Blood and Iron (14 page)

“Can’t trust ’em, not any more,” Anne said. “That’s never going to be the same again. That’s why I’ve still got Marshlands like a millstone around my neck. Who would want the place now? What would anyone do with it if he bought it?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Whitson said, “but I don’t know what that proves, either.” His mouth tightened to a thin, pale line. “The ideas I have had haven’t been good ones.”

“The whole country is having a rough time,” Anne said with more sympathy than she’d thought she would show. “It’s hard for anyone to prosper. We need to put some heart back into ourselves, but I don’t know how.”

“This inflation is eating us out of house and home,” the broker said. “Before long, everybody will be a millionaire and everybody will be broke.”

I told you so
trembled on the edge of being spoken, but Anne held her tongue. She
had
told Whitson so, and he hadn’t listened, and now he was paying the price. Because she’d converted her holdings into currencies that still meant something in terms of gold, she’d come through pretty well. When the upturn finally arrived, she would be rich again—if she could wait long enough.

Whitson said, “If you like, Miss Colleton, I can recommend a new broker for you. I know several very able men who—”

Anne got to her feet. “No, thank you. I hope you will forgive me for saying so, but your recommendation does not strike me as the ideal warrant for a man’s quality.”

Whitson bit his lip. “I deserve that.”

“Maybe you’ll have better luck in times to come. I hope you do,” Anne said, telling more of the truth than not—she had nothing personal against the luckless broker. “I see you have all my papers here. Please give them to me now.”

“Very well.” Whitson sighed as he handed them to her. “I should have been listening to your investment advice, not the other way round. The world has turned upside down since the end of the war.”

“Since the beginning of the war,” Anne said. “But you’re right. The Confederate States were on top, and now we’re on the bottom. Some people are going to be content to stay on the bottom, too. Some are going to try to see how to get back on top again. What will you do, Mr. Whitson?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, but swept the papers into her valise and left the broker’s office. As she turned around to close the door, she saw him staring after her. She let out a tiny sigh. Whitson was going to be one of the ones who stayed on the bottom for a long time.

His office stood only a few blocks away from the Capitol. Anne thought about going over to see the governor, but sighed again. She didn’t have the influence she’d enjoyed before the war, either. Not only had her fortunes suffered, she’d called in too many favors fighting the black Reds who lurked in the swamps by the Congaree long after their revolt was stamped out elsewhere. She’d almost had to seduce the governor to pry a machine gun loose for the militia.

“God damn you, Cassius,” she muttered. The former chief hunter at Marshlands had proved a far more stubborn and resourceful foe than she’d imagined any Negro could. She’d underestimated the blacks at Marshlands time and again, underestimated them and let them fool her.

“It won’t happen again,” she muttered as she hurled the valise into the back seat of her beat-up Ford. Before the Negro uprising, she’d driven a powerful Vauxhall. When the revolt broke out, she’d driven it up from Charleston toward Marshlands. South of the front—the Negroes of what they called the Congaree Socialist Republic had been able to hold a regular front for a while—a militia officer had confiscated the Vauxhall for use against the black rebels. She’d never seen it again. She wondered how many bullet holes scarred the fine coachwork these days.

After cranking the Ford’s engine to rough, noisy life, she climbed in and drove south down the Robert E. Lee Highway, from which she would eventually turn left to get to St. Matthews. She was about thirty miles away from home: a little more than an hour, if she didn’t have a puncture or a breakdown. If she did, the time might double, or it might go up by some much larger factor.

What struck her as she rattled along in the decrepit motorcar was how still and empty the countryside felt. Cotton and tobacco should have been ripening in the fields, and Negro laborers should have been tending both crops. Here and there, they were. But so many fields were a rank tangle of weeds and vines and shrubs, with no one even trying to bring in a crop on them.

It wasn’t the way it had been. It would never again be the way it had been. Tears stung her eyes, so that she had to slow down till they cleared—not that the Ford could go very fast anyhow. The cotton fields at Marshlands looked like this these days.

Colletons had thrived on the plantation since the end of the eighteenth century. Even so, she was ever more tempted to cut her losses on it, quit paying the exorbitant taxes, and let the state of South Carolina take it off her hands. As far as she was concerned, the state of South Carolina was welcome to it.

The Lee Highway crossed the Congaree on a steel suspension bridge. The Red rebels had damaged the bridge, but hadn’t managed to destroy it. Well before she came to the river and the swamps to either side of it, Anne took a revolver from the valise and laid it on the seat, where she could grab it in a hurry. As a force for rebellion against the government of South Carolina and that of the CSA, the Congaree Socialist Republic was dead. Not quite all the Negroes had been hunted out of the swamps yet, though. Some still made a living of sorts as bandits.

