The sun had gone down without ceremony, as it always did here—no grand curtain call, no applause. Just a gentle thinning of the light until the river became a darker ribbon threading its way through the trees.
Basil sat in a chair at the far edge of the dock platform, legs crossed with careful precision, glass sweating faintly in his hand. The gin and tonic caught what little light remained, the lime a pale green coin at the bottom. He lifted the glass, sniffed, and nodded. Acceptable. Not club quality, but then again, Alabama had surprised him before.
Cat crouched near the edge, forepaws tucked neatly beneath his chest, tail wrapped tight. His eyes tracked the bank with surgical focus. Something small rustled in the undergrowth. A frog, perhaps. Or something foolish enough to believe dusk offered concealment.
“It does rather creep up on you,” Basil said, not looking at Cat. “This place. You expect… I don’t know… banjos, possibly a man named Earl shouting at machinery. Instead, you get this.”
Cat’s ear flicked. A bat darted overhead. He followed it with his gaze, unimpressed.
“In England,” Basil continued, swirling the ice, “the estate announced itself. Gravel crunching, gates opening, centuries of family disappointment pressing down upon one’s shoulders the moment one stepped out of the motorcar.” He took a sip. “Very good roses, though. Absolutely relentless.”
A chorus of insects rose from the trees, tentative at first, then confident. The river answered with a soft, almost conspiratorial sound against the pilings.
“Here,” Basil went on, “no one expects anything of you. No lineage. No portraits glaring from oak-paneled walls asking why you haven’t died gloriously yet.” He glanced down at Cat. “Rather freeing, wouldn’t you say?”
Cat did not dignify this with a response. A raccoon emerged on the far bank, paused, and looked directly at him. Cat’s eyes narrowed. The raccoon thought better of it and vanished.
Basil smiled faintly. “Yes. I thought so.”
He leaned back, chair creaking companionably, and let his gaze follow the darkening river downstream toward the unseen bends of the Fish. Somewhere behind them, the house sat quiet and solid, lights low, content not to intrude.
“This,” Basil said at last, lifting the glass in a small, private toast, “is not home. But it is territory. And I find I no longer miss the former quite as much as I’m meant to.”
Cat’s tail flicked once, approval or dismissal impossible to tell.
Basil tamped the bowl with care, the practiced little ritual steadying his hands more than the gin ever could. He struck a match, let it bloom, and drew the flame down into the pipe. The 3 Old Men caught immediately—rich, civilized, faintly mischievous. He smiled despite himself.
“Mobile,” he said, exhaling a ribbon of smoke that drifted out over the water. “The Tinder Box there. Sold to me by a scruffy-looking Southern boy who knew precisely what he was about.” He nodded once, approving the memory. “Spoke of leaf the way a vintner speaks of soil. One does rather miss that—competence without theatre.”
Cat sat a few feet away, immobile, eyes glittering as the first true night creatures began to assert themselves. Something skittered. Something else croaked. The river took notes and said nothing.
“I had my English lovelies, of course,” Basil went on, as if continuing a conversation that had never stopped. “Girls with clever mouths and complicated hearts. Summer things. Autumn things. All quite beautiful, all quite unsuitable.” He drew again, slower this time. “We loved one another in the way one loves a season—intensely, and with the unspoken understanding that it must end.”
Cat’s whiskers twitched. A moth dared the lamplight that was not yet there.
“Marriage,” Basil said lightly, “would have ruined us all.”
He paused, then allowed the silence to stretch.
“Claire is… different.” The word landed softly, without flourish. “No riddles. No hedging. She loves me beyond all measure and—miracle of miracles—without complication. As though affection were not a negotiation but a fact.” He smiled into the bowl of the pipe. “Utterly innocent. And therefore devastating.”
The gin and tonic was finished now. Basil set the glass on the dock beside his chair and leaned back, pipe resting comfortably in his hand. The world felt rounder. Kinder.
At that moment, the automatic lights Bobby had installed came on—one by one among the trees—washing the yard in a cheerful, unapologetically modern glow. The dock brightened. The house behind them felt present without intruding. The forest accepted the light with good grace.
