White Doves at Morning

Chapter Twenty-four

WEEK later the sheriff sent word to Flower that he wanted to see her in his office. She put on her best dress and opened a parasol over her head and walked down Main to the jail. She had never been to the jail before, and she paused in front of the door and looked automatically at the ground to see if there were paths that led to side entrances for colored. The sheriff, Hipolyte Gautreau, saw her through the window and waved her inside.

"How you do, Miss Flower? Come in and have a seat. I'll run you t'rew this fast as I can so you can get back to your school," he said.

She did not understand his solicitousness or the fact he had addressed her as Miss. She folded her parasol and sat down in a chair that was placed closely against the side of his desk.

He fitted on his spectacles and removed a single sheet of paper from a brown envelope and unfolded it in both hands.

"You knew Carrie LaRose pretty good, huh?" he said.

"I did her laundry and cleaned house for her," Flower replied.

"A month befo' she died-"

"She didn't die. She was murdered."

The sheriff nodded. "Last month she had this will wrote up. She left you her house and one hundred dol'ars. The money is at the bank in your name. I'll walk you down to the courthouse to transfer the deed."

"Suh?" she said.

"There's fifty arpents that go wit' the house. A cane farmer works it on shares. It's all yours, Miss Flower."

She sat perfectly still, her face without expression, her hands resting on top of her folded parasol. She gazed through the doorway that gave on to the cells. They were empty, except for a town drunkard, who slept in a fetal position on the floor. The sheriff looked over his shoulder at the cells.

"Somet'ing wrong?" he said.

"Nobody is locked up for killing Miss Carrie."

"She knew a lot of bad t'ings about lots of people," he said. He seemed to study his own words, his expression growing solemn and profound with their implication.

"She gave Miss Abby the money to buy our school. That's why she's dead," Flower said.

But the sheriff was shaking his head even before she had finished her statement.

"I wouldn't say that, Miss Flower. There's lots of people had it in for Carrie LaRose. Lots of-"

"There was a white camellia by her foot. Everybody knows what the white camellia means."

"Miss Carrie had camellias growing in her side yard. It don't mean a__"

"Shame on the people who claimed to be her friend. Shame on every one of them. You don't need to be helping me transfer the deed, either," Flower said. She looked the sheriff in the eyes, then rose from her chair and walked out the door.

She used the one hundred dollars to buy books for the school and to hire carpenters and painters to refurbish her new house. She and Abigail dug flower beds around the four sides of the house, spading the clay out of the subsoil so that each bed was like an elongated ceramic tray. They hauled black dirt from the cane fields and mixed it in the wagon with sheep manure and humus from the swamp, then filled the beds with it and planted roses, hibiscus, azalea bushes, windmill palms, hydrangeas and banana trees all around the house.

On the evening the painters finished the last of the trim, Flower and Abigail sat on a blanket under the live oak in back and drank lemonade and ate fried chicken from a basket and looked at the perfect glow and symmetry of the house in the sunset. Flower's belongings were piled in Abigail's buggy, waiting to be moved inside.

"I cain't believe all this is happening to me, Miss Abby," Flower said.

"You're a lady of property. One of these days you'll have to stop calling me 'Miss Abby,'" Abigail said.

"Not likely," Flower said.

"You're a dear soul. You deserve every good thing in the world. You don't know how much you mean to me."

"Miss Abby, sometime you make me a little uncomfortable, the way you talk to me."

"I wasn't aware of that," Abigail replied, her face coloring.

"I'm just fussy today," Flower said.

"I'll try to be a bit more sensitive," Abigail said.

"I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, Miss Abby. Come on now," she said, patting the top of Abigail's hand.

But Abigail removed her hand and began putting her food back in the picnic basket.

THE next morning Flower woke in the feather-stuffed bed that had belonged to Carrie LaRose. The wind was cool through the windows, the early sunlight flecked with rain. During the night she had heard horses on the road and loud voices from the saloon next door, perhaps those of night riders whose reputation was spreading through the countryside, but she kept the.36 caliber revolver from McCain's Hardware under her bed, five chambers loaded, with fresh percussion caps on each of the nipples. She did not believe the Knights of the White Camellia or the members of the White League were the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers. In fact, she believed they were moral and physical cowards who hid their failure under bedsheets and she fantasized that one day the men who had attacked her would return, garbed in hoods and robes, and she would have the chance to do something unspeakable and painful to each of them.

