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up the alley where the stranger had disappeared. He led her over the fence to Mrs. Stephens’s backyard, and then between the houses to Tulip Alleyway and Jefferson Street. There the stranger waited with the horses under the gas lantern, and there also Paulina realized how much she was bleeding from the cuts on her legs where she had gashed herself on broken glass. She bent down and tore a strip of silk from her hem, and used it to wipe her hands and face; the stranger had no time for that. She sat astride a black mare, one of the “night-mares” of the Yankee cavalry in the Wilderness campaign—a giant brute with foaming cheeks and bloodshot eyes.
    She pulled the horse around in a stamping circle. All this time she had said nothing, though now she moved her lips and signaled with her left hand, a language of gesticulation that the colonel seemed to understand. Without asking and without ceremony he placed his hands around Paulina’s waist and lifted her up into the saddle, her dress ripped and bunched around her thighs.
    The stranger slid forward to accommodate her. She kicked her heels and the mare lurched down the street so suddenly that Paulina grabbed hold of her metal belt to keep from falling. She didn’t like this. Already she was wondering if she’d have been better off at Blanford Park. But they seemed to be headed there anyway; the colonel had mounted his own horse, and they followed him south and east until they saw the brick wall of the military cemetery, the tower of the church. There, on a raised wooden scaffold lit with guttering torches, the gallows stretched up thin and pale into the purple sky. The neighborhood authority was preparing an event, and a crowd of buskers and Negro minstrels had already gathered; Paulina had always hated these celebrations when Mrs. McKenney had insisted on taking her. For an instant she thought the colonel might draw rein, but instead he pulled out his revolver and shot it once into the air as he galloped past. Atop the scaffold the men turned toward them, the ropes in their hands. One pointed; now they were headed, Paulina guessed, toward the old siege lines and the battlefield. They left the road and cantered into the darkness of the park, a quieter rhythm. Dogs were waiting under the trees, but the horses didn’t shy away. Paulina knew where they were going, the demarcation line, breached now, the treaty broken—that’s what Gram had said. But she mustn’t have been talking about this. She didn’t know about this. There were no policemen here, no Commonwealth militia. How could she have predicted that the enemy would be so bold?
    In the past ten minutes her cuts had begun to ache, especially her hands and on her stomach where she’d rolled over the sill. Mixed with the strangeness of the evening and the hard, jolting ride, the pain made her drunk. Light-headed, she swayed in the saddle. Sounds and voices seemed muffled, while objects took on a hallucinatory clarity. The world seemed painted in colors that were not yet dry.
    The Crater was on private grazing land, a no-man’s-land according to the armistice. Following the battle, the Washington Artillery had sealed it with an enormous plug, an iron cylinder like the door of a vault. As they rode past the tumbled fences that surrounded it, along a new track in the turf, among the blue-coats and the dogs, Paulina could see a fire up ahead, a bonfire and a crowd of officers, and then the Crater’s Mouth beyond them.
    The stranger slowed their horse to a walk, down the incline and into the pit. Head drooping, hands twisted into the metal belt, Paulina saw the plug was broken, thrown back as if on hinges. And in the throat of the tunnel stood the machines that had done the work, steam-powered shovels and hammers, still seething and thundering, surrounded by a gritty mist. Beyond the plug, the tunnel was encased in riveted plates of pitted iron; they rode on a track of