James never questioned her about the dalliance. He didn't even know about her mysterious absences from their house. He was too stupid, too preoccupied with his petty tasks at the Treasury Department, which kept him working till eight or nine every night.
Powell not only fulfilled Ashton with his occasionally cruel lovemaking, he also fascinated her as a person. He was a hot patriot, yet ruthless in his devotion to his own cause. There was no paradox. He loved the Confederacy but hated "King Jeff." He believed in secession but not in this secessionist government. He intended to survive the doomed war and prosper.
"I have a year or so to do it. Davis will blunder along unchecked for some time yet. Our cause is just — we should and we could win. With the right man leading us, I could become a prince of a new kingdom. Under present circumstances and the present dictator, I'm afraid all I can become is rich."
A patriot, a speculator, an incomparable lover — she had never met a man quite as complex, and surely never would again. By comparison, Huntoon suffered even more than he had in times past.
No matter. The marriage, frail from the beginning, had now perished. The past few months had convinced Ashton that Huntoon couldn't provide social or financial advancement because he lacked the slyness, the nerve, and the brains. In that one short argument with Davis, he had fashioned his own noose and sprung the trap. Weekly, her loathing grew, as did her certainty that she was in love with Lamar Powell.
In love. How strange to realize the familiar words could apply to her. She had experienced the same emotion only once before. Then Billy Hazard had rejected her in favor of Brett, starting the chain of events that ended with her damned brother banishing her from Mont Royal.
Ashton doubted that Powell loved her. She judged him incapable of loving anyone except himself. It didn't concern her. She had enough to give for both of —
"Ashton?"
Her back was still to her husband. She snarled a vile word and pounded her fist on the pillow. Why wouldn't he leave her alone? "What is it?"
A soft, repulsive hand crept over her shoulder. "Why are you so cold to me? It's been weeks since I was permitted my marital rights."
God, even when he whined of love he sounded like a lawyer. He was going to pay for disturbing her. She rolled away, tossing her hair, found a match and struck it. She jerked the chimney from the bedside lamp, lit the wick, and slammed the chimney back. Braced on her elbows, she pulled her nightdress above her hips.
"All right, come on."
"Wh — what?"
"Get that smelly nightshirt off and take what you want while you can." The lamp set small fires in her eyes. She bent her knees, spread them, clenched her teeth. "Come on."
He struggled with the long flannel garment, his voice muffled inside. "I'm not sure I can perform on command —" As he dropped the shirt beside the bed, exposing his white body, she saw he was right. Huntoon looked ready to cry. Ashton laughed at him.
"You never can. Even if that scrawny thing does show a little life, it's no better than a thimble inside me. How did you ever expect to keep a wife content? You're pathetic."
And she snapped her legs together, jerked her nightdress down, seized the lamp, and left the bedroom.
Huntoon listened to her marching downstairs. "You mean bitch," he shouted, momentarily not caring whether Homer or any of the other house people heard him. Serve her right if they did.
The anger wilted as quickly as the slight stiffness, all he had been able to manage while she yelled at him. Her cruelty did something more than hurt him. It confirmed a suspicion that had been with him for some days. There was another man.
Huntoon flung himself back in bed and put his forearm over his eyes. Everything in Richmond was awry. He was trapped in menial work for a government he had first distrusted and now despised. He felt the same about Davis, whose foes no longer formed a company or a regiment, but a small army. Important men: Vice President Stephens; Joe Johnston; Vance of North Carolina and Brown of Georgia, governors who said Davis was usurping their powers; Toombs, the former secretary of state, to whom Davis had been forced to hand over a brigadier's commission to stop his scathing attacks.
The President dictated to the army and truckled to the Virginia clique, as if that were the only way to make his shabby pedigree acceptable. He was botching the war, mismanaging the nation, and — an easy extension in a distraught mind — thwarting Huntoon's ambition, thereby causing the rift with Ashton.
For an hour, he lay imagining her naked with another man. Some officer perhaps? That wily little Jew with his cabinet post and his fine manners? Or could it be a man like that sleek, patently untrustworthy Georgian, Powell? Dry-mouthed, Huntoon pictured his wife coupling with various suspects. He wanted to know the man's identity. He would confront her; demand that she give him the name of —
He stopped thinking that way. He couldn't do it. Knowing would probably kill him.
When two hours had gone by, he heaved himself out of bed, donned his robe, and went downstairs. The house had grown cold. His breath plumed visibly against the glow of a lamp in the parlor. He stepped into the doorway.
"Ashton? I came to apologize for —"
The sentence trailed away. He grimaced. She breathed lightly and evenly, curled in a large leather chair, fast asleep. Her legs were drawn up near her bosom and her arms clasped around them. On her face a smile of dreams, sensually contented.
He turned and stumbled toward the staircase, his ears ringing, that smile acid-etched on his memory. Tears came. He hated her but knew he was powerless to do anything about it, which only worsened the feeling. He climbed the stairs like an old man as the hall clock tolled three.
43
At Belvedere, Brett continued to fight her own daily war with loneliness.
One consolation: Billy's letters sounded more cheerful. His old unit, Engineer Company A, had returned to Washington and was quartered on the grounds of the federal arsenal along with two of the three new volunteer companies congressionally approved in August — B from Maine and C from Massachusetts.
Billy still maintained a starchy pride in belonging to "the old company." But he wrote that most of the regulars accepted the new recruits and were attempting to make them overnight experts in every skill from pontoniering to road building.
The newly constituted Battalion of Engineers incorporated the old cadre of corps regulars, and was now attached to McClellan's Army of the Potomac and commanded by Captain James Duane, '48, an officer Billy respected. In order to stay with the battalion, Billy's friend Lije Farmer had been required to resign as captain of volunteers and take a regular army commission as a first lieutenant. Oldest one in the Potomac Army, he claims, but he is content, and I am glad he's with us.
Brett was happy her husband was back where he wanted to be. With winter bringing military hibernation, she hoped he would be relatively inactive and thus out of danger for several months. She wondered about chances for a leave. She missed him so; there was many a night when she slept only an hour or two.
She helped around the house as much as she could, but that still left great stretches of empty time. Constance had gone back to Washington to be with George. The strange, ill-tempered colored man, Brown, was there, too, gathering more strays. Virgilia had won a place among Miss Dix's nurses and wouldn't be returning. Brett was by herself, moody and lonesome.
One steel-colored December day, she bundled up, walked to the gate of Hazard's, then up the hill to Brown's building. She found two of the children, a boy and a girl, studying at a board with Mr. Czorna, the Hungarian. His wife was stirring soup at the stove. Brett greeted each of them.