Through her open window she could hear a piece of paper flapping. She got up from the bed and walked barefoot to the front door and opened it. Tied to the door handle with a piece of wire were a thin, rolled newspaper printed with garish headlines and a note written on a piece of hand-soiled butcher paper.

The note read:

Dear Nigger,

Glad you can read. See what you think about the article on you and the Yankee bitch who thinks her shit don't stink.

We got nothing against you. Just don't mess with us.

It was unsigned.

The newspaper was printed on low-grade paper, of a dirty gray color, the printer's type undefined and fuzzy along the edges. The newspaper was titled The Rebel Clarion and had sprung to life in Baton Rouge immediately after the Surrender, featuring anonymously written articles and cartoons that depicted Africans with slat teeth, jug ears, lips that protruded like suction cups and bodies with the anatomical proportions of baboons, the knees and elbows punching through the clothes, as though poverty were in itself funny. In the cartoons the emancipated slave spit watermelon seeds, tap-danced while a carpetbagger tossed coins at him, sat with his bare feet on a desk in the state legislature or with a mob of his peers chased a terrified white woman in bonnet and hooped skirts inside the door of a ruined plantation house.

The article Flower was supposed to read was circled with black charcoal. In her mind's eye she saw herself tearing both the note and the newspaper in half and dropping them in the trash pit behind the house. But when she saw Abigail's name in the first paragraph of the article she sat down in Carrie LaRose's rocker on the gallery and, like a person deciding to glance at the lewd writing on a privy wall, she began to read.

While Southern soldiers died on the field at Shiloh, Miss Dowling showed her loyalties by joining ranks with the Beast of New Orleans, General Benjamin Butler, and caring for the enemy during the Yankee occupation of that city.

Later, using a pass from the Sanitary Commission, she smuggled escaped negroes through Confederate lines so they could join the Yankee army and sack the homes of their former owners and benefactors and, in some cases, rape the white women who had clothed and fed and nursed them when they were sick.

Miss Dowling has now seen fit to use her influence in the Northern press to attack one of Louisiana's greatest Confederate heroes, a patriot who was struck by enemy fire three times at Shiloh but who managed to escape from a prison hospital and once more join in the fight to support the Holy Cause.

Miss Dowling is well known in New Iberia, not only for her traitorous history during the war but also for propensities that appear directly related to her spinsterhood. Several credible sources have indicated that her close relationship with a freed negro woman is best described by a certain Latin term this newspaper does not make use of.

She set both the note and the newspaper under a flowerpot, although she could not explain why she didn't simply throw them away, and went inside her new house and fixed breakfast.

SEVERAL hours later a carriage with waxed black surfaces and white wheels and maroon cushions and a surrey on top pulled into the yard. A black man in a tattered, brushed coat and pants cut off at the knees sat in the driver's seat. A lean, slack-jawed outrider, wearing a flop hat, a gunbelt and holstered revolver hanging from his pommel, preceded the carriage into the yard and dismounted and looked back down the road and out into the fields, as though the great vacant spaces proffered a threat that no one else saw.

Flower stepped out on the gallery, into the hot wind blowing from the south. Ira Jamison got down from his carriage and removed his hat and wiped the inside of the band with a handkerchief as he nodded approvingly at the house and the mixture of flowers and banana trees and palms planted around it.

He wore a white shirt with puffed sleeves and a silver vest and dark pants, but because of the heat his coat was folded neatly on the cushions of the carriage. He carried an ebony-black cane with a gold head on it, but Flower noticed his limp was gone and his skin was pink and his eyes bright.

"This is extraordinary. You've done a wonderful job with the old place," he said. "My heavens, you never cease proving you're one of the most ingenious women I've ever known."

She looked at him mutely, her face tingling.

"Aren't you going to say hello?" he asked.

"How do you do, Colonel?" she said.

"Smashing, as my British friends in the cotton trade say. I'm in town to check on a few business matters. Looks like the Yanks burned down my laundry and the cabins out back with it."

"I'm glad you brought that up. My fifty arpents runs into seventy-five of yours. I'll take them off your hands," she said.

"You'll take them off-" he began, then burst out laughing. "Now, how would you do that?"

"Use my house and land to borrow the money. I already talked to the bank."

