Love and War

119

Mr. Lonzo Perdue, postal clerk and third-generation resident of Richmond, was a man beset by miseries. Scores of small signs warned that the Confederacy's death agony had begun, which meant the death agony of the city as well. Mr. Perdue wanted to rush his beloved wife and daughters away to safety. But where did safety lie with the Yankees so close? And even if he found sanctuary, how would he provide for his dear ones? The money with which the government paid him was worthless. If an officer on leave was lucky enough to find a pair of secondhand boots these days, he would buy them for fifteen hundred Confederate dollars and tip the clerk another five hundred.

It was January, the coldest in Lonzo Perdue's memory. The upper crust, a section of the social pie in which no one had ever placed Mr. Perdue, even by mistake, continued to hold parties, which the papers dutifully reported. They were called "starvation parties" now. The nobs attending drank lukewarm dandelion coffee and munched bits of James River ice served on dessert plates.

Not only were there snow flurries in the freezing air, there was despair. The brigand Sherman was loose in the Carolinas, burning, raping, and pillaging as he had done while crossing Georgia. Admiral Porter had closed on Fort Fisher with a Union flotilla and would soon force a surrender, if he hadn't already; lately the war news traveled like corn syrup left outdoors overnight.

Mr. Perdue decided this was because all the news was bad and that egotistical, half-blind bungler Davis didn't want any more of it to reach the people than was absolutely necessary. In his bureaucratic post, Mr. Perdue naturally heard rumors. The principal ones concerned the President, who was said to be madly suing for peace in secret. As well he might. The Enquirer scathingly asserted that, come spring, not one man in two would be left in the trenches at Petersburg.

There were harbingers of collapse everywhere. Mrs. Perdue, ever a champion of good works, divided her time between the Soup Association, whose kitchens dispensed a watery potato-flavored liquid to the starving, and a ladies' circle from St. Paul's Church that located old pieces of carpet, then sectioned and packed them for shipment to the lines. Each carpet square was intended as a blanket.

On his way to his daily job, Mr. Perdue no longer stopped to visit with acquaintances encountered on the street. His only overcoat had been donated — foolishly, he now realized — to army collection agents last fall. His only pair of woolen gloves, riddled with holes, kept him about as warm as no gloves whatever.

Of course he didn't bump into many acquaintances these days. Wounded soldiers — oh, yes, plenty of those. And roving niggers. But the decent people had deserted the streets. Mr. Perdue no longer ventured out after dark, for those hours now belonged to the sharps who ran the faro banks that were still booming and the pluguglies who made brawls and robberies commonplace and the carriages of the few speculators still enjoying champagne and foie gras — the damned traitors.

An upright and sober man all his life, Mr. Perdue had now become a suspicious and embittered one who whiffed betrayal and conspiracy everywhere. He was sick of a diet of white beans and a once-weekly portion of slightly gamy sliced turkey washed down with a tiny amount of apple brandy. He loved oysters and hadn't tasted one for a year, though he presumed King Jeff still dined on them regularly.

He hated the unseen, unknown powers who had reduced his poor wife and daughters to shabbiness. When they needed pins, they settled for slivers of palmetto. When they needed dress buttons, they dyed small bits of gourd. For his daughter Clytemnestra's eleventh birthday in December, the only present he had been able to find — and afford — angered him and broke his heart, too. It was a cheap little necklace of silvery iridescent flowers made from fish scales; price, thirty dollars.

The newspapers confirmed the approaching end in other ways.

Theatrical performances were advertised as sold out, the mobs enjoying a final orgiastic revel. Advertisements for runaway slaves appeared infrequently; some days, there were none. Owners knew they had little chance of recovering their property, thanks to the looming military disaster and the wicked pronouncements of the Original Gorilla.

Mr. Perdue's ears also told him the end was near. It was an unusual day or night that didn't include at least one interval of artillery fire from the defense lines to the south. The cannonading had become such a fact of life that it was worrisome if a day or a night passed without any.

On this particular morning, sunnier than most but still very cold, Mr. Perdue had left his wife in tears. For their daughter Marcelline's thirteenth birthday two days hence, Mrs. Perdue had struggled to find enough scrap satin to recover the girl's last pair of shoes. That would be her gift. At half past twelve last night, Mrs. Perdue had broken a needle, then broken down when she realized that her estimate of the amount of material needed was wrong. Half of one shoe could not be finished, and she couldn't buy any more satin to match.

His wife's plight was another stimulus of Mr. Perdue's anger. He looked even sourer than usual when he reached Goddin Hall, the four-story brick structure at Eleventh and Bank streets, just below Capitol Square. The first-floor post office shared the building with the Confederate patent office and various army functionaries. Mr. Perdue stuffed his three-fingered gloves in one pocket and started work next to his old post office colleague, Salvarini, the middle-aged son of a noted meat market proprietor who had lately closed his doors, refusing to butcher and sell dogs and cats.

Salvarini had already dumped two large pouches of incoming mail on the work counter, to be sorted into other crates or cloth and canvas bags lying about. There was little order in the post office anymore and no uniformity in what its employees did or how they did it.

"My wife's jaundiced color is worse," Salvarini said to his friend as they began sorting letters written on brown paper, wall­paper, newspaper — all kinds of paper. "I've got to find a doctor."

"They're all in the trenches," snapped Mr. Perdue. Hands warming at last, he began to whiz letters to the crates and bags or to various Richmond pigeonholes in front of him, with his usual dexterity. "Best thing you can do is consult a leecher."

"Is it safe? Are they clean?"

"I can't answer either question, but I know they're available. Read the papers. Dozens of them advertising. I did hear Mrs. Perdue remark that the one opposite the American Hotel is considered among the more reliable — here, what's this?"

He held up an envelope distinguished by the fact that it was exactly that — a genuine envelope, properly sealed with a blob of dark blue wax and addressed in a bold hand. The correspondent had identified himself in the upper corner as J. Duncan, Esq.

"The addresses are getting vaguer by the day," Mr. Perdue complained. "Look." He handed the envelope to Salvarini, who studied what was written on it. Maj. Chas. Main, Hampton's Cavalry Corps, C.S.A.

Salvarini nodded. "Also, there's no stamp."

"Yes, I saw that." Mr. Perdue scowled. "I'll bet some damn Yankee sent this by illegal courier and the courier didn't bother with a stamp when he posted it locally. I'll be hanged if I'll handle enemy mail."

Salvarini was more charitable. "Perhaps the sender's a Southerner who couldn't afford the stamp."

Lonzo Perdue, respectable husband, worried father, betrayed patriot, stared at the letter while his mouth turned downward still further. There was a distant rumbling, a whine of glass in the windows above them. Salvarini greeted the start of the bombardment with an expression bordering on relief.

"The rules are the rules," declared Mr. Perdue.

"But you don't know what this contains, Lonzo. Suppose it's important. News of some relative's death — something like that?"

"Let this Major Main learn of it some other way," his colleague retorted. With an outward snap of his hand, Mr. Perdue sailed the envelope into a wooden box already half filled with misaddressed letters, small parcels with the inking obliterated by rain or dirt — undeliverable items destined for storage and eventual destruction.

120

Charles felt increasingly alone, taking part in what was now beyond all doubt a losing fight. Even General Hampton no longer expressed confidence, though he swore to expend his last blood before he quit. The general had grown dour and, some said, revenge-crazed since his son and aide, Preston, had been killed near Hatcher's Run last October. Hampton's son Wade had received a wound in the same action.

Charles functioned — he rode and shot — yet his real self lived apart from daily events in some mental netherworld from which associates and friends departed one by one. Following his promotion, Hampton had gone up to staff, and Charles no longer saw him except from afar. Calbraith Butler and his division, after riding all night through the winter's worst sleetstorm to help drive back Gouverneur Warren's augmented Fifth Corps striking at the Weldon Railroad, were now bound for home. In South Carolina the men were to find remounts and, more important, defend the state against Sherman's horde.

All of this and January's cold wrapped Charles in the deepest depression he had ever experienced. The worst of it was a thought that marched into his mind at all hours of the day and night, as unstoppable as Grant's war machine. In leaving Gus, Charles was beginning to believe, he had made the worst mistake of his life.

His beard, white-speared, hung below the midpoint of his chest. His own smell was an offense to his nostrils; the army had run out of soap last autumn. To keep warm in the freezing weather, he used needle and thread from his preciously guarded housewife to fashion a poncho-like garment of rags and pieces of ruined uniforms. As the great robe grew longer and larger, it earned him a new nickname.

He was wearing the robe when he and Jim Pickles crouched beside a small fire one black January night. A bitter wind blew as they enjoyed their meal of the day — one handful of dried and badly burned corn.

"Gypsy?" Charles looked up. Jim groped under his filthy coat with a mittened hand. "Got some mail today."

Charles said nothing. He no longer looked for any for himself, hence never knew when deliveries were made. Jim tugged out a single soiled sheet and held it between index and middle fingers, well away from the fire.

"This was writ at home 'bout six weeks ago! My mama's dyin', if —" he cleared his throat, his breath pluming "— if she ain't gone already." A pause. He watched his friend closely to gauge the impact of what he said next.

"I'm leavin'."

The announcement wasn't unexpected. But Charles's voice was as cold as the weather when he answered it.

"That's desertion."

"So what? There's nobody else to care for the young ones after Mama's gone. Nobody but me."

Charles shook his head. "It's your duty to stay."

"Don't talk about duty when half the army's already took to the southbound roads." Jim's mouth, chapped and raw, grew thinner. "Don't give me that stuff. I know shit when I smell it."

"Makes no difference," Charles said in a strange, dead voice. "You can't go."

"Makes no difference if I stay, either." Jim flung the last of his small ration in the fire; that should have warned Charles to be careful. "We're whipped, Gypsy. Done for! Jeff Davis knows it, Bob Lee knows it, General Hampton — everybody but you."

"Still —" Charles shrugged "— you can't go." He stared. "I won't allow it."

Jim rubbed the palms of his mittens on his stubbled face. Beyond the perimeter of firelight, Sport whickered in hunger. There was no decent forage; the animals were eating wastepaper and each other's tails again.

"Say that again, Gypsy."

"Simple enough. I won't permit you to desert."

Jim jumped to his feet. No longer burly, his body appeared shrunken and frail. "You damn —"

He stopped, swallowed, regained control. Great leafless boughs above him moaned. Scattered through the chasm of the night, other little fires flickered and flared in the wind. "Back off, Charlie. Please. You're my best friend, but I swear to Jesus — you try to stop me, I'll hurt you. I'll hurt you bad."

Feeling heavy and tired as he rested on his haunches, Charles continued to stare from beneath the dirty brim of his old wool hat. Jim Pickles meant it. He really meant it. Charles had his army Colt under the robe, but he didn't reach for it. He remained motionless, the robe's hem dragging in the light snow left from the afternoon's fall.

Sadly: "Somethin's made you crazy, Charlie. You better straighten yourself out 'fore you try workin' on the rest of us."

Charles stared.

Jim curled his mittened fingers against his palms in a tense way. "So long. Take care."

The breath plume vanished as he turned and shuffled away, his step slow and deliberate. In December the sole of his right boot had worn through, requiring him to stuff papers or rags into the bottom to keep out the mud and damp. These always came loose, though, and did so again now. Bits of paper were deposited in Jim's footprints. And red spots, Charles observed. Bright red spots in each print in the new snow.

He heard Jim's horse leave. He stayed crouched by the dying fire, using the tip of his tongue to clean the gooey residue of parched corn from his sore upper gum. Somethin's made you crazy. The list was not hard to compile. The war. Loving Gus.

And his final, calamitous, mistake.

Two days later, Charles and five other scouts, all wearing captured Yankee uniforms, rode out once again to observe the Union left, which they reached by passing the Confederate works in front of Hatcher's Run, near the point where the White Oak and Boydton plank roads intersected. In the half-light before dawn, with new snow falling, the scouts bore southeast in a wide arc, pushing toward the Weldon rail line. Presently the snow stopped and the sky cleared. They spread out in order to cover more ground, each man on his own, out of sight of the rest.

Charles gauged his position and headed Sport left, or northward, again, intending to scout the Union works built down to a point on Hatcher's Run. He was passing through a deserted stand of trees as the sun rose, bright and surprisingly warm despite the cloud cover. Great shafts of light descended between the thick trunks. In the silence, walking Sport forward with his shotgun resting across his thighs, Charles could almost imagine he had entered some fantastic white cathedral.

Screaming broke the illusion. The screaming of a man in agony. It reached him through thick ground haze directly ahead.

He held Sport back; the bony gelding had heard the outcry, too. Charles listened. No small-arms fire. Odd. He was sure he was near, perhaps even a bit east of, the last Union trenches on the left of the siege line. He had to discover who was doing the screaming — a second man's voice joined the first — but he must go carefully to avoid blundering into videttes.

He murmured a command. The gray started forward at a rapid walk. After about an eighth of a mile, Charles saw orange smudges in the haze. The source was further obscured by the brilliant, sharply defined shafts of sunlight. He heard piercing screams again and a loud crackling. He smelled smoke.

He edged Sport ahead more slowly, began to discern mounted men against a wash of firelight, some structure burning. But why the screams?

A little nearer, halted and partly hidden by a tree, he was able to count ten men, several in gray, the rest in butternut. He saw a white-topped wagon and six more men, in blue uniforms, standing next to it, menaced by the pistols, shotguns, and squirrel rifles of the others. One of the ten — the larger group had captured the smaller, plainly — turned his horse around in order to speak to someone. Charles saw an open officer's coat with gold frogging. Then he saw a clerical collar with geneva bands; a Protestant collar.

Something clicked. He knew of this band of local partisans.

Behind them, a partly demolished farmhouse burned brightly. Charles decided he had better make his presence known. But first he had to get out of the Union blouse and roll it up. That took a minute. He was still struggling with a sleeve when, mouth dropping open, he saw the rider in the clerical collar wave a gauntlet. Two of his men dismounted, strutted around the frightened Union soldiers, then yanked one from the group and shoved him forward at gunpoint. "Walk in there, Yank. Jus' like the other 'uns did."

The prisoner started screaming before the flames touched him. One of the partisans ran a bayonet into the back of both his legs, so that he fell facedown, engulfed by fire, whirling the smoke. His hair ignited; then the smoke hid him.

Shaken, swearing, Charles spurred Sport out of the trees, waving his shotgun. "Major Main, Hampton's Cavalry. Hold your fire!"

It was well that he shouted that last, because the partisans turned and leveled their weapons at the first sound of his coming. He reined up among the unwashed, mean-looking civilians, the kind of irregular unit whose depredations had become a scandal in the Confederacy. This bunch was led by the gaunt, graying rascal wearing the parson's collar, confiscated dress sword, and gray coat with dirty frogging.

"What in the name of hell is going on here?" Charles demanded, although the billowing smoke and the screams and a sickening smell something like that of burned meat told him.

"Colonel Follywell, sir," said the leader. "And just who are you to ask such a question of us, and so arrogantly?"

"Deacon Follywell," Charles said, suspicions confirmed. "I've heard of you. I told you who I am. Major Main. Scout for General Hampton."

"Have you the means to prove that?" Follywell shot back.

"I have my word. And this." Charles lifted his shotgun with his gloved hand. "Who are these prisoners?"

"Party of enemy engineers, according to their commanding officer." Charles didn't follow the deacon's pointing finger. "We came across them desecrating this abandoned property —"

"Taking the lumber, that's all, you murdering bastard," one of the prisoners yelled. A partisan on horseback clubbed him with the butt of a squirrel rifle. The Yank fell to his knees, clutching the spokes of a wagon wheel.

"— and so, as is our custom, we are extracting recompense for numerous Yankee atrocities, including those of the Dahlgren raid, while we fulfill, at the same time, the apostle Paul's promise to the good Christians of the church at Thessaly: 'The Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels' "— the deacon shook a ministerial finger at Charles —" 'in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God and that obey not the gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ.'"

Charles's tightened lips showed his disgust. Deacon Follywell was indifferent. With a hint of threat in his watery brown eyes, he said, "We trust we have satisfactorily explained ourselves. We will therefore, with your kind permission, continue our work."

Again Charles smelled the vile odor from the blazing house. He would just as soon shoot a Yankee as spit on him, but if the South had to rely on this kind of defender — this kind of tactic — then her cause richly deserved to fail.

Sport raised and gently plopped his right forefoot in the snow. Charles shook his head. "You sure as hell don't have my permission, Deacon. Not to burn people alive. If Dahlgren was sent to commit atrocities in Richmond, he was killed before he had the opportunity. I'll take charge of these prisoners."

He counted on the partisans responding to commands of a regular army officer; Follywell's colonelcy was undoubtedly self-conferred. He realized his mistake when Deacon Follywell pulled his saber and shoved the point against Charles's chest.

"You try, Major, and you will be next into the flames."

Charles grew genuinely frightened then. He couldn't order or shout this band into obedience. Nor, he suspected, could he ride away from the scene easily, even if his conscience would have allowed it, which it didn't. Instantly, he saw his only means of saving the Yanks and preventing more murders. He had to form a temporary alliance.

He looked at the remaining prisoners for the first time. His stomach wrenched. The stocky, bearded officer in charge of the party was Billy Hazard.

Billy recognized him; Charles saw it in his friend's shocked eyes. But Billy was careful to give no sign.

What about the rest of the Yanks? Would they fight? Considering the alternative, he suspected they would. Could they over­come twice their number? Might — if Charles evened the odds slightly. What he contemplated was a departure from the road he had traveled since Sharpsburg, but somehow, in this weary winter, he had come to understand too late where that road led.

Only a moment had passed since the partisan leader spoke. Charles lowered his head and returned Follywell's stare. "Don't threaten me, you ignorant farmer. I'm a duly commissioned officer of the Confederacy, and I am taking these men to —"

"Pull him out of the saddle." Follywell waved a couple of his louts. The horseman on Charles's right reached for him. Charles gave him the shotgun point-blank.

The pellets sieved the man's face; blood streamed from his eye sockets and all the other holes. Follywell roared and pulled his sword arm back for a killing thrust. He got the other shotgun barrel. The blast lifted him from his saddle with his head tilting forward over his tornaway neck.

"Billy — the bunch of you — run!"

Charles had pared the odds to eight against five. But the eight had weapons, and the prisoners were dazed, slow to react. The wagon horses stamped and whinnied as a partisan turned his roan toward Charles, who was hurriedly dragging his Colt from the holster. Two of the Yanks leaped on another partisan while the one near Charles kneed his mount to steady it, raised his left forearm, and laid the muzzle of his revolver across it, all within seconds.

Shouts, oaths, struggle erupted just as the partisan fired. Charles would have been hit but for the stupidity of another of Follywell's men, who rode up from the rear and smacked Charles's head with the barrel of his long squirrel gun.

Knocked sideways, Charles started to slip off the left side of his saddle. He kicked his right boot free of the stirrup. The partisan with the squirrel gun coughed hard; the shot fired by the other man had gone in and out of his right shoulder.

The snowy landscape and towering fire tilted. Falling backward, Charles tried to free his left boot and couldn't. He felt a sharp twist in his thigh as his shoulder and the back of his head thumped the ground. He shot upward at the first partisan, missing. Sport was stamping and shying, feeling the unnatural drag on the left stirrup.

The rest happened swiftly, yet to Charles each action seemed harrowingly slow. Another partisan, dismounted, stamped on Charles's outstretched right arm. His hand opened. He lost the revolver.

The partisan flung himself on top of Charles, left hand choking, right hand pressing a pistol muzzle against Charles's body, up high near his armpit. He braced for the shot, seeing against a backdrop of misty sun shafts the first partisan, still on horseback, still maneuvering so that he, too, could shoot.

With no warning, weight and shadow crashed in from the left, knocking away the partisan kneeling on Charles. The man's pistol discharged; someone cried out. Only then did Charles understand that Billy had come on the run and dived and bowled the partisan back, taking the bullet himself.

The partisan on horseback fired. The blast was followed by an animal's bellow. Charles screamed, "Sport!"

Billy, wounded, wrestled the other partisan underneath the belly of the gray gelding. Punching, thrashing, kicking dirt and snow, the men struggled until Billy turned the partisan's own gun back on him by pressuring his wrist. Billy's finger slipped over the other man's, forcing him to fire into his own stomach.

Charles stared at Sport's left shoulder where the partisan's bullet had entered. The angle of fire would carry the bullet rearward and down. Not deep, he thought. God, don't let it be deep —

He retrieved his Colt, rolling to the left again. The mounted partisan tried to shoot him but was slow. Charles clasped his revolver in both hands. Two rounds killed the partisan and sent his horse galloping away through the shafts of sunshine. The dead man hung forward over the animal's neck.

Breathing hard, Billy scrambled from underneath the gray. The other engineers were locked hand-to-hand with Follywell's men and were by no means out of danger. Charles lurched to his feet. So did Billy, whose uniform had a moist patch of brilliant red on the upper left front. Beyond his friend, Charles saw more blood; it streamed down Sport's elbow and forearm to his left knee.

"Go on — while you can." Billy's breath plumed out. For a moment he locked his teeth against pain. "That's — one less I owe you."

"The slate's clean." Reaching out quickly, Charles squeezed his friend's sleeve. "Take care of yourself."

He put his boot in the stirrup and, when Sport took his weight, felt the gray's foreleg almost buckle. He had to escape — the firing would bring nearby Union videttes — but first he had to do a little more to ensure survival of the Yankees. He shot twice; two partisans dropped, one killed, one injured. As a couple of the Union engineers took possession of fallen weapons, the remaining partisans turned their horses, abandoned their dead leader, and thundered away in the vapor rising from the warming ground.

The gelding began to trot. "Can you do it, Sport?" Charles asked in a dry, strained voice. They passed over a patch of clean snow and, looking behind, he saw the trail of bloodstains, splashes at regular intervals. He knew what the end would be and began to curse.

In the melee he had dropped his shotgun and forgotten it, he realized. Didn't matter. Nothing mattered but this beautiful brave horse that had carried him so far, so faithfully, only to be hit by chance in a meaningless little fray that wouldn't even merit a footnote in official records. "Jesus," he said, squeezing his eyelids shut till he could barely see. "Jesus, Jesus."

Sport seemed to know they had a good distance to travel to safety. He galloped with the strength and exuberance of a colt, hoofs rifling out snow and mud beneath his tail, then rat-tatting along a stretch of plank road and through a covered bridge. They turned west again, into denuded pasture. Charles heard a drum­ming that grew louder. There was pursuit.

Over his shoulder he saw a pair of Deacon Follywell's partisans riding down on him. One dropped his rein and fired his carbine. The bullet dug a ditch in front of Sport, who veered with the sureness of an experienced war-horse and left the ditch stained red.

The thin, cool sunshine cast pale shadows of the riders in the field, one ahead, two behind. Charles breathed almost as hard as his horse, wanting the sanctuary of some woods directly ahead yet knowing that every bit of extra exertion pumped more blood from Sport's wound. The gray's mane stood out horizontally, fringe petrified by the wind. The eye Charles could see had the wild cast of battle, pain, both.

Another shot from the pursuers. It thunked a tree as horse and rider plunged into the woods. Abruptly, an ice-covered brook loomed. A shot broke a limb three feet behind, dropping it with a crash. Charles applied spurs. Up and over the stream Sport flew, leaving a misty red ribbon in the air behind him.

Branches whipped Charles's cheeks and laid one open. He could hear the gelding's labored breathing now, sense his strength faltering. Sport couldn't jump Hatcher's Run; they had to gallop through, tossing up fans of water. A moment more, and Charles saw the Confederate works.

He waved his hat, yelled the countersign. He indicated his pursuit, and the boys behind the earthworks began pinking away. The partisans wheeled and retreated. One shook a fist, then both vanished.

Charles reined in, dismounted, wiped his bleeding cheek, and walked Sport past the end of the earthworks, bending to murmur a gratitude so profound he could scarcely find words for it. A lot of men had joshed him about treating a horse as if it were human, but Sport had acted that way these past fifteen minutes, understanding Charles was in peril, giving everything — everything — to save him if he could. He owed as much to the gray as he did to Billy.

Sport stumbled, almost fell. Charles led him into a natural semicircle of bare shrubbery, let the rein drop, and watched as the gray slowly toppled onto his right side and lay there, heaving. Pink lather covered his left side from withers to belly.

A couple of mangy pickets tiptoed up. Without looking around, Charles said, "Find me a blanket."

"Sir, they ain't no blankets out here on —"

"Find me a blanket."

Within five minutes, a piece of sewn-together carpet square was passed over his left shoulder. Charles laid it gently on Sport. The gray kept trying to raise his head, as if he wanted to see his master. Charles knelt, the wet ground soaking his knees. His hand moved up and down Sport's neck, up and down.

"Best horse in the world," he whispered. "Best horse in the world." Twenty minutes later, Sport died.

On his knees next to the gray, Charles pressed dirty palms tight against his eyes. He wanted to cry, but he was unable, as he had been ever since Sharpsburg. He remained motionless a long time. Faces of gaunt, starving boys peeked from the door of a nearby bombproof. There was no comment, no mockery of the tall man with the bleeding cheek kneeling bareheaded by the horse.

Presently Charles struggled to his feet. He put his hat back on. He felt different inside. Purged. Dead. He walked slowly to the bombproof and said to one of the starving boys, "Now I need a shovel."

"So I buried him," Charles told Fitz Lee. "Dug the pit myself, put him in, and covered him. Then I piled up a few stones for a marker. Not a very fitting memorial to the best horse I ever rode."

Fitz had heard of the loss and invited Charles to his tent for whiskey. The burly, bearded general now looked far older than his years. He gestured to the tin cup on the field desk.

"Why don't you drink that? You'll feel better."

Charles knew he wouldn't, but he took some to be courteous. It was poor stuff, scalding to the throat.

"So it was Bunk Hazard who saved you?"

A nod. "But for him, I'd be dead right this minute. I hope he's all right. Looked to me as if he was hit pretty badly."

Fitz shook his head. "You've had one blow after another lately. First your cousin —"

Frozen, Charles repeated, "Cousin?"

"Colonel Main. Pickett's Division. It happened two or three weeks ago. I assumed you knew."

"Knew what?"

"That he came across a wounded Yank in the woods and stopped to help him, but the Yankee had a hide-out gun."

"Is Orry —?"

"Gone. Almost instantly, according to the orderlies who were with him."

Once, at West Point, Charles had fought bare-knuckled. It was a challenge, a contest — no animosity. After twenty minutes, his oppononet, shorter but more experienced and agile, began leaping through his guard time and again to land blows. There had been a point at which every blow hurt exquisitely — and then a sudden crossing into another state in which he could still feel each one but only its weight; he was beyond his own capacity for pain.

So it was now. He stared down between his scarred boots and thought of all he owed Orry, who had seen something worth saving in a scapegrace boy. Orry had urged him to try for the Academy, had even arranged for a tutor to prepare him for the entrance examinations. Charles loved his tall, slow-spoken cousin. Madeline loved him, too. What would they do?

"Charles, I am deeply sorry to break tragic news in such a blundering way. Had I understood —"

A vague wave. "It's all right. Never mind."

After a moment Fitz asked, "Do you have any present plans?"

"I'm not going to the dead-line camp, that I can promise you. I want to get a pass, head south, and hunt for a remount."

"Doubt you'll find one in all of Virginia."

"North Carolina, then."

"There, either."

A listless shrug. "Maybe General Butler will have an extra. He's in South Carolina."

"So is Cump Sherman."

"Yes." It had no power to alarm him. Nothing did. With a sigh and a stretch of his aching bones — he was falling victim to rheumatism — he rose from the camp chair, then picked up the scrap-and-rag cloak, which by now had developed a fringe from heavy wear. He poked his head through the slit in the center and settled the garment on his shoulders. He could still smell horse on it. He wished that tears were not mysteriously locked up inside him.

"Thank you for the drink, Fitz. You be careful now that we're so close to winding things up."

Fitz didn't care for the admission of defeat implicit in the remark. Annoyance flickered in his eyes. But he checked it, shaking Charles's hand and saying, "Again, my most sincere condolences about your cousin. I'm also sorry you lost the gray."

"I'm sorry I lost them both for nothing."

"For nothing? How can you say —?"

Without rancor, Charles interrupted, "Please don't use that superior-officer tone with me, Fitz. We fought for nothing. We lost family, friends — hundreds of thousands of good men — for what? We never had a chance. The best men in Dixie said so, but no one listened. It's a pity."

The friend insisted on being the general. "That may be true. But it remains every Southerner's sacred duty —"

"Come on, Fitz. There's nothing sacred about killing someone. Have you taken a close look at a dead body lately? Or a dead horse? It's goddamn near blasphemy, that's what it is."

"Nevertheless, duty demands —"

"Don't worry, I'll do my duty. I'll do my fucking duty until your uncle or Davis or someone with sense realizes it's time to run up the surrender flag and stop the dying. But there's no way you can make me feel good or noble about it. Good evening. Sir."

Two nights later, on foot, he reached the contested Weldon Railroad line south of Petersburg. A raggedy figure with a revolver on his hip, the oilskin-wrapped light cavalry sword tucked under his arm and a piece of cigar smoldering between clenched teeth, he climbed aboard a slow-moving freight car. Shells had ripped two huge holes in the car, windows on the moonlit countryside and the bitter white stars above. He wasn't interested in scenic views. They could blow up the whole state of Virginia for all he cared. They damn near had.

Ratlike stirrings and rustlings from the head end told him there were others in the southbound car. They might have passes; they might be deserters. He was indifferent.

He stood in the open door as the train chugged slowly through a way station where army signalmen waved dim lanterns at several switch points. He smoked his cigar to a stub and threw it away. Night air bathed him, cold as he felt inside.

The fringe of his rag cape fluttered. One of the boys huddled in a front corner thought he should speak to the new passenger. Then he got a look at the fellow's bearded face by the light of a waving lantern and thought again.

121

Ashton ached from sleeping in strange beds and straining to avoid contact with her husband's lardlike body beside her. How sick she was of all the dissembling — with James and with strangers who continually asked about their accents.

"Why, yes, sir — yes, madam — we are Southerners of a sort. We are Kentuckians, but of the loyal Union breed."

How galling to repeat that lie over and over, to be forced to endure the graceless remarks and cramped quarters offered by inn and hotel keepers along the route of their long, seemingly endless pilgrimage. With their forged papers, they had traveled from Montreal to Windsor and Detroit, then on to Chicago, and now, in early February, to St. Louis, where their paths would diverge. Powell and her husband would head due west on the overland stage; she was to take the twice-weekly service for Santa Fe.

On the afternoon before her departure, Powell sensed Ashton's malaise and risked inviting her for a walk on the levee while Huntoon napped, Ashton's husband had been in a stupor all day, having consumed far too much bourbon the night before.

"I'm sorry we're forced to part for a while," Powell said. Without touching, they strolled by a gang of noisy, laughing stevedores; the black men were putting cargo aboard a river steamer. "I know the journey has been difficult."

"Vile." Ashton jutted her lower lip. "I have no words to describe how sick I am of unclean beds and cheap food."

Assuming that no one on the busy river front could identify them, Powell took her hand and slipped it around his left arm. Their squalid hotel lay two blocks behind, and Huntoon had been asleep when they left.

"I understand," Powell murmured. "And some hard days are still ahead." He reached over to caress her right hand. She wondered why that produced such an uneasy feeling.

The back of her neck itched, too. But then, she was presently passing through those few days that were womankind's monthly burden; she had learned to suffer debilitating aches and peculiar moods as part of the experience.

"Once those are behind us, we can begin to build our enclave for people of true merit. Those who believe in the only genuine aristocracy — that of money and property. No egalitarians or negrophiles need apply."

She didn't smile; nothing was amusing today. "I really don't relish going on by myself."

"You will be perfectly safe in the coach. You have emergency funds —"

"That isn't the point. It's another long, miserable trip."

He flared. "Do you think mine will be easier? To the contrary. In Virginia City, I must load two wagons with secret cargo — remaining constantly on watch for thieves all the while. Then I must bring those wagons several hundreds of miles to the New Mexico Territory, through a wilderness infested with hostile savages. If I consider the potential rewards worthy of such risk, I should think you could curb your complaints about a relatively tame ride in a stagecoach."

Pain cramped her middle abruptly; the corners of her mouth whitened. A crude plainsman swaggered by, running his eyes over her bosom. The greasy fringe of his hide shirt brushed her arm. She felt as though a leper had touched her.

And Powell was still glaring. Everything angered him lately; he, too, must be feeling great strain. Realizing that moderated Ashton's cross feelings.

"Yes, you're right — I apologize." She lowered her head briefly to acknowledge his authority. "I just don't think you understand what a trial it's been to get in bed with James night after night and wish it were you."

A whistle sounded from a packet churning upstream in the broad river. "Never forget what I said on the Royal Albert. James is necessary. James is" — a pointed look — "a good soldier."

Some color appeared in her face, which had grown pale over the winter and gaunt because she had refused so much bad food. She had quite forgotten the military metaphor.

Powell's eyes brightened. Sometimes, seeing that particular glint in them, Ashton questioned whether her lover was altogether sane. Not that it mattered; a conventional mind was not an attribute of a man with epic dreams.

"I also remind you," he continued softly, "that it's a very long way from the Comstock to our destination. With miles of waterless waste to traverse, and the Indian threat, something could happen to any of the soldiers accompanying me."

She laughed then, feeling relieved, buoyant in spite of her feminine complaint. She did experience a twinge of pity for James. Poor soldier; about to start his last campaign. But it was brief.

Half a block away, hidden in shadow by the high wall of a mercantile building, Huntoon shook his head, reached under his spectacles with a kerchief, and vigorously wiped each eye. He then continued toward the river, following his wife and Powell until they disappeared behind a pyramid of casks.

Tears welled again. He blinked them away, dazed and angry. This was no surprise. He had suspected for more than a year and, since rejoining Powell, had caught more than one furtive glance between the lovers.

He didn't blame Lamar, whom he still advised. He blamed the bitch he had married. He had pretended to nap, then came skulking after them, because he wanted absolute proof, which he had obtained by spying. He must now write a second letter, telling her about the first one.

He faced about and walked swiftly back to the cheap hotel where they were staying. His expression was so odd — maniacal — that two blanket-wrapped Indians seated against the wheel of a wagon watched him long after he sped by.

