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.”