"Will you pay me for the buildings I lost?"

"No."

"By God, you amaze me, Flower. I'm proud of you," he said.

She felt her heart quicken, and was ashamed at how easily he could manipulate her emotions. She walked down the steps, then tilted up the flowerpot she had stuck the racist newspaper under.

"Read this and the note that came with it," she said.

Jamison set down his cane on the steps and unfolded the newspaper in the shade. Behind him, the outrider, whom Flower recognized as Clay Hatcher, stood in the sun, sweating under his hat. His bottom lip was swollen and crusted with black blood along a deep cut. He kept swiping horseflies out of his face.

Jamison tore the note in half and stuck it inside the newspaper and dropped the newspaper on the step.

"No one will dare harm you, Flower. I give you my word," he said.

"They already did. Three men raped me. They were paid by Rufus Atkins."

"I don't believe that. Rufus has worked for me thirty years. He does-"

"He does what you tell him?" she said.

His faced seemed to dilate and redden with his frustration. "In a word, yes," he said.

"He made me go to bed with him, Colonel. Miss Abby told you about it. But you didn't raise a hand."

"I set the example. So you're correct, Flower. The guilt is mine."

He was speaking too fast now, his mercurial nature impossible to connect from one moment to the next.

"Suh, I don't understand," she said.

"Years ago I visited the quarters at night. I took all the privileges of a wealthy young plantation owner. People like Rufus and our man Clay over there are products of my own class."

"You helped them hurt me, suh."

"People can change. I'm sorry, Flower. My God, I'm your father. Can't you have some forgiveness?" he said.

After he was gone she sat on the top step of her gallery, her temples pounding, a solitary crow cawing against the yellow haze that filled the afternoon. She could not comprehend what had just happened. He had looked upon her work, her creations, her life, with admiration and pride, then had accepted paternity for her and in the same sentence had asked forgiveness.

Why now?

Because legally he can't own you anymore. This way he can, a voice answered.

She wanted to shove her fingers in her ears.

WILLIE saw reprinted copies of the article from the racist newspaper tacked on trees and storefronts all over town. One was even placed in his mailbox by a mounted man who leaned down briefly in the saddle, then rode away in the early morning mist. Willie had run after him, but the mounted man paid him no heed and did not look back at him. Night riders had come into his yard twice now, calling his name, tossing rocks at his windows. So far he had not taken their visits seriously. He had learned the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia, when in earnest, struck without warning and left no doubt about their intentions. A carpetbagger was stripped naked and rope-drug through a woods, a black soldier garrotted on the St. Martinville Road, a political meeting in the tiny settlement of Loreauville literally shot to pieces.

But what do you do when the names of your friends are smeared by a collection of nameless cowards? he asked himself.

Make your own statement, he answered.

He saddled a horse in the livery he had inherited from his mother and rode out to the ends of both East and West Main, then divided the town into quadrants and traversed every street and alley in it, pulling down copies of the defamatory article and stuffing them in a choke sack tied to his pommel. By early afternoon, under a white sun, he was out in the parish, ripping the article from fence posts and the trunks of live oaks that bordered cane fields and dirt roads. His choke sack bulged as though it were stuffed with pine cones.

South of town, in an undrained area where a group of Ira Jamison's rental convicts were building a board road to a salt mine, Willie looked over his shoulder and saw a lone rider on a buckskin gelding behind him, a man with a poached, wind-burned face wearing a sweat-ringed hat and the flared boots of a cavalryman.

Willie passed a black man cooking food under a pavilion fashioned from tent poles and canvas. The black man was barefoot and had a shaved, peaked head, like the polished top of a cypress knee. He wore a white jumper and a pair of striped prison pants and rusted leg irons that caused him to take clinking, abbreviated steps from one pot to the next.

"You one of Colonel Jamison's convicts?" Willie asked.

"You got it, boss," the black man replied.

"What are you selling?"

"Greens, stew meat and tomatoes, red beans, rice and gravy, fresh bread. A plateful for fifteen cents. Or it's free if you wants to build the bo'rd road under the gun," the black man said. He roared at his own joke.

Willie turned his horse in a circle and waited in the shade of a live oak for the rider to approach him. The rider's eyes seemed lidless and reminded Willie of smoke on a wintry day or perhaps a gray sky flecked with scavenger birds. In spite of the heat, the rider's shirt was buttoned at the wrists and throat and he wore leather cuffs pulled up on his forearms.

