Breakthroughs (20 page)

Edna saw the body, saw the great pool of blood that had welled from it, and then saw and recognized the head. Her mouth opened in a scream that was for Nellie silent. Nellie ran to her, took her by both hands, and pulled her out of the church, Jacobs staggering along beside them.

More shells kept falling, each one a small earthquake. Some people in the streets were up and fleeing—fleeing in all directions, for no one path seemed safe. Others were down, some wounded or dead, others sheltering against fragments and blast. On the far side of Lafayette Square, the White House burned.

Nellie did not see Bill Reach. He must have known this was coming from the U.S. guns, as Hal Jacobs might have. He’d tried to save people. At risk to himself, he’d tried to save people. Nellie wondered if that meant she couldn’t hate him any more. Savagely, she shook her head. She owed him too much for that.

Anne Colleton glared at the men who served the three-inch guns she’d managed to pry loose from an armory where they’d been gathering dust. “You haven’t got rid of Cassius and his fighters,” she said, her voice suggesting that that was a sin incapable of forgiveness. In her mind, it was.

Captain Beauregard Barksdale, the militiaman commanding the little artillery unit, said, “We’re doing the best we can, Miss Colleton. We aren’t so handy with these here guns as we might be.”

She withered him with a glance. “I’ve seen
that
.” Her voice dripped scorn. She was being unfair, and knew it, and couldn’t help it. Beauregard Barksdale had undoubtedly been named for the famous Confederate general right after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and might well be more familiar with the brass Napoleons the Little Napoleon had fired than he was with the modern artillery pieces Anne had obtained for him.

“Ma’am, we are doing what we can,” Barksdale repeated stolidly. He took a deep breath, then let it wuffle out through his thick gray mustache. “And I’m still not even slightly sure it’s legal for you to be ordering the militia of the sovereign state of South Carolina around in the first place.”

Anne’s voice was sweet as ant syrup, and no less deadly: “Shall I wire the governor up in Columbia and ask him whether he’s sure? Shall I telephone him so he can tell you he’s sure?”

She meant it. The militia captain could see she meant it. Behind his bifocal spectacles, his eyes went wide. She stared at him, unblinking and implacable as a hawk. He wilted. She’d been sure he would wilt. “Well, no, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t reckon you’ve got to go so far as to do that. We’ll take your orders—won’t we, boys?” None of the other old men and youths serving the guns dared say no.

“You’d better,” Anne said. “I haven’t the time to waste going through this nonsense. If I have to go through it twice, I’ll be sorry—and so will you. I am going to be perfectly plain with you: yes, I have to squat when I piss. That does not mean I can’t blow your heads off with a rifle at a range beyond any at which you could hit me, and it does not mean I know nothing of war and am unfit to give you orders.”

If she couldn’t get them to obey her any other way, she’d fluster them into doing it. She’d never seen such a collection of red faces in her life. These men and boys had gone through their whole lives never imagining a woman would remind them
that
she pissed, let alone how she went about it.

“If you’re going to give orders, just give ’em, for God’s sake,” Captain Barksdale said, now not daring to meet her eye. “Don’t go on about…other things.” He shuffled his feet like an embarrassed schoolboy.

“That is what I was trying to do,” Anne said briskly. “I have some reason to believe I know where the Red bandits will strike next. You’ll have to hit them harder than you did last time to do any good.”

“Put us where we can hit ’em and I reckon we’ll do it,” Barksdale replied. The gunners—many of whom, Anne was convinced, could not have hit the ground if they fell off a horse—nodded.

“I will,” Anne said.
I hope,
she added to herself. Scipio was not to be trusted, not any more, not after shells had come crashing down around him. Had the shells killed Cassius and Cherry, she would have reckoned it worthwhile. As things were…as things were, she contemplated Scipio the exacting perfectionist huddled in the swamps, and knew she had a measure of revenge with every breath he took.

