And you like him very much indeed, Madeline said to herself. You seem able to accept him for what he is, but not me. Is that because you thought I was something you have always been told was better?
Sensing the onset of more bad feelings, Madeline blocked them by turning back to Constance, this time with a frivolous question about current fashions. The candles burned down, and conversation limped on, but something had gone out of Constance in the past few minutes. Her answers were forced, her efforts at banter unsuccessful. As they were finishing their lemon ices and coconut macaroons, she said abruptly, "I believe I'll go down to town for an hour."
Madeline asked, "Would you like company?"
"Thank you, no. I'm going to church."
It wasn't necessary to tell them she felt the need. Her face made it evident.
She drove the carriage herself down the twisting road in the night glare from Hazard's. Under Wotherspoon's guidance, the entire complex continued to operate twenty-four hours a day — and had never been so profitable.
Reaching the streets of the lower town, Constance felt the night wind rising, blowing dust. Lamps burned late in the army recruiting office. As she drove by, she noticed a sturdy Negro boy, the son of a worker at Hazard's, standing some distance from the entrance. Between the boy and the doorway, Lute Fessenden's cousin and some equally loutish crony whispered and joked.
When a few of the town's black men had attempted to visit the recruiter, there had been incidents of harassment. To prevent another, she slowed the carriage and prepared to speak to the substitute broker. Before she could, the black boy turned and disappeared in a dark alley. The significance of the two men loitering outside the office hadn't been lost on him.
Disgusted, she drove on to the small Catholic chapel that had been named, in a burst of poetic piety, St. Margaret's-in-the-Vale. The river valley, where flying soot and bits of cinder constantly blackened everything, could never live up to the literary connotations of vale, but it was a word very much liked by Lehigh Station's small Catholic community.
Because of the heat of the evening, the front doors of St. Margaret's stood open. Constance tied the horse to a wrought-iron post — Hazard's had donated and installed a row of eight — and slipped in, hoping meditation and prayer might lift the formless anxiety that had settled on her during supper. Inside the entrance, she genuflected, then slipped in to the second pew on the left.
Kneeling, she noticed a heavy, middle-aged woman across the aisle. The woman was poorly dressed, a shawl around her shoulders. Her forehead rested on her clasped hands as she prayed. Constance knew her. Mrs. Waleski's only boy had died in a Cold Harbor medical tent.
Hot wind gusting up the aisle fluttered the votive candles. The seven-foot Christ, painted and gilded, looked down from His cross with pity. Softly, Constance began praying.
Her mind was strangely divided, one part of it on her murmured plea for intercession, another on the great weight crushing her. She knew who had put the weight there. A stupid, thoughtless woman —
Here we are. Three war widows.
Ever since making that remark, she had been possessed by a premonition. For one of the three women at the table, the words would come true.
She was so sure of it, she was consumed with a fear no prayers could allay. Another fierce wind gust blew out half a dozen of the votive lights in their little glass cups red as blood.
114
Charles suffered a ravaging intestinal ailment during the first ten days of July. Still weak, still belonging in bed, he got up on the eleventh morning, obtained a pass, and set off on a dangerous ride around the west of Richmond, then northeast to Fredericksburg. His only guarantees of safe passage were his revolver and shotgun.
It would be his last trip to Barclay's Farm. He had decided that while lying with his knees drawn up against his pain-pierced gut. In bed, he'd had plenty of time to straighten out his thinking. The South would go down fighting, and he would go down with it. That was his sole duty now.
He couldn't deny he loved Gus, but she deserved a man with better prospects. Each day the odds against avoiding a fatal bullet increased. In the short run, he would hurt her. But when she found, as she surely would, a better man — someone whose head had not been oddly twisted by his war experiences — she would thank him.
He reached the farm at the end of a rain shower. The sun was out again, occasionally hidden by the clouds that flew over fields and woods at great speed, exchanging light for shadow, shadow for light. It was half past five in the evening. The clouds, the quality of sunlight at that hour, and the sparkling clarity of the land after the rain helped restore some of the farm's earlier beauty.
"Major Charles!" Washington, mending harness on the back stoop, jumped to his feet as Charles rode up. "Lord save us — old Sport looks about as starved as you do. Didn't expect we'd see you for a while. Wait till I tell Miz Augusta —"
"I'll tell her myself." Unsmiling, Charles yanked the back door open without knocking. "Gus?" He stepped into the kitchen, oblivious to the pained look on the aging freedman's face.
The kitchen was empty. Soup stock containing one large bone simmered on the stove. He shouted, "Gus, where the hell are you?"
She came dashing down the hall, hairbrush in hand. At the sight of him, her face glowed. She flung her arms around his neck. "Sweetheart!"
He pressed his bearded cheek to hers but broke the embrace when she started to kiss him. He flung a shabby butternut trouser leg over a low-backed chair and sat. He fumbled in his shirt for matches and a half-smoked cigar. His lack of emotion worried her.
At the stove, she swirled the long wooden spoon three times around the simmering pot. Then she laid the spoon aside and reluctantly confronted him.
"Darling, you don't look well."
"I caught the intestinal complaint again. I don't know which is worse, lying on a cot wishing my gut would fall out or riding over half of Virginia with General Hampton."
"It's been that bad —?"
"We've lost more men and horses than you'd believe. At least three whole troops of the South Carolina Sixth are in the deadline camp, without remounts."
She glanced out the window. "You still have Sport."
"Barely." He knocked his knuckles on the table twice.
She brushed at a strand of loose blond hair. "It breaks my heart to see you so thin and white. And discouraged."
"What else can you expect these days?" He found his nervousness increasing. Originally, he had considered staying the night — making love one last time — but he found he didn't have the brass to do that to her. Or the strength to endure it himself. Abruptly, he decided on a quick end.
He bit into the cigar stub, scraped a match on the chair bottom, waved it toward the windows as sulfurous fumes filled the room. "The farm's a wreck."
"Thank the Yankees. Hardly a day goes by without Boz or Washington firing a warning shot at some deserter sneaking around."
"You shouldn't have stayed here. You shouldn't be here now. How can you raise anything? How can you and the niggers survive?"
"Charles, you know I don't like to hear that word. Especially in reference to my freedmen."
He shrugged. "I forgot. Sorry." He didn't sound it.
She tugged at the tight waist of her dress. Charles's head was bent, his eye on the match applied to the cigar. Blue smoke whirled around his beard as he blew the match out.
Frightened, Gus said: "You sound as though you don't really want me to answer the questions you asked. You sound as though you're trying to pick a fight."