Breakthroughs (68 page)

“I do want to thank you for the support you have shown for my policies since I succeeded President Wilson,” Semmes said. “I hope that support will continue as we head toward the end of this war.”

I hope you still have some money and some influence left,
was what he meant. Anne hoped the same thing. She wished she’d sold Marshlands before the Red uprising—that would have given her more capital to invest. Her investments, at the moment, were disasters, but Marshlands was a catastrophe. Not only was it bringing in no money, the taxes she paid on the land were sucking the life’s blood from her veins.

She said, “I’ll do what I can. We need to get our strength back as quickly as we’re able to.”

That wasn’t a promise that what she would do would involve supporting Gabriel Semmes, although she would not have been brokenhearted to have him take it as one. And so he did, saying, “I knew I could rely on you. And let me say that, even now, I have some hope that the Army of Northern Virginia will yet halt the Yankees’ inroads, for which they are paying a dreadful price. If we stop them, if we can drive them back, we may yet get terms more nearly acceptable to the national honor.”

“I hope we do,” Anne said, and meant it. At the same time, though, she still held to the thought she’d had before: if the war was lost, best to escape it as soon as might be. With this war behind them, the Confederate States could start thinking about the next one.

It was, Lucien Galtier thought, a grand day for a wedding. He felt not the least bit sorry to hold the ceremony in the little tin-roofed church of St.-Antonin rather than the grander structure up in Rivière-du-Loup. Father Pierre, the local priest, got on very well with Father Fitzpatrick. Bishop Pascal would have made a fine show of getting along with Dr. O’Doull’s friend, and, while making that fine show, would have done everything in his power to undercut him. Lucien had seen Bishop Pascal in action before.

He fiddled with his wing collar and cravat. Marie had gone on and on about how handsome he looked in his somber black suit. Whether he looked handsome or not, he disliked the way the collar grabbed him around the neck. He sniffed at his sleeve, hoping neither the suit nor the white shirt under it smelled too overpoweringly of mothballs. They spent most of their time in a chest in the closet, coming forth for hardly anything but funerals and weddings.

His sons stood around fiddling with their collars, too. He’d had to tie their neckties for them: it was either that or spend half an hour waiting while they botched the job and then do the tying. Neither of them had had much practice at the art. He hadn’t had much himself, and hoped the knot in his own cravat was as straight as those he’d tied for Charles and Georges.

Had Nicole been marrying some young man of the vicinity, he too would have worn a black suit of no particular age (and no particular shape), and like as not a cravat his father had tied for him. Dr. Leonard O’Doull, on the other hand, wore a cutaway, white tie, trousers pressed into creases scalpel-sharp, and a stovepipe hat. When Georges saw him in his splendor, he whistled and said, “I thought I was getting a doctor for a brother-in-law, not a Rockefeller.”

“And I thought I was getting a troublemaker for a brother-in-law, and I see I was right,” Dr. O’Doull returned. He refused to let Georges get his goat. Lucien reckoned that the best way to handle his younger son, who was indeed a troublemaker.

Father Fitzpatrick came up to them, a little man with a beaky nose and hair the color halfway between rust and a sunset. “We’ll do it in just a few minutes, now,” he said. He spoke Parisian French with a peculiar lilting accent. When he spoke English with Dr. O’Doull, the lilt remained.

“This is good,” Lucien said. “This is very good.” He slowed his own speech a little for the priest’s benefit. Turning to his daughter’s fiancé, he asked, “Are you nervous?”

“Of course I’m nervous,” O’Doull answered. Georges looked disappointed; had O’Doull tried to deny it, Lucien’s son would have made him pay. The American doctor went on, “Weren’t you nervous when you married your wife?”

“Now that I think on it, it could be that I was,” Galtier said, and pursed his lips to show he knew he was understating things. He’d been as nervous as a man getting a half-grown lynx out of a tree, and he’d known Marie since they were both children. O’Doull had known Nicole only since they began working together at the hospital. No wonder he was nervous.

Friends and relatives filed into the church. Most of them waved to Lucien; some came over to shake hands with him and O’Doull. A few went inside with rather sour expressions. They were families with young men who might possibly have been matched to Nicole had her father not chosen this outsider. In their shoes, he would have shown a long face, too.