Captain Barksdale said, “We’d be even likelier to hit, ma’am, if you could get us some more shells to practice with.”

Anne rolled her eyes. “I count myself lucky if I’m able to pry loose enough shells for you to use in combat.” That was an understatement. From the start of the war till now, the three-inch field gun had been the workhorse of the Confederate Army. It served on every front, and every front screamed for shells. Detaching any had taken every wire she could pull.

The militia gunners hitched limbers and guns to horses and drove back to St. Matthews. In town, she saw two women on the street in trousers: not so fine as hers, but trousers. She accepted that as no less than her due. She’d been a leader in style and fashion before the war began. It was only natural that she should continue to lead now.

She was about to go up to her room when a messenger boy halted his bicycle with the heels of his boots. “Telegram for you, ma’am,” he said. She took the envelope. He hurried away after pocketing a ten-cent tip.

Ripping apart the flimsy paper was not an adequate substitute for settling Cassius and Cherry for good, but it had to do. When Anne was done reading the wire, she tore it to shreds, threw them in the air, and let the wind blow them away. None of the news from her brokers had been good lately. The markets in Richmond and London and Paris were faltering; the investments that had sustained her even after the ruin of Marshlands faltered, too.

She could not imagine when Marshlands would recover. She had trouble imagining when her investments would recover, either. If they didn’t…If they didn’t, she wouldn’t be the leader around these parts much longer. She had trouble imagining that, too, but less trouble than she would have had in the spring of 1916 and ever so much less than she would have had in the spring of 1915.

A train pulled into the station a couple of blocks away. The fire engine might not have been replaced after the Red uprising, but labor gangs, some working at gunpoint, had put the railroads back together in a hurry. Those iron rails bound the CSA together as nothing else could.

From the direction of the station, someone called her name. Her head turned. Coming her way was a tall man in a butternut uniform. “Tom!” she yelped in glad surprise, and ran toward her older brother.

Lieutenant Colonel Tom Colleton stared at Anne as she drew near. “Good God, Sis, what
are
you wearing?” he said.

She put her hands on her hips and glared at him. He didn’t flinch, as he would have before the war. In a way, that made her proud: he’d gone from an overage boy, a useless drone, to a man on the battlefield. In another way, it irked her more than ever: even as a man, he thought women should be useless toys.

With precision that showed how tightly she was holding her temper in check, she replied, “I am wearing the clothes I need to wear to go hunting bandits in the swamps of the Congaree—or did you want that rifle you sent me to gather dust in the closet?”

Tom took a deep breath, then decided not to make a scene. “All right,” he said. “You sure as the devil took me by surprise, though. I never would have reckoned the day would come when women showed off their shapes that way.”

“Really?” she asked, as if in innocence. “What sort of joints do you go to when you’re on leave but you don’t come home?” She had the satisfaction of watching a blush climb from his throat to his hairline. Deciding to let him down easy, she asked, “How are things at the front?”

He grimaced, but in an impersonal sort of way. “Not so well. We’ve lost just about all the ground we took back from the Yankees in the counterattack last fall. We’re shoved away from Big Lick and the Roanoke River, back toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. Dammit, it’s not that they’re better soldiers than we are. The trouble is, there are more of them than there are of us.”

“What about the black troops?” Anne asked.

Her brother shrugged. “They’re starting to come into the line. They’re raw. God only knows how they’ll do when push comes to shove. And even with ’em, there are still more damnyankees than there are of us. Defending is cheaper than attacking, thank God. If we’re lucky, sooner or later the USA will get tired of throwing away men against us and against the Canucks, and they’ll make some kind of peace we can stand.”

“And if we’re not lucky?” Anne said quietly.

Tom didn’t answer for a while. When he did, it was obliquely: “We’ve made the USA eat a lot of crow since South Carolina stopped flying the Stars and Stripes. I wonder what the bird tastes like, and how they’d serve it up. They remember every morsel, and that’s a fact.” He dug in his pocket, found a coin, and tossed it to Anne.

