Lincoln’s Dreams

CHAPTER SIX

Traveller was a perfect horse for Lee. He could stand the bad weather and the parched corn, and he had incredible stamina. When Lee reviewed the troops, Traveller would start out at a long lope and never once change his stride. The men would be lined up for sometimes as much as ten miles, and Traveller would gallop the whole distance while the other officers’ horses dropped out, one by one.

Fredericksburg was only fifty miles south of D.C., but it was an entirely different world. The redbud and forsythia were in bloom, and the martyred blossoms of the dogwood were everywhere.

I checked us in at the Fredericksburg Inn, a big old building with a wide porch. I asked for two adjoining rooms and then told the clerk I wanted to see them before we signed in. The clerk gave me a key and we went upstairs. The two rooms were really a suite on the second floor at one end of the building. I could see the parking lot from the window of one of the bedrooms and the Rappahannock from the other. There was a fire escape at the other end of the hall that went down to another, smaller parking lot that couldn’t be seen from the front of the building.

I left Annie in the room and went down and signed us in as Mr. and Mrs. Jeff Davis. The clerk grinned when he read it. I debated telling him that an angry husband might show up and giving him twenty dollars to tell the husband we weren’t there. Instead, I grinned back and said, “No, no relation. Everybody asks that,” and went out to move the car around to the little parking lot by the stairs and get the bags.

When I got back up to the suite, I put my bag in the bedroom with the view of the big parking lot and Annie’s in the other.

“You can relax,” I told her. “Richard will have ho way of knowing we’re here. The only person who knew I was going to Fredericksburg is Broun, and he’s in California. You can go ahead and unpack and then we’ll go get some breakfast.”

I went into the other bedroom, shut the door, and called Broun’s answering machine to make sure Broun hadn’t left the name of his hotel or the number on the machine. “I’m in sunny California doing research on my new book,” Broun’s voice said. “If you’ll leave your name and number and any messages, I’ll be picking my messages up remotely, and I’ll try to return your call as soon as possible.”

Good. He hadn’t left a number, and he hadn’t said anything about his research assistant picking up his calls. He had meant it when he said he wanted me to take some time off. I tried to think of anybody else he might have given his California number to. His agent probably, but she wouldn’t give out information to a stranger, even if he claimed to be an old roommate of Jeff’s. McLaws and Herndon maybe, though I doubted if he’d told them he was running off to California when he was supposed to be working on the galleys.

I punched in the remote code that would play me any messages left on the machine. There was a click and then a short whirring sound while the machine rewound, another click, and Broun said, “Jeff, I’m in California, and I must have brought the damned fog with me. I’m going to see the prophetic dreams man tomorrow. Call me if you run into any trouble with the galleys. And get some rest. I’m worried about you.”

I unpacked the bag I’d thrown together the night before and opened the box I had brought the galleys in. There were books lying on top. I didn’t remember packing any books. I picked the top one up. It was volume two of Freeman. I sat down on the bed and pulled out the other three hefty volumes, one after the other.

A soldier running from battle would sometimes find miles later that he was still clutching his rifle, or his hat, or a half-eaten square of hardtack, and had no more memory of doing it than he did of running away. And here we were fifty miles from the battle with a suite at the Fredericksburg Inn and Freeman’s R. E. Lee and who knows what in Annie’s duffel bag, two Johnny Rebs on the run. But sooner or later that soldier would stop running and decide what to do next, and I had no idea. I hadn’t thought any farther than getting Annie safely away from Richard.

I had done that, and we could stay here for at least a week and maybe longer if Broun stayed in California, but sooner or later we were going to have to go back to D.C., and sooner or later we were going to have to talk about the dreams.

But not yet. There was no telling how much Thorazine Annie still had in her system or how long it would take to work its way out. Dr. Stone had said taking somebody off a sedative abruptly might cause a “storm of dreams.” I wasn’t going to insist on figuring out what was causing Robert E. Lee’s dreams if she was having nightmares of her own. What she needed right now was breakfast and some rest and a vacation from the whole crazy mess.

