These days, nobody around Baroyeca was likely to tell anybody how to vote. Hipolito Rodriguez hadn’t been sure things would work out that way, but they had. The unfortunate accidents that happened to Don Joaquin’s barn and stable—to say nothing of the even more unfortunate accidents that happened to Don Joaquin’s guards—had quickly persuaded the prominent men in this part of Sonora not to push too hard against the Freedom Party.
“You understand what it is,” Robert Quinn said at a Freedom Party meeting a couple of weeks after those unfortunate things happened. “It has been a very long time since anyone told a patrón, ‘No, señor, you may not do this.’ They needed a lesson. Now they have had one. I do not think they will need any more.”
“What could we have done if they had come after us with everything they have?” Rodriguez asked.
Quinn looked steadily back at him. “It is like this. The rich men around Baroyeca have so much. The Freedom Party has so much.” He held his hands first close together, then wide apart. “If you put them in a fight, who do you think is going to win?”
“But suppose they talked to the governor,” Rodriguez said stubbornly. “Suppose they said, ‘Call out the state militia. We have to put down these Freedom Party men with guns.’ ”
“Muy bien—suppose they did that.” The Freedom Party organizer sounded agreeable. “Suppose they did exactly that. How many soldados in this state, Señor Rodriguez, do you suppose are Freedom Party men?”
“Ahh,” Rodriguez said, and his voice was just one in a small, delighted chorus of oohs and ahhs that filled Freedom Party headquarters. He went on, “You mean they cannot trust their own soldiers?”
“Did I say that?” Quinn shook his head. “I did not say that. Would I say anything that would go against the state government? Of course not.”
“Of course not,” Carlos Ruiz agreed in sly tones. “We don’t want to go against the state government. We want to take it over.”
“Ahh,” Hipolito Rodriguez said again. He found winning a national election easier to imagine than toppling the state government. Richmond was far away, and wouldn’t matter so immediately. A Freedom Party administration in Hermosillo would send shock waves rippling through Sonora.
Of course, a Freedom Party defeat in November would send shock waves of a different sort rippling through the state. Quinn said, “Remember, we have to win, or the lesson Don Joaquin learned goes for nothing.”
He didn’t say who had taught Carlos Ruiz’s patrón that lesson. He certainly didn’t say the men who’d taught that lesson had got their rifles and ammunition from him. Some things were better unadmitted.
Quietly Hipolito Rodriguez said, “That lesson had better not go for nothing, whether we win or lose. If they push us too hard, we can still fight.”
“You are a brave man, a bold man,” Quinn said. “You are the sort of man we want, the sort of man we need, in the Freedom Party.”
Rodriguez shrugged. “If a patrón wants to stay a Radical Liberal, that is all right with me. I used to be a Radical Liberal myself. I changed my mind. They have no business telling me I may not change my mind. I would never try to tell them any such thing.”
“Yes. You have reason. That is how it should be,” Ruiz said. Several other men nodded.
But Robert Quinn said, “Once we win, well, other parties will just have to get used to that. The difference between the Freedom Party and the other parties in the Confederate States is that we have reason and they do not. If they are wrong, why should we let them pretend they are right?”
“They are political parties, too,” Ruiz said. “One of these days, they will win an election.”
“I do not think so,” Quinn said. “I do not think one of them will win an election for a very, very long time once we take over.”
“What do you mean?” Ruiz asked. “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. That is how politics works.”
“Not always,” Rodriguez said. “How many times in a row have Whigs been presidents of the Confederate States? Every single time, that’s how many. If the Freedom Party is good enough to win, it will win just as many elections. That’s what you meant, isn’t it, Señor Quinn?”
“Sure it is, Señor Rodriguez,” Quinn said easily, with a small laugh. “That is exactly what I meant.”
Rodriguez wondered why he laughed. Because he hadn’t meant exactly that? If he hadn’t, what had he meant? What could he have meant? Rodriguez shrugged. Whatever it was, he didn’t think he needed to worry about it very much.
Someone asked, “Señor Quinn, how do we make certain the Freedom Party wins in Sonora this November?”
