The soldiers, chiefly wounded veterans, had organized a rear guard to sweep through the government warehouses on Thirteenth and Fourteenth, putting matches to the cartons and crates of official records. One grizzled man, who was twenty-five but looked forty, pried open a wooden box and exclaimed, "Here's something new — undelivered mail."
"Burn it," said his sergeant, whose pant legs, like those of his men, were soaked with whiskey. They had waded through gutters filled with it. The looters were breaking open everything.
The soldier stuck in his match. When a few letters caught, he plucked them from the box and used them to fire a second one, then a third and fourth. With the blaze roaring nicely, he dropped the original packet of letters on the plank floor, already hot, and hurried away to safety.
129
Outside the Ledger-Union, an office boy hung up a summary of a new telegraphic dispatch almost hourly. Each piece of information from the distant Petersburg-Richmond line was greeted with cheers from a crowd becoming steadily larger.
By midday on Monday, the third of April, the excitement brought work to a standstill at Hazard's and swept through Belvedere like fire in a dry spell. Madeline was the only one who retreated from it, going to her suite of rooms and shutting the door.
She was thankful the end seemed near. The dispatches did not say positively that General Lee had abandoned his hopeless position in front of Petersburg and the Richmond lines as well, but that presumption was being accepted throughout the mansion — and the ironworks and the town. Everyone felt the Confederate capital would soon fall. If all of this meant the bloodletting would stop, she was grateful.
Yet the news raised a less welcome consideration. After a surrender, she would have no excuse for not returning to Mont Royal.
She hated the thought. The place would only remind her of Orry. Yet she knew she had an obligation to go back as soon as it was possible to travel to South Carolina. There was a great deal of Washington talk about confiscating all the property of the largest slaveholders. She must be home to fight against that if it happened. If the love she and Orry shared had any monument at all, it was Mont Royal, tainted by black slavery though it was.
So her duty was unavoidable. She must remember and take courage from her father's words. We are all dying of life. She must make the journey and stand in Orry's stead, maintaining the home they had occupied together such a short time. Assuming, of course, that the plantation still existed. Northern journalists wrote long articles about the advance of General Sherman's army and the activities of his foragers operating on the flanks. So lurid and gleeful were these pieces, it was possible to imagine half of the state of South Carolina put to the torch, exactly like the city of Columbia.
But she wouldn't know Mont Royal's fate until she got there, and she couldn't get there without preparation. She was tired of imagining scenes of destruction. One antidote was physical activity.
From the closet where she had stored it, she brought a small trunk, in which she had carried her things from Richmond. She opened it and savored the aroma of a few cedar chips in the bottom. From the wardrobe, she took two dresses she seldom wore. One by one, she folded them and laid them in the trunk.
When it was about half full of items seldom used or worn since her arrival, her gaze fell on the half-dozen slender books on her bedside table. She picked out the third from the top, opened it at the ribbon marker, and gazed at the poem without seeing a word.
Don't, a silent voice warned. She shut the book, clasping it tight to her breast. Tears ran down her cheeks as she stared through the window at the hillsides of sunlit mountain laurel.
"It was many and many a year ago — in a kingdom — by the sea — that a maiden there lived whom you may know — by the name of —"
Shuddering, she bowed her head.
"By the name of —"
She couldn't say the rest. The poem had meant too much to both of them. She leaned over the trunk and laid the volume of Poe on a neatly folded shawl, then closed the trunk lid with a small, final click. It was all the packing she could manage at the moment.
When the conquerors marched into Richmond that day, Mrs. Burdetta Halloran was ready. She had spent nearly all her remaining money on one of the old flags, which cost dearly because the speculator selling them said many people wanted them. She burned her Confederate national flag in her fireplace.
In the morning the Yankees paraded past her home, led by the black horsemen of the Fifth Massachusetts Colored Cavalry — incredible sight. She concealed her sick scorn and cheered and waved her handkerchief beneath the Stars and Stripes she had hung above her front veranda. Many of her neighbors openly wept, but not all. She didn't give a damn for what the weepers thought of her behavior.
By the hundreds the conquerors came, fifing, drumming, grinning, celebrating beneath a sky painted by fires that still burned. On the flanks of the riding and marching men, Negroes skipped and danced and taunted the whites watching from porches and upper windows.
She saw a white officer notice her and cheered all the louder. Perhaps such a man would be taken with her appearance, stop, introduce himself. She had to survive somehow. She would.
"Oh, thank God, thank God," she cried beneath the grand old flag, waving her hanky so hard her arm ached. Her acting was so fine, tears coursed down her cheeks. Presently a chubby colonel reined his horse out of column and slowly approached the picket fence, to which she rushed and was waiting to speak as he smiled and removed his hat.
"No more slavery — and soon no more war, doesn't it seem so, Captain?"
"Yes, there's every indication that Lee is on the run," Billy agreed. Pinckney Herbert's small, bright eyes rejoiced as he tied a bit of string around the rolled-up razor strop. Billy had let his beard grow since coming home, but he kept the upper edges trimmed, and his old strop was worn out.
It was about an hour after Madeline had shut herself in her room — a mild bright Monday afternoon. Billy was mending. The wound frequently filled the upper half of his body with a diffuse but severe pain, though he always managed to overcome it when he and Brett snuggled in bed together. She said he had never been so passionate in all the relatively short times they had been together during four years of marriage. She told him that with great pleasure. He liked to reply, "Been living on army rations a mighty long time. You know — coffee, corn bread, and continence."
He thanked Herbert, took his change and the strop, and left the dim, dust-moted store with its wonderful homey smells of cloth, crackers, and onion sets. Though his chest was starting to ache again, he felt a renewed and joyful sense of life returning to normal. In recognition of it, he no longer wore his side arm.
The storekeeper was right, certainly. It was a new day for the whole land. The Thirteenth Amendment had gone to the individual states for ratification, and Illinois had been the first to do so. Even the pathetic Confederate President had acknowledged a need for change, though in his case Billy assumed the motive to be desperation, not principle. Davis, who would probably be hanged when the war ended — if he were caught, that is; any sensible man would flee the country — had in mid-March signed a law admitting blacks to the Confederate Army. Billy found it a gesture both sad and contemptible.
Doing his best to ignore the mounting chest pain, he strolled toward the Ledger-Union office to see whether there was more late news. His route took him past a lager beer saloon crowded with men who would soon trudge up the hill to start the afternoon shift at Hazard's. Beyond that, he approached a corner where bunting decorated the front of the recruiting office.