“Hosea said that I had given him something that no one and no amount of whippings could take away,” she resumed. “He told me that he’d had something in the nature of a revelation while the strokes were being laid on him. ‘They can’t unlearn me,’ was what he had thought. ‘They can whup me till I faint, but they can’t unlearn me. Only way they can is to whup me till I’m dead.’ Such, he said, had been my gift to him, and when the time came, he felt he owed it to me as much as to himself to make the most of it. I shall always treasure that letter. Would you boys care to see it, as proof positive that I am not the prejudiced witch who would have denied your mother her happiness? Who would have said what she claims I did?”

“We never thought that of you,” Nathaniel reassured her, leaving unspoken the brutal truth that, busy with their own lives, he and his brothers had never thought anything about her, one way or the other.

“Considering what your mother told you about me, I don’t see how you couldn’t have.”

He said nothing.

“Her welfare was always my first concern,” Aunt Judith carried on, and Nathaniel was beginning to feel a double irritation: with Drew for the clumsy, stupid frankness that had hurt her feelings, and with her for being hurt to the degree she appeared to be. These Southerners, he thought, were oversensitive to slight.

“I did more than give her my consent, I gave her my blessings.”

“Yes, ma’am. You told us that.”

“It was plain that your father was the very best she could do.”

He wasn’t sure he liked the tone of that, but kept silent.

Eliot did not like the tone, either, and seeking Aunt Judith’s meaning, asked if she was referring to all the men who had been disabled by the war. Their mother had mentioned how Beaufort was in those days: Confederate veterans with empty sleeves and trouser legs and barely a dollar in their pockets.

“Yes, that was true.”

“But you didn’t mean the boys closer to our mother’s age?” Eliot inquired, cautiously. “The ones who’d been too young to fight in the war? I’ll bet she could have had any one of them she wanted. She must have been awful good-looking—she still is.”

“Yes, Eliot, but her looks … That wasn’t the issue.…” She stopped herself, her lips, with their whiskerlike wrinkles, continuing to move silently. Suddenly, sharply gavelling the floor with her cane, she turned in her chair to look away at a point in space.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave now. Please.”

“Aunt Judith, did I say—”