not far away. 'Time may come when, if we do see anything interesting, we'll blow it to hell and gone.' He paused to shift the chaw of tobacco in his cheek and spit a stream of brown juice onto the red dirt. 'I'd like that.'
'So would I, Sergeant; so would I,' Captain Stuart said. 'My father got the chance to hit the damnyankees a good lick thirty years ago, back in the Second Mexican War.' He pointed over the river. 'They repaired the White House and the Capitol, but we can always hit them again.'
He struck a pose intended to show Featherston he was not only a third- generation Confederate officer but also as handsome as either his famous father- hero of the Second Mexican War- or his even more famous grandfather- hero of the War of Secession and martyr during the Second Mexican War. That might even have been true, though the mustache and little tuft of chin beard he wore made him look more like a Frenchman than a dashing cavalry officer of the War of Secession.
Well, Featherston had nothing against handsome, though he didn't incline that way himself. Though he was a first-generation sergeant, he had nothing against third-generation officers… so long as they knew what they were doing. And he certainly had nothing against Frenchmen. The guns in his battery were copies of French 75s.
Pointing over to the one at which he'd looked before, he said, 'Sir, all you got to do is tell me which windows you want knocked out of the White House and I'll take care of it for you. You can rely on that.'
'Oh, I do, Sergeant, I do,' Captain Stuart answered. A horsefly landed on the sleeve of his butternut tunic. The British called the same color khaki, but, being tradition-bound themselves, they didn't try to make the Confederacy change the name it used. Stuart jerked his arm. The fly buzzed away.
'If they'd had guns like this in your grandfather's day, sir, we'd have given Washington hell from the minute Virginia chose freedom,' Featherston said. 'Not much heavier than an old Napoleon, but four and a half miles' worth of range, and accurate out to the end of it-'
'That would have done the job, sure enough,' Stuart agreed. 'But God was on our side as things were, and the Yankee tyrants could no more stand against men who wanted to be free than King Canute could hold back the tide.' He took off his visored cap-with piping in artillery red-and fanned himself with it. 'Hot and sticky,' he complained, as if that were surprising in Virginia in July. He raised his voice: 'Pompey!' When the servant did not appear at once, he muttered under his breath: 'Shiftless, worthless, lazy nigger! Pompeyr
'Here I is, suh!' the Negro said, hurrying up at a trot. Sweat beaded his cheeks and the bald crown of his head.
'Took you long enough,' Stuart grumbled. 'Fetch me a glass of some thing cold. While you're at it, bring one for the sergeant here, too.'
'Somethin' col'. Yes, suh.' Pompey hurried off.
Watching him go, Stuart shook his head. 'I do wonder if we made a misake, letting our British friends persuade us to manumit the niggers after the Second Mexican War.' He sighed. 'I don't suppose we had much choice, but even so, we may well have been wrong. They're an inferior race, Sergeant. Now that they are free, we still can't trust them to take a man's place. So what has freedom got them? A little money in their pockets to spend foolishly, not a great deal more.'
Featherston had been a boy when the Confederacy amended the Constitution to require manumission. He remembered his father, an overseer, cussing about it fit to turn the air blue.
Captain Stuart sighed again. He might have been thinking along with Featherston, for he said, 'The amendment never would have passed if we hadn't admitted Chihuahua and Sonora after we bought them from Maximilian II. They didn't understand things so well down there-they still don't, come to that. But we wouldn't have our own transcontinental railroad without them, so it may have been for the best after all. Better than having to ship through the United States, that's certain.'
'Yes, sir,' Featherston agreed. 'The Yankees thought so, too, or they wouldn't have gone to war to keep us from having 'em.'
'And look what it got them,' Stuart said. 'Their capital bombarded, a blockade on both coasts, all the naval losses they could stand, their cities up on the Great Lakes shelled. Stupid is what they were-no other word for it.'
