and penciled comments on an architect's site plan for a new foundry he wanted to build in Pittsburgh. The city, situated on two rivers that flowed into the Ohio, would almost certainly become the iron and steel center of the nation in the next ten years. George wanted to be in early, with Bessemer-process converters modified for greater dependability by a technique from Sweden.

Inside, Constance and Patricia sang while Patricia played. "Listen to the Mocking Bird" and "Dixie's Land" — Brett's favorite — and "Hail, Columbia!", which many considered the national anthem; Congress and the public couldn't decide on an official one.

Presently the singing stopped. George kept working until the August daylight failed. He saw the caretaker's lantern moving through the sheet-shrouded rooms of Stanley and Isabel's house next door. The owners were seldom in residence. George didn't miss them.

He tried some mathematical calculations involving a piece of land he was considering for the new plant. He got the wrong answer four times and finally threw the papers aside. The melancholia, formless yet consuming, came on him again. He wandered inside, feeling old and spent.

In the empty library, he stopped beside a polished table and studied the two objects he kept there. One was a fragment of a meteorite — star-iron, it was called in the trade in ancient times. To him, it represented metal's incredible power to improve life or, forged into weapons, eradicate it. Beside the meteorite lay a sprig of mountain laurel, so abundant in the valley. In the Hazard family, by tradition, the laurel was an emblem of resilience, survival, the certain triumph of hope and goodness made possible by love and by family. The sprig was dead, its leaves brown. George flung it into the cold hearth.

Behind him, the door rolled open. "I thought I heard you in here." When Constance kissed his cheek, he smelled the pleasant sweetness of chocolates. Her red hair was pinned up, her plump face shiny from a scrubbing.

She studied him. "What's wrong, dearest?"

"I don't know. I feel so damn miserable. I can't explain why."

"I can guess some of the reasons. Your brother's on his way to the other side of the continent, and you're probably feeling like those two men you told me about. The men at Willard's who admitted they missed the excitement of the war."

"I'd be ashamed to admit I missed killing human beings."

"Not killing. A heightened sense of life, like walking on the edge of a precipice. There's no shame in admitting that if it's the truth. The feelings will pass."

He nodded, though he didn't believe it. The near-despair seemed overwhelmingly potent.

"It will be even emptier here in a few weeks," he said. "William off to start at Yale, Patricia back in Bethlehem at the Moravian Seminary."

She stroked his bearded face with the cool back of her hand. "Parents always feel sad when the fledglings leave for the first time." She took his arm. "Come, let's walk a while. It will do you good."

In the hot night wind, they climbed the hill behind Belvedere. Away to the left below them spread the furnaces and sheds and warehouses of Hazard's, casting a red glare on the sky.

Unexpectedly, their path brought them to a place Constance would have preferred to avoid, because it symbolized despair. They were at the large crater produced by a meteorite that fell in the spring of '61, right at the time the war started.

George leaned over the edge and peered down. "Not a blade of grass. Not even a weed yet. Did it poison the earth?" He glanced at the path running on up the hill. "I suppose Virgilia passed this way the night she stole all that silver from the house."

"George, it doesn't help to recall only bad things."

"What else is there, goddamn it? Orry's dead. Tom Hassler wanders the streets with a mind that will never be right. We didn't strive hard enough to prevent war, and now we've inherited the whole rotten mess. They talk about the South's cause being lost. Well, so is America's. So is our family's. So is mine."

The chimneys of Hazard's shot spark showers into the night sky. Constance held him tightly. "Oh, I wish I could banish those feelings. I wish you didn't hurt so terribly."

"I'm sorry. I'm ashamed of how I feel. It isn't manly." He muffled an oath by burying his face in the warm curve of her throat. She heard him say, "Somehow I can't help it."

Silently, she prayed to the God in whom she devoutly believed. She asked Him to uncloud her husband's mind and lift his burdens. She begged Him not to add so much as one new burden, however small. She feared for George if that happened.

Silent in each other's arms, they stood a long time on the empty hill beside the dead crater.

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

Gettys affected an exaggerated politeness, hovering uncomfortably close to Madeline. His small round wire-rimmed spectacles shone. A huge white handkerchief billowed from the breast pocket of his greasy coat. Even closely shaved, his dark beard lent him a vaguely soiled look.

Madeline noted the profusion of goods on the shelves. "I didn't know you were so well stocked. Nor that you had the capital for it."

"A relative in Greenville furnished the money," Gettys said at once. She saw him glance at her breasts while he wiped his chin with his handkerchief. "It's a decided pleasure to see you, Mrs. Main. What may I sell you this morning?"

"Nothing just yet. I'd like to know your prices." She pointed to a barrel. "That seed corn, for instance."

"One dollar per bushel. And one-quarter of the crop produced, or the cash equivalent. For the colored, the price is double."

"Randall, I'm happy to have the store open, but I don't believe we can stand that kind of price-gouging in the district."

She said it without rancor. Even so, it enraged him. He shed his smarmy politeness. "What we can't stand is that infernal school you're putting up. A school for niggers!"

"And any white person who cares to better himself."

Gettys ignored the remark. "It's an outrage. Furthermore, it's a waste. A darky can't learn. His brain's too small. He's only fit to be our hewer of wood, our drawer of water, exactly as Scripture says. If a nigger does have a scintilla of intelligence, education just inflames his base passions and foments hatred of his betters."

"Dear God, Randall, spare me that old cant."

"No, ma'am," he exclaimed, "I will not. We lost the war but we haven't lost our senses. The white citizens of this district will not permit it to be Africanized."

Wearily, she turned and walked to the door.

"You'd better listen," he shouted. "You've been given fair warning."

Her back was toward him; he couldn't see her face, and the startled emotion evident there. She thought unhappily of Cooper's letter about Desmond LaMotte. How many would turn against her?

Parking the wagon and tethering the horses, Madeline saw two men from the congregation throw away their cigars and dart inside the small tabby church where Episcopalian families from the district had worshiped for generations.

Both Madeline and Prudence wore their best bonnets. They approached the double doors. Music from the church's tiny pump organ squealed to silence as the avuncular priest, Father Lovewell, stepped into the entrance. Beyond him, in sunlit pews, members of the congregation turned to stare at the women. Madeline saw many people she knew. They didn't look friendly.

"Mrs. Main —" The priest's pink cheeks shone with sweat that steamed his spectacles. He pitched his voice low. "This is most regrettable. I am asked to remind you that, ah, colored are not permitted to worship here."

"Colored?" she repeated, as if he'd hit her. "That's right. We have no separate balcony to accommodate you, and I can no longer allow you into the family pew." She saw it, second from the front on the left, empty. Her self-control disintegrated.

"Are you in earnest, Father?" "Yes, I am. I wish it could be otherwise, but —" "Then you're a vicious man, with no right to claim that you practice Christianity."

He put his face close to hers, wheezing. "I have Christian compassion for my own race. I have none for a mongrelized race that promotes unrest, plots arson, advocates hatred, and worships the devilish doctrines of black Republicanism."

Prudence looked baffled and angry. Madeline managed a radiant smile. "God smite you where you stand, Father. Before I creep off to hide like some — some leper, I'll see you in hell."

"Hell?" The smug, sweating face drew back. Soft white hands gripped the doors. "I doubt that."

"Oh, yes. You just reserved your place."

The congregation broke into angry conversation. The doors slammed.

"Come along," Madeline said, kicking her skirt out of the way as she whirled and marched to the wagon. Prudence hurried after her, confused.

"What did all that mean? Why did he call you a colored woman?"

Madeline sighed. "I should have told you when you arrived. I'll tell you as we drive home. If you wish, you can leave. As to what else Father Lovewell meant, I'm afraid it was a declaration of war. On Mont Royal, on the school, and on me."

