He roved back and forth through the book perhaps half a dozen times, pausing for a moment to study the contents of a page, then moving on.
Only when he'd examined it this way did he return to one of the pieces of loose paper and remove it, unfolding it with such delicacy it might have been a living thing-a butterfly perhaps, whose wings he wanted to admire without doing the creature harm.
It was a letter. The hand it was written in was elegant, but the mind shaping the words more eloquent still, the thoughts so compressed it read less like prose than poetry.
My dearest brother, it said. The great griefs of the day have passed, and through the twilight, all pink and gold, I hear the tender music of sleep.
The philosophers are misled, I have come to believe, when they teach us that sleep is death's similitude. It is rather a nightward journey back into our mother's arms, where we may be blessed to hear the lovely rhythm of a slumber song.
I hear it now, even as I write these words to you. And though our mother has been dead a decade, I am returned to her, and she to me, and the world is good again.
Tomorrow, we do battle at Bentonville, and are so greatly outnumbered there is no hope of victory. So forgive me if I do not tell you 1 long to embrace you, for I entertain no such hope, at least in this world.
Pray for me, brother, for the worst is yet to come. And if your prayers are answered, perhaps also the best.
I have ever loved thee.
The letter was signed Charles.
Cadmus studied it for more than a little time; especially the penultimate paragraph. The words made him shake. Pray for me, brother, for the worst is yet to come. There was nothing in this library, in all the great, grim masterworks of the world, that had the power to distress him that these words possessed. He'd not known the letter-writer personally, of course-the battle of Bentonville had been fought in 1865-but he felt a powerful empathy with him nonetheless. When he read the page it was as though he was sitting beside the man as he sat in his tent before that calamitous battle, listening to the rain beating on the canvas, and the forlorn songs of the infantrymen as they huddled about their smoky fires, knowing that the following day a vastly superior force would be upon them.
Earlier in his life, when he'd first become familiar with the journal, and particularly with this letter, Cadmus had made it his business to discover as best he could the circumstances in which it had been written. What he discovered was this: that in March of 1865 the depleted forces of the Rebel States, led by Generals Johnston and Bragg, had been driven across North Carolina, and at a place called Bentonville, exhausted, hungry and despairing, they had dug in to face the might of the North. Sherman had the scent of victory; he knew his opponents would not last much longer. The previous November, he had overseen the burning of Atlanta, and Charleston-brave, besieged Charleston-would very soon fall beneath his assault. There was no hope of victory for the South, and surely every man who made up the forces at Bentonville knew it.
The battle would last three days; and by the standards of that war there was not a great loss of life. A thousand and some soldiers of the Union perished, two thousand and some Confederates. But such numbers mean nothing to a soldier in battle, for he need only die one death.
Cadmus had often thought about going to visit the battleground, which had been left, he'd been told, relatively untouched by time. The Harper house, a modest domicile that stood close by the field, and had been turned into a makeshift surgery during the conflict, still stood; the trenches where the Confederate soldiers had waited for the army of the North could still be lain in. With a little research he could probably have discovered where the officers' tents had been pitched; and sat himself down dose to the place where the letter he held in his hand had been penned.
Why had he never gone? Had he simply been afraid that the threads binding his destiny to that of the melancholy Captain Charles Holt would have been strengthened by such a visit? If so, then he'd denied himself in vain: those threads were getting stronger by the moment. He could feel them wrapped around him now-tightening, tightening-as if to draw his fate and that of the captain into some final embrace. He might not have been so troubled had it only been his life which was affected, but of course that wasn't the case. Loretta's damned astrologer knew more than he realized, with his insinuations of Geary family secrets and predictions of apocalypse. The intervention of almost a hundred and forty years could not provide asylum from what was in the wind; its message carried like a contagion from that distant battlefield.
Pray for me, brother, the captain had written, for the worst is yet to come.
No doubt those words had been true enough when they were written, Cadmus thought, but the passage of time had made them truer still. Crime had mounted upon crime over the generations, sin mounted on sin, and God help them all-every Geary, and child of a Geary, and wife and mistress and servant of a Geary-it was time for the sinners to come to judgment.
The conversation between Rachel and Mitch was surprisingly civilized. There were no raised voices; no tears on either side; no accusations. They simply exchanged disappointments in hushed voices, and agreed, after an hour or so, that they were failing to give one another joy, and that it would be best to part. Their only difference of opinion lay in this: Rachel had come to believe that there was no chance of reviving the marriage, and it would be best to start divorce proceedings immediately, while Mitch begged that they give one another a grace period of a few weeks to turn the decision over and be certain they were doing the right thing. After a little discussion, she said she'd go along with this. What was a few weeks? In the meantime they agreed to keep any discussion of the matter to a very small circle, and not consult lawyers. The moment a lawyer was brought into the picture, Mitch argued, any hope of reconciliation would be at an end. As to living arrangements, they would keep it very simple. Rachel would stay in the Central Park apartment; Mitch would either go back to the mansion or take a suite at a hotel.
They parted with a tentative embrace, like two people made of glass.
The following day, Rachel got a call from Margie. How about lunch, she said; somewhere grotesquely expensive, where they could linger so long over dessert that they could go straight on to cocktails?
"Just as long as we don't talk about Mitch," Rachel said.
"Oh no," Margie said, with a faint air of mystery in her voice, "I've got something much more interesting than him to talk about."
The restaurant Margie had chosen had been open only a few months, but it had already won a spate of four-star reviews, so it was packed, with a line of people all vainly hoping they'd get themselves a table. Inevitably, Margie knew the maitre d' (in a much earlier incarnation, she later explained, he'd been a barman at a little dive she'd frequented in Soho). He treated them both royally, taking them to a table which offered a full view of the room.
"Plenty of people to gossip about," Margie said, surveying the faces before them. Rachel knew a few of them by sight; a couple by name.
"Something for you to drink?" the waiter wanted to know.