He’s misread the room. At a table in the darkest corner, a plan is immediately hatched to kill him, a plan overheard one table over. Word reaches Canning, who contrives, with the help of Samuel Knapp Chester, a supporting actor in the company, to smuggle John out of town. “I owe Sam my life,” John tells Asia. Asia tries to remember which one Sam is. She thinks he’s a large, balding man whose mustache ends in sharp points. She could be wrong.

John’s made this into quite an exciting story, all politics and devilry and spy-craft. But there’s something hectic in his manner when he tells it, a high-pitched emotion she can’t identify. He seems feverish. She wonders if he’s been this way since he was shot or maybe since he learned some of his beloved Southerners want him dead. She thinks that something has happened and she thinks he hasn’t told her what. She counts on being his confidante. This is her first inkling of a whole world of things he doesn’t tell her.

She’d be even more concerned if she knew that he’s begun to drink. For years, with the examples of Father and Edwin before him, John’s been careful around liquor. That’s all changed. Now John’s the loudest drunk in the bar. When he’d railed against secession, he’d been disgustingly squiffed.

He’s not drunk this evening, but whatever turn in his spirit overrode those years of caution is there when he’s sober as well. It unsettles Asia just enough that she lets him go to Mother’s without sharing her own awful news. Asia is pregnant again.

“I dread it with such terror,” Asia writes Jean. There’s been no time to forget the horrors of Dolly’s birth and, as she’s never recovered fully, this one is bound to be worse. She blames the nurse who pressured her to stop breastfeeding during her fever, despite the pain in doing so. No one explained to her that once her milk dried up, she’d be ripe for pregnancy again. It was a cruelty to both mother and child and not one she’ll soon forgive.

Along with the familiar nausea and exhaustion, depression has wound tightly around Asia like a web she can’t escape. She snaps at Sleeper and Becky and even at Dolly. She cries herself to sleep. She’d believed that John’s visit would raise her spirits, but apparently nothing will do that.

BOOK FIVE

Doesn’t it strike you as queer that I, who couldn’t cut the head off a chicken and who was sick at the sight of blood, should be cast into the middle of a great war, with blood flowing all about me?

—Abraham Lincoln

The Election of Abraham Lincoln