With all the war dead, mediums are enjoying a bull market. John comes to visit and the brothers spend several evenings together with this mystic or that. They return to the house full of the strange and wondrous things they’ve experienced. Edwin’s faith seems to be growing. “It’s making a Christian of me,” he tells Mother and Rosalie. “Not that I wasn’t before. But now I really am.” For a brief period after each session, Edwin seems almost merry. He visits the famous Fox sisters, where ghosts touch his legs beneath the table, rock his chair nearly out from under him.

He hosts his own séances under the crystal chandelier in the long dining room of the Putnam house with no medium in attendance. Rosalie reassures herself that if there are ghosts about, they are Putnam ghosts. There’s no reason to think they’ll want to talk to her and, as it turns out, they don’t.

One evening, from her dark corner, Rosalie overhears Edwin’s friend Adam Badeau, who is visiting on a temporary leave. “Touching Ned’s fingers,” he says, “I received a strong nervous influence like nothing I’ve felt before. My right hand and arm began shaking more rapidly than any human being can shake, so rapidly that you couldn’t see my hand. My hand was then slammed repeatedly down on the table until I’d hurt myself. Afterwards, it assumed the position of a hand writing. A pen was put into it and marks were scratched onto the paper, but they amounted to nothing. This went on for more than an hour.”

The experiment was repeated the next night with the same results. “It was very strange,” Adam says. “I suppose it was just a sort of nervousness on my part.”

No. It had all been Edwin, Rosalie thinks. Edwin’s gift is to make people believe.

—

John is following the war news hungrily. Off in Pennsylvania, triumphant after his victory at Chancellorsville, General Lee attempts his second invasion of the North. He brings 71,000 men across the Potomac into Maryland and then to southern Pennsylvania. On July 1st, they meet the Union forces in the town of Gettysburg. Three days later, the Union casualties number 23,000, 28,000 Confederate. Lee has lost more than a third of his army. There is a day of thundering rain in which Lee is allowed to retreat. John goes grim and glum.

Edwin has returned to hardly noticing the war, so preoccupied with his own misery and his explorations of the world beyond the veil. Everything but his own grief seems remote again and, honestly, unimportant. As Rosalie comes upon him one morning in the breakfast room, sun streaming merrily through the windows, Edwin says, “I never knew how much I loved her,” and then flees upstairs without another word.

When Rosalie mentions Gettysburg to him, he tells her that the war is a mere matter of bodies. His interest is in souls.