with the Confederate forces, and MacDowell has gone to meet him.” A shadow covered his eyes. “I expect they have Breeland’s guns with them. Or I suppose I should say Mr. Alberton’s guns.” His food sat on his plate ignored. He did not say whether he had held any hope of stopping the arms from reaching the Union forces. Hester thought him blind to reality if he had, but sometimes one cannot bear to look, and blindness is a necessity, for a while.
All around them the dining room hummed with the babble of talk, now and then rising in excitement or anger. The air was clouded with tobacco smoke and, even at half-past eight in the morning, clammily hot.
“We can’t stop that.” Monk spoke with calm practicality. “We are here to find Merrit Alberton and take her home.” There was surprising compassion in his voice. “But if you wish to leave us and join your own people, no one will ask you to remain here. It may even be dangerous for you.”
Trace shrugged very slightly. “There are still plenty of Southerners about. Probably every man you see here with long hair comes from the South, the ‘slave states’ as they refer to them.” There was bitterness in him now. “It’s a fashion the North doesn’t follow.”
Hester liked him, but she had wondered many times during the journey how he could espouse something she considered an abomination, by any standards an offense against natural justice. She did not wish to know his answer, in case she despised him for it, so she had not asked. She heard the suppressed anger in him now as he gave it regardless.
“Most of them have never even seen a plantation, let alone thought about how it worked. I haven’t seen many myself.” He gave a harsh little laugh, jerky, as if he had caught his breath. “Most of us in the South are small farmers, working our own land. You can go for dozens of miles and that’s all you’ll see. But it’s the cotton and the tobacco that we live on. That’s what we sell to the North and it’s what they work in their factories and ship abroad.”
He stopped suddenly, lowering his head and pushing his hand across his brow, forcing his hair back so hard it must have hurt. “I don’t really know what this war is all about, why we have to be at each other’s throats. Why can’t they just leave us alone? Of course there are bad slave owners, men who beat their field slaves, and their house slaves, and nothing happens to them even if they kill them. But there’s poverty in the North as well, and nobody fights about that! Some of the industrial cities are full of starving, shivering men and women—and children —with nobody to take them in or feed them. No one gives a damn! At least a plantation owner cares for his slaves, for economic reasons if not common decency.”
Neither Monk nor Hester interrupted him. They glanced at each other, but it was understood Trace was speaking as much to himself as to them. He was a man overwhelmed by circumstances he could neither understand nor control. He was no longer even sure what he believed in, only that he was losing what he loved and it was rapidly growing too late to have any effect on the horror that was increasing in pace from hour to hour.
Hester was passionately sorry for him. In the two weeks she had known him, on the ship and the train to Washington, she had observed him in moments of solitude when there seemed a loneliness which wrapped around him like a blanket, and at other times when he had had a quick empathy with other passengers, also facing the unknown and trying to find the courage to do it with grace, and not frighten or burden their families even further by adding to their fears.
Aboard ship, there had been one gaunt-faced Irishwoman with four children who struggled to comfort them and behave as if she knew exactly what she would do when they landed in a strange country without friends or a place to live. And alone, staring over the endless expanse of water, her face had shown her terror naked. It was Trace who had gone and stood silently with his arm around her thin shoulders, not offering platitudes, simply sharing the moment and its understanding.
Now Hester could think of nothing to say to him as he faced the ruin of his country and tried to put it into words for two English people who had come on a single, and possibly futile, mission but who could return to peace and safety afterwards, even if they had to explain failure to Judith Alberton.
“We can’t know what we’re doing,” Trace said slowly, now looking up at Monk. “There has to be a better way! Legislation might take years, but the legacy of war will never go away.”
“You can’t change it,” Monk replied simply, but his face showed the complexity of his feelings, and Trace saw it and smiled very slightly.
“I know. I would be better employed addressing what we came for,” he acknowledged. “I’ll say it before you do. We must find Breeland’s family. They’ll still be here, and Merrit Alberton will be with them.” He did not add “if she is still alive,” but the thought was in the quick pulling down of his lips, and it was easy to read because it was in Hester’s mind as well, and she knew it was in Monk’s.
“Where do we begin?” Monk asked. He glanced around the huge dining room, where all the tables were full. Crowds of people had been coming and going all the time they had been there. “We must be discreet. If they hear that English people are asking for them, they may leave, or at worst, get rid of Merrit.”
Trace’s expression tightened. “I know,” he said quietly. “That’s why I propose to do the asking myself. It’s what I came for. At least it’s part of it. You’ll also need help leaving here with her. We may be able to go north, but maybe not. I can guide you south through Richmond and Charleston. It will depend upon what happens in the next few days.”
Monk hated being dependent on someone else, and Hester read it in his face. But there was no alternative, and to refuse would be childish, and risk even less chance of success.
Perhaps Trace was aware of that too. Again the ghost of a smile lit his expression. “Learn what you can about the army,” he suggested. “Movements, equipment, numbers, morale. The more we know, the better we can judge which way to go when we have Merrit … and Breeland, if possible. There will be plenty of war correspondents from British newspapers. No one will think it odd.” He shrugged minutely and a shred of humor filled his eyes. “In this war you are neutral, at least in theory.”
“In fact,” Monk added, “I may wish to see Breeland hang from the nearest tree, but I don’t tar the entire Union with the same brush.”
“Or the slave owners of the South?” Trace’s eyes were wide.
“Or them either.” Monk smiled back and rose to his feet, the last of his breakfast unfinished. “Come on,” he said to Hester. “We are going to research a brilliant and perceptive article for the
They spent the rest of the day moving from one place in the city to another, listening to people, observing those in the streets and in the foyer of the hotel, seeing their anxiety, sensing the frenzy in the air. A few were openly afraid, as if they expected the Confederate armies to invade Washington itself, but the vast majority seemed certain of victory and had hardly any perception of what the cost would be, even if they won every battle.
