Chapter One

Savannah, December 1863

Early on a Sunday afternoon, Amelia Sarah Beach, twenty-four, sat stiffly in her family’s upstairs drawing room massaging her fingers while gazing down warily at the square pianoforte, said to have once belonged to Johann Christian Bach. Ordinarily the drawing room was the busiest in the great house. It lay between Amelia’s and sister Lucy’s bedrooms and was once their indoor playhouse. Now it had become a female social center, as one could tell by the surroundings: two dressmaker’s busts, a Wheeler& Wilson sewing machine, a letter-writing table, a fireplace to read and warm by, an ornate dollhouse the sisters couldn’t bring themselves to evict, and a golden harp that both had given up because its strings bruised their delicate fingers.

Amelia stared out of the large lace-curtained window at Madison Square across the street. Soon a parade of fresh army recruits would halt in the public garden for a last round of marshal music and speeches about honor and glory. Then several of Savannah’s finest families would cross the street, pass through the iron gate and into the Beach’s reception hall to sip tea and punch at the first “social” of the Christmas season and breathe in the reassurance that wartime Savannah was still unscathed in at least one gracious home.

Later, a few of the families with the most promising, eligible male progeny would proceed inside to dinner, followed by parlor games and the Chopin polonaise Amelia had been ordered by her mother to “practice until perfect.”

Downstairs was a noisy clatter of plates being placed on tables as Mrs. Beach clucked over her household maids. But today all was quiet in the upstairs drawing room save for the gold filigree mantle clock that ticked like a metronome and pinged punctiliously every half hour. Amelia stared out again at Madison Square, took a deep breath, and soon launched into the brisk, raucousI’m a Good Ol’ Rebel. She had begun thumping the even louderD