“You’re an idiot,” she whispered, but it was herself she spoke to, not him. She’d told him that she’d do everything she could to help him, if he was sure that being a minister was truly his vocation. She’d been schooled by priests and nuns; she knew what a vocation was. Only she hadn’t, really.

I’m sorry, he’d written in his note to her.

“No, I’m sorry,” she said aloud and, closing the book, sat for a few minutes, staring into the fire. The house was quiet around her, wrapped in that peaceful hour before the preparations for supper began.

She’d imagined him doing what he did on the Ridge, though more officially: listen to people who needed someone to hear them, advise the troubled, comfort the dying, christen children, marry people and bury them … but she hadn’t imagined him comforting men dying on a battlefield, in the midst of cannon fire, nor burying them afterward and coming home bloody, with a stranger’s shattered teeth in his pocket. But something had called to him, and he’d gone to do it.

And he had, thank God, come back to her. Come in need of her. She blew out a long, slow breath and, rising, went to slide the Bible back into its place.

Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?

“Well, there’s a rhetorical question,” she said. “There isn’t anybody else who can do that for him, is there?” She took a breath, and clean air from the sea came in through the open window.

“Send me.”

100

The Power of the Flesh

Savannah

THE SIEGE WAS LIFTED, the city largely untouched by battle, save cannonball holes and minor fires in the houses closest to the fighting. Savannah was a gracious city, and its grace was still evident, as people resumed their lives with very little fuss.

John Grey picked up the handkerchief that Mrs. Fleury had just dropped for the second time and handed it back, again with a bow. He didn’t think it was flirtation—if it was, she was very bad at it. She was also a good quarter century his elder, and while she was still sharp of both eye and tongue, he’d noticed how the spoon rattled in her saucer when she’d picked up her teacup earlier in the afternoon.

If her hands were palsied, though, her mind was not.

“That girl,” she said, pursing her lips toward Amaranthus, who stood on the other side of the room, in conversation with a young man he didn’t know. “Who is she?”

“That is Viscountess Grey, ma’am,” Grey said courteously. “My brother’s daughter-in-law.”

Mrs. Fleury’s slightly red-rimmed eyes narrowed in closer inspection.

“Where’s her husband?”

Grey felt the usual qualm in his innards at mention of Ben, but answered smoothly.

“My nephew had the misfortune to be captured by the rebels at the Brandywine, ma’am. We have had little news of him since, but hope that he will soon return to us.” Even if it’s in a box … Hal couldn’t stand much more uncertainty—and he would have to write to Minnie soon.