Even in the mild climate hereabouts, a nighttime trip to the privy was a chilly business. She shut the door behind her to keep the cold out of the cottage. Going to the privy was also a smelly, disgusting business. And spiders and bugs and occasional lizards and mice visited the place, too.
Almost absentmindedly, she scooped up the pistol and carried it along with her when she went out into the darkness. She was halfway to the outhouse before she consciously recalled the warning the postman had given her. When she got to the privy, she set the little handgun down beside her before she hiked up her gown.
She spent longer in the noisome place than she'd expected. She had just risen from the pierced wooden seat when she heard voices outside. They were all familiar voices, though she hadn't heard a couple of them in more than a year. "She in dere?" Cassius asked. The hunter-the Red revolutionary leader-wasn't talking loud, but he wasn't making any special effort to keep his voice down, either.
"She in dere," Julia answered more quietly. "You don' wan' to wake she up, Cass. She gots a gun. She come out shootin'."
"Den we shoots she, and dat de end o' one capitalist 'pressor," Cassius said. "We gots dis cottage surrounded. Ain't no way out we ain't got covered. I oughts to know-de place was mine."
"Shootin' too good fo' dat white debbil bitch." Another woman's voice: Cherry's, Anne realized after a moment.
"Oh, is you right about dat!" Julia agreed enthusiastically. "I wants to watch she burn. She use me like I's an animal, she do. Ever since she come back, I wants to see she dead."
See if I give you a Christmas present this year, Julia, Anne thought. She'd got the idea Julia didn't much care for her, but this venomous hatred…no. She shook her head. She'd thought she'd known what the Negroes on Marshlands were thinking. She'd been fatally wrong about Cassius, and now almost as misled about Julia. She wondered if she understood at all what went on inside blacks' minds.
Cherry said, "Her brudder done use me. He have hisself a high old time, right till de end." Her laugh was low and throaty and triumphant. "He don' find out till too late dat I usin' he, too."
So Scipio told me the truth about that. Thinking about what had happened kept Anne from worrying unduly about the predicament she was in now. She'd seen some of it for herself; Cherry had put on airs, even around her, on account of what she did in the bedroom with Jacob.
Cassius said, "Don' matter how she die, so long as she dead. Top o'all de other crimes she do, I hear tell she behin'dat bill dat mystify de niggers to fight fo' de white folks' gummint. We strikes a blow fo' revolutionary justice when we ends de backers o' dat wicked scheme."
"So light de matches, den," Cherry said impatiently.
Through the tiny window cut in the outhouse door, light flared, brilliantly bright. Cassius and the other Reds must have doused the doorway to the cottage-and maybe the walls as well-with kerosene or perhaps even gasoline. Had Anne been inside there, she wouldn't have had a chance in the world to get free. The most she could have hoped for would have been to blow out her own brains before the flames took her.
"How you like it now, Miss Anne?" Julia shouted, exultation in her voice. "How you like it, you cold-eyed debbil?"
Cassius and Cherry and the rest of the Reds howled abuse at the cabin, too. After a moment, so did a rising chorus of Marshlands field hands, roused from their beds by shouts and by flames.
Anne realized that, if she was going to escape, she would have to do it now, while everyone's attention was on the burning cottage and nowhere else. She opened the privy door and stepped outside, holding up a hand to shield her face from the fierce glare of the fire. She started to step away from the outhouse, but then stopped and shut the door behind her-no use giving her foes (which seemed to mean everyone on the Marshlands plantation) a clue as to where she'd been. Maybe the Reds would think smoke and fire had overcome her before she woke up.
She wished her nightgown were any color but white. It made her too easy to spot in the darkness. Putting the privy between her and the fire, she made for the closest trees. Those couple of hundred yards seemed ten miles long.
No sooner had Anne reached the trees than the harsh, flat crack of gunfire came from behind her. Remembering everything Tom and Jacob had said about combat, she threw herself flat. That took care of her worries about the white nightgown, because she landed in cold, clammy mud. Shouts of alarm from the Negroes behind her told her what the gunfire was: rounds in the box of revolver ammunition in the cottage cooking off.
Deliberately, she rolled in the mud, so her back was as dark as her belly. Then she set out for St. Matthews, four or five miles away. A couple of plantations between Marshlands and the town had a sort of spectral half-life, but, after what had just happened to her, she was not inclined to trust her fate to any place where the field hands vastly outnumbered the whites. "I kept the government off them," she said through clenched teeth, "and this is the thanks I got? They'll pay. Oh yes, they'll pay."
After Scipio had visited Marshlands, she'd taken him off her list. When she was in Columbia, she'd learned he'd quit his job and didn't seem to be in town any more. That had been wise of him. She bared her teeth. In the end, it would do him no good. She'd have her revenge on him as on all the others now.
She stayed in the undergrowth alongside the road instead of going straight down it. That slowed her and wounded her bare feet, but left her less visible. As far as she was concerned, the latter was more important.
Every so often, she stopped in the best shelter she could find and listened to try to find out if anyone was pursuing her. She heard nothing. That made her feel only a little safer. She knew how good a hunter Cassius was. But every painful step she took brought her closer to safety.
She was, she thought, more than halfway to St. Matthews when a horse-drawn fire engine, lanterns blazing in the night, came clattering up the road toward Marshlands. A couple of armed guards on horseback trotted along beside it.
Anne stepped out into the roadway, waving her arms. She was so muddy, the fire engine almost rolled over her instead of stopping. "Jesus Christ!" one of the firemen exclaimed. "It's Anne Colleton."
"Don't go any farther," she said. "You haven't got enough firepower. Cassius and his Reds will be waiting to bushwhack you. And besides"-her mouth twisted-"the fire will have done whatever it can do."
The fireman who'd recognized her helped her up onto the engine. It stank of coal smoke from the steam engine that powered the pump. From a long way away, a rifle barked. The fireman grunted and crumpled, shot through the head. Another shot rang out, the bullet ricocheting off the engine before the sound of the report reached her.
"Get the hell out of here, Claude!" one of the guards shouted to the driver. The other guard started shooting in the direction from which the shots had come.
Claude could handle horses. He turned the six-animal team and headed back toward St. Matthews faster than Anne would have thought possible-but not before another fireman got hit in the foot. He cursed furiously, pausing every so often to apologize to Anne for his language.
Cassius, she thought. It has to be Cassius. The iron bulk of the pump shielded her from any more bullets. All she had to do, all the way back to town, was think about how the hunter, the Red, had ruined her twice. But she was still alive, still fighting-and so, in spite of the Negro uprising and everything else, were the Confederate States.
We'll whip the Yankees yet, she thought. And you, Cassius, I'll whip you.