There was a slick colored brochure lying on the oak chiffonier by the bed. I picked it up. Maybe we could take a walk around historic Fredericksburg, see some of the sights. “America’s Battlefield,” the brochure said. “Visit the Historic Civil War Battlefields. Where 100,000 fell! Stand in the shoes of the generals. Self-guided tour.”

I thought of Annie standing halfway up the hill at Arlington, looking down at the snowy grass. Fredericksburg’s battlefield had been made into a national cemetery, too, with twelve thousand unknown soldiers buried in it.

Maybe I shouldn’t have brought her here, I thought. She hadn’t dreamed about Fredericksburg yet, and I didn’t want her to. The battle had been a complete slaughter, with the Union soldiers trying to cross a flat plain to the defended ridge called Marye’s Heights. But Lee won, I thought. Maybe he doesn’t dream about the battles he won.

The other attractions were minor, to say the least: James Monroe’s law office, Mary Washington’s cottage, and Kenmore, a southern plantation where George Washington’s sister Betty Fielding Lewis lived, but when I checked the map, they weren’t anywhere near the battlefield, which meant we could go sightseeing and read galleys and do what Broun had sent me to do, which was interview a doctor about his acromegaly.

I dug the number Broun had given me out of my wallet and called Dr. Barton. The number had been disconnected. I opened the drawers in the oak chiffonier till I found the phone book and looked him up under “Physicians” in the Yellow Pages. There wasn’t any listing. There was a Barton listed in the white pages, but no “doctor” after his name. Broun had said he was old enough that his acromegaly hadn’t been treated. Maybe he’d retired. I called the number.

“Dr. Barton’s office,” a woman’s voice said.

“Good,” I said. “This is Jeff Johnston. I’m Thomas Broun’s researcher. I’d like to make an appointment with Dr. Barton.”

“Is this about a horse?” she said.

“No,” I said, squinting at the paper Broun had given me. “Is this Dr. Henry Barton’s office?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. Barton’s name was given to my employer, Thomas Broun, by Dr. Stone in Washington, D.C. I’m doing research on Mr. Broun’s new book, and I wanted to ask Dr. Barton a few questions.”

“Oh, how interesting,” she said. “I know my husband will want to see you. Let me look at the appointment book.” There was a pause. “Could it be next week sometime? He’s very busy. It’s spring, you know.”

I didn’t know why spring was so busy, but I didn’t say that. “What about in the evening?”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday. Could you come out tomorrow?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Do you know how to get here?” she said. “We’re out of town.” While she gave me directions, I thumbed through the yellow pages again. Yep. There he was, Dr. Henry Barton, DVM. Practice Limited to Large Animals. No wonder his wife had wanted to know if it was about a horse.

I put the phone book back in the drawer, picked up the brochure of “Historic Fredericksburg,” and took it into Annie’s room. “Dr. Barton can’t see me till tomorrow, so we’ve got the whole day. What do you want to see? Mary Washington lived here. We could go tour the house. There’s a mirror in her bedroom that…”

“I shouldn’t have come with you,” she said. She was sitting on the four-poster bed. It had a green-and-white sprigged muslin coverlet with a ruffled flounce. Annie had her hands flat on either side of her, trying not to clutch at the muslin flowers the way she had Broun’s African violet. “When I started having the dreams I was so scared I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to be alone at night, and Richard was trying to help me….”

And it just happened.

“I’m not Richard,” I said. “I don’t know what kind of ideas you’ve got about me, but I didn’t bring you down here for a fun weekend on Broun’s expense account. I brought you down here because you were running away from Richard, and I thought this was a safe place for you to hide. That’s it. I’m here to read the galleys for The Duty Bound and talk to some guy with long bones and big ears. I got a suite and registered us under a phony name because that way Richard couldn’t call and find out you were here, but if you want a separate room, I can…”

“That’s not it,” she said, crushing the coverlet in her clenched hands. “I didn’t think you… the suite is fine, Jeff. I’m glad you didn’t get separate rooms because I need somebody in the room at night. And you shouldn’t blame Richard for what happened. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have gotten involved with him. It just made things worse.” She let go of the coverlet and looked up at me. “The dreams scared Richard. He was afraid they were hurting me, and so he tried to stop them, but I couldn’t let him. I have a duty to the dreams.”

