her name, and said, 'I believe you have the Presidential Suite reserved for me.'
'Uh, Miss Colleton, I'm uh, very sorry, ma'am,' the clerk said, plainly alarmed at having to give her bad news, 'but we've, uh, had to move you to the Beauregard Suite on the third floor.'
She froze him with a glance. 'Oh? And why is that?' Her voice was low, calm, reasonable… dangerous.
'Because, ma'am, President Wilson's in the Presidential Suite,' he blurted.
'Oh,' she said again. Her laugh, much to the unhappy clerk's relief, held acquiescence. 'Nothing you can do about that, I suppose. I didn't know he was going to be in Charleston.'
'Yes, ma'am,' the clerk said. 'He's come down to launch the Fort Sumter — you know, the new cruiser that just got built. That's tomorrow. Tonight there's a reception and dance here. In fact…' He turned back to the rectangular array of message slots behind the registration desk and pulled out a cream-colored envelope. 'You have an invitation here. When Mr. Wilson's private secretary learned who had been booked into the Presidential Suite before him, he made sure to give you one.'
'I should hope so,' Anne said, conscious of her position in South Carolina. Then she turned the warmth up on her smile. 'That was thoughtful. The Beauregard Suite, you say. It will do.'
After she'd ridden upstairs in the lift and tipped the servants carrying her bags, she sat down on the bed and laughed till tears rolled down her cheeks. The Charleston Hotel was modern enough to boast telephones in its fancy suites, the Beauregard among them. She made a call. 'Roger?' she said when the connection was established. 'I'm afraid I won't be able to see you tonight after all… Yes, I'm seeing someone else… Who?… Why should I tell you?… Oh, all right, I will — it's President Wilson.'
That produced a good fifteen-second silence on the other end of the line. Then Roger Kimball said, 'I hope you're not going to see as much of him as you were going to see of me.'
Though the submariner couldn't see her, she nodded approvingly. He had gall. She admired that. 'How can I be sure?' she said. 'He hasn't asked me.' That made Kimball sputter, as she'd hoped. She went on, 'I will see you tomorrow — unless the president sweeps me off my feet.'
Kimball chuckled. 'Or you sweep him off his. But he's a long ways from young. Two nights running'd probably be tough for him. Tomorrow, then.'
'He does have gall,' Anne murmured after she'd hung up. She pondered her luggage. She'd brought clothes for going out with a young, none-too-wealthy naval officer, as well as some frilly, silky things for more private moments with him. What did she have that was suitable for dinner with the President of the Confederate States of America?
She went through the dresses she had with her. When she came to the summer-weight rose floral voile, she smiled. The full, pleated skirt would flow nicely around her legs as she moved, and the laced bodice over the white voile chemisette might draw the eye even of a president no longer young. The dress was wrinkled from its time in the suitcase. She grabbed for the bell pull by the bed. A maid knocked at the door less than a minute later. She gave the colored woman the dress for pressing.
As she'd been sure it would, it came back in plenty of time for the dinner, which, the invitation said, was to begin at eight o'clock. She had expected to have dined earlier and to be engaged in other things by then, but what you ex pected and what you got weren't always the same.
Like the Presidential Suite, the Beauregard Suite had not only cold but also hot running water. Anne ran the bathtub full and washed away the dust and grime of the trip from Marshlands down to Charleston. She knew she would start perspiring again as soon as she stepped out of the tub, but no one could do anything about that, not in South Carolina. She was glad she wore her hair short and straight, so the bath did not badly disarrange it.
She went downstairs about half past seven. As she'd expected, a crowd of rich and prominent South Carolinians had already gathered outside the doors of the banquet hall; a couple of Negro attendants with almost the presence of Scipio made sure those doors did not open prematurely.
Being a rich and prominent South Carolinian herself, Anne Colleton knew a good many of the people there. Being younger, more attractive, and more fe male than most of them, she had as much company as she wanted, and per haps rather more. She saw a couple of wives whose husbands had abandoned them to talk to her sending imperfectly friendly looks in her direction. She sent back the same sort of carnivorous smiles she'd given the fool in the Ford.
