Now she was the one who sighed. “We are too old for all of this.”
“Speak for yourself, woman. I’m as spry as ever.” He straightened his spine in proof and decided not to look around for a chair to perch on. Instead, he tilted her face up with a finger under her chin and studied it in the moonlight. There were wrinkles now, to be sure. Each one earned from years of living well, loving always. And the same beautiful smile. The same fathomless Caribbean eyes. “You are lovelier than ever, Mrs. Lane.”
“And you more handsome, but that is not my point, as well you know.” She lifted up on her toes and pulled him down enough to brush a quiet kiss over his lips. “I know you. I know you will rouse the Culpers from their slumber. But you cannot be the one out scouting anymore, riding thither and yon to meet with anyone who might have information. Your place is where the congressman’s once was. Behind a desk.”
Blasted things, desks. “I know. But the question of who else to bring in…”
They turned together back to the door that she had left cracked open to the ballroom. Thad looked out to see all the most treasured people in his world. Jack, dancing with their Julie and smiling down at her in the same way he had since she was born when he was five—with total adoration. He could ask more of Jack, but he already had his place in the Ring and in the navy besides. Out on the waves that Thad so rarely ventured onto anymore. Each of their boys had his place too, doing what they could.
“Are you certain you need anyone else?”
“I am certain.” He pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “We have a different kind of enemy this time around, sweet, one that will stretch our resources to the breaking point.”
“What kind?” Worry saturated her tone, and her fingers twitched against him. When they got home, she would head straight for her ever-faithful secretaire and its fresh stacks of paper.
Thad watched the colorful twirl of dancers, hooped skirts swishing and swaying as his nieces and daughters and granddaughters, his neighbors and friends all celebrated with them. His gaze fell on Marietta. The youngest of Jack and Julie’s children, and the most exasperating. The one with the most potential yet with the most determination to ignore it. Perhaps that was why she was his favorite.
She was more beautiful than she ought to be in her white silk, with her scarlet curls arranged just so. And that too-practiced smile aimed, now, at her new husband’s brother.
He sighed. “Hez’s intuition was right. A secret society is operating for the South and placed all through the country, all with a Southern agenda.” He had yet to voice their name, afraid he might be wrong. But the invisible ink had revealed it to him just that morning, minutes before he read in the papers that South Carolina had seceded.
The Knights of the Golden Circle.
Gwyn shook her head. Not, he knew, in denial. But in a wish that it wasn’t so. “And you think to undermine them?”
“I cannot think how else to reunite our country but to quiet those who sow division.”
“How will we find them, Thad?”
His gaze followed Mari as her groom swept her up in a dance. As Lucien Hughes, too handsome, too charming, laughed with his precious granddaughter. Thad’s fingers curled into his palm. “I think, sweet, that they just found us.”
Discussion Questions
1. When Gwyneth witnesses the horrors of the first chapter, she responds by obeying her father but at the cost of her mental and physical health. How would you have reacted? Would you have fled as he commanded or stayed and sought justice?
2. Thad has an intuition, an attuning to the Spirit, that often leads him to the place he needs to go at a specific time. Have you ever known anyone who seems to do this? Have you ever heard the whisper of the Spirit leading you in this way?
3. Who is your favorite character and why?
4. Family plays an important role for the characters in Whispers from the Shadows, both in how they support us and how they can hinder us. Which aspects best encompass your own family experiences?
5. Gwyneth works through the trauma of her father’s murder by drawing and painting. What do you do to deal with stressors? What did you think of her method?
6. Thad tells Gwyneth that “we are all broken.” In what way is that true of each of the characters? How is it true for you?
7. Do you think Thad did the right thing in marrying Peggy? Why or why not?
8. Rosie helps Gwyneth see that she has put her trust and found her rest in a fallible man rather than our infallible God. Have you ever relied too much on a person? Who, and in what way? What was the outcome?