The Guns of the South

* XVI *

“You jus’ leave it all to me, Marse Robert,” John Dabney said. “I promise I take care of everythin’ for you, make your inauguration day special,”

Robert E. Lee liked that kind of talk, whether from a junior officer during the war or, as now, from a caterer. Smiling, he said, “I place myself entirely in your hands, John.”

The rotund Negro beamed. “Make me a raft o’ mint juleps for drinks. The Prince of Wales, he like my mint juleps, you know that, sir?”

“So I’ve heard, yes.” Now Lee kept a damper on his smile: Dabney told that story at any excuse, or none. But it was true; when the prince visited Richmond in 1860, he’d praised the colored man’s juleps to the skies. The renown that won Dabney helped him gain so many cooking and bartending jobs that he ‘d been able to buy himself and his wife their freedom. Before the end of the war, he’d started his own restaurant and catering service. Since then, no one who was anyone in Richmond would think of holding a large entertainment without his supervision.

Dabney’s eyes got a faraway look as he added some detail to the feast that would follow Lee’s installation as President. The Negro could neither read nor write; he had to carry in his head all the preparations for each of the banquets he had in progress. Nobody had ever known him to slip up on that account.

Lee went into the bedroom of his Powhatan House suite. There Julia and his daughters were helping Mary Custis Lee into her gown. “You look lovely, my dear,” he said. “That shade of creamy yellow is particularly becoming to you.”

“I wish I’d had the seamstress make a jacket to go with the dress,” his wife answered. “It’s a raw day out there.”

“Early March is apt to be,” Lee admitted, “Still, the sun is shining. If I’d chosen to be sworn in on Washington’s birthday, as President Davis did, rather than waiting until March 4, we should have displayed ourselves in Capitol Square in the midst of a snowstorm: hardly an edifying spectacle for the people.”

“Why did you decide to wait?” his daughter Mary asked. “With the family’s connection to Washington, I’d expected you to follow Davis’s lead.”

“I had two reasons. One was fear of the weather, which proved justified. The other was that the Constitution prescribes March 4 as the first day of a new President’s term, and I desire to observe scrupulously its every provision.” Lee reflected on his own hypocrisy. While following all the meaningless minutiae for his inauguration, he aimed to sidle around the much more Prominent Constitutional prohibitions against interfering with slavery.

He intensely disliked feeling like a hypocrite, which was both alien and repugnant to his nature. But a show of observance on small matters would help mask his deviation in great ones, and he was resolved to deviate. The success of a man like John Dabney pointed up the injustice of slavery as no abolitionist tract could. Aside from the caterer’s undoubted ability, that was one reason Lee had engaged him: if legislators saw a successful black man in action, they might be more inclined to allow other Negroes to seek the same road.

Mildred Lee fastened a last stay. “We’re ready, Father,” she said.

“Excellent. Then let us proceed.”

“I want a lap robe, lest I catch my death,” Mary Custis Lee declared.

“Fetch your mother a lap robe, and quickly,” Lee said, with a pointed glance at his watch. “The ceremony is to commence at half past eleven o’clock.”

Mildred draped the robe over her mother’s knees. “Is that fast enough to suit you?” she asked. “Or if I’d taken longer, would you have left without us, the way you used to march off to church by yourself sometimes when we were slow?”

Lee, whose natural sense of punctuality had been reinforced by more than thirty-five years of military discipline, said,” As well you didn’t expose me to the temptation.” Mildred stuck out her tongue at him. He made an effort at looking severe, but found he was smiling in spite of himself.

Julia started to push Mary Custis Lee’s chair, but Lee waved her away: this was a duty he would undertake himself. Rather than going out to the lobby of the Powhatan House, he headed for the hotel’s rear doorway, which opened right across from Capitol Square. His daughters walked proudly behind him, their wide skirts rustling as they glided down the hall.

Chill air smote. Lee’s breath puffed from him, as if he had suddenly taken up pipe smoking. His wife pulled the lap robe higher. “There; you see? I should have frozen,” she said.

Lee reached down to pat her shoulder. “I am glad you have it.”

Capitol Street and the paths through Capitol Square already swarmed with people making their way toward the covered wooden platform which had been erected under the statue of Washington. Marshals with drawn swords—and with AK-47s slung on their backs—briefly halted the tide to let Lee and his family cross. Before he and Albert Gallatin Brown were sworn in on that platform, other ceremonies awaited at the Confederate Capitol.

Marshals helped Lee wrestle his wife’s chair up the stairs to the flag-draped entrance to the Capitol. The chief marshal, a plump, superannuated colonel of ordnance named Charles Dimmock, saluted. “Mr. President-elect,” he boomed.

Lee inclined his head. “Mr. Chief Marshal.”

Congressman Sion Rogers of North Carolina bustled up to Lee. “Mr. President-elect, on behalf of the Joint Committee on Arrangements, it is my privilege to welcome you to the Congress of the Confederate States of America. If you and your charming family will please to come with me?”

He escorted the Lees into the chamber of the Virginia House of Delegates—the Virginia legislature continued to meet in the Capitol, along with the Confederate Congress. Congressmen, senators, members of the Virginia Senate and House, Virginia’s Governor Smith, several other state heads, judges, generals, and clergymen packed the hall, along with a goodly number of reporters. They converged on Lee until Colonel Dimmock interposed his formidable person between the throng and the President-elect.

The minister from the United States caught Lee’s eye. “Congratulations, General, or rather, Mr. President-elect.”

“Thank you, Mr. Pendleton,” Lee answered gravely. George Pendleton, a former congressman from Ohio, was a close friend to U.S. Vice President Vallandigham, and had favored peaceful accommodation with the South throughout the Second American Revolution. Lee added, “Let me applaud you on General Sheridan’s recent capture of Winnipeg. Your armies continue to perform very well, as does your ironclad fleet on the Great Lakes.”

“You are generous to a recent foe.” What Pendleton meant by that was thanks for forbearing to comment on the complete dominance of the British fleet on the high seas. Not only had Boston harbor been bombarded again, but a force of English marines had seized and burned San Francisco, then reembarked on their ships and departed before U.S. forces could do anything about it.

“If you will come with me, Mr. President-elect…” Congressman Rogers said. Lee obediently followed him to the front of the chamber. Jefferson and Varina Davis, Albert Gallatin Brown and his wife Roberta, and outgoing Vice President Alexander Stephens, a lifelong bachelor, were already standing there chatting. So were Lee’s three sons and Joseph Brown; Albert Gallatin Brown’s other son, Bob, captured at Gettysburg, had emerged from a Northern prison camp so weak that he had died a year after the war ended.

“There, you see, Mildred, we are the last to arrive,” Lee said. His youngest daughter only sniffed. He laughed a little; Mildred was incorrigible.

As he came up, he noticed that, while Varina Davis and Roberta Brown were talking animatedly, their husbands, longtime political foes in Mississippi, still had little to say to each other. “That is a lovely ring, Mrs. Davis,” Roberta Brown remarked. “May I see it more closely?”

Varina Davis extended a slim, shapely hand. “Mr. Davis gave it to me upon our engagement. A dozen small diamonds surround an emerald-cut sapphire.”

“Lovely,” Mrs. Brown said again. “The mounting is also very fine work.”

The talk broke off when Jefferson Davis saw Lee approaching and hurried up to shake his hand. Albert and Joseph Brown followed, as did Stephens and Lee’s own sons. Lee also bowed over the hands of Varina Davis and Roberta Brown. Jefferson Davis said, “I leave you a nation at peace and secure within its borders, sir. God grant that you may offer your successor a similar boon.”

