Charles was still kneeling. Cuffey kicked his left arm. He tipped the other way and sprawled. With his heavy boot, Cuffey stomped on Charles's outstretched right arm. His hand opened. He lost the wired hilt of the saber.

Grimacing-it couldn't be termed a smile-Cuffey dropped on Charles's chest with both knees. Charles grappled with him. They rolled in a litter of pendants, prisms, table splinters, mirror chips. Cuffey clawed for his eyeballs. Charles held him back, but it took too white hands on the bleeding black wrist. Charles could feel his strength draining fast.

"Gonna-kill-you-white man." Panting, Cuffey wrenched his arm back. Slippery blood on Charles's fingers enabled him to get loose. He fastened both hands on Charles's neck. Charles felt the drip of Cuffey's blood on his throat.

"You-all finished. Jus' like-this place-"

And so it seemed. Charles was succumbing to shock and pain. His vision blurred. His right hand flopped out, scurrying desperately around the floor like a sightless white spider. He wanted a shard of mirror, a piece of prism to attack Cuffey's face.

The hands choked tighter, steadily tighter. Charles's red fingers touched and closed on something he couldn't immediately identify because of its ridged texture- The wired hilt.

From the corner of his eye Cuffey saw it coming. Charles jammed the light cavalry saber into Cuffey's left side under his arm. Simultaneously, Cuffey let go of Charles's bloodied throat and reared away from the sword. It had already pierced the yellow satin and now slid in two inches. Four. Six- Charles felt the blade scrape bone and slide on. Twelve inches. Fifteen- Cuffey shrieked then, leaping and writhing with the killing steel stuck through him. Charles held fast. Cuffey continued his violent contortions. The blade snapped below the hilt, three inches from the dress.

Still impaled on the part that was deep inside him, Cuffey plucked wildly at the stub of steel, teetering and twirling into the burning dining room. The belling yellow skirt caught. Flames encircled the hem, ran upward like a fringe going the wrong way. Turning, weaving, Cuffey completed the figure of his death waltz and dropped into the consuming fire.

Finding something to feast on, it rose higher. Charles saw no more of him.

The smoking ceiling creaked and sagged. Charles struggled to his feet, the remaining part of the sword-it resembled a metal cross-gripped in his right hand. Most of the engraved inscription was gone. All that remained was amily, 1861.

Blood soaked his right pants leg and squished in his boot when he walked. He spied his fallen Colt and retrieved it. He found the parlor as yet largely untouched by the fire. The windows had been knocked out, presumably so Cooper and the others could escape. He had to find them. The great house was lost.

He ripped down another drapery, cut it by stabbing and sawing with the stub end of the sword until he had a strip long enough to wind around his thigh several times. He snapped off the leg of a taboret, broke that in two, and used half to finish the tourniquet, hoping it would suffice.

His lungs hurt, an abrasive feeling throughout his chest. Smoke grew thicker every moment. He ducked through a window to the piazza, the empty revolver in his left hand, the broken sword in his right.

Daylight was coming. Cuffey's followers had managed to find most everything of value before the fire claimed the house. The evidence littered the drive. They had emptied the wine and spirit racks, the wardrobes, the kitchen cabinets. He saw seedy, bearded men, white and black, slipping away in the smoke between the trees, arms laden with loot.

Not all of them had been equally successful. The blond boy wearing Cooper's frock coat and the petticoat lay facedown amid silver and smashed plates. A bullet hole showed between his shoulder blades.

There was little shooting now. But all it took was one bullet, so Charles cautiously remained behind one of the white pillars as he shouted, "Cooper?"

Silence.

"Cooper!"

"Charles?"

The distant voice provided the guidance he needed. They were hiding in the mazy plantings of the formal garden by the river. He crept along the side of the house, careful to avoid touching it; the walls were hot. He turned the corner, passed the chimney, and scrutinized the lawn.

No one. He readied himself to make a dash, then remembered to announce something important with another shout.

"Cuffey's dead, Cooper. Cuffey-is-dead. I killed him."

The sounds of Mont Royal burning filled the stillness. But no voices. Yet he knew they had heard him. He drew air into his pained lungs, stepped away from the house, and ran as fast as he could on his injured leg down the grassy slope toward the Ashley.

Someone shot at him. He heard the bullet splat the dewy grass to his right, but no second report followed. In the garden he found himself surrounded by familiar faces. Without so much as a word to anyone, he fell forward in a faint.