8

Charles opened his eyes, braced his hands, pushed upward. An invisible sledge slammed his forehead and dropped him. "Godamighty."

He tried again. This time, despite the pain, he succeeded.

He stared across a small fire built in a shallow hole in the ground. Beyond the fire, a bearded man weather-burned to a dark brown bent a flexible stick back and forth, trying to break it. The man wore a coat so heavily beaded he might have come from a traveling medicine show. Near him a brindle dog lay gnawing a bone. Behind the man, cross-legged, sat a youth with slanted eyes and a malformed head.

Charles smelted something vile. "What in hell's that stink?"

"Bunch of herbs mashed in a paste of buffla brains," the man said. "I rubbed it on where they banged you the worst."

Charles began to perceive his surroundings. He was inside a tipi of hides stretched over a dozen eighteen-foot poles to form a cone, with a smoke hole at the top. He heard rain falling.

"That's right, this yere's our tipi," the bearded man said. "In the tongue of the Dakota Sioux, tipi means place-where-a-man-lives." He broke the stick and handed half across the fire. "Jerky. Do you good."

Charles bit off a chew of the smoked buffalo meat. "Thanks. I've had it before."

"Oh," said the man, pleased. "This ain't your first time in the West, then."

"Before the war, I served with Bob Lee's Second Cavalry in Texas."

The stranger's grin revealed stained teeth. "Better 'n' better." Charles changed position; the sledge struck again. "Listen, I wouldn't move too quick. You got more purple on you than a side of bad beef. While you was knocked out, I scouted around some. That little rooster who beat you up, he charged you with takin' the Grand Bounce."

"Deserting?"

"Yep. You better not go back on the post."

Charles sat up, fighting dizziness. "I have things there." The stranger pointed. Behind him, Charles discovered his carpetbag.

"I went in and picked it up. Nobody said boo 'cept for the boy on sentry duty. For a dollar, he looked the other way. What's your name?"

"Charles Main."

The man shot a hand over the fire. "Pleased to know you. I'm Adolphus O. Jackson. Wooden Foot to friends."

He lifted the leg of his hide pants and whacked his right boot, producing a hard sound. "Solid oak. Necessitated by a meet-up with some Utes when I was fourteen. My pa was alive then. We trapped beaver in the east foothills of the Rocky Mountains. One day, I was out alone and I got my foot in another man's trap by accident. Then the three Utes chanced by, in a bad mood. It was either get kilt or get outa that trap. I took my knife and got out. Well, part way. Then I fainted. Lucky for me, Pa come along. He drove off the Utes and got me out and took my foot off. He saved me from bleedin' to death." It was all said as if he were discussing the jerky he was chewing.

Charles waited till the dizziness passed. "I'm grateful to you, Mr. Jackson. I was in the cavalry till that little son of a bitch spotted me."

"Yes, sir, he's still fightin' you Southron boys, that's plain."

"I appreciate your taking me in and patching me up. I'll move along and find some other —"

"Stay right there," Jackson interrupted. "You ain't in no shape." He picked his teeth. " 'Sides, I didn't pull you out of the mud just because the fight was one-sided, with you on the wrong side. I got a proposition."

"What kind?"

"Business." Jackson discovered a speck of jerky in the tangle of white and brown hairs in his big fan beard. He flicked it away and said, "This yere group's the Jackson Trading Company. You met me already. This fine lad behind me is my nephew, Herschel. I call him Boy. It's easier. When his pa died of the influenzy back in Louisville, he didn't have no one else to look after him. He tries hard, but he needs carin' for."

Wooden Foot regarded the youngster with affection and sadness. That one glance made Charles like the man. Jackson made him think of Orry; he, too, had taken in a relative, and given him love and purpose to replace bitterness and hell-raising.

"And this here —" Jackson indicated the dog chewing the bone — "his name's Fenimore Cooper. Fen for short. Don't look like much. Border collies never do. But you'd be surprised how much weight on a travois he can pull."

Jackson finished the jerky. "Y'see, we go on reg'lar trips out among the Tsis-tsis-tas." He stressed the second syllable.

"What the devil's that?"

"All depends on who you ask. Some say it means our people, or the people, or the folks that belong here, to give it a loose translation. The Sioux translation's Sha-hi-e-la, which means red talk. Foreign talk. Other words, people the Sioux can't understand." Jackson watched his guest with a cheerfully superior smile. When he'd had enough fun, he said, "We trade with the Southern Cheyennes. You say their name this way, everybody understands." He executed a series of fast, smooth gestures, fist rotating, fingers jutting out or bending.

"I know that's sign language," Charles said. "Comanches in Texas used it."

"Yes, sir, the universal tongue of the tribes. What I just said was: We trade with Cheyennes in the Indian Territory. We take trade goods; we bring back Indian horses. It's a good livin', though not as rich as it could be. I won't deal in guns, or fermented spirits."

By then, Charles had a general fix on the nature of the proposition. "A good living, maybe, but pretty dangerous."

"Only now and then. They's two, three hundred thousand red men out this way, but way less than a third of 'em's ornery, and those not always. You can get along all right if they know you ain't scairt."

He plucked the turkey feather from his hair and ran his index finger into the broad V cut in the vane. "They can read a coup feather notched this partic'lar way. It says I met a bad Indian once and took his scalp, so he wouldn't have no afterlife, and then I cut his throat."

"The feather says that?"

Jackson nodded.

"Did you do it?"

Jackson's mild eyes stayed on his. 'Twice."

Charles shivered. Boy laid a soft hand on his uncle's shoulder, his face showing pride. Fen lazily licked his forepaws. The rain pattered on the tipi. "You mentioned a proposition."

"I need a partner to watch my back. I can teach him the country, and all that goes with it, but I got to trust him, and he's got to shoot straight. The first time."

"I'm a fair shot. I practiced a few years with General Wade Hampton's scouts."

Wooden Foot responded with an enthusiastic nod. "Southron cavalry. That's a tip-top recommendation."

"Are you adding a man or replacing one?"

Again the trader squished his tongue around his teeth. "No sense lyin' if we're to ride together, I guess. I lost one last trip. My partner, Dean. He laid hands on a woman. Her husband and some of his Red Shield friends carved Dean up for stew meat."

The jerky seemed to perform a leap in Charles's belly. "What's a Red Shield?"

"Cheyenne soldier society. They's several of 'em. The shields, the Bow Strings, the Dog Men — Dog Soldiers, they's sometimes called. 'Bout half the braves in the tribe belong to that one. When a young man gets to be fifteen or sixteen winters, he joins a society, and it's just about the most important thing in his whole life. All the societies started a long time ago. The way the legends tell it, a young Cheyenne brave named Sweet Medicine wandered way up north to the Sacred Mountain, which may be in the Black Hills — nobody's real sure. They say Sweet Medicine met the Great Spirit on the mountain and they powwowed a while. The Spirit told Sweet Medicine to go back and set up the societies to protect the tribe. Then the Spirit gave him all the society names, the special songs for each one, how each one oughta dress — the entire shebang. The societies are still run the way Sweet Medicine told the people to run 'em. They rule the roost, and you better not forget it. Even the forty-four chiefs in the tribal council don't fart in the wind 'thout the society men sayin' all right, go ahead."

"What exactly do these society men do besides boss the tribe?"

"Biggest job's to police the camp when it's time for a buffla hunt. They keep the young fellas in line, so nobody jumps suddenlike and scares off a prime herd."

"And I'd be replacing a man who got butchered by these people?"

"Yes, sir, Mr. Main. I wouldn't pretend they's no risk. They's rewards, though. The sight of some of the cleanest, sweetest country God ever made — and some of the fairest maidens. I get along fine with most of the Cheyennes. They like old Wooden Foot."

With a gurgle and a coo, Boy knelt beside his uncle and patted his beard. Jackson took Boy's hand between his and held it. The youth was calm and happy.

