Lincoln’s Dreams

CHAPTER TWELVE

At the battle of the Wilderness, Lee yelled to the Texas brigade to form a line of battle and then spurred Traveller through an opening between the guns and up to the front of the line to lead the attack. “Go back. General Lee!” the soldiers shouted. “Go back!” A sergeant grabbed hold of Traveller’s bridle, and General Gregg rode up to head him off. The soldiers stopped in their attack and shouted, “We won’t go on unless you go back,” but Lee seemed not to hear them.

We read galleys after we got back, me in the green chair with my feet on the bed, Annie propped up against the pillows with the copyedited manuscript on her knees. Broun had written himself off the battlefield finally, and into a makeshift hospital near Winchester, where Ben had been taken with his wounded foot and was being nursed by a sixteen-year-old girl named Nelly.

In these chapters Broun introduced a lot of new characters: an overworked, alcoholic surgeon who had been a horse doctor before the war, a battle-ax nurse named Mrs. Macklin, a fast-talking private named Caleb who was all of fifteen.

Theoretically, it was a bad idea to bring in so many new characters so late in the book, but Broun didn’t have any choice. Like Lee, he’d killed off everybody else, and now it was time to bring in the old men and the boys. And the women.

“Where’d you get shot? ” (Annie read) the boy in the bed next to Ben said. “I got it in the foot. ”

“Me, too,” Ben said, and turned his head carefully to look at him. He was afraid if he moved too quickly he would pass out. He had passed out in the wagon. The ambulance detail had propped him up in the back of it with his arms over the sides, and he had watched blood drip from under the wagon onto the dirt road. He had had the idea it was all his blood, and after he had bled more than any one person could possibly bleed, he had fainted.

He had come to when they tried to get him up the stairs, but one of them, a big, mean-looking woman, had hit his foot against the bannister, and he had passed out again.

“I ain’t shot bad,” the boy said proudly. He had a friendly, sunburned face. “I’m goin’ back soon’s they let me. My name’s Caleb. What’s yours?

Ben had tried to answer him, but then it was dark and there was the sound of a horse whinnying. Ben’s heart pounded. “Malachi?” he said.

“Promise me you’ll hold my hand,” somebody said pitifully, and Ben was afraid he was the one who had said it, but the voice went on. “Nothing bad can happen so long’s you are holdin’ it,” and Ben knew that wasn’t true so he decided he must not be the one talking. The horse whinnied again, and Ben recognized it as a scream this time.

“I promise,” a girl’s voice said, gravely, kindly, and then it was morning and the girl was standing over him saying, “I’ve brought you your medicine. Can you sit up and take it? ”

She was beautiful. She had light, fine hair pulled back into a bun. When she bent over, to set the brown bottle on a chair, Ben could see the part in her hair. She was wearing an apron and a gray dress that looked like it had faded from blue.

“Course I kin sit up for you,” the boy named Caleb said. He was sitting up on top of the covers. “For you I could git up out of this bed and go dancing, but would you dance with me? No. You’re breeding my heart. Miss Nelly, you know that, don’t you? ”

“I do not think you are quite ready for dancing yet,” Nelly said, pouring the laudanum into a tin spoon. Caleb’s leg was bandaged with heavy white strips of linen, but Ben could see that there wasn’t a foot there at all. He wondered if he himself had a foot.

Ben gulped the laudanum down.

“I am willing to dance with you this very day,” Caleb said, grabbing for Nelly’s hand. “We shall push the beds back against the wall. Miss Nelly, and you,” he waved his hand at Ben, “shall play us a jig tune. ”

“Nelly! Come away from there!” a woman’s voice said. She came and stood at the foot of the bed where Ben could see her. It was the woman who had hit his foot bringing him up the stairs.

“Have one of the others do that!” she barked. “We got another wagonload coming in, and here you are flirting with the menfolks.” She glared at Caleb. “You woke every soul in the house with your screaming last night. ”

He grinned at her. “I dreamed Miss Nelly wouldn’t marry me,” he said.

