Love and War

'I'm glad. I couldn't have said it first.'

'You have not struck me as a shy type, Captain.'

'With men like Beastly, no. With you —'

In a far steeple, a bell chimed the quarter hour. The night was still warm, but he felt warmer. Her right hand closed on his left, tightly.

'Will you come visit me at the farm when you can?'

'Even if I forget and call you Gus?'

She looked at him; bent to him. Blond curls bounced softly against his face. 'Even then.' She kissed him on the cheek and ran inside.

He strode off toward the rail station, whistling. The inner voice persisted. Be careful. Cavalrymen must travel light. He knew he should heed it, but he felt tall as a house, and he didn't.

36

At Treasury, James Huntoon came out of an emergency meeting convened by the secretary to discuss the counterfeiting problem. Huntoon sank into the pool of autumn light dappling his desk and laid before him a ten-dollar note that looked authentic but was not. He had been assigned to show it to Pollard, editor of the Examiner, so the paper could warn readers about all the bogus notes in circulation — notes printed more expertly, alas, than those from Hoyer and Ludwig, the government's official engraving firm. Pollard would love the story, and Huntoon relished the thought of reporting it; he shared the editor's dislike of the President, his policies, and the administration as a whole. The paper's current target was Colonel Northrop, commissary-general of the army, rapidly becoming the most hated man in the Confederacy because of his mishandling of food procurement and distribution. Pollard's anti-Northrop editorials never failed to mention that, once again, Davis was siding with a West Point crony. The only Academy graduate the Examiner supported was Joe Johnston; that was because the general and the President were wrangling bitterly over the rank to which Johnston felt entitled.

When speaking privately, editor Pollard was even more vindictive. He called Davis 'a Mississippi parvenu.' Accused him of taking orders from his wife — 'he is wax in her hands.' Reminded listeners that Davis had vetoed the congressional decision to move the capital to Richmond — 'Does that not tell you how he feels about our beloved Old Dominion?' — and had appeared 'stricken with grief,' according to his wife's statement, when informed he had been chosen president.

Pollard was not an isolated case. A cyclone of enmity, some of it expressed in extreme and violent language, was rising in the South. Stephens, the elderly vice president, openly referred to his superior with words such as tyrant and despot. Many were demanding Davis's removal — and the election to ratify his provisional presidency would not be held until November.

Huntoon's disenchantment with the administration was one reason for his depressed state. Ashton was another. She spent all her time trying to maneuver herself higher on the social ladder. Twice she had forced him to attend dinner parties hosted by that shifty little Jew, Benjamin. They had much in common, those two. They trod warily, pleasing all, offending none — because who could tell from which direction the cyclone would be blowing next week?

One genuinely savage quarrel had marred Huntoon's summer. Two weeks after the reception at the Spotswood, the flash gentleman with connections in Valdosta and the Bahamas had called at the residence into which Huntoon and Ashton had moved a few days earlier. The gentleman offered to sell Huntoon a share in what he termed his maritime company. On the Merseyside, at Liverpool, he said, he had located a fast steamer, Water Witch, that could be refitted at reasonable cost to run the blockade between Nassau and the Confederate coast.

'What would she carry?' Huntoon asked. 'Rifles, ammunition, that sort of thing?'

'Oh, no,' Mr. Lamar H. A. Powell replied. 'Luxuries. There's much more money to be made from those. Risks to the vessel would be considerable, as you know. So we are looking to the short rather than the long term. My figures suggest that if the cargo is selected carefully, just two successful runs can produce a profit of five hundred percent — minimum. After that, the Yankees can sink the vessel whenever they please. If she continues her runs, the potential earnings of shareholders approach the astronomical.'

Just then, Huntoon noticed his wife closely watching the visitor. Huntoon feared handsome men because he wasn't one, but he couldn't tell whether it was the aloof stranger's scheme or his good looks that titillated Ashton. Either way, he wanted nothing to do with Mr. L. H. A. Powell, whose background he had looked into after Powell had sent a note around requesting this meeting.

It was said Powell had been a mercenary soldier in Europe and, later, a filibuster in South America. Government records showed he claimed exemption from any military service by virtue of a rule excusing those who owned more than twenty slaves; Powell's declaration claimed seventy-five on his family's plantation near Valdosta. A telegraph message from Atlanta replying to one of Huntoon's stated that the 'plantation' consisted of a dilapidated farm cottage and outbuildings occupied by three people named Powell: a man and woman in their seventies and a forty-year-old hulk with a brain of an infant. A third brother had run off to the West. Hardly impeccable credentials, but they justified Huntoon's response to his caller.

'I want no part of any such scheme, Mr. Powell.'

'May I ask the reason?'

'I have several, but the principal one will suffice. It's unpatriotic.'

'I see. You'd rather be a poor patriot than a rich one, is that it?'

'Importing perfumes and silks and sherry for Secretary Benjamin is not my idea of patriotism, sir.'

'But, James, darling,' his wife began.

Goaded by some ill-defined but clearly felt threat the flash gentleman represented, he cut in, 'The answer is no, Ashton.'

After Powell had gone, they screamed at each other long into the night.

Huntoon: 'Of course I meant what I said. I'll have nothing to do with such unprincipled opportunism. As I told that fellow, I have any number of reasons.'

Ashton, fists clenched, teeth, too: 'Name them.'

'Well — the personal risk, for one. Imagine the consequences of discovery.'

'You're a coward.'

He went red. 'God, how I hate you sometimes.' But he had turned away before he said it.

Later, Ashton again, wilder than before: 'It's my money we live on, don't forget. Mine. You scarcely make as much as niggers who pick cotton. I control our funds —'

'By my sufferance.'

'You think so! I can spend the money any way I wish.'

'Would you care to test that in court? The law says those funds became my property the moment we married.'

'Always the smug little attorney, aren't you?' She tore blankets from their bed, opened the door, and hurled the bundle into the hall. 'Sleep on the settee, you bastard — if you're not too fat to fit.'

She pushed him out. Eyes watering behind his spectacles, he raised a placating hand. 'Ashton —' The slamming door struck his palm. He leaned against the wall and shut his eyes.

They had made up the next day — they always made up — although she denied him physical contact for a period of two weeks. After that her mood improved remarkably. She was cheerful, as if Powell and his scheme didn't exist.

But the memory of that quarrel existed and wouldn't go away; it was one more troubling cloud on a horizon that seemed to be filling with them. Huntoon sat at his desk with the forged note, his eyes vacant, his expression unhappy. The clerk he worked for had to tell him pointedly to get going to the paper.