“Yes, ma’am.” Starbuck stared at her as a man dying of thirst might look on a cool, shadowed, clear pool of water. She was so unlike the earnest, plainspoken, obedient girls who worshiped at his father’s church. Instead, this congressman’s wife was what the Reverend Elial Starbuck would have called a painted lady, a Jezebel. She was, Starbuck realized, the very image and model of all Sally Truslow wanted to be, and all he himself wanted a woman to be, for his father’s biblical austerity had put a taste for just such forbidden fruit into Nathaniel Starbuck. “Yes, ma’am,” he said again, “I’m a rebel.” He tried to sound defiant.

“Secretly,” the woman confided to Starbuck in a voice that carried clean above the cacophony of shells and musketry to reach every prisoner in the yard, “I’m a Lincoln killer too.”

Her husband laughed too loudly. “Don’t be absurd, Lucy! You’re from Pennsylvania!” He gave his wife a reprimanding tap on her knee with his gloved hand. “From the great State of Pennsylvania.”

Lucy pushed his hand away. “Don’t be obnoxious, Ben. I’m a Lincoln killer through and through.” She looked at her driver’s stolid back. “Aren’t I a rebel, Joseph?”

“You are, missus, you are!” The driver laughed.

“And when we win I shall enslave you, Joseph, won’t I?”

“You will, missus, you will!” He laughed again.

Lucy Matteson looked back to Starbuck. “Are you hurt bad?”

“No, ma’am.”

“What happened?”

“My horse was shot, ma’am. It fell. I was captured.”

“Did you,” she said, beginning a question, colored slightly, then a half smile flickered on her face. “Did you kill anyone?”

Starbuck had a sudden memory of Ridley falling backward off his horse. “I don’t know, ma’am.”

“I feel like killing someone. We slept in the most uncomfortable farm kitchen at Centreville last night, and the Lord only knows where we’ll rest tonight. If we rest at all, which I doubt. The rigors of war.” She laughed, showing small, very white teeth. “Is there a hotel at Manassas Junction?”

“I don’t know of one, ma’am,” Starbuck said.

“You don’t sound like a southerner,” the congressman interrupted with a sour note in his voice.

Starbuck, unwilling to explain, merely shrugged.

“You are mysterious!” Lucy Matteson clapped her gloved hands, then held out a cardboard box filled with scraps of tissue paper. “Have one,” she said.

Starbuck saw there were pieces of crystallized fruit nestling in the tissues. “Are you sure, ma’am?”

“Go on! Help yourself.” She smiled as Starbuck took a piece of the fruit. “Will they send you back to Washington, do you think?”

“I don’t know what they plan for the prisoners, ma’am.”