"And the message?"
"Jesse showed me how to get into your briefcase. I found the message while you were getting me a drink that night at your home. I took one of the carbons. You never noticed."
"I noticed later."
"Too much later." She smiled.
Suddenly it was too much for him: that familiar smile yet with so much treachery and falseness behind it. He clutched at the arm of the divan. "You betrayed me," he whispered hoarsely. "I loved you, and you—"
"Don't be an ass." She crossed the room and perched on a chair opposite him, crossing her legs, ever the lady. "You never loved me. You never saw the real me… only something you constructed in your mind. You saw me as the right person for your fiancée — beautiful, wealthy, gay, rather witless. That wasn't love. I don't know if you've ever been in love, Aubrey. If you were, you probably wouldn't be smart enough to realize it. But you certainly weren't in love with me."
For some reason that rang in his mind, repeated itself. He stared past her, his anger thwarted and his emotions uncertain.
He'd found the message gone and had been sure it had been Vyry. He remembered the moment when he'd wavered between the two women in his mind and how his whole upbringing had colored the instantaneous decision that evildoing lay with black skin. He'd suspected Vyry Lewis, destroyed her man, used and enjoyed her body.
But there had been that moment of doubt, a moment in which he'd felt something for her, some passing regret that he had been so thoroughly taken in. Yes, and more than that. Because he had felt something for her. Something that, yes, that he'd never felt for simpering teasing Sharon.
Something that might even in his own heart have been called love, except that she was black and he was a Quidley.
Hunt was watching him with an expression of intelligent interest he'd never seen on her face before. He straightened and put on a stern look. "Tell me something. You're Railroad, you say?"
"Yes."
"Then you're not really white. You're passing."
"Oh, Lord. You are just too naive. Do you really think the Road could have lasted for a hundred and fifty years without white people? White Southerners? Even before Secession there were plenty of whites who helped the slaves get on up North." She laughed, then sobered. "And if it was only blacks, then the Road would be nothing but colored terrorists. The way the government tries to portray us. But God help the South if there ever were a genuine colored revolt. We're the ones prevented it."
He nodded. He hadn't really thought she was passing; her hair was too blonde, eyes too blue, skin too white. But it had cleared the uncertainty up. "Let me ask you something else. Do you know the people who took me? Took the shell, I mean?"
"Yes. They stayed here with me while it was light."
"And you let them go on to Richmond with it?"
"Let them? I helped them. You still don't seem to understand, Aubrey."
"I'm beginning to. But how could you do that, maybe not as a Railroader, but as a human being? Don't you know what they plan to do?" He leaned forward. This was his only chance to convince her that she was wrong, that Turner and his men had to be stopped. In the corner, barely four steps away, the telephone stood waiting.
"They won't use it. The man in charge, he's level-headed."
"Level-headed? Turner?"
"No, he's not in charge. Another man is, one from higher up in the Road. He's hurt, but still in control. I can't believe he'd… no, they won't really use it, Aubrey. But it's important that the government thinks they will."
But they can't, he thought, feeling the stiffness of the cylinder under his tunic, against his heart. So that was a dead issue. What remained was to save himself, and to use that phone.
"Just what do you expect to gain, Sharon? The Railroad, I mean?"
"Equality, Aubrey. The same laws for black and white, for a beginning. Freedom to change jobs, organize, and vote."
"It'll be chaos. The two races can't live together. They won't even if they could."
"Now you're just parroting the government line, Aubrey, and worse, the Kuklos League line. They have to live together, but the only way they can do that without fighting is if the coloreds are free, too. Conditional Emancipation, Dixie Socialism — the same old hatreds go rotting on underneath the frosting. There's got to be a change, and this is our chance to do it quick and clean. If we don't the North is going to come down one of these days and do it for us."
She was persuasive, he had to admit… and, more than he liked to realize, she was expressing the very ideas that had stirred in him from time to time and which he had dismissed with a vague feeling of guilt as un-Southern, unworthy of him as a Confederate officer and as a Quidley. He struggled to think. It was true, he hadn't loved her. He saw that now. But he had loved Vyry.
Where did that put him? On whose side?
"You look poorly, Aubrey. Feeling ill?"
"I'm all right. What are you going to do? Where are you going now, Sharon Sue?"
"Leaving. I'm done here. Now I've got to be in Richmond, to act as an intermediary between the Railroad leadership and the government once negotiations start."
"And me?"
She twisted her lips in a moue that was almost that of the old Sharon Sue. "Oh, yes. You. Whatever am I going to do with you, Aubrey Lee Quidley? I can't let you go. Not before they're in Richmond. And I can't even let you get to a telephone." She rubbed her nose. "Actually, now that you know about us… mightn't you want to join us? We could use an officer—"
"That would be dishonorable."
She rolled her eyes. "I should have expected that. Well, I can't take you with me. I can't lock you up and take the chance you might escape again. As a matter of fact there's only one thing I can do with you, Aubrey, and that is kill you. Don't you think that's a terrible waste?"
He had the fantastic feeling still that this was a joke, but facing her eyes, fixed on his with an irreproducible mixture of gaiety and regard and at the same time coldness and obvious resolution, he knew it was not. She meant to kill him, with regret perhaps, but she'd do it. "Look," he said.
"It's no use, Aubrey darlin'. That's the only answer there is, and I can't say I'm happy to have you make me do it."
"I'm making you do it?"
"You are, you know." She stood, holding the gun on him. Out of sheer habit, he rose too, and stood facing her, brushing ineffectually at the front of his tunic, where prickly seeds had stuck during his crashing career through the woods. "Because it really is up to you. Now you've had time to think about it. I really don't want to have to hurt you. Won't you — change your mind — about joining us?"
He stood facing her, and remembered.
The Post. A younger Quidley, saluting the Banner for the first time, pride swelling in his throat.
Staring down at Turner as blood welled from his mutilated mouth.
His father, stern, commanding, uncompromising. A gentleman's defined by his word and by his actions — not by his speech, or by the size of his holdings. Remember that, son.
And another voice. Don't bother none about me, Major. You're one of a dozen I'll see tonight.
The tall dark portraits in the hallway.
Baylor's white-faced defiance.
The sword. The Stars and Bars.
The smell of the squalid apartments in the Colored Area.
A salvo of thirty-inchers tracing white chalk across the sky.
The blind lost hate in Turner's eyes.
I, Aubrey Lee Quidley IV, do solemnly swear to support and defend the Constitution and way of life of the Confederate States of America; to defend State's Rights and majority rule;…