“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 take the best horses and sent them back into battle.

I had left Freeman on Annie’s bed. I went in to get it. She was asleep on her stomach, one hand under her cheek, the other flung out across the book. I eased the book gently out from under her, and then went on sitting there, as if my presence could somehow protect her from the dreams.

She had made me promise to help her have the dreams. Well, I was helping, all right. She’d already had more dreams since she met me than she had ever had with Richard, drugs or no drugs, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do for her while she was having them. I couldn’t even wake her up.

Sitting here wasn’t helping her either. I needed to be awake and alert when she had the next dream, and I hadn’t had any real sleep since we got to Fredericksburg. But I didn’t want to get up and go in to bed. I don’t know what I wanted. Maybe for Annie to wake up, to open her blue-gray eyes and look at me. Not at smoke and horses and fallen boys, but at me. To look at me and smile and say sleepily, “You don’t have to stay here with me,” so I could say, “I want to.” And what did I want her to say to that? “I’m glad you’re here. I never have the dreams when you’re here”?

Annie murmured something and turned her face ever so slightly against the pillow. There weren’t any traces of tears left, though her nose was still red. Her hair had stuck to her cheek when the tears dried, and I brushed it back off her face. Her cheek felt warm to the touch. I laid my hand against it.

She frowned as if she were disturbed. I took my hand away. Her face softened at once. She sighed and turned onto her side, pulling her knees up, drawing into herself. Her breathing steadied.

I stood up, carefully, so as not to disturb her, and took Freeman into the other room and looked up Lee’s insomnia. He had had trouble sleeping throughout the war. “I fear I shall not sleep for thinking of the poor men,” he had written to his wife a week after Antietam. If he was ever able to get to sleep before midnight, his aides were under strict orders not to wake him up unless it was absolutely necessary. He had told them that to him one hour’s sleep before midnight was worth two hours’ after that time.

I fell asleep with the volume of Freeman still open on my chest and slept till after noon, and even though my sleep hadn’t come before midnight, it was still worth its weight in gold. I felt better than I had since before the trip to West Virginia, and able to think clearly for the first time about this whole mess. I had promised I would help Annie have the dreams. There was only one way to do that, and that was to figure out what was causing them.

I checked on Annie, who was still asleep. I shaved and got dressed, took a sheet of Fredericksburg Inn stationery out of the chiffonier, and started making a list of the dreams. Arlington first, and then Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville. The Lees had evacuated Arlington in May of 1861. I wasn’t sure of the date of the letter from Markie Williams that told what had happened to Tom Tita the cat, but it was sometime in 1861. Antietam was September 1862, Fredericksburg December of the same year, and Chancellorsville May of 1863. That meant the dreams were in chronological order, though they were telescoped in some way. Annie had dreamed almost a year of the war in one week, though she had dreamed about Arlington for over a year, with it only gradually becoming clearer. And there were important battles during that period of time that Annie hadn’t dreamed about at all.

I started another list on a second sheet of stationery, writing the dates of the dreams in one column and the drugs she had been taking when she had the dreams in a second column. The drugs had some connection with the dreams, though I didn’t know what it was. They had not suppressed REM sleep or kept her from dreaming at all, even though they were supposed to.

It was when Annie was on the Elavil that her dreams had suddenly become clearer, and the phenobarbital her family doctor had had her on apparently hadn’t worked at all to stop the Arlington dream. Thorazine had stopped the dreams, but she hadn’t had the storm of dreams Dr. Stone had predicted when she stopped taking it, and none of the dreams seemed to have any particular correlation with the drugs she was or wasn’t taking, so maybe there wasn’t a connection after all, and the timing of the dreams had more to do with when Lee managed to get a few hours of sleep than with the tranquilizers.

Annie was awake. I could hear her moving around, I folded up the lists and put them into my jeans pocket. I knocked on the half-open door and she opened it the rest of the way immediately.