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Molly worked so hard to bring us up in the church after Mother and Daddy died, I didn't have the heart.
    With my fussing about Tilly I hope you're not getting the impression I am sorry to have her here. I am sorry, but only for her. Tilly deserves more from her sixteenth year than to be marooned on an ugly world full of unhappiness, heat and sickness. Selfishly I am glad she's come. She is so much company for me. As you know, Joseph rarely talks-at least not to me. Saving it for his beloved "men" I suppose. Even the simple right of an army wife to complain about rations and quarters is denied me. When I see the hardship of the prisoners and the soldiers I cannot bring myself to enjoy whining about my lot. The freshest meat and vegetables, the cleanest water (the cisterns beneath the fort are a dismal failure-salt water leaks in-drinking water must be brought by barge) come to the officers.
    We do try our best to see that the prisoner's lives are bearable. This war has made us keepers-if not literally, then very nearly so-of our brothers. Joseph's closest friend is one of the inmates here, Colonel Battersea. As fate would have it, the colonel was Joseph's instructor at West Point. They became friends when Joseph was a cadet-the colonel and Mrs. Battersea took him under their wing. Now they are in opposing armies and my husband's old mentor is his ward.
    The prisoners of war are to be released, but no one yet knows when. Colonel Battersea's wife has a wasting disease, and Joseph has been trying to affect his early release but has yet to succeed.
    Where was I? Ah yes: getting ready for our show. I'd secured the mirror and the lamplight from Tilly and was setting about trying to blot out with the paint pots the ravages of the years. I'm still as slim and upright as when last you saw me (being "condemned to barrenness," as Joseph so kindly puts it, has its compensations). My hair is no longer strictly light brown. There are marked incursions of white. But, by parting it left of center and wearing my braids wrapped round my head I can hide the worst of it. My skin is what gives me away as very nearly forty. Much as I try, the sun has me looking like the selfsame field hand Molly used to tell us we'd resemble if we didn't wear our bonnets.
    For a time I painted and primped and powdered-my work cut out for me as I've said. Tilly stood at my shoulder burbling with "compliments": "Oh, Raffia, you don't look nearly so old with rouge. You know, from a distance, if only there weren't all that gray in your hair, you could almost play the part as well as me."
    At that, I said, "No thank you. I am perfectly happy to be the shadowy background against which your brilliance can show all the more brightly." That kept her from heaping more coals of kindness on my head for a few minutes while she worked out whether I was being cutting or genuinely humble.
    Into my hard-won silence came another of those terrible screams, this one in a dying fall, almost as if it changed after it was uttered from the cry of a human being to the wail of the wind through the casemates. It gave me a turn, I don't mind telling you. I had that sudden cold and shaking sensation Molly told us came when "a goose steps on your grave." This was most definitely a whole flock stomping on mine. Tilly slammed the window and the change in the air upset the light. In the sudden dance of the flames my face didn't look like me.
    It frightened me so badly I did the only thing I could think of and yelled at Tilly for closing the sash with such violence.
    "I'm going out there," Tilly yelled back. She stepped behind the screen in the corner that I use for dressing. Bits of clothing flew over the top.
    "Don't you pull your skirt over your head," I warned her. The amount of paint on her face would ruin the fabric.
    She stuck her head out and said: "I'm not having everything spoiled after we've worked so hard." The fright the last cry had given us sliced years off her. She sounded like a