“Hey, Kathleen. How are you doing?”

“I was at the meeting.” Her face was drawn under the harsh light. “I heard what your man there was saying about y’all.”

“Yes. Well. Everyone has an opinion in this town. You don’t want to believe everything you—”

“I’ll ride for you.”

Margery tilted her head, as if she wasn’t sure she was hearing right.

“I’ll ride. I heard what you was saying to Mrs. Brady. Garrett’s ma will mind the babies for me. I’ll ride with you. Until your girl’s arm is mended.”

When neither Margery nor Alice responded, she said: “I know my way around every holler for twenty miles yonder. Can ride a horse as well as anyone. Your library kept me going and I won’t see some old fool shut it down.”

The women stared at each other.

“So what time do I come by tomorrow?”

It was the first time Alice had seen Margery truly lost for words. She stuttered a little before she spoke again. “A little after five would be good. We got a lot of ground to cover. Course, if that’s too difficult because of your bab—”

“Five it is. Got my own horse.” She lifted her chin. “Garrett’s horse.”

“Then I’m obliged to you.”

Kathleen nodded at them both, then mounted the big black horse, steered him round, and was lost in the darkness.

* * *

• • •

When she looked back afterward, Alice would remember January as the darkest of months. It wasn’t just that the days were short and frozen, and that much of their riding was now done in the pitch black, collars high around their necks and their bodies swaddled in as many clothes as they could wear and still move. The families they visited were often blue with cold themselves, children and old people tucked up together in beds, some coughing or rheumy-eyed, huddled around half-hearted fires and all still desperate for the diversion and hope that a good story could bring. Getting books to them had become infinitely harder: routes were often impassable, the horses staggering through deep snow or sliding on ice on steep paths so that Alice would dismount and walk, haunted by the image of Beth’s red and swollen arm.

True to her word, Kathleen would turn up at 5 a.m. four mornings a week on her husband’s rangy black horse, collect two bags of books, and ride off wordlessly into the mountains. She rarely needed to double-check the routes, and the families she served met her with open doors, and expressions of pleasure and respect. Alice observed that leaving the house was good for Kathleen, despite the travails of the job and the long hours away from her children. Within weeks she carried a new air of, if not happiness, then quiet accomplishment, and even those families swayed by Mr. Van Cleve’s emphatic takedown of the library were persuaded to stay with it, given Kathleen’s insistence that the library was a good thing, and she and Garrett had honest reasons for believing so.

But it was hard all the same. Something like a quarter of the mountain families had dropped out, and a good number in the town, and the rumor mill had gone into overdrive so that those who had previously welcomed them now viewed them with wary eyes.

Mr. Leland says one of your librarians is with child out of wedlock after becoming crazed with lust from a romance novel.

I heard all five sisters over at Split Willow are refusing to help their parents in the house after having their heads turned by political texts slipped into their recipe books. One of them has grown hair on the back of her hands.

Is it true that your English girl is really a Communist?

Occasionally they even received insults and abuse from people they visited. They had started to avoid riding past the honky-tonks on Main Street as men would catcall obscenities from the doorways, or follow them down the street, mimicking what they claimed was in the reading material. They missed Izzy’s presence, her songs and her cheerful, awkward enthusiasms, and while nobody spoke openly of it, the absence of Mrs. Brady’s support felt like they had lost their backbone. Beth stopped by a few times but was so grumpy and despondent that she—and eventually they—found it easier for her not to be there at all. Sophia spent the hours she no longer had to fill with filing books by making up more scrapbooks. “Things can still change,” she would tell the two younger women firmly. “Have faith.”

Alice plucked up courage and made her way to the Van Cleve House, flanked by Margery and Fred. She felt weak with relief when Van Cleve wasn’t there and it was Annie who silently handed her two neatly packed suitcases and closed the door with an all-too-emphatic slam. But once back in Margery’s cabin, despite Margery’s assurances that she could stay as long as she liked, Alice couldn’t help feeling like an interloper, a refugee in a world whose rules she still didn’t entirely understand.

Sven Gustavsson was solicitous; he was a kind man who never made Alice feel unwelcome, and took time to ask her during every visit about herself, her family back in England, what she had done with her day, as if she were a favored guest he was always quietly delighted to find there, not just a lost soul clogging up their living area.

He told her about what really went on at Van Cleve’s mines: the brutality, the union-breakers, broken bodies and conditions she could barely stand to picture. He explained it all in a voice that suggested this was simply how it was, but she felt a deep shame that the comforts in which she had lived at the big house had been provided from its proceeds.

She would retreat to a far corner and read one of Margery’s 122 books, or she would lie awake through the unlit hours, her thoughts periodically interrupted by the sounds emerging from Margery’s bedroom and their frequency. Their uninhibited nature and unexpected joyfulness left her feeling first acute embarrassment then, after a week, curiosity tinged with sadness at how Margery and Sven’s experience of love could be so different from her own.

But mostly she would sneak glances at the way he was around Margery, the way he watched her move with quiet approval, the way his hand strayed to her whenever she was nearby, as if the touch of his skin on hers was as necessary to him as breathing. She marveled at how he discussed Margery’s work with her, as if it were something he took pride in, offering suggestions or words of support. She noted that he pulled Margery to him without embarrassment or awkwardness, murmuring secrets into her ears and sharing smiles lit with unspoken intimacies, and it was then that something in Alice would hollow out, until she felt there was something cavernous inside her, a great gaping hole that grew and grew until it threatened to swallow her whole.

Focus on the library, she would tell herself, pulling the counterpane up to her chin and blocking her ears. As long as you have that, you have something.

THIRTEEN

   There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as