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  I am writing to you tonight as I have been for several weeks, recalling stories of the war and those treacherous times of states’ rights and union,

  of slavery and freedom, of sacrifice and conviction, and of blood and great deprivation. I tell you this story with some trepidation, I must admit but I know that it is time for you to hear it all.

  Staring out into the darkness from my desk, I can smell the marsh on each warm breeze that meanders through my window. Thick with grasses and every insect that can battle tides and salt, the marsh’s scent is pure earth and water. Many find the scent abhorrent, but I find it strangely reassuring. Out there under the sky and blankets of stars on nights like this one, the land’s honesty whispers in contented tones like that of a comforted lover in tidal moonlight.

  The last weeks have passed slowly and I’ve had difficulty sorting bundles of memories tossed and tumbled like jetsam from an ocean floor where they’ve been resting for decades. Fingers of times-passed have become interlaced with today, 1891, and despite the lines in my face and the physical changes evident in the mirror, that young woman of the War three decades ago is in me. I will finally share the events that led up to that visit with Lydia, your father’s legal wife. You’ll see how this is our story of those months in 1862, and of the people who came from across time itself, I’m certain, as a reminder that we are made of spirit, and soul, as well as of flesh.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Northern Virginia Spring,1862.