Congressman Rogers, who wore a harassed expression, consulted a scrap of paper he carried in his left hand. “If you ladies and gentlemen will be so kind as to form a receiving line… First you, Mr. Vice President, then the Vice President-elect’s family, then Mr. Brown himself, then the President’s family and Mr. Davis, then the Lees, and finally General Lee himself in the place of honor at the end…” He repeated himself several times, and chivvied people about until he had them all where he wanted them.

Dignitaries began filing past, shaking hands and offering best wishes. Lee returned murmured words of thanks, which he wondered if they heard. Finally, Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas broke the routine. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s defeated running mate was a burly, broad-shouldered man, with a fierce countenance and a long, thick beard. He growled, “If you think you’re gonna turn the niggers loose, General Lee, you’ll do it only over my dead body.”

“I do hope it won’t come to that,” Lee said quietly—let Wigfall make of the answer what he would. The Texan stopped, stared, scowled, and, at last, forced by the crowd behind him, moved on.

Lee’s arm was tired and his hand sore when Congressman Rogers declared, “The hour now nears half past twelve o’clock. We shall proceed out through the east door of the Capitol to the platform in the following order: first, Chief Marshal Dimmock and his marshals; next, the band, which has—I hope—gathered by the east door; next, the members of the Joint Committee on Arrangements; next, the President-elect, attended by the outgoing President; next, the Vice President-elect, attended by the outgoing Vice President; next, the families of these officials; next, the members of the old and new Cabinets—excluding Mr. Davis, for obvious reasons—and their families, next…”

He went on for some time, marshaling his hosts like any good general. Senators and congressmen even lined up in columns of four. The press made up the rear of the procession, behind Masons and members of other benevolent societies but ahead of the generality of citizens.

The band began blaring “Dixie” as Lee made his way toward the east door—Congressman Rogers let out an audible sigh of relief to hear them. Lee remembered the last time he had left the Hall of Delegates. A band had played then, too, for he had just been invested with the command of the armed forces of a Virginia not yet even formally affiliated to the Confederate States of America. His step faltered for a moment as he thought of the changes he had been part of through the past seven years.

Outside, Colonel Dimmock was shouting at the generality of citizens who already crowded Capitol Square: “Make way for President Lee! Without the President, you don’t have a show. Make way, make way! Marshals, move them aside.”

The marshals did their best. Slowly, the procession began to advance. The journey to the base of Washington’s statue took three times as long as it should have. Lee fidgeted nervously as he went along at slow march. Jefferson Davis set a calming hand on his arm. “The crush does not matter, not today. As the good colonel said, without you we have no show.” Caught out like a small boy at some naughty act, Lee spread his hands in a show of guilt.

The band, still playing lustily, took its place to one side of the wooden platform after the marshals cleared away the numerous citizens who had thought the area ideal for viewing the inaugural ceremony. That only packed the rest of the square more tightly; crowds spilled out onto Ninth Street and Capitol Street, snarling traffic on both thoroughfares and creating a hubbub which, in both volume and intensity, seemed inappropriate to the celebration about to take place.

Having displaced the improperly situated spectators, the marshals spread out along the front of the platform. There were at most a dozen of them; it was no great show of force. Lee thought of Lincoln’s 1861 inaugural in a country coming apart, where sharpshooters peered from the windows of the U.S. Capitol and a battery of artillery remained just out of sight in case insurrection broke out without warning. No such fears disrupted the Confederate States, not today.

Lee and Jefferson Davis ascended to the platform. So did Alexander Stephens and Albert Gallatin Brown. The members of the Joint Committee on Arrangements already stood up there. Congressman Rogers had another list in his hand. “Yes, Bishop Johns, your place is up here, as is yours, of course, Judge Halyburton. Colonel Dimmock, you too, if you please, and the President of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and you, Governor Smith. For our other distinguished guests, we have seats waiting down here at the front.” He pointed to the rows of wooden chairs there, marked off by a gilded rope.

There was only one problem with those wooden chairs—not enough of them had been set out. Senators and members of the Virginia House of Delegates, reporters and congressmen and Cabinet members rowed like Kilkenny cats as they tried to stake out places to sit. Lee watched the unseemly spectacle for a couple of minutes, then turned to Charles Dimmock. “Mr. Chief Marshal, may I beg a favor and ask that my wife be brought up here? Given her infirmity, I fear she may not be altogether safe in that seething crowd.”

“I’ll see to it, sir.” Dimmock leaned over, called a couple of junior marshals to his side. The husky young men pushed their way through the squabbling dignitaries—seeing a minister pull a congressman’s beard, Lee wondered how many duels would arise from the day’s events—make their way to Mary Custis Lee, whom her children had protectively surrounded, and, with the help of her sons, got her and her chair onto the platform.

“Thank you, Robert,” she said. “This is much better for me.” A gust of wind tugged at her bonnet. She snatched up a hand to keep it from being blown away.

When all the chairs were taken and those unable to gain them had been banished beyond the pale of the gilded rope, the band, at a signal from Sion Rogers, fell silent. The congressman shouted, “The Right Reverend Bishop Johns will now ask the Lord’s blessing on this auspicious day.”

The noise from the crowd did not cease, but it did diminish as the bishop, splendid in the glistening silks of his vestments, stepped forward to the edge of the platform. “Let us pray,” he said. Lee bent his head, but not before he saw the wind blow off the bishop’s miter. Johns made a catch a baseball player would have been proud of, set the runaway headgear more firmly in place. Several people cheered.

Ignoring them, the bishop repeated, “Let us pray. Almighty God, guide and protect us in our efforts to perpetuate the principles which, by your blessing, our fathers were able to vindicate, establish, and transmit to us, their posterity. Our hope remains reverently fixed on you, whose favor is ever vouchsafed to the cause which is just. With humble gratitude and adoration, acknowledging the. Providence which has so visibly protected the Confederacy during its brief but eventful career, we trustingly commit ourselves to you, so that, with the continuance of your favor gratefully acknowledged, we may look forward to success, to peace, and to prosperity for our nation. Amen.”

“Amen,” echoed from the crowd as Bishop Johns stepped back. Judge J. D. Halyburton of the Confederate Court at Richmond strode ponderously forward to take his place. The judge had a Bible under his arm. His voice was a bass rumble that suited the massive frame his black robe could not altogether conceal:

“The President of the Senate of the Confederate States of America having informed me that Senator Albert Gallatin Brown of the state of Mississippi has obtained a majority of the electoral votes cast for the office of Vice President of the Confederate States of America; I now have the honor to invite Senator Brown here to me, to set his hand upon the Holy Scriptures and take his oath of office.” Judge Halyburton held out the Bible to Brown. “Raise your right hand, sir.”

As his running-mate was formally invested with the Vice Presidency, Lee looked out at the sea of faces, all turned toward the platform. Most were still and attentive, watching and doing their best to hear Brown take his oath. A small commotion a hundred yards away, or perhaps a bit more, drew Lee’s eye—several men were trying to elbow their way closer to the platform through the tightly packed crowd. Lee wondered why; most of them were tall enough to see over the heads in front of them.

Judge Halyburton was booming, “I now have the honor to invite General Lee here to me, to set his hand upon the Holy Scriptures and take his oath of office.”

Lee took off his hat as he walked over to the judge. The wind kicked up again, blowing his coat open. He tried to keep it in place with his arms, and hoped the chilly breeze would not cause him to catch cold.

“Set your hat down for a moment, if you would,” Halyburton said quietly. Lee obeyed, putting his foot down on the edge of the brim so the hat would not flyaway from him. His left hand went onto the Bible. At full volume once more, the judge said, “Raise your right hand.”

