Edna came by at closing time, as she often did now that Hal was dead. "How are you, Ma?" she said. "How was your day?"
"Fair. No, better than fair," Nellie answered, and told her about the Confederates.
Her daughter sighed, probably thinking of Confederate Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid and what might have been. Another world, Nellie thought, and laughed a little. If she was going to think of other worlds, why not one where the United States won the War of Secession and there never was any such thing as the Confederate States of America? With Virginia still in the USA, Washington wouldn't have been shelled. It would still be the capital in more than name, too. And who would ever have heard of Jake Featherston? Nobody at all, odds were.
"What are you smiling about?" Edna asked. When Nellie told her, she said, "Wouldn't that be something? You ought to write a book, Ma, like that gal from Boston did-you know, the one who shot the Confederate submersible skipper. You could get rich."
"Maybe I could get rich-if I could write a book. And if pigs could fly, we'd all carry umbrellas," Nellie said.
"You wouldn't have to do it all by your lonesome," Edna said. "That other gal had somebody else, a real writer, do most of the work. You could split the money and still have plenty."
"I haven't got enough ideas for a book," Nellie said firmly. "The only other thing I'm sure of is that we wouldn't have had this stinking collapse if we were one big country, and anybody can see that. It's not worth writing about."
"I suppose." Her daughter didn't want to give up the idea. "I know what you could do, then. Write about your life story. That's exciting enough for anybody, what with the spy stuff during the war and the.. . the other stuff back before the turn of the century."
By the other stuff, of course, she meant Nellie's time in the demimonde. "I don't want to write about that!" Nellie exclaimed. "I wish to heaven none of that ever happened. I spent all these years getting to be halfway respectable, and now you want me to write about
… that? Forget it, Edna."
"Too bad," Edna said. "It'd be exciting. People'd pay money to read about it."
"It wasn't exciting. It was just nasty." Nellie couldn't imagine how anybody who'd actually been in the demimonde could think it was exciting. She hadn't come close to warming up to a man more than a couple of times in all the years since she'd left. And how much would people want to read about that?
She expected Edna to go on harping about it. Her daughter refused to believe how foul it had been, how foul it had made Nellie feel after a man put gold on the dresser, got undressed, and then did what he wanted-and had her do what he wanted. But Edna didn't nag, or not exactly. Instead, she said, "You remember that Bill Reach, the fellow who Hal said ran the whole spy show?"
The fellow who made me out to be a whore in front of a coffeehouse full of Confederates, Nellie thought grimly. "I remember him," she said, and not another word.
"I wonder what ever happened to him," Edna said. "If you know that, you could stick it in the book, too."
I know what happened to him. I killed the drunken son of a bitch when he tried to rape me. She almost told that to Edna, just to shut her daughter up. How much could it matter now that Hal, who'd idolized Bill Reach for no good reason Nellie could ever see, was dead? But she swallowed the words. She'd promised herself she would take that secret to her own grave, and she aimed to do it.
"If I had to guess," she said after an all but imperceptible pause, "he got killed when the United States bombarded Washington before they took it back. An awful lot of people did."
"No story in that, though," Edna said.
"I don't care," Nellie said. "That's what I'm telling you. There was no story."
"Ma, you're a stick."
"Well, maybe I am. I don't care. I worked too hard for too long to tell a bunch of fancy lies now that I'm on the edge of turning into an old lady. What would Hal say if I did?"
"Tell the truth, then," Edna said.
"I have been telling the truth," Nellie lied.
Her daughter threw her hands in the air. "What am I supposed to do with you, Ma?" she said, half affectionate, half exasperated.
"You could just leave me alone. That's what you told me and told me, and then I finally went and did it." Nellie came as close as she ever had to admitting she might have meddled too much and too long in Edna's life. "Now maybe I get to tell you the same thing."
"Why do you think I'll listen any better than you ever did?" Edna asked. Nellie had no answer to that, and not having one frightened her. A child outgrew a parent's efforts at care, but a parent wasn't likely to outgrow a child's.
M arch 4, 1934, was a Sunday. Church bells rang in Richmond. Some of them summoned the faithful to worship. Others, later, proclaimed the imminent inauguration of a new president of the Confederate States of America.
At Freedom Party headquarters, Lulu fussed over Jake Featherston, fiddling with his collar as if she were his mother and not his secretary. He put up with it for as long as he could. Then he stepped away and said, "I'm fine. You don't need to fool with it any more."
"I want it to be perfect," Lulu said, for about the fifth time that day.
"Come two o'clock this afternoon, the chief justice of the Supreme Court is going to swear me in," Jake said. "Nothing in the world-in the world, you hear me?-could be more perfect than that." He shook his head. "No, I take it back. Burton Mitchel, that… so-and-so"-he was careful of his language around Lulu-"has to stand there and watch me do it and shake my hand before I do it-and afterwards, too. That's even better than all the rest."
"I mean, I want you to look perfect." His longtime secretary had said that five or six times, too.
"I'm fine," Jake answered. And he was fine, too, as far as he was concerned. No clawhammer coat for him, no white tie and stiff-fronted white shirt, no top hat. The butternut outfit he had on was almost identical to what he'd worn during the three years of the war. He even had three stripes on his sleeve, though these were also of butternut, not artilleryman's red. The War Department had left him a sergeant, had it? Well, all right. Now the whole country had a sergeant heading it up. He wasn't ashamed of that. He was proud of it, by God.
Willy Knight strode into his office. The vice president-elect also wore a quasi-uniform, one a good deal fancier than Featherston's. Some European armies had a grade one step up from general. They usually called it field marshal. Had the CSA used that rank, the men who held it would have worn uniforms a hell of a lot like Knight's.
"Whoa!" Jake shielded his eyes against the glare of gold lace and brass buttons. "You look like the nigger doorman at an expensive hotel, you know that?"
"Go to hell," Knight said, and grinned enormously. He stuck out his hand. Featherston shook it. No furtive trial of strength today. For once, they both had all the strength they needed. "We did it!" Knight's grin got wider. Jake hadn't thought it could. "We really did it!"
"You bet we did," Featherston said, "and this is only the first day. What you got to remember, Willy, is that getting here's just the start. Now we've got to do what we set out to do with the Party-"
"And with the Redemption League," Willy Knight added.
"Yeah-and with the Redemption League," Jake allowed generously. "We're in. We keep going right on forward." That was where he had the edge on Knight and everybody else. He kept thinking about the next step, the step to take after the one he was on now. He looked at his pocket watch. "Where's Ferd?"
"I'm here." Ferdinand Koenig stepped into the office. He wore a plain business suit that seemed all the plainer next to the uniforms.