“You can’t marry Nelly,” Ben tried to say. “I love her. ”

Nelly set the bottle of laudanum down on the chair and went out of Ben’s range of vision. Caleb swung his legs over the side of the bed and leaned across to pick up the bottle. “I dreamed Miss Nelly said she wouldn’t marry me and old Mrs. Macklin said she would.” He winked at Ben. “It was a nightmare, that’s what it was. ”

I watched Annie read, her head bent over the manuscript so I could see the part in her hair. “It’s the war,” Broun had said when I had refused to believe that Ben could fall in love with Nelly after only one day in the hospital. “A spoonful of laudanum, and Ben will do anything for her,” I had said, and Broun had answered, “People did things like that in a war, fell in love, sacrificed themselves.”

Maybe it was the war. We had been through a lot together—Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville and Brandy Station. I had explained her dreams to her, held her hand while she slept, dried her tears. All that was bound to produce feelings of camaraderie, affection. But I knew it wasn’t true. I had loved her since the moment I saw her standing there in the solarium in her gray coat.

I insisted on finding a restaurant that served fried chicken, as if that had been why we intended to go to Shenandoah. Annie brought home a drumstick wrapped in a napkin for the cat.

“You’ll kill it with kindness,” I told her. “You’re not supposed to feed them chicken bones,” but the cat was nowhere to be found. It had come out to the car when we got back in the afternoon, meowing reproaches, but now it wasn’t on the outside steps or over in front of the coffee shop.

“He’ll be back,” I said. “Cats always come back.”

“Tom Tita didn’t. He was locked in. He couldn’t get out.”

“The cat isn’t locked in. He’s probably found some other pushover to feed him, that’s all. You notice Tom Tita didn’t try very hard to get out. He was perfectly happy in the attic with all those mice, and when Markie Williams let him out he didn’t go racing back to Lee. He didn’t even miss Lee as long as the Union soldiers would feed him.”

“Lee missed him,” she said. “Cats don’t have any sense of loyalty, do they?”

“Their first loyalty is to themselves. What good would it have done Tom Tita to follow Lee through the Civil War? He would just have gotten himself killed. And the Union soldiers took good care of him, the way somebody’s taking good care of this cat right now.”

“You’re right,” she said. “Somebody’s taking care of him, and he’s fine,” but she stripped the meat off the drumstick and left it in a little pile at the bottom of the steps before we went in.

She went to bed at eight, and I tried to call Broun at the Westgate in San Diego again. There was no answer. I called the answering machine.

“I’m still in San Diego, Jeff,” Broun said. “I didn’t get in to see the endocrinologist. He was called out of town. I’m going to a place called Dreamtime while I wait for him to get back. Probably a bunch of Quacks, but you never know.” I waited, thinking there’d be a message from Richard, but there wasn’t

Annie tapped lightly on my door. “I had a dream about a chicken,” she said.

“Are you sure this is one of Lee’s dreams and not just something you ate?” I asked her, giddy with relief that I hadn’t inflicted Brandy Station on her.

“I’m sure,” she said. She leaned against the door. She was wearing the blue robe over her nightgown, and her eyes were bluer than I had ever seen them. Her short hair was tangled from sleeping on it. She looked beautiful. “The chicken was on the porch of my house. She acted like she belonged there. Did Lee have a chicken?”

“He had a horse,” I said. “He had a cat. I refuse to believe he had a chicken. It sounds to me like this dream is one of your own, brought on by that southern fried chicken we had for dinner. I told you I was giving you bad dreams.”

She went back to bed. I put the chain on the door and moved the chair over next to it, balanced the book on the arm. I corrected galleys for a while, read Freeman for a while, napped for a while, but I couldn’t sleep in spite of the fact that I had had maybe three hours sleep in the last two nights. It was a good thing.

Annie got out of bed, put on her robe, and tied the belt, all so calmly I thought she was awake. She pushed the chair out of the way. The book thumped onto the carpeted floor, making less noise than I thought it should. She reached for the chain.

“Where are you going, Annie?” I said quietly.

“My fault,” she said. She unfastened the chain.

