teamster appeared. The man's shoulders were round as the top of a question mark. Orry offered him a tip, but the man shook his head, gave him a sadly resentful look, and took the trunk away, making certain Orry heard his groans as he descended the stairs.
At dusk he donned his best gray uniform, locked the flat, and handed the key to the landlady. Carrying a small carpetbag containing items he didn't want to risk losing — his razor, a bar of soap, and two thin books of poetry — he walked to the marshaling yard where his transportation was waiting — a supply wagon bound south, seven and a half miles, to Chaffin's Bluff. There, Pickett's Division anchored the right end of the Intermediate Line, one of the five defense lines ringing the city.
The teamster invited Orry to sit next to him, but Orry preferred to ride in back, along with several unmarked boxes, his trunk and carpetbag, and his thoughts. He was happy to leave Richmond, but the prospect of joining Pickett's staff had not really lifted his spirits the way he had hoped. He was still shamed by Ashton's treachery and shocked by his callous disposal of Elkanah Bent. His loneliness since Madeline's departure could better be termed despondency. He prayed that she had reached Washington and would continue to think he was working in relative safety at the War Department.
Orry had always tried to draw lessons from experience. He had attempted it again after the entire government appeared to turn on his wife solely because she had a Negro ancestor. He found the lesson was familiar. Cooper had preached it for many years, and Orry had just as consistently ignored it until both sides had gone too far down the steep, dark road to war.
To this very day, the South was a stubborn pupil, rejecting the lesson even after the teacher's stick beat the pupil until he bled from mortal wounds. What would bring the Confederacy to an inglorious end was the same thing that had so foolishly created it: a rigidity of thought, a clinging to old ways, a refusal to adapt and change.
That was it, Orry saw with a little
Examples abounded. The South needed soldiers in the most desperate way, yet those who urged the enlistment of blacks were still called lunatics.
Were not the rights of states supreme? Of course they were. Thus the governor of Georgia needed no other grounds to exempt three thousand militia officers from army service and five thousand government workers besides. Using the same justification, the governor of North Carolina stockpiled thousands of uniforms, blankets, and rifles under the banner of state defense. Such right-thinking, principled men were more destructive than Sam Grant.
Orry wasn't a strong strategic thinker, but in sorting through probable causes of the inevitable defeat, he thought he had found another important one in newspaper dispatches describing the opposing presidents. At the start of the war, both Davis and Lincoln had personally directed military policy. Lincoln had even told McClellan the precise day on which he had to march to the peninsula.
Bloody losses had somehow taught Lincoln to revise his opinion of himself as a strategist and infallible judge of the capabilities of generals. On Capitol Square, it was widely held that at some point earlier this year, Lincoln had acknowledged his limitations by transferring control of the war engine to a man who ran it his own way: Grant.
Davis, by contrast, had never learned to recognize personal shortcomings, admit mistakes, adapt to new circumstances, change. The wheel revolved to Cooper again. When had Orry first heard him argue scornfully with their father that the South's greatest peril was its inflexibility? Longer ago than he could precisely remember.
Still, Orry reflected as the swaying wagon bore him toward Chaffin's Bluff, he mustn't be too hard on his own kind. Minds of stone were numerous not only inside Dixie but outside, too. There were plenty in the Yankee Congress; even one or two in the Hazard family, the foremost being Virgilia's.
But it was becoming clear to Orry that after the war ended, a new, entirely different world would arise. In that world there would be but one way for the South to survive and rebuild. That way was to accept what had happened. Accept that no black man would ever again labor unwillingly for a white man's profit. In sum — accept change.
He doubted whether most Southerners could do it. Many would undoubtedly go on hating, resisting, insisting they had been morally right, which Orry no longer believed. But again, he supposed just as many Yankees were willingly entrapped in the old modes of enmity and a yearning for reprisals. It was not, perhaps, merely the Southerner who failed to learn lessons, but every man in every epoch.
Trouble was, when you refused to learn, the result was what surrounded the rumbling wagon: soured earth; abandoned homes; imperiled lives.
Ruin.
Ruin and sadness like that on George Pickett's face when the general accepted Orry's salute and welcomed him to division headquarters.
'How good to see you at last.'
'It's good to be here, sir.'
A melancholy smile. 'I hope you'll say that after you've spent a few weeks in close proximity to our old acquaintance from West Point. We have met a man this time who either doesn't know when he's whipped or doesn't care if he loses his whole army to whip us. There is no way effectively to oppose that kind of man for very long.'
There is one, Orry thought. But he wasn't foolish enough to bring up the issue of black recruits and spoil the reunion and his first moments in the war zone.
113
Three women dining.
Constance called for candles instead of gaslight, believing it might warm the atmosphere for supper. It did, but that hardly mattered after her first effort to make conversation.
'Well, here we are —' she raised her claret to toast the guests seated on her right and left at the long table '— three war widows.'
'I wish you wouldn't say such a thing,' Brett exclaimed.
'Oh, my dear, I'm sorry. It was a clumsy attempt to make a light remark. I apologize.'
'It's too serious to joke about,' Brett said as Bridgit and a second kitchen girl marched in with china tureens of steaming mock turtle soup.
'I understand what you meant,' Madeline said to Constance, 'but I agree with Brett.' She wore a clean, dark dress, and her hair was neatly arranged, but she hadn't lost the haggard air acquired on her long journey. She plied her spoon and tried to comfort Constance with a smile. 'This is absolutely delicious.'
Straining equally: 'Thank you.'
Presently, Constance steered the conversation to a safer track. She laughed and spoke ruefully about her continuing weight problem, hoping that jokes at her own expense would enable them to forgive and forget her misplaced flippancy. She saw little sign of success.
She answered Madeline's questions about her father, Patrick Flynn. He was in the pueblo of Los Angeles and busy improving his Spanish so he could serve native-born clients in addition to the settler community.
'And Virgilia?'
'We never hear from her. I presume she's still with the nurse corps.'
'I would think she'd be a little more grateful for the shelter and guidance you gave her,' Brett said. 'Simple politeness would dictate an occasional letter, if nothing else.'
Constance reached for the glinting knife on the cutting board. Smiling, she began to slice the hot, fresh loaf. 'Alas, I don't think we can count gratitude among my sister-in-law's virtues.'
'Does she have any at all?' Brett countered, and with that fell grimly silent, eating her soup.
Dear Lord, Constance thought, did my blunder cause all this? The answer appeared to be yes. The more she considered the dark possibilities wrapped up in her brief, careless remark, the more it depressed her.
Madeline sensed the tension. She said to Brett, 'Tell me about this school for black waifs, won't you?'
'If you'd like, I'll take you up there tomorrow.'
'Oh, yes, please.'
