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could whisper to each other the way Julia and I used to do. I pretended I still had all my brothers (even one whose wife would rather sew than read!) and a Papa to spend Christmas with, and a Mother who’s strong and kind. Since I can’t have those tonight, I’ll settle for Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d’Artagnan, savored secretly like candy in the stillness here that’s broken only by the sounds of the troop trains.
T UESDAY , D ECEMBER 31
M ORNING
    I will send this off to Mrs. Johnson tomorrow, and hope she still “knows people who know people” (she should—her middle son is riding with the bush-whackers!). Mrs. Polk—widow of the President—gives a ball at her house. There is much dashing about the hallways and lending back and forth of gloves and laces, and you can smell burnt hair even downstairs in the parlor. Henriette’s sisters will be there, but Julia begged Henriette to stay home with her. She would have begged me to stay home with her (she is due in March), except she and Henriette are trying desperately to marry me off. Both tell me I should change to second mourning for the occasion, to better my chances: Henriette’s sister has a black-and-white that will fit me, they say, and hint that six weeks is “enough” for a brother. But I remember dancing with Payne, and in his honor will go to Mrs.Polk’s ball in my best black. Not that Payne would care, but I feel better so.
    To be honest, I’d rather stay here at the Academy tonight reading
The Three Musketeers …
or better still, be magically transported to Maine, with a bottle of Mrs. Polk’s blockade-run champagne in my hand, to toast in 1862—and all it may bring—with you!
    A blessed Christmas, dearest Cora.
S



Cora Poole, Southeast Harbor
Deer Isle, Maine
To
Susanna Ashford, Nashville Female
Academy
Nashville, Tennessee
T HURSDAY , J ANUARY 2, 1862
    Dearest,
    The same boat that brought Papa home to celebrate Christmas brought your letter of early November. I am so sorry, to hear about your brother—if there is anything that I can do, to help you or Julia, please let me know.
    It feels strange to write that I’m glad you saw my darling Emory. Thank you for not upbraiding him on my behalf. You asked how you could make his departure more bearable for me, and you have done so already, in greeting him as a friend. Did he look well? Thank you, too, for that wondrous sketch in the margin, of him on the gravel of Bayberry’s drive, wearing a borrowed black coat.
    And thank you for the drawing of me in my room. I laughed at the portrayal of me reading that mammoth pile of newspapers in bed: would that there were so many available here! Yet more often—my preceptresses at Hartford Female Seminary would grieve to hear—bedtime finds me lost utterly in
Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility
, or the beguiling
Emma
. How often I have been told,
and have told others
, that the reading of novels “rotted” a girl’s mind and rendered her unfit for “serious” mental effort. I suppose, if my mind is rotting this winter as a result of the contents of Mr. Poole’s trunk, I would not be aware of it. Yet it is to Miss Austen—and to yourself, Susie—that I owed my ability to laugh and shake my headafter my “speech” before the Southeast Harbor Ladies Reading Circle, rather than weeping with vexation and rage!
    To give the Reading Circle its new and proper name: it is now the Daughters of the Union Propaganda Society. Do you have Propaganda Societies in the South? They have sprouted up over the East since the War began, to encourage recruitment and promote the purchase of government bonds to finance the War. I spoke of the people I met in Tennessee: said that many Southerners sincerely support the Union but favor slavery as well, that many are kind, good-hearted, Christian people who do not deserve to be judged by their leaders or by their neighbors. Of Emory I only said, “My husband made a hard choice, one with which I cannot agree. But