"I'm so glad you heard from that Mr. Meek," she went on. "Even if you can't leave till autumn, you can write Richmond and accept the commission."
"Yes, I suppose I could do that now."
"So you have decided!"
"Well —" The very way he prolonged it was an admission.
"The bugs are getting fierce down here," she said. "Let's go back to the house for a glass of claret. Perhaps we can even find a second way to celebrate your decision."
"In bed?"
"Oh, no, I didn't mean that —" Madeline blushed, then added, "Right now."
"What, then?"
Impossible to hide her smile any longer. "I think it's time to unwrap the sword you've kept carefully hidden upstairs."
19
"Our Rome," old residents called it. As a girl, Mrs. James Huntoon had preferred the study of young men to that of old cities, but a certain amount of enforced education in the classics enabled her to dismiss the comparison as merely another example of Virginia arrogance. That arrogance permeated Richmond and raised barriers for those from other states. At the first private party to which Ashton and her husband had been invited — to have their persons and pedigrees inspected, she felt sure — a white-haired woman, clearly Someone, overheard Ashton remark crossly that she simply couldn't understand the Virginia temperament.
Someone gave her a smile with steel in it. "That is because we are neither Yankees nor Southerners — the South being a term generally used here to signify states with a large population parvenu cotton planters. We are Virginians. No other word will suffice — and none says so much."
Ignorance thus exposed, Someone sailed away. Ashton seethed, imagining she'd faced the worst the evening had to offer. She was wrong. James Chesnut's wife, Mary, a South Carolinian with a bitchy tongue and a secure place in Mrs. Davis's circle, had greeted her by name and refused to stop for conversation. Ashton feared that gossip about her involvement with Forbes LaMotte and the attempt to kill Billy Hazard, had followed the Huntoons to Virginia.
So she had failed two tests in one night. But there would be others, and she was determined to triumph over them. Although she had little except contempt for the well-born gentlemen who ran the government, and for their wives who ruled society, they held power. To Ashton there was no stronger aphrodisiac.
Like the ancient city, Our Rome had hills, but, by comparison the city was tiny. Even with all the office seekers, bureaucrats, and riffraff swarming in, the population was little more than forty thousand. Richmond had its Tiber, too — the James, looping and winding south and then east to the Atlantic — but surely the air on the Capitoline had smelled of something finer than tobacco. Richmond stank of it; the whole place had the odor of a warehous
Montgomery had been the first capital, but only for a month and a half. Then the Congress voted in favor of the move to Virginia — though not without argument. Richmond lay too near the Yankee lines, the Yankee guns, opponents said. Numbers votes overwhelmed them, as did logic: Richmond was the South’s transportation and armament center, and had to be defended whether the government was there or not.
Those who had resided in Richmond a long time spoke with pride of the fine old homes and churches, but never mentioned the teeming saloon districts. They boasted of families of exalted ancestry, but never acknowledged the degraded creatures of both sexes who sauntered the shady walks of Capitol Square in the afternoons, silently offering themselves for sale. The women, a hard lot, and seldom young, were said to be rushing here from Baltimore, even New York, in search of the opportunity a wartime capital offered. God knew from what sewer their male counterparts had crawled.
Old Rome — with Carolina Goths and Alabama Vandals already inside the walls. Even the provisional President — not yet formally confirmed for his single six-year term — was regarded as a Mississippi primitive. He had the further misfortune of birth in Kentucky, the same state that had given the world the supreme incarnation of vulgarity-on-earth, Abe Lincoln.
Although Ashton was glad to be near the center of power, it couldn't be said that she was happy. Her husband, though a competent lawyer and a staunch secessionist — "Young Hotspur," they had called him back home — could find no better job than clerk to one of the first assistants in the Treasury Department. That was in keeping with the contempt shown South Carolinians by the new government. Very few from the Palmetto State had been named to high posts; most were considered too radical. The exception, Treasury Secretary Memminger, wasn't a Carolina native. Fathered by some low-born German soldier, he had been brought to Charleston as an orphan. Never considered one of the so-called fire-eaters, he was the only kind of Carolinian Jeff Davis deemed safe. It was insulting.
Ashton and James Huntoon were squeezed into a single large room at one of the boardinghouses proliferating near Main Street; that, too, displeased her. They would find a suitable house eventually, but the wait was galling — especially because she was required to sleep in the same bed as her husband. He always left her unsatisfied on those rare occasions — initiated by her when she wanted him to do or buy something for her — that she let him maul and heave and poke her with that pitiful flaccid instrument of his.
Richmond might be a tarnished coin, but it was rare and valuable in a few respects. There were important people to be cultivated; power to be acquired; financial opportunities to be seized. There were also quite a few attractive men — in uniform and out. Somehow she would turn all of that to her advantage — perhaps starting tonight. She and James were to attend their first official reception. As she finished dressing, she felt faint from the excitement.
Orry's sister was a beautiful young woman with a lush figure and an innate sense of how to take advantage of those assets. She had insisted they hire a carriage, to create the proper impression from the moment they arrived. James whined that they couldn't afford it; she allowed him marital privileges for three minutes, and he changed his mind. How glad she was when he handed her down from the carriage outside the Spotswood Hotel at Eighth and Main, and she heard approving murmurs from a crowd of loungers on the walk.
The July evening was hot, but Ashton wore everything that fashion dictated for a woman of elegance, beginning with the four tape-covered steel hoops under her skirt; all but the top one had an opening in front, to facilitate walking. A web of vertical tapes held the rig together.
Over this, underskirts, and then her finest silk dress, a deep peach color she offset with little jet spangles on her silk hair net, and with black velvet ribbons tied to each wrist. Fashionable women wore a great amount of jewelry, but her husband's income confined her to a pair of black onyx teardrops hung from her ear lobes on tiny gold wires. So she had arranged her dark hair and chosen her wardrobe to let simplicity and her own voluptuous good looks be her devices for drawing attention.
"Now pay attention, darling," she said as they crossed the lobby in search of Parlor 83. "Give me a chance to circulate this evening. You do the same. The more people we meet, the better — and we can meet twice as many if you don't hang on me constantly."
"Oh, I wouldn't," Huntoon said, with that automatic righteousness that frequently cost him friends and hurt his career. James was six years older than his wife, a pale, paunchy, opinionated man. "Here — down this corridor. I wish you wouldn't treat me as if I were some witless boy."
Her heart raced at the sight of the open doors of Parlor 83, where President Davis regularly held these receptions; he had no official residence as yet. Ashton glimpsed gowned women mingling and chatting with gentlemen in uniforms or fine suits. She fixed her smile in place, whispering: "Act like a man and maybe I won't. If you start trouble now, I'll just kill you — Mrs. Johnston!"