as she would, though, she couldn't make herself sorry she'd done it.
She shared the small women's wing of the Charleston city jail with a couple of drunks and a couple of streetwalkers. They all kept sending her awestruck looks because she was locked up on a murder charge. She hadn't imagined anything like that. It was funny, if you looked at it the right way.
A matron with a face like a clenched fist came down the hall and stopped in front of Sylvia's cell. 'Your lawyer is here,' she said, and unlocked the door. Then she quickly stepped back, as if afraid Sylvia might overpower her and escape. Sylvia found that pretty funny, too.
Her lawyer was a chubby, white-mustached, very pink man named Bishop Polk Magrath. He insisted that she call him Bish. She'd never called anyone Bish in her life, but didn't argue. He sat on one side of a table in a tiny visiting room, she on the other. The matron stood close by to make sure they didn't pass anything back and forth.
'I still don't understand why you're helping me,' she said. She'd said that before, and hadn't got any kind of answer that made sense to her.
Now she did, after a fashion. Magrath's blue, blue eyes sparkled. 'You don't seem to have realized what a cause celebre your case has become, ma'am,' he said. 'I'll draw more notice for defending you than I would in ten years of ordinary cases.'
'I don't see how you'll draw notice for defending me and losing,' Sylvia said. 'I did it.' She hadn't tried to run after shooting Kimball. She'd given her revolver to the first man who stuck his head out the door of another apartment and waited for the police to come arrest her.
'Let's just put it like this, Mrs. Enos,' the lawyer said: 'There are a good many people in this town who think Mr. Kimball deserved what you gave him, a good many people who aren't the least bit sorry he's dead. If we can get enough of them on a jury, you might just see Rhode Island again.'
'Massachusetts,' Sylvia said automatically. She scratched her head. 'I don't follow you at all. Isn't-wasn't- Roger Kimball a hero down here for sinking the Ericsson?'
'Oh, he is, ma'am. To some people, he is,' Magrath said. By the expression on the matron's face, she might well have been one of those people. The lawyer went on, 'But he's not a hero to everybody in the Confederate States, not after what happened last June he's not.'
'Oh,' Sylvia said softly. At last, a light went on in her head. 'Because he was a Freedom Party bigshot, you mean.'
'What a clever lady you are, Mrs. Enos.' Magrath beamed at her. 'That's right. That's just exactly right. There are people in this country-there are people in this town-who would be happy if the same thing that happened to Roger Kimball would happen to the whole Freedom Party.'
One of those people, whoever they might be, was without a doubt paying Bishop Polk Magrath's fees. Sylvia certainly wasn't. She'd spent more than she could afford getting a passport and a one-way ticket down to Charleston. She hadn't expected she'd be going back to Boston. Maybe she'd been wrong.
'Time's up for this visit,' the tough-looking matron said. Sylvia obediently got to her feet. The lawyer started to reach across the table to shake hands with her. A glance from the matron stopped him. He contented himself with tipping his derby instead. 'Come along,' the matron told Sylvia, and Sylvia came.
Halfway back to her cell, she asked, 'Will supper be more of that cornmeal mush?' It didn't taste like much of anything, but it filled her stomach.
As if she hadn't spoken, the matron said, 'You damnyankees killed my husband and my son. and my brother's got a hook where his hand used to be.'
'I'm sorry,' Sylvia said. 'I haven't got a brother, and my son's too young to be a soldier. But the man I shot snuck up on my husband and more than a hundred other sailors after the war was over, and he didn't just kill them-he murdered them like he'd shot them in the back.'
The matron said nothing more till they got back to Sylvia's cell. As she locked Sylvia inside once more, she remarked, 'Grits for supper again, yes,' and went on her way.
'What's your lawyer got to say?' one of the streetwalkers called to Sylvia. 'A lawyer-God almighty.' She sounded as if she never expected to enjoy a lawyer's professional services, though a lawyer might enjoy hers.
