Brett's admiration gave way to a rush of dizziness. She held still, not daring to move for fear she would shame Madeline, who continued to speak as calmly as if she were reciting a primer lesson. You know what that means in the Confederacy. One drop of black blood and you're a black person." She paused. "Will that be true in Lehigh Station?"

Constance answered first. "Absolutely not. No one will know. You needn't have told us."

"Oh, no, I felt obligated."

Light-headed, Brett wasn't sure how she felt. Scipio Brown was forgotten as she struggled with the idea that this woman who shared her brother's bed and love-and the family name-was a Negro. Of course she didn't look it, but the truth was exactly as Madeline had stated it. Looks didn't measure blackness; only ancestry. Confusing emotions, childhood-deep, engulfed her.

"Are you positive it makes no difference?" Madeline asked.

"None," Brett said, wishing it were so.

"If I'd stayed on the river road, they'd have caught me sure," Andy said. "They popped out of the palmettos-two of 'em on mules-but I know some of the back paths and they didn't. That's how I got away."

"Well, sit down, rest yourself," Philemon Meek said, giving up his own chair. "I'm thankful you're all right."

The heavy air of a July twilight filled the plantation office. Meek paced, swinging his spectacles from his bent index finger. How old he's grown, Cooper thought from the shadowed corner where he stood, arms folded.

After Andy came dashing up the lane, sweat and fright on his face, Meek insisted the three of them confer here rather than in the great house. In the office, the overseer explained, they wouldn't be overheard, thus would not alarm Cooper's wife and daughter or the house servants. It was the house people Meek worried about most. He didn't want them to run off.

Cooper went along with Meek, but he had fewer illusions than the overseer. The house people knew the guerrilla band was encamped nearby, its ranks growing weekly. The only person unaware of the danger was Clarissa.

"If I'd known an ordinary errand would be so dangerous, I wouldn't have sent you, Andy," Meek said. "I'm sorry. Hope you believe that."

"Yes, sir. I do." Cooper marveled. The apology and the response demonstrated the immense change the war had wrought on the plantation.

Meek stopped swinging his spectacles. "Now I want to be clear about this. You saw white men this time."

"That's right. Two in regular army gray, three in butternut. Those butternut coats didn't look like much. Still, you could tell they belonged to soldiers-either the ones wearing them or the ones they stole 'em from."

The overseer pronounced the verdict they all knew: "If white deserters are joining the nigras, then we've twice the reason to fear." He swung toward the possessor of final authority. "I have little doubt they'll attack us, Mr. Main. This is the largest plantation still operating in the district. I think we should arm some of the slaves-assuming we can find anything to arm them with. The attack may not come for a while, but we've got to be ready when it does."

"Is that the only way?" Cooper snapped. "Fighting?"

The overseer was momentarily stunned to silence. Andy didn't know what to make of the questioning response. After a few seconds, Meek said, "If you can suggest another, I'll be glad to hear it."

Stillness, filled with insect sounds. Up toward the house, a woman chanted the melody of a hymn. From a great distance they heard the raucous cry of a salt crow, answered by another. Andy peered out the window anxiously.

Cooper recognized defeat, sighed. "All right. I'll go to Charleston to see whether I can find some secondhand guns." Brusquely and with urgency, Meek said, "Soon, please?"

In Richmond next day, Orry packed the last of the few personal things with which he and Madeline had furnished the rooms on Marshall Street. The items went into a crate he nailed shut with a hammer wielded easily in his powerful right hand. Pounding the precious rusty nails one by one, he wondered if he would ever see the box after he consigned it to a local warehouse. He felt despondent about his negative answer, but comforted when he recalled that it was not an isolated reaction. Throughout the South, expectations sank daily.

He squeezed uniforms and gear into a small dilapidated trunk for which he had paid a barbarous price. He tagged the trunk with appropriate information and set it on the landing. Late in the afternoon, a white-haired Negro teamster appeared. The man's shoulders were round as the top of a question mark. Orry offered him a tip, but the man shook his head, gave him a sadly resentful look, and took the trunk away, making certain Orry heard his groans as he descended the stairs.

At dusk he donned his best gray uniform, locked the flat, and handed the key to the landlady. Carrying a small carpetbag containing items he didn't want to risk losing-his razor, a bar of soap, and two thin books of poetry-he walked to the marshaling yard where his transportation was waiting-a supply wagon bound south, seven and a half miles, to Chaffin's Bluff. There, Pickett's Division anchored the right end of the Intermediate Line, one of the five defense lines ringing the city.