"Here's the cut of the cards," the trader said. "First year, I give you twenty percent of whatever we get for the horses we bring back. You prove out, I raise you ten percent a year till you're in for a full half-share. Till that time, I own all the goods and stand all the risks. Oh" — he grinned — "I mean excludin' the risks to your hair and your life. What do you say?"

Charles sat quietly, unable to say anything just yet. The trader proposed a change both large and profound. The presence of Boy made him think of his son. If he joined Jackson, he wouldn't see little Gus for months at a time. He didn't like that. But he needed work; he needed an income. And before the war, serving in Texas, he'd vowed that he would return and settle there. He'd loved the beauty of the West.

"Well, Mr. Main?"

"I'd like to sleep on it." He smiled. "I don't honestly know if I could get used to calling a man Wooden Foot."

"I don't give a damn about that if you shoot straight."

Shortly after, Charles rolled up in a warm buffalo robe by the dying fire. He squirmed until he found the position in which his bruises hurt him least, and fell asleep.

Instead of enormous prairie vistas or fierce Indians, he dreamed of Augusta Barclay. In the gray and featureless landscapes of sleep he had his hands on her warm bare body. Then other women slipped in, taking her place. He woke to stiffness, and guilt, then the burned-out feeling of homelessness, made all the more painful because of his aborted Army career.

He still had doubts about Jackson's offer. It was better than some dull, monotonous job, but it was also plainly dangerous.

Thinking on it, he turned over. His ribs ached; he groaned. The sound produced another, which he identified as Fen waking up and padding across the tipi to stand beside his head. Charles lay rigid. Would the dog bite him?

Fen's head bobbed down. His raspy warm tongue licked Charles's bruised face three times.

On such small affections do large decisions turn.

"Fine, damn fine," Wooden Foot exclaimed when Charles said yes in the morning. The trader rummaged in a heap of blankets and canvas-wrapped bales, found two supple objects that he pressed into his new partner's hands.

"What are these?"

"Buffla-hide moccasins. From a winter kill. You get the thickest coat on the buffla then. You turn it inside, see? These'll keep you warm where we're goin'."

The tipi filled with the rich smells of coffee boiling and sowbelly frying in a cast-iron skillet. With a mitten on his right hand, Boy squatted and held the skillet over the fire, an almost demented concentration on his face.

"I'll need a horse," Charles said;

"I got an extra I brought back from the Indian Territory. A four-legged jug-headed whelp of Satan nobody would buy. If you can ride him, you can have him."

"I have to qualify to be your partner?"

The trader squinted at him. "That's the size of it."

"I'm still pretty sore. Riding some wild horse won't help that any."

Wooden Foot shrugged to acknowledge the point. "I s'pose we could wait a day or so —"

Charles rubbed his aching ribs and thought about it. "No. Let's get it over with."

Heavy fog hid most of the ground around Wooden Foot's tipi, which he'd erected west of the tent town near Jefferson Barracks. The trader led Charles to the horse, tethered some distance from his other saddle animals and pack mules. The small, rangy piebald was black and white, with a broad face blaze.

"I think he's a killer," Wooden Foot said, reaching for the low tree branch to which he'd tied a rope fastened to the head­stall. "I prob'ly oughta shoot him."

"Watch out," Charles yelled, pushing Jackson as the horse reared. Front hooves slashed the mist where the trader had stood a moment before.

"See?" he said, from where the push had spilled him. "I broke him, but nobody can ride him. I come close to puttin' a bullet in him twice already."

Charles felt tense, uneasy. He was remembering his last, and fatal, ride on Sport in Virginia. Sport, an enemy bullet in him, had carried Charles to safety with speed and great heart while his lifeblood pumped away behind, splashing the snow. Sport had been a horse nobody had wanted.

"Don't try killing him in front of me," he said. "I lost a fine gray charger in the war. I can't tolerate anyone hurting a horse."

Still, he understood the trader's apprehension. The piebald had murder in his eye. Charles saw some virtues, though. Lightness — he estimated the horse at about a thousand pounds — a fine neck, and the smaller hooves and head typical of a Southern saddler.

"Indian pony, you said?"

"Yep. The Army ruins 'em. Chokes 'em with grain so they forget livin' on grass. Makes 'em weak and slow. Won't happen to this one. He won't live that long."

"Let's find out. Where's that blanket and saddle?"

The mist rolled thick around them. Wooden Foot tied the rope to the tree again. With a listing gait, Charles walked to the piebald. "It's all right," he said, putting the blanket on. "It's all right."

The piebald lifted his right foreleg. Charles's belly tightened up. Down went the hoof again, plop, and the piebald exhaled. Charles saddled him with care, tossing Wooden Foot a surprised look when the saddle's weight caused no problem. He didn't understand. Maybe there was some unfathomable streak of madness in that beautiful head.

He dropped the stirrups down and mounted slowly, as much from pain as caution. The piebald stayed still, though he turned his head, trying to see his rider. The mist rolled, the centaur figure rising from it. On the distant Army post, bugles sounded a morning call.

Quietly, Charles said, "Untie the rope."

Wooden Foot darted in and did it fast. Charles took the rope, wrapped it around one hand, gave an easy tug.

Shooting skyward, his left leg wrenched by jerking out of the stirrup, Charles thought, Jackson will have to kill him. He struck the piebald's croup as he came down, then hit the dirt, while the horse bellowed and kicked. The impact made him feel like torches had been lit in his body. A hoof gashed his forehead before he rolled clear and snatched out his Army Colt. Kneeling, in excruciating pain, he steadied the revolver with both hands, waiting for the horse to come after him.

The piebald snorted, stamped, but stood still. Boy hugged his uncle's waist from behind, peeking at the horse and the man aiming the gun.

"Better do it, Main."

"No, not unless — wait. I didn't notice before. Do you see that red bubble on his mouth?"

Peevish, Jackson said he surely didn't. Charles knew that men the trader's age often had trouble with their eyes. He shoved the Colt away and approached the horse cautiously. "Let me see," he said in a soothing voice. "Just keep quiet and let me see." His heart hammered; the piebald's eyes held that raging look again.

But he let Charles gently pry his jaws apart, revealing the blood-slimed bit. Charles exploded with laughter born of relief. "Come see this. Not too fast." Wooden Foot sidled in behind him. "There's your killer streak. An abscessed molar. Leave the reins alone, and he's fine. Pull them, he goes crazy."

"I missed it," Wooden Foot said. "Just damn completely missed it."

"Easy enough to do." Charles shrugged, unwilling to tell the older man he should buy a pair of spectacles. He reached under to rub the piebald's chest. "Soon as we find a horse doctor to nick that tooth and drain and poultice it, he'll be fine."

"You'll keep him?"

"That was the deal, wasn't it? You want to pat him, Boy? It's all right."

Wooden Foot's nephew scuttled forward, a heartbreaking elation on his white face. He touched the piebald and smiled. The trader sighed, his tension gone.

"Then he's yours to name, Charlie."

Charles thought a bit, joining Boy in patting the horse. "Let's see. It should be a name to make people respect him, and not fool with him. They don't need to know he's gentle." He patted the horse again. "You said the devil whelped him. I'll name him for his papa. Satan."

"Hot damn," the trader cried, starting a little jig, bouncing from his good foot to the artificial one with amazing agility. "Hot damn, oh, hot damn. This here outfit's back in business."

9

The day after Charles said yes to Wooden Foot Jackson's proposition, the trader took the piebald to a veterinarian. Leaving Boy with the horse doctor, he and Charles set off for the city. To avoid soldiers from Jefferson Barracks who might recognize Charles, they circled around and rode in from the west. The border collie ran along behind them.

Early Creole settlers had nicknamed the place Pain Court — Short of Bread — because so little of its commerce had anything to do with agriculture; it was then the fur-trade center.

