John finds a shawl and lays it over her. He sits on the end of the sofa, swinging her feet into his lap. “Poor Asia,” he says. “You’ve been invaded.” And then, as she closes her eyes, he tells her what he’s been doing with himself.

—

The night of November 19th, he was out walking with other members of the company. They were about to perform The Last of the Mohicans, the curtain only an hour away. But the excitement on the street was intoxicating. One minute he was going to the theater to paint his face and shout his lines. The next, he’d spun on his heel and walked in the opposite direction. His companions called to him, but he waved them away. “I’m off, boys,” he told them.

He hurried to the depot, where a special troop train had been commandeered for the civilian soldiers and was just about to depart. They’d had to wait for the governor. Without that, he’d have been too late. But he managed, with only minutes to spare, to talk his way onto the train. Several other men were trying to do the same. He was the only man to get through.

“I know people,” he says to Asia vaguely, and then shows her a calling card with the signature of O. Jennings Wise, the governor’s son, on the back. He retrieves the card from Asia, returns it to his breast pocket. He’d spent the next eighteen days as a soldier in the Richmond Grays, he says.

Asia has a fleeting memory of sitting on his bed at Tudor Hall, listening to him talk about the insurrection at St. Timothy’s. His excitement is just as boyish as then. “The best time in my life,” is what she remembers him saying. And now he’s had a better.

—

The Grays go first to Washington, where they have enough time between trains to march on the city in a spirited display. John’s borrowed some bits of uniform, a musket, and he marches directly behind the governor. The man next to him carries the Grays’ flag with the state motto in curling letters: Sic semper tyrannis. They circle the White House three times, expecting every minute that President Buchanan will come out to salute them. This doesn’t happen. He appears to be asleep.

Wise gives a speech. When he’s president, he says, he will never sleep through an invading army. It’s the least, really, one can ask of a president, that he be awake when troops descend on the Capitol.