"They'll approve you," Grierson predicted.
"No, they won't. I botched it."
"To the contrary. You did well. But I must say something that I've already said to Jack. If you're ever found out, I won't be able to help you. I won't compromise the regiment. It comes first. In every other circumstance you can count on me to go to the wall for you."
"Thank you, Colonel. I don't think it'll be necessary for you to worry about —"
The door to the hearing room opened. Ike Barnes, the junior man, stepped out.
"Three to two in favor of commissioning. It's conditional on War Department approval and a pardon." Beaming, Barnes stuck out his hand. "Welcome to the Tenth, Mr. August."
Charles crossed the Missouri on the ferry and rode to St. Louis in leisurely stages, savoring the tangy air and the crimson and gold of the leaves. The calendar kept Willa from making the reunion a physical one, but they slept warm in each other's arms in her bed at the New Planter's House.
When morning came, they kissed and murmured words of affection. Before he dressed, he lathered his face to shave away yesterday's stubble. He whistled while he plied the razor.
"That's very pretty," Willa called from her dressing table. "What is it?"
"This?" He whistled five notes. "Just something that came into my head last year. Whenever I think of Mont Royal, of everything that I loved before the war, I hear that tune."
"There's a piano at the theater. Would you hum it when we're there, so I can write it down for you?"
"Why, yes, of course."
And she did.
"That's my tune?" he asked, staring at the notes, which made no sense to him. She nodded. "Well, if you say so. It'll be a keepsake." He folded the paper carefully. "Maybe I can stop thinking about the past. I've found something better to take its place."
He leaned over and kissed her forehead. She closed her eyes and held his arm.
While she attended to theater business for a couple of hours, he strolled through the bustling streets. Today he wasn't at all troubled by the risk in the strengthening attachment; he was too full of excitement about the commission — an excitement Willa shared until they walked along the levee later, and he told her the reason he'd rejoined the Army. Although he spared her the obscene details, he described the demise of the Jackson Trading Company, and the hatred it had generated.
Willa had a strong reaction. But she kept it to herself, putting her feelings for him above her conscience. She'd never done that before, at least not so far as she could remember.
In her rooms that night, she showed him what she called her prize. It was the large framed photograph of the two of them taken the year before, Willa on the velvet settee with her head in the invisible clamp, Charles with his hand on her shoulder. Amused, he said they looked like figures in a waxworks. She swatted him and said she would retaliate for that by forcing a copy of the picture on him. He said he'd be glad to have it, and halfway meant it.
Over breakfast he learned something else about her. Her birthday was December 25. "Easy to memorize but hard to get anyone to celebrate with so much going on. I'm a horrid cook, but I can do a simple cake and icing. Most years, I even have to buy my own candles." He laughed.
Charles stayed in St. Louis for three more days. He attended a performance each evening. Then Brigadier Duncan summoned him back with a telegraph message. The pardon had been granted.
Willa cried when they said goodbye. She promised that she and Sam would be touring soon, and she'd find him. And love him properly, as she couldn't this time. He was in good spirits as he rode away.
A light drizzle started as Willa walked from the hotel to the theater. She was so preoccupied with Charles, she almost forgot to open her umbrella.
She knew so much about him, yet still knew so little. She sensed a coiled anger within him, an emotion quite different from last year's war-induced malaise. He had an enemy now. That was why she hadn't told him about taking the initiative and starting a local unit of the Indian Friendship Society.
There were six members. A Quaker couple, a Unitarian preacher, an elderly headmistress of a private school patronized by the children of wealthy German merchants, the theater's aging juvenile, Tim Trueblood, and herself. Charles wouldn't have liked to hear about the memorials they had already sent to Congress and the Interior Department.
She reached the theater and found the stage deserted, though she heard Sam's voice somewhere. She closed her umbrella and laid it on the prompter's table. The stage manager shot from behind a flat.
"Not there, not there! If he sees it, he'll go wild."
"That's right, I forgot. No umbrellas on the prompt table. I can't remember all the superstitions. What's he doing?"
"He's behaving a bit strangely. He's been bustling about with Prosperity's feeding dish, and now he's rehearsing in the green room."
"He does insist on doing Hamlet." She and the stage manager exchanged tolerant smiles, and she followed the sound of Trump's resonant voice as it proclaimed Yorick's infinite jest and excellent fancy. She almost stumbled on a crockery bowl of milk. She saw Prosperity curled up nearby, uninterested. She frowned. The bowl smelled peculiar. She picked it up and sniffed it again.
She marched the bowl to the green room, interrupting Sam's rehearsal in front of a long mirror. Despite the lacing of his corset, his black tights couldn't hide his corpulence. He looked silly in that costume, and more so with a wilted yellow chrysanthemum pinned to the front.
"Dear girl —" he began, one thumb hooked in the eye socket of a prop skull. He lost color when Willa extended the bowl at arm's length.
"I'll feed the cat from now on, Sam. You must have mixed up the bowls. She won't touch this one!" Willa passed it under her nose with a stagy sniff. "Cats don't like sour mash whiskey."
Trump almost fell in his haste to get the bowl. "It's nothing. A mere nip to brace me up today."
"And every day for a week. I've wondered why you were so excessively cheerful in the morning." She put the bowl on the table, saying sweetly, "Don't touch it."
Trump beat his breast with an aggrieved air. "Yes, my dear." He studied her from under his eyebrows, laid the skull aside, and put a fatherly arm around her. "You look unhappy. Am I the cause?"
"Not really."
"Charles has left, then."
"It's more than his leaving, Sam. He's managed a commission in the Army again."
"The Army's the right place for him. It's what he knows."
"It's the right place for the wrong reason." In a few sentences she described what had happened to Wooden Foot and Boy. By the end, Trump was pale. "He wants retribution. When he talks of it there's a blazing fury in him."
Cautiously, Trump said, "Is it the end for you two, then?"
"Oh, no." A rueful shrug. "It should be, but it's too late. I love him. I know it may bring me grief, and I can't do a thing about it. Mr. Congreve was right about love being a frailty of the mind."
She tried to smile and instead burst out crying. Sam Trump put his arms around her and tugged her in, gently patting her back with both hands while the sobs shook her.