Grace Clement looked in, as she had promised, felt his pulse, sounded his chest, and, when she had done, her concern was clear in her face. “His spirit is like a guttering candle,” she said. “I believe the torments of his mind are acting on his body, preventing it from healing. I have seen like cases, and I have seen their opposite. When the mind wills it, sometimes a patient pulls himself back from the very brink of the grave. But when the mind is troubled, as his is ...” Her words trailed away. “His pulse is feeble, his chest-it is not yet the death rattle I hear, but very like.”

I will not say it did not chafe my heart, watching her touch him and tend to him with skills I did not have. But even as I felt the hot pangs of jealousy, I knew they were unworthy, and strove to subdue them, asking, as humbly as I could manage, for her counsel.

She smoothed the coverlid and lifted his hands so that they lay pale against the white sheet. “If-when-he returns again to consciousness, I think you must find a way to speak with him that will diminish the guilt he feels about the past. He must be brought to care about the life—the future—that awaits him. I think you have daughters?”

“Four of them,” I said.

“Speak to him of them, remind him of their needs, his duty. That girl—woman—whoever she was—who saved him: she was right in what she struggled to set down about him: he is a good, kind man. But I don’t think he sees himself that way anymore. It will fall to you to convince him of it, if you want him to live.”

After she went to her other duties, I thought about her words. There was wisdom in them. But to do as she asked would not be easy. As a mother, I often had asked my girls to forgive each other; “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger,” I had instructed them, when the small and great slights of childhood set them against one another. Now, I would be tested. I would have to follow my own preachments. He had failed me in so many ways. He had not provided the material life I had expected, but I had adjusted to that long ago. He had not considered me, in deciding to go off to war, but I had feigned acceptance of that and held my peace. Now he had subjected me to a wound even more profound. He had betrayed me in the deepest, most personal way; harboring secret feelings toward another woman. And though I understood how it had come to happen, still it hurt me. Others had known truths about my marriage that he had kept hidden from me.

Somehow, I would have to unpack the anger and humiliation I carried in my breast, put it away, deep in an imaginary box, and store it somewhere on a high shelf of my heart, where I would deal with it much later. I was not sure if I had the discipline to do it. Even to save him.

How easy it was to give out morsels of wise counsel, and yet how hard to act on them. Before I left home, I had advised my girls to lessen their worry by being about their work-“Hope, and keep busy,” I had said. Well, that advice, too, might be as good for the mother goose as the goslings. So in the hours that followed, I tried to find solace by making myself useful to some of the other men in the ward. I wrote their letters or adjusted their pillows or fetched fresh water. They were touchingly grateful for these small attentions, and the doing of them provided a distraction from my own concerns and raised my spirits a little.

Mr. Brooke joined me in the waning afternoon and said that he would keep vigil at the bedside if I wanted some respite. Since there were still no signs of returning consciousness, I said yes to his offer, as the strains of the day had fatigued me. When I reached the cottage, Mr. Bolland had returned from his employment. A fire smouldered in the grate and he sat close by, engrossed in a newspaper. There was only the one chair, and as he did not offer it, I proceeded upstairs to sit upon my bed. I wanted to write something to the girls before I lay down to rest; I had, until then, left it to Mr. Brooke to convey the details of our situation. I fetched out my writing things, but found myself shivering. Generally, I tolerate cold very well. But there was a damp chill in the stoveless attic. An icy wind fingered its way through the cracked window panes. So I returned downstairs—a mean fire better than no fire at all-and upended the empty kindling box to serve as a stool. I returned my attention to my writing things. I inscribed my greeting.

But it was not so easy to go on from there, and not only because of the distraction caused by Mr. Bolland’s constant and apparently ineffective throat clearing. The young man had a dreadful case of catarrh. Every three or four minutes, he would cease his reading, snap his newspaper, and begin a painful effort to loosen the phlegm in his throat. I tried my best to block out the disagreeable sound and focus on what I wished to convey to my girls.