And then it was time to go inside, and for Lucien to lead Nicole down the aisle toward the altar. In her dress all of white, she looked very young and very beautiful. She beamed at him through the veil. He patted the hand she’d set on his arm. If she was happy, he would be happy. And, even if Dr. O’Doull was an American, he struck Galtier as a solidly good fellow.

So did Father Fitzpatrick, though he gave Lucien a start by pronouncing the Latin of his prayers in a most peculiar fashion. Galtier glanced sharply over at Father Pierre. The local priest remained calm. That let Lucien also remain calm. If Father Pierre thought Father Fitzpatrick’s pronunciation acceptable, God likely would, too.

After Dr. O’Doull had opened Nicole’s veil and kissed her, after he had set a ring on her finger, people headed across the street to the hall Lucien had hired for the reception—the money Major Quigley had paid for back rent for the land on which the hospital stood was proving useful in all sorts of ways. Once there, Lucien got a drink and then found an excuse to get Father Pierre in a corner and ask him about Father Fitzpatrick’s Latin.

Father Pierre was also holding a drink. He knocked it back, chuckled, and answered, “You need have no concern over that. English and Irish and American priests are in the habit of pronouncing their Latin as they believe the ancient Romans would have spoken.”

“And you, how do you pronounce your Latin?” Lucien asked.

“In the same way as does His Holiness the Pope,” Father Pierre said. “I think I have made the better choice, but the other is in no way evil, merely different.”

“I also think you have made the better choice,” Lucien said. “In your mouth, Latin sounds splendid. In Father Fitzpatrick’s mouth, I found it harsh and rather ugly.”

“Part of that is because you are not used to it,” the priest of St.-Antonin replied. “Their way does have a certain majesty to it—although, as I say, I prefer our own.” He rolled his eyes. “Trust English-speakers to pay no attention to what the rest of the world does.” Galtier laughed at that.

“Where is the joke,
mon beau-père
?” Leonard O’Doull asked. He could properly call Lucien his father-in-law now.

“Yes, Father, where is the joke?” Nicole echoed. Instead of Galtier’s arm, she clung with proud possessiveness to her new husband’s.

“It is a matter of Latin,” Lucien answered. With any luck at all, that would impress and confuse both the newlyweds.

It worked with his daughter, but not with O’Doull. The doctor thumped his forehead with the heel of his free hand. “But of course! I’m an idiot. Fitz learned his Latin the Ciceronian way, same as I did. But you folks here pronounce it as if the Romans had been Italians, don’t you? He must have sounded pretty funny to you.”

“If our way is good enough for the Holy Father in Rome, it is good enough for me,” Galtier said. Behind him, Father Pierre nodded. “And yes, your friend’s Latin did sound odd, though I am given to understand it is also good, of its kind.”

He wondered if that would insult the American. Instead, he saw that O’Doull was having a hard time not laughing. “Fitz’s Latin is certainly better than mine, these days,” his son-in-law said. “Who but a priest has the chance to keep his grasp of the language so fresh?”

“You have reason,” Father Pierre said. “I speak no English, I am sorry to say, and many priests who do speak English know not a word of French—unlike your friend Father Fitzpatrick, whose French is very good, if, like his Latin, spoken in an interesting way. But with such folk I speak in Latin, and I am understood. Even with the differences in pronunciation, I am understood.”

“It’s like the difference between the French of Paris and the French of Quebec,” O’Doull said.

“Why, so it is!” The priest of St.-Antonin beamed at him, then turned to Lucien and slapped him on the back. “You are a fortunate man, to have a scholar as part of your family.”

“I am a fortunate man,” Lucien said. “That is enough. And if I owe some of my good fortune to an American—why then, I do, that is all.”

Before either Leonard O’Doull or Father Pierre could say anything to that, shouts from the street distracted both of them and Galtier, too. A couple of people near the doorway called out to learn what was going on. Lucien heard the reply very clearly: “The flag of the Republic of Quebec flies over the city of Quebec!”

Several other people who also heard shouted for joy. A moment later, somebody punched one of them in the nose. Half a dozen men jumped on the puncher and threw him out. To Lucien’s dismay, he saw the fellow sprawled in the street with his trousers torn was a cousin he’d always liked pretty well.

