"If I hadn't done all the things I shouldn't do, my mama would be a happier lady today," Sam answered, which made the repair crew laugh. He went on, "Besides, in this mess, how the devil can you tell which way is up, anyhow?" He waved his hand. The plate on the inner curve of the armor wasn't the only new, raw repair, not by a long shot it wasn't. Other rectangular plates of metal covered damage to the roof and to the deck.

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wondered if this crew had done all that quick, rough work. If they had, he'd just stuck his foot in his face. But Mordecai said, "Tell me about it, why don't you?"

"Let me go under there and take a look," Carsten said. "Got a flashlight I can borrow?"

Stein wore one on his belt. Hiram Kidde would have wanted one like it; it had the size and heft to make a hell of a billy club. The door that let Sam down below into the mechanism that moved the gun worked stiffly; the metal in which it was set had been bent and imperfectly straightened.

With the door open so he could call to the repair crew above, he said, "Run it through there, would you?" They did. He shined the flashlight on as much of the hydraulic line as he could see. "Damn. Doesn't look like anything wrong here."

"That's what we thought," Mordecai answered. "You're doing everything exactly the way we did it."

"Am I? All right." Stubbornly, Carsten traced the hydraulic line from the gun back to where it ran behind the steel door through which he'd come. Behind the door…He whistled tunelessly between his teeth. Wondering if Lou or Bismarck or any of them had done it before him, he shut the door.

He whistled again, louder. A peeled-back strip of steel from the shell hit had been pushed between two links of the flexible armor the hydraulic line wore. You couldn't see that from above, because the hasty repairs to the deck hid it. And you might not be able to see it when you came down here, either, because you literally shut the door on it. But when the gun moved to that particular position, the line moved and the steel pinched off the flow of hydraulic fluid.

"Lucky it never pierced the hose in the armor," Sam muttered. He opened the door again. "Lou, you want to come down here and take a look at this?"

"I'll be a son of a bitch," Lou Stein said when Carsten showed him what he'd found. "Jeez, I wish it had pierced the line. Then we would have found out what the hell was wrong. Well, we can fix it, anyhow."

A cutting torch made short work of the offending metal. Mordecai used it with as much assurance as if he'd had ten fingers, not eight. He said, "Sam, we get back to Pearl, everybody on this-here repair crew will buy you a beer. This one's been makin' us crazy for a while, let me tell you. Look behind the goddamn door. What do they call it? Hiding in plain sight?"

"Yeah." Sam chuckled. "Hell, any sailor who doesn't want to work knows how to do that." He and Mordecai grinned at each other.

"What's the matter, Ma?" Edna Semphroch asked. "Lord, you ought to be dancing out in the street at how bully things are, but you've done nothing but mope the past month." She dried a last cup and set it in the cupboard. "We've got more money than I ever thought I'd see in all my born days, and we haven't seen hide nor hair of that awful Bill Reach since the Rebs hauled him off. I don't miss him, neither. He gave me the horrors." She shuddered.

"I don't miss him, either," Nellie Semphroch answered. She was drying silverware, and threw a fork into the drawer with unnecessary violence. "I wish to God I'd never set eyes on him."

She waited for Edna to start prying again about who Reach was, who he had been, and what he'd meant to her. She'd fended off those questions for months now. What Edna would learn if she got the true answer would not only make her wilder, it would also probably make her despise Nellie.

But, for once, Edna took a different tack tonight. She said, "Is Mr. Jacobs across the street all right? You ain't been over there for a while now, and you were going every few days for a long time."

If Edna had noticed that, had some alert Confederate intelligence officer noticed it, too? Nellie grimaced; she wondered if she even cared. She dried a teaspoon. "As far as I know, he's fine," she answered, doing her best to sound unconcerned, indifferent.

Edna looked at her out of the corner of her eye. "Were you sweet on him, Ma?" she asked in a tone that invited woman-to-woman confidences. "Is that what it is? Were you sweet on him and you had a quarrel?"

"We've never had a quarrel," Nellie snapped, all pretense of indifference vanishing before she could try to keep it. The irony was that she had discovered she was sweet on Hal Jacobs-and he on her-bare moments before she discovered he was working for Bill Reach, whom she still loathed with the deep and abiding loathing that clung to every part of her life before she'd met Edna's father.

Too clever for her own good, Edna noticed the hot denial at once, both for what it said and for what it didn't. "It's all right, Ma, it really is," she said tolerantly. "You know I wouldn't mind if you found somebody. Pa's been dead so long, I don't hardly remember him anyways. And Mr. Jacobs seems nice enough, even if-" She stopped. "He seems nice enough."

Even if he's old and not very handsome. Nellie could read between the lines, too. She sighed. Edna wanted license for herself, and was consistent enough, maybe even generous enough, to grant the same license to everyone else, even to her mother. That Nellie might not want it never occurred to her. But then, she didn't know Nellie had had far too much license far too young. Nellie hoped she would never find out.

"You really ought to make up with him, Ma," Edna said. "I mean-" She stopped again. This time, she didn't amend anything. She didn't need to amend anything. Nellie could figure out what she meant. You're not getting any younger. You're not going to catch anything better.

"Maybe I will," Nellie said with another sigh. She hadn't brought Hal Jacobs any information gleaned at the coffeehouse since she found out to whom he'd been giving it. One reason-one big reason-the place flourished as it did was that his connections helped it get food and drink hard to come by in hungry, Confederate-occupied Washington, D.C. If she didn't do anything for him, why should he do anything for her?

I'll do this for you, and you'll pay me off, Nellie thought. How was that different from the sweaty bargains she'd made in little, narrow rooms back when she was too much younger than Edna? "Damned if I know," she muttered.

"What did you say, Ma?" Edna asked.

"Nothing." The coffeehouse had become so popular with the Rebels, they'd probably help keep her in supplies if the shoemaker across the street didn't. But that felt like an illicit bargain, too. They hadn't been the kindest nor the gentlest occupiers, and a good many of them frequented her place for no better reason than the hope of seducing Edna. Nellie was sure of that, too.

And, to make matters worse, who could guess how long the Confederates were going to hold on to Washington? If she aligned herself with them now, what would the reckoning be when the United States reclaimed their capital? She thought that was going to happen, and perhaps not in the indefinite future. Oh, the Confederates bragged about and made much of what a submersible of theirs had done in the Chesapeake Bay, but was that anything more than a pinprick when you measured it against the hammering U.S. forces were giving the Rebs in Maryland? She didn't think so.

"You ought to go over there, Ma," Edna said. "He's a nice man."

"Tomorrow." Nellie didn't often yield an argument to her daughter, but most of their arguments were about what Edna was doing, not about what she was doing herself. She turned off the gaslight in the kitchen. "It's late. Let's go on up to bed."