“Hey! Hey! Stop your yammering and come over here, girl. You got something for me, huh? Cos I got something for you.”

Alice turned, her face a fury, and placed her hands on her hips. “Oh, do shut up! I’m trying to talk to my friend! For goodness’ sake!”

There was a brief silence, and then, from the other cell, a whinny of laughter. “Yeah, do shut up! She’s tryin’ to talk to her friend!”

The two men immediately began arguing among themselves, their voices lifting as the air turned blue.

“I can’t stay in here,” Margery said quietly.

Alice was shaken by how Margery looked after only one night in this place, as if all the fight had seeped out of her. “Well, we’re going to work this out. You are not on your own, and we are not going to let anything happen to you.”

Margery looked at her with weary eyes. She set her mouth in a thin line, as if she were stopping herself from speaking.

Alice placed her fingers over Margery’s, trying to grip her hand. “It will all sort itself out. You just try to rest, and eat something, and I’ll be back tomorrow.”

It seemed to take Margery a minute to register what she was saying. She nodded, shifted her gaze to Alice, and then, with a hand on her belly, she moved back to the floor, where she slid slowly down the wall and sat down.

Alice rapped on the metal lock until she had the guard’s attention. He rose heavily from his chair and let her out, closing the gate and eyeing the sheet behind her, from which Margery’s shoulder was just visible.

“Now,” said Alice. “I will be back tomorrow. I’m not sure if I’ll have time to get a slip, but I’m sure there will be no objections to a woman providing basic hygiene and assistance to a mother in waiting. That’s just decency. And I may not have been here very long but I do know that Kentucky people are the most decent of people.”

The guard looked at her, as if unsure how to respond.

“Anyway,” she said, before he could think too hard about it. “I brought you a piece of cornbread to say thank you for being so . . . flexible. It’s a rotten situation, which will hopefully be sorted out very soon, and in the meantime I am much obliged for your kindness, Mr. . . . ?”

The guard blinked heavily. “Dulles.”

“Officer Dulles. There you go.”

“Deputy.”

“Deputy Dulles. I do beg your pardon.” She handed him the cornbread, wrapped in a napkin. “Oh,” she said, as he opened it. “And I’ll want that napkin back. If you could just give it to me tomorrow when I bring the next lot, that would be lovely. Just fold it up. Thank you so much.” Before he could respond, she turned and walked briskly out of the jailhouse.

* * *

• • •

Sven hired a lawyer from Louisville, selling his grandfather’s silver fob watch to raise the money. The man attempted to demand a more reasonable setting of the bail money, but was refused in the baldest of terms. The girl was a murderer, the answer came, from a known family of murderers, and the state would not be satisfied with knowing she was out and free to do the same again. Even when a small crowd gathered outside the sheriff’s office to protest, he was unbending, stating that they could shout all they liked, but it was his job to uphold the law and that was what he was going to do, and if it was their father who had been murdered while going about his lawful business, they might think again.

“Well, the good news is,” the lawyer said, as he climbed back into his car, “state of Kentucky hasn’t executed a woman since 1868. Let alone a pregnant one.” This fact didn’t seem to make Sven feel much better.

“What are we going to do now?” he said, as he and Alice walked back from the jailhouse.

“We keep going,” said Alice. “We keep everything going as normal and wait for somebody to see sense.”

* * *

• • •

But six weeks passed, and nobody did see sense. Margery remained in the jailhouse even as various other miscreants came and went (and were, in some cases, returned). Attempts to transfer her to a women’s prison were rebuffed, and in truth Alice felt that if Margery had to stay locked up it was probably better for her to be where they could stop by and see her than to be somewhere in the city where nobody would know her and where she would be surrounded by the noise and fumes of a world completely alien to her.

So Alice rode to the jailhouse every day with a tin of still-warm cornbread (she had pulled the recipe from one of the library books and could now bake it without even looking) or pie or whatever else she had to hand, and had become something of a favorite with the guards. Now nobody ever mentioned slips but merely handed back the previous day’s napkin and motioned her through with barely a word. With Sven, they were a little stickier, because his size tended to make other men nervous. Along with food she would bring a change of undergarments, woolen sweaters, if needed, and a book, although the jail was so dark in the basement that there were only a few hours a day in which Margery could see to read. And nearly every evening when Alice finished up at the library she would head home to the cabin in the woods, sit at the table with Sven, and they would tell each other that this thing would be sorted out eventually, no doubt, and Margery would resemble herself once she was out in the fresh air again, and neither of them would believe a word the other was saying, until he left, and she would go to bed to lie awake staring at the ceiling until dawn.

* * *

• • •

That year, it was as if they had missed spring completely. One minute it was frozen, and then it was as if the rains had washed away a whole couple of months because Lee County slammed abruptly into a full-on heatwave. The monarch butterflies returned, the weeds rose on the verges, waist high under blossoming dogwoods, and Alice borrowed one of Margery’s wide-brimmed leather hats and wore a handkerchief around her neck to stop herself burning, and slapped at the biting creatures on her horse’s neck with the buckle of her reins.

Alice and Fred spent as much time together as they could, but they didn’t talk too much about Margery. Once they had done their best to meet her practical needs, nobody knew what to say.

The coroner’s inquest had found that Clem McCullough had died from a catastrophic injury to the back of his skull, probably caused by a blow to the back of his head or by falling onto a rock. Unfortunately the decomposition of the body did not allow for a more accurate conclusion. Margery had been due to testify at the coroner’s court, but an angry crowd had built up outside it and, given her condition, it was decreed that it would not be wise for her to enter.

The closer she drew to her due date, the more frustrated Sven had become, railing at the jailhouse deputy until he had been barred from visiting for a week—it would have been longer, but Sven was liked in town, and everyone knew nerves were getting to him. Margery had grown milk-pale, and her hair hung down in a dirty plait; she ate the food Alice proffered with a kind of detached observance, as if she would really rather not but she understood that she was obliged to do so. There was not a time that Alice visited her when it didn’t seem that having Margery stuck in a cell was a crime against nature: a flat-out reversal of how everything should be. Everything felt wrong while she was locked away, the mountains empty, the library missing some vital piece. Even Charley was listless, pacing backward and forward along the rail, or just standing, his huge ears at half mast, his pale muzzle lowered halfway to the ground.