Heaven and Hell

39

That night the rain changed to sleet. In the morning the temperature plummeted. Iron cold gripped the valley. Bleak skies hid the sun.

Jupiter Smith handled arrangements for the funeral; George was incapable. Even in the worst days of the war, he had never experienced anything like this. He had no appetite. When he tried a little broth he threw it up. He was stricken with continuous diarrhea, like that which killed so many men in the wartime camps on both sides.

He swung back and forth between not believing that Constance was gone and outbursts of grief that became so noisy he had to lock himself in a bedroom — not the one they'd shared; he couldn't stand to enter it — until the violent emotion worked itself out.

The homes and churches of Lehigh Station prepared to celebrate Christmas, though with less exuberance than usual because of the dreadful event at the mansion on the mountain. George thought the pieties of the season an abominable joke.

Christmas Day was somber and misty and, at Belvedere, joyless. Patricia played a carol on the great gleaming Steinway piano. William, ruddy and vigorous from a fall season of rowing at Yale, stood beside her and sang one verse of "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" in a strained baritone. He stopped singing when his father got up from the chair where he'd been sitting silently and walked out of the room.

Late in the afternoon, Jupe Smith called on them. He told George that all the telegraph messages had been sent to relatives and friends. He specifically mentioned Patrick Flynn, Constance's father, who was up in years now. "In his case, I described the cause of death as heart seizure. I saw no point in telling an old man that his daughter was, ah —"

"Butchered?"

Jupe stared at the floor. George waved, condoning the falsehood, and with a listless air walked back to the sideboard. He rummaged among cut glass decanters, accidentally overturning one. He was trying to get drunk on bourbon. His stomach had rejected it all afternoon.

He righted the decanter, dripping sour mash on the polished floor. "Where did you send the message to Charles Main?"

"Care of General Duncan at Fort Leavenworth."

"And Billy? Virgilia? Madeline? Did you —?"

"Yes. I warned every one of them, exactly as you instructed, George. I said that anyone in either family might be a target of this Bent, though I wander if that's really likely."

"Likely or not, it's possible. What about the earring?"

"I described it for each of them. Pearl, with a gold mount forming a teardrop. I don't quite see why —"

"I want them to know everything. Bent's description as I remember it — everything."

"Well, I took care of it."

George poured a drink. His linen stank, his speech was full of long pauses and unfinished thoughts, and his usually calm dark eyes had a wild glint. Jupe decided to leave.

"He's sick, Mr. Smith," Patricia whispered as she ushered the lawyer through the door. "I've never seen him act so strangely."

George had recovered slightly by the day of the funeral, which was held two days before the New Year.

Madeline was present, all the way from South Carolina. She was self-conscious, oddly shy. She was forty-two now, her hair heavily streaked with gray, which she refused to touch up with coloring. Her coat and mourning dress of black silk were old and shabby. When George first saw her, he greeted her with forced warmth and held his damp cheek against hers a moment. She didn't think he noticed her impoverished appearance. She was thankful.

Virgilia came from Washington. She was neatly though not expensively dressed. In her presence, George felt weak and small, very much the younger brother, even though there was only a year's difference between them. Much of Virgilia's old rage had been purged by her new life. She was able to embrace George with real feeling, and express her sorrow and mean it. The change confounded some of the townspeople who remembered the radical harridan of years past.

About three hundred men and women from Hazard's and the town joined the family for the funeral mass at St. Margaret's-in-the-Vale, then drove or walked in the freezing air to the hillside burying ground maintained by the church. Father Toone, Constance's priest, intoned his Latin beside the open grave, then traced the sign of the cross. Gravediggers began to lower the ornate silvered coffin on its straps. On the other side, red-faced and uncomfortable, Stanley and Isabel stared everywhere but at the grieving husband. Fortunately for everyone's peace of mind, they had not brought their obnoxious twins. Although it was not quite two in the afternoon, Stanley was noticeably drunk.

From behind George a gloved hand touched his arm. He reached across to take the hand without looking. Virgilia held tightly to her brother's fingers. The crowd broke up.

The bitter wind whipped the hem of Father Toone's surplice as he approached George and the two crying children. "I know this is a grievous day, George. Yet we must be confident in God. He has His purpose for the world and each of His creatures, no matter how hidden by clouds of evil that purpose may be."

George stared at the priest. Pale and hollow-cheeked, he bore a strong resemblance to photographs of the demented Poe in the last months of his life, Madeline thought. Stonily he said, "Please excuse me, Father."

It was the obligation of the Hazards to open the doors of Belvedere that afternoon and offer food and drink to the mourners. All of the rich breads and cakes, cloved hams and juicy beef rounds and oyster pies that normally would have been prepared for Christmas Day were served instead at the wake. Alcohol loosened tongues, and, before long, groups of guests were chatting noisily, even laughing, throughout the downstairs.

George couldn't tolerate it. He hid himself in the library. He'd been there about twenty minutes when the doors rolled back and Virgilia and Madeline came in.

"Are you all right?" Virgilia asked, hurrying to him. Madeline closed the doors, then fiddled with a black handkerchief tucked into her sleeve. His cravat undone, George sat staring at the women.

"I don't know, Jilly," he said. Virgilia was startled; he hadn't called her by that childish nickname since they were very small. Suddenly, he got to his feet. "What happened to her defies all reason. My God, it defies sanity."

Virgilia sighed. She looked matronly, and neat and well groomed in contrast to Madeline's obvious poverty. She said, "So does the world. Every day of our lives, I've discovered, we live with stupid mischance and clumsy melodrama, cupidity, greed, unnecessary suffering. We forget it, we mask it, we try to order it with our arts and philosophies, numb ourselves to it with diversions — or with drink, like poor Stanley. We try to explain and compensate for it with our religions. But it's always there, very close, like some poor deformed beast hiding behind the thinnest of curtains. Once in a while the curtain is torn down and we're forced to look. You know that. You went to war."

"Twice. I thought I'd seen my share"

"But life's not so logical as that, George. Some never see the beast at all. Some see it again and again, and there seems no sense to any of it. But when we look, something happens. It happened to me with Grady, and it took me years to understand it. What happens is that childhood comes to an end. Parents call it growing up, and they use the phrase much too casually. Growing up is looking at the beast and knowing it's immortal and you are not. It's dealing with that."

Head down, George stood by the library table. Near the fragment of star iron and a sprig of mountain laurel sat a soiled old beaver hat. It had been found on the lawn below the dormer Bent had entered. George's hand swept out, knocking the hat off the table and, inadvertently, the laurel. He put his foot on the laurel and crushed it.

"I can't deal with that, Jilly. I can't do it."

Madeline's heart broke. She wanted to take him in her arms, draw him close, comfort him. She was surprised and a little embarrassed by the strength of her feeling for the man who was her late husband's best friend. Color in her cheeks gave her away, but the others didn't notice. She quickly brought the emotion under control by turning away and putting her handkerchief to her eyes.

"Jilly —" He was calmer now. "Would you or Madeline please ask Christopher Wotherspoon to step in? I'd like to start on the arrangements for my trip."

Virgilia couldn't believe it. "This afternoon?"

"Why not this afternoon? You don't think I'm going out there and drink and crack jokes, do you?"

"George, these people are your friends. They're behaving in a perfectly appropriate way for a wake."

"Damn it, don't lecture." The brief communion, begun when he first called her Jilly, was over. "Wotherspoon has a lot to do to oversee Hazard's in my absence. He and Jupe Smith must also start up the Pittsburgh plant."

"I hadn't heard you were going away," Madeline said.

A listless nod. "I have business in Washington. After that — well, I'm not sure. I'll go to Europe, perhaps."

"What about the children?"

"They can finish the school year and join me."

"Where?" Virgilia asked.

"Wherever I happen to be."

Madeline and Virgilia exchanged anxious looks while George picked up the broken sprig of laurel. Contemptuously, he flung it in the cold hearth.

That night, very late, George woke. He felt like a child, frightened and angry. "Why did you do this to me, Constance?" he said in the dark. "Why did you leave me alone?"

He struck the pillow and kept striking it until he started to cry. He felt ashamed; ashamed and lost. He put his head down on the pillow. From the heavy starched cloth crept a scent, her scent, the imprint of someone who had shared the bed and the pillow for years. She was gone but she lingered. He tried to stop crying and couldn't. He cried until the gray light broke.

Every sheriff and metropolitan detective in Pennsylvania searched for Elkanah Bent. When he wasn't found by New Year's Day, George suspected he would not be found soon, if at all.

On the second day of the new year, 1868, George called on Jupe Smith and instructed him to put the new rail car up for sale. He then packed one valise and bid the servants and Patricia and young William goodbye. The children felt cast adrift. Could this cold, empty-eyed man be their father? William put his arm around his sister. In a moment, he felt years older.

George boarded the noon train to Philadelphia, speaking to no one.

At the War Department, a captain named Malcolm went through the ritual of sympathy. He asked, "There's no sign of this madman?"

"None. He's disappeared. I'd have caught him if the goddamn train hadn't been late —"

George stopped. He tried to relax the hand gripping the chair arm in Malcolm's office. Color returned slowly to his fingers and wrist. He wished he could tear the barbed ifs from his mind. It was impossible. He wished he could be man enough to do what Virgilia talked about: grow up; look at the beast. He'd looked, but it was destroying him.

Captain Malcolm saw his visitor's state and remained silent. Malcolm himself was under great strain, along with every other staff officer unlucky enough to be posted to Washington. The whole department had been in turmoil for months, following Johnson's suspension of Stanton as Secretary of War last August. Since a suspension was expressly prohibited by the Tenure of Office Act, Mr. Stanton, both, a Radical and a clever lawyer, denied the validity of the suspension. Grant, nevertheless, was rather reluctantly serving as interim secretary.

The President had suspended Stanton to test the Tenure Act and defy the Radicals, and they were after him for it. Early in December they had introduced an impeachment bill in the House. It had failed, but Malcom was assured the question would not be dropped. He understood the Senate was preparing to formalize its rejection of the suspension, and that might well provoke another attempt to oust Stanton. All of this made life difficult; Malcolm didn't know which of his departmental colleagues could be trusted with any remark beyond a pleasantry. At least this tragic man seated on the other side of the desk was not a part of the conflict.

Presently George said, "I've hired the Pinkerton agency. I want to give them all available information."

"I have a man searching the Adjutant General's personnel records now. Let me see how he's coming."

Malcolm was gone twenty minutes. He returned with a slim file, which he laid on the cluttered desk. "There isn't much, I'm afraid. Bent was charged with cowardice at Shiloh while temporarily commanding a unit other than his own. Lacking conclusive evidence in the matter, General Sherman nevertheless ordered a notation in his record and exiled him to New Orleans. He remained there until the end of General Butler's tenure."

"Anything else?"

Malcolm went through it. "Created a disturbance at a sporting house owned by one Madam Conti. Apprehended stealing a painting that was her property. Before Bent could again be brought up on charges, he deserted.

"There is one final entry, a year later. A man answering Bent's description worked briefly for Colonel Baker's detective unit."

George knew the work of Colonel Lafayette Baker. He recalled newspaper editors thrown into Old Capitol Prison for dissent about the war or criticism of Lincoln's policies and cabinet officers. "You're referring to the secret police employed by Mr. Stanton."

Malcolm lost his cordiality. "Mr. Stanton? I have no information, sir. I can't comment on that allegation."

George had seen enough bureaucrats to recognize the self-protective mode. Bitterly, he said, "Of course. Is that everything in the file?"

"Almost. Bent was seen last at Port Tobacco, where it's presumed he was arranging illegal entry into the Confederacy. There the trail runs out."

"Thank you, Captain. I'll convey the information to Pinkerton's." He added a polite lie. "You've been very helpful."

He shook Malcolm's hand and left. He felt his gut boiling, and barely reached Willard's Hotel before he was again stricken with violent intestinal trouble.

Virgilia found a doctor for him. The man sent to a chemist's for an opium compound that tightened up his gut but did nothing to stem the sudden fits of weeping that struck him at highly inopportune moments. One such attack took place when he was escorting Virgilia to Willard's dining room for a farewell supper.

With an exertion of will, he recovered his composure. His sister talked throughout the meal, trying to divert him with information about her work at Scipio Brown's home for black waifs, and the mounting Radical frenzy to remove the President by impeachment. George heard little of it, then nothing when he put his face in his hands and wept again. He was mortally ashamed, but he couldn't stop.

In his suite, Virgilia held him close before they parted. Her arms felt strong, while he felt weak, sick, worthless. She kissed his cheek gently. "Let us know where you are, George. And please take care of yourself."

He held the door open, pale in the feeble light of low-trimmed gas.

"Why?" he said.

She went away without answering.

In New York he booked a first-class stateroom on the Grand Turk for Southampton. He was carrying the name of a London estate agent with good contacts in Europe, particularly Switzerland. The estate agent recommended Lausanne, on the north shore of Lake Geneva, saying that any number of American millionaires suffering from ill health had found benefit there. George had indicated that he needed a restful haven.

In cold and damp January twilight, he stood at the rail among first-class passengers who were waving, chattering, and celebrating. A steward handed him a glass of champagne. He muttered something but didn't drink. Soul-numbing despair still gripped him. He had lost twenty pounds, and, because he was a short man, the loss seemed severe, lending him a wasted look.

Trailing smoke, her whistle blasting, the great steamer left the dock and moved down the Hudson past the Jersey piers and the shanties surrounding them. George's hand hung over the rail. A slight pitch of the vessel spilled the champagne. It dispersed in the air, the droplets not visible by the time they reached the oily black water.

How like the life of poor Constance, and that of his dead friend Orry, was the spilled champagne. A moment's sparkle, an accident, and nothing.

He walked to the stern, the fur collar of his overcoat turned up against the chill. With dead eyes he watched America vanish behind him. He expected he would never see it again.

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

After midnight on January thirteenth, Judith carried a taper to her husband's study at Tradd Street. She found him amid a litter of newspapers, his reading spectacles on his nose and a book in his lap. It was a book she hadn't seen him open for years.

"The Bible, Cooper?"

His long white fingers tapped the rice-paper page. "Exodus. I was reading about the plagues. An appropriate study for these times, don't you think? After the plague of frogs and the plague of lice, the swarms of flies and the boils and the killing hail, Moses brandished his rod again, an east wind rose and blew all night, and in the morning it brought a plague of locusts."

Dismayed and alarmed by his fervency, Judith put down the taper and crossed her arms over her bed gown. Cooper picked up the Bible and read in a low voice. "Very grievous they were. Before them there were no such locusts as they ... they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left: and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, through all the land of Egypt."

He took off his spectacles. "We have a north wind instead. Blowing in a plague of Carolina turncoats, Yankee adventurers, illiterate colored men — and they're all going to sit down in that convention tomorrow. What a prospect! Ethiopian minstrelsy. Ham Radicalism in all its glory!"

"Cooper, the convention must meet. A new constitution's the price for readmission to the Union."

"And a new social order — is that another price we must pay?" He picked up a Daily News and read, "The demagogue is to rule the mass, and vice and ignorance control the vast interests at stake. The delegates may well create a Negro bedlam." He tossed the paper down. "I concur."

"But if I remember my Bible, soon after the locusts came, there was a west wind to cast them back in the Red Sea."

"And you remember what followed next, don't you? The plague of darkness. Then the plague of death."

Judith wanted to weep. She couldn't believe that this spent, embittered man was the same person she'd married. Only by immense will did she keep emotion from her face. "Are you planning to observe any of the proceedings?" she asked.

"I'd sooner watch wild animals. I'd sooner be hung."

In the morning, he left early for the offices of the Carolina Shipping Company. Judith felt sad and helpless. Cooper was indeed becoming a stranger to her. He no longer had anything at all to do with Madeline.

Marie-Louise wasn't much better company for her, though the reasons were different. Judith found her daughter at the sunny dining table, her chin on her hands, her breakfast untouched, her eyes fixed dreamily on some far unseen vista. She was neglecting her studies and she talked of scarcely anything but boys. Marie-Louise especially admired some of General Canby's occupying soldiers. Whatever the other consequences of military Reconstruction, it was quite literally robbing Judith of a family.

Of the one hundred twenty-four delegates who convened on January 14, seventy-six were black. Only twenty-three of the white delegates were Carolina-born, but of those a fair number were former hotspurs. Joe Crews had traded in slaves. J. M. Rutland had collected money for a new cane when Preston Brooks broke his over the head of Charles Sumner, almost killing him. Franklin Moses had helped pull down the American flag after Sumter surrendered.

Andy sat among the delegates in his dusty orange frock coat, the first volume of James Kent's Commentaries on his knee. He was very erect, proud to be at the convention, but overawed, too; many of the Negro delegates were far better educated than he was. Alonzo Ransier, a native-born freedman, had chatted with him at length about the sweeping social changes the convention would produce. The most intimidating Negro was a handsome, tall, portly chap named Francis Cardozo. Although his skin was the color of old ivory, Cardozo, a free-born mulatto, proudly seated himself among the black delegates. He was an example of what a man could make of himself if he had unlimited opportunity, Andy thought. Cardozo had graduated from the University of Glasgow and formerly held a Presbyterian pulpit in New Haven, Connecticut

To overcome feelings of inferiority, Andy frequently recalled some earnest words that Jane spoke when she said goodbye to him at the river road. "You're just as good as any of them if you prove you are. You all start out equal in the eyes of God. Mr. Jefferson said so, and that's what the war was really about. Whether you end up ahead of where you started is up to you."

She'd hugged him then, kissed him, and whispered, "Make us all proud." Remembering it, he sat a little straighten.

There was none of the predicted "Negro bedlam" on the convention floor, though enthusiastic black spectators in the gallery had to be gaveled to silence by the temporary chairman, T. J. Robertson, a well-respected businessman of moderate views. The noisiest part of the hall was that occupied by members of the press, most of them Yankees. Many were dressed in plaid suits and gaudy cravats. Andy saw one reporter spit a stream of tobacco juice on the floor. He felt smugly superior. Earlier, Cardozo had remarked to him and some other black delegates, "The reporters have come down here to measure this convention against Northern morality. They'll measure our utterances and our behavior as well. Take heed and act accordingly, gentlemen."

Robertson's gavel brought the hall to order. "Before I turn the chair over to our great and good friend Dr. Mackey" — he was another respected local man — "I should like to remind those assembled of our high purpose. We are gathered to frame a just and liberal constitution for the Palmetto State, one which will guarantee equal rights to all, and gain us readmission to the Union."

The spectators demonstrated their approval. Again Robertson gaveled them down before continuing.

"We do not claim any preeminence of wisdom or virtue. We do claim, however, that we are following the progressive spirit of the age ... and that we shall be bold enough, honest enough, wise enough to trample obsolete and unworthy laws and customs underfoot, to initiate a new order of justice in South Carolina. Let every delegate turn his thoughts, and his utterances, solely to that purpose."

He means my thoughts, Andy said to himself. All right, he'd speak up. If he was wrong about something, he'd learn. Without making a few mistakes, how could you lift yourself from what you were to what you wanted to become?

He straightened in his seat, hand firmly on the law text. A rush of pride renewed his courage and restored his confidence.

"Now, ma'am," said Mr. Edisto Topper of Beaufort, "this is why I urgently requested a meeting." Standing beside Madeline in the pale January sunshine drenching the fallow rice square, the small, dapper attorney broke open the blue-gray lump of clay.

Madeline stepped back from the familiar stench. "I've always called that our poisoned earth."

Topper dropped the clay lumps, laughing. "Poisoned with riches, Mrs. Main." He turned to his young and servile clerk. "Gather several of those nodules and put them in the bag. We'll want an assay."

Madeline's forehead glistened with perspiration. When Topper's carriage had come rattling up the lane, she was busy brushing a new coat of whitewash on the pine house. Specks of it stippled her hands and the bosom of her faded dress.

"I can hardly believe you, Mr. Topper, though I'd certainly like to do so."

"Do, my good woman, do. The rumors are true. There is mineral treasure hidden along the Ashley and Stono rivers, and in the riverbeds as well. Your so-called poisoned earth is phosphate-bearing."

"But it's been here for years."

"And not a soul realized its worth until Dr. Ravenel of Charleston assayed samples from Lambs last fall." Topper swept the vista of rice fields with a flamboyant gesture. "Mont Royal could run as high as six or eight hundred tons of marl per acre. High-grade marl, sixty percent tricalcic phosphate, ten percent carbonate of lime — far richer than the marls of Virginia."

"It's very welcome news. But a little overwhelming."

He laughed again, and dry-washed his hands. "Understandable, dear lady. After years of defeat and privation, we are quite literally standing upon the economic rebirth of this section of the state. It's there in those foul-smelling nodules. That's the smell of money. That's the smell of fertilizer!"

They returned to homemade chairs on the lawn in front of the whitewashed house. From his valise, lawyer Topper produced reports, assays, surveys which he thrust at Madeline, urging her to read every word.

"Already there's a positive stampede to buy mineral rights from property owners. I represent a group of investors organized as the Beaufort Phosphate Company. All fine Southern gentlemen; Carolina natives, like myself. I'm sure you'll feel more comfortable knowing that when we do business."