“It’s not your fault. Let’s go back to bed.” I hooked the chain and led her carefully back to bed, my hand barely touching her arm. She didn’t resist at all. She stopped next to the bed and took off her robe.

“What happened to them?” she asked.

The chicken? Tom Tita? Or all those yellow-haired boys?

“We’ll find them,” I said. She got into bed and lay down. I covered her up. Fifteen minutes later we went through the whole thing again. After I had her back in bed, I wedged the chair under the doorknob and waited.

It took half an hour that time, and then she stood up again, put her robe on, tied the belt, and tried to move the chair. It wouldn’t budge. She turned and looked at me. “What happened to them?” she said angrily, as if I had hidden them from her.

“We’ll find them,” I said, and started back to the bed, my hand lightly on her arm, but halfway there she stopped and took two steps toward the windows.

“My fault,” she said softly. “My fault.”

We were at Gettysburg again, in the woods that were like an oven, watching the soldiers struggle back from Pickett’s Charge.

“My fault,” she whispered, took a few faltering steps forward, and sank down on her knees, her face in her hands.

“What is it, Annie?” I said, squatting beside her. “Is it Gettysburg? Is it Pickett’s Charge?”

She took her hands away from her face and sat back on her heels, staring blindly at whatever it was.

“Can you wake up, Annie? Can you tell me what you’re dreaming?”

She stretched her hand out toward something on the floor in front of her and then drew it back. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

She knelt there for over an hour, me squatting beside her until my legs cramped and I had to switch positions, talking to her, trying to wake her up, trying to get her back to bed. In the end I picked her up and carried her, placing her arms around my neck so she wouldn’t fall back, unfastening them when I had her in bed.

“What happened to them?!’ she asked when I covered her up.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but I’ll find out. I promise.”

Five minutes later she stood up again, put on her robe, and went over to the door.

“Annie, you’ve got to wake up,” I said tiredly.

She stopped pushing on the chair, straightened up, looked at the door, at me. “Did I do it again? Did I go outside?”

“You were trying your darnedest to,” I said. “Where were you? Gettysburg?”

“No,” she said, sitting down in the chair. “I was at Arlington again. It had snowed, like in the first dream, and I was looking for the cat. He was out under the apple tree, and I went out to get him, and I stepped on something. It was a Union soldier. He was lying face-down, with his rifle underneath him, and his name pinned to his sleeve.”

She was clutching the tie belt of her robe the way she had clutched the African violet in Broun’s solarium that first night. “I bent down to unpin the paper, but when I did, it wasn’t a blue uniform sleeve, it was white. And then I saw it wasn’t a dead soldier, it was a girl in a white nightgown, asleep under the apple tree.”

She didn’t ask me where it was or what the dream meant. She sat for a while in the chair, looking toward the middle of the room as if she could still see the apple tree and the girl asleep under it.

“I’m sorry I was sleepwalking again, Jeff,” she said. “Maybe you should tie me to the bed.” She took off her robe and lay down, her arms stiffly at her sides, as if she were willing herself not to walk in her sleep.

She lay that way the rest of the night. I didn’t know if she was asleep. She didn’t move when I picked up Freeman from where it had fallen on the floor and went into my room to get the other three volumes, when I locked the connecting door to my room and pulled the desk across it, or when I moved the lamp over by the green chair so I could read by its light.

There weren’t very many index references to Annie Lee, in spite of her having been Lee’s favorite daughter. I looked up the last one first. “I have always promised myself to go, and I think if I am to accomplish it, I have no time to lose,” he had written his son Rooney in 1870. “I wish to witness Annie’s quiet sleep.” She had died during the war at White Sulphur Springs, North Carolina. She was twenty-three years old.

“He was a good man,” Annie had said. His soldiers loved him, his children loved him, and he had had to sacrifice them all to the war, even his favorite daughter. Annie Lee had died of a fever, but she was as much a casualty of the Civil War as any soldier, dying young and far away from home. At least Lee had had the comfort of knowing where she was buried. He had gone to visit her grave in 1870. “I wish to witness Annie’s quiet sleep.”

