A disciplined widow, her zealot sister, and a pregnant Irish maid hold a dying Shenandoah plantation through the Civil War's last winter, sheltering a Black fugitive — until the night the men come home, bringing the war with them.

SYNOPSIS:

Late 1864. Three women hold the Hargrove estate together through the war's collapse: Cordelia, the widow-in-all-but-name running the books; her sister Beatrice, whose husband has stopped writing from camp; and Nora, the Irish maid whose own private's pay packet feeds the table. One sleet-bound night a Black traveller named Elias Walker knocks at the door with papers from a dead master and asks for shelter. Cordelia bolts him in the smokehouse. By morning the household has noticed his hands are too soft, his accent wrong, and a Confederate bounty for fugitive Yankee operatives still hangs at the post-office wall. They keep him anyway — through a long winter that ends when their men come home from the war.