'Yes, sir,' the sergeant repeated. Like any good Southerner, he took the stupidity of his benighted distant cousins north of the Potomac as an article of faith. 'If Austria does go to war against Serbia — '
It wasn't changing the subject, and Captain Stuart understood as much. He picked up where Featherston left off: 'If that happens, France and Russia side with Serbia. You can't blame 'em; the Serbian government didn't do anything wrong, even if it was crazy Serbs who murdered the Austrian crown prince. But then what does Germany do? If Germany goes to war, and especially if England comes in, we're in the scrap, no doubt about it.'
'And so are they.' Featherston looked across the river again. 'And Washington goes up in smoke.' His wave encompassed the heights. 'Our battery of three-inchers here is a long way from the biggest guns we've got trained on 'em, either.'
'Not hardly,' Stuart said with a vigorous nod. 'You think Cowboy Teddy Roosevelt doesn't know it?' He spoke the U.S. president's name with vast contempt. 'Haven't seen him south of Philadelphia since this mess blew up, nor anybody from their Congress, either.'
Featherston chuckled. 'You don't see anybody much there when it gets hot.' He wasn't talking about the weather. 'The last thirty years, they find somewheres else to go when it looks like there's liable to be shooting between us and them.'
'They were skedaddlers when we broke loose from 'em, and they're still skedaddlers today.' Stuart spoke with conviction. Then his arrogant expression softened slightly. 'One thing they always did have, though, was a godawful lot of guns.'
Now he looked across the Potomac, not at the White House and Capitol so temptingly laid out before him but at the heights back of the low ground by the river on which Washington sat. In those heights were forts with guns manned by soldiers in uniforms not of butternut but of green so pale it was almost gray. The forts had been there to protect Washington since the War of Secession. They'd been earthworks then. Some, those with fieldpieces like the ones Captain Stuart commanded, still were. Those that held big guns, though, were concrete reinforced with steel, again like their Confederate opposite numbers.
'I don't care what they have,' Featherston declared. 'It won't stop us from blowing that nest of damnyankees right off the map.'
'That's so.' Captain Stuart's gaze swung from the United States back to his own side of the river and Arlington mansion, the Doric-columned ancestral estate of the Lee family. 'That won't survive, either. They'd have wrecked it thirty years ago if their gunnery hadn't been so bad. They aren't as good as we are now'-again, he spoke of that as if it were an article of faith-'but they're better than they used to be, and they're plenty good enough for that.'
''Fraid you're right, sir,' Featherston agreed mournfully. 'They hate Marse Robert and everything he stood for.'
'Which only proves what kind of people they are,' Stuart said. He turned his head. 'Here's Pompey, back at last. Took you long enough.'
'I's right sorry, Marse Jeb,' said the Negro; he carried on a tray two sweati ng glasses in which ice cubes tinkled invitingly. 'Fs right sorry, yes I is. Here-I was makin' this here nice fresh lemonade fo' you and Marse Jake, is what took me so long. July in Virginia ain't no fun for nobody. Here you go, suh.'
Featherston took his glass of lemonade, which was indeed both cold and good. As he drank, though, he narrowly studied Pompey. He didn't think Stuart's servant was one bit sorry. When a Negro apologized too much, when he threw 'Marse' around as if he were still a slave, odds were he was shamming and, behind his servile mask, either laughing at or hating the white men he thought he was deceiving. Thanks to what Jake's father had taught him, he knew nigger tricks.
What could you do about that kind of shamming, though? The depressing answer was, not much. If you insisted-rightly, Featherston was convinced- blacks show whites due deference, how could you punish them for showing more deference than was due? You couldn't, not unless they were openly insolent, which Pompey hadn't been.
In fact, his show of exaggerated servility had taken in his master. 'Get on back to the tent now, Pompey,' Stuart said, setting the empty glass on the Negro's tray. He smacked his lips. 'That was mighty tasty, I will tell you.'
'Glad you like it, suh,' Pompey said. 'How's yours, Marse Jake?'
