“Then we should have told her that,” said Eliot, remembering that he’d been relieved by the foreman’s rejection; when he’d seen the benches crowded with whey-faced women and children shucking amid steam and stink, he’d shuddered.

“Sure, but then we would have had to have come right out and begged her for the money, and Braithwaites don’t beg,” Nathaniel said. “The way we did it, we sort of nudged her into volunteering.”

Really, he rationalized further, the only lies they’d told were to say that they’d been on their way to Beaufort to visit Aunt Judith and that their mother had spoken highly of her, and those untruths, because they made her feel good, fell on the white end of the spectrum.

“Oh, yeah? Wonder what your true-blue, two-cent magazine hero would say to that.”

“Frank Merriwell doesn’t exist,” Nathaniel said.

Although it was two hours to sundown, an electric chandelier, augmented by a candelabra, burned in the dining room, for its windows also had been shuttered. Bathed, combed, the boys looked as presentable as they could at dinner, a Carolina low-country feast of rice and yams, fried chicken and baked ham and okra and fluffy rolls dusted with powdered sugar. Aunt Judith, changed out of her dark blue dress into a dark red one, presided at the head of the table but ate very little. Her digestion wasn’t what it used to be, she complained.

The questions she had for them were not asked. Instead, she launched into a monologue about Marshlands, the rice plantation she and her first husband, one Caleb Maxey, had owned near Port Royal. Without bitterness but in the neutral voice of an historian, she spoke of its destruction by the Federal fleet that had blockaded Port Royal Sound in the fall of 1861, just before their mother was born, and of the Union occupation of Beaufort after the Confederate garrison on Hilton Head Island surrendered, the city becoming, for all practical purposes, a Northern outpost, what with bluecoats everywhere and their general, Stevens, headquartered on Bay Street, and sea-island slaves walking freely about among their former masters, emancipated by Yankee bayonets two years before Mr. Lincoln issued his famous proclamation. She told them about the Episcopal church turned into a military hospital, where she served as a volunteer, and oh, the suffering and horrors she had witnessed: doctors sawing off limbs on tombstones torn from the church graveyard to be used as operating tables, Southern blood and Yankee blood mingling to stain and blot the names of the long dead. Finally, she gave a sketch of their grandfather, her brother-in-law: his acumen in business (he’d started a successful cotton and indigo brokerage two years before the war), his handsome appearance, and his bravery. But she did not say a word about their grandmother, and they didn’t ask, because she never gave them a chance.