Lincoln's Dreams

I left Annie in the room and went down and signed us in as Mr. and Mrs. Jeff Davis. The clerk grinned when he read it. I debated telling him that an angry husband might show up and giving him twenty dollars to tell the husband we weren’t there. Instead, I grinned back and said, “No, no relation. Everybody asks that,” and went out to move the car around to the little parking lot by the stairs and get the bags.

When I got back up to the suite, I put my bag in the bedroom with the view of the big parking lot and Annie’s in the other.

“You can relax,” I told her. “Richard will have ho way of knowing we’re here. The only person who knew I was going to Fredericksburg is Broun, and he’s in California. You can go ahead and unpack and then we’ll go get some breakfast.”

I went into the other bedroom, shut the door, and called Broun’s answering machine to make sure Broun hadn’t left the name of his hotel or the number on the machine. “I’m in sunny California doing research on my new book,” Broun’s voice said. “If you’ll leave your name and number and any messages, I’ll be picking my messages up remotely, and I’ll try to return your call as soon as possible.”

Good. He hadn’t left a number, and he hadn’t said anything about his research assistant picking up his calls. He had meant it when he said he wanted me to take some time off. I tried to think of anybody else he might have given his California number to. His agent probably, but she wouldn’t give out information to a stranger, even if he claimed to be an old roommate of Jeff’s. McLaws and Herndon maybe, though I doubted if he’d told them he was running off to California when he was supposed to be working on the galleys.

I punched in the remote code that would play me any messages left on the machine. There was a click and then a short whirring sound while the machine rewound, another click, and Broun said, “Jeff, I’m in California, and I must have brought the damned fog with me. I’m going to see the prophetic dreams man tomorrow. Call me if you run into any trouble with the galleys. And get some rest. I’m worried about you.”

I unpacked the bag I’d thrown together the night before and opened the box I had brought the galleys in. There were books lying on top. I didn’t remember packing any books. I picked the top one up. It was volume two of Freeman. I sat down on the bed and pulled out the other three hefty volumes, one after the other.

A soldier running from battle would sometimes find miles later that he was still clutching his rifle, or his hat, or a half-eaten square of hardtack, and had no more memory of doing it than he did of running away. And here we were fifty miles from the battle with a suite at the Fredericksburg Inn and Freeman’s R. E. Lee and who knows what in Annie’s duffel bag, two Johnny Rebs on the run. But sooner or later that soldier would stop running and decide what to do next, and I had no idea. I hadn’t thought any farther than getting Annie safely away from Richard.

I had done that, and we could stay here for at least a week and maybe longer if Broun stayed in California, but sooner or later we were going to have to go back to D.C., and sooner or later we were going to have to talk about the dreams.

But not yet. There was no telling how much Thorazine Annie still had in her system or how long it would take to work its way out. Dr. Stone had said taking somebody off a sedative abruptly might cause a “storm of dreams.” I wasn’t going to insist on figuring out what was causing Robert E. Lee’s dreams if she was having nightmares of her own. What she needed right now was breakfast and some rest and a vacation from the whole crazy mess.

There was a slick colored brochure lying on the oak chiffonier by the bed. I picked it up. Maybe we could take a walk around historic Fredericksburg, see some of the sights. “America’s Battlefield,” the brochure said. “Visit the Historic Civil War Battlefields. Where 100,000 fell! Stand in the shoes of the generals. Self-guided tour.”

I thought of Annie standing halfway up the hill at Arlington, looking down at the snowy grass. Fredericksburg’s battlefield had been made into a national cemetery, too, with twelve thousand unknown soldiers buried in it.

Maybe I shouldn’t have brought her here, I thought. She hadn’t dreamed about Fredericksburg yet, and I didn’t want her to. The battle had been a complete slaughter, with the Union soldiers trying to cross a flat plain to the defended ridge called Marye’s Heights. But Lee won, I thought. Maybe he doesn’t dream about the battles he won.

The other attractions were minor, to say the least: James Monroe’s law office, Mary Washington’s cottage, and Kenmore, a southern plantation where George Washington’s sister Betty Fielding Lewis lived, but when I checked the map, they weren’t anywhere near the battlefield, which meant we could go sightseeing and read galleys and do what Broun had sent me to do, which was interview a doctor about his acromegaly.