December 20, 1860
Forty-six years later
Thad waited until the dancing was boisterous enough that no one would notice as he slipped away. Not far, not as far as he would have liked. Just into Jack’s library, right beside the ballroom. Where the music was just enough muted, where the lights were just enough dimmed. Where the world was just enough away. He moved over to the window that looked out on a skiff of fresh-fallen snow.
And he sighed.
He heard the sound of Gwyn’s slippers on the rug behind him, which brought a smile as it always did. Still, he sighed again as her arms slipped around his waist.
“What are you doing in here, my love? Marietta will want to dance with her granddad on her wedding day.”
His arms settled into their habitual place around her. “I know. I needed a few minutes.”
“You knew it was coming.” Her hand rubbed a circle on his back, but it couldn’t bring much comfort. Not yet. Not when the fracture was so new.
“I know. I had hoped, I had prayed…but there is no way around it now, sweet. Other states will follow South Carolina. The South will all have seceded in a matter of months. War is coming again.”
Now she was the one who sighed. “We are too old for all of this.”
“Speak for yourself, woman. I’m as spry as ever.” He straightened his spine in proof and decided not to look around for a chair to perch on. Instead, he tilted her face up with a finger under her chin and studied it in the moonlight. There were wrinkles now, to be sure. Each one earned from years of living well, loving always. And the same beautiful smile. The same fathomless Caribbean eyes. “You are lovelier than ever, Mrs. Lane.”
“And you more handsome, but that is not my point, as well you know.” She lifted up on her toes and pulled him down enough to brush a quiet kiss over his lips. “I know you. I know you will rouse the Culpers from their slumber. But you cannot be the one out scouting anymore, riding thither and yon to meet with anyone who might have information. Your place is where the congressman’s once was. Behind a desk.”
Blasted things, desks. “I know. But the question of who else to bring in…”
They turned together back to the door that she had left cracked open to the ballroom. Thad looked out to see all the most treasured people in his world. Jack, dancing with their Julie and smiling down at her in the same way he had since she was born when he was five—with total adoration. He could ask more of Jack, but he already had his place in the Ring and in the navy besides. Out on the waves that Thad so rarely ventured onto anymore. Each of their boys had his place too, doing what they could.
“Are you certain you need anyone else?”
“I am certain.” He pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “We have a different kind of enemy this time around, sweet, one that will stretch our resources to the breaking point.”
“What kind?” Worry saturated her tone, and her fingers twitched against him. When they got home, she would head straight for her ever-faithful secretaire and its fresh stacks of paper.
Thad watched the colorful twirl of dancers, hooped skirts swishing and swaying as his nieces and daughters and granddaughters, his neighbors and friends all celebrated with them. His gaze fell on Marietta. The youngest of Jack and Julie’s children, and the most exasperating. The one with the most potential yet with the most determination to ignore it. Perhaps that was why she was his favorite.
She was more beautiful than she ought to be in her white silk, with her scarlet curls arranged just so. And that too-practiced smile aimed, now, at her new husband’s brother.
He sighed. “Hez’s intuition was right. A secret society is operating for the South and placed all through the country, all with a Southern agenda.” He had yet to voice their name, afraid he might be wrong. But the invisible ink had revealed it to him just that morning, minutes before he read in the papers that South Carolina had seceded.
The Knights of the Golden Circle.
Gwyn shook her head. Not, he knew, in denial. But in a wish that it wasn’t so. “And you think to undermine them?”
“I cannot think how else to reunite our country but to quiet those who sow division.”
“How will we find them, Thad?”
His gaze followed Mari as her groom swept her up in a dance. As Lucien Hughes, too handsome, too charming, laughed with his precious granddaughter. Thad’s fingers curled into his palm. “I think, sweet, that they just found us.”