“That is a good question. That is a very good question.” Now Robert Quinn sounded not only serious but altogether sincere. “We ourselves here can only make sure we win in Baroyeca.” He waited for nods to show everyone understood that, then went on, “We have to do a few things. We have to let people know what the Party will do for them once it wins. We have to let them know what it will do for the country once it wins. We have to show them the other parties cannot do the things they promise, and that most of what they promise is not good anyway. And we have to do everything we can to keep them from having the chance to tell their lies.”
Hipolito Rodriguez understood all of that but the last. “What do you mean, Señor Quinn?” he asked. “How do we keep them from doing that?”
“However we have to,” the Freedom Party man said bluntly. “However we need to. Don Joaquin had a sad accident, verdad?” Again, he waited for nods. Again, he got them. Everybody here knew what kind of accident Don Joaquin had had. Nobody much felt like talking about details—better safe than sorry. Quinn continued, “When they come here to make speeches and stir up their followers, we do not let them. We shout, we heckle, we make enough of a disturbance to keep them from talking to an audience. If they cannot talk, they cannot get their message out, eh?”
“Sí, señor.” Several men said it together. Rodriguez wasn’t one of them, but he nodded. If the Freedom Party got to talk and no one else did, that was surely a large advantage. But . . .
He held up his hand. Quinn pointed his way. “Señor, how do we keep them from talking on the wireless?” he inquired.
“Ah, Señor Rodriguez, you do ask interesting questions.” As always, Quinn was scrupulously polite. He treated the men who’d joined the Freedom Party as if they were dons. Most white men thought of Sonorans and Chihuahuans as nothing but greasers. If Quinn did, he kept it to himself. That was another reason his following grew and grew. He continued, “We cannot stop that, not altogether—not yet. But it does not matter so much here in Sonora, because fewer places here have electricity than is true in most of the Confederate States.”
Carlos Ruiz clicked his tongue between his teeth. “That is not fair. That is not right.”
“I agree with you, Señor Ruiz,” Quinn said. “It is one of the things the Freedom Party will fix once we have power. But, whether we like it or not, it is true, and we have to take it into account.” He paused and looked around the room. “Are there any more questions? No? All right, then. This meeting is adjourned.”
Rodriguez was the first one to start out of the Freedom Party headquarters. From across the street, a shot rang out. Whoever held that gun didn’t really know what to do with it. The bullet cracked past Rodriguez’s head and thudded into the planking of the building behind him. Automatic reflex made him throw himself flat. Another bullet sang through the air where he’d stood a moment before. Glass shattered. Chunks rained down on him.
He rolled back into the building. “Blow out the lamps!” he cried. The headquarters plunged into darkness.
“Here.” Someone pressed a Tredegar into his hands. “If they want to play such games . . .”
He crawled up to the shot-out window. One of the men who’d fired at him was running across the street, straight toward the headquarters, a lighted kerosene lantern in hand. That made the fellow an even easier target than he would have been otherwise. He wanted to fight fire with fire, did he? The rifle leaped to Rodriguez’s shoulder. He squeezed the trigger. The man with the lantern shrieked, whirled, and crumpled, clutching his belly. The lantern fell on his chest. Burning kerosene poured out and made him into a torch.
Never shoot twice in a row from the same place unless the cover is very good—one more lesson Rodriguez had absorbed during the Great War. Staying low, he wriggled over to the other side of the window. Another Tredegar banged, this one at the back of Party headquarters. No cry of anguish from outside, but a triumphant yell from inside the building: Robert Quinn shouting, in English, “Take that, you fucking son of a bitch!” For good measure, he added, “Chinga tu madre!”
Bang! Bang! Bang! Somebody emptied a pistol into the headquarters as fast as he could shoot. Behind Rodriguez, a man yowled. At least one of those bullets had struck home. Rodriguez fired at the muzzle flashes. He worked the bolt, fired again, and then rolled away from that spot. He didn’t know whether he’d hit the enemy, but no more shooting came from that direction, so he hoped he had.
Running feet in the street, these from the direction of the alcalde’s house. A sharp cry of “Vámonos!” came from behind Freedom Party headquarters. Rodriguez heard more running feet, these running away. Quinn’s Tredegar barked again. The Freedom Party leader whooped again, the high, shrill cry English-speaking Confederates called the Rebel yell.