Before the reception could turn into a free-for-all, he let out a great bellow: “Enough!” He was loud enough to make everyone turn around and notice him. Still at the top of his lungs, he went on, “This is a wedding, not a political rally. Anyone who wishes to make it a political rally will answer to me.” He cocked a fist, leaving no doubt about what he meant.

“And me!” Georges and Charles said in the same breath, standing shoulder to shoulder with their father.

That settled that. People horrified at the victory of the Americans and the Republic of Quebec (very much in that order) over the Canadian and British troops defending the capital of what had been the Canadian province of Quebec kept that horror to themselves. Lucien Galtier felt some, as he watched the world with which he was long familiar crack further. But his manner also persuaded those who were delighted with the success of the Republic to keep their mouths shut. The reception went on.

Marie came up to him and spoke quietly: “You did very well there.”

“Did I?” Lucien shrugged. “I do not know. What should I feel? I was torn in two when France lay down her arms to Germany. Now I am torn in two again. What we had is not what we shall have.”

“Change.” His wife spoke the word as if it were more filthy than
tabernac
. “Why can the world not stay as it has always been?”

Now it was Galtier’s turn to whisper: “You ask this at the wedding of your eldest daughter to an American doctor? How many American doctors would have come to the farm a-courting without the war? Not more than six or eight, I am certain.”

Marie stuck an elbow in his ribs. “And I am certain you are as much trouble as Georges, which is saying a good deal. I am also certain Dr. O’Doull is a fine young man, even if he is an American.”

“I am certain of this as well, else I should never have allowed him to join the family,” Galtier said. “And I am certain we have profited since the Americans came, when everything is taken all in all. But in doing so, we have turned our backs on everything that we knew and taken hold of everything that is new. Do you wonder that I worry on account of it?”

“I wonder that you worry so little on account of it,” Marie answered.

“This only shows that, wife of mine as you have been these many years, you do not know every dark place inside my heart,” Lucien told her. “I worry—how I worry! But I have got by…we have got by. And, old or new, we will go on getting by.” Now he spoke with great determination. After a moment, Marie nodded.

Lieutenant General George Custer was in a state, and, for once, his adjutant was damned if he blamed him. “On my front!” Custer shouted. “Roosevelt accepts a cease-fire on
my
front! Does he accept a cease-fire on any other front? In a pig’s arse he does! Why my front? Why my front alone?”

“He must have reasons,” Major Abner Dowling said, though he’d been hard pressed to find any that made sense to him.

“Oh, he has reasons, all right,” Custer snarled. He had no trouble finding them, either: “He wants to rob me of my glory, that’s what he wants to do. He always has, damn him. He never let me go to Canada, to lead our soldiers there. And now this is the front where we first broke through the Rebels’ lines. This is the front where the U.S. Army learned
how
to break through the Rebels’ lines. And this is the front Teddy Roosevelt chose to halt. Do I have to draw you a picture, Major?”

“Sir, you can’t mean that,” Dowling said.

He might as well not have spoken, for Custer ranted right through him: “That man in the White House has tried to rob me of the credit I deserve for the past thirty-five years.
I
was the one in command when we drove Chinese Gordon out of Montana during the Second Mexican War, but who stole the headlines? Roosevelt and his Unauthorized Regiment, that’s who. Tell me to my face, Major, that he’s not doing the same thing now. Look at the map and tell me that to my face!”

Dowling obediently looked. The longer he looked, the more he wondered whether the general commanding First Army didn’t have a point. If Roosevelt hadn’t accepted the cease-fire, how far would U.S. forces have advanced by now?

Custer, inevitably, had his own opinion about that: “Murfreesboro? To hell with Murfreesboro! We’d be pushing on toward Chattanooga by now, damn me to hell if we wouldn’t.” Fortunately for him, Dowling couldn’t do anything of the sort. Chattanooga was a
long
way away.

“I doubt that, General.” The voice came from the doorway. Dowling turned. His mouth fell open. There, grinning, stood Theodore Roosevelt. How much of Custer’s tirade had he heard? By the look of that grin, altogether too much. Dowling kissed his own career good-bye.