Lincoln’s Dreams

CHAPTER NINE

Lee’s affection for Traveller was obvious. “If I were an artist like you,” he wrote his cousin Markie Williams, “I would draw a true picture of Traveller…. Such a picture would inspire a poet, whose genius could then depict his worth and describe his endurance of toil, hunger, thirst, heat, cold, and the dangers and sufferings through which he has passed. He could dilate on his sagacity and affection, and his invariable response to every wish of his rider. He might even imagine his thoughts through the long night marches and days of battle through which he has passed. But I am no artist.”

When Michael Miley took Lee’s photograph, Lee insisted that he be mounted on Traveller, “just as we went through the four years of war together.”

We went back to the inn after dinner and waited for Lee’s aides to deliver some last message so that he could take off his boots and settle onto his camp cot and go to sleep.

Annie rechecked the galleys that I had read the night before, and I got out my trusty Freeman and started in on Gettysburg. It was impossible for me to believe that Lee wouldn’t dream about this, the worst battle of the war, the end of the war really for the Confederacy, though Broun would fight me on that.

He claimed that Antietam was the decisive battle, that with the failure of Lee’s push into Maryland the war was effectively over for the Confederacy, even though there were three more years of killing left and Lee knew it.

Whether it was or not, and, more important, whether Lee was aware of it, he certainly knew it at Gettysburg a year later, and if anything would have given him bad dreams, it was that misbegotten battle. The high-water mark of the Confederacy. Lee made it all the way into Pennsylvania before the Union army stopped him, and then for three days he unleashed one assault after another that made it look like he could win after all.

On the morning of the third day, Lee met with Longstreet outside a schoolhouse. Longstreet didn’t like Lee’s plan of attack. Later Longstreet claimed he had said, “It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position,” and had considered the matter settled. Lee never blamed anybody but himself for the failure of Pickett’s Charge, but when his aide Colonel Venable said bitterly that he’d distinctly heard Lee direct Longstreet to send up Hood’s division in support, Lee had said, “I know! I know!”

Lee’s plan was to send Pickett’s men directly on a frontal assault at the Union center, and it almost worked. Pickett’s men made it up to the famous bloody angle of a stone wall and held it for almost twenty minutes, without any support at all, in spite of the fact that this time it was Fredericksburg in reverse, Lee’s men in an open field marching toward a defended ridge. But Longstreet didn’t send up the supporting divisions, and they couldn’t hold the wall. When the soldiers began to fall back, Lee rode down to meet them and send them back to Seminary Ridge, speaking encouragingly to nearly every man who passed.

“Try to reform your division in the rear of this hill,” he had told Pickett, and Pickett had said, “General Lee, I have no division.”

Annie went to sleep around ten, the covers pulled up over her shoulders as if she were cold. I called the answering machine, and Richard gave me his new theory, this one about sexual guilt and repressed Oedipal attachments.

I had felt all along that these calls, these theories, were leading somewhere, that they were all part of a pitch to persuade me to bring Annie back, but now I was not so sure. The theories didn’t fit together. Sometimes they even contradicted each other, and he jumped from one to another with the same quiet urgency of a man recounting a dream. He still used his Good Shrink voice, but, listening to him, I had the feeling that it was not me he was trying to convince, but himself.

“I talked to a Jungian psychiatrist today,” Broun said after Richard ran down. He pronounced Jung to rhyme with “hung.”

“He’s got a theory that our subconscious is really a storage bin for everything that’s ever happened in the past. Jung’s collective unconscious, only he says it’s not just common racial memories, it’s everything.”

He sounded excited, agitated. Maybe he was getting obsessed with Lincoln’s dreams. “Dates, people, places. It’s all down there, but people only dream bits and pieces of it, and even then something has to trigger the memories. That’s where Lincoln’s acromegaly comes in. He says a hormonal imbalance can unlock the collective unconscious. I know, I know, this sounds like the fortune-teller, but I think he’s on to something.”

I erased the messages, thinking about what he’d said. If a hormonal imbalance could unlock the collective unconscious, maybe a chemical imbalance could, too, and that was where the drugs came in. It would explain why the dreams had suddenly gotten clearer when Annie was on the Elavil. Maybe the phenobarbital had started to let down some kind of guard in the subconscious, and then the Elavil had completed the process, so that Lee’s dreams came through loud and clear.

