She remembered a moment from her childhood, the one transfixing moment of her past. She was riding in a carriage, dressed in a plain white dress, seated beside her mother who was not yet dead. She was safe. She was in Virginia, where she had been born.

Her mother’s golden hair was lit by the reflection from an elaborate lavender silk dress, her skirts voluminous and extravagantly decorated. She drove a large and simple carriage, and Catherine sat in the front seat, between her mother and a man, a military man who was not her father. In her memory, as it came to her, she could not see his face. Behind them, straight as pins, sat three other young men, cadets, smartly dressed in tight wool uniforms with epaulets and braids and stripes.

It had rained on the way, a quick, fierce downpour, and the hood of the carriage had been drawn over, and the rain fell even though the sun never stopped shining on them, such a thick rain she had barely been able to see as far as the horses’ steaming flanks. Then, miraculous and beautiful, the rain had stopped and the hood had been drawn back by one of the young men so the sweet cool air had flowed around them. The hood sprinkled her mother’s hair with tiny droplets, and her mother had laughed in a charming way. It was such a clear memory, the sound of it. That and the weather and the storm itself had been nice. Lovely, long ago.

The young soldier behind her had whispered in Catherine’s ear and pointed as a rainbow appeared. She could still smell, all these years later, the sweet sweat of his young body in his immaculate uniform. She could remember it better than all the rest of her childhood, better than the mountains of Virginia that lay beyond where the rainbow shone. She could feel his voice vibrating against the thin bones of her chest, a deep tingling beneath her skin. He whispered something about a pot of gold that was meant to lie waiting for her, just there at the rainbow’s end.