The teamster invited Orry to sit next to him, but Orry preferred to ride in back, along with several unmarked boxes, his trunk and carpetbag, and his thoughts. He was happy to leave Richmond, but the prospect of joining Pickett's staff had not really lifted his spirits the way he had hoped. He was still shamed by Ashton's treachery and shocked by his callous disposal of Elkanah Bent. His loneliness since Madeline's departure could better be termed despondency. He prayed that she had reached Washington and would continue to think he was working in relative safety at the War Department.

Orry had always tried to draw lessons from experience. He had attempted it again after the entire government appeared to turn on his wife solely because she had a Negro ancestor. He found the lesson was familiar. Cooper had preached it for many years, and Orry had just as consistently ignored it until both sides had gone too far down the steep, dark road to war.

To this very day, the South was a stubborn pupil, rejecting the lesson even after the teacher's stick beat the pupil until he bled from mortal wounds. What would bring the Confederacy to an inglorious end was the same thing that had so foolishly created it a rigidity of thought, a clinging to old ways, a refusal to adapt and change.

That was it, Orry saw with a little frisson of revelation. The fatal flaw. Minds of stone-pugnaciously proud of the condition.

Examples abounded. The South needed soldiers in the most desperate way, yet those who urged the enlistment of blacks were still called lunatics.

Were not the rights of states supreme? Of course they were Thus the governor of Georgia needed no other grounds to exempt three thousand militia officers from army service and five thousand government workers besides. Using the same justification the governor of North Carolina stockpiled thousands of uniforms, blankets, and rifles under the banner of state defense. Such right-thinking, principled men were more destructive than Sam Grant.

Orry wasn't a strong strategic thinker, but in sorting through probable causes of the inevitable defeat, he thought he had found another important one in newspaper dispatches describing the opposing presidents. At the start of the war, both Davis and Lincoln had personally directed military policy. Lincoln had even told McClellan the precise day on which he had to march to the peninsula.

Bloody losses had somehow taught Lincoln to revise his opinion of himself as a strategist and infallible judge of the capabilities of generals. On Capitol Square, it was widely held that at some point earlier this year, Lincoln had acknowledged his limitations by transferring control of the war engine to a man who ran it his own way: Grant.

Davis, by contrast, had never learned to recognize personal shortcomings, admit mistakes, adapt to new circumstances, change. The wheel revolved to Cooper again. When had Orry first heard him argue scornfully with their father that the South's greatest peril was its inflexibility? Longer ago than he could precisely remember.

Still, Orry reflected as the swaying wagon bore him toward Chaffin's Bluff, he mustn't be too hard on his own kind. Minds of stone were numerous not only inside Dixie but outside, too. There were plenty in the Yankee Congress; even one or two in the Hazard family, the foremost being Virgilia's.

But it was becoming clear to Orry that after the war ended, a new, entirely different world would arise. In that world there would be but one way for the South to survive and rebuild. That way was to accept what had happened. Accept that no black man would ever again labor unwillingly for a white man's profit. In sum-accept change.

He doubted whether most Southerners could do it. Many would undoubtedly go on hating, resisting, insisting they had been morally right, which Orry no longer believed. But again, he supposed just as many Yankees were willingly entrapped in the old modes of enmity and a yearning for reprisals. It was not, perhaps, merely the Southerner who failed to learn lessons, but every man in every epoch.

Trouble was, when you refused to learn, the result was what surrounded the rumbling wagon: soured earth; abandoned homes; imperiled lives.

Ruin.

Ruin and sadness like that on George Pickett's face when the general accepted Orry's salute and welcomed him to division headquarters.

"How good to see you at last."

"It's good to be here, sir."

A melancholy smile. "I hope you'll say that after you've spent a few weeks in close proximity to our old acquaintance from West Point. We have met a man this time who either doesn't know when he's whipped or doesn't care if he loses his whole army to whip us. There is no way effectively to oppose that kind of man for very long."

There is one, Orry thought. But he wasn't foolish enough to bring up the issue of black recruits and spoil the reunion and his first moments in the war zone.

113.

THREE WOMEN DINING.