If that was the case, then the dreams would gradually lose their power and clarity now that Annie was off the drugs, and the best thing to do was to wait them out till the chemical balance in her brain was restored and the dreams faded away.

I shut off the lights and went back into Annie’s room to wait it out with her, and was asleep in the chair within minutes. When I woke up it was three-thirty by the lighted dial of my watch. Annie was still sleeping peacefully, though she had flung most of the covers off. I thought, with the confused logic of the half-awake, that I must somehow have slept through her dream, but her breathing wasn’t the heavy, almost drugged-sounding breathing she had after the dreams, and my next thought, even more confused, was that I had stopped the dreams simply by telling her what caused them, and went back to sleep.

I must have heard the door slam because when I woke up again I was already halfway to it, only barely glancing at the bed because I knew she wasn’t there. I had it open and was out in the hall in time to hear the outside door close. The outside door that opened on the fire escape.

I ran to the end of the hall and pushed down on the metal bar. The bar gave, but the door wouldn’t open. Annie must be pushing on it from the outside. Or be lying crumpled against it. “Annie!” I shouted through the door, and then stopped. You weren’t supposed to startle a sleepwalker. If they were somewhere dangerous, on a cliff or something, they might fall. I tore back down the hall, down the front stairs, and through the empty lobby to the front door. It was locked, but from the inside. I got it open and raced around to the side of the building.

Annie was standing at the top of the stairs in her white nightgown, looking like a ghost in the gray, indistinct light of dawn. The cat was sitting on the top step, watching her.

“Annie,” I said quietly from the bottom of the stairs, “you’re having another dream.”

She was looking toward the Rappahannock. Fog lay along the line of trees like a gray blanket. “Goodbye, Katie,” she said with a catch in her voice. “Promise you’ll come back.”

“Stay there,” I said, “I’m coming.” I started up the stairs, one hand on the railing and the other held out to catch her if she fell. “What are you dreaming, Annie?”

She half-raised her hand in its full white sleeve as if to wave. “I wish you didn’t have to go,” she said, and then buried her face in her hand and began to cry. The cat watched her incuriously.

I stepped onto the landing and put my hand gently on her shoulder. “Annie, can you wake up? You’re having a bad dream.”

She took her hand away from her face and turned to me, her face alight. “No tears at Arlington!” she said brightly, “no tears,” and flung her arms around my neck and sobbed.

“Annie, don’t cry!” I put my arms around her. Sobs shuddered through her. “Honey, oh, don’t cry!”

She clung tighter to me, shivering in the thin nightgown. I patted her back and reached behind me for the door with one hand. I was afraid it would be locked from the outside, and how would I ever get her down these narrow stairs and back inside the inn? The metal bar gave under the pressure of my hand and opened. “Let’s go inside, Annie,” I said. “It’s cold out here, honey. Let’s go back to the room.”

She tightened her arms around me and pressed her face against my neck. “I don’t want you to leave,” she said, and lifted her tear-stained face up to mine, her face full of love and sorrow. Her eyes were wide open, but she wasn’t looking at me. Whoever she was clinging to, begging them not to go, it wasn’t me.

Her nightgown had come unbuttoned at the neck and was pulled away from the long curve of her throat. I could feel the uneven catch of her sobs through the thin cotton of the nightgown. “Annie,” I said, and the pain in my voice brought her awake.

Her eyes focused on me, frightened or surprised. “Where am I?” she said, and looked bewilderedly at the stairs and the fog-shrouded Rappahannock. “Did I have another dream?”

“Yes,” I said, disengaging her hands gently from my neck. I stepped back and down a step, almost onto the cat. “Do you remember it?”

“I was at Arlington,” she said. She looked down at her unbuttoned nightgown. “What did I do?—when I was asleep?”

I shoved down the bar of the door and it opened. “You did a little sleepwalking, that’s all.” I motioned her through the door, standing back, not touching her. The cat stood up and sauntered after her, and I shut the door in its race and then jammed the door down into its lock position and followed Annie into the room.

She was standing with her head bent, buttoning up her nightgown. I locked the door and put the chain on, which was what I should have done in the first place. If I had, none of this would have happened.

“You said you were at Arlington in the dream,” I said. “Was it the same dream as before?”

