"Oh, what a pity."
"I can tell you're deeply touched," he said, smiling.
"How did your brother die?"
"Shot," Powell said with a shrug. "A man accosted him in the elevator of the International Hotel. Robbery was presumed to be the motive. The man was never caught or identified. By coincidence, just the week before, Atticus had written a document, which I keep locked up downstairs. It deeds my brother's interest in the Mexican mine to me, his only surviving relative. He wrote the deed and posted it to a contact in Washington. The contact got it to Richmond via one of the regular mail smugglers."
Atticus Powell's act of generosity had been described with a touch of amusement. Ashton suddenly realized the story was a recitation for the credulous. Powell saw the understanding dawn and confirmed it.
"Consider what it means that Atticus and I were the only remaining members of our family. There is no one to come forward and assert that the handwriting on the deed bears only a superficial resemblance to my brother's. I now have a fine foreman superintending work at the mine, and he doesn't care who owns it so long as he's paid well and on time. I'm happy to say the Mexican is producing at a record rate. There's plenty of gold and silver for paying a private army."
He went searching for a cigar, vanishing into another room. Ashton knew Powell had hired the man who shot his brother, just as he had hired some forger to prepare the deed. Rather than being repelled, she felt renewed admiration. He had the kind of ambition and nerve Huntoon would lack through eternity.
"So you see," Powell said when he came back with matches and an unlit cheroot, "what I propose is not so fantastic. Not with the Mexican to finance it. Therefore I must ask you a question."
"What is it?"
He made her wait with elaborate match-striking and puffing. "Would you like to be the First Lady of the new confederacy?"
"Yes. Yes!"
Powell touched her breast; the ball of his thumb circled slowly on the tip. "I thought so." He was unable to keep smugness and a certain faint scorn out of his smile.
In the early afternoon, Huntoon wandered the glass-strewn sidewalks of Main Street. He couldn't go back to his prison at Treasury. Not after what had happened that morning.
Like so many other government workers in the buildings around Capitol Square, he had rushed outside when he learned of the rioting. He watched the gaunt gray President climb onto a wagon and plead for respect for the law. Davis said every citizen must endure hardship for the sake of the cause. People booed him. As a last pathetic gesture, he turned out his own pockets and flung a few coins to the mob.
It made no difference. It required the mayor reading the riot act and the sight of bayonets wielded by the provost's guard to restore order. While the riot was still in progress, Huntoon turned the corner from Ninth to Main and saw a familiar carriage outside a fashionable food and wine emporium. He stopped and huddled by the building, morbidly curious.
His wife was in the carriage. She had a hamper and struggled with several poorly dressed women before the carriage got away; swirling clots of rioters prevented him from seeing more.
But a little was enough. The hamper and the store she had been visiting heightened his certainty, growing for months, that she was involved with someone. Ashton never bought Franzblau's delicacies for their own table. He suspected her lover was Powell, the man who was enriching him, the man he both envied and feared. Huntoon turned and went back to his office but was unable to do any work. So here he was on the streets again.
A lady's shoe lay in his path. He kicked it into the gutter, the afternoon sunshine flashing from his spectacles. He moved like a sleepwalker, brushing aside two harlots who tried to solicit him. The litter of glass and ruined goods in looted windows seemed symbolic of his life and of the Confederacy.
Davis was destroying the dream of a truly free government on the American continent. The man was contemptible. Impotent.
He had no ability to inspire people and lacked the wisdom to stop his military meddling and give his best generals their head. His answer to runaway inflation, mounting shortages, universal discouragement was to proclaim special days of fasting and prayer — or throw a few coins to a mob. He deserved impeachment, if not something worse.
Like the nation, Huntoon's personal life was a shambles. In the sleepless hours of many an early morning, with Ashton snoring lightly in the separate bed she now insisted upon, he could no longer deny the truth of that.
Yet he could find no object of blame except Davis. He couldn't bring himself to leave his wife. She had made him wealthy, and, despite the way she treated him, he loved her. The dilemma made him physically and mentally impotent. Over the past months he had lost all appetite and a dozen pounds. In his confused state, the cancerous truth of Ashton's infidelity was mingling and becoming one with the cancer of despair for the government.
His frustration grew worse each day. His eyes hurt whenever he tried to work. He perspired or suffered cold chills for no apparent reason. The top of his head frequently felt as if an auger were being screwed into it. If only he had some way to relieve the bad feelings. Some target to strike —
"What am I to do?" he muttered, wandering amid the glass. "What in God's name am I to do? Murder her? Kill myself? Both?" Two Negro women overheard and stepped off the sidewalk to avoid him.
74
The wind warmed. The earth softened, The season changed. At the brigade encampment in Susses County, which they had been roaming in search of replacement mounts, Ab looked down. He and Charles were walking their horses across a muddy meadow to the traveling forge. The boots of both men were covered halfway to the tops; the stuff clung to their spurs like some evil yellow plaster.
Ab sighed. "Will you look at that?" He stamped one foot, then the other. None of the mud fell off. "If anybody asks me have I been through Virginia, I can sure to God tell them yes, sir, any number of places."
Charles laughed and put a match to the cob pipe he had taken up now that cigars were scarce. He felt good this morning. Maybe it was the springtime or the fact that Sport had survived the ordeal of winter. He still gave the gray meticulous care, but there wasn't much he could do about shortages of fodder, bad weather, or the filthy conditions of the cavalry camps. Sport had suffered with body lice, then had been struck with a siege of founder that tormented him with two weeks of fever and sweats and nearly caused the loss of his left forefoot. But Charles had rested him — nursed him through — and the gelding was in fine shape again.
Charles felt good for another reason. It was folded and tucked in the pocket of his butternut shirt.
While the farrier finished with some trooper's nag, the two scouts cleaned the feet of their horses with picks and uprooted weeds. The farrier searched for more shoes and nails, then pumped up the firebox mounted on a platform between the limber's two big wooden wheels.
Ab said, "Git your pass all right?" Charles patted his pocket. "You have a care, roamin' up there in Spotsylvany County by your lonesome. You bump into any of that Union horse, go the other way. I have the same feelin' you do about them damn ribbon clerks. They're learnin' to ride and shoot."