"You wouldn't bird-dog a fellow, would you, Captain Jarrette?" Willie said.

"I make it my business to check out them that need watching," the rider replied.

"You put your sword to me when I was unarmed and had done you no injury. But you also saved me from going before a Yankee firing squad. So maybe we're even," Willie said.

"Meaning?"

"I'd like to buy you a lunch."

Jarrette removed his hat and surveyed the countryside, his hair falling over his ears. He leaned in the saddle and blew his nose with his fingers.

"I ain't got nothing against hit," he said.

Jarrette waited in the shade while Willie paid for their lunches. He watched the convicts lay split logs in the saw grass and humus and the black mud that oozed over their ankles. His nose was beaked, his chin cut with a cleft, his eyes connecting images with thoughts that probably no one would ever be privy to. Jarrette did not sit but squatted while he ate, shoveling food into his mouth as fast as possible with a wood spoon, scraping the tin in the plate, wiping it clean with bread, then eating the bread and licking his fingers, the muscles in his calves and thighs knotted into rocks.

"This grub tastes like dog turds," he said, tossing his bare plate on the grass.

Willie looked at the intensity in Jarrette's face, the heat that seemed to climb out of his buttoned collar, the twitch at the corner of one eye when he heard a convict's ax split a piece of green wood.

"Tell me, sir, is it possible you're insane?" Willie asked.

"Maybe. Anything wrong with that?" Jarrette replied.

"I was just curious."

Jarrette shifted his weight on his haunches and studied him warily. "Why you tearing down them newspaper stories? Don't lie about it, either," he said.

"They defame people I know."

Jarrette seemed to think about the statement.

"Cole Younger is my brother-in-law, you sonofabitch," he said.

Willie gathered up his plate and spoon from the grass, then reached down and picked up Jarrette's and returned them to the plank serving table under the canvas-topped pavilion. He walked back into the oak tree's shade. "As one Secesh to another, accept my word on this-" he began. Then he rethought his words and looked out at the wind blowing across the saw grass. "May you have a fine day, Captain Jarrette, and may all your children and grandchildren be just like you and keep you company the rest of your life," he said.

WHEN the sun was red over the cane fields in the west, Willie pulled the last copy of The Rebel Clarion article he could find from the front porch of a houseboat far down Bayou Teche and turned his horse back toward town.

Now, all he needed to do was bury his choke sack in a hole or set fire to it on a mud bank and be done with it.

But a voice that he preferred not to hear told him that was not part of his plan.

Since his return from the war he had tried to accept the fact that the heart of Abigail Dowling belonged to another and it was fruitless for him to pursue what ultimately had been a boyhood fantasy. Had he not written Robert the same, in the moments before he thought he was going to be shot, at a time when a man knew the absolute truth about his life and himself, when every corner of the soul was laid bare?

But she wouldn't leave his thoughts. Nor would the memory of her thighs opening under him, the press of her hands in the small of his back, the heat of her breath on his cheek. Her sexual response wasn't entirely out of charity, was it? Women didn't operate in that fashion, he told himself. She obviously respected him, and sometimes at the school he saw a fondness in her eyes that made him want to reach out and touch her.

Maybe the war had embittered him and had driven her from him, and the fault was neither his nor Abby's but the war. After all, she was an abolitionist and sometimes his own rhetoric sounded little different from the recalcitrant Secessionists who would rather see the South layered with ash and bones than given over to the carpetbag government.

Why let the war continue to injure both of them? If he could only take contention and vituperation from his speech and let go of the memories, no, that was not the word, the anger he still felt when he saw Jim Stubbefield freeze against a red-streaked sky, his jaw suddenly gone slack, a wound like a rose petal in the center of his brow-

What had he told Abby? "I'll never get over Jim. I hate the sons of-bitches who caused all this." What woman would not be frightened by the repository of vitriol that still burned inside him?

If he could only tell Abby the true feelings of his heart. Wouldn't all the other barriers disappear? Had she not come to him for help when she and Flower started up their school?

He tethered his horse to the ringed pole in front of Abby's cottage. The street was empty, the sky ribbed with strips of maroon cloud, the shutters on Abby's cottage vibrating in the wind. He walked into the backyard and set fire to the choke sack in Abby's trash pit, then tapped on her back door.

