Breakthroughs by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

twisted arms to help get your bill for Negro troops through Congress. And now you won’t—”
    She broke off. Some of her rage evaporated. The only reason Semmes had wanted to arm Negroes was that the war, as it was presently being fought, was going so badly. It hadn’t gone any better lately. Maybe the president of the CSA really couldn’t spare any decent soldiers to help the lame, the halt, and the elderly of South Carolina’s militia go after Cassius and his guerrillas.
    “If they can’t handle the job, I’ll damn well have to take care of it myself,” she said. Somehow, that didn’t surprise her. Cassius had made the fight personal when he burned the mansion where her family had lived for most of a century. He’d made it even more personal when he tried to give her a bullet for Christmas. “If that’s how he wants it, that’s how he’ll have it.”
    She walked over to the closet, slid the door on its squeaking track, and scowled at the few sorry dresses and skirts and shirtwaists that hung there. She was used to ordering gowns from Paris and London and (in peacetime) New York. What she’d been able to buy in St. Matthews was to her eye one short step up from the burlap feed sacks poor Negroes and shiftless whites used to cover their nakedness.
    But, after she’d pushed aside the clothes, she smiled. Against the back wall of the closet leaned a Tredegar her surviving brother, Tom, had sent on learning of her escape. It was a sniper’s rifle, with a telescopic sight. She’d been a tomboy as a girl—good training for competing against men as an adult. She knew how to handle guns.
    During the Red rebellion, the authorities hadn’t let her fight against the Negroes of the Congaree Socialist Republic. Now—
    Now she picked up her handbag (which held, among other things, a revolver to replace the one she’d lost when Cassius burned her cabin) and went downstairs. It was cool, not cold; whatever winter might do up in the USA, it rested lightly on Low Country South Carolina. She headed for the haberdasher’s.
    St. Matthews had been a cotton town before the war. It was still a cotton town—of sorts. Most of the nearby plantations were either corpses or crippled remnants of their former selves. Most of the white men in town were gone for soldiers or gone to the grave. Most of the black men were gone, too: drafted into labor battalions, fled into revolt, or now wearing butternut themselves. Only a little of the damage done when Confederate forces recaptured the town from the Congaree Socialist Republic had been repaired. No labor for that, and no money, either.
    By what sort of luck Anne could scarcely imagine, Rosenblum’s Clothes had escaped everything. One of the bricks near the plate-glass window bore a bright bullet scar; other than that, the place was untouched. Inside, Aaron Rosenblum clacked away on a treadle-powered sewing machine, as he’d been doing for as long as Anne could remember.
    When the bell above the door jangled, he looked up over the tops of his gold-framed half-glasses. Seeing Anne, he jumped to his feet and gave her a nod that was almost a bow. “Good day to you, Miss Colleton,” he said.
    “Good day, Mr. Rosenblum.” As always, Anne hid the smile that wanted to leap out onto her face whenever she heard him talk. His accent, half Low Country drawl, half guttural Yiddish, was among the strangest she’d ever encountered.
    “And what can I do for you today?” Rosenblum asked, running a hand over his bald head. He would never go into the Army; he had to be nearer seventy than fifty.
    “I want half a dozen pairs of stout trousers of the sort men use to go hunting in the swamps of the Congaree,” she answered.
    He nodded. “These would be for your brother, after—God willing—he comes home safe from the war? Shall I alter them thinking he will be the same size he was when he went into the Army?”
    “I’m sorry,” Anne said. “You misunderstand, Mr. Rosenblum. These