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crowds, that I nearly wept. Instead I lighted my candle, and re-read your letters: wanting only, as you said in your latest, to be anyplace but here. Yet reading last week’s newspaper brought no distraction—accounts of skirmishes in South Carolina, of bloodshed and incompetence. At length I climbed to the attic, and opened Mr. Poole’s trunk of books, and sought for one of those novels that gave you such comfort. Upon finding it, I thought that the title
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
sounded rather lurid, yet surely a title like
Pride and Prejudice
connoted grave respectability.
    After two chapters I
had
to continue, and pursue the fate of the Bennet sisters and their ridiculous mother. There was hopeless love there, too, and I grieve for Elizabeth and her Mr. Darcy. As I read on, bundled up in my quilts, I did feel much better.
    You were quite right, dearest Susie, about the power of novels to lighten a heart. I never knew!
    Your enlightened friend,
Cora
    Susanna Ashford, Bayberry Run Plantation
Greene County, Tennessee
To
Cora Poole, Southeast Harbor
Deer Isle, Maine
T HURSDAY , D ECEMBER 12, 1861
    Dear Cora,
    Tho’ there has been no reply yet to any of my letters, I must seize this chance to write one more, while I can. Justin Poole will take this letter across to Kentucky, and this time he won’t be back.
    I’m at Bayberry again, tho’ thankfully will not be staying. Even Pa agrees that it’s too dangerous. We’re having Christmas here early, because of Gaius’s furlough. Then Henriette and Julia will go back to Nashville with me, and Pa will take the train in the other direction, to Richmond, to see if he can get a dispensation (or whatever it’s called) to sell our tobacco. *
    It apparently never occurred to Pa to write to any of us that Regal’s militia company is now camped around our tobacco-barn. We may be safe from bush-whackers this way, as Pa boasts, but it makes my hair stand on end, to see the men harass the maids when they go down to the servants’ out-house. Pa says, “It’s just the boys having a little fun. They don’t mean any harm by it.” But I’ve told the women servants that it’s all right for them to go down in pairs.
    The men from the camp relieve themselves in the weeds along the snake-rail fence. That’s in full sight of the window of my and Julia’s bedroom—which it didn’t used to be, but all the trees that surrounded the house have now been cut down for firewood.
    I feel like I’m in a bad dream: one of those where you’re with a total stranger, and everyone around you keeps saying, “No, no, that’s your mother—” (or Julia or Payne or whoever) and you
know
they’re lying.
    From the window of what used to be Payne’s room I sketch themen, eating or playing cards or cleaning their rifles. As you can see from these, I don’t get any too near. They hold cockroach races on hot skillets. I bet they don’t wash the skillets afterwards, either!
    I’m making a drawing of Gaius, as a Christmas present for Henriette. My brother is much thinner than he was last April, and he moves as if he’s in some kind of pain, though he has no wound. He hardly ever speaks, when he used to always have an opinion about
everything
, but he’s so tender and gentle when he plays with his children, it scares me sometimes.
F RIDAY , D ECEMBER 13
N IGHT
    I’m writing this in Payne’s old room, which is quiet, and warm because it’s over the kitchen. The rest of the house is freezing. I can hear Pa, Regal, and some of the militia, talking and shouting in the big parlor. We go back to Nashville Monday.
    I got Den to take me into town this afternoon to see Mrs. Johnson. It felt so strange, to have everyone ready to hang one another, over what used to be just politics. They’re seriously talking about turning Mrs. Johnson, sick as she is, out of her house, in spite of her oldest son swearing the Loyalty Oath. Her daughter’s husband swore the Oath only after they caught him leading a