Again, Lee obeyed. Then, phrase by phrase, he repeated the Presidential oath: “I, Robert Edward Lee—do solemnly swear—that I will faithfully execute—the office of President of the Confederate States—and will, to the best of my ability—preserve, protect, and defend—the Constitution thereof.” On his own, he added, “So help me God.”

Judge Halyburton’s plump cheeks got plumper as he grinned and stuck out a hand. “Let me be the first to offer you my best wishes, President Lee.”

“Thank you, sir.” Lee retrieved his hat. As if that were a cue, the band played “Dixie” again. The crowed cheered and clapped over the music. Lee used those couple of minutes to review his inaugural address. He hoped it would not slide out of his mind the moment he began to speak. He’d spent the last several days working to memorize it, but knew he lacked the lifelong politician’s gift for storing away long stretches of prose.

The music stopped. The crowd grew…quieter. When Lee decided they were as quiet as they were going to get, he took a deep breath and began, wishing he owned Judge Halyburton’s stentorian tones: “The trust you, the people of the Confederate States of America, have reposed in me makes me all too conscious of my own inadequacies. Further, the great achievements of my predecessor, the illustrious Jefferson Davis, founding President of our happy Confederacy, set a standard I despair of emulating. In the face of formidable odds, he secured for us our independence from the government of the United States, which was determined to deny us our right to such independence. He—”

Just then, the fickle wind flicked his hat out of his hand, leaving him with the unpalatable choice of losing his dignity by letting it blow away or losing his dignity by bending to pick it up. It lay at his feet, as if mocking him. He glared down at it. Before the wind could sweep it off the platform, he stooped down and grabbed it.

Something craacked through the space his head had just occupied. A bullet, the unsleeping soldier’s part of his mind reported. He started to straighten. Another bullet tugged at his coat sleeve, parting the material neat as a scissors.

Judge Halyburton had never seen combat. All through the war, he’d served on the bench in Richmond. But nothing was wrong with his reactions. He swept out a thick arm and knocked Lee off the platform. He stumbled and went to all fours when he hit the ground below. An instant later, the judge crashed down beside him with a cry of pain, blood soaking his robes from a shoulder wound.

Lee leaped to his feet, started to scramble back onto the platform so he could see what was going on—a dignified, even boring, occasion had turned to horror in the wink of an eye. Judge Halyburton grabbed his ankle and held him back, “Stay down here, you damned fool,” he shouted. “It’s you they’re shooting at.”

That had not occurred to Lee. Despite reading of Lincoln’s assassination in the Picture History of the Civil War, he still found the idea of political murder in America as alien as that sideways world wherein the South had lost its war for freedom.

Thinking of that other world, and of having seen those big men elbowing through the crowd, made him suddenly, dreadfully certain who the “they” doing the shooting were. “The Rivington men!” he exclaimed, and tried to break free of Judge Halyburton’s grip. “Let me got” But the judge clung to him, limpetlike, with all the strength in his unwounded left arm.

Bullets kept flying, with the extravagant frequency that marked the use of repeating weapons. Through his own startlement, through the rising tide of shouts and screams from the crowd, Lee noted that these repeaters, whatever they were and to whomever they belonged, sounded different from the AK-47s to which he’d become accustomed.

He also noted that, while the assassins had failed to slay him with their first shots, they were not giving up. All but one of the marshals who had served as ceremonial guards in front of the platform were down, dead or wounded. The sole unhurt man had his repeater on his shoulder, but hesitated to fire because of the crush of people between him and the gunmen, and because of the innocent people behind them. The assassins had no such compunctions.

Lee finally twisted free from Judge Halyburton. He leaped up onto the platform, only to be knocked flat by Jefferson Davis. “Stay low!” the just-become-former President bawled in his ear. As if to underline his words, another stream of bullets buzzed by.

The platform was a charnel house, blood and bodies everywhere. Wounded men shrieked. Mary’s chair lay on its side, two wheels in the air. Ice ran through Lee. “My wife,” he gasped. He had wanted her to be able to see his moment of triumph. Now—”Mary?” he said again. Davis did not, or perhaps would not, answer him.

The crowd surged like the sea gone mad. Most people were trying to flee the assassins, but some men moved purposefully toward them. Amidst the continued chatter of the strange repeaters, single pistol shots began to bark. A fair number of citizens habitually went armed, and almost all of them had fought in the Second American Revolution. After the initial shock, their instinct was to hit back.

The marshal with the AK-47 fired three quick rounds. Then he reeled backwards; the rifle flew from his hands as he clutched at his neck. A dignitary in frock coat and top hat snatched up the weapon and began to shoot with a confidence that showed he had been a wartime infantry soldier. Within moments, three other men grabbed fallen marshals’ rifles and followed his example.

But the assassins kept shooting, too. Lee wondered how that was possible, given the fire now coming against them from every side and their lack of any cover save the panicked folk around them. Yet the repeaters that were not AK-47s snarled on and on; men and women toppled and screamed. More bullets cracked by, some just above Lee’s head.

After what seemed forever but was, Lee’s pocket watch insisted, only a couple of minutes, the assassins’ weapons at last fell, silent. Jefferson Davis cautiously raised his head. When nothing happened, he let Lee up.

“Dear God!” Lee groaned, getting his first long look at the slaughter all around. He’d known the aftermath of battle ever since his days in Mexico, more than twenty years before; during the Second American Revolution he’d seen more slaughter than one man had any business knowing. But never in his worst nightmares had he imagined a firefight in the midst of a crowd of civilians—combat was for soldiers, not innocent bystanders.

If the murderers out there had ever heard of that rule, they laughed at it. Men in silk cravats and men in farmers’ overalls, women in faded calico and women in glistening taffetas bled and moaned and cried, for nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And up on the platform, where the assassins had concentrated their fire—

Lee had trouble telling who was slain, who wounded, and who merely splashed with other people’s blood. Then he saw that Albert Gallatin Brown, for one, would never get up again; the new Vice President of the Confederate States had a neat hole above his right eye, while the back of his head was a white and crimson horror of blown-out brains and bone.

Jefferson Davis yanked off his coat, began tearing at it to make bandages to help the injured. Lee knew he ought to do likewise, but he couldn’t, not yet—he’d just noticed his wife’s skirts, behind her overturned chair. “Mary?” he said. She did not answer, but she might well not have heard him through the groans and wails all around. He hurried to her.

Death had been kind, as far as death ever is. She looked surprised, not hurt, but her staring eyes would never see anything again. Blood soaked her breast and pooled all around her; a single round had gone in one side of her throat and, quite neatly, out the other.

As if from very far away, people shouted, “General Lee, sir! President Lee!” The titles reminded him that public duty came before private pain. He made himself turn his head away from the woman with whom he’d shared almost thirty-seven years. Tears would come later, when he had time for them. Now… now someone was yelling, “One of the bastards is still alive, President Lee!”

Even through shock and anguish, that could still surprise him. Like a splash of cold water, it helped clear his head. He said, “Then he must be kept so. We shall have answers for this. Bring him up here at once.” While he waited, he leaned over the edge of the platform, down to where Judge Halyburton sat holding his shoulder with his good hand and using some most unjudicial language. “Your honor,” Lee said, and then again, more urgently: “Your honor!”

“What do you need?” Halyburton growled.

For this day never to have happened. As fast as the thought appeared, Lee forced it down: no time for it, and no use to it. He said, “I believe, and hope momentarily to confirm, that the men who committed this cowardly atrocity belong to the society that calls itself America Will Break. That society has for some years housed itself in the building across from Mechanic’s Hall.” He pointed toward the western corner of Capitol Square. Sure enough, through the trees he saw the Rivington men’s flag still flying. “Will you grant us a warrant to search those premises?”