“No.” She took her blue robe off the bedpost and put it on. “I was standing on the porch with the waitress from the coffee shop, the one with the red hair, and she was getting ready to leave.” She cinched the tie belt of the robe and sat down on the bed, holding the robe closed at the neck with one hand. “We were waiting for the carriage. There were a lot of suitcases piled up on the porch. I didn’t want her to go.”

“I got that much,” I said, thinking of her arms around my neck, of the beautiful curve of her throat. “Why did you say, ‘No tears at Arlington’?”

“I didn’t. He…” She frowned and looked past me. “We were standing on the porch and then…” She leaned forward as if she were trying to reach something, though her hand remained fastened on the collar of her robe.

“Why don’t we talk about this in the morning,” I said. I stood up and pushed the green chair over against the door. “This probably won’t stop you if you sleepwalk again, but it’ll slow you down long enough for me to hear you.” I balanced the volume of Freeman on the arm. It would fall off if she tried to move the chair.

“Jeff,” she said, clutching the blue robe light against her neck. “I’m sorry I… about all this.”

I wanted to shout at her, “I’m not Richard. I’d never take advantage of you while you were asleep, for God’s sake,” but I wasn’t sure that was the truth.

“There’s nothing to be sorry about. You were dreaming,” I said, and went into my room and shut the door.

My collar was wet from Annie’s tears. I took off my shirt and put on another one and then went over and stood by the window, waiting for it to get light and thinking about Richard. “I wasn’t trying to hit on her, it just happened,” he had said when I accused him of taking advantage of Annie. “I was trying to help her.”

“That’s no excuse,” I said out loud, and didn’t know if I was talking to Richard or myself.

When it was light enough to read, I picked up volume one. I had left volume four, the one with the index in it, out on the chair for a sleepwalking alarm, but I didn’t know what to look for anyway, except for the reference to Arlington. If the dream had really taken place there, then this dream was from before the war, which meant my carefully worked-out theory was shot to pieces and I could start over, and volume one was as good a place to start as any.

I read till eight-thirty and then went out my bedroom door and over to the coffee shop and had breakfast. The redheaded waitress was there. “Your name wouldn’t be Katie, would it?” I asked her when she refilled my coffee cup.

“No,” she said disapprovingly, as if she thought I was trying to flirt with her in Annie’s absence. “It’s Margaret. Did you guys make it out to the battlefield yesterday?”

“No,” I said. Maybe we should have, I thought. Maybe then Annie would have dreamed about Fredericksburg again, and I would have known what to tell her when she woke up.

“We were standing on the porch at Arlington,” Annie had said. “The waitress was leaving and I didn’t want her to go.” Who could Lee have had visit that he wouldn’t want to go home? I didn’t know much about Lee’s life outside the war. All the research I had done for Broun had been about specific battles, and I was not even sure what family and friends Lee had outside of his son Rob, whom he had sent back into battle at Antietam, and the cousin, Markie Williams, who had gone back through enemy lines to fetch the Lees’ belongings from Arlington and found the cat.

Who would Lee have flung his arms around, have cried over? The answer was nobody. The men who had been in the war with Lee described him almost uniformly as “grave and kind” and “showing no sign of his emotions.” One of his biographers had nicknamed him “the marble man,” and all of them said he was devoted solely to his duty. He never talked about what was troubling him, never wept, not even over Stonewall Jackson. When the war was over, he never spoke of it.

He had paid dearly for that self-control. He had died of a heart attack, the controlled man’s disease, and he had had bad dreams about the war up to the very end. He had told Hill to come up when he was dying, and then, at the very end, said, “Strike the tent.” But he hadn’t cried or clung to his family, even on his deathbed.

What if this wasn’t one of Lee’s dreams at all? What if now that the barriers to the collective unconscious were down, Annie would start dreaming other people’s dreams?

Annie came over at a little before ten, looking like she hadn’t slept either. She was wearing a high-necked blouse buttoned all the way up.

“I don’t have any idea what your dream was,” I said. I dog-eared the page I was on and shut the book. “You’re sure it was at Arlington?”

“Yes. I was standing on the porch. The cat was there, and the apple tree. Its leaves had turned. It must have been in the fall. I’m sure it was Arlington. I mean, it’s always my house, the house I grew up in, but it stands for other houses.” She shook her head as if that weren’t the right word. “It feels like other houses. I think Lee must have to use the images I have in my mind to make the dreams out of, and then he makes them stand for other things. It’s the same with the people. I think he must choose the person who’s most like the person he knew….”