Poor man. When he had gotten the letter of her death, he had not shown any outward emotion. He had read the letter and then gone on answering his official correspondence with his aide. But when the aide had come back into the tent a few minutes later, he found Lee weeping.

It was four o’clock, one in California. I called Broun at the Westgate in San Diego, at the L.A. number. I called directory assistance and got the number for Dreamtime. There was no answer anywhere.

Just before dawn, Annie got out of bed and put on her blue robe. I put out a restraining hand, afraid she was sleepwalking again. She went over to the window. “Did you find out what the dream meant?” she asked.

I told her about Annie Lee. “She died in 1862,” I said. “Right before Fredericksburg.”

“Willie Lincoln died in 1862. He was Lincoln’s favorite son,” she said, hugging her arms to herself. “What did she die of?”

“I don’t know. A fever of some kind.”

“Poor man,” she said, and I wondered which man she meant, or if she would know if I asked her.

We spent the morning trying to sleep, gave up, and went to see the last tourist attraction in town, Hugh Mercer’s apothecary shop. We looked at silverplated pills and brown glass laudanum bottles and handwritten prescriptions for curing fevers.

We spent the rest of the day in the library. Annie took notes on Lincoln. I read Lee’s letters and tried to find out what Annie had died from. Nobody seemed to know. I found the chicken, though. Its name was little Hen. She had walked uninvited into Lee’s tent one day, and Lee had kept her for over a year. She laid an egg under Lee’s camp cot every day and sat on Traveller’s back, which delighted the soldiers.

We looked for the cat after dinner, but it was nowhere to be found. The neat pile of chicken scraps Annie had left for it was still on the step. “It’s probably holed up someplace warm,” I said. “It’s supposed to turn cold tomorrow.” We went back to the room, and I barricaded the doors, as if I thought I could somehow keep the dreams out.

I needn’t have bothered. Annie didn’t sleepwalk. She lay quietly, and watching her I thought the dreams must not be as bad, though when she told me about them, they were worse than ever.

Her house was on fire and a rider handed her a message which she tried to open with one hand. The message was wrapped around three cigars, and she couldn’t open it because her hands were bandaged. She handed it to the redheaded waitress and she couldn’t open it either, there was something wrong with her arm, and it wasn’t the waitress, it was a girl in a white nightgown and the message wasn’t wrapped around cigars, it was a letter, and Annie was afraid to read it.

She dreamed she stood on the porch of Arlington and argued with Richard, who was wearing slippers. The vet was in the dream, too. He handed Richard a message, and Richard tore it into little pieces and threw them on the ground.

“Who is the vet?” she asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Pickett maybe? Longstreet?”

“No,” she said bitterly. “Richard is always Longstreet.”

She dreamed about Gettysburg, the retreating soldiers sometimes coming back into the orchard from a burning house, sometimes carrying a chicken in their arms. She tried to reform them under the apple tree, but she couldn’t because Annie Lee was asleep under the tree.

There were no tears or sleepwalking during the dreams, and afterwards she recited her horrors to me gravely and I explained them as best I could, but she scarcely heard me. She seemed to be conserving all her strength for the dreams, lying perfectly still under the green-and-white coverlet. Her cheeks no longer burned, and when I touched her hands or her forehead, they were cold.

In the early hours of the morning I called the answering machine. Richard said, “Annie’s records show low levels of serotonin, which is indicative of a suicidal depression. The symbolism of her dream corroborates that. The rifle represents the desire to inflict harm, the dead soldier is obviously herself.”

“I was right about the Dreamtime thing,” Broun said. “They were a bunch of quacks. Imaginative quacks, though. They said the dreams were warnings sent by Willie Lincoln to his dad, and when I asked them how Willie Lincoln happened to be sending messages, and why, if they knew what was going to happen, the rest of the dead didn’t warn us of impending disaster, they came back with this theory that the dead normally sleep peacefully, but that Willie’s rest had been disturbed when Lincoln dug him up.