Cat blinked once, assessed the perimeter, and resumed his watch.
Basil regarded the scene—the river, the lights, the quiet—and released a final, contented plume of smoke.
“Well,” he said to no one in particular, “one does adapt.”
Basil let the pipe go out on its own. He did not relight it. Some thoughts, he had learned, were better left without ceremony.
“Robert,” he said quietly, using the name only he ever did.
Cat’s ears angled back—not in alarm, but attention. This was not small talk.
“Robert lives in a world that is, for all practical purposes, finished.” Basil folded his hands over the stem of the pipe and stared into the slow black water. “Not stagnant—no, no—but complete. God made the thing. The laws of physics, the rules of cause and effect, the moral order. All of it intelligible. Built to be understood by rational creatures, provided they behaved themselves and did the work.”
He smiled faintly. “It’s terribly reassuring, really. If you accept the Catechism, the universe stops being a mystery and becomes a syllabus.”
Cat watched a ripple on the surface. Something moved beneath. Something old.
“For Robert,” Basil went on, “the world may be difficult, but it is not treacherous. You can take its measure. You can orient yourself. You can act.” He paused. “And therefore, you can rest.”
The night insects grew louder, as if encouraged.
“My England,” Basil said at last, the words tasting different, “was never so obliging. We told ourselves it was permanent, but permanence was only ever a performance. Now the set has been struck, the script burned, and the understudies have seized the stage.” His mouth tightened. “Ignorant politicians. Moral cowards. People who mistake destruction for progress and call it virtue.”
Cat shifted, claws making a soft, almost affectionate sound against the wood.
“Everything I knew,” Basil said, “everything I was educated to defend—law, continuity, restraint, memory—has been betrayed. Not by enemies. By caretakers.” He shook his head once. “One can forgive malice. One cannot forgive stupidity in charge of a civilization.”
The automatic lights hummed faintly in the trees, steady and unapologetic. The dock stood firm. The river did what rivers have always done.
“I am a strategist,” Basil said softly. “And strategists must know when a position is lost.” He looked out toward the dark bends of the Fish River, where the water disappeared into forest and uncertainty. “There is no counteroffensive for England. Only evacuation—of loyalty, if not of body.”
He glanced at Cat then, one corner of his mouth lifting.
“Robert understands this,” he added. “He simply categorizes it differently. Where I see darkness, he sees a trial. Where I see collapse, he sees providence.” A beat. “Annoyingly effective, that.”
Cat’s tail flicked once. Agreement, perhaps. Or merely readiness.
Basil leaned back, letting the chair creak, and allowed the weight of the thought to settle.
“This place,” he said, gesturing vaguely at the lights, the river, the quiet competence of it all, “is not England. Thank God. It is… intelligible. Bounded. Governed.” He exhaled. “Robert would say that makes it moral.”
“I suppose,” Basil said, “that’s why I’m still here.”
-------------
Basil heard the car drive away—tires on gravel, a brief flare of headlights through the trees, then the sound receding down the drive. Miss Elizabeth’s car did not linger. It never needed to. She understood departures as well as arrivals.
The house exhaled.
Basil sat very still, pipe resting cold in his hand, eyes on the river where the lights fractured into trembling gold. The animals settled into their nocturnal arrangements. Cat resumed his patrol with seriousness. Beauregard made a small, satisfied sound somewhere behind them and lay down to sleep.
Basil waited.
The screen door opened without drama. Footsteps—unhurried, familiar—crossed the deck. Bobby Lee appeared carrying two glasses: an Old Fashioned for himself, dark and square shouldered, and a fresh gin and tonic for Basil, bright with lime.
He handed the gin over without comment, sat, and produced a Montecristo Churchill as if it had always been there. A match flared, then died. The cigar caught. Bobby leaned back.
They drank.
They smoked.
They did not speak.
The river continued its work. Insects tuned their instruments. The automatic lights held steady, content to illuminate without demanding admiration.
