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  Patrick thanked her. As she disappeared down the short hallway, he made a mental note to give Heinz some idea of Molly’s tragic time during the Brooklyn fire and how it had affected her attitude. Perhaps he couldn’t change her, but it would help to understand things.

  A moment later, Molly beckoned and Patrick entered the small, darkened room and took a chair by the bed. The creature under the covers was a mummy, swathed in soft white bandages so that only her blue eyes were visible. The hands were wrapped in white mittens, and her head was also covered with loose white bandages.

  “Frightened, Patrick?” Her voice was soft but firm.

  “No.”

  “Well,” she said, carefully adjusting herself so that she could sit up better, “I certainly was.”

  “How painful is it?”

  “Endurable. I’ve been told I look worse than I am. The burns are healing, although much of my face and hands are red and scabby. I believe I’m all swollen as well. But the doctors tell me nothing is permanent and I’ll heal in time.”

  “How soon will the bandages come off?”

  “Anytime I wish. I had Molly wrap me so I wouldn’t scare you away.”

  Patrick laughed, half out of relief. “Scare me? A bold general?” His voice softened. “Show me.”

  Slowly, and without using all her fingers, she unwrapped her hands, and then her face, and he realized how fortunate she had been. Even though he knew she was healing, she was virtually unrecognizable. She carefully removed her cap and he saw her shaved scalp and the jagged sewn gash that ran down the middle of her head. There was a light fuzz of blond where her hair was just starting to grow in. Her hands and the skin on her face were, as promised, cracked and scabbed. Where her skin was actually visible it was reddened like a bad sunburn. He realized she must hurt something awful.

  “I said I can handle the pain and I will. I must,” she said. “Do I have a choice?”

  “Not really.”

  “I am very fortunate and I know it. Mr. Morris pulled me from the fire.” To Patrick’s puzzled look, she continued. “Mr. Morris is our chief of security in the camp. He was a police chief in a town on Long Island. Very sadly he lost his family in a German bombardment of his town. He is a very tormented man. I am, however, eternally grateful that he was nearby at the time.”

  “As am I. Are you confined to the bed?”

  “No. I was just resting. I still tire very easily.” She shook her head. “No, that’s not quite right. I’ve spent most of the last several days lying here feeling sorry for myself, which is ridiculous when you consider the true horrors the refugees are enduring.” She raised herself to a sitting position. “Please hand me my robe.”

  He turned and found it draped across a chair.

  “Please don’t be bashful. I’m going to need your help.”

  Patrick took her arm, being careful not to touch her hands, and aided her to a standing position. As she swung her legs out of the bed he caught a glimpse of bare calf and tried not to look startled. When she stood, her nightgown modestly covered her from neck to foot. However, it was a light cotton gown and he sensed she had little on underneath.

  “You’re not going to blush, are you?” she asked as he draped the robe over her and eased her hands through the sleeves. Patrick allowed that he hoped he would not. He helped her into the living room, where a surprised Molly and Heinz were waiting.

  “I should have done this a few days ago. Molly, why didn’t you make me?” Molly snorted and said she’d tried but Katrina’d been a typical stubborn Dutchie.

  Patrick looked at his watch. It was only midmorning. “I’ve got to get to General Smith fairly soon, but I can spend the rest of the day. If you’re willing, I’d like to take you out for a carriage ride and a small picnic. It’d do you some good.”

  “I’ll have to be very careful of the sun.”

  Molly spoke. “You can wear a bonnet to protect your head and face and I’ll fix something to cover your hands.”

  “Fine, but how will I eat?”

  Patrick grinned. “If necessary, I’ll feed you. I’ll be back at noon. Lieutenant Schmidt, you are free for the rest of the day.” He paused. “That is, after you’ve found a place for you and me to stay.”

  Molly smiled. “Why General, sir, you and the German can sleep in the stable.”

  Later, after Patrick and Katrina had departed, Heinz confronted Molly in the kitchen of the house.

  “Molly, how can I convince you I am an American, not a German?”

  “Heinz Schmidt is not a German name? Perhaps you’re one of those Polacks. Or even a dago.” There was bitterness in her voice, but also a degree of sadness.

  “Molly, General Mahan told me your brother was killed by the Germans and that one beat you badly, and I’m sorry, but I want you to realize that I’m here to fight them, not love them. Look, the general and Miss Schuyler left us here while they went on their picnic, and I don’t want to spend the rest of the day with you hating me for something I never did.”

  She looked at him, a large young man, light haired and open faced. He looked honest and intelligent. And she wanted to hurt him. Or did she?

  “You said the Germans killed my brother? They blew his brains out in cold blood when all he did was try to protest them. He was twenty and the insides of his skull splattered all over me! Beat me? Some pig of a German punched me all over with his great fists, and then stuck his ugly thing inside me and raped me. Then, when he felt like it, he did it all over again!” She sagged from the confession and, to her fury, tears came from her eyes and her body began to convulse with sobs. “And it’s not just me. We see it every day as new refugees come in. The Germans let them pass, but they rob them, beat and kill them if they refuse, and take the women just like they did me. They are pigs!”