In the clamor before departure, Huntoon kissed Ashton's cheek, then pressed a sealed envelope into her hand. Passengers were already boarding the elegant egg-shaped Abbot-Downing coach that rested on wide, thick leather thorough braces. The manufacturers in Concord, New Hampshire, had painted it to order — lustrous dark blue — and decorated the doors with identical sentimental portraits of a beautiful girl admiring a dove on the back of her hand. Ashton cared less for aesthetics than for the availability of good seats, all of which would soon be taken. Crossly, she said, "What is this?"

"Just some — personal sentiments." His smile was limp; he avoided her eye. "If anything should happen to me, open it. But not before. You must swear you'll honor that request, Ashton."

Anything to humor the fat fool and get aboard. "Of course, darling. I swear."

She presented her cheek for a parting kiss. Huntoon buried his head on her shoulder, giving her a chance to cast a final longing look at Powell, very elegant and ebullient this morning. He twirled his stick and regarded the loving couple from a polite distance.

The coach driver poked his head into the vehicle while Ashton was engaged in her prolonged farewell. He had a big fan-shaped beard, white, and a beaded vest that looked as if it had once been rinsed in vegetable soup.

"How many of you folks rid in a Concord 'fore this?" Only one hand went up. "Wal, she's mighty comfortable, as you'll soon find out. But if you're travelin' the whole way to Santa Fe, I got to warn you that we hit some mighty twisty roads. Gits so bad some places, the horses kin eat out of the luggage boot."

Having delivered his standard joke for tourists, he tipped his hat, climbed to the box, and began separating the various reins of the four-mustang hitch.

Impatiently, Ashton pushed Huntoon away. "I must go."

"Godspeed, my love," he said, handing her into the coach. She managed to squeeze into the last place on the rear-facing front seat, leaving two laggards, a middle-aged drover in poor but clean clothes and a sleazy drummer with a sample case, to take the hard drop seats in the middle.

She examined the envelope. He had written Ashton on the front and closed it with three large drops of wax. He certainly did want his request honored if he sealed it that carefully. She dropped the letter in her reticule and then, despite the prospect of the rough roads, foul food, and verminous sleeping accommodations en route, began to feel quite cheerful. She suspected it wouldn't be long before circumstances required her to open the letter.

Handlers flung the last valises in the boot and lashed down the tarpaulin. The dispatcher blew a final sour call on his dented trumpet. Lamar Powell linked his arm with Huntoon's and waved with his lacquered stick.

Ashton waved back merrily. From Powell's jaunty air and confident smile, she knew she was absolutely right about the letter.

On several occasions George had reason to step down into a rifle pit or enter a bombproof. Each time the muck and stench nearly made him sick. Along the lines he frequently saw ears plugged with wadding, protection against the noise of the seige guns. He saw illness, boredom, fear all stewed together, with the dirt of Virginia sprinkled on for garnish. If the filth and squalor were this bad on the Union side, what must conditions be like on Orry's? And if this was Professor Mahan's newstyle warfare, he pitied his son's generation and those beyond.

The siege wore away men's sanity and decency. Occasionally he heard reports of acts of friendliness between those on opposing sides; some trading of coffee, tobacco, newspapers. But most of the time, only two things passed between the facing enemies: small-arms fire and vicious taunts. He was glad he had joined the Military Railroad Corps. He doubted he could have withstood a post on the line — the responsibility for ordering seventeen-year-olds to picket duty in the contested, shell-pocked strip between the rifle pits, there perhaps to die.

A morning in January found him underneath a trestle spanning a gully on the City Point line. He was surveying repairs his crew had made on one of the trusses. Well satisfied, he suddenly noticed the icicles along the edge of the trestle. They were dripping.

"So," he muttered to himself. The winter was ending. Maybe the spring would bring a surrender. He prayed that would be the case. He had come to hate the regular letters from Wotherspoon, cheerfully reporting the enormous profits Hazard's was still earning from war production. The bank was doing equally well.

Above him, mauls rapped steadily. His head started to ache. He climbed the muddy side of the gully, shielding his eyes against the sunshine till he found the man he wanted.

"Scow? I'm going over to that creek for a drink. Be right back."

"Good enough, Major," the black said to George's retreating back.

George unhooked his tin cup from his belt, using his other hand to loosen the flap of his holster. The creek, out of sight of the rail line, meandered within a few hundred yards of the Confederate salient. But it was Sunday — early — so he didn't anticipate any danger.

Patches of snow were melting and shrinking on both sides of the creek. The water rushed with a frothy, springlike sound. George thought he heard a suspicious noise in thick woods on the far side, so he waited behind a big maple for a moment or two. Seeing nothing, he moved down the bank, there squatting to dip his cup. He had it at his mouth when a man stepped from behind a tree on the other side.

George dropped the cup, spilling the water. His hand flew toward his side arm. The reb, in a kepi and torn butternut coat, swiftly raised his right hand, palm outward.

"Hold on, Billy. All I want is a drink, like you."

Holding his breath, George remained crouched with his hand near his revolver. The reb was about his age, though considerably taller, with a sickly mien enhanced by raw sores on his close-shaven white cheeks. The reb held his rifle carelessly, the barrel pointed toward the sky.

"Just a drink?" The reb nodded. "Here." George picked up his cup and tossed it across the creek. The impulse was so sudden he didn't quite understand it.

"Thank you very much." The reb walked, or, rather, limped, down to the water's edge. Shooting one more swift glance at his enemy — the reb's eyes were greenish, like a cat's, George observed — he laid his rifle on the ground. He crouched, dipped the cup, whirled it around to rinse it, threw the contents out, and refilled it to the brim. George smiled a little.

Loudly, greedily, the reb drank. The thudding mauls of the work crew seemed miles away. If this turned out to be some kind of ambush — more men lurking in the trees — George doubted he would survive it. Unexpectedly, that served to relax him. He pushed his forage cap back while trying to spot an insignia or any indication of rank on the reb's uniform. He couldn't. He assumed the man was a picket.

Suddenly, flashing in the sun, the cup came sailing back. "Thank you once again, Billy." George caught the cup, dipped it, and drank. The reb stood up and fastidiously wiped his lips with one finger. "Where is your home?"

Rising, too, George hooked the cup on his belt again. "Pennsylvania."

"Oh. I was hoping it might be Indiana."

George thought he detected an accent, though it was an indefinable one, not heavily Southern. "Why's that?"

"My brother lives there. He moved from Charlottesville to a small farm outside Indianapolis eight years ago. He belongs to a volunteer infantry regiment; I do not know which one. I thought perhaps you might be acquainted with him. Hugo Hoffman, two f’s.

"Afraid not. The Union Army's pretty big."

Hoffman didn't respond to George's smile. "Much bigger than ours."

"It must be hard, having a brother on our side. But I know it isn't uncommon. There are cousins fighting each other — and friends. My best friend in the whole world is a colonel in your army, as a matter of fact."

"What is his name?"

"Oh, you wouldn't know him. He's in Richmond, at your War Department."

"What is his name?"

Stubborn Dutchman, George thought. "Main, as in Main Street. His first name is Orry."

"But I do know him. That is, I have heard of him." George was openmouthed. "I remember because it is not a common name. There was a Colonel Orry Main on General Pickett's staff throughout most of last fall."

George could barely speak. "Was?"

"He was ambushed and shot by a wounded man he was trying to succor — a cavalryman from your side." Resentment crept in; Hoffman's green eyes were less friendly. "The incident has been widely circulated as proof of the barbarity of General Grant's troops."

"You say he was shot. You don't mean he was —?"

"Killed? Of course he was. Why else would anyone repeat the story? Well, Billy, the drink was refreshing, and I have enjoyed the conversation. I regret I am the one to inform you about your friend. I must go now. This business won't last much longer, I think. I hope I am not hurt before it stops. I hope you are not either. I am sorry about your friend." He tipped his grease-blackened kepi. "Good-bye."

George said good-bye, but so faintly the reb couldn't possibly have heard him above the bubble of the stream. He turned slowly toward the railroad. Sunshine poured over his face, blinding him. Stick, he thought. Stick.

He walked a less than straight course toward the sound of the hammering, stumbling twice. Just as the trestle came in sight, he had to turn back into the trees, where he hid and cried for five minutes, remembering his friend and the April fire.

Work on the trestle was finished before noon. In the mess where George stopped for Sunday dinner, he sat apart, not bothering to introduce himself to other officers, as he usually did. The mess was located behind one of several redoubts he had passed on his way to get this food he found he didn't want. The redoubts and adjoining trenches, packed with bored, yawning men, gave off increasingly noxious odors as the temperature climbed. He could smell the reek as he stared at his plate. It was the stench of ruin. Of a loss he could not yet accept or even believe.

Dully, he raised his head in response to faint music from the siege lines. A fife or piccolo, soon joined by a cornet, then by an improvised drum — it sounded to George like a stick on a large tin can. The melody was "Dixie's Land."

"There they go again," a captain complained to others at his table.

Out in the rifle pits, someone yelled: "Hey, Johnny, turn off that tune. Go home and beat your niggers if you have any left."

The response was a series of mocking rebel yells, more amusing than frightening today. George covered his face with both hands, then quickly dropped his hands to his lap when he realized others might be staring. They were. He didn't look at any of them straight on. He was too miserable.

"Here they come. Let the boys through with their instruments —"

That, too, came from outside, as did a general commotion. Several officers hastily finished their meals, grabbed their hats, and hurried out. He wondered why as "Dixie" continued to ring merrily over the Union lines.

Suddenly a second musical group, larger and including, from God knew where, a glockenspiel, began "John Brown's Body." Applause and cheers greeted the opening bars of the retaliation.

Singly or in groups, more and more officers left, until George was the last man seated at the stained trestle tables. Wearily, he picked up his cap and trudged outside. Both bands played at maximum volume, each trying to drown out the other. George was astonished to see soldiers in shirt sleeves on the parapets of the redoubts. Others were leaning over the forward edges of the rifle pits, enjoying the sunshine or a puff on a cob pipe or some raillery exchanged with the other side.

He walked slowly toward the stinking trenches. Looking beyond them, across the strip of scarred and trampled ground, he saw other soldiers, toy figures in gray and butternut, emerge from the fortifications; the lines were close here.

The musical conflict quickly became mere noise, one melody canceling the other. Then, abruptly, George heard men repeating a word to one another. "Hush. Hush." Someone else said, "Listen." Both bands fell silent.

Raising his hand over his eyes again, he tried to see the source of the sweet, piercing cornet notes. At last he did. The player was a small, dim figure on the other side — a musician of very small stature or, more likely, quite young. He had climbed to the top of a half-destroyed redoubt, his tattered shirt fluttering at the elbows, his horn flashing like an exploding star whenever the sun struck the metal at a certain angle.

George recognized the song before he heard the voices of the enemy soldiers who were climbing out of the rifle pits around the cornetist. It was the piece played and sung most frequently on both sides. Near George, an ugly top sergeant began to sing.

A baritone joined in, a tenor added harmony. The voices swelled, on the Union side and the Confederate side, and reached out and fused to form a single, strong-throated chorus.

Johnny Reb and Billy Yank, they sat or stood in full view of those who, at other hours and other places, were devoted to killing them. One or two Union men waved to soldiers on the other side. Here and there the waves were returned. But mostly it was just singing — austere, sober, loud as a hymn from a fervent congregation — as though both groups of Americans charged with shooting down other Americans were saying there was a deep and private place in each of them where dwelled a resistance to that awful idea. They said it with the cliched words of a sentimental ballad — and with tears, George saw suddenly. He counted at least a dozen men weeping while they sang.

The voices died away and then the last held note of the cornet. George donned his cap, giving it a smart tug. He felt a little more like himself again, conscious of his responsibilities. The song had reminded him of Belvedere. Madeline. He doubted she knew of her husband's death.

He loathed the thought of being the one to send the news. But it would be greater cruelty to refrain. No message from Richmond would ever reach her in Pennsylvania. He wasn't even sure she would be informed if she were living in the South. He heard that all the amenities were breaking down on the other side. The task was his.

As he set out to rejoin his men — they had taken their meal with one of the Negro regiments — he decided he must write immediately. He would send the letter to Constance, relying on her to know the best way to approach both Madeline and Brett.

Laughing, joshing, the Union soldiers continued to sun themselves in the mild afternoon air. A shot rang out.

"Damn you, Johnny," someone shouted. "That's a rotten thing to do."

Scrambling, men dropped out of sight with remarkable speed. The intermission was over. The concert of the guns was ready to resume.

122

February. In the dark over Washington, a freak electrical storm boomed and blazed. The intermittent lightning lent an eerie glow to a large diamond pendant Jeannie Canary wore between her small pink-pointed breasts. She lay nude in the sweaty bed, happily playing with her new jewel.

Stanley tied the sash of his dressing gown of royal blue velvet. Then he poured from the whiskey decanter. There was only a small amount left. In plush slippers, he walked to the pantry of the five-room flat in which he had installed his mistress. He returned with a fresh bottle of sour mash and topped off his glass.

Miss Canary bounced the big stone in her palms; another lightning burst made it twinkle. "You're drinking a lot tonight, loves."

"Oil for the machinery of the mind." And defense against constant fear that all of this — the little dancer, the six million dollars that had accumulated in the profit column of Lashbrook's, his power in Republican circles — would be snatched away because he was undeserving. He took a hefty swallow, a third of the glass.

Miss Canary knew better than to be overly critical of the source of her security. She dropped the subject of drinking, substituting a familiar and, to Stanley, annoying complaint.

"I do so wish you'd let me attend Mr. Lincoln's inaugural with, you."

"I've told you before, it's impossible." Isabel was returning from a long stay in Newport for the event. She had spent lavishly to convert Fairlawn into a year-round residence and had moved in without asking permission of anyone else in the family. The three brothers shared ownership of the property, but that fact was ignored when Isabel took it over last fall, just after she placed their incorrigible sons in a small Massachusetts boarding school. The school earned huge fees for catering to parents who wanted their offspring out of sight and mind. Aping their father, neither of the twins had any desire to don a uniform; resort to the school was unavoidable.

Stanley and Miss Canary had argued several times about the inaugural, which was scheduled for the first Saturday in March. To compensate for his refusal to take her, Stanley had given her the pendant — paste, but she didn't know the difference. Out of gratitude, she had an hour ago performed a certain act whose mere mention would have rendered Isabel catatonic.

Now, however, he found the girl back on the subject again, whining.

"But I have such a longing to see the President up close. I haven't, ever."

"You've missed nothing, believe me."

"You talk to him often, don't you?" Stanley nodded and drank more whiskey. He liked to maintain a slight blurring of his vision, a slight dulling of his senses, through all of the waking hours. "Is it true he doesn't bathe?"

"The statement's highly exaggerated."

Miss Canary reached down to scratch herself. "But they say women avoid him because he smells."

"Some women avoid him because he tells an occasional off-color story. It's the Western taste in humor. Farmerish," he said with a disdainful shrug. "But the chief reason he's avoided is his wife. Mary Lincoln is a jealous harpy. It prostrates her if her husband is alone with another woman for so much as five seconds."

"You don't mean alone the way we're alone?" Miss Canary giggled.

What a pathetic mind she has, he thought. Her last name suits her. "No, my dear." He slipped out of the velvet gown and began to dress. "I was referring to speaking with women at presidential levees. Public functions."

"Oh, that reminds me. Last night at the theater, I heard a terrible thing about the President. I heard that some actors are planning to kidnap or kill him. They're all supposed to be Southern sympathizers, but I didn't hear any names."

Buttoning his shirt, Stanley belched softly. "My sweet, if I had a penny for every such story circulating in this town, we'd soon amass enough money for a sea voyage to Egypt."

Miss Canary sat up, the diamond bobbling in her cleavage. "Are you thinking of taking me to Egypt?"

Stanley quickly raised a hand. "Merely an example." The poor child really taxed his patience sometimes. But he always forgave her when she demonstrated her sexual precocity.

"Must you go, loves?"

"I must. I'm receiving a guest at half past nine."

"Speaking of receiving — the draft for this month's rent hasn't arrived."

"No? I'll slap the wrist of my bookkeeper. You shall have it tomorrow, first thing."

She gave him a long, deep taste of her tongue to show her appreciation. After one more stiff drink of whiskey, he donned his overcoat and slipped out the door, his last impression a vivid picture of her on her knees on the bed, left hand caressing the diamond, right-hand fingers flexing in a tiny, childlike wave.

His waiting carriage bore him through rainy streets to the large house on I Street. With Isabel gone, he spent little time there. Sometimes, alone in the emptiness, he even missed the twins. He never let that foolish sentiment best him for long, though.

Servants had the gas burning and had set out refreshments. But the guest didn't arrive until quarter to eleven.

Ben Wade flung off his wet cape. The butler retrieved it from the floor. Stanley gestured sharply. The man left, closing the door.

Wade paced to the hearth to warm himself. "Sorry I'm late. I waited until the River Queen returned." He rubbed his hands, clearly pleased. "Mr. Seward and our beloved leader received the Confederate commissioners at Hampton Roads, all right. However, I was told there will be no armistice."

"Still the same sticking place —?"

Wade nodded. "The question of two nations or one. The President continues to insist on unconditional acceptance of the latter. Davis continues to refuse. That means you'll have a few more months to sell footwear to the army," he concluded with a sly smile. He left the hearth, took a plate and fork, and plucked a slice of turkey breast from the silver tray. "I have one more item of news."

"I hope it's the news I've been waiting to hear."

"Not quite. I can't get you the appointment as chief of the Freedmen's Relief Bureau."

"You mean Congress won't establish the agency?"

"Oh, no. That will be done this month — next month at the latest." The bureau had been under discussion since last year, when it became clear that the Confederacy would ultimately fall. The bureau's proposed mission was the regulation of all matters affecting the millions of newly freed Negroes in the South. Everything from land distribution to resettlement. It was an avenue to immense power, but if Stanley correctly read Wade's behavior — the senator seemed more interested in food than conversation — not only was the avenue closed, but the subject as well.

This was to Stanley what the inaugural was to Miss Canary. "Ben, I've given the party a hell of a lot of money. Thousands last fall alone, just to defeat the incumbent — until it became evident that we couldn't do it. I think my contributions should at least entitle me to the answer to one question. Why can't I have the job?"

"They — ah —" Wade seemed mesmerized by a morsel of turkey on his fork.

"A straight answer, Ben."

Wade whacked the fork down on the plate. A pinhead-sized speck of Isabel's precious gilt vanished from the edge. Wade jolted Stanley with the impact of his stare. "All right. They want a man with more administrative experience. They're considering a general. Oliver Howard's high on the list."

Stanley knew what the senator was really telling him. The radical cadre, which decided every important matter these days — the men who privately bragged that they needed no assassin to render the President powerless because they had already done it — had decided he was incompetent.

Of course the word they was inappropriate, and both men knew it. Wade belonged to the cadre. He had cast a vote. No matter how much black ink filled the profit columns of Lashbrook's, no matter how frantically Stanley diverted himself with variety-hall dancers or how much whiskey he consumed, he could never escape the truth of what he was. It hurt. He poured another glass of sour-mash medicine.

"General Jake Cox is also in the running," Wade said. "God help the rebs if he gets it. You've heard what he and Sam Stout propose, haven't you?"

"I don't think so," Stanley said in a dead voice.

Trying to jolly him out of his disappointment, Wade went on. "They propose we create a sort of American Liberia from the entire state of South Carolina. This new principality, or whatever the hell you want to call it, would be colonized and ruled by the niggers — whom we, of course, would diligently encourage to move there. Something in it, I'd say," he finished, adding a chuckle, to which Stanley didn't respond.

Wade tried a more direct approach, crossing to his wealthy host and laying a companionable arm across his shoulders. "Look, Stanley. It was never guaranteed that I could obtain the post for you. I can and I will make certain you're named one of the senior assistants, if you wish. The true power will reside on that level anyway — with the men who write the policy documents and operate the bureau on a daily basis. A Christian namby-pamby like Howard will be a mere figurehead. For that reason, I'm banking on him to get the job. When he does, those of us behind the scenes will be the ones who really make the colored people dance a Republican tune on Election Day. We'll have the whole country dancing before we're through. In a year, we can change our status from minority party to the only party — if we give the niggers the franchise but maintain control of it."

The glitter of Wade's gaze, the quiet fervor of his words, soothed and convinced Stanley. Even lifted his spirits a little, much as alcohol did.

"All right, Ben. I'll take the highest bureau post offered to me."

"Good — splendid!" Wade started to clap his shoulder a second time, but Stanley was already in motion toward the sideboard and the decanters. "Old friend —" Wade cleared his throat "— forgive me for saying this, but I can't help noticing you're drinking a lot lately. Frankly, there's been some talk."

Stanley pushed the stopper in, turned, and raised the brimming glass. He gazed at Wade across the shimmery disk of whiskey.

"So I've heard. But if a man has money and distributes enough of it in the right places, no one listens to that kind of talk. No one wants to risk disturbing the flow of generosity. Isn't that right, Ben?"

Challenged, Wade chose to lose. He laughed. "Indeed it is," he said, and toasted Stanley with his empty glass.

As Cuffey had grown, so had his guerrilla band. It now numbered fifty-two, nearly a third of them white deserters. They inhabited two acres of heavily wooded, relatively solid ground at the edge of a salt marsh near the Ashley. They carried firearms taken from murdered whites caught on the roads, and they lived well on food and drink stolen from homes, small farms, and the rice plantations of the district.

Three times Cuffey had personally led parties that pilfered hens from Mont Royal. The plantation itself he was saving for a special day. He watched the skies for telltale smoke and regularly sent one of his white boys to Charleston to report on the situation there.

During the past year, Cuffey had discovered within himself a certain instinctive ability to lead men, whatever their color. He was assertive, foxy, and implacable because of his years in slavery. He took special delight in stuffing himself with the food of the local white people. For that reason he was always hunting for new clothes. His stomach had grown huge, his face round as a cheese wheel.

In the short, cool days of early February, he scanned the skies with increasing impatience. He knew that Sherman, the general whose style and reputation he worshiped, had passed through Beaufort and Pocataligo and was now marching northward, his ultimate destination presumed to be Columbia. Soon, Cuffey reasoned the Confederate general in Charleston would have to rush most of his troops to the defense of the capital. When he did, the whole Ashley River district would lie open, unprotected — awaiting Cuffey's pleasure.

One night in the second week of the month, he lolled by his fire, roasting a dove on a stick and recollecting the pale thrashing legs of the woman from whom he had taken pleasure an hour ago. The band had recruited two white slatterns, both over forty, and a pair of younger mulatto girls to look after that aspect of the men's needs. Cuffey was fingering himself, wondering if the wench carried vermin, when shouts arose in the dark beneath some live oaks on the far side of the encampment.

He threw the impaled dove on the ground and jumped up. "Wha's all that racket over there?"

"Prisoner," called a yellow-bearded Georgia boy in a gray jacket. "Caught him on the road." The Georgia boy was one of Cuffey's best, a deserter with a fine love of killing. Hands on his paunch, Cuffey watched the boy and two blacks drag a small, bald, frightened man from the shadows.

"Bring him over here, Sunshine," he ordered, with the authority he had learned to invoke through voice and gesture. Something about the stumbling captive in grimy clothing struck him as peculiar. The boy nicknamed Sunshine gave the prisoner a prod with a bayonet he carried like a knife. At that moment, Cuffey's jaw went slack.

"Lord God — Mr. Jones."

"Is it —? Why, I think —" Salem Jones could hardly believe his good fortune. "Cuffey? Cuffey!" He almost slobbered with glee. At another fire, half a dozen men started singing the refrain Sherman's host had chanted all the way from Savannah:

"Yes, sir, it's me," Cuffey replied, with a grin intended to lull his prisoner. Suddenly his hand shot out. He twisted Jones's right ear savagely. "The nigger boy you used to cuss and beat and work half to death. I'm the boss now. Boss of this whole damn bunch. I like you t'show me some respeck."

One more twist and Jones dropped to his knees, howling. The singing stopped. Jones rubbed his reddened ear; blood oozed from the lobe. Cuffey snickered, retrieved the dove on the stick, and with some difficulty, resulting from his girth, squatted to resume the cooking.

"What you doin' away down here in South Carolina, Mist' Jones? I figured you ran off to jine up with the Yankees."

"He ran away from them, too," Sunshine said, with a giggle and a queer glitter in his blue eyes. With the tip of the bayonet, he touched the dark red D that disfigured Jones's right cheek. "I know what this yere brand means. D fer deserter."

"I heard there was a band like yours somewhere in these marshes," Jones said, gasping between almost every word. "I was hunting for it, but I never imagined I'd find you in charge."

Again Cuffey smiled. "No, sir. Bet you didn't." He rotated the bird in the fire. "Well, Mist' Jones, you cast your lot with a mighty fine group. We livin' off the fat of the land here — yes, sir, the fat of the land. Tell you somethin' else you might like to know. Soon as Gen'ral Hardee leave Charleston, we gonna have a real festivity down along the river." His smile dazzled. "Gonna visit a plantation name of Mont Royal. You 'member that place, don't you? You white son of a bitch." He whipped the stick around and touched Jones's neck with the smoking-hot dove. Jones screamed and fell over sideways.

Cuffey chuckled and put the bird back in the fire. He was jolly again. "I been savin' Mont Royal till we could pay a call an' not worry about reb sojers. Gonna be soon now. Gonna be a grand visit. Mr. Cooper's there — an' his wife an' little girl an' a stuck-up free nigger wench name Jane. I got a whole bunch of randy boys gonna like meetin' up with them. Meantime —"

Cuffey ran his tongue over his rotting upper teeth. "We got you to fool with, Mist' Jones. Ain' that right, Sunshine?" .

The Georgia boy giggled again. "Sure is, boss."

Suddenly, frantically, Jones flung himself at Cuffey's legs and clasped them. Only his pleading cry kept Sunshine from running the bayonet through his back.

"Please don't hurt me. Let me join up."

"What's that? Wha'd you say?" Cuffey lumbered to his feet with the white man dragging on him.

"I hate those people, Cuffey. Hate that whole family as much as you do. I hate Cooper Main like poison. His brother disgraced me — discharged me — Look, I know I mistreated you. God, how I know that. But times have changed. Things are all turned around anymore —"

"Damn if they ain't," Cuffey agreed. "Bottom rail's on top."

"Let me join up," Jones pleaded. "I'm good with a gun. I'll follow orders, I swear. Please — let me."

Cuffey gazed at the man clutching his leg. He smiled a lazy, quizzical smile and glanced at Sunshine, who touched three fingers to his wet lips and shrugged, giggling. One of the mulatto wenches ran through the encampment, shrieking with laughter. Two men chased her; one had his pants open. Out in the marsh, a salt crow called.

"Well —" Cuffey greatly prolonged the word, tormenting his prisoner "— I might. But you gonna have to beg me some more, Mist' Jones. You gonna have to beg me a mighty lot before I say yes."

He knew he would, though. The prospect of marching on Mont Royal, razing it, obliterating it forever with the former overseer in his little army was just too fine to pass up.

123

Next morning, about ten, Charles arrived at the place where the river road intersected the moss-hung lane leading to the great house. His rag robe, infernally hot, weighed heavily on him. His little bit of cigar — the last he had — went out while he stared up the lane at the familiar roof line, the upper and lower piazzas, the thick wisteria vines climbing the chimney.

Smoke rose from the kitchen building. He saw a Negro girl leave it and hurry to the main house. A crow went swooping across in front of him, and if he had been less tired, he would have laughed. He was home.

Not in a good season, though. Evening before last, he had passed near the route of march of General Sherman's vast army and seen fire in the heavens — Kilpatrick's horse leading the way and signaling its position to the infantry in the rear, a frightened farmer told him. Little Kil's riders were advancing toward Columbia through an avenue of burning pines. It was that conflagration filling the night sky with a furnace glow and that of the day with plumes of resinous smoke.

"I heard what them boys is sayin'," the frightened farmer declared as Charles drank from his well. "They say they're gonna wipe this hellhole of secession off the earth. The say here's where treason began and here's where it's gonna end."

"I wouldn't take that lightly," Charles advised. "I'd watch your womenfolk and expect the worst. This war's turned mean. Many thanks for the water."

It now appeared that Sherman, who had vowed to make Georgia howl, then done it, had kept on going due north, bypassing the Ashley district. Charles walked slowly up the lane with a weary wonder in his eyes; the place appeared untouched by the war. Then he began to change his mind. He saw noticeable wear on the buildings and a marked absence of slaves. How many of them had run away?

The signs increased as he drew closer. Tall weeds grew where lawn had spread before. A wagon without front wheels and axle lay abandoned near the office. He went all the way to the house, a dirty, bearded, ragged specter with a revolver on his hip, and no one opened a door or raised a window.

A few azalea bushes around the wisteria-clad chimney showed early buds; the weather had been unusually warm. He passed the chimney and continued along the half-oval of the hard-packed drive, spying a woman previously hidden by a pillar. She rose from her chair with a vague smile as he approached.

He stopped, thankful that he could soon pull off his boots and bathe his blisters. To the small, stout woman on the piazza he said politely, "Hello, Aunt Clarissa."

She frowned, studied him — especially the revolver and the wrapped sword under his arm — a few seconds more. Then she raised her palms to her cheeks and screamed in mortal fright to announce his homecoming.

That brought people all right. Two of the house servants ran out to take charge of Clarissa. How grizzled and stooped they looked, Charles thought as he waited to be recognized. It took them a minute — they were hovering around his aunt, who struggled — and during the interval he wondered whether none but the old, tired blacks had stayed.

"Charles? Charles Main?"

He tilted his hat back but couldn't manage a smile, even though he was nearly as astonished as Clairssa had been. "Yes, Judith, it's me. What are you doing here?"

"I'm dying to ask the same of you." She rushed to embrace him; felt his arms and torso stiffen at her touch. His garments were filthy. They reeked.

The two servants, one so old he hobbled, helped Clarissa inside.

The hobbling Negro gave Charles a curious stare but no greeting. Charles knew the man recognized him. In the old days, a stern master would have laid on the cane to punish such disrespect. Things had surely changed.

To answer Judith, he said, "I lost my horse up at Petersburg. I came all the way down here hunting a remount."

"Are the trains running?"

"Some. Mostly I walked. When I left North Carolina, I figured I'd find a horse — or a mule, anyway — before I got this far. Guessed wrong," he finished soberly, as Orry's older brother stepped onto the piazza. In shirt sleeves, a ledger under one arm, Cooper recognized Charles and let out his name with a whoop. Husband and wife shepherded the new arrival into the well-loved, well-remembered house, but Charles hardly saw it. One thought obsessed him. Do they know about Orry?

On the curve of the drive opposite the one where Charles had approached, motion stirred a tall, thick row of untended ileagnus. The motion suggested birds squabbling in the dense foliage. In the excitement of Charles's arrival, no one noticed.

On the other side of the shrubbery, after the front door closed, a narrow-faced young man with a smooth beige complexion crawled away through the weeds. He was barefoot, and his old jeans pants had a yellowing star on the rump. When the seat of his pants had worn through, his mother, who later died, had patched the hole with white flannel and imagination. The star was the North Star — the freedom star — and when his mama had sewn it on, he had still been property.

He had been sent to Mont Royal to estimate the number of men still present on the plantation. He had been born there and spent most of his life in the slave community. Now he had some real news to report.

Charles bathed in a big zinc tub in Cooper and Judith's bedroom — the same spacious chamber that once had belonged to Tillet and Clarissa and then, he presumed, to Orry and Madeline.

He had forgotten how it felt to have his long hair so clean it squeaked when he rubbed his palms over it. He put on a shirt and pair of pants borrowed from Cooper and went downstairs. His arrival had caused a great stir. There were nigras swarming all over the house — damn near as if they were Cooper and Judith's equals, he thought without animosity, just recognition of another remarkable change. He met a muscular, well-proportioned driver named Andy and a handsome black woman named Jane, who shook his hand in a grave way as she said, "I've heard of you."

Her steady stare, not hostile but not friendly either, conveyed meaning with perfect clarity. What it said was, I've heard you 're in the army that's fighting to keep my people shackled.

Maybe he was being too thin-skinned, but he thought that was what she meant. Despite her attitude and her reserve, she still impressed him in a positive way.

Philemon Meek, the new and elderly overseer, shuffled in to join them for the midday meal — the most bounteous they could provide, Judith said with embarrassment. Each plate held a bit of saffroned rice, a few field peas, a one-inch square of corn bread, and two strips of chicken cooked for the second or third time.

"Don't apologize," Charles said. "Compared to the fare up North, this is a feast."

The dining room, its rich woods gleaming, was both familiar and comforting. He started eating rapidly. Meek watched him over his half-glasses, and it was from the overseer that Charles presently heard of the guerrilla band operating in the neighborhood. Runaway slaves and army deserters, they were like the bummers traveling on the fringes of Sherman's army.

"But this bunch has stayed put in the low country," Meek said. "I'm told the leader is an old chum of yours — nigra named Cuffey."

Mildly startled, Charles finished the field peas and started to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. He noticed Marie-Louise, grown now and quite pretty, staring at him. The skin above his beard turned pink as he snatched his napkin from his lap.

"Cuffey," he repeated. "Imagine that. Think Mont Royal might be in for some trouble?"

"We've been preparing for that eventuality," Meek said.

"It appears to me you don't have many men left on the plantation. Except for your driver, those I've seen are gray as the moss outside that window."

"We're down to thirty-seven people," Cooper admitted. "Barely enough to run the place. I thought of closing the rice mill entirely for a while, but how would we survive? I don't mean just Judith and Marie-Louise and Mother; I mean everyone. Especially the older nigras. They're too worn out and frightened to run away."

"Which is what the rest did, I presume?"

Cooper nodded. "Liberty's a magnet for human beings. One of the strongest in creation. That's a point I frequently made to my father, to no avail. For a while I also forgot it myself, I'm ashamed to say. Ah, well. Why rake up the past? I want to hear the news from Virginia. Have you been in Richmond at all? Seen Orry or Madeline?"

To Charles's left, Clarissa sat with her meager meal untouched. Hands folded under the table, she studied him with the eyes of a threatened child. She had been doing so ever since they sat down. Those eyes held the kind of awe and fright with which long-ago European folk must have watched the pony-mounted Mongols storm out of Asia.