“And you’re afraid I’ll get scared, too, and start putting Thorazine in your food. I told you, I’m not Richard.”

“I’m all right. The Thorazine’s almost out of my system. I know. I’m feeling a lot better. There’s no reason to go see a doctor. He’ll try to stop the dreams. He’ll put me on some other drug.”

“I didn’t say anything about going to see a doctor,” I said helplessly, and then realized I had. “You mean Dr. Barton? That’s the guy Broun asked me to interview. He’s got acromegaly, the same growth disorder Lincoln had, and he’s not even a doctor. He’s a vet. When I called, his wife asked me if I wanted to see him about a horse.” I tried to smile at her. “I know it’s your duty to have the dreams. It’s my duty to take care of you while you do. I promise I won’t try to stop the dreams.”

“Okay,” she said. She smoothed out the coverlet where she had wrinkled it.

“Now how about some breakfast, and then we’ll hit all the hot spots of Fredericksburg? Mary Washington’s got this mirror that people flock from miles around to see.”

“All right,” she said, smiling. “Who was Mary Washington?”

“I don’t know,” I said, looking down at the brochure. I had twisted it into an unreadable wad of colored paper. “George Washington’s mother? Or his daughter maybe? Did George Washington have any daughters?” She was staring at the brochure. “I’ll pick up another one in the lobby.” I dropped it in the wastebasket.

“Annie, it’s going to be all right,” I said. “I’ll take care of you.”

“I know.”

Mary Washington was George’s mother. We had breakfast in a coffee shop across from the inn and then walked downtown to see Mary’s dressing glass and her sundial in a little house at the foot of the formal gardens of Kenmore.

I watched Annie anxiously all morning, but she looked fine. Better than fine. The warm spring air and exercise seemed to be doing her a world of good. She laughed at my comments on what sort of person Mary Washington had been, considering that her daughter had stuck her as far away from the house as possible, and said, “She probably talked as much about that awful dressing glass as the tour guide did.”

She smiled, a beautiful, untroubled smile. Oddly, it made her look older, more like a woman and less like a ravaged child, and I thought. Good, I’m doing the right thing.

But after lunch, browsing through our third antique shop, she started to look tired. She picked up a china cat and started to say something, and then stopped in mid-sentence and went over to the window of the antique shop and looked anxiously out toward the south as though she were waiting for A.P. Hill’s men to come up.

“Are you all right?” I said, worried that this was some side effect of the Thorazine.

She was still holding the china cat.

“Let’s go get some coffee,” I said. I’d been pouring coffee into her all day, in spite of Dr. Stone’s theory that caffeine caused bad dreams. I couldn’t think of any other way to get the Thorazine out of her system.

“I think I’ve had enough coffee,” she said, smiling. “I’m fine. I just have a headache.”

“Well, how about some aspirin then?”

“No, I’m fine. I’m just tired. Maybe we should go back to the inn.”

“Sure thing. Do you want to walk? If you’re tired, I can run back and get the car. Or we can call a taxi.”

“I don’t think Fredericksburg’s got taxis,” she said, putting the china cat down carefully on a drop-leaf table. “There isn’t any reason to panic, Jeff. It’s a sinus headache. I get hay fever. It’s probably the apple blossoms.”

She seemed fine on the walk home. A breeze had come up, and it blew the light hair back from her face and colored her cheeks. “This is a pretty town,” she said, “all these old houses. Was there a battle here? In the Civil War?”

“Yes.” I pointed at a dilapidated blue Ford sedan with a hand-lettered sign on its side as it drove past. “I told you they had taxis in Fredericksburg.”

We went up the outside staircase of the inn to our rooms. A back cat with white paws was sunning itself on the second step from the top. It made no effort at all to get out of our way.