But what did I wish to say? My news was cheerless. What could I say of their father’s condition? That his apparent recovery may have been chimerical; that he had relapsed and remained in grave danger. And what of myself? An honest accounting of my hours would hardly make fit reading: that I had thrown soup over one nurse in the morning, and spent the subsequent hours interrogating another as to their father’s secret past. That I was lodged in a miserable slum by a reeking sluiceway, cheek by jowl with a stranger who had egg stains on his waistcoat.

The ink dried on my nib as I searched for a style of truth that would not completely dishearten its recipients. And then I realized that this was exactly the dilemma he had faced, day following dreadful day, in camp or on battlefield: the lies had been penned, the truths unwritten, because he was ashamed, yes, on occasion; but also, and more often, because he had wanted to spare me from the grief that an accurate account would have inflicted. How he must have toiled over those pages, denying himself the satisfactions that come with unburdening the heart, censoring his every sentiment so that I could continue to think only the best of him and cast his situation in a tolerable light. And I had been ready to condemn him, for what had been, perhaps, a daily act of love.

I sat there as the light faded and Mr. Bolland folded away his broadsheet. I became aware that he was staring at me, my dry nib, my blank pages. When I returned his gaze, he looked away, embarrassed. I felt constrained to speak.

“Have you been in the capital very long, Mr. Bolland?”

“Too long, Mrs. March. It will be a year in January.”

“But surely the city affords some pleasures to a bachelor such as yourself?”

“I am not a bachelor. My wife and child reside with my parents at their farm on the Delaware, and I miss them grievously. The salary I make as a copyist is insufficient to allow me to relocate them here. No, Mrs. March; apart from the occasional improving lecture at the Smithsonian, there is little here to enjoy, if you set it beside the domestic happiness one might possess.”

Mr. Bolland’s words dropped unanswered into the bleak little room. My attempt at a natural exchange between strangers had misfired. Somehow, the thought of this man, also sundered from his family, was a final weight laid upon my depressed spirit, and I found I could not go on. What kind of life could one have, after all, if a family allowed itself to be torn apart-by war, by necessitous circumstances, or by a wedge driven into the heart by a crisis of trust? I knew then that whatever it cost me, I would bring my husband home. With my emotions suddenly stirred, I did not have it in me to make any answer to Mr. Bolland. Certainly I had no reserves from which to draw polite words of cheerful consolation. So I folded away my abandoned attempt at a letter, excused myself, and climbed up to the attic where I could at least lay my throbbing head upon a pillow. I drew my cloak around me, as well as the thin coverlid, and put gloves on my icy hands.

I fell asleep, though I had not intended to. When I awoke it was fully dark, and the waning street sounds told me the hour must be very advanced. I rushed down the stairs, anxious to return to the hospital, but Mr. Brooke was waiting for me by the fire.

“Do not fret yourself,” he said kindly. “I stayed till ‘lights out’ and that very capable Negro nurse spooned him some of the rice water with lemon that you had left with him, and also a little beef broth.”

I colored a little at the mention of Grace, troubled again by the thought of her attentions. But I knew my husband well enough to understand that he would not thank her if he knew she was feeding him animal fare. I smiled, thinking that such an abomination might very well be enough to rouse him into a conscious rage, he who had insisted on being a vegetable product almost his entire life. Yet I would not raise any objection. He needed strengthening, and if meat “medicine” might help to make him well, he would have to take that bitter pill along with all the others.

Kindly Mr. Brooke had bought me a pie, which he had kept warmed by the fire, and I ate it gratefully, although he had to stand so that I could use the kindling box to sit down upon. Mrs. Jamison had brought a kitchen stool for her own use, and was darning a sock. Mr. Bolland had turned his attention to a book. They shared the light of a single candle.

Mr. Brooke had two letters for me, a slender envelope inscribed in a small, precise, and unfamiliar hand, and a fat packet from home. This I opened eagerly. It contained cheering dispatches from each of my girls, and reassuring notes from Hannah and the two Laurences. I was obliged to hold these almost over the fire to get light to decipher the words—especially Jo’s chaotic, ink-blotted scrawls. I read them through once quickly, and then again, savoring each reassuring word, and sharing some of the contents with Mr. Brooke, who seemed especially attentive to what Meg had written. I turned then to the other envelope, and drew from it a lavender-scented note.

