CHAPTER 7The house Phyllis had built on the site of the brick mansion the Federal troops had burned in their rape of Carolina was hardly in the tradition of the Low Country. It was tidewater Virginia, with its central Georgian unit, flanking two-story wings and lower connecting hyphens. Unlike most plantation houses built on high arched foundations for ventilation and protection against the miasmas rising from the damp soil, it hugged the pleasant rise of the ground before its velvet terraces swept down to the marsh-fringed river. Even the familiar pillared portico was different from Low Country porticoes. It was semi-circular, full two stories high, but its fluted Corinthian columns rested on the pink-stone flagged earth and were lost in a riotous girdle of the magenta azaleas that most C