Madeline brushed back a stray strand of graying hair. "If, Mr. Topper. If."

"But you have the complete advantage in the matter! It's our capital what will be at risk, whereas all you give up is temporary use of your land. We handle everything. Dig the pits, build a tram road for horse carts, install steam-driven washers to separate out the sand and clay. We assume full responsibility for freighting or barging the washed rock to drying yards. Then we negotiate a favorable sale price. Mr. Lewis and Mr. Klett have already capitalized one processing firm to crush the rock and convert it to commercial fertilizer. Competing companies are sure to spring up soon. We'll be in a splendid position."

It was all too perfect. She kept searching for flaws. "What about men to dig the rock?"

"Likewise our responsibility. We'll hire every available nig — ah, freedman. Pay them twenty-five cents per foot dug, rock removal included."

She shook her head. Topper looked puzzled. "Something wrong?"

"Very definitely, Mr. Topper. There are black families starving all along this river, and I don't exclude Mont Royal. If you're going to mine my land, you'll have to create jobs that are worthwhile. Shall we say fifty cents per foot dug?"

Topper blanched. "Fifty? I'm not certain —"

"Then perhaps I should negotiate with someone else. You did mention competition."

The lawyer began to squirm. "We can work something out, dear lady. I'm certain we can work something out. Here, I've brought the option paper. I'd like to obtain your signature this morning, in advance of a full contract satisfactory to both sides." He took the folded document from his clerk. It was thick and wrapped with green ribbon. He flourished it as if it were a road map to El Dorado.

Trying to hide her excitement, Madeline scanned the finely written pages of tortured language made even more obscure by occasional Latin. She thought she understood the general sense of it.

"Ask your clerk to add a sentence about the agreed mining wage and I'll sign."

"We understand that a second signature will be needed."

"No. I have the authority to sign for Cooper Main."

With a trembling hand, she did.

She was wakened by the sound of a horse coming up the lane from the river road. She wrapped her old gown around herself and rushed out to identify the visitor. Unbelievably, it was Cooper, jumping down from a lathered bay. A foot-thick carpet of mist lay all about them.

"It was all over Charleston by ten last night, Madeline. We're laughingstocks."

Sleepily, she muttered, "What are you talking about?"

"Your damned contract with Beaufort Phosphate. Apparently you're the last person in the district to find out who's behind the company."

"Local men, the lawyer said."

"The scalawag lied. He's the only South Carolinian involved. The principal share owner is a goddamned Radical senator, Samuel Stout. You've sold us out to a man who flogs with one hand and bleeds us with the other."

Andy Sherman felt he had never stretched his mind, or learned so much, except for the time during the war when Jane was his teacher. Every morning as he dressed for his delegate work, he ached from hours spent on his knees polishing hotel floors or carrying jars of night soil out to the carts. Somehow a few hours of sleep sustained him, as did the one full meal a day that he allowed himself. He was nourished by the convention and the work he was doing there.

When he didn't understand a word, a phrase, an idea, he asked questions of the chair or fellow subcommittee members. When something was explained and he grasped it, he felt like a carefree boy waking on a summer morning.

Certain delegates, acting from timidity or expedience, tried to modify the great cornerstone of the emerging constitution, suffrage. They tried to add a qualifying poll tax of one dollar, and a literacy provision: any man coming of age after 1875 without the ability to read and write would be denied the vote.

In hot arguments against the amendments, Andy heard Union League doctrine recited by some of the black delegates. Some, but not many; a majority of the blacks were still too over­awed by their white counterparts, or simply too shy and uncertain to speak up. He tried to persuade a couple of them to take part. He was answered with apologetic evasions.

He discussed the problem with Cardozo, whose quick mind and impressive oratorical skills he continued to admire. "You're right, Sherman. As a race we are too reticent. Only education will alleviate that. Given the history of this state, however, I don't believe an adequate public school system can be in operation by 1875. I will vote against the amendment."

Andy spoke against it — his first time on his feet in the convention. Nervously, but with conviction, he read the little statement he'd phrased and rephrased on scraps of paper until it satisfied him. "Gentlemen, I believe the right to vote must belong to the wise and the ignorant alike, to the vicious as well as the virtuous, else universal suffrage as an idea means nothing."

Ransier was the first on his feet to applaud.

The provision was rejected, 107-2. The poll tax, which Cardozo scathingly branded the first step to returning power to the "aristocratic element," went down 81-21.

The blacks of Mont Royal were as protective of Madeline as if she were a child. They continued to insist that someone drive her to the city. She relented, and chose Fred.

On a crisp February morning, they stopped the wagon shortly after turning onto the river road. In the cleared field behind the fence a gang of thirty black men swung shovels. Flagged stakes outlined a trench six hundred yards wide by one thousand yards long, to be dug around the field to drain it,

Six men were dragging a huge timber with ropes to smooth a path down the center of the field. On that path, horse carts would eventually haul away mined rock. Edisto Topper had informed Madeline that most of Mont Royal would soon be covered by similar fields.

Here was the first. She was studying it proudly when a bright flash, as from a reflecting mirror, caught her attention. She turned and saw a mounted man about a quarter-mile down the road in the direction of Summerton. From his pudginess, and the light flashing from his spectacles, she recognized Gettys.

For a moment or so the storekeeper sat very still, as if watching her. Then, with a contemptuous flick of his rein, he turned and trotted away toward Summerton.

Madeline shivered. Somehow the day was spoiled.

It got worse. At the Palmetto Bank on Broad Street, a bald clerk, Mr. Crow, informed her that Mr. Dawkins would be unavailable all day.

"But I wrote him that I was coming. It's important that I speak to him," she said.

Crow remained cool. "In what regard?"

"I want to arrange to pay off my mortgage sooner than the bank requires. Mont Royal's being mined for phosphates. We should be receiving substantial income. I wrote Leverett all about this."

"Mr. Dawkins received your letter." Crow emphasized the mister, implicit criticism of her familiarity. "I was instructed to tell you that the directors of this bank are not disposed to prepayment. It's our prerogative under terms of the mortgage to insist that you continue regular quarterly payments."

"For how long."

"The full term."

"That's years. If it's a matter of the interest, I'll gladly pay that, too."

Crow stepped back a pace, disdainful. "It's a matter of policy, Mrs. Main."

"What policy? To keep me on a leash you can cut any time you choose?"

"Are you referring to foreclosure?"

"Yes. Is that a matter of policy, too?"

"Kindly lower your voice. Why should the Palmetto Bank wish to foreclose on Mont Royal? It's valuable land, with dramatically improved prospects for generating income. You're raising an extraneous issue." He thought a moment, then added, "Of course it's true that foreclosure remains an option of the bank, should you default. But in that event, the person to suffer would be the owner, Mr. Main. I'm sure you wouldn't want to be responsible for putting your relative in such a position —"

The point — the threat — was made. But how clumsy they were, how obvious in their passion to control her. Was the whole State, the whole South, still insane on the subject of Africanization! Surely, surely they no longer feared unlikely conspiracies, uprisings, arson plots against property, the raping of white women —

Then, abruptly, intuition pointed to the real cause, less dramatic but nevertheless lethal: the convention. It was meddling with the vote, and with taxes; it threatened to touch white money. Did Leverett Dawkins know of her connection with a black delegate? He must.

Crow stood behind a gleaming oak rail with a gate in it. Provoked by his rebuflf, and by snide looks from c couple of tellers, she reached for the gate. "I'm a good customer of this bank, Mr. Crow. I'm not satisfied with your explanations, or happy about your rudeness. I'm going to take this up with Leverett whether he's busy or not."

"Madam, you will not." Crow seized and held the gate shut.

"Please leave. Mr. Dawkins reminds you that colored are not welcome on these premises."

He walked off. Her eyes brimming with tears of rage, she fled.

The Imperial Wizard came by night.

In a lonely grove of great oaks a mile from Summerton, they planted and lit a ring of torches. Wives and sweethearts had sewn the regalia according to instructions sent earlier by letter. The Invisible Empire prescribed no color for regalia. At Des's urging, the initiates chose red. Gettys had paid for the expensive yard goods out of his handsome earnings from the Dixie Store.

Standing six feet two inches and powerfully built, General Nathan Bedford Forrest had a swarthy complexion and gray-blue eyes. Streaks of white showed in his wavy black hair and neat chin beard. He impressed the initiates as a man it would be unwise to challenge. When he presented them with an official copy of the Prescript, the national constitution, and told them the fee was ten dollars, no one objected.

The initiates stood in a line. The torches smoked and hissed around them. Erect and clear-eyed, Forrest moved from man to man, inspecting them. Des was almost dizzy with excitement. Jack Jolly carried himself with a certain smugness; this was his old leader, after all. Gettys sweated, though not nearly so much as Father Lovewell, who kept shooting glances into the insect-murmurous dark beyond the torches. One of the two farmers who completed the group recognized the priest, whom he saw in church every Sunday.

Forrest began his instruction.

"This is an institution of humanity, mercy, and patriotism. Its genesis and organizing principles embody all that is chivalric in conduct, noble in sentiment, heroic in spirit. Knowing of your previous declaration of loyalty to these principles, I shall, by order of the Grand Dragon of the Realm of Carolina, ask you ten questions."

His stem eyes raked them. "Have you ever belonged to or subscribed to the principles of the Radical Republican Party, the Union League, or the Grand Army of the Republic?"

As one, ''No."

"Do you righteously oppose Negro equality, both social and political?"

"Yes."

"Do you advocate a white man's government?"

"Yes."

"Do you favor constitutional liberty, and a government of equitable laws instead of a government of violence and oppression?"

"Yes!"

So it went, for nearly an hour. The lessons:

"We protect the weak, the innocent, the defenseless, against the lawlessness and lust of the violent, the brutal, the deranged. ...We serve the injured, the suffering, the unfortunate, giving first priority and highest allegiance to widows and orphans of the Confederate dead."

The rules:

"Any ritual, hand grip, code or pass word, as well as the origins, designs, mysteries, and other proprietary secrets of this organization shall not be knowingly betrayed. If any are so betrayed, the perpetrator shall incur the full and extreme penalty of our law. Never shall the name of the organization be written by any member. For purposes of printed announcement it shall be identified always and only by one, two, or three asterisks."

The investiture:

From the ground, Forrest plucked up a robe and sacklike hood of shiny sateen-weave cotton. Solemnly, he handed these to Des.

"I endow you with the title, rights, and privileges of Grand Cyclops of the klavern and, additionally, the title, rights, and responsibilities of Grand Titan of this district."

To Jolly: "I endow you with the title, rights, and privileges of Grand Turk, charging you to assist the Cyclops in all regards, and serve as his loyal adjutant."

"Yes, sir, General." Jolly accepted the regalia, his eyes brimming with anticipatory pleasure.

Grand Sentinel, Grand Ensign, Grand Scribe, Grand Exchequer — each man had a responsibility. With great solemnity and a high sense of patriotism absent from his life since he'd mustered out of the Palmetto Rifles, Des donned the shimmering red robe and hood. So did the others.

The torches fumed and smoked. General Forrest surveyed the hooded den. Well pleased, he smiled.

"You are the newest knights of our great crusade. Begin your purge here, on your home soil, where the face of the enemy is known to you. Joined klavern to klavern throughout our great Invisible Empire, together we will sweep the debased government of certain evil men from this land we love."

Des licked his lips and exhaled, rippling the mask that hung below his chin. Again he felt the weight of his boon companion, Ferris Brixham, sagging dead in his arms.

Jolly felt the rolling gait of a war-horse, and heard the screams of the dying at Fort Pillow.

And Gettys grew stiff under his robe, thinking of Orry Main's widow, denied her sudden new wealth, abducted and brought to a remote clearing like this, stripped bare for whatever punishment, or pleasure, they chose.

Eerily, Des sensed his thoughts. "Certain white men, Randall," he whispered. "A certain white woman, too."

40

Marie-Louise Main came into the springtime of her fifteenth year bothered by a number of things.

She was bothered at night by vivid dreams in which she waltzed with a succession of handsome young men. Each young man held her waist firmly and flirted in a Yankee accent she found wickedly attractive. Every face was different, but all the young men were officers in blue uniforms with bright gold buttons. The ending of each dream was similar, too. The young officer whirled her away to some dim balcony or garden path and there bent to kiss her in a highly forward way —

Whereupon she invariably awoke. She knew why. She was ignorant of what came after a kiss.

Oh, she had a general idea. She'd seen animals, and, well, she knew. But she hadn't the faintest idea of how it felt, or how she should behave. Mama had provided basic facts, but to questions about response she said, 'Time enough to talk about that when you become engaged. That will be some years yet." Of course Marie-Louise never mentioned the subject with Papa.

She was bothered by what she perceived as her inadequacy when she compared herself with her peers, the five other young ladies in her class at Mrs. Allwick's Female Academy. While she worked at her translation of selected passages from Horace or the Aeneid, the other girls passed notes and whispered about their beaux. Each had several, or claimed they did. Marie-Louise had none. Papa was so grim and preoccupied all the time, he wouldn't give her the slightest encouragement about boys. Not that it really mattered. She didn't know even one boy who might want to begin the courtship ritual with the customary small gifts and parlor visits.

She wondered if her looks contributed to this unhappy situation. She had to accept her height, and a slim figure; both parents were built that way. She'd inherited Mama's dark blond curls and a large mouth with good teeth. Her small bosom came in some mysterious way from Papa's side, she decided; Mama was flat.

When she felt good, she thought herself passably pretty. When something got her down — usually the lack of boys in her life — she was sure she was a homely horse. Objectively, she was considered an attractive young woman, with a pretty face suited to smiling and a natural warmth that invited friendliness, although it was true that she was a little too tall and thin ever to be deemed a beauty.

Marie-Louise was bothered by her father. He was stern and unsmiling, and although she had once been comfortable in his presence, she was no longer. Nor was Mama. Mama liked to entertain Aunt Madeline whenever she was in Charleston, but it could only be during the day, when Marie-Louise was at school; Papa refused to allow Uncle Orry's widow to eat supper at Tradd Street or call when he was at home. He never explained this intolerant behavior, but it wounded Marie-Louise, who was fond of her aunt by marriage. Mama said Aunt Madeline needed the affection and support of her family. Uncle Orry's best friend Mr. Hazard, the brother of Aunt Brett's husband, had lost his wife in some terrible accident. Aunt Madeline had gone to the funeral and was still upset about it, Mama said.

Papa didn't care. Papa was not himself; not the man Marie-Louise remembered from her early childhood. He was busy with all sorts of personal causes. For instance, twice a month he traveled on horseback to Columbia. He was one of thirty-eight trustees of the old South Carolina College, now reopened as a state university with twenty-two students. "If the Radicals and General Canby will leave us alone, we might make something of the institution." Exactly what he wanted to make of it, Marie-Louise couldn't fathom, but he was fiercely protective of the university, and of his position as trustee.

Papa was always delivering angry little sermons at meals. Marie-Louise knew there was turmoil in the state because of the new constitution that had something to do with public schools, one of the topics that most often prompted Papa's sermons. One evening he flourished a letter from General Wade Hampton. "He's chairing our special committee to write a protest to Congress about that damnable constitution." The next evening he waved some cheap inky sheet and declared, "The Thunderbolt is a trashy paper but in this case the editor's right. A property tax rate of nine mills per dollar would be thievery. The school scheme is nothing but a pauper's cause, engineered by approximately sixty Negroes, most of whom are ignorant, and fifty white men who are Northern outcasts or Southern renegades. Their tinkering with the social order will destroy this state morally and financially."

The new schools, to be attended by black as well as white pupils, were not the only issue that incensed Papa. He ranted about charges of treason brought against Mr. Davis after a long imprisonment. "Our caged eagle," Papa called him. As for the President of the United States, Mr. Johnson, Papa said he was "high-principled" and "the friend of Southerners," but he was apparently about to be driven out of office by a scheme Marie-Louise didn't understand at all. She only knew the fiendish Republicans were behind it.

Papa hated Republicans. He frequently rushed off to evening meetings of the Democratic party, which he supported with his effort as well as his money. Marie-Louise wished he'd spend more time with the family and less attending meetings and writing letters to newspapers castigating the Republicans. He had no time for his daughter when she tried to plead that she needed a beau, if not several. She decided she would have to acquire one of her own or be forever humiliated in front of her classmates at Mrs. Allwick's.

Finally, Marie-Louise was bothered by a competition at the female academy where she studied Latin and Greek (a bore), algebra (a mystery), and social deportment (useful with beaux; at least so she was told). To conclude the spring term, Mrs. Allwick planned an evening of dance demonstrations under the supervision of Mr. LaMotte, the academy's part-time dancing master. LaMotte was a peculiar man with a huge body, almost feminine grace, and eyes that Marie-Louise found unsettling; they always seemed to be focused on someone other than those he was teaching.

LaMotte frequently harangued the young ladies about "Southern womanhood." He said they represented its finest flowering and must protect themselves against men who would degrade it. Marie-Louise knew that "degrading" had something to do with men and women together physically, but when she mentally ventured beyond that, she was soon in the fogs of ignorance again. Two of her classmates giggled at such references; they understood everything, or pretended they did. It made her so mad she wanted to spit.

To open the program for parents, there would be a grand tableau. One of the six girls in Marie-Louise's class was to be chosen to represent this self-same Southern Womanhood. Mrs. Allwick would make the selection. Marie-Louise had decided that being picked was the most important matter in her life, next to beaux. She also feared the prize would go to a sow named Sara Jane Oberdorf, who said she had seven beaux. Marie-Louise had seen three. One was an undertaker's boy who liked to discuss and compare, funerals. One was the shy son of a local magistrate; he never answered anyone who said hello, merely grunted. The third was a lout so overweight that his neck bulged like those of certain old women afflicted with a condition Mama called "the goiter." But at least the three boys were alive and breathing, not creatures of some scarlet dream. Botheration!

One afternoon in early April, Marie-Louise left school at half past four, only to discover, when she stepped on the porch, that it was raining hard. She couldn't see Fort Sumter in the harbor.

Her chattering friends skipped off to parents or servants waiting in carriages. Marie-Louise clutched her Virgil and her algebra text and prepared for a soaking walk to Tradd Street. Then a familiar two-passenger buggy rounded the corner from the South Battery, and there was Papa, driving and waving his gold-knobbed stick.

"I was at a committee meeting at Ravenel's house. I saw it start to rain and thought I'd save you a drenching. Climb in. I must stop at the Mills House to drop off some papers. Then we'll drive home."

Marie-Louise's side curls bobbed as she jumped up beside him, sheltered by the buggy's top. With adoring eyes she gazed at her pale, tired-looking father. This was the most attention he'd paid to her for months.

A great many carriages and saddle horses were tied along the Meeting Street frontage of the hotel. Cooper found a space and told her to wait. He was gone more than the ten minutes he'd promised.

The rain diminished, swift-flying dark clouds moved on out to sea, and a steamy sunshine pierced through while she waited. She noticed a small crowd of men and women listening to a speaker on the steps of Hibernian Hall. Nearby, other men held placards. One said, republicans for free schools.

Bored, Marie-Louise left the carriage and strolled toward the crowd. The hoarse-voiced speaker, who might or might not have been a mulatto, was urging his listeners to vote in favor of the new state constitution. Marie-Louise paused at the back of the crowd. The two men just in front of her were unshaven farmer types. They gave her suspicious looks.

Suddenly she noticed a young man not far from her on her left. He wore a fawn coat and breeches and a billowing brown cravat. He was staring.

She almost sank through the ground. She recognized the pale face, light hair and curling mustache, and those brilliant blue eyes. It was the young civilian who'd given his seat to the Negress on the train from Coosawhatchie.

He smiled and tipped his hat. Marie-Louise smiled, feeling she must be red as fire. She clutched her textbooks to her bosom. Was she acting like a perfect fool?

"— and it behooves every citizen of good conscience to support free schools for South Carolina by voting aye on the constitution one week from —"

"Just a moment."

Heads turned. Marie-Louise pirouetted. Her legs wobbled from shock. Where had Papa come from so silently? Well, obviously from the Mills House, while she was all wrapped up in wondering about the young man.

Cooper pushed through the crowd. "I'm a citizen with a conscience. I'd like to ask a question."

"Yes, sir, Mr. Main. I recognize you," said the speaker, defensive and a bit sardonic. Marie-Louise flashed a look at the young man, trying to say that Cooper was her father, but of course the young man didn't understand. To the crowd, the speaker said, "This gentleman is a factor and shipping agent. A Democrat."

Predictably, the people growled. When someone said, "Hell with him," Marie-Louise reacted with a wrathful expression. How dare they be so rude to Papa?

Cooper elbowed his way to the steps of Hibernian Hall. Marie-Louise could tell that he was in one of his angry moods. "I listened to the fine platitudes this gentleman purveys as part of his Republican cant. I wonder if any of you know their true cost?"

"Shut him up," yelled one of the rough men standing in front of Marie-Louise.

"No," said Cooper, "I'm sure you don't. So I'll remind all you tenderhearted idealists that before the late unpleasantness, when South Carolina had some claim to prosperity, only seventy-five thousand dollars a year could be raised from property taxes to support public schools. Most of that money came from the tax on black bondsmen —"

"Get him down," shouted the rough man. Marie-Louise wanted to hike up her skirts and kick him with her pointed shoe. The speaker signaled to a couple of ragged musicians, who began to play "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" on fifes.