Times had changed. On the road bordered by sycamores and lindens, milkweed and climbing bittersweet, they passed farm wagons piled with apples or sacks of grain. They rode around two farmers driving pigs that filled the air with squealing and a characteristic stink.

Presently, rooftops appeared down the road and, above them, a hovering gray cloud. "Don't breathe too much in St. Lou," Wooden Foot advised. "They's buildin' more foundries and tanneries and flour mills and sheet-lead works than I can rightly keep track of. I guess 'Mericans don't care if they choke to death on fact'ry smoke so long as they go out rich."

The day was bright and nippy. Charles felt good. The effects of the beating were wearing off, and the gypsy robe kept him warm. His first impression of Wooden Foot had been right; the trader was a man to like and trust. Maybe his spirits would lighten in the weeks ahead, even if he did have to ride all the way to the Indian Territory to make it happen.

They rode toward the busy heart of town, passing old Creole homes of stone, frontier cabins of hand-hewn logs, and newer, half-timbered houses with Dutch doors built by members of the large German population. Around one hundred fifty thousand people lived in St. Louis, Wooden Foot said.

Reaching Third Street, they could already hear the wagon traffic and shouting stevedores on the mile-and-a-half-long levee ahead of them. A riverboat's whistle blew as Wooden Foot handed Charles a roll of notes.

"I'll stock up on trade goods while you buy some winter clothes. Also a knife. Also a rifle that satisfies you, and plenty of ammunition. Don't go scant or cheap. They ain't no general stores out where we're goin', and you'd be pretty unhappy to have a dozen hoppin'-mad Cheyennes on your neck and no more cartridges in your pouch 'cause you saved a penny. Oh" — he grinned —"buy some of them cigars you fancy. Man needs a little civilized pleasure on the plains. The winter nights are mighty long."

He waved, turned left at the corner in front of an oxcart, and disappeared.

Ten minutes later, Charles walked out of a tobacco shop on Olive Street with three wooden boxes under his arm. He slipped them in an old saddlebag Wooden Foot had given him.

He'd kept one cigar out to smoke. As he lit it, he noticed an Army officer striding along the walk on the other side of the street. He didn't know the officer's name, but he recognized his face from Jefferson Barracks. He held absolutely still. The match burned down, scorching his fingers.

The officer went around the corner without seeing him.

Charles exhaled, flicked the dead match away, and rubbed his stinging fingers on his leg. He relit the cigar as a wagon pulled up at the Olive Street side of a large two-story building on the corner. A second-floor signboard mounted to be readable from both streets said TRUMP’S ST. LOUIS PLAYHOUSE in showy red letters.

The wagon carried a load of unpainted boards. The teamster, a pot-gut with the front brim of his black hat pinned up, tied the rein to a hitching post and smacked the hip of the old dray horse as he got down — an unnecessary unkindness that made Charles frown. The teamster looked grumpy, but that was no excuse.

The man entered a door marked STAGE. He shouted something, then came out and began pulling boards from the wagon. He looked like he hated the work, and the world.

A black cat strolled out of the theater and approached the dray horse. The horse began to whinny and sidestep. The cat arched its back and hissed. The horse reared, whinnying wildly and lunging toward the street, almost causing a collision with a green-and-white hotel omnibus bringing passengers and luggage from the levee. One of the passengers leaned out to swat the wagon horse away. The horse reared again.

As the omnibus rattled on, the teamster dropped three boards on the walk and slapped the horse's hind quarter with his black hat. "Goddamn miserable nag." He hit again, and again.

Charles's face changed as he watched. The horse tried to nip his tormentor. The teamster reached under the seat and came up with a quirt. He laid it on the old plug's neck, withers, haunch.

Charles dashed around his mount's head and into the street, jumping to avoid being run down by a horseman. The teamster kept striking with the quirt. "Teach you to bite me, you fucking jughead."

A gentleman passing with a lady objected to the language. The teamster whirled and threatened him with the bloodied quirt. The man hurried the woman away.

The feeble prancing of the old horse amused the teamster. He struck the animal again.

"Hit him once more and I'll put one between your eyes."

The teamster glanced up to see Charles on the sidewalk, both hands extended in front of him, clasping the Army Colt. Charles's cheeks were deep red. The sight of the quirt marks enraged him. His heart beat at great speed, roaring in his ears. He drew the hammer back.

"He's my horse, for Christ's sake," the teamster protested.

"He's a dumb animal. Take your misery out on a human being."

To Charles's left, in the theater doorway, a woman said, "What is all this about?" Charles mistakenly looked at her, and the teamster laid the quirt across his shoulder.

Charles staggered back. The teamster knocked the Colt from his hand. Something exploded in Charles's head.

He tore the upraised quirt away from the teamster and flung it. Then he jumped the man and bore him down to the wooden walk. His right arm pistoned back and forth. Someone from a gathering crowd grabbed his shoulders. "Get up. Stop it."

Charles kept pounding.

"Get up! You're killing him."

Two men succeeded in pulling him away. The red haze cleared from his mind, and he saw the pulped, dripping face of the teamster, who lay on his back. One of the men from the crowd said to the teamster, "You better unload and get out of here."

Charles tossed the teamster a blue bandanna from his back pocket. The man batted it away and called Charles a filthy name. Charles flexed his aching right hand as the teamster struggled up and began to pull boards from the wagon, watching Charles from an eye already showing a purple bruise.

"Pretty severe punishment for horsewhipping," one of the onlookers said to Charles.

"The man jumped me." He stared until the onlooker muttered something and turned away.

To someone inside the theater, the woman said, "Arthur, please come help unload the lumber." Charles turned to her, completely unprepared for what he saw: a woman perhaps twenty years old, a picture-pretty thing, slim but well formed, with blue eyes and blond hair so pale it had silver glints. Her dress was a plain yellow lawn, dusty in places. She held the black cat in her arms.

"That stray cat spooked the horse. That's what started everything." Charles remembered his manners and dragged off his old straw hat.

"Prosperity isn't a stray. She belongs to the theater." The young woman indicated the signboard on the building. "I'm Mrs. Parker."

"Charles Main, ma'am. Believe me, I don't always blow up like that, though it does happen if I catch somebody mistreating a horse."

A broad-shouldered black man helped the teamster carry the boards inside. It was hard to say whether the teamster was more sullen over the beating or working with a Negro.

Mrs. Parker said, "Well, if that's a failing, it's in a good cause."

Charles acknowledged the remark with a nod and put on his hat, ready to go. The young woman added, "There's water in our green room if you'd like to clean your hands."

Reaching down to pick up his revolver, he saw that they were bloodstained. Something in him shied from accepting even casual kindness from any woman, but in spite of it he said, "All right. Thanks."

They stepped into a gloomy area backstage. From the stage, brilliant under calcium lights, a portly man approached with a queer sidestep gait. He walked bent over, a large pillow roped to his back like a hump. His tongue lolled from the corner of his mouth. His dangling hands swung to and fro, pendulumlike. All at once he straightened up.

"Willa, how can I concentrate on the winter of my discontent when a hundred idlers are rioting on my doorstep?"

"It wasn't a riot Sam, just a small dispute. Mr. Main, my partner, Mr. Samuel Trump." She pointed to the pillow. "We're rehearsing Richard the Third." Charles thought that was Shakespeare but didn't want to show his ignorance by asking.

Trump said, "Have I the honor of addressing a fellow thespian, sir?"

"No, sir, afraid not. I'm a trader." It surprised him a little to say it for the first time.

"Do you trade with the Indians?" the young woman asked. He said yes. "You sound Southern," she continued. "Did you serve in what they call 'the late unpleasantness'?"

"I did. I'm from South Carolina. I rode with General Wade Hampton's cavalry all four years."

"Lucky you came out unscathed," Trump declared. Charles thought it pointless to contradict so foolish a statement.

