say about drinking whiskey. Now, though-' He shrugged again. 'If he hurts less drunk, is that so bad?'
'Not in the least,' she said. 'All right, Doctor. I'll call you as I need you.'
Benveniste nodded and left. His Ford started up with a bang and a belch, then rattled away.
Anne went upstairs. Her brother was sitting up in bed, propped up by pillows. He had a bit more color than when he'd arrived at Marshlands. Nodding to Anne, he said, 'Here I am, a relic of war,' in his ruined voice.
'Dr. Benveniste said they might come up with new ways to make you better before too long,' Anne told him. Dr. Benveniste hadn't quite said that, but he had said he didn't know much about treating poison-gas cases, so surely he and other medical men would be learning new things about them. And giving her brother hope counted a good deal, too.
'Best thing he could have done for me was shoot me through the head,' Jacob said. 'Morphia's the next best thing, though. I'm still on fire inside, but it's not as big a fire.' He yawned; the drug was making him sleepy. Though his bedroom was rather dim, the pupils of his gray eyes were as small as if he'd been in bright sunshine.
He yawned again, then started to say something. The words turned into a soft snore. Without his seeming to realize it, his eyelids slid shut. The snore got deeper, raspier; Anne could hear the breath bubbling in and out of his tormented lungs, as if he had pneumonia.
She walked out into the hall and called one of the servants: 'Julia!' When the Negro woman had come into Jacob's bedroom, she said, 'I want you to sit here and make sure my brother does not lie down, no matter what. If he starts to slump away from the pillows that are supporting him, you are to straighten him up. Someone will have to be here all the time when he's asleep. I'll make arrangements with Scipio for that. Do you understand what I've told you?'
'Yes, ma'am,' Julia said. 'Don' let Mistuh Jacob lay hisself down, no matter what.'
'That's right. You stay here till he wakes up or till someone takes your place.' When Julia nodded again, Anne went out of the room, half closing the door behind her. Quite cold-bloodedly, she decided to arrange for Jacob's tenders to be chosen from among the younger, better-looking wenches of the household. She didn't know whether, injured as he was, he would be able to do anything with them or have them do anything for him. If he could, she would give him the chance.
In her office, a few doors down from Jacob's room, the telephone rang. She hurried down the hallway, the silk of her dress rustling around her ankles. Picking up the earpiece, she spoke into the mouthpiece: 'Anne Colleton.'
'How do, Miss Anne?' The voice on the other end of the line had a back- country rasp to it: not a Carolina accent at all, and certainly not the almost English phrasing of her broker, who was the likeliest person to call at this hour and who came from an old Charleston family. She couldn't immediately place who this caller was, though he did sound vaguely familiar. When she didn't say anything for a few seconds, he went on, 'This here's Roger Kimball, Miss Anne. How are you?'
She needed a moment to place the name, even though he'd written to her more than once after their encounter on the train to New Orleans: the randy submersible skipper. 'Hello, Lieutenant Kimball,' she said. 'I'm well, thank you. I didn't expect to hear from you. Where are you calling from?'
'Lieutenant Commander Kimball now,' he told her proudly, 'though I reckon you know me well enough to call me Roger.' That was true in a biblical sense, but probably in no other. 'Where am I at? I'm in Charleston, that's where. Fishing over on the other coast is so bad, they moved a good many of us back here.'
'I wish you luck with your fishing,' Anne said. That was true. After what the damnyankees had done to her brother, she wanted every ship flying their flag to go straight to the bottom of the sea. True or not, though, she wished she'd phrased it differently. Kimball would think…
Kimball did think. 'Since I'm so close now, I was figurin' on gettin' me some liberty time, and then comin' up there and…' He let his voice fade, but she knew what he had in mind. Since she'd already given herself to him, he thought he could have her any time he wanted.
That she'd made a related calculation about Jacob and her serving women never once entered her mind. What did enter it was anger. 'Lieutenant Commander Kimball, my brother just now came from the Western Kentucky front, suffering from chlorine in the lungs. I am not really in the best of positions to entertain visitors'-let him take that however he would-'at the present time.'