“Hello, there,” Annie said, reaching down to pet it. The cat closed its eyes and allowed itself to be petted as if it were doing Annie a favor. “I’ve always wished I could have a cat. My father was allergic to them.”

“Your father?”

“Yes. They gave him hives.”

“You know, I don’t know anything about you. Your family, where you come from, what you were doing before you started having Lee’s dreams. Where do you live?”

She straightened up, her smile gone. She looked the way she had that night when Richard had been ranting about Lincoln’s psychological problems. “A little town. About the size of Fredericksburg.”

“Broun has a cat,” I said hastily. “It’s a selfish brute. Like this one here.” I chucked the cat under its black chin and walked on up the stairs to open the door for Annie, hating Richard at that moment more than I had ever hated anyone.

I didn’t know anything at all about Annie. Correction: I knew she had a father who was allergic to cats, and that she came from a little town, and from the look on her face that was all she was going to tell me. I didn’t blame her. Richard knew all about her. If it wasn’t on the forms she had filled out at the Institute or the records her doctor had sent, Richard had found it out in his therapy sessions, and whatever he knew he had used: “I see your father died last year. Did you feel responsible for his death? What did he look like? Did he have a white beard? Like Robert E. Lee’s? Isn’t that what your dream is really all about?”

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, he had probably spent the morning calling those numbers on the forms. Next of Kin Not Living at Above Address, and demanding to know where she was. No wonder she didn’t want to tell me anything. I might turn out to be another Richard, and when she ran from me, she would want to make sure I couldn’t follow.

“Broun’s really going to be mad when he gets back,” I said, opening the door to my room and smiling reassuringly. “I gave his cat the leftover shrimp doodads.”

She followed me into the room. “What did they taste like?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want Broun to find out, but I think they’re awful. I was afraid that night of the reception he was actually going to force us to eat some of them. Now you go ahead and take a nap if you’re tired. Is there anything I can get you?”

She rubbed her hand across her forehead. “Jeff, I think I could use some aspirin after all.”

“I’ll see if I’ve got any,” I said, knowing full well I hadn’t packed any in the mad dash down here, and went into my room. I had almost offered to go get some for her, but there was something I had to do first. I shut the door and called Broun’s answering machine.

Broun’s California-fog message repeated itself, and Richard had called.

“I’m calling to tell you that I’m not angry about your getting me hauled in for questioning by the police this morning,” the Good Shrink said. “I know you felt threatened, and I know Annie feels threatened, but I want to reassure you that my only concern is my patient and her welfare.”

The psychiatrist must convince the patient he has her own best interests at heart.

“Running away isn’t the answer, Jeff. You have to bring Annie back so she can get the proper treatment. I know you choose not to believe me, but this neurotic fantasy of hers is dangerous. She’s completely dissociated herself from her dreams. She told me they’re Robert E. Lee’s dreamy. She’s on the edge of a complete psychotic break, and taking her to California is only going to precipitate it.”

Good. He thought we were in California. That meant he wasn’t going to show up here while I was gone. I didn’t want to leave Annie alone, but I had to find out about the Thorazine Richard had given her. I hung up and went back into Annie’s room. She was standing by the window, looking out at the trees that lined the river.

“I didn’t bring any aspirin. I’ll run get you some. I saw a drugstore on the way back here.”

“You don’t have to…”

“I’ve got to go anyway. I forgot to pack my razor, too, and, unlike Broun, I have no desire to grow a beard. Is there anything else I can get you?”

“No.” She managed a fair smile. She was looking flushed again.

“You’re sure you’ll be okay here? I’ll just be a few minutes.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. She tried for a better smile. A truck rumbled past the front of the inn, and Annie raised her head and gazed out over the trees as if what she had heard was the low thunder of artillery fire.

I took the car, bought the razor and some aspirin at a convenience store, and then drove downtown to the library. I’d seen it on our way back to the inn, a three-story brick building that looked like it had been a school.