Mrs. Parker told Trump what had happened outside, in words that flattered Charles and minimized his brutal rage. "I invited Mr. Main to clean up in the green room."

"By all means," Trump said. "If you wish to view a performance of our new production, sir, I recommend booking a seat early. I anticipate capacity business, perhaps even an offer to transfer to New York."

Willa gave him a rueful smile. "Sam, you know that's bad luck."

Trump paid no attention. "Adieu, good friends. My art summons me." Dangling his hands again, he sidled toward the stage, bellowing, "Grim-visaged war has smooth'd his wrinkled front..."

"This way," Willa said to Charles.

She closed the door of the spacious, untidy green room to confine Prosperity for a while. On a love seat with one leg missing, a gentleman snored, his handwritten part covering his face. Prosperity jumped on his stomach and began to wash herself. The actor didn't stir,

Willa showed Charles to a basin of clean water on a table strewn with make-up pots, brushes, jars of powder. She found a clean towel for him.

"Thank you." He was conscious of great awkwardness. After Gus Barclay's death, he'd withdrawn from the company of women. His visit to the tent-town whore had passed with almost no conversation.

Using the damp towel, he cleaned the blood from his hands. Willa folded her arms, taking his measure. "What do you call that garment you're wearing? A cape? A poncho?"

"I call it my gypsy robe. I sewed it together a piece at a time when uniforms started to wear out and Richmond couldn't send any new ones.

"I know little about the war except what I've read. I was only fifteen when the fighting began."

That young. He dropped the towel beside the basin; the water had turned red. "Before you ask, I'll tell you. I wasn't fighting for slavery and I didn't give a hang for secession. I left the U.S. Army to fight for my state and my family's home."

"Yes, Mr. Main, but the war's over. There's no need to be belligerent."

He apologized; he hadn't realized he sounded angry. There was a certain irony there. To how many men had he said the war was over?

"It was a bad time, Mrs. Parker. Hard to forget."

"Perhaps something pleasant would help. You performed a humane deed outside. You deserve a reward. I should like to buy you supper, if I may."

His jaw dropped. She laughed. "I shocked you. I didn't intend it. You must understand the theater, Mr. Main. It's a lonely business. So theater people cling to one another for company. And there's very little conventional formality. If an actress wants an hour's friendly conversation, there's no shame in her asking a fellow actor. I suppose it doesn't look so innocent from outside. No wonder preachers think us loose and dangerous people. I assure you" — she kept it light but it was pointed — "I'm neither."

"No, I wouldn't imagine so, you being married."

"Ah — Mrs. Parker. That's only a convenience. It keeps some of the stage door crowd at bay. I'm not married. I just like to choose my friends." Her smile was warm and winning. "I repeat my offer. Can you join me for supper? Say, tomorrow evening? We're rehearsing tonight."

He almost said no. Yet something prompted him the other way. "That would be very enjoyable."

"And no quibbling over a mere female paying the bill?"

He smiled. "No quibbling."

"Seven o'clock, then? The New Planter's House on Fourth Street?"

"Fine. I'll try to look more respectable."

"You look splendid. The very picture of a gallant cavalry­man." She shocked him with that easy frankness, and then again with the forthright way she shook hands. "Until tomorrow."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Oh, no, please. Let it be Willa and Charles."

He nodded and got out of there.

As he went from store to store, buying what he needed, he tried to figure out why he'd entangled himself with the supper engagement. Was it simple hunger for a woman's company? Or the way she had approached him, with unexpected candor and a reversal of the usual roles? He didn't know. He did know the young actress fascinated him, and that bothered him on two counts. He felt guilty because of Gus Barclay, and he was wary of the potential for pain that existed even in a friendship.

"She did the askin'?" Wooden Foot exclaimed when Charles told him about it.

"Yes. She isn't, well, conventional. She's an actress."

"Oh, I get it now. Well, take advantage, Charlie. They say actresses are always good for a fast romp on the sheets."

"Not this one," he said. It was one of the few things about Willa Parker he could state with any certainty.

10

To say the blue cutaway was old was to say the Atlantic was a pond. The coat had cost Charles four dollars, secondhand. 'This yere's strictly a loan," Wooden Foot had said. "I approve of romance but it ain't my habit to finance it." The haberdasher threw in a used cravat, and with another dollar borrowed from his new partner, Charles bought some Macassar oil. Dressed up and with his long hair slicked down, he felt foolish and foppish. '

That opinion seemed to be shared by two black men in green velvet livery who received guests at the entrance of the elegant New Planter's House, the second hotel in St. Louis to bear that name. Charles handed his saddle horse to a groom and stalked between the doormen. His sharp stare and vaguely sinister appearance forestalled any comment about his looks.

Willa rose from one of the plush seats in the spacious lobby. Her quick smile relieved his nervousness a little. "My," she said, "for an Indian trader you're certainly elegant."

"Special occasion. I don't have many. I'd say you're the elegant one."

"Thank you, sir." She took his arm and guided him toward the dining room. By some feminine magic he didn't begin to understand, she fairly sparkled with youthful prettiness, even though her outfit was nearly all black: her hooped skirt, her trim silk sacque, her small hat with a single black-dyed feather. White lace spilled at her throat and fringed her cuffs — just enough for dramatic contrast.

The haughty headwaiter tried to seat them behind a potted fern next to the kitchen entrance. "No, thank you," Willa said pleasantly. "I'm Mrs. Parker, of Trump's Playhouse. I send many of our patrons here to enjoy your cuisine, and I won't take your worst table. That one in the center, please."

It was a table for four, but the man was defeated by her charm. He thanked her effusively.

Soft gaslight and candles on the tables combined to create a civilized, intimate atmosphere in the busy room. Several gentlemen interrupted conversations to cast admiring looks at Willa. The black dress and her vivid blue eyes produced a lovely effect as she sat across from Charles, a swath of pink tablecloth between them. Napkins in the wine goblets resembled pink flowers.

"I'm out of place here —" he began.

"Nonsense. You're the handsomest chap in sight. No more begging for compliments, if you please."

He started to protest and saw she was teasing. The waiter delivered leatherbound menus. Charles blanched when he opened the one for wine.

"It's in French. I think it's French."

"It is. Shall I order for us?"

"You'd better. Do they serve any grits or corn bread?"

It made her giggle, as he'd intended. He began to enjoy himself. She said, "I doubt it. The veal medallions are always fine. And escargots first, I think." Charles examined his silver to conceal his ignorance about the nature of escargots.

"Do you like red wine?" she asked. "They have a Bordeaux from the little village of Pomerol, and it's reasonable."

"Fine." The waiter retired. "You know a lot about food and wine."

"Actors spend a great deal of time in hotels. Ask me to plant a garden or catch a fish, I'd be helpless." Her smile put him wonderfully at ease. He warned himself to be careful, remembering Gus and how it felt when he lost her.

"So you're ready to leave for the Indian Territory. Perhaps this year it will be peaceful out there." He pulled a cigar halfway out of his pocket; put it back. "No, go ahead. I don't mind cigars."

He lit it, then said, "You keep up on the Indians?"

He meant it facetiously. Her reply, "Oh, yes," was serious. "In New York I belonged to a group called the Indian Friendship Society. We circulated memorials to be sent to Congress asking the government to repudiate the massacre at Sand Creek. You're familiar with that?" He said he was. "Well, the blame for it lies entirely with the white man. We steal land belonging to the Indians, then slaughter them if they resist or object. The white man's relationship with the native tribes is a shameful history of deceit, injustice, broken promises, violated treaties, and unspeakable cruelty."

Charles found himself in awe of her crusader's passion. "My partner would agree with you," he said. "He likes the Southern Cheyennes. Most of them, anyway." "And you?"

"I've only had experience with a few Comanches, in Texas — all of them mad enough to shoot at me."

