least for as long as you don't get in my hair while you're here. You never used to. Will you now? Harder to tell.
Her brother's mouth set in a hard line: another expression she'd never seen on his face till now. 'I'm going back to the front in three days' time,' he said, his voice flat. 'Till the war is done, this is the dream. And when the war is done, it's liable to disappear like a dream, too.'
'What are you talking about?' Of all the people in the world, Anne should have been able to keep up with-to keep ahead of-her brother. Ever since they were tiny, she'd been the clever one, the dominant one, in the family. She'd taken that so much for granted, it had never occurred to her things might change.
'Never mind.' Tom stepped past her, into the hallway. His grin was more like the one she'd known, though not quite the same. 'Feels good to get out of the sun.' He kept on walking, and looked up toward the second-floor galleries. Like the grin, his chuckle had something new in it-restraint, maybe. Pointing, he said, 'Still got the funny pictures hanging on the walls, do you?'
'Some of them,' Anne said; he'd teased her about the exhibition ever since she'd had the idea for it. 'Marcel Duchamp is still here, too.'
'Is he?' Tom's lips thinned again. 'Do we have any liquor left, and how many yellow babies are due?' That wasn't teasing, it was cold contempt, one more thing she wasn't used to hearing from him. That it matched her own feelings about the Frenchman was, next to the unaccustomed harshness, a small thing.
She decided taking Tom literally might be the best way to defuse the situation: 'There's enough whiskey left for you to have a drink, if you want one.' When her brother nodded, she called for Scipio. As usual, he answered the call faster than should have been possible. 'Two whiskeys over ice,' she told him. He bowed and disappeared again.
'Ice,' Tom said. 'Saw plenty of that this past winter. Not in my drink, though.' He shook himself, as if realizing at last he really was away from the trenches of the Roanoke valley. 'I heard from Jacob not long before I hopped on the train down here. He's well, or was then.'
'I got a letter from him just the other day,' Anne answered. 'He said it looks like the Yankees are up to something in Kentucky, but nobody seems to know what it is or when the storm breaks.'
'Won't be long now,' Tom said. 'Roads should all be dry. They can build their supply dumps up to as big as they want them, put their reserves in place. As soon as they're ready, they'll hit us.' He spoke again like someone discussing the ins and outs of a business he knew well. Musingly, he went on, 'Show probably would have started there already if they hadn't had to pull men to deal with the revolt in Utah.'
Anne nodded. 'Between the Mormons and the Socialists, they have so much trouble inside their own borders, it hurts them when they try to fight us.' She spoke with vindictive relish. Scipio returned then, two tumblers full of amber whiskey gleaming on a silver tray. Ice clinked gently. Anne took one drink, Tom the other. She said, 'It's not like that here, thank God. We all stand behind the cause.'
To her amazement, her brother threw back his head and laughed. 'This is the dream, all right,' he said, and knocked back his whiskey with a flick of the wrist. 'You're not living in the real world, that's certain.'
Being the object of her brother's scorn angered her. 'Who in the Confederate States throws bombs and rises up against the government?' she demanded, and then answered her own question: 'No one, that's who.'
'No?' Tom set the tumbler down hard on the tray Scipio still held. 'These past few months, they've executed a couple of dozen niggers in my division alone. Reds, every last one of 'em, out-and-out Reds. Worse than plain old Socialists and Mormons put together, if you ask me.'
'That's not the same as-' Anne began.
Her brother cut her off, one more thing he wouldn't have done-wouldn't have dared do-before the war. 'And that's just in my division alone. Others, it's been worse. And God only knows how deep the rot has spread, away from the front.'
'I've heard that. I don't believe it,' Anne said firmly. 'It's not a problem here, I can tell you that much.'
When she used that tone of voice, it was supposed to make Tom shut up and knuckle under. It always had in the past. It didn't any more. 'Everybody says the same thing-till they get their noses rubbed in it,' he told her. 'A plantation this size, if there's not a Red cell somewhere on it, I'll eat my hat.' He pointed to the brown felt he'd hung just inside the door, and turned a hard and thoughtful gaze on Scipio.