“Madre de Dios.” An officer of the guardia civil—a policeman, in other words—stared at the burning corpse in the middle of the street. He crossed himself, not bothering to take the heavy pistol from his hand first. Then, pulling himself together, he strode up to Freedom Party headquarters. In a loud voice, he demanded, “What happened here?”
“I will handle this,” Robert Quinn declared. To the policeman, he said, “They tried to murder us. They tried to burn down our building and roast us inside of it. They wounded one of our men—I do not know how badly poor Carlos is hurt. All we did was defend ourselves.”
“Some defense,” the officer muttered. “If you’d done any more defending, nothing would be left of Baroyeca. Come out here now, with your hands up, all of you.” He sounded nervous, as well he might have. If the Freedom Party men felt like fighting instead of obeying, the alcalde—the mayor—probably didn’t have enough force to make them follow orders.
But Quinn said, “We are law-abiding citizens. The Freedom Party is the party of law and order. And I told you, we have a wounded man. We will come out.” In a low voice, he added, “Hip, stay behind and cover us in case this pendejo is not to be trusted.”
“Sí, señor,” Rodriguez whispered. The other Freedom Party men strode past him and out into the street. Carlos Ruiz walked unsteadily, his right hand pressed tight to his left shoulder.
A couple of more men from the guardia civil came up. They spoke with Quinn and the rest of the Freedom Party men in low voices, then led them away. Nobody made any move to shoot anyone, not now. Hipolito Rodriguez set down his Tredegar. As quietly as he could, he crawled to the back door and left. No one waited for him there—no one living, anyhow. Two bodies lay in the alley behind the headquarters. Magdalena wouldn’t be happy with him. He was happy just to be breathing. He expected he could deal with his wife. She argued much less than a bullet.
Early summer in Nashville made a good practice ground for hell. Of course, that was true through most of the Confederate States. Jake Featherston had brought the Freedom Party nominating convention to the capital of Tennessee for a couple of reasons. Moving it off the Atlantic coast reminded people the Party was a national outfit. And looking just a little north into stolen Kentucky reminded them what was at stake.
Flash bulbs popped when Jake got off the train from Richmond. Purple and iridescent green spots danced before his eyes. Supporters on the platform shouted, “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” Others called his name, again and again: “Featherston! Featherston! Featherston!” The two cries merged and blended in his ears. Together, they felt sweeter than wine, stronger than whiskey. Despite those spots before his eyes, he waved to the crowd.
Despite those shouts, his bodyguards formed up around him, protecting his flesh with their own. One bastard with a rifle had gunned down a Confederate president and sent the Freedom Party on a ten-year journey through hell. Another one now could wreck things again. If they put Willy Knight in the top spot instead of number two, could the Party win in November? Probably, Jake thought. This year, probably. But it wouldn’t be the same. He was sure of that. Willy Knight had a handsome face and handled himself pretty well on the stump. Jake . . . Jake had plans.
Maybe, just maybe, Knight had plans, too. Maybe, just maybe, those plans involved a hero’s funeral for Jake Featherston. That was another reason the bodyguards in their almost-Confederate uniforms didn’t leave an assassin a clear shot.
“What will you do if you’re elected, Mr. Featherston?” a reporter shouted through the din.
“Put this country back on its feet,” Jake answered, as he had so many times before. “Settle accounts with everybody who’s done us wrong.”
“Who would that be?” the eager beaver asked.
“You know who. You know what we stand for. Traitors better run for the hills. Niggers better behave themselves. The Confederate States have been too soft for too long. We won’t be soft any more.”
“Would you—?” The reporter never got to finish the question. The phalanx of guards, with Featherston at its core, pushed off the platform and through the station towards a waiting limousine. Freedom Party men and women waving Confederate and Party flags surrounded them, hands reaching between the bodyguards to touch Jake, if only for an instant. He shook some of them. When he squeezed one woman’s soft, plump fingers, she moaned as if she were coming right where she stood. He almost laughed out loud. He’d seen that before, and heard it, too.
The limousine took him to the Heritage Hotel. The lobby was full of painted scenes of Confederate victory in the War of Secession and the Second Mexican War; a plaque said they came from the brush of Gilbert Gaul. There were no scenes from the Great War, perhaps because Gaul died in 1919, but more likely because there were no victories to record.
