American Front (80 page)

Prisoner barracks were of rough, unpainted wood, with spaces showing between boards. Reggie didn’t look forward to that in winter. Bunks were similarly rough, and stacked on top of one another not double, not triple, but quadruple. He found a third-level one to call his own and climbed into it. “Home,” he said sadly.

Evening was coming to Hampstead, Maryland. As far as Jake Featherston was concerned, it looked like a pretty good evening. The Yankees out in front of the Confederate lines had been quiet, and the battery had needed to fire only a few rounds at them. Some of those had been gas shells, too.

“About time,” Featherston muttered to himself. The United States had been using gas against the Confederacy for months. Being able to respond in kind felt good. “Let those bastards worry about masks and goggles when we want ’em to, not the other way round.”

He got his mess kit and went over to the stew pot Perseus had bubbling. Some damnyankee farmer was short a chicken. Jake found himself imperfectly sympathetic, especially when the Negro ladled a drumstick into his mess tin. He smacked his lips. Sure as hell, things were looking up.

He sat around shooting the breeze with his gun crew. It wasn’t the same as it had been back in the old days, with the veterans who’d served beside him before the shooting started. But the new fish weren’t virgins any more, either. “We’ve got us a pretty good gun here,” Featherston said, looking back at the howitzer.

“The best,” Michael Scott said. The loader was probably right, at least as far as the battery went. By their smug grins, the rest of the gun crew agreed with him. “We got us the best niggers in the battery, too,” he added in the fond tones a man might use about a child of whom he is proud: the typical tones of a Confederate white talking about the achievements of a Confederate Negro. He patronized so automatically, he had no idea he was doing it.

“That they are,” Jake Featherston said. His tone of voice was a little different: he’d used Nero and Perseus as men, however uncomfortable that had made both him and them. He shook his head. He neither particularly liked nor particularly trusted Negroes, and the principal reason for that was his certainty that they had more capacity than they showed. As an overseer’s son, that worried him. The surprise you got if you kept thinking a man a boy was apt to be dreadful.

He didn’t mention that the two Negroes had helped him fight the gun. The crew he had now knew it, but they seemed intent on pretending they didn’t. He understood that; he tried to pretend it hadn’t happened, too. Doing anything else tore a hole in the fabric of the Confederate way of life. He was glad Nero and Perseus hadn’t turned uppity on account of their exploit. They would have been sorry for that, and some of the blame would have stuck to him, too.

He wandered over to see if anything was left in the stew pot, and came back with a couple of potatoes. The rest of the chicken seemed to have walked with the Lord, or more likely with the cooks. He shrugged. You had to expect that. Who ever heard of a cook’s going hungry?

After he’d disposed of the potatoes, he washed his mess tin in a bucket of water and scrubbed it with a rag till the metal took on a dull gleam. He made sure the rest of the gun crew did the same. Nothing gave you food poisoning faster than eating out of a dirty mess tin.

Scott broke out a deck of cards. Jake declined to get into a poker game, saying, “My luck’s been lousy lately.” That was, if anything, an understatement; he’d lost most of a month’s pay a week before, betting a full house against four artfully concealed nines.

He walked out onto Hampstead’s main street and peered north. The fall air was cool against his cheek. He couldn’t see anything much in the deepening twilight, and told himself that was just as well. If he had seen something, it would have been Yankee artillery flashes lighting up the horizon, which would have meant Yankee shells paying the battery a visit. This past year, he’d had all the glory and drama and excitement of combat he’d needed to prove to him that the best thing to hope for in the middle of a war was a nice, quiet day—or two or three of them in a row.

Since he didn’t feel like sleeping, he went back to check on the horses. Perseus and Nero had done their usual capable job of taking care of the animals. He patted the gray gelding on the nose, then headed out of the barn where the animals were resting.

A cricket chirped. Somewhere off in the middle distance, an owl let loose with a mournful hoot. From the front came the occasional crack of rifle fire. It was only occasional, though, not the continuous, almost surflike roar it became when the action heated up. He looked up to the rather cloudy heavens and thanked God he wasn’t an infantryman.

