ReUNION: What if the Civil War had never happened? (20 page)

All the while, Delphine asked herself just how she could question these people
about the Bourque-Callaway meeting—whether they objected to it or were for it,
and how strongly they felt. On two occasions, she thought she was leading the
conversation in the right direction, only to be interrupted by one of the young
men in tuxedoes, asking for a dance. She couldn’t refuse.

Back at the Randolph table, Delphine again attempted to steer the conversation
toward her father’s trip north, but a steady stream of visitors made that
impossible. After she sang, she thought—that might be the time, when the party
began to break up, when people were still a bit drunk and
talkative.

"When would you like me to sing?" Delphine asked her host.

"I'm thinking they'll be running out of gas around 12:30 or so," Mr.
Randolph told her. "I'll have the orchestra introduce you. How many songs
will you do?"

"How about a 40-minute set—six or seven songs."

Randolph smiled, and it was one of his old, self-confident smiles. "I'm
looking forward to it, Delphine. I've always thought yours was the most
beautiful voice in the Confederacy."

She bestowed one of her very best smiles on him. It wasn't an unusual
compliment, but this time it came from a man she liked and respected.

"When you're finished, Delphine," he said, "I'd like to have a
talk with you."

"Oh, about what?"

"About your father, actually."

That stopped her. "What do…"

"Edmund, we really should be in there." This came from Edmund's wife,
the formidable Whitney Randolph, uncrowned queen of plantation society, a slim
auburn-haired woman with an elegant bearing, an elegant purple silk gown, an
elegant necklace of three rows of perfectly matched pearls and a disdainful
expression on her thin lips.

Edmund offered Delphine a helpless shrug. "Of course," he told his
wife. "I've been neglecting my duties." Then, to Delphine,
"We'll talk after your performance. Would that be acceptable?"

"Of course," she said. She was intrigued and a little concerned. This
hadn't sounded like a casual request. Randolph had something important to talk
about, very likely something Roy would want to know about. And thus, she
thought, I begin my career as an undercover agent.

Both the debutants and their escorts had more endurance than Randolph had
anticipated. But, by 12:45, everyone was wearing down. Only rarely now did the
ardent young men need to be restrained by their elders during the slow dances.
The orchestra was beginning to sound frayed and just a hair out of tune.
Finally, at the end of a particularly upbeat number, Delphine's old friend,
Vincent Langhorne, the conductor, a man famous not only in the Confederacy but
in the NAU and Europe, turned toward the crowd and stepped forward on the
ballroom's stage.

"Ladies and gentlemen, thank you, thank you," he said, to polite
applause. "It is now my pleasure to introduce for your entertainment and
delight, the Songbird of the South, the finest—and let me say, prettiest—singer
of our time, the daughter of our beloved leader President Buddy Bourque and a
plantation girl herself, the one and only Delphine Bourque."

Delphine, having retrieved her guitar from the main hall closet, confidently
stepped onto the stage and reached for the microphone. Though she'd been
singing in public for years, she still suffered from occasional stage fright.
But not tonight. Tonight, she had something else on her mind besides singing.
She had a job to do.

The audience greeted her appearance with cheers and applause, which she
received with a humble smile. Finally, they began to simmer down. "Good
evening, everyone. Tonight, I've decided to sing four different kinds of
songs—some of them old, some of them new, some of them borrowed, some of the
blue. And if any of you young men and young ladies happen to get any ideas from
that—well, please don't blame me."

As was her custom, Delphine scanned the audience for familiar faces among the
sea of white gowns and tuxes—and she found them, quite a few of them, beginning
with Cecily Randolph, who was grinning at her like a kewpie doll. How young she
seemed, how long ago it seemed that they had played together.

Delphine sat down, touched her fingers to the guitar strings and heard her
voice rise in song, listening and watching herself as though from a distance.
She started with some old favorites, Deana Carter's
Strawberry Wine
and
Patsy Cline's
I Fall to Pieces
, both of which pleased and comforted
older members of the plantation aristocracy. At that thought, she sought—and
found—Edmund Raymond, standing toward the back of the crowd with a distant look
in his eye, and, as she listened to her own voice, singing on automatic pilot, she
wondered again about the talk he'd suggested.