"Damn you, I'll have my say." Cooper was flushed. Marie-Louise grew alarmed. She didn't see the young man drop back and circle the crowd, coming toward her.

Over the music Cooper shouted, "The stupendous and ill-conceived school scheme is estimated to cost nearly a million dollars a year. It can only come from taxes. If you vote for the Republican-inspired constitution, you'll be placing an intolerable burden on the state. South Carolina is on her knees, struggling to rise. This school plan will keep, her down forever."

A woman shook her parasol at him. "It isn't taxes you hate. It's the colored people."

The rough man yelled, "Either step down or we'll pull you down."

Marie-Louise didn't pause to consider her next action. She just beat the man's shoulder twice, hard, with her Virgil. "Let him alone. He has as much right to speak as you do."

The man turned, and so did his companion. Marie-Louise looked at them closely and grew petrified with fright. The one doing the yelling had a milky eye and wore a gold ring in his left ear. He glanced at Marie-Louise's bosom and smirked. "They take their concubines young in Charleston, don't they?" He said it in a hard Yankee accent.

"Watch your mouth, sir," said a low voice at her elbow. She turned to see the blue-eyed stranger. He confronted the two older men without apparent worry. "I believe the gentleman speaking is related to the young lady. You owe her an apology."

"Damn if I'll apologize to some mush-mouthed Southron. Why you taking her part, sonny? You sound like a Northern man."

"Chicago," he said with a nod. "I'm taking her part because you have the manners of a hog, and the South has no corner on respect for womanhood."

"Smart-mouthed little shit." The milky-eyed man drew his fist back. A woman shrieked. Suddenly, whistling down, Cooper's stick smashed the raised forearm. He struck a second time with the heavy gold knob, while the young man took hold of Marie-Louise's waist, lifted her, and set her out toward the curb, away from the press of people.

Breathing fast, the young man raised his fists defensively. It was an overly dramatic pose, but it thrilled Marie-Louise. Milk-Eye was groping for Cooper, who kept jabbing him with the ferrule of his stick. The rest of the crowd, though Republican, quickly turned against the uncouth pair. Hands restrained them. The speaker as well as several others offered exaggerated apologies.

Cooper pushed Milk-Eye aside with his cane. The young man lowered his fists. "Thank you, sir," Cooper said to him, brushing off his lapel. All at once he seemed to focus on the young man's face. He frowned. "We've met before."

"Not formally, sir. We saw one another on the railroad from Coosawhatchie some time back."

"Yes." Cooper froze him with that word. The crowd began to disperse. The speaker and the musicians blowing their fifes tramped away down Meeting Street in an impromptu parade. A few others joined them. Milk-Eye stood watching Marie-Louise and her two protectors until his companion convinced him to leave.

Cooper bowed.

"Cooper Main, sir. Your servant."

"Theo German, sir. Yours. I find it a pity that freedom to disagree was not tolerated here today."

Cooper shrugged, very cool toward him. Marie-Louise recalled how Papa had fumed when the young Northerner gave his seat to the black woman. "The new constitution is a ferocious issue, Mr. German. Our survival hinges upon its defeat."

"I am nevertheless in favor, sir."

"So I gather, sir, you not being a Carolinian."

"No, sir, I am only here temporarily, due to my, ah, job. I have rooms with Mrs. Petrie in Chalmers Street."

Marie-Louise looked past Papa's shoulder to the blue eyes of Theo German. She understood why he'd stated his address. Cooper suspected the reason, too.

"Papa, you haven't introduced me."

Icy, Cooper said, "My daughter, Marie-Louise Main, whom you so thoughtfully protected. I am in your debt." Cooper took her elbow. "Shall we go?"

Clouds above Meeting Street let through shafts of sunshine, one of which bathed the street near Hibernian Hall. Theo German's face shone like that of some golden statue. Marie-Louise felt faint.

The young man stepped forward abruptly. "Sir, I wonder if I might ask your permission —"

Oh, yes, she thought, dizzy with happiness. Before he could finish, Cooper literally pushed her toward the Mills House, interrupting. "Good afternoon, Mr. German."

In the carriage, aflame with resentment, she beat her gloved hands on her skirt. "Papa, how could you? He was about to ask permission to call."

"So I sensed. I don't believe we want any Yankee adventurers polluting Tradd Street. He's probably a Union League organizer, or something just as bad. He was a gentleman, I'll grant you that. But not enough of one to pay court to my daughter. When it's time for beaux, I'll inform you."

"Papa," she said, nearly weeping. He ignored her. He snapped the reins and swung the horse south toward Tradd Street. They rolled right by young Theo German, still standing outside Hibernian Hall with the golden light falling on him.

Chalmers Street, Chalmers Street, she thought, wanting to wave to him and not daring. I'm a grown woman. I'll not be told who to love. Mrs. Petrie, Chalmers Street.

Unknowingly, Cooper had just fueled a revolt.

Marie-Louise spent two days composing her note, on lavender paper. In it, she thanked Theo German effusively for guarding her honor, as she put it. Then, having weighed the worst consequences and pictured herself dealing with them, she added a final paragraph inviting him to attend the spring program at Mrs. Allwick's. Please address me here at the school if you care to reply, the note concluded. She signed her name, folded the paper, and wrote the school address on the outside. She moistened the note with a heavy floral perfume before waxing it shut.

The freedman who did odd jobs at the school took the note for delivery, asking no questions. The next day, a note came back, briefly and boldly inscribed:

I should be honored and privileged to accept your invitation.

Yours obediently,

Brvt. Capt. Theo. German

"Captain!" she exclaimed, hiding the letter against her bosom. Then he was indeed a Yankee adventurer. Probably one of those ex-soldiers who'd come down to plunder and pillage, as Papa put it. She hoped he hadn't been with Sherman. Papa would go insane.

She counted the days until the spring program, which fell a week after the elections. General Canby dispatched soldiers to watch polling places throughout the state and prevent interference with black voters. The new constitution was approved by some seventy thousand votes to twenty thousand. You might have thought a hurricane had struck Tradd Street. "Only six Democrats elected for thirty-one state Senate seats! And only fourteen Democratic representatives! The other one hundred ten are damned Black Republicans!"

"Cooper, please don't curse in front of your daughter," Judith said.

"We're ruined. We'll be bankrupt in a year." He remained in a rage up through the Tuesday night of the program.

Mrs. Allwick's on Legare was ablaze with lamps and tapers. Chairs were set around the fusty parlor, and a double curtain of white gauze and calico hung at the end adjoining the dining room. Behind the curtain, giggling girls in ivy wreaths and bed-sheet togas rushed to position themselves around Sara Jane Oberdorf, who had been chosen for the role of Southern Womanhood.

Marie-Louise no longer cared. She was tingling with expectancy. If this wasn't love, then it was something just as dizzying and delicious. She barely managed to stop chattering when Mrs. Allwick hissed for silence.

The curtain was pulled. Stiffly posed with the other girls, who represented Womanhood's handmaidens, Marie-Louise searched the audience. She almost fainted again. What a precious little dummy she was! Overlooking the obvious, assuming something totally incorrect.

All the chairs were filled by parents and relatives in their finery. He'd been forced to stand at the back, by the window bay overlooking the street. Thanks to all the lamps moved in for the program, he fairly glittered in his Army blue and bright metal buttons. He wasn't an ex-captain! He was a captain now.

And there in the second row sat her family, Papa visibly upset. His expression told her he knew he'd been defied. And over a Union Army officer. How would she ever explain?

She lost her balance, knocking Sara Jane off the box on which she stood. Southern Womanhood crashed into her handmaidens and spilled them like a bunch of circus tumblers. Children in the audience screamed with laughter, the tableau ended in chaos ... and the night was only starting.

The program concluded with the young ladies performing an elaborate quadrille. At the conclusion, a few parents immediately jumped up to applaud. Soon they were all standing. The curtain opened again, and Mrs. Allwick's pupils bowed to acknowledge the ovation. A couple of the girls giggled; because of her girth, Sara Jane had trouble bowing from the waist. While she attempted it, she shot murderous sideways looks at Marie-Louise. Cooper's daughter saw only the young officer, who was applauding wildly.

As the audience broke up, Judith took hold of Cooper's arm to get his attention. At the side of the parlor, wearing a white cravat and stockings and a dark green coatee and knee breeches, Des LaMotte stared at Cooper while mouthing thank-yous to the parents pushing up to congratulate him.

"Cooper, is that dancing master the one who —" "Same," he snapped. "Empty threats, I've decided." "I don't know. He looks as though he'd like to crucify you." Cooper shot him a glance. LaMotte held it a moment, unintimidated. Then he switched his attention to his admirers, bowing and kissing hands.

"We're leaving," Cooper called to his daughter, who was struggling through a crowd of pupils and parents near the curtain. "Get your bonnet and shawl."

"Please, Papa, I have to speak to someone."

"I saw him. We'll have nothing to do with any of Canby's mercenaries."

Judith said, "I think it's unfair to refuse her a few minutes of harmless conversation."

"I'll decide what's harmless and what isn't." Cooper seized his daughter's wrist. "Where are your things?"

Marie-Louise turned red. She wanted to perish on the spot. Captain German was moving toward them. Through welling tears, she saw him stop suddenly. She pulled, but her father wouldn't let go.

Judith gave up and hurried to find her daughter's things. Moments later, Cooper pushed Marie-Louise out a side door to a passage that led to Legare Street. She was crying loudly.

41

A man of seventy-six is too old for this, Jasper Dills thought. His journey on the Baltimore & Ohio had been a sleepless nightmare of jerks, bumps, cinders, and filth. Even in a first-class car, he found himself packed in with the canaille. Sweaty peddlers, pushy mothers with weepy children, flash gentlemen hunting victims to fleece at cards. Horrible, not to be borne.

But he was bearing it, was he not? He'd obeyed the imperious summons the moment it arrived by telegraph. He'd purchased his ticket and packed his carpetbag, because he was fearful of the consequences if he didn't.

The train arrived at the depot at dusk. A mild spring dusk, with flowers and trees blooming all along his route to the east side of town. God, it was horrible to be pulled away from Washington at this moment, when the curtain was about to rise on the last act of the high drama of Johnson and the Radicals — the Senate trial of the chief executive on the eleven articles of impeachment. Never before in the history of the republic had there been an opportunity to witness the dethroning of a sitting president.

Still, that drama was remote, while this one, if you cared to call it a drama, was immediate, touching his life and livelihood. All the way across the mountainous darkness of West Virginia, he had tried to imagine other reasons for the summons besides the one he feared.

The sweet scents of Ohio springtime did little to mask the city's noxious odors. Even here, in a quiet east-side district of fiercely steep streets and huge old houses, many decaying, the air smelled of the river, and the German breweries and slaughter­houses. Detraining at the depot, Dills had nearly choked on the odor of hogs and more hogs. A European traveler had called Cincinnati "a monster piggery," and nicknamed it Porkopolis. In the Tribune, old Greeley hailed it as "the queen city of the West." Which only confirmed that Greeley was unbalanced. When Mr. Dickens made his American tour in 1842, what could he possibly have found here that was worth seeing?

The hackney labored to the crest of a hill and turned into a circular cul-de-sac, where it stopped. Dominating the sullen sky between the cul-de-sac and the river was an immense Gothic Revival house, forbidding as a castle, which it resembled because of three adjoining octagonal towers on the river side. The rough stonework was dirtied by time and overgrown with untended ivy, much of it dead. Many of the ground-floor windows were planked over; others showed numerous breaks in small panes of stained glass.

Behind a rusting iron fence, the weedy yard sloped up to a recessed entrance. There Dills discerned a figure hovering in the shadows. Not the same damned caretaker after twenty-five years, he wondered, climbing out with his carpetbag. He paid the driver, adding a handsome tip with well-concealed regret.

"Come back for me in an hour and I'll double that," he said. It was outrageous to spend so much, but he was terrified by the thought of being isolated out here without transportation. He heard bird song in the distance, but near the great Gothic house not a bird warbled or flew. He couldn't help thinking he was in a place of the dead.

"Right, sir," the driver said. "Didn't know anybody still lived in this old dump." And away the hackney went down the hill, its side lamps dwindling and dimming, leaving him by the rusted fence in the lowering dark.

He heard the shuffling step of the old man coming down the walk. It was indeed the same caretaker, still fetching and doing for the resident of the house. He was crudely dressed, stooped, his age impossible to guess because he was albino, with red-tinged eyes and skin nearly as white as his hair.

His broken nails showed as he reached to open the gate. Rusty hinges squealed. From under a soiled cap, his red eyes watched the visitor as he pulled the gate wide. Dills stepped through, and then the caretaker slammed the gate again, a sound like a chord of wrong notes.

Halfway up the walk — roots and weeds had broken through the stairstep blocks, shattering them — Dills started violently when the caretaker spoke from behind him:

"She found you out."

He felt frail and vulnerable then. His heart fluttered and raced. He tried to summon the resentment he'd felt during most of the long, dirty journey. He needed every bit of it to endure what was to come.

Her room was at the very top of the tallest octagonal tower. Dills reached it by struggling up a creaky stair and stepping through a doorway with the shape of a classic Gothic arch. He was out of breath and feeling more unclean every moment. At least there was some air stirring up here. He could feel it, damp and fetid, as he shuffled across the stone floor toward the figure seated in a huge high-backed carved chair.

The chair was the only piece of furniture aside from a broken spinning wheel lying on its side amid skeins of yarn that had long ago rotted. In bowls and saucers set around the floor, fat homemade candles burned, a dozen of them, relieving some of the gloom and enabling him to see the chair's occupant. Behind her, two smashed-out windows afforded a commanding view of the Ohio River and the hilly dark blue shore of Kentucky. In the river, like boats on the Styx, barges moved slowly, their lanterns gleaming.

"I do not have a chair for you, Mr. Dills." Her tone suggested it was punishment.

"That's perfectly all right. I came as soon as I received your message."

"I shouldn't wonder. I shouldn't wonder you came — to protect your ill-gotten stipend."

She reached under the chair. He heard glass clink. Then something rattled. "You deceived me. Now and again my houseman fetches a local paper. He discovered this. You deceived me, Mr. Dills." .

"Relative to that, please let me say —"

"You said Elkanah was in Texas. You said he was a wealthy and respected cotton farmer. I have paid you, trusted you for years on the basis of such information. And this is your gratitude? All those letters concealing the truth?"

Blinking, feeling the frail heart in his breast racing faster, Dills dropped his carpetbag. "Might I see that?"

"You already know what it says." Thick blue veins bulged from the back of the hand she extended. He took the paper. There, in the general news column on the front page, he saw a paragraph under the heading bizarre Pennsylvania murder.

He scanned the paragraph until, without surprise, he came upon the name Elkanah Bent. He stopped reading and returned the paper with a trembling hand.

The woman held it a moment, then flung it away. Rationally, Dills knew he had little to fear from someone so old. And yet he was frightened.

It was partly the room — the candles in greasy pools of hot melted tallow — and partly the woman. Scarcely a hundred pounds, if that, and so ravaged by age and the unguessable emotions that had rioted in her sick mind all these years, she hardly looked human. She was more like a wax figure, a ghastly museum exhibit with a queer resemblance to her albino caretaker. She powdered her face, she powdered her hair, she powdered her hands, a thick layer of white dust. It formed a kind of crust beneath her livid old yellow eyes.

Time had worn away her eyebrows. The bony ridges pressed against her almost transparent skin, as if the skull sought a way into the light. Her hair, turned gray years ago, was whitened by the powder, which sifted down from her high-piled coiffure whenever she moved suddenly, as when she discarded the paper.

Far down on the river, a boat's bell tolled. Dills's attempt to summon resentment had altogether failed. The yellow eyes, unblinking, like the eyes of some armored lizard, reminded him of her mental condition. That he knew the history of nervous disorder running through her family did not make her any less intimidating. He wanted to flee.

"My son committed a hideous murder. Why?" "I don't know," Dills lied. "I don't know his connection with the victim. Probably an accidental choice." What was the point of trying to explain the vendetta against Hazard and Main? Dills had never been able to explain it to himself in any reasonable terms.

He licked his parched lips. A breeze passed over twisted lead strips that had once held stained glass and fluttered the candles. Somewhere under his feet, Dills heard the scurry of rats.

"You told me Elkanah was in Texas. I have letter after let —

"Madam, I wanted to spare you the painful truth."

Dry lips parted to reveal yellowed teeth. "You wanted to spare yourself loss of the stipend."

"No, no, that was not —" Dills gave it up. The mad old eyes, inquisitor's eyes, saw through his attempted deception. "Yes. I did."

She sighed, seeming to grow even smaller inside her heavy gray-silver dress. Patches of green mold showed on the lace hem, much of which had crumbled from rot. The low bodice hung out from her emaciated, heavily powdered breastbone.

With a quiver of her lips and a lift of one hairless brow, she said, "That is perhaps your first honest statement of the evening. You have cruelly deceived me, Dills. It was a condition of the stipend that you watch over Elkanah with utmost care."

The resentment burst out at last. "Which I did, until he made it impossible with his —" He choked back the word crazy. "His erratic behavior."

"But it was a primary condition of our arrangement."

"I would appreciate it if you would speak a little less unkindly," he said, testy. "I responded to your telegraph message out of consideration for you, and —"

"Out of fear," she spat. "Out of some imbecilic hope that you might keep the stipend." He stepped back; her yellow teeth were fully visible, like an enraged dog's. "Well, it's gone. The news article said my poor Elkanah killed some wretched woman, but no one knows why, or where he might be found, because he disappeared years ago. You knew that."

Somehow, though still frightened of her, Dills was experiencing a relief. Perhaps his nerves had been strained too far, could bear no more. "I did. I understand your anger."

"I loved him. I loved my son. I loved my poor Elkanah. Even when he was hundreds of miles from me, even when he was grown, and I had no idea of what he looked like, how his voice might sound —" She passed a hand in front of her face. Her fingers were almost hidden by dirt-encrusted rings of silver and gold, some with stones missing, it was a curious brushing motion, as if she were bothered by a cobweb he couldn't see. There were cobwebs in plenty elsewhere. All over the smashed spinning wheel, and in a gauzy weave under her chair.

"Well," the woman said, less rancorously, "I am glad of the truth at last. My son did not prosper in Texas, then."

"No. Never."

"Where is he hiding, Dills?"

Ah, a chance to wound her. Forcefully, he said, "I have not the slightest idea."

"How long have you not known?"

"Since shortly before the end of the war. He left the Union Army in disgrace." She flung back against the tall chair. "He deserted."

"Oh, God. My poor boy. My poor Elkanah."

She groped beneath her chair again, stirring cobwebs, which became attached to her fingers and hand. She drew into the light an old green wine bottle and a fine lead-glass goblet with a crack and a patina of dirt so thick that the goblet looked translucent. Into the glass she splashed some dark fluid, a port or sherry, perhaps, brown as coffee. He smelled only the rancid odor of spoiled wine.

She sipped without offering him any. Not that he would have touched the filthy stuff. "I should like to retire, madam. It was an exhausting trip."

The yellow eyes slipped across his face, and beyond. The dark brown fluid in the glass leaked from a corner of her mouth, running down her chin like a muddy river through snow. "You have no idea how I cared for him. How badly I wanted a decent life for him. All the more because he had such a terrible start."

What was she saving? The eyes sought his, almost pitiable in their sudden plea for understanding. "You know about my family, Mr. Dills."

"A little. By reputation only."

"There is a strain of mental instability. It runs back many generations, and has spread widely."

Even to the Executive Mansion, he thought. "It tainted my father. After my mother's death, when Heyward Starkwether began to pay court to me, my father grew jealous. I was his favorite child. Heyward proposed. When I told my father that I wanted to accept, it drove him to incredible rage. He had been drinking heavily. He was very powerful physically —"

Dills felt he was about to peer into some buried place, a place where something had been hidden, putrefying, for decades. He was gripped, perversely fascinated. Somewhere the rats shrieked, and there was another, lower sound, as of prey caught and hurt.

"Allow me to guess the rest, madam. Marriage was by then a necessity? You were already carrying Starkwether's child, later named Bent after the farm people who raised him. You revealed your condition to your father, and he beat you."

A vacant smile. Her right hand lolled over the carved chair arm. The filthy goblet slipped, fell, broke. She paid no attention. "Ah — ah. If it were only that simple. My father did use force the night I told him I wanted to marry. The rest of your chronology is out of order." He didn't understand. "Later, I wanted to do away with the unborn child. My father in one of his rages said he would kill me if I did. I was too terrified of him to attempt it. Together — his was the hand forcing mine, you see — we summoned Starkwether and convinced him of his responsibility. His guilt, if you will. I suspect he carried it until he died, poor wretched man."

Dills's hair crawled. Light was shining into the putrefying burial place.

"Are you saying you deceived Heyward Starkwether, madam?"

"Yes."

"My late client — Elkanah Bent's patron and declared father — had no connection with the boy?"

"Heyward supposed he was Elkanah's father. We convinced him of it."