They hid all day in one of the rice squares, resting with their backs against the dirt embankment that held back the river until the wood gates were opened to let it flow in. The band of survivors consisted of Cooper, his wife and daughter, Clarissa, Jane, Andy, a young kitchen wench named Sue and her two small boys, and Cicero, the elderly, arthritic slave with curly white hair. Cicero had managed to fill his two big coat pockets with rice. He passed it around as the sun approached noon. It was their only food.

Others, including Cooper, frequently spoke of wanting to go back to assess the damage. Clarissa was the most insistent. Charles was adamant.

"Not until dusk. Then I'll go first, alone. No use risking any more lives."

The tourniquet had helped. The thigh cut had clotted. He didn't feel good, but he was able to stay awake. He did wish he had some bourbon for the pain.

Cooper seemed prone to argue with his last remark. Charles forestalled it. "Look at the sky. That tells you what's happened." Above the embankment and the live oaks and palmettos bordering the rice acreage, black smoke banners flew.

Cicero was visibly affected by it. After watching the smoke for a length of time, his tension evident in the set of his lips and the glint of his eye, he exploded. "What happened to those boys we put on guard?"

"They didn't stay there," Cooper replied. It was a statement, not an accusation. But it enraged the old Negro.

"Cowards. Wouldn't fight for their home-"

Squatting and drawing patterns in the dirt with a stick, Andy said, "Wasn't their home by choice, remember."

Cicero glared. "Damn skunk-belly cowards, that's what they are. Nigger trash."

"Don't be so hard on them," Charles said. "They knew the South's beaten-that they'll have their liberty the minute it becomes official. Why should they stay here and die when all they had to do was run a mile or so and be free men right away? Tell you one thing. Thousands and thousands of fine, high-principled white Southern boys ran away from the army with a lot less reason." He put two grains of rice in his mouth and chewed.

Clarissa was particularly displeased by the need to stay in the field most of the day. Shortly after noon, she had to relieve herself and cried because there was no privacy. Jane bent close to her ear, whispered, then gently helped her all the way across the square and over the next embankment. She waited on the near side until the elderly woman reappeared.

Clarissa's familiar cheery smile had returned. When Jane brought her back, she said, "How sweet the air smells. Spring's coming. Isn't that lovely?"

"Yes," said Judith, putting an arm around her mother-in-law and patting her. "Yes, it is." Andy gave Jane a swift, almost chaste kiss on the cheek. Charles thought he heard the black man whisper, "Thank you."

Charles drowsed awhile during the afternoon. Eyes half closed, he visualized bits of the writhing struggle with Cuffey. His eyes flew open and he shuddered, reminded of another day, at the slave cabins, when they had both been only six or seven. Friends, they had wrestled for possession of a fishing rod. This time it had been two enemies contesting one life. My God, how far the wheel had turned.

Toward sunset, Cooper again declared that he wanted to go back to inspect the property. No shots had been heard for more than four hours, or any unusual sound at all. The smoke kept drifting, thinner but still strong-smelling. Why Clarissa no longer noticed, Charles couldn't imagine, unless it was because she dwelled so much of the time in the safer, softer landscape of her own mind and had retreated there again. She was a lucky woman in some respects.

"I don't believe anybody should go up there alone," Andy said. "I'm goin' with whoever decides to do it."

"I suggest the three of us go," Cooper said. Charles was by now too tired to continue the argument. He gave in with a shrug.

Unarmed, they trudged along the bank of the Ashley. The water shone red-gold in the lowering light. They passed the last rice square and advanced cautiously through the belt of big trees separating the fields from the formal garden and riverside lawn. From their angle of approach, the first visible damage was the broken planking and debris on the bank. The dock no longer existed.

Pale, Cooper wiped his lips and walked out of the garden. Following him, Charles saw pieces of two gold-edged platters on the grass and a ripped dress with a mound of excrement on it. Human, he presumed.

Cooper's attention was on the house. He whispered, "Oh, God above." Even Andy appeared stricken. Charles didn't want to look, but he did.

Mont Royal had been burned to its tabby foundation. Nothing stood in the ashes and rubble except a few canted black beams and the great chimney, soot-marked but with all of its thick wisteria vines intact. Charles supposed the vines were dead.