“Goddam right I will,” Halyburton said. “And if that’s where the snake’s lair is, sir, I’ll tell you to get yourself somewhere else besides here. A good shot could hit you from there.”

“He’s right, Mr. President,” Jefferson Davis said. “Get to cover at once, behind Washington’s monument.” He did not wait for Lee to argue, but forced him down off the blood-soaked platform and then behind the sheltering marble and bronze. At the same time, he shouted,” A guard for President Lee!”

The guard detachment was surely the highest-ranking in the history of the Confederate States, as a good half of its members were generals who had come to watch one of their own inaugurated. They held bared swords, weapons hardly more likely to be useful than the drums and fifes and horns of the bandsmen who also crowded round to protect Lee.

Despite the guards, despite Davis’s warnings, Lee looked around the base of the statue of Washington. More folk than Judge Halyburton alone must have heard what he said about the headquarters of America Will Break, for men marched purposefully toward it through the still-milling crowd.

“This is a hard day for the country,” Lee said. “We shall sorely miss Vice President Brown, as well as the other casualties we have suffered. And—” His voice broke. If he let himself think about and, he would not be able to do what manifestly had to be done. And would wait, would have to wait. Davis set an understanding hand on his shoulder. He nodded gratefully, said, “I hope—I pray—Mrs. Davis is safe?”

“Yes, she is well, praise be to God—I saw her. Your own loss—” Davis looked uncommonly grim. “We shall have a reckoning for this day, and hang these wretches higher than Haman—a better end than they merit, too.”

Lee’s sons, big men like himself, forced their way through the guards to him. Blood splashed Custis and Rob; by the way they ignored it, it was not their own. Lee’s mouth twisted when he saw Roonie cradling a wounded hand against his other arm. For a moment, he could not help being father rather than leader. “Your sisters, your wives?” he demanded harshly.

“None of them hurt,” Custis said, and Lee’s shoulders slumped in thanks. Then Custis went on, “But sir, is Mother—?” Tears cut clean tracks through the crimson stains on his cheeks.

“Yes, my dear boys, she—” Lee again checked himself before he dissolved in sorrow with his sons. Just then, a congressman and a fellow in the ragged clothes of a day laborer dragged Konrad de Buys up to him. He knew a crazy kind of relief; duty always pulled him out of his private concerns. How often Mary had taken him to task for that. Mary—He scowled and focused his attention on de Buys.

The Rivington man’s face, usually bold and boyish, was pale and twisted with pain. He’d been shot in the right wrist and left shoulder; blood soaked hastily—and no doubt grudgingly—applied bandages. His eyes widened, just for an instant, when he saw Lee. Then, as best he could through the torment of his wounds, he set his features to reveal nothing. He even managed an ironic nod of greeting.

Lee had always admired de Buys’s gallantry; to find it still displayed under such circumstances wrung from him a cry almost of despair: “Why, sir, why? What did we ever do to merit such treatment at your hands?”

“You know the answer to that,” de Buys said, and Lee remembered Andries Rhoodie’s voice, tolling like an iron bell: I do not threaten. I promise. Now the Rivington man permitted himself an expression: self-reproach. “Who would have thought we could bugger up this operation against the likes of you?”

“You mind your mouth, you son of a bitch,” the day laborer snarled, shaking de Buys like a rat. The Rivington man set his teeth against the agony that must have shot through him—then lashed out with a foot and caught his captor right between the legs. The day laborer collapsed with a groan, clutching at his privates. De Buys did not even try to run. He managed a haggard smile for Lee and another nod, as if inviting him to ask the next question.

Before Lee could speak, gunfire crackled in front of the building that had sheltered America Will Break since 1864. More screams and shouts arose from the civilians still milling about in Capitol Square. Konrad de Buys’s smile got wider. “You will not find us easy meat for your slaughter.”

“Nor did you find us so,” Lee said, which sobered the Rivington man.

Jefferson Davis said, “The snakes in their nest will presently discover, as this one has, that their plot against you miscarried, Mr. President. Again I urge you to repair to a location out of rifle range from that nest.”

Lee was about to refuse. Then he glanced at Konrad de Buys, saw the Rivington man watching him in turn. The intensity of de Buys’s gaze made him stop and think hard. The offices of America Will Break looked across Franklin Street to Mechanic’s Hall, not back toward Capitol Square. As Davis said, whatever Rivington men remained at their headquarters might well have thought their attack successful until armed men approached the building. If he stayed where he was, he gratuitously offered them a second chance to make it so.

“Very well, sir,” he said quietly. “Let us return to the Capitol, then, a building easily secured against anything short of artillery.” Davis’s nod was grateful Konrad de Buys’s face once more revealed nothing save pain and indifference. Most of the Rivington men were good at secreting away their thoughts, but Lee judged from the very blankness of the mask that de Buys concealed disappointment, not delight.

The plan had been for Sion Rogers to escort him from Capitol Square to the Presidential residence after the inaugural address, and for some other member of the Joint Committee on Arrangements to conduct Albert Gallatin Brown back to his rented house. The plan, thanks to the Rivington men, lay messily dead. So did Albert Gallatin Brown. Rogers, Lee thought, was only wounded…

Back at the Capitol, Lee sent urgent orders down to the armory and the powder works. There, if anywhere in Richmond, he would be able to lay hands on a decent number of properly trained soldiers. The Confederate capital was a city at peace; who would have imagined it needed garrisoning against its own? Lee stood surrounded by his country’s highest commanders, but they had no men to lead.

James Longstreet was saying something to the same effect, an old Indian-fighter’s joke about too many chiefs. Lee only half heard him; he was considering the extent of Konrad de Buys’s injuries. Shaking his head, he said, “You will need to see a surgeon.” Only when the words were out of his mouth did he realize he had been contemplating the best way to preserve the life of the man who, regardless of whether he had actually fired the fatal shot, had just killed his wife.

“A surgeon?” de Buys scoffed. “D’you think I care to live without my arms? That’s what he’d do to me, you know.”

“There is no other way to prevent the inevitable suppuration of your wounds—” Lee faltered. His surgeons—his time—knew no such way. The Rivington men might well.

But de Buys said,” Hang me and have done. You’ll get round to it soon enough, at all odds.” The hungry growls from everyone who heard him attested to the truth of that.

Someone tapped Lee on the back. He spun round. It was Colonel Dimmock, but for the bandsmen one of the lowest-ranking soldiers present. A bullet had clipped off the bottom of his right ear; though that side of his tunic was covered with blood, he seemed unaware he’d been wounded. He held out a weapon to Lee. “ ‘This was what those murdering swine were shooting with, sir.”

Lee took the—rifle? Even as his mind formed the word, he rejected it. The firearm was too short and stubby to merit the name. It reminded him of nothing so much as an AK-47 that had somehow been washed and left on the line to shrink. Even the metal stock, he discovered, folded around against the body of the piece to save space. The gun weighed next to nothing. He supposed de Buys and his henchmen had carried such weapons exactly because they were easy to conceal until needed.

Though de Buys was seriously injured, he held the gun well away from the Rivington man as he asked, “What do you call this thing?”

“Why should I tell you anything?” de Buys said. Then he spat out a short, sharp fragment of laughter. “But what the hell difference does a name make? It’s an—” Lee heard the name as “Oozie.” Seeing him frown in perplexity, de Buys amplified, “U-Z-I, named after Uziel Gal, the Israeli who designed it.”

“Israeli?” Lee frowned again. “Does that mean Israelite? No, never mind, you needn’t answer.” He turned to the men who had hold of de Buys. “Take him to jail. Make certain he is securely guarded. If he will not see the surgeon, do not compel him to do so; he will, after all, soon stand trial.” The soldiers nodded. Like Lee, they knew de Buys would go up on the gallows shortly after the trial was over.

