Walk in Hell

soppy over you.” The reverse, as she knew, also held; she’d caught them kissing and well on their way to worse a year before, and had watched Edna like a hawk ever since.

Her daughter just tossed her head. “He’s all right,” she said carelessly. “There are plenty of others, though.” That was calculated to make Nellie steam, and achieved the desired effect. Nellie was bound and determined that her daughter should go to the altar a maiden-she knew too well how grim the alternative could be. But Edna, and Edna’s hot young blood, weren’t making things easy.

Work helped. Running the coffeehouse kept the two of them hopping from sunup till long past sundown. If you were busy, you didn’t have time to get into trouble. Nellie said, “Start doing up the dishes. I’ll help in a minute-I want to count up what’s in the till first.”

“All right, Ma,” Edna said. She would work, Nellie admitted to herself, more than a little grudgingly. She wasn’t a bad girl, not really, just a wild girl, wild for life, wild for anything she could get her hands on, wild to let life-and the men crawling through life-get their hands on her.

The cash box was nicely heavy. Nellie had thought it would be. If she could do any one thing, it was gauge how busy the place had been through the day. Most of the take was in silver, too; as her place had become a favorite stop for the occupiers, they became more likely to give her real money and fob off their nearly worthless scrip on merchants whose goodwill mattered less to them.

“A couple of dollars less than I thought there would be,” she murmured, and then shrugged. She was doing well enough that a couple of dollars one way or the other mattered much less to her than they would have before the war started. She had no use for the Rebs, she spied on them whenever their loose talk gave her the chance, but she was getting, if not rich, at least well-to-do off them. Serves them right, she thought, and went to help her daughter clean up.

Artillery rumbled, off to the north and northeast, the noise clearly audible through splashing and the clank of china on china. “Louder these days,” Edna remarked, glancing in the direction of that deep-throated roar.

“Were you listening to the Rebs tonight?” Nellie asked. Edna shook her head. That exasperated her mother; Edna saw the war only in terms of how it affected her-not least by supplying her with handsome young Confederate officers to meet. Nellie went on, “They say they think they can stop our attack out of Balti-more, but it didn’t sound to me like they were real sure about it. If we’re lucky, we may run the Rebs out of here this summer.”

Edna kept right on drying saucers. She didn’t say anything for a while. The way she stood, though, suggested she wasn’t altogether sure it would be good luck. She liked the way things were going. Business wouldn’t be the same with the USA holding Washington again.

That wasn’t all that wouldn’t be the same. Mother and daughter spoke together. Nellie said, “The Rebs won’t want to give this town back,” while Edna put it more gamely: “They’ll fight like bastards to hold on to Washington.”

They finished doing the dishes in gloomy silence. There wouldn’t be much left of Washington after a big fight for it. The city had been badly damaged when the Rebels overran it in 1914, and they’d taken it pretty quickly. What would it look like if they chose to defend it street by street, house by house?

Nellie lighted a candle at one of the downstairs gas lamps, then turned them out. She and Edna went up the stairs to their bedrooms by the light of the candle. She used it to light the lamps in those rooms, then blew it out. “Good night, Ma,” Edna said around a yawn.

“Good night,” Nellie answered, hiding a smile. Keep Edna busy enough and she wouldn’t have time for mischief, all right. Maybe she wouldn’t. Nellie undid the hooks and eyes that held her skirt closed, then unbuttoned the long row of mother-of-pearl buttons on her shirtwaist. She tossed it into the wicker clothes hamper. The hamper was almost full; she’d have to go to the laundry soon. The corset came off next. She sighed with pleasure at being released from its steel-boned grip. She put on a long cotton nightdress, turned off the gas lamp, and climbed under the blankets.

Falling asleep seldom took her long. She’d almost done it when the Confederates sent a column marching up the street in front of the coffeehouse. The tramp of boots on pavement, the rattle of steel-tired wagon wheels, and the clop of horses’ hooves made her sit up. It was a good-sized column; they hadn’t sent so many men north in a while.

