"I intend to be careful," Anne said, a thumping lie if ever there was one. She put some snap in her voice: "Now kindly give that letter back, so I can use it again at need."
"Oh. Yes, ma'am. Sorry, ma'am." Where her grimy appearance and this beat-up motorcar hadn't convinced the militiaman she was a person of quality, her manner did. He handed the letter back to her.
The road from St. Matthews to Marshlands was not so heavily cratered as the highway up to town had been. By the time the rebels abandoned St. Matthews, they'd pretty much abandoned organized resistance against Confederate forces, too. But that thought had hardly crossed her mind before she heard a couple of brisk spatters of gunfire from the north, the direction of the Congaree swamps. Not all the Reds, it seemed, had given up.
Woods blocked any view of Marshlands from the road till not long before a traveler needed to turn onto the lane leading up to the mansion. I am ready for anything, Anne told herself, again and again. Whatever I see, I will bear up under it.
Coughing and wheezing, the Ford passed the last trees. There, familiar as the mole she carried on one wrist, was the opening into that winding lane. Just before you turned, you looked along the lane and you saw…
"Hell," she said quietly. She'd been hoping the place had survived, but it looked like a skeleton with most of the flesh rotted away. Altogether against her will, tears blurred her eyes. "Jacob," she whispered. If Marshlands had burned, her brother must have burned with it.
By contrast, the Negro cottages off to one side of the great house looked exactly as they had before the Red uprising began. A couple of men were out hoeing in their gardens; a couple of women were feeding chickens; a whole raft of pickaninnies were running around raising hell.
After a little while, her eyes left the vicinity of the mansion and traveled out to the cotton fields. Her teeth closed hard on the soft flesh inside her lower lip. If anyone had done anything with the cotton since she'd left for Charleston all those months before, she would have been astonished. Was that what the Red revolution had been about-the freedom not to work? Her face twisted into an expression half sneer, half snarl.
If the rest of the plantations in what had been the Congaree Socialist Republic looked the same way, a lot of planters were bankrupt, busted, flat. She wasn't; she'd invested wisely ever since Marshlands came into her hands. Most people, though, couldn't see past their noses. And, speaking of seeing…
One of the men in the garden plots had spotted her. He dropped his hoe and pointed, calling out to the rest. One after another, heads swung in her direction. Other than that, none of the Negroes moved. That in itself chilled her. Before the uprising, they would have come running up to her motorcar, calling greetings and hoping she had trinkets for them. Telling lies, she realized. Hiding what they really thought.
For a moment, she was especially glad of the Tredegar on the seat beside her. Then, all at once, she wasn't. How much good would it do her? What kind of arsenal did the Negroes have hidden in those cabins? She'd prided herself on knowing her laborers well. She hadn't known them at all. Maybe the Army men had been right when they thought her crazy to come here by herself.
A woman walked slowly toward her. It was, she realized after too long, Julia, who had been her body servant. The young woman, instead of a maid's shirtwaist and black dress, wore homespun made gaudy with bits of probably stolen finery. She was also several months pregnant.
The only reason Anne hadn't taken her to Charleston was that she'd gone there for an assignation, not legitimate business. Had it been otherwise, would Julia have turned on her? The thought was chilling, but could hardly be avoided.
"So you's come back, Miss Anne," Julia said. Her voice had something of the old servile tone left in it, but not much.
"Yes, I'm back." Anne looked over the neglected acres of what had been the finest plantation in South Carolina. "I don't know why the hell I bothered."
"Things, they ain't the same no mo'," Julia said. Had truer words ever been spoken, Anne hadn't heard them.
Almost as one equal to another, she asked, "And what did you do in the uprising, Julia? What did the niggers here do?"
"Nothin'," Julia said. "We stay here, we mind we bidness." But now she didn't meet Anne's eyes.
Anne nodded. This was a lie she recognized. "What happens when the soldiers start asking the same thing?" she said. Julia flinched. Anne smiled to herself. Yes, no matter what, she could manage. "Mind my business"-she pointed to the forgotten fields-"along with your own, and I'll keep the soldiers off your back. You know I can do things like that. Have we got a bargain?"
Julia thought for most of a minute, then nodded. "Miss Anne, I think we has."
George Enos had felt constricted on the Mississippi. He was used to the broad reaches of the Atlantic, to looking around from his perch on deck and seeing nothing but the endless ocean in all directions. Next to the Atlantic, any river, even the Father of Waters, seemed hardly more than an irrigation ditch.
And the Cumberland was considerably narrower than the Mississippi. These days, he and his fellow deck hands aboard the Punishment wore Army helmets painted Navy blue. This stretch of the river was supposed to be pretty clear of snipers, but nobody with the brains God gave a haddock felt like betting his life on it.
Before the Punishment headed up the Cumberland, Navy ironworkers had installed protection around the deck machine guns, too. Little by little, the war heading toward two years old, they were figuring out that this riverine fighting had rules of its own. George was glad of that, but wondered what the devil had taken them so long.
As far as he could tell, the Rebs had got the idea from the beginning. He pointed to the mine-sweeping boat moving slowly down the Cumberland ahead of the Punishment and said, "Anybody would think the damn Rebs did nothing but build mines in all the time between the Second Mexican War and now."
"Near as I can tell, that's right," Wayne Pitchess answered, his Connecticut accent not far removed from the flat vowels and swallowed r's of Enos' Boston intonation. Then he shook his head and pointed out to the battered farms out beyond the river. "I take it back. They raise tobacco, too."
"That's so," George agreed. Some of it got into Navy supply channels, too, probably by most unofficial means. He had a pouch of pipe tobacco in a trouser pocket. It wasn't as good as it might have been-which meant it had been cured, or half cured, after the war started-but it was a lot better than nothing.
Flags fluttered up the minesweeper's signal lines. The Punishment's engine changed its rhythm. The monitor began crawling away from the sweeper as the screw reversed to give power astern rather than ahead. "I'd say they found one," Pitchess remarked.
George nodded. "I'd say you're right. Other thing I'd say is, I hope they haven't missed one."
"There is that," Pitchess agreed. You had to hope they hadn't missed one, as you had to hope a storm wouldn't sink you out on the Atlantic. You couldn't do much about it, either way.
The mine-sweeping boat cut the cable mooring the deadly device to the bottom of the Cumberland. When it bobbed to the surface, the sweeper cut loose with its machine guns. The explosion showered muddy water down onto Enos a quarter of a mile away; the Punishment rocked as waves spread from the blast.
"Lord!" George had known what mines could do, but he'd never been so close to one when it went off. "If it's all the same to everybody else, I'd just as soon not run over one of those."
"Now that you mention it, I think I'd rather be on top of my wife, too," Wayne Pitchess said with a veteran's studied dryness.
George laughed at the comparison, then walked over to his machine gun and got busy checking the mechanism he'd finished cleaning not five minutes before. Most of the time, he managed not to think about how much he missed Sylvia. He hadn't yet visited one of the whorehouses that sprouted alongside rivers like toadstools after rain. He had stained his underwear once or twice, waking up from dreams he didn't much remember, dreams of the sort he hadn't had since not long after he started going to the barbershop for a shave.