The thrice-boiled chicken pieces, so flavorful a moment earlier, suddenly had the taste of chewed paper. Well, he thought as he returned Clarissa's sad, alarmed stare, there's at least one blessing in a broken mind. She won't understand.

Cooper was awaiting an answer. Slowly, Charles placed his napkin to the left of his plate.

"I didn't expect to be the bearer of the bad news."

Judith leaned forward. "Oh, dear — is one of them ill? It is Madeline?"

Silence. Memories flashed by, including one from the time when Orry had been educating him for the West Point examinations. The hired German tutor had forced Charles to read Scripture for its literary value as well as its religious content. He remembered a passage he had never fully appreciated before: the moment during the Crucifixion when Christ asked His Father to let a cup pass.

"Charles?" Cooper said, almost inaudibly.

But of course it wouldn't pass, and he told them.

On his knees, Salem Jones heard the commotion beyond the blanket hung on a length of wisteria vine to afford a little privacy. He withdrew from the grimy, drunken white woman, who rolled her head from side to side and whimpered for him to start again. He was already buttoning his pants.

Picking up his shirt, he stepped around the great live oak to which he had spiked one end of the vine. The usual evening fires sent smoke and sparks toward the winter stars. He spied Cuffey seated on the stump he liked to occupy — as if he were some damn nigger chief in Africa, Jones thought with a flash of resentment. He put the bad feeling aside in order to learn the reason for all the excitement.

Men crowded around Cuffey while two tried to talk at the same time. One was Sunshine, who had been away scouting around Charleston. The other was a light tan Negro whose name Jones didn't know.

Hurrying to the group, Jones heard Sunshine say, "Hardee marched out. I seen it. By now the troops are all gone from the city."

"There ain' but a few protectin' my old home place," Cuffey mused, smiling. "Now they's no sojers to come help, either. That's what I been waitin' on. Hey there, Jones — you hear?"

A vigorous nod. "Yes, sir."

"Well, that ain' the only good part. Lon —" he poked a thumb at the beige boy with the flannel star on his pants "— he spied an old friend at Mont Royal this mornin'. Cousin Charles."

"Invalided home from Hampton's cavalry?"

Cuffey prompted Lon with a look. The boy shook his head. "Didn't see any sign of him bein' hurt. But he was walkin', not ridin'."

Jones nodded. "That's enough to bring him home."

A meditative look spread over Cuffey's face. "Cousin Charles an' me useta be friends. Useta fish together. Wrestle, too."

He spat in the flames. Men smirked and nudged each other, sensing the end of boring inactivity. Cuffey arose and hooked his ' thumbs over the bulging waist of his trousers. Like a king, he paraded around the huge sparkling fire. Jones loathed the ignorant oaf, but Cuffey had spared him and allowed him to join the band in anticipation of their next big raid. He had to be grateful for that, he supposed, reaching up to scratch the itching D.

"We wait one more day — maybe two," Cuffey announced. "Till we sure the sojers are gone." He peered past the leaping flames at Salem Jones. "Then we go to Mont Royal an' take it clean down to the ground. Kill every living thing."

In the raw amiability of the moment, Jones rashly said, "Young Charles may give you quite a fight."

Cuffey's face drained of good humor. "I'm waitin' for that. I'm jus' waitin'. Maybe we wrestle one las' time. We do, I know who gonna lose."

124

Invalided home with a chest wound, Billy slept a good deal. He wasn't awake when Constance, ashen, brought the letter to Brett in the library.

"It's from George. Come sit down before you read it."

The news about Orry fell on Brett with the force of a sledge. Seated, she felt her whole body sag, and for a moment she labored to get her breath. Constance dropped to her knees beside the chair while Brett swallowed and made queer gulping sounds. She lifted the two sheets, gestured with them in a forlorn way, laid them down again, shaking her head.

"I don't understand. Madeline said he was still in Richmond."

"We all thought that."

Brett started to cry then, heaving sobs. Constance was startled because the manifestation of grief lasted such a short time. Less than a minute. Then a stark look came onto Brett's face. Constance saw the object of her sister-in-law's fierce stare: the prized meteorite in its place on the library table.

"Damn them. Damn their oratory and their precious rights and their generals" — Brett was up then, lunging — "and their weapons — " Constance was too slow to prevent her from snatching the meteorite, whose significance all those in the household understood. Spinning, Brett threw it like a discus at the nearest window.

It shattered glass and sailed away over the sunlit lawn. In panic, Constance thought, He'll never forgive me if it's lost. I must go find it this minute. She was immediately ashamed of the reaction; staying with Orry's sister was far more important.

Brett collapsed on an ottoman, the pages of the letter fluttering to the floor. She crossed her arms on her knees and bent her head, crying again. Constance barely heard the words amid the sobs.

"I'm — sorry. I'll — hunt for the star iron. I know it's — George's treasure. It's just — just that —"

Constance could make out nothing else.

What an admirable woman Billy had married, she thought half an hour later. In the face of a smiliar responsibility, would she be as strong? Brett had dried her puffy eyes, put back a few undone strands of hair, and recovered the letter, saying, "I must go up to Madeline. Is she in her sitting room?"

Constance nodded. "She wanted to read awhile. Would you like me to go with you?"

"Thank you, but I think it's best if I'm alone."

Slowly, Brett walked past the library table. After a ten-minute search, the meteorite had been found by the gardener and returned to its place on the gleaming wood. But Billy's wife, in a matter of an instant, had conceived a hatred of the object — what it meant, what it made possible — that would last until she died.

In the foyer, she reached out to grasp the freshly oiled banister, gazing upward. She fought back more tears and images of Orry. She lifted her foot to the first step.

It seemed to require hours to go up the staircase; she had never taken a longer or harder journey. At last she turned down the hall to the door of Madeline's sitting room, which was ajar. Through the opening Brett saw sunshine flooding the carpet; the room overlooked the laurel-covered hilltops behind the mansion. Her hand shook as she knocked.

"Yes, come in," Madeline called cheerily.

Go on, Brett thought. It became a silent scream. Go on. She wanted to run.

"Who's there?"

Underskirts rustling, Madeline walked to the door and opened it. The index finger of her other hand held her place in a slim, gold-stamped book. Her dress today was one of her favorites, a blue silk so deep and rich it almost looked black.

"Brett! Do come in. I was just rereading a few of Poe's poems. One is Orry's very favor — my dear, what's the matter?" She had been slow to note the signs that Brett had been crying. "Has Billy taken a bad turn?"

"It isn't Billy. It's Orry."

Madeline's dark eyes showed apprehension. So did her fading smile. She took her finger from the book, drew it against her breast like a shield. She saw the letter in Brett's right hand.

"Is there some problem in Richmond?"

"Orry isn't — wasn't — in Richmond." Why was she so slow to tell it? Delay would only prolong the anguish for both of them. "This is from George. I'm afraid it's very bad news."

With a forced look of skepticism, Madeline took the letter to the sunlit window bay. Brett waited near the door, noting the way Orry's wife moved the first page away from her face; her eyesight had begun to trouble her. She was turned toward the window.

She finished the first page and began the second. The initial indication of a reaction was a ripple of the dress material across her shoulders.

Her head whipped around. Angry, she said, "The Petersburg lines? How did he get to the Petersburg lines?"

"I wish I could tell you."

Madeline forced her eyes back to the letter. Watching her in profile, Brett saw the light glisten on a tear. The book dropped from Madeline's hand, striking the carpet with a soft thump. She seemed to tense and grow taller, as if straining on tiptoe for some reason.

Her hand crushed the letter. "Orry," she cried out and tumbled sideways in a spill of silk and petticoats.

"Kathleen," Brett exclaimed in the hall. "Kathleen — someone — bring the sal ammonia. Hurry!"

Voices downstairs said she had been heard. Brett turned around in the doorway, stricken by the sight of Madeline sprawled on the fine Persian rug. She was awake after the brief fainting spell, but she didn't get up. She lay on her side, awkwardly supporting herself with both hands. She trembled, her mouth half open. When she looked at Brett, there was no recognition.

The effect was overpowering. Brett was paralyzed, unable to move or help her sister-in-law for the next few moments. She couldn't even speak. Billy had been spared, but her brother was gone. The pain was unmerciful. How much worse it must be for Madeline. How would she find the strength to survive? Or even a reason to try?

125

Charles woke at daybreak on Sunday, the nineteenth of February. He had been dreaming of Gus.

It happened often. Opening his eyes didn't relieve the melancholy of the dreams or banish her image. She was a constant presence, stealing into his thoughts at intervals every day.

Yawning, he picked up the light cavalry saber and trudged downstairs. In the kitchen building, he found a fresh pot of imitation coffee, concocted of God knew what, and not a single Negro. He drank half a cup of the stuff — all he could stomach; it tasted like wood shavings. He poured the rest out the door and hunted for a rag.

He walked back to the weathered plantation house and braced an old chair against the wall on the piazza. From there he could watch the tree-sheltered lane leading to the river road and the road itself, brightened by winter sun. He pulled the rag out of his back pocket and reached down at the end of the piazza for a pinch of sandy soil. He dropped it on the rag and moistened it with spit till its consistency suited him. He sat down in the chair, drew the Solingen sword from its scabbard, and began to polish the dulled blade.

The stillness had a quality of expectancy. It had been present since yesterday, when wild rumors swept the river district. Rumors that Columbia had been burned night before last.

About eight o'clock, traffic on the river road began to pick up, men and an occasional military wagon coming from the direction of Charleston. Some butternut boys turned in, begging for a drink. Charles agreed to direct them to the well in return for information.

"What's going on in the city?"

"A lot of it's burned down. The mayor surrendered the whole place to some damned Dutchman, General Schimmel-something, right about this time yesterday. We are all going home. The South's licked."

Could have told you that a year ago. He didn't say it. They looked miserable enough — as did Cooper, who stepped onto the piazza wearing ragged slippers and a dressing gown with a large hole in one elbow.

"What's become of Sumter?" he asked one of the ragged soldiers.

"Nothing left but a pile of rock." The boy added bitterly, "That's what the Yanks wanted more'n anything."

"I have a house on Tradd Street. Do you think it survived the fire?"

"Couldn't say, but I wouldn't count on it. Is it all right if we stop talkin' and find the well?"

After they left, Cooper went inside, shaking his head. Charles returned to his chair and kept rubbing the steel. The engraved flowers. The medallion containing the letters C. S. The legend on the other side: To Charles Main, beloved of his family, 1861. That was another man. From another life, not this one.

A dilapidated shay pulled in about noon. The driver was Markham Bull, a neighbor and member of the large and distinguished Bull family. Fifty-five or so, Markham was in a state. He had been in Columbia attending to the affairs of a lately deceased sister when Sherman arrived. He had barely escaped in the aftermath of Friday night's fire, which he confirmed as fact.

"Whole town's gone, just about. The damn Yankees are claiming Wade Hampton lit the first match, to destroy the cotton rather than let them get hold of it. You can't imagine the behavior of Sherman's men. By comparison, the Goths and the Vandals were courtly. They even burned Millwood."

Charles raised his eyebrows. "Hampton's Millwood?"

"Yes, sir. All of his family portraits — his fine library — everything."

"Where's the general now?"

"I don't know. I heard he planned to ride west of the Mississippi to continue the fight, but that may not be true."

The fighting part could be true, Charles thought as Bull climbed into his shay and rattled off. The death of his son had embittered Hampton. If beautiful old Millwood was gone as well, that would only enhance the bitterness. Charles had a dark feeling that much the same process would be taking place within a lot of people in Dixie during the next weeks and months. Whether you construed it as punishment or suffering depended on your loyalties, but either way he was damn sure there would be plenty of bad blood left after the war.

The stragglers on the road became fewer as the day wore on. Light clouds moved in, hazing the sun, then hiding it. Charles kept polishing. By four o'clock he had restored most of the blade's original brilliance. He spat into an azalea bush, stretched and sniffed the wind's marshy odor. A salt crow squawked somewhere on the river behind the house. It struck him that he had heard a lot of crows during the last hour.

Around five, Cooper reappeared, gray-faced and tense. "Charles, you'd better come inside."

In the library, he discovered Andy and a twelve-year-old Negro boy who was excited and perspiring. "This is Jarvis, Martha's son," Cooper said to his cousin, thus identifying the youth as part of the Mont Royal population. "Tell us again what you saw, Jarvis."

"I seen a bunch of white an' black men in the marsh about a mile beyond the cabins. They was comin' this way."

"How many is a bunch?" Charles asked.

"Forty. Maybe fifty. They got guns. But they was laughin' and larkin' a lot. Sure not in any hurry. One buck, he was fat as a papa coon in the summertime. He was ridin' an old mule and singin' and joshin' with everybody —"

Andy scowled. "Got to be that damn Cuffey."

"Thank you," Charles said to the boy.

Cooper repeated the words, then abruptly added, "Wait." He reached in his pocket and gave Jarvis a coin, which delighted the youngster. Charles was astonished at the persistence of old patterns, even in a man as free-thinking as Cooper. The little exchange was seen by the woman named Jane, who had appeared silently at the library door. She looked at Cooper with contempt as Jarvis ran out.

Charles felt an old tension in his middle, the kind that always preceded a scrap. At the same time, there came an unexpected buoyancy. The waiting was over.

Cooper said, "Wonder when they'll come?"

"If I were Cuffey," Charles said, "I'd wait till first thing tomorrow — when we're dog-tired from staying up all night keeping watch. Better break out those two Hawkens and anything else that can be put to lethal use."

Andy frowned, as if considering whether he dared speak his mind. He did. "Might make more sense to pack up and leave, Mr. Cooper."

"No," Cooper said in a voice so firm and calm Charles was startled a second time. "This is my home. My family built Mont Royal, and I won't see it lost without a fight."

"My sentiments, too," Charles said. A tired smile. "Not very intelligent but nevertheless my sentiments."

Jane spoke. "And are the others supposed to risk their lives to save a place where you kept them like chattels?"

"Jane," Andy began, stepping forward. She ignored him.

Cooper scowled but quickly controlled his feelings. "No one is forced to stay. Not you or any of the people."

"But most will," Andy said. "I will. There are some good things on Mont Royal."

"Oh, yes," Jane said, though the assent was canceled by her tone. Walking past Charles, she ran a finger along a row of gilt-lettered book spines, rich embossed leathers dyed green, deep maroon, royal blue. "A few. Here's one — Mr. Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia —" She faced Cooper, defiant. "He made some wise observations about slaves and slavery. If the South had heeded them, you could have saved yourselves all of this."

"You can lecture us later, Miss Jane," Charles said, overly sharp because he privately agreed with her. "Right now we must call the men together."

"And bring the women and youngsters to one safe place," Cooper added. "Andy, will you get started?"

Nodding, Andy took Jane's arm and guided her out of the library — too firmly for her taste. She reacted by pulling away. Charles could hear them arguing as they left the house.

Cooper cast a glance at the stand holding Orry's old uniform, then sank into a chair. He regarded his cousin with gloomy eyes. "We're in a bad spot, aren't we?"

"Afraid so. The numbers are against us. Best we can do is maybe try an old Plains Indian trick I learned in Texas —" Frowning, he examined the saber he had brought in from the outdoors. One of the strands of fine brass wire that wrapped the hilt was broken.

He realized Cooper was waiting for him to finish. "Kill the leader, and sometimes the rest of the war party will turn back."

Cooper pulled at his lower lip. "Sounds like a pretty faint hope to me."

"It is. Do we have another?"

"Pack and run."

"I thought you said —"

"I did. I want to save this place, and not merely for sentimental reasons. I think we'll need it for survival once there's a surrender. If we run, we can be sure they'll spare nothing."

"All right, it's settled. We stay."

"You needn't."

"What?"

"I mean it, Charles. You came here hunting a remount, not more fighting."

"Hell, Cousin, fighting's all I know how to do. The current unpleasantness has rendered me unfit for a civilized occupation."

They stared at each other, neither man smiling. Charles felt anxious, impatient. The buoyancy returned, more intense than before. There was a battle coming, all right. In the distance, a salt crow screamed and a second one answered.

126

Each time Virgilia heard a carriage on Thirteenth Street, she rushed to the front window and was disappointed. Why was Sam so late? Something wrong at home?

Once more she let the curtain fall. Outside, February dusk deepened over the Northern Liberties. Virgilia's cottage in that outlying village — not the best location, but adequate — was a tidy four-room place, freshly painted after Sam bought it for her. The small lot was enhanced by two giant oaks and a bordering fence of new white pickets.

As the mistress of a congressman, Virgilia found herself constantly experimenting with roles she couldn't have imagined herself playing even a year ago. Tonight the cottage smelled of succulent roast duckling. She had always loathed kitchen work and would never be an accomplished cook. But she was learning. Her lover liked good food and wine.

She was also dressing properly and not just occasionally. Sam liked women well-groomed everywhere but the bedroom. For this visit, she had spent forty minutes arranging her hair, perfumed herself, and put on her best burgundy bombazine over a merciless corset that minimized her waist and emphasized her breasts.

To her immense satisfaction, Virgilia had also been cast as her lover's unofficial adviser. He discussed congressional business with her and had even started to ask her advice on certain matters. On the parlor desk lay a stack of closely written sheets he had left with her last time — the draft of a speech he was to deliver to a Republican caucus a few days after the inaugural. Sam wanted to use the occasion to put distance between himself and the Chief Executive. He had asked for her opinion of what he had written.

He got no such help from his wife, nor did he want any. He would stay married to the woman, though, as he confided to Virgilia, he considered her a sexless nonentity. He suspected his wife knew about the liaison with Virgilia, but he was confident she would never make trouble. His strategy for assuring this was a simple one. He frequently hinted that her situation was precarious and that he might leave her at any moment, although neither was true.

By half past seven the duckling was overdone, and Virgilia was upset. Pacing, she whirled toward the door at the sound of a horse. She flung the door open.

"Sam? Oh, I was so worried —"

It puzzled her that he didn't immediately climb down from the covered seat of the buggy. "I had to rush Emily to the train. Her father's ill in Muncie. She took the children. She'll be away at least a week." Light from the doorway illuminated his smile. "I can stay the night if I'm invited."

"Darling, that's wonderful. Of course you are."

"Then I'll put the horse up. He's been fed. It will take me a few minutes."

While he drove around to the small outbuilding behind the cottage, she warmed the duckling, the yams and snap beans. He came tramping across the backyard, knocking dust from the sleeves of his black frock coat.

"The traffic near the depot was unbelievable. It's the same downtown. I think half the country's here for the inauguration. At Willard's this noon, my waiter said they're putting cots and mattresses in the hall for the overflow." He bussed her cheek. "If you offer tent space in the yard, you might get rich."

Laughing, she put her arms around his neck and kissed him. He liked her tongue in his mouth and elsewhere. At the end of the long embrace, she asked, "Shall we eat now or later? I'm afraid the duckling is nearly black —"

"Let's have some anyway. Then we'll have the entire evening to do whatever we please."

She gave him a warm, slightly bawdy smile before he went down to the cellar for one of the several dozen bottles of wine with which he kept the place furnished. He was expert with a waiter's corkscrew; while she prepared the serving platters, he opened and decanted the wine.

Seated, they toasted each other. As Virgilia admired him over the rim of her goblet, she reflected that in many ways she was more fortunate than a wife. The illicit nature of their relationship lent all their times together a spice surely absent from most marriages. She had experienced the same kind of wicked and defiant excitement living with a black man.

The wine was a heavy-bodied Bordeaux; superb and not cheap. After he savored a sip, he said, "Damn big fuss over the inaugural ball — have you heard?"

She shook her head. "What's wrong? It sounds grand — just ten dollars for supper and dancing at the Patent Office, the Star said."

"But a number of our darker brethren expressed a desire to attend. Some of the congressional wives, mine included, were nearly prostrated by the news. Emily raved for an hour about the possibility of being asked to waltz by Fred Douglass or some other baboon. The ball committee had to rush out a statement of reassurance. The phrasing was polite, but the message was clear. No ticket sales to niggers."

"I find that disgraceful."

"Don't confuse liberty with equality, Virgilia. The former's all right. It's a tool for gathering votes. The latter will never be tolerated. At least not in our lifetime."

They talked on more pleasant subjects for a few minutes. The wine relaxed Virgilia and induced a playful mood not typical of her. "May I ask about the seat for the inaugural ceremony?"

"I have it for you. Reserved section near the platform for dignitaries in front of the east portico."

"Oh, that's grand, Sam. Thank you."

"But that's not all. I also managed to get you into the Senate gallery at noon, when that clod Johnson will be sworn in. Lincoln will be seated on the floor of the chamber, and his wife in a special section near your seat. You'll get to see the whole lot close up. When everyone moves outside for the swearing-in and the President's address, Emily and I will have places on the platform."

The giddiness brought words she herself didn't expect. "Perhaps when I see you and your wife, I'll wave."

He had been fondling her hand on the table. He let go, surprising her with his severity.

"I don't appreciate that kind of remark."

"Sam, I was only teasing —"

"I'm not."

Frightened and sobered, she hastily said, "I'm sorry, darling." The apology didn't come easy for her, but it was mandatory if she meant to keep him, which she did. "I know that in public we can't acknowledge that we're acquainted. I would never do the slightest thing to jeopardize your name or career. They've become as important to me as they are to you." She squeezed his hand. "You do believe me?"

An alarming silence. When he decided she had been punished sufficiently, he let his face soften. "Yes."

Virgilia was anxious to redirect the conversation. "I don't care a snap for hearing the Gorilla deliver a speech, but I am anxious to see him at close range. Does he look as bad as they say?"

"The man looks embalmed. He's thirty pounds underweight, and I've heard he suffers from almost constant chills. People are whispering that he's mortally ill. Unfortunately, his ailments have done nothing to reduce his mulish dedication to pushing his own opinions and programs. If the rumors of impending death were true, we'd be lucky." He sliced into the crackly duck and tasted a morsel. "Very good, this."

"I know it isn't, but it's kind of you to lie."

That got him smiling again. "I do it well, don't I? I practice every time I write or speak to constituents. Did you read the draft?" She nodded. "What do you think?"

Virgilia laid down her fork. "You told me you thought Lincoln's inaugural address would be conciliatory toward the South —"

"So far as I can find out, that's the tone, yes."

"I'm afraid the draft sounds much the same."

"Really? Too mild?"

"Not only that, too indefinite in terms of what you stand for." Here was one area in which she felt totally confident. So she pressed:

"The text wanders away from its purpose. The President has one approach to reconstruction, you and your friends quite another. You must do more than just establish the difference and identify your wing of the party. You must promote yourself more clearly and forcefully as a member of an elite group that should and will dominate reconstruction and rebuff the President's plan as the maundering of a moral coward. The public must know your name, Sam. They must identify it with absolute commitment to a hard peace. No forgiveness for traitors. You mustn't merely march in the right parade — you must show yourself leading it."

"I thought my draft did that."

"You want me to be honest, don't you? It's much too generalized and polite. For instance, it contains nothing remotely resembling Sherman's remark that he would make Georgia howl. The public needs to perceive you as the man who will make the whole South howl for years to pay for its crimes. It's that kind of simple, , vivid concept you must put into the speech, then repeat at every opportunity. If you do, when people think of congressmen, yours will be the first name to come to mind."

He chuckled. "That's an ambitious goal."

"It's what you want, isn't it?' He sobered. "Of course it is. But you won't get it unless you go after it. What if you fall short? All right, yours will be the second name people think of. But if you try for anything less than first, you'll be nothing."

Low laughter again. He took her right hand in his left, began stroking her palm with his thumb. "You are a remarkable woman. I'm lucky to have you for a friend."

"For as long as you want, darling. Shall we look at the draft?"

His thumb pressed and stroked, pressed and stroked. "Not just yet.”

"More food, then?"

"No."

"The dinner will be cold if —"

"It may be, but we shan't." He nearly overturned the table in his haste to stand and embrace her from behind her chair. She remained seated, pressed against the stiff bulge.

She reached around and squeezed the great strong thickness of it, moaning a little. His hand came over and down to grope her breasts. They stumbled toward the bedroom, pulling frantically at each other's clothing. Hair undone, Virgilia sprawled on the bed's edge and let him work at untying the side laces on her corset with one hand while he teased her lace-covered nipples with the other. Her breasts came free and sagged. He knelt at the bedside, kissing them. Then he kissed other places while she clasped her arms around his head.

She would never let him go. She would help him, comfort him, guide him — be a wife in every way but legally.

He flung her on her back, still with her petticoats around her ankles. She was yelling for him, arms extended. His sex felt huge as a Parrott rifle when he thrust it inside her. He was a potent, potent man, and not just physically. With him — through him — she would take revenge for poor Grady and the millions like him. She would exorcise her deepest hate. She would make the South howl.

In the lassitude afterward, a curious new thought occurred to her. The war had worked a change in much more than her appearance and the way she regarded herself. Her loathing for the South was as deep as ever, punishment of Southerners her abiding cause.

Yet there, too, she had changed. She now coveted the means as well as the end; the raw power to prosecute her cause or any other. Because of a chain of events, seemingly disconnected but which were not — they had a pattern, an inevitability she could clearly follow — the power was within her grasp. It was as near as the body of her lover slumbering beside her.

If this change in her prospects was the result of war, then war wasn't hell, as someone said Sherman had remarked, but one of God's greatest miracles. For perhaps the first time in her adult life, Virgilia fell asleep content.

127

Next morning, as clock hands at Mont Royal reached the final minute before six, a fiery light described a high arc out in the darkness, then descended, trailing sparks. "They've come," Philemon Meek exclaimed.

Thoughtlessly, he lifted the low-trimmed lamp from the dining table and rushed to one of the tall windows. Charles pushed his chair back. The scabbarded Solingen sword lay on the tablecloth. "Get away from there with that light!"

Frightened and excited, the overseer either didn't hear or ignored the warning. He lifted the swagged drapery for a better view. "They've torched the kitchen building. I can see them moving toward —" A gun blast broke the window, scattered glass, and hurled Meek backward over some chairs. The shattered lamp spilled oil that ignited instantly. Charles jumped up, swearing.

Shouts and taunts drifted from the darkness. Charles ran to the overseer, a pointless effort. The entire front of Meek's shirt bore oozing red spots left by the shotgun charge that had killed him.

Charles tore down a large section of drape and flung it over the oil fire eating the gleaming wood floor. Then he stamped on the drape, quenching the flames. A shot; the unseen bullet buried in the wall opposite the broken window.

The scorched drapes exuded a foul smell. Crouching down, he saw capering figures silhouetted by the fire consuming the kitchen building. Andy rushed in, then Cooper with one of the old Hawkens in hand. The other, Meek's, still lay on the table. Charles pointed to it.

"That's yours now, Andy. Take it upstairs, find a good vantage point, and start shooting. But make sure it's a place you can get out of quickly if they torch the house."

"Yes, Major," Andy said, snatching the old rifle and two of the small flannel bags Judith had sewn for powder and ball. Charles wasted no time pondering how remarkable it was to be arming a slave on a Carolina rice plantation. He had other things on his mind, chief among them survival.

"One more thing, Andy. You know what Cuffey looks like. Watch for him. He's the one we want taken out of action."

" 'Deed I do know him. They say he's all gone to fat and got himself a mule. Should make him easy to spot. I hope I'm the one who gets him."

He left. Charles crept to the window. A second fire was burning. The office.

"We'd better post ourselves in the hall," he said to Cooper. "You watch the door on the river side; I'll take the one by the drive." From these locations they would also be able to cover the locked doors of the parlor, where they had put all the women and children about five o'clock.

His face showing fear and strain, Cooper followed his younger cousin into the broad foyer that crossed the ground floor from front to back. "We had no warning, Charles. What happened to all those bucks you sent out as pickets?"

"Who the hell knows? They either got killed, ran off, or joined Cuffey's army." As any competent commander would have in a similar situation, he had spent most of the night outdoors, roaming from man to man, encouraging alertness in the pickets, jacking up their spirits. He had come inside the house half an hour ago to rest and collect himself, and this was the result. No warning.

"One side," he whispered suddenly, crouching again. A shadow passed a narrow vertical panel of glass at the left side of the driveway door. He drew his army Colt. A fire-limned figure appeared in the matching panel on the right side. Charles put a bullet into it. The figure sank down amid the tinkling of glass.

"That's one."

Behind him, a bolt rattled. He heard a child crying as the parlor door opened. Judith called, "Cooper? How many are —"

"Too many," Charles shouted. "Stay in there, goddamn it." The door slammed. The bolt shot home again.

In a flat, unemotional voice, Cooper said, "I don't think we'll live through this."

"Shut up with that kind of talk." Charles ran to the door on his side; he had seen a mounted figure fly past the narrow window lights. Smoke was drifting into the house. A defiant voice startled him.

"Hey, Charles Main, you in there? This here's one of your niggers come back to get you. Gonna burn you out, Mist' Charles Main. Roast you alive an' fuck your womenfolk."

"Cuffey, you son of a bitch —" Charles rammed his right arm through the broken window and fired. "Come in here and try."

Winged by the bullet, someone yelped. Charles heard the mule's hoofs rattling out there in the smoke and glare.

Then Cuffey's voice: "Pretty soon now. Pretty soon —"

Someone else had taken the bullet meant for him. Damn. It was a shot Charles could ill afford to waste.

"Over here," Cooper cried, an instant before the bolted door on the river side split apart, pounded by the butt ends of garden implements the raiders had found. As Charles waited for the door to give completely, brighter light outside the dining room drew his attention. There, beyond the trees, the whole sky glared.

He uttered a low, despairing syllable. They had fired the slave cabins. The sick house and probably the little chapel, too. They were warring on their own; the color of their victims no longer mattered. They were scum. Before they finished him, he would send some more down to tell Old Nick he was coming.

The river door burst apart. Four men crowded in, one with a fatwood torch that lit two white faces and two black ones. Cooper was struggling to aim the Hawken. Charles shot and hit no one. Three of the men leaped to one side, but one of the whites, a dumpy fellow with a pitchfork, lost his balance and lurched on toward the center of the foyer. The fatwood torch, thrown down, revealed the intruder's face, with a deserter's brand on the right cheek. Charles thought his mind had snapped. "Salem Jones?"

"Paying a call long overdue, you arrogant —" The rest was lost as Jones rushed him with the pitchfork.

Cooper fired. So did Charles, simultaneously throwing himself sideways to avoid the stabbing tines. Both shots missed. The momentum of Salem Jones's lunge carried him all the way to the other side of the foyer. The pitchfork tore through the fine flocked wallpaper, buried to a depth of two inches.

Charles ran at the former overseer, confused impressions assaulting him as they did in every battle. In the dining room, torches sailed through smashed windows, spreading fire again. In the parlor, breaking glass, frightened screams. The women had kitchen knives and cleavers for defense. Two of the men who had destroyed the river door beat at the doors of the parlor and yanked the knobs. All of this and a general background of gunfire, yelling, celebration registered during the seconds in which Charles dashed at Jones, who ranted incoherently while trying to free the pitchfork from the wall.

Charles knew he should shoot Jones in the back but couldn't. The men at the parlor doors succeeded in separating one door from the hardware of the bolt on the inside. Cooper's Hawken boomed. One man fell as Charles looped his free hand around Jones's waist and dragged him from the wall and the pitchfork. He saw a small, stout figure in the parlor doorway. "Mother — Jesus Christ, get back in there," Cooper cried at Clarissa, who was smiling in a puzzled way. Still pulling Jones, Charles failed to see the knife the panting man snatched from his belt. But he felt it when Jones slashed downward and back, stabbing his thigh.

Charles uttered a low cry, tears of pain momentarily blinding him. Without thinking, he pushed the former overseer away. Jones tore the pitchfork from the wall, and with his reach thus extended, ran back at Charles, who had shifted his Colt to his left hand so he could grip his bleeding leg.

The firelit tines flashed toward Charles's eyes. "You first, then your high and mighty cousin," Jones screamed. Charles had to try a shot with his left hand, though he had never been able to fire effectively that way. He was done —

A roar. Jones rose as if huge invisible hands had seized his middle. Legs and chest folded toward each other; then the vee reopened, and he came down, dead but still bleeding. The skittering of the pitchfork behind Charles told him it had sailed past his head.

As he turned to verify that, he saw several things: Cooper with the smoking Hawken, with which he had shot Jones after managing to reload; Jane at the open parlor door, urging Clarissa back into the room; one of the door-breakers fallen on his side, holding his face, which bled from a stroke of the red cleaver in Jane's hand. The fourth man had fled.

With a nod toward the light and heat filling the dining room, Cooper gasped, "Got to get everyone out before the whole place goes." Remembering, Charles yelped and dashed in there. He snatched the scabbarded sword from the smoldering tablecloth with his red-smeared right hand.

Back in the foyer, he leaned against the wall. Blood ran down his leg into his boot. He supposed he should have expected something this bad. He really hadn't believed that all the Negroes he had armed with lengths of lumber or implements and posted around the house would stay and fight for Mont Royal. He wouldn't have, in their position.

Something struck the door on the driveway side. A bullet? No, louder. A post wielded as a ram? Hastily, he limped toward his cousin, who was again reloading.

The door burst in. Charles pivoted too fast and fell on his face — which saved his life. Shots whined through the space where he had been standing. Recovering, he fired until the revolver was empty. The attackers withdrew.

Sweat glazed his face above his beard. He struggled to his feet, noticing the glistening blood his leg left on the inlaid squares of wood. "We have to get the women out," Cooper said.

"All right, but you stay with them from now on."

"We're done for, aren't we?"

"Not if —" Charles swallowed. Trying to reload, he found his fingers numb and thick-feeling. He couldn't grasp the shells properly. He dropped two. Kneeling to hunt for them, he finished, "— not if I can find Cuffey."

"You foun' him, white man. He foun' you, too."

Charles looked up to the head of the staircase and for the second time thought his mind had given way. Swollen with weight, there stood Cuffey. He shimmered in a ball gown of bright yellow satin.

Charles remembered hearing that Sherman's bummers and some of the freed slaves had donned women's clothing snatched from the closets of homes in Georgia. Cuffey must have heard it, too. He acted drunk and was an even more bizarre sight because of what he held in his right hand — a wide-bladed knife for cutting brush. The blade was two feet long.