She tried to figure out what that meant. Was it good news or bad? Good, if the Rebs were moving because they needed men against the U.S. attacks. Not so good, if these were troops freed up because the Negro uprisings in the CSA were collapsing. She’d have to see if she could find out tomorrow.

When the column had passed, she settled back down again. She was drifting toward sleep when someone knocked on the door. The knock was soft but insistent, as if whoever was there wanted to make sure she and Edna heard but also wanted to be equally sure no one else did.

She got out of bed in the dark. Her first suspicious glance, when she reached the hall, was to Edna’s bedroom. But Edna was in there snoring. She’d never been able to fool her mother about being asleep. Scratching her head, Nellie slowly and carefully went downstairs.

The knocking persisted. She wished she had a pistol down there by the cash box. She’d never thought she’d need one, though, not with so many Confederate soldiers always in the coffeehouse. And the Rebs had made it against their rules for locals to keep firearms, with penalties harsh enough to make her not want to take the chance of hiding one right under their noses.

They hadn’t made any rules against keeping knives. She picked up the biggest carving knife she had, one that would have made a decent sword with a different handle, and walked to the door. “Who’s there?” she asked, making no move to open it.

“It’s me, Little Nell.” Bill Reach didn’t name himself, confident she could identify his voice. She didn’t, but no one else these days-thank God! — used the name from her sordid past. When she neither said anything nor worked the latch, he hissed, “Let me in, darlin’. I got nowhere else to go, and it’s late-way past curfew.”

Nellie knew what time it was. “Go away,” she said through the door, quietly, so as not to wake Edna. That he had the nerve to call her darling filled her with fury. “Don’t you ever come here again. I mean it.” Her hand closed on the handle of the knife, hard enough to hurt.

“Listen, Nell,” Reach said, also quietly, “if you don’t let me in, I’m a dead man. I can’t stay on the dodge any more, and they-”

“If you don’t get out of here this instant,” Nellie told him in a deadly whisper, “I’ll scream loud enough to bring every Confederate patroller for a mile and a half around this place on the dead run.”

“But-” Reach muttered something under his breath. Then he grunted, an involuntary, frightened sound. “Jesus, Nell, here they come-it’s a whole goddamn Confederate column. They see me here, I’m dead and buried.”

For a moment, Nell thought he was trying to trick her. Then she too heard the rhythmic thump of marching men and the jingle of harness. Another column-probably another regiment-heading up toward the fighting. Nellie bit her lip till she tasted blood. She didn’t want the Rebs to lay their hands on…anyone. Even Bill Reach? she asked herself silently, and, with great reluctance, nodded. Even Bill Reach.

She opened the door. Reach scurried inside like a rat running into its hole. “God bless you, Nell,” he said while she closed it as quietly as she could. “If they’d have caught me, they’d have squeezed everything out of me, about you and this place and the shoemaker and-guk!”

Nellie held the tip of the knife against his poorly shaved throat. “Don’t you talk about such things, not to me, not to them, not to anybody,” she said in a voice all the more frightening for being so cold. “I’m not the foolish girl I was, and you can’t blackmail me. When that column marches past, you’re going out the door again. If you come around here after that, I’ll shove this in”-she did shove the knife in, perhaps a quarter of an inch; Reach moaned and tried to pull away, but she wouldn’t let him-“and I’ll laugh while I’m doing it. Do you hear me? You laughed when you shoved it into me, didn’t you? My turn now.”

He didn’t say anything. That was the smartest thing he could have done. A little moonlight came through the plate-glass window from outside. His eyes glittered. The fear smell, sharp and acrid, came off him in waves.

The Confederates tramped past the coffeehouse. Maybe the noise of their passing woke Edna. Nellie would have sworn she hadn’t been noisy enough to disturb her daughter. But, from the hall, Edna asked, “Ma, what’s going on? Who’s this bird? And-” Edna’s breath caught sharply. “What are you doing with that knife?”

“He’s trouble, nothing else but.” Nellie’s voice was grim. “But he’s in trouble, too, so he can stay here till the