After a while, Basil spoke.
“I think,” he said, quietly enough that the night had to lean in, “that England is finished. Not theatrically—no banners, no catastrophe worth the history books. Just… undone. Unmade by small men with large opinions.” He rolled the glass between his palms. “Everything that once constrained us has been declared optional. Memory, manners, obligation. One cannot defend a civilization that no longer believes it exists.”
Bobby Lee took a sip of his drink, considered it, and nodded once. He drew on the Churchill, let the smoke settle, then spoke in the same even tone he used for weather and ordnance.
“In 1866,” he said, “my people said the same thing about the Confederacy.”
Basil turned slightly, surprised.
“They weren’t wrong,” Bobby went on. “The world they knew was gone. Laws changed. Flags came down. Men who’d buried brothers went home to farms that weren’t theirs anymore, towns burned to the ground.” He shrugged. “They mourned. They said it was all finished.”
He took another pull on the cigar.
“And then,” Bobby added, “they raised children. Built churches. Planted gardens. Figured out how to live in what was left.”
Basil was quiet.
“They never stopped loving what they’d lost,” Bobby said. “But they learned the difference between loving something and living somewhere.” He glanced out at the river. “One of those keeps you alive.”
The night accepted this without comment.
Basil lifted his glass, drained it, and set it down carefully. “You do have an infuriating way of turning tragedy into logistics, Robert.”
Bobby smiled faintly. “Habit.”
They sat again in companionable silence—two men, an old river, and a house that asked nothing of them at all.
Bobby leaned back in his chair, the Churchill glowing faintly as he drew on it, then dimming again like a patient star. He didn’t look at Basil when he spoke. He looked at the river.
“You know what it is we actually serve,” he said at last. “It isn’t the Old South as it really was. That place was rougher. Meaner. More compromised than the stories admit.” He paused, considering. “Truth is, it never quite existed the way people remember it.”
Basil’s eyes stayed forward, but his attention sharpened.
“What survived,” Bobby continued, “was the idea of it. The Lost Cause. A myth, sure. But myths have a way of carrying an underlying truth forward when reality fails.” He gestured faintly toward the dark trees, the quiet house, the orderly lights. “Funny thing is, it’s only now—after everything else has been surrendered—that the thing becomes real.”
He turned then, fixing Basil with a calm, steady look.
“All the rest has been ceded to the barbarians,” Bobby said without heat. “Institutions. Cities. Nations that forgot what they were for.” He took another sip of his drink. “But here? In Dixie? The spark’s still alive. Faith. Memory. Order. People who know what they’re willing to stand for and what they’re willing to endure.”
The river slid past, indifferent and eternal.
Bobby tilted his head slightly. “Your people watched the Continent fall once. Nazis rolling over Europe like a tide. And still—some of you held. Some of you endured. How does an Englishman with that blood ever truly surrender to despair?”
For a moment, Basil said nothing.
Then he leaned forward, setting his empty glass down with deliberate care.
“I won’t,” he said grimly. The words were quiet, but they carried weight. “Not while I draw breath. Despair is a luxury of people who believe someone else will do the fighting for them.” His jaw set, eyes bright now with something fierce and unmistakable. “I may mourn. I may remember. But I will never give up.”
The night seemed to pause, as if listening.
Bobby’s mouth curved into a slow, genuine smile. Not amusement. Recognition.
“Good,” he said simply. “Because neither will we.”
-------------------------
They sat there then—two men from bygone worlds, smoke curling upward into the Alabama night, the river moving steadily on—unbowed, unbroken, and very much not finished.
Cat had not moved during the men’s exchange.
Neither had Beauregard.
But both had heard everything.
They always did.
Beauregard spoke first—not aloud, never aloud—his mind steady as a gun carriage set on firm ground.
The men have named it correctly, he said. Loss acknowledged. Ground chosen. Duty accepted. That is enough.
Cat’s eyes glinted toward the treeline where something slunk and then reconsidered its life choices.
