Lincoln's Dreams

“Robert E. Lee. They’re his dreams, aren’t they?” she said, and it wasn’t even a question. “I’m having Robert E. Lee’s dreams.”

I could almost smell the corn, hear it rustling in the still, hot steam of the morning, and I knew the guns were about to open up and the slaughter begin.

“Yes,” I said.

I got Annie something to eat and made her drink some coffee. I wondered if I should walk her around to try to keep her from falling asleep the way you did for a drug overdose, but she had been asleep for days. I wished Broun had a medical book from later than 1865 so I could look up Thorazine’s side effects.

The phone rang, “It’s Richard, you know,” she said, and took hold of my hands again, “He’ll come and get me.”

The answering machine clicked on. “He won’t know where we are,” I said. “The message on the answering machine says Broun’s in California. He’ll think I went with him.”

“What if he comes over?”

“We won’t be here,” I said. “I have to go to Fredericksburg to do some research for Broun. You can come with me. He won’t have any idea where we’ve gone.”

Annie was asleep before I’d finished talking, still holding on to my hands, her head turned slightly against the back of the club chair, her cheeks as pink as a child’s. I eased my hands out of hers and went and got a blanket from my room to put over her, and then, wide awake finally, I packed a bag and put it and Annie’s things into the car and then came back to the study and read galleys.

Richard called every ten minutes for the next three hours and then stopped, and I turned off all the lights in the study and went downstairs and made sure all the doors were locked. I went into the dark solarium and stood at the window, watching Richard pull up and park across the street and thinking about how the Civil War started.

Lincoln had offered Lee the command of the Union army, but he couldn’t take it, even though he was opposed to secession and hated the idea of war. “I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home,” he wrote his sister. “I know you will blame me; but you must think as kindly of me as you can, and believe that I have endeavored to do what I thought right.”

“I could have taken no other course without dishonor,” he wrote after the war, after he had killed two hundred and fifty thousand of his own men; and Lincoln, that other good man entrusted with mass murder, had said, “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us do our duty as we understand it.”

Our duty as we understand it. “I had to do it,” Richard had said, and had slept with a patient, had given her a dangerous drug without her knowledge, and I had promised I’d take care of her, so I couldn’t let him get away with it, even though he was my old roommate. “He just one day signed up,” Broun’s character Ben had said, “and I knew I had to, too.” And there we were, enemies.

At seven o’clock I went back upstairs and woke Annie up. I called the woman next door and told her I’d changed my mind about going to California with Broun and would she watch the cat, I’d put its food by the door and she could come and get it and the cat anytime she wanted.

Then I said, “And would you tell the police we’re gone? Broun doesn’t usually bother with that kind of thing, but there’s been a car parked across the street with a man sitting in it ever since I got back from taking Broun to the airport last night. I can’t tell if he’s watching the house or not, and I’m probably crazy to think it means anything. But Broun’s got a lot of first editions.”

When the police car pulled up next to Richard’s, I took Annie out through the back door to the garage, and we fled south, into the land of 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.