Clementine

Maria wondered how much time she had left.

Standing beside the desk, which must surely belong to the lieutenant colonel, was a red-haired man in scorched brown pants and an undershirt, with a loose gray jacket covering his bulky arms. He was possibly the whitest man she’d ever seen, with skin so pale it looked pink at the joints of his fingers, and blue around the recesses of his eyes. He gave her a look from top to bottom, folded his arms, and didn’t say anything.

A pair of guns hung from a belt around his hips, but he wasn’t holding anything at the ready.

“I swear I’ve seen you before,” Steen said to Maria. “It’ll drive me mad if I don’t figure out it.”

To change the subject, she said, “Who’s that child? Is he your son?”

“That’s no business of yours. Keep your mouth shut and your head down if you want to stay inside here, or we’ll throw you back out the door and let the pirate have his way with you.”

Outside, a pair of gunshots rang out from the woods, and there were shouts from behind the trunks of the trees.

“Hainey,” the red-haired man growled. “Jesus Christ. He can have his ship; why won’t he just take it and leave?”

Maria fingered the Colt she gripped behind her handbag. In a few steps she retreated to the desk, and to the boy. She crouched down beside him and touched the edge of his arm, but she said to Felton Brink, “Perhaps he took it personally.”

“What would you know?” he snapped back without looking at her. He walked to the nearest window and hid himself behind the edge of the frame so he could see outside without risking a bullet in the face.

She didn’t answer him. Instead she whispered to the boy, “Edwin?”

He raised his eyes-just his eyes-over the edge of his arm to look at her. They were brown eyes, and exhausted ones. He was no older than nine or ten years of age, and thin in the way orphans were expected to be, but without the hollow look of a child who starves.

Maria opened her arms and gave him what she hoped was an encouraging smile.

He unfolded from his crouch and let her lift him up as if what happened to him didn’t matter anyway, and he may as well let the woman hold him if that’s what she wanted to do.

He wasn’t very heavy. Maria pulled him up onto her hip, where she held him easily. He latched his legs around her waist and put his head down on her shoulder.

“You. What are you doing?” Steen asked.

With her free hand, she dropped her handbag and revealed the Colt. “I’m leaving. And I’m taking this child. Don’t do it-” she added as he reached for his belt and the gun that was holstered there. “You either,” she said to Brink, and her voice was as calm now as it had been hysterical a minute before.

She motioned with her gun that the two of them should stand together, and she circled her way around the desk, and around the room. She saw the diamond then, and she wondered how she could have ever missed it in the first place. It was perched on the desk like a paperweight, glittering as if it were alive-cutting the sunlight into ribbons, squares, and shining specks.

But Maria didn’t let her glance linger there for long.

She said to the boy with his face buried against her shoulder, his elbow bent into her cleavage, “Close your eyes, Edwin. We’re going to have to hurry.” She tried her best to estimate how long she’d lingered, and she couldn’t imagine that she had long before Hainey-and her thought of him was punctuated by another round of shots being exchanged outside-decided that her time was up.

“You,” she said to Brink. “Open that door. Now.”

“I don’t take orders from-”

“I don’t have any trouble with you,” she said to the pirate, speaking over his complaint. “I don’t care if you live or die, so I’m sending you on your way, and if you have any sense you’ll leave before I change my mind, or before you give me a reason to shoot you. Now go. Get out.”

He didn’t need to be told more than twice.

Brink reached for the knob, turned it, and checked outside to see if anyone was waiting to shoot him. Seeing no one, he pretended to tip a hat at Ossian Steen and said, “Pleasure doing business with you,” in a tone of voice that fooled no one. With a flash of brown and white and red, he was out the door and ru

Maria used her gun to urge Steen away from the door, which flapped itself shut behind Felton Brink. She came to stand beside it, her gun still aimed at the officer, and she said, “I’m going to destroy that weapon, and you’ll never have a chance to build another one.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he growled.

“Oh yes I do. You want to wipe Danville off the map-”

He interrupted her, “And in doing so, yes-end this blasted war…and I just now think, I believe, I think I know…You’re Boyd, aren’t you? I’ve heard stories, but-”

“Yes, that’s me,” she said, and she sounded like she wanted to spit, but she didn’t. She said, “And if you wanted the war to end so badly, you’d speak to your superiors about withdrawing, and allowing the South to go its own way. You wouldn’t create a weapon to demolish a city with the press of a trigger!”

He was angry now, and it showed around his eyebrows, and in a flushing of his ears. “Is that all you think? Is that as far as you can see?” He pointed a finger at her and said, “The union must be preserved, the will of an old spy be damned. The war can’t drag on forever; it can’t go on like this, like a mill grinding men’s bones to flour, year after year. Something must stop it, Belle Boyd. Something must end it in one blow-and if that means the death of thousands, then my soul will sleep easy at night. For I will have preserved the lives of tens of thousands-even your own soldiers! Even the lives of the Rebel boys who, even now, dress up in their fathers’ and brothers’ uniforms and wait until they’re tall enough to take to the field…even those boys will be saved if one city burns!”

Suddenly, and inexplicably, Maria’s eyes were wet and it was not an actress’s trick.

She aimed the gun at his forehead and said, “Then go burn down Washington, you son of a bitch!”

And she fired, and a hole opened up in Ossian Steen’s face. The back of his skull went splattering out behind him, all over the desk, and all over the priceless piece of carbon that sat on the edge like a paperweight.

Maria gasped-at her own actions, or with frustration, or relief, or some other emotion that she couldn’t pin down as it raged inside her. But she squeezed the boy, whose small fingers were clawing at her neck as if he could burrow down inside her body and stay there, and not hear another gunshot so long as he lived.

She picked up her handbag and the diamond, stuffing the latter inside the former. She leaned on the knob and half pushed, half kicked her way out of the small building and she dashed into the yard with the child in her arm and the gun still smoking in her hand.

At the edge of the treeline she saw one of the guards face-down and unmoving, though she saw no sign of the second one, or of Brink, or of Croggon Hainey-who she’d inexplicably been hoping to glimpse. Her disappointment surprised her, but she did not have time to explore it. Somewhere beyond the hill she could hear the surging hum of an engine lifting itself high into the sky; and somewhere down beyond the sanatorium came the thunder of inrushing feet-Steen’s reinforcements, or the remainder of the garrison, or surely some other problematic bunch of men.

Maria disentangled the boy’s fingers from her neck and set him down on the ground where he shuddered, but stood.

She spoke to him in a hurried torrent of words. “Edwin, you’re a smart boy, aren’t you? That’s why you live with Doctor Smeeks, down in the basement, isn’t that right?” He nodded, and she continued with the same fast patter, “Doctor Smeeks is making a weapon, but only because that terrible man was threatening to harm you. Now you must do something for me, do you understand?”