"But he was not?"

"No."

"In other words, all those years, my client was coerced into helping and supporting —?"

"Not coerced, Mr. Dills. Once he was convinced that Elkanah was his child, he helped him gladly, as any father would."

"Who was Bent's father, madam?"

The yellow eyes, moist and mad, reflected the candles around the tower.

"Why, Mr. Dills" — she giggled, a hideous coquetry — "surely you know. I said he used physical force."

"Sweet Christ! Elkanah's father was —"

"Mine, Mr. Dills. Mine."

The straw-littered stones of the floor seemed to tilt and shiver beneath Jasper Dills. The rational underpinning of his world threatened to collapse. "Goodbye," he said, snatching his carpetbag and rushing toward the door. "Goodbye, Miss Todd."

In the cul-de-sac, shivering, he waited and waited for the hackney to return. Now he understood the cause, and the extent, of Elkanah Bent's insanity. He no longer cared about the stipend. He wanted no more of it, or the woman he'd deceived, or Bent. Especially Bent, wherever he might be.

Dills finally understood much that he'd never understood before. Bent's unreasonable grudge against the Mains and the Hazards, a preoccupation since his cadet days; the brutality of the Lehigh Station slaying — Bent had inherited a capacity for evil.

Chilly sweat broke out on Dills's face as he recalled the times he'd criticized Bent, reproved him, ordered him out of his office. If he'd known the sort of man Bent really was, and if he'd known why, he'd never have done such things. He'd probably have cowered instead.

The hackney never came. Dills picked up his carpetbag and stumbled downhill, all the way to the lodging house he'd previously telegraphed for a room. There, at a late hour, he paid exorbitantly for a zinc tub of heated water.

Feeling filthy down to his bones, he sat in the tub with a cake of homemade soap as yellow as her eyes, scrubbing and scrubbing at his wrinkled, mottled skin and thinking of Elkanah Bent, his brain, his blood, his very being poisoned before his birth.

Dills slumped back in the tub, inexplicably sorrowful. God pity poor Bent, whom he surely would never see again. God pity even more the next person to incur Bent's wrath.

42

North of Washington on the Seventh Street Road, Maryland farmers once a week set up stalls and wagons for an open-air market. On the last Saturday in March, two days before the President's trial was to begin in the Senate, Virgilia and Scipio Brown went to the market to buy food for the orphanage. Brown drove the buggy and carried the money, amusing Virgilia by this insistence on handling all the male duties. He didn't seem upset by the looks they drew because she was white and he was not.

They moved through the crowded lanes of the market, among hens squawking in crates and piglets squealing in improvised pens. They argued about the subject most of Washington was arguing about these days.

"He's usurped power, Virgilia. To make it worse, he's the elect of an assassin, not the people."

"You have to be more specific than that to convict him." "Good Lord, they've drawn up eleven charges." "The first nine are all related to the Tenure of Office issue. Ben Butler's tenth article condemns Johnson for speeches criticizing Congress. Is free speech now a high crime or misdemeanor? The eleventh article is just a grab bag." "Authored by your good friend Mr. Stevens." "Even so —" They reached a cross lane. A cart approached, piled with crates of rabbits. "I stand by my opinion on it."

He saw the cartwheel lurch into a rut, tilting the vehicle sideways. Cordage snapped, freeing the crates. The huge stack toppled toward Virgilia and Scipio. He seized her waist and swung her away from the spot where the crates crashed down. Several broke; rabbits escaped in every direction. The driver ran off in pursuit.

Virgilia was abruptly aware of the mulatto's strong hands on her waist. And of a curious intensity in his dark eyes. She'd noticed similar looks several times lately. "Perhaps we'd better search for eggs and forget politics, Scipio. I wouldn't want it to ruin our friendship."

"Nor I." He smiled and released her. She tingled from the touch of his hands, and was more than a little startled by that reaction.

With arms grown strong from hard work, Virgilia pushed the wood paddle around the steaming kettle of thick pea soup. It was noon the next day. Across the kitchen, Thad Stevens sat with a tawny little boy dozing in his lap, thumb in his mouth. Virgilia's friend looked pale and weary.

"You will be there tomorrow for the opening of the trial?" he asked.

"Yes, and for as much thereafter as I can manage without falling behind here."

"You want him convicted, I assume."

Reluctantly, she said, "I don't think so. He denies any crime."

"His denial is estopped by his previous behavior. He sent Thomas to remove Stanton."

"Thomas failed, so it was only an attempt, not a removal."

"You're becoming legalistic, my dear." He didn't sound happy about it, although the whole Stanton mess was nothing if not a lawyer's delight.

Even Grant had been caught in the tangle. Grant's withdrawal as interim Secretary of War had precipitated a series of bitter exchanges with Andrew Johnson; a final letter from Grant charged the President with trying to "destroy my character before the country." That letter completely alienated Johnson, and persuaded many people that Grant was at heart a Radical. No one had been quite sure before. Grant's detractors immediately called him an opportunist, a political chameleon, and — the old canard — a drunkard. Never mind. Grant had purified himself in the eyes of the Radical leadership. In late May the Republicans would convene in Chicago to nominate a presidential candidate. Cynics said the general would there be "confirmed as a new member of the Radical church," and be chosen to run.

"Legalistic, Thad?" she said. "No. I'm only trying to look at matters fairly."

"The devil with fair. I want Johnson out. I will hound him till he's gone."

She let the paddle rest against the rim of the kettle. In the yard, where a mild March sun fell through the bare branches of two unbudded cherry trees, Scipio laughed and romped with several of the children. "Whether he's guilty or not?"

In his glare, she saw the answer before he gave it. "We are purging the man, but we are also purging what he represents, Virgilia. Leniency toward an entire class of people. Unrepentant people who still conspire to return this nation to what it was thirty years ago, when an entire black population was in chains and Mr. Calhoun arrogantly threatened secession if anyone dared object. There are seven impeachment managers. Do you have any idea of the enormous pressure already being brought against us? Letters. Cowardly threats —"

Disturbing the boy nestled in his lap, he pulled a wrinkled yellow flimsy from his pocket. "This came from Louisiana, that's all I know for certain."

She unfolded it and read, STEVENS, PREPARE TO MEET YOUR GOD. THE AVENGER IS UPON YOUR TRACK. HELL IS YOUR PORTION. K.K.K.

Shaking her head, she handed it back. For a moment Stevens's waxy cheeks showed some color. "The avenger is upon Mr. Johnson's track, too. His portion is a guilty verdict."

Scipio ran in the sunshine, whooping. The joyful sound seemed chillingly at odds with the congressman's angry eyes. His dogma had carried him down a road Virgilia had abandoned. There was no longer much hatred in her, but in him the war raged on.

On Monday, March 30, she arrived an hour before the doors to the Senate gallery opened. When they did, she fought her way upward among people hurrying and pushing. By the time Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase took the chair and opened the trial, there wasn't an empty seat or vacant stair step in the gallery.

Days ago, Chase had organized and sworn the Senate as a court. Today, all fifty-four legislators representing the twenty-seven states were present on the floor. Among them Virgilia saw Sam Stout, calm and smiling. He'd been quoted widely about his confidence in the outcome. He believed there would be no problem in obtaining the thirty-six votes necessary to convict Johnson on one or more of the articles.

The gallery was noisy, demonstrative, divided by partisanship. Some spectators whistled and waved handkerchiefs when the impeachment managers, seven men from the House, including old Thad with wig askew, took their places amid piles of books and briefs at a table to the left of the chair. President Johnson's five eminent attorneys faced them on the other side of the chair. All of the senators were squeezed into the first two rows of desks, with the desks behind packed with members of the House. Reporters filled the back aisles, lined the wall, and blocked the doors.

The trial opened with a three-hour oration by the chief manager, Representative Ben Butler of Massachusetts. Spoons Butler, the Beast of New Orleans, was a skilled and abrasive lawyer. He generated cheers and a blizzard of waving handkerchiefs when he declared that Johnson was patently guilty for removing Stanton in defiance of Congress and while Congress was in session.

Seated in the restless, noisy crowd, Virgilia gazed down on Sam Stout and felt no great hurt, only a melancholy emptiness. Time was indeed changing and mellowing her. To her surprise, her attention wandered several times from the scene below. In its place she saw Scipio Brown's eyes after he'd saved her from injury when the market cart overturned. She remembered how his hands had felt on her waist, pressing tightly. She liked the memory.

By the ninth of April, the managers had rested their case. Perhaps the high point of the prosecution's presentation had come when Butler whipped out a red-stained garment and flourished it. He said it was the shirt of an Ohioan from the Freedmen's Bureau whom Klansmen in Mississippi had flogged. Next morning Washington had a new phrase for its political lexicon; you whipped up anti-Southern sentiment by "waving the bloody shirt."

Johnson's lawyers presented the arguments for acquittal. Because of an epidemic of measles at the orphanage, Virgilia missed many of those sessions in April. When she read about them in the papers, she didn't regret it. The legalisms, the hair-splitting over the language of the Constitution, and the all-day orations sounded boring.

She wondered why long speeches were necessary. The issue seemed clear enough. Johnson's authority had been challenged by the various Reconstruction bills, including the provocative Tenure of Office Act, which effectively denied the Chief Executive the power to remove cabinet officers whom the Senate had confirmed. On this issue Johnson had dug in, to force a test.

Virgilia thought that that was not only valid but also necessary. Further, Edwin Stanton was Lincoln's appointee, not Johnson's, and it was in Lincoln's term, not Johnson's, that the Senate had consented to the appointment. She thought there was a strong argument that Stanton was actually outside the Tenure of Office jurisdiction.

Lengthy summations began. She heard the one by William S. Groesbeck, an eloquent Cincinnati attorney. He spoke to the subject of Johnson's character.

"He is a patriot. He may be full of error, but he loves his country. I have often said that those who lived in the North, safely distant from the war, knew little of it. We who lived on the border knew more ... our horizon was always red with its flames, and it sometimes burned so near we could feel its heat on our outstretched hands. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee lived in the heart of the conflagration ... in the very furnace of war ... and his tempered strength kept him steadfastly loyal to the Union ... impervious to treason. How can he then be suddenly transformed, in the words of the gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr. Boutwell, to the arch-demon? It is ludicrous."

At the managers' table, George S. Boutwell glared.

On and on they went, accusing, defending, interpreting, theorizing. Occasionally fist fights broke out in the gallery, and the trial would be stopped while ushers removed the combatants. The atmosphere in the gilt-and-marble chamber grew more and more charged with emotion, until Virgilia began to feel she was no longer in the United States, but in some Roman arena. The difference was that the victim to be sacrificed had not made even a single appearance. Johnson had organized a staff of runners to report each new development.

The Roman analogy proved especially apt the day the Honorable Mr. Williams, manager from Pennsylvania, attacked the accused:

"If you acquit him you affirm all his imperial pretensions and decide that no amount of usurpation will ever be enough to bring a chief magistrate to justice. That will be a victory over all of you here assembled. A victory to celebrate the exultant ascent of Andrew Johnson to the Capitol, dragging not captive kings but a captive Senate at his chariot wheels."

Men jumped up in the gallery, some cheering, some protesting. Chief Justice Chase needed four minutes to restore order. Virgilia saw faces red with indignation, and she saw others that made her think of predators — predators who fed on every accusation, no matter how outrageous.

Suddenly, on the far side of the gallery, she was startled to spy two other faces overlooked before. Her brother Stanley and his wife Isabel.

Virgilia no longer had contact with them; no invitations to dine at I Street, no birthday greetings, nothing. She often heard Stanley's name in the city, sometimes not in a flattering way.

Isabel glanced at Virgilia with no recognition. Stanley was absorbed in matters on the floor. How puffy he looked, Virgilia thought. Older than his forty-five years. His skin had an unhealthy, jaundiced coloration.

Williams eyed the quieting gallery. He raised his voice:

"If indeed the miscreant returns like a conqueror in Roman triumph, I can predict what will follow. A return of the Rebel office-holders whom he favors, and a general convulsion of their states, casting loose your reconstruction laws, and delivering over the whole theater of past conflict into anarchy, injustice, and ruin."

Again members of the crowd surged up, yelling and waving handkerchiefs. Virgilia sat in sad silence. In her view the managers had proved nothing, except that they wanted Johnson's blood before he ever came to trial, and would have it whether he was guilty or not.

The session recessed. On the packed staircase, Virgilia came upon Stanley leaning against the wall and mopping his yellowish face with a large kerchief. She stopped on the step above, trying to shield him from the buffeting crowd.

"Stanley?" she said over the noise. She tugged his sleeve. "I saw you earlier. Are you all right?"

"Virgilia. Oh — yes, perfectly fine." He seemed remote, eyeing the people pushing past her down the stairs. "And you?"

"Well enough. But I'm worried about you, Stanley. You look ill. It's been so long since we talked, and there are so many unkind stories afloat."

"Stories?" He jerked back like a felon threatened with hand­cuffs. "What sort of stories?"

She smelled the clove he'd chewed. To hide what other odor? "Stories about the things you do to hurt yourself. Great long drinking sprees —"

"Lies." He leaned his sweaty forehead against the marble, gasping. "Damn lies."

Grieving for him, and for his own lie, she touched his sleeve. "I hope so. You're a prominent man, enormously wealthy and successful. You have everything now."

"Perhaps I don't deserve it. Perhaps I'm not proud of what I am. Did you ever think of that?"

The blurted words stunned her. Stanley guilt-ridden? Why?

From behind, someone seized her shoulder. Virgilia was nearly toppled off balance; if she'd fallen, those pouring from the gallery might have trampled her.

Not four inches from Virgilia's nose, Isabel's long, horselike face seemed to inflate with rage. "Leave him alone, you mongrel slut. Stanley is tired, that's all. We have nothing to say to you. Stand aside."

Like an officer disciplining a private, she took hold of her husband's arm and thrust him down the stairs. She elbowed and pushed to open a path. Stanley was unsteady. He glanced back at his sister with a swift look of apology. At the landing, he and Isabel disappeared.

Virgilia thought she'd never seen her brother look so bad, so tormented. Why should great success cost him so dearly? she wondered again.

The summations concluded in the first week in May. By then all of Washington was charged, and changed, by the trial. Some called it the majestic working of justice. Others called it a saturnalia, a circus. Police routinely broke up fights that erupted over the trial. Gamblers poured into the city on every train, crowding the hotels and taking wagers on the verdict. When Chief Justice Chase closed the doors on Monday, May 11, and the court went into private session, the odds favored acquittal.

In the Star and other papers, Sam Stout had announced that the gamblers were wrong. Thirty-one votes for conviction on at least one article were firm, he said. Six more would tilt in favor of conviction by the end of the week.

On Thursday, Stevens sought refuge at the orphanage. "The damned press won't let me alone. My own constituents won't either." He looked even more tired than he had the last time he'd come.

"How is the vote?" she asked, pouring him hot herb tea. His veined, age-spotted hands shook as he tried to lift the cup. He gave up.

"Thirty-five certain. It hinges upon one man."

"Who?"

"Senator Ross."

"Edmund Ross of Kansas? He's a strong abolitionist."

"Was," Stevens corrected, with distaste. "Ross insists he'll vote his conscience, even though people in Kansas are deluging him with telegrams saying he's finished if he votes acquittal. Senator Pomeroy's hammering him. So is the Union Congressional Committee." That body of Radical senators and representatives had been organized to send messages to local party organizations urging them to pressure undecided senators. "Ross has even received threats against his life," Stevens added. "He isn't alone."

With exhausted eyes, he stared at Virgilia. "We must sway Ross. We must, or it's all been for nothing, and the Bourbons will recapture the South."

"You mustn't take the verdict quite so seriously, Thad. Your life doesn't depend on it."

"But it does, Virgilia. If we fail, I'm through. I don't have the heart or the strength to fight such a battle again."

On Saturday, the sixteenth of May, four days before the Republican convention, Virgilia awoke well before dawn, unable to sleep. She dressed and left the cottage in which Stout had once kept her; she'd thought of moving, to rid herself of memories the place aroused. But it was hers, it was comfortable, and she was able to afford it on her orphanage wage.

She walked through a silent section where the homes grew smaller and poorer. Soon she reached the orphanage. Surprisingly, she found the front door unlocked. She smelled coffee as she walked to the kitchen. He was seated at the table.

"Scipio. Why are you up?"

"Couldn't sleep. I'm glad you're here. We must talk. I'm supposed to deliver Lewis to his new foster parents in Hagerstown this morning."

"I remember." She accepted a mug of coffee from the enameled pot. His amber hand brushed hers. He reacted as if burned.

"I'd feel better if you didn't go to the Capitol," he said.

"I must. I want to hear the verdict."

"It could be dangerous. Huge crowds. Possibly a riot."

"It's good of you to be concerned, but I'll be fine. You mustn't worry."

He walked around the table and stood gazing down at her. The words seemed to tear from him. "But I do. Far more than you know."

Their eyes held. Shaken, feeling a torrent of response, she slammed the coffee mug on the wooden table and dashed out. She was unable to deal with the emotions revealed so unexpectedly in him, and in her own heart.

"That's thirty-four," whispered the stranger on Virgilia's left. "I mark Waitman Willey of West Virginia probable. So it's up to Ross."

Hisses from those nearby silenced the man, who went on scribbling and rechecking his tally on a scrap of paper. Before the roll call, George Williams of Oregon had moved that the first vote be taken on the final article, the omnibus, because if that passed, so would the others. The change in order was approved.

Chief Justice Chase spoke. "Mr. Senator Ross, how say you? Is the respondent, Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, guilty or not guilty of a high misdemeanor as charged in this article?"

He stood there a moment, the unprepossessing man from Kansas. Union veteran and old-line abolitionist, he was currently campaigning for removal of the Indian tribes by force. Virgilia watched Thad Stevens sit forward at the managers' table, white with strain.

Ross cleared his throat.

"How say you?" Chase repeated.

"Not guilty."

A roar in the gallery. Then wild applause, loud booing, handkerchiefs waved, a sea of whipping white. Stevens slumped back, eyes shut. One arm lolled limply over the arm of his chair.

Virgilia knew the vote was a watershed. The Congress had tried to exert its primacy over the executive and, a moment ago, the effort failed. No matter what else transpired, Radical Reconstruction was over. Thad Stevens had predicted it would be so if the vote went against impeachment. Stevens's body, slumped in his chair, said it again, unequivocally.

On the Capitol steps, people screamed, danced, hugged one another. A beefy man in a derby caught Virgilia's arm. "Old Andy twisted their tail. That's worth a kiss to celebrate."

His mouth swooped toward her while a hand stole to her breast. Those capering around them paid no attention. Virgilia twisted aside, but she was trapped. "Ain't you for Andy?" the man growled, pulling her.

"You drunken sot, leave her alone."

Virgilia recognized his voice before she saw him. The beefy man shouted, "No damn nigger can tell me —" Then Scipio's hand caught him by the throat, holding him until he gagged.

The revelers kept yelling, pushing, tilting bottles, dancing on the steps. Scipio released the beefy man. He fled as fast as the crowd would allow.

"What about Hagerstown?" Virgilia exclaimed above the noise.

"I postponed it. I couldn't let you risk this mob alone. Thinking about it kept me from sleeping, or eating anything —"

Behind him, people staggered and pushed. He was thrown against her. She raised her hands to arrest his forward motion and found herself holding him. A white woman, a mulatto man. In the tumult, no one cared.

He put his mouth close to her ear. "This is an easy place to tell you I've come to admire you. I've watched you and watched you with the children. You're a gentle, loving woman. Intelligent, principled —"

She wanted to tell him of all the evil things in her past. Something stronger, something live-giving, crushed the impulse. People can change.

"Beautiful, too," Scipio Brown said with his lips at her ear. She denied it with a nervous laugh. He was amused. "Does all this really come as such a great surprise?"

"I had some hint." She kept fighting against the buffeting of her back. "I saw the looks you gave me. But there are too many things against it, Scipio, not the least of them color. There's my age." A hand strayed to her graying hair. "I'm ten years older."

"Why should that bother you? It doesn't bother me. I love you, Virgilia. I have the buggy waiting. Come with me."

"Where?"

For a moment he seemed less than his assured adult self. He seemed shy, hesitant. But he managed to say, "I thought — if you weren't unwilling — could we be alone at your house?"

Her eyes grew damp. It was overwhelming, the idea of someone caring for her that much. Yet she knew a similar emotion had been stirring in her, beneath the level of thought, for a long time. She hadn't dared recognize it, or name it, till now.

"Virgilia?"

"Yes. I would love that," she said softly. Because of the tumult he couldn't hear the words, but he understood. She took his arm. "I’ll fix breakfast for us afterward."

43

Three weeks after the parents' program at Mrs. Allwick's Academy, the term ended. For the last time until fall, the girls trooped noisily out the front door at 4:30 on a sparkling June afternoon. Several beaux waited on the broad, cool porch, including Sara Jane Oberdorf's apprentice undertaker.

Marie-Louise remained unforgiven for the tableau tragedy. Sweeping past, Sara Jane said sweetly, "Still no one waiting? Well, perhaps when you grow up in a few years." She clutched her young man. "Lyle. How darling of you to be here."