“I’m flying up to Sacramento Wednesday to a sleep clinic there. I’ll be home sometime Tuesday. I’ve got an autograph party Saturday in L.A. and an appointment on Monday. I hope you’re doing okay on the galleys, son. I’m going to be impossible to get in touch with for the next few days.”

“I know,” I said.

I didn’t get any sleep to speak of. “Did you manage to get some sleep, Jeff?” Annie asked at breakfast. She looked as it she hadn’t. Her face was pale and there were dark, bruised-looking shadows around her eyes. She sat stiffly in the booth, as if her back hurt, and occasionally rubbed her hand along her arm.

“Some. How about you?”

“I’ll be all right,” she said, and handed me the stack of manuscript. She let the waitress pour her some coffee while she tried to find the place we’d left off.

“You know that big front they were talking about?” the waitress said. “It got stalled over the Midwest for a few days, but now it’s moving again. We’re supposed to get six inches of snow tonight. Can you believe that? In April.”

“Where are we?” Annie said after she left.

“Page six-fifty-six,” I said. “Where it starts, ‘ “No,” Nelly said.’ Page six-fifty-six.” I separated the manuscript into two piles, one only fifty or so pages thick. We were almost done, and what would we do then while we waited for the dreams?

“No” Nelly said, (Annie read) “and Ben tried to come awake to help her, but it was like trying to roll out from under the horse that had fallen on Malachi.

“He’s dead,” Mrs. Macklin said. She sounded impatient, as if Nelly had done something stupid.

“I know he’s dead,” Nelly said, and the need in her voice brought Ben completely awake. He pushed himself up in the bed. Pain roared out from his ankle, and he opened and closed his mouth in little gasps, trying to keep from screaming, pinned down by the pain.

He turned his head and looked at Nelly, She was sitting on a wooden chair next to Caleb’s bed. She was holding Caleb’s hand, gently, as she had every night since he had been brought in. His fingers clung to hers, and his eyes were closed, but he didn’t look like he was asleep. He must have been dead the whole night.

“You can’t do anything for him,” Mrs. Macklin said, and took hold of Nelly’s wrist.

“Let go of her,” Ben said, and then had to breathe in and out rapidly again so the pain wouldn’t overtake him, “Leave her be. ”

Mrs, Macklin ignored him. “Twenty men downstairs half dead and you sit here,” she said accusingly, “Let go of his hand.” Still holding Nelly by the wrist, she yanked her to standing, and Caleb’s arm came up smartly, as if he were saluting.

“No,” Nelly said desperately, “please,” and Ben lunged for Mrs. Macklin, but he didn’t make it. His foot got shot off again, worse than the first time, and he thought they must have had to cut it off at the knee.

When he opened his eyes to see, Nelly was still sitting beside the bed, but the boy’s body was gone, and somebody had laid a gray blanket over the ticking.

“I’m sorry,” Ben said.

Nelly rubbed her wrist. It looked red and puffy. “Do you know what he said to me yesterday?” she said. “He said that as long as I was holding on to him he had beautiful dreams.” She rubbed at her wrist, making it redder.

“You done the best you could,” Ben said. “He ain’t dreaming no more now anyways,” and he wanted to take her hand and hold tight, but he knew he’d be shot again before he reached the edge of the bed.

“I broke my promise,” she said.

“My friend Toby Banks that I told you about promised his mama he’d come home without a scratch on him. Some promises they just… you done the best you could. After he was,” he stopped and cast around for some way to say ‘dead,’ “after he was passed on to glory, he couldn’t feel whether you was holding on nohow. ”

“Promise me you won’t reenlist when your foot gets better,” she said.

“I promise,” he said, but she went on sitting by the bed, rubbing her wrist.

After a while Mrs. Macklin came in and asked to look at Nelly’s wrist. “No,” Nelly said.

“It’s all swollen,” Mrs. Macklin said angrily. “I’m a nurse. It’s my duty to tend to… ”

Nelly stood up, knocking the wooden chair over. “Don’t you talk to me about duty,” she said, cradling her arm like a baby against her, “not when you wouldn’t let me do mine. ”

Annie stopped reading. “I want to go to Arlington,” she said.

