The Victorious Opposition Read Free Page B

way.
That would have done well enough for her motto. She was a tall, blond woman with a man’s determined stride. If any gray streaked the yellow—she was, after all, nearer fifty than forty—the peroxide bottle didn’t let it show. She looked younger than her years, but not enough to suit her. In her twenties, even in her thirties, she’d been strikingly beautiful, and made the most of it. Now
handsome
would have fit her better, except she despised that word when applied to a woman.
    “Excuse me,” she said again, and all but walked up the back of a man who, by his clothes, was a drummer who hadn’t drummed up much lately. He turned and gave her a dirty look. The answering frozen contempt she aimed like an arrow from her blue eyes made him look away in a hurry, muttering to himself and shaking his head.
    Most of the passengers had to go back to the baggage car to reclaim their suitcases. Anne had all her chattels with her. She hurried out of the station to the cab stand in front of it. “Ford’s Hotel,” she told the driver whose auto, a Birmingham with a dented left fender, was first in line at the stand.
    “Yes, ma’am,” he said, touching a finger to the patent-leather brim of his peaked cap. “Let me put your bags in the trunk, and we’ll go.”
    Ford’s Hotel was a great white pile of a building, just across Capitol Street from Capitol Square. Anne tried to figure out how many times she’d stayed there. She couldn’t; she only knew the number was large. “Afternoon, ma’am,” said the colored doorman. He wore a uniform gaudier and more magnificent than any the War Department issued.
    Anne checked in, went to her room, and unpacked. She went downstairs and had an early supper—Virginia ham and applesauce and fried potatoes, with pecan pie for dessert—then returned to her room, read a novel till she got sleepy (it wasn’t very good, so she got sleepy fast), and went to bed. It was earlier than she would have fallen asleep back home. That meant she woke up at half past five the next morning. She was annoyed, but not too annoyed: it gave her a chance to bathe and to get her hair the way she wanted it before going down to breakfast.
    After breakfast, she went to the lobby, picked up one of the papers on a table, and settled down to read it. She hadn’t been reading long before a man in what was almost but not quite Confederate uniform strode in. Anne put down the newspaper and got to her feet.
    “Miss Colleton?” asked the man in the butternut uniform.
    She nodded. “That’s right.”
    “Freedom!” the man said, and then, “Come with me, please.”
    When they went out the door, the doorman—a different Negro from the one who’d been there the day before, but wearing identical fancy dress—flinched away from the Freedom Party man in the plain tan outfit. The Party man, smiling a little, led Anne to a waiting motorcar. He almost forgot to hold the door open for her, but remembered at the last minute. Then he slid in behind the wheel and drove off.
    The Gray House—U.S. papers still sometimes called it the Confederate White House—lay near the top of Shockoe Hill, north and east of Capitol Square. The grounds were full of men in butternut uniforms or white shirts and butternut trousers: Freedom Party guards and stalwarts. Anne supposed there were also some official Confederate guards, but she didn’t see any.
    “This here’s Miss Colleton,” her driver said when they went inside.
    A receptionist—male, uniformed—checked her name off a list. “She’s scheduled to see the president at nine. Why don’t you take her straight to the waiting room? It’s only half an hour.”
    “Right,” the Freedom Party guard said. “Come this way, ma’am.”
    “I know the way to the waiting room. I’ve been here before.” Anne wished she didn’t have to try to impress a man of no particular importance. She also wished that, since she had tried to impress him, she would have succeeded. But his