A clearing sky, a display of red, white, and blue, no more rain — with such favorable portents, why did his feeling of foreboding persist?

It was the families, he decided, the Mains and the Hazards. They had survived the war, but they were mangled. Virgilia, his sister, was lost to the rest of the family, self-exiled by her own extremism. It was particularly saddening because Virgilia was right here in Washington, although George didn't know where she lived.

Then there was his older brother, Stanley, an incompetent man who had piled up an unconscionable amount of money through war profiteering. Despite his success — or perhaps because of it — Stanley was a drunkard.

Matters were no better for the Mains. Orry's sister Ashton had vanished out in the West after being involved in an unsuccessful plot to overthrow and replace the Davis government with one that was more extreme. Orry's brother, Cooper, who had worked in Liverpool for the Confederate Navy Department, had lost his only son, Judah, when their homebound ship was sunk off Fort Fisher by a Union blockade squadron.

And there was his best friend's widow, Madeline, facing the struggle to rebuild her life and her burned-out plantation on the Ashley River, near Charleston. George had given her a letter of credit for forty thousand dollars, drawn on the bank in which he owned a majority interest. He'd hoped she would ask for more; most of the initial sum was needed for interest on two mortgages and to pay federal taxes and prevent confiscation of the property by Treasury agents already invading the South. But Madeline had not asked, and it worried him.

Even at this early hour, the horse-and-wagon traffic on the avenue was heavy. It was a momentous day and, if he could believe the sky and the soft breeze, it would be a beautiful one. Then why, even after isolating his anxieties about the two families, could he not banish the feeling of impending trouble?