windows. It took no imagination at all to picture women in hoop skirts strolling across the grass, or gentlemen in frock coats sitting on the porch discussing the possibility of secession while silent black servants served cool drinks.
Flowers grew everywhere, climbing up trellises, spilling over the borders of brick-edged beds. The heady smells of gardenia, magnolia, and roses perfumed the air.
A Confederate flag, faded and ragged at the edges, hung from a white pole in the center of the front lawn.
Beyond the house, she could see neat stone buildings. What once were slave quarters, smokehouse, summer kitchen-she could guess that much. The lawn stretched back to acre after acre of flat, fertile land thick with cotton. She saw a single tree in the center of one of the fields, a huge old cypress left standing either through laziness or sentiment.
For some reason that-just that single tree-brought tears to her throat. The simple majesty of it, the endurance it symbolized, touched her in some deep corner of her heart. Surely it had stood there for more than a century, watching over the rise and fall of the South, the struggle for a way of life, and the ultimate end of it.
How many spring plantings had it seen, how many summer harvests?
She shifted her gaze back to the house. It, too, symbolized continuity and change, and the stately elegance of the Old South that so many from the north thought of as indolence. Babies had been born there, grown up and died there. And the rhythm of this quiet spot on the delta went on. And on. The slow pulse of their culture and traditions survived.
The proof was here, just as it was in her grandmother's house, in those houses and farms and fields dotting the road into Innocence. And in Innocence itself.
She wondered why she was just beginning to understand that.
When she saw Tucker come out the front doorway to stand on the porch, she wondered if she was beginning to understand him as well. She got the car moving again, eased it around the island of peonies, and stopped.
'The way you were sitting back there on the drive, I was beginning to think you'd changed your mind.'
'No.' She opened the car door and stepped out. 'I was just looking.'
He was doing some looking of his own, and decided not to speak until the fingers squeezing his heart loosened up. She was wearing a thin white dress, with a full skirt he imagined would billow gloriously in a breeze. Two finger-width straps held it over her shoulders and left her arms bare. There was a necklace of polished stones around her throat. Her hair was sleeked back to set off matching stones that dangled from her ears. She'd done something mysterious and female to her face, deepening her eyes, darkening her mouth.
As she mounted the steps toward him, he caught the first whiff of her light, tempting scent.
He took her right hand in his left, and turned her slowly in a circle under the arch of his arm, as if in a dance. It made her laugh. When he saw how low the dress dipped in the back, he swallowed hard.
'I've got to tell you something, Caroline.'
'All right.'
'You're ugly.' He shook his head before she could comment. 'That's just something I had to get out of my system.'
'It's an interesting approach.'
'My sister's idea. It's supposed to keep women from falling in love with me.'
Why did he always make her want to smile? 'It could work. Are you going to ask me in?'
He traded her left hand for her right. 'It seems like I've been waiting a long time to do just that.' He led her to the door, opened it. Pausing, he studied her, wanting to see how she looked in the doorway-his doorway-with flowers and magnolia trees at her back. She looked, he realized, perfect.
'Welcome to Sweetwater.'
The moment she stepped inside, Caroline heard the shouting.
'If you've gone and asked somebody to come and sit at my table, the least you can do is set it.' Delia stood at the base of a curving stairway, one hand braced on a mahogany newel post, the other on her sturdy hip.
'I said I would, didn't I?' Josie's voice tumbled down the steps. 'I don't know what you're in such a god-awful lather about. I'm going to finish putting my face on, then I'll get to it.'
'Way she's messing around with those paints, it'll get set next week.' Delia turned. The righteous indignation on her face gave way to curiosity when she spotted Caroline. 'Well now, you're Edith's grandbaby, aren't you?'
'Yes, I suppose I am.'
'Edith and I, we used to have ourselves some nice chats out on her front porch. You favor her a bit, 'round the eyes.'
'Thank you.'
'This is Delia,' Tucker announced. 'She takes care of us.'
'I've been trying for the best part
'I'd be happy to do it,' Caroline began, but Delia was already pulling her along the hallway toward the living room.
'No sir, you'll do no such thing. Tucker peeled the potatoes and that girl's going to set out the china. Least she can do after asking that dead doctor to dinner.' She patted Caroline's arm then scurried off toward the kitchen.
'Ah… dead doctor?'
Tucker grinned, strolling over to an antique walnut server for the sherry. 'Pathologist.'
'Oh, Teddy. He's certainly an… interesting character.' She took a slow sweep of the room with its tall windows, lace curtains, Turkey carpets. The twin settees, as she was sure they were called, were in misty pastels. Cool colors predominated in the subtle stripes of the wallpaper, the hand-worked pillows, the plump ottoman. The richness of antiques melded with it. On the mantel above the white marble fireplace was a Waterford vase filled with baby roses.
'This is a lovely house.' She took the glass he offered. 'Thank you.'
'I'll give you the grand tour sometime. Tell you the whole history.'
'I'd like to hear it.' She walked to the window where she could look out at the garden and beyond to the fields and the old cypress. 'I didn't realize you farmed.'
'We're planters,' he corrected her as he came up behind her. 'Longstreets have been planters since the eighteenth century-right after Beauregard Longstreet cheated Henry Van Haven out of six hundred acres of prime delta farmland in a two-day poker game down in Natchez in 1796. It was in a bawdy house called the Red Starr.'
Caroline turned. 'You made that up.'
'No ma'am, that's just the way my daddy told it to me, and his daddy to him, and so on since that fateful April night in ninety-six. 'Course it's just speculation about the cheating part. The Larssons put in that bit-they're by way of being cousins of the Van Havens.'
'Spoilsports,' Caroline said, smiling.
'Could be that, or it could be the God's truth, but neither changes the outcome.' He was enjoying the way she looked at him, her lips tilted up just a little, her eyes laughing. 'Anyhow, Henry got so irritated about losing the land, he tried to ambush old Beau when Beau finished celebrating with one of the Starr's best girls. Her name was Millie Jones.'
Caroline sipped and shook her head. 'You ought to write short stories, Tuck.'
'I'm just telling you the way it was. Now, Millie was pleased with Beau's performance-did I mention that the Longstreets have always been known as exceptional lovers?'
'I don't believe you did.'
'Documented, through the ages,' Tucker assured her. He loved the way laughter brightened her eyes, softened her mouth. If he hadn't had a story to tell, by God he would've made one up. 'And Millie, being grateful for Beau's stamina-and the extra five-dollar gold piece he'd left on the night stand, went on over to the window to wave him off. It was she who spotted Henry in the bushes with his flintlock loaded and ready. At just the right
