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porch.
    “Life is always fleeting, Martise, and we pass through it quickly. This war will sweep it away even more quickly for thousands of young men, for the idealists, for the zealots. They will all fall before the fire. Hold on to this home of ours, Martise. Hold on tight, because the present will be whisked away by the winds of time, and such places are all that we will have to remember. It will be your heritage. Your children’s heritage.”
    She had made a vow to him then, not even understanding his words. She understood soon enough, however. Within a year and a half, he was killed, falling at Manassas in the opening stages of the war.
    Martise St. James. That much was true, she reflected. It was her name. But she wasn’t Lady St. James—that was Margaret. Margaret had married Martise’s cousin Aaron, the son of Martise’s uncle, her father’s older brother, Lord St. James. Then Aaron was Lord St. James and now …
    Now they were all gone. Aaron had fallen at Sharpsburg, and Margaret had died outside of Richmond of the typhus not a year later.
    She’d had to come here as Mary’s sister, for it was unlikely that Lord Creeghan would have allowed her if he knew that she was merely his deceased wife’s sister’s cousin-in-law.
    Margaret had been her friend, as close as Aaron, even though her cousin had led a very military life, being in the British service, fighting in Africa and then choosing to take on the fight of the Confederacy, joining up with the Rebs to fight with Lee. And in the midst of the decay and destruction of her country all around her, Martise had learned that Mary had died, too. After all of her startling letters, after the things that she had said and written. Mary, Margaret’s beautiful younger sister, carefree, a heartbreaker herself, being swept away by a man reported to be the catch of the season, the lord of Castle Creeghan. Mary, who was exactly the same age as Martise, who was her dear friend.
    Tears were stinging her eyes, Martise realized. She had woken up feeling maudlin, and she was grieving again, missing people she should have learned not to miss so dearly.
    Well, she was here. She was here now, and if she couldn’t change any of the horror that had ravaged her past, perhaps she could discover the truth about Mary. She owed it to her, and to Margaret, and even to Aaron. She had loved them.
    And she also needed the emerald. Desperately.
    Martise rubbed her eyes and rose and walked to the balcony doors, throwing them open. The wind swept in upon her. Beyond the parapets the sheer rocks and cliffs rose high, yet looking out, toward the east, she could see the sea, wild, gray, beautiful, thundering against the rocks with a power of its own. It was a stunning sight, she thought, as lovely as the green fields of home, in its way. The sky was clear and endlessly blue, yet offered up the harsh whisper of the wind, deceitful.
    She came back into the room and scrubbed her face, smiling. It was daylight. She was going to have no more fancies about Castle Creeghan. She was going to discover … things.
    But when she finished washing, she realized that her hands were trembling. She sat down at the foot of the bed, hugging her shoulders for warmth.
    She wanted very much to understand what had happened to Mary, and she also needed Mary’s property, because the emerald had to be among Mary’s things. It wasn’t as if she were stealing a Creeghan family jewel—the emerald belonged to the St. James family. Mary had seen Martise briefly before her marriage, and they had decided that Mary should take the jewel, which might be important in time, to Scotland, where it could not be seized by an angry enemy.
    Martise didn’t know the emerald’s exact value, but she knew that it was worth thousands of dollars. Enough to pay off the back taxes on Eagle’s Walk, and that was all that Martise cared about. Her father was gone, her mother had died years before the threat of war ever loomed over the