“You will do no such thing,” said Aunt Judith as he pushed his chair back, he hearing in the imperative an echo of the former mistress of a plantation with one hundred slaves. “Arthurlene is in my employ, and has her duties. You are my kin, and have yours, which are”—more softly now—“to answer the questions I have for you, if you can, that is.”

“We’ll try,” Nathaniel said. “Would you mind if we asked you one first?”

“I shall try as well.”

“Do we have an uncle? Or did we?”

Aunt Judith looked down and tugged at her lace cuffs.

“Which side of your family are you speaking of?”

“Well, yours, of course. Mother’s. Did she have an older brother?”

Her gray eyes rose from her sleeve to linger momentarily on Nathaniel’s face before they shifted to Arthurlene, who, with her back to the room and both hands on a sash, half-turned to give Aunt Judith a startled look.

“Oh, dear. It’s that warped window again. Nathaniel, it appears a man’s strength is needed, after all.”

He got up and gave the window a heave, expecting resistance; but there was none, and it flew up to slam against the top of the sill.

“Gracious! Elizabeth has a Great Sandow for a son,” Aunt Judith flattered, when he sat down again.

Gracious! His mother’s favorite expression.

“I’m not that strong,” he said. “The window wasn’t stuck.”

“As to your question, did your mother ever mention having an older brother?”

“No, ma’am, but …”

“Well, that answers it, doesn’t it? If she did, surely she would have said so. Wherever did you get this notion?”

He told her Kincaid’s story, which she dismissed with a wave.

“That was quite a coincidence, your running into him, but I’m afraid that old man has mixed things up. Your grandfather would, of course, have been speaking about his daughter.”

“That’s what we figured, but if I’ve got everything straight, Mr. Kincaid overheard our grandfather talking before some battle that took place in the spring of 1862. So Mother would have been around six months old. Wouldn’t that have been kind of early for her to be speaking her first words?”

From Aunt Judith, a brittle laugh.