They turned the Rivington man around and started to march him out of the Hall of Delegates. Only then did Lee see the four or five bullet holes in the back of de Buys’s jacket. The man had no business being on his feet, not if he’d taken those hits along with—along with the two that had actually wounded him, Lee thought uneasily; “Wait!” he said.

When he asked de Buys about his seeming invulnerability, the Rivington man smiled a nasty smile and said, “I told you we’d not be easy meat, General Lee.” Lee reached out and prodded his belly. It was hard, not with muscle but with metal or wood or something of that sort. Lee knew of no armor proof against rifle bullets. The Rivington men evidently did. No wonder the team of assassins had been so hard to bring down. He began to worry. If the Rivington men all wore it, they would be anything but easy meat.

As if to Underscore that concern, fresh firing broke out around the building America Will Break used. In a way, Lee supposed that was good news: it meant more troops were coming up to deal with the Rivington men. But it also meant they had not yet been dealt with.

The guards took Konrad de Buys away. The firing went on and on. A messenger dashed into the Capitol. Seeing Lee, he saluted raggedly and panted, “Marse Robert, them sons of bitches—begging your pardon, sir—they won’t give up for hell. We got a lot of men down out there, and I don’t know but one of theirs we kilt—son of a whore fell out the window he was shootin’ from. Can we bring up artillery to blast’ em out?”

“Whatever is wanted to accomplish the task at hand,” Lee replied at once. He ground his teeth. But for skirmishes inside Washington, his soldiers had scant experience fighting within the confines of cities. That did not appear to be true of the men of America Will Break. He thanked God that they were confined to a single building. A few hundred such fighters, especially armored like de Buys, might be able to seize and hold…even a town like Richmond. The thought was unpalatable but inescapable. He wondered how many Rivington men Rivington actually held.

Other messengers came in, bringing more word not only of the small battle across from Mechanic’s Hall but also of the carnage de Buys and his accomplices had worked. Lee’s heart sank with every piece of bad news: Alexander Stephens wounded; Judah Benjamin wounded; John Atkins, his choice to replace John Reagan as Postmaster General, dead; General Jubal Early dead with pistol in hand as he tried to attack the assassins; Jeb Stuart wounded. That last report hurt almost as if it had been one of his own sons, Past the bare fact of the injury, the messenger knew nothing. Lee bent his head and prayed the wound was not severe.

A Napoleon roared, and a moment later another. Lee heard the rending crash of twelve-pound iron roundshot battering masonry. He briefly wondered why the gun crews did not come to closer quarters and blast the Rivington men from their holes with case shot. Then he scorned himself for a fool. Even Springfields could murder an artillery crew that got close enough to fire case shot. Against riflemen with repeaters, the ploy was suicidal.

The brass cannon boomed again, and again, but then they fell silent. Small-arms fire continued. Lee paced the Hall of Delegates chamber like a caged lion, waiting for another messenger to come and let him know what was going on. He wished he could lead from the front, as he had in his U.S. Army days. But that role did not suit a commanding general, much less the President of the Confederate States.

At last a messenger did arrive. Lee all but sprang at him, only to recoil in dismay when he gave his news: “Bastards picked off the gunners faster’n they could serve their pieces, even at long range. They ain’t all dead, nothin’ like that, but most all of ‘em’s shot.”

Lee groaned. Sharpshooters with telescopes mounted above their rifles might have been able to hit artillerymen at a thousand yards or more, but he hadn’t thought AK-47s capable of such work. When he turned away, his eye fell on the—the UZI, de Buys had called it. He shook his head, annoyed at himself again. How could he assume AK-47s were the only guns in the Rivington men’s arsenal? The answer was simple but painful: he couldn’t.

Rifle fire rose to a new crescendo. Forgetting the dignity and importance of his office, Lee started for the doorway to find out what had happened and to take charge. Colonel Dimmock’s bulky body blocked his path. “No, sir,” the chief marshal said. “Here you stay till it’s over.”

“Stand aside,” Lee ordered. Dimmock did not move. He outweighed Lee by at least thirty pounds, and even the thought of forcibly shoving him aside reminded Lee that, trapped by his duty, he had to obey the chief marshal. He dipped his head to Dimmock. “I beg your pardon, sir. You are in the right.”

But waiting came hard, hard. The rattle of small-arms fire slowed, flared, slowed, flared once more, stopped. When the lull stretched to two minutes, Lee tried pushing past Colonel Dimmock again. Again the colonel refused to yield his place. Lee tossed his head like a man trying to bite his own ear. Dimmock ignored the show of temper. Bare moments later, the gunfire began again. Sighing, Lee apologized again.

A new messenger entered the Hall of Delegates. “Sir, it’s a hell of a mess out there. If those Rivington sons of bitches had a clear field of fire all around their damn building, we’d never get close enough to shoot at ‘em, all the lead they’re throwing around. We had us a little truce to move the wounded a while back—that’s what the quiet was. Hope you don’t mind that.”

“No, by no means,” Lee said. “We must do what we can for our men. Press on with the attack, and since the cover of the surrounding structures is proving our principal advantage, be sure to use it well.”

The soldier saluted and hurried away. The gunfire from around the AWB headquarters went on and on. It was nearly sunset when the racket peaked in a few seconds of sustained shooting at full automatic that stopped as abruptly as the fall of a headsman’s axe.

When yet another messenger came in, Lee pounced on him. The man looked weary but triumphant, an expression Lee had seen on soldiers since before the Mexican War. “The last of them murderin’ creatures is dead,” the fellow said. A cheer went up from everyone who heard him. He went on, “We finally got some troops into the building. Took some doin’—them Rivington bastards had the door barricaded so we couldn’t noways knock it down. Finally some of our boys made ‘em keep their heads down while some more went in through the windows. That distracted ‘em, made ‘em fight two bunches at once. They died hard, but they’s dead.”

“God bless you, Corporal,” Lee said. The messenger’s sleeves were bare of stripes. He looked confused for a second, then grinned enormously. Lee turned to Colonel Dimmock. “With your gracious permission, sir—?” The chief marshal stepped out of the doorway.

Officers and bandsmen formed up around Lee as he went outside. He did not want them, but they refused to go away. After brief annoyance, he decided he could not properly be angry with them: they had their duty, too. For that matter—something he thought of too late, had it been true—the last messenger might have been a Rivington man in disguise, aiming to lure him out of the safety of the Capitol.

He hurried west toward the statue of Washington. Capitol Square had emptied of healthy civilians, save for the doctors who moved from one of the wounded to the next, doing what they could. That, Lee knew, was pitifully little. No doubt the Rivington men, with their century and a half of added knowledge, could have given more effective treatment—but had it not been for the Rivington men, none of these poor wretches would have lain here at all. A small tincture of guilt colored Lee’s rage: had the people not come out to see and hear him, they would not lie here, either.

A four-wheeled military ambulance clattered eastward. Every bump made the wounded within cry out. Lee bit his lip. At least one of those wounded was a woman. War had spared him at least that horror. Now he met it in alleged peacetime, on what should have been one of the high days of his life.

He called to the ambulance driver,” Are you taking them to General Hospital Number Twelve?”

“No, sir, I got to go on to Chimborazo,” the driver said. “Number Twelve’s full up.” He clucked to his horses, flicked the reins. The ambulance sped up. So did the cries from inside it. Lee’s heart went out to those poor hurt souls. Chimborazo Military Hospital, out on the eastern edge of town, was twice as far from Capitol Square as Military Hospital Number Twelve, which meant they would have twice the jolting journey to endure.