The redheaded waitress bustled over and took Annie’s order, apologizing for not having seen her right away and filling both our coffee cups to the very brim.

“Like the waitress?” I said after she left.

“Yes. It was the waitress, but it wasn’t her really.”

“You called her Katie. Do you know her last name or what her relationship to Lee was? Was she a friend of his, a relative?”

“No, she was a friend of…” She picked up her spoon and stirred her coffee. “I just remembered something about the dream,” she said. “That never happened before.”

“What?”

“The waitress… Katie and I were standing on the porch saying goodbye, and I didn’t want her to go. We were both crying, and laughing at the same time because neither of us had a handkerchief, and then all of a sudden I was out by the apple tree and walking up to the house. You know how sometimes in a dream you’re one person and then you’re somebody else, only you’re still the first person, too? That’s how this was. I was walking up from the apple orchard, too, and I was still on the porch saying good bye to Katie. I had on my white nightgown, and she was in her waitress uniform, and we were both crying, and I went up on the porch and said to them, ‘No tears at Arlington!’ and laughed, and gave Katie my big handkerchief to blow her nose on.”

“Do you know who the girl on the porch was?” I asked. “The girl who was you?”

“No. But coming up from the apple orchard I was Lee.”

Well, at least the Pandora’s box of the whole world’s dreams hadn’t been opened yet, and she was still dreaming Lee’s dreams, even if I couldn’t place this one. “And so then this girl, whoever she is, flung her arms around Lee’s neck and started to cry?”

“No.” She put her coffee cup down and stared into it. “He… I… Lee came up on the porch,” she said slowly, “and said, ‘No tears,’ and all of a sudden I felt that I knew what was causing the dreams.” She looked up at me. “I was myself in the dream right then, not Lee or the girl in the white nightgown. I was myself. And I knew what was causing them. I knew why I was having the dreams.” She put her hand up to her mouth. Her eyes filled with tears. “Poor man,” she said softly. “Poor man.”

It had been Annie with her arms twined around my neck, after all, even though it wasn’t me she clung to. “Do you still know?” I said, wanting to reach across the table and comfort her, but not daring to even touch her. “Do you remember what it was that was causing the dreams?”

She wiped her eyes with her paper napkin. “No. I woke up and found myself hanging all over you. I was so ashamed that I’d been sleepwalking and that my nightgown was half off. I was afraid I’d tried to kiss you or something.”

You didn’t try to kiss me, Annie, I thought. I wasn’t even there. “You didn’t try to kiss me,” I said.

“And then when I tried to remember the dream, I couldn’t…” Her voice trailed off again the way it had the night before. After a minute she shook her head. “Jeff, I think we should go back to Arlington.”

That one had come right out of left field. “We can’t go back,” I said, stammering in my surprise. “Richard’s there.”

“I know, but when I went there before, it helped.”

Helped her to dream the horrors of Antietam and Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, I thought. I could see the look of terror on her face as she stood had there in the snow, looking down at the bodies on the lawn. I didn’t want to subject her to that again, even to solve the puzzle of the dreams.

“We’re only going to be here a couple more days. I need to see the vet again and finish up my research at the library for Broun.” These were useless excuses. I could obviously call the vet from D.C, and the only research I’d done since I’d been here had been on Lee, not Lincoln, but Annie wasn’t listening to me. She was leaning forward, as if she could almost reach out and touch the meaning of the dreams.

“The dreams have something to do with Arlington,” she said in that inflectionless voice she used to recite the dreams. “And the yellow-haired soldier. And the cat. Nobody knows what happened to them.” She looked up at me. “Did Lee have a daughter?”

“He had several, I think,” I said, relieved that she had changed the subject. “I know he had at least one. Agnes, I think her name was.” I stood up. “Go ahead and finish your breakfast. I’m going to go get my notebook and then we’ll go to the library and see what we can find out about Agnes.”

I went back to the room and gathered up the two volumes of Freeman that were by my bed. Annie had left the chair close to the door. Volume four was on the seat. I pushed the chair back where it belonged so the maid wouldn’t think we were trying to steal the furniture and picked up the book.

Annie was standing at the cash register talking to the redheaded waitress when I got back. I hoped she wasn’t pitching the battlefield again.

“The weather’s supposed to turn this afternoon,” the waitress said. “Big cold front moving in.”

Good, I thought. Maybe well be snowed in here.

