Challenged, Rachel lost a little of her confidence. She faltered before beginning to say: "Upstairs-"

You think womanhood should be all sighs and compassion? The expression on Cesaria's face had lost its comic excess; her eyes were heavy and hooded. You think I should have sat by that bastard's bed and comforted him? That's not womanhood. It's trained servitude. If you wanted to be a bedtenderyou should have stayed with the Gearys. There's going to be plenty of deathbeds to tend there.

"Does it have to end this way?"

Yes. I'm afraid it does. I meant what I said to the old man:

I'm too old and I'm too weary to stop war breaking out. She returned her gaze to the canvas, and studied it for a little time. We finally built the house in North Carolina, she went on. Thomas would go back and forth to Monticello, which he was building for himself. Forty years that house of his took to build, and I don't think he was ever satisfied. But he liked L'Enfant because he knew how much pleasure it gave me. I wanted to make it a glorious place. I wanted to fill it with fine things, fine dreams… Hearing this, Rachel couldn't help but wonder if Cadmus and Kitty, and later Loretta, hadn't felt something of the same ambition for this house, which Cesaria had just waged her own war against. Now of course the Gearys are going to come, and walk into that house of mine and see some of those dreams for themselves. And it's going to be very interesting to see which of them is the stronger.

"You seem quite fatalistic about it."

That's because I've known it was coming for a very long time. Ever since Galilee left, I suppose, somewhere in my heart I've known there'd come a time when the human world would come looking for us.

"Do you know where Galilee is?"

Where he always is: out at sea. She looked back at Rachel. Is he all you care about? Answer me honestly.

"Yes. He's all I care about."

You know that he can't protect you? He's never been good at that.

"I don't need protecting."

We all need protecting sometimes, Cesaria said, with a hint of wistfulness.

"Then let me help him," Rachel said. Cesaria looked at her with a strange gentility. "Let me be with him," Rachel went on, "And take care of him. Let me love him."

The way I should have done, you mean, Cesaria said. Rachel had no opportunity to deny the accusation. Cesaria was up and out of the chair, coming at her. There aren't many people I've met who'd talk to me the way you talk. Not after having seen all that's gone on here tonight.

"I'm not afraid of you," Rachel said.

I see that. But don't imagine being a woman's any protection. If I wanted to harm you-

"But you don't. If you hurt me then you hurt Galilee, and that's the last thing you want."

You don't know what that child did to me, Cesaria said. You don't know the hurt he caused. I'd still have a husband if he'd not gone off into the world ... She trailed off, despairing.

"I'm sorry he gave you so much pain," Rachel said. "But I know he's never forgiven himself."

Cesaria's stare was like light in ice. He told you that? she said.

"Yes he did."

Then why didn't he come back home and tell me? Cesaria said. Why didn 't he just come home and say he was sorry?

"Because he was certain you wouldn't forgive him."

I'd have forgiven him. All he had to do was ask and I'd have forgiven him. The light and ice were melting, and running down her cheeks. Damn you, woman, she said. Making me weep after all these years. She sniffed hard. So what is it you 're asking me to do? she said.

"Find him for me," Rachel replied. "I'll do the rest. I'll bring him home to you. I swear I will. If I have to drag him myself, I'll bring him home to you."

Cesaria's tears kept coming, but she didn't bother to wipe them away. She just stood there, while they fell, her face as naked as Galilee's had been that first night on the island; all capacity for deception scoured from it. Her unhappiness was there, plain to see; and the rage she'd nurtured against him all these years. But so too was her love for him; her tender love, planted among these griefs.

You should go back to the Garden Island, she said. And wait for him.

Rachel scarcely dared believe what she was hearing. "You'll find him for me?" she said.

If he'll let me, Cesaria said. But you make sure he comes home to me, woman, you understand? That's our bargain.

"I understand."

Bring him back to L'Enfant, where he belongs. Somebody's going to have to bury me, when all this is over. And I want it to be him.

"Are we at war then?"

That was the question Luman had asked me, the day I went down to the Smoke House to make my peace with him. I didn't have an answer for him at the time. Now I do. Yes, we're at war with the Gearys, though I would still be hard-pressed to tell him when that war actually began.

Perhaps, in reflection, that's true of all wars. The war between the states for instance, from the furnace of which the Gearys rose to such wealth and power-when did that begin? Was it the moment that the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter? That's certainly a convenient choice for historians: they can pinpoint the day, the date and even the man-a trigger-happy civilian called Edmund Ruf-fin-who did the firing. But of course by the time this even takes place the grinding work of war had been under way for many years. The enmities which fueled that work in fact go back generations, nurtured and mythologized in the hearts of the people who will bankrupt their economies and sacrifice their sons for that enmity.

So it is with the war between the Gearys and the Barba-rossas: though its first casualty, Margie, may only just be in the ground and the knives have only lately been sharpened, the plots and counterplots that have brought us to this moment go back a long, long way. Back to Charleston, in the early spring of 1865: Charles Holt and Nub Nickelberry stepping into Galilee's strange boudoir in the ruins of the East Battery, and giving themselves over to pleasure. Had they known what they were initiating would they have done otherwise? I suspect not. They were living in the moment of their hunger and their despair; if they'd been told, as they consoled themselves with cake and meat and the comfort of kisses, that the consequences of their sensuality would be very terrible, a hundred and some years hence, they would have said: so what? And who would have blamed them? I would have done the same, in their boots. You can't go through life worrying about what the echoes of the echoes of the echoes of your deeds will be; you have to do what you can with the moment, and let others take care of their moment when it comes.

So I lay no blame with Charles and Nub. They lived their lives, and moved on into the hereafter. Now we have our lives to live, and they will be marked by a period of war that may undo us all. It will be, I suspect, a subtle war, at least at the beginning, its significance calculated not in the number of coffins it fills, but in the scale of the structures it finally brings to ruin.-1 don't simply speak of physical structures (though those too will inevitably come down); I speak of the elaborate edifices of influence and power and ambition that both our families have constructed over the years. When this war is over, I doubt any of them will still be standing. There will be no victor: that's my prediction. The two dans will simply cancel one another out.

No great loss, you may say, knowing what you now know about us. There's a certain pettiness in the best of us, and such malice in the worst that their passing will probably be something to be celebrated.