Charles stared and stared, searching for the boy hidden inside the man. The boy with whom he had wrestled, fished, talked about women, and done most all the other things boys did. He couldn't find that lost friend, seeing only an apparition in yellow with a brush knife and insane eyes.

"You foun' him, an' he's obliged to kill you," Cuffey said, descending the stairs while Cooper and Charles watched with unloaded guns in their hands and the great house began to blaze on the second floor. Charles felt heat from the ceiling, saw curls of smoke like an evil halo near Cuffey's head.

"Get the women out," Charles whispered.

"I can't leave you to —"

"Go, Cooper."

"Yeh, go on," Cuffey said, slurring it. "It's Mist' Charles I wan' right now." To men crowding the driveway piazza, he screamed, "You all stay out till I'm finished, hear me? Stay out!"

Slowly, Charles slid the Colt back in its holster. He wiped his red hand on his shirtfront to dry it, then picked up the scabbard from the small table where he had laid it. The dress sword was too fine and slim to be of great use. But he had no time to get the fallen pitchfork, and Cooper, darting out of sight in the parlor, needed the Hawken.

Cuffey waddled on down the stairs, the yellow satin rustling. He held the flat of the long knife tight against his side, grinning.

"We useta be frens, din we?"

Taunting him, Cuffey slid the knife back and forth over the yellow satin, as if to burnish the metal. Charles stared at the blotched and bloated face touched with firelight.

"Used to. No more."

Two men, one a giggling blond boy wearing a frock coat of Cooper's and on top of that a petticoat, slipped through the door from the serving pantry, bringing a cloud of smoke with them. Both carried stacks of china plates topped by red-glinting heaps of silverware. Cuffey shrieked at them from the bottom of the stairs. They staggered outdoors, the giggling boy spilling silver pieces, one after another, a continuous clatter.

A moment before they left, Charles saw a familiar figure pass in the driveway, walking in a slow, stately fashion, as if on a morning stroll.

"Aunt Clarissa!"

She was already out of sight.

The slight turn of Charles's head gave Cuffey the advantage he wanted. He ran at Charles, both hands clasped on the brush knife. He brought it down from above, a whistling cut that would have cleaved Charles's head if he hadn't jerked aside.

Chop, the small table where the sword had rested split in half. Charles struggled to draw the saber but, God help him, it had somehow gotten stuck. Cuffey slashed horizontally, straight toward his neck. Charles staggered back out of the way. Cuffey's blade hit an ornamental mirror, which exploded fragments of glass, all reflecting the fire a moment, hundreds of skyrocketing sparks —

His right leg muscles starting to spasm because of the wound, Charles at last managed to pull the too-fragile sword. Cuffey again raised arms over his head; huge sweat spots discolored the armpits of the dress. The brush knife jangled the pendants of the foyer chandelier.

Unreasonably enraged, Cuffey flailed at the chandelier, two great angry slashes. Pendants broke and the bits fell, a brief prismatic rain. Unable to think but one thought — at the Academy he had been graceless in fencing class — Charles lunged in, sword arm fully extended.

His boot skidded on a pendant. Cuffey kicked him in the groin, hard enough to make him grunt and lean forward sharply. His right leg gave out. He crashed down on that knee, an impact that hurt even more than the kick. The brush knife blurred down toward his exposed neck.

Charles brought the Solingen blade over and cut Cuffey's right wrist on the inside. Blood spurted. Cuffey released the knife, which sailed past Charles's ear, so close he felt metal touch the lobe.

Charles was still kneeling. Cuffey kicked his left arm. He tipped the other way and sprawled. With his heavy boot, Cuffey stomped on Charles's outstretched right arm. His hand opened. He lost the wired hilt of the saber.

Grimacing — it couldn't be termed a smile — Cuffey dropped on Charles's chest with both knees. Charles grappled with him. They rolled in a litter of pendants, prisms, table splinters, mirror chips. Cuffey clawed for his eyeballs. Charles held him back, but it took two white hands on the bleeding black wrist. Charles could feel his strength draining fast.

"Gonna — kill — you — white man." Panting, Cuffey wrenched his arm back. Slippery blood on Charles's fingers enabled him to get loose. He fastened both hands on Charles's neck. Charles felt the drip of Cuffey's blood on his throat.

"You — all finished. Jus' like — this place —"

And so it seemed. Charles was succumbing to shock and pain. His vision blurred. His right hand flopped out, scurrying desperately around the floor like a sightless white spider. He wanted a shard of mirror, a piece of prism to attack Cuffey's face.

The hands choked tighter, steadily tighter. Charles's red fingers touched and closed on something he couldn't immediately identify because of its ridged texture —

The wired hilt.

From the corner of his eye Cuffey saw it coming. Charles rammed the light cavalry saber into Cuffey's left side under his arm. Simultaneously, Cuffey let go of Charles's bloodied throat and reared away from the sword. It had already pierced the yellow satin and now slid in two inches. Four. Six —

Charles felt the blade scrape bone and slide on. Twelve inches. Fifteen —

Cuffey shrieked then, leaping and writhing with the killing steel stuck through him. Charles held fast. Cuffey continued his violent contortions. The blade snapped below the hilt, three inches from the dress.

Still impaled on the part that was deep inside him, Cuffey plucked wildly at the stub of steel, teetering and twirling into the burning dining room. The belling yellow skirt caught. Flames encircled the hem, ran upward like a fringe going the wrong way. Turning, weaving, Cuffey completed the figure of his death waltz and dropped into the consuming fire.

Finding something to feast on, it rose higher. Charles saw no more of him.

The smoking ceiling creaked and sagged, Charles struggled to his feet, the remaining part of the sword — it resembled a metal cross — gripped in his right hand. Most of the engraved inscription was gone. All that remained was amily, 1861.

Blood soaked his right pants leg and squished in his boot when he walked. He spied his fallen Colt and retrieved it. He found the parlor as yet largely untouched by the fire. The windows had been knocked out, presumably so Cooper and the others could escape. He had to find them. The great house was lost.

He ripped down another drapery, cut it by stabbing and sawing with the stub end of the sword until he had a strip long enough to wind around his thigh several times. He snapped off the leg of a taboret, broke that in two, and used half to finish the tourniquet, hoping it would suffice.

His lungs hurt, an abrasive feeling throughout his chest. Smoke grew thicker every moment. He ducked through a window to the piazza, the empty revolver in his left hand, the broken sword in his right.

Daylight was coming. Cuffey's followers had managed to find most everything of value before the fire claimed the house. The evidence littered the drive. They had emptied the wine and spirit racks, the wardrobes, the kitchen cabinets. He saw seedy, bearded men, white and black, slipping away in the smoke between the trees, arms laden with loot.

Not all of them had been equally successful. The blond boy wearing Cooper's frock coat and the petticoat' lay facedown amid silver and smashed plates. A bullet hole showed between his shoulder blades.

There was little shooting now. But all it took was one bullet, so Charles cautiously remained behind one of the white pillars as he shouted, "Cooper?"

Silence.

"Cooper!"

"Charles?"

The distant voice provided the guidance he needed. They were hiding in the mazy plantings of the formal garden by the river. He crept along the side of the house, careful to avoid touching it; the walls were hot. He turned the corner, passed the chimney, and scrutinized the lawn.

No one. He readied himself to make a dash, then remembered to announce something important with another shout.

"Cuffey's dead, Cooper. Cuffey — is — dead. I killed him."

The sounds of Mont Royal burning filled the stillness. But no voices. Yet he knew they had heard him. He drew air into his pained lungs, stepped away from the house, and ran as fast as he could on his injured leg down the grassy slope toward the Ashley.

Someone shot at him. He heard the bullet splat the dewy grass to his right, but no second report followed. In the garden he found himself surrounded by familiar faces. Without so much as a word to anyone, he fell forward in a faint.

They hid all day in one of the rice squares, resting with their backs against the dirt embankment that held back the river until the wood gates were opened to let it flow in. The band of survivors consisted of Cooper, his wife and daughter, Clarissa, Jane, Andy, a young kitchen wench named Sue and her two small boys, and Cicero, the elderly, arthritic slave with curly white hair. Cicero had managed to fill his two big coat pockets with rice. He passed it around as the sun approached noon. It was their only food.

Others, including Cooper, frequently spoke of wanting to go back to assess the damage. Clarissa was the most insistent. Charles was adamant.

"Not until dusk. Then I'll go first, alone. No use risking any more lives."

The tourniquet had helped. The thigh cut had clotted. He didn't feel good, but he was able to stay awake. He did wish he had some bourbon for the pain.

Cooper seemed prone to argue with his last remark. Charles forestalled it. "Look at the sky. That tells you what's happened." Above the embankment and the live oaks and palmettos bordering the rice acreage, black smoke banners flew.

Cicero was visibly affected by it. After watching the smoke for a length of time, his tension evident in the set of his lips and the glint of his eye, he exploded. "What happened to those boys we put on guard?"

"They didn't stay there," Cooper replied. It was a statement, not an accusation. But it enraged the old Negro.

"Cowards. Wouldn't fight for their home —"

Squatting and drawing patterns in the dirt with a stick, Andy said, "Wasn't their home by choice, remember."

Cicero glared. "Damn skunk-belly cowards, that's what they are. Nigger trash."

"Don't be so hard on them," Charles said. "They knew the South's beaten — that they'll have their liberty the minute it becomes official. Why should they stay here and die when all they had to do was run a mile or so and be free men right away? Tell you one thing. Thousands and thousands of fine, high-principled white Southern boys ran away from the army with a lot less reason." He put two grains of rice in his mouth and chewed.

Clarissa was particularly displeased by the need to stay in the field most of the day. Shortly after noon, she had to relieve herself and cried because there was no privacy. Jane bent close to her ear, whispered, then gently helped her all the way across the square and over the next embankment. She waited on the near side until the elderly woman reappeared.

Clarissa's familiar cheery smile had returned. When Jane brought her back, she said, "How sweet the air smells. Spring's coming. Isn't that lovely?"

"Yes," said Judith, putting an arm around her mother-in-law and patting her. "Yes, it is." Andy gave Jane a swift, almost chaste kiss on the cheek. Charles thought he heard the black man whisper, "Thank you."

Charles drowsed awhile during the afternoon. Eyes half closed, he visualized bits of the writhing struggle with Cuffey. His eyes flew open and he shuddered, reminded of another day, at the slave cabins, when they had both been only six or seven. Friends, they had wrestled for possession of a fishing rod. This time it had been two enemies contesting one life. My God, how far the wheel had turned.

Toward sunset, Cooper again declared that he wanted to go back to inspect the property. No shots had been heard for more than four hours, or any unusual sound at all. The smoke kept drifting, thinner but still strong-smelling. Why Clarissa no longer noticed, Charles couldn't imagine, unless it was because she dwelled so much of the time in the safer, softer landscape of her own mind and had retreated there again. She was a lucky woman in some respects.

"I don't believe anybody should go up there alone," Andy said. "I'm goin' with whoever decides to do it."

"I suggest the three of us go," Cooper said. Charles was by now too tired to continue the argument. He gave in with a shrug.

Unarmed, they trudged along the bank of the Ashley. The water shone red-gold in the lowering light. They passed the last rice square and advanced cautiously through the belt of big trees separating the fields from the formal garden and riverside lawn. From their angle of approach, the first visible damage was the broken planking and debris on the bank. The dock no longer existed.

Pale, Cooper wiped his lips and walked out of the garden. Following him, Charles saw pieces of two gold-edged platters on the grass and a ripped dress with a mound of excrement on it. Human, he presumed.

Cooper's attention was on the house. He whispered, "Oh, God above." Even Andy appeared stricken. Charles didn't want to look, but he did.

Mont Royal had been burned to its tabby foundation. Nothing stood in the ashes and rubble except a few canted black beams and the great chimney, soot-marked but with all of its thick wisteria vines intact. Charles supposed the vines were dead.

"How could they?" Cooper said, wrath in his voice. "How could they, the damned ignorant barbarians —"

Softly, Charles said, "You used to tell me South Carolinians were fools because they were inviting war. They were eager for one. We just got what you predicted. The war paid us a call."

He touched his cousin's trembling shoulder to console him, then began to limp up the grassy incline. When he was still a good distance away, he felt the oven heat of the rubble. Here and there coals gleamed like imp's eyes. Slowly, wonderingly, he circled around the great chimney.

Cooper and Andy approached more slowly. Charles disappeared beyond the chimney. Suddenly Cooper and Andy exchanged alarmed looks. They heard Charles laughing like a crazy man.

"Hurry up," Cooper said, already running.

They dashed around the chimney to the darkening, tree-lined driveway. A few limbs near the house still smoked. Some others had burned away completely. Charles stood near the corpse of the blond boy, pointing and howling like a lunatic. The object of his mirth stood further down the drive: a flop-eared mule with rope halter and rein.

"Cuffey's mule," Charles gulped between bursts of laughter. "Mont Royal is wiped off the earth, but I've got a remount. Praise God and Jeff Davis! The war can go on and on and —"

The crazed voice broke off. He gave them a shamed glance and stalked away to the nearest live oak. He braced his forearm against it and hid his face.

128

That Sunday morning, the second of April, Mr. Lonzo Perdue and his wife and daughters were kneeling in prayer when the messenger rushed up the aisle of St. Paul's to whisper to the President. Mr. Perdue watched the Chief Executive, white-haired now, leave the church with an unsteady step. Mr. Perdue leaned close to his wife's ear.

"The defenses have broken. Did you see his face? It can't be anything else. We must pack and get on a train."

After the service, they wasted no time conversing with friends. They went straight home, packed three portmanteaus, and set out for the depot. They found all outbound trains were being held, though no official would explain why. During the afternoon the crowds grew steadily larger and more unruly, milling, pushing, overflowing the platforms and waiting room. Ultimately Mr. Perdue and his family found themselves encamped just outside the station entrance.

They heard glass smashing in nearby streets. Mr. Perdue trembled. "Looting."

"It must be the niggers," said his wife.

By dusk, the streets surrounding the depot were packed with more people than Mr. Perdue had seen for months. As night came, rumors flew. Lee had pulled out of the Petersburg and Richmond defense lines. He was in wild and confused retreat to the west.

Tempers shortened. There were incidents of pushing, fistfighting, rough treatment of the civilians when squads of soldiers had to quick-march into the mob to restore order. Then came the first explosion.

"Oh, Papa," cried Mr. Perdue's daughter Clytemnestra, cringing against her equally terrified father. "What are they doing?"

"Demolishing buildings. I think that was the Tredegar Works."

His daughter Marcelline began to shriek and babble as if taking leave of her senses. Without hesitation, Mr. Perdue slapped her several times. That took care of that.

By eleven, the city was an asylum lit by spreading fires. Davis arrived in a carriage surrounded by heavily armed soldiers. In the smoky lamplight, Mr. Perdue watched him pass into the depot. A train for Danville was waiting, someone said.

Mr. Perdue began to smell betrayal as he glimpsed certain other persons entering the station, each escorted by at least one soldier. He saw the scoundrel Mallory, who had wasted so many precious dollars on his worthless naval schemes. Trenholm, who had replaced Memminger at Treasury, arrived in an ambulance. Then came the damned Jew, Benjamin, sleek and cheery as ever. The privileged were to be carried to safety, away from the steady detonations of gunpowder, the brightening light of fires, the threat of hooligans looting —

"The boxcars of the special train will be opened," a railroad official shouted from the depot steps. "I repeat, the boxcars will be opened, but no baggage will be allowed. None!"

Screaming, shoving, the crowd surged forward. Not everyone could squeeze through the station doors at once. People began striking and clawing one another like enemy soldiers. Mr. Perdue saw a child fall, trampled, a short distance to his left. He didn't try to assist the girl; he was busy dragging his wife relentlessly toward the platform.

"Oh, but Lonzo — no baggage? I can't leave these few precious things —"

"Then you'll stay here without me. Girls, kick those women if they won't move." Thus the family won a place on the 11:00 p.m. out of Richmond.

As the train started up slowly, chugging and jerking, desperate laggards trampled and pushed one another, still trying to climb into boxcars already filled to capacity. In his car, Mr. Perdue and several other men manned the open door and protected their families by booting the faces and stamping on the hands of those attempting to board.

Marcelline tugged her father's coattail and pointed to a waving, yelling group on the platform. "Papa, it's Mr. Salvarini and his family."

"Yes, too bad," said Mr. Perdue as he reached down to a soft hand with two wedding rings on the fourth finger. Like some tenacious deep-sea creature, the hand had emerged from the mob to fasten on his trouser leg. He gripped the middle finger and bent it backward. As the hand released, he heard a bone pop. A stout woman sank from sight.

The tangle of bodies fell away at a faster rate; the train gathered speed and moved onto the trestle. Mr. Perdue's coat and cravat were in shreds. He was exhausted but happy — very satisfied and pleased by his untypical display of heroism in the face of danger.

Upriver, great light pylons showed where other James River bridges had been set afire. Perhaps I should have gone into the army after all, Mr. Perdue thought as the train bore him away into the night.

The soldiers, chiefly wounded veterans, had organized a rear guard to sweep through the government warehouses on Thirteenth and Fourteenth, putting matches to the cartons and crates of official records. One grizzled man, who was twenty-five but looked forty, pried open a wooden box and exclaimed, "Here's something new — undelivered mail."

"Burn it," said his sergeant, whose pant legs, like those of his men, were soaked with whiskey. They had waded through gutters filled with it. The looters were breaking open everything.

The soldier stuck in his match. When a few letters caught, he plucked them from the box and used them to fire a second one, then a third and fourth. With the blaze roaring nicely, he dropped the original packet of letters on the plank floor, already hot, and hurried away to safety.

129

Outside the Ledger-Union, an office boy hung up a summary of a new telegraphic dispatch almost hourly. Each piece of information from the distant Petersburg-Richmond line was greeted with cheers from a crowd becoming steadily larger.

By midday on Monday, the third of April, the excitement brought work to a standstill at Hazard's and swept through Belvedere like fire in a dry spell. Madeline was the only one who retreated from it, going to her suite of rooms and shutting the door.

She was thankful the end seemed near. The dispatches did not say positively that General Lee had abandoned his hopeless position in front of Petersburg and the Richmond lines as well, but that presumption was being accepted throughout the mansion — and the ironworks and the town. Everyone felt the Confederate capital would soon fall. If all of this meant the bloodletting would stop, she was grateful.

Yet the news raised a less welcome consideration. After a surrender, she would have no excuse for not returning to Mont Royal.

She hated the thought. The place would only remind her of Orry. Yet she knew she had an obligation to go back as soon as it was possible to travel to South Carolina. There was a great deal of Washington talk about confiscating all the property of the largest slaveholders. She must be home to fight against that if it happened. If the love she and Orry shared had any monument at all, it was Mont Royal, tainted by black slavery though it was.

So her duty was unavoidable. She must remember and take courage from her father's words. We are all dying of life. She must make the journey and stand in Orry's stead, maintaining the home they had occupied together such a short time. Assuming, of course, that the plantation still existed. Northern journalists wrote long articles about the advance of General Sherman's army and the activities of his foragers operating on the flanks. So lurid and gleeful were these pieces, it was possible to imagine half of the state of South Carolina put to the torch, exactly like the city of Columbia.

But she wouldn't know Mont Royal's fate until she got there, and she couldn't get there without preparation. She was tired of imagining scenes of destruction. One antidote was physical activity.

From the closet where she had stored it, she brought a small trunk, in which she had carried her things from Richmond. She opened it and savored the aroma of a few cedar chips in the bottom. From the wardrobe, she took two dresses she seldom wore. One by one, she folded them and laid them in the trunk.

When it was about half full of items seldom used or worn since her arrival, her gaze fell on the half-dozen slender books on her bedside table. She picked out the third from the top, opened it at the ribbon marker, and gazed at the poem without seeing a word.

Don't, a silent voice warned. She shut the book, clasping it tight to her breast. Tears ran down her cheeks as she stared through the window at the hillsides of sunlit mountain laurel.

"It was many and many a year ago — in a kingdom — by the sea — that a maiden there lived whom you may know — by the name of —"

Shuddering, she bowed her head.

"By the name of —"

She couldn't say the rest. The poem had meant too much to both of them. She leaned over the trunk and laid the volume of Poe on a neatly folded shawl, then closed the trunk lid with a small, final click. It was all the packing she could manage at the moment.

When the conquerors marched into Richmond that day, Mrs. Burdetta Halloran was ready. She had spent nearly all her remaining money on one of the old flags, which cost dearly because the speculator selling them said many people wanted them. She burned her Confederate national flag in her fireplace.

In the morning the Yankees paraded past her home, led by the black horsemen of the Fifth Massachusetts Colored Cavalry — incredible sight. She concealed her sick scorn and cheered and waved her handkerchief beneath the Stars and Stripes she had hung above her front veranda. Many of her neighbors openly wept, but not all. She didn't give a damn for what the weepers thought of her behavior.

By the hundreds the conquerors came, fifing, drumming, grinning, celebrating beneath a sky painted by fires that still burned. On the flanks of the riding and marching men, Negroes skipped and danced and taunted the whites watching from porches and upper windows.

She saw a white officer notice her and cheered all the louder. Perhaps such a man would be taken with her appearance, stop, introduce himself. She had to survive somehow. She would.

"Oh, thank God, thank God," she cried beneath the grand old flag, waving her hanky so hard her arm ached. Her acting was so fine, tears coursed down her cheeks. Presently a chubby colonel reined his horse out of column and slowly approached the picket fence, to which she rushed and was waiting to speak as he smiled and removed his hat.

"No more slavery — and soon no more war, doesn't it seem so, Captain?"

"Yes, there's every indication that Lee is on the run," Billy agreed. Pinckney Herbert's small, bright eyes rejoiced as he tied a bit of string around the rolled-up razor strop. Billy had let his beard grow since coming home, but he kept the upper edges trimmed, and his old strop was worn out.

It was about an hour after Madeline had shut herself in her room — a mild bright Monday afternoon. Billy was mending. The wound frequently filled the upper half of his body with a diffuse but severe pain, though he always managed to overcome it when he and Brett snuggled in bed together. She said he had never been so passionate in all the relatively short times they had been together during four years of marriage. She told him that with great pleasure. He liked to reply, "Been living on army rations a mighty long time. You know — coffee, corn bread, and continence."

He thanked Herbert, took his change and the strop, and left the dim, dust-moted store with its wonderful homey smells of cloth, crackers, and onion sets. Though his chest was starting to ache again, he felt a renewed and joyful sense of life returning to normal. In recognition of it, he no longer wore his side arm.

The storekeeper was right, certainly. It was a new day for the whole land. The Thirteenth Amendment had gone to the individual states for ratification, and Illinois had been the first to do so. Even the pathetic Confederate President had acknowledged a need for change, though in his case Billy assumed the motive to be desperation, not principle. Davis, who would probably be hanged when the war ended — if he were caught, that is; any sensible man would flee the country — had in mid-March signed a law admitting blacks to the Confederate Army. Billy found it a gesture both sad and contemptible.

Doing his best to ignore the mounting chest pain, he strolled toward the Ledger-Union office to see whether there was more late news. His route took him past a lager beer saloon crowded with men who would soon trudge up the hill to start the afternoon shift at Hazard's. Beyond that, he approached a corner where bunting decorated the front of the recruiting office.

Three doors this side of the office, he stopped, studying an odd little scene in progress. A trio of loutish men hovered around the hitch rail, between the recruiting office entrance and a broad-shouldered Negro boy in the street. One of the whites wore a soiled army uniform. Billy recognized Fessenden, the man who had once harassed Brett. The black youth had an apprehensive expression.

"Scat, coon," one of the men said. He picked up a good-sized pebble. Laughing, he lobbed it at the boy's old shoes. The stone landed an inch in front of a cracked leather toe. The soft plop was exaggerated by the silence.

"Yeh, get on back up to the mill and go to work," Fessenden said, equally amused. He relaxed and leaned back, resting his elbows on the rail and cocking one leg over the other like a standing stork. "Bob Lee's on the run. War's nearly over. We don't want colored boys fighting for us."

Billy stood quietly beside the brick wall of the cafe, which closed up during this part of the afternoon. The sloping wooden covering built over the sidewalk placed him in heavy shadow, but the Negro boy, facing the buildings, saw him. Fessenden and his cronies didn't. Watching the shabbily dressed boy, Billy began rubbing his thumb back and forth over the oiled strop leather.

The boy was clearly frightened, yet he swallowed hard and said, "I don't want trouble. I just want to join up while there's time." He stepped forward.

The young, pimply white man to Fessenden's left jerked something from a pocket in his checked pants. A snap — a flash — the boy held perfectly still at the sight of the long blade of the clasp knife.

"D'ja hear what the soldier said? No niggers from this town wanted in the You-nited States Army. Now you turn around and shuffle back to your shanty, boy, or they'll be pickin' pieces of your black balls outa this here dirt for weeks." A pause. "Boy? You hear me? Don't just stand there when a white man —"

"Let him pass."

The voice out of blue shadow spun all three of them. Billy stepped to the sunlit walk, halting just short of the recruiting office door. He couldn't see who was inside, but clearly they had no heart for intervening. Damn fool, Billy called himself, conscious of the absence of a side arm. A crawl of sweat reached his beard from under his left eye.

Fessenden was the only member of the trio to recognize him. "This is no damn affair of yours, Hazard."

"He has a right to present himself for enlistment if he wants."

"A right?" The knife carrier guffawed. "Since when's a coon got any —?"

Billy overlapped him, louder. "So let him pass."

"Tell him to go fuck, Lute," the third man said.

Fessenden scratched his stubbly chin, mumbling, "Shit, I dunno, boys. He's a wounded veteran like me."

"I've been told you were wounded in the tail," Billy said. "While you were running."

"You son of a bitch," Fessenden yelled, but it was the pimply one with the knife who took action, loping at Billy. Hastily, Billy backed against the building, broke the string on the strop, unrolled the leather, and laid it full force across the attacker's face.

"Oh, my God." Shrieking, he dropped the knife. A purpling welt striped him from brow to chin. The leather had drawn blood as well.

Under the heavy bandages, Billy's wound throbbed. Dizziness assailed him suddenly. Bending and watching Billy at the same time, the pimply young man groped for his knife. Billy kicked it off the wooden walk into the dust. Fessenden gave him an outraged look, heaved an aggrieved sigh.

"Shit," he said again. "Next thing, you'll be tellin' us this nigger oughta vote — just like white men."

"If he's allowed to die for the government, I guess he should be allowed to vote for it, wouldn't you say, Lute?"

Snickers of disbelief. "Jesus," Fessenden said, shaking his head. "What'd they do to you in the army? You've turned into one of them goddamn radicals."

It was nearly as surprising to Billy as to them. He had spoken out of conviction, one that had been growing without full awareness on his part until this contretemps demanded the translation of conviction to deed. He rippled the strop against his leg.

"Have I? Well — so be it."

He looked at the pimply lout and, summoning his best West Point upperclassman's voice, bellowed, "Get the hell away from me, you garbage." He raised the strop. "That's an order."

The pimply young man ran like a deer, nearly knocking Pinckney Herbert from his observation place in front of his store.

Billy glanced at the Negro boy. "You can go on inside."

The boy walked toward Lute Fessenden. He didn't hurry, but neither did he waste time while he was within Fessenden's reach. But Fessenden just watched him, turning as he passed, repeatedly shaking his head.

Before the boy entered the office, he gave Billy a smile. He said, "Thank you, sir," and was gone.

Billy raised the strop, intending to roll it up again. The sudden motion made Fessenden's other companion flinch visibly. Though Billy felt a mite guilty about it, he milked the moment, drawing the strop ever so slowly and provocatively across his open left palm. Fessenden's companion drew back.

"Good day, gentlemen," Billy barked. The frightened man jumped, grabbing Fessenden's arm.

"Let go of me, for Chrissake." Fessenden shook him off, and the two shamed whites quickly disappeared around the corner.

Shameless, Billy said to himself. Absolutely shameless, that last part. It relieved his guilt to recall that the two were deserving.

Pinckney Herbert ran down the sidewalk to shake his hand. Billy had all but forgotten about the painful wound. He felt fine: wickedly amused, unexpectedly proud, gloriously alive.

130

Rain fell on the low country that same afternoon. Charles sat at the foot of a great water oak, reasonably well protected from the drizzle as he read an old Baltimore paper that had somehow found its way to Summerville, the village where he and Andy had gone in search of food.

Charles had stayed at Mont Royal much longer than he should have, and much longer than he had planned. But every hand was needed to put up a new house — little more than an oversized cabin — on the site once occupied by the plantation summerhouse, which had been smashed and leveled but not burned. All the lumber in the new place was either broken, scorched, or both. The result was a crazy-quilt structure, but at least it sheltered the survivors, black and white, in separately curtained areas.

The food situation was desperate. Their neighbor Markham Bull had shared some hoarded flour and yeast. Thus they had bread and their own rice, but little else. Occasional visitors who appeared on the river road said the whole state was starving.

The visit to Summerville confirmed it. Even if they had been carrying bags of gold, it would have done no good. There was nothing to buy. Just the paper left behind by some refugee in flight.

Wishing for a cigar — he hadn't enjoyed one since the day he came home — Charles finished reading the lengthy account of Abe Lincoln's second inaugural. The war might last a while longer, but Charles assumed Lincoln would soon take charge of a conquered South. Therefore he ought to know what the man was thinking.

Mr. Lincoln sounded forgiving — on the surface. There was much in his address about malice toward none and charity for all. He wanted to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan. He wanted to achieve a just and lasting peace.

All very fine and humane, Charles thought. But certain other passages suggested that while Mr. Lincoln might forgive Southerners as individuals, he could not forgive the sin of slavery. And so long as the institution survived, he would prosecute the war.

... if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword ... it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

The judgments of the Lord. Charles kept returning to the phrase, staring at the five words on the yellowing newsprint. They summed up and reinforced what had been with him ever since the fire. A positive, guilt-tainted conviction that the war was ending in the only fitting and proper way.

Still, resting the back of his head against the tree and closing his eyes — speculation — he did recognize that it might have come out differently had not chance betrayed the South on so many occasions.

If the copy of Lee's order had not been found wrapped around the cigars before Sharpsburg.

If Jackson had not been wounded by a North Carolina rifleman.

If Stuart hadn't disappeared off the map, riding to repair his reputation, before Gettysburg.

If the Commissary Department had been run by a competent man instead of a bungler.

If Davis had cared more for common folk and the land and less for the preservation of philosophic principles.

If, if, if — what the hell was the use? They would lose. They had lost.

Up in Virginia, however, the war went on. And he had a remount. The war had done things to his head. Burned him out, used him up, like a piece of fatwood kindling. But he still had to go back. West Point taught duty above all.

He crumpled the newspaper and threw it away. He sat staring into the rain where he imagined he saw Gus standing, smiling at him.

He put his hand over his eyes, held it there half a minute, lowered it.

She was gone.

He climbed to his feet feeling as if he weighed seven hundred pounds. Still limping slightly from the healing leg wound, he went off to search for his mule. He collected his old army Colt, for which he had no ammunition, the cross-shaped sword fragment, which might in an emergency serve as a dagger, and his gypsy cloak of scraps and rags. He said good-bye to everyone and rode away north before dark.

131

On Palm Sunday evening, Brett and Billy walked up through the laurel above Belvedere. Hazard's was shut down, customary on the Sabbath, though some of the banked fires still fed smoke traceries out of the chimneys. The air was warm and fragrant with spring. Behind them, the tiered streets of the town, the peaceful river, the sunset over the mountains created a landscape of grays and mauves and small patches of pale, dusty orange.

That morning they had attended church, then partaken of a huge noonday meal, at which Mr. Wotherspoon had been a welcome guest. Ever since, Brett had silently rehearsed the two things she wanted to say to her husband. One was directly related to the impending end of the war, the other less so.

She knew the essence of each statement and some of the words, but she wanted a proper setting, too. So she had suggested the stroll. Now she found herself anxious and strangely unable to begin.

Billy seemed content to walk in silence, relishing the spring dusk and the feel of her hand in his. They came to the meteorite crater they had discovered the night before he returned to duty in the spring of '61, a night followed by so many changes in Brett herself and in the country that it sometimes resembled a series of tableaux on a stage, viewed from a balcony, rather than events in which she had taken part.

She noticed that weeds had at last begun to grow in the crater, covering about two-thirds of the surface of the sloping sides. But the poisoned earth at the bottom remained bare.

They strolled toward the next summit. Should she start with the second subject? No, it was better to dispose of the difficult one first. She forced herself.

"How soon do you think Madeline will be able to travel to South Carolina?"

He thought a moment. "They say there's almost nothing left of Lee's army. Or Joe Johnston's. I can't imagine that either can hold out more than a few weeks longer. I would guess she could start home sometime in May, if not sooner."

She took his other hand. Holding both, she faced him in the fading, dusty light.

"I'd like to go with her."

A smile. "I suspected you might."

"It isn't entirely for the reason you think. I do want to see how Mont Royal fared, but I have another motive. One which —" steadily, she looked at him "— which I'm not sure you'll approve of. I want to go back and stay awhile. The nigras will be free, and they'll need help adjusting to the change."

"You'll forgive me, but that sounds faintly like the benevolent mistress of the plantation speaking."

His wry smile angered her unexpectedly. "It may be, but don't you dare patronize me for it."

Billy put his arm around her. "Here, I didn't mean to upset you —"

She sighed. "And I didn't mean to snap. But I've been away so long — I admit I'm homesick. And I'm not patronizing the people at Mont Royal when I say they need help. Protection. They're in danger of being transferred from one kind of slavery to another. It was your own brother, Stanley, who warned me."

"Stanley? What do you mean?"

As accurately as she could, she repeated Stanley's remarks of a couple of years ago concerning the Republican scheme to befriend the freed Negroes, the better, to manipulate them as voters.

"Stanley said that?"

"Indeed he did. He was drunk at the time, else he wouldn't have spoken so freely. He declared that the party, or one faction anyway, had already agreed on the strategy. I believe him. That's why I want to go home and stay for a time. The slavery of ignorance is as wicked as any other kind. Perhaps it's the crudest slavery of all, because any man can see an iron cuff on his own leg, but it's hard to detect an invisible one."

She watched for a reaction. He lowered his head slightly, the dark hair, so like his brother George's, tossing in the strengthening breeze. A few bright stars shone against the mauve now. She could only interpret his silence as disapproval.

