Thaddeus Bird and Priscilla Bowen were married at eleven o’clock in the morning in the Episcopal Church opposite the Faulconer County Bank in the main street of Faulconer Court House. It had been threatening rain since dawn, but the weather stayed dry through most of the morning and Priscilla had dared to hope that the rain would hold off altogether, but a half hour before the ceremony the heavens opened. Rain seethed on the church roof, splashed on the graveyard, flooded the main street and drenched the schoolchildren who, in honor of their teachers’ wedding, had been given a morning off to attend the service.

Priscilla Bowen, nineteen years old and an orphan, was given away by her uncle who was the postmaster in the neighboring town of Rosskill. Priscilla had a round face, a quick smile and a patient disposition. No one would have called her beautiful, yet after a few moments in her company no one would have dismissed her as plain either. She had light brown hair, which she wore in a tight bun, hazel eyes, which were half hidden by steel-rimmed spectacles, and work-roughened hands. For her wedding she carried a spray of redbud blossoms and wore her best Sunday gown of blue-dyed cambric on which, in celebration of the day, she had pinned a garland of white handkerchiefs. Thaddeus Bird, who was twenty years older than his bride, wore his best black suit, which he had carefully mended himself, and a smile of deep content. His niece, Anna Faulconer, was present, but his sister stayed in her bedroom in Seven Springs. Miriam Faulconer had fully intended to be at the wedding, but the threat of rain and the onslaught of a cold wind had brought on a sudden attack of neuralgia complicated by asthma, and so she had remained in the big house where the servants banked the fires and burned niter papers to relieve her labored breath. Her husband was somewhere beyond the Shenandoah Valley, leading his cavalry raid, and that absence, if the truth were to be told, was why Pecker Bird had chosen this day for his wedding.