'I'm very sorry to hear that, Miss Anne,' the submariner said after a short silence. Sorry to hear which? Anne wondered. That Jacob's been gassed, or that I won't let you lay me right now? No sooner had the thought crossed her mind than Kimball continued, 'That chlorine, that's filthy stuff, by everything I've heard tell about it. I hope your brother didn't get it too bad.'
'It isn't good,' Anne said, a larger admission than she would have made to someone with whom she was socially more intimate. The physical intimacy she'd known with Kimball was of different substance, somehow; despite it, the two of them remained near-strangers.
'I really do hope he gets better,' Kimball said, and then, half to himself, 'Nice to know there's somethin' in this war you don't have to worry about aboard a submersible.' That brief bit of self-reflection done, he went on, 'All right, I won't come up there right away-you'll be busy and all. Maybe in a few weeks, after I make a patrol or two.'
His arrogance was breathtaking, so much so that Anne, instead of going from mere anger to fury, admired the quality of his nerve. He had been enjoyable, on the train and in New Orleans, a town made for enjoyment if ever there was one. Thinking about Jacob, she also thought she was liable to need relief from thinking about Jacob. She tapped a fingernail on the telephone case; indecision was unlike her. 'All right, Roger, maybe in a few weeks,' she said at last, but then warned, 'Do telephone first.'
'I promise, Miss Anne,' he said. She didn't know what his promises were worth, but thought him likely to keep that one. He started whistling before he hung up the telephone. Anne wished she had any reason to be so happy.
George Enos set his gutting knife down on the deck of the steam trawler Spray, opened the ice-filled hold, and threw in the haddock and halibut he'd just finished cleaning. Then he went back to the latest load of fish the trawl had just scooped up from the bottom of Brown's Bank.
The seaman who was helping him clean the fish, a fellow named Harvey Kemmel who spoke with a harsh Midwestern accent utterly unlike Enos' New England dialect, wiped his face on his sleeve and said, 'This here fishing for a living, it's damned hard work, you know?'
'I had noticed that, as a matter of fact,' George answered dryly as he yanked another squirming halibut up off the deck, slit its belly open, and pulled out the guts. He tossed the fish into the hold and grabbed another one.
Patrick O'Donnell came aft, a mug of the Cookie's good coffee clamped in his right hand. With his left, he slapped the side of the hold. 'Nice the boat's so much like the Ripple,' he said. 'Means I don't hardly have to think to know where things are at.'
'Same with me, Skipper,' George Enos agreed, 'and I heard Charlie say the same thing about the galley. I like it that we're all still together-except poor Lucas, I mean.'
'Me, too,' O'Donnell agreed. He glanced down at the load of fish Enos and Kemmel were gutting. 'We bring those into Boston, we'll make ourselves some pretty fair money off 'em.' His gaze swung northward. Brown's Bank lay north and east of Georges Bank, where the Ripple had usually operated. In time of peace, that would have mattered only because it cost them more fuel to reach. Now, with the southern coast of Nova Scotia, some of it still unconquered, not so far away, other concerns also mattered. Under his breath, O'Donnell added, 'If we get back to Boston.'
Work went on. Work always went on, and there were never enough men to do it. Like Harvey Kemmel, several of the other sailors were working aboard a steam trawler for the first time. That meant O'Donnell and Enos and even Charlie White spent an inordinate amount of time explaining what needed doing, which in turn meant they didn't have as much time as they would have liked to do their own work.
One of the new men, a tall, skinny fellow named Schoonhoven who'd started life on a Dakota farm, was the first to spot the approaching boat. 'Skipper,' he called, his voice cracking with what might have been alarm or excitement or a blend of the two, 'tell me that's not a submarine.'
O'Donnell raised a telescope-just like the one he'd had aboard the Ripple — to his eye. 'All right, Willem, I'll tell you that's not a submarine,' he said, and then, after a perfectly timed pause, he added, 'if you want me to lie to you.'
