"I'll tell you how-through my Hal, that's how," Nellie answered proudly. "You know TR gave him a Distinguished Service Cross, I expect. He didn't win that for playing tiddlywinks."
"I'm sure he didn't," Ferguson said. "I wish he were alive today so I could ask him about this entire important period."
"I wish he was alive today because I loved him and I miss him." When she first said she'd marry Hal, there at the end of the Great War, she hadn't dreamt how true that would be. What occasionally passed in their bedroom had next to nothing to do with it-with the large exception of causing Clara, who was the biggest surprise (and one of the most pleasant) Nellie had ever got. What made it true was that Hal had been a good man, and even Nellie, who had no use for the male half of the human race, couldn't possibly have had a different opinion.
"I'm sorry," the professor said. He was just being polite, though; Nellie could tell. He asked, "Is there anyone else who could possibly shed light on the way William Reach met his end in 1917, if that is what happened to him?"
"I can't think of anybody else," Nellie answered, which, again, was nothing but the truth. No one had been anywhere close by when Reach tried to rape her and she killed him.
But Professor Ferguson had ideas of his own. "What about your daughter, Edna"-flip, flip, flip went the notebook pages-"Semphroch?"
Even with his fancy research, he still got things wrong. "She's been Edna Grimes for a long time now," Nellie said, "and I guarantee she doesn't know anything about that." She did know about Nellie's scandalous background, though. Would she tell some professor what she knew? Nellie didn't think so, but wasn't a hundred percent sure. Edna had a mean streak in her that came out now and again.
"Didn't she receive a"-flip, flip, flip-"an Order of Remembrance, Second Class, at the same time as you were given your decoration?" Ferguson asked. "How can she be ignorant with that background?"
Nellie laughed in his face. "Easy as pie, that's how. She worked here with me, and sometimes I'd pass on things she told me, things she heard and I didn't. That's what she got her medal for. She would've married a Confederate officer, you know, if an artillery bombardment hadn't killed him on the way to the altar."
"Oh." Ferguson sounded faintly disappointed-and more than faintly revolted. He was old enough to have fought in the Great War. Like most men who were, he had no love for the Confederate States. He also seemed to have little understanding for what the people of Washington, who'd lived under Confederate occupation for more than two years, had gone through during that time. Nellie wasn't surprised. Few who hadn't lived here then did understand.
"You see?" Any which way, Nellie didn't want Ferguson talking to Edna. "Nobody knows nothing about Bill Reach."
Maynard Ferguson sighed. "I suppose not. I hope you realize how frustrating this is for me."
"I'm sorry," said Nellie, who was anything but. "Nothing I can do about it, though." Nothing I will do about it, anyway.
The professor left the coffeehouse, head down, shoulders slumped. Nellie put his cup in the sink. She'd never dreamt anybody would come poking after Bill Reach. But it didn't matter. In the end, it truly didn't. Only she knew the answer-only she knew, literally enough, where the body was buried-and she wasn't talking. Not now, not ever.
An aeroplane buzzed over the Charles XI as the French liner approached the Confederate coast. Anne Colleton glanced up at the machine, which roared past low enough for her to make out the words confederate citrus company painted on the fuselage in big, bright orange letters. The lines of the aeroplane suggested falcon much more than grouse. She wondered why a citrus company needed such a swift, deadly-looking aircraft.
Beside her, Colonel Jean-Henri Jusserand watched the aeroplane speed back toward the Virginia coast. The Frenchman said, "I suspect it would not be too very difficult to fit this aeroplane with weapons. Would you not agree, Mademoiselle Colleton?"
"I would agree that am I an idiot," Anne replied, also in French. "I should have seen that for myself." She kicked at the decking, angry at missing something so obvious.
"But-" Colonel Jusserand stopped, just in time. Anne sent him a sour look. He'd been about to say something like, But you are only a woman, Mademoiselle Colleton, so how could you be expected to notice such a thing? Then, fortunately, he'd remembered Anne had spent the last two years in Paris, dickering with some of the more prominent people in Action Franзaise-not always the people with fancy titles, but those who could promise results and mean it.
With wry amusement, Anne thought, But you are only a boy, Colonel Jusserand, so how could you be expected to know anything? Jusserand was in his mid-thirties, as young as he could be and still have fought in the Great War. He paid attention to Anne as a negotiator, but never once to her as a woman. She had fifteen years on him, give or take a couple. Most of the officers with whom she'd dealt were close contemporaries of the boyish colonel. Action Franзaise had, so far, done a better job of pruning deadwood from the French Army than the Freedom Party had of purging the Confederate Army.
The Charles XI pressed on toward Norfolk. More aeroplanes buzzed by to examine the liner. All of them said confederate citrus company. They shared the same sleek, dangerous look.
Colonel Jusserand asked, "Will there be an open display of these machines at the Olympic Games?"
"I don't know," Anne said. "I'm a stranger here myself." That held more truth than she felt comfortable admitting. She'd enjoyed her two years in France. She thought she'd helped her country while she was there. But, with Virginia in sight once more, she had to remember what she'd worked so hard to forget: that her time out of the CSA had also been an exile of sorts.
July in Norfolk brought memory flooding back. Though she was close to two hundred miles north of St. Matthews, the heat and humidity reminded her all too much of home. She'd never known weather like this in Paris. She wouldn't have been sorry not to renew acquaintance, either.
When the customs men saw her passport and Colonel Jusserand's, they very quickly became very respectful. "You're on our list, sir, ma'am," one of them said, touching the brim of his cap. He wore a snappier uniform than he would have when she left the Confederate States, one that made him look like a soldier rather than a functionary. "Our good list, I mean-we've got train tickets to Richmond waiting for both of you, and we'll get you to the station fast as we can."
He kept his promise, too. Anne wondered what sort of treatment she would have got had her name been on a different sort of list. She was just as glad not to have to find out.
Sweating in his brown wool uniform, Colonel Jusserand let out a sigh of relief when their railroad car proved air-conditioned. Anne found herself less delighted; too cold seemed as unpleasant as too hot. But she could add clothes for more warmth. She couldn't take them off outside, not if she wanted to stay decent.
With a cloud of coal smoke erupting from the stack, the locomotive began to roll. Jusserand stared at the countryside, which he was seeing for the first time. "How very many tractors and other farm machines there are," he remarked.
Anne nodded. "More than I remember seeing before I went to France," she said. "A lot more, as a matter of fact. Then there would have been nothing but sharecroppers working the land." Sharecroppers had come out in English. She thought for a moment before coming up with a French equivalent: "Tenant farmers."
"With so many machines, who needs men?" Colonel Jusserand said. "Where do you suppose the tenant farmers have gone?"
That was a good question. Anne answered it with no more than a shrug, for she didn't know, either. She did know most of the displaced sharecroppers were colored. Was it like this all over the CSA, or just in this stretch of Virginia? She couldn't guess. If this went on nationwide, what would the Confederacy do with all the displaced Negroes? One more question she couldn't answer. But, remembering what Negroes had done to the Marshlands plantation, remembering what they'd almost done to her, she hoped they got everything they deserved.