Chapter One

Washington City August 1865.

Dr. Jacob Lewis’s eyes welled as he gazed out the carriage window and saw his home for the first time in four years. He wasn’t sure what he had expected. Wreckage, perhaps, or widows weeping in the street. But not this stinking emptiness. And man alive, did it ever stink. He thought he’d left the stench of defecate and decay behind on the battlefields of Virginia and Maryland, but clearly it had followed him home.

If not for the familiar façade of his own home, he wouldn’t recognize the neighborhood at all. Once echoing with life, most of the tall houses on the oak-lined street sat shuttered and dark, as silent as the residents of the new cemetery on the hill across the Potomac. Most of his neighbors had been Confederate sympathizers, and it looked like they’d turned tail and run when the war shifted against them.

But the neighborhood wasn’t quite empty. There was a steaming pile of cow paddies right next to the carriage that Jacob had to dodge when he stepped out of the carriage and onto the muddy street. A pig shot out from behind a house and rushed him, and he jumped backward right into the shit. He reached for the bowie knife in the sheath on his right hip, but the animal cut to one side at the last second. He left his hand on the hilt of his knife for another couple seconds, taking comfort in the cold metal strapped to his hip. The knife was the one of only two mementos of his army service he had kept. He’d thrown his bloodstained uniform into a campfire when he’d mustered out.

He sighed and picked his way around the manure piles toward his house. He nearly tripped over a grimy man lying motionless in the gutter. The man’s scraggly beard lay halfway down his chest, and the uniform he wore was so muddy and tattered Jacob couldn’t tell whether it was Union or Confederate. Flies buzzed around the soldier’s head. That was never a good sign. He stared, searching for the telltale rise and fall of breathing, but couldn’t make out any motion. He wanted to keep walking, but with his right foot, he nudged the man in the ribs.

The man snapped awake, his muddied, yellow eyes darting back and forth. “Whassa matter wi’ you? I’m tryin’ to sleep.”

“Sorry,” Jacob said, skittering back a few steps. “Just seeing if you were all right.”

The man told Jacob where he could go and what he should do with his mother when he got there. Then he rolled over and closed his eyes.

Shaking his head, Jacob dug a brass key out of his pocket. The motion dislodged his other army memento from its home snug in the bottom of the same pocket. He gasped and caught the small lead cone just before it landed in the muddy street. He closed his eyes and blew a breath out between his cracked lips, gripping the Minié ball in his fist before tucking it back into his pocket.

“You dropped me,” it whispered.

Jacob shook his head and squeezed his pocket. He needed sleep.

The porch creaked under his weight when he approached the front door. He reached for the lock but then turned and looked out across the neighborhood. The few fellow Unionists on the block had fled when the war broke out. Having a rebel army only 800 feet across the river from the Executive Mansion tended to make a body uneasy. A few houses showed signs of life but judging from their smashed windows and half-unhinged doors, the occupants probably weren’t the lawful residents. Guilt knotted in his chest as he turned back to his own, unmolested, home. An elderly neighbor had kept an eye on the place while Jacob was away at war, but the man left town a few months ago. He’d written to say he was headed to relatives in Baltimore and if the government had any sense, they’d move the capital and abandon Washington.

“Makes you wonder why the President was so determined to protect the city, doesn’t it?” the Minié ball said from its nest in the bottom of Jacob’s right pocket. “Should have let the Rebs have it.”

For once, Jacob didn’t disagree with the mouthy bullet. He swallowed hard and reached for the door latch. The lock was cranky from neglect, and he jiggled the key a few times to make the sliders click into place.

The shuttered windows blocked all daylight into the house. He sneezed twice while he fumbled to light one of the gas lamps on the wall. When the lamp at last hissed to life, its flickering glow illuminated thick motes of dust drifting from the chandelier overhead.

As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he stepped into the sitting room and set his rucksack on the floor. Like all the furniture in the house, the sofa and armchairs were draped with sheets, once brilliant white but now dingy with dust. He lit a couple lamps, strode to the fireplace, and ripped the protective sheet off the large portrait that hung over the mantel.

“Hello, ladies,” he whispered to the figures smiling down at him. He gazed up into the eyes of his late wife, Hannah. In the portrait, she stood behind their daughter, Lydia, then nine years old, seated in a chair. How was it possible Hannah was ten years gone? Right up until the war broke out, her older sister had tried to persuade Jacob to move back to Boston near her, but he couldn’t leave the house Hannah had loved so dearly. The house was Hannah. She had selected every stick of furniture, every curtain, every tablecloth. She’d given birth to Lyddie in an upstairs bedroom where she died ten years later.

It was home.

He looked around at the dusty, sheet-draped sitting room and fought the urge to cry. What would his wife think of her home now?

He shifted his gaze to Lyddie’s grinning image. The ache that had settled in his chest tightened further. He’d missed her fiercely the past four years, but thank God he’d had the sense to send her away at the war’s outset. Now twenty years old, she’d written to him often from his brother’s cattle ranch in California, her most recent letter asking when she might come home. Her letters made it clear she loved California, but she missed him.

Putting the house back in order would be easy enough, but he couldn’t reverse the city’s decay. He and Lyddie could tolerate the mud and the crumbling buildings, he supposed, if not for that god-awful smell. Washington City’s sewage had been inadequate before the war, and the turmoil of the past few years hadn’t helped. Much of the excrement now fermenting in the streets was probably of human origin as well as animal.

“It’s all right, Lyddie,” he whispered. “We’ll figure it out, you and me. Just like we’ve always done.”

When he turned to leave the sitting room, he caught a glimpse of himself in a small mirror on the wall and stared, wide-eyed at his reflection. Who was this man staring back? He hadn’t taken a good look at himself since joining the Army. His hair, once dark and neat, was now wild and streaked with gray. He’d always preferred to stay clean-shaven, but a lopsided, graying beard drooped from his chin. Only his eyes were familiar. Their blue-gray hue that his mother used to say reminded her of the sea was unchanged despite the heavy bags underneath.

He trudged upstairs, yanked the protective coverings off his bed, and lay on top of the musty quilt. He pulled out his pocket watch and opened it to the small portrait of Hannah he kept tucked into the case. He laid it on his night table and dropped his head onto his pillows, ignoring the puff of dust that wafted up around his head. Though the sun still rode high in the sky, he closed his eyes and dropped right off to sleep, one hand covering the pocket where the Minié ball rested.