Republic. Now-
Now she picked up her handbag (which held, among other things, a revolver to replace the one she’d lost when Cassius burned her cabin) and went downstairs. It was cool, not cold; whatever winter might do up in the USA, it rested lightly on Low Country South Carolina. She headed for the haberdasher’s.
St. Matthews had been a cotton town before the war. It was still a cotton town-of sorts. Most of the nearby plantations were either corpses or crippled remnants of their former selves. Most of the white men in town were gone for soldiers or gone to the grave. Most of the black men were gone, too: drafted into labor battalions, fled into revolt, or now wearing butternut themselves. Only a little of the damage done when Confederate forces recaptured the town from the Congaree Socialist Republic had been repaired. No labor for that, and no money, either.
By what sort of luck Anne could scarcely imagine, Rosenblum’s Clothes had escaped everything. One of the bricks near the plate-glass window bore a bright bullet scar; other than that, the place was untouched. Inside, Aaron Rosenblum clacked away on a treadle-powered sewing machine, as he’d been doing for as long as Anne could remember.
When the bell above the door jangled, he looked up over the tops of his gold-framed half-glasses. Seeing Anne, he jumped to his feet and gave her a nod that was almost a bow. “Good day to you, Miss Colleton,” he said.
“Good day, Mr. Rosenblum.” As always, Anne hid the smile that wanted to leap out onto her face whenever she heard him talk. His accent, half Low Country drawl, half guttural Yiddish, was among the strangest she’d ever encountered.
“And what can I do for you today?” Rosenblum asked, running a hand over his bald head. He would never go into the Army; he had to be nearer seventy than fifty.
“I want half a dozen pairs of stout trousers of the sort men use to go hunting in the swamps of the Congaree,” she answered.
He nodded. “These would be for your brother, after-God willing-he comes home safe from the war? Shall I alter them thinking he will be the same size he was when he went into the Army?”
“I’m sorry,” Anne said. “You misunderstand, Mr. Rosenblum. These trousers are for me.”
“For-you?” His eyes went wide. The lenses of his spectacles magnified his stare even more. “You are joking with me.” Instead of staring, he really looked at her. “No, you are not joking. But-what would a woman want with trousers?”
“To go hunting in the swamps of the Congaree,” she repeated patiently. “I can’t very well do that in gingham or lace, can I?”
“What would you hunt?” he asked, still not believing.
“Reds.” Anne Colleton’s voice was flat and determined. “I will want these trousers as soon as you can have them ready. They shouldn’t be hard to alter to fit me; I’m as tall as a good many men.”
“Well, yes, but-” He blushed to the crown of his head, then blurted, “My wife is visiting our daughter in Columbia. Who will measure you?”
Again, Anne didn’t laugh out loud. “Go ahead, Mr. Rosenblum. Being so careful, you won’t take any undue liberties. I’m sure of it.”
He coughed and muttered, then blushed once more. “If you do this thing, Miss Colleton, will you wear a corset while you are doing it?”
Anne felt like giving herself a licking. She’d defied a lot of conventions, but some she didn’t even notice till someone reminded her they were there. She dashed into the dressing room, yanked the curtain shut, and divested herself of boning and elastic. When she came out, she was so comfortable, she wondered why she wore the damn thing. Fashion made a harsh mistress.
Aaron Rosenblum still hawed instead of hemming. In the end, though, he did as she wanted. In the end, almost everyone did as she wanted. He looked a little happier when she set two butternut-colored twenty-dollar bills on his sewing machine, but only a little. “I still do not know if this is decent,” he muttered.
“I’ll worry about that,” she answered, by which she meant she would not worry in the slightest.
The telephone rang a few minutes after she got back to her room. “Hello?” she said into the mouthpiece. “What?…Really?…Yes, bring him here. We’ll see. Greenville, you say?…You should have him here by evening…. Of course I’ll pay for train fare. I want to get to the bottom of this, too.” She hung the mouthpiece on its hook, then let out a long sigh that was also a name: “Scipio.”
After he’d fled Columbia, he’d gone up into the northwestern part of the state, had he? Now he was found out there, too. He knew how to get things done, did Scipio. A butler who didn’t know how to get things done wasn’t worth having. From things she’d heard, Scipio had been Cassius’ right-hand man in the Congaree Socialist Republic, and a big reason it held together as long as it did.
What did she owe him for that? After what the Reds’ revolutionary tribunals had done to so many white landowners, how many times did any official of the Congaree Socialist Republic deserve to die?
Waiting was hard, even though she knew Scipio was coming from more than a hundred miles away. She’d lighted the gas lamps before a knock sounded on her door. She opened it. The two whites who stood in the hall had the look of city policemen: middle-aged, rugged, wary, wearing suits that would have been fashionable about 1910 but were dowdy now. “Miss Colleton?” one of them asked in an Up Country accent. When she nodded, the policeman pointed to the Negro who stood, hands manacled behind his back, between him and his partner. “This boy the Scipio you know, ma’am?”
She carefully studied the black man, then slowly and regretfully shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid not. There must be some mistake. I’ve never set eyes on this man before in my life.”
Both white policemen stared at her in astonished dismay. Scipio stared, too, in equal astonishment-though not dismay-but only for an instant. Then, very smoothly, he went back to playing the innocent wronged. “You see?” he shouted to the policemen. “I ain’t dat bad nigger. I tol’ you I ain’t dat bad nigger!”
“Shut up, God damn you,” one of them growled. Perfunctorily, he added, “Sorry, ma’am.” Then he and his partner put their heads together.
Anne looked at Scipio. He was looking at her. She’d known he would be.
Major Abner Dowling slogged through freezing Tennessee mud from his tent toward the farmhouse where the general commanding the U.S. First Army made his headquarters. Dowling supposed the mud couldn’t have been quite freezing. In that case, it would have been hard. It wasn’t.
When the general’s adjutant lifted one booted foot out of the muck, pounds of it came up, stuck to the sole and sides. For one of the few times in his life, Dowling wished he were seventy-five pounds lighter. Far more often than not, he’d found, being fat mattered little, and he dearly loved to eat. But his bulk made him sink deeper into the ooze than he would have had he been thin.
Puffing his way up onto the porch, he paused to knock as much mud off his boots as he could. Cornelia, the colored housekeeper the general had hired after First Army’s attack on Nashville stalled the winter before, would not be happy if he left filthy tracks in the hall and parlor. Even if she was a mulatto, she was such a good-looking young woman, he didn’t want her glaring at him.
Delicious frying odors filled the air when he went inside. He sighed. Not only was Cornelia a fine-looking wench, she could cook with the best of them, too.
Neat in a white shirtwaist and long black skirt, she came sweeping out of the kitchen. “Mornin’, Major,” she said. “The general and his missus, they still finishin’ breakfast. You want to sit yourself down in the parlor, I bring you some coffee while you wait.”
He knew he could have gone straight into the kitchen, had he had anything more urgent than the usual morning briefing. But he also knew the general would not appreciate being disturbed at his ham and eggs and hotcakes, or whatever other delicacies Cornelia had devised. “Coffee will be fine,” he said. She made good coffee, too.
The parlor window gave him a good view of a couple of antiaircraft guns sitting out there in the mud, and of the wet, cold, miserable soldiers who served them. The Rebs had stepped up bombing attacks against First Army
