And she was lovely, dressed in the latest of high fashion from London, Paris, and Italy. As the richest woman in the city, she made it a point to be among the best dressed. Of course the men came flocking, only to find her politely intimidating, and forever disinterested in their favors.
Another ultimate irony. She was surrounded and desired by the kind of men Paw would have salivated to have her marry. Men for whom she had no interest or desire.
If there was one thing Sarah knew, it was men. In all of their guises, strengths, and weaknesses.
She had loved, and been loved, by a real man. Once. Which was good enough for any lifetime.
She arched an eyebrow, stepped back from the window, and hurried to the kitchen. There, she pulled the roasted salmon from the warming shelf above the stove. A puff of steam rose, carrying scents of curry, saffron, and cilantro as she lifted the lid on the roasting pan.
She was just pouring the wine when Philip entered, hanging his hat on the rack and shrugging out of his black wool coat.
“Interesting day?” she asked.
“Quite,” Doc told her, slapping the newspaper onto the table by the foyer. “Sorry I’m late. Had a last-minute patient. Man with a crushed foot.”
“Supper is ready. Wash up. Water’s on the stove.”
“Where is Molly?”
“I let all of the servants go home early.”
She arranged her crimson satin dress with its bustle-holstered revolver, and seated herself. She lifted the roaster’s lid and began spooning out sweet potatoes. Another of the wonders they’d found in San Francisco: foods available nowhere else. Things like fresh fruits and vegetables brought in by ship from South America. Remarkable fish, oysters, and clams. Epicurean delights and spices from the Orient. After the deprivations in Arkansas and Denver, it was culinary magic.
Doc dried his hands and seated himself. “I was thinking of Butler all day.” He gestured to the paper. “Do you remember General Tom Hindman?”
“Butler’s commander?”
Doc nodded. “After the war he escaped to Mexico with a lot of the other Confederates. It didn’t work out, and he went back to Arkansas. Was making a political comeback. A couple of nights ago he was sitting in his parlor easy chair. Someone shot him through the window. He died a couple of hours later.” He paused. “I wonder what Butler would think?”
She studied him in the lamplight, seeing the lines in his face—as if they were scars from his wounded but poorly healed soul. Lost love, dead friends, shot-mangled bodies, the hell of prison camp and disease, and then his struggle through the ruins of their world. It had left her brother a fragile and cracked human being.
“Butler would cry for him, Philip. You know that. Some souls are too good for this world.”
“If they’d just left him alone. Let him be a professor of history. Maybe we’d still have him.” Guilt tightened his expression. “Poor deluded soul, what do his wild Indians give him that we couldn’t?” He knotted a fist. “Damn that war for what it did to him.” A pause. “For what it did to all of us.”
In the following silence, she thought back to Pea Ridge, to the boys dying on the farmhouse floor. To starvation and Dewley, Billy, and her flight to Fort Smith. She smiled at the memory of Bret’s eyes, and of the desperate flight to Colorado. And everything that culminated in Billy’s body hanging from a bridge.
“If I could go back”—she balanced her fork—“I would throw the secessionists like Hindman, Jeff Davis, and the rest right into hell. And just as soon as they’d dropped into the flames, I’d shovel John Brown, Abe Lincoln, Grant, and the rest of the Black Republicans straight in after them. Let them scream and burn together.”
Doc’s gaze went distant. “So much could have been so different if the Federals had just let the Southern states go. James would be alive. So much suffering…” He shook his head. “Water under the bridge.”
“Slavery is gone.”
“And the murder of a half million men, and the maiming of millions more, the destruction, the looting, and burning of half the country was the only way we could find to end it?” He gestured with his butter knife. “That’s the best we could do? As a species we’re condemned to self-immolation.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Maybe my next investment should be in matches?”
“Mark my words.” Doc cut a bite of salmon. “Tom Hindman won’t be the last. If I know my brethren, the smoldering hatred in Southern hearts is going to burn for generations. They’ve been humiliated. They’re going to make the freed blacks suffer for it in the end, no matter what kind of promises the Yankees make.”
She shook her head. “God, Doc, just once, can’t you be wrong?”
He stared absently at the lace-covered table. “I think we’re all crazy. We believe in impossibilities. Not even so much as a touch of sanity. Fools for the impossible. Invest in those matches … and I’d stock enough coal oil to go ’round as well.”
“What would you change if you could go back?” she asked.
His smile flickered and died under his mustache. “Me, I could have stopped it all. He told me. Just before it started.”
“Who did?”
“A crazy man in a New Orleans brothel. If I’d known so much hung in the balance, I would never have cut off that lunatic’s leg.”
BY W. MICHAEL GEAR AND KATHLEEN O’NEAL GEAR FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES
NORTH AMERICA’S FORGOTTEN PAST SERIES
People of the Wolf
People of the Fire
People of the Earth
People of the River
People of the Sea
People of the Lakes
People of the Lightning
People of the Silence
People of the Mist
People of the Masks
People of the Owl
People of the Raven
People of the Moon
People of the Nightland
People of the Weeping Eye
People of the Thunder
People of the Longhouse
The Dawn Country:
A People of the Longhouse Novel
The Broken Land:
A People of the Longhouse Novel
People of the Black Sun:
A People of the Longhouse Novel
People of the
