I told him truthfully: "Once I would have said we should fight to the death to prove the righteousness of our cause. But now I think nothing is pure in this world, nor ever was, and we will die uselessly, as we have lived."

Did I say that he was a little drunk? I think he was. But he seemed quickly sobered by this, and said he would visit me again tomorrow, so that I could write the letter to his mother. Then he left me to sleep.

But I cannot. I think of what he said, and what I replied, and I wonder if tomorrow I should not forsake my uniform, and the cause I was ready to die for, and act as a man not as a soldier; and go my own way.

I can scarcely believe I wrote those words. But I believe that's why Nathaniel came to take the horse: it was his way of shaking me out of my stupor; of stopping me marching to my death. What would I have died for? For nothing. All of this for nothing.

Rachel looked at the clock. It was time to go, but she didn't want to stop reading, so she slipped the letters and the photographs back into one envelope, and the book back into the other, and took them both with her. As so often happened in this city the weather had changed suddenly: a warm wind had blown the rain clouds upstate, and for once the streets smelled sweet. As the cab bounced and rattled its way toward Soho she took out the journal again, and began to read.

The battle of Bentonville began on Monday, the twenty-first day of March, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-five. It was not, by the standards of the war between the states, a great, decisive or even particularly bloody battle: but it has this distinction: it is the last hurrah of the Southern Confederacy. Thirty-six days later General Joseph E. Johnston would meet William T. Sherman at the Bennett farmhouse and surrender his men. The war would be over.

Captain Charles Rainwill Holt did not desert on the night before the battle, as he had intended to; he thought better of it. The weather, which had been inclement during the march, became fouler still, and he judged his chances of getting away in the darkness without some harm or other coming to him less than good.

On the following day the battle began, and from the beginning it was a mess. The terrain was in places forested with pine, and in others swamp and briar. The men on both sides were exhausted, and there was scarcely an encounter through that first day and night that did not end chaotically. Men lost in smoke and rain and darkness firing back upon their own comrades. Charges led upon lines that did not exist. Earthworks abandoned before they were half dug. The wounded left in the woods (which had been set alight by cannon fire despite the rain) and burned alive within earshot of their fellows.

There was worse to come, and the captain knew it, but as the hours passed that stupor from which his son had come to stir him fell upon him again. More than once he saw an opportunity, and could not bring himself to take it. It was not fear of a stray bullet that kept him from moving. There was something leaden in him, like a weight that war had poured into his bowels, and it kept him from his escape.

It was Nickelberry the cook who finally persuaded him to leave. Not with words, but with his own departure.

It was just after dusk on the second day, and Charles had gone out from the encampment a little way, to try and put his thoughts in order. Behind him the men gathered round their cautious fires, trying by whatever means they could to keep their spirits up. Somebody was plucking a banjo; one or two exhausted voices were raised to sing along. The sound came strangely between the trees, like the sound of phantoms. Charles tried to bring to mind the garden in Charleston where he'd proposed to Adina; he'd calmed his troubled spirits many times thinking of that spot. Of the fragrance of its air; of the nightbirds that made such melody in the trees. But tonight he could not remember the perfume of that place, or its music. It was as if that Eden had never existed.

As he stared off into the darkness, lost in these melancholy thoughts, he saw a figure moving between the trees not ten yards from him. He was about to challenge the man, when he realized who it was.

"Nickelberry…?" he whispered.

The figure froze, so still the captain could barely distinguish him from the trees amongst which he stood.

"Is that you, Nickelberry?"

There was no reply, but he was certain that it was indeed the cook, so he began to walk in the man's direction. "Nickelberry? It's Captain Holt."

Nickelberry responded by moving off again, away from the camp.

"Where are you going?" the captain demanded, picking up his pace to catch up with the cook. The briars slowed the advance of both men, but Nickelberry in particular. He had walked into a very thorny patch, and flailed at them, cursing in his frustration.

The captain was almost upon him now.

"Don't get any closer!" Nickelberry said. "I don't want to hurt you none, but I ain't staying and you ain't gonna make me stay. No sir."

"It's all right, Nub. Calm down."

"I'm done with this damn war."

"Keep your voice down, will you? They'll hear us."

"You ain't gonna try and turn me in?"

"No I'm not."

"If you try-" The captain saw one of Nub's meat carving knives, pale silver, between them. "I'll kill you before they take me."

"I'm sure you would."

"I don't care no more. You hear me? I'd prefer to take my chances out there than stay and be killed."

The captain studied the man before him. He could barely see Nub's expression in the darkness, but he could bring the man's broad, expressive face into his mind's eye readily enough. There was cunning in that face; and tenacity. He wouldn't make a bad companion, Charles thought, if a man had to be living by his wits out there.

"You want to go on your own?" Holt said.

"Huh?"

"Or we could go together."

"Together?"

"Why not?"

"A captain and a cook?"

"Makes no difference what we were back there. Once we run we're both deserters."

"You're not trying to trick me?"

"No. I'm going. If you want to come with me, then come. If you don't-"

"I'm coming," Nickelberry said.

"Then put away the knife." Holt could feel Nickelberry's gaze on him, still doubtful. "Put it away. Nub." There was a further moment of vacillation; then Nickelberry slid the knife back into his belt. "Good," Charles said. "Now… did you know you were headed toward enemy lines?"

"I thought they were east of here."

"No. They're right there," Holt said, pointing off between the trees. "If you look carefully, you can see their fires."

Nickelberry looked. The fires were indeed visible; flickers of yellow in the enveloping night.

"Lord, look at that. I would have walked straight into their arms." Any lingering reservations he might have had about the captain's allegiances were plainly allayed. "So which way we goin'?" he said.

"The way I've reckoned it," the Captain said, "our best hope is to head south toward the Goldsboro Road, and then make our way from there. I want to head home to Charleston."

"Then I'll come with you," Nickelberry said. "I ain't got no better place to go."

None of what I've just recounted found its way into the pages of Holt's journal. He did not write in it again for almost two weeks, by which time the battle of Bentonville was long since over.

This is what Rachel read, as the cab carried her down Madison Avenue:

We came into Charleston last night. I can barely recognize the city, such is the violence that has been done to it by the

Yankees. Nickelberry kept asking me questions as we went, but I had not the life in me to answer. When I think of how this noble city stood before the war, and the way it is laid waste now, such despair rises in me, for truly all that was good seems to me to have passed away. This city, which was so fine, is now a kind of hell: blackened by fire and haunted by the dead. Entire streets I knew have disappeared. People wander the rubble, their faces blank, their hands bloody after turning over brick upon brick upon brick, looking for something by which to remember the life they had.