Desolate, Marie-Louise pulled her books against her bosom and walked down the steep wrought-iron steps. Her head was lowered; she saw the shadow fall on her skirt. "Excuse me." She sidestepped, glanced up, and dropped the books.

"Miss Main." Theo German bowed and swept off his straw planter's hat, which had a peacock-feather band. He was again out of uniform. "Allow me." He knelt to pick up the books.

"I thought —" Get hold of yourself, ninny. "I imagined you'd never speak to me after that dreadful evening. You must have thought I cut you."

"Of course not. I saw it was your father's doing." He straightened and offered his arm. "Do you have time for a stroll on the Battery?"

If I'm late. Mama will quiz me. And what if Papa should find out?

But Cooper's behavior at the program had lighted the fires of revolt in his daughter, and heightened her attraction to the young officer. "Oh, yes," she said.

Her bosom accidentally touched his coat sleeve. She felt as though a lightning bolt had struck her. Theo smiled, taking note of the sudden pink in her cheeks. There was some in his as well.

Bedazzling needles of reflected sunlight bobbed on the surface of the harbor. Gulls followed a fish trawler chugging in from the Atlantic. Out at Sumter, above the ruins, the Union flag stood straight in the breeze.

"Do you often go about town without your uniform?" Marie-Louise asked, desperately trying to remember Mrs. Allwick's lessons on social conversation. Her mind was a mass of glue.

"I do," he said. "General Canby doesn't object, and it's easier for me to get people to talk. I get helpful insights about local feelings that way. Of course, there are a few people who refuse to say anything at all after they hear me speak."

"Because of your accent."

He laughed. "I don't have an accent. You do. I find it charming, though."

"Oh, Mr. German — Captain German —"

"How about Theo?" he said, warming her with the friendly innocence of his blue eyes. Marie-Louise was suddenly so in love she could have perished of ecstasy and sunk through the ground to China.

"All right, but you must call me Marie-Louise."

"With pleasure."

The gulls squawked and swooped. The young couple strolled under stately old trees near the water. Theo told her that he was twenty-four — she'd known he was a worldly older man the moment she saw him — and attached to Canby's staff. "That day on the railroad, I was sightseeing. The loveliest sight I saw was in that passenger car."

"Papa was in a perfect fury when you gave the colored woman your seat." She sighed. "He's still fighting the war."

"Your father and half of Charleston. Still, the other half's enchanting. I've never encountered Southerners before, except for great lots of prisoners who naturally weren't in a good mood. I find Southerners are warm, charming people. And Carolina has a grand climate except in the summer."

"What did you mean about prisoners?"

He explained that he'd been commissioned in the last year of the war and posted to Camp Douglas, the huge prison compound south of Chicago. "We had thousands of inmates, but I heard shots fired only once, when a half-dozen attempted an escape. Only once did we feel any real danger. There was a Sunday in November of '64 when Chicago was seething with rumors that Confederate secret agents were going to torch the city and liberate our captives. Nothing came of it. When the prison was closed a year later, I decided to stay in the Army and see some of the country. I had never been out of Illinois until I came here." He smiled again, lightly touching her mittened hand on his arm. "I was lucky to be posted to South Carolina. I'd like to settle here and escape the snow and cold weather forever."

"Will you always be in the Army?"

"I think not. I was a law apprentice when I joined up. I'd like to finish my studies and practice." Marie-Louise feared she'd topple off the esplanade and drown if he kept turning those blue eyes on her.

Other beaux strolling with their sweethearts drifted in and out of the dappled shade cast by the trees. Along one of the oyster-shell paths came an old black man waving a fly whisk and pushing a creaky two-wheeled cart. He advertised his wares with a musical chant. "Buy melon. Sweet winter melon here."

"Would you like a slice of musk melon?" Theo asked. She was too nervous to do more than laugh and nod, but he didn't seem to mind. He bought slices from the vendor, bringing them back to the iron bench where he'd laid her books. Marie-Louise grasped the melon by means of a bit of paper wrapped around the rind. Careful as she was, the juicy melon leaked all over her chin. She was mortified.

Theo whipped out a handkerchief. "Allow me." With gentlemanly dabs, he dried her chin. Her body throbbed at every touch.

"I hope you don't think me too forward, Miss Main."

"Oh, no. But you must think me silly, nattering and giggling all the time. It's just that —" Did she dare? Yes, better to risk an explanation than lose him. "I'm not experienced with beaux. I've never really had one."

The melon dripped in his fingers. He bent toward her in the cool and breezy shade. "May I say it's my fervent hope that you'll never need another?"

That declaration brought her near the point of collapse.

Then, astonishing her again, he leaned forward quickly and brushed his lips across the corner of hers.

A great silence enveloped her. The chant of the melon man was gone, and the gull cries, the whistle of a packet putting out to sea, even the frantic lubbing of her heart. Her nervousness dropped away as she stood near him, gazing at him, irrevocably changed. Girlhood was over.

In their hands, the melon slices dripped, pattering the oyster-shell path. Neither of them noticed.

Gradually she forced herself back to reality. She saw the slant of the light falling on the great gabled houses of South Battery. It was late.

"I must be going back to Tradd Street."

"May I escort you?"

"Certainly." This time there was no fumbling as she slipped her arm around his. She felt at ease, womanly. No one paid them any heed as they strolled up Church in the mellow spring light.

"I'd love for you to meet my family," Theo said.

"I'd like that, too."

"I have eleven brothers and sisters."

"Good heavens," she cried.

He grinned. "I love them, but it did make for a crowded household, and skimpy portions at the table. Father's wage wasn't big enough to handle so many mouths. He's a Lutheran minister."

"Oh, dear. Not an abolitionist, too?"

"Yes, he was."

"And a Republican?"

"I'm afraid so. I'm the second youngest child, so I always had to sleep on the floor. We didn't have enough beds. It's the reason I joined the Army. To have a bed of my own and regular meals. Soldiers grouse about the poor food and bad mattresses. For me, it's the life of a prince."

Seeing the Tradd Street intersection but one square away, she said, "Like you, I'm very glad the Army brought you here, Theo." She was shocked by her own boldness.

As they walked on, she told him about the loss of her brother off the North Carolina coast, and the harrowing moments in the sea when she feared they'd all drown. "Papa was much less severe before Judah died. It did something to him, and he's never recovered."

"That's tragic. It does explain the way he reacted to me. I hope it isn't an impossible obstacle." In the shadow of a high brick wall, he faced her and clasped her hand. "I want to pay court to you in the proper way — You're frowning."

"Well, it would be much easier if you were — not what you are."

"As in Mr. Shakespeare's play?"

"What?"

"Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? In other words, why am I Romeo, a Montague? An enemy? Will it truly make a difference?"

Marie-Louise went swirling down into the blue whirlpools of his eyes, abandoning herself to emotions so fierce, she wondered if she could endure them. "No," she declared, all at once very certain of what she wanted. "No, it shall not."

"Your father —"

"No," she repeated confidently.

He left her at the gate of the Tradd Street house, promising to call formally the next afternoon. With a parting clasp of her hand, he was gone, leaving her floating there, several feet above the mundane earth.

"No!" Cooper clattered his spoon against the bowl of lamb stew. "I won't have some Yankee freebooter calling on my daughter."

Marie-Louise started to cry.

Judith reached out to squeeze her daughter's hand. To her husband she said, "It's a perfectly reasonable request."

"If he were a Southerner. One of us."

"Aunt Brett married a Yankee officer —" Marie-Louise began.

"Without causing the collapse of civilization as we know it," Judith remarked.

The irony was lost. "I refuse to have some yellow dog from Canby's staff sniffing around my family."

"You make it sound so crude and nasty," Marie-Louise cried. "It isn't like that."

"Please reconsider, Cooper," Judith began. He shot his chair back and rose. "Allow my daughter to be courted by a shoulder-straps whose father is a Bible-thumping Republican? I'd sooner have that fellow LaMotte in my house.

The decision is made. I am going to the garden to work while the light lasts."

With quick strides that rapped hard on the polished floor, he left the room. Judith braced for a new flood of tears. Instead, she was surprised by what she saw in her daughter's eyes. A silent rage not at all typical of a girl so young.

Marie-Louise wiped her cheeks. She kept staring at the doorway through which her father had disappeared.

Later, when it was dark, Judith went quickly to the piazza overlooking the garden. Insects circled the oil lamp burning on a wicker table. In a chair beside the table, Cooper had fallen asleep, his waistcoat open, his cravat undone.

Stepping over papers covered with columns of figures, she leaned over to wake him by kissing his forehead. Cooper jerked erect, momentarily unsure of his whereabouts.

"It's almost ten o'clock, Cooper. Marie-Louise ran up to her room right after we ate, and I've scarcely heard a sound since. I think you should go make peace, if that's possible."

"I did nothing wrong. Why must I —?" Judith's look silenced him. Rubbing his eyes, he stood. "All right."

She listened to his slow step ascending the stairs. Heard a faint knock. "Marie-Louise?" She was gazing into the dark garden when he came bolting down again, shouting. "She's gone."

"What are you saying?"

"She must have used the side stairway. Her room's empty, half her clothes are missing. She's gone!"

The specklike insects circled the flickering lamp. Judith allowed herself anger for the first time. "This is your doing. You've driven her out."

"That's impossible. She's a mere girl."

"Of marriageable age, I remind you. Many South Carolina girls are mothers at fourteen. You misjudged her attachment to that young man. Because of him — and you — she's run away."

A muffled pounding broke through the mists of sleep. Trying to interpret the sound, Madeline slowly raised her head. She heard Prudence Chaffee stirring in the other bedroom. The pounding grew louder. "Please — someone —" A woman's voice. Madeline thought she should recognize it, but she didn't. She was still too sleepy. Was it one of the freedmen's wives?

Prudence lighted her lamp and brought it to the door of Madeline's room. Her plain, stout face was alert, her eyes anxious. "Do you think it's trouble with the school?"

"I don't know." Barefoot, Madeline went to the front door. "It's the middle of the night."

It was actually morning, she discovered as soon as she opened the door. Between the great trees she saw jigsaw pieces of orange-tinted sky. The light silhouetted a disheveled figure on the stoop.

"Aunt Madeline —"

She couldn't have been more stunned if Andrew Johnson had come calling. "Marie-Louise! What are you doing here?"

"Please let me come in, and I'll explain. I walked all night."

"You walked all the way from Charleston?" Prudence exclaimed. ''Twenty miles, by yourself, on a dark road, and you didn't think twice about it?"

In the space of a heartbeat Madeline knew something dire had happened. A death? Some act of violence? Then she saw the bulging valise. People didn't pack a valise in order to report a tragedy.

"There's this boy. Papa refuses to let him court me. I love him, Aunt Madeline. I love him and Papa hates him."

So that was it. A young girl in love would do many a dangerous or thoughtless deed when her mind was fixed on her own problems. She remembered how it was with Orry; how romantic emotions had swept away many a practicality, and all fear of danger.

"Will you let me stay, Aunt Madeline? I won't go back to Tradd Street."

Then there would surely be trouble with Cooper. But Madeline couldn't turn her away. "Come in," she said, stepping back to welcome the breathless fugitive.

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

"Where is she? I demand you produce her."

He confronted Madeline on the lawn in front of the white­washed house. Down by the river, the steam machinery chuffed at the sawmill. A blade whined, straining to cleave through live oak.

"She's on the plantation, and perfectly safe. She wants to stay with us for a while. She definitely doesn't want the strain of more arguments with you."

"God. First you do business with black Republican carpet­baggers. Now you turn my daughter against me."

"Marie-Louise is in love with the boy, Cooper. I'd look closer to Tradd Street for the cause of her defiance."

"Damn you, produce her!"

"No. The decision to leave will be hers."

"Until she reaches majority, only I have the legal right —"

"The legal right, perhaps. Not a moral one. She's almost sixteen. Many girls are married, and mothers, before that age."

Madeline walked toward him and around him. "Now, if that's all —"

"It is not. Are you aware that there is a Kuklux den in the district?"

"I've heard rumors. I've seen no evidence."

"Well, I have it on good authority. The den keeps what's called the Dead Book. It contains names of those who offend the Klan. Do you know the name at the top of the first page? It's yours."

"It doesn't surprise me." Madeline's forced calm hid any sign of the sudden tight pain in her midsection.

"I warn you, those men are dangerous. If they come here, if they hurt my daughter because of you, I won't let the courts punish you. I'll do it personally."

She tried to plead reason one last time. "Cooper, we ought not to quarrel. Things will smooth out with Marie-Louise. Give it a week or so. Meanwhile, don't forget we all have ties. We're family. My husband was your brother —"

"Don't speak of him. He's gone, and you're what you've always been — an outsider."

She retreated, wincing as if he'd whipped her across the face.

His reckless rage was out of control. "I curse the day I convinced myself you could be trusted. That I owed you the management of this plantation because of Orry. Because he wanted you here. I wish to God I could cancel that moment and tear up the agreement and cast you out, because I would, Madeline. I would! You're not fit to stand in my brother's shadow. Orry was a white man."

Jamming his tall hat on his head, he strode to his horse. His face was hollow-cheeked, the color of gruel, and wrenched by hatred as he rode away.

Small and energetic, Lee drew swiftly on his pad with a charcoal stick. She had apologized for her unfamiliarity with architectural terms and sketched Mont Royal's columns as she recalled them. It was enough.

"The Tuscan order. The pilasters relatively freer of ornamentation than the Greek orders. A spare, clean capital and entablature — is this what you remember?"

Hands pressed together, Madeline whispered, "Yes."

"Was the siding like this? White?" He slashed horizontal lines behind the columns.

She nodded. "Tall windows, Mr. Lee. My height, or slightly taller."

"Like this?"

"Oh, yes." She couldn't hold back her tears. On his pad, created by a few expert strokes and her own imagination, she saw it at last. The second great house. The new Mont Royal ...

Cooper stood beside Wade Hampton at the rail of the gallery. Democratic Party business had brought him to Columbia to confer with party leaders. Hampton had suggested they go downtown for a firsthand look at those now running the state. From the moment Hampton led him inside the still-unfinished state-house, he was aghast.

Dirt and trash littered the hallways. The doors of the House were guarded by a shiny-faced Negro who sat in a cane-bottom chair tilted back against the wall. Ascending to the gallery, Cooper discovered what looked like a great smear of dried blood on the marble wall of the staircase.

Now he clutched the rail, stunned again. He knew that seventy-five of the one hundred twenty-four elected representatives were Negro, but seeing them in the chamber had a far greater impact. The Speaker was black. So was his clerk. In place of the decorous white youths who had formerly served as pages, Cooper saw — "Pickaninnies. Unbelievable."

Some delegates were neatly dressed, but he saw many secondhand frock coats as well. He saw short jackets and shabby slouch hats, the uniform of the field hand. He saw torn trousers; heavy plow shoes; woolen comforters and old shawls pinned around their wearers in lieu of a decent coat.

He recognized many of the white legislators. Former owners of slaves and great estates, they were a hushed minority among the blacks they once might have owned. As for the blacks, Cooper suspected their only political education was Union League cant. It would take years for such men to master the subtle arts required to govern. The state could be ruined first.

His face aggrieved, Hampton said, "Seen enough?"

"Yes, General." The two men fled up the steps to the gallery doors. ''The old saying's come true, hasn't it? The bottom rail is on the top."

Hampton paused in the corridor to say, "What transpires in there is a travesty and a tragedy. I am persuaded that we must redeem South Carolina from such men or face extinction of everything we value."

"I concur," Cooper said. "Whatever it takes, I'm willing to do."

Virgilia saw her old friend three hours before the end. She sat holding his hand under the watchful eyes of Sister Loretta and Sister Genevieve, two nuns from one of the old man's favorite charities, the Protestant Hospital for Colored People.

She and Scipio took the train to Lancaster to attend the funeral. On the trip they endured the angry stares and insulting remarks of other passengers. When they reached their destination, Virgilia struggled to contain her grief. She succeeded until they got to the graveyard where her friend was to lie.

Stevens had carefully considered his resting place during his last days. Because there were no prominent Lancaster cemeteries that accepted the bodies of blacks, he chose a small and poor Negro burying ground. He ordered that his stone be engraved with the reason:

I HAVE CHOSEN THIS THAT I MIGHT

ILLUSTRATE IN MY DEATH

THE PRINCIPLES WHICH I ADVOCATED

THROUGH A LONG LIFE:

EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR

When she saw that, Virgilia cried, great surging sobs, of the kind that had torn from her long ago when she went along to Grady's grave near Harper's Ferry. Scipio put his arms around her. It comforted her. So did his quiet words:

"Only a very few can say they died as they lived, testifying before the world. He was a great man."

Virgilia pressed against him. His hand clasped tightly on her shoulder, and neither paid attention to the startled looks they drew. She was glad his hand was there. She hoped it would always be.

The humid dark of a Low Country summer sapped strength and shortened tempers. At the old table in their tabby house, Jane pointed to the paper Andy had been reading and smoothing over and over with nervous strokes of his palm while he chewed his lip.

"Andy, it says right there, 'All disloyal white men and Leaguers are warned away.' What's to be gained?"

"I want a look at them. In the war, the generals on both sides always scouted the enemy."

"You gave Madeline your word."

"I kept quiet. That wasn't a promise. I'll be careful. And back soon."

He kissed her and slipped out. She touched her cheek. How cold his lips felt. She stared at the paper lying beside the candle that was attracting a whirl of tiny gnats. The black-bordered announcement repeated the same pattern of asterisks several times:

***

Asterisks were substituted wherever the name of the organization should have appeared. It seemed the only matter about which the Klan members were secretive. Their threats, their hatreds, were fully displayed in Mr. Gettys's copy. All disloyal white men and Leaguers are warned away.

Jane clasped her hands together and pressed them hard against her mouth. She closed her eyes. "Andy — Andy." There was dread in her whisper.

He circled toward Summerton in a wide arc, traveling through the marsh, trusting his memory of the usable footpaths. He slipped knee-deep in salty water only once.

It was a cloudless night, with no wind stirring. A thick haze dimmed the moon. The air was full of mosquitoes and tinier insects that flew near his ear with a sound like the steam saw cutting. As he approached Summerton from behind Gettys's store, he heard voices and laughter.

He crouched amid the underbrush growing in heavy woods at the rear of the Dixie Store. At the end of the front porch visible to him, some slatternly white women lounged. One had the front of her dress undone. A scrawny baby suckled at her left nipple. The conversation of the women was loud and profane.

On the other side of the dirt road Andy saw children seated in dust, along with a couple of the poorer sharecroppers from the district. All at once the talking stopped. The white people turned their attention to something out of sight beyond the store.

Sweating, he decided to move closer and observe from behind a huge live oak that stood about ten feet from the porch. To reach it he would have to cross open ground directly in front of him, weaving through a clump of foot-high yucca plants with rigid leaves sharp as spears. The open space was brightly lighted — a row of oil lanterns glowed on the porch, and a cropper's boy stood nearby with a blazing torch — but the people in the clearing were all looking the other say, up the road. He counted to three and moved.

He dodged among the yuccas, running with barefoot stealth. A woman on the porch heard him, but before she turned around he was crushed against the back of the tree, the bark rough against his shirt. He heard the woman grunt. "Just some animal, I reckon."

After a period of silence, he heard a faint rhythmic thudding. Horses or mules, walking down the dusty river road. In the crossroads clearing, someone cried, "Hurrah! Here they come."

Andy slid his face to the left behind the tree trunk, until one eye cleared the edge, giving him a good view of the crossroads, brilliantly lit now; half of the new arrivals carried smoking torches.

He knew they were men, and only that. Yet the sight of them struck him hard. They wore robes and hoods with eyeholes. The costumes were sewn of some shiny stuff the color of blood. It shimmered with highlights from the torches. He clutched the trunk and watched with his left eye, holding his breath.

In single file they paraded into the crossroads. The right side of the lead rider's robe was pulled up and tucked behind a belt gleaming with metal cartridges. The butt of his holstered pistol hung free. Among the other riders Andy spied old squirrel rifles, an ancient spontoon, even a saber or two.

Dust puffed up where the hooves fell. Round and round the clearing they rode, somehow all the more frightening because of their silence. Even the white slatterns and the croppers looked cowed.

The leader reined his horse in front of the Dixie Store. Andy noticed something he hadn't seen before. The second man carried some kind of wood box on his saddle, partly concealed under his robe. The box appeared to be rectangular, about two feet long, and made of unpainted pine.

The leader raised an old ear trumpet of the kind used by deaf people. He spoke through it. The trumpet made his voice tinny and gravelly, disguising it somewhat.

"The knights of the Invisible Empire gather. Enemies of white chivalry beware. Your days are numbered, Your deaths are certain."

It was trumpery, Andy knew. A childish masquerade. Yet he also knew the hearts of the hooded men, if not their faces. They were determined, and full of hate.

"Let the word go out," the leader bellowed through the dented trumpet. "Here is the first who will feel our wrath."

The second rider tossed the box on the ground. The lid pooped off. The box held some kind of doll.

The leader motioned and the file of riders moved out. Andy decided he'd seen enough. He started back through the yuccas to the thick woods from which he'd emerged. His mistake was glancing over his shoulder to check on the Klansmen.