  As she tried to regain control of herself, she saw the stricken and hurt look on his face, and saw that he too was near tears. “My father,” he said softly, “had two brothers. Now he has one. The oldest, Klaus, was drafted into the German army. It was peacetime and there was no problem. He would serve his three years and come home and resume his life. So would his two younger brothers. But one day Klaus came home in a box. An accident, they said. But we found he’d been beaten to death by a sergeant for not saluting some goddamn Junker properly. They held him down and stomped on his chest with their boots until his ribs were all crushed and he was puking blood.”

  Heinz took a deep breath and felt some of the pain his father had felt. “When my father and his brother found that nobody was going to do anything about the murder, even laughed at him, they decided they wanted nothing more to do with the kaiser’s Reich, and that Germany was no longer their home. This is our home now and, if necessary, I will kill Germans to protect it.”

  Molly looked at him and managed a small, bitter smile. “Perhaps I already did that for you,” she said and told him about the vengeance she’d extracted from her attacker.

  “Good,” he said when she was finished.

  “Young Lieutenant, you may be right. Perhaps I cannot go on hating everyone because of what one did. You are the general’s friend and he is Katrina’s friend, and they are both my friends. Therefore, I must figure out how and if I can learn to include you.”

  “Molly, let me be your friend,” Heinz urged. “I am your friend whether you realize it or not or want it or not.”

  “Really? We shall see whether I have a choice or not. Besides, don’t we have an assignment from their lordships?”

  Yes, he thought, and not all day in which to accomplish it. If he and the general were to remain in the area, they had to find a place to stay. With an overflowing refugee camp only a few miles away, that could be a monumental problem. “You said there was a stable?”

  Alone in his White House office, Theodore Roosevelt glared at the document he gripped in his hand. The handwriting was his own, but the words and the topic were so strange, so alien, as to be almost inconceivable. But they had to be conceivable now,
didn’t they? He could not deny the dark reality of the invasion and the upheavals throughout the nation that resulted from it. He took his pen and began to read again, poised to make corrections and additions to the message that would be telegraphed throughout America the next day.

  My Dear Americans,

  Today, Wednesday, July 4, 1901, is the 125th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America, and a day in which the whole country should be uniting in festive celebration of a century and a quarter of freedom and prosperity.

  Yet we look about and find it is not to be. For the first time since the War of 1812, a foreign army has imposed itself on our soil, and American soldiers are dying in valiant efforts to hurl them away.

  We did not wish this war. We did nothing to deserve it or encourage it. Yet we have been invaded by a tyrannical European power that wants our wealth, our dignity, our future, and our freedom. We will not surrender to them! As I write this, our armies and our navy are gathering to expel them. It will be a most difficult task. Germany is a great military power. We must, therefore, be greater, stronger, smarter.

  Germany has demanded that we negotiate a surrender. We shall indeed do that, but the surrender we negotiate will be the kaiser’s, not ours. We will not rest until every German soldier has been purged from our land, our cities have been retaken, our homes have been rebuilt and reoccupied, and the diabolical kaiser has been punished for his grievously evil deeds.

  It will take time to do this and we may have to pay a terrible price. The cost will include the lives of many young men who will be called upon to make the greatest sacrifice possible in the cause of their country. We honor them! We will make those sacrifices and proudly mourn our fallen and condemn the invader with our anger.

  A word. Please, dear friends, let our anger be righteous and focused only at the German invader. But let us not forget that we are all immigrants, or descendants of immigrants. Either we or our forefathers all came to this fair land from elsewhere in order to be free. This includes people from Germany or of German ancestry. Many of the Germans who came to America did so to be free of that same malevolent kaiser whose marauding hordes have appeared on our shore. The Germans who came to America have already fought bravely in our wars, including the Civil War and the recent Spanish war. Now those same German Americans are uniting with other Americans whose backgrounds include English, Irish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, and Spanish against a common enemy. Governors of two states, Wisconsin and Ohio, have informed me of their plan to form a German American legion to fight against the kaiser’s barbarian army. Therefore, I implore you not to take vengeance against the helpless immigrants. I have been saddened by reports of burnings, beatings, insults, and, yes, lynchings inflicted upon helpless and outnumbered people who happen to have recently come from Germany.

  If you are so brave that you wish to fight Germans, then join our army! I guarantee your blood lust will be sated. I further assure you that there are no saboteurs about. They were all captured, they were all German officers, and they will be punished according to the law. So there is no reason to fear someone who talks with an accent or who behaves differently.

  So let us spend this day in prayer, reflection, and preparation. Then let us go forth to bear our burden and earn our just victory.

  God bless America,

  Theodore Roosevelt

  President of the United States

  Katrina Schuyler tried hard not to giggle, but it was impossible.

  “Darn it, Trina, how can I feed you if you keep making it so difficult?” Patrick had graduated to using the more familiar form of her first name.

  The giggles turned to laughter. “I don’t know,” she gasped. Patrick had a piece of chicken impaled on a fork and was poised to pounce with it as soon as her mouth stood still. He was a wondrously ridiculous sight.

  “Is this what happened to me when I was a little baby?” Trina asked.

