Apart from Sophia, that was.

“You gonna marry that man now?” she said, when she heard.

“Nope.”

“Because you selfish?”

Margery had been writing a letter to the governor. She put down her pen and shot Sophia a look.

“Don’t you side-eye me, Margery O’Hare. I know what you think about being joined under the Lord. Believe me, we all know your views. But this ain’t just about you any more, is it? You want that baby to get called names in the schoolyard? You want her to grow up second class? You want her to miss out because people won’t have one of them in the house?”

Margery opened the door so that Fred could drop another load of books back into the library. “Can we at least wait for her to get here before you start scolding me?”

Sophia raised her eyebrows. “I’m just saying. Life’s hard enough growing up in this town without you giving the poor child another yoke around its neck. You know darn well how people made judgments about you based on what your parents did, decisions you had no hand in.”

“All right, Sophia.”

“Well, they did. And it’s only because you’re so pig-headed that you was able to make the life you wanted. What if she ain’t like you?”

“She’ll be like me.”

“Shows how much you know about children.” Sophia snorted. “I’m going to say it once. This ain’t just about what you want any more.” She slammed her ledger down on her desk. “And you need to think about that.”

* * *

• • •

Sven was no better. He sat on the rickety kitchen chair, polishing his boots while she sat on one side of the settle, and although his words were fewer, and his voice calmer, his point was just the same.

“I’m not going to ask you again, Margery. But this changes things. I want to be known as this child’s father. I want to do it all properly. I don’t want our baby to be brought up a bastard.”

He regarded her over the wooden table, and she felt suddenly mulish and defensive, as she had when she was ten years old, so that she picked distractedly at a wool blanket and refused to look at him. “You think we don’t have anything more important to talk about just now?”

“That’s all I’m going to say.”

She pushed her hair away from her face and chewed at her lower lip. He crossed his arms, brow lowered, ready for her to yell that he was driving her crazy, that he had promised not to keep going on, and she had had enough and he could git on back to his own house.

But she surprised him. “Let me think about it,” she said.

They sat in silence for a few minutes. Margery drummed her fingers on the table and stretched out a leg, turning her ankle this way and that.

“What?” he said.

She picked at the corner of the blanket again, then straightened it, and then looked sideways at him.

“What?” he said, again.

“You ever going to come and sit by me then, Sven Gustavsson? Or have I lost all appeal to you, now you’ve got me blown up like a milch-cow?”

* * *

• • •

Alice let herself in late, thoughts of Fred crowding out everything she had seen that day, the apologies of families whose library books had drowned along with the rest of their belongings, the black slurry that marked the base of trees, the scattered belongings, odd shoes, letters, pieces of furniture, broken or ruined, that lined the paths of the now sedate creeks.

All I can give you, Alice, is words.

As she had every morning and every night since, she felt Fred’s fingers tracing her cheek, saw his narrowed, serious eyes, wondered how it would feel to have those strong hands tracing her body in that same gentle, purposeful way. Her imagination filled those gaps in her knowledge. Her memories of his voice, the intensity of his expression left her faintly breathless. She thought about him so much she suspected the others could see right through her, maybe catch snatches of the constant fevered hum in her head as it trickled out through her ears. It was almost a relief to reach Margery’s cabin, her collar turned up against the April wind, and know that she would be forced to think about something else for a couple of hours at least—book bindings or slurry or string beans.

Alice walked in, closing the screen door quietly behind her (she’d had a horror of slamming doors since she’d left the Van Cleve house), and removed her coat, hanging it on the hook. The cabin was silent, which usually meant that Margery was out back, attending to Charley or the hens. She walked over to the bread bin and peered inside, pondering how empty the place still felt without Bluey’s boisterous presence.

She was about to call out back when she heard a sound that had been absent these last weeks: muffled cries, soft moans of pleasure coming from behind Margery’s closed door. She stopped dead in the middle of the floor and, as if in response, the voices suddenly rose and fell in unison, threaded through with terms of endearment and suffused with emotion, springs creaking and the head of the bed banging emphatically against the wooden wall and threatening to build to a crescendo.

“Oh, ruddy marvelous,” Alice muttered softly to herself. And she put her coat back on, stuffed a piece of bread between her teeth and went to sit outside on the front porch on the squeaky rocker, eating with one hand, and plugging her good ear with the other.

It was not unusual for the snows to last a whole month longer on the mountaintops. It was as if, determined to ignore whatever was going on down in the town, they refused to relinquish their icy hold until the last possible moment, right up until waxy buds were already poking through the thinning crystalline carpet, and on the upper trails the trees were no longer brown and skeletal but shimmered with a faint hint of green.

So, it was some way into April before the body of Clem McCullough was revealed, his frostbitten nose visible first, as the snows melted high on the uppermost ridge, and then the rest of his face, gnawed in places by some hungry creature and his eyes long missing, found by a hunter from Berea, who had been sent to the hillsides above Red Lick looking for deer, and would have nightmares for months afterward about rotting faces with fathomless holes for eyes.

To find the body of a well-known drunk was not that much of a surprise in a small town, especially in moonshine country, and might normally have guaranteed just a few days’ chatter and shaking of heads, as news got around.

But this was different.

Clem McCullough’s head, the sheriff announced, not long after he and his men came back down the mountainside, had been stove in on the back of a pointed boulder. And resting on the upper part of his chest, revealed as the last of the snow melted away, was a heavily bloodstained, fabric-bound edition of Little Women, marked Baileyville Packhorse Library WPA.