He stepped too near one of the yuccas. The point of the long leaf stabbed his leg through his pants, and he exclaimed in pain. Not loudly, but he drew the attention of the night riders. Someone yelled, rifles came up, pistols came out. The leader signaled toward the black man bolting for the trees.

Leaves daggered his legs as two hooded men rode him down, one on each side of the clump of yuccas. Panting, Andy ran faster, out of the yuccas. A musket butt slammed his head and knocked him to his knees.

The men dismounted and dragged him around in front of the porch. One of the white women, the one nursing, leaned over and spat in his hair. Held by his ears and shoulders, he was pushed near the leader's horse.

"Niggers were warned from this gathering," the leader boomed through the trumpet. He was a fearsome, towering figure, looming over Andy in robes that shone as if on fire. "Niggers who defy the Invisible Empire get what they deserve."

Another Klansman pulled out an immense hunting knife. The blade flashed as he turned the knife this way and that. "Drop his pants. You're through, boy. We boil nigger heads and nigger balls for soup."

"No." The leader slashed the air with the trumpet. "Let him carry word of what he saw here. Show him the coffin."

A man yanked Andy's head around so he could see the box open on the ground. A bullet had been fired into the velvet dress of the crude cornhusk doll inside the box. The leader indicated blackened letters burned into the coffin lid. Crooked letters, but legible.

"Someone read him what it says."

"I know this nigger," another Klansman said. "He's a Mont Royal nigger. He can read it for himself." Though the speaker tried to roughen his voice to disguise it, Andy recognized Gettys.

He was so frightened, his eyes blurred. He had to clamp himself tight with his inside muscles to keep from urinating. The leader roared, "All right, then. You tell that woman what you saw and what you read right there, nigger." He signaled again. Andy was released and kicked toward the woods.

He staggered forward. A pistol boomed four times. Each time, he started violently, expecting to be hit He kept running, past the yuccas toward the woods. Luckily, he didn't fall. He twisted when he reached the trees and saw gun smoke drifting blue above the robed men. They laughed at him. He ran into the dark.

44

On the day of the trouble, Charles woke an hour later than usual — five in the afternoon. He reached under his cot, uncorked the bottle, and took his first drink before getting out of bed. It had become his habit to start the day this way.

It was mid-August. The shanty where he slept, behind the place he worked, was airless and hot. Noisy, too. Texas cowhands shouted and stomped around the dance floor in the main building while Professor played a polka on the establishment's brand-new Fenway upright.

After a second drink, he reluctantly got up. He was already dressed; he usually slept in his clothes. He faced a twelve-hour shift as night bouncer at Trooper Nell's. Nell's was a thriving dance hall with upstairs rooms for the whores and their clients. It was located on Texas Street, between the Applejack and the Pearl, south of the railroad. If he listened carefully, he could hear the horses and hacks bringing paid-off trail hands to this less-than-respectable section of Abilene.

Trooper Nell's never closed. Abilene was booming, quickly becoming the most popular shipping point in Kansas. The gamble of Joe McCoy, an unassuming Illinois farm boy with a keen business sense, had paid off. Last year, in its first season, McCoy's two-hundred-fifty-acre complex of pens and chutes had loaded about thirty-five thousand head of Texas cattle aboard the U.P.E.D. This second season promised to double that. Despite the Indian trouble all summer, herds continued to pour across Humbarger's Ford on the Smoky Hill south of town. Almost every night, Charles had plenty of free-spending, hard-drinking cowpokes to sit on when they got out of hand. The Dickinson

County sheriff did little. He was a grocer by trade, with no talent for handling rowdies.

Charles used his fingers to comb tangles from his long beard. From a chair with a broken leg, he picked up a canvas scabbard he'd sewn together after studying a picture of a fierce Japanese warrior in an old copy of Leslie's. The warrior, called a Samurai, carried his long sword in such a scabbard on his back, the hilt jutting above his left shoulder. Charles put on the scabbard and shoved his Spencer into it. That plus his strapped-on Colt usually damped the fighting urge of the cowboys. He'd taken a lesson from Wild Bill, who'd become quite a legend in Kansas. Sometimes Hickok wore as many as five guns, plus a knife. That way, he cowed men instead of having to kill them. Charles hadn't seen Wild Bill in a while; he'd heard he was riding dispatch for the Army.

It was Charles's bad luck that he wasn't employed the same way. In fact, be hadn't put his sights on an Indian since his dismissal from the Tenth. And this was surely the year for it. The tribes had wintered peacefully enough. But then the Washington politicians had been unable to agree on the amount of the annuities to be paid under the terms set at Medicine Lodge Creek. Rations, guns, and ammunition went unissued as well. Last spring the angry Comanches had broken loose and gone on the warpath in Texas. Then the Cheyennes under Tall Bull, Scar, and other war leaders stormed into Kansas, supposedly to attack their old enemies the Pawnee. Before long they turned their hostility on the whites.

The Saline, Solomon, and Republican river settlements soon felt the fury. Fifteen whites were killed, five women raped in just a few weeks. So far August had been the worst month, with a wagon train attacked and almost destroyed at Fort Dodge, three wood choppers slaughtered while they worked near Fort Wallace, a Denver stage caught in a four-hour running fight from which driver and passengers barely escaped.

Agent Wynkoop could control the peace chiefs, but not the young men. Sheridan was in trouble. He had but twenty-six hundred infantry and cavalry with which to stop the raids. He'd sent a couple of experienced scouts, Comstock and Grover, to try to restore peace with the Cheyennes. A group under Turkey Leg welcomed the men, then turned on them with no warning, murdering Comstock and badly wounding Grover before he got away. The treachery didn't surprise Charles.

He hated being trapped so far from the action. But he didn't know any Indian-fighting outfit that would take him, and he wasn't fool enough to set out alone, a solitary executioner. So he worked in Abilene, and drank, while his rage and frustration built inside him.

One more drink and he left the shanty. He trudged across the trash-strewn backyard toward the rambling two-story building. He'd slept hard, but with more nightmares. He usually dreamed the old dream of blazing woods, wounded horses falling, his own slow death from smoky suffocation. Last night it had been different. In his dream, Elkanah Bent dangled a big pearl earring in front of him while he pricked Charles with a huge knife.

Early in the year, a telegraph message sent care of Jack Duncan had informed Charles of the murder of George Hazard's wife. Bent's long vendetta against the two families only strengthened Charles's conviction that the world and most of those in it were worthless. He didn't suppose Bent would ever come after him, though Charles had frightened him badly in Texas before the war.

Since January, Charles had returned to Leavenworth only twice. Duncan treated him with stiff-necked correctness, but no warmth. He let Charles know that he disapproved of the frequency with which Charles took a drink. Charles had tried to play with his son, talk to him, but the boy didn't like to be alone with him, always wanting to return to Maureen or the brigadier.

There were no letters from Willa waiting at Leavenworth, either. Nor had he written.

He was in his usual sullen, spiteful mood as he yanked the flimsy back door open and stalked down the dim hall to start work.

Professor was hammering the Fenway. Two cowhands were dancing with two of the whores on the plank floor. Three tables held groups of noisy, dusty drinkers. Charles saw some of the cowhands eye him as he strode toward the end of the shiny fifty-foot brass-fitted bar.

"Hit me, Lem." The bartender dutifully poured a double shot of his special-stock bourbon. Charles knocked it back, not noticing a seated cowboy whispering to another, who had curly blond hair. The blond youngster studied Charles with contempt. The place smelled of spit and sawdust, cigars and trail dust, and of cow chips someone had stepped in. Trade was brisk for half past five, and no more boisterous than usual. Down a staircase opposite the bar came the owner, five-foot-tall Nellie Slingerland. Nellie was somewhere over forty, always wore high-necked gowns, and had the biggest bosom Charles had ever seen on a woman so petite. Her eyes were bright and calculating, her cheeks pitted from some childhood disease. Nellie cost twice as much as any of the other whores, but to Charles she gave herself free. They slept together once or twice a week, usually during the day, and Charles always had to be good and drunk first. "Roll over here, buck," she'd say, and then he'd straddle her and push in and hold himself with straightened arms while he did her. She always yelled and jumped a lot. Because he was so tall, his head stuck out beyond hers. She never saw his closed eyes, or the strange twisted-up expression on his face. He always tried to pretend she was Willa. It never worked.

"How are you, buck?" Nellie's expensive tooled mule-ear boots thumped as she approached. She was called Trooper Nell because she refused to take the boots off for any man, Charles included. Abilene told a lot of tales about her: She was a former schoolteacher; she had poisoned her husband for his money on their farm near Xenia, Ohio; she preferred women.

"I'd be better if this heat would break," Charles said. He hated her term of address, buck, as if he were some field hand. But she paid him, so he put up with it.

"You look mad enough to chew a brick."

"I didn't sleep so well."

"Something new," she said sarcastically, reaching for the glass of lemonade the bartender poured from her private pitcher. She drank no strong spirits. "You're a damn good bouncer, buck, but you make it pretty obvious you don't like it. I'm starting to think you don't belong here."

She helped herself to more lemonade while surveying the customers. She paid special attention to the table where the blond cowhand sat. He was making all the noise.

"Watch that bunch," she said. 'The young ones cause the most trouble."

Charles nodded and remained lounging with his back against the bar, the Spencer stock jutting above his left shoulder. Presently the blond cowboy staggered to the dance floor, rudely pushing Squirrel Tooth Jo and her customer out of his way as he veered toward Professor. He requested something. Professor looked dubious. The cowboy slapped gold pieces on the top of the shiny black upright, looking truculent. Professor shot a look at Nellie and swung into "Dixie."

The blond cowboy whooped and waved his hat. He stepped on his chair and then onto the table where his friends were seated. Nellie bobbed her head at Charles. It meant, Stop that.

For the first time since awakening, he felt a pleasant anticipation. A roughly dressed man pushed the street doors open just then, caught Charles's eye, and grinned. The big bearded fellow in quilled pants and a fringed buckskin coat was familiar, but Charles couldn't quite place him. He had other things on his mind.

At the front end of the bar someone had left half a glass of whiskey. Charles gulped it, then reached across his left shoulder, unslinging the Spencer. He walked toward the table where the cowboy was dancing. The other men at the table stopped talking and pushed their chairs away. The cowboy's boot heels kept pounding the table, which sagged now.

"Buying drinks doesn't entitle you to break the furniture," Charles said, forcing a conversational tone.

"I like to dance. I like this music." The cowboy was no Texan. His thick accent said cotton South. Alabama, maybe.

"You can enjoy it sitting down. Get off the table."

"When I'm ready, soldier."

Charles's eyebrows shot up. The cowboy gave him a bleary grin, challenging him. "Soldier, I heard all about you in a place up the street. Hampton's Cavalry, but you went back in the U.S. Army afterward. We'd tar you for that in Mobile."

Out of patience, Charles reached for his leg. "Get down."

The cotton South cowboy hauled back with his boot and kicked Charles, clipping his left shoulder and throwing him off balance. The cowboy jumped down as Charles staggered.

Another cowhand snatched Charles's Spencer. Two more seized his arms. Charles bashed one and temporarily drove him back. Loco drunk, the blond youngster drove two blows into Charles's belly.

The impact knocked Charles away from his captors. He slipped and skidded, then dropped into a crouch. His Spencer lay six feet away.

"Stop that damned fool," Nellie cried as the cowboy pulled his .44 revolver.

His friends dove out of the way on either side, leaving no one near him. A similar exodus emptied the dance floor. The cowboy fired as Charles rolled to the right. The bullet flung up splinters and dust.

Nellie screamed, "That floor cost three hundred dollars, you son of a bitch!"

The bleary cowboy aimed at Charles again. Something slid along the floor to Charles's right hand. He saw only the boots and quilled pants of the man who'd slid him the Spencer. Before the cowboy could shoot again, Charles shot him in the stomach.

The cowboy flew backward, landing on the table and breaking it. Charles lurched up, favoring his left leg, which he'd twisted badly. One whore shrieked; Squirrel Tooth Jo fainted. In the ensuing silence, Nellie began, "Well, I guess that —" She got no further. Charles put a second bullet in the fallen cowboy. The body jerked and slid a foot. Charles fired a third time. The body kept jerking and sliding.

"Leave off," Nellie said, dragging his arm down.

"Self-defense, Nellie." He was shaking, fury barely under control.

"The first time. Why'd you need the other shots? You're as bad as any damn Indian."

Charles stared at her, trying to summon an answer. His left leg gave out. He hit the floor in a sprawl.

They carried him to the shanty and lowered him to the cot. Nellie shooed the barkeep and the porter out and regarded him soberly.

"The boy's dead, buck."

He said nothing.

"You can rest here till you leg's better, but I'm giving you notice. I know you had to defend yourself but you didn't have to mutilate him. Word gets around. Temper like yours, it's bad for business. I'm sorry."

Stony, he watched her turn and leave. Goddamn her, he was only trying to save himself —

No. That was a lie. Trooper Nell was right. One bullet was enough to finish the foolhardy youngster and he knew it. Why couldn't he get rid of the rage that had prompted him to fire the other shots?

A knock. He lifted his forearm off his eyes.

The shanty door opened. Against the fading August day­light, he recognized the silhouette of the bearded stranger, quilled pants and all.

"Griffenstein," the man in buckskin said.

"I remember. Dutch Henry."

"Had a hell of a time finding you. How's your leg?"

"Hurts. I'll be off it a while, I guess."

"I hate to hear that. I rode a hundred miles. All the way from Hays."

"For what?"

"To recruit you." Griffenstein pulled up an old crate and sat down. "The Cheyennes are running wild and all the cavalry does is chase 'em, so Phil Sheridan's decided to take the offensive. He's ordered one of his aides, Colonel Sandy Forsyth, to hire fifty experienced plainsmen and go into the field and kill all the hostiles they can find. I said we couldn't get a better man than you. You're still the talk of the Tenth Regiment."

Sourly, Charles said, "You mean my bobtail."

"No, sir. They talk about how you whipped those colored men into some of the best cavalry in the Army. They don't call your old troop Barnes's Troop, they call it Main's Troop — your real name — and the old man says amen."

"That a fact." Charles gripped his aching leg. "Here, give me a hand. I know I can get up."

He did, but he fell right back down, tumbling across the cot. "Damn. I wish you'd come one day sooner, Griffenstein."

"So do I. Well, next time. The way the red men are scalping and burning, there'll be a number of next times. You can join up then."

"Count on it," Charles said.

"How will I find you?"

"Telegraph Brigadier Jack Duncan. He's with the Departmental paymaster at Fort Leavenworth."

"A relative, is he?"

The convenient lie: "Father-in-law."

"Nobody said you were married."

"Not any more. She died."

And you killed every iota of feeling in the only other woman you ever loved as much.

The big man said, "Truly sorry to hear that." Charles's curt nod dismissed it.

They shook hands. Dutch Henry Griffenstein tipped his hat and left, closing the slat door, leaving Charles to swear with renewed frustration. In the dark he reached for the half-empty bottle under the cot.

Nellie Slingerland stuck by the firing. Charles was bad for business. Trooper Nell's was almost empty for the entire seven days that he lay in the shanty. The grocer turned sheriff dropped in on the last day to say witnesses had exonerated Charles on the grounds of self-defense.

Hobbling, he packed his few possessions. Nellie didn't bid him goodbye personally, just sent ten dollars with the barkeep. Charles used the money to get Satan from a livery in the respectable part of town. He left Abilene in the summer dusk and rode east into the dark.

45

When Willa went to pieces and forgot her lines a third time, Sam Trump said, "Ten minutes, ladies and gentlemen."

He drew her aside to the cushion-strewn platform serving as a rehearsal bed. He sat her on the edge, leaving inky prints on the sleeve of her yellow dress. Because of the fierce September heat, his blackamoor makeup ran and smeared.

"My dear, what is it?" He knew. She looked bedraggled; her silvery hair was dull and pinned up carelessly. He sat beside her, his black tights and tunic darkened by sweat. The white chrysanthemum pinned over his heart was wilted. Prosperity jumped in his lap and purred.

When she stayed silent, he prompted her. "Is it the weather? It will surely break soon."

"The weather has nothing to do with it. I just can't keep my mind on my part." She touched his hand. "Will you cancel rehearsals long enough for me to dash to Leavenworth again?"

"You were there not thirty days ago."

"But that poor child needs someone besides a housekeeper to pay attention to him. The brigadier's gone with the pay chest for weeks at a time. Gus might as well be an orphan."

Sam stroked Prosperity's sleek back. It was imperative that he find some way to jolt Willa out of her melancholy. It was deepening day by day, robbing her performances of energy. He nerved himself and said, "Dear girl, is it really the little boy who concerns you? Or his father?"

She gave him a scathing look. "I don't know where his father is. Furthermore, I don't care."

"Ah, no, of course not. 'The poet's food is love and fame,'

Mr. Shelley said, and it's true of actors also. But you are telling me that only half applies to you."

"Don't torment me, Sam. Just say you'll let Grace stand in for me for a few nights. I'll do better with Othello once I know Gus is all right."

"I hate to delay rehearsals. I have a premonition that our new production will be the one that propels us to the heights. I have telegraphed several New York managers, inviting them to come —"

"Oh for God's sake, Sam," she said, her face uncharacteristically hostile. "You know all those wonderful triumphs exist only in your imagination. We'll live and die provincial actors."

Trump stood. Leaping off, the theater cat caught claws in his tunic and left a long rip. Trump stared at his partner, wounded. Willa's blue eyes filled with tears.

"I'm sorry, Sam. That was a vile thing to say. Forgive me."

"Forgiven. As to your absence, what choice have I? You are sleepwalking through your roles. If one more trip to Leavenworth will arrest that, by all means go. Since we are being so candid, permit me to continue a moment more. I liked that young man when I first met him. I no longer like him. He's hurt you. Even when he's absent he hurts you. Somehow he reaches out into my theater to poison everything."

Willa gave him a sad half-smile. "It's called love, Sam. You've had affairs of the heart."

"None that destroyed me. I'll not see you destroyed."

"No, Sam. Just a few days, then things will be fine."

"All right," he said, doubting it.

On the train that carried Willa across the state, passengers jumped off at every stop to buy late papers. An unfolding story from eastern Colorado had burst onto the front pages. On the Arikaree Fork of the Republican River, a special detachment of Indian-hunting plainsmen under a Colonel Forsyth had been surprised by a huge band of Cheyennes. The detachment took refuge on a sparsely treed island in the river and forted up to fight.

Incredibly, they repelled charge after charge by the Indians, who numbered as many as six hundred, according to some of the dispatches. In one of the charges a renowned war chief named Bat had ridden in wearing a great war bonnet whose medicine was supposed to turn aside bullets. The medicine failed him. He was blown down, this Bat — Roman Nose, some called him.

Passengers on the train reveled in the reports of the battle of Beecher's Island, named in honor of the young Army officer, second in command, who had taken a fatal wound there. "They're safe," a passenger in the next seat exclaimed to Willa, showing a paper. "The men Forsyth sent to Fort Wallace got through. The relief column found 'em still holed up and carving their horses for meat."

"How many did they kill?" another passenger asked.

"Says here it was hundreds."

"By God, there ought to be fifty more fights like that, to make up for all the poor innocents who got scalped and outraged this summer.

Fuming, Willa spoke across the back of the seat. "You expect the Cheyennes to be peaceful when they aren't even treated with simple fairness and honesty? Almost a year ago, the peace commission promised them rations and weapons for hunting. By the time the weapons were issued, summer was nearly over. Do you expect them not to break faith when we do?"

Her voice trailed away over the clicking of the wheel trucks. The male passengers stared at her as though she carried cholera. The man with the paper said to the others, "Didn't know there was squaws who could pass for white women, did you, boys?"

Willa started to retort, but before she could, the man with the paper leaned forward and spat a large gob of tobacco pulp on the floor.

In times past, that kind of behavior would have challenged her to fight all the harder. Not now. She felt despondent, even foolish, caught in a battle that couldn't be won.

She stared out the window at white barns and cattle grazing in the twilight. She tried to close her ears to the sarcastic jokes the man continued to make about her. She felt miserable. Somehow he reaches out to poison everything.

Maybe her often-impractical partner was wiser than she knew. Maybe she should stop chasing doomed dreams. Maybe she ought to make this visit to Leavenworth her last.

"No, the brigadier's not heard from him in weeks," Maureen said when Willa arrived on a gray, gusty morning. "Is the general here?"

"No. He's riding the pay circuit again."

"Where's Gus?"

"I put him to hoeing the vegetable garden in back. It's entirely the wrong time of year — we've already harvested our squash and potatoes — but the poor thing needs something to fill his hours."

"He needs a normal life." Willa set her valise near the cold iron stove. "He needs schooling, parents, a home of his own."

"No disputing that," Maureen said. She looked older; the harsh prairie weather had wrinkled and aged her skin. "He'll not find those things here, I fear."

A low-pitched howling underlay their conversation. The front door rattled in its frame. Maureen twisted her apron. "Mary and Joseph, I hate this place sometimes. The heat. That infernal wind. It's blown for weeks."

