"Stop fidgeting, young man! You'll reopen the wound, and I'll have to get the surgeon around again."
Well, he knew that voice. Courage, he told himself. He'd faced U.S. regulars, hadn't he? Hadn't even flinched, so far as he could remember.
Turning his head a little, he saw the dragon in the doorway. She was glaring at him as usual.
Welclass="underline" not quite. The look on her face seemed more one of exasperation than outright hostility. So did the look she bestowed upon the mysterious woman sitting by his bed.
"The two of you!" he heard her mutter. The dragon came into the room and laid a hand on the leg-of-mutton shoulder. Then, gave it a little shake.
"Wake up, Imogene. Your precious captain's come around."
The head popped up. Yes, that was Imogene under the brim.
"Oh," she said.
Julia Chinn was now looking at the open Bible on Imogene's lap.
"I told you!" Firmly, she moved Imogene's hand aside and, more firmly still, closed the Bible. "You too young to be reading that."
Puzzled, Sheff tried to remember what part of the Old Testament Oh.
Fortunately, he didn't say it out loud. He even managed not to smile. He could remember the time his own mother had caught him engrossed in the Song of Solomon the way no proper thirteen-year-old boy ought to be.
To cover the moment's awkwardness, he cleared his throat. "I'm not a captain, Miz Julia. Just a second lieutenant."
Julia gave him that same exasperated look. "I wish! Boy, I will say you are prob'bly the most tenacious critter I ever met."
But the tone in her voice didn't seem as chilly by the time she got to the end of the sentence as it had when she started it. She reached down and tugged his blanket back into position and said quietly to Imogene: "Five minutes, girl. Then I want you out of here."
After she'd left the room, Imogene burst into a smile so wide it looked to split her face in half. That expression, with her full lips, brought out the African part of her ancestry, which was normally overshadowed by her light skin and hazel eyes. More green than hazel, really.
For the first time, Sheff felt a surge of passion. No poetic abstraction, neither.
Fortunately, he was still too weak to embarrass himself. The hand that would have impulsively reached for her lay limp on the blanket. So did:well. Everything else.
"They promoted you, Sheff! All the way to captain."
"That's:" He tried to decide how he felt. Pleased, of course. But "I'm not even eighteen years old. Won't be, till next month."
The smile wasn't fading at all. "Don't matter! The whole town's talking about it. Oh, Sheff, I'm so proud of you!"
" 'Doesn't' matter," he corrected.
"You and Mama!" She waved a dismissive hand. Which, on the way back, somehow found its way into Sheff 's. "Both nagging me."
He had enough strength to squeeze the hand. "You listen to your mama. Listen to me, too. She wants you talking proper. Properly. I'm trying myself."
The smile was replaced by a serious look. "Do-does it really matter, Sheff?"
"Yes, Imogene. It does."
In the corridor of the boardinghouse just outside the open door, where she'd been eavesdropping, Julia Chinn pressed the back of her head against the wall. It was either that or bang it against the wall.
The next three minutes weren't any better. She could have handled a rascal, easy as pie. This one:
"Imogene, that's been five minutes, for sure!" she shouted.
"Mama!"
"You listen to me, young lady!"
Sheff 's firm voice could be heard clearly, even through the wall. "Best do as your mama says, Imogene."
Julia had heard the talk herself. It couldn't be avoided, anywhere you went in New Antrim. Parker by the wall. For just that moment, she had a deep sympathy for the U.S. regulars who'd faced him. If only they'd:
But that thought led to a place Julia Chinn never wanted to go. There were limits. Whatever else, there had to be limits, or there was no point to any of it. She might as well sell Imogene to a slave brothel right now. Or herself, for that matter.
Sheff 's mother arrived shortly thereafter. She was all solicitous concern, fussing over him, but Sheff thought that was mostly her way of handling the grief caused by her brother's death. Sheff was still trying to come to grips with it himself.
It was hard. He still had that iron shell around him. The battle shield, he'd come to think of it. As useful as it was-indispensable, perhaps-it was now getting in the way of normal emotions. He was pretty sure he'd have to be careful about that. Taken too far, or too long, it could rub a man's soul so hard it became just a callus.
But he wasn't ready to deal with it yet. So, the two hours his mother spent in the room before she had to go home were mostly taken up with practical concerns.
There, fortunately-in a horrible sort of way-his uncle's death had eased the strain.
"The bank says it's canceling the loan outright," his mother said quietly. "On account of Jem. Well, your uncle's part, anyway. We still got to pay yours off. But Mr. Crowell told me they'd take your service as being complete. So there won't never be no interest."
Sheff knew the bank had adopted a policy of canceling any loans secured by a soldier's pay in the event the soldier died in the line of duty. The chiefdom's legislature was also talking about providing some subsidies for widows and orphans, but Sheff didn't think anything would come of it. Arkansas was actually thriving, economically, on account of all the new construction and manufacture. The war hadn't even put a dent in it-probably stimulated it, in fact. But wages were very low, with the constant influx of freedmen, and there just wasn't that much money to throw around.
Still, between the increased pay that would come with his promotion to captain and the work his mother got as a tailor, they should manage. She was paid a real tailor's wage, too, not the much lower rate most girls got in the garment manufactories. He was pretty sure they'd even be able to let Dinah keep going to school instead of her having to go to work in the shops.
His mother was holding up pretty well, too. She had her own version of a battle shield.
"The truth is, Sheff, we're doing better than we were back in Baltimore, with your father and uncle bringing in whatever they could. Which weren't never much. So you just make sure when you can get about again, that you keep fighting for Arkansas. You hear?"
Cal McParland came to visit him later that day. He brought John Ridge and Buck Watie with him.
"Congratulations," Ridge said immediately after walking into the room. "You heard about your promotion, I take it?"
"You'll give him a swelled head," Cal chided. But he was smiling as he said it. "Jumped him a rank, even."
Buck Watie slid into a chair. "Gave you the Legion of Honor, too. Only one who got it except Captain Dupont."
Cal laughed. "My cousin says the Laird got the idea from Napoleon, but he's obviously going to be a lot stingier than the emperor ever was."
Sheff had been wondering what a Legion of Honor was. For the most part, the Arkansas Army was patterned after the American, since that was the experience of most of its veterans. The American army didn't have the custom of awarding decorations for valor or merit, as did most of the European armies.
But that thought was swept away for the moment. "How's the captain doing?"
The good cheer left the room. Buck Watie shook his head. "Captain Dupont didn't make it, Sheff. The Americans returned his body the day after the battle."
"At least he didn't die slowly from being gut-shot," Cal added. "The Americans think he must have bled to death before the fighting was even over. From what I heard, our surgeon who looked at his body agreed with them."
Well, that was something. Sheff had liked Charles Dupont, even if he'd found his heavy accent hard to understand sometimes. He'd been a lot less prone to judging people simply by skin color than most of the Creole freedmen from New Orleans were.
As a group, Sheff didn't care for them much. Some of them had even been slave-owners themselves, and they still retained a lot of the attitudes. If they hadn't been forced out of the city after the Algiers Incident, most of them would still be in New Orleans. As it was, they tended to cluster together in one part of New Antrim that people were starting to call the Creole Quarter.