We walked down to the library. The librarian glared at me when I came in carrying my stack of books, as if she thought I’d taken them the day before without checking them out. Annie borrowed a piece of paper and a pen from me and said she was going back down to the reference section.

“I’ll be in biographies, where we were yesterday,” I said.

I looked up “Lee, daughters of.” He had had three other daughters besides Agnes: Mary, Ann, and Mildred. Since I had no way of knowing which one was in this dream, I used the only other clue I had. An hour into the index references under Arlington, I found what I was looking for.

In the fall of 1858, Katherine Stiles, a friend from Georgia, had come for a visit. When she got ready to leave, Lee had found her and his daughter Annie weeping together. “No tears at Arlington!” he had told them. “No tears!” His daughter Annie.

I looked up “Lee, Annie Carter (Robert E. Lee, daughter of)” in the index and started going through the page references. On March second, 1862, Lee had written her: “My Precious Annie, I think of you all, separately and collectively, in the busy hours of the night, and the recollection of each and every one whiles away the long night, in which my anxious thoughts drive away sleep. But I always feel that you and Agnes at those times are sound asleep, and that it is immaterial to either where the blockades are or what their progress is in the river.”

There it was, the connection I’d been looking for. I had tried to come up with all kinds of complicated rationales for why Annie was having the dreams—Richard’s drugs and chemical imbalances and Dr. Stone’s storm of dreams. It had never occurred to me that Annie might simply be having the dreams because Lee had called out her name in his sleep.

The sharp-faced librarian was leaning over me. “I see you brought your own books with you today,” she said in a voice with a surprisingly gentle tone and a marked Virginia accent. “I’m afraid our Civil War materials are very limited. Most people do their research out at the National Park Service Library.”

“The Park Service?” I said.

“Yes. It’s out at the Fredericksburg battlefield. When I saw you in here yesterday I wondered if you knew about it, but I didn’t like to interrupt your work. All the main source materials are out there. Do you know how to get there?”

Yes. March across an open plain to a defended ridge. “Yes. Thank you.” I gathered up my stack of Freeman. “Do you happen to know when they’re open?”

“Nine to five,” she said in that impossible Southern belle voice. “The battlefield itself is open until dark, I believe.”

I went and found Annie, who was in the encyclopedias, surrounded by the Ls. “I found what I needed. Let’s get out of here,” I said.

The librarian was standing at the front desk looking as forbidding as ever. I hustled Annie past without even telling her thank you, for fear she would say something to Annie about the battlefield, and suggested we walk downtown and get something to eat. “I saw a drugstore on the way up that had a soda fountain, believe it or not,” I said.

“I’m not very hungry,” Annie said.

“Well, then something to drink. A lemonade or something.”

The drugstore did have a fountain, though it was pretty decrepit-looking. The faded pictures of ice cream and grilled cheese sandwiches and root beer floats looked like they’d been up since the Civil War, and there was nobody behind the counter. A balding pharmacist was filling prescriptions in a booth at the back, but he didn’t look up, even when we sat down on two of the plastic stools.

“I’ll go ask if the fountain’s open,” I said and started toward the back, but before I got there the phone rang and he answered it. I waited for him to look up, reading the labels on the medicines. Half the rack was devoted to sleeping pills: Sominex, Nytol, Sleep-Eze. Richard would have felt right at home.

The pharmacist cupped his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and whispered, “Be right with you.”

I nodded and went back up to the front. Annie was looking at the rack of postcards next to the counter. I hoped to God they didn’t have one of Arlington.

“The pharmacist said he’ll wait on us as soon as he gets oft the phone.” I leaned over her shoulder to see the postcard she was holding. It was a photograph of Lee’s tomb at Lexington. The marble statue was of Lee asleep on his camp cot in his dress uniform and boots, with a blanket draped over him. One arm lay at his side, the other was folded across his chest. “I think I know what’s causing the dreams,” I said. “The girls on the porch were Katherine Stiles and Annie Lee.”

She put the postcard back in the rack with infinite care. “Annie Lee?”

“Lee’s daughter. You were right about it being one of his daughters. Annie didn’t want her friend to leave. Both girls were crying, and Lee told them, ‘No tears at Arlington.’”

Annie sat down at the counter. “No tears,” she said and put her hands on the volume of Freeman, one over the other.

