Le Petit Versailles
Confederate State of Louisiana
21st April 1862
Dear Mr O’Malley,
Your much sought-for letter received amidst great excitement. Cousin Constance was visiting and I trust you did not mind my reading to her the parts not intimate to you and I. She and Cordelia so begged me.
The gardens miss you and the magnolias – and other flowers too!
Of Father and my dear brothers there is no news yet. Perhaps they, like you, are marching, marching. Mother has taken the reins of running Versailles very admirably and to the surprise of all has succeeded wonderfully, following father’s written instructions. She has some trouble with Cupid, who so impudently spoke that ‘the Mistress could never be her Master’. Mother, to her credit, did not fail in administering the required remedy to the girl. She has now accepted that Mother is both Mistress and Master.
Cordelia enquires after you and Mr Joyce and Mr Moran.
We ladies send our affections to you all, who are our gallant protectors.
I am endeavouring to knit. It is tiresome but we hear reports that our army is short on socks.
I shall await hearing from you every day.
Emmy
Patrick, marvelling at the postal service, was in his element. The men spent much of their free time writing letters to loved ones. It was their lifeline to a previous life, a world once known – loved-ones, now framed in larger, more longed-for relief by the twin magnifiers of time and distance. But it was a retreating world – it retreating from them, they retreating even further from it.
A letter from home halted that retreat, reversed it momentarily. He wondered if, as war proceeded, railroad tracks ripped from the ground, deliveries intercepted, the old safe world would even further retreat.
For now, though, he was grateful. Grateful that the old world – the world of Emmeline, the girl he loved – had been delivered to his hand.