She refused to be so easily defeated. Not after Scipio Brown and his brood of lost children had worked such changes in the way she viewed people. She snapped off a bit of laurel, twirling it in her fingers.

"Do you remember your last night at home when the war started?" A nod. "We walked up here, and I said I was frightened. You reassured me by talking about this." She held out the sprig. "You told me what your mother had taught — that the laurel is like a man and woman's love for each other. It can endure anything. Well, I made a discovery while you were gone. I discovered it in the eyes and faces of those children at Mr. Brown's school. If the kind of love your mother described doesn't touch everyone — embrace everyone — if it can't be given freely and equally to everyone, it's meaningless. It doesn't exist."

"And going home — helping the nigras in whatever way you have in mind — that's an expression of love?"

Very softly: "To me it is."

"Brett —" he cleared his throat — "I met hundreds of men in the army who finally accepted emancipation because it was government policy, but they would choke on what you just said. There are a lot of them in that town right down there. They'd reach for a club or a gun to defend their right to be superior to Negroes."

"I know. But how can love be the property of a favored few? Or freedom, either? I was raised to believe they could. Then I came here to this state, this town, an utter stranger — and I learned."

"Changed, I would say."

"Use any term you like. I gather you object to my wish to —?"

His palm touched her cheek. "I object to nothing. I love you. I'm proud of you. I believe every word of what you just said."

"Is that really true?"

"You're not the only one this war affected," he said. He hadn't described the incident outside the recruiting office and didn't do so now. It struck him as too much like bragging. But his next statement touched the core of the incident. "I'm not the same soldier boy who stood here four years ago. I didn't realize what a distance I've traveled until — well, lately."

His smile wanned. Bending in the starlight, he kissed her mouth.

"I love you, Brett. What you are and what you believe. You're right about going home. Your help will probably be needed. I'll be proud and honored to escort you and Madeline back to Mont Royal. And since I'll have to return to duty sometime soon, there isn't any reason you can't stay as long as you wish."

"There's one."

The soft words startled him. Was that scarlet in her cheek? The lowering dark made him unsure.

"Sweetheart," she said, "you've been so ardent despite the wound — well, I'm not entirely certain yet — I haven't seen the doctor — but I believe we're going to have a child."

Wonderstruck, he could find no words. New life after so much loss — there was magic in it. Something miraculous. He looked at the laurel sprig in her hand, took it from her gently and studied it while she said, "You see, if I stay at Mont Royal, there's a possibility our child could be born there."

"I don't care where it happens, just so long as it happens. I don't care!" Exuberantly, he tossed the laurel in the air and hugged her, exclaiming his joy. The whoop rose up and echoed back from clear across the river.

That same Sunday evening, April 9, George was in Petersburg, having spent the afternoon assembling and loading construction materials on two flatcars. The Petersburg & Lynchburg line that ran west from town was under repair to supply the army pursuing Lee. George had to be up before daylight and on his way toward Burkeville.

Tired, he walked in the direction of the tents assigned to visiting officers. Off in the darkness, several horns, two fifes, and a snare drum struck up "The Battle Cry of Freedom." Yells and whistling accompanied the music.

"Damned strange hour for a concert," he muttered. He jumped back suddenly as a horseman galloped by, shouting, "Surrender! Surrender!"

An officer with his galluses down and his chest bare stumbled sleepily from a nearby tent. "Surrender? My God, I didn't even know we were under attack —"

Grinning, George said, "I think someone else may have surrendered. Hear the music? Come on, let's find out."

Away he went on his stocky legs. The other officer snapped his suspenders over his naked shoulders and ran after him. They soon came upon a whole mob of men piling out of tents. George could barely make sense of their noise:

"— sometime today —"

"— old Gray Fox asked Ulysses for terms —"

"— out by Appomattox Court House someplace —"

In an hour, Petersburg was bedlam. It was true, apparently; the Army of Northern Virginia was laying down its arms to stop the shedding of more blood in a war that couldn't be won. Under the Southern stars, George snatched off his kepi, tossed it in the air, and caught it, then began to take brain-pummeling swallows of busthead from bottles shoved into his hand by officers and enlisted men he had never seen before and never would again, but who were fine friends, closest of comrades, in this delirious moment of lifting burdens and spirits.

Pistols and rifles volleyed into the dark. Large and small musical groups blared patriotic airs. It occurred to George that, once he got home, he could sleep next to Constance every night for the rest of his life, with no one to tell him otherwise. He jammed his fists on his hips and danced a jig without knowing how.

Men swirled around him, jumping, dancing, staggering, drinking, cheering. He helped himself to more stiff drinks from the bottles being passed. He threw his cap in the air again, bellowing like a schoolboy.

"— rally round the flag, boys, rally once again, shouting the battle cry of —"

Singing lustily, jigging madly, he didn't notice the sink in the dark behind him, though he had certainly whiffed it. Luckily he only sank to his knees, though that was bad enough.

He cleaned up on the bank of the calm Appomattox River. Returning to the celebration, he noticed that other revelers didn't come as close to him as they had earlier. Still, he managed to get a few more drinks and, thus fortified, could regard what had happened as a humorous cap on an already glorious night. A night men would forever recall to fellow veterans, wives, sweethearts, children, and grandchildren, in terms of where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. George could not quite picture himself being truthful:

"I was in Petersburg, gathering crossties and spikes to reopen a section of the military railroad."

"Were you happy when you heard the news, Grandpa?

"You can't believe how happy."

"What did you do to celebrate?"

"I started dancing and fell in a trench full of shit."

132

Peace had its own unique strains, Stanley realized late in the week. Washington streets mobbed with drunken celebrants extended a ten-minute trip to an hour — or made it impossible. Isabel said the patriotic illuminations glaring from the windows of most houses and public buildings gave her bad headaches, though why this should be so when she stayed home and saw very few of them, Stanley couldn't explain.

He was bothered by the loud reports of fireworks all night long, by the tolling bells, the endlessly parading bands, and the hoots and merrymaking of gangs of whites and blacks roaming at will, even in the best neighborhoods. Add to that Stanton's tense air and repeated expressions of fear of plots to kill Grant or the President, and it added up to a miserable week for Stanley.

Stanton wanted to see him to go over matters pertaining to his departure from the War Department to take up the new post Wade had arranged. Stanley was ready with his files at nine Friday morning, but Stanton was too busy. At eleven the secretary had to rush to the Executive Mansion for a cabinet meeting. It lasted several hours, during which time Stanley didn't leave the department. He was hungry and out of sorts when, late in the day, he was finally summoned to Stanton's office.

Even then, the stout man with the scented whiskers and round spectacles was preoccupied with his fear of murder plots.

"The Grants aren't going to Ford's, anyway. That's half the battle won."

"Ford's?" Stanley repeated, blank because of fatigue.

Stanton was irritable. "What's the matter with your memory? Ford's on Tenth Street. The theater!"

"Oh. The President is going to see Miss Keene —?"

"Tonight. He seems to regard the appearance as some sort of patriotic obligation. He has completely disregarded my warnings. Grant listened. He was only too happy for an excuse to whisk his wife out of town on a train for New Jersey."

He stumped to the window, hands locked behind his back. "It's been a queer day. In that long meeting, we spent nearly as much time discussing the President's latest dream as we did on the pressing issue of practical steps to restore the Union."

Lincoln's strange dreams were a subject frequently gossiped about in Washington. "Which one this time?" Stanley asked, since some of them were known to recur.

"The boat," Stanton replied, staring out the window. "The boat in which he sees himself drifting. He says the dream always comes on the eve of some great happening. Before Antietam he dreamed of the boat. Before Gettysburg, too. It's curious that he can describe the boat vividly but not the destination. It's merely a dark, indefinite shore. His words," Stanton added, returning to his desk.

"It seems to me there's nothing indefinite about the future," Stanley observed while the secretary settled himself. "The war's over." That was the consensus, even though General Johnston's army remained in the field somewhere in the Carolinas. "What lies ahead is a period of intensive reconstruction — including, I trust, punishment for the rebels."

"Yes, definitely punishment," Stanton said. Stanley smiled. It would be his pleasure to help mete it out to former slaveowners.

They ran rapidly through the agenda Stanley had prepared. Stanton made notes — these records to be transferred here, those responsibilities assigned there. Stanley was thankful the secretary was overburdened and therefore impatient. It allowed Stanley to finish and leave the office two hours earlier than expected. He knew he should go home, but went instead, despite the traffic, to Jeannie Canary's.

It proved a bad decision. It was the wrong day for a carnal romp. And she was whiny.

"Won't you take me out this evening, loves? Surely we wouldn't be bothered, with so many drunken people everywhere. I'd love to see the play at Ford's." She no longer performed at the Varieties. She much preferred lazing about and spending the allowance Stanley furnished.

"They say the President and his wife are to appear in the state box," she went on. "You know I've never seen Mrs. Lincoln. Is she as squat and beady-eyed as they say?"

"Yes, dreadful," he retorted, made cross himself by her inability to make love just now.

"Couldn't you get tickets''"

"Not this late. Even if I could, we'd spent most of the time squeezed in crowds and wilting in the heat — on top of which, Tom Taylor's play is old and creaky. It would be a very disagreeable evening. A thoroughly dull one, too."

It was as if a perverted Nature had brought forth a black spring. Crepe blossomed everywhere that Easter weekend: on coat sleeves, the President's pew at the York Avenue Presbyterian Church, the marble facades of public buildings. Stores remained open extra hours to sell it by the yard and by the bolt.

Booth had escaped. Stanton proclaimed that the whole South must be prosecuted. Even Grant spoke of retaliatory measures of extreme rigor. In preparation for the state funeral on Wednesday, dry-goods stores quickly fashioned black-wrapped batons, sable sashes, ebony rosettes. Portraits of the slain President appeared in windows. Groups of stunned, grieving Negroes appeared on street corners. Paroled Confederate prisoners turned their coats inside out or threw them away for fear of being lynched.

Early on Tuesday, using a special pass provided by Sam Stout, Virgilia was able to cut into the double line of waiting mourners, as many diplomats and public officials were doing. Only in that way could she be assured of getting into the East Room of the mansion.

The slow-shuffling lines were extremely long. A guard told her an estimated fifteen thousand waited outside. Most would be disappointed when night came. The President was to lie in state this day only.

Carpenters had built a catafalque now covered in black silk.

The silk matched the outside of the white-lined canopy high above the casket, which was embossed with silver stars and shamrocks and bedecked with silver ropes and tassels. A silver plate mounted on a shield read:

Black drapes, windings, covers, concealed nearly every touch of color normally visible in the room. White cloth hid the glass of every black-edged mirror. Waiting her turn on black-painted steps which led up to the right side of the casket, Virgilia tugged at one black mitten, then the other, and smoothed her mourning dress. Finally her turn came. She stepped past the army officer at rigid attention at the end of the coffin — another guarded the opposite end — and gazed down at Abraham Lincoln.

Not even the techniques and cosmetics of the mortician could do much to improve his crude, wasted look. She had come here more out of curiosity than anything else, and she studied the corpse with half-lidded eyes. He had been too lenient and forgiving. Too much of a threat to the high purpose of men such as Sam and Thad Stevens.

The newly sworn President, Andrew Johnson, would pose no similar threat. Sam dismissed him as a dull-witted bumpkin. Along with Ben Wade and Congressman Dawes, Sam had already paid a courtesy call on Johnson. He reported to Virgilia that Wade, through pointed indirection, had left no doubt about what he and legislators of like mind expected of the new man.

"Mr. Johnson, I thank God you're here," Wade had said. "Lincoln had too much of the milk of human kindness to deal with these damned rebels. Now they'll be dealt with according to their deserts."

As the hunt for Wilkes Booth went on, even moderate politicians and newspapers throughout the North were blaming the entire South for the deed. Hinting at a Davis-inspired conspiracy. Demanding vengeance, Sam reported with glee. "By giving his life, Virgilia, our direst philosophical foe has been of infinite aid to our cause."

The conspiracy theory intrigued Virgilia. But she skewed her version slightly. Booth's murder ring had included others; a hulk named Payne or Paine had broken into Secretary Seward's house on the same night Lincoln was shot and would have stabbed Seward to death had not the secretary's son and a male nurse intervened. Others were said to be involved as well. Was Booth the sole motivator of the group? Suppose some radical Republican had inspired and encouraged him, hoping to produce the very result that had now occurred — a renewed cry for Southern blood?

It certainly wasn't beyond the realm of possibility, though she supposed the truth of it would never be known. Still, the truth mattered less than what had happened these past couple of days. Ordinary citizens were demanding the same harsh measures men such as Sam had long advocated.

"Madam? You will have to move on. Many others are waiting."

The usher spoke from the East Room floor, near some chairs hastily painted black and set out for the hacks from the press. The usher's whisper focused attention on Virgilia, embarrassing her. She almost called him a name. But this was no place, to create a scene.

Besides, she felt good. The sight of the dead Chief Executive was not at all depressing. The program of Sam's group could now be carried forward with less obstruction. The great majority, converted overnight by a bullet, wanted that program. Virgilia gave the usher a scathing look and walked decorously to the steps leading down. She glanced back once and fought to suppress a smile.

Sam was right. In death, the ugly prairie lawyer served his country far better than he ever had in life. His murder was a blessing.

133

Huntoon wanted to die. At least once daily, he was positive he would within the hour. He had lost something like twenty-five pounds and all his fervor. Would he never sleep in a regular bed again? Eat food cooked on a stove? Be able to relieve himself in privacy?

Each section of the long road from St. Louis had had its own distinctive frights and travails. On the journey in the overland coach, they had been accompanied and guarded more than half the way by a Union cavalry detachment. The Plains Indians were raiding, they were told.

Huntoon quaked when informed of that. Powell, on the other hand, seemed stimulated to broaden his performance as the loyal, fearless Kentuckian. Huntoon's loathing grew.

Virginia City, with its looming mountains, belching smoke­stacks, ruffian miners, was as strange and threatening as China or the steppes. He and Powell had to load the bullion at night at the refinery, laying the half-inch-thick tapered ingots in rows, according to a plan Powell had sketched. The ingots measured five by three inches. Each wagon bed carried ninety of them, for a total weight of around four hundred and fifty pounds. The worth at the prevailing price of twenty dollars and sixty-seven cents an ounce was just short of one hundred fifty thousand dollars. The arrangement and value of the gold loaded in the second wagon was identical.

"This is but the first shipment," Powell reminded him. "There'll be more, though not right away. The lode's rich, but most laymen don't appreciate the time and the immense ore tonnage needed to produce this much bullion. I've been readying this one shipment for over a year. But I was working in secret, through couriers, over a long distance. It will go faster from now on.

Because of the added weight, the underside of each wagon had been reinforced with special braces. After wooden wedges were placed inside to keep the ingots from shifting, the two men nailed a false floor into each wagon, covering them with dirty blankets. On top of the blankets, boxes and barrels of provisions as well as some crates of Spencer rifles were loaded next day. A six-horse hitch was required to pull each wagon.

Powell then hired his teamsters — two as regular drivers, a third as relief man. They were all thuggish, illiterate young fellows who spoke little and collectively carried a total of seven weapons. This trio constantly intimidated Huntcon with beetling stares and smirks. They would receive a hundred dollars apiece at the end of the trip. The guide, even cruder and more brutish, would be paid double that sum.

The journey had its own horrors: insects, bad water, freezing nights as they climbed to the Sierra passes, then descended to hazy, empty valleys. Huntoon suffered sneezes and ague for a week.

Bearing south through what the guide assured them was California, they were soon broiling and quarreling over the need to drink sparingly from the water casks while they crossed a frightful stretch of desert. Huntoon became so dizzy from the heat he was barely able to reply coherently when anyone spoke to him.

Eventually they turned southeast, whereupon Powell's hired men started to bedevil Huntoon with tales of Indian signs, which he, of course, could never see. Powell eavesdropped on some of these recitations with a straight face, suppressing amusement bordering on the hysterical. Huntoon took note of Powell's grave expression and concluded that the warnings were true — which terrified him even more.

He lost track of the days. Was it early May or the last of April? Was there really a Confederacy? A Richmond, a Charleston — an Ashton? He doubted it with increasing frequency as they pushed deeper into sinister mountains and arid, windblown valleys where strange, thorny vegetation grew.

The guide had quickly sensed Huntoon's weakness and joinedin to exploit it for the sake of relieving the boredom. Banquo Collins was about forty, a brawny Scot with mustaches he had let grow down long and pointed, like those of some of the Chinese on the Comstock. His first name had been bestowed by his father, an itinerant actor born in Glasgow, trained in London, and buried, penniless, in the pueblo of Los Angeles. Collins didn't know his mother's name.

He did know he enjoyed making the bespectacled Southron squirm. Collins's employer, Powell, was something of a hard case. Collins thought him demented but not to be trifled with. Huntoon, however, was born for bullying.

Nearly every day, he would say pathetically, "Where are we?" To which Collins liked to reply, after a number of suitable obscenities to register his annoyance, "Aren't you tired of asking that question, laddie? I am tired of answering it, for we're exactly where we were yesterday and last week and two weeks previous. On the trail to bonny Santa Fe. And that's that."

And away he would gallop, up alongside the lumbering wagons, leaving Huntoon on foot, swallowing dust.

Bonny, did he say? Sweet Christ, there was nothing bonny about this part of America. Why had Powell chosen it? Why had the Confederacy tried to occupy it? It was as forlorn as the moon, and full of menace. The teamsters delighted in warning him to watch out for coral and giant bull snakes — they neglected to mention the latter were harmless — or tarantulas and the allegedly venomous vinegarroons. "What the greasers call sun spiders. Real poison, those suckers." Another lie.

Huntoon was uninterested in the occasional sight of hairy buffalo, prairie-dog towns, orioles and hummingbirds and swooping duck hawks, the taste of roasted pinon nuts or the fact that crushed yucca root made excellent suds for washing. "Thass why they call it soapweed down this way, reb."

He hated all the verbal jabbing, but he was even more frightened when, one day, it stopped. The teamsters kept their eyes on the jagged horizon. Collins began to deluge Huntoon with warnings about red Indians, and not entirely for sport. He wanted to exorcise some of his own mounting worry.

"We're in the country of the Apaches now. Fiercest warriors God ever made — though some claim it was Satan who whelped them. Got no respect whatsoever for flesh, be it human or horse. The braves ride their animals till they get hungry, then they eat 'em. Makes no difference in their fighting — they always do that on foot. They like to sneak up, and it doesn't endanger them all that much. In a pinch, many an Apache lad can outrun a mustang."

"Do —" Huntoon gulped "— do you think there are Apaches close by, Collins?"

"Aye. A party from the Jicarilla tribe, if I read the sign properly. They're out there somewhere right now, watching."

"But surely we have enough guns to frighten them off —?"

"Nothing frightens off the Apaches, laddie. They go out of their way to plague white men and each other. Year or two ago, some of your Southron soldier boys rode into this country. The Apaches made a treaty of friendship at Fort Stanton, then endorsed it by ambushing and massacring a party of sixteen. They don't take sides, though — altogether neutral, they are. In a Union settlement they killed forty-six, including youngsters."

"Stop telling me that kind of thing," Huntoon protested. "What good does it do?"

"It prepares you for what we may run into. If we have bad luck and the Jicarilla decide to do more than watch, you'll have to fight like the rest of us." He sniffed. "Doesn't appear to me that you've ever done much fighting. But you'll learn fast, laddie. Mighty fast if you like living."

Taunting Huntoon with a laugh more like a dog's bark, he booted his horse forward toward the first six-horse hitch.

After years in the Southwest, Collins had adopted many Indian ways and devices. He didn't ride with a saddle, only a soft ornamented pad of supple hide stuffed with grass and buffalo hair. His pony had a war bridle: the rope of braided buffalo hair tied around the animal's lower jaw was the bit, the ends of the rope the reins. Collins had lived with a squaw wife for a while. Despite all this, he hated red men, the lot of them, and now began to regret hiring on with this crowd.

One possibility of profit offset the danger. Banquo Collins knew the two wagons contained something besides guns and provisions. Powell hadn't told him so, of course. But he suspected from the moment he saw the six powerful horses straining against the traces of the first wagon back in Virginia City. He confirmed the suspicion by discovering the special cross-bracing on the under­side of both wagons. The extra weight was not visible, but it was there.

How much precious metal the wagons carried, he didn't know.

But it had to be a goodly amount. Gold bullion, probably. As to its purpose, its ultimate use, he presumed that was Powell's secret. Maybe it had a connection with the Confederate cause, for which the man was openly keen. All the Southrons Collins had met were fanatics of one sort or another.

The secret cargo prodded him to prepare for various eventualities, for he did fear they were being followed. Had been for three days. Or at least that was when Collins first observed the sign, which he pointed out to no one else until he was sure he was right about it.

He estimated the number of Jicarilla as between ten and twenty. In the event of a hot brush with them, Collins intended to behave like the glass snake, a natural oddity he had discovered down this way. The glass snake was not a snake at all but a legless lizard with the ability to shake off part of its tail when attacked. The tail kept twitching after it separated from the body, and while the attacker was being distracted by the sight, the creature writhed away to safety.

Collins was not only determined to escape with his skin and his hair but with part of the gold. He certainly couldn't get away with several hundred pounds of it, but even a little would allow him to live handsomely and have fun for a while.

Aye, he would play the glass snake, all right. Having of course made sure, either by observing the Apaches at work or by taking action himself, that Mr. Powell and the lawyer were in no state to tell tales of his thievery, ever.

That evening they encamped among tall standing rocks near a deep gully, part of a line of eroded breaks above a stream they must ford. Collins assured Powell of an easy descent to be found three miles due south, but he preferred this campsite because of the natural fortifications the rocks provided. "Better here tonight than in the open." "You think the Apaches are close?" "I'm certain of it."

"How much longer to reach Santa Fe? Three days?" "Or a wee bit more." Collins never risked a lie with Powell. The man's eyes and barely controlled tension warned against it. "Now, sir, I suggest we build a fire and stay close to it. If you take a stroll, make sure it isn't far." "All right." "I must go ha' my dinner now."

"And we'll have ours."

Powell, Huntoon, and the teamsters ate biscuits and jerky, both of which helped relieve the boredom because it took so much time to soften the food with chewing. Collins preferred his own fare, pit-roasted pieces of mescal, an Apache delicacy of which Powell wanted no part.

Powell rubbed a slim hand over his hair. It felt dry, scratchy. He had run out of pomade weeks ago. He disliked hats. The result was more and more gray apparent. He must resemble a scare­crow. An old one, at that. Would Ashton laugh, he wondered. He imagined her naked as he leaned against a wagon wheel.

Huntoon rose, his apologetic expression explaining the reason. He stepped behind a rock. Two teamsters snickered at the sound of water.

Three days to Santa Fe. Apache in the vicinity. Powell decided he had better wait no longer. Huntoon had been useful, performing menial chores and dutifully twitching each time Powell reminded him that no matter how onerous his task, he must carry it out to prove his mettle. The stupid cuckold had done it, too.

Twilight came on rapidly in this craggy, lonesome land, which resembled nothing Lamar Powell had ever seen. He found it magically beautiful if taken on its own terms. As a teamster stood, stretched, and rubbed his rump, Powell left the fire and threaded through the stones to the gully rim, where he looked down. The gully bottom was already hidden in cool black shadow.

He gazed east, toward clouds that picked up the fiery light slanting from the opposite direction. Eastward, Ashton was waiting. He was disarmed and amazed to realize how much he missed her. In his own way, he loved her. She was intensely physical and warm, something her pitiful husband undoubtedly hadn't appreciated during his short span on earth. She would be an ideal first lady for the new state he would rule and guard from harm for the rest of his life.

He had planned the first steps months ago. Locate an appropriate site, near Santa Fe but not too near. Hire workers to erect a small ranch house and sink a well. Find some Confederate sympathizer to travel into Texas, spreading the word — rallying the disaffected soldiers, who, if not already paroled after a surrender, soon would be.

At first they would ride to Santa Fe singly or in pairs. But before the year was out, they'd be arriving by platoons and companies, shaking the earth with the sound of their coming. He would devise a new flag for them to carry against potential enemies, and write a proclamation establishing the new government on an equal basis with that of mongrelized Washington and all the nations of Europe.

It would be convenient to employ Huntoon as his first herald in Texas, but Ashton made it impossible. Powell meant to live with her from the moment they were reunited. Therefore —

A contented sigh signaled his decision.

Powell shivered; the evening air was cooling rapidly. Tonight was not only suitable; it was ideal, he thought, gazing east. He felt close to Ashton all at once.

Perhaps she, too, was growing excited as he drew near. He had sent a letter from Virginia City, which he presumed she had received by now; the mail surely traveled faster than his overburdened wagons. In the letter, he had described the contents of the wagons, their probable route of travel and approximate timetable. Was she poring over his words at this moment, thinking of the two of them romping on sheets of presidential satin? Delightful vision —

About an hour later, with night settling, he examined his four-barrel Sharps to be certain it was fully loaded. He tucked the gun away inside his frock coat, yellowed by travel dust, and sought Huntoon at the smoky fire. Collins was napping against a boulder on the far side. Two of the hired men still squatted next to each other, chewing jerky. The third had gone to take the first turn at picket duty.

"James, my friend?" Powell said, touching his shoulder. Huntoon's spectacles flashed with firelight as he turned.

"What is it?"

"Would you come for a short stroll? I have a matter to discuss."

Pettish, Huntoon said, "Is it important?"

A charming smile. "I wouldn't ask otherwise."

"I'm infernally tired."

A level stare, once more demanding that he prove his mettle. "Just five minutes. Then you can have a long rest."

"Oh, all right." Sounding like a cranky child, Huntoon wiped biscuit crumbs from the corners of his mouth. He had grown slovenly on the journey. Powell distastefully noted black dirt under the lawyer's nails.

They moved off among the rocks as the fire crackled beneath the black sky. From the near distance came the cry of an animal, half yelp, half growl. Banquo Collins sat up instantly, raising the brim of his buckskin hat. One of the teamsters glanced at the guide.

"Mountain lion?"

"No, laddie. That animal has two legs."

134

Earlier that day, Charles rode north in the Carolina springtime, through green rolling land where bowers of azalea blew to and fro in the warm wind and wisteria bloomed in purple brilliance. He saw little except Gus.

He saw her in the face of a much older farm woman who gave him a dipper of water when he asked politely. He saw her in a cloud formation. He saw her on the backs of his eyelids when he tethered the mule and rested by a roadside tree.

In all the muddle and madness of the past four years, he was trying to find something of worth. She was all there was. His memory held scores of small, touching portraits of her racing across the grass to greet him, cooking in the kitchen, scrubbing his back in the zinc tub, bending to embrace him in bed.

He had found one thing of value in the war, and out of confusion and some stupid, contradictory sense of duty — the same duty still driving him along these unfamiliar dirt roads — he had thrown it away. The hurt and regret that followed the dawning realization were immense. His physical wound was healing nicely, but the other one — that never would.

While still in his home state, he had chanced upon a rural store on whose counter stood a glass jar containing four old, dry cigars. He had the remainder of one in his clenched teeth at this moment; he had smoked the first half last night. The other three protruded from the pocket of his cadet gray shirt.

He was riding in hot sunshine, the gypsy robe rolled and tied behind him. Suddenly he saw a mounted man crest the next rise in the road and come cantering in his direction. Alarm gripped him until he realized he was still in North Carolina, though damned if he knew where. And the emaciated horseman raising dust in the afternoon wore gray.

Charles reined in the mule and waited. Birds sang and wheeled over nearby meadows. The rider approached, slowing his mount while he took Charles's measure and decided he was all right, though the man — an officer — still kept his hand near his side arm.

Charles chewed the cigar nervously, a glassy look in his eyes. The officer walked his skeletal roan closer and stopped.

"Colonel Courtney Talcott, First Light Artillery Regiment of North Carolina, at your service, sir. I gather from that shirt and your revolver that you're a soldier?" He scrutinized the scrap of sword in Charles's belt and his peculiar, dazed expression. The tone of the colonel's question hinted at lingering doubt.

Almost as an afterthought, Charles muttered, "Yes, sir. Major Main, Hampton's cavalry scouts. Where's the army?"

"The Army of Northern Virginia?" Charles nodded. "Then you haven't heard?"

"Heard what? I've been down on the Ashley, finding this remount."

"General Lee requested terms from General Grant more than three weeks ago. At Appomattox Court House, in Virginia."

Charles shook his head. "I didn't know. I've been taking my time riding back there."

"You certainly have," Talcott replied, not hiding his disapproval. "You needn't continue. The army has disbanded. The last I knew, General Johnston and his men were still in the field, though he, too, may have surrendered by now. If he hasn't, he soon will. The war's over."

Silence. A tan female cardinal fussed in a bush when a jay swooped too near her nestlings. The artillery officer looked askance at Charles, who showed no emotion. The colonel said again, more emphatically, "Over."

Charles blinked. Then he nodded. "I knew it would be. I just didn't know when." The officer scowled. "Thanks for the information."

Frostily: "You're welcome. I would turn around and go home if I were you, Major. There's nothing more to be done in Virginia."

Yes, there is.

The artilleryman cantered past, raising dust. He had no intention of riding beside the listless and slightly mad-eyed junior officer even for a few miles. The fellow had even forgotten to salute. Disgraceful.

The dust settled. Charles sat on his mule in the middle of the road, slumped, as the news sank in. It was official. They had lost. So much blood, suffering, effort, hope — wasted. For a few blindly wrathful moments, it made no difference that the cause was mis­begotten. He hated every goddamn Yankee in creation.

Quickly, that passed. But to his surprise, the defeat hurt more than he would have expected, even though it was inevitable. He had known it was inevitable for at least a year. Seen portents, read prophecies, long before that. The horses slowly starving in Virginia. Articles in brown old newspapers about Southern governors defying Davis with his own sacred doctrine of states' rights. A Union carbine that fired seven shots —

Feelings of relief and despair overwhelmed him. He plucked the fragment of the light cavalry saber from his belt and studied it. Suddenly, while light glanced off the stub of blade, his eyes brimmed with rage. A savage outward lash of his arm sent the metal cross whirling over the meadow, there to drop and vanish.

He knew the only course left to him if he were to stay remotely sane. He must ride on to Virginia and try to repair the damage done by his own foolishness. But first there was duty. Duty always came first. He had to make sure those at Mont Royal were not threatened by occupying troops or other dangers whose nature he couldn't guess. He would cover the distance to the plantation much faster than he had when riding north. Then, the moment he was finished at home — Virginia.

He lifted the rein, turned the mule's head and started him rapidly back the way they had come.

135

Under a brilliant full moon, Huntoon and Powell reached the edge of the gully. Huntoon was glad to stop. His feet hurt. Powell slipped his right hand in his coat pocket.

Huntoon took off his spectacles, pinched up a bit of shirt bosom and polished one lens, then the other, saying finally, "What is it you want to discuss?"

With a cryptic, "Look down there," Powell bobbed his head toward the gully bottom. Huntoon leaned forward, peered down. Powell pulled out the four-barrel Sharps and shot him in the back.

The lawyer uttered a short, gasping cry. He spun and reached for Powell's lapel. Powell smacked him with his free hand. Huntoon's spectacles flew off and sailed into the dark below.

Blinking like a newborn animal, Huntoon tried to focus his eyes on the man who had shot him. Pain blazing through his body, he understood the betrayal. It had been meant to happen on this journey. Planned from the start.

How stupidly naive he had been. Of course he had suspected Ashton and Powell were lovers. For that reason he had mailed the letter to his Charleston law partner. But later, filled with renewed hope of regaining Ashton's affection through a display of courage, he had regretted the instructions in the letter. But he had done nothing to countermand them, always assuming there would be ample time later. And what he'd seen in St. Louis had prompted the second letter; the one he'd given her —

Now, as if he could somehow cancel both past and present pain by will and action, he seized Powell's sleeve. Formed in his throat a plea for mercy and help. But the fiery wound and saliva rendered the words gibberish.

"Let go of me," Powell said with disgust, and shot him a second time.

The ball went straight into Huntoon's stomach, forcing him to step back. He stepped into space. Powell had a last brief vision of the poor fool's wet eyes and mewling mouth. Then Huntoon dropped.

Powell blew into the barrels of his pistol and put it away. Over the strident barking of coyotes across the gully, he heard the clump and thump of Huntoon's body striking, rebounding into space, falling and rebounding again.

Then it grew quiet. He could hear Collins and the others shouting to him. Was he all right?

With a smile, he stood regarding the high-riding moon. Despite the alarms from the campfire, he lingered a moment, studying the sky above the wind-scoured land and congratulating himself. He imagined Ashton's dark-tipped breasts, his alone now, together with the wild thatch below. He felt youthful. Content. Refreshed.

Over a hump of rock behind him, a small, skinny man with stringy hair and a waist clout appeared, bathed in brilliant moon­light for a moment. In his right hand he held a buckskin-covered war club consisting of a wood handle connected by sinew to a round stone head. Powell didn't see the man, or the second one, who rose into sight as the first man jumped.

He heard the man land and turned, terror clogging his throat. He clawed for the Sharps, but it caught in his pocket lining. The stone struck his head, one powerful and correctly aimed blow that broke open his left temple and killed him by the time he dropped to his knees, open-mouthed. Blood rushed down the left side of his face as he toppled forward.

The little Apache grinned and thrust the dripping club over his head, triumphant. His companion leaned down and landed beside him. Half a dozen others glided from behind other rocks, barefoot and light as dancers. All of them stole toward the voices and the fire glow.

The moment Banquo Collins heard the two shots and the teamsters started hollering, he quietly but quickly looked to his own gear. One of the teamsters said, "Who fired? 'Paches?"

"I doubt it. Sometimes they carry stolen pieces, but customarily it's a club — or a wee knife to slit your throat. Also, they'll not risk a fight and possible death at night. They believe conditions existing when they die follow them to the spirit world, and they want to rest forever in pleasant sunshine. Nothing to fear, see?"

Throughout the speech, Collins had finished gathering his gear. He tugged his hat over his eyes, turned and started away from the fire at a brisk walk. The teamster was too tense and stupid to compare the guide's statements with reality: the full moon lent the landscape a clarity and whiteness almost like that of a wintry noonday.