They pride themselves on being useless, she thought. They don't know anything, and they don't want to know anything. If you asked one of them to drive a motorcar, she'd tell you how unladylike it was, and how she had a chauffeur to take her everywhere she wanted to go. Old-fashioned, boring frumps. She wondered what they would have made of the exhibition of modern art she'd organized. Her lips pulled back in even more contempt. As if any of them could have brought off a show like that!
The women's stares turned even more poisonous when, after opening the doors, the attendants began escorting people to their seats. Not only was she placed at the president's table, but right across from him. 'We were told to put you here, ma'am,' her Negro guide said, 'to make amends for Mr. Wilson taking your room away from you.' He pulled out her chair so she could sit down.
Woodrow Wilson strode in, long and lean, at exactly eight o'clock. Everyone stood to honor him. He had something less than the almost demoniac energy of Theodore Roosevelt; you could not imagine him leading a charge across no-man's-land, as you would with the Yankee Kaiser. His appeal was more to the intellect, and he gave the impression of having that and to spare.
Which was not to say he could not be charming in his own way. Smiling across the table at Anne, he said, 'I do hope you will forgive me for so rudely dispossessing you this afternoon, Miss Colleton.'
'Quite all right. I feel I'm doing my patriotic duty by moving, Your Excellency,' Anne answered. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw she was getting more looks from people who didn't know exactly who she was. Down deep where it didn't show, she grinned. President Wilson had known who she was long before he'd taken the suite away from her. He'd visited Marshlands, after all. And Anne would have been astonished if more than half a dozen men in the banquet hall had contributed more money to Wilson's election campaign back in 1909 than she had. Her brothers had laughed at her then, but she thought the investment had paid off well.
No sooner had the thought of Tom and Jacob crossed her mind than Wilson said, 'I understand one of your gallant brothers was wounded this summer in a U.S. attack.'
'He was gassed, yes,' Anne said shortly. Having Jacob back at Marshlands in such a state would have been hard enough. Having him back at Marshlands in such a state and drugged on morphia and drunk when he wasn't drugged (and sometimes when he was) and fornicating his way through the colored wenches was ten times worse. That Cherry was getting so stuck up, it was as if she thought herself the rightful mistress of Marshlands.
At her anger, Wilson's narrow, deeply lined face hardened. 'It is because the United States, like the Huns across the sea with whom they are allied, employ such vile and unrestrained means of waging war that they and their arrogant pretensions must be checked.'
Down the table, a plump man with a red face that had grown redder with each glass of wine he'd poured down said loudly, 'The damnyankees need whipping on account of they're damnyankees. Once you've gone and said that, what more needs saying?'
Anne nodded emphatic agreement. But Woodrow Wilson shook his head. 'I would share this continent with them if I could,' he said. 'If tomorrow they would agree to a peace based on the status quo ante helium with us and our brave Canadian comrades, I would accept on the instant. Then this half of the world would be at peace, and we could work toward peace as well be tween our allies on the one hand and Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other.'
'They won't agree to any such thing, though,' Anne said. 'They tried to keep us from becoming a nation in the first place and they still think we be long to them by rights. If they can snuff us out, they will. We can't let them.'
'Unfortunately, Miss Colleton, I fear you are correct,' the president said sadly. 'And so we have no choice but to continue the struggle, confident that God and justice are on our side. I came down to South Carolina to celebrate our production of another tool toward our ultimate triumph.' He still seemed unhappy about such duty, and paused, shifting from the political to the per sonal: 'But you undoubtedly know why I am here. What brings you to Charleston? Business or pleasure?'
He did not say that slightingly, as many a man might have: he knew she was a businesswoman in her own right. 'Pleasure,' she answered. It was, at the moment, pleasure she was forgoing for the sake of the dinner, but Presi dent Wilson did not need to know about that.
