"Cooper?"
No movement. Nothing.
She shook her head and carried her lamp away, leaving him glaring at the rainy garden, the fury on his face digging lines so deep they were becoming permanent.
Passing the head of the stairs, Tim Wann noticed the motionless figure on the landing below. Tim looked a second time to be sure.
"Billy?"
The emaciated prisoner raised his head. Tim saw new streaks of white in the untrimmed hair. "Billy!" With a whoop and a slap of his leg, he bounded down to his friend, who supported himself with a padded crutch under his arm. "You're all right!"
"Well enough to come back to our splendid quarters. There are still some ribs healing, and I'm not steady on my feet — you talk too loudly, you're liable to blow me over. I'm a little slow getting around. It's taken me ten minutes to come from the ground floor."
"Someone should have helped you."
"I guess Turner doesn't believe in coddling his guests. You can help me the rest of the way if you want."
Tim slid his arm around Billy, who put his across the shoulders of the young soldier. Thus they reached their room, where Billy was greeted by exclamations of surprise and shouts of welcome. Even one of the daytime guards said he was happy Billy had pulled through.
A lieutenant thoughtlessly slapped Billy on the back. Billy made a desperate stab with his crutch and prevented a fall. "Jesus, Hazard — I'm sorry," the lieutenant said.
" 'S all right." Sweat showed in Billy's beard suddenly. "I need to sit down. Someone give me a hand —?"
Tim did. Others crowded around. Billy asked, "Is it still February? I lost track downstairs."
"It's the first of March," a man said. "They've doubled the guard force outside. There's a column of our cavalry north of Richmond — practically on the doorsill. Three or four thousand horse. The rebs fear they've come to free us and raze the city." "Do you know about the escape?" someone else asked. Billy shook his head, and heard about it. More than forty of the prisoners involved had been recaptured; but the rest, presumably, were on their way back to federal lines or already across. He learned next that Vesey, demoted to private, had been transferred to less comfortable duty outside one of the main doors.
They asked questions about his treatment downstairs, how he had gotten hurt. He answered each question with silence or a shake of his head. When he said he needed to visit the lavatory, Tim and another soldier lent a hand.
After Billy gained his feet, Tim said: "It was Vesey, wasn't it? Vesey tortured you and that's why he was demoted and tossed outside. That's right, isn't it?"
Billy's silence was already a matter of pride with him. "Never mind," he said. "I know who did it, and if I get a chance, I'll settle with him."
He wobbled on the crutch, pale and too feeble to settle much of anything. Tim and the other man exchanged looks. Tim had kept Billy's improvised journal safe. That night, while distant cannon fire reverberated through Libby, Billy wrote with the pencil stub.
Mar. 1 — Two remarkable circumstances. I am alive when Dr. Arnold, the old toper in the surgery, expected I'd die. Also — the reb who took it as his duty to injure me taught me a lesson so monumental I do not wholly grasp it yet. In here, forced to obey any order, no matter how humiliating or destructive, I at last understand how the enslaved negro feels. I have dwelt a while in the soul of a shackled black man and taken a little of it into my own, forever.
94
Stanley found it increasingly hard to accept and deal with all the changes in his life. Pennyford continued to send monthly reports of the enormous profits earned by Lashbrook's. Stanley read each with disbelief. The figures could not possibly be real. If they were, no man deserved such wealth. Certainly he didn't.
He found it hard to cope with the swift flow of public events as well. Weariness with the war now infected the entire North, the President having hastened the process with his proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction, announced last December. Lincoln proposed to pardon all rebels except the highest government officials and former army and navy officers who had defected.
The plan was not harsh enough to suit Wade and Stevens and their crowd, therefore not harsh enough for Stanley either. But what other kind of plan could one expect from a negrophile half mad from perpetual sleeplessness and depression? Instead of thinking rigorously about the enemy and the postwar period, Lincoln busied himself with trivialities, pious orations at cemetery dedications and the like. At Gettysburg last November he had delivered himself of one such anthology of homilies, to the monumental boredom of the crowd.
Because of his increasingly pro-Negro position and his failure to bring the war to a successful end, Lincoln was a detested man. The capital seethed with rumors of plots to kidnap or murder him. Stanley heard a new one approximately once a week.
Further, influential Republicans believed the President had done the party great harm by insisting on a new draft of half a million men on the first of February. There would be a call for an additional one or two hundred thousand by mid-March, Stanton had confided. Humans were being ground up like sausage meat in a butcher shop because the generals couldn't win. Thomas had held fast at Chickamauga last autumn — the Rock, the rabble quickly named him — but the engagement itself had been disastrous, redeemed only slightly when Bragg's army was driven from Chattanooga into Georgia in November. Now, flogged to almost insane desperation, Congress had reactivated the grade of lieutenant general and bestowed it on a man Lincoln had chosen — that drunkard, Unconditional Surrender Grant. As general-in-chief, he would soon take charge in the Eastern theater; Old Brains had been demoted to chief of staff.
None of that would save the President, Stanley felt. Lincoln would lose the fall election — no cause for grief there. But the number of Republicans he could drag along to defeat frightened Stanley and his friends.
Increasingly, Stanley felt a desire to leave Washington. He still relished the power that went with his job. But he wasn't comfortable with the philosophies and programs of those with whom he had allied himself in order to survive the Cameron purge. In January, the Senate had proposed a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery — in Stanley's view, far too radical a step, taken too hastily. Too many Negroes were already free and out of hand. Everywhere you looked in the city, black soldiers and freedmen postured and paraded, swollen with new self-importance.
One morning Stanley was summoned by the secretary only moments after arriving at his desk. Stanley's cravat was askew, his hair rumpled, his appearance wild-eyed. Stanton noticed.
"What the devil's biting you?" he asked, brushing the underside of his scented beard. Before leaving home, Stanley had taken some swallows of whiskey on the sly. They loosened his tongue.
"Walking here on the avenue, I had an unbelievable experience. Unbelievable — disgusting — I scarcely know the proper word, it shook me so. I came face to face with seven freedmen who forced me to step into the street to get around them. They would not give me room on the walk!"
The whiskey lent him courage to ignore Stanton's sudden scowl. "I realize they have been downtrodden people, sir. But now they presume too much. They strut about with all the boldness of white men."
Through the little round spectacles, Stanton peered at his assistant. The patient air of the teacher replaced the anger of the zealot. "You must get used to it, Stanley. Like it or not, that's the way it will be henceforth. As Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians, 'For the trumpet shall sound — and we shall be changed.' "
Not I, Stanley thought, still seething when he and the secretary concluded their business and he left. Not I, Mr. Stanton.