Riding a swaybacked horse he'd no doubt rented at the St. Matthews livery stable, Tom Colleton came slowly up the path toward the ruins of Marshlands. Anne Colleton stood waiting for her brother, her hands on her hips. When he got close enough for her to call out to him, she said, "You might have let me known you were coming before you telephoned the train station. I would have come to get you in the motorcar."
"Sis, I tried to wire you, but they told me the lines out from St. Matthews weren't up or had gone down again or some such," Tom answered. "When I got into town, I telephoned just on the off chance-I didn't really expect to get you. I was all set to show up and surprise you."
"I believe it," Anne answered. Tom had always been one to do things first and sort out the consequences later. She pointed to the wire than ran to the cabin where she lived these days. "They finally put that in last week. If you knew what I had to go through to get it-"
"Can't be worse than Army red tape," Tom said as he swung down from the horse. He looked fit and dashing and alert; his right hand never strayed far from the pistol on his hip. The scar on his cheek wasn't pink and fresh any more.
He also wore two stars on either side of his stand collar. "You've been promoted!" Anne exclaimed.
He gave a little bow, as a French officer might have done. "Lieutenant-Colonel Colleton at your service, ma'am," he said. "My regiment happened to find a hole in the Yankee lines up on the Roanoke, and they pushed forward half a mile at what turned out to be exactly the right time." He touched one of the stars signifying his new rank, then the other. "Each of these cost me about a hundred and fifty men, killed and wounded."
Slowly, Anne nodded. Tom had gone into the war as a lark, an adventure. A lot had changed in the past two years.
A lot had changed here, too. He strode up to her and gave her a brotherly embrace, but his eyes remained on what had been the family mansion. "Those sons of bitches," he said in a flat, hard voice, and then, "Well, from what I hear, they paid for it ten times over."
"Maybe not so much as that," Anne said, "but they paid." She cocked her head to one side and sent him a curious glance. "And you're one of the people who want to put guns in niggers' hands?"
He nodded. "For one thing, we're running out of white men to be soldiers," he said, and Anne nodded in turn, remembering President Semmes' words. Tom went on, "For another, if niggers have a stake in the Confederate States, maybe they won't try and pull them down around our ears. We smashed this rebellion, sure, but that doesn't mean we won't have another one ten years from now if things don't change."
"This one's smashed, but it's not dead," she said. "Cassius is still out in the swamps by the river, and the militiamen they've sent after him and his friends haven't been able to smoke them out."
"He's the kind of nigger I wish we had in the Army," Tom said. "He'd make one fine scout and sniper."
"Unless he decided to shoot at you instead of the damnyankees," Anne answered, which made her brother grimace. Then, suddenly, she noticed a new ribbon in the fruit salad above Tom's left breast pocket. Her eyes widened. Pointing to it, she said, "That's an Order of Lee, and you weren't going to say a thing about it."
She'd succeeded in embarrassing him. "I didn't want to worry you," he replied, which went a long way toward explaining the circumstances under which he'd won it. The Order of Lee was the Army equivalent of Roger Kimball's Order of the Virginia: only one step down from the Confederate Cross.
"I've been worried from the beg-" Anne started to say, but that wasn't quite true: in the beginning, she, like most in the CSA, had thought they'd lick the Yankees as quickly and easily as they had in their first two wars. She made the needed change: "I've been worried for a long time."
Julia came up to them then, her baby on her hip. "Mistuh Tom, we got yo' cabin ready fo' you."
"That's good," he answered. "Thank you." He spoke to her in a tone slightly different from the one he would have used before the war started, even if the words might have been the same then. In 1914, he would have taken the service completely for granted; now, he spoke of it as if she was doing him a favor. Anne found herself using that tone with blacks these days, too, and noticed it in others.
Tom went back to his horse, detached the saddlebags and bedroll from the saddle, and carried them while he walked after Julia. In 1914, a Negro would have dashed up to relieve him of them. If he missed that level of deference, he didn't show it.
And, before he went into the cabin, he asked, "You're not putting anyone out so I can stay in here, are you?"
"No, suh," the serving woman answered. "Ain't so many folks here as used to be."
"I see that." Tom glanced over at Anne. "It's a wonder you've done as much as you have out here by yourself."
"You do what you have to do," she said, at which he nodded again. Before the war, that hard logic had meant nothing to him. The Roanoke front had given him more than rank and decorations; he understood and accepted the ways of the world these days. As soon as Julia went out of earshot, she continued, in a lower voice, "We made a bargain of sorts-they do the work that needs to be done, and I make sure nobody from St. Matthews or Columbia comes around prying into what they did during the rebellion."
"You said something about that in one of your letters," Tom answered, remembering. "Best you could do, I suppose, but there are some niggers I wouldn't have made that bargain with. Cassius, for one."
"Even if you'd want him for a soldier?" Anne asked, gently mocking.
"Especially because I'd want him for a soldier," her brother said. "I know a dangerous man when I see one."
"I have no bargain with Cassius," Anne said quietly. "Every so often, livestock here-disappears. I don't know where it goes, but I can guess. Not that much to eat in the swamps of the Congaree, even for niggers used to living off the land."
"That's so," Tom agreed. "And he'll have friends among the hands here. Sis, I really wish you weren't out here by your lonesome."
"If I'm not, this place goes to the devil," Anne said. "I didn't get a great crop from it, but I got a crop. That gave me some of the money I needed to pay the war taxes, and it meant I didn't have to cut so far into my investments as I would have otherwise. I don't intend to be a beggar when the war ends, and I don't intend for you to be a beggar, either."
"If the choice is between being being rich and being a beggar, that's one thing, Sis," he said. "If the choice is between being a beggar and being dead, that's a different game." His face, its expression already far more stern than it had been before the war, turned bleak as the oncoming winter. "That's what the Confederate States are looking at right now, seems to me: a choice between being beggars and being dead."
He walked up into the cottage. Anne followed him. He tossed the saddlebags and bedroll onto the floor next to the iron-framed cot on which he'd sleep. Looking around, he shook his head. "It's not the way it was any more," he said, half to himself. "Nothing is the way it was any more."
"No," Anne said. "It's not. But-I talked with President Semmes not so long ago. He's worried, yes, but not that worried." She checked herself; if the president hadn't been that worried, would he have introduced the bill calling for Negro troops? Trying to look on the bright side, she pointed to Tom's tunic. "That was a victory, there in the valley."
"And it makes one," her brother answered bitterly. "I pray to God we can hold the ground we gained, too. We need every man in the CSA at the front, and we need every man in the CSA working behind the lines so the men at the front have something to shoot at the damnyankees. If everybody could be two places at once twenty-four hours a day, we'd be fine."