* * *

Evangeline waited half an hour, until she was absolutely certain Scully wouldn’t get up for some reason, then opened her trunk and took out a sturdy white flannel nightgown. The cloth was cold, although Scully had brought the baggage inside soon after their arrival, and she bit her lip at the prospect of laying the fabric against her bare flesh. Hovering near the fireplace, she held the garment before her, hoping the banked fire would warm it a little. She would have preferred to get into bed wearing all her clothes, but she was determined not to let her standards slip just because she’d come to a such remote place. If nothing else, she must set a good example for Abigail.

Still, the night was bitter. In the end, she compromised by shedding her dress and petticoats, then pulling the nightgown on over her drawers and camisole. She fairly dived under the covers, trembling violently as she settled into the icy sheets.

Abigail stirred beside her, smiling a little in the grip of some sweet dream, and Evangeline was heartened. She said a silent prayer and closed her eyes, waiting for sleep, yearning for it, but her mind’s eye was full of Scully.

She supposed it was natural enough to think about him; he was very attractive, in a rugged sort of way, and quite different from any man she had ever known. Not, of course, that she had known many—she didn’t remember her father at all, since he’d died when she was an infant, and her mother had passed on soon after. She’d grown up in a foundling home, St. Theresa’s, in Philadelphia, where boys and girls were kept carefully separate. Then, when she was sixteen, Clara Keating, Charles’s warm-hearted wife, had come to collect her, one sunny spring day, had chosen her from the midst of several hopeful candidates, and taken her home to help with the house and garden.

There, she had come to know Mott, who had inherited neither his mother’s merry nature nor his father’s quiet and kindly ways. Indeed, had Evangeline thought the Keatings’ only child representative of men in general, she would have joined a convent.

The next year, when Evangeline was seventeen, the war had erupted, but for a time it had seemed almost unreal, a series of faraway events, a gruesome and ongoing story, something Charles read about in the newspapers and Clara prayed over in church on Sundays and many times during the week. Then, young men began to march away, proud of their new blue uniforms and gleaming brass buttons, their sturdy boots and government rifles. They were so certain of glory, that first crop of boys, so confident of their ability to put things right before the summer was through.

Evangeline still ached, remembering them. For all that, it was more painful still to recall the men who eventually returned—shell-shocked and somber at best, sealed into cheap pine boxes at worst. Those in between were blind or deaf, missing arms and legs and cherished dreams, all innocence lost to them forever. Although she’d tended the wounded tirelessly, under Clara’s tutelage, she had never entertained—well—thoughts about them. Not of the unsettling sort she was having about Scully, at least.