71
In the deep amber dusk, Orry hurried past a wall on which someone had painted three words, only to have someone else attempt to scrub them away. Just above his head, ghostly white letters spelled DEATH TO DAVIS.
Neither the message — a not uncommon one these days — nor anything else, including his odious job, could spoil his mood. He was rushing because he had taken longer at supper than he intended. He and his old friend George Pickett had drained a forty-dollar bottle of imported Graves with their meal and packed several years' worth of reminiscences into a little more than an hour.
Pickett, who had been Orry's West Point classmate, looked as handsome as ever. Scented hair flowed over the collar of his uniform, and his smile shone as brightly as Orry remembered. They discussed subjects as diverse as their wives and the fat Yankee Bent, whose hatred of Orry had driven him to plot against Cousin Charles while both were serving with the Second Cavalry.
Pickett chided his friend for wasting himself in the job of watchdog over General Winder. "Though the Lord knows the poor lunatic ought to be watched by someone, so he doesn't disgrace us in the eyes of the world." Orry countered by saying that, menial and unrewarding as his work might appear, he was finding it important as carloads of prisoners came to town every few days, snatched up along the winter lines to swell the populations of already overcrowded Belle Isle and Libby.
"Winder administers those places, you see. The Yankees would be treated much worse than they are if the War Department didn't go in from time to time and curb the excesses."
Pickett accepted that. When they reached the bottom of the wine bottle, he admitted that despite promotion to major general in the autumn, he was unhappy. During recent months he had commanded the center of the Fredericksburg line, seeing little action. Between the old friends an unspoken truth seemed to hover. The war was not going well for the Confederacy. Soldier and civilian alike felt the stirrings of a poisonous doubt about the outcome. Someone had to be blamed; anonymous malcontents slashed DEATH TO DAVIS on empty walls.
Although the reunion had touches of melancholy, generally Orry enjoyed it, right down to the final cups of real coffee — three dollars apiece, and no questions asked about how the hotel had obtained it. They walked out arm in arm and parted on the street, Pickett to take his wife to see The Ticket-of-Leave Man at the smart new Richmond Theater, built where the Marshall had burned last year, and Orry to meet Madeline's train.
He rushed through the crowded, grimy depot, navigating around sad-eyed youths on litters or crutches, yelling peddlers, and strolling tarts. On a large chalkboard, the arriving Richmond & Petersburg train was shown as 1 ½ HRS LATE.
Night fell. The wait seemed far longer than what the board declared. Finally, out beyond the platform's end, a light appeared on the great trestle sixty feet above the river gorge. The train came in with a squeal of drivers, hissing of brakes, belching of smoke. The weather-bleached cars, most with broken windows, discharged furloughed men returning to duty and civilians of every degree from prosperous to poor. Amid the crowd, Orry stood out because of his height. He saw no one he recognized.
Had she missed a connection? Not been able to get away on schedule? Passengers waved to waiting friends or loved ones. Blurred, happy faces rushed by. His worry and anxiety deepened. Then, stepping down from the last car, there she was.
Her traveling dress had picked up the dirt so common on Southern trains these days. Locks of hair had come undone, straggling over her ears and brow. She looked exhausted and beautiful, and, whether in fact or by the alchemy of imagination, she smelled of the sweet olive of home.
"Madeline!" He shouted and waved like some schoolboy, struggling against the flow of passengers.
"Oh, Orry — my darling. My darling." She dropped a portmanteau and two hatboxes and flung her arms around his neck, hugging him, kissing him, weeping. "I thought I'd never get here."
"I thought you wouldn't either." Happy as a young bridegroom, he stepped back. "Are you all right?"
"Yes, yes — are you? We must collect my trunk. It was shipped in the baggage car."
"We'll get it and catch a hack outside. I hate for you to see my rooms. They're all I could get, and they're dismal."
"I'd sleep on a rubbish heap to be with you. Dear God, Orry — it's been so long — Oh, my. You've lost weight."
The sentences tumbled over one another, happiness cutting through the annoyances of the long, hard journey. Orry tipped a Negro porter, pointed him toward the baggage car, and located a hack. When they were on their way to the quarters he had hired a woman to clean that rooming, he sat on Madeline's left so he could keep his arm around her.
"I couldn't wait for you to arrive, but it's a bad time to be in Richmond. People are miserable. Angrier by the day. Everything's in short supply."
"One thing isn't. My love for you." She kissed him.
She treated his accommodations in the rooming house as if they ware palatial. Feasting on the sight of her by the light of a single low-trimmed gaslight, he asked, "Are you hungry?"
"Only for you. I brought some books —''
"Hurrah! We can read in the evenings —" Despite the strange, cruel tilting of the world, they might recall at least a little of the past. "Any poetry?"
"Yes, Keats. And a copy of Dickens's Pickwick Papers, which I liked very much."
"It's proscribed here. Too vulgar or something." He couldn't control his ebullience, going to her and circling her waist with his arm. He kissed her throat. "You must tell me everything new at Mont Royal. We've hours and hours of catching up to do —" He gazed into his wife's eyes, adding softly, "In many ways."
Madeline smiled. He changed position slightly so that he could touch and warmly close his hand over her breast. He kissed her with such ardor her back began to bow. Laughing, she broke the embrace. She began to unfasten the cloth-covered buttons of her bodice.
Naked with her in the cool bedroom, its door ajar to give them light, he gazed at her hair on the pillow and gently, gently pushed the tip of himself into her, experiencing a happiness almost unbearable. There came back to him then a poem they had read repeatedly during the frustrating years when honor and her marriage vows prevented this kind of consummation. Looking down at her, he spoke some of Poe's Annabel Lee.
" 'And this maiden she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me —'"
"We'll never be separated again," Madeline cried. "We mustn't be, ever. I would die."
From a second-floor window on Franklin Street, Mrs. Burdetta Halloran watched a hack arrive at the house directly opposite. A bosomy, cheaply attractive young woman with dark hair paid the driver, ascended the stoop, knocked, and waited with a tense air. A moment later, she stepped into a vertical bar of darkness, and the door closed.
Late afternoon light the color of lemons fell through lace curtains into the bay where Mrs. Halloran had kept a vigil on randomly chosen days throughout the past month. To the spinster who owned the house, she had presented herself as the aunt of a young woman suspected of falling into sin with the gentleman living across the way. She needed to be certain before pressing a confrontation, she said. Whatever the elderly spinster thought of the story, the small sum Mrs. Halloran paid each time kept her silent.
Who was the slut? Burdetta Halloran wondered. She didn't know, but she wouldn't forget the face. With short, quick tugs, she pulled on ecru mittens and spoke to the woman hovering in the dusty shadow.