“Don’t you see what this means? The dreams aren’t meant for you. Lee was thinking of his daughter, and through some freak of time, the message got sent to you by mistake. I don’t know how. Maybe you heard your name being called down in the collective unconscious or something.”

“Mistake,” Annie said, and shook her head. “He’s trying to tell me something. That’s what the paper on the soldier’s sleeve is, only I can’t read it. It’s a message of some kind.”

“But not to you,” I said. “You were right in more ways than one when you said they weren’t your dreams. They belong to Annie Lee. Her father was sending them to her.”

“There are messages in all the dreams except this last one,” Annie said. “There’s the message that the Union soldier was carrying when he got captured at Fredericksburg, and the message about Jackson’s arm being amputated. And Special Order 191.”

“And the reason you can’t make out the messages is because they weren’t meant for you. They were meant for Annie Lee. She’d recognize Katherine Stiles and she’d remember that day at Arlington and Tom Tita. She’d know what all of it meant. They’re her dreams, Annie, not yours.”

The pharmacist came bustling up to wait on us and tell us a long and involved story about Lila who usually took care of the front for him but who had broken her foot. “Messing around with horses at her age,” he said without explaining what she’d been doing. He stuck two paper cones into metal bases. “She should have known better.” He squeezed lemons into the paper glasses. “You folks tourists?”

“Sort of,” I said. “We’re here for a few days.”

He held the glasses under the soda water siphon one at a time, stirring the lemonades with a long-handled spoon. “You been out to the cemetery yet?”

“Cemetery?” Annie said.

“The battlefield. It’s a national cemetery now. Union soldiers. Confederates are buried over on Washington Avenue.” He scooped ice into the glasses.

“How far is it from here?” Annie said.

“Two miles maybe. You go down Caroline, that’s this street, till you come to Lafayette Boulevard,” he said, drawing a map on the damp counter with his finger. “That’s US 3. Turn right on Lafayette and follow it all the way out to Sunken Road. You can’t miss it.” The phone rang. The pharmacist plopped two lemon slices into the glasses, shoved them across the counter at us, and hurried back to answer it.

I peeled the paper off a straw and jabbed the ice in my lemonade with it. Did everybody in this whole damned town own stock in Fredericksburg battlefield? It’s a great place to visit. Seventeen thousand dead. There’s even an electric map, red lights for the mortally wounded soldiers, blue for the ones who froze to death. You can’t miss it. Take US 3 to Sunken Road, where the bodies are lying ten deep in front of the stone wall.

Annie was still looking at the counter where the pharmacist had drawn the map. In a minute she would say, “I want to go out to the battlefield, Jeff,” or worse, “I think we should go to Arlington,” and what excuse was I going to come up with this time?

“Do you think they’d have any aspirin in those little tins?” Annie said. “I didn’t bring any with me today, and I’ve got kind of a headache.”

“Sure,” I said. I slid off the stool and went to the back to ask the pharmacist. He was still on the phone. “You of all people should know I can’t prescribe without a doctor’s orders, Lila,” he said loudly. There was a long, frustrated pause, during which he stared at the phone.

I searched along the rack of medicine but didn’t find any tins. I grabbed a bottle of a hundred and took it back up to Annie. “Are you all right?” I broke the seal, dug out the wad of cotton, and shook two into her hand. She took them with a sip of lemonade. “Do you want to go back to the inn?”

“Yes,” she said.

I went back to the pharmacist and handed him three ones, holding up the bottle of aspirin where he could see it. “Especially not for you!” he shouted at Lila. “With your heart condition?” I waited some more. He looked up, finally, and nodded at me.

Annie was standing by the door waiting for me, the four volumes of Freeman in her arms. “Here. Let me take those,” I said, tucking them under my arm. I opened the door for her. “you want me to go back to the inn and get the car?”

“No, I’m fine, Jeff, really.” She smiled wearily. “I think Lee must be thinking about his daughter again.”

“I can go get the car,” I said, and then saw the blue Ford sedan let an elderly black woman out a block down and start toward us.

“Taxi!” I shouted, jumping out into the street as if I were trying to stop a runaway horse. “Taxi!”

The taxi driver pulled over and opened the back door for us. He was at least sixty, with a huge cigar and a stubbly beard that looked even sharper and more disreputable than Broun’s. I gave him the inn’s address, and he pulled out into the street.

“You two tourists?” he said over his shoulder. “You been out to the battlefield yet?”