If bandits were lurking there, they gave no sign. She spotted a couple of pickaninnies fishing and passed an old black man leading a skinny, swaybacked mule laboring along under some enormous burden tied to its back. She thought about stopping and making the old man show her what the mule carried. How many rifles and pistols had traveled through the CSA in bundles like that before the uprising of 1915? Too many, surely.

In the end, she drove on. She felt bad about it afterwards, but one person could do only so much. If the old man was moving guns or explosives, what was she supposed to do with him? Arrest him? Driving with one hand on the wheel and one on the pistol didn’t appeal to her. Shoot him on the spot? That did appeal to her, powerfully, but it wasn’t so simple as it would have been before the war, either. She would certainly have to go to court about it, which wouldn’t have been certain at all before 1914. The number of Negro veterans enrolled on the South Carolina voting lists remained tiny. The uprising during the war, though, showed how dangerous ignoring Negro opinion could be.

When she got into St. Matthews, she smiled. Several women on the street were wearing trousers. She’d started that fashion herself, getting Aaron Rosenblum the tailor to make her several pairs so she could go into the swamps to fight the Reds in clothing more convenient than an ankle-length skirt. These women didn’t wear pants because they intended to hunt Reds. They wore them because one of the most prominent women in Calhoun County did.

Tom Colleton chuckled when she remarked on that. “I had noticed it myself, as a matter of fact,” he said. “Gives a whole new kick to watching a pretty girl.”

“Does it?” Anne wasn’t sure whether to be angry or amused. She ended up a little of both. “That’s not why I got them, you know.”

“I never said it was,” her brother answered. “That doesn’t make what I did say any less true, though.” While Anne digested that and finally nodded, Tom went on, “Have we got any money left?”

“All things considered, we’re doing well—as well as we can be, anyhow.” With a certain amount of malicious pleasure, she added, “We’re doing a lot better than clever Mr. Whitson,” and explained how he’d gone bankrupt.

“So the broker’s broke, is he?” Tom said.

Anne made a face at him. Then she started to laugh. “That’s the sort of thing you would have said back before the war. You’re usually more serious these days.”

“I can laugh when somebody else falls on his face in the mud,” Tom told her. “Laughing when I’m down there myself is harder. Laughing when the whole country’s down there is hardest of all. I still don’t know how we’re going to get back on our feet, Sis.”

“Neither do I, not with the damnyankees standing over us with a club,” Anne said. “Sooner or later, though, they’ll ease up. They have troubles of their own, what with all their strikes and trying to hold the Canadians down and Socialists yelling their heads off. When they get too busy at home, that’s when we’ll find somebody who can help us get moving again.” She sighed. “I wish it would happen faster, though.”

Even months after getting over the Spanish influenza, Sam Carsten knew he wasn’t quite the man he had been. The disease had done its best to steamroller him into the grave. Something like a dozen sailors aboard the USS
Remembrance
had died. Many more, like him, remained weaker and slower than they were before they got sick.

He could still do his job, though, and do the hundreds of jobs any sailor had to do when he wasn’t at his battle station. And, as the
Remembrance
worked with the aeroplanes she carried, learning what they could and couldn’t do, he occasionally found time to marvel.

This was one of those times. He stood by the superstructure as the
Remembrance
steamed in the North Atlantic, watching while a Wright two-decker approached the stern. A sailor with semaphore paddles directed the aeroplane toward the deck. The pilot had to pay more attention to the director than to his own instincts and urges; if he didn’t, he’d end up in the drink.

“Come on,” Sam muttered. He’d been watching landings for a while now. Just the same, they made him sweat. If he couldn’t take them for granted, what were they like for the fliers? Pilots were the most nonchalant men on the face of the earth, but anyone who was nonchalant through one of these landings would end up dead. “Come on.”

On came the aeroplane. Smoke spurted as its wheels slammed the deck of the
Remembrance
. The hook on the bottom of the Wright machine’s fuselage missed the first steel cable stretched across the deck to arrest its progress, but caught on the second one. The two-decker jerked to a halt.

“Jesus.” Carsten turned to George Moerlein, who’d watched the landing a few feet away from him. “Every time they do that, I think the aeroplane is going to miss the deck—either that or it’ll tear in half when the hook grabs it.”

His bunkmate nodded. “I know what you mean. It looks impossible, even though we’ve been watching ’em for months.”

As the Wright’s prop slowed from a blur to a stop, the pilot climbed out of the aeroplane. Sailors with mops and buckets dashed over and started swabbing down the deck. With oil and gasoline spilling all the time, swabbing was a more serious business than on most ships.

Sam said, “The thing I really fear is one of ’em coming in low and smashing right into the stern. Hasn’t happened yet, thank God.”

“Yeah, that wouldn’t do anybody any good,” Moerlein agreed. “Could happen, too, especially if somebody’s coming in with his aeroplane shot to hell and gone—or if he just makes a mistake.”