The Hermitage Hotel had come through the war without much damage. Most of Nashville hadn’t been so lucky when Custer’s First Army seized it from the Confederate defenders in 1917. The Memorial Auditorium, across the street from the hotel, was a postwar building. What ever had stood there before wasn’t standing when the damnyankees grudgingly gave the land south of the Cumberland back to the CSA in exchange for the bit of Kentucky they hadn’t overrun. Jake reluctantly acknowledged that that was smart—with all of Kentucky in U.S. hands, no Confederate Senators and Representatives from the rump of the state could fulminate in Congress about how it needed to be redeemed.
His suite looked out at the Memorial Auditorium. Confederate flags and Freedom Party banners flew above it. Inside, delegates would be going through the motions of a political convention. Going through the motions was all they’d be doing. Unlike Whig and Radical Liberal conventions, this one was sewn up tight as a drum.
And I know who did the sewing. Featherston peered into a mirror with a gilt frame of rococo extravagance. His lean, leathery features suddenly lit up in a grin. “Me,” he said aloud, and pointed at his own reflection.
He’d just fixed himself a drink when someone knocked on the door. He had guards in the hallway. They wouldn’t let anyone dangerous past. He opened the door without hesitation. There stood Ferdinand Koenig, who’d come west from Richmond with him. “Come on in, Ferd,” he said.
“Willy here yet?” Koenig asked as he stepped into the suite.
Featherston shook his head. But then another door down the hall opened. Out stepped Knight, dapper in a gray pinstriped suit with sword-sharp lapels. He waved and walked down the hall toward the two longtime Freedom Party men. “Pat him down, boss?” one of the guards asked out of the side of his mouth.
“No, it’s all right,” Jake whispered back. “Nothing to worry about.” The guard looked dubious. So did Koenig. They both played it Jake’s way, though. Everybody plays it my way from now on, he thought, and smiled. Everybody.
Maybe Willy Knight thought the smile was meant for him. He grinned back and stuck out his hand. Jake took it. The clasp turned into a quiet trial of strength. Knight was a little taller and a lot wider through the shoulders, but Featherston’s rawboned frame carried more muscle than it seemed to. When the two men let go, Knight was the one who opened and closed his hand several times to ease the pain and bring it back to life.
“Come on in,” Jake said genially. “Have a drink.”
“Don’t have to ask me twice.” In spite of the hand that was surely throbbing, Willy Knight managed another grin. “You barely have to ask me once.”
They all went into Jake’s hotel room. He closed the door behind them. The guards looked even less happy. He still wasn’t worried. Knight wouldn’t plug him himself. That wouldn’t just take Jake off the ticket—it would take him off, too. He didn’t want that. He wanted to be number one, but he’d settle for number two.
Jake made himself another drink. Ferdinand Koenig and Willy Knight fixed whiskeys for themselves, too. He raised his glass in salute first to Knight, then to Koenig. “Mr. Vice President,” he said. “Mr. Attorney General.”
“Mr. President,” the other two men said together. All three drank.
“It’s going our way,” Featherston said. “We’ve got what it takes, and the country finally knows it. What we have to do now is make sure the Rad Libs and especially the Whigs are whipped dogs long before November rolls around. I like what’s happening down in Sonora—somebody hits you in the cheek, hit him back so goddamn hard, you knock his head off.”
Koenig chuckled. “That’s not quite what Jesus said.”
“Yeah, and look what happened to him,” Jake answered.
“Maybe we don’t want to come on too strong,” Willy Knight said. “We’ve spent the last ten years trying to live down that Grady Calkins son of a bitch.”
“But now we’ve done it,” Featherston said. “I want people to know—they’ll be sorry if they even think about going the wrong way. We backed down ten years ago. We had to. We don’t have to any more. We’re going to win in November. You can take it to the bank. But even if we don’t, by God, we’re going into Richmond anyways.”
Knight’s bright blue eyes widened. “That’s treason!” he said, and finished his drink with a gulp.
“It’s only treason if you don’t bring it off,” Jake said calmly. “If we have to grab it, we’ll win. We’re getting things ready, all nice and quiet-like. Like I told you, I don’t reckon we’ll need it.”
“We’d better not,” Willy Knight said, still jolted. “Christ, you’re talking civil war.”
