1870, Philadelphia, USA.
Martha Whitcomb, the wild child of Philadelphia society, is now a grown woman, independent in wealth and in personality. At twenty-three, still unmarried and childless, she is exposed to constant rumors and ridicule, crushed...
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The sound of an infant wailing somewhere in the manor pulled Martha from her sleep and she sluggishly crawled out of bed, disentangling herself from her linens and exiting her bedroom without bothering to light a lamp or cover her feet with slippers. She made her way down the barely-lit hallway, hardly making a sound on the rug beneath her feet, until she found the source of the ruckus.
Charlotte paced up and down the hallway near the nursery, murmuring softly and gently bouncing little Johnny in her arms as she walked. The poor infant was still suffering from his fever and could not sleep through the night.
Martha hesitated, rubbing at her eyes before stepping closer to the pair. There was something odd about the way Charlotte moved, about the sound of her voice, though Martha could not say precisely what it was. When her sister-in-law turned to face her, however, Martha realized that the woman was also crying.
"It is ridiculous," Charlotte admitted, burying her face in the sleeve of her nightdress and attempting to wipe her eyes. "I had a dream-I know...I can't stop envisioning it-I know he is dead."
Martha shook her head vehemently, rejecting the idea in its entirety. "He is perfectly safe," she insisted, though that was a lie. There was no such thing as 'perfectly safe' in a war, after all. But William was not dead. The Overland Campaign had been finished for nearly eight months, and William was entrenched in Petersburg. If anything, he was simply bored and cold. Nothing more. Nothing. "Have you not realized yet that he is indestructible?" Yes, it was a silly thing to say. No man was, after all, and Charlotte had seen with her own eyes at Gettysburg exactly how destructible a man could be.
But Martha had to believe it. She had spent too many nights plagued by nightmares of her own. Sometimes she was on the battlefield, watching in horror as William was torn to shreds by a hail of bullets. Sometimes she saw Thomas in one of those Georgian fires, burning to nothing. Sometimes she was in Cedarvale after Chancellorsville, her sturdy, stoic father trembling with quiet sobs, her mother howling like the most frightful banshee until Martha's ears bled from the sound.
She would awaken with a spastic jerk of her limbs, sometimes realizing that she had let out a scream of her own in the black night. Her heart would hammer so hard it threatened to explode from her chest, an icy sweat prickling her skin like a hundred needles, her throat dry as a desert, and her cheeks wet from tears. But she would awaken. She would lay back against her pillows, staring up at the ceiling, too afraid to close her eyes for what she might see, and repeat to herself over and over again that William was alive, Thomas was alive, and they would return in that precise state.
"Is he?" Charlotte asked in a voice too much like a child's, a voice pleading for a fantasy in which to hide, for shelter from the haunting monsters. Her face was horrible in the glow of the lamp that rested on a nearby table, the very image of misery and terror.
Martha nodded insistently. "I promise," she said, stepping closer. "Would you like me to hold Johnny for a bit?" she offered, knowing the infant could get heavy but anticipating the likely response.
