Finally, Lincoln forcefully reminded Halleck of his duties to support Grant, and Meade of his duties to defend Washington. Thus, when they finally called an end to the day's work, Grant's strategy was unchanged. It was amazing_: Nathan thought. Did the Confederates have similar problems within their military hierarchy? They had to. They were human_: weren't they? Also_: they were Americans_: which meant they were as political and venal as anyone else.

He heard a noise in the hall_: followed by a gentle tapping on the door. “Come in.”

It opened slowly. Rebecca peered shyly around its edge. “I was afraid you were asleep.”

Nathan sat up in surprise. He saw that she was wearing an incredibly awful-looking nightgown and had a cheap blanket draped around her shoulders. She looked beautiful and it was suddenly difficult for him to breathe.

“Am I making a mistake?” she asked, hesitation apparent on her face. The wrong answer and she would bolt. “Not for one second.”

He stood and walked to her as she closed the door behind her and let the blanket fall to the floor. An instant later they were in each other's arms and kissing with a pent-up fervor that left them gasping.

They parted breathlessly and he looked at her. He was thoroughly and immediately aroused. With trembling hands he unbuttoned the nightgown until he was able to slide it over her pale shoulders and let it fall freely down to her ankles. Her nakedness took his breath away. She was far lovelier than he had ever hoped to imagine. She had small but perfectly formed breasts, a flat belly, and gently curved legs that were covered by only a wisp of dark hair. He gently traced his hand down from her throat, across her breasts, and below her belly. She closed her eyes and swayed to his caress. Then she took his hand in hers and had him repeat the journey, while, with her other hand, she grasped his hardened penis through the cloth of his pajamas. He gasped and leaned down to kiss the burn scar on her neck.

Rebecca released him and removed his hand from her body. She unbuttoned his pajama top and slid it off his shoulders. He was more muscular than she had thought and not particularly hairy. Then she untied the drawstring of the pants and he, too, was naked. They kissed again and felt the warmth of their thoroughly aroused bodies against each other.

Nathan dimmed the oil lamp but left it on as just an ember that broke the darkness. They lay down in bed and caressed each other until they thought they'd explode. He entered her and they came together, and both cried out as their bodies surged into one. It had been so long, almost too long. For Nathan it was a renewal, while for Rebecca it was a belated beginning.

Outside the storm raged, and the lightning flashed. Outside, great armies moved towards each other in a dance of death. Inside, neither Nathan nor Rebecca cared about any of this as they began to make love a second time.

Lord Palmerston felt his body quivering with a sudden chill. It had nothing to do with age, at least not much. What sent concern and almost fear coursing through his body was the realization that virtually everything that could go wrong had gone wrong in the war with what should have been an enfeebled United States. What the London newspapers and his so-called loyal opposition in Parliament were calling the Massacre at Hampton Roads was yet another case in point. Until recently, it was inconceivable that one single ship could dominate a battle, yet this is precisely what had happened.

When the final tally was taken, a dozen British merchant ships and one armed schooner had been sunk, with more than two score others damaged by shell or fire, or both. A large percentage of the damaged ships would have to be scrapped due to the severity of their wounds, and the insurers at Lloyds were already screaming bloody murder.

Many of the merchant ships had been empty, but about a third contained priceless ammunition, cannon, and other supplies that had gone up in smoke or were now resting at the bottom of Chesapeake Bay. The solitary Union ship, the Potomac had steamed away from Hampton Roads and now rested at anchor under the guns protecting the harbor of Baltimore. Or, Palmerston wondered, was it the other way around?

Metaphorically, he acknowledged that yet another thread had come loose in the fabric of dominance he was attempting to weave for his beloved Great Britain.

Palmerston knew he was an old man, and he sometimes had a hard time dealing with all the changes in technology that had occurred in his lifetime. First was the railroad. Nonexistent in his youth, it began as little more than an interesting toy, then as a means of commerce. Now it was a method of moving huge armies across a continent at speeds that were only dreamed of a couple of decades prior. Even while Lee marched north, Grant was assembling an equally vast army using the North's tens of thousands of miles of rail lines that connected all parts of the Union like a spider's iron web. Lee's army could march twenty miles on a good day, but an army on a train might do ten or fifteen miles an hour for twenty-four hours, even in the worst of weather. The railroad had changed the face of war.

Another change was the fact that the Union was experimenting with repeating rifles. The fundamental weapon of the British and other armies had always been the musket, which had been essentially unchanged for nearly two hundred years. Now the rifled musket had increased range and firepower, and a repeating rifle, if manufactured in quantity, would again change the face of war.

How many faces did war have? he wondered.

But the most chilling change had been the steamship, which had spawned the ironclad. Again, only a few decades earlier, steamships went from unknown, to a novelty, to a necessity of commerce, and now, clad in iron, an invincible weapon of war, England depended on the wooden walls of her ships just as had ancient Athens, but now these walls were being smashed by shells from smoke-belching iron ships.

Admirals Chads and Parker had tendered their resignations following the debacle against the Potomac. Palmerston had rejected them for two reasons: first, because he had no one to replace them, and second, because of the nagging doubt that anyone else would have done any better,

The Admiralty had informed him that England would begin building new ironclad warships immediately, although it was hard for him to see what good that would do in this war. It took months, even years, to build a ship like the Warrior and she was already obsolete, Ironically, so was the original Monitor, along with the New Ironsides. The newer ships would have turrets, which the Warrior and the New Ironsides lacked, and would have more than one, like the Potomac, which doomed the Monitor to the scrap yard. New ships, the wizards of the Admiralty had said, would have higher free-boards than the current Monitors to facilitate ocean crossings. American Monitors were so low in the water that even a gentle sea washed over their decks. This made them difficult to hit, but perilous in a rough sea.

New ships would have sloping armored decks and round turrets, which meant that any shell striking one would be a deflection and not a direct hit. This was one of the reasons why the Monitors had sustained so little apparent damage in the three battles in which they'd been engaged. The new ships would have at least two turrets, maybe three or four, and each turret would contain at least two large guns. Because of the weight inherent in the turrets, the new ships would have to be much larger.

The technology race was going at a speed that was dizzying and almost incomprehensible to him.

So, he thought, in a year or so Great Britain would have some ironclads with which to challenge the Americans. However, the Americans were building coastal Monitors as quickly as a chicken lays eggs. It was even rumored that both the Union and the Confederacy were experimenting with ships that could operate underwater. It was a naval armaments race that Britain might not win, and Palmerston found the thought of sharing or even losing supremacy of the seas almost nauseating.