Then she stepped back into herself and segued to some newer numbers, Des'ree's
Kissing
You,
which got a big hand from the young people. following it with
Mine
,
the Taylor Swift hit. She lost the pitch for a couple of notes, but quickly
recovered. The applause was gratifying.

At that moment, almost as if Delphine had prompted him, some young man in
the audience shouted out, "How about some of your new songs," which
triggered more applause among the young people, and a few shouts of "yeah,
yeah."

Delphine obliged them with two from her latest album,
Someone to Take Me
Away
and
Just Another Day in Heaven
. After the applause, she stood
and made as if to leave the stage, a bit of pretense that fooled nobody. The
applause continued and she sat again, and sang the encore they were all waiting
for, her newest hit,
Waiting For You to Come Home.

The moment Delphine left the stage, she found Edmund Randolph at her shoulder. "That
was wonderful," he said. "As always."

"Thank you."

"Now I wonder if I could impose on you. Could we go someplace private to
talk?" he asked.

The request had come more quickly than she'd expected. "Of course."

He led her to an unobtrusive side door, then down a flight of wooden steps, to
what Delphine knew from her days playing with Cecily was one of Westover's
famous tunnels, carved into the underlying stone more than a hundred and fifty
years ago when it looked as though war might break out between North and South.

The tunnel was narrow—no car could have passed through it—and the walls were
rough and damp, but thick wooden planks had been laid on the floor and a string
of lights illuminated their path. If Delphine's guess was right, this was the
passage that led to the chamber under the ice house, perhaps 100 yards from the
main house.

"We're headed toward the ice house?" Delphine asked, wondering what
this was all about.

"Yes. Well, to the meeting room below it. Some old friends would like to
have a word with you."

"Old friends?" she asked, sounding a bit uncertain.

"Nothing to worry about, I assure you." Edmund said.

"Of course not."

Randolph walked beside her, silent for a moment. "I hope you've enjoyed
yourself at the cotillion," he said, finally.

"Brought back a lot of memories."

"Keep hold of those memories, Delphine," Edmund said. "You won't
be adding to them. None of us will."

"What do you mean?"

"That was the last of them."

"I don’t understand.”

Randolph stopped and looked back at Delphine and took her hands in his.
"This was the last of the cotillions, Delphine. We can't afford them
anymore. We had to borrow to put this one on."

"But the other plantation families…"

"We couldn't have put on this one without their contributions. Now they're
broke too."

"Edmund, if my fee…"

"Please, Delphine. Don't embarrass me."

"Surely times will improve. They always do."

"That's what we've said to ourselves—for years. But for some reason, it
never happens."

Now they began to hear voices, coming from up ahead. Men talking, arguing,
debating.

“I still think it makes no sense to ask the girl,” one man said. The voice was
old and crotchety.

“She’s supposed to be pretty sharp.” This came from yet another man, also old,
at least by the sound of his voice.

“For pity’s sake, Paxton, she’s a 22-year-old
girl
. She’s a piece
of fluff.”

“Randolph says she’s a lot more than that,” one of others said. “Besides, what
choice do we have? This may be our very last chance.”

"Creighton, you know as well as I that the die was cast when we lost Texas
to Mexico. All that oil revenue, gone." The voice was cultured, but no
longer young.

"H-He's…right," someone else said, oddly pausing between the two
words, as if talking were difficult for him. "When that happened, the
Confed-Confederacy just wasn't a s-s-s-sustainable…business any more."

"You're both wrong." The voice was high-pitched and sarcastic. “It
started earlier than that. It started when those Missouri reprobates voted to
join the NAU, then, by God, the damned Oklahomans did the same damn
thing."

"You may be old, Creighton, but you're not old enough to remember that.
That was over a hundred years ago.
.
We had
plenty of good years after that. Good decades." The remark was followed by
an outburst of coughing.