"How could they?" Cooper said, wrath in his voice. "How could they, the damned ignorant barbarians-"

Softly, Charles said, "You used to tell me South Carolinians were fools because they were inviting war. They were eager for one. We just got what you predicted. The war paid us a call."

He touched his cousin's trembling shoulder to console him, then began to limp up the grassy incline. When he was still a good distance away, he felt the oven heat of the rubble. Here and there coals gleamed like imp's eyes. Slowly, wonderingly, he circled around the great chimney.

Cooper and Andy approached more slowly. Charles disappeared beyond the chimney. Suddenly Cooper and Andy exchanged alarmed looks. They heard Charles laughing like a crazy man.

"Hurry up," Cooper said, already running.

They dashed around the chimney to the darkening, tree-lined driveway. A few limbs near the house still smoked. Some others had burned away completely. Charles stood near the corpse of the blond boy, pointing and howling like a lunatic. The object of his mirth stood further down the drive: a flop-eared mule with rope halter and rein.

"Cuffey's mule," Charles gulped between bursts of laughter. "Mont Royal is wiped off the earth, but I've got a remount. Praise God and Jeff Davis! The war can go on and on and-"

The crazed voice broke off. He gave them a shamed glance and stalked away to the nearest live oak. He braced his forearm against it and hid his face.

128.

THAT SUNDAY MORNING, THE second of April, Mr. Lonzo Perdue and his wife and daughters were kneeling in prayer when the messenger rushed up the aisle of St. Paul's to whisper to the President. Mr. Perdue watched the Chief Executive, white-haired now, leave the church with an unsteady step. Mr. Perdue leaned close to his wife's ear.

"The defenses have broken. Did you see his face? It can't be anything else. We must pack and get on a train."

After the service, they wasted no time conversing with friends. They went straight home, packed three portmanteaus, and set out for the depot. They found all outbound trains were being held, though no official would explain why. During the afternoon the crowds grew steadily larger and more unruly, milling, pushing, overflowing the platforms and waiting room. Ultimately Mr. Perdue and his family found themselves encamped just outside the station entrance.

They heard glass smashing in nearby streets. Mr. Perdue trembled. "Looting."

"It must be the niggers," said his wife.

By dusk, the streets surrounding the depot were packed with more people than Mr. Perdue had seen for months. As night came, rumors flew. Lee had pulled out of the Petersburg and Richmond defense lines. He was in wild and confused retreat to the west.

Tempers shortened. There were incidents of pushing, fistfighting, rough treatment of the civilians when squads of soldiers had to quick-march into the mob to restore order. Then came the first explosion.

"Oh, Papa," cried Mr. Perdue's daughter Clytemnestra, cringing against her equally terrified father. "What are they doing?"

"Demolishing buildings. I think that was the Tredegar Works."

His daughter Marcelline began to shriek and babble as if taking leave of her senses. Without hesitation, Mr. Perdue slapped her several times. That took care of that.

By eleven, the city was an asylum lit by spreading fires. Davis arrived in a carriage surrounded by heavily armed soldiers. In the smoky lamplight, Mr. Perdue watched him pass into the depot. A train for Danville was waiting, someone said.

Mr. Perdue began to smell betrayal as he glimpsed certain other persons entering the station, each escorted by at least one soldier. He saw the scoundrel Mallory, who had wasted so many precious dollars on his worthless naval schemes. Trenholm, who had replaced Memminger at Treasury, arrived in an ambulance. Then came the damned Jew, Benjamin, sleek and cheery as ever. The privileged were to be carried to safety, away from the steady detonations of gunpowder, the brightening light of fires, the threat of hooligans looting- "The boxcars of the special train will be opened," a railroad official shouted from the depot steps. "I repeat, the boxcars will be opened, but no baggage will be allowed. None!"

Screaming, shoving, the crowd surged forward. Not everyone could squeeze through the station doors at once. People began striking and clawing one another like enemy soldiers. Mr. Perdue saw a child fall, trampled, a short distance to his left. He didn't try to assist the girl; he was busy dragging his wife relentlessly toward the platform.

"Oh, but Lonzo-no baggage? I can't leave these few precious things-"

"Then you'll stay here without me. Girls, kick those women if they won't move." Thus the family won a place on the 11:00 P.M. out of Richmond.

As the train started up slowly, chugging and jerking, desperate laggards trampled and pushed one another, still trying to climb into boxcars already filled to capacity. In his car, Mr. Perdue and several other men. manned the open door and protected their families by booting the faces and stamping on the hands of those attempting to board.