"I know it's impossible to stop westward expansion. But it mustn't, come at the price of extermination of the original inhabitants of this country. Thank heaven there are signs of a movement toward peace. That bloodthirsty General Dodge wanted to unleash a thousand men to kill any Indians found along the Santa Fe wagon road, but he was blocked. And yesterday I read in the Missouri Gazette that Colonel Jesse Leavenworth, the Indian agent, has managed to get a truce with some of the Indians he oversees through his Upper Arkansas Agency. Do you realize what that means?"

She leaned forward, vivid color in her cheeks. "It means that William Bent and Kit Carson and Senator Doolittle of Wisconsin have a real chance to arrange a peace conference soon. Perhaps for once we'll have a treaty both sides will honor."

The waiter brought small silver forks and curious shell-like things arranged in a semicircle on each plate. Charles lifted the little fork, baffled.

"Escargots," she said. "Snails."

He coughed and groped for his cigar, resting in a crystal dish. Several deep puffs pulled him through his first encounter with snails that were eaten rather than observed in a motionless journey across a rock or a leaf.

After the waiter decanted the rich, heavy Pomerol, and Charles drank some, conversation became easier. He told Willa something of his war experiences, and of his closest friend, Billy Hazard, whom he'd rescued from Libby Prison. He described the officer named Bent who held an inexplicable grudge against both his family and Billy's. "He disappeared in the war. A casualty, I suppose. I can't say I'm sorry."

More wine, then the veal, appealingly garnished with bright yellow rounds of squash and large whole pea pods. He spoke of other matters with obvious emotion. He described his abiding love for Mont Royal — burned, but rebuilding — and his affection for his cousin Orry, who'd saved him from self-destruction.

Presently he said, "What about you? Is this your home?"

She concentrated on lifting a bit of veal with the fork in her left hand, something Charles had seen only among people of great refinement. "No. I answered an appeal from Sam Trump to help him put his theater on a profitable basis. He's an old friend of my father. Whose name was not Parker, by the way. It was Potts." She crossed her eyes and made a face, and he laughed.

They talked on, Charles forgetting how bizarre his slicked-down hair must look, or how ill at ease he felt in the frayed cutaway. The wine slipped down quickly, muting the candlelight, enhancing her prettiness. A violinist and cellist, solemn whiskered fellows in white ties and tail coats, began to play semi-classical airs from seats in a corner.

"What brought you to St. Louis as a trader, Charles?"

"Actually —" Did he dare trust her? He searched her blue eyes. Yes. "I've never gone out before. I graduated from West Point, you see. After the war I went back in the Army, but someone at Jefferson Barracks — a man who went to the Academy when I did — recognized me. They booted me out. Literally. Well, I needed a way to support my son —"

She dropped her spoon. It hit the edge of her dish of blueberries in cream and fell to the floor. Charles saw her anger. "Oh, no, wait." Without a thought, he shot his hand over to clasp hers. "I didn't trick you. I do have a son, eight months old. His mother died in Virginia when he was born."

"Oh. I'm truly sorry." Relaxed again, she picked up the new spoon the waiter had silently laid beside her gold-rimmed dish. With her eyes on the dessert, she murmured, "We both have a past out of the ordinary, it would seem."

He wondered about the undertone of pain in those words. A man tipped the musicians to play "Lorena." Charles and Willa exchanged looks, letting the sweet sad music speak for them.

The night smelled of wood smoke and approaching autumn. Willa suggested they walk on the levee, and they linked arms. This time she wasn't quite so careful; the silken thrust of her bosom rested easily, moved lightly against his sleeve. He experienced a strong physical reaction.

They turned right on the levee, a wide esplanade between the piers and a row of wood arid stone warehouses and commercial buildings. A sickle moon hid the dirt and litter, and softened the silhouettes of great crates and casks piled up awaiting shipment. A cargo watchman resting on a keg took his cob pipe from his mouth. "Evening." His left hand remained on his shotgun.

"It's been a delicious evening," Willa said, sighing. "Since you already know I'm forward, I might as well tell you that I'd love to repeat it."

Now, Charles thought. Cut it off. Leave it there. But he'd drunk too much of the rich red fruit of the village of Pomerol.

"So would I."

"Good. How long must I wait?"

"Till spring, I suppose. That's when Jackson comes back with the horses he gathers during the winter."

"All right." The black feather bobbed on her hat as she nodded. "Starting the first of next April, I'll leave a standing order at the ticket window. You'll have a box seat for any performance. When I see you in the audience, I'll know it's time for another supper."

"That's a bargain. You're very confident the theater will prosper."

"I'll make it prosper." She wasn't bragging, merely stating what she believed. "Like so many actors, Sam's a lovely, charming man, vanity and all. But he has a weakness for drink. If I can keep him away from it, and we can mount three or four new shows in repertory, a Moliere comedy, perhaps, and another of those melodramas Sam writes under the name Samuels — they're dreadful, really, but audiences love them, because he does know how to write stirring lines for himself — if we can accomplish that much by the time you return, we'll make it. Time then to think of adding actors for a touring troupe."

"For someone so young, you're very determined."

She watched the river. A great white side-wheeler churned upriver toward the Missouri, a necklace of amber lights gleaming along her cabin deck. From the channel drifted the slushing of her paddles and the bleating and squawking of sheep and chickens in crates stacked among new farm wagons lashed to the decks.

"Isn't she a pretty sight, Charles?"

"Yes, but the cabin lights make me feel lonesome."

"I know. I've felt that way ever since I was small and passed through strange towns with my father, wishing one of the lamps was lighted to welcome us — It's late," she said abruptly. "We should go back. I always check to be sure Sam's tucked in, and sober. We're running through Streets of Shame in the morning."

They walked in silence, comfortably, amid the night sounds of St. Louis: a man and woman quarreling; a banjo doing "Old Folks at Home"; street mongrels yapping and snarling over scraps. "That's a lovely tune," she said as they approached the theater. "What is it?"

"What do you mean?"

"The tune you were humming." She repeated a few notes.

"I didn't realize I was — it's just something I made up to remind me of home."

"That's something I've never had, a real home." They stopped by the stage door. She found a key in her silk reticule. "Sam sleeps in the office, and I have a pallet in the scene loft. It saves the cost of lodgings, though I hope I can move to better quarters if we're successful this season." She raised her head, waiting. Charles leaned down and gave her a brotherly kiss, barely touching one corner of her lips with his. Her left hand darted up to press the back of his neck a moment. They separated.

"Take proper care of yourself out West. I want to see you again in the spring."

"Willa —" He struggled; this had to be said. "You're forthright. Let me be the same. I live a solitary life, especially now that my son's mother is gone. I don't want —attachments."

Without emotion, she asked, "Does that include friendships?"

He was put off; could only repeat, "Attachments."

"Why don't you want attachments?"

"They hurt people. Something happens to one person, and afterward it's bad for the other. I don't mean to suggest that you and I — that is —" He cleared his throat. "I like you, Willa. We should leave it at that."

"Perfectly fine with me, Charles. Good night."

She unlocked the door and disappeared. He remained outside, gazing at the moon-washed building and congratulating himself on speaking at the right moment.

But if he'd done such a fine job of it, why was he so filled with delight, even a surprising yearning, as he thought of her face, the feel of her breast brushing his sleeve, things she'd said, the little graces that seemed to come so naturally to her?

Something was astir in him, something dangerous.

You'll have a lot of time for getting over that, he said to himself as he turned and strode off toward the hotel stable.

Inside Trump's Playhouse, Willa leaned against the street door. "Well," she said, "it was only a small hope."

She'd learned long ago that, in this world, hopes were easily and frequently dashed. She straightened up, touched her eyes briefly, then moved toward the band of light showing under the office door. The sound of Sam's snoring rescued her from the spell of the night and the tall Southerner, and the evening's foolish fancies.

