One child, a girl of seven, called for someone named Ruth.
The other was too young to tell Margaret where he had come from.
Catherine read the paragraph twice.
“Margaret never told me about children.”
“She tried,” Daniel answered.
“Look at the date.”
The letter had arrived during a week Catherine remembered vividly.
Richard had taken her to visit relatives, and a fever had confined her to bed for eleven days.
She remembered her husband reading her mail aloud because her eyes had hurt in the light.
He told her Margaret was unwell and growing confused.
He said the sisters should stop exchanging letters until Margaret recovered.
Catherine had believed him.
Or she had chosen to believe him, which was a different admission she was not yet ready to make.
The next letter had been written in Catherine’s own unmistakable penmanship.
It accused Margaret of inventing stories to embarrass the Blackwood family.
Catherine read aloud the final sentence.
“You are no longer welcome in my home or my life.”
Her voice broke.
“I never wrote this.”
Daniel pointed to the shape of the capital letter at the start of Margaret’s name.
“Your husband practiced it in a ledger.”
“How could you know?”
“I sharpened his pens and cleaned his desk.”
Daniel had discovered a sheet covered with variations of Catherine’s signature.
He had thought at first that the colonel was practicing a forgery for business purposes.
Only after finding the blue packet had he understood the greater purpose.
Margaret had continued writing after Catherine supposedly rejected her.
She described an agent named Silas Rook who moved people between plantations under false bills of sale.
She questioned why names vanished from county registers and reappeared in distant inventories.
She said Richard had threatened her with public ruin if she asked another question.
Then the letters stopped.
The final envelope carried a date six weeks before Margaret’s reported death.
Inside was a single unfinished page.
“I know what he did to the witnesses,” Margaret wrote.
“If I disappear, begin with the man who keeps the burial records.”
Catherine lowered the paper.
Her lips moved without sound.
For years she had told herself Margaret’s death came from an ordinary winter fever.
Richard had returned from the funeral with a physician’s note and a sealed coffin.
Catherine had not traveled because he said the roads were impassable.
Now the date on the envelope showed Margaret alive three days after the funeral supposedly took place.
