"Christ!" Altogether involuntarily, Carsten turned away from his viewing slit. One shell from the salvo hadn't landed by a destroyer, but on it. The ship might suddenly have rammed headlong into a brick wall. In an instant, it went from a yappy little terrier leading the fleet into action to a pile of floating-or rather, rapidly sinking-wreckage.

"A lot of good men there," Hiram Kidde said, as if carving an epitaph on a headstone. So, in a way, he was.

The Dakota began to zigzag violently at what seemed like random intervals. Armored against such shells, it could take far more punishment than a thin-skinned destroyer. That didn't mean you wanted to be punished- anything but. "Cap'n" Kidde summed that up in one short phrase: "Hate to be zigging when we should have zagged."

"Wish you hadn't said that," Hoskins told him. The grin the gunner's mate gave him in return looked like a death's head.

Sam Carsten made himself look some more. A few men in life jackets bobbed in the water near the stricken destroyer. He hoped they'd get picked up before the sharks found them.

He raised his gaze to Oahu ahead. Shells slammed down around the forts holding the coast-defense guns. Smoke and dust rose in great clouds. But the guns kept pounding back in answer. And more smoke rose from within the sheltered waters of Pearl Harbor, smoke that did not spring from shells. Carsten said, "I think they're gonna come out and fight."

"They're in a bad way," Kidde said, relishing the prospect. "They can't just sit there and take it, but if they come out, we're going to cross the T on 'em."

Sure enough, one of the Dakota's zigs to port became a full turn, so that she presented her whole ten-gun broadside to the emerging British warships, which could reply only with their forward-facing cannon.

"Hit!" everybody screamed at once as gouts of smoke spurted from a stricken British vessel, and then again, a moment later, "Hit!"

The ships of the Royal Navy were firing back; across blue water, orange flame and black smoke belched from the muzzles of their guns. And their gunnery was good. With a noise like a freight train roaring past when you were standing much too close to the tracks, a salvo of three shells smashed into the ocean a couple of hundred yards short of the Dakota. The battleship heeled to port as the captain took evasive action.

"Wish I could see what was happening on the port beam," Carsten said. "Have they bracketed us?"

"Sam, is that somethin' you really want to know?" Kidde asked him. After a moment, Carsten shook his head. If they put one salvo in front of you and one behind, the next one came down right on top of you.

"We in range for our piece yet, 'Cap'n'?" Hoskins asked.

"Not quite, but we're gettin' there," the gunner's mate replied. But then the Dakota turned so the gun didn't bear on the enemy. Carsten pictured the turrets that housed the main armament swinging back into position to carry on the fight. You fought your ship to bring them to bear on the most important targets the enemy had. If a torpedo boat or destroyer made a run at you, the five-inchers like the one Carsten manned were supposed to settle its hash. They were good for giving shore batteries hell, too: batteries that weren't main harbor defenses, anyhow.

Now, though, all Carsten could do was stare out to sea and wait for his turn. It bothered him less than he'd thought it would. Out there were the transports with the soldiers and Marines. If they all landed safely, the Sandwich Islands would fly the Stars and Stripes. The odds looked good.

"Hell of a start," he muttered.

The dandy up from Charleston studied the painting with a curious and critical eye. His pose was so languid and exquisite, Anne Colleton thought, that he should have been wearing knee breeches and frock coat and sneezing after a pinch of snuff, not in a dinner jacket and smoking a fragrant Habana. His Low Country drawl only strengthened the impression of aristocratic effete-ness: "Upon my word, Miss Colleton, we surely have here an extraordinary series of contrasts, do we not?"

She brushed back a lock of pale gold hair that was tickling her cheek. "I can think of several," she said. Starting with, why are you here at Marshlands while both my brothers have gone to serve their country? But to say that out loud would have been impolite and, however often she flouted the code of a Confederate gentlewoman, she still adhered to some of it. And so, not a hint of worry showed in her voice as she went on, "Which ones cross your mind, Mr. Forbes?"

Alfred Forbes pointed to the canvas he had been examining. "First and foremost, hanging that sense-stretching cubist portrait and all these other pieces from Picasso and Duchamp and Gauguin and Braque and the other moderns here in this hall strikes me as making contrast enough all by itself." He examined the painting once more, then grinned impishly. "Are you sure it's right side up?"

"Quite sure," Anne replied, with less frost in her voice than she would have liked. Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase had been upside down for a day before anyone noticed. It hadn't been the fault of her Negro servants, either; a curator who'd accompanied the exhibition from Paris had made the mistake. They couldn't even ship him home in disgrace, not with Yankee and German warships prowling the Atlantic. She went on, "I'll have you know Marshlands was avant-garde in its day, too."

"No doubt, no doubt," Forbes said. Now his smile was somewhere between speculative and predatory. "But even should I have been so ungallant as to doubt, I could point out that yesterday's avant-garde is tomorrow's-" He checked himself.

"Yes?" Anne Colleton said sweetly. "You were about to say?"

"Tomorrow's treasured tradition, I was about to say," he replied. He'd probably been about to say something like tomorrow's crashing bore, but he'd managed to find something better. His blue eyes were so wide and innocent, Anne smiled in spite of herself.

She said, "Supposing that to be a contrast"-it was one that had amused her ever since she'd arranged to bring the sampler of the best of modern painting from Paris to the Confederacy-"what other odd juxtapositions do you find?"

"That you chose to hold the show here, among others," Alfred Forbes answered. "Worthy though St. Matthews is, it hardly ranks with Richmond or Charleston or New Orleans or even Columbia"-that, a Low Country man's dig at the decidedly Up Country capital of South Carolina-"as a center of cultural advancement."

"It does now," Anne said. "These works would never have been seen in the Confederate States if I hadn't made the effort"- and spent the money, she thought, although saying that would have been vulgar-"to bring them here. This is my home, sir. Where would you have me exhibit them? The New York Armory, perhaps?"

Forbes laughed out loud, showing off even white teeth. "Not likely! The next progressive Yankee I know of will be the first. When the USA ships in art from abroad, it's fat German singers in brass unmentionables bellowing about the Rhine while the orchestra does its level best to drown them out- presumably not in the said river."

Anne smiled again. "They deserve each other, the Yankees and the Germans." The smile slipped. "But we don't deserve either of them, and we have the Yankees on our border and the Germans helping to harry the coast."

"Which brings me to yet another contrast," Forbes said: "how long the exhibition was supposed to stay on these shores and how long it may actually be here. Wouldn't want these paintings sunk."

"No, though a Yankee ship captain would likely boast of having rid the world of them." Anne Colleton dismissed the USA with that sentence and a curl of her lip. But the USA was not so easily dismissed. "A pity the Royal Navy took such a beating in the Sandwich Islands last week."