Margery pulled her mule to a halt and turned to face her. “Are you seriously asking me that question?”

Alice stared at her.

“And you want me to make you a librarian?”

It was the first time she had seen Margery laugh. She hooted like a barn owl, and was still laughing halfway back down to Salt Lick.

* * *

• • •

So how was it today?”

“It was fine, thank you.”

She didn’t want to talk about how her backside and thighs ached so badly that she had nearly cried lowering herself onto the seat of the lavatory. Or the tiny cabins they had passed, where she could see the inside walls were papered with sheets of newspaper, which Margery told her were “to keep the drafts out in winter.” She needed time to process the scale of the land she had navigated, the feeling, as they had picked a horizontal path through a vertical landscape, of being truly in the wild for the first time in her life, the huge birds, the skittering deer, the tiny blue skink lizards. She thought she might not mention the toothless man, who had sworn at them on the road, or the exhausted young mother with four small children running around outside, naked as the day they were born. But mostly the day had been so extraordinary, so precious, that she really didn’t want to share any of it with the two men.

“Did I hear you was riding out with Margery O’Hare?” Mr. Van Cleve took a swig of his drink.

“I was. And Isabelle Brady.” She didn’t mention that Isabelle had failed to turn up.

“You want to steer clear of that O’Hare girl. She’s trouble.”

“How is she trouble?”

She caught Bennett’s flashed look: don’t say anything.

Mr. Van Cleve pointed his fork at her. “You mind my words, Alice. Margery O’Hare comes from a bad family. Frank O’Hare was the biggest ’shiner between here and Tennessee. You’re too new to understand what that means. Oh, she might dress herself up in books and fancy words, these days, but underneath she’s still the same, just like the no-good rest of ’em. I tell you, there’s no decent ladies around here would take tea with her.”

Alice tried to imagine Margery O’Hare giving a flying fig about taking tea with any ladies. She took the plate of cornbread from Annie and put a slice on her plate before passing it on. She realized she was ravenously hungry, despite the heat. “Please don’t worry. She’s just showing me where to deliver the books.”

“I’m just saying. Mind you don’t hang around her too much. You don’t want her ways rubbing off on you.” He took two slices of cornbread and put half a slice straight into his mouth and chewed for a minute, his mouth open. Alice winced and looked away. “What kind of books are these, anyway?”

Alice shrugged. “Just . . . books. There’s Mark Twain and Louisa May Alcott, some cowboy stories and books to help around the home, recipes and suchlike.”

Mr. Van Cleve shook his head. “Half those mountain people can’t read a word. Old Henry Porteous thinks it’s a waste of time and tax dollars, and I have to say I’m minded to agree. And, like I said, any scheme with Margery O’Hare mixed up in it has to be a bad thing.”

Alice was about to speak up in Margery’s defense but a firm pressure from her husband’s hand under the table warned her off.

“I don’t know.” Mr. Van Cleve wiped away some gravy at the side of his mouth. “I’m pretty sure my wife would not have approved of a scheme like this.”

“But she did believe in charitable acts, Bennett tells me,” said Alice.

Mr. Van Cleve looked across the table. “She did, yes. She was a most godly woman.”

“Well,” Alice said, after a moment, “I do believe that if we can encourage godless families to read, we can encourage them to turn to scripture, and the Bible, and that can only be good for everyone.” Her smile was sweet and wide. She leaned forward over the table. “Can you imagine all those families, Mr. Van Cleve, finally able to truly grasp the word of God through a proper reading of the Bible? Wouldn’t that be a marvelous thing? I’m sure your wife would have had nothing but encouragement for something like that.”

There was a long silence.

“Well, yes,” said Mr. Van Cleve. “You could have a point.” He nodded, to suggest that that was the end of the matter, for now at least. Alice saw her husband deflate slightly with relief and wished she didn’t hate him for it.

* * *

• • •

Three days in, bad family or not, Alice had swiftly realized that she would rather be around Margery O’Hare than almost anyone else in Kentucky. Margery didn’t speak much. She was utterly uninterested in the slivers of gossip, veiled or otherwise, that seemed to fuel the women at the endless teas and quilting sessions Alice had sat in on up to now. She was uninterested in Alice’s appearance, her thoughts or her history. Margery went where she liked, and said what she thought, hiding nothing behind the polite courtly euphemisms that everyone else found so useful.

Oh, is that the English fashion? How very interesting.

And Mr. Van Cleve Junior is happy for his wife to ride alone in the mountains, is he? Goodness.

Well, perhaps you’re persuading him of the English ways of doing things. How . . . novel.

Margery behaved, Alice realized with a jolt, like a man.

This was such an extraordinary thought that she found herself studying the other woman at a distance, trying to work out how she had come to this astonishing state of liberation. But she wasn’t yet brave enough—or perhaps still too English—to ask.

Alice would arrive at the library shortly after seven in the morning, the dew still thick on the grass, waving aside Bennett’s offer to drive her in the motor-car and leaving him to breakfast with his father. She would exchange a greeting with Frederick Guisler, who was often to be found talking to a horse, like Margery, and then walk around the back where Spirit and the mule were tethered, their breath sending steam rising into the cool dawn air. The library shelves were almost finished now, stacked with donated books from as far away as New York and Seattle. (The WPA had put out a call to libraries to donate, and brown-paper parcels arrived twice a week.) Mr. Guisler had mended an old table donated by a school in Berea so that they had somewhere to lay the huge leather-bound ledger that listed books in and out. The pages were filling quickly: Alice discovered that Beth Pinker left at 5 a.m., and that before she met Margery each day, Margery had already done two hours’ riding, dropping books at remote homesteads in the mountains. She would scan the list to see where she and Beth had been.

    Wednesday 15th

 The Farley children, Crystal—four comic books