Stranger in Savannah [antikvár]

ONEJust after first light in early January of the new year 1854, Natalie sensed from the odd, white glare as soon as her eyes flew open that it had snowed in the night. Her impulse was to leap out of bed, run to open the shutters, and fill her eyes with the clean, crystalline wonder of her world gone white outside along the high cliffs of the Etowah River in the Georgia up-country. Instead she peered carefully at Burke, still sleeping beside her, then eased herself silently out of the warm bed into the icy room. A little cold never hurt anyone, she thought, hurrying in her bare feet to tilt the louvers of the shutters at their bedroom window just enough to see that inches of thick, glorious snow covered everythingBurke's woodpile in the corner of the still trackless front yard, her hydrangea bushes and the pine-straw walk out to the road that led to Miss Lib Stiles's house. Best of all, she liked the unpredictable way snow stacked itself on tree branches, sometimes in rounded heaps, sometimes in almost bladelike ridges of glistening flakes that didn't make it all the way to the ground.There was far too much snow for Burke even to think of riding into Cartersville to work on the store he was building, and if she were to rescue her friend Mary Cowper Stiles from her parents' cruelty, this was the day to try. Burke would be at home to play with Callie before and after her lessons with Mary Cowper and Natalie would be free to undertake the vital mission she'd put off for weeks.If I stall one more day, she told herself, still devouring the clean, white beauty through the barest slit in the shutter, I won't stand a chance of convincing Miss Lib. She's getting more and more distant every day and harder to talk to. Today, though, with Burke here to occupy Callie before her tutoring session,