The reference books were in a drab basement room lit by fluorescent lights. The only drug compendium they had was badly out-of-date, and it didn’t say anything about how to get Thorazine out of a person’s system, but it said abrupt withdrawal from a high dosage could cause nausea and dizziness.

It didn’t say what a high dosage was, and it didn’t particularly matter anyway since I didn’t have any idea how much Richard had given her, but how could he have given her any at all? The compendium described it as being just as dangerous as I thought it was.

Dozens of contraindications and warnings were listed, drowsiness and jaundice and fainting spells, and there was a note set off in double borders that read, “Sudden death, apparently due to cardiac arrest, has been reported, but there is not sufficient evidence to establish a relationship between such deaths and the administration of the drug.” I wondered if in the ten years since the book had been published they had managed to establish a relationship, and if Richard cared.

He had to have known exactly what Thorazine could do to Annie, and yet he had given it to her anyway. Why? It wasn’t used to cure mental patients. It was used to keep them under control.

I couldn’t find anything about headaches or fever in the list of side effects, although it said infections could result after the fourth week. All of the side effects and warnings seemed to be related to long-term use of the drug, and the last page reassured me. In spite of all the warnings, it was recommended in the treatment of everything from hiccups to lockjaw.

I went back to the inn and found Annie sitting on the outside steps, playing with the black cat. “My headache’s gone,” she said when I handed her the aspirin. “I feel much better.”

We ate dinner at the coffee shop where we’d had breakfast. “How are you feeling now?” I asked her when the waitress brought our check. “Have you been dizzy at all today?”

“No.”

“Nauseated?”

“No. Why?”

“You still may have some Thorazine in your system.”

“I don’t see how,” she said. “Between you and the waitress I’ve drunk enough coffee today to get anything out of my system. You don’t have to worry about the Thorazine.”

“Okay,” I said, picking up the check. “Then I won’t.”

She stood up and looked across at the inn as if she were afraid of it. “Now all we have to worry about is the dreams.”

I went back to the table to leave the tip. Her paper napkin was lying on the seat of the booth. She had shredded it into tiny pieces.

When we got back to the room, I said, “I thought I’d read galleys in here for a while.” I pulled a green chair over near the foot of the bed, and went to my room to get the galleys, taking a while to gather up Broun’s copyedited manuscript and a couple of blue pencils so Annie could get ready for bed, and whistling the whole time so she’d know I was there.

When I came back in, she was already in bed, in a long-sleeved white nightgown, sitting up against the pillows, her hands clenched together.

“Is that Broun’s book about Antietam?” Annie asked.

“More or less,” I said. “He keeps making changes. That’s why I need to get these done before he comes back from California, so he’ll quit fooling with it.”

“What do you have to do with them?”

“Read them over. Look for mistakes, typos, missing lines, punctuation, that kind of thing.” I moved the chair closer to the bed so I could prop my feet on the end of it.

“Can I help?” She said it calmly enough, but the knuckles of her clenched hands were white. “Please. I don’t want to just sit here and wait to go to sleep.”

I put the galleys down. “Look, I don’t have to work on these right now. We could watch some TV or something.”

“Really, I’d like to help with the galleys. I think reading would take my mind off the dreams. Do we take different parts or do we read it out loud to each other?”

“Annie, I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Because it’s about Antietam?”

Because it’s about Lee’s bandaged hands and a horse with its legs shot off and dead soldiers everywhere. “Yes.”

“You read those out loud, don’t you?” she said. “That’s exactly the reason I should help you. I can see if Broun made any mistakes. After all, I was there.”

There was nothing I could say to that. I handed her the galleys and a blue proofreader’s pencil. “I’ll read from the copyedited manuscript and you follow along to make sure everything’s there and they haven’t left out a line. You can check for typos, too. Just mark an X in the margin, and I’ll go back and put in the proofreader’s marks.” I handed her a pencil and put my feet up on the footboard and began to read:

“What time is it, do you reckon?” Ben said. They were crouched in a cornfield a little behind the sunken road where all the fighting was. They had fired over the heads of the men in the road until they ran out of cartridges and then had begun working their way backwards between the rows of shredded corn, taking rifles away from dead and wounded men and firing them. It seemed like they had been doing it for hours, but there was so much smoke Ben couldn’t even see the sun. He wondered if maybe they had been here all day and the sun had gone down.

