"Who is she?" Jamison asked.

Hatcher started to speak, but Atkins cut him off.

"Abigail Dowling got the money from Carrie LaRose, Colonel," Atkins said. "Is there something you want done?"

"I've suspected for some time Miss Dowling is an immoralist. Do you know what I mean by that?" Jamison said.

"No, suh," Hatcher said.

"Listen to the colonel, Clay," Atkins said.

"She has unnatural inclinations toward her own gender. I think she has no business teaching anybody anything. She is also trying to embarrass us in the national press. Are you hearing me, Rufus?" Jamison said.

"Yes, sir. To borrow a phrase from my friend Clay here, maybe it's time that abolitionist bitch got her buckwheats," Atkins said.

"Yes, and leave footprints right back to my front door," Jamison said.

Atkins' gaze focused on the river bottoms and a work gang hauling dirt up the side of a levee. The striped jumpers and pants of the convicts were stained red with sweat and clay. Atkins sucked in his cheeks, his eyes neutral, the colonel's insult leaving no trace in his face.

"I reckon we have a situation that requires a message without a signature," he said.

"Good. We're done here," Jamison said, and began to walk away. Then he turned, his hand cupped on his chin, his thoughts veiled.

"Rufus?" he said.

"Yes, sir?"

"No one is to harm Flower. Not under any circumstances. The man who does will have his genitalia taken out," Jamison said.

Jamison crossed the yard and walked under the porte cochere and into the house. Clay Hatcher stared after him, breathing through his mouth, his eyes dull.

"A little late, ain't hit? Don't he know Flower got raped by them lamebrains you hired?" he said.

Atkins used the flat of his fist to break Hatcher's bottom lip against his teeth.

ABIGAIL Dowling had discovered she did not know how to talk with Robert Perry. The previous evening she had seen him for the first time in almost four years. When she had run out of the classroom into the hallway to greet him, he had placed his hands on her shoulders and touched the skin along her collar with one finger. Instead of happiness, she felt a rush of guilt in her chest and a sense of physical discomfort that bordered on resentment. Why? she asked herself. The more she tried to think her way out of her feelings, the more confused she became.

He had stood up to Todd McCain and the drunkards who were harassing the Negroes under the live oak; his manners and good looks and the brightness in his eyes and his obvious affection for her were undiminished by the war. He walked her and Flower home, dismissing the shot fired over his head by McCain, offering to sleep on her gallery in case the revelers on the flatbed wagon returned.

But she didn't even ask him in and was glad she could honestly tell him she was feeling ill. When he was gone she made tea for Flower and herself and experienced a sudden sense of quietude and release for which she could offer herself no explanation.

Who in reality was she? she asked herself. Now, more than ever, she believed she was an impostor, a sojourner not only in Louisiana and in the lives of others but in her own life as well.

The next morning she looked out the front window and saw Robert opening the gate to her yard. He wore a brushed brown suit, shined shoes, and a soft blue shirt with a black tie, and his hair was wet and combed back on his neck. In the daylight she realized he was even thinner than she had thought.

"I hope you don't mind my dropping by unannounced," he said.

"Of course not," she said, and unconsciously closed her left hand, which her father had told her was the way he could always tell when she fibbed to him as a girl."Why don't we walk out here in the yard?"

They strolled through the trees toward the bayou. The camellias and four-o'clocks were blooming in the shade, and a family of black people were perched among the cypress knees on the bank, bobber-fishing in the shallows.

She heard Robert clear his throat and pull a deep breath into his lungs.

"Abby, what is it? Why is there this stone wall between us?" he said.

"I feel I've deceived you."

"In what way?"

Her heart raced and the trees and the air vines swaying in the breeze and the black family among the shadows seemed to go in and out of focus.

"You fought for a cause in which you believed. You spent almost two years in prison. I was a member of the Underground Railroad. I never told you that," she said.

"You're a woman of conscience.You don't have to explain yourself to me."

"Well," she said, her mouth dry, her blood hammering in her ears with a new deceit she had just perpetrated upon him.

"Is that the sum of your concerns?" he said.

She paused under an ancient live oak, one that was gnarled, hollowed by lightning, green with lichen and crusted with fern, the trunk wrapped with poisonous vines.

"No, I was romantically intimate with another," she said.

"I see," he replied.

His hair had dried in the heat and it had lights in it, like polished mahogany, and the wind blew it on his collar. His eyes were crystal blue and seemed to focus on a little Negro boy who was cane-lifting a hooked perch out of the water.

"With Willie?" he said.

"I can only speak to my own deeds," she said.

"Neither of you should feel guilt, at least not toward me. Nor does either of you owe me an apology."

"We're different, you and I," she said.

"And Willie is not?"

"You believed in the cause you served. Willie never did. He fought because he was afraid not to. Then his heart filled with hatred when he saw Jim Stubbefield killed," she said.

"I lost friends, too, Abby," Robert said.

BUT she was already walking back toward the house, her hands balled into fists, the leaves and persimmons and molded pecan husks snapping under her feet, the world swimming around her as though she were seeing it from the bottom of a deep, green pool.

"Did you hear me, Abby? I lost friends, too," Robert called behind her.

The following week, on a sun-spangled, rain-scented Saturday evening, Carrie LaRose entered St. Peter's Church and knelt down inside the confessional. The inside of the confessional was hot and dark and smelled of dust and oil and her own perfume and body powder and the musk in her clothes.

The priest who pulled back the wood slide in the partition was very old, with a nervous jitter in his eyes and hands which often shook uncontrollably, to such a degree he was no longer allowed to perform the consecration at Mass or to administer communion. Through a space between the black gauze that hung over the small window in the partition and the wood paneling, Carrie could see the hands and wrists of the priest framed inside a shaft of sunlight. His bones looked like sticks, the skin almost translucent, the veins little more than pieces of blue string.

The priest waited, then his head turned toward the window. "What is it? Why is it you don't speak?" he said.

"You don't know me. I run the brot'el sout' of town," she replied.

"Could I help you with something?"

"You don't talk French?"

"No, not well."

"I done a lot of sins in my life. The Lord already knows what they are and I ain't gonna bore Him talking about them, no. But I done one t'ing that don't never let go of me. 'Cause for me to wish I ain't done what I did is the same t'ing as wishing I wasn't alive."

"You've lost me."

Carrie tried to start over but couldn't think. "My knees is aching. Just a minute," she said. She left the confessional and found a chair and dragged it back inside, then plunked down in it and closed the curtain again.

"Are we comfortable now?" the priest asked.