Anne Colleton crouched in the brush that had advanced from the woods toward the ruins of the Marshlands mansion. With her crouched not only a squad of local militiamen but also a machine-gun team from somewhere down by Charleston. She’d almost had to go down on her knees in front of the governor to get them, but they were here. If he’d asked her to go down on her knees in front of him when they were all alone, she’d have thought about doing that, too. That was how much she wanted to make sure her trap slammed shut hard.
In a back pocket of her mannish trousers, she had a torn, dirty scrap of paper with a few words written in a crisp, elegant hand that did not match its stationery. If what Scipio told her was true…
If it wasn’t true, she was either wasting her time here or walking into a trap rather than setting one. Just for a moment, her hand fell to the barrel of the scope-sighted Tredegar beside her. Any trap that tried closing on her would take some damage first.
Off on the left of the little line, Sergeant Willie Metcalfe stiffened and let out a low hiss. As if afraid that wouldn’t be enough, he turned his head so that he presented the ruined left half of his face to his comrades. “Here they come,” he said in a hoarse whisper.
“Don’t open up too soon,” Anne ordered the militiamen. She’d said it before. She would say it again: “Let them get close. Let them get busy. And then…” Her voice, still soft, turned savage. “Let them have it.”
She stared avidly through the brush, north toward the Congaree. The ground—the ground that should have been covered with cotton instead of overrun by weeds—steamed as the sun rose higher and burned down on it. Through that thin, shimmering mist, she too made out the Negroes heading for the mansion.
They were a ragged lot, ragged and filthy, but they carried themselves like fighting men. Their strides were quick and wary. Their heads never stopped moving. She froze whenever they looked toward her, and hoped her companions had the sense to do the same. The militiamen, she feared, weren’t in the same class as the men of the Congaree Socialist Republic. If they kept the advantage of surprise, they wouldn’t need to be.
Some of the Negroes carried spades, some rifles, most both. One in particular stalked along like a beast of prey in spite of the Tredegar on his shoulder. His shoulder? Anne took a longer look at that Red rebel.
“Cherry,” she whispered. Her lips drew back from her teeth in a smile so ferocious that Linus Ashforth, who crouched beside her, involuntarily flinched away, as from a wild beast. Anne never noticed the white-bearded militiaman. Her attention remained altogether focused on the Negro woman who had been first her brother’s lover and then, as the Red revolt began, the instrument of Jacob Colleton’s death.
She didn’t need long to realize that, as she led the militiamen, Cherry bossed the Negroes. She bossed them imperiously, bullying them into doing exactly as she required. Bitch. Hateful bitch, Anne thought, never noticing how much Cherry’s style resembled her own.
“We done tried over yonder, dat side o’the mansion.” Cherry’s voice floated across a hundred yards of open ground. “Now we tries on dis side.” She led the Reds over toward the side where Anne and the militiamen waited. “Dig, you damn lazy niggers. Dig!” She set down the rifle and grabbed a spade herself.
They dug with her. Few would have been bold enough to argue. Cassius would have, but Cassius wasn’t here. Anne let out a silent sigh. Had Scipio handed her Cherry and Cassius both, she might even have thought about forgiving him. But Cherry by herself was no small prize.
“At my signal,” Anne whispered to Linus Ashforth and to the man to her left. “Pass it along the line.” They did. She picked up her rifle. She didn’t aim at Cherry, not yet. The militiamen stirred, picking their own targets.
Cherry was as alert as a beast of prey, too. She caught some tiny motion in the brush and let out a cry of alarm.
At the same instant, Anne shouted, “Now!” She fired at one of the men who’d just thrown down a shovel and was turning to grab for his rifle. The turn only half completed, he slumped bonelessly to the ground, blood pouring from a wound in his flank.
All along the line of militiamen, rifles barked. The machine gun hammered away like a mad thing. A couple of the Reds managed to fall flat, get hold of their rifles, and fire back. Their fire did not last long. Methodical as factory workers, the machine gunners traversed the muzzle of their weapon back and forth. Nothing on the ground in front of them could stay unhit for long.
