“Father, you underestimate me.”

“No, Colonel, that’s one thing I don’t do. Everyone else may underestimate you, but I know exactly what you’re capable of.” Father Dennen slugged down the rest of his brandy and set the glass on the desk rather hard. “If you’ll excuse me, I have parish duties.”

After the priest had gone, Colonel Waddell came around the desk. “A first-rate mind, but his sympathies are mistaken.”

“You mean the Negroes.”

“ ‘As a city upon a hill,’ that’s what we ought to be. A city with a grander vision, a place of enlightenment, a model for the Southern metropolis of the new century. Men should guide themselves by our light.”

Before the Colonel could get carried away, Sam said, “What do you want?”

“You, too? You think I’m in this for personal ambition?” He sounded so hurt, Sam felt embarrassed for asking. He was constantly surprised by Waddell’s eloquence, the utter sincerity of his tone. As always in his presence, Sam wanted more than anything for Waddell to take him into his confidence.

Colonel Waddell paced, limping jerkily, like a windup toy. “Do you know who discovered America?”

“Christopher Columbus, of course.”

Waddell stood admiring his shelves of books, his back to Sam. “Five hundred years before Columbus, Norsemen from Finland had already colonized Newfoundland. They called it Vinland.”

“I never realized.”

Waddell fingered the spine of a fat brown book. “Most people don’t. They accept whatever flimsy myth you put into their primer-book heads. But it’s all here, in Dr. Shallowate’s History of the Hibernian Navigations. The Nordic people came across the northern ocean in their celebrated longboats—langships.” He turned on Sam and fixed him with his gray eyes. “Your people.”

Sam was fascinated but also utterly confused—what had Viking raiders to do with Negro Republicans?

“They were a remarkable people, larger and stronger than any in southern Europe. Fearless and disciplined. Not like the swarthier races, who came later. And they brought no African slaves with them. Columbus started all that. The way he brought disease and ruin to the native peoples. The first thing he did was preside over the kidnapping and rape of a native woman. Later, he introduced the African slave to this hemisphere, on the sugar plantations. And the result has been misery on all sides, ever since.”

This was not quite the Age of Discovery as Sam had learned it in grammar school. He was surprised to hear Waddell taking the side of the natives.

“It is always a dreadful mistake to mix the races,” Colonel Waddell said quietly, sipping brandy. “The crew of the Niña carried syphilis home to Spain—the divine verdict on miscegenation! The Lord in his wisdom created the oceans to keep us apart.”

“But we’re not apart anymore,” Sam said. “You can’t change the past.”

Waddell narrowed his eyes and stepped close to Sam. When he spoke, Sam inhaled the fumes of brandy on his breath. “No, but you can change the future. You can take the future into your two hands.” He cupped his brandy snifter in both hands, like an offering. “You can make it whatever you want it to be.”