Pale and already exhausted by the ordeal of his rounds, the doctor studied the man with mingled disgust and sorrow. Once, the patient might have had a certain physical presence; he was tall enough. Now he looked decayed, shrunken. Skin striations indicated obesity at some past time. Privation had pared away all the fat except for a sizable paunch.
The patient's left shoulder tilted lower than his right. He was barefoot and wore one of the hospital's coarse gowns beneath a filthy old velvet robe donated to the Almshouse. On his head sat a battered plug hat. He glared at Mrs. Pember and the doctor.
Still whispering, the matron said, "He claims he's in constant pain."
"He looks it. Any history?"
"Only what he chooses to tell us. Sometimes he talks about falling from a high bluff into the James River. Then again he says his horse threw him at Five Forks, after the Yankees broke through General Eppa Hunton's lines. He says he was with the reinforcements General Longstreet rushed from Richmond, too late to save —"
"I know all about the fall of Richmond," the doctor interrupted, testy. "Does he have any papers?"
"Sir, how many men have papers since the government burned everything and ran?"
The doctor shrugged to acknowledge the point. He approached the patient. "Well, sir, how are we today?"
"Captain. It's Captain."
"Captain what?"
A long pause. "I can't remember."
Mrs. Pember stepped forward. "Last week, he gave his name as Erasmus Bellingham. The day before yesterday, he said it was Ezra Dayton."
The patient stared at her with strange yellow-brown eyes that held a hint of malice. The doctor said, "Please tell me how you feel this morning, sir."
"Anxious to be out of here."
"In good time. At least do Mrs. Pember the courtesy of taking off that filthy hat when you're indoors." He reached for the plug hat. The matron uttered a warning cry as the patient jumped up and threw the packing box at the doctor with ferocious force.
The box sailed over the doctor's head, thudding in the aisle. The patient lunged. The doctor jumped back, yelling for orderlies. Two country boys in stained smocks raced down the aisle, rushed the man, restrained him, and wrestled him onto his cot. Even with youth and strength in their favor, the patient's flailing fists battered them badly. He hit one orderly so hard, blood oozed from his ear.
Finally, they subdued him, using rope to lash his wrists and ankles to the iron cot frame. The doctor watched from the aisle, shaken. "That man's a lunatic."
"All the other doctors would agree, sir. He's positively the worst case in the Almshouse."
"Violent —" The doctor, shuddered. "A man like that will never get any better."
"It's such a pity, the way the war damaged them."
Angered by the attack, he said, "These wards are too crowded to accommodate pity, Mrs. Pember. When he calms down, force laudanum on him, and a strong purgative. Tomorrow put him out on the street. Use the space for someone we can help."
The fire set during the flight of the Confederate government's highest officials on the night of April 3 had swept from Capitol Square to the river, burning away the commercial heart of Richmond — banks, stores, warehouses, printing plants —something like a thousand buildings in twenty square blocks. Even the sprawling Gallego Flour Mill complex was gone, as were the rail trestles over the James.
Few who walked through the burned zone in succeeding months forgot the sight. It was like prowling the surface of some world out among the stars, a world both alien and tantalizingly familiar. Its hills were mounds of brick and broken limestone. Black timbers were the charred bones of strange and mighty beasts. Sections of buildings stood like the grave markers of the alien race.
Two nights after the Almshouse incident, the patient came stumbling through the mammoth Gallego ruins between the millrace and the Kanawha Canal. He'd been given the shabbiest of used clothing and turned out. He would have paid back those who did it, but for the fact that more important prey demanded his attention.
This evening he was enjoying great lucidity. He recalled in detail his fantasy of parading in the Grand Review. He also remembered the identities of those who had kept him from taking his rightful place in the military history of his country.
Orry Main. George Hazard.
God, how much he owed those two. Ever since they were all cadets at West Point, Hazard and Main had regularly conspired to thwart him. Year after year, one or the other had turned up to interfere with his career. They were responsible for a dizzying succession of falls from grace:
Damage to his reputation in the Mexican War. Charges of cowardice at Shiloh Church. Punitive transfer to New Orleans, and desertion to Washington. Failure in Lafayette Baker's secret police unit, and, finally, desertion to the South, whose people and principles he'd always despised.
All of it could be blamed on Main and Hazard. Their vindictive natures. Their secret campaigns to spread calumnies that had ruined him.
Sometime before he woke in the Almshouse, though exactly how long before, he couldn't remember, he had made inquiries about Main in Richmond. A veteran had recalled Colonel Orry Main's dying on the Petersburg lines. His other enemy, Hazard, was presumably alive. Just as important, each man certainly had a family. He remembered he'd tried to injure one of the Mains in Texas, before the war. Charles — that was his name. Surely there were many other relatives —
He tried to push all that out of mind temporarily and concentrate on the Gallego ruins. After an hour's search he located what he believed to be the right spot. He knelt and dug through the rubble, hearing the sound of swiftly running water. It poured over a giant mill wheel that no longer turned. Like most everything in the South, the wheel was broken.
Sharp fragments of brick hurt his fingers as he dug. Soon the fingers were covered with dust and blood. But he found what he'd buried. His memory hadn't abandoned him altogether.
Clutching the rolled-up oil painting, he moved to a rectangle of brilliant moonlight, there brushing dust from his treasure. The moonlight fell through a window frame high in a jagged section of brick wall. As he brushed the painting, the awl of pain pierced his forehead and began to bore in. Pinpoint lights began to flash —
He remembered his name.
He said it aloud. Beyond three walls standing at right angles to one another, a couple of black squatters by a bonfire turned toward the noise. One ambled over to investigate. After a look at the face of the man in the moonlit rectangle, he left quickly.
With greater power and confidence, the man said it again.
"Elkanah Bent"
Thin, bitter smoke drifted along the spectral walls. The smoke choked him. He coughed while trying to recall the face in the painting ... trying ...
Yes. A quadroon whore.
Where had he gotten her portrait?
Yes. A New Orleans sporting house.
That cued an even more important memory — the purpose of his life. He had redefined it, dedicated himself to it, weeks ago, then forgotten it during the bad period in the Almshouse.
His purpose was to make war.
The other war, the war to free the evil nigger and raise him to the level of the superior white man, was over, and lost. His war was not. He had not yet begun to marshal his forces, his strategic cunning, his superior intelligence, to make war on the families of ...
Of...
Main.
Hazard.