She’d had widows visit, grown children, a few elderly parents. One or two sisters, but not, until now, a nephew. Certainly not one who brought along his former high school teacher, who at this moment was feeling her way along the high ridge of open crates along the north wall, moving so quickly and decisively that she might have been a girl. A little worn, a little tired, but still slim and brisk, less like Sissy herself than like her own tall daughters, Joan, at eighteen, about to marry, and Clare, almost grown at sixteen. They had their father’s height and narrow build and couldn’t imagine, when they helped her into her capacious corset or repaired a gusset torn by her thick arms, that once she hadn’t looked so different from them. Hips, thighs, stomach—those slabs of flesh enclosing her now, leaving nothing untouched but her narrow wrists and ankles, had only begun to form when she was carrying Joan. Beneath the flesh that had accumulated through the sheer work of tending to them and her husband, Savery’s wife and children, their bills and farms and needs and injuries and illnesses—her real self had disappeared.

Then she’d inherited this project—and everything changed again. For whole days she sat in this room, absorbing all Savery had so patiently gathered and adding the scraps that continued to trickle in. Reading, making notes, drawing up plans and outlines; seldom actually writing but thinking, thinking, about what she would write—it made her feel that she too had been coppiced, her old thick self cut down to a clean stump, free to sprout fresh green wands.

“Would you have an outline?” the teacher asked. “A table of contents, perhaps? Your brother might have made some maps . . . ?”

As if those were for others to see. They were foundation, underpinnings, materials she’d draw on for the sturdy quilt that would in time surprise them all. Instead she offered the copies Izzy had sent to Savery in 1880, which were in a crate that had once held oranges. No, two crates—and they were behind the stack holding the letters saved by the young wife of the adjutant killed in ’64, and the brown hatbox sent by the officer who’d been college chaplain to three boys who’d enlisted together . . .

The room was so small that other crates had to be pulled out carefully, restacked and rearranged until finally—she asked her visitors to help—they reached the old orange crate and its companion, which had once held red wine. These she had Bernard balance on the corner of her working table. He reached for the sheaf of paper that lay on top, dusty and dotted with what she wished were bits of bark or leaves but were more likely mouse droppings.