“Mess cook?”
He gave a loud guffaw at this—; nothing, it seemed, could spoil his self-regard that evening. “Not on your life, sir! Not by half.” He wetted the ends of his moustaches with his tongue. “I’ve been commissioned, Mr. Ball. Three stars.”
I hushed for a spell, genuinely stunned. “General Beauregard,” I said, when I could say anything at all. “I’ll be damned.”
“Not yet,” Beauregard said, grinning like a donkey. “Not until I get to Charleston.”
He went quiet after that, focusing, no doubt, on some point in the foreseeable future when he’d be crowned first commander-in-chief, then president, then Imperator of the New World by a diet of generals, congressmen, financiers, and kings. As I watched him, the memory of our first meeting at Madame Lafargue’s — his arrogance, his insults, Clem’s following him downstairs — came back to me in luminous detail. No sooner had it done so than the desire to murder him stole over me like laudanum.
I resisted the urge, however, potent though it was—: to indulge it would have cost me the Redeemer. Looking back, of course, I regret my decision bitterly. How much might have been different if General Beauregard had never reached Charleston harbor!
At the time, however, I was ignorant of the Redeemer’s true design. And so, I soon learned, was Beauregard himself.
“Have you had much contact, lately, with He Who Shall Go Unnamed?” I asked.
Beauregard shook his head sleepily. “The Trade doesn’t need me to cover its tracks anymore, Virgil. Mightier personages than myself have its interests in their care.” He filled our glasses yet again. “I haven’t heard from our benefactor in over a year.”
“He hasn’t forgotten you, though, it seems.”
I’d thought this might finally rouse him, or at least put him out of sorts—; but he only pursed his lips. “I know he hasn’t. I still get my dividend, first of every month.”
“That must be a comfort.”
“I don’t mind telling you, sir, it isn’t.” Beauregard frowned. “I’m a man who likes to work for his upkeep, strange though that may seem.” He ran a hand through his thick, bear-greased hair, on which the rim of a lieutenant’s cap was still perfectly imprinted. “I’m hoping our little friend won’t get wise to my change of address.”
I couldn’t help but grin a little. “Oh! I think he might,” I said.
Beauregard only grunted.
“What’s the state of things, by-the-bye, with the Yankees up in Charleston?”
He bit his lip. “Touchy. There’s a good bit of — debate, I guess you’d call it — about a fort on an island in the harbor. Name of Sumter. The Yankees have it, you see. And they don’t want to give it over.”
I’d heard the name of Sumter before, from the Colonel and Kennedy. “And what’s your opinion? Should they?”
Beauregard shrugged his shoulders charmingly. “I don’t have an opinion, actually.”
I smiled at him. “You’ll most likely have to develop one, General, if you’re taking command of the Dixie batteries.”
“It won’t be my decision,” Beauregard muttered. I’d finally gotten him riled. “You do comprehend, don’t you, that one hasty decision there could start a war? Rest assured, Mr. Ball—: my orders on the Sumter question will be handed down from on high.”
“I have no doubt of that,” I said.
I was beginning to see the scale on which Morelle was playing, and it robbed me of my breath. Close as I’d been — or believed I’d been — to him, I was utterly confounded by this new intelligence. My brain went hot and pricklish, cringing and expanding, trying to get the outline of it clear.
My thoughts ran as follows—: (I) Abolition, if the papers were to be believed, had free run of the Union. (II) Even our new president was rumored to indulge in it, if thus far only in secret. (III) Abolition provided the Trade its cover, but an over-dose would prove lethal—; even secession, that most desperate of bluffs, might not manage to save us. (IV) If bluffing fell short of the mark, what then—?
“What’s the likelihood of war, do you think, General?”
Beauregard chewed on this a while. “I don’t think it must necessarily happen,” he said at last. “There’s a good deal of talk, on both sides, about preserving the Union. In spite of the all the fire-works—” He paused. “To be honest, I have no idea. If some manner of common ground could be reached on the slavery question — on slavery in the territories, at least. .”
I thought back to my parting words with Morelle. Divided as they were over slavery, he’d said, North and South were united over one thing—: the Trade. The powers that be — all of them — had come to view it as an intolerable evil. “They hate us heartily, dear K,” he’d said to me. “We can only hope, for the sake of our little métier, that they hate each other more.”
Now those last words had a new import for me. I sat on the divan in awe-struck silence, staring past the faro-tables at the tumbling brown river. The card-players had fallen strangely silent—; Beauregard, for his part, was adrift in a port-tinctured reverie. His exultation had altogether passed away and he looked haggard and remote. I excused myself and retired to my cabin.
I lulled myself to sleep that night by withdrawing into the most private recesses of my mind and gazing in calm fascination at the chaos Morelle had wrought there. My understanding of the Trade, of the country, and of my place within both had changed so drastically since my last visit that I wondered whether Clem would even know me. The shambles Memphis had made of me were terrible to behold. My allegiance to Morelle was shattered, my sense of right and wrong perverted past all remedy. The most fatal change of all, however, remained hidden from me still. My rationalism, which had been faltering for years, had been unseated in a single stroke. I had witnessed things in Memphis that would have sent Descartes himself scrambling for his rosary.
Thus, as Providence — or chance — would have it, Morelle’s influence over me doubled when I took him for my enemy. Reason was useless against him—; that much was clear to me after Memphis. To revenge myself on the Redeemer I’d have to enter, naked and half-blind, into the Redeemer’s world of symbols.
I awoke that night to a shape unlike any I’d seen with my blighted eye before. A glittering, scintillating sphere, the color of obsidian, revolved above me in the dark. Its surface was cut into facets, and all manner of images danced across them—: ramparts of smoke, rows of sallow, bearded faces, scores upon scores of boot-prints filling up with rain. The shape spoke in a language of trills and clangs and stutters, like the sound of valves opening and shutting in a boiler. Try as I might, I couldn’t understand a word of it, but I understood the pictures perfectly. I was being presented with the future—: not harbingers of the future, not abstract portents, but the future itself, in body and in blood. I needed no charts to make sense of what I saw.
It was war.
I sat up in my berth at half-past six, wide awake and grateful for it. To all appearances I was still aboard the Hyapatia Lee. I passed a hand over my face, trying to recollect my vision, then looked warily about the cabin. The shape had shrunk to the size of a chestnut, but it persisted in the far corner of the room, throwing off chiaroscuro sparks. Do what I might, it stubbornly refused to vanish. It kept me company all the way to New Orleans.
The change in me had now become impossible to ignore. For the first time since the start of the Trade, I’d made sense of a vision unassisted. But that was not all. I’d done more than simply make sense of what I saw—; I’d done something stranger still, more remarkable, more dreadful.