Constance called for candles instead of gaslight, believing it might warm the atmosphere for supper. It did, but that hardly mattered after her first effort to make conversation.

"Well, here we are-" she raised her claret to toast the guests seated on her right and left at the long table "-three war widows."

"I wish you wouldn't say such a thing," Brett exclaimed.

"Oh, my dear, I'm sorry. It was a clumsy attempt to make a light remark. I apologize."

"It's too serious to joke about," Brett said as Bridgit and a second kitchen girl marched in with china tureens of steaming mock turtle soup.

"I understand what you meant," Madeline said to Constance, "but I agree with Brett." She wore a clean, dark dress, and her hair was neatly arranged, but she hadn't lost the haggard air acquired on her long journey. She plied her spoon and tried to comfort Constance with a smile. "This is absolutely delicious."

Straining equally: "Thank you."

Presently, Constance steered the conversation to a safer track. She laughed and spoke ruefully about her continuing weight problem, hoping that jokes at her own expense would enable them to forgive and forget her misplaced flippancy. She saw little sign of success.

She answered Madeline's questions about her father, Patrick Flynn. He was in the pueblo of Los Angeles and busy improving his Spanish so he could serve native-born clients in addition to the settler community.

"And Virgilia?"

"We never hear from her. I presume she's still with the nurse corps."

"I would think she'd be a little more grateful for the shelter and guidance you gave her," Brett said. "Simple politeness would dictate an occasional letter, if nothing else."

Constance reached for the glinting knife on the cutting board. Smiling, she began to slice the hot, fresh loaf. "Alas, I don't think we can count gratitude among my sister-in-law's virtues."

"Does she have any at all?" Brett countered, and with that fell grimly silent, eating her soup.

Dear Lord, Constance thought, did my blunder cause all this? The answer appeared to be yes. The more she considered the dark possibilities wrapped up in her brief, careless remark, the more it depressed her.

Madeline sensed the tension. She said to Brett, "Tell me about this school for black waifs, won't you?"

"If you'd like, I'll take you up there tomorrow."

"Oh, yes, please."

Brett, too, was feeling ashamed of her outburst. Anxiety was the chief cause. The Ledger-Union was reporting many lives lost along the Petersburg siege lines. The word widow was one she hated to think about in connection with herself.

But she had to be honest; there was another irritant. Madeline's revelation in the rooming house. It had stunned Brett, but more than that, it had loosed an unexpected emotional reaction. As a presumed white woman, Madeline had earned Brett's wholehearted respect and affection. Now-well, she couldn't help it-she regarded Orry's wife differently.

It was a reaction bred into her from childhood. That was an explanation, not an excuse. The reaction shamed her, and yet she seemed powerless to banish it or keep it from affecting her behavior.

Madeline was aware of the new reserve on Brett's part ever since that pivotal moment in Washington. Whenever she felt incensed, she reminded herself that Orry's sister was under great strain, had been living far from her native state for more than three years, had had her husband captured, imprisoned, wounded. That was an immense load for any wife to bear.

Brett's response to the revelation was a curious and ironic contrast to her involvement with the colored orphanage, Madeline thought. Her concern for the welfare of the black children was evident from the passion and frequency with which she spoke of them. At least that was a change, and a remarkable one for a young woman bred in the frequently arrogant traditions of the Carolina low country. The war was changing everyone and everything in some fashion; a pity it couldn't alter old attitudes about black blood.

She hoped Brett would eventually be capable of overlooking what she now clearly regarded as a taint. If not-well, it would certainly alter family relationships. It sometimes seemed to Madeline that God had put Americans to a cruel, perhaps impossible test when He permitted the Dutch to land that first shipload of slaves on the Virginia coast so long ago. The black man out of Africa had repeatedly exposed the white man's weaknesses. It was, perhaps, fitting revenge for the moment when the leg irons clinked shut.

There had been unpleasant notes sounded at this table tonight. Three war widows. She understood the attempt at lightness but found it disturbing. Thank heaven Orry had done nothing about joining Pickett's staff. He should be relatively safe in Richmond until the city fell. Afterward, he might be interned awhile-even mistreated-but he would survive that; he was a strong, brave man.

Trying to restart conversation, Madeline once more addressed Brett. "This friend of yours-the one who operates the orphanage-will I have a chance to meet him?"

"I think so. I expect he'll pay at least one more visit before he goes into the army. I certainly hope he will." Brett smiled. "You'll like him, I know."