Two days later, the hard-faced matron marched up to Sylvia's cell and announced, 'You've got another visitor.' Disapproval congealed on her like fat in a pan cooling on the stove.
'Is it-Bish?' Sylvia still had to work to say that. The matron shook her head. Sylvia frowned in confusion. Now that Kimball was dead, her lawyer was the only person she knew or even knew of in Charleston. 'Who is it, then?'
Through tight lips, the matron said, 'Just come on.' Sylvia came. Sitting in an iron cage staled very quickly.
Waiting for her in the visitors' room was a blond woman about her own age whose sleek good looks, coiffure, and clothes all shouted Money! 'Mrs. Enos, my name is Anne Colleton.'
That meant nothing to Sylvia-and then, to her dismay, it did. She'd seen the name in a couple of the newspaper stories that talked about Kimball. 'You're one of the people who helped the Freedom Party,' she said. Maybe Bishop Polk Magrath had been talking through that derby of his.
Anne nodded. 'I was one of those people, yes, Mrs. Enos. And I was a friend of Roger Kimball's, too-I was, up till his last day on earth.'
Sylvia heard, or thought-hoped-she heard, a slight stress on the past tense. 'Were you?' she asked, with her own slight stress.
Maybe that was approval in Anne Colleton's eyes. 'You listen, don't you?' the woman from the Confederate States said. 'In fact, I'm not telling you any great secret when I say that Roger Kimball and I were more than friends, up till his last day on earth.'
Whatever hope Sylvia had went up in smoke. It hadn't been approval after all. It must have been well-bred, well-contained fury. 'Have you come here to gloat at me in jail, then?' she asked with gloomy near-certainty.
'What?' Anne Colleton stared, then started to laugh. 'You don't understand, then, do you, my dear?' Sylvia shook her head. She only understood that she didn't understand. Anne's voice went cold and harsh. 'I'll spell it out for you, in that case. Not too long before you shot him, Roger Kimball tried to take me by force when I told him I didn't care to be more than his friend any more. He did not succeed, I might add.' She spoke proudly. 'I might also add that I came very close to shooting him myself before you got the chance.'
'Oh,' Sylvia whispered. Something more seemed to be called for. She went on, 'I'm glad you didn't. It would have meant I'd spent all that money on my passport and train fare for nothing.'
'We wouldn't want that, would we?' Anne Colleton said, and sounded as if she meant it. 'With any luck at all, Mrs. Enos, the Confederate government or the government of South Carolina will pay your train fare north. Bish Magrath and I will do everything we can to see that that's what happens.'
'Oh,' Sylvia repeated in a different tone of voice. She'd put her children on the train, too, to distant cousins in Connecticut- distant, but closer than any other relatives she had close by. George, Jr., and Mary Jane had thought it would be a short get-acquainted visit. So had her cousins. Maybe, just maybe, if God and Anne Colleton turned out kind, they'd be right.
'Time's up,' the matron announced, and even Anne Colleton, who seemed able to outstare the lightning, did not argue with her. Sylvia got to her feet and headed back toward her cell. When she was about halfway there, the matron said, 'Some rich folks reckon they can buy their way out of anything.'
/ hope this one's right, Sylvia thought. Saying that out loud didn't seem to be the best idea she'd ever had.
Anne Colleton did not visit her again. Bishop Polk Magrath did, a couple of times. He didn't ask many questions; he seemed to come more to cheer her up than for any other reason. She didn't know how cheerful she should be. She'd gathered Anne Colleton was a power in the land, but how big a power? Sylvia couldn't find out till she went to court.
She came before a judge two weeks after Anne Colleton visited her. Bish Magrath kept beaming like a grandfather with plenty of candy canes in his pockets for his grandchildren to find. The lawyer at the other table in front of the judge-the district attorney, Sylvia supposed he was-seemed anything but happy. But was that because of the case or because he'd had a fight with his wife before coming here? Sylvia couldn't tell.
'I understand you have a request before we proceed, Mr. Chesterfield?' the judge asked the district attorney.
