Just a few pages later, in a passage dated August 22nd, 1864 ("a filthy, clammy night") he returned to the subject of how the men suffer, but from a different point of view.

I find myself losing patience with the idea that this war is the Lord's work. We were given free will; and we have chosen what? To make one another suffer.

Yesterday we came upon a hill which had apparently been, for a week or a month, who knows now, a place of some strategic importance. There were dead men, or what the foul heat of this season makes of dead men, everywhere. Blue and gray, in what seemed to me equal numbers. Why had they not been given Christian burials? I can only assume because there were not enough infantrymen of either side left alive to perform that duty, nor enough compassion left in their commanders to bring in a brigade and put the dead in the ground. The battle moves on to another hill-which will for a week or a month seem of vital strategic importance-and these hundreds of men, all somebody's sons, left for flies to breed in.

I'm ashamed of myself tonight. I wish I were not a man, if this is what men are.

The more Rachel read, the more questions she had. Who was this fellow, who had poured his feelings onto the page so eloquently she felt as though she could hear him, speaking to her? How had he learned to express himself so powerfully, and what purpose had he turned that power to when the fighting was finished? A preacher? A pacifist politician? Or had he done as his wife intended, and taken the book, with all its rage and its disappointment, back home to be sealed up and never spoken of again?

Then there was another series of questions, that were nothing to do with Charles and Adina. How had Margie come by the book? And why had she wrapped it up and hidden it alongside the letters from Danny? This was scarcely scandalous material. Perhaps at the time Charles's views would have been thought radical, but almost a century and a half later, what did it matter what he'd written?

She read on. Every now and then she'd unfold one of the loose notes tucked between the pages, some of which had nothing to do with anything she'd so far read, some of which looked to be thoughts he'd jotted down when he couldn't get to his journal, some of which were letters. There were two, side by side, from Adina, both sad and curiously abrupt. The first said:

Dearest husband,

I write with the worst of news, and know of no way to sweeten it. Two days ago the Lord took our darling Nathaniel from us, in a fever which came so suddenly that he was gone before Henrietta could bring Dr. Sarris to the house.

He would be four the first Tuesday of next month, and I had promised him you would take him up on your horse as a birthday .treat when you came home. He spoke-of this at the last.

I do not think he much suffered.

The second was shorter still.

I must go to Georgia, if I can, Adina wrote. I have word from Hamilton that the plantation has been brought to ruin, and that our father is in such despair he has twice attempted to end his own life. I will bring him back to Charleston with me, and tend to him there.

The hand that had written these letters was still just recognizably the same that had penned the inscription, but it had deteriorated into a spiky scrawl. Rachel could scarcely imagine what state the woman must have been reduced to: her husband gone, one of her children dead, her family fortune lost; it was a wonder she'd kept her sanity. But then, perhaps she hadn't.

Again, Rachel moved on. In an hour or so she'd have to set out for her meeting with Danny, but she didn't want to leave the journal. It fascinated her; these tragic lives, unraveling before her, like the lives of people in a novel. Except that this book gave her none of the familiar comforts of fiction. No authorial voice to put these events in a larger context; no certainty, even, that she would be shown how their troubles were resolved.

A few pages on, however, about halfway through the journal, she chanced upon a page which would significantly change the direction of all that followed.

Tonight I do not know if I am a sane man, Charles wrote. I have had such a strange experience today, and want to write it down before 1 go to sleep so that I do not dismiss it tomorrow as something my exhausted mind invented. It was not. I'm certain, it was not. I know how the visions that arise from fatigue appear-I've seen some of them-and this was of a different order.

We are marching southeast, through North Carolina. It rains constantly, and the ground has turned to mud; the men are so tired they neither sing nor complain, barely having the energy left to put one boot in front of another. I wonder how long it will be before 1 have to join them; my horse is sick, and I believe he only continues to walk out of love of me. Poor thing! I've seen the cook, Nickelberry, eyeing him now and then, wondering if there's any way in the world he can turn such a carcass into edible fare.

So, that was what the day brought, and it was horrible enough. But then, as dusk came, and it was that hour when nothing in the world seems solid and certain, I looked down

and saw-oh God in Heaven, my pen does not want to make these words-I saw my boy, my golden-haired Nathaniel, sitting on the saddle in front of me.

thought ofAdina 's letter: of how she had promised that ride upon the horse, and my heart quickened, for today was Nathaniel's birthday.

I expected the presence to disappear after a time, but it did not. As the night drew on he stayed there, as though to comfort me. Once, in the darkness, I sensed him look round and back at me, and saw his pale face and his dark eyes there before me.

I spoke then. I said: I love you, my son.

He replied to me! As if all this weren't extraordinary enough, he replied. Papa, he said, the horse is tired, and wants me to ride her away.

It was unbearable, to hear that little voice in the darkness telling me that my horse was not long for this world.

told him: then you must take her. And I had no sooner spoken than I felt my horse shudder beneath me, and the life went out of her, and she fell to the ground. I fell with her, of course, into the mud. There were lamps brought, and some fuss made of me, but I had fallen, I think, in a kind of swoon, which had perhaps kept me from any serious harm.

Of Nathaniel, of course, there was no sign. He had gone, riding the spirit of my horse away, wherever the souls of the loyal and the loving go.

There was a small space on the page now. When Charles took up his account again, he was plainly in an even more agitated state.

I cannot sleep. I wonder if I will ever sleep again. I think of the child all the time. Why did he come to me? What was he telling me?

Nickelberry is a better man than I took him to be. Most cooks are vile men in my experience. He is not. The men

call him Nub. He saw me writing in this book earlier, and came to me and asked me if I would write a letter for him, to send back to his mother. I told him I would. Then he said he was sorry my horse had died but I should take comfort that it had nourished many men who were so sick if they had not eaten tonight they would have perished. I thanked him for the thought, but I could see that he wanted to say more, and couldn 'tfind a way to begin. So I told him simply to spit it out. And out it came. He said he'd heard that there was now no hope that we could win this war. I told him that was probably true. To which he said, plain as day: then why are we still fighting?

Such a simple question. And I listened to the rain beating on the tent, and heard the wounded sobbing somewhere near, and thought of Nathaniel, come to ride with me, and I wanted to weep, but I did not dare. Not because I was ashamed. I like this man Nickelberry; I wouldn't care that I wept in front of him. I didn't dare begin to weep because I was afraid I would never stop.