"Hello, Willie. What are you up to?" she said, looking over his shoulder at the column of black smoke rising out of the ground.

"A lot of townspeople were incensed at your being slandered by this Kluxer paper in Baton Rouge. So they gathered up the articles and asked me to burn them," he said.

"What Kluxer paper?" she said.

He stared at her stupidly, then yawned slightly and looked innocuously out into the trees. "It's nothing of consequence. There's a collection of cretins in Baton Rouge who are always writing things no one takes seriously."

"Willie, for once would you try to make sense?" she said.

"It's not important. Believe me. I was just passing by."

"You look like a boiled crab. Have you been out in the sun?"

"Abby, love of my heart, I think long ago I was condemned to a life of ineptitude. It's time to say good-bye."

Before she could reply he walked quickly into the side yard and out into the street.

Right into a group of seven mounted men, all of whom had either black or white robes draped over the cantles of their saddles. Each of the robes was sewn with an ornate, pink-scrolled camellia. In the middle of the group, mounted on a buckskin gelding, was the man whose colorless eyes had witnessed the burning of Lawrence, Kansas.

"You was sassing me today, wasn't you?" he said.

"Wouldn't dream of it, Captain Jarrette," Willie said. He looked up and down the street. There was no one else on it, except an elderly Frenchman who sold taffy from a cart and a little black girl who was aimlessly following him on his route.

Another rider leaned down from his saddle and bounced a picked camellia off Willie's face.

"It's the wrong time to be a smart ass, cabbage head," he said.

"Get about your business and I won't tell your mother the best part of her sunny little chap dripped into her bloomers," Willie said to him.

The man who had thrown the flower laughed without making sound, then wiped his mouth. He had black hair the color and texture of pitch and was tall and raw-boned, unshaved, with skin that looked like it had been rubbed with black pepper, his neck too long for his torso, his shoulders sloping unnaturally under his shirt, as though they had been surgically pared away.

He lifted a coiled rope from a saddlebag and began feeding a wrapped end out on the ground.

"You were one of the convicts on the burial detail that almost put me in the ground," Willie said.

"I wasn't no convict, boy. I was a prisoner of war," the tall man said. "You sassed the captain?"

The summer light was high in the sky now, the street deep in shadow. Willie looked between the horses that were now circling him. The yards and galleries of the homes along the street were empty, the ventilated shutters closed, even though the evening was warm.

"Where's a Yank when you need one?" the convict said.

"Get on with it," Jarrette said.

The convict tied a small loop in the end of the rope, then doubled-over the shaft and worked it back through the loop.

"You listen-" Willie began.

The convict whirled the lariat over his head and slapped it around Willie's shoulders, hard, cinching the knot tight. Before Willie could pull the rope loose, the convict wrapped the other end around his pommel and kicked his horse in the ribs. Suddenly Willie was jerked through the air, his arms pinned at his sides, the ground rising into his face with the impact of a brick wall. Then he was skidding across the dirt, fighting to gain purchase on the rope, the trees and picket fences and flowers in the yards rushing past him.

He caromed off a lamppost and bounced across a brick walkway at the street corner. The rider turned his horse and headed back toward the cottage, jerking Willie off his feet when he tried to rise. Willie clenched both his hands on the rope, trying to lift his head above the level of the street, while dust from the horse's hooves clotted his nose and mouth and a purple haze filled his eyes.

Then the convict reined his horse and was suddenly motionless in the saddle.

A Union sergeant, with dark red hair, wearing a kepi, was walking down the middle of the street, toward the riders, a double-barrel shotgun held at port arms.

"The five-cent hand-jobs down in the bottoms must not be available this evening," he said.

"Don't mix in hit, blue-belly," Jarrette said.

"Oh, I don't plan to mix in it at all, Captain Jarrette. But my lovely ten-gauge will. By blowing your fucking head off," the sergeant said. He lifted the shotgun to his shoulder and thumbed back the hammer on each barrel.

Jarrette stared into the shotgun, breathing through his mouth, snuffing down in his nose, as though he had a cold. "How you know my name?" he asked.

"You were with Cole Younger at Centralia. When he lined up captured Union boys to see how many bodies a ball from his new Enfield could pass through. Haul your sorry ass out of here, you cowardly sack of shit," the sergeant said.