We had been through all this before. “There’s no reason to go to Arlington. We know what the dreams mean. Lee blamed himself for Annie’s death. Maybe he thought it wouldn’t have happened if Annie had been at home, if they hadn’t had to leave Arlington. We even know what the message is. It’s the letter telling him Annie’s dead. There isn’t any reason to go back to Arlington.”

“I have to…” She didn’t finish what she was going to say. “The dreams are going in circles. It’s like when I kept dreaming about the cat, and then when we went out to Arlington, it helped.”

Helped who? I wondered. You or Lee? She was helping him have the dreams, helping him sleep in that marble tomb of his at Lexington, and what was he doing to her?

“I think he is trying to atone,” Annie had said. Lee had loved his daughter. Surely he wouldn’t do anything to hurt Annie. I wished I could believe that. I wished I could believe this atonement of his didn’t mean dragging Annie through the Civil War till both their hearts were broken.

“Look,” I said, “you heard what the waitress said. The weather’s supposed to get bad, and anyway the vet’s not back from his conference. I think we should wait till we hear from him. That way we can finish the galleys, too. We can take them up to New York and stop at Arlington on the way.”

The waitress brought our eggs. “It’s snowing in Charleston,” she said. “I just heard it on the radio.”

“See?” I said, as if that settled it.

Annie cut her ham up but didn’t eat it. She just kept cutting it into smaller and smaller pieces. “It isn’t supposed to snow till tonight,” she said. “You could call the vet from Broun’s, Jeff. We could take the galleys with us and finish them in D.C.” She put the knife down and rubbed her wrist.

“Annie, you’re not in any shape to go to Arlington or anywhere else. You haven’t had any sleep for two days, and your wrist is obviously hurting.”

She stopped rubbing it. “I’ll be all right.”

“You could have sprained it when you hit it on the dashboard. Maybe we should go have a doctor look at it.”

“No,” she said and put it in her lap as if to hide it from me. “It isn’t sprained.”

“But it hurts. And you’re exhausted. We’re both too tired to think straight. I think the best thing for both of us to do is take some aspirin and try to get some sleep, and then we’ll talk about Arlington.”

“All right,” she said and looked, I thought, relieved.

We went back to the inn, and Annie did what I’d told her to, even though she protested that her wrist really didn’t hurt, took some aspirin and went straight to bed. I called Broun’s West Coast agent. He would know where Broun was if anybody did, and I had meant what I said about our being too tired to think straight. Broun wouldn’t be dead on his feet. He would know what to do, how to help.

His agent’s call referral service told me he was in New York. When I said I was trying to get in touch with Broun, she gave me a number to call. It was the number of Broun’s answering machine.

Broun hadn’t left any new messages. Richard had. I fast-forwarded over it to see if Broun had left a hotel name or a number and found a call from Broun’s agent. “You’ve got to get the galleys in now,” she said. “McLaws and Herndon is screaming bloody murder. They’re not the only ones who’ve called. Everybody’s looking for you. I got a call from a Dr. Stone, head of the…” there was a pause and a rustle while she looked at the message, “head of the Sleep Institute. He called to say that he had checked out the Gordon thing for you, and—”

“The Gordon thing?” I said. Gordon? I didn’t remember any Gordon.

“—that there was no clinical verification for Dr. Gordon’s theory that dreams can prefigure illness. You’re supposed to call him for the results.”

I called Broun’s agent and told her the galleys were almost done. “You don’t know how I can get in touch with Broun, do you?” I said. “There are a few errors I want to check out with him before I turn in the galleys.”

“All I’ve got is his West Coast agent’s number,” she said. “If you do get in touch with him, have him call me. I’ve got a lot of messages for him. What’s he doing out there?”

“He’s working on a new book about Lincoln’s dreams.”

“Oh, good,” she said. “I was afraid he was still messing with The Duty Bound. Oh, and Jeff, there was a call for you. A Dr. Richard Madison. He said it was urgent that he get in touch with you. I thought you were in California with Broun, so that’s what I told him. I’m sorry,”

“That’s okay. I’ve been hiding out trying to get the galleys done. When did he call?”