Willa went to the back door. From there she could observe little Gus, a sturdy, strong boy bending over a corner of the garden patch and listlessly poking at the dirt with his hoe. Dust and debris whirled over the garden and the nearby buildings. Gus's little round-crowned hat threatened to blow away at any moment.

Watching from the open door, Willa felt her heart near to breaking. How forlorn he looked. As hunched as a little old man. Digging, chopping — to no purpose.

She stepped outside. "Hello, Gus."

"Aunt Willa!" He dropped the hoe and ran to her. She knelt and hugged him. Charles's son was almost four now. He'd lost his baby pudginess. Although he was outdoors a lot, he tended to fair skin and paleness.

Despite the wind, she took him walking along the bluff above the river. She was asking questions, which he answered with monosyllables, when she heard a hail behind them. She turned.

"Oh good Lord."

Down the path lurched Charles. Over the back of his gypsy robe he wore some sort of canvas sling from which the stock of his rifle jutted. His beard was long again, and unkempt.

Little Gus spied his father, a smile burst onto his face, and he ran toward him. He'd gone but halfway when Charles stumbled over a rock and fell. Only a jarring stop with his hands kept him from slamming face first on the ground.

Gus halted, confused. Willa's expression grew strained. From the way Charles weaved as he stood up, she knew he was drunk.

"Hallo, Gus. Come give your pa a hug."

The boy continued to advance, but cautiously. Charles crouched down, enfolded the boy in his arms. Gus turned his head and Willa saw his eyes close and his mouth purse, as though he feared the man hugging him. The moment of spontaneous exuberance was gone.

Willa held her feathered hat against the gusting wind. That wind brought her a ripe whiskey smell. Drunk, all right. Gus quickly wriggled away from Charles. He looked relieved.

Charles stared at her, almost unfriendly. "Didn't expect to run into you. What're you doing here?" He spoke thickly, slowly.

"I wanted to see Gus. I didn't imagine you'd be around."

"I just rode in. Gus, go on back to Maureen, I need to talk to Willa."

"I want to stay out here and play, Pa."

Charles grabbed his shoulder, spun him, and flung him toward the row of officers' houses. "Don't sass me. Go along."

Little Gus looked ready to cry. Charles yelled, "Go on, goddamn it."

Gus ran. Willa wanted to upbraid Charles, strike him, horse­whip him. The intensity of her emotion upset her, both in its own right and because she knew she wouldn't feel it if she didn't love him.

Somewhere on the post, artillery pieces fired practice rounds. Charles took Willa's elbow and turned her almost as rudely as he'd turned the boy. He all but pushed her down the weed-grown path toward the river. Fighting for control, she said, "Where've you been, Charles?"

"Oh, do I answer to you about that?"

"For God's sake, I'm curious, that's all. Can't you recognize a polite question anymore?"

"Abilene," he muttered. "Been in Abilene. Had a job, but I quit it."

"What kind of job?"

"Nothing you'd care to hear about."

In a clump of willows near the edge of the bluff she stopped, confronting him. The wind stripped yellowing leaves from the weeping branches and flung them into the dusty gray distances.

She hated the whiskey smell on him, the odor of unwashed clothing. Emotion overwhelmed her again.

"Why are you so angry all the time?" She braced her gloved palms on the front of the gypsy robe and, on tiptoe, she kissed him. His beard scratched. She might as well have kissed marble.

"Look, Willa —"

"No, you look, Charles Main." Something warned her not to give rein to her feelings. She couldn't stop. "Do you think I'm here out of charity? I love you. I thought you loved me once." His eyes swept past her, to the dust-hazed river. "I want you to stop this wild life you're living."

"I came to see Gus, not hear lectures."

"Well, that's too bad. You'll hear this one. You don't belong on the Plains. Find a job in Leavenworth. Take care of your son. You've frightened him. You have to win him back. Can't you see that? He needs you, Charles. He needs you the way you were two years ago. I need you that way. Please."

He tugged the brim of his black hat low over his eyes, holding it against the roaring wind. "I'm not ready to come back here. I've got unfinished work."

"Those infernal Cheyennes —" She was nearly in tears.

"For whom your heart bleeds. You go take care of your Friendship Society and your goddamn petitions."

Not an hour here, and it's all going wrong she thought. "Why are you yelling at me, Charles?"

"Because I don't want you interfering with my son."

"I care about him!"

"So do I. I'm his father."

"Not much of one."

He hit her, open-handed, not hard. But she felt a pain beyond description.

Holding her cheek, she stepped back. Her small feathered hat blew off. He stabbed a hand out automatically but the hat sailed by, lifting on a gust, spinning on through the willows toward the Missouri. "Oh," she said, a small, forlorn sound. Then she looked at him again. Something hard kindled in her blue eyes.

"You've turned into a complete bastard. I used to wonder why it was happening. I used to care. I don't any more. Your boy doesn't either, but you're too stupid and drunk to see that. If you keep on, he'll hate you. Most of the time he's terrified of you."

"Christ, you're superior." He was loud, scornful. "First you had all the answers about the Indians. All the wrong answers. Now you're telling me how to raise my son. I don't need you. Take care of your own problems. Find some other man to drag into your bed."

"Go to hell, Charles Main. You just go to hell! No —" She shook her head, a violent movement. "You're already there, as low as anybody can get."

Enraged, he grabbed for her. She dashed by. "Willa!" A fleeting look back showed Charles her tear-streaked face. "Go ahead, run. Run!"

RUNRUNRUNRUN — it went echoing over the river. She was gone in the blowing clouds of leaves and dust.

"Miss Willa, you just got here."

"A mistake, Maureen. A huge mistake. Take care of that poor youngster. His father won't."

She walked all the way into Leavenworth City, the dust caking on her lids and lips and hands. A kindly ticket agent found her a basin of water and a piece of clean rag. She left on the four o'clock steamer for St. Louis.

When she walked back into Trump's Playhouse, filthy from travel, the old actor was astonished at the brightness of her man­ner. "Call a rehearsal, Sam. I'm eager to get back to work. I'll not be seeing Mr. Main again, if I'm lucky."

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

The muscular young black man, Ridley, put his arm around his wife. May was a slight, frail girl. She was in her third month, beginning to show.

Ridley had come home tired from digging and hauling all day in the Mont Royal phosphate fields. But the weather was so agreeable, he'd persuaded May to delay their supper and come enjoy the air with him. He felt good these days. He was earning a decent wage, and starting to build his own two-room house of tabby with help from his friend Andy Sherman and some tools loaned by Mr. Heely, the white foreman of the Mont Royal work force. Ridley was proud to be able to do all these things, and go wherever he wished as a free man. That included Summerton, where he intended to vote for General U. S. Grant for president, as Mr. Klawdell of the League suggested.

The last redness of the day was fading behind the thick woods bordering the river road. Walking together, Ridley and his wife heard a low hooting. May huddled close against him. "Sun's gone. We walked too far."

"Felt so peaceful, I lost all track," Ridley said, all at once aware of the lowering darkness. He gripped her hand and lengthened his stride; he couldn't hurry her too much because of her condition. Suddenly, behind them, they heard horses.

Ridley and May turned to look. They saw glowing lights floating above the road, and a red shimmer. They heard the jingle of bridles. Robed riders, carrying torches.

"May, we got to run. It's them Klan men."

She turned without a word and sprinted toward Mont Royal, her bare feet flying. He caught up with her and, side by side, they sped away from the trotting horses. Their bare feet thumped the sandy road. Ridley's breathing quickened; soon he was gasping. May let out a groan. The exertion was too much for her.

The four riders broke into a gallop. They quickly overtook the black couple. Ridley and May saw the shadows of the Klansmen appear on the road as they drew up close behind with their torches.

Two of the riders booted their mounts past the fleeing couple. Ridley smelled the animals as they dashed by, raising dust. The horsemen wheeled back in the center of the road. Ridley and May were encircled.

"Nigger, you know you're not s'posed to be out after dark," one of the riders said. All four were robed and hooded in scarlet cloth that rippled and gleamed when they moved. Ridley clutched May's shoulder, angry but not wanting to provoke them; they might hurt her.

"We were just on our way home, gentlemen."

"Gentlemen," another of them guffawed. "We're not gentlemen, we're hell's devils come to haunt rebellious darkies." The speaker dismounted and slouched forward. Ridley saw blue behind the eyeholes of the hood, but he didn't recognize the man by his build or his voice. The man thrust a Leech and Rigdon revolver under Ridley's nose. "Where you from, boy? Answer me respectfully."

"From down the road. From Mont Royal."

"Oh, then you're one of them Union League coons who expects he's going to vote come November. Going to try to put that goddamn Grant in the White House, are you, nigger-boy?"

May's dark eyes flashed with fury. "He is. He's a citizen and just as good as any of —"

"May, stop," Ridley begged.

"We are the devil's agents and we demand respect," the man said, raising his revolver to strike the pregnant girl.

Ridley jumped between them. "Run, May," he shouted. His hands darted to the throat of the robed man. The man fired a round. The sound of it was thunderous.

"Jesus, Jack," another of the riders protested. Ridley dropped to his knees, a wound just above his belt pouring blood onto his shirt. May screamed and leaped at the man with the revolver. Instead of shooting her, he drove his elbow into her round stomach. She cried out and fell on her back in the road, holding herself and weeping.

Her faded dress was twisted around her hips. She wore clean cotton drawers that suddenly showed a dot of blood. Jack Jolly pulled off his mask and gazed at May with repugnance. Another of the men said, "She's just a girl, Jolly."

Jolly pointed the Leech and Rigdon between the eyeholes of the man's hood. "You ain't got a goddamn word to say about it, Gettys." Ridley slowly rolled onto his side, quivered, lay still. Jolly gave a satisfied grunt, cocked the revolver, aimed at May's head, and fired another round.

Her body jerked. The sound boomed through the woods, rousing unseen birds that napped away in alarm. Jolly laughed and wiped his damp chin with the hem of his hood.

"That's one nigger vote we'll never have to worry about. Two if she was carryin' a boy."

"No violence," said Devin Heely, the small, red-bearded Irishman who had been hired in Charleston by the mine operators. "The Beaufort Phosphate Company's dead set against violence. It's my job as foreman —"

"They killed two innocent people," Madeline exclaimed. "How do you propose we deal with mad dogs like that? Invite them to tea to discuss the issue?"

Silence. Heely chewed on the stem of his cob pipe. It was dusk, twenty-four hours after the double murder on the road. Every available lantern was lit outside the whitewashed house, and every black man employed in the phosphate fields was standing or kneeling there in a great semicircle. They'd brought their wives, and all their children, too. A baby fretted. The mother rocked the bundled infant.

Seated together on the stoop, Prudence Chaffee and Marie-Louise watched Madeline. A woman in the crowd, May's sister, wept loudly. Heely opened his mouth to say something.

"She's right."

Heely and everyone else turned toward the voice. Andy stepped into the center of the lighted area. "They've left us only one choice. The one printed in the U.S. Constitution."

"What are you talking about, Sherman?" Foote asked.

"I'm talking about what it says in the second amendment. 'The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."'

"Showin' off his damn lawbook learnin'," someone else muttered. Andy paid no attention:

"I'm talking about starting our own militia company. Right here."

"You're a fool," Heely said. "If there's anything those Klan boys hate worse than the League, it's nigra militia. I am opposed —"

"I'm afraid you have nothing to say about it," Madeline broke in. "I think you're right, Andy. We have to protect ourselves. If those Klansmen come to Mont Royal, we won't have time to send to Charleston for soldiers."

Jane asked, "Where will we get guns?"

"Buy them in the city," Madeline said.

"Won't it be expensive?" Prudence asked.

Madeline gave her a strange, grieving look that neither she not Marie-Louise nor any of the others understood. "I should imagine. I'll find the money."

46

Here was the true prairie. Not a tree broke the horizon. It was the last day of October, and the wind scything over the ground foretold winter. Steel-colored skies expanded the vast, bleak space.

A tiny dot appeared, near the cut bank of a meandering creek. It enlarged to a horse and rider — Satan and Charles. Bundled into three shirts layered beneath the gypsy robe, he was still freezing. The hem of the robe whipped and snapped around him. The Spencer stock jutted above his left shoulder.

His eyes searched a large arc ahead, saw nothing. He chewed on a cold cigar, grumpily. Hell of a season to start a war, he thought. But if there was to be war, he wanted to take part. He'd quit his most recent job, loading freight at the wagon depot near Fort Leavenworth, and ridden over two hundred miles in the bitter autumn for that purpose.

In another half hour buildings of stone and adobe appeared on the horizon. Fort Dodge at last. He'd been resting Satan at an easy pace. Now he put him into a fast trot

He saw a big wagon park, then mounted squads drilling. He heard the crackle of practice fire from beyond the fort. This wasn't a post sunk into routine; there was too much activity. It got his blood up.

The officer of the day cast a wary look at the somewhat sinister stranger and said he might find those he asked about in the sutler's. Charles turned south past the stables to a flat-roofed adobe building with horses tethered outside. He put Satan with them and went in.

Dutch Henry Griffenstein was playing cards at an old round table in the corner. The largest pile of paper currency lay in front of him. Charles didn't know the three other civilians in the game. One, a nondescript man with tangled hair and a pipe in his teeth, kept spilling the deck as he tried to shuffle. "You're too drunk, Joe," said the player on his left, relieving him of the cards. Joe belched and slouched down on his tailbone, indifferent.

"Charlie," Griffenstein exclaimed, jumping up. "You got the telegram."

"I started the very next day."

"Boys," Dutch Henry said, leading him to the table, "this is Cheyenne Charlie Main. Charlie, this here's Stud Marshall, this is Willow Roberts, and here" — his tone shaded into deference as he presented the unkempt man, who was about ten years older than Charles — "our chief of scouts, California Joe Milner."

California Joe, whose eyes barely focused, shook Charles's hand. It was hard to say whose palm was more callused. Milner wore a filthy Spanish sombrero, his red side whiskers hadn't been trimmed in a while, and he was altogether one of the most slovenly men Charles had ever seen.

"Joe's the man I work for, Charlie," Dutch Henry said. "You, too, now."

California Joe belched. "If the general says so." He had an accent. Nothing cultivated, like fine Southern speech. It was the nasal whine of the mountain border. Tennessee maybe, or Kentucky.

"He means Custer," Dutch Henry said. "We got more than one general. We got General Al Sully, too. Little Phil put him in charge of the Seventh while Curly was still exiled. Sent him south of the Arkansas to chase the Indians. He didn't do so well. That's when Phil asked Sherman to remit Curly's sentence so we'd have a field commander who knows how to fight. They're both lieutenant colonels, Custer and Sully, but Sully's brevet is only lieutenant general, so Custer says he ranks him. They're sniping and fussing all the time."

"No business of ours," California Joe said to Charles. "I report to Custer, and so do you if he hires you. Ever scouted in the Indian Territory?"

"I traveled it for more than a year with a couple of trading partners. I can't say I memorized it."

"That part don't make no difference. All you really need to scout is a pocket compass and balls."

"You'll have to take my word that I qualify."

California Joe laughed. "You said he's all right, Henry. He is all right. Main, you go see Custer. You'll find him drillin' his troops at the new camp down on Blufif Creek. If he okays you, the wage is fifty dollars a month."

"I brought my own horse."

Another belch. "Then it's seventy-five. I'm gonna need another damn snort soon."

Charles wasn't much impressed by Milner's drunken buffoonery. Dutch Henry saw that and tugged his arm.

"I need a drink myself. Come on, Charlie, I'll buy. Deal me out, boys." They walked toward the log bar. California Joe picked up his new hand and dropped three cards in the lap of his greasy trousers.

"That's Custer's famous pet?" Charles said, incredulous.

Dutch Henry grinned. "One of the two-legged ones. Custer also brung two of his staghounds when Sherman fixed it so's he could come back from Michigan. We're getting ready for action here. Phil and Uncle Bill finally convinced Grant we should carry the war to the hostiles. Offense, not defense. The plan is to push 'em back to the Territory, and kill those who won't go peaceably to the reservation and stay put."

Charles drank a tall shot of razor-edged popskull in three, swallows. "You mean to say that's the plan with winter coming on?"

"I know it's contrary to sense, but it's really pretty smart of Little Phil. The hostiles will be settled into their villages, and you know as well as I do, their horses will be weak from lack of forage."

"I heard talk at Leavenworth that Sherman wanted Sheridan to move as early as this past August."

"He did, but the damn Interior Department screwed him again. The Olive Branchers made the Army hold off until it set up a safe camp for the hostiles who don't threaten anybody."

Charles scratched the head of a match with his thumbnail. He squinted behind the flame and puffed strong smoke out of the stubby cigar. "Where's the camp?"

"Fort Cobb. Satanta already took his Kiowas in. Ten Bears took his Comanches. Some Cheyennes went there, too, but General Hazen sent them away because we're not at peace with the Cheyennes. The Cheyennes are the ones we're going after. Some of 'em captured another poor white woman, Mrs. Blinn, and her little boy, over by Fort Lyon, first of October —"

"Who were the Cheyenne chiefs who went to Fort Cobb?"

"There was just one. Black Kettle."

Charles took the cigar from his mouth. He rolled it back and forth in his fingers. "And they didn't let him in? Of the whole crowd, Black Kettle's the least likely to harm anybody."

"A Cheyenne's a Cheyenne, that's the way Hazen saw it." Dutch Henry didn't understand why Charles looked troubled. Nor did he care. He slapped his friend's shoulder. "Ay God, Charlie, you missed a fine muss at Beecher's Island. The Solomon Avengers showed plenty of sand and spirit."

"That's what you called yourselves, Solomon Avengers?"

"Yes, sir. We killed a passel of Indians. But there's plenty more waiting. Cheyennes and Arapahoes —"

"The Army should stay away from Black Kettle."

"Hey, I thought you hated the whole bunch."

"Not him," Charles said, uneasy. He saw a vivid image of Willa's blue eyes. Dutch Henry frowned.

"Charlie, I told you, nobody cares which Cheyennes are all right and which aren't. The main idea's to kill 'em. You object to that, maybe you better forget it."

He thought of Boy and Wooden Foot, of their poor slaughtered collie.

"I don't object."

He ordered another drink. The smoke of his cigar drifted up past eyes grown as chill as the autumn sky.

He couldn't understand how a rum-pot like California Joe Milner could win George Custer's favor, but obviously he had, so Charles shook hands with the chief of scouts before he walked out of the adobe building. A snow flurry whirled big flakes around him. The sky was as black as dusk. A caped soldier appeared and handed him something.

"Compliments of the post Grant for President Club, sir." Charles examined the leaflet and its engraving of the candidate with military collar and epaulets showing. "No, thanks." He handed it back.

"Sir, voting is the civic responsibility of every —" "I've got other business," Charles said. The boy in the dark blue cape saw his eyes and didn't argue.

Charles curried and fed Satan and slept in the stables at Fort Dodge overnight. Next morning he reprovisioned and set out for the Seventh Cavalry encampment on the north bank of the Arkansas, about ten miles south of the fort. Flurries continued to whip out of the slate sky and he soon felt frozen again. He kept his spirits up by whistling the little tune that reminded him of home.

Camp Sandy Forsyth had been named for the commander of the Solomon Avengers. Charles saw its lights glimmering through the gloom of an early dusk. The sentry who challenged him said he was lucky not to have been shot at by some Cheyennes who'd lately been sniping at the camp. Charles shrugged and said he'd seen no sign of the Indians. He figured he'd had so much bad luck, he was due for some good.

He bedded in the wagon park with the permission of the noncom on duty. After chewing a little hardtack, he pulled down the earflaps of his muskrat cap, secured them by a thong under his chin, and rolled up in his blankets. He was thirsty; the water in his canteen had frozen. He felt tired, alone, depressed.

What he saw and heard soon after reveille changed that and got his blood up again. Rifle fire with the steady rhythm of practice drew him to the far side of the tent camp. He found a dozen troopers banging away at wood targets. He asked an old three-striper what was going on.

"When we find the hostiles, old Curly wants to be sure we can knock 'em down. These boys are some of the forty he picked out for his corpse day elite. Sharpshooters. Lieutenant Cooke's in command."

Charles continued his walking tour. There was an air of bustle in the encampment, a sure sign of a massive campaign. He counted twenty supply wagons and forty oxen present already. He saw evidence of an experienced military mind at work when he came upon two troops wheeling and maneuvering under the gray sky. All of one troop rode bays, all of the other chestnuts and browns. Custer had adopted the Confederate custom of coloring the horses. Putting all the men of one troop on similar mounts made identification easier in combat, and it had a way of enhancing pride and discipline, too.

Hammers whanged on hot anvils; Charles saw half a dozen farriers working to reshoe large numbers of horses. The Seventh's bandsmen drilled to the strains of "Garry Owen." Their gray mounts reminded him of Sport.

Another half-dozen wagons arrived during the afternoon. Shortly after five o'clock he was able to see Custer in his large A-frame tent.

"Be still, Maida." Custer patted the growling staghound who'd gotten up the moment Charles entered. He'd interrupted the general as he vigorously washed his hands in a basin of water that was still clear when he finished. Custer dried his hands and bounded forward energetically, his smile broad and white beneath his reddish-gold mustache. Blue eyes sparkled above the harsh ridges of his cheekbones. As they shook hands, Charles sniffed oil of cinnamon on Custer's ringlets.