Jarrette flinched, the blood draining out of his cheeks. He rubbed his palms on his thighs as though he needed to relieve himself. Then his face locked into a disjointed expression, the eyes lidless, the jaw hooked open, like a barracuda thrown onto a beach.

"That was Bill Anderson's bunch. I wasn't there. I didn't have nothing to do with hit," he said.

"I can always tell when you're lying, Jarrette. Your lips are moving," the sergeant said.

"Hit's Cap'n Jarrette. Don't talk to me like that. I wasn't there."

"In three seconds you're going to be the deadest piece of white trash ever to suck on a load of double-ought buckshot," the sergeant said.

"Cap?" said a man in a butternut jacket cut off at the armpits. "Cap, it's all right. He don't know what he's talking about."

But there was no sound except the wind in the trees. The man in the butternut jacket looked at the others, then reached over and turned Jarrette's horse for him.

Willie watched the seven horsemen ride quietly down the street, the shadows and their wide-brim flop hats smudging their features, their voices lost in the wind. The sergeant released the tension in the shotgun's hammers. He wore a silver ring with a gold cross soldered to it.

"You again. Everywhere I go," Willie said, wiping the blood from his nose.

"Oh, had them surrounded, did you?" the sergeant said.

Willie touched a barked place on his forehead. "No, I allow you're obviously a much more resourceful and adept man than I. Truth is, Sergeant, I regularly make a mess of things," he said.

The sergeant's face softened. "Wasn't much to it. I know Jarrette's name and what he is. Hold up a mirror to a fellow like that and he's undone by what he sees."

"What's your name?"

"Quintinius Earp."

"It's what?"

"Ah, I should have known your true, lovable self was never far behind. The name is Quintinius Earp, lately of Ripton, Vermont, now obliged to baby-sit ex-Rebs who can't keep their tallywhackers out of the clothes roller."

"Earp? As in 'puke'?"

"Correct, as in 'puke.' Would you do me a favor?"

"I expect."

"Go home. Pretend you don't know me. Piss on my grave. Dig up my bones and feed them to your dog. Go back to Ireland and take a job in the peat bogs. But whatever it is, get out of my life!"

"Could I buy you a drink?" Willie asked.

Sergeant Earp shut his eyes and made a sound in his throat as though a nail had just been hammered into his head.

ABIGAIL Dowling had been chopping wood for her stove and loading it into a box when she glanced through the side yard and saw a Yankee soldier armed with a shotgun disperse a group of men in front of her house. He had a red goatee and mustache and short muscular arms, and his dark blue jacket was pulled tightly down inside his belt so his shoulders and chest were molded as tautly as a statue's.

She set down the woodbox and walked through the side yard into the front. Down the street she saw a man walking away in the gloaming of the day, the back of his clothes gray with dust. The Union soldier had propped his shotgun against her fence and was buying a twist of taffy from a vendor. The soldier squatted down in front of a small Negro girl and untwisted the paper from the taffy and gave it to the girl.

"What happened out here?" Abigail said.

The sergeant stood up and touched the brim of his kepi. "Not much. Some miscreants giving a local fellow a bad time," he said.

"Was that Willie Burke?" she asked, looking down the street.

"Has a way of showing up all over the planet? Yes, I think that's his name."

"Is he all right?"

"Seems fine enough to me."

The black girl had finished her taffy and was now standing a few feet away, her eyes uplifted to the sergeant's. He removed a penny from his pocket and gave it to her. "Get yourself one more, then you'd better find your mommy," he said.

Abigail and the soldier looked at one another in the silence. "You sound as though you're from my neck of the woods," he said.

"On the Merrimack, in Massachusetts. My name is Abigail Dowling," she said.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Miss Abigail," he said. He stepped forward awkwardly and removed his kepi and shook her hand. He continued to stare at her, his lips seeming to form words that were somehow not connected to his thoughts. He grinned sheepishly at his own emotional disorganization.

"Do you have a name?" she asked.

"Oh, excuse me. It's Sergeant Earp. Quintinius Earp."

She smiled, her head tilting slightly. A look of undisguised disappointment stole across his face.

"Quintinius? My, what a beautiful Roman name," she said.

When he grinned he looked like the happiest, most handsome and kindly man she had ever seen.