"Don't be." He patted her back. "Don't be."
"The only salvation is, I'll soon be able to join him somewhere. Everyone says the war won't last ninety days."
"So they do." He released her and turned away so she wouldn't see his reaction. "We'll do our best to see that those ninety days pass quickly — without another incident. I know it wasn't the first. You're a brave young woman, Brett. But don't fight every battle alone."
She shook her head. "George, I must. I've always looked after myself." Forcing a smile: "I'll be fine. Ninety days isn't so long."
What more could he do? Frustrated, he excused himself and left, trailing a blue ribbon of smoke.
Upstairs, he found his son marching in the hall and bellowing the popular song about hanging Jeff Davis from a sour-apple tree. George stopped that and ordered William to his room, where he worked with the boy on ciphering lessons for half an hour. He next spent fifteen minutes with Patricia, trying to convince her that she'd have a hand cooler at the proper time. He failed.
In bed in his nightshirt, uncomfortably warm despite the summer breeze blowing in, he reached for the comforting curve of his wife's breast and lay close against her back while he described events at the General Merchandise. "She's counting on a short war to put an end to that sort of thing."
"So am I, George. I haven't heard from Father in months, and I worry about him down there in Texas. You know he never hid his hatred of slavery and slaveowners. Surely it'll all end soon. I can't believe Americans will fight each other for very long. It's inconceivable that they're doing it at all."
"As Orry said, we had thirty years to prevent it, but we didn't. I hate to dash Brett's hopes or yours —" He broke off.
"George, don't do that. Finish what you were going to say."
Reluctantly, he said, "Brett's forgotten that in May, Lincoln called for another forty-two thousand men. But not for the short term. The boys who signed up at the rally are in for three years."
Her voice grew faint. "I forgot it, too. You aren't hopeful about a short war?"
He waited a moment but finally admitted, "If I were hopeful, I'd have thrown away Boss Cameron's telegraph message the minute it arrived."
12
While Brett was encountering trouble in the United States, her brother Cooper and his family were nearing the end of a rail journey in Great Britain.
Smoke and cinders kept flying into the family's first-class compartment because the children, Judah and Marie-Louise, took turns leaning over the sill of the lowered window. Cooper permitted it, but his wife, Judith, considered it dangerous, so she sat forward, her posture tense as she held the waist of one child, then the other.
Cooper Main, forty-one, sat opposite her with a sheaf of naval blueprints unrolled on his knees. He made notes on the blueprints in pencil. Before starting, he'd drawn the curtains of the door and windows on the corridor side.
As usual, Cooper managed to make his fine clothes look untidy. It was his height, his lankiness, his preoccupied scholar's behavior that caused it. He paid almost no attention to the children's sightseeing, which horrified his wife, a flat-bosomed woman with thin arms, a long nose, and a great deal of curly dark blond hair, all of which Cooper found extraordinarily beautiful.
"Pa, there's a river," exclaimed Judah, hanging half in, half out of the compartment as he looked ahead, his hair shining in the hot July sun.
"Let me see, let me see!" Marie-Louise wedged her way into the window beside him.
"Both of you get in here this instant," Judith said. "Do you want that bridge to lop your heads off?" Forceful tugs ensured that it wouldn't. They tumbled back on the upholstery beside her, complaining, while the diamond patterns of the crossed beams began to flicker in the compartment. The express from London rattled over the Runcorn bridge, the river Mersey shining beneath like a field of mirror splinters.
Judah jumped across the aisle and pressed against his father's coat. "Will we be in Liverpool soon?"
"Yes, in half an hour or less." He began to roll the plans in preparation for hiding them in his luggage.
Marie-Louise scrambled over to his right side. "Will we stay for a while, Papa?" "Several months anyway." He smiled and patted her. "Captain Bulloch will meet us?" Judith asked. "That was the meaning of the classified insertion in the Times. Of course it's possible that some Union agent did away with him in the past three days."
"Cooper, I don't think you should joke about this work. Secret messages sent by advertisement, enemy spies lurking everywhere — hardly subjects for humor, in my opinion." She glanced from her husband to the children in a pointed way. But they were totally absorbed by the slow-moving shadows.
"Perhaps not. But we can't be grim all the time, and although I take my duties seriously — and I'm sensitive to the cautions Bulloch expressed in his letter — I refuse to let all of that spoil England for us." Leaning forward, he smiled and touched her. "For you most of all."
She squeezed his hand. "You're such a dear man. I'm sorry I snapped. I'm afraid I'm tired."
"Understandably," he said with a nod. They had left King's Cross in the middle of the night and watched the sun rise over the peaceful canals and summer-green countryside, neither admitting that uncertainty, homesickness, and worries about possible dangers beset them.
The family had sailed from Savannah on the last ship that got out before the Union blockade closed the Southern coast. The vessel had called at Hamilton, Bermuda, before steaming on to Southampton. Since their arrival in London, they'd been living in cramped rooms in Islington. Now, however, there was a promise of better, larger quarters in Liverpool, where Cooper was to assist the chief agent of the Confederate Navy Department, who had arrived some weeks earlier. Their mission was to expedite construction of ocean-going raiders to harass Yankee shipping. Behind the program lay a sound strategy. If the Confederacy could destroy or capture enough merchant vessels, insurance rates would rise prohibitively; then the enemy would be forced to draw ships from its blockading squadron to protect its own commerce.
Maritime matters were not new to Cooper. He had a long history of interest in and love for the sea. Unable to tolerate the family plantation or repeated quarrels with his late father on the issues of slavery and states' rights, he had gone to Charleston to manage a frowzy little commercial shipping firm that had come into Tillet Main's possession almost by accident. Through study, determination, and hard work, Cooper had turned the Carolina Shipping Company into the most innovative line in the South and built it to a level of profit only slightly lower than that of its larger but more conservative rival in the port city, John Eraser & Company. That company was now guided by another self-made millionaire, George Trenholm. Its Liverpool cotton-factoring office, operating as Fraser, Trenholm, would secretly channel funds into the illegal work Cooper was to undertake.
Before the war, on a plot of ground overlooking Charleston harbor, Cooper had started to create his great dream — a ship patterned after the immense iron vessels of Isambard Kingdom Brunei, the British engineering genius he had twice visited. He wanted to demonstrate that a Southern shipbuilding industry was a reasonable possibility, that prosperity in the state need not depend entirely on the drip of sweat from black skin.
While the shouters stumped for secession, he worked too quietly — which was one mistake. He worked too slowly — which was another. Star of Carolina had scarcely been started when the batteries opened fire on Sumter; he had signed her over to the Confederate Navy, and now, he understood, she had been ripped apart, her metal to be used for other purposes.