“I did not know you had any acquaintance in the city,” he said at last.

“Very recent; acquaintances made today only.” I could not bring myself to elaborate in the crowded confines of that room. “I-I am afraid I must beg another kindness, Mr. Brooke-”

“I think it is time you called me John,” he interrupted softly.

“John, may I ask you to accompany me to the post? I must reply to this note, and I am afraid it requires an answer tonight.”

“Of course I will,” he said, immediately fetching his coat and helping me into my cloak.

As soon as we stepped out into the cold air, he said: “I would have carried the letter for you willingly, but I wanted a private word. I, too, had a letter today, from Mr. Laurence. He is appalled at what I told him of our accommodations. He admires your scruples but insists that we relocate at once to Willard’s Hotel. He says that since I am representing his interests, I must be able to present myself properly to his associates, and that you do him no kindness by, as he put it, ‘insisting on fetching up like a pair of beggars’- Well, forgive me, but you know how very direct he can be. I do not see how I can flout his will in this. Please, what answer shall I make him?”

I felt gratitude toward the generous old man, and relief that I would be able to gracefully decline his charity without inflicting hardship on John Brooke. “Tell him thank you, but that it will not be necessary for him to extend himself any further on my account. I have unexpectedly received an offer of a room at a most comfortable and convenient Georgetown home. If you go to the Willard’s, then I shall be perfectly free to accept it and I need not post this letter after all.”

“You were going to decline, for my sake? You are too good.”

“Not at all.”

He shook my hand and then walked on alone. I turned back and went, for the last time, to my meager bed.

The carriage ride was so brief as made it barely worth harnessing the horses, but as the way was all uphill I was glad of the conveyance. The Negro servant, Markham, was waiting for me at the gate and handed me down most civilly. Mrs. Hale met me at the door. She was attired to go out, plain but elegant in a camel-colored cloak, calfskin boots, and a becoming, feather-trimmed bonnet.

“I am so sorry, Mrs. March, that I cannot stay to see you properly settled, but it is my day to assist at the contraband home in Alexandria, and I do not want to keep the driver waiting. You must use the house as your own. If you can dine with me, that would be delightful: I should like to hear more of your work with the Underground Railroad—Miss Clement mentioned your family’s long involvement-but I will not expect you, and do not feel obliged. If you need to remain at the hospital I quite understand, and cook will send you up something on a tray. The household keeps ‘doctors’ hours,’ which always are irregular, so feel free to call for something at any time. I have asked Markham to put you in the Chinese room; do not hesitate to let him or Hester know if you need anything-anything at all—to make you more comfortable.”

She laid a gloved hand on my arm and gave me a kindly look. “I do hope you find Mr. March improved today.”

I started to convey my thanks for all her kindness, but she cut me off. “Not at all, my dear. From what I hear from Miss Clement, he is a most remarkable man and the two of you deserve every consideration. And you would do the same for me, I daresay.”

Well, Mrs. Hale, I thought, when Markham closed the door and left me alone in the Chinese room, perhaps I might have done the same for you at one time, but it was long since such grand hospitality was in my gift. The room was beautiful. Light poured from two tall windows onto a red lacquered bed hung with heavily embroidered silk. Fresh-cut flowers in a T’ang vase spilled a jasmine scent that spoke of a distant springtime. There was an armoire inlaid with mother-of-pearl and a writing desk with ornately carved legs. On the back of a matching chair lay the warm, quilted robe I had borrowed on my previous visit. I felt like falling onto that soft bed, cocooning myself in its silkworm luxury, and sleeping for a week. Instead, I set my few things in the armoire and hurried off for the hospital.

Miss Clement had clearly mobilized all the resources of the Hale family. I had dreaded finding Nurse Flynn on duty and when I reached the top of the stairs and saw her just leaving the ward, my impulse was to shrink out of sight until she passed. But her pebble eyes missed very little. She recognized me at once, drew in her brows, and strode purposefully to where I stood. She nodded curtly. “Surgeon Hale asked to be told when you arrived,” she said, in a voice that was surly but also a little awed. “I shall let him know you are here.”