Seeing how things were, Cherry turned and ran. Anne had run once, too, when revolution broke out around her in Charleston. She’d escaped. Cherry was not so lucky. Anne peered through the telescopic sight, which made her target seem even closer than it was—and Cherry would have been an easy shot for someone less handy with a rifle than she was. She exhaled. She pulled the trigger. The Tredegar kicked against her shoulder. Cherry toppled with a shriek.
Anne started to break cover, then hesitated. One or more of the Negroes the militiamen had shot down were liable to be shamming. Beside her, Linus Ashforth did stand up. Sure as hell, a bullet cracked past his head. It could as easily have shattered his skull like a dropped flowerpot. He dove for cover. The machine gun hosed down the Reds. When Willie Metcalfe got to his feet, no one fired at him.
“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Anne said coldbloodedly. Now she rose.
“That one ain’t finished yet, ma’am.” Sergeant Metcalfe pointed in the direction of Cherry, who was still trying to crawl away with a shattered lower leg. He started to raise his own rifle.
“No!” Anne’s voice was sharp. “I want her alive. You men!” She waved to the rest of the squad, then pointed in the direction of the Reds who had been digging. “See to them. If any of them are still breathing, finish them off.”
She loped toward Cherry. Behind her, a couple of short, flat cracks rang out. Nodding in satisfaction, she trotted on. She had a round in the chamber of her Tredegar, and was ready and more than ready to fire if the colored woman had a pistol tucked in the pocket or waistband of her tattered dungarees.
Cherry snarled hatred at her, but made no move to reach for a weapon. “White debbil bitch,” she said. “They was right all along, damn them. You never was nothin’but a goddamn liar.”
“You know all about lies, don’t you?” Anne said evenly. “You told enough of them, back before the rebellion.”
“I ain’t never told lies like you ’pressors tell de niggers and de poor stupid buckra and your ownselves,” Cherry retorted. She gathered herself, though blood was puddling around her right calf.
“Don’t try it,” Anne advised her. “I’m too far away for you to reach me, and I won’t shoot you in the head. I’ll try for somewhere that hurts more and takes longer. Kidney, maybe, or one in each shoulder.”
To her surprise, Cherry nodded. “Ain’t a patch on what I do to you, I had you down shot on de ground.”
The longing in the black woman’s voice made Anne shiver, though she was the one with the rifle. She said, “After what you did to Marshlands, after what you did to my brother, you’ve had your turn already.”
“Ain’t.” Cherry shook her head. “Ain’t come close. Cain’t pay back three hundred years o’ ’pression in a day. Done whipped we and ’sploited we and sold we like we was horses and fucked we till we gots so many yaller niggers it’s a cryin’ shame. No, we ain’t come close.”
Anne heard the words. She heard the accusations. They didn’t register, not in any way that mattered. She shook her head. “You rose up against us,” she said. “You stabbed us in the back while we were fighting the damnyankees. And you—you—” When she tried to say what Cherry in particular had done, words failed her for one of the rare times in her life.
Despite the pain from her ruined lower leg, Cherry smiled. “I knows what I done, Miss Anne. I was fuckin’ and suckin’ your brother, and I was puttin’ on airs on account of it. And you knows what else?” The smile got wider. “All the time that goddamn skinny little white dick was in me, Miss An
ne, I never feel one thing. Never oncet.”
Without conscious thought, ahead of conscious thought, Anne’s finger squeezed the trigger. The Tredegar roared. The back of Cherry’s head exploded, splashing blood and brains and pulverized bone over her and the ground around her. She twitched and shuddered and lay still. But, below the neat hole in her forehead, her face still held that mocking smile.
“To hell with you,” Anne whispered, and two tears ran down her face, half sorry for Jacob, half fury at the black woman and the way she’d duped him and used him. And Cherry had got the last word, too, and goaded Anne into giving her a quick end at the same time. Anne kicked at the dirt. Automatically, she worked the bolt and chambered a fresh round.