It was a U.S. quarter-dollar. On one side, it bore a bust of Daniel Webster, whom Confederate schools vilified for opposing secession. Anne turned it over. The other side showed arrows and lightning bolts superimposed on a star, with the word
REMEMBRANCE
stamped across it.

She handed the coin back to her brother. “Till this war, we hadn’t fought them for more than thirty years,” she said. “Foolish for them to keep on harping on things when the last war was over and done with so long ago—before either one of us was born.”

“When you lose, Sis, the last war’s never over and done with,” Tom answered, scratching the scar that seamed his cheek. “I’ve questioned a lot of prisoners. The Yankees remember ever single slight from the day this state seceded all the way up to the day they’re captured.”

“The thing to do, then, is to make sure they don’t have the chance to make us eat crow,” Anne said, as if stating an axiom of geometry.

“Yes, that would be the thing to do,” Tom Colleton said.

Anne chose to ignore the incompleteness of his agreement. As she would have before the war, she took charge of him. She took him to St. Matthews’ only functioning hotel, checked him in, and then led him to the better of the town’s cafés. With only two open in St. Matthews, it rated merely the comparative, not the superlative. It wasn’t that good, either; a third one likely would have been the best.

With an air of big-brotherly amusement, he let her do all that. He didn’t depend on her to do it, though, as he would have before the war. He ordered a beefsteak that proved less tender than it might have, stuck a fork in it, and let out several piercing brays. Anne was chewing a bite, and almost choked from laughing.

He gave her a peck on the cheek after supper, saying, “We’ll talk more in the morning, Sis.”

They did, and had plenty to talk about: the night was enlivened when the Reds brought a machine gun out of the swamp and fired several belts of ammunition into St. Matthews from long range before melting away under cover of darkness. Anne had a window shot out, and was nicked on the hand by flying glass.

“Is it like this all the time?” Tom asked.

“They haven’t done that in a while,” Anne said, “but they can, till we hunt down the last of them. We’re having trouble with that, though, because so much of everything goes straight to the front.”

“We’d have worse trouble yet if it didn’t,” Tom replied. Anne’s mouth twisted in something less than a smile. She had no good answer for that.

Sam Carsten peered out of the narrow vision slit in the sponson that housed his five-inch gun as the USS
Dakota
inched her way forward. What he saw was endless choppy ocean. The South Atlantic swells were slapping against the battleship’s full armored length, which made her roll unpleasantly.

As if also noticing the motion, Hiram Kidde said, “Don’t nobody puke in here. Anybody pukes in here, he’s in big trouble with me. You got that?”

“Aye aye, ‘Cap’n,’ ” the gun crew chorused.

“I wish we’d put some more turns on the engines,” Carsten said. “That would help smooth things out.”

“Oh, that it would, by Jesus—that it would,” the chief of the gun crew answered. “What’s the matter with you, Sam? You think you could stash your brains in your bunk once they promoted you to petty officer? That ain’t how it works, much as I hate to tell you.”

Carsten’s ears heated. “Have a heart, ‘Cap’n.’ That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“It’s what you
said
, goddammit,” Kidde said. “Sure, bend some more turns on the engines. Why the hell not? What the hell we got better to do than charge right into the mine belt the limeys and the Argentines laid between Argentina and the Falklands? What’s it cost us so far? Just a cruiser and a destroyer. Why the hell not put a battleship on the list?”

“Maybe we should have swung wide around the goddamn Falklands.” Now Sam’s voice was an embarrassed mumble.

Hiram Kidde, having scented blood, wasn’t about to let him off the hook. “That’d be good, wouldn’t it? Tack an extra six or eight hundred miles onto the cruise. We don’t have that much margin ourselves, and our supply ships have even less. Shit, the Argentines who didn’t dare stir out of harbor against us are going to come right after our tenders and their escorts even now.”