“Jeff Davis wasn’t afraid of it. We shouldn’t be, either,” Jake answered. “I keep telling you and telling you, this is just in case. You’ve got to cover everybody who can carry the ball, and that’s what I intend to do.”
He almost hoped he would have to try to seize power by force. Storming the War Department would be as sweet as marching into Philadelphia would have been during the Great War.
“Once we’re in, however we’re in, we’ll make everything legal,” Koenig said. “If you’re in, you make the rules, and that’s just what we’ll do.”
Knight managed a sheepish smile, as if realizing he’d shown weakness. “You don’t think small, do you, Jake?”
“Never have. Never will,” Featherston replied. “As long as you can imagine something, you can make it real. That’s what the Freedom Party’s all about. We know the Confederate States can be great again. We know we can pay back all the bastards who held us while the damnyankees sucker-punched us. We can do it, and we’re gonna do it. Right?”
“Right!” Willy Knight said. Jake was watching him. He seemed as hearty as he should have. Maybe he’d just had cold feet for a moment. Featherston shrugged. How much did it really matter? As vice president, all Willy’d do was make speeches, and Jake intended to make sure of what was in them before they came out of the handsome puppet’s mouth. Knight still hadn’t figured out he’d been condemned to oblivion. That only proved he wasn’t so smart as he thought he was.
Jake and Ferdinand Koenig looked at each other. Koenig nodded, ever so slightly. The more he’d thought about it, the more he’d liked escaping the worthless number-two slot and being promised one where he could actually do things. Featherston had plans for the attorney general’s office. Once I’m elected . . .
Three days later, he took another step toward the Gray House in Richmond. When he strode up onto the speakers’ platform at the Memorial Auditorium to accept the Freedom Party nomination, the roar from the assembled delegates left his ears as stunned and battered as any artillery barrage ever had. The klieg lights blazing on him put the sun to shame. A thicket of microphones in front of him amplified his voice for the delegates, for people listening on the wireless web, and for the newsreels that would soon show his image all over the Confederate States.
“Hello, friends,” Jake said to all the millions who would see and listen to him. “You know me. You know what I stand for. I’ve been up here in front of you before. I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you—”
“The truth!” the Freedom Party men bellowed.
Featherston nodded. “That’s right. I’m here to tell you the truth. I’ve been doing that for a long time now. I think you’re finally ready to listen. The truth is, this country needs to put people—white people, decent people—back to work, and we will. The truth is, this country needs to put the niggers who stabbed us in the back in their place, and we will. The truth is, Kentucky and Sequoyah and that joke the USA calls Houston still belong to the Confederate States. We ought to get ’em back—and we will.”
He had to stop then; the applause was too loud and too long to let him continue. When at last it ebbed, he went on, “The truth is, the Whigs have had seventy years to run this country, and they’ve run it into the ground. Somebody else needs to do it, and do it right—and we will.” Another great roar. He held up his hands. Silence fell, completely and at once. Into it, he said, “If you like the way things have gone the past few years, vote Whig. But if you want to tell those people what you really think of ’em, vote—”
“Freedom!” That cry outdid all that had gone before. And then the delegates began to chant, “Featherston! Featherston! Featherston!” Jake stood tall on the platform, waving to the crowd, waving to the country, glorying in what he had and reaching out for what he wanted.
Bouncing around South Carolina, from Charleston to Columbia to Greenville and to the smaller towns in between, Anne Colleton felt more than a little like a table-tennis ball. When she got out of her Birmingham in St. Matthews, her brother greeted her with, “Hello. Didn’t I know you once upon a time?”
“Funny, Tom,” she answered, meaning anything but. “Very funny. For God’s sake, fix me a drink.” Her own flat looked unfamiliar to her. Maybe her brother hadn’t been joking after all.
He mixed whiskey and a little water for her and plopped in a couple of ice cubes. After he’d made himself a drink, too, he said, “Well, you’ve got Jake Featherston, and it looks like he’s going to win. Are you happy?”
“You bet I am.” She would have said more, but a long pull at the whiskey came first. “Thank you. That’s a lifesaver.”
“I ought to go places with a little cask around my neck, like those St. Bernard dogs in the Alps,” Tom Colleton said.
“I’d be glad to see you, that’s for sure.” Anne took another sip. “Yes, I’m happy. I’ve waited for this day ever since the end of the war, even though I didn’t know what I was waiting for at first.”