Linus Ashforth came up to her. The elderly militiaman spat a stream of tobacco juice into Cherry’s puddled blood. “This here was right good, ma’am,” he said. “Them murderin’ devils done took the bait you left ’em, and there ain’t a one of ’em going back to the swamps. Yes, ma’am, this here was pretty blame fine.”
“It wasn’t good enough,” Anne said, as much to herself as to the old man. “It wasn’t enough.”
“What more could you want?” Ashforth asked reasonably. “Every single nigger stuck his nose out of the swamp is dead now. Can’t do much better’n a clean sweep, now can you?”
“But there are still Reds in the swamps,” Anne answered. “When they’re all hunted down and killed, that will be—” She started to say enough, but shook her head before the word passed her lips. That wouldn’t be enough. Nothing could be enough to repair the damage the Negroes had done to the Confederate cause, the damage they had done to the Confederate States. She ended the sentence in a different way: “That will be a start, anyhow.”
Linus Ashforth’s whistle was soft and low and wondering. “Ma’am, don’t sound to me like you’ll ever be satisfied.”
“I would have been,” Anne said. “I could have been. God, I was. But it will be a long time before I’m satisfied again; you’re right about that. It will be a long time before this is a country anyone can be satisfied with.”
“Jesus God, Miss Anne, I’m sure as the dickens glad you ain’t mad with me.” The militiaman spat again, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
“You ought to be,” Anne Colleton said. She weighed the words, then nodded. “Yes, you ought to be, because if I’m angry at something, I’ll hunt it down and kill it.” She looked north, toward the Congaree. Silently, her lips shaped a name. Cassius.
Like so many small, hunted creatures, Nellie Semphroch had learned to stay laired up in her burrow, and to come out at night to forage. The occupying Confederates hardly bothered to patrol Washington, D.C., any more. Hal Jacobs said they’d given up because every man they had, they needed at the front. Nellie didn’t know about that. She did know that getting water from the Potomac or firewood from a wrecked building, she worried more about a chance U.S. shell than she did about men in butternut. Even at night, the bombardment from the north did not halt. It only slowed a little.
She was far from the only one prowling the night. If she passed close enough to Jacobs and a few others to recognize them, she would nod. When she saw others, she shrank back into the shadows, and that though she never ventured forth without a long, sharp kitchen knife. Still others shrank from her. That made her feel oddly strong and fierce.
Sometimes Edna would come out with her, sometimes not. When they needed water, they generally went down to the river together. Stove wood was easier to come by close to home. One of them would usually go out for it, or else the other.
“I wish we could find some coal,” Nellie said, not for the first time. “The grate isn’t really right for wood, and the stove pipe will get all full of soot and creosote. It’s liable to catch on fire.”
“If you’re going to wish, Ma, don’t waste your time wishing for coal, for God’s sake,” Edna said. “Wish for a couple days without shells falling all the damn time. That’d be somethin’ really worth having.”
“I think we may get that wish before too long,” Nellie said. “How much longer do you suppose the Confederate lines north of town are going to be able to stand the pounding the Army is giving them? They’ll have to crack pretty soon, and then the United States will have Washington back again.”
“Oh, bully!” Edna loaded her voice with sarcasm. “Even if you’re right, Ma, it’ll only take ’em a hundred years to build it all back up the way it was. And the Rebs’ll fight hard to keep the place, too.”
“I know they will—it’s about the only part of the line where they’re still on our soil instead of the other way round,” Nellie said. “But when you look at the way the war is going everywhere else, it’s hard to see how they’re going to be able to do it.”
“Well, what if the United States do come in?” Edna said. “Then the Rebs will pound the city to pieces from the other side of the Potomac. The only difference will be which way the guns are pointed.”
Nellie sighed and nodded in the candlelit dimness of the cellar under the coffeehouse. Her daughter’s guess held an unpleasant feel of truth.
After it got dark outside as well as down in the cellar, Nellie went out to see what she could find and to discover what the bombardment had knocked flat since the last time she came up above ground. One of the things that wasn’t flat any more was the street down the block from the coffeehouse. A big shell had dug an enormous crater in it. Time was when such wounds had been rare and the Confederates patched them as soon as they were made. Now the Rebs kept a few roads to the front open and forgot the rest.