And you like him very much indeed, Madeline said to herself. You seem able to accept him for what he is, but not me. Is that because you thought I was something you have always been told was better?

Sensing the onset of more bad feelings, Madeline blocked them by turning back to Constance, this time with a frivolous question about current fashions. The candles burned down, and conversation limped on, but something had gone out of Constance in the past few minutes. Her answers were forced, her efforts at banter unsuccessful. As they were finishing their lemon ices and coconut macaroons, she said abruptly, "I believe I'll go down to town for in hour."

Madeline asked, "Would you like company?"

"Thank you, no. I'm going to church."

It wasn't necessary to tell them she felt the need. Her face made it evident.

She drove the carriage herself down the twisting road in the light glare from Hazard's. Under Wotherspoon's guidance, the entire complex continued to operate twenty-four hours a day-and had never been so profitable.

Reaching the streets of the lower town, Constance felt the night wind rising, blowing dust. Lamps burned late in the army recruiting office. As she drove by, she noticed a sturdy Negro boy, the son of a worker at Hazard's, standing some distance from the entrance. Between the boy and the doorway, Lute Fessenden's cousin and some equally loutish crony whispered and joked.

When a few of the town's black men had attempted to visit the recruiter, there had been incidents of harassment. To prevent another, she slowed the carriage and prepared to speak to the substitute broker. Before she could, the black boy turned and disappeared in a dark alley. The significance of the two men loitering outside the office hadn't been lost on him.

Disgusted, she drove on to the small Catholic chapel that had been named, in a burst of poetic piety, St. Margaret's-in-the-Vale. The river valley, where flying soot and bits of cinder constantly blackened everything, could never live up to the literary connotations of vale, but it was a word very much liked by Lehigh Station's small Catholic community.

Because of the heat of the evening, the front doors of St. Margaret's stood open. Constance tied the horse to a wrought-iron post-Hazard's had donated and installed a row of eight-and slipped in, hoping meditation and prayer might lift the formless anxiety that had settled on her during supper. Inside the entrance, she genuflected, then slipped in to the second pew on the left.

Kneeling, she noticed a heavy, middle-aged woman across the aisle. The woman was poorly dressed, a shawl around her shoulders. Her forehead rested on her clasped hands as she prayed. Constance knew her. Mrs. Waleski's only boy had died in a Cold Harbor medical tent.

Hot wind gusting up the aisle fluttered the votive candles. The seven-foot Christ, painted and gilded, looked down from His cross with pity. Softly, Constance began praying.

Her mind was strangely divided, one part of it on her murmured plea for intercession, another on the great weight crushing her. She knew who had put the weight there. A stupid, thoughtless woman- Here we are. Three war widows.

Ever since making that remark, she had been possessed by a premonition. For one of the three women at the table, the words would come true.

She was so sure of it, she was consumed with a fear no prayers could allay. Another fierce wind gust blew out half a dozen of the votive lights in their little glass cups red as blood.

114.

CHARLES SUFFERED A RAVAGING intestinal ailment during the first ten days of July. Still weak, still belonging in bed, he got up on the eleventh morning, obtained a pass, and set off on a dangerous ride around the west of Richmond, then northeast to Fredericksburg. His only guarantees of safe passage were his revolver and shotgun.

It would be his last trip to Barclay's Farm. He had decided that while lying with his knees drawn up against his pain-pierced gut. In bed, he'd had plenty of time to straighten out his thinking. The South would go down fighting, and he would go down with it. That was his sole duty now.

He couldn't deny he loved Gus, but she deserved a man with better prospects. Each day the odds against avoiding a fatal bullet increased. In the short run, he would hurt her. But when she found, as she surely would, a better man-someone whose head had not been oddly twisted by his war experiences-she would thank him.

He reached the farm at the end of a rain shower. The sun was out again, occasionally hidden by the clouds that flew over fields and woods at great speed, exchanging light for shadow, shadow for light. It was half past five in the evening. The clouds, the quality of sunlight at that hour, and the sparkling clarity of the land after the rain helped restore some of the farm's earlier beauty.

"Major Charles!" Washington, mending harness on the back stoop, jumped to his feet as Charles rode up. "Lord save us-old Sport looks about as starved as you do. Didn't expect we'd see you for a while. Wait till I tell Miz Augusta-"