A steady stream of officers moved in and out of the room during Ramseur’s final hours. Some offered prayers. Some sat silently. All came to honor a friend. General Custer kept a vigil throughout the night.
As dawn broke over the valley and the death rattle continued, Ramseur’s attempts to keep moving air into his chest weakened. Charlotte rose to stretch her legs, setting aside the cold compress she had used to wipe Ramseur’s forehead. Custer picked it up and dabbed at his friend’s face.
The general opened his eyes and spoke in a weak voice. “I have a new baby and I don’t even know whether I have a son or a daughter.”
A moment of truth arrived for Charlotte. She had failed to save him, but she would not fail to give him the one piece of information she alone had the power to give.
She leaned in close and said in a low voice, “You have a daughter. Her name is Mary.”
The general’s mouth lifted slightly on the right side in an effort to smile. “Send a lock of my hair to my wife, Ellen, and bear this message: ‘I die a Christian and hope to meet her in Heaven.’”
And with those words, the general closed his eyes and quietly slipped away.
Charlotte met Custer’s steel blue eyes, now battle-weary and red-rimmed from a night of sleepless grief. “Thank you, Doctor Mallory. I will mention the excellent care the general received in my letter to Ellen.”
Charlotte’s chest hitched as panic swept through it. Her ancestor’s name could not appear in the historical record because of something she did. “Please don’t single me out, sir.” She struggled to think clearly. “The general received excellent care from your surgeon as well.”
He stood with his hat in his hands, nodded, and quit the room.
Charlotte went over to the window for a gulp of fresh air, but was almost suffocated by the smell of decaying flesh. The dead and dying of the two armies were commingled. Many of the wounded had crawled to the stream for a drink of cool water. Horses dragged damaged wagons behind them. Abandoned ambulances were still full of wounded soldiers. Cries of agony could be heard from every direction. Over eight thousand men had been killed, wounded, or captured, and many of the dead were in the plantation’s front yard, stacked in gruesome piles awaiting burial. They would all be buried in shallow graves until they could be moved to their final resting places.
She turned away from the window. All these years she had been so naïve. She’d studied history and reenacted battles and believed she understood the war. But she hadn’t, not really. War was gut-wrenching, heartrending, and, above all, deadly. And she had come close to being a casualty. Was this the point of this trip back in time? To see the war as it really was? If so, she’d seen enough, and she was ready to go home. Her fingers grazed the bump of the brooch again. As soon as she had privacy, she would use the tweezers she had pilfered from the medical supplies and find out if the brooch would take her back to her century.
Boots clomped on the floor behind her. She turned to see one of the junior officers who had been in and out of the room during the night.
“General Sheridan wants to see you. If you’ll come with me.”
She patted her beard and wig, hoping she continued to look the part of Major Carlton Mallory. As tired as she was, appearances still meant everything. Even more important, in this case her appearance might mean the difference between survival and death.
She was escorted to the front room Sheridan was using as his office. “Come in, Major. Take a seat.”
She sat across the desk from a dark-eyed man with closely cropped hair. A man she knew to be a ruthless and highly decorated warrior. He picked up a quill pen and dipped it into an inkwell. “Name and regiment?”
His steely tone triggered the bad kind of shivers along her spine. She twitched and straightened her back. She would not let him intimidate her. Who was she kidding? She was stuck in the Civil War, for Pete’s sake, and not at all sure how, or if, she could return home. Was she intimidated? Yes, by God, she was.
“Major”—she stopped to clear her throat and lower her voice—“Major Carlton Jackson Mallory, Second Corps Army of Northern Virginia.”
The pen squeaked across the paper. “Where’d you receive your medical training?”
“New York Medical College.”
“Do you own any slaves?”
“Of course not.” She gulped, knowing she needed to temper her responses. “Our slaves have been granted their freedom.”
“Yet you fight for the rebel cause.”
“I’m a doctor, not a soldier.”
“The Federals need good doctors, too.”
Her mouth had gone dry as paper. She gnawed the inside of her cheek and tried to summon a little saliva. “Virginia is my family home and has been for over two hundred years.”
“Where in Virginia?”
Fortunately, she knew her ancestor served the Second Corps until the end of the war, which meant he had not been captured in Strasburg. She would be safe giving him the answer to his question.
“Mallory Plantation is about ten miles north of Richmond.”
“What would you do to save your home from being burned to ground?” Sheridan glared intently.
For one shocking moment, the steady hand of time stilled. Had her presence in the past suddenly put her ancestors at risk? She took a long, steadying breath, then another, suppressing a roar of fear.
“Whatever I had to do.”
She knew in her gut she had committed herself to a task she wasn’t going to like. There’d be no return trip home in the near future.
He put down his pen, leaned back in his chair, and pursed his lips thoughtfully. Charlotte squirmed under the
