• WPA, The WPA Guide to Kentucky

Winter had come hard to the mountain, and Margery wrapped herself around Sven’s torso in the dark, hooking her leg around him for extra warmth, knowing that outside there would be four inches of ice to hack out of the top of the well and a whole bunch of animals waiting bad-temperedly to be fed and that these two facts, every morning, made the last five minutes under the huge pile of blankets all the sweeter.

“Is this your way of trying to persuade me to make the coffee?” Sven murmured sleepily, lowering his lips to her forehead, and shifting, just so she could be assured of quite how sweet he found it too.

“Just saying good morning,” she said, and let out a long, contented breath. His skin smelled so good. Sometimes when he wasn’t there she would sleep wrapped in his shirt, just to feel him near her. She trailed her finger speculatively across his chest, a question he answered silently. The minutes crept by pleasurably until he spoke again.

“What’s the time, Marge?”

“Um . . . a quarter to five.”

He groaned. “You do realize that if you’d stay with me we could get up a whole half-hour later?”

“And it would be just as hard to do it. Plus Van Cleve would no more let me near his mine, these days, than he would ask me to take tea at his house.”

Sven had to admit she had a point. The last time she had come to see him—bringing a lunch pail he had forgotten—Bob at the Hoffman gate had informed her regretfully that he had specific orders not to let her in. Van Cleve had no proof, of course, that Margery O’Hare had anything to do with the legal letters about blocking the strip mining of North Ridge, but there were few enough people who had either the resources—or the courage—to have been behind it. And her public crack about the colored miners had plainly stung.

“So I guess it’ll be Christmas here, then,” he said.

“All the relatives as usual. A packed house,” she said, her lips an inch from his. “Me, you, um . . . Bluey over there. Down, Blue!” The dog, taking his name as a sign that food was imminent, had hurled himself onto the bed and across the coverlet, his bony legs scrabbling on top of their entwined bodies, licking their faces. “Ow! Jeez, dog! Oh, that’s done it. Okay. I’ll make the coffee.” She sat up and pushed him away. She rubbed sleep from her eyes and detached regretfully the hand that had slid around her stomach.

“You saving me from myself, Bluey boy?” Sven said, and the dog rolled over between them, tongue lolling, for his belly to be tickled. “Both of you, huh?”

She grinned as she heard him fussing over the dog, the damn fool, and kept grinning the whole way into the kitchen, where she stooped, shivering, to light the range.

* * *

• • •

So, tell me something,” Sven said, as they ate their eggs, their boots entwined under the table. “We spend nearly every night together. We eat together. We sleep together. I know how you like your eggs, the strength of your coffee, the fact that you don’t like cream. I know how hot you run your bath, the way you brush your hair forty strokes, tie it back and then don’t look at it a lick for the rest of the day. Hell, I know the names of all your animals, even that hen with the blunt beak. Minnie.”

“Winnie.”

“Okay. Nearly all your animals. So what is the difference between us living like this and doing it but just with a ring on your finger?”

Margery took a swig of her coffee. “You said we weren’t going to do this any more.” She tried to smile, but there was a warning underneath it.

“I’m not asking, I promise. I’m just curious. Because it seems to me there’s not a whole heap of difference.”

Margery put her knife and fork together on her plate. “Well, there is a difference. Because right now I can do what I like and there’s not much anyone could do about it.”

“I told you that wouldn’t change. I’d hope you know after ten years that I’m a man of my word.”

“I do. But it’s not just freedom to act without having to ask permission, it’s freedom in my head. The knowledge that I’m answerable to nobody. To go where I want. Do what I want. Say what I want. I love you, Sven, but I love you as a free woman.” She leaned over and took his hand. “You don’t think knowing that I’m here purely because I want to be—not because some ring says I have to be—is a greater kind of love?”

“I understand your reasoning.”

“Then what?”

“I think.” He pushed his plate away. “I guess I’m just . . . afraid.”

“Of what?”

He sighed. Turned her hand over in his. “That one day you’ll tell me to go.”

How could she convey to him how wrong he was? How could she let him know that he was in all ways the finest man she had known and that the few months she had spent without him had made every day feel like the bleakest winter? How could she tell him that even now, ten years in, him simply resting a hand on her waist made something buck and spark inside her?

She got up from the table and placed her arms around his neck, her seat upon his lap. She rested her cheek against his, so that her words were murmured in his ear. “I will never, ever tell you to go. There is no chance of that happening, Mr. Gustavsson. I will be with you, day and night, for as long as you can stand me. And you know I never say anything I don’t mean.”

He was late to work, of course. He struggled to feel bad about it all day.

* * *

• • •

A holly wreath, a corn-husk doll, a pot of preserved fruit or a bracelet of polished stone; as Christmas drew closer, the girls would return each day with small thank-you gifts from the homes they visited. They pooled them at the library building, agreeing that something should be given to Fred Guisler for his support over the past six months but that bracelets and dollies were probably a little wide of the mark. Margery suspected there was only one gift that would make him happy, and that was something he was unlikely to put on his Christmas list.

Alice’s life now seemed to revolve around the library. She was fiercely efficient, had memorized every route from Baileyville to Jeffersonville, never balking at any extra mileage that Margery threw her way. She was the first to arrive each morning, striding down the dark, frost-covered road, and the last to leave at night, determinedly stitching books that Sophia would unpick and redo after she had gone. She had grown wiry, muscles newly visible in her arms, her skin weathered by long days exposed to the elements, and her face was set so that her lovely smile rarely lit her features, but flashed up only when it was required, and rarely stretched as far as her eyes.