on that road. What woman you might meet and love better than me."
Alvin felt a stab of dread. Was this something she had seen with her torchy knack? Or merely the worry any woman might feel? Well, it was his future, wasn't it? And even if she saw the possibility of him loving somebody else, that didn't mean he had to let it come true.
He wrapped his long arms around her waist and drew her close, and spoke softly. "You see things in the future that I can't see. Let me ask you like an ordinary man, and you answer me like a woman that knows only the past and the present. Let my promise to you now keep watch over the future."
She was about to raise another objection, when he kissed her lightly on the lips. "If you're my wife, then whatever there is in the future, I can bear it, and I'll do my best to help you bear it too. The judge is right here. Let me begin my life of new freedom with you."
For a moment, her eyes looked heavy and sad, as if she saw some awful pain and suffering in his future. Or was it in her own?
Then she shook it off as if it was just the shadow of a cloud passing over her and now the sun was back. Or as if she had decided to live a certain life, no matter what the cost of it, and now would no longer dread what couldn't be helped. She smiled, and tears ran down her cheeks. "You don't know what you're doing, Alvin, but I'm proud and glad to have your love, and I'll be your wife."
Alvin turned to face the others, and in a loud voice he cried, "She said yes! Judge! Somebody stop the judge from leaving! He's got him one more job to do!" While Peggy went off to find her father and drag him back so he could give her away properly, Verily Cooper fetched the judge.
On the way over to where Alvin waited, the judge put a kindly arm across Verily's back. "My lad, you have a keen mind, a lawyer's mind, and I approve of that. But there's something about you that sets a fellow's teeth on edge."
"If I knew what it was, sir, you may be sure that I'd stop."
"Took me a while to figure it out. And I don't know what you can do about it. What makes folks mad at you right from the start is you sound so damnably English and educated and fine."
Verily grinned, then answered in the vernacular accent he had grown up with, the one he had spent so many years trying to lose. "You mean, sir, that if I talks like a common feller, I'll be more likable?"
The judge whooped with laughter. "That's what I mean, lad, though I don't know as how that accent is much better!"
And with that they reached the spot where the wedding party was assembled. Horace stood beside his daughter, and Arthur Stuart was there as Alvin's best man.
The judge turned to Sheriff Doggly. "Do the banns, my good sir."
Po Doggly at once cried out, "Is there a body here so foolish as to claim there's any impediment to the marriage of this pair of good and godly citizens?" He turned to the judge. "Not a soul as I can see, Judge."
So Alvin and Peggy were married, Horace Guester on one side, Arthur Stuart on the other, all standing there in the open on the grounds of the smithy where Alvin had served his prenticehood. Just up the hill was the springhouse where Peggy had lived in disguise as a schoolteacher; the very springhouse where twenty-two years before, as a five-year-old girl, she had seen the heartfires of a family struggling across the Hatrack River in flood, and in the womb of the mother of that family there was a baby with a heartfire so bright it dazzled her, the like of which she'd never seen before or since. She ran then, ran down this hill, ran to this smithy, got Makepeace Smith and the other men gathered there to race to the river and save the family. All of it began here, within sight of this place. And now she was married to him. Married to the boy whose heartfire shone like the brightest star in her memory, and in all her life since then.
There was dancing that night at Horace's roadhouse, you