She had evidently just seen to my husband, for his bed was freshly made and there was greenish salve on the ulcers around his mouth. His color seemed better. I lay a hand on his brow and found his fever only slightly elevated.

Presently, Surgeon Hale arrived. He made me a most civil greeting and apologized for his brusqueness at our earlier meeting. “I am not as young as I was, Mrs. March, and I have a deal of trouble keeping the medical cases straight in my mind. The surgical cases-now, that’s another matter. Plunge a knife in a man, you remember it; but one fever or flux is much like another, wouldn’t you say?”

I did not know what to say, so I held my peace. Surgeon Hale was a small, delicate man, in his middle sixties, with a soft cadence to his voice that spoke of Southern origins. This need not have surprised me, for until the outbreak of war, and indeed even after, Washington had been more of a Southern town than a Northern one. But Mrs. Hale had a crisp Yankee diction, and I wondered how the two of them had come together.

I have no idea if the doctor had troubled himself much with examining my husband when he had first been admitted. I could not think so, given the demands of the surgical wards. But now he made a most thorough investigation: sounding every inch of the chest, laying hands on the abdomen, raising eyelids, and probing in the mouth. It was difficult to watch; impossible to turn away. When the surgeon had done, I hastened to adjust the gown over my husband’s withered nakedness and return him to the privacy of his coverlid. Surgeon Hale had turned his attention to some notes that Grace Clement had given him. He shook his head. “According to this, your husband’s bowels have moved eighteen times in the last thirty hours. This is incompatible with any hope for recovery. The calomel-that is mercurous chloride—targets his fever, and has reduced it, but it is a strong laxative, and the opiate tincture is not binding him sufficiently. I propose that we make a trial of discontinuing both drugs, and see how he does on quinine alone. If you will see to it that he gets fluids-barley water, rice water, broths-every hour, without fail, we will watch his condition and see if we can turn the tide here.”

“Will he-will he recover?”

He shook his head. “I cannot say. His age is against him. The bodies of the young are more resilient and can bear more insult. Hope, Mrs. March. That is all we can do.”

It took two days for the change of regimen to show a result. On the third morning, Hope triumphed. He awoke to the world, took my hand and held it, and would not surrender it, even when I required it of him so that I could help him eat a little custard-the first solid food he had taken in weeks. By the end of that day, he was able to sit, supported, and the next to stand for a few moments. By the end of a week, he could make his way, on an orderly’s arm, to the privy. We talked then, of all that had befallen him, and I tried to make him turn his face from the ashes of his endeavors, and to look at the sparks of hope that still flickered, here and there, for the greater cause he had served. Sometimes, it seemed he listened. Other times he became weary and I let be, thinking that there would be time to mend his spirits as his body continued to heal.

By then, the weather, too, had changed, and on Sunday morning I walked to church with the Hales and Miss Clement through falling flakes and a city suddenly made lovely to me. On the mornings that followed, I would wake in my warm chamber and look out on a clean, sparkling world. It seemed that everything in my life was being made fresh and restored to me.

I was able at last to write good news to the girls, and they replied with merry mock dispatches and songs to cheer the invalid.

I sat by his bed, reading from the latest parcel of missives. Jo had included a “pome,” a “silly little thing” that she had entitled “Song of the Suds,” about her struggles to master domestic arts, which I read to him:

“And see? She signs it ‘Topsy Turvey Jo’.”

“How I miss them!” he sighed.

“You will see them, soon enough,” I said brightly. Now that his needs were less pressing, I had taken to bringing a basket of needlework to his bedside, mending clothes for the convalescents. I bent down to put the letters away and took up a shirt with a torn seam. I was examining it to see the extent of the rend and did not look up until I heard his breath catch in a sob.

“Why, whatever is it?” I said, laying the shirt aside and reaching over to stroke his cheek.

“I can’t go home to them,” he said. “Not yet.”

“Well, of course,” I said, soothingly. “Dr. Hale says we must not think of moving you while the snowstorms persist. But he says there is every good chance that if the weather eases, we may have you home in time for Christmas.”

He shook his head. “No. I cannot go home. I am not discharged from the army.”