“What I hope is, we never come into range of a battleship’s big guns,” Carsten said. “Taking a hit is bad enough any which way—I’ve done that—but taking a hit here, with all the gasoline we’re carrying…We’d go straight to the moon, or maybe five miles past it.”

“It’d be over in a hurry, anyhow,” his bunkmate answered. Before Sam could say he didn’t find that reassuring, George Moerlein went on, “But that’s one of the reasons we’re carrying all these aeroplanes: to keep battlewagons from getting into gunnery range in the first place.”

Carsten stamped the flight deck, which was timber lain over steel. “We can’t be the only Navy working on aeroplane carriers.”

“I’ve heard tell the Japs are,” Moerlein said. “Don’t know it for a fact, but I’ve heard it. It wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me, either, not even a little bit,” Sam said. “I was in the Battle of the Three Navies, out west of the Sandwich Islands. Those little yellow bastards are tougher than anybody ever gave ’em credit for.”

Moerlein looked sour. “And they just walked away from the war free and clear, too. The Rebs are paying, England and France are paying, Russia’s gone to hell in a handbasket, but Japan said, ‘Well, all right, if nobody else on our side’s left standing, we’re done, too,’ and we couldn’t do anything but say, ‘All right, Charlie—see you again some day.’”

“We will, too,” Carsten said. “I was just a kid when they took the Philippines away from Spain right after the turn of the century. And now we’ve taken the Sandwich Islands away from England—I was there for that, aboard the
Dakota
. So they’re looking our way, and we’re looking their way, and nobody’s sitting between us any more.”

“That’d be a fight, all right. All that ocean, aeroplanes whizzing around, us bombing them and trying to keep them from bombing us.” Moerlein got a faraway look in his eye.

So did Sam. “Hell, if both sides have aeroplane carriers, you could fight a battle without ever seeing the other fellow’s ships.”

“That would be pretty strange,” Moerlein said, “but I guess it could happen.”

“Sure it could,” Sam said. “And you’d want to sink the other bastard’s aeroplane carriers just as fast as you could, because if he didn’t have any aeroplanes left, he couldn’t stop your battleships from doing whatever they wanted to do.” He stamped on the flight deck again. “And if the aeroplane carrier is the ship you have to sink first, that makes the
Remembrance
the most important ship in the whole Navy right now.”

For a moment, he felt almost like a prophet in the middle of a vision of the future. He also felt pleased with himself for having had the sense to figure out that aeroplanes were the coming thing, and grateful to Commander Grady for having brought him to the
Remembrance
, no matter how ugly she was.

Then something else occurred to him. He hurried away. “Where’s the fire at?” George Moerlein called after him. He didn’t answer, but hurried down a hatch to go below.

He guessed Grady would be checking one sponson or another and, sure enough, found him in the third one into which he poked his head. The officer was testing the elevation screw on the gun there, and talking about it in a low voice with the gunner’s mate who commanded the crew for that sponson. Sam stood at attention and waited to be noticed.

Eventually, Commander Grady said, “You’ll want to make sure of the threads there, Reynolds. Good thing we’re not likely to be sailing into combat any time soon.” He turned to Sam. “What can I do for you, Carsten?”

“I’ve been thinking, sir,” Sam began.

A smile spread across Grady’s rabbity features. “Far be it from me to discourage such a habit. And what have you been thinking?”

“We’ve taken the Confederates’ battleships away from them, sir, and we’ve taken away their submersibles,” Carsten said. “What do the agreements we’ve made with them say about aeroplane carriers?”

“So far as I know, they don’t say anything,” Commander Grady said.

“Shouldn’t they, sir?” Sam asked in some alarm. “What if the Rebs built a whole raft of these ships and—”

Grady held up a hand. “I understand what you’re saying. If the
Remembrance
turns out to be as important as we think she is, then you’ll be right. If she doesn’t, though—” He shrugged. “There are a lot of people in Philadelphia who think we’re pouring money down a rathole.”

“They’re crazy,” Sam blurted.

“I think so, too, but how do you go about proving it?” Grady asked. “We need to have something to do to prove what we’re worth. In any case, I believe the answer to your question is no, as I said: if the Confederate States want to build aeroplane carriers, they are not forbidden to do so. When the agreements were framed, no one took this class of ship seriously.”

“That’s too bad,” Carsten said.

“I think so, too,” Grady repeated. “Nothing I can do about it, though. Nothing you can do about it, either.”

Carsten looked southwest, in the direction of the Confederacy. “Wonder how long it’ll be before the Rebels have one of these babies.” Then he looked east. “Wonder how long it’ll be before England and France do, too.”