Captain Stuart’s tent was pitched not far from Jake’s gun. A lot of officers, instead of living under canvas, would have commandeered a house and made themselves comfortable there. That would have been all right with Featherston; what point to being an officer if you couldn’t take advantage of it? But Stuart, despite his fancy dinners and such, still affected a pose as just another artilleryman—except when he needed something from his father. The hypocrisy irked Jake.

He heard a low murmur of voices from beyond the battery commander’s tent. He frowned. What was going on back there? The voices grew quiet as he approached. He found Nero and Perseus, along with the Negro laborers from the rest of the guns in the battery and even with Captain Stuart’s servant Pompey, gathered in a circle around a tiny fire. Walls all around made it impossible for any Yankee to spot from the ground; they could smother it in an instant if aeroplanes came over.

Near the fire lay a pair of dice and some money. “Evenin’, Sergeant,” Pompey said in his mincing voice when he recognized Jake. “We is just spreadin’ the wealth around, you might say.” He grinned. His teeth were very white in his dark face.

“Yeah, well, I done spread my wealth around lately,” Featherston said. Perseus and Nero laughed. They’d heard him grouse about losing his shirt with that full house. When Pompey reached for the dice, Jake shrugged and left.

His own gun crew had their poker game going strong. He watched for a while, then pulled out what money he had left and sat in with them. He won a couple of little hands, lost a couple, then lost with a flush to a full house. That cost him a big piece of the anemic bankroll he’d brought to the game. He quit in disgust and went off to wrap himself in his blanket.

Some time in the middle of the night, somebody gently shook him awake. He looked up to find Perseus squatting beside his bedroll. In a voice not much above a whisper, the laborer said, “We ain’t actin’ like niggers no more, Marse Jake. Figured I’d tell you, on account of you know we don’t got to. You want to be careful fo’ a while, is all I got to say.” He slipped away.

Featherston looked around, not altogether sure he hadn’t been dreaming. He didn’t see Perseus. He didn’t hear anything. He rolled over and went back to sleep.

A little before dawn, Captain Stuart’s angry voice woke him: “Pompey? Where the hell are you, Pompey? I call you, you bring your black ass over here and find out what I want, do you hear me? Pompey!”

Stuart’s shouts went on and on. Wherever Pompey was, he wasn’t coming when called. And then Michael Scott hurried up to Jake, a worried look on his face. “Sarge, you seen Nero or Perseus? Don’t know where they’re at, but they sure as hell ain’t where they’re supposed to be.”

“Jesus,” Featherston said, bouncing to his feet. “It wasn’t a dream. Sure as hell it wasn’t.” Scott stared at him, having no idea what he meant. He wasn’t altogether sure himself. One thing seemed clear: trouble was brewing.

The policeman at the corner of Beaufain and Meeting Street—a pudgy, white-mustached fellow who might have fought in the War of Secession—threw up his right hand, halting north-south traffic on Meeting so trucks and wagons on Beaufain could continue making their way to and from the Charleston railroad lines and harbor.

Anne Colleton snarled something distinctly unladylike and stomped on the brakes of her Vauxhall Prince Henry. The motorcar groaned and squeaked to a stop, its radiator grill projecting slightly out onto Beaufain. She’d bought the Vauxhall because it could go fast, not for its ability to stop in a hurry. The brakes were a good deal weaker than the sixty-horsepower engine.

A man in a battered Ford was stopped alongside her. He gave her a look halfway between curious and rude. She’d long since grown used, if not resigned, to that look. Even in the USA, lady automobilists were a small minority. In the more conservative Confederacy, they were rare. She smiled back at the man. He might have thought it a sweet smile…if he were an imbecile.

Rather nervously, he tipped his straw hat. “Sure you know what you’re doing in the car”—he proved himself a Charleston native by pronouncing it
cyar
—“little lady? Wouldn’t you rather have a chauffeur drive you around?”

Anne smiled again, even more savagely than before. “I had to fire my last two chauffeurs,” she answered. “They went too slow to suit me.”

The policeman halted traffic on Beaufain and let the waiting vehicles on Meeting Street move. Anne put the potent Vauxhall—with three times the power of the Ford next to it—through its paces. She left the Ford’s driver choking on her exhaust.