  “Probably.”

  “Look, I’m bruised, not a cripple. Just cut the food into small pieces and let me use a knife to navigate the items onto a fork. I think I can grasp it well enough from there.”

  “How about a wineglass? Can you maneuver one of those?” He held a bottle of chilled white wine and a corkscrew.

  Trina laughed hard again. “Most definitely,” she answered.

  How pleasant, Patrick thought, and how misleading. The July sky was a vivid blue and the meadow that surrounded the shade tree where they were relaxing was as rich and verdant as could be imagined. A soft breeze weakened the thrust of the sun and made them comfortable. All around them birds chirped and squirrels chattered from overhead branches.

  And there were no ants. Yet.

  But only a few miles away from their idyll was a refugee camp that teemed with thousands of hurt, lost, and bewildered souls, huddled under inadequate canvas, many of them damaged both in body and soul. And only about thirty miles farther, there was war, and armed people were killing each other.

  This was an interlude, an oasis of calm, and it could not last. Tomorrow he would go south, find Baldy Smith’s headquarters, and try to see what was developing. In a few days Trina would be healed enough to go back to helping the refugees find more permanent places to stay than a squalid tent camp.

  The comings and goings were, she told him, developing into a cycle. The trains southbound from Springfield and Boston brought soldiers and supplies and picked up refugees in Hartford. From there the refugees were shipped to other cities throughout the eastern half of the United States. Tens of thousands had already departed. Hartford was developing into quite a railhead, and a number of temporary spur lines had been laid down to handle the dramatically increased volume of traffic. It seemed to Patrick to be very well organized.

  Along with talk of refugee camps, they learned a great deal about each other. Trina, he found, was extremely well read and well educated, almost intimidating in the depth of her knowledge. She had attended a number of classes at Barnard. She was also extremely athletic, another point that seemed to bother her peers who felt that a woman’s role was to be docile and physically weak. What Patrick first took for thinness he realized was a lithe muscularity. She enjoyed cycling, hiking, swimming, and horseback riding. Patrick recalled the horseback ride from New York and had to admit she was vastly superior to him in that category. He had reminded her he was infantry, not cavalry.

  Trina’s younger brother was a recently commissioned ensign in the navy and was serving on the newest battleship, the Alabama. She had no idea where he was, except that the ship was on a South American cruise. She hoped it was out of harm’s way, although she knew in her heart that it would not be so forever. Her father was a wealthy investor, descended from a long line of equally successful men. He was currently out west buying up oil rights. Jacob Schuyler had a feeling that the internal combustion engine was going to be important in the future and wanted to be prepared for that day. He was, Trina told Patrick, buying up the oil drilling rights to hundreds of thousands of acres almost for pennies apiece. She had been in contact with him by telegram, and he was trying to make it back from Texas, where oil had been found and was beginning to be drilled in profitable quantities. The first well, she laughed, was something named Spindle-Top.

  When she found that Patrick was from southern Michigan, she asked him if he knew Henry Ford.

  “No, I’ve never actually met him, but I know who he is and understand he’s trying to line up investors for a new corporation that will make cheap automobiles. He hasn’t asked my family to invest. Although we’re not poor, I don’t think we’d be interested in such a risky endeavor.”

  He continued. “My family has lived in the Detroit area for a couple of generations. My grandfather was a blacksmith and gradually expanded from repairing implements into making farm machinery. My father made the enterprise very profitable, but they wouldn’t be interested in Ford. At least not yet and not as investors, although it wouldn’t surprise me if they were interested in working with him as a
supplier. I haven’t followed those goings-on very much. I just know what I’ve read in letters from home. I chose the army, not farm machinery.” He laughed. “Why, has Ford contacted your father?”

  “Yes, but Father’s not interested in a direct investment either. But he did inform Ford that he would like to sell the automobiles if he was able to make them. That and oil are the extent of his interests at this time.” She thought for a moment. She had ridden in an automobile exactly once in her life and found it an experience that was both frightening and exhilarating. “If Ford succeeds, do you think the army would ever use automobiles instead of horses?”

  “Not for a long, long time. The automobile would have to be made reliable as well as inexpensive. That and it would have to be able to go cross-country over rugged terrain like a horse, and there would have to be fuel dumps to keep the things going. And what about mechanics for repairs? It would take a major reorganization of the army to accommodate automobiles. No, I don’t think that will happen for a while. Although,” he demurred, “there are other countries that are experimenting with putting machine guns on them and protecting them with armor plate.” He did not add that the current U.S. Army was firmly entrenched in the last century and not, thanks to Nelson Miles, very interested in future developments.

  She asked him why he joined the army and not the navy and was amused at the response: he got seasick.

  Quietly, they got around to the reasons why they both were still single. Trina readily admitted that her wealth had attracted many potential suitors when she was younger, but her fond and doting father would not push her into a relationship she did not want. She had known from early in her youth that she would never be a raving beauty according to the standards of the time. Her intellect and forceful personality scared off potential suitors, however obsessed with money they might have been. Too many men didn’t like dominant women or were afraid of them. There were also those who felt her quest for learning and athletics smacked of Bohemianism.