It also meant the butcher’s bill in the square was small only by comparison to a stand-up fight during the Second American Revolution. General Hospital Number Twelve could take in more than a hundred people. If it was already filled…He wondered just how many wounded had had to go to Chimborazo. He promised himself the Rivington men would pay for every one.

He started to go up to the covered platform on which he’d taken his oath of office, but stopped when he saw the dead and injured had been taken away. Only the bloody rills that ran down the timbers of the front and sides told of the chaos that had reigned here a few hours before.

He wondered where they had taken Mary. He wanted to see her, to say how sorry he was for inviting her up onto the stand, to say good-bye. No time now. He hoped she would know without his telling her. She was often sharp-tempered; with her endless bodily afflictions, who could blame her? But after thirty-seven years, she knew him—had known him, he corrected himself, still not truly believing it in his heart—about as well as one person can know another.

The bodies of the five men who had accompanied Konrad de Buys still lay where they had fallen. They were not a pretty sight. All but one had been shot in the head; the sole exception, who looked absurdly peaceful by comparison to his comrades, had bled to death from a thigh wound.

Rips in coats and shirts told of other rounds that had struck without doing damage. Lee’s lips thinned—they’d all been armored like de Buys. No wonder they’d been so hard to bring down. With that armor, maybe they’d thought they could escape once they’d done their murderous work. If so, they’d proved mistaken, there as elsewhere.

None of the assassins still gripped his UZI. Lee hoped that meant the guns had been taken to someone responsible—with luck, to Josiah Gorgas, who would no doubt be delighted to have such fascinating new toys to play with. And if not, well, if not, a thief would be able to use the UZIs only until they ran out of ammunition.

“Where now, sir?” one of the bandsmen asked when Lee shifted his direction again.

“To the offices of America Will Break,” he said in a voice like stone.

The corner of Franklin and Ninth was another scene whose like Lee had not known since the war. As in Capitol Square, physicians and ambulances swarmed liked bees. Bullet holes scarred and pitted the face of Mechanic’s Hall. A Confederate soldier shot through the head hung half in, half out of one window. Across the street was an identically dead, identically placed Rivington man.

The headquarters of America Will Break had taken far worse damage than Mechanic’s Hall; the twelve-pounder shot had blown several gaping holes in its brick and marble front. Only blind luck the building didn’t go up inflames, Lee thought. Fire spread so easily and was so hard to fight. He remembered the charred Richmond of the Picture History of the Civil War, and had to shiver. That disaster could have happened here.

He pointed to the roof, above which the red, white, and black AWB flag still flew. “Someone cut that down at once.”

A couple of soldiers hurried off to do his bidding. One of them said, “We ought to save it with our captured Yankee battle flags.” That had not occurred to Lee; he’d simply wanted the hateful banner cast on the rubbish heap. But the soldier had a point. The Confederacy had won a battle here, but the cost, the cost…

Lee followed the men into the building, looked around curiously. Part of the curiosity sprang from his never having been here before; the Rivington men had come to him rather than he to them. But some of his curiosity was also professional: here he had the chance to learn what hard combat inside a building did to it. He shook his head, not liking what he saw.

The trail of blood and crumpled bodies led him to the suite of offices America Will Break had used. Corpses in Confederate gray far outnumbered those in mottled green; the Rivington men had fought like devils—or perhaps they had simply preferred dying in action to the gallows. Brass cartridge cases clinked, an incongruously cheerful sound, as Lee kicked them out of his path.

A door had painted upon it AMERICA WILL BREAK and the organization’s three-pronged insignia. Lee stepped over two bodies in gray and one in green, walked inside. The fellow whose head and torso he had seen from the street had fought from a window here. Bullets had chewed up the wall opposite that window; the picture that hung there was no longer recognizable.

One of the bandsmen who guarded Lee looked around and said, “Take away the dead men and it ain’t so very peculiar, is it?”

He was right; shorn of carnage, the offices of America Will Break might have housed any fair-sized business or trading establishment. Lee did not know quite what he’d expected. Perhaps, knowing what he knew about the Rivington men, he’d looked for the future to have impinged more visibly on their operation. But the desks, the chairs, the cabinets full of papers here seemed at first glance no different from those in the War Department across the street. Those papers would have to be examined, of course, but their home appeared utterly ordinary.

“You’d reckon anybody nasty enough to do what these bastards done ought to have a place that looks worse’n this,” the guard went on.

“That’s so,” Lee said thoughtfully. The bandsman, whose every word declared his lack of education, had nonetheless touched an important truth. Evil, to Lee’s way of looking at things, ought to declare itself openly, to appear as foul as it was in fact. But the headquarters of America Will Break, a group that stopped at nothing, not even indiscriminate murder, to achieve its ends, had for the eye, at least, no taint. Somehow the semblance of normality made even worse the evil it contained.

Lee strode from room to room within the suite. All the furnishings were like those of the chamber through which he’d entered, which is to say, unmemorable. But unmemorable men could not have plotted such hideously memorable deeds.

At last Lee came to a door before which several soldiers stood. “It’s locked, sir,” one said. “We put a shoulder to it, but it don’t want to move.”

Excitement flowered within Lee—was this the Rivington men’s sanctum sanctorum? “Send for a locksmith, then, if you have not already done so,” he said. The soldier hurried away. Lee examined the doorknob. Here at last was something unfamiliar: its shape was like none he had ever seen. He wondered what luck the locksmith would have with it. The door was painted with a smooth coat of gray enamel. He rapped it. It was metallically cold, metallically hard, and gave not at all.

Jingling with tools, the locksmith arrived around half past six, and set to work at once. Five days later, despite his efforts, those of the best burglar in Richmond (released from jail to test his expertise), and a team of men armed with a stout ram, the door remained closed.

Once more, Lee found himself awash in telegrams. He would willingly have forgone the flood of sympathy, and indeed, were it possible, would have’ forgone the telegrams that had announced his election and set in train that bloody March 4.

From the flood, though, came a few messages he cherished. One, from Springfield, Illinois, in the U.S.A., said simply,

MAY GOD BE WITH YOU AND YOUR COUNTRY IN YOUR HOUR OF SORROW. YOU ARE IN MY PRAYERS. The printed signature read, A. LINCOLN.

Another came from Clarksdale, Mississippi:

REQUEST YOUR KIND PERMISSION TO RESCIND MY RESIGNATION FROM CONFEDERATE STATES CAVALRY SO I CAN LEAD AGAINST THE MURDERERS WHO WOULD SET AT NAUGHT OUR REPUBLIC AND ITS INSTITUTIONS—N. B. FORREST.

“How shall I respond to this one from Forrest, sir?” asked Charles Marshall, who had resumed his wartime post as Lee’s aide. By his tone, he wanted nothing to do with the Patriot leader.

But Lee said, “Answer, ‘Your country is ever grateful for your service, Lieutenant General Forrest.’ He and I may fail to see eye-to-eye on a great many issues, but hypocrisy has never been numbered among his vices. And against the men of America Will Break, I fear we may need the most able military talent available to us. Do you deny Forrest’s native gifts along those lines?” Marshall shook his head, but his mouth was set in a narrow line of disapproval as he wrote down Lee’s reply and took it to the telegraph office.

That afternoon, Lee endured his wife’s funeral service. Bishop Johns, one arm in a sling from the wound he himself had taken up on the platform, spoke of how all-wise Providence had Summoned Mary from the world of men, of how her spirit yet lived and would continue to inspire everyone who had known her thanks to the courage with which she had faced adversity, of her unshaken confidence in God as her hope and strength, which all would do well to emulate.