“It ain’t noon yet,” Malachi said. He had his hand under a soldier whose left shoulder had been shot off and who was lying face down in the broken corn stalks. He had yellow hair. His arm was lying on the ground beside him, still holding on to his Springfield. There was a scrap of cloth pinned to his sleeve with a stick. Ben put down his rifle and unpinned the cloth. It was a handkerchief.

Malachi turned him over and rummaged in his pockets. It was Toby.

“Come on,” Malachi said. “Looks like he ran out of minnies, too before they got him.” He thrust Ben’s rifle at him and yanked him backwards. “Listen. They’re bringing the guns up,” Malachi said, and Ben could feel the rough dirt shake under his feet.

“I have to…” Ben said and started forward again.

Malachi stood up and grabbed him by the back of his shirt. “What in tarnation do you think you’re doin’? ”

He showed the handkerchief to Malachi. “I gotta pin this back on Toby, How will they know who he is? How will his kin know what happened to him? ”

“They’ll have a right good idea, but they won’t find out from that,” he said, and jerked his finger at the handkerchief Ben looked at it. It was covered with soot from the powder so badly he couldn’t even make the letters out, “Now come on! What the hell you doin now? ”

“I know him,” Ben said, scrabbling in his pockets. “I know where he’s from. Do you got some paper? ”

A bullet kit Toby’s arm and gouged out another red hole, “Come on,” Malachi shouted, “or that gal back home’s gonna be findin’ out about you.” He took hold of Ben’s coat and yanked him back through the corn till they couldn’t see Toby anymore.

After a while the shooting let up a little and Malachi said, “Me, I stick my pertinents in my boots. ”

“They can shoot you in the foot, too,” Ben said.

“They can,” Malachi said, “but most likely you won’t get kilt straight off and you kin tell ’em who you are before you die. ”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We had no business reading that. ”

She was asleep. I took the galleys back from her and put in the proofreader’s marks till I began to feel sleepy myself, and then went and looked out the window a while at the Rappahannock. Union troops had camped on the far side of the river, no more than half a mile from here, their campfires hidden by the fog along the river, waiting for the battle to start. Everyone who had written about the Civil War, generals, platoon historians, journalists, said the waiting was the worst part. Once you were in the battle, they said, it wasn’t so bad. You did what you had to do without even thinking about it, but beforehand, waiting for the fog to lift and the signal to be given, was almost unbearable.

“It’s so cold,” Annie said. She sat up and tugged at the blankets with both hands, trying to pull them free of the foot of the bed.

“I’ll get a blanket,” I said, and then realized she was still asleep. She yanked hard on the coverlet and it came free.

“Get Hill up here,” she said, wrapping the flounced muslin around her shoulders and holding it together with one hand at her neck, as if it were a cape. “I want him to see this.” Her cheeks were flushed almost red. I wondered if she would be feverish if I touched her.

She let go of the coverlet and leaned forward as if looking at something. The coverlet slipped off her shoulders. “Bring me a lantern,” she said, and fumbled with the satin edge of the blanket.

I wondered if I should try to wake her up. She was breathing fast and shallowly, and her cheeks were as red as fire. She clutched the edge of the blanket in a desperate pantomime of something.

I moved forward to take the blanket away from her before she tore it, and as I did she looked directly at me with the unseeing gaze of the sleeping, and let go of it.

“Annie?” I said softly, and she sighed and lay down. The coverlet was bunched behind her neck, and her head was at an awkward angle, and I gently eased the coverlet out from under and pulled the blanket up over her shoulders.

“I had a dream,” Annie said. She was looking at me and this time she saw me. Her cheeks were still flushed, though not as red as they had been.