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

The mule recognized the hunched black man and nuzzled him. Juba dragged his tired, arthritic body across the porch of the Dixie Store. In pain, he clutched the door frame. The two white men didn't acknowledge his presence for almost a minute.

Finally LaMotte said, "You left it where I told you?" His height reduced the spectacled storekeeper, Gettys, to the size of a boy.

"Yessir, Mist' Desmond. Nobody seen me, neither." Gettys laughed. "It's a fine jest. Choice." "Only the opening salvo," Des said. "Wait outside, Juba." "I was wonderin', sir — I ain't et since mornin' —" "We'll be back in Charleston in a few hours. You can eat then."

Miserable, Juba knew better than to object. He moved slowly outside to the lowering dark.

Des said, "When I stopped here to wait while my nigger did the errand, I never supposed I'd meet someone like you. Gettys."

"It does appear that we share the same convictions, Mr. LaMotte."

"What you said about Mont Royal stupefies me. I had no idea that black bitch would be so audacious. She must be stopped. If you are equally strong about that, we should join forces."

"Yes, sir, I am strong about that."

Out in the dark, Juba leaned his aching body against a live oak. His head was full of sad thoughts of the heartlessness of which some men were capable.

Madeline held the mysterious package at arm's length, to sharpen the letters crudely inked on the wrapping, which was old wallpaper. She couldn't afford the glasses she needed.

MADELINE MAIN. She saw that clearly. Seated in a rocker on the other side of the lamp, Prudence said, "What on earth can it be?"

"Let's find out."

She opened the flat, square package. She discovered an old browned daguerreotype about ten inches high, mounted on a piece of cardboard. The subject was one of the ugliest black women she had ever seen, a woman with a long jaw and jutting upper teeth. Although the woman was smiling, it was a peculiar smile, full of malice. Everything the woman wore — frilly dress, lace mittens, feathered hat — was white. So was the open parasol she held over her shoulder.

Madeline shook her head. "It must be some reference to my background, but I don't know this woman."

She put the daguerreotype on a little shelf. Both women studied it. The longer they looked, the more sinister the smiling face became. Madeline saw it in her dreams that night.

Next day, a matter at the saw pit brought Lincoln to the house. As he began to speak, he noticed the daguerreotype and went silent. Madeline caught her breath.

"Lincoln, do you recognize that woman?"

"No, I — yes." He avoided her eye. "I worked for her once, for two weeks. Couldn't stand her meanness, so I just picked up an' ran." He shook his head. "How'd that awful thing come into this house?"

"Someone left it in the lane last night. Do you know why?"

Again he evaded her eye.

"Lincoln, you're my friend. You've got to tell me. Who is that woman?"

"She goes by the name Nell Whitebird. Please, Miss Madeline —"

"Go on."

"Well, the place I worked, her place, there was a lot of fine white gentlemen coming and going at all hours."

He hadn't the heart to say more. Madeline put her hand on her lips, angry, sorrowful, frightened too. Whoever her anonymous tormentors might be, they knew not only that she was an octoroon, but also that her mother had been a prostitute.

"Wake up, Madeline." Prudence shook her again. Madeline heard a man shouting. "Nemo's outside. There's a fire."

"Oh my God."

Madeline hastily rose from the rocking chair, rubbing her eyes. With clumsy fingers she fastened the four top buttons of her stained dress. She'd opened them for a little relief from the humid heat, and fallen asleep where she sat.

She ran to the open door. The lamplight revealed Nemo outside, his face tearful. She saw light in the sky. "Is it the school?" He couldn't speak, only nod.

She dashed from the whitewashed house and ran barefoot along the sandy road to the old slave quarters. Prudence kept up with her, dampness plastering her cotton nightgown to her broad bosom and wide hips. The bright glare through the trees lighted their way.

Just as they reached the schoolhouse, the last wall fell inward, a brilliant waterfall of fire and sparks. The heat was fierce.

Prudence didn't seem to think of that. "All my books are in there. And my Bible," she cried.

"You can't go in," Madeline said, dragging her back.

Prudence struggled a moment before she gave up. She stood watching the fire with pain and disbelief in her eyes.

Behind the two women, some of the blacks gathered: Andy and Nemo and Sim and their wives. Pride and Grant looked confused and lost.

"Did anyone see strangers around here?" Madeline asked. No one had. Sim said the fire's glare had wakened him; he was a light sleeper.

Madeline paced, almost dancing on her tiptoes, so angry was she, so overwhelmed with a sense of violation of her self, of her property, of simple and reasonable principles of decency and practicality.

She flung a damp strand of hair off her forehead. "Randall Gettys warned me not to open the school. I suspect he had a hand in this. He wouldn't set a fire by himself, I think. He strikes me as a perfect coward. He would need accomplices."

She watched the nearby trees, in case the fire spread. It didn't; the cleared area around the burned building contained it. The flames receded but the heat remained intense.

"The worst part is not knowing who your enemies are. Well, no help for that. Will one of you go up to the house and bring me that picture of the black woman?"

Lincoln stepped forward. "I will."

He hurried off. Madeline kept pacing. She couldn't control her nervous excitement. Prudence spoke softly to the blacks, shaking her head and shrugging because she couldn't answer their questions. "

Lincoln brought back the daguerreotype of Nell Whitebird. Madeline took it and stalked toward the glowing ruins. "This fire was the work of men so despicable, they have to hide their deeds under cover of darkness. I'm sure the same men sent me this." She thrust her arm out, showing them the face of the prostitute. "This is a black woman of bad character. The men who burned the school are saying blackness equals evil, evil equals blackness. God curse them. Do you know why they sent me this particular picture? My mother was a quadroon." They were astonished. "What's more, during a certain period in her life she sold herself to men. Yet my father adored her. Married her. I honor her memory. I'm proud to have her blood. Your blood. They want us to think it's a taint. Inferior to theirs. We're supposed to cringe in a corner and bless them when they deign to throw us scraps, or thank them if they choose to whip us. Well, to hell with them. This is what I think of them, and their tactics, and their threats."

She ripped the daguerreotype in half and flung the pieces on the coals. They smoked, curled, burned, vanished.

Madeline's face glowed red in the firelight. It ran with sweat from the heat, and her anger. "In case all of you are wondering, yes, this upsets me terribly, but, no, it doesn't change anything. When the ashes are cold, we'll clear them out and we'll start building a new schoolhouse."

11

Dear Jack, Charles wrote, I am going west with a trading company for 6 mas. to a year. My partner says leave any messages at Ft. Riley, Kans. I will be in touch as soon as I come back. I hope my son will stay well & will remember me & won't be too much trouble for you & Maureen. Give him an extra big hug from his "Pa."

I have to do this because I'm not in the Army after all. I had some trouble at Jefferson Barracks. ...

A slit of brilliant light lay between the land and solid gray clouds pushing down through the western sky. The calendar still said summer, September, but the rain-freshened vegetation and the chilly air tricked the senses into thinking autumn.

Out of the woods rode the entire Jackson Trading Company, leading a dozen mules heavily loaded with trade goods. Canvas parcels held bags of glass beads in both pony and smaller seed sizes; Wooden Foot Jackson favored diamond and triangle shapes, like those that glittered and flashed on the bosom of his coat.

The trader had explained to Charles that Cheyenne women wanted beads to decorate the apparel they made. White men had introduced beads to the West, so it was an acquired liking. An older, traditional, one was that for porcupine quills, which were abundant among the Mississippi but scarce on the dry plains, where they were going. The mules were carrying bundles of quills, too.

Jackson had also stocked up on some relatively bulky items. Iron hoe blades, which lasted longer than those made of a buffalo's scapula tied with rawhide to a stick. Durability was a virtue of another item he carried in quantity — a small iron rectangle with one long edge sharpened by a file. The tool replaced a similar one of bone used to scrape hair from buffalo hide and render it ready to sew into garments or a tipi cover.

