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and baby Gussie against her shoulder, she wondered how her old friend Isabelle would bear it. And how would Isabelle’s mother and father bear it? And what about Ida herself? How would she herself bear the pity of what had happened to Isabelle and her husband, James?
    It was not that Ida was timid. She had seen terrible things before. After the Battle of Gettysburg, during her desperate search for her missing husband on the battlefield, she had witnessed an amputation, she had endured the stench of dead horses, she had seen hundreds of badly wounded men, and she had searched among long rows of dead soldiers awaiting burial.
    Of course, her second husband, Alexander, had seen even more terrible things. As an army surgeon, Alexander Clock was accustomed to every kind of battle wound, gangrenous and worm-infested, and every kind of dangerous camp fever. He had served in field hospitals in Maryland after the Battle of Antietam, and then as chief surgeon in the Patent Office hospital in Washington. In fact, it had been in the Patent Office that he had first met Ida. She had gone there to look for her missing husband, but she had found her brother Eben instead, dangerously ill with typhoid fever. And it was there that Alexander had fallen in love with her, even as her time came to deliver her baby, the boy who was now bouncing up and down on the sofa in the sitting room.
    â€œHorace?” called Ida’s mother. “Are you trying to bring the house down?” Eudocia ran into the sitting room, plopped her grandson down on the sofa, and settled herself beside him. It was time for “Jack and the Beanstalk.”

James
    With drums and guns, and guns and drums ,
    The enemy nearly slew ye.
    My darling dear, you look so queer ,
    Oh, Johnny, I hardly knew ye.
    â€”Irish folk song
    T he mare needed no direction to follow the road to Nashoba. Mab trotted steadily between strawberry fields where people were spreading armfuls of hay. The gig rocked and jiggled as it crossed the bridge over Nashoba Brook. There was no other traffic on the road but a plodding old horse coming the other way, drawing a wagon loaded with a gigantic basket and a strange flabby object of shriveled red and blue. Two men in bowler hats were squeezed together on the seat beside the driver.
    Eben nodded as the wagon rattled by. “It’s the balloon, I think,” he told Alexander.
    His brother-in-law had not seen the hot-air balloon of Jack and Jacob Spratt floating over the Milldam that morning. He reached into his pocket and drew out a folded paper. “Perhaps,” he said, “you should read this.”
    Eben had to hold the paper before his eyes with both hands to keep it still. It was Alexander’s dry medical assessment, written neatly, like an official report:
    THE CASE OF 2ND LT. JAMES JACKSON SHAW, 32ND
    MASS. VOL., WOUNDED BY AN EXPLODING SHELL AT
    FIVE FORKS, VIRGINIA, APRIL 1, 1865
    The wound to the patient’s face has resulted in a complete loss of the bony and cartilaginous support of the nose. The tip of the nose has been drawn up and back until the nostrils and columella are so distorted that instead of looking downward, the interior nares look directly forward, giving a most dreadful appearance. The shattering of the patient’s jaw and the destruction of his tongue have resulted in the loss of articulate speech.
    Immediately after Lieutenant Shaw was carried to a hospital tent on the field, both arms were amputated at the wrist. Hooked prosthetic devices were later supplied in Philadelphia.
    The extensive wound to the face includes the loss of sight in the left eye. The patient’s mental condition is deeply distressing.
    Eben handed the note back without a word.
    Lieutenant Shaw and his wife, Isabelle, had come home to Nashoba at last, to live in the house of Isabelle’s parents, the Reverend Josiah Gideon and his wife, Julia.
    The Gideon house stood on a corner, its barn and outbuildings facing the