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whole Confederacy was short of salt. He had resorted to a twig and his own stale spit.
    Food had grown progressively poorer and scarcer. There was usually soup, if you could dignify it with that name. Water thickened with some corn meal. Occasionally he’d get potatoes, which he’d mash up and cook with a precious bit of meat. He’d learned to save the chunk of meat, wrap it in a scrap of cloth and reuse it the next day. He’d cooked one such chunk of pork over and over until it was black and smelled like garbage.
    It was no wonder the dysentery felled him again, this time for neatly three weeks.
    When he recovered, it was already mid-October. He was glad he hadn’t tried to get away yet. Some of the deserters had been caught, brought back, and sent to prison. But he was growing fretful, impatient.
    I am ordering you—
    Promise me—
    “Promise, sir.”
    General Hood had taken the army and disappeared into the northwest, hoping to cut Billy Sherman’s supply lines from Tennessee. Since Jeremiah’s unit was gone, he was ordered out with a contingent of Georgia Militia to find and join Hood. He was still physically weak. Couldn’t keep up—or at least had an excuse for pretending he couldn’t. One dawn, the militiamen left him behind.
    He was free.
    He rested three days in a glade above Atlanta, then headed southeast to deliver the letter. Technically, he supposed he was a deserter. But not in his own mind.
    He circled wide around besieged Atlanta and crossed the shell-blackened, trench-scarred fields with caution. With one expert shot he bagged a wild turkey, then gutted and roasted it. He had no salt to add as a preservative, but the meat would still last him a while.
    Careful as he was to avoid being stopped or questioned, he was defenseless against one threat: the disease in his system. He lost four more days in another patch of forest, lying on the ground hour after hour, wracked by fever, and bowel trouble. It was from those woods, a week ago, that he’d seen more evidence of how ruthless the conflict had become.
    He’d seen a sky blackened by fire-shot smoke. Heard thunderous reverberations from dynamite charges. The South’s transportation center and major rail junction was being systematically destroyed by men who didn’t give a damn about fighting honorably, only about winning their war to free the nigra and crush the rebels. He remembered wondering, hatefully, how many noncombatants had been blown up along with the rolling stock and roundhouses in Atlanta.
    Now, a good two miles from where he’d encountered the farmer, he was forced to stop. Out of breath. Light-headed.
    The darkness of the countryside oppressed him. The moon was temporarily hidden. Perhaps it was the lonely dark that made him think of his mother, Fan Lamont.
    She’d sent him off to this failing war with a curious and contradictory set of admonitions.
    She’d hated to see him go. Expressed grave concern about his safety. Warned him to be as careful as he could.
    Yet she was proud of his enthusiasm. Didn’t refuse when he begged to enlist. And, at the last moment, urged him to fight well and—most importantly— honorably.
    He suspected that the fervency that had finally overcome her fear had had something to do with his stepfather’s mysterious death in Richmond in 1861. It seemed that Edward Lamont, the actor, had tumbled down a flight of stairs in the building where he and Fan had been living. Jeremiah had been in Lexington at the time, staying with Fan’s father, Virgil Tunworth. The boy had heard the account of Lamont’s death from his grandfather.
    When Fan returned to the little town in the Shenandoah Valley after the funeral, Jeremiah began to have a feeling the accidental fall wasn’t the whole story. Based on the somewhat nervous way Fan answered his questions, he had decided there must have been something disgraceful about Edward’s death. Something Fan was desperate to counterbalance by giving reluctant permission