“I’m not worried about the galleys,” he said.
After I hung up I went and woke Annie up. We drove down to Bowling Green for dinner. Annie didn’t show any of the tension I’d seen the day before, and the color in her cheeks was back to normal. Even after we got back to the inn and were reading galleys up in her room, me in the green chair and she sitting cross-legged on the bed, she was relaxed and interested.
“Why don’t you go ahead and go to bed, Jeff?” she said at a little after eleven. “You didn’t get much sleep last night. I don’t think I’ll have a dream.”
“Okay,” I said. “Call me if you need me.”
I left the door of the room open and the light beside the bed on. I took off my shoes and settled down with the book I’d bought in Bowling Green. It was a pop history moment-by-moment account of the day Lincoln died, but it had a long description of the Cabinet meeting.
Lincoln had told his boat dream before the meeting started, while they were still waiting for Stanton. Grant said he was worried about Sherman, and Lincoln said not to worry, that he had had a sign, and told them his dream. He said he had had the same dream before every victory in the war and named Antietam and Gettysburg and Stone River.
Grant, who didn’t believe in dreams, said Stone River wasn’t his idea of a victory and a few more victories like that would have lost the war, and Lincoln said, “It must relate to Sherman. I know of no other important event which is likely just now to occur.”
I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to twelve. I turned off the light. What if Grant had believed in dreams? Would he have been able to figure out where the danger lay in time to bring up reinforcements, to set up a line of defenses that would have stopped John Wilkes Booth?
He didn’t believe in dreams. He knew a cock-and-bull story when he heard one, even when Lincoln was the one telling it. But I wondered if, afterwards, he ever dreamed that Cabinet meeting?
“My house is on fire,” Annie said.
I turned on the light. She was standing in the door in her white nightgown, holding the galleys. She came over to the bed and handed them to me. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she said, and the tears streamed down her unseeing face. “Isn’t he?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lee and Traveller were well matched. If Lee demanded more stamina and spirit than the average horse could give, Traveller had too much stamina and spirit for the average rider. He chafed at being reined in, had to be exercised strenuously, and had an uncomfortable, high trot. When Rob Lee had to ride him down to Fredericksburg for his father in 1862, he complained, “I think I am safe in saying that I could have walked the distance with much less discomfort and fatigue.”
It took me almost an hour to get her back to bed and sleeping more or less peacefully. I had tried to wake her up, even though I had read someplace that you weren’t supposed to wake sleepwalkers—or maybe that was one of Richard’s theories—but I couldn’t.
“Annie!” I said, and took hold of her hands. They were hot. “Wake up, Annie!”
“Is he dead?” she said, the tears running down her face and under her chin.
Is he dead? Who? General Cobb? He had died at Fredericksburg, but I wasn’t convinced we were still there. We could be anywhere. Armistead and Garnett had died at Gettysburg, A. P. Hill at Petersburg two weeks before the surrender. It could even be Lincoln.
“Who, Annie?”
Her nose was running from all the tears, but she didn’t make any effort to wipe it. I led her gently by the hand into the bathroom and got a Kleenex. “Tell me what’s happening,” I said gently and wiped her reddened nose. “Can you tell me, Annie?”
“My house is on fire.”
I dabbed clumsily at her cheeks with the wadded-up Kleenex. “What does the house look like, Annie?” I asked, and wiped her nose again.
She stared at our reflections in the mirror. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
I walked her back to her own bed and covered her up. She had stopped crying, but her lashes were matted with tears. The Kleenex was a sodden wad, but I wiped her nose again with it and tucked her in.
I stood beside the bed for a while, thinking she would wake up, but she didn’t. I reached for Freeman on the floor next to the green chair and tried to find a burning house. During the battle of Antietam, Longstreet had helped some women and children get their belongings out of a burning house in sharpsburg, but Lee hadn’t been there. In the weeks before the battle of Fredericksburg, most of the town had been burned down, but no one had been killed except for seventeen thousand soldiers.
“I had another dream,” Annie said, without any trace of tears in her voice. She sat up in the bed. “My house was on fire.” She shook her head as if to contradict what she was saying. “It was the same house as in the other dreams, but it wasn’t my house, and it wasn’t Arlington.”
“Whose house was it?”
“I don’t know. We were standing under the apple tree watching it burn, and a rider handed me a message. I couldn’t open it because I was wearing gloves, so I handed it to somebody who was standing beside me. It was the clerk here at the inn. He opened the message with one hand. There was something wrong with his other arm. When he opened the message, I saw it was a box of candles.”
I shut Freeman. I knew whose house was on fire now. “One of Lee’s aides risked his life to bring Lee a box of candles because he was having trouble reading the dispatches by the light of the campfire,” I said. “It’s the Chancellor house that’s on fire. We’re at Chancellorsville.”
“It isn’t a box of candles, though,” Annie said, looking at me the way she had looked at her own reflection in the mirror. “It’s a message.”
“The message is about Stonewall Jackson,” I said. “Lee’s right-hand man. He was injured at the battle of Chancellorsville. He had his arm amputated.”
“I sent a message back to Jackson, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” I said. I knew what was in that message, too. “Give Jackson my affectionate regards,” Lee had written. “Tell him to make haste and get well and come back to me as soon as he can. He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right.”
Annie leaned back against the pillows, rubbing her wrist as if it hurt. “But he’s not going to get well, is he? He’s going to die.”
“Yes,” I said.
She lay down immediately, docilely, as if she were a child who had promised to go to sleep after a bedtime story, and I went back into my room and got a blanket and brought it into Annie’s room so I could spend the night in the green chair.
Jackson’s doctors had predicted a speedy recovery, but he developed pneumonia and died nine days later. Toward the end he was delirious much of the time. “Order A. P. Hill to prepare for action!” Jackson had said once. Lee had called out for Hill, too, when he lay dying of a heart attack seven years later. “Tell Hill he must come up!” he had said clearly. I wondered if they had dreamed of the same battle and which one it was, and if Annie was doomed to dream it, too.
At five I gave up trying to sleep and went into my room and read galleys, leaving the door open in case Annie woke up again. Ben and Malachi spent the rest of the morning and most of a chapter trying to find their regiment, and Robert E. Lee found his son Rob. He was standing on a little knoll by the road when Rob’s artillery unit came straggling past with the only gun they had left. They were filthy and exhausted, and Rob stopped in front of his father and said, “General, are you going to send us in again?”
Robert E. Lee had his arm in a sling. A courier was holding Traveller because Lee’s hands were too swollen for him to hang on to the reins, and all around them cornfields and woods were on fire, and Antietam Creek ran a rusty red.
“Yes, my son,” Lee said. “You all must do what you can to help drive these people back.” He told them to
