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been married before?” Maddie called.
    Lucinda’s muttered response was just loud enough to carry into the bedroom. “And she’s doing it a second time?”
    “Yes, I was, and he was such a sweet boy.” Edwina stared up at the ceiling and tried to picture Shelly’s face as he had appeared nine years ago on their wedding day. Both scarcely seventeen and oh, so foolish. “He looked so handsome in his sword and sash.”
    “One does get pulled in by the uniform,” Maddie mused. “Angus is with the Tenth Hussars. Assuming he’s still alive.”
    Barely listening, Edwina let her thoughts drift back to those early days, when hope and southern pride had flowed through the South like summer wine until they’d all become drunk on Confederate patriotism.
    It had been a summer wedding. They’d held it in the garden under the wisteria arbor. Bees had droned in the flower beds, and the air had been heady with the scent of sweet alyssum and dianthus and stocks.
    Then had come the wedding night, and the realization that she had made a terrible mistake in marrying a childhood friend who was more like a brother than a sweetheart. After that one fumbling, awkward night—the memory of which still gave Edwina the shivers—poor Shelly had marched off in his smart gray uniform, only to return four months later, minus a leg.
    “What happened to him?” Maddie asked.
    “Gangrene.” Edwina didn’t want to think of those last horrid weeks—day after day watching him waste away—the suffering, the stench, the awful emptiness in his eyes. “It near broke my heart.”
    Pru snapped the wrinkles out of a skirt with such vigor it sounded like the crack of a whip in the small room. “You only married that poor boy because he was your friend,” she reminded Edwina. “He had no one else to wave him off to war, and you felt sorry for him.”
    “Maybe I shouldn’t have married him, Pru. But I loved him.” Tears welled up—for herself, for Shelly, for all the lost dreams. “Why did everything have to change? I wish that wretched war had never happened.”
    Pru paused in her packing to look at her.
    “Except for the slavery thing,” Edwina amended with a halfhearted wave of one hand. “Naturally I wanted that to stop.”
    “We English ended that nasty practice years ago, thank heavens.”
    “After,” Lucinda pointed out to the Englishwoman, “you introduced that nasty practice here.”
    “No matter how it ended,” Pru cut in, “on behalf of freed slaves everywhere, I just thank the Lord it’s over.”
    “On behalf of Yankees everywhere,” Lucinda quipped, “you’re welcome.”
    “Ha!” Sitting up, Edwina glared at her sister, still piqued by her callous, if true, remarks about Shelly. “You were never a slave, Pru, and don’t pretend you were.”
    “My mother was.”
    “And our father was a slave to her.” Edwina saw her sister’s face tighten and knew she’d misspoken. Despite their friendship with Lucinda and Maddie, Pru still insisted they not discuss their shared father. Anger seeping away, Edwina put her hand on her sister’s arm. “Please, Pru, let’s not get into that again. The war’s been over for five years. There’s even a man of color in the Congress. Can’t we finally put slavery to rest?”
    “Half color. And Mr. Revels was never a slave.” Pausing in her folding, Pru looked at the far wall, her expression troubled. “I try. But then I see all those bewildered Negroes wandering through the towns we pass, and I get angry all over again. They can’t read or write, Edwina. They have no training to start new lives. Someone should help them—do something.”
    Edwina studied her sister, feeling that pang of sympathy warring with her impatience. Freed slaves weren’t the only ones left bereft and bewildered. The South had been utterly destroyed. Thousands upon thousands had died. What more could be done to right that terrible wrong? Kill thousands more? “Here’s an idea, then,” she