Breakthroughs

If she couldn’t get them to obey her any other way, she’d fluster them into doing it. She’d never seen such a collection of red faces in her life. These men and boys had gone through their whole lives never imagining a woman would remind them that she pissed, let alone how she went about it.

“If you’re going to give orders, just give ’em, for God’s sake,” Captain Barksdale said, now not daring to meet her eye. “Don’t go on about…other things.” He shuffled his feet like an embarrassed schoolboy.

“That is what I was trying to do,” A

“Put us where we can hit ’em and I reckon we’ll do it,” Barksdale replied. The gu

“I will,” A

Captain Barksdale said, “We’d be even likelier to hit, ma’am, if you could get us some more shells to practice with.”

A

The militia gu

She was about to go up to her room when a messenger boy halted his bicycle with the heels of his boots. “Telegram for you, ma’am,” he said. She took the envelope. He hurried away after pocketing a ten-cent tip.

Ripping apart the flimsy paper was not an adequate substitute for settling Cassius and Cherry for good, but it had to do. When A

She could not imagine when Marshlands would recover. She had trouble imagining when her investments would recover, either. If they didn’t…If they didn’t, she wouldn’t be the leader around these parts much longer. She had trouble imagining that, too, but less trouble than she would have had in the spring of 1916 and ever so much less than she would have had in the spring of 1915.

A train pulled into the station a couple of blocks away. The fire engine might not have been replaced after the Red uprising, but labor gangs, some working at gunpoint, had put the railroads back together in a hurry. Those iron rails bound the CSA together as nothing else could.

From the direction of the station, someone called her name. Her head turned. Coming her way was a tall man in a butternut uniform. “Tom!” she yelped in glad surprise, and ran toward her older brother.

Lieutenant Colonel Tom Colleton stared at A

She put her hands on her hips and glared at him. He didn’t flinch, as he would have before the war. In a way, that made her proud: he’d gone from an overage boy, a useless drone, to a man on the battlefield. In another way, it irked her more than ever: even as a man, he thought women should be useless toys.

With precision that showed how tightly she was holding her temper in check, she replied, “I am wearing the clothes I need to wear to go hunting bandits in the swamps of the Congaree-or did you want that rifle you sent me to gather dust in the closet?”

Tom took a deep breath, then decided not to make a scene. “All right,” he said. “You sure as the devil took me by surprise, though. I never would have reckoned the day would come when women showed off their shapes that way.”

“Really?” she asked, as if in i

He grimaced, but in an impersonal sort of way. “Not so well. We’ve lost just about all the ground we took back from the Yankees in the counterattack last fall. We’re shoved away from Big Lick and the Roanoke River, back toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. Dammit, it’s not that they’re better soldiers than we are. The trouble is, there are more of them than there are of us.”

“What about the black troops?” A

Her brother shrugged. “They’re starting to come into the line. They’re raw. God only knows how they’ll do when push comes to shove. And even with ’em, there are still more damnyankees than there are of us. Defending is cheaper than attacking, thank God. If we’re lucky, sooner or later the USA will get tired of throwing away men against us and against the Canucks, and they’ll make some kind of peace we can stand.”

“And if we’re not lucky?” A

Tom didn’t answer for a while. When he did, it was obliquely: “We’ve made the USA eat a lot of crow since South Carolina stopped flying the Stars and Stripes. I wonder what the bird tastes like, and how they’d serve it up. They remember every morsel, and that’s a fact.” He dug in his pocket, found a coin, and tossed it to A

It was a U.S. quarter-dollar. On one side, it bore a bust of Daniel Webster, whom Confederate schools vilified for opposing secession. A

She handed the coin back to her brother. “Till this war, we hadn’t fought them for more than thirty years,” she said. “Foolish for them to keep on harping on things when the last war was over and done with so long ago-before either one of us was born.”

“When you lose, Sis, the last war’s never over and done with,” Tom answered, scratching the scar that seamed his cheek. “I’ve questioned a lot of prisoners. The Yankees remember ever single slight from the day this state seceded all the way up to the day they’re captured.”

“The thing to do, then, is to make sure they don’t have the chance to make us eat crow,” A

“Yes, that would be the thing to do,” Tom Colleton said.

A

With an air of big-brotherly amusement, he let her do all that. He didn’t depend on her to do it, though, as he would have before the war. He ordered a beefsteak that proved less tender than it might have, stuck a fork in it, and let out several piercing brays. A

He gave her a peck on the cheek after supper, saying, “We’ll talk more in the morning, Sis.”