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and clung to his mother’s skirts. She looked as if she might have wanted to say something, but she didn’t dare. You better not,  he thought.
      In front of city hall, a Whig speaker with a megaphone was exhorting a crowd that didn’t look to be paying too much attention to him. Eight or ten policemen stood around looking bored. “Outstanding!” Briggs exclaimed. “Nobody gave us away. They’d be a lot readier if they reckoned we were gonna hit’em.” His voice rose to a great roar: “Freedom!”
      “Freedom!” Jefferson Pinkard bawled, along with his comrades. They charged forward, tough and disciplined as they’d been during the war. Whistles shrilling, the Birmingham policemen tried to get between them and the suddenly shouting and screaming Whigs. If the cops had opened fire, they might have done it. As things were, their billy clubs were no improvement on the Freedom Party bludgeons.
      Jeff got one of the men in gray in the side of the head.
      Then he was in among the Whigs, yelling, “Freedom!” and “Damnyankee puppets!” at the top of his lungs. His bludgeon rose and fell, rose and fell. Sometimes he hit men, sometimes women. He wasn’t fussy. Why fuss? They were all traitors, anyway. A few of them tried to fight back, but they didn’t have much luck. The Whig rally smashed, their enemies bloodied, the Freedom Party men withdrew in good order. Jeff had a hard-on all the way back to the diner. Those bastards,  he thought. They got just what they deserved.
       
       
      S ylvia Enos wasn’t used to being a celebrity. She wished people wouldn’t stop her on the streets of Boston and tell her she was a hero. She didn’t want to be a hero. She’d never wanted to be one. All I wanted was to have George back again,  she thought as she hurried back toward her block of flats.
      But she’d never see her husband again. George Enos had been aboard the USS Ericsson when the CSS Bonefish torpedoed her—after the Confederate States yielded to the USA. Roger Kimball, the captain of the Bonefish , had known the war was over, too. He’d known, but he hadn’t cared. He’d sunk the destroyer that carried George and more than a hundred other sailors, and then he’d sailed away.
      He’d tried to cover it up, too. No one could prove a British boat hadn’t done the deed—till the Bonefish
      ’s executive officer, in a political fight with Roger Kimball, broke the story in the papers to discredit him.
      The story said Kimball was living in Charleston, South Carolina.
      And so Sylvia had taken a train down to Charleston. Customs at the border hadn’t searched her luggage. Why should the Confederates have bothered? She looked like what she was: a widow in her thirties. That she also happened to be a widow in her thirties with a pistol in her suitcase had nevercrossed the Confederates’ minds.
      But she was. And when she got to Charleston and found out where Kimball lived, she’d knocked on his door and then fired several shots into him. She’d expected to spend the rest of her life in jail, or to hang, or to cook in an electric chair—she hadn’t known how South Carolina disposed of murderers.
      Instead, thanks to politics and thanks to an extraordinary woman named Anne Colleton, she found herself free and back in Boston. The CSA couldn’t afford to be too hard on someone who killed a war criminal,  she thought. And why? Because the United States are stronger than they are.  That was heady as whiskey. Till the Great War, the CSA and England and France had called the tune. No more.
      But, no matter how strong the United States were, they weren’t strong enough to give her back her husband. The hole in her life, the hole in her family, would never heal. She had no choice but to go on from there.
      A tall, skinny man in an expensive suit and homburg stopped in front of her, so that she either had to stop, too, or to run into him. “You’re Sylvia Enos,” he exclaimed.