She was almost sorry the Charleston Hotel lay only a couple of blocks south of Beaufain. The sensation of speed in the Vaux-hall exhilarated her far more than the same speed would have in a train. Here she was the engineer, her foot on the throttle.
Freedom
, she thought.

A pair of Negro servants came dashing out from under the columned portico of the hotel. One of them handed her down to the sidewalk. Then both of them grabbed her suitcases and followed her inside. The doorman, a far colored fellow in a getup that made him look like a Revolutionary soldier, threw wide the door to allow the procession to enter.

Electric fans mounted on the ceiling stirred the air without cooling it. Anne strode up to the desk clerk, gave her name, and said, “I believe you have the Presidential Suite reserved for me.”

“Uh, Miss Colleton, I’m uh, very sorry, ma’am,” the clerk said, plainly alarmed at having to give her bad news, “but we’ve, uh, had to move you to the Beauregard Suite on the third floor.”

She froze him with a glance. “Oh? And why is that?” Her voice was low, calm, reasonable…dangerous.

“Because, ma’am, President Wilson’s in the Presidential Suite,” he blurted.

“Oh,” she said again. Her laugh, much to the unhappy clerk’s relief, held acquiescence. “Nothing you can do about that, I suppose. I didn’t know he was going to be in Charleston.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the clerk said. “He’s come down to launch the
Fort Sumter
—you know, the new cruiser that just got built. That’s tomorrow. Tonight there’s a reception and dance here. In fact…” He turned back to the rectangular array of message slots behind the registration desk and pulled out a cream-colored envelope. “You have an invitation here. When Mr. Wilson’s private secretary learned who had been booked into the Presidential Suite before him, he made sure to give you one.”

“I should hope so,” Anne said, conscious of her position in South Carolina. Then she turned the warmth up on her smile. “That
was
thoughtful. The Beauregard Suite, you say. It will do.”

After she’d ridden upstairs in the lift and tipped the servants carrying her bags, she sat down on the bed and laughed till tears rolled down her cheeks. The Charleston Hotel was modern enough to boast telephones in its fancy suites, the Beauregard among them. She made a call. “Roger?” she said when the connection was established. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to see you tonight after all…Yes, I’m seeing someone else…Who?…Why should I tell you?…Oh, all right, I will—it’s President Wilson.”

That produced a good fifteen-second silence on the other end of the line. Then Roger Kimball said, “I hope you’re not going to see as much of him as you were going to see of me.”

Though the submariner couldn’t see her, she nodded approvingly. He had gall. She admired that. “How can I be sure?” she said. “He hasn’t asked me.” That made Kimball sputter, as she’d hoped. She went on, “I will see you tomorrow—unless the president sweeps me off my feet.”

Kimball chuckled. “Or you sweep him off his. But he’s a long ways from young. Two nights running’d probably be tough for him. Tomorrow, then.”

“He
does
have gall,” Anne murmured after she’d hung up. She pondered her luggage. She’d brought clothes for going out with a young, none-too-wealthy naval officer, as well as some frilly, silky things for more private moments with him. What did she have that was suitable for dinner with the President of the Confederate States of America?

She went through the dresses she had with her. When she came to the summer-weight rose floral voile, she smiled. The full, pleated skirt would flow nicely around her legs as she moved, and the laced bodice over the white voile chemisette might draw the eye even of a president no longer young. The dress was wrinkled from its time in the suitcase. She grabbed for the bell pull by the bed. A maid knocked at the door less than a minute later. She gave the colored woman the dress for pressing.

As she’d been sure it would, it came back in plenty of time for the dinner, which, the invitation said, was to begin at eight o’clock. She had expected to have dined earlier and to be engaged in other things by then, but what you expected and what you got weren’t always the same.

Like the Presidential Suite, the Beauregard Suite had not only cold but also hot running water. Anne ran the bathtub full and washed away the dust and grime of the trip from Marshlands down to Charleston. She knew she would start perspiring again as soon as she stepped out of the tub, but no one could do anything about that, not in South Carolina. She was glad she wore her hair short and straight, so the bath did not badly disarrange it.

She went downstairs about half past seven. As she’d expected, a crowd of rich and prominent South Carolinians had already gathered outside the doors of the banquet hall; a couple of Negro attendants with almost the presence of Scipio made sure those doors did not open prematurely.