“Oh, gee, it was two or three days ago. He didn’t leave a number. Shall I try to find him in the phone book?”

“No!” I said and then laughed, hoping it sounded apologetic and not unstrung. “I’ve got to get these damn galleys in before I talk to anybody. If he calls back, I’m still in California, okay?”

“Okay.” There was a pause. I was so used to talking to the answering machine I almost punched in the erase code. “Jeff, all these psychiatrists are just helping Broun with his research, right?”

“Yeah. He’s trying to find out what caused Lincoln’s dreams.”

“Oh, good,” she said. “He had so much trouble with The Duty Bound I thought maybe… I’ve been worried about him.”

“He’s fine. I’ll have the galleys in to McLaws and Herndon by Monday.”

I went in to check on Annie. She was already asleep, one hand cradling the other. I wondered if I had done the right thing, trying to get her to sleep, or if I was only letting her in for more nightmares. I knew how Lee felt sending his son Rob back in at Antietam. I had told her I would try to get some sleep, too, but I doubted if I’d be able to. I was too worried about her. I took my shoes off and settled down in the green chair with the acknowledgments sheets for The Duty Bound.

“I’m going to the battlefield, Jeff,” Annie said, bending over me. She had on her gray coat. “Go ahead and sleep.”

“Are they open at night?” I said. I sat up, spilling the acknowledgments everywhere. I had fallen asleep and she had dreamed about Fredericksburg again. “I don’t think they’re open at night.”

“It’s three o’clock,” she said, and picked up her purse and the room key. “Go back to sleep.”

It was almost dark in the room. She had turned on the lamp by her bed. Three o’clock. I couldn’t let her go out to the battlefield in the middle of the night. I had to get up and get dressed and go with her.

“I’ll go with you,” I said, and bent over to put on my shoes. “Wait for me.”

“Go back to sleep,” she said, and shut the door behind her.

I stood up, still convinced that it was three o’clock in the morning and surprised to find myself dressed. I must have slept through the afternoon and on into the night while Annie dreamed about Fredericksburg or worse. Asleep on duty. They shot soldiers for that.

I grabbed my coat and racketed down the outside stairs to the little parking lot, but the car was still there. She wasn’t in it. I stood looking around the parking lot for a long, stupid minute, trying to think where she had gone and waking up to the fact that it was not the middle of the night.

It was getting dark out, and some cars had their lights on. The weather the waitress had predicted had come in. It was windy, and the sky was a gray blanket of cloud. The waitress was right, I thought, and would have given anything if she’d been hovering by my shoulder waiting to pour me a cup of coffee to wake me up.

And where was Annie? What if she hadn’t gone out to the battlefield at all? What if she’d caught a bus to Arlington? What if she’d taken off altogether, afraid I was going to try to stop the dreams, afraid I was going to put Thorazine in her food like Richard?

Richard. He had called Broun’s agent. Who else had he called? Nobody knows where we are, I thought desperately. But what if Annie had told Richard her second dream after all, and he had recognized it as Antietam? And when we weren’t in Antietam, he had gone on to the next battle? Which was Fredericksburg.

I raced back up the stairs, across the hall, and down to the desk. “Did you see a man in here, about my height, dressed like a doctor?”

The clerk grinned. “You looking for Mrs. Davis?” he said, emphasizing the Mrs. “She asked us to call her a taxi.”

A taxi? She wasn’t in a car with Richard, drugged and helpless, on her way back to Washington. She had taken a taxi to Arlington because I wouldn’t take her. “Did she say where she was going?”

“She didn’t say anything to me,” he said, still grinning. “When she called for the taxi, though, I heard her say she wanted to go out to Fredericksburg battlefield.”

I took the stairs two at a time, grabbed my car keys, and raced back out to the car and across town. But before I’d gone two blocks I knew I was too late.

Lincoln pardoned the sentries who fell asleep on duty, saying it was hard for farm boys to break their country habits. He wouldn’t pardon me. I had let Annie go out to the battlefield by herself, and it was starting to snow.