But Collins's rapid stride woke up the teamster. "Where the hell you goin'?" he yelled.

Head down, the guide kept moving. A few more steps, and he would have cover among the big —

"Collins, you yella dog, you come back here!"

Not a dog, a glass snake, he thought, recognizing hysteria in the voice and flinging himself sideways while reaching for his revolver. The wild shot fired by the teamster missed by two yards, pinging off rock. He didn't waste a bullet of his own — he might need every one — but his leap threw him against a boulder, bruising his shoulder. Recovering, he lunged on.

After a few steps he turned again, glimpsed part of the clearing between tall stones. He saw the Jicarillas swarm out of the dark beyond the fire and surround the three hired men. Genuinely frightened, Collins fled, leaving behind the capering Apaches and the wild, sharp barks with which they imitated a coyote. The barks were not quite loud enough to drown out the screams.

Running, stumbling often, Collins drove himself until pain and shortness of breath forced him to slow down. His chest felt close to bursting. After a brief rest he pushed on until he found a place where he thought he could descend. Hand over bloodied hand, he went down the rock wall. He misjudged one hold and fell the last twenty feet, knocked nearly unconscious.

Dust-covered, his hands and face red from cuts and scrapes, he rested again, then lurched to the edge of the stream, which he crossed with a minimum of noise. Not that the Apaches would hear the splashes. They were whooping and yelling to celebrate.

Collins knew they would take the horses to ride awhile, then butcher. They would also break open the gun crates and take the Spencers. He wanted to learn the fate of the two heavy wagons, the object of the late Mr. Powell's attention. The moment Collins saw the Apaches at the fire he knew they had disposed of his half-crazy employer and that worm of a lawyer. Neither man mattered to him, nor any of the teamsters. The teamsters were the tail of the glass snake.

What mattered was his own skin and, secondarily, the wagons. When he reached the shallows on the other side, he headed up­stream until he located a good observation point in some twisted junipers. He was almost directly opposite the mouth of the deep gully near the campsite. The Apaches had added fresh wood to the fire. He saw flames leap above the tall rocks occasionally.

He was wrong about the source of the fire, he quickly discovered. It came from one of the wagons, which appeared between the rocks, pushed by fifteen or twenty angry Indians. The whole forward third of the wagon was burning. The front wheels blazed brightly.

The Apaches pushed it to the gully rim and with grunts and exclamations tipped it over. The emptied wagon — if indeed it was completely empty, which Collins doubted — stood perpendicular a moment, tailgate toward the moon. Then it dropped, the front end decorated with two swiftly spinning disks of fire, like the Catherine wheels he remembered dimly from a childhood visit to his pa's home city of Glasgow.

Wood splintered. The fire separated into several gaudy sections, each of which hit a different place on the bottom. The Apaches disappeared, returning soon with the second burning wagon, which they also sent into the gully. Then they howled and shook their clubs and lances.

To Collins they sounded angry. Maybe they had expected some greater prize from the wagons than rifles and provisions. Maybe, he speculated, fingering an oozing gash in his left cheek, they didn't know where to look. The heaviness of both wagons in relation to their appearance had long ago convinced him of the existence of false floors.

He would investigate, though he certainly wouldn't remain here through the night to do so. He wanted no contact with the Jicarillas. It wasn't wise to buck the odds. A man won a pot with a pair only once in a while.

Merely by surviving the night, he would win plenty. He would win the chance to come back to the gully. He doubted these particular Apaches would ever come back to it, and they would be gone by daylight. The debris in the gully was safe for a while; this was not a heavily traveled route. He could return weeks, even months later, and be confident of finding whatever the burned wagons had concealed. Especially if it were gold.

Banquo Collins didn't know a lot about metallurgy, but he knew some. Gold could change its form. Mingle with other elements in the earth — that was gold ore. But it couldn't be destroyed. So long as no one chanced on the gully or examined the ashes, any gold that was there would remain there, his for the claiming.

Feeling good, he slipped away from the junipers by the stream. The red light down in the gully faded as he limped east beneath the huge full moon, wetting his lips occasionally as he imagined himself a wealthy tourist swallowing raw oysters and bouncing a San Francisco whore on each knee.

136

Homebound soldiers stopped occasionally at Mont Royal, bringing the Mains vivid word pictures of the ruin in the state. These they traded for water from the well. Cooper had no food to offer the travelers.

Although no partisan of the South, especially of the reasons it had waged war, Judith broke down and cried when she heard descriptions of the huge swathes of burned forest, trampled fields, looted homes that marked the passage of Sherman's juggernaut.

Columbia was scorched earth, whole blocks gone except for a fragment of wall or an isolated chimney standing amid acres of rubble. The new statehouse, roofless and unfinished, had been spared, though its west wall had been marked forever by four Union cannonballs fired during a bombardment from Lexington Hills, across the Congaree.

Bands of blacks clogged the roads, the visitors said, free but generally baffled by their new status and, for the most part, starving. There was no food available for white or black, and many village storekeepers had closed and boarded up their places. Altogether, the picture was one of desolation.

Since the danger of crop damage from the spring rice birds was past, Cooper decided to plant three squares for a June crop, something his father always did in case the earlier planting was ruined by the birds or by a storm-summoned infusion of salty water. To help him prepare the ground with a few rusty, unbroken implements remaining, he had only Andy, Cicero — too old for the work — Jane, and his daughter. Judith helped when she wasn't cooking or tending the small house built of raw pine.

Unused to physical labor, Cooper stumbled back to the house every night insect-bitten and hurting from his ankles to his neck. He would eat whatever tiny portion of food was offered, saying little, and go straight to his pallet. Often he moaned or exclaimed in his sleep.

Questions without answers tormented him during his waking hours. Could they raise enough rice to sell off a little, retaining the rest to help them survive the coming winter? Would the South be occupied by hostile troops for years now that the North was reportedly set on harsh reprisal because of Lincoln's murder? How would he ever learn what had happened to Orry's body since Richmond had been burned and, presumably, many army records destroyed? One soldier who had stopped described the mass graves around Petersburg, hundreds of corpses dumped in each with little regard for identification.

Questions hammered at his head till it ached as much as his body while he scratched the Carolina soil in the steaming sun. He was bent at the task one afternoon when Andy called his name sharply. He raised his head, wiped his sweaty eyelids to clear his vision, saw Judith dashing along the embankments separating the squares.

From her haste and her reddened face, he could tell something was wrong. He ran to meet her.

"Cooper, it's your mother. I went in during her nap, as I usually do, and found her. If I can judge from her expression, her passing was peaceful. Perhaps painless. I'm so sorry, darling —"

She stopped, cocking her head, puzzled and a little frightened by his queer half-smile. He didn't explain the momentary recollection that produced the strange reaction. Memories of Clarissa airily wandering about in the midst of the guerrilla attack. She had walked where guns were firing and never been scratched.

The odd smile disappeared; practical matters intruded. "Do you suppose we can find any ice at all for the body?"

"I doubt it. We'd better bury her right away."

"Yes, I think you're right." He slipped a throbbing arm around her, tears filling his eyes. They returned to the yellow-pine house for the rest of the day.

Cooper had discovered long ago that life had a perverse way of surprising you with the unexpected when you least needed it. He was sweating with Andy in the dusk, hammering together a coffin for Clarissa, when Jane appeared.

"We have three visitors."

Cooper swabbed his wet brow with his forearm. "More soldiers?"

She shook her head. "They came by railroad as far as they could — they say it's been reopened part of the way. Then they managed to buy an old mule and a wagon, both about done for —"

Testy, he said, "Well, whoever they are, you know what to tell them. They're welcome to camp and use the well. But we have no food."

"You'll have to feed these people," Jane said. "It's your sister and her husband and Miss Madeline."

When he thought it reasonably safe, Jasper Dills went down to occupied Richmond.

He was appalled at the destruction that had accompanied the collapse and flight of the Confederate government. A Union officer told him that while the fires raged, small-arms ammunition and more than eight hundred thousand shells had detonated over a period of several hours. A few substantially fireproofed buildings remained standing, but there were blocks and blocks destroyed. It was the heart of springtime, and the air should have smelled of flowers and new greenery. In Richmond it smelled of smoke.

The rutted streets were dumps for broken and abandoned furnishings, clothing, rags, bottles, books, personal papers. Even more distasteful to the little attorney was the human litter. Destitute white families roaming. Confederate veterans, many as young as fourteen, sitting in the sun with starved faces and vacant eyes. Crowds of Negroes, some strutting outrageously. And everywhere — on foot, astride saddle horses, driving wagons — soldiers in the blue of the conqueror. They were the only whites in the city who smiled, Dills noticed.

He was in a high state of nerves when he reached the sutlers' tents set up, complete with outdoor tables and cheap chairs, on the lawns of Capitol Square. At one such establishment, identified by its canvas banner as Hugo Delancy's, he met his contact, a former operative of Lafayette Baker's whom Dills had hired at a high price, dispatching him to Virginia to attempt to pick up a trail that was, perhaps, nonexistent.

The operative, a burly fellow with a cocked eye, took Dills to an outdoor table at Delancy's. He swilled lager while Dills drank a pitiful watery concoction passed off as lemonade.

"Well, what do you have to report?"

"Didn't think I'd have a blessed thing till six days ago. Tramped up and down the James almost three weeks before I turned up something. And it still isn't much."

The operative signaled a waiter to bring another beer. "Early in July last year a farmer saw a body floating in the James. Civilian clothes. The body was too far from shore to be retrieved, but the description — an obese man; dark-haired — roughly matches the one you provided for Captain Dayton."

"Last July, you say —?" Dills licked his lips. The stipend had continued during the intervening months. "Where did this happen?"

"The farmer was on the east bank of the river, about half a mile above the Broadway Landing pontoon bridge the army built later in the autumn. I spent another three days in the neighborhood, asking questions, but I didn't turn up anything else. So I'll take my money."

"Your report's inconclusive. Unsatisfactory."

The operative seized the lawyer's frail wrist. "I did the job. I want the pay."

Dills's strategy to save some money failed. He surrendered the bank draft from inside his jacket. The operative gave it a moment's suspicious scrutiny to embarrass him, then pocketed it, gulped the rest of his beer, and departed, leaving Dills between two tables of noisy whores, not far from the magnificent statue of George Washington.

Had Starkwether's son deserted to the enemy after Baker discharged him? If he had been killed, was it the result of a military mission or something more sinister? Was the body in the river actually Bent's? He had to know. If his periodic reports stopped, so would the stipend. He thumped his fist on the table. "What happened?"

Two of the sluts to his right heard the loud expression of turmoil and made remarks. Dills composed himself. The trail had run out. Starkwether's son was dead, merely another casualty of the long, distasteful, and ultimately purposeless war.

On reflection, the lawyer decided that an inconclusive report was better than none at all. Was valuable, in fact, if interpreted correctly. Since it said nothing to the contrary, it allowed him to continue writing the periodic memoranda, confidently asserting that Bent was still alive. It permitted him to continue to generate income indefinitely with those little pieces of paper — a huge return on a minuscule investment.

Less upset, he relaxed in the sunshine, ignored the odors of smoke and cheap perfume, and ordered a second glass of lemonade.

137

They buried Clarissa Gault Main in the half-acre of fenced ground that had received Mont Royal's dead, white and black, for three generations. Jane cried longest and loudest of any of the small band of mourners. She had developed a great affection for the gentle little woman whose aging mind had long ago freed her of ordinary human burdens. Jane had always taken special pains to see to Clarissa's needs, as she would those of a child. Aunt Belle Nin had once told her that for many people the process of growing old was one of reversal, a return to the state of the child, who needed a special kind of care, patience, love.

Andy stood at Jane's side and wept with her. Brett and Madeline were more controlled in their grief. Their greatest shock and emotional catharsis had come immediately after Billy escorted them up the lane, when Madeline saw that Orry's home was gone, and they learned about Clarissa.

Cooper showed the least emotion. He felt it his duty to remain steady, an example in a difficult time. Before the burial, he read verses from the New Testament — Christ's dialogue with Nicodemus on everlasting life from the gospel of John. Following the reading, Andy and Billy lowered the coffin into the ground, and each mourner tossed in a handful of sandy soil. For the closing prayer Cooper deferred to Andy, who praised Clarissa as a kind and generous woman, and movingly commended her to God's care.

A moment of silence followed the murmured amens. Then Andy said, "I'll finish the rest. You all needn't stay." Billy put his arm around Brett and walked out through the gate in the badly rusted fence. Wrought iron, he noted. Hazard's iron would have lasted longer. He was momentarily embarrassed by the thought.

Cooper and the others trudged after the young couple. Suddenly Brett stopped, gazing through the live oaks to the black ash heaps where the house had stood. Tears came again, but only briefly. She shook her head and turned to Billy.

"Mother's passing just now — it's a kind of watershed, isn't it? The end of something. That house, this plantation — it never was quite what it seemed to be. But whatever it seemed to be is gone forever."

Madeline overheard and nodded melancholy agreement. It was Cooper who replied, quietly but with a fervor surprising to his younger sister.

"We have let the worst go, but we'll rebuild the best. And fight for it with every breath."

Who is he? Brett asked herself in wonderment. I hardly know him. The old Cooper wouldn't have said such a thing. I am not the only one the war changed.

Three days later, following the arrival of a soiled letter misdelivered to the nearest neighbor, Charles reappeared in the lane riding his mule. Brett ran to greet and embrace him. He pressed his bearded cheek against hers, but it was perfunctory. She found him sullen and withdrawn; alarmingly so. When she tried to ask him about his experiences with Hampton's cavalry, he brushed the questions aside with terse, empty answers.

Before the evening meal, Madeline found an opportunity to speak to him. "How is Augusta Barclay?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen her in some time."

"Is she still in Fredericksburg?"

"I hope so. I'm going there in a few days to find out."

After dark, he and Cooper strolled the riverbank near the site of the ruined dock, at Charles's request. Before they got down to their talk, Cooper reported a piece of news.

"We've received specific information about Orry. It came day before yesterday, in a letter from General Pickett, much delayed. Orry's body was not put in a mass grave. It was shipped south together with a number of others when it became possible to locate enough draft horses to portage the coffins around a break in some rail line below Petersburg."

"The Weldon," Charles said with a nod.

"That took place many weeks ago. Unfortunately, there was an accident."

"What kind of accident?" Cooper told him. "Jesus." Charles shook his head. "Jesus Christ."

They walked on in silence for five minutes. Charles collected himself and informed his cousin that he wanted to leave for Virginia as soon as he felt those on the plantation were safe from danger.

"Oh, we're safe enough," Cooper said with an empty laugh. "Starving, perhaps, but safe. May I ask what takes you back to Virginia?"

"Something personal."

How closed and somber he's become, Cooper thought. "Will you be returning here?"

"I hope not. The trip involves a lady."

"Charles — I had no idea — that's wonderful. Who is she?"

"I'd rather not discuss it, if you don't mind."

Mystified and a little hurt by the rebuff from the cold stranger Charles had become, Cooper bobbed his head to signal acceptance, then fell silent.

It was their season for callers, it seemed. The following Monday, as Charles prepared to leave, Wade Hampton arrived on horseback. He was bound for Charleston but stopped off because he had heard of the burning of Mont Royal and Clarissa's death. Though never close, the Hampton and Main families had known each other for three generations. Most of the great planters of the piedmont and low country had at least a nodding acquaintance, but in this case it was Charles who had strengthened the ties.

Besides visiting Clarissa's grave alone and expressing his sympathy to the family, he had another reason for calling, he said. He hoped to hear something about one of his best scouts. To his surprise, they met face-to-face. Hampton was visibly appalled to find Charles in such a scruffy state, and so dour.

No longer in uniform and grayer than Charles remembered, Hampton wore a holstered side arm beneath his coat. His favorite, Charles observed. The revolver with ivory handle grips.

Because of his high military rank, Hampton had been denied the amnesty given the majority of Confederate soldiers after the surrender. The general carried this burden openly. Bitterness was particularly apparent when he stalked all around the rubble that had once been the great house.

"As bad as Millwood," he said, shaking his head. "We should take a photograph and mail it to Grant. Perhaps it might teach him the real meaning of what he calls 'enlightened war.'"

Later, in the hot May dusk, the men sat on crates and small casks on the grass in front of the pine house; it had no piazza. Hampton had brought a bottle of peach brandy in his saddlebag. They shared it, using a collection of unmatched cups and glasses.

Hampton questioned Charles about his last days in the cavalry. Charles had little to say. Hampton told them briefly of his own experiences. He had indeed wanted to continue the fight west of the Mississippi. "What they did to my son and my brother and my home persuaded me that I was not morally bound by the surrender." So he had ridden on in pursuit of the fleeing President and his party.

"I would have escorted Mr. Davis all the way to Texas. Even Mexico. I had a small company of loyal men, or so I thought. But they dropped away, gave up, one by one. Finally I was alone. At Yorkville, I chanced to meet my wife, Mary. She and Joe Wheeler — General Wheeler — persuaded me that trying to find the President was futile. I was tired. Ready to be persuaded, I suppose. So I stopped."

Cooper asked, "Do you know where Davis is now?"

"No. I suppose he's in jail somewhere — perhaps even hanged. What a disgraceful end to the whole business." He tossed off the last of his brandy, which seemed to calm him.

Hampton went on to say he was living in a house belonging to a former overseer. "My daughter Sally's to be married in June. I have that happy event to anticipate, along with the work of rebuilding this poor, wracked state. I'm glad you're on Mont Royal again, Cooper. I remember where you stood at the time of the secession convention. We're going to need men like you. Men of sanity and good will. Patience, strength — I think the Yankees will press us hard. Try us — punish us — severely. Booth did us incredible harm."

"Has there been any word of him?" Billy said.

"Oh, yes. He was caught and shot to death a couple of weeks ago on a farm near the Rappahannock."

"Well, gentlemen —" Charles stood up and set the fruit jar from which he had been drinking on the log that had been his chair "— I'll excuse myself with your permission. I have business in Virginia, and I want to be on the road by daylight. I leave you to your high ideals and the reconstruction of our glorious state."

Billy was baffled by this sourness. His old friend stood out in memory as lighthearted, quick to laugh. This shabby, bearded skeleton wasn't Bison Main, but someone much older, of much darker temperament.

"Someone must champion the South," Cooper declared. "We must defend her with every peaceful means, or there'll be nothing left for generations but burned earth and despair."

Charles stared at him. "That isn't what you used to say, Cousin.''

"Nevertheless, he's right," Hampton said, some of the old authority in his voice. "The state will need many good men. Including you, Charles."

With a bow toward the visitor, Charles smiled. "No, thank you, General. I did my job. Killed God knows how many fellow human beings — fellow Americans — on behalf of the high-minded principles of the high-minded Mr. Davis and his high-minded colleagues. Don't ask me to do anything else for the South or its misbegotten cause."

Hampton leaped to his feet, his stocky frame silhouetted against fading light in the west. "It is your land, too, sir. Your cause —"

"Correction, sir. It was. I obeyed orders until the surrender. But not a moment longer. Good evening, gentlemen."

Charles left before dawn, while Billy and Brett were still asleep with their arms around each other, squeezed onto the rickety cot provided for them. Billy had gone to bed saddened because his best friend had said so little to him. Charles had withheld something of great personal importance and had walked away every time Billy tried to mention his heroic behavior during the Libby escape. He had ridden off without a word of farewell, as Billy discovered soon after he awoke.

Smelling imitation coffee brewing, he gently touched Brett's middle — it was now certain that she was pregnant — kissed her warm throat, and slipped off the creaky cot. He lifted the cloth partition and found Andy at the stove. Andy confirmed that Charles had gone.

"Strange fella," he said. "Was he always so moody and glum?"

"No. Something happened to him in Virginia. Something other than the war. He was courting a woman. A widow. He cared for her very much —"

"Never heard a thing about any woman."

"He didn't tell me, either. Madeline did."

"Maybe that's it," Andy said, nodding. "If he thinks he lost her, that could account for it. A woman can tear up a man almost as much as goin' to war, I guess."

He smiled, but Billy didn't.

The passing days showed Brett how radically conditions and relationships had changed in four short years. Cooper toiled in the rice fields like one of their father's people. Madeline, who had been the chatelaine for a time, tied up her skirts, wrapped her black hair in a bandanna, and sweated right alongside him. Despite Billy's protests, Brett did, too. She insisted it would be a few months yet before she was unable to do her share.

Despite the joy of the new life growing within her, Mont Royal disappointed Brett because there were no blacks who wanted or needed her help. The kind of teaching Jane had done for a while, for example.

"There's an entire state in need of help," Cooper said when she expressed her feeling. "You've seen all the people camped in the fields and along the roads —"

But she wasn't persuaded. Everything was different and, except for her life with Billy, unhappily so.

George felt much the same way on the thirteenth of May. It was Saturday, the end of a week that saw Davis and his small party captured at a woodland bivouac near Irwinville, Georgia. George was shocked at the widespread ruin in Charleston, to which a coastal steamer from Philadelphia had brought him, with Constance. He was grieved by the sight of so many burned homes and buildings, and even more saddened by the great numbers of Negroes everywhere. Rather than happy, they seemed uneasy and occasionally sullen in their new state of freedom.

"It's entirely fitting and right that they have it," he said to Constance as they boarded the ancient sloop Osprey, which would take them up the Ashley. George wore a dark broadcloth suit; though not yet mustered out, he refused to wear his uniform. Nor did he need it to generate plenty of hostile stares and rude treatment.

"But there are practical problems," he went on. "How is freedom going to feed them? Clothe them? Educate them?" Even if practical answers could be found, would Northerners allow them to be implemented now that the military victory was won? Some would, of course; his sister, Virgilia, for example. But he believed such people were in a minority. The majority's turn of mind was illustrated by the telegraphic flimsy still folded in his pocket.

The message from Wotherspoon had been delivered to the pier in Philadelphia an hour before the coastal steamer weighed anchor: SIX MEN QUITTING TO PROTEST HIRING TWO COLORED.

He had immediately wired back: LET THE SIX GO. HAZARD. But that didn't alter the larger picture, and he knew it. His attitude was an atypical drop in the Yankee ocean.

Answering his questions of a moment ago, Constance said, "That's the purpose of the Freedmen's Bureau, isn't it? General Howard is supposed to be a decent, capable man —"

"But look who wormed into the bureau as one of his assistants. Do you really believe Stanley did it for humanitarian reasons? There's some secret agenda — political, probably. We're in for a bad time for a few years, I'm afraid. It may last even longer if the wounds don't heal. Aren't permitted to heal —"

But the Ashley was smooth, and their short journey upriver on Osprey uneventful — until they had their first glimpse of the plantation. George exclaimed softly. Constance clutched the rail.

"My God," he said. "Even the pier's gone."

"That's right, sir," the master of the sloop called from the wheel. There was a slyly exaggerated politeness to the last word, saying the captain didn't really believe his passenger deserved the appellation. The overused, overblown sir was a common Southernism, George was discovering.

"You'll have to cross a plank to shore," the man added. His eyes indicated that he might be pleased if husband and wife fell in the muddy water.

They had sent no advance word of their visit. They piled their valises on the grassy bank, including one old satchel that George had not let out of his sight since leaving Lehigh Station. As the whistle blew and the sloop chugged away, an unfamiliar black man appeared from behind the ruins of the great house. While Constance waited, George walked up the lawn. The Negro hurried down to meet him, introducing himself as Andy.

"George Hazard." They shook hands. Andy recognized the name and dashed off to carry the news to Cooper and the others, who were apparently at work in the rice fields.

George's shock deepened as he again studied the ruins, seeing in imagination the glittering ball the Mains once gave in honor of the visiting Hazards. The hanging lanterns, the swelling music, the laughing gentlemen and soft-shouldered women.

And here came Cooper, bare-chested and sweaty, a look of exhaustion on his face. He was followed by Billy, Brett, and Madeline, all grubby as farmers and giving off strong odors in the afternoon heat.

George silently reproved himself for the negative reaction. The Mains had always been farmers, though of a very elegant and special kind. Now it appeared that they had — to twist it a little — no hands but their own. Billy's were wet from the ooze of broken blisters, George noticed.

He wasn't surprised to find his brother here. Constance had reported Billy's departure with Brett and Madeline when George came home on furlough late in April. Once George had decided on this trip, he had shamelessly telegraphed Stanley and asked him to secure an extension of his leave.

Cooper and Judith, however, were astonished by the arrival of the visitors. They pretended elation, but their tiredness showed. So did an unmistakable reserve, a tension. George could scarcely believe he had ever heard the music at that lovely ball. The sight of the impoverished Mains left him full of despair. He hoped he had a partial remedy, brought up with the luggage and placed near his feet on the brilliant spring lawn.

Madeline and Judith led the visitors to the substitute porch — logs, boxes, and barrels arranged in front of the new pine house — then went inside to prepare some refreshments.

There was a half hour of halting exchanges of information about the two families. George expressed his sympathy to Madeline, then asked Cooper, "Where is Orry's grave? I'd like to pay my respects."

"I'll show you the marker we erected. The grave itself is empty."

"They didn't send the body home?"

"Oh, yes, they put it on a train, finally. Somewhere in North Carolina there was an accident on our splendid transportation system. The train derailed. A terrible smash-up. Forty pine coffins burned. George Pickett wrote to say there was nothing left."

George hurt as he seldom had in all his life. He heard April's fire bells dinning in his mind. He struggled to get the words out. "I'd still — like to see the marker and spend some time there alone."

"When would you like to do it?" Cooper asked.

"Now, if you don't mind. But first I must get something from my luggage."

Cooper described the route to the graveyard. Finding the marker, George drew from his pocket the letter he had kept in the satchel in his desk for four years. The letter to Orry. He knelt and dug a shallow hole in the sandy soil six inches In front of the marker. He folded the letter once and placed it in the hole, which he refilled, smoothing the sand afterward. Then, though never a deeply religious man, he clasped his hands and bowed his head. He stayed thirty minutes, making his farewell.

The afternoon was a trial. The Mains seemed a company of strangers. Or was that merely their plight distorting his own vision?

No, he decided, much had changed as a result of the destruction. It was most noticeable in Cooper, who had a certain forbidding politeness new to George. Orry's brother said he was glad to have an excuse to leave the fields for half a day, but his exhausted, anxious eyes belied that. Much had changed; did that mean everything had changed?

Supper lifted his spirits a bit. Although the meal was scanty — chiefly rice — the conversation was slightly livelier, less strained, than before. The exception was Cooper. He said little. George's anxiety deepened. Staring at Cooper was like trying to read a page of some Oriental language. Nothing could be deciphered.

When all of them had finished, they once again took places on the improvised furniture while the evening cooled and darkened around them. Madeline asked George about conditions in Charleston.

"Terrible," he replied. "I felt guilty because I couldn't hand a few dollars to each of the people on the streets."

"Black people," Jane said, not as a question.

"Whites, too. They all looked destitute — and hungry. On the docks, we saw dozens trying to catch fish with string. We saw scores tenting under blankets in vacant lots. What happened down here is dreadful."

"So was slavery, Mr. Hazard."

"Jane," Andy said, but her eyes defied him. George was dismayed to see brief anger on Cooper's face. Judith observed it, too, her mouth drawing into a tight line.

George's anxiety deepened. He had better say the rest, or he might never get it said.

"Of course you're right, Jane. I believe no person of conscience would assert any other view. But this is also true: there's been terrible damage to everyone. I don't mean loss of property. I mean damage to feelings. What's left, in the North as well as the South, is anger. Confusion. Bereavement —"

He and Madeline exchanged looks. Then he rose and walked a few steps down the lawn, locking hands at the small of his back as he struggled to focus his thoughts into the right words.

"The day Lincoln was shot, according to my brother Stanley, he told his cabinet about a dream he had the night before. He was in a boat rowing toward what he termed a dark, indefinite shore."

He turned, facing the semicircle of listeners, white and black, in front of the pine house not yet whitewashed. In the distance, the wisteria on the great chimney splashed the dusk with color.

"A dark, indefinite shore," he repeated. "It strikes me as an apt metaphor to describe our situation. Ours personally, and that of the country, too. It is one country again. Slavery's gone, and I say thank God. It was evil, and it was also brandished as a club over Northern heads for a long time."

"And when the club was finally put to use, it hurt us as much as you," Brett said.

George noticed another sharp look from Cooper. Had he indeed become someone else? Had the loss of his boy on the voyage from Liverpool destroyed the passionate convictions — the humanity — of his earlier days? George hoped this prickly new defensiveness, a trait he had seen in other Southerners but never before in Orry's brother, was a temporary aberration.

Self-conscious, George cleared his throat. "Anyway, we were friends, my family and yours, long before this terrible time." Brett leaned against Billy, who was standing behind her left shoulder. "More than friends, in some cases," he amended with a gentle smile.

Encouraged by a loving look from Constance, he went on, with a steadily strengthening voice. "We must remain so. Steadfastly. Four years ago, I believed we all faced a time of severe testing. Orry and I pledged to keep the bonds of friendship and affection between ourselves and our families intact despite a war —"

Then the fire came, and I feared we couldn't.

"We did —" he turned more directly to Cooper "— at least in my estimation."

Orry's brother stayed silent. With effort, George resumed. "Now I fear something else. The shore ahead is new but darker and more indefinite than ever. I think we're destined to pass through a second period of animosity and struggle which may, in its own way, be worse than war. How can we avoid it, with so much grief and loss on both sides? With a whole people newly freed but still justifiably enraged by the past? With venal men — I can name some, but I won't — waiting to take advantage of any misstep or show of weakness? We must be ready to weather all that. We must once again —"

A simple lift of his right hand; a glance slowly moving from face to face. Then, quietly: "Keep the bonds strong."

No one moved. No one spoke. God above, he had failed. He had failed personally, but, far worse, he had failed Orry. If only he knew how to speak properly, the way skilled politicians —

It was Brett who reacted first, reaching up and across to find and clasp Billy's hand. It was Madeline, her eyes tear-filled, who gave a single strong nod of agreement. But it was Cooper who gravely spoke for them all.

"Yes."

Almost dizzy from the sudden relief of his tension, George saw the Mains smiling, rising, starting forward. Hastily he held up both hands. "Just humor me a moment longer. One of the chief reasons I wanted to visit Mont Royal was to bring you a small token of my belief in what we have all reaffirmed."

He walked back to his log stool and the small satchel on the ground beside it. He slid the polished toe of his right boot forward, nudging the satchel.

"Does anyone recognize this?"

With a faint, puzzled smile, Cooper scratched his chin. "Wasn't it my brother's?"

"Exactly. In this bag Orry brought money to repay the loan I made to help finance the Star of Carolina. Orry traveled all the way to Lehigh Station at a very perilous time in the spring of '61, carrying over six hundred thousand dollars in cash — all he could raise of the sum I invested in your project. I never forgot that or —" again he cleared his throat "— or how much Orry himself meant to me. I came here to repay a debt of honor and friendship, just as he did. To put some of my resources into your hands, to help you rebuild."

He picked up the satchel and handed it to Cooper. "Before leaving home, I wasn't able to get reliable information about the banking situation in this state. I imagined it was still chaotic, however —"

Cooper nodded.

"Well, I am majority stockholder in the Bank of Lehigh Station, which I formed at the start of the war. Inside the satchel is a letter of credit drawn on my bank. The initial amount is forty thousand dollars" — Madeline gasped — "but there's more available. As much as you need. Now —"

He reddened unexpectedly. "I wonder if I might have some of that delicious berry punch you served this afternoon? I find my throat very dry all at once."

For a prolonged moment, nothing interrupted the twilight quiet but the rasp and hum of insects. Suddenly, with a swirl of sun-faded skirt, Madeline ran to him. She threw her arms around his neck. "I love you, George Hazard." He felt her tears as she pressed her cheek to his and hugged him. "And don't misconstrue the reason. If you were penniless, I would love you just as much."

Then they were all moving forward, closing around the two visitors. Judith kissed each of them twice. Andy spoke a few words of admiration and gratitude. Jane said a soft thank you to both. Brett embraced them in turn. Last of all, Cooper shook George's hand, so overcome he could barely speak.

"God bless you, George."

Shamefully, George wished it were Orry standing there instead. He turned away so none of them would see his eyes.

138

Santa Fe was fly-infested and revoltingly Latin-Catholic. Ashton was sure the caverns of hell, if they existed, could be no hotter.

She had a clean but cramped second-floor room on a narrow street of yellow walls, just a few steps from a cantina and the cathedral square beyond. Three weeks of waiting, mostly in that room, made her feel old as a crone. The parched air created new wrinkles, especially around her eyes. At least twice daily she examined her wrecked face in a triangle of broken mirror hanging on the adobe wall beside the hard bed. Would Lamar be displeased by her dry, sun-reddened skin? The possibility agitated her every day and spoiled her rest every night. But no more than the waiting.

Even now she found it unbelievable that a woman of her background and breeding had endured all that was necessary to reach this benighted place. The unspeakably long, occasionally terrifying coach trip. Poor sleep. Foul food at filthy way stations. Crude Westerners for traveling companions. An escort of scruffy Yankee cavalry for a couple of hundred miles because of the Indian threat. Mercifully, there had been no incidents.

When she reached Santa Fe, she found Powell's letter and thus expected his two wagons within a week. The week passed, and so did another, then a third. Her optimism began to dwindle along with her funds. Only a few dollars remained in her reticule — barely enough for another week's lodging and the barbarically spicy food the owner's wife brought up from the cantina.

On Saturday at the end of the third week, a commotion drew her to the spacious, sunlit plaza along with several dozen other people. A cavalry patrol had arrived, causing great excitement because the blue-clad troopers brought the body of a young man stabbed three times before he died.

"Picked him up at Winslow's trading station, west of here on the Rio Puerco," explained the Yankee lieutenant in response to the questions of a paunchy, self-important man Ashton presumed to be some town official. Mighty pompous for a greaser, she thought as the lieutenant went on: "He crawled that far — two, three miles — with these wounds after the Jicarillas massacred the rest of his party."

Ashton's flesh froze. Above a great roaring in her ears, she heard the lieutenant's voice continuing faintly.

"Winslow cleaned and dressed the stab wounds, but even so, the lad didn't last twelve hours." No, Ashton thought, queasy. Surely it couldn't be Powell's party.

