“I am in a position to question you,” Anne said. “You are not in a position to question me. She would have used her charms to soften him up, wouldn’t she?” That was not a question; she sounded wearily sure she knew whereof she spoke. “And Cassius. He’s still stealing things hereabouts, you know.”
“So I have heard, yes,” Scipio said. The more he talked about Cassius now, the less he would have to talk about what had happened a year before.
“He still has a price on his head, too,” Anne said. “If he comes round here”-the pistol twitched in her hand-“I shall kill him.” She studied Scipio, as if deciding whether to butcher a hog now or to wait. “And, of course, you still have a price on your head as well.”
“You said no harm would come to me if I visited you here,” Scipio said quickly. If she hadn’t had the pistol, he would have thought about trying to kill her. Living with her, serving her, had taught him how devious she was.
But when she said, “And I meant that,” he thought she was telling the truth. She went on, “You and Julia are the only members of the house staff I’ve been able to find. She and the field hands deny knowing anything. I’ve made my investigations, but you are the only eyewitness to what happened I’ve been able to…find.”
Catch was what she meant. Wherever she’d learned whatever she’d learned, she knew a good deal. Scipio had not defied Cassius when the Red leader made it plain his choices were cooperation and death. The stuff of defiance was not in him. Maybe it never had been; maybe his servile upbringing had trained out whatever he’d once owned.
He told the whole story, from Cherry’s claim of abuse to the gun battle in which Jacob Colleton had defended himself so well to the storming of the bedroom door behind which Anne’s gassed brother had barricaded himself. “Three or four men did that,” he said. “They rushed past me so fast, I do not know for certain who they were. I do not know which of them fired the fatal shot, either. Ma’am, you may do with me what you will, but I am being truthful in this regard.”
“I believe you,” Anne said, which caught Scipio by surprise. Sitting where she sat, he wouldn’t have believed himself. She went on, “The reason I believe you is that, if you were lying to me, you would have come up with a better story. The truth, I’ve found, is usually confused.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“Now-” Her voice sharpened. “Who burned the Marshlands mansion?”
“That was Cassius, ma’am,” he answered, adding, “I wish he had not done it. Many beautiful things were lost.”
“In five words, you’ve just given the story of this war,” she said. “I know you had a role in the so-called Congaree Socialist Republic. From what I’ve heard, you usually did what you could to stop its excesses. I suspect your reasons had as much to do with what would happen after the uprising was put down as they did with any special milk of human kindness in your veins, but only God can look into a man’s heart, and I’ve found out that, whatever else I may be, I am not God.”
Not knowing what to say to that, Scipio kept quiet. If Anne Colleton hadn’t thought she was God before the Red revolt, she’d done a fine job of concealing the fact. He wondered what she’d gone through. He didn’t have the nerve to ask. He didn’t have the nerve for a lot of things. In a nutshell, that was the tale of his life.
Wearily, Anne said, “Go back to Columbia. Go back to your work. Once we win the war, that will have been enough. Don’t ever come here again, unless I summon you.”
“Ma’am, on that you may rest assured.” Scipio wondered if he was talking like an educated white man for the last time in his life. In a way, he would miss it if that proved so. In another way, giving up what had been imposed on him was a sort of freedom in itself.
He rose, half bowed to Anne, and left the cottage. Field hands and children stared after him. He didn’t look back. As he got to the forest where he’d killed Major Hotchkiss, he decided he needed a new apartment, a new job, a new name. The widow had wanted to go to bed with him. He sighed. It wouldn’t happen now. “Odder chances,” he said aloud. “Dey is odder chances.” He kept walking toward the train station.
Brakes squealing, the train pulled into the station. “Cincinnati!” the conductor shouted. “All out for Cincinnati!”
Men, most of them in uniform, and a scattering of women rose from their seats so they could depart. Irving Morrell stayed where he was. So did Heinz Guderian beside him. “How far now from Cincinnati to Philadelphia?” Guderian asked in German.
Morrell visualized a map. “Six hundred miles, maybe a little less,” he answered in the same language. Seeing Guderian look puzzled, he amplified that: “About 950 kilometers.” He moved back and forth between one system of measurement and the other readily enough, but had learned the German found it harder.
Sure enough, Guderian twitted him about it: “How many feet in a mile? It is 5,280, nicht wahr? What a foolish number to have to keep straight every time you need to make a calculation.”
Before Morrell could defend the American system, the conductor leaned over and said with a smile, “Wir willen winnen der Krieg.”
Guderian stared at him, not because he spoke German so badly (he’d said “We want to win the war,” not “We will win the war,” which was what he’d probably meant, and he’d botched his article and his word order, too), but because he spoke it at alclass="underline" he was a black man with a mouth full of gold-crowned teeth. “Ja!” Guderian managed at last, and the conductor, smiling still, headed down the central aisle. To Morrell, the German General Staff officer said, “I had not realized just how popular my country was in the United States.”
“Oh, yes,” Morrell said with a nod. “Good thing we weren’t speaking French, or he’d have probably thought we were spies. A classmate of mine at the Academy, Jack Lefebvre, changed his name to Schmidt after the war started. It was either that, he told me, or kiss promotion good-bye. And I happen to know his people have been in the USA since before the War of Secession.”
“This business of everyone coming from elsewhere or having parents or grandparents who came from elsewhere is very strange to me,” Guderian said. “In Europe, we have been where we are since the Volkerwanderungen of a thousand years ago and more.”
Passengers were boarding the train as well as leaving it. Some of them came from elsewhere, too, speaking with accents plainly sprung from the CSA. A couple of those fellows, looking prosperous with big bellies, expensive black suits, and homburgs, sat down across from Morrell and Guderian. “It’ll be right strange,” one of them said to the other with a ripe drawl, “but I reckon we can do it.”
Shifting to English, Morrell leaned over and asked, “Who are you people, anyway?” Talk about spies-!
The man sitting closer to him stuck out a plump hand. “Major, I’m Davis Lee Vidals, lieutenant governor of Kentucky-of the United State of Kentucky, I make haste to assure you.”
Morrell reached out and shook the proffered hand, being careful not to squash it. He gave his own name. “That’s wonderful news!” he said. “Welcome back to the country where you belong.”
“Thank you very kindly, Major Morrell,” Vidals said. “That fellow sitting beside you-is he a German?” His voice was half dread, half awe: he might have been one of the people helping to bring Kentucky back into the USA, but he didn’t seem to know how to feel about U.S. allies who had been enemies of the Confederate States.
“Ja, I am a German.” Guderian spoke English with a heavy accent, but was fluent enough. He grinned at the Kentucky politician. “You would not expect to find an American officer traveling with a Frenchman, would you?” He’d paid attention to the story of Jack Lefebvre, now Schmidt, all right.