“You walked away from Featherston once,” Tom said.
“I made a mistake,” Anne said. “Aren’t you glad you never made a mistake in all your born days?”
“Now that you mention it, yes.” Tom was irrepressible. Anne snorted. Her brother went on, “I’ll tell you one mistake I didn’t make: once I got out of politics, I didn’t get back in.”
“You wouldn’t have talked that way before you got married,” Anne said. It made you soft, was what she meant. To anyone else, she would have said that, said it without a moment’s hesitation. With Tom, she hesitated.
He understood what she meant whether she said it or not. With a shrug, he answered, “Maybe you wouldn’t talk the way you talk if you had. Nothing to cure the fire in your belly like a little boy.”
“Maybe,” Anne said tonelessly. Some small part of her wished she had settled down with Roger Kimball or Clarence Potter or that Texas oil man or one of her other lovers. A husband, a child to carry on after her . . . Those weren’t the worst things in the world. But they weren’t for her, and never would be. “I’m on my own, Tom. Too late to change it now.”
Her brother eyed her. “And heaven help anybody who gets in your way?” he said.
Anne nodded. “Of course.”
“What happens if Featherston decides you’re in his way?”
She wished he hadn’t asked that particular question. For a long time, she’d been a big fish in the small pond of South Carolina politics, and not the smallest fish in the much bigger pond of Confederate politics. Going from the Whigs to the Freedom Party, back to the Whigs and now back to Freedom had cut her influence down to size. So had getting older, as she was all too ruefully aware.
What if Jake Featherston decided she was in the way? What if President Jake Featherston decided she was in the way? She saw only one answer, and gave it to her brother: “In that case, I’d better move, don’t you think?”
“You say that? You?” Tom looked and sounded as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “You don’t move for anybody.”
“If it’s a question of move or get squashed, I’ll move,” Anne said. “And Jake has more clout than I do. Jake has more clout than anybody does.” She spoke with a certain somber pride. She might have been saying, Yeah, I got licked, but the fellow who licked me was the toughest one of the bunch. She shook her head. Might have? No. She was saying exactly that.
Tom shook his head, too, in wonder. “What’s going to happen to the country, if a fellow who can make you pull in your horns starts running things?”
“We’ll all go in the same direction, and it’ll be the right direction,” Anne said. “We’ve owed a lot of debts for a long time. Don’t you want to pay them back? I know I do.”
“Well, yes, but not if I have to go bust to do it.”
“We won’t,” Anne said positively. “He’ll do what needs doing, instead of fumbling around the way Burton Mitchel has ever since things went sour.”
“Maybe. I hope so,” her brother said. “Hell, I’ll probably even vote for him myself. But that’s all I intend to do. You can go running around the state if you want to. Me, I’ll stay home and tend my garden.”
Had he read Candide? She doubted it; she couldn’t imagine a book that seemed less her brother’s cup of tea. She said, “The whole Confederacy is my garden.”
“You’re welcome to it,” Tom replied. “It’s too big for me to get my arms around. South Carolina’s too big. I think even St. Matthews is too big, but I can try that. My wife and my little baby boy, now—that I understand just fine.”
He’d gone into the war a captain, and a boy himself. He’d come out a lieutenant-colonel, and a man. Now he was a family man, but that seemed a pulling-in, not a growing-out. It made Anne sad. “You’ve got a lot of time left,” she said. “I hope you do, anyway. You can do whatever you want with it. What I’m going to do with mine is, I’m going to put this country back on its feet.”
“I hope so.” Tom got up and kissed her on the cheek. “What I’m going to do is, I’m going home to my family. Take care of yourself, Sis. I worry about you.” He went out the door, taking her chance for the last word with him.
I’m going home to my family. Ever since they’d lost their parents when they were small, she’d been his family, she and their brother Jacob, who was dead. He didn’t think that way any more. He didn’t care about the country any more, either. Anne made herself another whiskey. Tom might have his wife and a little boy. She had a cause, and a cause on its way to victory.
She slept in her own bed that night. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept there. It had been weeks, she knew. Her own mattress felt as unfamiliar as any of the hotel beds where she’d lain down lately.
