She laughed again, though it wasn’t funny. It was either laugh or scream. The Red uprising had proved as painfully as possible how much she had in common with her fellow white Confederate Americans.
Julia brought in chicken and dumplings for supper. Anne ate, hardly noticing the plate in front of her. Her body servant took it away. Anne lighted the lamps, one by one. They didn’t give her proper light by which to read, but they were what she had. She wasn’t holding her breath about getting electricity restored to Marshlands, any more than she was about getting back a telegraph line. On the off chance, she tried the telephone again. It was still silent, too. She snarled at it.
A couple of magazines told in great detail how the CSA might yet win the war. She would have had more faith in them if they hadn’t contradicted each other in so many places. She also would have had more faith in them if either author had shown more signs he knew what he was talking about and wasn’t whistling in the dark.
She poured herself a cup of coffee. The coffee remained good. As long as the Caribbean remained a Confederate lake, imports from Central and South America could still reach Galveston, New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola.
However good it was, the coffee did nothing to keep her awake. She drank it so regularly, it had next to no effect on her. When she started yawning over a particularly abstruse piece on Russia’s chances against the Germans and Austrians in 1917, she set down the magazine, blew out all the lamps but the one by her bed, and changed into a nightgown. Then she blew out the last lamp and went to bed.
She woke up sometime in the middle of the night. As she’d tossed and turned, her right hand had slipped under the pillow. It was resting on the revolver. That, though, wasn’t what had wakened her. “Coffee,” she muttered under her breath. She reached down for the chamber pot, only to discover it wasn’t there and remember why. Off to the privy, then-no help for it.
Her lips twisted in frustrated anger as she started to get out of bed. Marshlands had had flush toilets longer than she’d been alive; it had been one of the first plantation houses in South Carolina to enjoy such an amenity. She’d taken indoor plumbing for granted. The refugee camp had taught her it was too precious, too wonderful, not to be properly admired-and, at the moment, she had not so much as a pot to call her own.
Even in the mild climate hereabouts, a nighttime trip to the privy was a chilly business. She shut the door behind her to keep the cold out of the cottage. Going to the privy was also a smelly, disgusting business. And spiders and bugs and occasional lizards and mice visited the place, too.
Almost absentmindedly, she scooped up the pistol and carried it along with her when she went out into the darkness. She was halfway to the outhouse before she consciously recalled the warning the postman had given her. When she got to the privy, she set the little handgun down beside her before she hiked up her gown.
She spent longer in the noisome place than she’d expected. She had just risen from the pierced wooden seat when she heard voices outside. They were all familiar voices, though she hadn’t heard a couple of them in more than a year. “She in dere?” Cassius asked. The hunter-the Red revolutionary leader-wasn’t talking loud, but he wasn’t making any special effort to keep his voice down, either.
“She in dere,” Julia answered more quietly. “You don’ wan’ to wake she up, Cass. She gots a gun. She come out shootin’.”
“Den we shoots she, and dat de end o’ one capitalist ’pressor,” Cassius said. “We gots dis cottage surrounded. Ain’t no way out we ain’t got covered. I oughts to know-de place was mine.”
“Shootin’ too good fo’ dat white debbil bitch.” Another woman’s voice: Cherry’s, Anne realized after a moment.
“Oh, is you right about dat!” Julia agreed enthusiastically. “I wants to watch she burn. She use me like I’s an animal, she do. Ever since she come back, I wants to see she dead.”
See if I give you a Christmas present this year, Julia, Anne thought. She’d got the idea Julia didn’t much care for her, but this venomous hatred…no. She shook her head. She’d thought she’d known what the Negroes on Marshlands were thinking. She’d been fatally wrong about Cassius, and now almost as misled about Julia. She wondered if she understood at all what went on inside blacks’ minds.
Cherry said, “Her brudder done use me. He have hisself a high old time, right till de end.” Her laugh was low and throaty and triumphant. “He don’ find out till too late dat I usin’ he, too.”
So Scipio told me the truth about that. Thinking about what had happened kept Anne from worrying unduly about the predicament she was in now. She’d seen some of it for herself; Cherry had put on airs, even around her, on account of what she did in the bedroom with Jacob.
Cassius said, “Don’ matter how she die, so long as she dead. Top o’all de other crimes she do, I hear tell she behin’dat bill dat mystify de niggers to fight fo’ de white folks’ gummint. We strikes a blow fo’ revolutionary justice when we ends de backers o’ dat wicked scheme.”
“So light de matches, den,” Cherry said impatiently.
Through the tiny window cut in the outhouse door, light flared, brilliantly bright. Cassius and the other Reds must have doused the doorway to the cottage-and maybe the walls as well-with kerosene or perhaps even gasoline. Had Anne been inside there, she wouldn’t have had a chance in the world to get free. The most she could have hoped for would have been to blow out her own brains before the flames took her.
“How you like it now, Miss Anne?” Julia shouted, exultation in her voice. “How you like it, you cold-eyed debbil?”
Cassius and Cherry and the rest of the Reds howled abuse at the cabin, too. After a moment, so did a rising chorus of Marshlands field hands, roused from their beds by shouts and by flames.
Anne realized that, if she was going to escape, she would have to do it now, while everyone’s attention was on the burning cottage and nowhere else. She opened the privy door and stepped outside, holding up a hand to shield her face from the fierce glare of the fire. She started to step away from the outhouse, but then stopped and shut the door behind her-no use giving her foes (which seemed to mean everyone on the Marshlands plantation) a clue as to where she’d been. Maybe the Reds would think smoke and fire had overcome her before she woke up.
She wished her nightgown were any color but white. It made her too easy to spot in the darkness. Putting the privy between her and the fire, she made for the closest trees. Those couple of hundred yards seemed ten miles long.
No sooner had Anne reached the trees than the harsh, flat crack of gunfire came from behind her. Remembering everything Tom and Jacob had said about combat, she threw herself flat. That took care of her worries about the white nightgown, because she landed in cold, clammy mud. Shouts of alarm from the Negroes behind her told her what the gunfire was: rounds in the box of revolver ammunition in the cottage cooking off.
Deliberately, she rolled in the mud, so her back was as dark as her belly. Then she set out for St. Matthews, four or five miles away. A couple of plantations between Marshlands and the town had a sort of spectral half-life, but, after what had just happened to her, she was not inclined to trust her fate to any place where the field hands vastly outnumbered the whites. “I kept the government off them,” she said through clenched teeth, “and this is the thanks I got? They’ll pay. Oh yes, they’ll pay.”
After Scipio had visited Marshlands, she’d taken him off her list. When she was in Columbia, she’d learned he’d quit his job and didn’t seem to be in town any more. That had been wise of him. She bared her teeth. In the end, it would do him no good. She’d have her revenge on him as on all the others now.