Cherie Priest - Fiddlehead

“Take it as you like. But I’d like to throw my weight behind the Union, if the Union will have me. I’ll end your war in a fortnight if you’ll let me take charge of the project, or if you’ll allow Mr. Fowler to pursue it on my behalf, with my assistance.”

“That’s a bold claim.” The way Grant said it was just short of an accusation. She couldn’t possibly do any such thing. Could she?

“It’s a bold program.” She patted Desmond Fowler’s hand. “And it’s a bold man you have on your team, to take such a risk. As for the weapons we’re developing—I could arrange for a demonstration, perhaps. Not soldiers, of course,” she specified. “Maybe dogs, or horses, or—”

Grant was too drunk to keep the horror to himself. “Dear God, woman. If the weapon is half what you claim it is, it ought to be tested in battle—not on dogs, and certainly not horses!”

She smirked at him, and he wanted to punch her—a desire which shamed him even as the thought of it delighted him. The prospect of running a fist into her smug, pretty face. A face that Desmond Fowler could scarcely stop looking at. A lying face. He was as confident of that as the drink in his hand. Except the drink was gone, his glass empty.

Fine, then. He wasn’t sure of anything.

“Very well then, Mr. President. I understand your reluctance, and I’m flattered by it. You give me credit for having created something terrible, and I thank you.”

He shuddered. “What an awful thing to say.”

“More awful than war itself?” she asked. “Terrible things are necessary sometimes. One might argue that any means to the end of hostilities might call itself a virtue, no matter how frightful the initial cost. If we kill a few thousand people in the South and they tremble before the Union’s military might … then we might save the lives of tens of thousands more. How many have died already, Mr. President?”

“More than tens of thousands. Hundreds.”

“Hundreds from battle alone, or hundreds more from the disease, terror, and famine that comes in a war’s wake?”

“I could not say.” He did not know.

“But you’ve seen it yourself. You know the war better than anyone, and I do not think that you love it. I believe you want to see it concluded, in order to begin the long work of reconstructing the nation.”

She had him there. “I hate the war. If I could end it tomorrow, I would do so.”

Her smile was both sharper and more frightening than a line of bayonets, and Grant had walked right into it. “Then we do agree after all. I do think we can work together, Mr. President. I’ll end your war if you let me. I’ll give you back your country, in exchange for a clean reputation.”

He shook his head, not to argue with her but because she was asking for more than he could offer. Immunity from prosecution? That was easy enough to come by; he could hand it over with a signature. But should he? He did not believe her when she’d called herself a scapegoat. He did not believe that she’s unknowingly been party to a war crime, and he did not believe that she wanted nothing else from him—nothing at all. But if he asked her now, she’d only lie some more, and he was too drunk to sort out the particulars.

There was nothing else he could say. He could either play along and pretend he was running the show, or he could fight and lose, and then everyone would know how weak he’d truly become.

And to think, these men wanted him to run for another term. But he hadn’t fought that, either. He’d missed his chance. And now, he was on a ballot, in a yellow oval, in a white house, in a cage of his own making.

Could he survive a fourth term? Would he want to?

He stood up without another word, set his glass down on the sideboard by the door, and walked out.

He did not stumble until he was around the corner, so no one saw it, thank God; except then Jemison Simms stuck his head out to ask, “Mr. President?”

Grant did not turn around, only waved and said, “I’m fine. Leave me alone. I need to think.”

Simms, having known the president since they’d served in the war together, on the ground and on horseback, in uniforms instead of suits … decided (wisely, in Grant’s estimation) to leave the matter alone and go back inside.

The president assumed that Simms would settle things and send the cabinet home from what had to be one of the worst War Department meetings in the history of such meetings. Was it even an official meeting? No. Not with that woman there. Not with that cat among pigeons.

And Desmond Fowler—the fattest, worst pigeon of them all—was standing right behind her. His hand on her shoulder, not to control her but to take direction from her. Grant did not like that. Not in the slightest. Because Fowler was right about several things, including a few he hadn’t said, but only implied, like the fact that Grant would lose if he fought him. And that was the crux of it, wasn’t it? He’d brought Fowler in to be the Secretary of State because Fowler understood the way Washington worked. He understood politics, and politicking, as a duck knows water. That’s why he’d needed him eight years before, and that’s why he’d become so powerful: because Grant was a soldier, not a statesman. He did not know—and had never understood, not for five sober seconds—how things worked between men of state.

Maybe war wasn’t the most terrible thing of all. It was easy to understand, for all the carnage and misery. Here is one side. Here is another. You try to kill each other, and the best army with the best strategists wins, barring unexpected interference.

As his thoughts tumbled and clattered together, he found his way to a small library, one he’d only ever entered once or twice. It had a door, one he could shut behind himself. It even had a lock, which he used, then turned a switch to raise the dimmed electric lights. Then he turned them down again, because they made his head hurt.

“A patriot,” he mumbled.

That’s what Katharine Haymes had called herself. And he was certain Desmond Fowler thought the same of himself, as did the rest of those men in the War Department—scheduling war without setting foot inside it, or not anymore.

“To hell with the patriots,” he said, scanning the room for a liquor cabinet and not seeing one. He rubbed his eyes and sat down on the floor before his legs gave out underneath him.

“To hell with us all. ”

It took so little time to reach Richmond from Washington, D.C., that Maria wondered how the two cities managed to fight on opposite sides of the same war. It wasn’t even terribly difficult to travel between them; all it took was a false set of paperwork (provided by Mr. Pinkerton) claiming that she was a Red Cross nurse, a train ticket, and finally a carriage that took her to the doorstep of the Robertson Hospital.

The hospital was once a very large house, owned by a judge who’d fled the premises when the Yankees were coming, back in 1861. As the Confederacy stabilized into a state of war, the house’s original owner had made several attempts to return and reclaim the property; but Captain Sally had countersued, on grounds that possession is nine-tenths of the law … and besides, she was performing a service for the nation, a service she successfully argued was more important than the cowardly relocation effort that left the house abandoned in the first place. Since then, the house had been augmented extensively in order to accommodate the thousand or so men who found their way to Robertson from the fronts each year. Now it sat in the center of a small compound of tents, outbuildings, storage lean-tos, and a carriage house for the single ambulance that operated on the hospital’s behalf.