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We walked outside into the still, humid afternoon and listened. The fighting was the closest I’d ever heard it, just east of us. We felt the ground quaking. In the quiet moments between cannon blasts, we could hear the hollow clatter of gunfire, like bones rattling.

The horrific thundering finally stopped that evening, then resumed the next morning. By the time the battle ended the following afternoon, a long line of ambulances and farm wagons was already rolling into the city carrying the wounded and the dying.

“I’m going to Chimborazo Hospital to help,” I told Aunt Anne after lunch. She stared at me in surprise.

“You always did have a tender heart, Caroline. I remember how you nursed those little colored babies through the measles. But frankly, it surprises me that you’re able to go to such a dreadful place and see . . . that sort of thing.”

I forced myself to say what I had been thinking since the artillery fire began. “Charles and Jonathan are fighting out there somewhere. These soldiers might be from their company. If I don’t go and help them, who will?”

“I’d like to join you,” she said simply.

Chimborazo resembled a scene from Dante’s Inferno. I lost what little lunch I had eaten after I glimpsed a dying soldier whose entire lower jaw had been blown away. But from the men who were less seriously wounded, whose faces I cooled with water and whose thirst I helped ease, I learned that yesterday’s battle had been fought at Seven Pines, a few miles east of the city. Charles, along with the First Virginia Infantry, had taken part in a Confederate assault that attempted to push back the Union forces. The engagement had been successful the first day, then ended in a bloody draw the second. Among the wounded was the Rebel commander General Joe Johnston.

Before returning home, Aunt Anne and I drove downtown together, holding our breath and each other’s hands as we scanned a list of the four thousand men who had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. We sagged against each other in relief when we saw that Jonathan and Charles were not on it.

“You’ve changed, Caroline,” Aunt Anne said as we drove back up Church Hill afterward. “You’ve become a very strong young woman.”

I shook my head, my tears of relief still falling onto my lap. “No. I’m not strong at all. The fact that this war is so close terrifies me. Reading those lists and waiting to hear news of my loved ones is an agonizing ordeal. I’m not strong at all, Aunt Anne . . . but I’m learning to lean on a God who is.”

Chapter Sixteen

June 1862

All of Richmond was a hospital again. I spent every spare moment during the next week caring for wounded soldiers at Chimborazo Hospital. Then one quiet afternoon after the crisis eased and the hospital no longer needed me, a messenger came to our door. The man was gone again before I could hurry out to the foyer, but Gilbert handed me the note he had brought, scribbled on a folded scrap of greasy brown paper.

Dear Caroline,

I know that we are supposed to be at war with each other, but I cannot believe you would consider me your enemy. In Philadelphia, we were once dear friends, and I appeal to you now on the basis of that friendship.

I am being held here in Richmond as a prisoner of war. My fellow prisoners and I are suffering under dreadful conditions. Many of us are ill and near starvation. I remember your kindness and your Christian charity, and I ask for any shreds of mercy that you can spare my comrades and me. I am confined in a warehouse known as Libby Prison, in the east building.

Sincerely,

Lieutenant Robert Hoffman

United States Army

Eli and I went down to Libby Prison together. We parked the buggy on a side street and walked across the vacant lot beside the building beneath a broiling sun. The brick tobacco warehouse, which overlooked the canal, consisted of three conjoined buildings, four stories high, filling half a city block on the corner of Cary and Dock Streets. A faded sign, “L. Libby & Son,