Marcelline tugged her father's coattail and pointed to a waving, yelling group on the platform. "Papa, it's Mr. Salvarini and his family."

"Yes, too bad," said Mr. Perdue as he reached down to a soft hand with two wedding rings on the fourth finger. Like some tenacious deep-sea creature, the hand had emerged from the mob to fasten on his trouser leg. He gripped the middle finger and bent it backward. As the hand released, he heard a bone pop. A stout woman sank from sight.

The tangle of bodies fell away at a faster rate; the train gathered speed and moved onto the trestle. Mr. Perdue's coat and cravat were in shreds. He was exhausted but happy-very satisfied and pleased by his untypical display of heroism in the face of danger.

Upriver, great light pylons showed where other James River bridges had been set afire. Perhaps I should have gone into the army after all, Mr. Perdue thought as the train bore him away into the night.

The soldiers, chiefly wounded veterans, had organized a rear guard to sweep through the government warehouses on Thirteenth and Fourteenth, putting matches to the cartons and crates of official records. One grizzled man, who was twenty-five but looked forty, pried open a wooden box and exclaimed, "Here's something new-undelivered mail."

"Burn it," said his sergeant, whose pant legs, like those of his men, were soaked with whiskey. They had waded through gutters filled with it. The looters were breaking open everything.

The soldier stuck in his match. When a few letters caught, he plucked them from the box and used them to fire a second one, then a third and fourth. With the blaze roaring nicely, he dropped the original packet of letters on the plank floor, already hot, and hurried away to safety.

129.

OUTSIDE THE LEDGER-UNION, an office boy hung up a summary of a new telegraphic dispatch almost hourly. Each piece of information from the distant Petersburg-Richmond line was greeted with cheers from a crowd becoming steadily larger.

By midday on Monday, the third of April, the excitement brought work to a standstill at Hazard's and swept through Belvedere like fire in a dry spell. Madeline was the only one who retreated from it, going to her suite of rooms and shutting the door.

She was thankful the end seemed near. The dispatches did not say positively that General Lee had abandoned his hopeless position in front of Petersburg and the Richmond lines as well, but that presumption was being accepted throughout the mansion-and the ironworks and the town. Everyone felt the Confederate capital would soon fall. If all of this meant the bloodletting would stop, she was grateful.

Yet the news raised a less welcome consideration. After a surrender, she would have no excuse for not returning to Mont Royal.

She hated the thought. The place would only remind her of Orry. Yet she knew she had an obligation to go back as soon as it was possible to travel to South Carolina. There was a great deal of Washington talk about confiscating all the property of the largest slaveholders. She must be home to fight against that if it happened. If the love she and Orry shared had any monument at all, it was Mont Royal, tainted by black slavery though it was. So her duty was unavoidable. She must remember and take courage from her father's words. We are all dying of life. She must make the journey and stand in Orry's stead, maintaining the home they had occupied together such a short time. Assuming, of course, that the plantation still existed. Northern journalists wrote long articles about the advance of General Sherman's army and the activities of his foragers operating on the flanks. So lurid and gleeful were these pieces, it was possible to imagine half of the state of South Carolina put to the torch, exactly like the city of Columbia.

But she wouldn't know Mont Royal's fate until she got there, and she couldn't get there without preparation. She was tired of imagining scenes of destruction. One antidote was physical activity.

From the closet where she had stored it, she brought a small trunk, in which she had carried her things from Richmond. She opened it and savored the aroma of a few cedar chips in the bottom. From the wardrobe, she took two dresses she seldom wore. One by one, she folded them and laid them in the trunk.

When it was about half full of items seldom used or worn since her arrival, her gaze fell on the half-dozen slender books on her bedside table. She picked out the third from the top, opened it at the ribbon marker, and gazed at the poem without seeing a word.

Don't, a silent voice warned. She shut the book, clasping it tight to her breast. Tears ran down her cheeks as she stared through the window at the hillsides of sunlit mountain laurel.

"It was many and many a year ago-in a kingdom-by the sea-that a maiden there lived whom you may know-by the name of-"

Shuddering, she bowed her head.

"By the name of-"

She couldn't say the rest. The poem had meant too much to both of them. She leaned over the trunk and laid the volume of Poe on a neatly folded shawl, then closed the trunk lid with a small, final click. It was all the packing she could manage at the moment.