She was wild to ask questions but feared the troopers would be suspicious of her accent. They were the sorriest, most villainous-looking soldiers she had ever seen, far worse than those who had escorted the stage. There was a private with only one thumb. A corporal wearing an eye patch. One bearded man sounded like an Irish comic from a variety hall, and two others jabbered in some foreign tongue — Hungarian, perhaps. On the coach trip, a passenger had told her the hard-pressed Union government was having trouble filling the ranks of its Western army, hence would take the physically handicapped, immigrants who knew little or no English — even Confederates.

Finally, unable to contain her curiosity, she approached the cleanest of the lot, a sergeant. She asked the question of greatest importance to her.

"Can you tell me whether there were wagons with this party?"

The sergeant was from Indiana, but he was courteous and helpful in spite of that. "Yes, ma'am, the trader did say the dead boy mentioned wagons. Two, burned and pushed into a gully where the massacre took place."

She swayed, dizzy. The sergeant's eyes narrowed. What did it matter if he were suspicious? The questions must be answered; she asked the second most important one.

"Was the leader of the party a man named Powell?"

"Thats right. Some reb."

"And he's—?"

A nod. Only then did Ashton think of her husband.

"The rest, too?"

"Every one. Did you know any of them?"

"Mr. Powell — by reputation, not personally."

The answer clearly bothered the sergeant. If she had no connection with the victims, why had she asked about wagons? She knew it was a blunder and turned away before he could interrogate her. The lieutenant was talking to others about the wagons. She listened, haughtily ignoring the sergeant's scrutiny.

"After the young man died, Winslow and his two sons armed themselves and rode to the site. The 'Paches were long gone. Winslow saw pieces of a wagon wheel and a lot of ashes at the bottom of the gully, but that's all. The birds and the big cats got the other bodies."

She wheeled and set off up the street to her room, increasingly weak from shock. The Hoosier trooper watched her, asking himself questions about the puzzling behavior of the beautiful young woman in the gray summer dress. One thing sure; she obviously didn't hail from this part of the country.

In her room, Ashton sat on the bed, trembling. Two wagons containing three hundred thousand in gold — gone. And Powell, too. She had cared for Lamar Powell more than she had ever cared for any man. Her affection derived in part from his amazing sexual prowess, in part from his implacable ambition and where it could take both of —

No. That was over, and she had to face it. She was alone and abandoned in a wilderness, with no funds except those on deposit in Nassau. Her money and her dead husband's. All hers now.

A lot of good that would do her for the next two or three months. It would take at least that much time to supply the Bahamian bankers with evidence of Huntoon's death and proof of her right to the money. Could the funds be sent to her in Santa Fe? She couldn't answer all the questions arising from this newest, cruel turn.

But she knew one thing. She would live on that Bahamian money for as long as it took to locate the gully containing what was left of the wagons. The trader and his son hadn't investigated the wreckage, probably because it would never occur to any ordinary person that the ashes might conceal gold ingots.

What if the savages had carried the ingots away? It was a disturbing possibility, but not one that would alter her course. A fortune in gold that would double her personal worth could be waiting in that gully to the west, unknown to anyone except herself. The prospect helped soften her sadness about Powell. And the more she thought of the treasure, the faster her grief dwindled.

Concerning James, she could summon no grief at all. He had always been spineless, only marginally a man. Thinking of him did jog her memory. She dug in the bottom of her reticule for the sealed letter. Presuming it to be filled with sentimental twaddle, she had put it away in St. Louis and hadn't thought of it until this moment.

The letter was anything but sentimental. After a brusque salutation — just her name, followed by a dash — and a short paragraph of unflattering preamble, it said:

Ashton staggered up, crushing the letter between her clammy palms. "Not true," she whispered.

She seized her reticule and flung it against the slats of the shutters. "Not true." She overturned the bed. Hurled the chair against the wall. The landlady ran upstairs and pounded on the door, which was secured on the inside by a metal hook and eye.

"Señora, qué pasa ahí adentro?"

The chair broke. She smashed the clay wash bowl — pieces flew like shrapnel — and the drinking gourd, then dashed the scrap of mirror on top of them, screaming now.

"Not true — not true — not true!"

"Señora, está enferma? Conteste o tumbaré la puerta!"

The last words went whirling into a windy void as Ashton's eyes rolled up in her head and she fainted.

The landlady pushed until the hook broke away from the door. She shook and slapped Ashton awake. Gasping, Ashton explained her behavior in terms of a vaguely described seizure. She promised to pay for all the damages — a lie — if just the woman would help her into bed; she was ill. Muttering, the landlady did so.

Wearing only her chemise, Ashton lay rigid throughout the afternoon and into the hot hours of the night. Her brain was a cauldron of fear, anxiety, speculation. Finally, toward early morning, the air began to cool. She fell asleep and woke shortly before noon. The mariachi, which seemed to inhabit the cantina on a permanent basis, had resumed its dolorous violin and guitar music.

She sat up and held her head. There wasn't a dollar to be had from Nassau. But there was gold out here. She was not defeated. Far from it. She rummaged in her luggage until she found the lacquered Japanese box, which hadn't been opened since she deposited her memento from Powell. She lifted the lid slowly, gazed at the happily copulating couple and studied the assortment of buttons. After nearly four years, it was time to resume her collecting. And not merely for pleasure. She lowered the lid, confident that survival lay in what her box represented.

She put on her best cool dress, mauve lawn. It was in sorry condition after so much traveling, but a tiny triangle of mirror retrieved from the floor showed her that it would pass, especially with her bosom made prominent by her corset. In this heat the stays felt like implements of torture, but no matter. The effect was everything.

She left the room, descended the squeaky stairs with a regal air, and walked the short distance to the cantina entrance. She had been told the landlord was a Yankee, a former fur trapper who had left Kit Carson's company for a more settled existence.

When she pushed the doors back and entered the cool blue place, the mariachi men stopped in mid-squeak and mid-twang. Their mustaches went up as their jaws went down. Some elderly customers, Mexicans or Spaniards or whatever they were, clearly disapproved of her presence, but she didn't give a damn. Neither did the fellow in the apron behind the bar. He was a burly, strong-looking sort, with plenty of white in his blond hair.

Ashton smiled at him. "You are an American, I understand?"

"That's right."

"So am I." She worked to minimize her accent. "Unexpectedly stranded here by circumstance."

"I noticed you on the street. Wondered about your situation —"

"Might I ask you a question? In confidence?"

"Sure." She didn't miss the way his eyes touched her breast a moment.

"I would like to know the names of the two or three wealthiest men in the area."

"The two or three —?"

"Wealthiest."

"I thought I heard right." Amused, he added, "Hitched or single?"

Damn him. He thinks I'm nothing but a feather-headed female, to be made sport of. He'll find out. I'll come through this, survive this, the way I've survived everything else. And when I do, I'll have every man in this part of the country groveling for two minutes of my time.

"Ma'am? Hitched or single?"

Ashton's smile was dazzling.

"That really doesn't matter."

139

In the calm, starry hour after sunset, Andy and Jane walked along the Ashley, talking quietly and searching for their answer to a question Madeline had posed.

Of Cicero's future, there was no doubt. He was too old, too lacking in skills to do anything except stay on. He actually seemed displeased with the outcome of the war, complaining that the liberty Father Abraham had bestowed on him was unwanted, because it upset the routine of his life. Jane had started to reprove him on one occasion, but held back. Cicero was past seventy; she understood that any change was a threat.

Not so with her or with Andy. So they talked, their arms around each other's waist. The conversation was occasionally interrupted by some kissing and affectionate touching. After an hour, holding hands, they returned to the pine house where the lamps gleamed.

Everyone was still up because George and Constance were leaving tomorrow when Osprey came downriver again. As Jane and Andy entered the large, plain room that was a parlor in name only, they heard George saying he was anxious to get back to Lehigh Station and resume the role of full-time parent. Madeline smiled at the black couple from a barrel chair Cooper had made the week before. "Hello, Andy — Jane. Come in."

Jane began, "If this is a bad time to speak to you —"

"Not at all. Join us."

Andy cleared his throat. "We just wanted to answer your question about our plans."

Not a sound followed those words; they had everyone's attention. Jane spoke for both of them.

"We thought we'd stay a little longer in South Carolina."

"As free people," Andy added.

"It's our state now, too," Jane said. "Our land as much as it is the white man's."

Her words carried a faint challenge. Perhaps that was why Cooper hesitated a moment before he said, "Of course it is. I'm pleased by your decision. I'd be glad to have you stay here, unless you have something else in mind."

Jane shook her head, then glanced at the strong, proud man standing beside her. "Mont Royal's been good to me. Better than I ever expected."

"But we can't work without wages," Andy said. "Not now."

Cooper and Madeline exchanged looks signifying mutual consent. "I agree," Cooper said. "It's possible now, thanks to George."

"Then we'll stay," Andy said. "If we decide we made the wrong choice — if either of us decides that — we'll tell you and go. We don't answer to anyone but each other anymore."

Cooper responded with a small, quick nod of agreement. "I hope you won't ever reach that decision. I need you both very much."

Jane smiled. Relieved expressions showed on the faces of the others. Andy stepped forward.

"One other thing —"

"Yes?" Judith said.

"We want to get married."

There was a burst of congratulations, abruptly stilled when Andy went right on in a level voice. "But not the old way. Not by jumping over brooms. And we're both going to change our names. Jane and Andy are slave names. They were given to us. We want to pick our own."

Tense silence. Then Cooper simply raised his hand.

"Fine."

Madeline smoothed her skirt as she rose. "Can't we find something for a toast to the engaged couple?"

Smiling broadly, Andy put his arm around Jane again. "I'm so happy I'd settle for water out of the well."

"I think I remember something better," Judith said, raising the curtain that screened the kitchen. "Yes, here it is," she called from the attached pantry closet. She emerged smiling. "You gentlemen didn't finish Wade Hampton's peach brandy — thank goodness."

She poured a tiny amount for each of them as they fell into relaxed, companionable conversation. George, who had drawn the fruit jar, raised it to salute Andy and Jane.

"I wish you both the best. It won't be easy for you down here, at least not in the immediate future. But I'm not certain it would be much better up North."

With a touch of sadness, Jane said, "I know. Black faces do threaten people somehow. Scare them. Well, I can't help that. We'll come through just fine. You fought to free us, Major Hazard, so now we must take up the fight. I do expect many more battles before white people even start to accept us."

In the uneasy silence that followed, Cooper frowned and Billy admitted to himself that Jane was right. He need only examine his own attitudes of a couple of years ago. Though one war was over, he shared his brother's belief that another was just starting.

140

OPIN AGIN said the sign hanging crookedly on the front of a large log building just outside Goldsboro, North Carolina. Charles reached it right before dark. The weather was surprisingly cool for May. Rain had started an hour ago, and he had wrapped himself in the robe of rags and scraps.

A smaller line on the sign proclaimed, Confedrate Bills Prodly Acepted Here! Charles had nine hundred dollars' worth of those — back pay — stuffed in his shirt and pants pockets. He pitied a man who would try to run a business on pride and worthless currency, but he would accept that kind of lunatic hospitality tonight. He didn't want to sleep in the open again, especially with the rain, and hunt for an orchard or coop to rob for food.

A black boy led his mule away, promising a good rubdown and feed. Charles entered the main room of the roadside tavern, a drab place with a few desolate-looking men sitting about, talking, or lazily clicking pieces across a checkerboard. A fire brightened the stone hearth.

Charles ordered whiskey, a plate of lamb barbecue, and purchased a cigar from the innkeeper. He discovered the man had several rusty guns for sale and a few old boxes of ammunition. One contained shells that would fit his .48 army Colt. Elated, he bought the whole box for fifty Confederate dollars.

While he was eating, a man of about forty came noisily downstairs from the sleeping rooms under the eaves. He rubbed his hands at the fire while Charles tried to avoid his eye.

But the man forced conversation on him. He had a pink face, curly hair gone prematurely white, and a mouth downcast in a curve of perpetual suffering. He introduced himself as Mordecai Woodvine, itinerant salesman of Bibles and Christian tracts.

"Sure hope business picks up soon. Sure has been terrible the past couple of years. I hate traveling anymore. Too many uppity free niggers all over the place. But the work I do is God's work, so I guess I oughtn't complain." So saying, he continued to look miserable.

He sat down without invitation and insisted on knowing Charles's name and whether he had been in the army.

"Yes, I was. I scouted for Hampton's cavalry."

"The cavalry! There's plenty on that subject in Revelations. 'And I looked, and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.'" Through the smoke of his cigar, Charles could be seen scowling. Woodvine poked a finger at heaven, intoning, " 'And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth —' "

With intentional rudeness, Charles interrupted. "I'd say that describes our work pretty well." He wanted to strangle the man for prompting memories of Sport.

The fool went right on. "My cousin Fletcher was a cavalryman out west. Rode with Bedford Forrest — there's one good old rebel who won't tolerate this nigger freedom, I'll tell you. Fletcher got captured, and do you know what happened to him?"

Charles was on his feet. He indicated no interest in the answer, but got it anyway.

"They offered him a choice. Prison — or the Yankee cavalry. That's right, they shipped him to a regiment out on the plains somewhere. To fight Indians. There are a goodly number of our boys doing that, I'm told. They're called galvanized Yankees."

He leaned forward. "You understand, don't you? Galvanized metal is iron coated with zinc to keep out rust. A galvanized Yankee is a Confederate wearing a blue —"

"I know the meaning of galvanized."

"Oh. Oh, well — I thought maybe you didn't. Anyway, if you hanker to stay in some army, you might keep it in mind. That is, if you could stand to serve with men who brought this plague of emancipation upon us. I couldn't stand it. I'd puke my guts out, if you'll pardon the indelicacy."

"Surely," Charles said, an almost malevolent glint in his eye. "Galvanized Yankees. Think of that. Tell me, Mr. Woodvine, in which branch did you serve?"

"Me? Why — uh — I didn't. I'm too old."

"You're over forty-five? You don't look it."

"But there are reasons — a physical impairment —"

"And you probably spent most of the war in the woods, selling Testaments to the trees and quoting Scripture to the saplings — where they couldn't find you. Am I right, Mr. Woodvine?"

"What? What's that?"

"Good night, Mr. Woodvine."

He walked away, heading for his room. On the stairs, he heard the parting shot.

"Drunken veterans — that's all you see anymore. The army taught them to love whiskey. Issued regular rations of it. Disgraceful, that's my opinion."

Charles wanted to turn, go back, and beat Woodvine bloody. Instead, he shut the door of his room and leaned against it. He was a fool to react angrily. He had no interest in the Bible salesman or his cousin. Much as he had come to love Texas while he was with the Second, he had no interest in continuing as a cavalryman. He had no interest in anything but reaching Spotsylvania County as quickly as possible.

Rain tapped the roof as he stretched out and pulled up the cover. He heard the rain leaking with a steady drip near the foot of the bed. Downstairs, made boisterous with drink, some of the desolate men started to sing.

Charles recognized the piece. He had heard "O I'm a Good Old Rebel" several times since leaving South Carolina. It was sung with great fervor now that Johnston's army had surrendered to Sherman near Durham Station.

"Christ," Charles groaned, pulling the thin pillow over his head. It didn't shut out the rhythmic thumping of tin cups on the bar, the stamp of boots, or the splendid choir baritone of Mordecai Woodvine joining in.

Weeds and wild grasses tossed in the warm wind, high as the hamstrings of his mule. The wind snapped the gypsy cloak as Charles turned into the dooryard, an ominous feeling on him. The fields hadn't been prepared for planting. On such a pleasant day, when fresh air would have broomed the house, every window was shuttered. Around the rear stoop, wild violets showed where none had grown before. The open door of the barn revealed a rectangle of darkness.

"Washington? Boz?"

The wind blew.

"Anyone here?"

Sunflowers swayed in what had been the garden. Why was he awaiting an answer? Hadn't he gotten it when he came over the last hump in the scarred road and seen the house so still, the surrounding fields empty in the sunshine?

She had locked the place before going wherever she had gone. Using his elbow, he broke the window of the kitchen door, reached through, and let himself in. The furniture was there, chairs neatly squared up beneath the table. Pots and the iron skillet hung from their pegs in their remembered places. He jerked open cabinets. Dishes there, too.

He ran to her bedroom, his boots thudding the pegged floor. The bed was neatly made and on the table next to it he spied her book of Pope, a place marked with a pale blue ribbon. Surely she wouldn't leave that if she were planning to be gone for any length of time. She must be away for just a day or two, with the freedmen.

To confirm it, he bore down on the wardrobe, expecting to find most of her clothing. He yanked the doors open.

Empty.

He stood still, frowning, worried. How to explain the contradiction — all the clothes missing and her favorite book left behind?

He had left the porch door open; a strong gust of wind blowing through the hall caught a wardrobe door and hurled it shut with a bang. That roused him and broke the grip of his panic. He carried the book to the kitchen, laid it on the table, then hurried to the barn, where the freedmen stored their tools. All were still in place.

He sawed some boards, nailed them on the inside of the broken window, took the book, and tied the door shut with a length of rope. It would be one of the things for which he would ask her forgiveness the moment he saw her. One of many.

About to mount the mule, he paused and opened the book at the place marked by the ribbon. He discovered a small, unfamiliar flower, its blossom pressed flat, most of the yellow gone. He swallowed.

The poem was "Ode to Solitude." Gus had bracketed four lines with delicate strokes of an inked pen.

He cursed and shut the book. A shudder ran down his spine. He booted the mule all the way into Fredericksburg.

Although most of the population had come back, he saw few signs that repair of the destruction had begun. He inquired at two stores, without success. The proprietor of the third, a hefty butcher, gave him some information after he introduced himself.

"She let both her free nigras go. The younger, Boz, passed through town and told me. A few nights later, she disappeared without a word to anybody. That made me recall she had come in the day before and settled her account."

"How long ago was all this?"

"Several months."

"And you haven't seen her since?"

"That's right."

"But where the hell did she go?"

"Who do you think you're talking to, soldier? I'm a Union man." His hand slid across the moist red block to a boning knife. "I were you, I'd be more polite to the people that whipped you, else they might do it again."

Reddening, Charles restrained his anger. "I'm sorry. It's just that I rode a long way to find her."

The butcher saw his opportunity and smirked. "Maybe she didn't want you to find her. Ever think of that? Mrs. Barclay left her place without telling a soul in Fredericksburg or the county where she was headed. You don't believe me, you ask anybody."

He picked up his cleaver and began chopping a slab of faintly shiny meat with hard, swift strokes. Charles walked out, leaving a trail of boot prints in the sawdust. He leaned on the store front, stricken by the truth in the butcher's nastiness.

She hadn't wanted him to come back, else she would have waited. Or at least left word of her destination. Instead, she left a poem about death. The end of everything. He understood the positioning of the ribbon and the inked brackets. They were meant for him.

He walked around the iron hitching post, rested a hand on his worn saddle, and said something broken-sounding under his breath. The mule flicked his ears. Flies landed anyway. The pain, the uncertainty of loss, beat at Charles harder and harder by the second. He didn't try to quell the feelings. He couldn't have done it if he had wanted.

141

The corporal in charge of the two-man detail hailed from Illinois. He had been educated at Indiana Asbury, a tiny college in the next state, then returned to Danville, the home town of Mr. Lincoln's great companion Ward Latnon, where he taught in a one-room school for two years before mustering for war. He was twenty-four. The private helping him was four years younger. Their detail was one of many assigned to sift through the rubble of Richmond, with shovels and by hand, to locate and retrieve any unburned government documents.

The corporal and the private worked in the skeletal ruins of what had been a warehouse. Part of the roof remained, and two walls. The soldiers started early each day; this morning there was a slight fog, not yet burned off. The sun shafts around the fragment of roof seemed to hold smoke.

"Here's a box hardly touched, Sid," the private said. In this part of the warehouse yesterday they had discovered batches of undelivered letters, most of them at least partly scorched. When they pried open the new box, they found bundles that appeared untouched.

Since their assignment was to recover and mark any mail that could be forwarded, they thought their search, thankless thus far, had finally borne fruit. They were disappointed. The private showed Sid the top letter of a stack he was holding.

"Must've had a heavy rain. Guess the box leaked. Spoilt the address."

The corporal studied the letter. Saw faint handwriting indecipherable because of blots and water streaks.

"The rest like that?"

The private fanned the stack. "Ever' one."

Pleased, Sid said, "Then I guess we should open them. The address might be repeated before the salutation." That was an excuse; he was bored and wanted to sit down awhile. Opening mail beat pawing through wet ashes that stuck to your uniform and made it stink.

Besides, reading the mail of strangers appealed to his sense of drama. He had always loved Othello and Romeo and Juliet and the novels of Dickens. He dreamed of writing a piece of fiction of his own one of these days. Might be some stories worth remembering in these letters.

They sat on fallen beams and opened them one by one. The private did it mechanically, unmoved by anything he read. Sid rapidly grew disgusted. Contrary to his expectations, he found little except bad spelling, worse grammar, and fragmentary, wholly uninteresting observations about homesickness, mother's dearly remembered cooking, or the absolute perfection of every girl to whom a letter was addressed. In twenty minutes he was bored again. But orders were orders.

An hour had passed when he sat up suddenly. "Hold on, here's an interesting one. Signed J. B. Duncan — one of our own officers."

He showed the private the abbreviations and initials following the name. "Brigadier General, United States Volunteers. But it's addressed to someone he calls 'My dear Major Main.' You suppose that's a reb, Chauncey?"

"Pretty likely if the letter's here, don't you think?"

Sid nodded. "Seems to concern some female named Augusta — Oh, my Lord, listen to this. She became pregnant with your child, and although she knew of her condition at the time of your last visit, she would say nothing not wishing to exert moral coercion —" With new enthusiasm, Sid said, "This is an educated man. Telling quite a story."

"Sounds like a hot one," Chauncey observed.

Sid kept reading. "The pregnancy was fully as difficult, not to say dangerous, as that which occurred while she was married to Mr. Barclay. You know the unfortunate outcome that time, I believe. Fearing for her well-being and also her safety on that isolated farm where she foolishly remained throughout much of the worst fighting, I arranged to smuggle my niece over the Potomac and on to my present home in Washington. Here, on December 23 last, she delivered your son, a fine healthy infant to whom she gave the name Charles. But I regret to say the birth —"

The corporal's voice had dropped. He shot the private a melancholy look.

"What's wrong, Sid?"

"... the birth was not without its tragic aspect. One hour after delivering poor Augusta succumbed. She passed away with your name upon her lips. I know she loved you more than life itself, for she told me so."

Sid wiped his nose. "My God." He went on. "I have written twice before and paid to have each missive borne to Richmond by private messenger. I hasten to write yet a third time because I know postal service is disrupted, and I wish to do all that I can to make certain at least one of the letters reaches you. Regrettably, each letter bears the skimpiest of addresses, but I have none better."

A gulp of breath. "New paragraph. The divisive holocaust, perhaps ordained by God but tragic for His children nonetheless, shows every aspect of an imminent conclusion. When it is over, it is your right to claim your son. I will keep him, providing proper care, until you come for him, or, if you do not, for as long as is practicable for an old bachelor bent upon continuing his military career. I bear you no enmity. I pray this finds you whole and glad of the good portion of my news. Respectfully —"

Sid rested the last sheet on his knee. "That's all except for the signature."

"That ought to be delivered for sure," Chauncey said. He was subdued now, sitting motionless in a smoky shaft of light.

"Yes." The corporal thrust the envelope into the sun. Tilted and peered at it. "Hello, that's better. Here's the name again. Main. And the word Major. The first name's gone, along with the address. Still, that may be enough."

He folded the two pages, replaced them in the envelope, and slipped it in his pocket. "I'll bring this one to the lieutenant's attention myself."

"Good," said Chauncey, staring at Sid. Sid stared back. When the government of that damned Davis had torched so many of its records, how did you find one reb soldier among the hundreds of thousands wandering homeward on the roads of the South — or lying dead in mass graves, thickets, fields, from Virginia and the Pennsylvania mountains to the bluffs of Vicksburg and the hills of Arkansas?

Both knew you didn't; not easily. Sid would try, but he felt it was hopeless.

142

After leaving Fredericksburg, Charles wandered aimlessly for three days. Lay rigid each night, unable to sleep. Lost his temper without provocation and almost got knifed for it in another way­side tavern. Wanted to cry and could not.

In the scarred country above the Rapidan, he came to a four-way crossroads and dismounted. While the mule cropped grass, he took off his gypsy robe and lay down at the roadside. He hoped the mule kept eating for hours. He had no destination. No reason to go on.

Out of the bright north, three men approached on foot. All three wore filthy remnants of butternut uniforms. One, a towhead of eighteen or nineteen, hobbled on a handmade crutch. His right leg ended in a stump three inches above the road.

He was the one who greeted Charles with a wave and a smile. "Howdy. You're one of our boys, aren't you?"

Charles took the cigar out of his mouth. "I'm not one of anybody's boys anymore."

Giving him surly stares, the soldiers muttered among themselves, swung to the other side of the road, and continued on south. To homes that probably don't exist any longer, Charles thought.

Down the road, he heard noises suggesting a vehicle. He turned on his left elbow, squinted, saw the soldiers pass a group coming the other way. The soldiers went by without speaking. The group consisted of four people: a man, a woman, and two small girls. Black.

When they came closer, he saw their clothes were clean but threadbare. The cart, which carried the girls and some possessions bundled in croker sacks, had solid wheels but otherwise looked flimsy, obviously built by someone not trained as a wheelwright.

Nor did the family own an animal. The father pulled the cart. The mother walked barefoot beside him.

Yet neither parent seemed unhappy. They smiled and sang right along with their children. The mother and two girls clapped the beat. Charles stared at them as they started to go by. The sight of him reclining in the grass made them tense. The singing softened. He could hear no words except one: "Jubilo."

A grimace twisted his mouth. The father took note of that and of Charles's gray shirt. He took a firmer grip on the handles of the cart, pulling it as quickly as he could through the crossroads and away down the northern road. The children looked back at Charles, but not the adults.

Too tired and despondent to move, he tethered the mule to a tree branch. He wriggled back against the trunk, intending to doze a few minutes. There was no hurry about anything. She was gone for good.

He woke with a start. The slant of the light told him it was late afternoon. Something hanging above him tickled his face.

Half the tether, still tied to a branch. It had been chewed apart. The mule was gone, saddle gear and all. Luckily he still had his army Colt in the holster.

From the crossroads, he walked about half a mile in each of four directions. The road to the west faded away around a bend; the western landscape blended into the backdrop of the Blue Ridge. He stared at the mountains a moment, recalling his fondness for Texas.

He trudged back to the crossroads. No sign of the mule anywhere. Damn.

The sun slanted lower, casting spears of light between thick trees at the southwest corner of the crossroads. Charles started suddenly. Out toward the Shenandoah, past the woodlands, he heard a wailing rebel yell —

He shook his head. It was only the whistle of a train speeding through the countryside. A Yankee-operated train, more than likely. They had so many of them. And so many guns. And so many men who had come out of mills and stockyards and barns and offices and saloons to make war as nobody had ever made war before.

He walked into the center of the empty crossroads and surveyed it, and then the dead, empty land. For one strange moment, he felt as if all of the might of the Union had been directed against him personally.

It had beaten him, too.

He stood at the crossroads in the lowering dusk, tired desperation in his eyes. He just wanted to lie down. Stop. For good.

But pictures kept intruding. The Bible salesman he had met in Goldsboro who said they wanted cavalrymen on the plains. He had the right experience. It would be a way to survive. Start over. Maybe find a scrap of hope someday.

Hope in a world like this? Stupid idea. He'd do better to lie down in the roadside grass and never get up.

But more pictures came. Men with whom he had served. Ab Woolner. Calbraith Butler. Wade Hampton. Lee — imagine how he must have felt, once the superintendent of West Point and the country's finest soldier, forced to ask a fellow Academy graduate for terms. They said Old Marse Bob had conducted himself with dignity, rebuffing a few hotheads who wanted to continue guerrilla war from the hills and woodlands.

Although the men Charles remembered had, in his opinion, fought for the wrong reasons, they weren't quitters. Gus wasn't a quitter either. He dwelled on her memory awhile. It summoned a detail he had forgotten. A name.

Brigadier Duncan.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Gus had unmistakably signaled that their love affair was over, but he could at least satisfy himself as to her whereabouts and her well-being. Duncan might be able to help, if Charles could locate him.

Only one place to start. Not the safest place, either. But he didn't worry too much, because suddenly recalling Duncan infused him with the kind of energy he hadn't felt in a long time. His head started to clear, and his chin came up. Still a lot of daylight left. He had time to walk awhile. He picked up the gypsy robe and left the crossroads, northbound.

In half an hour he caught up with the black family, resting at the roadside. The moment the adults recognized him, they looked alarmed. Stopping in the center of the road, Charles took off his hat and tried to smile. It came hard. It had nothing to do with who or what they were. It just came hard.

"Evening."

"Evening," the father said.

Less suspicious than her husband, the woman said, "Are you going north?"

"Washington."

"That's where we're going. Would you like to sit down and rest?"

"Yes, I would, thank you." He did. One of the girls giggled and smiled at him. "I lost my mule. I'm pretty tired."

At last the father smiled. "I was born tired, but lately I've been feeling better."

Charles wished he could say the same. "If you're willing, I'll be glad to help you pull that cart."

"You're a soldier." He didn't mean a Union soldier.

"Was," Charles said. "Was."

143

Brigadier Jack Duncan, a stocky officer with crinkly gray hair, a drink-mottled nose, and a jaw like a short horizontal line, strode into the War Department, shoulders back, left hand resting on the hilt of his gleaming dress sword. When he emerged half an hour later, he was beaming.

He had enjoyed a brief but highly satisfactory chat with Mr. Stanton, who commended him for his performance of Washington staff work throughout the war and for his patience when repeated requests for field duty were denied because General Halleck wanted his administrative skills. Now, with the war concluded, his wish could be honored. Duncan had new orders and travel vouchers in his pocket.

He was being posted to the plains cavalry, where experienced men were needed to confront and overcome the Indian threat. He was to depart immediately, and would not even see the grand parade of Grant's army, scheduled for a few days hence. Special reviewing platforms and miles of patriotic bunting were already in place for the event.

Musing on how it would feel to ride regularly again — for the past couple of years, he had managed only an occasional Sunday canter along Rock Creek on some livery-stable plug — the brigadier prepared to cross crowded, noisy Pennsylvania Avenue. He noticed a slender, tough-looking fellow with a long beard, cadet gray shirt, and holstered army Colt. Obviously nervous, the man chewed a cigar and studied the building Duncan had just left.

The stride — better, the swagger — suggested the man might be a cavalryman. A reb, to judge from his shirt and threadbare appearance. Union boys were keeping themselves trim and neat in preparation for the grand review.

There seemed to be hundreds of ex-Confederates swarming around town, though if that wild-looking specimen had indeed fought on the other side, he was risking a lot carrying a side arm. Stepping off the walk, Duncan nimbly dodged a dray, then an omnibus, and forgot about the man. There was really just one reb with whom he was concerned: a brevetted major named Main.

Would he ever hear from the fellow? He was beginning to doubt it. He had written three letters, paid exorbitantly to have each smuggled to Richmond, and received no answer to any of them. It seemed likely that Main was dead.

In a guilty way, the brigadier was grateful for the silence. Of course Main deserved to have his son with him. But Duncan was enjoying the responsibility of caring for young Charles. He had his housekeeper and more recently had hired a fine Irish girl to wet-nurse the infant and take care of certain other odious duties.

She was expert at her job. The housekeeper must be given notice and a month's wages — no, two, he decided — but Duncan had obtained the Irish girl's promise that she would accompany him to any new post where duty took him. She might well refuse to go out among the Indians, however.

If she did, he would find someone else. He was determined to take the child with him. Being a great-uncle and de facto parent had added an unexpectedly rich dimension to Duncan's lifelong bachelorhood. The one girl he had adored as a young man had died of consumption before they could be married, and none other had ever been fine or sweet enough to replace her. Now the void where love belonged was filled again.

He soon reached the small rented house a few blocks from the avenue. Jaunty as a boy, he took the steps two at a time and roared through the door into the dim lower hall.

"Maureen? Where's my grandnephew? Bring him here. I have splendid news. We're leaving town tonight."

Few things in life had ever intimidated Charles. For a day or two, the newness of West Point had. Sharpsburg had. Washington did now. So many damn Yankees. Whether soldier or civilian, most were hostile as reptiles when he asked a polite question in his distinctly Southern voice. The bunting everywhere depressed him further by reminding him of defeat. He felt like some scruffy animal just out of the woods and surrounded by hunters.

With an air of confidence he didn't feel, he walked through President's Park and up the steps of the War Department. He had left his gypsy cloak at the squalid island rooming house and fastened the throat button of his faded cadet gray shirt for neatness, though the effect was lost because of his chest-length beard. Nothing could do much to improve his wolfish appearance, and he knew it.

Nervously fiddling with a fresh cigar, he entered the ground-floor lobby and walked through the first open doors he saw. In a large room, he found a great many noncommissioned soldiers and civilian clerks shuffling piles of paper at desks on the other side of a counter. This was worse than setting yourself up for battle.

But he had to go through with it. Any humiliation or scrap was worth it, if only he could find Duncan and satisfy himself about Gus.

One of the clerks in blue, bald as the knob of a cane although he barely looked thirty, approached the counter after making Charles wait three minutes. The clerk stroked his huge oiled mustaches, first the right, then the left, as he scrutinized the lean visitor.

The clerk took note of Charles's patched shirt of cadet gray. He eyed the army Colt and the cigar held between wind-browned thumb and forefinger almost as if it were a second weapon. He found the visitor vaguely menacing and barely worth the time of an offhand "Yes?"

"I'm trying to locate an army officer. Is this the right place for —"

"Haven't you got the wrong city?" the clerk broke in. He had reacted visibly before Charles finished his first sentence. "The United States War Department maintains no files on rebels. And in case no one's told you, if you were paroled, you're carrying that gun illegally." He turned away.

"Excuse me," Charles said. "The officer belongs to your army." As the words came out, he knew it was a bad slip, caused by nerves. He had confirmed his former loyalty. Tense, he continued, "His name is —"

"I am afraid we can't help you. We aren't in business to look up records for every paroled traitor who walks in the door."

