Ghosts of Time by Steve White Page A

Turning and looking through a door beside the stairway to the third floor, Jason could glimpse what looked like a nursery. Three children—a girl of nine or ten and two boys, apparently aged about eight and three, came running out, squealing. They were followed by another little boy, obviously of half-African descent. The girl took him by the hands and swung him around, sending him spinning off and causing him to collide with Jason’s booted legs. He looked up with round dark eyes. Jason wondered who he could be.
    “Children! That will do!” A dark-haired woman of about forty, no beauty but not unhandsome, bustled out of the nursery carrying an infant. “You must excuse Jim, Captain . . . Oh! Good day, General Lee!”
    “Mrs. Davis,” said Lee with a courtly inclination of his head. “I am pleased to see you and your children are in good health.”
    “ Excessively robust health, as some might say! Come, children.” Varina Davis, first lady of the Confederacy, hustled her brood, including the biracial boy, back into the nursery.
    As they descended the staircase, Jason worried that Lee would be too preoccupied with weightier matters to remember the requisition. But once on the street the general wrote it down and handed it to him along with the dispatch for the cavalry corps commander—which, Jason reflected, General Hampton would have to get along without. He wondered why that troubled his conscience.
    “Farewell, Captain Landrieu,” Lee said as he returned Jason’s salute. “Give my best regards to General Butler. I know you will continue to honorably perform your duty.” A shadow crossed the still-handsome face. “As will we all.” Then he turned, boarded the carriage, and was gone.
    Only then did Jason notice that a baker’s wagon was in front of the kitchen. Mary Bowser was there, in furtive colloquy with the driver. In the guise of reassembling his men, Jason walked over as the driver gave a final nod and departed.
    “I’ve got to get back inside,” Mary Bowser told them. “But here: this is a note for Gracchus.”
    “I see it’s in Elizabeth Van Lew’s code,” Jason noted.
    She smiled briefly. “Yes. It comes in handy even in ways she doesn’t know about.”
    “But where is he?”
    “Rectortown, up in Fauquier County. You’ll just have to find him.” She handed him another note, this one in plain language. “This is the only address I have that might do you some good. Memorize it, and then destroy the note.”
    “Right.” Jason started to go, but curiosity got the better of him. “Let me ask you something. When I was inside, I saw the Davis children, and there was this little black boy with them. Mrs. Davis called him ‘Jim.’ Who was he?”
    “Oh, that’s James Henry Brooks—or ‘Jim Limber’ as they call him. He’s the son of a free black woman. His stepfather was mean to him— real mean. Mr. and Mrs. Davis got him out of there and have brought him up with her own children. He’s their inseparable playmate.”
    “I see. That was good of them. But it almost seems . . . well, sort of incongruous . . .”
    “Yes. I know what you’re trying to say.” Mary Bowser sighed. “The Davises are not bad people. There are a lot of slaveowners who aren’t bad people.” Jason thought of Lee. “But there are those that are. And when you’re a slave, all you can do is trust to luck that you’ll get the first kind, because there’s no limit to what the other kind can do—no real limit, because how can laws against cruelty be enforced when slaves’ testimony isn’t admissible in court? It’s slavery itself that’s evil, even when the people aren’t.”
    Dabney spoke softly, as though quoting:

    “Bury the unjust thing
    That some tamed into mercy, being wise,
    But could not starve the tiger from its eyes
    Or make it feed where beasts of mercy feed.”

    Mary Bowser looked at him sharply. “What?”
    “Oh, it’s from a poem. You won’t have heard of it.”
    She looked at