Then all such worries vanished from her head. Here came the motorcar, kicking up a cloud of dust from the red-dirt path that led up to the mansion. The Negro driver stopped the automobile, leaped out of it, and got out Tom Colleton's bags. Then he opened the door to the rear seat and let out Tom, who handed him a silver coin that sparkled in the sun. Tom picked up his own bags and carried them to Marshlands' front door.
He wouldn't have done that before the war started, Anne thought, and then, an instant later, with concern more maternal than sisterly, He's gotten so thin.
She hurried to the door. Scipio somehow got there ahead of her; he shared with cats the ability to leave later than you did but to arrive sooner anyhow, and without seeming to have crossed the intervening space. He opened the door, letting in the warm May air, and said, "Welcome home, Captain Colle-" He stopped, for a moment looking quite humanly surprised. Tom Colleton wore a single star on each collar tab. Scipio corrected himself: "Welcome home, Major Colleton."
Anne threw herself into her brother's arms. He dropped his bags and squeezed her tight. After the joyous hellos and I-love-yous and good-to-see-yous, Anne said indignantly, "You didn't tell me you've been promoted again."
Tom shrugged. "We've seen a lot of casualties. Somebody has to step up and do the work." When he'd joined the Army, bare days after war broke out, he'd put a fancy plume in his hat and gone off gaily, like a knight heading out on a Crusade. Now he sounded both tired and altogether matter-of-fact about his business, more like a cabinetmaker than a cavalier.
He looked tired, too. His forehead had lines that hadn't been there the year before-he was eighteen months younger than Anne-and he carried dark circles under his eyes. His cheeks were hollow; a long, pink scar seamed one of them. Hesitantly, Anne reached up to touch it. "You didn't tell me about this, either."
Her brother shrugged again. "Got kissed by a shell fragment. Battalion doctor's assistant sewed it up. I didn't lose any duty time, so I didn't think it was worth talking about."
"You've changed," Anne said, perhaps more wonderingly than she should have. The young man who'd gone off to war had been the little brother she'd always known: witty, easygoing, not too effectual-certainly not effectual enough to want to put in any work at operating Marshlands when his sister seemed happy enough doing it all. And that had suited Anne fine; she rejoiced in the power it gave her. But when she looked into the eyes of the lean near-stranger who was her own flesh and blood, she didn't know what she saw. It flustered her. Tom had always been so easy to read, so predictable.
Scipio scooped up the bags. "I shall put these in your room, sir," he said.
"My room," Tom echoed, as if the phrase were in a foreign language. Slowly, he nodded. "Yes, go ahead and do that, Scipio." The butler carried the bags into the mansion. Tom took one step to follow him, then stopped, still outside. "Very strange," he murmured. "Unbelievable."
"What is?" Anne asked. She wasn't used to being unable to follow his train of thought.
"That all this"-Tom waved at the Marshlands mansion-"and all this"-the next wave encompassed the many square miles of the Marshlands estate-"is mine-part mine; excuse me, dear sister. And excuse me for sounding not quite like my old self. For most of the past nine months, my horizons have been limited to a hole in the ground and whether there'd be enough beans in the pot for my men and me. Coming back to this is like falling asleep and dreaming you've gone to heaven."
"It should be like waking from a nightmare," Anne said. "This is where you live. This is where you belong." At least for as long as you don't get in my hair while you're here. You never used to. Will you now? Harder to tell.
Her brother's mouth set in a hard line: another expression she'd never seen on his face till now. "I'm going back to the front in three days' time," he said, his voice flat. "Till the war is done, this is the dream. And when the war is done, it's liable to disappear like a dream, too."
"What are you talking about?" Of all the people in the world, Anne should have been able to keep up with-to keep ahead of-her brother. Ever since they were tiny, she'd been the clever one, the dominant one, in the family. She'd taken that so much for granted, it had never occurred to her things might change.
"Never mind." Tom stepped past her, into the hallway. His grin was more like the one she'd known, though not quite the same. "Feels good to get out of the sun." He kept on walking, and looked up toward the second-floor galleries. Like the grin, his chuckle had something new in it-restraint, maybe. Pointing, he said, "Still got the funny pictures hanging on the walls, do you?"
"Some of them," Anne said; he'd teased her about the exhibition ever since she'd had the idea for it. "Marcel Duchamp is still here, too."
"Is he?" Tom's lips thinned again. "Do we have any liquor left, and how many yellow babies are due?" That wasn't teasing, it was cold contempt, one more thing she wasn't used to hearing from him. That it matched her own feelings about the Frenchman was, next to the unaccustomed harshness, a small thing.
She decided taking Tom literally might be the best way to defuse the situation: "There's enough whiskey left for you to have a drink, if you want one." When her brother nodded, she called for Scipio. As usual, he answered the call faster than should have been possible. "Two whiskeys over ice," she told him. He bowed and disappeared again.
"Ice," Tom said. "Saw plenty of that this past winter. Not in my drink, though." He shook himself, as if realizing at last he really was away from the trenches of the Roanoke valley. "I heard from Jacob not long before I hopped on the train down here. He's well, or was then."
"I got a letter from him just the other day," Anne answered. "He said it looks like the Yankees are up to something in Kentucky, but nobody seems to know what it is or when the storm breaks."
"Won't be long now," Tom said. "Roads should all be dry. They can build their supply dumps up to as big as they want them, put their reserves in place. As soon as they're ready, they'll hit us." He spoke again like someone discussing the ins and outs of a business he knew well. Musingly, he went on, "Show probably would have started there already if they hadn't had to pull men to deal with the revolt in Utah."
Anne nodded. "Between the Mormons and the Socialists, they have so much trouble inside their own borders, it hurts them when they try to fight us." She spoke with vindictive relish. Scipio returned then, two tumblers full of amber whiskey gleaming on a silver tray. Ice clinked gently. Anne took one drink, Tom the other. She said, "It's not like that here, thank God. We all stand behind the cause."
To her amazement, her brother threw back his head and laughed. "This is the dream, all right," he said, and knocked back his whiskey with a flick of the wrist. "You're not living in the real world, that's certain."
Being the object of her brother's scorn angered her. "Who in the Confederate States throws bombs and rises up against the government?" she demanded, and then answered her own question: "No one, that's who."
"No?" Tom set the tumbler down hard on the tray Scipio still held. "These past few months, they've executed a couple of dozen niggers in my division alone. Reds, every last one of 'em, out-and-out Reds. Worse than plain old Socialists and Mormons put together, if you ask me."
"That's not the same as-" Anne began.
Her brother cut her off, one more thing he wouldn't have done-wouldn't have dared do-before the war. "And that's just in my division alone. Others, it's been worse. And God only knows how deep the rot has spread, away from the front."
"I've heard that. I don't believe it," Anne said firmly. "It's not a problem here, I can tell you that much."