done better if you'd invested along the lines I chose-the lines about which you had some unkind things to say when I presented them to you.'
'Go ahead-rub it in,' Whitson muttered. Anne did not dislike him enough to do any more gloating, so she pretended not to hear. He went on, 'I must admit, your ideas proved sounder than mine. I am, as I say, bankrupt, with holdings in worthless stocks. Your financial position is not as it was before the war-'
'Whose is, in the Confederate States?' Anne asked harshly.
'Not many folks', I'll tell you that,' the broker said. 'But you are merely poorer than you were. In the CSA, and especially here in South Carolina, that's an impressive accomplishment. Most plantation owners have long since gone belly up. You're still in the fight'
'Who else is?' Anne asked, interested in the competition.
'Importers,' Whitson answered. 'Steel men. Petroleum men in Texas and Louisiana-they're thriving, because Sequoyah's gone. Some of the Sonoran copper kings: the ones whose mines the Yankees didn't reach. But anybody who grew anything with Negro labor-cotton, tobacco, rice, sugarcane, indigo-has troubles the way a stray dog has fleas.'
'Can't trust 'em, not any more,' Anne said. 'That's never going to be the same again. That's why I've still got Marshlands like a millstone around my neck. Who would want the place now? What would anyone do with it if he bought it?'
'I haven't the faintest idea,' Whitson said, 'but I don't know what that proves, either.' His mouth tightened to a thin, pale line. 'The ideas I have had haven't been good ones.'
'The whole country is having a rough time,' Anne said with more sympathy than she'd thought she would show. 'It's hard for anyone to prosper. We need to put some heart back into ourselves, but I don't know how.'
'This inflation is eating us out of house and home,' the broker said. 'Before long, everybody will be a millionaire and everybody will be broke.'
/ told you so trembled on the edge of being spoken, but Anne held her tongue. She had told Whitson so, and he hadn't listened, and now he was paying the price. Because she'd converted her holdings into currencies that still meant something in terms of gold, she'd come through pretty well. When the upturn finally arrived, she would be rich again-if she could wait long enough.
Whitson said, 'If you like, Miss Colleton, I can recommend a new broker for you. I know several very able men who-'
Anne got to her feet. 'No, thank you. I hope you will forgive me for saying so, but your recommendation does not strike me as the ideal warrant for a man's quality.'
Whitson bit his lip. 'I deserve that.'
'Maybe you'll have better luck in times to come. I hope you do,' Anne said, telling more of the truth than not- she had nothing personal against the luckless broker. 'I see you have all my papers here. Please give them to me now.'
'Very well.' Whitson sighed as he handed them to her. 'I should have been listening to your investment advice, not the other way round. The world has turned upside down since the end of the war.'
'Since the beginning of the war,' Anne said. 'But you're right. The Confederate States were on top, and now we're on the bottom. Some people are going to be content to stay on the bottom, too. Some are going to try to see how to get back on top again. What will you do, Mr. Whitson?'
She didn't wait for an answer, but swept the papers into her valise and left the broker's office. As she turned around to close the door, she saw him staring after her. She let out a tiny sigh. Whitson was going to be one of the ones who stayed on the bottom for a long time.
His office stood only a few blocks away from the Capitol. Anne thought about going over to see the governor, but sighed again. She didn't have the influence she'd enjoyed before the war, either. Not only had her fortunes suffered, she'd called in too many favors fighting the black Reds who lurked in the swamps by the Congaree long after their revolt was stamped out elsewhere. She'd almost had to seduce the governor to pry a machine gun loose for the militia.
'God damn you, Cassius,' she muttered. The former chief hunter at Marshlands had proved a far more stubborn and resourceful foe than she'd imagined any Negro could. She'd underestimated the blacks at Marshlands time and again, underestimated them and let them fool her.
'It won't happen again,' she muttered as she hurled the valise into the back seat of her beat-up Ford. Before the Negro uprising, she'd driven a powerful Vauxhall. When the revolt broke out, she'd driven it up from Charleston toward Marshlands. South of the front-the Negroes of what they called the Congaree Socialist Republic had been able to hold a regular front for a while-a militia officer had confiscated the Vauxhall for use against the black rebels. She'd never seen it again. She wondered how many bullet holes scarred the fine coachwork these days.
After cranking the Ford's engine to rough, noisy life, she climbed in and drove south down the Robert E. Lee Highway, from which she would eventually turn left to get to St. Matthews. She was about thirty miles away from home: a little more than an hour, if she didn't have a puncture or a breakdown. If she did, the time might double, or it might go up by some much larger factor.
What struck her as she rattled along in the decrepit motorcar was how still and empty the countryside felt. Cotton and tobacco should have been ripening in the fields, and Negro laborers should have been tending both crops. Here and there, they were. But so many fields were a rank tangle of weeds and vines and shrubs, with no one even trying to bring in a crop on them.
It wasn't the way it had been. It would never again be the way it had been. Tears stung her eyes, so that she had to slow down till they cleared-not that the Ford could go very fast anyhow. The cotton fields at Marshlands looked like this these days.
Colletons had thrived on the plantation since the end of the eighteenth century. Even so, she was ever more tempted to cut her losses on it, quit paying the exorbitant taxes, and let the state of South Carolina take it off her hands. As far as she was concerned, the state of South Carolina was welcome to it.
The Lee Highway crossed the Congaree on a steel suspension bridge. The Red rebels had damaged the bridge, but hadn't managed to destroy it. Well before she came to the river and the swamps to either side of it, Anne took a revolver from the valise and laid it on the seat, where she could grab it in a hurry. As a force for rebellion against the government of South Carolina and that of the CSA, the Congaree Socialist Republic was dead. Not quite all the Negroes had been hunted out of the swamps yet, though. Some still made a living of sorts as bandits.
If bandits were lurking there, they gave no sign. She spotted a couple of pickaninnies fishing and passed an old black man leading a skinny, swaybacked mule laboring along under some enormous burden tied to its back. She thought about stopping and making the old man show her what the mule carried. How many rifles and pistols had traveled through the CSA in bundles like that before the uprising of 1915? Too many, surely.
In the end, she drove on. She felt bad about it afterwards, but one person could do only so much. If the old man was moving guns or explosives, what was she supposed to do with him? Arrest him? Driving with one hand on the wheel and one on the pistol didn't appeal to her. Shoot him on the spot? That did appeal to her, powerfully, but it wasn't so simple as it would have been before the war, either. She would certainly have to go to court about it, which wouldn't have been certain at all before 1914. The number of Negro veterans enrolled on the South Carolina voting lists remained tiny. The uprising during the war, though, showed how dangerous ignoring Negro opinion could be.
When she got into St. Matthews, she smiled. Several women on the street were wearing trousers. She'd started that fashion herself, getting Aaron Rosenblum the tailor to make her several pairs so she could go into the swamps to fight the Reds in clothing more convenient than an ankle-length skirt. These women didn't wear pants because they intended to hunt Reds. They wore them because one of the most prominent women in Calhoun County did.
Tom Colleton chuckled when she remarked on that. 'I had noticed it myself, as a matter of fact,' he said. 'Gives a whole new kick to watching a pretty girl.'
'Does it?' Anne wasn't sure whether to be angry or amused. She ended up a little of both. 'That's not why I got them, you know.'
'I never said it was,' her brother answered. 'That doesn't make what I did say any less true, though.' While Anne digested that and finally nodded, Tom went on, 'Have we got any money left?'
'All things considered, we're doing well-as well as we can be, anyhow.' With a certain amount of malicious
