He was, however, responsible for something he didn't mention in his account. When he. Holt and Nickelberry entered L'Enfant, they were followed. Their pursuers weren't common marauders; they were a small group of men led by Benjamin Morrow, the father of Katherine, who had lately lost both his sons to Nub's pistol. He was an old man by the standards of that age, well into his sixties, and perhaps his years made him more cautious and clever than a younger man might have been. Though he and his posse of five God-fearing Charlestonians had several times come close to their quarry as they'd chased them north. Morrow had refrained from attack. He wanted to get to the heart of the unholy power that had so besotted his beloved Katherine that she'd lost every drop of propriety, and gone to be a whore for this nigger Galilee. His caution and his curiosity had saved both his life and the lives of his men. By following in the footsteps of their quarry they'd unknowingly negotiated the traps that would have claimed them had they come into L'Enfant on their own. Once Cesaria realized she had trespassers, of course she descended on them like a fury.

I saw them in their graves, and I will never forget the expressions on their faces. They would have been better served by fate if they'd misstepped somewhere along the way, and perished in one of the traps. Instead they'd looked as though they'd been mauled by a cageful of hungry tigers. But given that they'd been killed by Cesaria, I'm certain even that would have been a kindness.

Anyway, now you know. And I have to say that in some corner of my being I believe the horrors that were visited upon us all soon after the dispatch of the Charleston Six would not have been so disastrous-indeed might not have happened at all-had they been forgiven their error and allowed to leave. Blood begets blood; cruelty begets cruelty. Once the Six were dead, it was all storms, horses and horrors. Galilee wasn't the cause of all that. She was; the goddess herself. Though she'd been the one from whom the glories of L'Enfant had come, she was also, in her madness, the architect of its darkest hour.

Rachel and Galilee didn't return to the fire. They went instead to sit on the rocks at the end of the beach. The sea was calm, and perhaps its soothing rhythm made it easier for him to confess what he still had to tell.

"It was Nub got me out of the house," he began, "just as he'd got me in. I think he probably believed Cesaria was going to kill me-"

"She wouldn't have harmed you. Would she?"

"In one of her furies, anything was possible. She'd made me, after all; I'm sure she believed she was quite within her rights as a mother to unmake me again. But she didn't get the chance. Marietta distracted her, and Nickelberry spirited me away. I was delirious most of the time but I remember that night-oh my God, how I remember it-stumbling through the swamp, thinking every sound we heard behind us was her coming after us."

"What about Nickelberry-the things he'd seen. How did he deal with that?"

"Oh Nub was a cool one. It was all too much for Charles, but Nub… I don't know, he just took everything in his stride. And he saw power. That was the crux of it. He saw power the like of which he'd never seen before, and he knew that if he had me, he had a piece of that power. He wasn't helping me out of Christian charity. He'd lived the life of an underdog. He'd been brought up with nothing. He'd come out of the war with nothing. But now he had me. My life was in his hands, and he wasn't going to let it slip away."

"Did you talk about what he'd seen?"

"Later. But not for many weeks. I was too sick. He'd brought out medicines that my sister Zabrina had given him, and he promised me that he'd stay with me and make me well."

"What did he want in exchange?"

"At the time, nothing. We made our way out to the shore, and we lived there in the dunes for a few weeks. Nobody came there; we were quite safe from discovery. He made a shelter for us, and I lay in it, listening to the sea, slowly getting well. He was my nurse, he was my comforter; he fed me, he bathed me, he listened to me rave in my fevers. He went out and brought back food. God knows where he got it. What he did to get it. His only concern was to make me well. I know it may sound perverse, but when I look back on that time, I think of it more fondly than any of my time in Charleston. I felt this great weight off me. Like I'd been cured of some sickness. I'd had every excess known to man. I'd made love to so many bodies, had so much beauty in my hands. I'd been so high I thought I'd never come down. And now it was all over. I was living out under the stars with nothing to call my own, just the sea, and time to think. That's when I first began to dream of building myself a boat and sailing away…

"Then one day Nub started talking about his own dreams. And I realized it wasn't going to be so easy. He had a friend in me; that's what he believed at least. We were going to work together, when I was well.

""This is the perfect time to start over,' he said to me. 'If we work together we could make a fortune out there.'"

"What did you say to him?"

"I told him I didn't want to have anything more to do with people. I'd had my fill of them. I told him about my dream of building a boat and sailing away.

"I expected him to laugh. But he didn't. In fact he said he thought it was a very good idea. But then he said: 'You

can't just sail away and forget what we've been through together. You owe me something.'

"And of course he was right. He'd risked his life for me in Charleston, shooting the Morrow brothers. He'd risked his life getting me out of L'Enfant. Lord knows, he'd seen things that would have driven lesser men mad, because of me. And then, when we'd reached the shore he'd tended to me night and day. Without him and Zabrina's poultices I would have been disfigured; maybe died. Of course I owed him. There was no question about it.

"So I asked him what he wanted from me. And he had a very simple answer: he wanted me to help make him rich. The way he saw it there were opportunities to make fortunes out there. Reconstruction was underway. There were roads to lay, cities to rebuild, bellies to feed. And the men who were at the heart of all that-with the wit and the skill to make themselves indispensable-those men were going to be richer than any men in the history of America."

"Was he right about all this?"

"More or less. There were a few oil tycoons and railroad magnates who were already so rich nobody was going to catch up with them. But he'd given the whole business some careful thinking, and he was not a stupid man; not by any means. He knew that as a team-with his pragmatism and my vision, his understanding of what people wanted and my capacity to get the opposition out of the way-we could become very powerful in a very short time. And he was impatient. He'd lived in the gutter for long enough. He wanted a better life. And he didn't care how he got it, as long as he got it." He paused, and stared out to sea. "I could still get myself my boat, he said to me, I could still sail away. That was fine and dandy. He'd even help me find a boat; only the best. But he needed me to help him in return. He wanted to have a wife and kids, and he wanted them to live the good life. It seemed like such a small thing when I was agreeing to it. Anyway, how could I refuse, after he'd done all he'd done for me?

"We made a kind of pact, right there on the shore. I swore I would never cheat him, or any of his family. I swore on my life that I'd be his friend, and his family's friend, for as long as I lived."

Rachel had a sickening sense of where this was going.

"I think you begin to understand," Galilee said.

"He didn't keep the same name…"