“I know,’ I said. I hung the coverlet over the end of the bed and sat down beside her. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

She sat up, tucking the pillow up against the headboard and pulling the muslin coverlet up over her bent knees. “I was standing on the porch of my house at night, looking down at the lawn. It was winter, I think, because it was cold, but there wasn’t any snow, and the house was different. It was on a steep hill, and the lawn was a long way below me, at the bottom of the hill. I was looking down at the lawn, but I couldn’t see it because it was too dark, but I could hear the sound of someone crying. It was a long way off, so I couldn’t really be sure what I heard, and I kept squinting down at the lawn, trying to make out what was down there.

“I turned on the porch light, and that just made it worse. I couldn’t see anything. So I turned it off again and stood there in the dark and just then somebody crashed into me and it was a Union soldier. He had a message for me, and I knew it would be good news, but I was afraid if I turned on the porch light to read it by, I wouldn’t be able to see what was on the lawn.

“Then I saw a light in the sky, a long way off, and I thought. Oh, good, somebody on their side has turned a porch light on, but it wasn’t like that, it bobbed and danced, and I thought, Somebody is bringing me a lantern to read the message by, and then the whole sky lit up with red and green, and I could see the bodies on the lawn.”

“Were they Union soldiers?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “only they weren’t wearing blue uniforms. Some of them were wearing long underwear, red and white, and some of them were naked, and I thought how cold they must be lying there without any clothes on. Do you know where we are?”

Oh, yes, I thought, I know where we are. I hadn’t taken her anywhere near the battlefield all day, but she had been there anyway. And why had I thought the battles Lee had won would haunt him any less than the ones he had lost?

“They weren’t wearing uniforms because the Confederates came down from Marye’s Heights in the middle of the night and stole them off the dead bodies. After the battle of Fredericksburg.”

She leaned back against the pillows as if I had said something comforting. “Tell me about the battle.”

“After Antietam, Lee retreated back into Virginia. It took forever for the Union army to make up its mind to follow him, and when they did it was at the worst possible place. In December, the Union army crossed the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg and tried to march across the plain southwest of town, but the Confederate army held Marye’s Heights above the plain. They proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can’t attack a defended ridge from an open plain.”

“And after the battle the wounded soldiers lay there crying for help on the plain?”

“Yes. It froze that night.”

“And the Confederate soldiers stole their clothes,” she said softly. “What about the message?”

“A Union courier got lost in the dark the night before the battle and wandered up to a Confederate picket line. He was captured and the orders he was carrying were taken to Lee. That same night the aurora borealis shone, lighting up the whole sky with red and green. Both sides took it as a good omen.”

She sat a long time huddled under the coverlet. “What time is it?” she asked.

“Eleven forty-five.”

She lay down. “If this time is anything like the others, I shouldn’t have any more dreams tonight. I usually don’t have them after midnight.”

“Was this dream like the others, Annie?” I asked, thinking of the “storm of dreams” Dr. Stone had said followed abrupt discontinuation of a sedative.

“No,” she said. She had propped herself up on one elbow, and she was smiling. “It was easier. Because you were here to tell me what it meant.” She yawned. “Can I sleep late tomorrow?”

“Of course. The morning after a battle the soldiers always get to sleep late,” I said, which was a lie. The morning after the battle the soldiers were marched off to the next battle, and the next, till they came to the one that killed them.

I sat down in the green chair and picked up the galleys.

“You don’t have to stay up, Jeff,” she said. “I won’t have any more dreams. You can go to bed.”

“I just thought I’d finish reading the chapter we were on,” I said. “Don’t worry about me. Go back to sleep.”

She was asleep almost instantly, but I kept on reading. Ben and Malachi made it out of their cornfield and into the dubious safety of the West Wood. Hooker opened fire on another cornfield with every battery he had, and nobody made it out of there. Ben’s brother and the rest of Mansfield’s Twelfth Corps got the order to hold the East Wood and, in the smoke and confusion, began firing at their own Union troops. When Mansfield tried to stop them he was hit in the chest by Confederate fire. It was a mortal wound, but he managed to dismount and lead his wounded horse to safety before he died.