Lee believed with his whole being every word the Right Reverend Johns spoke, yet the oration brought less comfort than it should have, serving instead to tear off the scab which had begun to grow over his grief. He wept, unashamed, as a hearse drawn by six black horses took his wife’s coffin to the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad depot to start its final journey to Arlington. He knew she would never have forgiven him for interring her anywhere else.

A lieutenant came up to him as he was leaving St. Paul’s, Church. “I beg your pardon, sir, for disturbing you at such a time, but your orders were to be informed the moment we succeeded in entering that sealed chamber. We have just done so.”

“Thank you, young man. Yes, I shall go there at once. Have you a carriage?”

“Yes, sir. If you will follow me—” The lieutenant drove Lee east on Broad to Ninth, and then down the western side of Capitol Square to the building that had sheltered America Will Break. When he swung right onto Franklin, Lee pointed and exclaimed. The lieutenant chuckled. “We took a leaf from your book, sir. Since that damned door—I beg your pardon again—defeated our every frontal assault, we decided to outflank it.”

A ladder leaned against the side of the building. Several masons in grimy overalls stood at the base of the wall. One still held a mallet and chisel. Crowbars and pry bars, along with chunks of stone and broken brick, lay on the sidewalk. They’d broken a hole in the wall big enough for a man to crawl though.

“Has anyone gone in yet?” Lee asked. When the lieutenant shook his head, Lee descended from the carriage and hurried toward the ladder.

The lieutenant sprang down, too, and got in front of him. With the self-conscious voice junior officers use when dressing down their superiors, he said, “With your permission, sir, I shall precede you, in case the Rivington men”—men was not the word he used—”have placed a torpedo or some other infernal device in there.”

Lee considered that, reluctantly nodded. His courage was not at issue here, and his duty to his country was. “Very well, Lieutenant; carry on.”

The young soldier swarmed up the ladder, disappeared into the inky hole. Lee waited with barely contained worry and impatience until he stuck his head out again. “Seems safe enough, sir, though I tripped over a chair and damn near broke my fool neck. Can you bring a lantern up with you? It’s still almighty dark inside.”

A soldier darted into the War Department across the street, came out with a lantern which he handed to Lee. He and a couple of the masons steadied the ladder while Lee ascended. Lee was simultaneously grateful and offended: they hadn’t offered the spry young lieutenant any such assistance. How decrepit did they think he was?

At the top of the climb, the lieutenant took the lantern from him, then helped him through the hole. He held the flickering light on high while Lee got to his feet. Its faint yellow beams and the gray light that came through the hole in the outer wall told Lee at once that America Will Break truly did not belong to 1868, or any year close to it.

“Metal,” he muttered. “Everything metal.” The desks, the cabinets, the bookcases against the walls, the swivel chairs, all were painted metal, like the impenetrable door that had so long defeated everything the Confederacy threw at it. On this side, he noticed, that door was set well into the wall. Its inner surface was not painted at all, only polished, and cast back at Lee the light the lantern shed upon it.

Above one of the cabinets, a low one, hung a poster blazoned with the emblem of America Will Break. Above the insignia stood the AWE initials Lee had first seen on Andries Rhoodie’s coffee mug in camp above Orange Court House. He wondered where Rhoodie was. The big man had not died on March 4, nor had he been at his house when soldiers came that evening, armed with a warrant and with AK-47s set on full automatic. That worried Lee—this side of Bedford Forrest, Rhoodie was as dangerous a man as he could think of.

Below the three bent spikes in their circle stood a pair of unfamiliar words: AFRIKANER WEERSTANDSBEWEGING, and below them, in smaller letters, AFRIKANER RESISTANCE MOVEMENT. Lee cocked his head. He wondered what an Afrikaner was—not an African, certainly, not by the way the Rivington men treated Negroes—and whether the name betokened resistance against Afrikaners, whatever they were, or by them.

He deliberately turned away from the poster, refusing to let inessentials sidetrack him” He walked over to the polished metal door, set his hand on the knob. The lieutenant dashed up and tried to turn it for him. This time, he refused to yield his place. The men on the other side of that door had done everything but fire a Napoleon at it—and they’d contemplated that, desisting only for fear of damaging the room the door guarded. Were it hooked to a torpedo, they surely would have set off the explosive charge.

He worked the knob. It did not turn smoothly—the Confederates had managed that much, at any rate, in their efforts to force it—but it turned. The door was heavy. Lee had to exert his full strength to pull it back, and the massive hinges squealed in protest as he did so, but it opened. A couple of officers standing on the other side stared at him, then grinned and began to clap.

Their applause was joined by another noise, a low, throaty rumble, that began as soon as the door swung wide. They stopped clapping. The rumble went on. Looking about for its source, Lee decided after a few seconds that it was somehow coming from within the thickened wall. It sounded mechanical, though not really like a steam engine. He wondered why anyone would want to conceal something mechanical inside a wall.

Behind him, in the hidden chamber, the lieutenant cried out. He whirled, wondering what trap the youngster had sprung. He saw no trap, only the lieutenant’s startled face. He saw that very clearly, for several long, thin tubes mounted on the ceiling—he’d not noticed them before; who notices ceilings?—had suddenly started shedding a fine, white light that illuminated the room as well as hazy sunshine might have. “What on earth—?” the lieutenant said. Lee did not know what on earth, either, though after a moment’s reflection he supposed he should not have been surprised the Rivington men enjoyed better lamps even than gaslight. But understanding all their tricks was another inessential now. The shining tubes let him read the titles of the volumes that packed these secret bookshelves. As soon as he saw the Picture History of the Civil War was one of them, the shelves drew him like a lodestone.

He ran a finger lightly down the spine of the Picture History, as if to reassure himself it was real. Somehow, finding a second copy of it was far more than twice as strange as finding only one. One was an isolated curiosity, a liber ex machina. But where there were two, there had to be hundreds, thousands. All at once, the distant time from which the men of the AWB had come felt nearly close enough for him to touch.

And that Picture History proved to be but one of hundreds of books about the Second American Revolution, though they called it the Civil War, or the War Between the States, or occasionally the Great Rebellion. He found memoirs by Joe Johnston, by u. S. Grant, by Jefferson Davis—he shook his head when he saw Davis’s were called The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Nation—byJubal Early. He shook his head again; he’d gone to Early’s funeral yesterday and knew his former division commander had written no memoirs. Nor, for that matter, had Johnston or Grant or Davis.

He also found studies on the battle of the Wilderness; on Confederate railroads; on black-white relations, North and South, before, during, and after the Second American Revolution; and on Confederate Richmond—one, he saw with wry amusement, was called General Lee’s City. The amusement slipped when he pulled the book off the shelf and saw on its cover Richmond in flames. He opened the book, discovered it had been published—would be published? would have been published?—in 1987. He also noted that its author was one Richard M. Lee, and wondered if the man was a descendant. If he was, he had an impartiality Robert E. Lee approved of, for he also seemed to have written a book named Mr. Lincoln’s City.

Lee put the book back in its place. It stood near half a shelf of volumes that looked to be devoted exclusively to him. He left them alone. He already knew who he was. The Rivington men, for all their reference works, plainly did not.

Along with the books on the Confederacy, Lee found several shelves of volumes on South Africa—not a country, so far as he knew, that appeared on the globe in 1868. Some had their titles written in English, but more in the German-looking language that had also produced the phrase Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging.

It was not German. That had been Lee’s first guess, when papers written in it turned up in the files of the AWB outer offices. But a professor of German summoned from the Virginia Military Institute had taken one look and gone back to V MI with his tail between his legs. Lee did not let failure frustrate him—and where the professor gave up, a Richmond merchant, a Jew from Aachen, was able to make fair sense of the AWB’s private tongue.