The trader said there were plenty of other things he could sell, but he preferred to carry just a few that had proved popular year after year. All the merchandise was for women, but it would be paid for by men, using the most common form of Indian wealth, horses.

Charles absorbed this along with Wooden Foot's explanation of his success.

"They's fort traders who sell the exact same goods I do, only the Cheyenries won't go near 'em. And vice versey. I been haulin' goods into the villages near twenty years."

"Don't the Indian agents regulate trading?"

Wooden Foot spat out some plug tobacco, thus expressing his opinion of the Interior Department's Indian Bureau employees. "They sure would like to, because they're mostly greedy no-goods who want the trade all to themselves. I keep an eye peeled for 'em. If they don't find me they can't stop me. The Gheyennes won't turn me in, for the same reason I still got my hair. I'm a friend."

"Who might turn into something else if you were crossed?" Charles pointed to the notched feather.

"Well, yes, they's that, too."

A cigar curled smoke up past the brim of Charles's brand-new flat-crowned wool hat. He sat comfortably on Satan, having sewn strips of scraped buffalo hide to the inner thighs of his jeans pants. The piebald was again in good fettle, though Charles took care to rein him lightly and guide him with knee and hand pressure whenever possible. Satan was responsive; he was smart. Charles hadn't picked wrong.

In the saddle scabbard he carried a shiny new lever-action Spencer that fired seven rounds from a tube magazine in the stock. His gypsy robe hid a foot-long bowie knife and a keen hatchet with Pawnee decorations, feathers, and beaded wrappings on the shaft. He was better equipped than the U.S. Cavalry, which had to put up with war surplus arms, no matter what.

The autumnal landscape, the chilly temperature, and the lowering night cast a melancholy spell over him. Wooden Foot attempted to counter it with lively conversation.

"How's that little actress? Pinin' away?"

"I doubt it."

"Plan to see her again?"

"Maybe in the spring."

"Charlie, you got a funny look. I seen it on men before. Did you lose some other woman?"

"Yes. Back in Virginia. I don't like to talk about it."

"Then we don't. Still, it's nice you got the actress, for comfort."

"She's only an acquaintance. Besides, one woman can't replace another. Can we drop it?"

"Sure. You'll soon forget about it anyway. They's lots of other things to command your attention where we're goin'." His tone said he meant perils, not amusements.

Charles wished he could forget Gus Barclay for even a little while, but he couldn't. And in the privacy of his heart he wished that his conscience would let him think in a more personal way about Willa Parker. She did capture his fancy with her striking combination of youth and worldliness, idealism and cheerful tolerance. He supposed it wouldn't hurt to accept her offer of a ticket to a performance when he got back.

If he got back.

Wooden Foot seemed confident. Still, there was a vast country lying ahead of them. And no denying that some of the tribes were angry about the presence of the Army and the steady westward waves of migration.

Fenimore Cooper switched his tail and frisked back and forth ahead of the riders, bolting now to the left, now to the right but always loping back with joyous barks. Charles wondered if the dog was happy about not being hitched to a travois just yet.

Boy saw a blue jay bickering in a shrub and clapped his hands in delight. Charles puffed his cigar and patted Satan. Growing smaller and smaller in the immense wooded landscape, the Jackson Trading Company passed out of sight and into darkness.

12

A thunderstorm roared over the city of Richmond. Rain poured from the eaves of the City Almshouse and splashed the grave­stones of Shockoe Cemetery immediately to the south. The noise of the storm kept patients awake in the charity wards this bleak September night.

One patient lay on his side, knees drawn up to his chest, arms clasped tightly around them. His cot was on the end of the row, so he was able to face the bare wall and hide with his thoughts.

In the dark high-ceilinged room men turned and groaned and rustled their bedding. A matron's lamp floated through like a firefly. A young man with a completely white beard sat up suddenly. "Union Cavalry. Sheridan's cavalry on the left flank!"

The matron rushed to his bedside. Her voice soothed him to silence. Then her lamp floated away again.

The Almshouse had been a Confederate hospital at the height of the war. Toward the end, it became temporary head­quarters for the Virginia Military Institute, which had been forced out of the Shenandoah by the ferocity of Phil Sheridan's horse. Since the surrender, several wings had reopened on a temporary basis to care for mentally disturbed veterans, the human debris cast up by the tide of war and left to lie on the shore of peace, abandoned, forgotten. At present the Almshouse sheltered about fifty such men. Hundreds more, perhaps thousands, huddled in the South's ravaged cities and wandered its ruined roads, without help.

The patient on the end cot tossed and writhed. A familiar awl of pain pierced his forehead and turned, boring deeper and deeper. He'd suffered with the pain, and a broken, almost deformed body, ever since he took a near-fatal fall into ...

Into ...

God, they'd destroyed his mind, too. It took him minutes just to finish the thought.

Into the James River.

Yes. The James. He and fellow conspirators had planned to rid the Confederacy of the inept Jefferson Davis. They'd been discovered by an Army officer named ...

Named ...

No matter how he tried, it wouldn't come back, though he knew he had reason to hate the man. In the struggle that ensued after the discovery of the plot, the man had pushed him through a window above the river.

He vividly remembered the shocks of the fall. He had never experienced such pain. Outcrops of rock slammed his head, buttocks, legs as he went bouncing downward, finally striking the water.

He had a recurring nightmare about what had happened next. Sinking beneath the water, clawing against the current to reach the surface, and failing. In the dream, he drowned. Reality was different. Somehow, by effort or by chance, he no longer remembered which, he'd dragged himself to a bank downstream, vomited water, and lost consciousness.

Since that night he had been a different man. Pain was a constant companion. Strange lights frequently filled his head. Lying on the cot in the midst of the storm, he saw them again, yellow and green pinpoint flashes that blossomed to starry bursts of scarlet, fiery orange, blinding white. As if all of that wasn't a sufficient portion of suffering, his memory constantly betrayed him.

Somehow he had reached Richmond and survived the great conflagration that leveled so much of the city the night the Confederate government fell. He lived by prowling the night streets, committing robberies. His most recent had yielded but two dollars and the handsome though old-fashioned beaver hat sitting on a shelf above his cot. He'd gone without food for long periods — two, even three days sometimes. Then there was a blank, after which he awakened in the Almshouse. They said he'd collapsed in the street.

Why could he remember some things at certain times, and not at others? Then again, a whole new set of recollections would be clear while the first ones were beyond his mind's grasp for hours, or days. It was all part of the damage done to him by ...

By...

It wouldn't come.

The rain fell harder, a sound like drumming. His hand crawled around under the cot like a blind white spider, seeking something he did remember. He felt it, pulled it up, hugged it tightly to his filthy coarse patient's gown. A torn magazine, given him during one of his lucid periods. Harper's New Monthly for July of this year.

He was able to recall paragraphs from the section called "Editor's Easy Chair." The copy described the Grand Review of Grant's and Sherman's armies in Washington, lasting two days in ...

In ...

May, that was it.

In the dark, he squeezed his hand into a fist. I should have marched. People kept me from it. They kept me from playing the role I was born to play.

He could picture it. He was riding a fine stallion, bowing from the waist to acknowledge the cheers of the mob, saluting President Lincoln with his saber, then riding on, his great steed moving in a high-stepping walk while the mob, sweating, awe­struck, chanted as one:

"Bon-a-parte. Bon-a-parte."

He was the American Bonaparte.

No, he should have been. They kept him from it, those men named ...

Named ...

No use.

But he'd remember them someday. Someday. And when he did, God help them, and all their tribe.

He listened to the drums within the rain most of the night. About four he fell asleep. He awoke at six, clutching the torn Harper's. Although free of pain, he was still wretchedly unhappy. He couldn't think of the reason.

He couldn't even remember his own name.