What she could see was prosaic enough: a bronze standing lamp, sections of a steel bookcase, rolled rugs, their patterns indecipherable. A few of the pieces of furniture were transported still swathed in their wrappings. Pat tried to make out their shapes and failed, catching only a glimpse of curved chair legs that ended in the characteristic Queen Anne ball. Perhaps the newcomers shared Jerry's love of old things, antique furniture, aged houses.

The fact that they had bought the house next door suggested that they did. Like her house, it was an anomaly on glossy, modern Magnolia Drive, with its rows of split levels and Williamsburg reproductions. Jerry had hated the new houses. A house wasn't even mature till it was a century old, he claimed, stressing the adjective as he always did when he had found a word that pleased him.

When they first came to Washington, ten years earlier, they had lived in an apartment for a while, but it soon became apparent that Mark's nine-year-old energies could not be confined within four walls, particularly walls built of plasterboard. He thundered up and down the stairs, smuggled in all the stray animals he encountered, bounced balls off passing neighbors (accidentally, of course), and generally raised Cain. They decided to hunt for a house. The prices in the District of Columbia were appalling, so they investigated the neighboring counties of Maryland and Virginia.

It wasn't until then that Pat realized her husband had a passion for old houses. He was a history buff, particularly interested in military history, and Pat had already tramped all the old battlegrounds within driving distance of Washington. She got a bad case of poison ivy at Bull Run, twisted her ankle at Gettysburg, and was stung by wasps at Yorktown, after Jerry, trying to locate the site of Rochambeau's unit, had disturbed a nest. But she had not known that Jerry's interest in the past extended to architecture until they found the house near Poolesville.