“But that’s only a formality-Dr. Hale says it can be effected in a matter of a day or two ...”

“I am not prepared to seek a discharge.”

“What are you saying? Are you still delirious?”

As soon as the words were out I wished them unsaid, for I did not wish to recall to him the cruel torments of those hours.

“My work,” he said in a whisper, “is not finished. The efforts of the past year, all of them bore rotten fruit. Innocents have died because of me. People have been dragged back into bondage. I cannot go home—to comfort and peace—until I have redeemed the losses I have caused.”

“And how,” I said, my voice grown cold, “do you propose to do that? When you set out a year ago, you were merely too old for the venture. Now you are both too old and a ruin. Who, precisely, do you think you can help? You, who cannot make his water without assistance?”

He winced, and I bit my tongue. He needed my understanding, not my anger.

“Not all you did went for naught,” I said gently. “The education you gave to so many, that cannot be taken away. Why, the letters you taught that girl—you said her name was Zannah—saved your life. Had you not taught so well, you would in all probability be dead now. How can you doubt the value of that?”

He waved a hand weakly, as if to dismiss the hard effort of so many months. “What good are letters to a woman who has lost her only child? Or to a man who has lost his liberty?”

“You did not kill that child, a Confederate did. As for the captive Negroes, the war does go on without you, you know. There are others whose efforts might have something to do with liberating those people—all of them—your friends included. It is pride that makes you think like this, that makes you feel as though you are indispensable.”

“Pride?” he said, smiling weakly. “How could you accuse me of pride? I have no pride left to me. I despise myself. I-I did not always act bravely. I left wounded men behind at the battle of the bluff I let go of Silas Stone in the river...”

I cut him off, for once his mind turned to these matters it began a cascade: weeping led to coughing, which gave him pain, which caused him to lose his appetite, which arrested the essential daily increase in his strength.

“You must stop this. Think of your girls and how their hearts lift at the thought of having you home ...”

“How may I revel in thoughts of my own homecoming, without reflecting on those who will never get home? Those wounded I left, crying; young Stone, drowning? They will never go home, because I was not brave enough.”

“Brave enough! How brave do you need to be to satisfy yourself? I said pride, and pride it is, when you speak so. For it is not enough for you to be accounted commonly courageous. Oh no: you must be a Titan. You must carry all the wounded off the field. You must not only try to save a man, you must succeed at it, and when you can’t, you heap ashes on your head as if all the blame were yours-none to spare for the generals who blundered you into that battle, or the stretcher bearers, who also fled for their lives; or for Stone’s own panic, or for the fact that he never troubled to learn to swim, not even a modicum of blame for the man who shot him ... You did not kill Silas Stone, or Zannah’s child. The war killed both of them. You must accept that.”

“But I might have saved them. There was a man, Jesse, he handed me a gun, and I handed it back to him. I valued my principles more than I valued their lives. And the outcome is, they are slaves again, or dead.”

“You are not God. You do not determine the outcome. The outcome is not the point.”

“Then what, pray, is the point?” His voice was a dry, soft rattle, like a breeze through a bough of dead leaves.

“The point is the effort. That you, believing what you believed-what you sincerely believed, including the commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’-acted upon it. To believe, to act, and to have events confound you-I grant you, that is hard,to bear. But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong-how can you not see? That is what would have been reprehensible.” And even as I said this, I knew that if I stood again in the cattle show ground, and heard him promise to go to war, I would hold my piece, again, even knowing what terrible days were to follow. For to have asked him to do otherwise would have been to wish him a different man. And I knew then that I loved this man. This inconstant, ruined dreamer.

He closed his eyes, his brows drawn. His breathing had become labored from the strain of our exchange. I fetched a cloth and made to bathe his forehead, which was beaded with sweat. He submitted for a moment or two, and then he pushed my hand away.

“Leave me now,” he said. “I need to sleep.”

“Yes,” I said, trying to school my voice so as not to reveal my hurt and confusion. “Yes, that would be best.”

I leaned down and kissed his brow. He did not open his eyes or respond in any way.

I gathered my things and walked toward the exit of the ward. Before I passed through the door, I turned back. His eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling. He did not see me go.