Lee stuck his head out the door, asked the two soldiers in the adjoining room, “Is Mr. Goldfarb anywhere about?”

“Yes, sir, I saw him next door,” said one of them, a captain. He turned to his companion. “You want to go and fetch him in here, Fred?”

Fred, who was a lieutenant, went and fetched him. Avram Goldfarb was a medium-sized, heavyset man in his fifties, with curly gray hair and a curly gray beard long enough to obviate any need for a cravat. His nose was more distinctly Hebraic than that of Judah P. Benjamin, and his eyes…when Lee looked into those dark, deep-set eyes, he gained a more profound understanding of the Book of Jeremiah than he had enjoyed before. Avram Goldfarb had seen sorrow, for himself and for his folk.

He dipped his head to Lee. “You’ve found more papers in this verkakte tongue for me to read, sir?” At Lee’s nod, he rolled those sorrowful eyes. “I will do my best, even if it makes me crazy. This speech, it is not Deutsch—German, you would say—it is not Dutch, as I should know, since Aachen lies by the border and before ‘48 I did as much trade with Amsterdam as with Cologne…But enough. This speech, it is not quite anything. It is, you would say in English, a mishmash.”

Lee was not sure he would say that, but he got the idea. He stood aside to let Goldfarb into the secret chamber. The Jew blinked when he noticed the extraordinary ceiling lights, but Lee gave him no time to ponder them. He pulled out a book that had Akrikaner Weerstandsbeweging in its title, hoping it would tell him more about the AWB.

“The African Resistance Movement: What It Is, by Eugen Blankaatd,” Goldfarb read.

“’African’?” Lee pointed to the poster on the wall.

“Afrikaner, then,” Goldfarb said, shrugging, “whatever an Afrikaner may be.” He opened the book to the frontispiece, an arresting photograph of a stalwart young man, his right arm upraised, his left hand on a Bible, standing blindfolded in front of what looked like a firing squad armed with AK-47s. There were a few lines of text under the photograph. Goldfarb translated them: “If I advance, follow me. If I retreat, shoot me. If I die, avenge me. So help me God…”

It was not the oath of a group that did anything by halves. Lee let air hiss out through his nose; to his sorrow, he already knew that. Whatever Goldfarb thought of it, his face revealed nothing. He turned the page, then startled Lee by starting to laugh. He pointed to the copyright page. “The printer must have been drunk, sir, and the proofreader too, or someone would have noticed this says the book was made in 2004.” He laughed again, louder this time.

“Mr. Goldfarb,” Lee said seriously, “I suggest you never speak of this, ah, error to anyone save me. Please believe me when I tell you I make this suggestion for your own safety.”

The Jew studied him, saw he meant what he said. Slowly, he nodded. “I will do as you say, sir. Now to the—is foreword an English word?”

“The preface, perhaps,” Lee said after a moment’s thought.

“The preface. Thank you. I begin: ‘More than half a Jahrhundert’—excuse me, a century—’ago, during the Second Worldwar—’” He said it like that, as if it were one word, so Lee needed a second to understand and another to start to imagine what it meant, but Goldfarb was already going on: “ ‘a great man, Koot Vorster, said, “Hitler’s My Struggle shows the way to greatness, the way to South Africa. Hitler gave the Germans a calling. He gave them a fanaticism which causes them to stand back for no one. We must follow this example because only by such fanaticism can the Afrikaner nation achieve its calling.” Goldfarb looked to Lee. “This, to me, is nonsense. Do you wish me to go on with it?”

Lee did not understand the historical references either, but he knew that was because the history in question had yet to happen. He also got a stronger feeling for the way the AWB thought: fanaticism, to his way of thinking, was no virtue, yet the Rivington men plainly considered it one. He said, “Please do continue, Mr. Goldfarb.”

“If you like.” Goldfarb cleared his throat and went on: “ ‘But no one—hmm—heeded Vorster.’ I am sorry, sir, but this is Dutch spelled as if the devil had written it, and I must sometimes guess what it means. ‘South Africa threw in with England, and Hitler and Germany were beaten—and so was South Africa. Now we whites are prisoners in our own country, ruined by stupid, evil laws that make all men alike, regardless of their color. Those who cursed our land with these laws call themselves liberal, but they lie. They call us outlaws. We take pride in the name, and call them fools. They have been seduced by outlanders and outlanders’ ways, and we will no more stand for it. White power shall yet rise again, and put the kaffir’—I do not know what a kaffir is, I am sorry—’back down into his proper place. The rest of the world be damned, say I. So say we all.’”

“They are a tiny group of radicals, then,” Lee breathed. Goldfarb gave him a curious look. He took no notice of it;

“Shall I go on?” Goldfarb asked.

“Wait.” Lee was thinking hard. If mankind’s opinion—”the rest of the world,” Blankaard had written—had decisively turned against these self-admitted Afrikaner outlaws a hundred fifty years ahead, then what better, more logical reason for their return to the Confederacy than an effort to build another nation that favored “white power” to become South Africa’s friend and collaborator in a changed future? Rhoodie had said as much, and everything the Rivington men had done here fit in with that goal.

The Confederate States of America had not been formed for outlawry: just the reverse. That alone would have made Lee oppose the AWB with everything he had. But the men from the future had given him other reasons. He heard again Bishop Johns’s prayers over Mary’s casket. “They shall not have their way.”

“Sir?” Goldfarb asked.

“Never mind,” Lee said. “No, you need go no farther in that book now; I have heard enough.”

“Yes, sir.” Goldfarb slapped the volume closed, stared all around. “What a strange place,” he said, to which Lee could only nod. Goldfarb pointed to an object—Lee knew no better word for it—on one of the desks. “What is that thing, for instance?”

“I cannot tell you, Mr. Goldfarb, for I do not know.” Lee had curiously tapped the artifact in question a couple of times himself, as he walked back and forth past it. Its main piece was shaped like a box, taller than it was deep, but it had a thin metal tube projecting upward from one comer of the top. A spiral cord joined the boxlike part to another one which was small enough to be held in the hand.

The front of the boxlike part was covered with switches and knobs. One said ON-OFF. Lee flicked it from the latter to the former. A light went on in the glassed-in upper part of the box. A low hiss, rather like distant surf but more steady, came from a metal-covered grill. Lee moved the switch back to OFF. The light went out; the noise faded and was gone.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Goldfarb said, “but what is it good for?”

“Again, I do not know,” Lee answered, though the AWB men doubtless did.

“Or what about this other thing next to it?”

“Still another mystery, I am afraid.” Lee ran his hand over the gadget close by the one that hissed. It was hard, but did not feel to the finger like metal, wood, or glass—though glass did seem to cover the large, dark, greenish square that dominated the center of the oyster-gray, upright cabinet.

Connected to that small cabinet by another spiral cord was a low, flat box with letters, numbers, and symbols printed onto upraised studs. For no reason Lee could fathom, the letters were scrambled, and there were two sets of numbered studs, one above the top row of letters, the other off to the right by itself. He poked a couple of studs. They clicked and went down under the pressure of his touch, but otherwise did nothing.

“Maybe it is a qwerty,” Goldfarb said, pointing to the nonsense word formed by part of one row of letters.

“Maybe it is,” Lee said, quite seriously. Then he pointed, too, at the words beside the sole decoration on the otherwise severely functional device: a stylized apple with rainbow stripes and a bite taken out of one side. “Or maybe it’s a Macintosh IVQL.”

“I wonder what it is for,” Goldfarb said.

“So do I.” Lee turned away from the qwerty—he liked the merchant’s suggestion better than his own—and found another book with Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging on the spine. “Tell me what this one contains, Mr. Goldfarb, if you would be so kind.”