“It’ll take the Rebs a while, and the frogs, too, I expect,” Commander Grady said. “We’re sitting on the CSA, and Kaiser Bill is sitting on France. England…I don’t know about England. They didn’t have the war brought home to them, not the way the Confederates and the French did. Yeah, they got hungry, and the Royal Navy finally ended up fighting out of its weight, but they weren’t
whipped
—you know what I mean?”

“Yes, sir,” Sam said.

Grady went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “And from Australia through India and Africa, they’re still cocks o’ the walk. If they decide they want to get even and they find some friends…” His laugh was anything but mirthful. “Sounds like the way we won this last war, doesn’t it, Carsten? We decided we were going to get even, and we cozied up to the German Empire. I hope to God it doesn’t work for them ten years down the line, or twenty, or thirty.”

“Yes, sir,” Sam said again. “I guess we just have to do our best to keep ahead of them, that’s all.” He sighed. “I wonder where all this ends, or if it ever ends.”

“Only way I can see it ending is if we ever figure out how to blow a whole country clean off the map,” Grady said. He slapped Sam on the back. “I don’t figure that’ll happen any time soon, if it ever does. We’ll have work to do for as long as we want it, the two of us.”

“That’d be good, sir,” Carsten said equably. “That’s the big reason I wanted to transfer to the
Remembrance
. As soon as they bombed us off Argentina, I knew aeroplanes were going to stay important for a long, long time.”

“You’re a sharp bird, Carsten,” Grady said. “I was glad to see you get that promotion at the end of ’16. You’re too sharp to have stayed an able seaman for as long as you did. If you were as pushy as you’re sharp, you’d be an officer by now.”

“An officer? Me?” Carsten started to laugh, but Commander Grady wasn’t the first person who’d told him he thought like one. He shrugged. “I like things the way they are pretty well. I’ve got enough trouble telling myself what to do, let alone giving other people orders.”

Grady chuckled. “There’s more to being an officer than giving orders, though I don’t suppose it looks that way to the ratings on the receiving end. I think you’ve got what it takes, if you want to apply yourself.”

“Really, sir?” Sam asked, and Commander Grady nodded. Sam had never aspired to anything more than chief petty officer, not even in his wildest dreams. Now he did. He’d known a few mustangs, officers who’d come up through the ranks. Doing that wasn’t impossible, but it wasn’t easy, either. How much did he want it? Did he want it at all? “Have to think about that.”

Jake Featherston rubbed brilliantine into his hair, then combed a part that might have been scribed with a ruler. He looked at himself in the tiny mirror above the sink in his room. He wasn’t handsome, but he didn’t figure he would ever be handsome. He’d do.

He put on a clean shirt and a pair of pants that had been pressed in the not too impossibly distant past. Again, he didn’t look as if he were about to speak before the Confederate Congress, but he didn’t want to speak before the Confederate Congress, except to tell all the fat cats in there where to go. He grinned. He was going to tell some fat cats where to go today, too, but they weren’t so fat as they wanted to be, nor so fat as they thought they were.

He donned a cloth workingman’s cap, put his pistol on his belt, and left the room. Fewer people bothered wearing weapons on the streets in Richmond than had been true in the first desperate weeks after the Great War ended, but he was a long way from the only man sporting a pistol or carrying a Tredegar. Nobody could be sure what would happen next, and a good many people didn’t care to find out the hard way.

Featherston hurried down Seventh toward the James River. The back room in the saloon where the Freedom Party had met wasn’t big enough these days, but a rented hall a couple of doors down still sufficed for their needs. After meetings, the Party veterans would repair to the saloon and drink and talk about the good old days when everyone had always stood shoulder to shoulder with everyone else.

Sometimes Jake was part of those gatherings, sometimes he wasn’t. After tonight, either he would be or he wouldn’t have anything to do with the Party any more. He saw no middle way—but then, he’d never been a man who looked for the middle way in anything he did.

A small crowd had gathered on the sidewalk in front of the meeting hall: men in caps and straw hats crowding around the doorway, jostling to get in. They parted like the Red Sea to let Jake by. “Tell the truth tonight, Featherston!” somebody called. “Tell everybody the whole truth.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” Jake answered. “I don’t know how to do anything else. You wait and see.”

Several people clapped their hands. But somebody said, “You don’t want to be Party chairman. You want to be king, is what you want.”

Whirling to turn on the man, Jake snapped, “That’s a goddamn lie, Bill Turley, and you know it goddamn well. What I want is for the Freedom Party to go somewhere. If it wants to go my way, fine. If it doesn’t, it’ll go however it goes and I’ll go somewhere else. No hard feelings.”

No matter what he’d said a moment before, that was a thumping lie. Hard feelings were what made Jake Featherston what he was. If the Freedom Party rejected him tonight, he would never forget and never forgive. He never forgot and never forgave any slight. And this rejection, if it came, would be far worse than a mere slight.