"Mebbe so, Paxton, but that was the beginning of the end," the
high-pitched voice insisted.

Now the tunnel widened and Delphine and Edmund Randolph entered a cozy room
that had been carved out of the stone. It was occupied by six men, all of an
age, sitting around a old wooden table on which sat several packs of playing
cards, talking, debating with a surprising amount of energy. A cloud of
cigarette smoke hovered over the table and the crystal ashtrays at either end
were both nearly filled with cigarette butts.

"T'weren't the beginning of anything," one of the men said. He was a
skeletal figure with sideburns down to the jawline and eyes set so deeply they
were hard to see. "It was the crop failures. The fourth one in a row was
the final blow." He took a long drag on his cigarette.

The youngest of the bunch shook his head in the negative. He was a 60-year-old
gentlemen, with dyed black hair, dressed in an exquisite London-tailored suit
only a decade or so out of fashion. "We were done in by a God-forsaken
plague of locusts. We should have listened to the scientists,” he said. “They
told us it was coming. We should have developed the insecticides they
recommended. But no, we got our pet scientists to say it wasn't true and we
told the country we couldn't afford the insecticide. Or that it wouldn't work.
We were so arrogant…" He stopped to light a cigarette.

Edmund Randolph knocked on the doorframe, hoping to get the men's attention.
But they didn't even notice him standing there, even with Delphine Bourque
beside him.

"Next thing you're going to tell me," said the man with the sideburns,
"is that we should have freed the slaves long before we did."

"Well, we should have," said the man in the London-tailored suit,
taking another cigarette from a slim, silver case.

A little grey gnome of a man who was sitting at the far end of the table had an
objection. "That completely wiped out my capital," he complained.

"You would have lost it anyway," said the man next to him, a fat,
bald-headed fellow with a sparse white
fringe circling around the back of his head. "We all did."

The gnome spoke again, with obvious bitterness. "So now what, you're going
to tell me we should let them vote?"

They all laughed.

"Gentlemen, gentlemen," Randolph called out. "I've brought a
guest. Gentlemen?"

They finally noticed Delphine, and stood up, like soldiers coming to attention.
Several offered her their chairs, but Randolph cut that short, finding a
folding chair leaning against a wall.

"I thought you wanted to talk to me about my father," Delphine said
to Randolph.

"Well, actually, we all do," Randolph told her. He turned toward the
men at the table. "Gentlemen, most of you already know her, but for those
who haven't met her or seen her in some time, this lovely and talented redhead
is Delphine Bourque, the daughter of our President and one of our most gifted
singers. Please introduce yourselves."

Delphine recognized most of them, of course. She'd known these faces since she
was a child. They were the core of the Confederacy, immensely powerful,
immensely wealthy, immensely admired, at least in their younger days.

The fat, bald-headed man put down his cigarette and held out a hand.
"Creighton Sinclair, Ms. Bourque. We met at Arcadia when you were knee
high to a grasshopper."

Delphine smiled. She extended her hand and he kissed it.

The next up was a white-haired man with watery blue eyes. He squinted at
Delphine, struggling to make her out. "I am Paxton Alexander, young
lady. You may recall that your father and I fought shoulder to shoulder at New
Orleans. Remarkable man, your father."

"Thank you," Delphine said, as they shook hands. "I think so
too."

It was the next man's turn, but Delphine spoke before he could. "Mr.
Aiken," she said, "Howard. I'm really happy to see you looking so
well." She moved toward him and gave him a hug.

Aiken smiled—at least that was his intention. Half his face was paralyzed.
"Thank you, Delphine. I've come a long way back sin-since…my s-stroke. And
thank your father too. His calls have been a tonic." He wobbled, but
remained standing.

"Delphine and I know each other," said the next man in line, a man so
thin he was almost two-dimensional. "I'm Everett Stokes, of Wildwind. You
all know that I served President Bourque as Secretary of Agriculture," he
said. "I guess you could say I presided over the crop failures." He
put down his cigarette, took Delphine’s hand and kissed it.