James stood and tried to brush the dead leaves and stagnant water from his uniform. “My name,” he said in his most officious manner, then stopped. What would happen to Elial Starbuck’s son in southern hands? Would they lynch him? Would they do the terrible things his father said all southerners did to Negroes and emancipators?

“Don’t care what your name is, Yankee, only what’s in your pockets. Me, Jake and Abe are kind of poor right now. All we captured so far is two boys from Pennsylvania and they didn’t have nothing but cold hoe cakes and three rusty cents between ’em.” The musket came up and the grin widened. “You can give us that revolver for a beginnings.”

“Buchanan!” James blurted out the name. “Miles Buchanan!”

Ned Potter and Jake Spring stared uncomprehendingly at their prisoner.

“An attorney!” James explained. “I’ve been trying to remember his name all day! He once accused Chief Justice Shaw of being costive. Intellectually costive, that is…” His voice died away as he realized that poor Miles Buchanan was dead now, and Abigail Buchanan was a widow, and he himself was taken prisoner.

“Just give us the revolver, Yankee.”

James handed over the blackened revolver, then turned out his pockets. He was carrying over eighteen dollars in coin, a New Testament, a fine watch on a seal-heavy chain, a pair of folding opera glasses, a box of pen nibs, two notebooks and a fine linen handkerchief that his mother had embroidered with his initials. Ned Potter and Jake Spring were delighted with their luck, but James felt only a terrible humiliation. He had been delivered into the hands of his bitterest enemies and he could have wept for his country’s loss.

One mile away from James, Nathaniel Starbuck searched a meadow that was pockmarked with shell fire and scored with hoofprints. The Yankees were long gone and the meadow was empty except for the dead. It was the pasture where Washington Faulconer had struck him with his riding crop, the place where Ethan Ridley had died.

He found Ridley closer to the tree line than he remembered, but he supposed all his recollections of the battle were confused. The body was a horror of blood and bone, of torn flesh and blackened skin. The birds had already begun their feasting, but flapped reluctantly away as Starbuck walked up to the corpse that was beginning to stink. Ridley’s head was recognizable, the small pointed beard being oddly clear of blood. “You son of a bitch,” Starbuck said tiredly and without real anger, but he was remembering the scar on Sally’s face, and the child she had lost, and the rapes and beatings she had endured just so that this man could be free of her, and so some insult seemed fitting to mark the moment.