Enough is never enough, Cat replied, his thought sharp, quick, alive with heat. Enough is how you lose inch by inch while congratulating yourself on dignity.
Beauregard regarded the river, patient even in thought.
And yet, he answered calmly, panic wins nothing. You hold what can be held. You build where building is possible. You do not burn the house because the world is on fire.
Cat’s tail lashed once.
On the dock, Bobby Lee and Basil sat in companionable silence, smoke drifting upward, the lights steady in the trees. The house behind them rested—secure, unapologetic, held.
They are choosing ground, Cat said finally. Not retreat.
Precisely, Beauregard replied. This is not despair. This is consolidation.
Cat watched the darkness beyond the lights, measuring distances no one else could see.
Good, he said. Then when the time comes, there will be something left worth defending.
There always is, he thought. If men of will remember who they are.
The animals returned to their vigil—one calm as bedrock, the other sharp as flame—guarding not just the house, but the resolve that had quietly taken root there.
A deep, rolling chuckle echoed in Beauregard’s mind—a sound like distant thunder remembered fondly.
I do still find it amusing, he said, warmth threaded through the thought, that you instructed me to place my entire, dignified body directly in front of a superheated cooling duct.
Cat’s eyes narrowed slightly, though his mouth—if cats could be said to have mouths for such things—curved in satisfaction.
You executed the maneuver perfectly, Cat replied. Textbook obedience under fire.
Obedience, Beauregard repeated, amused. Is not the word I would have chosen.
He continued anyway, memory brightening.
There I was—holding position like a stone wall—while you snapped the thermal alarm fiber optic cables with what I can only describe as unseemly and toothy enthusiasm. When the alarms failed and the core realized it was dying… He paused, savoring it. A very satisfactory explosion.
Cat’s tail flicked once, proud.
Most people build lairs assuming no one will be foolish enough to block the obvious, Cat said. They never account for a basset hound with orders and conviction.
Beauregard’s laughter returned, quieter now, contented.
As long as Bobby and Basil remain, he said, the old causes cannot die. Memory, faith, order—those things persist so long as men are willing to live them.
Cat’s gaze shifted to the darkness beyond the lights, where the woods thickened and the night pressed close.
And as long as we remain, Cat replied, his thought burning clean and sharp, the new villainies will not enjoy longevity.
Beauregard settled, confidence restored to its customary calm.
An acceptable result, he said.
On the dock, Bobby Lee and Basil sat without speaking, the animals' conversation utterly inaudible to them, smoke drifting upward, drinks cooling in their hands. Behind them, the house stood firm. Around them, the night held.
And within it all—old loyalties endured, and new evils learned to fear the light.
In all of it—quietly, stubbornly—what was good in God’s creation had not merely survived. It had thrived.
Two men, older now but still unmistakably men, sat in the dusk with the ease of those who had been tested and found sufficient. They loved their women fiercely, not as ornament or habit, but as men were meant to love: with protection, provision, steadiness, and joy in the giving. Their strength was not loud. It did not need to be. It was reliable, which is rarer.
Nearby, a cat kept watch—ruthless, precise, a creature of clean instincts and unblinking judgment. He asked no permission of the night and offered no mercy to what threatened the perimeter. He was what he was, without apology, and the world was safer for it.
At his side, a basset hound lay heavy with contentment, his heart a reservoir of loyal love. He did not scheme or strike. He endured. He held ground. He loved because love was his nature, and that, too, was a form of courage.
And away from the river, away from the lights, two women moved through the Alabama night—one getting ready for bed in Fairhope, the other driving across the Causeway into Mobile. They lived without hurry. Their shoulders were relaxed. Their thoughts were their own. They carried beauty within them because they knew—without doubt—that the men who loved them would bend heaven and earth to give them a world where beauty could be nurtured.
This was not nostalgia.
It was not myth.
It was natural order kept in small, human measure.
It was creation doing what it was designed to do when allowed to breathe.
The river flowed.
The lights held steady.
And somewhere between faith and ferocity, loyalty and love, the good flourished and thrived, quietly alive in the care of those who would not abandon it.
