His universe was shattered with the first cannon fire on Fort Sumter. He mustered at once with the Palmetto Rifles, a unit organized by his best friend, Captain Ferris Brixham. Out of the original eighty men, only three were left in April of this year, when General Joe Johnston surrendered the Confederacy's last field army at Durham Station, North Carolina. The night before the surrender, a beastly yankee sergeant and four of his men caught Des and Ferris foraging for food and beat them unconscious. Des survived; Ferris died in his arms an hour after officers announced the surrender. Ferris left a wife and five young children.
Embittered, Des trudged back to Charleston, where an eighty-five-year-old uncle told him Sally Sue had died in January of pneumonia and complications of malnutrition. As if that wasn't enough, throughout the war the whole LaMotte family had been shamed by members of another family in the Ashley River district. It was more than Des could bear. His mind had turned white. There was a month of which he remembered nothing. Aging relatives had cared for him.
Now he rode his mule through the marshes, looking for plantation clients from the past or people who could afford lessons for their children. He'd found neither. Behind him, barefoot, walked his fifty-year-old servant, an arthritic black called Juba; it was a slave name meaning musician. After his return home, Des had signed Juba to a lifetime contract of personal service. Juba was frightened by the new freedom bestowed by the legendary Linkum. He readily made his mark on the paper he couldn't read.
Juba walked in the sunshine with one hand resting on the hindquarters of the mule ridden by a man with only two ambitions: to practice again the profession he loved in a world the Yankees had made unfit for it, and to extract retribution from any of those who had contributed to his misery and that of his family and his homeland.
This was the man who confronted Cooper Main.
A yellow-pine plank thirty inches wide lay across the low spot in the salt marsh, a place otherwise impassable. Cooper reached the inland end of the plank a step or two before the ungainly fellow on the mule reached the other end with his mournful Negro.
On a dry hillock twenty feet from the crossing, an alligator lay sunning. They were common in the coastal marshes. This one was mature: twelve feet long, probably five hundred pounds. Disturbed by the interlopers, it slid into the water and submerged. Only its unhooded eyes, above the water, showed its slow movement toward the plank. Sometimes 'gators were dangerous if too hungry, or if they perceived a man or an animal as a threat.
Cooper noticed the 'gator. Although he'd seen them since he was small, they terrified him. Nightmares of their tooth-lined jaws still tormented him occasionally. He shivered as he watched the eyes glide closer. Abruptly, the eyes submerged, and the alligator swam away.
Cooper thought the young man with the imperial was familiar, but couldn't place him. He heard him say, from the other end of the plank, "Give way."
Hot and irritable, Cooper began, "I see no reason —"
"I say again, sir, give way."
"No, sir. You're impertinent and presumptuous, and I don't know you."
"But I know you, sir." The young man's glance conveyed suppressed rage, yet he spoke in a conversational, even pleasant, way. The contradiction set Cooper's nerves to twitching.
"You're Mr. Cooper Main, from Charleston. The Carolina Shipping Company. Mont Royal Plantation. Desmond LaMotte, sir."
"Oh, yes. The dancing teacher." With that resolved, Cooper started his horse over the plank.
It had the effect of a match thrown in dry grass. Des kicked his mule forward. Hooves rapped the plank. The mule frightened Cooper's horse, causing it to sidestep and fall. Cooper twisted in the air to keep from being crushed, and landed in the shallows next to the horse. He thrashed and came up unhurt but covered with slimy mud.
"What the hell is wrong with you, LaMotte?"
"Dishonor, sir. Dishonor is what's wrong. Or does your family no longer understand the meaning of honor? It may be insubstantial as the sunlight, but it's no less important to life."
Dripping and chilled despite the heat, Cooper wondered if he'd met someone unbalanced by the war. "I don't know what in the name of God you mean."
"I refer, sir, to the tragedies visited upon members of my family by members of yours."
"I've done nothing to any LaMotte."
"Others with your name have done sinful things. You all smeared the honor of the LaMotte family by allowing Colonel Main to cuckold my first cousin Justin. Before I came home, your runaway slave Cuffey slew my first cousin Francis."
"But I tell you I had nothing to do —"
"We have held family councils, those of us who have survived," Des broke in. "I am glad I met you now, because it saves me from seeking you out in Charleston."
"For what?"
'To inform you that the LaMottes have agreed to settle our debt of honor."
"You're talking nonsense. Dueling's against the law."
"I am not referring to dueling. We'll use other means — at a time and place of our choosing. But we'll settle the debt."
Cooper reached for his horse's bridle. Water dripped from the animal and from Cooper's elbows, plopping in the silence. He wanted to scoff at this deranged young man, but was deterred by what he saw in LaMotte's eyes.
"We'll settle it with you, Mr. Main, or we'll settle it with your brother's nigger widow, or we'll settle it with both of you. Be assured of it."
And on he rode, mule shoes loud as pistol fire on the plank. After he reached solid ground, his hunched serving man followed, never once meeting Cooper's eye.
Cooper shivered again and led his horse from the water.
Late that night, at his house on Tradd Street, near the Battery, Cooper told his wife of the incident. Judith laughed.
That angered him. "He meant it. You didn't see him. I did. Not every man who goes to war comes back sane." He didn't, notice her mournful glance, or recall his own mental disarray in the weeks following their son's drowning.
"I'm going to warn Madeline in a letter," he said.
4
Willa woke suddenly. She heard a noise and a voice, neither of which she could identify.
Memory flooded back. Claudius Wood — the Macbeth dagger. She'd fled along Chambers Street in the rain and almost been run down by the horse of a fast hansom when she slipped and fell at an intersection. Only after four blocks had she dared look back at the dim lamplit street.
No sign of Wood. No pursuit of any kind. She had turned and run on.
The noise was a fist pounding the door. The unfamiliar voice belonged to a man.
"Miss Parker, the landlady saw you come in. Open the door, or I'll force it."
"Ruin a good door? I won't permit it."
That was the voice of the harpy who ran the lodging house. Earlier, when Willa had come dashing in from the rainy street, the woman had peered at her from the dining room, where she presided over bad food and the four shabby gentlemen who occupied the other rooms.