"Mr. Main. Been expecting you. Please, sit right there."

"Yes, sir, General. Thank you." Charles sat on the canvas chair, noticing Eastern newspapers on Custer's crowded field desk. Reading upside down, he noted a headline circled in black ink. It had something to do with Grant's presidential campaign.

Elbows on the desk, Custer scrutinized him. It was hard for Charles to remember that this world-famous soldier was not yet thirty years old.

"We've met before, somewhere," Custer said.

"You're right, General. We were on opposite sides at Brandy Station."

"That's it." Custer laughed. "You gave me one or two hot moments, I recall. What was your unit?"

"Wade Hampton's Legion."

"Fine cavalry officer, Hampton. I've always liked Southerners." Custer opened a file. "You know the general purpose of our expedition, I presume. We're to search out and attack the enemy when they are least prepared, and kill as many of their warriors as practicable. To use the phrase of Senator Ross, we intend to conquer a peace."

Charles nodded. Custer scanned something in the file. "You must have an affinity for the Army. I see you tried to get back in twice, under a different name each time."

"Soldiering is all I know, General. I went to the Point a few years before you did. Class of '57."

"I see that here. I graduated in '61 by the grace of God and the fall of Fort Sumter." He closed the file. "Do you know the Indian Territory?"

"Your man Milner asked that. I was there for over a year, with a couple of trading partners the Cheyennes butchered."

The blue eyes pinned Charles. "So you'd have no hesitation about taking the lives of hostiles?"

"No, none."

Yet he was vaguely troubled by his answer. He decided it was because of the news about Black Kettle being turned away from sanctuary at Fort Cobb. Well, chances were the expedition would miss the tipis of the peace chief. The Indian Territory was vast.

"Griffenstein recommended you for this campaign. You two hunted together."

"Yes, sir. We worked for Buffalo Bill Cody."

"Do you speak Cheyenne?"

"Some."

"I've got a greaser who was raised with the tribe. You can back him up." He wrote a note. "Now let's go back to your experience. How well do you know the Territory?"

"I told Milner the exact truth. I've been over part of it. Any man who claims much more than that is a liar. The whole western part has never been explored in any systematic way. The Salt Fork of the Arkansas, the Canadians — white men have seen pieces of it, that's all."

"Fair enough. I'd rather have candor than lies."

A few cursory questions, and then Custer nodded. "All right, you're on. You take orders from Milner or from me. The first time you don't, you'll be disciplined."

A muscle in Charles's jaw jumped. He knew about Custer's famous discipline. It included such illegal punishments as head-shaving, flogging, imprisonment in a pit in the ground — and then of course there was Custer's order to his subordinates to shoot deserters.

Charles's hesitation annoyed Custer. "Something unclear about what I said, Mr. Main?"

"No, sir. It's clear."

"Good," Custer said, no longer quite as friendly.

Charles took it as dismissal. Standing up, he inadvertently knocked the stack of newspapers onto the frozen ground. Retrieving them, he saw several other articles marked in ink. "You must be interested in politics, General."

Custer gave him a cold look as he stood and drew on fringed gauntlets. "I make no secret of that. I'm watching General Grant's campaign closely, because some important people in the East have suggested I consider running for office. From a military victory to the presidency isn't such a long step, provided the victory is substantial, and gets headlines." Charles wondered how that might affect tactics on the campaign.

"Good evening, sir," Custer said, lifting the tent flap and following Charles outside. Charles's attention was caught by a man crossing the far side of the lamp-lighted headquarters area. Although his features were indistinct — light snow was falling again — his russet beard and stiff bearing were unmistakable.

The officer ducked into a tent. Custer said, "Do you know that man?"

"Unfortunately, I think so."

"If you have a grievance against him, keep it to yourself. General Sheridan is planning to join us. A number of his aides from Departmental staff are already here. Captain Venable is one of them." Pointedly, he added, "A first-rate officer. Capable and loyal."

Loyal. That word confirmed something Charles had heard before: You were Custer's admirer or you were his enemy. There was nothing between.

"Yes, sir," he said.

"You will excuse me." From the way the general turned his back, Charles knew Custer's final impression of him was poor.

Custer rode away into the dusk. The snow gathered on Charles's shoulders and hat brim. Venable. Good God. He recalled the sentry's remark about luck when he rode in. His had turned bad again.

47

He waited there on the high seat, the wagon parked close to the wall of the granary. Above him on the wall loomed a huge head, the heroic head of a soldier in uniform, bordered in red and blue with a decoration of white stars, LET US HAVE PEACE appeared in large letters in the decorative border above the head. Similarly large, the lower border said GRANT.

Cold rain poured from the night sky. Bent sat glaring at the portrait of the candidate. From time to time a shiver shook him; the November air was as bitter as January. All the residents of the tiny farm community of Grinnell were safely indoors.

From the granary came Drossel, a wad of cash in his fat hands. Drossel was a farmer for whom Bent had worked since drifting into this hamlet in Iowa late in the summer. He was smaller than Bent, an elderly but hardy man. He stepped close to the wagon, counted off bills, and handed them up. "Your wages," he said in his heavily accented English.

"Thank you, Heir Drossel." Herr and Frau Drossel addressed one another that way, with old-world formality, and he'd fallen into the habit.

The Drossels had migrated to America shortly after the political upheavals in Europe in 1848. They had found rich land in Poweshiek County, Iowa, and a promising future. They were Republicans, Lutherans; gentle, industrious people who had unquestioningly accepted Bent's assertion that he was a Union veteran traveling west in search of relatives believed to have gone to Colorado during the war. He wanted to be reunited with his family, he said. The Drossels understood that kind of quest, and the loneliness that fueled it. God had blessed them with everything but children, Frau Drossel had told him at supper on Bent's third day at the farm. Saying it, she wept, her head averted.

"The last of the crop is sold, handsomely. Our cribs are full for the winter. Follow me home, Herr Dayton. I have a special schnapps put by for this festive evening."

"Not very festive weather," Bent said, watching the roll of cash Drossel put away beneath his shabby wool coat. Drossel was portly, wore half-spectacles, and had a neat fringe of white beard running from ear to ear. His boots slopped in the mud as he walked toward a wagon parked ahead of Bent's. His mind racing, planning, Bent pointed at another poster on the granary wall. Grant's had been pasted over it, and all that was visible of it were the letters MOUR.

"I take it the Democratic candidate isn't popular in this part of Iowa?"

"Tcha," Drossel said, a kind of clicking sound. He clamped his round wool hat on his head and climbed the wheel to the seat of the first wagon. "What do we know of that Seymour? A New York governor. He might as well come from the moon. Grant, though, Grant we know. Grant is a national man. That is why he was nominated. That is why he will win."

"On his reputation," Bent said, experiencing the first turn of the awl of pain between his eyes. Pinpoint lights began to wink in his head. Military success could have carried him to the nation's highest office if only his enemies hadn't denied him an Army career.

Calm, he thought. Stay calm. Thinking of old wounds only reopened them. They could never be healed. All he could do was continue to extract a blood price from them. He'd done it in Lehigh Station and soon would do it again with his next, thoughtfully chosen victim.

"Herr Dayton, are you asleep?" Drossel was teasing, but with a certain Teutonic sternness. Many times during the weeks of hard labor in the cornfields, Drossel had ordered Bent to do this or do that, and Bent had almost gone for the old man's throat. Only the larger goal, the money he needed to continue his quest, overcame the strong urge to choke Drossel's orders down his throat.

"The rain is very hard. We are wasting time. Frau Drossel is waiting with a special supper."

In Bent's head, a white light-burst shaded into warm pink.

Another flashed scarlet. That isn't all that's waiting tonight, he thought, with a sly smile Drossel didn't see. The old man was shaking the reins over his mules, turning the wagon into the dark, away from the lights of the farming community.

The Drossels lived a half hour from Grinnell, on rolling land. There was no neighbor within two miles, and the topography made it hard to catch a glimpse of their neat white house and barns from a distance.

Once in the house, Bent changed to a dry shirt and socks in the cramped garret space up a short stair from the entrance to the Drossels' second-floor bedroom. Frau Drossel, resembling some little girl's button-eyed doll, and always prattling, brought steaming platters of schnitzel and red cabbage to the lace-covered table. Herr Drossel offered his dusty bottle of schnapps as though it were French champagne. Its hot peppermint bite soothed Bent's nerves somewhat; it warmed him and made him forget the tedious sound of the rain. Presently, the rain stopped. Bent was gratified. That would help his plan.

"We are so sorry you will be leaving, Herr Dayton," Frau Drossel said after the meal was over. "It is lonely out here. So hard to fill the long winter nights."

You'll never have to fret about filling another, Bent thought. He was barely able to grunt an answer, because his head hurt so much. When Drossel left the table, Bent noted the bulge of the cash in his pants pocket. The farmer kept the money with him as he busied about the downstairs, checking window latches, locking doors. Bent pleaded tiredness and said good night.

"Good night, Herr Dayton," Frau Drossel said, impulsively standing on tiptoe to kiss his stubbly cheek. He fought to keep from recoiling in disgust. Her weepy old eyes sickened him. "It has been so good, your company for all these weeks."

"I wish I could stay, Frau Drossel. You and your husband are like a family to me." The lights were flashing and bursting behind his eyes. His low-hanging shoulder throbbed from the damp cold. "I shall truly miss you. But life takes each one of us along a different road."

"Yes, what a pity," she exclaimed, while he envisioned the hell-bright glare at the end of her road. He nearly giggled. But he maintained his pious expression as she patted him. "But I understand that you must locate those who are dear to you."

"Yes, and I'm close now. It will be soon."

"Good night, Herr Dayton," Drossel called as Bent climbed the narrow little stair. Closing the garret door, he heard Drossel's parting remark. "You are a good man."

Instead of preparing for bed, he donned his coat again, then wrapped a long wool scarf around his neck. He pulled his valise from under the bed and examined the contents. He did it every night, a kind of superstitious ritual to guarantee success.

The rolled-up painting lay in the bottom under a few dirty garments. He groped down among the clothing until his fingers touched the teardrop earring.

Smiling, he shut the valise and snapped the clasps. From a corner shelf he took the soiled plug hat stolen to replace the one lost in Lehigh Station. He put the hat on, then drew on mittens with most of the fingertips missing. He sat fully dressed on the edge of the bed while the awl of pain bore deeper into his skull, and the imaginary lights burst and dazzled.

Below, he heard the clock in the old couple's bedroom chime half after twelve. Time.

He crept down the stairs and slowly turned the knob of their door. He opened the door, listened to the regular breathing from the two sleepers. He stepped in and shut the door, which clicked faintly. A moment later muffled cries filled the house.

The rain had passed, but a residual damp remained. Bent was shivering as he hobbled out of the dooryard of the farm. He turned left into the westbound road, a rutted mire of standing water and wet brown soil. His boots went in and out of the mud with sucking sounds.

He walked a quarter of a mile before feeling safe enough to stop and look back. He kept his left hand in his pocket, the fingers stroking and caressing the huge lump of cash taken from Herr Drossel. His excited manhood pushed against the lump from the inner side of the pocket.

"Ah —" A beatific sign. The farmhouse was no longer merely a white blur in the night. Rosy light glowed behind smoking curtains in upstairs windows. As he watched, the curtains ignited.

Bent huddled at the roadside, anticipating the delicious sound that he heard a moment later. The old couple. Bludgeoned unconscious, then securely lashed to their bed with strips of sheet. They were waking up. Feeling the heat of the fire he'd set in the downstairs parlor. Feeling it scorch and cook the floor under their bed — the bed they couldn't escape from.

They had thought him such a good man. They should have learned it was dangerous to trust appearances, or take strangers at their word, in this shit-hole world.

An upper window burst, then another. Flames shot out. Behind the roar, he heard screaming.

Bent turned his back on the brilliance and crouched over his valise. From it he took the teardrop earring in its setting of filigreed gold. He passed his fingertips over the pearl several times, each time with an exquisite sexual thrill. The memory of Constance's gashed throat was vivid.

Small foamy bubbled on his lip burst as he screwed the post of the earring into his left lobe. Wearing the memento of his punishment of George Hazard pleased and amused him.

He set the plug hat on his head and hobbled westward. The bobbing pearl caught the light of the burning farmhouse; it was as if an iridescent drop of coagulated blood hung from his left ear.

Slowly the firelight receded to the horizon and he hobbled in darkness, keeping himself warm by squeezing the great lump of cash and imagining his next victim and thinking, Soon. Soon.

MADELINE'S JOURNAL

In single file, the riders turned into the lane from the river road. A sickle moon set white highlights flashing along the barrels of their weapons.

They proceeded slowly under the arch of trees and rode around the white house quietly. They drew up in a line at the front door. In the moonlight their shimmering robes and hoods had a black cast. The eyeholes reflected no light at all.

The horseman in the center of the line raised his old squirrel rifle. A man on his right saw the signal, scraped a match on the heel of his plow shoe, and touched it to an oil-soaked torch. The light blazed up, illuminating the half-dozen riders.

"Call her out," said the man at the extreme right of the line. He sat his horse near the lowest limbs of a huge gnarled live oak. The upper portion of the oak's trunk was all but hidden by Spanish moss. Some bird or squirrel moved there, a faint rattling. The rider on the end peered upward, saw nothing.

The man at the center of the line raised an old speaking trumpet. Suddenly the front door flew back and Madeline stepped out, her left hand rising toward the rope of the ship's bell.

"Stay," ordered the man with the trumpet and squirrel rifle. Madeline looked pale as she clutched the front of a man's cotton robe worn thin at the elbows. Behind her, the stout schoolteacher peered out, and then Marie-Louise.

"We are the knights of the Invisible Empire assembled," said the man in the center. His nervous horse shied.

Madeline startled them all by laughing. "You're little boys hiding your faces because you're cowards. I recognize your long legs, Mr. LaMotte. At least have the decency to remove that hood and act like a man."

A Klansman at the left of the line hiked up both sides of his robe and put his hands on the matched butts of revolvers. "Let's kill the damn bitch. I ain't here to debate a nigger."

The man in the center raised the squirrel rifle to quiet the speaker. To Madeline he said, "You have twenty-four hours to leave the district." The torch hissed. There was a clicking sound, a lever action putting a cartridge into a chamber, and a voice behind and to the right of the line boomed out:

"No, sir. Not just yet."

They all turned as Madeline's glance flashed to the mossy tree. A burly, round-faced black had crept into sight on a thick limb that bent under his weight. He braced his shoulders against a limb above, freeing both hands for his rifle. Madeline recognized gentle, reticent Foote; she hadn't known who was standing guard tonight.

"I think you gen'men had just better turn 'round and ride off," Foote said.

"Jesus, it's only one nigger," protested the man with twin revolvers.

"One nigger with a repeating rifle," said another of the Klansmen. "I wouldn't be hasty, Jack."

"No names," the man in the center exclaimed. Marie-Louise whispered at Madeline's shoulder:

"It is Mrs. Allwick's dancing teacher. I know his voice."

Madeline nodded, her lips compressed. The man in the center of the line began, "Madam —" Madeline leaped forward, shot her hand upward, and tried to snatch his hood.

His horse danced and sidestepped. He batted at Madeline with the squirrel rifle but she wouldn't be driven back. She jumped and clawed at the hood again. This time, she pulled it off. Des LaMotte's face was red with fury.

"Well. At last. The notorious Mr. LaMotte. And I have a souvenir of your visit." She held up the hood.

All of them watched her — the other two women and the Klansmen and Foote on the sagging limb. During the struggle for the hood, the Klansman with the two revolvers had drawn both of them. Still unnoticed, with everyone's attention on Madeline, he bent his right arm, laid the muzzle of his left-hand gun on it, and squeezed the trigger.

The revolver roared. The horses whinnied and bucked. Foote took the bullet in his left thigh, blown back off the limb and out of sight behind the Spanish moss. "Foote," Madeline cried, running past the horses to reach him. Before she could, the rider nearest the tree raced his mount under the lowest branches. Another roar reverberated. Madeline jerked to a halt. "Foote!"

"Stop that other one," shouted the Klansman with the twin revolvers. Jack Jolly tore off his hood and aimed at Prudence, who had dashed outside after the second shot. The disfiguring scar showed white on his face.

Jolly was momentarily hesitant about putting a bullet in a white woman. His hesitation allowed Prudence to seize the bell rope. LaMotte's shout went unheard in the clangorous ringing. Another man cried, "That's done it. Let's go."

Eyes glassy with confusion, LaMotte shouted at Madeline: "You have twenty-four hours. Clear out. Everything. This teacher, your nigger militia —"

Something inside Madeline broke. She ran at LaMotte's horse again, caught hold of the headstall, and yelled at him in the voice of a dock hand. "The hell I will. This is my land. My home. You're nothing but a pack of cowards dressed for a music hall. If you want me off Mont Royal, kill me. That's the only way you can get rid of me."

The horse of the Klansman at the left of the line began to stamp. LaMotte threw anxious looks at his men. Jolly was enraged. "If you're scared to kill a nigger woman, I'm not." He pointed both Leech and Rigdon's at Madeline, grinning. "Here's a one-way ticket to Hell Station on the devil's railroad."

The hooded man next to him grabbed and lifted Jolly's arms an instant before the revolvers went off. One bullet tore into the shakes of the roof. The other sped high in the dark. The Klansmen were now in panic, but scarcely more frightened than Madeline, who'd flung herself back against the whitewashed house, certain that one of the bullets would find her.

"I'll not have it," said the man who'd interfered with Jolly.

Hearing him for the first time, Madeline registered astonishment "Father Lovewell? My God."

''I’ll not sink to this," he said. Jolly turned the pistols on him. Undeterred, the hooded priest grabbed his arms again. "Stop it, Jolly. I'll not condone murdering women, even a colored —"

"You pious fucker," Jolly cried, wrenching one arm free. He aimed at Father Lovewell's hood. Again the Episcopal priest struck Jolly's arm before the revolver discharged. The bullet plowed under the belly of Father Lovewell's mare, raising a spurt of dust. Out in the dark, answering the bell, men were shouting.

Father Lovewell snatched a revolver away from Jolly. Jolly aimed his remaining gun. His skittish horse reared, forcing him to delay his shot. With both hands steadying the piece he held, Father Lovewell pulled the trigger.

Jack Jolly stood up in his saddle, then slumped forward. Blood darkened the front of his sateen robe and leaked down his mount's flank. The other Klansmen were totally disorganized; freedmen could be heard running and hallooing.

Des LaMotte looked bilious as he backed his horse and yanked its head toward the end of the house. He raced away. The other Klansmen jostled each other trying to follow. Jolly's horse galloped off last, its dead rider wobbling and bouncing and threatening to fall.

Madeline's legs felt weak. She pressed her hands against the whitewashed wall to support herself. Bitter powder smoke choked her. The torchlight faded as the Klansmen galloped down the lane.

"Are you all right? Who fired shots?" That was Andy, charging in from the road to the slave cabins.

Madeline's nerve collapsed suddenly; shock shook her. Hair straggled in her eyes as she ran toward the darkness under the tree. "Foote. Oh, poor Foote —"

Before she reached him, she had to turn away, violently sick.

At the edge of the dark marsh, by torchlight, they weighted Jack Jolly's body with stones and slid it under the water.

"They shot him, and he fell right by the house. That's the story," LaMotte said, hoarse. "We couldn't bring him out because they were swarming all over us. Don't worry, his kin will never go to Mont Royal to collect the body,"

"And we aren't going back either," Father Lovewell said.

"Oh yes we are," LaMotte said. "I take the blame for what happened. I never imagined she'd have a guard posted. But I won't be whipped by a woman. A nigger woman at that. She shamed my cousins. Destroyed them —"

"Des, give it up. Father Lovewell's right." It was the first time Randall Gettys had spoken.

"If that's the kind of Southerner you are, all right," LaMotte said. His face was nearly as red as his hair. He was furious, because months of delay had culminated in a bungled night's work. But he wouldn't quit. "She's not going to stay on the Ashley and flaunt herself. She's going to die. I'll hide out a while: Then I'll go back alone if the rest of you are too yellow."

No one said anything. They threw their hissing torches into the brackish water and dispersed, leaving Jack Jolly submerged, with darting fish and frogs and a three-foot baby alligator for company. The alligator swam close to the body, opened its jaws, and with needle teeth began to feed on the face.

"Yes, I understand," Jane said when Madeline expressed her feelings. "My people lived with that kind of fear for generations. But I don't know that Mr. Cooper's right about the Klan giving up. Do you remember when Mr. Hazard visited, right after the war? I said I thought there would be many more years of battle before a last victory. I still believe it."

"I could go to General Hampton. He promised to help me."

"How can he help? He hasn't any troops, has he?"

Madeline shook her head.

"I think we'd better stay on watch," Jane said. "A man like that LaMotte, he might take defeat from a person of his own class, another man, but a woman? A colored woman? I'll bet he'd lose his mind rather than let that happen."

"I think he's already lost it."

Jane shrugged, not caring to argue the point. "It isn't the last battle. He'll be back."