the man who later married Orry's sister, Ashton. Virgilia encouraged the slave to run away. When he did, he succeeded.
Ashton Main, beautiful and unprincipled, had fancied Billy for a while, but he soon saw the fine and genuine qualities of Ashton's younger sister, Brett. As headstrong and crazed as Virgilia in some ways, the rejected Ashton had waited for her moment of vengeance; she conspired to have Billy murdered in a trumped-up duel not two hours after he married Brett at Mont Royal. Cousin Charles had dealt with that plot in his direct cavalry officer's way — rather violent, it was — and Orry banished Ashton and her fire-eater husband, James Huntoon, from Main land forever.
Virgilia's black lover, the slave whose escape she'd assisted, had been slain with others of John Brown's murderous gang at Harpers Ferry. Virgilia, at the scene and panic-stricken, had fled back home and was thus at Belvedere the night Orry made his perilous visit. It was this visit and the circumstances leading to it that a grieved and thoughtful George pondered as he rode up the last bit of steep road to Belvedere.
Orry's iconoclastic older brother, Cooper, had usually disagreed with most Southerners regarding their peculiar institution. In contrast to an economy based on the land, and the working of it by human property, he pointed to the example of the North — not perfect by any means, but in step with the new world-wide age of industrialism. In the North, free workers were speeding into a prosperous future to the hum of machines, not dragging a load of rusty methods and ideologies as heavy as wrist cuffs and leg manacles, and fully as hampering. As for the traditional apology of Cooper's state and region — that slaves were more secure, therefore happier, than Northern factory workers fastened by invisible chains to huge, hammering machines — he laughed that off. A factory worker might indeed starve to death on what the owners paid him. But he could not be bought or sold like mere chattel. He could always walk away, and no posse would ride in pursuit; no laborer would be recaptured, flogged, and hung from the flywheel of his great engine.
Cooper sought to establish a shipbuilding industry in Charleston and had envisioned, even started to construct, a huge iron vessel patterned after one designed by the British engineering genius Brunei. George had put capital into the venture, as much for the sake of friendship and belief in Cooper's principles as for the possibility of quick profit, which was slim.
In the final days of Sumter's survival as a Union bastion, with war no longer a doubtful question, Orry had gathered up as much cash as he could by mortgaging family property. It amounted to six hundred fifty thousand dollars of the original one million nine hundred thousand George had invested. Despite Orry's pronounced Southern accent, he had undertaken to carry the money to Lehigh Station in a small, plain satchel, by train. The risk was enormous, yet he came. Because of his friendship and because of a debt of honor.
The night the two friends met, Virgilia furtively summoned the mob — most certainly to lynch the visitor. But the attempt failed, and Orry had gotten safely on a late train and now was — where? South Carolina? If he had reached home safely, he had at least one chance for happiness. Madeline LaMotte, the woman whom Orry had loved, as she had loved him despite her imprisonment in a disastrous marriage, had rushed to Mont Royal to warn of the conspiracy against Billy's life. Once there, in defiance of the husband who had deliberately and systematically mistreated her for years, she stayed.
The aftermath of Sumter forced other decisions, however uncertain or emotional. Charles had enlisted in a South Carolina legion of cavalry after resigning from the United States Army. His best friend, Billy, remained with the Union engineers. And Billy's Southern-born wife, Brett, was living in Lehigh Station. The personal world of the Mains and the Hazards hung in a precarious balance as massive, threatening, unpredictable forces gathered.
It was that fact which George had been shunning these past fourteen days. Life was fragile. Friendship the same. Before parting, he and Orry had pledged that the war would never sunder the bonds between them. In this night's remembered ugliness, shrieks of pain, geysers of fire, George wondered whether they were naive. He felt, almost wildly, that he must do something to reaffirm his dedication to defending the ties.
He stabled his horse and went directly to Belvedere's library, a vast room with smells of leather and fine book papers. It was as silent as the night house.
When he crossed toward his desk, he spied a memento always kept on an otherwise bare refectory table. It was a conical object, rough-textured, measuring six inches from apex to base. The dark brown color indicated heavy iron content.
He realized why it had attracted his eye. Someone — a maid, probably — had moved the object from its customary position. He picked up the meteorite and continued to hold it while he envisioned the place in the past where he'd found it — the hills around West Point during his cadet days.
What lay in his hand was a piece of a much larger meteorite that had traveled through starry dark, and distances beyond his power to comprehend. Star-iron, the old men of the trade — his ancestors — called it. Known since the pharaohs ruled the Nile kingdoms.
Iron. The most potent stuff in the universe. The raw material for building civilization, or leveling it. From iron came the immense death weapons George planned to cast for a whole battery of reasons: patriotism, hatred of slavery, profit, a paternal responsibility for those who worked for him.
What lay in his hand was, in its way, war. He replaced it on the table precisely where it belonged, but he did so quickly.
He lit the gas mantle above the desk. Opened the lower drawer in which he had put the small, plain satchel — for remembrance. He looked at the satchel a while. Then, out of profound emotion, he inked a pen and wrote with great speed.
He started to inscribe the initial letter of his first name but then, with a swift, sad smile, wrote instead his West Point nickname.
He slowly folded the sheets; slowly placed them in the satchel and latched it; slowly closed the drawer and arose to the accompaniment of several irritating noises from his joints. Windows were open throughout Belvedere because of the warm night. He smelled the diminishing fetor of burning carried by the high wind. He felt cold and old as he put out the gas and wearily climbed the stairs.
BOOK ONE
A VISION FROM SCOTT