"Private," Charles said, seething, "I am asking you as politely as I know how. I need help. It's urgent that I find this man. If you'll just tell me which office —"

"No one in this building can help you," the clerk retorted loudly. The raised heads, suspended pens, sharp stares said he spoke for all those in the room. "Why don't you go ask Jeff Davis? They locked him up in Fort Monroe this morning."

"I'm not interested in the whereabouts of Jeff —" Again the clerk turned away.

Charles dropped his cigar, shot his hand across the counter and grabbed the clerk's collar. "Listen to me, damn you."

Consternation. Men running. Shouts — Charles's the loudest. "You can at least do me the courtesy of —"

Voices:

"He has a gun."

"Take it away from him."

"Watch out, he might —"

In the confusion, hands seized him from behind. Two other noncoms, one formidably large, had dashed around the end of the counter. "You'd better get out of here, boy," the big man said while the clerk puffed out his cheeks in a series of gasps, to demonstrate his outrage. He fingered his collar as if it had been permanently soiled. "Start trouble and you'll have your lunch in Old Capitol Prison. Maybe your Christmas dinner, too."

Charles wrenched free of their hands, glaring. They weren't hostile — at least the big one wasn't — but they were determined. His impulse was to start throwing punches. Behind him, in the lobby, spectators had gathered. He heard the questions and muttering as the big noncom gripped his arm.

"Come on, reb. Be sensible. Hightail it before —"

"What the devil is going on here?"

The barked words sent the noncoms to attention. They released Charles, who turned to see a stern, middle-aged officer with white hair and three fingers of his right hand missing. One shoulder of his dark blue coat-cloak was thrown back far enough to show an epaulet with an eagle of silver embroidery.

"Colonel," the clerk began, "this reb marched in here and made insulting demands. He wouldn't accept a polite refusal. Instead, he tried —"

The words went whirling away through Charles's mind, unheard as he stared at the Union officer and saw a farm in northern Virginia, in another year, in another lifetime.

"What is it exactly that he demanded?" the officer said with an angry glance at Charles, then a second, swift and astonished, one. My God, Charles thought, he isn't an old man at all. He only looks it.

His voice unexpectedly hoarse, he said, "Prevo?"

"That's right. I remember you. Hampton's cavalry. West Point before that."

Someone in the office mumbled, "Oh, we're to have an Academy reunion, are we?"

Prevo's glance silenced the speaker. Then, more temperately, he said to Charles, "What's the trouble here?"

"I came to ask for help. I desperately need to locate a Brigadier Duncan in the Union Army."

"Nothing so hard about that," Prevo said, his eye and his testiness directed toward the flushed clerk. "However, you shouldn't walk around with that revolver. Especially in this building. Take it off and give it to me, and we'll see what we can do."

Calming, Charles unfastened his gun belt. Prevo buckled it and hung it over his shoulder. To the bald clerk he said, "I want your name, soldier. Why didn't you do the decent thing and direct this man to the personnel clerks in the adjutant general's office?" To Charles: "They would have the brigadier's current address. I don't know him."

"Sir," the clerk stammered, "I explained — This man's a reb. Look at him. Arrogant, dirty —"

"Shut your mouth," Prevo said. "The war's over. It's time to quit fighting. Generals Grant and Lee seem to have assimilated that fact, even if you can't."

The humiliated clerk stared at the floor. To the big noncom, Colonel Prevo said, "I want his name on my desk in an hour."

"Yes, sir."

"Come on, Main. I remember your name now, too. I'll show you to the right office." As they started out, he paused and pointed to the counter. "I think you dropped your cigar."

The lobby crowd dispersed, though Charles continued to draw stares as he and Prevo walked up to the next floor. "Thank you, Prevo," Charles said. "I recognized you right away. Georgetown Mounted Dragoons —"

"And several other units since. Every one was decimated in Virginia, so they finally retired me to duty here. I'll be out in a couple of months. Here we go — turn right. We'll soon know the whereabouts of this General Duncan."

"I'm immensely grateful, Prevo. I really do need to see him about a serious matter."

"Professional?"

"Personal."

Prevo paused at a closed door. "Well, here's the office. Let's see what we can do." All of the wrinkles in his exhausted face moved when he tried to smile. "Even though I only lasted my plebe year, I have fond memories of the Academy. And the Academy does take care of its own. By the way — are you in a rush?" "No. Finding Duncan is important, but there's no hurry." "Excellent. I'll buy you a drink afterward. And," he added, lowering his voice, "return your gun." He opened the door as effortlessly as if he had all his fingers instead of one and a thumb.

144

Maureen, the plump, potato-plain young woman, brought the baby from the kitchen in response to Duncan's shout. The infant had been resting on a blanket in a patch of sunshine while Maureen opened pea pods for the evening meal. He had dark hair and a merry round face and wore a tiny shirt, trousers, and snug slippers, all of navy blue flannel. Maureen had sewn the garments herself.

"You say tonight, sir? Where are we going?"

The infant recognized his great-uncle and cooed when the brigadier swung him expertly into the curve of his left arm. "To the frontier — to see red Indians.'' Anxiously: "Will you still come along?"

"Indeed I will, General. I have read about the West. There is great opportunity there — and not nearly so much crowding as here in the East."

To ensure the arrangement, he added with a cagey smile, "Also, in the United States Cavalry there are many men of good character — single men — desirous of finding attractive, decent young women to marry."

Maureen's eyes sparkled. "Yes, sir. I have read that, too."

Mrs. Caldwell, the buxom, middle-aged housekeeper, came downstairs as the brigadier held out his right index finger. "Ah, sir, it is you. I was in the attic, but I thought I heard you arrive."

"Only to announce a permanent departure, this very evening." While he said that, Maureen wiped the extended finger with her apron. Duncan then put the finger into the baby's mouth. Up came one small, clutching hand, to find the knuckle and close.

Duncan explained matters to his housekeeper and entertained the baby at the same time. White spots, hints of teeth, had appeared on the infant's gums, and he loved teething on the brigadier's finger. He chewed it hard, grimacing and drooling happily.

"Then it's a promotion, is it, sir?"

"Yes, Mrs. Caldwell."

"My most sincere congratulations." She touched a corner of one eye. "I shall be sorry to see you go. The past five years have passed swiftly. And pleasurably, I might add."

"Thank you. Now we must discuss your future."

Mrs. Caldwell was happy about the generous settlement and even found a positive side to the sudden departure. "My widowed sister in Alexandria has been begging me to come for a visit. I may stay a week or two —"

"By all means. I can handle storage of the furniture and close out the lease by letter. We needn't bother with those things today. We have quite enough to do."

"What time is your train, General?"

"Six sharp."

"Then I'll definitely go to my sister's this evening. I'll hire a cab."

"Take the horse and buggy. I make you a present of it. I won't be needing it again."

"Oh, sir, that's extremely generous —"

"No more so than you have been," he said, remembering certain nights, lonely for both of them, when she was far more than a conventional housekeeper. Their gazes met, held a moment. Then, blushing, she looked elsewhere.

"You must at least permit me to drive you to the depot," she said.

"No, we'll hire a cab. That way, you can reach your sister's before dark."

"Very well, sir. Will you excuse me so I can see to your packing?" A great deal of it had to be squeezed into the next few hours.

But even little Charles seemed to approve of the abrupt redirection of their lives. He chewed harder than ever on his great-uncle's finger.

Charles continued to draw stares in Willard's saloon bar, but Prevo's presence forestalled trouble. The gun belt on the table had some effect as well.

They started with a whiskey each. That led to three more as the hours slipped by in an increasingly pleasant and easygoing exchange of reminiscences. Charles felt a euphoria of a kind he hadn't experienced since before Sharpsburg. Not only did he have Duncan's address on a slip of paper in his pocket, but it was in Washington, close by. The brigadier had been on the general staff throughout the war.

Slightly bleary, Prevo held his pocket watch near his face. "I have an appointment back at the department at a quarter past five. That leaves us twenty minutes for one farewell drink. Game?"

"Absolutely. Then I'll take a leisurely stroll to Duncan's." Prevo nodded, signaling the waiter. Charles went on, "Having another gives me a chance to mention something that bothered me for a long time. I'm also just drunk enough."

Puzzled, the colonel smiled and waited.

"You recall the day we met? I gave you my word that the female smuggler wasn't in the house."

The colonel nodded. "Your word as an officer and West Point man. I accepted it."

"But what I said was a trick. Oh, I was telling the strict truth. She wasn't in the house —" The waiter arrived with two fresh drinks. Charles waited until he set them down and left. "She was hiding in the woods."

"I know."

Glass at his lips, Charles started so hard he spewed a spray of whiskey, some of which landed on Prevo. The colonel produced a handkerchief and used it, explaining, "I spied the buggy. Fortunately, none of my men did."

Charles put the glass down. Shook his head. "I don't understand. Why —?"

"I had to pursue her, but nothing said I had to catch her. I didn't like making war on women, and I still don't."

With an owlish blink, Charles replied, "Damn shame some of your boys didn't feel the same way. Sherman and his stinking bummers. The damage done to South Carolina went beyond all bounds of —"

Abruptly, he stopped. A new flintiness showed in Prevo's eyes.

He hadn't touched his whiskey. Charles drew a hand across his mouth.

"I apologize. What you told that clerk applies to me, too. The war's over. Sometimes I forget."

Prevo glanced at his mutilated right hand, resting beside his glass. "So do I, Charles. We all paid. We'll all remember for years."

At ten past five, on the street outside the hotel, they parted with a firm handshake, friends.

At the Baltimore & Ohio terminal on New Jersey Avenue, amid a great crowd of departing passengers, Brigadier Duncun and Maureen, carrying the baby, boarded the cars. Duncan settled the Irish girl in her seat in second class — he had first-class accommodations — then returned to the platform to find his porter and make certain every piece of luggage was loaded.

The platform clock showed 5:35 p.m.

145

Studying house numbers, Charles moved along the block with a slight unsteadiness left over from Willard's. Should be one of these, he thought, a second before his eye fell on the tin numeral matching that written on the paper. Something choked in his throat a moment, and he began to sober quickly.

The house had a dark, abandoned appearance. Every drapery closed. No lights showing in the spring dusk. Panicky, he bounded up the steps to the door, knocking hard.

"Hello? Anyone in there?" What if he's moved? What if I can't find him? "Hello?"

More pounding, attracting the unfriendly notice of a couple rocking on their porch across the street. Behind the house, he heard sounds. Wheels and traces, a horse. He ran to the end of the porch just as a buggy passed, driven by a stout middle-aged woman with a portmanteau on the seat beside her.

"Ma'am? May I speak to you?" A glance had told him the buggy had come from the shed in back of the house.

She turned her head, eyes widening at the sight of the bearded, threatening figure leaning over the porch rail. Mrs. Caldwell's instinctive reaction was fright. She whipped up the horse.

"Wait! I have to ask you something —"

She turned into the street. Charles vaulted over the rail, landed in the side drive with a jolt, raced in pursuit of the buggy, which was gathering speed. The man and woman rose from their rockers, their expressions showing fear of the deranged-looking man chasing the vehicle.

Panting, Charles pumped his arms until he drew abreast of the buggy. "Please stop. It's urgent that I locate —"

"Get away from me!" Mrs. Caldwell flailed at him with the buggy whip, stung his cheek. Charles's instinct for defense took over. He shot his hand across to clamp and drag on her wrist.

"Stop! I don't mean you any harm, but —"

Struggling with him, she was forced to rein the buggy to a halt. "The law," she cried. "Someone call the law."

"Damn it, woman, listen to me," Charles said, breathing hard. "I need to find General Duncan."

Releasing her, he stepped back. The whip in her right hand shook, but she acted less alarmed. "I didn't mean to scare you — I apologize for grabbing you that way. But it's extremely important that I locate the brigadier. That's his house back there, isn't it?"

Guardedly: "It was."

"Was?"

"The general has left for a new military post."

Charles's stomach knotted. "When?"

"He is at the B & O station at this moment, departing at six. Now, sir, I insist on knowing who you are and the reason for this alleged urgency."

"Six," Charles repeated. "It must be almost that now —"

"Your name, sir, or I shall drive on immediately."

"Charles Main."

She acted as if he'd hit her. "Late of the Confederate Army?" He nodded, thinking. "Then you are the one —"

"Move over," he said suddenly, climbing up and practically shoving her to the far side of the seat. "Better hold the rail. I'm going to catch that train. Hah!"

He slapped the reins over the horse. Mrs. Caldwell screeched, clutching both her hat and the rail as the buggy shot forward like a bolt released from a crossbow.

Mrs. Caldwell was convinced she would die on the breakneck ride to the depot. The bearded man, the one Brigadier Duncan had sought so diligently, then given up for lost or dead, rammed the buggy through impossibly narrow spaces in evening traffic, causing pedestrians to scatter, hackney drivers to swear, dray horses to rear up and whinny. Rounding the corner into New Jersey, driver and passenger saw a water wagon looming ahead. Charles hauled on the reins, braked, veered, and stood the buggy on its left wheels for a moment. Mrs. Caldwell uttered a scream as the right ones came crashing down, the buggy missing the back end of the water wagon by inches.

Axles howling, wheel hubs smoking, the buggy jerked to a stop directly in front of the station, whose outdoor clock showed a minute after six. Leaping out, Charles flung the reins at the stunned woman, remembering to shout, "Thank you." He plunged into the depot like a distance runner.

''Train for Baltimore?" he yelled at a uniformed man rolling an iron gate shut.

"Just left," the man said, pointing down the platform toward an observation car receding behind billows of steam. Charles turned sideways to squeeze through the opening. "Here, you can't —

Almost at once, he had three station officials in pursuit. They were older and in poor condition; he was lean and desperate. Still, his lungs quickly began to hurt from the exertion. And he was losing the race. The train was already out of the roofed shed.

He saw the end of the passenger platform ahead. It was too late to brake his momentum. He jumped for the tracks.

He landed crookedly. His wounded leg twisted, hurling him onto the ties. "Get that man!" one of the pursuers howled.

Hurt and panting, Charles pushed up, gained his feet, and ran again, harder than he had ever run in his life. His beard flew over his shoulder. He thought of Sport. Sport could do it. Sport would have the stamina —

That drove him to greater effort. He came within a hand's length of the rear car. Reached for the handrail of the steps. Missed his stride again and almost fell — The rail receded. Concentrating on a memory of Gus's face, he put everything into a last long step.

He caught hold of the step rail with both hands. The train dragged him, his boots bouncing and bumping. He kicked upward with both legs, knowing that if he didn't, his legs might be pulped under the train.

One boot slipped on the metal step. He nearly fell off. His wrists and forearms felt fiery, tortured by the strain. But he pulled —

Pulled —

Weak and gasping, he staggered upright on the rear platform, only to see the car door open and a broad-shouldered conductor step through, barring him. The trainman saw the pursuers staggering down the track, understood their shouts and gestures.

"Please," Charles said, "let me go inside."

"Get off this train."

"You don't understand. It's an emergency. One of your passengers —"

"Get off or I'll throw you off," the conductor said, starting to push. Charles lurched backward, his left boot finding just empty air above the second step. Frantically, he grabbed the handrail and only in that way kept himself from tumbling into space.

"Get off!" the conductor yelled, raising his hands for a second, final, shove. Something hard rammed the center of his vest. He looked down and went rigid at the sight of Charles's army Colt pressed into his stomach.

"You have ten seconds to stop this train."

"I can't possibly —"

Charles drew the hammer back to full cock.

'Ten seconds."

With a flurry of signal flags and alarm whistles, the train stopped.

146

Only Brigadier Duncan's intervention and influence prevented Charles's immediate arrest and imprisonment. At half past ten that night, the two men sat in the parlor of the reopened house, their faces grim as those of opponents still at war. The Irish wet nurse was upstairs with the child Charles had looked at twice, the second time with feelings of confusion and even revulsion. After returning from the depot, Duncan had told him the whole story, and Charles wished he hadn't.

The evening had grown sultry, with rumbles of an approaching storm in the northwest. His neck button still fastened, Charles sat in a plush chair, an untasted shot of whiskey on a small table to his right. His lamplit eyes looked dead. As dead as he felt inside.

Suddenly, with fury, he leaned forward. "Why didn't she tell me?"

"Major Main," the brigadier replied with icy correctness, "that is the third, possibly the fourth time you have asked the same question. She loved you very much — as I stated in the letters you never received. She grieved because the war had — damaged you, to use her phrase. Damaged you to the point where you mistakenly believed you could not continue your relationship with her. But my niece was a decent and honorable young woman." Unmistakably, there was the suggestion that Charles had neither of those characteristics.

Duncan continued, "She refused to hold her — condition as a club over your head. Now I shall not explain all that again. Indeed, I am beginning to regret you found me. I cannot understand your coldness toward your own flesh and blood."

"The baby killed her."

"There is indeed something wrong in your head, Main. Circumstance killed her. Her frailness killed her. She wanted the child. She wanted to bear your son — she named him after you. Do you seriously mean to tell me you want nothing to do with him?"

Anguished, Charles said, "I don't know."

"Well, I have no intention of remaining in Washington while you undertake your bizarre deliberations on the matter. I thought that if I ever found you, the reunion would be a joyous moment. It is anything but that."

"Give me just a little time —"

"Hardly worth my while, Major — having heard your remarks of a moment ago. I shall be on tomorrow evening's six o'clock express for Baltimore and the West. If you do not want your son, I do."

A dazed blink. "The West —?"

"Duty with the plains cavalry, if it's any of your affair. Now, if you will excuse me, I find this conversation odious. I shall retire." He stalked to the parlor door, where strained politeness made him pause and say, "There is an unused bedroom at the second floor rear. You may spend the night if you wish." Duncan's eyes flayed him. "Should your son cry out, you needn't trouble yourself. Maureen and I will look after him."

"Goddamn you, don't take that tone with me," Charles yelled, on his feet. "I loved her! I never loved anyone so much! I thought I should break things off for her sake, so I could do my job and she wouldn't worry constantly. Now if that's a crime in your estimation, the hell with you. When I stopped your train and found you inside, I didn't know I had a son. All I wanted was to learn where she is — was —"

"She is buried in the private cemetery in Georgetown. There is a marker. I shall ask you tomorrow, Major, before my departure, to give me your decision about young Charles."

''I can't. I don't know what it is."

"God pity any man who must say words like those."

The brigadier marched up the stairs. On the upper landing, he heard the front door slam, then a rumble of thunder, then silence. White light glittered through the house. Duncan raised his head as the hard pelting rain hit the roof. He heard no further sound from below.

With a shake of his head and a sudden sag of his shoulders, he continued to his room, a grieving and dismayed man.

Charles walked all the way to Georgetown in the lightning and thunder and rain. Knocking at a cottage, rousing the owners, he obtained directions to the private cemetery. The sleepy couple with the lamp were too frightened to deny him an answer. He was a hellish apparition on their wet porch, a nightmare man with furnace eyes and a soaked gray shirt and rain dripping from his beard and his holstered gun.

Hurrying on, he reached the cemetery in an interval of pitch darkness. He slipped in wet grass, falling forward and nearly impaling himself on the spikes of the low fence. On his knees next to it, he felt the metal. Wrought iron.

Was it Hazard's? He uttered a crazed laugh. He was losing his mind. Everything was slipping, fusing, jumbling together. He wanted to scream. He wanted to die.

He kicked the gate open and lurched into the cemetery, searching by lightning flash. Granite angels spread granite arms and granite wings, imploring him to heaven with granite eyes. No thank you, I'm at my proper destination already.

In the dark he stumbled repeatedly over low headstones or crashed painfully into cold marble. Jagged lightning ran through the sky. He saw a towering obelisk against the glare and a name carved huge on the pedestal. STARKWETHER.

After a long period of wandering one way, then another, he found the grave. The headstone was small and rectangular, with a slightly sloping top upon which Duncan had put her name and the years of her birth and death, nothing more.

Charles sank to his knees, every inch of him soaked by the rain that still poured down. He didn't feel it or the cold. Only the misery, the awful, mind-destroying misery. He knelt beside the grave, careful not to kneel on it, and without conscious volition closed his fists and began to beat them on his thighs.

He pounded harder. To hurt, to punish. The undersides of his fists ached, but he kept pounding. The thunder cannonaded like the guns at Sharpsburg. The lightning flashed again and again, revealing a spot of blood on the right leg of his pants. The rhythm of the pounding quickened.

What was he to do, now that he bore this guilt? What was he to do with the child for whom he was responsible, thereby making himself responsible for this headstone? What was he to do?

A short, strange cry came from his throat; animal grief. Then, deep inside, a force began to build, its outlet impossible to deny. He opened his throbbing fists. Raised his right hand to his wet face and felt beneath his eye. That was not rain.

He threw himself forward on the grave, wet body to wet earth, and for the first time since Sharpsburg, wept.

Charles kept vigil at Augusta Barclay's grave until well past dawn, when the storm abated. Shivering, teeth chattering, he walked the long distance back to the central part of town, reaching the brigadier's house about ten.

Exhausted from the physical and emotional strain of the night before, Duncan had slept late and was only just starting his breakfast when the unbelievably sorry sight named Charles Main appeared in the door of the dining room. From somewhere above came the bawling of Charles's son and Maureen's comforting voice in counterpoint.

Clenching his jaw, Duncan strove to control himself. It was difficult. Red-faced, he said, "Christ. What did you do, drink and wallow in some gutter all night long?"

It looked like it. Charles's right pants leg showed a large blood spot. Dirt clung to his beard and every part of his soaked shirt.

"I spent the night at her grave. I spent the night thinking of my son. Trying to decide what to do."

Slowly, Duncan straightened to his most erect posture, his back no longer touching the chair. His eyes were full of hostile challenge.

"Well?"

147

"Next stop Lehigh Station. Lehigh Station will be the next stop —"

The conductor's voice faded as he left the car. The local had pulled out of Bethlehem at half past six. That meant they should be stepping through Belvedere's front door in less than an hour. George was thankful; he was spent. So was Constance, to judge from the way she leaned against him, silent.

He occupied the seat beside the window, watching twilight burnish the river and the blue-mantled slopes on the western side. He turned to say something to his wife but didn't. Her eyes were closed, her head sagging forward, creating three rounded chins in place of one.

George's tired face smoothed out as he lovingly studied her. Then his eye was caught by movement beyond the window on the other side of the aisle. As the train slowed down before a curve, he saw a cemetery and, in the foreground, three rows of five crosses, new and white. The movement drawing his attention was that of two elderly workers shoveling earth onto an unseen coffin in an open grave. A middle-aged man and woman stood beside the grave, the man with something red and white folded in his crossed arms. A flag.

The cemetery disappeared. Carefully, George put his arm around Constance so as not to wake her. But he wanted the comfort of touching her.

He felt an immense surge of love for the plump woman dozing beside him. Love for her and for his children, whose lives he must begin to supervise again, changing from soldier back to father. Love was really all that had pulled him through the past four years, he reflected. His eyes drifted across the river again, to the profusion of mountain laurel on the hillsides. Nothing else will pull us through the years just ahead, either.

"— gone too fast. With too many changes."

"Oh, definitely. I'm sorry Lincoln was martyred, but he can certainly be faulted for his policies."

George frowned, overhearing the travelers in the seat immediately behind. The first speaker sounded old, his voice full of the cranky negativism that inevitable state too often produced. The second speaker, female, sounded young. It was she who continued.

"The darkies deserve their liberty, I suppose. But at that point it should stop."

"So far as I'm concerned, it does. Let any nigger try to step through my front door like a white man, and I'll be there to deny him with my old horse pistol."

The woman sighed. "Some of our politicians aren't as courageous as you. They're actually promoting the franchise for the colored."

"Ridiculous. Why would anyone encourage such a change in the order of things? It's insanity."

Having endorsed each other's convictions, they settled into a period of quiet, leaving George to meditate amid the smells of dusty upholstery and the overflowing spittoon at the head of the car. Now the western hills were higher, their summits intermittently blocking the direct rays of the low sun. Changing patterns of shadow and light flickered over his face as he pondered.

Changes indeed. He thought of the slain President, whose unbelievably stark photograph — a recent one — they had seen in a black-draped shop window after they docked in Philadelphia. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln's party had nominated him because he was the least-known, therefore least-offensive candidate available. A strong man with strong views might have stirred strong reactions, which was dangerous to any organized group in pursuit of votes.

But once in office — the furnace of war — Lincoln, like iron, had been heated and hammered, melted and molded and transformed into something wholly new. Out of the corn-country politician of unknown views, presumably safe views — or no views or insane views, depending on the speaker — there emerged with the aid of the pricking of conscience and the whipping of expedience a President who propounded a definition of freedom so new and sweeping the nation would be years finding and deciphering all its meanings.

Lincoln's burdens of party leadership, governmental leadership, war leadership wrought radical physical changes as well. They cut gullies in the pain-eroded landscape of his face and drowned his eyes in lakes of perpetual shadow. The photographic portrait in the Philadelphia shop barely resembled those of a few years earlier.

In the hearts of the black people of the nation, Lincoln had changed from a man to a god by means of his own pen stroke. But in one way, George reflected, the man had never changed at all. He remembered Executive Mansion aides gossiping that Lincoln often lost his patience and sometimes his good humor and on rare occasions his compassion for the enemy. But it seemed to George that the man had never lost sight of his own North Star. He loved humanity, Southern as well as Northern, with a great heart. But he loved the Union more.

To preserve it, he had sorrowfully led a people to war. He had suffered mental depression and haunted sleep, fought the demons of ineptitude and incompetence and innuendo, hectored and joked, preached and cajoled, dreamed and wept for it. And then he had been chosen as the last sacrifice at the site where its continuity had been assured: the blood altar.

At least Abraham Lincoln had known for five days that his North Star still shone bright and pure, above the cooling embers of fires first kindled in that long-lost spring George remembered vividly, frighteningly, to this hour. The Union stood — profoundly altered but fundamentally unchanged.

George recognized but couldn't fully understand the paradox. It was simply there, mighty, majestic, and mysterious, like the murdered President himself. It was there — Lincoln was there — and would be forever, George suspected.

Closing his eyes, he rested a moment. Then he drew a circle of thought of much smaller diameter and meditated on the changes within that.

Orry dead — and his widow making no secret that she was, at least in the strictest view of Southerners, a Negress. He had heard it first from his brother Billy, but Madeline had candidly discussed it before the Hazards left Mont Royal.

And Charles. Everyone agreed Charles had been burned out by the war. Become a sullen, angry man. Brett, by contrast, was eagerly anticipating motherhood and, amazingly, often sounded more like Virgilia than a Southerner.

Cooper occasionally displayed a new, almost reactionary streak, as if he had turned about and finally accepted the Southern inheritance his father had always wanted to bequeath to him, and he had scorned for such a long time. In Cooper's case, anyway, George could identify the causes of the transformation. Cooper had lost his son, and he was growing older. Age brought a man more conservative thoughts and opinions. As George well knew.

Billy's views about blacks had changed, too, although his plan for his life was one of the few things that hadn't. Saying good-bye to George in South Carolina — he had two more weeks of leave and planned to spend it working for and with the Mains — he had stated his intention to remain with the Army Engineers. Unless, of course, something impeded his advancement, in which case there was always that railroad construction he and George had discussed. Trains were the coming thing. People had a nickname to certify it. The iron horse.

How intimately the process of change accelerated by the war had touched all of them, and the country. How deeply it had affected them and the country. No one was spared, neither those who accepted it nor those who denied it. Witness the pair on whom he had eavesdropped. The hardening of attitudes was in itself a change, in response to change.

Why did so many deny the universal constancy of the process, he wondered. Through some quirk of temperament or upbringing, George had embraced it early, within the framework of the family business. He had been open to innovation and had fought Stanley, who was not. Gradually, his perceptions had widened until he saw the benefit — or at least the inevitability — of change outside the gates of Hazard's as well.

Why did people ignore the lessons of history and their own senses, deny a law of life immutable as the seasons, and erect twisted barriers against it in their minds? He didn't know why, but they did. They wept for the goodness of half-imaginary yesterdays, yesterdays beyond altering, instead of anticipating and helping to shape the good of possible tomorrows. They found things to blame for the flow of events they wanted to stop and could not. They blamed God, their wives, government, books, fanciful combinations of unnamed men — sometimes even voices in their own heads. They lived tortured and unhappy lives, trying to dam Niagara with a teacup.

But he doubted anyone could change people of that stamp They were the curse and burden of a race laboring forward up a mountain in half-darkness. They were — it brought a weary smile — constant as the very change they hated.

Which reminded him of a certain small but important change he wanted to make at Belvedere. Ever since finding the fragment of iron-rich meteorite in the hills above West Point, he had kept it on the library table as a symbol of the power and potency of the metal that had created the Hazard fortune, For many years he had been seduced by iron's wide application in weaponry, and thus by its potential to change the fate of nations, the globe itself.

But in Virginia, he had begun to think that a certain adjustment or balance was required. During the last four years, Americans had fallen on other Americans like ravening animals. The full impact of the blood-letting — the ultimate shock when all the casualties, tangible and otherwise, were at last enumerated — lay in the future. When the shock set in, it would not soon pass, he was convinced. So it was wise to prepare, identify a balancing force.

When they reached Belvedere, he surprised Constance by what he did immediately after he spent a half hour hugging and talking with his son and daughter. He went out through the kitchen and up the hill, bringing back a green sprig of laurel, which he laid beside the piece of star-iron in the library.

"I should like a fresh sprig to be kept there at all times," he said. "Where all of us can see it."

That same night, on the 6:00 p.m. train bound for the transfer point at Baltimore, Brigadier Duncan and Charles sat opposite each other in a first-class car. Charles hardly looked as though he belonged there, smoking cigars and wearing that disreputable rag robe. Duncan insisted they take time on the trip west to obtain a decent suit until he was issued a new uniform.

Several times since Charles's return from the cemetery, Duncan had tried to draw him out on the subject of his vigil, particularly the thoughts and emotions that had led to his decision. But it was impossible for Charles to describe or even be open about the various alternatives that had flowed through his mind during that long night of rain, uncertainty, guilt, despair.

There was the possibility of sailing for Egypt to serve in the khedive's army, as he had heard in a Washington barroom that some Confederate officers were doing. There was the possibility of taking to the hills to continue guerrilla action against the Yankees. There was going home and wasting away in drink and idleness.

There was suicide.

There was also the West, where Duncan was bound. He had always loved the West, and Duncan reiterated the need for cavalrymen out there. Charles was trained for nothing else.

But all of that was peripheral to the central issue he confronted during the vigil: Gus's death and his son's life. They were not separate but one, inextricably interlocked.

It was Gus who had shown him the way. At the grave he had remembered their best times together. Remembered her strength, her will. No miraculous transformation had occurred while the rain fell on him in Georgetown and washed against his own flooding tears. He had never hurt so badly as he did then and now, and he knew the uncertainty and pain would persist for a long time. But he had learned, keeping vigil with the guilt and grief undammed at last, one truth above all: he still loved Augusta Barclay beyond life itself. So he must love the boy. He must live for the boy as well as for her, because they were one.

Seeing Charles's somber expression as he stared out the window into the sunlit meadows of evening, Duncan frowned. He was not yet comfortable in the Confederate officer's presence and wondered if he ever would be. Further, he wondered if Charles understood the ramifications of his decision. While the train was passing through one of the many small hamlets dotting the right of way in Maryland — Charles saw two demolished houses and a shell-blasted barn — Duncan cleared his throat.

"You know, my boy, this duty you plan to take on — serving in the regular army again — it won't be easy for a man of your background."

That drew blood. Charles chewed hard on his unlit cigar stub.

"I went through the Academy the same way you did, General. I'm a professional. I changed uniforms once. I can change a second time. It's all one country again, isn't it?"

"That's true. Still, not everyone will treat you as we both would wish. I'm only trying to warn you against the inevitable. Discourtesies. Insults —"

In a hard voice, Charles said, "I'll handle it." A flash of sun­light between low hills illuminated his ravaged face, unsmiling.

Duncan looked up, gratefully. "Ah — here's Maureen —"

The wet nurse appeared in the aisle, gently cradling the baby she had brought from her seat in second class. "He's awake, General. I thought perhaps you might like —" She stopped, plainly uncertain about which man to address.

"Give him to me." Then, catching himself, Charles said in a gentler way, "Thank you, Maureen."

With extreme care, he took the bundled shape into his arms, while Duncan leaned across to raise the corner of blanket with which Maureen had covered the infant's face while carrying him between cars. Duncan beamed, the picture of the proud great-uncle.

The pink-faced child regarded his father with wide eyes. Awed and fearful of somehow damaging him, Charles tried a tentative smile. The younger Charles grimaced and bawled. "Rock him, for God's sake," Duncan said.

That worked. Charles had never rocked a child, but he quickly caught on. The train passed through fields where a farmer walked behind his mule and plow in the dying daylight, turning new earth.

"Frankly, my boy," Duncan said, "although I'm extremely pleased the three of us are here together and headed where we are, I continue to admit to some astonishment. I felt that if you took your son, you would undoubtedly want to return to South Carolina and raise him as a Southerner."

The father stared at the older man. "Charles is an American. That's how I'll raise him."

Duncan harrumphed to signify acceptance, if not understanding. "He has a middle name, by the way."

"You didn't tell me that."

"It slipped my mind. This has hardly been an ordinary day. His full name is Charles Augustus. My niece chose it just before —"

He pressed a closed hand to his lips. Remembering was hard for him, too, Charles realized.

"Before her confinement. She said she had always loved the nickname Gus."

Feeling tears, Charles blinked several times. He gazed down at his son, whose face had mysteriously reddened, and taken on a puzzling appearance of strain. Duncan peeked at the infant. "Oh, I think we shall need the assistance of Maureen. Excuse me while I fetch her."

He stepped into the aisle. With great care, Charles touched his son's chin. The baby reached out and grasped his index finger. He drew it into his mouth and gnawed vigorously.

Duncan had already lectured Charles about the need for cleanliness. So far today, he had scrubbed his hands three times — something of a record in his adult life. He wiggled his finger. Charles Augustus gurgled. Charles smiled. With all of his attention on his son, he didn't see the rail fence that suddenly appeared beside the track or the feasting buzzards disturbed by the train and swirling upward, away from the rotting remains of a black horse.