That was too much for Anne. 'Tom, stop this at once, or you'll make me sorry you've come home,' she said. 'Scipio has raised both of us since we were babies. The idea that he could be a Red-it's disgusting. That's the only word I can find for it.'
'Things change.' Tom Colleton swung back toward her. He leaned forward a little. The implied threat of attack made Anne take half a step back before she realized what she'd done. And her brother did attack, though only with words: 'You're the one who's always going on about change. It's not as much fun as you make it out to be, not all the time it isn't. And if you think it can't happen right here at Marshlands, you're deliberately blinding yourself.'
Anne stared, first at him, then at Scipio. Her brother's face was grim and intent. Scipio showed nothing of what he thought, but then, he never did. Anne finished her whiskey, then, even harder than her brother had done, slammed the tumbler down onto the tray the butler was holding. A chunk of ice jumped out, leaving a little wet trail as it skidded across the polished silver surface.
'Get me another drink, Scipio.' She kept her voice low, but it was brittle with fury even so. The butler hurried away. When he came back a moment later with the second whiskey, she drank it fast, too. She could feel the liquor building a transparent wall between her and the world, but even that numbing could not disguise the fact that her kid brother's homecoming, far from being the celebration she'd expected, looked more like a disaster.
Percy Stone was dressed in his flying togs and had his camera by his side, but that hadn't kept him from sitting in on a poker game while he waited for Jonathan Moss to finish getting ready to fly. By the expression on his face, it hadn't kept him from losing money to Lefty the mechanic, either. He was in good company there; almost everybody rash enough to sit down with Lefty ended up sadder, if not necessarily wiser.
'Oh, thank God-duty calls,' Stone said when Moss came in. 'I think I'd sooner go up there and get shot at than stay here and get skinned.' Amid laughter, he studied his cards, then tossed a big silver coin into the pot. 'Raise a dollar.'
'And other one.' The mechanic named Byron tossed in a folded bill.
Two other players threw in their hands with various noises of disgust. Lefty said, 'I'll see those and bump it another three.' He made his five dollars with a gold half-eagle.
'That's enough for me,' Stone said, and folded. Byron looked harassed, but called-and promptly regretted it. Chuckling, Lefty scooped up the pot.
'I could have told you not to play cards with Lefty,' Moss said as Stone picked up the camera and the two fliers walked out to their Wright 17. 'As a matter of fact, I have told you not to play cards with Lefty.'
'It's the Socialist in me,' Stone answered. Moss let out a questioning grunt. The observer explained: 'I make more money than Lefty does, but at the poker table we redistribute the wealth.' He shook his head. 'I wouldn't mind it so much if the redistribution went my way a little more often.'
Moss blew air out through his lips with a snuffling noise, like a horse. 'I'm a Democrat,' he said. 'Always have been, probably always will be. If I earn something, I figure it's mine, and I want to keep it. I don't much like riots, either, so Socialism was a hard sell for me even before the Remembrance Day horrors.'
'That was pretty bad, if you believe what you read in the newspapers,' Stone agreed. He lifted the camera into his cockpit, then climbed in after it. Once he'd set it in the mount, though, he added, 'Of course, if you believe what you read in the newspapers, we've already won the war four or five times by now, which does make me wonder what the two of us are doing, going up in this contraption.' He slapped the doped linen fabric covering the side of the fuselage. It was taut, and thumped like a drum.
He had such a disarming manner to him that even political arguments that could have turned hot and heavy in a hurry got defused. 'Earning our salaries, so you can give yours to the ground crew,' Moss replied, scrambling into the forward cockpit.
'You have less faith in my card-playing than I do, and I didn't think that was possible,' Stone said. He whacked the pilot on the shoulder with a length of rubber tubing to which a cheap tin funnel had been attached. 'Stick this up to your ear and let's see how it does.'
The rubber tubing was of the sort that ran from the speedometer to the pitot tube out at the far end of the wing. Moss undid the funnel and stuck it through one ear hole of his flying helmet, then fixed it to the tube again.