When morning came, she was on her way again, driving down to Charleston. Featherston was coming into town in a couple of days for a rally that should finish sewing up South Carolina for the Freedom Party. She hurled herself into the work of making sure everything went off the way it was supposed to. Things were more complicated than they had been when she first started planning rallies. Making sure the wireless web and the newsreels were taken care of kept her busy up until an hour and a half before Featherston’s speech began. Saul Goldman did a lot of work with them—more than she did, in fact. She wondered if the head of the Freedom Party knew just what a smart little Jew he had running that part of his operation.
“Hello, there,” Featherston said, coming up behind her as she peered out from the wings to make sure the lighting arrangements were the way she wanted them.
She jumped. She wasn’t the sort of person who jumped when someone came up behind her, but Jake Featherston wasn’t the ordinary sort of person coming up behind her. “Oh. Hello.” She hated herself for how callow she sounded. No one had any business making her feel so unsure, so . . . weak was the only word that seemed to fit. No one had any business doing it, but Jake did.
He eyed the hall with the knowing gaze of a man who’d given speeches in a lot of different places. “Good to have you back in the Party,” he said, his attention returning to her. “I wasn’t even close to sure it would be, in spite of the pretty speeches you made me. But it is. You’ve given me a lot of help here, and I do appreciate it.”
“Happy to do anything I can,” Anne said: a great thumping lie. She knew she was doing things for Featherston, doing them as a subordinate. She wasn’t used to being a subordinate, wasn’t used to it and despised it. Once, she and Roger Kimball had thought they would guide Jake Featherston to power and then enjoy it themselves, with him in the role of puppet. The only small consolation she had was that they weren’t the only ones who’d underestimated him. At one time or another, almost everybody in the CSA had underestimated Featherston.
He said, “There’s a lot of people I owe, and I’m going to pay every single one of them back. But you, you owe me—you owe me plenty for walking out on me when I really needed a hand.”
He hadn’t forgotten. He never forgot a slight, no matter how small. Anne knew as much. And hers hadn’t been small, not at all. She said, “I know. I’m trying to pay you back.” Her gesture encompassed the hall where he’d speak.
The answer seemed to catch him by surprise. Slowly, thoughtfully, he nodded. “Well, you’re doing better than a lot of folks I can think of,” he said.
“Good.” Anne didn’t like the way he looked at her. He’d been an artilleryman during the war, not a sniper, but he eyed her as she thought a sniper would: all cold, deadly concentration. She was used to intimidating, not being intimidated. Being on the receiving end of a glance like that chilled her.
But Featherston sounded warm and lively when he went into his speech. “I never had a fancy name,” he declared. “I was only one more Confederate soldier, with a stamped tin identity disk around my neck. But every great idea draws men to it. Every idea steps out before the nation. It has to win from the nation the fighters it needs, so one day it’s strong enough to turn the course of destiny. Our day is here!”
The hall erupted. Anne found herself clapping as hard as anyone else in the building. When she listened to Jake on the stump, she always believed what he said while he was saying it. She might not believe it later, when she thought about it, but at the time. . . . She shivered, though she also went on clapping. She hadn’t met many people who frightened her. He did.
He thundered on: “Lots of people in the Confederate States think the Freedom Party can’t do the job if we get in. They’re fooling themselves! Today our movement can’t be destroyed. It’s here. People have to reckon with it, whether they like it or not. We recognize three principles—responsibility, command, and obedience. We’ve built a party—a party of millions, mind—based on one thing: achievement. And if you don’t like it, we say, ‘We’ll fight today! We’ll fight tomorrow! And if you don’t fancy our rally today, we’ll hold another one next week, even bigger!’ ”
He slammed his fist down on the podium. More applause interrupted him. Anne looked down at her carefully tended, carefully manicured hands. Her palms were red and sore. She’d broken a nail without even noticing.
“I’m not just here to ask you for your vote, or to ask you to do this or that for the Party,” Featherston said. “I’m here to tell you the truth, and what I aim to do. What I’ve got to give is the only thing that can pull our country back on its feet again. If all you Confederates had the same faith in your country that our Freedom Party stalwarts do, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in. We will pull ourselves together. We’re on the way, and I know you’ll help.”
I’m already helping, Anne thought proudly. Not being in charge didn’t bother her so much any more—not as long as she was listening to Jake, anyhow.