Half a block farther along the street, another couple of shells had landed, converting several houses and shops to rubble. In among the bricks would be lumber, much of it already broken into convenient lengths. Nellie tossed them into a large canvas duffel bag.
She had the bag nearly ready to drag back to the coffeehouse when Bill Reach’s voice spoke from out of the darkness close by: “Evenin’, Little Nell.”
Ice ran through Nellie, though the night was warm and humid. “You’re drunk again,” she said quietly. “If you were sober, you’d know better than to call me that.” Her head went back and forth, back and forth. Where was he?
He laughed. “Maybe I am. Maybe I would. And maybe I’m not, and maybe I wouldn’t. What do you think of that?”
There. Behind that pile of bricks, out of which stuck a couple of legs from an upended cast-iron stove. Her fingers closed around the handle of the kitchen knife. “Go away,” she said, still looking around as if she hadn’t found him. “Can’t you just leave me in peace?”
“I sure as hell would like a piece,” he said, and laughed again. “I liked it when I had it before, and I know I’d like it again. Oh, you were a hot number in between the sheets, Little Nell, and I don’t figure God ever gave another woman in the whole wide world a nastier mouth. Things you used to do…”
If she’d writhed with grunting, sweating customers pounding away atop her, it was only to make them finish faster, get off her, and leave the cheap little room where she worked. She’d always hated sucking on men’s privates. It seemed filthy, even when they didn’t squirt vile-tasting jism into her mouth—usually after promising they wouldn’t.
“Go away,” she repeated. “Those days are long gone, thank God. I’m a respectable woman now—or I was till you walked into my coffeehouse, anyways. Go back into the gutter, go back to spying, go wherever you want, just as long as you leave me alone. I don’t want anything to do with you, do you hear?”
He stood up. In his black coat and black derby, he was still hard to see. He swayed a little, then brought a bottle to his lips. Oddly, the whiskey seemed to steady him instead of making him keel over. “But I want somethin’ to do with you, Little Nell,” he said. “You haven’t given it to me, so it looks like I’m just gonna have to go and take it.” He smashed the fat end of the bottle on the bricks. A little whiskey spilled out—not much. Jagged edges glittered under the stars. “Just gonna have
to go ahead and take it,” he repeated.
“Go away,” Nellie whispered once more.
“You take what’s coming to you, and everything will be fine.” Bill Reach waved the bottle around. “You give me any trouble, and you’ll be real sorry. Yes, you will. Real sorry. Now get down on the ground and take it. Once it’s in there, you’ll love it. Hell, you always did.”
“No.” Nellie held the knife behind her back so Reach wouldn’t be able to see it.
The acrid fumes of the whiskey, some from his breath, some from the inside of the bottle, made her nostrils twitch as he came closer. “You ain’t runnin’,” he said. “You ain’t screamin’. See? You know you want it. I’m the man to give it to you, too. If you’re good, I’ll even pay you, same as old times.”
“No,” Nellie said again. Either he didn’t hear her or he didn’t listen. He took a couple more steps toward her, then extended his left hand to push her to the ground.
He still held the neck of the bottle, but he didn’t think he’d have to do anything with it. He’d surely made a lot of mistakes in his time, but that was the last and the worst. Nellie had no experience as a knife fighter, but Bill Reach couldn’t have stopped a two-year-old swinging a wooden spoon right then. The knife went deep into the left side of his chest. Its edge grated against a rib when Nellie yanked it out and rammed it home again.
He let out a brief, bubbling shriek, then toppled. Nellie wiped the knife clean on his coat while he was still feebly kicking. “Once it’s in there, you’ll love it,” she said. Then she grunted as she picked up the duffel full of chunks of wood, slung it over her shoulder, and headed for home.
When she got back, Edna was mixing salt pork into canned soup. “That looks like a good load, Ma,” her daughter said. “You were gone a while longer than I thought you would be, though. You have any trouble out there?”
Breakthroughs Page 38
