“If you please, sir, not now,” Lee said, holding up a hand. “Having just arrived after some days of travel, I would prefer not to be interviewed here in the train station. I expect to remain in Kentucky and Missouri until June. Surely we shall speak again.” The reporter started to ask his question anyhow; Lee shook his head. Charles Marshall came up beside him, his face stern. Darby finally seemed to get the message. With a half-disappointed, half-angry scowl, he hurried away.
“The nerve of the damned Yankee,” Marshall grumbled. “President Davis would have no business interrogating you so, let alone some brash reporter.”
“He is but doing his job, Major, as we do ours.” Lee grinned wryly. “I will admit to not being sorry he is now doing it somewhere else.”
In the ride to the Galt House on the corner of Second and Main, Louisville seemed very much a northern city, in that the vast majority of the people on the streets were white. Of the few Negroes Lee saw, several wore the remnants of Union uniforms. A couple of them turned to stare—and to glare—at his gray coat, and Charles Marshall’s.
General Grant was standing in the hotel lobby when Lee came in. He walked over to shake Lee’s hand. “One glance at the map and I knew I would beat you here, sir,” he said. “The railroad line from Washington to Louisville is much more direct than that from Richmond. I would have arrived sooner still if all the line of the Baltimore and Ohio ran north of the Potomac. But even so, I got in day before yesterday.”
“As you say, General, you enjoyed the shorter route.” Lee hesitated, then added, “I must say, sir, that I am happier to be meeting you again in this fashion than I was during the late war.”
“I’m a great deal happier to see you like this, that’s certain,” Grant said, puffing smoke from his cigar, “and ever so much better here than in the melancholy circumstances that surrounded us at Washington. Shall we dine together? Lieutenant Colonel Porter, my aide, is here with me. I hope he might join us.”
“Of course, if I may bring Major Marshall here,” Lee answered. He waited for Grant to nod, then continued, “Perhaps you will give us an hour in which to freshen ourselves? If it suits you, we shall meet you here at”—he glanced at a clock on the wall; its pendulum swung away the seconds—”half-past seven.”
“Very good, sir,” Grant said. They shook hands and went their separate ways.
Grant’s aide, Horace Porter, was a tough-looking fellow in his late twenties, with dark, wavy hair, stem eyes set in a forward-thrusting face, and a sweeping mustache set above a narrow strip of chin beard. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, gentlemen,” he said when Lee and Marshall came down from their second-floor rooms. “As we are on neutral ground here, shall we proceed to the dining room together?”
“An admirable suggestion,” Lee said with a smile.
Once seated, Grant said, “I have often stayed at the Galt House; my wife and I both have relatives in and close by Louisville. In summer, the terrapins from the Ohio are very fine here, but at this time of year we’d best stick to beef and potatoes.” His dinner companions accepted the suggestion. When the roast arrived, Grant cut a piece for himself but sent it back to the kitchen for more thorough cooking. “I can’t abide bloody meat,” he explained, “or blood of any sort, come to that.”
“An odd quirk for a general,” Lee said.
Grant chuckled in self-deprecation. “So it is, but I expect we all have our crotchets.” The colored waiter brought back his beef. It was black on the outside and gray on the inside. It had to be as tough as shoe leather, and taste like it, too, but he ate it with every sign of enjoyment.
Porter drank two glasses of whiskey; Lee and Marshall shared a bottle of wine. Despite rumors about Grant’s tippling, he stuck to coffee. Once the main course and the plum pudding that followed had been cleared away, Lee said, “General, if I may make so bold as to enquire, how do you view your role and that of your men here?”
Grant paused for thought before he answered. He had a pokerplayer’s face, one that revealed nothing unintended. “More that of policeman than soldier, I believe: to keep either side from doing too much in the way of smuggling rifles, to keep this a political fight and not a new outbreak of civil war, and to keep the election as honest as may be. And you, sir?”
Lee’s glass still held a little wine. He raised it in salute to Grant. “We shall get on capitally, sir. I could not have hoped to combine accuracy and succinctness so.”
“We would do well to cooperate if we hope to maintain the fragile peace here and especially in Missouri,” Porter said; his flat Pennsylvania accent—his father was a former governor of the state—contrasted with both Grant’s western speech and the soft Virginia tones of the Confederate officers. “Both states already hold enough rifles, and to spare, to break out in fresh fighting even were no new weapons smuggled across any borders.”
“Quite true,” Lee said, remembering blue coats and gray at Munfordsville. “Having spent so much time at war, we soldiers deserve a spell as peacemakers and peacekeepers, would you not agree?”
“I’d toast you, sir, if I had strong drink before me,” Grant said.
“I am pleased to accept the spirit of the toast without the spirits,” Lee said. Charles Marshall raised an eyebrow, Horace Porter snorted and then tried to pretend he hadn’t, and Grant chuckled, just as if, less than a year earlier, the four men hadn’t done their best to slaughter one another’s armies. It was, in fact, a most convivial evening.
A sunbeam stealing through the window woke Lee up. He left his nightcap on when he got out of bed; the fire in the fireplace had died during the night, and the room was almost as cold as his rent outside Orange Court House had been the winter before. After a good, satisfying stretch, he walked over to the sideboard where his uniform hung.
Everything happened at once then. A rifle roared. The window by which he was standing blew in, showering him with splinters of glass. A bullet buzzed past his head and smacked into the opposite wall.
He instinctively ducked, though even as he did so, he knew the motion was useless. He made himself straighten, ran the two steps to the window. By the sound, the rifle had been a Springfield; whoever was firing would need time to reload, time in which he could duck. Only later did he think two gunmen might have waited outside.
The outer air was even colder than that in his room. He stuck out his head, looked up and down the street. A man was running away, fast as he could go. A couple of other people pursued him, but only a couple—the hour was too early for many people to be out and about. A rifle lay against the front wall of the bakery that lay opposite the Galt House on Second Street.
Charles Marshall pounded on the door. “General Lee! Are you all right?”
“Yes, thank you, Major.” Lee let his aide in to prove it. On his way back to the bed, he started to hop. “No, not quite, I fear; I seem to have cut my foot on some of this glass. A maid will have to sweep it up.”
“You have some in your beard, too,” Marshall said. Lee ran his fingers through it. Sure enough, glittering shards fell down the front of his nightshirt. Marshall’s voice rose with outrage as the full import of the situation sank in: “Someone tried to kill you, sir!”
“So it would appear,” Lee said. By then, the hall outside his door was full of staring, chattering people, among them a popeyed Horace Porter. He spoke to them: “I am grateful for your concern, my friends, but, as you see, I remain uninjured. Major, would you be so kind as to shut that, so I can get properly dressed?”
Marshall obeyed, although, to Lee’s secret annoyance, he stayed inside himself. “Who could want to harm you, sir?” he asked as Lee buttoned his trousers.