A Freedom Party stalwart named Kirby Walker stood at Anne's right hand. "If they try anything, we'll be ready for 'em," he declared. Despite the heat and breathless humidity of early summer in Charleston, he looked cool and well pressed in crisp white shirt and butternut slacks. "We know-darn well they can't lick us."
He couldn't have been more than thirty years old. He would have been a little boy when the Great War ended. She wondered how long it would be till this new one put him in a real uniform instead of the imitation he wore. She also wondered if he had any brains at all. Some stalwarts didn't-they were all balls and fists, and they didn't need to be anything else. She said, "We don't know anything of the sort. If they hadn't licked us the last time, this war would look mighty different."
"Well, but we were stabbed in the back then." Walker sounded as positive as if he'd been there to watch the knife go home. "It'll be a fair fight this time, so of course we'll lick 'em."
He talked just the way Jake Featherston and Saul Goldman would have wanted him to. He talked just the way the President and his director of communications had been training Confederates to talk ever since Featherston took the oath of office. He thought the way they wanted him to think. He was the new Confederate man, and there were an awful lot just like him.
Anne, in fact, had come to Charleston to put on a rally for the new Confederate men and their female opposite numbers. When a lot of those men would be going into uniform, and when, in due course, they would start coming back maimed or not coming back at all, they needed to be reminded of what this was all about. Speeches on the wireless went only so far. Nothing like a real rally where you could see your friends and neighbors jumping up and yelling along with you, where you could smell the fellow next to you getting all hot and bothered, to keep the juices flowing.
A gray-mustached man who walked with a limp and carried a submachine gun led a gang of Negroes towards a merchant ship. The blacks wore dungarees and coarse, collarless cotton work shirts. Their clothes weren't quite uniforms. They weren't quite prison garb, either. But they came close on both counts.
Kirby Walker followed the blacks with his eyes. "Lousy niggers," he muttered. "We work 'em hard enough, they won't have a chance to get themselves in any trouble this time around."
"Here's hoping they won't," Anne said.
"If they do, we start shooting first," Walker said. "We'd've shot a few of 'em early on in the last war, we never would've had half the trouble with 'em we did. We were too soft, and we paid for it."
Again, he sounded as if he'd been there. This time, Anne completely agreed with him. She had been there. The Marshlands plantation, these days, was nothing but ruins. Before the war, she'd treated her Negroes better than anyone else nearby. And what had she got for it? Half-more than half-the leaders of the Red Congaree Socialist Republic came from her plantation.
She muttered to herself. Not very long before, she'd been sure she found Scipio, her old butler, waiting tables at a restaurant in Augusta, Georgia. He'd been in the Congaree Socialist Republic up to his eyebrows, and he'd managed to stay hidden for more than twenty years after its last vestiges collapsed. She wanted him dead. She'd been so sure she had him, too, till the restaurant showed her paperwork proving the black man she thought was Scipio really was the Xerxes he claimed to be, and that he'd worked there since before the Great War.
Anne muttered some more. She hated being wrong about anything. She especially hated being wrong about anything that meant so much to her. As far as she knew, that black man was still waiting tables at that restaurant. What would have happened to him if he really were Scipio… Her nails bit into the flesh of her palms. How she'd wanted that!
And she'd been so very certain! Half of her still was, though she couldn't imagine how that manager might have had faked paperwork that went back close to thirty years handy. Then she shrugged and laughed a singularly unpleasant laugh. Her gaze swung to the Negro work gang, which was hauling crates out of a freighter under the watchful eye of that half-disabled veteran with the submachine gun. Whether the Negro in Augusta really was Scipio or Xerxes, he might yet get his.
"What's funny, Miss Colleton?" Kirby Walker asked.
"What?" Anne blinked, recalled from dreams of vengeance to present reality. "Nothing, really. Just thinking of what might have been."
"Not a… heck of a lot of point to that, I don't reckon," the Freedom Party stalwart said. "You can't change things now."
"No?" Back at the start of the Great War, the glance Anne sent him would have melted him right out of his shoes. Now it only made him shrug stolidly. Her blond good looks hadn't altogether left her, but they slipped away day by day. She could still hope for vengeance against Scipio and against the United States. Nobody got even with time. She sighed. "I want to have another look at the hall, if that's all right."
"Sure enough, ma'am. I'm here to do what you need me to do," Walker said. He made himself a liar without even knowing he was doing it. What she needed him to do was acknowledge her as the beauty she had been. That wouldn't happen. She knew it wouldn't, couldn't. Knowing was an ulcer that ate at her and would not heal.
It was, perhaps, just as well that Clarence Potter would not know where this rally was being held. The hall had belonged to the Whigs for generations. Clarence had gone to God only knew how many meetings here himself. It wasn't far from the harbor, and it was right across the street from a bar: a good location. These days, nobody but the Freedom Party held meetings. The hall had stood vacant for quite a while. It wouldn't stay vacant long. And the Freedom Party, unlike the Whigs, did meetings right.
Stalwarts and Freedom Party guards and ordinary Party members started filling the place more than an hour before the scheduled meeting time. Everyone wore a Freedom Party pin: the Confederate battle flag with red and blue reversed. Most of the pins had a black border. That showed that the people who wore them had joined the Party after March 4, 1934, when Jake Featherston became President of the CSA. Members who'd belonged before that day looked down their noses at the johnny-come-latelies and opportunists, which didn't keep them from using the newcomers whenever they needed to.
A young Congressman named Storm or something like that was the first one up to address the meeting. Anne had heard him before. He was very good on the Negro question, weaker elsewhere. Here, he didn't get to show his paces. He'd barely started his speech when air-raid sirens outside began to wail.
"You see?" he shouted. "Do you see?" He shook a fist at the sky. "The damnyankees don't want you to hear the truth!"
People laughed and cheered. "Go on!" somebody shouted. "Who cares about a damned air raid?"
And the Congressman did go on, even when the antiaircraft guns around the harbor started pounding and bombs started falling. The Freedom Party men in the audience clapped their hands and stomped their feet to try to drown out the din of war. That made the Congressman shout to be heard over them and over the fireworks not far away.
Anne thought they were all insane. She'd been through a bombing raid in the last war. Sitting here in this exposed place was the last thing she wanted to do now. But she knew what would happen if she yelled, Take cover, you damned idiots! The Freedom Party stalwarts would think she was nothing but a cowardly, panicky woman. They wouldn't listen to her. And they wouldn't take her seriously any more afterwards, either. That was the biggest part of what kept her quiet.
Resentment burned in her all the same. Because you're so stinking stubborn, I'm liable to get killed.